Exiles and Migrants: Crossing Thresholds in European Culture and Society 1898723699, 9781898723691

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Exiles and Migrants: Crossing Thresholds in European Culture and Society Edited by

Anthony Coulson Foreword by

Eda Sagarra Royal Irish Academy

suss ex ACADEMIC PRESS

EXILES AND MIGRANTS: CROSSING THRESHOLDS IN EUROPEAN CULTURE AND SOCIETY

Editorial selection and Introduction Copyright ©Anthony Coulson 1997; chapters 1-18, Copyright© retained by individual authors The right of Anthony Coulson, and the contributors named in the contents, to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

First published 1997 in Great Britain by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS Box 2950 Brighton BN2 SSP

and in the United States of America by SUSSEX ACADEMIC PRESS c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc. 5804 N.E. Hassalo St. Portland, Oregon 97213-3644 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication 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 publisher. Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Exiles and migrants: crossing thresholds in European culture and society I edited by Anthony Coulson: foreword by Eda Sasara. p. an. Papers presented at a conference held Dublin City University, 1994. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1- 898723-69-9 (alk. paper) 1. Exiles in literature. 2. Immigrants in literature. 3. Minorities in literature. 4. European literature-19thcentury-History and criticism. 5. Literature and society. I. Coulson, Anthony. PN56.5.E96E97 1997 97-26462 809' .8920694-dc21 CIP

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound by Biddies Ltd, King's Lynn and Guildford Printed on acid-free paper

Univ. Library, UC Santa CnJ2 i 998

{Jt'{ Sb,~

Contents

S7b

c1-r 1111 Foreword by Eda Sagarra Acknowledgments

viii x

1

Introduction PART I DEMARCATION AND ASSIMILATION: SOCIO-CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE SEVENTEENTH TO NINE! EENTH CENTURIES

1

A Frank in the Ottoman Empire: the Case of the Chevalier d'Arvieux

23

Mary Hossain 2

Voloumous deamboulare: the Wandering Irish in French Literature, 1600-1789

32

Eamon 6 Ciosdin 3

Between Exile and Assimilation: Languages and Identity in German-Jewish Texts around 1848

43

Florian Krobb PART II EUROPE'S HOMELESS: A CENTURY OF EXILE

4

Land of the Fair, Land of the Free? The Myth of America in Irish Folklore

57

Grace Neville 5

From George Moore to Brian Moore: Irish Writers making a Fetish of Exile

72

Barbara Freitag 6

Enlightened Humanism Defeated: German Writers, Writings and Ideas in Exile, 1933-41 Sophie Perriaux

v

83

Contents

Vl

7 Klaus Mann's Novel The Volcano - a Document of German Emigration after 1933

91

Hermann Rasche 8 'There is no history here': Marguerite Yourcenar 's American Exile

101

Francesca Counihan 9 Varieties of Exile: Stefan Schiitz's Novel Katt

Ian Wallace

111

·

PART Ill EUROPE AND ITS OTHER: TiiE COLONIAL LEGACY AND ETHNICITY

10 Things Fall Apart: the Portrayal of African Identity in Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson and Chinua Achebe's

No Longer at Ease

125

Arnd Witte 11 The Dialogue of Exile: Cheikh Hamidou Kane's

L'Aventure ambigue Patricia Little 12 Three Generations of Francophone North African Writers in Exile: Dr~ Chraibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun and Mehdi Charef

136

144

Houssaine Afoullous 13 Images of Difference: The Portrayal of Ethnic Minorities in German Cinema since Fassbinder

154

Anthony Coulson PART IV ISSUES OF LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY: THE TEXT AS LOCATION AND MEDIATION

14 Stotious boats: Exile in Irish Translations of Rimbaud's &~u~re

1~

Kathleen Shields 15 Julien Green: Expatrie et Sudiste

185

Michael O'Dwyer 16 On Locating the Narrative Voice in Intercultural Literature: Franco Biondi's Die Unversohnlichen Mary Howard

193

Contents 17 J.-M. G. Le Cl~zio, Writer of Exile. A Treatment of Childhood and Exile in Desert and Etoile Errante

vii

201

/ean-Philippe Imbert 18 Language and Culture Crossing: the Ethnographic Bridge

212

Eliz.abeth Murphy-Lejeune The Contributors

223

Index

226

Foreword

The Royal Irish Academy Symposia on modem languages and their literatures are, like the Academy itself, an all-Ireland institution. They were initiated over twenty years ago with the aim of providing scholars working and teaching in the Republic and Northern Ireland with a forum to discuss their research. Like the Carolingian court, the Symposia are a peripatetic affair, meeting each year in a different location among Ireland's nine universities and university colleges, seven of which, plus Dublin City University's sister college, St Patrick's Teacher Training College, Drumcondra, are represented in the present volume. Since the mid 1980s, when a more focussed approach was introduced, with literature and linguistic topics alternating, these Symposia have provided a vital stimulus to modem languages research in Ireland. The present work, edited by the Symposium's chief organiser, Dr Tony Coulson of Dublin City University and a specialist in German cinema, features both historical continuity and new departures in the pattern of migration from and to Ireland. In the first section, Mary Hossain's and Eamon 6 CiosAin's papers on two early modem emigrants follow the eastward movement of medieval emigration, with Florian .Krobb, who writes about the second half of the nineteenth century, examining continuities represented by the role of Yiddish in mid European German-Jewish texts. The westward movement of migration in that century and the implicit recognition of the problems of assimilation by East European Jews in Germany provide a neat link to the second section, which includes essays on the Irish in America by Grace Neville and Barbara Freitag and on the German and French exiles of our own century, discussed by Sophie Perriaux, at the time of writing a lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, by Hermann Rasche, Francesca Counihan, and the keynote speaker to the conference, Professor Ian Wallace of the University of Bath. Crossing Threshholds has much to tell the reader about modem Ireland. Today's Ireland is arguably still - but not for much longer the most homogeneous society in Europe. It is a nation still predicated

...

Vlll

Foreword

ix

on emigration, although since the mid-nineties emigration from the 'Celtic Tiger' economy has been reversed and we have become a country of net immigration. Ireland's population fell continuously from 1848 to the 1960s, and even today at 3.5 million is not much more than half of what is was (in the 26 counties) 150 years ago. Neither the governments of the Republic nor its people, dogged by structural unemployment, have encouraged immigration, at least not of the poor or dispossessed, who might have made up the numbers of those who 'took the boat' for America. But today the university in particular benefits from free movement within Europe, and the slowly emerging pluricultural society characteristic of the younger generation in Ireland is well exemplified in the fact that nine of the eighteen contributors to Crossing Threshholds have come to work among us from abroad: two from France - though Dr Perriaux was lost to us by a new source of unwelcome migration: the university contract post system - one North African, three British and four Germans. Houssaine Afoullous, Pat Little, who spent a number of years working in West Africa, and Amd Witte, who came to us via Nigeria, provide an important counter-balance to the traditional Irish theme of 'horizontal' migration in Ireland by focusing of the 'vertical', North/South dimension, namely on the theme of exile in literature by and about Africa and its peoples. The five authors of the last section, Kathleen Shields, Mary Howard, an authority on migrant literature in the Federal Republic, JeanPhilippe Imbert, Michael O'Dwyer and Elizabeth Murphy-Lejenue, examine ways in which the literary text acts not just as a filter of experience of exile and migration, but helps mediate the associated problems of identity. It will be an issue of peculiar relevance for Ireland in the coming years.

Eda Sagarra Secretary Royal Irish Academy

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Rachel Finnegan and the National Languages Committee of the Royal Irish Academy for their help in organising the symposium upon which this book is based. I am also grateful to colleagues at Dublin City University, in particular Barbara Freitag, for their encouragement and assistance during my work on the project. The production of the book itself would not have been possible without the generous support given by St. Patrick's College Drumcomdra, Dublin, the Queen's University of Belfast, University College Galway, University College Dublin, St. Patrick's College Maynooth, and above all the School of Applied Language and lntercultural Studies at Dublin City University, for which special thanks are due to Professor Michael Townson.

Anthony Coulson Sydney February 1997

x

Introduction

'Homelessness', Heidegger wrote in his Letter on Humanism, is coming to be the destiny of the world'.1 No century has been so marked by the experience of mass exile and migration. The misery of the persecuted and starving, the savagery of ethnic war and conflict, and the magnetic pull of the economic forces of world-wide urbanisation and industrialisation, have brought about demographic movements on a scale hitherto unknown. Individually cµld collectively, humanity has found itself in transit: communities and even entire populations have been drawn or driven into alien lands and societies away from environments and ways of life inherited down the centuries. Yet beyond this literal sense, 'homelessness', as Heidegger argued, is also the lot of all who inhabit a world in which economic, social and change technological change has become a truly global phenomenon, and in which the very fact of globalisation itself, the ever-growing compression of the sites and channels of human intercourse, in politics, trade, communications, entertainment, tourism etc., has become perhaps the single most important factor of change. For 'at home', too, we are unable, increasingly, to escape an ongoing, everyday confrontation with difference - in all its life-forms - which raises equally inescapable questions about identity, belonging and 'normality'. The more the consciousness of the individual and the group is captured by the voices and images of otherness, the greater the need which is felt to affirm the self: 'under conditions of accelerated globalisation our contemporary concern with identity grows'.2 The juxtaposition of cultures and customs, of minority and majority beliefs and practices, today entails a 'heightening of civilisational, societal, ethnic, regional and indeed individual self-consciousness' (G 6). As 'flows of information, knowledge, money, commodities, people and images' across the globe are intensified, so our 'sense of spatial distance [is] eroded', to the point that 'in effect we are all in each other's backyard'.3 Rather than the integrated global village of which McLuhan spoke,4 that backyard is the living-space of a plurality of

2

Introduction

cultures, each dependent upon the other, yet each insistent on its own difference and distinctness. Amidst our postmodernist celebrations of the end of cultural metanarratives, we live in a world 'characterised not just by difference, but by a consuming and erotic passion for it'.5 However, the passion can be fuelled to excess by a longing for homelands of cultural essentialism, as the uncomfortable proximity of multicultural doctrines of ethnic separatism and the rhetoric of ethnic warfare suggests. The sense of lost cultural purity and homogeneity, where the group defines itself in relation to the perceived threat of otherness, can lead to the assertiveness of nationalist, religious or ethnic fundamentalism: here, the false universality of the familiar is affirmed over and against the unknown. It is clear that the growth of global consciousness is not merely a creation of modernity: in principle it can be traced to the Empires of Antiquity and the rise of world religions (G 7). Likewise our heightened awareness of issues of identity and alterity, belonging and exclusion, certainly predates our present-day affirmation of diversity. Indeed, it has been argued that 'western modernism has been "multicultural" from its very inception', developing a discourse of 'resistance' in an ongoing 'expressivist' critique of techno-rational universalism since the Enlightenment (CM 15). Said's study of 'orientalism' saw in the history of western colonialism the most rigorous suppression of that voice of the other.6 The ideology of evolutionism, the pre-eminence of 'civilisation' over 'primitives' to be redeemed in the name of 'progress', was built on the dualism of metropolis and colonies, with the latter rendered both invisible and speechless by the shield of the hegemony of Eurocentric values. However, the very project of Empire, the dissemination of the culture of the metropolis, contains within it the seeds of its own demise. In his essay 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', Georg Simmel, following Ferdinand Tonnies' analysis of the emergence of economic and social modernity, the transition from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft,7 speaks of the evolution of societies from community, closely structured around a core set of customs and cultural values and clearly demarcated against the outsider, to the culture of the city, based on the law of exchange and an ethos of calculation and contract.s As the inner bonds of the community are loosened, the traders of the metropolis reach beyond its borders to do business with the outside world, and in doing so, accelerate the pace of inner fragmentation. What Tonnies and Simmel describe in relation to the internal transformation of European societies at the turn of the century has characterised the processes of globalisation in our century. Exporting the culture of the metropolis necessarily entails the revision of frontiers and the dilution of the authority of traditional

Introduction

3

values, both imperialist and indigenous. The principle of exchange itself, however unequally implemented, will not allow the voice of the other to be suppressed indefinitely. As the forms of interaction and interconnection multiply, that voice cannot stay a remote unknown beyond the seas, or a quantity to be assimilated without trace into the dominant or prescribed cultural norm. At the core of this global modernity lies a necessary accommodation to difference as a presence within the sphere of the familiar. Even in the realms of Empire a new acceptance of otherness, an acknowledgment of its distinctness and value, takes hold, quite at odds with the supremacist tenets of evolutionism (CM 90ff.). Likewise, the reality of the development of ethnic community life in the United States refutes the clich~ of the melting-pot society, just as the growth of ethnic minorities in post-war Europe, even in the 'mother-cultures' of the ex-colonial powers, soon denied any assumptions or expectations of ready assimilation.9 The construction and dissolution of Empire represents one important strand in the reshaping of our consciousness of cultural frontiers in this century, in the evolution of modernity as the culture of difference. At the focal point of these encounters within and between societies which, for good or bad, have defined our experience of global integration, stand the figures of the exile and the migrant, both in terms of the reality of the historical displacement of individuals and peoples, and as a literary and cultural metaphor of a movement between worlds: one in which there is no certain home or destination, and in which personal and group identities are both a presence and an absence. These are figures who, by choice or necessity, distance themselves from one culture as they approach another, and are, or become, strangers to both. Again, the historical transition to modernity sees a significant shift in our perception of the 'stranger'. A new openness to the dialectic of alien and familiar, other and own, arises as the processes of globalisation intensify. It becomes part of the living experience of the exile and migrant, and is the essence of the balance of integration, autonomy and dialogue that must be attained in the cultural pluralism of present-day society. The ambivalence of our relationship with 'The Stranger' is discussed by Georg Simmel in his essay of 1908. Here, the stranger is said to be a synthesis of 'wandering' and 'attachment'. Traditionally a trader, he is both remote and close: 'the distance within this relation indicates that one who is close by is remote, but his strangeness indicates that one who is remote is near' (S 143). What we share, abstractly, according to Simmel, is that strangeness, each to the other, which only strikes us as strange, however, because of the physical closeness - and one could add: frequency - of the

4

Introduction

encounter. Without this closeness, the stranger would remain remote and unrecognised, while it is the sense of our difference that is the bridge between us. In the exiles and migrants of the twentieth century that same ambivalence marks both external and internal relationships: here, the movement and mediation between self and other is enacted both spatially, between the societies left and entered, and in time, in the life of the group and the individual, in the recollection of the past and the anticipation of the future. The exile and migrant must live between identities, negotiating with a strangeness that is both within and around them. Only in modem times, as Julia Kristeva has shown,10 have conceptions of alterity begun to attribute to the stranger, as outsider, a role representative of the human condition per se. Historically, the definity of the line posited between self and other reflects the authority and homogeneity of the values by which identity is located and affirmed. For the Ancient Greeks the foreigner is the 'barbarian', the incomprehensibility of whose speech excludes him from the universum of the logos. 11 The stranger who proves his worth may be granted protected status, but there is no question of integrating non-Greeks into the community of the polis. Even amidst the cosmopolitanism of Hellenist Alexandria, the class of strangers does not belong to the city or its political order. Rather, cosmopolitanism is the vehicle of disseminating Greek culture (F 66). Under Judaic monotheism, admission to the covenant with God is not necessarily, in all cases, restricted to the chosen people, and here, as in Stoic and Christian teaching, the commandment is to love thy neighbour, including the stranger. Yet in essence, this religious community simply redefines the political and cultural borders of the polis: the relationship with those excluded from the covenant 'does not differ fundamentally from that of other religious or moral doctrines (Stoicism, Christianity) which certainly regard themselves as universal, but only accept those who adopt the same universality as they do' (F 78). Certainly, it is true that from the early days of the Pauline missionary travels throughout the Mediterranean world, the Christian ecclesia is multinational. When, at the Pentacost, the disciples acquire the many tongues of the Heathens, it is to win them for a spiritual community which transcends ethnic difference (KF 137). Indeed, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, caritas towards the stranger plays a significant role in the institution of pilgrimage, which itself enacts the core of Christian belief, the arduous path to redemption, the transubstantiation of body to soul (F 92ff.). It is specifically as a stranger, progressing on the path of faith, that the pilgrim moves, and belongs, within the Christian brotherhood. But if difference is embraced here in the figure of the pilgrim, this is still

Introduction

5

because of what unites him with his hosts. The outsider remains a potential enemy. Christian universality is seen as quite compatible with the exclusion, and perhaps persecution, of the heretic and the followers of other faiths, not to speak of the radical divisions within the Church itself. At the same time, in the secular sphere, the development of feudal society and, later, the rise of the nation-state strictly qualify the ideal of universal Christian fellowship: in the practical world of law and custom, the stranger is anyone born outside the fiefdom, large or small, and entry into that enclosed world is dependent on the favour of the local lord or prince (F lOOff.). Even in the Renaissance rebirth of the spirit of discovery, the new-found fascination for the many and varied, and bizarre, worlds encountered in remote places by the explorers does not signify recognition or acceptance of the alterity of the cultures concerned. Rather, in the wealth and variety of the unknown the humanist ethos affirms its own universality: difference becomes a measure of the versatility and fullness of the inquiring mind (F 128ff.). That ethnocentric imbalance continues, in evolving forms, in travel literature of the 17th and 18th centuries, where the assumptions of European rationalism predetermine the perception of foreign cultures,12 and in the nineteenth century, in the nationalistcolonialist quest for the exotic, whose subjection and appropriation is to confirm the would-be universality of the conquering culture. The ideology which asserts the supremacy of a national culture over all that is alien, reflects dangers which can be traced to the Enlightenment itself: where the demolition of the barriers of ignorance and superstition, the rule of reason over the unknown, is proclaimed, the project of 'emancipation' bears within it the potential for its perversion into a totalitarian liquidation of alterity, such as our own century has witnessed. Yet the European Enlightenment also sees the emergence of a critique of rationalist universalism in which, for the first time, the conception of the stranger acquires a positive function in the definition of identity. Just as emphasis grows on the autonomy of the personal and the private, distinct from the public sphere, so the picture of foreign lands and peoples changes. The 'noble savage', who for Renaissance writers represented a curiosity, is now reinstated as an evocation of a lost natural humanity. Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes become the model for a literature in which Europe begins to see itself 'with foreign eyes'.13 Lichtenberg muses on the nasty shock of the American Indian who first discovered Columbus.14 Out of the foreigner grows the 'alter ego' through whom we recognise the corruption of our ways, and the journey abroad becomes, as in Swift, a satirical 'metaphor of the distance that we should adopt in relation to ourselves' (F 146). This is no dialogue

6

Introduction

between self and other: the stranger is still the projection of an ethnocentric consciousness. Yet the image of alterity acquires a new significance. No longer does it represent a realm of remoteness which confirms the unity and presence of the given order. Instead it marks the gradual emergence of a society fragmenting under the forces of subjective and objective rationality, which seeks to identify its own internal divisions, its own strangeness to itself. In Hegel's attempt to construct a philosophy of consciousness which takes account of this nascent sense of alienation, a system in which subjective and objective reason could be reconciled and synthesised, the encounter with alterity plays a key role. No culture, Hegel concedes, progresses in isolation from others. Collective and individual knowledge and identity are attained only where the mind, departing from itself, perceives the 'strangeness in itself' 1s of the object before it.16 For Hegel, what is incomprehensible cannot be accessible or present to the mind, but in this encounter the mind finds itself in its opposite, in estranged form, and thereby, through conceptual abstraction, is able to overcome its otherness, freeing the object of sensual particularity and making it 'something that is essentially and immediately mine'.17 Clearly, Hegel's system attributes a necessary and dynamic role to alterity, but the interaction of self and other remains one of assimilation rather than dialogue: the particular voice of the other is not heard - instead, its conceptualisation is the means by which the mind returns, securely, as it were, to itself - even if it must first accept self-alienation in order to progress to a higher level of being. In political and historical terms, it would be possible to see the counterpart to Hegel's synthesis in that very Eurocentrism which 'accumulated experiences, territories, peoples, histories', which 'studied them, classified them, verified them, but above all, [ . . . ] subordinated them to the culture and indeed the very idea of white Christian Europe'.18 While elements of Hegelianism may potentially legitimise such ideologies of cultural domination,19 the critical heritage of Enlightenment and Romantic literature and thought continues in the nineteenth century to explore a subjectivity which is by no means at one with itself, indeed whose identity seems invested, at its very core, with otherness. Variations on the dialectic of the strange and the familiar, discerned in Simmel's account of the stranger, pervade the literature of the nineteenth century, perhaps most strikingly in the enduring motif of the double or Doppelganger, with its portrayal of the double alienation of experiencing the other as self and the self as other. In its most extreme form the horror and hatred of that other-self can only result in blind self-destruction, as in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian

Introduction

7

Gray (1891) or Stellan Rye's film Der Student von Prag (1913). It is significant, in a century of global 'homelessness' and in the face of the cataclysm of nationalist passions in World War I, that Freud chooses the Doppelgilnger motif in E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale Der Sandmann as the starting point for his analysis of 'The Uncanny' in western culture: the dread of the repressed other within us.20 After Freud, Imo either wrote himself or were written to him. Each one of these, the letters and the voices, plays a specific role in the novel. The letters are used to plead Ml>mo's cause. For instance, in 'Une lettre A une prostituee ', Ml>mo talks about his physical misery and his need for love and affection, and he ends the letter by comparing his condition to hers, stating that there is not much difference between them, that both of them live in alienation and exile. The voices, on the other hand, are used to give different accounts of exile. For example, the voice of the student/author tells Ml>mo how he experienced exile both in his home country and in France. In his country, he joined the peasants to rebel against their government for taking their land, but he found out that he could not communicate with them because he did not speak or think like them, and so felt like a stranger amongst them. The only thing he could do, therefore, was to sit and listen to them, until the police came and took him to prison, where he was tortured. After that, he escaped to France, where he spent most of his time in an asylum. The voice of Gazel, who symbolises Palestine, tells him about the exile of her people, and manages to convince him to come out of his shell because there are other causes far more important than his own. Another feature of the novel is the importance given to space, as it reinforces the idea of the isolation which the immigrants live in. Most of the story takes place in Ml>mo's room, which is comparable to a cell: 'A square box dimly lit by a bulb stuck on the ceiling. The layers of paint on the wall are flaking away, falling like petals to become dust. Two bunk beds. A high window [ .. . )' (RS 15-16). In addition to the complete absence of any comfort in the room, MOmo has to share it with three other immigrants, and they all have to abide by the rules that govern everything except human dignity: - It is forbidden to receive women (there is a brothel, Chez Maribelle, not far from here). - It is forbidden to listen to the radio from nine o'clock. - It is forbidden to sing in the evening, particularly in Arabic or Kabyle . . . - It is forbidden to die in this room (die elsewhere, in your homes, for

150

Houssaine Afoullouss

instance, it is more convenient). - It is forbidden to commit suicide (even if you are locked up in Fleury-Mb-ogis); your religion forbids it, so do we. - It is forbidden to climb trees ... (RS 19-20)

When first published, La R~clusion Solitaire was regarded as another version of Les Boucs that had nothing new to offer. It is true that exile is the main theme of Ben Jelloun's novel, as it is of Chraibi's. Yet Ben Jelloun does not consider exile to be the lot of Arab immigrants alone; any human being can experience it, whether he lives in or outside his country, as the examples of the prostitute, the student and Gazel show. The most important thing is that one should not live in isolation - I.a r~clusion should not be solitaire; and that is exactly what saves M6mo from madness. By embracing the Palestinian cause, he found a new purpose in life, and forgot about his own misery. Another difference between the two novels is that in Les Boucs the narrator could not relate to his characters, even when he wanted to, whilst in La Afclusion Solitaire the narrator does relate. Very often the 'I' of the narrator becomes a 'We', referring to both, him and the immigrants, when he says, for instance: 'I came to your country reluctantly, expelled from mine, a little voluntarily, a great deal out of need. I came, we came, to earn our living, to safeguard our death' (RS 48).

This may be explained by the change of attitude towards the Francophone intellectuals after independence. Although one cannot say that these intellectuals were unanimously accepted, many North Africans started reading and even identifying themselves with their work, probably because they did not regard the French language and culture as a threat to their own any more. As a result, more books were published and new writers appeared. This, of course, proved that those critics who predicted the disappearance of Francophone literature after independence were wrong. Wrong they were indeed, since in the 1980s yet another generation of writers, quite different from their predecessors, appeared: different in the sense that they were a product of immigration. These writers are the sons and daughters of Arab immigrants, commonly known by the name of 'Beurs '. One important factor about them is the ambiguity of their status as writers. In most cases, they are French nationals, either because they were born in France or because they have lived long enough in the country to acquire French nationality, yet they are regarded by the French as Francophone rather than French writers (for the French, a Francophone means a French speaker, not a French person). Among the explanations given are that they do not follow the

Francophone North African Writers in Exile

151

French literary tradition, that their imaginative world is different from the French, and that their characters evolve within the North African community. There is, of course, some truth in this. These writers have, for instance, a different attitude towards the language: they use slang and Arab words quite frequently, invent words that are neither Arab nor French; even the syntax is sometimes distorted. Yet this does not mean that they are unable to write proper or literary French. In fact, they are trying to prove a point: 'Why should we write like the French if we are not considered like them?' As for their imaginative world, it is bound to be different, as they live in two worlds, two cultures, at the same time: that which their Muslim parents seek to sustain within the family home and that of the secular world which surrounds them in the streets and classrooms of France. The irony is that writers who came to France from other parts of the world, and brought with them their own culture, are still regarded as French writers: take the examples of Beckett, of Le Clezio, or even of Albert Memmi, who came from a Jewish Tunisian background, yet is considered now to be a French rather than a North African writer. The spirit of the 'Beur culture' is in many ways reflected in the title of Mehdi Charef's novel Le The Au Harem D'Archi Ahmed.6 The phrase is a malapropism uttered by Balou, a youth of North African origin, during a remedial maths lesson. The bi-cultural condition of the Beur generation is manifest in Balou's transposition of the Ancient Greek formula known as le theoreme d'Archimede. Its replacement by a near-homophonic but entirely incongruous assembly of elements drawn from the other side of the Mediterranean reflects, as Alec Hargreaves argues, 7 the coexistence of conflicting cultural codes within youths such as Balou. It is tempting to read this malapropism as emblematic of the confused and marginal condition to which the Beur generation is often held to be condemned. Also, one wonders whether the author is out to gently victimise his readers by taking this phrase as his title, thereby reversing the traditional relationship between the French and foreign communities. French readers opening the book in search of some exotic tale of Oriental manners are in for a shock. It contains no harem, no Ahmed and no more than the briefest of references to mint tea. Instead, we are plunged into a drab Paris housing estate 'qui sent [ ... ) l'urine et la merde' (LT 7). By inverting the conventions of literary exoticism in this way, Charef immediately asserts his independence of the stereotyped expectations of French readers. We are obliged to wait until half-way through the novel before the incident involving Balou provides an explanation for the title.

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Another point that makes this novel very interesting is the close friendship which binds together Madjid, who comes from an Algerian background, and Pat, who is French. During their schooldays, we are told, Pat and Madjid spent a year together in the same remedial class as Balou. Madjid was sent there because he used to lose his concentration at school after his father's accident on the building site where he was employed as an unskilled labourer. The boy's learning difficulties are therefore linked to the father's accident and to his low social status, rather than to his ethnic origin. Madjid managed to gain enough marks to leave the remedial group after a year, whereas Pat, with no ethnic handicap, came bottom of the class and remained there for three years. At the age of sixteen, both left school without any qualifications, and shared a life of unemployment and petty crime until they were caught and sent to prison. The message Mehdi Charef is subtly conveying through this, is that unemployment and delinquency are not the lot of the second generation of Arab immigrants alone, as is often suggested by the media and the right-wing political parties, especially Le Front National, but that of any youth whatever his nationality may be, be it French, Portuguese or Algerian. Once you put them in the same surroundings and conditions, the results will always be the same. To conclude, Francophone North African literature was born under the sign of exile: linguistic and cultural exile because these writers, particularly the first two generations, attended French schools where they learnt more about the French and Western cultures than about their own. Some of them were even unable to write a letter in their mother-tongue. Having been nourished by Western ideas of freedom and equality, many of these writers felt out of place in their patriarchal societies; and when they spoke up, they were rejected as being 'French'. Ironically, when they finally left for France, which constituted their physical exile, they expected the French to treat them as one of them. Instead, they had to face the same rejection, except that this time they were rejected as being Arab. As for the third generation, although some writers were born and still live in North Africa, those who are most spoken about are the 'Beur' generation. Being a product of immigration, this third generation of writers is in many ways different from the first two. The identity crisis they suffer from is much stronger. Their relation to their parents' culture is ambiguous; sometimes they praise it, other times they reject it, and very often they survive on what has been called 'bricolage culture!' (L 47). Their imaginative world and interests are also quite different from those of their predecessors. In addition, many of them have a very strong sense of humour, which makes their books very entertaining, despite the bleakness of the lives they usually portray.

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Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6

D. Chraibi, Le Passt simple, Paris, Denoel, 1954, r~d. Paris: Folio, 1991 (=PS); Les Boucs, Paris: Denoel, 1955, ~. Paris: Folio, 1989. K Yacine, Le Polygone ttoiM, Paris: Le Seuil, 1986, 182. All translations in this article are my own. We assume it is the Second World War. For three years, T. Ben Jelloun worked in a psychosomatic medical centre where his main patients were North African immigrants. He sums up his experience there in Ui plus haute des solitudes (Paris: Le Seuil, 1977), a book about the emotional and sexual misery of these immigrants. T. Ben Jelloun, Ui Rtclusion solitaire, Paris: Denoel, 1976, repr. coll. Point, 1981 (=RS). M.Charef, Le Tht au Harem D'Archi-Ahmed, Paris: Mercure de France, 1983 (=LT).

7

A.G. Hargreaves, 'Language and identity in Beur culture', French Cultural Studies, vol. 1, 1990 (February), 47-8 ( = L).

Images of Difference: The Portrayal of Ethnic Minorities in German Cinema since Fassbinder Anthony Coulson

U we consider the ways in which German cinema, since the revival of the feature film in the mid 1960s, has contributed to a new critical understanding of German culture and society, we probably think primarily of such accomplishments as Fassbinder's history of German consciousness, stretching from the land of. the economic miracle in the 1950s to the nineteenth century roots of antisemitism and authoritarianism; or of the reappraisal of the Heimatfilm by Reitz and others, stripping away the moralising and idealising complacency that infected that genre in the post-war years; or of Syberberg's autopsy of of Hitler's Germany as the depository of the spiritual garbage of our age, of the kitsch of instrumentalised myths. Or we recall the integrity and independence of mind that distinguished the best of the social and political dramas produced, by film-makers who perhaps met with little or no official approval, throughout the forty years of the existence of theGDR At the same time, German film has characteristically been a cinema of frontiers, reaching across historical and geographical spaces in order to redefine our present, and our cultural consciousness, in terms of their relation to the many faces of the other, the alien, and the unknown. Werner Herzog's achievement, in this sphere, was to evoke a sense of experiential states on the fringe of Germano- or Eurocentric rationalist categories. Herzog's expeditions into the unknown were matched by Wim Wenders' explorations of internalised l~dscapes, seeking to resist the technological colonisers whose fabricated images and phrases threatened, in Wenders' perception, to stifle the faint voice of a distinctively German film

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culture, just as the National Socialist media dictatorship of the past did, with its relentless devaluation of word and image. Increasingly, German cinema's quest to find its own voice in dialogue across frontiers of consciousness has taken account of the fact that a national culture constitutes itself as a meeting of many cultures. As Eric Rentschler observed, 'to speak of being German today means to talk about a multicultural world both within and outside one's national borders'. 1 Looking out and across those borders German film since the 1970s has produced tales in which visions and memories of foreign places challenge assumed notions of identity and belonging in the German protagonists.2 More consistently and more strikingly, however, as the size and significance of immigrant communities in Germany has grown, German film-makers have also examined the relations of ethnic and cultural difference which, evolving from one generation to the next, have fundamentally changed their society from within. Partly, attention has turned to a new variant of the old motif of the wanderer: the asylum-seeker. Following Christian Ziewer's Aus der Ferne sehe ich dieses Land (1978), Jan Schiltte's Drachenfutter (1987) and Tevfik Baser's Lebewohl, Fremde (1990) have illuminated the predicament of those seeking refuge, or another life, in Germany and other European countries. Primarily, however, interest has focussed on the fundamental issues of intercultural understanding raised by the presence in Germany of those who, as Max Frisch said of Switzerland, were summoned as workers but came as human beings.3 It was the advent in the 1960s of the Gastarbeiter ('guest-workers'), later renamed ausliindische Arbeitnehmer ('foreign employees') and now ausltindische Mitbilrger ('foreign fellow-citizens'), and through these migrant communities, the rapid introduction of a wide range of unfamiliar ethnic customs and traditions, that made the figure of the inllindische Ausliinder ('inland foreigner') one of the focal images in German cinema of identity and difference in modem society. I wish to examine, selectively, how that image of the immigrant in German cinema has developed in the course of the last three decades, reflecting the evolving relationship between majority and minority cultures in society at large. It is possible to identify four stages in the representation of the experience of ethnic minorities. In the first, the stranger is viewed from within the majority community, for whom he/ she is no more than the instrument by which their dominant position is maintained; in the second, the perspective is the incomer's experience of the host country, and the discrepancy between hopes and realities for those who cross the threshold but find themselves in no man's land; in the third, attention turns to the questions of tradition versus assimilation that arise as the ethnic communities establish

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themselves, particularly in the second and third generations; finally, as the erosion or diversification of ethnic identities continues, emphasis moves to the emergence of the intercultural itself, to the portrayal of a society which increasingly lives across and between the frontiers. By the end of the 1960s the Federal Republic had concluded 'guestworker' agreements with Italy, Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Morocco, with the total number of immigrants rising by then to close on two million. The decision had already been made, presumably in the name of European solidarity, no longer to recruit from the North African countries, and attitudes towards the southern Europeans recalled, at their worst, not so distant times when there had been millions not of guest- but of slave-workers. On their arrival in the 1950s the Italians were regarded, as one writer remembers, as 'Spaghetti-Presser', idlers hanging around the main streets and stations, cowardly knife fighters, unreliable war allies, and, above all, a sexual threat.4 Those prejudices survived, and more recent research has shown how much seeped through into media portrayals and public pronouncements by those who considered themselves far more enlightened.s This is the context in which Fassbinder first projected onto the screen the issue of Germany's confrontation, within its own borders, with its 'other'. In particular, two of his earlier films, the television production Katzelmacher (1969) and Angst essen Seele au/ (1973), can be said to represent the first phase of German cinema's exploration of multicultural society. In both these films it is emotional emptiness, sterility and insecurity which drives the German protagonists to seek compensation in aggressive rejection of the outsider - in the first case a guestworker from Greece, in the second one from Morocco. The source of the incomprehension and hostility is traced to a sickness which, long before the stranger arrives, has infected the 'insiders' of this society, a society which grasps at the opportunity to vent its viciousness. The outsider essentially acts the part of a catalyst that sets the mechanisms of hatred in motion. The irony is, as Fassbinder shows, that the same mechanisms can also work, so to speak, in reverse, so that apparent tolerance or even, in the case of the Moroccan Ali, friendship towards the foreigner can be the mask assumed, if this is required by the formula of self-interest which happens to be dominant at any one moment. In a sense, not even the existence, let alone the identity or autonomy of the other, is acknowledged, because, in Fassbinder's portrayal, the capacity for living human relationships, in these Germans, has long-since atrophied. When Emmi, the lonely widow in Angst essen Seele auf, struggles to nurture and protect her relationship with ·the young and dark-skinned foreigner against the outrage of those who have left her, too, on the fringe of society, the main threat lies in the

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drive for power and status, the repression of inner weakness, that is engrained within her - just as it is in all the other would-be insiders in this world. Only when Emmi learns to distance herself from that instrumentalising of the relationship is there a suggestion, at the close of the film, that she and Ali might begin to realise, and share, their humanity together. But even then, the signs are that this will be no more than a brief interlude before normality reasserts itself. In the lesser-known Katzelmacher, upon which this discussion will concentrate, even greater emphasis is placed on the exploitation of the foreigner within the internal network of power relationships. The title is itself abusive Bavarian slang for the southerner with the breeding capacity, and appetite, of a cat. The film is set in a provincial nowhere - marked by the stylised dialect as Bavarian - in which four young couples engage in self-perpetuating permutations of sex, exploitation, abuse, violence, bigotry and spite, mostly all combined. It is the cash flow for sexual services which keeps the merry-go-round functioning. Probably there are few films in which payment is made or demanded with such regularity. The prostitution just happens, as day-to-day business, without ever rising to the level of consciousness. 'Who's that guy then?', one of the men is asked about his well-to-do client. 'Just a guy', he answers evasively. Or 'I've got money with me' is the accepted signal for the girl to strip: no more needs to be said. Communication between the 'partners' is reduced to declarations that lead nowhere, suppressing doubt or annoyance and providing would-be security by closing off the spaces between them, while those spaces are filled with frozen silence. Yet they sense the silences must be broken, and if a phrase is not to hand, they rebel against their own speechlessness with frustration and violence. Repeatedly, the film returns to the same scenes, starting with an apparent image of relaxed contentment: the group sitting on railings in front of a sunny wall, a place to be together. But as we keep returning there, we realise how these figures are trapped between the wall and the roar of the traffic - which we never see - on our side. The composition of that line along the railings is always shifting, never complete. Or the couples gather round a table, constantly changing chairs that scrape harshly on the floor, then going out, coming back, moving again, slapping down cards on the table - but without speech. This one scene embodies what Fassbinder has also evoked through the structuring of his film, with rapid cutting from setting to setting, from one grouping to another, and back again, each in some form a duplication of the other. Beneath the petrification of relationships and dialogues there is an ongoing sense of restlessness, an unacknowledged longing to escape, to find words that actually say something.

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Fassbinder's original play, upon which the television film is based, only showed the entry of the stranger into this closed world. The additions he then makes with the film, the first third of which is given to the portrayal of the four couples, are themselves a significant indication of the role allotted the guestworker after he has crossed the threshold. For what this newcomer, a 'Greek from Greece', as they dub him, offers, is an outlet for their anger with themselves, a chance to find words that 'count'. The intruder, referred to either as the 'Greek' or as the 'Fremdarbeiter' ('alien worker' - a term inherited from Nazi times), becomes a new topic with which to break the silence: 'Liz has taken in a foreign worker.' (pause) 'So?' (pause) 'Funny, someone like that being here.' (pause)

Fassbinder traces the spread of that gossip, as it is fed into the system and each tells everyone else, who already knows it anyway, that there's a foreigner about. From there it is not far to 'Think she's got something going with him? (pause) Liz with the foreigner?' (pause) 'Dunno.' (pause)

which soon turns into 'But doing it with a foreigner, that's not done.' (pause)

and then into ever more stilted accounts of sexual advances and, finally, outright rape. Phrases of moral outrage become the currency of group solidarity, a pretence to a dialogue that all can ag1ee upon and can spread without reflection from one couple and one topic to the next: 'Where he comes from, there's Communists.' (pause) 'Lots of Communists.' (pause) 'The whole of Greece is full of Communists.' (pause) 'Communists are dangerous.' (pause) 'Communists should be banned.' (pause) 'He's one of 'em.' (pause)

The phrase-production is then fuelled by the breaking of ranks within the group, as if to cover up the cracks'of its inner insecurity. One girl, Marie, is drawn to the Greek, and in contrast to the others begins to admit her need, begins, genuinely, to speak of herself. 'They just talk and don't mean it', she says to her new friend, 'you're nice and I like you. (pause) You can't talk and that's the best thing for me.' The foreigner is graced with automatic exclusion from the language of repression. Between him and Marie there is the only sign in this

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tale that words, and even the acknowledged lack of them, can lead a way out of cells of self-hatred. Just as the phrases of town solidarity seem to be self-generating, divorced from any consciousness in those who produce them, so when the physical assault on the Greek comes it is equally arbitrary, simply happening in those spaces of alienation around the figures, an event they must then account for, but can only do so in the jargon that has isolated them: 'Now he'll definitely go.' (pause) 'Definitely.' (pause) 'Because it wasn't so nice here any more.' (pause) 'This is where we belong, and nobody else.' (pause)

Those clich~s, however, were never more than a substitute for the real currency which keeps the mechanisms of this society in operation above all maintaining the supply of sexual goods and services. The locals, then, have no problems in switching phrases when reminded of the importance of cash. Now the word is that it's better if the Greek stays, 'because you can take more rent, (pause) because they're stupid and don't know any better, (pause) because more's produced when they're there, that's better for Germany'. At the end Liz, the landlady, is proposing to partition her room: the implication, presumably, is that two, or more, foreigners are better than one - for Germany, of course. As in Angst essen Seele auf Fassbinder shows how easy it can be to discover the desirability of unwanted aliens, but the point is that the stranger here remains unseen, unrecognised, unknown, just a fiction in the jargon of repression. Fassbinder's Greek, and to a lesser extent Ali, in the later film, are presented as essentially passive figures against which mentalities and attitudes amongst the Germans are examined. In Katzelmacher the last word is given to Marie. Here, too, the Greek just belongs to her dream: 'He says he'll take me to Greece. ' 'And his wife?' 'Everything's different in Greece.'

For Marie the stranger represents an escape into a land of sentimental hope, one in which the reality of who he is plays little part. But at least she recognises that that land has got to be very different from the one she knows, the one in which her foreign friend is just a 'Katzelmacher'. By the later 1970s German cinema was producing a number of films that reflected the changing relationship between majority and minority cultures in Germany, with an immigrant population of various

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nationalities that had already taken root, physically and economically, but was only just beginning to build distinct communities of independence and influence within the German environment. Whereas Fassbinder had been concerned with the exclusion and exploitation of the foreigner by a society of outsiders unable to recognise their own alienation from themselves, interest now starts to shift towards issues of cultural compatibility, of the meeting of contrasting cultures, where the focus is on the individual experience of the migrant, not yet seen as the representative of an established community, but as an individual cut off from the memories, customs and language of the homeland and exposed to isolation, or worse, in an alien world. Here the perspective adopted becomes that of the migrant him- or herself, who has left behind rural life in, perhaps, Anatolia or Sicily and now struggles to survive, practically and spiritually, in an industrialised society. Into this category falls one of the first films to be made by an immigrant, Sohrab Shahid Saless's In der Fremde (1974-5), which evokes in the extreme austerity of its imagery the situation of a migrant factory worker in a bleak and unwelcoming environment. In Helma SandersBrahms' Shirins Hochzeit (1979) and Werner Schroeter's Palermo oder Wolfsburg (1979) the protagonists' entry into Germany is seen as a kind of pilgrimage to martyrdom. Schroeter's film reaches its climax when his main character, the victim of the irreconcilability of the two opposites embraced in the title, finally reasserts his own identity and integrity by confessing to the murders he has committed. In the last part of the film, his German trial is cross-cut with scenes of a Passion play in Palermo: he is Christ on the Cross, but the crucifixion in Germany is one where those who advocate his cause and secure his acquittal are in fact denying him the right to his own truth and reality. It is against that appropriation of his own voice that he rebels and protests his guilt. In Shirins Hochzeit the cultural exchange is pre-structured in the narrative itself, as a dialogue between Shirin, the narrator of her own tale, and her German other self. When Shirin follows the lover denied her in her village life, Mahmud, to an unknown land called Germany, the two narrators speak of her mission as a tunnel that must be dug through a mountain of iron. She 'digs' her way, as she supposes, towards her dream, marriage with Mahmud, but that turns out to be a path to degradation and death. The cold realities of the prostitution scene in Germany prove as lethal as the sexual oppression of her homeland. Shirin finds her love for Mahmud to be an ideal which is so devalued in that alien world that she loses herself in the course of her search. Yet she does retain the power, just, to resist, and like Schroeter's victim-hero, to make her own sacrifice - not as consciously as he did, but at least rejecting, once she

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realises the search is over, the enslavement into which she has been drawn. The hope with which each of these characters first set off for an unknown land may have collapsed into disillusion and despair, but neither, ultimately, renounces the right to remain themselves. This second group of films may be said to develop the picture of individual isolation and discrimination offered in the first phase in the portrayal of Germany's minorities, but they do so by turning from the presumptions of the majority community in .order to explore and reconstruct the complexity of the migrant's dilemma. Here flashbacks and narrative reflection recall the protagonists' past and present it as an essential dimension of their present situation, while initial hopes fade and future goals recede further and further into the distance. The third group of films I wish to consider builds on that recognition of the multi-dimensionality of the migrant's experience but addresses, a decade later, a significantly different society, one whose development, in the 1980s, poses questions of the nature and limits of cultural integration itself, now seen from the perspective of established minority communities and their sense of cultural and social identity, and focusing in particular on the experience of the Turkish community. As in other European countries with Islamic minorities, there has been considerable discussion in Germany of the difficulties of harmonising what seem to be irreconcilable customs and religious observances, and here it is the second or third immigrant generation that has been most affected by divided loyalties. Television documentaries and feature films have looked specifically at the problems of children who return with their parents to the family's land of origin, which may well not be their own place of birth, only to suffer a degree of alienation from their peers that was unknown to them in Germany. Within Germany, the experiences of a younger generation living between conflicting worlds found popular expression in Hark Bohrn's fasemin (1987). Essentially, the film takes a Eurocentric approach, presenting us with a love story set in the context of an at times oppressive Islamic moral code. However, strictly traditionalist members of the Turkish family portrayed, three generations of which are represented, are contrasted with those, including the father of the heroine Jasemin, who have more sympathy with the desire of the children to lead independent lives. Fundamentally, though, the issue is seen as one of the gap between generations: all of the children are shown as being very much at ease with western ways, without thinking, however, of rebelling against family ties or obligations. Trouble for the family arises both internally, when Jasemin's sister and her husband are unable to produce the expected blood-stained sheet after their wedding night - in fact the man has failed to perform, but automatically the woman is judged

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guilty - and externally, when Jasemin herself is wooed by a German boy. In the final sequence the angry father forces his daughter to leave with him for Turkey, the only place where his authority is secure, but she is rescued from that fate by her German friend, who whisks her off into the night on his motorbike. It is true that Bohm is careful not to leave his portrayal as unbalanced as this summary suggests. The happy face of the Turks is by no means one that is exclusively westernised. The togetherness of the Turkish community, the vitality of its customs, and the strong emotional bonds within the family play a part in the story. It is also the father who holds his kinfolk back when Jasemin threatens suicide if she is abducted, and the final shots show the girl's grief, rather than relief, when 'rescued'. On the one hand the message seems to be that youth and love will triumph over Islamic repression; on the other we are left wondering where Jasemin is finally heading with her latter-day St. George: presumably to a life outside her community, but the suggestion is that deep-rooted ties within the family will not be - and cannot be - completely severed. To that extent at least the possibility of a future dialogue between the cultures is not excluded, however limited its scope may be. There is no such hope for the protagonists of Tevfik Baser's 40m2 Deutschland (1986). A Turkish worker, Dursun, brings his wife to Germany, the strange new world that he has promised her. But the next morning she finds after he has left for work that she is locked in, in their apartment, the forty square meters of the title - to protect her from the vice that lurks outside, as Dursun puts it when challenged. The very opening of the film evokes the sense of enclosure and entrapment. We do not enter the apartment with the couple: we are already inside, while the camera pans the objects and walls that surround us. Throughout the film, these walls, the doorways and window frames, hold in the woman, their prisoner, and we share her fate. She, Tuma, seems driven into dark comers, at times crouching or hiding in misery. There is only one source of light, the window where she stands looking out, longing for some point of contact with the world she does not know. One of the few glimpses of freedom she enjoys, across the yard to the street comer, is ironically that of a prostitute plying her trade. What Tuma does see of the Germans is far from welcoming. When, twice, she sees a little girl with a doll at a window opposite and they begin to strike up a distant friendship, the girl is soon hauled away, after the mother realises who she is waving to. Two young Germans on a balcony drink and shout; another man does his mindless exercises. In a sense, everybody here is locked away. Once Tuma, having found the key, summons up courage and ventures down the stairs, but she meets nothing but blank stares.

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In the final scene, when she knocks on doors seeking help, the only response she gets is 'I don't understand you. I've only just moved in. I don't know anyone here. I'm an old lady.' It is not merely Tuma's ignorance of German that militates against understanding here. The neighbour's words are only a symptom of a deeper speechlessness that afflicts the Germans of this film - in their suspicion, anxiety or plain indifference. · Yet the greater isolation is imposed on Tuma by her own people, by the familiar world of her village and the family which bartered her to this husband, as we see in the flashbacks of Tuma's memories of the past. Dursun, too, is a victim, a victim of a cultural code of patriarchal authority and the honour of manhood. The result is a relationship almost without affection in which his wife is reduced to little more than an object of his domination. There is considerable stress in the film on the brutality of Dursun's sexual demands, as if that crude sexual release is the only compensation for his fear and hatred of a society in which he counts for nothing. The oppressive force of his cruelty and the claustrophobic weight of Tuma's imprisonment are further intensified by the overwhelming silence of the film, where sounds of life are generally limited to chance noises from outside, or the ticking of the alarm clock. If their relationship is without feeling, it is also almost without words. The shock of Dursun's vitriolic, almost racialist diatribe against the Germans and their immorality is heightened by the silence that precedes and follows, and reminds us of the real vu1nerability of the man, his desperate need for assurance that he, too, can be the master within his own forty square meters. Hence, too, his extravagant conceit on hearing that he is to be a father: he has proved his worth, and briefly Tuma is valued, because she is the instrument of that success. Tuma herself struggles to overcome the barrier of silence, to express the wrong she is suffering, but her rehearsals before the mirror of what she will tell Dursun when he returns only underline the absence of dialogue in her life, and the rehearsal is never translated into reality. Once, it is true, it seems as if she has succeeded in wringing a concession from her husband: he will take her to the Sunday fair. But he has no difficulty, after breaking his word, in finding a pious phrase to excuse the betrayal. Not surprisingly, Baser's subject proved to be highly controversial: the uncompromising portrayal of the inequality of the sexes and the violation of the woman's humanity in a loveless union was attacked as a gross misrepresentation of Turkish culture. There is no doubt that the film raises issues which relate specifically to the situation of Islamic culture in a western environment, and it is doubtful whether

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a German director could or would have attempted such an approach. Even so, 40m2 Deutschland need not, and should not, be read as a polemic against the customs of one ethnic minority. Rather, it is a dramatic fiction which clearly affirms individual human rights, and does so by attempting to understand, in one specific context, how the abuse of those rights can arise: namely, when ethnic traditions or identities are not lived and upheld in dialogue with others, but in fear of them. In an interview Baser defined his theme as the helplessness of human beings where two cultures 'collide' without speech.6 No less radically than Fassbinder's study in self-imprisonment in Katzelmacher, his film measures oppression and brutality as '40m2' of speechlessness. Dursun's final collapse in a fit leaves his naked corpse blocking the door of escape as firmly as he did when alive. Ultimately Tuma must find the courage to force her way out into life again, to find some kind of access to an alien world. The omens, to judge from her neighbours' reactions, are far from propitious. The final shots show her crossing the hall towards the light of the door and then, fearfully, stepping out. This time a door opens outwards, but we have no assurance that she, alone, foreign, pregnant and without the language of this country, will in future be able to exercise the self-determination hitherto denied her. But again there is one slight element of hope: at least she has penetrated the barrier and stepped over that threshold into the unknown. That, the film implies, might just be the beginning of a genuine openness between people and communities who must live both within and beyond the frontiers of any single culture. 40m2 Deutsch/and remains the most radical exploration of ethnic alienation in recent years. It retains powerful elements of the earlier migration phase - the portrayal of the vulnerability of the newcomer, and the strangeness and coldness confronting her hope for a new life on foreign soil. It also, however, raises fundamental questions about the dilemma of those stranded at the periphery of traditions and identities which no longer provide answers adequate to new experience but still resist any would-be dialogue or rethinking of relations with the other. The last films to be considered here may not recapture the psychological intensity of that Angst and resistance to what lies beyond the threshold which so distinguishes Baser's drama, but they do show us a society in which the consolidation of minority cultures in Germany, the new plurality of languages, beliefs and customs, brings with it, on the one hand, an ongoing intensification of cultural interchange, but at the same time an undeniable need to recognise the incompleteness and interdependence of each community, and a growing awareness of the discrepancies and discontinuities within each traditional grouping. As each generation redefines itself, both

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internally and externally, so the zones of mediation, populated by those who live in multiple worlds, or are caught between them, expand. That shift in emphasis is anticipated in /asemin and 40m2 Deutschland, but evolves in the 1990s into the portrayal of individual and group displacement in a multicultural society, into the stories of those who find themselves alienated or disinherited, both within and outside the family or community, as the frontiers of group-identity are redrawn and the structures of common values and inner bonding are eroded or modified. Both Doris DOrrie's Happy Birthday, Turkel (1992) and Sinan Cetin's Berlin in Berlin (1994) are 'threshold' films about relations across communal divisions which then proceed to reveal the tensions beneath the appearance of family harmony and togetherness and the fragility of accepted notions of ethnic identity. The very title of Berlin in Berlin, which enjoyed considerable commercial success in both Turkey and Germany, thematises the mingling of worlds, indeed the fact that one is always present in the other. On one level the duplication of 'Berlin' refers, conventionally, to the 'city' within a city: most of the film is set in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the largest · Turkish community in Germany. But on another level, the irony of the plot transforms this minority-majority relationship by inverting it: here the alien element is a German who crosses the threshold within his own land into that internal 'Berlin', and has to remain there, in changing degree both prisoner and guest, in an environment where language and customs, and in fact the conditions for his very survival, are dictated by his hosts. But again, as the title suggests, the interest of the film is directed, as it proceeds, less at the German than at the very unfamiliar Berlin of which he is obliged to become a part: at the Turks, and at the way they see both the intruder and themselves. The plot Cetin constructs to bring about this situation is seldom more than improbable melodrama. Thomas, an engineer and amateur photographer, is so fascinated by the wife of a Turkish worker at his building-site that he takes, and displays, a series of pictures of her. The husband's discovery of the photos leads to an angry scene which ends in his accidental death. Full of remorse, yet still apparently attracted by the enigmatic, quiet beauty of the woman, Thomas trails her over the next months back to the family's Kreuzberg home. His efforts to explain himself are overheard by two of the dead man's brothers, who now realise the death was more than a simple workplace accident. After a frantic chase, Thomas only manages to evade his pursuers by hiding in an apartment - which, it transpires, just happens to be the one where he is most threatened, or so it seems when he is discovered the next morning and the enraged eldest brother, Miirtiiz, is about to

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exact vengeance with a gun. At this point, however, the family elders, headed by the figure of the pious grandmother, affirm the authority of Turkish custom: so long as he stays within their walls the stranger must be granted sanctuary. The authority of the elders is upheld over the younger generation - but only just. The threshold to their home remains, for the German, a matter of life and death. From then on, Cetin's film returns repeatedly to that threshold as the setting of the dramatic crises in his plot: an attempted expulsion, a foiled escape, desperate re-entries, a defiant challenge, and final withdrawal. First under the shadow of Miirtiiz's gun, but then later, after enmity has slowly given way to a kind of friendship, even family fraternity, the door reminds us of the barriers between worlds, between Turks and Germans, but also, increasingly, between the members of the family themselves. Recalling aspects of 40m2 Deutsch/and, relationships develop and shift within oppressively claustrophobic interiors - shots across the room, through or round door frames, down into the comer where the German squats - relieved by little more than the gloom of the cramped stairwell and the intimidating closeness and height of the courtyard walls outside. The confinement of the setting and the melodramatic excesses of the plot - such as Thomas' defence of Miirtiiz against a knife-wielding German who storms in to reclaim his wife, or the skinhead ambush of the brothers which is used to motivate the final crisis - both contribute to our sense of the fragility and volatility of the relationships portrayed, which are probed and explored in a high concentration of close-up shots. The film opens with the aggressive intrusiveness of the gaze of Thomas' camera, intensified by the clicks of the shutter continuing on the sound-track. Ironically, it is the German who later finds himself the object of hostile, incomprehending stares as he crouches on the floor. The photos which are the cause of the feud also reappear later in the film, adding another dimension to the scrutiny to which Cetin's camera has subjected his characters. When, at the end, the widow, Dilber, retrieves the photos from the dustbin, it is as if she is looking in them for what is missing in her life - and in view of her originally somewhat ambivalent reaction to Thomas' picture-taking, showing a degree of tolerance, perhaps even satisfaction, which cannot be admitted to the rest of the family, the implication is that even in marriage she was unhappy. The camera, then, has revealed an emotional reality which has no accepted place in the enclosed moral world of the Turkish family. While the figure of Thomas remains relatively neutral, Cetin's film concentrates on the conflicts and contradictions which underly surface identities in the family, on the complexities of needs and values, desires and insecurities, which the very presence of the foreigner

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brings to light in his hosts. From the beginning there are sharp differences in attitude towards the intruder, cutting across the generations. On the one hand, the grandmother, secure in her traditional beliefs, reaches out a hand of tolerance, then friendship; on the other, the young son of the dead man refuses, at the end, to forgive either his mother or the man who 'murdered' his father. In between these stand the three surviving brothers, representing in themselves a contrast between the easy-going westernised, assimilated Yiicel and the tense, hotheaded Miirtiiz, who insists Yilcel speaks Turkish and, watching over Dilber, swears to avenge his dead brother's honour. Yet he can barely suppress his own sexual interest in his sister-in-law, and while she is expected to maintain a lonely chastity, he is permitted to take his sexual opportunities wherever they offer themselves, even if his partner is another man's wife. Repeatedly, the film returns to the theme of sexual inequality and to the discrepancies between Islamic morality and the reality of sexual desires and practices in the family. Once the grandmother affectionately chides Thomas: 'Son of an Unbeliever', and at once the scene cuts to the shot of a German girl adjusting her clothing as she is helped off a stretch of wasteland by the second brother. Or, more emphatically, parallel cutting links three scenes within the apartment: while Thomas learns to sing a traditional Turkish song with the grandmother, Dilber masturbates on her bed, and Miirti.iz watches through the keyhole. When the widow refuses to conform to family expectations and accept her brother-in-law, Miirtiiz provokes the final rupture by betraying the secret of the photographs. Frustration and jealousy at her subsequent decision to withdraw from the family culminate in the panic of his last death-threat against Thomas, one which he, by this time a broken and pathetic figure, is incapable of executing. Two encounters in the night with Thomas have already indicated the increasing strength of Dilber's longing to escape the confines of her life. Now, they leave one after the other, but they face down Miirtiiz together, and clasp hands as they walk on. There are apparent echoes here of /asemin: the German leads his Turkish lover away from her family to a new freedom. But there is an essential difference: Thomas is no winning hero: he remains a passive figure, hardly more than a stranger, and compromised by his own guilt. Dilber will have to determine her own future, and it is even less clear than with Jasemin where her path will lead. In this sense the conclusion represents less the triumph of liberation, and certainly not the victory of youth over tradition. It is rather the necessity of change that follows, irresistibly, from the crossing of thresholds, from the meeting of one Berlin with another, after which neither can remain the same.

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In Berlin in Berlin seemingly secure cultural and ethnic frontiers are violated, then renounced. In Dorrie's Happy Birthday, Turke! we start, and finish, outside those frontiers: our perspective is that of the outsider and go-between, the first multicultural private detective on the German screen, whose very disconnection from social allegiances bestows the advantage of mobility and insight in a variety of worlds. The identity of Dorrie's main character, in a genre devoted to the unravelling of explanations and the revelation of hidden facts, itself represents an ironic play with the theme of appearances and certainties. In Kemal Kayankaya, adopted from Jakob Ajouni's story, with its recasting of Chandler's bachelor investigator, DOrrie gives us, as she confirmed in an interview, a hero 'between two worlds':7 a Turk by birth, name and looks, but, having been raised by German step-parents, not by speech or consciousness. He is a child of the city of all races, a loner living and working in Frankfurt on his wits and sex appeal, skirmishing with the corrupt and the bizarre, and forever resisting attempts by both the malign and the well-meaning to presume and define who and what he must really be. At the beginning of the tale his unexpected Turkish client, Frau Ilter, is inclined to leave when she hears he speaks no Turkish, as if that prevents him from understanding her case. As his investigations into the death of her father and the disappearance, then murder, of her husband proceed, and the story - which leads from the prostitution and drug-dealing activities of the two men, via a trail of corruption and violence, including assaults on the detective himself, to the police crooks who head the whole racket - is gradually pieced together, Kemal, moving between Turks and Germans, continually has to contend with the petty racial presuppositions of everyday life that meet him on both sides. Those presuppositions need not necessarily be hostile. On the one hand he is wished well as a Turk, or congratulated on his German; or the retired police inspector who helps him recalls past professional difficulties with Jews and wonders that he can now sit as a friend at the same table as a Turk, while his wife insists on showing their guest her soft spot for his quaint Turkish manners and offering a special demonstration of her belly-dancing skills; or, with less elegance and charm, there are the skinheads who trip him up, as one of 'them', at the station, or the local policeman reminding him 'Allah say, no alcohol for Mustafa'. He, too, is adept at exploiting languages and roles if it suits him, acting the part of Turkish guestworker or diplomat, but that very possibility illustrates the racial and cultural presumptions which imbue all strata of society, not least amongst the Turks themselves. The film underlines the gulf that exists between Kemal and his client's . family. To visit them he has to travel to the fringe of the town: the

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estate of tower blocks lies shut off from easy access, beyond a railway crossing with a kiosk. Once, when the children bar his way, he has to daub a moustache on his lip to establish his credentials as a real Turk; at the end, their gift of a stick-on moustache reminds him of the gap that still exists between them. In the apartment the whole family, backed by the photos of the father and husband, twice sit in a line before him, watching him, and again he must account for his ignorance of Turkish. Dorrie has added to her source the beginnings of an affair between Kemal and Ilter: once they sleep together - when she admits her need for intimacy - and the detective starts to learn Turkish, but here, too, the barriers remain. Ilter never accepts back the blue scarf she left in Kemal's office after the first meeting. It becomes one of the central symbols of an emotional exchange that is never fully consummated, of feelings that cannot be openly reciprocated without breaking her complete allegiance to the family. It is linked to the blue glow of light into which Ilter twice steps as she walks away from a visit, while Kemal watches her, sadly, from his window high up in the tower. Each time he offers the scarf - the last time is just before she withdraws from him, with the family, behind the closed door of their communal room - Ilter's answer stays 'Not here, not now'. The same bluish light suffuses the night scene by the railway when Kemal crosses back from the Turkish estate - a bare no-man's land populated only by the woman in the kiosk. Here and elsewhere the neutral facticity of the long shots, low-angled or overhead, characterise the cityscapes which surround the detective as he journeys to and fro, while the rapid change of settings and the brevity of the verbal exchanges, with few exceptions, heighten the sense of homelessness and disconnectedness in this world. The whole film becomes, as the genre prescribes, an invitation to traverse those spaces and probe behind the surface of appearances. Kemal, too, must allow himself to be surprised, in the midst of the anonymity, by others, just as he is in the first scene by the previous night's pick-up and her birthday congratulations, while he imagined, feigning sleep, that he had already rid himself of the bother of further exchanges. All human relations in this film seem to be frozen into distant frames of stereotyped roles and images, but the images can be deceptive: the principle of surprise governs Kemal's, and our own, learning process. 'You're not very clever, you only see with your eyes', he is reproached by Ilter's mother. In the course of his investigations Kemal learns to see beyond appearances. At the end he realises it was Ilter who killed her husband, the man she was obliged to marry for the sake of the family. It is Frau Futt, the corrupt police-chief's wife and secret sadomasochist domina,

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who also reminds the detective that he should not believe all he sees, and she becomes, in betraying Putt's hiding place, the second wife to avenge herself for the abuses suffered from her husband. Finally, the roles are reversed, too, with the childlike drug-addict and prostitute Hanna, as she unflinchingly, even calmly, uses her toaster to torture her police tormentors. The very opening of the film offers an ironic commentary on the theme of the persistence of preconceptions, on the reading of the 'evidence' that is laid at, or literally daubed upon, Kemal's apartment door. The first shot picks out a half-smoked cigarette, stubbed out on the floor, and then the feet of an enraged caretaker who proceeds, in determined fashion, to draw a chalk circle around the offending corpus delicti, and mark out a trail which defaces the length of the corridor, before ending as a ring around Kemal's name on the door. It is, it transpires, part of an long-standing campaign waged by the caretaker to substantiate his view, forcibly expressed in Hessian dialect, of his enemy's (un)desirability as a resident. The point becomes an ongoing comic motif in the film, culminating in the episode when the same caretaker arrives to collect the detective on his release from hospital, following a savage beating in his bath by the police he is threatening to unmask. 'First and foremost, one's a Christian', the caretaker says, explaining his concern for the 'Turk', as if this were only natural, before proceeding to list the full charge-sheet of bloodstain damage which the victim must now pay for. Again Kemal has to escape, this time hobbling as best he can, from the frame in which others have cast him. Reputations and social appearances prove to be misleading evidence in the world of Dorrie's private detective. Precisely because he stands between communities and cultures, he can decode the presuppositions of each. His trade becomes an exercise in multicultural understanding: it opens access to hidden networks of relationships behind the facades of individual and group identities. With Ilter and her family there are tentative moments of trust, even if they are not permitted to take root. But in the drug and sex scene of the Frankfurt underworld there are also possibilities of human response: moments when the ambivalence of his own identity is not just seen, but accepted, by partners equally on the fringe of social order - such as the German prostitute Marguerite with her ironic but friendly 'Happy Birthday, Turk'. In the final shots of the film, it is another of those transient companions in the twilight zones of society, the woman in the railway kiosk, who reminds him, as he returns from the disappointment of his hopes with liter, that he is more than the way he is seen by one side or the other - at which Kemal sets off once again, back to town, optimistically bearing flowers

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for Marguerite. Perhaps more than any other of the films considered in this essay, Happy Birthday, Turk! ends, despite the setbacks suffered by its hero, on a note of sober hope, a sense of qualified confidence, that one day identities may be won from dialogue, that communities may come to live both within and beyond their thresholds of custom and belief, and that multicultural German, and European, society may learn to find itself in its other, and its other in itself. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Eric Rentschler, Notes for seminar on German film studies, 'Drehort Berlin: Die GroBstadt als filmischer Schauplatz und historische SpielfUiche', Goethe Institute Luxembourg, 22-7 July, 1992. For example, Uwe Schrader's Sierra Leone (1987) and Thorsten Nater's Sturzflug (1989). Max Frisch, 'Oberfremdung I' (1965), in M. F., Die Schweiz als Heimat. Versuche Uber 50 /ahre, ed. Walter Obschlager, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 219. Herbert Spaich, Fremd in Deutschland: auf der Suche nach Heimat, Basel: Beltz Quadriga, 1991, 14. See Angela Leahy, The Portrayal of Immigrants in STERN Magazine, MA thesis, Dublin City University, October 1996. Interview with Tevfik Baser: 'Tiirkische Familien waren sehr betroffen. Ein Gesprach mit Tevfik Baser', Tagesspiegel (Berlin), 10 October 1986. Interview with D. Dorrie: 'Figuren, die zwischen den Stiihlen sitzen. Im Gesprach mit Doris Dl>rrie iiber ihren neuen Film Happy Birthday, Tilrke!', Berliner Zeitung, 11 January 1992.

Part IV Issues of Language and Identity: The Text as Location and Mediation

Stotious Boats: Exile in Irish Translations of Rimbaud's Bateau ivre Kathleen Shields

Three twentieth-century Irish writers have chosen to translate Rimbaud's Bateau ivre into English: Samuel Beckett in the 1930's, Derek Mahon in the 1980's and Ciaran Carson in the 1990s.1 Why should these three choose a text that has as its subject exile and the weary longing to return? Rimbaud's Bateau ivre begins with an excited rejection of home: temp~te

a Mni mes eveils maritimes. Plus leger qu'un bouchon j'ai danse sur les flots Qu'on appelle rouleurs etemels de victimes, Dix nuits, sans regretter l'oeil niais des falots! La

The storm blessed my maritime awakenings Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves Which are called eternal rollers of victims, For ten nights, without missing the simple eye of the beacons!2

Far from missing the beacons on the shore the runaway boat is freed of its cargo and feels lighter than a cork. But at the end of the poem, the same verb 'regretter', to miss, is reintroduced: 'Je regrette l'Europe aux anciens parapets!' ('I miss Europe with its ancient parapets', stanza 21, 0131). What I propose to examine in this paper is how the three Irish translators, in choosing this particular poem, are exiling themselves from aspects of their culture which are narrow or problematic, and at the same time bringing new things to their culture. One could say that the act of translating is a distancing from one's own culture, or else that it is a seeking out in another culture, or literary work, of elements which are missing in one's own. We can classify translations as tending towards the 'adequate' pole, that is, we can

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say that they are source-oriented, and the Beckett translation, because it is the only one to print the Rimbaud text in parallel, seems at first sight to fit this description.3 It is not clear whether the decision to print the parallel version of the Rimbaud text that Beckett used (the 1912 Mercure de France edition by Paterne Berrichon) was actually Beckett's decision or that of the 1976 editors of the edition.4 Presumably this way of presenting the text was in accordance with the translator's wishes. We can also classify translations by saying that they tend towards the 'acceptable' end of the spectrum, in other words that they try to assimilate the original into the target culture, and the Mahon and Carson texts fit this description (ML 45). But whether the translation can be described as 'adequate' or 'aceptable', it is simultaneously aimed at, and distanced from, the target culture. There is something in Irish culture which makes translating deeply appealing to its writers. The historical reasons for this, the bilingual nature of the culture, are one reason for the appeal, and so in this century many writers, particularly poets, have undertaken translations as part of their work. But there are other, more contemporary reasons which an examination of these three translations can, I think, clarify. If one reason for the choice of Le Bateau ivre is that its subject is departure and return, another reason is that the original is itself a highly intertextual poem. The movement of excited setting out and jaded homecoming is taken over from Baudelaire's poem Le Voyage. Rimbaud takes a stanza of Le Voyage and uses it as a launching pad for his own journey into the unknown. Baudelaire had written: Pour l'enfant, amoureux de cartes et d'estampes, L'univers est egal c\ son vaste appetit. Ah! que le monde est grand c\ la clarte des lampes! Aux yeux du souvenir que le monde est petit! For the child, in love with maps and engravings, The universe is equal to his vast appetite. Ah! how the world is big in lamplight! In the eyes of memory how small the world isfS

Le Bateau ivre itself is a place where references to Jules Verne's

Vingt mille lieues sous les mers, to Poe's Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym, Chateaubriand's Voyage en Amerique, as well as to children's encyclopaedias and travel magazines, meet and criss-cross.6 Critics of Rimbaud writing before the late sixties, which was when Julia Kristeva coined the fruitful term 'intertextuality', had already commented on the poem's lack of originality and marvelled at the fact that Rimbaud had never seen the sea.7 Neither biography nor the idea of creative genius were much help in understanding a poem where what counted

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was the handling of themes and language. One of the attractions of Le Bateau ivre to a translator is precisely that it is not a perfect unity: in it different texts can be seen to surface and disappear. The critic Andr~ Lefevere sees translated texts as places where different ideas, or different types of poetics, or constraints such as the social and economic, 'mingle and clash'.8 Once we start translating, or reading translations carefully, we realise that few texts are perfectly closed and unified works of art. Different strands pull against each other, or are even left loose and unravelled. In the translations of Carson and Mahon, it will become apparent that two ways of reading a poem are made to conflict. We could choose to read the translations as elegantly wrought replicas of some of Rimbaud's strategies, transposed into the English language. But we can also see that by using texts from advertising and biography Carson and Mahon are making some kind of point about different ways of referring to the historical world outside the poem. The Beckett translation is a key to the cultural configuration which gives rise to the need to pit the text against the historical world which lies outside. And the translations which come after Beckett's can shed light on what Beckett is doing in his own translation. I shall now examine the three translations in chronological order, beginning with Beckett's Drunken Boat. The areas where Beckett makes systematic and significant shifts are those of syntax, vocabulary and register. To take the syntactic level first: in Rimbaud's Bateau ivre the syntax is often ambiguous, and the numerous inversions mean that we do not know until we get to the end of the sentence whether a given word is going to be the subject or the object of the sentence. These ambiguities, together with the frequency of run-on lines, leave the reader feeling tossed about, not unlike the boat of the title. Beckett keeps the inversions and run-on lines, but instead of creating syntactic ambiguity, he works on the sound of the text, introducing repetition. For instance, in stanzas 1 and 2 we have internal rhymes between 'grain' and 'strain' and the repetition of 'impassive' and 'passive' (CP 93). In stanza 11 there is more repetition, this time on the word 'feet', with Beckett's boat pictured as Storming the reefs, mindless of the feet, The radiant feet of the Marys that constrain The stampedes of the broken-winded Oceans. (CP 99)

And there are many more similar examples. In places also, Beckett's syntax seems deliberately flat-footed. In stanza 12 the phrase ' [ . . . ] tangle of I The flowers of the eyes of panthers in the skins of men' has no less than four 'of's (CP 98). This

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plethora of prepositions is an example of what Beckett himseli has called 'the syntax of weakness'.9 His treatment of Rimbaud's syntax keeps phonetic features of the text very much in the foreground, often at the expense of lexical elements. The result is a diminution of the sense of the poem in English, creating oddly echoing sound effects. One of the marvellous things about Rimbaud's Bateau ivre is the vocabulary of colour, whether fiery, metallic or painterly. Blues, greens and yellows predominate. To give just a selection of the vivid colours of the poem, we have 'l'eau verte' ('the green water'), 'des taches de vins bleus' ('stains of blue wines'), 'la mer lactescent' ('the sea becoming milky'), 'azurs verts' ('green azures'), 'bleuites' ('bluenesses'), 'l'eveil jaune et bleu' ('the yellow and blue awakening'), 'de glauques troupeaux' ('glaucous herds'), 'soleils d'argent' ('silvery suns'), '£lots nacreux' ('mother-of-pearl waves'), 'poissons d'or' ('golden fish'), 'cieux ultramarins' ('aquamarine skies'), and so on. The absence of colour in Rimbaud's last three stanzas is thus all the more striking: the only colour left is that of the 'flache noire', the dark puddle or pond where the child plays with a toy boat. Beckett systematically eliminates or tones down these colours, making his Drunken Boat altogether more drab than Rimbaud's Bateau ivre. This toning-down of colour can be connected .w ith another feature of Beckett's Drunken Boat, the replacement of elements of wonder in the boat's voyage by elements of horror and illness. 'La tem~te a ban mes eveils maritimes' becomes 'I started awake'; 'delires' (which can be happy in French) become 'thuds of fever' (stanza 7, CP %-7). Similarly 'frissons' (which can be shivers of excitement) become 'peals of ague' (stanza 9, CP 96-7). The line, 'J'ai heurte, savez-vous? d'incroyables Florides' becomes, somewhat excessively, 'I have fouled, be it known, unspeakable Floridas' (stanza 12, CP 98-9). A whole new vocabulary of illness ('haemorrhage', 'fever', 'weals', 'peals of ague', 'disembowelled', 'bloated') is introduced, tinging the English version with suffering and horror. At the same time, the Beckett version changes the register of the Bateau ivre, making it in places more formal, and archaic. And several Gallicisms make the English text sound oddly foreign. Unlike Ezra Pound's translations, which tried to capture the rhythm, diction and movement of words in the original and to re-energise twentieth-century English, Beckett's translations seem to be doing something else.10 They de-energise the English language by injecting it with foreign substance. We could regard Beckett's Drunken Boat as a first step towards his voluntary exile in France and the French language. It is probably true to say that his early translations from French into English represent a distancing from a literary culture perceived as too insular

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and ethnocentric. Yeats, in what Denis Donoghue describes as his equestrian mode, had created a dominant model of Irish poem one where selective readings of history were elevated to the status of a powerful personal origin myth.11 The equestrian Yeats was to make a reappearance when the Troubles began in 1969. Since then, writers have become tired of myth and history as the sole terms of debate, and tired of the argument about whether myth should be forged from history, or vice-versa. For Carson and Mahon, Beckett and translating open up another path from that laid down by Yeats. In 1934, praising experimental poets like Coffey and Devlin and MacGreevy, and attacking Yeats' legacy, Beckett wrote: [ ... ] contemporary Irish poets may be divided into antiquarians and others, the former in the majority, the latter kindly noticed by Mr. W. B. Yeats as 'the fish that lie gasping on the shore'.12

We could say that in translating Rimbaud the way he did, Beckett was exiling himself from English. But when he later went on to translate his own texts from French as well as from English it began to be apparent that he was doing something more. Until recently critics of Beckett's self-translation have continued to think in terms of national literatures and got lost in often tiresome assertions that a given English version was better than a given French version, or the opposite. More recently the debate has moved forward, with writers focusing on translation as repetition and on the status of the texts and their translated twins.13 In his translation of Rimbaud's Bateau ivre Beckett is already beginning deliberately to impoverish the English language, to make it fail, and to alienate it from itself. What we have in the later self-translations is an exile endlessly embodied within language. I shall now turn to the question of how the translated texts of Mahon and Carson refer to the extra-literary world. In a pioneering essay on poetry translation, James Holmes argues that if the original poem refers to a world outside the text then the translation of that poem could be called a 'metapoem' because it 'deals not with "the world" but with the linguistic formulations made by others; it is a comment on a comment.'14 This would mean that translations were always second degree literature, incapable of referring to a world outside themselves and doomed only to refer back to the original. There is another danger: if we understand the term 'intertextuality' in its broadest I