Displacing the Anxieties of Our World: Spaces of the Imagination 1443817023, 9781443817028, 9781443860871

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Displacing the Anxieties of Our World

Displacing the Anxieties of Our World: Spaces of the Imagination Edited by

Ildikó Limpár

Displacing the Anxieties of Our World: Spaces of the Imagination Edited by Ildikó Limpár This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Ildikó Limpár and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-1702-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-1702-8

CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Anxior, Ergo Sum: I Worry, Therefore I Am Ildikó Limpár Part I: Imagined Journeys through History, Gaming and Travel The Rise of Counterfactual History and the Permeability of Disciplines ............................................................................................. 10 Donald E. Morse Taming the Gaming Imagination: The Hidden Lexicon of Video Gaming Themes ........................................ 26 Péter Kristóf Makai Exile, Translation, and Authorial Self-representation in Elizabethan Travel Literature: The Case of Thomas Nicholls............... 44 Csaba Maczelka Part II: Political Anxieties and Fear of Dominance Juan of the Dead: Comedic Zombie Apocalypse, Social Upheaval, and Political Crisis in Raúl Castro’s Cuba ................................................. 64 Bill Clemente “When in Rome, Do As the Romans Do”: Power Game in Hannibal ....... 85 Julianna Borbély Miller vs. “Arminius”: Contested Influences on Bram Stoker’s Dracula ....................................................................... 102 Sándor Czeglédi

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Contents

Part III: The Space of Fantastic Science and Scholarship Parody of Academic Life in SF ............................................................... 122 Anikó Sohár Double Danger: Twins and Clones as Supplements in Christopher Priest’s The Prestige ........................................................ 145 Anna Petneházi Part IV: Spaces Natural and Spaces Artificial The Doubled City: The Displaced London in the Urban Fantasy Novels of Neil Gaiman and China Miéville ............................................ 162 Vera Benczik Arena on the Screen: Heterotopia and Theatricality in The Hunger Games Trilogy ................................................................. 177 Ildikó Limpár Decoding Green Encouragement: Ecocriticism on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy ................ 200 Zsuzsanna Tóth Notes on Contributors.............................................................................. 221

INTRODUCTION ANXIOR, ERGO SUM: I WORRY, THEREFORE I AM ILDIKÓ LIMPÁR

Descartes‫ތ‬s famous philosophical proposition in the form of “cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am)1 at first sight appears to be a reassuring, positive idea about existence, but we should not forget that it roots in deep existential fear. It is the doubt of existence that allows Descartes to conclude that he is: “dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum” (I doubt, therefore I think, therefore I am) as Antoine Léonard Thomas elaborates the French philosopher‫ތ‬s declaration.2 Ergo, even our knowledge about our existence is thus intertwined with our anxieties concerning the relationship between reality and illusion—spaces of the pragmatically experienceable world and spaces of the imagination. Descartes‫ތ‬s definitive conclusion concerning the fact of existence does not exclude the possibility that all else experienced is a deception, this being an important philosophical problem not only in the western cultural tradition, but also in the Orient, as Zhuagzi‫ތ‬s3 famous butterfly dream teaching dating back to the third century B.C. testifies.

1

René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, trans. John Veitch (Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1850), 74. 2 Antoine Léonard Thomas, Éloge de René Descartes, 1765, Google books, accessed 29 September 2016, https://books.google.hu/books/reader?id=mvQ5AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover &output=reader&pg=GBS.PA1. 3 In Chinese: ⳁᏊ ; transcribed usually as Zhuangzi (Master Zhuang) or Chuangtzu. “Zhuagzi,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 17, 2014, accessed 29 September 2016, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/.

2

Introduction Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn‫ތ‬t know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn‫ތ‬t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou. Between Chuang Chou and a butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.4

With computerized virtual reality having entered our life, the dream argument is more relevant than ever, as the popularity and abundance of cinematic works based on the theme of virtual reality5 and the flourishing video gaming industry warn us. Ironically, however, the threat that manifests behind these products of business and art generates a two-way reaction: it reinforces the anxiety connected to the inseparability of reality and imagination; yet, at the same time, it creates a space (or at least an illusion that there is a space) that may clearly be called imaginary as opposed to the world we know as real and is capable of this “dreaming.” This collection of essays focuses on such dreamed-up spaces of great variety and offers studies that focus on how anxieties—of different ages and geographical locations—are in relation to the world that produces them and hence to the person existing in that world. Art serves “to hold as ‫ތ‬twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure,”6 as Shakespeare explains with Hamlet‫ތ‬s words. But how variedly may a work of art reflect reality? And what do we learn about ourselves and our world from projections of anxieties that we wish to displace into realms where they may safely be studied and coped with? The space of imagination that conjures up versions of the world‫ތ‬s frustrations also offers a virtual battleground—and the possibility of triumph coming from a valuable gain of cognizance, once we do perceive the correspondence between spaces of the fantastic and those of the mundane. As this volume demonstrates, art may become a powerful tool to fight anxiety even without transmitting a 4 Chuang Tzu, “Discussion on Making All Things Equal,” in The Complete Works Of Chuang Tzu, trans. Burton Watson, Terebess Asia Online, accessed 29 September 2016, http://terebess.hu/english/chuangtzu.html#2. 5 See items listed in “The Best Virtual reality Movies,” Ranker, accessed 29 September 2016, http://www.ranker.com/list/best-virtual-reality-movies-list/allgenre-movies-lists?utm_expid=16418821253.1pST8hHXRlGe0nguOTQEHQ.0&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.go ogle.hu%2F. 6 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (Arden Shakespeare, London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 3.2.21-24.

Ildikó Limpár

3

straightforward message concerning resolutions; what is more, often exactly because it lacks such didacticism is art capable of encouraging the reader/spectator/player/researcher to make sense of what s/he is exposed to. Monster studies and dystopian literature and film studies have become central to research on the now proliferating works that give voice to culture-specific anxieties. This development in scholarship reinforces the notion that the genres of fantasy and science fiction call for interpretations that see their spaces of imagination as reflections of reality, not as spaces invented merely to escape the real world. In this vein, the present volume discusses fictive spaces of literature, film, and video gaming, producing a dialogue among disciplinary fields that bridges the imagined space between sixteenth-century utopia and twenty-first century dystopia with studies penetrating fictitious spaces beyond utopian and dystopian spheres. Part I of the present volume, “Imagined Journeys through History, Gaming and Travel,” encompasses essays that highlight the imaginative mind‫ތ‬s need of coping with real world challenges elsewhere than within the confines of reality. This section starts with Donald E. Morse‫ތ‬s overview of genres relating to counterfactual history and providing dissimilar spaces of fantasy to rethink historical issues, turns and conflicts. Providing ample examples to demonstrate the tangible difference among counterfactual history, the historical novel, fantasy history, Alternative History and the embedded historical novel, Morse emphasizes not only the permeability of genres, but also the significance of the thoughtfully selected divergence point in order to produce fiction that is capable of productively engaging with dilemmas of the past—and, consequently, of the present. Displacing the anxieties of history that still haunt or puzzle us into the imagined spaces these genres ensure thus has a practical use: the analysis may contribute to the study of history, and assist the readers in rethinking the complexity of past and present situations and in learning from this assessment. The chapter on fictional journeys through time is accompanied by Péter Kristóf Makai‫ތ‬s exploration of virtual tourism present in video gaming. Looking at the evolution of the simulated spaces that one plays in, Makai reviews the space concepts of video games from the Super Mario Bros. through a number of games that utilize theming in constructing gaming space to the playful dystopia of Fallout 3. One of the ways these virtual spaces address the issue of present day anxieties is by providing an escape from the harshness of reality through entertainment: gaming ensures fun (coming from the act of playing) and a sense of satisfaction (coming from rewarded achievement). The type of virtual space, however,

4

Introduction

proves essential in coping with the worries of the world, as it frames not only the environment, but also the kind of activity the game—or rather the consciously choosing user—demands, as these fantastic spaces often correspond to the gamer‫ތ‬s wishful thinking. However, not only wishes, but also various phobias may be reflected in the great varieties of virtual spaces, as the analysis of dystopian gaming spaces underline. In effect, this paper “plays” with similar ideas that the essay on counterfactual genres does, as entertainment video games are also based on revisitation in a displaced space of fantasy. As such, the discussed video games provide space not exclusively for entertainment, but, instead, for edutainment. Part I ends with the case study of an Elizabethan travel literature writer, Thomas Nicholls, whose utopias are less known to the general public. Using the genre of the utopia as explained by Milton as a starting point, Maczelka looks at Nicholls‫ ތ‬works as imaginary spaces that reflect the author‫ތ‬s ideas; but while this generic characteristic usually directs analysis to how the main text reflects social and political concerns, Maczelka posits authorial self-representation in the center of his analysis, directing attention to the paratexts, which inform the reader of an author who consciously hides his real identity and variously shapes his image until he invents his fictional alter ego of the poor, suffering pilgrim. As Maczelka argues, this authorial position is strongly connected to the anxieties Nicholls had to face: the pilgrim refers not only to the genre of travel literature, but also reveals the writer‫ތ‬s attempt at creating a world that is utopian in nature and thus erasing his affliction (connected to the contemporary political system). Part II, entitled “Political Anxieties and Fear of Dominance” centers around the complexity of how power relations may be conceptualized in worlds inhabited or characterized by monsters and the monstrous. Inviting the readers to engage creatively with Jerome Cohen‫ތ‬s observation that “A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‫ދ‬that which reveals,‫ދ ތ‬that which warns,‫”ތ‬7 this section of the book unveils a surprising variety in the ways monsters infiltrate the fields of political games. Bill Clemente‫ތ‬s study of Alejandro Brugués’ zombie comedy Juan of the Dead (2011) gives a detailed account of how this award-winning film deals with the anxieties generated by the Cuban regime, and thus calls attention to the significance of zombie texts—literal and visual alike—in providing effective criticism of present day political and social issues. Highlighting the role of cinematic zombies 7

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen,“Monster Culture. (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota Press, 1996), 4.

Ildikó Limpár

5

standing for the consuming and conforming society, Clemente provides an analysis of the film that demonstrates the Cuban socio-political crisis: turning into a zombie, accordingly, corresponds to the process of dehumanizing society by taking away people‫ތ‬s freedom and autonomy. The focused sources of frustration and fear include the tensional political relationship with the USA, Raúl Castro‫ތ‬s unsatisfactory programs to enhance the Cuban economy, as well as the role of media, contrasting official proclamations and revolutionary blogging. Clemente‫ތ‬s reading of this cinematic text thus convincingly demonstrates that monster texts, not excluding zomcoms, may indeed serve as an invented space where present-day anxieties can be observed and criticized in a fruitful manner. Julianna Borbély‫ތ‬s examination of the power game that is central in the TV-series Hannibal extends our general understanding of what monsters are. The anxiety that this paper explains in detail is twofold: on the one hand, it underscores the fear that evil is inexplicable, for evil is irrational; while on the other, the analysis makes the reader aware that humans are subject to the possible process of monsterization even in the real world. Existing outside the human law and ignoring the moral and social principles of humanity makes the title character, Hannibal, not simply a deviant member of society, but a freak whose anthropomorphic appearance is not in harmony with his beastly behavior—a monster, who is “harbinger of category crisis,” as Cohen explains.8 Minutely displaying the way Will Graham, the FBI agent, gradually turns into a monster similar to the criminal he tries to catch, Borbély elaborates on the power game between Hannibal and his hunter in terms of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage dialectics. The presented thinning, and consequent disappearing borderline between the human and the monstrous provides a serious warning concerning human nature in a world where evil and good have ceased to maintain a reliable content. Part II continues with Sándor Czeglédi‫ތ‬s discussion of the possible influences on the origin of the fictional character Count Dracula, one of the best-known monsters in western literature. This chapter allows the reader to perceive that the correspondence between the monster and the anxieties of the contemporary world that calls it to existence may assist even in contributing to scholarly debates that otherwise would come to a halt. Czeglédi joins the scholarly dispute on Vambery‫ތ‬s possible role in shaping the historical background of Stoker‫ތ‬s vampire, and offers new perspectives in judging the extent of the influence that remains a cardinal question in Dracula studies. Drawing on Jimmie E. Cain‫ތ‬s reading the 8

Ibid., 6.

6

Introduction

novel as an example of how the contemporary British Russophobia penetrates the author‫ތ‬s space of imagination, Czeglédi highlights the Hungarian Vambery‫ތ‬s affiliation with the British Foreign Office as a spy and agent, as well as his popularity that also manifests itself in Vambery’s public appearances and speeches. Czeglédi consequently argues that recent trends in Dracula criticism that aim at eroding the link between Vambery and Stoker should be subjected to reconsideration. The two chapters in Part III explore “The Space of Fantastic Science and Scholarship.” Anikó Sohár‫ތ‬s essay compares the presentation of academic life in the fantasy works by Connie Willis and Sheri Tepper. Focusing on the critical and parodical approaches these authors take, Sohár demonstrates that the examined SF novels display an overall modern world anxiety embedded in the importance of applicable education as well as the hindrances to access it due to the isolated circle of scholars who should assure high quality erudition but have lost touch with the practical side of life, cementing themselves in a rigid system that kills creativity, thus limiting the possibility to make advancements. The slightly differing attitude to the academia the novelists‫ ތ‬writing reflects may be traced back to their personal history of education: Willis‫ތ‬s ironical, insider treatment of the topic contrasts sharply with Tepper‫ތ‬s more satyrical, outsider approach; the texts consequently disclose both social and personal frustrations. Sohár‫ތ‬s chapter that highlights the comical aspect of scholarly life is paired with Anna Petneházi‫ތ‬s study on Christopher Priest’s The Prestige, in which the tragic existential questions emerge as focal. In her analysis, Petneházi relies on Jacques Derrida’s term “the dangerous supplement” to show how clones challenge our binary concepts of signifier and signified, of original and copy, of singularity and similarity, and how they posit humans in the realm of a symbolic death. This apprehension has become a favored topic in dystopian novels, but this time cloning becomes an integrated part of a rivalry between two magicians in the Victorian era. However, treating the uncanny fear of doubles in the imagined safe space of the past does not reduce the effect on the reader; in fact, the choice of setting amplifies the anxiety, suggesting that what we fear is not a possible, dangerous future, but something that is independent of time. In addition, cloning and textual doubling become inseparable in Priest‫ތ‬s concept. The novel thus also communicates the horror connected to the act of creation demanding the (symbolic) death of author; and the disquietude linked to the act of reading when the signification one expects and usually relies on becomes unstable—an angst that people in our rapidly changing world experience on an everyday basis.

Ildikó Limpár

7

Part IV takes the reader to “Spaces Natural and Spaces Artificial” with the help of three essays that specifically concern themselves with how the fictional spaces present in various fantasy novels relate to our contemporary world of reality. At the core of Vera Benczik‫ތ‬s analysis of urban fantasy novels lies the city—more exactly, the displaced London— as the site of the fantastic, co-existing with the mundane London in Neil Gaiman‫ތ‬s Neverwhere and China Miéville‫ތ‬s King Rat and Kraken. Benczik connects these novels through the common component of the reluctant questing hero, and the palimpsestual nature of the space in which the heroes go through a transformation. Her analysis reveals that as settings for a rite of passage, the same topography becomes the site of repression—the city of experiential reality; and the site of emotional projection and reflection—the fantastic realm. The heroes experience displacement, and both individual and collective anxieties are projected upon the estranged fantastic urban space. The chaotic and confusing nature of the fantastic city in examples belonging to the New Weird is also detectable in The Hunger Games trilogy; but while the city—that is, the Capitol—is expected to appear as the site of artificiality as opposed to the technologically less developed districts in Suzanne Collins‫ތ‬s Panem, the arena, signaling the ultimate chaos in the form of destructive wilderness, is the product of technology, and thus stands for an artificially created wild. This artificiality, as Ildikó Limpár argues in her essay, establishes a connection between the arena and the Capitol. As Limpár demonstrates, on the one hand the complexity of this relationship may fruitfully be explored with Michel Foucault‫ތ‬s theory on heterotopia. The connection between Panem‫ތ‬s world and the contemporary world that it mirrors in a dystopian setting may most successfully be examined, on the other hand, with Joanne Thompson‫ތ‬s approach of using heterotopology for theater studies specifically. This method allows the interpretation of the arena as a space of nightmarish imagination that through screening becomes a space of performance—a theater space that due to its heterotopic nature is able to offer moments of hope amidst the anxieties with which this horrific space confronts the audience. The final chapter, written by Zsuzsanna Tóth, examines how presentday anxieties may propel fantasy writing towards presenting imagined spaces which may enhance positive thinking about resolving key worries of our contemporary world. This ecocritical reading of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy points out how the core ideology of environmentalism—namely the desirable restoration and respectful preservation of the meaningful entirety of the natural environment— appears in the novels. Tóth argues that Pullman‫ތ‬s fantastic creations,

8

Introduction

particularly Dust, an evanescent deity, and the Mulefa people, reveal that the author recomposed representative items from Judeo-Christianity and English literary traditions so as to create his fictional manifestations of humankind’s connectedness with Nature, and, in a larger-scale context, with the whole Universe. As this collection of essays demonstrate, the fictive spaces which we used for centuries for displacing real-world fears are multi-functional. For one, dissociating ourselves from reality may offer temporary escape from worries that we may not have the stamina to ceaselessly cope with; second, displacement allows for the necessary distancing to experiment with understanding and managing the anxieties in a safe space, not endangering the integrity of the world or the problem-solver; and finally, perceiving the connection between art and contemporary anxieties may further scholarship by bringing new perspectives and consequently, new results in academic research. The study of the “Transformation of Things” that Zhuangzi points to in his dream lesson thus may be used to generate transformation in our contemporary world—a notion that the contributors to this volume believe in. We propose that the study of anxieties in the realm of imagination opens up space for positive changes in the real world. Anxior, ergo sum: I worry, therefore I am—because I thrive to understand how the anxieties I suffer from influence my understanding of the world, that, is my existence.

Bibliography Chuang Tzu. “Discussion on Making All Things Equal.” In The Complete Works Of Chuang Tzu, translated by Burton Watson. Terebess Asia Online. Accessed 29 September 2016, http://terebess.hu/english /chuangtzu.html#2. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. (1996). “Monster Culture. (Seven Theses).” In Monster Theory: Reading Culture, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, 325. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota Press, 1996. Descartes, René. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Seeking Truth in the Sciences. Translated by John Veitch. Edinburgh: Sutherland and Knox, 1850. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, edited by Harold Jenkins. Arden Shakespeare. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Thomas, Antoine Léonard. Éloge de René Descartes, 1765, Google books. Accessed 29 September 2016. https://books.google.hu/books/reader?id=mvQ5AAAAcAAJ&printsec =frontcover&output=reader&pg=GBS.PA1.

PART I IMAGINED JOURNEYS THROUGH HISTORY, GAMING AND TRAVEL

THE RISE OF COUNTERFACTUAL HISTORY AND THE PERMEABILITY OF DISCIPLINES1 DONALD E. MORSE

“Each significant historical action collapses a wave function of potentialities, and alters the temporal vector.”2

Introduction: Red Herrings and Parlor Games Since the end of World War II there has been a noticeable increase both in popular and scholarly history of counterfactual versions of important historical events, such as the conclusion of WWII, the outcome of the United States Civil War and so forth as a way of displacing anxieties into new spaces of the imagination. The noted British historian, diplomat, and journalist E. H. “Edward” Carr (1892-1982) among others appeared very unhappy about this development. In his George Macauley Trevelyan Lectures for 1961 Carr spoke briefly, derisively, but memorably on counterfactual history’s lack of value when he admonished his fellow historians to “get rid of this red herring once and for all.”3 Carr’s negative view may well have been provoked by the increasing popularity of books, such as John Collings Squire, If, It Had Happened Otherwise (1931). Among the contributors to Squire’s If were—most famously—Winston S. Churchill (If Lee had not won at Gettysburg), Hilaire Belloc, Andre Maurois and G. K. Chesterton. Squire himself contributed a most forgettable essay on If Francis Bacon had really written Shakespeare’s plays. Carr scathingly dismissed that compendium and such similar books 1 This essay is highly indebted to Gary Wolfe’s insightful reviews for Locus magazine which he kindly supplied to me and his important scholarly study, Evaporating Genres. 2 Kim Stanley Robinson, Galileo’s Dream (New York: Ballantine, 2009), 381. 3 Quoted in Roland Paulsen, “The Counterfactual Imagination,” in Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery, ed. Richard Swenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 164.

Donald E. Morse

11

as “a parlor game.”4 A few months after Carr published those same Trevelyan Lectures as What Is History?—a book that in its Penguin edition would become required reading for most university history majors in England and the United States—the popular slick magazine Look, ignoring Carr’s advice on disposing of suspicious fish, commissioned long essays from MacKinlay Kantor on “If the South Had Won the Civil War” and from William L. Shirer on “If Hitler Had Won World War II”—topics by then well explored in science fiction. “The contrast between the relatively mechanistic projections [of historians Kantor and Shirer] and the imaginative leaps of their science-fiction counterparts is rather telling,” dryly observes Gary Wolfe in Evaporating Genres.5 A few minutes contemplation of Phillip K. Dick’s now classic rewriting of the aftermath of World War II, The Man in the High Castle (1962), where the Axis Powers having won that war divide the United States between them, or of Robert Harris’s lesser known Fatherland (1992) with its detailed view from inside Germany’s third Reich ruled by a victorious Hitler, is enough to confirm Wolfe’s understated criticism. Unlike in these two novels, there are no “real toads” in Kantor’s and Shirer’s mechanistic “imaginary gardens.”6 But Carr’s magenta fish proved notoriously hard to banish even within his own discipline of history as seen in the marks of professional acceptance accorded counterfactual history, such as academic history conferences and journals. The first such conference was held at Ohio State University in November 1997, some 36 years after Carr’s book was published. The following year the Quarterly Journal of Military History dedicated that respected scholarly journal’s tenth anniversary issue entirely to the subject (1998).7 And as a final straw, in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science (2012) the noted philosopher Julian Reiss had a thirty page entry on “counterfactuals,” where he—defending these new spaces of the imagination—contends that “counterfactuals have stood the test of time with more success than positivism, and a world without at 4 Quoted in Robert S. Boynton, “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Profile of Niall Ferguson,” The New Yorker, 12 April 1999, accessed 26 July 2016, http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=50. 5 Gary K. Wolfe, Evaporating Genres (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 221n11. 6 Marianne Moore in “Poetry” (1919) identifies true poetry with the ideal of “imaginary gardens with real toads in them.” Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” in Anthology of American Literature 2, ed. George McMichael et al. (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 1388-1389. 7 See Wolfe, Genres, 64.

12

The Rise of Counterfactual History and the Permeability of Disciplines

least some speculation about what would, could, or might have been would be utterly impoverished.”8

Counterfactual Abraham Lincolns Recently, there has been a spate of counterfactual histories focusing on President Abraham Lincoln, such as Stephen Carter’s The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln (2012) that examines those forces arrayed against the president had he survived Booth’s assassination attempt. Carter envisions letters of impeachment voted because of Lincoln’s failed attempt at the postwar reconstruction of the South. An interesting scenario, perhaps, but I somehow doubt that Lincoln’s enemies—and he had many—would have been able to succeed in such an effort. In assassinating Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth killed the best friend the South could have had—one who demonstrated again and again that he had no interest in punishing or humiliating those he had defeated unlike the ones who would come into power after his death. Lincoln insisted that Southern soldiers who surrendered should be permitted to keep their horses and side arms and allowed to return to their homes. The surrender of Lee to Grant at Appomattox was a model of tact, respect, and courtesy—exactly what Lincoln had called for. While we will never know if Lincoln’s methods would have succeeded, we do know that the ones employed after his assassination failed miserably. In Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2006) historian Doris Kearns Goodwin outlines Lincoln’s methods making a strong—perhaps irrefutable—case for his extraordinary ability to win over opponents and where that proved impossible to co-opt them, and if that did not succeed then at least to keep them close by where he could watch their every move. Salmon Chase, whom Lincoln defeated in the Republican presidential primary, presents a vivid example of Lincoln’s employing all three strategies: In 1860 Chase assumed he would be nominated for President on the Republican ticket. But Lincoln decisively defeated him on the third ballot and then went on to be elected president. After winning the election, Lincoln shocked his followers and those who considered themselves his advisors, by including Chase in his cabinet and then motivating him to work for his [Lincoln’s] goals. The president kept him in the cabinet even when three years later Chase once again went campaigning for the Republican nomination, assuming erroneously and 8 Julian Reiss, “Counterfactuals,” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 156.

Donald E. Morse

13

without consulting Lincoln that the president would not seek renomination. Only when Chase openly campaigned against him did Lincoln force his resignation; that is, fire him. Such extraordinary forbearance in the interest of mastering and, even, co-opting your enemies served Lincoln well during his first term and I see little reason to assume it would not have also served him in his second term had he been allowed to finish it. While The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln illuminates what Lincoln quite probably would have had to face had he survived, this counterfactual history nevertheless tends to underestimate his consummate political skills together with his carefully honed ability to judge people, especially potential or current enemies.

The Historical Novel and Fantasy History Historical novels often appear closely aligned with counterfactual history and many are, yet others prove to be fundamentally distinct, such as Jerome Charyn I am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War (2014) which adopts Lincoln’s voice and uses it to dwell on his bouts of depression. That depression was originally discussed at length in Joshua W. Shenk’s Lincoln’s Melancholy (2005), where Shenk advances the hypothesis that “when Lincoln felt despair closing in, he found an escape route through politics.”9 Quite likely, but Lincoln also had other escape routes to hand. For instance, he escaped frequently to the theater which he loved, Shakespeare especially. He often quoted Shakespeare at length and from memory.10 Andrew Delbanco in a fair, even-handed review points to Charyn’s very real accomplishments that illustrate some of the potential of this type of novelization of history and historical characters along with its less attractive aspect: [Charyn] gives us a human Lincoln besieged by vividly drawn enemies and allies. . . . The book is daringly imagined, written with exuberance, and with a remarkable command of historical detail. . . . But there is also something trivializing here. This Lincoln talks too much. He is too self9

Quoted in Andrew Delbanco, “The New Adventures of Abe,” review of I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, by Jerome Charyn, The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014, 34. 10 Michael Anderegg after examining all available evidence for Lincoln’s knowledge of Shakespeare concludes that “Lincoln was throughout his life fascinated by and engaged with Shakespeare’s plays.” “Preface,” Lincoln and Shakespeare (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2015), xii.

14

The Rise of Counterfactual History and the Permeability of Disciplines exposing—as if Hannibal were to come back complaining of sore buttocks from too much riding upon elephants.11

Such “trivializing” remains the great pitfall of this kind of non-historical history writing and appears all the more stark in contrast to Goodwin’s warmly human portrait that dwells on Lincoln’s incredible memory and ubiquitous story telling without diminishing either the man or the office. Max Weber wisely insisted that “plausible counterfactuals should make as few historical changes as possible on the grounds that the more we disturb the values, goals, and contexts in which actors operate, the less predictable their behavior becomes.”12 Judged by such standards, Seth Grahamé-Smith’s novel Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (2010) would decisively fail. But Grahamé-Smith’s novel never pretends to be plausible nor should it be judged by the same standards as counterfactuals or even those used to judge historical novels but rather as a novel set in an alternate fantastic universe. In Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter all “the values, goals, and contexts in which actors operate” are disturbed—many greatly disturbed.13 For example, each of Lincoln’s terrible personal tragedies from the death of his mother (35-36) and later, his first love, Ann Rutledge (150-55) to that of his beloved son Willie (279-83) become in this novel and unlike in the historical Lincoln’s experience all-too predictable since the cause of each remains exactly the same as one or more vampires prove responsible for each tragedy. Rather than increasing the unpredictability of Lincoln’s actions—the danger facing many counterfactual histories—this single cause of virtually all actions both for and against Lincoln increases the predictability of Lincoln’s emotional response as well as his subsequent actions, thus creating a cardboard character out of one of history’s most complicated human beings. Similarly, all the major decisions Lincoln makes whether in politics or in war are motivated not by a desire to serve the country or to preserve the union but almost solely by his determination to fight and possibly rid the American continent of vampires. Perhaps the most blatant example is Grahamé-Smith’s rewriting of the horrors of slavery where the focus falls not on the human exploitation and denigration of other humans, but on the vampires who buy slaves mostly at bargain prices in order to drink their 11

Delbanco, “The New Adventures of Abe,” 35. Quoted in R. N. Lebow, Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2010), 55. 13 Seth Grahamé-Smith, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (New York: Grand Central, 2010). All further references to this novel will be given in the text in parentheses. 12

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blood, thus equating slavery with vampire food. While this equation might have proven a powerful metaphor for slavery as some reviewers suggest,14 the novel itself emphasizes a much more literal level in showing slaves being bled by vampires and postulating a cartel of vampires supporting the South in order to maintain their food supply—all of which distracts readers from the human responsibility for the very real terrors of that ghastly institution. The pinnacle of Grahamé-Smith’s trivializing occurs, however, when he presents John Wilkes Booth as a person who becomes a vampire in order to achieve immortality (319). When Booth as a vampire does kill Lincoln, he is then, in his turn, killed by a turncoat vampire who is aiding Lincoln in his prosecution of the war (329), thus shifting the reader’s focus away from the tragic death of the president to a desire for revenge on the vampire assassin. But the trivializing does not end with Lincoln’s death, for in an anti-climax Lincoln is brought back to life by that same turncoat vampire to become in his turn one of the “good” vampires guarding the republic from the bad vampires. Lincoln now will live forever or at least until he is able to sleep in his old office at the White House during John F. Kennedy’s presidency and then witness Martin Luther King’s great oration at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington (336), where the novel mercifully ends. Almost as an after-thought, readers then learn that vampires were also the cause of World War II and that that war should really be called “the second vampire uprising” (336). The cumulative result of all these vampire additions does not create in any sense a “plausible” plot nor plausible characters—nor does the novel pretend to. Judged on its merits, Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter may, perhaps, be best viewed as a mediocre vampire novel set in nineteenthcentury America with some twentieth-century afterthoughts. Such a judgment may appear even more valid when comparing and/or contrasting Grahamé-Smith’s effort to other similar but far more successful vampire novels set within a defined historical context, such as Dan Simmons’s Children of the Night (1992).15 In the latter novel, Simmons brilliantly 14

The novel has been described, for instance, as “a sinister fantasy in which bloodsucking becomes a metaphor for draining the nation of vitality and the will to survive.” Delbanco, “The New Adventures of Abe,” 34. 15 The novel’s title, Children of the Night derives from the 1931 film, Dracula when Bela Lugosi playing Count Dracula stops his carriage carrying the hapless R. M. Renfield and admonishes his passenger to ‘Listen to them [wolves howling]. The children of the night. What beautiful music they make.” Simmons surely shares his vampire-protagonist’s low opinion of Stoker’s “silly novel” and the subsequent “inept motion picture.” Dan Simmons, Children of the Night (New

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skewers Nicholae Ceauúescu, the Romanian dictator, by employing wellestablished conventions of the vampire novel to portray convincingly Romania as a charnel house created by the most successful dictator of the twentieth century who leads a band of deadly vampires. In addition, Simmons presents a fascinating study of the nature of blood, its function in the human body while speculating on how that function might differ in a vampire body. In contrast to Grahamé-Smith’s cavalier attitude towards historical characters and events, Simmons portrays events, people and places with great historical accuracy, making very few additional historical changes beyond those consequent upon transforming Ceauúescu into a vampire. The novel thus gives its readers considerable insight into the hideous conditions created by the Romanian police state that include the infamous traffic in orphans, the hiding of AID’s victims, especially children, an economy that at the expense of depriving citizens of food eliminated the national debt, the reams of Secret Police files of informers, the miles of Securitate tunnels under Bucharest and the heavily armored Securitate themselves including their army tanks—all done without sacrificing the terror, conflict, betrayal, and mystery associated with vampire fiction.16 Where Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter after its invented over-the-top unhistorical portrait of the United States’ greatest president limps to its tepid conclusion, Children of the Night creates and maintains high tension throughout, while effectively displacing anxieties created by Ceauúescu’s Police State into this new space of vampire fiction.

Alternate History Within history speculative stories about Lincoln and the Civil War, such as Carter’s and Charyn’s (but obviously not Grahamé-Smith’s), are labeled “Counterfactual History” yet within science fiction the same type of tale, as exemplified by The Man in the High Castle and Fatherland, becomes designated “Alternate History.” By the twenty-first century Alternative History had grown so popular as a sub-genre of science fiction that it took up many feet of shelf space in most contemporary virtual and brick-and-mortar book stores.17 A particularly vivid example and one of York: Warner, 1992), 333. 16 For a first person account of Romania in the darkest days under Ceauúescu see Donald E. Morse, “Travelling in Transylvania 1987-88,” Hungarian Review 7.1 (January 2016): 72-80. 17 Wolfe claims that “alternate history . . . in recent years has gotten so gentrified that it’s about ready for its own iPhone app. (“‘click here to see where your life went wrong’”) Gary K. Wolfe, review of Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson.

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the most successful twentieth-century science-fiction Alternative Histories remains Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1984 short novel, The Lucky Strike. In that novel Robinson imaginatively recreates the world of the crews selected to drop the first atomic bomb complete with their varied personalities and on-going rivalries along with their boredom waiting for assignments and their endless poker games. In most such successful Alterative History fiction there occurs a “divergence point”—to borrow Connie Willis’s useful term—that is, the point at which the story diverges from recorded history. Tom Shippey defines four essential characteristics of any “divergence point”: “The divergent point . . . should be (1) plausible, (2) definite, (3), small in itself, and (4) massive in consequence.”18 In Robinson’s story this divergent point occurs when Paul Tibbets, the captain of the crew chosen to drop the bomb, demonstrates to a United States Air Force official his and his crew’s ability to fly their B-52 under adverse conditions by taking off without using the two right wing engines—something the historical Tippets did, indeed, do. The alternative history Robinson creates begins, however, at this divergent point, where one of the two remaining active engines on the left wing fails, leaving of the original equipment only a single woefully inadequate engine. This engine by itself cannot keep the plane aloft and so it crashes in a fire ball killing all aboard. The narrator speculates that “something . . . minor . . . trivial . . . had made all the difference,” such as, perhaps, a welder applying his torch “a second less than usual” leading to an engine breakdown.19 Such oversights could also account for the ubiquitous plane wreckage found at the end of each runway on the historical as well as the “alternative” Tinian Island. “For want of a nail, the battle was lost,” has long been true. What Robinson adds, however, is the character of a 37-year-old back-up bombardier, Frank January, who, having experienced the Blitz while stationed in London recalls vividly during his long periods of inactivity the fear it engendered along with the awful casualties that resulted from bombing a civilian population. With the death of Tibets and his crew January now assumes responsibility as the bombardier who will actually drop the bomb. Having time to reflect, however, he comes to the painful conclusion that Locus, April 2010, np. 18 Tom Shippey, “Alternate Historians: Newt, Kingers, Harry, and Me,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 8.1. (1997): 17. Poor Alternative History may, however, contain many, perhaps dozens of such points. A parallel to the mandatory divergence point in Alternate History stories is the almost ubiquitous Butterfly Effect in time-travel stories. 19 Kim Stanley Robinson, The Lucky Strike (1984. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009), np.

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what this mission amounts to is “murder[ing] a whole city” of 200,000 people.20 At the last minute he delays releasing the bomb despite the cries and curses from the rest of the crew so that it explodes in all its hellish fury not over the city of Hiroshima but over a deserted island. After being summarily court-martialed and sentenced to die by a firing squad, and, as he awaits execution, the bombardier learns that a second bomb has also missed its city target because of cloud cover. “So we never dropped an atom bomb on a Japanese city,” he exclaims.21 In Robinson’s Alternative History then such events do indeed imaginatively “diverge” from the historical record taking off on a quite different but equally plausible trajectory. Unlike a time travel story, where any protagonist’s attempt to change history produces often disastrous results as, for example, the infamous time-traveler who steps upon a butterfly and alters future history. The Lucky Strike, like most Alternative Histories, offers a positive view by altering the past with what Wolfe calls its “retro-corrective fantasies in which things turn out more like they should have.”22 Moreover, as in the best counterfactual history, the alternatives delineated in The Lucky Strike do “provoke insight into policy choices,” which philosopher Julian Reiss saw as one of the greatest values of employing counterfactuals, and which is clearly also one of the benefits of Alternative History.23 Robinson’s The Lucky Strike remains compelling reading with its fully realized characters, careful plotting, realistic dialogue and scrupulous attention to convincing details especially when compared and contrasted to historians Kantor and Shirer’s pallid parlor games, Charyn’s trivializing and Grahamé-Smith’s over-reaching. One recent very welcome development in this popular genre has been the spate of books by Native American writers who also found their voice and subject by writing Alternative History. There have been many tales of stereotyped native North Americans by white writers—most notably Thomas Kinsella’s series of short stories collected in Dance Me Outside (1977) and Fencepost Chronicles (1987) where the native may indeed be the trickster but a trickster as the white man envisions him. Other white 20

Ibid. Ibid. 22 Wolfe, Evaporating Genres, 63. A similar reason is given by the philosopher Julian Reiss when he argues that “a historian can determine if a decision of a historical actor was a cause of an outcome of interest by asking ‘did the outcome occur but for the decision?’” Reiss, “Counterfactuals,” 155. Clearly, Alternative Histories alter “the outcome” by changing “the decision” however slightly at Connie Willis’s “divergence point.” 23 Reiss, “Counterfactuals,” 175. 21

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writers who have done better include both Robert Seidman in One Smart Indian (1979) and Dan Simmons in Black Hills (2010) where both adopt the native viewpoint, language and values while creating highly individual, non-stereotypical characters. But it remained for several native writers to produce alternate histories that rewrite from the viewpoint of Native North Americans the familiar story and its consequences that Kurt Vonnegut once labeled as Columbus and “the Sea Pirates.”24 Part of the Columbus story that usually goes unmentioned in popular legend is his dual motivation in sailing west.25 He did, of course, desire to discover large quantities of gold, but he also hoped to find the lost Paradise of Genesis since Eden and the new World were closely associated in the European imagination. Ferdinand and Isabella would get their gold, while Columbus in finding the Earthly Paradise would enjoy the healing of his soul, possess various unknown lands, and receive a series of titles including Admiral, governor and viceroyalty with all the perquisites that went with them. Yet in discovering the New World, Columbus found not the Earthly Paradise, but instead unleashed an Earthly Hell on the Native Americans already in residence.26 Unable and unwilling to envision any society but the Christian, mercantile, European one they knew, Columbus and his crew became, indeed, the “sea pirates” wrecking havoc wherever they went. The complex Native American response five hundred years after the event to the on-going tragedy initiated by Columbus and the complicated anxieties that event unleashed may be glimpsed in several Native American contemporary Alternative History novels as, for example, William Least Heat Moon, Columbus in the Americas (2002), Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus (1991), Thomas King, A Coyote Columbus Story (2002) and Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus (1991). Each of these works incorporates a Columbus “discovery narrative” in a new imaginative space but from quite different angles and with varied results. Each also uses a different narrative strategy—some borrowed from “the European literary heritage”27 but each is firmly rooted in the Native American oral story-telling tradition. That 24

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (New York: Delta, 1973), 10-11. The section on Native American Columbus stories draws upon Katalin Nagy Biróné’s excellent unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Discovery Narratives in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Debrecen, 2007). 26 For a compelling account of Columbus’s atrocities, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present (New York: Harper, 1980), 1-7. 27 Biróné, “Discovery Narratives in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” 16. 25

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tradition, like all oral story-telling, offers “validation of a different sort [from written stories, one that] comes from the communal sanction given to oral tradition; that is, the receiver of the text receives along with it a set of procedures for judging and interpreting the materials presented,” as Brian Attebery outlines.28 Moreover, as Native American communitybased oral stories and tales, these novels take up the story of sickness [initiated by Columbus] where its effects “can start to heal . . . through the traditional healing function of the native storytelling ‘event.’”29 Gerald Vizenor once commented on the Columbus story told across the US including in Native schools: “I don’t consider it healthy to tell a bad story that victimizes me.”30 Instead, in The Heirs of Columbus he attempts to tell a story where Christopher Columbus and “his dubious missions . . . overshadow the recognition and survivance of Native American Indians.”31 To accomplish this end he ignores questions about colonists and colonizing in favor of mixing tribal myths with his own fiction, then combining both with Western historiographic conventions, but the latter are—to borrow Katalin Biróné Nagy’s understated term—“handled freely” by way of pastiche.32 Columbus himself becomes a mixed blood and a trickster, yet fails to benefit from or develop in his new role. Rather than heroically discovering a new world, he returns to his old one dispirited Tired and broken because he [Columbus] lost most of his body parts on the way, . . . the old shamans heated some stones and put him back together again. . . . Harm, the water shaman, said he dreamed a new belly for the explorer, and Shin, the bone shaman, called in a new leg from the underworld, and he got an eye from the sparrow woman, so you might say that we created this great explorer from our own stones at the tavern.33

In this reconstitutive process his painfully “twisted penis” (30)—“a curse that turned the mere thought of sexual pleasure to sudden pain” (31)—is also restored. Yet Columbus remains impotent, disoriented, devoid of personality, unable “to turn into a story,”34 and so disappears while his 28

Brian Attebery, “Fantasy and the Narrative Transaction,” Style 25.1 (1991): 25. Biróné, “Discovery Narratives in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” 166. 30 Quoted in Laura Coltelli, “Gerald Vizenor: The Trickster Heir of Columbus: An Interview.” Native American Literatures Forum 2-3 (1990-1991): 102. 31 Gerald Vizenor, “Manifest Manners: The Long Gaze of Christopher Columbus,” Boundary 2.19 (1992): 228. 32 Biróné, “Discovery Narratives in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” 122. 33 Gerald Vizenor, The Heirs of Columbus (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991), 19. All further citations will be given in the text in parentheses. 34 Biróné, “Discovery Narratives in Contemporary Native American Fiction,” 137. 29

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flagship becomes a casino defined as a “reservation on an anchor” (7). In another role reversal that smashes the stereotype of the technologicallychallenged Indian, Vizenor has his Indians employing lasers, doing computer simulations and engaging in sophisticated genetic research. The latter comes about because of their belief in the healing power of the genes they have inherited from Columbus then reconstituted that are able to “reverse human mutations, nurture shamatic resurrection, heal wounded children, and incite parthenogenesis in separatist women” (132). Thus by using the techniques of Alternative History, writers such as Gerald Vizenor have been able to do what many other great fiction-writers and historians have always done: made visible those who are invisible and given voice to those who have been silenced. Surely such stories are some of the most successful examples of displacing anxieties into new spaces of the imagination.

The Embedded Historical Novel Finally, several recent novels that are neither counterfactual nor Alternate History appear as almost old fashioned history novels except that they are embedded in science fiction and/or fantasy. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Galileo’s Dream (2009), for example, features a “larger than life character that has little in common with the Galileo of legend.”35 But if this Galileo “isn’t the Galileo of pop legend,” he is clearly also not quite Bertolt Brecht’s revolutionary, either.36 The novel gives us a pocket history of science extrapolated into the future along with a clear picture of exactly what the historical Galileo accomplished. Gary Wolfe believes that Robinson’s Galileo may “turn out to be the most moving and accurate fictional portrait of this ‘first scientist’ that we’re likely to see.” “Much of the brilliance of Robinson’s historical narrative,” Wolfe rightly maintains, lies in simultaneously preserving that myth [of Galileo’s heroism] and puncturing it: he’s able to lead us meticulously through Galileo’s sometimes astonishing reasoning (such as developing a method of calculating longitude by using the orbits of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons), while at the same time building an utterly convincing portrait of an often arrogant and petty genius who complains about his salary, abandons the mother of his children, and sends his beloved daughters off to a convent before they’re even properly of age.37 35

Wolfe, Review of Galileo’s Dream, np. Ibid. 37 Ibid. 36

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Like The Lucky Strike, this well-researched novel is packed with convincing details, creating a brilliantly conceived plot with beautifully realized characters—at least in the Galileo-in-his-time sections. Unlike The Lucky Strike, however, Galileo’s Dream is not alternative history but novelized history; that is, a novel that attempts to depict accurately the historical Galileo. What distinguishes it from history novels, however, is its all-encompassing context for it is an historical novel buried within a science-fictional construct that includes time travelers from the future with a base of operations on Ganymede, one of Jupiter’s moons. That sciencefiction plot is too complicated to recount here but Robinson uses it to narrate discoveries from the history of science both past and future and then skillfully interweaves it with the story of the historical Galileo, his life and times and his discovery of longitude. James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder (2006) similarly presents an historical novel but he embeds it not within science fiction but within fantasy.38 Like Robinson, Morrow has done prodigious, meticulous research then created fully developed characters within the detailed historical epoch of eighteenth-century England and its American colonies. In both Robinson’s and Morrow’s novels, the science fiction and/or fantasy elements, such as time-travelers from the future on Ganymede in Galileo’s Dream or the protagonist’s ability to breathe under water in The Last Witchfinder, are ingenious but may not have been absolutely necessary in either case as in both novels it is the history, the historical characters and their confrontations with authority—in short, the historical novel that remains immediately and forcefully persuasive.

Conclusion: The Permeability of the Disciplines The rise of counterfactual history as a significant component of both popular and scholarly historical accounts of important events and people runs parallel with a general broadening and extension of the discipline into historical novels, fantasy and science fiction. As Wolfe argues, “science fiction and fantasy seem to have been particularly imperialistic in colonizing what was once the realm of the historical novelist.”39 Yet, there is also the distinct possibility that any and all disciplinary boundaries and not just history’s, literature’s or science fiction’s may prove permeable. 38

See James Morrow, “Preface,” The Last Witchfinder (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), xv. 39 Wolfe, Evaporating Genres, 61.

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Perhaps the most extreme example is a recent novel in which the characters, when faced with that most popular of all current fantastic horrors— that ultimate repository of “displaced anxieties” a zombie apocalypse!—reach for their tried and true survival tool: the calculus! The novel in question, Zombies and Calculus by Williams College math professor Colin Adams, published by Princeton University Press in 2014, demonstrates once again the enduring truth of the need for such “spaces of the imagination.” As Virgil many centuries ago pointed out in Book III of the Eclogues: “The Muses love alternatives.”40 Side-stepping this example of zombies and the calculus, the current popularity of counterfactual history, the historical novel, fantasy history, Alternative History and the embedded historical novel suggest that history, along with literature, science fiction and fantasy and, like the Muses, “love alternatives.” The fluidity and permeability of this broad range of disciplines and genres goes far beyond the “evaporating genres” of Wolfe’s seminal study. This evaporation currently occurs across a spectrum of history, literature, fantasy, science fiction and even mathematics to the point where historical research now enhances such “spaces of the imagination” as science fiction and fantasy while speculative thinking and fantasizing by displacing anxieties enriches the study of history through counterfactual history, novelized history, Alternative History and embedded history.

Bibliography Adams, Colin. Zombies and Calculus. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Anderegg, Michael, Lincoln and Shakespeare. Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2015. Attebery, Brian. “Fantasy and the Narrative Transaction,” Style 25.1 (1991): 28-41. Biróné, Katalin Nagy. “Discovery Narratives in Contemporary Native American Fiction.” Ph.D. diss., University of Debrecen, 2007. Boynton, Robert S. “Thinking the Unthinkable: A Profile of Niall Ferguson.” The New Yorker, 12 April 1999. Accessed 26 July 2016. http://www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=50. Carr, Edward. What is History? 1961. 2nd ed. Houndmils: Macmillan, 1986. Carter, Stephen. The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln. New York: 40

Quoted in Robinson, Galileo’s Dream, np.

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Random House, 2012. Charyn, Jerome. I am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War. New York: Liveright, 2014. Coltelli, Laura. “Gerald Vizenor: The Trickster Heir of Columbus: An Interview.” Native American Literatures Forum 2-3 (1990-1991): 10115. Delbanco, Andrew. “The New Adventures of Abe.” Review of I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, by Jerome Charyn. The New York Review of Books, March 6, 2014. Dick, Phillip K. The Man in the High Castle 1962. New York: Vintage, 1962. Dracula. Dir. Tod Browning. Star Bela Lugosi. 1931. Film. Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006. Grahamé-Smith, Seth. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter. New York: Grand Central, 2010. Harris, Robert. Fatherland. New York: Random House, 1992. Lebow, R. N. Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Moore, Marianne. “Poetry.” In Anthology of American Literature 2, edited by George McMichael et al., 1388-89. New York: Macmillan, 1974. Morrow, James. The Last Witchfinder. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Morse, Donald E. “Travelling in Transylvania 1987-88.” Hungarian Review 7.1 (January 2016): np. Paulsen, Roland. “The Counterfactual Imagination.” In Theorizing in Social Science: The Context of Discovery, edited by Richard Swenberg, 158-176. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Reiss, Julian. “Counterfactuals.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Social Science. 154-83. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Robinson, Kim Stanley. Galileo’s Dream. New York: Ballantine, 2009. —. The Lucky Strike. 1984. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009. Shenk, Joshua W. Lincoln’s Melancholy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Shippey, Tom. “Alternate Historians: Newt, Kingers, Harry, and Me,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 8.1 (1997): 15-33. Simmons, Dan. Children of the Night. New York: Warner, 1992. Squire, John Collings. If, It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History. London: Longmans, Green, 1931. Vizenor, Gerald. The Heirs of Columbus. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1991. Wolfe, Gary K. Evaporating Genres. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

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—. Review of Galileo’s Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson. Locus August 2009. —. Review of The Lucky Strike by Kim Stanley Robinson. Locus April 2010. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States 1492-Present. New York: Harper, 1980.

TAMING THE GAMING IMAGINATION: THE HIDDEN LEXICON OF VIDEO GAMING PÉTER KRISTÓF MAKAI

Enter the Video Game Video games are cyberspaces by virtue of projecting a virtual allegory of space in which the player’s actions are meaningful. The representation of the player in the virtual space allows for a much wider range of playful agency than in the earthbound world of physical life. Some media historians believe that what they really study is nothing less than the history of human transcendence, a thorough exploration of virtuality, as experienced and made through evolving cultural forms.1 Since even ordinary human beings can have out-of-body experiences,2 it should come as no surprise that our species has been designing virtual spaces since the dawn of time: art. 1

Aleida Assmann, “The Printing Press and the Internet: From a Culture of Memory to a Culture of Attention,” in Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations, ed. Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer (Albany: State University of New York, 2006), 11–24; Oliver Grau, Virtual Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003). 2 Jason J. Braithwaite, Dana Samson, Ian Apperly, Emma Broglia and Johan Hulleman, “Cognitive Correlates of the Spontaneous Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) in the Psychologically Normal Population: Evidence for an Increased Role of Temporal-lobe Instability, Body-distortion Processing, and Impairments in Own-body Transformations,” Cortex 47 (2011): 839-853; Jason J. Braithwaite, Kelly James, Hayley Dewe, Nick Medford, Chie Takahashi and Klaus Kessler, “Fractionating the Unitary Notion of Dissociation: Disembodied but not Embodied Dissociative Experiences are Associated with Exocentric Perspective-taking,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (October 2013): Article 719, accessed 4 September 2016, doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00719; Andra M. Smith and Claude Messier, “Voluntary Out-of-Body Experience: An fMRI Study,” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (February 2014): Article 70, accessed 4 September 2016, doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00070.

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Scholars and scientists who study VR use the term presence (shortened from telepresence) to denote the mediated feeling of being somewhere else. Explaining how we are mentally capable of projecting ourselves into the territory of the virtual is the Holy Grail of modern, computerized VR research.3 Although the person involved has a vivid sense of being in another world, s/he does not inhabit that world, but shall forever remain merely a tourist there,4 a person whose gaze is guided by the designers of the virtual space in a similar manner to how real-world tourists are instructed by the leisure industry to see a foreign country through the eyes of an acquisitive explorer.5 Since the humble beginnings of “travelling with the eye,” as 19th century panoramas were marketed,6 simulating other, faraway places has always served political and cultural purposes, which fosters the widespread design of virtual media. The power of simulation (which I do not use in the Baudrillardian sense) raises concerns about the enchanting quality of these places, where the ideological workings of depicting reality is less visible than in representational media, but still present. This is the source of our own age’s anxieties about the effects of electronic entertainment: not that we do not know that we are being manipulated, but that we happily go along with it because it is “fun.” In this paper, I attempt to sketch out some common themes of video game spaces to investigate their aesthetic functions vis-à-vis the spatial metanarratives they culturally encode. The more abstract a game space is, the harder it is for players to make sense of them. Every video game space encapsulates different regimes of interaction, as the player begins their first few play sessions in a state of unfamiliarity with the controls and the setting of the game. As a result, game designers routinely theme game spaces with familiar stereotypes and frequently emphasize the touristic aspects of gameplay to provide players with a mental attitude well-honed in the real world. These settings evoke a set of practices and cultural iconographies that were already present in other microcosmic 3

Matthew Lombard and Theresa Ditton, “At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.2 (1997): np. Wiley Online Library, accessed 4 September 2016, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1083-6101.1997.tb00072.x/full; Minsky, Marvin. “Telepresence.” OMNI Magazine, June 1980, accessed 4 September 2016, https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html. 4 Phil Turner, Susan Turner and Fiona Carroll, “The Tourist Gaze: Towards Contextualised Virtual Environments,” in Spaces, Spatiality and Technology, ed. Phil Turner and Elizabeth Davenport (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 281–297. 5 John Urry and Jonas Larssen, The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (London: Sage, 2011). 6 Grau, Virtual Art, 68-69.

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entertainment spaces, such as world’s fairs and theme parks.7 In computer games, these visuospatial narratives convey culturally decodable “fun” destinations, which enhance the players’ agency by casting them in the role of the tourist, the explorer, the conquistador. Once the iconography coalesces into a theme, it reinforces the illusion that the space the player explores and interacts with is almost real. Video games are revolutionary exactly for this reason: unlike VR installations and self-consciously artistic tech demos, video games make the exploration of the virtual space meaningful in terms of a ludic narrative that engages the player and offers significant incentives to alter the conditions of the simulated world. To clarify what I mean by “video game,” for the remainder of the paper I shall be using my custom definition: video games are digitally operated programs that simulate some sort of virtual space, require the interaction of a living human being who is represented in the digital realm with an avatar as a locus of agency, and whose actions are rewarded by the program along strictly defined, algorithmic rules.

Moving with Purpose in a Series of Tubes: The Linear Quest Narrative in Super Mario Bros. It has to be said at the outset that the sheer pleasure of experiencing another world, this liminal, shamanic position is a strong psychological incentive in and of itself. Marveling at the detailed, digitally created artworld is an aesthetic motivation on par with the joys of visiting the best museums, castles and landscape gardens. A well-designed game fuses such vivid artwork with themes and game mechanics to construct a place that feels “authentic,” a part of a living-breathing world, whose regions have a history and a potential future which is shaped by the player. Lisbeth Klastrup calls this psychological effect “worldness,”8 which suggests that 7

Makai, Péter Kristóf, “Befejezetlen múlt: a fogyasztás és a szórakoztatás utópiáinak térbeli kifejezĘdése a Disney-élményparkok Tomorrowlandjében és azon túl,” Apertúra (Spring-Summer 2015): np., accessed 4 September 2016, http://uj.apertura.hu/2015/tavasz-nyar/makai-befejezetlen-mult-a-fogyasztas-es-aszorakoztatas-utopiainak-terbeli-kifejezodese-a-disney-elmenyparkoktomorrowlandjeben-es-azon-tul/. 8 Lisbeth Klastrup, “A Poetics of Virtual Worlds,” Proceedings of the Fifth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference (Melbourne: RMIT, 2003), accessed 4 September, 2016, http://www.klastrup.dk/div/Klastruphesis.pdf; Lisbeth Klastrup, “The Worldness of EverQuest – Exploring a 21st Century Fiction,” Game Studies 9.1 (2009): n.p., accessed 4 September 2016, http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/klastrup.

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game spaces are not only spatially but culturally coherent, pseudogeographical venues of entertainment. The environmental design of a computer game, therefore, does not solely rely on representing areas, it requires them to be mappable and traversable.9 As a player, navigating the world and shifting our perspectives in two or three-dimensional space activate ancient cognitive mechanisms in us, which reward us with pleasure for successful way-finding.10 This is why game designers segment the exploration of the game-world into domains which can be unlocked with the death-defying feats of the players. They reward performance with the expansion of narrative territory. Representing focalized movement is already a protonarrative (“I went there, this is different from my original position in these ways”), since there is an emotional, qualitative, motivated component to the protagonist’s movements in the storyworld. So, game design can be fruitfully described as “narrative architecture,”11 as long as designers can shape the traversable space to elicit an emotional reaction from the player. Every game-world thus is an opportunity to practice what psychogeographers call dérive, a playful drift in the modern cityscape.12 Naturally, the goal-oriented approach players bring to the gameworld often override pleasurable loitering, as the protagonists of the game are given tasks and objectives to complete, which makes movement purposeful, driven rather than drifting. When the game-space is displayed, it is never experienced in full. Games are spatially segmented, either discreetly (as levels, stages, rooms, maps) or seamlessly, as larger gameworlds simulate different geographical entities on one continuous map. This is especially true of “open world” or “sandbox” games, which limit the player’s exploration far less than linear narrative architectures – within these open environments, there are usually several biomes or climates that can be explored, along with their respective ecosystems, which reinforces the worldness of the virtual world. 9

Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 79-83. 10 Nancy, Easterlin, “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation,” in Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, ed. Lisa Zunshine (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 257–274. 11 Henry, Jenkins, “Game Design as Narrative Architecture,” accessed 4 September 2016, http://interactive.usc.edu/blog-old/wp-content/uploads/2011/01 /Jenkins_Narrative_Architecture.pdf. 12 Guy Debord, “The Theory of Derivé,” 1958, Situationist International Anthology, Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006, accessed 4 September 2016, http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm.

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But first, let us take a simple platform game which is linear, the original Super Mario Bros.13 From the perspective of the forty-odd years of video gaming history, Super Mario is a rather old game with very simple game mechanics and schematic level design, which makes it a perfect example for demonstrating the basic premises of my main argument. Namely that a.) all computer games use spatial variety to signal progress in some fashion, b.) video game spaces are symbolically connected to a larger, in-game narrative, either explicitly or implicitly, and c.) simulated spaces in computer gamers are only “realistic” to a degree. They are primarily symbolic, more akin to toy theaters and model train scenery than to pleasure gardens and the great outdoors. In a platform game, the character controlled by the player has to travel from the left side of the screen to the right-hand side, while the screen scrolls continuously until the player reaches the end of the level. This is no trivial matter, however, since simple, ground-level movement is obstructed by bottomless pits, hills or pipes that are insurmountable when walking. There are also enemies, which harm the player when horizontally colliding into them. The player has to mitigate the terrain by jumping over obstacles and the top of the enemies if s/he is to make progress. These obstacles can be avoided by jumping on short, non-contiguous platforms that provide higher ground, hence the name of the genre. Accordingly, the game-world is horizontal and fundamentally tube-like, with no crossroads or bifurcations. Although the screen only moves left and right, there are “warp” pipes, which open upwards or downwards. The players can enter these, but it will not move them “up” or “down” on the map, it merely skips certain parts of the level, like the saccade of an eye when reading. Still, these “warp zones” suggest a less constrained, more vertical world, even though this is not the actual case. Even at this very early stage of video gaming, the designers felt the need to convey genre and motivational cues for the player to ease the anxiety that comes with playing in a relatively abstract space. Mario begins his adventures on a lush, green, hilly landscape, under a clear, blue sky, but he needs to visit many a castle to find his princess. The end of every level, the right-hand side of the tube is always a green pipe or a castle, whose dark gates allow the protagonist to disappear and reappear at the beginning of the next level. Contiguous spaces are always topologically correct, that is to say, they conform to the folk physics we develop when we are young, but the warp zones disrupt this contiguity. 13 Super Mario Bros, Nintendo, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, music by Koji Kondo, 1985.

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Even when the simulation wants to appear “natural” or intuitive, it can only be an abstraction. In the words of Espen Aarseth, video game levels are “allegories of space”: “they pretend to portray space in ever more realistic ways, but rely on their deviation from reality in order to make the illusion playable.”14 This deviation assuages the unconscious fears of the players that they might lose their hold on reality, as simulations are never perfect – not only from the perspective of an idealized, Platonic philosopher, but from the very enthusiastic gamer’s viewpoint, too. Euro Truck Simulator 215, an otherwise faithful simulation of long-distance hauling which simulates a large majority of Europe’s road network, has to compress space to make the experience of driving over long stretches of open road actually fun. So, travelling from Aberdeen, Scotland to Debrecen, Hungary does not take two real-world days but only a little more than an hour and a half if the player obeys all traffic laws, and a little less if s/he can pay the fines for speeding. In Super Mario, that tired, old cliché of medieval romances, “rescuing the princess” already establishes two stereotypical locations: the idyllic green hills and the castles of Bowser, the fire-breathing tortoise-king, who serves as the main antagonist of Mario. But the Italian plumber also enters dark, chtonic dungeons, he swims through an underwater level, jumps on skyscraping mushrooms high up in the skies, and he must cautiously leap above lava geysers underneath Bowser’s castles. Topologically speaking, these levels are similarly tubular, but the iconography of each stage (the ramparts, clouds, rolling hills, or seaweed and medusae) creates the illusion that our hero takes part in an epic adventure: he travels the whole wide world to save his damsel in distress. Computer games are an ideal medium for these picaresque quest narratives because of the player’s constant sense of danger, no matter how inconsequential it might appear due to its virtual nature.16 Therefore it should not come as a surprise that a significant percentage of story-driven games dress their virtual worlds up in the garbs of science fiction and fantasy, since these genres enable the creation of long, epic spatial narratives because they feature vast explorable worlds. Though perilous indeed, familiarity with the genre reduces the anxiety of finding yourself 14 Espen Aarseth, “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games,” in Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level, ed. Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz and Matthias Böltger (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007), 47. 15 Euro Truck Simulator 2, SCS Software, 2013. 16 Murray, Hamlet, 137-140; Jeff Howard, Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives (Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 2008).

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in a strange, new place, with customs that are hard to fathom. Since the publication of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces,17 creators of mass media narratives widely acknowledge the power and universality of the monomythical adventure story, whether in an SF/F guise or as a modern, neo-colonial adventure of relic hunting and tomb raiding. It is especially applicable to computer games, for the main challenge lies not in deciphering the tale, as it uses tried and tested patterns of storytelling, but in mastering the game mechanics themselves. At the same time, the ubiquity and universality of the monomythic adventure renders it easily adaptable to any environment. The need to transform the quest narrative to many different locales must be also attributed to the very limited processing capacities of early digital machines, when compared with what we have today. If the same game mechanic was transposed to several different areas with a distinctive feel, it lengthened the novelty of the play experience and suggested a steady progress. The change of scenery can also allegorize the ramping up of the difficulty curve: the first level’s Arcadian, lush green fields are followed by the deep, dark forest, after which the heroine must brave the highest peaks of the land. Then the desert awaits, whence the adventurer reaches the icy wastelands, the inhospitable jungles, only to finally delve deep into the bowels of the Earth, where s/he beats the final boss, flanked by flowing lava. In other words, as we stray further and further from the fertile lands of medieval Europe, and the continental, pastoral world preferred by Western culture, we learn more and more about the game mechanics, and we are more willing to accept that we are being challenged time and again. Spatial narratives, therefore, create and sustain the “flow” of optimal experience, in which the play continuously learns new abilities and skills, as well as the kinds of strategies and tactics needed to progress in the game.18

17

Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949 (London: Fontana Press, 1993). 18 Jenova, Chen, “Flow in Games,” (MFA Thesis, 2006), accessed 4 September 2016, http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/Flow_in_games_final.pdf; Csíkszentmihályi Mihály, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, (New York: HarperCollins, 1990); Robertson Holt, “Examining Video Game Immersion as a Flow State,” (BA Thesis, St. Catharine’s, Ontario: Brock University, 2000), accessed 4 September 2016, https://www.academia.edu/1466850/Examining_video _game_immersion_as_a_flow_state.

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Colonizing the Imagination: Touring Themed Worlds Let us now turn to a more mature classic platformer, Sonic and Knuckles,19 in which we can examine a greater variety of video game lands, as this game was designed for the fourth generation of video game consoles, and is an iconic showpiece of the 16-bit era. In the series, Sonic, the Hedgehog must collect rings and gems to defeat the evil Dr. Robotnik, who wants to build an evil “Eggman Empire” via his robot army. The “Mushroom Hill Zone” has a pleasing sylvan setting, in which Sonic jumps high from overgrown, trampoline-like mushrooms to reach new heights in his neck of the woods. In “Sandopolis Zone,” he must avoid quicksand traps amidst towering pyramids, he fights scorpions and sandworms, and as he reaches the second stage of the zone, he enters one of the royal tombs, whose interior decoration is crammed chock-full with every possible stereotype about ancient Egyptian burial sites. In order to complete “Lava Reef Zone,” Sonic must overcome the dangers of a mine nestled deep in the underground, and then continue onto the magma chamber of the atoll, where only moving platforms can protect him from certain incineration. Visiting the “Sky Sanctuary Zone” is a trip to a celestial, floating island, which is a sacred shrine to the world’s inhabitants. Here, Sonic pursues his archenemy, who represents the dark side of technological advance, amongst the walls and pillars of the shrine thick with creeping vines and wide-leafed palm trees. Sonic’s success and progress towards his nemesis is clearly signified by the modern, artificial materials and crazy inventions that appear in greater numbers as the player beats the levels of the game. The last level, “The Doomsday Zone” is the culmination of this trend, when Sonic finally trounces Dr. Robotnik in an epic battle IN SPACE! This particular concatenation of levels also suggests that Sonic, the defender of the natural realm and civilization travels through the world to protect it from technocratic authoritarianism. By completing the levels, the player conquers the elemental realms of earth, fire, water and air, as well as becoming the savior of the cultures that comprise the game-world. In Sonic games, and the considerable majority of games that conform to the epic adventure/quest romance narrative, level designers utilize a time-honored set of tropes and settings, which define the grand themes of the levels. For added familiarity, these themes are recycled within game series, game genres and other media. It is not by chance that arctic climes, 19 Sonic and Knuckles, Sega, Sonic Team, designed by Hirokazu Yasuhara, Hisayoshi Yoshida and Takashi Iizuka, 1994.

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tropical islands, ancient ruins, subterranean caverns, sunken cities, haunted mansions and deserts return with a frequency that borders on the unimaginative. These destinations are, of course, the very definition of “exotic,” conspicuously Other spaces in which adventures are usually set. Like computer-aided simulations in real life, they signify being somewhere else by using symbolical props to evoke the iconic visual vocabulary of pop culture. This practice of setting the scene is called “theming.” Theming is a process by which a commercial venue differentiates itself from its competitors by enhancing its built environment to incorporate symbolic architectural and ornamental motifs which hearken back to a different era or place.20 The most famous example of this practice can be found in theme parks, whose physical site is structured into different “lands,” but boutique hotels, themed restaurants or other leisure enterprises can also participate in theming to make, say, shopping a pleasant experience. Immersing oneself into the manufactured lands of theme parks bears a certain resemblance to virtual reality scholars’ descriptions of presence. In both cases, a virtual space is constructed, either physically or digitally, to thrill visitors and engender a playful attitude of the tourist and the explorer, who feels like s/he is elsewhere. Gottdiener highlights the fact that every person essentially behaves like a tourist in a themed space, and adds that “The work of tourism is the reexamination, relearning, and creative improvisation of methods for successful interaction. The tourist’s negotiation of the unfamiliar environment is also illustrative of the kind of work we all must do that is often taken for granted in our daily lives.”21 His concept of the tourist is startlingly in line with the main tasks of the video game player: both must find a way to reach their goals, they traverse unfamiliar space and must solve problems creatively. Now it becomes much easier to understand why it is so important that props and scenery should change constantly: the designers activate earlier, tacitly acquires cultural skills with these touristic commonplaces as they prime, prepare and prolong the player’s tourist-like attitude. Similarly to tourists and the great explorers, the video game players must constantly collect objects to ensure their survival. This practice is also meant to strengthen the materiality of gameplay that is fundamentally insubstantial. As part of the work of tourism, newcomers to the uncharted territory must “map” the world, see its sights and wonders, and to interpret 20

Mark Gottdiener, The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments, 2nd ed. (Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2001), 5. 21 Ibid., 151.

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the region’s otherness on their own terms, especially when the built environment and foreign people’s behaviors strike them as odd or puzzling. This sort of “environmental storytelling” puts the player’s actions into context, frames the fiction of the game-world within a familiar metanarrative of conquest, translates the ludic level’s past into material culture which left its mark on the landscape, serving as evidence of human inhabitation and biological or cosmic events.22 Representing the built environment, a wide range of buildings and ruins, not to mention other signs of human activities shaping the world lends an air of history to the freshly-made virtual space which cannot decay on its own (unless programmed in), bearing silent witness to the rise and fall of civilizations. Recurring themes of exoticism, the Middle Ages and science fiction are widespread and popular precisely for the reason that they are deeply embedded in cultural genres that delineated a unifying image of the Western world. As Deborah Philips points out, these genres, which later became the primary source of theme park iconography, were established as conventions during the early period of modern imperialism.23 Fantasy medievalism and fairy-tale romances were very popular in Britain with the rise of the bourgeois gentlemen because it codified standards of (upper) middle-class masculinity, and ennobled the feudal past which was tarnished by the historical narratives of the Enlightenment. It also effectively forged a more respectable image of Britain. In due course, epic works about Britain’s “historical” past have seeped into the twentieth century: partly due to the late modern fantasy boom and partly to the invention of role-playing games, popular culture preserved this tradition in the sword-and-sorcery pulp adventure novels that form the backbone of current video game RPGs. Gothic novels, developed in the 18th century, presented spine-chilling tales of ghosts and ancient castles that have a direct link to the ghost trains and blood-curdling haunted mansions of amusement parks. These, in turn, appear in the ghostly Boos and ruined

22

Don Carson, “Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park Industry,” GamaSutra, 2000, accessed 4 September 2016, http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3186/environmental_storytelling_.php.; Matthias Worch and Harvey Smith, “‘What Happened Here?’ – Environmental Storytelling,” Lecture at the 2010 San Francisco Game Developers’ Conference, accessed 4 September 2016, http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc10/slides /Smith_Harvey_WhatHappenedHereWeb_Notes.pdf. 23 Deborah Philips, Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground (London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012).

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towers of Super Mario Bros. 3,24 the latter of which is also an excellent place to rescue princesses. The British and the French empires both discover the treasures of Egypt at the end of the 18th century. From that moment onwards, tales about the secrets of the pyramids, the curse of the Pharaohs, and ancient mummies have inundated the Western press, which never shied away from making a buck or two by catering to the tastes of Western readers. Such sensationalist stories reinforced their sense of superiority when faced with the challenge of various “primitive” cultures, who seemed to live just fine without the fruits of industrial labor. Taking Cleopatra’s Needles, the burial chambers reconstructed in Western museums inadvertently themed the spaces where they were presented to the general public. There, again, is a straight line from here to the roller-coasters of Luna Parks, with their elaborate Egyptian hieroglyphs, sphinxes and scarabs that whoosh past the riders, or to the Luxor Casino in Las Vegas. Computer game levels that are set in Egyptian pyramids and the shifting sands of the desert are proud descendants of this cultural lineage. Yet another genre, the “boy’s own stories” (what we would call today “Young Adult” adventure fiction) have embellished the tall tales of seamen about unspoiled tropical islands, pirates and treasure, as well as primitive natives. Whole generations have been brought up on the exploits of undaunted sailors and privateers, who ravaged the Spanish Main or explored the Polynesian archipelago. The idyllic beauty of desert islands conjured up the image of the land of Cockaigne in the minds of a populace who lived an increasingly more hectic life in a developing capitalist society. As such, they became a smash favorite of entertainment businesses which wanted to lend an atmosphere of exotic leisure to a commercial venture. This also helped to generate larger revenues, as an earthly Paradise is not the place to be thrifty. Swinging pirate ships, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition’s Treasure Island and others of their ilk have firmly lodged themselves into popular consciousness as a metaphor of carefree, affluent life and pleasure. In computer games, tropical islands and pirate-infested archipelagos can be found in literally any genre.

24 Super Mario Bros. 3, Nintendo, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, music by Koji Kondo, 1988.

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Keep on Fallin’ In and Out of Love with Utopia: Fallout 3 as a Playful Dystopia Finally, I examine a game that employs the science fiction theme to full effect, this time, an action-adventure third person shooter. Fallout 325 is set in 2277, two hundred years after the world has been set on fire in an all-out nuclear war between Asia and the US. Washington D.C. and the surrounding area has become uninhabitable due to the devastation caused by the atomic bombs, and the remaining survivors by and large have confined themselves to nuclear shelters the size of smaller towns to ride out the worst period in relative safety. The protagonist, a former Vault Dweller emerges from one of these shelters to see what the world has turned into. Two hundred years have not passed without a trace: as he travels around the desolate Capital Wasteland, he witnesses a country in shambles. Two-headed cows graze on the ruins of D.C., derailed, decaying monorails house small groups of survivors, former buildings are taken apart and converted into decrepit shacks, and what were functioning factories once are now the outposts of marauders. Nonetheless, there are many objects that tell the tale of what has become of the old world. Pre-war money is useless, people trade in coke bottle caps. The motivational posters and comic books are inspired by the visual language and color scheme of the 1950s, the computers look like the old mainframe-era beasts, and some survivors worship an unexploded atomic bomb like some latter-day Black Stone of Islam. Although the player’s most important goal is to mow down all sorts of mutants and rogue bandits, in fact, it could be argued that the real task and greatest pleasure is to begin with these props and artefacts and then build a coherent picture of how history turned out since the Atomic wars, unearthing the secrets and motivations of the warring factions, as colonizing conquistadores and archaeologists have conducted their fieldwork in the nineteenth century. The anachronistic visual world of Fallout 3 is an experiment to criticize Cold War paranoia by means of an almost cutesy, but grim retrofuturistic aesthetic. It places our most terrifying fears into the future, and brings them alive, while mocking our most beautiful dreams of progress. The optimistic belief in technology, which characterized the High Modernist era was apprehensible in the many world’s fairs held in the first half of the 20th century, whose slogans were futuristic proclamations and 25

Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda Game Studios, designed by Emil Pagliarulo, Joel Burgess and Adam Adamowicz, 2008.

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coherent themes that connected consumption, edification and a vision of things to come. Spatially, these were expressed in the layout of the utopic venue of the world’s fair, which was the first entertainment venue where a smaller, virtual microcosm of the world was organized along the lines of a symbolic theme.26 Fallout 3 is a dystopic, ironic playground of the imagination that resurrects a bygone era’s ideals and subverts them, but in a way to ensure the survival of the fair’s logic of representation: theming. Although computer games were originally reputed to be a superficial, trigger-happy pastime for adolescent males within Western cultural commentary, potentially damaging because violence was woven into the very fabric of video game play, after the initial condemnatory period, newly emerging scholars have sought to redefine and celebrate the medium.27 This created a utopizing period of games scholarship, epitomized by Edward Castronova’s thought-provoking book title Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality.28 In the story of Vault 112, Fallout 3 presents a critical reexamination of the trope that the virtual world can somehow prove to be an idyllic phalanstery, removed from the anxieties of ordinary life. In game lore, Vault 112 was one of the last fallout shelters produced by the Vault-Tec Corporation, and it was designated to be a social experiment. They recruited 85 lucky test subjects, called Tranquility Loungers, and suspended these individuals in cryogenic vats, the Lounges, while hooking them up to virtual reality systems, so they may not suffer from the sensory deprivation of living in a desolate Vault for several hundred years. The virtual reality simulation itself is a Normal Rockwellesque, 1950s suburb called Tranquility Lane, complete with picket fences, gingham skirts, knit vests and tricycles. However, as soon as the subjects were connected to the system, the Lead Overseer of the project, Dr. Stanislaus Brown overtook the VR systems and used the subjects as puppets for his own perverted joy, controlling them with manic glee until he got bored with it. He convinces the player to wreak havoc within the simulation, making one of the little boys cry, breaking up the marriage of one of the couples, killing them, and finally, to mass-murder everyone inside the makebelieve world in exchange for freeing the player character’s father. 26

Scott A. Lukas, Theme Park, Objekt Series, (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), 34. Nick Dyer-Witherford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxiv-xxix. 28 Edward Castronova, Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007). 27

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Turning the nostalgic, sepia-toned, picture-perfect world of Tranquility Lane into a slaughterhouse, the player is complicit in the destruction of the experiment. The game designers use the mechanics of role-playing game quests and object-hunting to comment upon the virtuality of post-WWII suburban America, but also to critique the general obedience required of the player to complete any game, which frequently ends in massacres of genocidal proportions. It exposes the god-like properties of the designers, symbolized by the mad scientist Dr. Braun, and uses satire to poke fun at our anxieties about games being “murder simulators,” rife with anarchy and entertaining carnage. On the other hand, it reinforces the aforementioned complicity of the player in the ideology of militaristic entertainment, in which the greatest fun is to kill on command and be rewarded for it. By showing the flip side of game design as the ruthless machination of a crazed German scientist, the designers elide their own role in this, and whether the players make the connection between the two simulations is left to them alone.

Conclusion The virtual worlds of computer game, just like [t]he newest theme parks[,] act as powerful lifespaces—as physical places that project educational, political, and lifestyle messages amidst all the consumerism. Like the Paleolithic caves and the real mountains of prehistory that contained some of the species represented in these stores, [they provide] a fully functioning space that fulfills both utilitarian and symbolic needs. . . . Like our early human ancestors who may have used symbolic caves to deal with the unrealities, the difficulties, of the real world, we use these virtual spaces to do much the same.29

Fallout 3 and similar works of interactive art, that is to say, the spaces and stories of computer games have become the most powerful cultural symbols of a world of information technology and unpredictability. They harness the imaginary output of earlier eras to reconfigure our previous notions of media consumption. As a medium that is built upon the agency of the player, computer games rely on purposeful, non-trivial participation within the logic of interactivity. Your choices, your actions matter: they change the world—within certain boundaries, created by the designers. If game-worlds are fully functioning cultural spaces, they must have their own use and meaning. The most obvious need a game-world fulfills 29

Lukas, Theme Park, 244-245.

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is the welcome diversion from obligations issued by the working world.30 It also educates and, as in non-human animals, prepares the playful subject for the challenges of Life, which in our world is algorithmic, abstract, numerical, statistical, and frequently immaterial. Some would say, virtual. Video games might impart some “general knowledge,” but what they inculcate best is the logic of the digital age, that of programmable destiny, the logic of experimentation and mastery. And they teach it by engaging the player, who learns and relearns through doing. Trial and error eventually gives way to trial and triumph. But feelings of success and achievement are dwarfed by the symbolic need and reassurance that we live in a meaningful world, one where our actions make a difference. Our modern sense of self depends upon this . . . illusion, ideology or imperative. Narratives make such an understanding of agency possible, and with practice, turn it into an instinct. Video game narratives are predictably drawn from the tropes of mythic adventure stories, from the schemata of the earliest epics that fused their listeners into a legendary community who identified with their culture heroes. Sonic and Mario take on epic quests, travel the world to battle technological or fantastic demigods and restore order to their life-worlds. The global dimension of these world-spanning journeys are signaled by the variety of themes that the player and the character s/he assumes encounters. Themes create microcosmic units, whose inner consistency turn spaces into places. Juxtaposed, they form a macrocosm by including iconic elements that suggest a completeness without dutifully reproducing the world in its entirety. These symbolic elisions support particular visions of the macrocosm that make sense within the cultural logic of the game-world. In most computer games, that logic is a conflicting one: acquisitive but prosocial, neo-colonial and liberatory, serious and irreverent at the same time. Whenever these conflicts are swept under the rug, we can see the ideology of fun poking through. Fun, in these cases, is to take these basic premises for granted, to bask in the glory of doing, and to do it well. The gaming imagination needs cultural handholds to function well, and these are eagerly supplied by a popular cultural lexicon of imperial adventure, mythopoetic grandeur and conservative satire. But above all, it works, and I hope that my own contribution shed some light on how video game spaces “prefer” these cultural spheres and meanings.

30

Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Human Culture (London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949), 44, 51, 160-162.

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Bibliography Aarseth, Espen. “Allegories of Space: The Question of Spatiality in Computer Games.” In Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: The Next Level, edited by Friedrich von Borries, Steffen P. Walz and Matthias Böltger, 44–47. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007. Assmann, Aleida. “The Printing Press and the Internet: From a Culture of Memory to a Culture of Attention.” In Globalization, Cultural Identities, and Media Representations, edited by Natascha Gentz and Stefan Kramer, 11–24. Albany: State University of New York, 2006. Braithwaite, Jason J., Dana Samson, Ian Apperly, Emma Broglia and Johan Hulleman. “Cognitive Correlates of the Spontaneous Out-ofBody Experience (OBE) in the Psychologically Normal Population: Evidence for an Increased Role of Temporal-lobe Instability, Body-distortion Processing, and Impairments in Ownbody Transformations.” Cortex 47 (2011): 839-853. Braithwaite, Jason J., Kelly James, Hayley Dewe, Nick Medford, Chie Takahashi and Klaus Kessler. “Fractionating the Unitary Notion of Dissociation: Disembodied but not Embodied Dissociative Experiences are Associated with Exocentric Perspective-taking.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 7 (October 2013): Article 719. Accessed 4 September 2016. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00719. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 1949. London: Fontana Press, 1993. Carson, Don. “Environmental Storytelling: Creating Immersive 3D Worlds Using Lessons Learned from the Theme Park Industry.” GamaSutra. 2000. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3186/environmental_storytelli ng_.php. Castronova, Edward. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007. Chen, Jenova. “Flow in Games.” MFA Thesis. 2006. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/Flow_in_games_final.pdf. Csíkszentmihályi, Mihály. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Debord, Guy. “The Theory of Derivé.” 1958. Situationist International Anthology. Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm.

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Dyer-Witherford, Nick, and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Easterlin, Nancy. “Cognitive Ecocriticism: Human Wayfinding, Sociality, and Literary Interpretation.” In Introduction to Cognitive Cultural Studies, edited by Lisa Zunshine, 257–274. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Euro Truck Simulator 2. SCS Software. 2013. Entertainment Software. Fallout 3. Bethesda Softworks. Bethesda Game Studios. Designed by Emil Pagliarulo, Joel Burgess and Adam Adamowicz. 2008. Entertainment Software. Gottdiener, Mark. The Theming of America: American Dreams, Media Fantasies, and Themed Environments. 2nd edition. Boulder and Oxford: Westview Press, 2001. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Holt, Robertson. “Examining Video Game Immersion as a Flow State.” BA Thesis. Brock University, 2000. Accessed 4 September 2016. https://www.academia.edu/1466850/Examining_video_game_immersi on_as_a_flow_state. Howard, Jeff. Quests: Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 2008. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Human Culture. London, Boston and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” USC Interactive Media & Games. 2004. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://interactive.usc.edu/blog-old/wpcontent/uploads/2011/01/Jenkins_Narrative_Architecture.pdf. Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Klastrup, Lisbeth. “A Poetics of Virtual Worlds.” Proceedings of the Fifth International Digital Arts and Culture Conference, Melbourne: RMIT, 2003. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://www.klastrup.dk/div/Klastruphesis.pdf. —. “The Worldness of EverQuest – Exploring a 21st Century Fiction.” Game Studies 9.1 (2009): np. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://gamestudies.org/0901/articles/klastrup. Lombard, Matthew, and Theresa Ditton. “At the Heart of It All: The Concept of Presence.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 3.2 (1997): np. Wiley Online Library. Accessed 4 September 2016.

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http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.10836101.1997.tb00072.x/full. Lukas, Scott, A. Theme Park. Objekt Series. London: Reaktion Books, 2008. Makai, Péter Kristóf. “Befejezetlen múlt: a fogyasztás és a szórakoztatás utópiáinak térbeli kifejezĘdése a Disney-élményparkok Tomorrowlandjében és azon túl.” Apertúra (Spring-Summer 2015): np. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://uj.apertura.hu/2015/tavasznyar/makai-befejezetlen-mult-a-fogyasztas-es-a-szorakoztatasutopiainak-terbeli-kifejezodese-a-disney-elmenyparkoktomorrowlandjeben-es-azon-tul/. Minsky, Marvin. “Telepresence.” OMNI Magazine, June 1980. Accessed 4 September 2016. https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Telepresence.html. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998. Philips, Deborah. Fairground Attractions: A Genealogy of the Pleasure Ground. London and New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012. Poole, Steven. 2007. Trigger Happy: Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution. 2000. Web-download edition. 2007. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://www.org.id.tue.nl/IFIP-TC14/documents/poole-2004.pdf. Smith, Andra M., and Claude Messier. “Voluntary out-of-body experience: an fMRI study.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (February 2014): Article 70. Accessed 4 September 2016. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00070. Sonic and Knuckles. Sega, Sonic Team, designed by Hirokazu Yasuhara, Hisayoshi Yoshida and Takashi Iizuka. 1994. Entertainment Software. Super Mario Bros. Nintendo, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, music by Koji Kondo. 1985. Entertainment Software. Super Mario Bros. 3. Nintendo, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, music by Koji Kondo. 1988. Entertainment Software. Turner, Phil, Susan Turner and Fiona Carroll. “The Tourist Gaze: Towards Contextualised Virtual Environments.” In Spaces, Spatiality and Technology, edited by Phil Turner and Elizabeth Davenport, 281–297. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Urry, John, and Jonas Larssen. The Tourist Gaze 3.0. London: Sage, 2011. Worch, Matthias, and Harvey Smith. “‘What Happened Here?’ – Environmental Storytelling.” Lecture at the 2010 San Francisco Game Developers’ Conference. 2010. Accessed 4 September 2016. http://twvideo01.ubm-us.net/o1/vault/gdc10/slides/Smith_Harvey _WhatHappenedHereWeb_Notes.pdf.

EXILE, TRANSLATION, AND AUTHORIAL SELF-REPRESENTATION IN ELIZABETHAN TRAVEL LITERATURE: THE CASE OF THOMAS NICHOLLS1 CSABA MACZELKA

Introduction Thomas Nicholls (1532-1601), the subject of this paper, is described in the ODNB as a “translator and ship-owner.”2 While the former label refers to the handful of translations published by him, the latter reflects his activity as a mercer in Spain and the Canaries in troublesome years ending with imprisonment and serious financial problems. Nicholls and his works are fine examples illustrating the close link between translation and travel writing in Elizabethan culture, summed up by William Sherman in the 1

Supported through the New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Capacities

2

All biographical information (here and elsewhere) is based on R. C. D. Baldwin, “Nicholls, Thomas (1532–1601)”, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004), online edn., Jan 2008, accessed 6 Jan 2016. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20124. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only available English biography about Nicholls, except for an article covering his years and work on the Canary Islands: Francisco Javier Castillo, “The English Renaissance and the Canary Islands: Thomas Nichols And Edmund Scory,” SEDERI (1992): 57-69. A Spanish biography is available in Alejandro Cioranescu, Thomas Nichols, mercader de azúcar, hispanista y hereje (Instituto de Estudios Canarios: La Laguna, 1963).

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following words: “All Elizabethan travel writing, and not just those texts based explicitly or implicitly on foreign texts, participated in this project of translation in which the ‘strange’ (both civil and savage) was at once co-opted and occluded.”.3 This fascination with travel and translation is not only evident in those works of Nicholls which obviously fall into the category of “travel writing.” Even when he publishes the translation of a completely different text (Pedro de Mejía’s Spanish dialogue about the usefulness of physicians and medicines), in the dedication he describes himself as a traveling Christian, who carries two bags: one for provisions, as every pilgrim should, and, more uniquely, “the other to keepe such books as were giuen me by the way for charitie.”4 Significantly, when the same dedication finally reaches the compulsory point where the humble author offers the work to Thomas Fowler (d. 1590), it appeals to the dedicatee’s interest towards “trauailers works, as well by land as Sea.”5 Since the book in question, a didactic dialogue about the usefulness of physicists and medicine, hardly classifies as travel literature per se (except that the scene of speaking is, unsurprisingly, in Spain), the author seems to be confused when he appeals to the addressee’s preference for travel writing. Yet, as I would like to argue in the present paper, such a rhetoric is anything but a sign of confusion, encompassing an essential part of Nicholls’ highly conscious self-representation as an author, the governing element of which is the figure of the suffering traveler, or in his own preferred phrase, the “Poor Pilgrim.”6 The primary motif for the selection of a restless, tormented wanderer, however, is not rooted only in the more obvious link between traveling and pilgrimage. In Nicholls’s construction, the pilgrim becomes more than a simple traveler, a peculiar go-between figure who is kept in a perpetual state of limbo, a state that I will discuss following Edward Said’s

3

William H. Sherman, “Bringing the World to England: The Politics of Translation in the Age of Hakluyt,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) 14 (2004): 207. 4 [Thomas Nicholls], A Pleasant Dialogue, concerning Phisicke and Phisitions (Imprinted at London, by Iohn Charlewood, 1580), Aiiir. 5 Ibid., Aiiiv. 6 Whenever I refer to “self-representation,” I use the term not in its original sense deriving from Stephen Greenblatt, but in the sense described by Cathy Shrank as “the self-fashioning . . . where publication is used to mould an authorial identity.” Cathy Shrank, Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 21.

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Reflections on Exile.7 I would also like to point out that this selfrepresentation and the representation of the state of exile are profoundly influenced by a unique aspect of utopian fiction, which can be perfectly illustrated with Milton’s often quoted opinion about the genre. According to him, a utopia is a “mighty Continent wherein to display the largenesse of [the author’s] spirits.” 8 Milton’s early reflection clearly positions utopia as a space of imagination, a fictional place which can be populated with the author’s ideas. While in the broader context of the cited passage Milton emphasizes the educational-didactic potential in such an imaginative space, I will argue that in early modern texts the same utopian space is often used with the purpose of resolving real word conflicts— namely, the psychological-social anxieties of the author and his/her textual alter ego.

Merchant, Rector, Translator Nicholls’s first known work, The strange and marueilous newes lately come from the great kingdome of Chyna, a translation of a captured letter sent to Philip II was published in 1577.9 This was seven years after he was rewarded for years of suffering and political and religious persecution in the 1560s in Spanish prisons with a rectorship in Wilford in 1570, a position of which he was deprived because of his extreme Calvinism in 1577. The ten-page-long text conveys a sense of extreme practicality, and therefore authorial presence is almost completely missing in it. Nicholls is but a mediator here, summarizing a letter about China, his own role limited to the relation of the material context of the text (how, when, and where the letter was written). The translator is not named, only his monogram is featured on the title page, which is the only paratextual element in the text. This work seems to be a spontaneous undertaking, an ephemeral publication which does not contribute to the construction of an 7

Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173-186. 8 John Milton, “An Apology Against a Pamphlet Called A Modest Confutation of the Animadversions upon the Remonstrant Against Smectymnuus (1641),” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton 1. 1624-1642 (New Haven: Yale UP, 1953), 880-881. 9 [Thomas Nicholls], The strange and marueilous newes lately come from the great kingdome of Chyna (London: Thomas Gardynerand Thomas Dawson, [1577/78?]). There is no year on the title page, the Short Title Catalogue gives 1577 with a question mark, while Baldwin claims that it was published in 1578. See Short Title Catalogue, accessed 25 Jan 2016, http://estc.bl.uk/S116916 and Baldwin.

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authorial figure at all, but already indicates Nicholls’ obsession with faraway lands. Yet, the construction of such a figure would soon commence in Nicholls’ first longer translation, The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the West India, now called New Spayn (1578), which is a carefully constructed textual project extending the thresholds of translation. Whereas the earlier text contained only his monogram, here the author’s name appears after the dedication, as well as in the two prefatory poems. The work is dedicated to the central figure of Elizabeth’s network of foreign intelligence, Sir Francis Walsingham (c. 1532-1590), and although there are traces of this cooperation from as early as 1574, it should be recalled that Nicholls’ first known publications appeared directly after his removal from the clerical position, as if the change of vocation had been a necessary, but still somewhat foreseen and conscious decision. Nicholls’s biographer, R. C. D. Baldwin suggests that the translation program focused on works which “would inform the privy council‫ތ‬s strategic reappraisals of the military and financial strength of the Spanish monarchy,” so it seems that Nicholl’s first foray into the world of translation was primarily fueled by practical demands.10 The dedication of the work emphasizes that the text is not only a “delectable and vvorthy Historie” and a “most true and iust reporte of matter paste”, but also that it is a “[m]irrour and an excellent president, for all such as shall take in hande to gouerne nevve Discoueries.”11 Travel and thinking about the ideal government is inextricably linked here, and this is followed by a curious twist when the text recalls a dialogue between the translator and someone who took part in the original conquest led by Hernando Cortez. The force of the original is multiplied by a contact of the translator, an eyewitness, reflecting the growing demand for accurate observations in the period’s travel literature, which, according to Mary C. Fuller, became more and more practical by the end of the 16th century.12 One must be reminded, however, that Nicholls is a translator here—and when the mentioned dialogue is recalled, it shifts the focus on his own personal traveling experience, and his own personal encounter with someone capable of validating the contents of the book. 10

Baldwin, “Nicholls, Thomas.” [Thomas Nicholls], The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the West India, now called New Spayne … Translated out of the Spanish tongue by T. N. (Imprinted at London by Henry Bynneman, 1678), a.iir. 12 Mary C. Fuller, “The Real and the Unreal in Tudor Travel Writing,” in A Companion to Tudor literature, ed. Kent Cartwright (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 475. 11

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Within the culture(s) of early modern translation, of course, the line between author and translator is not a sharp one, and in innumerable cases, the “translations are modified, directly or indirectly (via ‘paratexts’ such as prefaces or letters to the reader).”13 Nicholls’ text is a perfect example for these uncertainties. The Spanish character (named Zarate) evoked in the dedication is a traveler and a conquistador himself, and the conversation revolves around the question whether it is reasonable to set out on a voyage of discovery at an advanced age. Of course, the wider context and the practical aspect of the text is at play here: this is, above all, a document assisting and propagating such voyages, so it is no wonder that Zarate wins this debate by rather conventionally referring to every man’s obligation to help his own brethren. However, the parallel between the elderly Spanish and the persona of Nicholls is extremely strong, further amplified by the final parts of the dedication, where we face the usual excuses: I am novve most humbly to beseech youre honor to accept this poore gifte, the vvhiche I haue translated out of the Spanish tong, not decked vvith gallant couloures, nor yet fyled vvith pleasant phrase of Rhetorike, for these things are not for poore Marchant trauellers, but are reserued to learned VVriters: yet I trust the Author vvill pardon mee, bycause I haue gone as neere the sense of this Historie, as my cunning vvoulde reach vnto.14

As the cited passage shows, the author represents himself as a merchant traveler, whose only accentuated quality is his poverty. At the same time, the compulsory authorial humility is to some extent counterbalanced by the dialogue with the other merchant traveler, for it concludes with a celebration of the Christian spiritual aspect of the venture, revealed by the pilgrim-like Zarate’s words: “I say vnto you, considering that all flesh must finish, I seeke for no quiet rest in this transitorie life.”15 Traveling is unequivocally celebrated in the dedication, which incorporates a brief but complete dispute, a stand-alone work by the translator-now-author Nicholls, whose activity as a traveler-translator is obviously serving the good of his own brethren. It is also important that such a figure can never find “quiet rest” in his life. This remarkable authorial presence is strengthened by the separate address to the reader, where an authoritative Nicholls calls attention to the fact that Cortez was not the first to discover New Spain. The famous anti13 Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural translation in early modern Europe, ed. P. Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 27-34 (quoted part: 20). 14 Nicholls], The Pleasant Historie, a.4r-v. 15 Ibid., a.4v.

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theatrical polemicist Stephen Gosson’s poem praising the translator further intensifies that presence, and while it makes no mention of the author of the original, it effectively blurs the line between traveller, author, and translator: “Loe here the traueller, whose paynefull quill, / So lyuely payntes the Spanish Indies out, / That English Gentlemen may vew at will, / The manly prowesse of that gallant toute.”16 Another poem (a Latin one), celebrating the riches of New Spain, concludes the prefatory material, in which the first steps of fashioning a new author take place.

Fashioning the Poor Pilgrim Nicholls’ next work, A Pleasant Dialogue betweene a Lady called Listra, and a Pilgrim. Concerning the Gouernment and common weale of the great province of Crangalor (1579, with a second volume appearing later that year), is the most widely known, probably because Lyman Tower Sargent included the text in his influential bibliography of utopias.17 Even a superficial glance at the book reveals that it mirrors many of Nicholls’ preoccupations discovered in the paratexts of his first translation, while the authorial self-representation reaches new levels in the literary work known to be the first one authored by Nicholls. The composition of the work is complex not only because of the many paratexts, but also because of a very delicately constructed, symmetric twovolume structure, an aspect of the work that has so far been largely neglected. The first mention of the work in Sargent’s writings is from 1976, when in a brief reference to the lesser-known utopias of the 16th century, Nicholls’ work appears among broad generalizations (“emphasising authority and religion,” “people are weak,” “the utopia is Christian and hierarchical”) covering eight related works. A few years later, another short reference appears in an article on utopias and the family, where the hierarchical nature of the dialogue is highlighted. Finally, his annotation in the later bibliography characterizes the work in similar terms: “Small town of good Christians. Emphasis on piety, equity and honesty. There is a godly 16

Ibid., b.iir. [Thomas Nicholls], A Pleasant Dialogue. Betweene a Lady Called Listra, and a Pilgrim Concerning the Gouernment and Common Weale of the Great Prouince of Crangalor (London: Iohn Charlewood, 1579); [Thomas Nicholls], The Second Part of the Painefull Iorney of the Poore Pylgrime into Asia, and the Straynge Wonders that He Sawe: Both Delectable and Profytable, in Sequell of the Lytle Dialogue, Betweene the Lady Lystra, and the Same Pilgrime (London: Iohn Charlewood, 1579). For the mention, see Lyman Tower Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature: 1516-1975 (New York: Garland, 1988), 1-2. 17

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prince, humble nobility, obedient citizens and a good clergy.”18 Referring to the work only in passing, Sargent offers no clue about the exact relationship between this text and the utopian tradition, neither is he interested in the text’s formal aspects, although he duly records in his bibliography that the work consists of two separate publications.19 In contrast, Judith Deitch is specifically interested in the form of Nicholls’ work. A pleasant Dialogue stresses its own generic affiliation in its title, and as we will see, there are other direct and indirect references to the same in the text. For Deitch, the dialogue, and particularly the “nonclassical” dialogue is important as a “locus of the construction of difference”, and she calls attention to the fact that “the radical representation of antithetical or oppositional identities . . . seems to be missing in Elizabethan inflections of the genre.”20 Precisely in this respect, she finds Nicholls’ work an exception, where, although the direct opposition of dissenting views is not present, through the fiction of the displaced land the “[t]he culturally distant other” is transmitted, and thus the text “cast[s] alterity as the absented object of discourse by in-group interlocutors.”21 While in her view the large corpus is almost completely devoid of dialogues between men and women, and/or between Europeans and non-Europeans, Nicholls’ work, in fact, covers both of these subjects (together with some other works from the same decade).22 Unfortunately, the broad scope of her article does not allow for a detailed discussion of the mentioned aspect, but it is of profound importance that the suggested framework for the interpretation is the discussion of the Other, which is, 18

Lyman Tower Sargent, “Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells,” Science Fiction Studies 3.3 (1976): 276; Lyman Tower Sargent, “Utopia and the Family: A Note on the Family in Political Thought,” in Dissent and Affirmation: Essays in Honor of Mulford Q. Sibley, ed. Arthur L. Kalleberg, James Donald Moon, and Daniel R. Sabia Jr. (Popular Press, 1983), 109-110; Sargent, British and American Utopian Literature: 1516-1975, 1-2. 19 The first part of the text appears in the Stationers’ Register in May 1579, whereas the second part is probably what is referred to as “The Travelled Pilgrym” in an entry from the end of August in the same year. See Edward Arber, ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 AD, Vol. II. – Text, (London, 1875), 159b, 163. 20 Judit Deitch, “»Dialoguewise:« Discovering Alterity in Elizabethan Dialogues,” in Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Helen Ostovich, Mary Vera Silcox, and Graham Roebuck (Newark, London: University of Delaware Press, Associated University Presses), 49, 52. 21 Ibid., 53. 22 Ibid., 52. She calls attention to Philip Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses and Thomas Lupton’s Siquila. Too Good to be True.

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according to her review of the non-classical dialogue tradition, heavily facilitated by the hybrid and intermediary genre of the dialogue that Nicholls chose to write in. In my opinion, this interpretative framework should be extended to other works by Nicholls, because this is equally true of his dialogue translation and his accounts of voyages, forming an essential part of his own authorial positioning. After Cathy Shrank provided a detailed overview about the text, which established a strong link between More’s Utopia and the dialogue, a more detailed examination of this aspect appeared in Chloë Houston’s recent monograph on Renaissance utopias.23 In her chapter-length review of postMorean English utopian literature, A pleasant Dialogue is discussed together with another similar text from the period, Thomas Lupton’s Siquila, Too Good to be True: Omen (1581-2, in 2 parts). In line with previous opinions and with the governing aspect of her book, Nicholls’ text is interpreted with an emphasis on the aspects of the dialogue form, travel literature, and the ideal society depicted in the text. Importantly, Houston also highlights the importance of the figure of the pilgrim, who not only represents the positive potential of travel, but becomes a more general metaphor for each individual’s life. Another important observation is that institutions are largely neglected in the description of Crangalor, with the exception of prisons, which obviously reflects the haunting memories of the author from the prisons of the Inquisition. In terms of form, Houston makes a crucial observation with regards to the paratexts of the text, namely that the dedicatory letter, while addressing a real person, the courtier Edward Dyer (1543–1607), is signed not by Nicholls, or by “T. N.”, but by Listra, one of the interlocutors of the ensuing dialogue. The border between textuality and reality is thus blurred, and this is further strengthened “by the presence of multiple voices (the Pilgrim, Listra, the narrator)”, so that the resulting “ambiguity has the effect of distancing the author from the text.”24 Indeed, Nicholls’ name never appears in the text, only his initials are featured on the final pages of the two publications. With this observation in mind, one might wonder why Nicholls decides to suppress his authorial voice in the examined dialogue, as well as in his other works. And the suppression is extreme—out of the six works attributed to him, only one contains Nicholls’ full name on its title page, 23

Cathy Shrank, “A Pleasant Dialogue between Listra and a Pilgrim,” HRI Digital – Origins of Early Modern Literature, accessed 25 Jan 2016, http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/origins/DisplayServlet?id=TN18335.5&type=normal. Throughout this paragraph, I heavily rely on Chloë Houston, The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 46-53. 24 Houston, The Renaissance Utopia, 48.

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usually only his initials are provided, but sometimes even those are missing. (A special case is when Gosson’s dedicatory poem mentions his name.) Part of the answer lies in the way the book makes use of the paratexts. Since Gerard Génette’s ground-breaking inquiries into the subject, it is a theoretical commonplace that these so-called threshold elements frequently serve the purpose of positioning the “main text” for the reader, to determine different aspects of reception.25 One of the best early modern examples for this process might be Thomas More’s Utopia, where the prefatory materials have always been a matter of interest, leading to a meticulously compiled map of the transmission of the text and its paratexts into the different vernacular cultures of early modern Europe.26 Even a brief glance at some relevant texts reveals the significance of the same to early modern English utopias: this is the place where the reader faces the most intensely self-reflexive generic statements in such works.27 On the other hand, recent, more focused inquiries into the use of this transitory medium in early modern texts have questioned many of Genette’s original observations, most fundamentally the usefulness of the metaphor of the threshold, which makes too sharp a distinction between main text and the paratexts. Instead, it has been argued that “paratextual elements are in operation all the way through the reader’s experience of the text, not merely at the start, and they continuously inform the process of reading, offering multiple points of entry, interpretation, and contestation.”28 I argue that this is entirely true in the case of A pleasant Dialogue, as the paratexts are not simply gateways for the reader into the text, but they are organic parts of the “main” text, without which important aspects of the work would remain unnoticed. In order to show this, it is necessary to take a look at the work’s structure with an emphasis on the nature and position of the different paratextual elements: 25 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 26 The results are summarized in Terence Cave, Thomas MoreҲs Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2008). 27 For a preliminary investigation into the use of the paratext in early modern English utopias, see my unpublished dissertation: Maczelka Csaba, The Uses of Paratextuality and Dialogicity in Early Modern English Utopias, unpub. PhD dissertation (University of Szeged, 2014), available: http://doktori.bibl.uszeged.hu/2210/. 28 Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 6.

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Description

1.

Title page of part 1 (see the full title above)

2.

Dedication Address: To the Worshipfull, Maister Edward Diar, Esquier: Listra wisheth prosperity. Salutation: “Your louing friend Listra, of Corinth”

3.

Caption: ‘The Dialogue’

4.

Verse dialogue between the book and the pilgrim

5.

Caption: FINIS. T. N.

6.

Title page of part 2, full title: The Second Part of the Painefull Iorney of the Poore Pylgrime into Asia, and the Straynge Wonders that He Sawe: Both Delectable and Profytable, in Sequell of the Lytle Dialogue, Betweene the Lady Lystra, and the Same Pilgrime.

7.

Dedication

Main text of Part 1.

Address: To the right Worshipfull Master Edward Dyar. &c. The poore Pylgrime wisheth felycitie Salutation: “Your Worshippes most humble, the Poore Pylgrime” 8.

Verse dialogue between the book and the pilgrim

9.

Caption: The Returne of the poore Pylgrime out of Asia, unto Corinth.

10.

Caption: The beginning of the Pylgrimes iorney into Asia.

11.

Caption: FINIS. T. N.

Main text of Part 2.

Table 1. The Structure of A Pleasant Dialogue between a Lady called Listra, and a Pilgrim This list is relevant for a number of reasons. First, it is clear that the dialogic nature of the work is heavily accentuated in the first volume: besides the title page, it is repeated right before the main text. While this is in line with the interpretation of the work as an Elizabethan dialogue, a closer look reveals another, a slightly different kind of dialogue within the text: the closing poem of the first volume is, in fact, a verse dialogue between the Book and instead of the author, the “Pilgrime.” This paratext is after the caption ‘Finis,’ so whereas we are supposed to be after the threshold, by offering a dialogue between one of the characters of the work and the book itself, the poem drives the attention from the author to

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the Pilgrim, who appears here as the one solely responsible for the book, who cares not for “recompence, / For profit of for gaine”, because, as he continues, “God … Vvill well rewarde my payne.”29 The work manifests itself here clearly as something created by the Pilgrim, and not by T. N. This is all the more interesting because of the already mentioned prefatory letter to the first volume, which is signed not by the Pilgrim, but by Listra, the lady who plays the minor role in the dialogue itself. It must also be noted that in the course of the conventional excuse, Listra appears to pose as the author of the text: “you wil wonder how I a strainger, presume to write this little dialogue,” and she also points out that she wrote in English, sustaining the fiction of her being from Corinth.30 However, in my opinion, this is not the only interesting element in Listra’s letter. Just like in other works of Nicholls, the preface relates to the question of language, translation, and travel, although this time the angle of this relation is reserved. The traveler is not simply someone who brings a text home (as we saw in the text about New Spain), but he can also carry the fame of his patron to faraway lands: But to make plaine these causes, fyrst I say, although I dwell so far from your natiue soyle, yet by trauelers I haue heard of your parentage & vertuous minde touching the publike weale of you Country, and this is the cause wherefore I offer this Pilgrimes talke unto your Worship, and where I write in your owne language, you shall understand that I proceede out of a noble house and linage, where my deare and louing parents, whished: yea and also procured that I mought haue vnderstanding of forreyn languages, among the which I chiefely desured to speake and write the English tongue. . . . pardon my base stile in your language, considering I am a strainger.31

While this can obviously be read as nothing more than a playful appeal for patronage, it must be noted that some of Nicholls’ recurring concerns are repeated in the passage: the traveler as the intelligencer, writing, language, and translation, but most importantly, the position of the “stranger,” which is used here in connection with Listra, but which is equally true of the Pilgrim, as many other places in the text (like the poem mentioned above) show. The first volume, together with its paratexts, largely suppresses the “real” author of the text, while at the same time, the two protagonists, 29

[Nicholls], A Pleasant Dialogue. Betweene a Lady Called Listra, and a Pilgrim, Ciir. 30 Ibid., Aiir. 31 Ibid., Aiir-v.

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Listra and the Pilgrim are elevated to a position close to authorship. This tendency is equally present in the second volume of the book, but the weight of the two roles change, and this second installment is dominated by the voice of the Pilgrim. Accordingly, the prefatory letter this time is written by him, but it rather closely connects to the subjects discussed in the first preface. It begins by recalling the fictional circumstances of the first volume’s transportation to Dyer through a merchant, which was, according to the Pilgrim’s report, followed by Listra’s suggestion that he “write, and sende vnto him the brief discourse of [his] late voyage into Asia.”32 The Pilgrim’s response to Listra’s suggestion is the most important part of the letter for our present purposes: Alas good Madame, quoth I, I can neither write, nor yet speake the Englishe tongue. Why quoth she, that is not material. But I pray you wryte in the Arabia tongue, for here are in this Cittie many Marchauntes, my friends, that can translate the same. And in accomplishment of my good Ladies wyl, I haue so done. But truly, I knowe not whether the translation doth agree with the originall: wherefore I remyt the same to your Worshippes learned iudgement.33

Once again, the Pilgrim reflects upon the task of translation, and also on authenticity in comparison to the original, highlighting the importance of merchant-translators in conveying information from abroad. The use of Arabian language is significant as a hint at the origins of our narrator, concerning which the text offers no other clues. This letter is followed by a verse dialogue between the book and the Pilgrim, similar to the one at the end of the first volume, arguing that there is a heavenly reward for the book, even if it might be subject to earthly offense: “some men, do call thee Roge, / and Vacabond also: / And captaine of inuencions, with many mischiefes mo.”34 Especially in this last quote, it is again the traveler’s trustworthiness that is at stake. There is at least one more thing that must be noted in connection with the second volume, namely that besides changing the protagonist (see for example the full title in the table above), it also employs subtle modifications in terms of its genre. While the first book is obviously a displaced, imaginary ideal state (even if Crangalor is a real geographical name, appearing in travel books of the time), written as a dialogue between the Pilgrim and Listra, the second book is more like a travel 32

[Thomas Nicholls], The Second Part of the Painefull Iorney, Aiiv. Ibid. 34 Ibid., Aiiir. 33

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report about Asia, where the conversational aspect of the dialogue is less important, and thus Listra’s role is even more restricted. Accordingly, the generic label ‘dialogue’ featured on the tile page and in a caption in the first volume disappears, and instead this is called a “paineful Iorney.” The author is the “Poore Pylgrime”, and this very name appears on the title page, then at the beginning and the end of the dedicatory letter, it is evoked by the verse dialogue, and then it is once again present in the caption/subtitle of the text. At the same time, Nicholls is only referred to at the very end of the next, and there only with his monograms, so, by the end of the second book, it is the “Poore Pylgrime” who emerges as the true author of the work. In the remaining part of my paper, I would like to take a look at this self-representative act, identifying other instances and exploring potential motives for Nicholls’ distancing strategy. A pleasant Dialogue is not the only work by Nicholls where the reader encounters the narrator/pseudo-author figure of the poor pilgrim. His translation of Pedro de Mejía’s dialogue, as I have already mentioned at the beginning of my paper, uses the paratextual material to reinforce the role of the translator-traveler, lending a new authorial voice to the whole text. In another translation (The strange and delectable history of the discoverie and conquest of the province of Peru, and the South Sea, 1581) Nicholls’ name occupies a prominent place on the title page.35 These three translations together suggest that enacting an alternate author is not that important a concern for the translator Nicholls, even if the subjects, as well as the prefatory materials show significant overlaps between the author and the translator Nicholls. In 1583, another individual work came out from Nicholls’ hands, a short pamphlet entitled A Pleasant Description of the Fortunate Islands called the Islands of Canaria. Significantly, even the monogram of Nicholls is missing from this text, while the title page claims that it was “Composed by the poore Pilgrime.”36 This is the first time that the Poor Pilgrim appears as an author of his own, without any explicit reference to the “real” author. Whereas later, the text is included in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations under the name “Thomas Nicholas”, the stand-alone version 35

Nicholas, T., The strange and delectable history of the discoverie and conquest of the province of Peru, and the South Sea … Written in foure bookes, by Augustine Sarate … Translated out of the Spanish tongue, by T. Nicholas (London: Richard Ihones, 1581). 36 [Thomas Nicholls], A PLEASANT Description of the Fortunate Islands called the Islands of CANARIA, vvith their straunge fruits and commodities, VERIE DELECTABLE to read, to the praise of God, Composed by the poore Pilgrime (Imprinted at London by Thomas East, 1583), Air.

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omits the name, and its dedicatory letter is also signed by “The P. P.”37 And the letter is nothing else but a description of pilgrims, who “after their wearie iournies, & returne into their natiue soile, to communicate the troth, of anie thing worthie to be knowen and of them seene.”38 More importantly, the pilgrim also refers to his (in fact, Nicholls’) unfortunate experiences on the island, recalling how he was condemned as a heretic by the Inquisition. This is the moment when the fictional authorial image, the image of the pilgrim completely merges with the “real” author, Thomas Nicholls.

Conclusion Thomas Nicholls was obviously trying to conceal his real person when he entered the world of books. Not only is his name missing almost completely from his own works (even if his translations seem to be more permissive in this regards), but he also seems to create a textual version of himself, which he calls the Poor Pilgrim. Some features of this figure appear already in his earliest works, but the development is gradual, culminating in the work on the Canaries, where the author given on the title page is the pilgrim, whereas the real name completely disappears. Whatever Nicholls’ motives for choosing the poor pilgrim as his fictional alter ego were, the examined strategies have significant implications not only concerning the different contexts (travel literature, utopia, translation culture, dialogue, alterity) mentioned in connection with the work, but concerning the corpus attributed to Nicholls, too. First of all, after the reconstruction of the fictionalized authorial figure, we might be able to expand the corpus attributed to Nicholls. Further bibliographical work must be performed in connection with this, but a quick search already yielded two promising entries in The Stationers’ Register. The first is a short note: “Third booke of the painefull pilgrim”, dated January 1580, which is chronologically consistent with the first two volumes of A pleasant Dialogue registered May and August 1579, whose second volume features the phrase “painefull journey” on its title page. The other reference is from August 1586, and it is about “a booke intituled a pleasant baite or Recreation for wayfaringe men compiled by the poore pilgrym.”39 Unfortunately, I have not yet been able to locate further 37

Ibid., Aiiv. Ibid. 39 See the two entries in Edward Arber ed., A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 AD, Vol. II., 165b and 209b. 38

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information concerning these two volumes, but as far as their titles show, they certainly fit among Nicholls’ works. Besides such textual considerations, however, we must also take into account the importance of authorial self-representation in Elizabethan translations, travel literature, and utopias. It is clear that the central arena for this is the paratextual environment of the book, an area that would deserve detailed, comprehensive attention. The translator and the author Nicholls virtually split, and the latter seems to be less at ease in what he is doing. And this is a good point of departure for some final remarks concerning the figure of the pilgrim. The Poor Pilgrim, as we must realize from all the quoted prefatory material, is poor on many levels, a figure constantly traveling, and constantly suffering, too. In the second book of A pleasant Dialogue, he is mocked by “Mahomettes”, and the relation about the Canaries recalls disquieting prison memories.40 The verse dialogues between the book and the pilgrim also remind the reader of the worldly suffering of the pilgrim, for which the remedy is the promise of everlasting happiness coming from God. Wherever the pilgrim wanders, he is a “strainger” (see the quote from Listra’s dedicatory letter above), and he appears as a wise but tormented soul. Ultimately, the pilgrim is an outcast, a figure who is always and everywhere in exile, who is always on the move, trying different climates, different countries, different genres, different authorial positions, because, in Carmine G. Di Biase’s words: “Life for the exile, then, can never be passive, for it is always attended by the threat that one’s identity, which has been formed elsewhere, will be extinguished.”41 Although Di Biase’s observation, which heavily relies on Said’s mentioned views on exile, concerns two of the great translators of the period, Michelangelo Florio and his son, John Florio, this is to some extent true of Nicholls as well. When in Spain and the Canaries, Nicholls ended up as a prisoner of the Inquisition. Being there in literal exile for years, he eventually returned home, and received the mentioned rectorship. Yet, after a couple of years, he was expelled from that position, too, and turned to a completely different profession: he became a translator, and later an author as well, although it must be noted again that the boundaries are not sharp. Besides, he was involved in legal difficulties until around 1590, hindering a return to his original profession of the “ship-owner.” Three decades, three completely different professions: in a sense, 40

[Nicholls], The Second Part of the Painefull Iorney, Biir. Carmine G. Di Biase, “The Example of the Early Modern Lexicographer,” in Travel and translation in the Early Modern period, ed. Carmine G. Di Biase (Amsterdam-New York: Rodopi, 2006), 16. 41

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Thomas Nicholls, the translator/author, is a product of his misfortunes. It is probably through his imprisonment and his legal and ecclesiastical troubles that he experienced the “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home.”42 Unfortunately forgotten for the present-day reader, the melancholy figure of the Poor Pilgrim in Nicholls’ text perfectly reflects the timeless state of mind of the exile, who “must always negotiate between two worlds, and two languages, at least, leading a difficult life in the spaces between worlds; and it is in those spaces that the exile’s main task—namely, to create an alternative, more habitable world—is carried out.”43 Indeed, the exile, just like Nicholls, always negotiates between two worlds, which is the possible reason for the preference of the go-between, semi-fictional dialogue genre, and this might also account for the fascination with translation as a possible bridge between the two worlds. Yet, at the same time, Nicholls always tries to create a third world of his own, in Milton’s already quoted words, a “mighty Continent wherein to display the largenesse of [his] spirits.” Inevitably, literature written by the exile is always utopian in nature, as its central element is the displacement into an imagined world, where anxiety can be resolved, if only in one’s mind. But in one’s mind, it can be resolved: in his mind, Nicholls can change the system whose victim he has become. Whereas texts like A pleasant Dialogue tell us a lot about an ideal Protestant commonwealth where the operation of different institutions and the followed policies and moral patterns are no doubt important—by focusing on its protagonist, by trying to understand why and how Nicholls turned himself into the Poor Pilgrim, an interesting new light might be shed upon a lost Elizabethan author and his little read works.44

42 Said, “Reflections on Exile,” 173, quoted in Di Biase, “The Example of the Early Modern Lexicographer,” 16. 43 Di Biase, “The Example of the Early Modern Lexicographer,” 16. 44 Further investigation is needed in connection with a lost Elizabethan play which might have been based on one of Nicholls’ texts, and there is a slight possibility that he was also involved in the theatrical production of the play. See “The Conquest of the West Indies,” Lost Plays Database, ed. Roslyn L. Knutson, David McInnis, and Matthew Steggle (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2009), accessed 20 Jan 2016, https://www.lostplays.org/lpd/Conquest_of_the_West_Indies,_The.

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Bibliography Arber, Edward ed. A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 AD, Vol. II. – Text. London, 1875. Baldwin, R. C. D. “Nicholls, Thomas (1532–1601).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008, accessed 6 Jan 2016, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/20124. Burke, Peter. “Cultures of translation in early modern Europe.” In Cultural translation in early modern Europe, edited by P. Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, 7-38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Cave, Terence. Thomas MoreҲs Utopia in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2008. Deitch, Judit. “»Dialoguewise:« Discovering Alterity in Elizabethan Dialogues.” In Other Voices, Other Views: Expanding the Canon in English Renaissance Studies, edited by Helen Ostovich, Mary Vera Silcox, and Graham Roebuck, 46-73. Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, Associated University Presses, 1999. Di Biase, Carmine G. “The Example of the Early Modern Lexicographer.” In Travel and Translation in the Early Modern Period, edited by Carmine G. Di Biase, 9-30. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006. Fuller, Mary C. “The Real and the Unreal in Tudor Travel Writing.” In A Companion to Tudor Literature, edited by Kent Cartwright, 475-488. Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Transl. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Houston, Chloë. The Renaissance Utopia: Dialogue, Travel and the Ideal Society. Farnham: Ashgate, 2014. Maczelka, Csaba. “The Uses of Paratextuality and Dialogicity in Early Modern English Utopias.” Unpub. PhD dissertation. University of Szeged, 2014. Available: http://doktori.bibl.u-szeged.hu/2210/. Nicholas, T. The strange and delectable history of the discoverie and conquest of the province of Peru, and the South Sea … Written in foure bookes, by Augustine Sarate … Translated out of the Spanish tongue, by T. Nicholas. Imprinted at London by Richard Ihones, 1581. [Nicholls, Thomas]. A PLEASANT Description of the Fortunate Islands called the Islands of CANARIA, vvith their straunge fruits and commodities, VERIE DELECTABLE to read, to the praise of God, Composed by the poore Pilgrime. Imprinted at London by Thomas East, 1583.

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—. A Pleasant Dialogue. Betweene a Lady Called Listra, and a Pilgrim Concerning the Gouernment and Common Weale of the Great Prouince of Crangalor. Imprinted at London: By Iohn Charlewood, dwelling in Barbican at the signe of the halfe Egle and Keye, 1579. —. A Pleasant Dialogue, concerning Phisicke and Phisitions. Imprinted at London, by Iohn Charlewood, 1580. —. The pleasant historie of the conquest of the West India, now called new Spaine. Atchieued by the most worthie prince Hernando Cortes, Marques of the valley of Huaxacac, most delectable to reade. Translated out of the Spanish tongue, by T.N. Imprinted at London by Henry Bynneman, 1578. —. The Second Part of the Painefull Iorney of the Poore Pylgrime into Asia, and the Straynge Wonders that He Sawe: Both Delectable and Profytable, in Sequell of the Lytle Dialogue, Betweene the Lady Lystra, and the Same Pilgrime. Imprinted at London: By Iohn Charlewood, dwelling in Barbican at the signe of the halfe Egle and Keye, 1579. —. The strange and marueilous newes lately come from the great kingdome of Chyna. Imprinted at London: Nigh vnto the three Cranes in the Vintree, by Thomas Gardyner, and Thomas Dawson, [1577/78?]. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile.” In Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 173-186. Sargent, Lyman Tower. British and American Utopian Literature: 15161975. New York: Garland, 1988, 1-2. —. “Themes in Utopian Fiction in English before Wells.” Science Fiction Studies 3.3 (1976): 275-282. —. “Utopia and the Family: A Note on the Family in Political Thought.” In Dissent and Affirmation: Essays in Honor of Mulford Q. Sibley, edited by Arthur L. Kalleberg, James Donald Moon, and Daniel R. Sabia, 109-110. Bowling Green: B. G. Popular Press, 1983. Sherman, William H. “Bringing the World to England: The Politics of Translation in the Age of Hakluyt.” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) 14 (2004): 199-207. Shrank, Cathy. “A Pleasant Dialogue between Listra and a Pilgrim.” HRI Digital. Origins of Early Modern Literature. Accessed 25 January 2016. http://www.hrionline.ac.uk/origins/DisplayServlet?id=TN18335.5&typ e=normal. Shrank, Cathy. Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530-1580. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004. Smith, Helen and Louise Wilson. Renaissance Paratexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

PART II: POLITICAL ANXIETIES AND FEAR OF DOMINANCE

JUAN OF THE DEAD: COMEDIC ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE, SOCIAL UPHEAVAL, AND POLITICAL CRISIS IN RAÚL CASTRO’S CUBA1 BILL CLEMENTE

The opening sequence of Alejandro Brugués’ Juan of the Dead (2011), winner of the Goya Award for Best Spanish Language Film (2013), casts rather an ironic light on the proclamation that accompanies the film’s trailer on You Tube: “Fifty years after the triumph of the Revolution, a new Revolution is about to begin.” The first “Revolution” in this quotation refers, of course, to Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s victorious campaigns that ousted Fulgencio Batista and installed the socialist regime still in control. As thousands of billboards constantly (Patria o Muerte, Todo Por La Revolucion, etc.) remind Cubans, moreover, the Revolution must continue. These ubiquitous proclamations and sundry other forms of propaganda media propagate likewise relentlessly pound the public with the Empire’s (the United States’) great evil and the embargo that afflicts the people and accounts for much that ails the Revolution, from rationed food to the black market. This always heightened alert includes, from the Cuban perspective, the post-9/11 invasion threat John Bolton’s U.N. address elicited (2003) when the Bush administration added Cuba to the list of renegade terrorist nations that the president had labeled the Axis of Evil, the list from which President Obama only recently, May 28, 2015, removed Cuba. And while many argue that the government endeavors to inflate fears of a U.S. invasion to legitimize the Castro regime’s continued rule, the editors of The Revolution under Raúl Castro (2015) report that in a 2006 interview with Ricardo Alarcón, confidant of Fidel Castro and long-time President of Cuba’s National Assembly, Alarcón told them that 1

This essay appeared originally in HJEAS Volume XXII. Number 2 (2016) as “Zombies Along the Malecon” and is reproduced here with minor changes with the permission of HJEAS editor Donald Morse and author Bill Clemente.

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he “awakes every day anticipating a U.S. attack on the horizon.”2 Many in Cuba share Alarcón’s suspicions, especially given the United States’ previous invasions, economic domination, and threats contained in documents such as the insidious Platte Amendment (1901), which included language—all of which was, over the course of many years, subsequently removed—that gave the U.S. “the unilateral right to intervene militarily in Cuba in order to preserve order as and when Washington determined.”3 For good reasons, then, Cubans as a rule distrust U.S. intentions. To this end, Juan of the Dead joins the list of zombie films that have proliferated since the terrorists’ attacks on the Twin Towers, both in the U.S. and abroad. As Kyle Bishop notes, “In the years following September 11, the number of both studio and independent zombie movies has risen dramatically”;4 he adds something of no small importance in the context of the political and social criticism Juan of the Dead levels at the government: “zombie cinema is among the most culturally revealing and resonant fictions of the recent decade of unrest.”5 The anxieties the presence of zombies in Havana create oblige Juan and his small group of cohorts to displace familiar ideologies in an effort merely to survive this imposed new order that in most respects belies their imagination. Far from a simple political attack against the current regime, this film likewise points to the potential for positive changes Raúl Castro’s ascendency to power might well provide, manifested most recently on July 20, 2015, by the opening of embassies after over fifty years and by the continued discussions about finally lifting the blockade. Indeed, while Alejandro Brugués’ film certainly responds to 50 years of the Empire’s invasion threats and both government incompetency and social decay, Juan of the Dead likewise reacts to the unsettling prospects of Cuba’s problematic future after the bearded men in berets (los históricos, the founding generation of the Revolution) finally exit the scene. Monsters such as zombies, as Judith Halberstam points out, are “meaning machines” that underscore a given society’s apprehensions or 2

Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William LeoGrande, eds., The Revolution under Raúl: A Contemporary Reader, 2nd ed. (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015), Kindle edition. 3 Antoni Kapcia, Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 15. 4 Kyle Bishop, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, 2010), 12. 5 Ibid., 16.

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anxieties,6 many of which the film addresses. Director Brugués, for example, points out that Cubans generally deal with problems in the three ways the film demonstrates through Juan’s actions: “they try to make a business out of it; they get used to it and keep going on with their lives; or they throw themselves to the sea to run away from the island.”7 Thousands of Cubans do at one point in the film fill the waters near Havana Bay and along the Malecon with a flotilla of rafts and other small boats attempting to flee the zombie horde, including Lazaro on his friend’s raft; Juan, however, swims to the raft and convinces Lazaro to stay, for Juan plans to make a handsome profit from the chaos. In effect, the zombie infestation of Havana forces confrontation with more than an obvious threat to life, especially for Juan, who eventually alters his habitual reactions to Cuba’s shifting circumstances and becomes more than the survivor in whom he originally took pride. Juan embodies, in many respects, the frustrations of a silent Cuban majority, the middle ground between what Antonia Kapcia labels “loyal activists” and an opposition “insufficient to end the system”; Juan is a member of “the passive loyalists” who continue to suffer but yet uphold the Revolution’s ideals.8 Against seemingly insurmountable odds at the film’s conclusion, Juan takes action and meets head on the horror that threatens to consume his beloved country. His final words, “Voy a estar bien. Sólo necesito que me den un fil” (I’ll be fine. I just need a chance) mirror the hopes of many Cubans for greater freedom and prosperity within the system. As I will eventually suggest, moreover, the ending also addresses the uncertain future of independent films such as Juan of the Dead. At the film’s onset, however, Juan’s words mark him not as a rebel with a cause in the new Revolution, but as a slacker, much in the guise of Simon Pegg’s character Shaun in Shaun of the Dead (2004). With a disconcerting rumble of distant thunder, to which I will return at the conclusion of the essay, Juan of the Dead begins in blue Caribbean waters on a beautiful day with Juan reclining on his small, ramshackle raft and sipping rum while his wanker sidekick Lazaro attempts unsuccessfully to spearfish a meal. In the first of this zomcon’s humorous exchanges, Lazaro asks Juan if he has ever given thought to rowing his raft to Miami. Laconically casting his finishing line, Juan replies in the negative: “There 6

Judith Halberstam, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 21. 7 “Official Movie Site, Director’s Statement,” Juan of the Dead, directed by Alejandro Brugués, accessed 25 August 2014, http://www.juanofthedeadmovie.com/lang/en/. 8 Kapcia, Cuba in Revolution, 44-45.

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I have to work.” This statement aligns Juan rather immediately not with rafters, los balseros, who continue to flee Cuba to reach the U.S., taking advantage of the “wet-foot, dry-foot policy” the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act established.9 Instead, his words connect him with the eponymous shirker Shaun in Shaun of the Dead with whom Juan at first seems to share traits, from an at best desultory motivation to a desert of ambition. As Lynn Pifer argues, “Shaun is the consummate slacker.”10 Juan, however, is not a slacker, for he loves his country despite the dreadful economic deprivations with which people must on a daily basis contend especially AfroCubans—all the main characters in the film are either black or mestizo—that followed Fidel Castro’s announcing the “Special Period in Time of Peace” in 1989. The Special Period resulted from the steep decline in funding from the former Soviet Union, the Soviet Block, and the subsequent tightening by the United States of the blockade, all of which left Castro’s government in economic peril. After the ouster in 1959 of Fulgentes Bautista, AfroCubans became and generally remain core supporters of the Revolution, because as William LeoGrande argues, Fidel’s government “did away with juridical discrimination and provided them with unprecedented upward mobility.”11 The Special Period, however, afflicted AfroCubans in devastating fashion. For other Cubans, his decade of economic hardships triggered the significant growth of small businesses, including paladares (private restaurants) and casas particulares (rented rooms) to house tourists; this legal flow of U.S. dollars continues to finance these and other means for private citizens to support themselves. AfroCubans, however, suffered from not having relatives, in Miami in particular, to send the needed dollars. And as the flourishing tourist industry surpassed sugar exports as the island nation’s greatest source of hard currency, owing to “lingering racism,” AfroCubans, LeoGrande explains, “were less likely employed in the tourist industry, where workers received hard-currency tips.”12 The title of Roberto Zurbana’s controversial New York Times editorial underscores this point, “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun.” “Racism,” 9

Antonio Aja Días, “Emigration and U.S.—Cuba Bilateral Relations,” in Brenner et al., Chapter 25. 10 Lynn Pifer, “Slacker Bites Back: Sean of the Dead Finds New Life for Deadbeats,” in Better Off Dead. The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 166. 11 William LeoGrande, “The Communist Party of Cuba on the Brink of Generational Change,” in Brenner et al., Revolution, Chapter 3. 12 Ibid.

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he argues, “is alive and well” in Cuba, an assertion that hastened his demotion at the Casa de las Américas.13 In the film, however, neither Juan nor the other characters directly complain about racism, though his habitual use of a telescope to view his surroundings from atop his apartment complex clearly marks Juan as an outsider, a reminder perhaps that the economic situation continues to marginalize AfroCubans, restricting the already confined space allocated for their economic development. Instead, Juan and displaced other characters poke delicious fun at all manner of targets connected with the glacial pace of progress, especially after the Special Period and the problems Raúl Castro had promised to relieve. At the point, for example, when Juan undertakes his new business venture, “Juan of the Dead,” he clearly criticizes the current government’s programs and on-going economic hardships, saying “What if they go on like this for another fifty years?” During the Special Period and later during the Battle of Ideas undertaken in 2000 in response to the Elián González crisis, Fidel Castro, as he had done previously, focused his efforts to uphold Cuban culture and to attack corruption on José Martí’s often repeated assertion, “Being good is the only way to be fortunate. Being learned is the only way to be free.”14 Raúl, on the other hand, has in his policies since 2006 stressed not funding further the cultural projects of which his brother remained fond but rather the other part of the Martí quotation that never received emphasis: “But most often in human nature, one must be prosperous to be good.”15 Juan’s words point to dissatisfaction with the stalled progress of Raúl’s programs meant to trigger the economic development required to bring about a more egalitarian society. In the opening scene, Juan’s comments both mark the film’s comedic foundations and signal political implications with which the movie openly flirts. While reeling in what looks like a substantial catch, for example, Juan tells his friend Lazaro that he, Juan, is a survivor, an affirmation he repeats as the film continues: “I survived Angola, Mariel, and the Special Period,” and other crises about which he does not elaborate. These contemporary concerns—brutally documented, for example, in Ben 13

Roberto Zurbano, “For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun,” New York Times, March 23, 2013, accessed 29 October 2015. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/for-blacks-in-cuba-therevolution-hasnt-begun.html. 14 Carlos Alzugaray Treto, “Continuity and Change in Cuba at Fifty,” in Brenner et al., Chapter 1. 15 Ibid.

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Corbett’s This is Cuba: an Outlaw Culture Survives, a first-person account of daily life primarily in Havana, and in Julia Cooke’s The Other Side of Paradise, books that in many ways celebrate the Herculean task simple survival often dictates—punctuate the comedy, from Cuba’s Black Spring to Fidel’s handing over to his brother Raúl the reins of power to the unrest, mentioned previously, surrounding the future after the deaths of the old guard. As Corbett reports, numerous people he met in Cuba said basically the same thing about daily life there: “Es difícil entender la realidad Cubana.” (It’s difficult to understand the Cuban reality.)16 President Obama’s remarks in December, 2014, on the troubled relationship between the U.S. and Cuba and the complex challenges that confront both countries as they work toward normalizing relations included a phrase common in Cuba to which Corbett refers and that the film underscores: “Cubans have a saying about daily life, “No es fácil” (It’s not easy).17 These social and political concerns bristle throughout the film and align this comedy with George Romero’s brilliant and horrific takedown of American consumer society, Dawn of the Dead. And while Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, and Juan of the Dead move in some decidedly different directions, the three films share a significant trope about zombies that Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry describe in their Zombie Manifesto: “As a nonconscious, consuming machine, the cinematic zombie terrifies because it is a reflection of modern-day commercial society, propelled by its need to perpetually consume” and, indeed, to conform.18 Or, in Juan’s case, simply to survive. And in so doing, through scamming tourists and other swindles, Juan and his crew underscore one of the tenets of the Special Period, resolver, to find a solution, to devise ways, generally illegal, to manage simple everyday needs, including basic foodstuffs—which for Juan includes prodigious amounts of rum—put beyond the reach of many due to insufficient salaries paid in old pesos. This situation exacerbates the rising corruption and economic illegalities the Special Period created and that plague contemporary Cuba. The film’s rendering of Juan’s comedic adventures in and around Havana illustrates, with hyperbolic leaps, this complex imbrication of Cuban ideological 16

Ben Corbett, This is Cuba: an Outlaw Culture Survives (New York: Westview Press, 2004), Kindle edition. 17 Barak Obama, “Transcript: Obama’s remarks on U.S.-Cuba relations,” Washington Post, December 17 2014, accessed 15 October 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-obamas-remarks-on-us-cubarelations/2014/. 18 Sarah Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Boundary 2.35.1 (2008): 99.

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forces and complex relationships. Through comedy, the space of the imagination expands to embrace reality and its commonplace anxieties. While viewers recognize with relative ease both Pegg’s contemporary London and the Winchester pub to which the film’s hero/loser leads his girlfriend and others to escape the zombies and the shopping mall outside Philadelphia where Romero’s survivors attempt to fortify themselves against the zombie onslaught, Alejandro Brugués’ concentration on Havana’s iconic structures and the film’s emphasis on topical references to ignite the humor often pose a considerable challenge for viewers. Juan’s odd catch illustrates this point about how the film freights the humor to underscore the “imprint of existing social positions.”19 Juan reels in a dead body, for example, but when he reaches to touch the floating corpse, its head lurches in an attempt to take a chunk out of his hand. At this juncture, Lazaro, often as useless as Shaun’s odious friend Ed, sends a spear through the zombie’s head, the only time in the film when Lazaro manages to use the spear gun with a positive outcome by actually hitting the target though more by accident than intent. Watching the body slowly sink, Juan suggests to his friend that they keep this matter to themselves. At this juncture, they know nothing of the Zombie apocalypse that will within a month—an homage, perhaps, to Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2003)— devastate Havana. But, on the other hand, as the corpse’s red coveralls indicate, the floater almost certainly comes from Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. military base in Cuba that has housed for over a decade suspected terrorists, a facility and prison population that remain a source of considerable tension between American and Cuban authorities. Though including sometimes wacky references to or paying homage to a considerable number of films, from Humberto Solas’s Lucía (the name of the married woman with whom Juan carries on an affair) to James Cameron’s Terminator, from Italian Zombie master Lucio Fulci’s Zombie 2, to Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, Juan of the Dead shares strong ties with numerous zombie films, including both Dawn of the Dead and Shaun of the Dead. The latter two films serve well to triangulate with Juan of the Dead to reveal shared tropes, as I have suggested, but also to distinguish what makes this zombie film distinctly Cuban. All three films, for example, share to a varying degree the common identification of the living dead with the living humans who strive to survive. As Carlos Clarens points out, after the enormous success of Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in laying a foundation for future zombie films, “The Zombies are now among us and we cannot tell them and the girl next door apart any 19

Ibid., 100.

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longer.”20 Shaun of the Dead’s opening sequence makes this connection manifest, as hungover Shaun, eyes rolled back, stumbles and shuffles early in the morning into his daily routine. Walking across a street to the Indian convenience store and back to his apartment, he fails along the way to notice the blood smears on floors and walls and the walking dead still seemingly going about their habitual patterns he resembles in his gait. The zombies function, in part, as the slacker generation’s metaphor for the mechanical way people go about their lives. And in Dawn of the Dead, as happens in innumerable post-Night of the Living Dead zombie films, the film does not concentrate as much on the zombies as on the humans who generally bring about their own destruction—in Dawn, for example, zombies want to consume; humans just own, and they produce nothing. This materialistic drive dooms most of the characters, for, in the words of Kyle Bishop, Romero’s devastating social critique reveals “an empty society in which life has been reduced to use alone.”21 Thus, for instance, Roger, one of the survivors, claiming ownership over the mall and its cornucopia of material temptations, fires on the invading bikers, destroying any hope for continued sanctuary. The enclosed space of the pub in Shaun of the Dead and the invasion of the Mall by the zombies that force the survivors in Dawn of the Dead to flee find reflection in the increasingly besieged Havana rooftop in Juan of the Dead that the survivors must eventually vacate. Juan of the Dead also emphasizes what Dawn of the Dead articulates beyond the ills of paternalistic capitalism and connected materialism and consumption; the zombie apocalypse underscores what Jamie Russell describes as the devastating rents in the “whole fabric of postmodern capitalist culture itself.”22 And while Cuba hardly represents a capitalist society, the zombie apocalypse clearly demonstrates by the conclusion of Juan of the Dead that, as Robin Wood argues about Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, “the social order (regarded in all Romero’s films as obsolete and discredited) can’t be restored.”23 Juan of the Dead mines this specific and significant point about the future of Cuba, for the struggles of the past decades in particular have closed the doors on a return to former ways. Jorge Mario Sánchez Egczcue suggests, for instance, that Cubans will 20 Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (New York: Capricorn Books, 1967), 32. 21 Kyle Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 32. 22 Jamie Russell, Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema (Surrey, UK: FAB Press, 2008), 94. 23 Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 122.

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continue resolviendo (resolving) problems and discovering other options as they have done with no small success, but he adds an essential caveat: It is quite possible that the normal process of trial and error will give rise to still-unforeseen alternatives, as those who govern and those who are governed will learn how to reform what can be salvaged and discard what is not viable. What is beyond doubt is that the society will never again be the same as it was in the previous decades.24

Juan, the survivor of Cuban society’s chaos, poverty, and the socialist government’s ineptitude, thus finds fragile sanctuary neither in a corner pub he probably cannot afford nor in a shopping mall patronized mainly by tourists but in the community on the roof of the dilapidated building where he resides and from which he watches through his telescope the mounting eradication of the population and the eventual devastation of Havana. Prior to the zombie catastrophe, Juan enjoyed an easy friendship with the building’s tenants. He helps, for example, an elderly woman, YiYi, and her invalid husband to exit the building’s malfunctioning elevator, flirting with her to put a smile on her face—Lazaro will eventually kill her in comic fashion, accidentally sending a spear-fishing harpoon through her zombie husband’s chest that also impales her to a chair after she blamed her husband’s death on government-provided expired medication. Juan and the others eventually learn what Romero taught in Night of the Living Dead: smash the skull, and you kill the zombie. After attempting an exorcism with a ritual language he obviously invents, in frustration Juan conks the zombie’s skull with a crucifix, and this after Lazaro, Lazaro’s son Vladi California, and he stuff the supposed vampire’s mouth with garlic and puncture his chest with multiple pieces from smashed wooden furniture. This scene, with its potent mixture of gore and giggle, finds repetition in numerous contexts in the film. Indeed, Brugués accomplishes with his humor what Stephen Savior posits about Romero’s zombie films: Romero’s zombies seem almost natural in a society in which the material comforts of the middle class coexist with repressive conformism, mindless numbing media manipulation, and the more blatant violence of poverty, sexism, racism, and militarism. . . . He gleefully uncovers the hidden structure of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration.25 24

Jorge Mario Sánchez Egczcue, “Challenges of Economic Restructuring in Cuba,” in Brenner et al., Chapter 9. 25 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

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Like Romero here and elsewhere, Brugués uses the destruction of Havana and splatstick comedy to lay rather bare at times the potential collapse of society, as rotten in its foundation as many of the crumbling edifices throughout the city. Things will never indeed be the same. Juan’s easy friendship with those who dwell in his area extends to two lesbian residents, one of whom, Sara, the lascivious Lazaro hits on. And in one of those references that evinces a laugh even from the uninformed, Lazaro, undaunted despite a blunt and ironic dismissal—“not even if you were the last person on earth”—asks Juan what the woman does; he replies rather dismissively, “Oh, she’s a blogger.” Given the context, his comment references the famous Cuban blogger Yoani Sánchez, author of the internationally praised Havana Real, which offers a devastating critique of things, from Cuba’s moribund infrastructure to the ineptitude of the medical services to the ill treatment of the gay community, at which the film pokes fun, including untrustworthy elevators. This intertextual reference punctuates the seriousness of the issues with which the comedy dances. And like Juan, Sánchez, a survivor of the Special Period but unlike a substantial number of her talented and educated friends who comprise part of the brain drain that robs the country of many young and talented people, refuses to dwell outside Cuba, choosing to live the dissident’s life in Cuba: “I promised myself I would live in Cuba as a free person, and accept the consequences.”26 Yoani Sánchez, as the editors of The Revolution Under Raúl Castro point out, is the most famous of the increasing number of Cuban bloggers, “whose Generación Y blog offers an acerbic look at daily life in Cuba, winning Sánchez international acclaim and the hostility of Cuban officialdom, which she regularly lampoons.”27 Blogging, then, serves as a dangerous vehicle, in the eyes of Cuban authorities, by which this generation explores its anxieties and fears, contesting the real and imagining it differently. Sánchez’s continued assaults against the government’s human rights record, among other things, frequently raise officials’ hackles and result in her continued harassment and detention despite the fact that the Raúl Castro government lifted travel restrictions against her and promised Cuban citizens easy and inexpensive access to high-speed internet. Her conflicts, like the film’s, point to the past and question the future. In 1961 Fidel Castro pronounced his famous dictate about criticism of the government: “Dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nadá.” Press, 1993), 82. 26 Yoani Sánchez, “Introduction to Part I,” in Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth (Brooklyn: Melville Hours Publishing, 1993), Kindle edition. 27 Ibid.

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(Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.)28 Fidel, conveniently, never articulated the specific boundaries between todo and nadá. As Sánchez’s situation indicates, these borderlines remain ambiguous under Raúl. And identical uncertainties also bear on independent films such as Juan of the Dead that began to appear in the ironically fertile field the Special Period unknowingly cultivated. When the Special Period’s drastic economic austerity evaporated funding from the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC), an arm of the federal government, filmmakers turned to outside funding for films such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío’s Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), a Cuban-SpanishMexican venture. The content of the film also illustrates the extended freedom to criticize the Cuban status quo, for “The film is also an example of how the new forms of financing for the arts broadened the possibilities for expression. Fresa y chocolate probes several previously taboo subjects: homosexuality, ideological rigidity, and even patriotism.”29 Unlike the previous ICAIC films that primarily portray the Revolution’s accomplishments, many of the independent films not only question the Revolution achievements but also address its shortcomings. The list of films that take advantage of this era’s burgeoning cultural freedom includes Fernando Pérez’s Martí: El Ojo del Canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary, 2011), a Spanish-Cuban production. This film portrays the venerable hero of Cuban Revolution not as the greater-than-human figurehead of Cuba, but as an at times troubled man. In Ann Marie Stock’s words, “The young José Martí is fearful and frustrated, he urinates and he masturbates, and his actions sometimes result in others being hurt.”30 A similar renaissance continues in other art forms, from music to literature, as the success, for example, of Leonardo Padura’s El hombre que amaba a los perros (The Man Who Loved Dogs, 2009) underscores; though focusing on abuses under Stalinism, the novel offers a scathing indictment of state control in general and pushes limits, as does Juan of the Dead, that illustrate the increased latitude Raúl Castro allows at this juncture. Along these lines, Julia E. Swig points out in Cuba, What Everyone Needs to Know, that Cuban officials give considerable leeway to “artists promoted 28

Fidel Castro, Discurso Pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario y Secretario del PURSC, Como Conclusion de las Reuniones con los Intelectuales Cubano, June 30, 1961, accessed October 20, 2015. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/. 29 “Prologue,” in Brenner et al. 30 Ann Marie Stock, “Making and Marketing Films in Twenty-First-Century Cuba,” in Brenner et al., Chapter 24.

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by the state who gain international renown,” allowing these artists, film makers, and singers to offer some “potent critiques of Cuban political, economic, and cultural life” if, concomitantly, these media also “legitimate several dimensions of the revolutionary ethos.”31 The “passive loyalist,” Juan’s weapon of choice against the zombies is, in fact, an instrument he will not use to escape Cuba but rather to exterminate the threat to his country, his oar. While Juan’s wife left him for Spain owing to his lack of ambition and her desire for a better life for herself and their daughter, and while he carries on an adulterous affair with the beautiful Lucía, Juan loves his daughter, Camila, who is still in Havana with her grandmother while she awaits a trip to Miami. Juan eventually realizes the threat the zombies pose. At first, the Cuban zombies wandering and walking the Havana streets going about their daily chores and habitual ways look quite normal until circumstances reveal otherwise. Juan instructs Sara, who survived her girlfriend blogger’s transformation into a zombie and who thought that everything looked pretty much normal, “Take a good look.” He eventually rescues Camila and, armed with his sturdy oar and handy numchuck, enlists Lazaro, who wields dual machetes and spear gun; Lazaro’s son, Vladi California, proficient with baseball and bat; the sling-shot toting transvestite La China; and El Primo, his hulking, bodybuilder sidekick who faints at the sight of blood. Together they form a new business, ironically becoming a member of the new entrepreneurs (cuentapropistas), the self-employed business ventures that have proliferated in Cuba since 2008, “the most visible manifestation of economic reforms undertaken since President Raúl Castro took office in 2008.”32 Instead of fleeing to the traditional claustrophobic confines such as a pub or a mall, a house in the country or an abandoned missile silo, to wait out the onslaught and in most cases get slaughtered by both humans and zombies, Juan and his crew hit the familiar streets of Old Havana, making the city itself very much a character in the film. For Juan does not initially view a zombie apocalypse as a threat, but rather as an excellent opportunity to, as he promises Lazaro, make a fortune. Thus is born, the cuentapropista, Juan of the Dead, the zombie version of Ghostbusters: “We will kill your relatives,” the publicity fliers read. In other words, this zomcom manipulates what Julie Kristeva describes as abjection and what Sigmund Freud defined as the uncanny that traditional horror films manipulate. Kyle Bishop summarizes well this horror the rotting and 31

Julia E. Swig, What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 161. 32 Philip Peters, “Cuba’s Entrepreneurs,” in Brenner et al., Chapter 11.

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walking dead generate: “Dead bodies are not only a breeding ground for disease or a symbol of defilement; they are also a reminder to the living of their own mortality. For such reasons, creatures that have apparently overcome the debilitating effects of the grave are treated with revulsion and fear.”33 Juan profits from what drives traditional horror, human weakness and terror. When a woman wants zombie Spaniards, whose wealth allows them to come to Havana for inexpensive S & M with AfroCuban prostitutes, removed from her casa particular, Juan demands payment in CUCs, the Convertible Peso, an artificial currency invented by the government to replace the greenbacks that greased Cuba’s thriving black market during the Special Period. Juan, in other words, will not work for worthless Cuban pesos. He charges 30 CUCs per zombie, but twice that much if the client’s relatives live abroad. The film thus exploits a familiar trope of zombie fare, the reluctance to kill a loved one, relative, or friend. Romero makes considered use of this situation, for example, in the beginning of Dawn of the Dead, when residents in a housing project in Philadelphia refuse to surrender their relatives-turned-zombies. In Shawn of the Dead, Shawn must contend with his mother turned zombie. The second season of The Walking Dead (2011-2012) provides a vivid example of this situation when the character Hershel Greene houses zombie friends and relatives in his barn, all of whom the other survivors eventually eradicate in horrific fashion. Juan, on the other hand, sees opportunity in the chaos and, in Cuban fashion, looks to profit from the horror. And thus begins a wonderful and often splatstick romp along the Malecon and up José Martí Avenue to the Old Capitol building. The film delights in accenting familiar icons such as the Hotel National; the American Embassy and attached José Martí Anti-Imperialism Platform, built in 2000 during the Elián González crisis and referred to as the “Demodrome” by Cubans; and the venerated Revolution Square, where huge images of Che and Castro adorn two of the buildings and look down on the area known for, among other things, Castro’s long orations.34 Here, in fact, in one of the most gruesome scenes of the film, a throng of living dead surround Juan and his business partners, invading one of the most politically sacred spaces of the Cuban imagination and revolutionary history. In the nick of time, an odd-looking truck comes to the rescue, harpooning a zombie to a pole and decapitating others as the truck circles the square: heads literally roll. Preacher Jones, the strange Englishspeaking, paramilitary-garbed, evangelical decapitator, claims to have a 33

Kyle Bishop, American Zombie Gothic, 121. Marc Frank, Cuban Revolutions: Behind the Scenes in Havana (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013), 37.

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plan for escape, presumably aboard Gamma, Castro’s prized yacht housed in the Museum of the Revolution in Havana. Once again, however, Lazaro’s spear-fishing prowess hits its errant mark, as if to underscore the fact that José Martí’s rejuvenated Revolution that Juan and his fellow zombie hunters may well represent needs no outside help from freedomspouting fanatics, either secular or religious, especially from someone whose name calls to mind the People’s Temple Reverend Jim Jones’ arsenic-laced Kool-Aid mass suicide horror in Guyana. While a significant percentage of Cubans were born after Castro came to power and the blockade began, “more than70 percent of Cuba’s 11.2 million people were born after Castro’s guerrillas swept down from the mountains.”35 As I noted previously, most Cubans do view the U.S. with suspicion, for this country’s involvement in Cuban affairs and its economy helped fuel the resentment behind the Revolution. By the mid-1950s, for example, “90 percent of Cuba’s telephone and electrical services, 50 percent of public service railways, 40 percent of raw sugar production, and 23 percent of nonsugar industries were U.S. owned.”36 Juan expresses something of a turning back to the Revolution’s roots when, upon seeing a shattered head of one of the many José Martí statues that dot Havana parks and that sit outside each elementary school in Cuba, he says with contempt, “Iconoclasts.” In addition, atop Juan’s roof when Lazaro hears a helicopter, he exclaims, “Juan, a helicopter; they’re coming to save us!” The reference to the helicopter recalls the manner in which the two survivors escape the mall at the conclusion of Dawn of the Dead, thus providing that film with a potentially happy ending. Here, however, the vehicle, smoking, spins out of control and demolishes the capitol’s dome, replicating an explosion that had once before destroyed this edifice. Juan will not leave. The zombie onslaught soon lessens opportunities for either humor or profit, especially after the deaths of the comedic La China and El Primo. La China, turned zombie, first engages in a hoot of a rumba danse macabre to the lyrics, “She wants to kill me, and I want to let her,” while handcuffed to Juan atop his roof. And the one time that Juan seeks sanctuary in the more familiar Gothic confined space of a bomb shelter, El Primo, La China’s bodybuilder partner, gets ripped apart by a zombie hoard trapped within. As in Romero’s first zombie films, media also offer misleading information. In Dawn of the Dead, for example, station managers insist 35 36

Ibid., 52. “History,” in Brenner et al.

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that the journalists lie about safe havens in the city known to be dangerous to ensure elevated ratings for advertising fees. The Cuban television news fails to make public what Fran states in Dawn of the Dead, “We’re blowing it ourselves.” In Juan of the Dead, the Cuban media claim that the zombies are dissidents financed by the United States to incite riots and to spread a virus prior to an imminent invasion. Juan, in fact, will make plans to flee, not to Miami, but to anywhere off the island, only after the Cuban television station announcer claims final victory as his blood splatters the television monitor. And Havana burns, but not before the television reporter had previously called for citizens to gather near the former American embassy to protest. Just who the zombies represent and the nature of the revolution to come become further evident when Juan, Lazaro, Sara, and Vladi California join a state-sponsored protest against the Empire at the José Martí Anti-Imperialism Platform located in the Plaza de la Dignidad across the street from the U.S. Embassy, where at various times Cuban authorities have allowed dissidents to gather in large crowds to obtain visas to leave the country. As zombie film buffs realize, however, in a zombie apocalypse, the last thing one wants to do is join a large raucous crowd in an open space. But as Daniel Drezner wryly notes, “There is no shortage of stupid or self-defeating behavior in zombie films.”37 Juan and three of his crew confront a throng of zombies and people who rush down the Malecon from the direction of the American Embassy and the Mount of Flags towards the Monument to the Maine that famously represents imperialist aggressions against Cuba. Camila had previously chastised her father for his selfish acts. Juan does remain loyal to his small community, and when La China, for instance, stole radios from the neighborhood and claims in his own defense, “We all have to make a living,” Juan counters with, “Yes, but you do not eat where you shit.” At this juncture Juan continues to feed off his fellow Cubans and their misery, dissolving the distance between the walking dead and the living. At the site of the gathering, zombies gnaw on the living, spreading their infection. As the mixed crowd of flesh-eating ghouls and terrified protesters rush from the heavily guarded old American Embassy, our group of four attempt, in Cuban fashion, to go with the flow and seek to identify with and join the crowd, first holding up the American flag and then the Cuban, but to no avail. Zombies, of course, acknowledge no national anthem or ideology. In a sense, the Cuban propaganda apparatus 37 Daniel Drezner, Theories of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 99.

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does not exactly lie about the capitalist threat, for prior to Romero’s transformation of the Haitian zombie into a flesh-eating ghoul, the living dead provided an excellent emblem for disenfranchised and impoverished black labor, what the government suggests the great Empire, the Colonizer, seeks to accomplish again in Cuba through a zombie-like invasion, a virus that biological warfare can spread. Zombies offer the government, then, an apt metaphor for the Capitalist Empire’s hegemony: they are, as Dawn of the Dead emphasizes, perfect and indiscriminate consumers. The Cubans, in fact, as Juan comes to realize, pretty much prey on themselves, as Juan’s small corporation “Juan of the Dead” underscores, despite the fun. Juan recognizes as much about himself and his own corporate greed: “In the end, Capitalism will take its toll on all of us.” If to become a zombie means loss of freedom and autonomy, the film suggests that after fifty years of Revolution not a great deal separates the downtrodden living from the living dead in Havana. The Cuban zombies provide an excellent metaphor for an imposed and calcified doctrine that dehumanizes the population. In fact, Juan shares much in common with the materialistic-minded survivors in Dawn of the Dead. And Kim Paffenroth’s argument about Romero’s zombies and human characters applies to Juan of the Dead: “For Romero, it is not the zombie’s bite that turns us into monsters, but materialism and consumerism that turn us into zombies, addicted to things that satisfy only the basest, most animal or mechanical urges of our being.”38 Not unlike the Cuban elite who live comfortably and, in a sense, feed off the populace’s poverty, Juan and his companions prey on tourists and the less fortunate to survive; they consume but create nothing, going so far as to toss an elderly man to the zombies and steal his cart to carry boxes of commandeered rum. Likewise, Lazaro brutally hacks to death a man simply because he owes him money. The film draws to a conclusion at the Monument to the Battleship Maine with a freeze frame of Juan suspended in the air, oar raised in something approaching euphoria, ready to attack an overwhelming number of zombies. Camila, now in the arms of Vladi, motors safely away from the Malecon along with Lazaro and a young boy Juan had recently rescued from the child’s zombie father—further evidence of his new perspective. In a final joke, the four escape and not necessarily to Miami in a cherry, late 1950s model Chevy, one of many of these pre-Revolution vehicles that frequent the streets of Havana, that Juan and company turned 38

Kim Paffenroth, Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Vision of Hell on Earth (Waco, Baylor University Press, 2006), 54-55.

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amphibian. The vehicle features an impressive hood ornament, a replica of the Black Virgin, who is variously associated with Africa, Santeria, Cuban Christianity, and the sea. What will happen after Havana burns and as Camila suggests, “disintegrates,” remains an open question, as does the exact nature of the new revolution. As Camila had told her father, “Things happen here, but nothing ever changes.” Shaun of the Dead concludes with a new harmony established and zombies under sufficient control to allow Simon Pegg’s character to upgrade his relationship with his girlfriend and to continue to play video games with his friend-turned-zombie Ed, an ending that suggests that not much has actually changed. Dawn of the Dead ends with the pregnant Fran piloting a fuel-hungry helicopter with Peter away from the besieged mall, offering a dim ray of hope for the future. Juan of the Dead’s ending has more in common with the beginning of Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985) in that the zombie apocalypse appears to have already destroyed society. What Lauro and Embry argue about the uncertain outcome of a zombie apocalypse obtains for Brugués’ film: “The zombie’s dystopic promise is that it can only assure the destruction of a corrupt system without imagining a replacement—for the zombie can offer no resolution.”39 Thus Juan’s final words prior to his confronting the zombie horde gathered at the monument, “I just need a little help,” point not to anxieties over the actual threat of the Empire’s invasion but to Cuba’s unsettled but hopeful future when, perhaps, restrictions that currently inhibit the expression of the Cuban imagination will diminish, allowing space for unfettered growth and development in both the country and the arts. The beginning of the film likewise points to the conclusion. The rumble of approaching thunder in the film’s opening scene undercuts the predominately tranquil beginning, suggesting the turmoil to follow. As Ann Marie Stock writes, the film’s opening sequence serves as an apt metaphor, as well, for the rise of independent films in Cuba: “The audiovisual scene in twenty-firstcentury Cuba is composed of brightly lit spaces with great potential as well as some dark tones and difficulties.”40 Cuba remains, in Mark Frank’s words, a place that faces “an always promising and always perilous future.”41 In addition to offering critical insights into Cuban life and politics, Juan of the Dead both makes a significant contribution to the popular genre of zombie films and emphasizes that Cuban movie making has moved from a national to an international stage. 39

Lauro and Embry, “Zombie Manifesto,” 96. Stock, Making and Marketing Films, 24. 41 Frank, Cuban Revolutions, 285. 40

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Bibliography Bishop, Kyle. American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture. North Carolina and London: McFarland & Company, 2010. Kindle edition. Brenner, Philip, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William LeoGrande, eds. The Revolution under Raúl: A Contemporary Cuba Reader. 2nd ed. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition. Brugués, Alejandro. Juan of the Dead Official Movie Site, Director’s Statement. Accessed 25 August 2014. http://www.juanofthedeadmovie.com/lang/en/. Castro, Fidel. Discurso Pronunciado por el Comandante Fidel Castro Ruz, Primer Ministro del Gobierno Revolucionario y Secretario del PURSC, Como Conclusion de las Reuniones con los Intelectuales Cubanos. June 30, 1961. Accessed 20 October 2015. http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1961/. Clarens, Carlos. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. New York: Capricorn Books, 1967. Cooke, Julia. The Other Side of Paradise: Life in The New Cuba. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2014. Corbett, Ben. This is Cuba: An Outlaw Culture Survives. New York: Westview Press, 2004. Kindle edition. Dawn of the Dead. DVD. Directed by George Romero. Pittsburg: Laurel Group, 1978. Dawn of the Dead. DVD. Directed by Zack Snyder. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 2004. Day of the Dead. DVD. Directed by George Romero. Los Angles: United Film Distribution Company (UFDC); New York: Laurel Entertainment Inc., 1985. Días, Antonio Aja. “Emigration and U.S.—Cuba Bilateral Relations.” In The Revolution under Raúl: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William M. LeoGrande, 2nd ed., Chapter 25. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition. Drezner, Daniel. Theories of International Politics and Zombies. Revised edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014. Egczcue, Jorge Mario Sánchez. “Challenges of Economic Restructuring in Cuba.” In The Revolution under Raúl: A Contemporary Reader, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William M. LeoGrande, 2nd ed., Chapter 9. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition.

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Frank, Marc. Cuban Revolutions: Behind the Scenes in Havana. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013. Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate). DVD. Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío. Cuba: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC), 1993. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Translated by David McClintock. New York: Penguin Books, 2003. Ghostbusters. DVD. Directed by Ivan Reitman. Culver City, CA: Columbia Pictures, 1984. Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Jaws. DVD. Directed by Stephen Spielberg. Universal City, CA: Universal Studios, 1975. Juan of the Dead (Juan de los Muertos). DVD. Directed by Alejandro Brugués. Spain: La Zanfoña Producciones; Cuba: Producciones de la Sta Avienda, 2011. Kapcia, Antoni. Cuba in Revolution: A History Since the Fifties. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lauro, Sarah and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism.” Boundary 2.35.1 (2008): 85-108. LeoGrande, William M. “The Communist Party of Cuba on the Brink of Generational Change.” In The Revolution under Raúl. A Contemporary Reader, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William M. LeoGrande, 2nd ed., Chapter 3. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition. Lucía. DVD. Directed by Humberto Solas. Cuba: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC), 1968. Martí: El Ojo del Canario (Martí: The Eye of the Canary). DVD. Directed by Fernando Pérez. Madrid: Televisión Española (TVE); Havana: Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC), 2011. Night of the Living Dead. DVD. Directed by George Romero. Pittsburg: Laurel Group, Market Square Productions, 1968. Night of the Living Dead. DVD. Directed by Tom Savini. Los Angeles, CA: 21st Century Film Corporation, 1990. Obama, Barak. “Transcript: Obama’s remarks on U.S.-Cuba relations.” Washington Post. December 17, 2014. Accessed October 15, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-obamas-remarks-

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on-us-cuba-relations/2014/. Otto, Jeff. “Shaun and the Dead Director.” IGN, March 23, 2004. Accessed 25 October 2014. http://www.ign.com/articles/2004/09/24/shaun-and-the-dead-director/. Padura, Leonardo. The Man Who Loved Dogs (El hombre que amaba a los perros). Translated by Anna Kushner. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. Paffenroth, Kim. Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Vision of Hell on Earth. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006. Peters, Philip. “Cuba’s Entrepreneurs.” In The Revolution under Raúl. A Contemporary Reader, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William M. LeoGrande, 2nd ed., Chapter 11. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition. Pifer, Lynn. “Slacker Bites Back: Sean of the Dead Finds New Life for Deadbeats.” In Better Off Dead. The Evolution of the Zombie as PostHuman, edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro. 163-174. New York: Fordham University Press, 2011. Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. Surrey, UK: FAB Press, 2008. Sánchez, Yoani. Havana Real: One Woman Fights to Tell the Truth. Brooklyn: Melville Hours Publishing, 2010. Kindle edition. Shaun of the Dead. DVD. Directed by Edgar Wright. Universal City: Universal Pictures, 2004. Shaviro, Steven. The Cinematic Body. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Stock, Ann Marie. “Making and Marketing Films in Twenty-First-Century Cuba.” In The Revolution under Raúl. A Contemporary Reader, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William M. LeoGrande, 2nd ed., Chapter 24. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition. Swig, Julia E. Cuba, What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Terminator. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. Los Angeles: Orion Pictures Corporation, 1984. Treto, Carlos Alzugaray. “Continuity and Change in Cuba at Fifty.” In The Revolution under Raúl. A Contemporary Reader, edited by Philip Brenner, Marguerite Rose Jiménez, John M. Kirke, and William M. LeoGrande, 2nd ed., Chapter 1. New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 2015. Kindle edition. 28 Days Later. DVD. Directed by Danny Boyle. Buckinghamshire, UK: Pinewood Studios, 2003.

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Wood, Robin. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Zombie 2. DVD. Directed by Lucio Fulci. Italy: Variety Film Production, 1979. Zurbano, Roberto.“For Blacks in Cuba, the Revolution Hasn’t Begun.” Translated by Kristina Cordero. New York Times. March 23, 2013. Accessed 29 October 2015. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/03/24/opinion/sunday/for-blacks-incuba-the-revolution-hasnt-begun.html.

WHEN IN ROME, DO AS THE ROMANS DO: POWER GAME IN THE HANNIBAL TELEVISION SERIES JULIANNA BORBÉLY

Introduction Evil proves to be a puzzle difficult to comprehend, challenging our intellectual capacities. According to Philip Cole, the idea of evil fills a “space of incomprehension,”1 that is, all negative experiences we encounter and cannot explain are designated as ‘evil.’ When faced with evil people or deeds, we instantly try to dissect the problem, see what has led to the event, ascertain and understand the background conditions that have determined what we are confronted with—we try to explain why evil has happened. However, when experiencing evil, reason is hardly the only way of processing it, especially in fiction. ‘Why’ is as important as ‘how’ and ‘to what effect.’ Frankenstein’s Creature, as it is clearly stated in the novel, was motivated by loneliness and anger—and the novel focuses on his deeds and their effect. The lengthy explanations in various texts of how evil was done suggest that man has a fascination with evil. This is reflected even in the multitude of artistic productions, crime and fantasy series. Television series have spin-off shows: NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service (2003-) generated NCIS: Los Angeles (2009-), while CSI: Crime Investigation Scene (2009-), led to the creation of the New York (2004-2013) and Miami (2002-2012) spin-off series. Structurally, most of them have an episodic nature and present one wrong-doing per episode. The identity of the negative character changes from episode to episode, while that of the investigators is the familiar element that holds the narrative together. As far as fictional criminal characters are concerned, of all the types of 1

Philip Cole, The Myth of Evil (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 150.

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evil entities, the serial murderers seem to be the most appealing ones. Due to the intriguing nature of the psychopathic construct, it is not surprising that psychopathic characters would appear in popular culture. Seen as the “cruder representations of evil in fiction,”2 they are portrayed as highly intelligent villains capable of unspeakably horrible crimes. Despite the fact that in the non-fictional world several studies indicate that psychopathic personalities are not outstandingly intelligent beings,3 their fictional counterparts possess almost superhuman abilities. The fictional image of a serial killer is a combination of a half human–diabolical monster, difficult to understand–and a more traditional killer.4 Thus, according to Adam Morton, the end result is a criminal who proves to be a force of nature instead of a motivated character.5 It is probably due to this that serial killers are intriguing characters: their actions lack external motivations, they seem to commit murders due to an inner urge, which creates a most puzzling narrative plot. One of the most curious and the least typical psychopathic fictional characters who also appears on screen is Hannibal Lecter, the cannibalistic serial killer from Thomas Harris’s popular trilogy Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal. In the novels Hannibal is a force of nature, possessing superhuman intelligence and physical power, supernatural understanding of human motive and emotions, and lacks all sympathy for human feeling.6 Harris’s Hannibal deceives the outer world with his display of charm and civility, while he manipulates all the other characters, and outsmarts criminal justice authorities. The 2013-2015 NBC television series is loosely based on the first and third book of the trilogy: the first novel, Red Dragon, is adapted in the second arch of Season 3, and Season 2 showcases the twins Mason and Margo Verger present in the third Harris novel; nevertheless, it primarily explores the “early relationship between the renowned psychiatrist 2

Adam Morton, Evil (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), 93. According to a study conducted by DeLisi et al., psychopathy and verbal intelligence are in an “inverse relationship” (175). Despite the careful wording of the study, suggesting that further research should be carried out to assess more accurately the relationship between various aspects of cognitive abilities and psychopathic personalities, its general conclusion is that these personalities do not possess the abilities they are attributed in the films. Matt DeLisi, Michael G. Vaughn, Kevin M. Beaver, and John Paul Wright. “The Hannibal Lecter Myth: Psychopathy and Verbal Intelligence in the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study,” Journal of Psychopathy and Behavioral Assessment 32.2 (2010): 169-177. 4 Morton, Evil, 95. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 97. 3

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[Hannibal] and his patient, a young FBI criminal profiler, [Will Graham,] who is haunted by his ability to empathize with serial killers.”7 Graham‫ތ‬s empathy with psychopathic criminals unsettles the FBI agent, but he gradually learns to control and use his demons. This process is triggered and later enhanced by Hannibal Lecter, Will’s psychiatrist—and unbeknown to his environment, a serial killer. The narrative plot focuses on how they affect each other. Hannibal is a captivating example of the novel for television: due to its “daring structural flourishes”8 it adopts different points of view and it moves back and forth between past and present, as well as reality and mind palaces. This makes the series a sophisticated third person singular narrative. Hannibal is not a classical whodunit, in which the identity of the wrong-doer is revealed by/to the investigator only at the end of the story. The audience is granted information concerning Hannibal‫ތ‬s hidden self from the very beginning, while Will learns the truth only by the end of Season 1. Only then does he realize that Hannibal, his therapist and the man helping him to investigate, does not only aid a serial murderer, but he himself is also one. Since Hannibal’s real identity is revealed early in the series, the emphasis shifts from the whodunit nature of the story to that of a power game between the archvillain and the pursuer. As the other protagonists do not know Hannibal’s real identity, the series in the detective genre investigates the relationship between persecutor and criminal based on an I-know-that-you-know-that-I-know principle. Once Will falls victim to Hannibal’s manipulation at the end of Season 1, and is thus falsely accused of murder and becomes imprisoned, he realizes that the only way to catch Hannibal is by beating him at his own game. From the beginning of Season 2, the relationship between Will and Hannibal becomes a twofold game of manipulation, in which neither Will nor Hannibal has the upper hand all the time. What is more, in order to catch the wrong-doer, even the investigator has to become a criminal and commit murder. With the moral grounds of the fight between good and evil being removed, Hannibal, the series, can be read in terms of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage dialectics. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel explains that self-consciousness gains independence only after having met its opposite—-another selfconscious being—and having recognized oneself as independent from the 7

“Hannibal,” IMDB, accessed 1 May 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2243973/ Matt Zoller Seitz, “Hannibal Redefined How We Tell Stories on Television,” Vulture, August 31, 2015, accessed 1 May 2016, http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/hannibal-redefined-how-we-tell-stories-ontv.html. 8

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other entity. In the process though, the two self-conscious beings struggle with each other to gain freedom from one another since they are bound in a relationship of dependence. One self-conscious being will always be in a superior position (the Master) while the other being (the Slave) is going to be subjected to the Master. In this process the Slave is subjected to the Master and does everything according to the latter’s wishes, yet after a while realizes that he is “other” than the Master. Recognizing oneself as independent from the Master, the Slave frees itself and can assume the position of the Master, the roles changing now. When the now-Slave achieves the same self-recognition as its predecessor, both beings become independent of one another. The relationship between Hannibal and Will Graham reflect the same dialectics, but with a little twist. Hannibal, the Master at the beginning, is holding Will in bondage. As the latter lacks proper information about the true identity of Hannibal, he does not even perceive the nature of their relationship. As soon as he becomes aware of himself and realizes his position in relation to Hannibal (in Season 2), Will struggles to free himself from the Master. He fights his way out of prison and tries to catch Hannibal, who manages to escape in the end. The first arc of Season 3, in which Will is chasing Hannibal through Europe, can be seen as the second struggle in Hegel’s dialectics. However, this phase is not entirely identical with the Hegelian pattern, since Hannibal will never be a Slave as Will was. The second arc of Season 3, in which Will asks for Hannibal’s help to catch another serial murder, signals the end of the Hegelian struggle because both entities become aware of being other than his opponent and gain self-recognition. It should be noted that Hannibal will always be a Master-like figure, since he is knowledgeable, composed, and at all times two steps ahead of Will, even during the manhunt in Europe. In this respect, he may be considered a father-figure, who wants Will to gain selfrecognition and grow. The twist in their relationship lies in the illusion of the serial killer‫ތ‬s superiority in relation to Will: though always a Masterfigure, Hannibal will always need Will either as a Slave or as an opponent—because only Will with his special ability can appreciate Hannibal’s real value. This interdependence allows their struggle to be read in terms of the fight between good and evil.

Conflict between Good and Evil Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter are independent entities at the beginning, yet their separation on ethical grounds is not relevant. Evil, represented by Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is awakened by Will Graham’s

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abilities to empathize with criminals. Hannibal, challenged by a worthy adversary, Will, wants to control the latter and tempt Will into Evil’s ways. Hannibal’s behavior in this respect reveals a mythological touch and can be read as Satan tempting Jesus. Mads Mikkelsen, the interpreter of the role played the part as if Hannibal were Lucifer himself.9 With a “paradoxical and tragic name,” as in Hebrew Satan’s name means “adversary,”10 he must always be a function of another, not an independent entity.”11 Hannibal needs Will to have someone who can oppose him. Will represents the challenge Hannibal needs and proves to be a worthy adversary. Their relationship is not a question of good and bad, but that of action and reaction. Will and Hannibal cannot exist without each other, therefore, total destruction is not an option: neither of them wants to annihilate the other. During their struggle, Will self-professedly changes his own point of view of the ultimate good. Having been deceived by Hannibal and accused of murder he did not commit, Will does not perceive the world in terms of the dichotomy of good and evil anymore, but adapts a deeds-andconsequences attitude: “You cannot reduce me to a set of influences. I’m not the product of anything. I have given up good and evil for behaviorism.”12 “[T]hen you can’t say that I am evil,” Hannibal replies, arguing that similarly to fire and storm, he is an act of God.13 Hannibal seems to be fully aware of his role and nature. He excuses his own evil deeds by claiming that “when it comes to nature, there is no choice,” as if his acts were beyond his control. What Hannibal implies is that the dichotomy between the two entities is not a black-and-white matter. He also alludes to the fact that similarly to storms, fires and hales, he cannot be labeled as simply destructive, as evil is not merely destructive, but serves a higher purpose, in our reading: to be foil to good, to help good/Will evolve. The psychopath is also aware of the fact that he cannot exist without Will. During a dinner served to Will and his boss, Jack, Hannibal states that they need each other—an observation reflecting that 9

Todd VanDerWerff, “Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal’s debut season (2 of 4),” The A.V. Club, July 24, 2013, accessed 1 May 2016., http://www.avclub.com/article/bryan-fuller-walks-us-through-ihannibalis-debut-se100644. 10 Neil Forsyth quoted in Cole, The Myth of Evil, 211. 11 Ibid. 12 Hannibal, “Naka-choko,” Season 2, Episode 10, directed by Vincenzo Natali, written by Steve Lightfoot, performed by Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy, Studiocanal October 19, 2015, DVD. 13 Ibid.

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he is the only one who sees the greater design. Hannibal does not seek to defeat Will completely, since he misses the challenge Will’s opposition proposes. While Will stays in prison, and thus cannot continue his therapy, Hannibal pretends that they have their therapy sessions. In Season 2 Hannibal is shown sitting and facing an empty chair when his regular session with Will should take place. Defeating Will is not as important as the power game between them, which comes into being after Will realizes that Hannibal cheated him and that he is the murderer Will was looking for. Will is the challenge Hannibal needs to feel alive since “self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged.”14 Will Graham is the other self-consciousness Hannibal encounters. In Will Graham, Hannibal finds an adversary worthy of him. Will is more than “the mongoose around the house when the snakes are ready to bite,”15 and his actions serve as incentives for Hannibal. The latter’s actions, however, serve as catalyzers for Will Graham, and thus Hannibal triggers a change in Will, who matures and grows into an opponent who is better equipped to fight Hannibal. Will gains control over himself and becomes equal to Hannibal when he realizes that he is “the narrator of [his] own story.”16 His imprisonment, the blow administered by Hannibal, was what he needed to work his way out of the inferior position, that is, to be released from prison. Hannibal, the evil entity, becomes a means of development of the ‘good guy,’ Will Graham. Following imprisonment Will matures, he learns to think like Hannibal, and to play by his rules. Will openly admits to Hannibal that the latter has changed him, thus acknowledging that he has become an equal adversary to Hannibal. He is willing to “adapt, evolve, become,”17 but this process also implies a desire to take revenge and destroy Hannibal. The only way to do that is turning into him, therefore Will becomes like Hannibal and does what Hannibal does: he admits that he attempted to have Hannibal killed, and he even commits murder. As one of the characters, Freddie Lounds sums up: “If you can’t beat him, join him. . . . 14

G. W. F. Hegel, “Lordship and Bondage,” in The Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J.B. Baillie. eBooks@Adelaide, last updated December 17, 2014. Ebook, accessed 1 May 2016, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hegel/phenomenology_of_mind/part7.html. 15 Hannibal, “Apéritif,” Season 1, Episode 1, directed by David Slade, written by Brian Fuller. 16 Hannibal, “Sakizuke,” Season 2, Episode 2, directed by Tim Hunter, written by Jeff Vlaming and Brian Fuller. 17 Hannibal, “Su-zakanao,” Season 2, Episode 8, directed by Vincenzo Natali, written by Scott Nimerfro, Brian Fuller, and Steve Lightfoot.

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“The only way to catch Hannibal is by becoming him.”18

The Relationship between the Two: Neither with, nor without You Psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter and FBI agent Will Graham are two adversaries in a relationship of dependence since one cannot exist without the other one. Their bond starts out of necessity, as Will is troubled by his emphatic imagination: by looking at the crime scene, he can think like the murderer and understand their motives much more easily. Being unable to deal with the anxieties caused by his ability, a psychotherapist, Hannibal Lecter, is called upon to help Will. Intrigued by Will’s ability to empathize with the murderer and to be able to imagine how any crime was committed, Hannibal considers Will a challenge. They are interconnected; one cannot exist in the form that it does without the other one. Their identity becomes meshed up: the criminal and the representative of justice become ‘friends.’ As Will words their alikeness when talking to Hannibal: “you are as alone as I am and we are both alone without each other.”19 Similarly to the Master and Slave, they need each other to be able to become aware of themselves. Both know that they depend on each other and that there is no place for them anywhere else but in each other’s proximity. Hannibal sees in Will someone he can turn into a being just like himself. At the end of Season 2, Will Graham takes two people‫ތ‬s life: when Hannibal sends Randall to murder him, Will strangles the man with his bare hands; then he burns the journalist Freddie Lounds alive because the woman starts to suspect that the real assassin is neither Hannibal nor Will separately, but the two of them together.20 The boundaries in their relationship disappear; their identity now turns one into the other, so much so that at the end of the episode, when the two men eat Freddie’s flesh, their faces overlap. Episode 10 of Season 2 focuses on this important stage in Will’s transformation. When the man sent by Hannibal to kill Will wounds the agent, and Hannibal takes care of his injured friend, he asks Will not to go inside and stay with him. “Where else would I go?,”21 Will replies, 18

Hannibal, “Naka-choko.” Hannibal, “Tome-wan,” Season 2, Episode 12, directed by Michael Rymer, written by Chris Brancato, Brian Fuller, and Scott Nimerfro. 20 Hannibal, “Naka-choko.” 21 Ibid. 19

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suggesting that he feels the two of them are linked, bound to each other. Cooking the “pork” (that is, Freddie Lounds whom Will killed) together further supports their symbiosis. The extent to which the two men become interchangeable is revealed not only by the end of the episode, but also by two parallel bedroom scenes: one involving Hannibal and his girlfriend, Alana Bloom; the other showing Will and Hannibal’s patient, Margo Verger. The two scenes, shown alternately, end with images of Will replacing those of Hannibal, thus implying that Will’s transformation has taken place—he is like Hannibal. The overlapping of the two faces is the visual representation of is the “spiritual unity in its duplication” known in the meeting of two kindred spirits.22 Criminal and persecutor having become akin in spirit is the result of the evolution of their relationship. In Season 1, at the beginning of their relationship, when Will does not yet know that Hannibal is his adversary, their antagonism is ethically well-based: Hannibal is the murderer and Will is the persecutor. In the next season, however, Will changes and becomes as manipulative as Hannibal—he even submits himself to tests in the psychiatric prison to get the substances that induce seizures, blackouts, and lost-time experiences. At this point, the difference between them may not be identified on ethical grounds. Having realized how he has been manipulated by Hannibal, Will adopts Hannibal’s ways and becomes equally manipulative. Their relationship changes and it cannot be perceived in terms of the dichotomy between good and bad, but rather as a power game similar to the struggle of the two self-conscious beings in the Lordship and Bondage dialectic.

Lordship and Bondage with a Little Twist The relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham starts from the premise that “self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged.”23 By the time their bond ends in Season 3, their relationship has gone through the phases of Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage, except for the fact that at the end they do not part and go on their way; instead, they return to the “spiritual unity in its duplication.”24 Weakened after fighting a third enemy, Hannibal and Will embrace and throw themselves off a cliff, thus dying together. “[Self-consciousness] has thereby sublated that other, for it does not 22

Hegel, Lordship. Ibid. 24 Ibid. 23

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regard that other as essentially real but sees its own self in the other.”25 Firstly, the Master sublates the other independent being in order to become certain of himself as true being; secondly, he sublates his own self, for he is this other. Further on, when the bondsman realizes his state, namely that by working for the master, he shapes the world according to the desires of another, he sees the world distinct from himself. Similarly, Will becomes aware of himself and sees Hannibal for what he is. The struggle that issues after this in Hegel’s description of the master and bondsman relationship occurs between Hannibal and Will as well, since in Season 2 they mutually try to have each other killed. Will asks for the help of a secret admirer he has to annihilate Hannibal,26 while Hannibal requests the assistance of an investigated criminal, Randall Tier, to slaughter Will. The pattern of Hegel’s lordship and bondage dialectics breaks towards the end of the season, when Will slays Randall, and consequently Hannibal proclaims that he is proud of Will’s development: “You should be quite pleased. I am.”27 Sublation, in Hegel’s view, has a double sense: on the one hand, it allows self-consciousness get back itself through canceling its otherness; on the other hand, it gives otherness back to the other self-consciousness and it cancels its own being in the other. Thus, it lets the other go free. One self-consciousness acknowledges the other and allows the other be independent of itself. Hannibal acknowledges Will, thinks of him as an equal in mind. Despite not possessing the vast knowledge the surgeon, philosopher and psychologist Hannibal does, Will has one attribute that Hannibal lacks, and that is empathy. Upon seeing a crime scene, Will can put himself in the place of the murderer, and in his mind palace think like the criminal does. In the process of recognition of self-consciousness A has no power over B if B does not do what A wants; this means that A has power over B only if B steps into A’s circle and pays attention to it. “The first does not have the object before it only in the passive form characteristic primarily of the object of desire, but as an object existing independently for itself, over which therefore it has no power to do anything for its own behalf, if that object does not per se do what the first does to it.”28 Accordingly, Hannibal can lure Will into his circle and manipulate Will to become like him only if Will steps into Hannibal’s circle—which he does by accepting 25

Ibid. Hannibal, “Mukǀzuke,” Season 2, Episode 5, directed by Michael Rymer, written by Andy Black, Scott Nimerfro, Brian Fuller, and Steve Lightfoot. 27 Hannibal, “Naka-choko.” 28 Hegel, Lordship. 26

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Hannibal as his psychotherapist. In Seasons 2 and 3, in which Will has grown into Hannibal’s equal in manipulation, both A and B pay attention to each other, hence they both have power over each other. Season 2 presents Will gaining strength and becoming as powerful as Hannibal. Gradually, Will is able to resist the latter’s control; what is more, he himself can direct the relationship at times: in order to get out and try to catch Hannibal, Will starts playing by his opponent‫ތ‬s rules, and succeeds in occasionally controlling the game. His imprisonment serves him a lesson, as it is the slap on the face he needed to wake up and, with a clear mind, claim that he is “not insane. Not anymore.”29 At this moment Hannibal does not have power over him anymore. As part of the manipulation, Will submits himself to the tests of Dr. Frederick Chilton, the head of the prison. This way he can bring himself into the same state he had been in before imprisonment, when he suffered of encephalitis which often caused loss of consciousness. Dr. Chilton administers Will certain substances that bring back memories in which he sees Hannibal take advantage of Will’s fever and loss of consciousness and feed him a human ear to set up a trap and direct suspicions of murder on Will, and send him to prison. Here and in the period following incarceration, Will manipulates Dr. Chilton: knowing that the psychiatrist is listening, he cries in Hannibal’s presence to convince the doctor of his broken psychological condition, asks a stranger to kill Hannibal, and even commits murder. The process of gaining independence from Hannibal completes in Season 3, in which he chases Hannibal through Europe in order to catch him and finally consults him in order to apprehend another serial killer. The episodes set in Europe and the Tooth-Fairy arc30 prove that Will can acknowledge himself and be independent of Hannibal. In the relationship of the two, Will Graham grows up to become a Master, hence, independent. Nevertheless, despite being independent of each other, Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham are almost organically connected: both can exist only if the other endures as well, because they need each other to acknowledge the other’s subsistence. Hannibal likes the challenge Will embodies, whereas Will learns to accept his own gift and not be tormented by it as it 29

Hannibal, “Hassun,” Season 2, Episode 3, directed by Peter Medak, written by Jason Grote and Steve Lightfoot. 30 It is a six-episode arc in Season 3 in which Will Graham is asked to investigate the case of a serial murderer generally referred to as the Tooth Fairy. In order to catch him, Will requests the imprisoned Hannibal’s help to give Will an insight into the criminal’s way of thinking.

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was the case at the beginning of their relationship. They both feel alive with the other one around, and seek each other’s company: although Hannibal got Will in prison, he cannot stay away from Will and continues giving therapy with Will even in the penitentiary. After his failed attempt to kill Will, Hannibal escapes to Europe, where he lives in hiding; but as the two men are forever bound, Will follows pursuit to Europe once he is out of hospital. Their close connection does not presume they do not fight with each another. Similarly to Hegel’s self-conscious beings, “They must enter into this struggle, for they must bring their certainty of themselves, the certainty of being for themselves, to the level of objective truth.”31 Each entity must aim at the death of the other since if something is not opposed, it is lifeless, merely existent.32 Only by meeting opposition can both Hannibal and Will be aware of being alive; without Will’s attempts to catch him, Hannibal is dormant, while Hannibal’s control, manipulation forces Will to mature, to accept and live with his ability to empathize with criminals and not lose his own identity.

Visual Representations of Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham Visual elements enhance the narrative and further highlight the story. Despite being a series centering upon a cannibalistic serial killer, the gore in the film is always diffused. The mundanity of two central elements, murder and cooking, is not presented. Gruesome murder and cannibalism often go hand in hand in the story; however, they are portrayed with toned down lights and colors. The victims having suffered is not shown, but only verbally suggested when analyzing the evidence. The murders presented only gradually do become more gruesome, but less and less is shown of them, the focus shifting onto the verbal conflict between the two main characters. Just like murder, cooking is not a common, every-day act, but art: Hannibal’s kitchen is an impeccable space dominated by an extremely nimble chef able to cook in a clean and neat way. As a matter of fact, both cooking and eating are done very elegantly. Hannibal’s kitchen and dining room, where all cooking and food-serving scenes take place, are surgically clean and orderly, as if taken from a home design magazine. Some of the most prominent similes and metaphors are taken from the animal world; therefore, both fishing and hunting are recurrent motifs in the film. Metaphors are also taken from this walk of life: through a 31 32

Hegel, Lordship. Ibid.

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description of trout fishing in winter do we learn what strategy the FBI will use to catch Hannibal. When discussing how to catch Hannibal, Will uses this metaphor to explain how to blur reality: “You have to create a reality where only you and the fish exist.”33 Fishing is an excellent retreat for Will, both in reality and in his fantasy: in Season 2 Episode 3, Will uses his mind palace not only to escape from the grim reality of being imprisoned, but also to understand how he got in that situation. In his mind he sees a stag walk out of the prison cell just at the moment when Hannibal appears and invites the stag to step back. This vision enables Will to understand that it was Hannibal who got him in prison. At this point, Will already suspects that Hannibal cheated him, and in a druginduced state in the next episode he recalls that Hannibal induced his encephalitis, fed an ear to him, and thus put the blame of being the Chesapeake Ripper on him. Will’s ability to emphathize with murderers is shown within subjective imagery clearly divided from the reality scenes by the image of a bright orange pendulum swung by three times on the screen. Will’s innermost thoughts are presented in these dream-like images. This subjective mental space is where he transposes himself and empathizes with the killer. Will’s subjective imagery is also the background against which the recurrent motifs of the film appear: he imagines himself as a deer with beautiful, well-developed antlers, while Hannibal appears as a man clad from head to toe in black leather with antlers on his head. Will’s getaways from the real world into this dream-like one allow him to imagine what killers had in mind while committing the crimes. This is also the space where he has mental conversations with Hannibal and realizes that he is becoming like his opponent. In one of the scenes the black-leather antler-man is roped to a tree facing Will, who demands that the man state who he is. The antler-man turning into Hannibal answers: “Must I denounce myself as a monster, while you still refuse to see the one growing inside you?”34 Will slowly does indeed resemble the cold Hannibal: his inner voice sounds like Hannibal, he becomes manipulative, shrewd and calculated. He becomes as murderous as Hannibal: he commits murder like Hannibal does by displaying the body in a gruesome manner. What is more, he is aware of his newly gained strength, especially when he claims that he is the narrator of his own story, that is, he is not controlled or manipulated anymore. As he avows after being imprisoned, 33

Hannibal, “Su-zakanao.” Hannibal, “Shiizakana,” Season 2, Episode 9, directed by Michael Rymer, written by Jeff Vlaming and Brian Fuller. 34

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he knows that he is not insane anymore. As all fictional serial killers, Hannibal Lecter is an almost supernatural character, and has a “kind of artistic style that a sufficiently intuitive person could understand and anticipate—we like them because we think they are diabolically alien and also rich characters.”35 The cannibalistic murders are in sharp contrast with the sophistication he displays. Selfcontrolled, impeccable, and highly sophisticated, Hannibal verges on the supernatural due to his understanding of the human motive and emotion. He possesses superhuman intelligence and supernatural physical abilities.36 Will acknowledges Hannibal’s superiority, admiring that “Hannibal follows several trains of thought without distraction from any of them.”37 Viewers’ aversion towards him is discouraged throughout the film. The elegance of his appearance and the orderliness of his office, his aristocratic style, the neatness of his kitchen and way of cooking in addition to the artistic table settings he creates render him likable. It is never shown how he commits the murders and most of all, there is no passion attached to his deeds. Only late in Season 2 do we see him commit a murder, but even then the gory details are eluded, and his connection to the crime is merely suggested. Since the audience cannot relate to him emotionally because of his murders, it is very difficult not to like him. Carefully constructed, his appearance also suggests a trustworthy, reliable person. He is a learned and widely read man, who speaks very eloquently. As a psychologist he has a very good understanding of his patients’ motivations and can articulate his thoughts very precisely. The extensive library in his office proves that his knowledge comes from books and study. His entire appearance is that of a man of old school: the lack of electronic devices, such as computers, laptops and other gadgetry in his office, which is furnished in retro style, reminds one of the 1960s70s. The orderly and surgically clean environment exudes undisturbed calmness and stands for an emotionless owner. The calm and impassionate nature is reflected in Hannibal’s personal appearance as well. Always dressed in expensive, mostly three-pieced suits, he is never disorderly. Even when he cooks, Hannibal can do that in a white shirt or a suit that remains spotless and wrinkle-free. His neat appearance and surroundings make sure that his character does not generate passion or any other ‘hot feeling’ in the viewers and that attention is diverted to the puzzling story and the discovery of the inner workings of a criminal mind. 35

Morton, Evil, 98. Ibid., 97. 37 Hannibal, “Primavera,” Season 3, Episode 2, directed by Vincenzo Natali, written by Jeff Vlaming and Brian Fuller. 36

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As “the smartest person in the room,” he is a refined gentleman, who plays the harpsichord and likens himself to a composer who “thinks about his unfinished music all the time.”38 At times he acts like a father to Will, especially when he praises Will‫ތ‬s accomplishment—that is, his act of murder.39 He understands the fact that Will fantasizes of killing him, which also reflects his father-figure like nature. Hannibal rules the lives of everybody he comes in contact with. “We don’t have an ending. He didn’t give us one yet,”40 says Abigail Hobbs, the daughter of the serial killer Will was pursuing in the first season, while Hannibal let everyone believe that she was dead. His manner of handling people and events suggests a master-of-the-universe attitude, he behaves as if he were God indeed. To use Hegelian terms, Hannibal Lecter is the Master who would never be in an inferior position despite his bond with the Slave.

Conclusion The series does not present the typical fight between Good and Evil, two opposite entities facing each other, but showcases a power game. The confrontation of these two characters endorses Hannah Arendt’s outlook on power, suggesting that “The only indispensable material factor in the generation of power is the living together of people.”41 In this respect, power game issues between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham because they meet and act together. The opening scene of Season 2 clearly indicates that it is not the outcome that is important, but how we get to that outcome: Episode 1 opens with a fight between Hannibal and Jack Crawford, the FBI agent in charge with the cases Hannibal and Will Graham deal with. The outcome, finding out that Hannibal is the archvillain, the serial murderer responsible for many cannibalistic crimes is not what is at stake in the narrative, but the interaction between the calculated and manipulative Hannibal and the gullible-turned-manipulative Will Graham. In Will, Hannibal finds an adversary to his liking—both challenging and different from him. Unlike Hannibal, Will does not have a personality disorder, only an active imagination, which enables him to empathize with murders. As opposed to this, Hannibal has a vast knowledge, but lacks empathy entirely. 38

Hannibal, “Futamono,” Season 2, Episode 6, directed by Tim Hunter, written by Andy Black, Scott Nimerfro, Brian Fuller, and Steve Lightfoot. 39 Hannibal, “Naka-choko.” 40 Hannibal, “Primavera.” 41 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 201.

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Unwillingly, Will challenges him, wakes up the hunter in Hannibal, and in the end the question is who wins the hunting game. Just like Satan, who according to the Hebrew meaning of its name is merely an adversary, Hannibal “must always be a function of another, not an independent entity.”42 In this reading, Evil cannot be separated from Good, since it is only the opposite of the hero.43 Evil in Hannibal, therefore, does not generate a clash in which its purpose is to eliminate the adversary. Neither Hannibal nor Will Graham attempts to ultimately destroy one another. In this series the emphasis is on the power game between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham. Since Will learns to be like Hannibal, the dichotomy between Good and Evil disappears and they become two entities which seek acknowledgment by the other in terms of the Lordship and Bondage dialectics. Season 1, in which Hannibal dominates the relationship, represents the first phase of the Hegelian dialectic. Hannibal manipulates Will into prison, hence he becomes the Master. This changes in Season 2, in which Will, having become aware of himself, fights back, starts manipulating the others like Hannibal does, which represents the second part of the Hegelian pattern. Will’s ability to shed the role of the Bondsman is signaled by his reevaluation of his mental palace, leading to an appreciation of his ability to empathize with the murderer and imagine exactly how the crime was committed. The retreat of his imagination is not a traumatic place anymore, he does not fight against it, but embraces it. Finally, Season 3 shows the two characters still connected to each other. In the first narrative arc Will travels around Europe, chasing Hannibal, who finally gives himself up. In the second narrative arc of the season Will asks for Hannibal’s help to find a serial murderer called the Tooth Fairy. The development of their relationship runs against Hegel’s Lordship and Bondage. According to Hegel’s dialectic, having lost his position of superiority, the Master will become Bondsman and go through the same process of self-recognition as the entity before him. At the end of this phase, the bondage between the two sub-conscious beings will disappear, they no longer need each other to distinguish themselves. This stage is missing from this Hannibal-story: the Master does not become a Bondsman, as if Hannibal did not need self-recognition. Only Will needs to develop and go through the stages of gaining self-recognition; to Hannibal he is merely a challenge. Therefore, contrary to what the Hegelian dialectic holds, the two beings who become aware of themselves 42 43

Forsyth quoted in Cole, The Myth of Evil, 211. Ibid.

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do not separate in the end: Will and Hannibal embrace each other and die together. Nevertheless, the spiritual unity of two beings, that is, the meeting of two kindred spirits that Hegel discusses in his dialectics still applies to the TV show. Hannibal and Will need one another: the first needs the challenge Will presents, the latter needs a force he can oppose in order to grow into an independent being. The relationship of Hannibal and Will reflect on the fight between Good and Evil. In the series this conflict does not stand on ethical or moral grounds; instead, it is a power game in which only a fully independent being, aware of himself and in control of his demons can prevail. Will can defeat Hannibal only when he learns to be like Hannibal. This raises the question of whether there is a clear-cut distinction between Good and Evil. Based on this story, there is not. The good and bad dichotomy does not work here. Will Graham is not the “bad guy” in the story, yet he commits murder, manipulates others, lies, and embraces ‘evil’ in order to catch (and conquer) the ‘ultimate evil,’ Hannibal Lecter. We can pinpoint him as a diabolical entity, yet must acknowledge that exactly due to his evil nature may the ‘good guy’ develop and gain self-recognition. Thus the anxiety caused by Hannibal’s destructive actions is countered by Will Graham’s ability to confront him eventually.

Bibliography Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1958. Cole, Phillip. The Myth of Evil: Demonizing the Enemy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2006. DeLisi, Matt, Michael G. Vaughn, Kevin M. Beaver, and John Paul Wrigh. “The Hannibal Lecter Myth: Psychopathy and Verbal Intelligence in the MacArthur Violence Risk Assessment Study.” Journal of Psychopathy and Behavioral Assessment. 32.2 (2010): 169177. Hegel, G. W. F. The Phenomenology of Mind. 1807. Trans. J.B. Baillie. eBooks@Adelaide. Last updated December 17, 2014. Ebook. Accessed 1 May 2016. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hegel/phenomenology_of_mind/part7. html. Phylosophy Bro. “G.W.F. Hegel’s ‘Lordship and Bondage’: A Summary.” Philosophy Bro.Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.philosophybro.com/post/55732351251/g-w-f-hegelslordship-and-bondage-a-summary. Blog.

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Hannibal. Created by Bryan Fuller. Performed by Mads Mikkelsen and Hugh Dancy. Studiocanal October 19, 2015, DVD. “Hannibal.” IMDb. Accessed 26 August 2014. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2243973/?ref_=nv_sr_1. Morton, Adam. Evil. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. VanDerWerff, Todd. “Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal’s debut season (2 of 4).” The A.V. Club, July 24, 2013. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.avclub.com/article/bryan-fuller-walks-us-throughihannibalis-debut-se-100644. Zoller Seitz, Matt. “Hannibal Redefined How We Tell Stories on Television.” Vulture. August 31, 2015. Accessed 1 May 2016. http://www.vulture.com/2015/08/hannibal-redefined-how-we-tellstories-on-tv.html.

MILLER VS. “ARMINIUS”: CONTESTED INFLUENCES ON BRAM STOKER’S DRACULA SÁNDOR CZEGLÉDI

Introduction Although the doctrine of “containment” has primarily been associated with post-1945 U.S. foreign policies engendered by Cold War anxieties and was designed to prevent the spread of Soviet ideological and concomitant territorial expansion, the very same idea of stopping the Russian acquisition of space along the Eurasian periphery of the British Empire had already been present a century before, in an age when Great Britain (and her Empire) was supposed to determine the fate of the world—at least in an ideal imperialistic scenario. However, there were omens that Britain’s power and ability to shape events around the Black Sea, in Central Asia and ultimately in India was slipping inexorably by the 1880s, and the country seemed to be entering a period that John Bagot Glubb described a century later as the “Age of Decadence.”1 In addition to the frustrations felt over the unsuccessful attempts to contain Russia, the sense of crisis was deepened by internal developments as well, most notably by the “long depression” between 1873 and 1896, ushering in a period of “hegemonic decline”2 from which the country could never fully recover. In order to determine to what extent the feelings of pessimism, decadence and degeneration were reflected in contemporary books published in Great Britain, the best freely available tool is probably the

1

John Bagot Glubb, The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival (Edinburgh: Willam Blackwood & Sons Ltd., 1977), 20-23. 2 Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22.

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online Google Books Ngram Viewer,3 which visualizes the normalized frequency curves of the search terms appearing in printed books digitized by Google, making the comparison of the overall trends more or less reliable even through several decades.

Fig. 4-1: The distribution of the words “degeneration,” “decadence” and “pessimism” in the Google Books database (in the British corpus)

In this fin de siècle atmosphere characterized by a multitude of anxieties, Britons wholeheartedly welcomed a messenger from the East, who corroborated their worst fears about losing power on the international scene, while also enthusiastically reassuring them of the superiority of British constitutional monarchy, suggesting that victory was a not-sodistant possibility in the “Great Game” for supremacy in Central Asia. The person with impeccable credentials, vast firsthand knowledge about the Orient, and almost superhuman linguistic skills, who assumed the role of waking England up to the Russian threat was a Hungarian explorer, historian and linguist, Arminius Vambery—a person of multiple identities, known in the East as “Resid effendi.”4 Incidentally, Vambery also worked for the British Foreign Office as a spy and an agent from approximately 1873 onwards (see e.g. the Records of the Foreign Office5), so his influence on British foreign policy decisions—and especially on decision3

Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed 7 April 2015, http://books.google.com/ngrams. 4 Vámbéry Ármin, Küzdelmeim (Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1905), 52. 5 The National Archives (document reference: FO 1093/46); accessed 3 January 2016, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_q=FO%201093%2F46.

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makers—may actually have been underestimated in the past. Harboring inveterate anti-Russian sentiments himself since the Tsarist regiments suppressed the Hungarian revolution in 1849, Vambery captivated like-minded audiences all across Britain, including Bram Stoker, whose vampire story—as Jimmie E. Cain argues—should primarily be interpreted as a literary manifestation of contemporary British Russophobia.6 Reading Dracula as a space of imagination where the anxieties of the contemporary world—dominated by the fear of Russia— are displaced, converged and coalesced certainly lends credence to the expectation that Vambery, who had sounded the tocsin of crisis over Russian expansionism perhaps hundreds of times in Britain alone before the 1890s, must have influenced the creation of the novel in some ways. The (very few) personal encounters between Stoker and Vambery have even given rise to sometimes wild speculations about the latter’s contribution to the shaping of Dracula, the extent of which (or indeed: whether it happened at all) is a matter of considerable scholarly debate even today. While acknowledging that taking sides in the current controversy is practically impossible due to the largely underdocumented nature of the Stoker-Vambery link, this paper nevertheless attempts to shed some new light on a few, as-yet-neglected aspects of the issue, especially from the Hungarian standpoint.

Perspectives on Vambery and Vampirism Three centuries after the publication of the “first widely read vampire story,” De magia posthuma by Karl Ferdinand Schertz (1706),7 the popularity of the genre is approaching previously unheard-of proportions. A clear indicator of the trend is the spectacular growing relative frequencies of the words “vampire” and “Dracula” in the Google Books database,8 especially since the 1970s:

6

Jimmie E. Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 2. 7 Gábor Klaniczay, “Decline of Witches and Rise of Vampires in 18th Century Habsburg Monarchy,” Ethnologia Europaea XVII (1987): 172. 8 Google Books Ngram Viewer, accessed 27 December 2015, http://books.google.com/ngrams.

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Fig. 4-2: The distribution of “vampire” and “Dracula” in the Google Books database

Another proof of the current “vampire renaissance” is the massive number of vampire-related movies produced since the 1896 release of the founding piece of the genre, The Haunted Castle (US)/The Devil’s Castle (GB), directed by Georges Méliès.9 In December 2015 the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) listed approximately 2,200 works10 whose short descriptions included the keyword “vampire”—69 of these titles were scheduled for release in 2016 and beyond. A few months after the completion of Méliès’s groundbreaking three-minute film, Bram Stoker’s fifth (and by far the best-known) novel Dracula came out in May 1897, published by Archibald Constable and Company. Stoker’s 390-page opus almost immediately popularized a vampire character who might to a certain degree have owed its existence to Vambery’s instructions about the historical background and the then-widespread vampire-related superstitions in Central and Eastern Europe. The myth surrounding Vambery as the most likely fountainhead of vampire lore (and even inspiration) for Stoker’s Dracula is alive and well today in the Hungarian-language portion of the Internet. A recent Google 9

G. Méliès, “The Haunted Castle (1896),” YouTube video, 3:18, posted by “silentfilmhouse,” March 20, 2011, accessed 6 January 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmKaz3Quzo. 10 “‘Vampire’ Titles,” The Internet Movie Database (IMDB), accessed 27 December 2015, http://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=vampire&mode=advanced&pag e=1&ref_=kw_nxt&sort=release_date,desc.

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search (conducted on December 27, 2015) focusing on the co-occurrences of the words “Vámbéry Ármin” AND “Drakula” in the same documents (restricted to Hungarian-language websites only) returned approximately 110 results. After removing the duplicates and the irrelevant web pages from the list, the remaining 65 documents showed the following distribution between 2006 (the date of the earliest hit) and 2015:

Fig. 4-3: The distribution of Hungarian-language Websites regarding the nature of the “Stoker-Vambery connection.”

Out of these 65 results only four sources mention Vambery’s rather uncorroborated role in the development of the Dracula story (as it is indeed reflected in more recent Dracula scholarship); the rest of the sites appear to be clinging to a largely outdated, frequently biased and embellished interpretation of the Stoker-Vambery link, which appears to be still absolutely prevalent in the Hungarian (cyber)space of imagination. Yet even those sites that raise doubts about Vambery’s contribution routinely forget to refer to their sources of information. There is one counterexample, a blog entry at olvasoterem.com (dating back to 2011), which even identifies leading Canadian Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller as the foremost expert on Stoker’s unpublished notes—who is simultaneously functioning as the chief mythbuster in the Vambery case.11 11 Jance, “Portré: Bram Stoker,” Olvasóterem.com, November 8, 2011, accessed 6 January 2015, http://olvasoterem.com/blog/2011/11/08/164-eve-szuletett-bram-

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The other, more detailed and factual website from the list contains an article from 2012, commemorating the 180th anniversary of Vambery’s birth. It can be found in the online version of the history magazine Rubicon, which dismisses as “legend” the assertions that Vambery’s Eastern European historical and ethnographic knowledge was the main catalyst and a major inspiration behind the Dracula novel.12 The remaining two skeptical sites are also blogs that merely question Vambery’s contribution (very briefly)—without supporting their claims any further. The overwhelming majority of the pro-Vambery sources (59 sites) simply copy the Hungarian Wikipedia entry on “Drakula,” which states— without citing the source of its information—that “1890-ben az író találkozott Vámbéry Ármin magyar professzorral, aki elĘször mesélt neki a havasalföldi uralkodó, III. Vlad Tepes Drăculea legendájáról,”13 i.e. “in 1890 the writer (Bram Stoker) met Hungarian professor Arminius Vambery, who, for the first time talked to him about the legend of Vlad Tepes Drăculea III, voivode of Wallachia.”14 Some Hungarian websites go even further and claim that Stoker paid his presumed intellectual debt to Vambery by explicitly mentioning him on the opening pages of the novel as “Arminius Vampiry.”15 In fact, the word “Vampiry” never appears in Stoker’s 1897 text (although there are three references in the later chapters to a certain “Arminius,” who is a friend of Abraham Van Helsing’s). The source of the “Vampiry” legend may be traced back to a paragraph from a rather creative Hungarian translation by Tibor Bartos from 1985, which has no direct equivalent in the original text: “Amikor a naplókból a ládák felĘl értesültem, nyomban levéllel kerestem meg Arminius Vampiry professzor barátomat Buda-Pesth-en, hogy véleményét kérjem,”16 i.e. “When I learned about the chests from the diaries, I immediately wrote a stoker/. Blog. 12 Tamás M. Tarján, “1832. március 19: Vámbéry Ármin születése,” RubicOnline (March 2012): n.p., accessed 14 January 2015, http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar /oldalak/1832_marcius_19_vambery_armin_szuletese. 13 “Drakula,” Wikipedia, last modified November 29, 2015, accessed 3 January 2016, https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drakula. 14 All Hungarian-language quotations are the author’s translations unless stated otherwise. 15 Richárd Rákócza, “Síkfilmes géppel Vámbéry nyomában,” Amerikai Népszava, April 23, 2012, accessed 8 January 2015, http://nepszava.com/2012/04 /magyarorszag/sikfilmes-geppel-vambery-nyomaban.html. 16 Olman, April 4, 2009 (2:06 p.m.), comment on Leiter Jakab, “Drakula,” Leiterjakab: Félrefordítások mindenhonnan, April 4, 2009, accessed 6 January 2015, http://leiterjakab.blog.hu/2009/04/04/drakula_2003. Blog.

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letter to my friend, Professor Arminius Vampiry in Buda-Pesth, to solicit his opinion.” Presumably, Stoker had originally intended to write the novel with a certain “Count Wampyr” as the main (anti-)hero.17 Whether Bartos was aware of this piece of information is not known. The name “Dracula” is supposed to have come from William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820)—a book that Stoker found in the local library while vacationing in Whitby in the summer of 1890.18 The word “Dracula” appears three times in Wilkinson’s book, once on page 17 and twice on page 19, where one meaning of the word (“Devil” in the “Wallachian language”) is also explained in a footnote.19 The names “Vlad”, “Tepes”, and “Impaler” are not mentioned in Wilkinson’s work—and they do not occur in Stoker’s finished book or in his Notes, either. Yet it would be too one-sided to blame only the Hungarian sources for spreading false claims or unfounded assumptions: in his extremely detailed Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (2011), J. Gordon Melton writes that “Stoker possibly learned of Vlad from Arminius Vambéry, a Romanian [sic] scholar he met in the 1890s in London.”20 Almost 500 pages later the same book—somewhat more correctly—identifies Vambery as a “Hungarian historian” but states that he was born in “Szerdakely”21 (correctly: “Szerdahely”, i.e. “Dunaszerdahely”, now: “Dunajská Streda”) instead of referring to Vambery’s real birthplace, the village of “Szentgyörgy” (currently: “Svätý Jur”). In fairness to Melton, Vambery himself regarded Dunaszerdahely his true birthplace, the town which “witnessed the awakening of [… my] consciousness”—as he wrote in the Hungarian edition of his autobiography.22 Melton goes on to describe Vambery as “a possible model for Dr. Abraham Van Helsing”23 in Stoker’s Dracula and also suggests that one of Vambery’s most popular books, Hungary in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times (1886), had already been available for 17

Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, Bram StokerҲs Notes for Dracula (Facsim. ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008), 17, footnote 14. 18 Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 285. 19 William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Various Political Observations Relating to Them (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820), 17-19. 20 J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (3rd ed. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2011), 253. 21 Melton, Vampire Book, 735. 22 Vámbéry, Küzdelmeim, 8. 23 Melton, Vampire Book, 735.

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Stoker for background research on Dracula.24 However, there is not a single reference to this possible source among Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008), the definitive, award-winning academic text annotated and transcribed by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, which omission—whether intentional or not— significantly weakens Vambery’s case. Unfortunately, the history of the Notes is not completely clear, either. Stoker’s handwritten comments on the plot as well as his handwritten and typed research notes were sold by his widow in 1913—one year after the author’s death—to a book dealer in New York, but from then on the whereabouts of the documents had been unknown until 1970, when the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia acquired them from a local bookseller.25 The first scholars to be able to read the Notes after their discovery were presumably Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, coauthors of the study In Search of Dracula (1972).26

The Case against Vambery Elizabeth Miller traces the roots of the “Vambery myth” to Harry Ludlam’s A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (1962), in which Ludlam maintained that “Bram sought the help of Arminius Vambery in Budapest,” furthermore, “Vambery was able to report that ‘the Impaler,’ who had won this name for obvious reasons, was spoken of for centuries after as the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land beyond the forest.’”27 Additionally, Jimmie E. Cain points out that the myth was subsequently reiterated by Daniel Farson, Stoker’s next biographer (and great-nephew) in 1975.28 Meanwhile, despite their early access to the Notes, Florescu and McNally also presented the Stoker-Vambery link in their 1972 study (titled In Search of Dracula) as a proven fact, stating that “The two men [Stoker and Vambery] dined together, and during the course of their conversation, Bram was impressed by the professor’s stories about Dracula ‘the impaler.’ After Vambery returned to Budapest, Bram wrote to 24

Ibid., 736. Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 1. 26 Ibid., 3. 27 Elizabeth Miller, “My friend Arminius,” excerpt from Dracula: Sense & Nonsense by Elizabeth Miller (Southend-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 2006), 161-166, accessed 10 January 2015, http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/AVambery.htm. 28 Cain, Bram Stoker and Russophobia: 86. 25

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him, requesting more details about the notorious 15th century prince and the land he lived in.”29 At the same time, Florescu and McNally admitted that “Unfortunately, no correspondence between Vambery and Stoker can be found today.”30 Nevertheless, the revised edition of In Search of Dracula in 1994 used a considerably more evasive language: “The two men dined together, and during the course of their conversation Stoker became impressed by the professor’s stories about his homeland.”31 For roughly the past three decades no serious scholar has tried to assert that Vambery in fact provided Stoker with the necessary information concerning the real Dracula’s historical or family background—whoever the model for Dracula might have been. Furthermore, according to Miller, there is no evidence that Stoker knew anything more about Vlad the Impaler than the few lines he had read about him in Wilkinson’s book.32 The Notes reveal several additional sources from which Stoker managed to gain some insight into the Hungarian language, culture and Transylvanian superstitions. Besides William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), Stoker is known to have consulted—as listed in Appendix IV of the Notes33—Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould’s The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1865); Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and its People (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1865); Nina Elizabeth Mazuchelli’s Magyarland: Being the Narrative of our Travels through the Highlands and Lowlands of Hungary (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1881); and also Emily Gerard’s “Transylvanian Superstitions” (published in the July 1885 issue of The Nineteenth Century). Consequently, Stoker did not really need to ask Vambery for any further information in order to be able to finish the Dracula story as we know it today—if he still did so, no direct evidence has been produced so far to substantiate those claims. Vambery’s works that are accessible online do not provide further clues, either. Out of his 16 books currently listed in the Hungarian Electronic Library (http://mek.oszk.hu) there is not a single line in any of them that makes a however passing reference to “Stoker”—not even in his 29

Quoted in Miller, “My friend Arminius,” n.p. Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Elizabeth Miller, “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes,” excerpt from Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, ed. Elizabeth Miller (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 1998), n.p., accessed 9 January 2015, http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/divorce.html. 33 Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 304. 30

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very detailed Hungarian autobiography, titled Küzdelmeim34 (“My Struggles”), in which he mentions dozens of statesmen, diplomats, literary figures, etc. he encountered in Britain (and many more elsewhere). In addition, when Jane “Lorna” Stoddard interviewed Stoker about Dracula for the July 1, 1897 issue of the British Weekly, Stoker did not identify Vambery when he listed explicitly some of his sources for the book, e.g. Emily Gerard’s “Transylvanian Superstitions” and Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-Wolves.35 Finally, the words “vampire,” “vámpír,” “Dracula,” “Vlad,” and “Tepes” cannot be found at all in Vambery’s works, including his world-famous history of Hungary in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886), published eight times between 1888 and 1923.

The Case for Vambery Perhaps the strongest single indicator of Vambery’s ancillary presence in the imagined background space of the novel is the fact that the name “Arminius” appears three times in Stoker’s Dracula (1897), each time as a reference to a mysterious friend of the Dutch professor and vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing. “Arminius” provides Helsing with vital background information on Dracula and his ancestors (by basically reiterating Wilkinson’s words from the Account of the Principalities), thus allaying at least some of the fears of the uncontainable unknown: “But he is clever. I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record, and from all the means that are, he tell me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk…. The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race…”36 “As I learned from the researches of my friend Arminius of Buda-Pesth, he [Dracula] was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman, and alchemist…”37 34

Vámbéry Ármin, Küzdelmeim (Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1905). Accessed 9 January 2015, http://mek.oszk.hu/03900/03975/03975.pdf. 35 Jane “Lorna” Stoddard, “Mr. Bram Stoker. A Chat with the Author of Dracula,” British Weekly, July 1, 1897, 185, accessed 19 November 2015, http://bramstoker.org/pdf/nonfic/nfdracuk.pdf. 36 Bram Stoker, Dracula (Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1897), Chapter 18, n.p., accessed 11 April 2014, http://bramstoker.org/pdf/novels/05dracula.pdf. 37 Ibid., Chapter 23, n.p.

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Stoker’s fictional character Arminius appears to overlap considerably with the real Arminius Vambery, although the references offer very few details about the person in question: we only know that he does research, works at BudaPesth University, and we can infer that he is able to communicate in foreign languages (since Helsing is not known for his Hungarian language skills despite his numerous academic titles listed in the book, e.g. MD, DPh, D. Lit). We also know that in real life Stoker had met Vambery at least three times (or, at a minimum, they were in the same place at the same time) between 1889 and 1892. The first such occasion was on April 26, 1889 “at Sandringham at a theatrical performance, which Queen Victoria… also attended.”38 The second and third encounters are described by Stoker himself in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving I-II (London: William Heinemann, 1906). The very last chapter of Volume I is devoted to Arminius Vambery. On pages 371-372 Stoker gives a brief account of the supper that Vambery also attended in the Beefsteak Room of Sir Henry Irving’s Lyceum Theatre on April 30, 1890. We learn that “He was most interesting and Irving was delighted with him. He had been to Central Asia, following after centuries the track of Marco Polo and was full of experiences fascinating to hear.”39 But instead of discussing Dracula and vampires, Stoker asked him if he ever felt any fear “when in Thibet.”40 The third meeting may not even have resulted in a personal conversation between Stoker and Vambery, for as Stoker recalls, he “saw him again two years later, when he was being given a Degree at the Tercentenary of Dublin University.41 On that occasion Vambery “shone out as a star” and “soared above all the speakers” and “spoke loudly against Russian aggression”, “a subject to which he had largely devoted himself.”42 In fact, Stoker recollections appear to fail as far as the essence of the speech is concerned. The Records of the Tercentenary Festival of the University of Dublin (the event was held between July 5 and 8, 1892) indicate that Professor Vambery “delivered, in vigorous accents, a speech in 38

Lory Alder and Richard Dalby, The Dervish of Windsor Castle: The Life of Arminius Vambery (London: Bachman and Turner, 1979), 314, quoted in David Mandler, “Vámbéry, Victorian Culture, and Stoker’s Dracula,” in Comparative Hungarian Studies, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasváry (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press Press), 54. 39 Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving I (London: Heinemann, 1906), 371, accessed 20 November 2015, http://bramstoker.org/pdf/nonfic/03irving01.pdf. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid., 372. 42 Ibid.

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the English tongue, glowing with generous admiration of the British people and their empire.”43 In his address to the students Vambery exhorted them to study the languages of the East, arguing that “if the British people will persevere in the study of the East, . . . the Empire will last as long as the sun lasts in the heavens.”44 The Russian threat—contrary to Vambery’s usual Russophobic disposition—was not addressed explicitly on that occasion (at least according to the transcript of the short speech as printed on pp. 260-61 in the Records). The Records also show Vambery’s continuing popularity: out of the 523 banquet guests he was designated number 34, consequently, “the illustrious traveller and Orientalist” sat at Table B, nearest to the dais,45 while Mr. Bram Stoker (guest No. 334) was given a seat at Table K.46 In those days Vambery’s fame in Great Britain was indeed very much comparable in magnitude to that of the incumbent presidents of the United States, as indicated by the normalized frequency curves of the names based on their appearances in British books contained in the Google Books database (see Fig. 4-4). For the sake of comparison, three contemporary US presidents: Grover Cleveland (serving as Chief Executive from 1885 to 1889 and from 1893 to1897), Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893) and William McKinley (1897-1901) were chosen:

Fig. 4-4: The popularity of Arminius Vambery on the basis of books published in Britain 43

Records of the Tercentenary Festival of the University of Dublin Held 5th to 8th July, 1892 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Co., 1894), 158. Accessed 29 December 2015. https://archive.org/stream/recordstercente00irelgoog#page/n4/mode/2up 44 Ibid., 261. 45 Ibid., 311. 46 Ibid., 315.

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Practically, Vambery was the most famous celebrity between 1883-88 of all the luminaries selected above—then his popularity started to decline. Vambery’s celebrity status was built on many things: his Eastern travels and unparalleled connections at the highest places (and palaces); his unparalleled linguistic skills and unquestionably pro-British and antiRussian attitude—let alone his “self-made man”-image—not to mention the hundreds of public lectures and speeches that he made in Britain. Prior to his meetings with Stoker Vambery had already published dozens of noted scholarly and popular writings in Britain. David Mandler47 lists two ethnographic works (Travels in Central Asia (1864), Sketches of Central Asia (1868)); two historico-political volumes (Central Asia and the AngloRussian Frontier Question (1874), The Coming Struggle for India (1885)); one autobiography (Arminius Vambery: His Life and Adventures (1883)); and two historical books (History of Bokhara (1873), Hungary in Ancient, Medieval and Modern Times (1886)). Mandler also estimates that from 1864 to 1913 more than one hundred English-language articles appeared under Vambery’s name.48 Consequently, a Russophobic “Eastern” figure of the fame and authority of a “distinguished foreigner” could have served Stoker well not only in grounding the Dracula story in partially displaced societal anxieties over the possible rollback of global British influence (aggravated by perceptions of irreversible economic and moral decline) but the (semi-)fictional character of “Arminius”—with obvious allusions to the academic celebrity from Hungary—probably also helped the author to anchor the plot in contemporary reality. The earliest dated page among Stoker’s Notes was written on March 8, 1890,49 52 days before the Beefsteak Room supper with Vambery. The novel was originally set in Styria (just like Joseph Sheridan LeFanu’s vampire tale Carmilla (1872)), but the name of the province was “soon changed to Transylvania.”50 The question of “when exactly?” would be of crucial importance in order to try to find out “who” or “what” persuaded Stoker to make the change. Unfortunately, we only know from Stoker’s handwritten notes that he crossed out “Styria” and inserted “Transylvania” instead some time after March 14, 1890.51 Considering the fact that he found William Wilkinson’s Account… as late as August 8, 1890, when he 47 David Mandler, “Vámbéry, Victorian Culture, and Stoker’s Dracula,” in Comparative Hungarian Studies, ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasváry (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press Press, 2011), 48. 48 Ibid. 49 Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 4. 50 Ibid. 51 Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 29.

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visited the Whitby Public Lending Library,52 it is reasonable to assume that there must have been other—earlier—developments playing a part in the decision. Elizabeth Miller offers three possible explanations53 for the change of the scene: (1) Transylvania was suggested by Arminius Vambery; (2) Stoker may have read other stories set in Transylvania; (3) the change was inspired by Emily Gerard’s “Transylvanian uperstitions”—the article identified as a source in the Notes as well. (According to Miller, Gerard’s influence is the most likely scenario.) While Gerard’s overwhelming influence on Stoker’s Dracula is undeniable, I suggest that the meeting with “Arminius” on April 30 may also have played a previously over-, then (especially nowadays) a rather underrated part in Stoker’s switching the scene to Transylvania. (That day must have been special for Stoker for other reasons as well: although he never practiced law, “he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in London on 30 April 1890.”54) Whether the “my friend Arminius, of BudaPesth University” phrase was included in the novel as a simple gesture of respect toward a celebrity of international renown or it was intended as some kind of acknowledgment (of a presumed intellectual debt) is impossible to determine for certain on the basis of the available documents today. Nevertheless, as J. Gordon Melton noted, one of Vambery’s most popular books, Hungary in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times (1886), had already been published (and republished) by the time Stoker started to take notes on his vampire novel. By 1890 the “fourth impression” of Vambery’s Hungarian history book had appeared.55 Simultaneously, the Google Ngram Viewer frequency curve (Fig. 4-4) also shows Vambery’s popularity soar and reach its peak in Britain around 1886. Furthermore, this volume is the only book among Vambery’s English-language works that introduces the author as “Arminius Vambery, Professor at the University of Buda-Pesth.”56 (Before the unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda in 1873, the institution had been known as the “Royal University of Pest”—frequently spelled as Pesth.) 52

Ian Thompson, DraculaҲs Whitby (Chalford: Amberley Pub., 2012), n.p. Elizabeth Miller, A Dracula Handbook (Xlibris Corp., 2005), 76. 54 Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 15. 55 Arminius Vambery and Louis Heilprin, Hungary in Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern Times (8th ed. London, Adelphi Terrace: T. Fisher Unwin, 1886), copyright page, accessed January 12, 2015, http://mek.oszk.hu/11700/11785/11785.pdf. 56 Vambery and Heilprin, Hungary, title page. 53

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Several other books written by Vambery describe the author simply as “Arminius Vambery,” while others add more detail, e.g. “professor of oriental languages in the University of Pesth,”57 “ordinary professor of Oriental languages at literatures in the Royal University of Pesth”58; but they never once refer to the author the way Hungary in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times—and Van Helsing in Stoker’s Dracula—does. In order to determine whether Vambery’s book also contributed to Stoker’s representation of Hungary and/or Transylvania in his vampire novel (by adding anything else beyond Stoker’s known sources) a more profound textual analysis would be required. Nevertheless, the assumption that both the book (which contains “Transylvania/n/” 86 times) and its author of immense lexical and practical knowledge would have been able to inform Stoker about virtually any aspect of Hungarian medieval history is beyond doubt.

Conclusion Eighteen-Bisang and Miller admit that given Stoker’s habit of using whatever scrap of paper was available for hastily recording his ideas— and, considering the vicissitudes of the said documents—it is not possible to determine whether “Bram Stoker’s Notes includes all of his preliminary Notes.”59 Consequently, there might be room for additional, not yet discovered sources among the key documents (whether fiction or nonfiction) that are now generally regarded to have been consulted by Stoker before or during the writing of his best-known piece. Consequently, the exact nature of Vambery’s contribution is likely to remain an open problem in the near future. This paper investigated whether Vambery’s works, especially Hungary in Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Times (1886)—reinforced by the personal encounters between Stoker and Vambery—could have affected the development of the Dracula story in any manner. While accepting that Vambery’s role was (sometimes grossly) exaggerated in the past—and it is frequently embellished and blown out of proportion in Hungary even today—there is reason to believe that his book on Hungarian history may 57 Arminius Vambery, Sketches of Central Asia (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1868), title page, accessed 10 January 2015, http://www.mek.oszk.hu/11800/11818/11818.pdf. 58 Arminius Vambery, History of Bokhara (London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873), title page, accessed 10 January 2015, http://www.mek.oszk.hu/11800/11804/11804.pdf. 59 Eighteen-Bisang and Miller, Notes, 9.

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have had a noticeable impact on Stoker’s developing the narrative. At the minimum, Stoker probably knew the book. A more ambitious assertion would be that it even contributed to the displacement of the imaginary space of Dracula’s home from Styria to Transylvania (or at least it turned Stoker’s research interest toward a more Eastern and less Europeanized direction, capitalizing on the contemporary anxieties of his intended audience). Admittedly, the latter statement is a matter of considerable speculation. Nevertheless, we should probably be less skeptical about Vambery’s overall influence than recent Dracula scholarship suggests.

Bibliography Alder, Lory and Richard Dalby. The Dervish of Windsor Castle: The Life of Arminius Vambery. London: Bachman and Turner, 1979. Cain, Jimmie E. Bram Stoker and Russophobia: Evidence of the British Fear of Russia in Dracula and The Lady of the Shroud. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Eighteen-Bisang, Robert, and Elizabeth Miller. Bram StokerҲs Notes for Dracula. Facsim. ed. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008. Glubb, John Bagot. The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival. Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons Ltd, 1977. Go, Julian. Patterns of Empire. The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Google Books Ngram Viewer. http://books.google.com/ngrams. Jance. “Portré: Bram Stoker.” Olvasóterem.com. November 8, 2011. Accessed 6 January 2015. http://olvasoterem.com/blog/2011/11/08/164-eve-szuletett-bramstoker/. Blog. Klaniczay, Gábor. “Decline of Wiches and Rise of Vampires in 18th Century Habsburg Monarchy.” Ethnologia Europaea XVII (1987): 165-80. Leiter Jakab. “Drakula.” Leiterjakab: Félrefordítások mindenhonnan. Accessed 6 January 2015. http://leiterjakab.blog.hu/2009/04/04/drakula_2003. Blog. Mandler, David. “Vámbéry, Victorian Culture, and Stoker’s Dracula.” In Comparative Hungarian Studies, edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasváry, 47-59. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press Press, 2011. Méliès, Georges. “The Haunted Castle.” 1896. YouTube video, 3:18. Posted March 20, 2011, Accessed 6 January 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPmKaz3Quzo.

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Melton, J. Gordon. The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead. 3rd ed. Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2011. Miller, Elizabeth. A Dracula Handbook. Xlibris Corp., 2005. —. “Filing for Divorce: Count Dracula vs. Vlad Tepes” Excerpt from Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, edited by Elizabeth Miller, n.p. Westcliff-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 1998. Accessed 9 January 2015. http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/divorce.html. —. “My friend Arminius.” Excerpt from Dracula: Sense & Nonsense by Elizabeth Miller, 161-166. Southend-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 2006. Accessed 10 January 2015. http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/AVambery.htm. Rákócza Richárd. “Síkfilmes géppel Vámbéry nyomában.” Amerikai Népszava, April 23, 2012. Accessed 8 January 2015. http://nepszava.com/2012/04/magyarorszag/sikfilmes-geppel-vamberynyomaban.html. Records of the Tercentenary Festival of the University of Dublin Held 5th to 8th July, 1892. Dublin: Hodges, Figgis and Co., 1894. Accessed 29 December 2015. https://archive.org/stream/recordstercente00irelgoog#page/n4/mode/2up. Stoddard, Jane “Lorna.” “Mr. Bram Stoker. A Chat with the Author of Dracula.” British Weekly, July 1, 1897. Accessed 19 November 2015. http://bramstoker.org/pdf/nonfic/nfdracuk.pdf. Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1897. Accessed 11 April 2014. http://bramstoker.org/pdf/novels/05dracula.pdf. —. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving I. London: Heinemann, 1906. Accessed 20 November 2015. http://bramstoker.org/pdf/nonfic/03irving01.pdf. Tarján, Tamás M. “1832. március 19: Vámbéry Ármin születése,” RubicOnline (March 2012): n.p. Accessed 14 January 2015. http://www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/1832_marcius_19_vambery_ar min_szuletese. The Internet Movie Database (IMDB). “‘Vampire’ Titles.” Accessed 27 December 2015. http://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=vampire&mode=adv anced&page=1&ref_=kw_nxt&sort=release_date,desc. The National Archives (document reference: FO 1093/46). Accessed 3 January 2016, http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/results/r?_q=FO%201093%2F46. Thompson, Ian. DraculaҲs Whitby. Chalford: Amberley Pub., 2012. Vámbéry, Ármin. Küzdelmeim. Budapest: Franklin Társulat, 1905.

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Accessed 9 January 2015. http://mek.oszk.hu/03900/03975/03975.pdf. Vambery, Arminius. History of Bokhara. London: Henry S. King and Co., 1873. Accessed 10 January 2015. http://www.mek.oszk.hu/11800/11804/11804.pdf. —. Sketches of Central Asia. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott and Co., 1868. Accessed 10 January 2015. http://www.mek.oszk.hu/11800/11818/11818.pdf.

PART III: THE SPACE OF FANTASTIC SCIENCE AND SCHOLARSHIP

PARODY OF ACADEMIC LIFE IN SF ANIKÓ SOHÁR

“All professors have a streak of madness.”1

Introduction In 1990, while waiting for the bus to go to the kindergarten, an elderly woman struck up a conversation with my daughter who was five at that time. After a while the elderly woman asked my daughter what her mother’s job was. She proudly replied that her mother was an assistant professor at the university. Then the elderly woman sighed: “Oh, you poor dear!” That was the moment I realized: not everybody considered teaching at universities so fine a job as I did. This incident aroused my interest in especially literary representations of academic life, and I am sorry to say, most of these representations seem to support that elderly woman’s opinion, not mine—or that of Terry Pratchett’s mother’s.2 I suppose it is hardly necessary to point out how high a value people set on education, in particular tertiary education, knowing that a degree means better life, better jobs, better salary, longer life expectation, that affordability and quality of university tuition concern lots of (grand)parents and youngsters who long for a more promising future for their (grand)children or themselves. It has been a common anxiety indeed, specifically since the end of World War II, which accounts for its prevalence in science fiction and fantasy. There are many, diverse educational institutions in fantastic literature: a school of wizards in the Earthsea novels by Ursula K. Le Guin, Od 1

Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Critics, the Monsters and the Fantasists,” in The Secret History of Fantasy, ed. Peter S. Beagle (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2010), 358. 2 “ My mother watched me become a Knight, but do you know, she would have been even prouder to talk about ’my son, the professor.’” Terry Pratchett, A Slip of the Keyboard (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland: Doubleday, 2014), 211.

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Magic by Patricia McKillip, the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, etc.; the Battle School in Enderverse by Orson Scott Card, a military academy in the Soldier Son trilogy by Robin Hobb a.k.a. Megan Lindholm; both a university and a theological seminary in A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr., a music school in The Bards of Bone Plain by Patricia McKillip and the Pern series by Anne McCaffrey, a consorttraining school for boys in Six Moon Dance by Sheri S. Tepper, a gladiator school in the Rigante Quartet by David Gemmell, and so on. Most of them are real “coming of age” or school stories in an unreal setting: if one replaces magic with a more realistic feature—a science or a talent—in them, they still work. Basically, they describe how we hand down our knowledge to the next generations, or more accurately, how we perceive this, what we consider important within this procedure—these are all represented from different perspectives, with varied emphasis in (fantastic) literature. The representation of academic life in SF, as the above examples illustrate, is a very popular ancillary or episodic topic. It usually mixes two subgenres: the so-called school fiction may be fused with types of speculative fiction: either with fantasy, as, for example, in The Kingkiller Chronicle by Patrick Rothfuss; or with science fiction, as, for instance, in the Hainish novels by Ursula K. Le Guin. In texts like these the university supplies the necessary and fascinating background for (at least a significant part of) the narrative. In some cases real universities gain fictitious training programs, professors or students—for example, Oxford in all Connie Willis stories on historians who use time travel as a research tool or practicum for undergraduates; or Pittsburgh in Steel Rose by Kara Dalkey, in which the protagonist’s real-life studies mean the main motivation for her encounters with the supernatural; or Toronto in Fionavar Tapestry by Guy Gavriel Kay, where the university truly is background, without any palpable function in the narrative, just explaining why those particular five people happen to attend a lecture which utterly changes their lives. Other institutions are located in an invented city in our reality, such as Newford University in several Charles de Lint books, or Blackstock College in Tam Lin by Pamela Dean—where everyday students hang out with the Sidhe and Shakespeare’s original actors. University professors or researchers may even be presented as vampires or witches, as in Deborah Harkness All Souls trilogy, or vampire-hunters as in the Borbála Borbíró sequel by Ágnes Gaura to mention at least one non-English novel, linking the school story with yet another subgenre, paranormal romance/adventure

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fiction. Sometimes the university is set in a secondary world,3 that is, both the university and the world are imaginary, like Unseen University and other magical colleges in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett. As school fiction is so popular, its parody and travesty have also become prominent in mainstream literature as well—for instance, the Campus trilogy by David Lodge (Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, Small World: An Academic Romance, Nice Work) which depicts Rummidge, a fictional British and Euphoric State University, a similarly invented American university, and the shifts in academic environment after the student protests in the sixties; or more recently The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs by Alexander McCall Smith, featuring a German philologist who, having been mistaken for a veterinarian, gives a highly successful guest lecture on a subject of which he is completely ignorant: Von Igelfeld stared at him in horror. Sausage dogs! He was expected to talk about sausage dogs, a subject on which he knew absolutely nothing. It was a nightmare; like one of those dreams where you imagine that you are about to take the lead part in a Greek play or where you are sitting down to write an examination in advanced calculus. But he was awake, and it was really happening.4

It is no wonder then that the mode of representation in fantasy and SF often criticizes, even parodies academia as well, particularly ’academese’ and the strife for positions. Just think of the above-mentioned Unseen University by Terry Pratchett, where killing a rival is an accepted way of advancement in the early novels (up to Reaper Man 1992:21, later replaced by using scathing irony); where an Archchancellor discovers The General Theory of Slood, that is “a natural substance that could be discovered by intelligent beings; it is said to be much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water,”5 and where students are considered a necessary but unpleasant adjunct to tenure and teaching is to be avoided at any cost . . . 3

Tolkien’s term in his essay “On Fairy-Stories” (1947) for a particular kind of otherworld, which is not bound to mundane reality, impossible according to common sense and self-coherent. The concept is summed up by John Clute in “Tolkien,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant (London: Orbit Books, Hachette Book Group, 1999), 951. 4 Alexander McCall Smith, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs (New York: Anchor Books, Random House, 2005), 16. 5 Terry Pratchett, The Last Continent (New York, London, Toronto, Sydneyand Auckland: Doubleday, 1998), 9.

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In this paper only a tiny part of this fascinating topic will be discussed to demonstrate the most typical anxieties linked with academic life that appear in SF: Connie Willis’s relevant stories, together with the travesty in the True Game sequel by Sheri Tepper. Thus, I am going to examine two imaginary spaces, the presentation of a “real” university (Oxford) and a made-up research center, the doubly fictitious one in Tepper’s Necromancer Nine. I shall focus on hierarchy, including relationships within and without, for example, faculty, students, and ‘public relations,’ as well as teaching and research, including curricula, degrees, research topics and publications.

The Authors The two writers and their works have been singled out of the previously mentioned multitude since the topics, the register, the mode of presentation and the underlying stance are all easily comparable, logically and pleasingly fit together. Both authors are self-declared feminists, who have chosen science—or speculative—fiction because this genre centers about “what if” and makes it easy to talk about their fixed ideas almost compulsively, believing that, as Brian Attebery puts it, “Science fiction is a useful tool for investigating habits of thought.”6 Their pet subjects do overlap: environmental issues, including overpopulation and extinct or endangered species, gender and racial prejudice, social injustice, hatred for authoritarianism, loss of privacy, real versus seeming communication and the like. Both of them tend to write about the same questions again and again, using different viewpoints, scrutinizing all aspects from diverse angles, and they are very aware of this tendency, as is manifested by the two quotations below. Both emphasize the importance of the writer’s frame of mind. Since academic life is one of Willis’s reappearing topics, one of her ‘obsessions,’ we can deduce that certain aspects of it must worry her very much: whatever you’re thinking about tends to come out, and it doesn’t really matter what you’re writing about. You can pick your topic, but really what the book is going to be about is what your current obsessions are. Your current fears, your current worries.”7 6

Brian Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2002), 1. 7 Lorraine Berry, “Success Is the Best Revenge.” Talking Writing Interview with Connie Willis, Part 2, 25 March 2013, accessed 2 April 2016, http://talkingwriting.com/connie-willis-success-is-the-best-revenge.

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In a similar manner, Tepper’s recurring effort to reflect on the importance of (proper) education may be traced back to her reasons for repeting her themes: I know I continually pound on the same themes, because they’re things I care about deeply. Those are the soapboxes. But when the stories get too similar, begin to feel like the same book, that is when I am dissatisfied. I want to be sure it’s something at least a little fresh and new, in approach or idea.8

They also share a dislike for unadulterated tragedy, tend to use sly humor to lighten dark scenes, and the reader may expect a sort of eucatastrophe9 at the end of their stories. Tepper has very strong views on unnecessarily horroristic or depressing scenes, tragical endings in fiction: My rules demand that no one be held and tortured on the page, though one may refer to it having happened. The bad guy always has to get what he deserves. The good guy or gal may be injured, but he or she or spouses and children may not be killed. If I know I can trust certain authors I‫ތ‬ll go ahead and read these terrifying five pages because I know it‫ތ‬s going to be okay. I never read an author twice if I can‫ތ‬t trust him or her to make it come out right.10

Willis’s specialty is romantic comedy, or more precisely, comedy of manners, so her writings are usually labeled comic science fiction, while Tepper calls herself a storyteller, “a voice crying in the wilderness”: “I’m accused of being a writer who preaches. Actually, I’m a preacher who writes!”11 We preachers are usually among the storytellers. Sometimes the two overlap, but in general the literary writer will sacrifice every character, every virtue, every goodness or purity to the needs of the writing. Much "great writing" is tragedy. Much “great writing” is depressing. The

8 “ Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe”, Locus Online, September 1998, accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/09/Tepper.html. 9 Tolkien’s term for a satisfying, not necessarily a happy ending, in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” Brian Stableford, “Eucatastrophe,” in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, ed. John Clute and John Grant (London: Orbit Books, Hachette Book Group, 1999), 323. 10 Neal Szpatura, “Of Preachers and Storytellers: An Interview with Sheri S. Tepper,” Strange Horizons, July 21, 2008, accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080721/szpatura-a.shtml. 11 Ibid.

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storyteller doesn‫ތ‬t usually indulge in either tragedy or depression because the storyteller wants the reader (hearer) to enjoy the telling. The storyteller may not even know what the needs of literature are. The storyteller (the preacher) wants to elevate the heart, not revel in technique. Chances are the storyteller doesn‫ތ‬t even have any technique.12

It might be interesting to note here that the authors‫ ތ‬personal history of education might also have influenced the selected representations. Sheri S. Tepper, who was born in 1929, was not allowed to go to university: On graduating high school, I wanted to go to a university that was known to have a good creative writing course. My parents told me it was too far away “for a girl.” They had already picked where I was to go. I therefore did the equivalent of repeating a couple of years of high school in a local two year college for girls: a kind of holding-tank for girls between high school and marriage. It had no creative writing course or anything else helpful. My brother, four years later, asked to go to the university I had chosen (only because I had chosen it) and was sent there without question.13

Tepper still sounds rather embittered by this unfairness in the interview, and her attitude might explain why she does not pursue the topic of (higher) education in her books as relentlessly as her fixed ideas, although it does pop up as a side-issue. For instance, in “Several Saintly Ph.D.s,”14 the ninth chapter of The Family Tree,15 the genetic research done by those Ph.D.s changes the world fundamentally; in The Margarets one of the Margarets is a linguist/intercultural mediator (cf. Willis’s “Blued Moon”); and in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall the heroines meet at college. Contrary to Tepper, Connie Willis, born in 1945, is a college graduate: she studied English and Elementary Education at Colorado State College, and completed a double BA in 1967. Her husband is a former professor of physics who taught at the University of Northern Colorado,16 so she had ample opportunity to learn about intra- and interdepartmental politics, 12

Ibid. Sheri’s True Biography,” Sheri-S-Tepper.com, 2013, accessed 2 January 2016, http://sheri-s-tepper.com/sheris-true-biography/. 14 Sheri S. Tepper, The Family Tree (New York: Avon Books, The Hearst Corporation, 1997), 117 (emphasis mine). 15 Ibid. (emphasis mine). 16 Courtney Willis,” Department of Physics and Astronomy, College of Natural and Health Sciences, University of Northern Colorado, accessed 2 April, 2016, http://www.unco.edu/nhs/physics-astronomy/faculty/willis.aspx. 13 “

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fights for grants and tenure, compulsory political correctness, and so on. No wonder that representation of academic life occurs in a number of her works; in fact, it seems to be one of her preoccupations. Willis often writes about or mentions academics of diverse research fields and related topics: for example, the hero of “Blued Moon” is a linguist, of “Schwarzschild Radius” a physicist and astronomer. She cannot talk or write about education without caricaturing certain contemporary tendencies in a quirky way. In her short story “Ado” (1988), for instance, everything considered non-PC must be omitted from Shakespeare’s plays; as a result, Hamlet ends up half a page long in a high school where teachers consequently do not relish teaching and look forward to snow days, when school is closed “so as not to endanger our children.”17 Another example of Willis‫ތ‬s parody of schooling issues is “In the Late Cretaceous” (1991), in which educational reforms and the reformers’ jargon, a sort of newspeak, are depicted in a hilariously exaggerated way. Conference-goers are also quipped about in “At the Rialto” (1989) novellette, which jokes about quantum physics and the uncertainty principle; and “The Winds of Marble Arch” (2000) novella, whose protagonist is an American professor of history attending a conference in London (it would be fascinating to compare it to David Lodge’s conference circuit), and which links Willis’s adoration for the London Tube system and her interest in the Blitz. The most satirical of her writings about academia is perhaps a short story entitled “The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective” (1997) which makes a laughing stock of doctoral dissertations and scholarly papers deserving an IgNobel despite all their footnotes and references (e.g., 15See Halfwits and Imbeciles: Poetic Evidence of Emily Dickinson’s Opinion of Her Neighbors, by I. Smart, Intelligentsia Press, 1991), which blatantly, but positively state impossibilities and use questionable research methods, mixing ill-matched facts: Until recently it was thought that Emily Dickinson’s poetic output ended in 1886, the year she died. Poems 186B and 272?, however, suggest that not only she did write poems at a later date, but she was involved in the “great and terrible events”1 of 1897.1

17 Connie Willis, “Ado,” in Impossible Things by Connie Willis (New York London Toronto Auckland Sydney: Bantam Books, 1994), 124.

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For a full account, see H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, Oxford University Press, 1898.18

In the spectrum of barbed thrusts at academic life, Willis can occasionally make as scathing remarks as Tepper, but usually just pokes fun at it, and vice versa, Tepper sometimes does a mild spoof of academia instead of the more customary ridicule. Both of them show contempt for rigid thinking and brainwashing, as they result in turning aside from exploring the unknown, repeating familiar patterns even when they are not pertinent, clinging to inflexibility, ending up with ineffectuality, and, in the long run, the decline and fall of scholarship.

Connie Willis’s Time Travel Stories Willis time travel stories include the novellette “Fire Watch” (1982, Hugo and Nebula Awards), Doomsday Book (1992, Hugo and Nebula Awards), To Say Nothing of the Dog (1998, Hugo Award), Blackout and All Clear (2010, Locus, Hugo and Nebula Awards). The recurring location is Oxford University, particularly Balliol, the time is mid-21st century (2054-2060) and sometime in the past (Doomsday Book: the arrival of Black Death, To Say Nothing of the Dog: Victorian era, “Fire Watch,” Blackout and All Clear: World War II in Britain, especially the Blitz). The chronological order of the narratives differs from that of the publication: the protagonist of “Fire Watch,” the very first time travel story, refers to the events of Doomsday Book as “not long ago.” “Look, it took me four years to get ready to travel with St. Paul. St. Paul. Not St. Paul’s. You can’t expect me to get ready for London in the Blitz in two days.” “Yes,” Dunworthy had said. ”We can.” End of conversation. “Two days!” I had shouted to my roommate Kivrin. “All because some computer adds an ’s. And the esteemed Dunworthy doesn’t even bat an eye when I tell him. ‫ލ‬Time travel is not like taking the tube, young man,’ he says. ‫ލ‬I’d suggest you get ready. You’re leaving day after tomorrow.’ The man’s a total incompetent.”19 18

Connie Willis, “The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective,” in Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis, The Hugo and Nebula-Award-winning Short Fiction, SF Masterworks (London: Gollancz, 2013), 77. 19 Connie Willis, “Fire Watch,” in Fire Watch (New York: Bantam Spectra, Random House, 1998), 2-3.

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The roommate Kivrin is one of the protagonists in Doomsday Book, John Bartholomew’s name is mentioned in To Say Nothing of the Dog, while Professor Dunworthy is a pivotal—in Doomsday Book even a pointof-view—character, who puts in an appearance in all of Willis‫ތ‬s time travel stories, and whose influence is enormous even when he hardly participates in the actual plot. In Doomsday Book, rivalry on several levels plays an important role. The strong vying for superiority between two colleges, Balliol and Brasenose—represented by Professors Dunworthy the ideal teacher and Gilchrist the typical mediocre academic—sometimes comes near to outright hostility, especially when Gilchrist as Acting Dean gets the fourteenth century opened to time travel during the Christmas break. Gilchrist intends to catch up with Balliol, where teachers and students alike use time travel as a research tool—even if it means visiting the Middle Ages without adequate preparation. Dunworthy, who knows the dangers of time travel and considers all faculty members of Brasenose inept, prepares a Brasenose student, Kivrin Engle to go back to 1320. Notwithstanding that he specializes in twentieth century England, he proves to be a more capable tutor and researcher than any medievalist in fictitious Oxford—thus enhancing the comic effect.20 Regrettably, an ill technician sends the student to 1348, where she gets first-hand experiences of the Black Death, experiences which sharply 20

“

I‫ތ‬m a twentieth-century historian, not a mediaevalist. I haven‫ތ‬t studied the Middle Ages in forty years.” “But you know the sorts of things I need to know. I can look them up and learn them, if you‫ތ‬ll just tell me what they are.” “What about Gilchrist?" he had said, even though he considered Gilchrist a self-important fool. “He‫ތ‬s working on the re-ranking and hasn‫ތ‬t any time.” And what good will the re-ranking do if he has no historians to send? Dunworthy thought. “What about Montoya? She‫ތ‬s working on a mediaeval dig out near Witney, isn‫ތ‬t she? She should know something about the customs.” “Ms. Montoya hasn‫ތ‬t any time either, she‫ތ‬s so busy trying to recruit people to work on the Skendgate dig. Don‫ތ‬t you see? They‫ތ‬re all useless. You‫ތ‬re the only one who can help me.” He should have said, “Nevertheless, they are members of Brasenose‫ތ‬s faculty, and I am not,” but instead he had been maliciously delighted to hear her tell him what he had thought all along, that Latimer was a doddering old man and Montoya a frustrated archaeologist, that Gilchrist was incapable of training historians. He had been eager to use her to show Mediaeval how it should be done. Connie Willis, Doomsday Book (New York: Bantam Spectra, Random House 1992), 7-8.

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contrast Professor Gilchrist’s hypotheses about the mortality rate of pestilence. Gilchrist is convinced that medieval reports of the plague are widely exaggerated. This competition pivots on competence (usually inseparable from one’s specialty), a key question in scholarship, and its consequences suddenly involve not just one’s academic reputation or citation number, but life and death both in the Middle Ages and 21st century—Willis draws this parallel whose focal point is the Massacre of the Innocents with real artistry, alternating romance and humor (whose source is often a mixture of the highbrow and the mundane, as the above quotation demonstrates). Apart from the question of competence, Dunworthy’s time and attention are also contended for: teaching and his relationship with his students, especially with the one left stranded in the past, should not take all of his time. As his assistant repeatedly points out, he has other duties: receiving an American choir, the administration and organization of college life, and reading aloud from the Bible during an ecumenical Christmas mass. Willis depicts an academic’s never-ending job: although one does not have fixed working hours, in practice it means that one works all the time, there are no weekends, holidays, leisure time, “no rest for the wicked.”21 It is also a wonderful parody of a person who cannot delegate tasks due to the incompetence of others, and his own “mother hen” nature. Another, very different rivalry similarly supplies a constant source of humor in the story: all young ladies in the novel, except Kivrin, strive for William Gaddson’s attentions (a Balliol student), and try to protect him from his overprotecting mother. Funnily enough, Professor Dunworthy and other faculty members also attempt to defend William from trouble, that is, from momism. The passage quoted below is part of a conversation taking place when Dunworthy finds William who is “energetically embracing” one of the supernumerary female characters: “Your behaviour is inappropriate to both the time and the place,” Dunworthy said sternly. “Public displays of affection are strictly forbidden in college. It is also ill-advised, since your mother may arrive at any moment.” “My mother?” he said, looking as dismayed as Dunworthy had when he saw her coming down the corridor with her suitcase. “Here? In Oxford? What‫ތ‬s she doing here? I thought there was a quarantine on.” “There is, but a mother‫ތ‬s love knows no bounds. She is concerned about your health, as am I, under the circumstances.” He frowned at William and 21

The lack of rest is also a key factor in To Say Nothing of the Dog, where the historians suffer from a so called time-lag, caused by frequent drops to the past, which results in severe symptoms of fatigue.

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Parody of Academic Life in SF the young woman, who giggled. “I would suggest you escort your fellowperpetrator home and then make preparations for your mother‫ތ‬s arrival.” “Preparations?” he said, looking truly stricken. “You mean she‫ތ‬s staying?” “She has no alternative, I‫ތ‬m afraid. There is a quarantine on.”22

William Gaddson is a healthy and robust, clever and charming young man, obviously not needing any mothering, particularly not from his own mother. Although William clearly does not study Petrarch as he should, he is resourceful and helps along the plot by solving quite a few problems, as he always happens to know a young lady skilled at the required special field. And it cannot escape any reader that Mrs. Gaddson’s and Professor Dunworthy’s overprotectiveness and fussing over William and Kivrin, respectively, differ not a whit. Dunworthy takes another youngster under his wings, the twelve-yearold Colin, a friend’s great-nephew (to be one of the protagonists in Blackout and All Clear) and together they save Kivrin who got stuck in the past. This relationship demonstrates the professor’s teaching abilities and has its humorous moments, too, although Dunworthy, a serious scholar who published the book on St Paul’s, is a lot less unworldly than the other academics of the series. As his attitude in “Fire Watch” also shows, knowing dates and statistics by heart is not what makes a real historian23. He is also a nice specimen of the absent-minded professor stock character, who concentrates on his inner landscape and research problems while people are talking to him (for instance, at the end of Chapter 2 in To Say Nothing of the Dog) and Willis employs all the usual jokes about it to good effect. The humor and the travesty of university procedures (including applying to the powers that be for lavatory paper and other necessities, as Balliol seems to have run out of everything all the time) are necessary to counterbalance the tragic and soul-stirring narrative describing the epidemics of both timelines, but they gradually disappear as the novel approaches its finale. These are even more emphasized in To Say Nothing of the Dog, a tongue-in-cheek pastiche-cum-burlesque, full of intertextual allusions, a real joy for the fans of Jerome K Jerome or any literary scholar specializing in the Victorian era. It does not lack serious undertones, but is altogether lighter in tone than Doomsday Book: for instance, when it presents the absurdity of lack of funds for pure research and the ancient Oxbridge rivalry, and explains why the whole Department of History has become an American millionaire’s slave. 22 23

Willis, Doomsday Book, 150-151. Willis, “Fire Watch,” 38-40, 42-44.

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[T]emporal physics had reached a point in its research where it couldn’t go anywhere without building a nuclear-powered fine-structure oscillator. And there was no money to be gotten from the multinationals, who’d lost interest in time travel forty years ago, when they found out they couldn’t rape and pillage the past. No money for buildings, either, or for fellowships or salaries. No money, period. And Lady Schrapnell was an extremely determined woman and extremely rich. And she had threatened to give the money to Cambridge.24

Funnily enough, the Oxbridge rivalry even sneaks in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, which attaches Dunworthy and the history department to Cambridge25 (1331) instead of Oxford University due to the lapse of a Canadian academic. Willis embeds bits of explanations in the time-lagged protagonist’s rambling soliloquies, peppers the story with interesting Victorian trivia to enhance the comical voice, puts two history professors on the stage, Reddick and Overforce, adherents to rival theories (character versus blind forces, the importance of people and events and facts versus natural laws of history created by analogy with [wholly misunderstood] evolution) so much so that they could kill each other and actually push the other into the river. Both of them belong to the already mentioned absent-minded professor type with a little Oxford flavor, somewhat aggrandized. A genuine eccentric Oxford don. They’re an extinct species, too, unless you count Mr Dunworthy, who is really too sensible to be eccentric. . . . My favourite don was Claude Jenkins, whose house was so messy it was sometimes impossible to open the front door, and who arrived late for a meeting and apologised by saying, “My housekeeper has just died, but I’ve propped her up on a kitchen chair, and she’ll be all right till I return.”26

Their tutoring, just like that of Mr Dunworthy’s, is quite idiosyncratic, personalized to such an extent that it affects private life, tailored to the given student’s aptitudes and disposition, who, in return, acts as a sort of attendant.27 Alas, education cannot prepare one for all eventualities and usually has its own limitations. It is illustrated when the time traveler historian is taught how to use an oyster fork and all Victorian mannerisms, but does not know anything about cats (an extinct species in 2060) and 24

Connie Willis, To Say Nothing of the Dog (New York: Bantam Books, Random House, 1998), 78-79. 25 John Clute, “Connie Willis,” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St. Martin’s Green, 1995), 1331. 26 Ibid., 87. 27 Ibid. 86.

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expects them to eat bread, or to follow and obey him when they are called . . .28 Another important motif of the novel tests chaos theory (which, in a sense, beautifully combines the work of character with that of the blind forces, another of Willis’s double patterns) and the pros and cons of a thinking based on it. It is best demonstrated by the two 21st-century historians in the Victorian era who, hoping that Hercule Poirot’s “let’s use the little grey cells” method will help, try to deduce the causes of a crisis point in time travel and arrive at the conjecture that carrying a cat to the future and back might destroy the time-space continuum, possibly the whole universe… “I’ve told her and told her, bringing anything from the past to the present would violate the laws of the space-time continuum, and do you know what she said? ‘Laws are made to be broken.’”29 Readers of these time travel stories may reach the conclusion that university professors and students are more interested in one another’s private life, particularly romantic affairs, and vying for ascendance— tenure, research grants and the like—regardless of their capabilities. Winking at the reader, Willis entertainingly describes not only the scholars’ fallibility, but that of the hypotheses or the disciplines as well. It is also noteworthy that most of the awards Connie Willis received were given for stories which, among others, tease or ridicule academic life: 8 out of her 11 Hugo Awards, 4 out of her 7 Nebula Awards, all four of her Locus Awards, both of her Arthur C. Clarke Awards. She is incredibly popular, possibly because even her most penetrating satires never aim to offend, just to expose human foolishness and, with a piece of luck, put it right. At least, in her tales. Willis, the erstwhile stand-up superstar of SF conventions – having her as your MC is like getting Billy Crystal back as host of the Oscars – and the author of some of the field’s funniest stories, is a woman of considerably greater complexity and gravity than her personal popularity reflects, and for all her facility at screwball comedy knock-offs and snappy parody, she wants us to know that she’s a writer of some gravity as well.30

Sheri Tepper‫ތ‬s The True Game Series When Sheri Tepper submitted her first novel (The Revenants), the 28

Ibid 132-144. Ibid., 31. 30 Gary K. Wolfe, “Passage.” Review of Passage by Connie Willis, Locus Magazine 46 (March 2001): 21. 29

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editor at Ace said “That was rather well written, but we couldn‫ތ‬t possibly publish anything that long by an unknown author. Could you give me something a little more accessible,”31 so she wrote the True Game novels, a trilogy of trilogies (The Chronicles of Mavin Manyshaped: The Song of Mavin Manyshaped 1985, The Flight of Mavin Manyshaped 1985, The Search of Mavin Manyshaped 1985; The True Game: King’s Blood Four 1983, Necromancer Nine 1983, Wizard’s Eleven 1984; The End of the True Game: Jinian Footseer 1985, Dervish Daughter 1986, Jinian Stareye 1986), whose volumes were reissued both in print and as e-books. The first trilogy tells about the adventures of a shapeshifter girl, Mavin, on a planet where some people, the Gamesmen, have psychic powers (telepathy, telekinesis and the like, called Talents) and they use it to game, that is to plot and make war on one another, while they uncaringly destroy the environment and kill the “pawns,” the people without Talents. The protagonist of the second trilogy is Mavin’s young son, Peter, another shapeshifter still at school, who gets involved in deathly schemes. The third describes partly the same events of the second trilogy from a young girl’s viewpoint, and presents a severely impaired happy ending. Only the fifth book in the chronological order is interesting from our point of view, as an important part of Necromancer Nine takes place within the so-called Base of the Magicians, among descendants of the researchers who arrived on the planet Lom from Earth to study “monsters.” These people now call themselves signtists—Peter’s spelling signifies that no acknowledged science exists there, even the word is unfamiliar. Mavin and Peter gradually discover that these people have some strange rituals, speak a language they cannot comprehend despite knowing the words, and wonder: “Who are these people, these magicians who do not like to be called magicians? They say they are “faculty” of a “college.” Well, I know what a college is. It is only another word for school. What are faculty except schoolmasters. Hm? Except these seem strangely preoccupied with signs and rituals, speaking often of signtists and Searchers. Is this some kind of religion?”32

31

Stephen Hunt, “Astounding’s Daughter: Sheri S. Tepper interviewed,” SF crownsnet, January 5, 2009, accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/articles/features/2009/Astoundings-Daughter-SheriS-Tepper-interviewed-13828.php. 32 Sheri S. Tepper, Necromancer Nine (New York: Ace Fantasy Books, 1983), 129.

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The inhabitants of this Base, the place where the spaceship landed, are given rather evocative, even telling names: Dean Manacle, Proctor Huskpaw, Lecturer Shear, Tutor Flogshoulder, etc. All these names have unpleasant connotations, alluding to their negative role in the narrative. There are only men at the Base, and their main occupation is still the study of monsters. The monsters turn out to be females, usually children or adolescents, kept in the monster pits, completely dehumanized. If those very young girls are physically fine, just mindless, they are selected for consecration, that is, to be mated with; when misshapen—having three legs or tentacles—they are only observed so as to produce scholarly papers, or at least a footnote: “Ah, yes, that one would make interesting watching. One could get a decent footnote out of that.”33 “Creatures from some portal,” said the one called Shear. ”That is why they go towards the pits. Creatures from some portal who have come into the base in search of their hitch.” “An inescapable hypothesis, Shear. Also, an interesting occurrence. One worthy of note. Perhaps a small monograph?”34

The long inbreeding—the researchers decided against mixing with other people whom they consider monsters because of their psychic powers—resulted in both physical and mental degeneration, illustrated by the fact that the academic titles are inherited, not earned: “As a direct descendent, unto the thirtieth generation, of the original Searchers, as fifth in a direct line to win the title of Dean, I am not one to be lightly called fool.”35 “Oh, no. Every one of us had been assistant, associate, tutor, lecturer, assistant professor—all of it. Each of you wanted the same for his boys.”36

The hierarchy within this community seems rigid, the elite, that is, the hereditary academics do not mingle with the technicians enlisted from common people. Their servants are either kidnapped ordinary youngsters or the less deformed beings from the breeding pits, but either way they are practically slaves, forced to obedience by high-tech boots which can stimulate nerve endings, using pain as punishment and pleasure as reward. These “scientists” adhere to the original task as they perceive it: their 33

Ibid., 123. Ibid., 114. 35 Ibid., 127. 36 Ibid., 134. 34

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ancestors were sent away from Earth with a monster, a telepathic girl whose mind-reading ability was considered too dangerous to be investigated at home—or at least this is what the people at the Base were told. “She was the monster, the girl monster, the one the ship brought. Only she. And all those others to watch her and write down everything she did. . . . Just to keep one little woman monster from threatening Home.”37 When one of them suggests that they should change their ways, create a new degree and do a different sort of research so as to solve their problems, the others vehemently protest against any deviation from the well-trod path, even though their task achieves nothing, and the problems threaten their existence. Their way of speaking reveals that the hardened structure has reached a religious status, unchallengeable, practically worshiped for its own sake: “Heresy,” thundered the Rector. “Professor Quench, you speak heresy of the most pernicious sort. Our forefathers made a sacred covenant with Home to search and record information about monsters. To think of creating a degree in some other discipline . . .”38

Later Quench, the only one among them whose mind truly is inquisitive, discovers that their ritual calling Home and therefore the whole Faculty are just a mockery, as the machines stopped working some fifty years previously, and they had no contact with Earth for a long-long time. What is more, the next volume, Wizard’s Eleven reveals that monster-watching was just a pretext to save some people from the war on Earth, the research therefore is doubly fictive, made-up so as to offer a legitimate way for many people to leave Earth behind in a made-up story as Peter and Jinian, the protagonists of the second and the third trilogy, respectively, learns it from one of the original researchers, Queynt, brother of Barish: “We came to serve a lie. There were wives who were loved and children who were loved and a world approaching war with another world which neither would win well. Some powerful persons of that world sought to send certain loved ones away to safety. They needed an excuse. A fiction. A lie...” “There was a woman, a girl. Didir. Some thought she could read minds. Others thought not. The people of her home place were afraid of her, true, naming her Demon and Devil. The powerful men of the place said they would send researchers away to another place to find out about this strange 37 38

Ibid., 164-165. Ibid., 135.

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Parody of Academic Life in SF Talent she had. In later time it may prove useful. However, the research may be long, so it will be necessary to send support staff and agriculturists and bio-engineers and technologists and so on and so on.’ Their wives were the agriculturists and their children the bioengineers. Among them were a few, a very few, who really knew something about such matters.” “You,” said Jinian. “And Barish.” “I,” he admitted, “and Barish. And a few others, though most of the so called scientists were second rate academics caught in a strange web of vanity and ambition. They stayed under the mountain, caught up in their dreams of research—research on `monsters.’ When we would not let them have Didir, they created monsters of their own. And we, the rest of us, came out from the mountain into this new, supposedly uninhabited world...”39

This revelation of course changes the reader’s perception, and limits the satire to “second rate academics.” It is therefore no wonder that the signtists, misunderstanding the function of the so-called defenders, manage to order the self-destruction of the Base. However, it alters the underlying gender problem not a whit. Neither does it change the fact that all academics in the novel, including Queynt and Barish, the “good ones,” seriously interfere in other people’s life without their permission, thinking that they know better than anybody else what may improve humankind. This severe criticism of scholarly attitude lacks any humor. Tepper clearly shows that any (scientific) community without outside stimuli and long-term variety is fated to decline, and it is evidently a determined position (in another novels of hers, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, the heroines vow never to fall or decline as they consider either of it a worse fate than death). She also implies that the exchange of ideas, interdisciplinary approaches and free access to knowledge are what she roots for both in her novels and in real life. She believes that intellect, either gifted or evolved, should be employed to comprehend the world around us: Any religion that says it knows the one and only truth is evil, because it limits knowledge. Any political body that says it owns the truth is evil. Same reason. Any repressive regime that seeks to control exploration and experimentation is evil. Same reason. Any regime that defines truth as a set of beliefs and occurrences that cannot be questioned, that can neither be demonstrated nor proven is not only evil but ridiculous. This includes all mythologies, miracles, etc. because, if creation happened for a reason, if it 39

Sheri S. Tepper, Wizard’s Eleven (New York: Ace Fantasy Books, The Berkley Publishing Group, 1984), 140-141.

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was done by God, you‫ތ‬d better believe every part of it, including intelligence, was done for a reason ascertainable, eventually, by intelligence.40

Peter Nicholls criticizes Tepper for tilting towards excess and melodrama while conceding that in the space of only a few years she has become one of sf’s premier worldbuilders . . . She is one of the most significant new—and new FEMINIST—voices to enter 1980s sf. The kindly spellbinder, who tells romantic tales around the campfire, has jaws that bite and claws that snatch.41

Perhaps this is why her books, or to be more precise, the expressed views polarize opinions so severely, particularly in some feminist circles, where “people either adore or despise” her.42

Conclusion Having had a look of the academics in the books of these two outstanding writers of SF and fantasy, I must conclude that their way of thinking and way of writing are astonishingly similar despite their differences in age,43 education, and experiences. Brian Attebery acknowledges that Willis’s method to redouble patterns and implications in her writings—like the parallel between Mrs. Gaddson’s and Professor Dunworthy’s overprotectiveness, or the pandemics in the 14th and 21st centuries— make her stories function “in ways we associate with literary artists,”44 with the general implication that other SF writers—some or many—are unable to achieve this. However, Tepper also employs this literary device: although less frequently, it is 40 Neal Szpatura, “Of Preachers and Storytellers: An Interview with Sheri S. Tepper,” Strange Horizons, July 21, 2008, accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080721/szpatura-a.shtml. 41 Peter Nicholls, “Sheri S. Tepper” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. (New York: St. Martin’s Green, 1995), 1212. 42 Sarah McCarry, “Sheri S. Tepper’s Dystopias,” April 12, 2011, accessed 27 July 2016, http://www.tor.com/2011/04/12/sheri-s-teppers-dystopias/. 43 Edward James considered Connie Willis a promising young writer in 1994 when Tepper was already a recognized author (see Nicholls‫ ތ‬words in footnote 41). Edward James, Science Fiction in the 20th Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 205. 44 Attebery, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction, 188.

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exerted in all her best writings, such as Beauty or Sideshow. Besides being fascinating literary artists and avid social commentators, both of these authors are wonderful story-tellers as well, who obviously relish relating their tales, the embedded little twists and subtle allusions, occasionally winking at the reader. Sheri Tepper’s books have some bizarre story lines, but the excellent writing and the originality make them entirely worthwhile. Her books are a cross between fantasy and science fiction, yet they deal with timeless issues of the struggle for equality, the balance of power between genders, and the effects of religious control on society. Throw in a lot of science fiction and fantasy elements (strange animals, aliens, special powers, etc.) and voilà – mind-bending stories!45

Jo Walton’s plaudit about Doomsday Book, “the book where she got everything right”46 is often quoted when discussing Willis’s writings, and no wonder: an author cannot wish for a higher accolade, particularly not from a fellow-writer who also created a tale based on time travel. But Willis is often appreciated by those readers who normally do not like science fiction or fantasy, Susan Grigsby, for instance, compares her style to that of Jane Austen’s, and her humor to that of P.G. Wodehouse’s.47 In addition to being fantastic writers in either meaning of the word, both Tepper and Willis seem to find academic life a fascinating topic, whose various aspects are examined from diverse angles, but almost always in the comic mode, although Willis’s ironical insider approach undeniably differs from Tepper’s satirical outsider portrayal. Both of them investigate questions of ability and achievement as academia is supposedly a sort of meritocracy; they show the still prevalent discriminatory practices impeding women’s advancement in scholarly hierarchies, and ridicule the exaggerated “publish or perish” policy of universities, and other features they are concerned about. (I must note, nevertheless, that in spite of being 45

Alyce, “Best & Worst of Sheri S. Tepper,” At home with books, September 5, 2012, accessed 2 April 2016, http://athomewithbooks.net/2012/09/best-worst-ofsheri-s-tepper/. Blog. 46 Jo Walton, “Time Travel and the Black Death: Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book” Tor.com, June 14, 2012, accessed 27 July 2016, http://www.tor.com/2012/06/14/time-travel-and-the-black-death-connie-willissdoomsday-book/. 47 Susan Grigsby, “Monday Murder Mystery: Traveling through Time with Connie Willis,” June 9, 2015, accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/6/8/1391046/-Monday-Murder-MysteryTraveling-through-time-with-Connie-Willis.

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wonderful and imaginative writers, so far they could not come up with so unwordly, quixotic or fabulous made-up idea that real-life academia did not produce galore in the thirty years I spent there.) Although the purpose of higher education has recently been debated worldwide, and no concensus has been reached yet,48 nobody doubts the importance of universities, nor do our authors. Their idea of an ideal university seems to resemble that of Cardinal Newman’s (Blessed John Henry Newman),49 since they believe that the goal of education is to improve one’s life and better the society in general and this can be achieved through learning and honing the mental faculties of teachers as well as students, a basically Enlightment concept. No wonder then, that potential threats to a bourgeoning academic life, within and without, give rise to concern in science fiction, after all, its premiss is science, and science and academia have been inseparables for a long time in Western civilization. As has been profusely demonstrated in this paper, both Tepper and Willis seem to be iconoclasts who have a strong urge to ameliorate all the defects and inadequacies they see in past and present academic life, they abstract these notions and use exaggeration, parody and satire to draw attention to them. Still, their works, without exception, represent education and academia as highly desirable and prestigious despite the worries expressed humorously, regardless of the fantastic settings, spaces of imagination in these works.

Bibliography Alyce. “Best & Worst of Sheri S. Tepper.” At home with books. September 5, 2012. Accessed 2 April 2016, http://athomewithbooks.net/2012/09/best-worst-of-sheri-s-tepper/. Blog. 48

See for instance, Roy Y. Chan, “Understanding the Purpose of Higher Education: An Analysis of Economic and Social Benefits for Completing a College Degree,” JEPPA 6.5 (2016): 2, accessed April 2, 2016, retrieved from: www.jeppa.org. 49 “The University . . . has this object and this mission; it contemplates neither moral impression nor mechanical production; it professes to exercise the mind neither in art nor in duty; its function is intellectual culture; here it may leave its scholars, and it has done its work when it has done as much as this. It educates the intellect to reason well in all matters, to reach out towards truth, and to grasp it.” John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University, (London, 1891): 125-126, accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/discourse6.html.

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Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. London: Routledge, 2002. Berry, Lorraine. “History Is the Raw Data.” The Blitz, the Plague and Other Fodder for Science Fiction. TW interview Part 1. Talking writing. January 28, 2013. Accessed 2 April 2016. http://talkingwriting.com/connie-willis-history-is-the-raw-data/. —. “Success Is the Best Revenge.” Love, Death and the Idiosyncrasies of Fate. TW interview Part 2. Talking writing. January 28, 2013. Accessed 2 April 2016. http://talkingwriting.com/connie-willissuccess-is-the-best-revenge. Clute, John. “Connie Willis.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 1331, New York: St. Martin’s Green, 1995. —. “Tolkien.” In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Edited by John Clute and John Grant, 950-55. London: Orbit Books, Hachette Book Group, 1999. Chan, Roy Y. “Understanding the Purpose of Higher Education: An Analysis of Economic and Social Benefits for Completing a College Degree.” JEPPA 6.5 (2016): 1-40. Accessed April 2, 2016. Retrieved from: www.jeppa.org. Hunt, Steven. “Astounding’s Daughter: Sheri S. Tepper interviewed.” SF crownsnet. January 5, 2009. Accessed 2 April 2016. http://www.sfcrowsnest.com/articles/features/2009/AstoundingsDaughter-Sheri-S-Tepper-interviewed-13828.php. Grigsby, Susan. “Monday Murder Mystery: Traveling through Time with Connie Willis.” June 9, 2015. Accessed 2 April 2016. http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/6/8/1391046/-Monday-MurderMystery-Traveling-through-time-with-Connie-Willis. James, Edward. Science Fiction in the 20th Century. Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Critics, the Monsters and the Fantasists.” In The Secret History of Fantasy. Appendix 1, 355-366. Edited by Peter S. Beagle. San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2010 (First appeared in Wordsworth Circle, January 2007). McCall Smith, Alexander. The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs. New York: Anchor Books, Random House, 2003. McCarry, Sarah. “Sheri S. Tepper’s Dystopias,” April 12, 2011. Accessed 27 July 2016. http://www.tor.com/2011/04/12/sheri-s-teppers-dystopias/. Newman, John Henry. The Idea of a University, London, 1891. Accessed 2 April 2016.

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http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/discourse6.html. Nicholls, Peter. “Sheri S. Tepper.” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, 1211-1212. New York: St. Martin’s Green, 1995. Pratchett, Terry. A Slip of the Keyboard. Collected Nonfiction, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland: Doubleday, 2014. —. The Last Continent. New York, London, Toronto, Sydney and Auckland: Doubleday, 1998. “ Sheri S. Tepper: Speaking to the Universe.” Locus Online, September 1998. Acessed 2 April 2016. http://www.locusmag.com/1998/Issues/09/Tepper.html. “Sheri’s True Biography.” Sheri-S-Tepper.com, 2013. Accessed 2 January 2016, http://sheri-s-tepper.com/sheris-true-biography/. Smythe, Colin. Terry Pratchett biography. 1996-2011. The L_Space Web. http://www.lspace.org/about-terry/biography.html. Stableford, Brian. “Eucatastrophe.” In The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Edited by John Clute and John Grant, 323. London: Orbit Books, Hachette Book Group, 1999. Szpatura, Neal. “Of Preachers and Storytellers: An Interview with Sheri S. Tepper.” Strange Horizons. July 21, 2008. Accessed 2 April 2016, http://www.strangehorizons.com/2008/20080721/szpatura-a.shtml. Tepper, Sheri S. Jinian Star-eye. New York: Ace Fantasy Books, The Berkley Publishing Group, 1986. —. Necromancer Nine. New York: Ace Fantasy Books, The Berkley Publishing Group, 1983. —. The Family Tree. New York: Avon Books, The Hearst Corporation, 1997. —. Wizard’s Eleven. New York: Ace Fantasy Books, The Berkley Publishing Group, 1984. University Records. Libraries: Archival Services. University of Northern Colorado’s Information Source. http://www.unco.edu/library/archives/arc_rg18s14f01.htm. Walton, Jo. “Time Travel and Black Death: Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book.” Tor.com. June 14, 2012. Accessed 27 July 2016, http://www.tor.com/2012/06/14/time-travel-and-the-black-deathconnie-williss-doomsday-book/. Willis, Connie. “Ado.” In Impossible Things by Connie Willis, 115-124. New York London Toronto Auckland Sydney: Bantam Books, 1994. —. Doomsday Book. New York: Bantam Spectra, Random House 1992. —. “Fire Watch.” In Fire Watch, 1-44. New York: Bantam Spectra, Random House, 1998.

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—. “The Soul Selects Her Own Society: Invasion and Repulsion: A Chronological Reinterpretation of Two of Emily Dickinson’s Poems: A Wellsian Perspective.” In Time is the Fire: The Best of Connie Willis. The Hugo and Nebula-Award-winning Short Fiction. SF Masterworks. 77-86. London: Gollancz, 2013. —. To Say Nothing of the Dog. New York: Bantam Books, Random House, 1998. Wolfe, Gary K. “Passage.” Review of Passage by Connie Willis. Locus Magazine 46.3 (March 2001).

DOUBLE DANGER: TWINS AND CLONES AS SUPPLEMENTS IN CHRISTOPHER PRIEST’S THE PRESTIGE ANNA PETNEHÁZI

Introduction One of the biggest anxieties of our scientifically developed contemporary world is the idea that cloning is possible and soon science fiction might become a cultural, social reality.1 This may be the reason why so many accounts of cloning are displaced, either by means of positing the plot into the future or by creating fictional spaces for this unsettling theme in science fiction novels and films. There is, however, a different strategy for displacement in fiction, namely distancing: setting the plot into the equally “safe” period of the past. This is what happens in Christopher Priest’s novel, The Prestige (1995), whose plot is organized around the diaries of two rivaling magicians, Alfred Borden and Rupert Angier in the turn of the century London. Surprising as it may seem, cloning becomes an integral part of one of the magic tricks and thus serves as a crucial element in this intriguing and deceitful story. The main plotline is set in the Victorian era, in which electricity is still considered magic, prestidigitation is really popular and the whole atmosphere and setting provide the perfect scene for a very complex plot about deceit, 1

In 1968 Ursula K. Le Guin read Gordon Rattray Taylor’s book on the possible future uses of cloning and she said: “I had been intrigued by his chapter on the cloning process. . . . He pointed out that some biologists have been contemplating these more ambitious possibilities quite seriously . . . I found it alarming. I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is–the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood.” Robin Scott Wilson ed., Those Who Can: A Science-Fiction Reader (London: St Martin’s Press, 1996), 204-205.

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doubling, and magic. Cloning and (textual) doubling are intertwined in the novel from the very start, not only in the plot but as organizing elements of the narration as well. The narrator, Andrew Westley—who is the great-grandson of one of the magicians, Alfred Borden—comes into the possession of the diary of his famous ancestor, and starts the reading process which will gradually explain his own strange experiences. We learn that he shares a psychic contact with someone whom he supposes to be a long lost twin brother. Although he does not have any brothers or sisters, let alone a twin, he feels, as he says, that: “All my life, as long as I can remember, I have had the feeling that someone else is sharing my life.”2 This so called someone else becomes the mystery of Westley’s life, since he cannot find any logical explanation for the feelings and sensations he is going through. Therefore, he is greatly relieved when he learns from a book that twins share similar experiences. By chance I came across a passage in a book, an adventure story, that described the way in which many pairs of twins are linked by an inexplicable, apparently psychic contact. Even when separated by hundreds of miles or living in different countries, such twins will share feelings of pain, surprise, happiness, depression, one twin sending to another, and vice versa. Reading this was one of those moments in life when suddenly a lot of things become clear. [. . . I]t seemed to explain everything. I had a twin somewhere. The feeling of rapport is in some ways vague, a sense of being cared for, even watched over, but in others it is much more specific. The general feeling is of a constant background, while more direct “messages” 3 come only occasionally.

Twins, then, are bound together on the psychic and emotional levels, what is more, they can communicate via giving impetus to their other half. They are one whole torn apart, who still retain a sense of belonging together. Even so, as it will later turn out, the real cause behind Westley’s experiences is not a twin, but something more gruesome and unique, which is part of the numerous secrets that formed the lives of the magicians; and which has from then on bound them and their families together throughout the decades. Andrew Westley is an orphan, whose family history and identity have to be sewn together, thread by thread, and since his story is strongly tied up with the misleading writings and secrets of the two magicians, it is only through reading and interpretation that he 2 3

Christopher Priest, The Prestige (London: Touchstone, 1996), 5. Ibid.

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can understand the mysteries surrounding both his birth and the secrets of his ancestors. Thus, the interpretative work goes on in the present, with the great-grandchildren Andrew (Borden) and Katherine Angier trying to disentangle the deceptive texts, and recreate from their own memories and from what they can glean from the diaries the gruesome event that gave life to Westley. We read the magicians’ diaries and the recounts of the offspring alternately, so the novel consists of (at least) four narrators, and it becomes even more fragmentary due to the time shifts and flashbacks. The texts are loci of displacement, imaginary places offering a chance for the magicians to displace their anxieties and secrets, they serve as complex and intriguing puzzles that we the readers need to solve through the act of interpretation. The textual selves preeminently turn out to be tools in the major trick that is the magicians’ lives. The reading process becomes difficult, since language allows the prestidigitators to hide behind signifiers and disguise the doubling that takes place in their lives. They achieve it, paradoxically, via a similar doubling in writing, creating deceitful written versions or copies of themselves, which have to be interpreted and disentangled just like the working of a magic trick. Yet, to find out the secrets lurking behind the diaries is just as difficult and futile as revealing the secret behind a trick. In a way, the doubling that takes place in their diaries is also a version of cloning, which repeats the gesture of replication that happens on the plot level. Borden is already “copied,” since he has a twin brother, yet both brothers pretend as if only one of them existed. They share a half-life, and consequently act as if they were the clones of the fictitious, non-existent being whom they both give life to, the magician Alfred Borden. Rupert Angier, on the other hand, does not refrain from actually cloning himself with the help of a teleporting machine every time he performs. Yet, the cost of this self-copying trick is that he has to kill one of himself at each occasion, so that his secret could remain unrevealed. The body staying behind on the stage during the trick, waiting for the water tank to kill him, is called the “prestige” body, while the new clone teleports to the allocated space and lives on until it becomes the prestige body himself. This repetitive replacement of the same with the same is how both magicians are supplemented. The “clones” or doubles function as supplements to the “original” magicians, without whom they would be lacking, unable to perform the so much longed-for trick. This is true of the written accounts as well, for without them the deceit would not be complete, the diaries are also tricks waiting to be solved. The legacy of the rivalry is a burdensome heritage that the magicians’ families have to cope with. Angier’s great-granddaughter, Kathrine contacts Andrew

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because she hopes that together they might be able to find the answers for this great mystery which keeps the families connected. The trick lives on until they are able to face it together, without rivalry, helping each other. In my reading, cloning and writing will be linked together, since they both give way for doubling and disguise (and also displacement) through the act of supplementation, where the clone is parallel with the signifier in writing, as both complete yet symbolically kill the entity they represent. I will use Jacques Derrida’s term “the dangerous supplement” to understand why writing is a perfect disguise and an inevitable tool for this traumatic doubling of and by the two magicians, and how they can create as well as annihilate themselves in writing via stepping into the play of signification as signifiers.

Supplementarity and Clones Jacques Derrida conceives of “supplementarity” in Of Grammatology in the context of writing. He interprets Jean Jacques Rousseau’s works, with special regard to his “Essay on the Origin of Languages.” In it, Rousseau condemns writing as the “disease of speech,” as the destruction of presence available to the speaker. Yet, as Derrida points out, he cannot entirely forfeit it either, since writing at the same time “promises the reappropriation of that of which speech allowed itself to be dispossessed.”4 Therein lies the danger but also the essentiality and inevitability of writing. It mirrors a process in which a loss5 and a reappropriation take place simultaneously. As Derrida explains: Rousseau considers writing as a dangerous means, a menacing aid, the critical response to a situation of distress. When Nature, as self-proximity, comes to be forbidden or interrupted, when speech fails to protect presence, writing becomes necessary. It diverts the immediate presence of thought to speech into representation and the imagination. This recourse is not only “bizarre,” but dangerous. It is the addition of a technique, a sort of 4 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins UP, 1997), 142. 5 “The signifier, that is, cannot make good the loss the subject suffers, a loss inaugurated by the advent of the signifier and the entry into the symbolic. This is the constitutive failure that Freud named castration. What is lost in castration is a certain guarantee that satisfaction can be attained through the signifier.” The psychoanalytic reading of the connection between trauma and the signifier is beyond the scope of my essay. See: Linda Belau, “Trauma and the Material Signifier,” Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001):3, accessed 10 December 2015, http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2belau.txt.

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artificial and artful ruse to make speech present when it is actually absent.6

Writing is like magic, an artificial techne used to recreate the selfproximity that was available in “natural speech.” The feeling of completeness and success is no longer available for the magicians, since they focus so much on perfectionism that they forget to live in the present and enjoy what they are doing. Angier becomes the victim of his greed (he even sheds his moral scruples and does séances to get large sums and later uses the teleporting/cloning machine to forge coins), and Borden of his moral hubris, whereby he exposes Angier’s séances as frauds and morally wrong. Both of them give up their previous life and live as the culturally constructed sign of the magician. Their rivalry is triggered by this loss of former self, which they both hope to fill with the feeling of success after outdoing or outwitting their rival. However, a rivalry in which they constantly test and overcome their own limits requires them to resort to supplementation. They know that they are incapable of surpassing a certain limit and be the magicians they imagine themselves to be, so they rather choose a symbolic death by accepting the help of supplements in order to achieve the inconceivable. The means of supplementation are either the help of science (and the teleporting machine which is able to produce clones) or writing, which is also able to produce clones through the use of signifiers. The danger in accepting either of these techniques is that no matter how much self-proximity they offer to retain from the original loss, they also threaten the subject with a loss of control and a symbolic annihilation. Writing is dangerous from the moment that representation there claims to be presence and the sign of the thing itself. And there is a fatal necessity, inscribed in the very functioning of the sign, that the substitute make one forget the vicariousness of its own function and make itself pass for the plenitude of a speech whose deficiency and infirmity it nevertheless only supplements. . . . The supplement adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence. It cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention, etc. . . . As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief, its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness. Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself, can accomplish itself, only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy. The sign is always the supplement of the thing itself.7

6 7

Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144. Ibid, 145.

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Thus, the sign seems to stand as a substitute for the entity, offering a solace by fulfilling the originary gap, yet at the same time symbolically “killing” and replacing the original object. The sign is a presence achieved at the cost of a loss, a giving up of a previous self-proximity, which was granted in natural speech. The signs in writing are the prostheses that supplement and thereby replace the person entering into discourse in writing. The textual selves help the magicians play with the signifying process, in which they can pretend to be clever, successful and even selfsame, but at the cost of numerous splits, loss, and deaths. The narrative in The Prestige with its doublings and misleadings offers a great opportunity to look at how the signifying process becomes the source of a symbolic death as well as a symbolic survival for the magicians through the performance of fictional doubling, and how the figure of the clone as supplement represents an originary trauma, a lack which must be compensated for in writing.

Writing: A Symbolic Death In Of Grammatology Derrida delienates how entering into writing means a symbolic death for the speaker, since from then on the signifier symbolizing the subject of utterance will take the place of the living entity. Rousseau reflects on this experience in the following way: “I never began to live until I looked upon myself as a dead man.”8 Once in the textual universe, the meaning of the signifier will always be defined in relation to the other signs of the system—as Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out. He “set forth of the arbitrariness of signs and the differential character of signs as principles of general semiology and particularly of linguistics.”9 Human life is to some extent similar to how Saussure describes language: it is a “systematic play of differences”—we are unique so long as we can be differentiated from others. The same applies to clone narratives, in which there is a relentless wish to establish the criteria of distinguishing between two beings who are genetically identical. Clones are like the Derridian “differance,”10 they challenge the binary concepts of signifier and 8

Ibid., 143. Ibid., 285. 10 “The two together–’difference’ and ’deferment’–both senses present in the French verb "differer," and both "properties" of the sign under erasure–Derrida calls ’differance.’ This differance–being the structure (a structure never quite there, never by us perceived, itself deferred and different) of our psyche–is also the structure of ’presence,’ a term itself under erasure. For differance, producing the differential structure of our hold on "presence," never produces presence as such. 9

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signified, of original and copy, of singularity and similarity. In this novel, however, it is not only the clones, but magic and writing as well, which can be used as techne, as artificiality, or substitute for the magicians to exploit in their tricks. When we move from the stage to the writing process, the disguising and misleading role of the paraphernalia and the costumes is taken over by the subject of utterence and its signifier. Yet, just as the inaudible “a” sound in the Derridean term “differance” refers to the deconstruction of the totality of meaning in logocentrism and destabilizes the traditional concept in the history of Western philosophy of writing as a secondary prosthesis for speech, these supplements also gain the upper hand and start controlling the plot of the magicians’ lie(ve)s. Magic tricks play with and also display sensory deceptions. The audience sees everything with their own eyes, and yet cannot see the very essence of what enables the presitidigitator to fool them. In the case of a magic show the audience expresses the same willing suspension of disbelief that the reader does during the act of reading, yet at the same time, both start an interpretative work, a critical thinking, trying to understand how the processes of the text or the trick work. Even so, they know that what they aim to achieve is futile and impossible, since the very pleasure comes from not knowing, from the tension created by the gap between sensory experience and reality. This gap is achieved on the stage and in the text as well through doubling. Both magicians double themselves in life and in their narratives as well. Visibility and legibility are the codes which the magicians aim at manipulating. Thus, provided that they are able to create a sign-system which then they can successfully and consequently apply to their lives, (like switching costumes for the Borden brothers, the need for killing the new clone in the case of Angier, or creating misleading selves in their diaries for both of them); then they will be true masters of their craft, being able to mislead not only the readers/viewers, but their fellow magicians as well. This success, however, comes with a price and the magicians need to sacrifice a lot to achieve their goals. Their lives are triggered by personal The structure of "presence" is thus constituted by difference and deferment. But since the ’subject’ that ’perceives’ presence is also constituted similarly, differance is neither active nor passive. The ’–ance’ ending is the mark of that suspended status. Since the difference between ’difference’ and ’differance’ is inaudible, this ’neographism’ reminds us of the importance of writing as a structure. The ’a’ serves to remind us that, even within the graphic structure, the perfectly spelled word is always absent, constituted through an endless series of spelling mistakes.” Translator’s Preface to Of Grammatology (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins UP, 1997), xliii.

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traumas (Angier’s wife miscarries their first child, the Borden brothers cannot live a full life) and this leads to a repetition compulsion which manifests itself in their relentless wish to copy and outdo each other. They give up their personal lives and become symbolically dead, only in order to be the better magicians. This symbolic death also happens when they choose to write. In their diaries they hide behind the open and vague category of the subject of utterance, the “I”. It is through speaking from this vague position that they can create the destabilizing accounts of their lives. Moreover, the gesture of stepping into discourse relativizes the individuals, puts them into a field of signification in relation to other signs, and thereby desubjectifies them as “merely” the subject of utterance. This is what these magicians long for, a lack of substantiality, a play of signification–always on the loose. When one looks closely, the passage from language to discourse appears as a paradoxical act that simultaneously implies both subjectification and desubjectification. On the one hand, the psychosomatic individual must fully abolish himself and desubjectify himself as a real individual to become the subject of enunciation and to identify himself with the pure shifter "I," which is absolutely without any substantiality, and content other than its mere reference to the event of discourse. But, once stripped of all extra-linguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking or, rather, that he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery.11

This means that the subject of utterance can never coincide with or fully be identical to the individual giving voice to it. It is not the person who speaks but language, and it does so from a position which right away creates a distance between the self and the occupied position. Through accepting the empty category of the “I”, which stands for everyone and no one at the same time, the magicians make use of the alienating role of language to mislead their readers. In their accounts of their pasts, the narrative “I” turns out to be a mixture of identities, all of whom hide under the common denominator of the signifier, just like the prestidigitators do on the stage, hiding behind their common stage personas. The deceit on stage and the deceit on paper both play with our imaginations, supposing that the reader and the audience will both expect and think of only one referent fulfilling the position of the speaker, thereby falling into the trap of signification. In case of the diaries, however, this trick becomes 11

Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (New York: Zone Book, 1999), 116.

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successful also due to the trick of the chosen genre. The diary format usually creates the expectation of truthfulness and directness in the reader. Here, however, it is anything but truthful, the very genre of honesty becomes a reserve of deceit and disguise. The narrator of Borden’s diary calls attention to this, he admits his intention to mislead right away, yet the trick works all the same. After a while we realize that the “I” is not always selfsame, that there are two different entities writing the memories of one. The text gives it away consciously, as part of the pact between the reader and the writer. This also creates a parallel between the stage performance and what the magicians do to deceive us and each other on paper. Borden writes: Let me then first consider and describe the method of writing this account. The very act of describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to see. A puzzle is implicitly involved. . . . Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent. I have misdirected you with the talk of truth, objective records and motives. Just as it is when I show my hands to be empty I have omitted the significant information, and now you are looking in the wrong place.12

He admits that his life is the trick, it encompasses everything he does, so his (or rather their) writing must inevitably be influenced by it. This is when the reader starts looking for traces of deceit in the text, and will sooner or later inevitably find them. For instance, there are passages in which we can detect an implicit dialogue between the two brothers, so it can also be claimed that the “I” they hide behind no longer conceals them completely. I might one day again hurt one of my hands while making a wheel for the cart of a publican. I said nothing of this to me! What is it? How far is it to be taken? I must write no more until I know! So, now we have spoken, it is agreed I may continue? Here it is again, on that understanding. I may write what I see fit, while I may add to it as I see fit. I planned nothing to which I would not agree, only to write a great deal more of it before I read it. I apologize if I think I was deceiving me, and meant no harm. I have read it through several times, & I think I understand what I am driving at. It was only the surprise that made me react the way I did. Now I am calmer I find it acceptable so far.13 12 13

Priest, The Prestige (London: Touchstone, 1996), 36. Ibid., 50.

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We need a second reading of the novel to fully grasp these lines, otherwise at first we might get lost in the playground of possible referents, not being able to differentiate between them. This reveals the destabilizing nature of language, which is able to create, visualize and preserve, but just as much to desubjectify and falsify. Indirectly, prestidigitation and cloning become the symbols of artistic creation in writing where the text is the only referent of itself, whose “truthfulness” (to life) is merely a myth. In the Western literary tradition, the act of poetic creation and, indeed, perhaps every act of speech implies something like a desubjectification (poets have named this desubjectification the “Muse”). “An ’I’ without guarantees!” writes Ingeborg Bachmann in one of her Frankfurt Lectures, “what is the ’I,’ what could it be? A star whose position and orbit have never been fully identified and whose nucleus is composed of substances still unknown to us. It could be this: myriads of particles forming an ’I’: But at the same time the ’I’ seems to be a Nothing, the hypostasis of a pure form, something like an imagined substance.”14

In these narratives the “I” is actually composed of at least two particles. Thus, we the readers of The Prestige are put into the same interpretative position in which Westley finds himself. We decipher together the two magicians’ intentions to mislead us from the very start, as well as the necessity to read not only between but sometimes against the lines to be able to disentangle the mystery, and to finally put the pieces of the puzzle to the right place.

The Unthreading of the “Twin-Mystery” The identity of the mysterious “someone else” sharing Westley’s life becomes even more unsettling when in the course of the plot (and of the similarly misleading and destabilizing reading experience) it turns out that what we all thought to be a twin brother is actually the prestige body of Westley, who was thrown into the teleporting machine as a child. The narrator is the clone who came about as a result of it, as the “residue” of the old rivalry that gave life to the machine and with it to Westley and the endless copies of Angier. The two magicians take the rivalry so seriously that they become each other’s “evil twins.” Both are obsessed with illusions, magic tricks and perfecting their trade, which they are trying to achieve through undermining the other’s success, finding out and revealing his tricks. Both are willing to sacrifice anything and everything 14

Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 114.

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to achieve this. Borden (who does actually have a twin brother) sacrifices one part of his life so that he and his brother can merge as if only one of them existed. Angier, on the other hand, goes so far in trying to outdo Borden as to use science in the place of magic in his teleportation trick. He learns about a certain Mr. Nikola Tesla, who pays a visit to London just at the time in order to advertise his experiments with electricity and alternating current. It is Borden who first realizes that Tesla’s mysterious knowledge and experiments may come in handy in his own trick, to heighten the sense of danger surrounding it. He misleads Angier by saying that Tesla is the key to his own magic trick. Angier, then, also starts to investigate what Tesla could do, so much so that he actually reaches further in the field than Borden ever ventured. Angier writes: He [Tesla] is indeed a prophet of what the next century will hold for us. A worldwide net of electrical generating stations, power given over to the humble as well as the mighty, instantaneous transmission of energies and matter from one part of the world to the other, the air itself vibrating with the essence of the aether! I grasped an important truth from Mr Tesla‫ތ‬s presentation. His show (for it was nothing less than this) bore an odd resemblance to any good illusionist’s.15

Since in the Victorian period electricity was relatively a new phenomenon, Tesla at the time was looked upon as a magician himself, working with divine forces. He was able to generate connection between otherwise unconnected objects (similarly to the psychic connection that the clones and twins share.) We read that “Veritable miracles were being spoken of and several informed newspapers reported that in Tesla‫ތ‬s hands lay the future of our world.”16 Tesla is a double figure to these magicians, who is just as devoted to his own field of “magic” as the other two, and he is also willing to go the distance. Angier recognizes this spirit in him and commissions him to build a teleportation machine with the help of which he could copy Borden’s famous magic trick, The New Transported Man. Although Tesla is aware and even warns Angier about the risks, his scientific curiosity overcomes his common sense and agrees to finish the machine. Angier, with the help of this monster of science creates the ultimate illusion. Thus, what the audience assumes to be a trick is actually what really happens: his body teleports from the stage to the previously allocated spot, in a flash. The name of the act is homophonic, referring to its instantaneous speed as well as to its bodily figurations in cloning. This 15 16

Priest, The Prestige, 219. Ibid., 218.

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new act is a transgression not only of science’s limits but the rules of stage magic as well. Borden reveals at the beginning of his diary that magic involves a pact between the audience and the prestidigitator. This means that the audience not only accepts the fact but also expects to be fooled. However, what Angier does in his new trick goes against the pact, since the audience in this case is really fooled, and it is precisely due to the fact that there is no magic trick involved at all. Thus, Angier denies the central rule of magic, namely that “what is seen is not what is actually being done.”17 The audience is not aware of the cost of the trick, either. In what follows I will interpret the role of death, a recurring trope in the novel, as constitutive of both magicians’ success and rebirth even. The doublings they achieved have led to their fragmentation into supplementary halves and half-lives. Both magicians live only in the signifier that is their names, the others (clones, diaries, doubles) are the shatters of a mirror, which reflects its own reflective capacity. Borden is eager to find out the secret behind Angier’s In a Flash show, so he goes to the theater to seek after the source of the trick. He manages to get into the backstage area, where he turns off the power, hoping to ruin Borden’s trick by this. Indeed, his deed turns out to be rather fatal, for without electricity the teleporting machine cannot work properly, and Angier’s cloning process remains incomplete. This results in a split between the prestige and the clone, and even though both survive, they are in a half-dead, half-alive state. The two of them together make up the previous Angier, they are two creatures who are actually each other’s supplements. One of them has a body, although a very weak one, the other, on the other hand, virtually lacks substantiality, since he is the part that was rapped out of the former body. Angier writes in his diary: The transmission had been interrupted! But it had begun before it was stopped, and now I could see an image of myself on the rail; there was my ghost, my doppelgänger, momentarily frozen in the stance I had adopted when I turned to look, half twisted, half crouching, looking away and up. It was a thin, insubstantial copy of myself, a partial prestige.18

Later, after the inevitable death of the prestige body, the partial clone comes back to the country mansion and takes over the writing of the diary. This is again a gesture that repeats the Borden brothers’ trick, who also addressed each other as “me.” I have borrowed a technique from Borden, so that I am I as well as myself. 17 18

Ibid., 115. Ibid., 339-340.

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I who write this am not the same as the I who died. We became two entities that night in Lowestoft, when Borden caused the malfunctioning of the Tesla apparatus. We went our separate ways. We have been together again since I returned to Caldlow House at the end of March, just as my temporary remission from the cancers began. While I yet lived, I maintained the illusion that I was one. One of me lay dying, while the other of me recorded my final concerns. All entries in this journal since 26th March have been written by me. We are each the prestige of the other.19

The subject of utterance signifies both of them, they and the other previously killed prestige bodies are all Angier. Without a massproduction of serial deaths, Angier could not have pulled off his tricks. The half dead state of this partial clone is a characteristic not only of these two unlucky beings, but also of Borden and his brother, Westley and his secret prestige waiting for his return, and the diaries and their authors as well. All of them are in need of supplementation, without their prostheses– that is each other–they cannot function well enough, all are in the limbo of being half-dead, until their supplements complete them. Yet, this completion is also a union through death. A lingering sense of death pervades Angier’s account of the cloning process. In a foreshadowing passage he mentions that he decided to store the prestige elements in his family’s crypt. He is surrounded by death, which leaves its marks on his body. They were around me on both sides, and the cavern extended far beyond. It was full of death, full of the dead, redolent of finality, life abandoned to the rats. . . . I caught a sight of myself in my dressing mirror, and I stopped to look. Thick white dust clung to my boots and ankles. Cobwebs straggled across my shoulders and chest. My hair had become matted on my head, apparently held down by a thick layer of grey dirt, and the same filth caked my face. My eyes, red-rimmed, stared out from the hollow mask my face had become, and for a few moments I stood there transfixed by the sight of myself. It seemed to me that I had been hideously transformed by my visit to the family tomb, becoming one of its denizens..20

This symbolic scene depicts his readiness to descend to the underworld, his willingness to face death, which he will do every time he performs this trick. The trickery with the “I” is taken a step further in Angier’s diary, when the narrative voice continues to speak after Angier’s demise and narrates the circumstances of his “own” death.

19 20

Ibid., 365. Ibid., 312-313.

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My dying was protracted, painful, messy and profoundly distressing to Julia and my children, as well as to myself. We were all shocked by the wretchedness of dying, and have been greatly subdued by the event. Death uniquely surrounds my life! Once, in harmless deception, I pretended to die so that Julia might live without scandal as a widow. Every use of the Tesla apparatus later brought death to my experience, several times a week. When Rupert Angier was laid falsely to rest I was alive to bear witness to it. I have cheated death many times. Death has therefore acquired a sense of unreality for me. It has come to be a commonplace event that by some paradox, it seems, I can always survive. Now I have seen myself on my deathbed, dying of multiple cancers, and afterwards, after that vile and painful death, I am here to report it in my diary. Wednesday, 6th July 1904: the day I died. No man should be so wretched as to have to see what I have beheld.21

The repetition compulsion is performed in the renewed deaths of each clone, it becomes the central motif in the rivalry, which results in their deaths and the survival of their supplements. One of the Borden brothers dies, yet, the fictitious Alfred Borden survives in the body of the other sibling. After the latter’s death, the magician whom the bodily beings signified still survives in discourse, as the narrative “I” of their diary. Angier presumably died right after the first trial running of the machine, but he gave birth to a serial rewriting of his life in his copies. That was the cost of his knowledge, an endless repetition of half-alive supplements. Angier seems to defy death. He routinely kills parts of himself in his show and thus becomes so accustomed to it, that by the end, he becomes a specter figure, who achieves a gruesome eternity with the help of the machine. The partial clone who came about after Borden’s meddling with electricity decides to teleport back to the prestige body. This union, instead of killing them, revives him yet again. After the more than two thousand clones he created and killed, after having narrated his own death, he (or a version of him) survives. When Westley goes down to the cellar to look for Nicky Borden’s (that is his own original) body, he finds all the previous corpses, neatly labeled and cataloged, and he meets a dark, shadow-like but living figure, clad in prestidigitator costume.

Conclusion This novel, with its twists and misleadings works the same way as the Derridean “differance,” as a displacement and deferment of fixed meaning and fixed referentiality, whose numerous misleading significations create a playground of potential signifiers and referents. The magicians employ 21

Ibid., 364.

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writing as one of their stagecrafts, a techne of disguise and doubling, with the help of which they can both hide and reveal the copying of themselves, each other, and the supplementation which kills and rejuvenates them at the same time. The figure of the “immortal” Angier walking away, haunting the present and perhaps even the future, is the symbol of the endless supplementation that takes place in the magicians’ personal lives, stage performances and writing as well. The immortal Angier, who himself becomes a writer during the course of the plot, can also symbolize the larger context of this game of signification, which is the novel itself. Priest plays similar tricks on us, readers: he constantly makes us believe something, while he right away distances or destabilizes any fixed referentiality. This whole play of unstable signification reveals our constant need for fixed referents and meanings, which, if denied, will trigger a sense of anxiety in us. This fruitful sense of disquiet can then be displaced into new forms of art, keeping alive the fascinating and often disturbing signifying processes, which will in turn recreate themselves and provide an awe-inspiring play for as long as we are willing to play.

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Book, 1999. Belau, Linda. “Trauma and the Material Signifier.” Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001): n. p. Accessed 10 December 2015. http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.101/11.2belau.txt. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins UP, 1997. —. Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Drąg, Wojciech. Revisiting Loss: Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in the Novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014. Lykke, Nina and Anneke M. Smelik, ed. Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology. University of Washington Press, 2015. Priest, Christopher. The Prestige. London: Touchstone, 1996. Wilson, Robin Scott. ed., Those Who Can: A Science-Fiction Reader. London: St Martin’s Press, 1996.

PART IV: SPACES NATURAL AND SPACES ARTIFICIAL

THE DOUBLED CITY: THE DISPLACED LONDON IN THE URBAN FANTASY NOVELS OF NEIL GAIMAN AND CHINA MIÉVILLE VERA BENCZIK

Introduction As Rosemary Jackson writes in her 1981 monograph on genre conventions, fantastic literature points to or suggests the basis upon which cultural order rests, for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems. The fantastic traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made “absent.”1

When Jackson circumnavigated the protean group of texts labeled fantasy in her 1981 monograph, she surely meant the words above in a figurative sense, suggesting that the fantastic as a mode “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture.”2 Yet the 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of a new subtype of fantasy, often associated through its authors with the so-called New Weird, which posited a city at its narrative center, and which gave a spatial expression to this polarized relationship between what we conventionally designate as ‘reality’ and the ‘fantastic.’ Called urban fantasy, this subcategory of texts features the metropolis as its setting—sometimes well beyond its function as mere backdrop to the action. Alexander C. Irvine identifies two basic ways in which authors use the cityscape in urban fantasy, “either an existing city [is] made fantastical 1

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Methuen, 1981), 4. 2 Ibid.

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or a fantastical city [is] made real.”3 Fantastical cities include China Miéville’s New Crobuzon in the Bas-Lag stories, or Jeff VanderMeer’s Ambergris, at the center of much of his fantasy. Both are baroque collages which rely and reflect on various urban ‘sources,’ most notably on the essence of the metropolis associated with London in particular. Irvine observes them to be a mock-Victorian recreation of the stewing tensions of contemporary London: tensions between and among communities of immigrants . . . simmering violent confrontation between an authoritarian militia and underground groups of political revolutionaries, the creation of a permanent underclass by the mechanisms of judicial punishment.”4

In both narrative worlds the city “is a genius loci, animating the narrative and determining its fantastic nature.”5 They echo the infernal chaos of a Bosch painting and the feel of a carnival—spaces and events where transgression and subversion are the norm. Yet, similarly to the well-regulated position of the carnival within the Christian church year, the urban chaos is contextualized within the framework of order—the urban grid—and this ultimately strengthens that world order instead of unraveling it. The present essay will concentrate on “the city made fantastical,”6 texts which use an existing metropolis as the site of the fantastic. As Irvine notes, “The immensity of the metropolis provides cover for any and all activity [. . . , and] this same immensity creates the cracks through which can seep the fantastic as well, since the metropolis by its very size becomes a kind of fantastic landscape.”7 The argument is concerned with permutations of London as the locus of marvels, and will concentrate on the Londons in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) and China Miéville’s8 King Rat (1998), and to a lesser extent Kraken (2010). The fantastic is set 3 Alexander C. Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, ed. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 204. 4 Ibid., 208. 5 Ibid., 201. 6 Ibid., 204. 7 Ibid., 203. 8 Much of China Miéville’s oeuvre can arguably been condensed into the category ’ode to the metropolis’. His Bas-Lag sequence, his science fiction (Embassytown) and his urban fantasy set in London (King Rat, Un Lun Dun and Kraken) all seem to feature the city in a way as can be almost regarded as an obsession, a love affair with the monstrous and hellish metropolitan construct.

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into the spatial context of contemporary metropolitan experience, and reflects on the fears facilitated by the processes of urbanization and industrialization—stock themes in urban fiction since the nineteenth century. The urban nightmare Irvine refers to is usually explained as the expression of experiences related to and anxieties projected onto the urban landscape of the industrial age. The group of nineteenth-century texts called “Thames Valley romances” by Patrick Parrinder “portray London not as a development of the garden city but as sinister wasteland.”9 Very often the infernal metropolis is juxtaposed to the idyllic pastoral context of the English countryside, the spatial canvas upon which the golden age longing of the imperial and post-imperial generation projected the Arcadia of Englishness. This image of London as hell found frequent expression in the Dickensian social criticism of the age. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century science fiction, these anxieties often manifested as a (post)apocalyptic landscape, where—according to Nick Yablon—the fear instilled by the city as monster found expression in large-scale urban destruction.10 The metropolis as site of terror and darkness is a theme frequently revisited and re-enacted in contemporary urban fantasy. As Irvine rightly notes, “The millennial visions of China Miéville . . . reach back through their predecessors . . . and themselves recapitulate a nightmare nineteenth century, only now through the prism of the twentyfirst century’s nightmares rather than those of the early twentieth.”11 The current essay will focus on the use of the urban setting, and questions relating to spatial rhetorics will be examined. The paper will explore how the urban text is used in these works, and in what ways certain spatial discourse strategies are discernible in the narratives in question. How can the urban, a locus intrinsically connected to modernism and present-ness, function as the background for a mode of estrangement and displacement? All three novels are set in London around the turn of the millennium, and follow a similar archetypal quest trajectory where the archetypal “reluctant questing hero”12—Richard Mayhew (Neverwhere), Saul 9

Patrick Parrinder, “From Mary Shelley to The War of the Worlds: The Thames Valley Catastrophe,” in Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, ed. David Seed (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), 60. 10 Nick Yablon, “The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909-19,” American Quarterly 56.2 (June 1, 2004): 308–47. 11 Irvine, “Urban Fantasy,” 204. 12 Ibid., 205.

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Garamond (King Rat) and Billy Harrow (Kraken)—leaves the familiarity of mundane London, and enters fantastic London in order to begin the journey. This voyage, conforming to the quest formula, ultimately leads to personal transformation, resolution and the saving of the city itself. London in these novels is topos and telos at the same time, it is both location and objective of the quest: Richard saves London from the enraged and vengeful Angel Islington—incarcerated into the fabric of the city as both entity and topographical feature; Saul avenges the death of the his stepfather and subdues the infernal figure of the Piper who threatens to unravel both the mundane and the fantastic London; and Billy learns to embrace his prophetic essence in order to avert the looming apocalypse. Following the template of traditional epic fantasy, all three novels are rites of passages, and the narrative follows the young heroes through their period of transformation while on their respective quests. According to Farah Mendlesohn, who examines the typology of fantasy narratives in her monograph entitled Rhetorics of Fantasy, this type of fantasy traditionally follows a pattern she labels “portal-quest fantasy,” in which the questing hero enters “a fantastic world . . . through a portal.”13 Notable examples include Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, or C. S. Lewis’s Narnia novels. The fantastic and the mundane are distinctly separated, and passage between the worlds can only be completed through marked gateways. When examining the three novels in question, they do seem to follow this pattern. London Below, the fantastic city in Neverwhere, cannot be accessed freely, and once there, return is denied forever, since those incorporated into the narrative fabric of the fantastic are in turn erased from the plot of the mundane. The dislocation is physical as well as metaphysical, as Richard has to realize. Both of Miéville’s heroes, although far from the erasure Richard experiences in Neverwhere, lose their place of origin as they are inscribed into the metamorphosed urban environment, rendering a return to their old, mundane city absolutely impossible. Thus spatially we may observe a clear doubling of the worlds, and a definite one-way transition from one world to another. But precisely because of their peculiar emplacement, crossing the threshold between worlds results in the transposition of the mundane and the fantastic. Because of the shared topography of both realms—London functions as reality and fantasy at the same time—, urban fantasy is able to subvert the traditional formula, and the three novels, while being predominantly portal-quest narratives, arguably inhabit at least two others 13 Farah Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), xix.

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of Mendlesohn’s categories, as well. The urban text is a palimpsest, where the different narrative layers overlap and intertwine, and in the course of the book the familiar is fully transformed into the estranged; yet the displacement paradoxically does not involve topographical difference, and the image of the original city is retained in the process. The resulting fully developed secondary world—complete with its cultural and moral framework—, which replaces the London we know by the end of the narrative, allows us to read the novels as “immersive fantasies” where the story “invites us to share not merely a world, but a set of assumptions. [. . . I]t presents the fantastic without comment as the norm both for the protagonist and for the reader.”14 But more importantly, there is a strong presence of the “intrusion fantasy” in all three novels. According to Mendlesohn, in intrusion fantasies the “fantastic is the bringer of chaos,”15 and the intruding world usually threatens to unravel and overwrite the world we know. Entities like ghosts, zombies, or vampires in horror stories embody this monstrous menace, and while they threaten individual or collective survival on the narrative level, on a metanarrative level they symbolize radically incomprehensible Otherness, impossible to understand and accommodate within mundane reality’s ontological framework. Thus the intrusion does not only threaten human existence, but also indicate the possibility of reality being overwritten by the incomprehensibly fantastic. All three novels feature such radically ‘other’ threats. The Angel Islington wants to bring about the end of the world after ascending back to Heaven, from which he was banished after sinking Atlantis. Vardy in Kraken is an atheist scientist with a Christian fundamentalist background and an insatiable nostalgic longing for the prelapsarian state which he equates with the projected Christian utopia of the pre-Darwin era. The original sin of his world is Darwin’s evolutionary theory and its subsequent victory over the transcendental paradigm. In order to usher in a new paradise he attempts to reset reality to the pre-Darwinian state of things, threatening to bring about the Apocalypse. King Rat showcases a double intrusion: first it is King Rat who shatters the mundane world of Saul by killing his foster father, and abducting Saul into the underworld of the London sewers. The second, more sinister force in the novel is the Piper—the abject monster of the horror tradition denying interpretation— who threatens to destroy both worlds for reasons utterly beyond comprehension. Both Neverwhere and King Rat feature greater or lesser abject 14 15

Ibid., xx. Ibid., xxi.

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monsters, similar to the Piper: the Angel Islington, and the assassins Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar in Neverwhere, and Goss and Subby in King Rat. All of these entities are as alien to the fantastic, as to the mundane city. Islington is kept prisoner, guarded by the Beast of London in a labyrinth, located somewhere in the city, but not allowed to integrate into its fabric. The giant boar-like creature, although monstrous in itself, is nevertheless part of the fabric of fantastic London, and abides by its rules, as its killing transforms the person who did it into the Hero of the story: “‘I’m now warrior,’ said Richard. The Abbot smiled gently. ‘You killed the Beast,’ he explained, almost regretfully. ‘You are the Warrior.’”16 In this respect the Beast is similar to the Architeuthis (giant squid) in Kraken, which is simultaneously the sea monster of mythology, the god of a cult, and preserved specimen in the Darwinian framework. It is anchored firmly in both worlds, unlike Goss and Subby, the hideous assassin pair in the novel. They echo the figures of Croup and Vandemar from Neverwhere, and together with Islington and the Piper constitute entities that both are atemporal and aspatial, they inhabit neither the familiarity nor the estrangement of the doubled metropolis, either in space or in time, and cannot become part of it, either. On the contrary, they embody forces which threaten to annihilate the doubled world.

The Spatial Discourse This doubling of the urban space leads Mendlesohn to argue that In Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996) or China Miéville’s King Rat (1998)—both of which are portal, rather than intrusion fantasies—a fantastic London underlies the London we know.... the worlds can exist in the same spaces at one and the same time, so that the scenes in Neverwhere in the underground stations do not take place in the nooks and crannies but in a parallel world that overlays the mundane world.17

Yet, as I commented earlier, the palimpsestual topographic overlay and the intricate intertwining of the mundane and the fantastic locale render a clear-cut categorization impossible. The peculiar use of the contemporary metropolis, however, lends itself to interesting observations concerning layering, palimpsestual overwriting and transgression. In all three narratives the fantastic is initially concealed, and thus they belong to the category of texts in which the parallel fantastic world is 16 17

Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (New York: Harper Torch, 2001), 340. Mendlesohn, Rhetorics of Fantasy, 151.

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invisible despite inhabiting the same space. An excellent example for this type of spatial division is the Harry Potter universe, where the wizard and the non-wizard (muggle) worlds coexist, yet only the wizarding world has knowledge of the other. Going beyond a simple suspension of disbelief, this type of seclusion begs the question: how is the fantastic hidden from the mundane? Although not urban fantasy per se, Miéville’s New Weird novel The City and the City (2009) offers a very interesting perspective: utilizing the clichés of hard-boiled detective fiction, the story is set in two imaginary, vaguely Central European city-states, BesĨel and Ul Qoma. Seemingly separated by a physical barrier at the onset of the novel, as the narrative progresses, the reader realizes that not only is there no physical demarcation line between the two urban spaces, but the two cities are actually interbuilt and architecturally entwined. The border is upheld purely by the spatial practice of the inhabitants, they “unsee” the city they are currently not in, a practice indoctrinated as reflex from childhood on, with transgressions punished severely in the case of adults. The inhabitants, “readers” of the urban text uphold the division of one city into two, and this metaphorical representation may be used to demonstrate the narrative strategies urban fantasy texts exploit: they heavily rely on the reader estranging the fabric of the city from the mundane, and enforce this seemingly paradoxical presence of the fantastic, which remains invisible until entered by the protagonist, an act that in turn overwrites what has been regarded as the norm, and produces the spatial palimpsest of the dual city in urban fantasy. Although there is a spatial coexistence, the narratives seem to rely on a hierarchical arrangement of text and subtext, mapped onto the city in architectural terms as above and below grounds. This arrangement echoes the separation of the architectural layers of urban space according to the notion of the vertical city, a concept in David Pike’s Metropolis on the Styx. This directional distribution and attribution of certain symbology of spaces, according to Pike, originate at least partially from the tripartite, vertical Christian cosmography, with heaven at the higher end of the vertical axis, and hell at the lower.18 Whether this is the result of certain cultural traditions, the underground has historically been regarded as “a site of crisis, of fascination, and of hidden truth, a space somehow more real but also more threatening and otherworldly than the ordinary world above.”19 In Neverwhere and King Rat the division between the mundane and the fantastic re-enacts this spatial division, as the estranged realm is physically 18

David Lawrence Pike, Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 7. 19 Ibid., 1.

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located under the normalcy of ground level: Gaiman uses the tube lines as the network cohabited by both worlds, and echoes this division even in the names London Above and London Below. Miéville’s King Rat lives with his entourage in the sewers below the city, a realm that Saul has to explore and become part of in order to accept his inheritance as ruler of the underworld. In terms of the city as text, the fantastic becomes the urban subtext of the metropolis; in addition, this palimpsestual overlay of body and building also echoes the Freudian notions of the division of the psyche into superego, ego and id. But the layered verticality of these urban constructs points beyond a simple Christian allegory or a straightforward psychoanalytic analysis. In Neverwhere the metaphysical is interwoven with the historical, and the surface of the city conceals the spatial chronicle of its history: the family of Door lives in a house whose rooms have been preserved as mementos of their destroyed real-life counterparts. A group of rats, the “Goldens” live in the skeleton of a woolly mammoth, and the labyrinth which houses the Beast is “one of the oldest places in London Below,”20 preceding the foundation of the first village at the site. London Below is the spatial expression of cultural memory, and as such is intrinsically chaotic and carnivalesque, instead of the neat stratification of an archaeological site. In King Rat it is the realm of folklore and fairy tales which manifest as the fantastic. Here the layers include the liminal realm of the titular character which he shares with other gods like the spider god Anansi, and which invisibly preys upon the mundane world. As we recede farther into the fantastic, we arrive at the figure of the Piper, whose mountain lies beyond space, time and comprehension. Beyond the vertical separation of the two spheres of mundane and fantastic, the two worlds seem to inhabit different time slots. Both Neverwhere and King Rat strongly echo the imagery of the Dickensian infernal metropolis within their fantastic realms, a city as yet untouched by the technological developments of the twentieth century. Kraken echoes Victorian London by invoking its steampunk reverberations by locating the main conflict at the time of the advent of Darwinism; it is not only evolutionary theory but several other cultural markers which point in the direction of the nineteenth century: taxidermy and the traditional practices of museology, the beginnings of modern archaeology, especially Egyptology—referenced through the liminal spirit Wati—and finally the central image of the kraken, a creature which passed from the realm of mythology into the realm of science with the first preserved specimens or 20

Gaiman, Neverwhere, 304.

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parts dating back to the nineteenth century.21 It thus embodies both the transcendental and the scientific, and serves as a linkage between the two worlds, arguably representing the mundane and the fantastic, as well. The novels, especially Miéville’s texts, make heavy use of the abject in their spatial rhetorics. The author has been fascinated by the concept of trash and waste since his childhood.22 The sewers and canals in Neverwhere and Kraken, but more prevalently in King Rat, the dumps and the homeless cardboard shelters all signify rejected spaces within the urban context. The abject locations are linked to other symbols of urban abjection within the novels: to animals usually considered city vermin like rats—the titular character of King Rat and his followers, or the RatSpeakers in Neverwhere—, pigeons or spiders. The rats especially are revealed as entities with (potential) power. In Kraken the dead body is displayed in the preserved specimens in the Museum of National History, and the whole story revolves around the disappearance of such a bottled monstrous apparition, iconic deity of the Krakenist cult. The body of the giant squid, the holy grail of the novel, is also what Julia Kristeva calls the ultimate abject, the dead body.23 Food and abjection figure importantly in both Neverwhere and King Rat. The “snacks” at Neverwhere’s Floating Market use the a cliché present in both fantasy and science fiction where culinary difference is often used as an estranging factor, and food perceived culturally as disgusting often signals the unraveling of the familiar, as is often the case, for example, in post-apocalyptic narratives. In King Rat organic waste, remnants of food thrown away transmutes into the fuel which transforms Saul into King Rat. The novel acknowledges the repulsion, but simultaneously posits the waste as a locus of desire. In these narratives the mundane urban text is abjected into the fantastic: the novels become journeys into this abjected underworld, infernal quests for the self, which promise transformation from everyman into hero, from boy into adult. They seem to display a neat Campbellian trajectory of initiation—separation—return: in Neverwhere Richard becomes the par excellence hero as the slayer of the great Beast of London, and Billy is proclaimed the Prophet of the Bottle in Kraken. But due to the intrusive nature of the fantastic the mundane world disappears 21

Bernard Heuvelmans, Kraken and the Colossal Octopus: In the Wake of SeaMonsters (London: Routledge, 2015). 22 The Monthly Video, Inside the Imagination of China Mieville, accessed September 29, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaaFun09At0. 23 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 3.

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and hence return becomes impossible. Beyond the abjection of general mundane space, the process also affects the specific haven of home. There seems to be a definite rejection of the concept of “home”, which Gaston Bachélard in Poetics of Space identifies as the ultimate shelter,24 referencing both the childhood home and its essence nostalgically projected upon the real place via memory. In all three novels the (paternal) home is not only denied, but it is also constructed as spatial taboo. In Neverwhere, when Richard briefly returns to London Above, trying to flee the responsibility of his quest, he finds his flat occupied by a new tenant. In King Rat the paternal home becomes the site of warped patricide: the man Saul believed to be his father is murdered by his real father, King Rat to entice Saul to enter the realm of fantasy. When Saul, like Richard, tries to evade the formulaic enactment prescribed by the quest, and attempts to return home, he is almost killed, as well. In Kraken Billy is hiding or looking for hiding places for much of the narrative; his flat becomes taboo as going there would too easily betray his whereabouts. The home-less characters have nothing left to do but move forward into the realm of the fantastic, and to complete the predetermined narrative arc.

Navigating the Urban Fantasy Navigating the realm of fantasy is characterized by alternative mapping, especially apparent if we use the framework established by Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City. He divides urban space into five different formations, paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks,25 whose interplay defines the navigational strategies of the ‘spatial practitioners’ traversing the city’s territory. When analyzing the spatial practices of urban fantasy, paths—“channels along which the observer customarily, occasionally or potentially moves”26—, nodes—“the strategic spots into which an observer can enter, and which are the intensive foci to and from which he is travelling”27—and edges—“linear elements not used or considered as paths by the observer”28—seem to be of prime importance. As the boundaries of both the mundane and the fantastic are 24 Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places, trans. by Jolas, Maria (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 5. 25 Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960), 46. 26 Ibid., 47. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.

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mostly the same, and the doubling of the city occurs within the same spatio-temporal parameters, different paths allow for alternative mapping and alternative navigation of the fantastic urban space. While nodes, in Lynch’s words, may be “moments of shift from one structure to another”29 as they mark way stations along the paths, it can be observed that in both Miéville and Gaiman the portals which allow such a border crossing are not part of this system. Underground paths like the tube or the sewers are part of both the mundane and the fantastic, but the nodes, which form part of both worlds—like the tube stations in Neverwhere—do not function as points of connection in the fabric between the spheres. Instead of joining and bridging, the nodes are doubled into entities existing in both realms, like Knightsbrigde, which transforms into the gruesome Night’s Bridge in Neverwhere, or Islington, where the place manifests itself as the ultimate evil, or Blackfriars, which become an actual monastic order guarding the key to all realms. In King Rat it is the edges—walls, crevices, rooftops, interstices—and the transformation of edges into paths which mark the alternative mapping practices of the worlds. Saul learns to navigate the city of London via these alternative routes, which emphasize the non-human negotiation of urban space. According to the rules of portal-quest fantasies, navigation between the worlds is ensured by portals, connecting points liminal in the same sense as bridges are, as they do not belong to either shore. In the strictly disconnected and isolated world structure of the urban fantasy these openings are simultaneously wounds, ruptures in the fabric between the mundane and the fantastic. Certain works, like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials are built on the narrative aim of closing the portals to effect the healing of the fabric between worlds, and restore the “normalcy” of separation. Dislocation into another realm is certainly seen as an anomaly, an act of trespassing that has certain consequences for both worlds. At the same time the quest itself is an archetypal narrative formula, which reinforces societal conventions and the normal advance from one societal state into another, a well-established literary projection of the rite of passage. This inherent contradiction between passage and trespassing becomes the driving force of the narrative in Neverwhere: the embedded quest for the key guarded by the Blackfriars is as much completing an archetypal narrative arc of a heroic deed as endangering the existence of London. When Richard emerges from the ordeal, his appearance suggests

29

Ibid.

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that “he had begun to grow up,”30 and thus completes the formulaic station of a rite of passage. But he also is on track to deliver the key into the hands of the angel Islington, who wishes to use it to take over the entirety of creation—and while the Black Friars know this, they are bound by the rules of the narrative formula to hand over the key. The rightness of growing up and the potential dangers of a key which opens all doors powerfully symbolizes this tension between the passage and transgression. The act of stepping through the portal initiates the quest. In Neverwhere the portal is a person: Door is a young woman and the last surviving member of a family who are the guardians of the portals between worlds. She lives in the “House Without Doors,”31 built by her grandfather from long-destroyed rooms from “all through London, discrete and doorless.”32 It is a place that embodies alternative mapping, as its rooms are not connected by doors but by portals, navigable only for those who have the gift to cross the boundaries between worlds. Her name constructs her as an anomaly, a door in a building that denies the existence of portals within its bunds. Wounded and hunted by the monstrous assassins Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar, Door accidentally stumbles into London Above, and her path intersects Richard on the way to a restaurant. After her interaction with Richard she “infects” him with “LondonBelowness,” as a result of which he is excised from his own mundane world and driven into the realm of the fantastic. Door exemplifies another instance of conflating the architectural with the human, only in this instance it is not the body that is mapped onto the building, but the other way round. She unites the contradictory notions of passage and trespassing in her own persona: while she is the guardian of the proper ways of connecting worlds, her own act of drawing Richard into the narrative is an accident, an act of transgression. In King Rat the titular character breaks Saul out of prison, and guides him via unusual pathways—interstices, wall niches, cracks, rooftops, back alleys and dead ends—into the fantastic underworld of the city. The cell door opens into another world not only in the figurative sense of marking the boundary between captivity and freedom, but also in representing the borderline between Saul’s reality and the fantastic. Apart from providing the doubled setting for the narratives, the city itself is constructed in terms of the organic and monstrous. Neverwhere’s Great Beast of London is a play on words which defines the metropolis as labyrinth in which the monster lives, and also denotes the city as the 30

Gaiman, Neverwhere, 253. Ibid., 80. 32 Ibid. 31

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Monster which has to be slain. The same notion of the metropolis as monster appears in King Rat, toward the end, when Saul looks down at the city reflected in the night-time Thames: He stared down at the city below his feet. It was an illusion. The shimmering motion of the lights he saw was not the real city. They were part of it, to be sure, a necessary part . . . but the beautiful lights, so much more lively than those above them, were a simulacrum. They merely painted the surface tension. Below that thin veneer the water was still filthy, still dangerous and cold. Saul held onto that. He resisted the poetics of the city.”33

A little further on he goes even further: On all other sides, the walls that enclosed him were vulnerable. They constituted the buildings’ underbellies, soft underneath the aesthetic carapace. … Seen from behind, caught unawares, the functionality of the city was exposed. This point of view was dangerous for the observer, as well as for the city. It was only when it was seen from these angles that he could believe London had been built brick by brick, not born out of its own mind. But the city did not like to be found out.”34

Kraken has the same image of the city as a living organism: one of the sects, the Londonmancers, devote their life to the service and protection of the City of London, and as the name suggests, decipher the City’s messages, and predict the future by reading the city’s “intestines,” and image which brings us back to wounds and wounding. All protagonists are defective and wounded in a sense. Richard is displaced from his home town and unhappy in his relationship, Saul is grieving for his father with whom he can never make amends, and Billy is metaphorically enclosed in one of the specimen bottles he so much loves. Their wounds are projected into the spatial environment, and their displacement into the fantastic functions as much as a journey of healing, as a rite of passage.

Conclusion The metropolitan fantastic as topos bears not only the wounds of the protagonists, but also functions as a site for projecting the collective anxieties of the age. All three heroes struggle with authority: Gaiman’s protagonist is isolated in the modern technocratic metropolis, and has to 33 34

China Miéville, King Rat (London: Macmillan, 2000), 237. Ibid., 257.

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define himself against both worldly and divine agency. Saul becomes a marginalized victim of authorities both mundane and fantastic, and starts a revolution to upset the existing authoritarian world order without destroying its citizens. Billy has to find a way to navigate the liminal territory between the scientific and the religious paradigm, and emerges as a synthesizer of the two realms. The displaced heroes complete the arc of the quest, and although return is denied as the fantastic cannot be unseen again, they effect a transformation of their respected territories of difference. The palimpsestual nature of urban fantasy remains intact, although we could argue that the mundane is transposed by the fantastic by the end of the novels. The tensions resulting from simultaneous formulaic re-enactment and the transgression of norms, just as the exposition of the fantastic body of the metropolis as the urban abject, leave the reader displaced and in discomfort. The Dickensian horror of the infernal city is revealed under the sheen: the fantastic is not a utopian space, nor is it far, far away, and this proximity to the familiar suffuses it with uncomfortable intimacy, shedding light on problems, issues and anxieties buried deep within the collective urbanite unconscious.

Bibliography Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. New York: Harper Torch, 2001. Heuvelmans, Bernard. Kraken and the Colossal Octopus: In the Wake of Sea-Monsters. London: Routledge, 2015. Irvine, Alexander C. “Urban Fantasy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, 200–213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981. James, Edward, and Farah Mendlesohn, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection. Transl. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Lynch, Kevin. The Image of the City. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. Mendlesohn, Farah. Rhetorics of Fantasy. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Miéville, China. King Rat. London: Macmillan, 2000. —. Kraken. New York: Del Rey, 2010. Parrinder, Patrick. “From Mary Shelley to The War of the Worlds: The Thames Valley Catastrophe.” In Anticipations: Essays on Early Science Fiction and Its Precursors, edited by David Seed, 58–74.

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Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995. Pike, David Lawrence. Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007. The Monthly Video. Inside the Imagination of China Mieville. Accessed September 29, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GaaFun09At0. Yablon, Nick. “The Metropolitan Life in Ruins: Architectural and Fictional Speculations in New York, 1909-19.” American Quarterly 56.2 (June 1, 2004): 308–47.

ARENA ON THE SCREEN: HETEROTOPIA AND THEATRICALITY IN THE HUNGER GAMES TRILOGY ILDIKÓ LIMPÁR

Introduction I‫ތ‬m beckoned over to a monitor. They play back the last few minutes of taping and I watch the woman on the screen. Her body seems larger in stature, more imposing than mine. Her face smudged but sexy. Her brows black and drawn in an angle of defiance. Wisps of smoke—suggesting she has either just been extinguished or is about to burst into flames—rise from her clothes. I do not know who this person is.1

In Mockingjay, the third volume of Suzanne Collins‫ތ‬s The Hunger Games Trilogy, Katniss is filmed so that the revolution may have propaganda material (propo) to be broadcast in the various districts and eventually in the Capitol. When Katniss looks at the monitor to check the taped propo, she knows she is looking at herself but is aware that the image does not reflect her real self. It is herself that she is watching and it is not herself at all. She is made to think about the difference between her own identity and her filmed character, which was created to convince masses that she is alive and is ready to lead the fight for freedom. As Katniss involuntarily has become the token of the rebellion led by District 13, the propo aims to transmit an image about the symbol and not the girl‫ތ‬s real self. This scene evokes Michel Foucault‫ތ‬s famous passage on the mirror-experience in his theory on heterotopia. The mirror, as a “placeless place” is, on the one hand, a utopia “that enables me to see myself there where I am absent.”2 But the mirror is also a heterotopia that “makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the 1

Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York, N.Y.: Scholastic Press, 2010), 78-9. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Trans. Jay Miskowiecz, Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 24.

2

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glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.”3 Similarly to Foucault‫ތ‬s example of the mirror, the film—and the medium that transmits it to the spectator, whether it is a monitor or a huge screen—functions as a heterotopic space. The heterotopia thus created has profound implications in The Hunger Games trilogy, where turning the Games into a public event, a screened spectacle, provides the foundations of a stable-looking, authoritarian state. Creating propos becomes a visualized form of message broadcasting. It is a method that District 13 uses in order to broaden the support and the scope of the revolution; it is a tool, at the same time that has earlier proven to be the Capitol’s most effective weapon in maintaining Panem‫ތ‬s political regime. Brainwashing via making the subjects of the state watch propaganda films on the history of Panem is one of the practices of the Capitol to ensure her power; but even more important from the aspect of political communication is the broadcasting of the Hunger Games, annually organized, screened, and presented to the people, who mandatorily watch their events. Among the series of events constituting the Hunger Games, the bloody championship that takes place in the arena is of primary significance; accordingly, I am going to focus on how screening the arena creates a heterotopia for Panem that encompasses all the roles that Foucault claims heterotopias should; and how understanding the arena as heterotopia leads to comprehending the underlying mechanisms of President Snow‫ތ‬s state. The arena in itself is a kind of heterotopia, I argue; and turning it into a spectacle via broadcasting the main events that take place there completes its heterotopic functions. Foucault‫ތ‬s theory has been severely criticized by many, mostly based on the impression that heterotopia, as framed by Foucault, is far too general to be of practical use or, as Benjamin Genocchio questioned, “what cannot be designated a heterotopia?”4 I believe that this effect comes partly from the loose interpretation of the term, as rarely do scholars consider all the principles assigned to the notion as necessary components in interpretation. Therefore, after observing the arena as a physical place based on all the principles that Foucault explains in his theory, I will then focus on the arena as a place of performance. My approach relies on Joanne Tompkins‫ތ‬s narrowed interpretation of heterotopia as suiting theater space analysis, this way highlighting the arena‫ތ‬s function as a broadcast theater space. 3

Ibid. Genocchio quoted in Joanne Tompkins, Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 22. 4

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Crisis Heterotopia Versus Heterotopia of Deviation Foucault argues that all cultures create heterotopias,5 and that heterotopias may be divided into two basic categories: the “crisis heterotopias,” explained as “privileged or sacred or forbidden places” characterizing primitive societies;6 and heterotopias of deviation, which people who do not conform to the norm society imposes take, and which are replacing the former type.7 One is tempted to argue that Panem has two distinct cultures, as Collins builds her fictional, dystopian world on a binarism between the Capitol and the districts; but in fact the visible discrepancies that may well be labeled as “cultural” come from the political that provides the most important common cultural experience for the two parts of the state—the Hunger Games. While the actual experience is different for the Capitol people and the district residents (fun versus suffering), what generates the experiences is the shared “cultural” event, the elongated and screened spectacle that actually confirms the division between the privileged and the marginalized. This event may, at the same time, be understood as the profane version of the once sacred rite of sacrificing a scapegoat (in this case, several scapegoats) of the community in order to keep the community “clean.” As René Girard contends in his theory on scapegoating, originally “The effectiveness of the ritual was the idea that the sins were expelled with the goat and then the community was rid of them.”8 In the context of the novel, the sin that was laid on the tributes is the past rebellion against the political regime, combined with its possible after-effect, that is, nurturing the idea of the revolution as a possible means of undermining the existing political structure. The scapegoats, consequently, ensure the stability of the totalitarian state, and the rite of sacrifice takes place at a designated, utterly profane place that, nevertheless supports the sacred, nearly divine nature of the presidency. Each year the Hunger Games are assigned a place within the culture where the tributes are gathered—but the symbolic nature of the arena makes it difficult to decide to which class of heterotopia this space of exile, torture and death belongs. Heterotopias of crisis are “reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment 5

Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Ibid. 7 Ibid., 25. 8 Girard, René. “An Excerpt from René Girard‫ތ‬s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001], chapter twelve, ‫ދ‬Scapegoat,‫ ތ‬pages 154-160,” Girardian Lectionary, accessed 12 September 2016. http://girardianlectionary.net/res/iss_12-scapegoat.htm 6

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in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women, the elderly, etc.”9 This definition seems to fit the arena, into which the tributes are sent. The tributes are definitely in a state of crisis: they are chosen to suffer for the sins of the past and all but the victor are doomed to die. For the participants in the Games, the arenaexperience constitutes a rite of passage10 into an early—and for most, painfully short—adulthood by confronting death in various forms. The uniqueness of Collins‫ތ‬s dystopian world, however, resides in this heterotopia of crisis as considered—at least by the Capitol people—a heterotopia of deviation. This is a place for the deviants, for those who are responsible for the revolution of the past. As those individuals are no longer alive, each year the punishment is taken by twenty-four descendants of the once rebellious population. In theory, all the districts are “punishment areas,” providing for the privileged Capitol, and lacking in essentials; in practice, however, a “punishment spectacle” (an arena) is created each year to better highlight what deviance means in terms of consequences. As Guy Andre Risko argues, the districts themselves are “juridically empty spaces, especially from the position of those children who could potentially be chosen for the Hunger Games—and for their parents, friends, neighbors, and mere acquaintances.”11 It follows, therefore, that the arena is a place that is fully outside the law and where the tribute may be understood as a Homo sacer in Agamben‫ތ‬s term, that is, “a figure of law that is empty of political legitimacy.”12 This Homo sacer turns into a deviant indeed not only in symbolic terms but also in practice, as the tribute “is thrown into the state of exception”13 and is forced to behave in a manner that clearly does not match the norm or the law in effect in other parts of the state. The arena situation and the arena itself provoke the tributes, and transform them into ruthless murderers. As the Hunger Games are broadcast, and the citizens are forced to watch the visual reports, the arena becomes the site that justifies the deposit of the children 9

Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 24. Arnold van Gennep‫ތ‬s term from his influential work entitled The Rites of Passage, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 11 Guy Andre Risko, “Katniss Everdeen‫ތ‬s Liminal Choices and the Foundations of Revolutionary Ethics,” in Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy, ed. Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark, Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 35 (Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland, 2012), 82. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 10

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into the place of deviance, showing what deeds these tributes are capable of in order to survive. The arena thus becomes both a forbidden place and a place of deviance, a combination of the two types of heterotopia—but the latter type reveals more about the arena‫ތ‬s role in the life of Panem‫ތ‬s community.

Transformation of Function While a heterotopia has a distinct, well-identifiable function within a society, that function may change in the course of history.14 As the plot of Collins‫ތ‬s novel series takes place in a relatively short period of time, this quality of the arena as a heterotopia may prove hard to examine. Nevertheless, as the third part of the trilogy focuses on a turning point in history, the overthrow of Panem‫ތ‬s government led by President Snow, readers are offered various scenarios to consider as to how the arena’s function may be transformed. The usage of the arena under President Snow‫ތ‬s regime is clear. It is a place that each year serves to reap a selected number of children. The motive behind sending children to the arena and turning them into a spectacle, to which the features of the arena importantly contribute, is to remind the once rebellious districts of their past actions that qualify as crimes in the interpretation of the dictatorship. It serves to fuel the trauma, not letting it run its course, always opening the wound on the body of the state, thereby further weakening those who lost the war and became oppressed. This function, at the same time, also supports maintaining the authoritarian state: the broadcast arena, as a huge monster whose brain is the Control Room, attacks the people of the districts in the course of a psychological war, as the arena images have long-lasting and widely targeting effects. Two children from each district are annually sent to this hell-like place, and while physically the districts lose “only” two persons (or one, in a very fortunate case), the whole community is affected by this loss: those who knew the tributes are obviously most deeply affected; in addition, the images evoke the arena experiences of the previous years, thus even those who are not directly affected in a year vividly remember their earlier losses and pain. This way the whole community is severely inflicted, and as a result, the districts are continuously under psychological torture. The images are evoked in various forms even after the actual arena phase of the Hunger Games is over, never allowing citizens to let their memories go or at least fade, denying them relief through working with 14

Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25.

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the trauma by not acknowledging trauma as such. For the Capitol people, the arena functions as a reminder of their privileged position and serves as a distraction from political awareness—just like any other components of their life that may be considered as spectacle, including parties and fashion. When the revolution wins and a new epoch is about to begin, the new leadership must decide on the fate of the Hunger Games. Indirectly this is a question about a new arena experience, presumably broadcast as the previous Games were. There are two options offered: no more Games ever, or one last Games to close the previous era. Either way, the function of the arena would change. The earlier created arenas would surely not stay as tourist sites for the Capitol people, but could possibly become memorial sites later on;15 yet, all this is just speculation, as the novel in the Epilogue does not ponder upon the future in this respect. Nevertheless, as there is a change in the political system, the idea of organizing a last Hunger Games, thus creating a last arena also emerges. If this plan were realized, the arena would come to function as a place of revenge and differentiation, where the previous era that was characterized by the massacre of district children (who would now be replaced by Capitol children) would spectacularly be ended. The act of differentiation would come about not simply by changing the targeted victims and audience; it would come about from the intention of the organizers, who would hold the Games not to repeat them yearly and maintain the wounded phase of the state, but to cut the wound deep enough to generate a trauma that differently inflicts and satisfies the inhabitants of Panem, and then let the traumatized people heal after this last arena experience. The arena would be a symbolic place that shows the power of the marginalized, and thus would communicate a different political message than it did before (according to the flawed logic of the new political power that would support such a move). However, based on this logic, the last arena would inevitably become a regularly broadcast image to remind the people of what to avoid in the future. Paradoxically, this reminder would also prevent full recovery from the trauma, and the arena would similarly serve to maintain the wounded phase (although with less blood, thus more humanely, one may argue).

15 This imagined transformation from the monstrous to the sacred is a process characteristic of real world concentration camps. The idea of a similar metamorphosis of the site may be supported by the parallel that one may find between the arenas and the concentration camps, which also aimed at massacring the scapegoated segment of the society.

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Juxtaposing Incompatible Sites When Foucault explains how a heterotopia “is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible,”16 he cites the Oriental garden as a prime example. The garden that symbolically encompasses the world we live in includes the signifiers of its various parts, therefore it is “the smallest parcel of the world and then it is a totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity.”17 That the arena is such a garden is not difficult to perceive. The place of combat, redesigned yearly is an extension of Panem that symbolically reproduces the power relations between the Capitol and the districts. The Control Room is occupied by Capitol people, who execute the orders of the Head Gamemaker, who has, therefore, a nearly divine power over the fate of the tributes. But the political dominance is strongly connected to economic and technological supremacy; accordingly, the arena exhibits the superiority of the ruling class in this respect, as well. The tools for survival are assured by the gamemakers; the goods that may specifically help a targeted tribute from the outside is connected to the sponsors, who naturally come from the privileged Capitol society—and this is why sending bread by a district community becomes such a powerful way of communication at one point in the first part of the trilogy. Yet, the most important aspect of Panem‫ތ‬s character is manifest in its disconnection from the natural world18 stemming from disrespect and resulting in the abuse of nature. While this special form of the garden appears as a wilderness and thus suggests a natural environment, it is at least partially artificial—created, manipulated, and functioning as a monster, just like the Capitol and its head, the President. What appears to be a “natural condition” roots in a technologically manipulated reality, similarly to life in the districts. The methods for maintaining the condition of persecution, isolation, and want in essentials for survival leading to an almost inevitable death are borrowed from Panem‫ތ‬s everyday reality. The use of muttations,19 which were famously employed by the Capitol in their 16

Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 25. Ibid., 26. 18 Carissa Ann Baker, “Outside the Steam: The Construction of Relationship to Panem’s Nature,” in Space and Place in The Hunger Games: New Readings of the Novels, ed. Deidre Anne Evans Garriott, Whitney Elaine Jones and Julie Elizabeth Tyler (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2014), 198. 19 Note that the word “muttation” is an artificial creation, the result of mutation, too. 17

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political machinations, including its unorthodox surveillance system of jabberjays, is a spectacular version that replicates the Capitol‫ތ‬s attempt to subdue the people in the districts. But the muttations mirror the Capitol citizens‫ ތ‬very nature, too: from Katniss‫ތ‬s perspective, these people look unnatural due to various manipulations effected by plastic surgery. As a consequence, while the district people are reaped—brought together and made a spectacle of with the help of the arena—the Capitol residents as a community appear as a freak show, a shocking spectacle for Katniss. The arena as a heterotopic garden mirrors the monstrous, hybrid nature of the Capitol that comes from the modification of the residents’ natural bodies: the natural environment is turned brutally murderous by the artificially generated “natural” hazards that threaten the tributes‫ ތ‬life. Poisonous fog or water, balls of fire, flood—all at the push of a button (literally), just like all the muttations that seem to be the “natural” inhabitants of the environment, while they are monsters, which were especially created to attack and kill the tributes. The majority of these components of the arena also demonstrate that the Capitol hurts not only physically, but longs to afflict the mind and the psyche. Just as the institution of the Hunger Games aims at a ceaseless psychological torture, the various muttations try to damage the brain functions and the psyche of the contestants. The jabberjays in the arenas imitate the desperate cries of the tributes‫ ތ‬beloved ones; the tracker jackers have a venom that causes hallucinations of all kinds; the wolf-muttations with the facial features and the eyes of the deceased tributes reflect the ultimate terror that the arena holds—that death does not put an end to suffering; that one may be possessed by the Capitol even after death; that one may lose one‫ތ‬s humanity any time, as it is impossible to resist the Capitol‫ތ‬s maneuvers of turning anyone into a monster. This latter threat is, again, a fear that reflects on everyday reality in Panem. Those who appear victorious in the Hunger Games, seemingly having overcome all the difficulties posed by the arena and the Capitol, stay, in fact, victims of the system that made them “spectacle victors.” They feel they have lost a part of their humanity. They may deeply suffer from this experience and realization, trying to suppress the pain coming from the trauma, as Haymitch does with the help of alcohol or the morphlings with the use of drugs; or they may embrace their new, hybrid identity, and instead of suppression, they may choose to make it part of a spectacle, as Enobaria does with her unique appearance that calls attention to her sharpened and inlaid teeth. Her post-arena body modification becomes a frightening memento of how she managed to become victor, as she actually killed “one tribute by ripping open her

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throat with her teeth.”20 The arena, this corrupted garden, may every year differently highlight aspects of the world it is a part of. In the seventy-fifth Hunger Games the arrangement of the arena symbolically corresponds to Panem‫ތ‬s structure, as the actual space of suffering is divided into twelve parts, each standing for one district, and each having a different tool to attack the tributes: jabberjays, poisonous fog, blood rain, and monkey muttations, just to name a few. The overall presence of poison and blood, furthermore, also indicates how Panem is ruled, since President Snow gained and maintains power with the help of poisoning his enemies—but as he also poisons himself to avoid suspicion, his mouth bleeds despite his simultaneously taking the antidote. In addition, Snow’s ever-present attribute, the white rose, emits a genetically enhanced scent to hide the reek of blood that comes from the president’s mouth. The rose, appearing as a natural object, is in fact a product of genetic engineering, and its function also relates to the bloody mechanisms behind Panem’s governmental power. It may be read as the object symbolizing all that Snow stands for—and Katniss does read the sign on several occasions, when the rose becomes the substitute for the president’s presence.21 The arena is the container of such artificially modified objects, creatures, and phenomena of nature, proving itself to be a heterotopia reflecting Panem’s monstrosity in this way, also. The annual fighting space of the Games thus represents the dystopian world that brought it into existence on many levels. It is a space of massacre outside the juridical Panem, it is part of the political Panem, and it represents Panem as a geographical and political entity as well as a spectacle. It embodies the space of the most inhumane imagination, ruthlessly collecting and amplifying all the anxieties of those people living in the districts; and as such, since Panem exhibits a space of imagination 20

Suzanne Collins, Catching Fire (New York, N.Y.: Scholastic Press, 2009), 224. The rose is generally associated with Snow‫ތ‬s character: the site of Katniss‫ތ‬s and Peeta‫ތ‬s post-victory interview is decorated with pink roses, reminding the couple of Snow‫ތ‬s power that contextualizes their triumph and turn it into a co-operation with the oppressing regime (Collins, Catching Fire, 166); it is the artificially reeking rose that signals the President‫ތ‬s visit to Katniss‫ތ‬s home in her absence (Collins, Catching Fire, 15); and later pink and white roses cover the place of destruction after bombing District 13 as a kind of signature of the designer behind the retorsion (Collins, Mockingjay, 161). I have written extensively on the symbolism of the rose in The Hunger Games trilogy in “Smell of Roses and Blood: The Vampire Empire of The Hunger Games trilogy,” Monsters and the Monstrous 4.2 (Winter 2014): 15-24. 21

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where our contemporary fears are presented to us in a well-articulated manner, the arena transforms into a site of our very anxieties about where our present may be heading.

Heterotopia Linked to Heterochrony Heterotopias “open onto what might be termed . . . heterochrony”:22 they are connected to slices of time beyond the actual time of the place it exists in. Foucault differentiates between two major types in this function of the placeless places: they may either be accumulative, as museums or libraries are; or they could be transitory, as fairground displays are; in addition, even the combination of these two kinds may be found as a newly emerging category, for which Foucault gives as an example the Polynesian holiday village, combining the heterotopia of festival by experiencing primitive life for a short term and the heterotopia of eternity because “the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to the origins were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge.”23 The arena in the Hunger Games novels clearly displays a festive quality. The arena is an empty (or even non-existing) space in physical terms until the Hunger Games it belongs to reaches its combat phase. Before the killing championship is displaced into this special space, the arena is only a space that will embrace its function—just like the outskirts of cities that regularly give place to fairs. The arena then becomes a spectacle, combining various elements in one place, including the tributes from the twelve districts, who would otherwise not be able to share the same, undivided space (as the districts are kept in complete isolation). Being tightly linked to Panem‫ތ‬s history, however, the arena calls for an interpretation beyond that of a transitory place dedicated to a special event. While this heterotopia exists in the present of the Hunger Games it was created for, as one of its functions is to make the spectators remember the past arenas, it exists in relation to all past arenas. This purpose becomes relevant through the practice of transforming the fighting places into themepark-like sites for Capitol tourists. One may argue that the post-Games arenas that become open to the public function as reverse Disneyland-sites in the Baudrillardian sense. In his influential essay entitled “Simulacra and Simulation,” Jean Baudrillard 22 23

Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 26. Ibid.

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discusses the concept of Disneyland. Citing L. Martin‫ތ‬s ideological interpretation that categorizes Disneyland as a “panegyric of American values, [an] idealized transposition of a contradictory reality,”24 Baudrillard argues that this “ideological” blanket functions as a cover for a simulation of the third order: Disneyland exists in order to hide that it is the “real” country, all of “real” America that is Disneyland. . . . Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology) but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, and thus of saving the reality principle.25

As opposed to this concept, the arena sites that invite visitors are presented not as imaginary but as real to convince the spectators that what may have appeared as imaginary because of the medium through which the place was experienced is a real place that may be physically entered and touched. The transformation of the arenas takes place to integrate the once isolated space of punishment into the everyday reality of Panem; therefore, the place needs to assume a kind of ordinariness as opposed to the phantastic. The fairytale-like quality of Disneyland, Baudrillard highlights, contributes to “the debility of [. . . Disneland‫ތ‬s] imaginary, its infantile degeneration.”26 The concept behind this appearance results from the contradiction between people‫ތ‬s nostalgic desire for their innocent childhood and the obligations that come with adulthood: “This world wants to be childish in order to make us believe that the adults are elsewhere, in the ‫ދ‬real‫ ތ‬world, and to conceal the fact that true childishness is everywhere—that it is that of the adults themselves who come here to act the child in order to foster illusions as to their real childishness.”27 The former arenas, in contrast, are associated with the hasty process of coming of age characterized by blood and death. It is an adult world, once isolated from the rest of Panem, and it wants to trick the visitors into believing that the children are elsewhere, in the “real” world—and to conceal the fact that in this world no “real” childhood is imaginable. There are no children outside the arena sites; there are only young people whose every 24 Jean Baudrillard, “Simulacra and Simulation,” in Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988), 171-2. 25 Ibid., 172. 26 Ibid., 173. 27 Ibid.

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possibility for an innocent and joyful childhood is taken away from them the moment they are born into this world. The altered usage of the arena as a tourist attraction still serves remembering, but only through a strictly controlled and manipulated process of reminiscence, as it is clearly constructed to avoid the memorial function by highlighting the fun aspect. President Snow makes the transformed space accessible only to the privileged part of Panem‫ތ‬s society, who enjoy the Hunger Games as if they were just an entertaining program, so the Capitol may easily direct the interpretation process, and reach the desired effect without much effort. The original function of an arena is always to provide a space of massacre in the present as well as to remind the audience of all the previous arena spaces of massacre. Although the gamemakers work hard to overdo all previous attempts of creating the arena as a site of bloody entertainment, components of the space inevitably echo earlier solutions (either by way of drawing parallels or by seeing certain methods as contrasting to previous designs). The arena, furthermore, abolishes time the way Foucault‫ތ‬s example of that Polynesian holiday village does: the arena-experience (which may include being physically in the space but also being “just” emotionally engaged with it via watching the events it holds, entering the space only virtually and emotionally) reflects on one point in the history of Panem: the moment of the Capitol‫ތ‬s victory over the rebellious districts, coinciding with the vantage point from which the Capitol views and interprets the whole of Panem‫ތ‬s history. It is the bloody reenactment of the destruction the districts suffered then, meant to be an educational process to the descendants of the people who lost their battle to the Capitol. This purpose of using the arena links to the theatrical and ritualistic nature of the place, based on spectacle, imitation and repetition to be examined later.

Isolation and Penetrability “Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable.”28 Unlike public places, no free access is granted to those who are to enter. Heterotopic sites are usually not entered voluntarily (as in the case of a prison, for instance) and/or without meeting prerequisites, very often a purification process (as in the case of many religious sites). Heterotopias often give the illusion, however, that they are easily penetrable, hiding, in fact, “curious 28

Ibid.

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exclusions,” the way night rooms for travelers in South America function.29 The arena place, as I noted before, recalls the prison-type heterotopia, a place of punishment, which the selected unlucky ones hardly ever enter voluntarily. Events in the trilogy are triggered by Katniss‫ތ‬s “volunteering” to become a tribute instead of her sister, Prim—an act that is clearly made possible by the rules of the Games; volunteering, nevertheless, just provides the illusion that people may exercise their right to free will in order to enter the arena. The government creates circumstances that force a fixed number of children to participate in the Games each year. Katniss acts out of despair when she volunteers: she strives to save her sister from death that would certainly befall her if she let the little girl be reaped—but Katniss would never enter the arena of her own free will. She voluntarily saves Prim, but involuntarily accepts the fact that this is possible only by becoming a tribute and fighting to the death. The tributes from the Career Districts, however, are often volunteers without such personal motives; the tradition of raising career tributes in these districts comes from unchangeable circumstances. The children in those parts of the state are trained to perceive the Games as an opportunity to effectively increase the standard of living for their people and for themselves. Volunteering, to say the least, is relative in all of these cases. But this is not the only aspect of penetrability to be considered when we look at the special case of the Hunger Games arena. The arena is not only a geographical location that may be entered by the tributes only; it is also a place that is made penetrable for everyone else by the Capitol‫ތ‬s process of broadcasting the events held there. For those living in the districts, this “opportunity” to enter the arena is just as involuntary as it was for those who were chosen as tributes to fight in the arena. It is a reminder of the political situation, and as such, a punishment that is comparable to prison. Yet, the collective experience, ironically, underlines the isolation of the suffering spectator (that is, the district inhabitant): broadcasting is a form of communication that is intended to be unidirectional and excludes the possibility of actively shaping the events shown on the screen. As this privilege is, actually, granted to the “sponsors,” those for whom this opportunity is only virtual due to their economically marginalized position feel their isolation and impotence manifest in the lack of communication with the fighters even more painfully. This inability to communicate and act makes the “usual” isolation of the district people from the Capitol more intense and palpable, 29

Ibid.

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and the arena fulfills its primary function designed by the Capitol of punishing all who do not belong to the privileged sector of Panem.

The Relationship to All the Remaining Space Heterotopias either create a space of illusion or a space of compensation in relation to all the other space in the culture that produces the site.30 The former function reveals how the real places are more illusionary than the heterotopia, while the latter projects a more perfected—I would say somewhat utopian—version of the real world. Since the arena, as I have demonstrated, suggests on many levels how Panem operates, watching it disturbs and unsettles the spectator, who must witness an intense presentation of what the world he lives in is like. While everyday life is hard in the districts, to use a euphemism, the existence of the district communities assures people of the survivability of the hardships (even though a lot of people do die simply of hunger in District 12, for instance). The arena, however, amplifies the bloodiness of the reality, intensely and brutally confronting people with the unveiled truth that the empire lives on the blood of its oppressed subjects, and survival is against the odds, while death appears as almost inevitable and at the same time unavoidably cruel. It also suggests the political principle of divide et impera upon which the empire is founded. The erasure of community is necessary for the emergence of the one and only victor both in the Games and in Panem’s everyday conduct of suppression. The arena is not utopian, but is the Capitol‫ތ‬s artistic representation of its own dystopian nature in the form of a controlled (though not scripted) performance—a characteristic that leads to an investigation of the arena specifically as a theater space.

The Arena as Theater Space In her Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space (2014), Joanne Tompkins lays out the reasons for using Foucault‫ތ‬s notion of heterotopia to fruitfully analyze theater performances, more exactly, theater spaces in performances as cultural products. Claiming that Foucault‫ތ‬s famous example of the theater as heterotopia has given way to interpreting the theater based on its general function as a heterotopia, she, in response, seeks to clarify how the notion of heterotopia may effectively be applied “as a means of rendering more palpable both 30

Ibid., 27.

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the spatial and the socio-political possibilities that theatre presents.”31 Tompkins lists six aspects of theater space, underlining that none of the listed features qualifies as heterotopic in itself. She, furthermore, emphasizes two characteristics that are often neglected when theater is interpreted with the help of heterotopia: one is the unsettling nature of heterotopia; the other is the socio-political relevance of the space when heterotopia is created by a performance. In my reading, Tompkins practically suggests with this latter claim that the theater in its general function is inherently capable of becoming a heterotopic space; theater space, however, will in effect become a heterotopia once the other principles—or at least some of the other ones—prevail.32 That is, what Foucault lists as the five principles should be considered not as alternatives in defining heterotopia, but rather as complementary features. Of course, the difficulty in interpreting and applying Foucault‫ތ‬s concept of heterotopia derives from the very fact that Foucault himself does not elaborate on the interconnectedness of the principles that he lists. If we refuse the complementary interpretation, heterotopia indeed becomes as broad a concept as Genocchio pictures it; if we insist on the complementary interpretation, we need to labor strenuously to make sense of Foucault‫ތ‬s idea of, for instance, the museum as a heterotopia, if heterotopia must either be a heterotopia of crisis or that of deviation (and I certainly do not entertain the idea that those who enter a museum or a theater are necessarily in a crisis or perform a deviant behavior from society‫ތ‬s point of view). Tompkins proposes a new way of using heterotopia for theater studies, surpassing the general notion of understanding theater as heterotopic space.33 By acknowledging theater as a special medium that is capable of creating heterotopia, Tompkins highlights the aspects of theater space that may usefully be linked to various principles that Foucault deals with, mostly emphasizing the capacity of theater space to juxtapose various 31

Tompkins, Theatre’s Heterotopias, 15. This approach, appears to be in accordance with Foucault‫ތ‬s general approach to heterotopia, I think. While he does not specify his idea about theater in detail, it is obvious from his text that one of his three famous examples for heterotopia, the garden is not understood in the broadest term. He limits the concept by narrowing his observation to a special type of garden. All gardens have the capacity to become heterotopias, but not all gardens may be considered as heterotopic sites. Similarly, while all theaters and cinemas do have the capacity of becoming heterotopias because of their basic function, they should meet some other requirements in order to consider them heterotopias in the narrow sense. 33 Ibid., 24. 32

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incompatible spaces in geography and in time within one site; and the necessity of “an intersection with the cultural context of which they are a part”34 in contrast with “a narrow metaphoric application.”35 In her view, site-specific performances carry the most potential for creating a connection between the performance and the socio-political world, which is a prerequisite for the heterotopia to fulfill its function. The value in exploring heterotopias in theatre and performance generally is the opportunity to connect theatre much more directly with the social and political world in which it takes place, expanding the possible frame(s) of reference and the effects of the performance and the ideas it elicits. Whether concrete or metaphoric, heterotopias provide the building blocks for creating something different: the opportunity to try out – on stage or in another type of space marked out for performance – what else might take place. In this way, heterotopia can generate spaces of promise, even of hope. A heterotopia may even provide a counter-example: that is, it may perform what option(s) are unlikely to take hold, simply to rule them out. [… Heterotopia, therefore, may] effect a change (however subtle) in the consciousness of audience members. It seeks to make audiences think, without prescribing what to think or anticipating immediate action per se.36

In The Hunger Games trilogy, the performance enacted in the arena is based on a completely different foundation than the site-specific performances Tompkins chose for her case studies; however, the visible contrasts are also helpful in understanding how the arena is able to generate the kind of heterotopia that Tompkins describes. Is the arena site-specific, at all? Surely not in the sense Tompkins uses the term. In Panem, the specific arena is a non-existing place before the performance begins, so it rather functions as a big, highly technological, yet traditional theater space. Each year the space is given new shape, as there is a new director (called the Head Gamemaker). And since the space, after the performance is over, is turned into a tourist site, we may think of the arenas as annually built theaters. The arena, however, is site-specific in the sense that it has a fixed history in the mind of the spectators despite the fact that the arena is not connected to one specific place in Panem. It is ideology-specific, but the space itself is part of the ideology: the space does not only provide setting for the performance; the space is the manifestation of the political power that orders the performance; furthermore, it does the job of the director, and it even becomes an active 34

Ibid., 22. Ibid. 36 Ibid., 41. 35

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participant of the performance due to its monstrous nature, as if it were the twenty-fifth tribute, who poses a lethal threat to all others. It becomes sitespecific to the spectators in the sense that memorials erected on sites of destruction are: the specific arena space immediately interacts with memories of all previous arena spaces which is one way an arena is able to generate heterotopia. Further differences between the examples Tompkins examines and the arena space in Panem emerge from the intention behind the performances. Site-specific performances, as Tompkins underlines, rely on the audience‫ތ‬s ability to create connection between the show they witness and the site it is located in; they also seek to generate a space of experimental thought by presenting what is not (either as what is hoped for or what is warned against). The directors of the arena performances, however, do not comply with the western theater heritage—in whose framework Tompkins necessarily works—and thus do not aim at perfecting society by the yearly organization of the Games: they do not hope for creating a heterotopic space in order to make people think of what might be instead of what exists, for these intentions would clearly come from a democratic political notion of the world; on the contrary, they carefully designed and built arenas in order to convince people that there is no space outside of what is allowed to be experienced, which is in harmony with the totalitarian political concept of the world. This seems to be an absolutely justified claim on the part of the organizers, as there is a crucial difference between an arena-performance and a more traditional theater performance: the theater spectators are aware that the theater is a reflection of reality and an illusion about reality, but not reality itself; in contrast, those who mandatorily watch the Hunger Games, are painfully aware that what they see is the reality. In fact, what the heterotopia may achieve in the mind of the audience is the same, but comes from a reversed process: the heterotopia Tompkins examines in her case studies comes from the ability of the heterotopia to give insight into reality with the help of deception, illusion—“brave theater”;37 the arena‫ތ‬s heterotopia works from the opposite direction: the gamemakers rely on the heterotopia‫ތ‬s ability to show reality—and this reality is trusted to deceive the audience and trick them into thinking that what they see is the reality, the only possible reality. Yet, while the arena does create this visible link between performance and the state, there is a heterotopia that emerges independently of—or rather, despite—the intention of the gamemakers. Were it not for this heterotopic site that takes the space of the gaps of the 37

Howard Barker‫ތ‬s term in Tompkins, Theatre’s Heterotopias, 3.

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presented world, the arena performance in its broadcast version would just reinforce the notion that there is no escape from this reality, and the anxieties presented in the arena correspond to the exact fears people face outside the arena. The hope that Collins‫ތ‬s dystopian world communicates comes from finding the gap in what is presented, and making sense of the heterotopia thus discovered. This heterotopia emerges as an inevitable consequence of the previously organized Games and comes from the nature of the performance: it is an unscripted play, where setting and major crisis situations are provided from the outside, but all else is shaped by improvisation. In this “play,” too, the dual identity of theater prevails: “Theatrical reality itself is a dual identity, the actor being both him/herself and the character in the play . . . ; the stage a constructed place and its referent in reality.”38 A duality may be observed, however, in connection with the arena as a theatrical space: it is a physical presence, and the representation or symbolic evocation of history as a battle field, evoking both the historical war that the Hunger Games aim to “commemorate,” and all previous evocations of this battle in the form of the arena performances. The actors do not have written speeches and stage directions; nevertheless, the main narrative is given, and it looks unchangeable—except there are gaps, and these heterotopias are able to shape the course of the dictated narrative. The moment when the performer—in this case, Katniss—decides to step out of the role of a puppet meeting the expectations of the gamemakers, and becomes her own agent coincides with the realization that the arena is not only reality but a theater strongly linked to politics, and as such, it should be able to fulfill its role as a “brave theater.” In fact, from the very start Katniss is well aware of the arena‫ތ‬s theatrical nature, but it takes time for her to realize that acting a part in this play is more than fighting for survival: it is also making sense of the quest for survival. She manages to perceive the arena both as a reality and as an absolute nightmare, a dystopia that purposefully magnifies the anxiety of her world in a mythic space, which has its scientific explanation in her world, yet still does not function as the reality outside the arena, so it is fantastic as an experience. And when she sees the arena as a dystopia, she is able to create the spaces of hope. In the seventy-fourth Hunger Games, this heterotopic space is created 38

Csilla Bertha, “Theatricality and Self-Reflexivity: The Play-within-the-Play in Select Contemporary Irish Plays,” in Irish Theatre in Transition: From the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century, ed. Donald E. Morse (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 100.

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by breaking isolation through friendship as opposed to practical alliance. Katniss makes friends with Rue, then pays respect to her after the little girl is slain, which then leads to Rue‫ތ‬s district sending her bread as a sign of appreciation and friendship. The arena thus manages to function as a theatrical dystopia, creating at the same time not only what is to be feared but also what is non-existent yet desirable: cooperation among the isolated districts and instead of accepting passivity action against the passive role one is submitted to. In the seventy-fifth Hunger Games, the dystopian space generates even greater cooperation, but we also know that heterotopic spaces of hope emerged before Katniss ever entered an arena: when Katniss and Peeta watch the recordings of the previous Hunger Games, it turns out that Haymitch won because he could use the part of his virtual prison that was supposed to be invisible, untouchable, unusable: the force field of the arena that always functions as the border of the space for fighting. Haymitch managed to understand how the arena he was thrown into works; by having used that knowledge he also demonstrated that what appeared once a non-existent possibility has become an aid in his becoming victor. Turning the arena‫ތ‬s, that is the Capitol‫ތ‬s tool of oppression into a weapon may seem to fit the traditional narrative that emphasizes the Capitol‫ތ‬s power over the tributes and the districts they come from and represent; but this act, actually, opens the space for alternative interpretation, pointing to what is not: the possibility to fight with the tool of oppression and thereby weaken the oppressor outside the space of performance. It disrupts the enforced narrative and allows the spectators to see a space of potential for change. Katniss fruitfully utilizes and extends this space when in Catching Fire she manages to direct the lighting at the force field that provides the actual walls for the arena as a theater place. The heterotopic site ceases to exist in its original form: its wall is destroyed, whereby its penetrability changes. The arena merges with the rest of the world, it loses its myth of being a space isolated from Panem‫ތ‬s spectators. The moment of destruction is the moment of creating the space of hope by actually demonstrating both the vulnerability of the oppressive regime and the possibility of uniting space by shattering the means of isolation.

Conclusion: The Screen within the Screen Dystopias written for a younger audience tend to be less didactic than those intended to be read by an adult audience, for they do not discard

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hope,39 and thus interpretation becomes less definitive. This ray of hope usually appears in the closure, but the reason why the Epilogue of Collins‫ތ‬s trilogy may actually end on a positive note is encoded in the heterotopic spaces that are able to recurrently surface due to the characters‫ ތ‬attempt at interpreting their own relationships to the spaces of which they are part. The heterotopia that comes to existence in the arena as a place of performance invites thinking without dictating what to think, Tompkins argues.40 In this respect, even hope is something that one must work for in Panem‫ތ‬s world. Heterotopia does unsettle order, but only if one is willing to discover and acknowledge the complexity of the links between what is experienced as heterotopia and its socio-political environment. Accordingly, the audience of the book series is also encouraged to think about the implications of the text that is a dystopia with heterotopic spaces of hope. The arena reflects Panem, and Panem, the fictional world of the trilogy reflects our contemporary world. The correspondence is the most obvious in the novels‫ ތ‬treatment of reality TV programming as part of the Hunger Games. As Valerie Estelle Frankel also observes: when Katniss is “forced to smile for the camera and the Capitol‫ތ‬s frivolous, pleasureseeking citizens, Panem with its Hunger Games begins to mirror another world—ours. This isn‫ތ‬t just a dystopian future; it‫ތ‬s the dystopia of present day America.”41 Since it is the screen that plays a crucial role in making the audience create the link between the text of dystopia and their own contemporary world, the cinematic adaptation of the text is able to evoke a heightened recognition. When in a cinema we watch the screen that shows Katniss‫ތ‬s image mirrored on a screen for an audience in Panem, we are urged to create the link between Panem and our world. The metacinematic scenes primarily appear to work with the irony of the situation, mocking the cinema-visiting real space audience for willingly enjoying Katniss‫ތ‬s suffering in the arena while morally identifying with the protagonist. We are entertained by the movie. We are guilty of schadenfreude, “enjoyment 39

Kay Sambell, “Presenting the Case for Social Change: The Creative Dilemma of Dystopian Writing for Children,” in Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults, (Children‫ތ‬s Literature and Culture Series, ed. Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), Laura Miller quoted in Bill Clemente, “Panem in America: Crisis Economics and a Call for Political Engagement,” in Pharr and Clark, Of Bread, 20. 40 Tompkins, Theatre’s Heterotopias, 41. 41 Valerie Estelle Frankel, “Reflection in a Plastic Mirror,” In Pharr and Clark, Of Bread, 49.

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obtained from the suffering of others,”42 even by reading the book, Andrew Shaffer argues.43 Watching the Games just like Capitol people, watching it for entertainment, makes us even more guilty, and the screen within the screen frames, just as the images of the entertained Capitol residents, easily inform the spectator that s/he is part of the process that makes the characters‫ ތ‬fate unbearable. Yet, while on the level of performance, the audience is aligned with the Capitol‫ތ‬s entertained spectators; the narrative takes Katniss‫ތ‬s perspective, and the films obviously invite the audience to take sides with the protagonist. Those who go to the cinema want to experience the hero(ine)narrative in the first place; but if the film‫ތ‬s metacinematic parts at least at one point make the audience unsettled, making them realize that what appears to be an innocent, fun-seeking spectatorship may indeed be very harmful on a larger scale, the heterotopia becomes functional, and allows for an interpretation that is not so definite. Catching the moments of Katniss watching herself creates a link between the protagonist and the spectator—on the screen as well as outside the screen. These moments are especially unsettling in their nature, for they put the spectator in the dual role of the victim and the victimizer, reflecting on one of the major anxieties of our world coming from the media‫ތ‬s manipulation that turns one into a victim and a victimizer without the person‫ތ‬s taking notice of that process. Watching a film about how damaging watching what is shown to us is strengthens the notion of the inescapability of one‫ތ‬s fate. Similarly to what David Roberts defines as the “framing play” or the play-within-the-play in theater,44 the movie adaptation‫ތ‬s metacinematic gestures indicate that “the world is moved by external authority”45—and this external authority in both Panem and in the world it reflects is manifest in the nearly divine power of those who possess the media. But the heterotopias that emerge in the gaps allow for reconsideration and do offer spaces of hope via interpretation. This is why the scene quoted at the beginning of this essay carries weight. What the book reveals by allowing us to read Katniss‫ތ‬s thoughts or what is exposed to us in the film via metacinematic moments confronts the spectator with the difference between seeming and reality, 42 Andrew Shaffer, “The Joy of Watching Others Suffer: Schadenfreude and the Hunger Games,” in The Hunger Games and Philosophy: A Critique of Pure Treason, ed. George A. Dunn and Nicolas Michaud (Hoboken, N.J., Wiley, 2012), 77. 43 Ibid., 87. 44 Bertha, “Theatricality,” 101. 45 Ibid.

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and how the screen is able to make use of the absence of the real, suggesting its existence by showing an image that is designed to conceal the real. These revelatory moments help the audience relate to the inherent heterotopias of The Hunger Games-series in books and on screen; as a consequence, they allow them to connect the space of imagination to the very anxieties that they suffer from on a daily basis and to educate a more socio-politically conscious youth via popular literature.

Bibliography Baker, Carissa Ann. “Outside the Steam: The Construction of Relationship to Panem’s Nature.” In Space and Place in The Hunger Games: New Readings of the Novels, edited by Deidre Anne Evans Garriott, Whitney Elaine Jones and Julie Elizabeth Tyler, 198-219. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2014. Baudrillard, Jean. “Simularcra and Simulation,” In Selected Writings. edited by Mark Poster, 166-84. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. Bertha, Csilla. “Theatricality and Self-Reflexivity: The Play-within-thePlay in Select Contemporary Irish Plays.” In Irish Theatre in Transition: From the Late Nineteenth to the Early Twenty-First Century, edited by Donald E. Morse, 99-121. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Clemente, Bill. “Panem in America: Crisis Economics and a Call for Political Engagement.” In Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy, edited by Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 35. 20-29. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland, 2012. Collins, Suzanne. Catching Fire. New York, N.Y.: Scholastic Press, 2009. —. Mockingjay. New York, N.Y.: Scholastic Press, 2010. —. The Hunger Games. New York, N.Y.: Scholastic Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Trans. Jay Miskowiecz. Diacritics 16.1 (Spring 1986): 22-27. Frankel, Valerie Estelle. “Reflection in a Plastic Mirror.” In Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy, edited by Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 35. 49-58. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland, 2012. Limpár, Ildikó. “Smell of Roses and Blood: The Vampire Empire of The Hunger Games trilogy.” Monsters and the Monstrous 4.2 (Winter 2014): 15-24.

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Gennep, Arnold van. The Rites of Passage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Girard, René. “An Excerpt from René Girard‫ތ‬s I See Satan Fall Like Lightning [Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001], chapter twelve, ‫ދ‬Scapegoat,‫ތ‬ pages 154-160.” Girardian Lectionary. Accessed 12 September 12 2016. http://girardianlectionary.net/res/iss_12-scapegoat.htm. Risko, Guy Andre. “Katniss Everdeen‫ތ‬s Liminal Choices and the Foundations of Revolutionary Ethics.” In Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy, edited by Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark. Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy 35. 80-88. Jefferson, North Carolina, and London: McFarland, 2012. Sambell, Kay. “Presenting the Case for Social Change: The Creative Dilemma of Dystopian Writing for Children.” In Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. Children‫ތ‬s Literature and Culture Series, edited by Carrie Hintz and Elaine Ostry, 163-78. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Shaffer, Andrew (2012): “The Joy of Watching Others Suffer: Schadenfreude and the Hunger Games.” In The Hunger Games and Philosophy: A Critique of Pure Treason, edited by George A. Dunn and Nicolas Michaud, 75-89. Hoboken, N.J., Wiley, 2012. Tompkins, Joanne. Theatre’s Heterotopias: Performance and the Cultural Politics of Space. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

DECODING GREEN ENCOURAGEMENT: ECOCRITICISM ON PHILIP PULLMAN‫ތ‬S HIS DARK MATERIALS TRILOGY ZSUZSANNA TÓTH

Introduction Due to the growing public awareness of worrisome issues like global warming, pollution, overdevelopment, deforestation and endangered species, children are increasingly involved in actively taking responsibility for the future of the Earth. However, the reception of the so-called “environmentally themed literature” for young people is rather problematic: Michelle Ann Abate finds that its messages on nature as a repository of the problems of the adult world contribute to the controversial status and often resistant readership of these books.1 For this reason, literary fictions furtively or even indirectly implying environmentalism are supposed to be more successful for child and adult readers alike. Fantasy fiction seems to be an appropriate literary genre for passing on green messages because of its high popularity among the youth and its dependence on reality. According to Peter Hunt, fantasy identified with “things as they cannot be” often manifests “a very direct critique of things as they are, even if not directly intended to be so.”2 By displacing the anxiety of their world into a space of imagination free enough to visualize the unspeakable, fantasy fiction authors call their readers’ attention to how things should not be in reality, even what should be done instead. A British author of juvenile fiction, namely Philip 1

Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 57. 2 Peter Hunt, “Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds,” in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Contemporary Classics of Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (London, New York: Continuum, 2001), 8.

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Pullman (1946- ) believes that “Imagination is giving a true account of realistic things.”3 His fantasy book trilogy, entitled His Dark Materials, consisting of The Golden Compass (1995),4 The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000), renders the same intention without the usual tropes, stereotypes and fetishes of mothering, otherness and escapism associated with Nature. My aim is to prove that Pullman’s trilogy propagates the desirable restoration and respectful preservation of the meaningful entirety of the natural environment (i.e. all living and nonliving things on the Earth), which is basically the core ideology of environmentalism. Raymond Williams distinguishes three principal denotations of the word “Nature”: the essential character of something; the “inherent force which directs the world,” as in the capitalized Nature of classical mythology or eighteenth-century Deism; and the material world including human beings.5 My analysis works with the conception of Nature as spiritual force and matter, which has been either overlooked or ignored in the Pullman-studies. Accordingly, I intend to examine the individual way this Post-modern literary work revives anti-rational and heterodox traditions of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Christian nature-mysticism, Pantheism, and the Western rhetorical devices of environmental ideologies attributed to “primitive” or indigenous peoples.

The Divine Gardener or the Divine Garden? Judeo-Christianity Pullman’s trilogy is a space of the imagination where a subversive reinterpretation of the canonized Judeo-Christian myth of the Fall of Man, as well as a criticism of the almost two-hundred-year old obscurantism of the institutionalized and politicizing Christianity are boldly realized. For this reason, the marvellous and heroic adventures of the two twelve-year old protagonists, Lyra Belacqua and William Parry, through numerous parallel universes (in a so-called multiverse) are in the service of the establishment of a new myth of human dignity which, however, happens 3

Quoted in Leonard S. Marcus, “Philip Pullman,” in The Wand in the World. Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, Leonard S. Marcus (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2006), 176. 4 It is the modified title of the American edition; the original, British one is entitled Northern Lights. 5 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Revd. Edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 223. Quoted in Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 143.

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to be far from the superiority of human omnipotence and omniscience. This myth strongly affects human attitude to the Other, i.e. non-humans. As Pullman himself admits, Environmentalists also tell a story about us and ourselves and our place in the universe. In a sense it’s a religious story, because that’s the big question of religion. Why are we here? What is here, what does it consist of? What have we got to do now we are here? What responsibilities does being conscious place on us? And those are questions which the environmental movement, over the past 25 years, and certainly since the global warming issue has come up, has been very much engaged in. What does it mean to us to be conscious of what we are doing to the world?6

In parallel with the above words, the central leading principles in the mythopoeia (fictional mythology) of His Dark Materials are also “humbleness,” “responsibility” and “consciousness.” With regards to humankind’s place in the imagined hierarchy of the cosmos, today’s dominant Western attitude based on Christianity is excessively distancing and exploitative. Anthropocentrism is the assumption that “the interests of humans are of higher priority than those of nonhumans.”7 Greg Garrard evinces that the underlying model of this virtually oppressive mastery is based on an “alienated differentiation and denied dependency: in the dominant Euro-American culture, humans are not only distinguished from nature, but opposed to it in ways that make humans radically alienated from and superior to it.”8 The roots of this indifference, even depreciation of nature are found in “the Hebraic (Semitic) divorce between divinity and nature and in Gnostic ascetic tendencies”;9 later reinforced by the theological and philosophical works of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), and René Descartes (1596-1650), and further stimulated by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution and twentieth-century explosive technological development. While this materialist attitude aims to increase 6

Quoted in Andrew Simms, “Philip Pullman: New Brand of Environmentalism,” The Telegraph, January 19, 2008, accessed 24 November 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3322329/Philip-Pullman-new-brand-ofenvironmentalism.html. (Emphasis mine) 7 Lawrence Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 134. 8 Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 25. 9 Åke Hultkrantz, “Ecology,” in vol. 4 of The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade in chief (New York, London: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995), 581.

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welfare and prosperity with the means of economic expansion, unfortunately, this excessive strategy neglects the existent environmental limits. Although Judeo-Christianity, in viewing nature as mundane matter as well as in attributing exclusive importance to the otherworld, has largely legitimized environmental destruction, there exists another, more ecofriendly Christian ideology. Having created the first human couple, “God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”10 Lawrence Buell calls our attention to the fact that these Biblical words, “subdue” and “dominion,” have not only been interpreted as divinely approved “transformation,” but also as “pious stewardship.”11 Later in the secularized era, modern ecological movement appeared after World War II, when the Western world finally became aware that “the view of nature as a resource [was] destroying nature as a human environment.”12 Per Binde sheds light on the fact that pairing the less known Christian view of nature closely related to the divine with contemporary environmental concerns—because of a new wish “to modify Christian thought and message so as to be credible and relevant to people facing the questions and problems of rapidly modernising world”—in recent decades led to the emergence of so-called “ecotheology” in both Catholic and Lutheran Churches.13 Man’s this kind of protective care, however, still demonstrates supremacy: we are believed to be the rightful Gardeners approved by God. However, the most extreme tendency for the sake of maintaining the ecological balance is called ecocentrism. It is the view or rather acknowledgement that “the interest of the ecosphere must override . . . the interest of individual species.”14 In effect, the origins of the propaganda for giving up humankind’s central position have nothing to do with either orthodox Christianity or this religion itself: The notion of ecocentrism has proceeded from, and fed back into, related belief systems derived from Eastern religions, such as Taoism and Buddhism, from heterodox figures in Christianity such as St Francis of

10 “Genesis 1:28,” The Official King James Bible Online, accessed 24 November 2015, http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/. 11 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 2. 12 Hultkrantz, “Ecology,” 581. 13 Per Binde, “Nature in Roman Catholic Tradition,” Anthropological Quarterly 74. 1 (January 2001): 20. 14 Buell, The Future of Environmental Criticism, 137.

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Within ecocentrism, moreover, there are two distinguishable scientific trends, the so-called “shallow approaches” to nature “arguing for the preservation of natural resources for the sake of humans” and “deep ecology” demanding “recognition of intrinsic value in nature.”16 The solution of the latter to “the dualistic separation of humans from nature . . . as the origin of environmental crisis” is the claim for “a return to a monistic, primal identification of humans and the ecosphere.”17 Yet, the radicalism and anti-materialism of deep ecology (i.e. its non-acceptance of economic expansion), and the altruism it requires anticipate its relative unpopularity. Primarily built on and reflecting on Judeo-Christian mythology, the mythopoeia of His Dark Materials trilogy defines mankind’s place in the cosmos, specifying a certain attitude to matter in general and the ecosphere in particular. “I suppose the real story, the basic story, the story I would like to hear, see, read, is the story about how connected we are, not only with one another but also with the place we live in. And how it’s almost infinitely rich,”18 as Pullman informs us. It follows that His Dark Materials embodies a space of imagination where anxieties can be traditionally displaced; what is more, in this specific space, some of the anxieties of the contemporary world are even resolved: what is wished to be realized, at least for Pullman, is the expounding of togetherness in line with biophilia (the love of life). Pullman also perceives that “[the place we live in]’s in some danger; and that despite the danger, we can do something to overcome it.”19 The rest of my analysis is going to explore to what extent Pullman’s story propagates ecocentricism.

England‫ތ‬s Green Literary Heritage: The Romantic Movement The appearance of the idea of unity with nature in English literature is generally attributed to the nineteenth-century Romantic Movement. In fact, His Dark Materials trilogy is an ingenious trans-textual eclecticism 15

Garrard, Ecocriticism, 23. Ibid., 21. 17 Ibid., 21. 18 Quoted in Simms, “Philip Pullman.” 19 Ibid. 16

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of outstanding religiously themed literary fictions. Pullman even has specified some of the sources that have had a great impact on him: I have stolen ideas from every book I have ever read. My principle in researching for a novel is “Read like a butterfly, write like a bee,” and if this story contains any honey, it is entirely because of the quality of the nectar I found in the work of better writers. But there are three debts that need acknowledgment above all the rest. One is to the essay “On the Marionette Theater,” by Heinrich von Kleist, (…). The second is to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The third is to the works of William Blake.20

The English author’s artistic imagination on the connectedness of all living and non-living things is shaped by, besides Christianity, two of his compatriots and literary models. They are the English representatives of the Romantic Movement paying special attention to Mother Nature, namely William Blake with prophetic rebellion against the Enlightenment, and William Wordsworth with nature worship. The visionary poet, artist and craftsman William Blake (1757-1827) was the first of the English poets to combat hypocrisy and social injustice, institutional religion, the principles of science and commercialism in the age of reason, industrialization and urbanization. According to Peter Ackroyd, all of Blake’s lyrics, vast verse epics and dramas are “filled with a yearning for spiritual reality, and for a redefinition of the human imagination beyond the Newtonian precepts of order and control.”21 Blake’s single-minded struggle was taken over, fulfilled and acknowledged in the English Romantic movement (cc. 1798-1832). According to William Wordsworth (1770-1850), poetry should be “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.”22 He, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772183) and Robert Southey (1774-1843) belonged to the most outstanding generation of Romantic poets in general, and they were the main figures of the Lake Poets in particular, living in the Lake District of England. As the Romantic poets were rather distrustful of the human world, they tended to believe that a close connection with nature was mentally and 20

Philip Pullman, “Acknowledgments” to His Dark Materials Book III: The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman (New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2007), 467. 21 Peter Ackroyd, “The Romantics,” BBC Home, January 2006, accessed 24 November 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/intro.shtml. 22 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798),” Project Gutenberg, November 25, 2011, accessed 24 November 2015, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622h/9622-h.htm.

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morally healthy. Despite the “pastoral tradition” of the Romantic period,23 as well as a new inclination toward a so-called “geo-piety,”24 Nature was paradoxically never described for its own sake. By first redefining the notion of nature as “a healing and spiritual force,” Coleridge and Wordsworth became “the pioneers in what has since become the ‘back to nature’ movement.”25 What is more, Kathleen Raine points out that, on the one hand, for the Victorians Wordsworth was not simply a poet but a religion, and the Lake District was a national shrine.26 On the other hand, the Wordsworthian Nature as the “all-embracing presence” had a character of femininity and maternity. As Raine argues, In Protestant England a too masculine, too moralistic, too rational deity had left man without that ‘refuge of sinners’ the Catholic world finds in the Blessed Virgin Mary; and through Wordsworth a whole nation too long deprived of the archetype of the feminine, compassionate, protective embrace of the Great Mother found shelter and respite in Wordsworth’s Nature.27

Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” (often abbreviated to “Tintern Abbey”) (1798), and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (also commonly known as “Daffodils”) (1807) are distinguished poems outlining his general philosophies on nature: (Mother) Nature’s moral (positive) influence on the poet and the almost spiritual union of people and nature. Although Blake cannot be called a ‘nature poet’ in the Wordsworthian sense, Raine claims that he had no less than Wordsworth to say about nature: “Where Wordsworth stands in awe before the vast, so does Blake before the minute.”28 In more details, while Wordsworth’s “grandeur lies in the spaciousness, the freedom, the majestic solitude and the all-embracing wholeness of his ‘nature,’”29 Blake’s chosen symbols of “the infinite in all things” are “[t]he least of things, flowers, worm and fly, grain of sand and particle of dust,”30 which is vividly illustrated, for instance, in his poem entitled “The Sick Rose” (1794). In short, the views of Pullman’s two literary inspirations, Blake 23

Garrard, Ecocriticism, 33. Hultkrantz, “Ecology,” 581. 25 Ackroyd, “The Romantics.” 26 Kathleen Raine, Blake and the New Age (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1979), 106. 27 Ibid., 119-120. 28 Ibid., 110. 29 Ibid., 108. 30 Ibid., 112. 24

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and Wordsworth, are based on orthodox Christianity in the sense that, with their nature-conceptions, Blake opposed it, while Wordsworth completed it. Although the trilogy’s mythopoeia has an agnostic worldview–“There may have been a creator, or there may not: we don’t know”31–, the traits of the Wordsworthian nature worship can be identified with the sincere, outof-doors feelings of bliss, holiness and awe foreshadowing the presence of spirituality in the ‘created’ world itself. The scientist Mary Malone, also a renegade former nun, is walking “along the floor of the grove [of huge, special trees] feeling much as if she were in a cathedral: there was the same stillness, the same sense of upwardness in the structures, the same awe within herself.”32 Later, when she has succeeded in climbing up one of these trees, She was as happy, in one way, as she had ever been. That one way was physically. In the dense green of the canopy, with the rich blue of the sky between the leaves; with a breeze keeping her skin cool, and the faint scent of the flowers delighting her whenever she sensed it; with the rustle of the leaves, the song of the hundreds of birds, and the distant murmur of the waves on the seashore, all her senses were lulled and nurtured, and if she could have stopped thinking, she would have been entirely lapped in bliss.33

The beauty and delight, peace and safety and happiness perceived simultaneously by all of her sensory systems evoke, if not the lost Garden of Eden, then everyman’s deeply hidden memories of early childhood when one unconsciously merged with the rhythm of flora and fauna. What is more, natural phenomena can also induce unsophisticated admiration, even fascination in Pullman’s characters. For instance, the sight of the Aurora Borealis (the northern lights) of the Arctic impresses Lyra, the main protagonist: The sight filled the northern sky; the immensity of it was scarcely conceivable. As if Heaven itself, great curtains of delicate light hung and trembled. Pale green and rose-pink, and as transparent as the most fragile fabric, and at the bottom edge a profound and fiery crimson like the fires of Hell, they swung shimmered loosely with more grace than the most skilful dancer. Lyra thought she could even hear them: a vast distant whispering

31

Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Book III: The Amber Spyglass (New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2007), 118. 32 Ibid., 76. (Emphasis mine) 33 Ibid., 326. (Emphasis mine)

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Just like Mary, Lyra also sees, hears and feels the magnificent manifestations of a kind of divineness equally animating all dweller of the cosmos. The reliability of Pullman’s self-definition of being either atheist or agnostic is questioned,35 especially by the fact that he also acknowledges the sense of awe and transcendence as “a universal human impulse.”36 While Wordsworth’s influence on His Dark Materials is undeniable, the impact of William Blake’s works is also significant. The next two parts of my ecocritical analysis will reveal, distinctively, how two individual products of Pullman’s authorial fantasy, namely Dust and the mulefa species, are largely connected to this Pre-Romantic poet’s heterodox visions.

One to All, All to One: Dust, an Evanescent Deity Taking the visionary heritage of William Blake as a starting point, Pullman makes the existence of cosmic balance intertwined with imagination and consciousness. In Pullman’s space of imagination, the roots of the connectedness of creatures with each other are found in the depth of matter. A substance called either Dust or Shadow Particles or straf, consisting of usually invisible, mysterious particles, is the central connective element of Pullman’s mythopoeia. “There’s more stuff out there in the universe than we can see, that’s the point. We can see the stars and the galaxies and the things that shine, but for it all to hang together and not fly apart, there 34

Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Book I: The Golden Compass (New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2007), 161. (Emphasis mine) 35 Pullman claims that “If we’re talking on the scale of human life and the things we see around us, I’m an atheist. There’s no God here. . . . But if you go out into the vastness of space, well, I’m not so sure. On that level, I’m an agnostic.” (Quoted in Steve Meacham, “The shed where God died,” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 13, 2003, accessed November 24, 2015, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/12/1071125644900.html). 36 “The Dark Materials debate: life, God, the universe . . .,” The Telegraph, March 17, 2004, accessed November 24, 2015, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3613962/The-Dark-Materials-debate-life-Godthe-universe....html.

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needs to be a lot more of it – to make gravity work.”37 Anne-Marie Bird points out that the concept of Dust is used to “connect the plethora of seemingly incompatible elements that make up the universe,” thereupon the setting of the whole narrative “epitomises the attempt to link together, and therefore equalises everything in its most simplistic form.”38 Besides, the fact that “Matter and spirit are one,”39 according to Santiago Colás, tells us how we might relate to (other) matter: “if we share with matter this propensity, then we would seem to be called to relate to it not as animate to inanimate, let alone human to animal, or even subject to object, but rather . . . as living matter to living matter.”40 The life cycle of Pullman’s conscious, dependent and mortal divinity evokes Blake’s antirational notion of imagination. “Shadows are particles of consciousness. . . . they know we are here. They answer back;”41 in other words, these particles gravitate to and cluster where human beings are. Besides, “Conscious beings make Dust – they renew it all the time, by thinking and feeling and reflecting, by gaining wisdom and passing it on.”42 However, Dust has needed some feedback system to reinforce it and make it safe. . . . Without something like that, it would all vanish. Thought, imagination, feeling, would all wither and blow away, leaving nothing but a brutish automatism; and that brief period when life was conscious of itself would flicker out like a candle in every one of the billions of worlds where it had burned brightly.43

To maintain the potential for consciousness, curiosity and vim, as well as the cohesive force between creators and creations, one must take responsibility for the quantity and quality of his own mental images. Although the eighteenth-century Age of Reason considered Imagination “a degenerative malady of the intellect,” William Blake regarded it as 37 Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials Book II: The Subtle Knife (New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2007), 76. 38 Anne-Marie Bird, “‘Without Contraries is no Progression’: Dust as an AllInclusive, Multifunctional Metaphor in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’,” Children’s Literature in Education 32. 2 (2001): 113. 39 Pullman, His Dark Materials Book II, 221. 40 Santiago Colás, “Telling True Stories, or The Immanent Ethics of Material Spirit (and Spiritual Matter) in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” Discourse 27.1 (Winter 2005): 47. 41 Pullman, His Dark Materials Book II, 78. 42 Pullman, His Dark Materials Book III, 440. 43 Ibid., 403. (Emphasis mine)

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superior to the organs of perception, as “the central faculty of both God and Man,” “the completest liberty of the spirit,” whose enemy is “Abstract Philosophy” or the “Reasoning Spectre.”44 Furthermore, according to Samuel Foster Damon, Blake’s small tractate, All Religions Are One (ca. 1788), affirms that the Imagination as “the Poetic Genius” produces “the True Man”; and “(allowing for infinite variety) all men are alike in the Poetic Genius”; and “all sects of philosophy are derived from it, ‘adapted to the weaknesses of every individual’”; and “all religions are derived from each nation’s different reception of the Poetic Genius”; and, finally, “the two Testaments ‘are an original derivation from the Poetic Genius.’”45 Closely related to imagination, the humanities are believed to save mankind, whereas science may be our death: “Art is the Tree of Life. . . . Science is the Tree of Death”; however, “Art” is meant to be “a whole mode of life, the life of the imagination.”46 In Pullman’s mythopoeia, truthful imagination, as “a form of seeing,”47 feeds Dust, the sentient glue of spirit with matter, of matter with matter. Moreover, the permanent cycle of substance involving Dust in the trilogy’s mythopoeia corresponds to recycling, one of the guiding principles of environmentalism. When the ghosts of the deceased leave the Land of the Dead, a prison-like desolate place, they get into the eternal cycle of nature: “We’ll be alive again in a thousand blades of grass, and a million leaves; we’ll be falling in the raindrops and blowing in the fresh breeze; we’ll be glittering in the dew under the stars and the moon out there in the physical world, which is our true home and always was.”48 Finally, when the time comes to merge into the cosmos, They [the ghosts] took a few steps in the world of grass and air and silver light, and looked around, their faces transformed with joy . . . and held out their arms as if they were embracing the whole universe; and then, as if they were made of mist or smoke, they simply drifted away, becoming part of the earth and the dew and the night breeze.49

Not only the human body, but also the soul provides molecules that may become part of other living things, which is a kind of afterlife. The 44 Samuel Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1965), 195. 45 Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 16. 46 Ibid., 28. 47 Pullman, His Dark Materials Book III, 443. 48 Ibid., 287. 49 Ibid., 385-386. (Emphasis mine)

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characters’ obliteration is portrayed, for Millicent Lenz, “as a kind of joyous merging with the cosmos,” which she compares to Jane Abramson’s so-called “fertilizer theory of immortality”: “the individual disintegrates, but his or her ‘atoms’ go on forever, in the death-rebirth cycle of nature.”50 Keeping connectedness in mind, I regard Pullman’s egalitarian divinity identical with pantheism. Bound to the names of Saint Augustine (354430), Francis of Assisi, Jacob Boehme (1575-1624), Meister Eckhart (c. 1260-c. 1327), the Cambridge Platonist John Smith (1618-1652) and Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) and even Wordsworth (Ferguson 130-131), Christian nature mysticism—an urge “to escape from a sense of separation, from the loneliness of selfhood, towards a closer participation and reunion with Nature or God”51—borders pantheism, a doctrine coined by John Toland (1670-1722) in 1705, but formulated by Baruch Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura: God and nature/the universe are identical, even interchangeable,52 involving the absence of a personal God, immortal soul and free will.53 Accordingly, Anne-Marie Bird interprets the interdependence between Dust and “living things” as the absence of the distinction between the “source” and the “product.”54 Today’s relevance of pantheism in the context of environmentalism is expressed by John W. Grula who is convinced that Judeo-Christianity and the Enlightenment as postmodernism’s predecessors are so exhausted that they fail to “provide a conceptual framework conductive to ensuring the long-term health of earth and its inhabitants.”55 Instead, pantheism, as a successor to the JudeoChristian, Enlightenment, and postmodernist paradigms, is proposed to 50

Jane Abramson, “Facing the other fact of life: death in recent children’s fiction,” School Library Journal 21.4 (December 1974): no page, in Millicent Lenz, “Philip Pullman,” in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Contemporary Classics of Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (London, New York: Continuum, 2001), 160. 51 F.C. Happold, Mysticism. A Study and an Anthology (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970), 40. 52 John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 142. 53 Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia, 173. 54 Anne-Marie Bird, “Circumventing the Grand Narrative: Dust as an Alternative Theological Vision in Pullman’s His Dark Materials,” in His Dark Materials Illuminated. Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 192. 55 John W. Grula, “Pantheism Reconstructed: Ecotheology as a Successor to the Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment, and Postmodernist Paradigms,” Zygon 43. 1 (March 2008): 160.

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provide “a theological foundation for the deep ecology movement,”56 to “recognize our limits and our kinship with the rest of the cosmos.”57 In addition, it is also Pullman’s pairing of the meaning (of life) with the desire for being linked to others that is identical with (nature) mysticism. Seeing clearly comes, for him, from consciousness and responsibility, “to make things better and to work for greater good and greater wisdom.”58 To the question whether he had ever had any experience that could be described as a mystical state, his answer was the following: Yes I have. Usually outdoors. Not very often, I may add. Probably only three or four times. It is to do with seeing things more clearly. Mystical experience is sometimes described as a cloudy state when the real world dissolves. For me it has not been like that, or else, what I have had has not been mystical experience. What I seemed to feel, was that I saw the connections between things much more clearly, much more vividly. There were patterns, there were correspondences, there were shadows here of something else, everything was connected. With enormous excitement, I could see that the universe was alive and I was part of it. I saw this so clearly and intensely that I don’t think I could sustain that state for very long.59

“Outdoors” here is likely to imply natural setting where, Grula argues, “pantheistic intuitive insights or mystical experiences nearly always occur,” without the presence of human aspect or imagery.60 Pat Pinsent’s argument, that “this sense of feeling connected to other living beings, and indeed to nature itself, sometimes involving a degree of awe and a recognition of some form of presence, . . . is often expressed by people who feel alienated from religious bodies,”61 corresponds to Pullman’s confession on how disappointed he is about organized Christianity.62 56

Ibid. Ibid., 174. 58 Pullman quoted in Huw Spanner, “Heat and Dust,” Third Way, 2002, accessed November 24, 2015, http://www.spannermedia.com/interviews/Pullman.htm. 59 Quoted in Jennie Renton, “Philip Pullman Interview,” Textualities, 2005, accessed November 24, 2015, http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/philip-pullmaninterview/. (Emphasis mine) 60 Grula, “Pantheism Reconstructed,” 162. 61 Pat Pinsent, “Unexpected Allies? Pullman and the Feminist Theologians,” in His Dark Materials Illuminated. Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 207. 62 Philip Pullman wrote that “The trouble is that all too often in human history, 57

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Conscious matter, or Dust, is both the producer and the product of human consciousness and imagination. The evanescence of Dust’s existence depends on humankind’s responsible attitude to each other, even to other species as well. This mutual (or cosmic) responsibility turns out to be a (notably timeless) response to a contemporary anxiety, i.e. the greed and indifference of organized religion toward, in Pullman’s view, all the others.

Humble Homogeneity with the Cosmos: The Mulefa People The cosmic mutuality between Pullman’s ecological divinity and conscious beings is best perceptible in the harmonious symbiosis characterizing a particular species in the trilogy. Among His Dark Materials trilogy’s uncountable parallel universes there is one that is the embodiment of an ecological Eden, populated by a quasi utopistic society– it is not surprising that they are the creatures of authorial fantasy. They have “a diamond-shaped frame, with a limb at each of the corners,”63 yet not a spine, and they look like “a cross between antelopes and motorcycles,” with horns and “trunks like small elephants.”64 All their movements are “full of grace and power.”65 Despite this Chimera-like appearance, these creatures are neither mythic monsters nor animals but “individuals, lively with intelligence and purpose.”66 In other words, as a character, Mary Malone comes to the conclusion, “These beings weren’t human, but they were people,” with intelligence, language and society: “it’s not them, they’re us;”67 and “Their word for themselves [is] mulefa,

churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people’s lives in the name of some invisible god (and they’re all invisible, because they don’t exist) – and done terrible damage. In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it. That is the religion I hate, and I’m happy to be known as its enemy.” (Quoted in Philip Pullman, “Religion,” Philip Pullman’s official website, 2009, accessed September 13, 2014, http://www.philip-pullman.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=110). 63 Pullman, His Dark Materials Book III, 109. 64 Ibid., 378. 65 Ibid., 80. 66 Ibid., 378. 67 Ibid., 109.

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but an individual [is] a zalif.”68 The environmental management of the mulefa is exemplary. In their community nothing is wasted.69 For instance, while their technology (comparable to humanity’s Stone Age) is primitive, all of their houses are built in much the same way out of wood and clay and thatch. There was nothing crude about them; each door and window frame and lintel was covered in subtle patterns, but patterns that weren’t carved in the wood: it was as if they’d persuaded the wood to grow in that shape naturally.70

Their way of laboring relies on working “not on their own but two by two, working their trunks together to tie a knot,”71 contrary to how human beings, for instance, Mary Malone works: “At first she felt that [. . . being able to tie knots on her own] gave her an advantage—she needed no one else—and then she realized how it cut her off from others. Perhaps all human beings were like that.”72 The mulefa’s dependence and reliance on each other to be able to prosper at all is coupled with their high effectiveness, even elegance in work: “They could discuss without quarrelling and cooperate without getting in each other’s way.”73 Briefly, there are “all kinds of order and carefulness in the [mulefa] village.”74 The mulefa live in peaceful symbiosis or coexistence with other species, including Dust. Their existence depends, first, on their physical structure. The diamond-shaped mulefa move with the help of wheels which are peculiar “seedpods”: “Perfectly round, immensely hard and light–they couldn’t have been designed better. The creatures hooked a claw through the center of the pods with their front and rear legs, and used their two lateral legs to push against the ground and move along.”75 As a gift of nature, this tool is an integral part of the mulefa body: “It was as if the mulefa and the seedpod really were one creature, which by a miracle could disassemble itself and put itself together again.”76 Second, one special member of the flora of the mulefa’s world provides them with the most important things for meaningful life. The special, extremely tall 68

Ibid., 111. Ibid., 113. 70 Ibid., 388-389. 71 Ibid., 114. 72 Ibid. 73 Ibid., 326. 74 Ibid., 389. 75 Ibid., 78. 76 Ibid., 204-205. 69

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trees, whose “foliage was dense and dark green,”77 supply the mulefa with the seedpod used as a wheel. Some special oil, through contact with the seedpod, is “the center of their thinking and feeling; . . . young ones didn’t have the wisdom of their elders because they couldn’t use the wheels, and thus could absorb no oil through their claws.”78 In exchange, the trees also benefit from this interchange because “the seedpods needed the constant pounding they got on the hard roads if they were to crack at all, and also . . . the seeds were difficult to germinate.”79 Briefly, “Without the mulefa’s attention, the trees would all die. Each species depended on the other, and furthermore, it was the oil that made it possible.”80 Third, what makes the usage of these wheels possible, even worthy is the geology of the mulefa’s habitat. All around there are “rivers of stone,” ever “some kind of [solidified] lava-flow,” “as smooth as a stretch of well-laid road in Mary’s own world, and certainly easier to walk on than the grass.”81 It is so well designed that one begins wondering what was first: the mulefa or the lavaroads. In sum, the mulefa’s “shape, and the roads, and the wheel trees coming together all made it possible.”82 Millicent Lenz directly refers to this species as “living exemplars of ideal ecologists” because of “their respect for the integrity of nature, their sustainable energy source (the ‘renewable’ seed pod ‘oil’), and their creatively synergistic relationship with other sentient beings.”83 Besides, the mulefa’s idyllic ecology in itself is far from developing into catastrophic disruption. There is a seeming parallel between the mulefa and environmentallythemed myths around indigenous people. Contemporary ecocritics, like Garrard, define dwelling on the earth “in a relation of duty and responsibility” as the implication of “the long-term imbrication of humans in a landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of ritual, life and work.”84 As Western peoples (i.e. Europeans and North Americans) have proven to be unable to “dwell in working harmony with nature,”85 they have turned to other cultures for models to appreciate the environment. Therefore, as 77

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 115. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 75. 82 Ibid., 390. 83 Millicent Lenz, “Philip Pullman,” in Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Contemporary Classics of Children’s Literature, ed. Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz (London, New York: Continuum, 2001), 132. 84 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 108. 85 Ibid., 120. 78

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Garrard points out, Since the sixteenth century at least, ‘primitive’ [i.e. non-Western] people have been represented as dwelling in harmony with nature, sustaining one of the most widespread and seductive myths of the non-European ‘other.’ The assumption of indigenous environmental virtue is a foundational belief for deep ecologists and many ecocritics.86

However, Åke Hultkrantz argues that the basic motive behind American Indian environmentalism is the “conception of nature as a manifestation of the supernatural or the divine;”87—just like the already introduced, less known views of Christianity. These all led to the formation of the figure of the “Noble Savage” or the “Ecological Indian,” which was a piece of rhetoric that was heavily charged with ideological content. Introduced by the humanistic philosophers Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) and Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the concept of the Ecological Indian, according to Garrard, is a construction of “intra-human difference” which “responded to, and in turn influenced, European encounters with indigenous Americans.”88 Due to the metaphor of the “primitive,” Indians or aborigines were seen as “being behind Europeans in an inevitable progression from a natural to a civilised state.”89 This metaphor, seen as “an ideological mystification,” Garrard argues, has been shared, from the seventeenth century, “both by those who viewed Native Americans as noble savages and as irredeemable heathens and cannibals.”90 However, it was only in the twentieth century when “an alliance between this frontier primitivism and anti-modernist environmentalism” led to the birth of the Ecological Indian.91 Nevertheless, the mulefa’s environmental attractiveness relies either on such nostalgic idealization or, rather, on their understanding of their ecological footprint. While Blake refused “Rousseau’s virtuous Natural Man, the height of perfection until corrupted by civilization,”92 Philip Pullman may not do that. Howsoever, the mulefa do not seem to be stock characters in literature at all: They stand for a state of happy fulfilment in the physical processes of life – 86

Ibid., Hultkrantz, “Ecology,” 581. 88 Garrard, Ecocriticism, 124-125. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Damon, A Blake Dictionary, 351. 87

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they manage their world completely – because they have what we call consciousness. They impose certain things on their world, but unlike human beings, who impose agricultural chemicals and nuclear power and so forth, the mulefa go about it in a gentler way, respecting the integrity of the things that they’re dealing with.93

The keyword, just as Lauren Shoset also points out, is “consciousness,” which is closely connected to the fact that the mulefa are the only species among the trilogy’s characters that can see the otherwise invisible Dust, without a helping device, such as Mary Malone’s amber spyglass, the title-giving object of the third book of Pullman’s trilogy. In Shoset’s words, the mulefa “visibly perceive universal cosmic consciousness in place of experiencing the overlayered, sometimes selfcontradictory individual consciousness of other sentient beings.”94 Accordingly, the mulefa worldview is ecocentric. The small-scale symbiosis between the mulefa, seedpod trees and Dust on the one hand, and the large-scale Cycle of Matter and Dust on the other hand—in other words the cosmic togetherness—would survive forever if there were not human selfishness and greed, i.e. anthropocentrism, both in Pullman’s space of imagination and the world around all of us.

Conclusion In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which is deeply permeated with Blakean, Wordsworthian, mystical, pantheistic and aboriginal-like religiosity and spirituality, Nature and Dust are intrinsically intertwined so much that the damage of both can bring the end of all parallel worlds—literally and figuratively. As a consequence, the author’s environmental message upon the desirable restoration and respectful preservation of the natural environment embodies a direct critique of the real world as well as a didactic purpose for susceptible young readers. Pullman’s ‘green’ encouragement stems from our contemporary environmental anxieties: as we cannot afford being separated from our natural environment without self-destructive consequences, all of us are 93 Quoted in Kelly Fried, “Darkness Visible: An Interview with Philip Pullman,” Amazon.com Message, accessed November 24, 2015, http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=94589. (Emphasis mine) 94 Lauren Shohet, “Reading Dark Materials,” in His Dark Materials Illuminated. Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, ed. Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005), 32.

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responsible for the deeds of each other. Pullman’s belief in connectedness and unity with the Cosmos seemingly tends to ecocentrism in the sense that no part of the entirety can be more important than the entirety itself. In my opinion, however, his view shows similarity with Greg Garrard’s suggestion to environmentalism: a worthy aspiration is needed instead of selfabnegating humility and submission to the presumed natural order. In more details, what Garrard refers to is an Ancient Greek virtue called “megalopsuche” (“the greatness of soul”), the combination of “the proper pride of a clever, resourceful animal with reasonable acceptance of the human place in a world we can neither wholly predict nor control.”95 It may prove to be more easily acceptable for the public in general, Pullman’s target audience in particular, than deep ecology.

Bibliography Abate, Michelle Ann. Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010. Abramson, Jane. “Facing the Other Fact of Life: Death in Recent Children’s Fiction.” School Library Journal 21.4 (1974): 31-33. Ackroyd, Peter. “The Romantics.” BBC Home, January 2006. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/romantics/intro.shtml. Binde, Per. “Nature in Roman Catholic Tradition.” Anthropological Quarterly 74.1 (January 2001): 15-27. Bird, Anne-Marie. “Circumventing the Grand Narrative: Dust as an Alternative Theological Vision in Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” In His Dark Materials Illuminated. Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott, 188-198. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. —. “‘Without Contraries is no Progression’: Dust as an All-Inclusive, Multifunctional Metaphor in Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials.’” Children’s Literature in Education 32.2 (2001): 111-123. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Colás, Santiago. “Telling True Stories, or The Immanent Ethics of Material Spirit (and Spiritual Matter) in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” Discourse, 27.1 (Winter 2005): 34-66. Damon, Samuel Foster. A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of 95

Garrard, Ecocriticism, 178-179.

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William Blake. Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1965. Ferguson, John. An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions. London: Thames and Hudson, 1976. Fried, Kelly. “Darkness Visible: An Interview with Philip Pullman.” Amazon.com Message. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=94589. Garrard, Greg. Ecocriticism. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. Grula, John W. “Pantheism Reconstructed: Ecotheology as a Successor to the Judeo-Christian, Enlightenment, and Postmodernist Paradigms.” Zygon 43.1 (March 2008): 159-180. Happold, F.C. Mysticism. A Study and an Anthology. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1970. Hultkrantz, Åke. “Ecology.” In vol. 4 of The Encyclopedia of Religion, edited by Mircea Eliade in chief, 581-585. New York, London: Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1995. Hunt, Peter. “Introduction: Fantasy and Alternative Worlds.” In Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Contemporary Classics of Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt, and Millicent Lenz, 1-41. London, New York: Continuum, 2001. Lenz, Millicent. “Philip Pullman.” In Alternative Worlds in Fantasy Fiction. Contemporary Classics of Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt and Millicent Lenz, 122-169. London, New York: Continuum, 2001. Marcus, Leonard S. “Philip Pullman.” In The Wand in the World. Conversations with Writers of Fantasy, Leonard S. Marcus, 167-183. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2006. Meacham, Steve. “The Shed Where God Died.” The Sydney Morning Herald, December 13, 2003. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/12/1071125644900.html. Pinsent, Pat. “Unexpected Allies? Pullman and the Feminist Theologians.” In His Dark Materials Illuminated. Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott, 199211. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Pullman, Philip. “Acknowledgments” to His Dark Materials Book III: The Amber Spyglass, by Philip Pullman, 467. New York: Laurel-Leaf, 2007. —. His Dark Materials Book I: The Golden Compass. New York: LaurelLeaf, 2007. —. His Dark Materials Book II: The Subtle Knife. New York: LaurelLeaf, 2007. —. His Dark Materials Book III: The Amber Spyglass. New York: Laurel-

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Leaf, 2007. —. “Religion.” Philip Pullman’s Official Website, 2009. Accessed 13 September 2014. http://www.philip-pullman.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=110. Raine, Kathleen. Blake and the New Age. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd, 1979. Renton, Jennie. “Philip Pullman Interview.” Textualities, 2005. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://textualities.net/jennie-renton/philippullman-interview/. Shohet, Lauren. “Reading Dark Materials.” In His Dark Materials Illuminated. Critical Essays on Philip Pullman’s Trilogy, edited by Millicent Lenz and Carole Scott, 22-36. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. Simms, Andrew. “Philip Pullman: New Brand of Environmentalism.” The Telegraph, January 19, 2008. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/3322329/Philip-Pullman-new-brandof-environmentalism.html. Spanner, Huw. “Heat and Dust.” Third Way, 2002. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.spannermedia.com/interviews/Pullman.htm. “The Dark Materials Debate: Life, God, the Universe…” The Telegraph, 17 March 2004. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3613962/The-Dark-Materialsdebate-life-God-the-universe....html. The Official King James Bible Online. “Genesis 1:28.” Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Revd. Edn. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (1798).” Project Gutenberg, November 25, 2011. Accessed 24 November 2015. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Vera Benczik is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research interests include science fiction, popular culture and Canadian literature, with special respect to the fiction of Margaret Atwood. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the motif of the journey in the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, and has since published widely about science fiction, James Bond in popular culture, and the fiction of Margaret Atwood. Her publications include studies on the spatial politics and the iconographic convergence of historical and fictional trauma in post-9/11 disaster cinema, the male body in Skyfall, and the use of the landscape as projection of female identity in Atwood’s early prose. Her current projects focus on the spatial rhetorics of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction narratives, and the use of modes of the fantastic in Margaret Atwood’s prose. Julianna Borbély, Senior Lecturer of English at Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, received her doctorate from West University of Timi‫܈‬oara. Having written her dissertation on the transposition of Jane Austen’s first two novels on film, her publications focus on the question of fidelity in film adaptations of literary classics and how various novelistic elements have been transposed onto screen in adaptations of Austen’s novels. Her research interests include translation studies with special focus on audio-visual translation. She also works as a dubbing translator from English to Hungarian, and translated, among others, the film adaptations of Tom Jones, and Bright Young Things. Bill Clemente is a Professor of English at Peru State College where he has taught for over twenty years. Over the past few years, he created new classes that include The Graphic Novel, Science Fiction Literature and Film, Zombie Films and Literature, Anime, and a Children‫ތ‬s Literature course on Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. An avid photographer and bird watcher, Bill also published an article about birding in The Prairie Fire. He has also served for the past decade as treasurer for the International Association for the Fantastic and the Arts and is presently vice-president of Alpha Chi National Honor Society. His most recent publications

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include “Panem in America: Crisis Economics and a Call for Political Engagement” in Of Bread, Blood and The Hunger Games: Critical Essays on the Suzanne Collins Trilogy and “Corporate Abuse and Social Inequality in RoboCop and Fido” in Critical Essays on Apocalyptic Narratives in Millennial Media. In addition, his article on the Cuban zombie film Juan of the Dead, “Zombies along the Malecón,” appears in the Spring 2016 edition of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. Sándor Czeglédi is an Associate Professor at the English and American Studies Institute (EASI) of the University of Pannonia (Veszprém, Hungary), where he teaches subjects focusing on American Studies from the perspective of applied linguistics/language policy. His publications are chiefly related to the fields of U.S. history, civilization, nation-building, and language status politics, discussing and analyzing especially the areas of officialization, bilingual education, language rights, and the relationship between perceived national security needs and language policy decisions, but his academic research also extents to debunking (or corroborating) widely-held myths related to Anglo-American history and civilization. Ildikó Limpár, Senior Lecturer of English at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest (Hungary) has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature and an MA in Egyptology. She has widely published on the subversion of myths in the works of contemporary authors, such as Tony Kushner, Marilynne Robinson, Linda Hogan, Diana Abu-Jaber, Amy Tan, extending her research to speculative fiction writers, including Robert Holdstock, Neil Gaiman, and Suzanne Collins. Her most recent publications relate to monster studies, interpreting the manifestations of the monstrous in The Hunger Games trilogy and in the Dracula TV-series (2013). She publishes fantasy novels and short stories under her pen name, while her non SF works, including plays, stories and a children‫ތ‬s book, appear under her real name. Csaba Maczelka is an Assistant Professor teaching English and Hungarian literary and intellectual history at the Partium Christian University in Oradea (Romania) and at the University of Pécs (Hungary). He defended his dissertation at the University of Szeged (Hungary) in 2014. The dissertation explored the use of the paratextual elements and the dialogue form in some early modern English utopias. His research interests also cover British-Hungarian cultural and literary contacts. He has published articles on the works of T. More (ANQ) and J. Hall (Gender

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Studies), and several papers (in Hungarian) on the reception of English literature in Hungary. He gave speeches at conferences in London, Oxford, and Bangor, besides numerous events in Hungary and Romania. Péter Kristóf Makai is a newly-minted Ph.D. and an Independent Scholar, having received his doctorate at the University of Szeged, Hungary. Writing his dissertation on autism in contemporary literature, his research interests span from SF and fantasy literature, cognitive literary theory to Tolkien studies, and video game studies. He published articles in Tolkien Studies, Wiley-Blackwell‫ތ‬s A Companion to JRR Tolkien, Apertúra and the Americana E-Journal. He also works as a literary translator from English to Hungarian, who translated novels by John Scalzi, Blake Crouch and R. J. Piñeiro. Donald E. Morse, University Professor, University of Debrecen, Emeritus Professor, Oakland University, USA, Fulbright Professor (1987-1989, 1991-1993) and Soros Professor (1990, 1996-1997) is the author or editor of 16 books, including The Irish Theatre in Transition (Palgrave 2015), The Novels of Kurt Vonnegut (2003), The Artistry of Brian Friel (2006 with Cs. Bertha and M. Kurdi), and Anatomy of Science Fiction (2006). With Csilla Bertha, he published Worlds Visible and Invisible (1994), A Small NationҲs Contribution to the World (1993), and More Real than Reality: The Fantastic in Irish Literature and the Arts (1991). Bertha and he received Rockefeller Fellowships to translate contemporary Hungarian plays into English (Silenced Voices: Five Hungarian-Transylvanian Plays 2008). For over 30 years he has chaired the annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Currently he edits the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies. Anna Petneházi graduated from the University of Debrecen as an English major in 2013, and a year later she obtained her degree in Teaching English Language and Hungarian Literature and Culture. Her BA thesis examined the complexity of power in seemingly clear power relations from a Hegelian master-slave dialectic; her MA thesis focused on how the narratives in contemporary literature presented liminal experiences through the imagery of liminal materials, spaces and time periods. She published about the film On The Road (2012), on the occasion of the new Hungarian translation of Kerouac’s novel (the original scroll) in 2011. She is currently a PhD student at the Department of British Studies. In her research she focuses on how clone narratives (both in novels and films) shape the cultural imaginary via offering possible rereadings of gender,

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binary oppositions, the norms for inclusion and exclusion, and their effect on community formation. Anikó Sohár has been a teacher and researcher of Literary and Translation Studies, and a (literary) translator since 1987. She received her double MA in Comparative Literature and History from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in 1986, her doctorate in Comparative Literature from ELTE in 1996, her PhD in Literary Studies (Translation Studies) from the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in 1997. Her dissertation discussed the cultural transfer of SF and fantasy, including pseudotranslations, after the political transformation in Hungary. She started teaching at ELTE, followed by KUL, the University of Miskolc, the University of West Hungary, and now Pázmány Péter Catholic University. She is interested in and has widely published on the fantastic, hybrid genres, SF and fantasy, translation studies, particularly literary translations. Zsuzsanna Tóth is currently a Ph.D. candidate who completed her Ph.D. studies on English Literature and Culture at the Literature Doctoral School, University of Szeged (Hungary) in 2015. She is interested in the literary representations of religiosity in contemporary English fictions of fantasy. She is currently working on her Ph.D. dissertation about Philip Pullman’s (1946- ) anticlerical trilogy, His Dark Materials, consisting of Northern Lights/The Golden Compass (1995), The Subtle Knife (1997), and The Amber Spyglass (2000). In this research theme she has had five published articles focusing on Philip Pullman’s (re-)interpretations of Judeo-Christian myths about the unity of man and the divine (like mysticism), of man and man (like brotherhood), of male and female (like androgyny), all embedded into “heterodox” or “dissident” religiousphilosophical traditions. In accordance with these writings, the aim of her Ph.D. dissertation will be to analyze how the religious motif of oneness functions in an apparently secular context.