Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space: Borders, Networks, Escape Lines (Cultural History and Literary Imagination) [New ed.] 9783034322058, 9781787076327, 9781787076334, 9781787076341, 3034322054

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Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space Borders, Networks, Escape Lines

DAVID WALTON AND JUAN A. SUÁREZ (EDS)

Peter Lang

CULTURAL HISTORY AND LITERARY IMAGINATION This collective volume explores questions of space in contemporary literary texts from a range of theoretical perspectives. In addition to mapping the ‘spatial turn’ in literary and cultural studies, this volume also brings together studies that apply spatial theory to the analysis of literary texts. Contributors tackle a broad range of themes, including how prose fiction addresses spaces of intimacy, abjection, espionage, discipline, madness, post-human identities, post-communist cities, the architecture of dystopia, and coercive medical practices. In turn, these themes open up analysis to key areas within contemporary literary and cultural criticism, including the study of sexuality, politics, power, and identity; the configuration of urban, regional, and national spaces and borders; and the delineation of private and public domains. The contributors reflect on diverse authors from English-speaking cultures and focus on a variety of genres and periods while acknowledging recent research in space studies and offering original contributions to what has now become a thriving field.

David Walton is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Cultural Studies at the University of Murcia. He is a founding member, and currently President, of the Iberian Association of Cultural Studies (IBACS). He is the author of the volumes Cultural Studies: Learning Through Practice and Doing Cultural Theory and editor, with J. A. Suárez, of Culture, Space, and Power: Blurred Lines. Juan A. Suárez teaches American studies and American literature at the University of Murcia. He is the author of the books Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars; Pop Modernism; and Jim Jarmusch; and editor, with David Walton, of the volume Culture, Space, and Power: Blurred Lines. He is currently one of the Principal Investigators of the HERA/European Commission-funded project ‘Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures’.

www.peterlang.com

Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space

CULTURALHISTORYANDLITERARYIMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY VOL. 26 EDITORIAL BOARD

RODRIGO CACHO, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE SARAH COLVIN, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE KENNETH LOISELLE, TRINITY UNIVERSITY HEATHER WEBB, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Contemporary Writing and the Politics of Space Borders, Networks, Escape Lines David Walton and Juan A. Suárez (eds)

PETER LANG

Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • Frankfurt am Main • New York • Wien

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek DieDeutscheNationalbibliothekliststhispublicationintheDeutscheNationalbiblio­ grafie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2017941145

Cover image: David Walton, Angel of History (Rebooted) (2016). Cover design: Peter Lang Ltd.

ISSN 1660-6205 ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-632-7 (ePDF) ISBN 978-1-78707-633-4 (print) • ISBN 978-1-78707-634-1 (ePDF) © Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2017 Wabernstrasse 40, CH-3007 Bern, Switzerland [email protected], www.peterlang.com, www.peterlang.net All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Anyutilisationoutsidethestrictlimitsofthecopyrightlaw,withoutthepermissionof the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. Thisappliesinparticulartoreproductions,translations,microfilming,andstorageand processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

Contents

Acknowledgementsix Juan Antonio Suárez and David Walton

Writing and the Politics of Space: An Introduction

1

Part I  Borders21 David Griffiths

1 Coercive Hospital Spaces in Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy23 Ángel Galdón Rodríguez

2  Metropolitan Isolation in Dystopian Literature

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María Luisa Pascual Garrido

3 The Island Space in Film Adaptations of The Tempest: On the Invisibility of Borders

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Clara Pallejá-López

4 The House: Friend or Foe? Buildings, Dwellings, and Home in Fiction

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Laura Torres-Zúñiga

5 Thresholds of Abjection: Identity and Space in Tennessee Williams’s Fiction

115

vi Part II  Networks137 Ana Rull Suárez

6 Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day: Sociopolitical Suspicion and Double Spaces of Espionage

139

Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo

7 ‘Perfect Cities, Permanent Hells’: The Ideological Coordinates of Urban Space in Postmodern Science Fiction

155

Isabel Santaularia i Capdevila

8 They Aren’t the Big Bad Communists We Were Raised to Think They Were? The Representation of Russia in Contemporary Crime Fiction and Thrillers

179

Martyna Bryla

9 Charting the Liminal Geographies of Eastern Europe in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories

201

Part III  Escape Lines

223

A. Robert Lee

10 Bound and Unbound: Figurations of Time-Space in African American Authorship

225

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

11 Reconfiguring the Epic Space in Anne Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy241



vii

Tomás Monterrey

12 The Literary Geography of a Border Zone: The Canary Islands in Ewing Campbell’s Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments259 Notes on Contributors

281

Index287

Acknowledgements

This volume has been long in the making and we have incurred, during its incubation and preparation, some debts. Our first thanks go to our patient authors; they have graciously endured the postponements imposed by our chronically busy schedules and have punctually responded to our queries and requests for revision. In the ungainly mix of rushing and waiting – scuttling to meet deadlines; waiting for editorial decisions and feedback – that inevitably characterize the rhythms of academic writing and publishing our authors – if we can be proprietary here – have been nothing but jolly fellow travellers throughout. Some of the essays included here were first presented at the 16th International Conference of the Iberian Association of Cultural Studies (IBACS) held at the University of Murcia, 4–6 October 2013. We remain grateful to conference attendees, the personnel and administrators of the Facultad de Letras who contributed to the running of the event, to the many student volunteers who staffed the venue, to the intellectual stimulation generated by plenary speakers (George McKay, Jean Rendell, John Storey, and Chris Weedon), and generally to all presenters. We also owe thanks to the Fundación Séneca for a Jiménez de la Espada grant that helped to defray conference costs. We would also like to thank those authors who were not part of the conference but who agreed to write specially commissioned chapters for us. At Peter Lang we want to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided useful feedback, and Laurel Plapp, for being a good-humoured, prompt, efficient, and attentive editor. The research included in the volume was partly underwritten by Research Project 15397/PHCS/10, of Fundación Séneca-Agencia Regional

x Acknowledgements

para la Ciencia y la Tecnología, CARM, and by Research Project FFI201454391-P, ‘Periferias de lo queer: Transnacionalidades, Micropolíticas’, of the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad-Gobierno de España. We thank both institutions for their support.

Juan Antonio Suárez and David Walton

Writing and the Politics of Space: An Introduction

There is a moment in Plato’s Republic (2012: 237) when Glaucon refers to those who look up into space and says that everyone can see that astronomy induces the soul to look upwards in such a way that the mind is led away from the known world to another. Plato, thinking of perfect truths above mere seeing and observing, disagrees on the grounds that those who elevate astronomy into philosophy actually make the viewer look down, not up. Contrary to the Platonic enterprise, contemporary cultural and literary criticism tends to repeat this gesture of ‘looking down’ at the ground in order to extract from the exploration of real and imagined spaces not an intuition of their ideal form but a materialist understanding of their effect on daily life, social relations, and cultural representations. No longer regarded as a mere backdrop, neutral container, blank expanse, or fundamental perceptual category (as Kant influentially proposed), space has come to be seen in contemporary philosophy, literary, and critical theory as something produced, to cite Henri Lefebvre’s foundational term: that is, conquered, governed, traversed, mapped, and structured by such factors as class, power differentials, race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and different kinds of national and cultural identity. While dating the emergence of theoretical paradigms is always a risky affair, it is safe to state that from the early 1970s onward, disciplines such as philosophy, history, geography, sociology, cultural studies, and anthropology have managed to reformulate space from an abstract, neutral, or ‘transparent’ category to a fully socialized domain, shaped by concrete and vastly diverging cultural, political, and aesthetic interests and agendas (Lefebvre 1991: 28–34). It is customary to describe literary studies as a latecomer to this new understanding of space. Other volumes like the present one frequently start their discussions of the spatial turn in literature with references to the influence of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre

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on literary criticism, an influence that may be dated to the late 1980s and early 1990s. And some critics have pinned the tardiness of literary criticism to join the age of space studies on Gottfried Ephraim Lessing (Buchholz and Jahn 2005: 551). Lessing characterized literature as a temporal, rather than spatial art: an art of ‘actions’ evolving diachronically, reported in succession, and perceived gradually, rather than of ‘bodies’ (Lessing’s term for ‘images’) to be instantly apprehended like a painting or a sculpture (Lessing 1971). For philosophers such as Michel Foucault, the primacy of time in literary analysis was much more than an after-effect of Lessing’s theories. It was, he claimed, the product of a general denigration of space in Western culture, which regarded space as static and inert, while it favoured time as the axis of transformation, growth, and dialectics (1980: 70). However, even though space was traditionally relegated in favour of time in philosophy and literary studies, it has never been completely erased from the latter. At least some gestures of spatial awareness have always been embedded in definitions of the literary; remember, for example, Aristotle’s postulation of a ‘unity of place’ in drama and the voluminous discussions on the meaning and applicability of this precept that punctuate the history of Western literary theory and criticism. Without going as far back as Aristotle, numerous critical milestones in the last century have predated and prepared the recent spurt of work on the spatiality of literature. A brief sample of the most influential would include Henry James’s reliance on spatial metaphors (‘scenes’, ‘the house of fiction’) in his pioneering reflections on the novel (1984 [1934]); Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the influence of urban experience on Charles Baudelaire’s poetry (1969); Joseph Frank’s characterization of the ‘spatial form’ of modern literature (1963: 3–61); Maurice Blanchot’s dissection of ‘literature’ as a space of radical exteriority where the subject and ordinary language are undone (1982); Gaston Bachelard’s phenomenological exploration of ‘lived space’ as a repository of memory and affect (1964); or Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope – the spatio-temporal tropes of narrative form (1981: 84–257). On the heels of these theoretical interventions, which range in time from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century, a considerable amount of work developed. Jeffrey Smitten’s 1981 bibliography

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of studies on space and spatial form in literature listed nearly 300 entries (Smitten and Daghistany 1981: 245–63); many of them employ methodologies that are no longer current – Joseph Frank’s concept of ‘spatial form’, structuralist narratology. In addition, the study of space in literature was advanced in the 1960s and 1970s by German scholars Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Bruno Hillebrand, Gerard Hoffmann, and Herman Meyer, who were influenced by Bachelard’s poetics of space, and by Dutch theorist Joos Van Bank, who worked under the mantle of Yuri Lotman’s semiotics; they had scarce echo in Anglo-American criticism, in part because their work appeared largely in German (Klooster and Heirman 2013: 5). Cumulatively, these contributions demonstrate that the so-called ‘spatial turn’ in literary studies started before the late 1980s and cannot be regarded a sudden turnabout or even an abrupt swerve, but a gentle swing of the wheel resulting, at best, in a change of lanes. Hence, the ‘turn’ of literary studies’ ‘spatial turn’ resides less in the emergence of space as a new object of inquiry than in the manner in which critics have approached this already familiar topic. Politics, a prominent word in our title, flags the distinctive trait in this turn. Therefore, the paradigm shift in the explorations of space in literature, as it has developed over the last three decades, rests on two interlocking assumptions, to which the chapters in this volume repeatedly return: one, that space and politics are mutually implicated terms, since space is a political category and politics a spatialized phenomenon; and two, that literature provides a nuanced, embodied cartography of the politics of space. We are using the term ‘politics’ here in the expanded sense given to it by Jacques Rancière in his work from the mid-1990s onward: not as the management of public life and resources and the functioning of parties and elections, but as the strategies that disrupt and reorient ‘the distribution of the sensible’ (Rancière 2004: 12–19). This is the regime – at once political, social, and aesthetic – that discriminates what is allowed to emerge into public discourse, and hence becomes available for discussion and scrutiny, from what is excluded from debate and is thus rendered invisible. Politics is the emergence into the public arena in the name of equality of precisely those excluded claims and neglected desires. The excluded contents are ‘the part of those who have no part’ to play in official public life (1999: 11). These contents – and discontents – have come in from the sidelines, using

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unofficial channels and knowledges, and, at times, trigger actions that upset the social balance. The irruption of these suppressed contents into visibility and discourse results in disagreement, which Rancière defines not as dissension over a particular topic but as an incommensurability in the terms of the discussion that turns these very terms into the main subject matter of debate. Rancière’s discussions of disagreement, politics, and the distribution of the sensible are dotted with spatial references to real and symbolic stages, borders, enclosures, and emplacements. After all, attaining discursive articulation and public visibility or, conversely, being ejected from the regimes of the sensible are spatial manoeuvres of entry and exit, admission and expulsion. They take place simultaneously in ‘sensory space’ (1999: 25), in the symbolic ‘space of the logos’ (1999: 26), and in actual locations whose access and transit are tightly regulated. Official politics – Rancière calls it ‘police’, since it regulates the social order and enforces the status quo – situates each and everyone in his or her own (physical and symbolic) place and ensures their compliance with the dominant spatial regimentation. In turn, the break instituted by politics – the emergence of the voice of the voiceless, of the part of those with no part – reconfigures ‘the space where parties, parts, or lack of parts have been defined. … Political activity is whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination’ (1999: 30). And the political subject is ‘an actor that connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities, functions, and capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience’ (1999: 40). Rancière elegantly formulates what has been long known by protestors and insurgents of all stripes: since domination is effected by means of spatial control, revolt and protest have to aspire to the takeover and reorganization of public space. He cites ‘the activity of demonstrators and those manning the barricades that literally turned urban communications paths into “public space”’ (1999: 30). More concrete recent examples are the Civil Rights movement in the United States, feminism, sexual liberation fronts from the 1960s onwards, anti-Apartheid action in South Africa, the ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings, which started in late 2010 and continued during the following year, and the various ‘Occupy’ movements that emerged in Europe and the United States after the massive protests that erupted in

Writing and the Politics of Space: An Introduction

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Spain on 15 May 2011. All of them have consistently linked their political agendas to the liberation of public space – by eliminating racially segregated areas, making public locations safe for women, allowing the open expression of unconventional sexualities, or turning emblematic squares and open spaces into modern-day agoras where citizens vent their discontent over the corruption and greed of governments, corporations, and financial institutions. Their protests transformed the grammar of public locations by modifying, momentarily at least, styles of transit, access, and use. The sit-ins, lie-downs, and demonstrations of Civil Rights protestors in the 1960s disrupted the daily functioning of Southern American towns; ‘Take Back the Night’ marches, kiss-ins, and queer visibility actions changed (for a minute) the male heterosexual dominance over urban space; and recent ‘Occupy’ movements brought to city centres and financial headquarters eloquent evidence of the frustration and distress caused by political and financial elites.1 In many ways, literature has long been a vehicle for the sort of discursive and spatial disruption that Rancière calls politics, and it has been the task of spatial literary studies to bring this function to light. Perhaps because of the so-called autonomy of the aesthetic realm and the ‘affirmative character of culture’ (Marcuse 2009: 70–4 and ff ), which segregated aesthetic

1

The voluminous bibliography on these developments is difficult to render synoptically. The authors have found especially useful the following titles: On the spatial rhetoric of 1960s protest, see Martin (2004). On feminist spatial militancy, Spain (2016) is quite extraordinary. On the spatiality of queer activism, see Shepard and Hayduk (2002) and Shepard (2010). hooks (2008) offers autobiographical reflections on some forms of African American spatiality, the earlier volume by Hakutani and Butler (1995) focuses on the urban settings of African American literature, and Knadler (2010) tackles the symbolic and literal spaces of African American ‘nationhood’ and citizenship. On the Arab Spring – and the social climate leading to it – see Bayat (2010), which is interestingly prophetic, and Sadiki (2015). Provocative theoretical reflections on the rhetoric of revolt are Mitchell (2012) and Rabbatt (2012). Manzanas and Benito (2014) take into account the grammar – and history – of spatial revolt in their insightful analyses of contemporary United States literature. And Nixon (1996) and Nyamende (1996) offer compelling considerations of the racialized spatiality of two important South African literary texts.

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experience from the pressures and obligations of social life, literary texts have been symbolic playgrounds where claims and desires muted in political discourse were allowed to thrive with relative freedom. In Rancière’s words: ‘The modern political animal is first a literary animal, caught in the circuit of a literariness that undoes the relationships between the order of words and the order of bodies that determine the place of each’ (1999: 37; see also Rancière 2004: 39–40). It is first in ‘the circuit of literariness’ where the claims of minorities often emerge into discourse before being translated into the register of public action. For example, critical consciousness of such issues as marginalization, exploitation, and class; the colour line; the boundaries between the domestic and the public; or the subjugation of sexual and social minorities arose in nineteenth-century literature before fuelling social movements and widespread protest. In fact, the task of feminist, African American, postcolonial, or queer critiques has been to establish bridges between public action and literary (or aesthetic) articulation. Both are equally political yet operate in different channels and media. Recent spatial critiques have contributed to these approaches ample evidence that the reimagining of social life conveyed in literature was accompanied by the reshaping and reimagining of social space. Yet such reimagining does not contain exclusively liberationist impulses; it also bears witness to the inertia of existing social and spatial arrangements. The spatial imagination in literature then reveals at once possibility and constriction, or what amounts to the same thing, political emergence and the work of the police – to invoke Rancière’s terms one last time. We have taken ‘borders’, ‘networks’, and ‘escape lines’ as broadly applicable, multivalent spatial tropes for both strategies of insurgence and oppression. They are not separate categories but interconnected systems with numerous overlaps. And neither are they to be conceived on an evolutionary scale where each would be the embryonic, imperfect incarnation of the next. On the contrary, they are to be regarded as superimposed, coeval, and interlocking, despite their undeniable differences. Such interlacing and simultaneity reject the way in which Anthony Giddens and Manuel Castells, for example, postulate a transition from pre-modern to postmodern spatial regimes (from ‘spaces of places’ to delocalized – in Giddens’s term, ‘disembedded’ – ‘spaces of flows’). Neither networks nor flows are

Writing and the Politics of Space: An Introduction

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solely contemporary phenomena; no space has ever been mere localized ‘place’ and estranged from broader frames of practice (commerce, travel) or reference (the layers of meaning attached to the ‘absolute’ religious and magical spaces described by Lefebvre [1991: 48–9, 234–62]). What may have changed with time is the media through which the links are achieved, the speed at which one may travel through the connectors, and the scale and coverage of the connections, once relatively circumscribed, now global. ‘Borders’ – in the broad sense of partitions and divisions – are perhaps the primary figures in the ordering of social life, which probably starts with a spatial mark, with a boundary intended to stake out a territorial claim. Border logic is dual (here/there; inside/outside; ours/yours) and pursues separation, distinction, and containment. ‘Networks’ are figures of circulation and connection and complicate the duality of the border by means of centreless dissemination. And ‘escape lines’ are trajectories of resistance and flight that may advance along – or across – the former two. In a way, every site combines elements of the border, the network, and the escape route. Every space – a private dwelling, a public location, even an ephemeral habitus such as a seat on a train or an airplane – is at once an enclosure, a multiply connected node, and an exit path, with all three possibilities superimposed on one another and differently activated in diverse circumstances. Literature has been privileged in witnessing these shifts and superimpositions. Numerous studies of nineteenth-century domestic fiction and women’s culture have shown that the bourgeois home was at once a place of confinement; a node in complex networks of consumption, familial and social relations, and even political rebellion; and a relatively unsupervised playground where women-centred relationships developed (Ryan 1990; Hayden 1980; Davidson 1986: 110–39; Tompkins 1980: 147–85; Rosenberg-Smith 1985: 53–75). Similarly, an important mass of literary and critical writing has shown that even the border, potentially the most oppressive spatial figure, is constantly undone by an undertow of linkages and escapes. Aztlán movement writers and Native American author Leslie Marmon Silko’s epic novel Almanac of the Dead (1991), among others, have proposed that the borders that (try to) separate the United States from Mexico and countries further south are traversed by a thick web of

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physical transits and cultural exchanges that long predate the emergence of the United States as an independent country and will probably continue despite contemporary attempts to curtail them. Much as they try to separate and divide, frontiers give rise to contact zones and hybridity, and generate their own lines of flight in the form of ‘borderline poetics’ and ‘mestiza consciousness’ (Anzaldúa 1987), transnational and diasporic dialogues in subalternity (Spivak 1990; Mohanti 1991), in-betweenness (Bhabha 1994), and intricate patterns of circulation and influence across the Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). Even the modern structures of surveillance and discipline influentially dissected by Michel Foucault such as the prison or the clinic (1989; 1995) – sophisticated incarnations of frontier-like demarcations and dense meshes linking locations, discourses, and practices – generate resistances and evasions that literary texts have been quick to register (Seltzer 1984; During 1992; Miller 1988; Quinby 1995). These examples – and, we hope, the chapters that follow this introduction – evince a renewed awareness of the political import of literature and demonstrate the vitality of spatial literary studies, a sub-area of literary scholarship that has developed a close rapprochement with the social field. They are also testimonies to the vibrancy and vitality of space itself, which Doreen Massey has productively defined as relational, heterogeneous, and always in process (2005: 9–15, 42–7). Space is a plane of experience that does not pre-exist the relations that take place in it. It contains vastly differing temporalities and uses and is always under construction, permanently unfinished and therefore on the verge of formlessness. These qualities make it more representable through stories, narratives, and personal testimonies – like the ones Massey herself often inserts into her academic writing2 – or through Nigel Thrift’s conceptual experiments in ‘non-representational theory’ (2008) than through the inevitable (if necessary) simplifications offered by maps, statistics, and aerial views. As a site of radical openness, emergences, and dissolutions, space turns out to be better apprehended through the embodied medium of literature than through the detached tools of the conventional geographer and map-maker. And reciprocally, as

2

See, for example, Massey (1995).

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we have been proposing here and this volume intends to substantiate, the political dimensions of literature arise in clearer outline from the critical scrutiny of the spaces represented in it.

This Collection In line with Massey’s ideas, in this collection we hold to a notion of space as dynamic and creative, contingent and not pre-given. Space, as Heidegger insisted, has to do with ‘spacing’, it is an ‘event’, something that actively creates (whether this be the border or the horizon, the interval, a sense of extension or a notion of near or far). Sites provide locations so spaces receive their being from locations and not from ‘space’ as such (1975: 152f.). The possibilities for the conception of space are enormous and could never be adequately captured within the confines of a single reader, which may help to explain why this is our second collection of essays on the theme. Our first volume, Culture, Space, and Power: Blurred Lines (Walton and Suárez 2016) contained analyses of contemporary mutations of public and private space in various cultural contexts and media, but we deliberately excluded essays focused on literary texts. This volume fills that gap. Our intention from the beginning was to unite literary studies of contemporary texts written from very different theoretical and methodological approaches and organize the contents of this book according to the three terms of our subtitle: borders, networks and escape lines. These three terms help to provide a thematic backbone to the book but we are aware that the division proposed in these blocks is a structural convenience and that the chapters cannot be hermetically sealed from one another. Consequently, there is some crossover between the different contributions and parts and we hope readers will find their own paths through the chapters and be stimulated by the interconnections. The volume seeks to be a cartography of what some authors have called the ‘spatial turn’ in literary and cultural studies – briefly outlined above – and a collection of case studies where the abstract formulations

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of spatial theory are applied in a clear fashion to the analysis of literary texts. Cumulatively, these case studies present a broad repertoire of spatial articulations in contemporary literature. While some kindred studies have focused on one or two of these articulations, this collection is conceived as a dialectical constellation. It rests on the premise that, since cultural meaning always arises from relations of opposition and difference, the signification of a particular spatial trope has to be thought out against the range of possibilities available at a particular historical moment. This is why the collection tackles centres and peripheries, real and imaginary spaces, public and private settings, psychological interiority and material locations, the spaces of power and oppression and the spaces of abjection, marginality, and resistance. One of the claims of the book is that none can be figured out in all their complexity unless placed in dialogue with the others. Contributors tackle a broad range of themes including how prose fiction addresses spaces of intimacy, abjection, espionage, discipline, madness, post-human identities, communism, dystopia, and coercive medical practices. These themes open up analysis to key areas within contemporary literary and cultural criticism including the study of sexuality, politics, power, identity, the configuration of urban, regional, and national spaces and borders, and the delineation of outer and inner space. The contributors reflect on diverse authors from English-speaking cultures and also centre on diverse genres and periods while acknowledging recent research in space studies and making genuinely original contributions to what has become in recent years a thriving field. The main objectives of this collection are: • • •

To reflect the broad range of innovative approaches to the analysis of culture and space; To combine essays which offer theory, speculation, interpretation, and detailed case studies; To offer readers a multi-disciplinary approach that unites studies from a wide range of related theoretical slants, including cultural studies, psychology and psychoanalysis, film, feminism, post-colonial and race theory, and gender studies.

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Borders The book’s first part brings together chapters, which in one way or another, address different kinds of borders, whether they be literal, psychological, or symbolic. The chapter that opens the book is David Griffiths’s contribution on coercive hospital spaces in Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy. It draws on Foucauldian theory to analyse the disciplinary mechanisms practiced inside Craiglockhart War Hospital, the institution in which Siegfried Sassoon was interned in 1917, after he made his controversial statement that the First World War was being deliberately prolonged and was characterized by political errors and hypocrisy. Griffith’s analysis of disciplinary procedures goes beyond the psychological and physical to assess the coercive role played by the adroit organization of architectural forms, the clinical spaces themselves and the effects of the hierarchical classifications that graded hospital staff. This approach gives us valuable insights into not only the workings of power but the manner in which the deviant patient’s body is objectified, made submissive and ultimately transformed into a useful subject. These themes of the organization of space, the breaking down of resistance, coercion and forms of social control help to set the tone for subsequent chapters. Griffiths’s work leads on to Ángel Galdón Rodríguez’s chapter on metropolitan isolation in dystopian literature which reviews some of the key texts in the tradition (Zamyatin’s We, Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four) and positions them in relation to more recent titles like Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies and Hugh Howey’s Wool. Galdón Rodríguez studies how the inhabitants of dystopian spaces in the various novels are controlled within urban limits and how these relate to other (often forbidden) locations beyond the metropolitan zones. This exploration involves questions of the evolution of dystopian narrative but links this interest in literary criticism with politics, ideology, and other cultural factors. María Luisa Pascual Garrido’s analysis of several cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest focuses on two independent films (by Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway) and two popular mid-century films (the

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Western, Yellow Sky, and the sci-fi film, Forbidden Planet). This brings the reader back to an engagement with Foucauldian theory which is used to analyse articulations of space, borders, imaginary literary spaces, authority, control, power, and resistance. Here Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ is utilized along with other concepts drawn from Border Studies to offer readings of film adaptations where the island becomes a key site for the exercise of power, space is a product of struggle, and borders are rooted in cultural, political and economic discourses and practices. Pascual Garrido augments her explorations of the operations of power by engaging with concepts like territorialization and deterritorialization, found in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, which help her to consider forms of resistance where authority is challenged by those on the margins who attempt to fight against the centre in order to seize power for themselves. The chapter engages with the politics of space and explores how this politics is articulated through common generic conventions in the case of Hollywood productions and as aesthetic challenge within the more experimental avant-garde narratives. The first part of the book closes with two studies that look at the symbolic importance of inner spaces. We have chosen to preface Laura Torres-Zúñiga’s contribution with Clara Pallejá-López’s more theoretical chapter on buildings, dwellings and home in fiction. Drawing on varied research in the human sciences – from Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung to Jean Piaget and Gaston Bachelard – Pallejá-López studies how the image of houses cannot be reduced to the role of a mere setting; the home creates powerful psychological and emotional connections which actually govern the way people organize reality and relate to space – and this is something which occurs very early in childhood. The chapter also explores how the home can be seen to complement and expand the sense of self, how it functions with relation to developmental psychology and how its loss can be traumatic; it further discusses the importance of architectural structures (‘literary houses’) within literary texts and how dwellings can function as psychological anchoring points. While Pallejá-López’s chapter stands up on its own, it is also an ideal introduction to Laura Torres-Zúñiga’s reading of thresholds of abjection in Tennessee Williams’s work. Torres-Zúñiga examines the way interdependent relationships exist between subjectivity and space. Starting with the

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symbolic importance of the rape scene in A Streetcar Named Desire, she investigates other Williams plays and short stories to trace his placement of identity crises in relation to architectural features of the house – especially thresholds and liminal sites. Torres further develops in this way a theme also explored in the previous chapter – the dynamics of inside and outside and the blurring of boundaries between self and other. And just as María Luisa Pascual Garrido is interested in how explorations of space relate to filmic conventions, Torres, drawing on literary criticism, is concerned with the way Williams manifested his interests in trauma and desire in formal dramatic terms, where the effects of these experiences are materialized spatially in the dramatic structure of a number of works.

Networks The chapters of this part focus on the interconnections between culture, power, and space, and on the relationship between these factors and capitalism, imperialism, class, history, travel, technology, and science. Some of these chapters deal with specific geographical locations like the USA, the Balkans, Russia, and other parts of Eastern Europe and, in line with the first part, there is work which engages with the postmodern ambiguity between the real and the imaginary. Chapter 6, by Ana Rull Suárez, investigates Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day from a broadly Foucauldian point of view; it teases out the relations between knowledge and power while tracing the relations between travelling and the politics of space. Rull Suárez’s principal interest is in what she calls ‘sociopolitical suspicion’ and the ‘double spaces’ of espionage (centred on the USA and the Balkan wars). Pynchon’s novel, through such narrative motifs as pilgrimage around the globe and time travel, serves as something of a smorgasbord for the exploration of these themes. Rull Suárez explores how Pynchon critiques US capitalist ideology and imperialism, which demarcate spaces and exercise power and control over the disfavoured. This approach allows Rull Suárez to investigate Pynchon’s appraisal of

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so-called ‘scientific development’, particularly the extent to which science serves human ends or is complicit in deceptive politics, genocidal violence, ethnic control, and technologies of destruction. Rull Suárez, like other contributors to this book, does not forget the formal characteristics of the writer’s technique which she sees as akin to postmodern narratives with its constant playing on ambiguous relations between fantasy and realism; between fiction and historically documented people and events. Chapter 7, by Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo, continues these debates into ideology and space, techno-scientific discourses, and postmodern narrative techniques by investigating ideologies of urban space in contemporary science fiction. In a broad-ranging analysis which focuses more specifically on J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise, William Gibson’s Virtual Light, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and Greg Bear’s Slant. Mateos-Aparicio draws on the literary criticism of Brian McHale and the spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre to consider the ‘perfect cities’ and ‘perfect hells’ postulated by these narratives. This analysis is made particularly interesting because the novels are seen to critique visualizations of urban structures and spaces where the principles of modernist urbanism and architecture are contrasted with the decentered metropolitan ‘urban sprawls’ of more postmodern narratives. In Chapter 8 the sci-fi genre is replaced by contemporary crime narratives and thrillers set in Russia. Here Isabel Santaularia i Capdevila maps the fictional representation of the Russian ‘other’ as a ‘monstrous space’; in this way, a number of Western crime writers, while not celebrating West European and American exceptionalism, demonize Russia, especially by mining its revolutionary and communist history. Santaularia selects a series of novels, all written within the last decade or so, which feature Russian protagonists who are either revolutionaries fighting against an autocratic tsar (Andrew Williams’s To Kill a Tsar) or work for the authorities (in Sam Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, William Ryan’s The Holy Thief, Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44, Boris Starling’s Vodka, A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops, and Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow). According to Santaularia’s reading, these narratives activate pre-existing ‘cultural codes’; their protagonists serve as mouthpieces for a representation of the former Soviet Union/Russia that

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tends to confirm narrow-minded stereotypes that do not challenge hackneyed images and only reaffirm the superiority of the West. Chapter 9, by Martyna Bryla, extends the dominant theme of the previous chapter, where the ‘othering’ of Russia segues into the ‘othering’ of Eastern Europe and links to earlier and later chapters insofar as it involves analysis of negative literary mappings and explores the themes of travel and space. Here Bryla, drawing on imagology and ‘geocriticism’, charts what she calls the ‘liminal geographies’ of Eastern Europe in Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories. This chapter not only offers detailed analysis of the short stories but links them to Oates’s journey behind the Iron Curtain (to Berlin, Warsaw, and Budapest), which was sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA), a body whose aims included the promotion of American interests and values abroad. Bryla develops a series of original claims about Oates’s work where the USIA trip is fundamental to the understanding of the evolution of short stories like ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’, ‘My Warszawa: 1980’, ‘Old Budapest’, and ‘Our Wall’, which conceives Russia as a geo-political space locked in stasis. Added to the contexts of culture and power, notions of space and mapping, and the confrontation between self, self-discovery, and otherness combine in this chapter to shed light on Oates’s engagement with Eastern Europe.

Escape Lines In the final part of this collection, we present three chapters united by utopian impulses mapped onto various locations and transits – concretely, onto the African American experiences of travel, exile, escape, and community-building in racialized sites; the journey motif in epic poems by ‘beat’ American women writers; and the Canary Islands as an insular border zone interconnecting three world cultures. Chapter 10, an exceptionally wide-ranging study by A. Robert Lee, takes up the figurations of time and space (as an as imaginative environment) in African American writing. Starting with a Robert Hayden poem

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and slave narratives (like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Lee ranges across what he calls a ‘selective gallery of key literary writings and cognate arts’, which also involves references to jazz, film and photography. After considering the abjuration of rights in slave-narrative, the chapter broadens its focus to take up the question of authorial agency with reference to key authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Weldon Johnson, John A. Williams, and Ishmael Reed. In this comprehensive panorama Lee is able to show how time and space have been fashioned in particular ways in African American writing, whether this be against a backdrop of slave ownership in Dixie, the ‘cellular northern city’, the ‘historic black war-zone’ or fantastical alternative realities. All this serves the interests of an African American acoustic-cum-memorial archive where black lives and cultures matter. In Chapter 11, written by Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo, the main emphasis is now put on patriarchy and what the author calls ‘reconfiguring the epic space’ in Anne Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy, a twenty-five-year-long project which Waldman regarded as a feminist epic. In her ‘investigative poetics’, Encarnación-Pinedo scrutinizes both literary and literal movements in terms of gender and poetic genre to bring out the way the trilogy challenges the hegemony of a poetic form almost entirely dominated by male writers. Drawing on thinkers as diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Henri Lefebvre, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja, the chapter surveys Waldman’s widespread use of fragments and the consequences of their reorganization within Iovis’s hybridized epic form. The final chapter in this collection is Tomás Monterrey’s ‘literary geography’ that investigates the Canary Islands as a border zone in Ewing Campbell’s Afoot in the Garden of Enchantment. Here concepts that have already shaped some of the chapters of the book – Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics, Soja’s postmodern geography, and Lefebvre’s ‘doubling’ and ‘mirage’ effects – are used alongside Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception to explore how Campbell visualizes the Canary Islands as a literary space, a border zone between three continents (Spain, North Africa and the Americas), which allows the novelist and short story writer to investigate various aspects of the politics of space. It is a space in which

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questions of the inner versus outer, power, division and identity can be explored and one in which the dissolution of the ordinary and the occurrence of the unexpected are fused. Campbell offers Monterrey the possibility of interpreting how the writer links the Americas with eastern Atlantic shores, how he melds old stories with present-day reality, where the drama of fate and providence, trials and survival, sorrow and redemption are played out in narratives that offer insights into the world and into individuals striving to contest oppression.

Bibliography Anzaldúa, G. (1987). Borderlands / La Frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute’s Books. Bachelard, G. (1964 [1957]). The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bakhtin, M. (1981). ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel’. In The Dialogical Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, trans. M. Holquist and C. Nelson, pp. 84–257. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bayat, A. (2010). ‘A Street Named Revolution’. Art as Politics: How Ordinary People Changed Life in the Middle East, pp. 161–70. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Benjamin, W. (1969). ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’. In W. Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn, pp. 155–200. New York: Schocken. Bhabha, H. (1994). ‘Of Mimicry and Men: The Ambivalence of Postcolonial Discourse’. In H. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 121–31. London and New York: Routledge. Blanchot, M. (1983). The Space of Literature, trans. A. Smock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Buchholz, S., and Jahn, M. (2005). ‘Space in Narrative’. In D. Herman, M. Jahn, M. L. Ryan (eds), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, pp. 551–5. London: Routledge. Castells, M. (1983). The City and the Grass Roots. Berkeley: University of California Press. Castells, M. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Davidson, C. (1984). The Revolution of the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York and London: Oxford University Press.

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During, S. (1992). Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972– 77. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M. (1989 [1977]). Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. Sheridan. New York: Random House. Foucault, M. (2003 [1973]). The Birth of the Clinic, trans. A Sheridan. London: Routledge. Frank, J. ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’. In J. Frank, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, pp. 5–62. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963. Giddens, A. (1990). The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. Hakutani, Y., and Butler, R. (eds) (1995). The City in African-American Literature. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Hayden, D. (1980). The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1975). Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter. New York: Harper. hooks, bell (2008). Belonging: A Culture of Place. New York: Routledge. James, H. (1984 [1934]). The Art of Fiction: Critical Prefaces, with an Introduction by R. P. Blackmur. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Klooster, J., and Heirman, J. (eds) (2013). Lived Space: The Ideologies of Lived Space in Literary Texts, Ancient and Modern. Amsterdam: Academia Press. Knadler, S. (2010). Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African-American Literature. New York: Routledge. Lessing (1971 [1766]). ‘Laocoön. Chapter XVI’. In H. Adams (ed.), Critical Theory Since Plato, pp. 349–52. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Manzanas, A., and Benito, J. (2014). Occupying Space in American Literature: Static Heroes, Social Movements and Empowerment. London: Routledge. Marcuse, H. (2009 [1968]). Negations, trans. J. Shapiro. Boston: Mayfly Books. Martin, B. D. (2004). The Theater Is in the Street: Politics and Public Performance in the 1960s. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Massey, D. (1995). ‘A Global Sense of Place’, Marxism Today ( June), pp. 24–9. Massey, D. (2005). For Space. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Miller, D. A. (1988). The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2012). ‘Image, Space, Revolution: The Art of Occupation’. Critical Inquiry 39 (1), pp. 8–32.

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Mohanti, C. (1991). ‘Introduction. Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’. In C. Mohanti, A. Russo, and L. Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, pp. 1–47. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Nayamende, A. (1996). ‘Martha Has No Land: The Tragedy of Identity in The Marabi Dance’. In K. Darien-Smith, E. Gunner, and S. Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land and History in South Africa and Australia, pp. 189–200. London: Routledge. Nixon, R. (1996). ‘Bessie Head and the End of Exile’. In K. Darian-Smith, E. Gunner, and S. Nuttall (eds), Text, Theory, Space: Land and History in South Africa and Australia, pp. 239–49. London: Routledge. Plato (2012). The Republic, trans. B. Jowett. New York: Collier & Son. Quinby, L. (ed.) (1995). Genealogy and Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rabbatt, N. (2012). ‘The Arab Revolution Takes Back the Public Space’, Critical Inquiry 39 (1), pp. 198–208. Rancière, J. (1999). Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. J. Rose. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics. The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. with an introduction by G. Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rosenberg-Smith, C. (1986). Disorderly Conduct. Visions of Gender in Victorian America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ryan, M. P. (1990). Women in Public Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. Johns Hopkins University Press. Sadiki, L. (2015). ‘Unruliness through Space and Time: Reconstructing “Peoplehood” in the Arab Spring’. In L. Sadiki (ed.), Routledge Handbook of the Arab Spring: Rethinking Democratization, pp. 1–13. London and New York: Routledge. Seltzer, M. (1984). Henry James and the Art of Power. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shepard, B. (2010). Queer Political Performance and Protest: Play, Pleasure, and Social Movement. New York: Routledge. Shepard, B., and Hayduk, R. (eds) (2002). From ACT-UP to the WTO: Urban Protest and Community Building in the Era of Globalization. London: Verso. Smitten, J., and Daghistany, A. (eds) (1981). Spatial Form in Narrative. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Spain, D. (2016). Constructive Feminism: Women’s Spaces and Women’s Rights in the American City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Spivak, G. (1990). The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. New York: Routledge.

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Thrift, N. (2008). Non-Representational Theory: Space / Politics / Affect. London: Routledge. Tompkins, J. (1980). Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction. New York and London: Oxford University Press. Walton, D., and Suárez, J. A. (2016). Culture, Space, and Power: Blurred Lines. New York: Lexington.

Part I

Borders

David Griffiths

1 Coercive Hospital Spaces in Pat Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy

abstract Pat Barker’s depiction in The Regeneration Trilogy of the psychoanalytical nature of thenground-breaking medical treatment applied by Dr W. H. R. Rivers to the acclaimed war poet Siegfried Sassoon and his fellow sufferers of psycho-neuroses at Craiglockhart War Hospital during the Great War (1914–18) has deservedly attracted great academic interest. This chapter, however, seeks to concentrate on Pat Barker’s portrayal, especially in Regeneration (1991) and to a lesser extent in The Eye in the Door (1993), of the coercive spaces inside the military hospital, which render the clinical approaches pursued therein especially effective. In line with Foucauldian tenets, especially those put forward in Discipline and Punish (1975) and Madness and Civilisation (1961), these coercive spaces will be shown to favourably predispose both patients and staff to engage with and largely conform to the prevailing value system, and, in so doing, to perpetuate the existing networks of power.

This chapter will make repeated allusion to Pat Barker’s Regeneration, the first volume of The Regeneration Trilogy,1 which focuses on the historically based relationship between Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), the acclaimed poet and highly decorated World War I combatant, and Dr William Halse Rivers Rivers (1864–1922), the pioneering neurologist-cum-psychologist. The latter is specifically directed by the reigning political authorities to take personal charge of Sassoon’s treatment at Craiglockhart War Hospital following Sassoon’s unexpected and controversial public declaration of July 1 The Regeneration Trilogy, written by Pat Barker, comprises Regeneration (1991), which was made into a film of the same name, The Eye in the Door (1993), which won the Guardian Fiction Prize, and The Ghost Road (1995), which was awarded the Booker Prize.

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1917. Sassoon’s declaration initially appeared in the Bradford Pioneer2 on 27 July and was then read out in The House of Commons on 30 July and published the following day in The Times: Finished with the War A Soldier’s Declaration I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purpose for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this War should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible for them to be changed without our knowledge, and that, had this been done, the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation. I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the military conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practised on them. Also I believe that it may help to destroy the callous complacence with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realise. (Barker [1991] 1992: 3)

Sassoon’s declaration, which opens Regeneration, could hardly have come at a more inopportune moment of the War for the British authorities. As documented by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), despite notable Allied success at Messines in June, the year of 1917 was marked by a succession of lamentable military encounters. The battle near Arras, forming part of the 1917 Spring Offensive, in which Sassoon had fallen casualty, recorded 160,000 killed and wounded in exchange for insignificant territorial gains. To make matters worse, French troops mutinied as the French offensive floundered. This debacle was to be followed by 2 The Bradford Pioneer was a socialist journal published in Bradford from 1913 to 1936 under the auspices of the Bradford Independent Labour Party.

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the attack towards Passchendaele, otherwise known as ‘The Third Battle of Ypres’, which was destined to become a repeat of the Somme. Ironically, this ill-fated assault began on the very same day Sassoon’s declaration was published in The Times. Passchendaele epitomized the failure of a strategy employing repeated assaults launched with ineffective artillery support and under excessively inclement weather conditions. The dogged three-and-ahalf-month campaign, abandoned in November 1917 with a total advance of only six miles, had claimed 310,000 British dead, many drowning in the liquid mud of No Man’s Land. The scenario faced by the British authorities on the home front at the beginning of 1917 was no less alarming. As revealed by J. M. Bourne in Britain and the Great War 1914–18 (1989: 209), strikes were becoming ‘commonplace in all major industries’. Serious food and fuel shortages during the severe winter months had led to considerable discontent among the civilian population while ‘a massive wave of industrial unrest’ broke out in England in the spring, which by May 1917 had spread to forty-eight towns, involving 200,000 factory workers and incurring the loss of 1.5 million working days. Dissent and civil unrest had grown to such an extent that a National War Aims Committee (NWAC) was hastily set up by the authorities in June 1917, just one month prior to Sassoon’s declaration, in an attempt to coordinate home front propaganda more effectively. Bourne (1989: 203) argues that the NWAC’s main aim was to foment a clearer sense of national purpose, which could be used as ‘a weapon of moral ostracism against “shirkers” and dissenters’. It is against this tumultuous background of military ineptitude and social unrest that Sassoon’s declaration and the reigning political authorities’ reaction to it must be charted. Sassoon’s renegade, dissenting remarks proved to be an instant source of embarrassment both at home and on the warring front and thus posed a potential threat to the Government for a number of reasons. Firstly, the declaration came from a well-respected, highly decorated war veteran of the current conflict (Egremont 2005: 103). Secondly, it came from a person of privileged social status and military rank, to all intents and purposes a safe product of the system but one who was prepared to air his opinions on principle and risk grave consequences. Thirdly, it did not contain a philosophically based anti-war pacifist message,

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which would have been much easier to counteract on pragmatic grounds. Fourthly, it seriously questioned the real motives behind the perpetuation of and, by implication, entry into the war given that conditions for a negotiated peace settlement with the enemy seemed highly favourable at that juncture (Purdue 2015: 176). Lastly, the declaration – ‘A Soldier’s Declaration’ – was made explicitly on behalf of the individual soldiers at the front, who were dying apparently unnecessarily, thus causing concern on both ideological and logistical grounds. The latter point is linked to a forceful rebuking of the ‘deception’ allegedly practised by the political (not the military) authorities and the ‘callous complacence’ exhibited by the civilian population in wartime Britain. During the Great War, 284 serving British soldiers are officially recorded as being executed for acts of desertion or cowardice, while seventy Commanding Officers died interned in carceral establishments for similar offences (Hynes 1990). Court-martial followed by execution or indefinite confinement was thus not a hollow threat to which Sassoon could consider himself immune. However, given the delicate social and military climate of the time, the authorities declined to accept the role of enemy that Sassoon had so publicly allotted them. Instead, Barker depicts them as evading the binary trap laid by Sassoon in that they choose to neutralize his potentially damaging declaration by proclaiming it fruit of a clinically diagnosed mental disorder, namely neurasthenia or shell shock. This diagnosis, which was tantamount in medical science to a temporary loss of reason or a transient bout of insanity, casts Sassoon firmly into the Foucauldian camp of déraison3 and is presented as such in an artfully worded counter communiqué publicly issued by the Under-Secretary of State for War, Ian MacPherson, and likewise published in The Times:

3

Foucault’s key term déraison (often translated as unreason) is to be understood as a ‘relational concept with respect to a changing norm […]. Déraison may be a way of marking that which recedes from and rejects conventional demands: when unquiet minds can no longer be trusted to be predictable; when they/we become unreliable guardians of common sense’ (Stoler 2013: 61).

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mr macpherson With regard to the case of Second Lieutenant Sassoon, immediately he heard of it, he consulted his military advisers, and in response to their inquiries he received the following telegram: A breach of discipline has been committed, but no disciplinary action has been taken, since Second Lieutenant Sassoon has been reported by the Medical Board as not being responsible for his actions, as he was suffering from nervous breakdown. When the military authorities saw the letter referred to, they felt that there must be something wrong with an extremely gallant officer who had done excellent work at the front. He hoped honourable members would hesitate long before they made use of a document written by a young man in such a state of mind, nor did he think their action would be appreciated by the friends of the officer. (Barker [1991] 1992: 69)

The British authorities’ reaction thus took the shape of an apparently benevolent intervention made on medical grounds in an attempt to defuse a politically awkward scenario by denying Sassoon the wider political debating forum he sought. Given the prevailing circumstances, this scathing statement – made by one of the British Army’s most highly decorated serving officers – could only be met by one of two reactions: a potentially damaging high-profile court-martial under Military Law or, alternatively, the scientifically endorsed attribution of his behaviour to a neurasthenic disorder. When considering the psychological impact of the latter imputation on sufferers of such an affliction, it should be borne in mind that social commentators of the time often cast the terms malingering and neurasthenic as interchangeable concepts whilst ‘the popular press argued that neurasthenic men were malingerers who had been born with debased bodies’ (Bourke 1996: 117). Interestingly, Bourke (1996) goes on to point out that as a general rule the medical community did not publicly refute these misconceptions and even published statistical studies that suggested a clear incidence of ‘predisposition of emotivity’ in the ailing soldiers, which implicitly labelled them as weak, unmanly, ‘hysterical’ or neurotic (Showalter 1985: 176). For the authorities, this clinical diagnosis would necessarily lead to confinement in a specialized medical institution, exposure to individualized therapeutic treatment, and ultimately recovery in the form of renewed conformity and eventual social/military reinsertion. Recovery did indeed take place four months after Sassoon’s admission to Craiglockhart when he was medically boarded, found to be fit for active service and ‘discharged to duty’ (Barker 1992: 250) on the Western Front.

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This disciplinary modus operandi involving the State’s conscious harnessing of medical discourse is one of the key disciplinary strategies that Foucault identifies in Discipline and Punish (1975) and traces so adeptly in his account of the rise and altogether subtler reign of the human sciences in a predominantly non-warring societal context.

Foucauldian Overtones This chapter will explore, from a Foucauldian standpoint, Pat Barker’s account of the artful deception involved in the authorities’ public assertion that ‘no disciplinary action was taken’ against Sassoon on interning him in Craiglockhart War Hospital, and will highlight the major spatial disciplinary mechanisms deployed within the fabric of the military psychiatric hospital. Disciplinary machinery will be shown to comprise not only the more physical, coercive architectural elements, but also the artful arrangement of clinical spaces, and the hierarchical classifications established within the hospital staffing structure. All these elements will be shown to unite so as to form a coordinated coercive atmosphere in which power circulates continuously and in the midst of which institutional figureheads, such as the historically inspired characters of Dr Rivers or Dr Yealland, are endowed a propitious, power-full space in which to carry out their patriarchally endorsed duty of returning the psychologically ailing and, more importantly, ideologically dissenting inmates back to the front. Within the military hospital context throughout the trilogy, the patient’s body becomes the prime target of power from both a physical and psychological standpoint. The deviant body is subjected and objectified, rendered docile and, whenever possible, ultimately transformed into an element of greater utility to the prevailing power network. This modality of control, which imposes ‘a relation of docility-utility’ (Foucault [1975] 1991: 137), implies uninterrupted coercion, which is exercised within an approach that consciously seeks to partition the most basic elements of human life, namely time and space. The erstwhile crushing of dissidence

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through extreme physical chastisement in a public arena – the implacable exercise of ‘Sovereign Power’ in Foucauldian terminology (Foucault 1991: 137) – largely gives way in Craiglockhart to more subtle and potentially more effective individualizing strategies of discipline and control. Individuals are fixed in a suffocating mesh of disciplinary and control mechanisms involving the active deployment of a panoply of normalizing strategies, ranging from rational persuasion to manipulation and active coercion. This entire scenario is subjected to serious questioning through Pat Barker’s uncannily Foucauldian portrayal of the institutional management of dissenters and rebels. Key elements in ‘the art of distributions’ and ‘the control of activity’,4 as put forward by Foucault in Discipline and Punish (1991: 141–56), become increasingly resonant in Barker’s depiction of the politico-clinical approach to the re-education of dissenting soldiers. Discipline, Foucault contends, proceeds in great measure from the artful distribution of individuals in space through, among others, the following three techniques: firstly, discipline sometimes entails the enclosure of the individual in a protected place; secondly, disciplinary machinery works on the principle of a cellular partitioning of space; and thirdly, discipline involves the calculated designation of a clearly defined individual rank or space to every individual element within a given classification or hierarchy. I shall now discuss Pat Barker’s depiction of the military psychiatric hospital fabric, especially that reigning at Craiglockhart War Hospital, in the light of these three distributive disciplinary techniques.

4

Foucault’s concept of ‘the control of activity’ (1991: 149–56), despite being highly relevant in terms of strategies employed in deviant re-education, lies beyond the scope of this chapter.

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The Art of Distributions: Enclosure ‘Discipline sometimes requires enclosure, the specification of a place […] closed in upon itself.’ (Foucault 1991: 141)

The process of alienating Sassoon, aimed at discrediting and ultimately neutralizing the controversial opinions expressed in his declaration, was rapidly put into motion. Sassoon was safely pigeonholed as suffering from a medical condition that successfully alienated him from mainstream society and publicly earmarked him as abnormal. To this label of abnormality was consciously applied the weight of a coordinated medical apparatus by which it was hoped he would be helped to regain his lost reason. Diagnosis was followed by confinement (albeit on a quasi-voluntary inmate basis) in Craiglockhart War Hospital, an institution under military jurisdiction dedicated to the treatment of shell-shocked victims of officer rank.5 Such confinement serves to further discredit and demoralize Sassoon while treatment is administered by an eminently qualified member of the medical community and an unimpeachable pillar of the establishment, namely Dr (currently wartime Captain) Rivers. In such a way, the State manages not to negate the accusations and implications contained in the declaration but rather to completely sidestep the issue by encouraging people to refuse to even contemplate them, arguing that they stem from an abnormal, distorted or sick vision of events. As Foucault so appositely observes in Madness and Civilisation: Confinement is the practice which corresponds most exactly to madness experienced as unreason, that is, as the empty negativity of reason; by confinement, madness is acknowledged to be nothing. That is, on one hand madness is immediately perceived as difference […]; and on the other hand, confinement cannot have any other goal than a correction (that is, the suppression of the difference, or the fulfilment of this nothingness in death). (Foucault [1961] 1997: 116)

5

Approximately 80,000 shell-shock cases were officially registered by the British forces during the Great War, although unofficial sources set the figure at nearer 200,000 (Hynes 1990: 186).

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Echoing Foucault’s premise that ‘confinement causes alienation’ (1997: 227), Barker depicts the authorities’ institutional internship of Sassoon in ‘Dottyville’6 as achieving a great measure of success among the general populace, the military ranks and even among his family and close friends. Indeed, the anonymous inmate of Craiglockhart who composed the following stanza in a poem published in the June 1918 issue of The Hydra7 eloquently expresses this debilitating sensation: Craiglockhart memories will be sad, Your name will never make us glad; The self-respect we ever had We’ve lost – all people think us mad.

This reaction is perhaps not unduly surprising in that, historically, citizens have been conditioned – as Foucault posits – to align themselves with the normal, non-deviant, official line of thought: ‘That which is called a base action is placed in the rank of those which public order does not permit us to tolerate […]. It seems that the honour of a family requires the disappearance from society of the individual who by vile and abject habits shames his relatives’ (Foucault 1997: 67). Interestingly, the apparently benevolent application of medical science8 to what the State identified in Sassoon as a scientifically knowable abnormality fails to arouse a rebellious reaction in the dissenter. As a matter of fact, it is Sassoon himself, albeit admittedly as a result of shame, fear of 6 7 8

An epithet used to describe Craiglockhart War Hospital, coined by Sassoon in a letter to his good friend Robbie Ross. Sassoon Private Papers (London: Imperial War Museum, 26 July 1917). The Hydra was the Craiglockhart Hospital Magazine, produced by inmates as a therapeutic activity and noteworthy for being edited by Wilfred Owen for six issues in 1917 and for featuring poems by Siegfried Sassoon. Dr Rivers’s therapeutic ‘talking cure’ approach – a ‘treatment that he [Dr Rivers] knew to be still largely experimental’ (Regeneration, 147) – was not generally endorsed by the medical establishment, which favoured more physically brutal methods employed by practitioners like Dr Yealland. As a testament to this fact, see Lt Colonel E. Farquhar Buzzard’s zealous advocacy of electric shock therapy in his Preface to Historical Disorders of Warfare (Yealland 1918).

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confinement and out of a sense of loyalty to his comrades at the front, who allows himself to be led into the normalizing process as he reluctantly agrees to be medically boarded and subsequently clinically treated rather than face carceral internment for the duration of the war. It is in Sassoon’s induced complicity – achieved through fear, insecurity and the timely persuasive intervention of his good friend Robert Graves – that we can appreciate how the disciplinary mechanism works so efficiently against Sassoon’s righteous indignation, clearly echoing Foucault’s observation that ‘[i]t is by force that the furies of a maniac are overcome; it is by opposing fear to anger that anger may be mastered’ (Foucault 1997: 180). If fear is regarded by Foucault as a key feeling to be aroused in the deviant, Craiglockhart War Hospital is depicted as a highly efficient coercive space for the application of medico-scientific discourse. An imposing Victorian building, it was built as a hydropathic sanatorium and was essentially frequented by members of the wealthy classes as a therapeutic drying-out centre, a rehabilitation establishment whose remit was to mitigate the excesses of a privileged lifestyle. The hospital was erected between 1877 and 1880 in a commanding position on the north-west side of Wester Craiglockhart Hill in the village of Slateford (now a suburb of Edinburgh). The building’s west-facing main façade is 280 feet long, Italianate in style and three storeys high, with two blocky end towers.9 During the First World War, the Hydropathic was taken over by the War Office in 1916, made into Craiglockhart War Hospital and placed under military jurisdiction until 1919 (McGowan 2007). One of the key feelings actively instilled in patients at Craiglockhart is that of fear or dread, leading to a profound sense of insecurity and isolation. Sassoon, from his very arrival at the hospital, is ‘daunted by the sheer gloomy, cavernous bulk of the place’ and must make a conscious effort to achieve a momentary ‘private victory over fear’ (Barker 1992: 8–9). 9

There exists an eerie architectural similarity between Craiglockhart Hydropathic Sanatorium () and the 1676 purpose-built lunatic asylum of Bedlam Bethlehem Hospital (), sited in the rural suburbs of London and designed by Robert Hooke (1635–1703), the prominent architect of institutional buildings.

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Craiglockhart’s distance from Edinburgh and its rural location, common for asylums and other psychiatric facilities, further compounded the patients’ feelings of isolation and vulnerability, softening them up and preparing the ground for later treatment of a generally subtler nature involving rational persuasion within the context of psychotherapy sessions. Long, narrow passageways, displaying a gloomy, sinister symmetry and the absence or scarcity of natural light lead the corridors to be likened to ‘a trench without the sky’ (Barker 1992: 17), a description whose authenticity is readily vouched for by Dr Rivers himself. If we appreciate that perhaps the only saving grace of trench warfare was the vision of space above soldiers in their stifling immobility, Craiglockhart is powerfully represented as being devoid of even that relieving perspective. Elements of light and darkness – the calculated denial and provision of light – are constantly juxtaposed in descriptions of hospital spaces within the trilogy. The oscillations between areas of light and shade are not arbitrary, but rather reveal disturbing, sinister situations that either expose or conceal, as best befits the clinical objective. In Craiglockhart, ‘that living museum of tics and twitches’ (Barker 1992: 206), the gloomy appearance identified by Sassoon at first sight and Dr Rivers’s allusion to the darkness of the corridors and lack of natural light in certain areas – ‘dark, draughty, smelling of cigarettes’ (Barker [1993] 1994: 218) – are counterpointed by the occasional, timely imposition of intimidating light and the use made of its directional source, especially during patient examination. Light, coming disturbingly from behind the Medical Board members, startles the exposed patient under examination: ‘He [the patient] got himself into the room somehow, and managed a salute. He couldn’t see their faces to begin with, since they sat with their backs to the tall windows […]. There was a great deal of light, it seemed to him, floods of silver-grey light filtered through white curtains’ (Barker 1992: 132). Likewise, in Regeneration, in another unspecified hospital for convalescing servicemen, the brightness of the light outside stands in sharp contrast with the dimness of the conservatory, in which severely injured soldiers were shamefully ‘hidden away’ from public view: ‘Shadowy figures sat inside […]. She was still dazzled by the brightness of the light outside and the relative dimness of the interior, and so she had to blink several times before she saw them, a row of figures in

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wheelchairs, but figures which were no longer the size and shape of adult men’ (Barker 1992: 160). This female civilian onlooker is outraged by the authorities’ deliberate removal of these soldiers from public visibility and she savagely indicts this premeditated act of concealment: ‘If the country demanded that price, then it should be bloody well prepared to look at the result’ (Barker 1992: 160). The National Hospital in London, where severe cases of war neuroses in enlisted ranks were treated during the Great War, betrays similar architectural elements, including long corridors, ‘immensely long wards, lined with white-covered beds packed close together’, windows on both sides which ‘reached from floor to ceiling’ while the entire clinical space was ‘flooded with cold northern light’ (Barker 1992: 224). In this case, however, the inmates are deliberately exposed and rendered painfully visible to the penetrating medical gaze, clearly echoing Foucault’s disturbing adoption and extension of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon model (1791),10 whose architectural and hierarchical configuration sought to ‘induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’ (Foucault 1991: 201). Invasive light and visibility, apparent in this scene, are later set against the horrific atmosphere of the brutal re-education session in Regeneration (1992: 229–33), conducted with apparent relish by Dr Yealland. The scenario for Private Callan’s breaking – ‘the removal of the physical symptom was described as a cure’ (Barker 1992: 224) – is based on Dr Yealland’s own account of this real-life case study in his book Historical Disorders of Warfare (1918) and is an account marked by the employment of darkness and carefully calculated illumination, all of which is designed explicitly to instil fear and insecurity.

10

Panopticon is a term coined by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). It refers to the design of a type of institutional building, especially penitentiary, which, thanks to its artful architectural configuration, can assure imperceptible, omniscient surveillance and thus produce efficient (self-)regulation of behaviour (Bentham 1812). In Discipline and Punish, Foucault transcends Bentham’s strictly physical, architectural concept of Panopticon to convert it into a central paradigmatic motif for modern power deployment within a variety of social networks.

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In addition, selective forms of physical restraint and verbal counter suggestion are systematically applied, which serve to severely limit the patient’s liberty and autonomy. The binding of his arms, the locking of the door and the ostentatious retention of the key are specific, localized extensions of the global spatial control unerringly imposed on the rank-and-file soldiers, who are exposed to a faster, more brutal approach to re-education than the officers at Craiglockhart (Leese 2002: 85–99).

The Art of Distributions: Cellular Partitioning of Space The aim of disciplinary space was […] to know how to locate individuals, […] to be able at each moment to supervise the conduct of each individual, to assess it, to judge it, to calculate its qualities or merits. It was a procedure, therefore, aimed at knowing, mastering and using. Discipline organizes an analytical space. […] The disciplinary space is always, basically, cellular. (Foucault 1991: 143)

Craiglockhart’s inmates, all of officer rank, are depicted in Regeneration as being forced to entertain conditions to which they were not accustomed. The bedroom doors were consciously rendered unlockable while personal privacy was impinged upon to an even greater degree by an absence of locks in the bathrooms. Sassoon’s realization that locks were indeed provided in the guest room, in which his close friend and comrade Robert Graves makes a brief stay, compounds his frustration. This difference in spatial privilege acts as an unarticulated offer or subliminal incentive that seeks to foment the patient’s desire to cooperate and thereby regain such civilized privileges. Craiglockhart is thus represented as a clinical space, endowed with total power by the State, in which the lack of locks and virtual absence of brute physical restraint are the keynote, echoing Foucault’s poignant observations on the calculation of openings in more modern disciplinary mechanisms: […] an architecture that is no longer built simply to be seen […] but to permit an internal, articulated and detailed control – to render visible those who are inside it; in more general terms, an architecture that would operate to transform individuals:

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Craiglockhart is an area in which self-regulation by the inmates is fomented by their internalization of determined rules/norms by which they are encouraged to abide. The patients largely follow the prescribed regime whilst any prospect of deviation from the established norms is threatened and, if necessary, ultimately met with physical confinement, as illustrated by Dr Rivers’s rather less humane treatment of Captain Broadbent, who persists in infringing the hospital rules: ‘I hope it doesn’t happen this time. Because last time, if you remember, you had to be locked up. Why don’t you go to see Major Bryce now?’ ‘Yes, all right.’ Broadbent stood up, reluctantly, and spat, ‘Thank you, sir’. (Barker 1992: 60)

Freedom of movement within the enclosed hospital setting is thus largely conceded at Craiglockhart providing the patients comply with the obligations dictated by the medical and nursing staff, such as attendance at consultations, participation in therapeutic activities embracing outdoor pursuits or, in the case of Dr Brock’s patients, activities that sought to actively re-establish their links with the surrounding environment (Brock [1918] 2012). One of the few physical spaces which is strictly out of bounds for inmates is the terrace at the top of the building, which Dr Rivers categorizes as being potentially too ‘tempting’ (Barker 1992: 19) a means of suicidal escape for the patients. Indeed, escape is not to be contemplated on any account, as structured channelling and reinsertion remain the prime objectives of this disciplinary regenerative space. Permission to go beyond the limits of Craiglockhart and its immediate rural surroundings, and thus enjoy the luxury of socializing with normal people, is awarded on the basis of appropriate behaviour. The suspension of this privilege is a source

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of chastisement, implemented as a direct consequence of non-compliance with internal norms or with more far-reaching military regulations. The therapeutic regime instilled by Colonel Balfour-Graham at Craiglockhart in April 1918, six months after Dr Rivers’s departure, is overtly alluded to in A. G. Macdonnell’s satirical novel England, Their England (1934), which makes clear reference to the spatiality of disciplinary power: It consisted of finding out the likes and dislikes of each patient, and then ordering them to abstain from the former and apply themselves diligently to the latter. For example, those of the so-called patients, for the Commandant privately disbelieved in the existence of shell-shock, […] those who disliked noise were allotted rooms on the main road. Those who had been, in happier times, parsons, schoolmasters, journalists, and poets were forbidden the use of library and driven off in batches to physical drill, lawn tennis, golf and badminton. […] Those who were terrified of solitude had special rooms by themselves behind green-baize doors at the ends of remote corridors. (1934:17–19)

Although the clinical approach favoured by Dr Rivers is not so aggressively focused on deliberate spatial harassment, compulsory room-sharing at Dr Rivers’s Craiglockhart (late 1916 to November 1917) nevertheless serves to increase the unwanted invasion of privacy and to exert further psychological pressure. The mixing of patients with different degrees of affliction is seen to seriously affect patients’ mental stability and Dr Rivers expresses his surprise that Sassoon is able to ‘tolerate being cooped up with “wash-outs” and “degenerates” even as long as he had’ (Barker 1992: 118–19). Foucault highlights just such a danger for the inmates of carceral institutions and earmarks it as a conscious weapon at the disposal of a dominating power: ‘First, confinement causes alienation: prison makes men mad’ (Foucault 1997: 227–8). The reader of Regeneration is therefore made privy to the force with which the hospital environment can contribute to the disintegration of a patient’s emotional integrity. Sassoon soon succumbs to fear and appears on the brink of psychological ruination: ‘He knew he was shivering more with fear then cold, though it was difficult to name the fear. The place, perhaps. The haunted faces, the stammers, the stumbling walks, the indefinable look of being “mental”. Craiglockhart frightened him more than the front had ever done’ (Barker 1992: 63). In this unfamiliar, unsettling scenario, he acutely suffers the physical incursions of confinement, even under such a

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relatively liberal regime. His hospital bed’s institutional ‘rubber underlay’ causes him to sweat unnaturally, which, in turn, imbues his skin with ‘a clinical smell that made his body unfamiliar to him’ (Barker 1992: 63). He is made to suffer both external alienation (from society) and self-alienation as he feels seriously out of sorts even with his own body. Sassoon’s lack of identification with his body at this stage, however momentary, is relevant in that, as Foucault highlights, the interned subjects’ control over their own bodies substantially changes in the institutional context: ‘At the heart of the procedures of discipline, it manifests the subjection of those who are perceived as objects and the objectification of those who are subjected’ (Foucault 1991: 184–5). The body becomes the object of clinical interest and is consequently appropriated by the network of power to be converted into a docile body, ultimately malleable, subject to the will and dictates of external sources arbitrarily invested with power.

The Art of Distributions: Hierarchical Hospital Structure Discipline is an art of rank, a technique for the transformation of arrangements. It individualizes bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations. (Foucault 1991: 146)

For Foucault, the key unit that defines the distribution of individuals within a disciplinary space is rank. In unwitting consonance with this idea, Pat Barker provides a poignant account of the working of the human hierarchy that regulates the medical milieu at Craiglockhart. The members that constitute this hierarchy, through their niches in the prevailing chain of command, are guardians of the system, maintaining its balance and ensuring the enforcement of the norms at the different levels. The hospital personnel, whether they be military representatives on the Medical Boards, consultant doctors, junior doctors, ward sisters, nurses, VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachment members) or orderlies, are co-ordinated – although more in on-going antagonism than in perfect harmony – to act in consonance. Each

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rank within the classification plays an integral part in providing updated knowledge on the patients and thus in producing situations where power can be more effectively deployed. As Foucault posits, ‘in organising “cells”, “places” and “ranks”, the disciplines create complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hierarchical’ (Foucault 1991: 148). It is worthy of note that allusions are constantly made in the narrative to the relationships maintained between the various members of staff within the hospital setting. Interestingly, the reader is provided a picture which, instead of presenting each faction as a harmonious cog in the overall well-oiled disciplinary machine, highlights the antagonism and constant jockeying for position prevalent within the system. The system is not a static hierarchy – it is subjected to a continual, fluctuating tension, marked by constant minor readjustments and repositionings made on the basis of the self-interest of each of its members linked to their level of identification with the reigning political authorities’ projection of national or collective interest. The system – in terms of maintenance of discipline – is presented as working efficiently to the extent to which these mini-resistances and conflicts are resolved. In line with Foucauldian premises, relationships within the hierarchy are thus in flux, subject to being constantly redefined, reaffirmed and consolidated. Despite the tension existing between and within the different levels that constitute the hierarchical structure, power distribution within the hospital context is clearly pyramidal in shape, roughly configured from top to bottom in the order of positions of responsibility previously mentioned, namely military administrative authorities (Major Huntley); senior consultant doctors (Dr Rivers, Dr Yealland, Dr Bryce, Dr Head, Dr Brock); junior doctors; Ward Sisters/Matrons; career nurses; VADs; orderlies and voluntary pacifist orderlies. In the National Hospital, where Dr Yealland practises, doctor-patient contact during the daily rounds is described as being kept to the curt, inexpressive, impersonal minimum while ‘frightened’ junior doctors are subjected to strict cross-questioning from the senior doctors in front of the accompanying medical entourage until they provide correctly framed answers, ‘a fear Dr Rivers remembered only too clearly’ (Barker 1992: 225) from his own training days at Bart’s Hospital. Foucault ([1976] 2007:150) identifies this ‘codified ritual’ as a clear example of the

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spatiality of disciplinary power at work within hierarchies: ‘the ritual of the visit: the almost religious procession, headed by the doctor, of the whole hierarchy of the hospital: assistants, students, nurses, etc., at the foot of the bed of each patient’. If there exists a marked tension within the ranks of the medical practitioners, then the subsequent stratum of hierarchical power – the nursing staff – betrays no less antagonism. Matrons or Ward Sisters wield considerable power within the hospital regime and maintain a delicate – at times indulgent and ambiguous – relationship with the senior doctors. Their antagonism or occasional chiding of the senior doctors helps to maintain the required distancing and occupational compartmentalization between Doctor and Sister/Matron whilst also enabling them to form a more intimate and privileged relationship with the immediately superior stratum of power: Rivers went into the hall, smiling, only to have the smile wiped off his face by the sight of Matron standing immediately inside the entrance. She’d observed the entire incident and evidently disapproved. ‘You could have sent an orderly down to push the chair Captain Rivers.’ Rivers opened his mouth, and shut it again. He reminded himself, not for the first time, that it was absolutely necessary for Matron to win some of their battles. (Barker 1992: 119–20)

Such scenes are a recurrent feature in the trilogy, especially in Regeneration (Barker 1992: 59) and The Ghost Road (Barker 1996: 19, 52) and illustrate that the surveillance/supervision component operating between different layers of the institutional power system does not always work solely along a dominant-subordinate axis. Instead, the interaction is subtler and more fluid, allowing for variations and compensations which paradoxically lead to a more compact and stable system. Resistance, or minor antagonism, serves to momentarily challenge or even breach the regulated status quo, but successfully managed resistance subsequently fixes the relationships more deeply within the areas of flux necessarily inherent in the overall infrastructure, as Foucault so perceptively highlights: By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power […] was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole

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together and traverses it in its entirety with effects of power that derive from one another; supervisors, perpetually supervised. (Foucault 1991: 177)

Within the nursing staff stratum of what Foucault would term ‘the continuous, individualising pyramid’ (1991: 220), comprising career nurses and VADs, we witness a curiously less flexible interaction, which perhaps indicates that the organizational structure is a combination of a hierarchical and divisional model. It would appear that the further down the power pyramid, the more rigid the power relations necessarily become. This configuration is in full consonance with Foucault’s premise that disciplinary mechanisms ‘use procedures of partitioning and verticality, that they introduce, between the different elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define compact hierarchical networks’ (1991: 220). Voluntary nursing staff become the butt of a series of derisory remarks throughout the trilogy, whether the narrative voice emanates from the nurses, the doctors or from the standpoint of the omniscient narrator. VADs are characterized in Regeneration as ‘clucking, fussing, flapping ineffectually’ (17), speaking ‘in that bracingly jolly way of theirs’ (224) and as being useful only for the ‘consoling’ of downhearted patients (139). Their usefulness is constantly devalued as they are relegated to a superficial, unskilled role within the body of the nursing staff. Indeed, Miss Banbury – a VAD at Craiglockhart – is dismissed by Sister Roberts as a ‘silly woman’: ‘She [the VAD] was … Sister Roberts’s bête noire, for no better reason then she was well-meaning, clumsy, enthusiastic, unqualified and upper-class’ (Barker 1996: 62). It is noteworthy that the career nurses, especially those having worked in pre-war asylums, generally emanated from the more impoverished sectors of pre-war society and as such quite rightly valued their hard-won position of authority and logically resented unskilled labour, above all coming from middle-class or upper-class volunteers (Hallett 2013). This fierce guarding of rank, acquired through arduous pre-war endeavour, paradoxically leads the career nurses into a more faithful, inflexible support of the overall system in which they have found a niche that endows them with globally limited, albeit locally significant power. It is precisely these components of the system that have most to gain in the perpetuation of

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the status quo and their standpoint is ironically portrayed by Barker: ‘She [Sister Roberts] had climbed her way out of the Gateshead slums and therefore felt obliged to believe in the corrosive effects on the human psyche of good food, good housing and good education’ (Barker 1996: 62). Indeed, Foucault astutely points out that the overall power structure, despite not being a static framework, does not seek to encourage excessive alliances between different factions operating within the same stratum for fear of potential challenge to and ultimate imbalance of the overall network: ‘That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; […] it establishes calculated distributions […] it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions – anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions’ (Foucault 1991: 219). The following echelon in the hospital staff hierarchy is occupied by the regular orderlies and voluntary orderlies, the latter being able-bodied men who carried out non-combatant work owing to their status of conscientious objectors to the war. No dialogue with either faction is entertained by the nursing staff as this rung of the hierarchical ladder is depicted as being mere order-takers, with very limited autonomy or influence. Nevertheless, within this rank significant tension does become apparent: ‘The nurses and the existing orderlies – men who were either disabled or above military age – did their best […]. What was desperately required was young male muscle, and this the pacifist orderlies – recruited under the Home Office Scheme – supplied. But they also aroused hostility in the staff obliged to work with them’ (Barker 1994: 149). The regular orderlies in Craiglockhart are unexpectedly given short shrift by Pat Barker as she unmercifully reveals the depths to which human nature can descend in its zeal to occupy any rung, however humble, of the power ladder: ‘He [Orderly Wantage] was a fat, jolly man with a limitless capacity for hate. He hated skivers, he hated shirkers, he hated conchies, he hated the Huns, he hated the Kaiser. He loved the war’ (Barker 1994: 150). This intra-level tension is portrayed as being caught up in an upward spiral of intensity until Dr Rivers feels obliged to intervene so as to re-establish order by forcefully rebuking the orderly who has deliberately left his pacifist counterpart in a compromising

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situation in which he has exposed an officer inmate to unscheduled suffering and humiliation (Barker 1994: 215). As we filter down towards the lower order of the power pyramid – no less important nonetheless in the overall concept of power maintenance and perpetuation – we encounter the objects on which power and disciplinary control is to be more formally and visibly applied, namely the inmates or patients. Whereas the reader is presented with a markedly ambiguous picture of medical treatment prescribed by the various doctors (from the largely more humane practices of Dr Rivers to the more brutal, unrelenting, impersonal aggression of Dr Yealland), nurse-patient interaction is almost universally characterized by a tendency towards active domination and control. Nurses take their role in the chain of command very seriously and are key elements in the maintenance of stability within the hospital fabric. They are a vehicle of constant surveillance and information collation and quickly earn the epithet ‘spies’ (Barker 1992: 67) for their nightly vigilance and subsequent reporting back to their superiors. Sassoon is continuously reminded of his exposure to unrelenting clinical observance and finds ‘the lack of privacy almost intolerable’ (Barker 1992: 145). Even beyond the hospital confines, in Edinburgh town centre, and outside her working hours, Matron sees a patient who has contravened regulations by removing the conspicuous hospital insignia from his greatcoat and proceeds to report this transgression to the hospital authorities with great relish (Barker 1992: 95). The valuable information provided ultimately leads to the patient’s obliged confinement on hospital premises for a fortnight. In similar fashion, the nurses also play a key role in regulating access to unbecoming commodities, such as alcohol or razors (Barker 1996: 61) through their regular, unscrupulous searching of patients’ private lockers. The reader is thus never allowed to entertain any doubt as to where their loyalties ultimately lie – self-interest in the quest for professional advancement or survival within the existing power network is clearly revealed as being their prime motivating force. Nurse Pratt is depicted as continuing to mete out the same kind of attention as she did ‘on the locked wards of large Victorian lunatic asylums’ prior to the war, while ‘in any altercation between a member of staff and a patient, the patient was automatically and indisputably wrong’ (Barker 1994: 213–14). Empathy shown to ailing

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patients is in scarce supply as nurses enact ‘a necessary suspension’ (Barker 1996: 146) of their sense of humanity so as to be able to unquestioningly carry out the role they have been allotted or have willingly assumed within the system’s hierarchy. The reader is likewise led to equate this level of emotional suspension with that invoked by both self-conscripted doctors (Captain Rivers) and frontline wartime soldiers (Second Lieutenant Sassoon) so as to be able to carry out their prescribed duty effectively. Both inmates and staff must be brought – whether consciously or unconsciously – to understand and internalize Foucault’s far-reaching insight: ‘In short, one should have a master, be caught up and situated within a hierarchy; one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination: […] it is a question of order to be maintained’ (1991: 291).

Conclusion Rather uncannily at times, given that she has never publicly acknowledged Foucault as a significant source of inspiration, Barker’s narrative clearly echoes a number of key Foucauldian tenets in its portrayal of the distributive disciplinary apparatus applied to the inmates of military psychiatric medical institutions during the Great War. The fear and shame instilled by the patients’ mere presence in such intimidating establishments, added to the emotional coercion applied by family and friends, are compounded by elements of intimidating physical architecture, by strategies involving calculated clinical spatial partitioning and by the insertion of inmates into a fixing, individualizing mesh of institutional hierarchy. As Foucault (2007: 149) argues when referring to hospital architecture in its broadest – not solely physical – sense: ‘[T]he hospital constitutes a means of intervention on the patient. The architecture of the hospital must be the agent and instrument of cure’. Confinement becomes analogous – at least for Sassoon – with potential moral, social and military ruination, while intolerably low levels of privacy and forced cohabitation unite to further increase the coercive tension. Inmates are objectified, exposed, examined

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and kept under constant surveillance in architecturally manipulated spaces ensuring maximum visibility and accountability, echoing what Foucault came to denominate as ‘the intelligence of discipline in stone’ and ‘the gentle efficiency of total surveillance’ (1991: 249). Barker seems to coincide with Foucault in emphasizing the heterogeneous nature of the apparatus that exercises power in that it includes not only human agents, but also instruments or vehicles of power (such as buildings and documentation production, processing and recording), as well as the regulations, norms, rituals and practices through which power is successfully deployed (Rouse 2007). These mechanisms – so evident locally within the confines of a particular institution, whether it be penitentiary, educational or medical in nature – are those presented by Foucault as having been dispersed into more subtle relationships of power within the context of a non-warring society in a process which he denominates ‘the swarming of disciplinary mechanisms’ (Foucault 1991: 211). In Pat Barker’s account, not only was Siegfried Sassoon successfully normalized and reabsorbed into the ideological fold after four months of treatment in ‘Dottyville’, but the State was also able to further strengthen its controlling hold as a direct consequence of identifying, scientifically discrediting and eventually neutralizing the element of resistance encountered. As Foucault so appositely highlights, power is the result of the on-going struggles to challenge and maintain networks of domination. Barker’s narrative demonstrates, in accordance with this idea, that there is paradoxically no power without resistance and that power relations are strengthened not weakened by the threat from a certain level of manageable resistance against which reinforced unity can be brought to bear. There is no more unifying force, especially in times of national adversity, than collective outrage about or condemnation of an event, person or group projected as being detrimental, threatening or dangerous to the common good. As Barker’s trilogy fictionalizes, a society’s willingness to accept this approach and become actively involved in its often brutal and callous implementation is essentially based on individual members’ well-developed awareness of self-interest inextricably linked to an often flawed conception of national or collective interest, the latter being the product of exposure to subtly manipulative disciplinary power networks.

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Bibliography Barker, P. (1992 [1991]). Regeneration. London: Penguin. Barker, P. (1994 [1993]). The Eye in the Door. London: Penguin. Barker, P. (1996 [1995]). The Ghost Road. London: Penguin. Bentham, J. (1812). The Panopticon versus New South Wales. London: Robert Baldwin. Bourke, J. (1996). Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourne, J. M. (1989). Britain and the Great War 1914–1918. London: Edward Arnold. Brock, A. J. (2012 [1918]). ‘The Re-education of the Adult: The Neurasthenic in War and Peace’. In Sociological Review a10 (1), pp. 25–40. London: Wiley. Egremont, M. (2005). Siegfried Sassoon A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Foucault, M. (1991 [1975]). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. London: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1997 [1961]). Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard. London: Routledge. Foucault, M. (2007 [1974]). ‘The Incorporation of the Hospital into Modern Technol­ ogy’, trans. E. Knowlton Jr, W. J. King and S. Elden. In J. W. Crampton and S. Elden (eds), Space, Knowledge and Power: Foucault and Geography, pp. 141–51. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fussell, P. (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hallet, C. E. (2013). ‘Emotional Nursing: Involvement, Engagement and Detachment in the Writings of First World War Nurses and VADs’. In A. S. Fell and C. E. Hallet (eds), First World War Nursing: New Perspectives, pp. 87–102. New York: Routledge. Hynes, S. (1990). A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture. London: Bodley Head. Leese, P. (2002). Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Macdonnell, A. G. (1934). England, Their England. London: Folio Society. McGowan, P. (2007). Edinburgh Survey of Gardens and Designed Landscapes. Edinburgh: City of Edinburgh Council. Purdue, A. W. (2015). The First World War. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rouse, J. (2007). ‘Power/Knowledge’. In G. Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, pp. 95–122. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Showalter, E. (1985). The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980. New York: Pantheon.

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Slobodin, R. (1978). W. H. R. Rivers. New York: Columbia University Press. Stoler, A. L. (2013). ‘Reason Aside: Reflections on Enlightenment and Empire’. In G. Huggan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Colonial Studies, pp. 39–66. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webb, T. (2006). ‘Dottyville – Craiglockhart War Hospital and Shell-shock Treatment in the First World War’, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (7), pp. 342–6. Yealland, L. (1918). Hysterical Disorders of Warfare. London: Macmillan.

Ángel Galdón Rodríguez

2  Metropolitan Isolation in Dystopian Literature

abstract A significant number of widely known instances of dystopian literature place the action in urban scenarios. However, a thorough exploration of the setting evinces that not only are the citizens always controlled in a metropolitan context, there is also an external forbidden space beyond the city. This chapter explores the features of this separation in some of the best studied dystopian texts in English literature and in a selection of more recent titles from the twenty-first century and seeks to establish the causes and purpose of the trope of urban isolation in the genre.

Critics and historians have studied dystopian literature in a number of ways. Starting in the literary field, dystopianism has spread to other corners of popular culture, including comics and films. Therefore, not only have dystopian elements been studied in the frame of literary criticism and comparative literature, but also, due to their social influence, in the more transversal perspective of Cultural Studies. While it would be difficult to date the birth of the genre, it may be granted that dystopian fiction emerges around the beginning of twentieth century with a stable series of features. However, one cannot be oblivious of certain precedents like Jack London in the late nineteenth century – When the Sleeper Awakes (1899), for example – or even older works such as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726). Known especially thanks to titles such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), dystopian fiction may be regarded as a subgenre of utopian literature. There are notable works with a major influence on the rise of dystopias, like Thomas Moore’s Utopia (1516) or Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1626). These authors depicted perfect societies where citizens satisfied their needs in both economic and

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intellectual ways. In the case of dystopias, however, the author imagines a society in which the polis is an adverse setting for mankind, hampering any progress that does not benefit a ruling elite. The aim of this fiction is to satirize the society in which the author lives, trying to warn the reader of current negative tendencies. Dystopias are understood in numerous popular forums – that is, the mainstream press – as predictions of the future, since it is a common trope of these texts to place the action then. Thus, in many journals and articles for entertainment magazines, there is some assessment of, for example, Huxley’s (Kirsch 2013) or Orwell’s texts’ accuracy as if they were political forecasts ( Jameson 2014). Nevertheless, dystopian writers are in fact satirizing their own society and this core element in the genre has been thoroughly analysed by the literary and cultural scholars. This understanding is supported in studies like George Orwell’s 1948 ‘Wilde’s Utopia’ (Orwell 2003: 74) or Huxley’s Brave New World Revisited (Huxley 2004), where both authors explain what triggers contemporary dystopian fiction: their own cultural environments, in terms of politics, economy, and social struggle. Since such contributions, a series of scholars have supported the idea of dystopias as satires, from authors specialized in the field, like Michael Sherborne, to those who are less specialized like Eric S. Rabkin or Mary Snodgrass. In fact, the subject of utopian and dystopian fiction remains attention-grabbing at present thanks to academics like Gregory Claeys or Fatima Vieira, along with the several periodical publications such as Utopian Studies, edited by Nicole Pohl, or associations like the Utopian Studies Society in Europe. In these and other forums, scholars have analysed many works of literature, especially the Anglophone tradition. This fiction has not only been the focus of interest for specialized criticism, but even for the authors themselves – as was pointed out earlier. Orwell, in fact, highlights the fact that Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels imagines societies taking into consideration a multiplicity of political and industrial factors, but always as satires of actual England (Orwell 2000a: 371). An example is the society of the Houyhnhnms, with an apparent free organization of the tribe, but compelling strong and static political structures (2000a: 376). In the second half of the twentieth century there were already valuable specific approaches in Eric S. Rabkin, Martin H. Greenberg and Joseph D. Olander’s edition No

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Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, which includes contributions on both utopian and dystopian fiction (1983). More recent studies offer thorough analyses of some of the various elements of dystopianism, such as Gregory Claeys’s compilation The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, which places it within the frame of utopian literature (2010). Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint’s volume The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction (2011) helps as well to understand the difference between dystopian novels and science fiction, two genres which are often misunderstood. Despite this profusion of scholarly studies, specific considerations of the urban aspects of dystopian fiction are scarce. A few, nonetheless, have already undertaken the task. A case in point is Eric S. Rabkin, who explains in his definition of the genre ‘Atavism and Utopia’ how it is a common characteristic for dystopian authors to create a sort of Garden of Eden beyond urban space (1983: 4). The subsequent Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature offers several thorough studies on the setting of dystopian works – that is, the historical moment, the ruling powers, the social context – and its effect on the development of the plot. The volume includes Fátima Vieira’s text ‘The concept of utopia’, J. C. Davis’s ‘Thomas More’s Utopia: sources, legacy, and interpretation’ and Gregory Claeys’s ‘The origins of dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell’, analysing the most significant authors. In fact, Brian Stableford, who also collaborates in the compilation, explains in ‘Ecology and Dystopia’ how nature has been depicted in the last two centuries in utopian and dystopian fiction. With all the above contributions shedding light on the understanding of the genre, what the present study does is a double exploration. First, it examines one element that can be found in the most popular titles of the genre, for example, Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four: the urban contextualization of the plot. Do the governments depicted in such novels need to lock the citizens up within the city limits to avoid heterodox ideologies? Is natural space against the interests of the dictatorial rule? Do characters who live in the wild, beyond city boundaries, mean a threat for the dystopian government? In short, is there a necessity to separate the city and natural space? Secondly, that question needs to be considered outside the group of dystopian titles traditionally studied as the most

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representative of the genre. The genre is being expanded as these lines are being written, with new works published every year, not only in the literary field. Examples of this are the novels Dominion, by C. J. Sansom (2014), or Occupied, by Josh Sheldon (2015), and the recent adaptation to films of texts like Divergent, premiered in 2014, or The Hunger Games series, released from 2012 to 2015. The fact that the film industry is currently investing in the adaptation of dystopian works shows the widespread interest the genre creates. It is therefore necessary to broaden the analysis and cover new titles. Are, then, modern dystopias in the twenty-first century still following up on the work of classic authors such as Huxley, Orwell or Bradbury? That being the case, are they inspired by similar factors? To try to answer these questions, I will briefly explore recent dystopias: Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2012) and Hugh Howey’s Wool (2013), which I will subsequently compare to the foundational titles already mentioned. Given the popularity of the genre and its multi-media diffusion, a merely literary analysis cannot be sufficient, and therefore the role of Cultural Studies in the approach to dystopian fiction is essential since it brings into play a multidisciplinary combination of methodologies, suited to the polyhedral nature of a civilization. The aim to understand a society as a diverse mixture of components is defined as one of the major aims in this field, as Stuart Hall explains, insisting ‘on the historical specificity of culture, on its plural, not singular definition; […] on the necessary struggle, tension and conflict’ (Hall 1992: 20). The depth of this intellectual task implies a wide variety of factors to be examined which are not only historical, but also industrial and cultural. This multiplicity of influences has been well theorized by authors such as Raymond Williams, who in his Culture and Society precisely highlights the importance of examples like George Orwell as a writer who defines in his works a society as a whole (Williams 1960: 304). Subsequent scholars like Andrew Milner state that ‘writing, reading and the various associate social practices which facilitate them represent the particular fashion by which one can understand the ‘informing process of narrative’. Milner then underlines the fact that ‘literary studies threatens to become part of a much wider intellectual enterprise, variously designated as “cultural sociology or cultural studies” (Milner 1996: 14). Bearing in mind the task here proposed, the following

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pages establish connections among multiple factors and try to avoid reductionist hypotheses. This is why the aim is to provide an explanation of the urban role in dystopian fiction, whether there is an intention to separate it from its natural and wild surroundings or not, and discuss the reasons for it, yet considering them as a mixture of factors both literary and cultural, as dystopian authors criticize the actual civilizations in which they live. To begin the analysis, a proper definition of metropolis needs to be provided, as it constitutes a core element in the definition of a civilization. Plato, in The Republic, saw the necessity of a social emancipation from nature and berated what the Greeks called barbaroi: groups who are unable to establish a functional town. For Plato, a Greek polis is defined in this way: perfect harmony among workers, ruling elites and guardians (Ferrari 2003: 116). When Mary Snodgrass tackles the definition of utopia, she attributes to utopian cities the ability to use and control nature for the benefit of their inhabitants (1995). Later dystopians will present urban scenarios as the antithesis of the metropolis as regarded in Greek culture. I have already explained that the trigger of dystopian literature is social critique, so the flaws of urban scenarios are hence one of the satirical targets in the fiction here analysed. Some of the best-known works of the genre come with the growth of modern totalitarianism, like Nazism or Stalinism. As dystopian cities therefore present undesirable states, the opposition between nature and the urban context makes the first one stand out as a warm shelter for the protagonists, who attempt to hide there from the governing powers. Pier Stephens explains the manner in which texts in Western tradition have continuously developed this idea in visions as early as the Bible. One only needs to go back to the harmony of the Garden of Eden. Later literary traditions will see the recurrence of nature as shelter for freedom, for example in the myth of Robin Hood (Stephens, 2010). It is not the aim of this text to thoroughly explain the features of totalitarianism, although something can be said to understand its importance within the context of the present research: it is intensely satirized in fiction in an array of forms, especially the twentieth century. There are previous dystopias that contribute to this satire, such as H. G. Well’s The Time Machine (1895), Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), or E. H. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), among others. Nonetheless, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s

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We (1924) is one of the earliest in making a clear attack on a defined form of contemporary totalitarianism. Tom Moylan, a scholar focused on the main characteristics of utopian and dystopian fiction, establishes that We influenced the subsequent dystopias Brave New World and Nineteen EightyFour, and contains numerous features that will later reappear in the previously mentioned works (2000: xv). Yevgeny Zamyatin develops We (Мы) not long after the Russian Revolution and the institution of the Soviet Union. Hence, his text can be understood as one of the first dystopias to criticize communist rule. According to Christopher Collins, author of a comprehensive volume on his life and works, the satirical features of the novel here analysed cause both his arrest and subsequent confinement, as well as the book being censored in the Soviet Union (Collins 1973: 16). Eventually, Zamyatin had to leave Russia to escape political persecution. His work became known in English in translation (Stephens 2010) and, as Marc Slonim explains in a preface to the book, it is through the American version that Huxley and Orwell meet numerous dystopian literary features that they later use in Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Zamiatin 1952: xxi). By depicting an imaginary totalitarian nation called the United State, Zamyatin presents in We a society in which all aspects of citizens’ lives are managed by the government. Individuals are nameless and are addressed by combining a figure and a letter of the alphabet. Such regulations are designed in order to erase their identity, replaced by a single-state one, that of the United State. This metropolis is presented as isolated from the rest of the world by the construction of a Green Wall. The wall disallows citizens from knowing about possible life beyond the control of the state. D-503 is the protagonist and is initially presented as a plain worker within the borders of United State, even showing dislike towards the outcasts: ‘From beyond the Green Wall, from the wild, invisible plains, the wind brings the yellow honeydust from a flower of some kind. This sweet dust parches the lips – you skim your tongue across them every minute – and you presume that there are sweet lips on every woman you encounter (and man, of course). This somewhat interferes with logical reasoning’ (2007: 5). D-503 worships human rational thought instead, including mathematics and mechanics:

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The cranks were twinkling, dipping to the right and to the left; the shoulders of the balance wheel were rocking proudly; and the cutting head of the perforating machine curtsied, keeping time with some inaudible music. Instantly I saw the greater beauty of this grand mechanized ballet. […] Why is this dance beautiful? The answer: because it is non-free movement, because the whole profound point of this dance lies precisely in its absolute, aesthetic subordination, its perfect non-freedom. If indeed our ancestors were prone to dancing at the most inspired moments of their lives (religious mysteries, military parades), then all this can only mean one thing: the instinct for non-freedom. (2007: 6)

A study that meticulously explains the features of this vision of the metropolis is Pier Stephens’s, analysing how Zamyatin presents the wild. Stephens claims that D-503 opposes both scenarios identifying nature as liberty (2010) in the most ‘Robinhoodian’ way. In contrast, the city of We is presented as a Garden of Eden, the United State acting as God, not giving total liberty, although providing harmony in exchange. The totalitarian state, then, brings the equilibrium and protection that lead to happiness: ‘Again we are simple-hearted innocents, like Adam and Eve. No more confusion about good and evil: everything is very simple, heavenly, childishly simple. The Benefactor, the Machine, the Cube, the Gas Bell Jar, the Guardians – all these are good’ (2007: 55). D-503’s sees nature as something dangerous and it is therefore necessary to isolate the metropolis from the evils of wilderness and chaos. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World appeared long after Zamyatin’s text. Published in 1932, Brave New World was written in the context of rapid development in scientific and industrial innovation, electrical networks, and mass consumerism, as well as politics, for example, the rise of the Soviet Union or fascism. Scholars know the special relevance of this historical frame to Huxley because he analyses its importance in Brave New World Revisited, where fields such as psychology, economy or chemistry are highlighted (2004a: 113), showing the complexity of the cultural dimensions that shape the text. Apart from Huxley’s self-commentary, there are thorough studies which also explore literary intertextuality in Brave New World. Michael Sherborne, for example, explains that it is essential to read it along with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. According to Sherborne, Huxley’s principal literary source is the English dystopian tradition, going

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back to Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) or The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) (2005b: 86, 106). Further critics like David Bradshaw understand Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four as part of a triangle with a common structure, initiated by Zamyatin’s We (2004b: vi) whose main goal, as was previously pointed out, was to criticize some elements in the early twentieth-century Soviet Union. In Brave New World Huxley satirizes a society where the state has developed to an exaggerated level all the economic, political and scientific trends of the 1930s (2004a: 30). Huxley, in fact, shifts the satirical environment by naming his characters after famous figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In what is known as the World State all citizens must be part of one of the five castes, organized in levels of importance and intelligence. The government harvests the individuals depending on industrial and economic needs. One of the protagonists, Bernard Marx, shows a deep awareness of his individuality, eventually questioning the political organization of the world. The reader finds a hinge in the plot during a vacation in a reservation in New Mexico. That reservation is the way in which Huxley imagines the Green Wall which Zamyatin had already used to isolate the city. Nevertheless, in a different way from Zamyatin’s idea, Huxley isolates the little wilderness left in the world from the widespread civilization with an electric fence. There, though, some tribes are allowed to carry on living in nature and according to tradition. Standard citizens go and visit them for recreation. Such excursions are designed by the government as a reminder of the advantages of life in the civilized dystopia. However, against the state’s intentions, Bernard decides to bring a savage to London. Many characters explain to the savage all the perks of modern society: ‘And you really can go flying, whenever you like?’ ‘Whenever you like.’ And she would tell him about the lovely music that came out of a box, and the nice games you could play, and the delicious things to eat and drink. (2004b: 110)

The savage, though, sees nature as Eden and finds in London that dystopian undesirable atmosphere which is to be disliked by the reader. Such a

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circumstance turns this uncivilized tribal human into an outcast. Hence, the author of Brave New World establishes a clear division between the wild and civilization: the World State and the Reservation. It is true, however, that the first one is clearly larger and rules over the second, but the reader can easily distinguish one from the other. Michael Sherborne indicates that ‘the Indians are unable to control or insulate themselves from nature and, instead, confront its dangers irrationally through rituals’ (2005a: 40). Then, the way to civilization is, according to Huxley, the creation of a sort of organization able to provide a progressively better welfare state and this is through minimizing the struggle against nature: hunger, cold, etc. (2005a: 38). Brave New World is a society in which the characters are happily embedded within the World State structures, disliking direct contact with nature: ‘Queer,’ said Lenina. ‘Very queer.’ It was her ordinary word of condemnation. (…) ‘I wish we could have brought the plane,’ said Lenina, looking resentfully at the blank impending rock-face. ‘I hate walking. And you feel so small when you’re on the ground at the bottom of a hill.’ (2004b: 92)

The World State teaches the population to dread nature, so that civilization looks more appealing. Thus, they are conditioned to hate the first and love the latter: ‘Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes’ (2004b: 18). This dystopian metropolis requires protection, as it is the only entity that guarantees a stable society: food, shelter, services, company and joy. Characters like Lenina understand that in the reservation in New Mexico, for instance, the concepts previously mentioned cannot be found. Contrary to this, however, the dissident Bernard Marx, John the savage and the other inhabitants of the reservation see nature from the opposite point of view. Aldous Huxley manages to draw through the hatred towards social and physical wilderness all the virtues of the natural environment. One of the most blatant scenes is that of the eagle, approaching the characters and offering them ‘a world very different from the man-made one’ (Sherborne, 2005a: 40). This is linked to the fact that at the end of the text the savage, having rejected the civilized London that he is shown, decides to live in a

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lighthouse: ‘He had decided to live there because the view was so beautiful, because, from his vantage point, he seemed to be looking out on to the incarnation of a divine being’ (2004: 216). To put it briefly, it can be noted that there is a special division between metropolitan and natural space, although this separation is also social, not only geographical. Huxley’s innovation lies in the way he isolates the metropolis as an inversion of the dystopias we have already described: instead of separating the metropolis from civilization, Huxley isolates a narrow wild area within the World State. There is much agreement about the fact that George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four along with Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World are among the most recognizable and best known dystopian texts – see, for example, William Steinhoff (1983: 155). An innovation, though, is the fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four is the representation of a world that, unlike Huxley’s World State, has been divided into three nations, all ruled by totalitarian regimes. The action takes place in the one that controls Great Britain, Oceania, where Orwell locates Winston Smith. Winston lives with much difficulty in London in terms of work conditions, scarcity of food and political freedom. The reader notes how the government hampers any development of individual identity in every way, controlling work, time, rest, leisure and even sex. However, to continue with the dystopian literary structure, Winston Smith changes from initial resignation to life under the dictatorial rule to rebellion against it. He defies the elite in a number of ways, from loving the girl he likes to tasting forbidden food. Does Orwell portray the dual spaces here studied by isolating the city from wild areas? The author does design paired spaces. In fact, Orwell shows his interest in the differences between the city and the countryside in some of his earlier works. It could even be noted that he shows a particular dislike for urban life. William Steinhoff reviews the evidence in texts like Coming Up for Air (1939) or the essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ (1952) (Steinhoff 1983: 149). Through them, not only do we learn that Orwell dreads the city – especially in the first example – but he also worships life in the rural England in which he grew up. ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, although published after Orwell’s death, was written before Nineteen Eighty-Four. The following quotation suggests this: ‘Keeping caterpillars, catching newts in the pond, butterfly hunting, watching dragonflies. The essence of it was in

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the railway journey, which seemed to put magic distances between yourself and school’ (2000a: 429). Winston Smith will act in Nineteen Eighty-Four as Orwell himself would have, trying to escape to the countryside. The one party that rules Oceania, however, insists on the virtues of urban life. Winston will not buy into that propaganda, finding only material poverty and psychological misery in every corner: ‘Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats’ (2000b: 3). The conditions of post-war London in which Orwell lived clearly show the author’s dislike for the city. The poor and smelly fictional British capital presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four continues the description Orwell started in Coming Up For Air: ‘Everything spent on the decorations and nothing on the food. No real food at all. Just lists of stuff with American names, sort of phantom stuff that you can’t taste and can hardly believe in the existence of. Everything comes out of a carton or a tin, or it’s hauled out of a refrigerator or squirted out of a tap or squeezed out of a tube. No comfort, no privacy’ (1979: 25). The author will then offer a very different view of nature in Nineteen Eighty-Four, as a sort of haven, away from the crumbling city. Such thoughts invade the protagonist psychology and Winston Smith imagines a space in his mind where he is actually free called ‘The Golden Country’, meadows in a bright day: It was an old, rabbit-bitten pasture, with a foot-track wandering across it and a molehill here and there. In the ragged hedge on the opposite side of the field the boughs of the elm trees were swaying very faintly in the breeze, their leaves just stirring in dense masses like women’s hair. Somewhere near at hand, though out of sight, there was a clear, slow-moving stream where dace were swimming in the pools under the willow trees. (2000b: 33)

The imaginary space becomes real when Winston meets the woman he wants to have sex with: Julia. Nature, thus, represents absolute freedom. However, contrarily to what happens in We and Brave New World, in Nineteen Eighty-Four the city is not physically isolated from the countryside. There is not even a regulation preventing citizens from leaving

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the metropolis. The isolation of the urban space, though, is psychological, very much like everything else in that dystopian London. Both Julia and Winston are well aware that by having that encounter in the prairies they have sealed their fate, since that brings much suspicion from every witness. Brian Stablefold has inquired into the intricacies of this separation, establishing that Nineteen Eighty-Four shows a clear assumption that technological development leads humanity to a natural hell. Isolation from the simplicity of nature may be seen in the way in which Winston is characterized, since he worships nature and understands the fields as an escape from the cruelty of the metropolis (2011: 269). The end of the Second World War and the rise of the United States of America that follows permitted the establishment of mass consumerism in developed nations. As it has been noted in previous research, this means a change in some of the themes depicted in dystopian satires (Galdón Rodríguez 2015). This is what leads Ray Bradbury to introduce new features in the genre in Fahrenheit 451 (1953). If Bradbury is best known for his numerous contributions to science fiction, experts in the field like Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint draw attention to how Fahrenheit 451 fits better into the dystopian genre (2011: 23). Bradbury portrays what is to become a new character in dystopia. For critic Tom Moylan, authors like Bradbury or Anthony Burgess reflected what they believed were people’s new concerns in the decades after the Second World War (2000: 168). Citizens in the 1950s are constantly encouraged to dedicate themselves to different kinds of amusements, from speeddriving to wall-sized televisions. The aim of Bradbury’s dystopian society is to eradicate all forms of dissidence by keeping citizens entertained, so literature, for example, is forbidden, since it can be a source of free thinking and the origin of discontentment. The protagonist, Guy Montag, works in the fire department, which is entitled to destroy with kerosene any book that is found. In spite of such a task, his encounter with a girl coming from a family of free thinkers awakes Montag’s curiosity towards the contents of books. This turns him eventually into a dissident himself, as he realizes he is not allowed to choose whether he wants a life of joy or not. Montag’s rebellious feelings are parallel to John’s in Brave New World. While in Huxley’s text contempt came in the shape of sex and drugs, Bradbury provides his

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characters with the opiates of motor sports and television. However, both Montag and John reject pleasure since they do not have it on their own volition in what constitutes, according to Gregory Claeys, a trend in dystopian literature based on the damnation of hedonism (2010). Although Montag eventually decides to rebel against the rules, his neighbour, Clarisse, does not directly impel him to read or fight the state. She simply invites him to draw his attention towards small details of life. Curiously, those little pleasures are of natural origin, such as flowers or the rain on your head. Clarisse is thus seeking the pleasure of nature within the context of an urban space: ‘The psychiatrist wants to know why I go out and hike around in the forests and watch the birds and collect butterflies. I’ll show you my collection some day’ (2008: 33). Two conclusions can be reached by reading this short extract. The first one is that the city is not separated from nature. There is not a We-like ‘Green Wall’, so citizens are free to roam and wander about. Yet, and this constitutes the second conclusion, such behaviour is regarded as queer and is strange enough to be treated by a psychiatrist. This resembles George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, since in spite of the absence of a physical separation between the metropolis and the natural space, visits to nature provoke suspicion. Montag’s first feelings once he has finally escaped the city and reaches the natural space are of awe and even pleasure: Montag was alone in the wilderness. A deer. He smelled the heavy musk-like perfume mingled with blood and the gummed exhalation of the animal’s breath, all cardamom and moss and ragweed odour in this huge night where the trees ran at him, pulled away, ran, pulled away, to the pulse of the heart behind his eyes. There must have been a billion leaves on the land; he waded in them, a dry river smelling of hot cloves and warm dust. And the other smells! (2008: 185)

Even though we only know about Montag’s first impression, we can conclude that he is pleased with life in nature. The dystopian state forces local intellectuals to go beyond the city limits and they are not allowed to return to the urban space once they are officially tagged as dissidents. There is, then, an ‘invisible Green Wall’. Yet, Montag is glad to live with these outcasts, away from the artificial civilization with its speeding and junk television. Plus, he adds the fact that in nature he enjoys intellectual freedom so, in

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spite of being on his own and without the protection the metropolis offers, nature becomes for him, once again, the perfect environment for the free development of the exile’s spirit, without the tight control over ideas and behaviour. According to Brian Stablefold, an innovation in the dystopias published in the second half of the twentieth century is the growing concern about the environment and its possible damage by civilization (2011: 273). Stableford calls this type of novel ‘Ecocatastrophe’: the destruction of nature by the hand of men, or ‘Malthusian anxiety’, which would be the depletion of natural resources due to over-exploitation (2011: 270). This is caused either by war or by irresponsible corporations and governments. Among the best examples of this, Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) stands out. Most of the population on Earth migrates to other planets in this novel due to high radiation after a nuclear war, which has led to the extinction of many species and to health problems in humans. Apart from being a satire of the author’s time, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? revolves around this toxic and enclosed atmosphere in which the characters must survive. Sherryl Vint’s study of Dick’s work, in fact, points out that Deckard, the main character, is not healed until he is able to reconnect with nature, understanding all the good it can provide (2011: 142). Dystopias like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? do not depict a clear geographical or physical isolation of the city. Nevertheless, humans need to protect themselves from any damage coming from the wildlife in a post-apocalyptic Earth. For example, the characters in this novel must cover their reproductive organs in lead to protect them from the radiation in the air. Having explored the isolation of urban spaces in dystopian fictions of the twentieth century in a variety of ways, a final question arises: what is the portrayal of the city in twenty-first-century dystopias? Has increased awareness of echo catastrophes influenced the genre? It is possible to find recent examples of dystopias that focus on the relationship between the metropolis and its natural context? Do these recent dystopias isolate the citizens who live in the capital from the outside natural world? The following lines will survey the urban features in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies (2012) and Hugh Howey’s Wool (2013).

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Uglies returns to the classic dystopian setting: an apparently perfect city, maximally organized and covering the people’s basic needs – that is, education, food, housing, etc. – as well as others such as entertainment and leisure. The characters are therefore initially immersed in an atmosphere of happiness and satisfaction: ‘It was all one big party, just like they always promised it would be. People were dressed up tonight, in gowns and in black suits with long coattails. Everyone seemed to find her pig mask pretty funny. They pointed and laughed, and Tally kept moving, not giving them time to do anything else. Of course, everyone was always laughing here’ (2012: 12). However, in the manner of the texts analysed above, this dystopia develops around a protagonist, Tally Youngblood, with a growing concern about how fair her society is. In spite of initially looking forward to the mandatory plastic surgery to join the standardized beauty cannons, Tally ends up questioning the necessity for it and the plot slowly becomes the struggle to live beyond the regulations of the state (Westerfeld 2012: 83). To what extent is an escape possible? Westerfeld, along with Orwell and Bradbury, does not imagine Zamyatin’s ‘Green Wall’. Yet, the government impedes any sort of mobility and exiting the city is strictly forbidden. Thus, there is no physical isolation, that is, the city is not fenced, but all citizens are psychologically and de facto constrained within the municipal boundary: ‘“Second warning. Restricted area”. Tally stopped her board. “If you keep going, Shay, you’ll get busted and we won’t be doing anything tonight”’ (2012: 51). The reason for this is, once again, the fact that the ruling elite cannot control the lands beyond the metropolitan border. Later in the text Westerfeld describes the features of the settlement where the outcasts live: the so-called ‘Smoke’. Through the eyes of one of the main characters, Tally, the reader understands that the Smoke village is a symbol of freedom, even though its inhabitants do not enjoy the perks of fancy food and endless entertainment: Forgetting her troubles was easy in the Smoke. Life was much more intense than in the city. She bathed in a river so cold that she had to jump in screaming, and she ate food pulled from the fire hot enough to burn her tongue, which city food never did. Of course, she missed shampoo that didn’t sting her eyes, and flush toilets (she’d learned

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Ángel Galdón Rodríguez to her horror what ‘latrines’ were), and mostly medspray. But however blistered her hands became, Tally felt stronger than ever before. (2012: 229–30)

In spite of being a recent novel, Westerfeld’s text has been the object of some academic interest (Isabel Walker Ross has found neat connections between Uglies, Huxley’s Brave New World and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (2010: 42)) and Jennifer Miskec and Chris McGee claim that the fictional government in Uglies needs to separate the city from its surrounding environment and to keep the population entertained to prevent them from imagining any other possible kinds of social organization. Ignorant of other forms of government, they will not demand changes (2007: 174). Howey’s Wool (2011) offers a different reality. Its characters do not enjoy the plenty depicted in Westerfeld’s novel. They must live in underground silos after numerous atomic bombs, which have turned the soil into a basin of toxic air. A governmental regulation forbids exiting the silo, reinforced by constant propaganda against any will to leave the underground den. Omnipresent screens show the eerie wasteland in a very Orwellian manner: ‘Padding silently across the room, he bent down in front of the computer and shook the mouse to wake the screen. A window popped up with live views of the servers, only distorted from such wide angles. It was another secret in a room overflowing with them, this ability to see distant places’ (2013: 371). Yet, a significant number of characters will attempt to find ways to exit the premises, wondering about the real possibilities of life outside. Wool, therefore, presents imprisoned figures that initially see freedom in the outer natural space. This follows the clear trend that is established in most well-known dystopias, as has been pointed out in previous research (Galdón Rodríguez 2014). Howey clearly presents a separation of the city, but in a very particular manner: the government explains the metropolitan isolation through serious toxic hazard and in fact this is not denied in the text. However, the characters continue seeking freedom beyond the metallic gates that lock up the remaining civilization underground. The mise-en-scène resembles that of E. M. Forster in The Machine Stops (1909), with the characters buried in rooms below ground level, hiding from the poisoned air in the surface:

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‘No life remains on it, and you would need a respirator, or the cold of the outer air would kill you. One dies immediately in the outer air.’ ‘I know; of course I shall take all precautions.’ (Forster 2011)

The outlook on dystopian literature I have developed here could be drawn further back in time and closer to the year in which these lines are being written. One might argue that more, or different, titles should have been included or excluded to support my hypothesis. At the same time, plenty of evidence has been provided to confirm that not only do dystopian authors set the action in metropolitan locations, but they also present governments that try to isolate this space from the surroundings. Zamyatin’s idea of a ‘Green Wall’ results in a practical starting point to analyse the texts. Nevertheless, the authors studied here represent urban isolation in a variety of ways. Although scholars have shown much interest in dystopian literature, there are, as yet, few contributions on twenty-first-century works, perhaps because there has been little time to analyse such recent literature. It is, hence, our task to continue with the study of dystopian narratives in modern times, since they are becoming the source for a great number of titles. These titles include, for example, the adaptations of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, along with many other instances in the film industry – The Lobster, the Divergent series, or Elysium, among others – but also comics – Nikopol or Ghost in the Shell – and videogames –Anno 2070 or Starbound. The variety and fertility of the genre in these first decades of the twenty-first century require serious studies on the themes developed in contemporary dystopian fiction.

Bibliography Bould, M., and Sherryl, V. (eds) (2011). The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. New York: Routledge. Bradbury, R. (2008). Fahrenheit 451. London: Harper Collins.

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Claeys, G. (ed.) (2010). The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Collins, C. (1973). Evgenij Zamjatin: An Interpretive Study. The Hague: Mouton. Ferrari, G. R. F. (ed.). Plato: The Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Forster, E. M. (2011). The Machine Stops. London: Penguin. Galdón Rodríguez, A. (2011). ‘Aparición y desarrollo del género distópico en la literatura inglesa: Análisis de las principales antiutopías’, Prometeica 4, pp. 22–43. Galdón Rodríguez, A. (2014). ‘Natural Spaces in Dystopian Literature’, Ángulo Recto. Revista de estudios sobre la ciudad como espacio plural 6 (2), pp. 85–100. Galdón Rodríguez, A. (2015). ‘La destrucción de la identidad cultural en el totalitarismo distópico’. In A. Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo and E. de Gregorio-Godeo (eds), Identidades en contexto y cultura posmoderna, pp. 167–72. Oviedo: KRK Ediciones. Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A., and Willis, P. (eds) (1980). Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchison. Howey, H. (2013). Wool. London: Random House. Huxley, A. (2005a). Brave New World. London: Vintage. Huxley, A. (2005b). Brave New World Revisited. London: Vintage. Jameson, E. (2014). ‘Five Future Predictions That Will Leave You Reeling’, Huffington Post, 15 December < http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ella-jameson/five-futurepredictions-t_b_6327526.html> accessed 12 March 2015. Kirsch, A. (2013). ‘What Would Aldous Huxley Make of the Way We Consume Media and Popular Culture?’, The New York Times, 5 November accessed 19 March 2015. Milner, A. (1996). Literature, Culture and Society. London: Routledge. Miskec, J., and McGee, C. (2007). ‘My Scars Tell a Story: Self-Mutilation in Young Adult Literature’, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 32 (2), pp. 163–78. Moylan, T. (2000). Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. New York: Westview Press. Nicol, C. (2007). ‘Brave New World at 75’, The New Atlantis. A Journal of Technology & Society 16, pp. 41–54. Orwell, G. (1979). Coming Up for Air. London: Penguin. Orwell, G. (2000a). Essays. London: Penguin. Orwell, G. (2000b). Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin. Orwell, G. (2003). The Observer Years. London: Atlantic. Purves, L. (2015). ‘1984? Brave New World? Why I love a little dystopia’, The Telegraph, 12 September accessed 1 December 2015.

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Rabkin, E. S., Greenberg M. H., and Olander J. D. (eds) (1983). No Place Else. Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Sherborne, M. (2005a). Brave New World: York Notes Advanced. London: York Notes. Sherborne, M. (2005b). Nineteen Eighty-Four: York Notes Advanced. London: York Notes. Snodgrass, M. (1995). Encyclopedia of Utopian Literature. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Steinhoff, W. (1983). ‘Utopia Reconsidered: Comments on 1984’. In E. S. Rabkin, M. H. Greenberg, and J. D. Olander (eds), No Place Else. Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, pp. 147–61. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Stephens, P. (2013). ‘The Green Wall: Nature as Oppositional Symbol and Operator in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Dystopian Frame’, Western Political Science Association 2010 Annual Meeting Paper accessed 1 July 2014. Vint, S. (2007). ‘Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?’, Mosaic 40 (1), pp. 111–26. Walker Ross, I. (2010). ‘Shaping and Cutting and Improving and Adding’: Acknowledged and Hidden Influences in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series and Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. Wellington: Victoria University. Westerfeld, S. (2012). Uglies. London: Simon & Schuster. Williams, R. (1960). Culture and Society. New York: Anchor Books. Zamiatin, E. (1952). We. New York: Dutton & Co. Zamyatin, Y.1 (2007). We. London: Vintage.

1

This stands for Yevgeny. Please note the spelling of this author’s name varies among different editions of his books. One cannot yet find agreement in the manner the name is transliterated into the Roman alphabet.

María Luisa Pascual Garrido

3 The Island Space in Film Adaptations of The Tempest: On the Invisibility of Borders

abstract This chapter examines how the island space in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) is reconfigured in four different films which range from such mass-entertainment products as the Western Yellow Sky (1948) and the science fiction classic Forbidden Planet (1956) to the inventive transpositions by Jarman – The Tempest (1979) – and Greenaway – Prospero’s Books (1991). I contend that the island is not a real location but a heterotopia, a space that lends itself to the dramatization of different conflicts and power struggles for domination and resistance, thus allowing great freedom for diverse discursive articulations of space. A comparison of the several reconfigurations of the island space in those film adaptations reveals how anxiety over space takes shape as various kinds of conflicts develop. The existence and nature of borders marking the inside/outside of bounded space is key to understanding how space is constructed in each film and to what purpose.

One of the reasons why The Tempest remains one of the most frequently performed and adapted plays in the Shakespearean canon is its original setting: the island, which lends itself easily to the dramatization of conflicts and power struggles for domination and resistance. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines an island as: ‘1. A track of land completely surrounded by water, and not large enough to be called a continent. 2. Something resembling an island, especially in its isolated or surrounded position.’ The first sense of the word is the literal one and emphasizes the separation of the island space from other places by means of physical boundaries (water), while the second sense is figurative and insists on the idea of remoteness and isolation. The concept of ‘heterotopia’ as discussed by Foucault (1986) is relevant to understanding why the island evoked in The Tempest more than 400

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years ago is not to be taken literally as a physical location but rather as a valid trope to stage power relations and political struggles. Heterotopias ‘have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect’ (Foucault 1986: 24). It is at once unreal space – ‘a site with no real place’ – and a counter-site – where ‘all the other real sites that can be found within the culture are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (Foucault 1986: 25). Set in an unnamed and uncharted space, Shakespeare’s island has yielded great freedom to authors and filmmakers for diverse discursive articulations of space. Vaughan and Vaughan (1998) call attention to the wide range of interpretations The Tempest has been subjected to since Davenant and Dryden first transformed Shakespeare’s play in 1667. Among the several critical approaches adopted to an analysis of The Tempest, ‘new historicism’ has ‘rejected both the intentionalist and the allegorical [readings]’ and insisted instead on the ‘broad historical and literary context – the dominant discourses, both written and oral, from which Shakespeare inevitably drew his inspiration and the play’s lineaments, characters, and ultimately, its literary and political significance’ (1998: 6). Most of these accounts are also ‘anti-colonialist’, concentrating on Prospero’s role as a colonial master and on Caliban’s rebellious contestation (Brown 1985; Barker and Hulme 1985; Skura 1989). Indeed, this type of analysis is usually embedded within a wider context of political plots of usurpation and resistance which pervade the whole play at different levels. The numerous adaptations of the play throughout the postcolonial world also suggest the text’s remarkable ‘popularity, flexibility, and universality’ (Vaughan and Vaughan 1998: 7). Feminist readings have criticized the general exclusion of women in the play, ranging from the vexing absence of Sycorax as a speaking character to Prospero’s control over Miranda’s sexuality (Thompson 1991). Such interpretations have brought to attention very different sorts of power struggles against the dominant hegemonic power, most of which may still be operating in the twentieth century. In this chapter I examine the island as an especially convenient setting to inscribe relations of power. The island is a site whose meaning may shift depending on the position assumed by various individuals or parties

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engaged in a specific set of social and political relationships inscribed within it, which are certainly dynamic. It is a space particularly exposed to processes of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization (Deleuze and Guattari 2015: 361–408). Due to its characteristic remoteness and boundedness, it is an ideal space to examine the various strategies to keep a territory under control. By the same token, it is also a space where authority will necessarily meet resistance, the opposition of those who are oppressed or on the margins, attempting to reach the centre and grasp power, which must be usurped and/or repossessed. Therefore, an analysis of how the several reconfigurations of the island space are represented in different film adaptations of The Tempest allows me to explore how anxiety over space takes shape as several power conflicts develop. In my view, it is also quite relevant for this discussion on the production of space and power to examine how the borders marking the inside/outside of bounded space are delineated, since control over space is closely related to the impassability or the penetrability of boundaries. The emergence of Border Studies as a new area of interdisciplinary research attests to the great concern over the production of space that characterizes our time.1 With great input from the fields of architecture, geography, anthropology and philosophy, there is general agreement as to the fact that ‘[b]orders are – as expressions of territoriality – normally crucial to what can be called the discursive landscape of social power’ (Paasi 2011: 23). Borders are also considered to be ‘context-bound phenomena […] deeply rooted in social, cultural, political and economic practices and discourses’ (Paasi 2011: 27). Although I use Shakespeare’s last play as a starting point for the analysis of the island space, I will examine in greater detail how that site is reconfigured in four films produced in the second half of the twentieth century. In these films the island space is transformed into alternative settings whose character may be determined by a variety of factors. On the one hand, the 1

Border Studies has become a dynamic interdisciplinary area of research since the 1990s due to the increasing challenge of globalization. Border crossing owing to tourism, trade, immigration or refugee crises is now a constant and has deep implications for nation states and is something that is being addressed from several related areas in the Social Sciences and the Humanities but, above all, in geopolitics.

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articulation of space in the Western Yellow Sky (1948) and in Forbidden Planet (1956), a science fiction film, could be said to be influenced by the generic conventions that regulate mainstream cinema production. As products of the Hollywood studio system they are shaped, to a certain extent, by the strict set of temporal and spatial configurations characteristic of each subgenre (Watson 2012: 191). In keeping with the generic expectations of a mass-audience trained to read well-established cinematic codes, the purpose is to ensure the commercial success of the films rather than give free rein to the creativity of the directors. In addition, these cultural products offer grand narratives based on Enlightenment and bourgeois values, generating a sense of community among a mass-audience. On the other hand, in The Tempest (1979) and Prospero’s Books (1991) the singular treatment of space and time, along with the broken narrative, indicate they are designed to accomplish specific artistic and ideological goals. As a result, the independent or avant-garde films by Jarman and Greenaway deal with chronological and spatial configurations in rather unconventional ways. Space in particular is constructed observing quite idiosyncratic semiotic codes in accordance with each director’s aesthetic and ideological agenda. In my view, both filmmakers offer imaginative spatial and chronological arrangements which are strategically used to resist the genre-based forms of decodification applied to mass-entertainment productions. By providing a singular interpretation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, these auteurs are stating their very personal views on what they consider are the main issues at stake in this play and which have to do, as I will argue, with the role of the artist and contemporary culture. In contrast to the studio productions, these experimental works are intended to appeal to minority sectors appreciative of their innovative outlook and willing to expose themselves to unorthodox world-views. Therefore, the island space in The Tempest and Prospero’s Books, far from being a conventional representation of such location, is a metaphor for the mind of the playwright-artist-magician-filmmaker. Yet, apparently diverse locations actually share many features with the island as a space where relationships of power are unstable and dynamic and authority may be overthrown, therefore offering the possibility to reassert existing power relationships, or alternatively, to reconfigure them. We will first consider power relations in Shakespeare’s play in order to see later

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on how these have been presented and what the relationship with space is depending on the different configurations the island space adopts in each one of the four films.

The Tempest (1611) As McEvoy points out, the combination of myth and fantasy characteristic of the so-called Shakespearean ‘romances’ allowed early modern spectators to reflect on ‘the way art and the imagination operate in creating our understanding of the world. It also provided an appropriate context in which to show the world not only as it is but as it could be were its potential fulfilled’ (2000: 242). In my view, it is the element of fantasy with its potential to transform reality what has made of The Tempest a text susceptible to so many possibilities of interpretation. Shakespeare must have drawn on current voyages of exploration to write The Tempest.2 The discovery of America and the news of a shipwreck in the Bermudas in 1609 probably set Shakespeare’s mind on the utopian and dystopian projects that lands far from the control of European powers might offer to aspiring contemporaries. There was, indeed, an enormous range of travel literature during the early years of colonial expansion (Hulme and Sherman 2004: 116–35), stimulating the public interest in overseas territories, and allowing the playwright to enlarge the list of well-known chartered territories with nameless, unexplored and unclaimed areas. For early modern travellers, a sea journey constituted both a physical as well as a mental rupture with their present, and this displacement 2

The Norton edition of The Tempest (2004) by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman includes several extracts of Shakespeare’s potential sources for the writing of The Tempest: ‘A Voyage to the Patagonians’ from Richard Eden’s The History of Travel in the West and East Indies, references to Antonio Pigafetta’s account of Magellan’s voyage around the world, and Michel de Montaigne’s essay ‘Of the Cannibals’, among others.

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yielded enormous possibilities for the audience’s suspension of disbelief. West (2002: 170) speaks of a semiotic and epistemological rupture when analysing the significance of space in Jacobean ‘travel plays’. Seen in this light, The Tempest must be deemed as a travel play too, as the act of crossing the seas – a spacious and risky geographical border – introduced a point of departure from the semiotic code governing people’s expectations, their conduct, and the actual interpretation of the real world in early modern Europe. Travelling implied the possibility of transgressing norms, allowing characters to behave and think differently in the ‘foreign’ environment. Therefore, travel in Jacobean drama also meant freedom to conceive of new premises for the establishment of fresh communities and power relations. Indeed, the action in The Tempest progresses as different acts of transgression occur. The first one is Prospero’s violation of the law of Nature as he commands Ariel to conjure up a storm that ‘dashe[s] all to pieces’ (I, ii, 8). However, this is actually triggered by a previous act of transgression – Antonio’s usurpation of the dukedom of Milan. Subsequent misconduct follows the tempest – Antonio and Sebastian’s plot to kill Alonso, King of Naples (II, I, 285–92), Caliban’s attempt to rape Miranda (I, ii, 347–8), and his plan to murder Prospero (III, ii, 50–9). The continuous infringement of natural, political and moral laws provides enough evidence of the transgressive nature of the play despite the final moment of forgiveness and reconciliation. Broadly speaking, transgression implies a crossing of limits, a violation of perceived boundaries separating the acceptable from the unacceptable. Therefore, it may be argued that The Tempest engages with the crossing of borders, both visible and invisible, at multiple levels. As for its geographical position the island is ambivalently located somewhere in the Mediterranean (I, ii, 234) between Naples and Tunis (II, i, 66–8). Yet there are also allusions to the Bermudas (I, ii, 229) and the Patagonian devil Setebos (I, ii, 372), which would simultaneously situate Prospero’s island in the Atlantic Ocean. Symbolically, the island is to be found at a vague ‘junction of the Old and the New World, the East and the West, trade and colonization, negotiation and conquest’ (West 2002: 212). According to West, the bare stage of Jacobean theatre ‘could become, geographically speaking, extraordinarily flexible […] Locations were social before they were geographical, and the action emerged from these sites of social interaction’ (2002: 29).

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Being outside the dominion of hegemonic powers, claims to authority and property as well as attitudes of resistance among the characters gathered on the island are an obvious indication of an increasing anxiety over its control and the wish for territorialization. This is manifest in Caliban’s claims over the island as a native inhabitant (I, ii, 331–1; III, ii, 40–2); in Ariel’s demand for freedom (I, ii, 245–9); and finally, in Prospero’s intention to keep everyone under control until he is ultimately restored as Duke of Milan. As Baker and Hulme see it ‘“English colonialism” provides The Tempest’s dominant discursive con-texts’ since usurpation appears in many ways in the text. Conspiracies and treachery are ‘figural traces of the text’s anxiety concerning the very matters of domination and resistance’ (1985: 198). Another relevant aspect to consider when analysing the configuration of the island space in The Tempest is the vague and ambiguous character of its depiction. The Jacobean stage was almost bare and features of space were suggested by a few verbal prompts and visual cues associated with costumes and social roles.3 Yet the first description of the setting – ‘an uninhabited island’ – is given in the stage directions. This suggests that the island space is not territorialized and is therefore free from social and political conflict. However, this is far from the truth. In the first act, Prospero presents himself as ‘master of a full poor cell’ (I, ii, 20)4 – thus underlining the idea that the island space is organized and used according to the existing power relations at the beginning of the play. According to these, Prospero claims ownership of the territory while Caliban and Ariel are subjected to his absolute rule. Although Miranda does not 3

4

See in this regard Chapter 1, ‘Stage-space in the Jacobean age’, in Russell West, Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster (New York: Palgrave, 2002). The author argues that spatial categories were used to articulate social experience in Jacobean drama: ‘Often, the locality of a scene could be indicated by the presence of typified characters, whose costumes or accessories provided the necessary cues for the spectator – soldiers, for instance, indicated that the scene was that of a battlefield, a shepherd that of a pastoral meadow. Here geographical place on the stage was entirely a function of social place as indicated by easily visual markers in the form of costume’ (2002: 22). All quotations of Shakespeare’s text are from Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman’s critical edition of The Tempest (2004) published by Norton & Company.

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directly oppress them, she certainly benefits from her social privileges as her father’s only heir. Following Lefebvre (1991: 77), it must be born in mind that space is social and ‘is produced and reproduced in connection with the forces of production (and with the relations of production).’ The utilization of the island space is decided by Prospero, who abuses Ariel and Caliban as work force, while he devotes his leisure time to read and to plot against his enemies so as to regain control over Milan. The fact that space is ‘socially constructed and used’ (Elden 2007: 105) has obvious political implications for the analysis of the island as a spatial trope in The Tempest – a space where struggles for power are inscribed. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that within the island space in The Tempest there are other spaces. The allusion to a ‘full poor cell’ (I, ii, 20) is a reference to a smaller territorialized space within the island – it is Prospero’s shelter or home. However, the combination of ‘full’ and ‘poor’ leaves the audience uncertain as to the exact value of this space.5 The noun ‘cell’6 brings to mind the notion of bounded space, which linked to ‘full’ may evoke the comforts of a home to be protected from rivals’ claims to that territory and the need to control what is in storage. On the other hand, in combination with ‘poor’, the reference to the ‘cell’ may suggest Prospero’s deprivation and lack of power in his exiled condition. It must also be born in mind that Prospero’s situation is the result of his failure to exert a strong political authority over another territory, Milan, from which he has been banished. Therefore, power relations in The Tempest are closed linked to control over space and to processes of territorialization. Despite the reference to exile and confinement, Prospero launches on a discourse intended to legitimize his claims to power over that plot of land and its inhabitants. The magus offers his own interested account of how 5 6

In the last act Prospero’s words as he dismisses Caliban suggest that the ‘cell’ may be associated to the ‘home’: ‘Go, sirrah, to my cell;/ Take with you your companions. As you look/To have my pardon, trim it handsomely’ (V, i, pp. 290–2). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the most generic meaning of the word ‘cell’ is that of ‘storeroom or chamber’, evoking ideas of abundance and protection. However, in a more specific sense, a ‘cell’ is defined as ‘a small room in which a prisoner is locked up or in which a monk or nun sleeps’, thus emphasizing the idea of confinement. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines ‘cell’ more neutrally as a ‘small compartment, cavity, or bounded space’.

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power relationships have been established. He justifies his domination over the island’s inhabitants arguing that Caliban cannot be considered a proper human being: ‘Then was this island / (Save for the son that she did litter here, / A freckled whelp, hag-born) not honored with / A human shape’ (I, ii, 281–4). Likewise, to curb Ariel’s annoyed pretensions to freedom, Prospero asserts his authority over him: ‘It was mine art, / When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape / The pine, and let thee out’ (I, ii, 291–3). Prospero grounds his claims to authority on his superior knowledge and enlightened rationality. As Paul Brown (1994: 48) argues, ‘The Tempest is not simply a reflection of colonialist practices but an intervention in an ambivalent and even contradictory discourse’ at a moment of historical crisis. As my analysis of the four selected film adaptations of The Tempest reveals, the inconsistency of Prospero’s discourse cannot be reduced to an anti-colonialist interpretation. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, discourse on space and power certainly becomes problematic. The ‘bare island’ to which Prospero refers again in the ‘Epilogue’ is actually an interested construction of the speaker. Indeed, depending on the aims and desires of each character, the island is diversely depicted, shifting its aspect and meaning. The island is a home for Miranda, while for Prospero, who has domesticated this space and subjugated Caliban and Ariel, it is a contested space that must be kept under control as it may be again reterritorialized. Presenting it as a ‘bare island’ allows Prospero to ignore other characters’ claims of sovereignty over that space. Furthermore, Prospero’s exiled condition makes him describe the island in a contradictory way, for he sees it both as a home and a site of deprivation. For Caliban, the island is a reign of terror due to his enslavement, but also a place to be repossessed. On the other hand, the remoteness and apparently unbroken nature of the island kindles various desires among the castaways. Hence, Gonzalo expresses a utopian yearning to found a new perfect world (II, I, 147–64); Stephano, the drunken butler, is lured by Caliban into becoming king of the island while ridding himself of Prospero’s subjection (III, ii, 103–6); and Sebastian’s ambition to usurp his brother’s crown becomes a project to be fulfilled with no apparent risk of being punished. Such conflicting views on the island space imply that its value is constantly shifting, constructed through divergent discursive appropriations.

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This space is contested by the island’s dwellers because it has been territorialized by Prospero, who has imposed his authority and forced Caliban, Ariel, and the newly arrived Ferdinand into different forms of slavery and servitude. Yet to most of the shipwrecked characters, unacquainted with Prospero’s machinations, the seemingly deserted island is available for the development of different projects. In my view, this ambivalence entails a conception of the island as a sort of ‘no man’s land’, where any alteration of the state of affairs is possible and space may be newly produced, thus establishing new social and power relationships. In this sense, the island is a heterotopia with great potential for conflict, which reflects Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ unease when confronting enterprises of exploration, expansion and colonization. As West argues, ‘the island opens up a space in which the power relationship may be reconfigured in new ways’. The shipwreck, he continues, is ‘a moment of spatial dispersion, an explosion which breaks apart the existing power relations, making possible the creation of new strategic relationships; but it is also an implosion in which the parties separated earlier by machinations of power are brought together once again, so that the earlier history can be rewritten’ (2002: 212).

The Transformation of the ‘Island Space’: From Text to Screen A recent study by González Campos (2006: 352–7) on TV adaptations and big screen versions of Shakespeare’s The Tempest listed as many as twenty-one versions of this play between 1905 and 1998.7 From the comprehensive catalogue provided by González Campos, I have discarded films 7

González Campos carries out an excellent analysis of a large corpus of films derived or adapted from Shakespeare’s play in several languages, including a few which have gone unnoticed by most film critics (2006: 271–82). The author leaves out documentaries and films unrelated to the original play despite a similarity in denomination.

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which adhere to realistic reproductions of the island as a natural setting. Instead, I have focused on four films where the island is displaced by seemingly unrelated spaces. In these films, borders delimiting the contested and bounded space of the ‘figurative island’ or inside it, of the ‘full poor cell’, adopt different shapes. The boundaries in these films are depicted as a desert or intergalactic space, or alternatively, dealt with in unconventional ways, so as to become inconspicuous because there is no clear separation between the inside and the outside bounded space, so the spectator is forced to think carefully about where Prospero’s island is to be found and even what is it in fact. The earliest film to be examined is an American Western by William A. Wellman titled Yellow Sky (1948), while the latest is Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991). I will also examine the transformation of the island space in the science fiction motion picture Forbidden Planet (1956) by Fred McLeod Wilcox and Derek Jarman’s underground version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1979). In some of these adaptations, physical space and borders are well defined and the temporal location accurately provided: Yellow Sky is set in the western American frontier in 1867, just two years after the Civil War, whereas the setting of Forbidden Planet is a remote planet beyond the solar system called Altair IV which humankind had colonized by AD 2257. In contrast, Jarman’s The Tempest and Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books avoid specific spatial or chronological indications so as to make the story impossible to date and locate in any real setting.

Yellow Sky (1948) Despite its title and setting, this Western is generally considered to be a free version or derivative of The Tempest (Kennedy 1992: 45, Howard 2000: 315, Rosenthal 2007: xxix). Addressed to a mass audience and following the narrative linearity typical of the genre, Yellow Sky presents the adventures of a gang of bank robbers led by Stretch Dawson (Gregory Peck) who

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arrive at a ghost town, a former gold mining spot in the western frontier.8 The village is physically isolated from the nearest civilized settlement by a vast stretch of desert, which is crossed by Dawson’s gang as they flee the organized forces of the law after a bank robbery. From a distance, Yellow Sky is perceived as a haven from certain death in the desert. However, upon arriving, the sight of Main Street reveals the town’s derelict state. The town has long been abandoned, except for a house located on its outer edge. This is the only building that has been kept standing and the only inhabited space in the town. It is the one remaining trace of a period when the site was occupied and territorialized and stands as a symbol of civilization above the ruins. Two people remain in Yellow Sky after the gold rush is over: Mike, a hard-bitten, and de-feminized version of Miranda, and her grandfather, a former gold digger, who has concealed his treasure in Yellow Sky to preserve it from greedy gold-seekers. In this Western version, Prospero’s authority is not based on his knowledge of magic spells but on his possession of the means of production, that is, access to the gold and control of the girl. The outlaws soon suspect there are concealed riches, and they all try to conquer the young woman in order to take control of the golden treasure as well. The gang breaks up as Dawson wins the girl over and agrees to respect the old man’s property (the house, the girl and the gold). The film closes with Dawson’s amendment through love and the death of the unredeemed characters who threaten to overpower the old man and dispossess him of the gold, and the girl of her freedom. This ending underlines a message of redemption, forgiveness and regeneration with Dawson and Mike’s institutionalized union in marriage. In any case, the key feature here is the reconfiguration of the island as a frontier ghost town. The outlaws take advantage of being outside the range of an effective political authority that might crush any rebellious conduct. The frontier is much more exposed to conflict and violence due to its peripheral position in territorialized space. The figurative island stands on a no-man’s land, a porous border where incoming characters 8

According to Hine and Faragher (2000: 10), ‘[the film] is a tale of conquest, but also of survival, persistence, and the merging of peoples and cultures that gave birth and continuing life to America’.

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endeavour to impose their rough rule through violence. However, the walls and fenced perimeter of the old man’s house suggest neat borders, so it is through the contrast between what is inside and outside bounded space that the opposing parties are organized and the battle for the domination of space is staged. Certainly, this dramatization of the power struggles in the western frontier mirrors in some ways the series of plots for conquest and domination staged in Shakespeare’s island. The staging of conflicts over space in Yellow Sky may be framed in its specific historical context. Following González Campos interpretation of this Western, the difficult period of expansion to the West following the end of the American Civil War must have triggered a number of associations with recent struggles over spatial domination in 1948. The date imprinted on the screen, 1867, suggested a post-war atmosphere. As González Campos (2006: 75–6) argues, contemporaneous audiences may have drawn connections between the conflicts deployed in that figurative island in the American frontier and the challenge posed by Axis powers crossing the boundaries of Allied territories during World War II. In view of this, the reconfiguration of the island on the western frontier makes much sense if we take into account that ‘frontier history tells the story of the creation and defense of communities, the use of land, the development of markets, and the formation of states’ (Hine and Faragher 2000: 10). A Western was an ideal vehicle to stage the violent struggle over contested space and the dangerous attempts at reterritorialization by external forces. Yet to many Shakespearean critics of the period (Wilson (1932), Tillyard (1938), Spencer (1942) and Brower (1951)), the final scenes of social reconciliation and the moral of renewal outweighed the scheming plots to alter power relations in the island space. Thus, it could be granted that the ‘happy ending’ of Yellow Sky, after Dawson’s gang’s failed attempt to control and reterritorialize space, would reflect that interpretation of The Tempest that underscored the need for redemption, forgiveness, and pacification. Dawson eventually sides with the old man and the girl and is thus acquitted and rewarded as Ferdinand is in The Tempest. Seen in this light, and despite the dissimilarities between the play and Yellow Sky, both seemed to encourage the audiences to leave warmongering behind and make a fresh start.

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Forbidden Planet (1956) Although this science fiction film cannot be considered either a close adaptation of Shakespeare’s last play, film historians acknowledge that the plot of Forbidden Planet owes a great deal to The Tempest (Thompson and Bordwell 2010: 316). In this transposition of Shakespeare’s text the island space is reconfigured in a radically different way and is transformed into a remote planet. The presence of magical and fantastic elements in The Tempest easily yields a number of parallelisms to be drawn between this romance and the popular genre of science fiction. During the Cold War the space race led the two superpowers to prove their superiority by competing in terms of military potential and technological progress. After land for exploration was exhausted, interplanetary space came to be seen as the next frontier to be conquered by the nations struggling for geopolitical dominance. This tension is reflected in the proliferation of science fiction literature and cinema in this period (Telotte 2001: 100; Geraghty 2009: 19–34). The development of nuclear weapons went hand in hand with this new phase of territorial expansion and people feared the risk of an atomic disaster after the effects of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs became known. As a result, by setting characters in a remote future and unknown locations in deep space, science fiction narratives of the 1950s and 1960s provided a productive ground for examining a growing anxiety over the proper limits of technological progress. The result was the proliferation of utopian and dystopian visions that reflected on the new space race and the dangers of using atomic power during the Cold War. Forbidden Planet, essentially a popular product intended for a mass audience, could also be read in this light. The obsession with the control of uncharted and as yet unclaimed ‘bare’ space is made explicit at the beginning of the film: ‘So at last mankind began the conquest and colonization of deep space’ (Forbidden Planet, 1956). Forbidden Planet opens with the image of a spaceship travelling through deep space. The crew have been sent into a rescue expedition for survivors of the Bellephoron, which landed on a remote planet, Altair IV, many years before. Upon their arrival, Commander Adams (Leslie Nielson) and his men

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meet Doctor Morbius and his daughter, Altaira who resemble Prospero and Miranda in some respects, although not in others. One important difference between Prospero and Morbius is the contrast between Prospero’s control over events thanks to his knowledge of magic, and Morbius’ inability to predict the effects of his actions, despite all his scientific knowledge, which eventually brings about his own annihilation and the destruction of the colonized planet. Morbius is the custodian of the advanced scientific learning that was passed on to him by the last of the Krells, a highly developed civilization which inhabited Altair IV until their extinction. Morbius’ sophisticated knowledge allows him to build a utopian home, a futuristic dwelling, in Altair IV. At first, Morbius appears as the perfect epitome of enlightened humanity. His appreciation for the scientific and technological knowledge allowing him to improve living conditions in such an inhospitable setting, his own command of high-tech equipment to keep territorialized space under control, and finally, his urbane behaviour are sufficient evidence to consider Morbius an admirable specimen of humanity. However, under the appearance of a perfect blending of nature and civilization, the space created in Altair IV by Morbius conceals humanity’s self-destructive nature. Morbius’ house looks everlasting and impenetrable. It has a built-in protective shell that is activated at will, while its transparent walls allow its dwellers to amuse themselves in a wonderful garden which they share with tamed beasts. The house is built on top of a laboratory where Morbius preserves the secrets of Krell culture. Technological progress makes Morbius feel safe, and he disparagingly rejects his rescuers’ plans to be taken back to Earth. He chooses to remain in what seems a perfect dwelling drawn in clean geometrical shapes and rationally designed by a higher intellet – the Krells’ – to cater to all their needs – a perfect symbol of civilization. Morbius’ house is a ‘dream house’ as Gaston Bachelard would put it: ‘the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms’ (1994: 61).9

9

For further reading on the space of the house and the inside/outside dialectics between ‘house’ and ‘universe’ see Chapter 2 in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon, 1994), pp. 38–73.

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However, if not correctly handled, knowledge, and hence power, may turn into a terribly destructive force. Morbius’ repressed instincts suggest a dangerous duality in humankind that may lead to its own destruction. The struggle over the space Morbius has carefully organized into an apparently perfect sanctuary of technological progress seems to be fought against an external opponent, a monster that attacks Morbius’ home-laboratory. Yet the battle for domination is actually fought against the enemy within. The transformation of the island into a futuristic utopian space which is destroyed by the same power (Morbius’s knowledge) which made its existence possible allows viewers to make inferences as to the risks implicit in a proud and irrational quest for scientific and technological domination, the one fought over during the Cold War by the leading world powers. Yellow Sky and Forbidden Planet, clearly designed as mass entertainment products – by Twentieth-Century Fox and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios respectively – fit into the broad category of ‘narrative film’ (Williams 1984: 121). To a certain extent, this type of commercial film may be said to be shaped by the requirements of the specific genre to which it belongs and which determines, to a great extent, ‘common themes, styles and iconography’ (Ryall 1998: 329). Regarding the choice of setting and the representation of space, the genre ascription of Yellow Sky to the category of ‘Western’ would justify the presence of a desert and a ghost town as prototypical landscape features. Likewise, the ultramodern spaceship interiors and hightech dwellings along with the depictions of intergalactic space are part and parcel of the commercial package of science fiction films. The crossing of boundaries delimiting territorialized space is apparent and inscribes the specific struggles for power staged in these films. In contrast, Jarman’s The Tempest and Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books are postmodern creations where spatial and temporal landmarks are arbitrarily used so as to resist the homogenizing cultural practices of the studio system. The eccentric treatment of space in these films is certainly derived from the eclectic approach adopted by both filmmakers, keen on ‘drawing upon and mixing different styles, genres, and artistic conventions’ (Hill 1998: 99). In spite of their differences, both postmodern versions of Shakespeare’s last play ‘dwell on the original script’s obsession with the interaction between life, art, dream, and play, subtly shifting through different planes of reality

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and representation’ (Harris and Jackson 1997: 91). In this regard, both filmmakers emphasize the metadramatic quality of the play and the selfconscious nature of the artist and of art. Hence, they take pains to underline Prospero’s absolute control of the ‘stage’, a space specifically built for the staging of power struggles and where conflicts are ‘magically’ solved. Given the amalgam of diverse elements that converge on the ‘stage’, the audience is forced to reflect on the artificiality of that space where illusion and reality actually blend.

The Tempest (1979) Jarman’s rewriting of The Tempest, characterized by its experimental aesthetic, differs sharply from the conventional narratives10 and spatial articulations of the films examined above. It is also radically opposed in tone and purpose to the Shakespeare film adaptations produced by the BBC between 1978 and 1985, which aimed at offering verisimilitude through choice of naturalistic settings (Willis 1991: 88). Jarman’s underground film is provoking due to its explicit sexual (queer) imagery and the postmodern mixture of high and popular culture, all of which outraged viewers used to more conservative adaptations of The Tempest (Kermode 1980).11 According to Vaugham and Vaugham, Jarman’s films were taken to be ‘statements of the late-1970s and early 1980s British counterculture intended for punk

10 Peake (2011: 171) makes explicit Jarman’s attitude towards narrative film: ‘Leigh tried to explain to Jarman that a film needs a story, however simple, since without a story you have nothing concrete to cut together. Jarman could not have been less interested. Rather than having an end in view, he preferred simply to capture whatever chanced to unfold before the lens, attempting afterwards to give these arbitrary images a shape. It was to a large extent, the approach he would favour all his life’. 11 Frank Kermode’s negative review of this adaptation of The Tempest made obvious his disagreement with Jarman’s interpretation and choice of cast which included punk star Toyah Willcox in the role of Miranda.

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and gay audiences’ (1991: 209). The anti-naturalistic effects created by the British filmmaker are mainly achieved by the absence of precise time and space coordinates, which were distinctly established in the Western and sci-fi derivatives of The Tempest. The action in this film is framed by the opening and closing scenes, in which Prospero is sleeping, to suggest that everything is a product of his imagination. As Jarman affirms, the island here becomes ‘an island of the mind’ (1984: 186). The few outdoor scenes are filmed using blue filters that contribute to creating an oneiric atmosphere (Harris and Jackson 1997: 91). So, even if there is a first glimpse of a natural setting –the sea and the shore in Prospero’s dream–the superimposed images of the storm on Prospero sleeping scene enhances the unrealistic atmosphere and suggests the hazy quality of dreams. After the initial scenes, the main action takes place mostly indoors in the poorly lit rooms and sinister corridors of a decayed mansion – Stoneley Abbey – a manor that had been partially burned down and mirrors Prospero’s rambling mind. The shabby interiors contrast sharply with the elegant and tidy home constructed by Morbius in Altair IV. There is no possibility of knowing where the characters are or where they go because proper borders delimiting the figurative bounded space of the island or the cell are almost invisible – gloomy rooms, walls, corners, and hallways remain in the suggestive half-shadows cast by candle light. Jarman also resorts to distorted mirror images and to abrupt changes of place within indoor space to create a feeling of spatial disorientation in a claustrophobic setting. The film’s temporality also disrupts the expectations of a potential mass audience. Analepsis and prolepsis are recurrent, since Jarman preserves Shakespeare’s text but reduces its extension considerably by cutting up ‘long expository monologues’ (Harris and Jackson 1997: 90). Another device to tease the audience’s need for temporal coherence is the choice of characters’ costumes belonging to different historical periods within the same scene, which reveals Jarman’s total disregard for chronological orientation. Prospero is more negatively portrayed here than in previous adaptations. He is a sadistic magician who obtains pleasure from tormenting others. In his space, he creates a kind of repressive state, where all characters fear being chastised. Ariel, with whom Prospero maintains a sort

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of sadomasochist master-servant relationship, is in charge of fulfilling his master’s wishes to vex his enemies. Additional sources of estrangement in Jarman’s appropriation of Shakespeare’s play are Prospero’s and Ariel’s homoerotic gazes at each other and at the naked body of Ferdinand as well as the final scene where merry sailors dance to celebrate their freedom from Prospero’s machinations. In Jarman’s film, when Prospero gives up his supernatural powers he does not only free the other characters, but he also releases his own suppressed homosexual desire. Actually, the final sequence – a reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s masque to honour Miranda and Ferdinand’s heterosexual union – is transformed into the flamboyant camp12 celebration with obvious gay overtones or, as Harris and Jackson put it, a ‘joyous celebration of male bonding’ (1997: 95). As a result, apart from the stylistic eclecticism and the anti-naturalism of the setting, Jarman’s film is an anti-establishment interpretation of The Tempest celebrating the existence of an alternative space where the repressive power of ideological policing may be overthrown. In this film the claustrophobic and shabby space of the island stands for a hegemonic culture which imposes heterosexual behaviour. In contrast, the brightly lit celebratory closing scene hails sexual freedom, diversity and hybridity. Although for many critics (Kermode 1980; Canby 1984) this adaptation was an act of profanation of Shakespeare’s canonical text, there were also positive reviews (Andrews 1980; Crowl 1980; Robinson 1980) which welcomed Jarman’s experimental film as a rebirth of Shakespeare in the cinema. As Harris and Jackson (1997: 97) rightly argue, Jarman’s Tempest ‘raises questions about body and mind, restrain and liberty, freedom and control, desire and fulfilment […]; above all it powerfully conveys a sense of shifting boundaries between illusion and reality, waking and dreaming, the playful and the serious, life and art.’ The struggle for power in this imaginary space is not fought over a material plot of land but rather over a much more abstract territory where ideological and aesthetic limits are

12

Camp, as defined in an essay by Susan Sontag has multiple meanings but here it is being used as ‘the love of the exaggerated, the “off ” of things-being-what-they arenot’ (1966: 279).

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constantly being transgressed to openly challenge and oppose conservative cultural values.

Prospero’s Books (1991) Like Jarman’s version, Peter Greenaway’s adaptation of The Tempest deviates from mainstream adaptations since it neither has a conventional narrative development13 nor does it recreate island space in a naturalistic setting. Instead, the film is structured by means of several devices being the central one the iteration of key images (water and books mainly), words and musical fragments which frame and mirror Prospero’s thoughts (Cavecchi 1997: 86). Greenaway combines sections of Shakespearean dialogue – written and recited by the Prospero himself – with descriptions and invented quotations of the real and apocryphal books Gonzalo has given to Prospero after having been deposed. The following quotation from The Tempest (I, ii, 166–8) is repeated several times in the opening scene: ‘Knowing I loved my books, he furnished me / From mine own library with volumes that / I prize above my dukedom’ (Prospero’s Books, 1991). Books constitute Prospero’s universe. In fact, the film could be described as a sort of multi-layered palimpsest crammed with intertextual references. The island is reconfigured here as a vast indoor labyrinthine space with indistinct borders. That immensurable space displays books, paintings, maps, artefacts, scientific instruments and the naked bodies of seemingly anonymous characters. Objects and bodies in endless quantities emerge on the screen without any apparent system of arrangement. Smaller compartments within this mystifying space stand for the different arts and scientific disciplines and are visually connected by means of large, open windows, door thresholds, and archways. Only occasionally pillars or 13

Gras refers to the filmmaker’s contempt of the ‘suspenseful development of a storyline’ which Greenaway associates with the Hollywood cinema, and reasserts the metaphorical and symbolic quality of his films.

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people partially block the view. No closed doors or walls separate in a logical form the vastness of this infinite interior space that stands as an extended metaphor for Prospero’s mind and his encyclopaedic knowledge, which is comprised in the twenty-four books Prospero describes. Paradoxically, the sea, the natural border of any island, is contained in an indoor pool. The usual relation between bounded space and its borders marking the inside/ outside distinction is radically subverted, thus forcing the audience to look at space from a totally new perspective. Prospero seems to inhabit a boundless space, since it is impossible to perceive its physical limits visually, unless one takes the book covers as isolating or framing devices to separate each field of knowledge stored in Prospero’s mind. The books are tropes for large rooms where learning is collected, repositories for the encyclopaedic knowledge of Western culture. Far from a ‘poor cell’, the space constructed and controlled by Prospero is a luxurious baroque interior fashioned to combine the distinctive features of the museum, the art gallery, and the library all in one. By erasing and shifting the borders separating different spaces, Greenaway has also created a place free from the conventional spatial compartmentalization that is associated with enlightenment rationality. Following Cavecchi (1997: 85–6), it could be stated that ‘far from any attempt at realism, Prospero’s island has become a place of illusion and deception’, where, I would add, in the absence of stable and clear spatial and temporal points of reference, the magus-artist can do as he pleases. Each scene takes places in the overcrowded and ornamented interiors that overwhelm the perceptual capacity of the average spectator. The effect is one of extreme artificiality and baroque intricacy, which sets the action in an unreal world. The unnaturalness of the setting and the characters’ actions are underscored by long lateral travelling shots through a never-ending, overpopulated space, by fade-outs, by the overflow of superimposed images, by frames-within-frames, and by mirrored and iterated images. Greenaway also resorts to special effects14 to create an atmosphere of unreality and 14 ‘His use of the digital Graphic Paintbox […] offers a relatively new way of producing space; and a frame, no longer two-dimensional, reveals multiple layers of spatial dimension’ (Cavecchi 1997: 83).

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artifice. In short, Prospero’s reading of The Tempest is translated into mental projections that unfold into a fantastic and impenetrable stage-like space. While being technically innovative and ‘with a tendency to disrupt spatial unity’ (Cavecchi 1997: 83), Greenaway’s film follows rather conservative interpretations of the play, consistent with the classical studies by Dowden (1875) and Knight (1947), in which Prospero was deemed as an alter ego of the playwright. For Anderegg (2000: 103–4) there is also a primary subtext of Prospero’s Books which identifies Prospero with Shakespeare, and with Sir John Gielgud, the actor playing Prospero, but also with Greenaway himself as creative artists.15 Cavecchi holds a similar view, claiming that Prospero holds the imaginative powers of a creator, ‘building up the scene before us […] while taking pleasure of his creation’ (1997: 94). Therefore, Greenaway’s aim is to highlight the artist’s infinite capacity to build a unique space over which he has unlimited control. The audience witness him writing the parts of all the characters and making the puppet-like figures play their roles. Their speeches are muffled by Prospero’s voiceover, divesting them of autonomy. Prospero’s command over the characters and situations is absolute. In an age of mass-production, Greenaway’s intricate construction of the island space as an unbounded store of artefacts and books stands as his tribute to the artistic and intellectual heritage of Renaissance culture. In this regard, Greenaway’s rewriting of The Tempest is also quite conservative as it implicitly states his concern about the trivialization of culture. In my view, the creation of this imaginary space, where Prospero-Greenaway can delight himself contemplating the fantastic visions his imagination conjures up, must be interpreted as Greenaway’s statement about the passive consumption of mass-produced cultural products and as his commitment to the preservation of high culture in the postmodern era.

15

‘The entire film is a projection of the conscious and subconscious mind of Prospero, who is at once poet/playwright, actor, filmmaker, and magician’ (Anderegg 2000: 104).

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Conclusion The most significant differences in these films’ depiction of island space have to do with the exact nature of that space; with the perspective from which island space is presented; and with the kind of conflict and power relations which each director highlights in each case. While Wellman’s Yellow Sky and Wilcox’s Forbidden Planet do not feature literal islands, they still resort to a physical space with distinct points of reference offered for spatial and temporal orientation. Borders are clearly marked to separate inner and outer space; controlled and unclaimed territory. In contrast, Jarman’s The Tempest and Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books deal with space as a mental construct, intentionally subverting the conventional spatial relationship established by the physical borders that allow us to distinguish territorialized from de-territorialized space. As to the standpoint from which the island space is presented, it has been argued that the unsystematic space reconfiguration that supplants the natural setting of the island in the last two films stands as a metaphor for Prospero’s mind. Thus, it may be claimed that the experimental films offer a more subjective perspective on events, unfolding in an unreal inner space whose limits cannot be rationally traced. The possibility of viewing events from outside and inside bounded, territorialized space in Wellman’s and Wilcox’s films encourages the audience to take sides with the most ‘reasonable’ contenders in the struggle for territorial domination, leading them to choose peace over war, and civilization over chaos. However, by deliberately focusing on an internal boundless space, Prospero is able to exert his imaginative powers without restraint within his own territory. As rational spatial orientation is unfeasible in the artificial, unreal space created by Jarman and Greenaway, the spectators cannot avoid being dragged into Prospero’s (i.e. Jarman’s and Greenaway’s) private world and to accept, at least for the duration of the film, the capricious rules governing such an idiosyncratic space. As I see it, adopting an internal or subjective perspective is an effective strategy of resistance on the part of these artists to preclude, with Prospero, any form of external domination mainly from an aesthetic point of view. Claiming absolute freedom from the hegemonic

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discourse of mass-culture is the specific struggle for power staged in these postmodern films. Finally, as to the nature of the power relations staged in each case, the Hollywood productions feature fairly familiar versions of the perpetual conflict between the forces of good and evil. And while Yellow Sky and Forbidden Planet may be considered as master narratives which hail shared values and depict communal voyages of expansion whose spatial physical borders are duly preserved, the postmodern reconfigurations of the island seem rather transgressive, as borders blur and dissolve and established categories are undermined. Jarman’s and Greenaway’s films foster estrangement, advancing greater stylistic heterogeneity and encouraging the exploration of hybrid artistic forms. The reconfiguration of the island space in these experimental films must be understood as the artists’ proclamation of their ideological and aesthetic independence, and the supremacy of the imagination over the homogenizing effects of mainstream forms of cultural production.

Bibliography Anderegg, M. (2000). ‘Greenaway’s Baroque Mise en scene at the Imaginative Centre of Shakespeare’s The Tempest: A Hypertextual Recapitulation of the Rivalry between Ben Johnson and Inigo Jones?’ In C. Stalpaert (ed.), Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books. Critical Essays, pp. 101–20. Ghent: Academia Press. Andrews, N. (1980). ‘A Thunderous Tempest’, Financial Times, 2 May, p. 21. Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Barker, F., and Hulme, P. (1986). ‘Nymphs and Reapers Heavily Vanish: The Discursive Con-texts of The Tempest’. In J. Drakakis (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares, pp. 191–205. London: Routledge. Brower, R. A. (1951). The Fields of Light. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brown, P. (1985). ‘“This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine”: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism’. In J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd edn, pp. 48–71. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

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Canby, V. (1980). ‘Movie Review: The Tempest’, The New York Times, 22 September, p. 20. Cavecchi, M. (1997). ‘Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books: A Tempest between Word and Image’, Literature/Film Quarterly 25 (2), pp. 83–9. Crowl, S. (1980). ‘Stormy Weather: A New Tempest on Film’, Shakespeare on Film Newsletter 38 (1), pp. 5–7. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (2015). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. London: Bloomsbury. Dowden, E. (1962 [1875]). Shakespeare: A Critical Study of his Mind and Art. London: Clarendon. Dragan, R. (2011). ‘Brave New Worlds: the Book, the Cinema, and Web 2.0 in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books and The Tulse Luper Suitcases’, Literature/Film Quarterly 39 (2), pp. 99–115. Elden, S. (2007). ‘There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political’, Radical Philosophy Review 10 (2), pp. 101–16. Foucault, M. (1986). ‘Of Other Spaces’, trans. J. Miskowiec, Diacritics 16 (1), pp. 22–7. Geraghty, L. (2009). American Science Fiction Film and Television. Oxford: Berg. González Campos, M. Á. (2006). Adaptaciones a la pantalla de The Tempest de William Shakespeare. Málaga: Universidad de Málaga. Gras, V. (1995). ‘Dramatizing the Failure to Jump the Culture/Nature Gap: The Films of Peter Greenaway’, New Literary History 26 (1), pp. 123–43. Hill, J. (1998). ‘Film and Postmodernism’. In J. Hill and P. Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, pp. 96–105. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hine, R. V., and Faragher, J. M. (2000). The American West: A New Interpretative History. Yale: Yale University Press. Howard, T. (2000). ‘Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshots’. In R. Jackson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film, pp. 295–313. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulme, P., and Sherman, W. (eds) (2004). The Tempest. William Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Jarman, D. (1984). Dancing Ledge. London: Quarter Books. Kennedy, H. (1992). Film Comment 28 (1), p. 42. Kermode, F. (1954). ‘Introduction’, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, The Arden Shakespeare, pp. xi-xciii. London: Methuen. Kermode, F. (1980). ‘Ideas Strangle Director’, The Times Literary Supplement, 16 May, p. 553. Knight, G. W. (1965 [1947]). The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Plays. London: Methuen.

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Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Loomba, A. (1989). Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McEvoy, S. (2000). Shakespeare: The Basic. Florence, KY: Routledge. Merriam-Webster Dictionary accessed 16 September 2015. Oxford English Dictionary accessed 24 September 2015. Paasi, A. (2011). ‘A Border Theory: An Unattainable Dream or a Realistic Aim for Border Scholars’. In D. Wastl-Watter (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Border Studies, pp. 11–31. Burlington: Ashgate. Peake, T. (2011). Derek Jarman: A Biography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Robinson, D. (1980). ‘A Tempest Full of Magic and Surprises’, The Times, 2 May, p. 13. Rosenthal, D. (2007). 100 Shakespeare Films. London: British Film Institute. Ryall, T. (1998). ‘Genre and Hollywood’. In J. Hill and P. Church Gibson (eds), The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, pp. 327–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Skura, M. A. (1989). ‘Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40, pp. 42–69. Sontag, S. (1966). Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Delta. Spencer, Th. (1942). Shakespeare and the Nature of Man. New York: Macmillan. Telotte, J. P. (2000). Science Fiction Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, A. (1991). ‘“Miranda, Where’s Your Sister?”: Reading Shakespeare’s The Tempest’. In S. Sellers (ed.), Feminist Criticism: Theory and Practice, pp. 45–55. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Tillyard, E. M. W. (1938). Shakespeare’s Last Plays. London: Chatto and Windus. Vaughan, V. M., and Vaughan, A. T. (eds) (1998). Critical Essays on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. New York: Hall. Watson, P. (2012). ‘Approaches to Film Genre – Taxonomy/ Genericity/ Metaphor’. In J. Nelmes (ed.), Introduction to Film Studies, pp. 188–209. London: Routledge. West, R. (2002). Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster. New York: Palgrave. Williams, A. (1984). ‘Is a Radical Genre Criticism Possible?’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9 (2), pp. 121–5. Willis, S. (1991). The BBC Shakespeare Plays: Making the Televised Canon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wilson, J. D. (1932). The Essential Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Clara Pallejá-López

4 The House: Friend or Foe? Buildings, Dwellings, and Home in Fiction

abstract Twentieth-century research in the human sciences suggests that the house in narratives deserves further attention beyond being regarded as the mere setting for a story. The impact of the idea of the home on the human mind is believed to generate intense psychological and emotional attachments which determine the way people relate to space and organize reality. This relationship with the home seems to go beyond the past or present human interaction held within the premises. For deeply engrained reasons, people often develop a one-to-one emotional connection with the house itself that occurs autonomously. In this regard, it could be argued that, to a certain extent, the home complements and expands the self. This chapter explores a series of different insights into the concept of the home, all of which converge into highlighting a primeval human need for a home which generates multifaceted relationships with buildings. For readers and writers, this implies that the house in a text will stand in a prominent place which will condition the way the house is understood.

The House: Friend or Foe? Buildings, Dwellings, and Home in Fiction Several of the best-known names in literature, interestingly, do not belong to characters. Instead, they refer to houses, buildings or other inanimate architectural structures. Wuthering Heights, Satis House from Great Expectations, the house of Usher or Bly from The Turn of the Screw are names of literary houses that often prove to be easier to remember than the names of their inhabitants. The human mind seems to be provided with a psychological anchor which bonds individuals to the spaces they

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inhabit. Contemporary research in the human sciences, as will be pointed out below, suggests that the house in narratives deserves further attention beyond being regarded as the setting of the story. The marked presence of houses in fiction begins early in a reader’s lifetime, as it appears that the house is the most recurrent element in children’s literature not counting the children themselves. This may be due to the impact that the idea of home has on the human mind, an idea believed to generate, as will be seen, intense psychological and emotional attachments which could well determine the way people relate to space and organize reality. For these reasons among others, this chapter explores a number of insights into the concept of the home. The recurrent image of the house in literature suggests underlying levels of meaning that might remain veiled to the inattentive reader, yet could well be operative on lower levels of consciousness. Today, the analysis of houses has extended to other areas such as philosophy, architecture, sociology and lastly – most relevant to my purposes – literary criticism. The present chapter will explore the relevance of these studies to the literary theory and criticism and to textual analysis. The following pages aim to offer an assortment of diverse psychological insights into the concept of home, all of which suggest a primeval human fascination with home which, it will be my contention, influences literary interpretation. Examples of this will be seen in the context of a number of literary texts as the chapter draws to an end.

The Significance of Home to the Human Mind Emotional response to a house is a common human trait which has received an increasing amount of attention in recent decades. Interwoven with the primeval need for shelter, there seem to be other aspects which only recently are receiving the attention they deserve. Architectural theorist Clare Cooper Marcus carried out a twenty-year study of these relations. She describes these dynamics as follows:

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[There] is a very simple yet frequently overlooked premise: As we change and grow throughout our lives, our psychological development is punctuated not only by meaningful emotional relationships with people, but also by close affective ties with a number of significant physical environments, beginning in childhood. That these person-place relationships have been relatively ignored is partly due to the ways in which we have chosen to ‘slice up’ and study the world. (4)

Marcus found that behind the idea of the ‘home’ always stand profound human feelings associated with the intimate spheres of the person. To define the essence of what makes a house a home remains an elusive thing. A justification of the emotional attachment to a house merely based on nostalgia for moments shared with other beings does not fully account for the bond between humans and houses. Feelings towards houses are often unconnected to people, in the same way that they are not necessarily directly linked to the amount of time spent in the building. To this end, there are houses that instantly feel welcoming and, at the same time, there are places which, regardless of the occupants or the furnishings, feel unhomely. Witold Rybczynski, professor of architecture and an architect himself, identified these emotional tensions in his clients, defining his experience as follows: I had designed and built houses, and the experience was sometimes disturbing, for I found that the architectural ideals that I had been taught in school frequently disregarded – if they did not altogether contradict – my clients’ conventional notions of comfort […]. I found myself turning again and again to memories of old houses, and older rooms, and trying to understand what had made them feel so right, so comfortable. (1986: viii)

As Rybczynski points out, architects, developers and planners have recently started to take these compelling feelings into consideration, wondering which architectural features could meet the emotional needs of potential buyers in order to improve their sales. Significantly, the idea of finding the right house is not directly related to the wealth of the seeker. Some people can afford several houses but feel alienated in all of them, while others feel ‘at home’ in strikingly modest living spaces. Some may be mystified as to why they chose an inappropriate house for their needs – too small or too big, for example – only to discover later that these houses reminded them

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of real or imaginary buildings from their past which still reverberated in their unconscious (viii). Since the 1970s, environmental psychology and sociology have appealed to the concept of ‘dwelling’ in an attempt to measure the liveability of a place (Flade 72). The findings point to an intimate connection between the person and the building, by which people personalise the living space according to their own identities, transforming a generic house into an individual home (72). This happens because, for deeply engrained reasons, humans react strongly to registers of the spatial spectrum such as the dwelling, the home country, the region and the neighbourhood, these being ‘the spaces people fight for and grieve over’ (Porteous 1995: 159). The close association between the physical space of the home and the self is actually a determining component in our society and is used by the social order in several ways. An example of its importance is the acknowledgement of the need to personalise space. Teenagers often display posters, photos, clothes, etc. in disarray, thus making a statement about identity by the way they (dis)organise their environment, even though their identities might not be fully developed yet. This attitude of proclaiming identity in one’s own private space is prolonged in the current obsession with home decoration and renovation (Lewis and Cho 2006: 74). Examples of deliberate manipulation of the personalization of space can be seen in the contrast between prisons and institutions like the army. When one is stripped of all freedom, the inmate is permitted to bring personally meaningful objects so that they may help in the assimilation of reclusion and minimise potential conflict. Conversely, when society wishes to mould a whole a group of individuals together who do have the option of leaving at will (as is the case in the army or in religious orders, for example), connection with the home is consistently precluded, and the attention of the group is deliberately focused away from personal items (Marcus 1995: 11). The prominence of the home in our society has also created social contradictions. For instance, in many countries it is mandatory to have an official identification document, while there are no regulations about having a residential address. However, in these same countries a person without a fixed address is viewed suspiciously and, in Western society, is labelled ‘homeless’ or transient. A lack of abode can be a serious, if not an

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absolute, impediment to finding a job, voting, opening a bank account or, ironically, renting a place to live (4). Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho coincide with Claire C. Marcus in denouncing this social incongruity and extend their observation to the figures of the drifter and the wanderer, all nomadic and homeless, who were considered ‘a disturbance to the normative symbolic order that was structured around the traditional home’ (2006: 71). There is further evidence of the human need for a healthy relationship with the home in that disturbances in this relationship can result in psychological disorders. When the home does not feel right – as for instance, homes with a lack of privacy or homes that are remarkably isolating – it can adversely affect mental health (Ewans et al. 2000: 529–30). Common disorders are what Marcus labelled as ‘domocentrism’ and ‘domophobism’.1 Domocentrics are profoundly connected to their house, and this relationship becomes a substitute for and barrier to a healthy interaction with other people (Marcus 1992: 82). Domophobics conversely feel secure in open spaces; they experience anxiety and discomfort at the thought of spending time in a home or having a fixed address, and find it extremely difficult to feel at home anywhere. Both conditions stem from the same primeval need for a balanced harmonious relationship with architectural space, where both extremes of excessive dependence and total rejection would be excluded. Marcus explored the reactions of people who had lost their homes, and concluded that generally this was an emotionally demanding experience, which required a mourning period: ‘When the home is lost, the loss of the house has to be acknowledged and grieved before our consciousness opens up to new possibilities’ (14). The most difficult scenario of loss occurs when the building is destroyed. ‘Houses live and die. So do villages and city neighbourhoods. It seems a natural process […]. Unfortunately, individuals continue to develop attachments to buildings […], [and] so often these attachments come to grief when the objects of attachment – places – are destroyed’ (Porteous 1995: 151). When houses are deliberately destroyed or assaulted by third parties, in what has been referred to as 1

Individuals who suffer from this condition have also been referred to as ‘philobats’ by Michael Balint (228).

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‘domicide’ (151), the occupants’ response to the attack has been noted as extremely intense. Similarly, when houses are broken into, people respond with a sense of violation and grief, as the house is felt to be part of the self. People whose houses have been burgled often scrub those houses as if their own physical bodies, as opposed to wood and bricks, had been breached (Marcus 1995: 243). As all this evidence suggests, the relationship with the home seems to go beyond past or present human interactions held within the premises. It occurs autonomously in a one-to-one emotional connection with the house itself that is not based on the human group. In this regard, it could be argued that to a certain extent, the home complements and expands the self. To trace the point where this identification with the home begins, it is necessary to appeal to developmental psychology. This area of psychology confirms that the feelings for the house, which originate in early childhood, are independent from the family group. When the child begins to acquire knowledge of the world, he or she ‘recognises various objects by the sense of touch alone’ (Piaget 1956: xii). In the early years of life, thus, what is real is what is tangibly accessible, and is usually comprised of the home. The first home is linked to the person’s most fundamental identity because the two are undifferentiated. Given that early exploration of the world is based on ‘“proximity”, corresponding to the simplest type of perceptual structurization’ (6), the young child is not capable of distinguishing himself from his surroundings, which implies that the family home appears to be an extension of the body in as much as the self is an extension of the family house (Piaget 2007: 126). Furthermore, the child infers that all objects which present a certain measure of activity are in fact animated (174, 250). The home, thus, with constant activity such as opening and closing doors and windows, noises or changes of lighting, is very much a living extension of the child, a seemingly animated first universe rather than a purely architectural structure. This deepest-laid association between the home and the person is carried throughout life, and can be easily seen in fiction where buildings often echo the human attributes of their dwellers. The leap from the home-world to the outer-world when children are old enough to attend school is a major mental milestone, in that they cross well defined physical boundaries and structures that separate home

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from the vast outside world in which they will later live. In The Poetics of Space (1958), the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard defines leaving the home as an critical transition (7). While it is true that infants exit their home on a regular basis, their relationship with the world outside is purely contemplative and normally takes place from a pram or a car, without physical access to what they see before them. Following Piaget and Bachelard’s ideas, it could be argued that most of the time there is no difference between what children see from the pram and what they see on the television in the lounge, and so to the child the outside world is not corporeal but equally fictitious. The imprint left on the adult psyche by the childhood home is a permanent link to the childhood universe. It becomes a symbol of a lost comfort zone, where most of what was tangible was contained within the walls of the family home and represents safety. As the child grows older, traces of that connection with what was once understood as part of one’s self are likely to remain. The need for harmony with the place we inhabit is therefore explained by the fact that, at one time, it was constituted as part of the self and, for a long time, it was all that was real. In the last decades, this earlier connection between the self and the home has in fact been used as a means to understand early human development. After several decades of worldwide travel studying different architectures from different cultures, architect and educator Olivier Marc noted that the way children see themselves is intimately related to their portrayal of houses, which become symbols for their emotional, mental, and even physical processes (1977: 76). Marc came to the conclusion that not only do houses represent the different cultures they stem from, but also that in all cultures, interestingly, the drawings of houses by children symbolize the individual human being. Furthermore, houses can stand as figurative representations of human trauma. Children will reach out to adults when they are in physical pain but are often reticent when it comes to talking about their emotional conflicts, as they fear their feelings might not be approved of by their elders. Marc describes this close link as follows: [A]s he draws, the child is also constructing his self, disclosing to himself his own hesitations, obsessions, inhibitions or fears […]. He is consumed by emotions which

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Clara Pallejá-López he lacks the experience to hold in check […] [a]nd so the child draws himself as he draws his house; sad or smiling, open or closed, pleasant or aggressive, welcoming or forbidding, the houses take the form of so many facial expressions. At first the house he draws is symmetrical, as he is; sometimes it is a face, sometimes the representation of his whole physique, very often both. The house can be a face whose roof is a hat, or its frame may resemble the child’s body. (76–7)

House drawings can represent permanent or durable states of mind, but they may also reveal a momentary condition or a fleeting mind set. In his research, this architect came upon the circumstance that children who had a temporary physical condition would, until healed, depict the house accordingly. For instance, children with injured legs would draw leaning houses (77). Bachelard also notes the association between the house and the ‘psychic state’ of the child in that the representation of houses ‘bespeak intimacy’, given that these drawings appear to illustrate the children’s distress (1994: 72). Bachelard comments on the work done by the psychiatrist Françoise Minkowska, who analysed house drawings by Holocaust children, including those of children in hiding spots such as false ceilings or wardrobes.2 The drawing of a barrack by a child from a concentration camp accentuates the belfry steeple and the angles of the supporting structure, giving it a piercing appearance.3 The same distortion is applied to some of the chimneys on the roof, while the original structure of the barrack mostly follows right angles. Trees along the side assume an aggressive position as they partially block the bottom half of the building. Common traits of trees such as, trunk shape or colour have been altered by the painter, and what is left is a series of black twisted branches that seem to hold the barrack up in the air, like dark claws emerging from the otherwise white ground. 2

3

See the drawings by children from the Terezin concentration camp collected by Friedl Dicker-Brandeis. Dicker-Brandeis taught art to some of the 15,000 children that stopped in Terezin on their way to different concentration camps. She hid thousands of these drawings and poems in two suitcases before she was sent to Auschwitz. The suitcases were eventually discovered and brought to worldwide attention with the publication of the book I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 1964. Sonja Waldsteinová. ‘Terezín Barracks’ (Archives number 129.361, 22 x 30 cm). She is one of the 100 children that survived Terezin. See page 85 in I Never Saw Another Butterfly.

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Notably, this girl studied by Minkowska chose a red shade for some areas of the roof in a drawing which otherwise was entirely made up of shades of grey and black. The pointy structures, the claw-like branches, and the red shade all conjure up images of injury and damage. The houses drawn by both Holocaust victims and children in hideaways invariably reflected their feelings in those moments. These houses function as projections of their own selves; the association takes place unconsciously and is therefore free of restrictions or restraints. Considering the close association between home and person, it is not surprising that psychology appeals to this deep bond between humans and houses in order to understand the mind behind a representation of a house. Analogous mental processes are at work in the psyche of children and in writers’ creative minds: in the former, these processes are externalized by the choice of shapes and colours; in the latter, by the ways in which fiction is located in, and unfolds in relation to, its settings.

House and Psychoanalysis: Throbs in the Unconscious The most significant advance in the study of the house is likely to be found in the rise of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis shifted the attention of psychology from what was a literal one-to-one communication between patient and therapist to the world of symbols and hidden meanings, taken to be gateways to the unconscious. Initially, dreams were looked at as premonitions, and houses were often interpreted literally as sheltering structures.4 However, there are early records of houses being interpreted on a psychological level and analysed as symbols representing other aspects of the dreamer’s life. One of the earliest written records of the study of houses 4

The Bible, for example, provides multiple instances of the human appeal to dream interpretation, often referring to them as visions of the night. Some of these references to the relevance of the interpretation of dreams in early Western cultures are Genesis 40:8; Acts 2:17; Numbers 12:6; Job 33:15; Joel 2:28; Daniel 2:1–3; Genesis 46:2 and Deuteronomy 13:1–5, among many others in both the Old and the New Testaments.

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on a symbolic level, and an antecedent to the creation of psychoanalysis in the twentieth century, is Artemidorus Daldianus’s study of dreams (second century ad). The diviner Artemidorus wrote the five-volume Greek work, the Oneirocritica, where he studied the symbolic potential of some objects. Allegedly, he was the first to identify formally the connection between the house and the human body in a section that he titled ‘The House, Image of the Self ’. He realized that in dreams houses stood for the very person of the dreamer, thus reflecting psychic activity and being part of the inner landscape (Marc 1977: 67). He understood houses and dwelling structures as expansions of the human body and symbols of a person’s physical vulnerability. He explained that the lack of a house would therefore indicate a lack of security: ‘[S]omeone dreamt that his wall had been broken through […] all those things refer to the body’ (Artemidorus 1975: 199). He went on to amplify this description as ‘[a]ll objects that surround our person like, for example, a cloak, a house, a wall, a ship, and similar things, signify one another’ (199). Artemidorus’s interpretation presents a psychological insight, as opposed to a merely premonitory precedent. Artemidorus took the first step in a trend which would reach its peak with the emergence of psychoanalysis. One of the first psychoanalysts to expand on the interpretation of the house was Wilhelm Stekel (1868–1940). He associated the house with the body of the dreamer, reading houses in terms of sexual anxieties (Stekel 1943: 420), and also expanded on the significance of houses by equating a former home with a person’s past. A person who, in dreams, lives in his old house, is a person who cannot face the present time: ‘He lives in the old house, that is to say in the past’ (439). By reading the building chronologically, Stekel shows that the house can function as a projection not only of a person, but also of the person’s past, highlighting the potential for the house to symbolize the individual in a different moment in time. The turning point in the interpretation of houses as symbols takes place with Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961). Jung’s metaphor of the house as a symbol for the mind is possibly the most widely acknowledged to date: I dreamed that I was in ‘my home,’ apparently on the first floor, in a cosy, pleasant sitting room furnished in the manner of the 18th century. I was astonished that I

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had never seen this room before, and began to wonder what the ground floor was like. I went downstairs and found the place was rather dark, with panelled walls and heavy furniture dating from the 16th century or even earlier. My surprise and curiosity increased. I wanted to see more of the whole structure of this house. So I went down to the cellar, where I found a door opening onto a flight of stone steps that led to a large vaulted room. The floor consisted of large slabs of stone and the walls seemed very ancient. I examined the mortar and found it was mixed with splinters of brick. Obviously the walls were of Roman origin. I became increasingly excited. In one corner, I saw an iron ring on a stone slab. I pulled up the slab and saw yet another narrow flight of steps leading to a kind of cave, which seemed to be a prehistoric tomb, containing two skulls, some bones, and broken shards of pottery. Then I woke up. (1980: 42–3)

Jung interpreted this house as an image of his own mind, in which the different levels stood for layers of his consciousness or unconscious, reflecting as well the evolution of his psyche. He explained his dream in the following manner: It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche – that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the salon. It had an inhabited atmosphere, in spite of its antiquated style. The ground floor stood for the first level of the unconscious. The deeper I went, the more alien and the darker the scene became. In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself – a world which can scarcely be reached or illuminated by consciousness. The primitive psyche of man borders on the life of the animal soul, just as the caves of prehistoric times were usually inhabited by animals before man laid claim to them. (1963: 184)

Later on in his life, Jung used this dream to illustrate the way the human mind works. Thanks to his analysis, his insights about house symbolism can be applied to the identification of meanings corresponding to the various areas of the dreamer’s psyche (especially the roof and foundations). When Jung expanded this metaphor by making specific references to attic/cellar imagery, he made an insightful symbolic association between the house and buried anxieties in the mind. He uses this polarized imagery to represent the conscious/unconscious dualism and to illustrate the phenomenon of repression. Gaston Bachelard builds on this dual image by incorporating the notion of fear. Quoting Jung, he posits: ‘Here the conscious

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acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar, hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that the noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent man did not venture into the cellar’ (Bachelard 1994: 19).5 Subsequently, he builds on Jung’s metaphor as follows: In the attic rats and mice can make considerable noise. But […] the creatures moving about in the cellar are slower, less scampering, more mysterious. In the attic, fears are easily ‘rationalized.’ Whereas in the cellar […] rationalization is less rapid and less clear; also is never definitive. In the attic, the day’s experiences can always efface the fears of night. In the cellar, darkness prevails both day and night, and even when we are carrying a lighted candle, we see shadows dancing on the dark walls. (19)

In Bachelard’s contribution, we can see where human anxieties would fit into the metaphor of the house of the human mind. Significantly, Bachelard positions anxieties not coming from the outside as in Artemidorus’s or Stekel’s analysis. Instead, they are placed inside the house, exemplifying the mind’s processing of trouble by locking fears up in the lower layers of the mind, a place where they can remind the psyche of their presence so that they can be dealt with and eventually exorcized. It is significant that anxieties and fears are visualized as part of the metaphorical house of the mind by Jung and Bachelard, revealing that such fears are part of what constitutes ourselves and what feels close or familiar to our experience. In 1919, Sigmund Freud presented a theory which connected precisely the idea of home with what is familiar and with horror. According to his theory of ‘the uncanny’, what a person finds most unsettling is what touches or is related to the person’s own home or what is most familiar: ‘this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed’ (Freud 2003: 148). In this essay, he defines the word ‘heimlich’ in his native language: ‘Heimlich, adj.: belonging to the house, to the family, or: regarded as belonging to it […] ‘intimate, cosily homely; arousing a pleasant feeling of quiet contentment, etc., of comfortable repose and secure protection, like the enclosed, comfortable house’ (126–7). ‘Unheimlich’, 5

Bachelard is citing Carl Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1947).

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however, is defined as ‘what was meant to remain secret and hidden and has come into the open’ (132). Merging the two definitions together, Freud comes up with the following logic: ‘[The] word heimlich is not unambiguous, but belongs to two sets of ideas, which are not mutually contradictory, but very different from each other – the one relating to what is familiar and comfortable, the other to what is concealed and kept hidden’ (132). Here we see the same duality found in Jung’s attic/cellar images. The house as a whole therefore, is not entirely to be trusted, as it allows for the possibility that things which are safely hidden (in psychoanalytical language ‘repressed’), might, to our horror, unexpectedly reveal themselves. In his theory of the uncanny, Freud posits that there is a unique quality about what is familiar to us, so that when it turns against us it becomes all the more disturbing and frightening. Freud proposes that our prior acquaintance with an object or place could be the precise property that makes the object/place particularly frightening to us. With regard to houses, the whole essay is presented in terms of familiarity with the family home, since the house emerges as the one entity/structure that hosts most of what can make us vulnerable. The house is at once what shelters us and conceals what, for various reasons, should remain hidden. Most importantly, Freud’s theory of the uncanny once again acknowledges people’s feelings of trust and human attachment to the home, which account for the sense of disorientation and betrayal when the home revolts against us. Freud notes that there are ‘particularly favourable conditions generating feelings of the uncanny if intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is inanimate or animate’ since children make no sharp distinction between these two categories (140–1). When this happens, former pleasurable feelings of safety are transformed into unsettling emotions. A feeling of betrayal is triggered when something trusted becomes contemplated as an enemy; however, our former attachment to this new enemy prevents us from letting go. Freud’s ideas, which linked the literal and the repressed, have had a decisive influence on literary criticism. If Freud’s theory revolved around what was included in the home and therefore was familiar, Maria Tatar has explored specifically the uncanniness of buildings in a selection of emblematic houses in English fiction. Her study sheds further light onto

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the question of why human beings are so responsive to the concept of home. She concludes that, indeed, what made them mysterious was precisely that the houses stood on the border between the familiar and the strange: [O]ne obvious point of departure for a study of the uncanny is the home. If we begin by looking at some of the familiar places in literature, it may be possible to recognize just what makes them mysterious or eerie. What, in short, makes a house unheimlich, or haunted? It is precisely in the border area between the familiar and the strange – at the point where heimlich and unheimlich merge in the meaning to suggest the sinister or treacherous. (Tatar 1981: 169)

Tatar’s ideas suggest that the reason why haunted houses perform successfully as agents of evil in horror fiction is precisely because this fiction feeds on our primeval psychological attachment to buildings, this being the reason why characters can never quite let go of the foul home until it is often too late.

The Early Conditioning: Children’s Literature The prominent place of the house in fiction highlighted by Tatar has been noted by other critics. The relevance of architecture for the understanding of the literary text is stressed by Ellen Eve Frank, who claims that a central strategy in the self ’s interaction with the world consists in placing oneself in relation to a building as part of human interaction with the environment. Because of this disposition, locations and buildings can function as spatial pointers, impacting on the reader’s understanding of the literary work as a whole: [Man] and the world are composed of the same elements which either are or have the illusion of being spatial-temporal, […] he imagines his consciousness or experience to be bounded or located in particular space, within white walls, bodies, time, while what is outside his personal realm he imagines to be boundless as he thinks the universe is boundless. Because of this structural correspondence, we may read

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all structures […] with a mental ruler and a table of equivalents […]. A building […] is also a building of meaning. (1979: 6–7)

Indeed, it appears that the grasping of the spatial structure of a story is central to the construction of its meaning. A story set in an undefined moment in time seems easier to seize than a story lacking spatial references, which, as a consequence, appears fluid and unstable, impossible almost for the human mind to visualize. House imagery, which, as we have seen, figures prominently in the human understanding of space, functions as a psychic anchor when it comes to the creation of meaning. The prevalence of architecture in fiction can crucially be discerned in children’s literature. Society trains children to focus on house imagery more than they or we might be aware of. Together with the children’s direct experience of the privileged position of the family home in Western culture, children’s literature persistently presents house imagery. The internalization of this imagery results in what could be referred to as an ‘over-susceptibility’ to representations of the house which will accompany them all their lives. Psychologist Virginia L. Wolf carried out a study in which she examined children’s literature about houses and its effects on the child reader. In her work, Wolf highlights the large quantity of houses in works written for children, and analyses the consequences for them as adult readers: Images of home abound in children’s literature […]. In Fairy Tales and After, Roger Sale emphasizes the importance of snug and cosy places throughout the history of children’s literature […]. My impression is not only that home is the dominant place in children’s literature, but also that the house is the chief form […] [this dominant place] takes. (1990: 54)

Once again following Piaget’s ideas of oneness with the home, Wolf explains that ‘the celebration of place in children’s literature is essentially a celebration of the self at one with the world’ (56). According to Wolf, as children grow they are presented with fiction which is gradually distanced from the idea of a safe home, with stories revolving around the need to protect, find or recover a house, to finally and eventually reach the point at which it is understood that there was never the certainty of home initially perceived: the safe refuge once thought invulnerable is in reality subject to all sorts

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of threats and dangers. This leaves an increasing sense of nostalgia in the growing child which might be visualized as the ‘wake of home’ (56). At this point, the child has to renounce the illusions of power, certainty and safety. Wolf believes that these are not forsaken easily, and argues that the longing for the childhood ideal of home remains, creating a particular receptiveness to the idea of home and therefore to house imagery in fiction: For some time the original and the new perceptions of reality both exist within the child until the new finally wins out over the original. Although Piaget never says so, we know that this victory is never complete or final. Psychology tells us that the child survives within each of us, continuing to influence our dreams and our behaviour. So the infant’s mythic experience of being at one with the world continues to haunt our imaginations, despite our adult awareness of its egocentricity. (55)

From Wolf ’s theory about the plethora of homes in children’s literature interesting implications arise, further enhancing the relevance of the depiction of houses in the construction of meaning, as it adds to the underlying power of house imagery for the adult reader and writer. The profusion and gradual withdrawal of homes for young readers which eventually disappear would condition readers by creating a habit of actively searching for the house in the text, a situation that is prolonged into the adulthood both of the reader and of the writer. Readers will look for the house in the story with interest and nostalgia simply because that is what they were instructed to do when they were young. It is likely that on most occasions adult readers will be unaware of this predisposition and that their responses will take place on an unconscious level. In the case of the writers, is seems hardly surprising that this training would result into significant and coded recreations of house imagery in their literary creations. The need for the grown child to constantly search for a home is still present in the adult reader’s mind, ready to find the home in the text or, in the case of the writer, to provide it and endow it with symbolism. Our reading processes therefore would, to an extent, be determined by this oversensibility to narrative depiction of houses. In this way, Wolf ’s account suggests that not only we are biologically programmed to be oversensitive to places of dwelling, but also that society trains us as children to be looking for meaning in home imagery. As Marcus has argued, humankind might have chosen not to slice up the world

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according to spatial constraints other than political delimitations, but this would not change the fact that the house does occupy a most prominent place in the organization of our society, a fact that might be muted but is nevertheless a highly operative force in the human psyche. Drawing close to the end of this chapter, it seems necessary to make reference to some of the most emblematic fictional houses exemplifying this intimate bond between house and occupant. A limited number of works have been analysed specifically under the scope of the reciprocal human/building bond. Incontestably, Edgar Allan Poe’s House of Usher and the Usher brother and sister Roderick and Madeline stand as the main exponents of house-dweller narrative parallels. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ is a story about the mental and physical decay of these two siblings, the last of a lineage, and also that of the family manor, which collapses with its owners inside as the story reaches a conclusion. Poe remarkably shifts an important amount of narrative attention towards the house, which is highlighted by his choice of title, and sets up clear correlations between the building and its dwellers: The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn. (1986: 140)

Description of its proprietor follows accordingly: I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! […]. A cadaverousness of complexion […]; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a

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By making explicit mention of the fissure, Poe is foretelling the imminent death of the owner of the property, something which would not have been the case if the description of the building had merely alluded to the overall architectural decay. As the house collapses in the end, the readers witness the foretold extinction of two entities which had been presented under equal parameters. Poe is a renowned exponent of this use of house imagery but he is by no means the only example. Emily Bronte, Isabel Allende or Charlotte Perkins Gilman have also made lavish use of house imagery in a way which completed their narratives to an extent not far behind that of some of the main characters. Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange fittingly resemble the personality traits of the Earnshaws and the Lintons. In Allende’s House of the Spirits, the ‘big house on the corner’, as it is called in the village, is divided into two halves to host Esteban in the front area and Clara in the back rooms. Lastly, in Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, the stifling atmosphere in the country house’s yellow room reverberates of imposed isolation and imprisonment under the dictates of patriarchy. In this regard, the work of Rosalind Ashe, who has published several illustrated volumes on literary house analysis, should be highlighted as a catalogue of houses worthy of further scholarly study. Among these notably stand the main dwellings in Rebecca, Great Expectations, The Picture of Dorian Grey, The House of the Seven Gables, The Great Gatsby, Dracula, Jane Eyre, Little Women, The Portrait of a Lady, Middlemarch, Gone with the Wind, Robinson Crusoe and Alice in Wonderland, among many others.

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All the evidence above suggests that, as Antje Flade (2007) phrases it in her study on the meaning of home, our psyches are ‘heavily swayed, in both positive and negative ways, by the spaces we move through and occupy’ (75). When applied to the mental processes involved in literary interpretation, the reader would inevitably try to complete the characters’ personas by positioning them in the material environments where they dwell. The books treated by Ashe stand as a small selection among the literary houses that still remain unattended and ignored by criticism. Hopefully, the amount of contemporary attention received by studies revolving around the psychology of the home will result in greater academic awareness of these unspoken yet crucial entities in a text.

Bibliography Artemidorus Daldianus (1975). The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by R. J. White. New Jersey: Noyes. Ashe, R. (1982). Literary Houses. New York: Facts on File. Ashe, R. (1983). More Literary Houses. New York: Facts on File. Ashe, R. (1984). Children’s Literary Houses. New York: Facts on File. Bachelard, G. (1994). The Poetics of Space, translated by M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon. Balint, M. (1955). ‘Friendly Expanses-Horrid Empty Spaces’, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 36, pp. 225–41. Bettelheim, B. (1976). The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Vintage. English Standard Version Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments, The (2009). Oxford UP.  Ewans, G. W., et al. (2000). ‘Housing Quality and Mental Health’, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 68 (3), pp. 526–30. Flade, A. (2007). ‘No Place Like Home’, Scientific American Mind 18 (1), pp. 70–5. Frank, E. E. (1979). Literary Architecture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freud, S. (2003 [1919]). The Uncanny, translated by D. McLintock. London: Penguin. Gilman, C. P. (1970 [1903]). The Home: its Work and Influence. New York: Source. Jung, C. G. (1947). Modern Man in Search of a Soul. London: Kegan Paul.

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Jung, C. G. (1963). Memories, Dreams, Reflections, translated by R. and C. Winston. London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan Paul. Jung, C. G. (1980 [1964]). Man and His Symbols. London: Picador. Lewis, T., and Cho, D. (2006). ‘Home Is Where the Neurosis Is: A Topography of the Spatial Unconscious’, Cultural Critique 64, pp. 69–91. Life in Shadows: Hidden Children and the Holocaust, online exhibition, available at The United States Holocaust Museum accessed 5 November 2015. Marc, O. (1995). Psychology of the House, translated by J. Wood. London: Thames and Hudson, 1977. Marcus, C. C. (1995). House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. Berkeley, CA: Conari. Piaget, J. (1956). The Child’s Conception of Space, trans. Langdon and J. L. Lunzer. London: Routledge. Piaget, J. (2007). The Child’s Conception of the World, translated by J. and A. Tomlinson. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Poe, E. A. (1986). ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. In David Galloway (ed.), The Fall of the House of Usher. London: Penguin, pp. 138–57. Porteous, J. D. (1995). ‘Domicide: The Destruction of Home’. In David N. Benjamin (ed.), The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments, pp. 151–61. Aldershot: Brookfield Avebury. Rybczynski, W. (1986). Home: A Short History of an Idea. New York: Viking. Stekel, W. (1943). The Interpretation of Dreams, 2 vols, vol. 2. New York: Liveright. Tatar, M. M. (1981). ‘The Houses of Fiction: Toward a Definition of the Uncanny’, Comparative Literature 33 (2), pp. 167–82. Volavková, H., and Raspanti, C. (1993). I Never Saw Another Butterfly. New York: Schocken. Wolf, V. L. (1990). ‘From the Myth to the Wake of Home: Literary Houses’, Children’s Literature: Annual of the Modern Language Association Division on Children’s Literature 18, pp. 53–67.

Laura Torres-Zúñiga

5 Thresholds of Abjection: Identity and Space in Tennessee Williams’s Fiction

abstract By means of their rupture with mimetic realism through expressionistic techniques and devices, some of Tennessee Williams’s plays are able to convey the interdependent relationship that exists between subjectivity and space. Before this experimentation on the stage, it was present in Williams’s prose writings, in particular those of his short stories rooted in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, where his characters’ crises of identity had been allegorized through the use of spatial tropes such as gothic houses or doors, the dynamics of the inside/outside boundary, and the presence of the ambiguous, liminal abject. An analysis of these elements in Williams’s short fiction will reveal how the spatial subtext problematizes the borders of subjectivity and in what terms Williams uses it in order to advocate for their/the latter’s flexibility.

During the climactic scene in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), prim Blanche Dubois faces her most terrible encounter with her brutish brotherin-law Stanley Kowalski, a ‘date’ that they had had ‘with each other from the beginning’ of the play (Williams 1951: 130). The growing tension between these two characters created by Tennessee Williams finally erupts when Stanley, the embodiment of the new sap in American society, grabs the opportunity of his wife not being home to settle his conflict with Blanche by forcing himself upon her. This rape precipitates Blanche’s fall into mental derangement and so leads to the end of the play, in which she will leave the Kowalski’s home to be conducted to an institution. As John S. Bak (2009b) has stated, critics have mostly focused on the mimetic aspects of the scene and have considered it a representation of domestic violence and male sexual dominance whose seeming inevitability from the beginning makes it difficult to extract a positive reading of the gender politics in the play.

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However, as Bak suggests, ‘there is an enormous difference between rape as literary “sign” and rape as social “signifier” in Williams’s play and in his canon prior to 1946’ (2009b). Therefore, a reinterpretation of the value of this scene should take into account, on the one hand, how its symbolic nature can be enriched by a semiotic reading of non-mimetic, expressionistic theatrical techniques, and on the other, how this violent encounter relates to similar occurrences in other texts by Williams. The physical realization of the rape is not actually represented on stage, but Blanche’s ensuing psychic disintegration is signified by means of one of Williams’s technical innovations that disrupted the realism still prevailing in the American theatre of the mid-twentieth century. At the moment of Blanche and Stanley’s confrontation, Williams specifies in one of his abundant stage directions that the audience is to witness the appearance of ‘lurid reflections’ on the walls, ‘shadows […] of a grotesque and menacing form’ (Williams 1951: 128), an expressionistic manoeuvre that suddenly transports the spectator inside Blanche’s agitated mind as if perceiving the scene through her eyes. At the same time, the text indicates that ‘through the back wall of the rooms, which have become transparent’ (Williams 1951: 128), the sidewalk can be seen, so that the exterior goings-on and the strangers on the street break into the privacy of the Kowalski’s house at a moment when intimacy – even if it is a perverse one – is paramount. These external intromissions mingle with Blanche’s inner hallucinations, which are still visible on a few solid sections of the stage walls. Thus, the spectators see how Blanche’s psychic breakdown is accompanied by a similar breakdown of physical borders and the blurring of the distinction between what is inside and outside her own experience. After that final ordeal, she will be shut off from reality altogether and descend into an evasive seclusion that will make her forever ‘dependent on the kindness of strangers’ (Williams 1951: 142). Williams’s experimentation with expressionistic elements had already begun in earlier plays, which incorporate technical devices that endow the scene with a non-realistic, poetic atmosphere, for example in his first Broadway success, the family drama The Glass Menagerie (1945). Unlike with A Streetcar Named Desire, however, some of these unconventional techniques have usually been discarded at the time of the play’s production

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(Adler 1994: 136–7). In The Glass Menagerie, besides introducing light effects and music as a counterpoint to what happens on stage, Williams proposes the use of a ‘screen device’ (Williams 2000: 395), whose images and written legends enable the audience to visualize the feelings and associative thoughts of Tom, the play’s protagonist, towards his mother and sister (Single 1999). In addition to the projections on this screen, Williams’s directions include a transparent fourth wall that divides the stage between the space of present time – from where Tom as a narrator pronounces his speeches – and the Wingfields’ apartment, the locus of Tom’s hazy recollections. Both the projections and the articulation of space recreate the psychic functioning of the narrator of this ‘memory play’ and offer a subtext that complements the written/spoken word in order to create a more material, ‘plastic theatre’ (Williams 2000: 395), that attempts to capture ‘the impressionistic qualities of the human memory’ (Presley 1990: 80). With these non-mimetic representations of space, Williams’s theatre contrasts with ‘the spatial obsessions of realism [that] close off territories […] analyse them, inhabit them with observable types;’ but instead, his plays denounce the ‘destructiveness of closure, of establishing limits’ and seem to ‘explore a discontinuous space, a light, mobile perspective, against the grain of mimetic illusion’, by simultaneously establishing and transgressing borders and lines of interpretation, as Anne Fleche has observed (1997: 87, 1). The key to this flexible configuration of space in A Streetcar Named Desire is, precisely, that Williams is attempting to ‘visualize the restless discourse of desire, that uncontainable movement between inside and outside, soul and body’ that is so characteristic of his entire oeuvre (Fleche 1997: 99). Whereas in realist theatre the moral code in relation to sexual life is ‘you will seek to transform your desire, your every desire, into discourse’ (Foucault, quoted in Fleche 1997: 90), Williams does not merely talk about desire, but tries to materialize its effects by creating an allegorical subtext that ‘makes explicit what realism obscures, forcing the sexuality that propels discourse into the context of the scene’ (Fleche 1997: 99) – in this case, where the violation of both Blanche and mimetic realism coincide. That is the symbolic effect of such a violent act on Blanche’s already fragile psyche – she is forced to face that part of her self that she had been trying to hide behind her assumed role as the genteel Southern

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belle and the prudish schoolteacher: her latent, disavowed sexuality, hinted at throughout the play by the references to the ‘epic fornications’ of her ancestors (Williams 1951: 43), her attraction to younger boys, and her past furtive encounters with soldiers. In his revision of this and other scenes of rape within the Williams canon – in the plays Not About Nightingales (1938), 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (ca. 1946), Vieux Carré (1975), and in the stories ‘The Important Thing’ (1945), and ‘The Night of the Iguana’ (1946/1948) – Bak detects a similar interaction or movement between soul and body in the feminine characters involved, who feel a conflict between their deep-seated moral condemnation of the flesh and their repressed need for human contact and intimacy beyond the merely spiritual. Hence the ambivalent attitude of these women, who seem to both reject and welcome their attackers. The involuntariness of the rape exonerates them from their Puritanical sense of guilt and so they are able to acknowledge the otherwise traumatic act as ‘a liberating experience in that it forced [them] finally to accept [their] longdenied sexual longings;’ the underlying intended effect would then be ‘to excoriate religious dogma for having appropriated human spirituality and sequestered it from various worldly appetites’ (Bak 2009b). Even in the case of Blanche, her submission to Stanley’s attack (she has an opportunity to escape while he is in the bathroom, but she does not) can be interpreted as an attempt to put an end to the desire that has been consuming her life and so ‘have a chance to continue existing, if only in her imagination, in that now-moribund Old South’ (Bak 2009b). The ultimate symbolic function of these acts that mix seduction and aggression, Bak concludes, is ‘to raze the self-imposed barriers we set between ourselves and another’ (2009b), as we can see in Not About Nightingales through the spatial metaphor in: Eva’s earlier explanation to Jim about her fascination with rape. In describing her ‘favourite nightmare,’ in which she finds herself alone in a ‘big empty house,’ knowing that ‘something or someone was hidden behind one of the doors, waiting to grab [her]’ (NN 84), Eva recalls being frightened but enjoys the feeling because in the dream it is she who finally pursues the source of her sexually aggressive fears: ‘But instead of running out of the house I always go searching through it; opening all of

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the closed doors—Even when I come to the last one, I don’t stop, Jim—I open that one, too’ (NN 84). (Bak 2009b)1

Although Bak does not pursue the use of spatial metaphors any further, his and Fleche’s analyses seem to agree that in Williams’s allegorical vocabulary, the breaching of the bodily limits that rape entails is also a sign for the razing of the innermost barriers of these female characters’ identities which are preventing them from penetrating those ‘closed doors’ that separate them from the feared/wanted realization of their desire. In the exemplary case of Blanche, the boundaries of her body, spirit and the stage space are pushed too far to the point of their collapse. It is also the intention of this chapter to trace the origins of such correlation between the body, the psyche and their representation in architectural terms to Williams’s early affinity with the Gothic, a trend which indeed found its disciplinary basis in architecture (Armitt 2011; Monnet 2010). It was in his short fiction, rooted in the tradition of the Southern Gothic, where Williams began to explore the constitutive relation between subjectivity and space. Before and beyond his career as a playwright, Williams was the author of more than fifty short stories, most of them originally published in periodicals such as Partisan Review, Story or The New Yorker, and then collected into five volumes: One Arm and Other Stories (privately published in 1948 and reissued in a trade edition in 1954), Hard Candy, A Book of Stories (1954), The Knightly Quest: A Novella and Four Short Stories (1966), Eight Mortal Ladies Possessed (1974), and the posthumous Collected Stories (1985). Scholars of the American short story have usually placed him within the second wave of Southern Renaissance writers (after 1945) together with Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers (Weaver 1983: 20–5). United under the common label of ‘new American gothic’ (Peden 1975: 72), they all share what Williams himself defined as ‘an intuition of an underlying dreadfulness in modern experience’ (Williams

1

Bak is quoting Williams’s Not About Nightingales, ed. with an Introduction by Allean Hale (New York: New Directions, 1998).

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1978: 42), as well as a penchant for violent imagery and the grotesque, and a characteristically gothic ‘narrativization of Otherness’ (Savoy 1998: 6).2 A typical strategy for gothic stories to narrate otherness as well as inspire such dreadfulness or uncanniness, as Freud put it (Freud 2003), is by awaking the double, a repressed other both familiar and estranged, who attracts and repels the protagonist subject and confounds its (the subject’s) self. Grounded on Freud’s uncanny– from the German unheimlich, unhomely (Freud 2003: 124) – Julia Kristeva’s seminal work Powers of Horror (1982) reformulates the spatial character of that haunting other through her figure of the abject, a not-me who has been excluded from individual and social self-definition because it ‘disturbs identity, system, order [… and] does not respect borders, positions, rules’. The abject is ‘[t]he in-between, the ambiguous, the composite’ (Kristeva 1982: 4). The abject threatens the subject’s sense of a fully self-sufficient identity by arousing a conflict of drives and drawing it ‘toward the place where meaning collapses’ due to a ‘spatial ambivalence’ with origin in the mother-child dyad (Kristeva 1982: 2; 63). The abject brings about an inside/outside uncertainty that characterizes the earliest stage in subjective development, when the close bond between child and mother does not let the former realize any separation between them yet, but it feels itself immersed in a space of completion that Kristeva names chora – Greek for ‘womb’ (Moi 1986: 12). Although it holds the potential for a re-union into a wholeness that promises the fulfillment of desire, the Kristevan ‘longing to fall back into the maternal chora’ arouses ‘a deep anxiety over the possibility of losing one’s subjectivity’– the very fear that ‘Freud identified as the ultimate source of the feeling of uncanniness [… or] “the return of the repressed”’ (McAfee 2004: 49). Tempting yet repulsive, the abject other in Williams’s stories is endowed with sexual and/or racial ambiguity, and provokes that gothic anxiety and the subsequent crisis of subjectivity that have been defined by Eve K. Sedgwick as an ‘insidious displacement of the boundaries of self ’, a self she additionally described as permeable (quoted in Jarraway 2

An unpublished play by Williams is in fact entitled American Gothic, but it makes reference to Grant Wood’s painting, as Bak (2009a) has argued, rather than to the literary movement.

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1998: 72, n. 4). The abject troubles the subject’s apparently stable identity by causing the collapse of the border between what is I, inside, and what is not I, outside. This disarticulation of a spatialized self correlates with a similar experience of fragmentation of the body (Kristeva 1982: 53), which in its turn finds its narrative spatial correlative in the ‘the most persistent site, object, structural analogue, and trope of American gothic’s allegorical turn’: the haunted house (Savoy 1998: 9). This gothic architectural allegory provides an indirect way to signify the subject’s psychic/physical borders between inside and outside that can give way to the penetration of the other or remain shut for the protection of the endangered self, so that not just the stories Bak mentions (‘The Important Thing’ and ‘The Night of the Iguana’) feature examples of symbolic rape, but other earlier texts deserve a re-assessment of their spatial dynamics in that light. Probably the clearest example in Williams’s fiction of this gothic crisis of identity and its interwoven narrativization of body, house and self is the story ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, written in 1935 and mostly overlooked by critics.3 Not only this story – both a poem by Emily Dickinson and one legend on the screen device of The Glass Menagerie share the same title. The poem by Dickinson encapsulates the mood of the homonymous story: ‘Elysium is as far as to / The very nearest Room. / If in that Room a Friend await / Felicity or Doom – / What fortitude the Soul contains / That it can so endure / The accent of a coming Foot, / The opening of a Door!’ (Dickinson 1999: 584). The story is about a young girl, Catharine, 3

References to this story just appear in comprehensive volumes on Williams, and then only briefly. Vannatta considers that it is in ‘Accent’ that ‘for the first time [Williams] clearly employs his own experiences as substance for a short story’ by reflecting his own and his sister Rose’s anxieties onto the two characters; he also finds that this story shows a more mature use of modernist techniques such as the use of imagery and apparently commonplace actions to convey great emotional intensity (1988: 11–12). Heintzelman and Smith-Howard’s Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams opens its alphabetical list of works with ‘Accent’, but they only include a synopsis and a mention about its resemblance with the story ‘The Important Thing’, ‘another tale of strained romantic tension between a budding writer and an ambitious yet sensitive female counterpart’ (2005: 19). This latter story will be dealt with later in this chapter.

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who returns from the city for a short visit to her hometown and finds that her bosom friend Bud Hamilton, who was supposed to wait for her at the station, is not there. Disappointed, she has to walk alone to his family’s house and upon arriving there, she uneasily finds out that Bud is not ‘waiting on the other side of any door of this house’ (Williams 1994: 32). The story adopts Catharine’s point of view exclusively and reproduces her thoughts and impressions during the increasingly restless wait and ‘suspense’ (Dickinson’s title for the poem) for the encounter with Bud, which she simultaneously looks forward to and fears. The Hamilton’s house fulfils all the requisites of the gothic haunted house: it’s ‘ugly, yellow’, full of dark rooms with creaking timbers and high ceilings that lead you upwards towards an ‘undiscovered submit of darkness’ from where ‘the sly laughter and whispering of ghosts’ are heard (Williams 1994: 34). The allegorical discourse that manifests the correlation between Catharine’s body and the house exemplifies how ‘inside and outside constitute the essential tension of the gothic’ (Holland and Sherman 1977: 288). Just as Catharine pictures the phantasmagorical house as struggling against ‘the returning spring’ and speaking ‘a loud denial to the playful wind’ outside it (Williams 1994: 34), she reveals her own struggle with a turning ‘spring’ and ‘winding’ inside: Every step of the long walk from the station had been like a relentless crank winding up inside her some cruelly sharp steel spring whose release would certainly whirl her to pieces. But the release had not come. […] So the spring had to go on winding itself still tighter till heaven knows that might happen. (Williams 1994: 32; italics added)

By a clever parallel of linguistic signifiers that brings to mind Freud’s analysis of dream logic (Thurschwell 2001: 36), the text equates what Catharine imagines is happening outside the house with what is happening inside herself. This equivalence is also detectable in the relation that the absent Bud has with both the house and Catharine. Bud is the house’s ghostly tenant – a ‘galloping ghost’ (Williams 1994: 34), usually secluded in the attic – who in order to make himself visible will now have to trespass its main door. Catharine acknowledges the architectural physical barrier that separates them, and wishes for its elimination:

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She wanted all at once to stand up and beat her fists against the old yellow boards of the house that were frailly forbidding the spring. She wanted to beat hard against them from the inside like April from the outside till the yellow boards splintered and tumbled down and she and Cecilia stood unsheltered in the leafy wetness outside. And then with no threshold to push his timid feet across, Bud would surely be there. (Williams 1994: 38)

This disintegration is indeed the fate of the gothic house, ‘whose solid actuality dissolves as [it] accommodate[s] (and bring[s] to spectacular figure)’ that which haunts it (Savoy 1998: 9). However, what Catharine does not (or cannot) acknowledge is that there are also physical barriers on her part that deter her from meeting Bud. She is one of ‘Williams’s grand deceivers who believe that they can escape the pull of the flesh indefinitely’, but as Bak remarks, ‘self-assurance in Williams is the true signifier of self-deception’ (2009b). Catharine buries any connotation of disruptive sexuality by hiding her numb corporeality from head to toe under a series of garments – ‘the spring hat of dark blue straw […], the gaily printed dress, the brand-new slippers of black suede with silk bows’ (Williams 1994: 32), and ‘her black kid gloves’ that reveal ‘so icy cold’ fingers beneath (Williams 1994: 36). As a typical Williamsian subject that ‘flees from sexuality to language’ (Sofer 1995: 338), Catharine also tries to divert attention from her body through talking: ‘there was a touch of self-consciousness in the ultra-casual pose of their bodies [and] Catharine was anxious to remove it with friendly chatter’ (Williams 1994: 35). When she prepares herself for the reencounter with Bud and plans to avoid any physical contact that might ‘frighten him off ’ (Williams 1994: 39) – no kiss, no shake of hands – it is her own anxiety towards her body and its sexuality that she is trying to dispel by means of an image of her self embellished by glamorous commodities and distracting language. In contrast, according to his sister’s description, Bud proves to be Catharine’s antithesis as he ‘doesn’t act civilized’ and lets his bodily side unrestrained, not bathing himself, remaining unshaven, and ‘not even bothering to put on all his clothes’ (Williams 1994: 37). Catharine’s attempts to come together with Bud on a merely spiritual level and transcend the body forebode the catastrophic effects that a physical encounter will have, as the abject ‘implies the subject’s recognition and

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refusal of its corporeality’ (Grosz, quoted in Weiss 1999: 92). The recognition of her own sexuality will bring about the discharge of the inner ‘spring whose release would certainly whirl her to pieces’ (Williams 1994: 38), a bodily disintegration like the one she wished for the house attacked by the spring outside. At the climactic moment of the story, when Bud makes his long-awaited-for appearance banging the door open and standing there on its threshold, the boundaries between inside and outside are inverted and Catharine does not stand unsheltered in the wetness outside, as she had wanted, but instead ‘her knees seemed ready to sink’ in the water inside herself because ‘now her bones were hollowed out by the running waters of fear’ (Williams 1994: 40). So, it is not the spring outside that succeeds in pulling down the house, ‘splintering’ the yellow boards as she intended, but her own inner spring which, after its ominous tightening throughout the story, eventually destroys her poise ‘with a noiseless splintering’ that lets terror overcome her and makes useless the strategies she had planned to sustain her feeble self-assurance: ‘She couldn’t speak the gay words of greeting nor touch the red cherries’ on her hat (Williams 1994: 41). Despite the distance that separates them, Catharine and Bud seem to touch faintly as two mirror images, he on the threshold with ‘his hand lifted slightly before him’ and she standing opposite with her hand on the staircase banister, joined by the almost physical contact of ‘the palpable blaze’ of his ‘arrow-bright’ eyes (Williams 1994: 41). Moreover, despite what some critics have called the ‘distasteful sexual imagery’ (Vannatta 1988: 12) of the references to rape that accompany Bud’s entrance (the offering of the cherry, impalement, arrows and nakedness),4 the reversal of boundaries that accompanies Catharine’s ordeal is suggested by a coincident trope by which Bud is not actually entering Catharine’s body but exiting it. ‘She wouldn’t be able to bear the intolerable moment of his birth in her presence’, she desperately reflects (Williams 1994: 40). Hence, Catharine and Bud’s implicit sexual encounter is at the same time signified as the exemplary moment of separation of two formerly united bodies, birth, an experience that Kristeva interprets as the ultimate abjection 4

Upon his appearance, Catharine feels ‘herself impaled like a butterfly upon the semidarkness of the staircase’, ‘unclothed’ (Williams: 1994: 41–2).

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and that connects with the Gothic’s ‘exploration of her [the heroine’s] relation to the maternal body that she shares, with all its connotations of power over and vulnerability to forces within and without’ (Kahane 1985: 338). In fact, has not Catharine been expecting Bud all along, feeling ‘a funny feeling in her stomach’ (Williams 1994: 38)? Does not the whole story depict a threshold sensation akin to birth, which Kristeva describes as a ‘scorching moment of hesitation (between inside and outside, ego and other, life and death)’ (Kristeva 1982: 155)? The birth-giving metaphor transforms here Bud’s outside-to-inside intrusion into an insideto-outside passage, and he becomes thus the expelled abject that ‘demonstrates the impossibility of clear-cut borders’ (Grosz, quoted in Weiss 1999: 92). When at the end Catharine flees up the stairs of the ugly house to find refuge in what now presents itself as a ‘haven of darkness above’ (Williams 1994: 40), she proves to be a precursor of Blanche. We witness her relapse into a regressive, psychic isolation within the darkest recesses of a body unable to reach and be reached by others, lost in ‘vast obliviousness [… and] tranquil self-absorption’ (Williams 1994: 42), almost becoming a haunting spectre herself. Yet, while it is true that the gothic crisis of subjectivity of the protagonist in ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, like that of Blanche, is described in destructive terms and leads to a tragic end – ‘doom’ instead of ‘felicity’, in Dickinson’s poem – Williams’s exploration of the permeability and displacement of the limits of the self does not always strike such a sombre note. The interdependence between subjectivity and space makes itself manifest in other texts that, although less clearly gothic in tone and setting, also share the narrativization of abject others and their disrupting effects on the subject’s self and relations with/in space. Such is the case of ‘Something About Him’ (1946), another story that has hardly received any critical attention. It coincides in some ways with ‘The Important Thing’ (1945), as both their protagonists take the risk of trespassing the frontiers of normativity and embrace the outsider other, experiencing thus destabilizing but exhilarating moments of liberation from conventional constraints. However, in the latter story about the relationship between John and Flora, two college students, spatial metaphors are not so clearly present, maybe because there ‘Flora is unquestionably raped’ (Bak 2009b) and the bluntness with which

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the act is described does not allow for a metaphorical subtext. Nevertheless, Bak analyses it as another example of ‘Williams’s queer notions of rape as rough sex cum spiritual truth’ (2009b), and this makes its resemblances with ‘Something About Him’ worth exploring. Flora is a strange girl, ‘a fugitive with no place to run to’ (Williams 1994: 174), ambiguously androgynous in behaviour – she shows none of the ‘softness and languor which [ John] found physically interesting in girls’ when, for instance, she squeezes his arm in ‘a grip that was almost as tight as a wrestler’s’ (Williams 1994: 165) – and in appearance: her features are excessive, a face ‘so broad’, eyes ‘too large’ and ‘always so filled with superfluous brightness’ (Williams 1994: 172). Still, John finds her ‘at once homelier and more attractive’ than other girls (Williams 1994: 167). Despite this seeming freakishness, Flora is not perceived by John merely as an ‘outlandish’ character (Williams 1994: 172), but also as someone uncannily close to his own thoughts and beliefs, ‘know[ing] intuitively what he was trying to say’ (Williams 1994: 167) and uttering his own unspoken words so that ‘her words fitted exactly what he had been thinking’ (Williams 1994: 166). If his very own thoughts, feelings, and sympathies are echoed by this ambiguous girl, and their shared interests ‘served to draw them closer together’, John risks discovering that ‘Perhaps he was no more like other people than she was’ (Williams 1994: 170). Flora seems his double, a part of himself mirrored back to him – in fact, they met dancing at a ball where ‘the walls were covered with long mirrors’ (Williams 1994: 163) yet John felt like ‘dancing by himself ’ (Williams 1994: 164). The final rape scene is John’s attempt at grasping the ‘Important Thing’ (Williams 1994: 166) that eludes him throughout the story, the materialization of that ‘something about her [Flora]’ (Williams 1994: 164) that he thinks will solve the question of his own desire. While Bak and others understand that what John discovers in himself at the end is his secret homosexuality – given the masculine attributes of Flora (Bak 2009b, Vannatta 1988: 44) – it can also simply be the recognition of the very possibility of breaking away from ‘patriarchal gender definitions’ altogether and from social constraints in a broader sense (Clum 1996: 48). In ‘Something About Him’ (1946), spatial allegory makes the sexual subtext less unquestionable, as in ‘The Important Thing’, but still very similar in character. It is the story of Miss Rose, the librarian of a small

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Southern town, who becomes the only friend to Haskell, the new grocery clerk that nobody seems to like. Haskell’s eagerness to please people and his odd habits are suspicious for the community, who consider him ‘too oily’ and ‘gruesomely excessive’ (Williams 1994: 213). As the abject that disturbs system, borders, and rules (Kristeva 1982: 4), Haskell perturbs the social system by exceeding his expected role as ‘an ordinary dime-a-dozen grocery clerk’ and inappropriately acting ‘like a new preacher’ (Williams 1994: 213). Like Flora, he confounds the sexual borders with his voice that reaches ‘an almost girlish falsetto’, and fingers ‘as delicate in their precision as the fingers of a young woman’ but capable of ‘wringing hands so fiercely’ (Williams 1994: 216, 218, 213); and he defies the rules of the community when he dares to disagree with some of his customers. Yet Miss Rose likes him and, after making acquaintance with each other in the library, Haskell moves to the same boarding house as the librarian, who starts changing her usually introverted attitude under the influence of her interest in him. Like Catharine in the aforementioned story, Miss Rose does not want to be touched – she and Haskell ‘edged unnecessarily close to the wall to prevent their clothes from touching’ (Williams 1994: 216) – but instead wants to be viewed, and founds her fantasy of identity on another fetishized commodity, in her case a French negligee that she wears in front of her mirror to reveal ‘a new Miss Rose’ (Williams 1994: 216). The negligee acts as a protective layer in her exposure to Haskell’s gaze: One morning she stood just on the inside of her door till she heard him descending the stairs […]. Then she caught the creamy lace about her throat and stepped out of her bedroom. She stood there in his full gaze for three ecstatic moments before she scurried into the bathroom with a slight hysterical giggle and locked the door […]. (Williams 1994: 216)

Significantly, Miss Rose chooses a space between doors for this fleeting moment of tentative self-exposure where the negligee camouflages her inner insecurities; however, the borders are still clearly established, as the doors are tightly closed. Miss Rose’s interaction with Haskell ends up in the breach of her defensive strategies and the identity crisis that abjection entails. While they are taking a walk from their home to the library and debating poetry, she

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experiences Haskell’s gaze in a very different – and more dangerous – way than before: ‘He looked down at her very slyly and something new came out of his eyes. It was almost palpable. It seemed to touch her cheek with little, tentative fingers. A palpable though very timid caress’ (Williams 1994: 217). In spite of Miss Rose’s initial avoidance of physical contact and her desire to be only looked at, Haskell, like Bud, ironically accomplishes the former by means of the latter: his gaze touches her, announcing the cracking open of her shell and hence the destabilization of her pretended solidity. However, unlike in the case of ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, Haskell’s eyes are not the only thing that touches Miss Rose, he physically touches her too: He caught her elbow as she stepped over the curb. His touch, his slight upward pressure, seemed to release her from all effect of gravity so that she felt as though she were floating with feathery lightness over the street. The laughter bubbled out of her lips irrepressibly like water gone down the wrong way. She was lifted up and blown forward, a thin tissue kite that was suddenly caught in a rising wind (Williams 1994: 217).

In contrast to the planned visual encounter in the hallway, this sudden physical intimacy and contact with the abject alters Miss Rose’s relation with ‘the more or less beautiful image in which [she] behold[s] or recognize[s]’ herself, and which is sundered by abjection ‘as soon as repression […] is relaxed’ (Kristeva 1982: 13). Like Catharine, Miss Rose lets herself go and cracks under the pressure of her inner waters, yet not of fear, but of uncontrollable laughter, and experiences a release from her outer shell, the fetishized negligee, which returns as that weightless, flimsy tissue that the wind will very likely rip apart as it is said to do with clouds a few paragraphs before: ‘some radiant white cloth, like a bridal veil, had been drawn swiftly over the sky and fragments of it had caught on these sharp projections and been torn loose and held there’ (Williams 1994: 217). Again, Williams makes use of implicit sexual symbols in the ‘pointed church steeples’ – those ‘sharp projections’ – tearing through the bits of bridal veil, as he himself commented elsewhere about the set of his play Battle of Angels (1939), which ‘depict[ed] churches with red steeples:’ ‘Get it? It’s symbolism, Freudian symbolism’ (quoted in Leverich 1995: 390).

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During this climatic scene, Miss Rose’s inner self proves itself readily permeable – as Sedgwick put it –, so that the effects of her contact with the abject Haskell are not as destructive as in the case of Catharine. When subsequently she returns to the library, she discovers borders to be more flexible, and finds inside/outside differentiations blurred: That heavy oak door with its foolish brass knocker and elaborate molding had never admitted her with so little resistance. It seemed to swing open from someone pushing inside. She stepped away to avoid a collision. But there was nobody but her, it was her own frail grasp that had drawn it so easily open! (Williams 1994: 218)

Doors are opened effortlessly now and lead to a limitless space that brings inside what previously was outside. The brightness that was formerly outdoors (‘Such brilliant sunlight this morning!’ Williams 1994: 215) and that will again be exterior at the end of the story (when the air is ‘keen and brilliant as a polished blade’, Williams 1994: 220) is internal now: ‘The room inside was wonderfully light and spacious. Brilliance was refracted from every surface, from the yellow oak tables and chairs, from ink pads and pencils, even from old Miss Jamison’s knobby cheekbones’ (Williams 1994: 218). Now that she traverses the borders with ease, incorporates Haskell’s ‘alacrity’ and ‘good humour’, and takes no account of the objectified presence or reproving gaze of ‘Miss Jamison [who] watched her sourly’ (Williams 1994: 218) – the same look that is being cast over Haskell all through the story5 – Miss Rose has clearly pulled down her self-imposed barriers and has come closer to the abject. Miss Rose’s fulfilment will nevertheless not last for long, since her feeling of completion comes from that ‘undifferentiated union’ with the abject and the surroundings that is a threat both to the identity of the self and of the community (McAfee 2004: 48). Eventually, Haskell will be indirectly forced out of town when he is fired from the shop due to the customers’ unjustified complaints about that uncanny ‘something about him’ that nobody likes (Williams 1994: 214, 218, 219). When he drops 5

‘Mrs. Henderson glared at him suspiciously’ (Williams 1994: 213), Mrs Jameson looks at Haskell ‘sharply’, and ‘Mr. Owens gave him the same look that customers gave him, puzzled, uneasy, a little bit hostile’ (Williams 1994: 214).

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by to say goodbye, he is not deterred by Miss Rose’s effort at keeping the abject under control by ‘naming the [lost] pre-nominal, the preobjectal’ (Kristeva, 1982: 11): ‘“Haskell!” she called. But he had already gone out the library door’. With his departure, Miss Rose sees how her previous ‘feathery lightness’ is quickly replaced by the fettering control of the community, represented by a stranger’s gaze ‘fixed on her, pinioning her attention coldly like a blade thrust down on quivering, agonized wings’ (Williams 1994: 219). Her life returns to a routine of urban hustle and bustle – ‘boxcars […], whistles screaming urgently, sparrows restlessly crossing the windows […], traffic signals and cars’ –, where she will then have to reconstitute a sense of a unified identity behind another shell – this time, a brown tweed jacket that she had reserved for special occasions but in the end she ends up using ‘every day’ (Williams 1994: 220). These stories seem to reproduce the underlying logic of Eva’s dream in Not About Nightingales: the attainment of one’s (forbidden) object of desire is a matter of ‘opening all of the closed doors’. In fact, the liminal space that a door frames seems a fitting location to signify the in-betweenness of the abject. This is the situation of other ambiguous characters – both sexually and racially – that make their appearance in Williams’s stories. In ‘Gift of an Apple’ (1936), for example, a young hitchhiker flirts with a fleshy and voluptuous Italian woman who lives in a trailer off the road along which he walks. The woman’s looks baffle the boy yet do not prevent him from feeling a certain attraction towards her. The darkness of her features, the masculinizing ‘coarse hairs along her upper lip’ and the ‘few dark hairs in the middle of her chest’, and an animalistic resemblance to a catfish that had ‘something not normal’ for having grown up inside a bottle (Williams 1994: 65), all make this Italian woman one of the most abject of Williams’s characters. She remains near the door of her trailer, from where she subtly negotiates with the boy the exchange of culinary and sexual favours that starts with the gift of the apple in the story’s title, and continues with a piece of meat initially reserved for the woman’s son. During that negotiation, we can see the hitchhiker’s identity waver as his masculine bravado is undermined by the emasculating comments and caresses of the woman (Kolin 2007), and he actually ends up wishing to satisfy his desire by taking the place of the woman’s son and thus becoming the very thing he had

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considered not normal (Torres Zúñiga 2014). After the failure of the negotiations, however, the boy has to continue on his way while the woman stands ‘[b]ig, heavy and dark […] in the door of the trailer’ that he never got to enter (Williams 1994: 68), keeping just for her both her dinner and the secret of her fascinating nature. Some years later, Williams would write the ‘heterosexualized’ autobiographical story ‘Rubio and Morena’ (1948) and make its writer–protagonist encounter a similarly ambiguous woman. Although she is based on Williams’s first long-term homosexual love, Pancho Rodriguez Gonzalez (Spoto 1985: 146, footnote), the masculinization of this female character is not necessarily an attempt to mask a male lover behind a more legitimate heterosexual appearance; Flora in ‘The Important Thing’ also mingles masculine and feminine traits but has her biographical origins in the feminine figure of Williams’s college friend Esmeralda Mayes (Spoto 1985: 120). Rather, Williams’s fascination with the androgyne lies in its ‘denial of definition, its functional ambivalence, its fusion of opposites, its transcendence of barriers’ (Bisby 2001: 57), features that also make it into the ideal other of gothic fiction. In ‘Rubio y Morena’, the writer Kamrowski encounters this other while he is precisely ‘detained at the border’ with Mexico (Williams 1994: 258; italics added), and in the hotel room where he has to spend the night ‘a figure appeared in the doorway […] so tall that he took it to be a man’, although soon it reveals itself to be a woman when she crosses the door and joins him in bed (Williams 1994: 258). This revelation does not however do away with the inherently indefinite character of the girl Amada, who as ‘the dark figure in the doorway of the hotel, even mistaken at first for that of a man, did not come into the light. It remained in shadow’ (Williams 1994: 261; italics added). When the unexpected visitor enters Kamrowski’s bed, only a muffled objection intimates the silent act that happens next between her and the writer: ‘No, he said, but the caller paid no attention and, after a while, Kamrowski was reconciled to it’ (Williams 1994: 259). This is yet another instance of a veiled coerced sexual encounter that nevertheless will have positive effects. The subsequent sentimental relationship between the girl and Kamrowski will trigger a dramatic change in the latter’s life, first of all by erasing the feelings of powerlessness that women had previously

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provoked in him and so restoring his sense of male dominance (Williams 1994: 261). Then, although they separate for some time, he returns to her border town to find her at her deathbed, where she will eventually succeed in the same feat as other abjects that ‘continuously violate one’s own borders’ (McAfee 2004: 47). Her literally breath-taking embrace breaks ‘all the way through the encrusted shell of his [Kamrowski’s] ego’ so that he undergoes a traversal of boundaries too, moving, like Miss Rose in ‘Something About Him’ does, ‘out of the small but apparently rather light and comfortable room of this known self into a space that lacked the comfort of limits’ (Williams 1994: 267). Unlike Miss Rose, however, Kamrowski experiences with anxiety such unbounded space where opposites are confused: ‘a space of bewildering dark and immensity, and yet not dark, of which light is really the darker side of the sphere’ (Williams 1994: 267). At the boundary of his known self, yet still a part of himself, that limitless space causes in him the paradigmatic feelings of the gothic unheimlich: ‘He was not at home in it. It gave him unbearable fright’ (Williams 1994: 267, emphasis added). Kamrowski belongs then with Catharine from ‘The Accent of a Coming Foot’, since both are unable to open up to the indeterminacy of the abject and retreat instead into the safety of their previous deadening self-absorption: ‘he crawled back […] crawled back out […] crawled back into the small room he was secure in’ (Williams 1994: 267). What all these stories reveal is how Tennessee Williams made use early on of the symbolic relevance of borders, doors and spatial dynamics in order to inscribe the discourse of desire in his texts in an indirect way that he could later on incorporate into his creations for the stage. It is noteworthy how many of the climactic moments of other early short stories are placed on or around a door’s threshold. A mansion’s threshold becomes the symbolic ‘altar of some wrathful god’ where the fearful trash picker in ‘A Lady’s Beaded Bag’ (1930) returns to its legitimate owner the money-laden bag he has found in the garbage, relinquishing thus his only chance to make the ‘enchanting visions of the pleasures which this money could bring him’ come true (Willliams 1994: 15). The tragic love story of ‘Something by Tolstoi’ (1930–1) concludes with the clanking of ‘the heavy black key to the bookshop’ being dropped by the returning wife when she discovers her abandoned husband is not able to remember her anymore

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(Willliams 1994: 25). In ‘Twenty-Seven Wagons Full of Cotton’ (1935), the origin for the homonymous play from 1946 and for the controversial film Baby Doll (1957), Mrs. Meighan tries to resist the sensual advances of the syndicate man that she has to entertain on her porch while her husband is away, but as ‘all the resistance flow[s] out of her flesh like water’, she is pushed in by the little, dark man through doors he progressively opens into the darkness of her house (Willliams 1994: 48). Moreover, this spatial allegory rooted in the gothic tradition brings with it the figure of the uncanny abject as that character able to stand on the threshold, defying boundaries, classifications and social control, and attracting the subject to the place where the border of his or her self-enclosed identity is pulled down or apart. It is not only the female characters who are raped – openly or symbolically– and experience that breaching of bodily/ psychic/spatial limits; men such as those in ‘Gift of an Apple’ or ‘Rubio y Morena’ and also perpetrators such as John in ‘The Important Thing’ face their own abjects and are drawn to the thresholds where the foundations of their selves quiver. Even Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire faces in Blanche ‘a double significance: She is both the Phallic Mother and the abjection (the feminizing abjection) he fears in himself ’ (Bedient 1993: 55), allowing for a new reading of their ambivalent relation. The importance of this spatial allegory definitely encourages future research into Williams’s stagecraft from a semiotic perspective that would focus not just on cases of rape but also on other spatial limits, openings and breakages that are part of the signifying network that weaves theatrical space, historical space, psychic reality, and literary text together (Übersfeld 1989: 108–43).

Bibliography Adler, T. P. (1994). American Drama, 1940–1960: A Critical History. New York: Twayne. Armitt, L. (2011). History of the Gothic: Twentieth-Century Gothic. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

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Bak, J. S. (2009a). ‘American Gothic Grants Tennessee Williams a “Woodian” Play’, Philological Quarterly 88 (1, 2), pp. 171–84. Bak, J. S. (2009b). ‘A Streetcar Named Dies Irae: Tennessee Williams and the Semiotics of Rape’, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 10 accessed 24 January 2016. Bedient, C. (1993). ‘There Are Lives that Desire Does Not Sustain: A Streetcat Named Desire’. In P. C. Kolin (ed.), Confronting Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, Essays in Critical Pluralism, pp. 47–58. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Bigsby, C. W. E. (2001). Modern American Drama, 1945–2000. Port Chester, NY: Cambridge University Press. Clum, J. (1996). ‘From Summer and Smoke to Eccentricities of a Nightingale: The Evolution of the Queer Alma’, Modern Drama 39 (1), pp. 31–50. Dickinson, E. (1999). The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R. W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Fleche, A. (1997). Mimetic Disillusion. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and U. S. Dramatic Realism. Tuscaloosa, AL and London: The University of Alabama Press. Freud, S. (2003). The Uncanny, trans. David McLintock. London: Penguin Books. Heintzelman, G., and Smith-Howard, A. (2005). Critical Companion to Tennessee Williams. A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts on File. 2005. Holland, N. N., and Sherman, L. F. (1977). ‘Gothic Possibilities’, New Literary History 8 (2), pp. 279–94. Jarraway, D. R. (1998). ‘The Gothic Import of Faulkner’s “Black Son” in Light in August’. In R. K. Martin and E. Savoy (eds), American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, pp. 57–74. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Kahane, C. (1985). ‘The Gothic Mirror’. In S. N. Garner, C. Kahane and M. Sprengnether (eds), The (M)other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation, pp. 334–51. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kolin, P. C. (2007). ‘Picaro Tom Goes Catfishing: The Proleptic Importance of “Gift of an Apple”’, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 9 accessed 24 January 2016. Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Leverich, L. (1995). Tom. The Unknown Tennessee Williams. New York: Crown Publishers. McAfee, N. (2004). Julia Kristeva. London and New York: Taylor and Francis e-Library. Moi, T. (1986). ‘Introduction’. In J. Kristeva, The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi, pp. 1–22. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Monnet, A. S. (2010). The Poetics and politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-century American Literature. Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Peden, W. (1975). The American Short Story. Continuity and Change. 1940–1975. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Presley, D. E. (1990). The Glass Menagerie: An American Memory. Boston: Twayne. Savoy, E. (1998). ‘The Face of the Tenant: A Theory of American Gothic’. In R. K. Martin and E. Savoy (eds), American Gothic: New Interventions in a National Narrative, pp. 3–19. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Single, L. L. (1999). ‘Flying the Jolly Roger: Images of Escape and Selfhood in Tennessee Willlams’s The Glass Menagerie’, The Tennessee Williams Annual Review 2, pp. 69–85. Sofer, A. (1995). ‘Self-Consuming Artifacts: Power, Performance and the Body in Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer’, Modern Drama 38, pp. 336–47. Thurschwell, P. (2001). Sigmund Freud. London and New York: Taylor & Francis e-Library. Torres Zúñiga, L. (2014). ‘Comida, mujeres y poder en la obra de Tennessee Williams. Food, women and power in the work of Tennessee Williams’, Dossiers Feministes 16, pp. 157–72. Übersfeld, A. (1989). Semiótica Teatral [Lire le théâtre]. Madrid: Cátedra. Vannatta, D. (1988). Tennessee Williams. A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston, MA: Twayne. Weaver, G. (ed.) (1983). The American Short Story 1945–1980: A Critical History. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers. Weiss, G. (1999). Body Images. Embodiment as Intercorporeality. London and New York: Routledge. Williams, T. (1951). A Streetcar Named Desire. New York: Signet. Williams, T. (1978). ‘Introduction to Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye’. In T. Williams, Where I live. Selected Essays by Tennessee Williams, ed. C. R. Day and B. Woods, pp. 40–8. New York: New Directions. Williams, T. (1994). Collected Stories. New York: New Directions. Williams, T. (1998). Not About Nightingales, ed. with an Introduction by Allean Hale. New York: New Directions. Williams, T. (2000). The Glass Menagerie. In T. Williams, Plays 1937–1955, pp. 393–465. New York: The Library of America.

Part II

Networks

Ana Rull Suárez

6 Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day: Sociopolitical Suspicion and Double Spaces of Espionage

abstract In the atmosphere of heightened diffidence and political rivalry among European nations that started around 1890 and eventually led to the Great War, espionage began to emerge as an extremely sophisticated pursuit. Simultaneously, scientific development, seemingly promoted for the sake of human progress, was harnessed in the service of war interests and technologies of destruction, and knowledge became in this way intimately associated with the exercise of power, a conjunction – power-knowledge – that has been regarded as a linchpin of contemporary societies. This chapter shows how Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day depicts this complex historical conjuncture of pervasive deception and conflicted motives in the early decades of the twentieth century. In Pynchon’s work the ‘Eastern Question’ and the Balkan Wars show that imperial forces, often separated from centralized governments or states, promote genocidal violence and ethnic struggle in order to maintain their power over populations. Pynchon conjures up a hypothetical convergence between the Eastern Question in Europe and the United States’ consolidation of capital and state power in its western territories.

This chapter explores the relationship between travelling and the politics of space in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day (2006), which describes a pilgrimage around the globe and delves into the shifting of spatiotemporal realities and the idea of the fourth dimension. By using fantasy, Pynchon criticizes the ideology of capitalism and imperialism, which delimit spaces

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and arrange surfaces to exert power and control over the least favoured social classes.1 Against the Day is an apparently chaotic novel that plays with concepts of space and time covering the historical period from the 1890s to just after the First World War. Political issues such as the ‘Eastern Question’ and the subsequent Balkan Wars seem to demonstrate how imperial forces, often separated from centralized governments or nation states, control humans by promoting genocidal racial and ethnic struggles in order to maintain their power. Pynchon imagines a fascinating historical convergence between the Eastern Question (in Europe) and the United States’ consolidation of capital and state power in its western territories in a novel that criticizes a society in crisis where, as critic Amy J. Elias points out, ‘the potential to reimagine social processes and ethical values is being replaced by a myopic, antiutopian, and soulless materialism’ (2006: 31). By means of references to history and geography, the author challenges the reader’s conventional perceptions of realities and geometries that become war scenarios depicted as if they were a game of chess, something that serves as a metaphor for war. Taking into account that Pynchon is not a historian, we can observe how he depicts history as not limited by national space and time; he demonstrates the possibility of several imaginary worlds, and multiple subjectivities and temporalities, in order to challenge historical concepts of nation and state as delimited territories with a shared time and coherent national histories. Moreover, characters throughout this novel are doubled and mirrored to disturb further this national space-time. Also, by means of his use of the concept of bilocation, which consists in being in two places at the same time, and perpetually crossing the realms of past, present, and future, he criticizes the territorial and temporal fixing of the nation-state, and at the same time, of literary genre. Pynchon highlights antagonistic forces monopolizing or influencing a regional or national space through a sense of perpetual threat. The situation he depicts resembles a permanent siege that functions as an important 1

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, according to Amy J. Elias ‘is a novel thematically obsessed with the symbolism of travel and the politics of space’ (29).

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element in the creation of a society corresponding to what Michel Foucault (1990: 140 ff.) calls biopower, consisting of a set of flexible techniques which attempt to standardize ways of life associated with modernity. According to Foucault, the way in which war creates society is explained by a regulatory process that dictates how human life should be conducted or lived as well.2 Pynchon, like Foucault, critically analyses how exercising power entails the creation and surveillance of the population by allowing certain forms of life to live and letting others die. J. Paul Narkunas’s essay on Pynchon’s Against the Day, a late Foucauldian reading of the novel, gives a very interesting account of the way in which the forces of corporate capitalism and government instigate racism and war. As a result of these processes, the institutional powers of the state (in spaces like in schools) are just one part of a changeable network of economic, social, and political power relations marking and policing the limits of the population, a web of relations Foucault calls ‘govern-mentality’, a mentality to govern (1978). In Against the Day, the character Scardsdale Vibe (who hired two gunmen that killed Webb Traverse, the father of the protagonists) gives a monologue addressing the Las Animas-Huerfano Delegation of the Industrial Defense Alliance (L. A. H. D. I. D. A.): We use them, […] we harness and sodomize them, photograph their degradation, send them up onto the high iron and down into mines and sewers and killing floors, we set them beneath inhuman loads, we harvest from few miserable years of broken gleanings. Of course we do. Why not? They are good for little else. How likely are they to grow to their full manhood, become educated, engender families, further the culture of the race? We take what we can while we may. […] We will buy it all up, […] all this country. Monkey speaks, the land listens. (2006: 1000–01)

Foucault calls ‘govern-mentality’ the mentality which Vibe’s social Darwinism seems to endorse here, reminiscent of the social Darwinist hierarchy put forward in Andrew Carnegie’s ‘Gospel of Wealth’ (1900), which discusses the financial giants of his era. Carnegie claimed that the

2 In Society Must be Defended, Foucault also diagnoses how biopower normalizes a state of struggle or war (2003).

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accumulation of wealth was beneficial to society and the government should take no action in order to avoid it. The novel, which opens at the Chicago World Fair of 1893, and brings into play a number of historical references through which Pynchon manages to create a sense of documentary realism. So, it might be observed how the Chicago World Fair could represent the place of pilgrimage of American laissez-faire capitalism and ideologies of white racial superiority. In the novel, the process is carried out by depicting the Chicago World Fair through a reverse iconography of class and values, so that labour camps assume holy auras, becoming places of martyrdom and sanctuaries that can be considered as sacred spaces. In Against the Day, The City of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels, Santa Barbara or Santa Monica are just some examples. Amy J. Elias highlights how, by defamiliarizing these city names, Pynchon ‘draws our attention to the already sacralized geography in which his postmodern pilgrims travel’ (Elias 2006: 33). In the Pynchon novel under discussion, anarchist groups and pilgrims (Frank Traverse travelling through the United States to avenge his father, Reef, Cyprian and Yashmeen travelling through Siberia to the Balkans, or Kit and his Tibetan pilgrimage site in Siberia) turn on the aggressive individualism that is central to capitalism, in the same way as the life of movement and migration upsets the political stability of nation-states. Pilgrimage reconfigures both time and space. It introduces the possibility of overlapping historical time as future time into the present, introducing the possibility of parallel worlds. Moreover, Against the Day is full of examples of alternative realities and future times, coinciding with different time dimensions, along with mirrored and fractured pasts and presents, with multiple spatial regimes. Scardsdale Vibe, the multinational thief tycoon in the novel, a character opposing anarchists and pilgrims, in fact sums up the new materialism of the twentieth century precisely as selfishness and motionlessness or inertia: Where alien muckers and jackers went creeping after their miserable communistic dreams, the good lowland townsfolk will come up by the netful into these hills, clean, industrious, Christian, while we, gazing out over their little vacation bungalows, will dwell in top-dollar palazzos befitting our station, which their mortgage money will be paying to build for us. […] Anarchism will pass, its race will degenerate into

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silence, but money will […] bring all low before it. It is simple. It is inevitable. It has begun. (2006: 1123)

In contrast to Vibe’s vision of a false community of vacation bungalows, Pynchon’s anarchism, according to Amy Elias, is associated with an ethics of reciprocity and is thus similar to Paul Goodman’s social anarchism, affirming ‘that the only sort of freedom that is really worth having, or even really free, is a social freedom, freedom lived in community with others’.3 In Pynchon’s novel, both the anarchist and the pilgrims distrust earthly hierarchy, promote popular movements outside parliamentary politics, and understand life as transition and movement. In his evolutionary judgment, human development towards a just society is dependent not on the conquest achievement of material necessity but on a series of largely contingent events and possibilities opened for a time but then they are closed again, possibilities such as roads not taken, or catastrophes that could have been avoided. Such a society is in fact formed through the lives of the pilgrim anarchists in Pynchon’s texts. According to Yashmeen, one of the main characters in the novel, ‘the only rule is that there are no rules’ (2006: 943). Pilgrimage embodies the idea of ‘underground men’, and here he shows his underclass sympathy by altering the conception of stable spaces of social organization, and by going back to orphism, a doctrine nearer the mysteries of orientalism and opposed to rationalism, materialism and positivism. There are some scenes that emphasize the holiness and power of nature and the Earth against the artificial death power of war technology associated with capitalism. Shambala, for example, becomes a central textual symbol, as the mythical city in the desert (793) which the capitalists are searching for as a space of infinite energy that will eventually trigger the war. Surveillance also has a central role in the exercise of spatial power. This has to do with the process of creating spaces for war, and resembles the days of the Cold War (the concept of the Great Game having been taken originally by the Russians from chess, but also signifying the English game of cricket). In fact, Pynchon had already explored a similar terrain in 3

George Levine, ‘Risking the Moment’, p. 61. Goodman is quoted in Cohn (2006), Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation, p. 62.

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Gravity’s Rainbow when referring to chess as a metaphor for war. A number of Pynchon’s novels (V., Gravity’s Rainbow), particularly those in which chess allusions inform the relationship between geometry and hegemony, as well as the question of complicity, can also be related to treatises on chess such as Marcel Duchamp and Vitaly Halberstadt’s L’Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont réconciliées (1932), where the players agree to superimpose mirror symmetry onto the sixty-four squares of the chessboard so as to recalculate the precise ‘opposition’ or ‘equilibrium’ between the Kings after each and every move. In this way, the space-time geometry of the game corresponds with the discursive and repressive formations of the state at war in the most general sense. In Against the Day, ‘Surveying’ is a code for surveillance or spying, and both are ‘great games’, like cricket and chess. So, among its numerous subjects and styles, Against the Day contains a postmodern reworking of the spy-adventure story with specific reference to Kipling. Almost every important character in Pynchon’s Against the Day is a spy, and when the narrator refers to the subject of espionage, he says that it was ‘styled by Mr. Kipling, in a simpler day, “The Great Game”’ (Pynchon 2006: 226–7). There are weapons sales representatives in Ostend, who come ‘as to some international chess tournament’ (558), and in one of the few more-or-less explicit references to the First World War, the war is seen as a game of chess (594). Pynchon depicts decentralizing state forces early in Against the Day when the Chums of Chance travel to the White City, the 1893 Chicago Exposition. The Chums of Chance appear as double characters because while they take part in the ‘real world’ as balloonists frequently subcontracted by sovereign governments for spying, they are also self-consciously fictional beings. They are sent by a mysterious Home Office to the World Fair to enter into a contract to spy on labour movements with White City Investigations, a private detective agency, militia, and rival to the Pinkerton detective agency. The White City appears as a republican symbol of the imperial subjugation of others. It is important to note that at the 1893 World Fair, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his frontier thesis to the American Historical Association, where he pointed to expansion as the most important factor in American history. He claimed that the existence

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of an area of free land and the advance of American settlement towards the west explains American development. In 1890, however, the Census Bureau stated that all the land within the United States was claimed, and there was no longer a frontier. Turner claimed that the frontier was gone roughly a hundred years after the Constitution was approved, and that meant for him the closing of the first period of American History. Turner questioned how American culture and history would develop and whether Americans would keep their typical dominant individualism (through encounters with a wild and cruel natural environment) after the frontier was closed. But, but, according to Narkunas (247), Turner proposed this thesis when the West had already been fully colonized and the subjugation of native peoples through confinement and genocide had taken place. Moreover, the privatization of public land in the western frontier by the Homestead Act of 18624 would result in a greater concentration of wealth and the rise of large corporate farms and ranches. White City Investigations also comments on the Pinkertons and the rise of private detective agencies and militias in the place of organs of centralized state governments. After the Homestead Strike of 1886, the Pinkertons became famous for prompting violence from strikers in order to legitimate their repressive responses to riots and their atrocities against them. Pynchon takes readers all over the world, through spaces of conflict such as Central Asia and the Mexican Revolution (1919/20), to show more and more of the world being managed by states or corporations, and guided by the railroads. At the same time, the spectre of the First World War haunts the entire text because it is the irrational outcome of all this rationalization by means of the railroad: in the end, it was the Austro-Hungarian

4

The Act proved not to be the solution to poverty as very few labourers and farmers could afford to build their own farm or to buy the necessary tools, seed or other items. That resulted in the end in that most of those who purchased land under the act were coming from areas quite close to their new homesteads. For instance, people from Iowa moved to Nebraska, those from Minnesota to South Dakota and so on. Under these circumstances the act was considered to invite fraud given how ambiguously it was framed. Early modifications by Congress only compounded the problem. (For the Homestead Act see Shanks, 2005).

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aspirations to monopolize trade in the Balkan region by means of the railroad that set in motion the events leading to the war. In Against the Day, a first description of the Great West is presented from the bird’s eye perspective of the Chums of Chance: while they are approaching the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 by air, they also float above Chicago, whose urban lay-out is characterized by the clear-cut coordinate system of the Cartesian grid: Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid […]. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate led to the killing floor. (Pynchon 2006: 10)

The passage refers to the crucial shifts brought about by industrialization: on the one hand, the subordination of the unstable dynamics of life to the teleological geometry of systematized killing routines; on the other, the partitioning of the lands, the spatial transition from prairie (a term that coincides with the name of one of the characters in Vineland and Against the Day) to pasture and from pasture to feedlot (Cronon 223); in other words, the transformation of an open space into fenced parcels of property. The reference to the Cartesian grid, which is the strictest tessellation (tiling of a plane by using one or more geometrical shapes) of any Euclidean plane by unit squares, marks the achievement of the colonization process. At a first glance, the more or less chaotic horizontal directionality that can be associated with the ‘sweeping stretch of prairie’ (Pynchon 2006: 10) in Against the Day counters the strictly organized vertical dimensionality of urban Chicago two decades after the Great Fire that took place in 1871: ‘Out the window in the distance, contradicting the Prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from mighty immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum […]’ (Pynchon 2006: 41). However, this apparently clear dichotomy becomes, like Chicago itself, blurry at the conceptual limits, with urban space shifting around the outskirts from the Cartesian grid into what Pynchon calls

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‘the urban unmappable’ (Pynchon 2006: 131). When Lew Basnight is confronted with the arbitrariness and ‘unmapped wilderness’ appearing within the limits of urbanity (Pynchon 2006: 38), puzzled by this unexpected interpenetration of ‘White City’ and ‘Dark City’, he asks himself: ‘Was it still Chicago? […] the first thing he noticed was how few of the streets here followed the familiar grid pattern of the rest of town […] increasing chances for traffic collisions’ (38). The same obscurity and fuzziness around the edges is observed within the organization of the Columbian Exposition: ‘how civilized […] and […] white exhibits located closer to the centre of the ‘White City’ seemed to be, whereas the farther from that alabaster Metropolis one ventured, the more evident grew the signs of cultural darkness and savagery’ (Pynchon 2006: 22). In Against the Day, the geometrical metaphor introduced by means of the Cartesian grid is mentioned again when Dr Vormace, at a meeting of ‘The Transnoctial Discussion Group’ with the topic ‘The Nature of Expeditions’, summarizes the colonists’ journey into what is called ‘unmapped wilderness’: We learned once how to break horses and ride them long distances, with oceangoing ships we left flat surfaces and went into Riemann space, we crossed solid land and deep seas, and colonized what we found […]. (Pynchon 2006: 131)

In this passage, Pynchon treats the ‘explorative’ and thus colonizing shift from flat space to spherical space – the shift from a flat to a round world – in terms of the transition from Euclidean to Riemannian geometry. In fact, the spatial shift suggested in this passage is the same example given by Henri Poincaré in Science and Hypothesis (1902), to illustrate the ‘entrance’ into Riemannian space. In Against the Day, the space covered by the railroad has a fundamental role in the events leading to the First World War. The railroad ‘penetrated, it broke apart cities and wild herds and watersheds, it created economic panics and armies of jobless men and women, and generations of hard, bleak city-dwellers […] who ruled with unchecked power’ (930). However, it is not only real travelling which the novel presents, but also the fantastic idea of time travel. And time travel can also take place under the sand when The Chums of Chance are in the ‘subdesertine frigate

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Saksaul’ (Pynchon 2006: 435), in search of the holy City Shambhala, a holy space of power. To travel underground, without dynamite and tunnelling, the sand has to be converted, through manipulating time, into something transparent, like glass.5 One of the characters, the Professor, explains how: by means of redistributing energy using the same process as changing the displaced sand into something transparent like quartz or glass; as no-one would want to be in the middle of the great heat that is produced by this process, ‘one must arrange to translate oneself in Time, compensating for the speed of light’. Here the character explains the way in which sand is deposited by wind, without any obstruction, assuming the mechanics of water-waves. This imaginative process makes it possible to move even deeper, like in an under-sand vessel where new elements analogous to vortex-formation would enter the wave-history, expressed by some sets of wave functions. Here, time travel is suggested as a way of coming back to the past: ‘So if you were looking for some way to reverse or invert those curves – wouldn’t that imply some form of passage backward in Time?’ (Pynchon 2006: 426). The espionage of the Chums of Chance is related to these Time Travellers. They are people who had fled the future, back into the past, and witnessed situations of poverty, famine and the end of the capitalist system. One of the characters wonders about his mission assignments: preventing others from entering their time-regime (Pynchon 2006: 415). In the novel, attractive rewards such as eternal youth are offered in what would become a Faustian situation; and in addition to Faust, Pynchon makes constant references to Dante’s Inferno as well, as I explain below. In this way, the Fourth Dimension appears in the novel as a ‘journey into the realm of the dead’ (242), but not only as a one-way trip; what enables the return journey, with its reversal, or spatialization, of time, is turning death into a place. Against the Day suggests the possibility of multiple nows in a relativistic space-time continuum and offers another scientific option for time travel. That is why vector and quaternion theories dominate the text; especially the latter seem to promise the option of reversing directions 5

‘Randolph wondered, “how can you travel underneath the sand and even see where you’re going?”’ (Pynchon, 2006: 426).

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along vectors and to open up the realm of the imaginary. Mathematics and physics are not just scientific expressions of what is often seen as a clockwork realm. They also provide a space for creativity and daydreaming. At Candlebrow, Merle Rideut and Roswell Bounce pick up the idea of Minkowskian space-time and think of ways to rearrange space to alter the ‘one-way vector “time”’ (Pynchon 2006: 457). They ponder the effect gravity has on time – as did Einstein in 1916 – but also the effect time has on gravity, and these speculations eventually lead them to develop the Integroscope. Theorists who paved the way for general relativity, such as Riemann, appear along with the fathers of quantum mechanics. The uncertainty principle is demonstrated just like the thought experiment of Schrödinger’s Cat, which is accidentally practised by Luca Zombini, a magician in the novel. Giving his novel a veneer of realism by mentioning real facts, names and scientific discoveries, Pynchon also playfully includes the space of the dead and the ghost worlds parallel to (and intruding into) the real world. There is also the translation of the ‘architecture of dream, of all that escapes the net-work of ordinary latitude and longitude’ (250), provided by the paramorphoscope and its makers, which, as suggested before, has the capacity to reveal other worlds beside the one we know, the one we have chosen, which is the only world granted to us (Pynchon 2006: 249). This type of reference, together with more direct mentioning of multiple worlds and space time as ‘tracks of departure to all manner of alternate Histories’ (682) indicates, according to Inger H. Dalsgaard, that quantum mechanics plays an important role in understanding bilocation in the text (90). Quantum mechanics is not limited to the Copenhagen Interpretation, which Bohr presented in 1927, and has come to include theories of uncertainty, complementarity, and the theory of the observer effect. Bohr’s Quantum Theory appears at the very beginning in the book, which is set in the 1890s; Pynchon is then introducing an anachronism in relation to the repercussion of subatomic physics in his text. Pynchon’s novel features another important theory about time as the fourth dimension by Peter Demianovich Ouspensky, who inherited an interest in the mathematics of higher dimensions from his father and additionally discovered the literature of Theosophy, combining both in

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his theories of the fourth dimension. Pynchon has Russian refugees arriving in Göttingen in 1906 anachronistically clutching copies of this book, which was not actually published until November 1909 (Henderson, 1993: 246–7). In Tertium Organum (published in 1911) Ouspensky offers the reader a glimpse of four-dimensional reality, compared to which the three-dimensional world is unreal if we imagine a consciousness not limited by the conditions of sense perception. This consciousness could go beyond the plane on which we move so that we will be able to see the past and the future lying side by side and existing simultaneously (Ouspensky 1981: 28). Ouspensky here uses the word ‘simultaneously’ in a kind of extra-temporal or hyper-temporal sense, so that his language re-introduces the concept of time as linked to space even as he tries to banish the latter. That way, the extra-temporal point of view is revealed as existing in hyper-time, and he highlights how in all attempts made before to link the idea of the fourth dimension with the idea of time there has always been implied the idea that there should be space in time as well as some sort of motion in that space. He insists: ‘It is evident that those who built these theories did not understand that, by retaining the possibility of motion, they put forward demands for a new time, for no motion can take place without time. As a result time moves in front of us, like our own shadow, receding as we approach’ (31). Ouspensky counters this abyss of never-ending regress by introducing, in place of ever-higher orders of hyper-time, one higher order of stasis, embodied in the word ‘eternity’: ‘[W]e shall not be able to understand the fourth dimension so long as we do not understand the fifth dimension. […] [I]n reality eternity is not an infinite extension of time but a line perpendicular to time; for if eternity exists, each moment is eternal’ (32). This vision of the ‘Eternal Now’ is for Ouspensky inseparable from his understanding of the Fourth Dimension. The conception of time as the Fourth Dimension tends to lead to the conclusion that time is illusory. Ouspensky, in the same way as Zangwill, uses the term ‘simultaneously’ in an extra-temporal sense. His language introduces the idea of time but he tries to make it vanish at the same time. In this way, the extra-temporal point of view appears as a concept that also needs the idea of ‘hyper-time’. Ouspensky understands this conceptual difficulty very well, and Pynchon refers to it in his novel.

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Against the Day explores the pre-relativistic universe of fourth dimensions in the late Victorian age by means of Dr Zoot’s machine and also by means of the Minkowskian space-time continuum. In the novel, the latter is represented through the lecture given by Minkowski at Candlebrow, which is obviously a version of an earlier documented lecture delivered in September of 1908. With this historical data introduced in his fiction, Pynchon seems to suggest that Minkowski’s lecture inspired the fictional Merle to build the Integroscope, which allows people see the future of those appearing in the photos. These things are developed by Yashmeen and Kit who are two characters in the novel who agree that to believe one can see ‘future, past, and present […] all together’, is ‘to interpret the fourth dimension as Time’ (Pynchon 2006: 617). The concepts of simultaneity and dynamism by Henri Bergson, according to Gourley (2013), help Pynchon to develop his complex interpretation of temporality. Ouspensky’s point of view of eternity has some points of contact with Henri Bergson’s notion of a ‘position outside of time which flows and endures’ (Bergson 1999:112); but for Bergson, as Gourley asserts, such a position means detachment from the real nature of time, rather than a privileged point of view from which to apprehend it. According to Ouspenski, from the point of view of eternity time doesn’t differ from other lines and extensions of space such as length, breadth, and height. This means that just as space contains things we do not see, so in time ‘events’ exist before our consciousness comes into contact with them, and they still exist after our consciousness dies out. So if we consider extension in time along the line of an extension in a space we do not know, time becomes the fourth dimension of space. Pynchon also introduces other theories into the novel such as the Hermitian Operator or the Hilbert-Pólyá Conjecture, which both agree that the fourth dimension in mathematics is a way of solving different hypotheses such as Riemann’s (1826–66), whose spectral theory has been regarded an antecedent of relativity. Such contemporaneous interest in the fourth dimension of space is the actual historical context to the relationships between science, spirit and imagination sketched out in Against the Day. These are elements that allow the creation of an innovative type of literature that combines science fiction with historical reality and also, a

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narrative typical of the noir novel, with detectives, prosecutions, spies and other things like multilayered intrigues. But all these elements also serve to criticize social and historical processes taking place in the Western world today. Due to the concern of mathematicians, artists, philosophers and writers, the fourth dimension opens the possibility of relativizing the accuracy of science and human knowledge, because beyond the paranormal beliefs or illusions of science fiction, this concept inspired people to question their position in the universe, motivating them to see and understand the world in a radically new fashion. To understand the true nature of human beings and their environment means exploring, through the dense tangle of history, the interactions of science, philosophy and religion. Pynchon through quantum physics, suggests that reality, as it is observed, is not divided or predictable. For Pynchon the universe seen from the perspective of subatomic physics has no borders, it cannot be measured exactly, and its behaviour is unpredictable. We discover that in the behaviour of a system formed from the construction of spatial demarcations there are only probabilities and conjectures. With the enunciation of his uncertainty principle, Heisenberg ended the rigid structures and old boundaries of classical physics. In admitting the uncertainty principle, Pynchon emphasizes the possibility of change and contingency. Against the Day suggests, in the end, that in literature, as in life, everything is organized through what seems to be a fourth element symbolizing the double sense of life and death in the novel. Pynchon is attacking the construction of subjects created by consensus and ruled by speculative values, and unable to act in the world. With this functional vision, the subject seems to be trapped by the laws of the system and swallowed by a huge black hole of no life. This critique affects subjects from all social backgrounds; the system is seen as a kind of grotesque abstraction: the citizen is a soulless type; a puppet with no will, driven by the winds of speculation and profiteering, governed by empty political speeches that echo permanently, multiplying their effects. Subjects have no spirit, no will, no feelings, they are vacuous robots manipulated by remote control and lack responsibility for their actions. Pynchon’s Against the Day, insisting on trips through the fourth dimension, criticizes all this. Using quantum theory, it is seen as based on humans

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suffering from severe myopia in an effort to see how far (and in how many multiple directions) the world can go. His literature, based on history and fiction at the same time, presents reality as a perpetual creation offering new insights into the past, which plays a very important role in our universe. Literature opens the door to conceiving humanity and history not as simple forms of existence or lists of facts taking place at a particular point but instead as forms of resistance against corporations and forms of power that try to manipulate or destroy human beings.

Bibliography Bergson, H. (1999). Duration and Simultaneity, translated by Mark Lewis and Robin Durie. Manchester: Clinamen. Cohn, J. (2006). Anarchism and the Crisis of Representation: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics, Politics. Selingrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Cronon, W. (1992). Nature Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Elias, A. J. (2006). ‘Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the Day’. In J. Severs and C. Leise (eds), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, pp. 29–47. Maryland: University of Delaware Press. Foucault, M. (1978). ‘Governmentality’ (Lecture at the Collège de France, 1 February 1978). In: Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, pp. 87–104. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. Foucault, M. (1990). History of Sexuality: The Use of Pleasure, vol.1. Vintage Books. Foucault, M. (2003). Society Must Be Defended (Lecture at the Collège de France, 1975–6), translated by D. Macey. New York: Picador Books. Gourley, J. (2013). Terrorism and Temporality in the Works of Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. New York: Bloomsbury. Gribbin, J. (1991). In Search of the Schrödinger’s Cat. London: Black Swan. Henderson, L. D. (1983). The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Levine, G. (2003). ‘Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction’. In Harold Bloom (ed.), Thomas Pynchon, pp. 57–76. Philadelphia: Chelsea House.

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Narkunas, P. J. (2006). ‘Europe’s “Eastern Question” and the United States’ “Western Question”: Representing Ethnic Wars in Against the Day’. In J. Severs and C. Leise (eds), Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, pp. 239–65. Maryland: University of Delaware Press. Ouspensky, P. D. (1981). Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought; A Key to the Enigmas of the World, trans. E. Kadloubovsky and P. D. Ouspensky. London: Routledge. Pöhlmann, S. (ed.) (2010). Against the Grain: Reading Pynchon’s Counternarratives. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pynchon, T. (2006). Against the Day. New York: Penguin, 2006. Severs, J., and Leise, C. (eds) (2006). Pynchon’s Against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide. Maryland: University of Delaware Press. Shanks, T. R. W. (2005). ‘The Homestead Act: A major asset-building policy in American history’. In M. Sherraden, Inclusion in the American Dream: Assets, Poverty, and Public Policy, pp. 20–41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 

Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo

7 ‘Perfect Cities, Permanent Hells’: The Ideological Coordinates of Urban Space in Postmodern Science Fiction

abstract The aim of this chapter is to explore the representation of the city in several postmodern science fiction novels which display the ideological confrontation between modern and postmodern ideologies in the architectural elements (buildings, urban layouts) which appear in the fiction. Firstly, the chapter will summarize postmodern criticism of the ideological connotations of modernist architecture and urbanism. In opposition to this representation, postmodern science fiction will be seen to offer an image of the city that stands for a de-centred, and therefore unstructured, non-hierarchical, and un-cohesive urban layout, which in turn corresponds to a de-centred, fluid idea of social structure. In this sense, the description of the city in these postmodern texts is a political as well as an aesthetic question. The analysis will focus on the fictional and ideological connotations of the confrontation between solid, unitary buildings like J. G. Ballard’s tall apartment block in High-Rise and the Omphalos pyramid in Greg Bear’s Slant and the depiction of fluid, de-centred, fragmented urban spaces like The Raft in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and the bridge city in William Gibson’s Virtual Light, which may stand as icons of the postmodern vision of human societies as multiple, changing political and ideological environments.

The Imagined Spaces of Science Fiction In ‘Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk’, Brian McHale states that cyberpunk, the thematic and aesthetic trend within postmodern science fiction most acclaimed by critics, achieves its ‘aesthetic

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contemporaneity’1 with mainstream postmodernist fiction because of its ability to ‘“literalize” or “actualize” what occurs in postmodernist fiction as metaphor – metaphor […] in the extended sense in which a textual strategy or a particular use of language may be understood as a figurative representation of an “idea” or theme’ (1992a: 150). What McHale means is that cyberpunk’s fictional elements (characters, settings, plots, etc.) can be read as tangible, if fictitious, representations of well-known postmodern tenets. For instance, if the postmodern worldview pursues the fragmentation of the unitary subject as part of its criticism of the Enlightenment project, cyberpunk, and in general postmodern science fiction, will present characters that actualize this fragmentation, such as Wintermute, the artificial intelligence that manifests itself in a variety of digital identities in William Gibon’s Neuromancer (1984). Similarly, other frequent inhabitants of the cyberpunk universe, such as robots, replicants and cyborgs, represent alternative conceptions of the human that challenge established ideas and offer science fiction readers an insight into the posthuman condition. The environments envisioned for these characters, such as space stations, offworld colonies, and other ‘microworlds’, can correspondingly be understood as solid metal actualizations of the multiplicity of worlds the postmodern Weltanschauung avows. In this sense, one of the representations of space in cyberpunk has become not only its defining mark, but also a recurrent motif in all postmodern science fiction and even in the postmodern conception of reality: cyberspace. Also known as the ‘matrix’, ‘the Grid’, the ‘Net’, the ‘Web’ (Bukatman 105), or ‘virtual reality’, cyberspace may be defined as a ‘consensual hallucination’ (Gibson 1995a: 12), a virtual space that exists only in an electronic and therefore immaterial sphere at a mental level and cannot be connected to any actual geographical location. The science fiction film TRON (1982) visualizes this notion of space. Cyberspace can thus be read as an actualization of the postmodern conception of space as a constructed 1 In Constructing Postmodernism, Brian McHale argues that ‘mainstream’ postmodern fiction and science fiction had begun an aesthetic and thematic contact in the 1950s which finally led to the confluence of the two genres with the consolidation of cyberpunk in the 1980s. This is what McHale calls ‘aesthetic contemporaneity’ (1992b: 225).

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entity, and stands in opposition to real (geographical, geometrical) space. In this sense, this notion of space replicates the postmodern impression that every human reality has been constructed, as Dani Cavallaro suggests (2000: 35). Virtual reality will at the same time ‘decenter the conventional notions of space and locality’ (Cavallaro 2000: 32) and ‘[produce] a unified experience of spatiality, and thus social being, in a culture that has become impossibly fragmented’ (Bukatman 1993: 156). The idea of a virtual space disconnected from physical, geographical, ‘real’ space and opposed to it is analysed by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space (1992), where he describes this postmodern notion of space as ‘mental space’ (1999: 3). Lefebvre claims that the division between ‘mental’ and real space serves the dominant ideology (capitalism), as it erases the ideological and historical preconditions of what he calls the ‘production’ of space. From this point of view, the postmodern fascination with cyberspace and virtual reality should therefore be read as conservative, rather than as subversive.2 In order to avoid reinforcing dominant ideology, Lefebvre suggests that a unitary approach is necessary: what he calls a ‘science of space’ that connects both realms and reveals the political and ideological implications of the production of space in Western societies. This new science of space will uncover, Lefebvre claims, ‘a technological utopia, a sort of computer simulation of the future, or of the possible, within the framework of the real – the framework of the existing mode of production’ (Lefebvre 1999: 9). By ‘technological utopia’ Lefebvre means the dominant capitalist ideology: in this sense, cyberspace, the ‘sort of computer simulation of the future’, would be but a representation of late century postmodern society as a clean, stylish, orderly and systematic social 2

Since the publication of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), Marxist criticism has in general supported the view that postmodernism is a result of the consolidation of late twentieth-century capitalist culture and therefore a manifestation of its superstructure. This is the reason why the Marxist reading of cyberpunk tends to define the genre as conservative because its pessimism and dystopian consciousness appear to support Fukuyama’s thesis of capitalist democracy as the culmination of history. See also Terry Eagleton’s The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996). As a Marxist thinker, Lefebvre seems to agree with this interpretation.

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space that conceals negative aspects of ‘real’ reality such as global economic inequality and the exploitation of natural resources. Lefebvre finds that this technological utopia is ‘a common feature not just of many science fiction novels, but also of all kinds of projects concerned with space, be they those of architecture, urbanism, or social planning’ (1999, 9). In short, according to Lefebvre, the organization of space at all levels (from urban planning to the imagined spaces of cultural products like science fiction) reveals, if analysed in detail, the political and ideological underpinnings of dominant capitalist (postmodern) culture, characterized as utopia. It then follows that the representation of space – and architecture is the art of space as well as the art that lies at the confluence of the utopian and the social – in postmodern science fiction has strong conceptual and ideological connotations, as this chapter intends to demonstrate. The aim of this chapter is to explore the ideological background of the representation of space in a variety of postmodern science fiction novels, which include J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), a novel that predates the ‘aesthetic contemporaneity’ of postmodern science fiction McHale describes; three representative cyberpunk novels: William Gibson’s Virtual Light, Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash; and Greg Bear’s Slant (1997), whose highly innovative science fiction is not so clearly associated with cyberpunk. Following Lefebvre, the main focus of this chapter will not be the analysis of cyberspace, whose interpretation as a mental space is clear, but the other urban and architectural elements present in the novels. The goal is to demonstrate that Lefebvre’s reading of the genre as conservative does not account for its complexity and ambiguity, because postmodern science fiction and cyberpunk, while prominent for their focus on cyberspace as a new locality, are not set entirely in a virtual realm. In fact, the novels contain conflicting visions of buildings and city structures that actualize the discursive clash between the modern and the postmodern social and ideological implications of architecture and urbanism. The skyscraper of Ballard’s novel and the pyramid at the centre of the fictional capital of the Republic of Green Idaho represent the principles of modernist architecture in conflict with the reality of the surrounding city; similarly, Stephenson’s fluid city in the middle of the ocean contradicts the principles of modernist urbanism which postulated clearly demarcated

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city centres. Nevertheless, the alternatives offered in the novels, such as city ‘sprawls’ and other decentred urban layouts (cf. Cavallaro and Bukatman) are not expressed in clear utopian terms, but rather as ‘critical utopias’ or dystopias of the present.3

Cities in Flight: Urban Space in Science Fiction Science fiction has envisioned future cities in many different, often contradictory ways. In fact, cities (as artificial, technological spaces) have been so recurrent and relevant in the genre that Gary Wolfe regarded them not as simple fictional elements, but as generic icons in his study The Known and the Unknown: Iconography of Science Fiction (1979). The difference, according to this critic, consists in the fact that the ‘meaning of icons involve psychological and cultural levels as well as fictive and aesthetic ones’ (1979: 17). In this sense, the representation of urban spaces in science fiction has reflected the changes in the cultural (and ideological) perception of the city. Wolfe’s analysis describes a constant fluctuation between two completely opposed, extreme versions of the city in science fiction. On the one hand, the genre has envisioned large cities which were the political and ideological centres of imaginary industrial nations or huge technological 3

Although cyberpunk was initially described as a dystopian (Bukatman 1993: 143), and therefore conservative, genre for its dismissal of the possibility of utopia, the tendency to analyse the genre as critical has been on the increase because, as a postmodern literary product, science fiction also seems to reject the utopia/dystopian dialectic. The new category of ‘critical utopia/dystopia’ is perhaps more adequate to describe postmodern science fiction (Baccolini and Moylan 2003: 3–4). Similarly, Fredric Jameson warns of the increasing ‘reflexivity’ of utopian writing (2005: 213). Also, David Harvey (2000) and John Gray (1998) have suggested that global capitalism can be understood as a utopia. If cyberpunk’s vision of global capitalism is negative or critical (dystopian), then the genre must have a strong subversive inclination, as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out (1995: xiii).

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empires, such as Trantor, the famous capital of Asimov’s galactic empire, or Coruscant, the capital of Star Wars’ Galactic Republic. These fictional cities are immense in extension and population, and are inferred as results of an urban development controlled by the technocratic ideology dominant in the twentieth century. On the other, in its bleakest moments, science fiction has also foreseen massive and mechanized but alienating and oppressive cities, such as the setting of the film Metropolis (1926), and cities in ruins, like Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (1974), to symbolize the culmination or the end of Western technological civilization. As can be deduced from his analysis, Wolfe suggests that the representation of cities in science fiction responds to the changes in the perception of the cultural, social and political climate. Furthermore, Wolfe perceives a trend in the prevailing representation of urban spaces in the genre: if cities had been mainly icons of progress in the early twentieth century, after the 1950s the positive vision of the massive urban conglomerates archetypal of early twentieth-century science fiction became increasingly understood and represented negatively as oppressive and alienating environments (1979: 88). In the 1980s, cyberpunk came to be the spearhead of the incorporation of the tenets of postmodern literature in science fiction, and this included the postmodern perception of architecture and, consequently, of urban space. Cyberpunk thus assimilated the postmodern preference for decentred, fragmented and scattered urban layouts, which avoided centres, and therefore ‘closure’, as will be explained in more detail in the next section. The epitome of this postmodern city is Los Angeles, whose massive, undifferentiated expanse is precisely the object of one of the foundational films of postmodern science fiction: Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). In the film’s initial scene, Scott offers a panoramic view of a future Los Angeles (2019 in the fiction; no longer far away from our present) which highlights the contradiction between the size of Los Angeles’ seemingly never-ending ‘sprawl’ (the urban layout as it really is today), and the solid, unitary connotations of an immense (imaginary) pyramidal construction set in the middle of the city: the Tyrell tower. In this sense, an irresoluble contradiction between vertical (highly technological, optimistic) and horizontal (de-centred, sparse cities) urban space seems to appear, which reinforces the conflict between unitary (modernist) and decentred visions

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of cities (postmodern), or, to use Edward Dimendberg’s terms, between the centripetal (modernist) city and the centrifugal one. The same disparity between vertical, centripetal buildings and horizontal, de-centred, centrifugal urban spaces will appear most of the novels analysed here: in Ballard’s High-Rise, for instance, the residential skyscraper where the action takes place is described in opposition to the surrounding urban area. Similarly, in Greg Bear’s Slant, the action takes places mostly in another towering, solid construction, the Omphalos pyramid, and in Virtual Light William Gibson develops his idea of a ‘vertical city’ built literally under a bridge. As will be shown, these buildings are treated in fiction as relics of a modernist ideology that never fulfilled the expectations it created. The following section will delve into the connections between postmodern architecture and literary criticism and will provide an example of how the social and ideological connotations attributed to architecture and urban planning can be used in a work of fiction. Nevertheless, before moving on to the next part it is necessary to point out that the buildings and cities that will be analysed are imaginary or part of a fictional work. On the one hand, this is essential to understand that this analysis will deal with the ideological background of architecture and urban planning considered as part of the overall production of space described by Henry Lefebvre. The novels are ‘actualizations’ of this notion and of the concept of ‘mental space’ discussed earlier. To be more precise, the representation of cities and buildings literalizes what Lefebvre calls ‘representational space’ (1999: 33), which refers to concrete spatial realities where the process of space creation works as a product and as a producer at the same time, organized so as to reproduce the ideological tenets of the dominant ideology. For Lefebvre, representational space is ‘actualized’4 in monuments and monumental architecture. Nevertheless, this ‘actualization’ is still imaginary, which means that readers remain at the conceptual level, so that the impression of space as a mental construct is reinforced. On the other hand, the fact that the 4

Although the term ‘actualize’ has been taken from McHale here, Lefebvre suggests a similar idea when he argues that ‘[t]he monument thus effected a “consensus”, and this in the strongest sense of the term, rendering it practical and concrete’ (Lefebvre 1999: 220, my emphasis).

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buildings and cities are elements in a work of fiction allows the possibility of multiple readings, which is an essential attitude in postmodern literature. Cyberpunk, as postmodern science fiction, does not only set about undermining the principles of modernist architecture, which tend to reinforce the technological utopia Lefebvre describes as underlying capitalist ideology, but also all totalizing ideas, including a single postmodern reading of modernist architecture and urbanism. Postmodern rejections of closed interpretations includes the perception of late capitalism as (technological) utopia, and as dystopia.

Postmodernism and Architecture Although the correspondence between the ideological and aesthetic fundamentals of postmodern architecture and postmodern literary theory are numerous,5 the most revealing among them is the association between buildings (and cities) and narratives, an association based on the metaphor of construction. For postmodern literary critics, narratives are structures which provide unity and meaning to loosely connected events; and for postmodern architects, buildings, like cities, have their own language and work as means of communication, that is, they tell histories and are not merely aseptic and functional spaces: ‘There are various analogies architecture shares with language and if we use the terms loosely, we can speak of architectural “words”, “phrases”, “syntax” and “semantics”’ ( Jencks 39).

5 In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992), Fredric Jameson acknowledged that his idea of postmodernism was influenced by the new aesthetic trends followed by a variety of artists like Andy Warhol, musicians like Terry Riley and The Beatles, film directors like Jean-Luc Godard, writers like Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs, and architects like Robert Venturi. In fact, he states: ‘[I] t was indeed from architectural debates that my own conception of postmodernism […] initially began to emerge’ (1995: 12). See also Linda Hutcheon (1995: 12).

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Analogous descriptions of both language and architecture as means of communication had previously been suggested by Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes in the 1960s. On the one hand, Michel Foucault described the discursive condition of architecture and urbanism, which were to be understood as the organization of space. For Foucault, the way space is organized is a visible sign of the exercise of power historically and, as a result, architecture and urbanism became political activities (cf. Lotringer 1989: 259). On the other hand, in his essay ‘Sémiologie et urbanisme’ (1967),6 Roland Barthes argued that all human space is meaningful (iconic, symbolic) and discursive (1990: 257). Barthes established a connection between the organization of cities and the concept of structure. The underlying meaning of a city lies in its centre, the position from which meaning is controlled. Barthes suggested that de-centred or multi-centred cities – Tokyo is the main example (1990: 264) – are freer and richer in meanings. It is thus clear that the postmodern worldview prefers the absence of a centre, and therefore would opt for scattered, fragmented and de-centred cities in the same way postmodern authors prefer de-centred, uncontrolled novels that lack a clear, linear interpretation. In this sense, as Gary Wolfe suggested, postmodern science fiction writers use buildings and cities as icons, that is, as powerful narrative elements with strong symbolic and ideological connotations. Some of these buildings or cities are central in the novels we are going to analyse, whereas some others are described in passing, but all of them carry intense metaphorical and ideological connotations which can be better appreciated when contrasted with the kind of centripetal cities and vertical, solid modernist buildings that we have seen so far. For this reason, the analysis of the architectural elements of the novels will be based on a visualization of the buildings or cities that appear in some of them and on placing them in their fictional context.

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The conference was first read in 1967 and the published in the magazine L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui (no. 53, December 1970–January 1971). In this chapter, I am using the Spanish translation of the paper included in the compilation of essays L’aventure sémiologique (1985). See bibliography.

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There is a science fiction story that brilliantly represents the conflict between positive and negative visions of the city in science fiction: William Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ (1981). Published a year before the release of Blade Runner, it provides many of the keys to interpret not only the ideological associations of the description of urban space in Scott’s film, but also the conceptual implications of cities envisioned by postmodern science fiction authors in general. The main character of Gibson’s short story is a freelance architecture photographer, who gets an assignment to photograph 1930s futuristic architecture. This allows Gibson to explore the social and ideological implications of architecture and urbanism, as the main character compares the modernist architecture of the 1930s with the urban realities of the 1980s. As a background for his work, he goes over some previous photographs: ‘I saw a dozen shots of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson’s Wax Building, juxtaposed with the covers of old Amazing Stories pulps, by an artist named Frank R. Paul; the employees of Johnson’s Wax must have felt as though they were walking into one of Paul’s spray-paint pulp utopias’ (Gibson 1995b: 41). From that moment on, the photographer begins to experience a curious case of hallucination or double vision: wherever he looks, he sees the cities envisioned by the 1930s science fiction superimposed over how the cities actually look like in the 1980s: The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. Roads of crystal soared between the spires, crossed and recrossed by smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury. The air was thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things (sometimes one of the quicksilver shapes from the sky bridges rose gracefully into the air and flew up to join the dance), mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters. (Gibson 1995b: 45)

The sharp contrast between the naive and confident science fiction of the 1930s and the gloomy pessimism of the 1980s is linked in the story to urbanism and architecture. What the pulps from the 1930s were extrapolating

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was not only the genre’s optimism, but the absolute trust in the scientific and technological progress of humanity that pervaded Western culture at the time and was present in other arts like architecture: what Lefebvre calls the ‘technological utopia’, that is ‘a common feature not just of many science fiction novels but also of all kinds of projects concerned with space, be they those of architecture, urbanism, or social planning’ (1999: 9). The spires and skyscrapers designed by modernist architects like Hugh Ferriss or Le Corbusier were also deeply embedded in the dominant ideology of the time. As ‘The Gernback Continuum’ suggests, however, by the 1980s the absolute trust in progress was something that had to be weighed against reality: That afternoon I spotted a flying wing over Castro Street, but there was something tenuous about it, as though it were only half there. I rushed into the nearest newsstand and gathered up as much as I could find on the petroleum crisis and the nuclear energy hazard. I’d just decided to buy a plane ticket for New York. ‘Hell of a world we live in, huh?’ The proprietor was a thin black man with bad teeth and an obvious wig. I nodded, fishing in my jeans for change, anxious to find a park bench where I could submerge myself in hard evidence of the human neardystopia we live in. ‘But it could be worse, huh?’ ‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘or even worse, it could be perfect.’ (Gibson 1995b: 50)

In the story, the spires, skyscrapers, and massive buildings located in orderly and centralized cities stand for an unwavering trust in science, technology and rationalism. In contrast to this reality represented by streamlined, dream-like architecture, the protagonist of the story lives in a 1980s America where this optimistic vision of the future no longer stands, or, to put it in other postmodern terms, where the future as a ‘metanarrative’ (Lyotard) had been substituted by what he calls ‘my little bundle of condensed catastrophe’ (Gibson 1995b: 50). ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ therefore recalls the criticism of modern urbanism by postmodern architecture theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s ( Jencks; Portoghesi). The story could therefore be considered as meta-science-fictional, as it is a science fiction narrative that revisits and revises previous works in the genre, including probably Ralph 124c 41+ (1925), Hugo Gernsback’s most famous novel, but also the stories he published as editor of Amazing Stories since 1926. The tale also mentions explicitly H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933),

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whether it is the novel or the film released in 1936, although he probably refers in general to the vision of the future predominant in the science fiction of the 1930s and 1940s, the period called the Golden Age. In this sense, the value of ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ as a postmodern science fiction story is double: on the one hand, it shows an awareness of the foundations of early postmodern literary theory, whereas on the other, its meta-(science)-fictionality recalls the aesthetic strategies of ‘mainstream’ literary postmodernism. ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ thus opens the path for a criticism of the ideological connotations of science fiction’s envisioned cities and organization of urban space, and suggests the major interpretative keys to much fiction coming afterwards. As an example of what Brian McHale would call the ‘aesthetic contemporaneity’ between postmodern ‘mainstream’ and science fiction literature (1992b: 225), Gibson’s story provides us with major tenets of the analysis of urban space in the postmodern worldview.

Spires and Sprawls: Monuments in Conflict Blade Runner’s opening scenes offer a glimpse of the contrast between the singularity of vertical constructions and the inconceivability of the urban sprawl, while ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ provides the ideological and conceptual background for the analysis of the conflict between two opposing architectural and urban conceptions in science fiction: spires and sprawls. Both can be analysed as actualizations of Lefebvre’s notion of monumental spaces, and as instances of narrative structures that literalize the totalizing metanarratives of postmodern theory. Spires, towers, and skyscrapers tend to represent the principles of modernist architecture, which are associated with the technological utopia of the dominant ideology according to Lefebvre. Contrarily, the urban sprawl, together with decentred or fragmented images of the city, recalls the rhizome design of the postmodern worldview. The juxtaposition of spires and sprawls in a narrative context is not simply a revision of the principles of modernity

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regarded as totalitarian by the postmodern attitude, but also a dialectical strategy to avoid a seemingly uncritical acceptance of the new postmodern tenets: sprawls are not described as idyllic spaces in postmodern science fiction, but rather, as ‘critical dystopias’, as I have suggested. The conflict between spires and sprawls can be found in a number of postmodern science fiction novels, some of which will be analysed here. The first one is J. G. Ballard’s High-Rise (1975), which, strictly speaking, predates the conventionally accepted beginning of postmodern science fiction in the early 1980s. Nevertheless, Ballard’s novel is an excellent example of the trend that led to the appearance of postmodern science fiction. The plot of High-Rise revolves around a solid building with obvious modernist connotations, where his main characters start to dwell in increasing isolation. The ideological context is clear. The description of the apartment block is linked to modern architectural principles from the beginning of the novel. The high-rise has a futuristic design that the main character perceives: ‘[W]hen [Laing, the protagonist] had sold the lease of his Chelsea house and moved to the security of the high-rise, he had traveled forward fifty years in time’ (Ballard 2000: 9). The skyscraper is also described as a clear example of massive architecture: ‘[T]he apartment block was a small vertical city, its 2000 inhabitants boxed up into the sky’ (9). Besides, it has obvious mechanical and technophiliac associations, as can be seen in the following quotation: ‘The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual resident in isolation’ (10). The building stands out and represents order in opposition to the rest of the urban space described in the novel: ‘[T]he ragged skyline of the city resembled a disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’ (9). Finally, the residential tower was developed in opposition to nineteenth-century residential and industrial architecture: ‘The massive scale of glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation on a bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation’ (Ballard 2000: 8). Nevertheless, this futuristic and comfortable building does not lead residents to more advanced and civilized states, but exactly the opposite. What happens in High-Rise can be described as a regression into more

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primitive human development. The ascent in the architectural structure of the block is identified with climbing the social scale, and it is also a decline into more primitive social organization, that is, a ‘descent into barbarism’ (2000: 134). The references to feudal and tribal order are inserted into other allusions to barbarism and animal behavior. The architect Royal acts as a ‘feudal lord’ (2000: 53); there are ‘tribal conferences’ (136); residents describe their society like an amalgamation of clans: ‘Perhaps a clan would be more exact’ (31); the tenants understand they are ‘moving towards a state of happy primitivism’ (109), and they even speak of themselves as ‘cave dwellers’ (2000: 108). Their reversion to a primitive state implies abandoning modern, sophisticated requirements for the satisfaction of basic human needs: ‘Now the new order had emerged, in which all life within the high-rise evolved around three obsessions –security, food and sex’ (2000: 136). The vertical coordinates are thus inverted or at least ambiguous, for the ‘ascent’ in the physical heights of the high-rise means a ‘descent’ into a stage of human development closer to savagery. The high-rise thus becomes an inversion of the technological utopia promised by a modernity that is associated with capitalist ideology. The economy inside the high-rise does not evolve towards the expansion of material production; contrarily, it soon becomes a closed system where mere survival is the main economic objective. In the end, the building becomes a monumental space where the dominant ideology does not succeed: instead of a technological utopia, the reader finds a modernist dystopia. In the meantime, the high-rise stands in the middle of its urban background: the London suburban area, perceived as ‘a different world, in time as well as in space’ (8), which at the beginning of the novel seemed to be the dystopia the characters were escaping from in search of security. It is the cosmopolitan London of traffic jams, overpopulation, the city whose description recalls the ‘hell of a world we live in’ of ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, the dystopian city that would later be depicted as dislocated and decrepit by cyberpunk (Cavallaro 2000: 175). It is in fact from the dystopia of the real city that the characters are trying to escape only to find a baser version of a totalitarian society. Similar, if not stronger ideological connotations can be found in Greg Bear’s Slant (1997). Like High-Rise, this novel does not belong to the most

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productive period of cyberpunk. Nevertheless, the ideological connotations of the monumental spaces the novel contains are comparable. If J. G. Ballard’s apartment skyscraper is the main symbolic element of High-Rise, Greg Bear’s Slant includes the Omphalos pyramid. Both buildings share an obvious solid, modern design and equally totalitarian and regressive associations in terms of social structures. Ballard uses height coordinates for social class division while the social elite in Bear’s novel build a pyramid, whose architectural features reinforce the symbolic connotations of modern architectural elements as oppressive and alienating, representative of a technological utopia that failed in the postmodern eyes. Bear’s fiction offers readers a glimpse of a society not so far into the future (the year is 2052) where social dynamics are everything but uniform. The United States of 2052 is a country divided between those states that allow artificial modification of the human body with nanorobots and a Mid-West enclave, the Republic of Green Idaho, which rejects any kind of technological intervention in the human body. Nanorobots make the majority of the population a mixture of human and machine. Bear’s novel emphasizes the fluidity and indeterminacy of a postmodern society where people can change appearance, sex and race at will, and where the use of machines inside the human body is beneficial, thus overcoming the traditional opposition between the human and the mechanical. The only destabilizing factor will come precisely from conservative (and essentialist) attitudes, represented by the Republic of Green Idaho and the conspiracy to build a massive, monolithic and eternal Noah’s ark: the Omphalos Pyramid. The Omphalos is a building with aspirations of unity, uniformity, and centrality (the word means ‘navel’ and ‘centre’ in ancient Greek): ‘The leading edge points at the heart of Moscow like a woodman’s edge (Bear 1998: 3). The pyramid in the novel is described as a massive building: ‘A tetrahedron four hundred feet high, with two vertical faces and a triangular base, it is the biggest thing in town’ (3). It also gives an impression of durability: ‘Omphalos is a broad-shouldered edifice, Herculean architecture for the ages […]’ (3). The building is associated in the novel with social elites, as the narration suggests: ‘[O]mphalos is publicly assumed to be a kind of fancy tomb for the rich and privileged […]’ (4). Its occupants are ‘just a different set of pharaohs’ (6). The Omphalos actualizes the traditional metaphor of

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the pyramid used to describe the social structure. These are precisely the connotations that are associated with it, for it is first believed to be a tomb for rich people who want to be frozen and revived in the future. But as the novel goes on, the reader discovers that it is in fact a shelter for a ‘natural’ (meaning ‘untherapied’ or non-modified genetically or technologically) elite, called the Aristos, who intend to survive what they considered to be a catastrophic social multiplicity. In this sense, they are the most reactionary of the already most conservative part of the United States, represented by the fictional Republic of Green Idaho. As happens in Ballard’s High-Rise, the pyramid’s milieu consists of fragmentary, decentred United States society whose postmodern fluidity and instability cannot be represented by monumental spaces such as the Omphalos building. The contrast between centrality and fragmentation, stability and fluidity, permanence and mobility in human social structures is also the context in which Snow Crash (1992), Virtual Light (1994), and Schismatrix (1985) can be placed. The three novels subvert the established notions of the organization of space (and therefore of social organization) by presenting fictional buildings and urban structures that contradict modernist and traditional architectural principles. Stephenson’s Snow Crash envisions a floating (fluid) city consisting of numerous boats which navigate freely over the Earth’s oceans, while one of the settings of Gibson’s Virtual Light is a bridge transformed into a town where social outcasts have found a home. Sterling’s Schismatrix presents perhaps the most challenging human environments, as the novel imagines a future in which humans have left the Earth to live in cities which are enormous space stations; these interplanetary cities subvert the oppositions between inner/outer space, natural/ artificial (human) space, and city/country (in both meanings of the word). These new, imagined monumental spaces respond to a different set of architectural, and therefore social and political, principles. Like many other of Stephenson’s novels, the plot of Snow Crash is complex and difficult to summarize. The main character is Hiro Protagonist, a pizza deliverer who has a second identity in the Metaverse (Stephenson’s term for cyberspace). He gets involved in a complex global conspiracy to extend a computer virus, Snow Crash. The conspiracy plot is less relevant to this chapter than the social and political context in which the story

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takes place. Stephenson envisions a de-centred and fragmented globalized world where countries function as franchises and embassies as multinational branches in which a new kind of city emerges. One of the characters of the novel, Bob Rife, is the leader of a new religion based on ancient Sumerian beliefs. His followers have formed what they call ‘The Raft’: floating city formed by an accumulation of all kinds of ships and boats. Anyone can enter this city, and anyone can leave at will. It is not stable, because it floats on the Pacific, even though it seems to have a centre: the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier, which is Rife’s ship. The Raft is a new type of human dwelling completely opposed to traditional cities; it is a moving urban area that is never constant, as boats are continuously added and removed from this conglomerate. In this sense, ‘The Raft’ is, first of all, a literalization of Lefebvre’s notion of the production of space, because it represents a human dwelling space created in the middle of the ocean, and a representation of the production of space as a process (Lefebvre 1999: 34). Secondly, it is a representational space itself, that is, an urban design that incorporates some ideological principles of postmodernism such as fluidity and fragmentation. In fact, ‘The Raft’ is an overt postmodern critique of a modern architectural belief: the Modern Movement preferred functionalism to creativity and, in pursuit of its ideal of pure forms, it intended to develop a neutral and timeless architectural style, which postmodern architects read as the inevitable result of the application of the principles of mass standardized production and capitalistic waste policies to construction materials and techniques (cf. Portoghesi: 1981). Modernist claims to rational, faultless building and city designs were rejected by postmodern aesthetics, and functionality was seen as a dehumanizing trait. The mixture of all kinds of ships that constitute the Raft was not initially designed for human habitation, but they are used as houses where a fluid, multiple, and ever changing society lives. This attack against the functionality of modernist architecture is also evident in William Gibson’s Virtual Light (1994). Again, the plot of the novel is difficult to summarize, so my analysis will concentrate on the ‘city’ where one of the main characters, Chevette Washington, lives. Chevette is a bicycle messenger who gets involved in a case of information theft among rival data smuggling groups. What is relevant for this chapter is

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the fact that Chevette lives literally under a bridge. The community she lives in moved into the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge when it was rendered useless by the construction of a tunnel. The bridge was closed, but many squatters and outlaws came to live there, occupying the bridge after violent confrontation with the police. After occupation, the bridge loses its modernist functionality and becomes subject to postmodern modification. Like the Raft in Snow Crash, it is built with materials reclaimed from junkyards. Contrarily to what many believed, this suspended city is described as a place of enormous vitality: Its steel bones, its stranded tendons, were lost within an accretion of dreams: tattoo parlors, gaming arcades, dimly lit stalls stacked with decaying magazines, sellers of fireworks, of cut bait, betting shops, sushi bars, unlicensed pawnbrokers, herbalists, barbers, bars. Dreams of commerce, their locations generally corresponding with the decks that had once carried vehicular traffic; while above them, rising to the very peaks of the cable towers, lifted the intricately suspended barrio, with its unnumbered population and its zones of more private fantasy. […] Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and he’d walked slowly forward, into the neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rainsilvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and he’d known that his journey had not been in vain (Gibson: 1994, 70)

The modernist solid structure of the bridge no longer serves its original functionalist purposes. The bridge has been occupied by a subversive social group consisting of the homeless and outlaws, who have turned it into an alternative city, as some characters comment in the story. ‘And that bridge, man, that’s one evil motherfucking place. Those people anarchists, antichrists, cannibal motherfuckers out there, man […]’ ‘I heard it was just a bunch of homeless people,’ Rydeli said, vaguely recollecting some documentary he’d seen in Knoxville, ‘just sort of making do.’ ‘No, man,’ Freddie said, ‘homeless fuckers, they’re on the street. Those bridge motherfuckers, they’re like king-hell satanists and shit. You think you can just move on out there yourself ? No fucking way. They’ll just let their own kind, see? Like a cult. With ’nitiations and shit.’ (Gibson 1994: 165)

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As we can see in this quotation, the bridge dwellers constitute a solid, active, productive social group which has stronger ties to one another than other ‘traditional’ communities. In general, Gibson sees and describes these characters in a positive light, as part of a creative and vital society. In fact, he provided a visual example of this kind of community in the film adaptation of his short story ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ (1981), released in 1995. The film, whose screenplay was also written by Gibson, presents a city suspended from a bridge and inhabited by an unconventional social group. Again the anarchic structure of these communities challenges the dull uniformity intended by modernist architecture and urban designs. These and other communities found in other novels by William Gibson, such as the Rastafarian space station of Neuromancer, are what McHale calls ‘microworlds’ (1992a: 152); they are and similar to the only human environments that can be found in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985). At first glance, the connection between Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix and architecture is not evident. Schismatrix is not a novel in the traditional sense, but a collection of short stories which share the same imaginary context, one in which humans have colonized the whole solar system and are living not only on Earth or on any of the other solid planets like Mars, but also on moons, small asteroids and artificial environments which are not exactly spaceships. Although at first sight the question of urban space is not relevant here, upon further reflection it is clear that Sterling’s artificial or modified environments are extensions of the city. In James Blish’s Cities in Flight (1970), scientists discover the technology necessary to control gravity, and as a consequence, many cities start floating and leave Earth, and even the solar system. This novel illustrates the union of two icons of science fiction, the city and the spaceship (which sometimes works as a city, as another ‘microworld’). Blish’s cities become the vehicle humans use to travel to the stars, and take human civilization with them. Instead of founding cities in a different planet, humans travel inside the cities themselves. This brings some light into what the universe of Schismatrix may represent. The multiplication of human settlements in the solar system also implies the proliferation of different types of social organization. Some of these settlements are small enclaves inhabited by a hundred people; others are huge environments where many groups live, or whole planets like the

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Moon. Some of them are organized hierarchically; some others consist of freely associated individuals. In fact, there is only one kind of uniformity in the stories: the division between the ‘Mechs’, humans who have modified themselves using machines (mechanicals) and have become cyborgs, and the ‘Shapers’, who have preferred to improve humans through genetic modification. To complicate things, a species of elusive aliens have appeared and established contact with humans. Each of these futures and diverse human social groups transforms, adapts and creates the artificial space where they live according to their needs. In opposition to the tendency towards uniformity and equality of globalization, each city is completely different from the others and has its own economy, government, and social division, as if humans had gone back in time to the era of the Greek city-states. There is simply no cultural centre in this atomized universe. Accordingly, these habitats are diverse: spaceships, asteroids, and cities excavated on the moon coexist in this mosaic of human societies which finally actualize Lefebvre’s main dictum: that the mode of production of a society has a definitive influence on the production of space, and consequently on the architecture and urban planning produced by the different societies. This is literalized in the diverse environments of Sterling’s novel, which can also be read as actualizations of John Gray’s (1998) vision of the global market not as a unified entity, but as a conglomerate of multiple versions of economic activity, ‘imperfect’ adaptions of laissez-faire capitalism.

Conclusion: New Cities, New Docieties I began this chapter with a brief description of the significance of cyberspace in cyberpunk and in postmodern science fiction, as well as of the implications of the idea of virtual reality for the postmodern worldview in general. As a literary motif, the notion of cyberspace actualizes the idea of space as a constructed entity, which corresponds to the overall postmodern vision of Western cultural principles as the consequence of the long-lasting

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imposition of an ideological background naturalized by discourse a posteriori. To this conception of space as a construct Lefebvre adds his notion of space as a product, that is, as the result of one specific mode of production, capitalism, and of the technological utopia that goes with it. This reading can also be applied to the notion of cyberspace; as Bukatman states: ‘in an era of ATMs and global banking, cyberspace is where your money is. So cyberspace is a financial space, a space of capital […] a place of testing and the arena for new technological rites of passage’ (1993: 156). From this perspective, the celebration of cyberspace in cyberpunk and in postmodern science fiction can be read as a reinforcement of the dominant ideology and therefore as conservative or even reactionary. Nevertheless, as this chapter has tried to show, cyberspace is not the only spatial configuration present in cyberpunk. In fact, the highly conceptual, ideal qualities of cyberspace (visualized in the film TRON, for instance) clash noticeably with the principles underlying the model of spatial organization endorsed by the postmodern worldview: the urban sprawl. The notion of a scattered, fragmentary, de-centred city clearly follows the tenets of the postmodernism and may well epitomize the postmodern concept of reality in opposition to cyberspace, which is subject to idealization. The sprawl is the urban setting outside cyberspace in postmodern science fiction novels, the place the bodies of the protagonists inhabit and where they go back to when they disconnect from the hallucination. However, in cyberpunk urban sprawls are far from ideal. It would thus be more appropriate to argue that postmodern science fiction does not portray an uncritical acceptance of cyberspace or, alternatively, of the sprawl. Rather, it presents a contrast, set in dialogic terms, between the modernist and postmodernist spatial dominants, represented by modernist and postmodern architecture, where both the ideological connotations of the modernist stylized vision of space (in terms of social and economic planning) and those of the postmodern vision itself (which favour de-centred, fragmented, tangled urban layouts and social structures) are subject to permanent critical reflection. Following Lefebvre, the conflict between these two conceptions of space is the clash between two modes of production, and therefore the battle between two social, political, and

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economic organizations presented in a dialogical, narrative mode, something typical of the postmodern Weltanschauung. In this sense, the unresolved spatial conflict of these novels is a challenge to the vision of global capitalism as utopia imposed by the dominant discourse. Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of the ‘end of history’ in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1999) is but the consolidation of the capitalist status quo defined in utopian terms as the perfect economic, social and political system, and incessantly supported by the discourse of what Lefebvre calls the technological utopia. Nevertheless, postmodern science fiction envisions global capitalism not as utopia, but as a dystopia, following the cues in John Gray’s False Dawn (1998: 2).7 Furthermore, the postmodern version of the genre moves somewhere beyond the categories of utopia and dystopia, and it is necessary to introduce concepts like ‘critical dystopia’, as Tom Moylan suggests (2003: 7), to understand its ideological stance in relation to the notion of utopia. The postmodern world, as Fred Pfeil suggested, reflects the collapse of the ‘utopian/dystopian dialectic’ (Fred Pfeil in Bukatman, 1996: 138). That postmodern science fiction continues to imagine new models of social organization literalized in its ‘microworlds’ indicates its rejection of the idea of the end of history as a construct of dominant capitalist ideology – another ‘metanarrative’ – and reveals the genre’s subversive potential in the search for new political alternatives that go beyond the simplistic definition of utopia or dystopia. This refutation of metanarratives and the criticism of any totalizing discourse contradicts global capitalism’s constructed sense of inevitable historical evolution as well as its assumption that no alternative is possible. The confrontation between buildings, urban patterns and spatial configurations 7

Although Gray actually uses the word utopia to define the single universal free market, he does so with a critical intention. This single global market is ‘a Utopia that can never be realized’ (1998: 2), and therefore, it can be understood as a dystopia. At the end of the book, after a long criticism of the negative consequences of this economic philosophy, he states: ‘A global free market is a project that was destined to fail. In this, as in much else, it resembles that other twentieth-century experiment in utopian social engineering, Marxian socialism’ (1998: 235). In the literary tradition, utopian systems that fail and produce oppressive economic and political systems are simply dystopias.

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of the novels analysed here prolongs the dialectic discussion of different models of social, political and economic organization at a time where alternatives to the idea of a global society unified by the capitalist mode of production seemed inexistent. In this sense, the new spaces envisioned by postmodern science fiction, such as the bridge dwellings in Virtual Light, the ‘Raft’ in Snow Crash, or the multiple habitats of Schismatrix may represent these new types of society, these alternatives to global capitalism. To quote David Harvey’s statement in Spaces of Hope: ‘Ask first: where is anti-capitalist struggle to be found? The answer is everywhere’ (2000: 71).

Bibliography Baccolini, R., and Moylan, T. (eds) (1997). Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Ballard, J. G. (2000). High-Rise. London: Flamingo. Barthes, R. (1990) La aventura semiológica. Barcelona: Paidós. Bear, Greg. (1998). Slant. New York: Tor Books. Bukatman, S. (1993). Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke University Press. Cavallaro, D. (2000). Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London and New Brunswick, NJ: The Athelone Press. Eagleton, T. (1996). The Illusions of Postmodernism. London: Blackwell. Fukuyama, F. (1992). The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Gibson, W. (1994). Virtual Light. New York: Bantam Books. Gibson, W. (1995a). Neuromancer. London: Harper Collins. Gibson, W. (1995b). ‘The Gernsback Continuum’. In W. Gibson, Burning Chrome, pp. 37–50. London: Harper Collins. Gray, J. (1998). False Dawn. London: Granta Books. Harvey, D. (2000). Spaces of Hope. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hutcheon, L. (1988). A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Hutcheon, L. (1993). The Politics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. Jameson, F. (1995). Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Jameson, F. (2005). Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso.

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Jencks, C. A. (1977). The Language of Postmodern Architecture. London: Academy Editions. Lefebvre, H. (1999). The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell. Lotringer, S. (ed.) (1989). Foucault Live: Interviews 1966–84. New York: Semiotexte(e). Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McHale, B. (1992a). ‘Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk’, Critique 33 (3), pp. 149–75. McHale, B. (1992b). Constructing Postmodernism. London and New York: Routledge. McHale, B. (1994). Postmodernist Fiction. London and New York: Routledge. Portoghesi, P. (1984). Dopo l’Architettura moderna. Roma and Bari: Laterza. Scott, R. (Director), and Deely, M. (Producer) (1982). Blade Runner [DVD]. United States: Warner Bros. Stephenson, N. (2003). Snow Crash. New York: Bantam. Sterling, B. (1996). Schismatrix Plus. New York: Ace. Wolfe, G. (1979). The Known and the Unknown: The Iconography of Science Fiction. Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press.

Isabel Santaularia i Capdevila

8 They Aren’t the Big Bad Communists We Were Raised to Think They Were? The Representation of Russia in Contemporary Crime Fiction and Thrillers

abstract This chapter analyses some contemporary thrillers and crime narratives set in Russia written in English in order to investigate how they perpetuate a negative vision of the country, which is depicted as a monstrous space, far more abhorrent than the crimes investigated by the protagonists. The chapter aims at demonstrating that, even though the authors shy away from drawing comparisons with a supposedly better West, and, thus, do not overtly celebrate Western exceptionalism, they still resort to strategies intended to demonize Russia and anchor its contemporary deficiencies to the country’s revolutionary and communist past. By turning Russia into a gothic landscape, in fact, these texts offer meaningful, if dated, conceptions of space that ultimately guarantee the superiority of the West.

Introduction: The Representation of Russia in Crime Fiction and Thrillers The representation of foreign settings in crime fiction and thrillers written in English has seldom been innocent. Authors who situate their stories in foreign lands may simply be trying to find a niche in the very crowded crime fiction scene by adding the mystery of the outré to the crime being investigated by the protagonist and targeting armchair travellers craving for lurid descriptions of exotic locales. However, and simultaneously, these stories often reinforce political and cultural prejudices contingent upon

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their times and portray foreign lands in the light of contemporary geopolitical tensions that determine the perspective from which readers will perceive them. Thus, as Anderson, Miranda and Pezzotti claim, exotic settings ‘reveal more about the society that observes them than they do about the society that is apparently observed and represented’ (2012: 6). Russia is a case in point since its portrayal in crime fiction and thrillers written in English responds to Western fantasies or anxieties related to the perception of Russia as an ally or an enemy at any given time. In the nineteenth century, for example, as Choi Chatterjee demonstrates in his study of the representation of Russia in popular fiction produced in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century till 1917, the arrival of Russian revolutionaries escaping persecution led to practices that challenged the popular view of Russia as a ‘barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasion of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar’ (2008: 754). Russian émigrés made their voices heard and they ‘played a significant part in creating models of themselves for American consumption […] that subsequently captured the American imagination’ (2008: 758) and found their way into representations of Russia and Russians in popular fiction. In the 1930s, on the other hand, writers such as William Buchan and Cyril McNeile turned from Germans as the villains of their thrillers to left-wing politicians, trade unions and foreign Bolsheviks, but Eric Ambler ‘responded to this reactionary tradition with a series of novels in which Soviet agents were treated as honourable individuals and in which international capitalism was perceived as the real enemy of world peace’ (Neuse 1980: 156). Positive renditions of Russia, however, are scarce, especially during the Cold War period when, in Everson’s words, the movies and popular novels ‘seized on Russia and communism as a convenient scapegoat and staple villain’ (1964: 137; emphasis in the original). Crime fiction and thrillers in countries such as the United States and Britain propagandized the Western values of democracy, the free market, human rights or the rule of law as opposed to the perversity of the Soviet Union, and dramatized the conflict between East and West as Armageddon, with Russia threatening our very existence with nuclear annihilation. The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, therefore, not only left

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Americans and the Western world in general without a foil against which to construct themselves as defenders of freedom and saviours of the world against communism and authoritarianism; it also meant that popular fiction had to look elsewhere to find foreign villains since Russians, as Elena V. Baraban’s unpublished thesis argues, were now allies in pursuit of the selfsame Western values they had abhorred in the past. This is not to imply that the end of the Cold War led to a significant transformation in the presentation of Russia in crime fiction, as recent contemporary examples that will be considered in this chapter demonstrate, namely, Andrew Williams’s To Kill a Tsar (2011), Sam Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar (2010), William Ryan’s The Holy Thief (2010), Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (2008), Boris Starling’s Vodka (2005), A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops (2011) and Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow (2013). Published between 2005 and 2013, these stories carry momentum as mouthpieces for a particular vision of Russia that confirms negative stereotypes and does not go beyond what we know, or think we know, about the country. Read chronologically, and taking into account the period when the action of these novels takes place, one can actually observe a continuum in the presentation of the Soviet Union/Russia, which is pictured as a monstrous space through and through, far more abhorrent than the actual crimes being investigated by the protagonists. Post-Soviet Union Russia, in fact, has not turned out to be a better version of its former self, especially if we focus on the time-span that covers the publication of the novels under analysis, which coincides with Vladimir Putin’s terms as President (2000–2008), Prime Minister (2008–2012) and President again (2012–present). Post-perestroika Russia was a nation on the verge of collapse, burdened with ‘unemployment, the near-total impoverishment of the population, the resurgence of tuberculosis, and the growing threat of AIDS; prostitution and sexual slavery; the increasing “brain-drain” and threat of nuclear proliferation; and […] terrorism and the war in Chechnya’ (Borenstein 2008: 1–2). Putin’s Russia is, apparently, much improved thanks to the liberalization of state-owned industries, especially the gas and oil industries, and the firm leadership of the President, fashioned by the Russian mass media as a reassuring ‘“man’s man” who can husband the nation’s resources and promise a return to

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greatness’ (Borenstein 2008: 227). Also, the visibility of the new Russian jet set projects an image of a rich nation that has gone from ‘being ready to sell anything […] [to being] ready to buy anything: football clubs in London and basketball clubs in New York; art collections, British and European energy companies’ (Pomerantsev 2015: 3). Underneath this glittering façade, though, lies the harrowing reality of a country characterized by ‘the Kremlin’s growing centralisation of power, the state’s restored control over television news, and the increasing irrelevance of the print media in the court of public opinion’ (Borenstein 2008: 227); and this is not to mention the many ills affecting contemporary Russia, including widespread poverty, corruption and oppression under the governance of a gangster state that seizes properties at its whim so that the middle classes feel they have no real right over their possessions; or the lack of a real democracy that guarantees a serious opposition to Putin’s regime. All in all, as Pomerantsev explains, quoting Oleg Deripska, a member of the nation’s nouveau riche, Russia ‘isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends’ (2015: 50). Indeed, Russia remains so objectionable that it can still be conveniently used to produce sensationalist, scary representations of the country in popular fiction and to promote, by contrast, Western values. Having said that, it would be one-dimensional to assume that negative representations of Russia in crime fiction and thrillers written in English respond only to neo-Orientalist practices that attempt to advance Western superiority by demonizing the East, especially if we take into account that the genre is too jaded to entertain the notion that our Western societies are inherently good. If we look beyond the clue-puzzle or cosy mystery traditions, contemporary examples of the genre interrogate Western societies and focus on the systemic nature of crime, with ‘individual crime […] seen as a symptom of, result of, or reaction to basic flaws in the political, social and industrial systems’ (Christian 2001: 2). The West in general and capitalism in particular, in fact, are exposed as criminal in novels such as Ian Rankin’s Black & Blue (1998), John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener (2005) or Paco Ignacio Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos’s The Uncomfortable Dead (2006), which scrutinize the cracks and crevices that break through the smooth

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façade of Western societies and demonstrate how far they have strayed from democratic and civil ideas. As a consequence, contemporary crime narratives exacerbate, rather than assuage, as the genre did in the past in its most conservative examples, our discomfort with the world we inhabit. Our unease with our contemporary world is also aggravated by broad developments that have affected our perception of space and our position in relation to other spaces, such as the dismantling of old colonial empires, the withering away of states or the emergence of bewildering forms of global finance and communication (Tally 2013: 77), which have intensified what Lukács termed our ‘transcendental homelessness’ (1971: 21), a sense of not being at home in the world. This state of disorientation, more than (or at least as well as) neo-Orientalist forms of knowledge-production of the East, comes in handy when accounting for the negative rendition of Russia in contemporary crime narratives since, in these stories, Russia’s monstrosity helps (Western) readers draw lines in a world that has become too porous and flexible to understand and, incidentally, reaffirm old spatial divisions that take for granted the West’s superiority.

Enter the Monster: The Representation of Russia and Comfort-making Strategies Crime fiction, thrillers and the Gothic have more in common than is apparently obvious. As critics like Julian Symons, Philip L. Simpson and Judith Halberstam demonstrate in their studies on, respectively, crime fiction, serial killer narratives and monstrosity, crime fiction, like the Gothic, explores the dark side of society and paints landscapes of evil inside and outside the human soul; polices the boundaries of normality by excluding the abnormal, the deviant and the criminal; and creates monsters/villains that can be read as symbolic representations of the fears and anxieties assailing our society at a particular time in history and are ‘either […] symptom[s] of or […] metaphor[s] for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself ’ (Hutchings 2004: 37). Monsters, whether

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human or supernatural, are intended to generate fear and, therefore, are crafted in such a way as to condense as many disgust-inducing elements as possible in their mottled, composite personas. Ironically, monsters are also reassuring, especially when their demonic, utterly ‘other’ nature and threatening potential stem ‘primarily from outside the culture […] rather than within its most precious policies and ideologies’ (Simpson 2000: 173) and become personifications of everything we think ‘we are not’. Thus, foreign, ethnic or racialized monsters/villains have become staple fare in crime and gothic narratives ‘as symbols of a diseased culture’ (Halberstam 2000: 14), often used, as Ken Gelder explains, ‘as a means of confirming (to “civilized” audiences) the unbridgeable backwardness and “savagery” of the object on display’ that a nation feels it must expel ‘even as it requires it for self-definition’ (Gelder 2000: 226–7). If we focus on crime narratives with a Russian setting, the villain is not just the foe the detective tries to outwit, capture and/or bring to justice, but villainy extends to the context in which the detective moves, which is so excessive and disgusting as to become completely alien, allowing readers to appreciate the difference between Western societies and Russia without having to resort to a comparison with the supposed good qualities of the West, which are not invoked in the novels under analysis. The monstrous image of Russia in contemporary crime narratives written in the last decade, and the attendant comforting perception of a world in which West and East remain completely different entities positioned at opposite ends of the good/evil spectrum, therefore, is drawn by means of various representation strategies that confirm Russia’s hideous nature to Western readers. To start with, most of the stories analysed in this chapter have Russian protagonists. While authors are entitled to provide accounts of different cultures, and they can be well acquainted with them through travel and study, it is significant they choose insider protagonists whom readers may easily take for granted speak for the people of Russia and, in this way, give their texts an aura of authenticity. Interestingly, the Russian protagonists are either revolutionaries fighting against an autocratic tsar in Williams’s To Kill a Tsar, or work for the authorities in Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, Ryan’s The Holy Thief, Smith’s Child 44, Starling’s Vodka and Matthews’s Red Sparrow. Consequently, they are all associated with and/or

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support communism (anarchism in Williams’s novel), which is supposed to work for the creation of a society in which property will be equally distributed and social injustice will disappear. However, as the stories unfold and the protagonists witness the abuses and depredations committed in the name of communism and/or the party’s disregard for the actual needs of the people, they lose faith in their original beliefs and the legitimacy of the means used to guarantee the creation of a Soviet paradise, so they all disparage communism from a position of authority conferred by their status as insiders intimately familiar with their surroundings. Williams’s To Kill a Tsar, for example, takes place between 1879 and 1881 and focuses on the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya’s (The People’s Will) terrorist attempts to assassinate the Tsar, whom they saw as ‘the embodiment of autocracy, antipathy to democracy and the oppression of the ordinary people’ (2011: 430). The group’s claims that there was no freedom in Russia and change was necessary were legitimate if we take into account that the Tsar, Alexander II, believed that his divine right to rule was ‘unshakeable and attempts by nationalist and democratic movements to challenge it were ruthlessly suppressed across the empire’ (2011: 427). Nevertheless, the novel seems to have been written to condemn revolutionary activity, which, in the story, leads to chaos, discontent and even more oppression. Williams spends little space elaborating on the Tsar’s tyrannical rule or on the conditions in which ordinary people lived, and focuses almost exclusively on the fanaticism of the members of Narodnaya Volya, as well as on their elitist detachment and disregard for the actual will of the people, whose lives become even more miserable after the regicide. In the novel, the terrorists are not romanticized freedom fighters but criminals moved by the single-minded objective to assassinate the Tsar to ‘purify the atmosphere’ (2011: 35), and they do not contemplate alternatives beyond terror and chaos, so they are ready ‘to say and do disgusting things in the name of the people, to lie, to slander, to be […] hateful’ (2011: 143). Williams also emphasizes their violence and the collateral damage that results from this violence. The third unsuccessful attempt against the Tsar, for instance, takes place in the Winter Palace and results in ‘[s]ixty casualties, soldiers and palace servants, severed limbs and broken bones, severe blast burns and shock’ (2011: 267). One of the injured is a nineteen-year-old

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soldier, ‘his chest crushed by falling masonry, his right leg attached by only a white sliver of bone. His chances of survival [are] slim’ (2011: 267). And no one can yet determine ‘how many men [are dead] in the guard room or how many [will] die of their wounds in the days to come’ (2011: 267). The fourth and definitive attempt against the Tsar is successful but Williams focuses on the innocent victims that result from the attempt: a Cossack killed outright, ‘his mount still twitching in a pool of blood in the centre of the road’; a passer-by ‘collapsed in a ball at the edge of the pavement, his clothes tattered, his face covered in blood’; ‘the broken body of a boy of ten or eleven, the raw meat he [carried] in his basket scattered in a macabre arc around him’ (2011: 382). And this is all for nothing since, after the assassination of the Tsar and in spite of an inflammatory notice posted by the group celebrating the regicide and urging workers to rise to claim their freedom, there are ‘no barricades or demonstrations in the streets, no general rejoicing’ (2011: 389). No one heeds the call to revolution and St Petersburg is ‘subdued, even a little fearful, the churches full of mourners and those seeking the comfort of the old system’ (2011: 389). Meanwhile, the ‘white terror’ (2011: 389) begins in earnest and the immediate effects of the attempt are more tsarist oppression, the execution of those involved in the regicide and the realization, at least for the only member of the party who has some scruples, Anna Kovalenko, that her comrades’ sole objective is to unleash chaos upon Russia. After the assassination of the Tsar, in fact, she can no longer envision a positive outcome resulting from revolutionary activity, so she ‘watche[s] and listen[s] to [her comrade’s] talk of liberty and the future with a dull ache in her chest until she [can] stand it no more and [leaves] the room’ (2011: 386). Thus, Williams’s revolutionary characters are used to ascertain the horror of the system they spawned and, incidentally, confirm a negative perception of Russia ever since communists took control of the country. The same strategy is used in Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, Ryan’s The Holy Thief and Smith’s Child 44, which take place during Stalin’s dictatorship. In the first, Inspector Pekkala has been in a gulag in Siberia for a decade when the story begins, but a reprieve comes when Stalin summons him to investigate the identity of some bodies found in an abandoned mine. Supposedly, they are the remains of the Romanovs and Pekkala’s mission

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is to track down the men who killed the Tsar and his family and to locate the Tsar’s treasure. As the Tsar’s Eye or personal detective, Pekkala knew the Tsar intimately and had a relationship of affection and respect for him and his family. When Pekkala is released in 1929, he finds himself forced to work for a man, Stalin, he considers responsible for his years in Siberia and for the unfair assassination of a tsar he loved and admired, as well as for the chaos, oppression and poverty in the country. Consequently, his views of Stalin’s policies and the man himself are negative to start with, and he only works for him because the alternative is a death sentence that Stalin reminds him he could sign any time he pleased. Pekkala holds no faith in a system which uses terror to guarantee the submission of the people and does not trust Stalin since he can glimpse what lies beneath his ‘emotional blankness’ (2010: 451) and what he ‘[finds] there [fills] him with dread’, so his only defence is to pretend ‘he [cannot] see it’ (2010: 452). The Holy Thief, in turn, takes place in Moscow in 1936. Captain Alexei Dimetrevich Korolev is a detective of the Moscow Militia’s Criminal Investigation Division who investigates the murder of a girl found dead and tortured in an old church. When the victim is identified as an American citizen, Korolev’s investigation is supervised by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known for its political repression during Stalin’s dictatorship. Tom Rob Smith’s novel begins during the great famine in Russia in 1933 and then jumps in time to the last months of Stalin’s dictatorship. In this context, Leo Demidov, an ex-soldier who works for the Ministry for State Security, the MGB, later to become the KGB, investigates a series of child murders in the supposed Soviet paradise where crime does not exist. Unlike Pekkala, both Korolev and Demidov believe in the system but their investigations bring them face to face with the grimy reality of Soviet life and, as a result, their faith in the communist utopia is progressively eroded. Korolev, for instance, thinks ‘things [will] be better soon […] for the next generation anyway’ (Ryan 2010: 143) since they are just ‘a stage in the evolution of history’ (Ryan 2010: 336) which requires sacrifices at the moment but will eventually result in widespread well-being. However, he finds it increasingly difficult to believe that ‘the leadership [is] working for the People’s future’ though he sticks to his faith since, if he stopped believing, ‘where would he be? What hell would he find himself in then

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– if it all turned out to be a blood-soaked lie?’ (Ryan 2010: 203). At the end of the novel, Korolev comes to terms with the realization that some members of the party are corrupt and order the assassination of those who threaten to expose the situation. As a result, his faith is further shaken and he confesses: ‘I’m not quite the Soviet citizen I thought I was’ (Ryan 2010: 338). Demidov’s awakening to the reality of the country comes much earlier in the story as his job as interrogator of people accused of counterrevolutionary activity or espionage involves torture and the consequent execution of those who, under exertion, confess to their crimes, even when they are innocent. Demidov is progressively revolted by his job, but keeps doing it nonetheless, sticking to the belief that innocent men are going to be ‘crushed in the cogs of a vital and important but not infallible State machine’ but the protection of the nation is ‘bigger than one person, bigger than a thousand people’ (Smith 2008: 110). As he investigates the child murders, however, and realizes they have been solved incorrectly, ‘covered up or blamed on the mentally ill, some political enemy, a drunk, a vagrant’ (Smith 2008: 324), Demidov changes his views. The ‘seed of doubt, sitting dormant and undigested in the pit of [his] stomach, crack[s] open’ (Smith 2008: 94) and Demidov ‘buck[s] the official line and [starts] thinking for himself ’ (Smith 2008: 325). The protagonists of Starling’s Vodka and Matthews’s Red Sparrow similarly abdicate their alliance to the Russian authorities as the stories unfold. Situated in the 1990s post-perestroika era, Vodka focuses on the privatization process of a State-owned vodka factory, Red October, as the first step towards the liberalization of prices and free market in the country. Set in Putin’s Russia, Red Sparrow revolves around Dominika Ergorova’s gradual loss of faith in her government after a stint in the infamous Sparrow School, where young and attractive SVR agents are trained to use sex to obtain information, and a spell in the Lefortovo prison, where she is held and tortured after she is suspected of counter-espionage activity. The protagonist of Vodka, Lev, is a vory, a member of the Russian mafia, but also the director of the Red October distillery and a parliamentary deputy. As a vory, he is sufficiently disengaged from the government to qualify as the hero of the story because, unlike the corrupt authorities, the vory have ‘kept [their] structure, [their] ideology’, they are ‘superior […] in culture

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and morality’ and they ‘pay the hospital bills of [their] wounded, [they] provide for the families of jailed men’ (2005: 128). Consequently, they are ‘honourable and decent’ since ‘the real gangsters are the politicians and bureaucrats, the state criminals, who enrich themselves without helping children and the elderly’ (2005: 148–9). As a parliamentary deputy, though, Lev supports the government’s new policies, which he expects will result in better conditions for the citizens of Russia. However, he realizes the president and the prime minister are not ‘good men trying to do good things’ (2005: 492). They are only concerned with self-preservation and will resort to anti-democratic measures to wipe out any opposition and guarantee their re-election. Consequently, ‘if democracy is to exist in Russia […] it will be not because of [them] but in spite of [them]’ (2005: 493). Dominika in Matthew’s Red Sparrow similarly becomes aware of the fact that the modern SVR is not so different from the former KGB. If anything, it is worse. In the past, agents were recruited ‘because of their ideology, their belief in world communism, their commitment to the dream of a perfect socialist state’; in the present, it is all ‘sharada, a charade’ (2013: 359) in a country where ‘the end of the Cold War has not diminished [its] leaders’ inclinations to do mischief ’ (2013: 322), now in the name of greed and ‘the global politics of oil and natural gas’ (2013: 358). If foreign protagonists appear in the novels, on the other hand, it is either to provide a moral perspective and to cast a condemnatory glance at the ravages that take place in Russia or as sacrificial lambs faced with a ravenous society craving for human blood. The foreign protagonist of Williams’s To Kill a Tsar, for example, is Frederick Hadfield, an English doctor who lives a comfortable life tending to the needs of the Anglo-Russian gentry in St Petersburg. However, his affair with Anna Kovalenko brings him face to face with the reality of revolutionary activity as conducted by Narodnaya Volya. Consequently, even though he thinks democracy is needed in Russia, his role in the novel is to denounce Narodnaya Volya’s terror practices, which he believes will ‘set back the cause of reform by frightening liberal opinion’ (2011: 37) and, he ominously predicts, will only lead to the creation of a nation ‘where anyone who stands in [the party’s] way [will be] judged to be an enemy of the people’ (2011: 288).

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The aptly named Alice Liddell in Starling’s Vodka is an American ingénue brought to Russia to supervise the privatization process of the Red October distillery. She has the knowledge and experience since she has spent the last two years running privatization programmes in Eastern Europe, ‘suddenly liberated after the momentous autumn of 1989 when government after government toppled, the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the Ceaucescus were executed by their own people’ (2005: 32). Equipped with ‘graphs, statistics, market research, forecasts and projections’ (2005: 98), she believes she is ‘gonna show these bastards a bit of ol’ American kickass’ (2005: 55) and help ‘a great nation back to its feet’ (2005: 229), ‘make a difference, […] transform this society’ by laying ‘the foundations of democracy and the free market’ (2005: 172) so ‘the Russian people […] can live in a normal country, not one run on lies and sophistry’ (2005: 330). Her good intentions, though, collapse when she is confronted with the reality of Russia, which, she is warned at the beginning, ‘is unique […] categorically and absolutely not like anywhere else’ (2005: 33) and certainly not ‘delirious with gratitude for the end of the Soviet Union’ (2005: 34). Predictably, she learns the hard way that Western methods cannot be applied to Russia, not because they are bad, but because Russia is not amenable to improvement. Faced with cumbersome bureaucracy, incompetence, external interference and disappointment, she increasingly finds Russia ‘tiresome’ as ‘everything [seems] annoying and difficult’ (2005: 348). And this is before she finds out she has simply been used to legitimize a process designed not to make society better, but to guarantee those in power can go on pocketing the profits of the companies they privatize. When the privatization of Red October fails, in any case, Alice is publicly blamed for the fiasco and dismissed, allowed, in the president’s own words, ‘no further part in the great reform effort, an enterprise to which she has contributed nothing but harm’ (2005: 468). After this, Alice self-destructs with vodka and even contemplates suicide; after all, the Russians ‘brought down Napoleon and Hitler; they can bring down anyone’ (2005: 470). At the end of the story, though, Alice decides to stay in Russia but only because she embraces the insanity of a country ‘where black [is] white, white [is] black’ and everything makes sense only if you step through ‘the looking-glass and [surrender] yourself to the peculiar principles of logic that [hold] sway in Wonderland’ (2005: 660).

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Nicholas Platt, the protagonist of Miller’s Snowdrops, is another of Russia’s casualties. Even though, like Alice, he is in the country on business working as a lawyer for a foreign firm, he believes that Putin’s Russia is beyond redemption and he takes his stay in Russia as an opportunity to enjoy Moscow’s wild nightlife and to take full advantage of the privileges he has as a foreign expat. His job involves doing the paperwork on the loans Russian conglomerates receive from foreign banks to make their acquisitions, and he is fully aware of the nature of the transactions conducted by his firm, which are described as ‘lipstick on a pig’, ‘a kind of legal money laundering’ that not even ‘sanitising covenants, undertakings, sureties and disclosures [can] perfume’ (2011: 27). In spite of his apparent scepticism, Nicholas takes for granted that people’s intentions must be good and, consequently, he is doomed to break against Russia’s cruelty. The latest deal he works on turns out to be a scam. In addition, he is taken advantage of by a Russian femme fatale who seduces him and uses his expertise to legalize a scheme designed to steal an elderly woman’s flat. At different points in the story, Nicholas is warned about Russia. The front man of the company his firm represents, for instance, tells him, ‘Be careful […]. Sometimes, in our Russia, people can be less kind than they seem’ (2011: 201). Faced with how unkind people in Russia can actually be, Nicholas is devastated and the hardest lesson he learns is that the country brings out the worst in people, that you cannot be ‘interested, concerned, noble’ (2011: 134); and he is no exception to the rule since, when he goes along with the crookedness of the country without either fighting or escaping it, he becomes ‘the kind of person [he] never [knew he] could be until [he] came to Russia’ (2011: 259). What these insider and foreign protagonists have in common is that they all revile Russia or are destroyed by it, often both, and, consequently, they all project a negative view of the country, which is not allowed to materialize as anything but the immoral monster we have received from numerous accounts in the media and other crime narratives. In the novels under analysis, furthermore, the roots of Russia’s evil are to be found in its revolutionary past, which marks a schism in time when things changed for the worse. In fact, the two novels that focus on tsarist Russia, To Kill a Tsar and Eye of the Red Tsar, do not provide an account of its problems, which, as stated before, are only tangentially addressed in Williams’s novel.

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Instead, both novels highlight how international forces could have exerted enough pressure to lead to reform if revolutionaries had not interfered. They also present the tsars as ‘not […] evil [men] but as much […] prisoner[s] of family and circumstance as everyone else’ (Williams 2011: 387) and the revolutionaries as harbingers of ‘[d]ark times’ and ‘crooks’ who, in the past, financed themselves by stealing from banks and now ‘have learnt to steal the whole bank’ and will soon be ‘running the country’ (Eastland 2010: 78–9). The motivations and conditions that led to revolution are not contemplated either. Instead, when the novels take place in the past, it is mobilized to confirm Russia’s monstrosity, so they concentrate on Stalin’s Russia, which is portrayed in all its grimness and depravity in Eye of the Red Tsar, The Holy Thief and Child 44. These three novels emphasize Stalin’s use of terror to oppress the population and describe a society characterized by physical and moral degradation. In the country, imprisonment, torture and executions without trial are common and people are sent to the gulags in Siberia if they support even mild types of reform. In fact, the enemies of the Party are ‘not merely saboteurs, spies and wreckers of industry, but doubters of the Party line, doubters of the society which await[s] them’ (Smith 2008: 29). Citizens are sent to Lefortovo if found guilty of what the government describes as ‘anti-Soviet agitation, counter-revolutionary activity and espionage’ (Smith 2008: 78), and subjected to interrogations that involve torture, forced confessions and death. In a context in which ‘[t]error [is] necessary’ since it ‘protect[s] the Revolution’ (Smith 2008: 77), fear is cultivated as if it were a virus released into the population so people live in a constant state of paranoia, afraid that a neighbour, a member of the family or a colleague may accuse them of betraying the Party, so it seems that ‘there [is] no class solidarity now that everyone [is] the same class’ (Ryan 2010: 140). In the country, ‘virtues like honour, compassion and justice’ (Ryan 2010: 168) do not mean anything since to guarantee the survival of the system it is ‘[b]etter to let ten innocent men suffer than one spy escape’ (Smith 2008: 43). Meanwhile, justice does not exist and people do not act according to what they believe is right or wrong, but simply by what they think ‘will please their leader’, who in turn decides who lives or dies ‘depending on his annotations on a list: a line against a name save[s] a person, no mark

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mean[s] they [are] left to die’ (Smith 2008: 171). Without a fair judicial system, people are simply forced to follow the Party line, so being ‘a good Communist […] [is] like following an arbitrary God who require[s] you to believe that white [is] white one day and black the next’, a situation that only makes sense if you take into account the rationale Stalin uses to justify his policies: ‘that the country [is] surrounded by enemies who [are] terrified by its very existence’ and that ‘[f ]aced with such implacable foes’ the Party needs to take steps that seem ‘at odds with its long-term historical destiny’ (Ryan 2010: 100). In the country, crime proliferates even though one of the fundamental pillars of society is that ‘[t]here is no crime’ (Smith 2008: 28) since it is believed that ‘murder, theft and rape [are] symptoms of a capitalist society’ (Smith 2008: 192). As a result, there is no need for a police force, which simply means that the militia are only a subsection of the Ministry of the Interior, ‘poorly paid, poorly respected – a force comprised of secondary-school dropouts, farm workers kicked off the Kolkhoz, discharged army personnel and men whose judgement [can] be bought with a half bottle of vodka’ (Smith 2008: 193). In this context, even a serial killer can go on murdering with impunity, ‘concealed not by any masterful brilliance but by his country’s refusal to admit that such a man even exist[s], wrapping him in perfect immunity’ (Smith 2008: 362). Stalin’s Soviet paradise is only a façade sold to tourists and foreign journalists invited on guided tours to places like Vodovenko, model towns built to offer a false impression of prosperity and to convince visitors that ‘the famine is a fabrication of anti-Soviet propaganda’ (Eastland 2010: 172). Meanwhile, the citizenry lives in poverty. When farms were collectivized, they were left in the hands of people who did not know how to run them, so crops failed and millions died during the great famine. As a result, huge numbers of peasants migrated to big towns driven by a combination of ‘hunger at home and the prospect of work in one of the big factories or on one of the many construction sites’ (Ryan 2010: 144), but they could not always find a job or a place to live, so now they are forced to find ‘a scrap of dry floor to lie down’ and to sleep ‘on stairs, on trams, in the Metro’ (Ryan 2010: 144). The reality of Soviet life is visible in the slums in Moscow where the new arrivals sleep rough while they wait for work permits, and those

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who die of starvation are ‘picked up […] from the streets everyday’ (Ryan 2010: 136) by the militia. People’s living conditions and the state of infrastructures bespeak the country’s moral degradation. Buildings in Moscow have been ‘flattened into rubble’ and used to ‘fill the foundations of the new city’ (Ryan 2010: 98). However, the ‘new world socialism [is] creating’ (Ryan 2010: 98) is as decrepit as the system itself. Roads are ‘holed and pitted by heavy trucks’ and tenements are tottering and leaning ‘against multi-doomed churches, shabby with […] disuse’ (Ryan 2010: 98). When it rains, it washes Moscow’s skies clear of the factories’ smog, only to ‘drop it into the streets as murky puddles of black sludge’ (Ryan 2010: 176). The city’s sewage and factory waste feed into the river Don and create patterns of ‘oils, filth and chemicals on the water’s surface’ (Smith 2008: 314). The winter’s snow hides the city’s imperfections, but does not eliminate them, so Russia becomes a vision of hell where people with haggard faces and ragged clothes are lost in a labyrinth of ‘long hours, short rations and vodka’ (Ryan 2010: 14). It is, all in all, a country of victims. As Pekkala says at the end of Eastland’s novel, ‘We are all victims of the Revolution. Some of us have suffered from it, and others have suffered for it, but in one way or another all of us have suffered’ (2010: 375). Russia’s revolutionary past and Stalin’s dictatorship, on the whole, are not used merely as backgrounds for the novels that take place in these contexts, but to ascertain the fiendishness of the country they created. The past, therefore, is invoked to paint landscapes of fear and destitution at the root of the country’s revolutionary beginnings which, unlike in countries like the United States, did not lead to a brave new world, but to widespread oppression, penury and poverty under communism. In fact, there is no progression in Russia’s history as depicted in the novels under analysis. Instead, Russia is presented as a ‘giant laboratory, performing on itself giant innovations in social engineering’ (Starling 2005: 65) and its history since the Revolution as a series of stages each leading to worse conditions than the last: ‘In the thirties there had been collectivisation, in the forties war; liberalisation in the fifties, retrenchment in the sixties; the seventies had brought stagnation, the eighties perestroika; and now this [making reference to the liberalisation of prices in the 90s], freedom

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or anarchy, depending on whether your vodka glass was half-full or halfempty’ (Starling 2005: 111). These stages have culminated in present-day Russia, which, like one of the country’s most notorious serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo, is not a ‘mistake of nature’ but a product of a ‘past dipped into darkness’ (Starling 2005: 210). The past, all in all, is ultimately activated to justify the nature of contemporary Russia, which remains as terrifying as it was during Stalin’s regime, trapped in the deadlock of a revolutionary legacy which the new Russia is unable to leave behind in novels such as Starling’s Vodka and Miller’s Snowdrops, which give the impression that the country is still Byzantine, unpredictable and illogical, lurching from one lunacy to the next. In Starling’s Vodka, the attempt to implement free market and democratic policies is doomed to fail because Russia is mired on the depths of the deficiencies and irrationality of its communist past. There is, for example, no ‘proper legislature’ in the country since laws are still made on the whim of the president, who then commits them to paper and can, and often does, ‘countermand or contradict [them] the next day’ (2005: 401). Laws, on the other hand, are ‘unjust and irrational’ and ‘rarely enforced’, so Russia has been turned into ‘a nation of lawbreakers’ (2005: 482). Furthermore, since the judicial system has been slavishly devoted to the service of state and party, it cannot become now ‘a neutral arbiter of society, a defender of the constitution, a protector of civil liberties, contracts and private property rights’ (2005: 482). Fair justice is still non-existent in a country where the prosecutor’s office is run ‘on strictly Soviet lines’ (2005: 135), confessions are exerted through torture, sentences are based on confessions and, if admissions contradict the facts, ‘then the facts are wrong; if the facts are wrong, they should be changed’ (2005: 137), and convicted felons are sent to prisons that ‘could [give] Satan nightmares’ (2005: 131). And if the judicial system is not sanitized and modernized it is because the fallacy that serious crime is nonexistent is very alive, deemed an abomination ‘found only in the West’, as are ‘racists, gangs, whores, the unemployed’ (2005: 209). Criminals are, therefore, a priori, déclassé elements, ‘Marxist for life’s flotsam’, that even have their own categories, ‘Easy Morals, Drifters, Adolescents, Retards’ (2005: 209).

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Russia, all in all, is trapped in the old system, which ‘will never be finished’ (2005: 188; emphasis in the original) because remnants of the old regime refuse to disappear and ‘will never be gone. Under a different name, perhaps, but never gone’ (2005: 86). In this context, Russian-style capitalism becomes ‘another ghastly social experiment’ (2005: 231) that wrecks the economy and only brings misery, ‘[p]eople begging on the streets, folks dying faster than they can make the coffins, no potatoes in the stores, babies born with only half a face, people who can’t take a piss because they’ve got the clap, pensions worth shit’ (2005: 99). Indeed, the only thing liberalization manages to achieve is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer as hyperinflation means that prices are too high so common citizens cannot even afford bread, people’s savings are wiped out, more and more people drop below the poverty line and discontentment leads to riots and anarchy in the streets. As a consequence, everyone is still living under ‘the zone’, the term used to refer to ‘the gulags and the prisons’ during Stalin’s regime and which in these days simply means ‘all [people are] frightened’ (2005: 393). And if people are frightened, it is with good reason. The country as a whole emerges as nightmarish, a gothic landscape populated by swarms of beggars, hustlers, homeless children, ‘[the] poor bastards […] [found in] the metros and street corners, playing war ballads or simply holding out upturned hands beneath lowered heads’ (2005: 539) that haunt a country described as a ‘banana republic. Without the bananas’ (2005: 73); a ‘shithole […] [that] could have inspired Dante to rework his Inferno’ (2005: 59); a world characterized by tragedy with onions as its perfect symbol since ‘[o] nions have multiple layers, and the more you peel away, the more you weep’ (2005: 220); a place where ‘there are no good times […], just bad times and worse times’ (2005: 97) so vodka is an ‘anaesthetic without which life would be unendurable, […] the only drug that enables the dispossessed to endure the monstrously cruel tricks life’s played on them’ (2005: 37). In a novel populated by killers (including a serial killer), torturers, mafia members, psychopaths, and terrorists, Russia is the true monster, ‘a society in decline and at war with itself ’ (2005: 531), ‘created by the old system and nurtured by the new, forged in the white heat of a revolution ushered through without the first thought for what it would do to […] the little ones, the forgotten ones’ (2005: 548). And what is worse, there is no room

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for improvement. As the author explains, ‘There was to be no miraculous recovery, and that was only fitting; the reason why none of Russia’s great novels have happy endings is because Russians wouldn’t know what to make of them if they did’ (2005: 651). If, like in Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, Satan came to Russia to create havoc in the capital, ‘he’d find his work already done’ (2005: 536). The devil himself, in fact, seems to be responsible for the contemporary Russia represented in Miller’s Snowdrops, which, predictably, shows no signs of improvement and is described as equally garish. Underneath an artificial façade of neon lights, new elite restaurants and nightclubs, there is only poverty and corruption in a country where ‘there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories’ (2011: 84). Russia is ‘a ruthless place’ (2011: 8) which can, like Lariam, ‘make you have wild dreams and jump out of the window’ (2011: 151). It is, indeed, ‘fucking Russia’, the whole country embodied in impressions of the ills that assail foreign visitors and natives alike, ‘The booze. The pollution. The shit food. The fucking airplanes. The crap that falls out of the sky when it rains, you don’t even want to think about’, so Russia is like ‘polonium. It attacks all your organs at once’ (2011: 83). Even though new money floods the country, nothing has changed and, amidst the skyscrapers where corrupt politicians and Western expats do business, Russia is the same country of ‘drunks and wrecks […] poor hopeless bastards’ (2011: 20) who slip off the end of the greased ladder. In Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, Pekkala asserts, ‘The only way to have a future in this country is to have no past’ (2010: 294), with which he expresses how the legacy of your past actions and allegiances follows you into the present. If applied to Russia as a whole, the sentence reverberates with meaning since it summarizes how the weight of the past determines Russia’s present, which, in the novels situated in contemporary Russia, is moored in the swamp of moral and physical sludge generated by years of communism.

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Conclusion Given that the contemporary novels under analysis in this chapter continue to fabricate a negative impression of Russia and, therefore, the image of the country as monstrous remains as alive as it was in narratives produced during the Cold War, it would be easy to conclude that Russia is still perceived as a threat rather than a defeated foe, brought to its knees after the dismantling of the Soviet Union and forced to remain in semi-colonial tutelage to the West. Since this has not been the case and Russia continues to mean trouble for the West, popular narratives could have resorted to the old cultural war of constantly comparing and contrasting Western efficiency, civilized values and liberal policies with Russian backwardness in order to counter the anxieties generated by Russia’s importance to the global economy and its colonial control of areas with vast oil resources, among other riches. However, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, crime novels and thrillers in English set in Russia produced in the last decade evade any attempt at comparison with the West and concentrate on painting Russia as a gothic landscape using a series of strategies ranging from the use of authoritative insider voices and horrified foreign bystanders who bring to the fore the brutality of the country or the use of the past to bind Russia to a perpetual state of arrested development, incapable of escaping or overcoming the legacy of its revolutionary origins and of the Soviet Union with its crime, corruption, anti-democratic policies and instability. Consequently, these stories do not apparently resort to neo-Orientalist practices designed to celebrate Western exceptionalism, which both crime narratives and thrillers have for a long time now endeavoured to undermine with their accounts that expose the underbelly of capitalist societies. And yet, the depiction of Russia as monstrous, alien and completely ‘other’ is still comforting nonetheless. First, because by the novels’ activation of, to borrow Jameson’s terminology, cultural codes or ‘proverbial wisdom or commonplace knowledge’ (1988: 28) related to Russia’s evil past and present, these narratives help us project a map onto the world that, in these stories, remains firmly divided into good and evil and is familiar

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and fully understandable, passed on from novel to novel in a continuum of images inherited from Cold War texts into the present. And secondly, the construction of Russia as a monster forces Western readers to distance themselves from Russian society and to look elsewhere for self-definition. In this way, the West does not even have to be invoked to reaffirm our values and our commitment to justice, democracy or the free market, no matter how flawed they have turned out to be. At some point in Ryan’s The Holy Thief, Korolev walks into a dilapidated bar where an emaciated elderly black man is performing tunes on a battered piano, his eyes ‘focused on another place. Another foreign Comrade washed up on the Moscow beach, thinking of the place he’d left behind’ (2010: 281). After reading these novels, we cannot help but do the same as the old pianist. We may not look back in nostalgia to idealized visions of the West we know may have never existed, but we look at our surroundings in relief since, at least, we are not in Russia.

Bibliography Anderson, J., Miranda, C., and Pezzotti, B. (eds) (2012). The Foreign in International Crime Fiction: Transcultural Representations. London: Bloomsbury. Baraban, E.V. (2003). Russia in the Prism of Popular Culture: Russian and American Detective Fiction and the Thrillers of the 1990s. Unpublished thesis accessed 17 December 2015. Borenstein, E. (2008). Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Carré, J. le (2005). The Constant Gardener. London: Hodder. Chatterjee, C. (2008). ‘Transnational Romance, Terror, and Heroism: Russia in American Popular Fiction, 1860–1917’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (3), pp. 753–78. Christian, E. (2001). ‘Introducing the Post-Colonial Detective: Putting Marginality to Work’. In E. Christian (ed.), The Post-Colonial Detective, pp. 1–16. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Eastland, S. (2010). Eye of the Red Tsar. London: Faber and Faber.

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Everson, W. K. (1964). The Bad Guys: A Pictorial History of the Movie Villain. New York: Cadillac Publishing. Gelder, K. (2000). ‘Introduction to Part Seven: Ethnic Monsters’. In K. Gelder (ed.), The Horror Reader, pp. 225–7. London and New York: Routledge. Halberstam, J. (2000). Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Hutchings, P. (2004). The Horror Film. Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited. Jameson, F. (1988). The Ideologies of Theory: Essays 1971–1986. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lukács, G. (1971). The Theory of the Novel, trans. A. Bostock. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Matthews, J. (2013). Red Sparrow. London: Simon & Schuster. Miller, A. D. (2011). Snowdrops. London: Atlantic Books. Neuse, S. M. (1980). ‘Teaching Political Science with Chillers and Thrillers’, Teaching Political Science 7 (2), pp. 153–67. Pomerantsev, P. (2015). Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia. London: Faber & Faber. Rankin, I. (1998). Black & Blue. London: Orion. Ryan, W. (2010). The Holy Thief. London: Pan Books. Simpson, P. L. (2000). Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer through Contemporary American Film and Fiction. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Smith, T. R. (2008). Child 44. London: Simon & Schuster. Starling, B. (2005). Vodka. London: HarperCollins Publishers. Symons, J. (1994). Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel: A History. London: Pan Books. Taibo, P. I., and Subcomandante Marcos (2006). The Uncomfortable Dead, trans. C. Lopez. New York: Akashic Books. Tally, R. T., Jr (2013). Spatiality. London and New York: Routledge. Williams, A. (2011). To Kill a Tsar. London: John Murray.

Martyna Bryla

9 Charting the Liminal Geographies of Eastern Europe in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories

abstract Framed by imagology and geocriticism, this chapter analyses American imaginative geographies of the European East in Joyce Carol Oates’s short stories (1984).1 I argue that Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest turn into liminal sites of danger and possibility for Oates’s American characters, incarnating both the escapist quality of travel beyond the ordinary and the darker side which the removal from one’s ‘comfort zone’ may entail. Thus, the experience of crossing the Iron Curtain and getting to know the Eastern other triggers self-discovery, confirming imagology’s premise that the way we map alterity tends to tell us more about ourselves than about others. In addition to unveiling the complex dynamics between selfhood and otherness, these stories also attest to the position which Eastern Europe occupied in the American Cold-War imaginary. Simultaneously, despite being embedded in a specific socio-historical moment, Eastern Europe mapped by Oates functions as a symbol which goes beyond the Cold-War context.

In 1980, the American writer Joyce Carol Oates visited Eastern Europe as part of her official six-week tour of the old continent.2 Oates’s journey to Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest was sponsored by the United States Information Agency (USIA): the public diplomacy body aimed at promoting American interests and values abroad. Speaking about USIA’s strategic goals, the historian Richard H. Pells termed the organization’s role schizophrenic (1997: 84). On the one hand, the agency’s function was to 1 2

Research for this chapter has been funded by Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía TECH. The complete itinerary of the novelist’s journey to Europe covered Frankfurt, Warsaw, Budapest, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Brussels, Antwerp and Berlin.

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convey accurate information about life in the United States. On the other, it was supposed to accentuate, even aggrandize those aspects of American culture that could further foreign policy aims. In other words, the uneasy relationship between culture and politics underlay USIA’s actions since its inception in 1953. It also, as I wish to argue, fuelled the short stories inspired by Oates’s travels behind the Iron Curtain. This chapter focuses on three tales: ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’, concerned with the representation of (West) Berlin, ‘My Warszawa: 1980’, which dramatizes the protagonist’s journey to the Polish capital, and ‘Old Budapest’ that maps the Hungarian capital from the point of view of diplomacy. In conclusion I also discuss the last story in Oates’s collection, entitled ‘Our Wall’, in which the novelist conjures up a dystopian vision of the world behind the Iron Curtain. In line with the theme of this volume, I will explore the relationship between culture, power and the politics of space in Oates’s stories by combining insights offered by geocriticism with the idea of liminality as applied to space and travel. In doing so, I will also address the ‘imagological’ dimension of Oates’s representation, pointing to the cultural imagery which accrued to the European East in the second half of the twentieth century and which the stories reflect to a certain extent. Although Bertrand Westphal (2011: xi), the originator of the concept of geocriticism, contrasts a spatial approach with that prescribed by imagology, suggesting that the latter ‘studies the insurmountable gap between a looking subject and an observed object and presumes that their respective places cannot merge in a global human space’, I hope to show that the two approaches may nonetheless complement each other. It is true, however, that the cultural context in which Oates’s works were produced implies bipolar divisions, which translate into inter-human relations portrayed by the novelist. The above-mentioned works form part of the ‘Our Wall’ section of Oates’s 1984 collection of short stories entitled Last Days: Stories.3 In 3

The collection of stories is divided into two parts: ‘Last Days’ and ‘Our Wall’. The first section comprises narratives set in Oates’s domestic environment of rural and urban America. In Brenda Daly’s assessment, both sections ‘mirror each other in a variety of ways’ as well as ‘move us, literally and figuratively from the United States

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hindsight, the title of the volume sounds somewhat prophetic – as Brenda Daly observed, ‘Last Days might be described as predicting the “last days” of the wall itself […]’(1995: 87). As prescient as the name may seem almost three decades since the collapse of communism in Europe, I wish to argue the opposite: rather than portray the Cold War world nearing its end, Oates casts the communist hemisphere as a timeless space and a universal symbol of divisive boundaries both on the map and in the mind. While the interplay of culture and power is crucial for understanding the context in which Oates’s diplomatic mission took place, the notions of space and mapping promise to shed some light on the author’s engagement with Eastern Europe in the short stories under discussion, and, in a broader perspective, on the area’s position in the American Cold-War imaginary. Spatiality has been a potent critical trend in literary and cultural studies for some time now. In Introducing Criticism at the Twenty-first Century, ‘space and place’ are listed among major critical themes or orientations which, despite having emerged in the previous century, ‘continue to provide different epistemological foci in the humanities’ (Wolfreys 2002: 4). Indeed, as Robert T. Tally Jr. (2013) demonstrates in Spatiality, geocriticism is a rich critical field inspired by philosophy, urbanism, and postcolonial studies, to name but a few disciplines shaping the critical treatment of spaces in literature, as well as the idea of literature as a form of mental cartography. Thus, the work of literature which portrays a given locus constitutes a singular map evoking the image of this place on the mind of the reader, while the writer assumes the role of the mapmaker whose power to select and omit allows her to chart the map which reflects her way of seeing. At the same time, argues Tally Jr. (2013: 79), the reader may play an active part in this literary cartography, introducing new, hitherto unseen ways of perceiving the entity that is being mapped, as in Daly’s interpretation of the title Last Days in terms of it being the harbinger of the decline of the bipolar world. What ensues is a new quality, or rather a new literary map, in which the to Europe’ (1995: 87). Apart from the tales discussed in this chapter, ‘Our Wall’ contains also two more stories: ‘Détente’, which dramatizes Soviet-American cultural and political differences, and ‘The Lamb of Abyssalia’, set in a fictitious Third-World country.

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real and the imagined coalesce as the poetics of space, to borrow Gaston Bachelard’s (1969) turn of phrase, blends in with the place-as-it-is. Tally Jr’s spatial approach to literature brings to mind Edward Said’s influential concept of imaginative geographies, which captures the idea of creating mental maps of peoples and places that ‘articulate the desires, fantasies and fears of their authors and the grids of power between them and their “Others”’(Gregory 2009: 370). Said coined this term to theorize Western cultural representations of the Orient, but the idea has travelled beyond Orientalism (1978), influencing scholarly works concerned with the tradition of imagining otherness as a means of consolidating one’s selfimage and identity. One of them is Larry Wolff ’s seminal work Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (1994), which constitutes the point of departure for studying the position of Eastern Europe in the Western imaginary in the post-Second World War era, when the geopolitical partition between the East and the West went hand in hand with the mental division into a better and a worse Europe. According to the historian, the divisive rhetoric about the Iron Curtain severing Europe into two unequal halves, which emerged following the war, hid ‘traces of an intellectual history that invented the idea of Eastern Europe long before’ (1994: 4). Through the analysis of eighteenth-century sources, Wolff argues that Eastern Europe as an idea and a mental map was conceived in the Western mind in the Age of Reason, when the enlightened intellectuals charted, described and dissected the area for the sake of their contemporaries, measuring it against Western standards of what civilized society should be like. Each traveller undertaking a journey to Eastern Europe, whether real or imaginary, was equipped with a mental map ready ‘to be freely annotated, embellished, refined or refolded along the way’ (Wolff 1994: 6). Such mental mapping involved the process of association and comparison; the lands of Eastern Europe were mentally associated with one another and juxtaposed with the Western ones. Eastern Europe, however, was not so much a counterweight to the refinement of Europe proper as a polymorphous, interstitial area conjured out of fact and fiction and hovering somewhere between the civilization of Western European capitals and the barbarism of the ultimate Orient: Asia. In other words, the enlightened imaginative cartography mapped Eastern Europe

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as a liminal ‘paradox of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion, Europe but not Europe’ (Wolff 1994: 7). In a sense, the second half of the twentieth century brought about similar (conceptual) in-betweenness. Speaking about the literary production in the east-central parts of Europe, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (1999) employs the term in-between peripherality to theorize the complex situation of cultural liminality understood in terms of negotiating one’s national cultural identity in relation to two major centres of influence: the Soviet Union and the West. Yet the scholar’s turn of phrase may also be applied to the representational strategies employed with respect to the area which, as the generic Westerner from Philip Longworth’s The Making of Eastern Europe (1994: 4) puts it, cannot be termed ‘Third World, but it is certainly not the Western world either’. In this sense, the very designation Eastern Europe may be seen as a semantic expression of the area’s liminality, denoting particularly in Western eyes, its entailment with the Soviet East and thus its peripheral position within the continent.4 Following Paul Connerton’s terminology, Eastern Europe functions thus as a place-name which is not only a delimiter of a place, but ‘encapsulates a well-known narrative’ (2009: 10). Importantly, in Oates’s short stories Eastern Europe’s in-betweenness has also a spatial dimension, as the American characters portrayed by the novelist map Eastern European alterity through exploration of the urban space which has the capacity to affect those who interact with it. By venturing behind the Iron Curtain, the Americans step into a liminal dimension which counterpoints the ordinary and is charged with the feeling of whatmay-be. Removed from the familiar Western realities, the places depicted in the stories promise a liberating break from the structured normality of

4

It is noteworthy that this designation was employed particularly in Western Europe and the US, while the native intellectuals of such countries as Czechoslovakia or Poland would think of themselves as Central Europeans. The idea of Central Europe as a counterweight to the Soviet-bound homogeneity of Eastern Europe was most famously expounded by Czech novelist Milan Kundera (1984), but it also appears in the writings of Polish émigré writer Czesław Miłosz (1986), among others.

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everyday life and thus entry into the realm of possibility.5 At the same time, travelling beyond the perimeter of the familiar entails breaking out of the ‘comfort zone’ and exposing oneself to the unknown, which in the context of Eastern Europe carries some disturbing overtones. As Hazel Andrews and Les Roberts argue in Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-between (2012: 6), when applied to space liminality often implies not only the playful and the liberating, but also ‘counter ideas’, such as power relations, terror, or surveillance, which in-between spaces may engender. Accordingly, I wish to suggest that the encounter with the European East 5

In fact, the notions of space and travel are embedded in the concept of liminality developed originally by Arnold van Gennep and elaborated by Victor Turner. In The Rites of Passage (1977: 18), first published in French in 1909, van Gennep illustrates the universal pattern of the rite of passage by likening it to the movement between two territories which implies suspension and potentiality: ‘[w]hoever passes from one to the other finds himself physically and magico-religiously in a special situation for a certain length of time: he wavers between two worlds’. In a similar vein, Victor Turner, in his application of the concept to the rituals performed by the Ndembu of Zambia, points to the liminal stage as the space-and-time in which neophytes become physically and metaphorically separated from the world as they knew it, divested of their habitual structures of thinking, feeling and acting, and made to reflect on their society and ‘the powers that generate and sustain them’ (1967: 105). As a result, they emerge transformed: enriched by fresh knowledge – gnosis – and ready to return to the community as new, more mature beings. Recognizing the concept’s significance beyond the context of tribes, Turner looked for manifestations of liminality in industrial societies, inviting others to focus their attention on liminal processes, which may ‘paradoxically expose the basic building blocks of culture just when we pass out of and before we re-enter the structural realm’ (1967: 110). The anthropologist himself identified a liminal world in Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), which celebrates life as an unending passage from one place to another charged with potentiality; in addition, Turner’s extensive work on pilgrimage attests to his interest in the generative potential of travelling beyond the ordinary. The productive potential of the physical journey away from the familiar and into the new and the unexplored underlies also more recent scholarship in liminality, which theorizes travel in terms of a liberating transitory experience in which ordinary life is put on hold. Tourism, for instance, emerges as such a liminal time and space characterized by the suspension of ordinary rules and norms and permeated with a sense of potentiality and expectancy. As Mark Gottdiener puts it, ‘[t]ravel is always an adventure, always an encounter with the “new”’ (2001: 11).

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portrayed by Oates incarnates both the escapist quality of threshold experiences and the darker side which the liminal may entail. Devastated by Nazism and staggering under the burden of communism, Eastern Europe seems hostile and potentially menacing to the American visitors. While still part of the old world, the area is imagined as existing in a different time and space, where ordinary rules do not apply and one’s behavior is not gauged by the same standards as in the West. As a result, Eastern Europe is both the object of Western gaze, an imaginative Cold-War geography, but also a space that affects those who come into contact with it; a locus of potential self-discovery and change. In this sense, Eastern Europe’s liminality is both conceptual and spatial, as the characters portrayed by Oates map Eastern European other and, in doing so, get to know the self by traversing the urban space of the capital cities: Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest.

Mapping the Liminal Site of the Berlin Wall in ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ One of the most powerful liminal tropes is that of the line which at once joins and separates two worlds, entities or territories. In fact, the very word liminality comes from the Latin term limen, which denotes a threshold. As the common heading of Oates’s peripatetic stories suggests, the organizing metaphor of the tales is the wall, both as a tangible physical barrier and a boundary in the mind, but also as a liminal site of danger and possibility. It comes to the fore already in the opening story, ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’, which focuses on the most spectacular incarnation of the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, dramatizing West Berlin as the city on the threshold between the East and the West. Like ‘[a] jewel afloat upon the sea of [Soviet] darkness’ (108), West Berlin is mapped as a liminal paradox which pertains to the West but would not exist without the East, whose shadowy presence, embodied in the Wall, looms large over the German capital. Oates’s fictional geography of Berlin is constructed out of hard facts and eerie fiction. Rooted in the Cold-War dynamics of international relations,

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the city is also deeply scarred by the recent history of the Second World War, whose memory stealthily creeps into the protagonist’s expedition. At the same time, Berlin is also mapped as a timeless city; a generic space of captivity overshadowed by the Wall, which is at once a monstrous phantom and the object of the protagonist’s desire. The story is narrated by a nameless American man who comes to Germany to uncover the reasons that led his younger brother to approach the Wall from the East, a seemingly senseless feat for which he was shot to death by the guards. However, each attempt at solving the puzzle is thwarted, as the bits and pieces he manages to collect refuse to form a coherent picture. The fragmentary quest is reflected in the narrative. ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ is divided into blocks of text which beat out an irregular, almost spasmodic rhythm, mirroring the narrator’s frantic search for truth. In cinematic fashion, we follow the American as he moves through the German capital trying to piece together the events which led up to his brother’s death. While at the outset of the story the narrator may resemble Charles Baudelaire’s (1964: 9) nonchalant flâneur: a passionate yet detached spectator of the crowd who like ‘a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness’ refracts a bustling cityscape, he soon becomes engulfed by the oppressive atmosphere of Berlin’s urban substance, inadvertently following in his brother’s footsteps. Paradoxically, one reason for the emotional disturbance that the narrator experiences in Berlin is the city’s uncanny resemblance to his home ground. Berlin is so Western that the narrator has difficulty deciding where he is: ‘It is America. But no it is Berlin. West Berlin. Germany. But no it is America. No? Yes? America? But with such strong accents?’ (100). This representation of the German capital as a Western city reflects the spirit of the times. Following the Second World War, Berlin became ‘embedded in America’s own political mythology, closely linked to what was defined as the United States’ unique mission in the world’ (Daum 2000: 56). Particularly the events of the Blockade, the Airlift and, most importantly, the erection of the Berlin Wall contributed to the formation of the cultural image of the city as ‘America’s Berlin’, that is, West Berlin became associated with American democratic values in the midst of the totalitarian East. Yet Oates seems to challenge the dominant political narrative embodied in John F. Kennedy’s eponymous pronouncement. Berlin’s ‘westernness’

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has little to do with the lofty ideals of freedom and democracy fostered by the United States’ State Department, manifesting itself instead in urban excess and corruption: revues and sex shops abound, underage prostitutes ramble the streets, and the city’s air is filled with ‘[o]dors of grease-fried foods, spilled beer, the companionable blare of American acid rock’ (102). In fact, Berlin’s apparent ‘Americanness’ seems to be only a lurid veneer concealing a self-contained panoptic space in which the narrator’s every move seems to be closely watched by invisible forces. Oates gradually builds up a sense of entrapment, infusing seemingly innocuous objects and incidents with meaning. Accordingly, the narrator is transfixed by the sight of ‘marvelous gleaming pyramids of shoes’ (102), which brings to mind the ceiling-high piles of shoes stored behind the glass panes at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp Museum. Also the name of the hotel where the man is staying, the Berliner Hospice, connotes death and suffering; in addition, his room is depicted with bellicose metaphors as a ‘sealed capsule, a bunker’ with a ventilation system ‘which might from time to time emit its own subtle gases’ (107). The feeling of physical and mental oppression culminates in the narrator’s dramatic cry, which evokes the memory of Nazi gas chambers: ‘O, help, I know you are listening, is the doorknob riveted in place? – are the poisonous gases being filtered in?’ (108).6 However, as much as the city reflects the cultural memory of Nazism, it is also curiously ahistorical at the same time, paradoxically because of

6

In the light of imagology, Oates’s representation of Berlin seems to reflect a more general pattern of cultural imagery which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century. According to the imagologist Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (2007), the positive representation of Germans as competitive, industrious and cultured (the image undoubtedly related to West Berlin’s singular position within the American political mythology) was conveyed mainly through travel and nonfiction works. As for American fiction, from the 1960s onwards the imaginative geography of Germany was infused with dark and gruesome imagery inspired by its recent Nazi past. Although Oates’s story is not explicit in this respect, her literary map of Berlin seems to resonate with the contradictory perceptions of Germany in the American post-war imaginary, something which imagologists refer to as an imageme – that is, a representation which is not homogenous but straddles ‘compounded polarities’ (Leerssen 2007: 344).

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the most spectacular symbol of the Cold-War era: the Wall. In her study of American images of post-communism, Andaluna Borcila employs the epithet ‘liminal’ to capture the Wall’s intermediate location between the opposing political systems of East and West, as well as to emphasize its status as a ‘liminal site, at the threshold between a Cold War and emerging post-Cold War imaginary’ (2014: 24). In both cases, the liminality embodied by the Wall is inextricably linked with Cold-War politics. In ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’, Oates steps beyond the context of the Cold War to cast the Wall as ‘a threshold of unpredictable dynamics’ (Benito Sánchez and Manzanas 2006: 2) and a liminal site in its own right, where the past and the present are fused in an almost indistinguishable blend: ‘As one nears the Wall the curious thing is, history is left behind. There is nothing here to indicate what year this might be, which language might be spoken if there were anyone at hand to speak …’ (106). In deleting the historical context, Oates allegorizes the Wall, turning it into a universal symbol of separation between people and nations: ‘The Wall is forever’ is the message left by the narrator’s brother. However, the Wall’s symbolism is taken even further, as Oates interprets it along the lines of Freudian psychoanalysis as an allegory of human existence, understood as the perennial struggle between the life and death instincts (Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle is found among the deceased’s papers): ‘Consider the eternal wisdom of the groin which opposes that of the Wall: for the Wall is Death. No mein Herr, I believe you are mistaken: the Wall is Life […]. For, as one approaches the Wall, even from the “Western” sector […] – note how the pulse helplessly quickens […], note how the heart grows tumescent, how vision is sharpened, the very air rings with delight’ (110). Thus, the Wall itself becomes the object of desire and the deadly act of approaching it is likened to the thrill which precedes sexual intercourse. By casting the Wall as the embodiment of life’s essence – the perilous dance between Eros and Thanatos – the story conveys an impression that the Wall and, by extension, this part of Europe, is an unreal space existing beyond time and history. This representation is further reinforced by the use of a legend-like narrative at the end of the story, in which the Wall transforms into a tower dungeon erected by a cruel landowner to imprison wrongdoers ‘[o]nce upon a time, in the remote days of the Holy Roman

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Empire’ (111). The only escape route from the dungeon is a narrow opening through which daylight and sounds from the outside world enter the prisoner’s cell. Although no one has ever made it out of the dungeon, the lure of freedom makes prisoners seek escape and they inevitably die in the attempt, for, as the legend’s moral goes, the human drive towards freedom is oblivious even to death. Although this ‘folk wisdom’ (112) seems to offer a symbolic rationale for his brother’s high-risk conduct, the American narrator’s research remains inconclusive. He does not ascertain whether his brother’s death was an accident, a suicide or a political gesture, but he does come close to comprehending his obsession, his ‘morbid interest’ (100) as he is transformed by the liminal experience of Berlin and overwhelmed by the tantalizing, sexual appeal of the Wall, where ‘[d]eath silently and secretly and ceaselessly pulses. One touch – ! One touch’ (111).

The (Un)homely Poland in ‘My Warszawa: 1980’ The transformative potential of the journey East is also explored in ‘My Warszawa: 1980’, the story framed by American cultural diplomacy. Accompanied by her partner Carl and several other intellectuals, the American novelist Judith Horne travels to Warsaw to take part in a conference on American literature. As in the Berlin story, walking the city becomes the form of mapping the unfamiliar space of the Polish capital on Judith’s and the reader’s mind. However, while West Berlin reminds the story’s narrator of the bustling American metropolises, at least in its flashy visual layer, Warsaw seems to Judith alien and menacing, making her feel anxious and vulnerable at the same time. There seems to be a mental (iron) curtain separating Judith from the Poles whose incomprehensible tongue and unfamiliar body language bother and confuse her. It is as if this part of Europe constituted a separate category within Judith’s personal classification of alterity: ‘[E]ven the hand gestures – lavish, stylized – confuse her. If she were in France, or Italy, or Spain – if she were in Germany – she would

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immediately feel at home’ (147). Clearly, despite being located within the bounds of the old continent, Eastern Europe is not Europe proper, and the premonition that Judith has entered a world apart intensifies as the story progresses. Gradually, the city, shrouded in a pervasive cigarette smoke and urban pollution, imposes itself on the novelist, threatening her customary poise, her safe American self. In this sense, Eastern Europe’s liminality is not just a matter of the marginal position it occupies within the American imaginative geographies of the time, but it also has a profoundly personal dimension. In the course of the story, Judith suffers from a sense of alienation and displacement that is directly related to the physical space in which she has found herself and its imagological charge, that is, what this space stands for in the common imaginary, and for Judith personally. In The Location of Culture (2004: 13) Homi K. Bhabha reaches for Sigmund Freud’s striking notion of the unhomely to speak about ‘the relocation of the home and the world’ – a sense of displacement in which the boundaries between the private and the public become blurred, and the confusion results in estrangement and disorientation. For Bhabha, the unhomely operates when ‘the traumatic ambivalences of a personal, psychic history’ merge with ‘the wider disjunctions of political existence’ (2004: 15). Although he identifies it predominantly with the colonial and postcolonial condition, he also admits that the unhomely may infuse ‘fictions that negotiate the powers of cultural difference in a range of transhistorical sites’ (2004: 13). It is crucial that the unhomely is a spatial condition, inextricably bound to the physical place whose historical and/or political substance invades the private, disturbing the delicate balance between the self and the world. This is what seems to happen to the nameless narrator of ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ who, on coming to Berlin, develops a morbid fascination with the Wall, and ends up imitating his brother’s descent into madness. This is also what befalls Judith Horne in Warsaw. Before arriving in Poland, Judith had been warned by her partner Carl that the journey to Eastern Europe might be a trying experience, not only because ‘“East Europe is a strain on anyone’s nerves”’(146) but especially given the writer’s ethnic background. Born and raised in New York City, Judith grew up unconcerned by the painful memory of her Polish relatives

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who died in Auschwitz Concentration Camp. Despite being aware of her Jewish heritage, she did not embrace it, choosing to be defined solely by her professional work. However, Warsaw turns out to be the liminal space of Judith’s late self-discovery. Removed from the safe haven of New York, there she is forced to confront what she has been trying to suppress most of her life. As she moves through the streets of the Old Town and the neverending meetings with Polish intellectuals, Judith’s sense of displacement grows, as if Warsaw with its layers and layers of history and smoke-filled air oppressed her physically, clinging to her skin in the form of ‘[l]ayers of grime, flakes, near-invisible bits of dirt’ (178). The process of mapping the city is, as in the Berlin story, intense and disturbing. The urban substance of the Polish capital imposes itself on Judith’s psyche as smells, voices, and architectural loci become infused with second meanings; smoke-filled air is likened to poison, while overflowing churches and the omnipresent Madonnas – the emblems of the Polish Catholic Church – remind her of the absence that nobody seems to mention, and which Judith did not think about until now. Suddenly, she is full of questions about ‘the Church and Polish history, Jews, discrimination, mass graves, death …’ (152). Thus, the embodied past of the Warsaw cityscape, with its rebuilt Old Town, the Jewish Cemetery and the traces of the former ghetto, acquires a personal significance for Judith, serving as a catalyst for her ‘undoing’: ‘Warsaw is an occupied city, an occupied zone, Judith thinks, waking, staring at herself in the dim bathroom mirror – and something is happening to her here. Is there a subtle poison in the air?’ (163). Judith’s vulnerability, which she has kept at bay in the safe American environment, comes to the surface in Warsaw, resulting in the unhomely sensation of being somebody else: ‘She feels weak. She feels Jewish at last. And womanly – in the very worst sense of the word. A Jew, a woman, a victim – can it be?’ (148). This curious gradation, in which ethnicity is closely linked to gender, signalizes Oates’s preoccupation with the cultural dimension of identity – one of the key themes in her fiction. As it turns out, Judith’s carefully constructed American self is not immune from either her roots or her femininity. There are two occasions in Oates’s fragmentary narrative that fully demonstrate the extent of Judith’s disintegration. Distressed to the point of

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hysteria, she first breaks down emotionally in the company of her partner Carl (‘she strikes out with her fists, sobbing like a child’ (174)), and then during a meeting with a Polish journalist, Marta, whose face bears Semitic features not unlike her own. While talking to the woman, Judith comes to realize that she is a convert. The conversion would not be so surprising in itself had it not been for the fact that the woman is clearly an anti-Semite, convinced that those Jews who had perished in the Holocaust ‘could have saved themselves […]. But they did not try’ (182). She even goes as far as to call them ignorant peasants. Marta’s condescension towards her kin strikes a chord in Judith, because it is her and her family’s identity that is being assaulted. Devastated, she leaves the journalist without a word in a trance-like state, her Eastern European rite of passage finally complete. In other words, she symbolically assumes her Jewish legacy with its adjacent painful history as part of her American identity – a heritage which she has deliberately chosen to neglect up to now, but which she has carried within nonetheless. In this sense, Warsaw becomes a liminal site in which Judith’s inner transformation is enacted; a place which, through its history, embodied in the city’s architecture, language, and stories, triggers a process of discovery which, distressing as it is, ultimately allows Judith to embrace the Eastern European in her, to map herself as part of this place. Thus, only at the end of the story is the meaning of the title fully revealed. The Polish place-name ‘Warszawa’, used instead of the common English variant ‘Warsaw’ and preceded by the possessive ‘my’, marks Judith’s symbolic reconciliation with the city which, though hardly homely, is nevertheless hers. In a broader perspective, by evoking the well-established trope of searching for one’s roots, Oates casts Eastern Europe as America’s other but also an integral part of its cultural heritage – a missing link in Judith’s transatlantic quest for the self.7 7

And perhaps also in Joyce Carol Oates’s. As Greg Johnson (1998) reveals in his biography of the novelist, the stories hide traces of Oates’s family history. Oates’s beloved paternal grandmother, Blanche, was born in a Jewish family, but her parents had changed the German-sounding surname ‘Morgenstern’ to the conventionally American ‘Morningstar’, in a symbolic denial of their Jewish background. Moreover,

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The Eastern European Spectacle of ‘Old Budapest’ Despite the fact that the story entitled ‘Old Budapest’ offers a less dramatic vignette of Eastern Europe in the 1980s, it nonetheless falls within the conceptualization of the area as a liminal space of potentiality. In fact, there is a connection between ‘Old Budapest’ and the previous tale, as the story’s protagonist, a glamorous American diplomat named Marianne Beecher, has been among the American delegates to the literature conference in ‘My Warszawa: 1980’. The action of ‘Old Budapest’ is set two years later in the Hungarian capital, where Marianne has been sent by the US National Science Education Foundation. Yet what exactly Marianne does behind the Iron Curtain remains a matter of speculation – she is rumoured to be a secret agent travelling ‘about East Europe spying on foreign service people for their mutual employer, the State Department’ (‘My Warszawa: 1980’ 156). Moving away from the domain of writers and academics, which Judith Horne represented in the Warsaw story, this time Oates imagines the world of diplomacy and people who, equipped with the magic ticket, the American passport, cross geopolitical thresholds with ease. If in ‘My Warszawa: 1980’ space had a distinctly personal dimension, in ‘Old Budapest’ the focus is on power and politics. Within American diplomatic circles, Eastern Europe is synonymous with ‘absurd little countries’ which ‘would be at one another’s throats’ if it were not for the Russians (196). Politically marginal, they are nevertheless considered to be attractive diplomatic destinations, given the amount of power the diplomats are granted there. ‘“You can change someone’s life by making a telephone call […]. You can save people. You can punish them”’, observes the director of public relations from the safety of the opulent residence belonging to the deputy chief of mission (202). Although Marianne does not seem to possess quite the same amount of power as the diplomat, she shares his condescending Oates’s maternal grandparents immigrated to the US from Budapest. Although the writer’s Hungarian roots got ‘ignored, or denied, or repressed’ during most of her life, her visit to Budapest provoked an uncanny feeling of ethnic affinity with Hungarians and a strong sensation of being ‘at home’ ( Johnson 1998: 1–2).

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attitude towards Eastern Europeans. When a Hungarian dissident, called Ottó,8 trusts her with a subversive manuscript, she agrees to help him but then forgets about the precious document, letting it be stolen from her hotel room together with a card bearing the author’s name. It is not hard to envisage that her recklessness and ignorance will probably cost Ottó his already precarious freedom. Marianne’s patronizing behaviour towards Ottó is symptomatic of her attitude to Eastern Europe, which seems to exist only as an exotic spectacle or a romantic, if somewhat quaint, backdrop for her privileged life to unfold. Conveniently far from home, it provides her with an opportunity to live a liminal experience free of constraints and everyday routine: ‘But what was quite like the queer intoxicating air of suspension, of a journey behind the “Iron Curtain”? – the term itself, corny and endearing, evocative of romance?’ (207). The Iron Curtain is thus not the menacing political divide, embodied by the smooth concrete of the Berlin Wall, but rather a threshold to the world where the routine of everyday life is placed on hold. Thus, it is behind the Iron Curtain that Marianne ventures into terrains that could prove precarious in other circumstances. Untied either by family obligations or economic constraints, she glides through Eastern European capitals, exploring her ‘limitless capacity for romance’ (206) by engaging in impassioned affairs with other temporary inhabitants of Eastern Europe, usually high-ranking-diplomats. Unlike Judith, Marianne is not weighed down either by the tragic past or the dismal communist present of Eastern Europe. Although she does at times feel ‘a certain indefinable melancholy’ and ‘the force of nostalgia’ for ‘those tragic countries’ (208), their turbulent history only adds to the region’s romantic allure: ‘The romance of East Europe […]. The tacky, seedy, despairing glamour of lost causes; the air of the fantastical and the drab; the queer elation of the American, in striding through this world, as through a twilit world beyond the looking-glass’ (194).

8

Marianne’s ignorance is exposed when one of her lovers, the deputy chief of mission, tells her that Ottó’s name is in fact his surname, since the name and surname are reversed in written Hungarian (211).

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Oates reaches for the liminal trope of the looking glass to convey the somewhat otherworldly experience that Eastern Europe is for Marianne. The world behind the looking glass connotes a titillating fantasy, a space of potentiality where bellboys offer to exchange currency ‘with the breathless air of offering illicit pleasures’, while telephones ring at night ‘with an exuberant life of their own’ (207). But it also carries more disturbing overtones. While Marianne is free to pass through the (iron) mirror,9 those behind the looking glass remain eternally trapped in their misery, like Ottó who has been denied his freedom of expression and whose only opportunity to outwit the system lies in the hands of a foreigner. The mirror motif reappears in the imposing Hilton Inn Hotel, Budapest’s bold and controversial landmark, where Marianne moves from her shabby Hungarian hotel at the invitation of her current lover. Located atop Castle Hill in front of the city’s most historic landmarks, the hotel’s striking bronze-tinted exterior reflects the scenery while at the same time preventing onlookers from peering inside. While the hotel guests, presumably Westerners, may admire the historic Budapest, they remain protected from the intrusive gazes of those remaining outside, who can only see their own reflection against the city’s monumental backdrop. Similarly, Marianne is comfortable admiring and judging Eastern Europeans from the snug position of an American diplomat, while at the same time remaining sheltered from the world which lies behind the protective walls of the Hilton, shielded from the burden of being part of it. Here, the ‘insurmountable gap’ between the spected and the spectant, which Bertrand Westphal criticized in the context of imagology, is perhaps most vivid, as Budapest is mapped as an exciting, orientalist spectacle staged for Marianne’s pleasure and which she may cease to watch if the performance does not live up to her expectations.

9

The image of the Iron Curtain transforming into a mirror is explored by D. Quentin Miller (2001: 206) in his analysis of one of John Updike’s short stories on Eastern Europe. The idea of an ‘iron mirror’ is explored in Joseph Benatov’s dissertation: Looking in the Iron Mirror: Eastern Europe in the American Imaginary, 1958–2001 (2008).

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Conclusions: Liminal Paradoxes of Eastern Europe Travel and space are at the heart of the three stories analysed in this chapter; they determine the characters’ behaviour and their state of mind. The cross-border movement connotes the suspension of everydayness typical of tourism, but the destinations, the Eastern European capitals, bring out the darker facets of liminal situations: displacement, trauma, and transgression. Oates’s fictional maps of Berlin, Warsaw and Budapest seem to be as much the fruit of her eastward journey as of the cultural imagery which has accrued to the region. The stories combine authentic details of topography and architecture with attempts at rendering some kind of elusive genius loci of the world behind the Iron Curtain, as seen by the American characters. In this sense, the communist realities are as important in mapping Eastern Europe as the area’s turbulent recent past, particularly World War II and the Holocaust, which keep defining it in Western eyes. History in Eastern Europe is tangible and space-bound. It resides in buildings, like the damaged Kaiser Wilhelm Church in Berlin and the rubble-resurrected Old Town in Warsaw, but also in the sensual experience of the city – its smells and sounds and the influence they exert on the American characters. The urban space is thus not just a framework or a container in which the inner voyage is enacted, but rather the trigger for the liminal experience of confronting the other and thus getting to know the self. The space’s generative potential is revealed in ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ and ‘My Warszawa: 1980’, whose protagonists are physically and mentally affected by the oppressive, historically charged atmosphere of Berlin and Warsaw, respectively. The cities gradually impose themselves on their psyches, exposing cracks and fissures in their hitherto complete American selves and rubbing salt into invisible wounds. Thus, the personal and the urban merge together resulting in the liminal condition of the unhomely in which the characters’ microcosms fracture under the weight of ‘history’s most intricate invasions’ (Bhabha 2004:13). If in ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ and ‘My Warszawa: 1980’ the space of Eastern Europe is heavy with history and memory, in ‘Old Budapest’ it is woven from breezy pre-conceptions which together form a dense veil,

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clouding the vision and distorting the picture of the Hungarian every-day. Marianne’s failure to comprehend (and take seriously) political realities not only endangers Ottó’s life, but also contributes to a reductionist representation of Eastern Europe. In this sense, the liminal dimension of Budapest as a transitory and thus constraint-free phase in Marianne’s diplomatic travels reinforces the city’s marginal status, casting it as an unreal, half-romantic, half-tragic Old-World setting which, as the scene at the diplomat’s residence demonstrates, is politically insignificant yet provides the characters with the possibility of enacting their personal fantasies of power and romance. Yet while the stories can be read as testimonies to a bygone era and the fictional maps of Cold-War geographies, it would be a mistake to reduce them in this way. Although Oates peppers her narratives with specific topographical, architectural, and linguistic details which give the narratives a here-and-now quality, there is a strong allegorical air to her representations. Thus, the Berlin Wall is not just the Cold-War barrier separating the West and the East but also a symbol of the perennial human struggle between life and death instincts. Similarly, Oates’s portrayal of Warsaw is less concerned with the realities of living under communism, even though the author includes references to actual events, people and places, than with exploring the relationship between self-made identity and arbitrary ethnicity. In this sense, the political realities of Eastern Europe, closely interlinked with the area’s complex historical predicament, ‘are not all important as facts, or social or cultural truths, but as signs and symbols of an ancient heritage of human potential and failing’ (Andrzejczak 1995: 311). As a way of concluding, I would like to bring up the last story of the collection, whose title attests to Oates’s fascination with the liminal trope of the threshold, and where the symbolic role which Oates envisages for Eastern Europe is fully explored. ‘Our Wall’ maps a dystopian space whose central element is a Wall erected so long ago that nobody questions its presence any more. Although neither time nor place are specified, this anonymous landscape bears a striking resemblance to East Berlin in the grip of Soviet Russia, providing a counter-image to the fictional map of West Berlin charted in ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’. In the story, East Berlin/Eastern Europe is imagined in terms of an eternal confinement, where repression has been internalized to such a degree that it is no longer perceived as

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such. Those who put it into question suffer terrible consequences, just like the narrator’s late brother, who lost his life in an attempt to defy the regime by seeking to escape into the world behind the Wall. The boy’s premature death echoes the demise of the American character in ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’, both of whom seem to be modelled on the notorious shooting of the eighteen-year-old German youth, Peter Fechter, who was killed on 17 August 1962 while trying to climb the Berlin Wall and escape into the West. By replicating Fechter’s fate first in ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ and then in the ahistorical ‘Our Wall’, Oates fashions Eastern Europe into a nightmarish dystopia; a space of captivity in which a nameless boy keeps climbing the Wall and dying in the attempt again and again as others (we? the West?), passively, watch. Yet the story, as does the collection, invites a more universal reading, particularly if seen from the post-1989 perspective. In Erica Jong’s words (1984), in ‘Our Wall’ Oates ‘reaches beyond realism to create, in metaphorical terms, the philosophical underpinnings of all walls’. In doing so, she transcends the Cold-War context to explore the borders existing not so much on the map but in the mind, ultimately incorporating the foreign space of Eastern Europe into her American fiction and thus turning it into fodder for her favourite theme: the painful and violent microcosm of the self within the macrocosm of (American) history and society. Refracted through the author’s inner geographies, the fictional map of Eastern Europe charted in Our Wall is thus as much a testimony to a specific historical moment as a universal tale about people whose lives become embroiled in history and politics. Approached from the perspective of geocriticism, Oates’s stories offer a fascinating example of how the space-as-it-is coalesces with the collective and individual mental mappings to produce a cartography which is simultaneously topical and universal. Moreover, it provides insights into American perceptions of Eastern Europe, revealing the area’s position within the American imaginary at the time when the demise of the binary world seemed like a distant fantasy. In this sense, Eastern Europe exists on the limen of Western geopolitical consciousness, constituting a category apart within the protagonists’ worldview. At the same time, the realm’s liminal dimension manifests itself in the way the protagonists’ journeys behind the Iron Curtain shape their actions and their

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sense of self. Removed from their domestic environment, Oates’s American characters experience the transformative and revelatory potential of the encounter with otherness, as the Eastern European capitals turn into sites of self-discovery and transgression.

Bibliography Andrews, H., and Roberts, L. (2012).‘Introduction: Re-Mapping Liminality’. In H. Andrews and L. Roberts (eds), Liminal Landscapes: Travel, Experience and Spaces In-Between, pp. 1–17. New York: Routledge. Andrzejczak, K. (1995). ‘“A Strain on Anyone’s Nerves”: The American Writer-Hero in Communist Europe’. In W. Zacharasiewicz (ed.), Images of Central Europe in Travelogues and Fiction by North American Writers, pp. 305–12. Tübingen: Stauffenburg-Verl. Bachelard, G. (1969). The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Baudelaire, C. (1964).‘ The Painter of Modern Life’. In J. Mayne (ed. and trans.), The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, pp. 1–40. London: Phaidon Press. Benatov, J. (2008). Looking in the Iron Mirror: Eastern Europe in the American Imaginary 1958–2001. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI. Benito Sánchez, J., and Manzanas, A. M. (2006). ‘Of Walls and Words: An Introduction’. In J. Benito Sánchez and A. M. Manzanas (eds), SLL5. The Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays on Liminal Negotiations, pp. 1–11. Madrid: The Gateway Press. Bhabha, H. K. (2004). The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Borcila, A. (2014). American Representations of Post-Communism: Television, Travel Sites, and Post-Cold War Narratives. Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies. New York: Routledge. Connerton, P. (2009). How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Daly, B. (1995). ‘Sexual Politics in Two Collections of Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Fiction’, Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1), pp. 83–93. Daum, A. W. (2000). ‘America’s Berlin 1945–2000: Between Myths and Visions’. In F. Tromller (ed.), Berlin: The New Capital in the East. A Transatlantic Approach, pp. 49–73. Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies.

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Gennep, A. van (1977). The Rites of Passage, trans. M. B. Vizedom and G. L. Caffee, Introduction by S. T. Kimball. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Gottdiener, M. (2001). Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Gregory, D. (2009). ‘Imaginative Geographies’. In D. Gregory et al. (eds), The Dictionary of Human Geography, 5th Edn, pp. 369–71. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Johnson, G. (1998). Invisible Writer: Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Penguin. Jong, E. (1984). ‘Uncanny States of East and West’, The New York Times, 5 August. Kerouac, J. (1975). On the Road. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Kundera, M. (1984). ‘The Tragedy of Central Europe’, The New York Review of Books 31 (7) (26 April), pp. 33–8. Leerssen, J. (2007). ‘Image’. In M. Beller and J. Leerssen (eds), Imagology: The Cultural Construction and Literary Representation of National Characters: A Critical Survey. Studia Imagologica: Amsterdam Studies on Cultural Identity 13, pp. 342–4. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Longworth, P. (1994). The Making of Eastern Europe. New York: St Martin’s Press. Miller, D. Q. (2001). John Updike and the Cold War: Drawing the Iron Curtain. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Miłosz, C. (1990). ‘About Our Europe’. In R. Kostrzewa (ed.), Between East and West: Writings from Kultura, pp. 99–108. New York: Hill and Wang. Oates, J. C. (1984). Last Days: Stories. London: Jonathan Cape. Pells, R. (1997). Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II. New York: Basic Books. Said, E. (2003). Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edn. New York: Vintage Books. Tally, R. T., Jr (2013). Spatiality. The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge. Tötösy de Zepetnek, S. (1999). ‘Configurations of Postcoloniality and National Identity: Inbetween Peripherality and Narratives of Change’, The Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association 23, pp. 89–110. Turner, V. W. (1967). The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Westphal, B. (2011). ‘Foreword’. In R. T. Tally, Jr. (ed.), Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, pp. ix–xv. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Wolff, L. (1994). Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Wolfreys, J. (2002). ‘Introduction’. In J. Wolfreys (ed.), Introducing Criticism at the Twenty-first Century, pp. 1–9. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Zacharasiewicz, W. (2007). Images of Germany in American Literature. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.

Part III

Escape Lines

A. Robert Lee

10 Bound and Unbound: Figurations of Time-Space in African American Authorship

abstract This chapter explores the distinctive imagining of time and space in a continuum of African American authorship. Taking its coordinates from Robert Hayden’s benchmark poem ‘Middle Passage’, it spans both a selective gallery of key literary writings and cognate arts from jazz to film and photography. The point of departure is slave-narrative with its witness to the denial of rights of time and mobility, especially as encountered in a text like Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). This focus is then widened to embrace the ways Afro-America and the writings in its name has fashioned its own sense of time and space, whether against a background of slave-shadowed Dixie or the cellular northern city, historic black war-zone or fantastical alternate-reality. The writers invoked include Zora Neale Hurston, Ernest Gaines, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, James Weldon Johnson, John A. Williams and Ishmael Reed.

Middle passage: voyage through death to life upon these shores. —Robert Hayden, ‘Middle Passage’ (1962)1

1

‘Middle Passage’ would go through several revisions after its first appearance in the journal Phylon in 1941. Its final form appears in A Ballad of Remembrance (London: Paul Bremen, 1962). References are to Henry Louis Gates Jr and Nellie Y. McKay, (eds), The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), p. 1501.

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These lines, several times repeated in one of the most powerful memorial poems of Atlantic slavery, supply points of departure, a contour. Hayden’s ‘Middle Passage’ summons black bodies rendered fetid in the slave ship’s hold (‘charnel stench, effluvium of living death’ (1504)) even as captain and crew pray to their Christian god for safe passage on from Cuba. Mention is made of sexual exploitation of female slaves (‘kept naked in the cabins’ (1502)). A white crewman gives voice to his side of the celebrated mutiny aboard the Spanish slaver Amistad in 1839 (‘Our men went down/before the murderous Africans’ (1504)). The poem’s ensuing account of the thrust for liberty by the ship’s human cargo, the murder of captain and most of the crew, and the ship’s drift to Long Island, makes for both specific and iconic remembrance. In this respect lines like ‘Shuttles in the rocking loom of history,/the dark ships move, the dark ships move’ (1503) invoke slave transportation as both one time-and-place and yet the index of wholly more encompassing race history and its repetitions. In his imaginative fashioning of these ‘dark ships’ (1503) and their African cargo Hayden deploys a rare gallery of voice, not to say dexterity of image. ‘Middle Passage’ quite especially envisages slavery as denial to the enslaved of their own rights of time or their own command of mobility, its overthrow the necessary reclamation of both. The remembered protest of slaveholders against ‘the right/of chattel slaves to kill their lawful masters’ (1505) in turn connects directly to the US Supreme Court case of 1841 where John Quincy Adams successfully argued for release of the thirtyseven insurrectionists back to Sierra Leone. Necessarily Joseph Cinqué, his Sierra Leone-Mende name Sengbe Pieh, features. It is under his leadership that fellow slaves are unshackled, freed not only of immediate bondage but in due course to achieve re-possession of their own time and space.2 The implications of slave transport for Afro-America’s rite-of-passage at large invite every kind of note. They encompass slave-ports in Africa, the Antilles, and the Atlantic seaboard, seizure and ocean crossing, landfall, plantation labour, Christianization, post-Civil War segregation, the Great 2

For historical analysis of the Amistad episode, see William A. Owens, Black Mutiny: The Revolt of the Schooner Amistad (New York: Plume, 1997) and Marcus Rediker, The Amistad Rebellion: An Atlantic Odyssey of Slavery (New York: Viking, 2012).

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Migration across several generations from cotton or tobacco Dixie to the north’s cities and enclaves, and each Jim Crow working of color-line or mainstream-minority divide. It is history, period for period, location for location, that has inspired key allusions to ancient and bible god, Mississippi backcountry and Harlem night, and can be heard in the spoken languages of sermon, trickster tales as in Brer Rabbit and Jack the Bear, signifying, and wordplay like joshing and the dozens. Each turn of clock or transition of place, to shared effect, likewise also enters the written page. The span stretches from the nineteenth-century slave narrative of Frederick Douglass and his compeers to the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s led by Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer and Zora Neale Hurston, and from Malcolm X and the Black Power writings of the 1960s to Beloved (1987) and the other Nobel Prize fiction of Toni Morrison. Throughout, as in ‘Middle Passage’, these writings make the withholding but also Afro-America’s re-cooption of its own timeline or space a presiding focus. Put again tangibly, and to cite another departure-point, the landing of a cargo of African slaves from a Dutch man-of-war in 1619 at Jamestown, Virginia, reaches forwards through time to, and now well beyond, Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights oration (‘Free at Last’), given at the major locus of DC’s Lincoln Memorial in August 1963.3 The echo is of slave labour, field or house, and of Emancipation however flawed. Other echoes connect to the citied north, the struggle to get beyond sub-standard tenement housing (in Chicago ‘The Projects’), the spirals of prison cell, drugs, gang death. None of which is to talk mere victimhood. A whole spectrum of creativity helps shape the equation, self or community, sport or language. Nor does this suggest some hermetic African American literary tradition. The imaginative cross-influences have been many, from Classical antecedent in the verse and homilies of the Boston slave-servant poet Phillis Wheatley (1753–84) to the role of Dante or Poe in Ralph Ellison’s landmark Invisible Man (1952). But an African American literature suffused in its own 3

A useful sense of context is to be found in Warren M. Billings (ed.), The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606–1689 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975).

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discrete ‘black’ workings of time and space, and in which whole corridors of remembrance lie embedded, is equally not to be doubted. In one sense this is writing centered in individual lives, but it again points to a yet more inclusive set of implications. What access to the US national timeline is Afro-America to occupy? How is Afro-America best to be situated in the national space? Latterly can it be said definitively that the Obama presidency signals a species of redemption, Afro-America finally and truly ‘up from slavery’ into full tenure in the nation? Black history, its evolving shelves of time and place, builds into a species of memorial archive, an acoustic corridor lodged in the African American cultural psyche. The longstanding power-politics of color, the play of separatism and assimilation, stalk everywhere, with gains in some respects, losses in others as the new century’s Black Lives Matter movement underscores. Collective remembrance along these latitudes and longitudes understandably has found its way into black literary idiom. It has done so also in an accompanying diversity of expression. Rarely has that more been the case than in African American music. Whether slave ring-shouts, cotton and other work songs, spirituals as affecting as ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, Dixieland stomp, or blues from Bessie Smith to James Brown, the will to creative self-owning of time and space is unmistakable. One readily invokes church choiring and Civil Rights anthems, but also magisterial jazz classics like Ellington’s ‘Take the A Train’, and John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’. The rap generation of Kanye West or Sean Combs gives yet another bearing, musical incantation as witness or hex, but above all liberation. Visual arts have equally been implicated, whether Romare Bearden’s bravura collage and bricoleur canvases, the block-styled Jacob Lawrence Migration Series, Elizabeth Catlett’s sculptures, or the spectrum of photoimagery from James Van der Zee to Gordon Parks. Nor would it be possible to overlook the line of cinema from Oscar Micheaux’s silent portraits of racial lineage like The Homesteader (1918) through to Spike Lee’s debut film She’s Gotta Have It (1986) with its concentration on un-coerced female sexual autonomy. The rich satiric graphics of Ollie Harrington add their weight, line-drawn shies at modern-era encirclements of racism from Dixie to urban America. Each of these different creativities help determine the

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working imagery of black time and space, a past into present from slave trade to Civil Rights, a transition of locale from the quarters to the metropolitan city. Despite prohibitions against slave literacy the African American written record begins early, whether the almanacs of Benjamin Banneker (1731–1806), the Narrative of the Igbo-born author Olaudah Equiano (1745–1801), or the fierce abolitionist Appeal of David Walker (1785–1830). The legacy has hugely widened across a multiplicity of genres, story and autobiography, poetry and drama, and even if given over to serious business not infrequently willing to engage in seams of dark irony and laughter. No one voice holds, no one overall version of time as space, space as time. Moreover, as much as the writing may address any explicit liberation theme, its variety, not to say virtuosity, of styling signals the yet further unbounding of boundary. An abbreviated selection of exemplary texts, even if well enough known, and dare it be said canonical, does duty.4 Slave narrative of essence enters the inaugural reckoning, a roster of now classic touchstones indeed to include Frederick Douglass’s Narrative (1845) with its dark-to-light account of ‘stolen’ literacy and escape from Maryland servitude to New England freedom. The very titling of fellow slave, more properly ex-slave, accounts give symptomatic insignia. Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave (1847) points up the presiding iconography of capture and flight, the slave self ’s de-enslavement and taking possession of new time, new space. Henry ‘Box’ Bibb’s Narrative (1849) borders on surreal historical riddle, bondage in Kentucky, escape in the vaunted box, and life in Canada where he founds the abolitionist journal The Voice of the Fugitive. The 2013 Steve McQueen screen adaptation of Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853), with its New York to

4

I have given more extensive accounts of several of the texts invoked in this chapter in Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 1998). See also A. Robert Lee (ed.), African American Writing, 5 vols (New York and Tokyo: Routledge/Editions Synapse, 2012).

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Louisiana highjack, could not more precisely remind the reader of the self arbitrarily pinioned to un-chosen chronology, un-chosen space.5 Few texts, however, settle more upon slavery’s incarcerating time-space than Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). Its gendered, fact-fiction story of Linda Brent as black slave-woman surrounded by sexual risk from her plantation owner / white pursuer Dr Flint adds further terms of reference. The plotline, which scholarship has established as largely actual, turns centrally on Brent’s recourse to hiding-out in her grandmother’s garret for seven years, the alternative being the unwilling surrender of her body or likely rape and murder. Her literal ‘retreat’ (114), boarded up in a cabin except for the trapdoor, and relieved from ‘darkness total’ (114) and airlessness only by three rows of loophole made with a gimlet, is emphatic enough. But before finagling her escape to Boston she will observe her children with fugitive eyes, spy resentfully upon Flint, suffer benumbed limbs and attack from insects, and mark each Christmas Day as non-festive, neither ceremonial date nor round-the-table family gathering. From start to finish Jacobs/Brent opts to delineate slavery as time put in abeyance (‘the dreary years I passed in bondage’ (201)) or as ‘rightful’ (200) space preemptively sealed. This curtailing of individual agency within slave parameters might almost be a geometric, squared enclosure. Slave texts, even so – to include neo-slave storying like Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), with its gynocentric chronicle of the slave-woman Vyry Brown, or Leon Forrest’s The Bloodworth Orphans (1977), with its epic genealogy of racially inter-ravelled lives begun in slaveholding – offer but one kind of expression of the temporal-spatial axis evident across African American literary production. The sense of chronological dimension, as of locationality, has been insistent. A roster underscores the point, writing by way of example given over the south, to the city, to underground-ness, and to perspectives of ‘passing’ and of the postmodern. 5

Selective studies of slave narrative include Rebecca Chambers, Witnesses for Freedom: Negro Americans in Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948); Sidonie Smith, Where I’m Bound: Patterns of Slavery and Freedom in Black American Autobiography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974); and Carl Plasa and Betty J. Rings (eds), The Discourse of Slavery (New York: Routledge, 1994).

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As to the south and the city, the sense of the era is important. Within the former Confederate states that has notably meant Reconstruction (1863–77), and a century later, the Martin Luther King years as they led into the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. North of the Mason-Dixon Line it has been variously the Jazz Age 1920s, the Depression 1930s, and the Black Power 1960s. Likewise spatial status enters the reckoning. Segregation and its footfalls, whether Birmingham, Alabama or Little Rock, Arkansas, backcountry or township, has apportioned great swathes of the black south. The black north looks to Afro-cities like Harlem or Chicago as mecca yet ghetto, pleasure palace yet labour source, church respectability yet street turf. Literary narrative strikingly refracts these different, often enough contrary, cross-widths. The south can invoke fictions by Zora Neale Hurston and Ernest Gaines to give, precisely, contrasting dimensions of black time-space. Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), famously all but ignored on publication yet under the advocacy of Alice Walker and others installed as seminal ‘womanist’ text, offers in its protagonist Janie Mae Crawford the portrait of a quite special style of black autonomy. This bears on a world beyond white coordinates, a wholly black-cultural Dixie full of its own chronology and living space. The novel offers a dense menu of habit, household, foodway, dress, and always family memory. Its very language, down-home, folkloric, as much to be heard as read, even at times almost that of ballad, draws coevally from southern black timeline and from powers of site be it township South Carolina or rural Georgia. Un-boundering as motif runs through the novel. A black Dixie lived in and for itself does not free Janie’s world of other boundaries, above all those of gender. Her progress through different liaisons – the mean older sharecropper Logan Killicks, the mayor of Eatonville Joe Starks, and the gambler-poet Tea Cake – tells a coming into her own: un-compliant black womanhood beyond women’s ‘mule’ standing spoken of by her country grandmother. The grandmother herself speaks of wanting to ‘preach a great sermon about colored women sitting on high’ (32). Joe Starks is drawn to a town made ‘all outa colored folks’ (48). But the principal register is reserved for Janie, whom as their marriage wanes Joe calls ‘too moufy’ (116). His death releases her, as she tells her friend Pheoby, to

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‘dis freedom’ (116). Life with Tea Cake, in consequence, intimate, sexual, un-coerced, and its remembrance after the Lake Okechobee hurricane and the dog-bite rabies that kills him, bespeaks her moving on into yet newer orders of time and space: Of course he wasn’t dead. He could never be dead until she had finished feeling and thinking. The kiss of his memory made pictures of love and light against the wall. She pulled in her horizon like a great fish-net. Pulled in from around the waist of the world and draped it over her shoulder. So much of life was in its meshes! She called in her soul to come and see … (286)

Janie’s ‘horizon’ in its plenary sense of possibility is both temporal and spatial, a self in prospect for time ahead yet un-forgetful of Tea Cake’s death, a self in the one America yet open to further American parameters. Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), in the sequence of The War Years, Reconstruction, The Plantation and The Quarters, would seem to render the south more in terms of longitudinal time-space. That, however, can flatter to deceive. Voiced by Jane, one-time Louisiana slave under the name Ticey and now the centenarian dictating her story into a tape-recorder, to be sure covers a span from 1860s Secession to 1960s Civil Rights. But the novel adroitly also transposes its circumstantial detail of time and space into forms of associative metadata, the given era or location steeped in skeins of memory, feeling, inward iconography. The instances are many; the novel for all its realist-naturalist surface borders on a gallery of images. As Yankee troops enter the plantation, Ticey’s white mistress speaks of the ‘precious blood of the South’ (5), the very romance of a magnoliaflavoured white Dixie. The would-be flight of Jane and her fellow slaves to Ohio, and avoidance of the well-named ‘patrollers’, leads into a major ritual of self-decolonization (‘Nobody was keeping the same name Old Master gived them’ (18)). Reconstruction bears its own contradiction (‘And that was the deal: the Secesh get their land, but the Yankees lend the money’ (69)). The blood of Ned, the Frederick Douglass figure killed for his refusal to agree to restored white hegemony, becomes stigmata, sedimented into the very soil of the south. In having Jane give witness to the ‘tragic mulatto’ story of Mary Agnes Lefabre, Gaines subtly reworks one of the most ancient

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of racial taboos, the taint of ‘black blood’. The Cajun Jules Raynard observes for good reason that ‘The past and the present got all mixed up’ (192). The novel’s final sequence in which the young Civil Rights activist Jimmy Washington is killed by Klan thugs for using a whites-only water tap, and Jane, in her great age, marches by Robert Samson, the latter-day liberal scion of the plantation dynasty, leaves history still dynamically in motion. The novel again shows the one successive phase or site of racial-historical business, in this instance the last in time, reflexively folding back into all those that have preceded. Step north from Dixie to the black city and another pair of novels do service. Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Jazz Age milestone, images this premier metropolis as a beckoning concourse of on-the-pulse black life. The story at hand, that of Jake Brown as l’homme moyen sensuel, variously World War I army enlistee who deserts in Marseilles, stoker, dock worker, kitchen cook on the trains, gambler, and whose alter ego is the intellectual Haitian porter Ray and who will find, lose, and then re-find his lover Felice, takes place against not one but two black cityscapes. Principally that means Harlem, with Philadelphia a lesser enclave. For in his depiction of Harlem, the brownstones and cabaret, chippies and pimps, shiv and bar fights, money-lenders and police raids, eateries and ragtime, and not least the ready sexuality, McKay gives fond but not unsparing portraiture to his city of blackness as a Jazz Age realm of the senses. Time and place again are consciously brought into juncture, a Harlem full of its own day and night yet the aggregation of past timelines, a Harlem incontrovertibly black Manhattan yet seamed in the footfalls of Dixie as earlier down-home. Jake’s sense of the city within-a-city as he crosses the Atlantic from France captures these dimensions in a language of working affection: Oh, to be in Harlem again after two years away. The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it. The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its streets. And all night long, ragtime and ‘blues’ playing somewhere … singing somewhere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyed Harlem … Turning now in Jake’s sweet blood … (15)

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There may well be saccharin in this version of Harlem. But McKay astutely also has his eye to the contraries built into its race-history. That can be the slavery-bequeathed colour hierarchy of yellows, browns and blacks, irreverence towards Booker T. Washington, even the soul food diet of chitlins and collard greens with their reminder of subsistence in the black rural south. It can be the glamour of Jake’s ‘promenade’ along Lenox Avenue and 125th to 140th Street yet also, as in the fight with Zeddy, the Black Belt as war-ground. Harlem, in the novel’s rendering, is so offered as absorbing the very timescale that made it and as being still in the process of making itself as location. No undue warmth underwrites the Chicago of Richard Wright’s Native Son. The calendar is the Depression, not the 1920s. The city’s black South Side may have saloon or pool hall or storefront church, but Wright makes over the city of Bigger Thomas and his family into labyrinth, corridor, tenement rat-maze. Rodent imagery opens the novel, the metallic clang of death-row cell door brings it to a close. Bigger, violent, fissured, the near unwitting murderer of white Mary Dalton and then his girl Bessie, and finally the fugitive caught in police cross-lights and brought to trial, actually internalizes his own predatory city. In other words, much as the novel has been heralded as Dreiserian or Zola-esque naturalism, it carries the altogether more interior signification of Bigger as figure of live dream. If he bullies, kills, finds himself burning Mary’s body in the Dalton furnace watched surreally by a white cat, and is explained in court through the Marxist terms of his lawyer Mr Max, he also inhabits the hypnagogic world Wright calls in ‘How “Bigger” Was Born’ – ‘the whole dark inner landscape of Bigger’s mind’ (xix). Bigger himself, as if to echo Harriet Jacobs, alleges ‘I’m on the outside of the world peeping in through a knot-hole in the fence’ (23). Bigger’s Chicago could not be more literally circumstantial, yet is at the same time immaterial and allegorical: both lived in the body and in the fault-lines of consciousness. Slave-ship cargo hold and chains, the Underground Railroad (if actually above-ground) as escape network, the Manhattan subway: all point to black time suspended and yet released, place as fixture yet translated into movement. They repeat as patterns in a range of African American texts, from The Life of Josiah Henson (1849) with its Maryland to Ontario

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slave-story, and from which Harriet Beecher Stowe would borrow for Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), to Charles Wright’s bitter-comical Manhattan fantasia The Wig (1966). But few have taken on greater benchmark standing than Richard Wright’s ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’ (1942), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman (1964), each a canny palimpsest, boldly reflexive in the inter-layering of prior black history into ostensible time-and-place now. ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’, one of Wright’s strongest stories in the posthumous collection Eight Men (1961), makes the very notion of subterranean both fact and figure. If the Underground Railroad supplies one source of metaphor so, too, does Dostoevski’s Notes from Underground (1864). The underground odyssey of Fred Daniels may well entail wrongful accusation, latter-day manhunt, flight along the city’s sewers, and fatal police chase. But it also functions as viewing gallery whereby Daniels can peer into America as elaborate historical pageant. In his journey he glimpses a Blakean dead baby, innocence traduced; an embalmer whose ice-cold work on a white corpse points to whiteness as hell; a coal-bin that might be the very fire of blackness; a movie whose flickers give glimpses of escapist America full of good times wealth and radio snippets with reports of war; acts of murder and real diamond and jewel theft; and a hallelujah black church service. Finally the stolen bank notes he pastes on the sewer walls suggest a grotesque Aladdin’s Cave, Gatsbyism actually withheld from him and his. He scrawls his name freddaniels (55) as though a first ever inscription of self-identity. His death by police gun as he removes the manhole cover, and resurfaces, comes about more on account of insights into the racial power-structure than supposed thievery and so intolerable to the pursuing cops. The story, realism undoubtedly, nevertheless veers tactically towards historic parable under the sway both of suspended time (‘Was it day or night now?’ (43)) and of dislocated space (‘underground blackness’ (77)). Invisible Man assumes vintage south-to-north itinerary, Ellison’s anonymous first-person journeyer himself a virtual paradigm of the making of Afro-America as he ingeniously jazz-riffs his way through the story. Timelines reverberate, place assumes iconography. Sight and blindness, naming and unnaming serve as the book’s dialectical levers. False papers, whether scholarship diploma, letters of recommendation, or political

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membership card, tease and mislead as to his identity. In his Dixie years the narrator fights for prize money as though to reenact the slave-pen’s Battle Royal. The scholarship to the Tuskegee-like college brings him fullface into Bledsoe as treacherous latter-day Booker T. Washington. The Golden Day brothel, with its visit by psychologically damaged lawyers, doctors and teachers from the local asylum, mocks his own black-bourgeois pretensions. It also implies a site, a space, that can refract the narrator’s own ‘mad’ illusions. In the north, he works his way through each figurative station of the cross: a worker at the Liberty Paints factory in which whiteness is all. He takes his place in the supposedly raceless Brotherhood under Communiststyle rules. He becomes the lover-stud in accordance with sexual myth. He is witness to Ras as reincarnated Marcus Garvey. After the death of the youth leader Tod he finds himself a participant in the apocalypse of the Harlem riot. His final metamorphosis is that of Rinehart, any-and-all confidence-man supreme. In the Prologue and Epilogue he is to be heard speaking from the basement retreat ‘that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth-century’ (9) and announcing that ‘the hibernation is over’ (502). This is to step out from underground to above, papers burned, past identities discarded, eyes open to the contra-flows of history across time and place that have been the making of Harlem, Afro-America, indeed America itself. Dutchman (1964) saw publication with stage instructions setting it ‘in the flying underbelly of the city … Underground. The subway heaped in modern myth’ (3). No prizes were to be awarded for identifying the Flying Dutchman allusion or indeed hints of Dante or Poe. But this was Jones/Baraka’s Black Power drama, fists clenched, a savage below-surface deconstruction of middle-class blackness and bitch seductress whiteness in the Adam-and-Eve persons of Clay and Lula (who carries an apple) as they circle aboard their myth-train. The Uncle Tom taunt of Clay by Lula (‘You are a well-known type’ (12) and ‘You middle-class black bastard’ (31)) and Clay’s counter-accusation steeped in historical memory (‘If Bessie Smith had killed some white people she wouldn’t have needed that music’ (35)) could not be keener. The two-acter, for all its 1960s aura and Manhattan

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setting, uncompromisingly adjudges ‘race’ a round-trip of love-hate and death, time and place repetition. A number of threads help indicate the yet more inclusive perspective. If ‘passing’ has long found notable expression in African American authorship it holds an especial pertinence in the rendering of time-space as imaginative environment. The harlequin ability to play both white and black (and in one case bisexual) allows for the unique vantage-point, the parallel or two-way vision in a manner of speaking. Protagonists thereby can enter different cultural timelines, inhabit different styles of place. Three narratives give due bearings. James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) lays down a necessary marker, the saga of its mixed-race narrator a veritable Pilgrim’s Progress. His Georgia birth he comes to think of as a dream. Subsequent life hovers at the edge of improbability, whether rich absentee white father, mis-cues at Atlanta University, flight in a linen basket on board a Pullman, Cuban cigar maker, gambler clad in a sheet after losses at the table, and touring ragtime pianist with his white mentor. Black or white, black and white, his straddling of the race-divide opens him to both evolving time-schema and site. Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) treads another time-space, the Manhattan pairing of Irene Redfield and Clare Hendry as affluent mulatto women not only living at the edge of ‘color’ but also white and black public-private sexuality. Their mutual attraction, which turns fatal in the light of Clare’s death, adds its own convex mirror as the sites of passing. Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982), as befits the novel of a professional philosopher, pitches itself as mock slave narrative, a birthswap in which ‘black’ Andrew Hawkins almost arbitrarily becomes ‘white’ William Harris. In its forays into the ontology of self and the making of ethnic and other human categories in time and space, Wright has his novel predicate a unique vantage-point: ‘The Negro (…) is the finest student of the White World, the one pupil in the class who watches himself watching the others’ (128).6

6

His philosophical take on these issues of ontology is given in Charles Johnson, Being & Race: Black Writing Since 1972 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1987).

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Timeline and space as imagined in the African American literary tradition could not but embrace a broad trajectory across generations and genres. One last pairing must do service for the more comprehensive reach. John A. Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), told as the serial hallucination of Captain Abraham Blackman about to be shot by a Viet Cong bullet, offers a striking pointer. The seminar Blackman has earlier given to the black soldiery in his company, some emblematically named like Griot, summons military lineage: He’d gone back to the American Revolution, to Prince Estabrook, Peter Salem, Crispus Atticus and all the unnamed rest; from there to the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Plains Wars, the Spanish-American War – all the wars. (14)

World Wars I and II, Korea, and Vietnam add to the litany as the novel moves speculatively towards a denouement which, in revenge for all the damage of the color-line to include a long segregated army embodied in General Ishmael Whittman, can be envisaged as the black take-over of America’s nuclear facilities. Each increment of memory plays into a deft paradigm of both black warrior past-into-present and the different black sites of arms and the man. To conclude with Ishmael Reed’s Flight to Canada (1976) is to broach the postmodern turn – slavery to the 1960s as time and site reflexively and with wittiest sleight of hand cross-hatched. Alternative reality guys historical reality. The novel’s verve shows throughout as, tongue-in-cheek, Reed fuses time-periods, gives location as actual but also digital. His alter-ego, Raven Quickskill, thereby, can give both in and out of time witness to the 1860s comic-gothic slave plantation ‘Camelot’ of Arthur Swille, update escape to Canada by yacht, and hypothesize America as a new but equally meretricious American property order presided over by the figure of Yankee Jack. Lincoln’s murder is to be watched on TV, his bargain with Swille that of a temporizing politician. Helicopters hover over the quarters. Phones ring across the Confederacy. Harriet Beecher Stowe dictates Uncle Tom’s Cabin into a cassette. Swille’s sister reveals their incest as though in a faux House of Usher even as the Swille son personifies a Dixie ghost as though

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out of Hamlet. Reed has made no bones about writing what he calls Hoodoo fiction, the Civil Era captured through the lens of modernity, a bucolic if in fact poisoned south and a freedom trail if in fact all-for-the-market north tricked out as America’s dark comedy. Flight to Canada offers grounds, not least on account of its fierce but always congenial wit, to be thought of as a wholly appropriate albeit antic apotheosis of time and space under African American literary auspices. In this, too, it reminds us of how the wider trajectories of time-space, past and ongoing, have elicited their imaginative reckoning in the overall span of US black authorship.

Bibliography Banneker, B. (1792). Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia Alamanack and ephermeris, for the year of our Lord, 1792. Philadelphia: William Goddard and James Angell. Bibb, H. (1849). Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, Written by Himself with an Introduction by Lucius C. Matlack. New York: published by the author. Brown, W. W. (1847). Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Boston: The American Anti-Slavery Society. Standard edn: Douglass, F. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. B. Quarles. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960. Ellison, R. (1952). Invisible Man. New York: Random House. Equiano, O., and Vassa, G. (1789). The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. London: published by the author. Forrest, L. (1977). The Bloodworth Orphans. New York: Random House. Gaines, E. (1971). The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Dial. Gates, H. L., and Mackay, N. Y. (eds) (1997). The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton. Henson, J. (1849). The Life of Josiah Henson, formerly a slave, now an inhabitant of Canada, as narrated by himself. Boston: A. D. Phelps.

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Hurston, Z. N. (1937). Their Eyes Were Watching God. Philadelphia, PA and London: Lippincott. Jacobs, H. A. (1861). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself. Boston: published by the author. Standard edn: Incidents in the Life of a Save Girl, Written by Herself, ed. Jean FaganYellin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Johnson, C. (1982). Oxherding Tale. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Johnson, J. W. (1912). The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. Boston: Sherman French. Jones, L., and Baraka, A. (1964). Dutchman, originally published as Dutchman and The Slave. New York: Morrow. Larsen, N. (1929). Passing. New York: A. A. Knopf. McKay, C. (1928). Home to Harlem. New York and London: Harper & Brothers. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Northrup, S. (1853). Twelve Years a Slave, Narrative of Solomon Northrup, a citizen of New York, kidnapped in Washington in 1841, and rescued in 1853. Auburn, NY: Derby and Miller. Reed, I. (1976). Flight to Canada. New York: Random House. Stowe, H. B. (1852). Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: J. P. Jewett. Walker, D. (1829). Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to Those of the United States of America. Boston: David Walker. Walker, M. (1966). Jubilee. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Wheatley, P. (1773). Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England. London: A Bell. Williams, J. A. (1972). Captain Blackman. New York: Doubleday. Wright, C. (1966). The Wig. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Wright, R. (1940). ‘How “Bigger” Was Born’. Originally published in part in Saturday Review of Literature ( June 1940), complete version reprinted in Native Son. New York: Harper & Brothers. Wright, R. (1940). Native Son. New York: Harper & Brothers. Wright, R. (1961). ‘The Man Who Lived Underground’, Eight Men. Cleveland, OH: World.

Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo

11 Reconfiguring the Epic Space in Anne Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy

abstract Anne Waldman’s The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment (2011) is a twenty-five-year-long project self-styled as a feminist epic. With the original premise ‘to shoulder/abdicate patriarchy’ (2011: xx), the three tomes that comprise the epic – ‘All is full of Jove’, ‘Guardian and Scribe’, and ‘Eternal War’ – seize upon positive and negative forms of masculine energy through the deeds of the archetypical patriarch Jove. Tracing or tracking Jove down becomes in Iovis a quest with a marked spatial dimension. On the one hand, movement and travel delineate the heroine’s investigation, and the poem becomes a remapping of the world – a cartographic effort through which she complicates hegemonic representations. On the other hand, and closely linked to this idea, the epic text itself is approached in Iovis as an available space to study and contest the subordination of women in history and literature. To explore these intersections, this chapter accesses Anne Waldman’s use of space in The Iovis Trilogy through two main points of entrance: the literary and literal movement delineated by an ‘investigative poetics’, and the exploration of genre and gender through the space of the epic text itself.

Poetics of Movement As a literary genre, the epic has long been associated with spatio-temporal journeys. ‘Epic storytelling’, write Mario Skempis and Ioannis Ziogas, ‘comes into existence by describing persons’ movements through space, [recounting] sets of successive events whose flow resembles the shifts inherent in a journey’ (2014: 3). Indeed, from Homer’s Odyssey to James Joyce’s Ulysses, movement – regardless of the actual mileage covered – has remained a basic ingredient of the epic literary concoction. In Anne Waldman’s

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reconfiguration of the genre, nevertheless, the role of movement and travel go beyond the basic level of content to a more profound understanding of the relationship between genre, gender and power. Spatial metaphors abound in the poet’s description of her approach: her poetics in Iovis, for instance, are referred to as ‘[i]nvestigative travel’ (2011: xi) and ‘writingtracking’ (2011: xi), and the feminist twist to the epic is interpreted as ‘further deterritorialization’ (2011: xiii), a term with philosophical connotations which results in the heroine’s need to isolate, investigate, and expose patriarchy’s claim to land – Jove’s conquering mode. In the essay ‘Epic & Performance’ (2001), Waldman reiterates the centrality of movement in her understanding of the genre by listing, as necessary elements to an epic poet, ‘[a] planet. A narrator. Hearty Lungs. A moveable desk’ (2001: 313). This ‘moveable desk’ (2001: 313) is actualized in Iovis through the various spatiotemporal travels and journeys that shape the epic, and that are used to explore recurrent themes such as: the perpetuation of patriarchy through historical, mythological or literary discourses; the social construction of masculinity and its similarly constructed connection to war and violence; and the mechanisms used to oppress and subjugate the less powerful. Before beginning her journey, nevertheless, the speaker ‘positions herself in the cosmos, already filled with the sperm of Jove who, “peoples space”’ (2011: 7). This vague geographical coordinate resonates throughout the collection, and serves the poet to situate her heroine in a world dominated by men – a situation also shared by the female writer who dwells in traditionally masculine literary circles and genres. Born in 1945, a few months before the end of the Second World War, Waldman consciously positions herself within a masculine world governed by war and violence in which women are often reduced to clichés – witch, body to be conquered, muse, seductress, or scapegoat, among others. Most frequently associated with the notoriously men-dominated Beat Generation, Waldman also belongs to a highly masculine literary world, where different incarnations of divine presences like Zeus/Jove, or human – but still semi-divine – writers like William Burroughs or Allen Ginsberg simultaneously act as teachers and oppressors. With this in mind, in the section ‘DEAD GUTS & BONES’ her epic poem becomes the medium through which she negotiates her position as a female writer:

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Telling the story telling the story on the hour How to become a writer out of the rib of a man How to spit out the man’s marrow to breathe free How to stand on the ground & contend with his mystical hormones (2011: 238)

Even if the author, and by extension any other woman included in her epic, is necessarily part of patriarchy – ‘born on the hem of war / arise out of father sperm’ (2011: 50) – as a poet she can still use her literature to fight patriarchal complicities and create a space to redress the exclusion of women from historic, political or artistic realms. This she does by putting into practice her ‘investigative travel’ (2011: xi), a technique that allows her to survey historical, mythological, or literary sources of different epochs and places and rearrange them in the space of her epic. For instance, in the section ‘SPRECHSTIMME (COUNTESS OF DIA)’, Waldman moves from the troubadour and poet Beatriz de Dia towards jazz and soul singers such as Mabel Mercer, Billie Holliday, Sarah Vaughan, Nina Simone, and Ella Fitzgerald. From twelfth-century France to twentieth-century North America and Europe, the speaker also moves – by substituting the singular ‘I’ for the plural ‘we’ in the course of the poem – from a globalized position of female artists to the individualized space of their art. In addition, she jumps from the specifically located art of these singers – voice, rhythm, pitch, improvisation – to a broader celebration of speech as a means to expose collective and individual injustice – ‘tongue is salvation, tongue stands in for all-the-body / she tells the truth about matricide, about genocide, about rape / about torture / cleansing is not unfamiliar in her witness trope’ (2011: 620). Shifting again in space and time to refocus the poem on her own position, the speaker elevates poetry – by default the epic in which she is relocating all these narratives – as a means of resistance: ‘she who was remains in lines of poetry’ (2011: 638). As a tool to contest historical, political or artistic representations, poetry becomes a space to reinvent not only oneself and others, but also language itself – ‘I will re=in=vent my roles / […] / sleep in the margins of my writing / speak there too’ (2011: 627). While the poet celebrates the liberating potential of language and discourse, she is also – as numerous sections in Iovis demonstrate – painfully aware of its equal potential as a weapon of control and manipulation:

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for instance, as a tool to perpetuate patriarchy. In ‘OUSTED’ the speaker juxtaposes the chauvinism of her contemporary fellow-poets with the systematic subordination of women within mythological discourses. Writing matter-of-factly, she states, ‘[o]f course the stories known in many lands many tribes say this: about how men go off to battle, to catch a wild animal, to avenge a sorry deed, and if they slip, if they get maimed, if the animal eludes their grip, blame it on the wives. The wives were unfaithful. And so rush home to punish them. Oust them’ (2011: 292). Hoping to contest this situation, the section ‘EVANGELLE’ takes the reader to the heart of the matter by means of a polysemantic trip taken by the speaker: a physical one to Oregon with the Merry Pranksters, a hallucinatory one towards the mother Goddess, and an exploratory one through the evolution of mythological discourse. A story told by the fire by a woman who is refashioned into a goddess through the LSD-inflected perception of the heroine directs the speaker’s attention to Apuleius’s description of the Goddess Isis in his Metamorphoses – or The Golden Ass – in which the protagonist invokes the deity for divine help. Referred to as the ‘goddess of a thousand names’ (2011: 410), Isis is a prime example of the different incarnations and cults that have been attributed to gods and goddesses throughout the ages.1 This is followed by a quote from Enuma Elish, the Babylonian epic of creation, which narrates the defeat of the mother Goddess Tiamat, who is brutally killed by her great great grandson Marduk.2 While in an

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Quoting from Apuleius, Waldman has Isis herself stress the geographical reach of her influence: ‘Some know me as Juno / some as Bellona of the Battles / others know me as Hecate / other as Rhamnubia / but both races of Aethiopiansm whose lands the morning sun first shines upon, / & the Egyptians, who excel in ancient learning & worship me with proper / ceremony to my godhead, / call me by my true name, Queen Isis’ (2011: 411). Waldman might have been influenced by Anne Baring’s and Jules Cashford’s The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1991). Tracking different representations of the Goddess in literature, art, and history, this book exposes the historical subordination of the Goddess through the imposition of a patriarchal Judeo-Christian mythology. Chapter 6 focuses on Isis and analyses Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, and Chapter 7 looks at the ‘defeat of the Goddess’ through the Enuma Elish following, thus, a process similar to Waldman’s.

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earlier myth Tiamat is described as a creatrix – responsible for creating the cosmos and a first generation of deities – in the later myth she is turned into a monster of chaos whose dismembered body is used to create – or recreate – the cosmos. The quotations included in Iovis focus precisely on Tiamat’s defeat, emphasizing the violence and aggression committed upon her female body. Interrupting the cutting-and-pasting of the myth, the poet adds critical comments that draw attention, not only to her process of research, but also to the malleability of myth and its connection to politics – ‘(we’re near the end of Sumero-Babylonian civilization / now see ever-increasing emphasis on war & conquest)’ (2011: 414). Marduk’s destruction and later conquest of the Goddess’s body – which is literally used as the ground to build his empire – emphasizes the brutal imposition of masculine violence upon women, a situation that has been normalized and justified through the mythical discourse. Drawing attention to the development of Tiamat’s myth, Waldman shows how humanity was ‘born of brutality, rape, conquering, born of the heaped / mass upon / mass upon of female / suffering’ (2011: 414–15). The kind of investigative, pseudo metaphorical, trip the poet takes in ‘SPRECHSTIMME’ and ‘EVANGELLE’, nevertheless, is not the only modality of Waldman’s ‘writing-tracking’ poetics. The speaker’s actual travels also take up a considerable space in her epic, delineating journeys whose purpose, as was the case in the previous example, is to expose the ‘colors in the mechanism of concealment’ used by patriarchy. A recurrent one throughout Iovis is the condemnation of war and violence in the name of god, greed, power or, as the poet puts it, the ‘antithetical hallucination / […] / that one fights for justice at all’ (2011: 724). Parting from the necessarily self-critical point of view of an American citizen, who ‘needs to be perpetually vigilant as investigator of the dark acts and mechanisms of war’ (2011: xiv), in ‘DARK ARCANA: AFTERIMAGE OR GLOW’,3 the heroine travels to Northern Vietnam to study the aftermath of the

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This long poem was published separately as Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow (2003), including photos taken by Patti Smith, who accompanied Waldman on her trip.

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Vietnam War on its twenty-five year anniversary.4 Written as an emotional and political travel journal, the repetition of the structure ‘what is it like’ is used to shift from the personal, outsider, perspective of the speaker, to that of those who were directly affected by the war. While wandering through Vietnam, the heroine tries an exercise in sympathy to see what it feels like, ‘to be / old American soldier’ (2011: 847), ‘to resemble a child’ (2011: 848), ‘to be a destiny of the victor-to-be’ (2011: 849), ‘to be bestial’ (2011: 855), ‘to be dead’ (2011: 870), ‘to be colonial’ (2011: 847), etc. Addressing her fellow Americans at the end of the poem, the speaker urges them to free themselves of the demons of war by exposing injustice and war crimes such as Nixon’s: ‘Dear American: no patent on life / reverse your crimes in the altered rice-tree-corn world!!!!!!!!!! / (secret bombing of Cambodia) / repent your afterimage / repent your glow’ (2011: 877). Using the epic to revere the victims – ‘hill-tribe girl / maimed. / excoriated. / for collusion. / second-caste citizen of hoops’ (2011: 853) – the heroine prays to both Vietnamese and Americans to give up retaliation and revenge – ‘don’t shoot / no romantic attachment to ‘dirty tricks’ past / please’ (2011: 854) – hoping, through a reevaluation of historical and political knowledge, to break the cycle of war.5 Following the assumption that there is ‘[h]istory & one’s own sense of history’ (2011: 791) – as the poet puts it – the ‘investigative travel’ and ‘writing-tracking’ poetics achieve their ultimate power as counter-history

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The poet’s emphasis on the position from where she speaks in this section, and elsewhere in Iovis, resonates with Addriane Rich’s politics of location: ‘It was in reading poems by contemporary Cuban women that I began to experience the meaning of North America as a location which had also shaped my ways of seeing and my ideas of who and what was important, a location for which I was also responsible. I traveled then to Nicaragua, where, in a tiny impoverished country, in a four-year-old society dedicated to eradicating poverty, under the hills of the Nicaragua-Honduras border, I could physically feel the weight of the United States of North America, its military forces, its vast appropriations of money, its mass media, at my back’ (‘Notes Toward a Politics of Location’, pp. 219–20). Nevertheless, and despite the ‘[o]ptimism prevails in spite of old karma’ (2011: 846) of the prelude to this section, the poet doubts the effectiveness of her approach; as she puts it, ‘time heels’ (2011: 855), but not quite heals.

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through the construction and preservation of an archive. In this context, the ‘hag’ and the ‘scribe’ – two figures the speaker continuously identifies with because of their dominion of language and ability to record it – become efficient trackers of Jove. In ‘REVENGE, a section where the poet/hag follows a masculine god-like figure through a world in ruins, the archive is explicitly set against the perpetuation of patriarchal control: Words on tapes and notebooks, which fill my shelves now, collapsing under the weight of grandiose insight and scoff. Can you take them all back? I doubt it. You said this, and you said that, and you lost the train […] No ears are deaf and all of you will hear me. Hear me. History needs to be retold in couplets. (2011: 144)

The epic text, once again, becomes the repository of this archive; an alternative map to a world – or rather, to the construction of a world – where the Patriarch can no longer rule on his own, but must necessarily include those who have already studied the ‘colors in the mechanism of concealment’.

Female Body and the Space of the Epic Independently of the actual form of travel described, the heroine’s mapping of the world is inscribed in the space of the epic. Just like the universe already ruled by Jove in which the heroine necessarily dwells, the epic text – rather than free, uncharted, territory – is approached as a fully mapped space in which women have been strategically located. Indeed, despite a considerable number of epic works authored by women – such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), or H. D.’s Helen in Egypt (1961), to

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name a few – the epic continues to be seen as a predominantly masculine genre. Bernard Schweizer notes that, ‘[b]oth in subject matter and in form, epic may well be the most exclusively gender coded of all literary genres; so much so that epic and masculinity appear to be almost coterminous’ (2006: 1).6 The generic history of the epic plays an important role in Iovis, as it helps the poet to explore her text’s literary lineage. In the introduction to Book I, Waldman frames her text within the modernist epic tradition: I honor and dance on the corpse of the poetry gone before me and especially here in a debt and challenge of epic masters Williams, Pound, Zukofsky, and Olson. But with the narrative of H.D.’s Helen in Egypt in mind, and her play with ‘argument.’ I want to don armor of words as they do and fight with liberated tongue and punctured heart. But unlike the men’s, my history and myths are personal ones. (2011: 3)

In this short paragraph, Waldman tackles crucial aspects that will be relevant throughout the trilogy, including the tension between influence of and departure from the epic masculine masters, the play with language as a weapon to escape masculine control and – particularly interesting to this section – the representation of her own, situated, experience within the poem. One of the ways in which the poet approaches this last issue is by using the history of the epic, as well as the epic text itself, to contest the preconceived literary and real spaces women are relegated to. Not coincidentally, the gender/genre debate is fully explored in ‘OUSTED’ – a section where the speaker condemns the reigning sexism within literary circles and foresees herself becoming extinct like species, tribes, and ancient civilizations if men continue to ‘oust’ her and her poetry. In this context, Waldman uses the meta-narrative space offered by the epic to situate her poem within the specific context of the modernist tradition

6 In Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion and the Female Epic, Schweizer traces the perpetuation of the epic as a masculine genre through the critical discourse: ‘Bakhtin maintained that epic represented “a world of fathers and of founders of families” (13). In a similar vein, Jorge Luis Borges stated that “the important thing about the epic is a hero – a man who is a pattern for all men” (64)’ (2002: 7).

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and the ‘worldly territories of epic poetry’ (2011: 1), to use Elisa BesheroBondar’s phrase. To do so, the poet includes a personal letter in which Iovis is criticized for the inclusion of autobiographical information within the epic. Reading Waldman’s piece in dialogue with the epic works of Charles Olson, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, the writer of the letter states: You have declared these men/works as the ancestors of IOVIS, and your poem does have this architectonic puzzle aspect as well. But the pieces you use are not really like those in Olson or Pound; somewhat closer to Williams, and even Guy Davenport’s fictions in emotional content. Because your pieces are overwhelmingly personal history, not political or geological history, as the others tend to use. (2011: 294, my emphasis)

Clearly differentiating between Waldman’s ‘emotional’ epic and Pound’s and Olson’s – in his opinion – more political poems, this letter not only attests to the way academia continues to read gender as genre,7 but also draws attention to the spatial ordering of women and female experience in the world. This gendered spatial regime, as Carole Pateman notes, stems from a theoretical discourse based on a ‘division between the public (the social, the political, history) and the private (the personal, the domestic, the familial), which is also a division between the sexes’ (2013: 6). The perpetuation of this division, which dominates the historical spatial ordering of both men and women, is also visible in the construction of literary genres, being part of the ‘[s]ocial practices, state institutions, symbolic representations and cultural artefacts’ (McDowell 2003: 13) that have been shaped by it. In this respect, the absence of Louis Zukofsky’s ‘A’ from the masculine – that is to say ‘political’ – epic writers in the critique of Waldman’s epic is quite relevant. Now studied as one of the most influential twentiethcentury epic poems, A could also be considered to fit into the ‘emotional’ or ‘personal’ category Iovis has been negatively included in. Barry Ahearn stresses, in a precise way, the personal nature of Zukofsky’s epic in the introduction to the 2011 edition:

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For a study of the interrelations between genre, gender and feminism see Mary Eagleton’s ‘Genre and Gender’ (1989).

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Much like Zukofsky’s epic, Waldman’s Iovis is informed by the poet’s life, and its modern ‘architectonic’ construction includes personal correspondence, as well as the voices of friends, relatives, students and other artists, whose dialogues create a collage of the historical, political and personal. Disrupting the public/private, masculine/feminine binaries, in ‘ELEVEN FACES ONE THOUSAND ARMS’, the speaker refers to Zukofsky as ‘the most complete in “A”–12’ (2011: 809), and opens her poem by quoting – and adding comments in brackets – twenty-two verses of the beginning of this movement, as Zukofsky referred to the twenty-four sections in his poem. Here, Zukofsky turns to the story of the genesis to welcome his son Paul into the poem, whose music and presence permeate the movement in much the same way as Waldman’s son does in Iovis.8 Despite Zukofsky’s extensive inclusion of autobiographical details, his position as one of the great epic writers – together with Pound, Olson and Williams – has remained fairly unquestioned, which shows, as the following analysis hopes to demonstrate, that the critique included in Iovis is not based on Waldman’s appropriation of the genre, but solely on her gender. Indeed, the celebration of Zukofsky’s ‘A’–12 in Iovis foregrounds the poet’s situated poetics, manifest in the need to ‘speak out from within her personal narrative’ (xi). This discourse echoes what Susan Friedman has called ‘locational’ feminism, since it is concerned with depicting ‘the position

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In the very first section, ‘ALL IS FULL OF JOVE’, her son is introduced as ‘her guide […] trickster, shape-shifter who both interrupts her & goads her on’ (2011:7). In a personal interview, Waldman specifically highlighted the role of Zukofsky’s son in his epic as an influence on her own approach to the genre. In her own words: ‘His son is so present in his work … and I admire the willingness to include, because some poets are distanced from the poem’ (personal interview, 6 November 2014).

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one occupies, the standpoint from which one speaks, and the location within which one’s agency negotiates’ (2001: 22). In addition to using the epic, a genre already preoccupied with spatial relations, the speaker in Iovis is concerned with locating – but not solidifying – her situation with regard to factors such as gender, genre, nationality, politics and age, among others, to explore how these influence her position in the – literary – world. As a case in point, in the passage that follows the quotation from ‘A’–12, the speaker denounces the detrimental effect of binary oppositions in poetry, stating that she ‘did doubt gender in any passing literary indeterminacy’s irony as an old page […] did doubt itself as myself representing “person” “poet” and as person better dare to be part of the history of my time’ (2011: 810). Claiming back the political dimension of her poem, she situates herself in the lineage of those poets who were concerned with the state of the world, and validates the legitimacy of Iovis with the emergence of new problems: ‘We were preoccupied with the problems of the city-states. Me too, me too. And Hiroshima? And Lebanon? New Orleans? Fallujah?’ (2011: 810). In any case, the question remains whether a female poet, preoccupied like the men were with socio-political issues, is able to use the epic genre to the same effect. This issue is tackled in another excerpt from a personal letter written by the poet and performer Kristin Prevallet – who was at the time taking a class on Charles Olson taught by Robert Creeley. After celebrating the epic’s ability to depict ‘how one goes about bringing one’s BEING into the poem [as well as] the complex intersection of mythology, history, and personal fluctuations in life’ (2011: 370), Prevallet denounces Creeley’s gender-bias: he refused to consider Iovis an epic poem on account of Waldman’s ‘ego’ – merely understood here as the incorporation of her autobiographical persona into the poem. Since the male epic writers Waldman invokes were also – to various degrees – personal,9 the writer rightly complains that

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‘The Pisan Cantos’ are often analysed as the most personal of all the cantos in Pound, as he wrote them while imprisoned in Italy and with very limited access to books. In much the same way, neither Williams in Paterson nor Olson in The Maximus Poems excise their autobiographical personae. Williams, for instance, writes: ‘I decided there would be four books following the course of the river whose life seemed more and more to resemble my own life as I more and more thought of it’ (1992: xiii).

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‘what was at stake here was not ego but gender’ (2011: 370). As Prevallet puts it elsewhere, ‘[w]hy is the masculine ego an explorable space and the feminine ego a restricted one?’ (2008: 145). Subverting this bias, in Iovis the speaker’s personal experience is essential – rather than detrimental – to the development of the epic quest. The text is not only informed by the actual or metaphorical travels analysed in the first part of this chapter, but also literally composed of the textual tokens and remnants of those trips. In ‘WHY THAT’S A BLADE CAN FLOAT’, she writes: The poet has by now travelled a distance, spanning mental universe, moving cross country, moving cross town and comes to rest with her box of scraps, notes, journals, memorabilia, letters, unfinished versions, her major task continuing unsettled at her feet. She spreads the documents about her, and bows her head. She feels a burden to sustain the plan. The society is crumbling around her. (2011: 278)

The ‘scraps, notes, journals, memorabilia, letters’ (2011: 278) – while being the direct products of her experience – forge a strong link between Iovis and its modern – again, mostly male – predecessors. In Waldman’s epic, the rearrangement of ‘the chaotic fragments’ (1996: 112) – using Franco Moretti’s term10 – further disrupts the genre/gender debate as it often engages in explicit political dialogues. Indeed, a closer look at the fragments that helped create the ‘architectonic puzzle aspect’ (Waldman 2011: 294) of the epic – those that were in the first letter interpreted as ‘overwhelmingly personal history, not political or geopolitical history’ (2011: 294) – effectively exposes the lack of foundation of similar critiques. Even when using documents of a strict personal nature – such as private correspondence – the letters chosen often transcend the narrow reach of 10

Moretti focuses solely on works authored by men – James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, among others. The only reference to women writers and the epic genre in the whole book is the following footnote: ‘The term hero, here, is not male by chance or mere habit. The original interweaving of epic and war did indeed relegate female figures to a marginal role, which has persisted to our own day. Joyce’s Penelope is fortunate enough to have a tremendous monologue – but she is restricted to the book’s last chapter. It is because of this symbolic imbalance, I think, that European women writers have always preferred novels to epic story-telling’ (1996: 14).

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the imposed ‘emotional’ label. In the context of the epic, they act as alternative versions of history that contest the dominant, patriarchal, recording of events. Set out against – or alongside – the ‘official’ version, these (hi) stories are counter-spaces potentially uncontaminated by the ‘mechanism of concealment’. In this light, family letters become alternative channels to report war, private means of communication turned into a medium to talk about ‘what the newspapers may not have told you’ (2011: 823). As such, the archiving and rearranging of these pieces of ‘counter-memory’ (2011: 831) in the space of the epic is not an incidental action, but a calculated strategy to contest the authoritarian manufacture of history. Much in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, Waldman ‘brush[es] history against the grain’ (Benjamin 1968: 257), recovering the stories of the less powerful and placing them in dialogue with the historical construct of the victors. This position imbues thoroughly the poet’s approach to the epic genre; she shifts from Virgil’s arma virumque cano11 – ‘I sing of arms and of man’ – to ‘lacrimare, lacrimatus’ (2011: 529), a transition guided by ‘the travails of weeping’ (2011: 529) of those normally left out of the scope of the epic. In addition to the shifts characteristic of the modern epic tradition – ‘“Before-and-After” is transformed into an “Alongside” and history thus becomes a gigantic metaphor for geography’ (Moretti 1996: 52) – Waldman’s use of fragments echoes Benjamin’s monumental study of nineteenth century Paris in The Arcades Project. In Iovis, Waldman’s emphasis on ‘=Montage as resistance=’ (2011: 834), results in the creation of vast folders which serve as a source to investigate patriarchy. The reorganization of the fragments in the epic problematizes the notion of a linear conception of historical time. Although Waldman’s understanding of montage is not as radical as Benjamin’s,12 Iovis avoids an authoritative voice that frames the interpretation of the fragments, being the reader the one in charge of

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As Waldman puts it: ‘I sing of war, but not of its glory. I sing down war’ (2006: 90). He wrote: ‘Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no values, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them’ (1999: 460).

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recreating the text’s meaning13 – even if the poet risks making none at all: ‘is this voice speaking merely to a specialized audience? / can you hear me in the back? / down under? behind a screen’ (2011: 813). Nevertheless, just as Susan Buck-Mors reinterprets and reconstructs Benjamin’s archive in The Dialectics of Seeing (1989), one can similarly create meaningful structures and patterns from the fragmented Iovis by paying attention to the repetition of concepts. Indeed, fuelled by the heroine’s own emphasis on investigative poetics/ politics, the connection between the different fragments is, if not guided, then suggested by recurring themes throughout the trilogy, such as the cyclical nature of war, the political and social perpetuation of violence and the subordination of women and other oppressed collectives to patriarchal control. In addition to using personal correspondence extensively, the poet rearranges whole sections from newspaper articles which, either directly deal with the poet’s main concerns, or are shaped and modified to do so. For instance, in the section ‘AEITOLOGICAL ONES’, the poet builds a whole paragraph using headlines or sentences from articles published in The New York Times – the majority from 5 June 1990. Pasted into the same conversation, the scraps strike up a globalized, transnational, conversation about war: Bush and Colombian President to assess drug wars today, Canada premiers try to save pact, Dubcek rebukes Slovak protestors who rebuked Havel, Japanese feel quite ready for a visit from Gorbachev, White House sees aura from summit, in Europe few are cheering, Summit failed to narrow dispute on Afghanistan, Santiago: Allende’s widow meditates anew … (2011: 191)

Creating a complicated political dialogue – reminiscent of John Dos Passos’s ‘Newsreels’ sections in the USA trilogy14 – the different headlines expose the interrelation of global politics and the media’s manipulation in 13 14

The narrative pieces at the beginning of each section help, as the poet puts it, ‘track the field-poet’s steps as they thread through a maze’ (2011: 3), but do not necessarily explain the cohesion or overall meaning of the fragments. In his trilogy USA, John Dos Passos had already blended together similar documents in the ‘Newsreel’ sections. These, as Juan A. Suárez writes, ‘are collages of found

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presenting them as isolated issues. A similar technique is employed in ‘TO BLUNT THE KNIFE’, where the speaker condemns Jove for ‘turn[ing] a blind eye / basta, basta’ (2011: 363) and for ignoring the interconnection of related events. To do so, Waldman pastes together two articles published in The New York Times in 1993; the first one relates the arrest of eight white supremacists who were planning a massacre at an African Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Quoting from the article, the poet notes that ‘[d] uring a search of five residences, numerous weapons were seized, including machine guns, as well as Nazi paraphernalia, including swastikas & portraits of Hitler’ (2011: 364). To complicate what Jove would define as an isolated incident, this article is pasted together with ‘Street Guns: a Consumer’s Guide’ – written a few months prior to the previous one – in which guns are referred to as if they were fashion accessories.15 With this cutting-andpasting, the poet creates a new text that exposes not only America’s cult of violence, but also its hypocrisy towards the thousands of annual deaths by gunshot. As an example of the consequences of this paradox – the condemnation of armed, violent, groups and the encouragement to purchase guns for personal use – the poet includes an excerpt of an anti-gun protest letter relating the murder of a sixteen-year-old exchange student shot to death on his way to a Halloween party by a man who allegedly thought the student was trespassing with criminal intent when he mistakenly knocked on the gunman’s door. In the rearranged space of the epic, this accident – which took place in 1992 – becomes the ‘chronicle of a death foretold’; it also starts an inconclusive discussion about gun control in the USA that ‘Anne-Pacing-the-Floor-More-Vigorously-Now’ (2011: 365) – an alter ego of the heroine – joins with her own letter to request that the president

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texts, including snatches of songs, journalistic prose, political speeches, headlines, and ticker-tape news releases’ (1999: 43). See for instance, the sexualized language used in the following description: ‘Snap open the dark, gleaming weapon’s well-oiled cylinder, feel the silken weight of cartridges sliding into their chambers – the elegance and sensuous simplicity make the cranky semiautomatic’s advantages seem marginal’ ().

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‘reassess the easy availability of guns in this country and in doing so help prevent the thousands of similar incidents …’ (2011: 365). To conclude, in Iovis, the figure of the poet/heroine fuses with that of the archeologist, or researcher, who complicates simplistic historical discourses by stressing the interconnections of fragments and the multilayered quality of reality. This, as Edward Soja (1989) writes, drawing on John Berger’s work, is central to the reassertion of space in a (post)modern landscape where ‘[w]e can no longer depend on a story-line unfolding sequentially, an ever-accumulating history marching straight forward in plot and denouement, for too much is happening against the grain of time, too much is continually traversing the story-line laterally’ (23). In Iovis, the extensive use of fragments and their rearrangement within the textual space of the epic implicitly eschew the linear (re)construction of history and convey instead the intersecting journeys and heterogeneous spaces that form human history. This history is duly framed outside of what Mikhail Bakhtin described as the ‘absolute past’ (1981: 15) of the epic, a past that is ‘monochromic’ (1981: 15) and ‘lacks any relativity, that is, any gradual, purely temporal progressions that might connect it with the present’ (1981: 15). Quite the opposite, Iovis is set in the continuing, ever-changing, space of contemporaneity, where the heroine’s poetics becomes a ‘[c]ontinued examination – investigating, gathering, tasting, participating in all its hues’ (Waldman 2011: xiv), rather than an heroic act with an attainable goal. In this regard, even if on some level the epic constitutes a remapping of the world,16 the heroine in Iovis runs away from absolute constructions and conceptualizations of space since, to do so, would mean perpetuating Jove’s autarchy. Much like Henri Lefebvre’s organic social space – made up of ‘[g]reat movements, vast rhythms, immense waves [… that] collide and ‘interfere’ with one another’ (1991: 87) – Waldman’s epic is not a fixed cartographic projection, but a reminder of the constant need to 16

‘Create your own country: to make the energies dance. Then rearrange the chairs, books, molecules, garden, tend lively phones & phonemes. Scramble the parts writ on buses, planes, on random scraps, on top of newsprint, sung into a machine, screamed into the void – now gather herein to create ongoing orderly chaos’ (Waldman 2011: 342).

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negotiate, reinvent and hybridize the real, imagined, and literary spaces in which we live.

Bibliography Ahearn, Barry. (2011). ‘About “A”’. In L. Zukofsky, A, pp. vii-xix. New York: A New Directions Book. Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. BAKHTIN, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Baring, A., and Cashford, J. (1991). The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. London: Viking. Barret Browning, E. (2008). Aurora Leigh. New York: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, W. (1968). ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. In H. Arendt (ed.), Illuminations, pp. 253–64, trans. H. Arendt and H. Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Benjamin, W., and Tiedemann, R. (1999). The Arcades Project, trans. H. Eiland and K. McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Beshero-Bondar, E. (2011). Women, Epic, and Transition in British Romanticism. Lanham, MD: University of Delaware Press. Buck-Morss, S. (1989). The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Dos Passos, J. (1996). U. S. A. The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. Eagleton, M. (1989). ‘Gender and Genre’. In C. Hanson (ed.), Re-reading the Short Story, pp. 55–88. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Friedman, S. S. (2001). ‘Locational Feminism: Gender, Cultural Geographies, and Geopolitical Literacy’. In M. DeKoven (ed.), Feminist Locations: Global and Local, Theory and Practice, pp. 13–36. New Jersey: Rutgers University Press. H. D. (1974). Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions Books. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell. McDowell, L. (2003). ‘Place and Space’. In M. Eagleton (ed.), A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, pp. 11–31. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Massey, D. (1996). Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Moretti, F. (1996). Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Q. Horae. London: Verso.

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Olson, C. (1985). The Maximus Poems. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pateman, C. (2013). ‘Introduction: The Theoretical Subversiveness of Feminism’. In C. Pateman and E. Grosz (eds), Feminist Challenges: Social and Political Theory, pp. 1–12. New York: Routledge. Pound, E. (1996). The Cantos. New York: New Directions Books. Prevallet, K. (2008). ‘Kristin Prevallet on Anne Waldman’. In A. Greenberg and R. Zucker (eds), Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections, pp. 171–82. Iowa: University of Iowa Press. Rich, A. (1994). ‘Notes towards a Politics of Location’. In A. Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985, pp. 210–31. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Schweizer, B. (2002). Rebecca West: Heroism, Rebellion, and Female Epic. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Schweizer, B. (2006). Approaches to the Anglo and American Female Epic: 1621–1982. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited. Skempis, M., and Ziogas, I. (eds) (2014). Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Soja, E. W. (1989). Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso. Suárez, J. A. (1999). ‘John Dos Passos’s USA and Left Documentary Film in the 1930s: The Cultural Politics of “Newsreel” and “The Camera Eye”’, American Studies in Scandinavia 31 (1), pp. 43–67. Waldman, A. (2001). ‘Epic & Performance’. In A. Waldman (ed.), Vow to Poetry: Essays, Interviews & Manifestos, pp. 311–18. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Waldman, A. (2003). Dark Arcana: Afterimage or Glow. Chester, NY: Heaven Bone Press. Waldman, A. (2006). Interview by Matthew Cooperman. ‘Rhizomic Poetics: A Conversation with Anne Waldman’. In A. Waldman (ed.), Outrider: Essays, Poems, Interviews, pp. 64–96. Albuquerque, NM: La Alameda Press. Waldman, A. (2011). The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press. Waldman, A. (2014). Personal Interview. New York, 6 November 2014. West, R. (1994). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey though Yugoslavia. New York: Penguin Books. Williams, C. W. (1992). Paterson. New York: New Directions Book.

Tomás Monterrey

12 The Literary Geography of a Border Zone: The Canary Islands in Ewing Campbell’s Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments

abstract The notion of border raises ideas of division, power and hybrid identities. Yet in Ewing Campbell’s (1940–) Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments (2007), borders are seen as intersecting areas overcharged with the energy of manifold encounters and, therefore, with the dissolution of the commonplace and the emergence of the unexpected. The Canary Islands offer Campbell a geographical insular territory in the Atlantic intersection between Europe and Spain, Moslem North Africa and the Americas, a space ready for literary signification for the writer and free of literary meaning for his readership. This chapter attempts to analyse Campbell’s construction of spatiality in his Canary Islands stories. With the help of theories such as Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception, Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatics and nomadology, Lefebvre’s mirror and mirage effect, and Soja’s postmodern geography, the discussion will show how the Canaries provide Campbell with suitable territory to explore the politics of space.

Ewing Campbell’s narratives concentrate on how characters gain deeper insight or self-knowledge; however, the title of his short story collection Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments indicates the importance of space in his fiction. ‘Afoot’ denotes the human body and movement, subjectivity and performance. Campbell’s narrators are indeed literally or metaphorically afoot. He seems to prefer first-person narrators who come across situations similar to their own, or events they have personally experienced or observed like faithful witnesses or reporters. ‘Afoot’ also implies topography and movement. Every story is built around somebody (a migrant, a walker, a tourist, etc.) or something (an object, an animal, a letter that may or may not reach its addressee, the wind, etc.) that moves – or dashes in – altering

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the normal course of events, or triggering a sort of (self-) revelation. On the other hand, ‘Garden of Enchantments’ suggests an alternative name for the epithet ‘Garden of Hesperides’, often attributed to the Canary Islands. Ewing Campbell, a Texas writer, former professor at Texas A&M University, and author of a book about Raymond Carver’s short stories, visited Tenerife in 1997 as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of La Laguna, where he taught a creative writing course to postgraduate students. During his three-month stay, his literary imagination was deeply impacted by the geographical and cultural peculiarities of the islands, which inspired five short stories and stimulated the revision of four others to introduce references about them.1 Campbell describes the Canary Islands sites with the faithful authenticity of a travel writer, while at the same time providing characters and plots with a suitable spatial background – both symbolic and naturalistic – to heighten the meaning of the story beyond the mere detailed description. However, he pursues neither a realistic nor a romanticized presentation of the islands. The golden apples grown in the Hesperides have become enchantments, spell-bound illusions, which sometimes perform a distortion of reality in borderland zones (Tex-Mex or the islands), and sometimes construct a sense of reality out of the uncontrollable forces and energies operating upon the individual. Unlike the mythical Hesperides, Campbell’s literary garden does not produce the apples of eternal youth; his characters do not portray young beauties or brave heroes in the classical sense of the terms. Instead, his stories focus on people – mostly men – who bravely bear the burden that either their decisions or destiny have brought upon them, and who refuse to become losers to fruitlessness and futility. The Canary Islands are an 1

Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments contains thirteen stories previously published in different journals and reviews. The five short stories set in the Canary Islands are ‘Two Men Do Not Dream the Same Dream’, ‘Flint and Cochineal’, ‘Gauloises à la Carte’, ‘Levanto’ and ‘Floaters’. The four revised short stories are ‘Piranesi’s Labor’, ‘A Room at the Jacaranda in Agadir’ (also published as ‘The Forty and Eight’ in Piranesi’s Dream and as ‘The Room in the Driskil’ when it first appeared in Kenyon Review), ‘The Bridge of the Inca’ and ‘In the Rambla de Cataluña’. The other four stories (‘Tauromaquia’, ‘Documenting Praxedis’, ‘Maundy Thursday’ and ‘Sor Juana Love’) take place in the Tex-Mex border zone.

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accidental setting for his fictional project. However, he certainly exploits their impressive geology and natural heritage, as well as their privileged position in Atlantic history and routes. Their greatest appeal, however, stems from their geographical insular location, which both intersects with and interconnects Spain, Moslem North Africa, and pre/Hispanic America, and which has seldom been explored in literature. They thus retain an unusual purity of signification for writers. Rather than an Atlantic region, Campbell conceives the Canary Islands as an oceanic border platform or dramatic stage – a ‘representational space’ in Henri Lefebvre’s taxonomy (1991: 41–2) – ready for literary signification. Campbell is primarily interested in exploring how external factors and energies, as well as inner drives, alter or disrupt the normal course of events in his characters’ lives; but his view of the Canaries as an insular border zone intersecting three world cultures invites an in-depth study of the politics of space in his short stories about the islands. This Atlantic archipelago grants enough freedom to his creative talent, once he is liberated from the restrictions imposed by setting fiction in locations saturated with meaning. Therefore, this chapter aims to study Campbell’s rendition of the Canary Islands’ space as a border zone where he investigates aspects of the politics of space, in particular human beings’ limitations, resistance to victimization and struggle for survival against a complex grid of social spatiality, violence, personal drives and supernatural forces. For this purpose, and for the sake of clarity and coherence, my discussion will proceed, story by story, from the one dealing with perception to the one concerned with chance: that is, from the more to the less empirical. The main character of ‘Floaters’, police commandant Dagoberto Gama, suffers from a retinal disorder known as ‘Muscae volitantes’ (Campbell 2007: 123)2 – the ‘floaters’ of the title. When the optician examines his eyes with a bright beam, he feels the doctor is accessing his innermost life, like when he would confess his sins to the priest as a child. Dagoberto’s reflection on this duality contrasts with his interlocutor at La Fragua restaurant, Monsignor Duarte, who metaphorically feeds on the world and on nature. 2

Further quotations from Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments will be parenthetical referred as EC after the citation.

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Duarte is always shown enjoying the savoury dishes (songbirds, oxtail, and octopus a la gallega) cooked by Chucho Lavapiés. ‘Floaters’ is a story about sensations, perceptions and wrong judgements that partly illustrates Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical argumentation in his Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty challenges both empiricism and intellectualism for neglecting the individual’s sensorial activity involved in the process of perception. Instead, he accepts Gestalt theory; but, on defending his phenomenological approach, he contends that ‘the objective thinking of classical logic and philosophy will have to be questioned, the categories of the world laid aside, the alleged self-evidence of realism placed in doubt, in the Cartesian sense, and a true “phenomenological reduction” undertaken’ (1962: 49). Dagoberto embodies the modes of perception challenged by MerleauPonty. Despite his retinal problem, he is endowed with a strong awareness of place. The sights of Tenerife and La Laguna are described from his empiricist point of view and knowledge. For example, when he imagines people strolling on the shore of the ancient lagoon from which the city took its name, and which, once dried up, has become ‘a district of lush gardens and walled villas […] and sheltered successful merchants, lawyers, investors, and entrepreneurs of all sorts where water used to lap at the edge of town’ (EC 114).3 Besides, as police commandant, Dagoberto has acquired an admirable capacity to notice trivial signs and traces upon the urban surface, usually overlooked by ordinary pedestrians, and is able to reason about them: The thought occurred to him then that the quality of life for a town of any size is visible in its streets because potholes and cracked sidewalks signal failing economies and hard times ahead. […] Traffic, room to walk or not, parking spaces recorded, in part,

3

This is the only urban area of La Laguna mentioned by Campbell in the story. While the transformation of this spot throughout the course of history is shown through Dagoberto’s perception, there is also an attempt at associating the economic status of its residents with the (ever-mythical) origin of the city’s name. Campbell is very accurate in his observation, since nothing in the text suggests he knew that this nowabsent lagoon was a sacred place for the Guanches (the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of Tenerife) and therefore forbidden to be approached.

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the facts of human lives because where it was necessary to keep an eye on the ground, you could be sure that solitude and loneliness would leave their marks in a residue of soot, debris, and dung. The signs were always there in the need to watch where you stepped – no matter the number of attractive façades, carved wooden balconies, expensive window hangings, or elaborate doorways hewn from ancient travertine. A rule by which to measure the public weal, in good times or bad, and La Laguna could not be excepted […]. (EC 113–14)

Dagoberto Gama’s scientific experience of the world will be useless – and, in fact, will betray him – when he wrongly deduces that Monsignor was the owner of a mastiff that had defecated in the entrance to Chucho’s restaurant and had damaged his coat. Monsigor was the treasurer of the Presa Canario Society and had written a scientific article about this local breed. Dagoberto’s retinal condition suggests the problems of partiality or inattentiveness attached to his empirical mode of perception, which leads him to false associations and conclusions, epitomizing Merleau-Ponty’s objections to the intellectualist principles of interpreting experience from preexisting notions. Later on, Monsignor Duarte raises the dog incident with Dagoberto and remarks on the difficulty of finding an effective solution to perplexing cases such as this. Here Campbell creates a highly ironic tension between them. Whereas the police commandant believed he had done Monsignor a favour by persuading Chucho not to take legal action against him, Monsignor intended to make Dagoberto’s situation uncomfortable because, as he informed him, the mastiff was nobody’s dog and was therefore a case in the police commandant’s line of duty. Moreover, Monsignor reproaches Dagoberto for ignoring the fact that the mastiff spent nights at the university gate and followed Mijo’s terrier, ‘marking every place as his own once the other dog has moved along’ (EC 114). Whereas Dagoberto tries to reach truth through evidence and theorizes about neglected urban signs, Monsignor learns from the actual object and is able to explain the causes of some of those visible urban marks. He obtains knowledge of the world bodily, through subjective interaction with things. As Merleau-Ponty stated: ‘I become involved in things with my body, they co-exist with me as an incarnate subject, and this life among things has nothing in common with the elaboration of scientifically conceived objects’ (1962: 185).

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Perception is also a key element in ‘Two Men Do Not Dream the Same Dream’ (‘Two Men […]’ henceforward). The opening story of Afoot is set in Nuestra Señora de África, the marketplace building in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. At the beginning the narrator explains how a long period of drought had altered the island economy, and how people started to grow nopals and to farm cochineal, an insect from which a precious carmine tincture for textiles is obtained. Like his Tex-Mex story ‘Tauromaquia’, ‘Two Men […]’ attests to Campbell’s fascination for marketplaces, sites throbbing with popular culture as opposed to the official culture, as Bakhtin described the marketplace of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: ‘[It] was the center of all that is unofficial; it enjoyed a certain extraterritoriality in a world of official order and official ideology, it always remained “with the people”’ (1984: 153–4). ‘Two Men […]’ focuses on the reactions, both inside and outside the marketplace, following the extraordinary event of a carp fish being heard to speak. It occurred in the cellar of Don Yitzak Goldemberg’s fish shop when the apprentice fish-cutter Nicolás Micaelo ‘raised his truncheon to club the first carp of the day’ (EC 1). Nicolás heard only a human voice. Merleau-Ponty (1962: 341) states that a hallucination ‘has no place in the “geographical world” […] but in the individual “landscape”’. However, it ceased to be a hallucination when the carp spoke a second time, and Don Yitzak understood its message, in perfect Hebrew, announcing ‘[t]he end is near’ (EC 3) and commanding him to pray and study the Torah. Although the supernatural experience is shared by two people, the event is hard to believe and contrary to Campbell’s usual realistic aims. His fictional worlds tend to be void of weird elements and told through a consistent external perspective (reinforced in this tale by a third-person narrator). What sort of story is this? Though empirically unbelievable, in March 2003, a case of a Hebrew-speaking carp in a New York market was reported in the media (BBC News 2003). Campbell made use of the factual press release as hypotext (using Genette’s taxonomy)4 for his story 4

Gérard Genette (1997: 5) defined hypertextuality as ‘any relationship uniting a text B ([…] the hypertext) to an earlier text A ([…] the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of a commentary.’

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and relocated the event to Tenerife. He reproduced the original New York Christian and Jewish pair at the fish shop, as well as their speculations about the significance of the wonder. This is not a magic realism story because they attempt to elucidate its meaning, and the fish was once used as an icon to represent divinity in both religions: ‘Dagon’ (EC 4) for the Hasidic Jewish sect, and ‘ichthys’ (EC 7) for the early Christians. Like the Ecuadorian employee at the New York market, Nicolás believes it is the devil, whereas Don Yitzak intuits it is ‘a harbinger of good times ahead’ (EC 5); and, like in New York, the fame of the speaking fish spread like wildfire in Tenerife, although they had both agreed to keep it a secret. The prodigy of the marketplace attracted masses ever eager to believe in miracles, witchcraft, curative powers and superstitions. A family of six suffering from ‘a perpetual ringing in their ears … [came] to seek silence from the astonishing carp’ (EC 6), and ‘[t]he alcalde of Vilafor led an entourage to Santa Cruz after the town well went dry. […] He had a petition signed by every adult in that mountain community who could write. It pleaded for divine intervention and a restoration of water because the town earned most of its income selling to visitors who swigged from bottles what they shunned from the tap’ (EC 6). But modern marketplaces are no longer the medieval kernels of popular culture that Bakhtin discussed in his treatise on Rabelais (1997). They are under the strict supervision of local authorities. Nonetheless, Campbell displays the tension between popular culture and official control. In fact, as commercial and service dealings in and around the marketplace increased dramatically, the island government sent an inspector, who eventually ordered closure on the suspicion that visitors were being illegally charged to see the carp. However, the market soon reopened when a delegation of merchants threatened ‘to withhold the mordisco they paid officials who, in turn, depended on this delicate morsel to pay for their mansions and wooden balconies’ (EC 8). In the source event, the capitalist order prevailed because the fish was sold to an ordinary customer. In Campbell’s story, ‘the remains of the incarnate spirit’ (EC 8) entered the realm of popular culture when it was purchased by a travelling-carnival impresario to be added to his ‘bill of wonders’ (EC 8). The entire island of Tenerife seems to be permeated by the power of popular belief, since the

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very night the carp was sold and taken to the southern tourist resort of Los Cristianos, it rained heavily for several days. The prodigious coincidence of the prophetic fish and the end of the drought prompted Don Yitzak’s intuition that ‘God had sent the carp to end the long drought and the showman from the carnival to relieve him of his burden and the pain in his head’ (EC 9). Intuition has traditionally been related to popular culture, to a pre-scientific path to knowledge.5 Campbell, who rejects fantasy and superstition, allows such popular interpretations a certain potentiality for truth, at least in his fiction. Merleau-Ponty (1962: 294) said that ‘[i]f myths, dreams and illusion are to be possible, the apparent and the real must remain ambiguous in the subject as in the object’. The title ‘Two Men Do Not Dream the Same Dream’ – borrowed from the BBC News report of the story of the speaking fish (2003) – highlights this ambiguity and the latent, almost imperceptible space of popular understanding and expression ready to emerge when rationality fails to give answers. The opening story of Afoot also establishes Campbell’s fictional cosmology. Tenerife is not only the meeting point of people of different races and nationalities, but also of creatures acting as hybrids, or quasi-objects, between the human and the non-human. From Campbell’s pragmatic viewpoint, these creatures stand above the human because they provide humans with benefits (for example, the parasite insect cochineal which brought wealth to the island, but needs special care and cannot survive heavy rainfalls or storms) or with noxious consequences like Dionisio’s syphilis (EC 5). On the top of this pyramid, Campbell places non-human energies like twists of fate and chaos (represented in ‘Two Men […]’ by the drought and the rain and their respective effects), political repression and violence, and criminality, but also hope and providence. Although Campbell’s universe seems to be governed by the same dynamics that activated the characteristic worlds of naturalistic fiction, he does not indulge in the decay and annihilation of the protagonist; rather, he prefers to assert the providence 5

Phenomenology elevated the role of intuition in consciousness, as Levinas (1995: 93–4) has argued: ‘It is in intuitive life that we must look for the origin of being, and the concept of intuition is wide enough to account for all the forms of beings and to respect the originality of each’.

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of nature, represented in the opening story by the wonder of the speaking carp as a good omen, announcing the end of the long drought. The marketplace of Santa Cruz is revisited in ‘Gauloises à la Carte’. It is a story about State violence against a Moroccan in Zouave trousers, who earns a living peddling single cigarettes. It takes place in the daily tarpstall market area (mercadillo) off the building of Nuestra Señora de África, which now represents a sedentary space with established merchants. The multicultural atmosphere of the mercadillo is described by the unnamed first-person narrator as an extension of the cosmopolitan cities of northwest Africa: ‘Haggling voices filled the air. Spanish, French, Arabic merged in the din of bartering […] and merging, words lost their meanings. The effect was hypnotic’ (EC 30). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 381) made a distinction between sedentary space and nomad space: ‘sedentary space is striated, by walls, enclosures, and roads between enclosures, while nomad space is smooth, marked only by “traits” that are effaced and displaced with the trajectory’. Even though the French philosophers do warn about not linking their notion of the nomad with contemporary illegal immigration or with people on the fringe of society, their theoretical proposal partly helps with an interpretation of Campbell’s off-marketplace spatiality because the concepts they use to elaborate their argumentation are taken from historical social phenomena. Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 380) established a difference between the migrant and the nomad: ‘the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen, or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point only as a consequence and as a factual necessity.’ They considered a third category, the itinerant or ambulant, like the artisan or transhumant, describing those who ‘follow a flow of matter’ (1987: 409), like carpenters follow the grain of wood. ‘Gauloises à la Carte’ is constructed around several stories of people who move: itinerants, like groups of traders from Gambia and Senegal; migrants, like the narrator’s friend Saïd Benhallam; and Omar the Zouave, the narrator himself and the fourteenth-century historiographer Ibn Khaldun, who exhibit elements of the nomadic identity in their respective ways. The emphasis on space and mobility is also evinced in the number of places

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mentioned (four out of the seven Canary Islands, as well as other places in Africa, Asia, Spain and Europe) in relation to the activities carried out by the impressive gallery of characters in a 4000-word story. ‘Gauloises à la Carte’ also explores the difficulty faced by an ordinary middle-class citizen – represented by the narrator’s point of view – when trying to succeed in perceiving the spatiality of the nomadic species and their practices. The narrator enjoys visiting the market zone and talking with Benhallam, with whom he grew friendly. The narrator seems a sort of flâneur as described by Baudelaire (2010: 9), since most of the story consists of his impressions of the scenes he witnesses; however, the exoticism of the trading activities and the traders’ existential trajectories escape his understanding. Like Dagoberto in ‘Floaters’, the narrator relies on appearances to access knowledge. He can see Omar the Zouave carrying cigarettes of different brands (Gitane, Gauloise, Café-Noir Egyptian) and occasionally selling them to passersby. At the end of the story the police approach him, examine the content of his boxes and ask for his papers. Eventually the Zouave is hustled off and arrested (EC 35). The narrator shuddered at the sight and could not figure out what had happened. He learnt from Benhallam that the Zouave was passing Gueules off as French Gauloises, and realized the importance of ‘the [brand] name in faint blue sans serif capitals’ (EC 30). This draws attention to two key issues in the story for the purpose of this chapter. The first is the narrator’s sudden awareness of assorted signs, often overlooked by people but significant for the target few, producing an intricate tapestry of non-official, rhizomatic codes, which are generated in this case by itinerants and ambulants within the space they reterritorialize temporarily. As he reflects, when listening to Benhallam’s life story: ‘Ethnicity, origins, family, setting – contexts determined the symbolic means of distinction. It produced a grammar of signs I could scarcely hope to appreciate or understand. But there was much about me Saïd could not understand’ (EC 32–3). The second refers to an incidental glimpse into pre-capitalist spatiality when the narrator first saw the Zouave peddling smokes and felt it was ‘like a trip back to the time tobacconists offered loose cigarettes by the weight or five in a paper to laborers and boatmen’ (EC 29). The pre-capitalist epoch that the narrator recalls and that

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the Zouave keeps on practising contrasts with the capitalist spatiality the peddler challenges by selling cigarettes without the right trademark printed on them. It is precisely the absence of the trademark on the products he offers that determines the offensive nature of his dealings and of his very presence in Western spatiality. When Benhallam asks the narrator if he comes to the market for profit, he becomes embarrassed at learning that it is just for the sake of travelling. The narrator’s nomadic nature is hinted at just in the opening sentence when he mentions the ‘tiff with the Guardia Civil over an unstamped page in my passport’ (EC 29). Although he does not overtly reveal his reasons for travelling, it is suggested that he does it – like a ‘spiritual citizen of the universe’ (Baudelaire 2010: 7) – to imbibe new sceneries, lifestyles and unexpected conditions of human existence, and ultimately for a deeper understanding of his own – a nomadic trajectory toward self-knowledge. Benhallam dissented from the narrator’s urge to move for the sake of travelling. Instead, he declared his accepted reasons for leaving his home land: ‘a man may cross the desert or the sea to improve his lot, to fulfill his duty of his hajj, to escape poverty and oppression’ (33). Benhallam illustrated his views by introducing the story of the fourteenth-century historiographer Ibn Khaldun, who became the Sultan of Granada’s envoy at the court of Pedro I the Cruel, but later suffered disgrace, imprisonment and exile. Still, he lived to serve Tamerlane and died in Egypt when the Canary Islands were being conquered by the first Europeans. According to Deleuze and Guattari, it was also Ibn Khaldun who, besides contrasting bedouinism with sedentariness, defined ‘the nomad war machine by: families or lineages PLUS esprit de corps’ (1987: 366). In ‘Gauloises à la Carte’, the mercadillo serves Campbell to explore the shape of the boundless nomadic space and its conflicts with the striated space of the State, and in the process to foreground the myriad of overlooked, nomadic spatial signs, in order to expand his creative universe. The main characters of ‘In the Rambla de Cataluña’, Jackson and Rexy, are a young American couple on holiday in Barcelona, before moving to southern Spain to catch the ferryboat for Tangier. The Canary Islands are only mentioned in a reference to a restaurant. In this story, Campbell divides the centre of the Catalan metropolis into two major districts: the

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Eixample and the old town, each with their own spatiality and both topped by Gaudi’s monumental Sagrada Familia standing as an axis-mundi of the human microcosm beneath. Whereas at the Eixample dining room the welldressed couple received extremely courteous treatment from the waiter, in the old town Jackson was robbed of his money by a Gipsy pickpocket, just on leaving the bank where he had exchanged some traveller’s cheques. The difference in social behaviour between both areas is conveyed with metaphors of urban fauna: the image of cats quickly emerging from their shelters in the Eixample to munch the scraps a woman brought for them contrasts with the old town birds that stain the man’s jacket with their droppings.6 Mainstream tourist and central leisure areas (unlike ventures in suburban districts or the politics of urban-life scenes) have appealed little to literary criticism or to Marxist-oriented studies of space and geography. Campbell reinforced the couple’s bourgeois, middle-class allegiance to the State order by remarking the good quality of their clothes and by insisting on their lawful, properly status – passport and traveller’s cheques – thereby providing a traditionally State-regulated identity and a guarantee of cash beyond national borders. Though foreigners, Jackson and Rexy are at the opposite extreme from Omar the Zouave, whose position in this tale is occupied by the urban Gipsies. Campbell does not manifest racial prejudices, except for the pickpocket stereotype that has stigmatized this nomadic people in Western societies. According to the regimes of violence proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, this theft belongs to the category of ‘struggle’ (1987: 447, original emphasis), or primitive violence, inherent to human nature and prior to agricultural societies, whereas in ‘Gauloises à la Carte’ the peddler is the victim of the State: ‘violence only against the violent, against “criminals” – against primitives, against nomads – in order that peace may reign’ (1987: 448). The exotic Moroccan setting of ‘A Room at the Jacaranda in Agadir’ has improved this third version of the story over the first two (‘The Forty and Eight’ and ‘The Room in the Driskil’) set in Texas. This one-letter epistolary short story deals with free mobility across borders, simultaneity, 6

These grotesque images may also hint at the consequences of human intervention in the order of nature.

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a quasi-secret society, and a whiff of hermeticism and esoteric lore. In his letter, Clavijo informs his friend Justo of a strange event. On missing his copy of Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan while he was removing his books from storage crates, he searched for a new copy at rare and out-ofprint book shops while on holiday in Agadir. One day, he got up from a deep siesta for the unexpected visit of a certain Dr Abumeron from La Société des Quarante Hommes et Huit Chevaux, an international society for Welsh writer Arthur Machen’s work. Abumeron’s appearance as a Moroccan in Western clothes, and speaking Spanish with an American accent, embodies the same tripartite, polygonal intersection of continents and cultures that Campbell found in the Canary Islands. As Abumeron informed Clavijo, the society’s name derived from the boxcars used in France at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and its raison d’être was to withdraw Machen’s books from circulation. This unusual aim led Clavijo to think that Machen’s works could offer new and threatening evidence about the Affair and raise unwanted consequences in their times. It is as if Machen’s writing were a loose living root containing encrypted information, which reappears in the present to both reproduce and invigorate the (rhizomatic) affair that provoked such grave diplomatic, military and political upset in turn-ofthe-century France. Despite being set in real locations, this story – or rather Clavijo’s imagination – unfolds a complex spatiality where heterogeneous elements and historical periods are mingled, or converge, in the present to reveal that alongside our natural/social space exists another geometry (that of secret societies or intelligence networks) of a truly rhizomatic structure, totally unconcerned with political or geographical frontiers, and whose sole visible manifestation, or envoy, is Abumeron, as evidenced in his intrusive visit to Clavijo’s hotel room. The Société is neither a secret society nor a lobby, which function like strange attractors in the chaotic universe of globalization, but appears to be a mixture of both. The paradoxical aim of removing Machen’s books from circulation certainly covers a secret interest, whereas the cultural deterritorialization it attempts may influence society by starting a domino-effect to boost the value of a commodity or (cultural) object, or by preserving the status quo of a trend, policy or ideology. The uncanny visitor from

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the spectral society triggered Clavijo’s fears when he suddenly recalled a certain Arteaga, the (fictional) ill-fated Spanish translator of Machen’s The Hill of Dreams. It is then that he decides to inform his friend Justo, believing to have seen one of Machen’s books in his library in Arrecife (Lanzarote). The trait of ubiquitousness attached to these groups is emphasized by Clavijo’s choosing to write his friend a letter (as in imitation of the nineteenth-century masters of horror stories), instead of using a faster communication channel. In this story Campbell explores the emergence of chaos, as events – or rather words – produced in Agadir will surely have effects in distant Lanzarote. The end is left open. Since the text consists of one single letter, readers will never know what was simultaneously happening at Justo’s while the letter was being written, while it was on its way to Lanzarote, or after he received it; whether he accepted Dr Abumeron’s offer, hid his copy or was killed (which would explain the absence of a reply); or if it was all down to Clavijo’s fabulation through his frequent threshold states of consciousness. On discussing nomadology, Deleuze and Guattari define smith guilders as neither nomadic nor sedentary, but as itinerants in search of the iron matter-flow of the subsoil, for whom “every mine is a line of flight” (1987: 412, original emphasis). In other words, a rupture from – but still part of – the rhizome in a deterritorialized space, perceiving from without all multiplicities and codes existing in a plane of consistency (or immanence) as finite and filling all dimensions. For Abumeron and other members of his society, every removal of each of Machen’s books may constitute a line of flight in their deterritorializing project, but one that apparently lacks the creative and transformative energy of becoming and of opening supplementary dimensions. Self-exile is certainly a true line of flight, and individuals (writers, philosophers, but also those fleeing from political violence, misery or even from their sentimental failures) who acknowledge their self-exiled conditions are nomads in the full sense described by Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 381). Tenerife is briefly mentioned in the revised version of ‘The Bridge of the Inca’. It is set in Argentina, where Campbell also lectured as a Fulbright scholar before Spain, and deals with exile, dictatorships and fathers who lose their offspring.

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The narrator opens the story by telling of a holiday trip with his daughter to Mendoza and the Bridge of the Inca, over River Las Cuevas, from where the Aconcagua can be seen. According to local myth, the Inca’s young son became very sick and was brought from afar to be purified in the curative waters of the river, as a last resort remedy for his fever; but the child died before reaching the place. However, his dead body was submerged in the waters and was soon covered in gold. Everybody understood that the gods had performed a miracle by preserving the prince’s dead body. The realistic base of the legend is revived when Don Baldemar Doramas, the owner of the hostería where the narrator and his daughter are staying, explained how his father fled Tenerife, escaping from Franco’s regime, and took his family to Argentina, where eventually his own daughter, a courageous young doctor, would suffer a violent death at the hands of military agents during Videla’s dictatorship. Unlike in the Inca legend, the cruelty of the political brutality cancelled the heroism of her death and any sign of divine compassion for the desolate father. The narrator thinks how ‘Generations of the Doramas family had dwelt in countries with national intrigues that cost innocent lives. Tenerife or Argentina, it did not seem to matter. In the shadow of Mount Teide or beneath Aconcagua, it was all the same’ (EC 81). The very site of the Inca myth enacts a modern narrative of losing offspring; however, whereas the former finds an explanation in the designs of the gods, the latter is the result of the fascist State war machine and its intense line of flight: in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, ‘a line of pure destruction and abolition’ (1987: 230). Converging in the modern spatial enactment of the myth, the chaotic emergence of State totalitarian violence in history is conveyed by the Doramas’ doomed genealogy. ‘The Bridge of the Inca’ thus illustrates Campbell’s method of juxtaposing parallel stories to draw a universal statement, using the Canaries – or Tenerife, as in this one – as a platform to connect similar cases, or variations of the same phenomenon, across time and space. If ‘A Room at the Jacaranda in Agadir’ and ‘The Bridge of the Inca’ contain characters who are urged to escape the present, ‘Flint and Cochineal’ features an unnamed American narrator who tries to escape his past. He arrives in Tenerife after a dreadful marriage that ended in divorce and meets Flann O’Dávila, a native Canary islander whose marital life is desperate

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because of his German wife’s reluctance to accept the local manners of socializing, with the result that his family and friends avoid him. ‘Flint and Cochineal’ is a masterpiece of external perspective by a first-person narrator conveying the inner transformation of masculine sentiments. The narrator twice sets out on a journey. When his divorce proceedings are finally over, he decides to bolt, in what he describes as a ‘graceless way’ (EC 11). His journey finally leads him to Tenerife, situated very close to La Gomera, the island from where Columbus incidentally set sail on his voyage of discovery. On his journey eastwards, the narrator brings American objects, like the poncho and the flint (identified at the end with a New Mexico Neolithic Clovis point), uses the Mexican parasite insect, the cochineal, as a symbol of both human weakness and stamina, and comments on the Spanish conquistadors’ importation of Oaxaca natives’ technique of extracting carmine from cochineal. This eastwards journey and temporary relocation to Santa Cruz de Tenerife hint at his unfulfilled desire for marital happiness. Realizing the content of a court letter forwarded by this attorney, he leaves it unopened; instead, he pours a glass of wine and, looking into the flames of his home fire,7 decides to go trekking in the wild and rugged hills of Anaga the next day. This second journey, which constitutes the main part of the text, represents the narrator’s line of flight. The realistic description of the landscape and the conversation with Flann reflect both his marriage experience and the psychic healing process within him during the passage. The narrator’s climb to La Laguna and up to the forests of Las Mercedes represents the gradual shift of perspective as he crosses several borders from the more sophisticated social spatiality of urban areas to the pure wilderness of rural spaces: I went along the streets of La Laguna, quiet at this early hour, beneath elaborate wooden balconies, past convents, past a lush park, and followed the road out of the city. […] until the countryside opened up.

7

Due to the mild weather in Santa Cruz, houses have no chimneys. The fire therefore becomes a symbol of marital identity. The narrator’s gazing at the flames suggests his full awareness of finally having lost that identity, as well as his ongoing desire for it.

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After passing La Laguna I entered a different terrain. Plowed fields lay inside borders of canebrake and date palm. The canebrake and date palm gave way to bracken, and I entered a mountain track winding through the cloud forest of Monte de Las Mercedes (EC 13).

At a sight-seeing point at the top, he met Flann, an islander with a melancholic expression, gazing at the distant port of Santa Cruz as if wishing to sail off. This is the beginning of the narrator’s exorcism of his past. On the way down the steep slopes of Anaga, when Flann discloses his marriage problems, the narrator’s attitude suggests he has also experienced a similar conflict in his own marriage. Flann’s account produces the mirror and mirage effect, theorized by Henri Lefebvre (1991: 183). In Steve Pile’s words: ‘Lefebvre sees the doubling (or mirage) effect of the mirror as constitutive of subjectivity, as does Lacan; unlike Lacan, however, Lefebvre is prepared to argue that the mirror is analogous to social space: that is, that social space acts like a mirror by “doubling” nature, by mediating between things, by containing and locating bodies and providing a position, a place in society’ (1996: 160). The narrator discovered his own reflection in Flann, but the image reflected back, far from being narcissistic, embodies the spectre of his former self during the period of marital tribulations. This awareness triggers the narrator’s path to the epiphanic moment when he sees Flann’s German wife, Eva, and compares her with the flint he carries in his pocket. He instantly declines Flann’s invitation to enter his house and walks away with the excuse of keeping to his excursion schedule, while Flann (his mirror image) is left stuck in time and space: ‘standing there, outlined against the glow of the western sky’ (EC 17). Since Flann is the mirror image of the narrator, the narrator’s last glimpse of Flann turns him into an epitome of marriage misery, in accordance with Lefebvre’s discussion of difference and repetition in relation to the space in the mirror frame: ‘Into that space which is produced first by natural and later by social life the mirror introduces a truly dual spatiality: a space which is imaginary with respect to origin and separation, but also concrete and practical with respect to coexistence and differentiation’ (1991: 186). The narrator’s walking away signals his line of flight from sentimental anguish. It means literally a continuation of his excursion plan, but

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metaphorically a deepening (or regression) into his subjectivity, particularly into his human and masculine essence. That night there was a heavy storm in Anaga. He took shelter in a cave and tried to keep warm in his poncho. He longed for a cup of coffee, but that domestic pleasure was unattainable: the image of the home-fire flames of his room in Santa Cruz contrasts with the lightning thunderstorm raging outside. Instead, the narrator embraces the wild storm, content with thumbing his flint. In so doing, he felt a transcendental communion with primitive, early masculine identity, uncontaminated by social bonds and contracts, which he associated with a (nomad) Guanche: ‘But I embraced it, thumbing my Clovis point the way a Guanche traveler might have stroked a talisman to summon up good fortune. I embraced the storm, welcomed every flash, and felt myself drifting toward a restful sleep’ (EC 18). Liberated from the politics of social spatiality, the narrator reaches the destination of his line of flight to fully exorcize his past by diving deeper into his inner self and delighting in his natural, primitive, regained identity. Moreover, Campbell’s description of Anaga, though extremely true to life, depicts a landscape intensely charged with sexual images, not only in the diversity of upright, phallic images (vegetation, crags …), but also in the concave space that men occupy, like the little bar near Afur and the cave where the narrator sleeps. Unlike his place in Santa Cruz or Flann’s house, the cave at the end suggests both the narrator’s triumph over the politics of domesticity, and a reassessment of his masculinity by intruding into and finding comfort in that concave space. Like Anaga in ‘Flint and Cochineal’, the island of Fuerteventura becomes a dramatic setting in ‘Levanto’, where determination, chaos and fate perform an ambivalent denouement; and, like in ‘Two Men […]’, Campbell chose a third-person narrator for a story about extraordinary events. Fuerteventura, which for local people is an island that inspires serenity and invites introspection, is faithfully described as a pure, ancestral wilderness with a rugged surface and desolate landscape – a fitting minimalist space for primitive violence and destruction to burst forth. Cadamorro arrived in Fuerteventura as a public notary, ignoring the advice of Doña Flamina, the clairvoyant lady in Motril, who had divined his future in the coffee ground patterns of his cup and had warned him against travelling

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there, telling him: “while you’re away you’re going to miss the most dramatic event of your life” (EC 38). ‘Levanto’ is a story about (the impossibility of ) escaping the future. Once on the island, Cadamorro avoids death thanks to a powerful sandstorm blown across from Africa by the wind known as ‘levante’ (the ‘levanto’ of the title), which prevented him from reaching the Posada. Instead, he remained at shepherd Ibrahim Ferrer’s hut for three nights. Meanwhile, at the hostel of his destination, the landlady and her two daughters were murdered by her son, Lorentiano, who was driven mad by the levante. The esoteric basis of this story is fairly exceptional in Campbell’s fictional method of sticking to objectivity, like a public notary. It appears to be a narrative experiment of how a supernatural (or extradiegetic) predetermined design contrives to unfold its scheme upon a subject in the fluid dimensions of time and space. Doña Flamina was right in her prediction. Nevertheless, the event did not occur in Motril but on a distant island, way beyond its geographical borders. Although the story does not deploy an intricate plot of a global butterfly-effect, it does provide an instance of Edward Soja’s (1989: 22) identification of the postmodern turn of geography when, quoting Berger (1974: 4), he highlights ‘Prophesy now involves a geographical rather than historical projection; it is space not time that hides consequences for us’ (original emphasis), adding that it implies ‘a shift in the context of meaning and interpretation which hinges around the impress of simultaneity versus sequence, spatiality versus historicity, geography versus history’ (1989: 22). At the same time, and incidentally related with affect theory, Campbell exposes a case in which objective, physical stimuli (such as the climatic conditions of the hot levant wind carrying sand and dust from the Sahara) raised at a distance on the continental platform cause an extremely sensitive neurological system beyond the sea, driving the individual to perform evil deeds against his own family. As the narrator explains, ‘levanto, like other malevolent winds of the world, had the power to drive men to despair and alter them in such a way that they no longer considered the consequences of their acts either upon themselves or upon others’ (EC 44). In the Canary Islands stories of Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments, Campbell investigates how inner drives and external powers

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– extraordinary, mysterious agents operating in effective reality – influence his characters’ subjectivity and existence, their limited or erratic perception of the world. The situation of the archipelago at the Atlantic intersection of three continents turns the Canaries into a universal dramatic stage, where a large gallery of characters must constantly negotiate their roles and respond to permanently changing circumstances. As a result, the Canary Islands become a border zone where social codes do not weaken but multiply, and established identities do not hybridize but interact. For Campbell, the Canary Islands stand as a literary space – wild and civilized, primitive and promising. In them, the writer connects the Americas with eastern Atlantic shores, old stories with present day reality: stories about fate and providence, ordeal and survival, misery and redemption; stories about gaining deeper insight into the world and into individuals striving to resist victimization.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Baudelaire, C. (2010). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne. London: Phaidon Press. BBC News (2003). ‘“Talking Fish” Stuns New York’, 16 March accessed 9 December 2015. Berger, J. (1974). The Look of Things. New York: Viking Press. Campbell, E. (2007). Afoot in the Garden of Enchantments. Akron, OH: Rager Media. Deleuze, G., and Guattari, F. (1987). A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Genette, G. (1997). Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. C. Newman and C. Doubinsky. Lincoln: Nebraska University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Malden, MA: Routledge. Levinas, E. (1995). The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, trans. A. Orianne. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Pile, S. (1996). The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. London: Routledge. Soja, E. J. (1989). Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Theory. London: Verso.

Notes on Contributors

Martyna Bryla holds an MA in English Philology from the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and a PhD in English Studies from the Department of English, French and German at the University of Málaga, Spain, where she currently teaches. Her research interests include literary imagology, particularly in relation to East-Central Europe, and the construction of selfhood and otherness in multinational contexts. She has published on Philip Roth’s transatlantic connections. Estíbaliz Encarnación-Pinedo holds a PhD from the University of Murcia, Spain, and is currently a lecturer and researcher in the Department of Modern Languages at the Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia. Her doctoral research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and she is a member of the research group ‘Periferias de lo Queer III: Micropolíticas, Transnacionalidades’, also funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. Her research focuses on gender and feminism in postwar and avant-garde American poetry. She has participated in several international conferences on Beat poetry and literature and has published articles such as ‘Memoir as the Reconstruction of History in Women of the Beat Generation’, included in the volume Out of the Shadows: Beat Women Are not Beaten Women (ed. F. Forsgren and M. J. Prince, 2015). Ángel Galdón Rodríguez lectures at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Albacete, where he received his PhD. His dissertation explores the influence of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in popular culture. He is the author of articles on dystopian fiction such as ‘The Beginning of the Character’s Dissidence in Dystopian Literature and Films’, in Altre Modernitá (vol. 3), and on science fiction, and he has contributed to the publications of the Poe Spanish Association, among them, to the collective volume A Descent into Edgar Allan Poe and his Works (ed. M. Rigal, 2010).

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David Griffiths is Lecturer at the University of Cantabria, in Santander. He is Senior Lecturer in English for Specific Purposes at the Faculty of Tourism Management and his research interests include contemporary British literature, gender studies, trauma and power strategies. A. Robert Lee, formerly of the University of Kent, UK, was Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo (1996–2011). His many publications include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the 2004 American Book Award; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009); and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outsiders, Ethnics (2010). Ángel Mateos-Aparicio Martín-Albo obtained his PhD at the University of Castilla-La Mancha (Ciudad Real, Spain), where he is currently Associate Professor. His main research interests are the intersection of science fiction and mainstream postmodern literature. Recent essays have appeared in Creative Forum: Journal of Literary and Critical Writing (2011) and in the edited collection The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (ed. M. A. Raja, J. W. Ellis and S. Nandi), and he has co-edited, with Eduardo de Gregorio, the volume Culture and Power: Identity and Identification (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013). Tomás Monterrey is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of La Laguna, Spain. He has edited the special issues of Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses ‘Contemporary Scottish Literature, 1970– 2000’ (November 2000) and ‘Literature and Science’ (2005). His fields of research include British postmodern fiction and the relationship between literature and the visual arts, in particular the ekphrastic descriptions in realistic novels and short stories. In the last two decades, he has also written extensively about the representation of Tenerife and the Canary Islands in English and American literatures.

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Clara Pallejá-López is Lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages at the Catholic University of San Antonio in Murcia, Spain. She has taught language and literature in New York and New Zealand. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. She has published on modern horror and fantasy, and more specifically on the rise of the sentient house in fiction. Her current research interests are the intertwining of sociocultural tensions and fiction and the genetic encoding of particular fears. María Luisa Pascual Garrido is Lecturer at the Department of English and German Studies at the University of Córdoba, Spain. She received her MA in English (1991) and her BA in Translation Studies (1995) from the University of Granada, and completed her PhD (2001) at the University of Cordoba. Her research interests include literary translation, modern English (Shakespeare and the eighteenth century), and contemporary American literature (Plath, Oates). Her Spanish edition of Hoban’s Riddley Walker (2005; revised edition: Cátedra, 2011) was distinguished with the Translation Award of the Spanish Association for English and American Studies in 2005. She has also published several annotated Spanish editions of eighteenth-century texts: Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (La historia de Rasselas, príncipe de Abisinia, Berenice, 2007) and Mary Astell’s essays (Escritos feministas, Maia, 2013). Ana Rull Suárez holds a PhD in English Philology from the UNED (Madrid) and has worked as a teacher of Spanish as a foreign language and as a lecturer on English and North American literature. She has published on Cervantes, Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Pynchon, and Don DeLillo, and has also collaborated on a number of radio programmes focused on British and American literatures. Isabel Santaularia i Capdevila is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Lleida, where she teaches English novel, popular narratives, literature and cinema, and British history and society. Her research interests include cultural studies, gender

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studies, and popular narratives. She has published a book on serial killer fiction, El monstruo humano: Una introducción a la ficción de los asesinos en serie (Laertes, 2009), and numerous articles in national and international journals such as Lectora, Atlantis, The Journal of Gender Studies, Clues: A Journal of Detection or Victoriographies. She is also a member of a research project on postcolonial crime fiction. Juan Antonio Suárez teaches American Studies and American Literature at the University of Murcia. He is the author of the books Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars (Indiana University Press), Pop Modernism (University of Illinois Press), and Jim Jarmusch (University of Illinois Press ), and co-editor, with David Walton, of the volume Culture, Space, and Power: Blurred Lines (Lexington). Recent essays have appeared in the journals Screen, Criticism, Grey Room, and Exit-Book, and in edited collections such as Film Analysis (W. W. Norton, 2013), The Modernist World (Routledge, 2015), and The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Literature (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), among others. Laura Torres-Zúñiga is Lecturer in English at the Universidad Católica San Antonio de Murcia, Spain. She is a member of the research project ‘“Women’s Tales”: The Short Fiction of Contemporary British Writers, 1974–2013’ (funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness) and a participant in the European Network for Short Fiction Research. Her research focuses on cultural studies and the short story (American and British), in particular the narrative work of American playwright Tennessee Williams. David Walton is Senior Lecturer and Coordinator of Cultural Studies at the University of Murcia. He is a founder member, and currently President, of the Iberian Association of Cultural Studies (IBACS), which is dedicated to the promotion of the area on the Iberian Peninsula, and has directed a Séneca Foundation project on political activism and contemporary urban space (2012–16). He has published widely on cultural theory and cultural practice and cultural studies and visual cultures. Recent books include

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Cultural Studies: Learning Through Practice (Sage) and Doing Cultural Theory (Sage), and he has edited, with J. A. Suárez, the collection of essays Culture, Space, and Power: Blurred Lines (Lexington). He has also published chapters and articles on new sexualities, the satire of Chris Morris, graffiti culture, the interfaces between philosophy and cultural studies and motorcycle studies.

Index

Anzaldúa, Gloria  8 Aristotle 2 Bachelard, Gaston  2, 3, 12, 17, 83, 92, 101–2, 105–6, 113, 204, 221 Bakhtin, Mikhail  2, 16, 17, 248, 256–7, 264–5 Ballard, J. G.  14, 155, 158, 161, 167, 169–70 Bear, Greg  169 Benjamin, Walter  2, 16, 17, 114, 229, 253–4 Bhabha, Homi K.  8, 212, 218, 221 Blanchot, Maurice  2, 17 Bradbury, Ray  52, 60–2 Campbell, Ewing  259–78 Castells, Manuel  6, 17 Certeau, Michel de  1 Cold War  82, 84, 143–5, 180–1, 198–9, 203, 207, 210, 219–22 crime fiction  179–83 cyberpunk 155–77 cyberspace  156–8, 170, 174 Deleuze, Gilles  12, 16, 71, 267, 269–70, 272–3 Eastland, Sam  14, 181, 184, 186, 194, 197 Ellison, Ralph  16, 225, 227, 235–6 Foucault, Michel  1, 2, 8, 12, 18, 26, 28–45, 69, 141, 163 Freud, Sigmund  12, 106–7, 120, 122, 128, 210, 212

Gaines, Ernest  225, 231–2 gender and confinement  71, 115, 118–26, 230–1, 233, 237 and literary genre  72–3, 248–52 and movement  241–2, 248–52 and spatial politics  1, 2, 10, 16, 71, 115, 118–26, 213, 230–1, 233, 237, 241–2, 248–52 geocriticism 201–21 Gibson, William  14, 155, 156, 158, 161, 164–6, 170–5 Giddens, Anthony  6, 18 Greenaway, Peter  11, 69, 72, 79, 84, 88–90 Guattari, Félix  12, 16, 71, 259, 267, 269, 272–3 see also Deleuze, Gilles Hayden, Robert  15, 225–6 hooks, bell  5, 18 Howey, Hugh  11, 52, 62, 64–5 Hurston, Zora Neale  16, 225, 226, 231 Huxley, Aldous  11, 48–58, 60, 64 Iron Curtain  201–21 Jacobs, Harriet  16, 225, 230, 234 Jarman, Derek  11, 69, 72, 79, 84, 85–8 Johnson, James Weldon  16, 225, 237 Jones, LeRoi (Amira Baraka)  225, 236–7 Jung, Carl Gustav  12, 104–7 Kant, Immanuel  1

288 Index Kristeva, Julia  120–30 Lefebvre, Henri  1, 7, 14, 16, 76, 157–62, 165–6, 171, 174–7, 256, 261, 275 Lessing, Gottfried Ephraim  2, 18 Lotman, Yuri  3 McHale, Brian  14, 155–73 McKay, Claude  16, 225, 233–4 Marcuse, Herbert  5, 18 Massey, Doreen  8–9, 16, 18, 28, 257 Matthews, Jason  14, 181, 184, 188, 200 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  16, 259, 262–6 Oates, Joyce Carol  15, 201–21 Orwell, George  11, 49, 50–9, 61–2, 64, 66 Piaget, Jean  12, 100–1, 109–10, 114 Plato  1, 18, 19, 53, 66 politics and alien status  261–2, 270–6 and ethnic identity  229–35 and gender  116–20, 128–34, 242–6, 251–4 and national identity  201–16 and spatial demarcation  3–6, 50, 53–6, 68–73, 139–40, 142, 158–64, 202–3, 210, 215, 220 and spatial protest  3–4, 68–71 postmodernism  13–14, 16, 84–5, 90, 142, 144, 155–77, 182, 230, 238, 277, 282

Smith, Tom Rob  14, 181, 186–8, 192–4 space and alien status  261–2, 270–6 and borders  3–6, 50, 53–6, 68–73, 139–40, 142, 158–64, 202–3, 210, 215, 218–21 and chronological sequence  149–52 and ethnic identity  229–35 and gender  116–20, 128–34, 242–6, 251–4 and national identity  201–16 and protest  3–4, 68–71 and queer subjectivity  85–8, 131–2 and subjective ontogenesis  96–103, 108–11 and surveillance  30–44, 56–62, 75–8, 143–9, 187–9, 192, 205–6 and the unconscious  103–8, 120–5 urban  5, 14, 51, 60–2, 146–7, 155–77, 205, 218–19 Starling, Boris  14, 181, 184, 188, 190, 194–5 Stephenson, Neal  14, 155, 158, 170–1, 178 Sterling, Bruce  14, 158, 170, 173–4 thriller(s)  14, 180–99 virtual reality  156, 157, 158, 174

Ranciére, Jacques  3–6, 19 Reed, Ishmael  16, 225, 238–9 Ryan, William  14, 181, 184, 186–8, 193–4

Waldman, Anne  16, 241–57 Westerfeld, Scott  11, 52, 62–4, 67 Western(s) (film genre)  79–81 Wilcox, Fred McLeod  79, 91 Williams, Andrew  14, 184–6, 189, 191–2 Williams, John A.  16, 238 Wright, Richard  16, 225, 234–5, 237, 240

science fiction  49–53, 82–5, 152, 155–7, 159–60, 162–7, 173–7

Zamyatin, Yevgeny  11, 53–8, 63, 65, 67 Zukofsky, Louis  248–50, 257

CULTURALHISTORYANDLITERARYIMAGINATION EDITED BY CHRISTIAN J. EMDEN & DAVID MIDGLEY EDITORIAL BOARD: RODRIGO CACHO, SARAH COLVIN, KENNETH LOISELLE AND HEATHER WEBB Thisseriespromotescriticalinquiryintotherelationshipbetweentheliterary imagination and its cultural, intellectual or political contexts. The series encouragestheinvestigationoftheroleoftheliteraryimaginationincultural historyandtheinterpretationofculturalhistorythroughliterature,visualculture and the performing arts. Contributionsofacomparativeorinterdisciplinarynatureareparticularlywelcome. Individualvolumesmight,forexample,beconcernedwithanyofthefollowing: •

The mediation of cultural and historical memory,

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The material conditions of particular cultural manifestations,

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The construction of cultural and political meaning,

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Intellectual culture and the impact of scientific thought,

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The methodology of cultural inquiry,

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Intermediality,

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Intercultural relations and practices.

Acceptanceissubjecttoadvicefromoureditorialboard,andallproposalsand manuscriptsundergoarigorouspeerreviewassessmentpriortopublication.The usuallanguageofpublicationisEnglish,butproposalsintheotherlanguages shown below will also be considered.

For Frenchstudies,contactKennethLoiselle



For German studies, contact Sarah Colvin



For Hispanic studies, contact Rodrigo Cacho



For Italian studies, contact Heather Webb

Vol. 1 ChristianEmden&DavidMidgley(eds):CulturalMemoryandHistorical ConsciousnessintheGerman-SpeakingWorldSince1500.Papersfrom the ­Conference ‘The Fragile Tradition’, Cambridge 2002. Vol. 1. 316 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-160-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6970-X Vol. 2 ChristianEmden&DavidMidgley(eds):GermanLiterature,Historyand theNation.PapersfromtheC ­ onference‘TheFragileTradition’,Cambridge 2002. Vol. 2. 393 pp., 2004. ISBN 3-03910-169-2 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6979-3 Vol. 3 Christian Emden & David Midgley (eds): Science,Technology and the GermanCulturalImagination.Papersfromthe­Conference‘TheFragile Tradition’, C ­ ambridge 2002. Vol. 3. 319 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-170-6 / US-ISBN 0-8204-6980-7 Vol. 4 AnthonyFothergill:SecretSharers.JosephConrad’sCulturalReceptionin Germany. 274 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-271-0 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7200-X Vol. 5 SilkeArnold-deSimine(ed.):MemoryTraces.1989andtheQuestionof German Cultural Identity. 343 pp., 2005. ISBN 3-03910-297-4 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7223-9 Vol. 6 RenataTyszczuk:InHopeofaBetterAge.StanislasLeszczynskiinLorraine 1737-1766. 410 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-324-9 Vol. 7 ChristianEmden,CatherineKeen&DavidMidgley(eds):ImaginingtheCity, Volume 1. The Art of Urban Living. 344 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-532-9 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7536-X Vol. 8 ChristianEmden,CatherineKeen&DavidMidgley(eds):ImaginingtheCity, Volume 2. The Politics of Urban Space. 383 pp., 2006. ISBN 3-03910-533-7 / US-ISBN 0-8204-7537-8 Vol. 9 Christian J. Emden and Gabriele Rippl (eds): ImageScapes.Studiesin Intermediality. 289 pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03910-573-1 Vol. 10 AlasdairKing:HansMagnusEnzensberger.Writing,Media,Democracy. 357 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03910-902-9 Vol. 11 Ulrike Zitzlsperger: ZeitGeschichten: Die Berliner Übergangsjahre. Zur Verortung der Stadt nach der Mauer. 241 pp., 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-087-2

Vol. 12 AlexandraKolb:PerformingFemininity.DanceandLiteratureinGerman Modernism. 330pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-351-4 Vol. 13 CarloSalzani:ConstellationsofReading.WalterBenjamininFiguresof Actuality. 388pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-860-1 Vol. 14 MoniqueRinere:TransformationsoftheGermanNovel.Simplicissimusin Eighteenth-Century Adaptations. 273pp., 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-896-0 Vol. 15 Katharina Hall and Kathryn N. Jones (eds): Constructions of Conflict. TransmittingMemoriesofthePastinEuropeanHistoriography,Cultureand Media. 282pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-03911-923-3 Vol. 16 Ingo Cornils and SarahWaters (eds): Memories of 1968. International Perspectives. 396pp., 2010. ISBN 978-3-03911-931-8 Vol. 17 AnnaO’Driscoll:ConstructionsofMelancholyinContemporaryGerman and Austrian Literature. 263pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0733-8 Vol. 18 Martin Modlinger and Philipp Sonntag (eds): Other People’s Pain. Narratives of Trauma and the Question of Ethics. 252pp., 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0260-9 Vol. 19 Ian Cooper and Bernhard F. Malkmus (eds): Dialectic and Paradox. Configurations of the Third in Modernity. 265pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0714-7 Vol. 20 Kristina Mendicino and Betiel Wasihun (eds): Playing False. Representations of Betrayal. 355pp., 2013. ISBN 978-3-0343-0867-0 Vol. 21 GuyTourlamain:VölkischWritersandNationalSocialism.AStudyofRightWing Political Culture in Germany, 1890–1960. 394pp., 2014. ISBN 978-3-03911-958-5 Vol. 22 RicardaVidalandIngoCornils(eds):AlternativeWorlds.Blue-SkyThinking since 1900. 343pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1787-0

Vol. 23 HenrietteSteinerandKristinVeel(eds):InvisibilityStudies.Surveillance, Transparency and the Hidden in Contemporary Culture. 388pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0985-1 Vol. 24 BerndFischerandMayMergenthaler(eds):CulturalTransformationsofthe Public Sphere. Contemporary and Historical Perspectives. 349pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-0991-2 Vol. 25 MarjorieGehrhardt:TheMenwithBrokenFaces.GueulesCasséesofthe First World War. 309pp., 2015. ISBN 978-3-0343-1869-3 Vol. 26 DavidWaltonandJuanA.Suárez(eds):ContemporaryWritingandthe Politics of Space. Borders, Networks, Escape Lines. 302pp., 2017. ISBN 978-3-0343-2205-8