Literary Transnationalism(s) [1 ed.] 9789004370869, 9789004370852

Citation preview

Literary Transnationalism(s)

Textxet studies in comparative literature

Series Editors Theo D’haen (University of Leuven/KU Leuven) Karen Laura Thornber (Harvard University) Zhang Longxi (City University of Hong Kong) C.C. Barfoot (University of Leiden) Hans Bertens (University of Utrecht)

VOLUME 89

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​tscl

Literary Transnationalism(s) Edited by Dagmar Vandebosch and Theo D’haen

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Vandebosch, Dagmar, editor. | Haen, Theo d’, editor. Title: Literary transnationalism(s) / edited By Dagmar Vandebosch and Theo D’haen. Description: Boston : Brill, [2019] | Series: Studies in comparative literature,  ISSN 0927-5754 ; volume 89 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018038272| ISBN 9789004370852 (hardback : alk. paper) |  ISBN 9789004370869 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Literature–Cross-cultural studies. | Literature and  transnationalism. | Transnationalism–History. Classification: LCC PN61 .L56 2018 | DDC 809/.933582–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018038272

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. ISSN 0927-5754 ISBN 978-90-04-37085-2 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-37086-9 (e-​book) Copyright 2019 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

Notes on Contributors ix

Introduction 1 Dagmar Vandebosch and Theo D’haen

Part 1 Transnationalism 1

Medieval Transnationalism? 15 César Domínguez

2

Liquid Spaces: (Re)thinking Transnationalism in an Era of Globalization 28 Amaury Dehoux

3

Transnationalism, Its Oxymora and Double Anthropology: From The Sun Also Rises to En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages and Baby No-​Eyes 37 Jean Bessière

4

Writing in a Second Language: Trauma or Liberation? 50 Tomás Espino

5

Writing-​between-​Worlds: On the Wit, Weight, and Wonder of Literatures without a Fixed Abode (Proceeding from José F.A. Oliver) 62 Ottmar Ette

Part 2 Starting from Europe 6 Between Original and Translation: Transcultural Fiction and Pseudotranslation in the Eighteenth Century 89 Beatrijs Vanacker

vi Contents 7

Old-​School Transnationalism? On References to Familiar Authors in World Literary History: East(-​Central) European Literature as Presented by Johannes Scherr 104 Michel De Dobbeleer

8

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons: The Case of the Illustrated Monographic Series at the End of the Nineteenth Century in Great Britain and France 121 Dragos Jipa

9

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne Sourde: Intranational and International Networks and Cultural Mediation (Belgium, Spain, Latin America) during the Interwar Period 132 Reine Meylaerts and Diana Roig-Sanz

10

‘No Border Can Hold Him’: Transnational Discourses in Contemporary British Spy Novels about Europe 145 Janine Hauthal

Part 3 Starting from the Americas 11

American Poiesis and American History 161 Djelal Kadir

12

Triangulating Troy: The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida 176 Johan Callens

13

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California: Multicultural Spaces throughout the Works of Alejandro Morales 192 Inge Lanslots and An Van Hecke

14

“I move, therefore I am”: Carlos Fuentes’s Transnational Mexicanness 205 Reindert Dhondt

Contents

15

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond: Spatial Imaginations of Transnationality in Two Anthologies of Young Latin American Writers 221 Liesbeth François

16

The Caribbean as a Cross-​Breeding of Transnationalisms: Carpentier, Walcott, Glissant and Benítez-​Rojo 237 Erica Durante

17 K​nots of Memory in French Caribbean Literature: Edouard Glissant’s “Nous ne mourions pas tous” 245 Kathleen Gyssels

vii

Notes on Contributors Jean Bessière is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the Sorbonne. Author of numerous monographs, collective volumes, and articles, on theory of literature, the novel, postcolonialism, European, and French literature. President of the ailc/​i cla 1997–​2000. Johan Callens holds degrees from the University of Texas at Austin and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, where he is Professor of English, and has published widely on American drama and performance. Essays of his have appeared, amongst others, in Text and Performance Quarterly, Theatre Research International, The Journal for Dramatic Theory and Criticism, Modern Drama, The Drama Review, Theatre Journal and PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art. His book publications include The Wooster Group and Its Traditions (2004), Dis/​Figuring Sam Shepard (2007) and Crossings: David Mamet’s Work in Different Genres and Media (2009). More recently he coedited Dramaturgies in the New Millenium: Relationality, Performativity, and Potentiality (2014). Michel De Dobbeleer is a Slavist, Classicist and Italianist, who as a post-​doctoral assistant currently examines the (re)presentation of East European literatures in 19th-​century world literary histories (Ghent University, 2015–​2018). His previous world literature-​related publications dealt with, a.o., ‘foreign’ literary history, Western comics adaptations of Slavonic classics, imagology and (pseudo)translation between the Low Countries and Eastern Europe, and the theme of the siege in Russian and other European ‘world epics’. Most of his other publications focus on narrativity and/​or chronotopes in epics, historiography and comics, often from a comparative point of view. Amaury Dehoux is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the Université Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). With the support of the fnrs, he has completed in 2015 his dissertation on “The Post-​Human Novel or the End of Modern Mankind”, a comparative study of post-​human representations in Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone and Japanese Literatures between 1980 and 2015. His research addresses issues related to the contemporary novel and cultural globalization. His publications include L’Égarement comme signe d’une communauté. La

x

Notes on Contributors

Génération Perdue d’Aragon, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald et Hemingway (Peter Lang, 2013), and papers in Poétique, Neohelicon, and the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature. Theo D’haen is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and Emeritus Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Leiden. He has published widely on (post) modernism, (post)colonialism, crime fiction, and world literature. Recent publications in English comprise American Literature: A History (Routledge, 2014, with Hans Bertens), The Routledge Concise History of World Literature (Routledge, 2012), Crime Fiction as World Literature (Bloomsbury, Ed., with Louise Nilsson and David Damrosch, 2017), Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational:  Literature and the New Europe (Brill/​Rodopi, Ed., with César Domínguez, 2015), Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World (John Benjamins, Ed., with Iannis Goerlandt and Roger Sell, 2015), Caribbeing: Comparing Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (Rodopi, Ed., with Kristian van Haesendonck, 2014), World Literature: A Reader (Routledge, Ed. with César Domínguez and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, 2013), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (Routledge, Ed., with David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, 2012). Member Academia Europaea, Fellow of the English Association, Fellow of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History, former President of fillm. Reindert Dhondt is Assistant Professor of Hispanic Literature at Utrecht University. He has previously worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at Leuven University (KU Leuven), where he earned his PhD, and has been a visiting scholar at Brown University and ucla. He is the author of Carlos Fuentes y el pensamiento barroco (Iberoamericana-​Vervuert, 2015), and has coedited Transnacionalidad e hibridez en el ensayo hispánico. Un género sin orillas (with Dagmar Vandebosch, 2016), International Don Quixote (with Theo D’haen, Rodopi, 2009), as well as a thematic issue of the journal CO(n)TEXTES (“L’ethos en question”, 2013). He is currently working on essayistic discourse in Latin America and the interrelation between violence and literature in Mexico and Colombia. César Domínguez is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela and honorary Chair Professor at Sichuan University. His

Notes on Contributors

xi

teaching and research focus upon theory of comparative literature, European literature, translation, cosmopolitanism, ecocriticism, and world literature. His most recent book publications are World Literature: A Reader (Routledge, Ed. with Theo D’haen and Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, 2013), Contemporary Developments in Emergent Literatures and the New Europe (usc, 2014), Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational: Literature and the New Europe (Brill–​Rodopi, Ed. with Theo D’haen, 2015), and Introducing Comparative Literature: New Trends and Applications (Routledge, 2015), a Spanish translation of which has been published by Taurus. He is Vice-​President of the Spanish Society of General and Comparative Literature, secretary of the icla Coordinating Committee, Member of the Academia Europaea, Fellow of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History, and former President of the European Network of Comparative Literature Studies. Erica Durante is at present a visiting Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University. She has held the position of tenured associate professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Louvain (Belgium). Her research has focused on Italian, French, Spanish and Latin American literature, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary era, and on contemporary francophone and hispanophone literature of Africa and the Caribbean. She has published extensively in comparative literature, genetic criticism and Global Studies. Funded by the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, she has compiled the edition of Borges’ personal library in the precious Borges’ archive in Buenos Aires. She is the author of Mallarmé et moi (Pisa: ETS, 1999) and Questions de poétique et d’écriture: Dante au miroir de Valéry et de Borges (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008), and she has edited Los Meridianos de la Globalización (Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2015) and Le Double: littérature, arts, cinéma. Nouvelles approches (with A. Dehoux) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2018). Her current research focuses on literature and globalization and she is completing a new monograph titled Destination Global: Air Travel in Contemporary Film and Fiction. Tomás Espino is a fpu Predoctoral Fellow at the Department of General Linguistics and Literary Theory of the University of Granada (Spain) and a Research Associate at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published several papers on Jorge Semprún and is currently working on his PhD dissertation on multilingual exilic writing.

xii 

Notes on Contributors

Ottmar Ette is Professor and Chair of Romance Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He is an Honorary Member of the Modern Language Association of America (mla), member of the Berlin-​Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and regular Member of the Academia Europaea. Ottmar Ette directs the research project on “Alexander von Humboldt’s American Travel Diaries: Genealogy, Chronology, and Epistemology” (2014–​2017) and, since 2015, an eighteen-​year Academy project on “Travelling Humboldt—​Science on the Move,” which focusses on editing the manuscripts of Alexander von Humboldt’s American and Russian-​Siberian travel diaries. His most recent publications are Transarea: A Literary History of Globalization (2016), Writing-​between-​ Worlds: TransArea Studies and the Literatures-​without-​a-​fixed-​Abode (2016) and Der Fall Jauss: Wege des Verstehens in eine Zukunft der Philologie (2016). Liesbeth François is postdoctoral researcher at KU Leuven (University of Leuven, Belgium), with a scholarship from the Research Foundation—​Flanders (fwo). She obtained her PhD in 2015 at the same university, with a dissertation on the representation of walking and space in the work of the Argentine author Sergio Chejfec. Her current research focuses on imaginaries of the underground in Mexico City in contemporary Latin American literature. She has conducted research stays at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (unam), the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba (unc, Argentina) and the University of California at Los Angeles (ucla). Publications include articles on contemporary Latin American prose fiction (Chejfec, Cortázar, Villoro) and on literary theory, and a co-​edited special issue of Interférences littéraires/​Literaire Interferenties about space and everyday life in contemporary literature. At present, she is preparing a monograph on Sergio Chejfec, based on her dissertation. Kathleen Gyssels is Professor of Francophone Postcolonial Literature and Culture at Antwerp University, where she teaches classes on authors from the African and Jewish diasporas. Her publications are principally concerned with African American, Caribbean and Francophone authors and subjects from a broad, comparative perspective. Her current research has extended her reach to include conflictual issues, such as the Memory Laws and the Memory Wars in the French Republic and postcolonial countries. She is Coordinator of the Research Group for Postcolonial Literature at the University of Antwerp and an Associate Member of the Institute for Jewish Studies. More info on https://​www.uantwerpen.be/​en/​ rg/​postcolonial.

Notes on Contributors

xiii

Janine Hauthal studied English and Applied Theatre Studies in Giessen and Bristol, and earned her PhD in English from the University of Giessen. After working as research assistant and assistant professor at the universities of Giessen and Wuppertal, she is at present Post-​doctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation—​Flanders (fwo) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014–​2017). Her research interests include metareference across media and genres (especially metadrama), British drama since the 1990s, contemporary (Black) British writing, postcolonial theory, and trans-​medial/​intercultural narratology. Her current research project investigates how Europe is imagined in contemporary British literature. Dragos Jipa is Lecturer in the Department of French Language and Literature at the University of Bucharest and coordinator of the Doctoral School for Social Sciences at the CEREFREA Villa Noël. He earned his PhD at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (Paris) in 2012, with a dissertation entitled La canonisation littéraire et l’avènement de la culture de masse. La collection « Les Grands Ecrivains Français » (1887–​1913), published in 2016 with Peter Lang. His main research interests include the constitution of literary history as a discipline, the history of the author, book history and the sociology of literature. Djelal Kadir is the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of numerous books and articles on theory of literature, comparative literature, American and Latin American literature(s), modernism, postmodernism, and world literature. He served as the editor of World Literature Today from 1991 to 1997, guest-​edited an issue of pmla on American Studies in 2003, and founded and served as first President of the International American Studies Association. His main publications comprise: Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability (Stanford UP, 2011[2]‌), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (co-​editor with Theo D’haen and David Damrosch) (Routledge, 2011[3]), The Longman Anthology of World Literature (6 vols. Co-​editor with David Damrosch et al.) (Pearson/​Longman, 2004), Comparative History of Latin American Literary Cultures (3  vols. co-​editor with Mario Valdés) (Oxford UP, 2004), How Far Is America From Here? (co-​editor with Theo D’haen, Paul Giles, and Lois Parkinson Zamora) (Rodopi, 2005), Other Modernisms in An Age of Globalization (co-​editor with Dorothea Löbbermann) (Winter Verlag, 2002), João Cabral de Melo Neto: Selected Poetry 1937–​1990 (editor) (Wesleyan & UP of New England, 1994), The Other Writing: Postcolonial Essays in Latin America’s Writing Culture

xiv 

Notes on Contributors

(Purdue UP, 1993), Columbus and the Ends of the Earth:  Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric As Conquering Ideology (Univ. of California Press, 1992), Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986). Inge Lanslots is Assistant Professor in Italian Culture and (Literary) Translation Studies at KU Leuven. Her more recent research deals with migration, the discourse on mafia-​like organizations, Italy’s 1968, the G8 2001 (Genova). She has published on contemporary Italian (crime) fiction, on comic books/​graphic novels, and on the transmediality of narratives. She is also co-​editor of Incontri. Rivista europea di studi italiani and the MovingTexts Series (Peter Lang). Reine Meylaerts is Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at KU Leuven where she teaches courses on European Literature, Comparative Literature and Translation and Plurilingualism in Literature. She was director of cetra (Centre for Translation Studies; https://​www.arts.kuleuven.be/​cetra) from 2006–​ 2014 and is now board member. Her current research interests concern translation policy, intercultural mediation, and transfer in multilingual cultures, past and present. She is the author of numerous articles and chapters on these topics. She is also review editor of Target. International Journal of Translation Studies. She was coordinator of 2011–​2014: FP7-​PEOPLE-​2010-​ITN: TIME: Translation Research Training: An integrated and intersectoral model for Europe. She is former Secretary General (2004–​2007) of the European Society for Translation Studies (est) and Chair of the Doctoral Studies Committee of est. Diana Roig-Sanz is a Ramón y Cajal research fellow at the Open University of Catalonia. She has been awarded several grants and has worked at different research institutions including the École Normale Supérieure, KU Leuven, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Università di La Sapienza, University of Amsterdam, University of Barcelona, and Pompeu Fabra University. Her publications include numerous articles in international peer-​reviewed journals, as well as chapters and books (2 full books, one under preparation, and 7 as editor, one in progress with Reine Meylaerts). Her research interests comprise Sociology of Translation and Cultural History, particularly within the Hispanic domain. Beatrijs Vanacker is a postdoctoral research fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (fwo) and works at KU Leuven, where she conducts research on the transnational

Notes on Contributors

xv

spread of the novel in the eighteenth century, with a special focus on pseudotranslation and women writers. Her doctoral thesis Altérité et identité dans les ‘Histoires anglaises’ au dix-​huitième siècle: co(n)texte, réception et discours, was published with Brill in 2016. She also co-​edited two special issues on pseudotranslation:  ‘Scénographies de la pseudo-​traduction’ in Les Lettres Romanes, and ‘Pseudotranslation and metafictionality’ in Interférences littéraires/​Literaire interferenties. Dagmar Vandebosch is Associate Professor of Hispanic literatures at KU Leuven. Her scholarly interests focus on the construction of cultural identities in Spanish-​language narrative prose and essays and on Hispanic literature in intercultural and transnational contexts. She is the author of Y no con el lenguaje preciso de la ciencia. La ensayística de Gregorio Marañón en la entreguerra española (Droz, 2006) and co-​editor of El juego con los estereotipos. La redefinición de la identidad hispánica en la literatura y el cine postnacionales (1990–​2010) (Peter Lang, 2012), El ensayo hispánico: Cruces de géneros, síntesis de formas (Droz, 2012), Ensayo hispánico y sociedad: Diálogos de un género en movimiento (Droz, 2014) and Transnacionalidad e hibridez en el ensayo hispánico: Un género sin orillas (Brill, 2016). An Van Hecke studied Romance Philology at KU Leuven. She obtained an MA in Latin American Studies at the unam (Mexico) and a PhD in Literature at the University of Antwerp, with a dissertation on the Guatemalan author Augusto Monterroso. She has published articles on Mexican, Chicano, and Guatemalan literature. Her book, Monterroso en sus tierras: espacio e intertexto, has been published by the Universidad Veracruzana Press (2010). Her main areas of interest are intercultural relations, displacement, national identity, intertextuality, bilingualism and (self)translation. She is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies at the Faculty of Arts, KU Leuven, Campus Antwerp.

Introduction Dagmar Vandebosch and Theo D’haen In 2009, Steven Vertovec started off his much-​cited work Transnationalism with “Today transnationalism is everywhere, at least in social science.” (2009: 1) Eight years later, in times in which plans are being made and executed to close borders to people and goods, transnationalism seems less self-​evident, and the question of how transnationalism―both as a cultural, political and economic reality and an academic perspective―will evolve in the near future, has become unexpectedly pressing. Although the recent rise of nationalist and protectionist political stances suggests that social science’s strong focus on transnationalism has eclipsed other emerging social tendencies, it also indicates the social and cultural impact of globalization and transnationalism in the first decades of our century. Not only in the social sciences, but also in other fields and disciplines, such as literary and film studies, considerable research on transnational relations has been carried out in the last decade or so. Several of the researchers involved find that the increase in academic interest in the topic and the complex nature of transnationalism have led to a “semantic inflation”, which affects the analytic potential of the term and makes it necessary to further define the concept. (Lie 2016: 17; see also Hjort (2010) and Higbee and Lim (2010: 10)) In what follows, we briefly present the most important issues in the theoretical literature on transnationalism. We focus mainly on transnationalism’s relation to globalization, its view on the nation, and its impact on other categories, such as space, identity or social groups. Before we do so, however, it is appropriate to reflect a little on the nature of transnationalism. Most definitions consider transnationalism as strikingly characteristic of contemporary societies, and turn it into a topic of research: a social, economic, political and/​or cultural phenomenon worthy of interest. This is the case with Vertovec’s definition of transnationalism as “sustained cross-​border relationships, patterns of exchange, affiliations and social formations spanning nation-​states.” (2009: 2) For other researchers, transnationalism is not only an object of study, but also a hermeneutic perspective that questions and decentralizes the nation as an analytical category. (Lie 2016: 18–​ 19; Seigel 2005: 63; Pence and Zimmermann 2012: 496) This is particularly the case with the proponents of so-​called global history. (Beckert 2014; Frankopan

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_002

2

Vandebosch and D’haen

2015; Conrad 2016; and earlier Abu-​Lughod 1989; Wallerstein 1974, 1980, 1989) Still, as the founders of the journal Transnational Cinemas, Higbee and Lim, point out, adopting transnationalism as a hermeneutic perspective does not imply an acritical, celebratory view on transnationalism as solely liberating: Our intention is to … critically engage with this conceptual term, to better understand how a form of what we will term ‘critical transnationalism’ might help us interpret more productively the interface between global and local, national and transnational, as well as moving away from a binary approach to national/​transnational and from a Eurocentric tendency of how such films might be read. (2010: 10) Similarly, Stefan Köngeter warns against a “euphoric use” of the term transnationalism, which is often linked to the hope that nation-​state borders and nationalism can be overcome, and calls upon researchers not to forget that the crossing of boundaries also makes them visible and reproduces them, and that transnational practices can not only lead to a lessening or cancelling of difference, but can also deepen it. (2010: 179) In the field of literary studies, similar statements are made by Paul Jay (2010) and Pier Paolo Frasinelli, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson (2011). Jay calls upon scholars both to “scrutinize university’s complicity with the forces of global capital” and to “guard against facile approaches to cultural globalization that tend to simply celebrate diversity and hybridity without thinking critically enough about its effects” (2010: 7), while Frasinelli et. al. plead for a ‘traversing’—​one could say ‘critical’ or ‘adversative’—​transnationalism: “Traverse”, in common usage, means to cross over or move through a particular space or obstacle; originally it is also to discuss, dispute and oppose. The latter meaning is now obsolete, but it would serve us well to keep it in mind while considering the implications of what we have called “traversing transnationalism”. Running together, these two meanings of “traversing” translate into paying attention to how transnationalism’s focus on circulations and crossings among different spaces, different scales (…) and different temporalities (…) enables the critical interrogation of these spatio-​temporal coordinates, for which the transnational serves as a substitute. (2011: 3) Transnationalism is generally considered to be very closely related to globalization, but the exact nature of this relation is subject to discussion, as is the perspective on globalization. According to Vertovec, enhanced transnational

introduction

3

connections represent a key manifestation of globalization, which, following Held et. al., (1999), he defines as a phenomenon that “has entailed the increasing extent, intensity, velocity and impact of global interconnectedness.” (quoted in Vertovec 2009: 2) Paul Jay relates the beginning of the transnational turn in literary studies to the emergence of postcolonialism, and social movements that defended ethnic and sexual minorities, in the 1960’s―that is, decades before what is commonly considered the present era of globalization. The periodization of ‘globalization’ is in fact an important topic of debate in research on transnationalism: as Köngeter reminds us, the idea that “transnational studies view transnationality as a comparatively new or only in recent times widespread phenomenon” is one of the most widely-​held objections to transnationalism. (2010: 179) Both Jay and Köngeter are in favour of a historical view of globalization, beginning in the sixteenth century and covering a large period of colonization, decolonization and postcolonialism. (Jay 2010: 3) Globalization is a complex phenomenon that impacts on an economic, political, social and cultural level. Paul Jay strongly criticizes the tendency that exists both among economic and cultural scientists to stick to their own analytical models and ignore the relevance of the other dimensions of globalization. To him, it is impossible to “separate economic from cultural commodities: when commodities travel, culture travels, and when culture travels, commodities travel.” (2010: 3) A second point of interest is transnationalism’s conceptualization of the nation. An appropriate starting point might be Vertovec’s distinction between ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ practices. International relations concern either interactions between national governments or the movement of people and commodities between one nation-​state and another. Transnational relations, on the other hand, refer to “sustained linkages and ongoing exchanges among non-​state actors based across national borders.” (Vertovec 2009: 3; Iriye and Saunier 2009) Both concepts are relational, but transnationalism focuses on relations between actors other than the nation-​state, such as business corporations, ngo’s, migrant communities or individuals. Many other studies, however, warn against a total disregard of the nation as an analytical category and prefer to treat it “as one among a range of social phenomena to be studied, rather than the frame of the study itself.” (Seigel 2005: 63) As Nadia Lie observes, referring to Higbee and Lim, the relation between ‘­national’ and ‘transnational’ practices and realities is not dichotomic, but rather a very complex relation that, up to a certain extent, is mutually constitutive. (Lie 2016: 20) Higbee and Lim broaden the scope of transnationalism even more, making a strong plea for a form of transnationalism that articulates a politics of difference and shows a critical understanding of “the unstable and shifting

4

Vandebosch and D’haen

identifications between host/​home, individual/​community, global/​local, and indeed, national/​transnational, as well as the tensions these generate.” (Higbee and Lim 2010: 12) It would indeed be a mistake to assume that transnationalism concerns mainly relations between entities larger than the nation. As a relational concept, transnationalism encompasses entities that operate on a local level, as well as within a national, regional or supranational context. Finally, transnationalism has had an undeniable impact on our thinking about categories such as space, identity or social groups. This is without any doubt the aspect of transnationalism that has been studied most intensively in literary studies, with a particular focus on migrancy and its effects on identity. Vertovec (2009: 4–​13) singles out a few of these changes, such as the transformation of dispersed diasporas into “transnational communities”, connected by networks largely facilitated by new technologies; the emergence of multiple and hybrid identities in migrant communities; and the change in people’s relation to space, from a sense of locality―as in Appadurai’s definition of locality as “structure of feeling, property of life and ideology of a situated community” (189)―to translocalities. Cultural and literary studies have shown a vast interest in hybridity over the last years and have studied it in close relation to cultural globalization and transnationalism. According to Jay, the term, which originally referred to the way colonized and border cultures constructed an identity out of multiple cultures in opposition to a hegemonic ‘pure’ identity, has turned into a highly problematic explanatory metaphor for cultural origins in general: If all cultures and identities are at their core hybrid, then two things happen: hybridity loses its value as an explanatory term specific to border cultures, and the term itself becomes essentialized and foundational, since it comes to stand for a general truth about the ontological nature of all forms of subjectivity and identity. (2010: 82) But even with regard to border and migrant cultures, a certain caution is often observed concerning the concept of hybridity, especially when it is conceived in a celebratory way. A  good example of this reticence can be found in the thinking of Néstor García Canclini, who in an interview with Fiamma Montezemolo somewhat distances himself from his own trend-​setting analysis of Tijuana as a laboratory of postmodernity and multiculturalism: Hibridación no es sinónimo de conciliación entre diferentes o desiguales. (…) con el tiempo me di cuenta de que desde el punto de vista epistemológico y metodológico la noción de hibridación es una noción

introduction

5

descriptiva, permite describir procesos múltiples de fusión (…), pero en cada caso hay que analizar específicamente cómo esas fusiones, siempre parciales—​que dejan mucho fuera—​, operan en medio de conflictos y desigualdades sociales que persisten y a veces se agravan por el mismo contacto. Entonces la hibridación no es el punto de llegada, no es la noción clave para describir un estado de la sociedad, y menos un estado satisfactorio, es el reconocimiento de que ya las culturas no pueden desenvolverse en forma autónoma y ajena a lo que ocurre en la escena global. (in Montezemolo 2009: 146) [Hybridity is not synonymous to reconciling differences or inequalities (…) gradually I realized that from an epistemological and methodological perspective the notion of hybridity is a descriptive one, that it allows one to describe multiple processes of fusion (…), but in each case one has to analyse specifically how these fusions, always partial—​because they leave out a lot—​, work in the midst of social conflicts and inequalities that keep on existing and sometimes become aggravated by the very contact. Then hybridity is not the point of arrival, nor is it a key notion for describing a particular state of society, and even less a satisfactory state, it is rather the recognition that cultures cannot develop autonomously, and unrelated to what happens on the global scene.] Birgit Kaiser’s Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015) proposes yet a­ nother view on hybrid identities, based on Jean-​Luc Nancy’s concept of the “singular plural” as the affirmation of both the irreplaceability of each and every ‘one’ and its being ‘with’ others. Kaisers views are also in line with Gayatri Spivak’s (2003) “planet thought” as a form of thinking “that does not abstract from localities and historical constellations of power.” (Kaiser 2015: 12) As for the transformation of space, Nadia Lie (2016: 21) stresses the importance of networks, as spaces of interconnectedness, the tendency towards dissociation of identity and (geographical) place, and the emergence of ‘new spaces’, such as non-​places (Augé 1992), multiple space (simultaneity of ‘here’ and ‘there’) and global cities (Sassen 2013). Finally, new spaces are also created by scholars in transnational studies themselves: as Rob Wilson (2002) observes with regard to the Asia-​Pacific region, geographical areas are ‘regionalized’ by critics and founding agencies—​that is, they are shaped into coherence and consensus through an act of social imagining. (Jay 2010: 74) Wilson’s ‘critical regionalism’ aims to “analyze the history and politics of how particular s­ paces get regionalized” in response to changing political, cultural and economic interests. (Jay 2010: 75) Other examples of spaces (re)shaped by transnational

6

Vandebosch and D’haen

discourse are the Western/​American hemisphere (Hemispheric Studies) or the Hispanic world—​or “Hispanic Atlantic,” as Marvin D’Lugo calls it in analogy with Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (2009: 5)—, which relate Latin America respectively to the United States (or North America) and to Spain (or Europe), constructing Latin-​American space in line with an established cultural, political or economic frame of interest. The volume that follows is divided into three parts. The contributors to Part i address the question what transnationalism is by way of a number of case studies. César Domínguez starts from the view that the space transnationalism crosses over and moves through is related to both the nation—​understood as an invention of the modern age—​and processes that erode the nation, such as globalization, which inaugurates the era of postnationalism. He then turns to what he calls his “medieval informant”, an extremely beautiful parrot as depicted in folio 58v of the MS Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Codex Latinus 549, which is known as the Codex Cumanicus, in order to interrogate the idea of medieval transnationalism through the language and concepts medieval people themselves deployed to construct their world. Amaury Dehoux starts from the observation that the well-​known Manifeste pour une littérature-​monde en français presents a paradox: it criticizes the francophonie, a transnational space, because of its lack of “transnationalism.” However, he argues, in the era of globalization the “space” a language covers is fluid, liquid—​it is permanently redrawn by the mobility of the writers and their imaginary. Such liquid transnationalism is particularly relevant for theorizing and modelling the nomadism or the in-​betweenness of many contemporary authors. Jean Bessière specifies the notion of transnationalism by questioning the extensions and connections of its various national factors, and to define their paradoxes and their use of double anthropology, i.e. the individual as defined by two anthropological frames, one which is western and another one which refers to nature and traditional beliefs. Transnationalism and its paradoxes (oxymora, characters’ double situations, double anthropology) characterize any human subject as partial and able to be someone else—​to display the compatibility of cultural differences. Thus, an image of the diverse national and cultural factors is obtained, which excludes any image of a whole. Tomás Espino argues that writing in a second language, a common practice since antiquity, became a problematic issue and a source of anxiety for many authors after the emergence of the monolingual paradigm at the turn of the 19th century. Thus, while for many writers the loss of the ­mother tongue and the transition to a second language constituted an extremely painful experience, for others the mother tongue was a carrier of repressive

introduction

7

connotations and the adoption of a new language became a joyful and liberating experience. Ottmar Ette touches upon similar issues when he turns to the very diverse cultural logics and transcultural networks of connections that characterize the textual universe that he calls ‘Literatures of the World,’ inhabiting a cosmos created by a plurality of languages. In and between these Worlds, landscapes play a prominent role: not so much as settings for a location in a new homeland, but as landscapes of theory in which the movements between the languages, between the cultures, between the geographies incessantly reproduce themselves. Part ii of the present volume gathers essays that address transnationalism in a European setting. Beatrijs Vanacker looks at how transcultural prose fiction functioned in eighteenth century France, as it shaped the emergence and spread of the novel before the birth of the nation state, taking a selection of French pseudotranslations as a case in point. She focuses on the topos of the pseudotranslator’s defective multilingualism as it is commented upon in the paratext. If this recurring theme can be read—​within the context of a specific work—​as a prerequisite of the translator’s creativity and, therefore, the French novel’s originality, it also pertains to more general questions concerning the very role translation played in the emerging literary field of prose fiction. Hence, pseudotranslations enable us to shed new light on the very ethnocentric principles that informed the various forms of transcultural prose writing that shaped the “translative” literary field in the first part of the eighteenth century. Starting from Marcel Cornis-​Pope and John Neubauer’s deliberately transnational History of the Literary Cultures of East-​Central Europe (2004–​2010), Michel De Dobbeleer explores the ‘transnationality’ of the nineteenth-​century German literary historian Johannes Scherr’s (re)presentation of the young East European literatures in his Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur (1851), the first edition of what would become the most successful instance of the then booming genre of world literary history. One of Scherr’s strategies to ‘open up’ the unfamiliar literatures of Eastern Europe consists in comparing authors or works to counterparts from literatures with which the average German reader was supposed to be more familiar. Scherr also imposes on each of these literatures three phases, with the literature in question becoming nationally distinctive in the final phase. For Scherr, then, a literature cannot be transnational(ly recognized) without first having become distinctly national. At the end of the 19th century, Dragos Jipa argues, the illustrated monographic series about the “great writers of the past” represented a means of consolidating the national identity of the common reader. However, their conception and publication was also the result of what Thiesse called “the cosmopolitism of the

8

Vandebosch and D’haen

national.” Consequently, a transnational perspective is instrumental in revealing the foreign influences on the national literary pantheons. Taking as an example two book series, Jean Jules Jusserand’s “Grands Ecrivains Français” and John Morley’s “English Men of Letters,” Jipa investigates the “circulatory patterns” (Saunier) that contributed to the rise of English studies in nineteenth-​century France, and to the civilizing goal that united the Western community of scholars. Reine Meylaerts and Diana Roig-Sanz apply the idea of cultural transfer and the need to reconstruct transnational and intracultural networks to the life and work of one significant cultural mediator, the Belgian-​born Paul Vanderborght (1899–​1971), whose multiple transfer activities helped shape international, national, and regional urban cultures throughout a broad range of cultural capitals and multilingual frameworks: Brussels and Antwerp, Cairo and Alexandria, Madrid and Barcelona, and Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Janine Hauthal looks at how John Le Carré, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Coe and Dave Hutchinson in their (relatively) recent spy thrillers re-​imagine Britain transnationally in Europe. The relocation of British characters to (the East of) Europe undermines and opens up the dichotomous universe that traditionally characterizes Cold War (and post-​Cold War) politics and aesthetics, and imagines a globally connected, transcultural Europe that complicates the traditionally nationalist discourses of (British) espionage fiction. In Part iii the Americas shift into transnational focus. Djelal Kadir observes how American history is in large measure the history of others. The poetic corpus of (hemispheric) America makes this fact more legible and more incontrovertibly significant than America’s official narratives and their historiography. Kadir’s essay traces a number of examples dating from the early colonial period to the present that illustrate this fact. Most illustrative in this regard are works by figures from the periphery—​slaves, mixed-​bloods, women, indigenous people who wrote from the margins of their canonical time. These are figures that have ended up defining the canon, demonstrating how the centre ends by being defined by its margins. Johan Callens looks at the 2012 collaboration between the American Wooster Group and the Royal Shakespeare Company on a Troilus and Cressida for the London Cultural Olympics, with the rsc doing the Greeks and twg the Trojans. Because the play dramatizes the collision between two cultures, the transatlantic collaboration became a way of confronting two theatre companies with radically divergent aesthetics. twg subsequently revised the production as Cry, Trojans! (2014) and had masked American performers play the Greeks by mimicking the delivery of the rsc cast. The latter practice thereby came to supplement that of twg for the Trojans, based as it is on the speech intonations of Hollywood Indians. Taking his cue from one such fragment

introduction

9

and the documentary basis of Cry, Trojans!, Callens contextualizes twg’s production with the painterly representations and re-​enactments of American ­Indians by the artist-​ethnologist George Catlin, precursors to Bill Cody’s Wild West Show and models for cosmopolitan cultural exchange. Inge Lanslots & An Van Hecke analyze the fiction of Chicano author Alejandro Morales as mapping the historical and the potential evolution of the different L.A. settlements and communities, their history (of migration) and their often problematic interrelations. At times, these ethnic groups seem to live in mono-​ethnic geographies each having a different social identity, inferior to the dominant Anglo one. Nonetheless, the different groups also share the same spaces regardless of any inter/​intra-​ethnic group differences. Therefore, Morales conceives his own ‘geo-​history’, with mono-​ethnic as well as transnational geographies, where real and imagined spaces meet. Reindert Dhondt traces a discursive map of the use of the term “­postnational” in present-​day studies on Latin American literature and on the work and figure of Carlos Fuentes in particular, and criticizes the underlying assumptions of the so-​called “postnational turn”. He argues that in the case of Fuentes, a “postnational” approach, with its emphasis on processes of deterritorialization or denationalization, is less adequate and productive than a “transnational” one, which singles out the movement and the possibility of multiple roots, without denying the analytical relevance of the national level. Fuentes’s seemingly contradictory anti-​nationalist, pan-​Hispanic and Latin-​Americanist discourse of cultural self-​affirmation clearly supersedes the idea of a national identity, but is simultaneously constructed in interrelation with/​in antagonism to the cultural and political “other” that is represented by the United States. Far from being “post-​Mexican” or rootless, Dhondt maintains, the “self” of the enunciator in Fuentes’s work re-​thinks his Mexicanness in a dynamic, globalized, yet rooted way. In other words, the idea of Mexican identity as constructed in Fuentes’s discourse is not homogenous nor limited to a national territory, but rather rhizomatic and transnational. In debates on contemporary Latin American literature, Liesbeth François observes, two anthologies of short stories have become reference points for studying the way in which national and regional identity are constructed in literary texts:  McOndo (Fuguet & Gómez, 1996)  and El futuro no es nuestro (Trelles Paz, 2008). These two collections depart from the explicit intention to propose (counter-​)images of Latin American identity and to abandon the concept of the nation as a fundamental category for literary production and reception. This has led to the idea that they would be examples of the same “postnational generation”—​a generation that would include Latin American writers from the mid-​1990s until now. Although François recognizes this shared

10 

Vandebosch and D’haen

postnational inspiration, she seeks to examine the two anthologies’ different, and in some cases even opposite, responses to the globalizing tendencies that affect questions of national and regional identity in Latin America. Erica Durante starts from the position that the Caribbean, as a cultural space, is the consequence of Western colonization. The political and e­ conomic processes that characterize the history of these territories have produced a ­peculiar identity pattern unique to this region. This uniqueness resides in the Caribbean islands conceiving of themselves as an interdependent space and having built their national identities in permanent connection with other areas of the world. This specific way of considering otherness implies that the notion of transnationalism appears as a pleonasm when applied to this region of the world. The most emblematic Caribbean twentieth-century authors, Walcott, Carpentier, and Glissant, have defined a Caribbean literary tradition and proposed a poetics of relation that is exportable worldwide as an anthropological, historical and cultural pattern of transnationalism. Kathleen Gyssels upholds that with Tout-​monde (1993) Edouard Glissant changed his focus from the Caribbean to a more transnational and transcommunitarian one. A  close reading of “Nous ne mourions pas tous” (‘We did not all die’), a chapter of Tout-​monde, Gyssels argues, shows how Glissant’s transcommunitarian approach fails in his wrestling with two competing memories―Black versus Jewish―in the French-​Caribbean cultural production (narrative, film and theory). Together, the texts here gathered offer an extended reflection on the notion and the practice of literary transnationalism. While primarily concentrating on European and hemispheric American examples, they nevertheless hold out the possibility of applying the insights here offered to other regional entities, constructions, or constellations. Works Cited Abu-​Lughod, Janet L. Before European Hegemony:  The World System A.D. 1250–​1350. New York/​Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minnea­ polis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Augé, Marc. Non-​Lieux:  Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. ­Paris: Seuil, 1992. Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Knopff, 2014. Conrad, Sebastian. What Is Global History? Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press, 2016.

introduction

11

D’Lugo, Marvin. “Across the Hispanic Atlantic: Cinema and Its Symbolic Relocations”. Studies in Hispanic Cinemas, 5.1 (2009): 3–​7. Frankopan, Peter. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Frasinelli, Pier Paolo, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson (eds.) Traversing Transnationalism. The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Held, David, Anthony McCrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton. Global Transformations:  Politics, Economics and Culture. Cambridge:  Cambridge Polity Press, 1999. Higbee, Will and Song Hwee Lim. “Concepts of Transnational Cinema: Towards a ­Critical Transnationalism in Film Studies”. Transnational Cinemas 1.1 (2010): 7–​21. Hjort, Mette. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism”. World Cinemas, Transnational Perpectives. Ďurovičová, Nataša and Kathleen Newman (eds.) New York: Routledge, 2010.12–​33. Iriye, Akira and Pierre-​Yves Saunier. The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009. Jay, Paul. Global Matters:  The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 2010. Kaiser, Birgit Mara. Singularity and Transnational Poetics. New  York/​London:  Routledge, 2015. Köngeter, Stefan. “Transnationalism”. Social Work & Society 8.1 (2010): 177–​181. Lie, Nadia. “Lo transnacional en el cine hispánico: deslindes de un concepto”. Nuevas perspectivas sobre la transnacionalidad del cine hispánico. Lefere, Robin and Nadia Lie (eds.) Leiden/​Boston: Brill/​Rodopi, 2016. 17–​35. Montezemolo, Fiamma. “Cómo dejó de ser Tijuana laboratorio de la posmodernidad. Diálogo con Néstor García Canclini”. Alteridades 19.38 (2009): 143–​154. Pence, Katherine and Andrew Zimmerman. “Transnationalism”. German Studies Review 35.3 (2012): 495–​500. Sassen, Saskia. Global Cities: New York, London, Tokyo. (1992). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Saunier, Pierre-​Yves. Transnational History. London: Macmillan, 2013. Seigel, Micol. “Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn”. Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62–​90. Spivak, Gayatri. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. Abingdon/​New York: Routledge, 2009. Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-​System I, II, III. London:  Academic Press, 1974, 1980 and 1989. Wilson, Rob. “Imagining ‘Asia Pacific’ Today.” Learning Places: The Afterlife of Area Studies. Miyoshi, Masao and H.D. Harootunian, (eds.) Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 231–​60.

Pa rt 1 Transnationalism

∵

Chapter 1

Medieval Transnationalism? César Domínguez Fourteen years ago, the Universities of Leuven and Ghent co-​organized an international conference on “National Identities and National Movements in European History”. The late Chichele Professor of Medieval History Rees Davies—​one of the keynote speakers—​was asked to address the topic “National Identities in Premodern and Modern Times”. Davies opened his talk in a seemingly inauspicious way. “Medieval historians tend to find themselves in a tricky position when there is any discussion of nations and national identities. They are painfully aware that they may be regarded as unwelcome and even improper guests at such a discussion.” (567) Not even the prefix pre-​ was enough to make Davies feel more comfortable. “If the topic can be extended to include the pre-​history of nations and nationalism”, Davies went on, “then perhaps they [medieval historians]—​rather like young children at an adult evening party—​can be allowed to introduce themselves briefly before the main business of the evening gets under way and they are asked to withdraw.” (567) Davies’ reaction was in line with the conception of the “nation” by leading historians, sociologists and social anthropologists—​such as Ernest Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Elie Kedourie, and Eric Hobsbawm, among others—​as an essentially modern, indeed arguably post-​1789 phenomenon. If this is the case for the topic of nationalism, then an essay on medieval transnationalism might seem like a truly unfortunate choice to include in a collective volume on literary transnationalism(s), or, at worst, an exercise in self-​flagellation over an issue that is most likely beyond the scope of medieval studies. One piece of information, however, challenges this picture, and casts doubt on Davies’ position: a search for “nation” in the database Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies returns no less than 412 hits; “national identity” returns 824 hits, while a search for “transnational” returns only 3 hits. And whereas the hits for “nation” and “national identity” return hits for articles written from the period 1956–​2014, the three hits for “transnational” are limited to articles written in the period 2004–​2008. These figures show that, in contrast to Davies, other medievalists have not apparently found themselves in a tricky position when dealing with the concept of nation—​or, even better, national identity—​during the Middle Ages. Such a position seems only to be reserved, on the contrary,

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_003

16 Domínguez for scholars who search for links between the medieval period and transnationalism. There should be, therefore, a blind spot in medieval studies between nation/​ national identity and transnationalism that makes for an uneasy transition from one to the other, even though the meaning of the latter implies at least some reference to the concept of nation and nationhood. The aim of this essay is to investigate this blind spot. First, I will survey the set of questions posed by transnationalism in current debates by modernists. Second, I will turn to a medieval informant in order to trace the idea of medieval transnationalism through the language and concepts medieval people themselves deployed to construct their world. Finally, some concluding remarks will follow along with suggestions for the future direction of this research.

Modernist Transnationalism

In recent years, transnationalism has reshaped debates across many disciplines, including the social sciences and humanities. And yet, as Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson stressed only a few years ago, what this concept stands for exactly remains open to debate. (1)  In what follows, I will draw on one of the most authoritative presentations of the concept by the leading social anthropologist Steven Vertovec, who suggests six clusters of concepts to disentangle the term, on the grounds of a general characterization of transnationalism as “economic, social and political linkages between people, places and institutions crossing nation-​state borders and spanning the world.” (1) 1. transnationalism as social morphology. Transnationalism means here a kind of social formation that spans borders (4), such as ethnic diasporas and, mainly, migrant transnationalism. 2. transnationalism as a type of consciousness. Transnationalism is understood here as a consciousness marked by dual or multiple identifications (6). 3. transnationalism as a mode of cultural reproduction. Transnationalism makes reference here to a syncretic, creolized process of cultural interpenetration (7). 4. transnationalism as avenue of capital. Transnationalism is here represented by transnational corporations, which implement transnational practices and are key to understanding globalization (8). 5. transnationalism as a site of political engagement. Transnationalism materializes here in the arena of non-​governmental

Medieval Transnationalism?

17

organizations, “which distribute resources […], facilitate complementary or cross-​cutting support in political campaigns, and provide safe havens abroad for activities of resistance which are illegal or dangerous in home contexts” (10). 6. transnationalism as (re)construction of place or locality. Transnationalism names here the process whereby people’s relations to space have changed by creating “transnational ‘social fields’ […] that connect and position some actors in more than one country” (12). Vertovec’s clusters show that transnationalism is typically a “modernist construction”, for the conceptual space that transnationalism crosses over and moves through is related to both the nation—​understood as an invention of the modern age—​and processes that erode the nation, such as globalization, which inaugurates the era of postnationalism. Transnationalism is therefore located between nationalism and postnationalism, a binary model that some scholars have tried to correct by introducing a third category, such as Françoise Lionnet and Shu-​mei Shih’s “minor transnationalism”, with which they want to acknowledge “the creative interventions that networks of minoritized cultures produce within and across national boundaries.” (7) The nation as a modernist construct depends not only on a very specific timespan (from 1789 onwards) but also on a very specific set of conditions. According to one of the most influential definitions, that of Anthony D. Smith, the nation is “a named human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical memories, a mass public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties for all members.” (National Identity 14) Smith changed his own 1991 classical definition eleven years later, for he acknowledged the ideal-​type nature of his concept of nation. Now the definition reads as “a named community possessing an historic territory, shared myths and memories, a common public culture and common laws and customs.” (“When Is a Nation?” 15) Even though Smith has removed the mass character of public culture and the reference to a common economy and replaced “common legal rights and duties for all members” by “common laws and customs”, Davies’ critique, which focuses on Smith’s classical definition, still holds: “Such criteria might well exclude many contemporary countries which are currently members of the United Nations.” And he adds a point of special interest here: “they [such criteria] would certainly exclude medieval communities and collectivities, even though they were termed nationes by contemporaries.” (569) The data provided by Jaroslav Krejčí and Vítězslav Velímský in 1995 as adapted to post-​1989 conditions make the problems arising from the exclusion of medieval communities and collectivities more visible. According to Krejčí

18 Domínguez and Velímský, “most of the seventy-​three ‘nationalities’ that at present can be counted on the European continent, have kept the ethnic names that were already in use in the Middle Ages and still live in more or less the same areas where ethnic groups of the same name demonstrably lived a millennium or longer ago.” (Hoppenbrouwers 25) Furthermore, twenty-​four [nationalities] (about one third) have their own sovereign state, nineteen (about a quarter) hold an equal position with other nationalities in a federated state, eighteen (another quarter) have autonomous status within a state—​federated or not—​and twelve (about one sixth) do not have any rights of self-​government. Most European nationalities (sixty out of seventy-​three) see language as the “primary basis of their particular culture.” (Hoppenbrouwers 25-​26) “This seems”, as Peter Hoppenbrouwers concludes, “an impressive medieval heritage indeed.” (26) One may even argue, as Montserrat Guibernau does, that one of the changes in Smith’s definition—​the elimination of references to the mass character of the public culture—​is due precisely to the relevance of the medieval case, for Smith argues that the ethnic origins of nations are to be found in premodern times. For such origins in the pre-​history of nations, Smith coins the term ethnie to describe “named human populations with shared ancestry myths, histories and cultures, having an association with a specific territory, and a sense of solidarity.” (The Ethnic Origins 32) At best, both the elimination of mass culture and the introduction of ethnie as precursor of the (modern) nation make of Smith a moderate modernist. “He is a modernist”, Hoppenbrouwers (25) claims, “because he does not believe in premodern nations, let alone nationalism, he is moderate because he sees modern nations as clearly rooted in premodern ethnies.” Let us come back now to Vertovec’s disentanglement of the concept of “transnationalism” and see how his six clusters make him a modernist, for all the examples provided are present-​oriented:  from illegal and violent social networks that operate transnationally (social morphology), to works concerning global diasporas as analysed specially within cultural studies (types of consciousness), to fashion, music, film and visual arts as the most conspicuous areas in which hybridity and syncretism are observed (mode of cultural reproduction), to tncs as the major institutional form of transnational practices (avenue of capital), to ingos as representatives of a global public space (sites of political engagement), to a high degree of human mobility, telecommunications, films, video and satellite TV, and the Internet as facilitators of translocal understandings ((re)construction of place). Not even Vertovec’s caveat

Medieval Transnationalism?

19

that “[t]‌here are many historical precedents for and parallels to such patterns” (3) makes him a moderate modernist, for neither of the precedents he provides goes back before the end of the nineteenth century. In short, current debates on transnationalism have made the present-​ oriented nature of the category “nation” even stronger, leaving almost no room for the introduction of medieval precedents. Let us add to this the already mentioned data offered by the database Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies. Though my conclusion may not be completely accurate, for it would require empirical evidence that I cannot provide at this stage, the fact that the number of hits for studies on medieval national identities doubles the number of hits for studies on nations during the Middle Ages leads me to think that the former are mostly but metaphorical extrapolations of the concept of national identity par excellence: namely, modern national identity. An additional fact that may support my conclusion is that when “nation” and “national identity” are searched together, the number of hits decreases to 101. The lack of a thorough debate on medieval “nations”, the metaphorical extrapolation of modern national identities to the Middle Ages, and the overwhelming present-​oriented nature of transnationalism in current discussions may therefore explain the insignificant number of studies that focus on medieval transnationalism—​not to mention the a priori negative influence of studies by big names such as George Coulton, Johan Huizinga, Gaines Post or Halvdan Koht, who have advocated a primordialist approach to the nation. This overview needs to be completed with what studies on medieval transnationalism actually do. If we cross-​reference data from both the databases Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies and mla International Bibliography, the number of studies listed under the heading of “(medieval) transnationalism” increases to 20, covering the period 2004–​2015. None of them provides a definition of “medieval transnationalism”, a remarkable feature in itself that is somehow reflected by the fact that only three (Gilleir, Montoya & Dijk; Kabir; Urban) include the word “transnational” in their titles. Furthermore, one of these studies is a 2010 collective book to which 11 out of the 20 essays listed belong. The use of “transnational” in this collective book, which addresses early modern female authorship from the late Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century from Portugal to Russia, proves to be non-​specific, for “transnational” is defined as either comparative or international. The present volume thus explores the various ways in which women’s writing in the early modern period can fruitfully be approached from a transnational perspective. This transnational perspective can assume the form of a strictly comparative approach—​i.e., one where it is us today

20 Domínguez who detect parallels between women writers operating in different national contexts, regardless of whether they themselves may have been aware of such commonality of interests or approaches. Alternatively, it can assume a more historical bias, relying on documentary and empirical evidence pertaining to these women’s biographies or literary contacts. (Gilleir & Montoya 17-​18) Curiously enough, the only study that addresses transnationalism within the medieval context in more depth is listed by neither the Brepolis Medieval Bibliographies, nor the mla International Bibliography—​Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies, by Michael C. Howard. Howard, an anthropologist who works on international relations and Indochinese culture, aims at counterbalancing what Jerry H. Bentley has termed as “modernocentrism”, that is, “the enchantment with the modern world that has blinded scholars and the general public alike to continuities between premodern and modern times.” (qtd. in Howard 3) For Howard (4), the only difference between transnationalism in the past and in the present lies in “the number and range of people involved in transnational relations. In the past the difficulties and expense of travel and communication made it impossible for most people to maintain transnational links.” Howard’s Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies is a good illustration of the moderate modernist approach. Both the concepts of “nation” and “transnationalism” are taken at face value on the grounds of the lexicon of current debates. Next, they are applied to the Middle Ages to conclude that these phenomena already existed, but not quite so as at present, which makes of them a sort of imperfect precedent within a teleological argument. “Whereas nation building […] is a common feature of many modern states”, Howard claims, “the attitudes of the rulers of older empires varied.” (27) From this follows that “it is often appropriate to think in terms of transnationalism when looking at relations between the component populations of many of these empires in addition to transnational relations beyond imperial borders.” (Howard 27) Ironically, such an approach makes of medieval transnationalism a middle ground between nationalism and postnationalism, on an equal footing with Lionnet and Shih’s minor transnationalism, for the latter also advocate “an awareness and recognition of the creative interventions […] within and across national boundaries.” (7) When located within the teleology of the (modern) nation, medieval transnationalism appears as a much more restricted phenomenon in relation to its modern, more evolved form. Let us take, for instance, Vertovec’s clusters of six conceptual premises for (modern) transnationalism. It is easy to anticipate

Medieval Transnationalism?

21

that medieval transnationalism would include only embryonic forms for the first three clusters, namely, social formations spanning borders, dual or multiple identifications, and processes of cultural interpenetration. Howard’s book, in fact, is confined exclusively to the first cluster, with a typology of key agents for social formations spanning borders that includes long distance traders, soldiers, monks, and scholars.

Informing on Medieval Transnationalism

As anthropologists lead efforts to conceptualize and understand transnationalism, my turning to their disciplinary key method—​the interview with the “native”—​should not come as a surprise. The haven where my informant lives is a paper cage, namely, the manuscript housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana Codex Latinus 549, which is known as the Codex Cumanicus. My medieval informant is an extremely beautiful parrot as depicted in folio 58v (see Appendix) where the second of the two sections of the codex has just started. (Kuun 140) As the artist is using the blank space of the lower part of folio 58, it is clear that the drawing is connected to another section of the manuscript, namely, the first part, which includes “nomina volucru”, wherein the papagaxius is listed. The first section of Codex Cumanicus, which is known as the “Italian Part”, extends from folio 1 to folio 55, whereas the second, or “German Part”, extends from folio 56 to folio 82. The Italian Part includes several lists of adverbs, pronouns, humours of the body, vocabulary pertaining to religion, weather, professions, food, and animals, to name but a few. It is, therefore, legitimate to wonder why somebody decided to depict an animal and, among animals, specifically a parrot. The Italian Part of the Codex Cumanicus is, according to one of its best specialists, “a practical handbook of the Cuman language with glossaries in Italo-​ Latin, Persian and Cuman.” (Golden 32)  Cuman became extinct around the seventeenth century. During the fourteenth century, however, Cuman was the lingua franca of the Golden Horde. This explains why a Franciscan during the 1290s compiled this tri-​lingual glossary with the help of “Italian men of commerce (Venetians or Genoese).” (Golden 33) The Italian Part, also known as the “Interpreter’s Book”, was aimed at Christian preaching in the north-​western area of the Mongol empire. What other animal would be more appropriate than a parrot to symbolize the glossary? Like a parrot that is taught a human language, the glossary provides preachers with Cuman words and simple phrases to be mimicked upon the Latin equivalent. For medieval people, as for us, parrots are attractive animals for their beauty and ability to use human

22 Domínguez language. “Psytacus est avis viridis tota, torque aliquantulum coloris aurei”, says Albert the Great. And he goes on, “In India sunt et in Arabia et in desertis calidorum climatum in quibus parum pluit inveniuntur. Linguæ est latæ et longæ et ideo optime format voces articulatas quando a iuventute didicerit.” (Stadler 1916–​20, 2:1509; De animal. 23.24) [“The parrot is a totally green bird with a bit of a golden ring on its neck. These birds are found in India and Arabia and in desert areas of warmer climates where it rains but little. Its tongue is long and broad and it therefore forms articulate sounds very well when it is taught to so do from its youth.” (Albertus Magnus 1647; 101)] Isidore of Seville, in turn, had underlined the quasi-​human nature of parrots when he stated “ita ut si eam non videris, hominem loqui putes.” (12.7.24; “if you do not see the bird you would think a human was speaking”—​Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 265) While it is common opinion that medieval testimonials on language acquisition and exposure to “foreign” literature do not abound, the parrot in the Codex Cumanicus does recount stories by the Cuman people to us, ænigmata to be precise. While the Italian Part provides preachers with the rudiments of Cuman, the German Part is a book in progress, which consists of Christian texts translated into Cuman and Cuman riddles, among other materials, compiled by German Franciscans. The link between the Interpreter’s Book and the German Part (also known as the “Missionaries’ Book”), thanks to the parrot, becomes therefore all the more symbolic. After having learnt words and simple phrases, the parrot-​preacher goes on to the next step: a literary genre—​ riddles—​one of whose features is brevity. “Besides the usual educational importance of riddles—​as a ludic and highly motivational activity”, Jean Lauand says, “in the Middle Ages they are involved with religious values.” (5) One may therefore conclude that Franciscan preachers found in Cuman riddles valuable material to be included in sermons and other religious texts for conversion purposes. Preaching would be more effective if texts of the target society were used, not to mention the fact that these texts would prove the existence of shared values between the source community of preachers and the target community. Could, for instance, the Cuman riddle “aq kmening avzu yoq. Ol yumurtqa” (Golden 45; “The white-​ vaulted structure has no mouth (opening). That is the egg”) have recalled for Franciscans Isidore of Seville’s link between ova and uvida, for “uvidum [est] quod interius [humorem habet]” (12.7.80; “whatever has it on the inside is ‘moist’ ”—​Isidore of Seville, Etymologies 269)? Be that as it may, the information provided by the Cumanicus parrot is quite straightforward. First, the religious, political and economic systems of the Golden Horde and European society were not independent, but rather were closely interlinked during the Middle Ages. Though the Codex developed over time,

Medieval Transnationalism?

23

in its present twofold form as “Interpreter’s Book” and “Missionaries’ Book” it testifies to mercantile and religious leaders collaborating under the guidance and protection of the Kingdom of Hungary to secure contacts across borders. And, second, if the decomposition of both the religious community and the dynastic realm were preconditions for the emergence of the nation according to Benedict Anderson (12–​22), these structures were, by contrast, instrumental for medieval transnationalism. This fact should lead us to either stop thinking of a negative Middle Ages against which our positive modernity emerged or accept the formulation “transnationalism before the nation” as non-​contradictory. In the Kitab al-​I’tibar (Book of Contemplation), the twelfth-​century writer and diplomat Usama ibn Munqidh provides us with many anecdotes regarding the acculturation of crusaders who had settled in the Latin East in contrast to the brusque manners of those who had just arrived from the West. “Anyone who is recently arrived from the Frankish lands”, he claims, “is rougher in character than those who have become acclimatized and have frequented the company of Muslims.” (Usama ibn Munqidh 147) And already in relation to the first crusade, the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres described this acculturation process as follows, nam qui fuimus Occidentales, nunc facti sumus Orientales, qui fuit Romanus aut Francus, hac in terra factus est Galileus aut Palaestinus. qui fuit Remensis aut Carnotensis, nunc efficitur Tyrius vel Antiochenus. iam obliti sumus nativitatis nostrae loca, iam nobis pluribus vel sunt ignota vel etiam inaudita. hic iam possidet domos proprias et familias quasi iure paterno et hereditario, ille vero iam duxit uxorem non tantum compatriotam, sed et Syram aut Armenam et interdum Saracenam, baptismi autem gratiam adeptam. alius habet apud se tam socerum quam nurum seu generum sive privignum necne vitricum. nec deest huic nepos seu pronepos. hic potitur vineis, ille vero culturis. diversarum linguarum coutitur alternatim eloquio et obsequio alteruter. lingua diversa iam communis facta utrique nationi fit nota et iungit fides quibus est ignota progenies. […] qui erat alienigena, nunc est quasi indigena et qui inquilinus est, utique incola factus. (Fulcheri Carnotensis 748-​749; 3.37) [“For we who were Occidentals now have been made Orientals. He who was a Roman or a Frank is now a Galilaean, or an inhabitant of Palestine. One who was a citizen of Rheims or of Chartres now has been made a citizen of Tyre or of Antioch. We have already forgotten the places of our birth; already they have become unknown to many of us, or, at least, are unmentioned. Some already possess here homes and servants which they

24 Domínguez have received through inheritance. Some have taken wives not merely of their own people, but Syrians, or Armenians, or even Saracens who have received the grace of baptism. Some have with them father-​in-​law, or daughter-​in-​law, or son-​in-​law, or stepson, or step-​father. There are here, too, grandchildren and great-​grandchildren. One cultivates vines, another the fields. The one and the other use mutually the speech and the idioms of the different languages. Different languages, now made common, become known to both races […]. Those who were strangers are now natives; and he who was a sojourner now has become a resident.” (Krey 280-​281)] If these passages are read against Smith’s definitions of “nation” and “ethnie”, one should wonder whether the lack of common public culture and common laws and customs in the case of ethnies is nothing other than a condition for making possible the construction of a precedent for the nation despite being contrary to empirical evidence. Besides, as Rees noted, there is “a certain present-​minded arrogance about” positing medieval ethnies as precedents of modern nations due to the former’s lack of a mass culture that articulates national identities in Anderson’s terms. “In fact oral societies do not necessarily lack the mechanisms for fostering such national identity—​notably through the activities of professional remembrancers and genealogists, travelling bards and story-​tellers.” (Rees 569) My previous examples of medieval language and concepts for conveying the experience of transnationalism (ignota, inaudita loca; seu generum; diversarum linguarum; nationi; alienigena; indigena; inquilinus; incola) might be objected to on the grounds that here it is the European big Other—​Islam—​ that forged these (trans)national identities. And yet, the colonies in the Latin East spread the same cultural and social forms found in the Latin Christian core. (Bartlett) Besides, medieval colonialism in the Latin East points to the disciplinary field that is best suited for addressing issues of nation-​building process—​postcolonial medieval studies. “Engagement by medievalists with postcolonial studies”, Lisa Lampert-​Weissig claims, “has led to approaches that broaden and shift regional frames, question normative formulations of European Christendom, and take on constructions of periodization.” (3–​4) All these approaches, however, have focused on challenging either the teleological contrast between the premodern and the modern (Lampert-​Weissig 4), or the configuration of Europe as the standard-​bearer in relation to which other world regions should be judged. (Cohen 7–​8) Consequently, postcolonial medieval studies paradoxically contributed to reinforce a homogenous image of the Middle Ages in its effort toward decolonization from one of the most effective imperial forces—​romantic nationalism and its philological offspring. That the

Medieval Transnationalism?

25

focus has been placed on the modern nation in itself as a hegemonic force that has colonized medieval literatures rather than on medieval nations proper—​ except for notable exceptions, such as the already mentioned Rees Davis and Susan Reynolds—​may provide an explanation for the blind spot I  have discussed here between nation/​national identity and medieval transnationalism. Appendix

MS Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. Z. 549 (Codex Cumanicus), fol. 58v

26 Domínguez Works Cited Albertus Magnus. On Animals. A Medieval Summa Zoologica. Trans. Irven Michael Resnick. Vol. 2. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 1999. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. ed. London: Verso, 1991. Bartlett, Robert. The Making of Europe:  Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950–​1350. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Introduction. Midcolonial”. The Postcolonial Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. New York: Palgrave, 2001. 1–​17. Coulton, George G. “Nationalism in the Middle Ages”. Cambridge Historical Journal 5 (1935–​1937): 15–​40. Davies, Rees. “Nations and National Identities in the Medieval World: An Apologia”. Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine 34.4 (2004:  National Identities and National Movements in European History): 567–​579. Frassinelli, Pier Paolo, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson. “Traversing Transnationalism”. Traversing Transnationalism. The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies. Eds. Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 1–​11. Fulcheri Carnotensis. Historia Hierosolymitana (1095–​1127). Ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1913. Gilleir, Anke and Alicia C. Montoya. “Introduction: Toward a New Conception of Women’s Literary History”. Women Writing Back /​Writing Women Back. Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era. Eds. Anke Gilleir, Alicia C. Montoya and Suzan van Dijk. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 1–​20. Gilleir, Anke, Alicia C. Montoya and Suzan van Dijk, eds. Women Writing Back /​Writing Women Back. Transnational Perspectives from the Late Middle Ages to the Dawn of the Modern Era. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Golden, Peter B. “Codex Cumanicus”. Central Asian Monuments. Ed. H.B. Paksoy. Istanbul: Isis, 1992. 29–​51. Guibernau, Montserrat. “Anthony D. Smith on Nations and National Identity: A Critical Assessment”. Nations and Nationalism 10.1–​2 (2004): 125–​141. Hoppenbrouwers, Peter. “The Dynamics of National Identity in the Later Middle Ages”. Networks, Regions and Nations. Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–​1650. Eds. Robert Stein and Judith Pollmann. Leiden: Brill, 2010. 19–​41. Howard, Michael C. Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies. The Role of Cross-​Border Trade and Travel. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Huizinga, Johan H. “Patriotism and Nationalism in European History”. Men and Ideas. History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance. Trans. James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1960. 97–​155. Isidore of Seville. Etymologiarum sive originum. Ed. W.M. Lindsay. Oxford: Clarendon, 1911.

Medieval Transnationalism?

27

Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Transnational Medieval Utopias”. Negotiating Heritage: Memories of the Middle Ages. Eds. Mette Bruun and Stephanie Glaser. Turnhout: Brepols, 2008. 371–​383. Koht, Halvdan. “The Dawn of Nationalism in Europe”. American Historical Review 52 (1947): 265–​280. Krey, August C. The First Crusade:  The Accounts of Eyewitness and Participants. ­Princeton: Princeton UP, 1921. Kuun, Géza, ed. Codex Cumanicus. Budapest: Scient. Academiæ Hung., 1880. Lampert-​Weissig, Lisa. Medieval Literatures and Postcolonial Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2010. Lauand, Jean. “The Role of Riddles in Medieval Education”. Revista Internacional d’Humanitats 16 (2009): 5–​12. Lionnet, Françoise and Shu-​mei Shih. “Introduction. Thinking through the Minor, Transnationally”. Minor Transnationalism. Eds. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-​mei Shih. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2005. 1–​23. Post, Gaines. “Two Notes on Nationalism in the Middle Ages”. Traditio 9 (1953): 281–​320. Reynolds, Susan. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–​1300. 2nd ed. ­Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Smith, Anthony D. The Ethnic Origins of Nations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. London: Penguin, 1991. Smith, Anthony D. “When Is a Nation?” Geopolitics 7.2 (2002): 5–​32. Stadler, Hermann, ed. Albertus Magnus, De animalibus libri XXVI. 2 vols. Münster: Aschendorffsche, 1916–​1920. Urban, Misty. “National and Transnational Forces in the Story of Judith”. Medieval Perspectives 19 (2004): 269–​279. Usama ibn Munqidh. Book of Contemplation. Trans. Paul M. Cobb. London: ­Penguin, 2008. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London: Routledge, 2009.

Chapter 2

Liquid Spaces

(Re)thinking Transnationalism in an Era of Globalization Amaury Dehoux Published in the French newspaper Le Monde in 2007, the manifesto entitled “Pour une ‘littérature-​monde’ en français” (“For a ‘world-​literature’ in French”) has probably not been the Copernican revolution it pretended to be—​the francophonie, declared abolished by the manifesto, remains an operative framework for literary studies; consequently, the replacement of this long-​established framework by a so-​called “littérature-​monde” is far from achieved. The difference in critical fortune of the two terms can perhaps also at least be partially explained from the tendency of the authors of the manifesto to exaggerate the originality of their arguments. Nevertheless, it remains possible to identify in this manifesto some intuitions from which one can start reconsidering the francophonie, and more generally the definition of other transnational linguistic areas—​for instance the Spanish-​or English-​ speaking ones. Indeed, the world-​literature manifesto seems to contain an obvious paradox: it refers to an a priori transnational notion—​the francophonie—​while at the same time criticizing the same notion because of its alleged lack of transnationalism. To do away with this paradox, the manifesto’s authors use an ideological and historical argument: as the francophonie sets up a clear distinction between France itself and the French-​speaking “peripheries,” the very notion implies an atlas of the world in which the mother country continues to hold a central and privileged position. In other words, the concept of francophonie reserves the use of proper “French” for France itself, while it reduces the idiom of other French-​speaking areas to less noble variants and insidiously perpetuates the link, supposedly exclusive, between language and nation. Because of the predominance of the French nation it irremediably implies, the francophonie would thus fall short of a truly transnational perspective. Without being wholly unconvincing, this explanation is definitely incomplete and does not actualize all the critical potentialities the manifesto can generate. We can certainly go one step further and propose another interpretation of the argument developed in the manifesto. To be more precise: here we will not engage with the predominance of the nation from an ideological

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_004

Liquid spaces

29

and historical perspective; rather, we will underline the influence of such a predominance in some conceptual constructions. With this change of perspective, we will be allowed to neglect issues properly related to France and the francophonie and to focus on some general principles of the construction of transnational linguistic areas. More specifically, this move allows us to question how the idea of nation itself determines the conception of such large areas, while it at the same time calls forth a strong tension with their transnational perspectives and backgrounds. The origin of this tension can be found in a defining pattern of the nation, which is the problematic of the soil.1 Indeed, to establish itself as such, each country must necessarily possess its own territory:  the nation has to correspond with a measurable perimeter, which can be precisely delimited within the space of the world. This perimeter is essentially solid: it is made up of tangible and relatively stable material, which gives the nation a certain concreteness and consistency. Thanks to these characteristics, the national territory can also be mapped: due to its explicit boundaries, the territory can be reproduced and represented on a document, which increases the idea of fixity attached to the notion of nation. In other words, the territorial mapping and the idea of nation generate a process of mutual over-​determination: they mutually imply and intensify each other—​the idea of the state calls for an atlas, and the latter consolidates the former’s recognition as a nation. This process of mutual reinforcement explains a kind of indivisibility between the idea of mapping and that of territory. Consequently, the predominant part the nation plays in the conceptualization of transnational linguistic areas logically leads to the aspiration of mapping the latter. The conception of such areas is thus quite similar to the definition of the nation: they are considered as sorts of supra-​nations, which can be drawn as vast territories made up of the sum of the territories where the same language is spoken—​so there would be a map of the francophonie, as of the anglophonie and the hispanophonie. The world-​literature manifesto perfectly expresses this particular way of considering these linguistic areas, defining the francophonie as a “virtual country” (“un pays virtuel”) (“Pour une littérature-​monde”). The latter designation actually constitutes a reformulation of the lack of transnationalism ascribed to the term francophonie and, more in general, to international linguistic areas:  far from going beyond the nation, the conceptual background of those spaces remains largely dependent on the national paradigm. According to the reciprocal over-​determination mentioned before, the fact of mapping these

1 On the thought of the nation and its background, see Anderson.

30 Dehoux areas ultimately confirms and consolidates the predominance of the nation, and thus stands in the way of a truly transnational perspective. At this point, linguistic transnationalism seems to face an aporia, as it does not seem to manage to go beyond the nation. Still, and even if they may not have been fully aware of it, with their concept of virtual country the authors of the manifesto do offer a way of resolving this aporia. Indeed, the conjunction of “virtual” and “country” underlines that the idea of nation, while remaining implicitly present within linguistic transnationalism, also generates a certain tension. More precisely, if a country is considered virtual, it means in fact that this country is not actualized and is thus logically immaterial. But, as said earlier, a distinctive feature of the nation is precisely the fact that it is based on the materiality of the space its soil covers. In spite, then, of the link between the traditional nation and its transnational linguistic area, the two remain separated by an irremediable gap, which proves that the paradigms of the nation are not appropriate for such areas and are unable to understand the latter’s full extent and characteristics. At the same time, linguistic transnationalism can be rethought from this gap. Indeed, the virtuality of the international linguistic areas concerned should not be a source of depreciation or inferiority—​this would only amount to another way of asserting the priority of the nation and its paradigms in the understanding of such areas. The immateriality to which we referred earlier should rather be considered as a peculiar feature of transnationalism itself. Unlike the nation, which is actualized by its territory, the spaces we are talking about are first defined by the language spoken there, an element that is essentially immaterial and elusive. In other words, language is clearly opposed to territory, as it cannot be confined to a delimited and measurable space. This is precisely the reason why linguistic transnationalism cannot be reduced to the idea of the nation: of a radically distinct nature, they relate, respectively, either to a space of soil—​the nation—​or to a space of flows—​linguistic transnationalism.2 It seems obvious that language belongs to the space of flows. Indeed, as we have just suggested, one of its main characteristics is precisely its fluidity—​ speech is usually defined as a flow of words. To this first argument may be added a second, even more relevant from a transnational perspective. Because language is actualized by its speakers, it is irremediably related to their “flow”: the movements of each human being are eventually equivalent to the mobility of

2 This duality between the space of soil and the space of flows is inspired by Castells’ duality between the space of places and the space of flows, which is freely adapted here.

Liquid spaces

31

the idiom s/​he speaks. In this regard, we should mention the Argentinian writer Andrés Neuman, who defines language as the luggage of the individual travelling around the world (“Writing with two Passports”). While using an imaginary peculiar to contemporary hypermobility, such a definition demonstrates that the current ethnoscapes (Appadurai) necessarily imply a flow of languages that are the first—​and sometimes the sole—​property of deterritorialized people. In other words, through the language, the flow replaces the territory. Thanks to its own mobility, the language allows to think beyond any idea of fixation or fixity, since it supposes a process of identification through movement. One can read Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet as an explicit fable of such linguistic fluidity. The novel at first seems to adhere to an a priori traditional conception of the English-​speaking world based on the predominance of territory. It tells the move of its protagonist, Ormus Cama, from India to the United States, via Great Britain. In other words, it seems to map the English-​speaking “world” as a complement of nations related by the English language. The protagonist’s journey might also suggest that this aggregate of territories perpetuates the idea that certain countries keep a privileged position with regard to the link to the English language:  the United States then would be the center of the contemporary English-​speaking world, while India is located in the periphery of this world. However, in fact, Rushdie’s novel refers to this usual order of things only to point out its futility and to propose another and contrasting option. This critical perspective is already expressed in the novel’s title, which strongly ironizes what actually happens in the narrative. The title explicitly refers to the ground that is supposed to lie beneath the feet of the characters. But this ground is in fact absent in the story; it collapses—​ the second protagonist of the novel, Vina Apsara, disappears during an earthquake. The initial mention of the ground thus underlines its absence in the story. This absence, then, teaches us a major lesson concerning the English-​ speaking world as drawn by Rushdie’s characters. It shows that, unlike one’s first intuition or interpretation, such a world never manages to establish itself on stable ground. The novel’s English-​speaking area never becomes a fixed territory: it is rather a space repetitively reconfigured by the protagonists’ movements. Instead of to the space of “ground,” it belongs to the space of flows and the latter’s perpetual mobility—​another way of reading the symbolism of the earthquake. Defined as fluid or liquid, transnational linguistic areas can then be interpreted from a switch of paradigms. These areas cannot be considered as a priori existing territories to which a language is related. Quite the reverse, the construction of such areas is based on the predominance of the language, which, thanks to the mobility of its speakers, extends to different places. In this sense,

32 Dehoux these areas do not refer to any pre-​established form. Even more so, because the flow never stops, they will never acquire a definitive shape. They rather call for a continuous mapping. At this point, since it is impossible to map them definitively, these areas present another opposition to the nation. Indeed, given that such spaces perpetually change, they immediately render useless an atlas that pretends to fix them—​no sooner would such a map be drawn than it should be re-​drawn and this process would go on forever. The liquidity of these transnational areas, which permanently change, produces a critical framework particularly relevant for understanding and modeling the situation of many contemporary writers. Indeed, in the current “global” world, a lot of authors develop and theorize tendencies to nomadism and deterritorialization. They consider that they are no longer linked to a particular context, a nation: they live in various places and define their mobility as the basis of both their existence and their poetics. Of course, the aim here is not to pretend that nomadism is a radical novelty—​this would be to deny the long tradition of travel writers. However, one could admit that such nomadism has seriously increased thanks to globalization and the hyperconnectivity it generates between the different places of the planet: made easier and maximized by the huge network the earth has become, this nomadism represents a way of life for part of the population; it is a real paradigm of the contemporary world.3 To support the argument about nomadism and its predominance with contemporary writers, we may again refer to Andrés Neuman. As we learn from his essay Cómo viajar sin ver. Latinoamérica en tránsito (How to Travel Without Seeing. Latin America in Transit), this Argentinian author is extremely concerned with his condition of traveler, and he tries to model it. He defines himself as a practitioner and an observer of mass travel. In his opinion, the destination has no importance, since it is not the real aim of the travel—​as clearly expressed by his essay’s title, Neuman does not see the places where he stops. Being a tour, his trip seems in fact a constant transit: the movement is more essential than the arrival. Both Neuman and Latin America become fluid. While doing so, the Argentinian writer achieves the deterritorialization he is looking for. Thanks to his ability to live in several places, as underlined by the symbolism of his double passport, Neuman no longer has any privileged links with any particular country, or fatherland—​attaining the paroxysm of his nomadism, he admits being a stranger everywhere. Such a state of transit eventually becomes both the driving force and the allegory of his writing process. This is proven by his discourse on luggage. Neuman claims that he needs a suitcase

3 See here the works of Urry on hypermobility and those of Agier on cosmopolitism.

Liquid spaces

33

to write a book: with this affirmation, he makes clear that his creative process is intimately related to the thought of the transit—​he explicitly has to feel a nomad in order to compose his work. He even compares the art of packing his bag with that of writing. Neuman, then, considers nomadism as the link between his way of life and his artistic creation: being a writer is equivalent to being a mass traveller. For the Argentinian author, these two aspects of his existence are inseparable since they mutually imply each other. His writing is thus literally included in the space of flows. Or consider the case of the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou. The life history of this author clearly expresses his nomadism:  born in the Republic of the Congo, Mabanckou lived in France before moving to California. Perfectly aware of his mobility, he defines the latter as the basis of his writing process: his metaphor of the migratory bird theorizes the central part transit plays in his literary creation (Mabanckou 55–​66). One can compare the writer to a bird. This animal symbolizes the freedom of movement itself: able to fly, yet not essentially connected to any territory—​its flight can be considered as a faculty of permanent deterritorialization. In this sense, if it never leaves the place where it was born, a bird is not totally a bird, since it does not fully actualize its own potential. Mutatis mutandis, such assertions also apply to the contemporary writer. If the latter persists in rejecting the mobility generated by the global world, he will definitely remain unaccomplished. If he stays locked in his native territory, he will always be the prisoner of a structure that conditions him in spite of his own will. For this reason, entering the flow does not mean losing one’s identity; quite the reverse, it is a way for the artist of finding his own voice—​his own singing—​, thanks to the process of estrangement caused by travel. Finally, according to Mabanckou, the real writer cannot be considered as such without the experience of nomadism on which his existence and work are based. The examples of Neuman and Mabanckou are particularly significant since both writers clearly express the central part language plays in the process of deterritorialization. Neuman looks at language as luggage: he carries his idiom all over the world. Like a suitcase, language represents a compact domestic sphere that the nomad writer lugs along during all his transits. Alain Mabanckou formulates the same idea even more strongly when he describes an existential horizon where deterritorialization prevails over all other paradigms: “We will no longer come from a certain country, from a certain continent, but from a certain language” (“Nous ne viendrons plus de tel pays, de tel continent, mais de telle langue.”) (Mabanckou 56) Such an affirmation proves that the nomad world is not equal to a world without any references: if he rejects any links to the soil—​on this point, his idea of the bird flight is absolutely clear, Mabanckou

34 Dehoux suggests an identification thanks to language, which becomes a symbol of alliance. In other words, both Neuman and Mabanckou define language as the depository of a certain kind of locale. However, since the idiom is essentially fluid, liquid, and can be taken everywhere, it does not prevent the writers from entering into relation with the global. Quite the contrary, the language seems to be the basis of the dialectics between the local, which it preserves, and the global, which it makes available. Thanks to his idiom, the writer can lug his domestic sphere, his immunological bubble, all over the world; he can design each place so that it becomes the provisional support of his existence and his creation. This is a way of explaining the expression “world-​literature in French” itself. While putting together these two words, the manifesto’s authors underline that literature can only be connected to the world from a clearly identified language, which prevents the individual from getting totally lost in the global imaginary and which enables him to live in the flow of globalization itself.4 Language thus plays a predominant role in the characterization of the transnational or global writer. One could even affirm that it represents the sole specification available for an author who, by definition, cannot be ranked in any stable category—​he is a nomad. This could be a way of reinterpreting the debates around Kazuo Ishiguro. Due to his problematical situation, which locates him between England and Japan, this author is usually considered as a homeless or in-​between writer.5 In fact, this lack of classification suggests a fundamental lesson. It underlines that Ishiguro does not belong to any territory—​he lives beyond the space of grounds. He can only be related to the space of flows—​he is an English-​speaker. This taxonomic fluidity provides Ishiguro’s work with a maximal power of contextualization: according to the author, his novels are international since they can indiscriminately deal with various places and be read in different localities. Thus, Ishiguro’s novels are allegories of linguistic transnationalism. They actualize a writing that substitutes the global imaginary for the national reference. Thanks to such a substitution, Kazuo Ishiguro’s descriptions of Japan and England are equally relevant—​in both cases, he evokes an international representation of these countries and in order to 4 In the manifesto, this idea is made less visible by the broad meaning the authors give to the notion of the world. Indeed, they use this notion as a synonym for history and the real, through a clear opposition to formalism, the Nouveau Roman, and the self-​referential power of literature. Such a confusion weakens the critical significance of the manifesto. In this sense, it seems better to use a strict definition of the world as a globe, a sphere that human beings can live in. This definition perfectly points to the central problematic of the manifesto, which is the way people experience spaces thanks to their language. On the world as sphere, see Sloterdijk. 5 On Ishiguro as homeless author, see among others Lewis.

Liquid spaces

35

achieve such a figuration he cannot use a pattern that is too local. Because of this process of deterritorialization, the Japanese reference is also a part of the English-​speaking world of Ishiguro, and this part is actually as important as the English reference for this author. This argument points to the gap between Ishiguro’s perspective and the usual representations of the English-​speaking world, which do not include Japan in its territorial map. Mutatis mutandis, such comments are also valid for Alain Mabanckou. As the Congolese author suggests himself, his American experience must be included in his conceptualization of the francophonie: when modeling this writer’s liquidity, one has to reckon in the failure of a traditional mapping which supposes a univocal link between a territory and a language. Finally, the discourse and the work of many contemporary writers confirm the relevance of proposing new paradigms to understand transnational linguistic areas. Confronted with nomad authors, literary theory needs to define fluid critical frameworks, able to fit the fluctuating paths of global writers. It is also necessary to think of perpetually extensible areas so that they can always include the new places these writers cross during their experience of the world and in their creative activity. For this reason, the literary critic should reject any predefined atlas and reinterpret instead the link each place has with a language and its speakers—​the writers. If we consider mobility as part of the epistemology of transnational areas, we may better understand and model a major trend of the contemporary literary production. Like many aspects of globalization, such a model implies going beyond the structuring paradigm of the nation state: it calls for a literary theory which can be, like contemporary global society, liquid or fluid.6

Works Cited

Agier, Michel. La Condition cosmopolite. L’anthropologie à l’épreuve du piège identitaire. Paris: Editions La Découverte, 2013. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1996.

6 This liquid theory refers obviously to the works of Bauman.

36 Dehoux Lewis, Barry. Kazuo Ishiguro. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Mabanckou, Alain. “Le Chant de l’oiseau migrateur.” Pour une littérature-​monde. Michel Le Bris & Jean Rouaud (eds.) Paris: Gallimard, 2007. 55–​66. Neuman, Andrés. Cómo viajar sin ver. Latinoamérica en tránsito. Madrid: Alfaguara, 2010. Neuman, Andrés. “Writing with two Passports: The 2014 Puterbaugh Lecture.” World Literature Today 88.3-​4 (2014): 89–​96. “Pour une ‘littérature-​monde’ en français.” Le Monde 15 Mar. 2007. . Rushdie, Salman. The Ground Beneath Her Feet. London: Jonathan Cape, 1999. Sloterdijk, Peter. Bulles. Sphères I. Trans. Olivier Mannoni. Paris: Fayard, 2002. Sloterdijk, Peter. Globes. Sphères II. Trans. Olivier Mannoni. Paris: Fayard, 2010. Sloterdijk, Peter. Ecumes. Sphères III. Trans. Olivier Mannoni. Paris: Fayard, 2013. Urry, John. Sociology beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty-​First Century. London/​ New York: Routledge, 2000.

Chapter 3

Transnationalism, Its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

From The Sun Also Rises to En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages and Baby No-​Eyes



Jean Bessière About Transnationalism—​Short Introductory Notes One way to specify the notion of transnationalism is to question the extensions and connections of the various national factors that literary works identify, and to define the paradoxes of these extensions and connections with a precise view to their organization and function in fiction. I propose to study what I call the use of double anthropology in some novels from the nineteen-​ twenties to the present. This approach will allow us to characterize the semantics of transnationalism and its literary status today. The references we find in transnational novels are kinds of images which designate parts of at least two entities—​two nations (or two cultures). These designations can be more or less extensive depending upon the scale of the image, the size of the part that the image represents, and the size of the whole. Each designation is more or less complex depending on the structure and the implications of its image. The diverse images, which relate to one nation or culture, can be structurally linked or juxtaposed and appear more or less commensurable. These links are always partial for two reasons.1 First reason: they are cut and retied by literary works and eventually appropriated from external influences. Second reason: they should be defined as kinds of oxymora: they at once connect and keep radically distinct the various national factors which are described. The agents in the literary work, who are committed to transnational relationships, perceive and enable us to perceive these partial connections, by which they are finally designated. Transnational representations always imply this double qualification of the human agents and its consequence: a reflexive perspective.

1 The expression is borrowed from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s book, Partial Connections.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_005

38 Bessière The extension of national (or cultural) references is maximal when the different anthropological frames that support them are made explicit. In that case, since the connections of these references combine anthropological perspectives which are not comparable, transnationalism is to be identified with a kind of double anthropology. Today, because of the worlding of most literatures, this double anthropology is a frequent feature of literary transnationalism. I will read transnationalism and its paradoxes (oxymora, double situation of the agents committed to transnational relationships, double anthropology) according to their less explicit expressions, to their counter-​expressions, and to their most explicit exemplifications. These three stages will allow me to highlight the most contemporary kinds of transnationalism and the importance of double anthropology to characterize any human subject as partial and able to be someone else—​to display the compatibility of cultural differences. Transnationalism’s paradoxes should eventually be redefined:  they allow a whole image of the diverse national and cultural factors, but exclude any image of a whole. This redefinition is congruent with one constant characteristic of transnational literary works: they refer to the natural world, which contains the representations of all national factors and makes their connections possible without delineating any whole image.

Transnationalism: Its Paradox, its Illustrations—​Hemingway’s The Sun also rises, Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages—​and Its Counter-​Illustration—​Fuentes’s Terra Nostra

In order to illustrate this approach to literary transnationalism, let us consider three novels, Hemingway’s The Sun also rises, Fuentes’s Terra Nostra, and Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. The Sun also rises has not often been read as a transnational novel, but should be qualified as transnational, since it locates American expatriates in the Paris of the 1920s—​viewed as the perfect image of a French city and France—​and in Spain, represented by natural sceneries and bullfights. Transnationalism has been overlooked because the extension of the references to France, Spain and America, and the cultural links between French, Spanish and American characters are not considered for themselves in the novel. However, the multiplicity, persistence, differences and compatibilities of French, Spanish and American factors make The Sun Also Rises a transnational novel. Because the main character, Jake Barnes, witnesses all the relationships between the characters and designates all the locations of their actions, he allows a double reading,

Transnationalism, its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

39

which defines the representation of transnationalism according to a double movement: from the characters to national identities, and from these characters and identities to a wide common ground—​Paris and Spain—​, the locus communis of all the national identities and the possible designation of a whole image of the diverse national factors. En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages is an evocation of today’s African dictators, seen as beasts and endowed with animal identities, and a plea for democracy. The novel refers to African realities and symbols, on the one hand, and on the other hand it looks at the same realities with Western eyes since democracy has been imported into Africa. Transnationalism (or transculturalism) is obvious: En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages allies African animism and Western individualism and naturalism. Animism and individualism/​naturalism are two different anthropological frames which apply to the same realities and designate the same ideal of democracy. The extensions of the national or cultural references are maximal and the connections between them imply a radical opposition and a possible conjunction—​this ideal democratic community defined or symbolized by the two different anthropological frames. En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages illustrates the largest figuration of transnationalism by opposing and uniting these exclusive anthropological frames. Terra Nostra has not been read as a transnational novel either, although it evokes two continents and several centuries, its characters often referring to many national times and places, and its realities appearing to be multiple. The extensions and connections of the various historical and national references are fully developed but do not picture transnational links: they designate the imperial Spanish history and culture. While this history is divided between the Old World and the New World, the novel limits the relevance of its diverse national and cultural references:  it describes a world with many parts and wholes, and finally defines it as the container of many events and connections, with one center, Spain, which keeps a discrete identity. The novel does not allow us to recognize to the diverse national references any compatibility with Spanish factors, which have one single signified:  the incommensurability of Spain. Terra Nostra exemplifies the negation of transnationalism; although it refers to many countries and cultures, it maintains the historical and symbolic whole, which is Spain. These short remarks about The Sun also Rises, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages and Terra Nostra allow precise comments about the notion of transnationalism. The prefix “trans” in the word transnationalism means that, in the evocation of an international context, the multiplicity and the connections of various national (or cultural) references cannot be disassociated. Multiplicity and

40 Bessière connections define transnationalism and its literary images as a play upon the differences and compatibilities of data which are borrowed from more than one nation or one culture. Compatibility is to be defined as the minimal condition to connect various national data. It does not imply to specify the connection, which is only to be identified with the possible adequacy of these different data. Consequently, compatibility is not synonymous with the construction of an obvious hybridity, or with a kind of dialogism between different national (cultural) discourses. It just implies that one can imagine a wide range of alliances between differences. Because transnationalism is twofold in two ways—​it refers at least to two nations (or cultures) and it unites differences and compatibilities—​, its representations construct kinds of oxymora: national (or cultural) references are at once distinct (eventually agonistic) and compatible and allow the continuous recognition of explicit national (or cultural) identities, with no figuration of totalization or unity. The Sun Also Rises exemplifies the minimal condition to construct connections, which is compatibility. En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages extends the range of national and cultural connections, links what is separated and opposed, African animism and Western individualism/naturalism, and describes this double anthropological identity as the anticipation of a democratic world and consequently as the explicit figuration of the universal. Terra Nostra offers many connections between various national factors but makes them the means to describe the complexity of the Spanish world; it presupposes that this world is a whole within which no foreign factor is autonomous and free to enter a compatibility game. The play upon difference and compatibility makes any representation of transnationalism a paradox. I  call it the paradox of the limit and extension of national (or cultural) identities. Since the national (or cultural) identities which transnationalism renders compatible are not essentially altered, each identity appears limited to itself and its relevance extended through this compatibility. One imagines the transnational representation of a nation A  and a nation B. Nation A’s identity tokens seem to be allowed to apply to nation B’s identity tokens, while the reverse application is also possible. Because the play upon difference and compatibility allows this double extension with no identity alteration, it implies a locus communis, which makes the connections between national references obvious. It suggests a universal perspective, although no clear thought or hypothesis of the universal is available. Furthermore, the same play connotes cosmopolitanism. The latter is to be understood as the recognition of any “other” with no kind of appropriation of what/​who is recognized—​no other can be changed or made dependent upon the subject who recognizes it.

Transnationalism, its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

41

Difference and compatibility oxymora, identities extensions, cosmopolitanism and the universal, which is implied, have obvious effects on the ways in which transnationalism assembles national and cultural factors. The latter are viewed as kinds of aggregates while their limits are stressed. These aggregates make the representations of compatibility obvious through partial connections. Partial connections link facts, objects, symbols, beliefs, individual persons from different cultures. They do not refer to the wholes of the cultures, which are connected, since these wholes are impossible to view and difficult to be conceived. The aggregate is defined by its constituents only—​ facts, objects, identities, individual persons, various beings… In other words, transnationalism enacts a specific world, which is one and multiple—​this duality makes a locus communis—​with no possibility to disassociate its parts or to perceive it as a whole, although it designates a kind of whole. The notion of partial connection complements the difference and compatibility oxymoron: compatibility does not imply comparability or any shared and unchanged attribute between two national factors, but suggests to shift from one national factor to another and to consider them at once as heterogeneous and as kinds of reciprocal supplements, with no totalization or hierarchy. The description of a national factor and the recognition of its meaning do not depend upon its identity and its comparability, but on which characteristics compatibility and partial connections allow us to single out. The exclusion of any totalization and the descriptions of the national factors as different and compatible impose a shared reading of the novels under scrutiny and to distinguish their ways to play upon difference and compatibility. This exclusion explains the impressionistic description of Paris in The Sun Also Rises, the series of double evocations (men seen as animals) of the dictators in En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages and the monstrous evocation of the royal family in Terra Nostra (the wholeness of Spain is so complete that not even the royal family can figure it). Each novel characterizes national factors as parts coming from other larger pieces, and, since these factors should not add up and reconstitute kinds of wholes or cannot reconstitute wholes, they are assembled as collages. The exclusion of any figuration of totality and consequently of unity justifies the stress put upon spatial diversity and the picture of human beings as mutually exterior to one another. The transnational play upon parts and wholes, partial connections and collages becomes difficult when novels refer to many nations, cultures, in multiple ways, and extend their references to wide national and cultural fields. Discontinuities are likely to prevail, and transnationalism runs the risk of being equated with a chain of heterogeneous and disparate evocations. Today postcolonial and world literatures are changing the scope of

42 Bessière national references and compel writers to respond to this risk. That’s why they combine wide national and cultural references and symbolism with anthropological perspectives. The Sun Also Rises exemplifies a limited range of national references and its construction offers no broad perspectives. It makes Paris and Spanish locations the perfect positions from which to describe various national compatibilities. It can be read as an aggregate of local, French, Spanish and American factors, and the city of Paris and Spain can be identified at once as the figuration of a locus communis and as the sites of the extension of French, Spanish and American identities. The city of Paris alone figures universalism, which allows us to designate the intractability of the disparate and partially connected national factors. Because the range and the extension of national references is limited, no emphasis upon the partial connections subtext is necessary. Kourouma’s En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages evokes the whole of contemporary Africa and uses references to a wide series of various national data which are associated to anthropological perspectives, because the latter cannot be cut into pieces and parts and do not allow for limited connections. The novel coherently plays upon a clearly identified transnational and transcontinental (Western and African) oxymoron—​animism versus individualism/​ naturalism—​which applies to multiple national and cultural realities. This kind of overall oxymoron excludes an overall reading of the novel. En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages disassociates the play upon its double anthropology from two interpretations:  the first hypothetical interpretation would identify in the novel an invitation to view Africa as a whole which encompasses its contradictory anthropological paradigms; the second hypothetical interpretation would conclude that the novel shows indeterminate meanings and undifferentiated cultural images. The first interpretation reduces the incompatibility of the two anthropological frames and invalidates the justifications to promote ideas of non-​alienation and democracy. The second interpretation equates the novel with the nostalgic confession of the desire for a higher and indeterminate whole. Against these two interpretations, the anthropological frames are to be identified as compatible in a specific way: each of them extends the other, but only from the other’s position, and stresses that the difference and incompatibility of animism and individualism/​naturalism imply a universal characterization of the human being: he/​she is partial and able to be someone else. Consequently, readers reject any single vision of human beings and view them as exterior and connected presences to one another under the aegis of individualism/​naturalism and of animism. This confirms the rejection of totalization and of any kind of hierarchy. Two arguments are associated with this double

Transnationalism, its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

43

anthropology: one which is quasi allegorical—​the dictators are described as wild beasts and the idea of free elections is defended—​, and another which is about transnationalism and interculturalism: the two types of subjectivity—​ the Western and the African—​refer to two incompatible cultural paradigms which create the paradoxical mutual positions of the individual persons. This transnational oxymoron is to be recognized by anyone because it allows a wide range of national and cultural references and makes us read them in a coherent fashion. This use of dual anthropological frames and their literary constructions are common in twentieth-​century literatures which refer to Western and non-​ Western cultures. Because critics prefer the less precise notion of hybridity to describe cultural transnationalism, they often overlook this play, which exemplarily applies to characters and represents links between people and cultures with no appeal to common unity and origin. Because of these exclusions, dual anthropological frames allow us to conceive or imagine transnational (or transcultural) social relationships with no reference to any kind of entity, which would impose a characterization of the various national references. They are means to move beyond the minimal connections of The Sun Also Rises and the finally univocal image of transnationalism, which Terra Nostra offers, and to handle the heterogeneity and complexity of multiple national references. Focusing upon the individual person and the typology of the subjectivities associates transnationalism with reflexive attitudes, which cannot be disassociated from the descriptions of the subject, the individual person, as incomplete or partial. This typology of the subjectivities is wholly transnational and transcontinental; it equally applies to Haruki Murakami and to Kourouma.

Transnationalism, Double Anthropology and Partial Connections

To apply the play upon double anthropology to characters—​i.e. to human subjects—​in novels is an easy means to picture two worlds as equally accessible, to compare the positions of characters (subjects) who are fully committed to their worlds, and to show that these characters’ identities are incomplete. This play reconstructs the difference and compatibility duality, endows it with a maximal scope, and suggests to read an extension of each subject’s position in another. By switching perspectives from one subject to another, transnationalism (or transculturalism) characterizes these subjects as able to perceive national, cultural and social relationships as at once part and not part of themselves. It uses the main dual typologies of subjectivity, which contemporary anthropology describes.

44 Bessière Let me present this typology by summarizing Claude Lévi-​Strauss’s and Philippe Descola’s theses. Lévi-​Strauss (2011) distinguishes the centrifugal subject and the centripetal one. The first subject does not refer anything or nearly anything—​including his/​her own personal feelings or affects—​to himself/​herself, but to the other or others, whom he/​she views as his/​her equals and able to include his/​her identity. This centrifugal subject defines a non-​western subjectivity, very often Asian according to Lévi-​Strauss. The second subject refers anything and anyone, or nearly anything and anyone to himself/​herself. That is the basic definition of the romantic subject, which, mutatis mutandis, still applies to people in Western cultures. Lévi-​Strauss thinks that the opposition between the two types of subjectivity is exemplified today by the contrast between the behavior of European and Japanese individuals. Philippe Descola, an anthropologist, distinguishes the naturalist subject and the analogical one (Descola 2005). The first subject, i.e. the modern subject (modern means as of the seventeenth century) views himself/​herself according to a duality: on the one hand, the mind or the spirit, and, on the other hand, nature. All human beings belong to nature; each human being possesses a singular mind or spirit. The second subject, exemplarily the individual of “first cultures” studied by anthropologists, is an analogical subject. All natural beings have different bodies—​according to their species and to each being—​; they have analogical minds—​similar minds which can ally men and animals, men and plants, animals and plants, etc. This last identification by Descola refers mainly to animism. Both typologies define the human subject by the contrast which cultures establish between the subject’s singularity and his/​her link to others. These typologies differ in that Lévi-​Strauss’s refers mostly to our modern world while Descola’s distinguishes between the “first worlds” and our modern world. It should however be stressed that many cultures today are associated with Des­ cola’s two types of subjectivity—​for example, African countries—​, and that many literary works use them simultaneously. These typologies allow us to characterize the human subject according to two opposite statuses, which match broad national and cultural images, and to figure each nation’s (culture’s) specificity, limits and symbolization of the universal. Many contemporary transnational works can be read according to Lévi-​ Strauss’s and Descola’s typologies. The transnational themes and the magical realism of South American novels fit the animism and individualism duality, as do many African postcolonial works, refusing to be identified with the hybridity of antagonistic cultures only—​let me cite En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages again. Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore links the psychological and

Transnationalism, its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

45

existential portrait of its main character—​a high school student who exemplifies the distraught Western individual and his/​her centripetal subjectivity—​to Shintoism and animism. The novel by the New Zealand Maori writer Patricia Grace, Baby No-​Eyes, links Maori and Western New Zealand communities, and associates and contrasts their world-​views. Each of these anthropological dualities allows us to interpret the whole work which uses them, but excludes any saturating interpretation. Only partial connections between the work’s worlds, anthropological perspectives, and characters can be drawn. In Baby No-​Eyes, the Maori world can be identified by referring to Lévi-​Strauss’s first type of subjectivity, and the world of Western New Zealand by referring to his second type of subjectivity. Specific temporal representations are associated with the play upon this typology of subjectivity. The Maori biographies are biographies of centrifugal subjects and display chronologies and time sequences, which can be exchanged by the characters or displaced from one character to another. These kinds of mutual time lines give its substance to the Maori community’s temporality. The Western characters’ biographies, which are biographies of centripetal subjects, are defined by singular chronologies and display the constitution of the personal self. A character, Tawera, exemplifies both subjectivities simultaneously:  he can experience and read the two chronologies and show how they partially overlap because they designate common public moments. These moments allow partial interpretations of both worlds from the perspective of its “other” world, within the novel. The same double use of contradictory subjectivities and partial connections is to be read in the works I have mentioned. In En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, the main characters show at once naturalist and anagogical subjectivities. In Kafka on the Shore, the young Kafka appears singular and unique because he receives two anthropological qualifications—​he is a Western individual and welcomes Shintoism and its animism. Because transnationalism, double anthropology, partial connections, and types of subjects command us to view the characters of these novels neither as individuals and kinds of atoms, nor as persons defined by a holistic view of their community, no individual or collective identity is self-​sufficient, and each is defined by what it is not more than by what it is. The move from “what it is” to “what it is not” justifies the prefix trans-​ in the word transnationalism and shows that “what it is not” is to be recognized as the means to designate the limit and the possible extension of “what it is.” A question is consequently to be asked:  what is an identity as such? Let me say that, because of the use of double anthropology, an identity is shown as wholly deployed in the world; it always appears to extend the other one—​only from the other’s position. The identities, which are proper to each nation or culture, at once show

46 Bessière their limits, suggest to move beyond them, and realize capacities for the other. That’s why in Baby No-​Eyes, Tawera, the Maori character who gets adjusted to modern society, can recognize and interpret both cultures. This play upon double anthropology and paradoxical subjects, individuals, implies a double hermeneutics—​hermeneutics of the possible and of the mediation between nations and cultures. Because of their difference and compatibility, transnational works delineate possible worlds—​these worlds contain the capacities of the other worlds. En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages identifies the possible world with a possible democratic one, which is viewed from the extension of animism—​perfect exemplification of all beings’ equality. Because double anthropology ultimately defines individual persons as exterior and connected presences of human beings to one another, all characters in the novel are mutual mediators and mediators of any exteriority. The hermeneutics of the mediation allows us to imagine relationships between one and others from different backgrounds or pertaining to different species. That’s why Kourouma’s, Murakami’s and Grace’s worlds are explicitly fictional—​no human being can talk with cats, men are not animals, a still-​born child cannot see her mother and brother. Because these worlds and characters do not entail the novels’ authors and readers to be committed to any animist or supernatural belief, they identify these fictions with kinds of abstraction. These fictional abstractions delineate literary contexts which respond to the impossibility to figure the single grasp which would succeed in holding two nations or cultures. Each novel describes a place, an individual’s position as shaped and defined by another place, another position, and makes social relationships within both nations or cultures a part and not a part of any individual. Double anthropology and its fictions show that no individual or no nation (or culture) can quite establish a perspective for himself/​herself or itself.

Transnationalism: From the Rereading of Contemporary Cultural Notions to Esthetics

Transnationalism’s difference and compatibility duality and its double anthropology invite us to reread some contemporary theses about globalization and cultures, to characterize partial connections semantic of some dominant literary transnational paradigms, and to assess the universalism to be recognized to literature. These three conclusive developments can be extended to today’s literature with no specific reference to transnationalism. Paradoxically, contemporary critiques of the nation and discussions about globalization tend to reify the objects they discuss, because they do not take

Transnationalism, its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

47

into account their own presuppositions, which are to be associated with transnationalism’s duality. One can say, as Homi K. Bhabha remarked in The Location of Culture, that “the principle of nation is [not] itself in the least contingent and accidental.” (1994: 203) But one should add: this internal critique of the nation is to be supplemented by an external approach: to imagine a nation as a nation, one needs to restore a perception of other nations, countries, which will neither disappear nor merge with one’s nation. The principle of nation happens somewhere, in the presence of other nations, cultures, because events and history become interventions. The latter make different countries’ and cultures’ identities the issue and allow partial connections between these countries and cultures. Because of these partial connections, no clear set of identifications can be subsumed by one nation or culture. One should not refer the principle of nation to some founding myth, as Bhabha does, but to the relationships between countries and cultures—​partial connections—​, which make the principle of nation and its critique possible. No nation (or culture) can quite establish a perspective for itself. In Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, about global culture, local cultures and individual persons, Arjun Appadurai affirms that “modernity at large” makes us view the world as the container of flows which destabilize local and national cultures and identities, and which paradoxically trigger violent primary national reactions. The latter possibility is not clearly explained by Arjun Appadurai, and its relevance is restricted if we mention examples of non-​violent alliances of diasporas and national habits—​Turkish workers continue to watch Turkish films in Germany. Whatever qualification globalization receives, whatever “-​scape” is recognized by the individual person, neither globalization nor media flows can be viewed as abolishing partial connections and necessarily producing a feedback loop between global and local. I have stressed that no individual or no nation (or culture) can quite establish a perspective for himself/​herself or itself. The same should be asserted about media and globalization: whatever degree of imperialism they should be recognized, any individual person’s cultural position is shaped by another individual’s cultural position and another culture, should the latter be a small part of the media flow. This short conclusion about some of Homi Bhabha’s and Arjun Appadurai’s opinions is to be associated with the basic structure of literary transnationalism that has been described. The difference and compatibility oxymoron, with references to at least two nations (or cultures), enables us to describe specific relationships: one national or cultural reference exists as an extension of another; they are distinct and each is defined by the extension which applies to it. These extensions show an equal semantic substance, which makes them at once discrete and continuous mutual connections. Salman Rushdie’s The

48 Bessière Moor’s Last Sigh’s intertextuality and transtemporality rely upon this kind of paradoxical semantic continuity. In Edouard Glissant’s Tout-​Monde, the whole world, which is not a whole, and “créolité” are similarly pictured:  all times, places and human agents are related by partial connections, in a continuous play of cutting and expansion. Both novels disregard proportion since national, cultural and historical references apply to human subjects and objects and data of many sizes, and they allow us to posit the whole world which is not a whole as infinite—​the cutting and expansion play could be applied to many other human agents and data. The preceding remarks about Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai can be rephrased: the proximity of nations and cultures and the flow of globalization are also subject to a cutting and expansion play. Transnationalism in the novels I  have referred to finally pictures a world where the Ego and the Alter happen at the same time, and one nation, one culture and others entail one another simultaneously. This difference and continuity play allies heterogeneities and makes these novels partially fantastic. The fantastic neither contradicts any reality nor designates a transcendent or out of reach world. It identifies transnational realities to prosthetic ones. Any place, any object, any being can be increased by the difference and continuity play. This play finally describes our world as a possible continuous support—​ an everlasting prosthesis. That is the conclusion of Kafka on the Shore, En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages, and Baby No-​Eyes. That is what defines the central paradigm of important transnational novels. In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Boabdil’s Granada is a kind of past and prosthetic extension of today’s India and consequently supposes a fantastic view of time, which does not negate the present. In Tout-​Monde, any time, any place, any individual person has a prosthetic relationship to another time, place and person. The description of events, situations and individuals as prosthetic does not characterize the commonsense world and the fantastic one as antagonists. That’s why transnationalism, in these novels, leaves characters or readers where they began, in the commonsense world. The fantastic and commonsense world alliance shows that literary transnationalism, as it is exemplified by the novels I  have mentioned, can break binaries—​the same and the other, the local and the global, the national and the transnational—​, avoids reifying hybridity and references to national identities, and refuses to make cosmopolitanism, globalization, etc., paradigms that are ready to be used. Whatever political, economic and national divisions and hierarchies literary transnationalism presupposes or refers to, its cutting and extension play, its paradox of “the one is the other,” which is to be received insofar as the one and the other evoke perceptions of relations, designate the possibility of further background to be applied whatever national factors are

Transnationalism, its Oxymora and Double Anthropology

49

presented. Let me return to the prosthesis topic and supplement it with one remark: the novel itself is a prosthesis which allows the evocation of many national factors because it makes language a surface of representation, a kind of common ground for all the transnational oxymora to be written, and not only a means to designate realities. One more step should still be taken to demonstrate that transnational oxymora ruin the old Aristotelian approach to the novel. What is named the great novel—​the nineteenth-​century novel—​defines spaces by their divisions and the actions and displacements of characters by the transgression of borders, limits—​in Dickens, in Balzac, in Flaubert, the decision to move from the province to the capital city, from a small town to a larger, is always central. Paradoxically, this move does not create a new context—​the whole context is presupposed before the decision to move is made. This context, the world, which is always presupposed, is also the background of the “international theme” in Henry James’s novels. In the transnational novels we have referred to, borders establish new contexts, and characters are no longer qualified by their capacities to transgress limits, but by their ability to adjust to these new contexts and to embody the specific redefinitions they undergo. No position and action of the characters is subsumed in a self-​identification, or obliterated because of the new context. In The Sun Also Rises, the love affairs epitomize this constant redefinition. Double anthropology refers it to the most extensive contexts and, by its power to connect multiple identities, it figures new relations of difference and similarity and triggers new redefinitions of individuals. Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1996. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Descola, Philippe. Par-​delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Fuentes, Carlos. Terra Nostra. (1975) Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2003. Glissant, Edouard. Tout-​monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Grace, Patricia. Baby No-​Eyes. Auckland: Penguin Books, 1998. Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. (1926) New York: Scribner, 2006. Kourouma, Ahmadou. En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages. Paris: Le Seuil, 1998. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude. L’Autre face de la lune: Ecrits sur le Japon. Paris: Le Seuil, 2011. Murakami, Haruki. Kafka on the Shore. (2002) New York: Vintage International, 2006. Rushdie, Salman. The Moor’s Last Sigh. New York: Vintage International, 1995. Strathern, Marilyn. Partial Connections. Updated Edition. Oxford: Altamira Press, 2005.

­c hapter 4

Writing in a Second Language Trauma or Liberation? Tomás Espino Writing in a second language has always been a common practice in world literature.1 Since antiquity, many authors have chosen to write in a second or third language in order to secure a larger audience or position themselves within a major literary tradition. Others chose a particular language depending on the genre or the subject matter of their work. It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a full account of the multiple reasons that prompt the decision to use a second language for literary purposes.2 Instead, this paper will focus on how the authors themselves have perceived their linguistic choice. Their reactions range from indifference in the casually multilingual Middle Ages to a deep sense of trauma and guilt or a deep feeling of personal liberation from the constraints of politically marked languages in the contemporary era. It must be noted that multilingualism exerts its influence in literature even if the language of choice is the mother tongue.3 At the same time, other authors have combined several languages in the same work, a practice commonly known as “code-​switching” which Kremnitz has defined as “intra-textual multilingualism.” (textinterne Mehrsprachigkeit) (19) This paper, however, will concentrate on the perception of language choice in cases where a full transition 1 The present research has been possible thanks to the funding provided by the FPU Programme of the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU13/​04866) and the Research Project “Hermeneutics Today: Current Trends and Authors” of the National Programme for the Promotion of Scientific and Technical Research of Excellence of the Spanish Ministry of Economy (FFI2013-​41662-​P). 2 For a full discussion of the motives for language change in literature, see Kremnitz (2015). 3 Wandruszka, from a linguistic point of view, speaks of a universal multilingual identity, as every human being is bound to be in contact with at least different registers and varieties of his or her mother tongue throughout life. This universal multilingual identity could also be applied to literature. Steiner points to the influence of Greek and Latin in Racine or Milton (15) and the pressure of Russian in Nabokov’s English prose. (20) Guillén defends eloquently the existence of a “latent bilingualism” in the case of exiled authors who write in their mother tongue but are influenced by the foreign language of their everyday life. (124) Kremnitz argues that every language known by an author can potentially influence the language he uses for literary purposes. (19)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_006

Writing in a Second Language

51

into another language takes place and the mother tongue has been permanently or temporally abandoned. Literature written in a second or a third language is transnational in many ways. Firstly, a physical movement out of the nation (i.e., forced or voluntary migration) is often (but not always) the ultimate reason for the change of language. Secondly, the movement towards a second language is often a way of undermining national frameworks which define the mother tongue as the organic and affective core of individual identity and therefore as the only authentic means of expression. Thus, writing in a second language becomes a way of overcoming national monolingual paradigms. Lastly, this type of literature also promotes a transnational methodology, since “bilingual writers may have more in common with bilingual writers in other languages than they do with monoglots writing in any one of the languages they use.” (Klosty-​Beaujour 1) Consequently, serious study of literature written in a second language entails an approach which must necessarily transcend the traditional academic boundaries of national literary historiography. Writing in a second language flaunts a long tradition in Western literature. Ancient Greek authors chose different Greek dialects depending on genre. (Kremnitz 34–​35) In Europe, literature in vernacular languages started to flourish around the 12th Century, and was marked from the very beginning by multilingualism and translation. (Kremnitz 41) Indeed, medieval literary conventions prescribed that the choice of language depended on genre and not on the nationality of the author: Latin was used for theological and scientific purposes, French was the language par excellence of epic poetry, and Occitan was best suited for lyric poetry. (Chaytor 23) This practice of utilizing certain languages based on genre lasted into the 16th Century. (Forster 17) Other authors adopted the language of their audience. In these cases the authors do not seem to have any particular regrets or longing for their mother tongue. At most, they explicitly excuse their linguistic mistakes by explaining that they were not brought up in the language in which they are writing.4 The striking case of Charles, Duke of Orléans (1394–​1465), a French nobleman captured at the Battle of Agincourt who spent twenty-​four years imprisoned in England, illustrates to what extent language and nationality had only loose ties in medieval literature. According to Pierre Champion, Charles d’Orléans 4 See for instance Thomasin von Circlaere, born in Friuli, who completed his epic poem Der wälsche Gast (The Romance Stranger) in High Middle German despite being a native speaker of Italian or Friulian. At the beginning of this poem (vv. 33–​74), he offers his excuses for his mistakes and explains that, as a native of Friuli, he accepts corrections “âne spot” (“without scorn”) to his German.

52 Espino embraced the language of his captors and composed poetry both in his vernacular French and in English during his years in England. None of these pre-​modern instances of literary bilingualism reflect upon the role of the mother tongue and second languages in the formation of individual identity, let alone take a particular stance on the effects of the language choice on the individual. In this sense, it could be argued that languages were not marked from an ideological perspective. All this evidence seems to support the claim that language in the Middle Ages was regarded as a mere communicative tool with no political, ideological, or emotional connotations. (Forster 47) The situation of the culturally and linguistically diverse Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages constitutes an interesting exception to this situation and anticipates some of the later developments in the rest of Europe. Whereas the Muslim south produced early examples of code-​switching from the eleventh until the fourteenth century (the Romance kharjas placed at the end of the Arabic lyrical compositions known as muwāshshaḥāt,), and a generic distribution was favoured in the Christian North during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (when Galician-​Portuguese became the language of lyric poetry even outside its linguistic boundaries), the position of second languages in literature stirred a heated debate among Jewish poets and scholars during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The disciples of the Hebrew grammarian Menahem ben Saruq bemoaned the erosion of the Hebrew language in exile and tried to preserve it from Arabic innovations, whereas other writers, such as Moses Ibn Ezra incorporated Arabic traits into Hebrew and even composed some of their writings in Arabic. (Wahnón Bensusan “The Condition of Exile” 44) In turn, the thirteenth-​century kabbalist Abulafia lamented the loss of the Hebrew language:  “had we preserved the Holy Tongue we would have been more worthy, and the majority of our nation would have been wise and understanding and knowledgeable in our language.” (qtd. in Idel 25) This debate on the consequences of abandoning the mother tongue may echo an organic conception of the mother tongue as integral part of the lost Jewish nation which predates modern nation-​states.5 The emergence of modern nation-​states starts to alter the relationship between language and nationality in the rest of Europe. Indeed, the modern period marks the beginning of the process of “ideologisation” of language. (Kremnitz 50) Baggioni, in Langues et nations en Europe, argues that there is a direct link between the transition from common languages towards national languages formation and state formation, while Anderson goes one step further in

5 For a discussion of pre-​modern nations including the Jewish nation see Gat (2012).

Writing in a Second Language

53

Imagined Communities in claiming that the expansion of vernacular languages into all spheres of writing is the main trigger for the formation of modern states. The idea of language loyalty represents a key concept uniting language and the sense of belonging to a national community. First coined by Uriel Weinreich in 1953, language loyalty describes “the state of mind in which the language (like the nationality), as an intact entity, and in contrast with other languages, assumes a high position in need of being defended.” (Weinreich 99)6 As discussed earlier, language did not play an important role in national identity until the emergence of the nation-​state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thus, we could argue that language loyalty is not an absolute notion but rather an idea rooted in the concept of modern nation which would eventually cancel the theoretical possibility of writing in a second language by the early nineteenth century. In the meantime, authors such as Milton would continue to write in several languages, often using a particular language for one particular topic.7 Forster argues that multilingual literature, still untouched by the mystique surrounding national languages, continued to be produced during the baroque period, in the context of the “poésie précieuse”, i.e. poetry produced in small circles of cosmopolitan literati. (Forster 47) The process of “ideologisation” of language which began in the Renaissance reached its apex thanks to the writings of Johann Gottfried von Herder, ­Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, who “spearheaded the view that one could properly think, feel, and express oneself only in one’s ‘mother tongue.’ ” (Yildiz 7)  Herder insisted on the distinctiveness of each language, which he saw as the direct emanation of the genius of each nation. He expanded this idea into the realm of national literature and went on to claim that “the genius of language is also the genius of the nation’s literature.” (1: 147) Humboldt adopted a markedly relativist stance towards language by arguing that languages determined the thoughts they expressed: “Language is the external

6 “In need of being defended” may give us a clue towards the historical origins of language loyalty. The first years of European nation-​building coincide with the appearance of the first normative grammar of Romance language, Nebrija’s Gramática castellana (1492), and treatises such as Bembo’s Prosa della volgar lingua (1525), Juan de Valdés’ Diálogo de la lengua (1535), Speroni’s Dialogo delle lingue (1542), and Du Bellay’s Défense et illustration de la langue française (1549). These works do not only follow the path of Dante’s De vulgari eloquentia in securing the position of vernacular languages against Latin, but also establish a direct link between language and political power—​“Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” (Nebrija 5)—​and consequently promoted a fierce competition for supremacy between different vernacular languages. (Wahnón Bensusan 110) 7 Significantly, the only love poems composed by Milton were written in Italian. See the work entitled with a line taken from an Italian poem by Milton: Brugnolo (2009).

54 Espino manifestation, as it were, of the spirit of nation. Its language is its spirit and its spirit its language; one can hardly think of them as sufficiently identical.” (60ff; trans. Cowan 277) Schleiermacher, using an organic image of the mother tongue charged with connotations of kinship and belonging, concluded that it was impossible to write in a foreign language and compared bilingual writers to doppelgangers who scorn the laws of nature and try to confuse people. (63) These ideas paved the road for a new “monolingual paradigm.” (Yildiz 7–​9) In literature, the monolingual paradigm gave rise to separate national (monolingual) literary studies from which literature written in a second language was excluded. Consequently, this kind of literature has been perceived as a rare exception until very recently. (Stockhammer, Arndt, and Naguschewski 7) Forster illustrates the dramatic change in the perception of literature written in a second language with the examples of William Beckford’s Vathek (1786) and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé (1894). Within a century, the attitude towards works written in French by native speakers of English had varied to the extent that, while Beckford’s Vathek had enjoyed a normal reception, Wilde’s Salomé caused an outcry not only because of its markedly erotic overtones, but also because of the fact that it had been written in French. (54) Indeed, multilingual authors were considered as dangerous outsiders who threatened the sacred link between language and nationality. “The a priori strangeness of the idea of a writer linguistically ‘unhoused’, of a poet, novelist, playwright not thoroughly at home in the language of his production, but displaced or hesitant at the frontier.” (Steiner 14) Language choice ceases to be a straightforward decision depending on genre or topic and becomes a vital statement with far-​reaching consequences affecting the author and the public. In the case of Wilde’s Salomé, Steiner suggests a liberating effect produced by the use of the French language, “an expressive enactment of sexual duality, a speech-​symbol for the new rights of experiment and instability he claimed for the life of the artist.”8 (Steiner 16) The relationship between language and nationality reaches new heights of tension with the multiplication of exiled authors, especially during the first half 8 Writing in a second language has often been linked to sexual liberation and sexual guilt. (Klosty Beaujour 41)  Elsa Triolet expressed her sense of guilt at writing simultaneously in Russian and French: “I am bigamous. A crime before the law. You can have as many lovers as you like, but not two husbands”. (54) Steiner, speaking of Nabokov, considers that “incest is a trope through which Nabokov dramatizes his abiding devotion to Russian, the dazzling infidelities which exile has forced on him, and the unique intimacy he has achieved with his own writings as begetter, translator, and retranslator.” (19) Kristeva argues that “tearing oneself away from family, language, and country in order to settle down elsewhere is a daring action accompanied by sexual frenzy: no more prohibition, everything is possible”. (30)

Writing in a Second Language

55

of the twentieth century. Multilingual literary practice multiplies, but it does so within a monolingual theoretical framework, thus creating a source of anxiety for bilingual authors. The fear that adopting a new language may eventually result in the loss of the mother tongue, especially in the traumatic situation of exile, became an obsession for writers, whose life is inextricably entwined with language. (Llorens 160) Nabokov, already a well-​known Russian author by the time he started using English for artistic purposes by translating some of his own Russian novels, decided to abandon Russian altogether in the late thirties in view of the bleak prospects for the previously culturally thriving Russian émigré community in Europe. His is a story of pain and trauma:9 “My complete switch from Russian prose to English prose was exceedingly painful—​like learning anew to handle things after losing seven or eight fingers in an explosion.” (Strong Opinions 47) This was Nabokov’s “private tragedy”, in which he especially bewailed the loss of “implied associations and traditions.” (The Annotated Lolita 316–​7) The trauma produced by the loss of the richness of associations in the mother tongue, which is perceived as a natural and perfect communion with reality ­fusing the signifier with the signified, is shared by other bilingual exilic writers such as Eva Hoffman, whose Jewish family was tacitly forced to leave Poland during the years of veiled anti-​semitism promoted by Stalinist authorities: The very places where language is at its most conventional, where it should be most taken for granted, are the places where I feel the prick of artifice […] The problem is that the signifier has become severed from the signified […] ‘River’ in English is cold–​a word without an aura. (Hoffman 106) For many bilingual authors, being cut off from the childhood echoes or associations of the mother tongue is a trauma that adds up to the trauma of exile. From a psychoanalytical perspective, Kristeva sums up what the trauma of living in a new language means: “Not speaking one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood.” (Kristeva 26–​27) At the same time, she also aknowledges the liberating power of a new language: “Lacking the reins of the maternal tongue, the foreigner who learns a new language is capable of the 9 For Cathy Caruth, “trauma is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature —​returns to haunt the survivor later on.” (4) In the case of Nabokov, the trauma caused by the loss of the mother language and the painful appropriation of the foreign language returns insistently in most of his writing in the shape of émigré characters or in the recurring trope of incest.

56 Espino most unforeseen audacities when using it”. (Kristeva 31) However, this is only a qualified liberation. Kristeva, steeped in what Yildiz defines as the “postmonolingual”—​“a field of tension in which the monolingual paradigm continues to assert itself and multilingual practices persist or reemerge” (Yildiz 5)—​tends to define a second language as something artificial which poses almost unsurmountable barriers to true creativity: “Nevertheless, the foreign language remains an artificial one—​like algebra or musical notations—​and it requires the mastery of a genius or an artist to create within it something other than artificial redundancies”. (Kristeva 32) Other authors assess the effects of the acquisition of a second language in more positive terms: “The appropriation of the French language has played a key role in the constitution of my personality.” (Semprún 1988: 122) In the case of Jorge Semprún, who arrived in France with his family fleeing the Spanish Civil War, the perception of French as a universal language of freedom did not mean the loss of Spanish, which he started using in his novels after becoming a successful author in French: “The appropriation of the French language (…), a language rooted not in soil but in universality, (…) did not entail in my a case forgetting or reneging on Spanish”. (Semprún 1988: 134) Semprún is only one of the numerous Spanish authors who see in the French language a liberating force which enables them to escape from the silence of the mother tongue, which had become a site of political trauma, the language of censorship and persecution. (Molina Romero 125) Similarly, Yasemin Yildiz, following the work of Cathy Caruth, examines the German writings of Turkish author Emine Sevgi Özdamar as a way of coming to terms with the recurring traumas of political violence inscribed in the mother tongue. (143–​169) Writing in a foreign language was also an act of liberation for Beckett. As Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour puts it: “For Beckett, as for many others, the study of French, Italian, and German, which allowed him to grow beyond the Procrustean limits of Fatherland and Mothertongue, was the first step in psychic liberation”. Once he had detached himself from the mother tongue, Beckett could return to English “without the original emotional servitude.” (Kosty Beaujour 165, 170) The choice of literary language became a vital decision in postcolonial contexts. The imposition of European languages was instrumental in the strategy of domination of colonial powers. (Ashcroft, Griffins, and Tiffin 7) After the end of colonialism, some writers decided to write in the former colonial languages. Chinua Achebe, for instance, justifies the use of English as a common national language in the following terms: “If you take Nigeria as an example, the national Literature, as I see it, is the literature written in English; and the ethnic literatures are in Hausa, lbo, Yoruba, Efik, Edo, Ijaw, etc., etc.” (75) At the

Writing in a Second Language

57

same time, he describes the move away from the mother tongue as a “dreadful betrayal” which “produces a guilty feeling” in which he had no choice. (83) Achebe thus reproduces for the most part—​except for the obsession with language purity, since he pleads for an English which is “altered to suit its new African surroundings” (81)—​the same monolingual framework of European major languages. Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o tried to refute Achebe’s theses by exposing English as a site of trauma and repression against the mother tongue. In “The Language of African Literature” he recalls the violence against the Gikuyu language at school: Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment—​three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks—​or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY. (288) For Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, who returned to Gikuyu after having written in English, literature in the mother tongues (which he calls “national languages”, thus rejecting a monolithic linguistic model for Kenya) is “part and parcel of the anti-​ imperialist struggle of Kenyan and African peoples”. (290) In contrast, other authors have stressed the liberating power of common languages because of their “neutrality in a linguistic context where native languages, dialects, and styles sometimes have acquired undesirable connotations” [emphasis in the original]. (Kachru 292) It would seem that in some colonial contexts (Kachru is referring to the case of India), the English language has long ceased to be a site of colonial trauma and has become a useful tool for social change. The ultimate reason behind the swaying attitudes towards language change may be found in the alternation between two major strands of linguistic thought across history:  universalism and relativism. (Stockhammer 141) On the one hand, the linguistic universalism of the Stoa, the modistae, the Grammaire générale, or Chomsky has variously stressed the common roots or features of all natural languages. Thus, if all languages are only variations of a single human code, switching from one language to another cannot be a cause of concern.10 On the other hand, the linguistic particularism of 10

A modified, “Eurocentric” version of this universalist stance is to be found in Nina Berberova’s autobiography, The Italics are Mine, which details Russian émigré life: “there exists in the world a minimum of five languages in which one can in our time express what

58 Espino Herder, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Sapir, and Whorf, which underlined the uniqueness of each language and its inseparability from thought, promoted the idea of incompatibility and even “impossibility” (in Schleiermacher’s words) of writing in a second language.11 This framework may have become in turn both a source of anxiety for writers who decided not to write in the mother tongue and a reason for their invisibility in traditional national literary histories. Elizabeth Klosty Beaujour compared the trajectories of several bilingual writers and established a common pattern which started with a traumatic phase of “obsession about maintaining the linguistic purity of the mother language (and attaining linguistic purity in their second language).” Those who survive the trauma may attain a sort of belated liberation: “By the end of their careers, the greatest of them accept the fact that a polylinguistic matrix12 is basic to their life and art.” (27) All the previous examples show the varying attitudes and stances towards the phenomenon of literary multilingualism, which, far from being a rarity (a perception induced by monolingual literary histories), is as old as literature itself. The concept of postmonolingualism is especially fruitful in assessing the possibility of different attitudes towards writing in a foreign language and in gauging the influence of the changing historic, philosophical and linguistic frameworks that promote or hinder multilingual practice. It is to be hoped that more studies in this area, especially in today’s globalized context, will increase the visibility of literary multilingualism in its clash with literary studies restricted to a single nation, thus contributing towards the recognition of writing in a second language as one of the major driving forces of literary transnationalism.

11

12

he wants to the entire Western world. In which one of these this is done is then not so essential”. (321) In the 20th century, many linguists stressed the negative effects of bilingualism Epstein (1915), Weinreich (1953), or Vildomec (1963). Even Harald Weinrich, the promoter of the Chamisso Prize for foreigners writing in German, spoke in 2004 of second-​language writing in terms of “handicap” (1340). Recent neurological research proves otherwise. For a discussion on the positive effects of bilingualism, especially in the case of literature, see Klosty-​Beaujour. (7–​27) “The polylinguistic matrix” which Steiner posits as “the determining fact of Nabokov’s life and art” (18) is also crucial for other bilingual writers, such as Jorge Semprún, who stated that his fatherland consisted not in any langue in particular but in langage in abstract (1993: 19), which in his case was composed of a whole geography of Spanish, French, and German loanwords and literal translations.

Writing in a Second Language



59

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. “The African Writer and the English Language”. Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays. New York: Anchor Books, 1976. 74–​84. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Writes Back Theory and practice in post-​colonial literatures. London and New York, Routledge, 1989. Baggioni, Daniel. Langues et nations en Europe. Paris: Payot, 1997. Berberova, Nina. The Italics are Mine. Translated by Philippe Radley. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. Brugnolo, Furio. La lingua di cui si vanta amore: scrittori stranieri in lingua italiana dal Medioevo al Novecento. Rome: Carocci, 2009. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Champion, Pierre. Vie de Charles d’Orléans. 1394–​1865. Paris: Honoré Champion, 1911. Chaytor, H.J. From Script to Print. An Introduction to Medieval Literature. London: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Circlaere, Thomasin von. Welscher Gast. Heidelberger historische Bestände − digital. Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg. Web. 4 Jan. 2016. ‹http://​digi.ub.uni-​heidelberg. de/​diglit/​cpg389›. Cowan, Marianne. Humanist Without a Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963. Epstein, Izhac. La pensée et la polyglossie. Lausanne: Payot, 1915. Forster, Leonard. The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature. London: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Gat, Azar. Nations. The Long History and Deep Roots of Political Ethnicity and Nationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Guillén, Claudio. El sol de los desterrados. Literatura y exilio. Barcelona: Quaderns crema, 1995. Herder, Johann Gottfried. “Ueber die neue Deutsche Literatur”. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Gesammelte Schriften. Bernhard Suphan (ed.) Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–​1913. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation. London: Heinemann, 1989. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluß auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts. Herbert Nette (ed.) Darmstadt: Claassen & Roether, 1949. Idel, Moshe. Language, Torah, and Hermeneutics in Abraham Abulafia. Translated by Menahem Kallus. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989. Kachru, Braj B. “The Alchemy of English.” The Post-​Colonial Studies Reader. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin (eds.) London: Routledge, 2007. 291–​295.

60 Espino Klosty Beaujour, Elizabeth. Alien Tongues: Bilingual Russian Writers of the ‘First’ Emigration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Kremnitz, Georg. Mehrsprachigkeit in der Literatur. Vienna: Praesens 2015. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon Roudiez. New York: Harvester & Wheatsheaf, 1991. Llorens, Vicente. Estudios y ensayos sobre el exilio republicano de 1939. Seville:  Renacimiento, 2006. Molina Romero, M. Carmen. “Écrivains espagnols d’expression française: une littérature exilée dans la langue de l’autre”. Quaderns de Filologia. Estudis literaris. Vol. xii (2007): 117–​130. Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. Alfred Appel, Jr (ed.) London: Penguin, 2000. Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. London: Penguin, 2011. Nebrija, Elio Antonio de. Gramática castellana. Salamanca, 1492. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “The Language of African Literature”. The Post-​Colonial Studies Reader. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffins, and Helen Tiffin (eds.) London:  Routledge, 2007. 285–​290. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. “Ueber die verschiedenen Methoden des Uebersezens”. Das Problem des Übersetzens. Störig, Hans Joachin (ed.) Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963. 38–69. Semprún, Jorge. Adieu, vive clarté. Paris: Gallimard, 1998. Semprún, Jorge. Federico Sánchez se despide de ustedes. Barcelona: Tusquets, 1993. Steiner, George. Extraterritorial:  Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution. London: Faber and Faber, 1972. Stockhammer, Robert. “Die gebrochene Sprache des Literarischen. Goethe gegen Searle”. Exophonie. Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur. Robert Stockhammer, Susan Arndt, and Dirk Naguschewski (eds.) Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007. 137–148. Stockhammer, Robert, Susan Arndt, and Dirk Naguschewski. “Einleitung. Die Unselbstverständlichkeit der Sprache”. Exophonie. Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur. Robert Stockhammer, Susan Arndt, and Dirk Naguschewski (eds.) Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2007. 7–27. Triolet, Elsa. La mise en mots. Geneva: Skira, 1969. Vildomec, Veroboj. Multilingualism. Leyden: A. W. Sythoff, 1963. Wahnón Bensusan, Sultana. “The Condition of Exile in Twelfth-​Century Judaic Poetics”. Inequality and Difference in Hispanic and Latin American Cultures. Robert McGuirk and Mark Millington (eds.) Lewiston/​Queenston/​Lampeter:  Edwin Miller Press, 1995. 33–​50. Wahnón Bensusan, Sultana. “El ideal cosmopolita: claves históricas y culturales”. Las lenguas extranjeras como vehículo de comunicación intercultural. Julián Jiménez Heffernan (ed.) Madrid: Ministerio de educación, Secretaría general de información y publicaciones, 2009. 85–​127.

Writing in a Second Language

61

Wandruszka, Mario. Die Mehrsprachigkeit des Menschen. Munich: Piper, 1979. Weinrich, Harald. “Chamisso, Chamisso Authors, and Globalization”. Translated by Marshall Brown and Jane K. Brown. PMLA 119.5 (2004): 1336–​1346. Weinreich, Uriel. Languages in Contact. Findings and Problems. The Hague:  Mouton, 1953. Yildiz, Yasemin. Beyond the Mother Tongue. The Postmonolingual Condition. New York: Fordham, 2012.

Chapter 5

Writing-​between-​Worlds

On the Wit, Weight, and Wonder of Literatures without a Fixed Abode (Proceeding from José F.A. Oliver) Ottmar Ette

In the House of Language(s)

For the small boy in Hausach, it was actually quite simple in the house.1 For at home, he moved from one language to another much as he moved from one room to another: I grew up in a house with two stories. On the first story Alemannic was spoken, that is, something like German, and on the second, Andalusian, that is, something like Spanish. Whenever a clear and starry night began to appear, and you could see the moon in the sky, it was called “la luna” on the second story, and was feminine. Should one behold la luna from the first story, however, she became suddenly masculine and was called “der Mond.” A couple of flights of stairs were sufficient to change the woman to a man—​and vice versa. (Oliver 2015: 16) José F.A. Oliver was born (1961) and raised in Hausach, Baden. In this passage from the prelude “Zwei Mütter. Wie ich in der deutschen Sprache ankam” (“Two Mothers. How I Came to the German Language”) from his 2015 volume of essays titled Fremdenzimmer (Guest Room), he has described and exemplified in a literarily condensed manner the House of Language—​or better, his House of Languages. This house is a space of languages in which a few steps suffice to let the reality outside of language appear and be heard in greatly differing ways, if indeed the moon be masculine from one perspective, while from another, as la luna, it takes on feminine characteristics and sounds quite different. Constant changes in perspective, changes in language, and the translational efforts connected to these changes are demanded of this child of Spanish immigrants (“guest workers,” as they were designated in the German Bundesrepublik

1 This article was translated by Mark W. Person.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_007

Writing-between-Worlds

63

of the day), and not only between Spanish and German, but at the same time, between Alemannic and Andalusian. For this child of migration, the world, one might say, is not contained completely within a single point of view, but instead makes the combinatorics of different positions inevitable:  a life of never-​ending changes in perspective. In other words:  the world cannot be grasped from the perspective of a single language, but instead makes familiarity with different languages and the rules of their translatability indispensable. Migration means a life between languages, between cultures, between worlds: amidst the one language, there are always the other languages. In the House of Languages, in the logosphere of migration, the words behind words have their say. Thus no language has the final word, pointing always to the other(s). For in this House of Languages, significance does not lie only in the different stories—​that of the Andalusian Spanish as well as that of the Alemannic German—​from which the small boy looks upon the reality external to language, which is forever branching off into different linguistic realities. Much more crucial are the stair-​steps—​and thus, the actual migratory spaces—​on which the child moves back and forth. The staircase is the connective-​and-​ migratory space par excellence. That such spaces connect not only different logospheres but different graphospheres is visibly manifested in the printed book in the italicizing, the quotation marks, and of course, in the absence of italicizing, the absence of quotation marks. All things here have different places, and yet can only be grasped from a state of motion, and as motion. The child on the staircase stands for—​or moves about within—​a Speaking-​ between-​Worlds that comes to rest and later becomes a Writing-​between-​ Worlds.2 This Writing-​between-​Worlds is characterized by fundamental differences that are not easily dispelled, and yet also do not form and solidify as mutual opposites or antitheses. The Spanish and the German, the Andalusian and the Alemannic are different, and in their differing perspectivations they cannot simply coalesce. Every language demands its own Recht (right/​reality), its own logic. And thus does the celestial moon appear as masculine and feminine simultaneously, such that neither one perception nor the other might prevail or dominate one’s thinking. A coexistence of languages rules. Heterogeneities, indeed, opposites are simultaneously valid, precisely because the differences

2 For the first development of this concept, see Ette (2005).

64 Ette continue to exist:  it is a matter of a fundamental equipollency,3 whereby that which is different is gleich gültig (equally valid), but not gleichgültig (indifferent). Writing-​between-​Worlds, like Speaking-​between-​Worlds, is a world of constant intra-​and interlingual translations (Jakobson 1971: 260). This deeply translational movement is inscribed into all perceptions of things. José F.A. Oliver first attempts to illustrate in a sophisticated manner just how complex these translation processes can become in the figure of his first person narrator who is, at first, consciously translating. Thus the small boy from Hausach translates the sentence “Morge Nochmittag gemmer in d Heibere” (Oliver 2015: 15) into Spanish as “Mamá, mañana vamos a buscar Heidelbeeren.” (16) How might one understand such a feat of translation, or such a logosphere? The translational accomplishments included in the text may be demonstrated and analyzed on widely varying levels. In the example above, it is at first simply a translation from Alemannic into Spanish (or, more accurately, Castilian), in which there is definitely a slight shift in meaning insofar as the direction of movement is reversed: “In den Heidelbeeren gehen” (“going to the blueberries”) becomes fetching blueberries. Thus it is shown that the child, no doubt aware of the mother’s language proficiency, fills the gap in the Spanish not with the Alemannic “Heibere,” but with the Standard German “Heidelbeeren,” and thereby performs a translation, not from Alemannic to Spanish, but from Alemannic to German. For Oliver, Alemannic is not a dialect, but a language—​and even more, as we shall see, a perfectly valid literary language. On the level of the linguistic result, the double-​ translation leads to a combinatorics of two languages that had not been present in the Alemannic original sentence. A situation of moving across languages arises, a translingual situation that brings the proficiencies of the various speakers and listeners into its considerations, into its play with the language. Beyond this, however, the boy primarily translates between his two mothers, the biological one from Andalusia who was allowed to follow her husband to Germany only after a marriage by proxy, and the other mother, a woman named Emma Viktoria who, as a migrant within Baden, would become so important to the “struggle for language” (Oliver 2015: 10) that is inescapable in association with migration. The translation situation is indicative of a translingual field of tension within which at least two mother-​tongues are translated, insofar as translation must be performed between two mothers of differing linguistic origins. “For every need,” as the first-​person narrator reports, “I had a mother” (Oliver 2015: 10)—​and on this level too, in the dissimilarity of the two mothers, an equipollency occurs in which nothing is gleichgültig (indifferent), 3 On the concept of equipollency in philosophical thought, see Ette (2014).

Writing-between-Worlds

65

but everything is gleich gültig (equally valid). Thus no simple acculturation takes place, but rather, a transculturation4 that constitutes, perhaps, the decisive prerequisite for the writer in German with a Spanish passport: “The immediate gratification in that the German language belonged to me too, and that the guest worker’s child was not inevitably to be the guest worker of tomorrow.” (Oliver 2015: 10) So it is that in the House of Language and of Languages, sufficient migratory space is created to ensure a mobility that is not only linguistic, but also social and environmental. The first person narrator happily remains in the migratory space, in the stairway between the different languages. The movements between the mothers, between the languages, between the genders and between the worlds make possible a life that first and foremost can be reflected as a complex linguistic movement. The transformation of the spoken to the written word, of the logosphere into the graphosphere, intensifies the constant changes in perspective, and their reflection as well, in an ever more intense manner, but never such that an end to all translingual translation processes could ever ensue. The chance to “say a word” does not mean to say one word: in all lexemes, the places beneath places, the words beneath words are always included. Writing-​between-​Worlds obtains its actual driving force from the equipollency of differences and of diversity. And nothing here can turn the gleiche Gültigkeit (the equal validity) into a gleichgültigkeit (an indifference), nor into the imperialism of any one language, one mother, one country. The indisputably weighty burden of being a guest worker’s child becomes here, through the wit of constant translation (and through impressive linguistic wits), a wonder for language(s), and for a world that can never be understood from a single perspective, with the aid of a single language, or thanks to a single logic. The House of Language(s) can thus become a House of Wonders. The wonders of the spoken and then written word open up in this way upon the wonders of the text.

From the Logosphere to the Graphosphere

The second narrative or “Essay” of his volume Fremdenzimmer titled “Reproach and Resistance: When the Alemannic Language Entered My Writing,” is likewise centered on the House of Language(s), but deals here not with the

4 Regarding the concept of the transculturalidad, see its “inventor” from 1940, the Cuban anthropologist and cultural theoretician Fernando Ortiz (1978).

66 Ette problems of language translation, but with a rigorous language suppression. The schoolhouse now takes the place of the House, and the place of the mothers is taken by the male German teacher who, in the name of supposedly better social opportunities seems to want to obliterate mercilessly everything that has any hint of being Alemannic. The first-​person narrator mounts a resistance against such a Language Police. Not only the insubordinate schoolboy, but even more, the Alemannic mother tongue altogether is expelled from the classroom: the House of Languages is expected to become the House of High German. Taking the place of interlingual translation is the monolingual implementation that is to become iron law. But recourse to the Alemannic Poet-​Prince Johann Peter Hebel (the name, incidentally, means “lever”) soon provides the lever to lift away the reproach and therewith the exclusionary mechanisms of the unreasonable language politics of the Goethe-​obsessed German teacher, who is depicted as a Riigschmeckter (someone not from Baden), and thus as a “perpetual ‘Gastling’ ” (Oliver 2015: 29) (part Gast, “guest,” part Fremdling, “stranger”). Thus is effected the enrollment into a world of literature and, subsequently, of putting language into writing, a world that, graphospherically, will clearly not exclude any of the languages from the young man’s personal House of Languages. And this despite the fact that he, ejected from the classroom, “still had to go out into the hall and scribble the surname of the classicist 250 times on paper.” (Oliver 2015: 29) But who, really, would want to blame Goethe for what happened in German language classrooms in the seventies, or for what is happening in such classrooms today, harassments that in most recent times have been cashed in on in the form of big box office films? In José Oliver’s literarily compressed world, the languages as literary languages in written form are just as polylogically present as in the world of spoken languages. Thence comes the importance of the fact that the Alemannic language came into Oliver’s writings, and of the manner in which it did so. Before the backdrop of his House of Languages, it could not come to an ironically apostrophized “Alemannic vs. High German clash of civilizations.” (Oliver 2015: 29) 5 As regards the founder of the “Hausacher ‘Leselenz’ ” (“Springtime of Reading,” a literary festival in Hausach that is both local and international, and is set up to be multilingual) that continually awakens anew a sensitivity to the “words and writings of the 55 nationalities” (Oliver 2015: 60) living in the small Black Forest city, the reasons for the fact that it could never come to such a collision of languages and cultures are many and obvious: the familiarity with an

5 This references Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations (1996).

Writing-between-Worlds

67

inclusive convivence (Ette 2012), a coexistence of different perspectives with an equipollency of languages and cultures, and, certainly not least, the experience of a “Living-​between-​Worlds” that is inherent to migration, and which began in the House of Languages in Hausach. These, then, are the elements that first make possible the greatly varying forms and norms of a Writing-​between-​ Worlds that is oriented toward a peaceful coexistence of different and differentiating logics. In the subsequent texts in Oliver’s Fremdenzimmer, the literary space of intertextual references to German and Alemannic, to Spanish and specifically (with mention, for example, of Federico García Lorca or Rafael Alberti) Andalusian literature is thoroughly illuminated. It is thus no surprise that José F.A. Oliver repeatedly acted not only as translator,6 but also as interpreter for the Andalusian poet who so certainly influenced to his views on poetry. The Andalusian and the Alemannic, the Spanish and the German, enter into mutual, polylogical relationships, much as they had done quite early on in multilingual volumes of poetry:7 convivence of the diversity of languages and cultures that in Oliver found their most concentrated expression in lyric poetry. But this is not simply a matter of a multilingualism that places texts of widely varying languages side by side, as it were. Much more, it is about the polylogic of words, where la luna is ever-​present in der Mond, and where the masculine notion may always be heard in her too. The idea that a different perspectivization of not only space but of time as well is linked to each language is underscored by Oliver in the example of Alemannic which, as opposed to Standard German, privileges “a continuous present perfect as a grammatical measure of time” such that it consistently carries with it another perception of the past in the present, and an ongoing influence of the past upon the present. (Oliver 2015: 41) Multilingualism in one’s own writing, as well as the development of translingual forms of writing in general, accommodates a quasi-​cubist art that succeeds in presenting to the eye and ear several views of an object simultaneously. The wit and wiles lie in bringing the words and perceptions into an oscillation, a swinging between cultures. It is in this way that images of motion arise from out of the differences between perspectives and perspectivizations, images of motion that either undermine or take ad absurdum the limitedness of a single standpoint, of a single (as it were, “natural”), but highly historically applied central perspective. To the 6 C.f. García Lorca, Federico: Sorpresa, Uverhofft. Ausgewählte Gedichte 1918–​1921. Einschreibungen und Irritationen von José F.A Oliver. Berlin-​Budapest-​Vienna: Hochrot Verlag 2015. 7 See, e.g., Oliver (1997); on the development of José Oliver’s lyric poetry, see the eighth chapter “Einwanderung” in Ette (2004), esp. pages 245–​250.

68 Ette child of migration, this is surely inconceivable from the beginning, though no doubt sensorially present. Nothing is more likely to have shaped the life and experience, the reading and writing of the narrator than this radical dynamizing of all of the perceptions of a reality that really may only be perceived in the plural, as realities. All of this, as it is expressed in the essay “d Hoimet isch au d Sproch” (“The Homeland is also the Language”), “opens doors into the unsaid.” (Oliver 2015: 42) It is just this that is the actual mission of all literature: to translate imaginable, unthinkable, unutterable, unwritten, unread, and unlived Life into Life that is imagined, thought-​out, spoken, written, read, and lived, in order to reclaim, within the (to be) experienced life, that which has been said into the unsayable. In Writing-​between-​Worlds, in the translingual Literatures without a fixed Abode, the landscapes play a prominent role: not so much as settings for location in a new homeland, but as landscapes of theory8 in which the movements between the languages, between the cultures, between the geographies incessantly reproduce themselves. While the world of the Black Forest, firmly anchored in the primary geologic formation, offers the writer the possibility of a regional location, at the same time, as a green sea, it always refers to Andalusian Málaga and the blue sea that his beloved grandfather sailed as captain of a small ship with Málaga as its home harbor: oscillations from “blue sea to green” and back again. (Oliver 2015: 5) Here, the transregional images overlay one another as they do in the Ortenau, which is equally ill-​suited to be a static point of reference: Oliver’s landscapes of theory are always landscapes of superimposition, the mobile dimensions of which can only be fully recognized as something of a disentanglement puzzle. In Oliver’s enigmatic text “Kurzer Brief aus der W:ortenau” (“Short letter from the W:ortenau”—​displaying the Ort [place] in Wort [word]), a literary landscape of theory is thus developed that seeks to give expression to this region of transition, of constant movements between south and north, east and west, right from the first sentence: “Literature and the poetry within it invite the reader as landscapes invite the curious wanderer.” (Oliver 2015: 52) In the movement-​metaphorics of the landscape as one of those ensembles (each one specific and all of them precarious) of factors and vectorizations, if the dynamic of the wanderer continuously presses on toward the crossing of boundaries and the expansion of new horizons, there ensues in the reading and in the reader a dynamic that, whether with Brecht or Grass, with Hebel or Hauff, not only gives name to mobile points of reference within German and Alemannic

8 On the concept “Landscape of Theory,” see Ette (2013).

Writing-between-Worlds

69

literature, but at the same time connects the Ortenau of Words with other regions—​above all, again, with Spain. It is a migration with seven-​mile boots, the landscape made up of cross-​fades: in the one landscape that the readership seems to have before its eyes, the other landscapes continually emerge. Everything is relational and is based on discontinuities in which the leaps allow two or several landscapes to appear in a single one. It is not by chance then, that the literary migratory space of this W:ortenau should betake itself to the cradle of the modern European novel and follow the traces of the pícaro in Grimmelshausen’s picaresque novel Abenteuerlicher Simplicissimus Teutsch to Spain, where Cervantes, in his Don Quijote de la Mancha harked back not only to the knightly romance, but especially to the movement impulses of the novela picaresca. Offenberg, Gaisbach, and above all, Renchen are projected in this manner upon the landscapes of Spain; a Mancha comes into existence in the middle of the W:ortenau, in which migrations, wars, and literatures unceasingly cross one another: “Cervantes and Grimmelshausen, two war-​torn souls, rebels, visionaries, and dreamers, approach one another even across borders, insofar as they profusely, uncompromisingly give name (because they recount with the hand of Words) to that which must deal out murder and death.” (Oliver 2015: 54 f.) In Grimmelshausen, Cervantes appears in the midst of the W:ortenau, yet Quijote has already anticipated Simplicissimus. These are the multilingual points of reference between which the graphosphere of a Literature without a fixed Abode develops, and this is the literary migratory space in which the constant translations of José Oliver become inscriptions—​and the concept of inscription remains a translation and a transference9—​in which, among the words, among the places, and among the landscapes, other words, other places, and other landscapes reveal themselves. They are not subject to any sort of statics, which allows them not to be fixed, and to swing in never-​ending motion. In this way, José Oliver’s W:ortenau constructs a mobile graphosphere that is removed from the literature of any homeland, because it is inscribed as, and determinedly updates itself—​“fort-​ schreibt,” or perhaps “f:ortschreibt”—​as a Writing-​between-​Worlds. (See also Bachmann-​Medick 2009) So the motion is more than motion in “Vom Grün weithin behauset. Eine Liebeserklärung,” (“Housed Largely in the Green:  A declaration of Love”) when it says “The Ortenau is motion; never a standstill.” (Oliver 2015: 60) In Wort (word) the Ort (place) and the Fort (onward) can always be heard. 9 C.f. the application of this term in the translations of Federico García Lorca in the above-​ mentioned sorpresa, unverhofft.

70 Ette

Migration and Literature

In the context of the considerations laid out here, it is by no means surprising that in his book Fremdenzimmer, José F.A. Oliver should turn in a particular way to forms of life and art that owe much to the nomadic. Emblematic of this is the flamenco or cante jondo, which establishes a connection between Oliver’s lyric poetry, via the poetic writing of Federico García Lorca, and the world of those nomadic groups that in Spain are designated by the collective term gitanos—​a term that should not be seen as equivalent to the German Zigeuner (Gypsies). Alternating since the time of the Catholic Monarchs between what one might today call a “culture of welcome” for foreigners on one hand and their threatened or actual expulsion by the Spanish ruling power of the day on the other, between mere tolerance in the sense of putting up with and attempts to force the nomads into permanent settlement, the various biopolitical attempts to come to grips with the “problem case” of the gitanos in Spanish territory move with the help of methods of greater and lesser brutality. Persecution of the Romani and the Sinti in Europe flare up again and again even up to today. For José Oliver, a nomadic art borne of exclusion or persecution becomes the basis of the fundamental relationship between “flamenco and migration” (Oliver 2015: 71) that began to take shape for the guest workers’ child upon hearing the great voices of flamenco in the living room in Hausach with its flamenco dolls. In this Art without a fixed Abode, there opens a world of nomadic or perhaps nomadically wandering life and activity that achieves world-​wide dimensions with the migrations of both Sinti and Romani to Latin America. The writer’s (and singer’s) own life and writing, and his Writing His Own Life, are not unaffected by this: “Perhaps I wear my pilgrim’s boots because, among other things, the cante jondo is continually able to penetrate me and at any time cause me to sally forth into the comings of things past.” (Oliver 2015: 83) Thus does there ever live within past movements an element of future that carries this vectorization across times and across spaces into something prospective that seeks to reflect itself over and over in nomadic wandering. In the story of the boy, that is at the same time a story of the writer, a great variety of the forms of migration play a defining role. It can be found on the individual as well as the collective level, and even on the level of human history: “Migration, so the story wends its serpentine way, began with the banishment from Paradise.” (Oliver 2015: 84) If literature, viewed from its multitude of beginnings, forever retains and develops the awareness of life and writing after Paradise, then the isotopies connected to migration in

Writing-between-Worlds

71

the Literatures without a fixed Abode are extracted in an especially fundamental manner and—​as we have seen—​are connected to translingual and transcultural elements and, to an equal degree, to nomadic elements as well. Both mandatory and voluntary forms of migration thereby enter the field of view just as do the changes in standpoint and perspectivation that accompany migratory movements. The nomadic is deeply inscribed into all of Oliver’s writing. If migration, then, represents the actual common thread of Oliver’s Frem­denzimmer, then this migration and this guest room—​which, until the recent past was called the “Gästezimmer” in the southwest (Gäste being “guests,” while Fremde is “stranger” or “foreigner”)—​are moved into a perspective of human history that is of a transareal stamp. For without a doubt, the homo migrans is as old as homo sapiens himself:  there have been migrations for as long as there have been people, in any and all cultural areas. For Europe, small yet so influential to global history, is not only in motion (Bade 2000); it is also accurate to perceive Europe as motion. (Ette 2001) The current waves of migration from the Near East and Africa are basically parts of a long story in which beautiful Europa, herself abducted from a shore in what is today called the “Near East,” must answer for a history of violence and rape, of human smugglers and of deportations, of migration and transmigration. This story, wrapped up in both the myth of the beautiful princess Europa and in the fascinating phenomenon that is Europe, has by no means come to its end: it is, rather, experiencing its currently so dramatic acceleration, which is leading once more toward an intermingling of Occident and Orient. If it is the case that in the short text “El Muerte” (mirroring, as it were, the relationship between der Mond and la luna) the terms la muerte and der Tod mutually penetrate one another and are translingually translated as die Tödin (feminization of the German masculine) and el muerte (masculinization of the Spanish feminine), then the omnipresence of der Tod and die Tödin, which can already be sensed on the first page of the book in the speech “von Einsamkeit und Tod” (“On Loneliness and Death”), (Oliver 2015: 9) can certainly not be overlooked. Also revealed here is the degree to which the “Gegenwartsvergänglichkeit” (“transitoriness of the present”) (Oliver 2015: 92) is melded into the image of the deceased father. This image of a “Feierabendzeitnomade” (“nomad of quitting time”) (Oliver 2015: 93) and a “guest worker who liked to have guests” (Oliver 2015: 94) is frequently interwoven with migration and nomadism. Thus the image of the one father is illuminated at the end of the volume between the two mothers who dominated the beginning of José F.A. Oliver’s Fremdenzimmer. The father, whose initials stand in

72 Ette the middle of José F.A. Oliver’s name, is the figure who is the catalyst of that migration and with it, of that literature which would inevitably become necessary to Writing-​between-​Worlds. Yet the volume, adorned with a cuckoo clock with a bull on top, obviously (as should by now have become clear) goes far beyond an individual and familiar migration story. It is no accident that the end of the postscript includes the trip to the Book Fair in Frankfurt am Main, well-​known as the biggest book fair in the world. It was an Italian guest worker from Hausach who took along the budding writer—​not so much to the book fair itself, but to an “Italian courtyard next to the Book Fair” in which a “Casa di Cultura Popolare” had settled. (Oliver 2015: 113) This indicates the place, the marginalizing localization, of the so-​called Gastarbeiterautoren in those early years of the eighties during which the rapid development of those Literatures without a fixed Abode began to show up in the tension field of literature and migration. These translingual literatures, arising from a wide variety of contexts, have of course long since found their place not next to but within the halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair and, beyond specific distinctions, have won all of the major literary prizes in Germany. As a result of these changes, their symbolic capital is incomparably higher today than in the seventies and eighties. This look back into the time of the seventies and eighties incorporates, in a manner that is at once very subtle and cautious, and yet also clearly contoured, that part of history that shaped the lives of the first person narrator and many others into the Fremdenzimmer that “German Literature” had conceded to—​as it is still called today—​“not quite German literature.” As late as 2005, a special issue of the renowned journal Literaturen appeared, addressing the topic “Foreigners. Life in Other Worlds,” in which much was reminiscent of the attempts at denaturalization, thanks to terms like “migrant literature” and “migration literature.” For even the headline to an interview with Terézia Mora, Imran Ayata, Wladimir Kaminer, and Navid Kermani speaks of its dealing with “four not quite German authors.” (Literaturen 2005:  26) The thoroughly different strategies of the four writers in dealing with such classifications, in their interplay of mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion, are absolutely worth reading and entertaining, but they also illustrate how impertinently in every respect the terms of a statically understood national literature—​be it German, French, Spanish, Hungarian, or Polish—​tend to be employed. The concepts of Writing-​between-​Worlds and Literature without a fixed Abode are aimed at nullifying, in a literal sense, the exclusionary mechanisms of national (and nationalistic) thought structures in the realm of literature. While it is quite evident that overcoming the seemingly so “natural” opposition of national literature and world literature is tied to this, it may only be elucidated in the

Writing-between-Worlds

73

framework of a transareal and world-​spanning understanding of literary phenomena and thus, in its own particular area of study.10 But let us turn back to José F.A. Oliver, whose literary works highly productively and multilingually unravel, in a manner that is not only exemplary but truly paradigmatic, the challenges of Writing-​between-​Worlds that are being examined here. An interview of José F.A. Oliver by Ilija Trojanow, conducted on June 16th, 2015 and published in book form, examines the once so self-​ evident marginalization, indeed, exclusion as Gastarbeiterliteratur and, with equal clarity, the confrontation with the positions of well-​known critics who would dispute “that authors who are not of German heritage could contribute anything substantial to German literature.” (Trojanow 2015: 100) Looking back at the nineties, Oliver tells in this interview of hostilities and threats at public appearances, of cancelled readings, and of the police protection required due to self-​appointed defenders of German and of Germanness. (Trojanow 2015:  101) The interview bears witness to the level of vehemence with which some were able to agitate and take action against the literature of the so-​called “Gastarbeiter,” against a “literatura gast” (Trojanow 2015:  103)—​exclusions such as are occasionally still reflected in terms like “migrant literature” or “migration literature” or, as Oliver asserts, reflected in allusion to the Chamisso Prize as “Chamisso-​Literatur.” (Trojanow 2015: 104) That Oliver himself saw to it that a Hausach concern (Trojanow 2015: 106) would be prepared to finance the publication of one of the first doctoral dissertations in this field shows not only the writer’s engagement and his pronounced capacity to employ wit to throw off the weight and to wondrously transform it into a story, it also shows the intimate way that literature and philology in their exchanges are important to one another, in this area particularly. Before this backdrop, the both concretely and symbolically understandable journey of this Black Forest-​born writer represents, precisely next to The Frankfurt Book Fair, an important step that traces the path from the multilingual personal logosphere, via the translingual graphosphere, to the sphere of the public view: for “so, somehow, began everything public.” (Oliver 2015: 113) But how does one progress further with a writing that moves between worlds, between languages, and for which José Oliver’s Fremdenzimmer offered an especially significant example of how the story of a childhood and youth after (and yet still in) a migration opens upon the story of a writing that may be understood as an inscription into a long tradition of

10

For an extensive examination of this, see Ette (2015a).

74 Ette Literatures without a fixed Abode? And in what way will things continue with this dramatic, generations-​spanning and productive connection between literature and migration, with this Writing-​between-​Worlds that is “settling” into a world after the twentieth century, the one known as the “century of migration”?

Writing in a World Gone Off Course

Before we can look into the migratory spaces of the Literatures without a fixed Abode, we should ask ourselves, with recourse to another representative of Writing-​between-​Worlds, from which world and which perspective we consider this situation that today is shaped on a wide variety of levels by all norms and forms of migration. For a life and a writing between Orient and Occident, between the so-​called “Near East” and Europe, opens perspectives of a multilogical understanding that can not only call into question any self-​centered viewpoint that excludes all other perspectives, but can nullify it. Novelist and essayist Amin Maalouf was born in 1949 in Beirut, but now lives in France, alternating between Paris and the Ile d’Yeu. In his Le dérèglement du monde (spring, 2009), his analysis of a world-​wide period of things having gone off course, he demonstrates inexorably the dangers that have pushed humanity at the start of the twenty-​first century to the edge of a precipice—​a situation that (as we know today) has gained in dramatic tension. The dimensions of Maalouf’s reflections, globe-​spanning and, from the beginning, changing familiar perspectives,11 can be recognized from the first lines: Nous sommes entrés dans le nouveau siècle sans boussole. Dès les tout premiers mois, des événements inquiétants se produisent, qui donnent à penser que le monde connaît un dérèglement majeur, et dans plusieurs domaines à la fois—​dérèglement intellectuel, dérèglement financier, dérèglement climatique, dérèglement géopolitique, dérèglement éthique. (Maalouf 2009: 11) [We have entered the new century without compass. From the very first months on, unsettling events have happened, that lead us to think that

11

See the first published book by Amin Maalouf, Les Croisades vues par les Arabes (1983).

Writing-between-Worlds

75

the world is suffering a major disorder, and this in several domains all at the same time—​intellectual disorder, financial disorder, climate disorder, geopolitical disorder, ethical disorder.] It would be superfluous to add from today’s perspective a dérèglement migratoire [migration disorder] to this fundamental dissolution of world order. But whoever might expect, after this carefully conceived opening of the essay, a deeply pessimistic point of view on a planet and a world society will soon find themselves pleasantly surprised: the book by this Lebanon-​born representative of the Literatures without a fixed Abode is far away from any sort of pessimism, any sort of nostalgia, and quite certainly from any sort of paralyzing Weltschmerz. For like an implicit counterargument to Samuel P. Huntington’s discussion of a Clash of Civilizations from 1996, it is the author’s intention to identify those points of orientation for a coexistence by which the planetary Ship of Fools might direct itself anew. The essay, by an author who writes mostly in French (and thus outside of his mother-​tongues) revolves around a differentiated understanding of the enduring process of a globalization, the cultural aspects of which were long underestimated and which, in the just barely weathered financial crisis were again forced into the background amidst the political economic debates involving sums in the billions. The far-​reaching disregard or even complete exclusion of the cultural, intercultural, and transcultural implications of globalization was and is a decisive error that brings catastrophic consequences in its wake. And Amin Maalouf allows for no doubt: it is precisely these cultural dimensions that will decisively determine the future of humanity. We require answers that in the sense outlined above are directed polylogically toward a coexistence in peace and diversity. For convivence (Ette 2010) represents without a doubt the central challenge of the twenty-​first century on a planetary scale. Just what important, even fundamental role Amin Maalouf, winner of the 1993 Prix Goncourt assigns specifically to literature immediately becomes clear in the motto by William Carlos Williams that is set at the front of the volume. It puts forth the Lebenswissen (Knowledge for Living) of literature in the sense of an ÜberLebenswissen (Survival Knowledge) of humanity in the condensed form of the poem: “Man has survived hitherto /​because he was too ignorant to know /​how to realize his wishes. /​Now that he can realize them, /​he must either change them /​or perish.” (Maalouf 2009: 9) If we follow Maalouf’s considerations, it is essential no longer to see the respective “others” from the perspective of heterostereotypes that deceptively present us with ideological, religious, or mass-​cultural constructs. As much as

76 Ette possible, we must reject unilateral constructions of the other such as the intercultural dialog has so often fallen back on. It is far better to perceive the endless differences and differentiations with other eyes, as it were—​with the eyes of many others (and not of the other)—​from different angles simultaneously, and thus polyperspectively. In so doing, nothing—​so stresses the author of Léon l’Africain—​can replace literature: L’intimité d’un peuple, c’est sa littérature. C’est là qu’il dévoile ses passions, ses aspirations, ses rêves, ses frustrations, ses croyances, sa vision du monde qui l’entoure, sa perception de lui-​même et des autres, y compris de nous-​mêmes. Parce que en parlant des «autres» il ne faut jamais perdre de vue que nous-​mêmes, qui que nous soyons, où que nous soyons, nous sommes aussi «les autres» pour tous les autres. (Maalouf 2009: 206) [The intimacy of a people rests in its literature. This is where it unveils its passions, its aspirations, its dreams, its frustrations, its beliefs, its vision of the world that surrounds it, its perception of itself and of the others, including ourselves. Because when speaking of “others” we should never lose sight of the fact that we ourselves, whomever we are, or wherever we are, we are also the “others” to all others.] Literature is the best antidote against any sort of mass-​cultural or propagandistic simplification or schematization. For it comes to us from a great variety of languages, cultures, and communities. Based on this multitude of origins, we would actually have to say: it is the Literatures of the World that—​beyond any unifying and long-​since outdated conception of “world literature”12—​open for us the entrance to a great variety of cultural and transcultural configurations that grant us, or at least facilitate for us, thinking and action in multilogical life-​contexts. In our time particularly, the Literatures of the World—​and in no small way thanks to those phases of accelerated globalization that include the periods from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth, from the middle of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth, from the last third of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth, and from the eighties of the twentieth century to our present day in the twenty-​ first—​have become the privileged laboratory of the Erfahrung (experience in 12

This becomes especially distinct in Casanova (1999), where we are presented with a world literature obviously oriented to the center of Paris. A clearly more open and at the same time reader-​oriented, yet still US-​centric conception of “world literature” can be found in Damrosch (2003).

Writing-between-Worlds

77

the sense of seeing and learning), and even more, of the Erleben (experience in the sense of actually living something out) of cultural complexity. Consequently, the Literatures of the World form potential schools of thought on that which is complex as well as on that which is radically multilogical and open to results. For the ÜberLebensWissen, the knowledge for and about living (and survival) and the ZusammenLebensWissen, the knowledge for living together, that exist in the Literatures of the World are indebted in a fundamental way to a Poetics of Movement that is oriented less toward boundaries than toward paths of knowledge, less toward roots than it is toward routes.13 Regarding history, these literary forms of expression and experience are interested not in the sedimentary, the stratified, but in the vectorial, the directional: to the system (best perceived as rhizomatic) of the Literatures of the World, any sort of statics is foreign. In the face of a seemingly diminishing role and significance of literature(s), we clearly must self-​critically ask ourselves today: in what way are literature-​and culture-​studies prepared to take this fundamental function of literature and argumentatively push it into the public focus, and to use the potential of the specific Knowledge for Living of the Literatures of the World in a way that is productive and publically urgent? How, especially, might the connections between the philologies and the Literatures of the World be considered anew and so ordered, such that they can bring their specific knowledge, both ethically and aesthetically grounded, to fruition for the use of a world community?

On Knowledge of (and from within) Movement

The question of the specific knowledge of literature has for some years been the focus of current debates in the literary sciences. This fact is not easily tied in with the trend which is growing ever more apparent in the humanities and in cultural studies that the place of the memoria theme, which has been dominant for quite some time, is being taken over by knowledge problematics—​ regardless of whether or not one might be speaking here of a paradigm shift significant in terms of historical studies. The question regarding the knowledge of literature is to no small degree the question of the societal, political, and cultural relevance of this knowledge within the current twenty-​first century information societies and knowledge societies in their various forms. 13

See for a critical discussion of Pascale Casanova’s and David Damrosch’s concepts of World Literature the recently published book WeltFraktale. Wege durch die Literaturen der Welt (Ette, 2017).

78 Ette The perception of literature that concentrates more on the past has no doubt contributed over the course of the last quarter-​century to the suppression of that prospective dimension that can as surely be found in the Gilgamesh epic as in the Shijing or in the narratives of the One Thousand and One Nights. But by no means do the Literatures of the World only fulfill the undisputedly vital memoria-​function with a view to a memorializing past, they also develop their prospective relevance, which is oriented toward possible futures. This is all thanks to a Knowledge for Living that is equally capable of confronting not only past and present, but also future life-​forms and life-​norms. What, then, does literature want to do, what can it do, what does it succeed in doing? And how can we newly understand its particular logic from within a Poetics of Movement? It seems to me, in fact, that there is no better, no more complex entry into a community, into a society, into a culture than literature. For over the course of long millennia and in the greatest possible variety of geocultural areas, it has collected a knowledge of living, of surviving, and of coexisting that specializes in being neither discursively nor disciplinarily specialized, nor specialized as a “dispositif” of forms of knowledge. Its capacity to impart its knowledge to its readers as experiential knowledge which can be reconstructed step by step, or even more, can be acquired by reliving it, allows literature to reach people and be effectual even over great spatial and temporal distances. The quality of literature that defies being disciplined is, in this context, the guarantor of its fundamental openness to the future. If therefore the oldest texts of Mesopotamia, China, India, or the Arab World—​ to cite but a few examples—​can still “reach” us even today, then this proves that this is a matter of repositories of knowledge that store for the long term and can be newly contextualized in a variety of ways, and which, over millennia and across all boundaries of language, can again and again and quasi-​interactively be connected in new and different ways to existing segments of knowledge. The Literatures of the World do not allow this from one single, centrally set perspective, or from a single history and tradition. They have at their disposal many origins with diverse traditions and histories that also open upon many different futures, futures that they offer, thanks to their imagination, as though in a school of thought, in a laboratory of future possibilities and limits of human life. At the same time, the Literatures of the World are laid out in such fashion that they may be laid out in many different ways and thereby release that cosmos of the plurality of speech, the coordinates of which have come to stand out far more distinctly in our consciousness since the considerations of Mikhail Bakhtin. (1979) The Literatures of the World are accordingly not only indebted to different horizons of meaning, different discourses and universes of discourse, but also to very diverse cultural logics and transcultural networks

Writing-between-Worlds

79

of connections. The Literatures of the World are consequently a playing field of the multilogical, insofar as they make it possible, indeed imperative, to think in widely varying logics at once. Nothing could more effectively prepare us for the conditions of a life in a multilogical world. Their characteristic diversity of meaning, their polysemy, actuates the development of poly-​logical structures and structurings that are directed not toward gaining a single, firm standpoint, but toward the constantly changed and renewed movements of understanding. Every conversation between active persons introduces—​like the conversations between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza—​forms and norms of an ever-​differing Knowledge for Living that is transferred and injected into the relational network of connections. Literature is not about depicted reality, but about the artistic depiction of realities that have been lived and are relivable, that are able to be experienced and are livable. Thus it aims, in an Aristotelian sense, not at the elucidation of some evidence of the particular, as in historiography, but at the general, fundamental question about the places, words, and movements of people in the universe.14 In the context of the fourth phase of accelerated globalization (Ette 2015b), which is moving toward its end in the current decade, the Literatures of the World, as the mobile of knowledge (in the sense of a mobile sculpture), see to it that the wide variety of realms of knowledge and segments of knowledge from one, several, or a great number of communities and societies are constantly, experimentally connected to one another in new ways and become enmeshed in a polylog of languages and cultures. Literature is therefore a knowledge in motion, the multilogical structure of which is of a relevance crucial to survival for the twenty-​first century, whose greatest challenge is without a doubt a transareal coexistence in peace and diversity. It is high time, then, to promote in the realm of literary and cultural science a Poetics of Movement that grasps literature in movement and as movement, and places its primary focus upon a Writing-​between-​Worlds that—​though anchored in a long tradition—​will gain tremendous momentum over the course of the present century. For there can be no doubt that the Literatures of the World are becoming in growing numbers Literatures without a fixed Abode, inscribing themselves—​quite in the sense of José Oliver—​into translingual contexts. It is sufficient merely to observe the current flood of refugees to be able to comprehend that these developments, even when looking at European literatures of the future, will bring about fundamental changes in the sense of a writing that is quite naturally translingual. Here, new paths from the logosphere to the graphosphere will develop which with wit will transform 14

C.f., in a different context, Ette (2015a).

80 Ette the weight of history into a wondrous appropriation of historical realities. Not a world literature that seeks ever more strongly to grow unified, but rather a polylogically self-​updating development of the Literatures of the World is crucial for our present as well as for our future. The epoch of world literature, in its historical becoming, has long since become historic: it lies behind us. From today’s perspective, one may with good reason maintain that in the postmodern era, the temporal, historico-​chronological fundament of our thought and our processing of reality that has been so dominant in the European modern era has grown weaker, admittedly without having faded away completely. At the same time, spatial concepts and mindsets, and also patterns of perception and modes of experience have unmistakably increased in meaning. In the second half of the eighties at the latest, new spatial concepts were developed that are perhaps most convincingly reflected in the conceptual work of Edward W. Soja. (1989)15 The discussions of the eighties and nineties were—​and this continues into the present—​quite substantially determined by geocultural and geopolitical questions that by no means remained restricted to cyberspace, but instead generated territorializations, mappings, and remappings as influenced by the postcolonial or the clash of cultures. Even Samuel P. Huntington’s vision of the Clash of Civilizations, or Niall Ferguson’s Civilization. The West and the Rest (2011) may be assigned to still another (geoculturally and geostrategically implemented) spatial turn. Today’s challenge consists of converting these mappings (set-​fast in whatever database) into living, mobile mappings in order to be able to counter effectively the prevalent territorialization of any kind of so-​called alterity. But this also means: we must step out of, indeed, perhaps even depart from a reasoning based on alterity that has fundamentally characterized entire philosophical traditions of the twentieth century, such as perhaps the French philosophy (for which Vincent Descombes (1981) has impressively demonstrated it) in epistemology and methodology. The Poetics of Movement that today more than ever should be advanced contains a cosmopolitics that is oriented toward fundamentally complex contexts and—​in taking recourse to the Literatures of the World—​is able to develop polylogical forms of thought that are no longer fixated, as though hypnotized, on the opposition of one’s own to the foreign, of the self to the other: radicalizing, as it were, the attempts that sought to anchor what is one’s own and what is foreign in ourselves,16 whether

15 16

A later reaction to this spatial turn, given from an international point of view is presented by Schlögel (2003). Of general relevance here, see also Bachmann-​Medick (2006). See, among others, Kristeva (1988) and Todorov (1985).

Writing-between-Worlds

81

short of or beyond psychoanalysis. But where do the greatest problems lie on the way to such a poetics with a view to the sciences from literature? In the realm of philology especially, there remains the need for a precise terminological vocabulary for movement, dynamics, and mobility. With a look to current discussions, one could speak of an unmistakable colonization of movements by a flood of spatial concepts which set fast and conceptually reduce the dynamics and vectorizations by means of an obsessive spatialization. It seems therefore to be quite necessary to replace spatial history with a history of movement, in which the available mappings are vectorized and translated into dynamic, mobile space-​time conceptions. The Literatures of the World supply here a decided aid to visualization when they present and represent vectorially designed patterns of depiction and patterns of thought which come to expression with the highest intensity in the Literatures without a fixed Abode. Thus do the written forms of a Writing-​between-​Worlds generate indispensible sources of impulse for the future formation of theory. Regardless of whether we are dealing with global, continental, national, regional, or local dimensions: spaces first come into being through movements. Movements, with their patterns and figures, with their specific intersections and traversals, first vectorially produce a space—​in the retention and advances, as it were, of past and present movements, but also, prospectively, of future movements. Can we truly understand the space of a city without registering it vectorially? Can we really understand a lecture hall or a geopolitical area if we filter out of it the motions of the many various players within it? It is just the open structurings of literature that reveal the hopelessness of any such endeavor—​and by no means only in the category of travel literature. Literature and theory are not opposites, but go hand-​in-​hand in the development of new possibilities of thought. Walter Benjamin’s passages, for instance, form not only spaces, but configurations—​exactly as the title of the Passagen-​ Werk indicates:  mobile, vectorized migratory spaces and choreographies. If certain patterns of movement break off, then the corresponding spaces with their long-​familiar delimitations break apart—​and other migratory spaces arise, as is so clearly shown today by the tension field between the Near East and Europe. Changes and dynamizings of this sort occur as much at the level of architectonic or urban spaces as at the level of national or supranational spaces, which can be newly configured and fundamentally transformed through other directions of movement and other figures of movement. The Europe of the past and the present, and of the future too—​in motion and as motion—​ forms an excellent visual example of this. For beneath the very movements of the present—​and it is at this that the concept of vectorization is aiming—​the old movements again become perceptible and recognizable: they are present

82 Ette and retrievable, as movements within both the firm structure and the mobile structurings of spaces—​and they can also be made out distinctly in the paths of the migrations of our time. Growing ever more observable since the last quarter of the twentieth century, the development of the Literatures without a fixed Abode, in the sense of translingual and transcultural forms of writing, have led to the situation where all elements and aspects of literary production have been more radically and enduringly set in motion than ever before. We find ourselves present at a general vectorization of all (spatial) references, one that also encompasses national literary structures, and one that is not properly described by the concept of world literature as formulated by Goethe—​for its part, a highly productive response to the second phase of accelerated globalization—​which has been insufficient for quite some time now, and has grown obsolete. The time therefore has come, with the transition from a merely spatial history to a mobile history of literature, to recognize the Literatures without a fixed Abode as a seismographic system of language forms and altered language norms that holds in readiness for us new possibilities of thought and life and, with innovative concepts, makes a new conception possible. It is obvious that for humanity today, it is of critical importance to our survival to translate into our societies the Knowledge for Living of the Literatures of the World and thus render them societally productive, especially those literatures that may be ascribed to a Writing-​between-​Worlds, particularly in this time of a global situation marked by the dissolution of world order, the dérèglement du monde. The philology here is suited to a task to which it can grow (again and further). The Literatures of the World, as laboratories of the multilogical and cutting across the centuries, across the cultures, and across the languages, have amassed a knowledge of life, in life and for life, that can contribute to the bridging of an ever more threatening chasm to which a representative of the Literatures without a fixed Abode has for good reason and with great foresight drawn attention. As it is stated in Amin Maalouf’s aforementioned essay, both admonishingly and programmatically: Ce qui est en cause, c’est le fossé qui se creuse entre notre rapide évolution matérielle, qui chaque jour nous désenclave davantage, et notre trop lente évolution morale, qui ne nous permet pas de faire face aux conséquences tragiques du désenclavement. Bien entendu, l’évolution matérielle ne peut ni ne doit être ralentie. C’est notre évolution morale qui doit s’accélérer considérablement, c’est elle qui doit s’élever, d’urgence, au niveau de notre évolution technologique, ce qui exige une véritable révolution dans les comportements. (Maalouf 2009: 81)

Writing-between-Worlds

83

[What is at stake is the gap that opens up between our rapid material development, which every day opens up more of the world to us, and our too slow moral development, which does not allow us to face the tragic consequences of that opening up. Of course, material development cannot be slowed down, nor should it. It is our moral development that has to speed up considerably, that has to catch up, and urgently so, with the level of our technological development. This requires a veritable revolution in our behavior.] The Literatures of the World—​and particularly the widely varied forms of Writing-​between-​Worlds—​by the fact that they are not beholden to any single perspective, nor to any single logic, culture, or language, thus provide a vital means for meeting these pressing demands and, in the sense of a multilogical philology, think of our world in a new way. In the Writing-​between-​Worlds of the present can be found the paths to a successful convivence, in which different origins bring about new futures. Works Cited Bachmann-​Medick, Doris. “Spatial Turn.” Bachmann-​Medick, Doris. Cultural Turns. Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften. Reinbek bei Hamburg:  Rowohlt, 2006. 284–​328. Bachmann-​Medick, Doris. “Fort-​Schritte, Gedanken-​Gänge, Ab-​stürze. Bewegungshorizonte und Subjektverortung in literarischen Beispielen.” Raum und Bewegung in der Literatur. Die Literaturwissenschaften und der Spatial Turn. Hallet, Wolfgang/​ Neumann, Birgit (eds.). Bielefeld: Transcript, 2009. 257–​280. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Die Ästhetik des Wortes. Edited and with a foreword by Rainer Grübel. Translated from the Russian by Rainer Grübel and Sabine Reese. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979. Bade, Klaus. Europa in Bewegung. Migration vom späten 18. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2000. Casanova, Pascale. La République mondiale des Lettres. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Damrosch, David. What is World Literature? Princeton-​Oxford:  Princeton University Press, 2003. Descombes, Vincent. Das Selbe und das Andere. Fünfundvierzig Jahre Philosophie in Frankreich: 1933—​1978. Translated from the French by Ulrich Raulff. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1981. Ette, Ottmar. “Europa als Bewegung. Zur literarischen Konstruktion eines Faszinosum.” Europa: Einheit und Vielfalt. Eine interdisziplinäre Betrachtung. Holtmann, Dieter/​ Riemer, Peter (eds.). Münster-​Hamburg-​Berlin-​London: LIT Verlag, 2001. 15–​44.

84 Ette Ette, Ottmar. ÜberLebenswissen. Die Aufgabe der Philologie. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2004. Ette, Ottmar. ZwischenWeltenSchreiben. Literatur ohne festen Wohnsitz (ÜberLebenswissen II). Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2005. Ette, Ottmar. ZusammenLebensWissen:  List, Last und Lust literarischer Konvivenz im globalen Maßstab (ÜberLebenswissen III). Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2010. Ette, Ottmar. Konvivenz. Literatur und Leben nach dem Paradies. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2012. Ette, Ottmar. Roland Barthes. Landschaften der Theorie. Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2013. Ette, Ottmar. “Vom Philosophieren ohne Festen Wohnsitz.” Ette, Ottmar. Anton Wilhelm Amo:  Philosophieren ohne festen Wohnsitz. Eine Philosophie der Aufklärung zwischen Europa und Afrika. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2014. 91–​109. Ette, Ottmar. “Desde la filología de la literatura mundial hacia una polilógica filología de las literaturas del mundo.” América Latina y la literatura mundial. Mercado editorial, redes globales y la invención de un continente. Müller, Gesine /​Gras Miravet, Dunia (eds.). Madrid—​Frankfurt am Main:  Iberoamericana—​Vervuert, 2015a. 323–​367. Ette, Ottmar. “Beschleunigung. Kann die Globalisierung ein Ende nehmen?” Das Lexikon der offenen Fragen. Kaube, Jürgen /​Laakmann, Jörn (eds.). Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2015b. 32–​33. Ette, Ottmar. WeltFraktale. Wege durch die Literaturen der Welt. Stuttgart:  J.B. Metzler, 2017. Ferguson, Niall. Civilization. The West and the Rest. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. García Lorca, Federico. sorpresa, unverhofft. Ausgewählte Gedichte 1918–​1921. Einschreibungen und Irritationen von José F.A Oliver. Berlin-​Budapest-​Vienna: Hochrot Verlag, 2015. Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Jakobson, Roman. “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” Jakobson, Roman. Selected Writings II. Word and Language. The Hague-​Paris: Mouton, 1971. Kristeva, Julia. Etrangers à nous-​mêmes. Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard 1988. Literaturen (Berlin). Issue 4 (April 2005). Maalouf, Amin. Les Croisades vues par les Arabes. Paris: Jean-​Claude Lattès, 1983. Maalouf, Amin. Le dérèglement du monde. Quand nos civilisations s’épuisent, Paris: Grasset, 2009. Oliver, José F.A. Duende. Meine Ballade in drei Versionen. Die Ballade vom Duende. La balada del Duende. S Duendelied. Gutach: Drey-​Verlag, 1997. Oliver, José F.A., Fremdenzimmer. Essays. Frankfurt am Main: Weissbooks, 2015. Ortiz, Fernando. Contrapunteo cubano del tobacco y el azúcar. Prólogo y Cronologia Julio Le Reverand. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978.

Writing-between-Worlds

85

Schlögel, Karl. Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit. Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik. München—​Wien: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2003. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies. The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. London: Verso, 1989. Todorov, Tzvetan. Die Eroberung Amerikas. Das Problem des Anderen. Translated from the French by Wilfried Böhringer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985. Trojanow, Ilija. “José Oliver und Ilija Trojanow im Gespräch.” Oliver, José F.A.: Heimat. Frühe Gedichte. Selected and edited by Ilija Trojanow. Berlin-​Tübingen: Verlag Hans Schiler, 2015.

Pa rt 2 Starting from Europe

∵

Chapter 6

Between Original and Translation

Transcultural Fiction and Pseudotranslation in the Eighteenth Century Beatrijs Vanacker

Transcultural Prose Writing

“Though there is a marked presentist trend in the way th[e]‌concept has been energized in recent literary studies, transnational culture did not begin in the postmodern era,” as Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever noted in the introduction to their 2001 edited volume The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel, thereby stating the obvious, namely that transnational—​or rather “transcultural”—​literary practice long “predated the birth of the nation state.” In a joint effort to readjust Ian Watt’s claim1 that the (English) novel came into being in the eighteenth century—​and more specifically through the writings of Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (see Watt 1957)—​recent studies of eighteenth-​century prose fiction writing have indeed taken a transcultural turn. Fully acknowledging the fact that the eighteenth century marked an irrevocable change in the novel genre, scholars such as Mary Helen McMurran (2009) and Srinivas Aravamudan (2005) have built a case for a reappraisal of the constitutive role played by translation—​and transmission in general—​in this respect. It is this practice of transcultural fiction writing—​and, more specifically, the illustrative value held by the many pseudotranslations published in France during the (first half of the) eighteenth century—​that this article seeks to address. In Cohen and Dever’s volume on The Literary Channel, then, the idea of a transcultural literature is defined in terms of “literary exchange”—​that is, a novel’s translation from its source-​language into another, sometimes multiple languages—​and mostly focussed on cross-​Channel exchange, whereby the quintessential role of France and England in eighteenth century culture and literature is highlighted. Although in line with the general idea that “cross-​ Channel exchange was the most active and fervent arena” of literary exchange

1 See e.g. Aravamudan Srinivas’s thoughts on “recuperating fiction for the nation” (70).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_008

90 Vanacker during the Enlightenment, Mary Helen McMurran’s 2009 The Spread of Novels:  Translation and Prose Fiction in the Eighteenth Century rightly presents the transcultural production of prose fiction in more radical terms. Based on thorough bibliographical analysis, McMurran comes to the conclusion that—​ especially in the first half of the eighteenth century2—​“translators did not necessarily value having or following the original.” (161) In this respect, she points at the idea of “transmission,” since—​as she states—​“translating had long been embedded in transmission as the basis of European culture [;]‌[c]onceptua­ lized in the premodern period in the twin concepts of translatio imperii and translatio studii the activity of rendering was still in many ways a ubiquitous task that belonged to all literary endeavour.” (McMurran 7) Indeed, writers of different European countries, such as Eliza Haywood, Marie-​Jeanne Riccoboni, Antoine-​François Prévost or Antoine de la Place, to name but a few, all published translations as well as original works where the distinction between originality and translation was often far from clear-​cut. Hence, literature as a whole being in a sense “translative” or “transmissible” by nature, “a translation was not necessarily an attempt to copy an original, but partly an original in its own right.” (McMurran 5) In more than one case, the idea of a partial translation-​turned-​into-​an-​original is to be taken quite literally, as is illustrated most convincingly in the twofold cross-​cultural migration of Haywood’s 1744 The Fortunate Foundlings. Ten years after the publication of Haywood’s original, Crébillon-​fils publishes Les Heureux Orphelins (1754), which is called “une imitation de l’anglais” [imitated from English] on the title page. Yet, while staying fairly faithful to the original in the first chapter, the narrative veers away from Haywood’s version after some thirty pages, to become a libertine novel, entirely in line with Crébillon-​fils’ other work. Interestingly, we come across a similar approach in Edward Kimber’s 1759 version of the novel, The Happy Orphans, in which he also follows Haywood’s work—​or rather Crébillon’s version of it—​for the first part, later abandoning the plot at the exact same passage as Crébillon did, again turning it into a new story, in which themes and characters borrowed from both earlier versions are merged with new narrative elements.3 In Kimber’s case, the text is even presented as a “translation,” despite being a very different story for the larger part. The translational claim is upheld during the entire narrative, by means of a fictitious translator’s note in which explicit reference is made to the so-​called original. This specific case, then, also attests 2 See also: “English and French translators were not providing copies of each other’s original novels in a straightforward exchange of national literary products.” (7) 3 On this specific case of cultural transfer, see also Bernadette Fort (1980) and my article in Eighteenth-​Century Fiction (2012).

Between Original and Translation

91

to the ubiquity of a related literary phenomenon in the field of eighteenth century trans-​cultural prose fiction: the practice of falsely presenting novels as translations, whereas they are in fact original texts, with no source ​text to be found. Pseudotranslation Of course, when considered in the light of the “translative nature” of (early) eighteenth-​century literature, the presupposition that these pseudotranslations are in fact “original” stories instead of translations seems somewhat problematic at first. Against the backdrop of a tightly woven cross-​cultural literary context, how can we be sure that there was indeed no long-​forgotten text, written by a lesser-​known novelist and published under a different title, of which the so-​called pseudotranslation happens to be a more or less faithful rendering? This was the case for Histoire de Mme Dubois, écrite par elle-​même. Nouvelle anglaise (1769), which was listed as a pseudotranslation in Harold Streeter’s bibliographical overview (1936) before Madeleine Blondel established a link with the original version, by the hand of Mrs Woodfin, in 1968.4 Nonetheless, analysis of the critical reception of these novels reveals that for most works now labelled as pseudotranslations, contemporaneous (critical) readers had a strong awareness of their French signature. Even when prose fiction was published anonymously—​as was often the case throughout the eighteenth century—​the conjecture of translation was regularly questioned, not to say unveiled, from the very first literary reviews onwards. A striking case in point in this respect was Beaumarchais’ comment on Prévost’s Le philosophe anglois, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, in which he deemed the depiction of the novel’s main characters to be “as improbable as their supposed origins.”5 Likewise, in an account of the novel Lettres écossaises, traduites de l’anglois (1765), Le Mercure de France unveils the translation as an original (“the English editor, or rather the author of these letters”) with the critic playfully addressing the readers’ willing suspension of disbelief.6 4 A counter-​example is de la Place’s Thoms Kenbrook (1765) which was indeed written by the French author, but taken to be a translation by one of the most renowned journals of that time, L’Année littéraire. 5 “Leurs caractères et leurs aventures, à peu de chose près, sont aussi peu semblables que leurs origines.” (1732) All French citations were translated by the author of this article. 6 “L’éditeur anglois, ou plutôt l’auteur de ces lettres, les donne comme une copie de celles que Miss Elisabeth Auréli, petite nièce du célèbre docteur Swift, écrivait pendant ses voyages, à ses amis en Angleterre. Il assure les avoir reçues à Genève des mains de cette voyageuse.

92 Vanacker If these pseudotranslations were commonly interpreted as fictitious translations by eighteenth-​century readers, the often elaborate paratextual framing nevertheless sheds light on how literature and/​in translation functioned in the context of eighteenth-​century French literature. As such, pseudotranslations prove symptomatic (and are thus revealing) of the norms and manners governing the literary field of their time and day as well as the position occupied by translation in a particular literary field. By the fact that they mimic the translational discourse put to use in prefaces of actual translations (or imitations), they provide a unique mode of representing, of “staging” prevailing literary practices in a specific historical and cultural context, and it is this reflective—​ not to say metafictional—​dialogue between pseudotranslations and translation practice in general during the eighteenth century that will be addressed in this article. Indeed, when Susan Bassnett states that pseudotranslations urge us to question whether “we [can] always be certain that we know what a translation is” or whether “the object we call a translation [is] always the same kind of text” (1998:27), she addresses pseudotranslations as such—​in the sense that their sheer presence puts into question the general belief in translations as faithful renderings of a source-​text—​without therefore pertaining to a specific historical context.7 Similarly, in her chapter on “Translation with no Originals: Scandals of Textual Reproduction” (2006), Emily Apter rightly indicates that “[c]‌ases of pseudotranslation reveal the fundamental unreliability of a translation’s claim to approximating the original in another tongue.” (220) Yet, in the context of eighteenth-​century French literature and/​in translation, with a dominant practice of Belles Infidèles, pseudotranslations do not only function as reminders of the inadequacy of translation in terms of a “textual transfer across a binary divide” (Bassnett 27); this inadequacy is also explicitly commented on in their paratexts. This comes to the fore in pseudotranslations which parodically reveal the fictitious nature of their translational claim through an e­ xcessive mentioning of possible source ​texts, such as Lamorlière’s La nuit anglaise (1799),8 Sans doute qu’il laisse à ses lecteurs la liberté d’ajouter ou de ne pas ajouter foi à ce cadre ingénieux.” (109)/​“The English editor, or rather the author of these letters, presents them as a copy of the ones Miss Elisabeth Auréli, niece of the famous doctor Swift, wrote to her friends in England during her voyages. He affirms to have received them in Geneva from the traveller herself. No doubt he leaves it to his readers whether they want to believe this ingenious framework.” 7 On this note, see also David Martens and Beatrijs Vanacker (2013). 8 In the title, reference is made to a great number of different versions: “La Nuit anglaise ou les aventures jadis un peu extraordinaires mais aujourd’hui toutes simples et très communes de M. Dabaud, marchand de la rue Saint-​Honoré à Paris. Roman comme il y en a trop, traduit

Between Original and Translation

93

or, more than half a century earlier, Crébillon fils’s highly popular L’écumoire, ou Histoire de Tanzaï et Néadarné (The Skimmer, or the Story of Tanzaï and Néadarné, 1734).9 This last work is mostly known for its thinly veiled criticism of the papal bull Unigenitus (promulgated by Pope Clement xi in 1713), which led to the author’s imprisonment in Valenciennes, but it is also a fascinating example of a poly-​pseudotranslation (namely a pseudotranslation which playfully refers to various supposed previous versions—​Santoyo and Fuertes 31). A famous writer of—​often both satirical and licentious—​fictions in his time, Crébillon resorted to the scénographie of pseudo-​orientalism in a number of his works (see e.g. Les amours de Zeokinizul, roi des Kofirans. Ouvrage traduit de l’arabe du voyageur Krinelbol, 1746). What makes L’Écumoire particularly relevant, however, is the fact that it offers a parody on the posture of the incompetent translator, by multiplying the number of incomplete deficient versions which supposedly transmitted—​and radically transformed—​the original into the text presented by the French translator. Whereas the work is defined as an “histoire japonaise” [Japanese history] on the title-​page, the first chapter of the preface—​tellingly entitled “De l’origine de ce livre” [On the origin of this book]—​leads the reader through many other versions of the text, starting with the Japanese original, which the translator claims to have been translated into Chinese, Dutch, German, Latin and Venetian—​with all versions of the narrative explicitly stated as defective or unfaithful;10 even the Japanese “original” appears to be not quite as original as was announced on the title page, since the “translator” mentions yet another “original,” written in a kind of proto-​Japanese language spoken by the “Chechian,” a people which he identifies as the, by then, extinct ancestors of the Japanese. By informing his readers that the language in which the original version was written has in fact vanished, Crébillon fils also reveals his parodic take on the general use of pseudotranslation in his time and day. Indeed, in spite of elaborate paratextual framing, through which these novels were attributed to a pretended source text in another language, all effort to recover this 9 10

de l’arabe en iroquois, de l’iroquois en samoyède, du samoyède en hottentot, du hottentot en lapon et du lapon en français par le R.P. Spectroruini, moine italien […].” The novel appeared in at least 10 editions throughout the eighteenth century (see also Santoyo –​Fuertes 25). The title was slightly altered throughout the novel’s publication history. See for instance: “On ne se flatte pas d’avoir bien réussi à cette dernière traduction. Le Vénitien est un jargon difficile à entendre, & le Traducteur françois avoue que dans le Toscan même il y a bien des termes qui l’arrêtent.” (1734, xi)/​“We do not flatter ourselves to have succeeded with this last translation. Venitian is difficult to understand, and the French translator admits that even in Tuscan there are quite a few words that puzzle him.”

94 Vanacker imaginary source text was—​by definition—​to no avail.11 The ideal of a faithful rendering of “the” original is further undermined through the fact that the pseudo-​translator either explicitly notifies his readers of the defective linguistic competence12 of previous translators (the Dutch translator is said to have translated the Chinese version “very imperfectly, as he himself acknowledges”—​vii) or emphasizes their unfaithful rendering of the source-​text (as is the case for the translation in Latin, to which the translator is said to have added personal notes and comments—​viii–​ix). Through this paratextual fiction—​the pretended history of the text’s intricate genealogy taking the form of a parodic “travel narrative”13—​Crébillon fils thus playfully exposes a wide-​spread perception of translation in the first half of the eighteenth century, in which translations were often easily accepted as “another original” rather than as the faithful rendering of a source t​ ext. However, this play on translative infidelity and linguistic incapacity is not confined to the paratext, but is also frequently echoed throughout

11

12

13

A few decades later, Guliane, conte physique et moral, traduit de l’anglais (1770) is published. Its paratext provides the reader with an explicit―and again parodic―comment on the ubiquity of pseudotranslations (especially from the English): “Eh, d’où sortez-​vous monsieur, si vous croyez qu’il faut sçavoir l’Anglois pour faire des ouvrages traduits de l’Anglois? Comment pouvez-​vous ignorer qu’il ne sort de Londres rien que de parfait.” (4)/​ “Where have you been, Sir, if you think it necessary to understand the English language in order to translate English texts? How can you not know that nothing less than perfect is imported from London?” See Santoyo and Fuertes: “Todo parece indicar, en efecto, que Crébillon pretendió hacer uso de la técnica narrativa ‘de moda’ para volverla contra la propia moda, […]. Porque no nos hallamos únicamente ante un caso, excepcional como técnica narrativa, de poli-​ pseudo-​traducción, sino también ante un texto con una amplia dosis de sorna burlona, ya que buena parte de las sucesivas versiones (incluida la del propio autor, al francés) se presentan hechas por traductores ignorantes, inexpertos o simplemente desconocedores del idioma que traducen.” (31 –​emphasis mine) /​[Everything seems to indicate indeed that Crébillon pretended making use of a fashionable narrative technique in order to turn it against this fashion as such. […] We are not only dealing with an exceptional case of poly-​pseudotranslation, in terms of narrative technique, but also with a text that displays a fair share of irony, since many of the successive versions (even the one by the author, into French) are presented as versions made by ignorant, inexperienced translators or even by translators who were simply unfamiliar with the language they translated from.] Whereas Santoyo and Fuertes rightly state that the reference to the translator’s incompetence is exceptional by virtue of its recurrence, the claim of incompetence is in fact not an isolated phenomenon. McMurran uses this metaphor when defining the parameters shared by different theories on prose fiction in the first part of the eighteenth century: “For all their breadth, and for all the variation in individual writers’ stories, the single unifying idea in these histories is that fiction is by nature transmissible, and that its history cannot be told except as a kind of travel narrative.” (37)

Between Original and Translation

95

the stereotypical love-​story of Tanzaï and Néadarne. Apart from joining in the tradition of frivolous and licentious novels which Crébillon mastered so eloquently, the work’s satirical stance is also directed towards questioning the very rules governing the art of storytelling, both oral and written. In one of many self-​reflective paragraphs, the translator—​whose comments are oftentimes introduced into the narrative as such—​addresses the recurrent blanks in the “original,” while acknowledging that he took the liberty of filling in most of these himself. On that occasion, he first seems to uphold the need for a faithful rendering of the source ​text, only to return to the idea of deficient multilingualism, an argument which he then turns into a justification for his own creative, not to say subversive take on the original: Le devoir d’un traducteur doit n’être autre chose que de suivre littéralement son auteur, si ce n’est qu’il ne l’entend pas bien, il peut le périphraser, le commenter, l’ajuster. [The task of a translator should be nothing other than to literally follow his author, except for when he does not understand him well, he can paraphrase him, comment on him, adjust him.] Whereas Crébillon fils presents us with a parody, which not only addresses the general presuppositions underlying concurrent translation practices, but—​ as a “poly-​pseudotranslation”—​also appears to lay bare the fictitious, stereotypical nature of pseudotranslation in particular, other novels seem to share this self-​reflective mechanism without therefore adopting a parodic stance. In l’abbé Prévost’s Cleveland, ou le philosophe anglois (1731), one of the best-​ known examples of eighteenth-​century French pseudotranslation, the translator’s preface includes an account of his meeting with Cleveland’s son, the latter being intent on getting his father’s memoirs published. It is this paratextual character who initially presents Cleveland’s memoirs as defective and incomplete, by stating that parts of the story line have been left blank. Surprisingly (or not), here is where the Translator steps in. The translator admits, “Je me serais chargé de ce soin sans balancer, si j’eusse sçu la langue angloise assez parfaitement … je me bornai au dessein d’entreprendre en françois, ce que je ne me sentois point capable d’exécuter en anglois.” (s.p.) [I would have ­taken this task [of completing the memoirs] upon myself without hesitation, if I had had a sufficient knowledge of the English language … I limited my task to carrying out in French, what I did not feel capable of doing in English.] As this prefatory narrative suggests, the task of translating the so-​called original into French already implies a creative contribution by the translator, who is

96 Vanacker explicitly solicited by Cleveland’s son to fill in the gaps and, therefore, turn his father’s manuscript into a(n) (at least partially) different story. Translation thus implies adaptation, and while this act of creativity is commented upon in the paratext, it is not deemed problematic by any of the prefatory characters. When looking at other pseudotranslations published in the same period, this paratextual display of the translator’s incompetence appears to be a recurring theme: for instance, in Grandvoinet de Verrière’s novel Mémoires et aventures de Monsieur de *** (1735), supposedly translated from Italian into French, the translator begs the reader for his understanding concerning any mistakes he might have made, since:  “Puis-​je me flatter enfin que le Lecteur me passera toutes les fautes que je ne puis manquer de faire en écrivant en françois, tant par rapport au peu de temps qu’il y a que je suis en France, qu’à la difficulté de la langue […].” (5) [Could I flatter myself that the reader will forgive me all the errors I will inevitably make when writing in French, given my recent arrival in France, and the language being so difficult] Similarly, in Les soupers de Daphné (1886 (1740)) the original manuscript is once again presented as unreliable (the original being described as “curieux débris” (4)), while the translator also admits that he is not particularly well-​versed in Greek or Arab, the latter being, nonetheless, the language in which the “translated” manuscript was written. Once again, translation is explicitly conceptualized as a new version, instead of being a faithful rendering of the source-​text. Indeed, whereas several protagonists of these pseudotranslations are fluent in different languages, therefore serving as narrative intermediaries in an often transcultural fictional space (as is illustrated by numerous encounters between French and English characters in e.g. Le philosophe anglois)14, pseudo-​ translators paradoxically (or not) insist on their own defective multilingualism. Metaphorically speaking, this recurrent staging of the translator’s inadequacy, then, seems to attest to a more general translation policy—​especially in the first half of the eighteenth century—​according to which free translations and adaptations were the rule rather than the exception. In this respect, it appears that—​as a rule—​translators (working with actual source-​texts) not only recognized, and even claimed, their original contribution to the target-​text; some of them also implied that a perfect command of the source-​language should not be a prerequisite for a satisfactory “rendering” of the source-​text. In Mme Riccoboni’s preface to Amélie (1763), a particularly unfaithful version of the original by the hand of Henry Fielding (1751), the translator’s defective linguistic skills also seem to have paved the way for a radically different version of the novel:

14

On this specific topic, see also Shelly Charles (2010).

Between Original and Translation

97

En étudiant l’Anglois, sans maître, sans principes, la grammaire & le dictionnaire près de moi, ne regardant ni l’un ni l’autre, me tuant la tête à deviner, j’ai traduit tout de travers (comme j’entendois) un Roman de M. Fielding. Ce qui étoit difficile, je le laissois là; ce que je ne comprenois point, je le trouvois mal dit: j’avançois toujours. […] Il me paroît qu’en effet cela peut composer une traduction très-​infidelle du Roman de M. Fielding. [While studying English, without a teacher, without principles but with a grammar-​book and dictionary at hand (but not looking at either one of them), agonizingly guessing [the meaning], I translated Fielding’s novel very poorly (as I intended to). I left untranslated what was difficult; and considered that what I did not understand was simply not well-​said: I still continued […] It seems to me that this has indeed resulted in a very unfaithful rendering of M. Fielding’s novel.]

Transcultural Geography?

The quote from Riccoboni’s preface also hints at an underlying feeling of indifference towards the original text—​and culture—​, which is in line with the overall target-​oriented translation practice of that time. In close relation to their recurrent self-​representation of linguistic inadequacy, translators indeed often displayed a lack of interest regarding the cultural context in which the original was shaped; a lack of interest mostly fuelled by a firm belief in the unquestionable supremacy of French culture. As it seems, the highly target-​oriented translations and imitations were thus often based on ethnocentric principles and these were generally referred to as common practice in translators’ prefaces. In the introduction to his translation (1755) of Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison, for instance, l’abbé Prévost admits that “J’ai supprimé, ou réduit aux usages communs de l’Europe, ce que ceux de l’Angleterre peuvent avoir de choquant pour les autres Nations. Il m’a semblé que ces restes de l’ancienne grossiereté Britannique, […], deshonoroient un Livre où la politesse doit aller de Pair avec la Noblesse & la vertu.” [I have omitted or adapted to European manners all typically English aspects which might be shocking to other nations. It seems that these remainders of English coarseness […] would be disgraceful to a book where politeness should go hand in hand with a noble and virtuous spirit.] Significantly, the French translator positions himself as a rightful interpreter and bearer of European culture, thereby cunningly assuming a level of equivalence with French culture as the centre of Western civilization; an equivalence supposedly shared

98 Vanacker by his (French) readers. Hence, if translators showed an interest in English fiction—​and to a certain extent writers of pseudotranslations certainly played along with the general mood of Anglomania—​translation nevertheless brought about a radical rewriting of mores and manners, based on prevailing cultural stereotypes which were projected on the work from the paratextual framework onwards. Evidently, this predisposition is also apparent in cases of adaptation, as is illustrated in the abovementioned French rewriting of Haywood’s The Fortunate Foundlings. Indeed, the thorough rewriting process upon which Crébillon fils’s imitation of the English novel (Les Heureux Orphelins) was based, seemed to reflect an ethnocentric rewriting practice. Whereas Crébillon fils added some couleur locale to the first, more or less faithful part, of his rendering, he started adapting the novel material more drastically after somewhat thirty pages, mainly by introducing a frenchified libertine character who was absent from the original and whose perspective (condescending views on English mores and manners included) dominates the narrative in the last two parts of the novel. Again, pseudotranslations of that time and day tend to (playfully) emphasize this mono-​cultural stance, thereby—​even if sometimes indirectly—​laying bare the underlying franco-​centric perspective so many ​eighteenth-​century French translations implied. Certainly, as has already been mentioned, many pseudotranslations nevertheless featured polyglot characters, constantly on the move, dangling as it were between languages and cultures, which certainly contributed to the initial illusion of a transcultural geography. At the same time, however, this transcultural landscape “often t[ook] the form of establishing national stereotypes” (Aravamudan 61), and the exotic protagonists more often than not ended up in France (on that account Les Lettres Persanes [1721] is a striking example) or were frequently involved with French characters. Consequently, the impressive array of imagined cultural identities was in fine often counterbalanced by the only viewpoint the intended public could actually—​and was supposed to—​ relate to, namely that of the French author. In this respect, one could of course argue that pseudotranslation has at all times held a symptomatic value with regard to the ethnocentric aspect of literary translation as such. Many scholars have indeed highlighted the fact that translation always—​at some level—​implies a tendency towards domestication (Venuti), which “ramène” [reduces] the original’s otherness “tout à sa propre culture, à ses normes et valeurs.” (Berman 27) [to one’s own culture, one’s norms and values] By forging the cultural identity of a text—​often in accordance with the readers’ expectations—​and yet presenting it as a translation in the paratext, pseudotranslations, as a literary practice, are known to push the boundaries of our general understanding of what a translation—​and the “cultural transfer” it implies—​can and should be.

Between Original and Translation

99

Nevertheless, it seems that in (the first half of) the eighteenth century, the combination of a growing, yet mostly superficial interest in other cultures—​ best illustrated by the Anglomania-​movement (Grieder 1985)—​on the one hand, and the intense migration and free adaptation of literary texts on the other, resulted in a more straightforward ethnocentric approach. Within this historical and cultural frame of reference, French pseudotranslations seem to have functioned (not to say thrived) even more explicitly as mono-​ cultural fictions, created by the mind of a French author. Indeed, if only for their recurrence,—​and in spite of the appearance of transculturalism, with fictions supposedly translated from English, Arab, Greek, Italian and Japanese manuscripts—​pseudotranslations essentially served as French fictions, and were perceived as such by the public, or at least by their critical readers. It should come as no surprise then, when in the journal Bibliothèque française: ou histoire littéraire de la France a reviewer of Desfontaines’ Le nouveau Gulliver overtly pointed at the notably French character of the novel: “C’est un prétendu fils qui n’a rien de commun que le nom avec son père, non pas même le caractère national; le père est Anglois, le fils est Parisien, comme on le verra par la suite de notre extrait” (287) [This is a pretended son who has nothing in common with his father, not even his national character: the father is English, the son is Parisian, as will become clear from the rest of our excerpt], thereby referring to the obvious French nature transmitted by the novel’s many comments on national identity. Although set in England, the thoughts of its main character, young Gulliver or rather, as the reviewer rightly observed, “of the abbé Desfontaines,” could indeed only be attributed to a French perspective: A ce point, les lecteurs tant soit peu instruits commencent à perdre de vue l’Angleterre pour ne la fixer que sur le Royaume voisin, & ils y sont confirmés par les réflexions du jeune Gulliver, ou plutôt de Mr. l’Abbé D.F., qui ne peuvent convenir qu’à la France & par-​dessus lesquelle [sic] nous passons. (287) [At this point the informed readers lose sight of England, and the attention shifts towards the neighbouring kingdom; their perception is confirmed upon reading the ideas uttered by young Gulliver, or rather by l’abbé Desfontaines; ideas which can only apply to France and which we will not address any further.] (287) Moreover, the translator’s lack of acquaintance with—​and superficial interest in—​the cultural specificities of the so-​called original is addressed more than once in the paratext. In Lettres de miladi Goods Berrys et du chevalier Hynson,

100 Vanacker traduites de l’anglois (1759) the irrelevance of the fictitious source text’s cultural framework becomes apparent in a letter by the imaginary author: Comme j’étois en France lorsque j’ai fait la plus grande partie de cet Ouvrage, je crains d’avoir souvent médit des François, en ne croyant parler que de nos ridicules & de nos vices. (9) [Given the fact that I wrote the larger part of this work while in France, I  fear that I  have often belittled the French, while thinking that I  was commenting on our ridiculous habits and vices.] Although it is not openly defined in terms of a lack of interest, one is made aware of the underlying assumption that the work—​criticism included—​ was in fact addressed to French readers in spite of its supposed Englishness. Moreover, making use of the typically ambiguous authorial stance often adopted in pseudotranslations—​with both pseudo-​translator and imaginary author being in fact created by one and the same empirical author—​the latter cleverly invokes the authority of the imaginary author (who supposedly wrote the original version of the text) to legitimize this francocentric perspective. As for this generally ethnocentric perspective, Crébillon fils’s pseudotranslation once again appears to be of particular interest by virtue of its self-​reflective nature. In his parodic preface to Tanzaï et Néadarné, Crébillon fils shows to be fully aware that, throughout the process of repetitive retranslation supposedly lying at the basis of his work, much of the so-​called ori­ ginal’s cultural specificity was inevitably lost: “On peut aisément inférer des différentes mains par lesquelles ce Livre a passé, qu’il doit lui rester peu de ses grâces nationales.” (xii) [One can easily infer from the fact that this book passed through a great amount of different hands, that very little of its national charm has been preserved], only to promptly dismiss the relevance of this cultural setting in the next sentence: “et je ne sais, à tout prendre, s’il en sera moins bon” (xii) [(and, all things well considered, I’m not sure whether this did the book any harm. In what follows, he gives a clearly ironical account of his own free rendering of the original which, although he admits he was unable to actually read it—​“Je suis persuadé que Kiloho-​éé [l’original] est infiniment inférieur à cette traduction, quoique faite d’après une Langue que je n’entends presque pas” (xv–​xvi) [I am convinced that Kiloho-​éé [the original] is infinitely inferior to this translation, although written in a language that I hardly understand]—​he playfully invalidates precisely because of its cultural specificity: “Les livres Orientaux sont toujours remplis de fatras, & de fables

Between Original and Translation

101

absurdes.” (xii–​xiii) [these Oriental books are always filled with rubbish, and with absurd fables] Hence, by mimicking the ethnocentric character inherent to contemporaneous orientalism, he succeeds in laying bare the feeling of superiority that informs it, not in the least by means of a satiric take on French culture as well, which is described in an equally clichéd way (the French being typically described as cold and rational). This becomes very noticeable in the last paragraph: Pour le fonds, il peut être extravagant; mais c’est vraisemblablement la faute de l’original. On auroit tort d’exiger de l’imagination d’un Chinois, la régularité & le goût qui brillent dans nos Auteurs François, qui toujours compassés, sont presque toujours fort raisonnables, & froids encore plus souvent. (xvi) [As for the content, it may be extravagant, but the fault lies probably with the original. It would be wrong to expect that the imagination of the Chinese presents the same regularity and taste as shown by our brilliant French authors, who, ceremonial by nature, are almost always very rational and—​even more often—​cold.] Conclusion Whereas the self-​reflective nature of the paratext in Tanzaï et Néadarné makes for an explicitly straightforward discourse on translation and cultural transfer practices of that time and day—​as an effect of its satiric nature—​, this article has aimed to demonstrate that its informative value is nonetheless shared with other cases of pseudotranslation. By way of conclusion, it seems crucial to return once again to Mary Helen McMurran’s seminal work, The Spread of novels, in which she convincingly defines eighteenth-​century literature—​at least in the Cross-​Channel zone—​as a radically “translative” field, in which novels were not always easily associated with distinctive categories. However, whereas these findings lead McMurran to the conclusion that this “situation was likely to breed indifference” (McMurran 2010: 49) amongst eighteenth-​century readers, in the sense that “prose fictions were accepted, valorised, and transferred without the stamp of authorial and national identity” (49), this does not seem to have been the case with pseudotranslations. The often visibly fabricated nature of their paratexts—​and the explicit reference to the original contribution of the pseudo-​translator—​were as such highly revealing of the texts’ French origins.

102 Vanacker In fact, it is by virtue of their factitious nature that pseudotranslations hold certain clues to help us understand the specific nature and functioning of prose fiction during the Enlightenment. The overall presence of eighteenth-​ century French pseudotranslations as such should be interpreted as a “sign of the times,” pointing at the “fundamental unreliability of translation practices” while also laying bare the apparently contradictory argumentation underlying French eighteenth-​century transculturalism. By staging the pseudo-​translator’s creative use of the so-​called original in eighteenth-​century novels, these texts zoom in on the excessive unfaithfulness of (actual) translators towards their source-​texts. Hence, pseudotranslations enable us to shed new light on the very ethnocentric principles that informed the various forms of transcultural prose writing that shaped the “translative” literary field throughout the eighteenth century. Works Cited Anon. Lettres de Miladi Goods Berrys et du chevalier Hynson, traduites de l’anglois. Amsterdam: chez Cellot, 1759. Anon. Guliane, conte physique et moral, traduit de l’anglois, et enrichi de notes pour servir à l’intelligence du texte. Londres—​Paris: chez Jean Nourse et chez Hardy, 1770. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: University Press, 2006. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Fiction/​translation/​transnation:  the secret History of the Eighteenth-​Century Novel.” A companion to the Eighteenth-​Century English Novel and Culture. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (eds.) Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 48–​74. Bassnett, Susan. “When is a Translation not a Translation?” Constructing Culture: Essays on Literary Translation. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (eds.) Clevedon: Cromwell Press, 1998. 25–​40. Berman, Antoine. La Traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Bibliothèque françoise ou histoire littéraire de la France. Tome xv. A Amsterdam: chez du Sauzet, 1731. Blondel, Madeleine. “Essais d’identification de traductions.” Etudes anglaises 21.2 (1969): 81–​88. Charles, Shelly. “Prévost palimpseste: de l’usage de la réécriture dans Cleveland.” Lectures de Cleveland. Colas Duflo, Florence Magnot-​Ogilvy, and Franck Salaün (eds.) La République des Lettres 39. Leuven: Peeters, 2010. 21–​40. Cohen, Margaret and Carolyn Dever (eds). The Literary Channel: The Inter-​National Invention of the Novel. Princeton: University Press, 2001.

Between Original and Translation

103

Crébillon ​fils, Claude-​Prosper Jolyot de. L’écumoire, histoire japonoise. Amsterdam et Leipzig: chez Arkstée et Merkus, 1734. Fort, Bernadette. “Les Heureux Orphelins de Crébillon: de l’adaptation à la création romanesque.” RHLF 80 (1980): 554–​573. Grandvoinet de Verrière, Jules-​Claude. Mémoires et avantures de Monsieur de ***, traduits de l’italien par lui-​même. Paris: Prault, 1736. Grieder, Josephine. Anglomania in France:  1740–​1789. Fact, Fiction and Political Discourse. Genève/​Paris: Droz, 1985. Martens, David and Beatrijs Vanacker. “Scénographies de la pseudotraduction II. Usages et enjeux d’un infra-​genre dans la littérature française.” Les Lettres Romanes 67.3-​4 (2013): 479–​495. McMurran, Mary Helen. The Spread of Novels. Translation and Prose Fiction in the eighteenth Century. Princeton: University Press, 2009. Mercure de France, dédié au Roi par une Société de gens de lettres. Rey: à Amsterdam, 1777. Meusnier de Guerlon, Anne-​Gabriel. Les soupers de Daphné; suivis des Dortoirs de Lacédémone. Ed. Maurice Tourneux. Paris: Librairie des Bibliophiles, 1868 (1740). Prévost, Antoine-​François. Le Philosophe anglois, ou Histoire de Monsieur Cleveland, fils naturel de Cromwell, écrite par lui-​même, et traduite de l’anglois par l’Auteur des Mémoires d’un homme de qualité. Paris: Didot, 1731. Prévost, Antoine-​François. Lettres angloises, ou Histoire de Miss Clarissa Harlove. Londres: chez Nourse, 1751. Riccoboni, Marie-​Jeanne. Amélie, roman traduit de l’anglois. Paris et Liège: Bassompierre, 1762. Santoyo, Julio C. and Alberto Fuertes. “Rizando el rizo de la pseudotraducción: L’écumoire, ou Tanzaï et Néadarné: Histoire japonoise, de Claude-​Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon (1734).” Estudios de Traducción 4 (2014): 21–​33. Vanacker, Beatrijs. “Discours libertin et argument national dans le triptyque (Haywood, Crébillon-​fils, Kimber) des ‘Heureux orphelins.’” Eighteenth-​century Fiction 24.4 (2012): 655–​685. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.

Chapter 7

Old-​School Transnationalism? On References to Familiar Authors in World Literary History

East(-​Central) European Literature as Presented by Johannes Scherr Michel De Dobbeleer

East(-​Central) European Literature and Transnationalism Now

Not without reason, scholars of East(-​Central) European Literature boast the availability, in their field, of a well-​thought-​out transnational literary history: the icla’s History of the Literary Cultures of East-​Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2004–​2010), by editors Marcel Cornis-​Pope, a Romanian working in the US (since 1983), and the late John Neubauer (1933–​2015), a US citizen born in Hungary who resided most of his career in the Netherlands (University of Amsterdam). Clearly knowing what it is to cross national borders, the editors came up with four majestic volumes which were indeed refreshingly transnational. Just like ‘Central’ and ‘Eastern’ Europe, ‘East-​Central’ Europe is a region very hard to define, being home to plenty of so-​called minor or peripheral literatures, of which Polish literature may be considered the biggest (esp., when measured by number of Nobel Prizes in Literatures).1 For the editors, the region is a liminal and transitional space between the powers in the west and the east, a long but relatively narrow strip stretching from the Baltic countries in the north to Macedonia in the south. To the west it is clearly bounded by the hegemonic German cultures of Germany and Austria; to the east it is hemmed in by Russia’s political and cultural sphere, but the border is, admittedly, less distinct, for the Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldavia, were both part of Russia’s hegemonic power and suppressed by it. (Cornis-​Pope & Neubauer 6) 1 Four, five or even six: Henryk Sienkiewicz (1903), Władysław Reymont (1924), Czesław Miłosz (1980) and Wisława Szymborska (1996) were unquestionably Polish. Often also the Polish-​ born Jewish-​American author in Yiddish Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978) is considered to be a Polish Nobel prize winner, while some Poles also want to include the Gdańsk-​born, and self-​ declared Kashubian Günter Grass (1999).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_009

Old-School Transnationalism?

105

The nearly 2400 pages of the History offer various thematic, generic, institutional and other approaches (“nodes,” 16–​18) to present and discuss the mutual dependence and overlapping of these often less-​known literatures. The work’s innovative ‘transnational attitude’ thus unsurprisingly lies in the fact that many chapters surpass the national approach of the communist and earlier times. Admittedly, the majority of the individual contributions remain primarily national in scope, but their grouping together in (mostly thematic) book parts, provided with ‘transnational introductions’, allows the reader to put them in a transnational―or at least supranational―perspective. (Academic) study of the literatures of the region has been dominated for over a century by Slav(on)ic Studies departments, but in recent decades some of these changed their name, usually replacing “Slav(on)ic”2 with something like “East European.” By far the majority of languages in East-​Central Europe are Slavonic, but the History convincingly shows that the (developments of the) ‘transnational’ similarities within East-​Central European literary culture have little or nothing to do with language families (cf. infra). The two most prominent non-​Slavonic literatures in the region, Hungarian and Romanian―coincidentally or not corresponding with the roots of the editors―are well-​represented in the History, but the same goes for most other non-​Slavonic East-​Central European literatures.3 Looking at the tables of contents and skimming through the many pages, one gets the impression that the transnational (‘transregional’/​‘transsubcontinental’)4 impact from the East, i.e., mainly from Russia(n literature), might have been less taken into account than that from the West. Reasons for this should be looked for in the partially political scope of the History. Already on the first page of the ‘General introduction’ (1–​18), we read: In East-​Central Europe, a region poised at the crossroads of its history, not only literature, but the political culture itself will benefit from a rethinking 2 In what follows, I use the British variant ‘Slavonic’ (‘Slavic’ is used in the US, while ‘Slav’ normally refers to the Slavs as a people, outside linguistic/​literary contexts). 3 Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Albanian are ‘smaller’ literatures than Hungarian and Romanian. Literature in German and Yiddish used to be rich in East-​Central Europe (or Mitteleuropa, see Cornis-​Pope & Neubauer 2–​4, 13, on why they did not want to use this term in their book title), but (just like Romani) there are currently no countries in the region in which these languages and their corresponding peoples are titular. (Probably, therefore, these literatures should―in my view―be considered more transnational than those which are also ‘national’.) 4 Russia is now and then considered a subcontinent, East-​Central Europe, however, (to my knowledge) never (geographically at least, there is indeed no reason to do this).

106 

De Dobbeleer

that emphasizes transnational interactions. May the present book, the first of a four-​volume project, contribute both to a critical rereading of the East-​Central European literary cultures and to transnational literary historiography in general. (Cornis-​Pope & Neubauer 1; my emphasis) Transnational (world-​)literary studies are hardly imaginable without politics. The transnational link par excellence between these diverse countries during the last century is certainly that they all belonged to the so-​called Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union.5 It is therefore understandable that the editors in their search for a fresh perspective wanted to avoid approaches reminding them of “Russian hegemony” (4), as suggested by the term ‘Eastern Europe’. This paper will not discuss whether Russian literature’s transnational ‘effects’ in one way or other may have been minimized or ‘wronged’ by Cornis-​ Pope and Neubauer, instead it will probe how the literary production of the region has been (re)presented some hundred and fifty years ago, in what was then one of the most successful and widespread literary historical works: Johannes Scherr’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1st ed., 1851). I will show that Scherr’s approach already displayed a certain degree of―albeit what we could call ‘old-​school’―transnationality.

East(-​Central) European Literature and Transnationalism Then? The Case of Johannes Scherr’s Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur (1851)

One would think that writing a world literary history would take many years, if not decades from one’s career, but this does not seem to have been the case with Johann(es) Hieronymus Scherr, an astonishingly productive writer of fiction and scholarly/​popularizing works alike.6 Born in 1817 near Schwäbisch Gmünd, in what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg, Scherr would grow into a so-​called ‘1848 man’. Before his active (though local) role in the failed revolution, he had studied German philology, history and philosophy in Tübingen (with a dissertation on the Nibelungenlied). In 1849, as a cofounder of the 5 Moscow indeed by far dominated the Eastern Bloc, but was not almighty, witness the Yugoslav-​Soviet (or Tito-​Stalin) split in 1948, and the Albanian-​Soviet split from the latter half of the 1950s onwards. 6 Cf. Steffen (394–​408), who somewhat strangely does not mention one of his most notable titles, Geschichte der deutschen Frauen (1860).

Old-School Transnationalism?

107

“Demokratischer Verein” and having condemned the military counterrevolution, he was sentenced to fifteen years of imprisonment, but fled to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1886. In 1860 he was appointed Professor Ordinarius of history and literature at the Polytechnikum in Zürich, where his lectures were among the most frequented (Schleier 703). The book which will be central in the rest of this contribution, however, his Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart: Ein Handbuch für alle Gebildeten, predates his professorship, and was published two years after his escape from Germany, in 1851. From his still very readable preface (“Einleitendes Vorwort,” iii–​x), we learn that this large-​scale literary history was conceived to be part of an encyclopedia, which―in the words of the author―explains its popularizing approach: Für die ganze Anlage und Oekonomie meines Buches war der Umstand maaßgebend, daß es eine Abtheilung der “Neuen Encyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste” bilden sollte, welche unter meiner und meines Freundes Grieb Redaction i. J. 1847 in Stuttgart (Franckh’sche Buchhandlung)7 zu erscheinen begann, deren Vollendung aber die Ungunst der Zeit verzögerte. Ich schrieb also für das große Publicum und hatte dessen Stellung zur Literatur und ihrer Geschichte, welche Stellung nicht die eines Mannes vom Fach sein kann, zu berücksichtigen. (Scherr vii) [Decisive for the whole purpose and rationale of my book was the circumstance that it should constitute a volume of the New Encyclopedia of Sciences and Arts, which edited by me and my friend Grieb began to appear in 1847 in Stuttgart (Franckh’sche Buchhandlung), but whose completion was slowed down by the difficult times. I am therefore writing for the general public and had to bear in mind its viewpoint on literature and its history, a viewpoint that cannot be that of a specialist.] Although Scherr’s history was not the first piece of Weltliteraturgeschichte,8 it would definitely become the most successful, seeing, in the following eight decades, eleven reprints and/​or revisions (cf. Goßens 366–​367), as well as several translations: in Danish, Hungarian, Polish, Russian and Serbian.

7 Although Scherr was persona non grata in Württemberg, many of his works, especially his literary histories kept being published in Württemberg’s capital, Stuttgart. 8 The first piece of world literary history is generally considered to be Friedrich Schlegel’s so-​ called Vienna lectures (Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur, 1812), cf. Hutcheon 4.

108 

De Dobbeleer

Scherr’s Weltliteratur Project From its first edition onwards, Scherr made clear that he wanted to treat the literature of the whole world (iv). The term Weltliteratur, however, only appeared in the work’s title since the ninth edition (Illustrierte Geschichte der Weltlitteratur [sic], 1895, i.e., the first to appear after Scherr’s death; it was revised and updated by Scherr’s stepson, professor Otto Haggenmacher). This does not mean that Scherr, in 1851, was not fully aware of its significance and relation to Goethe, who had died nineteen years before. Not unlike Cornis-​Pope and Neubauer, who 153 years later referred to politics in the preface of their literary history, Scherr’s work, too, was written with a mission that was bigger than merely literary-​historical: Deutschland hat im Verdruß und Kummer über seinen neulichen politischen Bankerott seine wahre Mission der kosmopolitische Vermittler des europäischen Geisteslebens zu sein, noch nicht wieder aufgenommen. Meine Arbeit wurzelt aber ganz in dieser Mission und kommt demnach zu spät oder zu früh. Angenommen jedoch, daß Bücher, deren Grundgedanke ein richtiger ist, jederzeit zum Erscheinen berechtigt sind, so mag das meinige seinen Weg antreten. Sein Grundgedanke ist die Idee der Weltliteratur, eine Idee, zu deren Versinnlichung ich schon früher durch meine “Poeten der Jetztzeit” (1844) und meinen “Bildersaal der Weltliteratur” (1847)9 Beiträge lieferte, welche von Seiten der Leser und Kritiker nicht unfreundlich aufgenommen wurden. Die Aufhebung aller localen und nationalen Abgeschlossenheit, Einseitigkeit und Selbstgefälligkeit, der allseitige Verkehr und die unaufhörliche Wechselwirkung der Völker unter einander […], das ist, will mir scheinen, das wahrhaft revolutionär wirksame Motiv unserer Zeit. Die große Völkerwanderung der Ideen hat begonnen. In ihrem Verlaufe werden die geistigen Erzeugnisse der Nationen immer mehr Gemeingut und dadurch werden nationale Bornirtheit und Eifersucht, bisher Haupthülfsmittel der Despotie, unmöglich. So concentrirt sich denn in der Idee einer aus den vielen localen und nationalen Literaturen zu gestaltenden Weltliteratur, wie Göthe sie ahnte, die freudigste Zukunftshoffnung. Wie langsam auch diese Idee ihrer Verwirklichung entgegenschreite, immerhin darf es kein überflüssiges oder unfruchtbares

9 Both are anthologies, the former one a collection of literary portraits and text excerpts conceived as letters to Scherr’s wife (Steffen 394–​395).

Old-School Transnationalism?

109

Geschäft genannt werden, unter die Pionniere derselben sich gereiht zu haben. (x; Scherr’s emphasis) [Germany, in its irritation and grief about its recent political bankruptcy, has not again taken up its true mission to be the cosmopolitan mediator of European intellectual life. My work, however, is totally rooted in this mission and therefore comes too late or too early. Assuming though, that books whose basic principle is right are entitled to appear at any moment, then mine can set out on its way. Its basic principle is the idea of world literature, an idea which I already earlier helped to render perceptible through my Poets of the Present (1844) and my Portrait Gallery of World Literature (1847), which readers and critics did not receive unkindly. The removal of all local and national isolation, one-​sidedness and complacency, the all-​round circulation and the unceasing interaction between the peoples […], all this is, it seems to me, the truly revolutionarily active motive of our time. The big migration of ideas has begun. In their course, the intellectual creations of the nations will ever more become common property and, consequently, national narrow-​mindedness and envy, so far the main aids of despotism, will become impossible. In this way, then, the most joyful hope for the future concentrates in the idea of a world literature to take shape, as Goethe foresaw it, from the many local and national literatures. However slowly this idea may advance towards its realization, at least it may not be called a superfluous or unfruitful undertaking to have lined up among its pioneers.] In these words, which conclude Scherr’s preface, one can already notice some of the transnational intentions with which Scherr had taken on his colossal job. This being said, the perspective through which Scherr wants his reader to look at (the) world(’s) literature is―and should be―definitely that of his fellow Germans (or more broadly: speakers of German): Die Literaturgeschichte ist überhaupt recht eigentlich ein Fach für die Deutschen, denn nur ihrer universellen Empfänglichkeit ist es gegeben, alle die verschiedenen Klänge heimischer und fremder Gemüths-​und Geistessprache ganz zu verstehen, zu genießen und zu würdigen. Daher gedieh denn auch die Literaturhistorik in Deutschland zu einer Fülle und Trefflichkeit wie sonst nirgends. (Scherr iii) [Literary history, anyway, is actually a field for the Germans, since their universal responsiveness alone has been granted to fully understand,

110 

De Dobbeleer

enjoy and appreciate all the different sounds of indigenous and foreign languages of the mind and spirit. That is why literary historiography in Germany thus throve into a wealth and excellence like nowhere else.] Whether or not anachronistic, it is not impossible to put the kind of cultural experience in which Scherr aims to involve himself and his readers in the terms of David Damrosch’s well-​known characterization of world literature by means of the geometric figure of the ellipse: World literature is […] always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture; hence it is a double refraction, one that can be described through the figure of the ellipse, with the source and host cultures providing the two foci that generate the elliptical space within which a work lives as world literature, connected to both cultures, circumscribed by neither alone. (Damrosch 2003: 283) While in Damrosch’s definition the host culture is (at least in theory) as variable as the source culture, Scherr seems to think of only one host culture, or in any case one which is clearly most suitable: his own, German culture, the one indeed through which Goethe so influentially handed him (and us) the term Weltliteratur. For Scherr, the source cultures―representing the other focal point of Damrosch’s elliptical refraction―are invariably presented as Nationalliteraturen, which however, as Scherr warns, must not be conceived (anymore) as totally separate or monolithic: Unter Nationalliteratur begreift man […] wesentlich das auf künstlerischem Wege hervorgebrachte Schriftenthum, die Erzeugnisse der Poesie und schönen Prosa, welche, auch abgesehen von dem sprachlichen Unterschied, durch eine eigenthümlich nationale Färbung von den literarischen Produkten anderer Nationen sich unterscheiden, wobei jedoch auf die “eigenthümlich nationale Färbung” kein allzu großes Gewicht gelegt werden darf, weil dieselbe, wie die Geschichte der modernen Kunstdichtung zeigt, vielfach verwischt und getrübt erscheint. (Scherr iv) [By national literature one […] essentially understands the human writing generated by artistic means, the creations of poetry and literary prose, which, also apart from the linguistic difference, differ in particular national colouring from the literary products of other nations. Here,

Old-School Transnationalism?

111

though, not too much importance should be attached to the “particular national colouring,” because the latter, as the history of modern poetry shows, frequently appears blurred and obfuscated.]

Slipping through the Net? East(-​Central) European Literature as Presented by Scherr

Some fifty years before Cornis-​Pope and Neubauer’s History, the Ukrainian-​ born Slavist, with a ‘transnational’ academic career (in Czechoslovakia, Germany and the US), Dmytro Chyzhevsky (1894–​1977) questioned the view, among Slavists and other scholars, that linguistic family relations automatically imply closer literary contacts and, vice versa, that the absence of such family ties implies fewer literary contacts (cf. Bojtár 423–​424). Looking at the one century older table of contents of Allgemeine Geschichte (see appendix 1), one immediately sees that Scherr largely stuck to these linguistic family relations:  ­chapters  3–​5 deal with the Romance, ­chapters  6–​9 with the Germanic literatures. The other three chapters combine literatures of more than one family. Chapter  1 is devoted to six Asian literatures, all of them the object of the then developing Orientalist departments. Chapter  2 treats the literatures studied in the Classical Studies departments. Hence, we can easily see the main ‘philologies’ reflected in this table of contents: orientalische (ch. 1), klassische or Alt-​(ch. 2), romanische (ch. 3–​5) and germanische Philologie (ch. 6–​9) respectively. The last chapter (see appendix 2), however, somewhat slips through the net: there was (and actually still is) no academic domain (department) in which one can thoroughly study Slavonic, Hungarian and Modern Greek literature all together. In 1851, German chairs in Slavonic or Hungarian (Finno-​Ugric) studies did not exist yet, while Modern Greek studies would later often be incorporated in classics departments. It is crystal-​clear, therefore, that this last chapter is a kind of ‘repository’, presenting those literatures with which Scherr did not yet precisely know what to do, but from which he expected a lot. Already in his preface, Scherr mentions that the Neuromantik, as he calls it, is or will be flourishing in these literatures (vi). As a matter of fact, we can thus infer, in Scherr’s table of contents, a kind of plot, along which the history of world literature seems to proceed. First, the East gets his attention, and then Scherr moves westwards to the southern half of Europe. Having arrived on the Iberian Peninsula, he moves north to the British Islands (with a detour to the Anglophone New World), whereupon he comes back to the continent, on his way to German literature, to which he devotes almost one quarter of his 556 pages. After that, 54 pages remain for

112 

De Dobbeleer

the rest of Europe, neatly divided between Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, a vast region which had been ‘invented’, as Larry Wolff puts it, only since the Enlightenment.10 Europe’s barbarian lands were now no longer in its North, but in its East. While the western and closest part of this East more or less formed (Cornis-​Pope and Neubauer’s) East-​Central Europe, the eastern and furthest part mainly consisted of (European) Russia. Whether it was considered barbarian or not, in Scherr’s time, Russia―the eastern of the two dominating cultures in the middle of which Cornis-​Pope and Neubauer situate East-​Central Europe (6; cf. supra, the western being Germany)―was already a respected power. Since Napoleon’s defeat in Moscow (1812), Russia had even become a political superpower and, after the Congress of Vienna (1815), part of the pentarchy.11 As regards its literary production, however, the immense country was still considered a minor player within European culture. While the epic songs of the Serbians had already drawn Goethe’s attention (cf. Harder), the (Western) ‘discovery’ of Russian literature came somewhat later.12 Being closer to the German-​speaking world, it was Polish literature which received most pages in this final chapter. All in all, only three East-​Central European literatures, as defined by Cornis-​Pope and Neubauer, are treated individually13 in the concluding chapter: Czech, Polish and Hungarian literature. Admittedly, Romanian literature had already been touched upon in the short (some thirty lines) appendix to ­chapter  5:  ‘Moldo-​walachische (daco-​romanische) Sprache und Literatur’. (Scherr 284–​285)

10

11 12 13

The North-​South (or better: South-​North) polarization of Europe, so typical of the ancient Roman world view anachronistically survived into the eighteenth century, and it would take the Enlightenment “to bring about that modern reorientation of the continent which produced Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Poland and Russia would be mentally detached from Sweden and Denmark, and associated instead with Hungary and Bohemia, the Balkan lands of Ottoman Europe, and even the Crimea on the Black Sea. […] The Enlightenment had to invent Western Europe and Eastern Europe together, as complementary concepts, defining each other by opposition and adjacency”. (Wolff 5, and passim; see also Cornis-​Pope & Neubauer 4) Scherr’s Allgemeine Geschichte was published two years before the outbreak of the Crimean War, in which a British-​French-​Ottoman alliance defeated the Russians (1853–​1856); the German-​speaking powers did not take part in the war. For the pioneering work (esp. reviews and translations) by diplomat Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, see Goßens 166–​175. The first real history exclusively devoted to Russian literature was Heinrich Koenig’s Literarische Bilder aus Rußland (1837). That is to say, under a separate subtitle in the table of contents. In the ‘Einleitung’ of 10.1, however, (proportionally) much space is devoted to Serbian literature (Scherr 530–​531); not for nothing, “Serbien” is mentioned in the title of 10.1 (see appendix 2). Note also that the Slovak poet Ján Kollár is treated in the ‘Czech’ chapter (cf. infra).

Old-School Transnationalism?



113

‘Transnational’ References to Familiar (Literatures and) Authors in Scherr’s Treatment of East(-​Central) European Literature

An obvious strategy in histories of unfamiliar literatures consists in linking their authors and works, sometimes particular literary forms or even whole traditions, to more or less comparable ones that are expected to be familiar to the reading public. Unsurprisingly, it is in this way, too, that Scherr ‘opens up’ the mostly young East(-​Central) European literatures. Additionally, there seems to be a tendency in Scherr’s Allgemeine Geschichte to implicitly divide a (burgeoning) nation’s literary history in three phases: (1) the phase in which only folk poetry is produced, (2) the phase in which foreign examples are (merely) imitated, and (3) the phase in which the literature in question becomes nationally distinctive and in which certain authors try to emulate or compete with great foreign authors. Phases 1 and 2 can easily be inferred from what Scherr says about Romanian literature: Die neuere [phase 2] daco-​romanische Literatur besteht, wenn wir die Gattung des nationalen Volkslieds [still belonging to phase 1] abrechnen, hauptsächlich aus Uebersetzungen und Bearbeitungen italischer, französischer, deutscher und englischer Dichtungen. (Scherr 284–​285) [The more recent [phase 2] Daco-​Romanian literature, if we leave aside the genre of the national folk song [still belonging to phase 1], mainly consists of translations and adaptations of Italian, French, German and English works.] Rather than focusing on specific authors or works, Scherr simply contents himself here with referring to whole literatures, whereas the transition to phase 2 in Russia is described as follows: “Die deutsche Klassik und die englische Neuromantik wurden maßgebend, Schiller, Scott und Byron die beliebtesten Vorbilder [Classical German literature and English Romanticism became authoritative, Schiller, Scott and Byron the most favourite models]” (545). On Poland’s ‘phase 2’, Scherr is overtly critical: so beherrschte sie [i.e., the Poles] doch stets die unselige Schwäche, gegen inländische Gebrechen Abhülfe durch die Fremden zu erwarten, und dieser Schwäche verdankt es auch die Literatur [of phase 2], daß sie, sich losreißend von volksmäßiger Tradition und Poesie [phase 1], so lange ein bloß nachahmende, vom Ausland völlig abhängige war, bis Mickiewicz ihr Befreier wurde. (Scherr 534)

114 

De Dobbeleer

[thus they [i.e., the Poles] kept being dominated by the ill-​fated weakness of expecting help from abroad against inland troubles, and it is this weakness which Polish literature [of phase 2], breaking away from folk tradition and poetry [phase 1], has to blame for being so long merely imitating, completely dependent on foreign countries, until Mickiewicz became its liberator.] It is manifest that Scherr’s conception of literature is very romantic: works which display originality are considered as good literature, whereas works which more or less imitate older works, whether foreign or not, are rather considered as bad or at least immature literature. Adam Mickiewicz, who is still regarded Poland’s national and greatest poet, finally ushers in Poland’s phase 3.  Although Byron has indeed influenced Mickiewicz (among many other poets), so ist Mickiewicz darum kein Nachahmer des Ersteren. Und warum? Weil er die Versöhnung der Gegensätze zwischen Ideal und Leben, welche die tiefer wühlende Skepsis Byrons nicht sinken konnte, für sich im Christenthum, ja im Katholicismus fand, und dann weil er Pole vom Scheitel bis zur Zehe, weil er national ist. Ojczyzna [‘fatherland’]! das ist die Saite, die in Mickiewicz’s Dichtungen immer vibrirt. Polen läßt ihm keine Ruhe, es läßt ihm auch keine Zeit, sich so tief in das Meer der Zweifel zu stürzen, wie Byron, dem England keine Sorge machte. (Scherr 538; my emphasis) [Mickiewicz is therefore not necessarily an imitator of the former. And why? Because he found for himself the reconciliation of the antitheses between ideal and life―which Byron’s more heavily tossing scepticism could not resolve―in Christianity, yes in Catholicism, and also because he is Pole from top to toe, because he is national. Ojczyzna [‘fatherland’]! That is the string which always vibrates in Mickiewicz’s works. Poland leaves him no peace, it leaves him no time, either, to throw himself into the lake of doubt as deep as Byron, whom England did not worry. (my emphasis)] The Poles may thus consider Mickiewicz not only as the ‘liberator’ (cf. supra, “Befreier”) of their literature, but in a sense also of their partitioned (since 1772) fatherland. Whereas here the comparison with Byron serves to indicate how phase 3 has started, foreign authors’ names are also mentioned during Scherr’s

Old-School Transnationalism?

115

treatment of phase 2, as we already saw with regard to Russia’s transition to this phase. Here, more than in phase 3, where the best East European authors try to surpass the foreign ones, the latter―or merely the titles of their famous works―appear to have functioned as beacons to follow (even if they were not actually followed as such by the authors in question, cf. infra). It is evident, though, that their names most of all serve as reference points for Scherr’s readers. The Slovak sonnet cycle, Slávy dcera (Sláva’s Daughter, 1824), for example, by Ján Kollár, is said to be “ein patriotisch-​allegorisch-​erotisches Gedicht mit stark Petrarkischer Färbung [a patriotic-​allegorical-​erotic poem with strongly Petrarchan colouring]” (Scherr 532), and Jan Erazim Vocel’s Labirint slávy (The Labyrinth of Glory, 1846)  is called “ein Stück neuczechischer Faustdichtung, in welcher der angebliche Erfinder der Buchdruckerkunst, Jan, die Rolle des Faust und Duchamor die Rolle des Mephisto spielt [a piece of modern Czech Faust drama, in which the alleged inventor of book printing, Jan, plays the role of Faust, and Duchamor the role of Mephisto]” (Scherr 533). A little further, the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski is linked to three authors in one sentence:  “Er hat sich als Dichter nach dem Franzosen Ronsard, mehr aber noch nach Virgil und Ovid gebildet [As a poet he has formed himself after the Frenchman Ronsard, still more though after Virgil and Ovid]” (Scherr 535). A particular technique of referring to foreign authors consists in using their name as a metaphor.14 In this way, Kochanowksi’s compatriot, Mikołaj Rej, is called the Polish Montaigne: “als Prosaist aber hat er sich den Namen des polnischen Montaigne erworben [as a prose writer, though, he has earned himself the name of the Polish Montaigne]” (Scherr 535), while Sándor Petőfi “ist in mehr als einer Beziehung der Burns Ungarns [is in more than one respect the Burns of Hungary]” (Scherr 551). Such uses of Montaigne and Burns could be regarded as quality labels, definitely within the scope of (here) Polish and Hungarian literature respectively. Best of all, however, is when East(-​Central) European literature even surpasses a renowned foreign work. This honour has been awarded to a Serbian piece of epic poetry (from phase 1): Die Schilderung der Kossowoer-​Schlacht, welche das serbische Heldenlied gibt, darf sich kühn neben die Epik aller Nationen stellen und ich wüßte selbst im Homer keine schönere Szene, als die ist, wo das junge Amselfelder Mädchen mit Brot und Wein und Wasser auf das Schlachtfeld kommt, um drei ihr befreundete Helden in der Hitze des Kampfes zu erquicken, und alle Drei todt in ihrem Blute schwimmend findet. (Scherr 530–​531) 14

Roumiana Stantcheva has called this technique “comparison-​‘labeling’ ” (306).

116 

De Dobbeleer

[The depiction of the Battle of Kosovo presented by the Serbian heroic poem may boldly match with the epic poetry of all nations, and even in Homer I do not know a more beautiful scene than that in which the young girl from the Blackbirds’ Field comes to the battlefield with bread and wine and water, in order to refresh three heroes, her friends, in the heat of the battle, only to find all three of them dead, swimming in their blood.] With the help of a notion made operational in Mads Rosendahl Thomsen’s Mapping World Literature, I would posit that by means of all these references Scherr created transnational constellations, “points of connection across genres, nations, languages and ages” (Thomsen 140). In several cases such constellations can be ‘discovered’ only long after the death of the constellation-​ forming authors. One indeed must not necessarily have been inspired (or influenced, to use another platitude) by a (foreign) author to form―in due course―a constellation with him or her. Scherr often leaves us guessing about whether or not an (East-​)Central European author actually knew the foreign author mentioned during the description of the former’s life and work, but in both cases a constellation is ‘at work’, which could be easily picked up by later literary historians.

Two Conclusions

As regards the above-​mentioned foreign authors (/​works) used by Scherr in his final chapter―Schiller, Scott, Byron, Petrarch, Goethe, Ronsard, Virgil, Ovid, Montaigne, Burns and Homer―all of them are, still today, ‘big names’ from German, English (Scottish), Italian, French, Latin and ancient Greek literature. It may be remarkable that Scherr, in his ‘referencing’ and ‘mentioning’ does not particularly favour the German authors, which indicates that the non-​German names, too, were already considered to be common property among Scherr’s reading public of laymen. Although we have seen that for Scherr, the first focal point of Damrosch’s elliptical refraction was German, the above list shows that a German (layman)’s point of reference was not limited at all to German authors and works. Hence Weltliteratur in Goethe’s sense of a transnational project was in progress for all these non-​German authors, but not yet for the East European ones. Only if East European authors are mentioned in paragraphs not dealing with their own literature, they can be said to have entered the ‘world literature frame of reference’ of the German reader. In Scherr’s Allgemeine Geschichte this happens

Old-School Transnationalism?

117

once with Mickiewicz, who is mentioned where Scherr treats Pushkin. Regarding the latter’s aim to unite Western Romanticism and nation-​specific folk motifs, Scherr states: “Dies hat Puschkin mit Mickiewicz gemein und es ist ihm kaum weniger gelungen als diesem” (Scherr 546)(This Pushkin has in common with Mickiewicz, and he has hardly been less successful than the latter). It is, however, problematic to infer from such a sentence that the Polish poet had already entered Scherr’s ‘world literature frame of reference’. Polish literature had just been treated before the Russian―moreover in the same chapter—​, and Scherr could count on it that his readers, only a few pages later, would still remember Mickiewicz.15 For a second and final conclusion, apart from the old-​school transnational use of the authors’ names, I turn back to the posited division in phases by Scherr. In spite of Scherr’s above-​quoted advice (or even warning) from his introduction, not to overvalue “eigenthümlich nationale Färbung” (iv), it nonetheless seems that a developing literature first had to be visibly, and in a particular, individual way national, in order to be able to reach phase 3. Without having reached this third stage, it would clearly never even be possible for the literature in question to play, one day, a transnational role in world literature. In such logics, a literature―or any other concept or thing for that matter―cannot be transnational (transnationally recognized) without first having become distinctly national. Isn’t ‘national’ in our own twenty-​first-​century logics, too, still a ‘more necessary’ part of the term ‘transnational’ than many of us would acknowledge? Works Cited Bojtár, Endre. “Pitfalls in Writing a Regional Literary History of East-​Central Europe.” History of the Literary Cultures of East-​Central Europe:  Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Vol. 2: The Making and Remaking of Literary Institutions. Eds. Marcel Cornis-​Pope and John Neubauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. 419–​427. 15

Much in the same way, some Scandinavian authors are mentioned where Scherr (538) starts to treat Mickiewicz: “Er leistete der polnischen Poesie den Dienst, welchen Oehlenschläger, Atterbom, Geijer und Tegnér der skandinavischen geleistet, allein er läßt als Dichter die Genannten weit hinter sich. [He did Polish poetry a favour such as Oehlenschläger, Atterbom, Geijer und Tegnér had done to Scandinavian, but as a poet he leaves those mentioned far behind.]” As we said, Scandinavian literature had been treated just before the final chapter (Scherr 503–​526). On the other hand, Mickiewicz (still alive at the time of writing, 1798–​1855) is already mentioned in Scherr’s preface (vii).

118 

De Dobbeleer

Cornis-​Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer, eds. History of the Literary Cultures of East-​ Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries. 4 vols. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004–​2010. Damrosch, David. What Is World Literature? Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003. Goßens, Peter. Weltliteratur:  Modelle transnationaler Literaturwahrnehmung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2011. Harder, Hans-​Bernd. “Goethe und die slawische Welt.” Goethe und die Welt der Slawen:  Vorträge der 1.  internationalen Konferenz des “Slawenkomitees,” im Goethe-​ Museum Düsseldorf, 18.-​22. September 1979. Eds. Hans-​Bernard Harder and Hans Rothe. Gießen: Schmitz, 1981. 1–​16. Hutcheon, Linda. “Rethinking the National Model.” Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory. Eds. Linda Hutcheon and Mario J. Valdés. Oxford:  Oxford UP, 2002. 3–​49. Scherr, Johannes. Allgemeine Geschichte der Literatur von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart: Ein Handbuch für alle Gebildeten. Stuttgart: Franckh, 1851. Schleier, Hans. “Scherr, Johann(es) Hieronymus.” Neue Deutsche Biographie. Bd. 22. Eds. Franz Menges, et al. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2005. 703–​704. Stantcheva, Roumiana L. “To Label, to Compare, to Appropriate … As a Strategy of Foreign Literary Criticism.” Trans. Svetozar A. Dimitrov. The Canonical Debate Today:  Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries. Eds. Liviu Papadima, David Damrosch and Theo D’haen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 299–​311. Steffen, Marion. “Johannes Scherr als Anthologist und Kulturhistoriker.” Weltliteratur in deutschen Versanthologien des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eds. Helga Essmann and Udo Schöning. Berlin: Schmidt, 1996. 391–​409. Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. London: Continuum, 2010. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994.

1.

Appendix 1: Scherr’s Table of Contents (1851) Hauptstück: Das Morgenland 1-​ 1) Chinesen 2-​ 2) Inder 8-​ 3) Hebräer 23-​ 4) Araber 30-​ 5) Perser 42-​ 6) Türken 52-​

Old-School Transnationalism?

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

119

Hauptstück: Hellas und Rom 54-​ 1) Hellas 54-​ 2) Rom 79-​ Anhang) Das Christentum 93-​ Hauptstück: Die romanischen Länder 98-​ 1) Frankreich 103-​ Hauptstück: Die romanischen Länder 175-​ 2) Italien 175-​ Hauptstück: Die romanischen Länder 228-​ 3) Spanien und Portugal 228-​ a) Spanien 228-​ b) Portugal 269-​ Anhang) Moldo-​walachische Sprache und Literatur 284-​ Hauptstück: Die germanischen Länder 286-​ 1) England (Schottland, Irland, Nordamerika) 286-​ Hauptstück: Die germanischen Länder 361-​ 2) Die Niederlande 361-​ Hauptstück: Die germanischen Länder 372-​ 3) Deutschland 372-​ Hauptstück: Die germanischen Länder 503-​ 4) Skandinavien (Island, Norwegen, Dänemark, Schweden) 503-​ a) Island und die alten Isländer 504-​ b) Dänemark und Norwegen 511-​ c) Schweden 516-​ Hauptstück: Die slavischen Länder—​Ungarn—​Neugriechenland 527-​ 1) Die slavischen Länder; Czechien (Böhmen), Serbien, Polen, Rußland 527-​ Einleitung 529-​ Die neuczechische Literatur 532-​ Die polnische Literatur 534-​ Die russische Literatur 543-​ 2) Ungarn 549-​ 3) Neugriechenland 552[-​556]

120 

De Dobbeleer

Appendix 2: The First Page (527) of Scherr’s Last Chapter

Chapter 8

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons

The Case of the Illustrated Monographic Series at the End of the Nineteenth Century in Great Britain and France Dragos Jipa The foreign perspective (or what Michel Espagne called le paradigme de l’étranger) is essential to the construction of national literary pantheons. National communities are the result of various inclusions and exclusions, and the stranger is the one that defines negatively the identity of the national subject. However, when it comes to practices, “the cosmopolitism of the national” adds further layers of complexity to the issue. As Anne-​Marie Thiesse has shown, European nationalisms of the 19th century use a very similar tool-​kit in order to define the identity of the nation, consisting of a history of national heroes, a national language, cultural monuments, folklore, national costumes, animals, etc. This was also the case with literature seen as a national monument: histories of literature were written approximately in the same manner, from England to Spain, from France to Italy and even in Japan. The production of histories of literature was not the only common practice at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th:  more collective endeavors, such as illustrated monographic series, are also common to multiple spaces. Series such as English Men of Letters, American Men of Letters, Grands Écrivains Français were designed to comfort the national sentiment of common readers and to make them believe that their literary ancestors are worthy of a quasi-​religious cult. Created at the beginning of the 19th century in order to spread knowledge and contribute to the formation of a new political subject (Olivero, 1999), the series as a publishing practice became more and more specialized. The three monographic series mentioned underline the specificity of the literature in question while also foregrounding the ways in which it was different from other literatures. Still, just as with the literary histories previously mentioned, these projects are also related. More precisely, the French and the American series are the result of contacts with and influences from the English one. In the 1870s, John Morley, a disciple of John Stuart Mill, was the editor of one of London’s most important journals, The Fortnightly Review, which served as

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_010

122 Jipa a platform for rationalist and positivist voices. Considering that the diffusion of knowledge could serve as a means for social progress and emancipation, Morley, who was also sat on the reading committee of Macmillan publishing house, started a book series meant to promote his ideas. The English Men of Letters was to be an instrument to “nourish the curiosity” of a new public that had benefited from general education but did not have a lot of time to spare for reading. These Short Books are addressed to the general public with a view both to stirring and satisfying interest in literature and its great topics in the minds of those who have to run as they read. An immense class is growing up and must every year increase, whose education will have made them alive to the importance of the masters of our literature and capable of intelligent curiosity as to their performance. The Series is intended to give the means of nourishing this curiosity, to an extent that shall be copious enough to be profitable for knowledge and life, and yet be brief enough to serve those whose leisure is scanty. (Morley qtd. in Korsten 505) Publishing thirty-​nine volumes between 1878 and 1892 in what was called The Original Series, and twenty-​five volumes between 1902 and 1919 (The New Series), the English Men of Letters became “a monument of late-​Victorian criticism” (Korsten), giving Macmillan an important position in the publishing field and establishing itself as one of the most influential instruments in creating a national literary identity. Morley worked closely with Frederick Macmillan in convincing important names to contribute to the series: Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, Edmund Gosse, Henry James, G. K. Chesterton wrote biographies of literary figures of English history. He also asked Matthew Arnold several times but the latter refused. The name of the series was finally chosen by Macmillan, after Morley had long hesitated between Lives of Great English Authors and Short Books on English Authors. It was in this series that Charles Warner, an American writer and friend of Mark Twain, in 1879 tried to publish a volume about Washington Irving. Confronted with Morley’s rejection, Warner offered his book to a Boston publisher, Houghton Mifflin, along with the idea that a new series should be published, American Men of Letters. Along with another series, American Statesmen, this became one of the first examples at the end of the 19th century of a distinct, American, literary history (Casper 271). At the same time, in the late 1870s, England and London became the main interest for a young French scholar, Jean-​Jules Jusserand. Passionate about English literature, he wrote extensively about the medieval period. However, he

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons

123

did not embrace a teaching career, but entered upon a diplomatic one. First as an élève-​consul at the French Consulate, then as an embassy counsellor between 1887 and 1890, he met the most important literary and political figures of London and made the acquaintance of John Morley, “one of the best friends I made on the path of life” (Jusserand 48). In Paris, he entered the circles of Gaston Paris, the famous Romance scholar, where on Sundays he met figures like Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan, Gaston Boissier, Albert Sorel, Eugène Melchior de Voguë, etc. It was with Gaston Paris that he conceived a French series that would try to accomplish the same mission as the English one, but for a French audience. The initial plan was to publish 40 volumes, in honor of the 40 members of the Académie française; with this purpose in mind, he contacted Hachette, the publisher of his doctoral thesis in order to submit a publication project (Jipa 25). The proposal included the acknowledgement of his source of inspiration, but also the difference he wanted to establish compared to the model: My idea was of a rapprochement, a greater intimacy, a knowledge easily acquired through pleasantly written short books about those famous men living in solemn temples too rarely visited. John Morley had given an example with his English Men of Letters; I desired, however, that the French public be offered biographies not only of our great writers of all times, but of their works. For such works have a life of their own, an endless life, in the course of which they may behave well or not, help or hinder, elevate or debase. (Jusserand 78) Jusserand managed to gather the most important figures in the Parisian literary field, the initial plan including names such as Gaston Boissier, Anatole France, Paul Bourget, Hippolyte Taine, Jules Lemaitre, Ferdinand Brunetière, etc. Not all of them actually contributed to the series, which might be regarded as a symptom of the evolution of French literary history at the turn of the century. In a conflict between rhetoric and philology, the former was seen as an Ancien Régime paradigm and the latter as a democratic and republican discourse. Of course, philology eventually won, and the evolution of the series testifies to this. The conservative critic Brunetière finally refused to write his Voltaire and it was only two decades later, in 1906, that the monograph in question was written by Brunetière’s former student, Gustave Lanson, who would become the most influential French literary historian of the first half of the 20th century. The three similar book series confirm Thiesse’s idea about the “cosmopolitism of the national.” A  comparative view could focus on their common

124 Jipa elements while identifying the shared assumptions that define all of them. As such, one could enumerate some common conceptions about the Nation understood as an “imagined community” (as defined by Benedict Anderson) and History as a master-​narrative that unfolds through the ages (as shown by Reinhart Koselleck). Another common element is a preference for the biography and its moral dimension. According to Sainte-​Beuve, la vie et l’oeuvre were mutually illuminating. Naturally, there are also some differences: the English series concentrates more on the lives of great authors, building on the idea that readers who knew those examples of respectability and bourgeois success could elevate themselves form a moral point of view and thus “develop [their] character” (Stefan Collini). Jusserand chose to focus more on the works of great authors, drawing on the idea that these works need to be revisited in order for the readers to rediscover the communion of thought and feelings between them and their great ancestors. This can also be seen in the context of the spread of French literature studies (as opposed to the classics) and mass education starting with the reforms of Jules Ferry in the 1880s. However, this article will try to consider the three series not from a comparative perspective, which would mean seeing them as monads and comparing them element by element, but from a transnational perspective, by trying to follow the relations between the series and how these relations were shaped by previous circulations. This kind of method aims to reveal the relations that transcend national boundaries, political as well as cultural. Relations are created by circulations between different entities and spaces and the transnational approach is capable of revealing what Pierre-​Yves Saunier called “circulatory patterns,” which have a stable structure in terms of content, direction, intensity and extent, in other words, “the order within the space of flows” (Saunier 80). Taking as an example the Anglo-​French relation revealed by the circulation of the book series’ idea, I will try to define and characterize the conditions of possibility that allowed the transfer to take place and analyze the meaning of this transfer in the political and cultural context at the turn of the twentieth century. Some “circulatory patterns” have been identified and will be presented in the following pages: the rise of English studies in 19th-​century France, the international exchanges between scientists, a civilizing goal that united the Western community of scholars, and international exchanges in the book publishing industry. As social sciences were not yet developed in the 19th century, literature was considered a primary source of knowledge about foreign cultures. Hence, the study of foreign literatures developed as an instrument of constructing one’s own national identity (by means of differentiation); Hyppolite Taine’s theory of literary history, with English literature as a field of application, is a good

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons

125

illustration thereof. But, at the same time, in the “age of empires,” studying foreign literatures also meant knowing the culture of the political competitors. Michel Espagne has shown how, in France, what today would be called English studies developed in a context of “anglomania,” that is a particular interest in English literature and political culture, as well as in English history, the roots of which were to be found before the Revolution, in the 18th century. Foreign literature chairs were organized in universities as a way of defining the national literature; in this sense, the English case is very interesting because it served as a counterweight to the German influence in the context of the Franco-​Prussian war of 1871 that ended with the French defeat at Sedan. The Revue britannique and the Revue des Deux Mondes published studies on English literature and an interest in English culture blossomed in the Paris salons, such as that hosted by Mary Clarke (between 1830 and 1880) or that hosted by James Darmesteter, professor at the prestigious Collège de France, and his wife, Mary Robinson (at the end of the century). The editor of the Grands Écrivains Français series, Jean-​Jules Jusserand, spent his intellectually formative years in this scholarly environment while also contributing to its development. His passion for English literature thus developed in the context of an institutionalized interest in France that also meant teaching, publishing and socializing. He was the first, after Taine, to publish a Histoire de la littérature anglaise (the first volume was published in 1896), after having written his thesis, in 1877, about the English theater before Shakespeare. Highly influenced by Taine, Jusserand tries to define the English national character (le génie du peuple), and he does so by postulating both how it differs from the German and resembles his own. With regard to the English language, he insists that the Celtic element was not eliminated by the German, and draws a comparison with the French case. Le voile d’une langue étrangère, latine en France, germanique en Angleterre, n’était pas si rigide, ni si épais qu’aujourd’hui même on ne puisse discerner à travers lui les formes du génie britannique ou gaulois ; génie très fécond, très reconnaissable, fort diffèrent du génie des anciens, plus diffèrent encore de celui des Teutons envahisseurs. (Jusserand qtd. in Espagne 283) [The veil of a foreign language, Latin in France, Germanic in England, was not so rigid nor so thick that even today we should be unable to discern through it forms of the British or Gallic genius; a very fertile genius, very recognizable, very different from the genius of the ancients, even more different from that of the Teutonic invaders.] (translation mine)

126 Jipa In the context of the need to exact revenge against Prussia, when the French believed that German intellectual superiority was the main advantage that had determined the outcome of the war of 1871, a knowledge of English literature and, more generally, of English cultural practices, acquired a national dimension for Jusserand. Importing an English book series model and adapting it to a French public was a means for consolidating the national character of his countrymen. Another circulatory pattern that allowed the series idea to travel from England to France was that of the international scientific and scholarly exchanges that developed in the second half of the 19th century. Seeing science and scholarship as a common endeavor, scientists from all over Europe engaged in intense correspondence and exchanges that were meant to contribute to the development of knowledge beyond national borders. They created international structures such as associations and conferences in order to exchange ideas and to work together towards the greater good. Philology was also influenced by these structures. With its roots in Germany, it spread all over Europe and became one of the most influential paradigms in the field of literary studies (see Espagne & Werner). Jusserand’s interest in English literature was that of a philologist, publishing erudite studies and solving authorship enigmas about medieval texts. During his stays in London, he made the acquaintance of “men of letters” like Robert Browning, Henry James, Edmund Gosse, Leslie Stephen (“who had just launched his grand Dictionary of National Biography” Jusserand 96) and, most importantly for this subject, John Morley. Exchanges continued also through letters and, occasionally, through visits from one country to another. Jusserand recalls one visit of the Taine family to London, in 1889, followed, in 1892, by Morley’s and Gladstone’s visit to Paris, where Jusserand introduced them to Renan. These international exchanges were also characterized by what Anne Rasmussen has called “friendship as a scientific/​scholarly value.” Relations between these “multiple men” (Ch. Prochasson 214) were also personal, mixing private and public life. Jusserand kept a careful record of such personal encounters, so that he was able to provide details, three decades later, when Morley asked for help in writing his Reminiscences: “I am on the eve of publishing some souvenirs, and in them I  could not resist the temptation to include a jaunt I had in Paris in company with you in 1892. It was your kindness which made that jaunt happy and memorable to me, and I have devoted a few pages to it and to your benignant share in it.” (Morley qtd. in Jusserand 143). Science was also a field for national assertion; however, the friendship between these cosmopolitan men of letters reveals the ideal of an international scientific and scholarly society governed by specific moral and professional laws, in spite of national rivalries.

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons

127

According to Saunier, “Dedication to a common goal” can be another pattern defining transnational relations that allowed the circulation of the book series idea. The common goal was in this case a complex set of beliefs about literature and its functions in society. One of these beliefs was in the moral powers of literature and in its force to elevate the common reader above the daily problems. This discourse is in itself the result of transnational circulation. As Chris Baldick has argued, Matthew Arnold, the central promoter of such ideas in the Victorian age, was influenced by the writings of the major French critic of the 19th century, Charles-​Augustin Sainte-​Beuve. Following his French counterpart in his search for national unity in the wake of the political crisis of 1848, Arnold insists on literature’s power deriving from its universal scope and the human values it represents (see Eagleton 21). This attitude was extremely influential in the decades when John Morley directed his series and he formulates it in his own words: Our object is to bring the Periclean ideals of beauty and simplicity and cultivation of the mind within the reach of those who do the drudgery and service and rude work of the world. And it can be done—​do not let us be afraid—​it can be done without in the least degree impairing the skill of our handicrafts men or the manliness of our national life. (Morley cited by Kijinski 210) The same belief in the moral powers of literature was shared by the French men of letters of the time, amongst whom one of the most influential was the literary historian Gustave Lanson. A contributor to Jusserand’s series and author of the best-​selling Histoire de la littérature française (1894), a book that would serve generations of students, in France and abroad, Lanson shared the same idea that literature had the moral qualities to elevate the common reader. In the foreword to his Histoire, he wrote: La littérature entretient dans les âmes, autrement déprimées par la nécessité de vivre et submergés par les préoccupations matérielles, l’inquiétude des hautes questions qui dominent la vie et lui donnent sens ou fin. Pour beaucoup de nos contemporains, la religion est évanouie, la science est lointaine ; par la littérature seule leur arrivent les sollicitations qui les arrachent à l’égoïsme étroit ou au métier abrutissant. (Lanson ix) [In souls otherwise depressed by the necessity of living and overwhelmed by material concerns, literature keeps alive the unrest over those elevated questions that dominate life and give it meaning or purpose. For many of

128 Jipa our contemporaries, religion has faded, science is distant; it is through literature alone that arrive the summons that deliver them from their narrow selfishness or numbing work.] (translation mine) Another common belief was in the power of literature to civilize and unite the nation by consolidating its spirit. As Chris Baldick has shown, it would be a mistake to separate social, religious or political interests from “purely literary” concerns. The period is defined by the idea that literature was an instrument of the British Empire’s struggle to dominate the global stage, in a context in which new powers arose. The English Men of Letters series, then, contributed to a complex operation whose purpose was to create an “organic” national tradition based on the glorious Elizabethan past that had to nourish the political imagination of the British and give them the means to face the challenges of the present. French literary historians were engaged in actually the same discourses. As a diplomat, Jean-​Jules Jusserand, the editor of the Grands Écrivains Français, was engaged in the military and political operations of the 1880s that culminated in the transformation of Ottoman-​occupied Tunisia into a French protectorate. He was sent to analyze and write a report on the reforms necessary to modernize Tunisian society, now a part of the French empire. One of the main points of his report concerned the courses that needed to be taught to the Tunisians. Next to a course on the French language, another three courses had to be introduced: literature, law and accountancy. Between 1882 and 1887, Jusserand served as head of the Bureau des Affaires Tunisiennes, a department in the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the Quai d’Orsay that also included the administration of Indochina and Sub-​ Saharan Africa. Importing an English model can be retraced as a pattern also from the perspective of the History of the Book. The important French publishing house Hachette at the turn of the twentieth century, following the educational reforms of Jules Ferry, published most of the schoolbooks used in France. In 1851 Louis Hachette visited the Great Exhibition in London. There, he met William Henry Smith, who had invented the practice of selling books at railway stations. His monopoly on bookshops expanded along with the railways. Seduced by this business idea, Hachette returned to Paris and submitted to the Compagnies des Chemins de fer a proposition meant to be both useful and pleasant to the public. Insisting on the spare time that travelers have during the train journey, Hachette wanted to offer them the possibility to spend it in an agreeable fashion that would also be useful, because instructive. He proposed a series to be called the Bibliothèque des Chemins de fer:

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons

129

qui ne comprendra que des ouvrages intéressants, d’un format commode, d’un prix modéré, d’où seront sévèrement bannies toutes les publications qui pourraient exciter ou entretenir les passions politiques, ainsi que tous les écrits contraires à la morale. (Hachette qtd. in Olivero 72) [which will comprise only interesting books, in a convenient format, at a moderate price, from which will be severely banned all publications that might arouse or uphold political passions, as well as all writings contrary to morality.] (translation mine) In the political context of the Second Empire and its censorship, Hachette understood the political potential of a series that could be widely disseminated to the public, hence carefully managed his business in order to gain the authorization of the Minister of the Interior. Concerned with his audience, he organized the series into seven categories that were to be distinguished by the colors of their cover: red for travel guides, green for works of history and travel, leather for French literature, yellow for classical and foreign literatures, blue for agriculture and industry, pink for children, and orange for other works. In 1854, sixty railway libraries had already been opened, and Hachette had entered upon a business venture that would be most profitable for his publishing house. The Bibliothèque des Chemins de fer series, however, was not so successful. A decade later, he reorganized his catalogue, introducing series titles that would become famous:  Bibliothèque rose, Bibliothèque des Meilleurs Romans étrangers, etc. English publishers like George Slater or George Routledge had sought for more diversity in their offer of yellow-​backs: Parlour Library of Instruction, Library of Railway Readings, The Traveler’s Library, etc. A specific “railway literature” literature was born, and a distinction made according to the public: Murray’s Home and Colonial Library targeted men, Parlour Library targeted women. Considering these previous relations between Hachette and the English publishers, the inspiration Jusserand took from Morley should not come as a surprise; Morley’s model is even carefully mentioned in the contracts that Jusserand and the series’ authors signed with Hachette Publishing house between 1887 and 1913. The importance of the English model needs to be seen in accordance with a core feature of the serialized publication. Even though the particular authors did not concern themselves very much with this model, the fact that the series’ editor, Jusserand, was following in the footsteps of Morley is decisive because of his author-​function with regard to the series. He conceived of the project and submitted it to Hachette, he selected the “great writers” to be the subject of a volume in the series, he chose the contributors

130 Jipa to the series, he defined the outline that, according to the contract, had to be followed with every volume in the series as well as the format, frontispiece image and all other material features. Because of the multiple ways in which he contributed to the series, he could also be seen as a kind of “author” of it, an author concerned with ordering the discourse about literature produced by the different contributors. These circulatory patterns reveal the transnational dimension of the construction of national literary pantheons. The example of the book series shows how the national projects in the nineteenth century were in fact the result of a complex system of relations with other national cultures. The paradox is that all these national projects tried to conceal the foreign reference or to use it as a means of defining and asserting the values of their own national literature. This is yet another way in which the crossing of boundaries made them visible (Frasinelli 3). From a theoretical point of view, the transnational approach is helpful in moving beyond the “methodological nationalism” of conventional literary history. The challenge resides however in identifying and characterizing relations between elements instead of comparing independent elements. Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Baldick, Chris. The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–​1932. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. Casper, Scott E. Constructing American Lives. Biography and Culture in Nineteenth-​ Century America. Chapel Hill & London:  The University of North Carolina Press, 1999. Collini, Stefan. Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–​1930. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Espagne, Michel, Le paradigme de l’étranger. Les chaires de littérature étrangère au XIXe siècle. Paris: Le Cerf, 1993. Espagne, Michel, and Michael Werner, eds. Philologiques III Qu’est-​ce qu’une littérature nationale? Paris: Maison des sciences de l’Homme, 1994. Frasinelli, Pier Paolo, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson (eds). Traversing Transnationalism. The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2011. Jipa, Dragos. La canonisation littéraire et l’avènement de la culture de masse. La collection « Les Grands Ecrivains Français » (1887–​1913). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2016.

The Transnational Construction of National Pantheons

131

Jusserand, Jean-​Jules. What me befell, Reminiscences. London: Constable & Co., 1933. Kijinski, John. “John Morley’s ‘English Men of Letters’ series and the politics of reading.” Victorian Studies, 4 (1991): 205–​225. Koselleck, Reinhart. Le futur passé: Contribution à la sémantique des temps historiques. Translated by J. Hoock and M.-​C. Hoock, Paris: ehess, 1990. Korsten, F.J.M. “The ‘English Men of Letters’ series—​a monument of late-​Victorian criticism.” English Studies 6 (1992): 503–​516. Lanson, Gustave. Histoire de la littérature française. Paris: Hachette, 1894. Olivero, Isabelle. L’Invention de la collection. De la diffusion de la littérature et des savoirs à la formation du citoyen au XIXe siècle. Paris: Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine /​Maison des sciences de l’Homme, 1999. Prochasson, Christophe. Paris 1900, Essai d’histoire intellectuelle. Paris:  Calmann-​ Levy, 1999. Saunier, Pierre-​Yves. Transnational History. London: Macmillan, 2013. Rasmussen, Anne. “L’amitié, une valeur scientifique. Les amitiés internationales des savants au tournant du siècle.” Jean Jaurès. Cahiers trimestriels, 143 (1997): 77–​95. Thiesse, Anne-​Marie. La création des identités nationales, Europe, XVIIIe–​XIXe siècles. Paris: Seuil, 2001.

Chapter 9

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne Sourde

Intranational and International Networks and Cultural Mediation (Belgium, Spain, Latin America) during the Interwar Period Reine Meylaerts and Diana Roig-Sanz Introduction This essay wants to be a plea for studying cultural mediators as key figures in literary and cultural history. If we want to come to a nuanced and insightful understanding of cultural history, we need to study cultural transfer. This is not new. What is perhaps new is that cultural transfer can be best studied by taking the people who embody this transfer as a starting point. In other words, we need to study cultural mediators. This essay therefore aims to give a deeper understanding of the figure of the cultural mediator, defined here as a cultural actor active across linguistic, artistic and geographical borders and as such the carrier of cultural transfer. This definition crucially wants to stress the need for a focus on the process of transfer, on the overlap of actor roles, and on the transgression of artistic fields. It therefore makes sense to take into account mediators’ plural activities and plural roles and the various ways in which these activities and roles interact and transform each other. Cultural histories do not follow fixed monolingual or territorial schemes and they are neither linear nor unidirectional. Especially in young, multilingual and heterogeneous cultures, cultural mediators perform strategic transfer roles, create new mediating practices and institutions and are therefore the true architects of common repertoires and frames of reference that make up cultural history. Their complex and partially overlapping roles form important cultural practices but are rarely acknowledged as such nor studied at large because they transcend the traditional binary concepts of disciplines such as literary studies, translation studies, and transfer studies. These binary concepts prevent us from seeing the complexity of both the mediators’ roles and their mediating practices. Let us focus on one such cultural mediator, the Belgian Paul Vanderborght (1899–​1971), whose multiple transfer activities in the interwar period helped shape international, national and regional urban cultures throughout a broad

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_011

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde

133

range of cultural capitals and multilingual frameworks: Brussels and Antwerp, in Belgium; Cairo and Alexandria, in Egypt; Madrid and Barcelona, in Spain, and Buenos Aires and Mexico City, in Latin America.1

Paul Vanderborght’s Intranational and International Networks

Vanderborght’s transfer activities after the Great War were concerned with literatures and cultures which did not reach a degree of autonomy or prestige comparable to their French or English counterparts and which were in the interwar period marginal players in world literature. Belgium and Latin America aimed to gain international recognition and authority on the world literary scene. Since its creation in 1830, bilingual Belgium had been struggling with the romantic idea of one nation, one language, one literature and found itself squeezed as it were in between its neighbours France and Holland, with both of whom it shared a language, but who could build on a much stronger literary tradition in respectively French and Dutch. Spain possessed a long indigenous literary tradition, but at the beginning of the twentieth century the Spanish cultural field was still experiencing the effects of a state of decline. In this context, Vanderborght observed the importance of reciprocity: if various national communities entered into a shared network of exchange, they would consequently find channels to export their literary gems. The francophone Belgian writer Paul Vanderborght (born Frasnes-​lez-​ Gosselies, 1899; died Binche, 1971) grew up in Wallonia, the southern French-​ speaking part of Belgium. In 1920, Vanderborght was a student in Brussels. After the Great War, Brussels participated in the spirit of internationalism that overtook Europe, and numerous internationalist avant-​garde periodicals were created. Vanderborght shared this spirit, and in 1921 he joined Pierre Bourgeois to create La Lanterne sourde (1921–​1931): at first a literary magazine (1921–​1922), it rapidly became one of the most important cultural networks of the interwar period. No other Belgian interwar group was more present in the Belgian and international press (La Nervie 1932: 2). According to a contemporary colleague, Vanderborght was a prodigious animator who played a role incomparable to that of anyone else in the Belgian literature of his time (La Nervie 1932:  14). Unlike other Belgian magazines and groups, La Lanterne sourde organized conferences, receptions, feasts and exhibitions and invited the most important

1 Vanderborght’s archives are preserved in the Archives et Musée de la Littérature de Bruxelles.

134 

Meylaerts and Roig-Sanz

Belgian (Flemish and francophone) and European (mainly French) writers and artists of its time: Jules Romains, Darius Milhaud, Blaise Cendrars, Marinetti, Stefan Zweig, Ilya Ehrenburg, and the Spanish and Latin American writers Miguel de Unamuno (see also below), Ventura Gassol, Francisco Castillo Nájera, and Alfonso Reyes. Vanderborght’s international transfer activities aimed to promote pacifist intercultural dialogue and were mainly concerned with five areas—​Russia, Egypt, Greece, Great Britain, Spain, and Latin America. In what follows, we will briefly discuss Vanderborght’s role as an intra-​ Belgian and international mediator during the period of modernism and the avant-​gardes. From 1830 onwards, Belgium had had to contend with growing tensions between the two language groups, given the lower status of the Flemish language and culture within the officially francophone state. Especially in the interwar period the country had to contend with an increasing “linguistic divide” as Flemish activists worked to emancipate the Flemish language and culture and make Flanders a monolingual Flemish region instead of a bilingual one. In 1932, Flemish became the official language of Flanders’ administration and education—​after more than a decade of linguistic and cultural struggle. This push towards regionalism went hand in hand with a rise in patriotism (especially after the Belgian victory in the First World War) and internationalism. All these partially conflicting developments caused heightened discussions about a “national” and “Belgian” cultural identity.2 One of the main responses toward the growing claims for Flemish emancipation was to underline the need for cultural transfer between the two language communities, literatures, and cultures. Cultural mediators such as Roger Avermaete, Gaston Pulings (see Meylaerts and Gonne 2014, Meylaerts and Lobbes 2015), and Paul Vanderborght played an important role in this process. Vanderborght personally wished to contribute to the promotion of Flemish literature and to the exchange between Flemish and francophone literatures in Belgium as a way of promoting the idea of a genuine Belgian literature. As Vanderborght stated in his Manifesto in Favor of Flemish Literature (“Pour les Lettres flamandes”), published in the francophone Belgian newspaper Le Peuple (January 3, 1925), it would be nonsense for francophone Belgian culture to promote international literary and artistic exchanges and receive the best foreign writers while neglecting Flemish writers like Buysse, Streuvels, Teirlinck, and Timmermans. Nevertheless, his contemporaries perceived this openness towards Flemish writers as going against the grain. Vanderborght’s role as an 2 This was of course a transnational phenomenon in the context of an identity crisis that was not restricted to Belgium: see Anderson (1991); Gellner (1983); Hobsbawm (1990) and Thiesse (1999). See also Augusteijn and Storm (2012).

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde

135

intercultural mediator between Flemish and francophone literatures in Belgium took several forms. In line with his profile as an animator, Vanderborght used conferences as the main platform to establish cultural mediation between Flemish and francophone literatures and cultures. As Alfano notes, approximately ten conferences were organized between 1925 and 1931—​some of these were devoted to Flemish literature in general, while others focused on specific authors, such as Paul van Ostaijen, Moens, Teirlinck, and Van de Woestijne, who were representative of the innovative trends in the Flemish literature of the time. The first of these conferences took place on January 8, 1925, some three years after the magazine had ceased publication. August Vermeylen—​a well-​known ­Flemish bilingual writer, art historian, and professor of literature and art history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, who also was a senator for the socialist party—​ spoke at this conference. Vermeylen supported Flemish emancipation and saw Flanders’ role within a European perspective that was very much in line with Vanderborght’s internationalist tendencies. However, Vermeylen never joined any separatist groups involved in actions against the Belgian state. As was usually the case in the sociolinguistic context of the time, Vermeylen was perfectly bilingual and spoke in French about Flemish literature in his conference entitled “Les Lettres flamandes contemporaines.” In 1905, at the Universal Exposition in Liège, Vermeylen had already used French while delivering a similar conference on Flemish literature. After the First World War, comparable initiatives—​moderate Flemings using French to speak or write about Flemish literature—​had already taken place and would continue to do so. These types of mediations were mainly housed by conservative, monolingual francophone circles in which intra-​Belgian cultural contacts were conditioned by translation—​securing the receiving public’s monolingualism and reaffirming French as the dominant language and literature. As such, this first Vermeylen conference was part of a larger movement of openness towards Flemish literature during the interwar period. However, this traditional pattern was soon abandoned in favor of more innovative formulas. In May 1925, Vanderborght organized a manifestation in honor of the Flemish playwright Herman Teirlinck—​on this occasion, speeches were given in French and in Flemish without translation. Les deux langues du pays gardant ainsi, l’une et l’autre, leur personna­ lité et leurs droits propres. Ce procédé, fondé sur la libre association des deux langues et des deux cultures en Belgique, apparaît alors tout nouveau, d’autant plus qu’il a été adopté, en dehors de tout esprit politique, par un groupement où la plupart des écrivains s’expriment en français. Il

136 

Meylaerts and Roig-Sanz

réussira et sera, maintes fois repris, dans d’autres réunions similaires de «La Lanterne sourde», qui a contribué ainsi au rapprochement confiant des écrivains belges de langue française et de langue flamande. (La Nervie 1932: 5) [Each of these national languages keeps its own character and its own rights. This process, which is based on the free association of Belgium’s two languages and cultures, seems completely new, as it was adopted—​ with no political intent—​by a group of mostly francophone writers. The process will be successful and will be repeated in similar “La Lanterne sourde” meetings, which thus have contributed to bringing francophone and Flemish Belgian writers closer to each other.] Unlike more conservative initiatives, Vanderborght’s role as a cultural mediator was based on non-​translation: a transfer mode that presupposed the audience’s bilingual character and contributed to putting Flemish and francophone literatures and cultures on an equal footing. Surely, this was perceived as a very innovative way of establishing intercultural contacts, to which the La Nervie passage testifies. Let us give one more example. After the death of the Flemish poet Karel Van de Woestijne, Vanderborght organized a similar “manifestation in honor of the renowned poet” on October 16, 1929. The large meeting was presided by two famous writers:  one was Flemish (Cyriel Buysse), and one was francophone (Hubert Krains). Vanderborght and Vermeylen delivered speeches about Van de Woestijne in French, while Herman Teirlinck delivered his in Flemish. Jacqueline De Kesel read some of Van de Woestijne’s poems both in the original Flemish version and in French translation. The special issue of La Nervie concludes: “l’œuvre de rapprochement entre les écrivains belges de langue française et de langue flamande, librement entreprise par «La Lanterne sourde», n’aura pas été vaine” [the reconciliation work between francophone and Flemish Belgian writers that was freely undertaken by “La Lanterne sourde,” was not in vain]. Again, bilingual manifestations were perceived as the best way to mediate between Flemish and francophone literatures and present them as equal partners in the context of increasing sociolinguistic tensions between the two groups. Not surprisingly, all these manifestations were extensively and positively covered in the Flemish press. Next to these conferences and their novel way of mediating between Flemish and francophone Belgian literatures, Vanderborght also engaged in more institutional forms of mediation between the two cultures. Both Teirlinck and Vermeylen were members of La Lanterne sourde. Between 1925 and 1929,

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde

137

Vanderborght taught French in Egypt. Before he left for Cairo in September 1925, Vanderborght was replaced as head of La Lanterne sourde by the modernist Flemish poet Paul Van Ostaijen and the francophone poet René Verboom, who both supported the magazine’s codirector, Pierre Bourgeois. Although it was Bourgeois who contacted Van Ostaijen, Vanderborght was fully supportive of the change. After some six months, Van Ostaijen left but still maintained contact with La Lanterne sourde. When Van Ostaijen died prematurely two years later, the group organized an homage to the poet. In conclusion, through all these forms of intercultural mediation, Vanderborght courageously went against the grain as his colleague Georges Rens testified in 1932: “C’est aussi en allant contre le courant qu’ils amenèrent à leur tribune des confrères des Lettres flamandes.” [It was also by going against the grain that they brought colleagues from Flemish literature to their pages]. This attitude of going against the flow also characterizes Vanderborght’s international transfer activities with the Spanish-​speaking world. What was Vanderborght’s role in the promotion of Spanish and Latin American literature in Belgium and what were the mediating institutions that helped shape this relationship? What was the national and supranational image of Belgium that Vanderborght managed to convey to the Hispanic field? Vanderborght, who was well aware of the growing interest in contemporary Hispanic literatures in France (mainly promoted by Valéry Larbaud), took an early interest in Spanish and Latin American literature, as well as in the dissemination of literature from Belgium, both francophone and Flemish. The contacts with Spanish and Latin American writers did not always pass through Paris, but often came about on Vanderborght’s own initiative. A few events organized on behalf of the Lanterne Sourde group were decisive in this history of exchanges and transfers. First, Vanderborght’s interest in Spanish literary life is illustrated by his articles on Spanish literature published in Le Disque vert, a journal edited by the Belgian Franz Hellens, whom Vanderborght joined for some time. Vanderborght also gained awareness of Spanish, Catalan, and Latin American culture due to his fruitful contacts with the International PEN Club’s delegations from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. Second, there was Unamuno’s stay in Brussels in 1924. Vanderborght invited the Spanish writer to La Lanterne sourde in 1924 as a protest against his exile during the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera (Verbeke 2006). The invitation from La Lanterne sourde was the first international public demonstration against Unamuno’s exile. This was not without significance, as La Lanterne sourde was originally a non-​ political group. The event brought together many Belgian and foreign writers. Unamuno’s speech in Brussels (August 1st 1924) coincided with a reading from Le Christ du Vélasquez, which Unamuno himself had translated into French.

138 

Meylaerts and Roig-Sanz

In 1938, this volume was translated by Mathilde Pomès and published by the Cahiers du Journal des Poètes. Unamuno’s stay in Belgium received a very positive reception in the international press. The events organized during Unamuno’s visit also served to strengthen his ties to some Belgian writers and critics such as Michel de Ghelderode, Léopold Rosy, Georges Linze, and Frédéric Denis, who had published reviews and French translations of Unamuno’s works. Third, Spanish and Latin American writers participated in the Rupert Brooke Committee, which aimed to internationally coordinate a tribute to the English poet who had died on the Greek island of Skyros. With this objective in mind, Vanderborght expanded his network of international contacts and encouraged the creation of various national committees around the world. The Spanish and Latin American writers enthusiastically joined the initiative: Unamuno, Eugeni D’Ors, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, Jorge Guillén, Antonio Marichalar, Ventura Gassol, Alfonso Reyes, Gabriela Mistral, and Ventura García Calderón, among others. The initiative was also promoted in well-​known Hispanic periodicals such as La Gaceta Literaria. Fourth, in 1932 Paul Vanderborght created the Amitiés Hispano-​Belgo-​Américaines which permitted contacts with a vast but little known territory at the time. The list of members is very long: Vicente Aleixandre, Manuel Altolaguirre, Luis Araquistain, Azorín, Cernuda, Gaya, Giménez Caballero, Jacinto Grau, Juan Guerrero Ruiz, Antonio Machado, Salvador de Madariaga, Gregorio Marañón, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Marichalar, and Pedro Salinas. Salvador Albert, the Catalan poet and the Spanish ambassador in Brussels, was the group’s honorary president. At the Amitiés Hispano-​ Belgo-​Américaines, Vanderborght organized lectures (one by Américo Castro in March 1933, while he was the Spanish ambassador in Berlin), concerts and other events that allowed Belgian, Spanish and Latin American artists and intellectuals to establish fraternal links. However, the main objective of the association was to promote, under the leadership of Vanderborght, a literary collection of translations: the Amitiés Hispano-​Belgo-​Américaines collection. This collection of Hispanic contemporary literature included―among other titles―Azorín’s Doña Inés, translated by Georges Pillement; Jacinto Grau’s Monsieur Pygmalion, translated by Francis de Miomandre; Jesús Rodolfo Lozada’s Simon Bolivar (1783–​1930), in a translation by Paul de Ceuleneer; the Anthologie de la poésie hispano-​américaine, and Poètes espagnols d’aujourd’hui, both selected and translated by Mathilde Pomès. All these transfer activities played a key role in the recognition of Latin American literature. This is true, for example, of the dissemination of Mexican literature, which occurred in Belgium thanks to Vanderborght’s numerous reviews in the press and the personal contacts he established with Alfonso Reyes and Francisco Castillo Nájera, a diplomat and the author of a volume of French

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde

139

poetry from Belgium (Un siècle de poésie belge, 1931). The Amitiés hispano-​belgo-​américaines group also aimed to raise awareness of Catalan and Portuguese literatures by translating them, and to improve the profile of francophone and Flemish literature from Belgium in Spain and Latin America. Vanderborght was not only active in the literary field but also acted as an animateur d’art. In 1933, he tried to organize an exhibition on Picasso at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels and also became interested in the Mexican art movement. Between 1932 and 1933, he considered organizing a tribute to the Spanish painter El Greco by means of a memorial and a cruise. Vanderborght saw the Crete-​born Toledo painter Domenikos Theotokopoulos, El Greco, as a symbol of international rapprochement between Greece and Spain. Vanderborght’s project included the inauguration of a monument in Candie (Picasso was contacted to produce it) and a commemorative medal for Toledo. He also planned to organize a cruise to bring the portrait of the humanist scholar Joan Luis Vives, who was born in Valencia and died in Bruges (the epicenter of Spanish trade in Flanders) from Belgium to Spain. For Vanderborght, Vives symbolized closer links between Belgium and Spain. However, Vanderborght’s enthusiasm was not enough, and neither of these two projects carried through. Vanderborght and the group he led with Pierre Bourgeois made commendable progress in putting Belgian literature and culture on the international map and introducing the European interwar spirit to Belgian literature. In this sense, what was the image of Belgian literature and culture that Vanderborght managed to convey on the international stage? Although Vanderborght believed in a specific Belgian literature independent from France and was interested in Belgian writers writing in Flemish, the French model still prevailed and the image that Vanderborght exported from Belgium and Flanders was an image in French, fostered by the internal debate on its own identity. For Spanish writers, Belgium (and Flanders in particular) meant the glorious Spanish past of the sixteenth century and the search for their roots back when Flanders was part of Spain―these links were also accepted by Vanderborght, as illustrated by his plan for a cruise from Belgium to Spain to honour Joan Luis Vives, who had spent most of his life in the Southern Netherlands. In the framework of an identity crisis (both in Belgium and in Spain), Flanders appeared as a kind of utopia where (a return to) tradition and regionalism were a response to political, economic and cultural homogenization. Vanderborght’s friendship with Spanish writers made it possible to, rather than focus on the differences, be drawn to the similarities, as evidenced by Unamuno in two articles published in the Buenos Aires newspaper Caras y Caretas after his stay in Brussels. Unamuno focused on the relations between Belgium and the Iberian Peninsula. In the first article (“Comparsas populares

140 

Meylaerts and Roig-Sanz

en Bruselas” [Popular troups in Brussels] (1 November, 1924)), Unamuno highlighted the historical relationship between Castile and Flanders, and recalled the Spanish roots of the Flemish population. Brussels, he said, reminded him of Madrid. In the second article, published in August 1925, the Basque writer mentioned the cheerfulness of the city’s inhabitants and said that this was not only a feature of warmer countries. Unamuno also referred to the classic by Charles de Coster, La Légende d’Ulenspiegel (1867) (very appreciated by the Catalan writers), but none of his reflections addressed the language issue—​an issue that he did not fully understand, judged by his views on the Catalan question. Catalonia was to contribute to Spain, even to “Catalanize” Spain, but lose its language in the process. As we have seen above, Vanderborght’s role as a cultural mediator within Belgium was instead based on non-​translation: his bilingual conferences on Flemish literature presupposed a bilingual audience and contributed to putting Flemish and francophone literatures and cultures on a par. On the contrary, Unamuno never addressed Spanish, Catalan or Basque literatures as equal partners. In this respect, Vanderborght’s attitude was quite different, as he personally contributed to the promotion of Flemish literature and to the exchange between Flemish and francophone literatures. In spite of being able to read Flemish (Verbeke 2006), Unamuno’s vision was very stereotypical and limited to the description of Flanders’ folklore, landscape and traditions. This perspective partly coincided with the image exported by Vanderborght and several Belgian writers since the late nineteenth ­century, which gave a depiction of Flanders in French, a French literature using stereotyped Flemish subject matter. Catalan writers and intellectuals did not consider the ties between Castile and Flanders to be their own and focused on raising awareness around a significant number of contemporary Belgian poets and playwrights who were chosen for their innovativeness and for their nationalist praise of the homeland. In this respect, they shared Vermeylen’s support for Flemish (or Catalan) emancipation claims and promoted an equal status for the Dutch and Catalan language in Belgium and Spain. Like Vanderborght, most Catalan writers and intellectuals also supported an internationalist tendency and saw Flemish and Catalan’s role within a larger, European perspective. The most important example of the reception of Belgian literature in Catalonia is provided by La Revista (1915–​ 1936), a renowned journal with a penchant for countries with limited linguistic territories (Danish, Czech, Irish, Flemish) or with authors belonging to persecuted peoples (Serbian, Armenian). Extracts from the Ulenspiegel by Charles De Coster were translated into Catalan. La Revista also published authors from Vanderborght’s circle such as Hellens, Paul Fierens, Odile-​Jean ­Périer, and René Purnal, and other francophone authors such as Louis Pierard and Marcel

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde

141

Wyseur, and, of course, Emile Verhaeren. The translations of Flemish authors include texts by the nationalist Wies Moens, and by Paul van Ostaijen. Exchanges and transfers between Spain and Belgium were also visible in the artistic field. In general, there was a strong relationship between literature and painting: many Spanish writers were also painters (José Moreno Villa, Gaya, Lorca, and Alberti). Unamuno, like other writers of his generation, was also interested in the Flemish pictorial tradition, of which he was a connaisseur and an admirer, and which in some cases he proposed as a model. At the end of the nineteenth century, Unamuno felt that nothing resembled the Basque pilgrimages more closely than those which the Flemish painter David Teniers (1610–​1690) depicted in his works, and suggested them as a model for Basque art of local customs and manners (Charle 1992). Flanders was seen as a utopia of sorts, serving as an ideal for the dreamed-​of Euskal Herria or even for Catalonia. Vanderborght was also promoting the paintings of Darío de Regoyos and of Ignacio Zuloaga, probably the internationally best-​known Spanish painter of the early twentieth century. Zuloaga made some writer’s portraits and between 1910 and 1920 there was a discussion in Spain on the image of Spain Zuloaga’s paintings had exported: e.g. El Cristo de la Sangre, La víctima de la fiesta, Toros en Turégano … Unamuno was one of his advocates. Zuloaga promoted El Greco’s work, and Vanderborght (as mentioned above) considered organizing a tribute to the Spanish painter of Toledo. El Greco had been completely forgotten during two centuries and he was not reclaimed until 1894, thanks to Santiago Rusiñol, an important Catalan writer and painter. The first El Greco exhibition was in 1902, in the Museo del Prado, and some books on his works were published afterwards. So Vanderborght was very well informed because El Greco’s rediscovery and recognition were still quite recent. As for the image of Spain and Latin America that Vanderborght imported to the Belgian literary world, we must acknowledge that it was inevitably determined by the image that French writers, translators and hispanists (Pomès, Daireaux, Miomandre, and Ernest Martinenche) had already disseminated and by the institutions or platforms (especially those in Paris) that paid most attention to Spanish and Latin American literature (the circle of the Revue de l’Amérique Latine and some initiatives by the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation). These groups, who ran in the same circles as Vanderborght, determined to a considerable extent which contemporary Spanish and Latin American writers were published in Belgian journals and were also crucial in deciding which works were considered worthy to be discussed or translated. Thus, with the exception of Gómez de la Serna and some poets of the so-​called Generation of 1927 for Spanish literature, these authors had already had a long career (Unamuno and Azorín) and were not part of the

142 

Meylaerts and Roig-Sanz

most avant-​garde and innovative groups of the interwar period. This distorted view of what Vanderborght considered to be the most representative and innovative facets of Hispanic literature was also apparent in the opposite direction. Compared to the French avant-​garde, the movement in Belgium was more measured, but it was nevertheless interpreted in Spanish, Catalan and Latin American literary circles as being similar. The activities of Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde were sometimes described as avant-​garde, but their commitment to openness, their eclecticism, their aim of reconciling the past and the present and their apolitical nature placed them more firmly within literary modernist tendencies of the era, which characterized publications such as the French nrf, T.S. Eliot’s The Criterion, and the Spanish Revista de Occidente. In the 1920s and 1930s, Spanish and Latin American critics continued to focus on Belgian authors from previous generations (De Coster and Verhaeren) and francophone authors who had passed through the filter of Paris (Crommelynck and Hellens). Verhaeren had close links in Brussels with the Spanish painter Darío de Regoyos, who translated Verhaeren’s essays published in L’Art Moderne., and added the drawings in the first edition of their book España negra (1899), a title which refers to Goya’s paintings. However, the Spanish and Latin American writers ignored some of the contemporary modernist authors (both francophone and Flemish), and the authors closest to avant-​garde movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism (Clement Pansaers and Paul Nougé). These writers, who brought together literature and politics, were opposed to the modernism that characterized Vanderborght’s project and the cultural policy of La Lanterne sourde and other similar journals such as 7 Arts. Conclusions The relations between Belgian and Hispanic literatures in the interwar period are much less well-​known than the dialogue that took place between French writers and critics and the Spanish-​speaking world. However, as we have seen, Vanderborght was able to establish new and multiform sets of transfer practices within multilingual and multicultural intranational and international frames. He was, to use Christophe Charle’s term, an homme double, who acted as a discursive bridge between linguistic communities. Vanderborght promoted and integrated Flemish literature, Spanish and Latin American literature and art in francophone Belgium. He also promoted francophone Belgian literature in the hispanophone world and placed Spanish and Latin American writers on the same level as their Belgian and French counterparts. As we have

Paul Vanderborght and La Lanterne sourde

143

shown, he made an outstanding effort to bring these literatures closer together. In spite of all his efforts on behalf of Flemish literature within Belgium, he did not continue them on the international scene. In other words, from an intra-​ Belgian viewpoint, Vanderborght’s point of reference remained francophone Belgian literature. In promoting francophone literature outside Belgium, Vanderborght came close to the Unanimism of Romains (the French writer was the first to review a work of Catalan literature in the prestigious nrf) and to the humanistic and collaborative spirit that characterized the interwar period. Vanderborght was especially interested in contemporary Spanish and Latin American authors and artists, which set him apart from other writers and intellectuals of his generation, who were much more familiar with the Spanish classics or with an exoticizing, romantic and distant image of the Iberian Peninsula and especially of Latin America. Vanderborght aimed for renewal without rupture―a principle he shared with literary modernism. While it is true that transfers and exchanges between “peripheral” cultures often pass through the centres of the dominant large cultural systems (from which they in turn seek to differentiate themselves), it is also true that Vanderborght strove to side-step those channels and to discover for himself the most representative contemporary authors of Hispanic literature.

Works Cited

Alfano, Melanie. La Lanterne sourde. 1921–​1931. Une aventure culturelle internationale. Brussels: Éditions Racine, 2008. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities. London: Verso, 1991. Augusteijn, Joost and Eric Storm (eds.) Region and State in Nineteenth-​Century Europe: Nation-​building, Regional Identities and Separatism. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Charle, Christophe. “Le Temps des hommes doubles.” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine. 39 (Jan.-​March 1992): 73–​85. D’hulst, Lieven, et al. “Towards a multipolar model of cultural mediators within multicultural spaces. Cultural mediators in Belgium, 1830–​1945.” Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en Geschiedenis/​Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire. Special issue: Belgian Cultural Mediators, 1830–​1945. Crossing Borders, Borders Resisting. 92.4 (2014): 1255–​1275. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: cup, 1990. La Nervie. Special issue: Lanterne sourde. Brussels, 1932.

144 

Meylaerts and Roig-Sanz

Meylaerts, Reine and Maud Gonne. “Transferring the city—​transgressing borders: Cultural mediators in Antwerp (1850–​1930).” Translation Studies. Special issue: The City as Translation Zone. 7.2. (2014): 133–​151. Meylaerts, Reine and Tessa Lobbes. “Cultural mediators and the circulation of cultural identities in interwar bilingual Belgium. The case of Gaston Pulings (1885-​1941).” Orbis Litterarum. 70.5 (2015): 405–​436. Roig-Sanz, Diana and Reine Meylaerts. Literary Translation and Cultural Mediators in ‘Peripheral’ Cultures. Customs Officers or Smugglers? London/New York: Palgrave, 2018. Thiesse, Anne-​Marie. La création des identités nationales. Paris: Seuil, 1999. Verbeke, Frederik. “Anotaciones sobre Unamuno y su estancia en Bruselas de 1924.” La cultura del otro: español en Francia, francés en España. Manuel Bruña Cuevas et al. (eds.) Seville: pus, 2006. 721–​732.

Chapter 10

‘No Border Can Hold Him’

​Transnational Discourses in Contemporary British Spy Novels about Europe Janine Hauthal In recent years, scholars from the field of postcolonial studies have turned to notions of the transnational and transcultural in order to account for different perspectives on, and new developments in postcolonial and diasporic fiction.1 This conceptual shift becomes particularly pertinent with regard to literary imaginations of Europe, especially in British literature. In contrast to previous postcolonial approaches, which have predominantly focused on stereotyping and the nationalist ‘rhetoric of othering’ in these texts,2 more recently notions such as ‘cosmopolitanism’, the ‘postnational’ and ‘transnational identities’ have increasingly gained currency in studies on ‘imaginary Europe(s)’,3 and scholars such as John McLeod (2009; 2011) have started to debate the emergence of a ‘transcultural’ or ‘transcontinental’ shift in the ‘European novels’ of Black British writers Bernardine Evaristo and Mike Phillips. Taking up McLeod’s claim, this paper investigates how the imagination of a globally connected, transnational Europe in contemporary British spy novels brings transculturality to the fore. The paper holds that an investigation of espionage fiction is particularly interesting with regard to the exploration of ‘literary transnationalism(s)’. As genre fictions, spy novels tend to rely heavily on the use of stereotypes about gender, class, nationality and ethnicity ―

1 For the notion of the transnational see e.g. Ramazani (2009) and Jay (2010) as well as Vandebosch/​D’haen in the introduction to this volume; for that of the transcultural and related notions such as transculturation, transculture and transculturality see e.g. Ortiz (1995 [1947]), Welsch (1999), Davis et al. (2004; 2005), Antor (2006), Bekers et al. (2009), Schulze-​Engler/​ Helff (2009), Kuortti (2014). 2 Cf. e.g. Fendler/​Wittlinger (1999), Hollis (2000), Nyman (2000), Korte et al. (2010), Huggan (2011), Göttsche/​Dunker (2014). 3 Cf. Bemong et al. (2008), Bekers et al. (2015), Dominguez/​D’haen (2015). See also the critical exploration of the “uneasy relationship between ‘Europe’ and the ‘postcolonial’ ” by Frank Schulze-​Engler (2013: 670), who has aptly pointed to both “Europe’s colonial and postcolonial ‘unfinished business’ ” (671) and “the structural invisibility of Europe in postcolonial discourses” (680).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_012

146 Hauthal especially in their antagonistic portrayal of heroes and villains. Moreover, the protagonists of spy novels often seek to protect national interests. As a result, spy fiction frequently displays a nationalist rhetoric, as James Bond’s epitomisation of the English gentleman demonstrates in an exemplary way.4 The representation of space in these novels is also often characterised by a ‘rhetoric of othering’, and underpins discourses of sovereign power and national identity (cf. Goodman 2016: 7). At the same time, however, protagonists of spy novels are faced with an increasingly globalised world and with political geographies in a state of flux. Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, developments ensued that have deeply unsettled the previous Cold War dichotomies of East vs. West, and have complicated spy fiction’s nationalist rhetoric. According to Sam Goodman, British spy novels in particular have been affected by decolonisation and Britain’s increasing imperial decline. This shows, for instance, in the “compensatory fantasy” of Ian Fleming’s Bond, a British spy who tirelessly maintains the integrity of Empire in predominantly exotic contexts, and thus throws the dwindling of the British Empire into reverse (Goodman 2016: 12). According to Anette Pankratz, “Bond’s role as international super agent compensates Britain’s growing insignificance” (2007:  131) in a post-​imperial world. Triumphing over ethnically and culturally hybrid villains, Bond demonstrates “on the map of the Cold War, […] the superiority of the West; on the anachronistic imperial map he re-​enacts Britain’s most successful battles against its old enemies and he also mythifies the supremacy of white male Britishness over all ethnic others” (Pankratz 2007: 132). Later spy novels by John le Carré and Len Deighton take a different track, mirroring Britain’s diminishing international standing by relegating the spy from international agent to domestic detective and shifting the focus to geographically and politically proximate European locations (cf. Goodman 2016: 10–​12). Driven by my interest in contemporary Anglophone ‘fictions of Europe’,5 this paper focuses on four British spy novels whose European settings are 4 The continuous prominence of the figure of the spy as a signifier of British identity and his central position in the British cultural imaginary has recently been demonstrated by the 2015 premiere of the 24th Bond film Spectre, which took place in London and was attended by William, Kate and Harry aka “Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and Prince Harry” (www.007.com/​spectre-​royal-​world-​premiere; last accessed 5 Feb. 2016). See also Danny Boyle’s film Happy and Glorious, starring Queen Elizabeth II as herself alongside actor Daniel Craig as James Bond at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London (cf. Goodman 2016: 1–​2). 5 This paper is part of a broader research project, in which I explore how Europe is imagined in contemporary British novels, plays and travelogues (cf. Hauthal forthcoming). The project focuses specifically on the relationship between Britain and Europe and on the emergence

No Border Can Hold Him

147

indicative of the diminishing influence of British interests overseas, namely Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1990), John le Carré’s Our Game (1995), Jonathan Coe’s Expo 58 (2013) and Dave Hutchinson’s Europe in Autumn (2014). These four novels will be analysed in the chronological order of their temporal settings in order to illuminate if and how British views on continental Europe have changed during and after the Cold War.

Reflecting Britain’s Decline in the Early Stages of the Cold War: The Innocent and Expo 58

I will begin my analysis with McEwan’s The Innocent or The Special Relationship (McEwan 1990 = TI), which came out just after the collapse of the Berlin Wall,6 and I will compare this work to Coe’s Expo 58 (Coe 2013 = E). Both novels are set roughly in the same period: the beginning of the Cold War in the 1950s. The main action of The Innocent takes place in 1955–​1956 Berlin, while Coe’s novel, as the title already indicates, is set largely in Brussels around the time of the 1958 World’s Fair. Both novels feature unassuming young male British civil servants, both of them ‘innocents’, who encounter and experience historical change and whose stays in Europe deeply unsettle their private and professional lives. The Innocent centres on Leonard Marnham, a 24 year-​old Post Office technician from Tottenham still living with his parents. Leonard is sent to Berlin, where he works on a secret British-​American intelligence project that involves installing tape recorders in a tunnel that has been dug into Berlin’s Soviet sector in order to tap into Soviet landlines. Coe’s protagonist, Thomas Foley, is 32 and lives with his wife Sylvia and his baby daughter Gill in the suburbs of London (Tooting). Working as a junior copywriter for the Central Office of Information, he is sent to Brussels to supervise the ‘Britannia’, the replica pub that forms the heart of the British exhibit at ‘Expo 58’. Like Leonard, Thomas subsequently becomes involved in secret operations by British, American and Russian intelligence whose purposes are never fully revealed to him. In both The Innocent and Expo 58, the protagonists represent their country abroad. They are portrayed as stereotypically English and, in each novel, this Englishness is challenged. On his first day at work, Leonard, for example, asks for tea in the American canteen―of course, to no avail (cf. TI 22). In addition, of previously disregarded transcultural discourses in British ‘fictions of Europe’―a term first coined by sociologist Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1991). 6 McEwan also wrote the script for the novel’s 1993 adaptation for the cinema, directed by John Schlesinger, starring Anthony Hopkins and Isabella Rossellini. See Sumera (2010).

148 Hauthal there are numerous incidents in which Leonard observes a stiffness in the way he is dressed7 as well as in his manner of communicating that he ascribes to his ‘Englishness’ and opposes to the American display of self-​confidence: He [Leonard] had an idea there was something risible about his stiffness of manner. His Englishness was not quite the comfort it had been to a preceding generation. It made him feel vulnerable. Americans, on the other hand, seemed utterly at ease being themselves. (TI 7) Leonard feels “foolish,” “insufficient” and ashamed of his “English dither” (TI 4) when he first talks to his American superior Bob Glass over the phone. The role-​model function that Americans such as Glass have for Leonard also clearly shows in sentences like the following: “His [Leonard’s] voice sounded prissy in his ears. In deference to Glass, he was softening his ‘t’s and flattening his ‘a’s” (TI 9). Adding to the awkwardness that characterises Leonard at the beginning of the novel, the heterodiegetic narrator reveals that Leonard thinks of Germany as “a defeated nation” (TI 5). Even though he was too young to contribute to the victory, he still feels proud of it ‒ despite the fact that not the British but the Russian army had liberated Berlin, thus mocking his display of national pride: Leonard had been fourteen on V-​E Day […]. […] He had spent the war with his granny in a Welsh village over which no enemy aircraft had ever flown. He had never touched a gun […]; despite this, and the fact that it had been the Russians who had liberated the city, he made his way through this pleasant residential district of Berlin that evening […] with a certain proprietorial swagger, as though his feet beat out the rhythms of a speech by Mr Churchill. (TI 5)8 Similarly, critics of Expo 58 have described Thomas as “a sort of anti-​James Bond” (Connolly 2013: n.p.) and have seen in him “the classic Englishman abroad: well-​ meaning, apologetic, and a martyr to misunderstanding” (McCrum 2013: n.p.). 7 Leonard’s suit and tie form a stark contrast with the leisurely dress code of Glass and Russell: “Like Glass, Russell wore his shirt open to reveal a high-​necked white vest underneath. As they pulled away, Leonard fingered his tie knot in the darkness. He decided against removing the tie in case the two Americans had already noticed him wearing it” (TI 28). 8 That one of the novel’s main concerns is the contemplation of national pride is already indicated on the first page when Lieutenant Lofting complains about the lack of appreciation in the way the Americans cooperate with the British on joint projects, thus speaking volumes about wounded national pride: “They go behind our back, they withhold information, they talk down to us like idiots” (TI 1).

No Border Can Hold Him

149

Contrasting Thomas’s “obtuse […] stupefaction” (E 9)  and his “indifference” (E 10) with his superiors’ conviction that he is their “man in Brussels” (E 11),9 Coe ridicules his protagonist with the help of the novel’s heterodiegetic narrator. His way of doing so, however, is less explicit than McEwan’s. Despite these slight differences, the crisis of national imagination ensuing from Britain’s decline as an imperial power is reflected in both novels in the protagonists’ insecure masculinity. Both Leonard and Thomas are not only young and hopelessly inexperienced, but ―what is more―they embody ‘new men’. The way they relate to women contrasts sharply with the “virile cult of competence” (IE 18) and aggression of their working environments, which are almost exclusively inhabited by men. Thomas, for instance, is fully aware of (and not at ease with) the fact that he is performing his masculinity differently: “What sort of man preferred a stroll in the park with his wife and baby daughter to the pressing business of getting on in the world?” (E 13)10 As the narratives proceed, these ‘new men’ are open to form love-​relations with European women―with the older German, Maria, in the case of Leonard and with Flemish-​Belgian Anneke in the case of Thomas. While in both novels the U.S. and Russia are suspended in Cold War concurrence, competition and enmity, the British characters introduce a transcultural element into this constellation, and by extension into the spy genre. By way of their romance plots, both novels place Britain in Europe and draw attention to European rather than national concerns. In The Innocent, the specifically European dimension of the transnational discourse that emerges as a result of the lovers’ encounters is explicitly reflected in the speech that Leo­ nard’s American boss, Glass, gives on the occasion of Leonard’s and Maria’s engagement: We all of us in this room, German, British, American, in our different kinds of work, have committed ourselves to building a new Berlin. A new Germany. A new Europe. […] We all know that the place, the only place, to start making a Europe free and safe from war is right here, with ourselves, 9

10

This phrase echoes Graham Greene’s Our Man In Havana (1958), a (critical) espionage classic set in Cuba―just one of many self-​referential reflections on the genre and classics of spy fiction in Coe’s novel. Thank you, Theo D’haen for drawing my attention to this intertextual reference. A similar example can be found in The Innocent, namely in one of Maria’s first thoughts about Leonard: “The man scrabbling to leave by her front door was less like the men she had known and more like herself. […] How wonderful it was, not to be frightened of a man. It gave her a chance to like him, to have desires which were not simply reactions to his” (TI 54–​55).

150 Hauthal in our hearts. Leonard and Maria belong to countries that ten years ago were at war. By engaging to be married they are bringing their own peace, in their own way, to their nations. […] Marriages across borders increase understanding between nations and make it slightly harder each time for them to go to war ever again. (TI 124)11 Significantly, both novels link this shift in focus from a nationalist to a transnational perspective to the protagonist’s process of maturation. Leonard, for instance, reflects: “Germans were no longer ex-​Nazis, they were Maria’s compatriots. […] Leonard took it as a sign of his new maturity that he could work contentedly alongside the man Glass had described as a real horror” (TI 63). The novels’ attention to the protagonists’ development reveals that in addition to the romance, the Bildungsroman, too, exerts its influence on the two texts. The influence of both generic templates is most clearly discernible in the way the two novels end. Informing readers in detail about what happened to the lovers after their separation,12 the endings exceed spy fiction’s traditional closures and indicate that their quintessential actions and settings merely serve as a backdrop for their primary exploration of the psychology and identity of their characters. This is confirmed in other contemporary British spy novels about Europe, whose strategies also bring transculturality to the fore, as an analysis of John le Carré’s Our Game will show.

Restoring British Supremacy? Explorations of the ‘Wild East’ in Our Game

Our Game (le Carré 1995 = OG) is set in the early 1990s and focuses on Timothy Cranmer, a prematurely retired member of the British Secret Service, aged 48, who has settled down in his stately manor house with his young partner Emma, where he is producing wine and learning to ‘un-​become’ a spy. When his friend and former double agent Lawrence (Larry) Pettifer disappears with 11

12

Leonard’s German fiancée Maria, however, criticizes Glass’s speech:  “ ‘It was a terrible speech,’ Maria said, although from her look he thought she did not really mean it. ‘Does he think I’m the Third Reich. Is that what he thinks you are marrying? Does he really think that people represent countries? […]’ ” (TI 129) In The Innocent, a postscript set in 1987 tells how Leonard returns to Berlin and receives a letter from Maria (TI 213–​226). Similarly, the last chapter of Expo 58 summarizes major historical events and relates what happened to Thomas and his family, culminating in Antwerp, where 84 year-​old Thomas meets Anneke’s friend Carla, who insinuates that he might be the father of Anneke’s oldest son (cf. E 262).

No Border Can Hold Him

151

Emma, Cranmer sets off on a quest which takes him to Europe’s exotic ‘wild East’, the region of the unruly and independence-​seeking Ingush in the Caucasian Mountains. With the prominence it accords to doubling, Our Game lacks the traditional dichotomous structure of the spy thriller.13 Critics have pointed out that Larry can be perceived as Cranmer’s alter ego and—​both literally and ­metaphorically―as his invention (cf. Cobbs 1998:  235; von Rosenberg/​Stratmann 2005: 78). Eventually, Cranmer even becomes Larry’s successor, taking sides with the Ingush and thus finding redemption, as Larry had before him. As in The Innocent and Expo 58, readers of le Carré’s novel are confronted with a protagonist suffering from an identity crisis. At his age, however, Cranmer’s crisis is attributed not to innocence and youth, but to the corrupting effect of his trade, which manifests itself in his moral vacuity and inability to truly connect. According to Cobbs (1998: 230), “[t]‌he comment about having kept his heart in a box may be the key to Cranmer’s problem. A lifetime of spying has made him a spy psychologically, morally, and aesthetically.” Reflecting on his past career and on what he perceives as the deceitful practice of espionage, Cranmer openly questions the moral integrity and negative impact of his trade: “What good had it ever done us, this cloak-​and-​dagger rigmarole? What harm had it done us, the endless wrapping-​up and hiding of our identities?” (OG 49) Cranmer’s fundamental questioning of espionage as a trade, by implication, also criticises the traditional dichotomies of Cold War rhetoric. Our Game frequently hints at the collapse of Cold War dichotomies by praising the Caucasus for representing the new diversity of post-​Cold-​War Europe. The novel criticises both Russia for oppressing the independence movements of small nations (such as the Ingush) and the British establishment for following the example of America’s post-​Soviet policy of non-​involvement and turning a blind eye to the oppression of the Ingush (cf. OG 285). Hence, in Our Game, as Ingrid von Rosenberg and Gerd Stratmann observe, the opposition is no longer between two political systems East and West, but between the alliance of the great powers against small nations, between the forces of uniformity and eccentric individual cultures, between monolithic stagnation and dynamic fragmentation. (2005: 69)

13

Nevertheless, it clearly polarizes heroes and villains, i.e. the Ingush vs. the Russians. According to Cobbs (1998: cf. 239–​240), it forms a stark contrast in this respect to le Carré’s earlier George Smiley novels, in which good and evil were less easy to identify.

152 Hauthal It becomes clear that, in comparison with the two previously discussed novels, Our Game is proposing a different but equally European idea of the transnational based on the notion of post-​Cold War ‘unity in diversity’. Interestingly, however, le Carré’s critique rests on two English protagonists whose relocation to Eastern Europe and whose identification with a cause outside their nation’s interests redeems them. The novel thus suggests a special relationship between Britain and Europe. Accordingly, the doppelgänger’s Englishness is emphasized when Cranmer, in his impromptu eulogy for Larry at the end of the novel, insinuates that his friend might have identified with the Ingush cause because he “was an Englishman who had loved freedom above everything” (OG 407). The novel thereby affirms the classical British auto-​stereotype of Britain as the “mother of freedom” evoked, for instance, in James Thomson’s well-​known hymn “Rule Britannia” (Lenz 2002: 56). Hence, despite its critique of the British establishment, Our Game runs the risk of implicitly reinstating British supremacy. I will now turn to Europe in Autumn in order to demonstrate how this spy novel develops le Carré’s concerns with diversity into a future Europe and adds a further facet to the special relationship of Britain and/​in Europe.

The Plural Borderscapes of a Future Europe: Europe in Autumn

Europe in Autumn (Hutchinson 2014 = EA) takes to the extreme the idea of (European) political geographies in a state of flux. As a result of terrorist threats, paranoia about asylum seekers and a flu epidemic, Europe―as imagined by Dave Hutchinson―has disintegrated into a patchwork of pocket nations, tiny duchies, small polities and minor republics, each with its own borders and laws. New states are created every year, so that the map of this future Europe constantly redraws itself. In this Europe, a transnational organisation called Central claims to subscribe to the pan-​continental values of the Europe that was, “keeping alive the spirit of Schengen,” i.e. “the right of free access across national borders” (EA 75).14 Central employs so-​called “Coureurs,” who transport packages and other fragile or dubious goods from state to state, “drifting around what used to be Europe” (EA 74). The novel’s protagonist, the Estonian Rudi, initially a cook in a restaurant in Krakow, becomes increasingly involved 14

Central’s transnational values are also discernible in the following two quotes: “Central does not facilitate in any way, shape, or form, the creation of any type of quasi-​national entity” (EA 164); “If Central had had a single stated objective, it would have been the eventual abolition of borders and free movement for all” (EA 213).

No Border Can Hold Him

153

in the Coureur business and eventually works as a border-​crossing spy himself.15 In the novel, however, it is not only Central that draws upon Europe’s legacy. A second cross-​border collective is “The Independent Trans-​European Republic” (EA 60), a train-​line running across Europe, whose borders are protected. A civil engineering project begun in the “European era” (EA 50) with the aim of connecting Europe from Portugal to Siberia, “the Line” continued to thrive, even after the EU had dissolved and the European economy had imploded. Creating a bureaucracy comparable to that which had once administered the EU, the Line, once it had been built, declared itself to be sovereign territory and granted all its employees citizenship (cf. EA 50–​52). Thirdly, there is also a nation called “the Community,” which exists in “a parallel universe” with limited access: “The Community was a topological freak, a nation existing in the same place as Europe but only accessible through certain points on the map” (EA 278). As readers learn from a guidebook that accidentally falls into Rudi’s hands during one of his errands as a Coureur, the Community is “mapped over” what used to be Europe (EA 275). Entirely populated by Englishmen (cf. EA 275), it turns out in the course of the novel to be the most powerful player in Hutchinson’s dystopian Europe. Reverberating with imperialist undertones, the novel’s depiction of the Community’s expansionism is reminiscent of the historical British Empire: .

It was as if Baedeker had, on a whim, invented a country, and then simply copied it onto Continental Europe. Or rather the Whitton-​Whytes and their descendants, not being satisfied with creating their own English county, had simply rewritten Europe and then proceeded, very quietly, to conquer it. (EA 277) By relegating transcultural Europe to the past and offering ‘divergent’ versions of it in the future, Hutchinson’s science fiction thriller depicts a Europe in which Cold War dichotomies no longer apply, but where nationalism has risen to even higher levels. On the one hand, the novel criticises this nationalist resurgence and reflects on transnationality through the invention of alternative

15

In the novel, elements of the spy genre are connected to the Coureurs and repeatedly ridiculed, as the following passage demonstrates: “Rudi had read his share of spy thrillers, so the situation he found himself in seemed familiar. More than familiar, actually; it smacked of cliché. Cloak and dagger, clandestine meetings on darkened streets in Central Europe. He didn’t feel nervous, particularly. Faintly embarrassed, perhaps, but not nervous.” (EA 29; cf., similarly, EA 41; 74; 112; 115; 185; 281).

154 Hauthal cross-​border collectives such as the Coureurs, the Line and the Community. On the other hand, its many nameless minor characters who are identified solely on the basis of national (or ethnic) characteristics reinforce a nationalist rhetoric. Finally, when it comes to how the novel conceptualises the relationship of Britain in Europe, its strategy of reversal comes to the fore. In contrast to the previous three texts, in which Britain’s decline prompts a shift in focus towards Europe and European affairs, Hutchinson depicts a Europe in decline―emphasised in the novel’s title ‘Europe in Autumn’―and suggests that this, in turn, has allowed Britain (or rather England)16 to regain power. Through the invention of the Community, whose territory “exist[s]‌in the same place as Europe” (EA 278), Hutchinson not only imagines Britain as being ‘in Europe’ in the literal sense, but actually crossfades and replaces Europe with Britain.

Relocating Britain in Europe: The Contemporary British Spy Novel as a Manifestation of Literary Transnationalism

In the first three spy novels treated here, the relocation of British characters to (the East of) Europe opens up and at the same time undermines the dichotomous universe that traditionally characterises Cold War (and post-​Cold-​War) politics and aesthetics. Moreover, imagining a globally connected, transcultural Europe in the four texts complicates the traditionally nationalist discourses of (British) spy fiction and allows for the emergence of transnational discourses. This shift in focus tends to coincide with mixing the genre of the spy novel with elements from other genres, including romance, Bildungsroman and science fiction. In The Innocent, Expo 58 and Europe in Autumn transculturality is thus reinforced by generic hybridity, while in Our Game the critique of the British establishment from within coincides with a focus on the psychology of the spy. Ultimately, by challenging the traditional literary formula of espionage fiction from a transcultural perspective, all four spy novels indicate the need to (re-​)conceptualise cross-​cultural relationships, which―in the literary analysis of the spy genre―have been approached predominantly through their national or postcolonial implications. To conclude: In this paper, I have taken the fact that all four novels relocate Britain in Europe as an incentive to explore the texts in question as 16

In keeping with the novel’s theme of resurgent nationalism, Hutchinson imagines Scotland to have become an independent country and reflects on this development at length (cf. EA 229–​237).

No Border Can Hold Him

155

manifestations of literary transnationalism. However, in none of the four texts are these emerging transnational discourses without ambiguity. While this ambiguity is probably most clearly discernible in Europe in Autumn, with its depiction of European decline and the resurgence of British and other nationalisms, it can also be detected in the other three novels. In McEwan’s and Coe’s spy novels, the protagonists’ transnational relationships eventually fail. In Our Game, Larry and Cranmer subscribe to a hopeless (and ultimately nationalist) cause, which presumably brings about their deaths. A closer look at the endings thus illustrates that the emergence of transnational discourses in these texts does not necessarily coincide with the appearance of a convivial and cosmopolitan Europe. Based on an understanding of the prefix ‘trans’ as an act of crossing borders rather than abolishing them, and as an indicator of sustained tension rather than a mere contact zone, or dissolution of differences into a newly created hybrid ‘third space’, the four texts in question epitomise notions of transnationalism and transculturality that cannot be put on a level with all-​encompassing cosmopolitanism. Acknowledgement The research for this article was financed by the Research Foundation—​ Flanders (fwo).

Works Cited

Antor, Heinz (ed.) Inter-​und Transkulturelle Studien: Theoretische Grundlagen und interdisziplinäre Praxis. Heidelberg: Winter, 2006. Bekers, Elisabeth, Sissy Helff and Daniela Merola (eds.) Transcultural Modernities: Narrating Africa in Europe. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2009. Bekers, Elisabeth, Maggie Ann Bowers and Sissy Helff (eds.) “Imaginary Europes.” Special Issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing. 2015. Bemong, Nele, Mirjam Trywant and Pieter Vermeulen (eds.) Re-​Thinking Europe: Literature and (Trans)National Identity. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2008. Cobbs, John L. Understanding John Le Carré. Columbia:  University of South Carolina, 1998. Coe, Jonathan. Expo 58. London: Penguin, 2013. Connolly, Cressida. “Expo 58, by Jonathan Coe—​review.” The Spectator, 21. Sept. 2013. Web. 28 Aug. 2015.

156 Hauthal Davis, Geoffrey V., Peter H. Marsden, Bénédicte Ledent and Marc Delrez (eds.) Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-​Colonial World. ASNEL Papers 9.1. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2004. Davis, Geoffrey V., Peter H. Marsden, Bénédicte Ledent and Marc Delrez (eds.) Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a ‘Post’-​Colonial World. ASNEL Papers 9.2. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2005. Domínguez, César and Theo D’haen (eds.) Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational: Literature and the New Europe. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2015. Fendler, Susanne and Ruth Wittlinger (eds.) The Idea of Europe in Literature. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Göttsche, Dirk and Axel Dunker (eds.) (Post-​) Colonialism across Europe: Transcultural History and National Memory. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2014. Goodman, Sam. British Spy Fiction and the End of Empire. New York: Routledge, 2016. Hauthal, Janine. Britain in Europe: The Emergence of Post-​Insular Identities and Transcultural Discourses in Contemporary British Literature (forthcoming). Hollis, Andy (ed.) Beyond Boundaries:  Textual Representations of European Identity. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2000. Huggan, Graham (ed.) “Postcolonial Europe.” Special Issue of Moving Worlds—​A Journal of Transcultural Writings 11.2 (2011). Hutchinson, Dave. Europe in Autumn. Oxford: Solaris, 2014. Jay, Paul. Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2010. Korte, Barbara, Eva Ulrike Pirker and Sissy Helff (eds.) Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2010. Kuortti, Joel (ed.). Transculturation and Aesthetics: Ambivalence, Power and Literature. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2014. Le Carré, John. Our Game. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995. Lenz, Bernd. “‘This Scept’red Isle’:  Britain’s Insular Mentality, Interculture and the Channel Tunnel.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures 9.1 (2002): 51–​67. McCrum, Robert. “Expo 58 by Jonathan Coe—​review:  Jonathan Coe marries cold war and classic comedy to equal Graham Greene.” The Guardian, 7 Sept. 2013. 28 Aug. 2015. McEwan, Ian. The Innocent. London: Vintage, 1990. McLeod, John. “European Tribes:  Transcultural Diasporic Encounters.” Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas. Michelle Keown, David Murphy and James Procter (eds.) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 19–​36.

No Border Can Hold Him

157

McLeod, John. “Transcontinental Shifts:  Afroeurope and the Fiction of Bernardine Evaristo.” Afroeuropean Configurations:  Readings and Projects. Sabrina Brancato (ed.) Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. 168–​182. Nederveen Pieterse, Jan. “Fictions of Europe.” Race & Class 32.3 (1991): 3–​10. Nyman, Jopi. Under English Eyes: Constructions of Europe in Early Twentieth-​Century British Fiction. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2000. Ortiz, Fernando. Cuban Counterpoint:  Tobacco and Sugar (1947). Durham/​ London: Duke UP, 1995. Pankratz, Anette. “Mapping Bond and His ‘Little Atoll’.” Insular Mentalities:  Mental Maps of Britain. Essays in Honour of Bernd Lenz. Jürgen Kamm and Gerold Sedlmayr (eds.) Passau: Karl Stutz, 2007. 129–​143. Ramazani, Jahan. A Transnational Poetics. Chicago, Ill.:  The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Schulze-​Engler, Frank and Sissy Helff (eds.) Transcultural English Studies: Theory, Fiction and Reality. Amsterdam/​New York: Rodopi, 2009.

Schulze-Engler, Frank. “Irritating Europe.” Graham Huggan (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. 669–691.

Sumera, Adam. “Ian McEwan’s The Innocent: The Novel and the Movie.” Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 21.2 (2010): 41–48. von Rosenberg, Ingrid and Gerd Stratmann. “New Thrills: John le Carré and Mike Phillips Discover the Wild East of Post-​Cold War Europe.” Literary Views on Post-​Wall Europe. Christoph Houswitschka, Ines Detmers, Anna-​Christina Giovanopoulos, Edith Hallberg and Anette Pankratz (eds.) Trier:  Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2005. 65–​82. Welsch, Wolfgang. “Transculturality—​the Puzzling Form of Cultures Today.” Spaces of Culture: City, Nation, World. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash (eds.) London: Sage, 1999. 194–​213.

Pa rt 3 Starting from the Americas

∵

Chapter 11

American Poiesis and American History Djelal Kadir When the modernist poet and pediatrician William Carlos Williams published his treatise on American poiesis in 1925 he called it In the American Grain. What he actually documented, and re-​enacted, in the process, is the most salient characteristic of poetry in the history of the Americas, a trait that renders the title of Williams’ treatise highly ambiguous and, thus, an illustration of the paradox he chronicled and he, himself, embodied. Historically, the persistent attribute of American poiesis is to be perennially “against the grain.” A history of American poiesis, inevitably, is a history of the diverse forms of this contestation that extends from an antinomian non-​conformity in Puritan New England to Jeremiad and dissent to the essentialist pursuit of authenticity and the identity politics of multiculturalism, countered, in turn, by militant response to nativist naturalism with irony and caustic parody. The twenty-​first century has tended toward the latter of these antithetical modes of being “against the grain,” and, in doing so, being very much “in the American grain.” Williams’ incursion into American historiography illustrates the tension of this equivocation that, in Williams’ words, is inexorably “forked by preconception and accident.” Thus, in his Autobiography of William Carlos Williams the poet describes his In the American Grain as follows: “a study to try to find out for myself what the land of my more or less accidental birth might signify” (Moody 2009: i). Williams’ family genealogy is an epitome of the fortuities of transcultural Americanness, enough so to overload even the most plural template of multiculturalism a century before the term was coined. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1883, Williams was the son of an Englishman who was raised in Puerto Rico and of a Puerto Rican mother who was herself of French Basque and Dutch Jewish descent. Thus, Williams’ “more or less accidental” Americanness is very much “in the American grain,” a fate whose caprices would haunt Williams the poet to the point of driving him to pursue the vagaries of poetic contingency and to a vocation of healer for over four decades as a medical doctor and specialist in pediatrics. Like the happenstance genealogical history he embodied, his poetic corpus is the paradigm of contingency, a poiesis that contests historical necessity or inevitability in formal structure and in its thematic concerns. In this sense, he is exemplary of the paradox he describes, being “in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_013

162 Kadir the American grain” by virtue of tenaciously operating “against the grain.” His view of American poiesis is summed up most elaborately in his five-​volume “epic” poem Paterson (1946–​1958, set in Paterson, New Jersey), which he called a “local epic” (as opposed to a universal one) and its epode or song he termed not the song but “A Sort of a Song” that originates in “No ideas but in things” and the vicissitudes and accidents of their historical fortuities: —​Say it, no ideas but in things—​ nothing but the blank faces of the houses and cylindrical trees bent, forked by preconception and accident—​ split, furrowed, creased, mottled, stained—​ secret—​into the body of the light! paterson, Book I: http://​allpoetry.com/​from-​Book-​I,-​Paterson The enjambed versification of these dashing lines, almost as dashing as Emily Dickinson’s, displays a contestatory prosody doubled, or doubled over, into ambiguity, not to say contradiction—​bent, forked, split, furrowed, creased; with elements of each verse contested in the next in contrapuntal duality—​ ideas and things; preconception and accident; saying and secret; stained and light. A decade earlier, Williams had already rehearsed the trials of conviction and the tribulations of the happenstance, dialectical antitheses that transform things and lives, that, in turn, find their afterlives in the sharply adversative poetic metaphors of language and poetry’s “body of light.” He had done so in a poem by the same title in 1944, “A Sort of a Song,” in which the dynamic impulse emanates from ambiguity and antitheses—​slow and quick, sharp and quiet, wait and sleepless, people and stones—​contrasts that, as the poem recommends, are to find their harmony in poiesis, “—​through metaphor to reconcile”; and the poet and reader are exhorted to “compose,” and “invent” like the flower—​saxifrage—​that splits the rocks, as the literal Latin etymology of its name demands, a compelling instance of convergence of linguistic semiosis and diegetic poiesis in action: Let the snake wait under his weed and the writing be of words, slow and quick, sharp to strike, quiet to wait, sleepless. —​through metaphor to reconcile

American Poiesis and American History

163

the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! Saxifrage is my flower that splits the rocks. The Wedge, 1944 There is, then, a materiality or thingness to this American poiesis—​of the people and the stones//​Saxifrage [and] the rocks. And it is epitomized in Williams as a human historical materiality, as for example in his 1955 poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult/​to get the news from poems/​yet men die miserably every day/​for lack/​of what is found there” (Journey to Love, 1955), lines that echo, as some of you will recognize, the peroration of the 1924 poem “The Snow Man” by Wallace Stevens that enjoins us to behold the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” There is, too, something inherently antinomian in this phenomenal paradox, a contestatory phenomenalism that makes itself felt from the beginning of American history, certainly since the term “Antinomian” was applied to an American impulse in the earliest moments of Anglo-​America’s history when the zealous enthusiasm of Anne Hutchinson was put on trial in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in November of 1637 for its non-​conformity against the already non-​conformist Puritans. Their dissident enthusiasm propelled them out of England and across the Atlantic into what they would call New England. This originary dissidence subtends the poetic iconoclasm that has always vexed the canonical narrative of American historiography, hence, the irreverence with which Williams’ In the American Grain revisits the iconic figures (Christopher Columbus, Montezuma, Cortés, Juan Ponce de Leon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Champlain, Thomas Morton, Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, John Paul Jones, Aaron Burr, Edgar Allen Poe, and Abraham Lincoln) of American history since its founding as a transatlantic reality fully imbued with its own utopian unreality and delusional ideologies. Aristotle, of course, had already detected something that intervenes between what is history and what we know as history, namely, historiography. From the beginning, then, we have a sense of history as composition that, like all compositions, is constructed through protocols of mythos and logos in their particular habitus or lexis. Aristotle called these protocols “poetics.” Poiesis, then, is central to human existence and human history, inasmuch as the operations of poiesis are simultaneously generative and mimetic, certainly transformative, not only for poetry but for any composition, including historiography. And the case of America as New World emerges as an illustrative instance of this complexity in which poiesis plays a role that is world-​defining

164 Kadir and indispensable, but also incidental and provisional, that is to say, hazardous and contingent, inherent attributes, all these, of what today we call “world literature.” The ways in which this poiesis operates are multiple, albeit inevitably subject to the vagaries of circumstance and the fortuities of historical contingencies. And so, it becomes imperative to remain alert to the many instances of this circumstantiality and its paradoxical predicaments, rather than simply acquiesce to the orthodoxy of canonical and sanctioned exemplars of any historical moment. And from the earliest moments of American history, American poiesis has been productively inflected by heterodox figures and eccentric practices that contested conventions from the periphery, with some of those heretical margins ultimately defining the canon from which the circumstances of the moment marginalized them. The mid-​twentieth-​century literary historian and critic F. O. Matthiessen in his seminal treatise American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) mapped the ways in which the American canon became constituted by the eccentric figures and their non-​conformist practices a century earlier. My point is that this paradoxical process in which canonical centrality is defined by heterodox marginality is a perennial characteristic of American poiesis that extends to the colonial period of the American Hemisphere. Which point on the margin of any given historical moment one chooses to take as illustration of this American poiesis ultimately defines the nature of the center and the shape of that periphery. And the inevitability of this historical phenomenon obliges Americanists and others who would seek to understand American history and its poiesis to remain alert to the fluctuating possibilities on the margin of American culture and historiography. Our own aim here, then, is to probe a number of such points on what in their time was the periphery and examine a number of counter voices across the historical spectrum and in contemporary practice. One of the earliest quests at the heterodox periphery that circumscribes the center and ends by defining a cultural common ground of American history is an Afro-​Caribbean composition that voices the very question of where, indeed, might be the source of this heterogeneous culture, a question that continues to be asked variously by such contemporary writers as, for example, the Canadian Rudy Wiebe in his now canonical short story “Where Is the Voice Coming From?” about the history and narrative of the Canadian Indians. The early colonial work I am referring to is the eponymous composition “Má Teodora.” It dates from around 1562 and is said to be the primal source of the Cuban musical genre called son, variously translatable as “air,” “sound,” and “voice,” popularized in Afro-​Cuban poetry by the twentieth-​century avant-​garde poet

American Poiesis and American History

165

Nicolás Guillén. As her name indicates—​mother (Má) and god’s gift (Teodora)—​the son, or “air,” interrogates eponymously the whereabouts of origins and the practice of its poiesis as rhythmic verse and as lyrical performance of dance and song. Má Teodora, said to be the composer and protagonist in the performance, is historically Teodora Ginés, a manumitted slave born in Santiago de los Caballeros on the Island of Española, today’s Dominican Republic, who travelled with her sister Micaela, also a freed slave, to Santiago de Cuba around 1560. There, they formed a church “orchestra” in the Cathedral of Santiago along with Jacome Viceira, a Portuguese clarinetist, and Pedro Almaza from Málaga. Teodora would remain in Cuba until her death circa 1580, and her composition is said by many musicologists, including the novelist Alejo Carpentier in his 1946 scholarly treatise La música en Cuba, to be the origin of the son genre in Cuba. There are those who question this chronology, but this too is part of the perennial undecidability in America’s cultural interrogatory of where the source, the mother spring, or fountainhead, of American poiesis rises. The lyrics are a set of three contrapuntal call-​and-​response verses, or canto y responso, in 3.3.2 rhythm. The call, usually a choral or collective voice, inquires, “¿Dónde está la Má Teodora?”—​“where is Má Teodora?” and the response, conventionally a soloist’s, counters, “Rajando la leña está”—​“she is chopping wood.” “To chop wood” in Afro-​Caribbean vernacular, means, “to dance.” “Palo y bandola” are musical instruments, a stringed pear-​shaped instrument and its stick or bow: ¿Dónde está la Má Teodora? Rajando la leña está ¿Con su palo y su bandola? Rajando la leña está ¿Dónde está que no la veo? Rajando la leña está The music was transcribed by the Cuban ethnomusicologist Laureano Fuentes Matons in 1893 in his book Las artes en Santiago de Cuba.1 Má Teodora’s search for Má Teodora in her eponymous son resonates as a perennial quest of American poiesis, a seeking after its origins, its place, its time, and its social significance as cultural practice in the American Hemisphere’s history. We could say that every American poet, “chopping wood” in his or her own

1 Here is the link to the original transcription and its performance by Cuba’s legendary Celia Cruz and Lino Frias: https://​www.youtube.com/​watch?v=xI8xzEvlmcI.

166 Kadir way, has been answering Má Teodora’s call ever since. One of the first echoes to her summons is the first African-​born woman poet in the New World to be published, not just performed. Like Má Teodora, New England’s Phillis Wheatley was also a slave from age seven when she was sold into slavery and transported to America in 1761. She attained her freedom when her mistress, Susannah Wheatley died in 1774. Her poem “On Imagination” is a meta-​poem, an ars poetica, composed very much in eighteenth-​century, neo-​classical style, its prosody as sophisticated as any poetic composition in the English language. Metrically, Wheatley demonstrates her command of versification, casting her lines in iambic pentameter—​the metric most common to the English tradition from Elizabethan poetry to William Shakespeare’s dramas to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Wheatley “chops the wood” real fine, and the lines of her poem scan into rhymed couplets in heterostrophic arrangement of cuartetos (3 of them) and decimas (4 of them), with an unrhymed couplet as coda. Notable in this highly self-​ conscious prosody are certain elements that enrich its systematic structure, such as a) the ambiguous preposition “on” in the title—​a double entendre which here could mean “about imagination” or “constructed upon imagination”—​; b) the address directed at Imagination as an apostrophe in the poem’s incipit; and, finally, c) the closing signature in the poet’s first-​person as an adversative coda that, in ending, seeks to silence the poet’s song and points also to its asymmetry—​the “unequal lay” as structurally heterogeneous and self-​effacing and not equal to the task that imagination deserves. This self-​deprecating gesture is also part of a long poetic tradition the Roman poets referred to in Latin as adequatio and a tactic, more often than not ironic, formalized as captatio benevolentia. These prosodic gestures are highly technical and deliberate, meta-​poetic protocols with a long history, which Wheatley clearly commands, and flaunts, with exquisite mastery. There is something cutting, then, in the historical irony in this mastery by the slave who commands the poiesis of the culture that enslaves her. And the title of the poem compels our imagination to consider the significance of this fact through the intricate history of race and poiesis in America. To paraphrase Má Teodora, then, ¿Dónde está la Má Phillis? She certainly “chopped wood,” and she did so exquisitely in the manner of Alexander Pope, the English translator of Homer’s Iliad, whom she emulated in translating Ovid into Augustan heroic couplets. The most recent and most thorough biography of this extraordinary woman is Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage by Vincent Carretta. The few facts we know about Phillis Wheatley make the happenstance nature of William Carlos Williams’ conditional phrase “more or less accidental” most apt, starting with her name, as we know it, which derives from the name of the slave ship in which she was transported to Boston from Western Africa and bought as a personal slave for Susannah, wife of

American Poiesis and American History

167

a tailor named John Wheatley, whose family name also became her own surname. Historians speculate that she was kidnapped and sold into slavery, that she is most likely from the Fula people who read Arabic script, that she proved a prodigal student of English and Latin in the Wheatley household, that she is likely to have known the mother of New England’s poiesis, Anne Bradstreet and her poetry, and that she died at age thirty-​one shortly after delivering her third child, who, like her two previous children, also died in infancy. Wheatley’s most significant role in America’s poiesis is the irony of her prodigious genius that mastered the poetic culture of her masters through her autodidactic learning in the Latin and English traditions. Along with her contemporary New England poet Anne Bradstreet, she was dubbed the “tenth muse,” a title the Spanish vice-​ regal court of New Spain had conferred upon another deeply learned classicist, scientist, and poetic prodigy, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz a century earlier. The tradition of the “tenth muse,” as you might recall, has its origins in the Athenian philosopher Plato, who had honored Sappho with that title. Asynchronously consonant, the two manumitted black slave women, Má Teodora Ginés and Phillis Wheatley, are separated by two hundred years. They converge in the twentieth century through two of their poetic descendants, in both of whom these founding mothers of American poiesis continue to resonate—​the Afro-​Cuban modernist master of the son Nicolás Guillén (1902–​ 1989) and the Afro-​American master of the English language and its prosodic intricacies Langston Hughes (1902–​1967). The two met through Hughes’ Spanish translator and editor of El Diario de la Marina, Fernández de Castro, in Havana in February 1930. They would meet a number of times thereafter in Cuba and in Europe, most notably in the Spanish Civil War. Their last meeting occurred in 1948. Born in the same year of 1902 (the Afro-​American on February 1 in Joplin, Missouri; the Afro-​Cuban on July 10 in Camagüey, Cuba) there are other parallels and convergences in their biographical and poetic itineraries. They are both sons of racial miscegenation: Guillén’s mother and father were both descendants of mixed black and white parentage. And Hughes hails from a mixture of black, white, and American Indian ancestry. For all intents and purposes, within the biopolitics, racial laws, and ethnic taxonomies of America, they are black poets, and they self-​identified as such ethnically and poetically. Which is to say that they are both poets of the vernacular Afro-​Cuban and Afro-​American poiesis. To say “vernacular” in the case of these two poets is to mean more than “vulgate” or “colloquial” speech. In Latin, you might recall, the verna was the Roman household’s slave woman born in springtime. We do not know in which season the slave woman Teodora Ginés was born in Española’s Santiago de los Caballeros; nor do we know the season of the seven-​year-​old Phillis Wheatley’s arrival into

168 Kadir her Boston servitude. We do know, however, that the vernacular language and racial history of both Guillén and Hughes date to the poetic language of Teodora and Phillis, respectively. And the poetic idiolect in which both twentieth-​ century black poets found their greatest source of creative energy is the performative poiesis each of them inherited through the tradition of their respective poetic precursors. Hughes transformed the highly structured prosody and richness of the English poetic tradition he inherited from Phillis Wheatley, a legacy that he inflected with the history of his cultural and racial blackness, that is, with American blues and jazz. Hughes’ award-​winning first book of poems, The Weary Blues, published in 1926 when he was twenty-​four years old, already revealed a poetic voice that is lyrical but trans-​personal, collective, commemorative, speaking for more than itself. The universal poiesis of Wheatley’s neo-​ classical imagination metamorphoses in Hughes into the universal condition of human history and the weariness of its perennial vicissitudes. And Guillén’s son is Hughes’ “soul,” that genre of Afro-​America that resonates with the wisdom and weariness of the ages. Hughes wrote his poems to be sung with musical accompaniment in the Harlem clubs he frequented throughout his life and was an integral part of what is known as the Harlem Renaissance. Perhaps the signature poem in Hughes’ first collection is “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” a poem that is indicative of the scope and horizon of the poet’s ambition, reaching out across the ages and far-​flung habitations of human history. The Negro Speaks of Rivers I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I’ve known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. The Weary Blues, 1926

American Poiesis and American History

169

And Guillén, who echoes Hughes in his poem “Llegada” [Arrival], “sabemos dónde nacen las aguas” [“we know where the waters are born”], for his part, appropriated the patrimony, or, we should say, “matrimony” of the contrapuntal son whose originary sounds spring from Má Teodora as performative rite of racial miscegenation, a métissage that was the collective body of Má Teodora’s multiracial orchestra and the genealogy of Guillén’s family tree and, of course, from the fraught racial history of Afro-​America as a bi-​continental Hemisphere. Each of these men had to discover and prove worthy of his inheritance as a poet. And they ended up in mutual solidarity, ensuring their poetic success when their biographical and poetic histories intersected, starting with their first meeting in February of 1930 when Hughes visited Havana. The meeting proved auspicious, especially for Guillén, who, with the encouragement of Hughes, discovered a solution to the poetic impasse that he had expressed most poignantly in his collection of poems eight years earlier, De cerebro y corazón [Of Heart and Mind] of 1922. An eight-​line poem in this collection resounds as Guillén’s heart-​felt cry: “¿Dónde está la Má Teodora?” The poem is entitled “Ansia,” which in Spanish translates as anxiety or as longing. Being “anxious” in Latin, the verb is angere, means to be choked, unable to breathe or speak. Here is the poem in the original and my translation in English.  Ansia La palabra es la cárcel de la idea. Yo, en vez de la palabra, quisiera, para concretar mi duelo, la queja musical de una guitarra. Una de esas guitarras cuya música dulce, sencilla, casta, encuentra siempre para hacer su nido algún rincón del alma … De cerebro y corazón, 1922 Longing The word is the prison of the idea. I, instead of the word, would wish for the musical plaint of a guitar to specify my lament.

170 Kadir One of those guitars whose music sweet, simple, pure, always finds some corner of the soul to nest in … Of Heart and Soul, 1922 The instrument with which the mournful longing seeks to alleviate the inexpressible lament pent up in “the word” proves to be none other than Má Teodora’s stringed bandola and its son. And this is the collective voice of the Afro-​Cuban vernacular that Hughes urged Guillén to look for when they met in Havana in February. And, sure enough, two months later, in April 1930, Guillén published the eight poems that became his first collection of Motivos de son, poems that Hughes will translate into English. Hughes learned his Spanish initially in 1919 and during the year 1920–​21 when he went to live with his father in Mexico, where the older Hughes, fleeing the racial laws of the U.S., had emigrated following his divorce from Langston’s mother. On Hughes’ Spanish proficiency, Guillén noted in an essay entitled “Conversación con Langston Hughes,” part of his biographical book Prosa de prisa, 1929–​1972 (vol. 1, 17): “El castellano de Mr. Hughes no es muy rico. Pero él lo aprovecha maravillosamente. Siempre consigue decir algo que desea. Y, sobre todo, siempre tiene algo que decir.” [“Mr. Hughes’ Spanish is not very rich. But he uses it marvelously. He always manages to say what he wants. And, above all, he always has something to say.”] The son is a radical innovation in Guillén’s poetic career and in the tradition of Afro-​Cuban poiesis, radical in the sense that Guillén, like Hughes who reaches back to the headwaters of “Ancient dusky rivers,” goes back to the radix, the root of pre-​linguistic poiesis, what lies before the asphyxiating “­palabra.” In other words, Guillén, like Hughes, and like William Carlos Williams who differentiated between “words and things” before them, sought for an alternative language to the word that is, as Guillén says, “la cárcel de la idea,” “the prison of the idea,” for an idiom that is more commensurable with historical reality and more adequate for its expression. In this recuperative metamorphosis, then, “la palabra” morphs into motivo. And, specifically, it transmutes into motivos de son. “Motivos” in Afro-​Cuban Spanish translate into English as lyrics, the signifying expressions in a musical composition that communicate without entrapment in words, in palaver, what is communicable beyond itself as word. And the composition in question—​the question here being “¿Dónde está la Má Teodora?”—​is the son, the air, the tune, or lay whose genesis is in Teodora Ginés’ “rajando leña,” her “chopping wood” with her stick and bandola. Thereafter, motivos becomes a leitmotif in Guillén’s Afro-​Cuban poiesis, with Motivos de son followed the next year by Sóngoro cosongo (1931) and El son entero in 1947, a

American Poiesis and American History

171

corpus that placed Guillén squarely within the arc of international Négritude, a movement that triangulated Africa with Europe through the pivotal periphery of the Afro-​Caribbean. The vernacular idiom of Hughes and Guillén is a language of resistance and liberation, a poetic and political pursuit of self-​emancipation that pervades the defining peripheries of American poiesis. Many of the mainstream avant-​ gardes and the howling voices of the Beat Generation found in the son and “soul” of Hughes and Guillén a poetic precedent with which to explore and explode the circumscriptions of language and canonical orthodoxy. Notable among the beneficiaries of that liberatory poiesis are the descendants of American Indians, “Native Americans,” as they are called in the U.S.A., “first peoples,” in Canada, and “indígenas” in Latin America. I would like to point to a strain of indigenous poetry that is particularly compelling in the current poetic scene of America and that is still “in the American grain” of writing against the grain characteristic of America’s poiesis. This is a strain of poetic production that retains the dissensual, contestatory, and antithetical impetus of self-​ emancipation and self-​authentication we witness since the earliest poetics of resistance, explicit as in the compositions and son of Má Teodora, and implicit in Phillis Wheatley’s mastery of classical prosody. It should be noted, however, that after the innovative poetics of Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén, whose pursuit of an emancipatory poiesis was tantamount to a problematic pursuit of authenticity they themselves came to suspect, in the younger generation of poets the problem of authenticity becomes foregrounded, and no less so than its pursuit as poetic project. Highly self-​conscious of the fate of authenticity and keenly aware of the dangers of self-​authentication as inevitable objects of reification, stereotyping, and cliché in an institutional discourse that calls itself “ethnopoetics,” the younger generation of indigenous poets makes a leap into spectral irony that holds up a deflecting mirror to the history of identity formations and processes of representation. Thus, we witness a recuperation of survival strategies that have always been integral to the precarious fate of the indigenous peoples of America. These are the strategies of irony, of subterfuge, of the subtly carnivalesque trickster, embodied in the ironic Afro-​Caribbean arachnid folk hero Anancy and by the cunning coyote of the American Indians. Theirs are subversive acts that reflect back and invert in an attempt to reverse the historical representations of ethnographic authenticity and essentialist “indigeneity.” These strategies are described as postmodern modes of spectralization that the Native American Anishinaabe-​Chippewa scholar and writer Gerald Vizenor has called the condition of being “post-​ Indian.” In his 1994 book of essays entitled Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance, Vizenor describes “postindian” as a counter-​phenomenon

172 Kadir that contests the Indians of Columbus’ invention and the Indians of the white man’s hegemonic discourse. Which is to say that Vizenor does not envision an alternative “Indian.” Rather, like his fellow Native American writers, he lays out the complexities and historical vicissitudes that pertain to the condition and discourse of living as an indigenous people. One of the signature poems of this contestatory process is a work by Sherman Alexie, a member of the Spokane/​Coeur d’Alene tribe who grew up on the Spokane Indian Reservation in Wellpinit, Washington State. It is called “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel,” which as its ironic title indicates, is neither a novel nor a manual or handbook. And, great in its iconoclastic irony, it is, rather, a performative instance of an act of what Vizenor calls survivance: How to Write the Great American Indian Novel All of the Indians must have tragic features: tragic noses, eyes, and arms. Their hands and fingers must be tragic when they reach for tragic food. The hero must be a half-​breed, half white and half Indian, preferably from a horse culture. He should often weep alone. That is mandatory. If the hero is an Indian woman, she is beautiful. She must be slender and in love with a white man. But if she loves an Indian man then he must be a half-​breed, preferably from a horse culture. If the Indian woman loves a white man, then he has to be so white that we can see the blue veins running through his skin like rivers. When the Indian woman steps out of her dress, the white man gasps at the endless beauty of her brown skin. She should be compared to nature: brown hills, mountains, fertile valleys, dewy grass, wind, and clear water. If she is compared to murky water, however, then she must have a secret. Indians always have secrets, which are carefully and slowly revealed. Yet Indian secrets can be disclosed suddenly, like a storm. Indian men, of course, are storms. They should destroy the lives of any white women who choose to love them. All white women love Indian men. That is always the case. White women feign disgust

American Poiesis and American History

173

at the savage in blue jeans and T-​shirt, but secretly lust after him. White women dream about half-​breed Indian men from horse cultures. Indian men are horses, smelling wild and gamey. When the Indian man unbuttons his pants, the white woman should think of topsoil. There must be one murder, one suicide, one attempted rape. Alcohol should be consumed. Cars must be driven at high speeds. Indians must see visions. White people can have the same visions if they are in love with Indians. If a white person loves an Indian then the white person is Indian by proximity. White people must carry an Indian deep inside themselves. Those interior Indians are half-​breed and obviously from horse cultures. If the interior Indian is male then he must be a warrior, especially if he is inside a white man. If the interior Indian is female, then she must be a healer, especially if she is inside a white woman. Sometimes there are complications. An Indian man can be hidden inside a white woman. An Indian woman can be hidden inside a white man. In these rare instances, everybody is a half-​breed struggling to learn more about his or her horse culture. There must be redemption, of course, and sins must be forgiven. For this, we need children. A white child and an Indian child, gender not important, should express deep affection in a childlike way. In the Great American Indian novel, when it is finally written, all of the white people will be Indians and all of the Indians will be ghosts. Alexie’s poem offers, tongue-​in-​cheek, a compendium of stereotypical ingredients most commonly used for the representation of Native Americans. Alexie lays out these clichés under the rubric of Anglo-​America’s most commonly expressed desideratum—​“The Great American Novel.” More than a desideratum, “The Great American Novel” is an American obsession—​a shibboleth (literally,

174 Kadir “ear of corn” in Hebrew)—​trait, sign, peculiarity that typify, authenticate, and distinguish a people from others. The poem’s trickery whose wiles and subterfuge are the specialty of yet another stereotypical Indian figure—​the trickster or wily coyote—​consists in the reversals of the most commonly spoken, and often racist, clichés into the unspeakable figures of ridicule. This is the ruse of the subterfuge that Vizenor called the stratagem of survivance, a tactic that makes for a poiesis of resistance through parodic dissonance and carnivalesque satire. In a postmodern era, in fact, Vizenor keenly notes, this is the strategy of “the simulation of survivance” (169), inasmuch as these tactics bear the mark of adoption and adaptation of the ruins and forms of representation of others. American history is in large measure the history of others. The poetic corpus of America makes this fact and its significance more resonant and more clearly legible than America’s official narratives and their historiography. Works Cited Alexie, Sherman. “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel” from The Summer of Black Widows. The Summer of Black Widows. Brooklyn, NY: Hanging Loose Press, 1996. http://​www.poetryfoundation.org/​poem/​237270. Carpentier, Alejo. La música en Cuba. (1946) Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1982. Carretta, Vincent. Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2011. Fuentes Matons, Laureano. Las artes en Santiago de Cuba. (1893) Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1981. Guillén, Nicolás. Obras completas, La Habana: Instituto del libro, col. Letras cubanas, vols. i & ii (Poesía), 1972, 1973. Guillén, Nicolás. Prosa de prisa, 1929–​1972. La Habana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975. Guillén, Nicolás. Motivos de son. La Habana: Rambla, Bouza y Cía., 1930. Guillén, Nicolás. “Llegada.” http://​www.poesiaspoemas.com/​nicolas-​guillen/​llegada. 8 December 2015. Guillén, Nicolás. “Ansia.” http://​artespoeticas.librodenotas.com/​artes/​1075/​ansia-​1922. 8 December 2015. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers.” Collected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1987: http://​www.poetryfoundation.org/​poem/​173693. 8 December 2015. “Ma Teodora”:  http://​www.pbs.org/​buenavista/​music/​a_​ma-​teodora.html. 8 December 2015. Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford UP. 1941.

American Poiesis and American History

175

Moody, Rick. “Introduction,” In the American Grain: Essays by William Carlos WIlliams, 2nd ed. New York: New Directions, 2009. Stevens, Wallace. “The Snow Man.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A.  Knopf, 1954. http://​www.poetryfoundation.org/​poem/​174502. 8 December 2015. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners:  Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1994. Wheatley, Phillis. “On Imagination.” Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. London. 1773: http://​www.bartleby.com/​150/​19.html. 8 December 2015. Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1925. Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. Revised Edition. Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1992. Williams, William Carlos. “A Sort of Song.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol ii. 1939–​1962. Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. 55. Williams, William Carlos. “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Vol ii. 1939–​1962. Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions, 1986. 310.

Chapter 12

Triangulating Troy

The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida Johan Callens Ever since it emerged out of The Performance Group in the second half of the 1970s, The Wooster Group has been a truly transnational company. While deeply rooted in New York City’s transdisciplinary artistic scene, it has toured widely, done developmental residences, and from the start set up collaborations with continental companies and institutions. These collaborations began with the Kaaitheater Festival (Brussels) and Mickery Theater (Amsterdam), which became their European base, where even duplicate sets and props were built and stored, and shows re-​imagined for the European circuit. The partnerships would soon be extended to Theater-​am-​Turn (Frankfurt), Hebbel-​Theater (Berlin), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna) and the Festival d’Automne (Paris). This network would later be incorporated into the Informal European Theatre Meetings (ietm), an organization now acting as go-​between with fellow organizations around the globe (Pearson 2011: 79, 142–​143). In the mid-​1990s the European support was such that it allowed The Wooster Group not just to showcase new work on the continent but to develop it over several years in their home space, the Performing Garage, NY. Currently the company has structural relations with the Baryshnikov Arts Center (NY), REDCAT (LA), the Edinburgh International Festival, Holland Festival, as well as the Festival d’Automne in Paris, in order to stabilize revenue in economically uncertain times. Like The Wooster Group’s circuit of presenters, its repertory has grown more international over the years. During the first decade of the company’s existence it may have revolved around canonical American plays by Eliot, O’Neill, Miller, and Stein, but by now this canon has been supplemented by French (Flaubert, Racine), Russian (Chekhov), Polish (Wyspianski), English (Shakespeare, Pinter) and even Italian source texts (Busenello, Virgil, Moravia). Among several of these the Trojan War has been a recurrent motif, assuming full force in Cry, Trojans! (2014). This transnational production of Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida neatly brought into play the current tension between a neo-​ liberal, profit-​driven globalization and a moral cosmopolitanism (Rebellato 2009: 59–​84)

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_014

Triangulating Troy

177

A prefiguration of this conflict can be seen in the divided interests of the 19th century visual artist and ethnographer George Catlin (1796–​1872), who features indirectly in Cry, Trojans!. Having gained firsthand experience of life in the Indian territories, painting portraits, local scenes and landscapes, and assembling artefacts for what came to constitute his Indian Gallery, he moved to Europe for want of American interest, in search of patronage from governments, learned bodies, and private collectors. In the course of his travels at home and abroad Catlin came to embody a cosmopolitan ideal that did not preclude a lingering exceptionalist and nationalist ideology. If anything, it legitimated this ideology as guarantor of international success and leadership and may therefore have offered a somewhat specious version of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “rooted” or “patriotic” cosmopolitanism (1997: 617–​639; Hausdoerffer 2009: 4; Iannucci 2011: 15). The constant comparisons of European and American Indian customs during his sojourn on the continent warrant Catlin’s importance as cultural broker. Still, they tend to idealize the American middleground between the at times decadent European “civilization” and arguably primitive American Indian “savagery,” despite the wrongs his country had committed against its native inhabitants and we might add Catlin himself by neglecting his and the American Indian contribution to the US identity (Mulvey in Feest 1999: 261; Iannucci 2009: 153–​154). In this regard, Catlin’s internationalism only adumbrated a true cosmopolitanism, given that his efforts at raising foreign interest in native cultures through his Indian Gallery were meant as leverage to convince Congress into acquiring it and as compensation for what he deemed the American Indians’ “inevitable” disappearance. Throughout its international touring history, The Wooster Group, too, has been acting as an ambivalent cultural ambassador, promoting the American avant-​garde and arts while also being highly critical of the republic’s failure fully to implement its initial promises. While the disenfranchisement of African Americans has been more visibly targeted in controversial productions featuring blackface—​notably Route 1 & 9 (The Last Act) (1981), l.s.d. (… Just the High Points …) (1984) and Emperor Jones (1993)—​Rumstick Road (1977), the second instalment of the Rhode Island Trilogy, through the toponym’s genealogy (Gray & LeCompte 1978: 94–​95) already emblematized the base deceptions to which the colonizer had recourse to impose himself on the American Indians and appropriate their land. Ironically, rampant alcoholism—​inseparable from the profit motif and materialism castigated in Shakespeare’s Troilus & Cressida—​ was among the flaws the American Indians criticized in European society and Catlin himself in the Indian territories (Letters and Notes 1: 257). Before demonstrating, however, how Catlin’s transnational life and work elucidate The Wooster Group’s Cry, Trojans!, it may be useful briefly to

178 Callens recapitulate the genesis of that production. Rupert Goold, former Associate Director of the rsc (Royal Shakespeare Company) and former Artistic Director of the Headlong Theatre, in 2008 did a Macbeth which LeCompte liked (Trueman; Wooster Group Q & A). He therefore proposed to join forces on a production of Troilus and Cressida for the World Shakespeare Festival at the 2012 Cultural Olympics, with the rsc doing the Greeks and the twg doing the Trojans. In 2006 that play, after its disastrous premiere was aborted because of technical difficulties, had enjoyed a somewhat “dullish” staging directed by Peter Stein in another collaboration between the rsc and the Edinburgh International Festival (Gardner). I mention it here because Ferdinand Wogerbauer’s burnished metal design invites comparison with the aluminum panels in Laura Hopkins’ set for the Greek scenes in the 2012 production. Because Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida very much dramatizes the collision between two cultures, the transatlantic collaboration also became a way of confronting two theatre companies with radically divergent backgrounds and aesthetics, what Deborah Shaw called the Royal Shakespeare Company’s “actor-​focused, text-​based rigour” and The Wooster Group’s “conceptual multi-​ media wizardry” (qtd in Shenton). In fact, both companies initially rehearsed their scenes independently and only came together for the final weeks of rehearsal to work on the shared scenes and finalize the project, which premiered on 3 August 2012 in the Swan Theatre, Stratford-​upon-​Avon. By then, however, Goold had withdrawn from the project because of a movie commitment and had been replaced by Mark Ravenhill, at that point rsc writer-​in-​residence. Ravenhill foregrounded the love between Achilles and Patroclus, as played by Joe Dixon and Clifford Samuel, though the exact nature of their characters’ relationship—​homosocial as for Homer (Iliad)¸ Xenophon and Pindar, or homosexual as in Aeschylus’ fragmentarily surviving Myrmidons and Plato’s Symposium—​is still a matter of debate (Miller in Rodgers & Morton). In Cry, Trojans!, the 2014 remake of the production by The Wooster Group alone, the bond between Achilles and Patroclus is de-​emphasized in favor of Goold’s initial intention to draw on Shakespearean performance conditions and the history of the Royal Shakespeare Company. This was matched by LeCompte’s documentary interest in Shakespeare’s rhetoric and the speech delivery of Hollywood actors playing American Indians, as it relates to these movies’ cliché presentation of them as noble or not so noble savages and spiritual superiors to the white colonizer. An early attempt at redressing these distorted presentations is Elliot Silverstein’s 1970 revisionist western A Man Called Horse, one of the movies excerpted on the stage monitors, offering movement patterns for the performers and sound samples for the consummate soundtrack. Based on a short

Triangulating Troy

179

story by Dorothy M.  Johnson (1905–​1984), one of the few female western writers, A Man Called Horse deals with John Morgan, a British lord played by Richard Harris, who in 1825 went “native” by ultimately being initiated into the tribe that previously captured him after killing his companions. The movie thus supports what I would call the “interloping” theme, a term dating from Shakespeare’s time and reserved initially for traders and ships illegally trafficking in the colonies by trespassing on the rights of a trade monopoly (oed), hence in keeping with the pervasive commercial metaphors woven into Troilus and Cressida, as well as the many go-​betweens:  within the Trojan and Greek camps (notably Pandarus and Thersites who exchanged masters, Ajax for Achilles) but also among the two camps (Helen, Diomed, Cressida and her father Calchas, the Trojan priest who defected to the Greeks). By extension the diverse trappers, miners, explorers, and settlers during the American frontier days were also interlopers—​including an artist-​ethnologist like George Catlin who ostensibly promoted the Indian cause yet operated as middleman for a Texas colonization scheme and was briefly imprisoned for its failure, if also for the debts he kept incurring (Goetzmann 2009: 27; Eisler 2013: 358–​359). Catlin’s own mother had in fact been captured by an Indian tribe when she was still a girl living on the frontier, and Folkert de Jong’s latex costumes in Cry, Trojans! turn Shakespeare’s characters into Janus-​like interfaces between the classical past and mediatized American Indian present. The acculturation theme of A Man Called Horse is also at stake in The Hanging Tree (1959, dir. Delmer Daves), the screen adaptation of Dorothy M. Johnson’s “Lost Sister,” another story of hers based on Cynthia Ann Parker’s difficult reintegration into white settler society after her liberation from the Comanche with whom she had been living and raising a family since her kidnapping as a child. This historical case equally informs Alan LeMay’s 1954 novel, The Searchers (1956), which John Ford adapted to the screen with the German-​American actor Henry Brandon (born Heinrich von Kleinbach) playing Scar the abductor, Natalie Wood and her younger sister Lana the parts of the girl and woman, and John Wayne that of the traumatised Civil War veteran, Ethan Edwards, searching for his lost niece among the Comanche who massacred his family. Whether in John Ford or Howard Hawkes western vehicles (Rio Bravo, Red River, …) Wayne was of course tantamount in constructing the conventional movie image of cowboys and Indians. By contrast, Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse aimed at authenticity when basing the Sun Vow ritual on the O-​Kee-​Pa, or torture ceremony of the Mandan tribe. Catlin documented this ceremony in his paintings and Letters and Notes (1844), accompanied by one of the many certificates of authenticy, underwritten by several of his companions, and

180 Callens when that did not suffice as validation, returned to it in a separate 1867 volume with more circumstantial evidence. Presumably The Wooster Group’s recreation of the Trojans into an imaginary American Indian tribe draws on diverse sources. These may include some of John White’s famous 16th century watercolors, as Kate Valk interrupts Pandarus’ praise of Troilus with the remark that Achilles is the better man for being able to fly (1.2.238-​239). This case of poetic license invokes White’s Secotan “Flyer” (1585, British Museum), a shaman so-​called because he was believed to possess the ambiguous power to communicate between earthly and spiritual realms (Gaudio 2008: 56). In the context of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, then, he is another interloper of sorts. By the same token, The Wooster Group’s American Indians may well have been informed by some of Catlin’s portraits of Sioux and Choctaw ball players featuring lacrosse sticks, the more so since Catlin in his Letters and Notes (2: 123) considered these ball games as proper a subject for painters and sculptors as the Olympic Games, the 2012 edition of which ran concurrently with The Wooster Group’s Troilus and Cressida, when it played at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, and at the Riverside Studios, London. Alternatively, some of the plain sticks, used e.g. by Ari Fliakos when at the production’s start he traces a circle on the stage floor, recall the stick dances of African American slaves founded on secret military drills. The American Indian ball games, which lasted several days, apart from having a religious and communal function, constituted a similar symbolic form of warfare. In this they resemble Shakespeare’s metaphorical presentation of the courtship between Troilus and Cressida as a “virtuous fight” (3.2.166), matched by Hector’s “fair play” when he grants mercy to conquered Greek opponents (5.3.43), and transposed by The Wooster Group in the brief sequence during which Ari Fliakos and Scott Shepherd play some ball to mark a break in the enmities between Hector and Achilles (5.6.15). But, then, some English commentators at the time dubbed Catlin’s Indians a “ ‘Homeric’ race fit for a classical saga” (qtd in Lewis 2008:  11) and he himself frequently associated them with ancient Greeks or medieval knights caught up in a national mythic drama (Hight 1990: 123). The search for authenticity, however, like any attempt at retrieving true origins, is a somewhat devious venture. This applies to Catlin’s 19th century painted scenes, some of which prove montages of memories, stagings and imaginings (Hight 1990: 122–​123). It also applies to 20th century theatrical and filmic reenactments of the West, as well as to The Wooster Group’s 21st century production of Troilus and Cressida, a play arguably written shortly after Hamlet, Shakespeare’s consummate pursuit of art’s truthfulness, “your bait of falsehood” that should catch “the carp of truth.” (2.1.59-​60) In this regard, Dennis Lynton Clark, the production designer on A Man Called Horse, may have been

Triangulating Troy

181

assisted by the American Museum of Natural History, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institute, but when conferring with American Indians he discovered that “their notion of Indian clothing was based on the costumes designed by Hollywood studios” (dvd). Conversely, Catlin believed the Mandans, which a smallpox epidemic by 1837 had decimated (Thornton 1987:  95–​99), were “the descendants of Prince Madoc of Wales,” who according to Richard Hackluyt, “had sailed to America in 1170” (Goetzmann 2009: 24, 41), a belief A Man Called Horse alludes to in the name of John Morgan’s companion, Joe Maddock. Apart from helping to spread such rather speculative notions, Catlin also contributed to the late 19th century wave of Wild West Shows and reenactments when as early as the mid-​1840s he toured Europe with a party of Indians (Warren 2005: 191; Lewis 2008: 13), replacing the earlier used manniquins, white boys and white men made up to look like American Indians. Prior to his departure from New York in 1839 he himself did not recoil from dressing up and performing as a hardly qualified Blackfoot medicine man (Eisler 2013: 134–​ 138). Once in London he kept up the practice when lecturing in the guise of a Crow chief or attending the prestigious Caledonian Ball in copper body make-​ up and face paint, and treating the other guests to a Sioux scalp-​dance, joined by his London middleman Charles Augustus Murray (Catlin’s Notes 1: 69–​70). While Catlin may thus have found a means of ventilating his own feelings of estrangement on the European continent (Iannucci 2009: 156), he discontinued the practice of impersonating American Indians toward the end of his English tour, when embarrassment at the carnivalesque masquerades gained the upper hand (Catlin’s Notes 2: 123–​124). In Great Britain the performances were experienced as exotic remnants of a dying race but in the United States such “liberating” “redface” performances only reasserted white superiority (Lewis 2008:  7–​8), as distinct from the American Indians’ self-​performance on the frontier (Pratt 2013:  274). For all practical purposes Catlin invented the first traveling ethnological exhibit, though his Indian Gallery was modeled after Charles Wilson Peale’s Philadelphia Museum of art and natural history, as well as the St. Louis Museum of General William Clark, Superintendant of Indian Affairs on whose travels up the Missouri river Catlin accompanied him as an embedded artist-​ethnographer. The tension between art, documentation and showmanship that marks Catlin’s written and visual records as well as his Indian Gallery and reenactments, would keep permeating western art, and much the same forces are at work in The Wooster Group’s American Indian reimagination of Shakespeare’s Trojans. Catlin’s traveling exhibit is still echoed in the stock set Folkert de Jong and Delphine Courtillot designed for The Wooster Group, but it was much more

182 Callens pronounced on the revolving stage of the Swan Theatre, where the performers resembled dressed-​up dummies amidst the typical American Indian utensils (tipi, fire with pot, drums, dried meat …), when wheeled in view for the Trojan scenes. Granted, props like the plastic alcohol containers and rubber tire equally invoke the stock image of Indian reservations. Catlin’s interactive lecture-​performances involved not just the display and sale of his paintings but also allowed for the tasting of buffalo meat inside a tipi, the donning of authentic dress, playing of instruments, and smoking of pipes (Bank 12–​13; Pratt 2013: 275). The Indian Gallery tellingly opened at London’s “Egyptian” Hall in January 1840, in a city ignorant of, yet eager for all things American (Lewis 2008: 4–​5). Though Catlin himself upon his arrival, like so many transatlantic travelers before him, experienced life in the capital, from the dirt on the streets to conmen and driving left, as a regular culture shock, he quickly adapted to his new environment, soon enough gaining access to its upper echelons (Iannucci 2009: 153). After “show Indians” (first Ojibwa[y]‌, later Iowa[y]) had been engaged for the tableaux vivants and live incarnations of frontier scenes his gallery was even presented to Queen Victoria in person (Catlin’s Notes 1: 133ff). At the Vauxhall Gardens the American Indians also demonstrated horsemanship and in Lord’s Cricket Ground the game of lacrosse as publicity for the Indian Gallery (Catlin’s Notes 2: 119), admission to which cost a shilling. The indoor activities were not only participatory, they were also gendered for marketing reasons, with domestic scenes and peace-​time activities (games, dances, rituals) aimed at women and children, and war activities (ambushes and attacks, scalping) targeted at men (Bank 2007: 13; Lewis 2008: 7). In the tragedy that befalls Troilus and Cressida through the inevitable mix-​up of these two spheres, Shakespeare’s play of course provides a profound critique of such artificial gender division. When audience interest waned and box office receipts dwindled, Catlin took his Indian Gallery to France. There King Louis-​Philippe, a former visitor to the US and Indian country, took a sufficient enough interest to let Catlin display his gallery in the Louvre, for the royal family’s exclusive pleasure. The King also commissioned or the artist possibly volunteered to provide large scale copies of some fifteen paintings from the Louvre’s American Museum and twenty-​five scenes from LaSalle’s exploration of the US (Eisler 2013: 337–​338). Unfortunately, neither prestigious job led to any financial remuneration for Catlin, a prospect further curtailed by the subsequent 1848 revolution forcing Louis-​Philippe to flee. Luckily, Catlin by then had stored his Indian collection in a Parisian warehouse prior to its post-​revolutionary shipment to London. In the meantime, he himself had relocated to Brussels, planning a tour with his American Indians to Ghent and Antwerp. Sadly enough, the London-​based

Triangulating Troy

183

Ojibwa troupe he then used came down with the small-​pox before the opening performance in the capital, so that several American Indians died and more deaths followed upon the troupe’s return to England. This human disaster, that must have severely taxed the spirits of the troupe and its employer, further exacerbated by the increasing financial needs, even urged Catlin to issue a public warning against bringing Indians abroad in Niles’ National Register 7 March 1846 (Eisler 2013: 339–​342; Roehm 306–​307). These misfortunes prevented Catlin from taking his performances and Indian Gallery further afield to Germany, where favorable reports helped clear the ground for an Indian village in the Dresden zoo, a Wild West feature in the Circus Sarrasani, and the most profitable passage of Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in 1890 and 1906 (Warren 2005: 353–​354). Catlin’s great model, the scientist-​ explorer Baron Alexander von Humboldt (1769–​1859), had seen his Indian Gallery in London in 1842 and Paris in 1845, where the two like-​minded spirits met. As a result Catlin in September 1855 visited the German, then eighty-​five, in Berlin and on that occasion was introduced to the King and Queen. Von Humboldt subsequently tried to enlist his much younger admirer in their mutual conflict with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft. The US government’s official Indian Affairs specialist throughout the 1830s indeed had questioned the value of von Humboldt’s five-​volume Cosmos with regard to the issue of the American Indian’s origin as well as the authenticity of Catlin’s Mandan O-​Kee-​Pa ceremony. Schoolcraft’s critique of the American artist-​ethnologist, however, was partly motivated by his refusal to supply illustrations for Schoolcraft’s Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, commissioned in 1846. Soon enough Schoolcraft joined the likes of John James Audubon and Margaret Fuller, opposing the US government’s acquisition of his former friend’s Indian Gallery (Eisler 2013: 316–​317), even if Fuller felt that Schoolcraft’s presentation of American Indians, notably in his Oneata, or the Red Race of America “was flawed in its failure to describe their ill-​treatment and its consequences” (Iannucci 2011: 103n4, 188–​189). For lack of official support Catlin had left the US in 1839 and lived as an expatriate for the next thirty years, only to return to his home country shortly before his death December 23, 1872, unknown and unappreciated. Given the exorbitant costs of his American Indian enterprise, he kept seeking federal patronage but his 1846 international campaign to have his collection bought for the newly established Smithsonian, despite petitions from France, England and the US, was equally unsuccessful through Schoolcraft’s lingering negative publicity and active lobbying. The latter’s six volume encyclopedia was eventually published in 1851 as illustrated by Captain Seth Eastman (Balch 1918: 145) around the time that Catlin was imprisoned in London for his debts

184 Callens and his involvement in the Texas colonization scheme. To secure his freedom Catlin was forced to sell his Indian Gallery to Joseph Harrison, an American locomotive manufacturer, who failed to exploit it. Ironically, upon his death in 1874, two years after Catlin himself passed away in New Jersey, Harrrison’s widow donated the entire collection to the very institution that had been deprived of it due to congressional and public opposition. By then, however, not Catlin but Eastman had been promoted to the status of “preeminent painter of Native American life” (Eisler 2013: 381). Given the relevance of Catlin’s Mandan images for Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse and The Wooster Group’s ghosting of the rsc actors’ performance in the 2014 remake of the original production, it may be worth adding that in the 1860s Catlin returned to Brussels where he resided for several years in penurious conditions. Several money-​making schemes failed to bring in sufficient revenue, such as the publication of two moralizing books for youths on his legendary adventures in South America and one on the health benefits of sleeping on one’s back, lips closed, a technique learnt from the American Indians. Meanwhile he also turned his notes on the Mandan O-​Kee-​Pa into an independent monograph published in London in 1867, so as to rebuff Schoolcraft’s earlier critique of the arguably unreliable and sensationalized description of the ceremony. Unfortunately, the additional limited edition “for gentlemen only,” which included the phallic rituals and graphic representations of O-​Ke-​ Hee-​Dee with a huge dildo humping buffalo dancers or being pursued by the village’s women, tended to counter any rehabilitation (Goetzman 2009: 22–​23; Eisler 2013: 390–​393). What also preoccupied Catlin during his reclusive, not to say ghostly, existence in Brussels, further burdened by the deaths of his wife and boy, was the reconstruction, from memory or sketches salvaged from his creditors, of the paintings from his lost Indian Gallery. These sketches were in fact tracings or outlines of the heads and torsos from the original portraits he had had the foresight to make between 1848 and 1852. To this effect he used a camera lucida or photographic lens, outlines of which were then transferred onto paste-​ board panels. These would eventually constitute what he called his “cartoon” collection (Dippie 1990: 355–​356; Krebs 1990: 37n4; Eisler 2013: 389–​390), put on display and sold in series of ten to thirty sketches, under the specious label of “album unique.” Specious indeed, since Catlin also made color facsimiles on Bristol board, so that some originals ended up having drawn outline as well as thinned oil doubles. The wash gives the latter an undramatic, ghostly look, though Catlin’s exhibition of them opened in Brussels July 19, 1870, the very day the German-​French enmities erupted (Eisler 2013: 400). The appendices to the first volume of Catlin’s Notes chronicling the Indian Gallery’s reception include

Triangulating Troy

185

a French review of his earlier Letters and Notes, based on his “odyssey.” Published in the Indépendance Belge January 4, 1846, this notice emphasizes the chimeric nature of the West and its native population, always already tainted by civilization and artfulness, witness the post offices presumed necessary to relay Catlin’s hardly sent public letters, which the reviewer enjoyed like a “good novel” by James Fenimore Cooper (1: 242–​245). By the time Catlin died in 1872 he had recreated 1200 of his earlier works, now ghosted by their remembered images (Goetzmann 2009:  30–​31), much as The Wooster Group performers ghosted the delivery of non-​indigenous Hollywood performers standing in for American Indians. In 1910 New York’s American Museum of Natural History bought Catlin’s cartoon collection from his daughters but in 1965 resold it to Paul Mellon who donated most to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC (Krebs 1990: 37). Catlin’s cartoon collection, Indian Gallery and American Indian performances catered to Europe’s romantic nostalgia for people and things premodern and exotic, arguably on the brink of extinction. His own conviction of the American Indians’ “certain” disappearance went hand in hand with his support of Andrew Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, passed in 1830, the year in which Catlin set out for St. Louis. This act legalized the forced displacement of Indians West of the Mississippi on the misguided assumption that they were doomed anyhow as representatives of an earlier evolutionary stage, unable to withstand the march of progress, much like the ancient Britons. The American Indians’ susceptibility to European diseases was indeed considered evidence for the vanishing race thesis, as was their succumbing to whiskey and guns, both traded for furs. Of course, the Indians’ vanishing increased the value of Catlin’s work, as he knew only too well (Catlin ’s Notes 1: 217). Similarly, their being vanquished by civilization, though not quite dead yet, became the precondition for the harmless enjoyment of Catlin’s Indian Gallery and its attendant entertainment. Catlin’s Mandan, then, and by extension, the American Indian in general, were the necessary victim to enable the US nationalist myth of Manifest Destiny (Hight 1990: 123). Both the myth of Manifest Destiny and that of the American Indians’ extinction, not to mention Catlin’s memorial reconstruction of his paintings, seriously problematize notions such as authenticity and documentary realism, by drawing attention to the mediatization of the American Indian—​whether through Hollywood movies or the ethnographic art of the Pennsylvania-​born Catlin and the Swiss viewpainter Karl Bodmer, another source for Silverstein’s A Man Called Horse, who equally contributed to the mounted Plains Indian stereotype. Compared to Catlin’s more impressionist work, that of Bodmer, trained as a professional engraver, possessed far more detail, rendered

186 Callens accurately even if he did not understand its cultural significance and even if the whites of his watercolors left sufficient room for the imagination (Goetzmann 2009: 41, 45). Far more problematical were the novels of the extremely popular German writer Karl May (1842–​1912), referenced in Jason Grote’s contribution to the program of the Stratford Troilus and Cressida. May never set foot on the North American soil until after he had written most of his western stories, and even then he failed to visit the Far West, yet he contributed immensely to Europe’s imaginary construction of it. His prolific literary output began in 1875 (“Old Firehand”) and reached the height of popularity with his 1893 trilogy on the German survey engineer Old Shatterhand and his Apache bloodbrother Winnetou, joined in their fight against bad Indians and bad white American settlers (Warren 354–​355). Several centuries earlier, at the start of the American colonial enterprise, Shakespeare, too, contributed to this imaginary West, with plays like The Tempest, in which he has been said to fantasize about the newly discovered continent, stimulated by the Virginia Company’s Bermuda Pamphlets, New World bestiaries, and the wondrous sight of American Indians visiting an England impervious to their dispossession. True, by now the scholarly transatlantic contextualizations of The Tempest have been supplemented by English translations of Virgil’s Aeneid riding the wave of travel stories, the Hapsburg conquest of Carthage (Tunis), domestic colonization of the British Isles motivating English contempt for the “wild” Irish, and the displacement of the Lincolnshire fens’ local inhabitants by land reclamation projects whose cause was taken up by the fen spirit Tiddy Mun (Vaughan, Warner, Gillies, Hamilton, and Brotton in Hulme & Sherman; Borlik). Whatever the interpretative reach granted The Tempest—​local, Mediterranean or transatlantic—​the video which Wooster Group associate Chris Kondek designed for Stefan Pucher’s 2007 production of that play at the Münchner Kammerspiele (Mancewicz 40–​52) seemed to have paved the way for Cry, Trojans! since, like Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest betrays the imperialist dream underlying a nationalist venture similar to that of Karl May’s Germany (Warren 2005: 354–​355). The Wooster Group’s decision to perform the Trojans as American Indians, should, then, be contextualized by this imaginary West, whose Otherness, whether in speech, costume, or demeanor, precisely constituted its appeal to Europeans. While the attention paid to costume and demeanor is quite explicit, the company’s painstaking presentation of the speech intonations derived from Hollywood Indians may be less obvious, compared also to the mimicked voices of the British actors in the Greeks’ speeches retained for the New York revision. Since the New Yorkers wanted to keep the production on their repertory they had to resolve the problem of the missing British actors. They did

Triangulating Troy

187

so in the simplest of ways, by playing back a tape from the London version and mimicking the original actors’ delivery. At times they even line up behind the microphone thereby fusing the classical Greek chorus with the contemporary chorus line, its synchronizing effects in this case transcending real time and bridging the temporal gap between the original and its reenactment, past and present. As director Elizabeth LeCompte explained: “To portray the Greek characters when needed, we wear masks and follow the London performance as a kind of ‘ghost’ track, invoking the absent enemy by emulating the rsc voices” and “The collaboration came down to two directors trying to figure out what Shakespeare meant to them, and then sharing it with The Wooster Group in the most violent way because they were very competitive with each other.” (Brussels Program & Talkback, my emphases) The director’s word choice here is quite significant, for it extends the mimetic desire and its ensuing violence from the play proper (Girard 1991, ­chapters 14–​18 and 26) into the performance frame by way of the competitive acting, much as Morgan’s efforts to equal if not excel the American Indian bravery in A Man Called Horse function as bridge between the frame and inset movie. Hence, when Scott Shepherd, already dressed up in his American Indian costume, introduces Cry, Trojans! in a brief prologue recapitulating its genesis, he makes it sound as if the rsc actors failed to show up, thus poking fun at their unmanliness and lack of professionalism. Far from vaunting the British actors for their expert delivery, The Wooster Group technicians, by way of demonstrating the ghosting procedure, jokingly picked the particularly bombastic passage in which a vainglorious Ajax (originally played by Aidan Kelly in a mock bodybuilder’s top) has his trumpeter call for Hector rather prematurely (4.5.6-​12). The joke involves a deliberate pun on Ajax’s appearance for the planned “encounter” in his “appointment” or knightly armour, thus demonstrating the sophisticated dramaturgical work underlying what looks like a potshot at the rsc. The joke at the expense of the venerable British company is later extended when Ari Fliakos starts mouthing Diomed’s lines in Danny Webb’s thick “Crocodile Dundee-​sounding Aussie” accent (McNulty). As a corollary, the very idea of Englishness epitomized in Shakespeare, albeit more often for ideological reasons than in actuality, is further undermined, as is the idea of the American Indian by the performance of the Australian-​ born Shakespeare actress Dame Judith Anderson in A Man Called Horse a year after her controversial cross-​dressed Hamlet, at the age of 72, directed by William Ball. The imitation of the intonations and speech patterns of the sound excerpts transmitted through the performers’ ear pieces makes for an equally schizophrenic situation. Of the many American Indian movies screened in the

188 Callens pre-​production phase, each performer apparently had a personal montage made of speech fragments played back in a loop during the performance, superimposed or alternating with the sound tracks of the movies on the monitors, so the actors occasionally interject Shakespeare’s lines with an American Indian phrase or outcry from the screened or overheard material. In Cry, Trojans! the performers may at times be hearing the same movie synchronized, at times each of the performers may be hearing their own movie(s), besides having to watch the one screened on the monitors, or having to listen to the tape of the London performance. This complex multitrack delivery conveys to what extent the American performers experienced Shakespeare’s language as non-​ native or secondary. At the same time, the media montage denaturalized the delivery of the American Indian stage and movie personas, and refracted the American Indian identity, just as Caliban in Shakespeare’s Tempest becomes a prism for the Other, whether the North American Indian, the North African from Tunis or the Trojan from Virgil’s Aeneid. To conclude, The Wooster Group’s ghostly (re-​)appropriation of native and non-​native American voices to breathe life into Troilus and Cressida can be seen as a contextual refunctioning of their wonted acting practice by the mimetic desire permeating Shakespeare’s play, as well as a historical reframing of this practice by Catlin’s Indian Gallery, whose initial lecture show, a format reminiscent of Spalding Gray’s performances from Nayatt School onwards, was supplemented by tableaux vivants and reenactments, similar to The Wooster Group’s Hamlet based on Bill Colleran’s filmic record of John Gielgud’s 1964 staging. While the mediatization in Cry, Trojans! may be said to feed on Hollywood films like A Man Called Horse as much as on the ethnographic art work of George Catlin, two cases privileged by the present analysis in the interest of space, the theatrical and actorly memorialization integral to the production always also pertains to The Wooster Group’s work-​in-​progress, recalling as it does Kate Valk’s consummate performance in L.S.D. (… Just the High Points …) and O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, where she meticulously reproduced the inflections of Timothy Leary’s baby sitter, or invoked Caribbean and African-​ American speech patterns when presenting Tituba and Brutus Jones. That the racialized performances keep riling spectators paradoxically suggests the lingering need for The Wooster Group’s consciousness-​raising productions, whose documentary level both informs and undermines certitudes, just as the general designation of American Indian only erased the continent’s cultural variety. Cry, Trojans! perhaps fails to return the massacred population, its grounds and bison, in keeping with Wovoka’s prophecy, for all that it remains a ghost dance of sorts, haunting those who witnessed it with visions of a still repressed past.

Triangulating Troy

189

Acknowledgement The research conducted for this article is part of the “Interuniversity Attraction Poles” programme financed by the Belgian government (BELSPO IAP7/​01). Works Cited Alexie, Sherman. The Summer of Black Widows. New York: Hanging Loose Press, 1996. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Cosmopolitan Patriots.” Critical Inquiry 23.3 (Spring 1997): 617–​639. Balch, Edwin Swift. “The Art of George Catlin.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 57.2 (1918): 144–​154. Bank, Rosemarie K. “Don’t Let What Really Happened Get in the Way of the Truth: Reflections on Theatre, Ethics, and ‘The Moral Order’.” Theatre Symposium 15 (July 2007): 8–​19. Borlik, Todd Andrew. “Caliban and the Fen Demons of Lincolnshire: the Englishness of Shakespeare’s Tempest.” Shakespeare 9.1 (2013): 21–​51. Catlin, George. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs and Conditions of the North American Indians. 2 vols. New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841 & 1844. Rpt as North American Indians. Ed. and Introd. Peter Matthiessen. Penguin Classics, 2004 [1989]. Catlin, George. Catlin’s Notes of Eight Years’ Travels and Residence in Europe. 2 vols. New York: Burgess, Stringer & Co, 1848. Catlin, George. O-​Kee-​Pah: A Religious Ceremony, and other Customs of the Mandans. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1867. Rpt. as edited by Ed. John Ewers. New Haven: Yale UP, 1967. Dippie, Brian W. Catlin and his Contemporaries:  The Politics of Patronage. Lincoln: ­Nebraska UP, 1990. Eisler, Benita. The Red Man’s Bones:  George Catlin, Artist and Showman. New  York: ­Norton, 2013. Feest, Christian F. “Indians and Europe? Editor’s Postscript.” Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Ed. Christian F. Feest. Lincoln: Nebraska UP U of Nebraska P, 1999 [1989]. 609–​628. Gardner, Lyn. Review of Troilus and Cressida. The Guardian 16 August 2006. Gaudio, Michael. Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2008. Girard, René. A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Goetzmann, William H. and William N. Goetzmann. The West of the Imagination. ­Norman: Oklahoma UP, 2009 [1988]. Gray, Spalding, and Elizabeth LeCompte. Rumstick Road. Performing Arts Journal 3.2 (Autumn 1978): 92–​115.

190 Callens Hausdoerffer, John. Catlin’s Lament: Indians, Manifest Destiny, and the Ethics of Nature. Lawrence: Kansas UP, 2009. Hight, Kathryn S. “ ‘Doomed to Perish’: George Catlin’s Depictions of the Mandan.” Art Journal 49.2 (Summer 1990): 119–​124. Hulme, Peter, William H. Sherman, and Robin Kirkpatrick, eds. The Tempest and Its Travels. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania UP, 2000. Iannucci, Alisa Marko. “Antebellum Writer-​Travelers and American Cosmopolitanism.” Ph.D. dissertation Boston College, 2011. Iannucci, Alisa Marko. “Cosmopolitan Culture:  George Catlin’s Americanness.” ­Cercles: Revue Pluridisciplinaire du Monde Anglophone 19 (2009): 152–​161. Johnson, Dorothy M. The Hanging Tree. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1957. Johnson, Dorothy M. Indian Country. Foreword Jack Schaefer. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1995 [1953]. Krebs, Edgardo Carlos. “George Catlin and South America: A Look at His ‘Lost’ Years and His Paintings of Northeastern Argentina.” American Art Journal 22.4 (Winter 1990): 4–​39. Lewis, Robert M. “Wild American Savages and the Civilized English:  Catlin’s Indian Gallery and the Shows of London.” European Journal of American Studies 3.1 (Spring 2008): 1–​18. Mancewicz, Aneta. Intermedial Shakespeares on European Stages. London: ­Palgrave, 2014. McNulty, Charles. “Cry, Trojans! (Troilus and Cressida) is Wooster Group lite.” Los ­Angeles Times 28 Febr. 2014. Mulvey, Christopher. “Among the Sag-​a-​noshes: Ojibwa and Iowa Indians with George Catlin in Europe 1843–​1848.” Indians and Europe: An Interdisciplinary Collection of Essays. Ed. Christian F. Feest. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1999 [1989]. 253–​275. Pearson, Mike. Mickery Theater: An Imperfect Archeology. Reviews by Jack Heijer and Loek Zonneveld, trans. Paul Evans. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2011. Pratt, Stephanie. “Objects, Performance and Ethnographic Spectacle:  George Catlin in Europe.” Interventions:  International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 15.2 (2013): 272–​285. Rebellato, Dan. Theatre & Globalization. Foreword Mark Ravenhill. London:  Palgrave, 2009. Rodgers, Beckie, and Michelle Morton, eds. Troilus and Cressida. The Wooster Group /​ Royal Shakespeare Company Co-​Production. World Shakespeare Festival, 2012. Roehm, Marjorie Catlin. The Letters of George Catlin and His Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Thomson Learning, 2006.

Triangulating Troy

191

Shakespeare, William. Troilus and Cressida. Ed. and Introd. David Bevington. Arden Shakespeare, Third Series. London: Cengage Learning, 1998. Shenton, Mark. “Rupert Goold Departs RSC/​Wooster Group Troilus; Mark Ravenhill Steps in.” Playbill 20 April 2012. Silverstein, Elliott, dir. A Man Called Horse. Paramount Pictures EC 108960 DVD 2009. Thornton, Russell. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History since 1492. Norman: Oklahoma UP, 1987. Trueman, Matt. “Wooster Group and the RSC: Strange Bedfellows …” The Independent 1 Aug 2012. Warren, Louis S. Buffalo Bill’s America:  William Cody and the Wild West Show. New York: Knopf, 2005. The Wooster Group. Cry, Trojans! (Troilus and Cressida). Kaaitheater Program. KunstenFESTIVALdesArts 20–​24 May 2015. The Wooster Group. Postproduction Q&A led by Erwin Jans. Kaaitheater 20 May 2015.

Chapter 13

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California Multicultural Spaces throughout the Works of Alejandro Morales Inge Lanslots and An Van Hecke “He read the history of the Ambassador Hotel and the city of Los Angeles. In the construction scenes, in photographs of the building crews, he recognized Chinese, Indians and Mexicans. He gazed back at the faces that after a while seemed to be from the same family. We all share the same roots, the same family, he thought as he ­finally found himself in the midst of the Ambassador’s garden.” River of Angels—​Part three 165

∵ Negotiating Space The 2014 documentary Inner Borderlines: Visions of America through the eyes of Alejandro Morales, directed by Luis Mancha, can be read as an introduction to the life and work(s) of Alejandro Morales (1944), Chicano author and scholar from Montebello. In the first chapter of Inner Borderlines, entitled “Freeways,” Morales himself, while driving on an L.A. Freeway, gives the audience his view on the complexity of the U.S. identity. According to Morales, who takes a particular interest in Southern California, the freeway is a striking metaphor for today’s society, a conflictive space where multiple ethnic groups live together: I think they connect places in a sense more than people. […] In Southern California, people have the latest cars, […]. But they don’t obviously connect to people, they don’t talk to people. […]. The freeway is a good metaphor for the idea of negotiating space, because you have to move in

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_015

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California

193

each day, you are crossing the white lines. […] the only ways and times that people get to know each other is by crashing. Morales in Mancha 3: 43–​6 :30 1

Contrary to most criticism in Chicano and Latino literature, which mainly focuses on the confrontation between two cultures, two languages, two ethnic backgrounds or two different histories, Mexicans/​Chicanos versus Anglos, Morales stresses the multi-​ethnic character of Californian society. The former perspective might seem the most obvious one, as it clearly opposes two cultures, which are separated by a conflictive border between the U.S. and Mexico, but Morales does not reduce his works to the representation of Mexicans/​Chicanos and Anglos. Like many of his colleagues, Morales narrates how L.A. has become a space where migrants from all over the world live together: native Americans, Latinos, African Americans, and Americans with Asian or European roots. At times, these ethnic groups seem to live separated from each other, each in their own neighborhood, in what the postmodern political geographer and urban planner Edward Soja calls “mono-​ethnic geographies.” (Soja 291) Nonetheless, they also share the same spaces and meet each other regardless of the intra-​ethnic group differences. Cities, such as Los Angeles, are not just a melting pot, but contain “transnational geographies” (Soja 296), places of interconnectedness and transcultural encounter within a dominant Anglo American context. Therefore, Soja speaks of L.A. in terms of a “fractal city” (Soja 282), which forces researchers to remap these different groups, their problematic relations and their complex interdependence despite the struggle for a hegemonic cultural dominance. Soja argues that L.A. comprises a regional network of settlements, which develop a hierarchical and pyramidal structure: the settlements, which are often smaller rather than larger relate to “a single dominant urban core,” the so-​called mother city, which on various levels enhances centripetal and centrifugal forces. (Soja 16–​17) The spatially specific context of L.A. dictates behavourial and transactional processes, as well as social and political ones, which may evolve over time and have become even more complex in the digital age. (Soja 13–​17) Attachments to place may weaken (deterritorialization) or become stronger (reterritorialization) (Soja 151–​152) redefining social spatiality and territorial identity. People continuously cross, blur and recreate borders often imposed by Anglo Americans. In this light, we will present a detailed analysis of the fiction works of Alejandro Morales by mapping the historical and the potential evolution of the different 1 Already in 1996, Morales gave a similar view on the constant border-​crossing in Southern California: “Southern California is a profusion of cultural enclaves, a multitude of otherness,

194 

Lanslots and Van Hecke

L.A. settlements and communities and their interrelations. To that end, we have selected fragments from the following works: Reto en el paraíso (1983), The Brick People (1988), The Captain of All These Men of Death (2008), Little Nation & Other Stories (2014), and River of Angels (2014).2 Morales goes far beyond his own familiar ‘space’ as a Latino in the U.S. crossing all kinds of borders, which allows him to conceive his own “cartography” and “geohistory” (Soja). Morales can then be considered as a “transnational author” (Knowles), even if he does not cross a real frontier between two countries. He constantly crosses borders within ‘the City of Angels’ which he sees as a multi-​layered geography (Vertovec), which he not only explores in his novels but also in his essays and in the documentaries based on his life and work (The Brick People, 2012; Inner Borderlines, 2014). L.A., in the work of Morales, symbolizes California and the whole of the U.S., which appears as a melting pot today. However, drawing on the postmodern metaphor of the freeway that he presented at the steering wheel, we can state that Morales’s view on contemporary U.S. society is in fact pessimistic, or even dystopian:  in L.A., there is no real communication, one does not know one’s neighbor, the gaps between the L.A. communities seem to be bigger than ever, and the only moment you get in touch is when you crash. Morales’s fiction (and essays), however, depict a far more nuanced society. Despite the many gaps between different ethnic groups, especially between the Anglos and other groups, the author privileges the potential interconnectedness between them, embedding the interrelations within a historical context. At the beginning of his literary career, Morales deliberately opted for the genre of the historical novel, foregrounding the past of ethnic minorities. As official Anglo-​American history writing has mostly erased the history of minority groups, Morales is always concerned to recover this forgotten history, to fill “the gaps” of Chicano history, as well as of other ethnic groups. The history of Southern California appears as “a palimpsest, with archives layered one on top of the other by human beings crossing into this vortex since the ancient people settled here near the river.” (River of Angels—​Prologue xi) Among other scholars, Adam Spires postulates that recovering this history is quite challenging for Chicano writers: “Life for the Chicano/​a demands the continual process of navigating across borders, potentially destabilizing one’s sense of wholeness. The writer’s task, as dubious as it developing together and creating literal and metaphorical borders. It is an unending, unfinished process of continuous movement, of ceaseless change, of always becoming, of perpetual transformation, complicated by a cryptic omnipresent uniformity.” (Morales in Gurpegui 24) 2 We also consulted other works by Morales such as Death of an Anglo (1988), Barrio on the Edge (1998), and Waiting to Happen (2001) but references to other ethnic groups are not present or not explicit in these works.

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California

195

may be, is to somehow weigh a cultural mooring into this sea of ever shifting undercurrents to claim a recognizable space to call home.” (Spires ix) In his fiction, Morales depicts his home, his space and identity, as intrinsically intertwined with those of other ethnic groups, which Morales labels as Indians, black, yellow … This might seem to confirm stereotypization,3 which is also used by the different groups themselves, especially in the case of racial mixing, but the labelling clearly typifies the processes, as described by Soja, within a specific spatial context. Some of Morales’s labels coincide with nationalities (Italian, French, Mexican …); others refer to colors and racial differences (brown, black, yellow …)—​ the concept of race is of course very complex and in fact relative. As Morales is a great observer, he shows a special kind of sensibility towards ethnic groups that are defined in terms of otherness with respect to the dominant Anglos (Lanslots and Van Hecke). Morales insists on how Asians, African Americans and Chicanos are subject to various types of discrimination and racism, as we read in the passages on the beginning of the twentieth century. Many Anglos shared the same stereotypical views denying the other ethnicities national roots: The Chinese were an ugly disfigured race, a people who would never look you directly in the eye—​always mysterious, deceiving, treacherous and suspicious. Negroes were consummately lazy, a people who required endlessly repeated instructions; they still had a slave mentality, worked only when beaten and under constant surveillance. Mexicans were half-​breed mongrels who could not follow instructions; they were retarded and docile enough to work from sunup to sundown or longer, stupid like donkeys that never complained about the abuse. River of Angels—​Part two 86

Anglos seemed to dictate the hierarchical and pyramidal structure of L.A., which persists to the present day. African Americans On the lowest step of the pyramid Anglos situate African Americans, to whom Morales refers as Blacks or Negroes—​the choice of the term depends on the perspective of the narrator or character. In Morales’s works most black people have lived at the margins of L.A. society for centuries. In River of Angels, 3 “[L]‌a incorporación de estereotipos (nacionales y otros) en contextos nuevos adquiere un interés especial precisamente debido a que el fenómeno del estereotipo connota la idea de fijeza:  al sugerir la permanencia de la identidad mediante el uso de estereotipos, se hace posible redefinir esta identidad solapadamente.” (Lie 13)

196 

Lanslots and Van Hecke

the “superior” Anglo perspective is very explicit: “The country had to segregate the low ape-​like Negroes, descendants of slaves.” (River of Angels—​Part three 182) This confinement fits within the Aryan theory, impersonated by the uncle of one of the protagonists. This type of racism, to which the novel refers on numerous occasions, is based on pseudo-​theories, further promoted via stereotypical statements by the Anglos, which is diametrically opposed to the narrator’s perspective, who tries to invert the pyramidal structure searching for a new national identity, whereas Anglo Americans reinforce various forms of exclusion. In the historical novel The Captain of All These Men of Death (2008), based on the life of the author’s uncle, we get a better understanding of how Chicanos and African Americans related in the past. This novel’s protagonist and first-​person narrator, Robert Contreras, who wanted to fight in World War ii but could not enlist because of tuberculosis, reconstructs his stay in the frightful Olive View Sanatorium, referring to poor Mexicans and blacks who became subject to experiments:  “[We] kept our mouths shut and didn’t say a word about what the doctors and nurses did to us. Unfortunately, all this was so easily forgotten.” (The Captain—​Prologue 3) What is striking is the fact that this segregation of patients who suffered from TB had also a positive outcome: “At Olive View there was no discrimination—​not like the outside where Mexicans and zoot suiters were fighting sailors and marines like the halls of Montezuma all over again. […] One of the head doctors, Dr. Cohen, insisted that everybody be treated fairly.” (The Captain 92–​93) At first sight, the sanatorium seems to be a utopian place, with no discrimination or racism, where patients could have fun singing and dancing. But the truth about the experiments stays hidden for many years. One night Robert discovers a separate room, a kind of laboratory, with “seven black and three Mexican women.” (The Captain 226) This discovery was forever stamped on his memory. Jews Aryan theory and stereotypization can also be linked to the representation of Jews. In the novel The Captain of All These Men of Death (2008) we note the presence of an interesting secondary character, named Mel. At the encounter with Mel at the Olive View Sanatorium, the protagonist Robert is fully aware of Mel’s trauma, due to his “otherness” or his so-​called “inferiority”: “When he was sitting there naked with his forearms on his knees, I saw it: a series of letters and numbers tattooed on his right forearm. I  held Mel’s arm. He didn’t resist as I read out loud, ‘ZW101426’.—​‘I’m a Jew. I survived Auschwitz. I have come to this sanatorium of my own accord to die, and I am happy.’ ” (The Captain 210) Then Mel tells Robert that his parents were killed because they had

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California

197

tuberculosis: “That was the Nazi policy.” (The Captain 211) The comparison between Auschwitz and Olive View is tragic. After Auschwitz, every place is a happy place, even the Sanatorium. The persecution of the Jews is also mentioned in River of Angels: “From their chapter houses the members launched attacks against all dark-​skinned people—​Mexicans, blacks, Indians, Asians—​and their highest priority: the Jews and their supposed takeover of Hollywood. The task of eliminating Jews came from the Nazi ideologists in Germany.” (River of Angels—​Part four 235) Contrary to the negative portrayal by some characters, the narrator stresses the positive impact of Jews on L.A. history. Japanese Morales includes few references to Japanese migrants, mainly in terms of racism and of re/​deterritorialization. In the texts, Japanese live closely to the Mexican immigrants/​Chicanos. Highly illustrative for our research is the following storyline drawn from The Brick People, which narrates how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Japanese and Mexicans shared the same neighborhood. There is mutual understanding and they all help one another. We read the story of Malaquíes who just arrived from Mexico and bought some cows: “The milk was sold to Japanese families […]. The Japanese made Malaquíes a successful farmer. Matola, Ajimba, Matusaki, and Yokohira taught Malaquíes many farming techniques […]. In return, he shared his tools and his time in helping them transport their crops to the market.” (The Brick People 135) As all the members of the Japanese neighbor’s family are mentioned by their names, a personal bond is created based on solidarity and respect. But then, suddenly, in July of 1922, all the Japanese left without notice. Afterwards, “strange men entered the ranch and burned every house that the Japanese had occupied.” (The Brick People 136) These events have to be situated within the historical context of the interwar period. Malaquíes’s family is scared that this may happen to them too but then his wife, Lorenza, says: “It’s because they are Japanese and we are Mexicans. If we were black, it would be worse.” (The Brick People 136) Except for the Anglos, all the other ethnic groups are discriminated against, at times for historical reasons, but the ethnic groups seem to draw borders between themselves while continuously crossing these same borders. Indians The issue of problematic borders between ethnic groups can best be clarified via the analysis of the representation of Indians with regard to the Chicanos/​ Mexicans: they hardly communicate because they do not understand one another, although they share blood ties and have been living on the same ground for ages. In Reto en el Paraíso (1983), there is a short fragment in which four

198 

Lanslots and Van Hecke

men are walking into the mountain:  two Chicanos—​Antonio Coronel and Juan Padilla—​and two Indians. Quite significantly the latter are not named, which means we don’t get to know them as individuals. Suddenly, the group is watched by “eyes,” apparently the eyes of all kinds of animals—​they are on the “ground of the ancestors.” Moreover, the men themselves have the “eyes of an owl” and the “ears of a deer.” One of the Indians climbs a tree “to talk to the stars” to help them find the way back. As Coronel “accepts the word of the Indian” (Reto en el Paraíso 48–​49), there is a certain level of trust between both. Despite the apparent distance and the tendency towards hierarchical interrelations, Morales emphasizes how Indian culture is always present underneath, and even if there are no more Indians in most parts of the region, their culture survives through myths and legends. The foundational myth of Aztlán, which is recurrent in Chicano literature, is mentioned in many contexts, as for instance in River of Angels. (Prologue viii) Another Indian legend, which survives the course of history, is that about the Indian man whose wife and five children were murdered. The old man retreated to a tree and came out of it every night. (Little Nation 85–​86) In the passages which refer to Indian legends, the culture of the natives is intrinsically linked to nature. In the previous example, the man and the tree become one, but the relation between natives and nature is more prominent in River of Angels, in which one of the protagonists, Abelardo Ríos, a “Mexican-​Indian” (5), has an excellent knowledge of the river. He “consider[s]‌himself a member of the Indian population.” (River of Angels—​Part one 8) Toypurina, Abelardo’s wife, fully understands the spirit river predicting its tidings. Hence her association with the “River Mother.” (River of Angels—​Part two 77) In addition, Toypurina seems to incarnate the history and the heritage of the native Americans (“She had thousands of human souls attached to her”, River of Angels—​Part two 63), which makes her hard to label. A police officer, for instance, refers to her as “a ‘witch’, an ‘Indian hag’ and a ‘Mexican healer.’ ” (River of Angels—​Part two 77) Morales further describes how Indians, in general, are treated as outcasts and are confined to the periphery, a sign of the deterritorialization of previous settlements as well as of centrifugal forces within L.A. Chinese The geohistory of the Chicanos is also closely related to that of the Chinese migrants in the sense that both share a history of labor exploitation within the same setting, twisting borders and boundaries between them. In The Brick People, Mexican workers at Simons discover a burial ground with thousands of cadavers while digging a clay pit. First, they think the cadavers are Indians, but then they see “mummified bodies, clothed in Chinese garments with hair and

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California

199

beards arranged in the Chinese tradition.”4 (The Brick People 18) The owner of the brick factory, Joseph Simons “understood about the land being sacred burial ground for the Indians, but why hundreds, perhaps thousands of Chinese were buried there was beyond his comprehension.” The reader gains insight via a long flash back to the massacre, which starts as follows: “The blood had flowed from a feud between two Chinese fraternal organizations. The battle had resulted from a forbidden love affair between two young people whose parents belonged to rival Tongs.” (The Brick People 18) At the end of that particular story, the narrator, who remains anonymous, gives his opinion on the events in a very critical tone:  “In spite of the unimaginable crimes that occurred, little punishment followed. The City of Los Angeles had shown little concern for the Chinese even at the most brutal moments during the massacre.” (The Brick People 23) Morales “exhumes” a forgotten part of history stressing the deterritorialization of the Chinese minority by remembering their presence in Los Angeles: like many other migrants, the Chinese minority contributed substantially to the modernization and development of L.A., but it was then pushed away or confined to other parts of the city. River of Angels repeatedly illustrates the importance of Chinese migration in L.A. (River of Angels—​Part one 12–​13) The contribution of the Chinese migrants to the construction of the railroad had an impact on commerce. The appearance of Chinatown, as in many other big cities in the world, also changed the building of L.A. Chinese worked with outsiders and “had many non-​Chinese clients.” (River of Angels—​Part two 71) Morales demonstrates how, in daily life, the contact and exchange between different ethnic groups, Soja’s behavourial and transactional processes within a specific context (Soja 13–​17), are possible and common. French Surprisingly, French immigration has also been significant in the history of Southern California. In Morales’s works, this lesser known migration turns into a stunning story in “The Gardens of Versailles” (Little Nation 27–​41), in which Morales explores the limits of imagination and fantasy. “The Gardens of Versailles” tells the story of a couple of which the husband Beaugival claims “that he was French” (Little Nation 27), although he rather appears to be Mexican with a name like Plácido. He speaks French, though, and his wife is French—​ the story is interspersed with French quotes of verses, which is not the case for 4 The story is based on the historical Chinese massacre of 1871 in L.A. which started as a battle between two Chinese factions, but ended in riots where many Chinese migrants were killed by the mob.

200 

Lanslots and Van Hecke

all ethnic groups. However, Beaugival relates to the Chicanos who live in the same neighborhood, or more precisely the Mexicans that work at the Simons Bricks Factory. From the 1920s until the 1940s, Beaugival builds a beautiful mansion adding a new room each year: The Gringos called it ‘The Beaugival Estates,’ […]. Visitors would often come to see the so-​called hacienda for themselves. Beaugival would host small parties for special guests sent by the mayor to show off Montebello’s Spanish-​French heritage. […] As for us Mexicans from Simons, we were never given a second thought. We didn’t exist. We didn’t belong to Montebello’s proud Spanish-​French heritage. Little Nation 32–​33

This passage not only shows the hierarchical structure of L.A., but it also demonstrates how complex the relations are between ethnic and territorial identity. The Beaugival Ranch is first categorized as “Spanish-​French heritage,” which does not correspond to the historical context. Later on, the Ranch will be dismissed as a Mexican house, with no historical value: “It’s a house made of mud that any greaser could have built.” (Little Nation 37—​a “greaser” is a discriminatory term for Mexican) The ranch will be razed to the ground for the sake of industrialization, but the soil of the ranch will be left bare. The Beaugivals, who exemplify intercultural mixing, will disappear with their ranch:  “What happened to the Beaugivals themselves remains a mystery. Perhaps they had escaped the explosion and fled before the fire.” (Little Nation 39) It is suggested that at the end of last century “two skeletons lying in a close embrace … [on a Mexican blanket]” (Little Nation 41) are discovered in one of the subterranean rooms of the ranch. The story reminds us of other classical stories about inseparable lovers, but re-​elaborates the issue of changing attachment to places. In the context of our analysis, it is a striking example of communication between the Chicanos and the French: there is admiration, respect and solidarity, but only in an imaginary L.A., which will be wiped out in the story itself. Italian Conversely, the figure of the Italian migrant fully materializes the cityscape Morales strives for. Apparently ignorant of their own roots—​the Italian characters seem to barely recall the origins of their parents―, they slowly reach out to others, sharing spaces and knowledge with immigrants of different ethnic groups. In River of Angels, for instance, the architect Simon Rodia relates to Mexicans and African Americans translating these encounters into the buildings he designs. Thanks to his Mexican colleagues, Rodia overcomes his

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California

201

shyness about meeting other people. As the narrator closely observes: Rodia “shared a garden with several African American families, who, in turn, taught him Southern cooking. Simon enjoyed their company, their food and their families. The intricacy and the diverse colors in the structures he built mirrored his relationship with his neighbors, who, like him, came from a distant place in the world. […]” (River of Angels—​Part three 132–​3) The shared garden is a physical meeting ground facilitating all kind of exchanges between groups and individuals, as is the park donated by the Rincón family to the city of L.A. The park, with its plaza, named after the winery Consentido Hermano Rincón’s parents had started, epitomizes Morales’s utopian vision of the L.A. community as a multi-​ethnic cityscape favouring inter-​cultural mixing (Soja 297), and, by extension, of the U.S.  in general. Plazas symbolize “transnational geographies” (Soja 296) or places of interconnectedness and transcultural encounter.

Gaps and Bridges

From the previous analysis an important distinction has emerged: in many references to other ethnic groups, these are perceived and labeled as a group: African Americans, Jews, Japanese, Indians, Chinese, French and Italians. The reader feels the distance and often the fear. On the contrary, when Morales focuses on an individual character of another ethnic group, he or she is given a name. At this point, doors are opened and real contact becomes easier. This is the case of the Japanese family:  Matola, Ajimba, Matusaki, and Yokohira. Also the French neighbors, the Beaugivals, are known by their name, as are the Jew Mel and the Italian Simon Rodia. When people get a name, the “cityscape” with a specific geohistory, as defined by Soja, comes to life. In many fragments we also see how the co-​existence of different ethnic groups affects the use of language: bilingualism (Spanish/​English) has always been an essential aspect of Morales’s life and work and has strongly determined his view on the L.A. multicultural society. (Van Hecke) When he talks about his novel Reto en el paraíso, a bilingual experiment published in 1983, he situates his work within the larger context of a multilingual space: “Reto en el paraíso is a literary option that can function in a multilingual setting. Today, in Southern California approximately eighty languages are spoken. Each has a literature that should be recognized and developed. Multilingualism is a fact and the future.” (Morales in Gurpegui 20)  Morales goes beyond the problematic aspect of bilingualism, a sign of social transnationalism—​the belonging to two national identities, and gives us a panoramic view. In the prologue of his latest novel, he pictures a view of the future where he even goes against mainstream

202 

Lanslots and Van Hecke

politics and sees multilingualism as the only option for the United States: “For the United States, one language is no longer feasible, productive or wise. Multilingualism is the answer for the times to come.” (River of Angels—​Prologue ix–​x) His own work is a reflection of this multilingualism, as there are quotes in foreign languages, such as Spanish, French or Italian, the meaning of which can be deduced from the context. Morales initially published in Spanish but then switched to English to address a wider audience. Progressively, the portrayal of ethnic groups is phrased in English, the dominant language. From a narratological point of view, Morales’s novels start from a Chicano perspective, as the narrators (both internal and external) are usually Chicanos. Furthermore, many stories about other ethnic groups are secondary stories to the main narrative, of which the story about the Chinese massacre in The Brick People is highly illustrative. At first sight, these stories are autonomous, as in a mise-​en-​abyme, and they can be read independently. But a closer reading reveals that all these stories are interconnected: the ground where the thousands of Chinese corpses were found is the place where Simons decides to extend his factory and where Chicanos have to work. The ground seems to be cursed from the beginning. It is also a story of injustice and discrimination by the Anglos of a minority group. The historical and spatial multilayeredness of L.A., which is often dystopian, enables a utopian setting where cultures meet. Critics tend to talk about transculturalism, transnationalism and heterotopia as if they were new phenomena and also Morales, in 1996, uses the concept to describe modern/​contemporary L.A.: “Today urban population is concentrated from Los Angeles to San Diego/​Tijuana, two ‘supercores’ that continuously reach out toward each other filling the spaces between with a multitude of independent collective ‘topias’ evolving into heterotopia. Los Angeles and San Diego/​Tijuana together constitute a new urban model, a heterotopia.” (Morales in Gurpegui 23) But in fact, L.A. has been transcultural since its foundation, as Morales himself says in the story “Little Nation”: “The town of Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles was founded by mestizos, mulatos, Indians and a French albino on the Banks of the Porciúncula River in the year 1781.” (Little Nation 83) From a spatial point of view, the central plaza in the city becomes very symbolic for this kind of encounters: “Mexicans, blacks and Chinese had settled in the centre of the city around the old plaza.” (River of Angels—​Part one 14) But also the bridge appears as a metaphor for cultural encounters as it becomes “neutral territory, where all races, religions and ethnicities converged because of the economic necessity of crossing over the river quickly.” (River of Angels—​Part one 14) In this paper, we have analyzed the trialectics of the L.A. ‘cityspace’ (Soja) and of its inhabitants, the tension between real, imagined and a third space, as represented by Morales—​who depicts the multiple

Bridging the Gaps in Southern California

203

interrelations which connect ethnic groups and, as we have discovered, social classes—​in its spatial, conceptual and literary dimensions. Actually, we sense that Morales’ ultimate dream is one of a society where transcultural and transnational communication must and can be possible, as is described in the following passage of a fictitious but cosmopolitan barrio: From the Los Angeles basin, Barrio Margarito always glowed with enchantment. […] Although known as a Mexican barrio, an international, interracial and intercultural flavor permeated life in Barrio Margarito. The barrio was a boiling pot of races, each respecting others and living in dignity. There were Mexicans, Blacks, Arabs, Jews, Indians, Asians, native Americans, and gypsies who lived in this magic place above Los Angeles. […]. Barrio Margarito was a circus which never failed to amaze, never stopped to rest. The Brick People 187–​188

Morales’s works of fiction sculpt a “new form of lived space, […] open to a multiplicity of interpretative approaches” (Soja 251), in which real and imagined space come together in a new, “third space.” (Soja 10–​12) Within his historical fiction, Morales is an inventor and narrator of stories, creating fantasies (like that of the Mexican-​French couple in “The Gardens of Versailles”) and re-​inventing old legends (like that of the massacre of the Chinese in The Brick People, or the many Indian legends). The complex relationship between history and fiction can be summarized by the following quote: “Fantasy is reality, and reality is fantasy in Southern California. These entities represent the polymorphous ‘other’ and collectively, dynamically, and simultaneously contribute to the alluring sense of strangeness.” (Morales in Gurpegui 26) Paradoxically, Morales seeks rapprochement through emphasizing otherness and a sense of strangeness. By doing so, transcultural and transnational gaps can be bridged. Works Cited Castillo, Pedro G. and Antonio Ríos Bustamante. México en Los Ángeles. Una historia social y cultural, 1781–​1985. México: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1989. Gurpegui, José Antonio. Alejandro Morales: Fiction Past, Present, Future Perfect, Arizona: Bilingual Review/​Press, 1996. Knowles, Sam. Travel Writing and the Transnational Author. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Lanslots, Inge and An Van Hecke. The Brick People by Alejandro Morales, Novel and Documentary:  A story of Intercultural (Mis)Communication. Paper presented at

204 

Lanslots and Van Hecke

International Colloquium Interculturalité/​Interculturality, Antwerp, 2015 (“The Brick People by Alejandro Morales, Novel and Documentary: A story of Intercultural (Mis)Communication Localization and Interculturality.” The Journal of Internationalization and Localization. 3.2 (2016): 182–195). Lie, Nadia, Silvana Mandolessi and Dagmar Vandebosch. El juego con los estereotipos. La redefinición de la identidad hispánica en la literatura y el cine postnacionales. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2012. Mancha, Luis. Inner Borderlines; Visions of America through the eyes of Alejandro Morales. España: octv Producciones, 2014. Morales, Alejandro. Reto en el paraíso. (1983) México: Grijalbo, 1992. Morales, Alejandro. The Brick People. (1988) Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press, 1992. Morales, Alejandro. The Captain of All These Men of Death. (1988) Arizona: Bilingual Press/​Editorial Bilingüe, 2008. Morales, Alejandro. River of Angels. Houston Texas: Arte Público Press, University of Houston, 2014. Morales, Alejandro. Little Nation & Other Stories. Translated by Adam Spires, Houston, Texas: Arte Público Press, 2014. Rosales, Jesús. La narrativa de Alejandro Morales: encuentro, historia y compromiso social. New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Soja, Edward. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2000. Spires, Adam. “Alejandro Morales: Writing Chicano Space.” Alejandro Morales, Little Nation & Other Stories. Translated by Adam Spires, Houston, Texas:  Arte Público Press, 2014. vii–​xxv. Van Hecke, An. “Translation in heterotopia: Alejandro Morales’s novel ‘Waiting to Happen.’” La traduction dans les cultures plurilingues. Francis Mus and Karen Vandemeulebroucke (eds.). Arras: Artois Presses Université, 2011. 211–​222. Vertovec, Steven. “Conceiving and researching transnationalism.” Ethnic and Racial Studies. 22.2 (1999): 447–​462.

Chapter 14

“I move, therefore I am”

Carlos Fuentes’s Transnational Mexicanness Reindert Dhondt For approximately the past twenty years, Latin American culture has often been addressed from an explicitly “postnational” perspective. This “postnational turn” in the humanities can be attributed to the erosion of the nation-​ state, which is in turn the result of the increasingly intense communications and interdependence between the various regions of the world, known as “globalisation” (Castany-​Prado 2007:  13; Vertovec 2009:  54). Generally speaking, these studies point out that the concept of nation has ceased to be the principal reference in political, economic or identity discourse. Heavily inspired by the writings of Jürgen Habermas, Mexican sociologist Roger Bartra refers in this regard to a “post-​Mexican condition”, stemming from the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) and the crisis of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri) rule in the 1990s, which he believed would pave the way for a popular democratic renewal. In his 1991 article entitled “La venganza de La Malinche: hacia una identidad postnacional”, Bartra warns of a “fierce nationalist unification” that smothered Mexico’s multi-​coloured society and legitimized authoritarianism, stating that “[…] when I point out the need to overcome cultural unease, I am not proposing as a cure an integration to the Anglo-​American world parallel to the economic agreements on free trade with the United States and Canada.” (2002: 63) Bartra deconstructs nostalgic nationalist myths that underlie Mexican post-​revolutionary culture, unsettling classical essentialist representations of mexicanidad as a static “cage of melancholy”. According to Bartra, the challenge to build a new “postnational” identity is inextricably interwoven with the need to overcome political authoritarianism and centralising homogenization, dismissing thus the national as something static, provincial and encumbering: “[…] we are faced with the problem of overcoming nationalist pride to build a postnational identity based on the multicultural and democratic forms of a civic life that forms part of the Western world.” (64) More recently, usage of the term “postnationalism” has increased considerably in studies of Latin American literature and culture. In their introduction to the collective volume New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-​National Literatures and the Canon (2014), Timothy R. Robbins and

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_016

206 Dhondt José Eduardo González refer to the members of the Crack and McOndo movements as “postnationalists”, as their work transmits a “de-​territorialised” sense of identity associated more with personal and global concerns than the idea of nation (Robbins & González 3). In a decade in which concerns about national identity receded as neoliberal optimism gained the upper hand, the writers of McOndo and Crack were seen as advocates of globalization. Whereas the Boom broke with realist novels of social denunciation, but all the same kept up a political (commonly leftist) commitment, Jorge Volpi and his generation avoided social commentary and an explicit preoccupation with a shared cultural past and the search for a Latin American identity. The position taken by current-​day “postnationalist” writers extends far beyond the cosmopolitan critique of authors such as Jorge Luis Borges or the nineteenth-​century Modernists, who produced fiction that has often been classified as “extraterritorial” (cf. Guerrero 173). In contrast, the so-​called “postnational generation” does not aspire to question or extend the thematic boundaries of national literature as Borges and Darío aimed to do, but instead opt to ignore these boundaries completely. Indeed, the Crack generation relegates to a second plane the search for an identity in essentialist terms and the construction of an imaginary national community that sustains much of Mexican―and by extension Latin American―“highbrow” literature. In his Diccionario del Crack (2004), Pedro Ángel Palou proposed a definition of “nationalism” symptomatic of the unease the term provoked among the end-​of-​the-​century generation: “Mal entendido patrioterismo. En estética: esterilidad. Regresión anal, búsqueda de un origen imposible. Toda nación es una mezcla, un potlach, una maraña. No hay identidad, como no hay yo. El yo es los otros. La nación en singular no existe.” (202) [“Erroneously understood chauvinism. In aesthetics:  sterility. Regression in time and the quest for an impossible origin. All nations are a mix, a potlatch, a tangled mess. There is no identity, as there is no self. The self belongs to others. Nation in the singular does not exist.”1] It is worth noting that the works of the “posnationalistas” reveal both the “globalisation of the novel” and “the novelisation of the global” (Siskind 27). In other words, to a certain extent their works illustrate the globalisation of the literary market that drives authors to presuppose an implied reader who does not subscribe to a particular culture―consider the Alfaguara Global project or the literary blog El Boomeran(g)―and at the same time they are steeped in images of a globalised culture, most frequently characterised by neoliberal, mass-​media and North American traits, which challenge a traditional oppositional cultural discourse that confronts

1 All translations from Spanish are mine.

I Move, Therefore I Am

207

the Hispanic and the Anglo-​Saxon. Their fiction integrates elements from US pop culture and global youth culture. The location of culture is no longer a mythical, archetypal town that symbolizes Latin America’s age-​long isolation disrupted by the forces of Anglo-​European modernity, but the non-​place of the shopping mall and a McDonald’s restaurant as symbol of a modernization that is synonymous with Americanization. Carlos Fuentes’s narrative works have repeatedly revealed themselves to be an ideal place for postnational thought: despite its deep roots in Mexican culture and its capacity to establish an explicit dialogue with the discourse on Mexican national character, particularly with Octavio Paz’s El laberinto de la soledad (1950), Fuentes’s work clearly transcends the particular features of a national culture. The fantastic, cosmopolitan and non-​committed or “irresponsible” nature of his first book of short stories entitled Los días enmascarados (1954) earned him a reproach for a blatantly “Proust-​like” style. According to his critics in the 1950s, the young Fuentes “proust-​ituted” himself in his attempts to overcome a retrograde chauvinism that dominated Mexican cultural life in the 1950s. In the same vein, his bi-​cultural condition was also criticised in the diatribe-​review entitled “The Guerrilla Dandy” published in the late 1980s, in which the Mexican historian Enrique Krauze referred to Fuentes as “a foreigner in his own country” (28), a traitor whose works reflect an artificial and false Mexicanness.2 Moreover, Krauze blames Fuentes for yielding to the taste of foreign readerships and Hollywood stereotypes: “The key to Fuentes is not in Mexico; it is in Hollywood.” (28) The relevance of postnational and hemispheric studies is particularly evident in the comparative study After the Nation. Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon (2014), in which Pedro García-​Caro analyses the way the two authors subvert and criticise the national discourse and images of both cultural spheres that are becoming increasingly intertwined. In turn, Heike 2 In “De Quetzalcóatl a Pepsicóatl” in Tiempo mexicano (1971), Fuentes defines Mexican identity as a series of superposed masks. The obsidian mirror of Tezcatlipoca does no longer reflect an indigenous deity, but shows a hybrid image: “Quetzalcóatl se fue para siempre y sólo regresó disfrazado de conquistador español o de príncipe austriaco. ¿Debemos por ello, enajenarnos a Pepsicóatl?” (1971: 34) [Quetzalcóatl went away for ever and only came back disguised as a Spanish conquistador or an Austrian prince. Do we have to alienate ourselves therefore from Pepsicóatl? (my translation)] This essay cannot only be understood as a commentary about the Mexican identity in general terms, but also as a reflection on the identity of the author himself. The play of masks and the distance from which Fuentes was able to examine Mexican reality is precisely the reason why he has been criticized so heavily by various authors, from Krauze and other PRI-​supporting “organic” intellectuals to Mexican border writers, who did not recognize themselves in the way Fuentes portrayed the US-​Mexican border culture.

208 Dhondt Scharm, in “No(n)-​Place like Home: Postnational Narrative in Carlos Fuentes’s Gringo viejo” (2012), considers how the concept of nation is de-​essentialised in a novel that offers an outside perspective on the Mexican Revolution, focusing particularly on the relationship between postmodern thought, on the one hand, and Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of “liquid modernity” or the fluid experience of selves in societies characterized by migratory flows and new communication technologies, on the other. Fuentes’s posthumous novel Aquiles o El guerrillero y el asesino (2016) about the Colombian M-​19 guerrillero Carlos Pizarro has been described by Julio Ortega as a novel about “la paradoja de lo postnacional sin nación” (preface, 25), but since the Mexican narrator is clearly an alter ego of Fuentes, who discusses Mexican nationalism and cultural differences between Colombia and Mexico, a transnational reading is at least equally productive. At first sight postnationalism appears to be a sort of toolbox providing an insight into Fuentes’s literary critique, characterised by a radically cosmopolitan and autonomist stance. Fuentes was not only particularly skillful in introducing literary innovations into the Mexican context, from Anglo-​Saxon modernist techniques and French nouveau roman templates in La muerte de Artemio Cruz (1962) to a postmodern play with doubles and substitutions in Cristóbal Nonato (1985), he was also surprisingly quick to embrace new theories from the humanities in his literary essays and manifestoes, from the influence of Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses in La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969) to the assimilation of Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnival theory and concepts of the dialogic and the chronotope in Myself with Others (1988) and Valiente mundo Nuevo (1990). However, whilst it is true that Fuentes systematically rejected rigid nationalist formulas in his fiction, Mexico or Latin America continues to represent the background for several of his writings on literature. Furthermore, whilst Robbins and González highlight “a fragile production of locality” (6) and the apolitical or individualist nature of the “postnationalists” as their defining features, no one can fairly deny that Fuentes’s work is devoid of a political and collective dimension. Indeed, even his fictional works are dotted with a discourse more commonly associated with journalism and essays, in which Fuentes seems to resort to various types of discursive utterances tailored specifically to his target audience, be it North American, European or Latin American (cf. Van Delden 2009: 160sq.). From the late 1970s onwards, Fuentes replaced a continental or pan-​Latin American consciousness that clearly permeates La nueva novela hispanoamericana (1969)―which by the way already includes a chapter entitled “Juan Goytisolo: la lengua común”, as he considered Señas de identidad to be “el encuentro de la novela española con la que se escribe en Hispanoamérica” (78) [“a meeting between the Spanish novel and that written in Latin America”] ―for

I Move, Therefore I Am

209

an increasingly transatlantic and even global concept. His reflection on the World Republic of Letters culminates in Geografía de la novela (1993), a volume of essays in which he draws a new literary map by claiming that the old Eurocentrism has given way to a polycentrism that fulfils Goethe’s prophecy regarding world literature. Creating a dialogue with classic texts such as Borges’s “El escritor argentino y la tradición” (1951), Fuentes adopts a universalist stance. Whereas for Borges the tradition of Argentina and, by extension, that of all countries of recent settlement is the whole of Western culture, Fuentes argues that even European literature has acquired a peripheral character due to the absence of any type of centre. Nevertheless, this discourse celebrating the eccentric does not imply that all things national are no longer relevant, but rather that they have become profoundly de-​centred. It is therefore not surprising that the Crack generation defended Fuentes for moving away from any nationalist claims and decentralising the geography of the novel. In fact, the Crack group mostly directed their criticism against post-​Boom writers and the commercialized version of magical realism (which is referred to as literatura light), but they consider Fuentes as a kind of father figure. In turn, Fuentes never resisted an opportunity to draw attention to the parallels between his writings and those of the Crack. In his last pronouncement on the Latin American novel, Fuentes clearly identifies himself with the thematic orientation of the Crack generation, whose national reception and international recognition he interpreted as the end of a dogmatic period in Mexican literature: “Si Padilla, Volpi, Palou, Urroz o Rivera Garza hubiesen publicado sus novelas en, digamos, 1932, los cinco habrían sido llevados a la cima de la pirámide de Teotihuacan para arrancarles el corazón y arrojárselos a las jaurías nacionalistas, acusados de afrancesados, malinchistas, cosmopolitas, tránsfugas de la realidad y enemigos de la Revolución.” (2011: 361) [“If Padilla, Volpi, Palou, Urroz or Rivera Garza had published their novels in, say, 1932, all five would have been taken to the top of the Teotihuacan pyramids where their hearts would have been ripped out and thrown to the nationalist packs, amidst accusations of their being pro-​French, Malinche-​style traitors, cosmopolitan, blind to reality and enemies of the Revolution.”] Yet whilst according to Jorge Volpi “Latin American literature no longer exists”3 (despite the recent emergence of “narconovelas” as the characteristic and 3 Cf. “Seamos radicales: la literatura latinoamericana ya no existe. Preciso: existen cientos o miles de escritores latinoamericanos o, mejor dicho, cientos o miles de escritores chilenos, hondureños, dominicanos, venezolanos, etcétera […] La idea de una literatura nacional, dotada con particularidades típicas e irrepetibles, ajenas por completo a las demás, es un anacrónico invento del siglo xix.” (Volpi 2009: 164–​165)

210 Dhondt dominant genre of Latin American literary production that replaced both magical realism and the dictator novel), Fuentes’s final work of literary criticism is entitled La gran novela latinoamericana (2011), which includes an essay on Machado de Assis. Instead of focusing on the novelty of the Boom’s works and their universal status, as he did in La nueva novela hispanoamericana, Fuentes underscores the cultural continuity with the imaginary of the Spanish conquest. Similarly, the concept of the “territory of La Mancha”, provides Fuentes with grounds to criticise the provincialism and cultural “Balkanisation” of Latin America, doing away with the myth of a pure identity, which eventually becomes “tainted” (manchada) by Cervantine discourse, characterized by a constitutive uncertainty and polyphony. However, at the same time, Fuentes builds up a new linguistic-​ cultural community, a literary commonwealth characterised by the use of the Spanish language and mestizaje, and in which several writers find a space for their own re-​territorialisation. In other words, Fuentes insists on moving beyond the concept of national literature, whilst at the same time encouraging integration into a community that is defined by its very language (see Pohl 27). We therefore argue that a transnational approach is more effective in describing these processes of uprooting and re-​rooting. The postnational approach often fails to consider the interrelation between national and other levels of cultural production (regional, global). In this sense, transnationalism has been posited as “a critical mode of postnationalism” (Castle 256) or a corrective measure against postnationalism (Lie 2016: 328). The position adopted by transnational studies can therefore be summed up as follows: “Nations are not elided in this transnational perspective but they are symbolically and politically recast. They are imagined differently as inherently and externally relational, embedded and contextualized, always implicated in and partaking of larger processes and changes” (Assman quoted in Lie 2016: 328). In other words, national considerations are not ruled out as irrelevant, but instead are called into question, problematizing thus the idea of nation in its homogenizing nineteenth-​century formulation instead of merely dismissing it. As an example, several of the short stories included in Carlos Fuentes’ 1995 novel La frontera de cristal point to the fact that national stereotypes cannot be undone, but instead become even more accentuated in border areas. In addition to the persistence of these stereotyped images, linguistic barriers also hinder “transnational flows” (Appadurai 1996) in a number of stories that integrate La frontera de cristal (1995). Also, by recasting the figure of La Malinche in the new transnational context of the free trade industries of the US-​Mexican border in the story “Malintzin de las maquilas”, Fuentes joins the list of chicano writers who revamp a symbol of Mexican national identity by replacing the indigenous or Spanish component with a North American one.

I Move, Therefore I Am

211

However, the rejection of a rigid cultural and literary nationalism has not prevented Fuentes from advocating a vision of Mexican identity as seen from the two-​fold perspective of the Anglo-​Saxon Protestant world on the one hand, and the Latin American Catholic world on the other, particularly in his early political journalism. In the extended article entitled “El imperialismo y los países latinoamericanos”, dated 28 May 1962 and which was first published in the Mexican magazine ¡Siempre! and reproduced the same year in the Cuban daily Revolución, Fuentes directly addresses the “North American friends”, without disqualifying the rhetoric of the Cold War. The immediate context of the Bay of Pigs invasion (1961), Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress initiative and―in the words of Fuentes himself―“the violation of inter-​American law in Punta del Este”, led Fuentes to adopt a Latin Americanist discourse in defence of a territory that could be called “ours”, in the manner of José Martí’s Nuestra América: Pensamos lo mismo que Simón Bolívar hace 150 años: ‘Los Estados Unidos parecen destinados por la Providencia para plagarnos de males en nombre de la libertad.’ […] Ya conocemos el camino. Abran bien los ojos. Hoy es Cuba. Mañana … Abran bien los ojos. Serán vencidos los ejércitos del privilegio. Serán derrumbadas las estructuras viejas. Serán recuperadas las tierras, las minas, las empresas. […] Somos distintos de ustedes. Nuestros problemas no son los de ustedes. Tenemos que tomar decisiones y caminos distintos a los que ustedes creen universalmente válidos. No sean provincianos. Entiendan la diversidad del mundo. […] (1962: 23–​24) [“We are of the opinion expressed by Simón Bolívar 150 years ago: ‘The United States seems destined by Providence to plague us with miseries in the name of Liberty.’ […] We know the way. Open your eyes wide. Today it is Cuba. Tomorrow … Open your eyes wide. The armies of privilege will be vanquished. The old structures will be torn down. The lands, the mines, the businesses will all be recovered […] We are different from you. Our problems are not yours. We have to take different decisions and roads from those you believe to be universally valid. Do not be provincial. Understand the diversity of the world. […]” Worthy of note is the fact that the oppositional discourse Fuentes employs does not exclude a defence of diversity. Nevertheless, it cannot yet be classified as a celebration of internal plurality, but rather as an anti-​colonial discourse aimed at safeguarding identity which appeals to a sense of Latin American solidarity in the light of US imperialism. Although it is true that Fuentes deconstructs the homogeneity of the Mexican national identity through a play

212 Dhondt on Mexican stereotypes that can be observed in several of his fictions, the discourse aimed at differentiation from the usa can still be sensed in many of his articles and essays. Indeed, in 1988, Fuentes included the following in his introduction to the English translation of Ariel (1990), the landmark essay by José Enrique Rodó, which promoted a new vision of Latin American culture, calling for a reflection on the spiritual qualities of “Latinity” in opposition to “Nordomania”, the attraction to the technological progress and growing wealth of the usa: […] if, as I believe, Latin America has now achieved an identity, then it must pass the test of living with alternativity. You can cast this in political and economic terms, if you wish: we must pass from nationalism to interdependence, but interdependence is senseless without a basis in independence. […] On the cultural level, this means preserving your national or regional identity while testing it in the waters of alternativity. The Other defines our We. (18) In keeping with the continental perspective of the Boom, Fuentes joins the discourse on Latin American identity, clearly positioning himself as an “Arielist”. He advocates “a cosmopolitanism which conciliates national identity and universal values of wholeness” (18), conceiving identity as a relational concept (alternativity), which implies acknowledgement of otherness. This respect for plurality is also evident in his ongoing defence of what could be termed “civic nationalism” with regards to Mexico: Fuentes does not consider national identity to be based on ethnic criteria, but rather on a series of rights and obligations shared by all citizens. Hence his insistence on civil society as a means of bridging the chasm between the “legal nation” and the “real nation”, by which he refers to the gap between the letter of the law and the everyday practices that unfold in legal contexts, which traces back to the colonial formula “la ley se acata, pero no se cumple” (“the law is complied with, but not implemented”). (cf. Van Delden 1998). In this sense, Habermas refers to a “constitutional patriotism” as a means of overcoming nationalist pride―contaminated by Nazi ideology―and constructing a postnational identity. Similarly, Fuentes proposes a discourse of mestizaje which is far more inclusive than the “monocultural” state-​centred discourse tracing back to the writings of José Vasconcelos, who portrays the mestizo as the quintessence of the Mexican nation. In contrast to the “mestizo nationalism” put forward by the post-​revolutionary Mexican State, Fuentes does not see mestizaje as a form of purification (Europeanisation) or a form of acculturation―a forcedly harmonious and homogenising synthesis―but rather in terms of hybridisation or transculturation.

I Move, Therefore I Am

213

In his work Valiente mundo nuevo (1990), Fuentes associates mestizaje with the concept of the hybrid in line with the thinking of Bakhtin (particularly his idea of polyphony or the dialogic interplay of various characters’ voices, without one eclipsing the other), as well as with several postmodern and postcolonial ideas. The talk entitled “Nationalisms” that Fuentes wrote for a seminar organized by the Mexican Secretariat of Social Development in 1993 also sheds considerable light in this respect: Cuanto aquí llevo dicho propone una cultura más bien centrífuga, más heterogénea que homogénea, más empeñada en recuperar diferencias que en imponer semejanzas, más cercana al ritmo de lo que está siendo, cambiando, inacabado: una cultura, como quisiera Rag de Dirag [sic; Jacques Derrida, RD], suelta, no fija, sin un solo centro, sino muchos, sin origen ni fin absolutos. Sí, una cultura con un sello fraternal al nuestro, mexicano, iberoamericano, latino, indio, negro y mestizo: hijos de imperios verticales, de teologías exigentes y de prohibiciones estériles, los latinoamericanos hemos hecho una cultura a contrapelo, heterodoxa frente a la ortodoxia, múltiple frente a la singularidad […] (1994: 55) [Everything I have said so far points to a rather centrifugal culture that is more heterogeneous than homogenous, more bent on recovering differences than imposing similarities, closer to the rhythm of that which is taking place, shifting and incomplete: a culture such as that proposed by Jacques Derrida, loose, not fixed, with multiple centres rather than a single one, with no origin or absolute purpose. Yes, a culture very close to our own, Mexican, Ibero-​American, Latin, Indian, black and mestizo:  the sons and daughters of vertical empires, of demanding theologies and useless prohibitions, we Latin Americans have built a culture against the grain, unorthodox rather than orthodox, choosing multiplicity over singularity.] Yet such an attitude does not prevent Fuentes―like Spanish philosophers such as Ramiro de Maeztu and Américo Castro―from understanding the Hispanic world as a product of mestizaje, putting forth an idea of hispanidad which, unlike the ideology of Franco’s regime, was clearly not based on ethnic or religious aspects. Paradoxically, his discourse of mestizaje does not imply a move away from the dichotomic construction of identity. In “La

214 Dhondt herida mexicana. México, nacionalismo e integración”, an editorial published in the magazine Este País in 1991, Fuentes claims that nationalisms are reprehensible, but at the same time he acknowledges that Mexican nationalism is essential to prevent the country from falling under the grip of its northern neighbour: […] Estados Unidos, que aunque participante primordial de la economía global, no deja por ello de ser un país nacionalista. ¿Se nos va a pedir que nosotros dejemos de serlo, mientras nuestro poderoso vecino incrementa su propio nacionalismo hasta un grado de peligrosidad que, por qué no, nosotros los mexicanos podemos ser los primeros en sufrir? El resultado de nuestra experiencia histórica ha sido una cultura contenida dentro de los límites de la nación, pero no por ello monolítica. Dentro de cada unidad nacional latinoamericana hemos dado cabida a policulturas indígenas, europeas, negras y sobre todo mestizas, mulatas. Pero fuera de los límites nacionales hemos estado íntimamente ligados a las culturas ibéricas y, por medio de ellas, a las del Mediterráneo. Ella ha bastado para relacionarse también con las otras culturas de este hemisferio―anglosajona, francesa, holandesa―y del resto del mundo, sin perder nuestra propia personalidad cultural. (1991: 13–​14) [[…] Despite playing a major role in the global economy, the United States remains a nationalist country. Are we to be asked to cease to be so, whilst the nationalism of our powerful neighbour continues to grow to such a dangerous extent that indeed, we Mexicans could be the first to suffer the consequences? The result of our historical experience is a culture contained within the limits of the nation, yet which is not necessarily monolithic. Each Latin American national unit has provided space for indigenous, European, black and above all mestizo and mulatto polycultures. Yet outside the national boundaries we have also held close ties with the Iberian and by extension Mediterranean cultures. This has in turn allowed for relations with the other cultures in this hemisphere—​Anglo-​Saxon, French, and Dutch—​and indeed with the rest of the world, without losing our own cultural personality.] Fuentes’s insistence on the polycultural nature of the Latin American nations is striking, particularly considering that he also employs a pan-​Hispanic discourse centred strongly on the cultural continuity with the Iberian Peninsula,

I Move, Therefore I Am

215

calling for a cultural “counter-​conquest” against the United States. What is more, Fuentes considers the cultural differences between the usa and Latin America to be so considerable that hybridization or mestizaje are impossible, even among the Latino communities in the usa. The end result is not―to use the metaphor employed by Samuel Huntington―an “Anglo-​Protestant tomato soup” to which immigrants add further ingredients in order to make it more flavoursome without altering its essential nature, but rather a salad bowl or potpourri―a metaphor for a multicultural society seen as a mosaic or an archipelago of different communities. In his prologue to the work entitled Americanos. Latino Life in the United States (1999), Fuentes favours a supranational discourse of cultural self-​assertion in opposition to the US host society. Once again the Hispanic and the Anglo-​Saxon are seen as immiscible elements: How many songs were sung to recall the history of the mestizo epic, from Murrieta in California to Pancho Villa in Chihuahua to Martin Fierro in the Pampas, dance bringing together all that makes the body beautiful, rhythmic, delighted to be of the world, in the world, the Indo-​Afro-​Iberian world where the tango is Andalusian and African, the Mexican corrido a descendent of the Castilian romancero, the soulful bolero a child of the Arab love-​call, the whole Caribbean a carnival of sounds and pleasures derived from all the traditions of the human voice and the human body, its passions, its pains, its longings, its rebellions. These are the hands that took up arms with Bolívar and Martí and Zapata, but also the hands that fashioned the perfect altar and the candy skull, the mural by Orozco and the anonymous graffiti in East L.A. (14) Fuentes frequently urges Latino emigrants not to strip themselves of their culture, replacing it with that of their host country, complying with the objectives of assimilationist policies. Yet however strongly Fuentes insists on mutant and inclusive identities, it clearly appears that mestizaje has its limits. This is the ambivalent discourse that Maarten van Delden termed “multicultural pan-​ Hispanism”, which clashes with the discourse that predominates in contemporary Latin American literature and which highlights the de-​territorialisation and de-​nationalisation of authors and their works (see Lie et al. 74–​75). A further indication of this multicultural pan-​Hispanism is the insistence on a cultural “counter-​conquest” that targets their northern neighbour, rather than the ancient mother country. This conception is also to be found in a carnivalesque passage in La frontera de cristal, in which a character praises the “chromosomal imperialism” carried out by Mexico in the usa through the mass emigration of workers. Also, this same idea is echoed in Fuentes’s highly ironic review of

216 Dhondt Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004) by political scientist Samuel Huntington: Only the Mexicans and the Hispanics, in general, are separatists. These people have conspired to create a separate Hispanic American nation, the soldiers of a re-​conquest of the territories lost in the Mexican-​American War of 1848. To speak a second (or a third or fourth language) is a sign of culture throughout the world excepting, it would seem, in the Monolingual Eden invented by Huntington. To establish the requirement of a second language in the US (as occurs in Mexico and in France) would eliminate the Satanic effects that Huntington attributes to the language of Cervantes. Hispanic speakers in the US do not form impenetrable nor aggressive groups. They adapt themselves rapidly to English and, at times, conserve the use of Spanish, thus, enriching the accepted multiethnic and multicultural character of the US. All in all, mono-​lingualism is a curable disease. (2004: 79–​80) As I have argued on an earlier occasion (Dhondt 2015a, 2015b), Fuentes’s baroque discourse works in a similar mode, allowing for the revindication of a prestigious cultural legacy and the hybrid nature of Latin American culture, the result of European aesthetics and an indigenous comprehensive vision of the world, simultaneously allowing Fuentes to distance himself from Anglo-​Saxon culture. Fuentes wrote numerous essays defending and promoting cultural difference. Instead of dispersing these differences, he seemed intent on multiplying them. Although it is true that he contributed to dismantling the idea of the nation as a culturally homogeneous society, his discourse continues to contain a clear degree of nationalism characterised by opposition to the United States. It can therefore be claimed that Fuentes’s pan-​Hispanic discourse contrasts with the notions of de-​territorialisation and de-​nationalisation of the Crack movement. His discourse is profoundly transnational, rather than postnational. Furthermore, Fuentes’s stance is more in keeping with the transnational paradigm, or even more so, with the notion of “multiterritorialism” posited by Ángel Esteban and Jesús Montoya: unlike the authors of the diaspora, far from being a de-​territorialised or, as Krauze claimed in his controversial review, a de-​ Mexicanised writer, Fuentes comes across as a tireless traveller or a nomad.4 Fuentes was indeed an inveterate globetrotter, an image which he strongly 4 In this respect I would like to quote an insightful passage from a personal letter written to Fuentes by the Peruvian critic José Miguel Oviedo on 2 August 1988: “Curioso que los defensores y cultores del haiku, el renga y el tantrismo, sean ahora como apóstoles de cierto

I Move, Therefore I Am

217

cultivated, as revealed in the documentary filmed by pbs entitled Crossing Borders: The Journey of Carlos Fuentes (1989) and his personal motto “I move, therefore I am.” (Talbot 23) But contrary to someone like Roberto Bolaño, in which several scholars have seen a prototype of a new kind of “global writer” (cf. Corral 2011; Pope 2011), Fuentes is not a homeless writer who preferred to feel out of place everywhere rather than belonging to a specific nation. In other words, his cosmopolitan stance does not keep him from acting like the spokesman of Mexican or Latin American culture. According to some more sociologically oriented scholars, the transnational nature of literature depends to a large extent on the conditions under which it is produced: “[Transnational] literatures are produced by writers who are generally more affluent, more mobile than populations regarded as diasporic, who may feel ‘at home’ in several locations rather than ‘exiled’ from home and who spend time travelling, and even living in two or more locations” (Ashcroft et al. 214). It is this definition that is often used in migration studies in order to refer to the new migrant subject who is not completely detached from his culture of origin, but who, because of the collapse of spatial barriers due to new means of transport and communication, lives in a space between his culture of origin and his culture of adoption, not just for the moment, but permanently. Like numerous Puerto Ricans, the inhabitants of “Manhatitlán,” and other communities of transnational citizens, Fuentes was constantly on the move, physically, culturally as well as linguistically. In this sense, Fuentes, who divided his time between London and Mexico City in the last two decades of his life, permanently fluctuating between two clearly differentiated cultures, was not apátrida, but profoundly transnational. Also, the delinking of locale or geographical setting in various novels does not automatically imply a de-​racination. In his narrative and essayistic work as well, Fuentes constantly celebrated all forms of cultural exchange and interconnectedness, without discarding the importance of the national level, as is illustrated in the way he harks back to an oppositional discourse when referring to nacionalismo barato, según el cual sólo hay un México, el de ellos. ¿No habíamos quedado en que la ficción es la ficción y que la imaginación era soberana? Y es grotesco que alguien que se llama Krauze te maltrate en una revista pro-​sionista por haber nacido en Panamá y estudiado en Washington:  es como si el Judío Errante se disfrazase de zapatista de feria.” (Carlos Fuentes Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library) [“It is strange that the defenders and cultivators of haiku, renga and tantra are now a kind of apostles for a cheap form of nationalism, whereby only one Mexico exists: theirs. Hadn’t we agreed that fiction is fiction and that the imagination is sovereign? It is grotesque that someone who goes by the name of Krauze should mistreat you in a pro-​Zionist magazine, simply for having been born in Panama and studied in Washington: it is as if the Wandering Jew had suddenly disguised himself as a performing Zapatista”]

218 Dhondt the increased importance of the Hispanics in the United States. The ambiguity of his discourse, relying on an anti-​Americanist and anti-​imperialist stance, a critique of a narrow nationalism and the construction of a pan-​Hispanic identity, shows that he was able to transcend the prevailing nationalism-​versus-​ cosmopolitanism or regionalism-​versus-​universalism dichotomy by focusing on a more inclusive and pluralized conception of Mexicanness that does not legitimize authoritarian rule, as maintained by Roger Bartra in his appraisal of the post-​Mexican condition, precisely because it was constructed in a transnational way as a series of intersecting and moving identities. Works Cited Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Studies. The Key Concepts. London/​New York: Routledge, 2007. Bartra, Roger. “The Malinche’s Revenge: Toward a Postnational Identity.” Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-​Mexican Condition. Trans. Mark Alan Healey. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. 61–​64. (originally published as “La venganza de la Malinche: hacia una identidad postnacional.” Este País 1 (April 1991): 17–​19). Castany Prado, Bernat. Literatura posnacional. Murcia: Ediciones de la Universidad de Murcía, 2007. Castle, Gregory. The Literary Theory Handbook. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013. Corral, Wilfrido H. Bolaño traducido: nueva literatura mundial. Madrid: Ediciones Escalera, 2011. Dhondt, Reindert. Carlos Fuentes y el pensamiento barroco. Madrid/​Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/​Vervuert, 2015a. Dhondt, Reindert. “Carlos Fuentes between Baroque and Modernity: A Reading of his Essays.” The Reptant Eagle: Essays on Carlos Fuentes and the Art of the Novel. Ed. R ­ oberto Cantú. Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015b. 256–​270. Esteban, Ángel, and Jesús Montoya Juárez. “¿Desterritorializados o multiterritorializados?: la narrativa hispanoamericana en el siglo XXI.” Literatura más allá de la nación. De lo centrípeto y lo centrífugo en la narrativa hispanoamericana del siglo XXI. Ed. Francisca Noguerol Jiménez et al. Madrid/​Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/​ Vervuert, 2011. 7–​13. Fuentes, Carlos. “El argumento de América Latina:  Palabras a los norteamericanos.” ¡Siempre! (25 April 1962): 20–​25. Fuentes, Carlos. La nueva novela hispanoamericana. México:  Joaquín Mortiz, 1980 [1969].

I Move, Therefore I Am

219

Fuentes, Carlos. Tiempo mexicano. México: Joaquín Mortiz, 1971. Fuentes, Carlos. Preface. Ariel. Por José Enrique Rodó. Trad. Margaret Sayers Peden. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988. 13–​28. Fuentes, Carlos. Valiente mundo nuevo. Épica, utopía y mito en la novela hispanoamericana. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990. Fuentes, Carlos. “Nacionalismo e integración.” Este País 1 (April 1991): 10–​15. Fuentes, Carlos. “Una nueva legalidad para una nueva realidad.” Libertad y justicia en las sociedades modernas. Ed. Miguel Ángel Sánchez de Armas. México, D.F.: Miguel Ángel Porrúa, 1994. 41–​60. Fuentes, Carlos. La frontera de cristal. Una novela en nueve cuentos. Madrid: Alfaguara, 1996. Fuentes, Carlos. “Introduction.” Americanos: Latino Life in the United States /​La vida Latina en los Estados Unidos. Por Edward James Olmos, Lea Ybarra, y Manuel Monterrey. Boston/​New York/​London: Little, Brown and Company. 1999. 12–​15. Fuentes, Carlos. “Huntington and the Mask of Racism.” New Perspectives Quarterly 21.2 (March 2004). 77–​81. Fuentes, Carlos. Aquiles o El guerrillero y el asesino. Ciudad de México/​Barcelona: Fondo de Cultura Económica/​Alfaguara, 2016. García-​Caro, Pedro. After the Nation. Postnational Satire in the Works of Carlos Fuentes and Thomas Pynchon. Evanston: Nortwestern University Press, 2014. Guerrero, Gustavo. “Migration, nation et globalization en Amérique Latine.” Migration and Exile: Charting New Literary and Artistic Territories. Ed. Ada Sevin. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. 169–​176. Krauze, Enrique. “The Guerrilla Dandy.” The New Republic (27 June 1988): 28–​38. Lie, Nadia (2016). “Transnacional.” Viagens, deslocamentos, espaços: conceitos críticos. Ed. Stelamaris Coser. Vitória, ES: edufes. 326–​335. Lie, Nadia, Silvana Mandolessi, and Dagmar Vandebosch. “The Transnational in Hispanic Studies.” A World History of Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen. Brussels: Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2012. 71–​79. Palou, Pedro Ángel. “Pequeño diccionario del Crack.” Crack. Instrucciones de uso. Ed. Chávez Castañeda, Ricardo et al. México: Mondadori, 2004. 193–​205. Pohl, Burkhard. “Estrategias transnacionales en el mercado del libro (1990–​2010).” Aleph 25 (2012: “Escritores hispanoamericanos en España”). 13–​34. Pope, Randolph. “A Writer for a Globalized Age:  Roberto Bolaño and 2666.” Old Margins and New Centers: The European Literary Heritage in an Age of Globalization. Eds. Marc Maufort and Caroline De Wagter. Brussels/​New York: Peter Lang, 2011.157–​166 Robbins, Timothy R., and José Eduardo González, eds. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative:  Post-​National Literatures and the Canon. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

220 Dhondt Scharm, Heike. “No(n)-​Place like Home:  Postnational Narrative in Carlos Fuentes’ Gringo viejo.” INTI: Revista de literatura hispánica 75.1 (2012): 64–​75. Siskind, Mariano. Cosmopolitan Desires. Global Modernity and World Literature in Latin America. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2014. Talbot, Stephen. “On The Run with Carlos Fuentes.” Mother Jones 23.9 (November 1988): 20–​25. van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville: Vanderbilt Unversity Press, 1998. van Delden, Maarten, and Yvon Grenier. Gunshots at the Fiesta. Literature and Politics in Latin America. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. Abingdon/​New York: Routledge, 2009. Volpi, Jorge. El insomnio de Bolívar. Cuatro consideraciones intempestivas sobre América Latina en el siglo XXI. Barcelona: Debate, 2009.

Chapter 15

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond

Spatial Imaginations of Transnationality in Two Anthologies of Young Latin American Writers Liesbeth François The reformulation of the sense of Latin America and its nations as cultural, geographical and literary units in the present-​day context of accelerated globalization is an omnipresent topic in critical discourse. According to Francisca Noguerol (2008), the most appropriate concept to describe the contemporary narrative production in Latin America is its “extraterritoriality”, its moving away from the framework of the nation-​state ― although she also notes that there exists a large tradition of cultural hybridization in the literatures of the continent. As Nadia Lie, Silvana Mandolessi and Dagmar Vandebosch note in their text “The Transnational in Hispanic Studies” (2011), various literary discourses are indeed characterized by this opening-​ up of their reflections on Hispanic identity through their inclusion of issues such as displacement and new forms of hybridity, but at the same time they often tend to ambiguously promote a more essentialist discourse on the uniqueness of this identity. (75) What these discussions have in common is, of course, the question as to how the transnational networks in which the continent is immersed influence Latin American nations and the notion of “Latin America” itself. I would like to address this problem through the discussion of the spatial imaginaries proposed in two emblematic anthologies of young writers, one from 1996 and the other from 2008, that enter explicitly into discussion with each other as to the image of Latin America that they intend to create. In 1996, Chilean writers Alberto Fuguet and Sergio Gómez launched their polemical and much-​debated anthology McOndo as a satirical reaction to what they perceived as a certain stereotype, based on demands of international publishing houses, of the kind of fictional worlds Latin American literature should represent. This collection includes seventeen short stories written by young authors (born after 1959, the year of the triumph of the Cuban Revolution) from different Latin American countries and from Spain. The prologue of this collection ― the title of which is an obvious parody of the mythical, rural and exotic Macondo that appears in the stories of García

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_​0 17

222 François Márquez1 ― functions as a kind of manifest, in which the editors explain their intention to distance themselves from the ever-​popular magical realism to which Latin American literature tended to be reduced on the international market. Instead, the stories they selected emphasize the urban character of the contemporary metropolises and the influence of globalization: “We think that selling a rural continent when it, in reality, is urban […] is aberrant, too easy, and immoral.” [“Vender un continente rural cuando, la verdad de las cosas, [sic] es urbano […] nos parece aberrante, cómodo e inmoral.”2] (16) McOndo has been followed by several other publications edited by the same authors or along the same lines, such as Líneas aéreas (Airlines) or Se habla español (We Can Speak Spanish). The “McOndian” arguments are summarized and debated in the prologue of El futuro no es nuestro. Nueva narrativa latinoamericana (The Future Is Not Ours. New Latin American Prose Fiction), published in 2008 and edited by the Peruvian author Diego Trelles Paz. El Futuro no es nuestro presents twenty short stories written by young authors (born, in this case, between 1970 and 1980) from different countries of the continent. Trelles Paz recognizes the merits of the McOndo proposal in that it granted visibility to a generation of authors who “managed to write down and to describe a literary world that had already distanced itself from the limiting frontiers of the national” (19) [“una generación de escritores latinoamericanos (y españoles) que, con una mirada propia aunque con distinta fortuna, consiguió escribir y describir un mundo literario ya alejado de las fronteras limitantes de lo nacional”], but he critiques its lack of theoretical solidity and its own tendency towards a stereotypical vision of Latin America, now reduced to urban spaces that are defined in terms of their function as centers of consumption for the middle classes. With respect to the McOndians, El futuro no es nuestro “announces itself, here and now, with a scalpel between its fingers and the happy certainty that in literature, like in every art, there are no changes without ruptures.” (19) [“se anuncia, aquí y ahora, con el bisturí entre los dedos y la alegre certeza de que en la literatura, como en todo arte, sin rupturas no hay relevos.”] The editor observes that the short stories share the McOndian rejection of the total novel and Boom aesthetics, but that their authors wish to shake off both the burden of this tradition and the limitations of the literary market alike. 1 As Trelles Paz notes (16), it should be clarified, however, that Fuguet and Gómez did not target García Márquez and his work in the first place, but that they primarily reacted against writers they considered as his epigones, who continued reproducing, according to them, the same stereotypes of magical realism. 2 All translations in this article are mine.

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond



223

McOndo, El Futuro no es nuestro and Debates on Post/​Transnationalism

In their introduction to New Trends in Contemporary Latin American N ­ arrative. Post-​National Literatures and the Canon (2014), Timothy Robbins and José ­Eduardo González center on the importance of the question of post-​nationality for, precisely, the young writers included in McOndo and El futuro no es nuestro. They consider them to be one generation, which they call the “post-​national generation”, and of which these two anthologies would be important signals. Although they are aware of the distinctions that Trelles Paz comments upon in his foreword, they argue that both tendencies can be understood as parts of a larger movement that calls into question the framework of the nation-​state. What they all have in common, according to Robbins and González, is that “one can no longer read them without first having to rethink our definition of that place of origin as something other than the nation” (n. pag.). Of course, Robbins and González do not pretend that the literary production of the last two decades can be reduced to these phenomena, but they do consider them as important anchoring points, beyond the satirical and relativizing comments their own editors have made about them. Likewise, my purpose is to study them as not fully representative but still important signals of literary change in contemporary Latin American prose fiction.3 Before delving into the spatial imaginaries of the two collections, I would like to make some brief terminological remarks. As indicated by Theo D’haen and Dagmar Vandebosch in the introduction to this volume, the concepts in this debate tend to be characterized by different meanings and uses. Robbins and González use the post-​nationalist paradigm in order to describe a generation of writers who, in their terms, share the “perception of the insufficiency of the national culture paradigm to convey their sense of locality” (n. pag.). Rather than also adhering to the “post-​national” perspective, I  prefer to use the concept of “transnationalism” to describe the spatial experiences represented in these anthologies, for two main reasons. On the one hand, if one considers the definition offered by Steven Vertovec of transnationalism as a “condition in which, despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders […], certain kinds of relationships have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-​spanning yet common―however virtual―arena of activity” (3), it becomes clear that the

3 On the role and importance of anthologies of Latin American writers in processes of canon formation, see Logie & De Maeseneer and Sastre.

224 François concept of transnationalism precisely covers this idea of a space of flux that supersedes the nation and that has manifested itself predominantly in the last few decades.4 In addition, the clarification proposed by Raymond Rocco and Fernando García Selgas that transnationalism can be distinguished from related notions by considering it as a concept that “highlights the sociocultural and political components of the social spaces and spheres that traverse and transcend nations” (12) allows us to work with a concrete (“social spaces and spheres”) but flexible conception of transnationalism, which includes different levels (“traverse and transcend nations”: local, national, regional, global). On the other hand, as Nadia Lie has pointed out, the concept of “transnationalism” is used by various scholars precisely as a corrective to the term of “post-​ nationalism”, which would suggest that the level of the nation-​state disappears altogether in these discussions. As I will argue, the nation-​state appears in several of the stories, more than “as a problem”, as one of the levels to be taken into account. In what follows, then, I  would like to establish a dialogue with the findings of Robbins and González, and reflect on the implications of this “post-​ national/​transnational” paradigm for the image of Latin American nations in the anthologies under discussion. I will argue that these two collections indeed reveal the intention to dissociate themselves from a strict national framework, but that they do so in two different and interesting ways, that indicate two rather dissimilar responses to the fading-​away of the nation-​state and the realities of accelerated globalization. In a second movement, I will briefly explore the implications of this transnational inspiration for the concept of “Latin America” itself, which, in spite of its apparent opening-​up to more globally oriented phenomena, remains largely unquestioned in both of the anthologies. I will focus on the spatial imaginaries that are present in the prologues and the short stories themselves,5 as they constitute an important battleground for debates on national and Latin American identity.6 The prominence of the 4 By considering transnationalism as a recent phenomenon, I do not imply that “earlier” forms of transnationalism are impossible. The desirability of including these experiences in theoretical considerations on transnationalism is a topic that exceeds the limits of this article. 5 Although there are more levels on which the anthologies can and even should be productively compared (see Logie for a methodological framework for the macro-​analysis of anthologies), I will limit myself within the confines of this article to the prologues and a general comparison of the stories themselves. 6 Of course, a description as concise as the present one on a totality of 37 short stories risks falling into creating reductive and stereotypical visions of the proposals itself. However, I think that some general tendencies can be noted that might not apply to, strictly speaking, all of the stories collected in these two volumes, but that can be significant at the time of studying more closely their collective call for change.

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond

225

spatial dimension does not come as a surprise; as argued in the work of various influential human geographers and other social scientists who relied upon the ideas of Henri Lefebvre and Edward Said, space is to be understood as a dynamic medium, that is always under construction and as both a product of and a ground for human interaction, shot through with power relations and ideological tensions. Likewise, geopolitical and cartographic reflections have been fundamental in debates on national and regional identity in Latin America, and in its recent reformulations (Aínsa, Speranza).

Transnationalism in McOndo and El Futuro no es Nuestro

At the level of the prologues, both anthologies share a questioning of the nation-​state as the only and ultimate framework in which their stories should be read. Fuguet and Gómez state that the authors published in McOndo “do not feel like representatives of some ideology and not even of their own countries” (17), and Fuguet, in a later text, advocates a “certain new Free Trade Area of the Americas (ftaa) sensibility”, which would be “less about nationality and more about empathy.” (Fuguet 2001: 68) Likewise, Trelles Paz notes that “[r]‌oots nor traditions, and even less concepts as out of date as nationality or the homeland, limit, at present, our unconditional pact with fiction” (25). The comparison of the stories themselves, however, reveals an interesting difference as to the spatial imaginaries that are associated with transnationality in either anthology. I will argue, indeed, that some of the characteristics of the McOndian stories tend to call into question the rejection of the nation-​state announced by the editors and largely considered as one of the main characteristics of this volume. First of all, a striking difference between the two collections of stories is the omnipresence, in McOndo, of concrete spatial markers, and its relative absence in El futuro no es nuestro. Rory O’Bryen has argued that, although it is surprising that the stories collected in McOndo are classified according to the nations to which their authors belong, this would suggest that the editors are aware of the possible resistance of the nation, which is only cited here to be displaced to the background in the actual stories. However, I would like to explore the thought that the McOndian stories actually bring very much to the foreground not only national, but also local and “global” markers. The hybridity that has been studied in McOndo is one that is composed of very clearly identifiable elements that are tied to the spaces in which they occur and with which they are tied up. While in most of the short stories of El futuro the reader has to guess in which city, country or even continent the narrative takes place,

226 François in the majority of the McOndo texts streets, places and countries are explicitly identified or evoked through elements associated with local or national identity, and then combined with, so to speak, “foreign” elements. To name just a few examples from McOndo, the protagonist of Argentine author Martín Rejtman’s story searches for a girl “close to Caballito, Primera Junta and Flores. [He walks] along the entire West boulevard as if the city were a haunted village. At Campichuelo 300 [he sees] Laura’s motorcycle tied to a tree”7 (68); the Colombian characters (in the story of Santiago Gamboa) go to see a movie in Astor Plaza, eat in El Rancho, and stay in Estadero del Norte; Fuguet’s own story narrates the visit of a Chilean to the United States and Mexico, which he evokes through references to Ciudad Juárez, Paso del Norte, and the local habits of drinking mezcal, tequila and Corona. In these clearly identifiable and nationally marked spaces, the writers then tend to emphasize the presence of what could be seen as elements of the “globalizing tendencies” mentioned in the prologue, such as MacDonald’s (Rejtman), popular music and rock (Fresán), payments in dollars (Soto), international―mostly North American―movies (Gómez). Another example of this difference can be found in the speech of the characters. In El futuro, apart from some regionalisms, the language tends to be rather neutral ― for instance, in the two Argentine stories, one can even get the impression that their authors expressly have tried to avoid second-​person sentences, in order to omit the use of “vos” and the accentuation differences in the conjugation of the verbs. By contrast, the McOndian stories seem to emphasize, on the one hand, the specificities of national speech, and, on the other hand, their mixing with English-​language words and turns. For instance, a character from a story by Costa Rican author Rodrigo Soto explains that in his country “we say ‘pura vida’, okey, chuncke, cachivache and chaparrón” (96) [“Decimos ‘pura vida’ y okey, chuncke, cachivache y chaparrón”], while the members of the Mexican rock group that David Toscana describes express their frustration to each other with the Mexican turn of phrase “no mames” (“no way”) and an Argentine character in Fuguet’s text is identified on the spot by his exclamation of “Che, qué quilombo” (“what a mess”, 119). In the story of Sergio Gómez, characters mix English, French and Spanish, and talk about “greis keli” (Grace Kelly), “topgan” (Top Gun) and “milcheic” (milkshake). The result is, more than the unmarked lingua franca that maybe could be expected from a proposal that aspires to shed off the burden of national representation, a language that is the product of a very specific, local mix of infranational, national and transnational elements. 7 “por Caballito, Primera Junta y Flores. Camino por todo el Oeste como si la ciudad fuera un pueblo fantasma. Al 300 de la calle Campichuelo veo la motito de Laura atada a un árbol.”

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond

227

This way, more than providing an image of how these stories could take place “in any part of the First World” (Fuguet & Gómez 10), the authors of McOndo examine the way in which, in the words of Saskia Sassen, “[the global and the national] overlap and interact in ways that distinguish our contemporary moment.” (Sassen 2001) These stories do not push the nation to the background, but, on the contrary, pull it to the foreground, and examine the way in which national space becomes intertwined with elements that traditionally belong to other spaces. Here is where I  think the post-​national paradigm provokes unwanted resonances, as the spaces of the McOndian stories do not leave aside the paradigm of the nation, but explore transnational mixes of elements. They explicitly highlight the presence and the structure of transnational spaces, and in doing so create what we could call a certain “couleur transnationale.” Mette Hjort (2009) has proposed the concept of “marked transnationality” in the context of transnational cinematic productions, in order to refer to films produced by authors who “intentionally direct the attention of viewers towards various transnational properties that encourage thinking about transnationality.” (14) Similarly, we could think of McOndo as characterized by this “marked transnationality” in the field of literature.8 Is El futuro no es nuestro a case of “unmarked transnationality”, then? In most of the cases, we could say that the need for the authors to draw attention to national contexts and transnational relations is far less important than in McOndo. The nation appears less as a problem to be questioned than as a problem already left behind. However, I would argue that El futuro in the very structure of its narrative spaces represents an alternative form of transnationalism. I think it is significant to note that twelve out of the twenty stories do not explicitly reveal their geographical coordinates. The others take place in the countries of origin of their authors (6) or in other parts of the world, such as London or Seoul (2). In general, I would say that these texts depart from a more abstract and generalizing inspiration than their McOndian counterparts. Their transnationality consists less of explicit considerations on how national and “foreign” elements are combined than of the conscience that the experiences they describe take place, to hark back to Vertovec’s definition, “in a planet-​spanning yet common arena of activity.” (3) A particularly good example of this tendency is the story “Una historia cualquiera” (“A Story Like so Many Others”) by Guatemalan author Ronald Flores, about a young girl who 8 Of course, “marked/​unmarked transnationality” necessarily refers to different phenomena in cinema (the impossibility of leaving aside concrete features of spaces where the story takes place in films, questions of production and participation, etc.), and the way in which it can be applied to literature calls for further exploration.

228 François moves to an unidentified City to work in a factory and is abused by her superiors. This text is actually a better (and even literal) example of the way in which stories “could take place in whatever part of the world” than the McOndian narratives themselves. Various other stories of El futuro no es nuestro partake of this abstract inspiration: they take place in houses, colleges, hospitals, fields, etc. that cannot be specifically situated. As for the stories collected by Trelles Paz that do specify their geographical location, mostly the theme of nationality is either absent or receives an ironic treatment. In the first case, some phenomena can be more closely associated with the specific context of the nations in which they were written―for instance, historic and social events that are linked to the activities of the Sendero Luminoso in Perú or of hired assassins in Medellín―without, however, presenting them as specific national problems. In the second case, in the few stories that do explicitly refer to questions of national identity, the most salient aspect is their parodic intention or their playing-​down of its importance. For instance, Cuban writer Ena Lucía Portela lets her protagonist watch television in order to “see how bad everything goes in the world and how well off we are in my country” (111), while in Chilean Lina Meruane’s text the national hymn of a non-​specified country only functions as a cover for the secret erotic activities of some school girls in the bathroom of their college. One could say that in these stories, the nation-​state does not come to the foreground, but rather is reduced to an already inoffensive, somewhat ridiculous and maybe even pathetic, background. The stories in El futuro no es nuestro, then, partake of a transnational inspiration in that their frame of reference is a globalized world rather than the strict limits of the nation.

Transnationalism and the Concept of “Latin America”

If Latin American countries are presented through a transnational lens in these volumes, what are the implications for the image of “Latin America”?9 At the level of the stories, questions of Latin American identity receive a treatment that is comparable to that I have identified on the issue of the nation: the McOndian texts are characterized by a foregrounding of the mix of different spatial scales, among which the regional is also present, and in El futuro, the abstract inspiration, the absence of a reflection on identity or ironical 9 Latin America in itself is, of course, a transnational entity. However, in this section, I aim to describe its inscription in larger transnational networks rather than its internal transnational configuration.

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond

229

references to this theme10 tend to present the region, like the nation, as a problem that is not at the center of their attention anymore. In this sense, there seems to be a link between the treatment of both the national and the regional context  ― whether this occurs by the combination of nationally/​­regionally marked elements (in McOndo) or by omission or irony (in El futuro). Of course, the historical and sociocultural conditions in which the concept and ideological framework of Latin American nations and of “Latin America” itself were created differ substantially, but the conscience of a more and more globalized world is translated in these stories into operations that affect the national and the regional level alike. However, the prologues of the two collections point to a more ambiguous position: while they explicitly reject the nation as the framework within which the stories should be read, they do not problematize the regional perspective in the same way. Fuguet, Gómez and Trelles Paz criticize representations of Latin America without leaving the notion itself behind, nor claiming that it is not the appropriate context anymore to read the stories. Unsurprisingly, the spatial dimension is again the main arena for debates on how Latin America should be represented. Fuguet and Gómez take as a starting point García Márquez’s mythical village of Macondo, which they identify as the stereotypical space of magical realism, and, by extension, of the Latin American exoticness demanded by the foreign publishing houses to which they refer in their introduction. “The country of McOndo” they talk about functions as a correction to the magical-​realist stereotype of Macondo in that it includes in its representation what the authors perceive as the “globalized” and “urban” realities of the continent: “Our McOndo is as Latin American and magical (exotical) as the real Macondo (which, after all, is not real but virtual). Our country of McOndo is bigger, more overpopulated and full of pollution, freeways, metro, cable TV and shantytowns. In McOndo there are McDonald’s, Mac computers and condominiums, as well as five-​star hotels built with laundered money.” (15) [“Nuestro McOndo es tan latinoamericano y mágico (exótico) como el Macondo real (que, a todo esto, no es real sino virtual). Nuestro país McOndo es más grande, sobrepoblado y lleno de contaminación, con autopistas, metro, TV-​cable y barria­das. En McOndo hay McDonald’s, computadores Mac y condominios, amén de hoteles cinco estrellas construidos con dinero lavado y malls gigantescos.”] 10

For instance, in the short story “Sun-​Woo” by Argentine author Oliverio Coelho, the narrator ironizes the life of a character described as “any Latin American writer of a well-​off family” (31) who loses himself in the naïve adherence to an Orientalized stereotype of a Corean woman.

230 François Fuguet and Gómez conceive of McOndo as a representation of Latin America that is closer to the idea of the “global village” than to the folkloric images associated with magical realism. Trelles Paz, from his side, precisely formulates his critique on the McOndo version of Latin America11 through the rejection of the ― as stereotypical ― spatial images they use: “in McOndo [the exotism demanded by the foreign consumer] is replaced by the excluding Latin American reality of the lounge and the mall.” (17) [“en ‘McOndo’ esta figura deformada con varita mágica es reemplazada por la excluyente realidad latinoamericana del lounge y del mall.”] Instead, but without proposing it as an explicit alternative for the McOndian imaginary, Trelles Paz uses the spatio-​temporal image of collapse in order to provide a kind of interpretive frame for the short stories in his anthology. His introduction concludes with the invitation to “come and see, dear reader, here we are: with our back towards the future, while we tell stories of decay.” (27) [“Come and See, querido lector; ven y mira, que aquí estamos: de espaldas al futuro, narrando el derrumbe.”] In contrast with the nearly atemporal present of the “country of McOndo”, this phrase echoes Walter Benjamin’s description of the angel of history, who tries to recompose the past while being dragged towards the future. This reference, when paired with the expression that “the future is not ours”, transmits both the conscience of the complex and conflictive historical processes that have shaped the place from which they speak (“here we are”) and the impossibility of getting a grip on them in order to envision a different future.12 If spatial imagination in literature frequently aims to create a map of one’s place in an often chaotic and unconceivable world (Tally), the spatial re­ presentations of these anthologies propose a reflection on the place of Latin America on a rapidly changing and more and more globalized planet. As Diana Palaversich and other scholars have noted, the editors of McOndo tend to reduce the “global village” of Latin America to a mostly North American village or even a “neoliberal village”, with a prominence of English terms and references to mostly U.S.-​based transnational companies. Trelles Paz’s critique on this position and his insistence on the despair transmitted by the stories of 11

12

It should be noted that Trelles Paz seems to adopt a more conciliatory position in a later collection of stories that he co-​edited with Daniel Alarcón, as a special issue of the magazine Zoetrope: Allstory. However, the very concise introduction to this issue does not seem to aim at attaining the same degree of critical reflection as in El futuro. The analogy is, of course, only partial. In the case of this anthology, it is clearly not the idea of progress that functions as the storm that makes the angel drift away and obscures historical analysis, but, on the contrary, the uncertainty about the possibility of understanding the past and the present world.

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond

231

his anthology might point to the conscience of the difficulty of taking a position in the context of the contemporary transnational world.13 At this point, I think Robbins and González’s observation that “one of the main characteristics of this generation of writers is not so much their rejection of politics, as it is the feeling the traditional political parties/​political views in Latin America cannot be trusted to express their ideologies” (n. pag.) reaches its full force in the case of El futuro, where it can even be applied more generally to the waning of traditional political parties or views in several parts of the world. If in McOndo, the dominance of the United States, and, to a lesser degree, of other centers of the so-​called “First World” is accepted and mostly embraced (except for the reduction of Latin America to a rural and exotic image), in Trelles Paz’s anthology relations of power are implicit, played out at a personal level, and already disconnected from clearly identifiable nations or other institutional structures. This invisibility is, of course, one of the main problems in the analysis of and resistance to hegemonic relations (Bauman 9–​15), and the short stories in some way transmit the confusion and powerlessness of the individual characters caught in the middle of these phantom-​like tensions.14 While the lifestyle of most of the McOndian characters is clearly pervaded by the economic dominance of the United States, several stories of El futuro express the uncertainty about the location and functioning of the structures that decide upon their lives. 13

14

This is also exemplified in the spatial dimension of the stories: the most emblematic place of the country of McOndo turns out to be the nonplace, while in El futuro no es nuestro there is a high share of closed and often dystopic spaces. The two types of spaces do not necessarily exclude each other, but in this case they tend to highlight two different kinds of spatial experiences. The spaces in which the stories of McOndo take place are airports, malls, fast-​food restaurants, highways, cinemas, etc. They are characterized by the sense of solitude-​and-​anonymity-​among-​the-​masses and of urgency that Marc Augé has described in his book Nonplaces. In McOndo, the characters visit places crowded with people but in which they ultimately feel most lonely, where velocity and volatility reduce time to the strict present, and which cause a feeling that could be described as (a post-​modern form of) spleen. The spatial grammar of these nonplaces is defined by the model of consumption. On the other hand, enclosure and, as Trelles Paz announces in his foreword, decay are the concepts that can be seen as a kind of common denominators for all of the stories of El futuro no es nuestro. These are personal stories, in which local, national and supranational elements have their influence, but which ultimately all lead to the same anxiousness about the future, that does not distinguish anymore between places, nations or regions. In this sense, El futuro demonstrates a phenomenon that has been described by Josefina Ludmer: she observes that the narrations that belong to what she calls a “global order” tend to express a distinct temporality, an apocalyptic and stagnating sense of detemporalization, as opposed to the lineal and progressive time of the nation-​state (91).

232 François While there are clear differences in the visions on how Latin America should (not) be represented in the context of an increasingly planet-​ spanning sociocultural sphere, these do not imply a rejection of the Latin American framework altogether, as in the case of the nation-​state. Establishing a dialogue with the ample theorizations of Latin American regional identity would lead us too far, but it is clear that the concept of “Latin America” is no less an ideological construct than is that of the nation. As Walter Mignolo has noted, the very idea of “Latin America” derives from a specific, colonial point of view, that has been used to legitimate exclusions in the countries that are considered to be part of it, and still functions as a way of reducing this zone to the perspective of other powerful actors at world level. This is precisely the main irritation of Fuguet and Gómez, as they fiercely oppose the burden of the stereotypes of Latin America imposed by North American and European publishing houses. However, they do not abandon the concept of “Latin America”, but try to reclaim it. Their insistence on what Latin America is,15 while resisting certain stereotypical representations of it, leaves intact the idea that there is such a thing as “­Latin American ­identity.”16 For instance, the authors of this anthology do not represent their own countries, the editors explain, but “they are intrinsically Spanish-​American. They have this prism, this form of situating themselves in the world.” (17 ―my emphasis) [“son intrínsecamente hispanoamericanos. Tienen ese prisma, esa forma de situarse en el mundo.”] In this context, it appears that, if the McOndo phenomenon has been studied as an expression of hybridity and of the globalizing tendencies that characterize the contemporary world (O’Bryen, Candia, etc.), it may also be interesting to note that this inspiration is not absolute, but enters into conflict with the desire to reclaim Latin American identity. In El futuro no es nuestro, similar claims to the “Latin Americanness” of the collection are absent. However, it can be noted that Trelles Paz, while criticizing the McOndo proposal for its lack of theoretical solidity, uses the

15

16

“Latin America is the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires […] Latin America is, irremediably, mtv Latina […] And we go on: Latin America is Televisa […]” (“Latinoamérica es el teatro Colón de Buenos Aires […] Latinoamérica es, irremediablemente, mtv latina […] Y seguimos: Latinoamérica es Televisa […]”, 15–​16). One exception is their comical remark that when they tried to get in touch with other Latin American writers, they experienced so many difficulties that they “thought Latin America was an invention of the Spanish language departments of North-​American universities” (“Llegamos a pensar que América Latina era un invento de los departamentos de español de las universidades norteamericanas”, 12).

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond

233

designation of “Latin American narrative” without further reflection. For instance, he positions the works of the authors he represents in the context of a Latin American tradition without elaborating on this point: “in essence, the principal concerns and motives of the Latin American tradition have not changed.” (21) [“las preocupaciones y los motivos medulares de la tradición literaria latinoamericana, en esencia, no se han alterado.”] Furthermore, if El futuro in its selection presents a more even distribution on the level of nationality and gender than McOndo,17 its criteria for selection remain vague, and it is not clear what conditions should be fulfilled in order to consider someone a “Latin American” writer.18 By using “Latin America” as a pragmatic and apparently innocent concept, Trelles Paz also disregards the discursive and ideological tensions that are at play in its delimitation. What is more, the use of “nuestro” (“ours”) in the very title of the book and its frequent repetitions in the prologue do not only contribute to the naturalization of this delimitation, but also create the impression of a strong collective and identitarian project.19 Although it can be read as referring more to the idea of the generation to which these authors belong, it mainly suggests that the future is not in the hands of, specifically, young Latin American writers. Implicitly, the Latin American “prism” of viewing the (literary) world comes back in Trelles Paz’s prologue, although he does not insist on it: “Although, as can be seen, the essential motives of literary tradition have not varied radically between the last generations of Latin American writers, there is an already consolidated formal and thematic certainty that unites and identifies us even beyond our will and our reluctances20 […]” (24 ― my emphasis) [“Aunque, como puede apreciarse, los motivos esenciales de la tradición literaria no han variado radicalmente entre las últimas generaciones de escritores latinoamericanos, hay una certeza formal y temática ya consolidada que nos reúne y nos identifica incluso más allá de nuestras voluntades y reticencias […]”] This way, while most of the stories of El futuro

17

18 19 20

In contrast with El futuro, McOndo does not include a single woman writer. This is explained by Fuguet and Gómez by the statement that they simply did not receive qualitative contributions from women —​which has been thoroughly criticized by Diana ­Palaversich (45). I limit myself to signaling this point; in order to elaborate on it, a comparison of the selection the two anthologies perform is necessary, but exceeds the limits of this reflection. I would like to thank Dagmar Vandebosch for pointing this out to me during the “Literary Transnationalism(s)” conference. Of course, this union “beyond our will and our reluctances” contrasts sharply with the earlier affirmation that “roots nor traditions […] limit our unconditional pact with fiction.”

234 François themselves seem to shake off the burden of national and regional representation, the idea of a strong Latin American identity is inconspicuously put forward at the programmatic level of the prologue. As shown by my brief comparison, the undoubtedly transnational inspiration of these two anthologies gives way to a variety of responses and operations on the framework of the nation and of the region that do not necessarily coincide at a programmatic and a literary level. The treatment of the nation in the prologues of McOndo and El futuro no es nuestro is based on rejection, while the brief analysis of the stories themselves has led me to distinguish between two different kinds of transnationalism that are played out in the respective anthologies:  the “marked transnationality” ―  rather than “post-​nationality”― of McOndo, defined largely in terms of the blending of identifiable local, national, regional and global elements, and the tendency towards abstraction and relativity in El futuro no es nuestro. As for the question of the region, these anthologies are less prone to leave the concept of “Latin America” behind, except for the stories in El futuro that do not bother to situate themselves or that ironize about Latin-​Americanness. Here, the tension between an opening-​up and a more essentialist view on Latin American identity observed by Lie, Mandolessi and Vandebosch in literary and critical discourse manifests itself in the conflict between a clearly transnational vocation and the need to profile a distinctively Latin American voice.21 The comparison of these two volumes suggests that, indeed, on a programmatic level, “Latin America” may be a concept too strategically important to leave aside in the midst of externally created (mis)representations and unequal access to literary platforms that impede Latin American writers to realize their “unconditional pact with fiction.” However, in the end, as several stories in El futuro no es nuestro demonstrate, this dilemma does not need to be reflected explicitly in literature with a transnational vocation, and might even be eclipsed by the problem of simply identifying the geopolitical framework that constitutes the battleground for these spatial imaginations.

21

In this context, see also Latin Americanism after 9/​11 by John Beverley. Beverley discusses at length various tensions that have been playing in the last fifteen years between a mostly U.S.-​and Europe-​based academic and postcolonial discourse on Latin America, a “neo-​Arielist” defense from the mostly criollo cultural elites in Latin American countries, and what he sees as an alternative position that is emerging de facto under the form of the identity politics and the projects of the New Left that have emerged in the last decade.

From Macondo to McOndo and Beyond



235

Works Cited

Ainsa, Fernando. Palabras nómadas:  nueva cartografía de la pertenencia. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2012. Augé, Marc. Non-​lieux introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Seuil, 1992. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge, Malden: Polity Press, Blackwell, 2000. Becerra, Eduardo, ed. Líneas aéreas. Madrid: Lengua de Trapo, 1999. Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Critical Theory and Society: A Reader. Ed. Stephen Eric Bronner & Douglas Kellner. London, New York: Psychology Press, 1989. 255–​263. Beverley, John. Latinamericanism after 9/​11. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Candia, Alexis. “McOndo y el espejo trizado: la diseminada modernidad latinoamericana.” Espéculo 34 (2006): n. pag. 11 Jan. 2016. De Maeseneer, Rita & Ilse Logie. “Las antologías como instrumentos de canonización: una introducción.” El canon en la narrativa contemporánea del Caribe y del Cono Sur. Ed. Rita De Maeseneer & Ilse Logie. Genève: Droz, 2014. 201–​206. Fuguet, Alberto. “Magical Neoliberalism.” Foreign Policy 125 (2001): 66–​73. Fuguet, Alberto & Sergio Gómez, eds. McOndo. Barcelona: Grijalbo Mondadori, 1996. Hjort, Mette. “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism.” World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. Ed. Nataša Durovicová y Kathleen E. Newman. London, New York: Routledge, 2009. 12–​33. Lie, Nadia, Mandolessi, Silvana & Dagmar Vandebosch. “The Transnational in Hispanic Studies.” A World History of Literature. Ed. Theo D’haen. Brussel: Contactforum, Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie van België voor Wetenschappen en Kunsten, 2011. 71–​80. Lie, Nadia. “Lo transnacional en el cine hispánico: deslindes de un concepto.” Nuevas perspectivas sobre la transnacionalidad del cine hispánico. Ed. Nadia Lie & Robin Lefere. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 13–​25. Logie, Ilse. “La narrativa latinoamericana vista desde fuera: un análisis de antologías extranjeras de la última década.” El canon en la narrativa contemporánea del Caribe y del Cono Sur. Ed. Rita De Maeseneer & Ilse Logie. Genève: Droz, 2014. 207–​224. Ludmer, Josefina. Aquí América Latina: una especulación. Eterna Cadencia, 2010. Mignolo, Walter D. The Idea of Latin America. Malden, Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2009. Noguerol, Francisca. “Narrar sin fronteras.” Entre lo local y lo global: la narrativa latinoamericana en el cambio de siglo, 1990–​2006. Ed. Jesús Montoya Juárez & Ángel Esteban. Frankfurt, Madrid: Iberoamericana, Vervuert, 2008. 19–​34. O’Bryen, Rory. “McOndo, Magical Neoliberalism and Latin American Identity.” Bulletin of Latin American Research 30 (2011): 158–​174.

236 François Palaversich, Diana. De Macondo a McOndo; Senderos de la postmodernidad latinoamericana. México D.F.: Plaza y Valdés, 2005. Robbins, Timothy R. & José Eduardo González, eds. New Trends in Contemporary Latin American Narrative: Post-​National Literatures and the Canon. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Rocco, Raymond, & Fernando J. García Selgas, eds. Transnationalism. Madrid: Editorial Complutense, 2006. Sassen, Saskia. “Spatialities and Temporalities of the Global:  Elements for a Theorization.” Globalization. Ed. Arjun Appadurai. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. 260–​278. Sastre, Luciana Irene. “Prólogos en antologías de nuevos narradores latinoamericanos:  performance del canon literario.” II Jornadas de Estudios de la Performance. Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 9–​10 Oct. 2014. 25 Jan. 2016. Soldán, Edmundo Paz & Alberto Fuguet. Se habla español: voces latinas en USA. Miami: Alfaguara, 2000. Speranza, Gabriela. Atlas portátil de América Latina: Arte y ficciones errantes. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2012. Tally, Robert T. Spatiality. London, New York: Routledge, 2013. Trelles Paz, Diego, ed. El futuro no es nuestro. Buenos Aires: Eterna Cadencia, 2009. Trelles Paz, Diego & Daniel Alarcón. “Enter the Post-​Post-​Boom.” Zoetrope: All-​Story 13.1 (2009). 11 Jan. 2016. Vertovec, Steven. Transnationalism. London, New York: Routledge, 2009.

Chapter 16

The Caribbean as a Cross-​Breeding of Transnationalisms Carpentier, Walcott, Glissant and Benítez-​Rojo Erica Durante

The Historical Origins of the Caribbean Notion of “Otherness”

The Caribbean as a cultural space has been widely considered as the consequence of colonization. Since the arrival of Christopher Columbus, and until the demise of the Western European colonial empires, the identity of the islands of this vast archipelago, nearly five-​fold larger than the Greek one, has been largely viewed as a hybrid of waves of migration during the colonial era with insignificant preservation of the heritage of the pre-​colonial indigenous population. The historical evolution that has shaped these territories since the sixteenth century has therefore generated a paradigmatic transnational space characterized by the persistent and dominating effects of colonial values and political institutions, and the absence of an autochthonous national consciousness. The Caribbean region, as an ensemble, and regardless of local peculiarities, has not been established by the sovereign will of autochthonous people, but it was built and organized by foreign hegemonies. Thus, different political, linguistic and religious models were imported and imposed by Western powers, and despite the emergence of independence movements, their influence persisted to the current era. Some Caribbean countries are characterized, even nowadays, by political systems related to the colonial epoch. Martinique and Guadeloupe are designated as French overseas departments and territories, while Puerto Rico and Cuba, the last Spanish colonies in the Americas to gain independence, define their identity by referring to the nearby geographical locations of North or Latin America or in relation to their African anthropological and physiological heritage. The settlement patterns that Western colonialism has introduced to the Caribbean islands had a significant effect on the unique nature of the socie­ ties that have evolved in this region of the world. The coexistence of European settlers and African slaves has integrated diverse ethnicities and cultures within a single insular space. In particular, the African slave trade that forcibly

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/​9 789004370869_​0 18

238 Durante uprooted thousands of Africans from their homelands, and transplanted these “naked migrants” (Glissant 2008: 87) into an environment dominated by colonial powers, was instrumental in the creation of a region in which the cultural heritage of ethnic groups has not been preserved in its original form, but rather has been fused into a unique multicultural global entity. These multiple crossings of distinct and distant peoples, who found themselves concentrated in a limited place, have led to the emergence of a unique notion of altérité, “otherness”. Unlike the domination of a single and stable local identity within the ancestral European and African populations, in the Caribbean context the very notion of “autochthonous” loses its meaning and authority, and such a unique monolithic identity is in fact undermined by the absence of indigenous rooted people or a dominating foreign ethnicity. Thus, despite the existence of socio-​economic strata, the multiethnic fabric of equally-​foreign groups that appeared during the colonial era in this archipelago has led to the emergence of an equivalent concept of “otherness” across the various populations present in loco.

From “Otherness” to “Relation”

The co-​presence of different “othernesses” brings about the concept of “Relation” as an intrinsic feature of the Caribbean area. In the absence of an original unique identity in the Caribbean region, this space can be apprehended only in the context of coexistence, pluralism and multiple connections. This yields a specific perception of the concept of “Relation”, as a thought and an ethical principle that transform the notion of insularity itself, reflecting the observation that islands of the archipelago cannot be viewed as isolated, but rather in a framework of interpenetration and interdependence. Moreover, the current representation of the Caribbean basin tends to feature it as a network of islands sharing a maritime space, in addition to being “an island bridge connecting, in ‘another way’, North and South America”. (Benítez Rojo 2) This original and essential unity, which represents the common anthropological and cultural pattern of the Caribbean, coincides with the concept of “Relation”, as a junction of different otherness. This common thought of the “Relation”, rooted in the hybrid history of these countries, is theorized and modeled by a significant number of major writers of the Caribbean, whether English, French or Spanish speakers. As a matter of fact, the concept of “Relation” is an essential aspect of the poetry, the fiction and the essays of the Martinican author Édouard Glissant, who built his entire work precisely around this concept, treating it as a true poetic principle. By

The Caribbean as a Cross-Breeding of Transnationalisms

239

formalizing the concept of “Relation” in several theoretical texts and speeches, also by referring to Deleuze and Guattari, Glissant has not only correlated the nature and spirit of the Caribbean to this notion, but has also proposed a model of “Relation” exportable from the Caribbean to the rest of the world. According to Glissant, the notion of “Relation” overcomes the concept of métissage that the Martinican poet translated into English using the term “crossbreeding”. (2008: 82) While “crossbreeding” is the obvious product of the meeting of different ethnic groups, the “Relation” is an evolving notion, in a perpetual progress, which can lead to unpredictable hybrids. Moreover, since the concept of “Relation” is applicable to other regions in the world, as well as to areas that are not characterized by the mixture of multiple ethnicities, it permits the “delocalization” of this notion beyond the Caribbean boundaries. This delocalization reaches a second stage when, in the Traité du Tout-​Monde (1997), Glissant introduces the notion of “creolization”, which “overlaps with linguistic production” (“un langage qui court à travers les langues de la Caraïbe, anglaise, créole, espagnole ou française, qu’elle soit de Carpentier, de Walcott ou des écrivains francophones de la Martinique, de la Guadeloupe ou de Haïti”) (2008:  83; my translation), but nevertheless does not generate a directly predictable synthesis. Furthermore, despite the reference to the creole Caribbean Creole languages, contained in the term “creolization”, this notion can be applied to any other place on earth, inasmuch as it takes into account the horizon of the world. In line with Glissant, previous or coeval Caribbean authors also recognized the same rhizomic nature of the archipelago and made of this transnational “open idea of identity” their poetic principle. This is for instance the case of Alejo Carpentier and Derek Walcott who both consider themselves as “Caribbean writers”, rather than as Cuban and Saint Lucian authors, respectively. Their work and thought, as well as the manner in which they handle several languages, confirm their global apprehension of this space in which there is no possible fracture or supremacy of one island or language over others. On reporting his last conversation with Alejo Carpentier, Édouard Glissant quotes this relevant statement expressed by the Cuban novelist: “We, Caribbean writers, we wrote in four or five different idioms, but we all share the same language”. (Glissant 1996: 43) The Caribbean language to which Carpentier refers as common to the entire archipelago must be understood as a way of seeing, thinking and designating elements of the world, transcending linguistic differences and revealing the substantial multilingualism and diversity of the region. Glissant argues, based on his conversation with Carpentier, that this Caribbean transnational language would therefore be the result of the “Relation” and “mutual contamination” among these idioms. It would be a “language that

240 Durante runs across the languages of the Caribbean, English, Creole, Spanish or French, whether it is used by Carpentier, Walcott or any other Francophone writer of Martinique, Guadeloupe or Haiti”. (1996: 43)1 The concept of “Relation” is not merely a theoretical construct but it is also integrated into the poetry of the region. In this perspective, the image of the sea, common to the Caribbean islands, emerges as one of the most frequent metaphorical representations of this concept within the archipelagic context. In this sense, it is not a coincidence that Glissant has the following two epigraphs at the beginning of his essay Poétique de la Relation (Poetics of Relation): “Sea is History” and “The unity is submarine”. The former echoes Walcott’s famous poem (Walcott 2007), whereas the latter is a quotation from the Barbadian writer Edward Kamau Brathwaite. Glissant places the emphasis on the capacity of the Caribbean Sea to be an enormous reservoir of layers of human history, linking in a form of analogy the image of the sea and the concept of “Relation”. Other authors who introduce the image of the Caribbean Sea to represent the perpetual pattern of “Relation” also draw a similar analogy. In particular, in the poem A Sea-​Chantey Derek Walcott connects several islands and alludes to the peculiarity of the Caribbean Sea by reiterating the liquid consonants as an analogy of the “liquid of the Antilles”: “Anguilla, Adina /​Antigua, Cannelles, /​Andreuille, all the l’s, /​Vowels, liquid of the Antilles” (Walcott, In A Green Night. Poems 1948–​1960 64). In Walcott’s perspective, the Caribbean common cultural identity is deeply characterized by the morphology of the sea surrounding the archipelago. Moreover, in a stimulating contradiction, Walcott perceives the Caribbean Sea as a “pool or a pond”, stagnating while moving, flat and deep: That pond is moving water. But the stillness of it is within the Caribbean basin. In that basin, genuinely―without any ghetto romanticizing about mixed cultures―there is a breeding of cultural organisms going on at a rapid pace. Walcott and Lerner 91

A similar vision of the Caribbean maritime space, as a cognizable and navigable sea, emerges also from Carpentier’s novels. El reino de este mundo (The

1 My translation. Since the English language does not provide two different terms to translate the French words “langue” et “langage”, in the context of this quotation, I opted for translating “langue” by “idiom” and “langage” by “language”. In my following transcription of the original French quotation from Introduction à une poétique du divers, I will underline these two terms in italic: “Nous autres Caribéens, nous écrivons en quatre ou cinq langues différentes, mais nous avons le même langage”.

The Caribbean as a Cross-Breeding of Transnationalisms

241

Kingdom of This World), El Siglo de las luces (Explosion in a Cathedral) and El harpa y la sombra (The Harp and the Shadow) focus on the sailing of characters within the archipelago. The act of sailing from one island to another is intrinsic to the insular identity. Namely, to be defined as an island, each territory necessarily has to recognize the sea as an inherent component of its identity. The interpretation proposed by Glissant of this same sea echoes Walcott’s, by the reference to the geographical shape of the Caribbean Sea, used in this context as well in order to fully apprehend the Caribbean consciousness. From Glissant’s viewpoint, “the Caribbean Sea is the sea that ‘diffracts’ ” (2008: 81), in the sense that, since 1492, it has been “a place of passage”, a space of “relativity, the fabric of a great expanse (…) which opens out onto diversity”. (2008: 81) This specific natural configuration, that designs the Caribbean as a seemingly unbounded archipelago, constitutes the main difference with the Mediterranean Sea. The latter appears geographically as a “concentrating sea”, (2008: 81) which, also because of its circular natural contour, has historically “given rise to a universalizing expression of rationality and spirituality”. (2008: 81) Because of the scattered form of the archipelago, the Caribbean landscape appears as a space without established borders, characterized by an unceasing reoccurrence of islands, whose contours remains vague, as noted by the Cuban writer Antonio Benítez Rojo, in the evocative title of his essay La isla que se repite (The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective): Which one, then, would be the repeating island, Jamaica, Aruba, Puerto Rico, Miami, Haiti, Recife? Certainly none of the ones that we know. … This is again because the Caribbean is not a common archipelago, but a meta-​archipelago …, and as a meta-​archipelago it has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center (3–​4) … a cultural meta-​archipelago without center and without limits, a chaos within which there is an island that proliferates endlessly, each copy a different one, founding and refounding ethnological materials like a cloud will do with its vapor? (9). In the aftermath of waves of colonization and slave deportations, this “sea-​ archipelago” has fundamentally established itself as a threshold-​sea, a transition sea, which records ethnic interactions and the emergence of human hybrids. Like a huge container, comparable to the belly of a slave-​ship, the Caribbean Sea gathers, in a broad open space, a great diversity of peoples, languages, artistic forms, and beliefs. Originated in a variety of places and cultures of the world, these different elements are related to one another within the

242 Durante Caribbean area; they are intertwined in unpredictable and mutually enhanced manners, constituting the preamble of transnationalism.

From Transnationalism to a Crossbreeding of Transnationalisms

As a paradigmatic space of crossbreeding and interdependence, the Caribbean emerges as an anthropological, historical and political model of transnationalism. According to Glissant, each island of the archipelago forms part of the inclusive and encompassing system of “Relation”, and despite its sovereignty, each nation “cannot but be sensitive to a sort of participation in the vivacity of the Caribbean” (“ne peut qu’être sensible à une sorte de participation à la vivacité de la Caraïbe”, “les Caraïbes hispanophones, anglophones, francophones et les autres (créolophones)”) (1996: 21; my translation). This region of the world is characterized by an innate transnational and multilingual aptitude that interconnect resiliently “the Spanish, English and French-​speaking Caribbean, as well as the other (creole-​ speaking)” islands, while preserving their engagement in the broader global flows. An overview of different discourses about literature proffered by major Caribbean writers leads to the inference that some of the poetic principles established by these authors should be apprehended from the perspective of their transnational consciousness. Their vision of literature as well as their perception of the world is by definition transnational, in the sense that certain notions and theoretical frameworks that they formulate are deeply anchored in the Caribbean concept of “Relation” and are nevertheless applicable to other regions of the world. This demonstrates, yet again, the scope and unpredictability of the notion of “Relation”. In particular, major voices of the Caribbean literary tradition often identify themselves with the region as a whole rather than with their individual island. Derek Walcott, for example, defines himself as a “Caribbean poet”. This self-​designation as a “Caribbean poet” has to be read as his wish to position himself not within the context of a singular island, Saint Lucia, or of a specific state, but within the holistic logic of the archipelago. This transnational Caribbean perception is also present in Carpentier’s writings, which feature the Cuban insularity within the larger Caribbean insularity. His first novel Ecue-​Yamba-​O, conceived as an Afro-​Cuban novel, is a clear expression of this transnational posture, as are his statements about the Caribbean “ontology” (88), which are reflected in his view of the troubled colonial history. In line with this pan-​Caribbean thought, Carpentier established a fundamental literary notion that originates from the unique experience of the archipelago, as he uncovered it initially in Haiti. Defined in the prologue of the first edition of The Kingdom of this World (1949), which, at least in part,

The Caribbean as a Cross-Breeding of Transnationalisms

243

relates the maritime journey of a settler and his slave, from Santo Domingo to Cuba, the notion of real maravilloso, “magical realism”, circulated throughout the countries of South and Central America, and emerged as a major paradigm of the Latin-​American Boom. The rhizomic power of this definition, which can be applied to the entire American continent, corroborates again both the nature and the transnational posture of these territories, insofar as the “marvelous real” (87), observed by the Cuban novelist in Haiti, is not “the unique privilege” of the island but “the heritage of all of America” (87). Thus, in Carpentier’s perspective, the complete history and the “ontology” of America should be read as a “chronicle of the marvelous real” (88). A similar vision is expressed by Édouard Glissant, who also defines the Caribbean as “a preface to the continent” (2008: 81). The path that has been followed thus far attests that nations within the Caribbean archipelago developed their identity mirroring other nations with a full awareness of “otherness” interacting within the same restricted geographical location. One could even suggest that the concept of “transnationalism” applied to this region of the world would lead to a pleonasm. Hence, it appears more appropriate to employ the expression crossbreeding of transnationalisms in order to emphasize the peculiarity of the Caribbean region both as a pioneering space of transnationalism and as a model of total adherence to the transnational paradigm. The fact that each island cannot ultimately be defined per se, but rather in association with a heterogeneous ensemble of nations, whose history and language embrace recursively other histories and languages, suggests that within the Caribbean archipelago the concept of “transnationalism” ought to be used in a plural form. In addition, the existing “unity-​diversity” paradigm that characterizes this region enriches the notion of transnationalism that emerged in the archipelago. The Caribbean has provided the world with a lexicon of literary transnationalism, coining terms such as “creolization”, “Tout-​monde” (Whole-​world), “Chaos-​monde” and “mondialité” (globality). These expressions are deeply linked and reflect a conceptual progression. They incorporate in an increasingly explicit manner larger transnational spaces, such as the entire world, augmenting and surpassing the initially autochthonous and epistemologically less evocative term “créolité”, with the richer concept of “creolization”. Works Cited Benítez-​Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Trans. James Maraniss. 2nd ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

244 Durante Carpentier, Alejo. “On the Marvelous Real in America”. Magical Realism. Theory, History, Community. Ed. with an introduction by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durkam & London: Duke University Press, 1995. 75–​88. Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Glissant, Édouard. Introduction à une poétique du divers. Paris: Gallimard, 1996. Glissant, Édouard. “Creolization in the Making of Americas”, Caribbean Quarterly 54.1/​ 2 (2008): 81–​89. Walcott, Derek. “A Sea-​Chantey”. In A Green Night. Poems 1948–​1960. London: Jonathan Cape, 1962. 64–​66. Walcott, Derek and Neal Lerner. Conversations with Derek Walcott. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. 86–​94. Rpt. of. “An Interview with Nancy Schoenberger”, Threepenny Review (1983): 16–​17. Walcott, Derek, “The Sea is History”. The Star-​Apple Kingdom. Walcott, Derek. Selected Poems. Edited by Edward Baugh. London: Faber and Faber, 2007. 123–​125.

Chapter 17

K​nots of Memory in French Caribbean Literature Edouard Glissant’s “Nous ne mourions pas tous” Kathleen Gyssels For Theo

…

“Save Our Souls” At that moment only will you all understand when they get the idea soon they will get that idea to want to gobble themselves up some nègre like Hitler gobbling up Jews seven fascist days out of seven

L.G. Damas, Pigments, 1937, translated A. Lillehei

…

This is an elementary fact about literary discourse—​that the views expressed, questions raised, arguments or associations proposed, are not to be taken as propositions endorsed by the author, even when there is no particular character to whom to attach them. Derrida, Passions

∵

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004370869_019

246 Gyssels In his introduction to a special issue of Yale French Studies, Michael Rothberg demonstrates his appreciation of the French-​Caribbean authors and intellectuals who forged “knots of memory” to unite the shared suffering of minorities in the French Republic: Les lieux de mémoire’s amnesiac relation to French colonial history and to the impact of decolonization and postcolonial migrations is startling―even more so when we consider Nora’s personal engagement during the Algerian War of Independence and his devastating book on French Algerians. But here Nora is probably more symptomatic than unique. French society in general has been slow to respond to the “fracture coloniale” recently diagnosed by progressive French critics, even as―further irony―Anglo-​American postcolonial studies mark an enormous debt to anti-​and postcolonial Francophone thinkers and writers such as Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and, more recently, Maryse Condé and Édouard Glissant. (Rothberg 6–​7) While agreeing with Rothberg’s argument, I  believe that the inclusion of Glissant (1928–​2011) as a forerunner of “knots of memory”1 begs critical reassessment. From Caribbean Discourse onwards the theorist and founder of “Caribeanness” struggled with discussing the Shoah and the Middle Passage on equal terms.2 A  particularly revealing instance of the “irreconcilable differences” (2016)—​as Albert Memmi put it in an interview with Gary Wilder―is Glissant’s travelogue, Tout-​monde (1993). This work marks a change in Glissant’s thought and writing. The Martinican theorist shifts from an exclusively French/​Caribbean perspective to transnational issues symbolized by the “rhizome”―the ever-​changing, unpredictable and hybrid identity nourished by a maximum of encounters and voyages. A close reading of an overlooked chapter of Tout-​monde, “Nous ne mourions pas tous” (We didn’t all die), will demonstrate my point. The chapter in question concerns itself with the war memories of a Martinican pharmacy student who, thanks to a sympathetic German officer,

1 Nicole Lapierre (212–​213 et  al.) embraces Glissant as one of the bridge builders between Blacks and Jews in the French Caribbean. 2 “This population did not import, or collectively continue, the modes of existence and means of material and spiritual survival it had practiced before its displacement. Only traces exist, and only in the form of urges or surges. Leaving aside persecution, on the one hand, and slavery on the other, this is what differentiates the Jewish diaspora from the slave trade of the Negroes”. (ed. 1997: 42).

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

247

miraculously escapes deportation and returns to Paris. I allow that not all Nazis were perpetrators and that there were “traitors” in both camps, something amply documented by Serge Bilé in Sombres bourreaux (2011) with respect to Caribbean, African and other victims of non-​European origin―an essay suspiciously overlooked in the French Antilles. Moreover, I do not ignore the fact that some of the greatest novelists (whom Glissant admires) launched the Nazis’ contrapuntal narrative, explaining why orders were executed (think of Jorge Luís Borges’ 1949 novella, “Deutsches Requiem”, which Lawrence argues has been misread). This chapter has suffered from lack of attention because of its dubious defense of Nazi criminals at the expense of victims who remain, paradoxically, unnamed by the rather unsympathetic protagonist. The polyphonic perspective, the unclear shifts in narrative voice and, above all, the subversive and problematic conclusion, dealing with post-​memory issues of both Black and Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in comparative terms, is bound to leave readers puzzled. To add to the perplexity, Glissant seems to want to ‘kill’ the founders of Négritude. As early as 1937, Léon Damas celebrated the tirailleurs sénégalais in some of his most memorable poems (“Et Caetera”, “Save our Souls”), with Senghor and Césaire later following suit. Glissant attempts to complete the picture through a Martinican soldier who miraculously owes his survival to a ‘nice’ German, but who also seems indifferent to the suffering of inmates, particularly Jews, the victims par excellence of fascism. As Glissant himself did not live through the Second World War in France (he was about 10 years old and lived in Martinique at the time), this narrative should not be regarded as reflecting his own experience. Rather, it must be understood against the backdrop of a broader framework, that is, the history of Caribbean poets addressing the horrors of war. Interestingly, rather than inscribing himself in the poetic lineage of Senghor, Damas, Césaire and Tirolien, Glissant makes use of World War ii poetry’s descriptions of black soldiers’ war efforts in order to distinguish himself from his “symbolic Fathers”. In narrating the Martinican’s astonishing story, Glissant consolidates his notion of Tout-​monde, that is, the unpredictable, implausible and unfathomable kinds of encounters which take place in the turmoil of history, and which both change our destinies and transform our identities. I posit that Glissant’s treatment of Holocaust victims, versus his treatment of those people of color who were casualties of the Second World War, is paradoxical. The young Martinican student (who remains nameless), is saved from the death camps because the German officer deciding his fate happens to adore all things Antillean (women, rum, Creole). He is released without further ado. However, in narrating the student’s survival story, Glissant fails to do justice

248 Gyssels to the tragic destiny of all the colored and non-​colored victims who were less fortunate. Moreover, despite pretending to be simply retelling an Antillean soldier’s testimony of these events, the meta-​narrator, Glissant, concludes his extraordinary anecdote with broader claims about Black and Jewish diasporas during and after World War ii. Indeed, the final section of “Nous ne mourions pas tous” compares the number of survivors of both communities (without going into detail) and their respective migration patterns. Astonishingly, Glissant treats colored people as mere collateral victims of Nazism and dwells on the relationship between Blacks and Jews in problematical language terms. In an interview with Celia Britton, one of his most loyal critics, Glissant insists that this is a “true” story (although the years spent in the Caribbean in the narrative differ from those he mentions in the interview).3 Rather than faithfully recounting the witness’s story, he expands and thereby transforms it by superposing the Martinican pharmacist’s version onto a larger canvas, thereby creating a strong resonance with other war-​writers. The student’s story of weeks of unemployment and ennui (boredom), for example, echoes Sartre’s experience of the so-​called “phony war” of his War Diaries. This is just one of the many intertextual links introduced by the double-​voiced narrator, who mixes famous novelists and philosophers (Sartre) with a witness’s narrative and Glissant’s overall heterodiegetic voice. Like Sartre in his war journal,4 the Martinican notes the absence of action and the elusiveness of the Front (444–​ 445). Furthermore, like Sartre, the second-​year medical student is surprised to benefit from his “free time” spent doing nothing. One thinks, coincidentally, of Sartre’s discovery of Heidegger’s work, which was given to him during this period by a kind German. Glissant includes other famous authors from the World Literature canon. Consider the Martinican’s captain, who swore to fight the militarily superior enemy on horseback with his preferred weapon, the sabre (445). The young colored man’s miraculous escape from death, moreover, is highly reminiscent of Nobel Prize winner, Claude Simon’s La route des Flandres, where the first-​ person narrator comes to grips with the fact that he is the only one to survive 3 In his interview on this same chapter, Glissant gives slightly other years. Britton does not correct him nor does she go into depth about the choice of being so “general” (Germans for Nazis, “they” for the other deported, and so on). (Britton, 2007) 4 Just as Sartre transformed the fabric of his everyday life into material for philosophical reflection, Glissant retells the story of someone else who is surprised by the “phoney war”. Glissant also mimics Sartre when, after leaving Seuil for Gallimard, his essays acquire subtitles, echoing Sartre’s Situation i, ii, iii series. “Late Glissant” is without peer in this respect, as his tenants pass over this imitation of the prominent philosopher and bridge builder between Blacks and Jews (Forsdick 2010).

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

249

the extermination of his regiment. In Simon’s novel, a ‘crazy’ commander-​in-​ arms fights German tanks with sabres. Jean Giono’s Le grand troupeau seems to have been on Glissant’s mind as well, as he compares troop movements to sheep (445) wandering in all directions, not knowing exactly where to go: “ils tournaient en rond, c’était manifeste” (they went round and round in circles, it was obvious) (446). What is also remarkable about Glissant’s rendering of the story is that it remains unclear which assertions may be attributed to the author and which pertain solely to the meta-​narrator. In this semi-​fictional account, some are problematic, to say the least. The chapter’s protagonist, the French soldier selected by General Mülher (452) to be sent back to the capital, never speaks on his own behalf: his story is narrated by Glissant. Yet occasionally the information conveyed, the choice of words, and the style and opacity of some passages make us uncertain as to who is responsible for some of the highly doubtful assertions. That the only black soldier (“lui seul de son espèce”; “the only one of his kind” 450)  among the masses of deported soldiers is discovered by a Nazi officer who has more or less ‘gone Creole’, is one example. Readers cannot tell whether the description of the Creole language as “un langage métèque ou d’animal semi-​humanoïde” (“an alien tongue, or that of a half-​human-​half-​ animal”) (452) is to be attributed to the student or Glissant, or whether this is merely the opinion of the majority of Germans at the time of the events (the Holocaust). Perspectives and narrative voices are deliberately blurred, “turn round and round in circles”, “spinning”. The reader is helpless to determine whether the author is employing sarcasm or wit, or whether the imprisoned soldier is too ignorant regarding other prisoners, or too terrified to investigate what happened to the unlucky soldiers after the war. We will never know. The “turmoil” (“tourbillon”) of narrative voices sustains a climate of ambiguity. The “conclusion”, which discusses the impoverished relations between Jews and Syrian-​Lebanese migrants, and the number of Blacks and their discrete presence in contrast to Jews, raises especially controversial issues no single critic seems to have addressed. Empathy vs Indifference In the encounter with the sympathetic “Général Mülher ou Mühler” (sic) (453), who unexpectedly grants an “Ausweiss” (sic) (453, italics in original text), Glissant’s student remains strikingly indifferent. His attitude towards other victimized groups, during and after the War, is not transformed in any way, nor does he become a Resistance fighter on returning to his apartment in Paris.

250 Gyssels The chapter hardly elicits readers’ sympathy with respect to the prisoner, but nor does it allow for identification with the German, whose passion for the Caribbean relies on superficial exoticism, predicated on his erotic memories of the island’s inhabitants. The colored prisoner remains ignorant of and worse, indifferent to other prisoners’ fates as they are deported to Germany (449). He returns to his normal life in Paris and merely keeps the Ausweis as a relic on his mantelpiece. Consequently, Glissant’s “Parabole” (which title resonates with Saint Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians, “Nous ne mourrons pas tous”, which Toni Morrison’s uses in Song of Solomon (1977)) demonstrates a troubling absence of “Relation” by the founder of the Poetics of Relation (1990). He who has survived by sheer luck shows no compassion for the Other:  “the only one of his species” seems to have blocked alterity in the wake of totalitarianism. Work Camp survivor, Emmanuel Levinas, is, at this point, Glissant’s opposite, despite their shared interest in and commitment to erasing ethnic and other differences. Glissant’s informant never mentions the victims of the Holocaust by name, a means of silencing Jews. This erasure is the opposite of Toni Morrison’s vindication, “Call me my Name”, in Beloved (1987). He does not call the German a “Nazi”, or an “SS”, because the Martinican, we learn, does not know what the terms mean: Et voilà ce général, qui était peut-​être un SS, (mais le pharmacien n’avait aucun moyen à ce moment-​là de deviner ce que pouvait être un SS,) (sic) enflammé de son propre discours, ravi d’enrouler devant ses subordonnés une langue dont aucun d’eux n’avait jamais entendu parler (…) dont la plupart (de ces (sic) subordonnés donc) auraient immédiatement décidé que c’était un langage de métèque ou d’animal semi-​humanoïde, (…) voilà le général en dérade dans une envolée lyrique sur les plaisirs et les beautés du pays (…) (452). [And then this general, who may have been an SS general, (but at that time the pharmacist had no way to guess what an SS might be,) fired up by his own speech, pleased to trot out before his subordinates a language of which none of them had ever heard speak (…) a language that most of them would have immediately judged as that of an alien or a half-​human animal (…) then this general waxes lyrical about the pleasures and beauties of the island (…). … (452) (Translation mine)] In a strange reversal of Morrison, perpetrator and victim, Celan, and other Nobel Prize winning poets are not called by their real names. Enamored with the West Indies during the prewar years, the German served as a spy on the

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

251

Panama Canal in Cuba and Jamaica.5 His deepest impressions of Martinique center on the island’s lush landscape, handsome women, irresistible cuisine and delicious rum. If this is a true story (as Glissant insists in an interview with Britton),6 it proves that there are exceptions, and that the binary victim/​perpetrator, Jew/​Nazi has been dismantled. The chapter’s polemic ending dwells on what happened to survivors after the war. This final reflection, which can hardly be attributed to the Antillean pharmacist, compares Jewish and Antillean diasporas:  “Martinicans can be found everywhere […] Antilleans, who are much fewer in number, are scattered like powder and don’t impose themselves anywhere” (456) and “The ‘Syrians’, or Lebanese, Syrians, Jews, are all mutual enemies, and we were unaware too that these Jews, of whom we had no direct or specific knowledge, had multiplied over a much wider area of the earth than we could have possibly imagined” (456) (Italics mine). At this point, we can no longer give the author the benefit of the doubt. These sentences call for nuances and correction since Glissant’s World War ii witness, who never once mentions the vast majority of victims, is now making comparisons between segments of immigrants in Europe worldwide (it is in the “Tout-​monde”). Context is not taken into consideration and readers are made to believe that ethnic tensions were “imported” into the Caribbean after the war. History, in contrast, reveals that Syrians, Lebanese and Jews migrated in different waves after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the First World War, and that Jews remain the most “invisible” diaspora within a diaspora in the archipelago. Some of the latter settled after the 1492 expulsion of Sephardic Jews and in the wake of Columbus’s discovery of the West Indies.

Relating Heterotopias: Misreading or Misleading?

In order to fully understand and analyze the semi-​fictional Tout-​monde one must turn, as ever, to Glissant’s accompanying essays. In Traité du Tout-​monde 5 Putman notes that anti-​Black prejudice is more prominent in Venezuela and Cuba: Jamaica and Puerto Rico are not mentioned in this regard. This is one of the many vague sentences in Glissant’s narrative. 6 Britton: “What is especially striking in Tout-​monde is that there are completely implausible encounters. I think, for example, of a character who only crops up intermittently, but one who I  like very much:  the Antillean pharmacist, who is made a prisoner of war and who finds himself in the presence of a German general who speaks Creole. E. Glissant: ‘And that is a true story, I did not make it up. This particular German had lived in Martinique before the war […] so he learned to speak Creole Martinique-​style […] He was the one who saved this Martinican pharmacy student, because the Germans were not known for sparing black soldiers’ ”. (Britton 2007: 103–​104). See also Britton (2009).

252 Gyssels (1997) and Une nouvelle région du monde (2006), Glissant enumerates a ‘whirlwind’ of disasters, both human and natural. As in his atypical ‘Grand Tour’, the world traveler employs an unnatural voice (Richardson 2006), and uses deliberate implicitness and euphemism to cancel out spatio-​temporal distinctions between various catastrophes and link them randomly together. The following list from his 2006 essay is revealing of this approach: “Auschwitz and the incommunicable, Gorée, Robben, Fort de Joux and the Tjibaou cave, Gulag snow, Saint-​Pierre in Martinique” (Une nouvelle région du monde 147). In “Nous ne mourions pas tous” Glissant seems to speak up for the ‘sympathetic’ German and the ignorant Martinican, neither of whom shows interest in those who perished in the Holocaust (a word replaced, at least in French, by “Shoah”, thanks to Claude Lanzmann’s nine-​hour-​long eponymous documentary). Here and elsewhere, Glissant eschews the concepts used by contemporary thinkers (Derrida), as well as key concepts forged by camp, or work-​camp, survivors (Levinas). The Parable is meant to illustrate Glissant’s concept of “tourbillon”, which he uses consistently throughout this particular chapter as well as the entire work. It becomes (as is often the case in his thinking) a cluster of metaphors, a “floating signifier” (Zizek). Glissant (1995) talks about “tourbillon” when discussing Faulkner’s style for example. Referring to the war, he sees turmoil or “maelstrom”, a spiral, a whirl, as well as “vertigo” created by “chaos”. As in Claude Simon’s La route des Flandres, Glissant’s witness capitalizes on the idea that one’s fate during the war is the outcome of sheer chance. Through dislocated grammar, fragmented discourse and lack of punctuation, Simon’s novel relates to the experience of total disorientation endured by soldiers expected to fight enemy tanks on horseback with a sabre.7 In a rather clumsy resonance to Simon, Glissant’s officer who similarly fought with a sabre, is killed in action: [Les Allemands et les Français] se découvrirent semblables, […] ceux qui détestaient la guerre, ceux qui ne croyaient pas à la Grande Allemagne. Ce capitaine en effet chargea sabre au clair et se fit déchiqueter par un blindé, son cheval avec lui. Les actions les plus absurdes paraissaient raisonnables. […] [ils ne savaient pas] qui avait le premier déposé son arme. Ni la bravoure ni la prudence n’avaient été individuelles […] La masse de milliers d’hommes s’agrégea en troupeau tranquille, sous cette pluie qui damait. (447–​448)

7 Following La route des Flandres (1960), Simon published L’Invitation. He waited until 1989 to launch L’Acacia, a dense novel in which he returned to the dominant themes of his earlier fiction, not least that of warfare. Like Glissant, he was an inveterate traveler.

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

253

[[Germans and Frenchmen] discovered they were similar to each other, (…) those who hated the war, those who did not believe in a Great Germany. The captain indeed charged with his sabre and got ripped apart by a tank, and his horse with him. The most absurd actions had the appearance of being normal, rational. […] they did not know who was first to put down his weapon. Neither bravery nor prudence had been an individual matter [….] The mass or thousands of men gathered in a peaceful herd, under the clinging rain. … (447–​448) (my translation)] Glissant evokes the same strange atmosphere Jean Giono describes in his semi-​ autobiographical novel, Le grand troupeau (1932), dealing with World War i. In both Giono’s and Sartre’s work we find elements of “transhumance”, of wandering and the anxiety of an uncertain future. The climax of the story―the encounter between the officer and the Black man who is part of the group submitted for interrogation―takes place against a background of endless waiting and the ultimate, brutal Blitzkrieg. As rumors of the nature of the interrogations spread, he becomes increasingly terrified by the prospect of being sent to a work, or worse, a concentration camp: La rumeur enfla bientôt: que là-​bas officiait une manière de tribunal […] on recherchait ceux qui étaient alsaciens ou lorrains, et qui seraient enrôlés dans l’armée allemande […] on déportait en Allemagne les officiers et les intellectuels […] On envoyait les autres dans leur foyer. (449) [The rumor soon spread: that over there a kind of tribunal was going on […] They were looking for who was Alsatian or Lorrain, and who would be enlisted in the German army […] officers and intellectuals were deported to Germany […] the others were sent home. (449)] Despite being “a Negro”, the Martinican character only conjures up pleasant memories for Colonel Mühler; so much so that he profits from the German’s “favors.” He is very happy to be treated like a “rat de pilori” rather than a rat trapped in a sinking ship(wreck), and he is certainly better off than a field mouse (rat de champ):8

8 In a Creole proverb le “nèg de champ” vs “nèg de case” contrasts the two categories of slaves. The “Nèg’ de champ” (field slave) faces worse conditions than slaves in the “Big House”.

254 Gyssels Il était fait comme un rat pilori (un rat indigène) dont un rat de cale a pris la place. Non seulement pour les camps de prisonniers, mais sûrement pour beaucoup pire, il n’allait pas même imaginer. (450) [He was cornered, felt like a “rat pilori” (a native rat) whose place had been taken in by a bilge rat. Not only with respect to the prison camps, but also something certainly much worse, which he was not even going to think about. (450) (Emphasis and translation mine)] This comparison is far from neutral. The “un-​imaginable” is, of course, the concentration camp and “final solution”, of which the prisoner cannot be aware. Yet, since this story is told after the War, one would expect an explicit reference to the Holocaust at this point. Obscuring the image of the Jew, often portrayed often as a mouse or rat in anti-​Semitic propaganda, the narrator uses the Creole expression “rat de cale” versus “rat de pilori”, an expression, moreover, that evokes a (death) sentence: “clouer au pilori” (to pillory). While both categories of rat, that is, “rat de pilori” and “rat de champ” are trapped in the same space of the ship, they receive very different “treatment”, which must be interpreted in comparative terms. The narrator differentiates between the trapped mouse (rat) on the deck and those in the terrible confinement of the ship’s belly. The former enjoys the better treatment and is ultimately “saved”, while the latter “drowns” (to use Primo Levi’s 1986 apt title. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1981) also comes to mind). A flagrant omission in this seemingly neutral narrative is an account of other victimized groups. It is perplexing that Glissant’s character never evokes the “rat de cale”, the Jew. One reason might be Said’s “Question of Palestine”, that is, Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. Like Said, Edgar Morin and André Schwarz-​Bart (in his posthumous “circumfession”, Morning Star, 2009), Glissant disagrees with Israeli occupation and the new colonies in the West Bank. Traces of this stance may possibly be found in the author’s indirect treatment of the difficult relationship between Jews and non-​Jews or, more specifically, between Blacks and Jews. Glissant remains deliberately ambiguous, thereby stirring up polemics and suggesting unreliability. In this chapter, Jews within and beyond the diaspora, are invisible, out of reach and voiceless. Michael Wiedorn argues, however, that “the opacity demanded by Glissant’s texts serves as a sort of protective mechanism, insulating the radical difference of the other from the self’s, at times, depredatory search for knowledge” (184). The opacity masks the Martinican’s sheer ignorance about the “others deported in a carriage”, and the student seems not to have heard of them at all:

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

255

Il savait qu’en ce moment-​là il eût dû croupir dans un wagon en compagnie des autres déportés vers l’Allemagne ou pire être tassé dans un plombé pour une destination inconnue, au lieu de suivre ce capitaine d’armée qui portait sa valise […]. Calé confortablement dans ce coin du compartiment où on l’avait installé avec des égards dus à l’ami d’un puissant général de l’armée allemande. (454) [He knew that at this time he should have been stuck in a railway carriage, together with the others deported to Germany or worse, packed in a sealed carriage headed for an unknown destination, instead of following this captain who carried his suitcase […]. Comfortably wedged in the corner of this compartment where he had been installed with all respect due to the fiend of an influential general of the German army. (454) (Translation mine)] The narrator concludes that, like others, Martinicans eventually settle far from their native land. However, while most groups of migrants adapt to their host country, the narrator suggests that the Jews typically impose their views and identity on their new environment: “Antilleans, who are far fewer in number, are scattered like powder, without imposing themselves anywhere” (456) (Translation mine). This dangerous assumption takes on the nature of an objective truth emanating from the story’s omniscient narrative point of view. One is reminded of Derrida’s Dissémination (1972) and Feu la cendre (1987)―a fellow philosopher’s reflections on memory and commemorating the dead. Further echoes of this conviction may be found in Poetics of Relation,9 as well as in Traité du Tout-​ monde. Indeed, Glissant repeatedly describes the Mediterranean Sea as the basin of “arrowlike nomadism” where “Hebraism, Christianity, Islam” imposed their “thought of the One” (Traité du Tout-​monde 157), misleading readers to believe that Jews, like the Greeks and Romans, forced others to speak their language and, above all, adopt their religion. He prefers to speak about Hebraism rather than “Judaism”: he considers the Jews “conquerors” who impose their faith, culture and world view. It is a conviction which resonates in the final section of “Nous ne mourrions pas tous”, as the narrator rephrases and repeats his assertion that Jews are more widely dispersed and more numerous than Antilleans: “Jews, of whom we had no direct or specific knowledge, had multiplied over a much wider area of the earth than we could have possibly imagined” (456) (Italics mine). 9 Glissant defines the Mediterranean basin as the sea where the “ONE root identity dominates”, whereas the Caribbean is the basis of a hybrid and creolized civilization where mixing and race blending are the reality.

256 Gyssels In Comparative Postcolonial Diasporas, Britton heralds Glissant as an exceptionally important go-​between in the French-​Caribbean, mediating the conflictual components of Caribbean society: Edouard Glissant’s concept of the ‘Tout-​Monde’, for example, envisages a world in which ‘the Antilleans scatter themselves everywhere like a powder, without establishing themselves anywhere’―and, in fact, goes on to compare them with the Jewish diaspora: ‘nor did we know that these, the Jews, of whom we had no direct or specific knowledge, had multiplied themselves across a wider space than anything we could imagine, in the world.’ (1993: 386, emphasis mine)10 The translation “across a wider space” glosses over quantitative differences in the original, which may allude to the large families that orthodox Jews tend to have in Israel and the occupied territories. Having declared that Martinicans are spread across the globe in a “powder-​like” fashion―as are Irish, Italians, Corsicans and Basques―the narrator states that, collectively, Jews still outnumber those populations. He, moreover, would have us believe that this group of migrants forms part of the “Syrian-​Lebanese” (456). To apply the label, “Syrians”, to Lebanese, Syrians and Jews (456) is unfortunate, and moreover an error (see Gibson, 2014; Taylor and Case, Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions, 2015). It implies that the World Wars were responsible for introducing hostilities between people of Arab and Jewish descent, and their consequent ghettoization in the Caribbean archipelago. While Glissant and his followers praise the “kaleidoscopic” nature of Martinican society, founders of the subsequent créolité movement simplified questions of faith and downplayed active/​ passive affinities with mono-​religions and cults other than African-​derived magic-​based cults (quimbois, voodoo). “Nous ne mourions pas tous” concludes with the provocative thought that his people, having survived the massacre, eventually settled in the “tout-​monde” without claiming land or religion, and that they are not ruthless with respect to their rights: On trouve partout un Martiniquais: Combien de fois ne l’avons-​nous pas constaté […] pour nous rassurer sur notre existence? Remarquez, ce n’est pas comme les Italiens ou les Irlandais, qui ont choisi leurs terrains de débarcation, ils s’entassent et se ramassent dans des endroits qu’ils ont sélectionnés. Les Antillais qui sont tellement moins nombreux, éparpillent partout comme une poudre, sans insister nulle part. 10

Britton translates Glissant, and quotes him in her 2009 essay (Britton 2009: 151).

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

257

Comme les Corses, et peut-​être aussi les Bretons, ou sûrement les Basques. La poudre de l’insondable. Ou comme cette population que nous appelions si indistinctement “les Syriens”, sans avoir jamais su qu’elle était divisée en elle-​même, Libanais, Syriens, Juifs, tous ennemis d’eux-​mêmes, et nous ne savions pas non plus que ceux-​ci, les Juifs, dont nous n’avions aucune connaissance directe et distincte, avaient multiplié plus à large que tout ce que nous pouvions imaginer, dans le monde. Mais nous n ­ ’allions pas mal, nous non plus. (456–​457) [One finds Martinicans everywhere: How often have we not found it so […] so that we know we exist? Note, it is not as with the Italians or the Irish, who chose where they wanted to settle, they accumulate and get together in places of their own choice. Antilleans, who are far fewer in numbers, are scattered like powder, without imposing themselves anywhere. Like the Corsicans, maybe also the Bretons, and certainly the Basques. The powder of the unfathomable. Or like that population that we so indiscriminately called “Syrians”, not knowing how divided they were amongst themselves; Lebanese, Syrians, Jews, all mutual enemies; and not knowing either that Jews, of whom we had no direct or detailed knowledge, had multiplied more prolifically than anything we could have imagined, all over the world. But we’re not doing too badly either. (456 -​457) (Translation mine) (Emphasis mine)]



Who is the inclusive “we” in this fragment? Is the student or Glissant speaking? Scholarly research on Glissant’s immense and thought-​provoking oeuvre has bestowed so much authority on him that any “turning around” of political issues tends to pass unnoticed. Reading Glissant “against the grain”, his opacity may be arguably posited as a strategy to avoid clarity, or transparence (Crowley 2009). Tout-​monde’s chapter on World War ii is frequently overlooked (Forsdick 2010; Britton 2007; Cailler 2011; Prieto 2010) since it obliges critics to engage with the author’s position in a “memory war” still unresolved on the French-​Caribbean “front”. Rhizome/​Luftmensch In The Last of the Just, André Schwarz-​Bart ends his apocalyptic epic by declaring―in German in the original text―that Nazism turned six million Ernie Lévy’s into thin air:

258 Gyssels And so it was for millions, who turned from Luftmenschen into Luft. I shall not translate. […] The only pilgrimage, estimable reader, would be to look with sadness at a stormy sky now and then. Schwarz-​B art, 1973: 374, emphasis in the original

Millions have vanished from the face of the earth into ‘thin air’: the narrator, nonetheless, searches the skies for traces of the departed and for potential solace. Someday, he suggests, readers, too, will feel this presence in the skies: Yes, at times one’s heart could break in sorrow. But often too, preferably in the evening, I can’t help thinking that Ernie Lévy, dead six million times, is still alive somewhere, I don’t know where … Yesterday, as I stood in the street trembling in despair, rooted to the spot, a drop of pity fell from above upon my face. But there was no breeze in the air, no cloud in the sky … there was only a presence. Schwarz-​B art 1973: 374

The same airy dismissal returns in André Schwartz-​Bart’s 1972 novel, A Woman Named Solitude. Its epilogue evokes the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto as a haunting non-​lieu de mémoire (non-​place of remembrance) (Nora) linked to the Matouba massacre (see Gyssels 2014). Luftmensch has come to metaphorically denote the rootless, wandering Jew, continually displaced and, in every instance, obliged to start all over again. In Caribbean literature, the mangrove,11 rhizome and banyan have all been used to express uncertainty of origins and illegal/​illegitimate genealogies. Interestingly, mangroves have aerial roots, a typical feature of Caribbean vegetation. In Maryse Condé’s counter-​créoliste novel, Crossing the Mangrove (1989), the metaphor of the mangrove counters utopian belief in a trans-​ethnic and multicultural Antillean society. In the “manifestos” by Confiant, Chamoiseau and Glissant―especially the Intraitable beauté du monde:  Adresse à Barack Obama―Glissant predicts a new “imagined community” that transcends the borders of race, class, religion and other differences. Obama’s election is regarded as confirmation of an evolution towards an American (and Caribbean, European) society where people of all colors, ethnicities and religious backgrounds are able to live together. Glissant’s texts, however, tend to restrict inter-​ethnic dialogue and threaten to rip asunder the fledgling, and vulnerable, mutual comprehension and respect that is in progress (Itzkovitz, 3). Rhizomatic 11

Condé’s novel, La traversée de la mangrove (1989), translated as Crossing the Mangrove, rejects the prescriptions dictated by Glissant, Chamoiseau and Confiant. (Hirsch 1997)

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

259



converges to some extent with Luftmensch, the image of the wandering Jew whose rootless and nomadic existence might result in a hybrid and unfathomable identity, as another French-​Caribbean Jew-​by-​adoption has proposed (Gyssels, 2014). In the African diaspora, the rhizome has become the botanical image for up-​rootedness, the nomadic life and creolization. This is another example of the opportunities for intercultural understanding missed by Glissant and his followers. Shared aspects of Black and Jewish diasporas and synergy between Jewish and Black authors and artists (Harlem Renaissance, jazz, etc.) are ignored by the utopian “Tout-​monde”, which dangerously divides a multi-​ ethnic and multicultural post World War ii landscape. Non-​Response As Culler argues, the “irresponsibility of literature, this double-​voicedness, is always under attack” (Culler 7). He quotes Derrida’s Passions in support of his claim: This authorization to say anything paradoxically makes the author an author who is not responsible to anyone, not even to himself, for whatever the persons or the characters of his works, thus of what he is supposed to have written himself, say and do, for example. And these “voices” speak, allow or make to come—​even in literatures without persons or characters. This authorization to say everything (which goes together with democracy as the apparent hyperresponsibility of a ‘subject’) acknowledges “a right to absolute nonresponse”. Derrida 1993: 28–​2 9, quoted in Culler 7

Culler’s assertion is reminiscent of the truism that precipitated Schwarz-​Bart’s pessimism in Morning Star, where a depressed Haïm Schuster cynically notes that, in its extreme form, this thinking could even excuse the “Shoah”. By the same logic, Hitler becomes a victim of his time, education, character, bad luck and so on. (Schwarz-​Bart 2011: 246). Diasporic thinking has spurred the development of Caribbean fiction and essays which transcend boundaries of ‘nation’, ‘race’, ‘class’, ‘gender’ and religious affiliation (active or passive). However, it remains a huge challenge, in theory and fictional practice, to bridge the different diasporas re/​routed to the Caribbean. As the Cuban-​Sephardic anthropologist, Ruth Behar, stresses in The Vulnerable Observer, criticism surrounding Israeli power and politics in the ongoing struggle in the Middle East (146) has torn African and Jewish diasporas apart. Regrettably, conflictual memories and “memory wars” in the

260 Gyssels French-​Caribbean literary world perpetuate themselves instead of resolving (Itzkovitz, 2011). While, as a general rule, obliterating concrete names and places in parabolic writing is not problematic (Philippe Claudel’s Rapport de Brodeck (2007) is a convincing example of this well-​worn path by France’s post-​ Littell generation), it is distressing in certain instances, such as in the case of alterity, and the recognition of differences in exiled populations and emigrations forced by extreme violence. While Glissant’s ‘whirlwind’ of writing embraces geo-​physical, mental and commemorative dimensions, it is surpassed by a large margin by Michael Rothberg’s “knots of memory”. Rothburg demonstrates that the entanglement of memories by ethnically, socio-​culturally and even religiously different individuals, and the intricate work of coming to terms with the traumas of the past, does not lead to a dismantling of dichotomous reasoning (as Borges’ “Deutsches Requiem”, in contrast, convincingly does), nor to a creolized embrace of the French-​Caribbean landscape. Moreover, if one considers Raphaël Confiant’s anti-​Semitic fiction and non-​fiction, and Chamoiseau’s evasive answers on his main influences and models, one has the strange impression that the Black-​ Jew relationship is still taboo and that postcolonial Jews remain hidden on the margins. “Frères migrants” (Chamoiseau’s latest pamphlet to date, whose title echoes Littell’s incipit in The Kindly Ones), affirms that Blacks and Jews have a long road ahead of them to knot the wounds of the past.

Works Cited

Behar, Ruth. The Vulnerable Observer:  Anthropology that Breaks your Heart. ­Boston: Beacon Press, 1996. Bilé, Serge. Sombres bourreaux. Collabos africains, antillais, guyanais, réunionnais, et noirs américains dans la deuxième guerre mondiale. Paris: Pascal Galodé, 2011. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Deutsches Requiem.” L’Aleph. Translated by Roger Caillois and René L.F. Durand. Paris: Gallimard, 1949. 105–​115. Britton, Celia. “Souvenirs des années 40 à la Martinique: interview avec Edouard Glissant.” L’Esprit Créateur 47.1 (2007): 96–​104. Britton, Celia. “Exile, Incarceration and the Homeland: Jewish References in French Caribbean Novels.” Comparing Postcolonial Diasporas. Michelle Keown, David Murphy, James Procter (eds.) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. 149–​167. Cailler, Bernadette. “Totality and Infinity, Alterity, and Relation.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy 19.1 (2011): 135–​151. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Frères migrants. Paris: Seuil, 2017. Claudel, Philippe. Le rapport de Brodeck. Paris: Stock, 2007.

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

261

Condé, Madeleine, Cottenet-​Hage, Madeleine. eds. Penser la créolité, Paris:  Karthala, 1989. Condé, Maryse. “Globalisation et diaspora.” Diogène 184 (1998): 29–​36. Condé, Maryse. Moi, Tituba, sorcière noire de Salem. Paris: Mercure, 1986. Condé, Maryse. Crossing the Mangrove. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Anchor Books, 1995. Culler, Jonathan. “The Most Interesting Thing in the World.” Diacritics 38. 1–​2, (Spring-​ Summer, 2008): 7–​16. Derrida, Jacques. Dissémination. Paris: Galilée, 1972. Derrida, Jacques. Feu la cendre. Paris: Galilée, 1987. Derrida, Jacques. Passions. Paris: Galilée, 1993. Dufoix, Stéphane. “W.E.B. DuBois: ‘race’ et ‘diaspora’ noire/​africaine.” Raison politique 1 (2006): 97–​116. http://​www.cairn.info/​revue-​raisons-​politiques-​2006-​1-​page-​97.htm. Forsdick, Charles. “Late Glissant: History, ‘World Literature,’ and the Persistence of the Political.” Small Axe 33.14. 3 (November 2010): 121–​134. Gibson, Carrie. Empire’s Crossroads: A New History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the Present Day. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014. Giono, Jean. Le grand troupeau. Paris: Gallimard, 1931. Glissant, Edouard. The Ripening. Translated by Michael Dash. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann., 1986. Translation of La Lézarde, Paris: Seuil, 1958. Glissant, Edouard. Caribbean Discourse. Selected Essays (1981). Translated by Michael Dash. Charlottesville: Virginia University Press, 1987. Glissant, Edouard. Tout-​Monde. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. Glissant, Edouard. “Le vertige Faulkner.” Libération. (22-​06-​1995). Reprint in Le Nouvel Observateur. http://​bibliobs.nouvelobs.com/​romans/​20110203.OBS7393/​le-​vertige-​ faulkner-​par-​edouard-​glissant.html. Accessed 21 July, 2016. Glissant, Edouard. Poetics of Relation. (1990). Translated Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1997. Glissant, Edouard. Une nouvelle région du monde. Paris: Gallimard, 2006. Greenhouse, Shira Emily. Reflexions on Sartre’s Réflexions. Wesleyan College, 2008. http://​ wesscholar.wesleyan.edu/​cgi/​viewcontent.cgi?article=1043&context=etd_​hon_​theses&seiredir=1&referer=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.bing.com%2Fsearch%3Fq%3Dreflexions%2Bon%2Bthe%2BJewish%2Bcondition%2C%2Bsartre%26form%3DPRASU1%26src%3DIE11TR%26pc%3DEUPP_​ASTE#search=%22reflexions%20 Jewish%20condition%2C%20sartre%22 Gyssels Kathleen. “Critical Glissantism: Glissant’s take on World Literature and Language.” Major versus Minor? Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World. Theo D’haen, Iannis Goerlandt, Roger D. Sell (eds.) Johns Benjamins Publishing, 2015. 103–​124.

262 Gyssels Gyssels Kathleen. Marrane et marronne. La coécriture reversible d’André et de Simone Schwarz-​Bart. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Gyssels Kathleen. “A Posthumous Caribbean Novel and Two Diasporas:  on L’Ancêtre en Solitude de Simone et André Schwarz-​Bart.” Southern World Arts News. (SWAN) (­February 2015). http://​southernworldartsnews.blogspot.be/​2015/​10/​a-​ posthumous-​caribbean-​novel-​and-​two.html Gyssels Kathleen. “A Shoah Classic Surfacing”, Prooftext 31.3 (2001). http://​muse.jhu. edu/​journals/​prooftexts/​v031/​31.3.gyssels.html. Hantel, Max. “Errant Notes on a Caribbean Rhizome.” Rhizomes 24 (2012). Online publication. http://​www.rhizomes.net/​issue24/​hantel.html Itzkovitz, Daniel. “Notes from a Black-​Jewish Monologue.” Transition 105 (2011): 2–​20. Lapierre, Nicole. Causes communes. Des Juifs et des Noirs. Paris: Stock, 2011. Lawrence, Ramsey. “Religious Subtext and Narrative Structure in Borges’ ‘Deutsches Requiem.’” Variaciones Borges 10 (2000): 119–​138. Leiris, Michel. Contacts de culture et de civilisation à la Martinique. Paris: Gallimard/​ Unesco, 1955. Levin, D. M. “Cinders, Traces, Shadows on the Page: The Holocaust’ in Derrida’s Writing”. Postmodernism and the Holocaust. Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (eds.) New York/​Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998: 265–​86. Levi, Primo. The Drowned and the Saved. (1988). Translated by Raymond Rosenthal. New York: Vintage, 1989. Littell, Jonathan. The Kindly Ones. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. New York: Harper, 2009. Les bienveillantes. Paris: Gallimard, 2006 Memmi, Albert. Dominated Men. Notes towards a Portrait (1968). Boston:  Beacon Press. 1969. Memmi, Albert. Racism. Foreword Kwame Anthony Appiah. Translated with an introduction by Steve Martino. Minneapolis and London: UP Minnesota, 1999. Memmi, Albert. The Scorpion, or the Imaginary Confession. Translated by Eleanor Levieux. NY: J. Philip O’Hara, 1971. Le scorpion ou la confession imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Memmi. Albert. Colonizer and Colonized (1957). Introduction by J.P. Sartre. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991. Miles, William F.S. “La créolité et les Juifs de la Martinique.” Pouvoirs dans la Caraïbe 6 (2010): 129–​60. Revised and updated translation of “Caribbean Hybridity and the Jews of Martinique,” 2005. http://​plc.revues.org/​823. Mitsch, Ruthmarie H. “Maryse Condé’s Mangroves.” Research in African Literatures 28.4 (Winter, 1997): 54–​71. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Knopf, 1977. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

KNots of Memory in French Caribbean literature

263

Petitjean-​Roger, Jacques. “Les juifs à la Martinique sous l’Ancien Régime”. Revue d’histoire des colonies 43.151(1956): 138–​158. Prieto, Eric. “Edouard Glissant, Littérature-​monde, and Tout-​monde.” Small Axe 33 (November, 2010): 11–​120. Pluchon, Pierre. Nègres et juifs au XVIII ième siècle. Paris: Tallandier, 2006. Putman, Lara. Radical Moves. Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race in the Jazz Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern, Contemporary Fiction. Ohio University Press, 2006. Rothberg, Michael, and Max Silverman Sandoval. “Introduction, ‘From ‘Lieu de mémoire’ to ‘Noeud de mémoire’.” Yale French Studies 118–​119 (2010): 9–​15. Sartre, Jean-​Paul. Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre:Novembre 1939-​Mars 1940, The War Diaries of Jean-​Paul Sartre: November 1939–​March 1940. Ed. Arlette Elkaim-​Sartre. Translated by Quentin Hoare. New York: Pantheon, 1985. Schwarz-​Bart, André and Nina Simone. Un plat de porc aux bananes vertes. Paris: Seuil, 1967. Schwarz-​Bart, André and Nina Simone. Morning Star. (L’étoile du matin, 2009). Translated by Julie Rose. New York: Overlook Press, 2011. Schwarz-​Bart, André. A Woman Named Solitude (La Mulâtresse Solitude, 1972). Translated by Ralph Manheim. Syracuse University Press, 1992. Schwarz-​Bart, André. The Last of the Just. (1959). Translated by Stephen Becker. New York: Atheneum, 1973. Simon, Claude. La route des Flandres. Paris: Ed. Minuit. 1960. Taylor, Patrick, and Frederik Ivor Case (eds.) Encyclopedia of Caribbean Religions. 2 vol. University Press of Illinois, 2015. Wilder, Gary. “Irreconcilable Differences, an Interview with A. Memmi.” Transition 71 (1996): 158–​177. http://​www.jstor.org/​stable/​pdf/​2935279.pdf.