Miranda Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / Multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the English- speaking world

21 | 2020 Modernism and the Obscene Scandales littéraires : le modernisme et l'obscénité

Philippe Birgy et Aurélie Guillain (dir.)

Édition électronique URL : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/27682 DOI : 10.4000/miranda.27682 ISSN : 2108-6559

Éditeur Université Toulouse - Jean Jaurès

Référence électronique Philippe Birgy et Aurélie Guillain (dir.), Miranda, 21 | 2020, « Modernism and the Obscene » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 13 octobre 2020, consulté le 16 février 2021. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ miranda/27682 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/miranda.27682

Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 16 février 2021.

Miranda is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 1

SOMMAIRE

Modernism and the Obscene

Introduction Philippe Birgy et Aurélie Guillain

Disinterest and Disruption: The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Modernist Aesthetics of the Obscene Kevin Kennedy

“Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood Margaret Gillespie

“Show! Hide! Show!”: High Modernism and the Lure of the Obscene Olivier Hercend

Staging the Obscene in A Glastonbury Romance (1932) by John Cowper Powys Florence Marie

Ezra Pound’s Representations of Sexual Intercourse and the Female Genitalia in The Cantos Emilie Georges

Against “the Censor’s Scythe”: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Yasna Bozhkova

The Challenge of Taking Sides: Virtue as Corruption in Joyce’s Ulysses Philippe Birgy

Prospero's Island

‘The resonance of the music’ in Resistance, Novel (Sheers, 2007) and Film (Gupta, 2011) Annelie Fitzgerald

Ariel's Corner

Theater

“It’s Time for the System to be Refigured”: An Interview with Playwright Marcus Scott Interview Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

Jane Eyre, National Theatre at Home during Lockdown Critique de spectacle / Performance review Céline Savatier-Lahondès

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« Découvrir et partager » : Entretien avec Nicole Birmann Bloom, Chargée de mission, arts de la scène, au service culturel de l’ambassade de France à New York. Entretien Emeline Jouve

The Tempest (2020) by Creation Theatre: Live in your Living Room Performance Review Heidi Lucja Liedke

Times of Contagion: The Social(ist) Politics of Plague in Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare Essay Laura Michiels

Autour de Sarah Kane par les élèves de l’École de la Comédie de Saint-Étienne Critique de spectacle/Performance review Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme

Music, dance

Une étoile, deux solos, trois plateaux : Hugo Marchand, entre Crystal Pite, Chopin et Bowie Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Body and Soul de Crystal Pite (2019) au prisme du Prélude n°4 de Frédéric Chopin : quand un duo d’étoiles s’affranchit du poids des maux Franck Ferraty

Krakauer-Tagg Duo : du souffle et des marteaux pour abattre les murs du confinement Cyril Camus

Designing for Performing Arts – Interview de Lola Clavel, créatrice de costumes à Sydney (danse, concerts, comédies musicales) Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

American visual arts

Exposition « Scott et : L’été raphaëlois » Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël, 12 juillet au 30 septembre 2019.Commissaire de l’exposition : Anne Joncheray Elisabeth Bouzonviller

N’importe où hors du monde : Susan Bee in Barbara Montefalcone

British visual arts

Turner, peintures et aquarelles. Collections de la Tate Musée Jacquemart André, Paris, 13 mars 2020-11 janvier 2021. Sarah Gould

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Recensions

Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell, Céline Horgues (eds), Linguistique anglaise et oralité : vers une approche intégrée Saandia Ali

Sophie Chiari (ed), Ecrire la catastrophe. L’Angleterre à l’épreuve des éléments (XVIe - XVIIIe siècle) Armelle Sabatier

Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, from Ancient Rome to the Twenty- First Century Alexandra Sippel

Antonella Braida-Laplace, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, Céline Sabiron (éds.), Inconstances romantiques. Visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long XIXe siècle Sébastien Scarpa

Hélène Ibata. The Challenge of the Sublime. From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art Laurent Châtel

John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century Wayne E. Arnold

Kei Miller, In Nearby Bushes Eric Doumerc

Linda S. Ferber, Nancy K. Anderson (eds.), The American Pre-Raphaelites – Radical Realists Muriel Adrien

Sarah Greenough, Sarah Kennel (eds. ), Sally Mann – A Thousand Crossings Muriel Adrien

Monica Latham et Nathalie Collé (ed), Mark SaFranko : The Creative Itineraries of a "Renaissance Man" Brigitte Friant-Kessler

Richard Pine, Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988. Volumes One and Two Isabelle Keller-Privat

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Modernism and the Obscene

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Introduction

Philippe Birgy and Aurélie Guillain

1 Arguably, modernism is indebted to romantic aesthetics, notably to the postulate that all areas of reality, be they noble or ignoble, can be represented and given shape through an original gesture of artistic creation.1 Indeed, in many modernist works, new zones of experience, new aspects of corporeality and sexuality, have gained both visibility and aesthetic dignity through the invention of experimental forms, as excretory body functions famously did in Joyce’s Ulysses. In the process, modernist artists may have continued one important aspect of the romantic tradition, but they were also increasingly going against a vision of art in which the artist’s freedom of expression is a strict correlative of art’s civilizing function. An illustration of this vision is Matthew Arnold’s 1869 statement that literature and the arts are dedicated to the advancement of civilization: “culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world, and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically” (Arnold vii). In this statement, the matter is settled: the function of the artist is to watch over the development of modernity, to exalt its motives or denounce its vagaries, expunge its passions and correct its improprieties; in such a view, a claim to freedom of expression can only be justified because this expression is crucial to society as a whole.

2 Yet at the turn of the century, some modernist artists seemed willing to interrupt this fruitful agreement as they seemed to become increasingly absorbed in explorations of a disturbing interiority: Beckett, Cunard, Eliot, Joyce, H.D, Woolf, Lawrence, Pound, Yeats and before them, Beardsley and Wilde, were cases in point. H.G. Wells deplored Joyce’s “cloacal obsession”2 and E.M. Forster regretted his friend Virginia Woolf’s attraction towards the “dreadful hole of aestheticism” which caused her writing to drift rudderless, untied as it was to any moral cause (Forster 240). Even when representatives of the various modernisms and avant-gardes viewed themselves as the heralds and enunciators of modernity, as artists who were determined to accompany the movement of the modern age, to point out its ins and outs, illuminate its nooks and crannies, their critics could be prompt to reject that claim; their censors would argue

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that these modernist explorations did not concern the average sensual man and that these artists spoke only about themselves, in their names only, with a strange pretension that placed them on the side of the vulgar and unworthy. To contemporary critics and censors, when modernist authors engaged in the indecent exposure of corporeal matters, these authors were being idiosyncratic, thus betraying the mission of the artist to enlighten the public about the contemporary state of society. If on the contrary, they were acknowledged as artists who indeed brought into light some aspects of the modern condition, then those aspects of the modern age were deemed inherently intolerable, unthinkable, better left entirely alone and preferably in a state of invisibility. In trials such as the 1921 obscenity trial incriminating the serialized publication of Joyce’s Ulysses in The Little Review, it seemed that the only way of making visible the revulsing and embarrassing pictures of contemporary life was through the process of their purgative expulsion, through their delegation to a perverse author who had to bear full responsibility for it. This was quite an unsettling consideration at a time when the figure of the author was already so controversial.

3 Obscenity trials are, of course, highly revealing of the evolution of free speech in the or the United States from a legal point of view: through the study of these trials, one can establish what, according to custom and the moral precepts of the time, must be banned from the public sphere and even held as illegal, i.e. as condemned to remaining secret, for even if they were merely exposed in private circumstances, such contents might still corrupt the mind. Of course, the definition of what counts as obscene is bound to fluctuate at the same time as standards of morals and customs. The question needs to be further problematized by considering that the criteria determining what was offensive (and what was not) were disputed ones and could hardly be considered as being standardized in the UK or the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century. In obscenity trials, the morality leagues often appropriated the prerogative to speak out on behalf of putative victims, stating the seriousness of the potential offence to which they could be exposed, thus creating the legal of the impressionable young girl, or that of the man in the street. Such fictions merely betray the of a homogenized, universal response to universally offensive contents, rather than actually reflecting a standardized set of moral and affective responses to the “obscene” in the public.3

4 Now, to reflect upon the nature of the sensitive reader’s revulsion at certain “obscene” contents, modernist literature itself can be of invaluable help: indeed modernist texts rarely fail to contain a self-reflexive approach to their own handling of obscene material which is often intertwined with an experimental approach to both narrative technique and to questions of subjective identity. Consequently, this collection of essays will not be not an exploration of legal issues related to free speech in the arts and letters during the modernist period; the essays that are gathered in this special issue will rather concentrate on how modernist literature problematizes its own relation with its shocking contents and its impressionable reader. Indeed, one major question raised in the discussion of “literary obscenities” is the question of how literature redefines itself as it tackles material that is designed, or expected, to shock its audience.

5 The question is thus - at least in part - the nature and role of literature, which itself is bound to a reflection on aesthetics. Now aesthetics, in its elaboration, is partly linked to obscenity, as it defends itself from the latter by distinguishing a form of detached

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contemplation and appreciation from the consumption of representations of the body that engage and arouse the senses—an erotic stimulant that feeds fantasy and encourages concupiscent or lascivious states. In Obscene Modernism, Allison Pease regards the aesthetics of the late 19th century as the foundation stone of the attitude that consists in defending literature against any moralist attack. Aestheticism is analysed by Pease as a defence system, a rampart against the attacks of the leagues of virtue and good sense: the aesthete claims that he is creating an exclusive domain where nothing can be inappropriate and where freedom of expression is protected in an absolute, unconditional manner. All objects, including those confined to the dustbin by civil society, can be taken up as material by the artist since it is the artist’s formal research that matters and prevails. In this way, as Pease puts it, obscenity is made “safe for literature”. Thus the self-contained, autonomous quality of formal experiments in the aesthetic movement and later, in modernist texts, is precisely what makes them the privileged textual site where obscenity can energize the aesthetic gesture, endowing it with an increased power to affect the reader.

6 Many important studies of the links between modernity, modernism and the obscene have analysed this shifting, complex articulation between the literary sphere, the defence of free speech within and without it, and the relation between the text and the “sensitive reader” who is going to be affected by the shocking text, which is always at the heart of the public debate on the function of art (Bradshaw; Cotter; Pease; Potter; Parkes). In this collection of essays, we propose to examine how individual texts deal with the question of obscene exposure in a self-reflexive manner, often questioning the role of the sensitive reader, always a potential voyeur, a witness corrupted by the very act of seeing. Indeed, obscene modernism is endlessly pondering the nature of what is most likely to shock and provoke revulsion. Is revulsion the result of some acquired reflex or is it visceral disgust? Is there any physiological cause to this aversion? Which are the specific visions causing it and why? Is it the evocation of mud and formlessness, waste, flux, decay and if so, why is that and above all, how is the subject related to it— for inevitably, whatever gives us cause for concern cannot be entirely foreign to us. In this instance Kristeva’s definition of the abject has remarkable explanatory force and what is called “obscene” might very well derive its horrifying power from the process of abjection. In Kristeva’s scheme, the term designates a state of indistinction between self and non-self that plays a role in our constitution as subjects, which we must reject once we have achieved self-control and autonomy. Yet for all that, what has been abject-ed does not cease to come back to us in our thoughts, precisely because the process of abject-ing the Other has gone into the making of the self and is never wholly overcome: Freud’s dynamic model of the unconscious is the mainstay of Kristeva’s own scheme and for this reason, it does not consider the possibility of abjection ever being overcome in a dialectical process. If the obscene is to be interpreted as deriving its power from “abjection,” then obscenity will give endless cause for offence. Obscenity will be associated with some external corrupting agent, some guilty party, always other, sometimes a whole class of suspects, but it will derive its power to offend from the dynamic, conflict-ridden constitution of the subject itself. Why a sensitive reader feels revulsion at “obscene” material has to do with the (shifting) foundations of subjectivity and is therefore a question that philosophers and philosophically-minded critics have already explored at some length (Nietzsche; Bataille; Lacan; Kristeva; Bersani; Zizek; Rabaté). The essays in this collection will carry on this exploration, but through the close examination of particular texts.

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7 In “Disinterest and Disruption: The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Modernist Aesthetics of the Obscene,” Kevin Kennedy examines Wilde’s text in the light of Pease’s arguments in Obscene Modernism. The close study of Wilde’s example is, among other things, an opportunity to reconsider these arguments. As Pease recalls, Kant establishes a distinction between the pleasant and the beautiful: the first category (the pleasant) relates to individual pleasures and includes pornography, while the second (the beautiful) is a fundamentally disinterested emotion. The for the pleasant is associated with the undisciplined bodies of the lower classes, whose interests must be policed and disciplined by the ruling class of educated gentlemen, who are capable of freeing themselves from material concerns and the demands of the body for the good of all. Kennedy remarks that making Lord Henry a spokesman for sensual and amoral aesthetics is to forget that Lord Henry never puts into practice the principles that he is professing, and that in the absence of action, spirit and ideas continue to prevail in him. Depersonalization and an inclination towards the immaterial tend to repress the corporeal in him. Lord Henry appropriates the excesses of his friends’ passions and he thus de-substantializes them, converting the expression of these passions into some sort of aristocratic Kantism. Kennedy’s analysis echoes with Potter’s statement that the very term of “obscene” or “obscenity” is, in itself, an attempt at domesticating, controlling, fixing the meaning of what defies reason and threatens a collective order based on the control of disruptive elements of society—the uneducated masses.

8 The following essays, by Margaret Gillespie and Olivier Hercend respectively, focus on the theme of the “dirty little secret” that is placed at the invisible core of textual dynamics in works by Djuna Barnes, Joyce, Woolf or T.S. Eliot. The very notion of “dirty secret” has been envisaged variously in literary modernism. A case in point was D.H. Lawrence, who , according to Deleuze and Guattari, “that psychoanalysis was shutting up sexuality in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, fitting it into an artificial triangle of desire, thereby recasting the whole of sexuality along entirely different lines, making it a ‘dirty little secret,’ a family secret, a private theater, rather than regarding sexuality as the fantastic factory of nature and production” (Deleuze & Guattari 49). In the process, sexuality is covered in a guilty veil and objects of desire are thus concealed from view. For Lawrence, it is the upper body, the head and the hands that want to intellectualize the lower body in order to understand it. According to him, this is how a substitute for sexuality is born: pornographic literature and its intellectualized obsession with sex are really the product and offspring of contemporary morals: And so you get first and foremost, self-consciousness, an intense consciousness in the upper self of the lower self. This is the first disaster. Then you get the upper body exploiting the lower body. You get the hands exploiting the sensual body, in feeling, fingering, and in masturbation. You get a longing to see the lower self, the pornographic desire to see the lower reactions: like the little chamber-pots with an eye painted on the bottom, and “je te vois, petite sâle,” which were sold in Paris as little chimney-piece ornaments. You get the obscene post cards which most youths possess. You get the absolute lust for dirty stories, which so many men have. And you get various mild sex perversions, such as masturbation, and licking, and so on. What does all this mean? It means that the activity of the lower psyche and lower body is polarised by the upper body. Hands and mouth want to become the sexual agents. Eyes and ears want to gather the sexual activity into knowledge. The mind becomes full of sex: and always, in an introvert, of his own sex. If we examine the apparent extroverts, like the flaunting Italian, we shall see the same thing. It is his

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own sex which obsesses him.” For Lawrence, brute unthinking sexuality is perceived as what has been, and is still being, wrongfully repressed. (Lawrence 146)

9 For Barnes, it is the opposite, as Margaret Gillespie demonstrates “‘Obscene and touching’– the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood”. To her, it is the incestuous perversion and its destructive effects on the subject that must be exposed. In her study of Barnes’ Nightwood, Gillespie emphasizes the relationship between the empirical reality of incest on the one hand and the writing to which it may give rise on the other, the writing having incorporated the imposed necessity of silence and displacement. The article situates the question of what can be said in a work of literature in the context of the obscenity trials of the interwar period. For Gillespie, obscenity in Djuna Barnes’s text appears as the obfuscated content of a trauma. Literature, as she conceives it, harbors the upset expression of an inexpressible secret. In this perspective, obscenity appears to be constitutive of modernism. The traumatic experience is what gives form to the writing which holds the obscenity of trauma without the author or the reader ever being directly exposed to it. In the case of Djuna Barnes, the ambivalent attempt at simultaneously representing and obfuscating the obscene trauma is the very source of literary sophistication and formal inventiveness— notably because literary sophistication has a screen-like, cosmetic and legitimizing function. Simultaneously, a metaphorical style of writing appears to be the only way of reconstructing this experience of incestuous pedophilia: the character of Robin, the protagonist’s lover, who concentrates in herself, in a displaced form, the contradictory qualities of the incestuous person who misled the child. Barnes deploys, according to Gillespie, a modernist narrative and stylistic program dictated by the re-evaluation of ethics and aesthetics, which cannot be satisfied with a linear narrative exposition, when it comes to representing the un-representable trauma.

10 As for Olivier Hercend’s article, “Show! Hide! Show! : High Modernism and the Lure of the Obscene” it analyses how the devious strategies of modernist authors such as Woolf, Joyce and Eliot serve the evocation of unspeakable structures of domination. Those who have an interest in hiding their “dirty little secret” adhere to the status quo, throwing a modest veil over what underlies their prosperity: male domination (the repression of sexual fluidity in Orlando) and the exploitation of the most deprived. Conversely, the modernist texts studied by Hercend place these unspeakable structures of domination at the heart of the text. They remain in its margins, unutterable but persistently suggested. Indeed all their technical and stylistic resources are propped against the unsaid. Hercend shows how in each case, the work’s facture seems determined to incorporate and contain everything that has been repressed, instead of comfortably leaving out the factors that secretly weigh on the work from the outside. The article thus suggests that modernism forces an ethical position on the reader, who must make the choice either to see or not to see. Thus, if Joyce’s readers stick to the narrative of “Two gallants,” they inevitably become the accomplices of the protagonists. Likewise, Eliot’s fixation on the sordid is redoubled in the minds of both the narrative persona and the reader who become attached to it. Hercend’s analysis of how modernist texts represent the un-representable strongly resonates with Rancière’s reflections on how ignoble matters and little people gained visibility in modern literature through what he calls the “aesthetic regime of art”. Rancière argues that literature, in this sense of “the best that has been thought,” was merely a way of keeping the vast bulk of mankind out of the picture, to consolidate the hierarchy where the dominant set the rule and the dominated remained invisible since they did not

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appear in . What happened with Flaubert and Balzac was that suddenly, a new literature appeared which narrated the lives of simple people, vulgar people, and made a style out of it, showing that it was possible to find a literary interest in incidents that concerned characters who had been deemed minor (and whose stories were often judged unpalatable if not downright disgusting by the defender of classical standards).

11 The obscene, then, takes the form of an appeal. Through clues and enigmas, the reader is challenged, led by his curiosity or his voyeuristic instincts to explore what is hidden behind the silences and ellipses of the text. The reader must confront the unsaid—what remains unsaid about mental suffering, alcoholism, rape and other sexual assault or the horrors of war—but the reader must also question his own blindness, in the face of these counter-stories of the world in which he lives.

12 In “Staging the Obscene in A Glastonbury Romance,” Florence Marie remarks that Cowper Powys, in his defense of Ulysses against the censors, talked about a text that would be “too obscure” to be obscene. The idea, she notes, displeased the judges who spontaneously associated obscenity and obscurity. The association implies that what lurks in the shadows must have been first relegated to oblivion, that it had to have been deliberately put out of the way. And repression certainly constitutes a deliberate (though unconscious) attempt at rejecting desires that do not agree with moral standards. In her study of two scenes from John Cowper Powys’ A Glastonbury Romance (1932) that play on and with the abject and the repugnant, Marie concentrates on images of degradation, decay and formlessness. These are evocative of mortality, of the corporeal condition exposing us to such an infamous end. Marie suggests that the focus on such images indicates a shift in literary modernism from sexual material to visions of abjection and formless matter. But again the two remain linked by the role what has been repressed in the constitution of the subject. What has been repressed has a charm of its own, being mixed with disgust: the pleasure one takes in the obscene is unjustifiable and inexplicable and it cannot become fully conscious without causing remorse and anxiety.

13 In “Ezra Pound’s Representations of Sexual Intercourse and the Female Genitalia in The Cantos,” Emilie Georges’ observations on Pound’s poetic elaboration are particularly relevant in terms of symbolic constructions. As Georges reminds us, Pound’s texts forcibly assert the domination and superiority of a phallic principle that orders, classifies and distinguishes, over the primitive chaos embodied by women and the shapeless and soft character of their sexual organs. The phallic line gives form to the boundless and mysterious abundance of the feminine. In the Cantos, fecundity, when understood as the expression of natural sexuality (luxuria), is opposed to usura, a sexualization of economy engendering a misplaced taste for money. Decay and degradation result from reproductive functions being diverted from their natural purposes and being projected into economic thought—things that the hero must avoid in order for life to follow death, so that life may be renewed. And Pound duly emphasizes the sacredness and ritualistic dimension of sexuality, linked to ceremonies of fertility and regeneration. Georges’ article points to one possible key to understand the modernist use of obscenity. Indeed, the modernist use of ritual and profanity foregrounds the ambivalence of the sacred: pure and impure, the sacred is the means of renewal, but at the cost of a violent rejection, a visceral expulsion of mud, shapelessness, fetidity and everything that goes against nature, including vile, infamous, “unnatural” practices. In the sacrifice of a scapegoat, the contempt and

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disgust of the community is focused on the appointed enemy who, besides corrupting everything it touches, is also infinitely beneficial, since it brings together the members of the community against him and allows a discharge of negative feelings and a symbolic eviction of evil. Thus, the judgment of obscenity points to a miracle whose secret cannot and must not be pierced, for it operates in darkness. It bears the seal of infamy but also represents the miracle of life. It is this double polarity that anthropologists emphasize and that René Girard takes up in his studies of sacrificial practices. It is, again, the same ambivalence that W.B. Yeats is exploiting in “Crazy Jane on God” and “Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”: “All things remain in God,” Yeats writes, “foul and fair are near of kin,” and “love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement” (Yeats 263).

14 In “‘Against the Censor’s Scythe’: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Elsa von Freytag- Loringhoven,” Yasna Bozhkova remarks that the obscene is traditionally a mode of masculine expression in which it is the female body that embodies physical indignity, whether grotesque or frightening. One might think of Stephen’s mother appearing to Stephen in Ulysses as a “ghoul, corpse-chewer” who tries to bring him back to a universe of guilt and paralyzing conformism. Having sacrificed herself to her kin, she expects the same humility from her son. In Stephen’s delirious imagination, this undesirable place is equated with the realm of the dead. Opposing the flamboyant “non serviam” of the Promethean or Luciferian artist to the familial order, he strikes against the servility of this mother who reenacts the sacrifice. Conversely, as Bozhkova argues, female modernists such as Loy, Barnes or Freitag turned these expectations upside down. Their affirmation of the female body is not degrading, but stands in opposition to the prudery and modesty associated with the sublimation and idealization of women in Victorian culture and ideology.

15 Philippe Birgy’s article focuses on the chapter of Ulysses that was incriminated during the 1921 obscenity trials; above all, it centers on the many textual ambiguities making it impossible for critics to decide upon one vision of the female subject in this text: is she being empowered or victimized by the frame of female exhibitionism and male voyeurism? At a textual level, does the handling of free indirect speech grant the subject a voice of her own or is the female persona being ventriloquized by Bloom? The narrative apparatus of Joyce’s modernist text creates radical undecidability by instructing the reader to take one critical position and almost immediately dislodging that reader from that initial stance. Birgy moves on to interpret the image of Gerty’s indecent exposure as the product of an ambivalent vision of purity, one that uneasily “sits between an idealization of the female object of desire and the defacement of its purity”; the article points out the homology existing between the Catholic confession and pornography, in that both produce and rely on images of purity in order to exhibit images of defaced purity. Another layer of ambivalence, which accounts for the explosive, scandalous charge of the text, including in a contemporary context, concerns “the self-empowerment” of Gerty as she accesses “a position of visibility which actuates a situation of maximum exposure. It entails an extreme vulnerability and susceptibility, which invite degradation”. The text’s antithetical pairing of female purity and female defacement catches not only Gerty, but also the reader, in its , and places the reader-turned-voyeur into an impossibly compromising position.

16 Birgy’s argument echoes some questions raised by Hercend about the position of the reader in modernist texts that invite readers to peep into the unspeakable secrets of

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domination structures. The article also echoes Bozhkova’s reflections on the feminist uses of obscene images of the female body: Bozhkova shows that Loyd’s or Freitag’s modernist use of shocking images of female corporeality aimed at debunking the distinction established between the obscene female figure and the idealized one, which are both objects of a male gaze, in order to link female sexuality to the assertion of a female subject. By contrast, Birgy’s analysis of “Nausicaa” suggests that Joyce’s text connects the obscene with the idealized, the impure with the pure, in a more fundamental way, making it impossible to entirely evade the terms of the ambivalence, short of a sacrificial purge.

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Zizek, Slavoj. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (Wo Es War). London: Verso, 1994.

NOTES

1. Jacques Rancière described this move in his own terms, calling it “the aesthetic regime of art” and distinguishing it from the representational ideal (and system) of the classical age (Rancière 2006). 2. “Mr. Joyce has a cloacal obsession. He would bring back into the general picture of life aspects which modern drainage and modern decorum have taken out of ordinary intercourse and conversation. Coarse, unfamiliar words are scattered about the book unpleasantly, and it may seem to many, needlessly. If the reader is squeamish upon these matters, then there is nothing for it but to shun this book.” (H.G. Wells, “James Joyce,” The New Republic, 10 March 1917) 3. On the complexity of legal and historical questions raised by obscenity trials, see Erik M. Bachman. Literary Obscenities: U.S. Case Law and Naturalism after Modernism Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

AUTHORS

PHILIPPE BIRGY Professor Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

AURÉLIE GUILLAIN Professor Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Disinterest and Disruption: The Picture of Dorian Gray and the Modernist Aesthetics of the Obscene

Kevin Kennedy

More than this, it is easy to imagine a book, let us say, by Oscar Wilde, clever, scintillating, even brilliant in its writing and utterly foul and disgusting in its central theme and dominating effect.1

1 Derived from the Latin obscenus, whose etymology is sometimes traced back to the notion of an offstage or hidden area, the obscene is situated at the limits of representation, disrupting conventional notions of morality and art.2 It has been argued that modernist fiction is based on an aesthetics of the obscene (Pease 2000), fundamentally breaking with the Kantian notion of aesthetic disinterestedness, which had dominated most of the 19th century. While the latter foregrounds contemplation and the communal, sublimated aspects of bodily experience, modernism de-sublimates the body, emphasizing its sensual, filthy, anti-social, abject dimension. In its apparent commitment to aestheticism and late-Victorian decadence, Oscar Wilde’s fin-de-siècle novel The Picture of Dorian Gray is not usually subsumed within the modernist canon. Yet, like many notable modernist novels, it was accused of obscenity and virtually banned, despite all the supposedly obscene acts taking place “offstage,” intimated only through allusion. In its ironic portrayal of the corrupting influence of art, Wilde’s novel prefigures (and to some extent even exceeds) the way in which so-called obscene art will be treated in the legal, academic and social discourses of the first part of the twentieth century. In the following, I intend to explore to what extent Wilde’s novel can be considered a proto-modernist text in its adherence to an “aesthetics of obscenity” and its rejection of Kantian disinterestedness. I argue that Dorian Gray, while not explicitly describing taboo acts like modernist works such as Ulysses, is modernist in its attempt to introduce the un-sublimated body into the realm of high art. My discussion will focus on Wilde’s exploration of the tension between the body and aesthetic representation, which in the novel is symbolized by its two main characters, Dorian and Lord Henry, and literalized through the painting that records Dorian’s “obscene” acts. I suggest that its meta-commentary on the relation between obscenity

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and the aesthetic, corruption and morality, makes Wilde’s novel a paradigmatic modernist text. In conclusion, I analyse the nature of the obscene, which, as I argue, is not necessarily the explicit depiction of bodily functions or sexual acts, but the “thing” that ultimately resists representation, remaining “offstage,” frustrating any attempt at appropriation and thus disrupting the basic parameters of social and subjective existence.

Wilde and Obscene Modernism

2 The obscene has long been associated with literary modernism and its various formal and thematic transgressions. In recent years, there has been a plethora of articles and books on the legal, aesthetic, moral and formal dimension of obscene literature at the beginning of the twentieth century, establishing it as a defining feature of modernist art as a whole (see, for instance, Pease 2000, Pagnattaro 2001, Glass 2006, Potter 2013): “Modernist art is produced at the same historical moment and in the same social space as ‘obscene’ art” (Chisholm 167). While Victorian and fin-de-siècle authors are sometimes discussed as important precursors to this “aesthetics of the obscene,” Oscar Wilde is only rarely mentioned in this context. Although his work is often seen as sharing and even heralding many key concerns of literary modernism, such as his interest in aesthetic autonomy, individualism and formal experimentation (Gagnier 1997), it is only occasionally analysed in relation to its obscene dimension. Wilde’s credentials as a transgressive artist, however, are well established. Jonathan Dollimore discusses Wilde’s “transgressive aesthetic” in relation to his radical individualism and (homo-)sexuality (Dollimore), while Petra Dierkes-Thrun argues that Salomé (which she construes as a paradigmatic modernist text) partakes in the modernist “replacement of traditional metaphysical, moral, and cultural belief systems with literary and artistic discourses that develop utopian erotic and aesthetic visions of individual transgression” (Dierkes-Thrun 2).

3 In addition to its transgressive modernism, Wilde’s work has also been discussed in the context of the legal and moral issues surrounding obscene literature in the late 19th century. Simon Stern analyses the “Obscenity Effects” of Wilde’s seminal novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, yet without specifically linking it to the discourse on obscene modernism, so prevalent in recent modernist studies. Stern’s article compellingly shows how the novel dissects the dialectic of corruption and autonomy that underlies the prosecution of obscene works: “Wilde interweaves questions of influence, corruption, and addiction—and at the same time […] retraces the logic by which jurists and legislators purported to diagnose the agency of obscene works” (Stern 762). This notion of corruption was most famously expressed in the so-called Hicklin test from 1868, which became the legal benchmark for judging obscene literature for almost a century, shaping the majority of legal cases involving modernist works in the early 1900s. According to Hicklin, a work was deemed obscene if it had the tendency “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” (quoted in Pagnattaro 218) This almost reads like a summary of The Picture of Dorian Gray, whose eponymous protagonist starts leading a life of “sin” after reading an obscene work of literature, the so-called Yellow Book: “Dorian Gray had been poisoned by a book” (Wilde 2000, 140). Dorian is thus presented as the stereotypical untrained reader—naïve, gullible and lacking any will or

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discernment of their own—whom the prosecutors of obscene works set out to protect: “Dorian presents a thoroughly ironized portrait of a young person complying with the predictions of the obscenity police” (Stern 762). In addition to young people, the law sought to inoculate women and the increasingly literate working-class population, i.e., segments of the population, whose enfranchisement was seen as a potential threat to the dominant political order.3 Wilde’s critical and satirical portrayal of the corrupting influence of art thus already intimates the political dimension underlying the seemingly moral question of whether a particular person should be exposed to certain works or not, presaging “the next century’s struggle with perennial questions about art and its responsibilities to and freedom from its reading audience” (Leckie 172).

4 Prosecutions for obscenity of famous modernist works, such as Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, likewise often hinged on a distinction between the (literary) elite— whose education and intellectual powers would shield them from a work’s damaging influence—and the average readers—whose lack of training and/or mental incapacity would render them highly susceptible. The defenders of “obscene” modernist literature, by contrast, shifted the focus away from the content to the work itself, foregrounding its autonomy and artistic integrity: “The belief that art’s claim for value and for our serious attention rests not on its ideas, message, or content, but on aesthetic considerations divorced from subject matter stands at the center of the revolution that we call modernism” (McGowan 417). Again, this stance is already explored in Wilde’s novel, especially by the famous “Preface”, which states that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written […] Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art” (Wilde 2000, 3-4). Wilde’s preface, added for the novel’s second edition, was written in response to the accusation of immorality and obscenity levelled at the text upon its initial publication. Although it is never made explicit what kind of “sinful” activity Dorian Gray engages in, many contemporary readers thought it contained coded references to sodomy, which at the time was still a crime.4 Akin to the defence of Ulysses thirty years later, Wilde’s preface defends his use of “obscene” material by appealing to the aesthetic value of his work, radically divorcing it from its ethical content, demanding a space for art where “The artist can express everything” (3). This mirrors the “obscenity of modernism,” which, as Loren Glass observes, “was contained by its aesthetic consecration. The Ulysses case provided legal sanction for this space of containment” (Glass 349). Wilde’s novel thus already contains in nuce the shift from a vision in which the literary work is defined both by its contents and its ethical relation with an implied audience, towards a vision in which literature is defined by its autonomy, which characterised the literary obscenity trials and debates of the first part of the 20th century.

5 With of the prosecutions of obscene works of art in the second half of the 20th century, the focus shifted yet again, this time away from the “autonomous qualities of texts to the phenomenological experience of readers” (Glass 357). In tandem with the transition towards a more democratic, inclusive society following World War II, the law no longer felt the need to protect certain segments of the population, passing the responsibility of how to respond to morally questionable literature on to the reader. The emphasis on the individual’s role when dealing with obscene literature is again prefigured in Wilde’s novel when he claims that “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors” (Wilde 2000, 4). The novel itself illustrates this point by highlighting the way Dorian responds to the different works of art in his life, the painting and the Yellow Book, both of which he blames for his moral failings. Wilde makes it clear that

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art, regardless of how obscene or transgressive it is, can never be held accountable for an individual’s actions. Lord Henry, echoing Wilde’s own views, expresses it most succinctly: “As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action […] The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame” (208). The Picture of Dorian Gray’s call for an aesthetically autonomous appreciation of art thus functions as a harbinger of how the question of obscene art would be dealt with in the era of literary modernism and beyond: “The aesthetic argument […] anticipates the most successful response to print censorship that would develop in the modernist period. Instead of highlighting the need to protect the reader, the emphasis slowly shifted to the need to protect art” (Leckie 174).

6 There is, however, a more specific sense in which Wilde’s novel may be put into a productive dialogue with obscene modernism, particularly regarding questions of aesthetic disinterest, the disruptive potential of art and the often only implicit political dimension underlying them, beyond the legal framework in which such discussions are usually couched, and which tend to unduly restrict them. “Questions concerning the artistry of obscenity and the reading of art for nondiscursive modes of transgression are often lost in the discussion of the strategies and effects of legalization” (Chisholm 167). In the following I will discuss The Picture of Dorian Gray in relation to some key aspects of Allison Pease’s influential work Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of the Obscene, which presents questions of artistic obscenity in a larger socio- historical and philosophical context, beyond their strictly legal interpretation.

Disinterest, Disruption and the Aesthetics of Obscenity

7 Pease argues that the modernist “aesthetic of the obscene,” which emerged in the early 20th century, is based on a conflation of two different modes of representation, which in the 19th century had been strictly separated: aesthetics and pornography. Pease differentiates these two modes using Kant’s famous distinction between the agreeable and the beautiful (Kant 51-53). Although both ultimately derive from the body, the agreeable is aimed directly at an individual’s sensual satisfaction (e.g. food, sex, alcohol), while the beautiful in the Kantian sense transcends physical pleasure, becoming a communal category of taste. Thus “the subject of the agreeable has an interest in that agreeable object. The subject of the beautiful is […] disinterested” (Pease 22). Pease construes pornography as a prime example of the agreeable. Unlike high art, pornographic literature offers an unmediated representation of the (sexual) body, having “arousal as its main purpose” (34), i.e., aiming at private pleasure. For Pease, the pornographic is thus associated with “interest, individualism, and social disruption” (164). Traditional aesthetics, à la Kant or Shaftsbury, by contrast, are an attempt to transform physical sensation into a rational category, whereby sense becomes idea, the private becomes communal/communicable, the agreeable becomes beautiful, and the body’s irrational, disruptive materiality is disciplined.

8 The Picture of Dorian Gray reflects the tension between mind and body, disinterest and interest, as elaborated in Pease’s notion of the obscene aesthetics of modernism on both a thematic and a formal level. As has been noted by many commentators, Wilde’s novel is full of references to the physical body and its complicated relationship with the mind (see for example Davis 2013). In a very general sense, it may be read as an attack

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on the strict separation between sensuality and rationality, characteristic of 19th century aesthetics. “The harmony of soul and body,—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is bestial, an ideality that is void” (Wilde 2000, 13). Yet, at the same time, it very much continues the aesthetic tradition of artistically sublimating obscene or explicit representations of the body, of “spiritualizing the senses” (126), rejecting any form of crass realism and, by implication, pornography. In this sense it is continuous with “the earlier project of Shaftsburian and Kantian aesthetics to bring the body more overtly into the realm of culture by objectifying the senses and making them rationally intelligible” (Pease 38). This is also reflected in Dorian Gray’s depiction of class.

9 Pease shows that the aesthetic disavowal of the body through an engagement with art is based on specific class considerations. One of the key ideological categories informing the property-owning bourgeoisie’s claim to superiority was the notion of “disinterestedness,” based on “economic and aesthetic distancing” (24). Its political power was legitimate, so the argument went, because it was economically independent, free from the narrow material interests of the masses and thus able to judge impartially and justly. This freedom from economic considerations was complemented by an assumed freedom from the demands of the physical body. A gentleman’s position of power and influence was thus justified because he, unlike the majority of people, was not under the constraints of physical passions and base economic interests. Hence the prevalent attempt in 19th century philosophy, which in many ways functioned as an ideological justification for the political status quo, “to stave off the forces of interest, desire and irrationality from a pure sphere of understanding” (25). The aesthetic (and by implication the whole political) ideology of the 19th century middle classes in Europe was thus one of disembodiment and disinterest.

10 Conversely, the “interested” body came to be seen as a threat to order and social stability: it became an obscene, morally questionable body—vulgar, sensual, possibly diseased—, which had to be policed, purified and proscribed. It thus emerged as a central, albeit negative, category of middle-class self-definition, both literally and metaphorically. Everything that was excluded from the self-understanding of the educated middle classes became associated with the body: women, “exotic” peoples, criminals, and especially the working classes. In a dominant political metaphor of the time, the latter was regarded as the body to the middle-class mind, which, like the real body, had to be tamed and subdued, lest its unruly nature would cause chaos and disruption: “To the middle classes the working classes represented the body, and as such were outside the culturally hegemonic realm (while simultaneously functioning as a necessary other, as necessary as one’s own body)” (77).

11 Like many novels of its time, The Picture of Dorian Gray displays the anxieties of the educated middle and upper classes towards the working population and the erosion of traditional class structures at the end of the 19th century, explicitly linking the body with the lower strata of society. The dandified lord and quintessential aesthete Lord Henry claims that “crime is to lower classes what art is to us, simply a method of procuring extraordinary sensations” (Wilde 2000, 202), suggesting that the different classes have different ways of satisfying physical needs: unmediated, individual, interested (financial, sexual) satisfaction, on the one hand, and sublimated, disinterested aesthetic enjoyment, on the other. Although Wilde championed an equal and democratic society,5 his values were very much those of the aristocracy. The values

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of the Aesthetic movement, of which Wilde was a major exponent, were a “relic of the anti-materialist, aristocratic ideals of the 18th century which were perpetuated by an elite educational system that tried to cut itself off from the means of production” (Pease 46). Pease argues that this attitude was based on a fundamental paradox, as the aristocratic and middle-class elites were only able to create a coherent image of themselves in relation to what they condemned: “vulgar” material interests, the increasing commercialization and industrialization of social life and, most importantly, the obscene body. Thus, with the gradual enfranchisement of the working classes, “the ideological boundaries of privilege were being threatened by the very bodies that had been needed to define privilege itself” (43).

12 Wilde’s portrayal of the well-do-to elites in Dorian Gray frequently relies on foils from the working-class population.6 At one point, Dorian is contrasted with the frame-maker Mr Hubbard, who carries the eponymous painting up to its hiding place in the attic, while Dorian looks on. The narrator describes Hubbard as having “the true tradesman’s spirited dislike of seeing a gentleman doing anything useful” (Wilde 2000, 117). Conversely, towards the beginning of the novel Lord Henry’s uncle, Lord Fermor, is characterized in terms of his disdain for work and utility, having […] set himself to the serious study of the great aristocratic art of doing absolutely nothing[…] he paid some attention to the management of his collieries in the Midland counties, excusing himself for this taint of industry on the ground that the one advantage of having coal was that it enabled a gentleman to afford the decency of burning wood on his own hearth (33).

13 Wilde thus integrates and perpetuates the dominant class ideology of his time, drawing a sharp dividing line between those who have to use their “obscene” bodies to survive and those who disparage any form of physical labour. However, despite its professed attitude towards class, Wilde’s novel also prefigures some of the socially disruptive elements that would come to characterize modernist literature, specifically in its confrontation between physical passion, on the one hand, and its aesthetic, rational sublimation, on the other.

14 In the early 20th century, many modernist writers began to explore the disruptive potential of the body, radically changing and expanding the possibilities and moral parameters of art. Several writers, such as James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, incorporated pornographic tropes into their writing. Thus, according to Allison Pease, “the body entered art, and quite specifically literary art” (Pease 192). However, in contrast to traditional pornography, which, as we have seen, is aimed at physical stimulation and thus fundamentally “interested,” the modernist aesthetic of the obscene “is a mode of sexual representation that, while potentially affecting the sensual interests of its readers, does not, as opposed to pornography, seek sexual arousal as its main purpose” (34). Pease’s key point is that even though the modernists revolutionized literary representation, defying the moral censorship of the body, they ultimately continued the aesthetic tradition by subordinating physical stimulation to intellectual contemplation: “the aesthetic of the obscene continues to objectify and distance the senses, and in doing so it perpetuates the project of the aesthetic traditions” (35). In other words, although modernism embraced the disruptive potential of the body, it ultimately absorbed and diluted this disruption within aesthetic disinterest.

15 The modernist approach to obscene material thus rested on a basic paradox. In its attempt to capture “individual sensual impact that cannot necessarily be universally communicated” (35), it repudiated the universal aspirations of traditional aesthetics.

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Yet, in bringing the body into the realm of high art, it attempted to universalize the very negation of universality, which characterizes the obscene. I would argue that this very paradox is also present, albeit in a slightly less explicit form, in Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, exemplified by its two main characters, Lord Henry and Dorian Gray.

Lord Henry and the Aesthetic Disavowal of the Body

16 Lord Henry’s flamboyantly amoral pronouncements and witticisms have already been discussed abundantly in the available secondary literature.7 The same is true for the seemingly immoral influence he exerts on the young and impressionable Dorian.8 As Patrick Duggan notes, “Lord Henry Wotton trumpets the aesthetic philosophy with an elegance and bravado that persuade Dorian to trust in the principles he espouses; the reader is often similarly captivated,” but, and I would agree with this claim, “it would be a mistake […] to interpret the novel as a patent recommendation of aestheticism” (Duggan 61). The Picture of Dorian Gray is often seen as a prime example of Aestheticist literature, in which the two main characters—whose friendship is more like a teacher and student relation–live, think and act according to Aestheticist principles. Yet, their respective attitudes towards life and art are in fact quite dissimilar, to the point of being mutually exclusive. Using the aforementioned tension between the Kantian notions of the agreeable and the beautiful, or, in Pease’s terms, the pornographic and the aesthetic, it becomes possible to argue that Lord Henry is not really a full-blown aestheticist, but rather a Kantian aesthete, whose main concern is to translate sensual experience into disembodied, communal pleasure. Dorian, on the other hand, is identified with selfish, interested, obscene sensuality, whose experiences therefore resist communal (and even linguistic) appropriation and who therefore negates the aesthetic philosophy espoused by his mentor. In this sense, one might say that in the novel, taken as a whole, Dorian functions as the obscene body to Henry’s “disembodied” mind.

17 Although Lord Henry ultimately continues the Kantian tradition of negating body in favour of mind, he nonetheless rejects any strict dualism: “Soul and body, body and soul—how mysterious they were! There was animalism in the soul, and the body had its moments of spirituality. The senses could refine, and the intellect could degrade. Who could say where the fleshly impulse ceased, or the psychical impulse began?” (Wilde 2000, 57). And, a little earlier, he claims that “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul” (23). This deliberate equivocation concerning the hierarchy of mind and body is the reason why Lord Henry is usually seen as the quintessential Aestheticist, who calls for a “new hedonism” (25), an amoral approach to life and art, in which pleasure should always trump conscience. On the surface, this reading is certainly warranted, as the following passage nicely illustrates, where Henry is trying to impress Dorian with a proto-Freudian speech about inhibition and release: I believe that if one man were to live his life out fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream,—I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism[…] Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind, and poisons us. The body sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a

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pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. (21)

18 Here Lord Henry seems to be suggesting that uninhibited bodily satisfaction should be the prime incentive in life, regardless of convention, taste or public morality.

19 The great irony of Lord Henry’s character, however, is that he himself never engages in any such “purifying actions”. In the course of the novel it becomes clear that he is more concerned with words than with deeds, with bodiless pleasure than with carnal satisfaction. As his painter friend Basil Hallward tells him: “You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing. Your cynicism is simply a pose” (8). Lord Henry is a popular socialite, a favourite guest at the all the dinner tables of London’s upper- class society, where he charms his hosts with his pointed remarks and witty paradoxes. Although he constantly provokes and teases his various interlocutors with speeches on uninhibited sensuality and society’s “monstrous laws” (21) that suppress it—at one point even asserting that “sin is the only real colour element left in modern life” (30)— it quickly becomes clear that what he is really interested in, is not so much experiencing “new sensations” (25), but talking about them. As he admits himself at one point: “One’s own soul and the passions of one’s friends–those were the fascinating things in life” (15): in other words, what he really wants is to aesthetically appropriate the physical passion of others (like Dorian Gray, for example). His real concern is to “give lovely names to things. Names are everything” (186). And, in what could be described as an attack on the obscene aesthetics of modernism avant la lettre, he professes to “hate vulgar realism in literature. The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one. It is the only thing he is fit for” (186). In one witty epigram, he thus continues the traditional upper-class amalgamation of explicit (bodily) representation and physical labour, both of which he sneers at.

20 Lord Henry ultimately disavows the obscene, sensual body in favour of gentlemanly distance and detachment, thus subscribing to and upholding the aesthetic tradition of 19th century philosophy, “based on a lack of bodily need, a disavowal of desire, control over objects through cognitive distance, and a belief in the possibility of universal consensus in the experience of the beautiful” (Pease 27). Henry abhors the “vulgar” details, which, in his mind, should always be aesthetically transformed into beauty and harmony: “One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar” (Wilde 2000, 98). In a similar vein, he laments that he lives in “an age so grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common in its aims” (37). Channelling the values of his class, he associates physicality with the common man, whom he implicitly chides for his “crude violence […] lack of style […] vulgarity[…] and sheer brute force” (98). The clearest indication, however, that Lord Henry is not a depraved Sadean libertine, willing to take any risk in order to procure extraordinary sensations, comes towards the end, when he tells Dorian that “murder is always a mistake. One should never do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner” (203). This amounts to an exemplary (albeit humorous) Kantian denigration of the body (murder is one the most violently “interested” actions possible) and a plea for all physical activities to become universally, socially communicable, integrated into the prevailing conventions of taste and morality, in this case the post-dinner chat of refined gentlemen over cigars and brandy.

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Dorian Gray and the Interested Body

21 In stark contrast to Lord Henry’s insouciant provocations, turning (reported) private transgression into public pleasure, his protégé Dorian Gray ultimately abandons the public realm in favour of private sensuality and experience. In this respect, Dorian is reflective of a shift that Kathy Alexis Psomiades associates with the transgressive poetry of Algernon Swinburne, one of Pease’s exemplary Victorian precursors to the modernist aesthetics of the obscene: “Instead of marking the moment when beauty becomes public, it marks the moment at which public man is privatized, drawn into the aesthetic erotic realm, and at which he gives up his public power for private pleasure” (Psomiades 87). Dorian is drawn into the “erotic realm” because he decides to put the things that Lord Henry talks about “into practice, as I do everything you say” (Wilde 2000, 47). It is true that Wilde never explicitly describes the transgressive practices Dorian engages in—even though their carnal nature is strongly implied. In this sense his work is fundamentally different from the explicit descriptions of body parts and sexual acts in “obscene” modernist works such as Ulysses. However, as Pease suggests, the explicit representation of the body is not essential to the modernist aesthetic of the obscene; the fact that the works she puts forth as exemplars of obscene modernism “contain explicit sexual representations simply makes the incorporation of the body into artistic representational and reception practices more obvious” (Pease 192).

22 On the one hand, it is clear that Dorian, because of his “extraordinary good looks” (Wilde 2000, 101), symbolizes classical physical beauty: ethereal, refined and chaste. Yet, as the narrative progresses, he becomes increasingly associated with the “other” body (obscene, indescribable, disruptive) and all of its contemporary metaphorical connotations: deviant sexuality and low social status. Dorian continually strives for new physical sensations: “infinite passion, pleasures subtle and secret, wild joys and wilder sins–he was to have all of these things” (102). Eschewing detailed description, Wilde frequently resorts to the Christian notion of sin to delineate Dorian’s behaviour. Yet, he completely empties it of its traditional metaphysical sense as a violation of divine law, linking it quite explicitly with physical passion, beyond conscious control: “There are moments, psychologists tell us, when the passion for sin, or for what the world calls sin, so dominates […] every fibre of the body […] Men and women at such moments lose the freedom of their will. They move to their terrible end as automatons move” (181). The implication is that, when Dorian pursues his secret passions, he becomes pure body, devoid of will, reason or conscience.

23 Although seemingly in thrall to Lord Henry’s teachings, which promote a more or less traditional hierarchy between body and mind, Dorian constantly subordinates the mind to the body, and theory to experience: “he felt keenly how barren all intellectual speculation is when separated from action and experiment” (128). The “new hedonism” he envisions “was to have its service of the intellect, certainly; yet it was never to accept any theory or system that would involve the sacrifice of any mode of passionate experience” (126). At one point, Dorian even becomes interested in contemporary biological accounts of human agency, “delighting in the conception of the absolute dependence of the spirit on certain physical conditions, morbid or healthy, normal or diseased” (128). Dorian’s delight in this biological dependence of mind on “morbid” physicality could not be further from Lord Henry’s categorical rejection of vulgar

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details. Dorian, in his rejection of sublimated, aestheticized passion, thus represents the pornographic, interested body, in love with “things that one can touch and handle” (107). For the effect of pornography, as Pease writes, “is such that it registers decidedly individual sensual impact that cannot necessarily be universally communicated. In this way it promotes a turning inward of the subject” (Pease 35). Likewise, Dorian is concerned with private sensation and sensual gratification, which resist sublimation and thus need to remain unarticulated.

24 Dorian is gripped by “passions that would find their terrible outlet” (Wilde 2000, 115), yet he is unable to communicate his experiences to society at large, because polite society rejects the body. He fills other people with “a madness for pleasure” (145), ruining reputations and giving rise to wild speculations about his activities: “His extraordinary absences became notorious, and, when he used to reappear again in society, men would whisper to each other in corners…determined to discover his secret” (136). Basil Hallward fears that Dorian is “bad, corrupt and shameful” (147), but Dorian is convinced that society is merely hypocritical: “we are in the native land of the hypocrite” (146). Yet, at the same time, he lives in the constant fear that “the world would know his secret” (135), i.e., the secret of the body, in its pure, unmediated materiality. He spends long, solitary hours gazing at the “obscene” painting (variously described as “bestial, sodden and unclean” (118), “shameful” (115) and having “a corruption of its own”(115)) like a stereotypical consumer of pornography. The tragedy of his character, however, is his ultimate inability to grasp the fact that he “is” the body. He constantly mocks the painting for its “misshapen body and the failing limbs” (124), failing to make the inextricable connection between the self and its physical manifestation. After murdering Basil Hallward, he blackmails his former friend Alan Campbell into making the body disappear, because it “is the only piece of evidence against me” (162). Yet, in his final attempt to rid himself of his own body, symbolized by the painting, he inadvertently kills himself, confirming the inextricable tie between his character and the “shameful body”.

25 While the protagonist of The Picture of Dorian Gray symbolizes the literal body, he is also associated with the body in a more metaphorical sense, specifically with the working- class body, reflecting the widespread association of the lower classes with pornography, both of which were regarded as fundamentally disruptive: “the lower classes and pornography were viewed as uncontrollable, diseased, or poisonous forces that threatened to penetrate the healthy social body” (Pease 49). Unlike Lord Henry, Dorian is the product of a class-transcending liaison. His aristocratic mother marries “a penniless, young fellow, a mere nobody” (Wilde 2000, 35), leading to her social ostracization and early death. As the narrative progresses, London’s working-class areas, its brothels and opium dens, become Dorian’s favoured hunting ground: “I felt that this grey, monstrous London of ours, with its myriads of people, its splendid sinners, and its sordid sins […] must have something in store for me” (48). Utilizing a common narrative trope of Victorian literature, Wilde has Dorian visit the East End, where “it was said that he had been seen brawling with foreign sailors in a low den in the distant parts of Whitechapel, and that he consorted with thieves and coiners and knew the mysteries of their trade” (136). There his fascination with the obscene body is made explicit: “The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him” (179). Yet, at the same time, he is reminded of Lord Henry’s words that

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“you can only cure the soul by means of the senses”, which “he had often tried[…] and would try […] again now” (176).

26 Although Dorian strives for a “spiritualizing of the senses” (126), for the aesthetic sublimation of base physical needs, he ultimately fails “to stave off the forces of interest, desire and irrationality from a pure sphere of understanding” (Pease 25). Towards the end of the novel he wholeheartedly embraces the interested, obscene body, fundamentally breaking with Lord Henry’s Kantian aestheticism, the redeeming qualities of art, as well as its underlying class ideology: Ugliness that had once been hateful to him because it made things real, became dear to him now for that very reason. Ugliness was the one reality. The coarse brawl, the loathsome den, the crude violence of disordered life, the very vileness of thief and outcast, were more vivid, in their intense actuality of impression, than all the gracious shapes of art, the dreamy shadows of song (177-178).

27 Dismissing ethereal, “dreamy” art and celebrating “coarse” reality, Dorian rejects both Aestheticism and traditional Kantian aesthetics, in the same way that, according to Pease, modernist literature subverted traditional standards of representation by including unfiltered, graphic depictions of sexuality. Dorian’s character is thus reflective of Wilde’s attempt to introduce the interested body into the realm of high culture. The paradox here, however, is that Dorian’s praise of the chaotic, vulgar, unmediated world of social outcasts, perverts and criminals (“the crude violence of disordered life”) occurs in a highly stylized, high-cultural format. Thus, like his fellow proto-modernist Swinburne, and in contrast to actual pornographic literature, Wilde makes the “body safe for middle class consumption” (Pease 63-64), for whom obscenity is “socially problematic because of its potential to disrupt community” (5).9 In other words, by including the obscene body into a work of high art, he “removes from the body its threatening materiality” (71). Despite his own programmatic claim in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ that “Art is Individualism and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force” (Wilde 2007, 254), Wilde’s treatment of the individual, sensualized body, like that of his modernist successors, ultimately subsumes disruptive jouissance within aesthetic enjoyment, turning the body into an object for communal, sublimated contemplation, “no longer solely obscene, or offensive to taste” (Pease 35).

Conclusion: The Obscene Resistance to Representation

28 The tension between the interested body and disinterested contemplation, which, according to Pease, lies at the heart of obscene modernism, also fundamentally shapes The Picture of Dorian Gray. In this respect, it belongs to the tradition inaugurated by such quintessential modernists as Nietzsche, Freud and Marx and their respective projects of rehabilitating the body against the aesthetic tradition of the 19th century. Conversely, like many works of high modernist fiction, Wilde’s novel attempts to bring the agreeable into the realm of the beautiful, private pleasure into disinterested art. This is nicely reflected in Lord Henry’s attempt, towards the end of the narrative, to aestheticize Dorian’s (obscene) existence/body, telling him that “life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets” (Wilde 2000, 207). Of course, The Picture of Dorian Gray contains no explicit sexual representation, only hints and allusions, and in this sense fundamentally differs from high modernist works.

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However, these allusions were seemingly enough to provoke outrage and disgust in its contemporary readers. One review, for instance, claimed that the book “derives pleasure from treating a subject merely because it is disgusting” and “delights in dirtiness and confesses its delight” (216). To its contemporary readers, The Picture of Dorian Gray thus undoubtedly contained an obscene, fundamentally interested dimension.

29 This disgust at an invisible obscenity, as opposed to an explicit representation, points towards an under-theorized dimension of obscenity in recent modernist studies. This dimension, as I would suggest, accounts for the fundamentally disruptive nature of obscene material, beyond the private pleasure of an anti-social individual or the fear of class erosion. Discussing the work of D.H. Lawrence, Rachel Potter argues that “the obscene specifically signifies ideas about the limits of knowledge […] the desire to label the object as obscene…is an attempt to place and contain it; to control the strangeness of it and its ability to disturb” (Potter 115). This suggests that the obscene representation always points towards an unknown, frightening realm, where the distinctions that structure everyday reality (body/mind, word/object, inside/outside, aristocrat/worker, judge/criminal) collapse. In other words, obscenity functions as a linguistic strategy to bring that which lies outside the accepted standards of representation into the realm of symbolization, thereby attaining a degree of control over it. In this sense, it is like the Lacanian Real, an attempt to think “pure” materiality before its transposition into meaning and signification (cf. Lacan 1998). The Real, like the obscene, points towards the beyond of langue, beyond the ineluctable universality and transparency of the (written) word. As Hal Foster suggests, “‘Obscene’ does not mean ‘against the scene’ but suggests an attack on the scene of representation […] an impossible opening onto the real” (Foster 113-114). The obscene is impossible because, in its attempt to label and control the “beyond” of representation, it merely illustrates the absence of “real” matter, “real” bodies and “real” pleasure in the immateriality of language: the obscene, like the Real, can never be accessed directly, since it is only produced through its own absence.

30 The Picture of Dorian Gray stages, and grapples with, the impossibility of communicating the “secret” physicality of bodily experience. It is full of references to secrecy and secret vices, refusing to be captured within the transparency and stability of a fixed term, phrase or image: “those curious unpictured sins whose very mystery lent them their subtlety and their charm” (Wilde 2000, 118). Wilde struggles to convey the unthinking fleshliness, the pure, unmediated physicality of the body. Dorian, for example, is touched by a “secret chord, that had never been touched before, but that he felt was now vibrating and throbbing to curious pulses” (21). Setting off for the East End, he is in search of that “poisonous secret of life” (237), as well as “pleasures subtle and secret” (102). The absence of explicit representation in Wilde’s novel is not solely due to concerns over public decency or the fear of prosecution. Rather, Wilde is convinced that “the crude brutality of plain realism” (Wilde 1962, 264) is unable to capture the secret, mute, “offstage” dimension of existence itself.10 As so often in the novel, Wilde uses Basil Hallward as a foil for his own ideas. The latter is convinced that obscene “vices” ultimately become legible on the body, visible and transparent: “People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice, it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even” (Wilde 2000, 143). Wilde, however, is fully aware that as soon as one

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theorizes sensual experience, one is immediately in the realm of language and human cognition and thus inevitably fails to capture the experience in question. Sinful bodies are linguistic constructs, whose true “reality” must therefore always remain a secret. His novel thus bears testament to the more general “difficulty of translating being into knowing” (Pease 145), formlessness into form, objects into words: “Mere words! How terrible they were! How clear, and vivid, and cruel! One could not escape from them. And yet […] They seemed to be able to give a plastic form to formless things […] Was there anything so real as words?” (Wilde 2000, 22).

31 The novel’s poetics of allusion are crystallized in Wilde’s persistent use of the word “thing”, the most generic word in the English language (“formless things” (22), “things that one can touch and handle” (107) “it made things real” (177), “to have all of these things” (102), “give lovely names to things (186), “You never say a moral thing, and you never do a wrong thing”. (8) “the fascinating things in life” (15)).11 This is evidently not due to Wilde’s lack of verbal dexterity, but rather suggests an attempt on his part to designate a reality beyond words, as featureless and undefined as the word “thing” itself. The word “thing” furthermore recalls Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’, the noumenal reality beyond phenomena, which, according to Kant, always escapes mediation and thus cognition. The “thing’s” resistance to representation, its essential “off-stageness,” is reflected in the tension between surface and depth (appearance/truth, body/soul, phenomenon/noumenon) that structures Wilde’s novel.12 The numerous allusions to secret depths and invisible realms, which lie behind the surfaces of “things”, attest to a preoccupation with phenomena that resist straightforward symbolization. Thus, the preface programmatically states that “all art is at once surface and symbol/ Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril” (Wilde 2000, 4). The beyond of representation is perilous because it is—as Dorian remarks vis-à-vis music (the non- representational art par excellence)—“not articulate. It was not a new world but rather another chaos, that it created in us” (29). As Anna Budziak suggests, “metaphorical depth means ‘chaos’; it cannot be explored since all meaning is always exposed on the ‘surfaces’” (Budziak 138).

32 Through Dorian, Wilde explores the fascination exerted by elusive depths, beyond mediation, while intimating that they will only ever yield unintelligible confusion. Dorian is worried that he is shallow (Wilde 2000, 49), devoid of depth, failing to realize that, as Lord Henry observes in one of his faux-didactic monologues, one must remain faithful to the surface (of representation) as there ultimately is nothing behind appearance: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances” (24). Dorian’s downfall is precipitated by his belief in metaphysical depth, the soul behind the body, represented by the painting. Before showing Basil the painting, he proclaims “I shall show you my soul” (146). For him, “the soul is a terrible reality” (205), i.e., he thinks of noumenal depth as substantial and real, as clear and legible as a portrait. However, when Dorian attempts to destroy the portrait “its surface—though in the most uncanny way—remains intact […] The meaning, thus, is to be read on the flat surface, whilst the bodies, even if treated as a metaphor of enclosure for their three-dimensionality and alleged depth, having been rendered open by stabbing, reveal no deep essence of their lives” (Budziak 140). The obscene body in Wilde’s novel thus remains as mute and uncommunicative as the Kantian “thing-in itself,” while nonetheless persisting in its very inarticulability.

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33 The obscene in The Picture of Dorian Gray must be understood literally, in its putative etymological sense, as that which remains “offstage”, beyond representation, beyond words—not because of its questionable morality, but because of its inherent unrepresentability. As Pease suggests vis-à-vis Joyce and Beardsley: “The irony of the attempt to bring representation closer to the body is that the representations quickly become the mediation of the body” (109). The body always remains a “discursive practice”, in “serious” as well as in pornographic literature. For Pease, the “aesthetic of the obscene” thus becomes “an attempt to capture the seemingly paradoxical nature of representing the “unrepresentable” (35). Wilde’s attempt to represent the unrepresentable puts him alongside other influential modernists for whom the body became the primary site for an artistic exploration of the “unknown” beyond human cognition.13 Petra Dierkes-Thun suggests that Wilde’s play Salomé “prefigures modernism’s central project of transforming metaphysical sublimity into physical and artistic sublimity” (Dierkes-Thun 3). While I would agree with this claim, I believe that this must be understood as a negative, apophatic sublimity, revealing the impossibility of bringing the obscene, the heterogeneous, the radically other, into the realm of representation.

34 The obscene is not necessarily the “realistic”, explicit body in its unfiltered materiality, but rather the impossibility of appropriating this very materiality for the project of human communication, defining a fundamental limit for human subjectivity, rationality and self-mastery: “The unrepresentable—obscene—aspects of the self, then, might be seen as those impulses and drives that lie behind the sexual and excremental imagery” (Potter 102, my emphasis). All supposedly disinterested works of art depend on, as Adorno claims, “the intensity of the interest from which they are wrested” (Adorno 11). The painting of Dorian Gray literalizes this notion by recording the character’s obscene acts. Yet in spite of the attempt to capture such acts, the novel ultimately suggests that they always remain fundamentally incommunicable: “Form and colour tell us of form and colour—that is all” (Wilde 2000, 111). In its claim for the autonomy of artistic representation and its concurrent exploration of the limits of such representation, Wilde’s novel functions as an early example of the obscene aesthetic of modernism, disrupting the conventions of taste and morality, not because of its explicitness, but for revealing the limits of clarity, accountability and legibility, which define communal reason itself.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Robert Hollut-Kentor trans. London: Continuum, 1997.

Birmingham, Kevin. “The Prestige of the Law: Revisiting Obscenity Law and Judge Woolsey’s ‘Ulysses’ Decision.” James Joyce Quarterly 50: 4 (2013): 991-1009.

Breuer, Rolf. “Paradox in Oscar Wilde” Irish University Review 23:2 (1993): 224-235.

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Budziak, Anna. “Oscar Wilde’s Refutation of ‘Depth’ in The Picture of Dorian Gray: A Reading.” Brno Studies in English 30:10 (2004): 135-145.

Chisholm, Dianne. “Obscene Modernism: Eros Noir and the Profane Illumination of Djuna Barnes.” American Literature 69:1 (1997): 167-206.

Davis, Michael. “Mind and Matter in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Victorian Literature and Culture 41:3 (2013): 547-560.

Dierkes-Thrun, Petra. Salome’s Modernity: Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetics of Transgression. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011.

Dollimore, Jonathan. Sexual Dissidence: Literatures, Histories, Theories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Duggan, Patrick. “The Conflict Between Aestheticism and Morality in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.” WR: Journal of the Arts & Sciences Writing Program 1:1 (2008-2009): 61-69.

Foster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October 78 (1996): 106-124.

Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works. James Strachey trans. London: The Hogarth Press, 1961.

Gagnier, Regenia. “Wilde and the Victorians.” In The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Ed. Peter Raby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Gillard-Estrada, Anne-Florence & Besnault-Levita, Anne (eds.). Beyond the Victorian/Modernist Divide. Remapping the Turn-of-the-Century Break in Literature, Culture and the Visual Arts. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Goldstone, Andrew. Fictions of Autonomy: Modernism from Wilde to de Man. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Gurfinkel, Helena. “The Second Wilde Revival: Current Trends in Oscar Wilde Scholarship.” Kritikon Litterarum 43: 1-2 (2016): 143–166.

Glass, Loren. “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo‐American Modernism.” Critical Inquiry 32:2 (2006): 341-361.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgement. Werner S. Pluhar trans. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Alan Sheridan trans. New York: Norton, 1998.

Leckie, Barbara. “The Novel and Censorship in Late-Victorian England.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Ed. Lisa Rodensly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. 166-183.

Manganiello, Dominic. “Ethics and Aesthetics in ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, 9:2 (1983): 25-33.

McGowan, John. “From Pater to Wilde to Joyce: Modernist Epiphany and the Soulful Self.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 32:3 (1990): 417-445.

Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne. “Carving a Literary Exception: The Obscenity Standard and Ulysses”. Twentieth Century Literature 47: 2 (2001): 217-240.

Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass Culture and the Aesthetics of the Obscene. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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Potter, Rachel. Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship & Experiment 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Psomiades, Kathy Alexis. Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Stern, Simon. “Wilde’s Obscenity Effect: Influence and Immorality in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Review of English Studies 68 (2017): 756-772.

Wilde, Oscar. The Letters of Oscar Wilde. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962.

---.The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. London: Penguin, 2000.

---.The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays. 1898. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

---.“The Soul of Man Under Socialism”. In The Decay of Lying and Other Essays. 1891. London: Penguin, 2010.

NOTES

1. “The People v. Dial Press,” cited in Pagnattaro 2001, 233. 2. “The word ‘obscene’ is from the Latin obscenus, meaning adverse, inauspicious, ill-omened; also abominable, disgusting, filthy, indecent […] At the same time, the word referred to ideas about the limits of representation; to those aspects of humanity or language which ought to remain off- stage” (Potter 3). 3. “There were three kinds of readerships ‘whose minds’ were seen to be the most open to immoral influences: the young person, women and the working classes” (Potter 17). 4. The Picture of Dorian Gray, as is well known, was used against Wilde during his trial for ‘gross indecency’ at the Old Bailey in 1895. Following his unsuccessful libel suit against Lord Alfred Douglas’ father, the Marquess of Queensbury (who had called him a “posing somdomite” (sic)), Wilde himself was twice put on trial, the second of which resulted in a conviction and a two-year prison sentence. Simon Stern suggests that the novel itself only escaped prosecution because “Wilde’s trials also served in effect as an obscenity trial”. During the trial, the prosecutor Charles Gill called “Dorian Gray an ‘immoral and indecent work’ that described the ‘passions of certain persons guilty of unnatural practices,’ adding that the novel was ‘calculated to subvert morality and to encourage unnatural vice,’ and that Wilde himself had had a ‘corrupting influence’ on half a dozen young men” (Stern 760). This was reflective of the work’s contemporary reception, especially in its first version, when it was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in June 1890. W.E. Henley’s review in the Scots Observer from 5 July 1890, for instance, claims that the novel’s subject matter is “only fitted for the Criminal Investigation Department” and that Wilde does not sufficiently reject his protagonist’s “course of unnatural iniquity”: “Mr Wilde has brains, and art, and style; but […] he can write for none but outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys” (Wilde 2000, 218-219). 5. See Wilde’s essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (Wilde 2010). 6. For an in-depth analysis of the fundamental connection between the modernist creed of aesthetic autonomy and issues of class and servitude, see Goldstone 2013. 7. See for, instance, Manganiello 1983 and Breuer 1993. 8. See Sterne 2017. 9. Underlying the discourse on obscene literature, according to Pease, is the desire to police the distinction between “aesthetic” high art and “pornographic” mass culture. This desire also reflected in Wilde’s portrayal of Dorian’s affair with the actress Sybil Vane, who acts in a theatre for the uneducated masses where Shakespeare is played by

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“ungainly, shabbily-dressed actors” (80) to “common, rough people, with their coarse faces and brutal gestures” (79); Dorian is “rather annoyed at the idea of seeing Shakespeare done in such a wretched hole of a place” (50). 10. “I love secrecy. It seems the one thing that that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us” (Wilde 2000, 7). 11. See also, for instance, Wilde 2000 (3, 7, 208, 102). 12. See Budziak for an in-depth discussion of Wilde’s deployment of the tropes of depth and surface in Dorian Gray. 13. Other notable modernist writers to have explored the paradoxical realm beyond representation include Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett.

ABSTRACTS

This essay explores to what extent Wilde’s novel can be considered a proto-modernist text in its adherence to an “aesthetics of obscenity” and its rejection of Kantian disinterestedness. I argue that Dorian Gray, while not explicitly describing taboo acts like modernist works such as Ulysses, is nevertheless modernist in its attempt to introduce the un-sublimated body into the realm of high art. My discussion will focus on Wilde’s exploration of the tension between the body and aesthetic representation, which in the novel are symbolized by the two main characters, Dorian and Lord Henry, and literalized through the painting that records Dorian’s “obscene” acts. I suggest that the text’s metacommentary on the relation between obscenity and the aesthetic, between corruption and morality, makes Wilde’s novel a paradigmatic modernist text. My reading of Wilde’s work also analyses the nature of the obscene, which, as I argue, is not essentially the explicit representation of bodily functions or sexual acts, but the “thing” that ultimately resists representation, remaining “offstage,” frustrating any attempt at appropriation and thus disrupting the basic parameters of social and subjective existence.

Cet article étudie les aspects du Portrait de Dorian Gray qui font du récit de Wilde une possible préfiguration de l’esthétique de l’obscène dans une acception moderniste ; en effet, comme nombre d’œuvres modernistes, l’écriture de Wilde subvertit déjà, à sa manière, le principe de contemplation désintéressée qui est caractéristique de l’esthétique kantienne. L’article tente de montrer que ce n’est pas dans la représentation d’actions ou de gestes tabous que réside le jeu de l’écriture wildienne avec l’obscénité, mais dans sa tentative de faire entrer une corporéité non sublimée dans la sphère de l’art et de la culture noble.

INDEX

Mots-clés: modernisme, obscène, esthétique, désintéressement, rupture, corps, sublimation, pornographie, irreprésentable Keywords: modernism, obscene, aesthetics, disinterestedness, disruption, body, sublimation, pornography, impossibility of representation

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AUTHORS

KEVIN KENNEDY Enseignant contractuel CY Cergy Paris Université [email protected]

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“Obscene and touching”–the tainted aesthetic of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Margaret Gillespie

Introduction: Barnes scholarship and the question of obscenity

1 A number of scholars (Gilmore 1994,1 Plumb 1995, 2 Faltejskova 2010 3) have viewed obscenity in Djuna Barnes’s writing as primarily a question of eluding institutional and societal constraints where her censored modernist peers famously failed.4 The author’s Ladies Almanack (1928), a bawdy chapbook celebrating American heiress Natalie Barney’s lesbian coterie, for instance, was privately printed as a limited edition and covertly hawked on the streets of Paris. Such was the linguistic opacity of the once- performed play, The Antiphon (1958), written in arcane Shakespearean-style verse, that its disturbing theme—a father’s sexual abuse of his daughter—went largely unnoticed.5 The novel Ryder (1928), a “female Tom Jones” (Caselli 197) in the novelist’s own words, and Nightwood (1936), loosely based on Barnes’s ill-fated Parisian love affair with silverpoint artist Thelma Wood, were both partially “sanitized” at editorial stage to avoid censorship, with or without the novelist’s assent.6

2 One of T.S. Eliot’s key concerns, in his role as editor for Nightwood, published in London by the highly respectable Faber and Faber in 1936, was that the novel would suffer the same fate as Ulysses, be judged obscene, go to court and be banned (Blake 153). Eliot’s misgivings were certainly not without foundation for a text that in the words of Jane Marcus “flaunt [s] every possible taboo from the excretory to the sexual and […] invent [s] taboos uncatalogued even by Freud” (Marcus 2004: 102). The publisher took a number of precautionary steps, “robing” the novel in a drab and worthy introduction— the discursive equivalent of “pale grey,” as one contemporary reviewer aptly observed (Potter 173), and excising explicit references to homosexuality. Terms like “fairy,” “faggot” and “queen” (Faltejskova 95) as well as many of the cross-dressing protagonist

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Matthew O’Connor’s, saucier same-sex tales and escapades were removed.7 Earlier in the editorial process, Emily Coleman, Barnes’s friend and de facto literary agent, also convinced her to cut lines referring to O’Connor’s nightgown as “not only the womanly, but the incestuous garment,” claiming the lines were “meaningless” (Hollis 245).

3 Yet as Diane Chisolm has rightly observed, the bounds of legal discourse are just one benchmark by which obscenity may be judged: “obscene art may be legalized by new court rulings and/or legitimized by a body of liberal taste and still retain the power to shock” (Chisolm 169). Eliot was successful in publishing Nightwood, but even after partial bowdlerization, it still remained “considerably more sexually explicit” than most books previously published in the United Kingdom (Potter 173). Reading Nightwood through Sade and the surrealists among others, Chisolm showcases its transgressive potential which she argues deploys “a vast battery of obscene materials” to irreverently assail the regimented norms of legal, sexological and theological discourse to figure a mise-en-texte of the “‘obscene’ frame of speech in which any unbecoming sexuality must be lived and thought” (Chisolm 195, 172). For Rachel Potter, Nightwood’s obscene “bodies, minds and words” are significant in highlighting a shift in the inter-war cultural climate and the demise of moral censoriousness, occasioning a veritable sea change in the parameters of what would constitute literary value and novelistic form (Potter 174).

4 My focus and interest here, however, lie less in the “flaunted,” manifest, obscenity of Nightwood than in the notion of the obscene as an issue of problematic visibility within the text. Returning to the twin etymological origins of the term, the Latin obscaenus meaning “from or with filth, ill-omened or abominable,” and the Greek ob skene, meaning “off-stage, not fit to be seen on-stage” (McKay 80), I propose to explore not only what “filth” or “abomination” the narrative openly reveals, but what it also conceals within its discomfiting poetics. More specifically, drawing on the interface between literature and trauma theory, I will discuss how a text like Nightwood may function as a , enabling the textual enactment of the repressed/ob-scene memory of abominable/obscene traumatic experience. This is not to suggest a reading of the narrative as biographical mapping. Central to my thesis is the notion that traumatic memories cannot be accessed directly but paradoxically come into being only through the process of testimony—in Barnes’s case, the creative process that is then offered up to the reader as witness. But how is this “ob-scene obscene” figured in the narrative? Is there a discernable poetics, or even ethics, of the obscene? My exploration will open, by way of example, with a reading of Nightwood’s unsettling final chapter, which offers an instance of both manifest and latent obscenity. We will go on to see how the character of Robin Vote functions within the logic of the narrative to encode traumatic memory, and more specifically the trauma of incest. This will lead us to reflect upon the interplay of incest, traumatic memory and modernist textuality before offering a series of readings towards the definition of a poetics of the “ob-scene obscene” in Nightwood and asking whether the creative act may have an ethical role to play in healing an authorial voice possessed by its traumatic past.

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Nightwood: the unsettling final chapter

5 As he revised Nightwood prior to publication, Eliot had also initially been keen to suppress the novel’s controversial final coda chapter, “The Possessed,” set in a decaying chapel where the female character Robin Vote fights with a dog belonging to her former lover Nora, before collapsing into tears and bringing the dog down with her (Caselli 181). The manuscripts of the last versions of Nightwood show that even though the chapter was finally retained, Eliot was still considering replacing the expression “obscene” in the final paragraph by the more innocuous “unclean”—a recommendation Barnes refused to follow, wryly dismissing it as an “example of T.S. Eliot’s ‘lack of imagination’”8: Then she began to bark also, crawling after him—barking in a fit of laughter, obscene and touching. Crouching, the dog began to run with her, head-on with her head, as if to circumvent her; soft and slow his feet went padding. He ran this way and that, low down in his throat crying, and she grinning and crying with him; crying in shorter and shorter spaces, moving head to head, until she gave up, lying out, her hands beside her, her face turned and weeping; and the dog too gave up then, and lay down, his eyes bloodshot, his head flat along her knees. (139)

6 The meaning of the passage was apparently obvious to Barnes herself—“Let the reader make up his own mind if hes [sic] not an idiot he’ll know” she commented (Plumb 1995: xv)—and it has prompted clear responses from some critics. In his 1975 assessment for instance, Robert Nadeau had no qualms in pronouncing the passage “strangely beautiful in spite of the fact that the action described would be considered obscene by almost any standard” (Nadeau 160, my emphasis). More recently, Teresa de Lauretis has described it as “shocking in its unequivocal simulation of a sexual act from frenzied crescendo to failed orgasmic release” (De Lauretis 121). Yet the scene has largely invited a “critical silence” (Blake 161) on the part of scholars, and those who have chosen to comment on the ending have tended to either stand pruriently back, viewing it as a dystopian descent into bestiality, or to offer oblique or abstract appraisals of its possible meaning. Kannenstine’s 1977 monograph on Barnes, Duality and Damnation, for instance, refers to “a bizarre ritualistic ceremony with the beast which brings her down to its level” (Kannenstine 94, my emphasis) and Jane Marcus retreats behind the cover of allusion referring simply to “the novel’s controversial last scene with the dog” (Marcus 1984: 154). Avoiding the sexual question altogether, Donna Gerstenberger has interpreted the ending as a postmodern riff on The Waste Land (Gerstenberger 39)9 while Erin Carlston sees it as an “ironic rebuttal of fascism” (Carlston 79); many twenty-first- century scholars have pursued Gerstenberger’s and Carlston’s less literal approach, reading the passage through the lens of queer theory or the posthuman (Blake 162).10

7 My own unease around this passage comes from elsewhere and is rooted in the oxymoron—“obscene and touching”—with which the narrative voice glosses the episode. The expression points to an unresolved tension between a doting, sentimental gaze on the one hand (“touching”) and a moral abomination on the other (“obscene”), and seems to invite the reader to be at once charmed and yet troubled by the spectacle conjured up before their eyes—that “strangely beautiful” scene in Robert Nadeau’s words. In her comparative study of the publishing fates of Nightwood and Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian Bildungsroman The Well of Loneliness (1928), Leigh Gilmore posits obscenity as “constitutive of, rather than corollary to modernism,” because legal discourse was necessarily imbricated within the emerging sexological and literary

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innovations of the period (Gilmore 604). A literary work deemed likely to encourage criminalized sexual practices would thus be obscene in the eyes of the law; hence the accessible, realist narrative of The Well was judged obscene by the courts on account of its alleged potential to corrupt innocent or ignorant minds (612). Conversely, Eliot’s introduction to Nightwood, flagging the novel as more “poetic” and therefore elusive, successfully pre-empted censorship by presenting “‘deviance’ as […] a matter of literary style” (623). Yet here in this particular passage, it is the narrative itself which foregrounds its own obscenity, inviting the reader to apprehend it as such and begging the question of what precisely it is that makes it so. Certainly the Robin-dog dyad is discomfiting because it collapses the binary between human and bestial, civilized and uncivilized, pure and impure, conjuring up a tableau that “would be considered obscene by almost any standard.” But the passage also unsettles, I would argue, because of the disarming disparity, or dislocation, between style and content—an uneasy combination of seemingly artless language describing an all-but-innocent event. Eschewing the reassurance of “innocently mimetic writing,” as Daniela Caselli has argued with regard to the author’s journalistic pieces, Barnes offers us a tainted aesthetic with which we become an unwitting accomplice (Caselli 23). In other words, it is also in the poetics of the writing (the very quality that saved Nightwood from censorship), that the obscene is to be located.

An encounter with incest

8 One reading, I would contend, of this jarring juxtaposition of the “touching” and “beautiful” and the “shocking” and “obscene,” of juvenile candor and adult sexual knowledge, is that the narrative is figuring here the trauma of incest, the trace of which runs through much of the author’s work as both subtext/thematic and as trope. The etymology of the term is helpful in understanding how it may be figured in a literary text. As Jane M. Ford reminds us, the “incest taboo […] derives […] from man’s limitations and boundaries, separating him from the animal world wherein most sexual activity is indiscriminate […] the derivation of the word ‘incest’ supports this, coming as it does from the Latin incestum or ‘unchaste’” (Ford 5). Following Ford’s argument through, the chapel scene in Nightwood may be viewed not simply as an overtly sexual encounter between man and beast, as Nadeau and de Lauretis read it, but rather as the “objective correlative”—to borrow T.S. Eliot’s famous term—or metaphorical reconfiguration, of an incestuous coupling.11

9 Readings of Nightwood commonly offer a biographical mapping that parallels the failed lesbian love affair of Nora and Robin and Barnes’s own liaison with silverpoint artist Thelma Wood.12 But the novel also engages with far earlier experiences—Barnes’s relationship with Zadel Barnes Gustafson, her paternal grandmother, a relationship which the figure of Robin obliquely revisits. Evoking the emotions that the writing of Nightwood had aroused, Barnes commented in a letter to Emily Coleman in 1936: I am up to my neck here in my lost life—Thelma & Thelma only—& my youth—way back in the beginning when she has no part in it & yet she is cause of my remembrance of it. (Plumb 1993, 158)

10 This comment strikingly underlines the near-physical hold the past has on the author, suggesting she might simply be engulfed (“up to my neck”) or “possessed” by it, as Cathy Caruth has said of the experience of trauma (Caruth 5), an impression the use of

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the present tense to describe the past underscores. Equally significant is the fact that the memory of Barnes’s ex-lover is tenacious precisely because she has come to signify childhood experiences that long preceded her (“way back in the beginning when she has no part in it”) and points to something other than herself. More explicitly, writer Chester Page’s memoirs have related a conversation where the novelist told him she had “fallen in love with Thelma Wood because she resembled her grandmother” (120).

11 From this perspective, the novel’s ending scene should not then be viewed as the culminating demonstration of Robin’s moral and sexual degeneracy, and thus the direct representation of an obscene act, but rather the metaphorical transposition of earlier “unchaste” or “unclean” relationships (to recall Eliot’s uncannily prescient interpretation) that continue to haunt, or “possess,” writer and writing, as they underscore the complex dyad of Nora and Robin. Earlier passages in the narrative would also seem to back up this interpretation. One such is when the heartbroken Nora tells how she sought out her lover “in Marseilles, in Tangier, in Naples, to understand her, to do away with [her] terror”: I haunted the cafés where Robin had lived her night life; I drank with the men, I danced with the women, but all I knew was that others had slept with my lover and my child. For Robin is incest too, that is one of her powers. In her, past-time records, and past time is relative to us all. Yet not being the family she is more present than the family. A relative is in the foreground only when it is born, when it suffers and when it dies, unless it becomes one’s lover, then, it must be everything, as Robin was, yet not as much as she, for she was like a relative found in a lost generation. (D. Barnes 1995, 129)

12 Not only does Nora, in a disturbing conflation of the maternal and the sexual, describe Robin as “my lover and my child,” but she also explains that Robin’s attraction lies in the fact that she is “incest,” which is “one of her powers,” “like a relative found in another generation,” adding that relatives who become lovers “are everything.” The curious expression “Robin is incest” underscores the metaphorical function her character seems to be playing as a “formula” for the repressed experience of incest. Strikingly, the boundaries between victim and perpetrator are blurred: probity holds no sway. Robin is both “child and lover,” yet a source of “terror” and “power” because she signifies incest; although she is not a blood relation she is yet “more present than the family.” It is a textual practice, which, in Caselli’s words, constitutes “a form of collusion with the past, which, far from nostalgically pure, is tainting and compromising” (Caselli 2009, 197); for Diane Chisolm, the narrative “imagines an erotic decrepitude beyond good and evil” (186), suggesting how obscenity, and incest in particular, may participate in modernism’s rethinking of aesthetic and ethical value.

Incest and trauma in literary modernism

13 If incest has long haunted literary texts as a perennial thematic element since Greek tragedy, it attained a particular significance in the modernist period with Sigmund Freud’s invocation of Oedipus to explain normal sexual development. Barnes was more than familiar with Freud’s writing13 and Nightwood stands among a plethora of modernist texts turning their attention to incest as narrative topos or poetic trope, and of which Lolita, Finnegan’s Wake, and The Making of Americans would be salient examples. The modernist text’s engagement with incest does not content itself with plotline. From a formal point of view, as Jen Shelton has observed, the power relations at play in

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the incest dynamic, and the question of narrative (un) reliability (whose story is to be believed, the adult’s or the child’s?) are also central to much modernist writing: Just as victims of incest, narratively disabled by the stories allotted to them by culture […] must find a way to tell a story they understand to be true, so too must certain experimental texts seek out narrative modes that contest the conservatism of existing narratives. (Shelton 30)

14 Moreover, such are the ambiguous and conflicting emotions generated by the experience of incest—the will to recount, and the inability to do so out of a sense of “filial duty to love and respect” (Shelton 5), or quite simply because the memory has been repressed—that the conventional linear testimonial form predicated on the of truth is inadequate. The experience of trauma, as Cathy Caruth has argued, does not manifest itself directly in narrative, but emerges in “radical disruption and gaps” because “it is the fundamental dislocation implied by all traumatic experience that is both its testimony to the event and to the impossibility of its direct access” (Caruth 4, 9). For Julie Taylor, “many of the characteristics of trauma —its tendencies towards unknowability and unrepresentability for instance—are compatible with the epistemological and representational uncertainties […] of Barnes’s work” (Taylor 8). Like modernist writing, traumatic memory, with its emphasis on symbolic representation, “tells without telling,” articulating an experience that cannot be voiced explicitly, or has not been consciously processed (E. Barnes 2). Literature, as Elizabeth Barnes argues, has the potential less to relate traumatic experience than to stand in for that experience, or as Dori Laub has argued, offer the possibility of “the displacement of traumatic experience onto myth, stories, and so forth and […] a means for its realization, through the witnessing of trauma by listeners/readers” (Laub 57). For while historical evidence of an event may exist, no real knowledge of it exists until the event is “witnessed”—that is until someone has become cognizant of it: Since trauma by definition precludes the possibility of the subject experiencing the shocking event, the trauma victim is unable to bear witness to what happened to him/her. Thus someone else— a listener or a reader— must serve as a witness (E. Barnes 2)

15 “Let the reader decide,” Barnes’s take on the interpretation of the chapel scene in Nightwood analysed above, would seem to echo this theory, also supported by Caruth, that “the history of a trauma can only take place through the listening of another” (Caruth 11). In correspondence with Coleman, Barnes writes of her dislike of “parading” the “innermost secret,” preferring for it to be “expos [ed] in art” and “given to the reader, the eye,” as a form of “initiation,” a comment that similarly suggests how traumatic memory cannot be accessed directly, but “is brought into the world through the artistic process and the reader’s witnessing” (Taylor 9).

Barnes: childhood abuse

16 Notwithstanding the inappropriateness of any hermeneutic enterprise that would search to elucidate an “innermost secret” or biographical origin or truth, the Barnes Papers, held at the McKeldin Library at the University of Maryland offer a rich source of archival material that has enabled scholars to gain some sense of the sexual violence Barnes was confronted with in her early years and which makes its belated, oblique (re) appearance in her writing. Mary Lynn Broe for instance refers to a succession of traumatic events, including “the father’s attempted rape, his ‘virginal sacrifice’ of the

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daughter, then his brutal barter of his daughter-bride” at the age of sixteen to Percy Faulkner, his mistress’s brother—a sort of step-uncle—and a man over three times Djuna’s age (Broe 56).

17 These events are both told and not told, on-scene and ob-scene in the linguistically opaque, mock-Elizabethan narratives of Ryder and The Antiphon, with trauma theory offering a possibly entry into these hermetic texts. Thus, where T.S. Eliot had been dismissive of The Antiphon’s obscurity and apparent inaccessibility, predicting that audiences would find it “tedious […] because they [would] not understand it” (Herring 1995: 276), Julie Taylor invites us to reconsider “the perverse anachronism and allusiveness” of the play through the prism of traumatic experience, viewing Barnes’s “literary repetitions and restagings” as a dramatization of the role of audience or reader as witness where “affective and narrative ambivalence” have a key role to play (Taylor 38, 39).

18 The same traumatic event also features in the second draft of Nightwood, in pages that were discarded before publication and which appear to relate the circumstances of adolescent Djuna’s “marriage” ceremony to Percy Faulkner, as well as hinting at earlier incidents of abuse. In this instance, though, instead of the bewilderingly recondite style of Ryder and The Antiphon, the reader faces a text of disconcerting simplicity: And then I had a lover and a doll, and because he was a man who had held me on his knee when I was a child, and because I had a doll and ate caramels, and looked up at him and said ‘yes’, he couldn’t bear it. He thiught [sic] perhaps, that he was bored, but it was something else; he was an old man then […] (D. Barnes 1995, 299)

19 The reader’s attention may be drawn to a number of elements: the disarmingly naïve rendering with its the childlike syntax and accumulative use of the conjunction “and,” flat tone and meager lexicon. This formal innocence, is however, sharply undercut by the shocking pairing of “a lover and a doll,” hinting at an unspeakable event. Barnes’s narrative mode here is redolent of , whose The Making of Americans contains a similar, stylistically guileless passage. In Stein’s text, the reader witnesses a sexually abusive father admonishing his daughter for her provocative behavior in public. Here too, discomfit is caused by artless tone, lexical and syntactical simplicity and relentless repetition that are singularly at odds with unutterable experience, itself maintained ob/scene and imperfectly articulated through euphemism: It happens very often that a man does something, that a man has something in him and he does a thing again and again in his living. There was a man who was always writing to his daughter that she should not do things that were wrong that would disgrace him, she should not do such things and in every letter that he wrote to her he told her she should not do such things, that he was her father and was giving good moral advice to her and always he wrote to her in every letter that she should not do things that she should not do anything that would disgrace him. He wrote this in every letter he wrote to her, he wrote very nicely to her, he wrote often enough to her and in every letter he wrote to her that she should not do anything that was a disgraceful thing for her to be doing and then once she wrote back to him that he had not any right to write moral things in letters to her, that he had taught her that he had shown her that he had commenced in her the doing the things that would disgrace her […]. (Stein 488-499)

20 The epistolary nature of the exchange brings into sharp relief the daughter-victim’s entrapment within the terms of a paternal discourse from which there is no “outside,” but in Barnes’s text too, it seems impossible to escape the internal logic of the traumatic event, which imposes the terms of its own apprehension:

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[…] I had said, “No, I will marry you in my heart but I will not marry you in church.” Because that was a big new ideal my father had in his head. Then I remembered the ceremony beside the Christmas tree, when my father and my grandmother stood by, and my mother by the door in her apron, crying and thinking God knows what; and he put a ring on my finger and I kissed him. Before that, it must have been two hours, I had gone down on the floor and hugged my grandmother by her knees, dropping my head down, saying, ‘Don’t let it happen, and she said “It had to happen.” (D. Barnes 1995, 300)

21 While a number of family members are present, they seem to have surrendered agency, as if numbed by what Dori Laub has termed, in another context of trauma, “the contaminating power of the event” (Laub 66): “‘it had to happen’” as the grandmother says. And perhaps the most unsettling of bystanders is indeed the figure of the collusive grandmother, to whom the narrator turns vainly for help: not only is their power relation clearly underscored by the granddaughter’s lowly position (“hugged my grandmother by the knees”), but the grandmother is also clearly figured as the upholder of patriarchy, “incest’s first cousin” in the words of Jan Shelton (Shelton 2), standing by with the father and blatantly ignoring the mother’s distress.

Zadel Barnes Gustafson: sexual initiator

22 Documents held in Djuna Barnes Collection at the McKeldin Library, University of Maryland suggest that Zadel Barnes, Djuna Barnes’s paternal grandmother not only displayed complicity with her son’s abusive behavior, but herself actively participated in her granddaughter’s sexual initiation. Sexually explicit correspondence between Barnes and Zadel indicate that the author was also victim of another, far rarer, form of incest for much of her childhood. Written over a period of eighteen years, the first dating from when Djuna was six, the letters, “obscene and touching” in their way, reveal the grandmother’s “conflated efforts to nurture and exploit” her granddaughter: “practical advice on groceries and chores; lavish endearments that seem carefully designed to manipulate; and a regressive, highly euphemistic language that expresses her erotic desire for her granddaughter” (Dalton 121). One letter, for instance, addressed to “Dear Snickerbits” from the Grand Union Hotel in New York, Zadel ends with the humdrum news about an ongoing embroidery project: “I went to Indian beadwork store and did all the bead, thread and needle job, also, yesterday” (Barnes Gustafson, 7 September 1909). However, this is immediately juxtaposed with a caricature of Zadel, skirted, but featuring taut outstretched breasts and the comment “Deys’ stretched orful!,” the fake-unschooled vernacular discourse functioning to downplay the blatant sexual content of the message.

23 The ambiguous nature of Djuna’s responses to Zadel also comes across in correspondence. Through Zelda’s prism, Djuna is portrayed as enamored. In one letter dating from April of the same year for instance, Zadel revels in the affection her granddaughter has lavished on her in her previous exchange: “What! Did you really write “My Ownest Licious Grandmother” Lors! Yer orter seen me livellin’ with amazement and joy XXX” (Barnes Gustafson, April 1909). However, the only letter in the collection from Djuna and written in response to accusations from Zadel that she did not write enough, expresses deeply conflicted emotions, marked by a mixture of rage, despair and fear which is swiftly followed by a declaration of affection, suggesting the self-censuring power of the “filial duty to love and respect,” identified by Shelton,

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which make it so difficult for incest victims to tell après coup, is already in place much earlier. Writing of another experience of trauma, the Holocaust, Dori Laub has exposed how its perpetrators “brutally imposed upon their victims a delusional ideology whose grandiose coercive pressure totally excluded and eliminated the possibility of an unviolated, unencumbered, and thus sane point of view” (Laub 1995, 66). Reading the correspondence between Barnes and her grandmother, one is struck by the ambivalent status of the coded language employed, indicative both of the complicity born of a secret shared, and yet also pointing to a mode of discursive entrapment outside of which it is impossible for the granddaughter to evolve. Anger is both articulated and rendered powerless by its juxtaposition with a metonymical, sexualized terms of address: “You is a nasty Pink Tops” writes the young Djuna alluding to her grandmother’s aroused nipples Feb 26/09 Dear Pink Top Pebblums and Grandmother:- Imagine my feelings when the mail brought nothing from you, for me!! This is the way I looked immediately. You is a nasty Pink Tops and Grandmother Flitch and I hate you—oh no I don’t I love yer! ha! ha!

“Bits and pieces of memory”

24 References to a grandmother figure in a series of dreams experienced by Nora in Nightwood convey similarly ambivalent emotions, underscored by the confused, uncertain status of what the protagonist perceives and, this in a narrative already- flagged-as-unreal because a dream; the fact that the grandmother herself is initially evoked in absentia via the description of her room, a room which is categorically not her grandmother’s—“the absolute opposite”—and yet somehow exudes the memory of her, only adds to this constitutive indeterminacy, telling without telling, revealing and screening, offering “bits and pieces” of traumatic memory not yet assimilated into full cognition (Felman 16): This dream that now had all its parts, had the former quality of never really having been her grandmother’s room. She herself did not seem to be there in person, nor able to give an invitation. She had wanted to put her hands on something in this room to prove it; the dream had never permitted her to do so. This chamber, that had never been her grandmother’s, which was, on the contrary, the absolute opposite of any known room her grandmother had ever moved or lived in, was nevertheless saturated with the lost presence of her grandmother who seemed in the continual process of leaving it. (D. Barnes 1995, 55-56).

25 “Eschew [ing] ‘truth’ in favor of a symbolic experience (E. Barnes 2), it is the very form or “architecture” of the dream which goes on to conjure up the grandmother as an inescapable—albeit initially benign and ethereal—presence: “the architecture of the dream had rebuilt her everlasting and continuous, flowing away in a long gown of soft folds and chin ” (56). However, as Nora goes deeper into her dream the tone changes to become swiftly rife with contradictory sentiments and precautionary qualifications as the grandmother figure makes her appearance: With this figure of her grandmother, who was not entirely her recalled grandmother, went one of her childhood, when she had run into her at the corner of the house—the grandmother who, for some unknown reason, was dressed as a man, wearing a billycock and a corked moustache, ridiculous and plump with a leer of love, “My little sweetheart!”—her grandmother “drawn upon” as a prehistoric ruin is drawn upon, symbolizing her life out of her life, and which now appeared to

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Nora as something being done to Robin, Robin disfigured by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain. (56)

26 The lecherous connotations of the “plump with leer of love” and the phallic double entendre of “billycock” (hat) mark the grandmother’s sexual appetite as virile, predatory and menacing, but there is also something unmistakably grotesque about the cross-dressing garb, redolent of a circus ringmaster controlling his troupe of freaks and animals; given the significance of the circus motif in the novel, this implied comparison would seem to point to the centrality of the grandmother figure in the narrative as a whole, an absent presence running through the text. The polysemy of “drawn upon” testifies to the text’s attempts to conceal or erase the grandmother as it takes its inspiration from her memory. The grandmother appears as a (albeit) crumbling mythological nexus or “prehistoric ruin” and establishes the incestuous relation as the cornerstone of all desire within the novel. The unsettling branding of the incest narrative onto Robin at the end of the passage stands an act of mutilation that is all but innocent (“Robin disfigured by the hieroglyphics of sleep and pain”). Robin is, as the narrative voice states earlier, “the infected carrier of the past” who not only stirs incestuous desire in Nora because she resembles her abusive grandmother, but also, disturbingly, arouses the reader’s own sexual appetite, eroticizing our own ties of kinship and drawing us into the narrative’s matrix: Before her the structure of our head and jaws ache—we feel that we could eat her, she who is eaten death returning, for only then do we put our face close to blood on the lips of our forefathers (36)

Conclusion: Tainted aesthetics

27 An unpublished notebook entry in which Barnes poses the plaintive question “I have yet to be forgiven for being abused?” (Plumb 1992, 158) provides some indication of the hold which childhood trauma continued to maintain over the writer well into adulthood and long after the publication of Nightwood, as she continued to attempt to capture its complexities, yet remained “possessed”, in its sway. The desire for pardon that Barnes’s question voices suggests a sense of guilt, as if she were somehow in collusion with its abomination, its obscenity. Yet for the author, who compared the writing process to an open “bleeding wound” that must not heal, and a “place” not to be “betrayed,” the “affective force of traumatic memory” (Taylor 47, 9) is also a powerful source of inspiration, which is to be kept ob-scene, and upon which the writing will compulsively and obliquely draw, as if its aesthetic were somehow “tainted” by the traumatic experience.

28 The image of an open or gaping wound is suggestive of the “gaps” and “disruption” that Caruth identifies as being constitutive of traumatic experience, as it is of the narrative modes we would typically associate with the modernist text, and which we have identified in the passages from Nightwood analysed above. In particular, we gain sense of incest trauma forming an absent presence running through the text, encoded in the trope of Robin its metaphorical incarnation (“Robin is incest”) and appearing grotesquely in the richly figurative grandmother dream sequence. But the poetics of the “ob-scene obscene” may also be discerned in that unsettling combination of innocence and experience, of the “touching” and the “obscene,” incongruence of naïve form and corrupt content where I would argue, the traumatic event occurs as symptom.

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29 What of the position of the reader-witness? Whereas some narratives of incest survival celebrate the victim’s story, setting up a clear moral hierarchy and establishing a narrative of recovery and deliverance, Barnes’s modernist writing denies her reader- witness such ethical comfort, initiating them into a text that is the “illegitimate offspring” (Caselli 203) of an incestuous coupling.

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Scott, Bonnie Kime. Refiguring Modernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

Shelton, Jen. Modernism and the Narrative Structure of Incest. Gainsville, Fl.: Florida University Press, 2006.

Sherbert, Gary. “Hieroglyphics of Sleep and Pain.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. 30.3 (2003): 117-145.

Stein, Gertrude. The Making of Americans, Normal, Il.: Dalkey Archive, 1995.

Taylor, Julie. Djuna Barnes and Affective Modernism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012.

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NOTES

1. Leigh Gilmore’s comparison of the publication histories of The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood “pursue[s] the ‘non-case’ of Nightwood, a novel that evaded the censor” (614). She interprets T.S. Eliot’s bland and universalizing preface, as well as his cutting of explicit references to male homosexuality as a strategical move to escape the fate that had befallen Radclyffe Hall’s novel, which fell foul of British obscenity law and was banned in 1929. 2. Of Eliot’s preface and editorial cuts to Nightwood, Cheryl Plumb notes “It may not have been the text that [Barnes] had hoped would be published, but she could live with compromise, given her fears that it would not be published” (Plumb 1995, xxiv). 3. For Monika Faltejskova, Eliot’s editing of Nightwood constituted primarily “a case of personal censorship” (92). 4. “When we think of the provocative work of Anglo-American literary modernism, the famous trials of James Joyce’sUlysses, D. H. Lawrences Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William Burrough's Naked Lunch come immediately to mind” (Chisolm 167-168). 5. T.S. Eliot predicted people would find it “tedious […] because they will not understand it” (Herring 276). 6. Barnes’s true feelings regarding T.S. Eliot’s editing of Nightwood and his oblique, obfuscating preface remain unclear. She both claimed that he had “missed the mark” and that his introduction was “an unheard of honour” (Faltejskova 112, 111). She also mocked the primness of his emendations: “of Eliot’s changing ‘bugger’ to ‘boys,’ Barnes exclaimed, ‘Imagine trying to wake Eliot up!’” (Plumb 1995, xxii). As for Ryder, Barnes won a “small victory” when she successfully obliged the publisher, Boni and Liveright, to print ellipses where portions of the text had been removed: “in this way, the ellipses would serve as traces of censorship; they would indicate an absence in the text and censoring hand” (Gilmore 614). 7. For instance in “Bow Down,” the first chapter of the novel when O’Connor recounts the life of King Ludwig of Bavaria who had “had everything but a woman and a collar—and I wouldn’t be too sure about the lace collar” or when he is caught masturbating in public and appositely imprisoned in “Marie Antoinette’s very cell—she, like O’Connor, being a “blasphemed queen”. These passages are restored in Cheryl Plumb’s 1995 edition of the novel (D. Barnes 1995, 23-28). 8. Note in the margin of the manuscript. As Faltejskova explains, “Barnes fought against this change for she inserted it back into the proof and saw that the published version had the original phrasing” (98). 9. “The dog and the chapel as well as other aspects of Nightwood and the circumstances of its publication compel us to think of Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem that made Eliot the self- constructed high-priest of modernism: but while the cultural anthropologists may be tempted to say that these are the same bones and the same ruins, one has only to think of the way in which the dog and the chapel perilous function in Eliot’s poem to know that Barnes’s project differs fundamentally in its intention and orientation” (39). 10. “Where these critics differ from earlier accounts of the scene is in their careful articulations of the complexity, ambivalence, and potential for pleasure inherent in shame, and in their sense that becoming bestial might be a movement that is meaningfully queer, functioning as a renunciation of the social or a withdrawal from the category of the human” (Blake 162-163). 11. T.S. Eliot used this phrase in his 1919 essay “Hamlet and his problems” to describe “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion” that the poet feels and hopes to evoke in the reader (Eliot 58). 12. Herring is one of the many scholars who refer to Wood as “the counterpart of Robin in Nightwood” (Herring 158).

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13. According to biographer Andrew Field, Barnes undertook analysis in the 1938 with Antonia White’s psychiatrist Alexis Carrell, but “the analysis was short lived, perhaps because Barnes knew her Freud too well” (Field 211).

ABSTRACTS

A number of scholars have viewed obscenity in Djuna Barnes’s writing as primarily a question of eluding institutional and societal constraints. Her novel Nightwood (1936) was partially bowdlerized at editorial stage to avoid censorship on account of its male homosexual content. But obscenity also lies elsewhere in the novel, in the figuring of the author’s probably incestuous childhood liaison with her grandmother. It is a relationship which haunts the narrative, constituting a form of collusion with, and witness to, the past and one with which the reader becomes unwittingly complicit.

La question de l’obscénité dans l’œuvre de Djuna Barnes a été principalement étudiée sous l’angle de la censure : son roman Nightwood (1936) a été partiellement expurgé au stade de la relecture afin d’y échapper et son contenu explicitement homosexuel s’en trouva, de fait, fortement réduit. Mais l’obscénité est également à l’œuvre dans la représentation d’une relation d’enfance, très probablement incestueuse, entre l’auteure et sa grand-mère. Cette relation hante Nightwood et y installe une connivence narrative avec ce passé, dont le lecteur devient le témoin et le complice involontaire.

INDEX

Keywords: modernism, obscenity, incest, trauma, censorship Mots-clés: modernisme, obscénité, inceste, trauma, censure

AUTHORS

MARGARET GILLESPIE Maîtresse de conférences University of Franche Comté [email protected]

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“Show! Hide! Show!”: High Modernism and the Lure of the Obscene

Olivier Hercend

Introduction

1 The accusations of obscenity which were famously leveled at major modernist works like Ulysses and The Well of Loneliness, and the long and complex history of trials, censorship and resistance that followed, have long framed the debate on modernism and the obscene around artistic freedom and the merits of representing sexuality and the body in literature. Between the description of real life—as in the passage in the “Calypso” episode of Ulysses where Bloom’s stay in the outhouse is described—and the desire to play on provocation, bawdiness or bad taste–for instance in Eliot’s youthful “Bolo” poetry—, arguments centered around the question of what constituted art, and what remained in the realm of pornography. This was compounded by political and social struggles, which in Britain centered around the “Obscene Publications Act” of 1857, as well as the practices of distributors, such as the decision by circulating libraries to self-censor at the start of the twentieth century.1 However, these oppositions tended to rest on a narrow definition of obscenity as pure vulgarity, and as such obscured a shift in the meaning of the word, which came to also encompass “the uncomfortable or unconscious dimensions of the psyche”, to quote the words of Rachel Potter (Potter 10). As Potter observes, obscenity is a complex word. Coming from the Latin “obscēnus”, with the dual meaning of “inauspicious” and “disgusting” or “indecent”, the obscene as a concept not only describes more or less thinly veiled references to sexuality, scatology, perversity and violence, but also refers back to the “scene” or stage, and to the “limits of representation; to those aspects of humanity or language which ought to remain off-stage”, out of the frame, for fear of shocking or outraging the public (Potter 3). This plurality of meanings is particularly important when dealing with modernism, as the tension between what can be seen, what is

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hidden and what is hinted at, is central in the modernist aesthetics, especially in relation with sexuality, violence and scandal.

2 Indeed, as Christopher Butler argues, modernism is part of a larger cultural movement, questioning “the boundary between an idealized waking fantasy suitable for literature, and the primitive, liberating regression of dreams” (98), the interaction between the drives of the human mind and the censorship of accepted discourse. Quoting the epigraph to Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, “Flectere si nequeo superos, acheronta movebo” (“If I cannot direct the forces above, I will then put the lower spheres in motion”), Butler integrates this dichotomy within a broader reflection on the interactions between surface and depths, the visible and the invisible, as well as the spoken and the unspoken, which directs the early development of psychoanalysis (Butler 4). In this context, the ambiguity of the obscene appears: it is both a form of protection, keeping out what should not be shown, and a way to highlight the limits of the framing, a way to admit that something has been left out. Not showing, leaving a blank or covering up a scene also reveals its existence, creating a form of mystery.

3 As a matter of fact, a recurrent feature of modernist texts is the perceivable covering up of violent, erotic or disturbing scenes. This will be my starting point in order to define the modernist notion of the obscene. Far from being a form of accident, the side effect of a new form of realism or literary experimentation, I believe it to be a form of artistic trope, and part of a set of parallel rhetorical strategies. Whether it be for artistic or political purposes, hinting at blind spots, luring the reader towards the seams of the textual fabric, is central to modernist aesthetics, and a recurrent pattern in otherwise very distinct texts. Authors as different as T.S. Eliot, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf all tend to outline scenes which they partially or totally cover, leaving them beyond the limits of what is explicitly stated in the text. In doing so, they highlight the literary conventions of framing, as well as the cultural and political forces that influence the choices determining what to show and what to leave out. Finally, by creating this form of indeterminacy, opening up the possibility of another event behind those which the text presents, they call to us as readers. Obscenity places us in front of a dilemma which invokes the notion of ethics, of what we are allowed to infer or imagine, how far away from the written word it is possible, and perhaps necessary, to go, in order to forge our own understanding of the work and of the world that it depicts.

4 Hence, analyzing a number of defining works from these three authors as examples, I will show that the obscene, as the margin between what can be written and what cannot, is a fundamental feature of modernist texts, which are very often haunted by a form of “tantalizing” absence, to quote the words of Makiko Minow-Pinkney (Minow- Pinkney 59). This tension is both artistically fruitful and politically charged, as it opens up the frame of expression, using the lure of the scandalous to highlight the arbitrariness of taboos and socially accepted forms of framing. Finally, by tying interpretive decisions to ethical dilemmas, it reshapes the interaction between writer and reader. Asking us whether to look or not to look further, to imagine what is implicit or to choose between competing visions of the same scene, it focuses our attention on the limits of literature, and beckons us to question our role within the work; our capacity, and perhaps our duty, to participate in the construction of meaning.

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The absence as lure

5 In analyzing modernist texts that deal with sexually explicit, violent or disturbing scenes, I would argue that a certain cluster of stylistic and narrative patterns emerges. The event in question is very often only hinted at or hidden, but paradoxically influences the rest of the description and takes on a larger symbolic meaning. Instead of being circumscribed by the silence, it tends to evoke other things left unsaid, and reveals a form of hidden discourse. A very telling example of this is the interaction between Gerty and Bloom in the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses. On the beach at sundown, Bloom leers at Gerty. She accepts his voyeurism and leans back to watch fireworks, letting him see her legs and masturbate to her “half-offered” body (477). However, neither her actions nor his are explicitly described. Her exhibitionism is partially covered up by her own thoughts: she shows her “knee,” then “legs,” her “garters,” “nainsook knickers” and finally “above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading” (476-478). The enumeration starts with body parts, but then metonymically shifts to her articles of clothing, and finally to a half-finished sentence, which only hints at what she shows—what Bloom would be the first to see-through the triple negative construction “no-one ever not even”. The closer the text comes to the obscene part of her display, the more contorted the style becomes in order not to state what is being shown, to the point that the grammar of the sentence breaks down. Meanwhile, other parallel scenes are evoked, such as the activities of “skirtdancers and highkickers” (477). Likewise, though it is clear that Gerty understands Bloom’s actions, she does not put them into words. She sees that “His hands and face were working” (476) and remembers a friend telling her about a lodger doing “something not very nice” over some pictures. And after the event, she hints at the vulgarity of his behavior: “An utter cad he had been!” (478).

6 However, this way of meandering around the unspoken event actually conjures up a number of tropes and signs, which enhance the erotic intensity of the scene.2 There is more to hiding than to showing in this passage. Firstly, the mediations themselves are sexually charged. As Benoît Tadié remarks, the “Nainsook” brand adds a tactile dimension to an interaction which would otherwise be only visual, through the integration of the publicity slogan “the fabric that caresses the skin” (211-212). Furthermore, the shared secret itself becomes a form of sensually charged silence: “Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret” (478). And most of all, as previously mentioned, other scenes of unspoken desire and obscene lust echo the one at hand. Uncouth desire breeds desire, as this moment on the beach reminds Gerty of the “something not very nice” that lodgers do, which “you could imagine sometimes in the bed” (476). This form of ripple-like effect, this wave of desire rushing from being to being behind the fixed barriers of the text, reaches its peak when the firework goes off—a very straightforward metaphor for climax—“then the Roman candle burst and it was like a sigh of O! and everyone cried O! O! in raptures and it gushed out of it a stream” (478). The “sigh of O!” is reified: it reaches beyond individuals, linking them in a “gushing” “stream” of inarticulate emotion. Far from keeping the sexual tension out of the passage, its obscenity seems to liberate it from any form of fixation, letting it course through individuals, and symbols, influencing the entire passage until even the sky bursts in climax. The fact of keeping the concrete event at the margin of the text,

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creates a point of indeterminacy, which ends up saying a lot more about the ubiquity of sexuality than any realistic description could purport to express.

7 Although certainly not a modernist invention, this paradox of a scene that is hidden, but in such a way as to enhance its evocative power, is a recurrent stylistic feature of high modernism. In “The Fire Sermon,” the third part of The Waste Land, the encounter between the typist and the clerk is on the verge of turning into a squalid scene of barely consensual sex (“flushed and decided, he assaults at once […] and makes a welcome of indifference,” l.239-242), when a parenthesis opens, and Tiresias begins to speak, stopping only after the deed is done and the man “Bestows one final patronizing kiss” (l. 247) before leaving. On the one hand, this means that the intercourse is not described. It is visibly hidden, through the use of the parenthesis. However, what is described is Tiresias, looking at the scene being “enacted” (l. 244). As Maud Ellmann puts it, “The seer turns into a Peeping Tom, the most ambiguous of spectators” (97) while the reader witnesses this form of voyeurism. Furthermore, the figure of Tiresias is also very ambiguous in that context. One of the myths surrounding Tiresias is his having changed into a woman for seven years. Therefore, when he says “I Tiresias have foresuffered all” (l.243), the one hidden sex scene is made to evoke his entire sexual experience, including the violence that the term “foresuffered” implies, and links the modern setting with other scenes going as far back as Ancient Greece (“I who have sat by Thebes,” l.245). While being absent from the explicit text, sexuality and violence insist at the margins, and seem to color the whole of human experience. In his Five Lessons on Psychoanalysis, Freud compares the neurotic effects of repressed emotions and experiences to a spectator at his conference being forced out of the room, and then hammering at the door, disturbing the class from the outside with much more forcefulness than he ever could within the room (Freud 26-28). This metaphor perfectly illustrates the effects of the obscene within the poetics of The Waste Land: it is visibly left out, and just as visibly disturbs and influences the meaning of the scenes in question.

8 In the context of modernist literature, this motif of absence and insistence, the duality that characterizes the obscene, is undeniably part of a broader aesthetics. This is why I include Virginia Woolf in the reflection, though she might be considered as warier of the obscene than many of her contemporaries, as attested by her comments on the “indecency” of Joyce’s Ulysses. First of all, her novels do contain numerous instances of partially covered violence or sexuality, although their inclusion is often more implicit than in the works of Joyce. But more importantly, she is concerned with the dialectics between showing and hiding. She knows both the importance of protecting the individual from the “shocks” of experience, and the violence of silence and social taboos imposed upon the individual who has experienced trauma or powerful emotions. In Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language, Daniel Ferrer highlights her ambivalence towards language in that respect. Language is both a tool of control, and serves a “screening function” or, taking up the words of Bernard in The Waves, a tool of “attenuation of the original shock” of living (85-88). This duality particularly influences Woolf’s attitude towards the obscene. In Jacob’s Room, when Jacob is with his mistress Florinda, the narrative voice speaks of his mother’s letters in his entrance hall while the two lovers are in the bedroom: if the pale blue envelope lying by the biscuit box had the feelings of a mother, the heart was torn by the little creak, the sudden stir. Behind the door was the obscene thing, the alarming presence... (124).

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9 The sexual undertones of the “little creak” of the bed do hint at the unexpressed, “obscene thing,” while the position of the narrative voice, at the limit between the bedroom and the outside world, can be paralleled with the position of Tiresias in The Waste Land. But the entire scene also reinforces the motif of the novel: the room itself is “obscene,” always in the margins of the text, always seemingly unattainable, just as Jacob is. And the letters represent this inability to reach the protagonist and know him in other ways than in absentia. At the end of the novel, after his demise, when Betty Flanders and his friend Bonamy enter his room, one of the first things they see is “[a]ll his letters strewn about for anyone to read” (246). They are what is left after his disappearance, in the antechamber to his empty room. In Woolf’s writing, the obscene is a symbol among others of the impossibility to reach an intimate understanding of others through language. And, like other motifs of unattainable presence, it is linked with a form of mystery, a desire to know more about Jacob than what remains of him in the written text of the novel. The experience of violence and sexuality is linked with what Minow-Pinkney calls the “motif of the quest” in Woolf’s style: they stand as forms of “hermeneutic provocation, goading the reader into a sense of tantalizing but never quite delivered significance” (84).

10 This is why I assert that, far from being a simple coincidence, the recurrence of a stylistic and narrative pattern within modernist texts dealing with the obscene is meaningful. It is part of an array of artistic strategies, to change events and scenes that could otherwise be disturbing or disgusting to some—and perhaps quite banal otherwise—into tantalizing absences, which influence how the entire work is read. The term “tantalizing” is particularly apposite here, in that it stresses the dynamics of desire and frustration. Tantalus’s plight comes from the fact that the foodstuffs are in plain sight, that he can imagine them and project his desires onto them (a feature which pictorial takes on the scene of his torments tend to highlight), so that they come to stand for his very drives. Instead of having a value in themselves, since they cannot be grasped, they become mere forms of appeal to him, calls upon his hunger and thirst. Likewise, since they are not shown, the obscene events only exist inasmuch as they manage to evoke thoughts and emotions, and trigger some form or other of mental reconstruction on the part of the reader.

11 The motif of the nightingale and the myth of Philomel in The Waste Land is particularly revealing in that respect. Her rape is neither shown nor explicitly stated: it only appears through understatements (“by the barbarous king/So rudely forced,” l. 99-101) and antitheses such as the nightingale’s “inviolable voice” (l.101). But, as Anne Tomiche notes, her singing, the very “inviolable voice” of her changed self, continues to carry sexual connotations: ““Jug Jug” to dirty ears” (125). Once again, the hidden scene seems to influence the rest of the poems, adding possible innuendos and sexual tension to a bird’s melodious singing. But most importantly, it also seems to bear on its own reception: the people hearing the nightingale and thinking of Philomel—and by extension, the readers of the poem—are accused of having “dirty ears” (l.103) and twisted thoughts. When, later in the poem, the singing recurs, this effect is emphasized. The text reads: “Twit twit twit/Jug jug jug jug jug jug/So rudely forc’d./Tereu” (l. 203-206). “Tereu” is the vocative form of Tereus, the rapist: “You, Tereus”. We are made to hear the scene, to witness the call itself, from which we can reconstruct the violence of the interaction. Not only does this way of dealing with the obscene question the limit between what is explicit and implicit in the text, the scene and the “off-stage”

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aspects: it also subverts the relation between the written word and our reconstruction of it. To use another dramatic metaphor, it breaks the “fourth wall,” appealing directly to us as readers. As Vicky Mahaffey explains, the figure of Philomel, through her appeals, “challenges the reader to hear the silenced voice and see the hidden image” (137). Through this process of interpellation, the obscene becomes an instrument, used to reveal the limitations of artistic conventions and social norms, and to propose new forms of interactions with literary texts.

Breaking the frame

12 Changing the obscene into a mysterious facet of the text implies that something worthwhile has been left out. It intimates that previous conventions on what to say and what to hide have lost their pertinence, and that their blind spots might be artistically more fecund than their framing. That is for instance what Eliot asserts in his early poetry, through the changes in perspective, the focus on the dingy backstreets and darker corners of the city: the poet, like the women at the end of the “Preludes,” finds inspiration by “gathering fuel in vacant lots” (l.54), going where there seems to be nothing, in order to find the paradoxical fertility of what is left—the waste. David Bergdahl, in “T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land as a Bakhtinian Carnival,” emphasizes the presence of “freaks” and “rejects” in Eliot’s poetry, linking it to a carnivalesque reversal in poetic standards (2). This also implies a form of accusation against what Benoît Tadié describes as the “hypocrisy” of those who cling to a lost innocence (159). The poetic mind in Eliot’s early poetry is as “sordid” as the world around it (“You dozed, and watched the night revealing/The thousand sordid images/Of which your soul was constituted,” “Preludes,” l.26-28). In “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” for instance, the sexual urges of the speaker, although they are never mentioned per se, seem to take hold of the world around him, making “the street lamp sputt[er],” calling to direct his attention towards prostitutes (l.14). The mechanics of arousal, sexual tension and possible impotence also seep into the world around: The memory throws up high and dry [...] A twisted branch upon the beach [...] Stiff and white./A broken spring in a factory yard,/ Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left/Hard and curled and ready to snap (l.23-32)

13 The stiffness, the power to “snap,” are both still latent in the entire scene, all the while being threatened by wreckage (“high and dry”) or abandonment (“Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left”). Although these poetic constructions are not entirely new, and the influence of Laforgue is strongly felt (particularly in his musings on his illness), in the context of Eliot’s development as a poet, this evocation of unspeakable bodily powers constitutes a form of manifesto. They herald a new form of poetics, which implicitly attacks Eliot’s forebears. In “Cousin Nancy,” the new trends that the young woman follows are pitted against the poetic tradition, in the guise of “Matthew and Waldo, the guardians of the faith,/The Army of unalterable law,” keeping watch from the bookshelf (l. 12-13). Hinting at sexual urges through metaphors found in “vacant lots” is undoubtedly a way to liberate poetry from the frame that poets such as Matthew Arnold and Ralph Waldo Emerson had adopted. And, like cousin Nancy’s behaviour, or that of aunt Helen’s servants in “Aunt Helen,” courting each other in the house when the old lady is dead, this new perspective fosters a form of

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dissent, a breach in the consensus on what can be expressed and what must remain hidden. It sows the seeds of scandal.

14 In Modernist Fiction and News, David Rando stresses the influence of New Journalism on modernism, especially its insistence on scandals and breaking news. According to him, modernist writers tended to show interest in the mechanics of “scandalous disclosure,” but with a certain ambivalence. Indeed, they also “resist disclosure, by making readers more aware that experience itself is a difficult thing to represent,” “whereas newspapers obviously court readability”. This “dialectic of revealing and concealing” (Rando 48) makes use of the modernist trope of the obscene, linking it to wider cultural and political strategies. In Joyce’s Dubliners, the woes of the city and its inhabitants appear as a sum of more or less hidden scandals, half-told stories that the protagonists must follow in order to reach an understanding of the world they live in. The obscene comes to represent the moral decay of the inhabitants. In “An Encounter,” the two children who have not gone to school meet a man, whose speech sheds light on the implicit sexual tension in the chastisement of students and on the desire that it awakens. It takes the form of an enigma, a mystery to unravel: “He described to me how he would whip such a boy as if he were unfolding some elaborate mystery [...] and seemed to plead with me that I should understand him” (17). The desire to unveil the meaning behind the whipping of boys becomes a locus of sexual tension in itself: the man lusts after the child’s understanding. Conversely, in “The Sisters,” the boy protagonist has erotic dreams about hearing the strange priest’s confession: “It murmured; and I understood that it desired to confess something. I felt my soul receding into some pleasant and vicious region” (4). Knowledge of what is unspoken becomes an erotic prospect, because it breaks the frame of silence and innuendos that stifles the characters, and reveals the hidden ills of Ireland—in the case of “The Sisters” and “An Encounter”, the perversion of priests and educators. This dynamic echoes what Jean-Michel Rabaté calls the “perversion” of Joyce’s writing in Dubliners: by describing the characters’ search for truth, or their encounter with secrets that threaten them, the narration aims at having “a certain number of effects on the reader” (19-20). This in turn fosters a desire for reversal, for a questioning of the figure of authority, like the one that the protagonist of “The Sisters” experiences. Just as the child wants to hear the confessions of his confessor, the style of the short stories is made to kindle the reader's desire to interrogate the text, to go beyond what is said and peer into its secrets. Thus, Dubliners attacks the secrecy and hypocrisy of Irish society by promoting curiosity and the search for the hidden, obscene truth. Rather than merely showing the scandals that plague the Church and education system (among others), it changes them into obscene, tantalizing secrets, that we have to search beyond the text to uncover.

15 Furthermore, this duality, both hiding and hinting at scandals within society, also calls into question the instances of censorship, the social and political framing imposed upon public and private life. Indeed, while the obscene leaves the underlying secret hidden, the obstacles—those who want the scandal to be hushed—appear all the more starkly as they stand between the readers and what they want to know. We have already seen how Tiresias’s posture, his role as a “peeping Tom,” was part of what made the undisclosed sex scene in The Waste Land so disturbing. But perhaps the most biting indictment of the censor in modernist literature is to be found in Orlando, around the transformation of the protagonist into a woman. Indeed, that scene is interrupted

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by the arrival of the “Three Deities,” “Purity,” “Modesty” and “Chastity,” who ask that the sex change be hidden, and do not want to see it. Their struggle against the trumpets of the Truth makes for a sort of comical interlude, which indeed obfuscates the process of transformation, but sheds a piercing light on their own motivations for not wanting to witness it. For these deities have vested interests: they are in connivance with other social forces, and their forced ignorance serves to buttress a wider political system: We go, we go [to] those who honour us […] those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the darkness; those still worship us, and with reason; for we have given them Wealth, Prosperity, Comfort, Ease. (97)

16 In trying to hide the scandal—the possibility of sexual fluidity—they end up showing their own reasons to adhere to the status quo. As Christine Reynier puts it, Woolf uses what goes beyond the accepted frames, using “what society rejects” in order to bring to the fore and satirize the arbitrariness, the aberrations and injustice of its codes (Reynier 2008). The comedic value of the obscene lies not in what is hidden, but in what is revealed around the blind spot, and the fundamental baseness of the instances of censorship.

17 But the political aspect of satire always rests on certain moral preconceptions, appealing to the personal common sense or humanity of the reader to arouse their indignation. It calls for a judgment. Indeed, breaking the frame, making new aspects of reality enter the ken of art, also fosters a need to break down and reconfigure moral codes. Dealing with Ulysses and Joyce’s attitude towards the reception of his works, Wolfgang Iser argues that “the undercutting of norms […] will inevitably bring them above the threshold of consciousness and thus exhibit them for inspection” (136). As a matter of fact, in modernist texts the obscene, by stressing the limits of previous world- views, contributes to a change in perspectives and a reevaluation of moral standards. Stephen Dedalus’s moral “coming of age” in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is particularly eloquent on this issue. Indeed, faced with the strictures and hypocrisies of moral and religious norms around him, Stephen strays, entering the “Daedalian” maze of the city, and comes to face the obscene, in the form of sexual urges. Once again, the unspoken desire remains outside of the text, but it leaves traces. This leads to a form of quest, following such hints as the “echo of an obscene scrawl which [Stephen] had read on the oozing wall of a urinal” (83). Language, written and spoken, is overrun by sensuality: during Stephen’s first encounter with a prostitute, her “softly parting lips” “press[...] upon his brain […] as though they were the vehicle of a vague speech” (85). Moreover, this contamination goes far beyond the moment of his sexual awakening. The rituals of the Jesuits, especially those that employ language, such as confession, become tainted by his newfound experience. When he wants to confess his sin of the flesh, the very discourse that Stephen is trying to formulate becomes a vehicle for spreading his perversion: he imagines writing his secrets on paper and leaving them in the street, adding that: “a girl might come upon them as she walked by and read them secretly” (97). Like the “not very nice things” that Gerty’s friend saw the lodger do, and which “you could imagine sometimes in the bed” (Ulysses, 476), his erotic drives seem ready to spread to others, using the very means that are meant to contain them. But this also reveals the erotic power of confession, the underlying hypocrisy of the Jesuits, who derive pleasure from their power over those that they listen to. This is partly why Stephen refuses to become a priest himself, and to “know the sins, the sinful longings

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[…] hearing them murmured into his ears […] by the lips of women and of girls” (Portrait 134). He is aware of the scandalous, hidden lusts for power behind the professed morality of the Church. Thus, his coming of age consists in facing the limits of accepted norms, in seeing what hides behind these barriers, peering into the obscene recesses of Irish society.

18 Finally, the result of his maturation, the act that closes the novel, after the individual instances of judgment and choice, of doubt and self-doubt, is to endeavor to renew the norms themselves. In this light, his final statement of intent, “I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race” can be better understood (229-232). Having understood the failings of Ireland, as well as his own inadequacies, Stephen imagines himself as the architect of a new conscience, like Dedalus, the “Old father, old artificer” whose name he bears (Portrait, 217). He grasps the ethical implications of his acquired knowledge, his power to transform the world through his understanding, and the responsibility that this power entails. I now wish to affirm and demonstrate that this narrative arc very narrowly parallels the very experience of reading Joyce’s texts. As Paul B. Armstrong puts it, “Ulysses points out [the reader’s] limits, their inadequacy,” but in doing so offers an “emancipatory” pleasure “by […] liberating the reader’s power to mean” (148). Hence, the trope of the obscene not only serves the political and aesthetic aims of modernism, but also leads into the realm of what Derek Attridge calls “reading and responsibility”: the ethical side of modernist literature.

The ethics of obscenity and the role of the reader

19 Indeed, in the face of a shift in perspective and a subversion of accepted norms, the experience of the obscene requires that the reader adopt an ethical posture. Hans Georg Gadamer, in Truth and Method, proposes what I consider to be a fruitful definition of this term in the context of reading and interpretation. Interpretation, Gadamer explains, not only consists in forming rules, but also in applying the received knowledge and norms to new situations. This is what is traditionally called “subtilitas applicandi,” and the point where hermeneutics–the art of interpretation–encounters ethics (148). Taking up Aristotle’s distinction between the realm of nature (“physis”), which is ruled by mechanistic laws, and the ethical realm, Gadamer argues that the latter is founded on, and constantly renewed by, human actions. No ethical act can be judged solely on the basis of preexisting or transcendent standards, for it must include its own effect on ethical conceptions as part of its value (153). As in the case of Stephen, whose perspective on his country and himself is the basis for a possible re-creation of Irish conscience, ethics intervenes when the application of knowledge necessitates an implication, a commitment to the result of one’s actions (165). In the case of the obscene, the change of perspective and the reevaluation of norms that it entails are not objective: their extent relies entirely on a decision. We can always decide not to see, not to hear, not to go on a quest. The modernist use of the obscene puts the reader in front of their own power to construct meaning, and the possible consequences of seeing, or not seeing, what is hidden behind the limits of the written word.

20 Moreover, the obscene calls upon the ambivalence of desire: there is a drive to see, but it may be just as erotic to miss the scene, to remain at the threshold. Jean-Michel Rabaté calls this the internal contradiction of voyeurism: although the acme of power is

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to see while remaining invisible, as Michel Foucault asserts in his reflections on the panopticon (203), voyeurism rests on the much more ambivalent intertwining of a desire to see with a desire to remain blind. This is what explains Bloom’s cry: “Show! Hide! Show!” in the “Circe” episode of Ulysses, when, in his dream, Boylan invites him to watch his cuckolding through the keyhole of his door (72). Voyeurism as a perversion implies a form of power, the ability to peer or not to do so–nobody would call someone who is forced to watch a scene a voyeur. This is all the more true when the instinct to know more is aroused through a text, which by definition the reader can stop reading at any time. It is frequent for modernist texts to present the very act of continuing to read them as bordering on the voyeuristic activity. In the second part of The Waste Land, “A Game of Chess,” the description of the woman’s room, which will lead to the evocation of Philomel as well as the intimate conversation between a couple, starts with the mention of a “golden Cupidon [who] peeped out/(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)” (l. 80-81). Hence, the entire passage is presented as what the “peep” sees, and what another might “hid[e] his eyes” from. The Waste Land not only features characters in ambiguous positions, like Tiresias: it also places the reader in front of scenes that some might feel more comfortable hiding away from.

21 This poses the question of the reader’s implication in the text, what is at stake in reading and interpreting different passages, in accepting or refusing to follow some hints. In Dubliners, Joyce often uses the mechanics of narrative tension to place his readers in very awkward positions, as the accomplices, or at least the knowing witnesses, of disturbing actions. The short story “Two Gallants,” starts with Lenehan praising a story which, according to him “takes the biscuit” (36). In order to know the exact nature of this story, we have to read on, gathering hints from the discussion, as well as cultural references: “ʻYou’re what I call a gay Lothario,ʼ said Lenehan. ʻAnd the proper kind of a Lothario, too! ʼ” (38). We are made to picture a scene between Corley, Lenehan’s friend, and a young woman (“In his imagination he beheld the pair of lovers walking along some dark road; he heard Corley’s voice in deep energetic gallantries”, 42), and guess at his intentions, from Lenehan’s own perspective: “He might yet be able to settle down in some snug corner and live happily if he could only come across some good simple-minded girl with a little of the ready” (43). And the story ends on a narrative climax with the revelation: “[Corley] extended a hand towards the light and, smiling, opened it slowly to the gaze of his disciple. A small gold coin shone in the palm.” (45). On the one hand, this reveals the baseness of the character, capitalizing on the woman’s desire to con her and get money from her. But the narrative pleasure that we as readers derive from the story parallels the outcome of Corley’s actions. We cannot judge without understanding what has happened; and if we understand it, we are on the side of the conman. Our posture mirrors Lenehan’s: we have done nothing ourselves, but we profit from the crime, at least in terms of literary build-up and payoff. We take on the role of Corley’s public. Kershner remarks on the parallel between Corley’s ostentatious behavior, making Lenehan wait before he shows him the coin for instance, and the pacing of the story itself. In creating suspense, “Joyce has encouraged the reader’s collaboration in the degrading ritual” enacted by the two gallants (86). This sort of trap reveals the dangers in adhering to a story’s structure: sometimes, by accepting to read on, we make ourselves the accomplices of some very cruel narratives.

22 On the contrary, certain modernist texts hint at the wrongness of averting one’s eyes, of accepting the social conventions which isolate or hush up certain facts. It is

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interesting to see how all three authors attack the social taboos around mental disorder, for instance. This appears in the reactions around Kernan’s alcoholism in the short story “Grace” in Dubliners, in Woolf’s vision of psychiatrists as censors throughout Mrs Dalloway—in the description of William Bradshaw’s activities (“[he] secluded […] lunatics, forbade childbirth, penalised despair, made it impossible for the unfit to propagate their views”, 84), or even Rezia’s final vision, linking Dr Holmes to an obstacle in front of the light, closing off access to the window from which Septimus’s body can be seen: “She saw the large outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr. Holmes” (27). But in the poem “Sweeney Erect,” Eliot questions the visibility of hysteria, the indifference that it creates, by appealing directly to the reader’s powers of interpretation. Indeed, the woman’s seizure on the bed is only half- described, hinted at like an obscene event: “Gesture of orang outang/Rises from the sheets in steam./This withered root of knots of hair/Slitted below and gashed with eyes, [...] The sickle motion from the thigh/Jackknifes upward at the knees [...] Pushing the framework of the bed” (l.11-19). The animalistic and mechanistic metaphors (“gesture of orang outang”, “sickle motion”) as well as the violence of the verbs (“slit”, “gash”) both hide and reveal the violence of her frenzied gestures. However, they also bypass the woman’s humanity. Furthermore, the behaviors of witnesses tend to light on their lack of interest in the actual event: they stress either its banality (Sweeney “knows the female temperament”, l.23) or its social consequences (women “deprecate the lack of taste”, l.36; “Observing that hysteria/Might easily be misunderstood; /Mrs. Turner intimates/It does the house no sort of good”, l.37-40). Hence, everything in the text contributes to focus our attention away from the terrible scene. If we choose to do so, however, we are as base and inhuman as the caricatures that surround the poor woman. By challenging us to either reconstruct the woman in pain ourselves, or to accept the horrible indifference of the other characters, “Sweeney Erect” presents a concrete case of ethical appeal to the reader. Interpreting this poem, acting as readers to re-establish the obscene suffering, is a matter which involves our ability to see beyond what is written, our courage in piercing through social indifference, but also, simply, our humanity.

23 Ultimately, the modernist take on the obscene questions the responsibilities of the reader of literary texts. Deciding whether to see or not to see some things is not only a matter of aesthetics or technique: it can also call upon our sense of duty and morality, what we must do and what we should not do. In Ethical Joyce, Marian Eide links the incompleteness of the frame in “The Sisters”—the insistence of what we have in this essay called the obscene–with a broader appeal to the reader’s “bad conscience” (39). More generally, it seems to me that modernist authors tend to bring to light and question the conventions of reading in terms that are not only aesthetic, but also moral.

24 A particularly memorable instance of this are the final lines of “The Burial of the Dead”, the first part of The Waste Land. Conjuring up an apocalyptic scene where the dead walk through London, the speaker suddenly turns to one named Stetson, and starts a form of enigmatic and disturbing line of questioning (“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?/Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?”, l.71-4) which ends with a sudden change in interlocutor, echoing a quotation from Baudelaire’s address to the reader at the start of Les Fleurs du Mal: “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” (l.76). The underlying accusation of “hypocrisy,” especially with the intertext of Baudelaire’s poem, hints at a form of

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shared knowledge, which we are accused of rejecting. Here, once again, the obscenity of the ideas contained within the morbid image–the corpse turned into a tree, blooming with some uncouth flowers—is both glossed over, and seems to call to us as readers, to evoke something that we know but do not wish to formulate. The violence of this assertion, the discomfort it creates, also encourages us to examine our “bad conscience”, and wonder whether indeed we might not have some idea of what he means, some stake in the poem’s endeavor. It asks us to accept the power of words to question who we are, and, in return, to implicate our own mind and imagination in the reading of the poem. Reading The Waste Land in a detached, intellectual way, it argues, might be hypocritical, when the text aims at speaking directly to you. Harriet Davidson links the passage and the notion of “hypocrite lecteur” to what she calls the reader’s “improper desire,” which is both a desire to go beyond what is proper, towards what is socially unacceptable–for instance the obscene–and a desire to go beyond property, to appropriate the imagery of the text and bend it to our own quest for meaning (Moody 122, 128). Hence, the evocation of our kinship with the poet also suggests that we are entitled to take part in the construction of meaning, that it is our place, and that refusing to act upon this desire of ours is the real hypocrisy.

25 These two aspects of the modernist stance with regards to the obscene—the questioning of our power to see and not to see, as well as our ability to interact with the written word, and interpret its meaning according to our desires and moral imperatives—coalesce in Woolf’s conception of reader involvement in “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”. This is where the meaning of the obscene as “inauspicious” and “adverse” appears alongside that of what is left “off-stage”. Indeed, as Rachel Potter shows, the shift in the notion of obscene also led to a form of push back, pointing at the fact that what was truly indecent was “the atrocity of the system” and social oppression (Potter 3). In her essay, Woolf uses the dialectics of showing and hiding to lure the reader into paying attention to what is left unsaid in a seemingly banal scene, and to hint at the possibility of another kind of “obscene”: that of unspoken human suffering. While the narrator is sitting in the train, she spots Mrs Brown with a man named Smith, and the pair stop short of evoking “a secret, perhaps sinister business, which they did not intend to discuss in [her] presence” (4). Mrs Brown has a secret trouble, perhaps linked to her son or daughter’s immoral behavior. However, it seems that the true obscene, what has no place in literature, is her own misery. Musing upon this encounter, the narrator skips to the imaginary adventures of the son (“I was also strongly tempted to manufacture a three-volume novel about the old lady’s son, and his adventures crossing the Atlantic” 15) while leaving Mrs Brown herself out of the narrative. Likewise, contemporary authors according to the essay would be unable to speak of her actual lived experience: “Mr. Galsworthy would only see in Mrs. Brown a pot broken on the wheel and thrown into the corner” (11), “With all his powers of observation, which are marvelous, with all his sympathy and humanity, which are great, Mr. Bennett has never once looked at Mrs. Brown in her corner” (13). Like the other instances of the obscene, she remains hidden, all the while giving birth to many potential stories about everything around her–all but herself. As Michael Tratner puts it, Mrs Brown’s suffering is that of the “unaccounted for” woman, the suffering that is left out of the text, like that of Mina Purefoy giving birth to her child in the “Oxen of ” episode of Ulysses while the narrative focuses on the men downstairs (52).

26 However, this inability turns into a form of moral appeal, which seems to emanate from Mrs Brown herself, from the “lure” of her absence: “There was Mrs. Brown protesting

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that she was different […] and luring the novelist to her rescue by the most fascinating if fleeting glimpse of her charms” (17). The erotic undertones of the “fleeting glimpse of her charms” make it indubitable that Woolf is playing with the lure of the obscene, beckoning us forward through the oscillation between hiding and showing, the “glimpses”, while ironically appealing to our interest in the old lady’s “charms”. But this mocking call of the flesh leads into a very different kind of quest, and the lure shifts to a moral imperative, a call upon our duty: like an old woman in distress, “Mrs. Brown must be rescued, expressed” (17). Averting our eyes from her would be to fail her, to let her symbolically die. And, as the narrator affirms, our means to save her have to do with our power as readers, our ability to spot what is left out, and, by seeing it, make it a part of the text: “[Let me] remind you of the duties and responsibilities that are yours as partners in this business of writing books, as companions in the railway carriage, as fellow travelers with Mrs. Brown? For she is just as visible to you who remain silent as to us who tell stories about her” (20). To quote Frédéric Regard, Mrs Brown, the “will o’ the wisp” (1), is also a form of Socratic daimôn, a call from outside the frame, asking us to rectify something. As such she conjures up our sense of ethics with the meaning that Badiou gives to the notion, that of a “faithfulness to the event” (11, 19). Her call to the narrator, which is also a call to us, is an encounter, and as such, it gives us a form of responsibility. She is there, waiting to be saved, and we must choose whether to see her and acknowledge her place in reality, her existence offstage, outside of canonical literature, or to avert our eyes and remain within the confines of previous conventions. That is what the modernist take on the obscene ultimately does: by confronting the readers with the margins of the frame, it stresses their own activity in setting and potentially transforming this frame. It forces them to acknowledge their own responsibility concerning what is and is not shown, what is and is not seen, within a work of art.

Conclusion

27 Certainly, modernism broke the fixed, social standards of obscenity, the limits between what should and should not be shown, as they had been fixed by previous generations of writers and existing institutions. It is historically and culturally important to wonder which rules it broke, to what extent, and with what kind of reactions. However, I believe this movement can only be understood in the light of how modernist artists actually acted upon the notion of the obscene: how they went back to the action of setting the margins, of leaving things out, and asked how this very act could become charged with meaning. They made playing with the mechanics of inclusion and exclusion a part of their art, each with different aims and ideas. But through this, they came to parallel conclusions, on the possibility to make absence mysterious and tantalizing, on the power of scandal to subvert the norms of an era, and, most importantly in the context of this reflection, on the underlying interaction with the readers, the consequences of luring them towards what the text does not state, and the responsibilities that befall both author and reader in this complex space at the margin of the written word. In doing so, they exposed another kind of cultural obscenity: what Lyndall Gordon calls the “confidence trick perpetrated by the middlemen of the book trade,” who “persuaded common readers to surrender judgment” and “crave a diet of prestigious opinions, not true words” (262). Leaving the readers outside, making them a passive, subservient audience, and masking their power to react to texts and

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participate in the process of signification, was a form of social hypocrisy—a marginalization which Eliot, Joyce and Woolf challenged from the very margins of the obscene.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Armstrong, Paul B. Play and the Politics of Reading: the Social Uses of Modernist Form. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.

Attridge, Derek. Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction’s Traces. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Last accessed 03 September 2019. .

Barthes, Roland, Le plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

Bradshaw, David, and Rachel Potter. Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. Last Accessed 22 April 2020. .

Butler, Christopher. Early Modernism: Literature, Music, and Painting in Europe, 1900-1916. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

Cole, Sarah. At the Violet Hour: Modernism and Violence in England and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Last accessed 20 January 2019. .

Davidson, Harriet. T.S. Eliot and Hermeneutics: Absence and Interpretation in The Waste Land. Baton Rouge: State University Press, 1985.

Eide, Marian. Ethical Joyce. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central. Last accessed 20 January 2019. .

Eliot, T. S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1963.

Ellmann, Maud. The Poetics of Impersonality: T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Ferrer, Daniel. Virginia Woolf and the Madness of Language. London ; New York: Routledge, 1990.

Foucault, Michel. Surveiller et punir : naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard, 1975.

Freud, Sigmund. Cinq leçons sur la psychanalyse suivi de Contribution à l’histoire du mouvement psychanalytique. Traduit par Yves Le Lay. Paris: Payot, 1970.

Gordon, Lyndall. Virginia Woolf: A Writer’s Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: from Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.

Joyce, James. Dubliners (1914). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

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---. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

---, Ulysses. London: Penguin, 1922, 2000.

Kershner, R. B. and Joyce, Bakhtin. Popular Culture: Chronicles of Disorder. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Mahaffey, Vicki. Modernist Literature: Challenging Fictions? Malden: Blackwell, 2007.

Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject. Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1987.

Potter, Rachel. Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Last Accessed 22 Apr. 2020. .

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Joyce : portrait de l’auteur en autre lecteur. Petit-Rœulx: Cistre, 1984.

Rando, David. Modernist Fiction and News: Representing Experience in the Early Twentieth Century. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Regard, Frédéric. La force du féminin: sur trois essais de Virginia Woolf. Paris: La Fabrique éditions, 2002.

Reynier, Christine. “The ‘Obstinate resistance’ of Woolf’s short story”. In Journal of the Short Story in English, 50 (2008), Last Accessed 28 August 2018. .

Tadié, Benoît. L’expérience moderniste anglo-américaine, 1908-1922 : formes, idéologie, combats. Paris: Didier érudition, 1999.

Tomiche, Anne. Métamorphoses du lyrisme : Philomèle, le rossignol et la modernité occidentale. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2010.

Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.

Wilson, Nicola. “Circulating Morals.” In Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Ed. David Bradshaw and Rachel Potter. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013. 52-70.

Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room (1922). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

---. Mrs Dalloway (1925). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

---. “Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown” (1924). New York: Columbia University. 2005. Last accessed 25 August 2018. .

NOTES

1. See for instance Nicola Wilson's article on the self-censorship of circulating libraries, and the impact that their decisions had on the careers of authors like D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce (Wilson 52-70). 2. This analysis is particularly influenced by the reflections of Roland Barthes, in Le Plaisir du texte, on the erotic value of intermittence, and the seductiveness of the flesh “scintillating” between clothes (Barthes 17-18).

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ABSTRACTS

Within the canon of postwar “high” modernism, the question of the obscene is often framed in terms of the artistic freedom to talk about sexuality and the body, and the status of indecency within literary works. However, this narrow focus only deals with the more visible facet of a broader tension, which pervades modernist aesthetics. Indeed, though such central works as The Waste Land or Ulysses are haunted by references to sexuality, scatology, perversity and violence, their relation to the obscene plays just as much on what is left hidden as on what is shown. Indeed, the word “ob-scene” may also refer to the boundary between the “scene” and its margins, between what is presented and what remains out of sight, and blurring such boundaries constitutes a fundamental modernist strategy. Artists such as Joyce and Eliot, but also the supposedly primmer Virginia Woolf, play with narrative or poetic framing, as well as the ambivalence of language, to signal towards what escapes the social and cultural boundaries of representation. Their works teem with veils and innuendos: cracks echoing behind closed doors (Woolf 1923, 124), cries disguised as the chirping of a bird (Eliot 1969, 58), or gasps and releases covered by the symbolic explosion of fireworks (Joyce 1922, 478), leaving traces from which another scene, another facet of the text, can be reconstituted. The obscene then becomes a form of appeal: through hints and enigmas, readers are called upon, led by curiosity or voyeuristic impulses to delve into sometimes fearful depths, where they can be confronted with mental suffering, alcoholism, rape and sexual aggression or the horrors of war, and made to reflect on their own blindness to these untold counter-narratives, hidden in plain sight. Without forcing these things upon us, the modernist aesthetics of the obscene break away from traditional framing, opening up the perspective towards what people want to hide, but also, crucially, to what we might have decided not to see.

Dans le canon de la littérature moderniste d’après-guerre, l’obscène est le plus souvent étudié à travers la question de la liberté artistique face à la censure, de l’intérêt d’exprimer ce qui choque ou scandalise au sein d’une œuvre littéraire. Quoique pertinente en contexte, cette perspective élude une tension bien plus globale, inhérente à l’esthétique moderniste. En effet, si des œuvres aussi centrales que The Waste Land ou Ulysses sont hantées par des images à caractère sexuel, scatologique, pervers ou violent, leur rapport à l’obscène se joue souvent autant dans ce qu’elles cachent que dans ce qu’elles expriment. De fait, outre sa valeur légale, telle qu’elle était définie notamment par l’Obscene Publications Act de 1857, le mot « ob-scène » renvoie également à la notion d’une limite entre ce que l’on peut montrer et ce qui doit rester hors de vue, limite que l’art moderniste ne cesse de remettre en question. Des auteurs comme Eliot, Joyce, mais également Virginia Woolf, jouent avec les cadres narratifs et poétiques, et avec l’ambiguïté du langage, pour faire signe vers ce qui élude les frontières sociales et culturelles du représentable. Leurs textes sont pleins de remarques voilées, de sous-entendus : des craquements derrière des portes closes (Woolf 1923, 124), des cris masqués par un chant d’oiseau (Eliot 1969, 58), des gémissements et des débordements recouverts par l’explosion symbolique d’un feu d’artifice (Joyce 1922, 478). En outre, tous ces événements laissent des traces, à partir desquelles il est possible de reconstituer d’autres scènes et d’avoir accès à d’autres facettes de l’œuvre. Ainsi, l’on peut dire que l’obscène prend la forme d’un appel. Le lecteur est interpellé, à travers des indices et des énigmes, mené par sa curiosité ou ses instincts voyeurs à explorer ce que cachent les silences du texte. Il doit alors se confronter à ce qu’il découvre de non-dit – sur la souffrance psychique, l’alcoolisme, le viol et les agressions sexuelles ou encore sur les horreurs de la guerre – mais aussi questionner son propre aveuglement, face à ces formes de contre-histoires du monde dans lequel il vit. Sans nous y forcer, l’esthétique moderniste de l’obscène nous propose

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ainsi d’échapper aux cadres artistiques traditionnels, pour ouvrir notre regard à ce que l’on veut nous cacher, mais aussi, en dernière instance, à tout ce que nous-mêmes avions accepté de ne pas voir.

INDEX

Keywords: Modernism, Ideology and Discourse Analysis, Counter-History, Ethics Mots-clés: Modernisme, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, idéologie et analyse de discours, contre-histoire, éthique, Hans Georg Gadamer

AUTHORS

OLIVIER HERCEND ATER Nanterre Université [email protected]

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Staging the Obscene in A Glastonbury Romance (1932) by John Cowper Powys

Florence Marie

1 “Nobody quite knows what the word ‘obscene’ itself means, or what it is intended to mean: but gradually all the old words that belong to the body below the navel have come to be judged as obscene. Obscene means today that the policeman thinks he has a right to arrest you, nothing else” (Lawrence 625). As made clear by D. H. Lawrence in 1929, there existed no definition of the term “obscenity” under English statute law. Nevertheless the idea that “fiction has the power to corrupt and offend in its cultural significance” (Potter 2013b, 10) and as a consequence that censorship was advisable was still very much in the foreground in the 1920s. This did not prevent some modernist novelists from dramatizing issues of sexuality more blatantly: “writers who saw themselves at the forefront of literary developments became more experimentally obscene in their writing about sex, excrement, and physical corruption” (Potter 2013b, 71). Thus some works were banned in the United Kingdom—for example Ulysses in 1923 —while others, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), were not even published there in the first place. Such was not the case of John Cowper Powys’s works although he had been referred to by the American Moral Prosecutor in 1921 as “Powys the English Degenerate” (Peltier 43; J. C. Powys 6, 4 July 1950). While still in the US—where he spent more than twenty-five years as an itinerant lecturer—he was called to the witness stand to defend the editors of The Little Review, who were being sued for having published several episodes from Ulysses (1918-1920) and in particular “Nausicaa”. J. C. Powys testified that James Joyce’s novel was “too obscure and philosophical a work to be in any sense corrupting,”1 using an argument which was unpalatable to the censors of the time, who tended to consider that “obscurity implied obscenity” (Parkes 9).2

2 J. C. Powys was at first sight a rather unlikely defender and writer of obscenities. This is what he said about himself in a letter he wrote to Henry Miller in 1950: Another difference between us is my old maidishness—It’s a wonder I ever managed to have a son & it’s natural enough he should be a Roman Catholic Priest—[…] [my

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vices] are vices that could easily exist in an extremely fastidious old maid who shivered at those three words of four letters & of one syllable that our authorities ban the use of in your most widely known works! In fact I have all my life been actually that fastidious old maid […]. (Peltier 34; J. C. Powys 3, 22 May 1950)

3 This “old maid” was outwardly squeamish; there are few dirty words—for instance “bitch” and “whore”—in A Glastonbury Romance, which is 1120 pages long, and they do sound rather unnatural under J. C. Powys’s pen. His “old maidishness,” however, was in no way conventional, even beyond the mere gender trouble implied by the feminized self-characterization. Indeed in the very same letter J. C. Powys also spoke of “[his] instinctive sex-vices [his] inherent sadism & masochism & spiritual & mental homo- sexuality (which is a weird sort of twice inverted Lesbianism when I really examine it)” (Peltier 34; J. C. Powys 3, 22 May 1950). These traits lurk in the background of the first five novels J.C. Powys had written from 1915 to 1929 but came to the fore in A Glastonbury Romance,3 a novel published in 1932, one year before the lifting of the ban on Ulysses in America. The uncensored publication of Powys’s novel is evidence of what Rachel Potter refers to as “the seemingly liberalization of rules on acceptable fiction” in the 1930s (Potter 2013b, 9), but there may also be more intrinsic reasons.

4 A Glastonbury Romance is an encyclopaedic collection of all the sexual activities that were rumoured at the time to corrupt “the minds and morals of those who are open to such immoral influences” (Benjamin Hicklin quoted in Potter 2013b, 2) and as a result to deprave families and communities. I will briefly refer to these elements in the first section of the article, where the word “obscene” will be used in a very broad sense, as was the case in the 1920s—a time when the highly “mobile category” of the obscene (Mullin 19) was tapped into to ban not only Ulysses (1923) but also The Well of Loneliness (1928), a novel which is far from racy. 21st-century readers will take all the sexual activities mentioned in A Glastonbury Romance in their stride but it could not have been the case in 1932 on account of the pervading sexual morality, which though laxer in the 1930s than in the 1920s, was not what it is today. I will try and consider why the novel was not deemed obscene and to do so I will draw on the distinction which can be established between “bawdiness” and “obscenity”. While the first term implies humour and good humour, the second one seems to be more overwhelmingly associated with the idea of filth: “what is bad about obscene sexuality is that it portends ills because it is related in some way to matter that is base, putrid, unclean, and offensive to the senses” (Dillon 267).

5 Two passages will be studied in detail in the second section to probe into the category of the obscene. Admittedly, these two scenes are not related with sexuality proper. One of them is overtly scatological, a kind of indecency deemed obscene at the time: “the word ‘obscene’ referred to ideas about the limits of representation; to those aspects of humanity or language which ought to remain off stage” (Potter 2013a, 3). The other scene is about the sudden encounter with the dead carcass of a cat; strictly speaking this cannot be considered as obscene, especially as nobody has staged it on purpose. But obscenity has also come to be associated with what is low and ‘informe’. In the 1950s J.C. Powys discussed pornography and obscenity with Henry Miller, with whom he corresponded until his death in 1963. They agreed that pornography, which they rejected for being merely a titillating thing, was widely different from obscenity, which they both praised.4 Henry Miller was to clarify his vision of obscenity later and I think J.C. Powys would have agreed with his words:

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When obscenity crops out in art, in literature particularly, it usually functions as a technical device: the element of the deliberate which is there has nothing to do with sexual excitation, as in pornography. If there is an ulterior motive at work, it is one which goes far beyond sex. Its purpose is to awaken, to usher in a sense of reality. (Miller quoted in G. Mayne 66)

6 In fact Henry Miller associated obscenity with “the most repulsive aspects of concrete matter: death, flesh, rottenness, excretions of the body” (Mayne, 67). This is precisely what is stake in the two passages under study, which deal with concrete matter, expose the protagonists and the readers to the lowest realities and stress their connection with the sacred. This will enable us to look at the affinities of the obscene with the abject from a Kristevan angle.5

7 In the third section the article focuses on the obscenity oozing from a character’s whole frame of mind. The shift is in keeping not only with what Rachel Potter asserts about obscenity in the modernist period (“The obscene changed from something connected to the body—particularly the sexual and excremental—to the uncomfortable or unconscious dimensions of the psyche” [Potter 2013a, 10]) but also with Powys’s idiosyncratic conception of obscenity. In this particular case, the sexual and the psyche are intrinsically linked and the role played by the attitude of the audience—a certain Mr. Evans—is in the foreground since he is the one experiencing a “fearful thrill” in seeing what is usually forbidden.6

“To hell with middle-class pruderies” (GR 900)

8 The sentence is tellingly pronounced by the old aristocrat of the novel, the Marquis of P. It could be used to sum up the novel as a whole since it may be read as a catalogue of the sexual activities and vices that were considered indecent at the time.

9 In the novel extramarital sex is more than common. Persephone Spear goes from her husband to her uncle, to another woman and then to Will Zoyland before jilting them all one after another with “a clever modernity” (GR 237) that knows no limits. As for Will Zoyland, he is ready to share his wife, Nell, with Sam Dekker, provided she does not forbid him to sleep with her. He openly says so to her lover: If Nell will stop this foolery of sleeping on the sitting-room sofa, will stop, in fact this foolery of being cross with me and cold to me, I’ll be ready—d’ye hear me lad? —I’ll be ready to share her with ye. So long as ye don’t tumble her ‘in me wone bed,’ as they say around here, ye can have the lass up hill and down dale—I’m mum. I’m mute. (GR 133)

10 What is more Sam Dekker is the son of the vicar, who is present during the conversation and who will eventually fall in love with his son’s mistress (or rather with her “white limbs” [GR 246] and breasts) and project “his own feelings into those of his son’s behaviour” (GR 287). In a certain way Nell’s body could be said to be exchanged, reminding the reader of the idea that “men establish bonds with each other through the exchange of a female body” (Parkes 41).

11 Secondly, although there are quite a few illegitimate children in the novel—Will Zoyland is one of them and he is the son of the Marquis of P.—non-reproductive sexuality is everywhere to be found. The old aristocrat of the novel is more than happy to let his daughter have a fling without getting married and asks her and her lover if they know about contraceptive devices (“‘You understand how to keep—you mustn’t be

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cross at an old man’s grossness—from getting—into trouble, as the servants say?’ Rachel nodded mischievously […]” [GR 898]). John Crow and his cousin Mary are in love but their sexuality seems to be of a complex kind and may not entail penetration, which could be one way of understanding why the narrator calls it “sterile” (GR 312) and could cast light on John’s own questioning: “Was that because he was congenitally more attracted to men than women? ‘Is the way I make love to Mary,’ he thought, ‘a sign that I am all the time half thinking of her as a boy?’” (GR 491)

12 In fact, and in some cases this clearly has something to do with the idea of sterility, most of the male characters in the novels but also some women seem to have experienced some kind of homosexual desires at one time or another, and to have indulged in them. Bisexuality lurks in the background. Philip Crow, the capitalist, remembers a passionate love affair he had “with a boy at school” (GR 671). Miss Drew is passionately in love with Mary Crow (GR 228); she vents out her emotions in a passionate outburst and her lesbian longings are explicit both physically or verbally (GR 636-640). So are those of Angela Beere lying next to Persephone Spear (GR 698). As for John Crow, he recalls fumbling with Tom Barter and is still aroused by the memory of their “vicious play that hot Sunday afternoon at the bottom of the boat”: […] and John was surprised at himself, glancing furtively at Tom’s stolid profile, to find what an intense thrill it still gave him, what a delicious voluptuous sensation, to feel himself weak and soft, where Tom was strong and hard! (GR 264)

13 These are only a few instances of the countless hints at lechery and indecencies where the swapping of gender roles, incestuous tendencies, sterile sexuality and prostitution take pride of place.

14 The omnipresence of sexual transgression is also obvious in that the most spiritual moments in the novel are imbued with eroticism, even though this may have more to do with blasphemy than obscenity. As when Mary Crow’s moment of being in front of the rising sun is conveyed in explicitly orgasmic terms: Her soul had come back with a violent spasm, like a rush of blood to her head, and her whole nature seemed to pour itself out towards the reddish light on that tall column. Her pulse of happiness was intense. What she experienced was like a quivering love ecstasy that had no human object. She could actually feel the small round breasts under her nightgown shiver and distend. Her head instinctively fell back a little, while her chin was lifted up. Her lips parted, and a smile that was a smile of indescribable happiness flickered over her face. (GR 556)

15 Even Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings are reinterpreted in this atmosphere infused with desire and sexuality by a narrator whose thoughts would have left E. M. Forster’s Cecil Vyse aghast in A Room with a View: […] and to Leonardo the wavering beginning of a girl’s smile carried, folded within its calyx, the blue veins of her thighs, the wild-rose tips of her nipples, the arch of her instep, the silkiness of her flanks, the unfathomable recessions of her final yielding to the pressure of desire. (GR 981-982)

16 And yet A Glastonbury Romance was not censored. This may have a lot to do with the fact that sexuality is hardly ever presented as “permeated with filth” (Dillon 269). As a result and even if, as we shall see, it is not always devoid of perversities, on the whole it appears to be more bawdy than obscene. To draw this distinction one may use Martin Dillon’s definition of obscenity as opposed to bawdiness in his analysis of Sade’s The 120 Days. He examines the specificities of obscenity and suggests that Sade’s The 120 Days “is, paradigmatically, an obscene work” precisely on this account:

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The 120 Days is, paradigmatically, an obscene work. It invites us into an obscene world. It does that by taking something worldly—a kiss in particular, sexuality in general—and presenting it as obscene, i.e., as essentially permeated with filth and associated with decay and death. (Dillon 269)

17 Such is clearly not the case in J.C. Powys’s novel. In fact the down-to-earth, even matter-of-fact way of referring to all sorts of sexuality seems to suggest that in spite of “middle-class pruderies” these things have always existed and will continue to exist and that there is something rather healthy and life-affirming about such attitudes in human beings who are simply “personalised animals”. Does Will Zoyland not claim that all this is “natural” for girls as well as for boys (GR 133)? Does the vicar himself not have “a very natural and earthly attitude towards erotic emotion” (GR 284)? Sexuality, whatever its guise, is not so much flaunted as shown as one of the realities of life (“natural”).

18 Now in J.C. Powys’s words, reality lies “between the urinal and the stars”; he lets his imagination run the whole gamut. His tone, however, is neither prophetic nor polemical, even when he refers to homoerotic love. Homoerotic images and scenes abound in his novel and in some cases they are far racier than in The Well of Loneliness banned after an obscenity trial four years before the publication of A Glastonbury Romance. Powys’s novel may not have been banned because the tone is far less solemn and much more humorous and Rabelaisian than in Radclyffe Hall’s novel (Parkes 148-160).7

19 The ostensible indifference of transgressive characters to the social and in some cases religious norms they are transgressing is in keeping with the fifth gospel developed by John Geard, the very Rabelaisian mayor of the town, who lives life to the full and indulges in the impulses of his grotesque body: among other things he enjoys making water in his garden and breaking wind. Angelika Reichmann compares his one-year reign to “the ephemeral power of the Carnival King—in fact, a fool” (Reichmann 2010, 75). Although John Geard hardly ever expatiates on this fifth gospel of his, he seems to adumbrate the sanctity of all kinds of love if the heart is pure: “Only good can come from every embrace. It matters not at all from what cups, or from what goblets, we drink, so long as without being cruel, we drink up Life’ (GR 1085). “To hell with middle- class pruderies” indeed; to hell with the social hierarchies and the censorship that have accompanied them.

20 There is in fact only one form of obscenity left: it is hinted at in the previous sentence through the word “cruel” but is also everywhere to be found in the novel, embedded as it is in the living world (GR 643, 658, 691, 930), which is more often than not “red in tooth and claw”8 “under the pressure of the cruelty of the First Cause” (GR 930): such obscenity as there is, is that of acute mental or physical suffering, the latter being precisely what two characters, John Crow and Sam Dekker, have to stare at in horror.

“Obscenity may revolt, disgust and instruct, but does not excite” (Sade quoted by Henry Miller in Peltier 38; Henry Miller 5, 6 June 1950)

21 As already said, obscenity is hardly a concept; it is an elusive and relative category. One way of approaching it is to analyse the effects it has on those who are confronted with

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it as Henry Miller does when he uses the words “revolt” and “disgust” in a letter to Powys: I have been reading about the life and work of de Sade. He understood clearly the difference between pornography and obscenity. Says de Sade (in Aline et Valcour): —“Obscenity may revolt, disgust and instruct, but does not excite.” (Peltier 38; H. Miller 5, 6 June 1950)

22 This is what I will now analyse in two episodes when the protagonists come up against the obscene imposing itself on them and “usher[ing] a sense of reality”, which, if one follows Julia Kristeva’s argument in Pouvoir de l’horreur has something to do with what is likely to threaten the individual’s sense of the self as opposed to an originally ab- jected other.9

23 John Crow is an atheist who loathes superstition and feels ill at ease in the atmosphere of Glastonbury, which is soaked in legends. Although John’s secret wish is to play havoc, he nonetheless goes to great lengths to stage a Midsummer pageant for the Mayor, who wants Glastonbury to become a New Jerusalem. He once finds himself crossing the River Brue at Pomparles Bridge, the very place where King Arthur is supposed to have thrown his sword Excalibur. He ends up staring at something which he had not expected: John’s eyes, roaming in search of anything that might recover the ambiguous romance that hung about the spot, fell eventually upon a dead cat whose distended belly, almost devoid of fur, presented itself, together with two paws and a shapeless head that was one desperate grin of despair, to the mockery of the sunshine. (GR 357; emphasis mine)

24 This first description is followed by several other mentions in the course of four pages: “this encounter with the distorted face and up-blown belly of this poor corpse” (GR 357); “that hairless belly in the mud,” “the despairing grin of that scarcely recognisable head” (GR 358); “the mindless despair of that decomposed cat-head in the filthy Brue-mud” (358); “the abominable despair in the hollow-sockets of that decomposed cat- head” (GR 360); “Its swollen hairless belly … its paws that resemble the claws of a bird … the snarling ecstasy of its curse” (GR 360; emphasis mine). John is faced with the refuse out of a garbage can coming from Glastonbury (GR 360), in other words with the physical presence of death, and the confrontation is inadmissible to his narcissistic self because the shapeless head of the cat holds up a mirror to his own face. It can be argued that the sudden intrusion of the abject is so accidental that the word “obscenity” is hardly relevant in so far as this was not intended for him (Maier 2-3); nevertheless John’s fascination in the passage transforms decaying matter into something obscene. The narrator himself uses the word once in the passage: “In all normal suffering there are certain natural laws such as mitigate what the entity in question is enduring. When these laws are broken an element enters that is monstrous, bestial, obscene.” (GR 360; emphasis mine) The last sentence of the quotation also implies that the obscene is associated with the idea of the disruption of a certain order (“when these laws are broken”), a fact proved by the state of decomposition of the dead cat, whose head has lost its form (“shapeless”, “distorted”). Now, what has no form, “what reduces the logos to silence” is obscene (Mayne 64).10

25 As for Sam Dekker, he has decided to break up with his mistress and to embark on a mystical quest of his own during which he tries to behave like a saint, imitating some of the Christian knights of medieval romances. In the passage under study he is about to give an enema to an old man, whose anus is affected by piles, and finally gives it:

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“bending over the old gentleman’s rear”, “the anus of an aged man” (GR 948). Sam is thus face to face so to speak with the materiality of the body and its excremental functions all the more so as he is also in charge of getting rid of what is in the chamber pot: “‘I’ll carry this away’” (GR 949); “he emptied the thing in the privy.” (GR 949)

26 In both cases the protagonists have to deal with the “aching body” the destiny of which is to die: John is looking at a corpse; the old man whom Sam is tending refers to his own carcass (“‘and I be a wambly carcass’” [GR 948]). Now it seems to me the two passages revolving around a confrontation with abject material have a lot in common.

27 First of all, the only sense that is explicitly involved is the sense of sight although there could have been another one in the case of Sam. John is visually fascinated with the dead cat and its grin: “John’s eyes” (GR 357); “stare” (GR 358); “John stared down” (GR 360). In spite of his repulsion he cannot look away almost as if he was mesmerized. As for Sam, even before starting, he “had visualised every detail of the giving of the enema” (GR 946); “these piles, […], presented themselves to his mind” (GR 947). The visual is probably what is paramount as far as the obscene is concerned and in Sam’s case it is interesting to see that the effect of repugnance is anticipated and exists by a projection of the imagination.

28 Secondly, the same words are repeated several times (in particular in the episode concerning John) testifying to the protagonist’s unwitting fascination; they also function as a snare in which the reader could be trapped. The mention of the repellent details is obsessive and nothing is done to redeem them: the hairless and swollen belly (which on account of its being hairless reminds one of a human belly), the squashed head and its sinister grin. The language used is descriptive and denotative on the whole, with the exception of the lexical field of despair. What is suggested is that these things present themselves as is made clear in the text the first time John sees the cat and the first time the piles are mentioned: “presented itself” (GR 357); “these piles, […], presented themselves to his mind” (GR 947).11

29 Thirdly, the reaction of the two protagonists is a physical one. The narrator speaks of John’s “diabolical twinge of mental and even of physical misery” (GR 357) and then John starts to grin back at the cat. The narrator leaves no doubt that Sam’s reaction is above all a bodily one: “his body weakly murmured” (GR 947); “his cowardly body was still trying to escape” (GR 947). Both protagonists experience “revolt and disgust”. Now, as indicated by Maddelena Mazzocut-Mis, In disgust the link with corporeity is immediate. On the one hand, the body is an object of disgust, body putrefied, body contaminated. On the other hand, one’s reaction to disgust is corporeal, visceral, physiological. (Mazzocut-Mis 108)

30 The two protagonists react as embodied characters and the distance between themselves and what they are staring at or imagining disappears. No wonder John’s grin is a mirror-like image of the cat’s: “he replied to the despairing grin of that scarcely recognisable head with a grin of his own that was no less unredeemed” (GR 358).

31 Fourthly, there is a moment when both protagonists seem to have lost the power to express themselves in words: John is said to be “dazed” (“a dazed condition of his senses” [GR 360]) confronted as he is not only with death but also with the suffering he associates with death and the “torturing world” (GR 360) and with the meaninglessness of “earth-life” (GR 358). No words are exchanged between the old man and Sam during the procedure. Probably because, as suggested by Henry Miller, “a sense of reality” has

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been ushered in in a way which leaves the two protagonists speechless. In both scenes John and Sam are face to face with the crumbling distinction between subject and object, which takes them back to a pre-symbolic relation with the world.

32 The propinquity of the obscene and the sacred in these two passages12 gives us indirect insight into the obscene as an experience of disintegrating limits between self and not- self. Having gazed at the dead cat for a very long time, John, who as I have said is no believer, is given a vision: John was struck, there, leaning as he was against the sun-warmed parapet, by a sudden rending and blinding shock […] He distinctively saw … literally shearing the sun-lit air with a whiteness like milk, […], an object, resembling a sword, falling into the mud of the river! (GR 361)

33 Now, the obscene is what cannot be redeemed by the Symbolic (“he replied to the despairing grin of that scarcely recognisable head with a grin of his own that was no less unredeemed.” [GR 358]; emphasis mine). Sylvain Floc’h writes that: L’obscène, c’est l’imbouffable, l’inconsommable, la répugnante confrontation avec un corps qui refuse de se laisser convertir en hostie et inflige sa lourde présence. La bête crevée refuse de se laisser transformer en planche de salut, et l’esprit se retrouve confronté à sa propre obscénité […] L’objet résiste à l’extradition, s’obstine à coïncider avec lui-même, avec son apparence, et, avec un manque de tact absolu, s’installe dans le littéral au grand mépris du métaphorique.” (Floc’h 12)

34 But is it possible to stare at it without making up for it? Is it possible, to quote Henry Miller, to let “a sense of reality” sink in without begetting some “mystical” and / or “aesthetic” discourse? The answer is probably “no”; at least this is what Julia Kristeva contends. Could it be then that John’s confrontation with the obscene and with the world as it is when it is stripped of all illusions and his realization of his own proximity with the abject is so overwhelming that he cannot but sublimate it although he is an unlikely candidate for such a task? Could his vision be simply a way of hinting at what one’s mind tends to do, namely to produce “mystical” or “aesthetic” discourse on shapeless matter, when one has to deal with the abject? In that respect and keeping Julia Kristeva’s analysis in mind, it is interesting to note that the object which John identifies as Arthur’s sword is a phallic symbol for the law of the father, which could cut off what has to be got rid of. The disappearance of the sword in the mud, however, is ambiguous to say the least, especially as the sword leaves no trace whatsoever behind (“When it struck the mud it disappeared.”[GR 361]). Could this mean that there is nothing left to redeem concrete matter, whose very nature is embedded in the Brue- mud (GR 360), and that the vision is only temporary? The proliferation of meanings is after all one of the consequences of the confrontation with the obscene since the obscene stresses the vulnerability of the symbolic. Now this very proliferation was also at the heart of modernist literature.

35 The interpretation suggesting there is nothing left to redeem the world is plausible if we think of what happens to Sam. The day before giving the enema to the old man, Sam is rewarded in his quest since he sees the Grail (GR 938-9): What he saw was at first accompanied by a crashing pain. That was the word Sam himself thought of to express it—the word crashing. But as his vision clarified before him and grew distinct this pain died away. But it was dazzling, hurting, blinding, at first, and it was associated in his mind with the sense of a sharp, long-shaped thing piercing his guts. […] what he felt was a gigantic spear was struck into his bowels and struck from below. (GR 938-939).

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36 Oddly enough the vision seems to foreshadow the enema. Sam himself conflates these two opposite moments of his life in a blasphemous way and the sacred finds itself on the same level as the obscene: “The two extremes of his experience, the anus of an aged man and the wavering shaft of an Absolute piercing, mingled and fused together in his consciousness.” (GR 948) “Holy Sam” ’s taking care of the old man while thinking of the Holy Grail smacks of the scatological streak in medieval literature, which would be in keeping with Geard’s fifth gospel (especially as the scene is also humorous); it may also be a modern reminder of the specificity of the New Testament since Christ comes into contact with those who are not pure.13 This may also mean that the dualism Sam has based his holy quest on (the body versus the spirit; the material versus the divine) will come to naught in the end and as such this confrontation with obscenity does “instruct” the young man. Sam is cleansed of his dualism (as the old man is cleansed of his excrement) as if some kind of catharsis had taken place—which according to Henry Miller is precisely the role of obscenity.14 Does Sam not discard his own asceticism and question the idea of the Resurrection as a result? (“A sharp pang took him when—in this extremity of clairvoyance—he realised that his living tortured Christ was now changed to something else” [GR 948]).15

37 Thus the aching body is caught in a nexus of abjection and religion. Sam’s vision takes place before he gives the enema to the old man whereas John’s occurs after he looked at the carcass of the cat. The chronological order may be inverted but the closeness between the sacred and the abject is underlined as if they were two sides of the same coin. The reader is likely to consider whether the sacred is not the answer to the abject when the “sense of reality” is too overwhelming—an answer which is both vain and necessary—and whether the realities of life are not here to belie man’s aspirations to spirituality when they are based on dualism.

“Nothing is in itself obscene apart from the human observer” (Havelock Ellis quoted in Parkes 83)

38 The last case I would like to examine is that of Mr Evans, who has to deal with an obscenity which is not exterior to him but comes from within, from his psyche.16 This time we are dealing not with an accidental symptom of disturbance but with a more general structure, which organizes the whole life of Mr Evans, a character whose sadomasochistic desires and fascination with some images (GR 109) may well be “substitutions for repressed childhood or elementary experiences.” (Potter 2013a, 7)17

39 Early in the narrative we are told that something is amiss in the life of this man, who is tormented with sadistic visions, in particular the vision of “a killing blow delivered by an iron bar.” (GR 150, 252) That such images can be considered “obscene” is to be related to what J.C. Powys’s own vision of real obscenity, namely acute mental or physical suffering and their link with cruelty. They were scenes of sadistic cruelty, these pictures that dwelt in the back chambers of Mr. Evans’ mind; and the extraordinary thing about them was that, in spite of their iniquity, which was indeed abominable, they still produce in him—whenever the least glimpse of them took form again—an inebriation of erotic excitement that made his pulses beat, his blood dance, his senses swoon, his knees knock together. The taste of the least of these loathsome scenes was so overpowering to him that it reduced all the rest of life—eating, drinking, working, playing, walking, talking—to

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tedious occurrences, that had to be got through but that were wanting entirely in the electric quiver of real excitement. […] No one would ever know—unless Mr Evans confessed to a priest—how many of these abominations had actually been practised, how many of them described in forbidden books, or how many just simply invented by a perverted imagination.” (GR 109)

40 Mr. Evans is a scholar in charge of an antiquarian shop, in the cellar of which there is a book, entitled The Unpardonable Sin, which turns out to be “some monstrous Aphrodisiac of Obscenities” (GR 247), attracting and repelling him at the same time. Throughout the novel Mr Evans does what he cannot to think too much of the book or to go near it, so guilt-ridden he feels about his own sadistic feelings. He is nevertheless haunted by some images. After overcoming his vices for a while thanks to his marriage he yields to temptation and is at a loss to fight back against the return of the repressed when he is given the opportunity of becoming an actual voyeur and of watching somebody kill a victim with an iron bar (Reichmann 2012, 32).

41 Each time Mr Evans thinks about the book his physiological reaction is extreme as made clear previously (GR 109): “His legs were shaking. His knees were knocking together! His fingers must have been shaking too…” (GR 245); “His hands shook so much and his knees knocked together so violently, as he gloated over this dreadful scene, […]” (GR 1003). As indicated by the aforementioned “an inebriation of erotic excitement” (GR 109) or “some monstrous Aphrodisiac of Obscenities” (GR 247) Mr Evans’s reaction is an erotic one. The more obsessed he is, the more recurrent the metaphor of the “worm-snake” of the “sex nerve” becomes until an erection and an orgasm are suggested by a description of the rest of his body (GR 1003) and a deceptively demure remark: “That little coiled-up nerve-snake, now suddenly grown so quiescent that if Mr Evans were to strip himself naked there would have been nothing indecent in the exposure […]” (GR 1004).

42 The obscenity is connected with the subject’s psyche and Mr Evans’s misery throughout the story is due to his being “the slave of his conscience”. He tries to make amends for his sinful but does so in an ambiguous masochistic way as when he decides to play the role of Christ on the Cross during the pageant and suffers so acutely that he faints after having had an orgasm and after some of his blood vessels have burst. His sadistic desires, however, remain where they are, in his subterranean psyche, in the same way as The Unpardonable Sin is locked in a bookcase in the dark recesses of the cellar (“a still narrower staircase going down” (GR 244); “that dark little staircase”; “the cellar”, “a key-hole in this glass-door” [GR 245]). The narrator proffers an obscene explanation for this obsession which may be Freudian: “—and it is quite possible that the whole thing started from his father’s forcing his mother to let him enjoy her long after the child’s conception had begun—” (GR 1020).

43 Now beyond the combination of obscenity and religion (“the holy excess of sadistic satisfaction” [GR 1004]) and the “immensely powerful scene of auto-erotic flagellation” on the cross (Krissdottir 260), Mr Evans’s position is all the more interesting as his sadistic desires do pre-exist books but are fuelled by them since the scenes that torment him have been written on purpose (which is, according to Corinne Maier, the necessary condition for the idea of obscenity):18 Once, when he was very young and seized by a sadistic frenzy—[…]—he had killed something with a piece of iron. After that the little Owen would frantically turn over the pages of all his children’s books to find pictures of creatures being killed, especially being killed by heavily crushing instruments. It had to be a thing of iron

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and it had to come crashing down, smashing everything, smashing skull and vertebrae together, or the performance, demanded with such a swooning, trembling, fainting orgasm by the worm-snake, would not be a master one! (GR 1020)

44 As an adult he has mentally transformed the most terrible and abominable passages in the books he has read into “pictures [dwelling] in the dark chambers of [his] mind” (GR 109). Now, when these “palpable images” (GR 108) resurface they trigger off his bodily excitement, an idea foreshadowed by the adjective “palpable”: the distance between Mr Evans and the object he is looking at tends to disappear. He is nevertheless in the position of the voyeur gazing at what is for him a sexualised object—a phallic iron bar (GR 1020-1021)—which has been staged probably on purpose in some “forbidden book” (GR 109). And he will be geared into action, and will plan to actually witness in the real world what he has been reading about in the fictional one, the signified replacing the signifier in the end (GR 986-1062).

45 Is Mr Evans as a result in the position of the “mediating voyeur figure whose own excitement in gazing at the sexual object is intended to function as a model to viewers” (Pease 131-132)? It is not for me to say since obscene qualities reside both in object and subject (Dillon 260). But as far as J. C. Powys himself was concerned Mr Evans was certainly that kind of figure: “It must be that the idea of ‘voyeurs’ getting such wicked pleasures in itself stirs up my evil being even though the violence itself is totally out of my sphere!” (quoted in Krissdottir 259)19 It seems to me, however, that if in these scenes one becomes a voyeur it may partly be on account of the rhetoric of extreme effects concerning Evans’s un-aesthetic bodily reaction. Thus willy-nilly we are reminded of “the physically stimulating powers of books” (Pease 100), even if only vicariously, and made to question our own attitude as readers of obscenities staged on purpose by some narrator.

46 A Glastonbury Romance is “an enormous book, not just in size but in scope” (Krissdottir 262) and obscenity is simply one theme amongst many others and appears in different guises. Sexual transgressions, which could have been seen as obscene at the time, are multifarious and at the same time seem very natural. At times J.C. Powys takes a more psychoanalytical stance so as to deal with the affinities between the obscene, the abject and the sacred. And he also prompts the reader to ponder over the role of in the constitution of the obscene as such, tackling a subject he himself was particularly responsive to.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Margaret C. “‘Ulysses’ in Court.” The Little Review (Jan-Mar. 1921): 21-5. Last accessed on November 10, 2018. .

Bradshaw, David & Rachel Potter. Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

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Dillon, Martin. “The Phenomenon of Obscenity in Literature: The Specification of a Value.” Journal of Value Inquiry 16:4 (1982): 259-274.

Fawkner H. F. “Dysfunctional Responsiveness in A Glastonbury Romance: J.C.P, Nihilism and Christianity.” Powys Review XIV (2004): 103-120.

Floc’h, Sylvain. “L’obscène et le révoltant.” In L’Obscène. Cahiers de l’université. UPPA, 1984. 5-16.

Forster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October 78 (Fall 1996): 107-124.

Krissdottir, Morine. The Life of John Cowper Powys: Descents of Memory. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007

Kristeva, Julia. Pouvoirs de l’horreur. 1980. Paris: Seuil, 1983.

Lawrence, D. H. “Introduction to the Unexpurgated Edition of Pansies (1929).” In The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence. Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2004. 624-627.

Maier, Corinne. “Dynamite de l’obscène et le hic de la perversion.” Revue Silène. (2006). Last accessed on October 20, 2018. .

Mazzocut-Mis, Maddalena. How Far can We Go? Pain, Excess and the Obscene. J. Coggan trans. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012.

Mayne, Gilles. Eroticism in G. Bataille and Henry Miller. Birmingham: Summa Publications, 1993.

Mullin, Katherine. “Poison More Deadly than Prussic Acid: Defining Obscenity After the 1857 Obscenity Act 1857-1885.” In Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Eds. David Bradshaw & Rachel Potter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 11-29.

Parkes, Adam. Modernism and the Theater of Censorship. New York & Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Pease, Allison. Modernism, Mass-Culture and the Aesthetics of Obscenity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.

Peltier, Jacqueline (ed.). Proteus and the Magician: The Letters of Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys. Mappowder: The Powys Press, 2014.

Potter, Rachel. Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment 1900-1940. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

---. “Introduction.” In Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Eds. David Bradshaw & Rachel Potter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 2-10.

---. Censorship and Sovereignty (1916-1929).” In Prudes on the Prowl: Fiction and Obscenity in England, 1850 to the Present Day. Eds. David Bradshaw & Rachel Potter. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 71-89.

Powys, John Cowper. A Glastonbury Romance. 1932. New York: The Overlook Press, 1996.

Reichmann, Angelika. “‘Pure Romance’: Narcissus in the Town of Mirrors.” Powys Review XXII (2012): 21-32.

---. “Dostoevsky in Wessex: John Cowper Powys after Bakhtin and Kristeva.” Powys Review XX (2010): 27-48.

Walker Read, Allan. “An obscenity symbol.” American Speech 9: 4 (1934): 264-278.

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NOTES

1. “Mr. John Cowper Powys testifies that ‘Ulysses’ is too obscure and philosophical a work to be in any sense corrupting. (I wonder, as Mr. Powys takes the stand, whether his look and talk convey to the court that his mind is in the habit of functioning in regions where theirs could not penetrate: and I imagine the judges saying: ‘This man obviously knows much more about the matter than we do—the case is dismissed.’ Of course I have no historical basis for expecting such a thing. I believe it has never happened” (Anderson 23). 2. J.C. Powys’s remark was precisely to the point in so far as the form used in Ulysses invalidates its sensuous content: “the sensuous content in Ulysses’s narrative is rendered impotent by form” (Pease 90). 3. Although anchored in the political turmoil of the 1920s, A Glastonbury should be read above all as a modern re-writing of the Grail legends. It focuses on the life of a rural community and boasts about fifty principal characters, whose lives it follows over the span of one year. 4. “[I] agree with you in praising the obscene & denouncing the pornographical …” (Peltier 36; J.C. Powys 4, 29 May 1950). 5. “[J. Kristeva] also developed a theory about a rather different category of the literary obscene. For her there is a genre of twentieth century ‘abject’ literature, which ‘takes up where apocalypse and carnival left off.’” (Potter 2013a, 9) Kristeva’s definition of the abject revolves around the idea that it “is what I must get rid of in order to be an I at all. It is a phantasmatic substance not only alien to the subject but intimate with it—too much so in fact, and this over- proximity produces panic in the subject. In this way the abject touches on the fragility of our boundaries, of the spatial distinction between our insides and outsides as well as the temporal passage between the maternal body and the paternal law. Both spatially and temporally, then, abjection is a condition in which subject-hood is troubled, ‘where meaning collapses’; hence its attraction for avant-garde artists and writers who want to disturb these orderings of subject and society” (Forster 114). 6. I am here referring to Allan Walker Read’s old definition of obscenity in 1934: “To hazard a definition, we may say that obscenity is any reference to the bodily functions [sex, the excrementary functions] that gives to anyone a certain emotional reaction, that of a certain ‘fearful thrill’ in seeing, doing, or speaking the forbidden” (Walker Read 264). 7. J. C. Powys was also the author on a book on Rabelais in 1948. 8. Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A. H. H., 1849. The quotation is in Canto 56 and refers to man: “Who trusted God was love indeed / And love Creation's final law/Tho' Nature, red in tooth and claw/With ravine, shriek'd against his creed” Tennyson, Alfred, “In Memoriam”, LVI, last accessed on June 5, 2019 . 9. “L’excrément et ses équivalents (pourriture, infection, maladie, cadavre, etc.) représentent le danger venu de l’extérieur de l’identité: le moi menacé par du non-moi, la société menacée par son dehors, la vie par la mort” (Kristeva 86). 10. “Toute cette désorganisation de l’organique traduit la mort violente d’un ordre par ailleurs menace de mort lente. […] Selon cette perspective, l’obscénité, c’est l’innommable, l’indifférencié, le non-identifiable” (Floc’h 10). 11. Henry Miller too spoke of “these grinning, leering, skulking skulls” behind [his] words. (quoted in G. Mayne 66). The cat’s grin also calls to mind some of the pictures by Francis Bacon. 12. While writing A Glastonbury Romance, J.C. Powys was reading Gustav Fechner and “Fechner’s theories on the nature of the relation between the spiritual and material world may have influenced the Romance” (Krissdottir 258).

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13. “C’est par l’abolition des tabous alimentaires, par la consommation avec les païens, par le contact verbal et gestuel avec les lépreux […] que se distingue […] le message du Christ” (Kristeva 135). 14. “By forcing us to stare obscenity in the face, Miller’s fiction seems to prepare us for an ecstatic experience reaching the level of intensity of a ‘catharsis’” (Mayne 67). 15. Without any reference to the obscene, H. F. Fawkner drew the same conclusion when he wrote: “No distinction is in the last analysis made between matter understood from the viewpoint of Christ and matter understood from the viewpoint of nature, between natural flesh and flesh that no longer belongs to nature, between natural and non-natural suffering” (Fawkner 107). 16. This is in keeping with what Julia Kristeva said about the new, internalized vision of abjection developed in the New Testament: “L’idée d’une intériorisation subjective de l’abjection sera, elle, l’œuvre du Nouveau testament” (Kristeva 125). 17. Rachel Potter is here referring to Bataille’s interpretation of obscene images in The Story of the Eye (1928). 18. “Aussi un fait pur, un événement, ne peut pas être intrinsèquement obscène : il ne le devient que s’il est pris dans les rets du filet d’un faiseur d’images ou d’un montreur de spectacles. L’obscène s’adresse au spectateur, il vient le déstabiliser, le refendre” (Maier 2-3). 19. See the following extract from one of his letters to Henry Miller: “ I used to borrow from a friend Sadistic Books in French […] and carry them off to my / lodging where I wd. read them with my knees knocking together & all my pulses going it like mad in a prolonged cerebral fury of crazy unsatisfied satisfaction” (Peltier 40-1; J. C. Powys 5 [24 June 1950]).

ABSTRACTS

A Glastonbury Romance by John Cowper Powys was published in 1932, just one year before the ban on James Joyce’s Ulysses was lifted in the United States. Powys’s novel was not censored, although it is rich in scenes and hints that would have been deemed obscene in the United Kingdom barely ten years before. This is probably due to the evolving mores of society in the 1930s but this is also a consequence of the tone used by Powys, which will enable me to draw a distinction between bawdiness and obscenity. Then the detailed analysis of two passages in which the abject and the sacred vie with each other will make it possible to highlight some characteristics of the staging of the obscene: scopic drives, a pre-symbolic relation with the world and a confrontation with a sense of reality that is so overwhelming that the sacred appears as the only answer—an answer which is both vain and necessary. Lastly, the article offers to probe into the position of the implied reader of obscene works thanks to the mise en abyme that can be found in the novel.

Publié en 1932, un an avant que la censure dont l’Ulysses de James Joyce faisait l’objet aux États- Unis ne soit levée, le roman de John Cowper Powys, A Glastonbury Romance (1932), ne connut pas de démêlés avec la justice pour atteinte aux bonnes mœurs. Pourtant, il abonde en scènes et allusions qui auraient été jugées obscènes dix ans auparavant au Royaume-Uni. Si on peut voir dans cette absence de censure un effet de la libéralisation des mœurs dans les années 1930, on peut aussi penser qu’elle est la conséquence du ton utilisé par Powys, ce qui nous amènera dans un premier temps à distinguer paillardise et obscénité. Par la suite, l’analyse en détail de deux scènes où l’abject le dispute au sacré permettra d’étudier certains traits propres à la mise en

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scène de l’obscène : pulsion scopique, rapport pré-symbolique au monde, confrontation avec une réalité telle que le sacré apparaît comme la seule réponse à la fois vaine et indispensable. Enfin dans un troisième temps sera abordé le thème de la réception des œuvres obscènes et de leurs effets sur le lecteur, tel qu’il est mis en abyme dans le roman de Powys.

INDEX

Keywords: corpse, disorder, excrement, fascination, obscenity, bawdiness, perversion, sacred, sadism, sexuality Mots-clés: cadavre, désordre, excrément, fascination, obscénité, paillardise, perversion, sacré, sadisme, sexualité

AUTHORS

FLORENCE MARIE Maîtresse de conférences Université de Pau [email protected]

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Ezra Pound’s Representations of Sexual Intercourse and the Female Genitalia in The Cantos

Emilie Georges

1 Ezra Pound, author of the eight-hundred-page-long Cantos, is not known as an erotic poet, despite being self-admittedly a great admirer of both Ovid and Catullus (see e.g. Pound, 1961, 33, 47, 58, 104)—and John Gery, in his analysis of “The Thought of What America,” emphasises how obvious the erotic and even obscene qualities of some classical texts were to people who, like Pound, knew them well (Gery 189). There are, however, passages that deal with sexuality in The Cantos, most notably in Cantos XXIX, XXXIX, and XLVII, and Pound’s ways of dealing with the theme has been commented upon by such critics as Leon Surette (A Light for Eleusis 1979), Peter Makin (Provence and Pound 1978), and Robert Casillo (The Genealogy of Demons 1988). They generally emphasise the sacred dimension that sexuality takes on in Pound’s poetry, apparently following the medieval Provençal conception of sexuality, and highlight Pound’s masculinist heterosexual vision—with its idealisation of woman and its strong focus on the role of the phallus. What has been less commented on is the ways in which Pound represents the female genitalia. We know that he was not afraid of being crude and some of his early poems—in Blast and Lustra especially—were deemed obscene at the time (Stock 162-163, 194-195). In The Cantos he still called a phallus a phallus but in his representations of the female genitalia he resorted to a greater variety of poetic devices—the effects of which range from idealisation to disgust, reflecting the diversity noted in society at large by Braun and Wilkinson (“Sociocultural Representations of the Vagina,” 2001). Analysing these diverse representations will enable us to better apprehend Pound’s conception of women and sexuality and how it relates to his vision of economics and politics (in the broadest sense of the word).

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Mortal women and the eternal feminine in Ezra Pound’s life and writings

2 Before embarking on this exploration of the representations of the female genitalia in Ezra Pound’s Cantos it may be useful to offer a few comments on the poet’s relationships with women throughout his life. Taking this biographical factor into consideration is all the more interesting as he came of age during the first wave of feminism (which spanned the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century) and died in 1972 just as the second wave was taking off. In certain respects he was very much a man fully ensconced in his patriarchal ways: he had a reputation as something of a ladies’ man, having been dismissed from a teaching position because a woman had been found in his rooms (Stock 42). He also had a wife he never left, Dorothy Shakespear, as well as a lifelong mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge. Although this view of him as a successful lover is sometimes qualified (Nicholls 72), the facts tell us that his romantic relationships worked very much to his advantage.

3 As for his professional relationships with women, he seemed to offer advice to them with the same alacrity that he did men, his most famous protégées being Iris Barry and Marianne Moore (Stock 193, 435), and was not loath to accept financial support from women either, as shown by his relationships with Margaret Cravens and Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry (Stock 121; Dennis 1999, 268). Helen Dennis argues that Pound is ambivalent in his relationships with women and specifically notes the “contradictions between his work as promulgator, collaborator and colleague to literary women such as H.D., Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, and his sense of the ideal feminine” (Dennis 1999, 265).

4 Nowhere is this more evident than in his relationship with the poet H.D.: she recounts in End to Torment the well-known event of the creation of Imagism when Pound deemed her an Imagist (H.D. 18) which evinces his admiration of her as a poet and his support of her endeavours (although one may well argue that, by naming the movement, he retained a paternalist form of control over her work), but she also recalls instances when his patriarchal mindset is more obvious, such as his deeply unsettling visit to her hospital room when he regretted that the child she was about to give birth to was not his (H.D. 8, 30, 33, 41). The importance of the question of paternity in the patriarchal system has been studied by second-wave feminists such as Kate Millett (112) and while Pound’s remark to his former lover H.D. may seem more wistful than bitter, there is undoubtedly a darker side to it for the modern reader who knows that proof of paternity authorises patriarchal control over the mother. His nickname for her, “Dryad” (H.D. 12, 17, 18), evokes the nymphs of Greek mythology and Dennis is quick to point out that by “characteriz[ing] her as a tree nymph” he did not “address her as an equal” but rather “cast her in romantic versions of the archetypal feminine” (Dennis 1999, 273).

5 This notion of the archetypal feminine has been identified by feminist thinkers such as Germaine Greer as the embodiment of beauty (63), celebrated by male artists and poets (64-65) and presented to women as an unattainable ideal. Greer (67) emphasises this idealised woman’s complete lack of agency and Dennis’s analysis follows the same line: she sees in those of Pound’s poems which are concerned with H.D. a “compulsion to write this fellow Imagist poet back into the myth of Daphne, back into the role of inspiring muse” (Dennis 1999, 274). More generally, Pound celebrated goddesses

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throughout his Cantos and the importance of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, in the very structure of his poem has been identified by various scholars (see e.g. Casillo 1985, 145; Bacigalupo 30-31). The representation of women as types extends to his closest relationships: Helen Dennis tells us that he identified his wife with the type of the Victorian angel and Olga Rudge with the goddess of love (Dennis 2010, 408). If one remembers that Pound had been much influenced by Victorian literature (Paul 20-21), a main aspect of which was the idealisation of women and love (Millett 127-128), the poet’s aesthetic seems fully consistent with the ideas of the era during which he came of age and not at all exemplary of any avant-garde thinking on gender-related questions (Dennis 1999, 265).

6 One final aspect to be explored here is the question of sexual violence which, as Casillo (1988, 228) noted, is absent to the point of having been erased in certain passages which Pound took from classical texts, such as the sexual relations between Ulysses and Circe in Book X of Homer’s Odyssey. This may seem paradoxical, but it is consistent with the idealisation of love which Pound scholars have often underlined in his work (Sieburth 164; Casillo 1985, 140) and with Millett’s contention that the use of force has been made invisible by the success of patriarchy in garnering general assent, even from women (Millett 43). Simply put, Pound did not see the need for violence in sexual matters. What makes this more disturbing is the fact that he also refused to acknowledge violence in political matters, more specifically in the case of Italian Fascism (Pound 1935, 51). We thus begin to see how politics and sexuality may be entwined in Pound’s aesthetic. At this point, one might expect there to be no explicit references to the female genitalia in Pound’s Cantos, since he favoured an idealised vision of love and sexuality, but it is not the least of Pound’s contradictions that his poem does contain some such allusions.

The messy female genitalia: enemy to the poet?

7 Commenting on Canto XXXIX William Cookson (55) remarks that “[s]ex, the mysterious life-force of the universe, has a sacred dimension in The Cantos which is at a far remove from the trivialization and commercialization of sexuality that has been steadily increasing since the poem was written.” Although this sounds very much like the conservative thinking of a man who belongs to an older generation, it also indirectly points to the relation that Jean-Michel Rabaté identifies between Pound’s approach to sexuality and his economics. Rabaté argues that for Pound “magic, money and sexuality ultimately lead to the same affirmation of fecundity” and so we cannot understand the poet’s approach to sexuality without considering his economics and vice-versa (Rabaté 216). While Cookson speaks of a “commercialization of sexuality” that is absent from Pound’s Cantos, Rabaté perceives in the poem the poet’s desire for fluidity, for good circulation (218-219) that would effectively link economy—or the circulation of money—with sexuality—or a circulation of genital fluids through intercourse. As Rabaté indicates, money that does not circulate “congeals” and we might imagine, although Pound never explicitly said as much, that the same would symbolically happen to the soft flesh of the vulva since Rabaté tells us The enemy is for Pound the soft mass, the bloated flesh, and the striking feature is that phallic assertion needs the ‘cutting’ quality of thought, which dissociates, dissects the 'clots' which become clogs. (Rabaté 219)

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8 Rabaté’s use of the word “enemy” here is perhaps slightly too strong for, although the image of the soft-flesh-as-enemy applies to such figures as Pope Pius the Second (“Papa Pio Secundo”) who is a “swollen, swelling s o b” (Pound 1996, X, 44), the same cannot be said of female genitalia, which are never considered dangerous to man in The Cantos. Robert Casillo remarked on the paradox of that non-threatening softness, reflecting that one of the elements of Italian Fascism which attracted Pound was “its masculine cult of ‘hardness’” (Casillo 1988, 91). Similarly, Richard Sieburth argued that “the Other or the excess that needs to be vigorously eliminated from contemporary art” is designated by Pound’s preference for “phallic metaphors” “as somehow feminine or excremental—soft, slushy, slithery, ambiguous, indefinite, internal” (Sieburth 149). Where economy and sexuality are linked is not so much in that image of the soft-flesh- as-enemy as in the need for circulation (Sieburth 152-153; Casillo 1985, 127) and for an ordering principle which is always symbolically phallic for Pound: Rabaté speaks, after Pound, of “the ‘cutting’ quality of thought” (Pound, “Cavalcanti” 1968, 154) and Pound himself explicitly links coitus and ideation, and the phallus and innovative thought in the postscript to his translation of Remy de Gourmont’s Natural Philosophy of Love (La Physique de l’amour): There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide [sic] charging, head-on, the female chaos. Integration of the male in the male [sic] organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation. (Gourmont, Pound trans. 1922, 207)

9 In these now famous sentences Pound assigns a receptive role to the vulva or “female chaos”. It seems here that the female organ is undifferentiated matter, following Gourmont’s assertion that in nature the female is primitive and differentiation is a male prerogative (Gourmont, Pound trans. 1922, 31) and that this matter can only be shaped by heterosexual intercourse, by phallic penetration. Feminist thinkers remark that the primordiality of the female may be true from a scientific point of view (Greer 30; Millett 30), but they emphasise the unimportance of the differentiation which then takes place. Construing this primordiality as a primitiveness to be shaped by a man’s action is a purely patriarchal interpretation which only serves to reinforce male power. As previously mentioned, Helen Dennis has pointed out the contradiction between Pound’s traditional, heteronormative ideas and his support of female modernist artists whom he knew; she analyses the above-quoted passage in the following manner: Pound's theory seems to want to tease out a connection between the physiology of heterosexual desire, the image-making faculty and the visionary experience of the mystic or initiate. It is a theory which confers glamour on women and elevates them to the status of mantra or divine muse, but which sits uneasily with a full consideration of the political rights of individual women to autonomy and equality. (Dennis 1999, 276)

10 Like other Poundian scholars (Surette 97; Makin 1978, 250), she links Pound’s representations of sexuality with mysticism, but Dennis is not blind to the poet’s faults and biases, writing elsewhere: Woman is seen as biologically inferior to man, something of a biological mess at times. The masculinist theory of genius which he propounds in his translator’s postscript informs Canto XXIX, which is problematic since its tone is unstable, possibly ironic. (Dennis 2010, 406-407)

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11 Dennis finds it difficult to analyse this Canto because its unstable tone leaves too much uncertainty as to Pound’s meaning(s). Her attempts at interpretation remain at a distance from the text as she focuses on Pound’s ideas rather than on his language. Consider this extract from Canto XXIX: Wein, Weib, TAN AOIDAN Chiefest of these the second, the female Is an element, the female Is a chaos An octopus A biological process and we seek to fulfill… TAN AOIDAN, our desire, drift… Ailas e que'm fau miey huelh Quar no vezon so qu'ieu vuelh. Our mulberry leaf, woman, TAN AOIDAN, “Nel ventre tuo, o nella mente mia, “Yes, Milady, precisely, if you wd. have anything properly made.”

“Faziamo tutte le due… “No, not in the palm-room”. The lady says it is Too cold in the palm-room . Des valeurs, Nom de Dieu, et encore des valeurs (Pound 1996, 144-145)

12 No image here is directly related to the female genitalia by the poet, but because of the postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love we easily associate “the female/Is a chaos” with “the female chaos” that the phallus “charg [es], head-on,” and therefore it seems equally easy to associate the other images, the soft flesh of “an octopus” and the “biological process,” with that specific part of the female body. What we find is thus a synecdochical picture of woman where she is defined by her reproductive system, as a female rather than a woman. This tendency to refer to women synecdochically has been noticed by feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir who spoke of how certain people reduce woman to “a matrix, an ovary” (“une matrice, un ovaire” Beauvoir 37) and Germaine Greer who explained that a woman herself, and not only her genitals, is sometimes referred to as “a gash” (Greer 297). It does not change much that Pound afterwards refers to the female character as “woman” (which does not seem to be a word of address but rather an apposition to “our mulberry leaf”) and “milady” in the dialogue and then as “the lady” to introduce another piece of dialogue: these last two terms have an ironic ring (Greer 295) and while we move away from biological images to a social image of woman, sex, the biological function to which women are so often reduced (Millett 119) is still very much at the heart of the matter. The picture these terms—“chaos,” “octopus,” “biological process”—convey to us is one that is, like the tone of the Canto according to Dennis, unstable, messy, and rather unappealing.

13 This messiness, however, is not woman’s alone. Pound also gives us a mixture of five different languages—not including English—in the course of about twenty short lines. This results in competing atmospheres and contributes to the tonal instability of the Canto: while the use of a cut-off German phrase (“Wein, Weib [und Gesang]”1) evokes a festive, rowdy spirit, the Greek takes us back to ancient rituals and the Provençal to the amorous atmosphere of troubadour poetry. The Italian is twofold: medieval with the adaptation of Dantescan lines (Terrell 117) and contemporary with the spoken

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sentence: “faziamo tutte le due”. The orality of the latter sentence is marked by the spelling: faziamo instead of facciamo, which could indicate a variation in pronunciation; the meaning of the sentence is also unstable because it can be understood as either “let’s do it together” (Terrell 117), if we surmise that Pound made a mistake in transcribing a phrase he had heard (tutti e due or tutt’e due meaning “together”), or “let’s do both” (Edwards et al. 67). Either way, we feel the context to be that of a sexual encounter in which a man tries to have his way with a woman who resists him: the contemporary Italian outlines his virile, amorous enterprise while the spoken French (“Des valeurs,/Nom de Dieu, et/encore des valeurs”) sounds like a jocular comment from an amused passer-by or a Flaubertian narrator. Pound thus adopts several personae in the course of these few lines to give us a multiplicity of cultural perspectives, all of which inform his approach to sexuality: it is all at once masculine, jocular, festive, poetic, and mystic. It is also sexist in its synecdochical, messy representation of woman and her genitalia.

14 In Pound’s use of the words “chaos,” “octopus,” and “biological process” we find an unappealing picture of the female body, but not one which seems to cause real disgust in the speaker. This changes in Canto XXXV where Pound’s anti-Semitism surfaces in an image that is at once sexist and racist, reducing both women and Jewish people to an association with the—apparently disgusting—lower body: this is Mitteleuropa and Tsievitz has explained to me the warmth of affections, the intramural, the almost intravaginal warmth of hebrew affections, in the family, and nearly everything else…. (Pound, 1996, 172-173)

15 Because of Pound’s known anti-Semitism, we know that that image of “almost intravaginal warmth” cannot be understood as reassuring (as the warmth and cosiness of a home can be) to the speaker. His anti-Semitism as well as his Anglophobia would only increase as the Italian Fascist regime grew harsher and more intolerant towards dissidents and people whom it considered inferior in the years leading up to and during the Second World War. Interestingly, each of these two themes—anti-Semitism and Anglophobia—is associated at least once in the poet’s writings with a vulvar image. In The Natural Philosophy of Love he had written of “the great vulva of London” and in a letter to William Carlos Williams written in the same year he would be even more aggressive in his phrasing, as Helen Dennis tells us: The First World War had decimated the young male population leaving “a greater proportion of females above that of males (which) makes it THE land for the male with phallus erectus. London THE cunt of the world.” (Dennis, 1999, 276)

16 She adds that his use of a Latin word for the male organ and of the slang word “cunt” for the female genitalia is “significant”. According to her, “Pound is not talking biology so much as culturally positioning himself within the dominant order which is phallogocentric.” (Dennis, 1999, 276-7). As accurate as that analysis may be, it does not tell us much about the reasons why Pound chose the very specific word “cunt,” which is often regarded as one of the most vulgar in the English language and among the most offensive insults which can be thrown at another person. As we shall see later, Pound did not abstain from using Latin words to denote the female genitalia in The Cantos. In this letter, however, he chose a word which has a very specific connotation: it is most probable that he deliberately chose this slangy female counterpart to the Latinate male

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phallus as an insult to London which, after the First World War, became for him not only a land of “females” but also a land of defenders of usury such as Winston Churchill (Pound, 1978, 285, 395) whom he would come to abhor: the pun on “cunt” is intended.

17 Pound also chose at times to use ellipses, rather than explicit words, as in “Il est tombé dans le/de sa femme” (Pound 1996, XXVII, 129), literally “he fell into the/of his wife”. We can make a number of hypotheses regarding the word that this blank stands for: it could quite simply be a term, either common or vulgar, which denotes the vulva or it could be a word such as filet (net) or piège (trap) that has no explicitly sexual connotation but pertains to the traditional domain of sexist wife jokes.2 It could also be the more generic word trou (hole), as in the phrase “tomber dans le trou,” which would imply that the man has been waylaid and is now stuck in a hole. This hypothesis can be related to another example of bodily humour, the common French joke “t’es tombé dans le trou ?” (have you fallen in?) which is said to someone who has stayed on the toilet for a long time.

18 Pound’s knowledge of colloquial French has not been discussed as much as his knowledge of contemporary Italian, but it is quite possible that he knew enough to make such a joke. Dudley Fitts, who reviewed the typescript of The Pisan Cantos, thought Pound’s French was actually better than his Italian (Ten Eyck 47) and later in The Cantos the poet also uses the phrase “maison close” (Pound 1996, C, 716), which Terrell merely translates as a “closed house” but which also means “brothel” (Terrell 648). It seems probable that it is not a mere coincidence that Pound chose this phrase because the more usual term for “closed” in French is fermé (e). More simply, the missing word could be a spoken word that Pound, a non-native speaker, did not catch, which fact he thought it would be amusing to include in his rendering of the sentence in his Canto— perhaps knowing that people would imagine something obscene. The study of his typescripts and of the first editions of the first thirty Cantos3 shows that Pound hesitated between “le” and “la,” that is, between a masculine and a feminine noun. This could be because of an imprecise knowledge of French grammar on Pound’s part or it could indicate that he changed his mind as to what word should be implied by the ellipsis. Whatever the case may be, that word does not appear anywhere and was apparently always meant to remain a mystery to the reader.

19 The line break after “le” highlights the fact that it is a broken sentence and emphasises the absence of the noun we expect while perhaps also conveying the idea of a fall into oblivion. Leaving a blank allows the reader to fill in what is missing and to imagine what they please. The common use of ellipses to elide obscenities easily suggests a sexual image to the reader’s mind. It is very probable that Pound’s humour surfaces here, as in other French passages in The Cantos (e.g. Canto XXIX), and that the French language is, in Pound’s poetry, a cue that invites the reader to look for comedy.

Between fecondità and luxuria: ambivalence towards sexual intercourse

20 In spite of those subtle traces of humour, the tendency in Poundian criticism has often been to focus on the aestheticisation of intercourse in the form of the phallic line giving shape to the formless female matter (which, contrary to the phallic line, is “sensitivity without direction,” Canto XXXV, 173) or on the mystic dimension of sexual

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intercourse that Pound perceived in troubadour poetry (e.g. Pound 1973, 70), but that focus on the sacred dimension of the sexual passages has also meant that commentators have rarely reflected on their explicitness. By way of example, let us consider this extract from Canto VI: WHAT you have done, Odysseus, We know what you have done… And that Guillaume sold out his ground rents (Seventh of Poitiers, Ninth of Aquitain). “Tant las fotei com auzirets “Cen e quatre vingt et veit vetz…” The stone is alive in my hand, the crops will be thick in my death-year… (Pound 1996, 21)

21 In that short passage, which constitutes the beginning of Canto VI, the elements which we will find in other Cantos concerned with sexuality—good stone and good crops, the figure of Odysseus, and lines from a Provençal troubadour song—are reunited: they are markers of a world that is, according to Pound, free from usury. The poetic cluster “death-year” is repeated in Canto XLVII (“doth thy death year/Bring swifter shoot?”), where the figure of Odysseus is present as well and which is also concerned with the sacred and ritualistic dimension of sexual intercourse. We can also note that the Provençal lines are very sexually explicit. Peter Makin translates the two lines but only remarks that they tell us of Guillaume d’Aquitaine’s role as economic, cultural, sexual, and ritual fertiliser (Makin 1978, 75). We can construe their meaning as: “I fucked them, as you will hear, a hundred-and-eighty-eight times…” Tant, which is not really translatable here but literally means “so much,” underlines the astonishing effect of the number found in the second line. This tale of sexual prowess, told in vulgar Provençal (foter being of the same register as “to fuck”) is, to quote Cookson, “at a far remove from” our common, modern conception of the “sacred dimension” that one might find in sexuality.

22 In this particular instance it is difficult to see the restraint which Makin identifies as an important aspect of Pound’s conception of the troubadours’ approach to sexuality (Makin, 1978, 250) and Casillo tells us that Pound “never defines discursively the correct ῾proportion’ between restraint and sexual fulfilment,” preferring instead to “symbolize it mythically, as in the combination of Venus Genetrix and the Virgin Artemis” (Casillo 1985, 133). However, because of the later reference to crops, we can conclude that there is indeed a celebration of fecundity in these lines. This fecundity is compatible with the opposite of restraint, the morally ambiguous concept of luxuria which Pound mentions elsewhere in the Cantos, always in the form of a condemnation when it is used in an economic sense, and therefore synonymous with the English “luxury”: And hither came Selvo, doge, that first mosiac'd [sic] San Marco, And his wife that would touch food but with forks, Sed aureis furculis, that is with small golden prongs Bringing in, thus, the vice of luxuria; (Pound 1996, XXVI, 122)

23 However, when luxuria is synonymous with the French luxure (literally “lust” or more precisely a form of liberated sexuality) it is met with much more indulgence by Pound, as in the case of Cunizza in Canto XXIX:

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And she left with a soldier named Bonius nimium amorata in eum And went from one place to another “The light of this star o'ercame me” Greatly enjoying herself And running up the most awful bills. (Pound 1996, 142)

24 While the Latin phrase “nimium amorata in eum” (too much in love with him) also suggests an overabundance, it is followed by a translated quotation from Canto IX of the Paradiso in which Dante meets Cunizza. This is an extremely authoritative source in Pound’s eyes, and the cultural and intellectual weight of this reference, together with the meaning of the quotation, serves to excuse her actions. Even the last line, “And running up the most awful bills,” which points again to the theme of luxury, is written in the colloquial, oral style (“most awful”) of a modern witness laughing at her exuberance rather than censuring it.

25 Pound found the idea of luxuria as luxure in chapter XX of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (Gourmont, Pound trans. 1922, 197-198), in which Gourmont tells us that human diversification, as opposed to the single gesture animals have for each action, is called “luxure” by the moralists. In this passage Gourmont celebrates the human aptitude to invent a multiplicity of pleasant ways to live: luxuria is also variety in cooking, perfumes, the arts, machinery etc. We should remark that Pound chose to focus on only two aspects of luxuria in his Cantos and while he condemns one form of overabundance as monopoly, he praises the other as an affirmation of human fecundity.

26 By comparison with Canto VI’s celebration of overabundant fertility, Canto XLV offers a nightmarish vision of sexuality in which the rite, be it that of what Pound would deem natural sexual intercourse or that of Eleusis, has been either perverted or “staye[d]” by the “sin against nature” that is usury: Usura slayeth the child in the womb It stayeth the young man's courting It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth between the young bride and her bridegroom CONTRA NATURAM They have brought whores for Eleusis Corpses are set to banquet at behest of usura. (Pound 1996, XLV, 230)

27 The word “whores” shocks the reader by the virulence of the condemnation it entails and a vulgarity which, to the poet’s mind, only reflects that of usury since prostitution is a “commercialization of sexuality” where, one could say, usury, to Pound, is a sexualisation of commerce because it arouses “money-lust” (Pound 1996, XIV, 61) in its devotees.

28 Pound’s censure is also expressed through his use of the Latin word “usura” and the Latin phrase “CONTRA NATURAM”. The Latin language seems to carry a certain moral authority which Pound had already played with—in an ironic mode—in Canto X where we find Pope Pius II’s verbose and vituperative condemnation of Sigismundo. In Canto XLV the poet himself becomes invested with that moral authority as he chooses to use Latin without speaking through a persona.

29 Similarly, he uses archaic English forms and phrases (“slayeth,” “stayeth,” “at behest of”) to evoke a long-standing tradition which usury endangers. This, as well as the use

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of Latin, situates us outside of time, in a rather than a utopia, illustrating Pound’s idea of a “bellum perenne” (Pound, 1996, LXXXVI, 588) between the “man who wants to do a good job” and the usurer (Pound, 1996, LXXXVII, 589).

30 As we see in the above-quoted passage, this eternal war is, all in all, a war that is waged by usury against fecundity. The infertility we witness in the lines concerned with the wedding rite extends to crops, of course, but also to housebuilding: with usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper, with no mountain wheat, no strong flour (Pound 1996, XLV, 229)

With usura hath no man a house of good stone each block cut smooth and well fitting (Pound 1996, XLV)

31 Although there is no reference to genitalia and sexual intercourse is only present in the mention of its absence, we do find images which are reminiscent of a Poundian symbolic representation of intercourse: or where virgin receiveth message and halo projects from incision, (Pound 1996, XLV)

32 In these two lines, as in that which reads “each block cut smooth and well fitting,” we find again the image of the phallic line cutting through matter to give shape to thought. Of course, because of the context and the fact that a chisel has previously been mentioned, we know that “incision” here refers to an engraving technique and yet we cannot help seeing in this incision, which by cutting creates light, a “halo,” an image reminiscent of what Pound termed “coitu inluminatio” (Pound 1996, XXXVI, 180; LXXIV, 455): an illumination that happens in—that is, through and during—coitus.

Sacred sexual intercourse, sacred Latinity: the cunnus

33 This coitu inluminatio is visually depicted in the sexual episode in Canto XLVII: Hast thou found a nest softer than cunnus Or hast thou found better rest Hast'ou a deeper planting, doth thy death year Bring swifter shoot? Hast thou entered more deeply the mountain?

The light has entered the cave. Io! Io! The light has gone down into the cave, Splendour on splendour! By prong have I entered these hills: That the grass grow from my body, That I hear the roots speaking together, The air is new on my leaf, The forked boughs shake with the wind. (Pound 1996, 238)

34 As Casillo argues, we find in the above-quoted lines an image of light entering a cave which suggests a sacred event, a procession perhaps, and the name of the goddess Io is chanted as the event takes place (Casillo 1988, 90). The exclamation “Splendour on splendour!”—this noun being commonly found in Dante’s Paradiso in which images of divine light are of primordial importance—reinforces the general impression of a sacred event taking place before our eyes. However, as Casillo duly notes, we are also

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presented with images of nature, several of which imitate the movement of sexual penetration (one repeatedly enters the mountain, the hills etc.) while the last ones rather evoke a Whitmanian communion with the grassy earth. The flesh and vegetable elements are joined just as man and woman are joined and it is therefore possible to read, from the perspective of a male speaker, “my leaf” and “[t]he forked boughs” as vegetable metaphors for male and female genitalia respectively.

35 It is not the only instance in which Pound employs such imagery to refer to genitalia: in Canto XXXIX he uses the simile “her crotch like a young sapling,” which explicitly links the human flesh to a vegetable element, and in Canto XXIX he refers to “[o]ur mulberry leaf, woman,” where either woman as a whole can be understood to be represented by a mulberry leaf or, if we follow the same line of thought as with the “octopus” and “chaos” that are found in the same Canto, the mulberry leaf could stand for her genitalia, also presenting us with a synechdochical view of woman. This in turn, since the mulberry tree is where the silkworm grows, can be connected with images of in the Cantos, most notably that of the “bachi da seta” (the silkworm cocoons) which Italian women, according to Pound, would put in their apron as part of a fertility rite (Pound, 1996, 565; Terrell 469-70). Because of Pound’s frequent allusions to rites and because of his insistence on the sacredness of crops, the conflation of human flesh and leaf could be understood as a means to convey to the reader the sacredness of physical unions.

36 Another, more explicit natural image in the above-quoted passage is the “nest softer than cunnus”. In this particular instance, Pound mixes two markers of sacredness: the comparison with nature and Latinity. Indeed, in a chapter of Carta da visita entitled “Gli iconoclasti” which encapsulates Pound’s fears concerning the destruction of the Mediterranean civilisation as the war rages on, he celebrates once again “the mystery of fecundity” (“il mistero della fecondità”) through elements expected and unexpected: “Il latino è sacro, il grano è sacro. ” Coitus, despite not being mentioned, is most probably implied in the word “fecondità”. It may seem strange that Pound would link the Latin language with a symbol of fertility (“grano”) but we should remember that to his mind Latin was not only a language of rite but also one that spawned all the Romance languages which he had so enjoyed studying in his youth. (The result was his collection of essays The Spirit of Romance first published in 1910).

37 It therefore appears that we find in cunnus not merely an explicit word for the female genitalia: the use of a Latin word may convey the image of a fertility rite. Indeed, Massimo Bacigalupo who calls the two Cantos in which the word “cunnus” appears— Cantos XXXIX and XLVII—the “fertility cantos” (Bacigalupo 74) recalls to our minds the presence of the motif of the death-year harvest (“doth thy death year/Bring swifter shoot?”) in Canto VI, another Canto that is concerned with sex, and he stresses the idea of death leading to rebirth which is to be found in that motif (Bacigalupo 71, 73). Sexual intercourse, the cultivation of wheat, and the Latin language are connected by their sacredness. Thus, it is not that, as one might suppose, Pound shies away from using an English equivalent that would be more immediately intelligible to his reader: while he has no qualms about using the word “fuck,” which is used repeatedly in Canto XXXIX, we never find in all the Cantos any explicit English terms for the female genitalia. This is probably not due to a squeamish reluctance on Pound’s part (he would often use such terms in his personal correspondence for instance); rather it might be that, at least in this instance, the Latin word sounded better to Pound in the aural context of the line or

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that he thought it carried more interesting connotations—mainly that of sacredness. It is also possibly an echo of this passage from Canto XXXIX: Venter venustus, cunni cultrix, of the marge ver novum, canorum, ver novum Spring overborne into summer late spring in the leafy autumn καλὸν ἀοιδιάει KALON AOIDIAEI Ἤ θεὸς, ἠὲ γυνή…..φθεγγώμεθα θᾶσσον e theos e guné….ptheggometha thasson First honey and cheese honey at first and then acorns Honey at the start and then acorns honey and wine and then acorns Song sharp at the edge, her crotch like a young sapling illa dolore obmutuit, pariter vocem (Pound 1996, 193-94)

38 Canto XXXIX has often been commented upon and commentators focus on various aspects. Robert Casillo writes at length of Circe’s ambiguous status as both “a dangerous witch and a harlot” who “is identified with a feminine lack of order” (Casillo 1988, 89, 227) and a woman who joins in a sacred union with Odysseus which “anticipates Pound’s encounter with Gea Terra (Earth Mother) in Canto 82” (Casillo 1988, 90). William Cookson emphasises the spiritual dimension of the Canto and links it with the coitu inluminatio of Canto XXXVI (Cookson 55). Leon Surette underlines the explicitness of the beginning of the Canto, speaking of “a kind of Hugh Hefner paradise of sensual fatigue” (Surette 84), but quickly moves on to drawing a parallel between Dante’s visio beatifica and Pound’s version of Odysseus’ descent (86); he does not mention the Latin. Both A. David Moody and Peter Davidson remark on the heavy rhythm which translates the drugged atmosphere of the beginning of the poem (Moody 175; Davidson 22). Of all these commentators, only Davidson writes about the Latin phrase “[v]enter venustus, cunni cultrix”: The preceding line, which might be translated, ‘belly beautiful, cultivator of her genitals’, suggests a skilled, elaborated attitude to the pleasure of love, as opposed to the spontaneous coupling celebrated in the Pervigilium. (Davidson 22)

39 His translation is technically correct, despite the fact that it does not explicitly show that it is Circe who is the cultivator (cultrix being the feminine of cultor) and does not render the variety of the meanings of cultrix—although, to be fair, that is impossible to do in a single-word translation. The Latin word cultrix denotes a woman who performs the act of colere. The verb colere itself can mean “to cultivate,” “to heal,” “to inhabit,” or “to worship, to honour”.4 So the cunni cultrix can be merely one who “cultivates” her vulva and learns to know it—or in blunter terms one who is well versed in self- pleasuring—which would give her “a skilled, elaborated attitude to the pleasure of love” or she could be a worshipper, a high priestess of the cunnus. We find again in that very subtle pun—for Pound, a good Latinist from an early age (Stock 12), was most probably aware of the multiple meanings of the word cultrix—an allusion to the sacred dimension of coitus. Because of Pound’s ambiguous attitude towards the female genitalia, it is impossible to know with certainty whether the meaning of “worshipper of the vulva” should be taken to be pejorative or not, but this possible translation of the word cultrix, together with the name of the goddess of love, Venus, which we hear in the adjective “venustus” (beautiful), hints at the sacredness of the sexual act. The

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alliteration, in [v] and in [k], adds an aural dimension which supports this sacred dimension as the Latin line can be read in a singing voice, like a ritual chant.

40 Casillo reflects that the “velvet marge” which completes the line can be understood as the “undefined border of the Pontine Marshes” (a swamp that Mussolini drained, a fact which is later recounted in Canto XLI). The critic also notes that through that image Pound “evokes [Circe’s] fundamental undecidability” (Casillo 1988, 228). Although his analysis ties in rather well with the faint trace of disgust towards the female genitalia that we find in other images used by Pound, such as the “octopus,” it is also possible— and perhaps more probable—that here “velvet” echoes “venter,” and the “ventro” of Canto XXIX. Additionally, this opulent fabric may recall the snugness of a nest, to which the cunnus is later compared in Canto XLVII.

41 However, this more positive interpretation of Pound’s text should not distract us from the violence lurking behind the appearance of softness. As previously mentioned, violence is almost consistently erased by Pound, even when he alludes to rapes found in classical texts. Because he so staunchly refuses to see it, violence can only remain, partly concealed but never well enough, in the form of ambiguity. This ambiguity is especially present in the representations of female genitalia, which range from the strangely disgusting warmth of familial affection to the bucolic image of the soft nest. Circe, an adversary with whom Ulysses must consort in a fertility rite (Bacigalupo 70, 73), epitomises this ambiguity towards women’s willing participation in sexual intercourse (Greer 278). Pound’s tendency to resort to mythical images, the use of Latin and the references to the agricultural world, may compel us to think that the choice of the word cunnus, this sacred vessel, is detached from history—and indeed that is probably Pound’s intention—but Bacigalupo warns us against such a misconception and links Pound’s celebration of sex as a fertility rite with Mussolini’s own fertility policies, with regard to both women and agriculture (Bacigalupo 71). He even goes as far as associating Pound’s Circe with Fascism (Bacigalupo 53). Pound’s decision to use a Latin word may be tied to a memory of reading the ribald classics (Gery 189), but his regard for Latin is also intricately linked to his appreciation for certain aspects of Italian culture that Fascism favoured, as the above-mentioned extract from Carta da visita shows. In the Fascist discourse as in the patriarchal, violence is hidden from sight because it is in the interest of the oppressor that his oppression is not recognised as such by his victim. It is a rhetoric with which Pound’s poetics aligns completely.

Conclusion

42 Following Casillo’s and Bacigalupo’s intuitions and relying on Braun and Wilkinson’s typology of negative representations of the vagina (and by extension of the entire female genitalia)5 in Western societies, we can determine that Pound’s representations fit certain, but not all, of the stereotypes that the two researchers have identified. The female genitalia are seen as—at least symbolically—inferior to the penis since the vulva, unlike the phallus, has no creative role and, as Dennis points out, it is seen as “something of a biological mess at times”; they remain, however, complementary with the male genitalia and are never deemed “sexually inadequate” by the poet (Dennis 2010, 406-407). The vagina is never seen as dangerous, even in the case of the morally ambiguous Circe, or as an absence in the Freudian sense (Braun and Wilkinson, 19)—although one could argue that there is a lack in that it needs the phallic energy of

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man to give it purpose. It is not “vulnerable and abused” either—perhaps first and foremost because from the perspective of this rather traditional heterosexual male, sexual intercourse could never be perceived as rape—but we should also note that the consistent absence of any indication of sexual violence or male pleasure found in domination and violent intercourse does not preclude the hidden presence of violence, especially on a political level, be it totalitarian politics or sexual politics (Millett 23-24).

43 Pound’s representations of the female genitalia tend to oscillate between the slightly disgusting (they are messy, chaotic, sometimes associated with people—Jews or rather what they symbolised for him as an abstraction—and places—London—which Pound found repulsive) and the nearly-mystic, the vulva being a passive receptacle for the energetic penis, a fertile soil (soil being sometimes seen as dirty too) for the sowing and ploughing (a word that is often found—perhaps not merely coincidentally—in the Cantos). With their characteristic oscillation between the repulsive and the sacred and with their conflation of natural images and Latinity these representations of the female genitalia are to be related to Pound’s preoccupation with economics and political and social life. The morally vested Latin language serves to underline both the sacred (the cunnus that is to be penetrated in the rite of coitus, the coitu inluminatio that happens in that process) and the sinful (usura, contra naturam). The ambiguous luxuria, like the ambiguous female genitalia, should be thought of in relation to Pound’s often implicit distinction between desire for an abstract object (in the form of money-lust for example) and desire for a concrete object (a house of good stone, crops, intercourse): the concrete is linked to the sacred whereas abstraction leads, in Pound’s mind, to perdition.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bacigalupo, Massimo. The Forméd Trace: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Beauvoir, Simone de. Le Deuxième sexe, tome I : Les faits et les mythes. 1949. Paris: Gallimard, 1986.

Braun, Virginia, and Sue Wilkinson. “Sociocultural representations of the vagina”. Journal of Reproductive and Infant Psychology 19 (February 2001): 17‑32.

Casillo, Robert. The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

---. “Troubadour Love and Usury in Ezra Pound’s Writings”. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 27:2 (1985): 125‑ 153. Last accessed 3 December 2019. .

Cookson, William. A Guide to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2001.

Davidson, Peter. Ezra Pound and Roman Poetry: A Preliminary Survey. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1995.

Dennis, Helen. “Pound, women and gender”. In The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 264-283.

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---. “Gender and sexuality”. In Ezra Pound in Context. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 402-411.

Edwards, John Hamilton et al. Annotated Index to The Cantos of Ezra Pound: Cantos I-LXXXIV. Berkeley: University of Press, 1957.

Gaffiot, Félix. Dictionnaire illustré latin-français. Paris : Hachette, 1934.

Gery, John. “‘The Thought of What America’: Ezra Pound’s Strange Optimism,” Belgrade English Language and Literature Studies II (2010): 187-206. Last accessed 13 December 2019. .

Gourmont, Remy de. The Natural Philosophy of Love. Trans. E. Pound. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. Last accessed 25 July 2019. .

Greer, Germaine. The Female Eunuch. London : Flamingo, 1993. Last accessed 22 April 2020. .

H.D. (Hilda Doolittle). End to Torment : A Memoir of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1979. Last accessed 28 April 2020. .

Labuski, Christine. “Vulnerable Vulvas: Female Genital Integrity in Health and Dis-ease”. Feminist Studies 39:1 (2013): 248‑ 276. Last accessed 28 March 2020. .

Makin, Peter. Pound’s Cantos. London and Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1985.

---. Provence and Pound. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Moody, A. David. Ezra Pound: Poet: Volume II: The Epic Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Nicholls, Peter. “‘A Consciousness Disjunct’: Sex and the Writer in Ezra Pound’s ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’”. Journal of American Studies 28:1 (1994): 61‑75. Last accessed 19 February 2020. .

Paul, Catherine E. Fascist Directive. Clemson: Clemson University Press, 2018.

Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. London: Faber and Faber, 1961.

---. The Cantos. New York: New Directions, 1996.

---. Ezra Pound Speaking: Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard Doob. Westport and London: Greenwood Press, 1978.

---. Jefferson And/Or Mussolini. L’Idea statale. Fascism as I Have Seen It. London: Stanley Nott Ltd., 1935. Last accessed 3 May 2017. .

---. Literary Essays. Ed. T. S. Eliot. New York: New Directions, 1968.

---. Selected Prose, 1909-1965. Ed. William Cookson. London: Faber & Faber, 1973.

---. “Canto XXVII”. The Cantos Project. Last accessed 20 August 2019. .

Rabaté, Jean-Michel. Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound’s Cantos. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

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Sieburth, Richard. “In Pound We Trust: The Economy of Poetry/The Poetry of Economics”. Critical Inquiry 14:1 (1987): 142‑ 172. Last accessed 12 December 2018. .

Stock, Noel. The Life of Ezra Pound. 1970. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1982.

Surette, Leon. A Light from Eleusis: A Study of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. 1979. Bloomington: Xlibris Corporation, 2000.

Terrell, Carroll F. A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound. 1984. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Ten Eyck, David. “Romance Languages”. In Ezra Pound in Context. Ed. Ira B. Nadel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 43-53.

NOTES

1. This phrase is generally translated as “wine, women and song” and is also the title of a waltz by Johann Strauss II. 2. Examples of such jokes include the English phrase “the old ball and chain” to designate one’s wife and the French phrase “se faire passer la corde au cou” (to get tied down, meaning to get married). 3. These are made available at < http://thecantosproject.ed.ac.uk/index.php/canto-17-27- overview/canto-xxvii?start=1> 4. See Gaffiot’s Dictionnaire illustré latin-français (1934, 344) for the definition of “colere” and its French translations. The translation into English of those words found in the definition is mine. 5. The importance of distinguishing between the vulva in its entirety and the vaginal opening has been underlined by Christine Labuski, because referring to the vulva may help avoid the assignation to the role of a passive receptacle, a common problem in heterosexual representations of female genitalia (Labuski 227).

ABSTRACTS

This paper focuses on the ways in which Ezra Pound chose to represent the female genitalia in his Cantos. The discussion of these representations is based on the work of Poundian scholars such as Peter Makin, Robert Casillo, and Jean-Michel Rabaté who have dealt with the place of sexuality in Pound’s poetry, but it also aims to offer new insights, relying both on works of feminist scholarship and on an analysis of Pound’s use of Latin in the context of sexuality.

Cet article s’intéresse aux diverses manières dont Ezra Pound représente les parties génitales féminines dans ses Cantos. L’étude de ces représentations s’appuie sur le travail de chercheurs poundiens tels que Peter Makin, Robert Casillo et Jean-Michel Rabaté qui ont traité par le passé de la place de la sexualité dans la poésie de Pound, mais elle cherche aussi à offrir de nouvelles perspectives grâce aux travaux de penseuses et chercheuses féministes et à travers une analyse de l’emploi du latin par Pound dans le contexte de la sexualité.

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INDEX

Keywords: modernism, obscene, Ezra Pound, The Cantos, genitalia, representations of woman, femininity, poetry, American poetry Mots-clés: modernisme, obscène, Ezra Pound, Les Cantos, parties génitales, représentations de la femme, féminité, poésie, poésie américaine

AUTHORS

EMILIE GEORGES PhD student/doctorante contractuelle Université Paris Nanterre [email protected]

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Against “the Censor’s Scythe”: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

Yasna Bozhkova

My bawdy spirit is innate— A legacy from my Dada— His crude jest bestowed on me This sparkle of obscenity […]

Whether you love it or turn up your nose Whether it pleases you or not It grows—develops—pops off the tree Circling ball—nude in stockings1

1 The obscene is unquestionably at the very heart of the modernist project. As it relates to modernism, this notion may be defined both in the more specific sense of using images that are explicitly sexual, filthy or otherwise offensive to bourgeois morality and good taste, and in the broader sense of bringing to the fore everything that had previously been kept “off stage,” i.e. had been seen as not being fit subject matter for literature and art. Yet, historically, and particularly in the trajectory of provocation spanning from the Marquis de Sade to the avant-garde experiments of the Surrealists, the obscene female body often remains a prerogative of male authors, a body objectified and subjugated to a paradigm of male fantasy. Thus, unsurprisingly, critics tend to more often examine the obscene strategies of male modernists—most prominently in the case of two iconic novels from the 1920s, James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928)—focusing less often on the equally groundbreaking work of their female contemporaries. For instance, in her book Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, Allison Pease traces the emergence of explicit sexual representation from the fin de siècle aesthetics of Decadence to the zenith of modernist experimentation in the 1920s, but most of the writers and artists that she discusses are male—from Swinburne and Beardsley to the canonic modernist examples of Joyce and Lawrence. Rachel Potter’s more recent study

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Obscene Modernism: Literary Censorship and Experiment pays more attention to female figures, but without raising the important question of how female writers’ use of the obscene differed from or engaged with that of their male contemporaries.2 This article aims to explore the textual and visual strategies of representing the obscene in the work of three female modernists—Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.3 It delves into the use of sexually explicit, as well as deliberately repulsive, carnivalesque or scatological imagery in their work, paying attention to possible mutual influences as well as to their shared reaction to the most canonic case of modernist engagement with the obscene—the trial over the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses on the pages of The Little Review. By choosing these three lesser-known and previously marginalized4 female figures as case studies, it seeks to examine how the modernist focus on the obscene ambivalently intersects with gender. I argue that these three female writers’ engagement with the obscene around 1915 was precocious, extremely radical, and stylistically groundbreaking and idiosyncratic, arising independently from any male modernist experimentation along such lines. In turn, this raises the question of how they later responded to the growing prominence of obscene poetics in the work of male modernists, and how they engaged with cases of censorship given wide coverage in modernist magazines. I take the example of Joyce’s Ulysses in order to show that while they defended modernist works in equally uncompromising terms, praising their groundbreaking aesthetic searches and denouncing the censorship that threatened them, at times they also suggested that the male fantasies concerning female sexuality in particular did not sufficiently reflect the reality of female bodily experience. Although the three women knew each other well and their transatlantic paths intersected often,5 I read the stylistic similarities and echoes between their works not so much as direct influences but rather as common resonances: together, they articulate a modernist female subjectivity working against the clichés of prudish, virginal femininity and other restrictive norms of bourgeois morality. They also seek to dismantle the paradigm of the eroticized female body as an object of male fantasy; Loy also suggests that male modernists did not know how to properly express female sexuality and bodily experience. The first part of this article examines how Loy reacted against the norms of social and literary propriety of her Victorian education and created a strikingly original poetics of the obscene in her early poems and manifestoes. In the second part, I move on to explore some correspondences between the works of Barnes and Baroness Elsa, which bring to the fore a repulsive obscene female corporeality at odds not only with the norms of propriety of bourgeois culture, but also with modernist constructions of the female as an object of male desire. Finally, I explore how all three writers engaged with the question of censorship in the wake of the obscenity trial of Joyce’s Ulysses.

Mina Loy: “Shedding […] petty pruderies”

2 Loy’s lifelong engagement with the obscene was goaded on and directed against the Victorian ideal of sexless female purity, often personified and represented by the repressive influence of her mother, a coercive maternal censor who often appears in her autobiographic writings. As Carolyn Burke suggests in her biography of Loy, she internalized this censoring voice in her youth, and her later poetic experiments went hand in hand with her liberation from this censorship. A direct attack against this culture of prudery and censorship, spanning everything from everyday family lives to

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literature, appears in her semi-autobiographical satire Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose (1923-25), where Loy stages her own family narrative, the courtship and marriage of “Exodus” (a figure for her Hungarian Jewish father) and “English Rose,” her prudish British mother, representing the ideal of Victorian purity: Maiden emotions breed on leaves of novels where anatomical man has no notion of offering other than the bended knee to femininity

and purity passes in pleasant ways as the cows graze

for in those days when Exodus courted the rose literature was supposed to elevate us (Loy 1982, 124)

3 In these lines, Loy parodies the conventions of chivalric romance and the pastoral in order to denounce literary censorship, which in Victorian culture sought to create a literature completely expurgated from any form of bodily experience.6 As the parodic, deliberately infantile rhyme in “knee,” “femininity,” and “purity,” and then in “ways,” “graze,” and “days” suggests, literary censorship is bound to make for bad poetry.

4 From her earliest manifestoes and poems, Loy set out to develop a daring, radically embodied poetics, motivated not so much by a desire to shock, but rather by a thoroughgoing endeavor to dismantle the very concept of the obscene which was, to her, imbricated in an ideology of middle-class morality becoming increasingly obsolete and stifling to any form of artistic creativity. “Aphorisms on Futurism,” her first published text, written in Florence and published in Camera Work in New York in 1914, is characteristic of her stance: TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark.

THEY are empty except for your shame.

AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness. (Loy 1997, 152)

5 As Burke suggests, this manifesto-like text can be seen as a “dialogue with herself” in which Loy stages her psychic liberation, not only responding ironically to the revolutionary aesthetics and to the misogyny of the Futurist movement, but also setting her creative mind free from the “internalized censor” (Burke 160) of the restrictive social norms of her prudish upbringing. As is often the case in Loy’s manifestoes and other polemic texts, this aphorism opposes the collective voice of a liberated “we,” that ostensibly stands for the avant-garde artistic communities she frequented, to a “you” who seems to represent both bourgeois culture and her own self which had subconsciously internalized its censorship. In the lines quoted above it becomes clear that for Loy, the shock value of the obscene was only necessary in so far as it could expose the absurdity and the hollowness of the concept itself: the supposedly offensive sounds (“we shout” and “we scream”) paradoxically dissolve into

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“innate senselessness” once the shame surrounding them is dispelled. Likewise, in her “Feminist Manifesto,” dated “November 1914,” Loy once again attacks this mental attitude of shame: Another great illusion that woman must use all her […] clear-sightedness & […] bravery to destroy—for the sake of her self-respect is […] the realization in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex—except in the mental attitude to it. (Loy 1997, 156, emphasis hers)

6 She argues that if women could dismantle this obsessive association of sex with impurity and obscenity, which for her amounts to nothing more than outdated superstition, this would trigger “an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine” (Loy 1997, 156). Likewise, in “The History of Religion and Eros,” she writes: “Sex! This word […] overflows with misassociations. To clarify its future significance, sex must be renamed” (Loy 2011, 247), and decides that the term “Eros” must be used instead.

7 This desire to dismantle the oppressive ideology of social propriety that created a mental attitude of shame around sexual experience and the body as a whole, which proved particularly stifling for women writers, accounts for the obscene imagery omnipresent in her early poetry. It creates a dialectic tension between explicit naming of what had previously been taboo, and its strategic renaming or refiguring through striking and often grotesque images in order to subvert or debunk its associative charge of shame. In 1915, Loy famously caused outrage with the publication of her “Love Songs”: also written in Florence, they appeared in the inaugural issue of the little magazine Others in New York, and were later integrated into the longer sequence Songs to Joannes, published as a separate issue of the journal in 1917. The first section of the sequence opens with a surprising and often discussed image of sexual intercourse and female orgasmic experience, which almost reads like a manifesto of Loy’s approach towards the obscene: Spawn of Fantasies […] Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage “Once upon a time” Pulls a weed white star-topped Among wild oats Sown in mucous membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva (Loy 1997, 53)

8 Alfred Kreymborg, the editor of Others, eloquently summed up the reaction of shock and stupefaction upon the poems’ publication, even among members of the New York avant-garde: “[t] o reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure, punctuation, even more offensive” (Kreymborg 1929, 489). As Laura Scuriatti points out, Loy’s poems were deemed scandalous “not only because of their explicit sexual content, the unembellished descriptions of the corporeal and fleshly aspects of sexual encounters […], but also because these were told from the point of view of a female speaking voice” (Scuriatti 2005, 73). Interestingly, some of those who were most outraged by Loy’s subversive take on love poetry were women,

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including Harriet Monroe and particularly Amy Lowell, who threatened to withdraw her financial support to the magazine. Loy’s obscene imagery is both daringly explicit and lewd, ironically thriving in its shock value, and utterly defamiliarizing, to the extent that this shock value paradoxically ends up losing its charge. In particular, this is caused by the ironic use of scientific terms, jarring in the lexicon of love poetry (“spawn,” “snout,” “mucous membrane,” “saliva,” and later even “spermatozoa”). The prominent figure of the grotesque, ribald “Pig Cupid” with his phallic “rosy snout” becomes the personification of Loy’s aim to do away with the boundaries between romantic love, the erotic and the obscene: Cupid, the other name of the Greek god of love Eros, encapsulates a whole tradition of clichéd love imagery, but on another level, it stands as a substitute for “Sex,” as Loy suggests in “History of Religion and Eros” (Loy 2011, 247). Inscribed in a tradition of decadent bawdy iconography such as in Félicien Rops’s painting Pornocratès. La femme au cochon, this figure also hinges on a multilingual pun, since cochon, the French for “pig,” also means dirty-minded, lusty or obscene. It is well established in Loy scholarship that the imagery of this poem responded both to the misogyny of the Futurists F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, with whom Loy had ephemeral extramarital affairs at the time of the composition of the poem, and to Valentine de Saint-Point’s “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913), in which she repudiates romantic sensibility, eulogizing instead a liberating sense of desire: We must stop despising Desire, disguising it in the pitiful clothes of old and sterile sentimentality. […] WE MUST GET RID OF ALL THE ILL-OMENED DEBRIS OF ROMANTICISM, counting daisy petals, moonlight duets, heavy endearments, false hypocritical modesty. When beings are drawn together by a physical attraction, let them—instead of talking only of the fragility of their hearts—dare to express their desires, the inclinations of their bodies, and to anticipate […] their future carnal union. (De Saint-Point 168, emphasis hers)

9 In Loy’s “Love Songs,” in a striking, ironic literalization of De Saint-Point’s rhetoric, the debris of romanticism become “erotic garbage,” while the quotation marks around “Once upon a time” conjure up and sweep away the entire tradition of desexualized, fairy tale, love. Loy both explores the shock value of naming the male anatomy with unprecedented license, and pinpoints the need to invent an entirely new, uncensored language for the body, rewriting the male body as a “skin-sack” and “clock-work mechanism”: The skin-sack In which a wanton duality Packed All the completion of my infructuous impulses Something the shape of a man To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant More of a clock-work mechanism Running down against time To which I am not paced My fingertips are numb from fretting your hair (Loy 1997, 53-54)

10 At times, Loy does not hesitate to use outright blasphemy, for instance when the Christian symbolism of the Eucharist into her imagery of sexual intercourse: “[breaking] flesh […]/At the profane communion table/Where wine is spill’d on promiscuous lips” (Loy 1997, 54). However, the poem’s imagery quickly moves beyond such cultural symbolism, redefining what would have been perceived as obscene by her

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contemporaries as something utterly natural, by interweaving it into a series of surprising organic images: When we lifted Our eye-lids on Love A cosmos Of coloured voices And laughing honey

And spermatozoa At the core of Nothing In the milk of the Moon (Loy 1997, 56)

11 Thus, the poem ironically brings to the fore the “pornograph [y]” of nature, suggesting that in the natural world, unencumbered with “petty pruderies” and other social inhibitions and taboos, the socially created category of the obscene becomes absurd: Shedding our petty pruderies From slit eyes

We sidle up to Nature — — — that irate pornographist (Loy 1997, 63)

12 The poem abounds with such ironic images of an absurd natural “pornography,” picturing swarming fireflies “Bouncing/Off one another/Again conjoining/In recaptured pulses” (Loy 1997, 61) and then comparing the lover and addressee of the poem to one of these copulating beings: “You too/Had something/At that time/Of a green-lit glow-worm” (Loy 1997, 61). As they appeared in New York avant-garde magazines like Others, Loy’s “Love Songs” and other early texts worked for the liberation of the female body from the corset of bourgeois conventions and morality, making her reputation as the perfect embodiment of the liberated “modern woman.”7 Yet, together with the myth of her dazzling physical beauty, these poems created her aura as a sexualized body and as a dazzling object of male desire. Thus, while with her internal focus Loy depicted the sexualized female body as an experiencing subject rather than a passive object of desire, she did not fully do away with the paradigm of female seductiveness.

(Performing) Repulsive Women: Djuna Barnes’s and Baroness Elsa’s Queer Obscene

13 Around the same time in the mid-1910s, in New York, Djuna Barnes and “Baroness Elsa” created an equally radical but alternative form of obscene, which stemmed from an equally “radical, anti-bourgeois sensibility” (Goody 39). More repulsive, excessive and violently transgressive, it not only rejected the norms of propriety but also attacked the very idea of the eroticized female body as an object of male desire in order to develop a decidedly queer corporeal female poetics.8 While Barnes’s later use of the obscene in the “gay Amazonian mythology” (Goody 167) of Ladies Almanack and in the famous “obscene and touching” (Barnes 1936, 179) final scene of Nightwood is more often examined, I want to focus here on her earliest major text, The Book of Repulsive Women (1915). The Beardsleyesque decadence of its imagery is less often read in relation to the obscene, perhaps because Barnes herself later dismissed it as “idiotic.”

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As Goody puts it, Barnes’s book “draws on the decadent tradition in both its representation of abject femininity (in the poems and Beardsleyesque drawings) and its anti-bourgeois stance, proffering these repulsive women as evidence of alternatives to the clean, straight aspirations of modern America” (Goody 39). If Barnes’s chapbook is as disturbing as Loy’s Songs to Joannes in its engagement with female embodiment, nudity and bodily fluids, the key difference between the two texts is that while Loy adopts the point of view of the female subject to focus on bodily experience, Barnes adopts an external stance towards the women depicted. The voice of the speaker ambivalently oscillates between the outraged repulsion ironically recommended by the title and a complicit voyeurism that in fact revels in the grotesquerie that is described. The line “We’ll know you for the woman/That you are.” (Barnes 1915, 13) in the opening poem “From Fifth Avenue Up” establishes the technique through which Barnes’s voice ambivalently ventriloquizes cultural attitudes about women by pretending to describe them as they truly are. The attempt to “know” the woman described (and women in general) quickly becomes the pretext for an obscene fantasy: For though one took you, hurled you Out of space, With your legs half strangled In your lace, You’d lip the world to madness On your face.

We’d see your body in the grass With cool pale eyes. We’d strain to touch those lang’rous Length of thighs; And hear your short sharp modern Babylonic cries.

[…]

See you sagging down with bulging Hair to sip, The dappled damp from some vague Under lip. Your soft saliva, loosed With orgy, drip. (Barnes 1915, 14)

14 It is striking that the terms “saliva” and “spawn,” jarringly foreign to the lexicon of poetry, appear both in Loy’s “Love Songs” and in Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women, both of which date back to 1915.9 Likewise, just as Loy blasphemously depicts the sheets of sexual intercourse as a “profane communion table,” Barnes touches on the outright blasphemous use of Christianity, as the voice admits valuing the repulsive women “still a little/More than Christ” (Barnes 1915, 17). It is also useful to notice that both Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” and Barnes’s Book of Repulsive Women articulate the obscene around the polarity of “we” and “you.” Yet, the clear-cut opposition between the liberated “we” (“we shout, we scream”) and the outraged “you” (“you whisper,” “your shame”) in Loy’s text is rendered significantly more problematic in Barnes’s chapbook: the unnamed and more ambivalent “we” seems to denounce the women (“you”) as epitomes of moral degradation, “Ravelling grandly into vice” (Barnes 1915, 24), and yet to take voyeuristic pleasure in observing them (“we’d see,” “we’d strain to touch”). While, through her internal point of view, aligning the female subject with the obscene,

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Loy seeks to demystify and naturalize what was perceived as offensive, such as the naked body, in an inverse movement, Barnes showcases the obscene “repulsiveness” of the women, making them as ostentatiously artificial and excessively transgressive as possible. As Goody points out: What is particularly pressing in this text is the effect of conjoining women with the grotesque so that the articulation functions in a process of stratification in which the articulation woman-body-grotesque comes to seem ‘natural’. Using such a decadent aesthetic Barnes runs the risk of merely reinforcing a reductive representation of women. Her only defence against this naturalisation […] is to make her women appear as unnatural as possible, both in the poems and in the illustrations. (Goody 166)

15 Indeed, the text exploits a multiplicity of stereotypes of moral and bodily degradation and vice, such as the great Whore of Babylon, the orgy, the oozing and dripping bodily fluids, and the term “lip,” prominently used twice both as a verb and as a noun—an unambiguous reference to lesbian sexual practices. Yet, as the series of textual and visual depictions of repulsive femininity unravels, the obscene female body takes a variety of forms: the ribald and lewd sexuality of the opening poem is increasingly displaced by images of deformed ugliness (“With your belly bulging stately/Into space,” Barnes 1915, 15), of the body abjectly wallowing in waste, of grotesque animality or of equally grotesque images of childbirth, freakish babies and mothers, such as the “Naked-female-baby/In grimace” (Barnes 1915, 15) or the “blank udders” of the “massive mother” (Barnes 1915, 27-28). For both Barnes and Loy, motherhood and babyhood are obscene, corporeal activities, not melodramatic, desexualized phenomena, as they were often represented in bourgeois culture. One may compare Barnes’s images to Loy’s depiction of the female body in childbirth in the poem “Parturition,” which caused almost as much outrage as “Love Songs,” or to her disturbing focus on the “ample sex” (Loy 1997, 24) of a sick newborn female baby in the opening lines of the poem “Babies in Hospital”. The trajectory of obscene, repulsive female bodies in Barnes’s chapbook culminates in the last two poems, “Corpse A” and “Corpse B,” where the body wallows on the street, “shock-abbreviated,” shocking in its abjection, lying “listlessly like some small mug/Of beer gone flat” (Barnes 1915, 36). Thus, while the collection is read by most critics as a “coded early lesbian manifesto […] staging the birth of the lesbian” (Caselli 77), I argue that what is most remarkable and unique about this early text is Barnes’s articulation of a repulsive femininity, which is only partially related to Barnes’s lesbianism, since the female characters in Ladies Almanack and Nightwood have none of the revolting aspects of these grotesque, “repulsive” women. Rather, Barnes sets out to dismantle the very paradigm of the eroticized, seductive female body by taking its opposite to extremes.

16 With her pioneering Dada performance art, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven ostensibly sought to create the living embodiment of Barnes’s “repulsive women.” As Daniella Caselli points out, there is a striking similarity between the poetics of Barnes’s chapbook and the performance poetics developed by Baroness Elsa, in their intertwined dimensions of the repulsive, the shocking and the outlandish: Barnes’s early poetry could be described—like she does with the Baroness—as “astonishing”. “Repulsive,” however, would be another way to account for the kind of avant-garde performed both by Barnes’s early poems and by the Baroness. (Caselli 68)

17 As Caselli notes, there is a striking correspondence between Barnes’s poetics of obscene, “repulsive” womanhood, and the Baroness’s art, for which her own body

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became a , as eloquently presented in William Carlos Williams’s account of the Baroness, published in Contact in 1921: She lived in the most unspeakably filthy tenement in the city. Romantically, mystically dirty, of grimy walls, dark, gas-lit halls and narrow stairs, it smelt of black water closets, one to a floor […]. Waves of stench thickened on each landing as one moved up. She […] went by the name of La Baronne. Close up, a reek stood out purple from her body, separating her forever from the clean souls of Yankeedom. It was that peculiar, pungent smell of dirt and sweat, strong of the armpit. La Baronne had filled her room with […] refuse collected from the street. There she lived with three dogs. (Williams 11)

18 While it is well known that Barnes used the Baroness as model for the characters of Nightwood,10 the eccentric poet-artist is arguably also a possible model for the repulsive women of Barnes’s poetic collection. She seems to be the living incarnation of the image that appears in Barnes’s “From Third Avenue On,” connecting the female body with filth, stench, and waste: And now she walks on out turned feet Beside the litter in the street Or rolls beneath a dirty sheet Within the town. (Barnes 1915, 19)

19 The illustration of an outlandishly dressed woman walking with her peacocks that accompanies the poem “From Third Avenue On” strikingly resembles accounts of the Baroness walking the streets of New York City, dressed in her extravagant costumes, such as a bra made of tomato-cans, and surrounded by a multitude of reeking dogs. The most extreme case of the three artists examined in this article, Baroness Elsa gained notoriety in New York avant-garde circles around 1915 for her extravagant, offensive, violently transgressive body performances, which “luxuriate [d] in exhibitionism” (Gammel and Zelazo, in Freytag-Loringhoven 19). For instance, Barnes remembers in her unpublished biographical notes that the Baroness “made a great plaster cast of a penis once, & showed it to all the ‘old maids’ she came in contact with.” (Barnes 1933, 4) Using this object as a performance prop, the Baroness symbolically appropriated a masculine identity, which may be seen both as a means to transgress the norms of propriety, a shocking act typical of Dada’s épater le bourgeois strategies, and to acquire the status of a male artist, which Gammel sees as a “gender performance in the Butlerian sense” (Gammel 196). On another occasion, she shaved her head and dyed it vermillion, embodying “the vermillion, vibrant flow of potency, making herself a phallic erection” (Gammel and Zelazo, in Freytag-Loringhoven 20). She became a leading figure in the cluster of expatriate artists of New York Dada, featuring Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Francis Picabia among others, lending her body to many of their collaborative épater le bourgeois acts. For instance, in 1921 she starred nude in a film shot by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray titled The Baroness Shaves Her Pubic Hair, and in 1922, Ray sent a letter to Tristan Tzara featuring a still from this film, showing the nude Baroness Elsa, with her legs spread provocatively to form the letter “A” for America, and punningly titled “merdelamerdelamer de l’a…merique,” which reads alternately as de la mer, de la merde, and de l’Amérique, informing him: “Cher Tzara—dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada and will not tolerate a rival,—will not notice dada.” (in Freytag-Loringhoven 89). The offensive gesture of her nude body staged as the letter A clearly engages with the symbolism of Hawthorne’s The Letter, in an extreme, provocative Dada attack on American puritanism. In 1917, she also created a phallic readymade sculpture made of plumbing pipes called God

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(previously attributed to Morton Schamberg). Based on this sculpture, on her preference for scatological imagery, and on her frequent collaborations with male Dadaists, critics have speculated that she might also be the unacknowledged author or at least co-author of Duchamp’s Fountain. Although the strikingly original nature of the Baroness’s art was acknowledged and respected by male artists like Duchamp, her excessive, exhibitionist performance of female desire was nonetheless perceived as “repulsive” even among avant-garde artists, as Williams’ misogynistic account demonstrates, dwelling at length on the details of her syphilis, broken teeth, and “the stale smell rising from her body” (Williams 12). Enamored of both Duchamp and Williams, whom she dubbed respectively M’ars (which stands for “my arse”) and “WC,” the Baroness often made her excessive and unrequited sexual appetite the subject of her performances, assemblage art and poetry. For instance, painter Louis Bouché remembered her reciting a poem, whose refrain went, “Marcel, Marcel, I love you like Hell, Marcel,” “while giving her nude body a rubdown with a copy of Nude Descending a Staircase” (qtd. in Freytag-Loringhoven 13). The poem “Aphrodite to Mars” can be read as an obscene love song fantasizing about Marcel Duchamp (“M’Ars”): Caesar’s Digging point Sharp kiss Plenishing Snapping thirst’s gash Rimflush Rubyblood’s desire […] Ejaculating silently High To Stain glintedges (Freytag-Loringhoven 65)

20 The visual poem “Graveyard Surrounding Nunnery” begins with the lines “When I was/ Young— foolish—/I loved Marcel Dushit/He behaved mulish—” (Freytag- Loringhoven 201). After a similarly failed attempt to seduce “Carlos—some husky guy,” the speaker theatrically chooses to become a nun, accompanying the poem with a sketch of phalluses laid to rest behind crosses. As Gammel and Zelazo argue, “Her characteristic use of the dash here takes on the symbolic function of castration, cutting her lines short as she cuts down the men she mocks, who, in their implied failure to please her, force her to choose the abstinence of the nunnery” (in Freytag- Loringhoven 20).

21 The Baroness’s poetry, published on the pages of The Little Review starting from 1918, literally abounds with explicitly obscene, repulsive and scatological imagery. Her quasi- obsessive use of portmanteau words often features obscene wordplay, such as “phalluspistol” (Freytag-Loringhoven 153). As Gammel and Zelazo point out, “More than any other Dadaist in New York, the Baroness fanned the flames in the fight against censorship and puritanical prejudice” (in Freytag-Loringhoven 27). Like Loy’s, the very mention of her name came to stand as shorthand for the doubly offensive dimensions of unabashed female desire and radical formal experimentation. In the Baroness’s case, to this was added the dimension of theatricalized, excessive and exhibitionistically displayed “repulsiveness” which alienated many even among the avant-garde.11 In the years 1918-1921, she became the most often printed poet on the pages of The Little

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Review alongside Joyce’s Ulysses, and came to represent the modernist fight against bourgeois good taste and propriety just as much as Joyce, and perhaps even more so for being a woman. As Gammel puts it, she became “a living figurehead for the journal’s masthead motto, “MAKING NO COMPROMISE WITH THE PUBLIC TASTE.” Of all important avant- gardist contributors—including Joyce—the Baroness challenged the conventional taste more aggressively than others” (Gammel 246). Gammel goes as far as to suggest that her poetry greatly contributed to the obscenity charges against The Little Review, since it was considerably more explicit than Joyce’s highly veiled writing of obscenity, articulated in metaphorical, complex writing (Gammel 252-253).

“Re-Joyce”: Female Modernists Writing the Obscene in the Wake of the Ulysses Scandal

22 This leads me to examine how Baroness Elsa, Barnes, and Loy responded to the arch example of modernist obscenity—the 1921 trial following the publication of Ulysses in The Little Review, which resulted in banning the publication of the novel in the United States. Since it is well-known that Joyce’s Ulysses was particularly championed by women—first by the editors of The Little Review, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, and then by bookseller Sylvia Beach, who published the novel in book form in Paris, it is interesting to examine how modernist women writers responded to this case of flagrant censorship, and how their subversive strategies evolved after it. As Gammel explains, it is important to note that during the trial “the male avant-garde had retreated behind a wall of silence, leaving the public fight to the women” (Gammel 255-256). As early as 1920, in the July-August issue of The Little Review that also printed the notorious “Nausicaa” episode that attracted the attention of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and in fact immediately preceding it, the Baroness published a poetic manifesto in defense of Joyce’s work titled “The Modest Woman,” which begins thus: Artists are aristocrats. […] Who wants us to hide our joys (Joyce?)

If I can eat I can eliminate—it is logic—it is why I eat! My machinery is built that way. Yours also—though you do not like to think of—mention it—because you are not aristocrat [sic]. Your skirts are too long—out of “modesty,” not decoration—when you lift them you do not do it elegantly—proudly. Why should I—proud engineer—be ashamed of my machinery— part of it? […] Joyce is engineer! one of boldest — most adventurous—globetrotter! (Freytag- Loringhoven 286)

23 Not only does the Baroness unabashedly defend the explicit sexuality of Joyce’s novel, punningly inscribing obscene “joys” in his very name, but she also particularly champions his unprecedented, bold use of repulsive, scatological imagery, referring to the famous scene where Leopold Bloom eases his bowels after breakfast at the end of the “Calypso” episode: “If I can write—talk—about dinner—pleasure of my palate—as artist or as aristocrat—with my ease of manner—can afford also to mention my ecstasies in toilet room!” (Freytag-Loringhoven 287). The Baroness’s text was in fact prompted by the essay of a certain Helen Bishop Dennis, printed in the previous issue of the journal, that had attacked Joyce’s “immodesty in writing about toilet matters”

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(Gammel 252). In response, the Baroness situates Joyce in an ancient literary tradition of the erotic and the carnivalesque body, only to blasphemously denounce the “great stupidity” of the Bible in the next sentence: Goethe was grandly obscene—what do you know about it? Flaubert—Swift—Rabelais —Arabian Nights—Bible if you please! only difference—Bible is without humour— great stupidity! So: how dare you strut—step out—show yourself with your - tuft in ear? (Freytag-Loringhoven 288)

24 For the Baroness, as for Loy, the obscene is essentially a social construct created by a bourgeois culture negating the body. Paradoxically, when it is part of a serious aesthetic quest, the “obscene” is never truly obscene, i.e. vulgar: The way he slings “obscenities”—handles them—never forced—never obscene— vulgar! […] In fact—his obscenities—until now—are only thing I could taste —enjoy —with abandon—his blasphemies. Pure soul of child—wisdom of sage—genius. (Freytag-Loringhoven 288)

25 The Baroness developed her engagement with Joycean corporeality in a mocking, posthumously published Dada poem called “Kindly” (ca. 1920-1924), which was, as the manuscript explicitly states, “Inspired by J.J.’s ‘Ulysses’”: And God spoke kindly to mine heart — So kindly spoke he to mine heart — He said: “Thou art allowed to fart!” So kindly spoke he to mine heart. (Freytag-Loringhoven 86)

26 The Baroness here engages not only with representations of farting in Ulysses—both Bloom’s in “Sirens” and Molly’s farting in bed in “Penelope”—but also with Joyce’s obsession with his wife Nora’s farts, documented in letters. The conversation between woman and God seems to be particularly inspired by the lines “give us room even to let a fart God or do the least thing better yes hold them like that a bit on my side piano quietly sweeeee theres that train far away pianissimo eeeeeeee one more song” (Joyce 763), where, due to Joyce’s experimental lack of punctuation, the text may be read as though Molly is addressing God, begging for permission to give free rein to her corporeal needs. The deliberately infantile rhymes of the Baroness’s poem, similar to those of Barnes’s The Book of Repulsive Women, are particularly subversive, especially in the third stanza, where in the blasphemous lines ascribed to God “farts” rhymes with “hearts” and “arts”: “I made — The foreparts And the hinderparts — I made the farts — I made the hearts — — — I am grand master of the arts!” (Freytag-Loringhoven 86)

27 This poem makes it particularly palpable that, in a sense, the Baroness’s work is more radical than Joyce’s and closer to Duchamp’s subversive anti-art gestures. While for Joyce the obscene is enmeshed in an intertextual project of staggering complexity, which reinvents tradition without destroying it, the Baroness’s mocking, ribald Dada verse sets out to dismantle the very canon of poetic tradition, just as much as Duchamp’s iconoclastic gesture of making a urinal into a work of art. Like Duchamp’s, her work is also strategically calculated to provoke censorship, rather than to eschew it: in another provocative footnote, Baroness “helpfully” provides specific instructions as to how the poem should be printed “should there arise any objection to candidness”;

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the offensive terms are parodically rendered more palatable by replacing letters with dashes in parentheses next to the main body of the poem: “(f—)” and “(sh—t)” (86). This also shows that the Baroness’s liberal use of the “em dash,” an idiosyncratic, signature stylistic feature that she shares with Loy (for example in the line “Nature/— — — that irate pornographist,” Loy 1997, 63), is connected with their subversive strategies of writing the obscene. Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the Baroness’s work deliberately, persistently and “brazenly thr [ew] down the gauntlet to the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice” (Gammel and Zelazo, in Freytag-Loringhoven 42), for example in the 1919 poem “King Adam,” where the female speaker excitedly addresses her lover, capturing a scene of oral sex: “Kiss me……………upon the gleaming hill…………*” (Freytag-Loringhoven 56). The asterisk is accompanied by a provocative footnote provided by the Baroness herself, which reads: “Donated to the censor”. As Gammel observes, the “mocking of the censor was all the more audacious as oral sex featured as a ‘degenerate’ act on the list of John Sumner’s vice-squad agents” (Gammel 247).

28 Like the Baroness, both Loy and Barnes engaged more directly and explicitly with the obscene and with censorship after the trial of Ulysses and their subsequent encounter with Joyce. In 1922, Barnes interviewed Joyce in Paris for Vanity Fair, accompanied by Loy, who made a portrait of him that was published alongside the interview. Barnes’s appraisal stresses the tongue-in-cheek, humorous dimension of Joyce’s bawdiness: Because he had heard of the suppression of The Little Review on account of Ulysses and of the subsequent trial, he sat down opposite me, who was familiar with the whole story, ordering a white wine. He began to talk at once. “The pity is,” he said, seeming to choose his words for their age rather than their aptness, “the public will demand and find a moral in my book—or worse they may take it in some more serious way, and on the honor of a gentleman, there is not one single serious line in it.” (Barnes 1922, 66)

29 Barnes’s most prominent response to “that great Rabelaisian flower Ulysses” (Barnes 1922, 66), as she called it in her article, may be found in her 1928 novel Ryder, which is, as Caselli puts it, “an illustrated fiction in which a Rabelaisian bawdiness pervades everything as the mark of the instability of meaning” (Caselli 197). Ryder was described by a contemporary reviewer as “vulgar, beautiful, defiant, witty, poetic, and a little mad; a bewildering hodge-podge of the obscene and the virginal, of satire and wistfulness, of the grossest humor and the most delicate sadness—a book that absolutely battled classification, but that surely is a most amazing thing to have come from a woman’s hand” (quoted in Caselli 198). As many have pointed out, there are formal and thematic echoes between Ryder and Ulysses. Of course, the complex intertextuality, and the poetics of recycling and parody of Ryder cannot be reduced solely to the Joycean influence, but the novel’s technique clearly hinges on the shifting of styles that Joyce experimented with in Ulysses, and includes other Joycean elements, such as the long, a-grammatical sentences and the use of neologisms. Yet, as Caselli argues, the book “spurns Ulysses’s mythological scaffolding and boldly uses a bigamous family as the threadbarest of frameworks” (Caselli 197): like the Baroness, Barnes took the outrage a step further by appropriating elements of Joyce’s novel while stripping them of the mythological framework, and going even beyond Joyce’s depiction of the “ordinary” sexuality of a family by adding transgressive elements like bigamy and incest. Unsurprisingly, the text was censored because of the bawdiness of its text and illustrations: the U.S. Postal Service refused to ship it, and several illustrations were suppressed, including an image in which Sophia is seen urinating into a chamber pot,

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arguably inspired by Molly’s urinating in “Penelope.” In the foreword preceding Ryder, Barnes wrote sardonically: This book, owing to censorship, which has a vogue in America as indiscriminate as all such enforcements must be, has been expurgated. Where such measures have been thought necessary, asterisks have been employed, thus making it matter for no speculation where sense, continuity, and beauty have been damaged. That the public may, in our time, see at least a part of the face of creation (which it is not allowed to view as a whole) it has been thought the better part of valour, by both author and publisher, to make this departure, showing plainly where the war, so blindly waged on the written word, has left its mark. Hithertofore, the public has been offered literature only after it was no longer literature. (Barnes 1928, vii)

30 It can perhaps even be argued that Barnes used certain images deliberately in order for her work to be censored. Just as in Baroness Elsa’s poem “Kindly” the dashes both obfuscate and foreground the obscene words, in Barnes’s novel the asterisks prominently signal the presence of suppressed passages and denounce the barbarity of the “war, so blindly waged on the written word” which has damaged the text’s “sense, continuity, and beauty.” One must also note that there is often a national dimension in the modernist attacks against censorship: Barnes denounces the “vogue [for censorship] in America,” and Baroness Elsa also attacks American puritanism and opposes it to a more aristocratic, cultured Europe in her defense of Joyce in “The Modest Woman”: “America’s comfort:—sanitation—outside machinery—has made American forget own machinery—body! […] In Europe—when inferiors do not understand superiors—they retire modestly—[…] So society is made—in Europe—slowly —! so: culture—so: aristocratic public. […] That attitude of the learner—the inferior— you should feel in regard to James Joyce” (Freytag-Loringhoven 287-288). Conversely, by making the prudish, desexualized “English Rose” an allegory of the whole nation in “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” Loy makes prudery a national characteristic, a dimension also explicitly inscribed in her poem “Joyce’s Ulysses,” where the obscene is referred to as “the giant reflector” that Joyce “flashes” on “the sub rosa” (Loy 1997, 89) in order to “satirize/the imperial Rose” (Loy 1997, 90).

31 The undated poem “Joyce’s Ulysses” was most probably composed shortly after the publication of Joyce’s novel in book form by Sylvia Beach in Paris in February 1922. Although she did not meet Joyce in person until 1922 in Paris, Loy followed with great attention the details of the confiscation and destruction of issues of The Little Review and the subsequent obscenity trial of Ulysses. She even appeared in court to support the editors of journal. In a letter to Mabel Dodge, she reports that “The Little Review has been arrested” and ironically comments on the fact that stylish intellectual women from Greenwich Village defended supposedly obscene literature, creating something of a shock: “We looked too wholesome in court representing filthy literature” (qtd. in Burke 288-289, emphasis Loy’s). In the posthumously published fragment “Censors Morals Sex,” Loy attacks John Sumner, the secretary of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice and one of the main prosecutors of Ulysses: The censor to whom the public defers exists only in its supposing that public to exist ‘somewhere’ else. The worst kind of sex maniac is the Censor (re: Sumner and Smoot). With their canine affinities—they can only sustain their sexual potentiality by sticking their noses into their neighbour’s——— (Loy 2011, 225)

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32 Her remarks echo the rhetoric of Jane Heap’s leading essay “Art and the Law,” published in the September-December 1920 issue of The Little Review, which turned into a “Sumner vs. Joyce” debate: The society for which Mr. Sumner is agent, I am told, was founded to protect the public from corruption. When asked what public? its defenders spring to the rock on which America was founded: the cream puff of sentimentality, and answer chivalrously “Our young girls.” […] If there is anything I really fear it is the mind of the young girl. I do not understand Obscenity […]. To a mind somewhat used to life Mr. Joyce’s chapter seems to be a record of the simplest, most unpreventable, most unfocused sex thoughts possible in a rightly constructed, unashamed human being. Mr. Joyce is not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; […] men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere—seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom—and no one is corrupted. Can merely reading about the thoughts he thinks corrupt a man when his thoughts do not? […] It was the poet, the artist, who discovered love, created the lover, made sex everything that it is beyond a function. It is the Mr. Sumners who have made it an obscenity. (Heap 5-6, emphasis hers)

33 In answer to Heap’s insistence that before “rush [ing] in with talk of obscenity,” the public must ask the key question: “Is it a work of Art?” (Heap 7), Loy wrote “Joyce’s Ulysses,” making it one of the leading poems of her first poetic collection Lunar Baedecker [sic]12, published in 1923. In this poem, she unequivocally praises the mastery of the novel, where: The elderly colloquists the Spirit and the Flesh are out of tongue — — —

The Spirit is impaled upon the phallus (Loy 1997, 88)

34 Loy’s appraisal particularly celebrates the novel’s carnivalesque conflation of the upper and the lower stratum of the body, of the “voice and offal/of the image of God” (Loy 1997, 88). She also uses metaphors of scientific discovery to praise Joyce’s groundbreaking exploration of the uncharted regions of human sexuality and corporeal experience: the novel is compared to a “pilgrimage/to the Libido (Loy 1997, 88), while in an earlier version of the poem, titled “James Joyce,” she calls it an “Atlas/ of an uncensored Earth.”13 This dimension of mapping is also intrinsically related to an enterprise of linguistic discovery, a quest for a new language for the “obscene”: “The word made flesh/and feeding upon itself/with erudite fangs” (Loy 1997, 89). Loy also alludes to modernism’s collective fight against censorship in her poem “Apology of Genius,” often read as a modernist manifesto, which is emblematic of Loy’s shift to “a more politicised understanding of obscenity and censorship” (Potter 2010, 50) in the early 1920s. She described modernist works as a “delicate crop/of criminal mystic immortelles,” standing firm against “the censor’s scythe” (Loy 1997, 78). Apart from the quasi-explicit reference to Sumner as the “censor,” the term “immortelles” reads as a direct allusion to Ulysses, as Scuriatti and others have noted: “In episode VI (“Hades”) of Ulysses, Bloom thinks of immortelles during Paddy Dignam’s funeral” (Scuriatti 2019, 91). While immortelles are artificial flowers, the term in the female form chosen by Loy also means “immortal women,” i.e. female writers “threatened by the censors” (Scuriatti 2019, 92) for engaging with the obscene. Thus, for Loy, and also for Barnes and the Baroness, Ulysses, although written by a man, triggered a brazen demonstration

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of anti-bourgeois sentiment and a jubilatory14 celebration of both female corporeality and female authorship. As Gammel puts it, “The Ulysses battle ultimately was a gender campaign in which women […] claimed the authority over […] sexual subject matter” (Gammel 253).

35 Yet, in the posthumously published essay fragment “The Library of the Sphinx,” Loy gives a considerably more ironic and even skeptical view of male literary expressions of female sexual desire, acerbically attacking the idea of literature, including the literary obscene, as a prerogative of male writers: “Your literature—let us examine it your literature—it was written by the men— […] the whole of our psychological literature written by men might be lumped together as the unwitting analysis of the unsatisfied woman” (Loy 2011, 254-257). In this essay, Loy makes it clear that for her, modernism is no exception to the reductive idea of the female obscene as a male fantasy. She engages in a critical appraisal of many contemporary works written by men notable for their treatment of female sexuality, including, among others, Joyce’s Ulysses, the novels of D.H. Lawrence, and the work of Frank Harris, who became famous for his sexually explicit descriptions in his memoir My Life and Loves. Harris is sardonically dubbed “CUN-T INKER [s]” (Loy 2011, 254), which suggests that male writers could do no more than “tinker” in writing the “obscene” female body: Even James Joyce in the introspective finale of Mrs. Bloom to his cosmic day—writes —“‘would he give me’ if I let him ‘retire’ on my ‘bases’” […] D.H. Lawrence who had come nearest to defining the psychic experiences of passion has plainly revealed that he is not cognisant of the mechanistic processes by which those psychic experiences can progress into appeasement. […] If our erotic, romantic, and realistic literature has presented the gentle reader with an interminable procession —of ladies “possessed” in floods of delight—the instantaneous beatification of the female by the (always) condescending male—where may we ask did those authors live? In some sublime refuge from our daily life? (Loy 2011, 254-256, emphasis hers)

36 Loy’s experiences with the macho attitudes of the Futurists had made her acutely sensitive to the outdated and simplistic impulses sometimes ruling even the most innovative male avant-garde artists. Although her feminist criticism in “The Library of the Sphinx” clearly shows her respect for Joyce and Lawrence, who broke new ground in depicting experiences previously considered obscene, she pinpoints the lingering temptation of the fantasy of “ladies ‘possessed’ in floods of delight” that even such modernist writers were not entirely liberated from. In order to dismantle this paradigm, she seems to suggest, one would need to free female subjectivity not only from the constraints of prudish, patriarchal society but also from the need to satisfy male desire. She also hints at the fact that the degree to which most women’s sexual lives were unsatisfactory was at the time an even greater taboo, and thus even more obscene, than sexuality itself.

Conclusion

37 Modernist writers were uncompromisingly united in their collective fight against the norms of bourgeois propriety and the repressive forces of censorship meant to enforce it. Women writers were certainly in the vanguard of this collective struggle, both as authors in their own right and as critical voices in defense of their male contemporaries. At the same time, there were more subtle and ambivalent tensions along gender lines, particularly when it came to freeing female subjectivity from

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lingering patterns of objectification and subjugation to male desire. It is also revealing that while the obscenity trials ultimately contributed to the canonization of Ulysses or Lady Chatterley’s Lover as modernist masterpieces, women’s engagement with the obscene, particularly when it ran counter to the fantasies of (forbidden) heterosexual desire and seduction, often contributed to their marginalization, as the case of the Baroness’s “repulsive” obscene most poignantly demonstrates.

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Scuriatti, Laura. Mina Loy’s Critical Modernism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019.

---. “Negotiating Boundaries: The Economics of Space and Gender in Mina Loy’s Early Poems.” Feminismo/s 5 (June 2005): 71-84.

Williams, William Carlos. “Sample Prose Piece: The Three Letters,” Contact 4 (1921), 11.

NOTES

1. Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. “Analytical Chemistry of Progeny.” Trans. Irene Gammel (Freytag-Loringhoven 40). All other work by this artist quoted in this article was originally written in English. 2. Potter also focuses on Loy in her illuminating article “Obscene Modernism and The Wondering Jew: Mina Loy’s ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,’” where she situates Loy’s work in a context of modernist experimentation with the obscene but without raising the question of gender. 3. Often referred to simply as “Baroness Elsa,” Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven was an eccentric German-born poet who wrote unprecedentedly shocking poetry in English, created pioneering assemblage structure and performance art, and who was associated with the ephemeral artistic movement that came to be known post-factum as New York Dada. See Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa, and Francis Naumann, New York Dada. 4. Loy, Barnes, and “Baroness Elsa” have in common that their previously marginalized work has come to increasing prominence in the past two decades, as part of the effort of recovery and re- examination of modernism along gender lines undertaken by feminist critics. The blatantly, aggressively obscene imagery of Baroness Elsa’s work has arguably contributed to its marginalization: it had never appeared in book form until 2011, when Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo edited a collection of her challenging poetry and art titled Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

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5. Loy and the eccentric German-born “Dada Baroness” met in New York in the 1910s and were involved in the activities of New York Dada. Loy and Barnes were lifelong friends, becoming particularly close in Paris in the 1920s and then in New York in their later lives. Barnes and Baroness Elsa were also close friends, and Barnes is credited with having ensured the survival of the Baroness’s unpublished manuscripts after her death. They also wrote about each other: Loy appears in Barnes’s Ladies Almanack, Loy wrote a play titled “Rosa” in which Barnes appears as “Bjuna Darnes,” and the Baroness appears as a character in Nightwood. 6. Loy’s mocking and cartoonish representation of the puritan aspects of Victorian culture through the allegorical figure of “English Rose” that appears in Anglo-Mongrels is undoubtedly reductive to some extent, since it conflates individual and national history, drawing on her lifelong antagonism with her own mother, whom she saw as an incarnation of the prudish Victorian matron. See for instance Alex Goody’s article “Empire, Motherhood, and the Poetics of the Self in Mina Loy’s Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” on the question of her sarcastic debunking of “an ideal of English maidenhood” (Goody 2011, 63). 7. In February 1917, the New York Evening Sun published an article eloquently titled “Mina Loy, Painter, Poet and Playwright, Doesn’t Try to Express Her Personality by Wearing Odd Looking —Her Clothes Suggest the Smartest Shops, but Her Poems Would Have Puzzled Grandma,” in which she was presented as the perfect embodiment of the modern woman: “If she isn’t the modern woman, who is?” (quoted in Burke 8). 8. There have been many analyses of Barnes’s complex relation to lesbianism, shaped by her famous line “I am not a lesbian, I just loved Thelma,” but critics agree on the queer aspect of her work. While Baroness Elsa’s most decidedly obscene works revolve around heterosexual desire, she cultivated an androgynous physique, often appropriating phallic elements in text, sculpture and performance, something that Gammel and Zelazo call a “queered heterosexuality” (in Freytag-Loringhoven 17). 9. The term “spawn” appears in the opening line of Loy’s “Love Songs” and in the famous line “the massive mother of/Illicit spawn” (Barnes 1915, 28) from Barnes’s “Twilight of the Illicit,” often read as an explicit articulation of lesbianism. Since Loy and Barnes did not know each other yet in 1915, the possibility of direct influence can be excluded. 10. Gammel suggests that the Baroness provided the prototype for Frau Mann, while Lynn de Vore argues that the character of Robin Vote is fundamentally based upon Elsa. 11. For example, Harriet Monroe reacted against the Baroness’s offensiveness in an article in Poetry: “The trouble is the Little Review never knows when to stop. Just now it is headed straight for Dada; but we could forgive even that if it would drop Else von Freytag-Loringhoven on the way.” (qtd. in Freytag-Loringhoven 351). In turn, Jane Heap published a defense of the Baroness on the pages of The Little Review. 12. As Potter notes, Loy’s collection was censored in the US for its explicit sexual content (Potter 2010, 47). 13. Mina Loy, “James Joyce,” Mina Loy Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Box 5, Folder 98. 14. Both the Baroness and Loy played with the “joyful” connotations of Joyce’s name: while the Baroness punned on “Joyce” and “joys” in “The Modest Woman,” Loy wittily titled an unpublished note on her fellow modernist “Re-joyce,” which reads as both “Re-Joyce” (a critical response) and “rejoice”.

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ABSTRACTS

This article examines the textual and artistic strategies used by three female modernist writers— Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven—to probe into the specificities of the female modernist obscene. In the works of these three authors, daring sexual and corporal images abound, creating a surprisingly precocious poetics of the obscene, which emerged around 1915, independently from the experiments of their male contemporaries. On the one hand, this poetics works against the repressive grip of the norms of propriety ruling bourgeois society. But on the other, Barnes’s and von Freytag-Loringhoven’s works also unsettle the canonical image of the female body as an object of desire, by using grotesque, repulsive, scatological, and androgynous images. Secondly, this article raises the question of how female modernists engaged with the most iconic experiments of male authors, by taking the example of the obscenity trial of Joyce’s Ulysses. While in their defense of Joyce’s novel the three authors engaged in an uncompromising collective modernist fight against censorship, Loy in particular suggests that the obscene fantasies of Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and other male modernists did not sufficiently represent the reality of female experience.

Cet article se propose d’étudier les stratégies textuelles et artistiques que trois écrivaines modernistes, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes et Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, emploient pour représenter l’obscène, afin de se demander quelles sont les spécificités de l’obscène moderniste féminin. Dans les œuvres de ces trois auteures, prolifèrent des images sexuelles et corporelles d’une hardiesse inouïe, qui se transforment en une véritable poétique de l’obscène ; celle-ci émerge vers 1915, indépendamment des expériences de leurs contemporains masculins. Si, d’une part, elles cherchent à se libérer de l’emprise de la société bourgeoise et des convenances qui la régissent, d’autre part Barnes et von Freytag-Loringhoven en particulier visent aussi à rompre avec l’image stéréotypée du corps de la femme en tant qu’objet de désir, en utilisant des images grotesques, répugnantes, scatologiques ou androgynes. Nous nous demanderons ensuite comment cette poétique de l’obscène féminin se situe par rapport aux expériences masculines les plus marquantes, en prenant pour exemple leurs écrits visant à défendre le roman Ulysses de James Joyce, lors du procès pour obscénité qui lui fut intenté après sa publication dans The Little Review. Si les trois auteures s’engagent dans un combat moderniste collectif sans compromis contre la censure, Loy suggère également que les phantasmes obscènes de Joyce, D.H. Lawrence et d’autres écrivains modernistes ne correspondent pas vraiment à l’expérience féminine.

INDEX

Keywords: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, James Joyce, modernism, avant-garde, obscene, censorship Mots-clés: Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, James Joyce, modernisme, avant-garde, obscène, censure

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AUTHOR

YASNA BOZHKOVA Professeure agrégée d’anglais Université Sorbonne nouvelle [email protected]

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The Challenge of Taking Sides: Virtue as Corruption in Joyce’s Ulysses

Philippe Birgy

Introduction

The presence of obscenity in Joyce’s writing and the suspicion of pornographic content have given rise to hesitant sentiments in its readers concerning the reactions these materials were meant to excite and the position they should adopt in relation to them. Many readers have doubted the appropriateness of their own response, wondering whether the problematic contents were designed to attract or repulse. This preoccupation, framed by the moral scandal which the publication of Ulysses had caused, had already been at the center of the 1921 trial.1 I wish to examine the exact tenor of such reactions, taking into consideration the critical production devoted to the question of obscenity, censorship and pornography in Joyce’s work (Birmingham, Cotter, Mullin, Pease, Potter, Potter and Bradshaw, Vanderham) and paying special attention to “Nausicaa,” a chapter that was the bone of contention in the 1921 trial. It is the configuration of its narrative apparatus which, I will argue, has caused the readers to toss restlessly between different critical options, prodded on by misgivings about possible authorial intentions. I wish to start with a preliminary reading of “Nausicaa” examining the fluctuating and somewhat contradictory instructions which the text seems to be giving its readers. This close reading will allow me not only to outline some conflicting interpretations of the text, but more importantly, to chart the textual turbulence that keeps dislodging the reader from any of these stations, forcing that reader to move between them in accordance with the text’s sway. For all the motions the text induces are less invitations than orders. And whether one goes with the narrative flow or is prompted to disengage from it to discipline and reason it out, one is obeying contradictory commands.

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Accordingly, I will focus first on the formal/discursive features producing the conflict of interpretations: I am thinking of the irreducible ambiguity of the system of enunciation and focalization, which allows two divergent readings, even if both interpretations are associated with a revulsive reaction; I am also thinking of the polyphonic interweaving in Joyce’s text of different discourses on women, on their purity and the corruption of that purity, which leads to different types of assessments of what is ultimately being exposed in Joyce’s text. Having clarified these points, I will then concentrate on the characterization of the female subject and the degree of autonomy it can possibly negotiate, caught up as it is in the nets of discourses that both compete and collude to define that female subject. Among other things, “Nausicaa” seems intent on attacking any presumption of innocence, as if endowing his characters with an awareness of corruption, or even a certain willingness to take advantage of it, were the only way for Joyce to give them a measure of autonomous consciousness.

A preliminary reading: the moral ground as discomfort zone

In the thirteenth episode of Ulysses, the narration focuses on Gerty McDowell, who first comes off as the stereotypical young female person of popular novels written for purposes of moral edification. As she watches after the children on the beach, Gerty muses upon uncertain prospects of love, romance and marriage, placing particular emphasis on the dignity of her humble condition and the refinement of her feelings. Accordingly, she indulges in very decent thoughts about a young and chaste suitor, wondering whether he will propose her. Although she occasionally succumbs to passing fits of dissatisfaction with her two female acolytes, she strives to keep her temper in , maintaining a decorum that is consistent with her self-projection as a forbearing young woman. Yet as the narrative unfolds, she gradually drops these subjects, and wishes suitor, friends and children to hell. She was glad that something told her to put on the transparent stockings thinking Reggy Wylie might be out but that was far away. Here was that of which she had so often dreamed. It was he who mattered and there was joy on her face because she wanted him because she felt instinctively that he was like no-one else. (Ulysses 293) This discontinuity forces the readers to realize that, contrary to their expectations, this sentimental evocation of her suitors is not part of a pseudo-realistic narrative but that the narrative follows the inconsistent, quickly changing flow of Gerty’s thoughts: she has presumably been daydreaming in the style of certain melodramatic novels such as The Lamplighter by Mary Cumming, 2 and fictionalizing herself, using the topoi and clichés borrowed from it as well as from girls’ magazines (Richards 4, 6-7) and at this point readers understand that the flow of Gertie’s thoughts is ready to take another direction. At this point, noticing the presence of a mature man sat on a bench—for to all appearances she is the center of perception in this narrative—, she starts weaving quite another tale, casting herself in the role of the forgiving young woman who will redeem the shady past of the aforementioned gentleman.3 Most notably, in an allegorical élan which infuriated censors, Gerty draws an explicit parallel between the compassionate

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figure of the Virgin Mary and herself just before revealing her underwear to the onlooker in a passionate effusion of love (Ulysses 290, 294): […] and her face was suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw […] (300) What added insult to injury was that Gerty’s risqué number should have been represented as a blessing. One would be well-advised to pursue the implications of that paradox beyond the merely bawdy because it is around this unorthodox appropriation that the religious and pornographic scripts become entwined in such a way that their interdependence is made palpable: confession, as I will argue in the third part of this article, relies entirely upon a supply of sins whose exposure is mandatory, which makes it intrinsically similar to pornography in this respect.4 Meanwhile, the female protagonist has become aware that the gentleman is masturbating and has decided to put on a show for his benefit. This growing awareness and the gradual indulgence in the obscene5 that accompanies it constitute the dramatic movement of the text. Its inflation of bawdy connotations climaxes in sync with what we suppose to be the voyeur’s orgasm, after which the text lapses into self-justificatory reflections on his personal responsibilities in this sexual encounter. Indeed, once the readers have reached the acme of this scene, they are likely to get a sense that the focus of the narrative has shifted back to this voyeur who is no other than Leopold Bloom, the protagonist of the novel, so that retrospectively it becomes difficult to decide whether Gerty has really collaborated in this fantasy—if not authored it—or whether it is Bloom, himself a reader of cheap sentimental fiction and erotic literature, who has made up the whole tale (Ulysses 766–776). She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because—because Gerty MacDowell was... Tight boots? No. She’s lame! O! Mr Bloom watched her as she limped away. Poor girl! (301) This problem has been an apple of discord among the text’s commentators as well as a source of fruitful critical reflections, because according to the first reading Gerty is an unwilling victim who is objectified by a man’s glance while according to the second, she is an accomplice, perhaps even the instigator of the erotic game, which means that she possesses experience and agency such as the typical heroine of sentimental fiction doesn’t. And, to crown it all, she has a sex life of her own.6 On that account, it seems that criticism is doomed to falter and come to a stall because it is blocked by some practical conclusion concerning the implication and significance of the chapter. Either one will reason out “Nausicaa” as a case of imaginary manipulation which projects male prejudices and fantasies upon a representative of the other sex who symbolically embodies the whole gender. Or alternately Gerty is granted —once for all—an agentivity that enables her to construct herself from the commonplaces she has gleaned from the printed press (Richards 205-248). Yet, for all that, the question of whether one should treat the first part of the narrative as if it were the production of a character, Gerty McDowell, rather than the invention of another character, Leopold Bloom (who somehow would have a narrative prerogative since he might be the one imagining what Gerty is imagining), remains unsettled. I will have to come back subsequently to the implications of this undecidability. There is an evident danger in dismissing structural distinctions (notably

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those couched in terms of enunciative and narrative hierarchies) so as to rationalize the moral, social, or political import of Bloom or Gerty’s characterization. For one may well easily end up ventriloquizing these protagonists.7 Above all, it might be argued that such evaluations, which involve a psychological assessment, are problematic, for how would one decide if a character in a fiction is another character’s invention or not? What would be the alternative, then? Shall one posit that Gerty is a real person? The hypothesis may appear particularly precarious in a text which dramatizes the constitution of the self in language and insistently suggests that the social subject is summoned to appear at certain discursive places. The language of the chapter, as Morrisson has noted, is that of commercialized youth culture (5) so that the narrative persona comes off as a composite text, constituted by a patchwork of phrases compiled from magazines and serialized novels, in the same way that Bloom’s fantasies are the product of his sundry readings. Kate Mullin follows this line of reasoning, hinting that through Gerty, Joyce attacked the Social Purity Movement imposing a drastic cultural censorship at the time, in Ireland as well as in America, and that he attacked it through the medium of its own discourse, forcing the defenders of that moral stance8 to admit that the young person of their moralistic imagination was a projection that hardly concealed their own fixation on obscenity9. In other words, what “Nausicaa” revealed, lurking behind the hysterical urge to expose guilt and fault and lascivious morality in others, was just the inquiring glance of the voyeur at work.10 As for the implication of the sexual “freedom” attributed to Gerty, it may readily be interpreted as misogynistic. In a sense, it only seems to justify men’s encroachment upon her privacy:11 Thankful for small mercies. Cheap too. Yours for the asking. Because they want it themselves. Their natural craving. Shoals of them every evening poured out of offices. Reserve better. Don't want it they throw it at you. Catch em alive, O. Pity they can't see themselves. (301) “Because they want it themselves”: the revulsion caused by such a pronouncement resulted in “Nausicaa”’s being caught between the conjugated hostilities of two sections of the public sphere that had quite differing worldviews, resulting in what looked like an unholy alliance between purity movement feminists and upholders of a moral order that prescribed conventional gender roles. Although conservatives and social purity feminists shared the same rhetoric, the latter was thoroughly hostile to female suffrage. Nineteenth century feminists had endorsed the Comstock act under which The Little Review was prosecuted. (Garton, 102-3). I insist on the term “revulsion,” for this is a reaction caused by the text, and the way the latter engages in the register of sensationalism will be of capital importance for my examination of its operations. Joyce has pitched the text of “Nausicaa” stylistically between two interpretative options where it sits uncomfortably so that, even today, it can be interpreted either as a gross denial of the existence of the “double standard” that consolidated its operations or as a critical exposure of it, depending on whether we understand the young woman’s duplicity as an “expression of Joyce’s conviction” and Bloom’s fantasies as a frank honest revelation of what’s on everyman’s mind or consider that Bloom’s behaviour is not meant to be condoned but is crudely presented in order to inspire disapproval. For instance, here is Bloom’s expression of his fears after the act:12 But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a

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thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don’t tell. (300) It has been argued that Joyce’s attack against the social purity ideal won him his reputation. As the issue of the Little Review containing one of the installments of the text was seized by the U. S. Post Office and the magazine prosecuted for obscenity, the whole affair went public and allegedly contributed to the author’s notoriety. Although Joyce might be suspected, according to Mullin, of having engineered the whole scandal, the profitability of such complications remains a debated issue (Parke 4). At any rate, the incident refers us to the hypothetical dialogue established with the Society for the Prevention of Vice through the medium of the Little Review. In this case, it appears that the dialogue would have consisted in a literal repeat of the opponent’s language, reproduced in a context where it appeared to have been compromised so that it exhibited contradictory intents. Thus Ulysses recuperates the arguments of the censors, unpacking the scabrous implications that lie dormant in them, as we shall see in the examples taken from “Circe” in the last part of this paper.

Interfaces and permutations: the reversibility of discourses and critical reception

The various critical stances elicited by the text tend to unfold in a series of polemical and contradictory arguments that feed into one another. Assessing their relative value seems to impel us to move endlessly from one position to the next. It is obviously on the nature of such turnarounds and transitions that one should focus one’s attention. In order to clarify the debate, lest it should result in a series of antitheses without resolution, I propose two typologies. To begin with, there are obviously various strands or generic discourses in the chapter which coexist problematically, neutralizing or invalidating one another.13 On the one hand, there is the narrative which constrains itself to fit the conventional idiom of young girls’ magazines and the commercial adds that are inseparable from it. That conundrum is not Joyce’s creative addition, it was already part and parcel of the discourse of girls’ magazines.14 (Morrisson 133-65) Joyce merely pushes it to the point where its inner disquiet is reactivated and its ideology speaks itself out. Indeed, the pastiche of nineteenth century literature of edification is so literal in the first pages of “Nausicaa” that it seems to pre-empt any possibility of technical experimentation with the language, and we may wonder why Joyce imposed upon his own art such a restriction, unless his purpose was to make the reader feel, through the literality of the prose, all the obscenity that social purity and organized prudery repressed. (This is the negativity which is everywhere at work in Joyce’s fictions). From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl’s honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. (299) The chapter also accommodates the language of religion. The latter is already replicated: not only is it to be found in the liturgy of the Catholic Mass, but it is also assimilated, in a moralized version, within the publications for the young person that

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inspire Gerty. Here again, it is difficult to neatly take the threads of that weave apart, since “Nausicaa” conflates and sets against each other two ideological constructions: that of Marian compassion and that of divine superiority and aesthetic autonomy.15 The first consists in a liberal and right-minded celebration of otherness, of an alter ego to which one might open up, which one could reach out for, through the species of love, devotion or care—a counterproductive scenario for girls aiming to achieve a sense of autonomy since it sets the problem of the maternal function and the restriction it imposes upon the female subject, all men being children, as Molly repeatedly professes. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her. There were wounds that wanted healing with heart balm… Then mayhap he would embrace her gently, like a real man, crushing her soft body to him, and love her, his ownest girlie, for herself alone. (293) As for second ideological fiction, it projects an image of blessed and beatific self- sufficiency (such as only the possession of the phallus supposedly provides, hence potentially a masculine position of strength) on which the dignity of Gerty’s position depends, and which allows her to remain unsullied by her own sympathetic yearnings towards a fallen man. But the demands which make themselves felt and are articulated through these role models must be understood in context. What is fictionalized is the very pressing contemporary urgency of independence that modernity required yet withheld from women. She was a womanly woman not like other flighty girls unfeminine he had known, those cyclists showing off what they hadn’t got and she just yearned to know all, to forgive all if she could make him fall in love with her, make him forget the memory of the past. (293) Thirdly, the discourse of pornography is evidently woven into “Nausicaa”.16 For our purpose, we will address it as a dual formation again, relying as it does on the possibility of corruption, hence of a putative purity that can be assaulted and defiled. One should probably add to these the discourse of the little magazines with which “Nausicaa” is supposedly in dialogue. The reception of the episodes of Ulysses published in The Little Review is a case in point because it blurred the lines between vulgarity and distinction, eliciting two contradictory reactions.17 So that Joyce’s prose was perceived by its opponents as lurid and sensationalist while its advocates chose to see it as boldly innovative, radical and demanding. In the eye of its defenders, it stood in opposition to the facile, pedestrian prose it imitated, and was meant for a discriminating and open- minded reader. This is by no means an exhaustive list of the discourses cannibalized by Joyce, and exhaustiveness is not the aim of my recapitulation. Rather, what I would like to point out at this stage is that each discourse mentioned above is already internally torn and dislocated by a constitutive problematic. The effect is that on the surface, Joyce seems content to play with the material at hand, or rather, to let it play itself out according to its own rules so that it exposes its flaws and irregularities. The inflational momentum of Joyce’s writing maximizes the reach and deepens the implication of the discourses it seizes upon, throwing into relief the dramatic tensions that disturb them—the stylistic technique applied in the chapter being according to the Gilbert schemata “tumescence/ detumescence” (Joyce drafted this list of colors, body parts, symbols and art forms associated to each chapter in order to help Stuart Gilbert understand the general organization of the book).

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The modalities of these discourses’ combinations vary incessantly. Either they add up on a paradigmatic axis, thanks to the play of polysemy which allows for allusive and metaphoric double entendre; or they are arranged sequentially on the syntagmatic axis, which allows for different rhythms and alternations that alter the nuances of their proximity, whether one register passes imperceptibly into another, clashes with it or gets interlaced with other incompatible discourses in rapid succession.18 Lingerie does it. Felt for the curves inside her déshabille. Excites them also when they’re. I’m all clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice. Milly delighted with Molly’s new blouse. At first. Put them all on to take them all off. Molly. Why I bought her the violet garters. Us too: the tie he wore, his lovely socks and turned-up trousers. He wore a pair of gaiters the night that first we met. His lovely shirt was shining beneath his what? of jet. Say a woman loses a charm with every pin she takes out. Pinned together. O, Mairy lost the pin of her. Dressed up to the nines for somebody. Fashion part of their charm. (301-302) The effects of these overlapping and conflicting discourses have elicited a number of critical opinions that sought to inquire into the accusation of obscenity and scandal generated by “Nausicaa”. It seems to me that these roughly define five understandings of the situation conjured up by Joyce in the chapter, all of them casting a different light on the implications of the text. The first one, defended by Thomas Richards (The Commodity Culture of Victorian England) suggests that “Nausicaa” consists in a crude and uncompromising presentation of the regimen of the commodity at the turn of the century which provided the rationale of relationships between the sexes. Under this perspective, the feminine press is apprehended as an ideological extension of commercial mores which encouraged female readers to construct their identity and self-consciousness along its lines, using the methods of advertisement. On the other hand, there is a critical view which aligns with the conception of the young person championed by Margaret Anderson. Morrisson, for instance, invites us to read the chapter as a situation of empowerment predicated on the representation of youth as idealized romantic aspiration conflated with the libidinal economy of the commodity (Morrisson 133-66). Referring “Nausicaa”’s text to the circumstances of its publication in the Little Review, Morrisson insists on the emancipatory force of sexual assertiveness in the young female person which enabled her to challenge the conventional moral order of late nineteenth century. These two options are difficult to hold together in a single assessment of “Nausicaa” since the first insists on the strategies of containment of the female subject and the determinations that bear upon her, whereas the second attaches more importance to the inventiveness and spirit of imaginative enterprise of the free woman. Yet both suggest corruption, whether in the form of fraudulent manipulation or uninhibited behaviour. Two other positions try to negotiate between the terms of this discrepancy. One of them, that I would call anthropological, endeavors to bypass that dichotomy by positing some foundational interdependence between the well policed, regulated and monitored conception of the ideal and the disturbed and mismanaged enterprise that endangers it, between irreproachable behaviour and abjection.19 Its exponents, such as Potter (Obscene Modernism Literary Censorship and Experiment), rest their analyses against Nietzsche’s twin concepts of Dionysian and Apollonian, Freud’s notion of idealization, and more generally on the discourse of psychoanalysis which contends that repressed

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contents are bound to reassert themselves with fierceness proportional to the zeal that had presided over their suppression. Such accounts bind us to as set of anthropological presuppositions that may be contested.20 Yet, at least, if one does not wish to go with their theoretical implications, they still keep their relevance as plausible sources of influence in “Nausicaa,” since turn-of-the-century artists and intellectuals were conversant with such ideas that belonged with the intellectual climate of the period. The other line of argument, notably as exposed by Allison Pease, suggests that modernism was a strategy of accommodation that attempted to bypass the prohibition placed on pornographic material meant for sexual arousal, so that it “made obscenity safe for literature” (Vanderham 57-86). In this scheme the representation of promiscuous subjects ceases to be a matter of morality altogether, staving off both censorious accounts of the visual exploitation of women’s bodies and the social and ethical import of female ascendency. Aesthetics, according to Pease’s view, is a form of literary appreciation which, through an effort at distanciation and contemplative detachment, seeks to wrench itself from the more common relationship to both visual and textual material where the representation is instrumental and put in the service of sensual gratification, a mode of operation whose paradigm is pornography. As I will contend, it could well be that distanciation is precisely the condition of pornography (i.e. the presentation of an image of concupiscence and carnality that relies for its effect on an assumed purity it would have the capacity to corrupt). The message of pornography is “hands off”. But this prohibition is meant to generate the desire to contravene its arrangements, to infringe and encroach upon the privacy of what is ostensibly put forward as an image of desire, so that pornography and modernist scripts seem to share a fundamentally ambivalent relation to the distance existing between the consumer of indecent images and these indecent images. It can be observed that, somehow, Pease’s line of argument, which relates modernism to pornography as to its antithetical opposite, can be related to the anthropological line of argument which binds idealization to abjection as to its antithetical twin, too. Indeed, Pease’s argument deconstructs the distinction that brackets off the modernist enterprise from more trivial pursuits, presupposing a substratum of sensual experience always bordering on abjection behind the creative formal endeavor of the modernist writers. I believe that all such formulations of the antithetic duality of modernism express not only its forceful uprooting from an ignominious background in the interest of artistic innovation but also the active production of such a background (just as the suspicion of abysses of vice and unfathomable depths of lewdness are capital to the pornographic effect). Finally, there is the case made by Rabaté for a perception of Ulysses that excludes any relationship with any “other” (be they female or male or “womenly men”) for the simple fact that Joyce’s language abolishes any privileged relation to the name of the father. Hence the textual proliferation and a form of jubilation or jouissance in the wielding of language which is untied to any concern with another subject or subject position. Thus it remains unconcerned with romantic attachment, marriage, the constraints of a politics of the sexes or the assertiveness of any character that may stand for another subject. Joyce’s purpose is, in Rabaté’s view, purely egoistic. Those are roughly the main positions that have dominated the critical reception of “Nausicaa” and the commentators of the chapter navigate the interstices between

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them to achieve readings that account for the text’s ambivalences and duplicity, negotiating the relative weight to be given to the terms of the dialectics they articulate (euphoria and dysphoria, passivity and activity, constraint and freedom…) and assessing the measure of their overlapping, whether they ultimately pronounce their equivalence, subversion, inversion, or transformation one into the other.21 Perhaps even more important than the exact typology of relationships between these terms is the notion of interface, either as protective border that preserves the integrity of each critical construct or allows the passing of one into the other. For this reason, I shall now turn to the (apparently) structural problem of the connection between those critical positions logically bound together thanks to various proceeds of transition, hybridation and reversal—this in order to build upon them rather than critique their theoretical foundation.

The operations of ambivalence

The gesture of empowerment that can be read in Gerty’s performance is profoundly ambivalent. It is accompanied by a great discursive flow geared towards self-assertion. As Mullin demonstrates, it is consonant with a form of nineteenth century feminism which aligned itself with the recriminations and exigencies of temperance leagues (as is clear from Gerty’s emphatic reference to the drinking habits of her father). The refusal to submit entirely to a patriarchal order is discernible in Gerty’s attempt to carve out a space of privacy, and in the avoidance of crude contact with the other sex. But she is also working toward this aim under prodigious constrains. She endeavours to stand on her own and her imaginary construct is certainly an index of her resilience, yet she remains pinned to her seat by her infirmity, at a disadvantage, while the rest of her party move freely about her, with great velocity, a fact upon which she dwells at length and deeply resents (Ulysses 294). A leftover on the marriage market, she is left behind in more than one way, forced to contemplate the festive celebrations at a distance, and she sublimates her condition in the self-portrait she draws. These unfavorable circumstances require that she make a stand, at the risk of pride or vanity, a moral reading would imply, and Gerty’s discourse registers this danger.22 From everything in the least indelicate her finebred nature instinctively recoiled. She loathed that sort of person, the fallen women off the accommodation walk beside the Dodder that went with the soldiers and coarse men with no respect for a girl’s honour, degrading the sex and being taken up to the police station. No, no: not that. (298-299) Hers is a fallback position that makes a virtue of paucity. She will stand out untouched, untouchable, virginal. But since privacy, in Foucaldian terms, is always mediated (and it is explicitly given out in “Nausicaa” as a construction meant to the address of a theoretical male observer), as soon as Gerty declares herself openly as a person whose integrity cannot be breached (even in her role of Marian consoler and provider of help, she remains uncorrupted by the opprobrium associated with the voyeur), she is bound to make an exhibition of herself since she has stepped into a spectacular apparatus. Prudery is the essential corollary to that coming out in the open: the claim for an autonomous self comes at the price of one’s isolation. (As a French phrase has it, one may be preserved in one’s virginity like potted meat or candied fruit.)

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In Bloom’s conception, such monitoring system is not strictly related to the immediate constraint exercised by his gaze, but it is objectified as a natural disposition (one that above all, in its ascendancy, excises the patriarchal). The train of his thoughts unfolds as a series of commonplaces meant to confirm a difference between the sexes that is grounded on a fundamental self-consciousness of the female. (It may be that the distinctions between sex, sexuality and genre are precisely what it seeks to dissolve, and that such confusion causes Bloom to run into contradictions, but on the level of the narrative flow, they are inscrutable.) Did she know what I? Course. Like a cat sitting beyond a dog’s jump. Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that innocence? Poor idiot! His wife has her work cut out for her. Never see them sit on a bench marked Wet Paint. Eyes all over them. Look under the bed for what’s not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives. Sharp as needles they are. (304) From that premise (“Did she know what I? Course.”), Bloom articulates sequentially a host of clichés that the commentators of the text are forced, as a matter of method, to break down into their ideological components. But doing so, they inevitably neutralize the effect of rapid succession that favors their overlapping. In this analogic succession, women are generally acclaimed as the weavers of illusions and, because of their mastery of that art, they are also perceived those who dispel others’ illusions, who are expert at picking apart their fabric and canceling the effects of layering and covering up, the play of veils which gives the illusory object of desire a nebulous and ineffable density. Bloom pointedly reminisces of a man he once signaled to his wife’s attention on account of his good looks. This incident is the feminine counterpart to the illusion by which Bloom feels he has been tricked on the beach. (“When I said to Molly the man at the corner of Cuffe street was good-looking, thought she might like, twigged at once he had a false arm. Had too. Where do they get that?” (Ulysses 304). Contrary to Bloom, Molly immediately detects the defect of the desirable figure she is presented with, without even having been caught a single instant in the spectacular apparatus. In his internal monologue, Bloom collates all the commonplaces that distinguish women as self-conscious deceivers. The following chain of reflections is an example of that swift movement which leads us from the expression a state of alertness to the intimation of a special ability to thwart tricks: “Never see them sit on a bench marked Wet Paint. Eyes all over them. Look under the bed for what’s not there. Longing to get the fright of their lives” (Ulysses 304). This anxious vigilance equally goes together with a paranoid disposition which perversely allows women to enjoy a sense of danger that they supposedly invent. It can also be interpreted as a desire to be deeply affected which they closely monitor, and the common phrases in Bloom’s monologue suggest that this control system is inbuilt. The character’s concern with evidencing female subjects’ natural disposition is, as we have noted above, constantly undercut by the examples he chooses. Just before revealing his prejudices, Bloom had inadvertently exposed the model of aestheticism’s imposture (“Women never meet one like that Wilkins in the high school drawing a picture of Venus with all his belongings on show. Call that innocence? Poor idiot! His wife has her work cut out for her.”) Such formulation invites confusion between voyeurism and exhibitionism, a slippage that plays into the hands of the feminine

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subject. That the idiomatic expression “to have one’s work cut out” should involve work rather than play is not indifferent to Bloom’s false consciousness. Another similar slippage occurs when he gradually introduces the motif of the looking glass (“Milly for example drying her handkerchief on the mirror to save the ironing. Best place for an ad to catch a woman’s eye on a mirror.”) Here again, the importance accorded to women’s relations to mirrors as evidence of some natural disposition towards self-conscious performance, one that is “bred in the bone,” is undermined by the correction after “father” that marks the erasure of any atavistic paternal responsibility in such schemings: “Handed down from father to mother to daughter, I mean. Bred in the bone” (Ulysses 304). As far as the moral aspect is concerned, everything revolves around the presumed innocence of the young female person, and its fictionalization in the debates concerned with the force of corruption of literature. (I use the word “fictionalization” in the sense that the judge and the lawyer had to conjure up a legal fiction–the average person, the man of the street—as the touchstone in their assessment of the chapter’s effect on its readership). But the issue is passably complicated by the suggestion that literature can only corrupt those who are susceptible of being corrupted. (Mullin 2013, 15) Insofar as they are easily impressionable, they must certainly have a particular leaning towards vice: this argument has theological implications that we are not at leisure to investigate here but that Joyce would have been highly conscious of. This debate leads us back to the contemporary critical dispute between those who read in Joyce’s text a confirmation of male domination and those who see in it a crude exposure of its crushing violence. “Nausicaa” seems intent on attacking any presumption of innocence, as if endowing his characters with an awareness of corruption and even a certain willingness to take advantage of it were the only way for him to give them a measure of autonomous consciousness—as if these were prerequisites for the constitution of a plausible (fictional) subject. Joyce’s text thus presents itself to the censors in such way that it explicitly reinforces the prejudices they hold against it, and insistently exposes its characters as corrupted.

The dialectics of corruption and purity

Although the difference between the sexes that Bloom believes he documents with the minutia of his past experiences and readings contradicts itself at every turn of phrase, still, that difference remains the main focus of his demonstration, the goal towards which he exerts his faculties of synthesis, however inconclusively. Sexual relationships, as depicted in Ulysses, require asymmetry. In its script, one protagonist must be in pursuit of the other while the latter indefatigably steals itself away. But this game of pursuit resists reduction to the binary politics of the sexes that practical feminism condemns on account of the entrenched privileges of the male subject. This is not to say that gender roles are not literally and perceptibly inscribed in Ulysses, indeed they proliferate. But the question of those who collaborate in these constructs remains open, and unanswerable, because any attempt at elucidation gets caught in an endless recursive cycle of reciprocations and retaliations, due to a persistent uncertainty as to the discursive positions of those who relate the experience. Since no roles are firmly assigned in this dis-symmetrical configuration, as I will try to exemplify below with reference to “Circe,” the subjects keep changing position,

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perpetually losing their balance, so that the fantasy of being touched and contaminated is nowhere so close at hand than when one has the assurance that the gulf is insuperable, and this superior sense of incorruptibility only exacerbates the urge to abolish it. (Bloom muses upon his experience on the beach: “Excites them also when they’re. I’m all clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice.) All in all, the situation involving a voyeur and an innocent creature that is being espied into a visual apparatus requires a measure of bad faith that is not clearly attributable to any party, and both symptomatically deflect the blame upon the other. The form of this paradox is most clearly exposed in “Circe,” a chapter which I take to be, among other things a subtext, a recapitulation and a deepening of “Nausicaa”’s implications.23 In its opening scene, Gerty, who is ostensibly presented as a figment of Bloom’s imagination, appears to bear all the duplicity: first remonstrating her putative corrupter for having taken her virginity (“You did that I hate you” Ulysses 361), her accusation is immediately superseded by her admission that “I love you for doing that to me”. This is, I believe, the very matrix of the voyeuristic configuration.24 Although not guilty of that charge, Bloom lies about it: “I, when, I never saw you”. His denial suggests that the verb “to see” functions as a metaphor for some illicit touch. His dodges leave all the blame entire, his lame attempt at exculpating himself from the sexual assault of innocent young women eventually resulting in unintelligible verbiage (Ulysses 376, 378). At that point, we reach the limit of the social use of language, the moment when it crumbles into meaningless and useless glossolalia). Nonetheless the fault is publicly exposed. In the imaginary that Bloom conjures up, he stands guilty before the court of licentious thoughts, and the crimes he confesses or which are blamed upon him only exist in his mind. Bloom testifies to the fact of having had erotic thoughts about excretive organs. Or to put it slightly differently, he admits having conceived that body parts exerting an erotic fascination or attraction also had excretive functions, holding these two thoughts in his mind at the same time. (“Enemas too I have administered… I have paid homage on that living altar where the back changes name”). This admission sits in between an idealization of the female object of desire and the defacement of its purity by the vulgarity of what it celebrates. (Ulysses 449) What is of relevance in the reasoning I am trying to pursue is this simultaneity. Again, commentators of Ulysses who dwell with good reasons on the proximity between sexual attraction and abjection go back on the defense undertaken by Quinn who posited that the repulsive presentation of sex chosen by Joyce could not be attractive, hence his prose could not be defined as pornographic. Eventually, Bloom breaks the charm: without desire and sexuality, the ethereal would not exist. (“If there were only ethereal where would you be all, postulants and novices? Shy but willing like an ass pissing.” Ulysses 451) His attack on virtue is both libelous, defiling its target, and elucidatory. It aggressively flings the accusation back at the figure who issued it, in such a way that he actually breaches the integrity of the fictional persona’s identity and jeopardizes her metaphysical existence. Here as well, that coincidence of cruelty and justice in the same observation has much significance for my account: THE NYMPH (With a cry flees from him unveiled, the plaster cast, cracking, a cloud of stench escaping from the cracks) Poli…!

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BLOOM (calls after her) As if you didn’t get it on the double yourself. No jerk and multiple mucosities all over you. Your strength our weakness. What’s our studfee? What will you pay on the nail? You fee men dancers on the Riviera, I read. (451) Whoever utters seditious and defamatory words can only be perverse.25 Any statement that hurts the feelings and upsets one’s sense of self-respect has to be the language of the pervert. It has to be so, at any cost, for no other explanation will do. The blame must be deflected upon the one whose language is audibly fraught with distasteful innuendoes, otherwise it would leave one with the responsibility of confronting the disquiet occasioned by the pervert’s presence as a personal matter, and recognize one’s own suppressed attraction towards what one figures in it.26 This is an exorcism of sort whereby the condemnable vice is externalized and any degree of closeness between the offense and oneself is denied. One does not want to have anything to do with it, or register it as anything but an inconvenience. For any rapprochement would involve the danger of contamination. Yet the possibility of such contamination suggests a compatibility, a capacity to be affected by such noxious influence, hence the kinship that it overtly denies. For fear of infection, it must be expurgated and purified. The elaboration of purity as discourse and performance is motivated by that evasion. Jastrebski underscores the popular, lowly extraction of the Nymph pinned on the wall of Bloom’s bedroom (Jastrebski 172). This mythological figure has been cut out from the pages of a magazine where it had to suffer the infamous proximity of slimming pills, music hall celebrities and mummer shows. Mortal! You found me in evil company, high kickers, coster picnic makers, pugilists, popular generals, immoral panto boys in fleshtights and the nifty shimmy dancers, La Aurora and Karini, musical act, the hit of the century. I was hidden in cheap pink paper that smelt of rock oil. I was surrounded by the stale smut of clubmen, stories to disturb callow youth, ads for transparencies, truedup dice and bustpads, proprietary articles and why wear a truss with testimonial from ruptured gentleman. Useful hints to the married. (444) It is by its forcible extraction from the company of its peers that it acquires the distinctive and distinguished aura that is also the source of her humiliation. That compartmentalization, which it is difficult to tell whether it is willed, in an act of self- consciousness, or imposed by the admiring glance that raises the Nymph to the position of icon, eventually denaturalizes her so that, taken out of her prosaic context, she suffers from being thus circumscribed. That the suffering might be the result of this enforced detachment is an aspect that commands our attention. The cult to which the Nymph is subjected is tantamount to her subjugation and humiliation. She keenly registers the offense: her strong reaction to Bloom’s verbal sally touches her to the quick. In this situation where she articulates her recriminations, she actuates all the feelings, mortified as she is by Bloom’s idolatry, and her overflowing wrath instantly transforms into the abjection which sullies her reputation. Since total simultaneity is unconceivable in a narration of events, the aspects of her aporetical condition must perforce come apart in the dramatization of the episode. The latter only reproduces these states of consciousness as contradictory movements so that they appear as successive takes on her predicament, motions affecting the thymia, transformations of her mood. Likewise, the critical commentators who wish to describe the functioning of the text, to enumerate its proceeds and its thematics, are bound to describe them as disjointed

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phases, moments of glories and infamies, in an artificially frozen succession of tableaux. The paradox on which I have concentrated so far, the one that makes and mars the reception of “Nausicaa” spells out the condition of the image of desire. Namely: that the desirable figures of the text create their ignominious condition as they detach themselves from the common ground of existence that they had to bear with.27 Just as the nymph on the picture hung up above the bed in Bloom’s bedroom is perceived as a temptress eluding Bloom’s grasp, whose shell peals and cracks up, oozing a viscous fluid, as she is disavowed by her admirer, so Gerty is carried away by her impersonation of the proud and authoritative “womanly woman”. As I have shown, any moral implication of that statement to the effect that the female character has simply brought upon her her own shame and that she deserves such treatment would be irrelevant, owing to the impossibility of identifying oneself durably with Gerty—or with Bloom for that matter—these subject positions being illusory throughout. Self-empowerment, standing out of the rank and raising up to a position of visibility actuates a situation of maximum exposure. It entails an extreme vulnerability and susceptibility which invite degradation. (The nature of this invitation inevitably sends us back to that difficult question of the female person’s share of initiative in Joyce’s design and I will not try to neutralize the moral scandal it involves for it is this explosive charge the episode is loaded with). In Bloom’s view, women signal themselves as available to the attention of their admirers—and to that attention only—but, as the Nymph insistently protests, she is not one of these women. She shrinks from any contact. Coming out in the open entails vulnerability. One must therefore put on a good face and watch one’s moves. That is: carefully monitor one’s appearances, an enterprise that is all too readily interpreted as one of seduction. Whoever expresses that quandary will be charged with the full responsibility of what he exposes. (The positions of voyeur and exhibitionist are significantly interchangeable in the circular plot of humiliation and redemption of “Circe”). The sacrificial function of the figure of the sex offender is explicitly noted. When in doubt persecute Bloom. My client, an innately bashful man, would be the last man in the world to do anything ungentlemanly which injured modesty could object to or cast a stone at a girl who took the wrong turning when some dastard, responsible for her condition, had worked his own sweet will on her. All the blame should be laid on Bloom. So that the assurance that he would not have behaved with Mary Driscoll otherwise than he would with his own daughter becomes instantly loaded with double entendre aggravating his crime. (“The young person was treated by defendant as if she were his very own daughter.”) The language of Bloom’s lawyer only further compromises his client. In the scapegoating configuration, whoever undertakes the defense of unmentionable crimes is liable to lose their good name (378).

Conclusion

In “Nausicaa,” Joyce actuates and sets at work in his writing the duplicity that underlies the defense of temperance and purity, giving free play to its corrupting force. To begin with, whoever hoists the banner of purity and holds out to everyone’s

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attention the moral exemplum of the young female person also implies and plays upon the possibility of her degradation and capitalizes, to maximize its impact, on the danger to which she is exposed and the thrill that such perspective inspires. In short, those who conjure up an angelic vision also think into existence the bestial antithesis against which it stands out. Thus phrased, this remark does not substantially enlarge on Pascal’s dictum. An addition must made to clarify its implication. The point is that, as long as criticism is intent on denunciation, whether it sides with the text or takes arms against it, uncovering some injustice or immorality, it will go round and feed the same vicious/ virtuous cycle that it purports to explore. For instance, we may legitimately aim at exposing in its scandalous nudity the lowliness that underpinned the attempts of morality leagues, arguing righteously that they evacuated their own trouble, refusing to reflect upon the nature of their own response whenever their taste was offended. But such a postulate does not rescue us from our critical predicament. The blandest version of this counter-moralizing or anticlerical argument holds that the paragons of virtue read dirty literature under the cloak, and that they secretly indulge into what they reprove in others. But that formulation merely initiates a new wave of recrimination. As long as criticism does not desist from forcefully expelling the pervert as a matter of principle in the name of some sort of virtue, it will recreate that same figure of the pervert, the man (man and not woman) who should know better, who should be past the age of obscenities (note that Bloom’s infantile regression in “Circe” is one of his means of evasion). And as long as one will pit against this repulsive nudity another more dignified and unsoiled nakedness that would only signify innocence, then this line of criticism will reconstruct the virginal image that calls for its defilement. And those who take offense at the suggestions of perversion contained in that “call for defilement” and charge whoever mentions it with being the one that conceives such lewd thoughts refuel the same critical machinery. They will not even have begun to emerge from the contradictions of the holy/unholy alliance of chastiser and chastized, from the see-saw movement of reversals and turnarounds that Joyce dramatizes—the Apostolic Church, the British Crown, Old Ireland, the Patriots, each in turn keep castigating and heaping abuse on one another, in a great circular parade. The description of the character of Gerty, of Gerty as Gerty envisions herself, is two- faced. The term “duplicity” itself is misleading, too easy to neutralize so as to affirm the purity of one’s intent, and I hope I have managed at least to convey this idea that the existence of a purity of intent that is the immediate cause of its corruption. In the criticism of “Nausicaa”, it is of crucial importance to understand that the virginal figure to which Gerty relates and on which she relies is obscenity itself, not its flipside, its double or evil twin. If the critics miss this nuance, the effect of the text upon them will be corrupting, they will have been caught by its pull, they will have themselves become the chastizers, the denunciators of the vice that lies at the bottom, under the pretence of the virtuous. Such is the movement that Joyce’s text encourages. Perhaps its effect will always remain perversive. Its specificity is that it forces its readers to experience these disagreeable twists reluctantly, against their will, and without hope of disciplining and regulating their confusing impressions. For such reduction could only be achieved at the cost of their exclusion from the fictional pact (as should be clear, at

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this stage such pact cannot be equated with a writer-reader contract). And even this distanced position will not guarantee their safety, for that very reluctance to engage with the text will arouse suspicion.

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NOTES

1. Our working definition of obscenity is derived from this trial: what was at stake was the capacity of certain literary materials to corrupt the reader and encourage lewd thoughts. These terms had already been established as a standard fifty-three years before: “According to Lord Chief Justice Alexander Cockburn in Regina v. Hicklin (1868), the test for obscenity involved simply the determination of ‘whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.’” This is a pragmatic definition which characterizes obscenity by what it does, not what it is, as Bachman observes (Bachman 1). 2. The exact measure of the influence of Mary Cummings’ novel is contested. Potter makes the case for a thorough rewriting of The Lamplighter (Potter 2004) and William K. Kupinse recapitulates its possible implications (Kupinse 81-87). 3. “If he had suffered, more sinned against than sinning, or even, even, if he had been himself a sinner, a wicked man, she cared not. Even if he was a protestant or methodist she could convert him easily if he truly loved her”. 4. In the fifth chapter of Ulysses, Bloom ponders on the institution of confession: “ Wonderful organisation certainly, goes like clockwork. Confession. Everyone wants to. Then I will tell you all. Penance. Punish me, please. Great weapon in their hands. More than doctor or solicitor. Woman dying to. And I schschschschschsch. And did you chachachachacha? And why did you?” (28).

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5. Again, the obscene spectacle is meant to stir desire and invite sexual behavior of a deviant kind. 6. This perception reflects Jane Heap’s observation: “if there is anything I really fear it is the mind of the young person”. (Heap 5-7). As we shall see, most of the critical positions adopted by contemporary have been anticipated by the first reactions it elicited on the occasion of its publication in serialized form. 7. Here again the reaction elicited on the occasion of the 1921 trial by the treatment of the case already set the terms of this critical response (Parkes 76). 8. One may wonder whether “Nausicaa” was in any manner destined to the attention of the Society for the Suppression of Vice. That Joyce had become entangled in a dispute with them is one thing, that his prose was addressed to them is another. 9. That is, according to our definition, on what, in the spectacle of the vulnerable virgin, elicits pleasure and causes excitement. 10. This was a frequent objection raised against the zeal of the censors, as Potter Observes, one that Windham Lewis used on the subject of Ulysses and Eliot on that of Lawrence’s painting (Potter 2013, 55-58). 11. All the more so since this common insinuation is immediately contradicted by another fragment of opinion according to which it is a “Pity they cant see themselves”—the latter being at variance with the accusation of self-consciousness that Bloom documents throughout his tirade. 12. Adam Parke’s reading of the passage is that Bloom’s point of view is dominant in it (Parke 83.). Denis Donoghue inclines the same way in The Practice of Reading (229-231). Although this interpretation might be contested (and the text is certainly designed to be contested), one has to admit at least that Gerty’s and Bloom’s narratives blend in the transition from one to the other. All the examples featured below involve some inconsistency in the enunciation and thereby illustrate the uncertainties—that I have evoked in the introduction—about the position the reader should adopt. Here, the narrative blends Gerty’s sentimentalism with Bloom’s strategy of concealment in a way that precludes us from to locating the source of enunciation. 13. That the virginal young woman of Catholic disposition does not obsess on petticoats and knickers, does not aggrandize herself and abstains from self-serving behavior should be obvious. And least of all does she indulge in pornography. 14. All the products enhancing physical beauty that Gerty mentions aim at drawing potential husbands by making herself sexually attractive, on the model of the “lovely seaside girls” massively commodified in advertising. They invite the consumers/readers to adopt the deviant position of voyeur or exhibitionist, setting the template for the peep show situation that Bloom references: “Mutoscope pictures in Capel street: for men only. Peeping Tom. Willy’s hat and what the girls did with it. Do they snapshot those girls or is it all a fake? Lingerie does it. Felt for the curves inside her déshabillé. Excites them also when they’re. I’m all clean come and dirty me. And they like dressing one another for the sacrifice” (301). 15. The process of singling out, celebrating and elevating remarkable women inherited from Ruskin’s ideal and more generally, from the Victorian worldview, relies heavily on sublimated images of the female body that pictorial conventions recommend. To phrase the point slightly differently, the bid for autonomy has to be performed visually in a social context as aesthetic integrity (Austin). As Carla Rice puts it, “[f]or girls coming of age in consumerist, individualist and media driven cultures, the body has become an important identity project” (3). 16. It rests on the methodical exploitation of obscene material for their sexually stimulating properties. As Lynn Hunt contends, the term was introduced as a regulating category to cordon off licentious cultural products from women and the lower class, for fear it would corrupt them (Hunt 19). Pornography thus became a genre or province of literature whose motifs, tropes

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patterns and stock situations could be parodied, and they are evidently quoted as such in “Nausicaa”. 17. Sometimes in the same reader, as was the case with Pound for instance, according to Paul Vanderham (19-27). 18. For a more substantial study of these variations, see the comments on Bloom’s train of thought in the third part of this study. Insofar as paradigmatic substitutions are concerned, one notes that Joyce does not rely on metaphorical language, mostly leaving it to the characters. Conversely, he exploits common phrases which he uses in an improper context conducive to bawdy insinuations. 19. Insofar as the two views presented above are concerned, its implications are straightforward: the liberatory force of the modern individualism embraced by young womenmay well stand in opposition to their despicable commercial instrumentalization, this does not entail that the first can be conceived without the second. Likewise, one may resent being enslaved to one’s passions. But refusing to be subjected to them would fail to procure a higher ground for life since it would suppress the vital energies on which that life depends. 20. Freud’s insufficient theorization of the female psyche as distinct from the male libido has been deplored by feminists and made him a disputable reference. Still, his insights have been significantly prolonged by Kristeva’s notion of abjection, which undoubtedly casts a light on the episode under study. As for Nietzsche, like Freud, his dependence on 19th century science as well as on the cultural prejudices of his time is sometimes invoked as a hindrance to his use in the humanities. 21. On the model of Bloom’s protestation that he would not do to Mary Driscoll (whom he is accused of having assaulted) any more than he would to his own daughter, a statement undermined by the fact that he has brought together Milly and Gerty in the course of his associative thinking. 22. This also seems to be Mary Driscoll’s position when summoned to appear before the court to give evidence against Bloom. There she explains her refusal to yield to his solicitations by stating “I thought better of myself poor as I am,” thus combining the discourse of self-empowerment and the discipline of humility. 23. Ulysses, in its serialized form, as has been amply documented, keeps track of the debate on obscenity in the press. Its subject matter and allusions respond to the episodes of its own censure and publication. Its pastiches of self righteous discourse and moral prescriptions are done in imitation of journalistic prose. In short, it responds to the constraints imposed by the censors. 24. It has been objected to me while presenting this paper in a conference that in a post #metoo world, one would be expected to name the perpetrator of abuse: is the duplicity of the feminine object a fantasy production of the voyeur (Bloom), or a characterial trait ascribed to Gerty by the author? At the end of the first section of this essay, I made the case for a textual construct that systematically lent itself to contrary judgments. The most outstanding case is the dream scene in “Circe” where Bloom is first celebrated for his humane behavior before being tried for sexual misconduct. On this occasion, many women reveal that they have been victims of sexual harassment at his hands, two of them declaring: MRS BELLINGHAM: Me too. MRS YELVERTON BARRY: Me too. Yet considering that Bloom displays masochistic tendencies and welcomes the ladies’ threats of corporeal punishment with thrilled abandon, one may wonder if he has not conjured up this scene, offenses included, for the sole purpose to tease himself. In this context, defining Bloom’s actual crime is as scattershot and risky as estimating Joyce’s complicity with his character. 25. This, again, is a pragmatic definition of perversion, understood in terms of the effect it has on other subjects. It is the flipside of the more obvious description according to which the pervert is

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the one whose behaviour deviates from normalcy, and who is not content with yielding to depravity but assiduously desires this degradation. But in both definitions, the meaning is relative to specific periods and mores. In Joyce’s text, it is related to the Catholic notions of sin and vice. 26. As Rabaté notes, Joyce “quotes the famous statement Wilde gave as a defense of his only novel to the Scots Observer and then generalizes boldly: Everyone, he wrote, sees his own sin in Dorian Gray (Wilde’s best known novel). What Dorian Gray’s sin was no one says and no one knows. Anyone who recognizes it has committed it.’ (Rabaté 170). 27. In this, it resembles the condition of meaning as Derrida envisages it: positing a stable concept requires to set against adverse notions, so that the concept may present distinct outlines. Yet this operation necessarily excludes something that is part of its constitution, Derrida argues. For this reason it has to be distinguished from a dialectic turn, for it does not involve the overcoming of a contradiction between antithetical terms, nor the disclosure of some imposture which would cover up a concealed intention.

ABSTRACTS

This article concerns the presence of obscene contents in Ulysses and the embarrassment that such material has caused among its readers. It dwells more specifically on the thirteenth episode of the novel, “Nausicaa”. After recapitulating the main arguments put forward by scholars in response to the most unpalatable and morally touchy aspects of the episode, I propose to concentrate on the internal contradictions elicited by the various discourses woven together in it. I argue that the narrative apparatus set up by the author forces one to occupy unstable positions and that this instability is what has led to the different critical receptions of Joyce’s text. By exposing the reader to contradictory imperatives, this narrative apparatus aims at conflating virtue and vice into a single entity.

Cet article concerne la présence de contenus obscènes dans Ulysses et l’embarras que ce matériau littéraire a causé et cause encore chez ses lecteurs. Il se concentre plus particulièrement sur le treizième épisode du roman, “Nausicaa”. Après avoir récapitulé les arguments principaux exposés par les universitaires en réponse aux aspects les plus dérangeants et moralement suspects de l’épisode, je me propose de me concentrer sur les contradictions internes des divers discours qui s’entrelacent dans le texte de Joyce. Mon argument est que le dispositif narratif mis en place par l’auteur nous force à occuper des positions instables et que ces instabilités déterminent les différentes réceptions critiques du texte de Joyce. En exposant son lecteur à des impératifs contradictoires, il vise à confondre la vertu et le vice en une seule entité.

INDEX

Keywords: interface, James Joyce, narrative apparatus, “Nausicaa, ” moral scandal, obscenity, public exposure, Ulysses, visibility, voyeurism Mots-clés: dispositif narratif, exhibition, interface, James Joyce, “Nausicaa”, obscénité, Ulysse, scandale moral, visibilité, voyeurisme

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AUTHOR

PHILIPPE BIRGY Professor Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Prospero's Island

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‘The resonance of the music’ in Resistance, Novel (Sheers, 2007) and Film (Gupta, 2011)

Annelie Fitzgerald

Introduction

1 Resistance, Owen Sheers’s acclaimed novel, was published in 2007 and released as a film in November 2011. Amit Gupta, the film’s director, and Sheers co-wrote the screenplay, and Resistance was subsequently nominated for three BAFTAs. There is a pleasing symmetry in the fact that Sheers’s first novel became Gupta’s first feature film.1

2 In her Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon reminds us that adaptations say things differently, but that they also say slightly different things (3). My objective in this analysis is to make a modest contribution to adaptation studies by examining the ‘transcoding’ of this novel into a film, along with some of the shifts in emphasis, the ‘slightly different things’, that the adaptation occasioned. Literature, as Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan have underlined, has a rich synergistic capability and multilayering potential that operates on a horizontal level, namely on the single ‘track’ of the verbal discourse (Cartmell and Whelehan 10). Film, on the other hand, is synergistic on a vertical level, with multiple signifying layers operating simultaneously: sounds, music, images, language (dialogue) function together in what Michel Chion has called a synchresis (Chion 1990, 9), a term already used by the Russian formalists.

3 My principal focus will be on the analysis of one scene in particular, where the protagonists share a piece of music. With regards to adaptation studies, this is a particularly interesting scene because of the centrality of the diegetic music within it. Analysing the presence of music, another signifying system, in this scene helps one reflect on the respective aesthetic and technical limitations of film and literature, and the resonances and resistances that pertain to each medium or ‘code’. In this scene, then, the resonances and resistances that are present thematically throughout the novel and film are prominent, but the film adaptation also foregrounds some of those

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encountered in the process of transcoding a story from novel to film. As Robert Stam and Alessandra Raengo note, ‘Adaptations redistribute energies and intensities, provoke flows and displacements; the linguistic energy of literary writing turns into the audio-visual-kinetic-performative energy of the adaptation, in an amorous exchange of textual fluids’ (Stam and Raengo 46). Before focusing on this scene, however, and assessing the redistribution of such energies and intensities in Resistance, some background information about the novel and its adaptation is necessary.

4 In both novel and film, recent history is ‘adapted’ in that an alternative version of the Second World War is represented, one in which the Normandy landings have failed and Nazi has invaded Britain. In the afterword to his counterfactual novel, Sheers reveals that the kernel for the story was given to him by an acquaintance in Abergavenny, the market town located at the edge of the Brecon Beacons in Wales where he grew up. In 1940 local man George Vater was recruited into the Auxiliary Units Special Duties Section, which was, as Sheers explains, ‘a network of farmers, vicars and other local people trained and prepared to run messages and spy’ in the event of a German occupation (Sheers 2008, 352).

5 Resistance is set in a remote valley, the Olchon, which lies just on the English side of the border between England and Wales, a real location very close to Abergavenny. One day the women of the valley wake up to find their husbands have all vanished, presumably in order to join the Resistance, and they thus find themselves forced to deal with the demands of farm labour on their own, at the same time as they try to cope with their loss and worry. The arrival a few weeks later of a German patrol on a secret mission, led by Captain Albrecht Wolfram, greatly exacerbates this anxiety. In time, however, an uneasy co-habitation, ‘a fragile mutual dependency’, as Sheers himself has put it (Sheers 2011), develops between the women of the valley and the German patrol. With the onset of a brutal winter, the women come to rely increasingly on the help of the men who are their enemies. The main focus of the story is the evolving relationship between Sarah Lewis, a young wife struggling to come to terms with the unexplained disappearance of her husband, and the world-weary, battle-worn Albrecht. Both protagonists are faced with making difficult choices in the course of the story, which explores the resonances and resistances in their relationship.

Reception

6 Shot over thirty days on a budget of £2 million, the film featured Andrea Riseborough as Sarah Lewis and German Tom Wlaschiha as Captain Albrecht Wolfram. On its release in late November 2011, the film received some critical reviews, being unfavourably compared by one critic (French) with It Happened Here, a 1964 film that imagined a Britain occupied by the Nazis, while another opined that “the story sinks into humourless catatonia, surrendering all pulse” (Robey). ’s Peter Bradshaw, however, was more positive, remarking, “Cult status may yet arrive for this strange, atmospheric movie, an eerie counterfactual fantasy with a hint of Cavalcanti’s Went the Day Well?” Bradshaw added: This is an overwhelmingly bleak film, progressing with a dreamlike drift, and the howl of wind is a continuous accompaniment. There is little conventional suspense or action, just an undertone of violence, and a sense of hallucination and disorientation. (Bradshaw)

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7 Writing in the Telegraph, Sarah Crompton deplored the fact that the ‘beautifully shot’ film which she thought really ‘deserve[d] to be seen’ was only being screened in thirteen cinemas in Britain (it did not have a cinema release in France). As a result, it would barely be seen on the big screen where, she argued, it looked ‘sumptuous’ (Crompton). By contrast, film critic Dylan Moore concluded that, ‘The brooding beauty of the landscape aside, there is no compelling reason for this novel’s translation into the visual medium’ (Moore).

A ‘filmic’ novel

8 As Moore suggests and as Sheers himself has pointed out, the landscape is indeed ‘one of the main characters’ in both the novel and the film.2 As one of the film’s producers, Sheers insisted that the film was shot where the story was set: ‘It has an extraordinary drama and yet it’s on a scale where it can be caught’ (Sheers, DVD). The landscape exerts a powerful hold on the minds of the characters, as suggested by this passage from the novel narrated from Albrecht’s point of view: ‘he’d never seen somewhere quite like the Olchon before. Somewhere so still, so bluntly beautiful and yet possessed, within that same beauty, of such a simple, threatening bareness too’ (Sheers 2008, 130). Gupta’s still, establishing shots of the landscape seek to capture this spartan beauty. Eschewing digital technology in favour of 35 mm film, Gupta explains that he used a 2.4:1 aspect ratio because depicting the landscape was important3, and indeed the film features numerous long and very long shots of characters in the landscape. As film critic Peter Bradshaw has noted, the howling wind is omnipresent in the film’s soundtrack during outdoor shots, where it underlines the harsh elemental environment in which the women live and upon which Sheers’s prose dwells. In the novel, the wind also emphasizes Sarah’s solitude: ‘She listened but again there was nothing. Just the wind, hushing and rushing in her ears, rising and falling like her own blood, like distant waves, endlessly folding against a stubbornly silent shore’ (Sheers 2008, 68).

9 Gupta has described Sheers’s poetic prose as ‘a visual style of writing’ (Giles-Keddie); it exquisitely depicts, for example, the shape and features of the valley in which the story is set and the phenomena of the natural world the valley encloses: The still dawn she’d watched through that window turned into a crisp morning, brittle with brightness after the days of loose rain billowing like curtains across the valley. Every twig of every branch seemed redrawn, sharper. The edges of the hills were newly refined against the sky like old blades worked to a thinness on the granite sharpening wheel. (Sheers 2008, 90)

10 Indeed, for Gupta there was ‘something about [the novel] that felt very filmic’ (Giles- Keddie). In another of the promotional interviews he gave after the release of Resistance Gupta remarked that the novel’s very ‘cinematic atmosphere’ was something that he wanted to capture on screen (Walsh). Gupta employs the same term—despite its notorious vagueness—to refer to the ways in which he and Sheers went about adapting the novel: ‘It’s interesting how many people talk about it being quite a faithful adaptation but when you write it down it’s not very faithful. It’s faithful to the atmosphere’ (Gupta, DVD).4

11 The atmosphere of both the film and novel can be described as one of emotional restraint and yet of rawness; it is sparse and spartan, bleak and sober. In the film, this

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sobriety is also reflected in the costume design, which banishes bright colours; the characters’ clothes’ colours are muted greys, brown and blues that blend in with the tones of the quietly dramatic landscape that the characters inhabit. The frugality of the lives depicted in the novel and film is also reflected in the devices employed by Gupta: the camera is predominantly static and there are no tracking shots or pans. As far as editing is concerned, cuts are favoured over fades and dissolves. The static camera and straight-on angles also reflect the sober restraint that characterises the story; the rare camera movements are reserved for ten flashbacks focalised through different characters5; the dreamlike quality thus created serves to distinguish them from real time. Sheers notes that Gupta references Terrence Malik’s The Thin Red Line in his filmic approach to flashbacks, i.e., using a moving camera for filming such scenes (Sheers, DVD). The analepses in the film tend to be related to characters’ memories of the past and to operate as reflections of their state of mind in the present rather than explanations as to how the current situation came to be. In the film, for example, we do not know that George’s recruitment into the Auxiliary Unit took place 4 years previously in 1940; it is simply not necessary to know this fact.

12 The film can therefore be considered faithful to the novel’s atmosphere, in accordance with Brian McFarlane’s definition of the adjective ‘as a descriptive term to designate loosely a certain kind of adaptation’ (McFarlane, 166). Although the film respects ‘the fundamental narrative, thematic or aesthetic features of its literary source’ (Stam and Raengo 14), some further brief general remarks about the ways in which the adaptation (hypertext) departs from the source novel (hypotext) merit exposition. After all, Gupta and Sheers set themselves the challenge of transforming a 350-page novel into a 90- page script and a 90-minute film.

Redistributions, displacements and mutations

13 As is often the case in film adaptations, compression, elision and omission (Leitch 99) serve to pare down the novel’s narrative complexity. The novel’s plot features various kinds of analepses and progresses in a much less linear way than the film, though the film resorts to a flashback structure (of which more below). Certain characters are amalgamated: Tommy Atkins and the anonymous agent in the novel become one character in the film; the member of SS Albion who discovers Sarah’s diary at the end of the novel is replaced by Albrecht at the end of the film. Furthermore, certain subplots, such as Bethan and Gernot’s burgeoning relationship, are excised, and the proportion of the story devoted to George, the character based on George Vater, is reduced, although his cardinal role in the plot development is retained.

14 Overall, then, the novel’s narrative arc is retained, along with its principal thematic and aesthetic features. But the film contains significant ‘mutations’ (Hutcheon 31) and numerous additional scenes. Sheers has commented that he ‘really started enjoying the script-writing, when [he] was actually writing new dialogue, new scenes. That felt great’ (Sheers, DVD).6 For example, Sarah’s voice-over accompanying the final sequence was written for the film. Likewise, when Sarah walks alone to Llanthony Priory to fetch water for Albrecht to whom she is showing the valley whence she comes, in the novel she tries and fails to recall her husband, Tom (Sheers 2008, 335)7; in the film, however, she enters the church and we see a flashback of her wedding, with Tom waiting for her at the altar. One of the effects of this change is to modify the degree of her ‘resistance’

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to Albrecht as perceived by the reader and audience, thereby portraying her as more resistant to him in the film than in the novel.

15 Earlier on, a sequence written specifically for the film demonstrates how filmic images are very concisely used to contrast the levels of resistance to interaction with the Germans between the women: one day the Germans leave rabbits they have caught for each of the women in the valley. Sarah throws hers to her dogs, but when she goes to visit her neighbour Maggie, she finds rabbits strung up inside her porch. As Sheers points out, filmic storytelling can do ‘the work of 10 or 15 pages in the novel’ (Sheers, DVD). This is just one example of such filmic shorthand.

16 Yet another example is the juxtaposition of English and German in the film. Sheers and Gupta have both stressed that they were determined to ensure that the German characters’ dialogue was shot in German and not transposed into English, as was the case in the novel. Sheers explains: Once uniforms are replaced by civilian clothes then language becomes the most manifest form of occupation. As film-makers, the juxtaposition of a wartime setting, German words and Welsh hills, was exactly the kind of emotional and thematic shorthand we needed. (Sheers 2011)

17 About a third of the film’s dialogue is thus in German (with English subtitles), something which emphasizes that which divides the two groups of characters and underlines the transgressive nature of the human relationship that develops between them. The alien nature of the German uniforms in the Welsh context is reinforced through the language in which the patrol communicates against the backdrop of this very landscape. The novel cannot ‘hear’ German; in other words, it cannot make the foreign language audible and present in the way that the film can.

18 A further aspect of the soundtrack that will be paramount in the rest of this study is the presence of music. There is very little non-diegetic music in the film, with dramatic strings being heard at two crucial points, which signify the onset of a crisis: when George shoots Maggie’s colt, Glyndwr, precipitating the end of the isolated relative safety of the Olchon Valley, and when Albrecht returns to Sarah’s cottage after she has fled to the mountains and failed to meet him as she had promised. At some other points in the story, we briefly hear the same string chords, a musical leitmotif. The film, however, does contain one instance of diegetic music, and this, as mentioned earlier, will be the focus of the rest of this study.

The music scene and mise-en-scène

19 What I have called the music scene—the ‘musical parenthesis’ to use Michel Chion’s words (Chion 1995, 212)—is a key episode in both the novel and the film because its cardinal function is to precipitate a crisis in Albrecht and Sarah’s relationship, which is then set on a new footing. Sheers has described it as a fulcrum around which the film turns, and indeed it occurs almost exactly at the mid-point of the film.

20 In the film, the music scene is made all the more resonant by the paucity of non- diegetic music in the soundtrack, echoing its pared-down aesthetic. The action in this episode in both novel and film is fairly straightforward: one early spring morning, Sarah’s birthday, Albrecht comes to visit Sarah, bringing with him an old gramophone which he acquired—unable to resist taking it—as a spoil of war while passing through Oxford on his journey to the Welsh borderlands.8 He plays Sarah a record and, after

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listening, Sarah, very moved, reacts angrily to this imposition (and its implications of complicity, and possibly intimacy) and asks him to leave. He reveals that he did not come to the valley to look for her husband and the other men but for something else. When she asks him what it is, he offers to show her. Subsequently, the object of his quest is revealed to be the Mappa Mundi from nearby Hereford Cathedral, hidden away in a cave high above the valley.

21 In the film, the music scene is highly condensed, consisting of 39 shots lasting just under 5 minutes (40:26-45:14), whereas in the novel it takes place over a dozen or so pages (222-233). The characters’ dialogue is reduced by a half: 398 words of direct speech in this section of the novel as against 199 words of dialogue in the equivalent film sequence.

22 In the novel, focalisation switches between Sarah and Albrecht as the reader is given insight into both their states of mind at this point in the narrative. The sparse dialogue is interspersed with several analepses, both homo- and heterodiegetic (Genette), which amplify the psychological resonance of the episode. These analepses, three of which are narrated from Sarah’s point of view and two from Albrecht’s (in a form of counterpoint), can be summarised thus:

23 1) After Albrecht has arrived at Sarah’s farmhouse, we learn from the narrator that relations between the women of the valley and the Germans have thawed since the winter; only Sarah keeps a distance, disapproving of Maggie and Albrecht behaving like confidants. Sarah has difficulty accepting the fact that ‘Tom had, after all, just gone and left nothing other than a fading scent on his clothes and the ghost of his impression in the mattress’ (Sheers 2008, 223) (Sarah: homodiegetic analepsis).

24 2) Some of the Germans have begun wearing the farmers’ clothes; Maggie had given her permission for them to wear them (Albrecht: homodiegetic analepsis).

25 3) Sarah recalls her feelings the previous day when she had ridden up the hill, where Nature provided a cruel reminder of her solitude: ‘a pair of crows circle[d] and dance[d] about each other in the air. When they’d landed they’d rubbed shoulders and Sarah had felt again, as if for the first time, the pain of her solitude’ (Sheers 2008, 224) (Sarah: homodiegetic analepsis).

26 4) Sarah recalls seeing local women dressing up to the nines and waiting at railway stations in order to wave at passing trains that might contain their mobilised husbands (Sarah: heterodiegetic analepsis).

27 5) Albrecht has been experiencing a reawakening of his senses with the start of spring. He and his patrol have been listening to gramophone records throughout the winter (Albrecht: homodiegetic analepsis).

28 In the novel, these analepses all occur within the first five pages of the episode, thereby suggesting their scene-setting function within this section of narrative. If the analeptic sections of the narrative are suppressed, what remains closely corresponds to what is portrayed in the film sequence, with the sparse dialogue punctuated by descriptions of the characters’ attitudes and behaviour that resemble stage directions or the text of a screenplay, as in the following passage from the novel: He busied himself at the gramophone, taking the small crank from out of its clip in the box and fitting it to the square bolt at the back. He began winding, slowly at first, then quicker, talking to Sarah as he did.

‘You have no music here,’ he said with his back to her. ‘I thought you might like

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some.’

Sarah didn’t reply. Her head was bent to the table as she traced the knots and whorls in the wood with her finger. (Sheers 2008, 225-26)

29 Two of the analepses focalised through Sarah’s consciousness at the start of the music scene foreground the female protagonist’s anguish at having been deserted by her husband: ‘Abandoned in a world gone sour. […] Sarah had felt again the pain of her solitude’ (Sheers 2008, 224).9 Her solitude is underlined in the fourth analepsis: There was nowhere she could go in the hope of seeing Tom. No reports she could read with her heart in her mouth. And no letters she could wait for. Just an empty vigilance for some sign, some hidden message and her long rides up on the hills, forever facing up to their blank answer. (Sheers 2008, 225)

30 In the film, the lack and absence evoked explicitly here (reinforced by the repetition of the negative particle and the adjectives denoting absence) are referred to in the diary entry, written specifically for the film, which Sarah is writing when the sequence begins, and that the audience hears in a voice-over: March 10th. I’ll only be 27 once Tom, and you aren’t here. It’s weeks now since the thaw. But no one’s come in the valley. I heard the motorbike the other day so perhaps they’re getting ready to leave. (Resistance, 40:26)

31 The first medium long shot shows Sarah, seen from behind, leaning over her desk in the farmhouse kitchen and writing. Her voice-over continues as we see two shots of Albrecht in civilian clothes (of which more below): a long shot of him walking towards the camera carrying a case under his arm—subsequently revealed as the gramophone— followed by a medium shot of him walking out of shot. The next shot is the same as the first; Sarah then gets up to answer the door. In the novel, this episode begins with the arrival of Albrecht at Sarah’s door and describes her curiosity about the ‘thick square leather case’ (Sheers 2008, 222)10 he has with him. In the film, the cross-cutting of these shots forms a sort of counterpoint that suggests the tension that will arise between the two protagonists in the scene that follows. In the novel, it is the succession of analepses focalised through the two protagonists that help create this tension. In the film, there is also irony, of course, in the cross-cutting of Sarah’s voiced-over speculation that the Germans are on the point of leaving and Albrecht’s purposefully striding through the local landscape dressed in civilian clothes.

32 In the film, the absence and solitude that haunt Sarah (to which the act of diary-writing to Tom in both the novel and film attests11) are also inscribed in the mise-en-scene of the sequence. Sarah, little more than a dark silhouette seen from behind, is sitting at her desk to the extreme right of the shot, a position which underlines the neat frugality of the rather gloomy farmhouse kitchen, with its bare table and tidily arranged pots on the dark shelves above the stove; the low-key lighting, the chromatic sobriety of the empty kitchen and the fact that it occupies about 5/6ths of the shot help convey the painful absence which lies at its heart and about which Sarah is writing at the start of the sequence. Sheers has noted that Gupta’s direction ensured that the concepts of absence and silence permeated the film (Griffiths). The farmhouse thus contains a sort of vacuum—notably the empty armchair next to the stove—that Albrecht will come to fill with both the music and his person; his placing the gramophone on the bare table constitutes a visual counterpoint to the bulky closed account book which serves as Sarah’s diary and which lies on her desk on the right of the shot. All this brings to mind McFarlane’s comment that ‘the writing can never tell us all about a scene, whereas the

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film is forced to fill its settings, as it fills its frame, with the paraphernalia of the world in which its action is set, creating a visual replacement for effects achieved by the writing’ (McFarlane 130).

33 Another aspect of the mise-en-scene in the film needs to be highlighted at this point: in the novel the narrator draws attention to the fact that Albrecht is still wearing his Wehrmacht uniform, worn out though it may be: He still wore his uniform, threadbare at the elbows and knees. The collar of his shirt was broken and frayed. Over the winter some of the other members of the patrol had begun mixing their uniforms with clothing they’d found in The Court. (Sheers 2008, 223)12

34 The second (long) shot of the sequence, however, shows Albrecht in civilian clothes— this is the first time he appears in the film without his uniform—and in the third (medium) shot, the details of his typical farmer’s clothes can be clearly made out: a brown jacket, a green-grey cable-knit pullover and grey trousers. The previous sequence in the film had shown Albrecht asking Maggie to allow him and his men to wear the clothes they had found at the Court farmhouse where they had billeted themselves. In this sequence, Albrecht’s new clothes also have a symbolic value and suggest that he is sloughing off—or at least trying to slough off—his identity as an enemy soldier.

35 The change of clothes expresses Albrecht’s desire, explicitly articulated at a later point in the text of the novel, to be seen by Sarah as ‘more than the sum of this uniform’ (Sheers 2008, 230). In this part of the novel, the narrator makes clear the transformation undergone by Albrecht since he last saw Sarah: he seems ‘lighter, younger’ (Sheers 2008, 223) to Sarah; he also feels ‘lighter than he had ever done, possessed of a quick, fragile potential. The turning within himself he’d detected on those early walks through the valley was complete’ (Sheers 2008, 226). In the novel, Albrecht’s wish to be seen differently by Sarah is evoked explicitly in the text; in the film, this desire is implied by being visually encoded in Albrecht’s change of clothes.

36 Albrecht’s change of clothes also indicates a shift in the terms on which he hopes to engage with Sarah thanks to the gramophone and its music. Sarah’s attire, too, in the film sequence is significant: she is dressed in black, as if in mourning, while her pallid face has a grey-blue tinge. This melancholy mood is subsequently echoed in the piano music Albrecht brings her and the tone of the diary entry she is writing to her husband.

Resonances

37 In the novel, the record that Albrecht plays to Sarah is Bach’s Cello Suite N° 4 in E-flat major whereas in the film it is the ‘Venetian Boat Song’ from Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words for the piano (Op. 19, N°6, Andante sostenuto in G minor). Although they are played by different instruments, both pieces of music are solos—and perhaps thus help reflect the solitude of the characters.

38 In the novel Sheers’s prose underlines the emotional expressivity of the music Sarah and Albrecht listen to. The movement of Bach’s cello concerto which has the most effect on Sarah is the ‘Sarabande’: ‘Languid, slow, pregnant with sorrow, the strings seemed to belong to another instrument altogether. A regretful but wise and saddened cousin of the cello that had played the first three movements’ (Sheers 2008, 229). Mendelssohn’s piano ‘song’ can also be described using the same adjectives and may

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therefore be considered, in emotional and expressive terms, a piano equivalent of the work for strings by Bach. In very general terms, then, although they are from different periods in the history of music—Baroque in the novel and Romantic in the film—both musical works convey a similar tone or mood of melancholy.

39 Several reasons for the substitution of Mendelssohn’s work for Bach’s can be adduced. The first is no doubt the pragmatic reason that the sparse non-diegetic music in the film—composed by Mark Bradshaw—consists of strings; thus, in order for diegetic music to be clearly distinguished from the non-diegetic music the former had to be played by another instrument, in this case the piano.

40 The second reason, as Gupta suggests in his DVD commentary, is that Mendelssohn was Jewish. Provided that the audience is aware of this, the music scene takes on another, slightly subversive, layer of meaning: the music selected—and appreciated—by a German officer and which he wishes to share with an ‘enemy’, was written by a Jewish composer; Bach, on the other hand, could be considered an archetypal German cultural reference.

41 A third reason for the shift from representing a whole concerto to playing little more than a minute’s worth of music is also a pragmatic one: the film cannot afford to devote thirty minutes or so to the performance of Bach’s entire cello concerto, in contrast with the twelve pages the novel is able to devote to its being played and to the protagonists’ experience of the music. The screenwriters, therefore, sought a way of cutting short the music, so the scene in the film is condensed, with the minute of Mendelssohn’s piano ‘song’ that features in the film being sufficient shorthand to set the melancholy tone that is fundamental to this scene.

42 The music of both composers is certainly a signifier by means of which, in both the novel and film, Albrecht invites Sarah to see him in a different light and attempts to overcome the situation of conflict in which they find themselves ensnared. In the novel, the narrator tells us that Albrecht wishes to share the experience of listening to the music with Sarah, for ‘the creation of a common ground between them. A common ground that was not a consequence of war, but was in spite of it’ (Sheers 2008, 226). In both novel and film, however, Albrecht’s explicit explanation to Sarah for why he has brought her the music is simply that it is her birthday.

43 In the film, it nevertheless becomes clear that the music constitutes a substitute language for Albrecht, a means of trying to engage in dialogue with Sarah in a manner that is different to that afforded by verbal language. In this respect both the novel and film invoke the expressive and emotive properties of music, along with the—admittedly somewhat well-worn—notion that music is a language which transcends national identities and differences.13 In La Musique au cinéma, Michel Chion reminds us that music is the element in a film that is susceptible to the most flexible and immediate communication (Chion 1995, 214). In this scene, then, the music functions as a sort of impossible verbal dialogue by which Albrecht attempts to arouse an emotional resonance in Sarah and initiate what the novel calls ‘a rare sharing’ (Sheers 2008, 231).14

44 The novel depicts the characters as listening together to the whole cello concerto from beginning to end (thus to what can be thought of as a whole musical ‘story’), with Albrecht announcing to Sarah the name of its different movements as they begin: the Allemande, the Courante, the Sarabande, the Intermezzo. Sheers’s text confronts the

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perennial difficulty of representing music in words, as in the following description of the first movement, which can be described as a musical ekphrasis: He lowered his head and at the same time, as if his movement had created it, a bow drew itself deeply across a single bass string before melting to a higher note that fell back towards the first. At the end of that descent, the bow drew across the bass string again, ricocheting the notes higher once more to repeat the movement, the same as the first, but different too. Each time the bow pulled across that bass string, brief and sonorous, a scattering of breadcrumbs on the table near Sarah’s hand vibrated over the wood. (Sheers 2008, 226-27)

45 Here, the narrator insists on the impersonal character of the music’s production but notably avoids the passive voice; the bow, we are told, ‘drew itself’, ‘drew across’, ‘pulled across’ the string. The absence of a musician figure helps focus the reader’s attention on the two people who are listening to the concerto and whose fates the music intertwines. Indeed, the action of the bow on the single bass string figures an encounter or resonance between two different elements, much as Albrecht and Sarah can be considered different elements encountering each other in the farmhouse kitchen.

46 The narrator’s language subtly associates Albrecht with the production of the music; the homonymic term ‘bow’ is used to describe his attitude in the music-listening episode: ‘his bowed head over his folded arms’ (Sheers 2008, 227); ‘his head still bowed’ (Sheers 2008, 228). Albrecht avoids looking at Sarah throughout the time the music is playing and his bowed attitude is suggestive of submission; of the victor asking his victim for forgiveness, perhaps, in an inversion of the relationship dictated by the wartime situation.

47 One of the everyday uses of string, of course, is to bind things together, and what the text also traces here is the engendering of a subtle connection between Albrecht and Sarah, signalled by the downward movement of his head at the start of the paragraph quoted above and the vibration of the breadcrumbs on the table near Sarah’s hand at its end. The text thus suggests the development of a resonance—both the result of physics and an index of emotion—that is set in motion by the music and that connects the two characters; this resonance (the term is explicitly mentioned on pages 227, 229 and 230) between the music and the breadcrumbs on the table at which Sarah is sitting is alluded to three times in the course of the music scene, evoking a fragile and tentative reaching out and connection.

48 In the novel, then, the absent music—absent in that it exists only in Sheers’s ekphrastic prose—is made present, and indeed ‘re-presented’, by the narrator’s description of it and of the characters’ thoughts and feelings as they listen. Once the music has started, the narrative is focalised principally through Sarah’s consciousness, shifting mainly to Albrecht’s when the cello concerto is over. Listening to the first movement, Sarah finds that everything in the room, the table, the dresser, the range, the horseshoe over the door, seemed in contact with a new element. The trees she could see through the window over Albrecht’s shoulder now moved not with the buffeting wind as before, but under the command of the rise, fall and procession of the music. (Sheers 2008, 227)

49 Sarah’s familiar surroundings are transfigured by the music that fills her kitchen and overflows into the world outside. The emptiness and blankness she had experienced in the analepsis at the start of this episode become instead a plenitude—‘her kitchen filled

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with more sound than it had ever heard’ (Sheers 2008, 228). On the conclusion of the first movement, a similar transformative interaction or resonance between the environment of the farmhouse and the music is described: ‘The wind outside seemed amplified and a blackbird’s song rang through the yard, as if all the sound about them had been washed clean in the cello’s music’ (Sheers 2008, 229).15

50 If Sarah’s perception of her surroundings is thus transfigured by its being bathed in the music emanating from the gramophone in her farmhouse kitchen, the narrative also traces the thoughts and feelings she experiences as she listens to the concerto. When the ‘Sarabande’ begins, for example: Sarah found her own head dropping now and her eyes closing. It was beautiful but she could not bear it. The music seemed to know. About her hours on the hillside, the wind like the sound of her own blood in her ears, the long nights lying awake in her abandoned bed. It was as if the notes of her heart over these past three months had been dictated directly to the hand that drew this bow over these strings to describe, so perfectly, the complex yet simple geometry of her damaged soul. (Sheers 2008, 229)

51 Sarah recognises here that the music somehow expresses her state of mind and gives expression to her feelings. In the novel, therefore, the music fulfils the ‘empathic’ function (Chion 1995, 228) that is often assigned to it in film by helping to express and reflect the emotions of the characters: ‘the music seemed to know’. That the music chosen by Albrecht is able to produce this effect in Sarah in the novel evokes the sympathy that exists between them.

52 In the film, the diegetic music by Mendelssohn also serves to arouse an emotional response in the audience; emotions that may well reflect—and help intensify—those attributed to and expressed by the characters on screen. In his introductory chapter to Literature and Film, Robert Stam points out that there is a considerable difference between mentioning a piece of music in a text and hearing it performed, even more so when the hearing is combined with seeing filmic images, when there is ‘a synergistic interaction between tracks’ (Stam and Raengo 18). In the film, of course, the music is experienced by the characters as well as the audience and does not need to be represented within the limits of another signifying system. In other words, the auditory plenitude of the music is directly present in the film and does not require representation in another semiotic code. Its effects on the characters (manifest in facial expressions, gestures, words) are embodied and enacted by the actors and witnessed by the audience, whom the music also affects. While it is playing, the music itself, combined with the attitudes and facial expressions of the actors, is both a substitute for and suggestive of the intense internal drama—the ‘inward vision’ (Sheers 2008, 228)— being experienced by the characters and that is explored at length in the novel.16 In the film, the lack of dialogue while the music plays is fundamental to the synergistic suggestion via the music and images of the state of intense yet restrained emotion experienced by the characters.

53 The connections between Sarah and Albrecht traced by the narrator’s detailed descriptions of the music and the ways it is perceived by and affects the characters in the novel are suggested on screen by the montage and its alternate shots of each immobile character as the music plays. The music and the montage also serve to build tension between the characters, in anticipation of the rupture and interruption to come. Rarely are the heads and faces of both protagonists completely contained in the

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same close-up shot once the music has started playing, a disjuncture that perhaps reflects the thwarted romance that is being played out between them.

Dissonances

54 In the novel, the two protagonists listen to the whole cello concerto, and it is only after the stylus has reached the end of the record that Sarah asks Albrecht why he is there and then rebukes him for what his nation has done, alluding to the deportation and extermination of the Jews: ‘I know what you’ve done […]. So don’t cover yourself with this music. Because I see you’ (Sheers 2008, 231). In the film, on the other hand, Sarah abruptly puts an end to the performance, removing the stylus from the record with a jarring zippy noise that sharply interrupts the flow of Mendelssohn’s music.17 She then almost snarls at Albrecht when reproaching him for what he, as a representative soldier and citizen of the German nation, has done; her words are almost identical to those in the novel: ‘I know what you did. […] So don’t come here and cover yourself with your music. Because I see you’ (43:40). In both novel and film, Albrecht’s attempts, via the music, to have Sarah see him in a different light, appear to have failed; she can— or will only allow herself to—see him as an enemy rather than just a man. In addition, Sarah’s insistence in both the novel and film on the fact that she ‘sees’ Albrecht indicates her refusal to submit to the auditory power of the music and to the story he seems to wish to develop from it; she explicitly resists and rejects the emotional resonance that Albrecht has sought to instigate between them by means of the music.

55 Despite this similarity in the conclusion of the confrontation in both the novel and film, the tone of the music sequence in the film is somewhat different, and Sarah’s putting an abrupt end to the impromptu concert is one of the symptoms of this difference. Her resistance to Albrecht’s gesture is therefore more assertive and pronounced. The ‘concert’—or Albrecht’s attempted indirect dialogue with Sarah via the music—lasts 9 shots and 1 minute 18 seconds (41:55-43:13). The long-held close-up of the gramophone (41:55-42:22) after we see Albrecht’s hand setting the stylus on the record has its counterpart in the close-up (43:04-43:07) of Sarah’s hand determinedly removing the stylus from the record. This act of resistance, one might argue, visually prepares the viewer for Sarah’s subsequent aggressively defiant verbal reaction towards Albrecht, which in the novel comes as more of a surprise given the nature of Sarah’s musings as the music is playing.18

56 Furthermore, the act of listening to the music is, in the film, more tense and dramatic: both characters remain standing at opposite sides of the kitchen and feature in separate shots, whereas in the novel Sarah is depicted as sitting at the table. The lengthy close-up of the gramophone is followed by an equally lengthy medium shot of a tired- and emotional-looking Sarah (42:22-42:34), with her arms hanging at her side, her pallid face rather ghostly against her black dress and the shadows in the kitchen; there is then an equivalent lengthy medium shot of Albrecht (42:34-42:45) leaning against the kitchen wall, his slightly transpiring face half in shadow and his arms folded almost defensively across his chest. While the novel describes Albrecht as standing with his head bowed, the film’s protagonists are gazing at each other while the music plays, though they are not in shot together. The editing here thus resembles a classical shot/reverse-shot, but the dialogue between the characters consists in this instance of musical notes rather than words.

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57 There is also a subtle shift in the coincidence of dialogue and physical actions in the film which is significant. In the novel, Albrecht responds to Sarah’s accusation that he thinks her husband is dead with the negative ‘Maybe not’, adding that the war may be full of terrors but that it is full of miracles too (the regeneration he has undergone in the valley being one such miracle). We then read: ‘They remained like that for several seconds before Albrecht straightened up and turned round. ‘I should leave. I am sorry if I’ve upset you, Mrs Lewis.’ He fastened the latches on the box and slid it off the table’ (Sheers 2008, 232). In so doing, Albrecht is also symbolically packing away his hopes after Sarah’s angry outburst.

58 In the film, however, the shot of Albrecht closing the latches on the gramophone follows Sarah’s question, ‘You think he’s dead don’t you?’ Before Albrecht gives a verbal answer to Sarah’s question, we see a close-up shot of his hands fastening the latches, and the loud clunk this action makes seems to undercut the answer he then gives to Sarah’s question (‘Maybe not’) and contradict the slight hope it admits; indeed the black gramophone case itself might also be seen as an avatar of a coffin, thus perhaps suggesting the tenor of Albrecht’s true thoughts about the fate of Sarah’s husband.19

59 There is thus a shift in emphasis in this scene between the novel and the film, with the filmic music scene having a more conflictual and forlorn tenor due to Sarah’s brusque interruption of the music. Her refusal to listen any further to the music Albrecht has brought her and her insistence on ‘seeing’ him are a form of resistance to what is referred to in the novel as ‘the resonance of the music’ (Sheers 2008, 230).

Conclusion: resonance and resistance

60 The cardinal function of the music scene is the same in both novel and film, precipitating a crisis—an eruption of dissonance and dissent on Sarah’s part—which then sets Albrecht and Sarah’s relationship on a new footing and leads both characters to new knowledge. Albrecht subsequently reveals to Sarah the real reason for his presence in the valley and takes her to see the concealed Mappa Mundi, thereby establishing between them a complicity different to that he had hoped for when he brought her the music. In both works, resistance and resonance are in play as key notions in the music scene (and indeed throughout the story), but to differing degrees. The music resonates more with Sarah in the novel, and the music scene’s mood is more contemplative and meditative (at least until Sarah’s angry outburst); in the film— thanks to the interrupted music—it is more confrontational, and Sarah’s resistance to Albrecht is heightened.

61 While I chose to focus on the music scene—with the presence of its extra signifying system—as a particularly interesting entry point into the adaptation of the novel, other narrative mutations and additions also reflect this heightening of Sarah’s resistance to Albrecht in the film. Some examples from the latter part of the film include Sarah’s ‘vision’ of her husband in Llanthony Priory; the final flashback to Tom’s kissing her goodbye on the forehead when he left her as she slept; her poisoning her dogs; the fact that it is Albrecht, rather than an SS Albion soldier, who opens Sarah’s bible to learn of her death at the end (she has inscribed the date of her death next to that of her birth in her bible). In this sense, the music scene is emblematic of the tenor and effect of the numerous adjustments and the redistribution of intensities made to the story in its transcoding from novel to film. In very general terms, and to misappropriate somewhat

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a musical term, the adjustments include shifts in key: Sarah’s resistance is heightened in the film, while the theme of resonance is more pronounced in the novel. The shift in both is apparent in the music scene.

62 Studying the adaptation of the music scene in the film also highlights that which resists translation from one medium into another. In the novel, the music scene is protracted as the music has to be re-presented in another semiotic (here linguistic) code. As the music ‘plays’ silently, the interior worlds of both characters can be explored with great temporal and spatial freedom. The text interweaves a depiction of the music being played by the gramophone with Sarah’s internal emotional response to the music. Such suppleness, as Cartmell and Whelehan have suggested, is characteristic of literature’s ‘rich synergistic capability’ (Cartmell and Whelehan 10) within a single semiotic code. Somewhat paradoxically, the resonant and emotive power of music is more prominent in the novel, where the ‘silent’ and absent music is re-presented and its effects articulated in words by the narrator. In the film, on the other hand, the scene is condensed and the (recorded) music is played (mimesis), while the tenor of the intense interior worlds and emotions of the characters is suggested through a synergistic combination—or synchresis—of the diegetic, ‘on-screen’20 music and the actors’ facial expressions and physical performances. The emotive power of the music, while directly experienced by the characters as well as the audience, is also conveyed by the fact that Sarah feels compelled to interrupt it as something to be resisted.

63 The ‘common ground’ (Sheers 2008, 226) of the music scenes in film and novel thus displays differing degrees and kinds of resonance and resistance, calibrated in accordance with the technical constraints of each artistic medium. In Sheers’s words, ‘the very practical elements of film-making sometimes force you to make changes’ (Sheers, DVD). Such changes, of course, also combine with the aesthetic and interpretive choices made by the screenwriters and director in the adaptation process. The novel and film say things differently, but also slightly different things. Operating in audio-visual-kinetics, the film foregrounds Sarah’s overt resistance to the music she— and the film’s audience—hears, while the novel, in an extended musical ekphrasis, gives more weight to the resonant power of the ‘silent’ music and its effect on the characters’ states of mind, especially Sarah’s. In other words, the intensities of resonance and resistance represented and perceived in the novel and the film reflect the constraints of these art forms, their respective discursive and technical limits inflecting the shape of the stories they tell.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Amit Gupta’. United Agents. http://www.unitedagents.co.uk/amit-gupta. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Bluestone, George. Novels into Film. 1957. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

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Bradshaw, Peter. ‘Resistance–review’. The Guardian, 24 November 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/24/resistence-review. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Cartmell, Deborah, and Imelda Whelehan (eds). The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Chion, Michel, L’Audiovision, Paris : Nathan, 1990.

---. La Musique au cinéma. Paris : Fayard, 1995.

Clerc, Jeanne-Marie. Littérature et Cinéma. Paris: Nathan, 1993.

Crompton, Sarah. ‘Resistance: the small British movie Resistance really deserves to be seen’. The Telegraph, 25 November 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/film-blog/8916702/Resistance-the-small-British- movie-Resistance-really-deserves-to-be-seen.html. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Corrigan, Timothy. Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. London: Routledge, 2011.

Desmond, John M. and Peter Hawkes. Adaptation: Studying Film and Literature. New York: McGraw Hill, 2006.

French, Philip. ‘Resistance–review’. The Observer, 27 November 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/nov/27/resistance-review-french-owen-sheers. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Giles-Keddie, Lisa. ‘Interview with Resistance Director Amit Gupta’. Heyuguys, 25 November 2011. http://www.heyuguys.com/interview-with-resistance-writer-director-amit-gupta/. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Griffiths, Lloyd. ‘Owen Sheers. Resistance, Q&A’. Buzz, 10 November 2011. https://www.buzzmag.co.uk/uncategorized/owen-sheers-resistance-qa/. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Gupta, Amit. ‘DVD commentary [with Owen Sheers]’, Resistance, dir. Amit Gupta, Big Rich Films, Film Agency for Wales, Square One Entertainment, 2011.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

Leitch, Thomas. Film Adaptation and its Discontents. From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009.

McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film. An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Mellet, Laurent, and Shannon Wells-Lassagne. Etudier l’adaptation filmique. Cinéma anglais, cinéma américain. Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2010.

Moore, Dylan. ‘Resistance’. The Arts Desk, 21 November 2011. http://www.theartsdesk.com/film/resistance. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Robey, Tim. ‘Resistance’. The Telegraph, 25 November 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/filmreviews/8914013/Resistance-review.html. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Row, Jess. ‘The Plot Against Britain’. New York Times, 2 March 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/books/review/Row-t.html. Accessed 10 February 2019.

Sheers, Owen. Resistance. 2007. London: Faber & Faber, 2008.

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---. ‘DVD commentary [with Amit Gupta]’, Resistance, dir. Amit Gupta, Big Rich Films, Film Agency for Wales, Square One Entertainment, 2011.

---. ‘When the Nazis Came to Hay’. The Telegraph, 23 May 2011. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/hay-festival/8523902/Hay-Festival-When-the-Nazis-came- to-Hay.html. Accessed 10 February 2019.

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NOTES

1. Sheers (b. 1974) is one of Wales’s most prominent contemporary writers. He has published two collections of poetry, two novels, several works for theatre and television, non-fiction, and was named the Welsh Rugby Union’s first Writer in Residence in 2012. Twice awarded the Wales Book of the Year, he has been Professor in Creativity at Swansea University since 2015. Gupta (b. 1972), who writes and directs for film, theatre, television and radio, contacted Sheers after reading Resistance to suggest they collaborate on a screenplay. In 2007 he wrote and directed a short film called Love Story, and Jadoo—a feature film adaptation, this time of a radio play he wrote for BBC Radio 4, which was released in 2013 and selected for the 2013 Berlin Film Festival. He has since written and directed another feature film called One Crazy Thing, released in 2018. 2. DVD audio commentary. Hereafter: Sheers, DVD. 3. DVD audio commentary. Hereafter: Gupta, DVD. 4. Sheers also uses ‘tone’ to describe what he and Gupta sought to retain while adapting the novel for the screen: ‘I mean “tone” was the word that you were always talking about early on, and I think that’s what you adapt isn’t it?’ (Sheers, DVD). 5. 1) Sarah relives being rescued by Albrecht in the snow; 2) Albrecht collects dog tags from dead soldiers in the snow on the Russian front; 3) Sarah remembers a past Christmas with Tom and other men; 4) Albrecht relives a combat scene; 5) Sarah remembers her wedding night with Tom; 6) Sarah has a flashback of her wedding; 7) At the agricultural show George recognises Alex as the German soldier he saw at a checkpoint; 8) George remembers Tommy Atkins telling him that collaboration cannot be tolerated; 9) George recalls Tommy Atkins asking him how he wants to survive; 10) Tom kisses Sarah goodbye (this is an ‘omniscient’ and not a subjective flashback as Sarah was unconscious at the time). 6. Sheers also points out that Gupta and he agree that a ‘faithful’ adaptation makes a bad film; they are in fact ‘both fans of bold adaptations. If you’re going to move a story into a different medium for story-telling it should change’ (Sheers, DVD). 7. Sarah, we are told, hoped ‘that the place would still hold a resonance of that day’ (Sheers 2008, 335). 8. ‘Albrecht hadn’t been able to resist and as Alex started the car he’d loaded the gramophone and kit bag of recently introduced 33rpm records onto the back seat’ (Sheers 2008, 108). 9. See also: ‘Tom had, after all, just gone and left nothing other than a fading scent on his clothes and the ghost of his impression in their mattress’ (Sheers 2008, 223). 10. ‘Sarah’s eyes were immediately drawn to the thick square leather case Albrecht had carried in his right hand’ (Sheers 2008, 222); ‘She couldn’t take her eyes off the case. It was a rigid box

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covered in dark leather, battered and scratched with use. Her mind raced to wild possibilities as to what it might contain’ (Sheers 2008, 223). 11. Yet in the novel, Sarah never admits to Tom that the valley has been occupied by Germans who are actually helping the women to survive, and finds herself compelled to be economical with the truth to her absent husband. 12. In the novel, Albrecht is first described wearing mainly civilian clothes at a later stage in the story, namely when Sarah takes him to see Landor’s house in the Llanthony Valley: ‘He still wore a pair of grey-green uniform trousers, Wehrmacht-issue boots and an army water bottle on his belt. But from the waist up he was dressed in clothes from The Court; a heavy tweed jacket over a shirt and a dark blue jumper’ (Sheers 2008, 279). It should also be noted that, while the novel describes the scholarly Albrecht as wearing spectacles, being a leading man in a film means that Tom Wlaschiha’s character is relieved of the deficiency of short-sightedness. 13. The emotively resonant power of music is evoked in an analepsis in the music scene in the novel: the German soldiers have been listening throughout the winter to the records acquired by Albrecht: ‘The music had stilled them. At times it had lifted them too’ (Sheers 2008, 226). 14. In the film, the music scene can be regarded as a sort of mise en abyme of the way a film’s own musical score operates as an emotional prompt to the audience, in whom it may arouse empathy with the protagonists’ plight. 15. Sheers also compares the emotional release experienced by Sarah when listening to the music to the thawing of the snow along the river: ‘So much sound, so intricate and yet so simple. The weight of the winter months seemed to collapse about her, undermined by this music like the blocks of snow along the banks of the Olchon, weakened and loosened by the river’s renewed energy’ (Sheers 2008, 227-28). Sarah’s experience in the novel corresponds in many respects to what Michel Chion defines as the ‘musical parenthesis’ in film: ‘La parenthèse musicale dans beaucoup de films, incarnée par ces séquences de bonheur ou de mort, de rêverie ou de destin qui correspondent presque toujours à un moment où les bruits et les paroles s’effacent, représente un moment de jouissance, de plaisir, d’émoi, parfois d’horreur, échappant au fil linéaire et chronométrique du temps’ (Chion 1995, 212). 16. Sheers has described the actors as ‘lending their nervous system to the characters, doing so much acting with their faces’ (Griffiths). 17. In the novel, the music ends thus: ‘The needle ran to the end of the final groove and stayed there, riding the revolving thud of the record’s silence, the pulse of nothing playing into the room’ (Sheers 2008, 230). 18. Note the juxtaposition of mood (‘glazed’, ‘blushed’ and ‘tender’ versus ‘clean’, ‘hard’ and ‘pared’) in the following two paragraphs: Sarah was looking directly at him. Her eyes were glazed with tears, the skin about them blushed with unspent crying. He allowed himself the slightest of tender smiles. ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. Her voice was clean and hard as bone, pared of all depth by her anger. Her eyes remained locked on his. ‘You’ve won this war. Why don’t you just leave now? Leave us alone?’ (Sheers 2008, 230). In the novel, the abrupt change of mood is also highlighted by the shift in meaning of the term ‘needle’ in this scene: Sheers refers to the gramophone’s stylus as a ‘needle’ on three occasions when the record is playing (pages 226, 229, 230); subsequently, we are told that Sarah ‘used her husband’s name as a needle to pierce him’ (Sheers 2008, 231). An instrument of potential momentary harmony becomes a weapon. 19. Death is invoked in the text of the novel, but in relation to Albrecht rather than Tom: ‘Standing there like that he looked like a body prepared for the coffin’ (Sheers 2008, 227). 20. I have translated Michel Chion’s ‘musique d’écran’ as ‘on-screen music’ (Chion 1990, 71).

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ABSTRACTS

Owen Sheers’s counterfactual wartime novel Resistance (2007) was adapted and released as a film in 2011. The article first gives a brief overview of the film’s reception and the adaptation of the novel before undertaking a detailed comparative analysis of the central scene involving diegetic music in both novel and film. The study focuses on the adjustments—the resonances and resistances—that the transcoding of this scene from one medium to another entails and reflects on how they impact the narrative and its interpretation.

Résistance (2007), le roman de guerre contrefactuel d’Owen Sheers, fut adapté au cinéma en 2011. Cet article donne d’abord un bref aperçu de la réception du film et de l’adaptation filmique du roman avant de procéder à une analyse comparative détaillée de la scène centrale dans le roman et le film, laquelle tourne autour d’une musique diégétique. L’étude dégage les ajustements – les résonances et les resistances – qui résultent du transcodage de cette scène d’un médium à un autre et réfléchit à la façon dont ils impactent la narration et son interprétation.

INDEX

Keywords: adaptation studies, diegetic music Mots-clés: études d’adaptation, musique diégétique, Resistance

AUTHORS

ANNELIE FITZGERALD Maître de conferences` Université Toulouse – Jean-Jaurès [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

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Ariel's Corner

Emeline Jouve (dir.) Theater

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“It’s Time for the System to be Refigured”: An Interview with Playwright Marcus Scott Interview

Raphaëlle Tchamitchian

Weblinks

Marcus Scott website: https://writemarcus.tumblr.com/

Biography of the Interviewee

Marcus Scott is a playwright, musical theater writer, librettist, journalist, blogger critic and teaching artist. His work includes the musical Cherry Bomb, the Fidelio (which was called “urgent, powerful, and poignant” by The New York Times and “imaginative, vital, and heartbreaking” by The New Yorker), and the plays Tumbleweed, Natural Selection, Blood Orange, Double Rainbow and Malaise . His work has notably received readings or development at Joe’s Pub, 54 Below, Cherry Lane Theater (Downtown Urban Arts Festival), Theater 80 St. Marks (Downtown Urban Arts Festival) and New York Festival (at the Pershing Square Signature Theatre). And his writing has appeared in American Theatre, Soule, Elle, Out, Essence, Playbill, Broadway Black, among others.

The Interview

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Fig 1

Marcus Scott. Credits: Thomas Dunn

Raphaëlle Tchamitchian: What is happening right now in New York City regarding the sanitary crisis? Are venues expected to reopen anytime soon? Marcus Scott: The city was supposed to open in July, but everything’s been pushed back until February 2021 with a hard open probably around April, because we’re expecting a second or third wave of the pandemic. In terms of what’s happening in the industry, the Tony Awards are going to take place digitally this Fall for the first time. They’ve just announced the nominees. In terms of my own personal journey, I’ve lost out on a lot of different opportunities, including things that would have changed my career. I lost an opportunity for an opera that I wrote, that was supposed to premiere at the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. I lost out an opportunity for a play of mine to premiere at the Signature Theatre here in New York. Throughout this process though, I’ve been commissioned to write short musicals for a digital format. Because of Zoom, that has its own style written into it, my writing is changing: characters are not jumping from scene to scene as much, they all talk to the camera, and a lot of plays are monologues or two-handers.

RT: Like the rest of the country, American theatre is going through a political and racial crisis. How is Black Lives Matter changing theatre? Marcus Scott: Right now, different establishments in America are going through a rude awakening. BIPOC (Black and Indigenous People of Color) are coming out from the woodwork. Some of the most interesting artwork is done by women and people of color, and we very much feel there’s not a lot of opportunities for us. In America, before Hamilton, 82% of the people getting produced in theaters around the country were white men. In a post-Hamilton world, about five years later, this number has

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gone down to 70-72% of white men. That leaves 28-30% to all the other groups of people, warring up in the margins: women, people of color, black people, indigenous people, queer people, trans people, people who have different bodies… They’re all fighting for the “token spot”: the room left by white cis males for one woman, one black person, one Native American, etc. In the theater community, people are really fighting back.

RT: How is the fight taking place? Marcus Scott: People are connecting within communities. For instance, we’ve had our very first Antonyo Awards1, digitally hosted by Broadway Black2, a media company that promotes black theatre and reports on what’s happening in the black community. Awards were only given to black artists, and the whole show looked at our accomplishments from the very beginning in Tin Pan Alley. It was a very popular broadcast, but also divisive because there wasn’t a lot of categories; it was very much an actor’s award as opposed to a writer’s or a composer’s award. But point of the matter, the Antonyo Awards looked at the dearth of opportunity for black people on Broadway and in American theater. For example, one technical award (of two) was given to the only person who was working on that role, because there’s only one black person working in that one role on Broadway. A number of other tools are being activated, like The Kilroy’s, a collective of LA and NYC playwrights, directors and producers, that issue a yearly list of the most exciting and worth-producing plays by women, trans and non-binary playwrights3. The Lilys4 also support and honor women, and they initiated The Count5, which studies diversity within regional theaters seasons. Finally, there is a list for Asian American theatre.

RT: Can you speak about the new coalition of BIPOC theatre artists “We See You White American Theatre”? Marcus Scott: Yes, so “We See You White American Theatre” published a 31-page long manifesto6 about a month ago signed by people like actress Audra McDonald (a multiple Tony Awards winner), Oscar-winning actress Viola Davis and playwright Lynn Nottage (two-times winner of the Pulitzer Prize). Within the community, while a lot of people have given unbridled support to the movement, there is some opposition, sometimes even animosity—see for instance the lengthy paper issued by Tony Award winner actress Tonya Pinkins7. There are two schools of thought. First, armchair activists who are speaking out and demanding certain things in a very politicized way. Second, people who emphasize the action part of the fight. Demands are great but, outside of saying “this is not fair,” what are you doing physically? Are you marching on the streets? Are you unionizing black talent? Outside of the movement helping you, how are you helping the person behind you?

RT: I’m guessing you’re part of the second school… Marcus Scott: I am. I marched during Occupy Wall Street, I spoke out for Black Lives Matter, I took the streets, I signed petitions, I went to offices and talked to people… I used my platforms as a journalist, as a playwright and as a concerned citizen. I find that we can make as many lists of demands as we want, we firstly have to do something. Some of the demands of “We See You White American Theatre” are overkill. One of the things they want people to do is acknowledge we all live and work

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on Indigenous and Native American land: I love that people are acknowledging it, I get it, but anybody who reads a history book knows it was stolen. So what are we doing beyond that? We should be giving money and resources, giving Native Americans work, commissioning indigenous talent, offering free tickets to indigenous people kids. I feel there’s a lot of manufacturing wokeness and there’s a lot of woke- washing that’s going on right now in the theater community—and by “woke- washing” I mean theaters or companies that will give money for a particular month or a particular moment and then disappear8. I find that, to a certain extent, “We See You White American Theatre” is telling people to feel a certain way instead of having a conversation. A lot of liberals are not making any compromise, and are refusing to have a dialogue with conservatives, and vice versa. There is also a lot of centrist behavior afraid to take sides—and a lot of that is because people are behind a screen.

RT: Is the “We See You White American Theatre” movement getting responses from theater leaders? Marcus Scott: A lot of theater heads are stepping down, and a new group of people are coming in. Usually they’re also white men or white women, but they’re younger and a little bit more “hip.” There are also diversity and inclusion hires, but a lot of the BIPOC people coming in are either interns or fellows, either doing managing, technical or administrative jobs. Rarely are these people on the artistic side. But the biggest change is that the American theatre subscriber base is changing almost overnight. Traditionally, the biggest subscriber base (regional theaters and Broadway alike) is white middle-aged middle-class women from the boomer generation or generation X. That kind of base has views rooted in a certain type of racism, which is why theaters are not producing the most challenging and artistically fulfilling works. Today, we’re trying to diversify the people who are coming into the theater by giving initiatives to students of color and free seats for black creators. There is a lot more of an outcry for BIPOC critics as well. My biggest critique though is that we are not holding BIPOC institutions to their standard right now. I’m seeing a lot of people attacking predominantly white institutions (as they should be) but not holding black—particularly black because I’m black—institutions accountable. Yet, those institutions sometimes uphold white supremacist practices. For instance, a lot of BIPOC theaters, while doing performative work for the community, won’t pay attention to a black playwright until a white institution validates them. Most of them don’t have a lot of money (white institutions may have millions of dollars per year, and a lot of BIPOC theaters will have at most two million dollars, which is not a lot of money), so they have to make strategic decisions. Often, they will have a windfall, the one event that they know everyone’s gonna be at no matter what they do, and next to that they will produce programs for emerging talent. But a lot of the time these emerging talents are people who have been around for years and have been validated by white institutions. They are not bringing in people who frankly have the right kind of acumen.

RT: Doesn’t that have as much to do with capitalism—not taking risks for money—as it has to do with racism? Marcus Scott: It’s definitely capitalism but capitalism doesn’t exist without white supremacy; they’re both connected. The value of the black dollar is huge: if black people around the world took one day off, we would take down the global economy. Whether in cinema (Spike Lee, Viola Davis, Angela Bassett, Lee Daniels, Jordan Peele,

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Tyler Perry) or in music (Beyoncé, Rihanna, Lizzo, Megan Thee Stallion, Janelle Monáe—and those are just black women!), we’re killing it right now. We are the most subjugated and demonized people worldwide, and yet at the same time, in a really weird way, people still take black art, fashion and influence in their work—it boggles my mind. In theatre, the person who had the Pulitzer Prize for Drama this year is a black gay man from Detroit who wrote a musical he’s been working in the trenches for 16 years9. He is the person everyone is looking to right now as the voice of American theatre. Several black playwrights are transitioning to television and film. One of the most profitable plays last year on Broadway was Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play. When you compare all that to the fact we are among the 30% of people who are warring in the margins, it’s repugnant. So it’s not enough to say: “it’s capitalism.” Now we’re having a moment, so people want to give two or three spots to black and brown creatives… it’s upsetting because we’ve been saying this for years. As black creators in particular, we have to respond to anti-blackness, to police brutality we’re seeing en masse on television every day, while also fighting for our lives. This is systemic, this is happening everywhere—you’re a part of it as well.

RT: What do you think theater as an art form can do politically? On the one hand, one might believe art cannot have any real political effect on life, because the fight occurs on the streets or in unions; on the other hand, one might think art is political in itself, formally and aesthetically, when it challenges pre-existing notions of what it should be or say. Where do you stand on that matter, regarding theatre in particular? Marcus Scott: I stand on the latter. Art is fundamental. I would not be an artist if I believed otherwise (there’s not enough money! Often, I’m coming from my pocket to create my own art). Art can insight change. There are political exiles from all over the world in America right now who would be murdered on the spot if they’re in their country. In America we’ve had people blacklisted during McCarthyism because they wrote something or acted in something. I mentioned Slave Play earlier: people, particularly white people, felt like they were being attacked. During a talk back, a woman stood up and yelled at the playwright; she was escorted out of the theater. Sweat by Lynn Nottage, which won the Pulitzer Prize, is about the economic bubble bursting in Pennsylvania. The Cost of Living by Martyna Majok, which also won the Pulitzer, is about people who are enduring a life with a disability and are looking for love and looking to be acknowledged as sexual beings. Those plays created conversations that people weren’t having. Beyoncé’s Homecoming celebrated blackness’s wealth, riches and contributions during two hours. A lot of black children cried when Chadwick Boseman died: by playing Black Panther, he affirmed us; he told us we could be superheroes too. We couldn’t do that without art. Other institutions can’t do that. Medicine cures, but how do you learn that you can be a doctor? Most often through some kind of media.

RT: Does that mean you think what theatre can do politically is put black narratives on stage? Marcus Scott: It’s more putting BIPOC, as well as trans and queer people, on creative teams to de-center whiteness. We have been on stage, so it’s about doubling the amount of BIPOC creatives in order to get rid of the “token spot.” Globally, there are more people who look like me than people who look white: put those stories center- stage. I’m not saying that we should be the ones taking over; I’m saying that theatre needs to reflect the world we live in. Put more people of color, and change up the subject matters as well. It’s time for the system to be refigured.

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RT: Well, thank you so much for your time and generosity. Marcus Scott: Thank you for interviewing me, it’s an honor.

NOTES

1. Broadway Black. “Broadway Black Presents the Inaugural Antonyo Awards.” Youtube. Online June 19, 2020. Last accessed October 5, 2020. 2. Broadway! Black. When Theatre Goes Dark. Last accessed October 5, 2020. 3. The Kilroys. Last accessed October 5, 2020. 4. The Lillys. Last accessed October 5, 2020. 5. The Lillys. “The Count.” Last accessed October 5, 2020. 6. We See You White American Theatre. “BIPOC Demands For White American Theatre.” Last accessed October 5, 2020. 7. Pinkins, Tonya. “Why I Am Fed Up With Performative Activism From White and Black Theater Makers.” Medium. Online July 10, 2020. Last accessed October 5, 2020. 8. Born within the context of Black Lives Matter, the term « woke » refers at first to a state of consciousness and alert vis-à-vis the oppression and marginalization of minorities, especially black. Its usage has then spread to larger political and sometimes mundane contexts. 9. Michael R. Jackson for A Strange Loop.

ABSTRACTS

Interview with African American playwright Marcus Scott about the political and racial crisis in American theatre. Led via Skype on September 4th, 2020.

Entretien avec le dramaturge africain américain Marcus Scott autour de la crise politique et raciale du théâtre américain. Mené par Skype le 4 septembre 2020.

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INDEX

Keywords: Marcus Scott, American theatre, black theatre, Broadway, We See You White American Theatre, crisis, race relations, BIPOC Mots-clés: Marcus Scott, théâtre américain, théâtre noir, Broadway, We See You White American Theatre, crise, relations raciales, BIPOC Subjects: Theater

AUTHOR

RAPHAËLLE TCHAMITCHIAN PhD in Theatre Studies Associated member of lab. SeFeA/IRET - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle [email protected]

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Jane Eyre, National Theatre at Home during Lockdown Critique de spectacle / Performance review

Céline Savatier-Lahondès

Informations factuelles sur la pièce

1 Cette adaptation du roman de Charlotte Brontë pour le théâtre est une création de Sally Crookson et The Company. La pièce a été diffusée dans le cadre de National Theatre Home, visible en ligne gratuitement pendant le confinement du 9 au 16 avril 2020, via la plateforme américaine YouTube.

2 La version mise en ligne avait été diffusée auparavant au cinéma par National Theatre Live. Cette adaptation de Jane Eyre (1847) a été jouée au National Theatre à Londres en 2015, en collaboration avec l’Old Vic Theatre de Bristol.

3 Mise en scène : Sally Cookson

4 Durée : 3 heures 15 minutes, avec entracte.

5 Distribution : Jane Eyre : Madeleine Worall Rochester : Felix Hayes Mr Brocklehurst / / Mason : Craig Edwards Helen Burns / Adele / St John / Grace Poole / Abbot : Laura Elphinstone Bertha : Melanie Marshall Bessie / Blanche Ingram / Diana Rivers : Simone Saunders Mrs / Mrs Fairfax : Maggie Tagney Les autres personnages sont joués par les membres de The Company

6 Équipe technique : Décor : Michael Vale Costumes : Katie Sykes Lumière : Aideen Malone Musique : Benji Bower

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Son : Mike Beer & Dominic Bilkey Mouvement : Dan Canham

Liens :

7 National Theatre at Home, Jane Eyre : https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/nt-at- home-jane-eyre

8 National Theatre at Home, Jane Eyre. https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/sites/ default/files/national-theatre-at-home-jane-eyre-resource-pack.pdf

9 Découvrir la pièce visuellement : Brinkhoff/Mögenburg photographies, Jane Eyre : https://www.rbbm.photos/jane-eyre (UK Tour 2017)

Critique

Introduction : Théâtre confiné, théâtre chez soi

10 Empêché de représentations en direct pour un irremplaçable public, le théâtre s’est donné en ligne pendant le confinement dû à la pandémie de Coronavirus. Pour le Théâtre National de Grande-Bretagne, ce fut chaque semaine une pièce offerte, un classique proposé dans une mise en scène contemporaine, accessible et rafraîchissante. L’adaptation de Jane Eyre n’a pas dérogé à cette proposition, tant la mise en scène de 2015 illumine de manière dynamique l’œuvre de Brontë et souligne les traits de son héroïne, et son chemin vers la réalisation de soi.

11 En raison du média choisi, YouTube, les applaudissements muselés par la situation sanitaire se sont transformés en commentaires en direct sur la plateforme, entremêlés eux-mêmes de dons, participations financières pour soutenir le théâtre et régler son billet pour la représentation – une forme de ‘chapeau’ virtuel, en somme, agrémenté des commentaires enthousiastes des spectateurs. La diffusion à portée mondiale grâce au médium américain, inédite pour le National Theatre, tout comme la situation de crise sanitaire, a suscité un sentiment d’appartenance à une audience planétaire, tout en permettant une ‘sortie’ virtuelle au théâtre à Londres depuis chez soi, où que l’on soit. Le National Theatre peut en être ici chaleureusement remercié. Malgré les diffusions de National theatre Live dans les cinémas, beaucoup n’auraient sans doute jamais assisté à ces représentations en temps normal, ainsi que le nombre conséquent de spectateurs en ligne à chaque représentation en a témoigné.

12 Le cadre littéral de la télévision ou de l’ordinateur, outils garants d’accessibilité à l’art confiné, apporte une illustration métaphorique de la situation du spectateur, empêché, lui aussi, dans ses libertés de déplacement, cadré par des règles imposées par la nouvelle rigueur sanitaire nécessaire. Pour Jane Eyre, le cadre se fait multiple car à celui de l’écran s’ajoute celui de la scène du Lyttleton theatre et sa configuration frontale, simple et conventionnelle, à la différence de celle de l’Olivier en forme d’éventail, dans lequel se sont jouées, par exemple, des pièces comme Frankenstein, diffusée pendant le confinement également, ou encore Le cercle de Craie Caucasien de Bertolt Brecht, plus loin de nous, en 1997.

13 La scène correspond à l’œuvre. Cette disposition frontale renforce le cadre et répond par la même à celui dans lequel se trouve enfermée l’héroïne de la pièce, prise par les

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conventions de ce 19e siècle qui emprisonne les corps et les âmes. Tout comme Jane ne voit pas au-delà de la boîte dans laquelle elle est enfermée et se débat pour trouver un sens à sa situation, le spectateur, ravi d’un côté de pouvoir assister au spectacle, essaie cependant de s’accoutumer au cadre réglementaire dans lequel il se retrouve forcé et de tirer du sens de cette situation inédite.

14 La mise en scène de Sally Cookson fournit certainement du sens tant elle illumine le roman par un dialogue entre texte, personnages, mouvements, décor, lumière et musique. Tout fait sens et clarifie l’œuvre, fournissant ainsi une matière riche à l’étude théâtrale comme au commentaire littéraire.

Le décor

15 Le décor de Jane Eyre rappelle le théâtre de tréteaux par sa configuration générale – une plateforme surélevée – et le matériau de construction – le bois, un bois brut, naturel, presque non travaillé. Comme sur la gravure de 1620 montrant la représentation de Mondor et Tabarin place Dauphine à Paris1 la scène principale, au centre, est entourée d’une structure rectangulaire, des rideaux venant fermer l’espace sur les côtés et au fond. Cela a pour effet de créer une ‘boîte’ dans laquelle Jane est enfermée et d’où, comme d’un ‘escape game’, elle va devoir s’extraire. Chez Jane se joue une lutte entre sa condition, imposée par le carcan social, et le goût presque inconscient et inné de sa propre liberté. Le décor permet de rendre visible cette lutte car plusieurs niveaux de tréteaux, reliés par des échelles et des pans inclinés, donnent à voir l’évolution de Jane, entre descentes et ascensions. Malgré tout, le décor reste simple et sobre, et renvoie à cette même simplicité qui caractérise Jane (« plainess »).

16 Le rideau blanc permet tous les jeux de lumière qui eux-mêmes disent encore le personnage de Jane, sa simplicité et son maintien, son merveilleux dénuement, mais avant tout et particulièrement ses émotions intérieures. Le rouge représente l’amour, comme avant le mariage de Jane, où le attire tous les regards et échappe en même temps aux personnages tant il semble inatteignable, dans sa demeure céleste scintillante.2 Les lumières ajoutent à l’éblouissement et au rêve de mariage avec Rochester, sur le point de devenir réalité... Le rideau entourant la scène sur les côtés et le fond crée une enveloppe englobante qui contribue à rendre Jane immensément présente puisqu’il reflète ses émotions autant qu’il domine l’ensemble et fait écho aux actions se déroulant sur scène.

17 Le décor étant fixe, les différents lieux sont délimités par des jeux de lumière et des zones d’ombre venant ouvrir ou restreindre l’espace, comme lorsque Jane est au chevet d’Hélène mourante. La couleur bleue qui envahit le rideau caractérise Thornfield Hall, demeure de Rochester, archétype de l’architecture gothique, insondable et mystérieuse comme son propriétaire. Ce dernier dit d’ailleurs à ce propos : « I like Thornfield, with its old crow trees and lines of dark windows ». Les fenêtres descendues des cintres s’ouvrent et se ferment pour signifier le passage du temps et des saisons, et renvoient tour à tour à l’enfermement et à l’envie de liberté de Jane. Les lumières descendues elles aussi des cintres rendent l’endroit éblouissant, magique et enchanteur, surtout pour une jeune gouvernante sortie de l’orphelinat.

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Fig.1

18 L’architecture labyrinthique de Thornfield et ses différents niveaux dans lesquels Jane se perd, au sens propre comme au figuré, sont rendus par les niveaux de plateaux et par les échelles représentant les escaliers. Pour traduire l’impression de désorientation procurée par le bâtiment, le troisième étage se situe à nouveau en bas sur la scène principale, pas en hauteur. Enfin, lorsque Thornfield brûle, des flammes s’élèvent depuis le fond du décor, et de sombres éclats tombent depuis les cintres, sur les fenêtres cassées.3 Le rêve se brise, mais aussi l’enfermement. Et là commence l’errance de Jane Eyre, qui aboutira à sa libération.

Jane

19 Comme vu plus haut, le décor entier sert le personnage principal et entre en résonnance avec lui. Cependant, la mise en scène de Sally Cookson offre aussi une incarnation de Jane dans d’autres éléments.

20 Tout d’abord, la trajectoire du roman, cette ligne du bildungsroman qui offre à Jane Eyre une construction d’elle-même est rendue sur scène par le mouvement, par les nombreuses chorégraphies opérées lors des changements de lieux, par exemple. Jane y est entourée des personnages-chorus qui lui servent de voix intérieure. Il s’agit d’un groupe d’acteurs agissant à plusieurs reprises autour de Jane pour refléter sa complexité intérieure et ses pensées, notamment concernant Rochester, mais aussi lorsqu’elle court pour aller d’un lieu à un autre, ou bien pour revêtir sa robe de mariée.

21 L’actrice choisie est de relativement petite taille et correspond à la description du livre (« little friend » dit Rochester). Elle est simple, sans maquillage, sans apprêt, naturelle. La robe qu’elle porte, d’un gris uni, illustre cette nature. D’un style 19e siècle, les robes dessinées par Katie Sykes restent relativement courtes (au-dessus de la cheville) et permettent ainsi suffisamment de liberté de mouvement pour grimper aux diverses échelles du décor. Ceci donne un air de modernité aux costumes et illustre la propre modernité de Jane Eyre dans sa volonté d’émancipation féminine. Entre liberté et

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contrainte, les costumes aussi illustrent le propos de la pièce et le paradoxe dans lequel se trouve Jane – exister telle qu’elle est ou bien mourir.

Fig. 2

22 La mort s’incarne dans les costumes féminins, sauf dans celui de Bertha. Les filles de l’orphelinat de Lowood où Jane est envoyée enfant portent ce type de robe grise, et nombre d’entre elles, à l’instar de certains membres de la famille de Charlotte Brontë, trouvent la mort dans ce lieu triste, de fièvre typhoïde, souvent. Cookson choisit de faire s’élever de multiples robes grises et simples au-dessus de la scène, comme autant de dépouilles d’enfants portées en majesté, procurant ainsi force et tristesse au récit théâtral. Au moment du mariage, la robe grise de Jane est ôtée et suspendue elle aussi au-dessus de la scène. Elle s’élève, comme pour signifier la mort de son ancien moi, et d’une vie triste et sans attrait. Des cintres, descend la robe de mariée et Jane revêt ensuite le blanc qui doit l’unir à Rochester : « Not so poor and plain after all » dit-il. Les personnages autour de Jane miment ses gestes alors qu’ils l’aident à se vêtir, confirmant ainsi leur rôle de démultiplication de la personnalité complexe de Jane. C’est bien grâce à cette complexité intérieure, grâce à son intelligence et auto analyse que Jane tend à quitter l’habit de son siècle et à embrasser la modernité.

23 Cependant, tout à son siècle, elle se livre à l’homme qui cause à première vue sa perte. Ainsi, la voix caverneuse et profonde de Rochester – Felix Hayes – est la fosse dans laquelle elle tombe, comme engouffrée, mangée. L’homme a tout d’un maître, il faut dire. Cookson choisit de le montrer par la présence d’un homme dans le rôle de Pilot, le chien de Rochester. Le double entendre induit par l’image de l’homme-chien renforce le pouvoir de domination du maître des lieux – certes l’acteur joue bien un chien, mais c’est aussi un homme, et cela pose question. Les cheveux roux et la longue barbe de Hayes ajoutent encore au côté inquiétant et ambigu de Rochester, personnage type de roman gothique. Cependant, tout puissant qu’il soit, Rochester se confronte à l’incarnation puissante de Bertha, son épouse légitime. C’est peut-être ici que la mise en scène de Cookson s’éloigne le plus de l’époque d’écriture du roman pour entrer dans la modernité et aborder des questions qui préoccupent encore notre époque contemporaine.

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Bertha

24 Le personnage de Bertha apparaît dans Jane Eyre comme le danger de la folie, la sauvage venue des îles lointaines, l’instinct animal qui doit absolument mourir en l’Homme pour qu’il trouve la paix. Cependant, l’adaptation théâtrale travaille la notion de folie et Bertha apparaît, sans que le spectateur le sache, depuis le début de la pièce, incarnée par la chanteuse de Jazz et actrice Melanie Marshall. La musique live et la voix de la chanteuse illustrent les pensées et l’état émotionnel de Jane, depuis le début de la pièce. Puis, au moment du mariage avorté, c’est bien la chanteuse en robe rouge qui revêt le voile dont Jane s’est séparée. Bertha était là depuis le début, comme une figure qui hantait Jane tout au long, comme un double.

25

26 La question de l’identité est amenée par la musique avec la chanson « Crazy » de Gnarls Barkley, chantée par Melanie-Bertha : « Who do you, who do you , who do you think you are ? », puis « Does that make me crazy ? Possibly ». Bertha apparaît comme l’injuste condamnée, la sauvage réhabilitée de La prisonnière des Sargasses de Jean Rhys. Elle existe ici comme un double de Jane, paradoxalement stable et présente, et qui réfléchit elle aussi sur sa condition. Si Jane revêt à nouveau sa robe grise après le mariage avorté, passant ainsi du gris au blanc puis au gris à nouveau, Bertha, elle, reste vêtue de rouge tout au long. Le rouge couleur de l’amour, amour charnel, folie, sexualité et instinct, tout ce qui est rejeté par la convenance du siècle où le patriarcat règne en maître. Une femme se retrouve confrontée à l’injonction des conventions sociales en contradiction avec ses propres instincts. Que doit-elle faire ? Dans la mise en scène de Cookson, Bertha apparaît comme la figure du double, inventée par Charlotte Brontë pour exprimer la complexité intérieure et les désirs charnels féminins d’une Jane qui ne peut les dire ouvertement. Alors que dans le roman, la religion termine le propos (« Amen ; even so come, Lord Jesus ! »), les derniers mots de la pièce : « It’s a girl », montrent l’aboutissement du cheminement du personnage de Jane Eyre, née à elle-même en tant que fille, femme, féminin.

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Fig. 3

Conclusion

27 Tout dans cette pièce inspirante et magnifique converge vers la quête identitaire de Jane, ainsi que dans le roman. Le décor, simple et brut, comme ‘en travaux’, illustre l’état d’esprit de Jane et son évolution, tel un bildungsroman qui conduit l’héroïne vers l’apprentissage de sa maturité. La lumière met en exergue ses émotions. Les costumes donnent à voir le siècle et la modernité en même temps. La musique accompagne tout au long, donne puissance et vérité, et se révèle juge et arbitre du questionnement sur l’identité. Enfin, les jeux d’acteurs apportent des touches originales qui servent aussi le sens et commentent le texte. Le langage théâtral est exploité ici dans sa totalité au service de l’œuvre et relève le défi extraordinaire de mettre en scène ce monument de la littérature anglaise et mondiale qu’est Jane Eyre.

28 Comme le laisse entendre la chanson finale : « The mountains stand before me, the rivers running wild », il semble que pour la pièce, Jane a intégré sa nature sauvage, naturellement, et invite l’humain en général à faire de même.

29 Grâce à la pièce, les spectateurs seront sortis de leur cadre confiné pendant trois heures intenses d’une représentation riche, vivifiante et qui donne à réfléchir.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre, Ed. Richard J. Dunn. New-York, London: Norton, 2001 (1971).

Degaine, André. Histoire du théâtre. Saint Genouph : A.G. Nizet, 1992.

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National Theatre at Home, Jane Eyre Ressource Pack. March. 20. Sept. 2020. .

Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New-York, London: Norton, 1999.

NOTES

1. Théâtre de Tréteaux : La troupe théâtrale de Tabarin lors d’une représentation sur la place Dauphine à Paris (début du XVIIe s.). Gravure sur cuivre, d’époque (1620). Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale. Crédit : AKG-Images : https://www.akgimages.fr/CS.aspx? VP3=SearchResult&VBID=2UMESQ5RC22JJ9&VP3=DirectSearch 2. Voir le site internet des photographes de théâtre Brinkhoff-Mögenburg Il s’agit des photographies de la tournée de 2017 au Royaume Uni, avec Nadia Clifford dans le rôle de Jane et Tim Delap jouant Rochester : https://www.rbbm.photos/jane-eyre . 3. Crédits images : Les figures 1, 2 et 3 sont des photographies d’écran effectuées lors de la diffusion en ligne le 09 avril 2020. Prises de vues Céline Savatier Lahondès (CSL), avec l’aimable autorisation du National Theatre.

RÉSUMÉS

Critique de l’adaptation de Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë (1847) par Sally Cookson et The Company (2015) diffusée en ligne pendant le confinement par le National Theatre de Londres. Cet article propose une réflexion sur le théâtre en confinement, met en exergue la théâtralité de la pièce et sa façon de dialoguer avec l’œuvre littéraire pour en offrir une interprétation contemporaine.

Review of the adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) by Sally Cookson and The Company (2015) broadcast online during lockdown by the National Theatre. This paper offers a reflexion on theatre during lockdown, highlights the theatricality of the play and the way it discusses the original literary work to offer a contemporary interpretation.

INDEX

Keywords : Jane Eyre, lockdown, adaptation, languages, staging, set, lights, costumes, music, actors, National theatre at Home, 2020 Mots-clés : Jane Eyre, confinement, adaptation, langages, mise en scène, décor, lumière, costumes, musique, acteurs, National Theatre at Home, 2020 Thèmes : Theater

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AUTEURS

CÉLINE SAVATIER-LAHONDÈS Docteur, Membre associé Université Clermont Auvergne, IHRIM (UMR 5317) [email protected]

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« Découvrir et partager » : Entretien avec Nicole Birmann Bloom, Chargée de mission, arts de la scène, au service culturel de l’ambassade de France à New York. Entretien

Emeline Jouve

Liens

1 Cultural services of the French Embassy: https://frenchculture.org/

2 FACE Foundation: https://face-foundation.org/

Entretien

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Figure 1

Nicole Birmann-Bloom. Credits: N. Birmann-Bloom.

Emeline Jouve : Nicole Birmann Bloom, comment devient-on Chargée de mission au service culturel de l’ambassade de France à New York ? Pouvez-vous revenir sur votre parcours ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Mon parcours est un peu atypique… Enfin, peut-être pas tant que ça, car nous avons tous des parcours originaux et uniques, mais on peut dire que je me suis construite sur le tas, sur le terrain, et le cheminement a été progressif, graduel. Je suis arrivée au service culturel, un coup de chance (oui, cela arrive !) à l’âge de 40 ans, en 1995. Je souhaitais rejoindre mon compagnon américain et j’ai postulé pour un poste d’assistante qui se libérait aux Services culturels de l’Ambassade de France à New York. Je n’avais jamais travaillé dans un service culturel d’une ambassade et ma vision de son organisation était assez floue, mais sans doute mon travail pendant près de 8 ans dans un organisme semi-gouvernemental d’un pays étranger à Paris, comme assistante, avait dû intéresser le secrétaire général qui m’a embauchée. En France, je travaillais dans un environnement non français, une culture différente (asiatique, en l’occurrence) à Paris. Arrivant au service culturel à New York, j’étais à l’étranger, mais avec des Français ; cela me faisait sourire.

E.J : Quel était cet organisme semi-gouvernemental ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Le Singapore Economic Development Board. Dans cette antenne parisienne, de 1987 à 1995, j’assistais deux directrices, toutes deux de Singapour (l’une expatriée, l’autre résidente en France) : j’ai découvert une autre culture, une autre façon de travailler.

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E.J : Votre cursus scolaire vous prédestinait-il à une carrière dans les « affaires internationales », au sens large ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : En fait, j’ai eu une formation de danseuse ; j’étais cependant loin de me considérer comme une danseuse. J’avais de nombreuses hésitations. À partir des années 70, adolescente, j’étais particulièrement intéressée par toutes expressions artistiques (et notamment physiques : danse, théâtre de geste, mime…). Il me semblait évident que si je me confrontais à ces pratiques, j’apprendrai (sans savoir où elles pourraient me mener puisque c’était l’aventure.)… En anglais on parle souvent de « Dance or Theater as a source of knowledge ». J’ai suivi plusieurs formations équivalentes à un conservatoire, j’ai appris parfois brutalement, et d’autres fois avec tant d’émerveillement. J’ai suivi une formation de trois ans en France à l’école de Françoise et Dominique Dupuy ,et entre 1976 et 1978, j’ai fait passage à New York qui m’a beaucoup marqué, tellement que 16 ans ont été nécessaires avant d’y retourner… Et beaucoup plus tard, après avoir abandonné toute pratique de la danse, ou presque, et repris des études, j’obtins donc un emploi en répondant à une annonce parue dans le journal dans cet organisme semi-gouvernemental.

E.J : Quel type d’études aviez-vous alors repris ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Je souhaitais suivre une formation d’éducatrice spécialisée dans la continuité de ce que je faisais à cette période (je travaillais avec des enfants et adolescents dans les écoles et dans des centres culturels dans le cadre de programmes liés à l’éducation artistique et leur créativité me passionnait). J’ai postulé pour cette formation, mais mon dossier s’est perdu ; je l’ai appris plusieurs mois plus tard. Ne pouvant pas attendre, j’ai choisi de passer un B.T.S. d’assistante de direction car je maîtrisais deux langues étrangères. C’était une formation intense sur deux ans (avec étude du droit du travail, économie, marketing, gestion administrative et comptabilité). Ces deux ans m’ont beaucoup plu et ce B.T.S. m’a permis d’avoir accès à un emploi très rapidement. Pendant la première année de B.T.S., j’ai reçu une lettre confirmant mon acceptation à la formation d’éducatrice, mais c’était trop tard.

E.J : Votre appétence pour l’international remonte à votre enfance, n’est-ce pas ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Petite, puis adolescente, l’international, « l’ailleurs », tout ce qui pouvait me sortir de ma cellule, me motivait. Une façon de s’échapper mais aussi de découvrir autre chose. Ma mère travaillait dans une organisation internationale, l’O.C.D.E. (Organisation de Coopération et Développement Economique), où nous pouvions croiser des personnes de toutes nationalités : petite fille, j’étais fascinée ! À l’école, puis au lycée, l’histoire et les langues étrangères, les correspondances épistolaires avec une étudiante à Bali, les événements mondiaux tels que la guerre du Vietnam, la faim dans le monde, m’ont beaucoup touché. J’ajouterai que mes deux parents étaient très ouverts aux expressions artistiques. Je leur suis très reconnaissante de l’éducation qu’ils m’ont donnée. Et à travers la danse, le théâtre, je pouvais voir le monde.

E.J : Pouvez-vous revenir au New York que vous avez connu entre 76 et 78 ? Comment décririez-vous la scène artistique de ces années-là ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Oh, c’était si nouveau ! À cette époque, j’ai 20 ans. Tout ce que je voyais était loin d’être basé sur la forme, sur la recherche d’un geste beau, d’une forme destinée au regard de l’autre ; il y avait plus d’ouverture dans les mouvements,

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des approches créatives nouvelles ; en bref, tout allait plus loin. Avec ma culture française, je me sentais prisonnière de la forme, du geste bien fait, face aux Américains. En France, j’avais cependant participé à quelques ateliers de théâtre et de mouvement qui m’avaient changée. Par exemple, en 1974, j’avais suivi un stage à Genève avec une professeure venant des USA, Ze’eva Cohen, qui était accompagnée par une violoncelliste, Gwendolyn Watson. Nous avions des ateliers d’improvisation, elles deux me poussaient à aller dans le mouvement l’une avec sa musique déchaînée, l’autre en parlant ; il n’y avait alors plus de temps pour penser à une technique, à un geste dessiné, et au regard de l’autre… Une porte s’était ouverte… À New York, entre 1976 et mon retour en France en 1978, j’avais l’impression qu’il n’y avait pas d’interdit, pas de jugement de l’autre dans les créations que je voyais. J’ai pu voir pour la première fois des artistes tels que Meredith Monk, , , et écouter des musiques étonnantes. Et bien sûr des « events » de la Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) avec des danseurs formidables, tous différents, tous « animal » ; ils/elles étaient oiseaux, chats…. Il faut rappeler que j’avais découvert la MCDC pour la première fois au festival d’Avignon en 1976 et c’était la raison de mon séjour à New York. D’ailleurs, dès 1973-1974 (et principalement par le biais du Festival d’Automne qui venait d’ouvrir), j’ai pu découvrir des compagnies et artistes américains d’esthétiques et messages différents : Alvin Ailey Dance Theater Company (cette dernière même avant l’ouverture du Festival d’Automne si mes souvenirs sont bons), Alwin Nikolais, Martha Graham Dance Co., Jose Limon Dance Company, Bob Wilson, Lucinda Childs, Andy de Groat… C’était une autre énergie, les danseurs, performers, étaient fabuleux. J’étais donc bien motivée ! À New York, j’allais surtout voir de la danse, des performances, et moins de théâtre ; mes moyens étaient bien limités ; je ne bénéficiais pas de bourses comme cela aurait pu être le cas quelques années après, et je travaillais le matin, assurait des baby- sittings, et je prenais mes cours. De plus, New York était particulièrement dangereux à cette période, donc des sorties en solitaire, ce n’était pas possible. Ce que je voyais à New York, c’était d’immenses possibilités, de nombreuses espaces (abstraits et physiques) à investir… Je n’avais pas conscience de cette échelle en France. Et puis à New York, « on discutait moins, on faisait plus » ; c’était la méthode « do it ». Oui tout était grand ; ces espaces immenses étaient nouveaux pour moi, parisienne.

E.J : Entre votre départ à la fin des années 70 et votre retour dans les années 90, est-ce que vous vous teniez au courant de ce qui se passait à New York ou avez-vous perdu le contact jusqu’à votre retour en 1995 ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Oui, depuis Paris, mais par période et principalement dans le cadre du Festival d’Automne, ou en lisant des articles sur la scène new-yorkaise et américaine, mais cela me rendait un peu triste. J’étais partie de New York avec regret en 1978, et rapidement, parce que la vie y était trop difficile. Je n’ai pas gardé de contacts avec les personnes rencontrées à New York, à l’exception d’une personne et deux professeurs, qui, français d’origine, sont revenus vivre en France : Kilina Cremona qui a formé de nombreux danseurs français, puis Roger Meguin. À Paris, je restais très « accrochée » au travail de la compagnie de Merce Cunningham, mais je me tournais aussi vers la création venant de pays européens. En fait, ce qui me motivait le plus dans les années mi 80 début 90, finalement, c’était

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toujours le travail de Merce Cunningham, puis celui de William Forsythe (un autre américain, alors directeur du Frankfurt), de Maguy Marin également, les mises en scène de Patrice Chéreau, le « move » de Michael Jackson, des textes de théâtre… Parmi les chorégraphes français, j’avais un peu de mal à m’y retrouver revenant de New York. J’étais revenue fascinée par la capacité des chorégraphes, des performers américains à « prendre l’espace » (c’était le terme souvent utilisé), par leur exploration du mouvement sans partir d’une histoire, d’un narratif ou de sentiments, mais à partir du mouvement seul (même si celui-ci a finalement une histoire et/ou finit par en créer une nouvelle). Peu à peu, j’ai essayé d’oublier ces années qui avait précédé mon retour en France : j’avais laissé tomber la danse et les pratiques artistiques. Je voyais peu de créations, c’était presque douloureux et je m’en détachais volontairement.

E.J : Quand vous arrivez en 1995, plus de 15 ans après cette douloureuse séparation avec la ville, quel est le New York artistique que vous découvrez ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Une ville plus « relaxe », plus propre, mais encore plus bruyante, plus compétitive, où l’argent est roi. Assez rapidement, je découvre des réseaux, des communautés, dans cette ville immense. En danse par exemple, c’est finalement un petit réseau, compétitif certes, mais une communauté qui se serre les coudes quand il le faut. Dès le début, je redécouvre la vie artistique par la musique, puis très vite par la danse, et après le théâtre. Je découvre Steve Paxton dont j’avais beaucoup entendu parler mais curieusement je n’avais jamais vu son travail en France, et surtout je ne l’avais pas vu danser. De la fin des années 90 et jusqu’à 2016 environ, ce sera une effervescence: Wally Cardona, Dean Moss, Urban Bush Women, Bill T. Jones (déjà sur la scène depuis quelques années), Ronald K. Brown, Tere O’Connor, Stephen Petronio, plus tard Trajal Harrell, Sarah Michelson, Okwui Okpowasili, Miguel Gutierrez, Kimberly Bartosik, Faye Driscoll, Heather Kravas, les retours de Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, et les créations du Wooster Group, d’Elevator Repair Services, Big Art Group, Big Dance Theater, Richard Maxwell, des auteurs comme Will Eno, Tony Kushner, Christina Masciotti, les auteur. e. s afro-américain. e. s comme Suzan-Lori Parks, Jackie Sibblies Drury, et récemment Jeremy O’Harris… Je découvre aussi le travail d’Alonzo King et Keith Hennessy (basés sur la côte ouest) et je continue de découvrir ce qui vient d’Europe pour mieux comprendre les différences. Je m’intéresse bien sûr de près à la création venant de France, ou d’artistes soutenus par les organisations culturelles françaises, puisque cela fait partie de mon travail. Et pendant plus de 20 ans, j’absorbe : j’écoute, je vois, sans forcément tout comprendre, même maintenant 10, 20 ans plus tard, mais je continue de tisser des fils pour mieux cerner ce que j’ai vu, entendu dans le contexte américain, un environnement d’une grande complexité et tellement rude. C’est aussi une façon pour moi de mieux comprendre ce qui se passe dans le monde.

E.J : Revenons à votre travail à l’Ambassade. En 1995, vous devenez donc assistante aux Services culturels de l’Ambassade de France à New York. Comment la transition entre assistante et chargée de mission s’est-elle faite ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Embauchée comme assistante du secrétaire général, je dois avouer que mes fonctions n’étaient pas très palpitantes. Mon travail était

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principalement du suivi administratif, ce qui ne me dérangeait pas cependant ; j’avais aussi beaucoup moins de travail que dans mon emploi précédent mais c’était aussi une nouvelle vie. Tout allait changer en 1999. Le département des échanges artistiques créait un nouveau programme pour promouvoir les auteurs dramatiques contemporains français aux États-Unis. La responsable de ce département et la direction souhaitaient une personne pour assurer la continuité. J’ai proposé d’être cette personne ; la direction a approuvé et j’ai rejoint l’équipe dans un premier temps comme assistante de trois personnes (deux chargés de mission, une attachée culturelle) puis quelques années plus tard, je suis passée chargée de mission arts de la scène. Le défi pour moi a été de naviguer entre cette structure gouvernementale avec des changements de direction fréquents (tous les 4 ans), et une profonde motivation à développer les échanges culturels, à être sur le terrain et à l’écoute, pour découvrir et comprendre. À partir de 1999, les années se sont enchaînées. Peut-être un jour, on les nommera les « golden years » en raison de la dynamique et de la richesse des échanges, des appuis financiers qui les accompagnaient. Et il ne s’agissait pas seulement de développer des projets d’artistes français aux USA ou d’artistes soutenus par les institutions françaises, mais aussi d’être dans un dialogue. En tant que chargée de mission, j’ai pu fusionner ma formation artistique et ma pratique de gestionnaire. Elle s’est faite naturellement… C’est, je dois l’avouer, magnifique, j’ai eu beaucoup de chance. Avec la pandémie et les bouleversements que nous traversons, ces échanges prendront de nouvelles formes, il y a tant à revoir maintenant pour construire le monde de demain. Avec le recul et ma longévité au service culturel, bien que je ne me sente pas nostalgique, je réfléchis souvent à ces années pour imaginer l’avenir.

E.J : Pouvez-vous brièvement présenter les types de missions qui sont les vôtres ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : La pandémie que nous traversons et ses conséquences entraîneront sans doute la révision de certaines de nos missions, au service culturel, mais ces dernières années, celles qui me concernent ont été multiples, mais c’est aussi un travail d’équipe que je détaille un peu plus bas. Difficile d’être brève. Je pourrai résumer les missions en six points : 1. La mise en relation entre les partenaires américains et les artistes français du secteur du spectacle vivant (théâtre, danse, cirque, arts de la rue, marionnette…) ainsi que des artistes soutenus par des institutions culturelles françaises (par exemple, les artistes du continent africain). Cette mise en relation s’articule avec le développement en amont de voyages de curateurs et présentateurs pour découvrir les créations de ces artistes, puis par la suite, avec l’accompagnement au montage d’une tournée (notamment dans le cas où l’artiste ou la compagnie n’a pas d’agent) ou d’une résidence. Le degré d’investissement varie en fonction du projet. 2. La promotion de textes d’auteurs dramatiques (aide à la traduction, diffusion) et montage de mises en espace avec des partenaires américains, et l’accompagnement de ces productions.

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3. La participation à l’organisation d’événements (par exemple « La nuit de la philosophie et des idées »), ou de festivals de danse, de théâtre en collaboration avec des institutions partenaires en France et aux États-Unis (comme « France Moves » en 2001, « Act French » en 2005, « Dance : A Festival of Performances and Ideas » en 2014, etc.). Dans le cas de ces derniers, la coordination de la part du service culturelle est importante (programmation, budget, tournée, communication). 4. La communication autour de ces projets, de la présence française en général (article, e-blast, e-newsletter, interviews, recueil de témoignages, brochures). 5. La participation à l’animation du réseau sur un territoire immense. En plus de New York, il y a actuellement 9 services culturels aux USA. Ces services culturels sont composés d’un attaché culturel et d’un ou deux adjoints en fonction de la circonscription ; ils sont rattachés aux consulats, soit à Chicago, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Houston, La Nouvelle-Orléans, Los Angeles, San Francisco, et également à Washington, à l’Ambassade. Le poste de New York a une vocation fédérale avec les grandes lignes stratégiques données par le Conseiller culturel. Bien que l’attaché culturel en circonscription a une certaine autonomie et des priorités établies avec le Conseiller culturel en fonction du terrain, il y a une coordination importante à suivre sur l’ensemble du réseau, qui parfois s’articule avec celle du réseau canadien notamment dans le cas de la circulation des artistes et des auteurs. Par ailleurs le budget des services culturels est géré à New York. À New York, les attachés culturels et les chargés de mission sont des spécialistes dans leur discipline et donc accompagnent chaque attaché en circonscription sur le territoire en fonction de la nature et du contenu du/des projets développés. 6. La coordination des programmes FACE Contemporary Theater et FUSED en partenariat avec FACE Foundation (appel à projets, suivi des dossiers, budget, rapport, communication, etc.). Les grandes lignes directrices de ces programmes seront certainement revues à l’automne 2020.

E.J : Vous évoquiez les « golden years » de vos fonctions. Ces années « enchantées », si je puis dire, correspondent donc aux premières décennies du XXIe siècle, avant la crise sanitaire ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Oui je dirais entre 1999 et 2019 avec un rythme soutenu actuellement remis en cause, non seulement en raison de la pandémie mais aussi en raison de l’écosystème de ces échanges qui doit être repensé. L’une ne va pas sans l’autre et le signal d’alarme avait déjà été tiré.

E.J : Que voulez-vous dire par « écosystème » ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : La relation entre art et argent, entre production et consommation et par conséquent, les excès, les défis du XXIe siècle comme la protection de l’environnement. De nombreux artistes, et des compagnies en ont bien conscience. Pour revenir au sujet des « golden years » j’aimerais ajouter que si ces dernières années, les fonds publics ont diminué, le service culturel aux USA de son côté continue de lever des fonds privés (aux USA comme en France) pour développer ses activités. Sans cette levée de fonds, nos activités seraient très réduites. Donc mon travail est un travail d’équipe. Par exemple, le poste de chargé. e du développement a été créé en 2001. Il ou elle travaille directement avec le Conseiller culturel et FACE

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Foundation (l’organisation de droit privé américain, partenaire du Service culturel, capable de recevoir ces fonds), et nous. Nous travaillons également en partenariat avec l’Institut français à Paris, en adaptant les programmes et en renouvelant les initiatives. C’est indispensable.

E.J : Pouvez-vous expliciter la fonction et le fonctionnement de Fondation FACE ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Il y a plusieurs programmes hébergés par la Fondation FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). Pour le secteur des échanges artistiques, les quatre principaux sont Etant donnés Contemporary Art, pour les arts visuels, Jazz & New Music, pour le champ musical, et les deux pour lesquels je suis impliquée, Contemporary Theatre et FUSED (French-US Exchange in Dance). La coordination de ces programmes est suivie par les chargés de mission supervisés par un attaché culturel. Ils répondent à une politique de coopération culturelle de promotion de la scène française contemporaine aux États-Unis et de soutien aux échanges artistiques entre la France et les États-Unis. FACE Contemporary Theater existe depuis 1999, à l’initiative de l’Institut français (l’institution partenaire des services culturels, affiliée au Ministère des affaires étrangères et dédiée à la promotion et coopération culturelle et éducative française et francophone dans le monde.) Comme les autres programmes, il fonctionne avec un appel à projet, puis la sélection par un comité d’experts indépendant et la distribution de bourses. Dans ses premières années, FACE Contemporary Theater (qui portait alors un autre nom) se concentrait sur la diffusion de textes d’auteurs dramatiques contemporains et les productions de ces auteurs. Ce programme a évolué assez rapidement pour s’ouvrir à des nouvelles formes, plus hybrides, du spectacle vivant, répondant aux intérêts des curateurs américains et aux développements de la scène française et vice versa, car une des caractéristiques des deux programmes FACE Contemporary Theater et FUSED est leur bilatéralité, c’est-à-dire qu’ils soutiennent également des artistes américains en France, en fonction du budget disponible. À ce jour, FACE Contemporary Theater soutient des projets non seulement de théâtre de texte, mais aussi ceux des arts du cirque, de la marionnette et du théâtre de rue, ainsi que des résidences. Il a permis de soutenir des artistes tels que Philippe Quesne, Joris Lacoste, Gisèle Vienne, Pascal Rambert, Fabrice Melquiot, Yngvild Aspeli, Raphaëlle Boitel, Koffi Kwahulé, Dorothée Munyaneza, Daniely Francisque, le BEGAT Theater, Aurélien Bory, et parmi les Américains, Richard Maxwell, pour n’en citer que quelques-uns. Toutes ces années, ce programme ainsi que le programme FUSED ont été essentiels à la coopération, très dynamique, entre les institutions culturelles américaines et françaises, et aux échanges entre artistes, compagnies et collectifs. De son côté, le programme FUSED a permis à des artistes tels que Rachid Ouramdane, Christian Rizzo, Emmanuelle Huynh, Nacera Belaza, Bouchra Ouizguen, Anne Collod, Jérôme Bel, Kader Attou, ou encore Trajal Harrell, Liz Santoro, de présenter leurs pièces. Ces deux programmes bilatéraux ont pour mission de soutenir des artistes français pas ou encore peu connus sur le territoire américain, et réciproquement pour les artistes américains en France. Ils permettent notamment aux curateurs américains, soucieux de la prise de risque qu’il ou elle pourrait prendre en présentant un artiste peu connu de réaliser leur projet avec un encouragement financier, dans un environnement économiquement fragile.

E.J : Les systèmes français et américains sont très différents. Les modalités de financements de l’art ne sont pas les mêmes d’un côté et de l’autre de l’Atlantique. De plus,

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les réglementations du travail des artistes ne sont pas les mêmes dans les deux pays. Pouvez-vous nous présenter ces différences ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Nous utilisons d’autres termes, nous parlons du « non-for profit theater » versus « for-profit theater » aux USA. En français, la traduction la plus fidèle serait « non commercial » versus « commercial ». L’un cherche à faire du profit, l’autre pas, et s’il en fait dans le cas du « non-for-profit », le profit est reversé à l’organisation. Le terme « Mainstream Theater » c’est ce que nous utilisons pour parler des théâtres, salles de spectacles avec une programmation grand public, en général qui ne prend pas trop de risque, mais qui peuvent être « non-for-profit » également. C’est un tissu assez complexe formé de plusieurs réseaux (centres d’art contemporain, salles de spectacles plus grand public, etc.) et il y a de nombreux croisements entre le secteur non-for-profit et for-profit. Ce ne sont pas deux mondes qui s’ignorent, loin de là, et nous travaillons avec l’ensemble de ces réseaux. Effectivement le financement est différent. En France, l’apport des fonds publics est très important. Aux États-Unis ils représentent environ de 1 à 10 % : le financement de la culture et de la création artistique (comme d’autres secteurs) est principalement assuré par le mécénat en provenance de fondations privées, de particuliers et de sociétés (« corporations »). Le statut des artistes et techniciens est également différent (syndiqués ou pas) ; certains font le choix de ne pas être syndiqués ce qui leur laisse une plus grande liberté, d’autres le sont. Être syndiqué représente un minimum de protection dans un pays ou le système d’assurance maladie est complexe et coûteux ; il permet de respecter un seuil d’un salaire décent. E.J : J’imagine que ces différences, qui sont certes des richesses, peuvent être des obstacles aux échanges internationaux. Est-ce en effet le cas et si oui, comment parvenez- vous à les dépasser ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Je ne sais pas si nous arrivons à dépasser ces différences, mais plutôt on s’enrichit de ces différences et nous nous adaptons. Ce qui importe dans le montage d’un projet, d’une tournée, c’est de travailler ensemble avec la compagnie en France par exemple et les partenaires américains. Oui, il y a des difficultés financières, des obstacles à la circulation (visa de travail parfois difficile à obtenir, des dossiers à remplir pour un accord), mais si le désir et les énergies sont là, on y arrive. Cela semble naïf ce que je dis, mais très souvent, je reviens à ces notions basiques. Peut-être c’est cela « dépasser les obstacles ».

E.J : La mise en place d’une fondation pour financer les arts est inspirée de la culture américaine, n’est-ce pas ? Diriez-vous que le financement des arts et la valorisation d’artistes français s’« américanisent » et que les fonds privés sont l’avenir du sponsoring artistique ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Inspirée de la culture américaine, oui et non car la recherche de mécénat pour les artistes existe depuis longtemps en Europe également, mais la Fondation FACE est essentielle. Le service culturel, ici à New York et pour l’ensemble du pays, a été pionnier dans cette démarche de levée de fonds, me semble-t-il. Depuis longtemps, le service culturel en partenariat avec la Fondation FACE (elle existe depuis les années 50 mais sous un autre nom, et était, dans un premier temps, dédiée à la promotion du film français) a recherché l’accompagnement de sociétés ou fondations pour soutenir ses programmes et projets. Il y a eu de nombreuses initiatives année après année (et c’est toujours le cas). Le financement public français, même important, ne suffit pas à répondre à une dynamique ambitieuse dans un pays où le coût de la vie est élevé, surtout dans les grandes villes, coût auquel

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s’ajoute les transports internationaux, ou encore, ces 15 dernières années, des frais élevés de visa de travail, obligatoires, pour les compagnies étrangères présentées aux USA. Les artistes peuvent baisser leurs cachets (jusqu’à un seuil décent) mais les coûts de transport et de visa, non. Des transitions, des évolutions seront nécessaires, surtout après la crise que nous traversons, mais il y a un équilibre à maintenir… C’est comme une maison, tu l’as construit pour qu’elle tienne, même si tu recherches de nouvelles formes extraordinaires, il y a toujours une capacité d’adaptation en évolution, sinon elle s’écroule. Donc le mécénat privé, oui, c’est important pour maintenir cet équilibre, et surtout ce dialogue entre deux, plusieurs cultures. J’espère que les grandes fortunes seront encore plus généreuses que ces dernières années, mais vraiment encore plus ! Je ne suis pas à l’aise pour parler des relations entre art et argent dans nos sociétés actuelles (occidentales notamment). C’est un conflit : je l’ai ressenti quand je me formais à la danse, je le ressens toujours.

E.J : Les Américains sont-ils plus à l’aise pour parler d’argent ? Est-ce que vous diriez que la difficulté d’aborder l’aspect financier qui touche à l’art est un « mal » français ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Oui en général, les Américains sont plus à l’aise pour parler d’argent, mais un mal français, non je ne dirai pas cela. Je dirai humblement qu’il y a des approches culturelles différentes, et toutes font plus ou moins sens. Aux USA, pour le développement d’un projet, le budget est rapidement mis sur la table, ce qui est réaliste dans nos sociétés actuelles si nous souhaitons que ce projet puisse fonctionner au mieux. Concernant les artistes venant de l’étranger, les institutions culturelles américaines dans un environnement basé sur le mécénat, attendent souvent d’organismes comme les services culturels français, une aide financière. Ce n’est pas systématique, mais fréquent. Cependant un objet artistique ne se développe pas qu’avec de l’argent, mais avec des personnes humaines et ce n’est pas une marchandise. Actuellement la crise que nous traversons révèle de nombreuses contradictions ; elles sont examinées, étudiées. Certaines réflexions me rappellent celles des utopies des années 70s. (anti-consumérisme, lutte contre le racisme, résistance contre un pouvoir établi régressif…)

E.J : Vous évoquez à nouveau la crise actuelle. Observez-vous des formes de résistances artistiques ? Comment est-ce que le théâtre survit aux USA et, en tant que chargée de mission, quels sont vos moyens actuellement pour maintenir le lien entre la France et les États-Unis ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Le théâtre américain, pour le qualifier, je pourrai utiliser les adjectifs « activiste » et « résistant ». Il survit tant bien que mal. Cette période de pandémie est difficile pour tous, dans le monde entier. Aux États-Unis, c’est 8.4 % de chômeurs (août 2020) actuellement et toutes les catégories de métiers, dont celles du secteur artistique, déjà précaires en temps normal, en pâtissent. Dès le mois de mars, de nombreuses structures, des fondations ainsi que des syndicats ont œuvré pour défendre ce secteur ; plusieurs organisations culturelles et des artistes ont pu bénéficier d’une aide minimale dans le cadre des plans de sauvetage (CARES Act) ; il est encore trop tôt pour parler des effets en 2021, mais les partenaires américains signalent qu’ils fonctionneront avec des budgets réduits ; les artistes eux de leur côté,

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déjà habitués à une précarité, sont actifs et inventifs, me semble-t-il. Ensemble ils re- imaginent. Cet été, par exemple, dans l’État de New York, plusieurs initiatives ont vu le jour en espace ouvert et en respectant les consignes sanitaires (port du masque obligatoire, distanciation etc.), mais la saison d’automne pour le secteur du spectacle vivant, contrairement à ce que nous pouvons voir en Europe, est pratiquement 100 % en ligne. La pandémie a rendu encore plus évidente les inégalités sociales, les assassinats de George Floyd (ce dernier filmé et vu par des millions de personnes dans le monde), de Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, ont rappelé le racisme latent et systémique qui touche toutes les couches de la société y compris les institutions culturelles dans lesquelles la communauté BIPOC (acronyme pour Black, Indigenous and People Of Color) est sous-représentée. La discussion était déjà engagée mais ces récents évènements ont accéléré les réflexions, les prises de position et les actions. Quant à la place des échanges internationaux dans ce contexte, elle est également à revoir. La société américaine est en plein changement, en évolution. Nous le vivons au quotidien et c’est difficile d’en parler, surtout pour une personne dans ma position qui culturellement a un pied dans un pays, l’autre ailleurs. Actuellement nous pouvons noter que des directeurs artistiques blancs démissionnent pour que des homologues de la communauté BIPOC puissent assurer leur fonction. Les artistes se manifestent également. Et les États-Unis sont en pleine campagne présidentielle. Et nos moyens au service culturel, ce sont surtout nos énergies, les idées, nos passions plus que les aides financières. À mon avis, c’est qui me semble le plus important, ainsi que la nécessité de vivre le moment présent, le comprendre avec sensibilité et attention pour pouvoir adapter… Il y a plein de projets en cours de développement et ils ne fonctionneront, ils ne verront le jour que grâce aux énergies de ces personnes, et à notre capacité d’adaptation. L’équipe de direction des services culturels y travaille… Je vous invite d’ailleurs à regarder le site Frenchculture.org pour suivre nos efforts d’adaptation.

E.J : Pour terminer, pourriez-vous nous confier ce qu’est, pour vous, la plus grande satisfaction dans votre métier ? Nicole Birmann Bloom : Découvrir et partager avec les autres. E.J : Nicole Birmann Bloom, un grand merci.

RÉSUMÉS

Entretien avec Nicole Birmann Bloom, Chargée de mission, Arts de la scène, au service culturel de l’ambassade de France à New York. L’échange a été conduit par courriel entre le 6 juillet et 28 août 2020.

Interview with Nicole Birmann Bloom, Program Officer, Performing Arts at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. The interview was conducted by emails from July 6th to August 28th 2020.

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INDEX

Keywords : Nicole Birmann Bloom, dance, diplomacy, France, New York, theatre, United States Mots-clés : Nicole Birmann Bloom, danse, diplomatie, États-Unis, France, New York, théâtre Thèmes : Theater

AUTEUR

EMELINE JOUVE Maîtresse de Conférences INU Champollion/Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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The Tempest (2020) by Creation Theatre: Live in your Living Room Performance Review

Heidi Lucja Liedke

Factual information about the show

1 Performers Al Barclay Ryan Duncan Madeleine MacMahon Itxaso Moreno Giles Stoakley Rhodri Lewis Simon Spencer-Hyde PK Taylor Annabelle Terry

2 Creative Team Adaptor/Director: Zoe Seaton Designer: Ryan Dawson Laight

3 Production Team A Creation Theatre production in association Big Telly. Production Manager: Giles Stoakley Stage Manager: Sinead Owens Videography: Stuart Read Producer: Crissy O’Donovan

4 Websites Creation Theatre: https://www.creationtheatre.co.uk Big Telly : https://www.big-telly.com

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Review

5 Prospero is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Topic: The Tempest | 18/04/20 at 7 pm Time: Apr 18, 2020 07:00 PM London Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/95301315614 Meeting ID: 953 0131 5614 Password: 027373

6 As I receive this email on April 18, 2020, a few weeks into Covid-19 lockdown, I am partly confused (So this is theatre now?) and partly simply pleasantly bewildered. Nothing is as it used to be, everybody’s daily lives have been adjusted to a “new normal,” so why shouldn’t a Shakespearean character from the past email me in the Here and Now? Fiction and reality, technology and analogue materialities become concepts whose meanings are now more than ever somewhat insignificant. With the advertising phrase “‘We are such as dreams are made on’—11-25 April, The Tempest LIVE, interactive and in your living room” the Oxford-based theatre company Creation Theatre is one of the first to create a piece of Covidian theatre, that is theatre that has been created during the global pandemic, that makes use of communication technologies such as the programme Zoom and repurposes them in their function and that either explicitly or implicitly addresses the fact that both performers and spectators are witnessing the performance in a state of emergency. The result is a playful take on ’s The Tempest, a production far from perfection but without the desire to be so—an experiment that tackles and plays with precisely the “stuff” that dreams are made on, by letting spectators contribute “props,” such as their teddy bears and crisp bags.

7 Zoe Seaton (Big Telly) has already adapted The Tempest in 2019 and the version shown in April works with the same cast. Since this is my first Zoom performance, and also one of the first times I am using the communication programme at all, I am a little apprehensive about turning on my laptop camera. My partner and I have made a date night out of it, put on nice clothes and hurried to finish dinner before the show starts, just as we would have done before attending a regular performance. Creation Theatre’s chief executive, Lucy Askew, offers a brief introduction and seeing that the circa 100 viewers have settled in, the show begins. The ‘Zoom host’ Prospero (Simon Spencer- Hyde), is a stern-looking middle-aged man, wearing a black turtleneck and big rectangular glasses. He is sitting in front of a wall of TV screens (fig. 1) and asking his spirit Ariel to conjure together Antonio (Giles Stoakley), Alonso (Al Barclay), Sebastienne (Madeleine MacMahon), Ferdinand (Ryan Duncan, eating a Magnum ice cream) and Trinculo (Rhodri Lewis, in an Irish pub). The use of virtual backgrounds is well chosen and highlights a main facet of a given character. In the context of the pandemic, this urgent plea for help by Prospero sheds a new light on the supposedly powerful centre of the play: he may sit in the “control centre” and see where everyone is on his screens, he may be the one in charge of the microphone but he is shut off from the actual world and in fact powerless and immobile. One is forced to draw connections to the individual’s position during lockdown: on the one hand, we have access to social media and all kinds of electronic devices and screens. But how far will they get us? Where would we be without the help of devoted spirits?

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Figure 1

Simon Spencer-Hyde as Prospero Photographer credit: screen shot taken by author

8 In the beginning of the show, there are a few instances of not quite successful audience engagement: after Alonso and Sebastienne have been invited to an award ceremony on a ship, randomly selected audience members find questions in their Zoom chat that they can ask them stepping into the role as journalists, for instance from the Gloucestershire Echo or The Daily Mail. This has a rather stilted effect and slows down the pace at the beginning, as we are eager to get the show started. Some of the questions, however, play the role of a wrap up, such as “How do you respond to the Prospero allegations?” enabling a quick exposé that is, interestingly, guided by the spectators and not, as is usually the case, presented through dialogues in the text.

9 The idea that the figurative power belongs to the audience is the most memorable impression I got from attending this production. On the one hand, this is achieved through the character of Ariel (Itxaso Moreno). The spirit is the messenger, the doer and the bridge between fiction and reality, technology and materiality, ‘us’ (the spectators’) and ‘them’ (the actors and actresses). When Prospero asks the spirit to create a storm, Ariel turns to us to click our fingers for rain drops (fig. 2), clap our hands for heavy rain and we can see randomly selected screens showing people in their living rooms doing just that. After a few seconds of skeptical wrinkled foreheads, one notices how spectators chime in enthusiastically and we see strangers’ smiling faces. As the storm successfully brings all of Prospero’s enemies onto the island, even the production’s internet connection gets wobbly, creating a truly immersive experience. Through this, our emotional connection to Ariel is especially strong—we are part of their team, after all—which makes the ensuing power play between the spirit and Prospero even more painful to watch.

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Figure 2

Itxaso Moreno as Ariel, asking audience members to conjure up a storm with her by rubbing their hands and imitating the sound of blowing wind Photographer credit: screen shot taken by author.

10 What this production of The Tempest is especially successful at is reminding us of the fact that theatre—even if it cannot take place as we’re used to it at the moment, on a stage, in a theatre building—transcends spatial restrictions. Theatre is not a fixed thing, we create its magic, and this magic can be far from being polished and perfect. Yes, there are technical glitches throughout this production and some missed connections. But they do not disturb the enjoyment of the play, they actually add to its urgency. When Miranda—in a millennial take on dating, perhaps: many people dating in the 21st century meet their love interests via screens first, after all—sees Ferdinand for the first time (fig. 3), she is both paralyzed and curious. She has never seen a man in her life and cannot come to terms with this new feeling of being in love. Of course, this relationship is one of Shakespeare’s more one-dimensional and stereotypical ones, however, in this production, it becomes quite clear that Miranda is in a power position to gaze upon Ferdinand and select him. At the same time, there is something fragile about this one- sided encounter: the fear, also characteristic for online dating, of actual human encounters, an insecurity that comes along with a shift in social life from analogue to the virtual. In the current context, it also reflects the lack many people feel as it is impossible to visit friends and loved ones.

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Figure 3

Annabelle Terry as Miranda, falling in love with Ferdinand ‘at first sight’ Photographer credit: screen shot taken by author.

11 Perhaps one of the most memorable scenes is the equally kitschy and funny moment when Ferdinand and Miranda get engaged: separated by screens, Ferdinand hands her the engagement ring across the screen border. During this scene, some spectator’s screens pop up in the margin so I can see a woman following the dialogue with a curious look on her face. In the very moment in which Ferdinand and Miranda ‘touch’ (fig. 4), the screen lights up in pink and red colors and the two share a screen in a composite montage accompanied by cheerful music that was recorded before the show. It is an incredibly moving moment to witness what can happen when the technological divide is broken up and bridged. I feel myself wishing to be pulled into the screen as well, an emotional yearning that is only heightened, when I see the other spectators, including the woman who had watched the performance with a neutral facial expression a moment ago, start smiling brightly. To see the faces of my fellow spectators is a new and wonderful addition, something impossible in the regular setting when one is, in comparison, left on one’s own, in the darkness, having to wade through the emotions the performance confronts one with in isolation until the lights go up. Here, we may be alone in our living rooms, but we are more aware of the actual community of spectators we are part of because we can see them and see their reactions.

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Figure 4

Miranda and Ferdinand bridging the technological divide that separates them and audience reaction Photographer credit: screen shot taken by author.

12 The second dimension Creation Theatre’s The Tempest evokes emphatically is that of the communal labour involved in creating any theatre production. After the show, as the performers bow and are applauded by their virtual spectators, they reveal their living rooms to us, posing in front of green canvasses or happily washing off their make up (fig. 5). We look into exhausted, sweaty faces and the joy of theatre is as palpable and somehow more intimately so than in the traditional setting of curtain calls in a theatre that are over after 30 seconds, with the lights going on and everyone rushing off to get home. Now, we do not have to rush anywhere. We can enjoy having witnessed an unusual piece of theatre, we can acknowledge the work that has been put into it—not invisible work, but manual and physical work as well—and we can acknowledge our fellow spectators (fig. 6). To have this communal bond is something that is crucial in times of social isolation for many. When Prospero says at the end of the play “Now my charms are all o’erthrown / And what strength I have’s mine own” I beg to differ: you are not alone. We are all in this together.

Post-show discussion

13 After the performance on 18 April, I attended a post-show discussion group via Zoom that was organized by Erin Sullivan and Peter Kirwan. Thank you to all members of the discussion—it was wonderful to find words for, celebrate and also be hesitant about this new theatrical form. (In alphabetical order: Pascale Aebischer, Michael Joel Bartelle, Judith Buchanan, Thea Buckley, Sarah Busch, Colette Gordon, Susanne Greenhalgh, Ronan Hatfull, Stuart Hampton-Reeves, Elizabeth Jeffery, Emer McHugh, Steve Purcell, Lyn Tribble, and John Wyver).

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Figure 5

Madeleine MacMahon/Sebastienne after the show Photographer credit: screen shot taken by author.

Figure 6

Audience members waving to each other after the show Photographer credit: screen shot taken by author.

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ABSTRACTS

Theatre review of The Tempest by Creation Theatre, directed by Zoe Seaton. Venue: Live, in your living room (online only). 11 April—10 May 2020.

Critique The Tempest par Creation Theatre, sous la direction de Zoe Seaton. Spectacle en ligne (uniquement). 11 avril – 10 mai 2020.

INDEX

Subjects: Theater Keywords: Contemporary British theatre, Zoom Theatre, lockdown theatre, Covid-19, Shakespeare, audience participation, immersive technologies Mots-clés: théâtre britannique contemporain, théâtre-Zoom, théâtre en temps de confinement, Covid-19, Shakespeare, participation du public, théâtre immersif

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Times of Contagion: The Social(ist) Politics of Plague in Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare Essay

Laura Michiels

We thought we were remaking ourselves. Perhaps we were. For each morning we were someone new and the world was almost a surprise, like biting into a piece of fruit with your eyes closed. (Wallace 70)

1 Sheerly by coincidence I started reading James Meek’s To Calais, In Ordinary Time (2019) last March, when lockdown measures were first taken in Belgium, the country where I live. As far as I was aware, Meek’s was a historical novel set during the Middle Ages, detailing the journey from Britain to France of a company of archers and several people who–unwittingly or not–become associated with them. What I did not realise is that the events unfold in 1348, when a significant segment of Europe’s population succumbed to the Black Death, and that most of the characters would consequently never see their journey through. Of course, our current pandemic is nothing like the medieval plague in many ways: our odds of survival are better, due to improved health care and the nature of the disease, plus most of us do not tend to look to religion to cure us. And yet some similarities were striking. Take a look at the following passage from the novel: The death, as they called it, had come to Heytesbury five days before, and already slain forty folk, men, women and children, a third of the town. None would go to their neighbours’ houses no more for fear they’d sick. Folk would hang cloths of their windows, one to send for the priest, two to ask for food and drink to be left for them, three to have a body borne away. The priest and the bell-ringer had gone to and from the homes of the sick so often none paid them heed no more. The inn was shut, none came to town to buy the cloth they made, the crops were ripe but none would harvest them, and half the

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cattle lacked a master. (Meek 275- 276)

2 A fast-rising death toll, a sort of lockdown (self-imposed here), struggling businesses and wasted crops… Even though most aspects of Meek’s novel felt very alien to me, these elements now were somehow familiar, which would not have been the case last year.

3 Since I am a theatre scholar, closed theatres were an important part of my lockdown experience. Theatre would have provided the perfect means to make sense of the present conditions, in that its association with contagion and plagues has been a long one. The Elizabethan Age is known as a golden era for theatre. Moralistic London authorities drove theatre companies to the suburbs where they built playhouses like the Theatre, which became highly successful. This idea about the development of 16th- century theatre in England is quite common. But according to David Kathman, several things are wrong with this picture. Most importantly for my purposes, Kathman asserts that the history of commercial theatre during the period was not one of unmitigated success but can be better understood in terms of economic booms and busts (42). The plague had more than a little to do with this because whenever the disease reared its head again, large gatherings were forbidden and theatres were forced to stay closed, sometimes for months on end. To someone like Shakespeare, who was a shareholder of the theatre where his plays were also performed, these occasions came at great financial cost (Greenblatt). And yet as Stephen Greenblatt points out, Shakespeare rarely portrays the plague. He uses it as a metaphor but hardly ever refers to the actual disease and the circumstances it brought about.

4 While the plague posed an economic threat to the theatre in Elizabethan times and served as a metaphor for things unhinged or malevolent in the work of its most famous representative, French director and actor Antonin Artaud posited several likenesses between theatre and the plague in his famous collection Le Théâtre et son double (1938). These were not to be feared but welcomed. In Artaud’s words: If the essential theater is like the plague, it is not because it is contagious, but because like the plague it is the revelation, the bringing forth, the exteriorization of a depth of latent cruelty by means of which all the perverse possibilities of the mind, whether of an individual or a people, are localized.

Like the plague the theater is the time of evil, the triumph of dark powers that are nourished by a power even more profound until extinction. (Artaud 30)

5 “Latent cruelty”, “perverse possibilities”, “time of evil” and “triumph of dark powers” may not sound very appealing to most people but were deemed necessary by Artaud. Only these would allow for the kind of thoroughgoing purification he envisioned. Only these would force us to confront the hypocrisy governing our society. No lockdowns required therefore.

6 Artaud has become known as a visionary, associated by most with freedom and experimentation. But this idea is, in Kimberly Jannarone’s opinion, based on metaphorical readings of his work which do not take into account the specific historical context. She points out that the essays included in Le Théâtre et son double were written between 1931 and 1935, slightly more than a decade after the First World

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War and at the moment when a Second World War already was a distinct possibility. The images of carnage, disorder and stacks of dead bodies that can be found in “Le théâtre et la peste” were therefore hardly metaphorical to Artaud’s contemporaries. They did not bring to mind the Middle Ages but the much more recent history made in the trenches (40). In light of this, it is perhaps even more problematic that such carnage is presented as desirable and necessary. Artaud envisioned “a nucleus of men capable of imposing this superior notion of the theater, men who will restore to all of us the natural and magic equivalent of the dogmas in which we no longer believe” (Artaud 32). The phrasing is patriarchal (“a nucleus of men”), implies force (“imposing”) and hierarchy (“superior notion”). According to Jannarone, the essay resonates with the language not of freedom but of fascism (48).

7 In 1995, American playwright Naomi Wallace wrote One Flea Spare. She was equally inspired by violence and the plague yet the political slant of her text is very different. A native from Kentucky now living in North Yorkshire, UK, Wallace has become known for writing plays that are radical in terms of contents as well as form. She is a political playwright with a distinct interest in history and likes to investigate how different types of oppression (racial, gender, sexual, class etc.) intersect. Boundaries do not hold in her texts as the dead refuse to stay in their graves, picket lines and border fences are crossed, bodies are sliced open, past blends with present and houses are broken into. Wallace’s socialist politics find expression in plays condemning the excesses of capitalism and imperialism.

8 One Flea Spare takes place in 1665 and is, for the most part, set at the London home of William and Darcy Snelgrave. The city is gripped by the plague and while many aristocrats have left for the safer countryside, the Snelgraves were “unlucky”: their servants became ill, as a result of which they, too, were quarantined. At the beginning of the play, they have almost completed their 28 days of mandatory lockdown when a new accident befalls them. A sailor named Bunce and Morse, the supposed daughter of one of their aristocratic neighbours, break into the Snelgraves’ home. Because these newcomers may have brought disease into the house, the guard Kabe decides that a new period of lockdown is necessary. The Snelgraves find themselves obliged to live in cramped quarters with a lower-class man and a child whom they have never met before and do not trust. Boredom leads to the disclosure of secrets, while class boundaries are slowly eroded. By the time the lockdown ends, both Snelgraves are dead, Bunce has escaped and Morse goes to jail, where she might also die.

9 The play was commissioned by London’s Bush Theatre, where it was first performed in October 1995. One Flea Spare’s American premiere occurred in February 1996 at the Actors Theatre during the Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1997, the play’s first New York production took place at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. As often happens with Wallace’s work, British critics were enthusiastic, while their colleagues across the Atlantic responded with lukewarm or even outright hostile reviews (Gornick). Ben Brantley in The New York Times called the 1997 production “stiff, schematic and surprisingly unaffecting” (Brantley) while the plot reminded him of Jean Genet’s Les Bonnes (1947) without the older play’s force or impact. Spectacularly negative, John Simon in New York Magazine wrote that the play is “not only pretentious and boring but also empty, pointless, and totally preposterous” (Simon 92).

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10 In spite of its mixed reception in Wallace’s home country, the play was translated into French by Dominique Hollier as Une puce, épargnez-la and performed at the Comédie Française’s Théâtre Ephémère in 2012. Wallace became, after Tennessee Williams, the only other American playwright included in the company’s permanent repertoire (Stevens Abbitt 276). The French production was highly stylised, a “postmodern version […] [paying] clever homage to the paintings of Old Masters and the masterpieces of French neoclassical theatre” (277). In the French magazine L’Express, Laurence Liban called the play “a sorrowful and agonizing meeting behind closed doors, against the backdrop of the plague and of puritanism” (Liban, translation mine). She praised Anne- Laure Liégois’s forceful direction as well as the performances of all five actors.

11 Racial unrest lay at the heart of Wallace’s decision to write One Flea Spare. Her idea for the play grew while riots were spreading like wildfire in Los Angeles after four police officers were not convicted of assault in the beating of Rodney King. Wallace herself says: I’d been reading Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year when the riots broke out and I began to see them both–L.A. and the London plague–as the same event. A time of crisis. A time when rich and poor get thrown together–and, suddenly, one sees alternatives. I began to think about what happens when the containment of a presumed danger through the regimentation of space breaks down, such as when South-Central L.A. began to “invade” Beverly Hills. I wanted to foreground a society in crisis. By writing about a time other than our own, it’s possible for issues that have become locked in rhetoric, or dismissed as too overdetermined for the stage, to become visible anew. (qtd. in Gornick)

12 While Rodney King was neither the first nor, unfortunately, the last African American to suffer abuse at the hands of the police, his violent encounter with LAPD was one of the first to be videotaped, which allowed it to go viral and outrage to spread widely (Arango). Today, racial inequality and excessive force have once again become the subject of nationwide debate and protest after white police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on African American George Floyd’s neck for almost nine full minutes, ignoring his cries of distress and killing him in the process. Whereas these gruesome events took place in Minneapolis, protest has arisen in most major cities across the country and in other parts of the world. In Los Angeles, it has become very difficult not to think back to the 1992 riots. But, following Tim Arango’s assessment, we should be aware of some significant differences between the riots back then and now. The protesters during the nineties were mostly African Americans who stayed in the then black neighbourhood of South Central. The current protesters are, conversely, of different racial backgrounds and are taking their discontent to the wealthy white neighbourhood of Beverly Hills. This because “rage and anger over racism and police abuses have been compounded by outrage at another of America’s most profound issues–growing income inequality” (Arango).

13 Even though race riots were on Wallace’s mind when she started writing One Flea Spare, race does not seem to play a major part in the text. No reference is made to the characters’ racial background and since the Snelgraves are aristocrats in 17th-century London and Morse can pass for one, they are almost certainly white. The only character

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who might be of colour is mentioned in one of Bunce’s stories about life at sea. Bunce talks about a fellow-sailor named Killigrew, whom he loved. At Mrs Snelgrave’s request, he describes Killigrew’s breast which was “Darker. Like the skin of an apple it smelled, and as smooth” (Wallace 31). Given the play’s association between fruit and eroticism, Bunce here appears to hint at his strong desire for this darker sailor. Killigrew and Bunce fought side by side against the Dutch yet the former was “luckier”: he died, allowing him to escape further impressment.

14 Bunce’s life so far has, to a large extent, been a product of his class background. Unlike race, class is very important in Wallace’s text, which explains Brantley’s complaint that the plot feels like “a Marxist economics class” (Brantley). According to Brantley, the plague creates “a climate in which illness and death are, if nothing else, democratic” (Brantley). But this claim glosses over some of the finer details of the plot. Wallace herself recently explained that she sees the plague and economic injustice as catastrophes that are equally destructive: It’s also about pestilence on top of pestilence, as we have today: a dangerous virus on top of a destructive economic system. That’s twice the blow. For me, it’s about imagining a

radically different world, reenvisioning the way we relate to one another. (Wallace, qtd. in Rodriguez)

15 Although the plague is not democratic in that it hits the poor harder, it does allow class boundaries to erode over time.

16 One Flea Spare includes five characters: the Snelgraves are aristocrats, Bunce and Kabe are lower-class and Morse hovers somewhere in between because she is a class pretender. As mentioned, the Snelgraves are still in London by accident rather than choice. Everyone else of their class has left the city, including the king and his courtiers. Vividly describing one of the pits where the plague’s many victims are buried, Kabe explains that The hungry. The dirty. The abandoned. That’s who dies. Not the fancy and wealthy, there’s hardly a one, for they have fled, turned their back on the city. Clergymen, physicians and surgeons, all fled. (Wallace 39)

17 However, the Snelgraves find themselves locked up by a lower-class man, forced to share their house with two lower-class characters. Theirs will be a different fate altogether.

18 The plague that spread across the world during the 14th century was a catastrophe by any standard. But not all of its side effects were negative. The disease “almost instantly reordered long-standing social relations between rich and poor, lord and serf, turning the tables on Europe’s ruling elite in previously unimaginable ways” (Roos 27). Because labour was scarce, workers were able to demand higher wages. The ruling classes were scared by what felt like a topsy-turvy world to them and tried to limit wages and forbid workers from dressing like them.

19 One Flea Spare is set during the 17th century but the plague equally seems to loosen class restraints within the specific context of the Snelgrave household, at least temporarily. This is the result of the 28-day lockdown: sharing the same two rooms with virtually nothing to do obliges the characters to look for entertainment in unexpected corners.

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Initially, Bunce is not allowed to be around the other three characters at all times. He is engaged as a servant, continuously expected to clean the house with vinegar, and locked up, leading to a sort of lockdown within the lockdown. Yet from the very beginning this arrangement is destined to fail. The Snelgraves, firstly, do not realise that while they lock away one lower-class character, they are sharing a room with another. Morse is, after all, not whom she claims to be. The Snelgraves unquestioningly accept her as “one of us” (Wallace 13) without a shred of evidence. Meanwhile Mr Snelgrave tells his new servant I’m not a cruel man, Bunce. But even under these conditions I can’t just let you walk about. This is my home. Under my protection. The problem is that you have the only suitable room in the house because it has a door that I can lock and we must sleep on the kitchen floor. (Wallace 13)

20 Bunce inadvertently benefits from the Snelgraves’ fastidiousness about class separation, in that he sleeps in a nice room and they have to make do with the kitchen floor.

21 Clothing plays an important role in breaking down class barriers. Dressing up and crossdressing are common occurrences in Wallace’s plays yet in this case a historical precedent can be found. As mentioned, the upper classes in medieval Europe were angered by lower-class women and children wearing clothes previously owned by wealthy plague victims and tried to prevent them from doing so (Roos 27). Morse manages to pull off her upper-class charade thanks to her dead mistress’s dress. She enters the Snelgrave household claiming that she is Sir Nevill Braithwaite’s daughter. While Mr Snelgrave is somewhat suspicious of her behaviour because “Sir Braithwaite’s daughter doesn’t climb over roofs. Sir Braithwaite’s daughter doesn’t enter uninvited” (Wallace 13), he quickly accepts her based mainly on appearances. Even after Kabe tells him that all three members of the Braithwaite family, including the daughter, were found dead, Snelgrave is not inclined to believe him: “She can’t be dead! She’s alive and well and a pest in my house” (Wallace 40).

22 How does Morse end up dressed up like an upper-class young woman? After Mr Snelgrave has died, Morse tells him about her own mistress’s death. She used to serve a girl named Lissa, who was in severe pain during her final moments and asked Morse to hold her. Morse seized the opportunity to bargain and would only hold her employer if she gave up her shoes and dress. By the time this transaction was completed, Lissa had already gone. While it may seem cruel to barter with a dying, by now blind girl, Morse repeatedly describes the cruelty she herself suffered at the family’s hands. Lissa routinely beat her with a stick while she was going about her duties and Sir Braithwaite locked up Morse’s mother as soon as she presented with symptoms of plague. He neither allowed his servant to see her daughter nor did he give her any food. Snelgrave even suggests that Sir Braithwaite might have been Morse’s father, since “[m]asters make free with their maids” (Wallace 59). Little surprise then that she has few scruples about stealing from Sir Braithwaite and his ilk.

23 Bunce’s journey across class borders develops differently but also involves clothing. As mentioned, Bunce at first spends his time sequestered from the other characters to maintain the semblance of social hierarchy. However, a combination of boredom and desire leads both Snelgraves to spend protracted periods of time with him. Mr

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Snelgrave lets Bunce wear his shoes, mainly to see what will happen, because “[h]istorically speaking, the poor do not take to fine shoes. They never have and they never will” (Wallace 26). To Bunce, this statement does not ring true and he wonders why he cannot just keep the shoes, since Snelgrave owns other pairs. Darcy and William Snelgrave both want to find out about Bunce’s life at sea, with a special interest in his sexual history. By entertaining his hosts with stories of mutiny and licentious behaviour, Bunce secures his freedom. Yet these stories which the Snelgraves so avidly want to hear and order Bunce to tell, ultimately also contribute to undermining the household’s hierarchy. Mr Snelgrave wants to find out every detail about the things desire led Bunce to do on board a ship with only men, but is less than pleased when the sailor volunteers information about his desire for Mrs Snelgrave. The violence ensuing from this particular conversation leaves Mr Snelgrave restrained in a chair, giving Bunce the opportunity to take his clothes, including the shoes he had previously tried on.

24 Whereas the power dynamics inside the newly minted Snelgrave household are prone to change, all four characters are temporarily at the mercy of a lower-class force, namely the watchman Kabe. It is Kabe who decides that the Snelgraves will spend an additional 28 days locked down together with their new house guests. Three of the people inside the house try to bargain with him yet only one appears to be successful. Morse wants a certificate which will allow her to leave the city but Kabe claims that these are impossible to come by. Instead they end up making a deal involving delicacies and sexual favours. Mr Snelgrave wants to buy items to keep the plague at bay and has no choice but to overpay. Kabe rejects his other offer of riches in exchange for freedom. When Bunce attempts to make the same deal, using Snelgrave’s money, the guard is more willing to comply because he does not “care enough about you to hate you. Rabble” (Wallace 66). Even though these words seem hardly complimentary, Kabe himself had been identified as rabble in an earlier conversation with Morse. A shared class background combined with a radical family history may lead to his decision to help Bunce rather than Mr Snelgrave.

25 During one of his own conversations with the guard, Mr Snelgrave had correctly recognised a strain of radicalism in Kabe: “The dying is done in this house, I thank the Lord. And when the dying is done in this city, Kabe, you better run, because I smell a Leveller’s blood in you, ringing loud and clear. I thought we buried the lot of you” (Wallace 41). Kabe claims to be innocent of the beliefs he is accused of but does admit that his father was a Leveller. These casual remarks are easily missed yet they hint at a buried layer of radicalism, at another catastrophe leading to ideas about societal renewal. The Levellers constituted a political movement active during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s, a series of armed conflicts between those loyal to the King (Royalists) and those who favoured the British Parliament (Parliamentarians). The Levellers were disappointed by the violence used by the government and wanted to rethink the role played by Parliament. They did not want to think of Parliament as a body representing the nation but as an employee of the nation (Appelbaum 131). Citizens are, according to the Levellers, defined by natural rights and can pass on their opinion through representatives. By means of their Agreement of the People, the Levellers advocated for a representative democracy (136).

26 Yet these ideas were not radical enough for the tastes of some. Mr Snelgrave is happy to hear that Kabe’s father has choked: “A proper death for a man of his station.

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Levellers. Diggers. I say cut them to pieces or they will cut us to pieces” (Wallace 41). It seems safe to say that Mr Snelgrave is a fan of neither levellers nor diggers and tends, as opponents of these separate movements were wont to do, to conflate the two (Hughes 218). The Diggers had, in part, brought this upon themselves by using the label “True Levellers” in their first publication. This because the actual Levellers had just issued a statement to counteract the common perception that they posed a serious economic threat and were in favour of levelling estates (Gurney 123). The Diggers, by contrast, were a radical movement in England during the 1640s associated with Gerrard Winstanley. They believed that the earth belonged to everyone, that private property should be abolished, as should buying and selling (viii). The Diggers had turned this theory into practice by digging on St George’s Hill in Surrey. While neither the Levellers nor the Diggers saw their ambitions realised, the 1640s wars did result in major change, at least temporarily: the execution of King Charles I and Britain’s brief stint as a republic, “in a sense, the single most utopian thing ever attempted in British political history” (Appelbaum 102). The aristocracy lost some of its power and a remarkable freedom to publish and preach could be observed (J. Miller 3).

27 It is not entirely surprising that a movement like the Diggers should come into being in the wake of a civil war that led to regicide, at least if one is inclined to believe the ideas set forth by Walter Scheidel in his 2017 study The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Scheidel discusses the “Four Horsemen of Leveling”, namely mass warfare, violent revolution, state collapse and lethal pandemics (Scheidel 6). According to Scheidel Violent shocks were of paramount importance in disrupting the established order, in compressing the distribution of income and wealth, in narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Throughout recorded history, the most powerful levelling invariably resulted from the most powerful shocks. (6)

28 Various critics and commentators have noted that the current moment feels like another turning point. Obviously, it is impossible to predict where the present crisis will leave us. But, as Jerome Roos points out, krisis was an important term in Hippocratic medicine: it indicated the in-between moment when a disease could either become worse and lead to death or when recovery was starting (24). The Black Death spelled the demise of the Middle Ages and its feudal system. Roos wonders whether the current pandemic could mean the end of late modernity (24). Clare Cain Miller, for her part, asserts that “[h]istorically major crises have tended to empower workers” (C. C. Miller). The examples she gives are, again, the Black Death and its connection to feudalism but also the New Deal, which came about as a result of the Great Depression. Miller acknowledges that the current pandemic is not as threatening as the plague but points out that it does come at a moment when discussions about income inequality were already raging in the US. The present situation may not lead to improved conditions for workers because many people have lost their jobs and the disease has worsened inequality in that it struck African Americans and Latinos disproportionately hard (C. C. Miller). Yet at the same time, expectations have been adjusted: many companies have, for instance, awarded benefits like paid sick leave. Even if these policy changes were supposed to be temporary, it could prove difficult to revert to the old situation.

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29 Where does Wallace’s play leave us? Will its topsy-turvy world prove permanent? Both Snelgraves have died, which, in a way, could seem to indicate the end of the old order. But matters are far more complex than a simple “out with the old, in with the new”. Mrs Snelgrave’s life is ended by Morse. Of course, the story of an aristocrat put to death by a former servant smacks of revolution. However, in this particular case, it is actually an act of love. Mrs Snelgrave has contracted the plague and is in great pain. She initially asks Bunce to take her life yet he refuses because he “ha[sn’t] the courage” (Wallace 71). Morse complies after another round of bartering, which leaves her with Darcy’s gloves. Even though Bunce escapes as far as we are aware, he himself does not have high hopes about his chances of survival now that the Snelgraves are gone: “It is done. We are dead” (Wallace 72). After Mr Snelgrave’s death, Bunce had already pointed out to Morse that he “might as well rope [him]self and walk to Tyburn. Save them and [him] the trouble” (Wallace 66). Morse actually ends up in prison where she is compelled, through violence, to discuss what happened during the lockdown. Bunce’s prediction may have come true, in that the first question she is asked is “What are you doing out of your grave?” (Wallace 7). If four out of the five characters die, the picture we are left with appears rather bleak.

30 A final twist turns our attention to love and desire. Morse’s last words to us are about love: “Because I loved them, and they have marked me” (Wallace 74). While Kabe is singing another one of his songs, she throws an orange in the air and “[j]ust as she catches it, the lights go black” (Wallace 74). The orange had earlier served as a prop in one of Bunce’s stories about desire at sea. Throughout the play a connection between desire and fruit is developed: Morse lets Kabe touch her based on the promise of apples and tangerines, while the quote I used as an epigraph for this article is part of Darcy’s description of her formerly passionate sexual history with Mr Snelgrave. As mentioned, it is desire combined with boredom which breaks down various barriers over the course of the play. To Wallace, rediscovering love and desire is another act of subversion, another hidden layer of radicalism because “[i]n our society, the body is a thing made instrumental use of, and then asked to be–meant to be, unable to be–a thing of love” (qtd. in Gornick). Desire, then, “serves the need to end one’s singular state. It creates the space in which to reimagine oneself” (qtd. in Gornick). Morse’s final disobedient gesture allows her to escape confinement and swings open the door to that space, which we are invited to enter with her.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Appelbaum, Robert. Literature and Utopian Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.

Arango, Tim. “In Los Angeles, the Ghosts of Rodney King and Watts Rise Again.” The New York Times, 03 June 2020. Accessed 08 June 2020.

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Artaud, Antonin. The Theatre and Its Double. Translated by Mary Caroline Richards. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Brantley, Ben. “Prisoners in Their Own Home, Facing the Twin Ravages of Plague and Power.” The New York Times, 10 March 1997. Accessed 05 June 2020.

Gornick, Vivian. “An American Exile in America.” New York Times Magazine, 2 March 1997. Accessed 16 Nov. 2017.

Greenblatt, Stephen. “What Shakespeare Actually Wrote About the Plague.” The New Yorker, 07 May 2020. Accessed 05 June 2020.

Gurney, John. Brave Community: The Digger Movement in the English Revolution. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.

Hughes, Ann. “Diggers, True Levellers and the Crisis of the English Revolution.” In The Agreements of the People, the Levellers, and the Constitutional Crisis of the English Revolution. Eds. Philip Baker and Elliot Vernon. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 218-238.

Jannarone, Kimberly. Artaud and His Doubles. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2010.

Kathman, David. “The London Playing Bust of the Early 1580s and the Economics of Elizabethan Theater.” Shakespeare Studies 45 (2017): 41-50.

Liban, Laurence. “Une puce, épargnez-la à la Comédie Française.” L’Express, 19 May 2012. Accessed 09 June 2020.

Meek, James. To Calais, in Ordinary Time. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2019.

Miller, Claire Cain. “Could the Pandemic Wind Up Fixing What’s Broken About Work in America?” The New York Times, 10 Apr. 2020. Accessed 05 June 2020.

Miller, John. A Brief History of the English Civil Wars: Roundheads, Cavaliers and the Execution of the King. London: Constable & Robinson, 2009.

Rodriguez, Giovanni. “Naomi Wallace’s Theatre of the Plague: More Riveting and Relevant Than Ever.” Forbes, 10 May 2020. Accessed 05 June 2020.

Roos, Jerome. “How Plagues Change the World.” New Statesman 149:5520 (2020): 24-28.

Scheidel, Walter. The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2017.

Simon, John. “Flea-Bitten.” New York Magazine, 24 March 1997, pp. 92-93.

Stevens Abbitt, Erica. “Une puce épargnez-la (One Flea Spare).” Theatre Journal 65:2 (2013): 275-277.

Wallace, Naomi. In the Heart of America and Other Plays. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 2001.

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ABSTRACTS

Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare (1995) was inspired by Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the LA riots that followed the acquittal of four policemen after they had beaten Rodney King. To her, these events became linked, because spatial barriers broke down, obliging the rich and poor to share a common space. The play is set in 17th-century London at a time when the city is ravaged by the plague. Four characters are quarantined together against their will, which leads to extraordinary situations. Several critics have noted that the plague can be seen as a leveller but I would actually like to qualify this idea, in that the disease mainly kills the poor in the play and the power shift it portrays seems to be temporary at best. At the same time, I want to explore the text’s hidden layers of radicalism, which it could be argued are a by-product of catastrophe.

« Une puce, épargnez-la » (1995) de Naomi Wallace a été inspiré par « Le journal de l’Année de la peste » de Daniel Defoe et les émeutes à Los Angeles qui ont suivi l’acquittement de quatre policiers après avoir battu Rodney King. Selon elle, ces événements sont liés parce que pendant ces faits, les barrières sont tombées, obligeant les riches et les pauvres à partager un espace commun. La pièce se déroule dans le Londres du 17ème siècle, à une époque où la ville est ravagée par la Grande Peste. Quatre personnages sont mis en quarantaine contre leur gré, ce qui conduit à des situations extraordinaires. Plusieurs critiques ont noté que la peste peut être considérée comme un élément niveleur, mais je voudrais en fait nuancer cette idée, dans la mesure où la maladie tue principalement les pauvres dans la pièce et le changement de pouvoir qu’elle représente semble être, au mieux, temporaire. En même temps, je voudrais explorer le radicalisme du sous-texte, qui pourrait être considérées comme un sous-produit de la catastrophe.

INDEX

Keywords: Naomi Wallace, One Flea Spare, political theatre, plague, radical politics, class differences Subjects: Theater Mots-clés: Naomi Wallace, Une puce, épargnez-la, théâtre politique, peste, radicalisme, inégalités sociales

AUTHORS

LAURA MICHIELS English lecturer Erasmus Brussels University of Applied Sciences and Arts [email protected]

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Autour de Sarah Kane par les élèves de l’École de la Comédie de Saint- Étienne Critique de spectacle/Performance review

Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme

Informations factuelles sur la pièce

1 Pièce vue le vendredi 31 janvier 2020 à la Comédie de Saint-Étienne.

2 1h25 sans entracte.

3 Mise en scène de Lorraine de Sagazan, assistée de Sarah Delaby-Rochette.

4 Avec les élèves de la promotion 29 de l’École de la Comédie – École supérieure d’art dramatique de Saint-Étienne : Lina Alsayed, Yohann-Hicham Boutahar, Ambre Febvre, Brahim Koutari, Chloé Laabab, Jonathan Mallard, Élise Martin, Djamil Mohamed, Julia Roche, Mikaël Treguer, Pierre Vuaille.

5 La Comédie de Saint-Étienne – jeudi 30 et vendredi 31 janvier 2020 – Présentation publique d’atelier.

Liens

6 Autour de Sarah Kane, présentation sur le site de la Comédie de Saint-Étienne : https://www.lacomedie.fr/evenement/autour-de-sarah-kane/

Critique

7 La création du spectacle Autour de Sarah Kane, joué les 30 et 31 janvier 2020 à la Comédie de Saint-Étienne par les élèves comédien.ne.s de la promotion 29, aurait pu coïncider, à quelques semaines près, avec le vingt-cinquième anniversaire de la première

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représentation d’Anéantis au Royal Court Upstairs, le 12 janvier 1995. Alors que l’enfant terrible1 du théâtre britannique faisait à l’époque couler beaucoup d’encre outre- Manche, son œuvre, que les élèves comédien.ne.s de cette vingt-neuvième promotion ont su s’approprier avec brio et justesse, est aujourd’hui unanimement saluée par la critique. Son intensité dramatique justifie à elle seule d’être étudiée par de jeunes comédien.ne.s en formation.

8 Cette création est le fruit d’un travail collaboratif initié par Lorraine de Sagazan, comédienne de formation et à la tête de la compagnie La Brèche. Pendant plusieurs semaines, à ses côtés, les onze élèves comédien.ne.s ont travaillé une œuvre complexe et difficile, qui « affronte l’indicible et représente l’irreprésentable » (Angel-Perez 2006, 154), afin de créer un spectacle composite, constitué d’un montage de plusieurs scènes et d’extraits de diverses interviews. Cette performance, jouée trois fois dans la salle de répétition du Centre dramatique national stéphanois, est le résultat d’un atelier dont la portée va bien au-delà de sa visée pédagogique : Autour de Sarah Kane est aussi (et avant tout ?) un vibrant hommage à l’une des dramaturges les plus influentes de la fin du XXe siècle.

Du travail d’atelier à l’hommage : la création d’un spectacle composite

9 En guise de prologue, la représentation débute par de très brefs témoignages des élèves comédien.ne.s : chacun.e partage une anecdote, ou un ressenti, pour exprimer la manière dont il/elle a appréhendé la découverte de la dramaturge britannique et son œuvre. Cette ouverture est une manière de rappeler indirectement au public que le travail conduit par Lorraine de Sagazan a une vocation pédagogique et artistique qui s’inscrit parfaitement dans le projet de l’École de la Comédie, « où la création et la transmission sont intimement liées2. » Cet atelier est pour les élèves en cours de formation une façon de s’approprier un théâtre exigeant et extrême, une « matière hallucinante pour des jeunes gens […] plong [és] dans la totalité d’une œuvre souvent considérée comme une des plus fascinantes du XXe siècle », comme le rappelle la note d’intention distribuée au public à l’entrée de la salle. Par la juxtaposition de pièces et d’interviews, les onze comédien.ne.s créent alors un spectacle qui permet, en une heure et demie environ, de traverser l’œuvre et de « chercher un endroit d’incarnation et de vérité, pour tenter d’approfondir leur singularité au plateau », comme le stipule également la note.

10 Des cinq pièces écrites par Sarah Kane, le spectacle en convoque trois, représentées partiellement : la première scène d’Anéantis (1995), un extrait de Manque (1998) et un de 4.48 Psychose (1999). Entre, les comédiens mettent en scène des reconstitutions d’interviews données par la dramaturge. Ces intermèdes, éminemment métathéâtraux, se voient et s’entendent comme des interstices à visée didactique qui permettent d’appréhender conjointement les enjeux politiques, poétiques et esthétiques de l’œuvre ainsi que la vision que Sarah Kane avait du théâtre et, plus généralement, de l’art. Ils ont une double fonction, puisqu’ils offrent aux élèves comédien.ne.s une clé d’entrée dans cet univers dramatique en même temps qu’ils permettent au public de se familiariser avec cette écriture et une telle esthétique. Très efficaces, ces transitions, qui servent d’analyse préalable à la représentation, soulignent le lien inextricable entre

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l’auteure et son théâtre et rendent compte de l’évolution formelle et thématique de l’œuvre.

Figure 1

« Je veux dire, la façon dont la scène a été perçue est intéressante. » (Sarah Kane, in Saunders 2004, 84) Crédit : © Valérie Borgy

11 Il est aisé – mais inexact – de scinder l’œuvre de Sarah Kane en deux : les trois premières pièces (Anéantis, L’Amour de Phèdre, Purifiés) d’un côté, au cœur du In-Yer-Face, où la violence (physique et verbale) contamine texte et plateau ; les deux dernières (Manque, 4.48 Psychose) de l’autre, « où l’on pourrait lire une résurgence du théâtre poétique » (Angel-Perez 2006, 153). Autour de Sarah Kane, en « glissant » d’Anéantis à Manque, réussit particulièrement bien à souligner les échos entre les deux pièces et mettre en exergue ce qui les relie. Bien que la forme des pièces diverge grandement, le cœur du sujet de Manque (et de 4.48 Psychose) est déjà en germe dans Anéantis. En choisissant la scène d’ouverture de la première pièce de Kane, dans laquelle Ian et Cate se retrouvent dans la chambre d’un hôtel de Leeds, il s’agit de mettre en relief les rapports de domination mentale et physique qui animent les deux protagonistes. Cette dualité est ensuite régulièrement déclinée au sein de l’œuvre : la relation, qu’elle soit amoureuse, familiale ou médicale, repose fortement, à des degrés divers, sur des rapports d’autorité et de soumission. Dans Autour de Sarah Kane, Ian et Cate sont interprétés successivement par deux couples de comédiens. Pendant que les deux premiers acteurs jouent, les autres les regardent, puis un changement s’opère : un second duo prend alors le relais, le premier devenant à son tour spectateur. Ce choix de mise en scène n’est pas sans rappeler, dans une certaine mesure, la trinité « Victime. Fauteur. Spectateur. » (Kane 2001, 40) évoquée dans 4.48 Psychose.

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Figure 2

« Une chambre d’hôtel très luxueuse à Leeds – le genre de chambre si luxueuse que cela pourrait être n’importe où dans le monde. » (Kane 1999, 13) Crédit : © Valérie Borgy

« Victime. Fauteur. Spectateur. », ou la mise en abyme du dispositif scénique

12 Grâce à cette réplique, Sarah Kane justifie la position de chacun de ses personnages, tour à tour victimes, spectateurs ou auteurs des actions. Y a-t-il une opposition, une délimitation et une frontière entre chaque statut ? La réponse est moins sûre. Chacun.e est à même d’endosser l’un de ces rôles et de glisser subtilement de l’un à l’autre. Le dispositif de Autour de Sarah Kane reprend cette idée en plaçant les élèves comédien.ne.s parfois en acteurs, dans une dualité bourreau/victime propre à l’œuvre, parfois en témoins, lorsqu’ils sont spectateurs d’une scène jouée par leurs partenaires.

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Figure 3

« Victime. Fauteur. Spectateur. » (Kane 2001, 40) Crédit : © Valérie Borgy

13 Le plateau est à la fois un lieu unique et multiple. Jonché de chaises, de fauteuils, de canapés et même d’un matelas entreposé à même le sol en fond de scène, à jardin, il est tour à tour la chambre d’hôtel d’Anéantis, l’institution médicale de 4.48 Psychose, ou un studio (le micro apparaît comme un accessoire métonymique des médias) où sont menées les interviews entre une incarnation de Sarah Kane et des journalistes. Le centre est moins encombré ; c’est d’ailleurs essentiellement dans cet espace que se jouent les trois extraits des pièces. Toujours présents et visibles, les onze comédiens, lorsqu’ils ne sont pas en jeu, sont généralement assis autour de cet espace central et observent attentivement le spectacle qui se déroule sous leurs yeux et ceux du public. La performance étant basée sur un travail d’atelier, cette configuration ajoute une dimension pédagogique : c’est aussi en regardant que l’on apprend. S’opère alors une mise en abyme, où le public voit des comédiens eux-mêmes en train d’assister à la représentation. Ce dispositif est même inversé dès l’entrée des spectateurs dans la salle : les comédiens, déjà présents sur le plateau, regardent le public s’installer. De temps à autre, certains interagissent par un regard ou un mouvement ; d’autres se contentent de regarder plus ou moins fixement des personnes assises dans les gradins, jusqu’à parfois instaurer un léger malaise, sentiment régulièrement ressenti par ailleurs par des spectateurs faisant l’expérience de la représentation d’une pièce de Kane. Ainsi, ce dispositif interroge alors notre place dans ce spectacle : lequel des rôles de cette trinité jouons-nous face à ces apprentis comédiens ? Sommes-nous de simples témoins de leur apprentissage ? Ou sommes-nous des victimes (consentantes !) de ce qu’ils s’apprêtent à nous jouer ?

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« Comment puis-je retrouver la forme maintenant qu’est partie ma pensée formelle ? », ou l’impossible après

14 Sarah Kane aurait près de cinquante ans aujourd’hui. Si elle n’avait pas décidé de mettre fin à ses jours quelque temps après avoir terminé la rédaction de 4.48 Psychose, qu’aurait-elle pu écrire ensuite ? À la fois testament littéraire – où l’on trouve un certain nombre d’éléments métadramatiques pour comprendre l’ensemble de son œuvre – et pièce à la forme expérimentale, 4.48 Psychose est de toute évidence la plus métaphorique et la plus poétique de l’œuvre, dans laquelle les conventions du genre dramatique sont abolies. Cette ultime pièce pose ouvertement la question d’un hypothétique après : « Comment puis-je retrouver la forme maintenant qu’est partie ma pensée formelle ? » (Kane 2001, 18) finit par s’interroger l’une des voix de la pièce (peut-on parler encore de personnage ?). En effet, quelle forme nouvelle Sarah Kane aurait-elle pu inventer, après avoir déconstruit les codes traditionnels du genre ? C’est cette question – entre autres – que l’on se pose, lorsque les lumières de la salle se rallument à l’issue de la représentation de Autour de Sarah Kane. « Autour », il n’en est, pour être honnête, pas vraiment question : le spectacle nous plonge directement « au cœur » du théâtre de la dramaturge britannique. En un peu moins d’une heure et demie, son œuvre est condensée en un spectacle rythmé, énergique, poétique et sensible, interprété avec justesse.

15 Lorsque la dernière réplique de 4.48 Psychose, « s’il vous plaît levez le rideau » (Kane 2001, 56), résonne dans la salle alors que le noir se fait sur le plateau, la représentation se conclut par un dernier extrait d’interview sur la nécessité d’écrire : Me. I’ve only ever written for myself. In fact, the truth is that I’ve only ever written in order to escape from hell. And it’s never worked. But, at the other end of it, when you sit there and watch something and think: ‘Well, that’s the most perfect expression of the hell that I’ve felt’, then maybe, it was worth it. I’ve never written anything for anyone else. Apart from a little comedy play for my Dad once. But that’s very hidden.3

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Figure 4

« Sarah Kane avait la capacité de pénétrer au plus profond de ce qui se passe à l’intérieur de chacun d’entre nous, et ce n’est pas une chose purement subjective – c’est la façon dont nous sommes en rapport avec notre réalité extérieure. » (Edward Bond, in Saunders 2004, 51) Crédit © Valérie Borgy

16 Cette fois, ce n’est pas à travers la voix de l’un.e des onze élèves comédien.ne.s que celle de Sarah Kane se fait entendre. C’est directement la sienne – en anglais, donc – que l’on entend s’échapper des haut-parleurs de cette grande salle plongée dans l’obscurité, nous rappelant que son œuvre continue de planer sur la scène contemporaine, plus de vingt ans après sa mort. Si la dramaturge écrivait pour elle, pour « échapper à l’enfer », son théâtre continue de faire écho à l’époque que nous vivons, ne cesse de nous interpeller et nous faire réfléchir au monde qui nous entoure mais aussi penser à notre rapport individuel et collectif à celui-ci, car les pièces de Kane ne font que « tradui[re] le politique en termes intimes ; [parler] du général par le biais de l’individuel ; du macrocosme à travers le microcosme. » (Angel-Perez 2006, 153)

17 À quelques semaines près, le spectacle Autour de Sarah Kane aurait donc coïncidé avec le vingt-cinquième anniversaire de la première représentation d’Anéantis à Londres. Un quart de siècle sépare ces deux créations. Une nouvelle génération s’empare avec succès de l’œuvre de la dramaturge, nous rappelant, s’il était encore nécessaire de le faire, son intemporalité et son éclatante modernité. N’est-ce pas ce qui en fait une œuvre classique ? Autour de Sarah Kane apporte une vibrante réponse à cette question rhétorique.

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BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Angel-Perez, Élisabeth. 2006. Voyages au bout du possible. Les théâtres du traumatisme de Samuel Beckett à Sarah Kane. Paris : Klincksieck.

Kane, Sarah. 1999. Anéantis. Paris : L’Arche.

Kane, Sarah. 2001. 4.48 Psychose. Paris : L’Arche.

Saunders, Graham. 2004. Love me or kill me. Sarah Kane et le théâtre. Paris : L’Arche.

NOTES

1. Expression de D. Alberge, journaliste, dans son article ‘Drama’s Enfant Terrible Takes Her Own Life at 27’, publié dans The Times, le 23 février 1999 (suite au suicide de la dramaturge). 2. Site web de l’École de la Comédie : https://ecole.lacomedie.fr/ (consulté le 25 juin 2020). 3. Interview avec Dan Rebellato, 3 novembre 1998 : http://www.danrebellato.co.uk/sarah-kane- interview (consulté le 26 juin 2020). Le passage concerné se trouve à partir de 35’10’’.

RÉSUMÉS

Critique de Autour de Sarah Kane, un spectacle présenté par les élèves comédiens de la Comédie de Saint-Étienne en janvier 2020.

Review of Autour de Sarah Kane, a show performed by the actor students of the Comédie de Saint- Étienne in January 2020.

INDEX

Thèmes : Theater Keywords : Sarah Kane, In-Yer-Face theatre, workshop, tribute, Blasted, Crave, 4.48 Psychosis, Comédie de Saint-Étienne Mots-clés : Sarah Kane, théâtre In-Yer-Face, atelier, hommage, Anéantis, Manque, 4.48 Psychose, Comédie de Saint-Étienne

AUTEUR

SAMUEL CUISINIER-DELORME Maître de Conférences Université Clermont Auvergne

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IHRIM (UMR 5317) [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud (dir.) Music, dance

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Une étoile, deux solos, trois plateaux : Hugo Marchand, entre Crystal Pite, Chopin et Bowie

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

1 Pour les amoureux de la danse, le printemps confiné/déconfiné de 2020 aura paradoxalement été marqué par des rendez-vous réguliers avec leur art de prédilection : barres proposées en ligne dans l’intimité des maisons et des appartements (des professeurs de danse et des solistes de compagnies nationales aux étoiles de l’Opéra de Paris),1 dans des parcs2 ou sur les ponts de Paris,3 performances où le collectif tente de reprendre ses droits par mosaïque d’écrans interposée (tels le Room/Roof Piece de la Compagnie Trisha Brown). Ces démarches multipliées ont proclamé cette impossibilité du corps dansant de taire sa présence au monde, sa propension à faire de l’expérience forcée des limites des occasions de se réinventer, de se regagner, de se dire encore et autrement.

2 Au nombre de ces moments privilégiés figurent également les séquences proposées par la 3e Scène de l’Opéra de Paris, espace numérique en forme de "scène infinie" si bienvenue en ces temps de repli nécessaire, ou encore la mise en ligne, par divers canaux et réseaux sociaux, de chorégraphies faisant resurgir le monde d’avant ou préludant au monde d’après. Sur ce fil temporel fragile naviguant entre deux époques s’inscrit la trajectoire du jeune danseur étoile Hugo Marchand que les internautes ont pu voir tour à tour évoluer dans la lumière crépusculaire de la somptueuse pièce de Crystal Pite, Body and Soul, créée en automne 2019 au Palais Garnier avec le Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris, puis, au mois de mai 2020, s’élancer au soleil d’une liberté renaissante parmi les colonnes de Buren au son de l’inoubliable "Let's Dance" de David Bowie. "Moment de danse et de liberté" (selon les termes du danseur au tout début de la vidéo) offert à des spectateurs en manque de scène réelle, aux marges d’un Palais Garnier et d’autres hauts lieux culturels pour un temps délaissés, ce dernier solo, par son mélange d’ardeur et de vulnérabilité, par sa grammaire corporelle, ne peut que faire écho, dans la mémoire collective, à celui de Body and Soul où, sur le Prélude n°20 de Chopin, Hugo Marchand a donné la pleine mesure de ses qualités d’interprète. Une fonction

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d’interprète systématiquement magnifiée, chez Crystal Pite, par la tension extrême et répétée de visages où se lisent tour à tour, tout au long de la pièce, la douleur, l’espoir, l’obsession, l’abandon, la toute-puissance du désir dans une œuvre qui, comme le confirme la note d’intention de la chorégraphe, n’a de cesse d’explorer les liens, les conflits, les douleurs qui unissent et déchirent l’humanité.4 C’est une même intensité que l’on retrouve sur les "deux plateaux" du Palais-Royal, les colonnes qui jaillissent des profondeurs du sous-sol se muant en supports, obstacles à franchir, jalons du périple d’un corps qui s’affranchit des entraves par des envols renouvelés. C’est, en outre, un même minimalisme en noir et blanc, pantalon et tee-shirt, version baskets ou chaussettes, qui lie les deux moments, ceux où l’étoile se dépouille de ses attributs scéniques habituels de prince de , de cheik de ou de chevalier des Grieux pour replonger dans un temps séculier palpable pleinement habité des doutes, des interrogations et des espoirs contemporains.

3 Certains critiques de la pièce de Crystal Pite ont souligné, à son endroit, le caractère quelque peu rebattu de l’utilisation de la musique de Chopin dans la danse,5 et l’on songe en effet à Jerome Robbins (In the Night, Dances at a Gathering), John Neumeier (La Dame aux Camélias), Thierry Malandain (Nocturnes), jusqu’à Marie Chouinard et ses 24 Préludes de Chopin, œuvre qui a vu le jour quelque vingt ans avant celle de Pite. Cette réserve paraît toutefois doublement contestable, d’une part en raison de la présence de la musique de Chopin dans le seul Acte 2 de la pièce, et d’autre part en raison de la lecture très personnelle que Crystal Pite fait des Préludes, qui subissent à l’occasion quelques amplifications et distorsions électroniques et parmi lesquels la chorégraphe opère un choix. Ainsi, même si l’ordre originel de la partition de Chopin est strictement respecté au début de la pièce, l’œuvre ne tarde pas à se trouver partiellement battue en brèche, certains de ses éléments manquant à l’appel. Crystal Pite retient ainsi moins la logique compositionnelle des Préludes – la succession de tonalités majeures et de leurs relatives mineures – que le potentiel expressif né d’une gradation de climats, d’intensités, de contrastes entre un groupe et des individualités qui s’en détachent pour servir un propos en construisant toute une dynamique de passage et de relais. Le Prélude n°15 et le Prélude n°20 se succèdent ainsi, unis par un fil conducteur émergeant, dans le Prélude n°15, sous la forme d’une figure solitaire, celle d’une danseuse dont la trajectoire, peu à peu, se désolidarise de celle de l’ensemble en une opposition frontale devenant quête individuelle, et dont l’errance et la déambulation, de porté en porté, aboutit à un repli au sol, figé dans une attente anxieuse. Modulant en sa partie médiane en ut dièse mineur, ce prélude en ré bémol majeur semble offrir, dans la version de Pite où à la basse ostinato de cette partie médiane répond l’échappée solitaire, des signes avant-coureurs du drame qui va se jouer tout au long du solo de la séquence suivante.

4 Composé en ut mineur, le Prélude n°20 possède la tonalité d’autres œuvres de Chopin célèbres pour leur contenu dramatique, œuvres parfois programmatiques et quasi narratives telle l’Étude n°12 de l’opus 10, dite "Révolutionnaire", ou simplement évocatrices d’une tension comme le poignant Nocturne n°1 de l’opus 48. Le solo qu’il accompagne vient ici appuyer, dans sa structure et son évolution, ce caractère dramatique, épousant le largo du prélude dont la mélodie en accords se déploie selon une succession implacable de noires, un rythme pointé se superposant à l’ensemble pour évoquer une marche funèbre (comme l’ont souligné, entre autres, Vladimir Jankélévitch dans la très belle étude qu’il consacre à Chopin dans son ouvrage de 1957

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Le Nocturne, mais aussi l’écrivain Jean-Yves Clément dans les deux très brèves lectures poétiques qu’il livre de ce prélude dans son recueil Variations Chopin de 2005).6

5 La prostration au sol du final du Prélude n°15 cède d’abord le pas, dans cette nouvelle séquence, à la verticalité du danseur (Hugo Marchand) qui, selon la perspective agonistique énoncée en début de pièce par la voix off dictant les évolutions respectives de "figures" 1 et 2 aux configurations diverses, se retrouve seul contre tous, seul debout au milieu de corps chutant au sol, immobiles et plongés dans l’ombre. Cette corporalité à la fois puissante et vulnérable, douchée de lumière, affirme sa présence au moyen d’un relevé suivi d’un plié effectué avec des bras amples défiant les limites spatiales, les ports de bras qui se succèdent convoquant inexorablement les figures mêlées des "ailes de géant" de l’albatros baudelairien et les ondulations désespérées de La Mort du cygne de Fokine. Toute la première phrase musicale, dont la courbe mélodique est globalement ascendante avec une intensité sonore croissante, est marquée par la vivacité des mouvements d’extension et d’élévation – attitude bras en couronne, développé quatrième devant très rapide, tours en attitude – qui se multiplient et s’obstinent dans toutes les directions.

6 La deuxième phrase musicale, dans un registre plus grave, semble démarrer en écho lointain à la série de gestes dictée par la voix off (celle de l’actrice Marina Hands) tout au long du premier Acte de la pièce, les mains et le regard s’engageant dans une recherche inquiète corroborée par l’ample rotation de la tête et du torse qui entraîne peu à peu, en un grand plié, vers le sol. Un lent tour en arabesque, un relevé en attitude où la tête s’incline précèdent de peu la trajectoire descendante du corps tout entier qui, en réponse à la courbe mélodique elle-même, va s’accentuer avec la reprise pianissimo de la phrase. Suspension et ralenti dans les tours en attitude et les pirouettes règnent tout au long de cette reprise dont le point d’orgue vibratoire semble faire résonner à l’infini l’extinction programmée en début de pièce par la voix off ("La lumière du plafonnier vacille et s’éteint"). Le passage du fortissimo au pianissimo, l’une des signatures de cette seconde phrase redoublée, est celui de la reddition progressive d’un corps et d’un souffle vaincus par un combat impossible, le prélude tout entier semblant ici retracer l’histoire d’un acte individuel de résistance entre élans et abattements, essor et chute.7 L’intensité de ce solo est d’autant plus forte qu’il instaure la pulsation d’une respiration individuelle suite à l’énergie fulgurante du groupe, trait que l’on retrouve dans l’alternance groupe vs. solo ou duo systématique dans la pièce mais qui acquiert ici une densité particulière, servie par la musicalité extrême de Crystal Pite et sa conception millimétrée du mouvement.8

7 Du clair obscur du discours intérieur des corps et des âmes sur la scène de Garnier aux pleins feux des colonnes de Buren au mois de mai, de l’intimisme des Préludes au tube éclatant de Bowie (tout empreint des vibrations de sa période berlinoise de renaissance), le passage relèverait-il du grand écart ? Assurément pas si l’on en croit, en premier lieu, les signes qui, même insensiblement, renvoient à l’événement que la confrontation avec la chorégraphie de Pite a constitué pour Hugo Marchand, ce dernier en soulignant dans plusieurs interviews le caractère profondément marquant. Dès les premiers instants, et de manière récurrente par la suite, l’engagement extrême de la tête, du torse et des bras, l’alternance entre pliés, tour en attitude et pirouettes évoquent irrésistiblement la chorégraphie du solo de Body and Soul dont le danseur semble avoir pleinement incorporé la gestuelle. Mais si la figure de l’albatros s’impose ici de nouveau, au début du morceau, par le jeu des ports de bras répétés – bras à la

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seconde, rotations et oscillations –, c’est sur un mode cette fois résolument conquérant, celui d’une prise de possession pleine et entière de l’espace qui oppose un contraste absolu à la carcéralité d’une évolution contrainte, dans Body and Soul, par une gravité inexorable et la présence de corps jonchant le sol. À la traversée initiale de l’esplanade sous forme de course répondent deux autres traversées en grands jetés, l’effet de lévitation étant d’autre part accentué par les cabrioles, pirouettes, série de tours seconde, amorces de manèges et arabesques triomphantes dont le danseur, tout à l’ivresse d’une nouvelle liberté, nourrit abondamment sa chorégraphie.9 C’est l’une des colonnes les plus basses qui fournit le socle d’une de ces arabesques en équilibre, le danseur se muant alors en cette "statue vivante" appelée de ses vœux par Daniel Buren :10 non seulement spectateur mais aussi acteur de la "perspective sans cesse renouvelée" animant l’esprit de lieux qui redeviennent, plus de trente ans après leur création, l’emblème d’un renouveau.

8 De la mélodie en accords obstinés du Prélude n°20 à la ligne de basse imperturbable de Bowie, ce sont une même ferveur, une même rage désespérée, un même défi lancé à l’élan vital qui opèrent. "Let’s dance/ For fear your grace should fall, Let's dance / For fear tonight is all" : ces paroles rappellent de manière subreptice la tonalité blues originelle du morceau de Bowie dont tempo, harmonies et arrangements ont fait l’objet d’une réécriture et d’un ré-habillage substantiels par le musicien Nile Rodgers, producteur du morceau.11 Le début de l’interprétation proposée par David Bowie en 2000 à Glastonbury – entre autres versions du même genre au cours de ses concerts des dernières décennies – renoue d’ailleurs avec cette intention initiale, comme pour suggérer cette tension implorante logée au cœur du groove étincelant.12

9 Jamais peut-être, avant l’élan d’Hugo Marchand à travers les colonnes de Buren, la célèbre injonction de , "Dansez, dansez, sinon nous sommes perdus",13 n’aura fait écho avec tant de force, tant de pertinence, tant d’urgence, à celle de Bowie. Du soleil noir des Préludes à la du "serious moonlight" 14 et de son astre noir, 15 l’étoile porte haut les couleurs mêlées des émotions humaines.

NOTES

1. Certains danseurs étoiles de l'Opéra de Paris ont ainsi proposé des barres en ligne ; c'est le cas de Germain Louvet, Hugo Marchand, Dorothée Gilbert, Léonore Baulac, Eleonora Abbagnato et Valentine Colasante. 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CB8A5rI5vw (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h81MCZt5kjo (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 4. http://www.chroniquesdedanse.com/prochainement/body-and-soul/ (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 5. https://www.resmusica.com/2019/10/31/body-and-soul-de-crystal-pite-a-opera-de-paris- garnier-le-corps-sans-lame/ (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 6. C'est sous les auspices combinés de la douleur et de la mort que Jean-Yves Clément appréhende, en deux temps, ce prélude : "Le chemin de ta douleur est ta douleur elle-même ; ce qui fait toute ta douleur" (53) ; "Noire terre, ta mère et ta mort" (83).

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7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ3MCJdMC78 (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). Ce potentiel dramatique du Prélude n°20 a été pleinement identifié et exploré par Rachmaninov en 1902 à travers ses Variations sur un thème de Chopin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiDtLscGnn8, consulté le 10 juillet 2020), mais aussi par le chanteur Barry Manilow dans sa célèbre chanson "Could it be magic" de 1973 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52-EkZRnG2E, consulté le 10 juillet 2020) qui fera l'objet de plusieurs reprises successives par plusieurs artistes et groupes pop. 8. Je remercie chaleureusement Hélène Darroman, professeur de danse et chorégraphe, d'avoir attiré mon attention avec précision sur ces points essentiels de la pièce et du langage de Crystal Pite. 9. https://www.facebook.com/infofrance2/videos/la-création-originale-lets-dance-hugo- marchand-/694641941324577/ (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 10. https://www.frac-centre.fr/collection-art-architecture/buren-daniel/les-plateaux-projet- amenagement-la-cour-palais-royal-paris-64.html?authID=33&ensembleID=87 (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaIx_FBk4-Q (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFKnCcB5YDU (consulté le 9 juillet 2020). 13. Cette injonction apparaît en frontispice du film de Wim Wenders, Pina (2011). 14. "Let's sway / Under the moonlight, the serious moonlight" ("Let's Dance"). Notons que cette expression en forme de paradoxe et de clair-obscur a donné son nom à la tournée promotionnelle de l' Let's Dance en 1983, "Serious Moonlight Tour". 15. Le dernier album de David Bowie, paru en janvier 2016 deux jours avant la mort de l'artiste, est intitulé Blackstar.

INDEX

Keywords : dance, Hugo Marchand, Crystal Pite, Frédéric Chopin, David Bowie, music, video Mots-clés : danse, Hugo Marchand, Crystal Pite, Frédéric Chopin, David Bowie, musique, vidéo Thèmes : Music, Dance

AUTEURS

NATHALIE VINCENT-ARNAUD Professeur en études anglophones Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Body and Soul de Crystal Pite (2019) au prisme du Prélude n°4 de Frédéric Chopin : quand un duo d’étoiles s’affranchit du poids des maux

Franck Ferraty

1 « Il faut bien que le corps exulte », chantait langoureusement Jacques Brel en 1967 dans « La Chanson des vieux amants ». C’est par ces mots que pourrait débuter la prodigieuse chorégraphie Body and Soul de la Canadienne Crystal Pite, créée au Palais Garnier par les danseurs du Ballet de l’Opéra de Paris le 29 octobre 2019 : « L’acte II, rythmé par les Préludes pour piano de Chopin, dévoile des interprètes comme désarmés, aux pieds nus. Femmes et hommes ont la même partition chorégraphique mais s’opposent en lignes graphiques et picturales. De magnifiques duos (Léonore Baulac et Hugo Marchand, Ludmila Pagliero et François Alu) s’extirpent du groupe et s’émancipent1. » Il en est ainsi des deux danseurs étoiles du Ballet de l’Opéra, Léonore Baulac et Hugo Marchand, qui se révèlent de sublimes interprètes dans un pas de deux éblouissant, convoquant le piano du compositeur franco-polonais Frédéric Chopin2.

2 Chevillé au corps de son non moins sublime Prélude n°4 op. 28 en mi mineur (1838) à la splendeur crépusculaire3, le musicien romantique nous offre une plainte languissante transfigurée par le travail d’une chorégraphe en pleine possession de son art, dévoilant un horizon onirique d’une sensualité, d’une modernité et d’une actualité troublantes : le miracle de la danse s’accomplit alors presque par enchantement. En 1969, Gainsbourg revisitait cet opuscule via son titre « Jane B4 ». On se remémore la prédiction gravée dans les paroles gainsbouriennes inspirées du roman Lolita de Vladimir Nabokov5 (1955) : « Tu dors au bord du chemin/Une fleur de sang6 à la main. » Les oracles ont parlé, le dénouement sera tragique. Le dernier vers de la chanson, saisissant par sa beauté maculée de sang à laquelle Jane Birkin prête sa fragile voix, ne laisse aucun doute quant à l’issue, rappelant immanquablement Arthur Rimbaud et le

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vers final de son immortel « Dormeur du val » (1870) – « Il a deux trous rouges au côté droit » –, ou encore Boris Vian7 et son roman L’Herbe rouge (1950) : « Ils s’endormirent sans parler, le corps contre la terre chaude, dans le parfum des fleurs sanglantes 8 », mais aussi, dans une moindre mesure9, Paul Verlaine avec son sonnet « Le son du cor s’afflige vers les bois » (extrait du recueil Sagesse de 1880) mis en musique par en 189110 : « Pour faire mieux cette plainte assoupie/La neige tombe à longs traits de charpie/À travers le couchant sanguinolent. » Dans chacun de ces cas, la mort suggérée, esthétisée, euphémisée, s’invite de manière impromptue en faisant irruption par effraction, le surgissement du champ lexical du sang laissant le spectateur médusé.

3 Ivre d’une confidence chopinienne bouleversante par sa démesure expressionniste, le couple Léonore Baulac/Hugo Marchand s’élance et s’enlace sensuellement dans un tourbillon vertigineusement mélancolique, comme aimanté par l’appel languissant et désespéré d’un piano empli de contrition : les mouvements du corps fusionnent avec les mouvements du cœur au-dessus d’une chorégraphie diaphane spirituellement incarnée, charnellement désincarnée, où flotte un songe évanescent sur la scène d’un temps fantasmé s’affranchissant du poids des maux pour ne retenir que les mots inouïs d’un rêve d’amour inextinguible (à l’image d’un Liebestraum lisztien). Sur le tranchant pénétrant d’une puissante lame de fond, oscille une musique du corps et de l’âme débordant de larmes.

4 Sur un plan scénographique, le spectateur/auditeur, tout en contemplant la beauté immaculée des corps en mouvement, assiste à une longue déploration au piano reposant à la main gauche sur une inclinaison chromatique – éminemment expressive11 – constituée d’accords plaintifs se déplaçant en mouvements conjoints : répétés, ils évoluent en état de lévitation, de suspension, d’apesanteur jusqu’à conjurer le temps en le volatilisant, c’est-à-dire en le vidant de sa substance métrique pour l’évanouir dans un fantasme amoureux, grâce à un subtil jeu d’ondes stationnaires résonnant dans le médium du clavier, se déployant et se redéployant à l’envi au gré d’un vibrant pas de deux unissant les deux protagonistes. La main droite, dénudée, dépouillée, réduite à sa plus simple expression, joue néanmoins sur un Presque-rien doublé d’un Je-ne-sais-quoi12 lourd de sens, lequel procède de l’ondulation lancinante d’un infime demi-ton rendu éminemment expressif par l’harmonie chromatique. Ce demi-ton, tour à tour ascendant/descendant, générateur de clair-obscur, se mue en ton dévoilant un intervalle de seconde majeure d’une profondeur et d’un lyrisme inouïs, avant de s’émanciper en arabesque à partir de la mesure 5. La mélodie fait figure d’épure où le temps transcendé, tout en s’écoulant goutte à goutte, note après note, semble ne plus avoir de prise sur le Mystère d’une danse évoluant en état de grâce absolu.

5 Cette page musicale chorégraphiée offre à l’analyste les dimensions d’un court prélude mesuré13 aux contours non mesurés, démesurés, immesurables : le temps des horloges est aboli au profit d’un Largo souverain se dérobant à l’irréversible en élargissant et dilatant éperdument les lignes de fuite et d’horizon, sapant les fondements symétriques de la forme strophique de type AA’ qui structure cette partition. Notons que la chorégraphe Crystal Pite fait de la reprise variée, non pas un décalque, mais une répétition autre, mûrie par le poids du premier énoncé, par les épreuves endurées, par le corps psychique libéré de ses blessures à l’âme : tout se passe comme si on répétait la même chose et, en même temps, comme s’il se disait autre chose, car, dans l’intervalle, quelque chose d’autre s’est passé. In fine, transfiguré par un adage poignant faisant

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office de décharge cathartique, le thème lacrymal se meut en consolation, remédiation, résilience.

6 L’intrusion de la mort sublimée dans le Prélude n°4 revisité par Gainsbourg allait refaire surface, quelque vingt-cinq ans plus tard, sous une autre forme dans la scène du massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy du film La Reine Margot de Patrice Chéreau (1994), avec Isabelle Adjani14 dans le rôle-titre. On y voit une chorégraphie surréelle campant des corps en mouvement se donnant l’accolade, s’étreignant, s’empoignant, se débattant dans l’ardeur d’un improbable ballet réglé d’une main de maître, au milieu d’une foule ensanglantée et d’une folie meurtrière : la barbarie est neutralisée, anesthésiée, volatilisée cinématographiquement au profit d’une scène fantasmée jouée corps et âme, qui ne veut montrer que l’ambiguïté d’un corps à corps où, à la sauvagerie des combats, se substitue la grâce d’un lien fraternel et où soudain les protagonistes ne sont plus « sur terre pour tuer des pauvres gens15 ».

NOTES

1. https://www.telerama.fr/sortir/body-and-soul-le-ballet-de-crystal-pite-enchante-le-palais- garnier,n6501059.php (consulté le 30 juin 2020). 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rA6E9IpVGA (consulté le 30 juin 2020). 3. Il n’est pas insignifiant que ce prélude, à côté du 6e en si mineur, ait été choisi pour être joué à l’orgue de l’église de la Madeleine le jour des funérailles du compositeur, le 30 octobre 1849. On y entendit aussi à l’orchestre sa Marche funèbre et le Requiem de Mozart. Notons que le pianiste de jazz Keith Jarrett cite à trois reprises de manière réminiscente les deux premières mesures du 4e Prélude au tout début et dans le déroulé de la composition/improvisation In Your Quiet Place coécrite avec le vibraphoniste Gary Burton en 1970 https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=fxvHapje8DI (consulté le 30 juin 2020) : la ressemblance est troublante si l’on considère les toutes premières notes (broderie mélodico-harmonique autour de si-do-si) ainsi que la tonalité convoquée, en l’occurrence mi mineur comme chez Chopin. L’ethos nostalgique de cette page de piano jarrettien confirme l’emprunt. 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-3phtJB_fc (consulté le 30 juin 2020). 5. « Ainsi, bien que la chanson de Gainsbourg soit beaucoup plus courte que le poème de Nabokov (trois strophes au lieu de treize), le compositeur n’en respecte pas moins la structure, tant au niveau du prologue que de l’épilogue puisqu’il insiste sur la disparition de Jane B. […] La fin se révèle néanmoins différente. En effet, chez Nabokov, c’est Humbert Humbert qui s’imagine mourir dans un accident de la route : « […] ma voiture claudique, / Cette dernière étape m’achève. / Ils me jetteront dans une décharge publique, / Le reste est rouille, étoile et rêve »(Lolita, 447). Au contraire, chez Gainsbourg, c’est Jane B. qui est assassinée […]. Le dénouement se veut donc beaucoup plus cruel et tragique bien que Gainsbourg ait pourtant retiré certains détails originaux insoutenables sur le sort subi par Jane B.» (Yannicke Chupin, Agnès Edel-Roy, Monica Manolescu et Lara Delage-Toriel, dir., Vladimir Nabokov et la France, Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2017, p. 206). Les premiers vers de Gainsbourg tendent indéniablement la main à ceux de Nabokov:

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« Signalement Yeux bleus « Perdue : Dolorès Haze. Signalement : Cheveux châtains Bouche écarlate, cheveux noisette Jane B. Àge : cinq mille trois cents jours Anglaise (bientôt quinze ans !) De sexe féminin Profession : néant, ou starlette » Âge : entre vingt et vingt et un (NABOKOV) Apprend le dessin Domiciliée chez ses parents » (GAINSBOURG)

6. C'est moi qui souligne ; il en est de même dans les trois autres occurrences en gras qui suivent. 7. Boris Vian était très lié à Serge Gainsbourg – son cadet de huit ans – auquel il allait consacrer un article dans Le Canard Enchaîné du 12 novembre 1958, « Du chant à la une : Serge Gainsbourg » et un autre, l’année de sa mort, intitulé tout simplement « Serge Gainsbourg » (cf. Bonjour Philippine, n° 14, février 1959). 8. Cf. Classiques modernes, Boris Vian, romans, nouvelles, œuvres diverses, Édition établie, présentée et annotée par Gilbert Pestureau, La Pochothèque, 1993, p. 439. 9. L’évocation du sang n’intervient que dans l’avant-dernier tercet. 10. Cf. Trois mélodies sur des poèmes de Paul Verlaine : 1. « La mer est plus belle que les cathédrales » ; 2. « Le son du cor s'afflige vers les bois » ; 3. « L’échelonnement des haies ». 11. espressivo, précise le compositeur au tout début de la partition. 12. Les deux expressions sont celles du philosophe-musicien Vladimir Jankélévitch (cf. Le Je-ne- sais-quoi et le Presque-rien, PUF, 1957). 13. Une octave ascendante en anacrouse suivie de seulement 25 mesures écrites à C barré. 14. Onze ans plus tôt, en 1983, l’actrice – également chanteuse – avait signé sept des onze textes présents sur l’album Pull Marine que lui consacra Serge Gainsbourg. Leur première rencontre avait eu lieu en 1974 : la jeune comédienne chantait « Rocking chair ». 1984 devait marquer l’année de leur dernière collaboration : titre de la chanson, « Rupture au miroir » qu’Isabelle Adjani interpréta en duo avec Jane Birkin, la boucle étant ainsi bouclée. 15. Cf. La chanson « Le Déserteur » de Boris Vian/Harold Berg (1954).

INDEX

Thèmes : Music, Dance Mots-clés : chorégraphie, piano, mort esthétisée, mélancolie, chromatisme, temps fantasmé, résilience Keywords : choreography, piano, aestheticized death, melancholy, chromaticism, fantasy time, resilience

AUTEURS

FRANCK FERRATY Docteur en musicologie, agrégé de musique [email protected]

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Krakauer-Tagg Duo : du souffle et des marteaux pour abattre les murs du confinement

Cyril Camus

1 C’est le hasard qui a voulu que Breath & Hammer, le premier album du Krakauer-Tagg Duo, sorte en plein milieu d’une période où une grande part du monde se calfeutrait pour ralentir l’hécatombe provoquée par la COVID-19. Nous naviguions alors entre canapé et salle de bain, avec rares détours réglementés par la supérette ou la pharmacie. Beaucoup balançaient entre angoisse exacerbée par les actualités, deuils impossibles de proches isolés, et télétravail écrasant. Les « essentiels » devaient substituer au télétravail des équipées terrifiantes dans des transports en commun, des usines, des supermarchés ou des hôpitaux devenus de potentiels foyers de contagion. Certains n’en pouvaient plus d’être enfermés sans fin avec les mêmes personnes, et rêvaient d’être seuls. D’autres, seuls, enviaient les premiers. La sortie de Breath & Hammer le 8 mai 2020, dans ce contexte inédit, est, certes, un hasard, mais on n’aurait guère pu imaginer de meilleur moment pour l’apparition de cet album précis. Baume au cœur et décloisonnement ultime, le travail de Krakauer et Tagg, qui a toujours consisté à briser beaucoup de murs symboliques, est un must-listen pour les confinés de partout.

2 Le « souffle » évoqué dans le titre de l’album, c’est celui que David Krakauer insinue dans sa clarinette. Ce sexagénaire new-yorkais est depuis longtemps une légende pour les amateurs de klezmer jovial, de jazz déchaîné et de hip-hop insolite. Il n’a pas manqué de succès dans le domaine de la musique savante, comme le Diapason d’or obtenu en collaboration avec le , pour leur interprétation (1997) de Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994) du compositeur argentin Osvaldo Golijov1, ou le prix Pulitzer de musique obtenu par l’œuvre de chambre Tempest Fantasy (2004) composée par l’Américain Paul Moravec pour Krakauer et le trio de pianistes Trio Solisti2. C’est toutefois en dynamitant les cloisons entre divers genres de musique populaire que Krakauer a semblé s’épanouir le plus, faisant partager à des publics divers son énergie, son goût de l’invention, sa passion pour la musique traditionnelle juive et sa volonté d’impliquer cette tradition dans toutes les fusions culturelles imaginables. Entre 1988 et

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1996, ces traits se sont exprimés au sein du groupe The Klezmatics, dont le style klezmer3 se mêle régulièrement à des sonorités et des rythmes jazz, rock4 ou ska5. Il a ensuite créé son propre orchestre Klezmer Madness ! et il a invité à y participer le rappeur, pianiste et accordéoniste canadien Joshua Dolgin, dit « », dont le hip- hop éclectique est aussi très marqué par l’influence klezmer6. Ils ont multiplié ensemble les mélanges entre klezmer/jazz à la Krakauer (déjà très métissé7) et hip-hop à la Socalled (donc tout aussi cosmopolite, et tout aussi féru de culture yiddish8), à l’image de leur hymne fou et bigarré « Bubbemeises » (2004)9. Enfin, se sentant sans doute à l’étroit entre des horizons culturels si limités, Krakauer et Socalled ont formé un autre groupe (Abraham Inc.) avec , célèbre tromboniste afro-américain qui a joué aux côtés de ou au sein du Count Basie Orchestra et de Parliament-. Ainsi naquirent deux rehaussant le cocktail ashkénaze d’une touche de funk : Tweet Tweet en 201210 et Together We Stand en 201911.

3 Parmi les récentes aventures musicales de Krakauer (en plus de la formation d’un autre groupe appelé Ancestral Groove), il y a le Krakauer-Tagg Duo qu’il forme avec l’autre architecte de Breath & Hammer. En effet, le « marteau », ou plutôt les marteaux, dont il est question, c’est ceux qui se trouvent dans le piano de Kathleen Tagg. Pianiste sud- africaine de renom, également résidente de New York depuis 2001, elle s’emploie aussi à briser les murs qui séparent les genres musicaux. Son association avec Andre Petersen, autre pianiste sud-africain, sur l’album Where Worlds Collide (2017), en est un exemple notable. L’univers sonore de Tagg, plutôt classique et expérimental, et celui de Petersen, résolument jazz, s’y mêlent dans une course effrénée12. Une autre des co- créations de Tagg est le spectacle (et l’album correspondant) Soul of Fire (2014). Avec le violoniste classique Piet de Beer, le bassiste de jazz Charles Lazar, et le percussionniste spécialisé dans la world music Joseph Avergal, Tagg y accompagne la chanteuse soprano Zanne Stapelberg dans son interprétation passionnée et entraînante de douze tangos, flamencos et chansons traditionnelles d’Espagne et d’Amérique latine13.

4 Le Krakauer-Tagg Duo a été formé en 2012. Les deux musiciens éponymes ont depuis créé et joué plusieurs spectacles ensemble — notamment The Keepers of the Flame en 201714 et Voyages en 2018 (voir Kelly), et l’album Breath & Hammer, qui donne l’impression d’être une synthèse de ces rencontres créatives, est en fait tiré de leur premier spectacle, également intitulé Breath & Hammer, et présenté au public pour la première fois le 17 janvier 2016, dans la salle de concert National Sawdust, à Brooklyn, dans le cadre du festival artistique FERUS qu’y organise, tous les ans, la maison de production VisionIntoArt15.

5 Sur la page de présentation du spectacle, sur le site du duo, une citation du critique journalistique Bill Milkowski qualifie Kathleen Tagg de pianiste « aventureuse » (Milkowski). Plus loin, le texte de présentation dit qu’elle est une « exploratrice sonore » assimilable à un « savant fou » (« ‘mad-scientist’ South African sound explorer » ; « About »). En effet — comme Krakauer a su tirer de sa clarinette mille sons étonnants à travers le travail sur les rythmiques propres aux divers styles musicaux qu’il a abordés et mélangés, en repoussant toujours plus loin la tessiture de l’instrument, et en pratiquant la respiration circulaire16 — Tagg utilise des techniques de jeu étendues17. Ainsi, elle traite volontiers le cadre du clavier comme un instrument de percussion, et elle joue tout aussi volontiers sur un « piano préparé »18. Dans le cadre de Breath & Hammer, elle a poussé ses expérimentations bien plus loin. À travers la « préparation » des cordes avec du papier et du tissu, mais aussi en mobilisant cordes et

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marteaux de maintes façons hétérodoxes (en pinçant les marteaux comme des cordes de harpe, par exemple, ou en frottant les cordes avec une mèche d’archet, comme s’il s’agissait des cordes d’un violon ou d’un violoncelle), et en créant des boucles électroniques à partir de samples des sons qu’elle produit, elle parvient à transformer son piano en orchestre complet, créant tout un environnement sonore riche qui enveloppe les étirements onduleux du son tantôt suave, tantôt strident de la clarinette de Krakauer19.

6 L’album Breath & Hammer pousse cette logique encore plus loin que le spectacle. Comme l’explique le texte de présentation qu’on trouve dans le livret du CD (et sur la plateforme d’écoute et de vente Bandcamp20), chacune des neuf pistes de l’album a été créée à partir de centaines d’enregistrements de sons tirés par Krakauer de sa clarinette et par Tagg de son piano préparé. En créant des samples de leurs propres interprétations, et en les mêlant pour former neuf morceaux électro-acoustiques composites, chacun étant issu d’environ quarante sources différentes, mais avec toujours les mêmes interprètes, le duo aurait pu aboutir à l’équivalent sonore de la créature de Frankenstein21. C’est le contraire qui se produit. Cette suite est bien un assemblage de sons émis à des moments et dans des conditions différentes ; elle est aussi un assemblage de styles musicaux hétéroclites, point culminant des carrières de deux musiciens voués à l’hybridité générique ; enfin, Krakauer et Tagg ne se privent pas des ruptures de rythme et de ton qu’on attend d’un artiste à la discographie empreinte de jazz 22 et d’une autre qui s’inscrit dans le domaine de la musique expérimentale23. Pourtant, les maîtres mots semblent être douceur et harmonie. Si l’écoute de Breath & Hammer favorise indéniablement l’immersion dans un univers sonore qui captive l’imagination comme ceux que décrit Josh Kun dans Audiotopia (2005)24, cet univers est très loin de la violence, des ténèbres glacées et des cris d’angoisse qu’évoquent ceux de certains célèbres compositeurs avant-gardistes, également adeptes des ruptures et des techniques de jeu étendues, tels que Ligeti ou, surtout, Penderecki25. La musique expérimentale et composite du Krakauer-Tagg Duo se situe, au contraire, dans un registre apaisant et chaleureux. Krakauer lui-même le soulignait lorsqu’il évoquait des morceaux joués au cours du spectacle Voyages, déjà présents au programme du spectacle Breath & Hammer, et partiellement repris sur l’album : Some of the (avant-garde) repertoire is crazy and very violent, but this actually is a very peaceful, calm, meditative sort of piece. It builds quite a bit and gets crazy in the middle, but in a friendly sort of way. (cité dans Kelly)

7 La question qui peut alors se poser est : comment détruit-on des murs sans violence ? Il s’agit bien sûr de favoriser la communication entre les deux côtés d’un mur, pour permettre aux gens (ou aux cultures) de part et d’autre de faire comme si le mur n’existait pas. Créer des espaces musicaux (pour rester dans le champ de la métaphore de Josh Kun) où les cultures se rencontrent à travers le mélange de leurs traditions a été le but avoué d’à peu près tous les groupes et les projets développés par Krakauer26. Chez Tagg aussi, les liens culturels et humains sont un thème récurrent, comme on peut le voir notamment à travers le titre de ses premiers albums : Connection (2014) — une suite de pièces du compositeur américain Jake Heggie, que Tagg interprète en duo avec la cantatrice new-yorkaise Regina Zona — et Where Worlds Collide, déjà évoqué, avec Andre Petersen. Breath & Hammer ne fait pas exception. Le texte de présentation de l’album affirme ainsi : « Fundamentally Breath & Hammer is about connections between people and a celebration of identity through music »27. Le spectacle éponyme était accompagné d’enregistrements en direct de gros plans de Tagg, de Krakauer et de leurs

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instruments pendant qu’ils jouaient, projetés sur un écran derrière eux, et, lors de leurs concerts dans la salle Pierre Boulez à Berlin (2019), les deux musiciens étaient entourés d’une sorte de vaste paravent transparent qui faisait office d’écran, et les images mouvantes de leurs propres gestes musicaux les enveloppaient comme d’immenses doubles spectraux, formant une installation conçue par l’artiste multimédia américain Jesse Gilbert28, et intitulée The Ties That Bind Us29. Puisque les vidéos qui composent The Ties That Bind Us représentent l’acte physique de production de la musique, on peut supposer que les « liens » évoqués dans le titre de l’installation sont la musique elle- même. Quant à « nous » (« us »), c’est un déictique qui a l’avantage de pouvoir désigner, alternativement voire simultanément, Tagg et Krakauer, et/ou Tagg et Krakauer et le public, et/ou Tagg et Krakauer et les musiciens du monde entier qui les inspirent et qui sont leurs amis et collaborateurs, et/ou les musiciens du monde entier en général, et/ ou les musiciens du monde entier et leur(s) public(s), et/ou l’humanité en général.

8 Sur le plan de la thématisation des « liens » et des échanges, l’album a bien sûr pour lui, comme le spectacle, la diversité d’origine des œuvres interprétées. « November 22 » est ainsi une composition de Kinan Azmeh, clarinettiste syrien qui vit à New York et se produit souvent en Allemagne et en Syrie30. « Shron » est l’œuvre de Roberto Rodriguez, percussionniste new-yorkais d’origine cubaine, spécialisé dans la fusion du klezmer et des musiques d’Amérique latine31. « Demon Chopper » est une création de Rob Curto, accordéoniste philadelphien d’origine italienne, spécialisé dans la musique folk américaine et les musiques brésiliennes, notamment le forró32. « Parzial » et « Ebuhuel » sont des compositions du saxophoniste et compositeur avant-gardiste et multigenres John Zorn33, initialement créées pour son groupe de klezmer/free jazz Masada, et déjà présentes sur un album de morceaux de Zorn joués par Krakauer, sorti en 201234. « Moldavian Journey » est l’œuvre d’Emil Kroitor, célèbre accordéoniste klezmer moldave35. Enfin, « The Geyser » est une création commune de Krakauer et Tagg, « Rattlin’ Down the Road » est de Krakauer et, surtout, « Berimbau » est une composition de Tagg (également présente sur son album Where Worlds Collide36), et la pianiste précise que le titre est le nom d’un instrument de musique brésilienne37, mais fait aussi référence à un instrument similaire utilisé dans son Afrique du sud natale38.

9 Si l’album n’est pas, contrairement au spectacle, enveloppé dans The Ties That Bind Us, il n’en a pas moins eu ses propres extensions audiovisuelles, et ce, en réaction à la pandémie et au confinement. Ces événements ont en effet conduit à l’annulation de la tournée prévue pour accompagner la sortie de l’album, et celle-ci a donc été remplacée par les Krakauer & Tagg’s Sunday Connections, une émission hebdomadaire en ligne, diffusée en direct sur Youtube, Facebook, et les différents sites de Krakauer et Tagg39, produite et animée par les deux artistes, qui s’efforcent, selon le mot de Krakauer dans la deuxième vidéo, d’« apporter de la musique depuis chez eux jusque chez leurs spectateurs », en ces temps « sacrément difficiles »40. Les deux musiciens se filment dans leur appartement new-yorkais, et en visioconférence avec leurs amis et collaborateurs, également confinés chez eux, avec, en général, un ou des extraits de concert enregistrés avant la période du confinement, et d’éventuels extraits d’entretiens également réalisés pré-confinement. Pour chaque vidéo, les invités choisissent une œuvre caritative, et les spectateurs qui le peuvent sont invités à faire un don. La première vidéo (29 mars 2020) est un entretien avec Kinan Azmeh autour de sa composition « November 22 », de ce qu’elle signifie pour lui (son explication prend la forme d’une méditation sur la notion mouvante de « foyer » pour un expatrié), suivi

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d’un extrait d’un concert d’Azmeh jouant « November 22 », accompagné de l’orchestre de chambre du festival Morgenland d’Onasbrück, puis d’un extrait du spectacle Breath & Hammer, où Krakauer et Tagg jouent leur version du morceau d’Azmeh. La deuxième vidéo (5 avril 2020) est une présentation d’Abraham Inc., avec des extraits d’une visioconférence avec Fred Wesley, et de nombreux extraits de visioconférences et d’entretiens pré-confinement avec les différents (et nombreux) autres membres du groupe, ainsi que des extraits de concerts, notamment une interprétation, par le groupe, du tube funk de Wesley « House Party » (1980). La troisième vidéo (12 avril) est un entretien en visioconférence avec l’écrivain polonais Krzysztof Czyżewski et son compatriote enseignant et musicien Michał Moniuszko, qui travaillent tous deux au sein de la fondation Borderland et du Borderland Center of Arts, Culture and Nations, à Sejny, deux institutions visant à promouvoir les échanges culturels (notamment à travers la musique klezmer) entre la Pologne, la Lituanie, la Biélorussie, et les autres pays dont la région frontalière de Sejny peut être vue comme le carrefour. La vidéo se termine sur « Human Music » (2017), un extrait de The Keepers of the Flame, spectacle de Tagg et Krakauer organisé avec la collaboration de nombreux musiciens du monde entier, et avec l’aide de la fondation Borderland. La quatrième vidéo (19 avril) est une visioconférence avec Rob Curto, qui explique ce qu’est le forró, parle de la genèse de sa composition « Demon Chopper », qu’il joue un peu en direct de chez lui, seul avec son accordéon, avant que Kathleen Tagg n’aille au piano pour montrer les différentes étapes qu’elle doit suivre, pour sa reprise de « Demon Chopper » avec Krakauer, pour transformer son piano en orchestre de percussions brésiliennes. Enfin, un extrait du spectacle Breath & Hammer conclut la vidéo en montrant le « produit fini ». Dans la cinquième vidéo (26 avril), Tagg et Krakauer parlent, avec le réalisateur américain Eric Steel, de son film Minyan (2020), et de la bande originale qu’ils ont composé pour le film, avec Krakauer à la clarinette et Tagg au piano et au violoncelle41. D’autres visioconférences du même genre étaient prévues, avec Jesse Gilbert le 3 mai, Andre Petersen le 17 mai, Socalled le 24 mai, et enfin, le 31 mai, avec , bassiste et guitariste d’Ancestral Groove, et Sarah MK, chanteuse qui s’est produite ponctuellement avec Abraham Inc.42

10 Il semble cependant que la sortie de leur album le 8 mai ait débordé les deux producteurs-animateurs de web-émission en herbe, puisqu’après l’entretien avec Eric Steel, on ne trouve plus que trois courtes vidéos sur la playlist des Sunday Connections sur Youtube, et aucune ne contient d’invité ou d’extraits d’entretiens ou de concerts pré- confinement. Au lieu de cela, Krakauer et Tagg interprètent, en direct de l’appartement, un morceau par vidéo : d’abord, le standard klezmer « Der Gasn Nign », ensuite une composition de Krakauer intitulée « Offering Nigun » (dont le seul enregistrement qui existait jusque-là était une piste de l’album Krakauer Live in Krakow, enregistré avec Klezmer Madness ! et Socalled au club Indingo de Cracovie en juin 2003, et édité en CD en 2004), et, pour finir, « Moldavian Journey » d’Emil Kroitor. Dans la première (celle du 3 mai), Krakauer explique que lui et Tagg vont faire deux concerts, d’une heure et demie chacun, en direct de l’appartement, le dimanche suivant (événement qui a effectivement eu lieu le 10 mai), et que ça demande donc trop de préparation pour pouvoir aussi tourner un épisode normal de Sunday Connections. On peut supposer que l’emploi du temps postérieur à la sortie de l’album n’a pas permis de reprendre l’émission comme prévu43.

11 Pendant la période du confinement (ou les différentes périodes de confinement, selon les pays), il y a eu beaucoup de musiciens s’essayant à la diffusion de concerts virtuels

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dans des salles dédiées44 ou depuis chez eux45, ou à des sortes de « bœufs Zoom », où plusieurs musiciens jouent ensemble en visioconférence46. Il y a même eu un certain nombre d’artistes célèbres dans d’autres domaines que la musique décidant de chanter un peu ou de jouer un air face à leur webcam47. Les quelques chercheurs qui ont commencé à analyser ces phénomènes s’accordent pour voir les mêmes notions de construction de lien social et de solidarité mises en avant dans chacune de ces interactions entre ces personnalités et les millions d’internautes qui suivent leurs publications en ligne, ou qui sont prévenus de ces récitals virtuels par les articles participant ensuite à leur viralité. Ainsi, Anita Datta a beau conclure un bref article sur ces « chorales virtuelles » en niant catégoriquement leur capacité à créer une expérience partagée comparable à un concert « en présentiel », elle n’en commence pas moins sa démonstration avec le constat suivant : Early into lockdown audio-visual content began surfacing on social media, presenting ‘virtual’ ensemble performances created by layering individually recorded videos of musicians performing in isolation. Such multi-track videos present a spirit of communitas and fortitude, invoking the power of music to ‘bring people together’. (Datta 1)

12 Selon Datta, la réalité empirique contredirait cette profession de foi en raison d’appareils d’enregistrement inadéquats (dans le cas notamment des smartphones et autres webcams), et des difficultés à synchroniser et accorder en direct plusieurs voix et/ou plusieurs instruments enregistrés à des endroits différents, dans des conditions différentes, et avec des appareils de trop mauvaise qualité pour bien s’entendre mutuellement. Elle s’appuie sur l’expérience, selon elle « universellement » décevante et stressante, des musiciens qui s’y sont essayés48. Des sources aussi vagues paraissent cependant difficiles à vérifier. Le champ d’expérience auquel elle s’intéresse est par ailleurs très restreint. En effet, si le début de son article décrivait le phénomène de façon assez large, en se référant aux « musiciens professionnels », elle ne parle en fin de compte que des chorales de chant classique et religieux, et elle n’évoque que l’expérience des membres de ces chorales, pas celle des spectateurs.

13 Roberta Lamb et Robbie MacKay adoptent une perspective plus large, s’intéressant de façon globale à la manière dont les échanges musicaux se sont accrus entre personnes confinées, non seulement à travers les vidéos en ligne de célébrités et de musiciens, mais aussi avec les chants sur les balcons et autres initiatives spontanées de diverses populations (voir Lamb et MacKay). Ils n’évoquent pas les difficultés et limitations techniques posées par l’enregistrement et la diffusion sur l’Internet. Ils s’appuient par contre, non sur des témoignages « universels », mais sur des articles de pédagogues de la musique, d’animateurs sociaux et d’ethnomusicologues (avec des liens hypertextes renvoyant aux articles en question). Ils passent aussi une partie de leur démonstration à analyser la tonalité et le rythme des morceaux de musique folk joués par l’acteur américain Steve Martin, dans son jardin, sur les vidéos de banjo qu’il a mises en ligne fin mars 2020. Enfin, ils s’intéressent aussi, pour cet exemple, à la façon dont Martin utilise sa persona publique ainsi que la mise en scène de sa vidéo pour amplifier l’impression de familiarité, de camaraderie, qu’inspire sa courte intrusion dans la navigation quotidienne, émaillée d’actualités terrifiantes, des internautes confinés. Leurs conclusions sont sans appel : quelles que soient les conditions, les échanges musicaux sont un medium fondamental pour tisser des liens de solidarité et bâtir le sentiment d’une communauté partagée, et les phénomènes d’accroissement des

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échanges musicaux en ligne ou entre balcons pendant le confinement ont été un exemple expressif de ce pouvoir d’apaisement et de rapprochement de la musique.

14 Dans un environnement comme celui-là, le travail de Krakauer et Tagg semble avoir donné naissance à l’un des univers créatifs les plus adaptés au besoin collectif de compenser symboliquement la séparation physique radicale et généralisée que décrit la formule « distanciation sociale ». Détruire les murs et les cloisonnements (entre genres musicaux, entre cultures, entre communautés), construire des liens, des ponts, mélanger, métisser, brasser, c’est l’obsession que traduisent les productions musicales de chacun des deux musiciens, et Breath & Hammer ne témoigne assurément pas d’un quelconque essoufflement en la matière. Que l’aspiration se traduise toujours par une réussite ou non49 importe peu : son expression reste systématique, et évidente dans la moindre pratique des deux musiciens, en duo ou avec d’autres. Non seulement l’album, sa fusion de genres musicaux, et son intense et chaleureuse expressivité, reflètent cette obsession et cette expérience dans la recherche de ponts et de liens entre les gens et les cultures, mais son caractère composite et expérimental préfigurait la réussite dans le domaine de la mise en ligne de vidéos confinées. En effet, Krakauer et Tagg ont produit un album dont les dialogues entre instruments résonnent avec beaucoup de naturel, alors même qu’il s’agit en fait d’un agrégat de centaines de samples, et que les nombreux instruments qu’on croit entendre sont en fait les mille emplois bizarres que Tagg a trouvés à faire de son piano. Après cet exploit, il ne semble, rétrospectivement, pas si difficile de produire en catastrophe des vidéos elles-mêmes composites (car mélangeant visioconférences en direct, concerts à la maison, extraits d’anciens entretiens ou concerts), et de parvenir à en faire le modèle de convivialité et de chaleur humaine requis en ces temps troublés. Tout concourt à faire des Sunday Connections exactement ce modèle : des regards pétillants des deux producteurs-animateurs lorsqu’ils parlent de musique avec leurs invités/collaborateurs/amis au contenu à la fois serein et passionné de leurs échanges, en passant par la simplicité douillette du décor. Cette série de vidéos, malheureusement incomplète, aura finalement étendu et enrichi avec beaucoup d’à-propos ce qui a été le projet multimédia d’expression et de création de convivialité de Breath & Hammer de sa naissance sur la scène de National Sawdust en 2016 à son apparition sur les plateformes de vente et d’écoute en 2020, du décloisonnement des genres et des cultures au déconfinement des esprits.

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Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus. 1818. In Four Gothic Novels: The Castle of Otranto, Vathek, The Monk, Frankenstein. Oxford/New York : Oxford University Press, 1994. 461-606.

NOTES

1. Voir « FKZ: Krakauer & Kronos Quartet ». 2. Voir Playlist « Moravec: Tempest Fantasy / Mood Swings / B.A.S.S. Variations ». 3. Voir «The Klezmatics, Tuml = leben » 4. Voir « The Klezmatics – Elijah Rock ». 5. Voir « Klezkalypso (Teach the Ska) ». 6. Voir Playlist « Socalled—Ghettoblaster (Full Album) ». 7. « Krakauer and [Michael] Alpert immersed themselves in the study of Greek, Turkish and Balkan music at the same time they were learning klezmer. In fact, Krakauer notes that after he began to perform with klezmer groups, it was his ability to see connections between various musical styles that helped him find a voice in Jewish music » (Goldberg 88). 8. « The Canadian Jewish rapper DJ Socalled opens one of his songs with a soliloquy by the Yiddish singer Theodor Bikel: […] one of many [samples] that DJ Socalled […] uses in fusion music that integrates Yiddish, English and French, among other languages. » (Glaser 266). Outre le rappeur québécois d’origine congolaise Kamenga Mbikay, dit « Sans Pression », qui intervient en français sur la chanson « (Rock the) Belz » (2007) évoquée par Glaser (voir « 07. Rock the Belz – Theodore Bikel & Socalled »), Socalled a aussi enrôlé Enrico Macias parmi les intervenants de sa chanson « UNLVD » (2011) (voir Socalled, « UNLVD »). 9. Voir « David Krakauer – Bubbemeises (feat. Socalled & Klezmer Madness) ». 10. Voir Abraham Inc., Tweet Tweet. 11. Voir Abraham Inc., featuring David Krakauer, Fred Wesley and Socalled. Together We Stand. 12. Voir Tagg et Petersen. Where Worlds Collide. 13. Voir Stapelberg et Tagg. Soul of Fire. 14. Voir « Keepers of the Flame ». 15. Voir « Listen: David Krakauer and Kathleen Tagg Present ‘Breath and Hammer’ ». 16. « Circular breathing [is a] breathing technique used by wind instrument players where air is inhaled through the nose at the same time air is expelled from the mouth. This technique allows for sound to be sustained for an indefinite length of time » (Harnsberger 31). 17. « [The phrase] extended technique [refers,] in general, [to] nontraditional methods of obtaining sounds from musical instruments. » (Jones 203). 18. « [A] prepared piano [is] a piano whose strings have been altered in some way. Either pieces of metal, wood, felt, or other objects have been added to mute or alter sound quality » (Thomsett

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174). Pour un exemple connu d’emploi de pianos préparés par Tagg (et Andre Petersen), voir « Kathleen Tagg & Andre Petersen play ‘Rapela’ by Moses Molelekwa ». 19. Selon les termes du texte de présentation déjà cité : « Krakauer’s use of extended techniques, improvisation, and circular breathing on the clarinet, along with Tagg’s prowess inside the piano to remake it as a harp, a zither, a drum, and a cello creates a collective sound that completely transforms these two acoustic instruments » (voir « About »). On peut voir un aperçu du travail de Tagg sur la vidéo « Kathleen Tagg’s ‘Piano Orchestra’. Breath & Hammer w David Krakauer. Nov 22 by Kinan Azmeh arr. Tagg », où plusieurs images superposées se concentrent chacune sur une des boucles musicales lancées par la pianiste au cours de l’interprétation du morceau « November 22 ». 20. Voir Krakauer et Tagg. Breath & Hammer. 21. Celle-ci est, en effet, également une création composite, patchwork de divers morceaux de cadavres, que le protagoniste du roman de Shelley a assemblés avant de leur donner vie, mais on sait que Frankenstein se montre pour le moins déçu du résultat esthétique de son travail d’assemblage : « no mortal could support the horror of that countenance. A mummy again endued with animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived » (Shelley 491). 22. « Krakauer’s engagement with klezmer blends musical, cultural, and personal motivations, particularly in relation to his experiences playing jazz. In a 2005 interview, he claimed that in the 1970s he suffered a ‘crisis in confidence’ regarding jazz: ‘I was afraid that I had nothing to say. What could I do after [John] Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Charlie Parker, Sidney Bechet, [and] Louis Armstrong? […] And ultimately, I started playing with some of those [klezmer] musicians. So suddenly my jazz background and listening to all these amazing Turkish and Greek and Albanian players came together. I felt like I had found a musical home.’ » (Goldberg 73, 88). 23. « Experimental composers have […] brought about the alteration of timbre by inserting objects between the strings […]. Cage devised the prepared piano as a one-man percussion band and Steve Reich describes his Phase Patterns as ‘literally drumming on the keyboard.’ Alternatively, auxiliary objects may be placed between the keyboard and the performer who activates them to produce sounds, as in Kosugi’s Distance » (Nyman 192). On a vu dans les précédents paragraphes à quel point le travail de Kathleen Tagg s’inscrit dans cette tradition. 24. « [S]ongs can be understood as audiotopias. […] [M]usic functions like a possible utopia for the listener, that […] is experienced not only as sound that goes into our ears and vibrates through our bones but as a space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit, be safe in, learn from […]. […] [M]usic and songs are […] almost-places of cultural encounter that may not be physical places but nevertheless exist in their own auditory somewhere. […] I can put on a song and live it, hear it, get inside its notes and chords, get inside its narratives and follow its journeys and paths » (Kun 2-3). 25. C’est ce qui conduit Helen Mitchell à conclure, à la fin de la reproduction d’une série d’entretiens qu’elle a menés avec des compositeurs de musique de jeux vidéo d’horreur : « In the depiction of fear and horror, the ‘otherness’ of avant-garde music continues to be a source of inspiration to composers […] involved in films and games. Associations between the musical avant-garde and what might be termed ‘the dark side’ are firmly entrenched within popular culture […]. Although avant-garde music might not be ‘pulling the crowds’ in terms of concert hall box office receipts, within the popular context of horror and visual media it has become the sound of fear » (Mitchell 142-143). Le Hongrois György Ligeti est bien sûr cité en référence au cours de ces entretiens (139) et le nom du Polonais Krzysztof Penderecki y apparaît à de multiples reprises (133, 139, 140, 141), notamment (133) pour l’utilisation abondante que Stanley Kubrick a fait de ses compositions dans la bande originale de son film The Shining (1980). On peut ajouter à cet exemple le fait que le Lontano (1967) de Ligeti figurait aussi dans la bande originale de ce film,

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et que cinq morceaux de Penderecki avaient déjà été utilisés par William Friedkin pour celle de The Exorcist (1973). Même pour des films qui ne sont pas tout à fait des films d’horreur mais qui s’y apparentent ou jouent tout au moins sur des moments d’extrême tension dramatique, ces deux compositeurs semblent s’imposer. On retrouve ainsi le Lontano de Ligeti dans Shutter Island (2010) de Martin Scorsese, policier balançant entre récit de détection et horreur psychologique, son Requiem (1963-1965) dans Godzilla (2014) de Gareth Edwards, remake américain apocalyptique du kaiju eiga éponyme (1954) d’Ishirô Honda, et le Thrène pour les victimes d’Hiroshima (1959-1961) de Penderecki apparaît dans la scène de guérilla urbaine du film de science-fiction dystopique Children of Men (2006) d’Alfonso Cuarón, et à plusieurs reprises dans la troisième saison (2017) de la série Twin Peaks (1990-2017) de David Lynch. 26. Voilà par exemple comment le projet culturel du groupe Abraham Inc. a été décrit, par Fred Wesley (dans un entretien de 2012 avec Jenna Makowski pour le magazine DC Life) : « Abraham is the father of us all. We all come from the seed of Abraham. Black, white, Jewish, Christian, Muslim—it all comes from one seed, and it’s all incorporated into one new music » — et par Krakauer (dans un entretien avec Jon Solomon pour le site du journal Westword) : « It’s totally logical in terms of the direction music is going in general now. And just totally logical politically like in the world today when you can bring cultures together. Not just a collage, because that’s not really interesting, but a real dialogue between cultures » (cités dans Goldberg 103 ; voir Makowski 43 pour la publication initiale des propos de Wesley ; voir Solomon pour ceux de Krakauer). 27. Voir Krakauer et Tagg, Breath & Hammer. 28. Voir Gilbert, site officiel. 29. On en voit un aperçu dans « Breath & Hammer: The Ties That Bind Us. David Krakauer & Kathleen Tagg ». Un peu plus d’explications et d’extraits photographiques, audio et vidéo peuvent être trouvés sur la page « Brearth [sic] & Hammer: An Immersive Fusion of Sound and Images ». 30. C’est lui qui, sur son trajet retour vers New York, début 2017, a été bloqué quelque temps à Beyrouth à cause du décret de Donald Trump interdisant l’accès au territoire américain aux ressortissants de l’Iran, de l’Irak, de la Libye, de la Somalie, du Soudan, de la Syrie et du Yémen (voir Knopper). 31. On peut écouter un album complet de compositions klezmer de John Zorn arrangées par Rodriguez de façon à les habiller de sonorités et de rythmes typiques des musiques cubaines, à la page « John Zorn/Roberto Rodriguez—Aguares, Book of Angels Vol. 23 ». 32. « Brazilian music/dance style from the Northeast, traditionally played in trio with accordion, triangle and marching drum. Forro can also include other instruments but […] remains accordion-led » (Balderston, Gonzalez et López 590). On peut écouter des productions du groupe de « bluegrass brésilien » Matuto, dirigé par Curto, à la page Matuto. Brazilian Carnaval in the Appalachian Mountains. 33. Pour plus d’éléments sur Zorn, le mouvement de musique avant-gardiste, rock et jazz qu’il a fondé autour du klezmer et de l’identité juive, et les liens entre lui et Krakauer, voir Cuthbert, et voir aussi Barzel. 34. Un aperçu de chaque piste, un peu plus long que sur d’autres sites de vente, peut être entendu à la page Krakauer, Pruflas. 35. Voir « FKZ | Emil Kroitor & The Trance-Moldavian Express | Stranik & Husan ». 36. Voir « Berimbau—Kathleen Tagg ». 37. « A pitched percussion instrument of bantu African origin, […] found mainly in the Brazilian state of Bahia, and […] used to accompany capoeira. A wooden bow with a metal or rubber string, whose tension is varied by means of a coin or wedge at one end, it produces a limited range of oscillating tones. The string is struck rhythmically with a thin wooden stick, and the sound

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amplified by means of a gourd resonator attached to the lower end of the bow » (Balderston, Gonzalez et López 166). 38. Elle explique cela à environ 32’10’’ après le début de la vidéo « Breath and Hammer Acoustic | Virtual Concert ». 39. Playlist « Krakauer & Tagg Sunday Connections Broadcasts From Home ». 40. « This is really a heck of a time for everybody, so, hope you’re doing okay, and, we decided to do this series to bring music from our home to yours. » Ma traduction. « Krakauer & Tagg’s Sunday Connections #2 with Fred Wesley and Abraham Inc. ». 41. Précision : il s’agit d’un vrai violoncelle, pas d’un piano transformé en violoncelle. La vidéo contient un montage d’enregistrements des deux musiciens en train de jouer l’une des parties de la bande originale. 42. Voir « David Krakauer & Kathleen Tagg Launch New Weekly Livestream Series: Sunday Connections with Krakauer & Tagg ». 43. Le duo a en effet repris les concerts promotionnels. Certains sont effectués chez eux (voir « Clarinet Virtuoso David Krakauer and Pianist Kathleen Tagg Share an Intimate Performance »). D’autres sont effectués dans des salles dédiées, mais le public reste quand même chez lui, le concert étant malgré tout enregistré et retransmis en ligne. C’est le cas de « Breath and Hammer Acoustic | Virtual Concert », enregistré dans l’église méthodiste de Saranac pour l’association The Hill and Hollow Music et le média Mountain Lake PBS. 44. Exemple : « Dropkick Murphys—Streaming Up From Boston ». 45. Exemple : « Together at Home with First Aid Kit ». 46. Exemples : 3 Daft Monkeys. « Perfect Stranger Lockdown Cyber-Busk » et « Hot 8 Brass Band— Love Will Tear Us Apart (Jazz Foundation of America Emergency Fund Concert) ». 47. Voir Hughes pour deux exemples en un article. 48. « Singers of all standards have universally reported the experience to be stressful, disorienting and musically dissatisfying » (Datta 1). 49. Randall Goldberg note ainsi, à propos d’Abraham Inc. : « [T]he musicians consistently emphasize their collaboration as a paradigm of Black-Jewish relations. For example, while promoting a performance at a Jewish music festival in Maryland, Krakauer told the Washington Jewish Week: ‘What’s been very beautiful about this project is that it feels like an ongoing discussion between Jews and African-Americans, a beautiful cultural exchange.’ It is difficult to find such press in African-American periodicals for the band, and maybe that tells us something about how it is perceived by Black America. Of course, a harmonious musical relationship is not the same as a nationwide Black-Jewish coalition, and Wesley may have noted the limitations of Abraham Inc.’s metaphor in an interview aired by American Public Media: ‘Blacks and Jews both like to eat, dance, and sing. That’s very important. And shaking booty is important to both cultures, and we will come together on that if nothing else.’ If the band does not reflect the reality of Black-Jewish relations, however, they at least provide an ‘audiotopia’ where the ensemble and their fans can feel good about this fraught relationship » (Goldberg 104-105).

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INDEX

Thèmes : Music, Dance Keywords : klezmer, fusion, jazz, experimental music, electro-acoustic music, video, Internet Mots-clés : klezmer, fusion, jazz, musique expérimentale, musique électro-acoustique, vidéo, Internet

AUTEURS

CYRIL CAMUS Professeur agrégé en CPGE / Docteur Lycée Ozenne [email protected]

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Designing for Performing Arts – Interview de Lola Clavel, créatrice de costumes à Sydney (danse, concerts, comédies musicales)

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud

Nathalie Vincent-Arnaud Peux-tu rapidement évoquer les étapes de ton parcours et ce qui t’a amenée à quitter la France pour l’Australie, et plus particulièrement pour Sydney ? Lola Clavel1 J’ai étudié le costume à Paris (Diplôme Métiers d’Art costumier réalisateur). Puis j’ai approfondi mes connaissances techniques avec un diplôme de toiliste patronnière (modéliste) et une année d’apprentissage dans l’atelier tailleur de l’Opéra Garnier. Après cette année d’apprentissage, j’ai travaillé sur plusieurs productions à l’Opéra Garnier et à l’Opéra Bastille, mais aussi pour le cinéma et le théâtre. J’ai ensuite eu envie d’aller travailler dans un pays anglophone et obtenir une meilleure maîtrise de la langue anglaise. Beaucoup de livres de costumes, mode ou couture sont en anglais et ne sont pas traduits en français, ce qui a été une grande motivation pour améliorer mon anglais ! À l’Opéra, j’ai rencontré quelques costumiers qui avaient passé une ou deux années en Australie. J’ai choisi Sydney, car on m’avait donné quelques contacts sur place et dit que c’était une ville dynamique et internationale, avec des opportunités de travail dans mon domaine et un cadre de vie agréable. Sydney est une ville très verte bordée de nombreux parcs nationaux et de magnifiques plages.

NVA Tu as effectué un stage et le début de ta carrière à l’Opéra de Paris où tu t’es consacrée pour l’essentiel aux costumes pour l’opéra et le ballet tout en abordant en parallèle d’autres genres (cinéma, télévision, entre autres). Ton départ pour l’Australie a-t-il constitué un

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changement de cap radical ? As-tu été amenée à apprendre de nouvelles pratiques, et lesquelles ? LC Les premiers mois en Australie, je voulais juste trouver du travail dans mon domaine et acquérir le vocabulaire technique que l’on utilise tous les jours dans les ateliers de couture et costumes. Mon premier travail était dans un atelier de retouches de robes de mariée, c’était assez nouveau pour moi. À Paris, ma qualification était tailleur homme, je travaillais essentiellement dans les ateliers tailleurs où l’on concevait les costumes pour les hommes (chanteurs, danseurs, acteurs). J’ai donc appris des techniques différentes de ce que je connaissais. Ensuite j’ai été embauchée chez une designer de robes de mariée sur mesure, Leah Da Gloria (https://www.leahdagloria.com/). C’est un univers assez différent du costume, mais cela m’a beaucoup plu de changer d’environnement, de faire des robes uniques, de travailler avec des tissus précieux et de belles dentelles, d’apprendre de nouvelles techniques (https://www.lolaclavel.com/luxury-design/luxury-wedding-dress-leah- da-gloria/). J’ai travaillé un peu plus d’un an chez Leah, puis j’ai eu l’opportunité de travailler sur une comédie musicale romantique, Love never dies, composée par Andrew Lloyd Webber. C’est une suite du Fantôme de l’Opéra créé tout d’abord au théâtre West End à Londres en 2010. En 2011 Love never dies a été créé en Australie par une équipe entièrement australienne avec leurs propres direction et design. En 2018, j’ai donc travaillé avec l’équipe qui concevait de nouveaux costumes (en respectant le design de la production australienne de 2011) pour le Nissay Theatre de Tokyo où le spectacle s’est joué en 2019 (https://www.lolaclavel.com/stage-costumes/musical- costumes/musical-outfits-love-never-dies-2019/). Love never Dies possède une certaine notoriété ; une tournée mondiale était prévue en 2020 mais a dû être retardée à cause de la pandémie de Covid-19. Le spectacle a été mis en ligne sur la chaîne YouTube The Shows Must Go On ! Depuis cette fabuleuse expérience de 2018, je travaille sur des productions de spectacles ou de télévision. J’ai aussi mon propre atelier dans lequel je conçois des costumes ou robes sur mesure.

NVA Sur quoi s’appuie le travail de documentation que tu effectues pour une comédie musicale dont l’intrigue se situe dans une période passée ? As-tu plutôt le souci de l’exactitude, de la copie conforme au modèle historique, ou laisses-tu plutôt libre cours à ton invention ? LC Sur la plupart des comédies musicales pour lesquelles j’ai travaillé, le designer dessine les costumes et souvent nous fournit une documentation d’inspiration. Beaucoup de visuels sont des images de costumes historiques. L’atelier lui propose ensuite des tissus, prépare des échantillons de teinture ou de manipulation si l’on cherche à créer un effet particulier. Je pense que le respect historique est décidé en amont avec la production. Dans les comédies musicales, les comédiens doivent pouvoir chanter et danser dans leurs costumes, et avec ces contraintes il n’est pas toujours possible de respecter à 100 % le côté historique. Il faut adapter le costume aux mouvements et au chant. On va parfois utiliser des tissus stretch ou adapter les coupes pour faciliter le mouvement. Ce ne sont

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pas des techniques dites historiques, mais elles sont souvent utilisées pour la scène. On laissera aussi de l’aisance dans les costumes autour de la cage thoracique afin que les artistes ne soient pas gênés pour chanter. NVA Tu as longtemps fréquenté le milieu de la danse lors de tes années à l’Opéra de Paris. As-tu eu des contacts, forte de ton expérience, avec l’Australian Ballet à Melbourne ? LC Je suis allée les voir danser à l’Opéra de Sydney mais les costumes sont réalisés dans les ateliers à Melbourne.

NVA Dans les domaines de la danse, de la comédie musicale, observes-tu en Australie des frontières entre culture savante et culture populaire pour ce qui est des publics, des pratiques, des regards que l’on porte sur ces différents genres ? LC On peut, comme en France, noter des différences de publics selon les spectacles. Certaines comédies musicales sont intergénérationnelles. Cette année par exemple, je travaille sur les costumes de Frozen (La Reine des Neiges), et on peut très bien imaginer une famille entière, des grands-parents aux petits-enfants, regarder ensemble ce type de spectacle. Je pense qu’en Australie les comédies musicales sont plus nombreuses et plus populaires qu’en France. La plupart des comédies musicales en Australie viennent de Broadway. Les Anglo-Saxons sont plus familiers de ce genre et possèdent un répertoire de spectacles plus large. C’est sans doute plus ancré dans leur culture.

NVA Tu as également travaillé avec des artistes comme Ricki-Lee Coulter, célèbre chanteuse australienne qui se produit en solo. Comment conçois-tu les costumes pour les concerts ? Selon quelle évolution, quelles spécificités du programme ? LC Assez souvent, la chanteuse et la production (ou le manager) ont déjà conçu et pensé le spectacle. Ils ont déjà une idée du style et du nombre de tenues qu’elle portera. Mon rôle est de peaufiner les idées et de proposer un design pour chaque tenue : je sélectionne des tissus, puis on organise des essayages au cours desquels on détaille et finalise les costumes. Il y a généralement un vrai dialogue avec la chanteuse au moment de la conception et des essayages. Par exemple, Ricki-Lee Coulter est une artiste dotée d’une très belle personnalité, avec qui il est facile de dialoguer et d’échanger des idées. Je l’ai rencontrée grâce à Janet Hine qui s’occupait de la production des costumes de Love never dies pour Tokyo. J’ai d’abord créé un costume pour elle pour un spectacle à l’Opéra de Sydney à l’occasion de l’Australia Day en janvier 2019 (https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDDns6MKtlg). Puis, quelques mois plus tard, j’ai conçu les costumes de sa tournée australienne. J’ai aussi créé un costume pour la chanteuse Kate Miller Heidke, candidate de l’Eurovision 2019 (https://www.lolaclavel.com/stage-costumes/singer-dresses/full- crinoline/), mais cette fois j’avais répondu à une annonce, envoyé mon portfolio, eu

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un entretien téléphonique et une rencontre avec la chargée de production avant de commencer le projet. Cette année, comme un peu partout dans le monde, de nombreux spectacles ont été annulés. Des opportunités se présentaient pour 2020 mais la plupart des événements ont été reportés. J’ai pu avoir du temps pour faire mes propres créations et collaborer avec des photographes de mode, mannequins, maquilleurs, coiffeurs. Nous avons été publiés dans des magazines de mode en Angleterre, au et aux États-Unis, ce qui a été une expérience très enrichissante pour moi.

NVA La musique en elle-même a-t-elle une influence déterminante sur ta création des costumes en dehors des échanges que tu as avec les artistes ? LC J’essaie toujours d’écouter la musique de l’artiste avec qui je vais travailler. Je trouve que c’est important de saisir le style et l’image que l’artiste veut donner avant de créer quelque chose pour lui.

NVA Si tu retournes un jour vivre en France, quels enseignements penses-tu que ton expérience professionnelle à Sydney t’aura apportés ? LC Une meilleure maîtrise de la langue anglaise, ce qui pour moi est un véritable point fort dans le milieu du costume et de la mode aujourd’hui. Pouvoir communiquer avec un plus grand nombre d’artistes, de designers mais aussi de fournisseurs de tissus ou d’autres artisans. Avoir accès a un plus grand nombre de documentations et de connaissances. J’ai aussi appris de nouvelles techniques et je me sens plus autonome et capable de réaliser des projets de plus en plus complexes. Pour le moment je n’ai pas l’intention de quitter Sydney, mais je n’ai pas encore décidé si je m’y installerai pour de nombreuses années encore. Le seul inconvénient est évidemment d’être très loin de la France et donc de mes proches. Sydney est une grande ville très attirante, la population y est très cosmopolite et respectueuse des règles dans les espaces communs. C’est une ville qui peut convenir à tous : familles, étudiants, jeunes travailleurs... Les Australiens sont travailleurs mais respectent aussi le temps libre de chacun. J’ai toujours trouvé facile de communiquer et de travailler en équipe avec les personnes que je rencontre, les gens étant très abordables d’une manière générale. Pour conclure, je ne m’ennuie vraiment pas à Sydney ! J’ai le sentiment de toujours apprendre de nouvelles choses et de rencontrer d’autres artistes ou passionnés de mode et de costumes.

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NOTES

1. https://www.lolaclavel.com/ https://www.picuki.com/profile/lola.clavel

INDEX

Keywords : costume, musical, dance, concert, singing Mots-clés : costume, comédie musicale, danse, concert, chant Thèmes : Music, Dance

AUTEURS

NATHALIE VINCENT-ARNAUD Professeur en études anglophones Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

Sophie Maruejouls-Koch (dir.) American visual arts

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Exposition « Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald : L’été raphaëlois » Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël, 12 juillet au 30 septembre 2019.Commissaire de l’exposition : Anne Joncheray

Elisabeth Bouzonviller

Plaque Villa Marie, Valescure, Saint-Raphaël

Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

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Villa Marie, Valescure, Saint-Raphaël

Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

1 Dans « Comment vivre avec trois fois rien par an », récit autobiographique publié en 1924, F. Scott Fitzgerald raconte comment, cette même année, il est arrivé de New York sur la Côte d’Azur avec son épouse Zelda et leur fille Scottie, âgée de deux ans et demi. Initialement motivés par l’excellent taux de change en faveur du dollar et les loyers dérisoires, ils s’y sont installés de juin à novembre, sont tombés sous le charme des lieux et ont eu l’illusion de devenir de vrais « Européens civilisés » (Fitzgerald 1957, 114). Le récit retrace avec humour leurs démêlés, à l’arrivée, avec un escroc local lors de leur recherche d’un hébergement, puis leur installation ponctuelle à « l’Hôtel du jardin » à Hyères (Fitzgerald 1957, 106), sans doute le « ’s Park Hotel » (421) d’après l’essai taxonomique de Zelda, « ‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number——’ » qui évoque tous les hôtels fréquentés par le couple entre 1920 et 1933. Viennent ensuite leurs tractations avec l’agence W. F. King qui leur proposa, pour un loyer mensuel de 79 dollars, la Villa Marie à Valescure, aujourd’hui quartier cossu et paisible sur les hauteurs surplombant la baie de Saint-Raphaël. Initialement nommée Villa Reichenberg, cette résidence était l’œuvre de l’architecte Pierre Aublé qui, outre un grand nombre d’autres villas Belle Époque, a conçu la basilique Notre-Dame de la Victoire de Saint-Raphaël.

L’Exposition

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Affiche de l’exposition

Jean-Luc Guillet, Service communication, ville de Saint-Raphaël

2 Du 12 juillet au 30 septembre 2019, Anne Joncheray, directrice du musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël, organisait l’exposition « Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald : L’été raphaëlois » avec Jean-Luc Guillet, auteur d’une évocation poétique de la vie de Zelda et spécialiste de cette Côte d’Azur qui, depuis le 19e siècle, offre le charme de sa côte découpée et la douceur de son climat à une clientèle anglo-saxonne aisée en quête d’exotisme à la française. L’objectif de l’exposition était de mettre en lumière un patrimoine architectural et littéraire puisque Gatsby le magnifique, publié en 1925 aux États-Unis, a été écrit principalement lors de ce séjour à la Villa Marie. L’existence à Fréjus d’une médiathèque du même nom brouillait les cartes pour les visiteurs comme pour les locaux, alors que, nichée dans son jardin méditerranéen comme à l’époque des Années folles, la villa occupée par les Fitzgerald est toujours à louer et s’offre au regard curieux des passionnés de biographies littéraires qui longent la ruelle tranquille qui la borde. Elle a même été l’objet de visites guidées à l’occasion des journées du patrimoine sous la houlette de Jean-Luc Guillet. La renommée du roman aux multiples traductions1, surtout depuis qu’il est tombé dans le domaine public en 2010, et le succès des films de 1974 et 2013 inspirés de l’œuvre, avec respectivement Robert Redford et Leonardo Di Caprio dans le rôle éponyme, étaient une incitation forte à une évocation du fameux visiteur dont la résidence de quelques mois en ces lieux a donné naissance à l’un des plus célèbres romans du modernisme américain.

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Villa Marie, Avenue des pins, Valescure, Saint-Raphaël

Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

Les Américains sur la Côte d’Azur pendant les Années folles

3 À la fin du 19e siècle, les membres de l’aristocratie britannique et russe avaient adopté Cannes comme lieu de villégiature pendant la saison hivernale, mais dès que les fortes chaleurs de l’été débutaient, ces visiteurs migraient plus au nord, vers des stations balnéaires plus tempérées, telle Deauville par exemple. Pendant les Années folles, les expatriés américains, qui appréciaient le soleil et la baignade, lancèrent une autre mode et transplantèrent l’effervescence artistique parisienne sur la Côte d’Azur pendant les mois d’été, en particulier dans le sillage d’un couple de riches esthètes installés en France depuis 1921 : Gerald et Sara Murphy. Ainsi, Fitzgerald concluait : « […] on pouvait se permettre beaucoup plus de choses sur la Côte d’Azur l’été, et tout ce qui s’y passait semblait avoir un côté artistique. »2 (Fitzgerald 1965, 15)

4 Parmi les visiteurs des Murphy, qui finirent par faire construire leur « Villa America » au Cap d’Antibes et s’étaient liés d’amitié avec les Fitzgerald, se trouvaient des artistes américains comme Hemingway ou Dos Passos, des membres des russes de Diaghilev mais aussi des créateurs avant-gardistes comme Léger, Picasso ou Stravinsky, peintres et musiciens qui jonglaient avec des couleurs et des sons bruts, qui déformaient l’ordinaire et juxtaposaient l’inattendu pour finalement bafouer les harmonies traditionnelles. En septembre 1925, Fitzgerald remarquait avec humour : Il n’y avait personne à Antibes cet été hormis moi, Zelda, les Valentino, les Murphy, Mistinguet, Rex Ingram, Dos Passos, , les MacLeish, Charlie Brackett, Maud Kahn, Esther Murphy, Marguerite Namara, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Mannes le violoniste, Floyd Dell, Max and Crystal Eastman, ex-Premier Orlando, Étienne de Beaumont–un véritable coin sauvage, hors du monde. (Turnbull 359)

5 Cet environnement novateur modifiait perception et création et entraîna une nouvelle approche littéraire3 pour Fitzgerald qui avait déjà publié deux romans, 4 de la même manière que ce contexte français fertile et inédit influença Zelda dans son activité

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picturale.5 Ainsi, dans une lettre du 1er mai 1925 à son éditeur Maxwell Perkins, Scott se réjouissait de la modernité de Gatsby le magnifique alors qu’il attendait impatiemment les premiers résultats de vente de l’ouvrage : « […] c’est quelque chose de vraiment NOUVEAU du point de vue de la forme, des idées, de la structure : le modèle pour notre époque que Joyce et Stein recherchent et que Conrad n’a pas trouvé. » (Turnbull 182).6

Infidélité

6 Le séjour raphaëlois allait également donner lieu à un épisode qui fait encore couler beaucoup d’encre chez certains biographes quelque peu tentés par les sirènes de la presse à scandale bien que les détails restent enfouis à tout jamais dans le passé intime des protagonistes de l’affaire. En effet, alors que Scott composait son grand roman moderniste, Zelda, désœuvrée, passait son temps à la plage Veillat et flirtait avec Edouard Jozan, fringant aviateur français, qui rivalisait d’acrobaties aériennes au- dessus de la Villa Marie pour attirer son attention et prouver son attachement, à l’instar des prétendants que la jeune femme avait connus dans son Alabama natal. Cette relation extra-conjugale, dont la nature exacte reste sujet de conjectures, donna lieu à une ultime confrontation violente entre les époux qui en sonna le glas. Finalement, Jozan s’effaça et ne souhaita jamais revenir sur ce sujet source de tension mais aussi d’inspiration littéraire pour le couple.7 Fitzgerald résumera laconiquement la situation dans son Ledger en ces termes : « La Grosse crise ‒13 juillet » 8 (Bruccoli 232). Désir de divorce, tentative de suicide, menaces et violences conjugales, rien n’est certain pour les Fitzgerald qui n’ont cessé de mettre leur vie en scène et de s’en inspirer pour leurs œuvres mais « l’affaire Jozan »9 révèle l’extrême fragilité d’une Zelda dont les médecins diagnostiqueront l’état de schizophrène quelques années plus tard, bien que cet avis soit remis en cause de nos jours.10 L’épisode raphaëlois trahit aussi l’amorce d’une fêlure qui ira grandissante pour un Scott si fondamentalement inquiet malgré ses multiples déclarations bravaches et qui concluait dans ses Notebooks : « Ce mois de septembre 1924, je sus que quelque chose s’était passé qui ne pourrait jamais être réparé. »11 (Fitzgerald 1978, 113)

Les Années folles dans un décor médiéval

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La Renault NN Cabriolet Torpédo dans l’église romane

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

La Renault au cœur de l’exposition

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie Marlene Kuhn-Osius 14 septembre 2019.

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La Renault, capot et phare

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

La Renault, tableau de bord et volant

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

7 L’exposition d’Anne Joncheray et Jean-Luc Guillet se tenait dans le musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël, bâtiment du 12e siècle, classé monument historique et

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situé au cœur de la vieille ville. Tandis que l’ancien presbytère de San Rafèu abrite la collection permanente, l’église romane attenante reçoit les expositions temporaires, telle celle consacrée aux Fitzgerald pendant leurs années 1924-1929 dans la région. Pièce maîtresse de l’exposition, une réplique exacte de la Renault NN Cabriolet Torpédo acquise par les Fitzgerald en 1924 à Saint-Raphaël, pour s’éviter des frais de taxi pendant leur séjour, trônait au centre de l’église médiévale. Entourée de bagages, comme si les voyageurs venaient tout juste de débarquer, elle rappelait l’existence vagabonde des Fitzgerald, qui ont non seulement sillonné l’Amérique sans jamais s’établir durablement, mais ont aussi suivi la mode initiée par d’autres artistes et intellectuels de l’époque qui délaissaient les États-Unis pour l’Europe.12 Sans l’apport de pièces authentiques ayant réellement appartenu aux Fitzgerald, l’exposition a réussi avec finesse à créer une ambiance d’époque qui évoquait très efficacement l’univers du couple, leurs séjours sur la Côte d’Azur et les Années folles dans la région.

L’Abside

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

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Écrire à la Villa Marie

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

8 Outre l’automobile rutilante, dans la lumière tamisée de l’unique salle d’exposition, l’attention du visiteur était attirée, vers une large photographie en couleurs de la Villa Marie dans son écrin de verdure projetée sur les parois de l’ancienne abside romane. L’ombre du romancier planait sur les lieux ; face à l’abside, une chaise vide installée devant une petite table surmontée d’une machine à écrire semblait inviter à l’écriture du chef-d’œuvre moderniste et attendre que l’occupant de la Villa Marie reprenne son activité scripturale. À l’autre extrémité de la salle, de larges photographies en noir et blanc des Fitzgerald à la Villa Marie et dans les environs étaient projetées sur le sol, contribuant ainsi à une sorte d’expérience immersive de l’univers fitzgeraldien.

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Projection au sol Scott et Scottie Fitzgerald

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

Une ambiance rétro

Vitrine correspondance et écriture

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

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Vitrine musique

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

Vitrine alcool

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

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Vitrine photographie

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

9 Une série de vitrines présentait des objets d’époque qui relèvent de cet univers effervescent qui est tout autant celui des Fitzgerald que de Gatsby le magnifique et plus généralement d’une période qui s’est signalée par une modernité et un goût des loisirs qui ont durablement marqué les sociétés occidentales. Les vitrines étaient agencées par thèmes : les voyages, la photographie, la correspondance et l’écriture, la musique ou encore l’alcool. Les objets exposés évoquaient habilement l’ambiance des Années folles qui ont vu l’avènement de l’automobile, du jazz, de la photographie touristique et familiale et d’une littérature américaine foisonnante ayant acquis ses lettres de noblesse.13 Ainsi que le rappelait la vitrine sur l’alcool, cette époque de bouleversements sociaux et culturels a aussi été le théâtre d’excès qui faisaient suite aux privations et traumatismes de la guerre et que l’Amendement sur la Prohibition tenta de contrôler sans succès de 1920 à 1933.

Les Fitzgerald, vie et œuvres

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Panneau 1 de l’exposition

Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie E. Bouzonviller 14 septembre 2019

10 Pour le visiteur en quête de renseignements approfondis sur les séjours des Fitzgerald sur la Côte d’Azur, huit panneaux thématiques parfaitement documentés reprenaient des éléments biographiques et historiques agrémentés de photographies d’époque et de citations issues de correspondances et d’essais publiés par Scott et Zelda, tels « How to live on Practically Nothing a Year » et « ‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number——’ ». Le séjour à la Villa Marie, mais aussi celui à l’Hôtel Continental à la fin de leur bail, ou à l’Hôtel Beau Rivage en 1929 lors de leur dernier passage à Saint-Raphaël, étaient détaillés. Ces panneaux s’attachaient également à l’écriture de Gatsby le magnifique, la liaison avec Jozan, les joies de la baignade en Méditerranée, les rencontres avec les Murphy, inspiration pour Tendre est la nuit, et avec de nombreux artistes ou écrivains, comme Dos Passos ou Ring Lardner. Avec concision et exactitude, la vie et les œuvres du couple entre 1924 et 1929 étaient clairement présentées et liées à l’environnement local. Un panneau consacré aux hôtels de luxe de Saint-Raphaël indiquait que c’est à l’Hôtel Beau Rivage que les Fitzgerald furent informés du Krach de Wall Street. Un monde s’effondrait alors que Zelda elle-même allait bientôt perdre pied et être internée pour des troubles psychiatriques tandis que Scott peinait à maîtriser sa consommation d’alcool. Irruption brutale de la maladie dans une atmosphère de fêtes et de création artistique, les désordres psychologiques de Zelda sonnèrent en 1930 la fin de l’enchantement méditerranéen et s’inscrivent comme un écho de l’effondrement financier international de l’époque. Du succès des Années folles à la déroute des Années trente, le destin des Fitzgerald semble reproduire fidèlement celui de l’Amérique ; ainsi, les adieux à la Côte d’Azur se confondent, pour Scott et Zelda, comme pour l’Amérique, avec ceux à l’insouciance et la réussite. Couple emblématique des Années vingt, les

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Fitzgerald s’enfoncent dans la maladie et les épreuves alors que la nation elle-même s’y abîme. Ainsi, l’exposition d’Anne Joncheray aura su célébrer la Côte d’Azur comme lieu fondamentalement propice aux loisirs et à la création artistique et évoquer une époque et un destin intimement liés aux bouleversements économiques, sociaux et littéraires du 20e siècle.

Faire vivre l’exposition

Affiche du colloque

Jean-Luc Guillet, Service communication, ville de Saint-Raphaël

11 Alors que l’exposition avait été inaugurée le 12 juillet avec une conférence donnée par Jean-Luc Guillet, « Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald, l’été raphaëlois », accompagnée de lectures de textes des Fitzgerald par Alexandre Mexis et Mathilde Allet, la saison s’est terminée avec, le 14 septembre, une journée complète d’animations intitulée “L’Escale Gatsby » qui comprenait deux conférences universitaires,14 des visites guidées de l’exposition et la projection en soirée du Gatsby le magnifique de Baz Luhrmann. Selon la presse locale, la fréquentation de l’exposition a été un succès et les animations ont réuni un large public. Les visiteurs, résidents pour la plupart, ont apprécié de (re) découvrir leur patrimoine à travers cette perspective littéraire américaine. Ils ont pu saisir les liens intimes et enthousiastes entre ces artistes américains de l’Entre-deux-guerres et la région, qui ont favorisé l’émergence d’un certain tourisme estival international. En outre, la puissance évocatrice des lieux a été soulignée au travers des activités littéraires et picturales exercées par ces visiteurs d’Outre-Atlantique. Plus spécifiquement, cette “Côte d’Azur bien-aimée”15 est apparue comme une inspiration majeure pour un des romans phare de la « Génération perdue »,16 ainsi que Gertrude

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Stein nommait ces jeunes Américains qui avaient eu vingt ans au moment de la Grande Guerre et qui, suite au profond désenchantement qu’elle suscita, n’ont cessé, dans leur écriture, de remettre en question l’expérience nationale.

Colloque « L’Escale Gatsby »

Marie-Agnès Gay et Elisabeth Bouzonviller Musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël Photographie Marlene Kuhn-Osius 14 septembre 2019

BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Anonyme. « Saint-Raphaël un passé riche d’avenir. Cycle d’expositions et de conférences du 28 février au 30 novembre 2019. » https://fr.calameo.com/books/0036605732282e4e84c6b, 1 septembre 2019.

Anonyme. « Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald : un patrimoine Raphaëlois. » https://www.ville- saintraphael.fr/information-transversale/actualites/scott-et-zelda-fitzgerald-un-patrimoine- raphaelois-1215, 16 septembre 2019.

Anonyme. TV83.info. « Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald. L’été Raphaëlois. » http://www.tv83.info/ 2019/07/12/scott-et-zelda-fitzgerald-lete-raphaelois/, 12 juillet, 2019.

Antolin-Pirès, Pascale. L’Objet et ses doubles. Une relecture de Fitzgerald. Pessac : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2000.

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Béghain, Véronique. Quand l’Europe retraduit The Great Gatsby Le corps transfrontalier du texte. Pessac : Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013.

Berman, Ronald. « F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gerald Murphy, and the Practice of Modernism. » In The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 6 (2008) : 145-153.

---. The Great Gatsby and Modern Times. Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1994.

Bouzonviller, Elisabeth. « Les Expatriés américains des années 20 en France, de Paris à la Côte d’Azur. » Conférence présentée lors de « L’Escale Gatsby », Musée archéologique et Centre Culturel. Saint-Raphaël, 14 septembre 2019

Fitzgerald, Francis Scott. This Side of Paradise. New York : Scribner’s, 1920.

---. The Beautiful and Damned. New York : Scribner’s, 1922.

---. The Great Gatsby. New York : Scribner’s, 1925.

---. Tender Is the Night. New York : Scribner’s, 1934.

---. « How to Live on $ 36,000 a Year. » 1924. In Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. New York : Scribner’s, 1957. 87-99.

---. « How to live on Practically Nothing a Year. » 1924. In Afternoon of an Author: A Selection of Uncollected Stories and Essays. New York : Scribner’s, 1957. 100-116.

---. The Crack-Up with Other Pieces and Stories. Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1965.

---. The Notebooks of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1978.

---. Romans, nouvelles et récits. Ed. Philippe Jaworski. Paris : Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, 2012.

Fitzgerald, Zelda. Save Me the Waltz. 1932. In Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Londres : Little, Brown, and Co, 1992. 9-196.

---. « ‘Show Mr. and Mrs. F to Number——.’ » 1934. In Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Londres : Little, Brown, and Co, 1992. 419-431.

Gay, Marie-Agnès. « Les Fitzgerald sur la Côte d’Azur ou de la vie à l’œuvre. » Conférence présentée lors de « L’Escale Gatsby », Musée archéologique et Centre Culturel. Saint-Raphaël, 14 septembre 2019

Grand, Anaïs. « Une exposition retrace le passage de Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald sur la Côte d’Azur. » Var matin. https://www.varmatin.com/expos/une-exposition-retrace-le-passage-de-scott-et- zelda-fitzgerald-sur-la-cote-dazur-398010? t=YjRkNjQwY2UwY2FiY2VjNTQyOTZmN2YxN2IwMDlkOTJfMTU3OTUxODEyODgxMl8zOTgwMTA%3D&tp=viewpay, 16 juillet, 2019.

Guillet, Jean Luc. L’Été de Zelda. Nice : Baie des anges, 2011.

---. Promenade des Anglais, la Belle Époque des villas. Nice : Baie des anges, 2006.

---. Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald en Provence et sur la Riviera. Saint-Raphaël : Bohèmes éditions, 2016.

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York : Scribner’s, 1926.

Lanahan, Eleanor (éd.). Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. New York : H. N. Abrams, 1996.

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Taylor, Kendall. Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald A Marriage. 2001. New York : Ballantine, 2003.

---. The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic. Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2018.

The Great Gatsby, dir. Jay Clayton, Newdon Productions, 1974.

---, dir. Baz Luhrmann, Bazmark Films, 2013.

Stein, Gertrude. Paris France. 1940. Londres : Peter Owen, 2003.

Turnbull, Andrew (éd.). The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Londres : Bodley Head, 1964.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, An American Woman’s Life. Londres : Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

NOTES

1. Les traducteurs ont été nombreux à se confronter à ce roman poétique exigeant, ainsi que le rappelle Véronique Bégain, mais l’on retiendra surtout ici la consécration de l’ensemble de l’œuvre fitzgeraldienne avec sa parution en 2012, dans la collection de la Pléiade, sous la direction de Philippe Jaworski dont nous adopterons la plupart des choix de traduction pour cet article. 2. Notre traduction. 3. Ronald Berman, qui s'est particulièrement attaché à l'étude de la modernité chez Fitzgerald, propose des comparaisons entre le romancier et les artistes peintres de l'époque dans son article « F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gerald Murphy, and the Practice of Modernism ». Il cite, entre autres, Linda Patterson Miller qui qualifie la relation entretenue par Gerald Murphy avec Dos Passos, Fitzgerald et Hemingway d’« histoire collective » (Berman 2008, 146). Voir aussi The Great Gatsby and Modern Times (Berman 1994). 4. Loin du Paradis en 1920 et Beaux et Damnés en 1922. 5. Voir l’ouvrage que sa petite fille, Eleanor Lanahan, a consacré à sa peinture : Zelda: An Illustrated Life. The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald. 6. Notre traduction. Dans son ouvrage L'Objet et ses doubles : une relecture de Fitzgerald, Pascale Antolin démontre que l'œuvre fitzgeraldienne offre une transition depuis un mode de représentation basé sur une tentative de reproduction de la réalité vers une écriture de type moderne fondée sur la crise de la représentation. 7. Alors que Scott semble mettre en scène ses craintes conjugales dans le chapitre VII de Gatsby le magnifique qui oppose Gatsby à Tom Buchanan au sujet de Daisy, avec Accordez-moi cette valse, Zelda propose un roman à clef où Alabama Knight tient son propre rôle et Jacques Chevre-Feuille celui de Jozan. 8. Notre traduction. 9. Kendall Taylor, qui avait initialement publié en 2001 une biographie des Fitzgerald, plaidoyer féministe en faveur de Zelda intitulé Sometimes Madness Is Wisdom: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald A Marriage, s’est penchée plus précisément sur la liaison avec Jozan, en 2018, avec The Gatsby Affair: Scott, Zelda, and the Betrayal that Shaped an American Classic. 10. Voir Linda Wagner-Martin (89-94). 11. Notre traduction. 12. À la Belle époque, le « Grand tour » entraîne de nombreux Américains en quête de culture vers l’Europe ; au tournant du siècle, certaines personnalités choisissent même de s’y installer définitivement comme Nathalie Barney, Henry James, Edith Wharton ou Gertrude Stein. Pendant

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l’Entre-deux-guerres, la tendance s’accentue, tandis qu’artistes et intellectuels tentent d’échapper au joug des fondamentalistes et conservateurs appelant de leurs vœux une Amérique de la rigueur morale, le dix-huitième Amendement faisant partie de leurs succès. Jeunes écrivains, peintres et esthètes fréquentent le salon de Stein alors qu’elle célèbre la France comme le cœur de la vie artistique et intellectuelle de l’époque : « Paris c’était là où se trouvait le vingtième siècle […] Paris c’était là où il fallait être » (11, 13). Scott Fitzgerald fait partie des visiteurs de Stein, au 27 rue de Fleurus à Paris. Avec Zelda, il a découvert l’Europe lors d’un premier voyage qui débuta le 3 mai 1921 et s’acheva en juillet. Leur deuxième traversée a lieu en mai 1924 avec un retour en décembre 1926. Ils séjournent de nouveau à Paris en avril 1928 et rentrent le 7 octobre. Enfin, ils embarquent pour l’Europe une dernière fois en mars 1929 et retournent définitivement aux États-Unis le 15 septembre 1931. 13. Sinclair Lewis est le premier Américain à recevoir le prix Nobel de littérature en 1930, il sera suivi, entre autres, par Eugene O’Neill en 1936, William Faulkner en 1949 et en 1954. 14. Marie-Agnès Gay (Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3), « Les Fitzgerald sur la Côte d’Azur ou de la vie à l’œuvre », Elisabeth Bouzonviller (Université Jean Monnet, St-Étienne), « Les Expatriés américains des années 20 en France, de Paris à la Côte d’Azur ». 15. Expression utilisée par Fitzgerald dans une lettre de 1926 à Maxwell Perkins (Turnbull 200). 16. Ernest Hemingway a choisi la phrase « Vous êtes tous une génération perdue » comme épigraphe pour son roman de 1926 Le Soleil se lève aussi et l’a attribuée à Stein qui l’aurait utilisée lors d’une conversation.

RÉSUMÉS

Ce compte-rendu de l’exposition « Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald : L’été raphaëlois » au musée archéologique de Saint-Raphaël du 12 juillet au 30 septembre 2019 se penche non seulement sur l’événement mais aussi sur la présence américaine sur la Côte d’Azur pendant l’Entre-deux- guerres et sur certains textes biographiques des Fitzgerald qui retracent l’expérience du couple en ces lieux alors que Scott écrivait Gatsby le magnifique.

This essay focuses on the “Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald : L’été raphaëlois” exhibition, which took place at the archeological museum in Saint-Raphaël from July 12 to September 30, 2019. It deals with the event but also with the American presence on the French Riviera between the wars and with some of the Fitzgeralds’ autobiographical texts which relate their stay there, in particular when Scott was writing The Great Gatsby.

INDEX

Keywords : Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, French Riviera, Saint-Raphaël, Villa Marie, American literature, modernism, Gatsby Thèmes : American art Mots-clés : Scott et Zelda Fitzgerald, Côte d’Azur, Saint-Raphaël, Villa Marie, littérature nord- américaine, modernisme, Gatsby

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AUTEURS

ELISABETH BOUZONVILLER Professeur Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Étienne [email protected]

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N’importe où hors du monde : Susan Bee in Paris

Barbara Montefalcone

“I want the paintings to create a space that people want to be in, that the paintings will give them some hope for the future.” Susan Bee

1 On November 27, 2019, I had the pleasure to host a talk by artist, editor, and book artist Susan Bee. An audience of professionals and art students from Paris College of Art attended the event and were introduced to Bee’s rich and multifaceted creative universe.

2 A New York native, Bee has developed, since the early 1970s, a deeply personal painterly style combining art historical and literary references, gender-related issues, and an expressionist use of color and line. A series of early photographic experiments were followed by a more assertive painterly style characterizing both her own work and her collaborative projects with poets and artists including Charles Bernstein, Johanna Drucker, Susan Howe and Jerome Rothenberg. These projects led to the publication of sixteen artist’s books and to a series of one-of-a-kind books Bee is currently working on.

3 To date, she has had nine solo shows at A.I.R. Gallery, New York, including a solo show (Anywhere out of the World) at A.I.R. in September-October 2020. Her work has been widely reviewed and is in many public and private collections including Bibliothèque nationale de France, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. As a parallel to her artistic production Susan Bee edited, from 1989 to 2016, M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a leading feminist magazine publishing the work of critics, art historians and poets.

4 Some of these key moments in her artistic career were addressed during her public talk at Paris College of Art and, more in depth, during a private conversation the following day. The interview that follows is the result of that conversation, and of some recent correspondence with the artist whom I wish to thank for her openness and generosity.

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Barbara Montefalcone: Let’s start by talking about Paris. You seem to come pretty often… Susan Bee: I have come to France since I was a child with my parents, and since then we have been coming often because I love French culture and I studied French in high school. And so did my husband, poet Charles Bernstein. We have friends here, but we also admire the culture of France: the food, art, and poetry. I feel there is a rapport between Paris and New York: friends that we have in New York have places in Paris, and there is a rapport between French culture and the culture of New York, so it’s a place that I love to come to.

BM: When you studied French in high school did you study the language, the literature or both? Which authors did you read? SB: I read some Balzac… I studied literature too. In the end, I read French authors that I really like more often in English, such as Baudelaire, Proust, and the poets. I read Victor Hugo, Dumas, and, of course, Simone de Beauvoir, who was very important in terms of feminist thinking, and Sartre. During the time in the 1960s, when I got involved with French culture it was more about Godard, and the existentialists. I love so many aspects of French culture that have drawn us here, and also the exchange with poets, my publishers like Gervais Jaussaud of Global Books and the editors of Piet Bot from Joca Seria, which published my photos and book covers, academics, and with the artists here. Everybody we know in New York are either poets or artists … it seems like I hardly know any regular people, normal people! (Laughing)

BM: You said that you first came to France when you were a child. What do you remember of those trips? SB: My parents were artists from Berlin, so they had a tie to Europe, and we often came to Europe. I have always felt that I was somewhat more European. My parents were German Jews, so that’s not a happy group. They left when they were teenagers, and went to Palestine, but we had a very European upbringing as opposed to an American upbringing. They came to the U.S. in 1947 and I was born in 1952, so they had only been in New York for five years when I was born. So there was still the sense of a tie to Europe and to European culture. That’s probably why I am more tied to European culture than a lot of Americans are. I don’t feel myself to be fully American in some ways because of this tie to Europe. I was born in Manhattan, so I am a native New Yorker, which is unusual. Usually when I meet people in New York they have just moved there, their families aren’t there, they have not this tie to New York as an actual place where people live. I think it’s true of Paris too.

BM: When did you start drawing? SB: I started during my childhood. My parents were both artists, my mother used to put me in her studio, she was an oil painter and she would stick me in the corner of her studio as a child with oil paint and a piece of paper. As a child I was going to openings: she had shows in New York, my father also showed there. So you can say I was brought up to be an artist. They were against my being an artist, because it’s a very bad profession, which turned out to be true, (laughing) but nonetheless that is all I was trained to be. I saw them doing their artwork and their friends were artists. I went to Barnard College where I studied art history and art, and then I went to Hunter College where I got my MA also in art. We left New York, Charles and I for two years, we went to the West Coast, and that was the only time we were really out of New York because my husband is also a New York native.

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BM: How would you describe your early work? SB: I have always been painting in oils, and also watercolors. I went to the High School of Music and Art in New York, which is a specialized public high school and many important artists and musicians have come from that school. To get into the school, you have to show a portfolio of your work. I am still in touch fifty years later with friends who went to that high school. Many professional artists and designers, opera singers, and jazz musicians came out of that high school, so I got more out of my high school than I got from my later education. But I also learned a lot at Barnard, where I studied art history, and I have a strong editorial and writing background. In graduate school, I wrote my thesis on Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy and photograms, and I was making photograms and altered photos then. I had a show in 2015 in New York of work I did in the 1970s1, which people loved now, but didn’t like in the 70s, when I couldn’t get the work shown. People wondered why I stopped doing that work. I had a darkroom and had migrated from painting, which was frowned upon in my graduate program, to photography. However, the photography I was doing was abstract and very painterly. So, I couldn’t show it until 2015 but it was work I did in 1977 to 1981 and people love it now. But they didn’t at the time, because it was not the time when abstract photography was in vogue. Most photographers then were doing street photography. My work in photography was so painterly that I realized I might as well just go back to painting. It was dark room work and I painted the developer on so it was very experimental.

BM: Were you ever tempted to go back to that kind of work? SB: Once I had children, I had to give up the darkroom. I had a studio downtown that was a half an hour away, so without a darkroom I couldn’t do that work anymore, so I went back to oil painting.

BM: And then you started a series of artist’s books SB: The first one that I did in 1978 was called Photogram2. It is all abstract and there is no text, it’s just my photograms. That was a beginning of what I didn’t realize was going to be a lifelong project of artist’s books. It was self-published and I was part of the early artist’s book movement that was happening at that time. Since then I have published sixteen more books. The first book I did for Granary Books was in 1985, Talespin, and that’s just my book, there is no poetry involved. Steve Clay who is the publisher, asked me if I wanted to have a poet to collaborate with, and I told him, I just wanted to do my own book. He published it and I was happy to have the opportunity. I have done a few other books that are not very well known, that are very limited editions, small unique editions with texts and collage, and a more recent series of accordion books that are hand painted.

BM: Why are you moving towards this kind of projects? SB: I don’t need a publisher and they are really more like long drawings, but they are also narratives. It’s something that I can do on my own and I enjoy doing them. I am selling them as unique objects. I have shown them in art and book fairs. I have done seventeen now including two miniature books. It’s a new direction that feels personal but now that they have been shown in galleries and art fairs, they are out in the world. If you work with a publisher you have deadlines, and if you work with a collaborator you have certain parameters you have to respect. That is true even when I worked

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with Johanna Drucker, she wrote stories for our upcoming book, which I am very excited about Off-World Fairy Tales to be published in November 2020 by Litmus Press, the same publisher that did our collaborative book, Fabulas Feminae3. We have been working on Off-World for two years. I am always involved with my newest projects, so that I don’t think so much about the past projects. That would be the third book with Johanna. A Girl’s Life4, Fabulas Feminae, and Off-World Fairy Tales are sort of a trilogy because there are relationships between the ways we did those three books and also the subject matter.

BM: They all focus on gender roles… SB: Yes, they are about gender roles, A Girl’s Life was about two teenage girls and their relationships and their friendships and how they came together. That was also about our friendship, because Johanna and I have been friends since we met, which is in 1977. We have been friends for forty years and we each have our own practices. She is a scholar and also a professor. In addition, she has a visual art and poetic practice, and she is the leading scholar of artist’s books. I edited her book–The Century of Artists’ Books5, so that there are all these overlaps in our practice.

BM: Who had the idea to start making books together? SB: We were both being published by Granary Books and I was working at the time also with Susan Howe and other poets. I asked Johanna: Do you want to do a book together? We also checked with Steve Clay to see if he would publish it. He already published both of us separately, and we had been collaborating with other people. Johanna had been collaborating with her husband at the time, Brad Freeman, and I had been collaborating with Charles, so we thought that rather than collaborating with our husbands, let’s collaborate with each other. That was the feminist aspect, but it was also a question of friendship and admiring each other’s work and wanting to see how we could work together. We had so much fun working together, and I am

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enjoying it even more now. We started working together in 2000 (A Girl’s Life came out in 2002) and so since 2000 off and on we have been collaborating.

BM: What do you mean by working together? Do you set up a meeting and work in the same place at the same time or do you correspond? SB: Mostly we have not been in the same place at the same time. But with A Girl’s Life I made several trips to Virginia (Johanna was teaching there at the time) and she came to New York. So, some of that was done in person and some of that was done where she would send me the text and I would read it and respond. She would ask for certain images--collaborations as you know are very back and forth, plus she and I have not lived in the same place for many years so the projects have required travelling.

BM: How about your first collaborative book? Was it with Charles Bernstein? SB: Yes, we made some little books on our own, like one called Disfrutelos in 1977 that is up on my website and also on Ubu Web6. We started collaborating even when he was in college: I made some posters for productions that he did and then we did a piece called “Johnny June” in 1971. He gave me a poem–and I made illustrations. It looks like a page from a children’s book. We met in 1968, at that time Charles was the editor of his high school paper at Bronx Science. In 1981, Segue published The Occurrence of Tune, which was our first offset printed collaborative book as opposed to our own little productions in-house, and that one was based on my photo work from the 1970s and included a long poem by Charles. It was the first book that was published by a regular publisher as opposed to being self- published. We had our own little press called Asylum’s Press–and also Charles was publishing his magazine, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E in 1978-1981. I was the designer of that magazine and made the logo for it. So, I was working on his projects to some degree and also writing for his magazine.

BM: Going back to the 1970s, could you say a few words about your early paintings and the numerous art historical references that are still very present in your work? SB: I grew up in New York City and studied art history in college, and I always went to museums. I grew up a few blocks from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so I spent a lot of my spare time going to the museum, and I am steeped in art history. There is no blank slate for me because I have seen so much art, also my parents took us to many museums in Europe, so I feel everything that I do have some reference to something in the past. Though I was an abstract painter for a while in the 1970s, I returned to figuration in 1980. Then I realized artists like Marsden Hartley and Edvard Munch are very important to me, and I wanted somehow to get them into the paintings, so they became important reference points. I also use images from medieval manuscripts, which are a very important source and inspiration to me. There are also many Matisse paintings that I admire. I have a love of many different painters and they enter into the vocabulary of what I am painting. I don’t think any contemporary painter comes out of nothing; even naïve painters come from some reference points. I have also looked at a lot of folk art and I am very interested in naïve artists and in their approach to making art. My artwork involves collage in the books, but also in the paintings. I sometimes collage items into the paintings too. It’s a way to take something from the real world or from the art historical world and make it my own. When I look at Munch, it’s my

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version of what he did, but I like to enter into his space, as in my painting Demonology. There are references to the self-portrait of Ensor, which I changed to my own self- portrait. That’s a very obvious example of taking somebody else’s work and revising it, because people have recognized the Ensor. It’s a tribute to his work and it’s also a way for me to understand his work. I put myself into his work without his work taking over. It’s not a copy exactly and it’s not appropriation, it is more of a tribute. A lot of appropriation is not really done with a sense of love, whereas the reason I wanted to redo the Ensor was that I love the image, and I admire what he was doing surrounding himself with these demons, and I wanted to understand it.

BM: You use numerous patterns in your paintings, and I noticed a recurrent dripping motif on figures, cloths, on a bed cover… Is this a tribute to Abstract Expressionism and Jackson Pollock? SB: I am definitely influenced by Pollock. I have been using his drip technique. I like to also work on the floor. I watched the film called Painters Painting7 of him working. After watching him work and studying his paintings, I decided I was going to be dripping too. I use enamel paint and I drip on the floor and then I leave the paintings on the floor flat to dry. You see the painting totally differently when it’s on the floor and I also put sand in. It’s a question of texture, but it’s also something that’s less controllable and I like the idea of accidents. I sometimes spatter the watercolors in the books. I am fairly controlled about it but I spattered many pages in the entire edition of Little Orphan Anagram8. There is spattering through the entire forty copies, so each copy was different because you cannot spatter in the same way twice so it brings a sense of the accidental and the unconscious, which is what Pollock believed he was doing. For me, because I get very controlled and tight when I work sometimes in those patterns, this is a way of bringing in more spontaneous movements, which can exist in painting. However, I have a tendency to get so involved in reworking and

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working over and over again whereas the spatter is not easily controllable. I control it in my way, but things happen, it’s not predictable.

BM: You couldn’t base one entire work on this technique though. SB: I have used it to a more or less degree, but I am still using it in the studio. I have a painting right now that I am working on that has feathers in it, Witches Brew; it has drips and it has sand. The elements are very layered so it feels archeological. There is a sense that there is a layer building up which you can’t really see unless you are seeing it in person, but the texture is very important in the paintings. People are often surprised after they have seen me talk about my work or seen it in reproduction on my website and then when they see the paintings they realize it’s very textured. There is scraping into the painting, there are built-up sections that are not that visible. It’s hard to see those things in reproductions, but to me texture is very important. That’s what I like about paintings: you can make a texture, and that’s very visceral.

BM: Can you tell me something about the accordion books that you are currently working on? SB: These leporellos have a relationship to Chinese calligraphy and scrolls. I did do a limited edition accordion book called Fool’s Gold9 with poems by Charles Bernstein. It is a very rare, eighty-inch-long book. There were forty copies and it has been shown in some museum shows. That one was not done by hand, but it is a very lengthy book. I love that format, because the leporello is very interesting to read--you can open parts and then you close parts. It’s rarely seen in its full length. One of the accordion books I did in 2012 is eighty inches long, so nobody ever sees the whole book. Even when I was working on it, I could only work on parts, because my table wasn’t long enough to unfold it to its full length.

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I also love working with Johanna. I made illustrations for her stories and then she asked me to make little spots. I had assignments that were very funny like “make a cloud with an arrow”, “make an angel with a wing”, “make a spaceship with a creature on it”. I have a whole list of assignments that she gave me for Off-World Fairy Tales. It’s sci-fi and it has robots and creatures … it has a lot of fantasy in it.

BM: You don’t mind having assignments then SB :No, I think it’s great to have assignments, especially assignments that are almost ridiculous. I kept the funny list of what Johanna asked for. She started to tell me on the phone and I made notes of what I was supposed to do. The list was so idiosyncratic, but I interpreted it the way I felt like. When I do my own book there is not the same back and forth, it’s just me and the book, so it’s more like making a painting. But when I work with somebody else they have opinions: they like things; they may not like things.

BM: And you seem to like sharing the creative space with someone… SB: I like to do it sometimes. But, even when I work on my own there is always the feedback from an audience, so I am not working in isolation, because I always have viewers. Other artists come to my studio and give me their opinions, which I don’t always appreciate. People are very critical in New York and tell me things that I don’t necessarily want to hear. In the first issue of my magazine, M/E/A/N/I/N/G #1, 1986, I published a list of all the critical comments that people had said in my studio. People still find that piece relevant. I read it aloud in Barcelona for a MACBA podcast in 201910. It includes critical comments like “you should use a bigger brush”, “you should buy more paint”, “what is this work about”. So, I started keeping track of all these remarks that had been made in my studio, and it still holds up. You have to be very tough to survive all these critiques. There are artists who live out in the country; they just send their work to galleries and they never have to interact with other people. But I am part of a community, in fact, poets have been my best supporters: they are the ones who buy my work and they seem to like it the most. So, I feel very supported by the community of poets. Artists are more critical, but they are also my friends. I worked with the artist and writer Mira Schor for thirty years.

BM: Yes, could you tell me more about M/E/A/N/I/N/G? How did the project start and end? SB: We started in 1986. We just wanted to make a magazine of critical thoughts that was run by artists and painters, but had more of an orientation towards painting, and New York, and feminism. It was a feminist publication that included men, which at the time was frowned upon. I also worked for Women Artists News, while we were involved with the feminist art movement, but we wanted a broader perspective. I wanted to be able to include poets, art historians, and critics that were not necessarily part of October or Artforum. We wanted to bring a different perspective, and strangely it took off: we didn’t expect really to go past the first issue, or two, and then people wanted more issues, and so we kept going for thirty years.

BM: How did you distribute the magazine? We had a distributor to bookstores, but mostly we just mailed it ourselves. We only made five hundred copies of the first issue, then we started making bigger runs, like a thousand. It was offset, we printed it in downtown New York. I had a studio in Tribeca, and Mira was there too and we met up. We never expected it to last. Then we got a little bit of government money -- not very much, and subscribers. We sent out a

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subscription notice, which is what we did with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and people subscribed. We did two issues a year, and they came out as hard copies. We made twenty issues of the hard copies from 1986 to 1996, and then after that we made a book, an anthology that came out from Duke in 200011. It was almost 500 pages, and that was a huge project. All the original magazines are now on our website, they have been scanned12. After that we decided to go online: we continued with the project but virtually, without having to print it. People miss the printed copies, but it just became too difficult to raise the money. We never really made any money and we never had any help. It was really a two-person operation. We both had other work and commercial jobs. I had kids; there was just a lot going on; it became too much for us. The virtual online issues started in 2002 and were easier to produce: you could include eighty people, or a hundred people because you weren’t actually printing the pages. So, we went on until 2016. We covered various topics: feminism, collaboration, and resistance. We had themes, but we published articles as well.

BM: When is your next show, and what kind of work do you plan to present? SB: My solo painting show, “Anywhere Out of the World: New Paintings, 2017-2020,” is scheduled for March 202013. It involves fantasy, mythology, and dreamscapes. It’s a different direction than my last solo show, which featured paintings of couples based on film stills and had a lot of patterning14. This one is about mythological creatures: harpies, demons, and angels. Demonology is in it, and the painting called Anywhere out of the World, which is based on Chagall’s self-portrait from 1914 and is titled after a quote from Baudelaire15. I am going in a more introspective direction. This has to do with my reaction to being in Trump’s America, which is a very disturbing place. This reality is pushing me into escapist fantasies and ecological themes. There is a painting called Underwater, which features a large shark in the water and deals with the feeling of dystopia. The studio is not an escape from the world for me. I get the newspaper every day and so I am immersed in the news. I feel I am reacting by wanting to be in a more romantic and dreamlike space that’s my own little utopia, which is reflected in the paintings. I want the paintings to create a space that people want to be in—that the paintings will give them some hope for the future.

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ENDNOTES

1. “Photograms and Altered Photos from the 1970s”, Southfirst, New York, January 10 – February 15, 2015. 2. New York: Asylum’s Press, 1978.

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3. Susan Bee, and Johanna Drucker, Fabulas Feminae, New York: Litmus, 2015. 4. Susan Bee, and Johanna Drucker, A Girl’s Life, New York: Granary Books, 2002. 5. Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books, New York: Granary Books, 1995. 6. https://www.ubu.com/contemp/bernstein/index.html 7. Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, directed by Emile De Antonio, 1972. 8. Charles Bernstein and Susan Bee, Little Orphan Anagram, New York: Granary Books, 1997. 9. Tucson, Az: Chax Press, 1991. 10. https://rwm.macba.cat/en/sonia/sonia-308-susan-bee 11. M/E/A/N/I/N/G: An Anthology of Artists’ Writing, Theory, and Criticism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. 12. M/E/A/N/I/N/G Online: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pepc/meaning/ 13. “Anywhere Out of the World: New Paintings, 2017-2020,” that was scheduled for March 2020, was instead presented in September-October 2020 at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, due to Covid. 14. Pow! New Paintings. A.I.R. Gallery, New York, March 16-April 16, 2017. 15. “N’importe où hors du monde”, Le Spleen de Paris, 1989.

INDEX

Mots-clés: art, poésie, américain, livre d’artiste, collaboration, petite édition, féminisme Keywords: American, art, poetry, artist’s book, collaboration, small press, feminism Subjects: American art

AUTHORS

BARBARA MONTEFALCONE Chair of Liberal Studies Paris College of Art [email protected]

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Ariel's Corner

Vanessa Alayrac (dir.) British visual arts

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Turner, peintures et aquarelles. Collections de la Tate Musée Jacquemart André, Paris, 13 mars 2020-11 janvier 2021.

Sarah Gould

1 En 2018, l’artiste Emma Stibbons se rend au pied du Mont-Blanc pour dessiner et photographier les paysages peints par J.M.W. Turner au début des années 18001. Le motif de l’imposante mer de glace laisse place, chez l’artiste contemporaine, à un glacier méconnaissable, en retrait et amoindri. En mettant à jour la fragilité de ces espaces, le travail de Stibbons révèle la manière dont les paradigmes de la pensée écologique nous invitent à revoir la peinture de Turner. Son œuvre apparaît ainsi comme une célébration de la nature, capturée en peinture, alors qu’elle allait être irrévocablement altérée par les effets de la Révolution industrielle.

2 Les soixante aquarelles et dix peintures à l’huile prêtées par la Tate Britain au musée Jacquemart André sont autant de représentations de la splendeur de la nature et de ses transformations. Le parcours de l’exposition, divisé en huit étapes, suit les voyages de Turner en Grande-Bretagne et sur le continent. La première salle ouvre sur des compositions de jeunesse. En complément de sa formation initiale à la Royal Academy, Turner poursuit son apprentissage en devenant dessinateur topographique pour des architectes comme Thomas Malton ou James Wyatt. Dans la presse des années 1790, les paysages de Turner et de son contemporain Thomas Girtin prennent la place auparavant réservée à la peinture d’histoire2. Les dessins techniques produits par Turner sont sublimés par l’attention portée à la géologie du territoire, ainsi exploré et représenté de manière quasi scientifique. Dans ces vues, comme Château de Norham : étude de couleur (vers 1798) ou Vue de l’Abbaye de Fonthill (1799-1800), Turner reproduit deux types de pierres : celles de l’esprit, et celles de la nature. Le paysage est dégradé en différents niveaux, avec au loin la pierre lisse et façonnée par la main de l’homme et au premier plan la roche rugueuse et irrégulière du terrain.

3 En mettant en exergue l’aquarelle, médium fragile, qui craint la lumière, le transport, et le monde, l’exposition revêt un caractère exceptionnel. La plupart des œuvres sur papier n’ont jamais auparavant été montrées en France. Considérées comme des images mineures au 18e siècle, souvent réalisées par des amateurs, les aquarelles connaissent

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une ascension au début du 19e siècle en Grande-Bretagne. Deux sociétés, les Old et New Watercolour Societies, fondées respectivement en 1804 et 1831, participent de cet intérêt récent. Turner en a connaissance, mais il ne les rejoint pas. Moins onéreuses que les peintures à l’huile, elles séduisent un public d’acheteurs toujours grandissant. Chez Turner, l’aquarelle ne sert pas seulement à retranscrire des effets atmosphériques et évanescents. L’exploration de différentes techniques offre la possibilité au peintre de représenter avec précision la nature dans sa matérialité. Le médium révèle ainsi ce rapport tangible au monde chez Turner, qui n’utilise pas l’aquarelle pure. Dès ses débuts il varie les expérimentations et transferts de techniques, de l’aquarelle à l’huile et inversement. En cela, il s’inscrit dans la lignée d’aquarellistes britanniques qui ont donné leurs lettres de noblesse au médium en le magnifiant. David Cox, par exemple, choisit un papier granuleux afin d’explorer des variations de texture et Paul Sandby recrée, grâce au procédé de l’aquatinte, les effets de l’aquarelle en gravure3.

4 Dans une petite aquarelle non dénuée d’humour, Turner représente le port de Scarborough dans le Yorkshire. Au premier plan, une femme au visage caricatural, comme sorti d’un dessin animé — Turner ne s’attarde jamais sur les visages —, ramasse des crevettes sous les yeux de son chien. Au loin les falaises de calcaire et une myriade de détails aux couleurs éclatantes attirent l’œil du spectateur. En parcourant l’exposition, ce dernier suit les pérégrinations du peintre à travers la campagne anglaise, les Alpes, à Venise, ou dans les châteaux écossais. À chaque étape, Turner recrée l’émotion ressentie face aux forces naturelles. Chez lui, la représentation des éléments participe de la connaissance de ce qui les constitue ; dans l’expérience sensible se joue un rapport à la vérité. Frédéric Ogée rappelle l’épistémologie qui sous- tend l’œuvre du peintre : « Profondément convaincu des vertus éclairantes d’une approche empiriste du monde, Turner conçoit chaque image comme une expérience sensorielle autant qu’intellectuelle de la présence et de la vérité des choses, comme une forme de moment poétique4. »

5 Dans l’œuvre tardive [Venise vue depuis la lagune], choisie pour apparaître sur l’affiche de l’exposition, Turner témoigne de la force de sa palette. Dans sa construction l’aquarelle rappelle les champs de couleur de Rothko. Ici, Venise et sa lagune sont représentées par des lavis jaunes et turquoise sur lesquels se détache un gondolier. Le ciel est piqué de nuages pourpres aux tons riches et chauds. Les flots et les nuées sont la matière même du travail de Turner. Du reste, ce choix de sujet lui attire régulièrement les moqueries des critiques et de manière croissante dans la dernière partie de sa vie. En 1817, alors qu’il est déjà au sommet de sa gloire, les écrivains William Hazlitt et Leigh Hunt écrivent que les tableaux de l’artiste sont moins des représentations de la nature que du médium à travers lequel on les voit. Leur conclusion est restée célèbre : Turner fait « des peintures du rien, mais très ressemblantes5 ». Par la suite, une telle diatribe a pu en conduire certains à le considérer comme un artiste protomoderniste ou un peintre abstrait avant l’heure. Le problème d’une telle lecture est qu’elle part d’une définition métaphorique de la forme qui perd de vue ses différents déterminismes historiques6. L’exposition démontre le contraire : dans ses expérimentations, Turner s’approche autant que faire se peut de ce que l’on ressent au contact de l’air, de l’eau et de leurs interactions avec la lumière.

6 En ce sens, certaines œuvres non finies sont parfois trompeuses. L’exposition fait la part belle à ces œuvres sur papier qui, pour la plupart, n’étaient pas destinées à être exposées. Dans ses fascinantes ébauches colorées, les Colour beginnings, loin de pousser

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la représentation dans ses retranchements, Turner nous livre les différentes étapes de la complexité de son processus créatif. Un dialogue se crée entre deux études pour Château de Bamburgh, Northumberland, la dernière aquarelle exposée par Turner à la Graphic Society en 1837. Dans l’une, la silhouette du château se détache sur l’arête rocheuse le long du rivage, alors que dans l’autre, elle apparaît en négatif, remplacée par une béance blanche aux contours nets. Au premier plan, un navire est échoué. Ce topos est cher aux peintres, et à Turner en particulier. Ensemble, ces deux études renvoient au fil narratif de l’œuvre du peintre, celui de l’interaction de l’homme et de la nature. Ce centre lumineux, ou cette tache blanche, est un motif récurrent dans les œuvres présentées dans l’exposition. Dans une huile inachevée de 1827-28, qui représente le lac de Nemi, cette même trouée lumineuse vient happer le regard et faire concurrence au soleil. De même, dans une scène de l’Eneide de 1834, Le Rameau d’or, le lac Avernus apparaît comme une ouverture blanche, entre incandescence et froideur, et se fait, cette fois, à la fois miroir du soleil et porte des Enfers.

7 Dans Mer agitée avec des dauphins, Turner nous promet des cétacés. S’agit-il d’une paréidolie, ce phénomène psychologique qui joue sur les perceptions visuelles et produit parfois une perception de visages ou formes reconnaissables dans un nuage ou une tache ? Est-il possible de distinguer des dauphins ? Peu importe. Turner renvoie ici à une situation en mer sur un bateau qui tangue, lorsque le brouillard obstrue la vision et brouille les repères. L’œuvre rappelle les déploiements d’effets de matière, visible dans des plus célèbres de l’artiste, par exemple dans Le Négrier de 1840. Dans ces marines, la fumée des bateaux à vapeur fusionne avec la brume naturelle et fait crépiter la matière du tableau. Turner représente le monde moderne dans lequel il vit et la manière dont ces bouleversements modifient sa perception.

8 L’exposition ne s’arrête pas à la porte du musée puisque, depuis le printemps 2020, elle existe dans une version virtuelle. Ouverte le 13 mars 2020, pour fermer deux jours plus tard, l’exposition a rapidement, été dématérialisée en ligne. La visite immersive qui est proposée est à 360 degrés et permet de zoomer sur les œuvres en haute définition. Pour renforcer l’impression de visite in situ, des bruits de pas et des rires d’enfants ponctuent l’errance du visiteur devant son écran. Pour chaque tableau, des commentaires de conservateurs, mais également de visiteurs, sont disponibles. Si certaines réflexions s’apparentent davantage à des bavardages, ponctués de « Ohhh » et de « c’est trop beau ! », le résultat est atteint. En effet, cette visite virtuelle plonge le spectateur en immersion et vient redoubler l’objectif de Turner : faire vivre à l’homme, par le biais de la peinture, une expérience en le plaçant au plus près des éléments de la nature. Malgré l’utilité d’un tel dispositif, ce n’est finalement pas l’« aura » de l’œuvre qui manque, cette perte de sens que Walter Benjamin ressentait dans la reproduction photographique. C’est davantage le rapport intime aux œuvres que Turner a réussi à créer qui fait ici défaut, aspect inévitablement nié dans cette expérience puisque dans ses transformations radicales de style et de techniques, l’artiste donne à son œuvre une dimension haptique, faisant appel aux sens du spectateur.

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NOTES

1. Voir l’exposition “Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud” à la York Art Gallery at au Abbot Hall Art Gallery du 29 mars 2019 au 5 octobre 2019. Pour consulter le travail d’ Emma Stibbons : < https://www.emmastibbon.com/ > 2. David Solkin, Art in Britain, 1660-1815, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010, p. 260. 3. Sur le sujet, voir le livre d’Alison Smith : Alison Smith, Watercolour, Londres : Tate Britain, 2011. 4. Frédéric Ogée, Les Paysages Absolus, Paris : Hazan, 2010, p. 167. 5. Trad. personnelle. William Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, The Round Table. 1817, Oxford: Woodstock Books, 1991, p. 19-20. 6. L’exposition de 2014 de la Tate de Londres, “Late Turner, Painting Set Free,” insistait sur la nécessité de réhistoriciser une lecture des œuvres tardives de Turner plutôt que de les considérer comme des explorations purement formelles.

INDEX

Keywords: Turner, watercolour, English painting, ecology, virtual tour Mots-clés: Turner, aquarelle, peinture anglaise, écologie, visite virtuelle Subjects: British art

AUTHORS

SARAH GOULD Maître de conférences Paris 1 - Panthéon Sorbonne

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Isabelle Keller-Privat and Candice Lemaire (dir.) Recensions

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Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell, Céline Horgues (eds), Linguistique anglaise et oralité : vers une approche intégrée

Saandia Ali

RÉFÉRENCE

Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell, Céline Horgues (eds) : Linguistique anglaise et oralité : vers une approche intégrée (Paris : Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2019), 180 p. ISBN : 978-2-37906-017-5.

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1 L’ouvrage collectif d’Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell et de Céline Horgues affiche d’emblée par son titre l’objectif ambitieux de faire dialoguer et interagir différents champs disciplinaires de la linguistique afin de proposer une « approche intégrée » de l’étude de la langue orale. Au fil des contributions variées, les auteurs font appel à différents outils, corpus, méthodologies et branches de la linguistique pour analyser l’oralité en langue anglaise. Il ne s’agit pas de faire de « l’art pour l’art », de la phonétique pour la phonétique, ou de « l’analyse sonore pour elle-même », mais de la phonétique et de la phonologie en relation avec le sens, le discours et la communication. La phonétique n’est pas non plus uniquement au service de la langue qu’elle viendrait illustrer, conforter ou accompagner mais elle s’intègre pleinement à la création du sens du message. Le choix des termes conceptuels utilisés par les auteurs pour y faire référence est très varié tout au long de l’ouvrage et reflète la complexité de l’objet d’étude ainsi que les différents points de vue, les multiples facteurs et niveaux d’analyse que l’on peut invoquer pour éclairer le fonctionnement de l’oral.

2 L’ouvrage se compose de trois parties principales elles-mêmes divisées en plusieurs chapitres : la première partie contient deux chapitres, la seconde quatre chapitres et la troisième trois chapitres. Un avant-propos et une postface jalonnent l’ouvrage.

3 L’avant-propos permet de décrire la genèse de ce travail d’écriture et de recherche qui vient consacrer les travaux réalisés par un ensemble de chercheurs dans les douze dernières années au sein du réseau informel OSLIA (Oral Spontané et Linguistique Anglaise). L’ouvrage est aussi un hommage aux recherches menées par Claude Charreyre, membre de ce groupe de recherche et récemment décédée. Même si celle-ci ne se considérait pas comme une oraliste dont l’objet de recherche aurait été la langue orale essentiellement, ses recherches ont toujours pris en compte les marqueurs oraux. Dans ses travaux, et ce dès 1982, elle met déjà en valeur le rôle crucial de la prosodie dans toute analyse grammaticale linguistique. Les objectifs et les défis que pose la

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réalisation d’un tel ouvrage sont mis en valeur dans cet avant-propos. Il s’agit de travailler à une meilleure compréhension et une meilleure appréhension du fonctionnement de la langue orale spontanée. Il faudra alors fournir des clés, des outils et des approches méthodologiques permettant d’analyser l’oral comme faisant partie intégrante de la communication et de la création du sens. Quelques difficultés sont mentionnées telles que le caractère synchrone de l’oralité, la superposition des phénomènes linguistiques et phonétiques, la co-construction du sens en temps réel, les ratés potentiels et l’analyse post-conversation qui sera l’objet du travail du linguiste. La filiation avec les travaux d’Antoine Culioli (1991, 1999) par l’intermédiaire de Claude Charreyre est aussi posée à cette occasion.

Linguistique de l’écrit et analyse de l’oral : filiation d’une démarche en linguistique énonciative

4 La première partie de l’ouvrage collectif est construite autour de deux articles qui revisitent les travaux de Claude Charreyre. Le premier, « Pour une syntaxe énonciative : l’apport de Claude Charreyre », rend hommage aux travaux de Claude Charreyre non publiés tels que son HDR. Le texte comprend des notes très personnelles, Alain Deschamps faisant référence à Claude Charreyre en utilisant uniquement son prénom. L’auteur présente de façon synthétique et claire les apports de Claude Charreyre sur le plan théorique. Son interprétation du cadre théorique Culiolien à travers de multiples exemples originaux et pertinents vise à étendre cette analyse à un domaine plus large passant de la syntaxe de la phrase à la syntaxe de l’énoncé dans toute sa complexité. Les notions de groupe nominal et de groupe verbal sont ensuite revisitées avant de présenter une vision et une théorie applicables à l’étude des anaphores. C’est une approche particulièrement originale qui ouvre la voie à l’analyse des anaphores verbales. Ce chapitre pose clairement son objectif qui est de faire connaître, même de façon jugée trop synthétique par l’auteur, la richesse du raisonnement de Claude Charreyre caractérisé par sa « grande maîtrise des outils théoriques énonciatifs », « un don pour trouver des exemples remarquables » et « une grande finesse dans les analyses de suites textuelles simples et complexes » (33). L’auteur fait le choix de se concentrer sur l’apport en linguistique de l’écrit et dans le domaine de la syntaxe plutôt que d’aborder les questions liées à l’oralité dans cet hommage.

5 Dans le second chapitre, « I et le question tag, ou le jeu de l’énonciation : un protocole d’analyse pour le traitement de l’oral », les co-auteurs Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell et Mark Gray s’embarquent dans une relecture d’un article de Claude Charreyre publié en 1984. Celui-ci a été riche d’enseignements pour les deux auteurs qui en tirent chacun dans leur domaine et dans leurs recherches respectives des leçons pertinentes et considérables. Mark Gray développe les liens entre la dimension énonciative et le contour intonatif dans les question tag pendant qu’Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell définit les contours d’un protocole d’analyse de l’oral s’inspirant de l’article de Charreyre (1984) et en propose une extension vers une approche interactive liant syntaxe, sémantique, énonciation et prosodie. La portée du question tag dans les énoncés à deux propositions est le point de départ de la recherche menée par Charreyre (1984) et Gaudy-Campbell et Gray (2019). Ils analysent plus précisément « les choix mélodiques effectués sur les reprises par question tag ». Les exemples fabriqués utilisés dans l’article de Charreyre

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(1984) sont complétés par des exemples tirés de corpus authentiques permettant une représentation statistique. Mark Gray montre que la montée intonative accompagnée avec une forme interrogative, indique que le locuteur se soumet au jugement de validité de son interlocuteur (38). Au contraire, lorsque le question tag est réalisé avec une chute mélodique, l’auteur identifie une confirmation liée à « une question qui se pose » (38). Le contour du question tag est aussi associé à la place de l’accent nucléaire qui va conditionner et contraindre les choix mélodiques possibles. S’appuyant sur les travaux de Gray et Nicaise (2002), les auteurs élaborent l’approche globale suivante de la contribution des mélodies et l’interprétation des énoncés.

6 Dans cette approche on considère que la contribution des mélodies à l’interprétation des énoncés appartient au domaine du repérage d’une relation prédicative par rapport à la situation d’énonciation. Le choix mélodique d’un énoncé permet notamment d’identifier comment la relation prédicative est repérée par rapport à l’énonciateur et au co-énonciateur. Dans le cas des mélodies descendantes, le repérage par rapport à l’énonciateur est privilégié, tandis que les mélodies montantes privilégient la prise en compte du co-énonciateur/ interlocuteur (40).

7 On passe ensuite du lien entre syntaxe et prosodie à une approche plus globale de l’apport de l’article phare. Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell explore ainsi la question de la linéarité de la production de la parole qui mène à considérer les phénomènes de reprise (ou question tag ici) comme « seconds » voire même « secondaires » et propose de s’affranchir de cette affirmation en s’appuyant sur les concepts de programmation et d’anticipation (mis en place dans Gaudy 2000) et sur les principes de la linguistique énonciative : la programmation émane de l’énonciateur, l’anticipation du co- énonciateur (43).

8 De façon concrète, par exemple, le choix du contour mélodique associé à l’accent nucléaire dans la proposition principale interagit avec le contour mélodique appliqué au question tag pour véhiculer du sens. Se pose alors la question de la stratégie discursive en jeu au moment de l’énonciation. C’est dans cette interaction entre l’analyse des paramètres énonciatifs et celle des paramètres prosodiques (intonatifs ici) que l’auteur étudie le statut des énoncés. On retrouve l’idée d’un « dépassement » des limites de la micro-syntaxe pour aller vers l’étude de la macro-syntaxe. Comme Claude Charreyre auparavant, Isabelle Gaudy-Campbell passe de la phrase à l’énoncé, aux propositions enchainées et, au-delà de celles-ci, à l’étude du paragraphe oral.

9 L’approche développée par les auteurs « convoque tour à tour la prosodie, le sémantisme, les repérages énonciatifs et la syntaxe » (48). Elle met en lumière l’apport de l’oral dans la linguistique traditionnelle en en définissant des contours précis liés au « positionnement énonciatif » (49), aux écarts par rapport aux normes de la langue et « au trait sonore accompagné de sa dimension prosodique » (49). Le cadre théorique ainsi que la filiation de ce cadre sont mis en place dans cette première partie qui ouvre la voie aux recherches d’application qui vont suivre.

Structuration et agencement discursif

10 Dans cette seconde partie les chercheurs mettent en application une approche intégrée de l’étude de l’oral spontané en observant une série de marqueurs spécifiques à l’oral

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spontané tel que I mean et I think. L’analyse de l’utilisation de ces marqueurs oraux est réalisée à travers le prisme de la linguistique énonciative.

11 Jean Szlamowicz se penche sur « I mean comme ligateur flottant » à l’aide d’un corpus de travaux remontant à 2001 et d’un ensemble d’exemples tirés de son corpus de thèse (1997-1998). I mean est présenté comme un marqueur autonome qui n’appartient pas à la relation prédicative. Il est accompagné d’indices intonatifs discrets mais fondamentaux sur le plan de l’énonciation. Sont cités par exemple les pics d’intensité, les variations légères de la fréquence fondamentale et les variations de durée ayant un impact sur la saillance du marqueur. Celui-ci est défini comme un marqueur à la fois anaphorique et cataphorique permettant de préciser sa pensée, de reformuler sa pensée, de la clarifier ou d’en proposer des développements. Il est lié à des phénomènes égocentrés (centrés sur le locuteur lui-même) par opposition au marqueur you know par exemple qui est associé au co-énonciateur. L’auteur puise tour à tour dans la sémantique, dans la morpho syntaxe et dans l’analyse du discours et de son intonation pour révéler le statut discursif énonciatif de I mean. Des exemples précis sont ensuite analysés à partir de l’étude du corpus de thèse et en relation avec la valeur de rectification que peut porter I mean ainsi qu’avec la valeur d’explicitation.

12 Steven Schaefer développe une analyse combinatoire de la forme I think mêlant sémantique, syntaxe du discours et variations prosodiques. L’apport complexe des variations prosodiques à l’interprétation du sens est éclairé par une approche énonciative de l’analyse du corpus dialogique choisi (une interview entre un journaliste et Tony Blair). L’objectif principal est de mieux comprendre la contribution de I think en contexte et dans ses différentes formes : que celui-ci soit un verbe introductif, un parenthétique qui apporte un commentaire ou un marqueur discursif vide. L’article de Claude Charreyre de 1984 représente de nouveau une inspiration pour cette étude intégrant l’oral et surtout la dimension prosodique dans l’analyse d’un marqueur discursif. La théorie des opérations énonciatives (TOE) est au cœur de la recherche menée par l’auteur et souligne l’idée d’une prise en charge de l’énoncé par « l’énonciateur-origine » (73). L’effet de la prosodie ainsi que celui de la position linéaire sur des énoncés du corpus sont étudiés en détail. Le placement de l’accent nucléaire sur le pronom I ou bien sur le verbe think est pris en considération comme dans les recherches précédentes apparaissant dans la littérature. Cependant Steven Schaefer montre qu’il n’y a pas de corrélat direct entre prosodie et interprétation et que c’est bien « l’analyse combinatoire de I think en tant que prise en charge modale d’un énoncé » (82) qui permet d’en éclairer les usages.

13 Le chapitre V, « Associer les pièces du puzzle : marqueurs verbaux et prosodiques en oral spontané », écrit par Marine Riou, explore le marquage de la transition topicale par deux modalités dans le discours : les marqueurs de discours et le registre de voix étendue. Le travail de recherche s’appuie sur un corpus oral spontané en anglais américain datant des années 2000. Celui-ci est transcrit selon les conventions de l’analyse conversationnelle (voir Jefferson 2004). La pragmatique et l’analyse conversationnelle sont combinées afin d’étudier ce phénomène. Le corpus oral est utilisé pour détecter automatiquement les changements de registre coïncidant avec une transition topicale et pour réaliser des recherches de marqueurs discursifs associés pour en fournir une étude statistique. Les résultats montrent que le locuteur a véritablement le choix d’utiliser soit un marqueur discursif uniquement, soit un marqueur prosodique uniquement ou bien les deux afin de signaler le changement de

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topic. L’auteur favorise donc une approche combinatoire appliquée à la transition topicale qui analyse le rôle joué par les marqueurs dans l’interaction. Cette approche combinatoire permet de mettre en lumière la « synonymie pragmatique » (86) des marqueurs de la transition topicale (c’est-à-dire le fait que deux marqueurs puissent être utilisés à une même fin).

14 Yann Fuchs présente ensuite une étude expérimentale de l’usage des quotatifs say et be like en discours : « Quotatifs et performance multimodale : quelques pistes méthodologiques ». Cette étude vise à mettre en place une approche méthodologique multimodale pour l’observation de ces quotatifs dans un corpus conversationnel constitué par l’auteur (Cambridge Student Corpus 2010-2011). Pour la première fois dans cet ouvrage un auteur introduit la dimension gestuelle dans l’étude des phénomènes verbaux à l’oral. Il prend en compte le canal verbal, le canal sonore et le canal visuel afin d’interpréter la dimension orale des quotatifs. Le concept de performance multimodale est associé à la distribution fonctionnelle sur le plan sémantique, pragmatique et interactionnel. La chaîne segmentaire, les éléments prosodiques et les attitudes corporelles sont intégrés dans cette approche. Les quotatifs souvent considérés comme des « introducteurs de discours direct » (100), ont connu une évolution récente dynamique dans la langue anglaise, ce qui explique en partie l’intérêt que les chercheurs leur portent. L’auteur va donc tester les hypothèses les plus fréquentes émises au sujet de be like et say à l’aide de son corpus. Alors que say serait le plus souvent associé à une forme de neutralité représentée sur le plan sonore et niveau de la performance gestuelle, be like serait assimilé à une forme de « dramatisation du discours » accompagnée d’une performance à la fois sonore et gestuelle. Les premiers résultats confirment en partie ces hypothèses et mettent en valeur une certaine prééminence des variations de hauteur de voix sur les variations gestuelles co-verbales dans la distinction du comportement de say et be like. Les micro- analyses appliquées à différents locuteurs montrent toutefois que le quotatif say est employé avec beaucoup plus de variabilité que le quotatif be like.

Contribution de la prosodie à la grammaire de l’oral

15 Les contributions de cette troisième partie s’éloignent quelque peu du cadre de la théorie des opérations énonciatives pour observer de façon globale et combinée la contribution des différents facteurs prosodiques à la structuration du discours oral. Sur le plan de la prosodie, la hauteur mélodique, les pauses et le débit sont observés de façon systématique recherchant leur impact sur la structuration du discours et leur contribution à la « construction du sens dans sa globalité » (117). Le chapitre VII, « Structurer le discours : le rôle de la prosodie » est consacré aux recherches de Susanne Moore Mauroux présentant l’étude d’un corpus d’émissions de radio qui comportent toutes un présentateur et des invités. Le genre défini est médiatique, dialogal et interactionnel. Il s’agit de discours de type très structuré comportant des phases précises et systématiques et l’auteur s’intéresse en particulier aux phases de présentation (pendant lesquelles le présentateur présente les invités) qu’elle met en opposition avec les phases d’interaction (pendant lesquelles les invités répondent à des questions). Dans chacune de ces phases, on explore l’utilisation des multiples facteurs prosodiques mesurés pour comprendre leur participation et la façon dont ils se combinent entre eux ou bien au contraire sont autonomes et dominants. L’observation

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de locuteurs spécifiques montre notamment une corrélation entre un débit lent et des pauses lors des phases présentatives et, d’autre part, un débit plus rapide dans les phases interactives qui sont plus spontanées. Des marqueurs lexicaux tels que les déictiques, et les connecteurs logiques sont associés à ces observations et en particulier aux variations de la fréquence fondamentale. L’auteur se penche aussi sur les changements thématiques en interaction avec le pitch reset qui semble systématique et la modulation du débit et des pauses. Cette partie fait écho aux travaux de Marine Riou qui présentait une analyse des transitions topicales.

16 Sophie Herment propose une étude des structures syntaxiques de focalisation non canoniques en discours dans le chapitre VIII intitulé : « L’interface syntaxe/prosodie : réinterprétation en discours oral et approche discursive de la prosodie ». En se basant sur des corpus oraux semi-spontanés (le corpus ICE-GB et le corpus Aix-Marsec), elle étudie les caractéristiques syntaxiques et prosodiques d’un ensemble de structures de focalisation telles que les clivées, les dislocations à droite ou le « do emphatique ». L’objectif de ce travail est la mise à jour d’une approche discursive combinatoire appliquée à la grammaire de l’oral. Un cadre théorique est bien défini mettant en relation d’une part la structure informationnelle des énoncés et d’autre part les éléments prosodiques de façon structurée. Sont pris en compte le découpage des unités intonatives, le placement du noyau et le type de contour mélodique associé. L’auteur réinterprète les relations entre la syntaxe et la prosodie en discours montrant notamment l’absence de contradiction entre « économie linguistique et redondance » (136) dans les cas où à la fois la syntaxe et la prosodie sont utilisées pour la mise en relief. Les écarts entre les patrons attendus et les patrons réalisés sont présentés comme porteurs de sens et leur rôle dans le discours est mis en valeur par cette recherche. La prosodie prend son sens autour de la notion d’informativité développée par l’auteur. Elle « marque ce qui est important pour le locuteur au moment de l’énonciation » (142). On va ici au-delà de la grammaire traditionnelle pour proposer une approche combinatoire alliant syntaxe, pragmatique et prosodie afin de rendre compte de la complexité et de la richesse du discours oral semi-spontané.

17 Dans l’avant-dernier chapitre de l’ouvrage, « Désaccentuation, composition, réduction, cliticisation : un continuum », Ruth Huart s’intéresse aux combinaisons de termes appartenant à des catégories grammaticales différentes et aux phénomènes phonétiques de réductions qui leur sont associées à partir de l’observation d’un corpus d’enregistrements et de débats tirés de la radio britannique sur une douzaine d’années. Les liens entre le choix d’écriture soudée et l’accentuation sont étudiés à la lumière des opérations énonciatives sous-jacentes. De la fusion graphique vers la cliticisation, l’auteur définit un continuum dynamique propre à la langue orale spontanée. L’auteur montre notamment que les formes verbales soudées (gonna, wanna, gotta), ne perdent pas seulement leur forme phonétique pleine mais aussi la « valeur modale » (159) qui était « le reflet du point de vue de l’énonciateur » (159). L’opposition entre forme soudée et formes distinctes ne représente pas une simple variante mais le choix d’une forme ou de l’autre permet au contraire de véhiculer des informations sur « l’intention de signifier de l’énonciateur » (164).

18 Il s’agit là d’un ouvrage d’une grande cohérence et d’une grande clarté. Les contributions sont riches et variées tout en gardant un même but : celui de montrer ou de nous éveiller à la complexité de l’oral (en particulier spontané), de dépasser les barrières de la grammaire prescriptive traditionnelle pour faire sens des « infractions »

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aux règles en combinant les approches, les disciplines, les niveaux d’analyse et de matérialité de la substance sonore. On s’éloigne des cloisons traditionnelles entre les disciplines pour se diriger vers une véritable approche dite intégrée. Cette approche permet de mettre en valeur les interfaces entre les différentes disciplines, méthodologies, et approches de la langue orale. On en reste intrigué, intéressé et nourri de pistes de recherche et de nouveaux questionnements. Cet ouvrage constitue un hommage réussi aux travaux fondateurs de Claude Charreyre, aux travaux riches et dynamiques des chercheurs du réseau OSLIA et à la dimension orale de la langue anglaise.

INDEX

Mots-clés : oralité, linguistique anglaise, énonciation, oral spontané, linguistique de corpus, prosodie, variations prosodiques, intonation, grammaire de l’oral, syntaxe, pragmatique, méthodologie, analyse de l’oral, analyse du discours Keywords : English linguistics, spoken English, spontaneous speech, corpus linguistics, prosody, prosodic cues, intonation, grammar, syntax, pragmatics, discourse analysis, research methods

AUTEURS

SAANDIA ALI Maître de conférences Université de Toulouse – Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Sophie Chiari (ed), Ecrire la catastrophe. L’Angleterre à l’épreuve des éléments (XVIe - XVIIIe siècle)

Armelle Sabatier

RÉFÉRENCE

Ecrire la catastrophe. L’Angleterre à l’épreuve des éléments (XVIe - XVIIIe siècle), sous la direction de Sophie Chiari, Clermont-Ferrand, Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2019. ISBN : 9782845168886, 18 euros

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1 En ces temps de crises multiples, à la fois politiques, récemment sanitaires, et, depuis plusieurs décennies, écologiques, l’ouvrage collectif dirigé par Sophie Chiari, au titre prometteur, constitue une lecture salutaire tant pour les spécialistes du monde anglophone que pour des lecteurs, certes moins avertis, mais passionnés par les questions environnementales. Bien que la thématique de ce livre soit axée exclusivement sur l’Angleterre des XVIe, XVIIe et XVIII e siècles, les treize chapitres, toujours d’une grande érudition et précision, demeurent tout de même abordables.

2 Cette publication fait suite à l’organisation de deux tables rondes qui se sont tenues lors d’un colloque dont la thématique principale, à savoir les catastrophes naturelles, s’inscrit dans le cadre d’un projet de recherches plus vaste, Isite Cap 20-25. Dans une introduction très complète sur le sujet abordé dans l’ouvrage, Sophie Chiari rappelle que, depuis très longtemps, l’homme perçoit ce que l’on appelle aujourd’hui « un dérèglement climatique », en particulier au travers des phénomènes naturels que sont, par exemple, les inondations, souvent perçues comme la manifestation de la colère divine. Ainsi, la religion a permis à l’homme d’appréhender et de donner un sens à ces événements, du moins jusqu’au XVIIe siècle. La période choisie dans cet ouvrage, à savoir la première modernité, met en lumière des changements dans la perception des catastrophes naturelles. Alors qu’au XVIe siècle ces événements soudains sont vécus comme une punition divine, un glissement vers une rationalisation s’opère à partir du XVIIe siècle où les sciences prennent progressivement le relais. L’originalité de cet ouvrage réside également dans l’aire géographique étudiée, l’Angleterre. Sophie Chiari souligne que le sujet de cet ouvrage, loin d’être novateur, demeure un domaine encore peu exploité par la critique, en particulier pour les représentations littéraires des catastrophes naturelles dans l’Angleterre de la première modernité.

3 Les deux premières parties de l’ouvrage rassemblent des contributions qui laissent entrevoir, au fil de la lecture, l’évolution progressive de la société anglaise face aux

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aléas climatiques. La première partie ancrée dans l’Angleterre Tudor, explore les représentations religieuses au travers de l’analyse détaillée de sermons publiés à la fin du XVIe siècle. Le troisième chapitre se concentre plutôt sur les emblèmes qui utilisent, en partie, le discours religieux pour condamner les errements des êtres humains. Jean- Jacques Chardin note tout de même que ce support qui fait dialoguer le mot et l’image, dévoile un début de « sécularisation » du discours sur les catastrophes naturelles. Selon lui, la thématique de la punition divine sert à masquer une lecture plus morale et plus politique.

4 Les trois chapitres suivants, figurant dans la deuxième partie, explorent le tournant épistémologique, le passage vers une rationalisation qui émergent progressivement à partir du XVIIe siècle. Le chapitre de Margaret Jones-Davies laisse entrevoir les tiraillements de certains auteurs comme Sir Thomas Browne, partagés entre leur foi et la raison humaine. L’exemple de l’arc-en-ciel, que Jean-Jacques Chardin cite également (p.57-58), constitue un exemple frappant. Ce phénomène naturel que nous percevons aujourd’hui par le prisme de la théorie de Newton, était considéré, encore du temps de Shakespeare, comme une création divine lors de l’épisode du Déluge. Les interrogations de Browne sur l’existence de l’arc-en-ciel avant cet épisode biblique traduisent les prémices de ce glissement vers une rationalisation des phénomènes climatiques. Le chapitre suivant prolonge la réflexion sur les soubresauts du climat par le biais de la Tempête de Shakespeare. Le chapitre de Mickaël Popelard vient clôturer cette partie en mettant en regard Shakespeare et Bacon tout en abordant le concept d’Anthropocène. La troisième partie se concentre sur un autre aspect de la perception des catastrophes naturelles que certains contemporains de Shakespeare, mais aussi de Daniel Defoe, ont « éprouvé » lors de multiples voyages en mer. Les trois chapitres de cette partie analysent avec brio divers récits de voyage qui nous emmènent vers la Nouvelle- Angleterre, l’Antarctique vue par le capitaine Cook au XVIIIe siècle, en passant par les Bermudes ou la Virginie, des contrées décrites par William Strachey dont le récit aurait influencé un certain Shakespeare pour une de ses dernières pièces, The Tempest. Les quatre dernières contributions rassemblées dans la dernière partie, proposent au lecteur un voyage dans l’imaginaire musical et théâtral si riche de l’Angleterre de la première modernité. La plupart de ces contributions sont accompagnées de nombreuses illustrations de grande qualité. Une bibliographie très complète sur le sujet vient clôturer cet ouvrage d’une très belle facture dont l’érudition et le style toujours accessible permettent au lecteur du XXIe siècle de se poser loin du tourbillon politique et médiatique qui domine les débats sur l’écologie et, peut-être, de repenser son rapport à la nature, le poids de sa responsabilité, mais aussi d’envisager sa propre impuissance face aux catastrophes naturelles.

INDEX

Keywords : drama, emblems, the Flood, sermons, travels Mots-clés : déluge, emblèmes, récits de voyage, sermons, théâtre

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AUTEURS

ARMELLE SABATIER Maître de conférences Université Paris 2-Panthéon Assas [email protected]

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Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century

Alexandra Sippel

REFERENCES

Helena Rosenblatt, The Lost History of Liberalism, from Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018. 365 p. ISBN 978-0-691-17070-1.

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1 A specialist of French liberalism, Helena Rosenblatt has written extensively on some essential figures of the French Enlightenment like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or, more at length, on Benjamin Constant, whom she identifies as the philosopher who theorised contemporary French liberalism. Liberalism is therefore no uncharted territory to her, albeit in the much narrower framework of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Her 2018 book, The Lost History of Liberalism, aims both at continuing this study of liberalism, from Roman times down to the twenty-first century, and to give heart to today’s liberals as their doctrine seems to have lost its original sense of purpose (“Liberals should reconnect with the resources of their liberal tradition to recover, understand, and embrace its core values. This book is meant to relaunch that process” 277). As she undertakes “a word history” of liberalism (5), Rosenblatt presents readers, liberal and otherwise, with a very vast array of writers and thinkers, mainly from France, Britain, Germany and the US, who all contributed to define and redefine the concept over the centuries. Some of them are well-known while others have now fallen–unjustly, she argues–into oblivion. She tries to make sense of shifting meanings of the word, by staging transatlantic dialogues between European and American authors. Eight chronological chapters span the odd twenty-two centuries separating Cicero from Hayek–and beyond.

2 Rosenblatt usefully reminds readers that things “liberal” originally were the hallmark of citizens who had received a liberal education and were expected to behave liberally– liberal was derived from “liberalitas” rather than from “libertas,” even if only free citizens could be expected to display liberality. Going all the way back to this Latin etymology is enlightening as it helps better apprehend the paradigmatic shift that occurred when “liberal” came to be related to “liberty” (and individual rights) more than to liberality (as a set of duties to the public). Chapter 3 helps understand how this very change was applied to economics: to political economists, free trade and laissez faire, which entailed the repeal of tariffs and taxes on international trade, were ways of

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behaving liberally with one’s trading partners. It was a way of abandoning the commercial competition inherent in mercantilism in order to embrace the more generous principles of Montesquieu’s doux commerce.

3 However, as political economy claimed recognition as a new scientific field, liberal regimes no longer sufficed. Rosenblatt shows that a liberal king or ruler was understood as one who liberally granted freedoms to his people. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, though, “libertas” came to compete with “liberalitas” as the most frequent meaning for “liberal,” and the doctrine of individual liberties construed as natural rights gained credentials. Whereas liberalitas was aristocratic in its essence, natural rights were democratic and vested in all individuals. From the late seventeenth century in Britain, and even more so after the American and the French Revolutions in the wider western hemisphere, freedom of religion, of expression, of the press and so on came to be identified with liberal regimes. Freedoms granted by a liberal ruler could be taken away at a whim by the same, or a later ruler. By contrast, no one could rightfully strip individuals of their natural rights. This leads Rosenblatt to dedicate long developments to religious questions. In a nutshell, she demonstrates that the most dogmatic religions (Catholicism in France, the best established Protestant denominations in Britain, Germany and the United States) were at odds with liberalism as they expected it to cause the downfall of traditional society. A specialist of Constant and Germaine de Staël, she mainly focuses on French Catholicism to show how the Church (both in France and in Rome) sapped liberal attempts at reforms throughout the nineteenth century until it decided to try and infiltrate it, as it were, so as to devoid it of its substance from within.

4 The nineteenth century was replete with debates that stirred the passions of self-styled Liberals. After free trade became the norm, the question of how much a government was supposed to step in on behalf of the people became central in the political arena. As socialism and communism were on the rise, John Stuart Mill–among others–embraced some of their principles and pleaded for a brand of liberalism generous to the poor too. Gladstone, the “Liberal icon” (177) gathered crowds of workers around him when he delivered public speeches. His Conservative adversaries accused him of demagoguery. And yet, though he supported individual rights at home, Gladstone sided with the South during the American Civil War, and, ultimately, the Conservative Disraeli was deemed to have done more for the people than him. In the US, Abraham Lincoln embodied the arch-Liberal figure as the Civil War unfolded and as he represented the North determined to set the slaves free. What Rosenblatt leaves out, however, is the wider economic context. Indeed, Lincoln’s young Republican party embraced classical economic liberalism that gradually superseded protectionism, especially in the era of Big Business in the Reconstruction years. Although no single book could possibly address both the political and institutional nature of liberalism and how it impacted the evolution of economics within some 300 pages, Rosenblatt fails to highlight how the Reconstruction era and Big Business in its aftermath, contributed to the rise of American laissez-faireism that ran deep and mitigated Rooseveltian attempts at setting up a generous, European-like welfare state for example.

5 Rosenblatt also illustrates how Liberals had to battle with Caesarism throughout the nineteenth century. Napoleon I had put an end to the liberal aspirations voiced by French revolutionaries and by B. Constant and de Staël. Napoleon III did much the same in the second half of the century, modelling his imperial persona after Julius Caesar. In

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Germany socialism became so irrepressible that Bismarck was the first Western ruler to adopt measures that pertain to a welfare state. Essential voices that contributed to liberalism’s transformation into a more social and interventionist movement in the nineteenth century were those of Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand and Karl Knies who founded the Association for Social Politics, and denounced classical liberal economics in the process. To them, “it was morally abhorrent to claim that egoism and unbounded competition should serve as the basis for any viable and just economy” (222). Like German and French liberals, British and American academics welcomed these thinkers to their universities, their brand of social liberalism spread to the industrialised world and “new liberalism” gained the moral high ground. Traditional liberalism, on the other hand, receded and merged with Conservatism–even more so in Britain as the Liberal Party fell apart on the question of Irish Home Rule.

6 Colonialism and imperialism were two sides of the debate over the growth of Britain’s hold on wide chunks of the world. Though Liberals were not opposed to colonialism as they considered it was the only way of introducing whole parts of the world to the principles of liberal government, they opposed imperialism that aimed at suppressing indigenous cultures. As Darwin’s theses on the evolution of species and the subtle interplay of cooperation and competition between species gained ground, the Liberals also became divided on the question of eugenics. Like Conservatives, Liberals were wary of an alleged degeneration of the human race and of the risks of seeing this trend worsen if the “unfittest” were left to their own devices when it came to reproduction (237). In the US, this was made even plainer by Woodrow Wilson’s acceptance of schemes to deter black people from having children. Rosenblatt might have insisted more on how pervasive these eugenicist ideas were, as even socialists like the Webbs advocated socialist measures for eugenicist reasons (i.e. if the State did not relieve poverty, then charitable giving would go to the poorest who were precisely those who were the most likely to weaken the race).

7 One of Rosenblatt’s challenges (one that she sets to herself at least) is to revive the voices of long-forgotten authors, notably German ones. John Locke and John Stuart Mill are indeed present in the book, but not necessarily as much, or where, readers would expect. Locke is mostly discussed for his writings on tolerance and education, rather than those on government–which Rosenblatt can hardly be blamed for as Locke has already been amply researched. Neither J.S. Mill nor the Fawcetts are mentioned in the sub-chapter dedicated to the question of female suffrage. When Rosenblatt bemoans that too few women and men were inspired by American feminists in the mid- nineteenth century, she fails to shed light on little-known early socialist figures who did claim equal property and civil rights for women as soon as the 1810s. She also makes it sound as if American feminists were a majority in the US, which they were not.

8 This somewhat artificial dialogue across centuries and continents (between American and European feminists, or between American and French Liberals in the days of Napoleon III) often brings more confusion than light regarding liberalism. Indeed, Rosenblatt often tends to confront diverging interpretations of liberalism with too little definition or background for the reader to really understand what has to be concluded–other than that it is an elusive concept. A different organisation of the book, perhaps one focusing on the contradictions between economic and political liberalism,

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with the former attached to unbridled competition and individualism and the latter synonymous with dedication to the greater good, might have proven more insightful.

9 Another issue this reviewer has with The Lost History of Liberalism is the apparent neglect with which primary sources are referenced in end notes. Instead, Rosenblatt repeatedly uses the mention “quoted by,” which makes it much more complex for readers to find the original quote in order to research the wider work from which interesting quotes are excerpted. Very short passages are taken out of their context and pitted against one another, sometimes a German one against a French or American one, making it close to impossible to understand whether the authors cited really entered a dialogue through their works, or whether it is the historian’s task to make sense of piecemeal references. This is true even in the last chapter that aims at demonstrating why the US has adopted liberalism as its dominant, or even as its only, doctrine. Liberalism means different things to different people: Hayek indeed often used it on its own where others would use “neoliberalism” in order to signal that they are not discussing Roosevelt’s brand of liberalism as implemented in his New Deal. Here too, more historical background would have made the evolution of liberalism easier to decipher. Rosenblatt regrets that in the twentieth-century United States, liberalism has come to be equated with a movement focussing on individual rights and freedoms only, thereby relinquishing the commitment to the greater good it had in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries. This leaves out the whole Civil Rights movement and the passing of the Civil Rights Acts by the Democratic administration of Lyndon B. Johnson in the late 1960s. It even brushes aside more recent measures like Barack Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 2010. Although it can be argued that healthcare and health itself are private issues, Obama’s system rested in a large degree on the fact that all citizens had to commit and to take out insurance so that premiums might be more affordable to all.

10 All in all, The Lost History of Liberalism sketches out the evolution of the word “liberal” from its ancient aristocratic overtones to its democratisation. The shift from a commitment to liberality and self-sacrifice for the greater good to a defence of individual natural rights attached to the person is quite enlightening. So is the stress on the many ways in which liberals staged their differences with their conservative or socialist contemporaries over the centuries and in industrialising and industrialised countries. However, the complexity of the term is such that “liberalism” remains quite blurry. The conclusion suggests that to Rosenblatt, true liberalism is a form of latter- day civic humanism: commitment to the greater good in a democratic framework.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: libéralisme, Lumières, France, Grande-Bretagne, Allemagne, Etats-Unis, éducation libérale, libéralité, liberté, économie politique, droits naturels, religions, catholicisme, protestantisme, libre échange, laissez-faire, socialisme, communisme, césarisme, concurrence, colonialisme, impérialisme, eugénisme, individualisme Keywords: liberalism, Enlightenment, France, Britain, Germany, the US, liberal education, liberality, liberty, political economy, natural rights, religions, Catholicism, Protestantism, free trade, laissez-faireism, socialism, communism, Caesarism, competition, colonialism, imperialism, eugenics, individualism

AUTHORS

ALEXANDRA SIPPEL Maîtresse de conférences Université Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Antonella Braida-Laplace, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, Céline Sabiron (éds.), Inconstances romantiques. Visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long XIXe siècle

Sébastien Scarpa

RÉFÉRENCE

Antonella Braida-Laplace, Sophie Laniel-Musitelli, Céline Sabiron (éds), Inconstances romantiques. Visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long XIXe siècle (Nancy : Presses universitaires de Nancy - Editions Universitaires de Lorraine, 2019), 282 pages, ISBN 978-2-8143-0548-9

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1 Bel ouvrage, plutôt complet et bien pensé, que ce collectif consacré aux inconstances qui caractérisent, à maints égards, le romantisme britannique. Par nature, l’œuvre romantique, parce que tensionnelle, est instable. Visionnaire, nourrie d’idéalisme, en quête de perfection intuitionnée, elle semble vouée au fragmentaire et aux révisions permanentes. Dans leur introduction, les trois éditrices du volume l’expliquent avec clarté : penser l’impermanence, c’est plonger dans la genèse du geste créateur, en appréhender le caractère obsessionnel, fantasmatique, charnel (et donc, périssable, mortel), c’est « remettre en question la figure de l’auteur comme instance stable » (14) et, partant, « ouvrir le champ de la critique à l’aléa » (15). Ce texte romantique mouvant, en souffrance, Marc Porée le dit à son tour « incurablement aporétique » (30), inachevé par nécessité, « in-définitif » (33), en somme, et toujours discontinué. En s’appuyant sur les propos de Daniel Ferrer, ce dernier précise en quoi le faire romantique relève d’une « logique du brouillon » particulièrement féconde puisqu’hantée par « l’infini des possibles » (32). Passé ce « Prélude », l’ouvrage se déploie en trois mouvements (chacun composé de deux chapitres) respectivement intitulés « L’éphémère », « L’instable » et « L’inachevé ».

2 « L’éphémère », d’abord, fait la part belle au 18e siècle, soit au romantisme émergeant où se mêlent les aspirations à la grandeur pérenne et les méditations sur la fragilité humaine. Dans le premier chapitre intitulé « Ruines et fragments », John Baker compare deux poèmes d’ampleur à la segmentation néanmoins marquée : les Seasons de James Thomson et les Night Thoughts d’Edward Young. En les inscrivant dans un contexte culturel qui est celui de la fascination pour le passé et ses vestiges (Percy, Ossian, Chatterton, Pope…), J. Baker mène une réflexion sur le poème fragmentaire, ce « précipité paradoxal de l’impermanence » (39), « suspendu entre la forme et l’informe » (45), qui « renvoie inéluctablement à ce qui lui manque » (43). Chez J. M. W. Turner et Joseph Gandy, l’antique et le contemporain cohabitent également de façon spectaculaire. Pour Hélène Ibata, « le vestige est trace d’une totalité dont l’artiste

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s’efforce de retrouver les contours afin de surmonter le chaos » (67). En d’autres termes, les compositions de ces deux artisans de la sublimité sont des réflexions visuelles sur la décomposition et l’anéantissement, des méditations sur l’œuvre dévastatrice du temps dont la destruction projetée par Gandy de la Banque d’Angleterre est un exemple saisissant (76).

3 Le second chapitre (« Corpus ») de ce premier mouvement traite du corps dans les œuvres de William Blake et de S. T. Coleridge. En se focalisant sur la figure de Tharmas, Camille Adnot propose « une lecture de The Four Zoas comme une œuvre achevée mais non finie » (83) dont l’édition fut d’ailleurs « aussi fluctuante que sa substance » (82). Corps métamorphique, décomposé, tiraillé, éparpillé (dont les vers proliférants de Blake sont le reflet textuel), Tharmas, le Zoa de l’instinct dans le système blakien, est à l’image de l’élan créateur chez ce penseur halluciné de la divinité humaine : une ouverture sur l’infini (au sens de l’éternité) par le truchement de l’infinitude (qui est fragmentation, instabilité). Le corps de S. T. Coleridge pourrait-il être qualifié de tharmasien ? À lire les pages que Kimberley Page-Jones lui consacre, on est tenté de le penser. Ce qui est certain, c’est que le poète qui « scrute les moindres défaillances de son corps, détaille les symptômes qui le parcourent, met en faisceau les sens, les organes, les membres, les nerfs » (107) sait aussi la « nécessité de faire advenir une langue à soi, idiosyncrasique » (104), capable d’exprimer ce qui parle bel et bien à travers le corps, « à l’insu de soi » (100), en deçà de la pensée.

4 « L’instable », le deuxième mouvement de l’ouvrage, également subdivisé en deux chapitres (« Variance : le texte et ses possibles » et « Rémanence : le texte et ses doubles »), s’ouvre sur un autre regard porté sur Coleridge. Jeremy Elprin nous invite à considérer l’intérêt du poète pour le sonnet. Car même s’il paraît « difficile de voir en Coleridge un dévoué sonnettiste » (124), celui-ci fit le choix de cette forme au début de sa carrière (quand il s’inspirait notamment de W. L. Bowles), puis vingt ans plus tard, en « un acte significatif de renouvellement personnel et créatif » (140). Faut-il voir dans ce retour à la forme du sonnet une « affaire de recyclage troublée et troublante, le résultat tardif d’une expérimentation aussi féconde que défaitiste » (140) ? C’est la conclusion de J. Elprin qui considère ce geste (cristallisé par le poème « Fancy in Nubibus ») comme une marque « d’irrésolution, d’hésitation entre création et oisiveté, espérance et exaspération, début et fin(s) » (140). Fabien Desset propose ensuite une réflexion sur l’œuvre particulièrement protéiforme et indéterminée d’un P. B. Shelley en devenir qui expérimente dans le but de « trouver se voie et sa propre voix » (144) : St. Irvyne ; or, the Rosicrucian: A Romance, un roman lacunaire, augmenté de poèmes disparates, fruit des influences gothiques de Scott, Lewis, Radcliffe et Gray, et travaillé par le motif de l’instabilité dont l’édifice éponyme fournit une image parfaite. L’impression qui se dégage de cette œuvre hétérogène est celle de la tentative littéraire, comme si Shelley n’avait finalement « livré que des premiers jets, une série de brouillons » (162).

5 Le chapitre suivant, « Rémanence : le texte et ses doubles » offre une réflexion sur le phénomène intertextuel à l’œuvre dans quelques textes romantiques. Caroline Dauphin s’intéresse à la triangulaire liant les poèmes d’Erasmus Darwin et de William Blake à un hypotexte antique : celui des Métamorphoses d’Ovide. L’occasion pour elle de démontrer que le phénomène d’hybridité mêlant l’humain au végétal (et à l’animal, dans certains cas) dans les œuvres de ces trois grands auteurs connaît des ramifications nombreuses car il met au jour une logique de bouturage linguistique (croisements intertextuels) tout autant qu’une volonté d’enracinement des poètes romantiques dans un univers

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symbolique et stylistique qui, bien qu’il laisse transparaître une proximité certaine avec des textes antérieurs, leur reste propre. Ainsi, l’auteur du Book of Thel parvient-il à métamorphoser les « fleurs ovidiennes et darwiniennes » pour offrir au lecteur un « bouquet blakien composite et original » (176). En d’autres termes, le génie créateur serait peut-être ici le fruit d’une croissance combinant le culturel et le naturel, et l’œuvre créée, une sorte de floraison spontanée portant les racines de la vie (humaine, littéraire, intellectuelle), si fragiles soient-elles, à maturité. En traitant de l’émotion dans les romans de Mary Shelley – où se manifeste « un souci de retenue corporelle » (184), c’est-à-dire d’équilibre, de stabilité –, Audrey Souchet démontre à son tour que les textes de l’antiquité informent également des œuvres telles que Frankestein ou Valperga. De Platon, dont le Banquet et Phèdre sont convoqués, à Ovide, dont les Métamorphoses s’avèrent être une « source privilégiée pour figurer la passion féminine » (191), en passant par la poétesse Sapphô, Mary Shelley a puisé dans le corpus antique pour nourrir sa vision de la femme sentimentale, cette « femme-abeille, humble ouvrière de la confluence des cœurs dont elle fait, littéralement, son miel » (196), comme l’écrivaine fit le sien de ses sources.

6 « L’inachevé », troisième et dernier mouvement de l’ouvrage, se divise en un premier chapitre entièrement consacré à Thomas De Quincey (« Palimpsestes quinceyens ») et un second intitulé « Survivances » où la question du devenir des auteurs romantiques est abordée. Dans la première étude traitant de De Quincey, Céline Lochot retrace les conditions d’émergence des écrits quinceyens dont elle nous rappelle qu’ils ne furent que « tardivement envisagés » par leur auteur « comme un tout » (203). Et si l’écriture, chez cet auteur fuyant au style éminemment digressif, relève bien d’une entreprise de reconstruction identitaire, force est de constater que De Quincey ne put que revendiquer une « autobiographie anonyme » (215) dans laquelle, en l’absence de véritable figure auctoriale, l’inconstance et la dispersion font en quelque sorte autorité. « L’œuvre achevée », « l’écriture aboutie » ne cessent en effet de « reculer devant De Quincey » (219), confirme Thomas Leblanc pour qui l’écriture quinceyenne « porte dans sa facture même la trace à la fois répétée et toujours renouvelée de sa course contre elle-même » (219). Selon lui, les Confessions, entre autres productions, sont « le témoignage obscur de cet échec à la complétude créative » (233). L’étude de différents procédés discursifs (usage de structures impersonnelles, de verbes à particule, ruptures rhétoriques…) montre bien comment De Quincey (alias X.Y.Z. dans certains de ses écrits) chercha toujours à avoir, mais aussi à atteindre, sans pouvoir le faire vraiment, le dernier mot (ou la dernière lettre…) face aux piliers immuables de l’histoire littéraire, dont S.T.C. (Coleridge) évidemment.

7 Le deuxième chapitre de ce mouvement, et dernier de l’ouvrage, débute par une analyse menée par Anne Rouhette sur la place occupée aujourd’hui par les œuvres de Jane Austen au sein de l’université française (enseignement, thèses, publications scientifiques). Il apparaît que si l’intérêt pour cette écrivaine insituable, qui se tint en marge du romantisme, ne semble pas faiblir (contrairement à celui que portent les lecteurs à Dickens, Defoe ou les sœurs Brontë), la réception de son œuvre en France s’avère néanmoins marquée par l’inconstance chronologique (248). Enfin, Aurélie Thiria-Meulemans aborde l’œuvre de William Wordsworth, le Prélude, en particulier, qui fit l’objet d’un incessant travail de réécriture et dont les versions de 1805 et 1850 sont ici comparées. Elle nous rappelle que, pour Wordsworth, « le spectre de la mort rôde derrière toute figure de l’achèvement, de la clôture » (258), car mettre un terme à une œuvre autobiographique reviendrait à donner à cette dernière « l’autonomie

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redoutée qui signifie la mort de son auteur » (269). Et quand le noyé surgit des eaux dormantes dans le Livre V du Prélude, n’est-ce pas le texte wordsworthien lui-même « qui ressuscite l’être que le poète a été, qui met en scène ce moi passé » (268) sous les traits effrayants d’un cadavre ? Accoucher d’une œuvre achevée serait ainsi, en un sens profond, signer un acte de décès. À cela, il n’est peut-être de remède que le labeur constant de la réécriture, de la révision, au risque d’engendrer un texte en perpétuel devenir, inconstant.

INDEX

Keywords : Romanticism, long 19th century, fragment, vision, revision, instability Mots-clés : Romantisme, long 19ème siècle, fragment, vision, révision, instabilité

AUTEURS

SÉBASTIEN SCARPA Maître de conférences Université Grenoble Alpes [email protected]

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Hélène Ibata. The Challenge of the Sublime. From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art

Laurent Châtel

REFERENCES

Hélène Ibata. The Challenge of the Sublime. From Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic Art. Manchester University Press, 2018. ISBN : 1526117398

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1 Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) is of one of the most well-known texts of eighteenth-century British art and aesthetics alongside with Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) and Reynolds’s Discourses at the Royal Academy (1769 – 1790). But The Challenge of the Sublime by Hélène Ibata sheds new and fresh light on the Enquiry as it tackles Burke’s reception and legacy among nineteenth-century British artist. Ibata contends that by implying painters could not rouse sublime feelings as much as poetry, Burke succeeded in provoking painters who became intent on proving him wrong. Just as poets had long been thought to induce sublime thoughts in their readers, painters equally felt there was no reason to check their flights of imagination and restrain their talent for representation on canvas. Ibata pushes her argument one step further: she suggests that the sublime became a (new) challenge for artists to take up in order to win over the technical constraints which they faced with two-dimensional canvasses and the age-old paradigm of mimesis. The “challenge of the sublime” also thus refers to artists’ frustrations at Burke’s underestimation of the powers of pictorial power and thus to Burke challenging artists into renewed creativity: he fueled artists with energy and ideas to experiment further with visual representation. The first part of the book is a survey of the genesis as well as the afterlife of Burke’s Enquiry; first of all, a genealogy of sublime theories is provided, concerned with highlighting the various strands of thinking on the sublime that went into Burke’s essay which is presented as the “culmination” of a long tradition with radical, subversive potential. The study of his relation to previous explorations of the sublime, notably Longinus Peri Hupsous, as well as his affinities with more recent British writers, highlights Burke’s idiosyncratic and unique place, and his role in subverting and adapting it: Burnet, Dennis, Shaftesbury, Addison and Baillie are called up as possible sources and forerunners of Burke’s ideas. The seeds of important aspects of his essay, its emphasis on terror and on the passions, its repertoire of natural sources of the sublime, and its pioneering “psychology” of the sublime can all be traced back to several layers of British thought. Secondly, the posterity of Burke’s essay is examined particularly in relation to Sir Joshua Reynolds and James Barry, two early shapers of the Royal Academy of Arts. Chapter four highlights the fascinating double portrait by Barry of himself with his friend Burke in a striking and admittedly bewildering epic episode taken from Homer’s Odyssey - Portraits of Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus (Crawford Art Gallery, Cork); this image epitomizes the study conducted in Part I on the actual incidence and import of the intellectual connections and exchanges that shaped the Enquiry. The three chapters of part II of the book study the ways British artists challenged the constraining idea of “narrow limits of painting”, focusing respectively on panoramic canvasses, frames and architectural fantasies. Ibata’s central tenet is Burke’s skepticism about the possibility of a pictorial sublime. Her main target is to gauge whether his ideas hindered or conversely exacerbated pictorial practices in reaction to academic exhibition paintings; she argues that the growing taste for the aesthetics of terror necessitated innovative means to counteract what was often deplored about painting on canvas at that time, the necessarily “quadrilateral frame of the painting” (p. 148). In this part the fashion for book illustration and beyond-the- frame panoramas are studied very closely as visual supplements and tools to transcend pictorial finiteness. The last two chapters of the book (Part III) focus on Blake and Turner’s interpretations of the sublime. While seeing Burke in the context of his contemporary readers, contacts and friendships, such as painters Reynolds and Barry,

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the book is also shaped by later philosophical and art historical readings of the sublime, notably those of Immanuel Kant, Louis Marin, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Derrida: their definitions and interpretations are made to reverberate back onto Burke- a non- historicist posture which enables a widening of the acceptation (and expectations) of the late eighteenth-century sublime, but somehow stretches Burke beyond his intent and design. As a whole, the book provides the most comprehensive study to date of the interrelation between a well-established text (too often read in isolation in past writings) and manifold British pictorial practices conceived here as more or less direct reactions to Burke’s ideas and beliefs. As such, needless to say Hélène Ibata’s book is of utmost interest to students and scholars alike of nineteenth-century art and aesthetics.

2 It is one of the greatest merits of the book to trigger off questions which open up a forum for discussion and a renewed consideration of what, for the nineteenth century, characterizes the artistic achievements of British painting and what constitutes the experience of the sublime. Firstly, one may wonder whether the contention that Burke was going “against the whole tradition of the sister arts” is a case of Burke “dividing” the arts or rather simply reinforcing the hierarchy between them in favour of poetry? For that matter, when it comes to ut pictura poesis, the book contains a stimulating invitation to rethink the full extent of the incidence and dialogue between the theories of Bodmer, Burke and Lessing. Secondly, one is left wondering how to interpret Burke’s presumed anti-pictorialism. Baldine Saint Girons put it down to his anchorage in rhetoric and belles lettres, and his own specific interest in the performativity of speech and power. As Burke himself put it, he was “without any affectation, thoroughly convinced, that he ha (d (no skill whatsoever in the art of painting” (Letter to Barry, p. 122). Therefore it is delicate to infer from his friendship with artists that that there was anything in him to think things out visually. What with being still very young and mainly steeped in literary culture, Burke was ill-fitted in the 1750s for contemplating the (future) potential of British art (despite his acquaintance with artists) and he just did not envisage the awe-inspiring effect and intensity of affect of canvasses. Similarly, it is difficult to infer from Burke’s emphasis on drawing and determinacy, which he ranked as being essential training of great artists, that he was excluding painting altogether from any qualification for sublimity–was Blake after all not taking up the cudgels both for linearity, determinacy and the quest of the sublime? One is also left wondering whether the idea that Burke ‘draws attention to the visual arts as the locus of a representational crisis’ is over-exaggerated; for all his fears that painting may be too imitative and fail to rise above mechanical crafts, Burke would hardly have been bent on exploring the present or/and future state of visual arts. This makes one think of Horace Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting (1762-80) explicitly calling for a school of landscape in Britain (on account of the fine countryside which was readily available to inspire British artists) as if Britain had not already been producing landscape painting. Difficult to say whether Walpole was blind to them or simply being provocative and controversial. As for Burke, it is more convincingly a case of being dedicated to classical learning and belles lettres. Finally, one may take issue with the working hypothesis throughout that the sublime should not be thought beyond representation. This brings to the fore two questions – firstly it is worth asking whether Burke’s paramount concern was reception rather than representation as testified by his focus on the perceptions of readers and spectators.”It is a different matter altogether to assess the sublime from the point of view of representation: could painters not paint sublime objects and settings with sublime textures and handling without, in the end, viewers

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necessarily being seized with the sublime? How does viewing Turner’s Dolbadern Castle compare with viewing Dolbadarn itself on the Welsh Marches? Secondly, one may ask whether the sublime as a psycho-aesthetic category of art appreciation should not remain an intermediate experience that is always characterized by being ‘below the limit’, on the edge, in suspension and in-between? The sublime partakes of divinity and transcendence–whichever it might be–, so it is perhaps worth suggesting that when men and women have a share in it, they always see and feel it from below, beyond any representational frame and artefact. This makes one think of Whately declaring in his Observations on Modern Gardening (1770) that gardening is superior to landscape painting, as a reality to representation. For the sake of intensity, the sublime needs to be a direct experience in the flesh - non-virtual, non-vicarious, devoid of proxy, but not fully ‘bodied’.

INDEX

Keywords: art, aesthetics, British visual arts, sublime, landscape, mimesis, sister arts, reception studies, representation, word and image Mots-clés: art, esthétique, arts visuels britanniques, sublime, paysage, mimesis, arts sœurs, études de la réception, représentation, texte et image

AUTHORS

LAURENT CHÂTEL Professeur des universités Université de Lille [email protected]

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John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century

Wayne E. Arnold

REFERENCES

John Burnside, The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (Princeton University Press, 2020), 510 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-20155-9

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1 Somewhere in Arncroach, Scotland, John Burnside is reading and writing. Perhaps he is perusing Henry Miller (his previous Princeton publication was on Miller), or perchance he is delving into unknown poetry from the Ivory Coast; he may very well be working on his eighteenth volume of poetry. Burnside, if nothing else, is a prolific artist and critic. In his most recent publication, The Music of Time, the poet-cum-novelist delivers an expansive representation of his versatility involving his medium of choice: poetry. Sprawling across twenty-three diverse chapters, Burnside guides us along a meandering path of 20th century verse, endeavoring to connect a variety of themes under the canopy of modernity. The title of his work is intriguing in that we may expect Burnside to show us a beautiful tonality in poetry encircling a variety of poetic genres; instead, he argues that “music-making is a way of making sense of noise,” and in turn, “poetry is a way of ordering experience” (12). Experience is gained with time; to grapple with the hardships that life brings our way, Burnside encourages us to learn from the noise-altering music of poetry. The varied cacophonies during the 20th century were, periodically, devastating and catastrophic: the impacts on the individual were no less critical. “The music of what happens” (12), Burnside posits, can guide us in approaching the vastness of the past in relation to where we stand today. The text is intended for our present global situation, and The Music of Time meanders across various topics that remain ever-present in our environment (politically and socially) by studying the songs of the poets who were best positioned to record the significance of events unfolding around them.

2 The Music of Time is a political text. It may seem odd to draw comparisons between a Scottish poet and the United States, but nearly every theme in the 2020 United States presidential election is present in Burnside’s writing. For good reason. Early on, Burnside makes clear that “the first strong influences that guided me as a poet were American” (17). The environment, Black Lives Matter, fake news, political leaders, the human condition, and international politics, among others, are present. Surprisingly missing, however, is any gender-focused poetic discussion—a significant oversight in a well-thought-out collection of verse. Nevertheless, Burnside demonstrates his adeptness in melding a variety of political and social topics into an engaging examination, with the overall purpose of trying to make sense of discordances, via poetry. While the overtones may be political, the text does not bombard readers with the current global political climate. Several parts avoid direct reference to politics, focusing instead on nature or human relations. The topics of each section seem specifically chosen to highlight the significance of poetry in terms of political art, and Burnside illustrates how the music generated by poetry helps us understand the varied noises surrounding certain historical and even current events.

3 Poetry is communal, Burnside states (25). From this position, he then engages with his selected poets to muse over numerous events that are often present in daily life (work, travel, marriage, family, the natural world, etc.), and global influences on our societies (wars, racism, class, politics, environmental devastation, loss of culture, etc.). Take for instance the approach to the institution of marriage, and marriage/divorce poems. Legitimate value exists in a poem “that gets out the dissecting kit and digs deep into what makes modern marriage so difficult, on the one hand, and so rewarding when it is sustained, on the other” (328). Looking primarily at the poetry of Robert Graves, Louise Glück, and Alan Shapiro, gives witness to noxious relationships, as in Glück’s “Mock Orange” (1968), or the difficulties of indefinitely maintaining a marriage, as shown in

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“Anger,” from Shapiro’s Tantalus in Love (2005). Increasingly in the 20th century, Burnside states, the “polarity of romantic engagement versus institutional obligation found expression in the works of poet after poet as unrealistic matrimonial expectations were more openly discussed and divorce rates soared” (328).

4 This marital fallout is part of the noise surrounding our modern lives; but we need not fear, as Burnside explains, while utilizing the poetry of Robert Graves, since Graves finally discovered “that, far from losing themselves in one another, true lovers turn outward to the world and learn how to live there more skillfully than they would otherwise have done” (331). Poetry is not self-help verse waiting to be read, and Burnside is not imploring us to direct our lives through couplets and sonnets, yet there is definite worth to be found in the personal experiences of poets.

5 As noted, The Music of Time has a political lean. Multiple sections deal with the triumvirate of politics, philosophy, and poetics. “A Golden Age of Poetry and Power” conjoins politics and poetry most clearly. It looks at the relationships between President John F. Kennedy, Robert Frost, and Frost’s diplomatic trip to Russia in August 1962. The chapter, which briefly touches on the American Dream, refugees (in relation to Emma Lazarus’s sonnet), and Geraldo Rivera, primarily focusses on the bond between president and poet. It is obvious from the chapter’s title that Burnside considers this period the apex of 20th century American poetry when the country’s greatest living poet read at an inauguration and then would travel as a representative to Russia shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis. Frost and Kennedy’s relationship aside, Burnside highlights the link between politics and culture (250); this connection, as intimated elsewhere in the book, has been continually weakened before and after this particular golden age, as poetry is avoided by the greater populace and the media deteriorates its image. While Frost’s relationship with Kennedy ultimately came to a dramatic ending, the significance of Frost’s presence on inauguration day 1961 is meaningful. Burnside laments that American presidents have drifted away from a willing association with poets (18); it may have been to his gratification then that Democratic party nominee Joe Biden quoted Seamus Heaney in his acceptance speech on August 21, 2020. Heaney is featured in The Music of Time and Burnside concludes his thoughts on the poet with the following summation: “To anyone reading Heaney the risible contention that poetry is politically ineffective is like saying that raising a child or planting a tree is a waste of time” (438). Frost’s association with Kennedy is obvious, and with Biden Burnside has been buffered concerning his evaluation of Heaney’s poetry.

6 Hope is a bit of an overplayed political word these days (see Biden’s selection of the Heaney poem); nevertheless, throughout the previous century of verse, Burnside believes that hope and poetry have been intrinsically entwined: “Hope is the essence, then, for all poets. We might even say that to make a poem at all is an act of hope” (11). Poetry helps us deal with the noise arising from the daily, social, and global events that occur over time, and interpretation of poetic words enables us to reimagine the noise into a type of music (11). This transformation is built on the embodiment of hope. Burnside’s text is fairly consistent in this overarching theme of noise, poetry, music, hope—although he notes that most of the poets with which he engages are rather depressing and depressed individuals.

7 Several parts hinge around the theme of nature and animals, both of which are connected with the environment. In “Why Look at Animals,” Burnside provides one of

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the more engaging discussions concerning how modern humans have lost touch with nature—specifically, the presence of wild animals in our lives. Echoing Henry David Thoreau’s endorsement for the West and wildness in his essay “Walking” (1862), or perhaps mindful of the feckless Christopher McCandless as portrayed in John Krakauer’s Into the Wild (1996), Burnside stresses that a possible “sense of being bereft comes from living day to day with the near-absence of wild things.” Corresponding to the increasing decrease in our chances to experience natural wild animals, “the obliteration of vast numbers of species during the last hundred years or so has been paralleled by the steady growth in animal encounter poetry” (208). Included are poems that deal with deer, snakes, bees, the animal Other, and even a poem about suicide in the jaws of lions. The chapter is an absorbing gambol through nature, with Burnside arguing that humans are hungry for something lost, “an almost unbearable homesickness for our own wild selves and for the other animals” (233). Nature, animals, and the environment are easy elements to find in poetry, but Burnside’s selections are particularly acute in that the verses do not need manipulation to help elucidate his themes.

8 This newest Burnside publication is an enjoyable read; the chapters are short, and the content and poetry keep the reader’s interest. The Music of Time does have its political undercurrents, but these do not detract from the major argument that poetry can help us transform the noise of our lives into music that, if anything else, might help us whistle while we struggle. Part of Burnside’s literary prowess appears in his near- seamless incorporation of a wide spectrum of philosophers. From the Greeks to the modern theorists, Burnside can illustrate how certain thought patterns have echoed across the centuries. There is, however, a sense of clandestineness on Burnside’s part concerning the content, even the title could be considered misleading. This concealment comes about in a couple of subtle ways. First, the section titles are obscure —what is involved with a chapter entitled “Where Turtles Win”? (think Lawrence Ferlinghetti). What will be discussed in this place filled with winning turtles? (methinks non-academic poetry). The second manner by which the themes seem hidden is with the index. While a 23-page index is lengthy and well appreciated—recording every artist, poem, and book mentioned—there are very few terms listed concerning the themes. In this sense, with both the titles and the index, every chapter remains a relative mystery until read. The text also feels like it lingers in the first half of the 20th century, or at least Burnside seems to draw on additional poets from that era. Most importantly, Burnside deftly keeps his argument on track, only occasionally becoming ambiguous, and he emboldens us to “stay attuned to the music we have been given, rather than trying to create a perfect harmony that can never exist” (461). Here is a worthwhile endeavor by Burnside, one that demonstrates his knowledge of language and its importance in the shape of poetry.

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INDEX

Mots-clés: poésie, XX° siècle, environnement, politique américaine, rêve américain, espoir, animaux Keywords: poetry, 20th century, environment, American politics, American dream, hope, animals

AUTHORS

WAYNE E. ARNOLD Associate professor of American studies The University of Kitakyushu, Fukuoka, Japan [email protected]

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Kei Miller, In Nearby Bushes

Eric Doumerc

REFERENCES

Kei Miller, In Nearby Bushes. Manchester: Carcanet, 2019. ISBN: 978 1 78410 845 8. 76 pages.£9.99

1 Kei Miller is a Jamaican poet and novelist who is currently the Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa and was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Collection for his 2014 book of poems The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. In 2017 his novel Augustown won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature.

2 Miller’s latest collection, In Nearby Bushes, was published in 2019 by Carcanet and takes its title from a phrase used in a legal context in Jamaica to refer to criminals escaping into "nearby bushes". The phrase seems to recur in many newspaper articles relating incidents leading to some violent deaths. In the context of Jamaica, the word is, of course, associated with the mountains, and with rural areas, but also with Jamaica’s tormented past, as in the days of slavery, runaway slaves and Maroons escaped into the "bush", or the hills.

3 The collection is divided into three sections, "Here", "Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places", and "In Nearby Bushes", which look at various aspects of Jamaican history through the prism of places, placelessness, and naming.

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4 The phrase "in nearby bushes" suggests something hidden, something which is not to be seen, and which should not be visible. As indicated in one of the first poems in the collections, "The Understory", Miller is concerned with Jamaica’s hidden past and tormented present, and he wants to tell his readers about the hidden Jamaica tourists never really experience: "Are there stories you have heard about Jamaica? /Well here are the stories underneath" (8).

5 Jamaica’s slave past is dealt with neatly with the tale of the reindeer which were brought to Jamaica for a show in 1988, and because of or thanks to a hurricane which devastated the island in that year, managed to escape into the hills and to put down roots, so to speak, so that their population now stands at 6,000. That story is, of course, used to deal with the issues of identity and displacement, with the reindeer, like the runaway slaves before them, having to adapt and to make Jamaica their home: "There is such a thing as the perfect storm. It includes an actual storm & deer in weak cages & nearby bushes.

How wonderful to escape Into hills that have always been escape. They are the new maroons." (18)

6 The prose-poem entitled "Place-name: Oracabessa -" looks at the issue of naming and colonialism. Oracabessa is, of course, well-known as the place where Ian Fleming lived and wrote so many of his James Bond novels. From "Oracabessa" ("Golden Head"), the poet engages in a long meditation on Jamaica’s history, the gold the Spaniards looked for in Jamaica, the gold in James Bond’s golden gun, and finally the golden light reflected on a bay or on bananas which eventually inspired writers like himself to write in a new language to dismantle the language of the colonizing power: light guilding the bay, and perhaps bananas, and perhaps ackee, and such language as could summon wind to capsize Columbus’s ships–and if that’s not gold, then what is? (34)

7 In many poems, the issue of naming comes to the fore, as in Millers’ previous collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. In the poem entitled "Sometimes I Consider the Names of Places", Miller takes the example of New Zealand where the natives called a place "Otepoti" only to see that name erased by settlers who were reminded of their native Scotland and renamed it "Dunedin": Place name–Dunedin. Old Gaelic word. "Dun" being the same word as "fort". Fort being the same word as "burgh". Dunedin or Fort Edin, or Edin Fort, or Edinburgh" (31)

8 As the quotation above makes it clear, Miller explores the process of "making territories out of maps" (31) and often resorts to the device of the mock dictionary entry to make his point: place names and maps are mere constructs which reflect a particular world view which was imposed on the natives by settlers and colonists.

9 In another "micro-essay" (27) with the same title, the same technique is applied to the Caribbean, and to Christopher Columbus’s infamous mistake: Sometimes I consider the names of places: The West Indies. Or said another way: Western India

as if India was not enough" (33)

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10 Social divisions, violent acts perpetrated against the gay community ("A Psalm for Gay Boys"), the apparent emptiness and void to be found in a post-colonial island, the constant (and very colonial) craving for foreign things and the consequent devaluation of things Jamaican, are all dealt with at various points in this collection through the prism of language. In fact, Miller encourages his readers to look at Jamaica and at its troubled history in a novel way, and to see the creative possibilities behind the apparent chaos and lawlessness. In the end, the lesson seems to be that even the places are important and can be poetic.

INDEX

Mots-clés: poésie des Caraïbes Keywords: Caribbean poetry

AUTHORS

ERIC DOUMERC Maître de Conférences Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected].

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Linda S. Ferber, Nancy K. Anderson (eds.), The American Pre-Raphaelites – Radical Realists

Muriel Adrien

RÉFÉRENCE

Linda S. Ferber, Nancy K. Anderson (eds.), The American Pre-Raphaelites – Radical Realists (Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2019), 294 p, ISBN 978-0-300-24252-2

1 The American Pre-Raphaelites – Radical Realists is the catalog of an exhibition of some 90 works by American artists influenced by John Ruskin (1819-1900) in celebration of the 200th anniversary of his birth, held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC from April 14 to July 21, 2019. The exhibit took place 34 years after a pioneering exhibition organized by the Brooklyn Museum in 1985, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, named after their short-lived radical mouthpiece and journal. The catalog is a collection of chapters edited by the curators of the exhibit, Linda S.

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Ferber (museum director emerita and senior art historian at the New York Historical Society) and Nancy K. Anderson (curator and head of the department of American and British paintings at the National Gallery of Art), complete with illustrations, a plates checklist, portraits and short biographies of the artists, a selected bibliography and an index.

2 Linda Ferber starts by introducing the group of artists who were dubbed the American Pre-Raphaelites for their Ruskinian allegiance. Ruskin never travelled to the United States but his reformist ideas rejecting academic art and his appeal for artworks that focused on the exacting details of the natural world found a resounding echo in the United States, especially among ardent followers such as Fidelia Bridges, Charles Herbert Moore, Henry Roderick Newman, William Trost Richards, the Hills, Robert J. Patkinson, and most notably Thomas Charles Farrer, a veteran of the Union army. This British-born artist who studied with Ruskin and Rossetti spearheaded the creation of the Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art in 1863.

3 Ruskin’s call for meticulous descriptions of nature was, according to Asher B. Durand, decisive in the emergence of a national school. Under the influence of the best-selling Elements of Drawing (1857), American Pre-Raphaelites painted out of doors directly from nature, and did so with intense attention to detail. Like the British Pre-Raphaelites, they were highly critical of the old system, theirs being the Hudson River School or paintings such as Leutze’s in the exhibition for the Great Metropolitan Fair in 1864. essay also focuses on the architect members Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis Jr. who conducted projects in the Gothic revival style advocated by Ruskin.

4 The heyday of the movement was in the mid-1860s, during the Civil War years: their reformist agenda included the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery, as encoded in the political subtext of their pictures. Although they were quite aware of their own historical importance, the group disbanded by 1870 and they went their separate ways. The group was a catalyst for the founding of the American Watercolor Society and a harbinger of the American Aesthetic movement.

5 Tim Barringer’s chapter gives an overview of the British Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and of the influential role of Ruskin’s teachings, before listing the instances during which Ruskin was in contact with Americans. Ruskin met W.J. Stillman who cofounded The Crayon with John Durand, son of Asher Brown Durand. His closest friend was Charles Eliot Norton, who would become the first professor of History of Art at Harvard University. Charles Herbert Moore, one of the American Pre-Raphaelites, was Ruskin’s travelling companion in 1876-78, and copied Italian works for him and Norton. As for T.C. Farrer, he exported the zeal for reform of the Working Men’s college to the US when he emigrated in 1858.

6 Sophie Lynford’s chapter focuses on the political subtext of the works of the American Pre-Raphaelites. Even though no images of the movement illustrated slavery specifically, their artwork endeavored to advance political causes. The Association for the Advancement of the Truth in Art had internalized Ruskin’s idea that art was linked to the moral condition of a country. British-born T.C. Farrer’s engagement with progressive Christian socialism originated at the Working Men’s College, where Chartism sparked fervent political debate. Chartism shared a common purpose with African American abolitionism for which there was an active lecture circuit in England in the 1840s and 1850s. In the United States, Farrer enlisted in the Union army for three months. He also stayed with his wife in the house of Gabriel Joseph B. Parsons who had

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taken part in many significant battles fought by the Army of the Potomac. Farrer was the only American Pre-Raphaelite to produce a significant body of narrative work, such as Gone Gone (1860), which was steeped in a sense of foreboding with the impending war. Lynford connects the painting with Millais’s treatment of the same theme in various pictures, such as The Black Brunswicker.

7 The architects Peter Bonnett Wight and Russell Sturgis Jr. strongly adhered to Ruskinian ideas, carrying them to unprecedented heights. Not only did they promote Gothic revivalism so as to counter the pernicious effects of mechanization on the arts; they also found in that architecture the means to promote the values of egalitarianism, manual labor and craftsmanship, the importance of sourcing materials locally, as well as the display of native flora and fauna in ornaments and decoration. Lynford describes the boldness of buildings by Wight, such as the National Academy of Design, or the North’s first army field hospital.

8 The Association repudiated Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, Frederick Church, Albert Bierstadt as these artists were believed to have condoned an expansionist ethos in their landscape paintings, extolling or at least tacitly endorsing the policy of the Manifest Destiny. Indeed, in their idealized compositions of the American sublime, the viewer could take cognitive possession of the scene and by extension of the physical landscape. The American Pre-Raphaelites spurned formulaic entry points and picturesque markers (such as repoussoirs, winding paths...) and substituted these exhausted tropes with arduous hyper-realistic mimesis, more consonant with their quest for truth. Lynford gives a few examples of the faithful landscape transcriptions that were favored over idealized landscapes. Moore’s Hudson River, Above Catskill (1865) modestly features a small strip of the Hudson riverfront, a rocky bank with an unusual assemblage of unseemly detritus. It foregrounds the trope of the wrecked or stranded boat―emblematic of a marooned situation. The quasi-taxonomic profusion of botanical and geological residue actually exceeds the realist mandate set by Ruskin. Likewise, John Henry Mills’s literal Study of Trap Rock features a broken jumble of cleaved and angled blocks as an allegory of wartime carnage. The claim behind these non-showy, discrete subjects, was that no object was less deserving of the painters’ care; this acuity of vision was meant to convey values of equality. Unlike the View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, , after a Thunderstorm―The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole, the same Catskill landscape by Farrer in View of Northampton from the Dome of the Hospital (1865) is treated as still life. The piece is a collection of disparate objects rather than a grand and unified Claudian vision. Moreover, Farrer takes the opposite vantage point to Cole — from the State Hospital for the Insane―many of whose inhabitants were former Union soldiers― as this was more consonant with his purpose. 9 Barbara Dayer Gallati starts by saying that the elaborate and virtuoso literalism of the American Pre-Raphaelites and their depiction of nature’s minutiae did not preclude them from engaging with thematic content. She goes over the privileged themes that arise in Pre-Raphaelite productions. The first theme is that of portraits of artists intensely absorbed by their work, which seems consistent with the Pre-Raphaelites’ embrace of the virtues of industrious labor. That occupation is sometimes music- making as it requires practice and dedication. Another leitmotiv is the floral symbolism, common in Victorian culture. Of course, the American artists preferably turned to North American species, often humble unassuming wildflowers. The Biblical or Shakespearian symbol of the neglected unweeded garden, albeit showing fine

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botanical detail, is also frequent and draws on Holman Hunt’s Light of the World. Some paintings revel in hidden symbolism and Dayer Gallati compares Hunt’s Awakening Conscience with Farrer’s Practicing Lesson, as well as the latter’s self-portrait with Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait. Embedded paintings in scenes of separation and loss successfully make a self-reflexive comment on the medium of the picture itself, as can be seen in Gone! Gone!. The reference of Millais’ Huguenot Lover equates the separation of two lovers to that of a country torn apart during the Civil War.

10 Mark Mitchell argues that Ruskin’s influence on the minor genre of still life was particularly significant in the United States. His writings were read loosely as validation for the primacy of visual perception over artistic convention, and their focus on the intimate appreciation of nature and the democratic quality of an egalitarian view of things was resonant with the young American republic. The most famous work of art by Ruskin in the United States, Fragment of the Alps (c.1854-56), a watercolor belonging to Charles Eliot Norton, his longtime friend and a champion of the American movement, toured the United States in 1857-58. It embodied Ruskin’s exhortation that artists observe nature closely and transcribe it faithfully. Mitchell compares and contrasts it with Charles Herbert Moore’s Rocks by the Water. He also compares John William Hill’s Bird’s Nest and Dog Roses (1867) with Hunt’s Bird’s Nest with Sprays of Apple Blossoms (c. 1847). Most still lives were actually foregrounded in their natural setting, more than on tabletops.

11 American Pre-Raphaelites also drew inspiration from the German Biedermeier that accompanied a wave of German immigration. This accessible style of painting appealed to the burgeoning American middle classes, and artists such as Severin Rosen were popular among American art collectors. American Pre-Raphaelites infused their still lives with the lush sensuality and intense colorism of vibrant flowers and lustrous fruit found in the Biedermeier style, even though Ruskin would have them turn to more austere and mundane subjects. Some, such as Fidelia Bridges, advanced nature studies towards the dawning Aesthetic movement.

12 Diane Waggoner explores the links between the works of the Pre-Raphaelites and photography. Ruskin’s emphasis on the close scrutiny of nature, on rendering minute, sharp and legible details, was both a concern of Pre-Raphaelite practice and a feature of photography, technically and thematically. As mimetic realism was characteristic of photography, the medium contributed to the rise of realism as an aesthetic mode. Its specific modalities (flattened forms, cropped visual field) were also to be found in paintings. Waggoner first focuses on WJ Stillman, a forbear of American Pre- Raphaelites who travelled to London a few times. Stillman befriended Lowell and Norton and, via them, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louis Agassiz. They all embarked on a camping expedition in 1858 in the Adirondacks with Stillman as a guide. Stillman engaged in photo-making whenever he came back to the Adirondacks and lauded photography in the Crayon (precursor to the New Path). Though none of the artists of the Association are known to have practiced photography themselves, their paintings were reproduced as photos. The New Path pushed for images that were legible to the botanist and geologist. Photographers such as John Moran went for subjects akin to those singled out by American Pre-Raphaelites, taking pictures of the tangled and profuse underbrush of the forest. However, photography’s exactitude was probably one of the factors that accelerated the demise of the Pre-Raphaelites.

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13 Janice Simon analyzes the content of the austere-looking New Path (no images, no advertisements) which lasted only 12 months, and which was edited successively by Clarence Cook, and Sturgis as of May 1864. She compares it with its precedents and models, The Germ (1850) and The Crayon (1855-61). The Pre-Raphaelites insisted unwaveringly on the observation of Nature, for they believed divinely ordained beauty was attained through direct study of nature—what they called “the truth of nature”— which they extolled as the foundation of what was moral. They were intent on marking an iconoclast and radical departure from the US’s previous servile imitation of European models, railing against the inauthentic and elaborate spectacle displays of the huge of the Hudson River School. They added that America had a comparative edge over the United Kingdom as it was unencumbered by outmoded and entrenched traditions and prejudices. As ardent supporters of the Union cause, this independence of tone was also political. The freedom allotted to slaves was also that of their artistic endeavors, they claimed. Their ideas in the journal were indebted to the Emersonian vision: they harnessed its spirit of self-reliance, and the idea of an active soul engaged freely with the world. Simon also spots a few literary influences such as Tennyson and examines how exhibition reviews evaluated artists, mainly according to their faithfulness to nature.

14 All in all, it is paradoxically through the ubiquitous influence of a British-born critic, Ruskin, that the Pre-Raphaelites hoped to launch a distinctive American school. The fact that they are dubbed American Pre-Raphaelites is due to the influence of Ruskin’s writings and an extension of his vision more than to any real connection with the real British Pre-Raphaelites, apart from Farrer with Rossetti. Their preference for landscape and still life over medieval inspiration reflected the fact that medievalism was not really central to American concerns whereas the theme of the land was more consistent with their identity-building.

15 Even if one may regret repetitions between chapters and the fact that plates and texts are often not on the same page (not always making for easy and smooth reading), this beautiful catalog certainly provides informative and enlightening scholarship on this little-known short-lived movement, with large high quality reproductions of paintings―many of which had never been publicly exhibited until then. The exhibition “Pre-Raphaelites Vision” held at the Tate in 2004 was the first survey to include American Pre-Raphaelites, Henry Roderick Newman and expatriate Thomas Charles Farrer. This exhibit showcases their work and updates research on the movement in a much more comprehensive way. However, pieces of the puzzle are still missing. Some of Farrer’s narrative paintings remain unlocated, such as Evening Thoughts or April, 1861, and it would be all the more interesting to find them as the American Pre-Raphaelites generally had an aversion to overt narratives. This catalog will certainly foment scholars’ eagerness to find paintings yet to be discovered, which may portend further discoveries on the American Pre-Raphaelites.

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INDEX

Mots-clés : Préraphaélites, école de l’Hudson, Biedermeier, peinture américaine, nature morte, photographie, Guerre de Sécession Keywords : Pre-Raphaelites, Association for the Advancement of Truth in Art, Hudson River School, American Aesthetic movement, Great Metropolitan Fair, National Academy of Design, Manifest Destiny, Catskill, Adirondacks, Biedermeier, still life, American painting, photography, Civil war

AUTEURS

MURIEL ADRIEN Maître de Conférences Université de Toulouse 2-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Sarah Greenough, Sarah Kennel (eds. ), Sally Mann – A Thousand Crossings

Muriel Adrien

RÉFÉRENCE

Sarah Greenough, Sarah Kennel (eds.), Sally Mann – A Thousand Crossings (New York, Abrams; Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2018), 331 p, ISBN 978-1-4197-2903-4

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1 The exhibition Sally Mann: A Thousand Crossings was the first major survey of this prominent artist―dubbed America’s “Best Photographer” by Time magazine in 2001―to travel in the United States and France. Since the Corcoran Gallery of Art was placed under its stewardship, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC acquired 25 photographs by Mann, making it one of the largest repositories of her photos in the country. The exhibition was on view at the National Gallery of Art from March 4 through May 28, 2018, and then toured the country in four other venues, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem (June-Sept.2018), then at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (Nov-Feb 2019), the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (March-May 2019), the High Museum of Art in Atlanta (Oct-Jan 2020), and also traveled outside the USA at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, France (June-Sept 2019)―where US photography is often showcased.

2 This monographic catalog, richly illustrated with more than 100 photos, including several previously unpublished ones, testifies to the scope of Mann’s art and vision. This catalog, whose title comes from John Glenday’s poem “Landscape with Flying Man” (2009), is the first comprehensive one to document Sally Mann’s art.1 The authors include, among others, the curators of the exhibition: Sarah Greenough (senior curator and head of the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art) and Sarah Kennel (formerly The Byrne Family curator of photography at the Peabody Essex Museum and now curator of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta).

3 The first chapter, by Sarah Greenough, gives a broad and engaging overview of Sally Mann’s art, in a broadly sweeping manner that never falls into superficiality, even if it may seem at times a little fragmented. The following chapters zoom in on various aspects of Mann’s work. An aspect that Greenough specifically addresses is Mann’s great interest in literature, from her early age as an avid reader to a BA and MA in creative writing in 1975 from Hollins College, Roanoke, Virginia. Parallel to her studies,

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Mann learned photography at her boarding school in 1969 and in workshops (less expensive than art schools), including one conducted by Ansel Adams and an assistant of his, Ted Orland, whom she claimed was one of her mentors. In 1973, she discovered 7500 19th-century glass negatives by Michael Miley, which she catalogued and reprinted, and from whom she later drew inspiration. Another eye-opening photographer for Mann was Nancy Rexroth with her Diana camera.

4 Mann reconciled writing and photography with Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (2015), an award-winning memoir of “silver poems of tone and undertow” that evoke literature read in her teenage years. Her pictures in general have the immersive intensity and ambiguous sweep of a story. In Second Sight (1983), she prefaced her platinum prints with poems, as had done photographers of the 1960s or 1970s (Robert Frank, Duane Michals, Jim Goldberg, or even Vito Acconci, Barbara Kruger or Sophie Calle). Another significant artist of her life was painter, sculptor and photographer Cy Twombly, who also mixed the visual and the verbal.

5 Greenough then recounts Mann’s life story, “Spinning a story of what it is to grow up, without fear and without shame” (Mann). Born May 1st, 1951 in Lexington, Mann lived there almost her whole life. In this small town, renowned for its alluring landscape and rich history, Mann was raised in a household that cared little for children, with highbrow parents who were outsiders and eccentrics in this small, close-knit town. However, she was nurtured by the defining and beloved presence of an African American woman, Gee Gee (Virginia “Gee-Gee” Carter), who worked for the family for 50 years and who was a custodian parent or even a surrogate mother for Mann.

6 Mann’s controversial pictures are further developed in the next chapter. At Twelve (1988) is a collection of photographs of 12-year olds on the cusp of adulthood, staring unblinkingly at the viewer with a sense of self-knowledge. Blindsided and then maybe chastened by the more significant controversy of Immediate Family (1992)2, Mann turned away from photographing her family to record the dark elegiac landscape that surrounded it. Her family “receded into the landscape”, as if grieving the loss of her children’s youth. When Mann received the ‘Picturing the South’ Commission for the High Museum of Arts, she explored the Georgian landscape as “a silent witness to another age”, fraught with troubled history. She then traveled to Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi in a state of grace, seeking the earth “to give up its ghosts” in the “flawed heart of the country” in a Conradian fashion, and her journey led to her publication, Deep South (2005). A number of pictures are in homage to Emmett Till, after whom she named her son. These humdrum and nondescript places laden with historical pain were, in her own words, “teasingly slow to give their secrets”.

7 Mann inherited her father’s fascination with death, especially after his own death in 1988 and Gee-Gee’s in 1994 (aged 100). She developed an interest in what mattered to the dying person, before turning to corpses. After exhuming her beloved Greyhound, Eva, Mann photographed the corpses donated to the University of Tennessee Forensic Anthropology Center, otherwise known as the Body Farm, and studied the way in which human flesh decomposed under various conditions. What Remains (2003) depicts poignant but pictures of decaying corpses and putrid flesh, both distanced and aestheticized. It also eerily includes close-up portraits of Mann’s grown children, calling to mind Victorian post-mortem portraits of children. Larry, her husband, was diagnosed in the 1980s with muscular dystrophy, a degenerative and devastating illness. As a counterpoint to male artists photographing their beautiful muses, she

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photographed his weakened body in Proud flesh (2009), a testimony of their mutual trust and steadfast love, and another meditation on time’s forward march, as testified by the accompanying quotes from TS Eliot (Four Quartets, 1936-42), Eudora Welty (The Ponder Heart, 1953), and this memorable one from Nabokov: “Our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness”, Speak, Memory, 1951.

8 When a sex offender fled onto Mann’s farm and was fatally wounded during a shootout with the police, she turned her attention no longer to what nature did to a dead body, but to what a dead body did to the earth, how the land “bore witness” and “remembered”. In a series of ominous penumbra-toned photos of Civil War battlefields made between 2001 and 2003, she tried to capture the pervasive energy that permeates a site festering with historical suffering. Faulkner’s books, especially Absalom, opened her eyes to the “rivers of blood, tears, sweat that African-Americans poured into the dark soil of their thankless new home”, and to the refusal of the cursed South to own up to the horrors of slavery. Between 2006 and 2015, she made tintypes in the Great Dismal Swamp―where many slaves converged in the years before the Civil War―and also focused on Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831. Again, her pictures seem fogged and clouded by oppressive humidity, spindly trees and desolate bogs, flooded in solarized incandescence. Another series of pictures (2006-15) compiles small vernacular African-American churches scattered through the Virginia countryside. The images are shot with Ortho negatives and printed on expired photo paper. They show derelict buildings enshrouded in white flares, as if haunted with the memories of the African Americans who worshipped and socialized there. Mann’s talk at Harvard University (Mossey lectures) led to the publication of her memoir Hold Still (2015). Even if her parents and brother Chris had supported the Civil Rights movement, the family had taken advantage of a society that sustained the servitude of African Americans— including Mann’s beloved nanny, Gee-Gee. Mann had to wrestle with the obliviousness, ignorance, blindness and silence of her family and, consequently, her own complicity. It is with that in mind that she photographed the choreographer Bill T. Jones and other African Americans, all the while aware of the fraught question of her legitimacy in speaking about slavery. Abide with Me, begun at the time of Obama’s presidency, laments 400 years of intolerance, but is also a way to address oblique acknowledgements and to call for hope.

9 Sarah Kennel then tackles her family pictures between 1985 and 1994. These were shot in an Arcadian setting, in a 400-acre land huddled in a horseshoe bend on the Maury River miles away from town, in a remote summer cabin built by her father and brothers, lacking the modern conveniences, where life seemed prelapsarian, unbound by normative social values. In this rustic space of rocky cliffs, lustrous, glossy, dark water, under the moisture-laden heat and glorious golden light beaming through the dark bush and overhanging foliage, Mann shot the pleasures, perils, and rituals of free- range childhood. Mann steers clear of maudlin pathos, and records these moments of grace with forthright directness.

10 With these pictures, Mann became embroiled in controversy. After the exhibition at the San Diego’s Museum of Photographic Arts of 1989, Mann’s aptness as a mother was questioned. Her pictures strayed into dangerous territory, shot through with dark undercurrents―the menacing specters of injury, cruelty, incipient sexuality, parental neglect, exposure of her children to voyeurism, and child maltreatment. In 1992, Aperture published a selection of 60 works by Mann, which were deemed provocative

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and raised conflicted questions about her impetus, the intent and consent. Was she instrumentalizing her children by displaying their intimate experience for her own egotistical artistic purposes? The nudity of her children was found troublesome and offensive. Her unsettling book was sucked into a maelstrom of several national debates and Mann was catapulted into the spotlight, her family unprepared for such public attention.

11 Mann’s pictures, taken with an 8 x 10 inch view camera, were in fact staged as much as they were captured, with the cooperation of her children who were involved in the creative process. One of Mann’s lines of defense was that critics misunderstood that photography is fictitious, rehearsed, and arranged. However, there is undeniably a non- fictitious dimension in her pictures: the intimacy and trust within the family; the fact that motherhood fueled her creativity; that photographing danger and threat was also a way to ward them off.

12 Another character to appear recurrently in her pictures was Gee-Gee, the indefatigable African-American nanny and domestic employee, who was also a widow with six children that she raised on her own. The various pictures entitled The Two Virginias, show the bond between Gee-Gee and her namesake, Mann’s own daughter, through mirroring and contrast.

13 Mann had a keen awareness of the transience of things and the passage of time. Her pictures evidence great nostalgia for irretrievable states of grace, the wistful and riveting beauty of those gleaming family moments. Photos are sorrowful acknowledgments of impermanence and ways to pin down fleeting moments. The last series she did of her children were their larger-than-life portraits, and they stress a sense of mutability, with drips, streaks and blurs intimating the treachery of memory which “decays like the rest, is unstable in its essence, flits, occludes, is variable, sidesteps, bleeds away, eludes all recovery.” (107) After Immediate Family, Mann substituted these “flashes of the finite” by a series of landscapes, “languid tableaux of the durable”, the bedrock which forms the basis for the magisterial 2004 What Remains exhibition.

14 Drew Gilpin (President and Lincoln Professor of History, Harvard University) focuses on Mann’s photographs of the memory of the bloody battlegrounds of the Civil War (Antietam, Cold Harbor, Fredericksburg) and the ghastly scenes of carnage and devastation they left behind, with bodies carpeting the earth. The United States as a nation and as a people owes its existence to this loss and wreckage. Cold Harbor took place 140 years before Mann photographed it, and was literally a 19th body farm. Mann felt she was “walking among the accretions of millions of remains”. There were no formal procedures for burying the dead, reporting losses, and identifying the deceased. Mass burial pits were improvised, and in 1866 a reburial program was organized, but 46% of corpses remain unidentified. Mann used her 8x10 inch view camera with bellows and hood, and reactivated the wet-plate collodion process used by Mathew Brady and Alexander Gardner (Mann felt she was also enacting the belated ceremonial ritual act of homage for the thousands of buried men.

15 Publicized racial crime that occurred during her childhood include Emmett Till’s story whose route Mann retraced. Emmett Till was visiting relatives in the Delta in the summer of 1955 when he was abducted by two white men, beaten, shot, tied to a cotton-gin fan, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River. His mutilated corpse was defiantly displayed in an open casket by his grieving mother and that picture acted as a

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symbol and catalyst for the civil rights movement. In Mann’s photo, the narrow, moldy, stagnant creek where his body was thrown is no less than a quagmire where the viewer is greeted by a ghoulish scrawny hand.

16 The relentless and deep-rooted burden of her homeland’s past as well as the quest for atonement via photography is the source of Mann’s creativity. It was only late in life that Mann realized that the schools were all white by design and not by happenstance and that she interrogated the social relations of race and class that had shaped her upbringing. Mann was appalled in hindsight about the taken-for-grantedness of the practices of race and subjugation woven into her childhood, such as with her nanny Gee-Gee, whose oppressed condition she had been blind to. Mann was confronted with “the truth of all that [she] had not seen, [she] had not known, [she] had not asked.”

17 In a more subjective―and perhaps more piecemeal―vein, the chapter by Hilton Als (New Yorker staff writer and recipient of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism) has a literary and political ring to it. She summons the big names of the literary tradition of the South (Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty…) to depict a Southern sense of place, a Southern morbid luminescence that recalls photography itself, the “ties that bind and abide” to the homeland, and the region’s “fierce and instructive ghosts” (Flannery O’ Connor). Als explains that the colonists were to the British a subordinate species and the former sought to rise above that classification by generating a lower class―that of the slaves―especially as conquest was considered proof of one’s favor with God. Als also goes over the coping mechanisms of African Americans, with Jesus’s suffering being a source of resilience in order to survive in a world they had not created. Nat Turner’s revolt, capture, death, and a century later, the story of Emmett Till were so thickly embedded in Virginian history that Mann’s Black nurse, Gee-Gee, erupted with anger when Mann happened to pick up a crippled black hitchhiker. Calling to mind another minority, Als points out that Mann had liberal parents who loved art and words in a region that was not liberal, and therefore was fortunate enough not to be stigmatized for being a woman and an artist.

18 Malcolm Daniel (Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) deals with the ancient processes Mann resorted to. After describing her two darkrooms, one spotlessly clean, the other a capharnaum, he expands on the wet collodion process, introduced by British photographer Frederick Scott Archer (1813-1857) in the 1850s. The process was taught to Mann by the Osterman couple. The process served several purposes. Violating the rules in a freewheeling fashion made the creative process more exploratory. Mann’s deliberately shoddy technique allows accidents to play a role (with foggy effects, overexposure, stains, streaks and solarization) and puts her subjects at ease. The blemishes, ragged edges and fading vision are reminiscent of negatives unearthed from times past. Mann talked about a “fetishistic ceremony”, even though her purpose was to reference the past, not to imitate it, and she was far from the realist rendition her forebears sought. The flaws and blasted effects of the emulsion are likened to wounded bodies, especially as collodion was also used to dress wounds.

19 Her dark and ravaged close-up self-portraits, after a horseback riding incident in 2006, are direct positive images, akin to ambrotypes. Their pitted and scratched skin-like quality mirrors the decay and corrosion of the flesh. In another technique, her Blackwater pictures were first shot digitally in color, then tweaked on the computer (collodion is not panchromatic, i.e. not equally sensitive to all colors of the spectrum),

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and then photographed anew in the studio as tintypes. Chance elements no longer occurred at the outset here, but at the end of the process.

20 The book shows a good progression of chapters, from the general to the more specific. As in most collective volumes, there is a repetition of ideas and quotes from chapter to chapter, but fortunately, the reader does not grow weary of Mann’s enchanting quotes, which evidence her literary talent.

21 Far from the conceptual art trend and from the shift to digital technologies, Mann boldly opted to turn to ancient photo techniques, investigating the potential of ancient equipment, courting the vagaries of chance and their crepuscular effects to develop a contemporary―if anachronistically pictorialist―vision. The metaphorical agency of her techniques, the way her processes lend meaning to her pictures, is compellingly broached in this volume, which is all too infrequent in other art catalogs.

22 Haunted by her roots and inheritance, Mann’s photos are steeped in the aching love for her homeland, “its profligate physical beauty”. They also grapple with a lingering sense of shame and accountability for its scarred and troubled history. Mann not only hopes to come to terms with the predicament of her homeland―at once a sanctuary, a battleground and a graveyard―but also to gain deeper insight into herself through her effulgent and elusive art, infused with a sense of poignant oneirism. This intensely personal and idiosyncratic journey into what nourished and shaped her from her earliest age is given universal and transcendent resonance through the fundamental themes it addresses and its value as a memento mori―both an “ode and requiem” (Faustine Rodin). As an in-depth and comprehensive synthesis of her photographic work that spans over four decades, this retrospective catalog is very welcome for the scholarly and critical attention it brings to the full range of Mann’s nebulous, refulgent and magnetic art.

NOTES

1. It is preceded only by the less detailed catalog of her 2010 exhibit at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. 2. See below for details of this controversy.

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INDEX

Keywords : photography, pictorialism, collodion, Civil Rights, Georgia, Virginia, Antietam, Cold Harbor, slavery, family, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Civil War, Great Dismal Swamp Mots-clés : photographie, pictorialisme, collodion, droits civiques, Georgie, Virginie, Antietam, Cold Harbor, esclavage, famille, Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, guerre de Sécession

AUTEURS

MURIEL ADRIEN Maître de Conférences Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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Monica Latham et Nathalie Collé (ed), Mark SaFranko : The Creative Itineraries of a "Renaissance Man"

Brigitte Friant-Kessler

REFERENCES

Monica Latham et Nathalie Collé (ed), Mark SaFranko: The Creative Itineraries of a "Renaissance Man",Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 2019. ISBN 978-2-8143-0537-3

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1 Au commencement, une résidence d’artiste (ARIEL) et un projet pédagogique interdisciplinaire et innovant, porté par Barbara Schmidt et Céline Sabiron, au sein de l’université de Lorraine, en collaboration avec les chercheurs d’IDEA, ce qui permet de relier la recherche, des pratiques créatives et l’enseignement des langues vivantes (niveau Master) à la présence d’un auteur vivant. Autour de ce projet riche et ambitieux gravitent ensuite des activités, des événements culturels et scientifiques et des publications (version papier et version électronique). C’est donc à un ensemble de formats et de publications satellitaires que se rattache cet ouvrage (PUN-EDULOR) de la collection BPTI, « Book Practices and Textual Itineraries », dirigée par Nathalie Collé et Monica Latham.

2 Miranda a également déjà publié trois entretiens avec Mark SaFranko dans Ariel’s Corner :

3 Armand, Claudine. « Piecing the Puzzle Together: An Interview with Writer and Artist Mark SaFranko. » Miranda [Online], vol. 18, 2019.

4 Bak, John S. « In Interview with American Playwright Mark SaFranko. » Miranda [Online], vol. 18, 2019.

5 Heberlé, Jean-Philippe. « An Interview with Mark SaFranko: The Songwriter. » Miranda [Online], vol. 18, 2019.

6 Dans le volume BPTI 11 ‘Mark SaFranko : Itineraries of a Renaissance Man’ sont consignés et retranscrits des conférences, des entretiens avec des chercheurs de l’université de Lorraine, mais également des dialogues avec des étudiants en Master qui ont participé à la mise en scène et mise en voix de textes de SaFranko, sous la houlette de l’écrivain. Avec ce volume, nous entrons dans les coulisses de l’écriture et de la créativité d’un écrivain. L’ensemble est à la fois hétérogène par les formats et charpenté par la volonté de faire découvrir un auteur américain finalement assez peu connu. Le tout a résolument des allures de making of : on s’attache à montrer toutes les

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coutures qui d’habitude restent plutôt discrètes pour donner une visibilité au processus d’écriture et de fabrication des textes, notamment dans leurs états de notes ou encore de brouillons successifs (49-92) reproduits. Le volume témoigne aussi des étapes (conférences, séminaires, concerts, expositions) de la résidence ARIEL, sigle dont la signification ‘Auteur en Résidence Internationale en Lorraine’ est redonnée à plusieurs endroits de l’ouvrage.

7 Itinéraires d’un enfant peu gâté (‘I come from a blue collar background’ comme le rappelle souvent SaFranko lui-même), les chemins de traverse de Mark SaFranko sont nombreux et les passerelles entre différentes formes d’art multiples : romancier, nouvelliste (Raymond Carver n’est jamais très loin chez SaFranko), auteur de pièces de théâtre, poète, compositeur et musicien accompli (Voir son site personnel : https:// marksafranko.com). Sa créativité se déploie en effet dans différents médias et quelquefois jusqu’au bout de pinceaux qui lui permettent de jouer avec la fluidité de l’aquarelle. Inutile de viser l’exhaustivité, elle n’est pas au cœur du projet, ni d’ailleurs dans l’esprit de SaFranko dont le morceau musical I Still Don’t Know Who I am (reproduit page 258) figure dans l’album Best of 3 mais sert aussi de titre pour un autre album, montrant ainsi que la formule résume bien une personnalité en perpétuelle quête d’identité. On peut écouter le morceau ici : https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=cdxf5GYuXFo&list=PLhUu-biRVwigUKu7I8zy-3X8w6nG_QJJ9&index=85

8 Son expression et son style mêlent les jeux proustiens du ‘je’ auctorial à la rugosité d’une langue célinienne. Écrivain autodidacte, journaliste aussi, SaFranko est souvent décrit comme le « plus Frenchy des Américains », il ne cache pas son immense admiration pour l’auteur du Voyage au bout de la nuit et pour Georges Simenon : ‘I stole from Celine’ (112). Parmi les préférés de sa bibliothèque il y a d’autres grandes figures comme Dostoïevsky, Camus dont il aime surtout L’étranger et le Philippe Djian de 37 ° 2 le matin. Américain sans doute, SaFranko porte néanmoins en lui les gènes de cette Amérique issue de l’immigration de l’Europe de l’Est et nourrit ainsi une irrésistible attraction vers la chose européenne. La France tient une place à part dans son cœur. De son propre aveu, sa carrière a d’ailleurs véritablement pris un élan depuis l’autre côté de l’Atlantique (France, Angleterre) et non sur les terres de Hawthorne, ou d’Hemingway, ni même de Dan Fante dont il était un ami et qui dit de SaFranko « Je crois bien qu’à choisir, ce gars-là préférerait écrire que respirer » (Épigraphe de la pièce Minable, première pièce de théâtre publiée en langue française, E-Fractions Editions, 2013). Proche d’un Hubert Selby Jr., Henry Miller ou d’un Charles Bukowski, SaFranko trouve en Europe le terreau qui inspire son écriture classée tantôt néo-beat, tantôt « dirty realism ». L’Europe c’est aussi pour lui un écosystème éditorial et culturel plus propice à la diffusion de ses textes que Harper Collins, du moins à ses débuts. « Mark Safranko, cet écrivain américain emblématique de l’underground new-yorkais, ce genre de type qu’on adore en France. » http://bookalicious.fr/plaid-nouveautes/ (consulté le 22 août 2020)

9 Les librairies où il a signé ses romans en Lorraine dans le cadre de la résidence en sont encore une preuve.

10 L’homme aime à dire qu’il se verrait bien vivre au temps de la Renaissance où l’éclectisme intellectuel et la curiosité des humanistes s’étaient emparés de tout un continent. Il réitère à l’envi que le marché du livre aux États Unis ne respire que par le nom de Stephen King et n’aspire hélas guère à d’autres horizons littéraires. Dans la sous-partie ’55 questions to Mark SaFranko’, il se prête au jeu d’un portrait chinois

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(245-49) qui livre l’essentiel de sa philosophie de vie. Si rien ne le destinait au métier d’artiste ou d’écrivain, une fois l’obstination de l’écriture installée dans sa tête, l’écriture s’est imposée à lui, plus que lui ne l’avait choisie pour en vivre. Qualifié parfois d’auteur underground, SaFranko dont on découvre au fil des sections du volume les diverses facettes : Authorial Testimonies, Translation, Reception, Portraits of the Artist.

11 On peut relever plusieurs types de contributions : entretiens et dialogues avec l’auteur, témoignages commentés des activités menées avec l’écrivain (séminaires, pratiques théâtrales, traduction) et les transcriptions des conférences, textes d’auteurs, brouillons de textes. La sous-partie intitulée « Portraits of the Artist » rassemble des reproductions d’aquarelles, exposées (nov. 2018 -jan. 2019) au Centre d’Arts Chalon de l’université de Lorraine. Ce sont essentiellement des autoportraits de l’artiste, agrémentés de quelques lignes descriptives. L’ensemble des interventions et entretiens est centré sur SaFranko pour former un portrait kaléidoscopique, ce qui semble bien correspondre à l’homme et à l’artiste-auteur-compositeur-musicien. Il est parfois difficile de se départir d’un sentiment de fragmentation quelque peu trop éclatée à la lecture des différents ‘morceaux du puzzle’, pour reprendre l’expression employée dans l’entretien réalisé par Claudine Armand. Que retenir de tous ces fragments ? Une vie trépidante et bien remplie pour l’auteur qui relate combien il lui a été difficile de percer dans son propre pays. Une écriture compulsive et nécessaire, non pour le public mais pour la survie. Enfin, et surtout, il ressort des différents entretiens que la résidence a permis des collaborations et rencontres chaleureuses et fructueuses, y compris pour l’écrivain qui a rencontré Philippe Claudel et qui a commis une nouvelle dont le sujet, un incident vécu à Nancy durant son séjour, fait aussi l’objet d’une traduction, le tout reproduit en intégralité ici : http://ariel.univ-lorraine.fr/la- lorraine-vue-par-les-auteurs-ariel/mark-safranko-an-incident/

12 ARIEL se perçoit comme un projet pédagogique stimulant et dynamisant pour des étudiants Master dont certains déjà engagés dans la recherche, alors que d’autres ont pu bénéficier de la présence de l’écrivain-dramaturge durant des ateliers de pratiques théâtrales. L’essentiel du volume étant constitué de transcriptions écrites d’entretiens avec l’écrivain en résidence et de communications faites par ce dernier à l’occasion de séminaires ou d’invitations en tant que conférencier, la publication de ces morceaux choisis oscille entre écrit et oral. La voix de SaFranko est lue et vue (50-60), une expérience sensorielle et cognitive qui peut être complétée par des vidéos ou des enregistrements audio pour donner un corps performatif à ces textes. En effet, il est possible d’écouter l’enregistrement de l’interview qui est retranscrit ici : https:// videos.univ-lorraine.fr/index.php?act=view&id=7377 (consulté 24 août 2020). Le format même des transcriptions d’entretiens induit inévitablement des répétitions, mais les ateliers ont chacun des objectifs spécifiques. On lit avec intérêt l’article de Heather DUERRE HUMANN qui approfondit une partie abordée dans son ouvrage Gender Bending in Detective Fiction. On regrette la qualité de résolution de certaines reproductions (56-57, 75, 163, 167) assez surprenante pour une collection dont les volumes témoignent en général d’une grande attention aux illustrations. Les dimensions des portraits de l’exposition auraient permis de se faire une meilleure idée de la production plastique de l’écrivain. On peut aussi se demander s’il fallait vraiment reproduire en version papier tous les posters, affiches et visuels de communication. Depuis 2018, le projet de ces résidences se poursuit à l’université de Lorraine : on peut en consulter les archives et suivre les différentes activités, qui sont susceptibles d’inspirer d’autres universités

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en France et ailleurs. Il faut saluer ces initiatives qui offrent aux étudiants l’occasion, peut être unique, de côtoyer durant leur formation, ou même de leur vie, un auteur- artiste de son vivant (130). Après SaFranko, l’université de Lorraine a accueilli une auteure italienne en 2019. Il faut nourrir l’espoir de voir d’autres auteur-e-s d’autres horizons participer à ce projet de résidence. Longue vie à ARIEL, donc !

INDEX

Keywords: Dirty realism, Neo Beat writer, artist residence, novel, short story, crime fiction, playwright, music, composer, song writer, publishing Mots-clés: « réalisme sale », écrivain Néo-Beat, résidence d’artiste, roman, nouvelle, fiction policière, dramaturge, musique, auteur-compositeur, monde de l’édition

AUTHORS

BRIGITTE FRIANT-KESSLER Maître de conférences en études anglophones et arts visuels UPHF, Université Polytechnique Hauts de France, Valenciennes [email protected]

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Richard Pine, Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988. Volumes One and Two

Isabelle Keller-Privat

REFERENCES

Richard Pine, Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988. Volumes One and Two (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), vol 1 452 p, ISBN 978-1-5275-3847-4, vol 2 430 p, 978-1-5275-3898-6

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1 To all those who thought they were done with Lawrence Durrell after having fallen in love reading The Alexandria Quartet, gone hitchhiking on Cyprus with Bitter Lemons tucked in their rucksack, and laughed with The Durrells in Corfu (Christopher Hall, ITV comedy-drama, 2016-2019), Richard Pine proves that they were rash and careless: “it is […] only a beginning” (Prospero’s Cell, Faber, 1962, 17). The two thick volumes of Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings 1933-1988 soon convince the reader that there is

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more than first meets the eye in this protean writer who not only produced accomplished works of art in every genre (novels, island books, essays, plays and poems) but whose lesser-known and unpublished writings reveal an enquiring, alert and anxious mind that never ceased to roam the world in a desperate attempt to “find out where [he] fit in the universe” (vol 1, 411).

2 Richard Pine’s endeavour to arouse our interest in a man who from the start “was never native to anywhere” (vol 1, xiv) and finally succeeded in making himself heard from elsewhere is thoroughly rewarded. As Corinne Alexandre-Garner has aptly been remarked, Lawrence Durrell was, from the start, “exiled even from exile” (Deus Loci. The Lawrence Durrell Journal, NS 2001-2002, 44-57): an Anglo-Indian child, initially deprived at age 11 of a home that was not his, he was sent Home where he never belonged. Yet, few scholarly publications have so potently foregrounded Durrell’s “restlessness and rootlessness” (vol 1, xiv). The editorial policy adopted in these two volumes brings back to life not only the slow maturing of the artist’s voice and gaze (encompassing Charles Norden, Lawrence Durrell, and Oscar Epfs) but also the diversity of his intellectual probing, and the spirited, wayward network of literary and artistic brotherhoods. The variety of texts chosen by Pine highlights the vast scope of Durrell’s interests and experiences as well as his delightful sense of humour. Yet, the editor refuses to track down the various stages of the development of Lawrence Durrell’s progress. Thus, Richard Pine breaks free from the conventional plodding along the “dotted line” (Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet. Clea, London: Faber 1974, 758) of chronology and relies on the reader’s implicit knowledge of Durrell’s personal history. It is thus no wonder that Ian Mac Niven’s, G. S. Fraser’s and Marc Alyn’s works, amongst many others, should frequently crop up, as if to remind the attentive reader that, just as in Durrell’s fictions, these volumes reveal deeper strata of meaning.

3 Opting for a thematic perspective that highlights meetings and departures, landscapes and people, and the labile frontiers between styles, tones and genres, Pine offers us a medley of texts in what purports to be “not an ‘academic’” work (vol 1, xviiii)— although one may feel strongly enticed to distrust the assertion considering the massive amount of archival exploration, thoughtful organization, and even translation in the case of the few introductions that were originally published in French. The editor emphasizes in each of his concise introductions the careful planning that has guided the composition of the sections throughout both volumes. However, he provides the reader with relatively few notes, unlike most academic authors. The notes that do find their way into the text are always illuminating and, consequently, whet the reader’s appetite for more insightful details. It is true that Durrell himself started the tradition of referring the reader “to a page in the text which is mysteriously blank […] to throw him back upon his own resources—which is where every reader ultimately belongs” (The Alexandria Quartet. Balthazar, London: Faber, 1974, 307) and that he repeatedly lambasted our culture built on “the cramming of the skull with facts and pragmatic data which positively stifle the growth of the soul” (Spirit of Place, Faber, 1969, 160). Pine thus inscribes his books in a most Durrellian paradox, flouting academic conventions while demanding a learned and extensive attention that will enable the reader to fully appreciate Lawrence Durrell’s Endpapers and Inklings like a posthumous version of the mysterious Obs and Inks recording in Caesar’s Vast Ghost “the haphazard and spasmodic nature of [a] corporate thinking” (Caesar’s Vast Ghost, London: Faber, 1990, 14).

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4 Indeed, one may argue that there is something “haphazard and spasmodic” in the conjunction of the various parts of each volume. Thus, volume 1 is composed of Durrell’s self-portraits, short forays into the visual arts, four early fictions, letters sent during wartime, and a final, longer section entitled “Spirit of Place” providing insight into Durrell’s diplomatic career and travels through non-fictional pieces as well as letters and various contributions. Intertwining sections devoted to a specific genre, or to a particular historical period or place, Pine proceeds in volume 2 by exploring the Durrell-Miller connection through various contributions that enlighten the reader not only on Henry Miller’s art but also, simultaneously, on Durrell’s self-reflexive metadiscourse. The following section, “Dramas and Screenplays” echoes the third section in volume 1 by giving us access to rare material that reveals the slow, careful elaboration of themes, descriptions and metaphysical enquiries that pave the way for their final accomplishment in the well-known dramatic works that have received worldwide attention and twice brought their author tantalizingly close to the Nobel Prize. The section gathering “Essays, Lectures, Reviews and Introductions” includes conversations, notes, commemorative pieces as well as Durrell’s discussions on sex, feminism and censure that account for his support of controversial figures such as D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller and help contextualize some of the esoteric developments on sexuality in The Quartet, The Revolt of Aphrodite and The Avignon Quintet. The penultimate section, “Incorrigibilia”, including non-apologetic, although highly controversial pieces, leads to one of the rarest documents: the climactic, arcane, and baffling notebook that lends its title to Pine’s two volumes. The Asides of Demonax, subtitled Endpapers & Inklings, eventually leaves the reader to ponder upon man’s frail grasp on life, thought and history. It also reads as an invitation to marvel at the artist’s final leap from “the long slide deathwards […], from the darkness of life […] into light, into immediacy!” (vol 2, 430).

5 The complex composition of the two volumes that refuses to draw a line between genres, periods, places and topics also blends better known texts—some of which have already been published and republished—and unedited, archival material from the various private and public collections held by the British Library, the Durrell archives in Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Paris X – Nanterre University, and The Durrell Library of Corfu, to quote only a few. These include facsimiles of Durrell’s notebooks complete with drawings and doodles that are a true researcher’s treasure- trove. Reading The Magnetic Island in volume 1 or The Asides of Demonax in volume 2 the reader cannot help feeling thankful for such an easy access to precious archival material that will definitely lead him to reconsider Durrell’s entire opus. Likewise the unsigned contributions to The Economist at the time of Durrell’s stay in Cyprus shed an entirely new light upon the writer’s divided loyalties and call for a new reading of Bittter Lemons of Cyprus. In that respect, Pine’s volumes stand out as the natural sequel to James Gifford’s edition From the Elephant’s Back (University of Alberta Press, 2015) 1. However, unlike Gifford’s volume that focuses exclusively on unpublished and out-of- print essays in a seminal collection that establishes Durrell as a modernist anti- authoritarian artist, Pine’s publication adopts a broader perspective that endeavours to leave no stone unturned by including Durrell’s “various hands […] mite, obs or inks” (Caesar’s Vast Ghost, London: Faber, 1990, 15). In the constant shuttling between unpublished and published yet lesser-known texts, between people, times and places, Pine confirms Durrell’s status as a rebellious artist who, out of choice and by necessity, adopted a minority position, constantly fighting out from a marginal, tight corner in

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order to redefine the space and alter the contours of English literature. Estranged from the Oxbridge circles of the successful and influential modernists, writing from the “imaginary homeland” which, Salman Rushdie claims, is the privileged territory of “exiles or emigrants or expatriates […] haunted by an urge to look back” (Imaginary Homelands, New York: Vintage, 2010, 10) Durrell has produced a multifaceted, perplexing, and polymorphous work that resists classification. He has occupied literary spaces that are considered peripheral (travel writing, letters, short pieces of fiction) until acquiring a worldwide fame as a novelist—a title which he felt failed to acknowledge his true poetic being, his elsewhere self. His English language, tender and sardonic, romantic and obscene, is a nomadic language to be sought for in the most unlikely places. It is a language that resists and challenges the canon and that thoroughly justifies such an erudite, all-embracing, irreverent, and non-canonical approach as the one chosen by Richard Pine.

NOTES

1. For a review of James Gifford’s From the Elephant’s Back see Isabelle Keller-Privat, “James Gifford. Personal Modernisms. Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes & Lawrence Durrell. From the Elephant’s Back. Collected Essays and Travel Writings”, Études britanniques contemporaines, 51 | 2016, http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3502

INDEX

Mots-clés: archive, autobiographie, fiction, essai, théâtre, récit de voyage, poésie, peinture, photographie, correspondance, critique, enfance, Seconde Guerre mondiale, Inde, Egypte, les Balkans, Grèce, France, Californie, paysages, villes Keywords: archive, autobiography, fiction, essay, drama, travel writing, poetry, painting, photography, correspondence, criticism, childhood, World War II, India, Egypt, the Balkans, Greece, France, California, landscapes, cities

AUTHORS

ISABELLE KELLER-PRIVAT Professeur Université de Toulouse – Jean Jaurès [email protected]

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