Literature and the Long Modernity [1 ed.] 9789401210959, 9789042038523

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Literature and the Long Modernity

176

Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

Begründet von Alberto Martino und in Verbindung mit Francis Claudon (Université Paris-Est Créteil Val de Marne) – Rüdiger Görner (Queen Mary, University of London) – Achim Hölter (Universität Wien) – Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz) – John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) – Alfred Noe (Universität Wien) – Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin) – Sven H. Rossel (Universität Wien)

herausgegeben von

Norbert Bachleitner (Universität Wien)

Redaktion: Paul Ferstl und Rudolf Pölzer Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut für Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Sensengasse 3A , A-1090 Wien

Literature and the Long Modernity

Edited by

Mihaela Irimia and Andreea Paris

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014

Le papier sur lequel le présent ouvrage est imprimé remplit les prescriptions de “ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documents Prescriptions pour la permanence”. The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. Die Reihe “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” wird ab dem Jahr 2005 gemeinsam von Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York und dem Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin herausgegeben. Die Veröffentlichungen in deutscher Sprache erscheinen im Weidler Buchverlag, alle anderen bei Editions Rodopi. From 2005 onward, the series “Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft” will appear as a joint publication by Editions Rodopi, Amsterdam – New York and Weidler Buchverlag, Berlin. The German editions will be published by Weidler Buchverlag, all other publications by Editions Rodopi. ISBN: 978-90-420-3852-3 E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-1095-9 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2014 Printed in The Netherlands

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Mihaela Irimia (University of Bucharest) Why the Long Modernity 2. C.W.R.D. Moseley (University of Cambridge) Forging the Key of Remembrance: Books, Cultures and Memory

7 19

3. MĈdĈlina Nicolaescu (University of Bucharest) Mediating Between East and West in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Translations of Shakespeare 31 4. Stefan Herbrechter (Coventry University) Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist: The Case of Hamlet

45

5. Maâgorzata Grzegorzewska (University of Warsaw) ‘Pictures like a summer’s cloud.’ The Phenomenology of the Visual in William Shakespeare’s Plays and on the Stage of the Contemporary Theatre

57

6. Petruŗa NĈiduŗ (University of Bucharest) Spectres of the Old World in the New

73

7. Christoph Ehland (University of Paderborn) The Laws of Piracy: Pirates as Messengers of Modernity in Thomas Heywood’s Fortune by Land and Sea

85

8. Herbert Grabes (University of Giessen) The Five Radical Modernizations of Long Modernity

101

9. Pat Rogers (University of South Florida) Modernity Then and Now

119

10. Francis O’Gorman (University of Manchester) An Alternative to Whig Modernity: An Analysis of Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century 133 11. Clifford Siskin (NYU) Literary History in the Long Modernity

145

12. Shobhana Battacharji (Jesus and Mary College, New Delhi) Modernity during the Long Romanticism: The Case of Byron

159

13. Jürgen Pieters (Ghent University) Literature and the Long Search for Modernity: The Counter-Histories of Antoine Compagnon and William Marx 175

14. Laurent Milesi (Cardiff University) Speeds of (Post)Modernity

199

15 Thomas Docherty (University of Warwick) Now, or to Tell the Truth, the Contemporary

225

16. Adrian Oŗoiu (University of Baia Mare) In the Wake of Finnegan? Wordplay in Malcolm Lowry and Flann O’Brien: Modernism as a Punceptual Dead End

241

17. Hans-Peter Söder (University of Munich) The Globe is Not Enough: In Defence of National Literature(s)

261

18. Linda Hutcheon (University of Toronto) Literature in the Long Modernity: Its Reception in the Digital Age

275

19. Alan Riach (University of Glasgow) Scottish Literature and Anglo-American Modernity: What Makes It New?

293

20. Eve Patten (Trinity College, Dublin) Modernity and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Making of a ‘National Reader’

309

21. Isabel Oliveira Martins (The New University of Lisbon) Marianne Baillie’s View of Portugal or British Femaleness Abroad

323

22. Michael Hutcheon (University of Toronto) The Musical Modernism of Olivier Messiaen

337

23. Ludmila Volná (Charles University, Prague) Towards Indian Modernity and the Birth of Indian Writing in English: The Case of Rammohan Ray 345 24. Bogdan útefĈnescu (University of Bucharest) Late (for) Modernity: Transition and the Traumatic Colonization of the Future of Postcommunist Cultures 355 25. Arleen Ionescu (University of Ploieûti) Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature. Adrian Oŗoiu’s Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita 369 Notes on Contributors ,QGH[

387 3

Mihaela Irimia Why the Long Modernity To the contemporary literary and cultural critic the very concept of modernity appears inseparable from that of history. Itself a problematic concept, history has traversed an amazing range of semantic adjustments and readjustments and the Heideggerian observation that historicity precedes history drives the case home. 1 The German philosopher was persuaded that the historicity of being at the heart of Being made it imperative for the human race to dig deep, layer after layer, to reach the hidden truth from which we have been estranged in time. On such premises it was obvious to him why the question of language could only be central to the whole of Western philosophy and why philosophy was coextensive with an unceasing and always more subtly reinforced hermeneutic endeavor. Braving the barriers and pitfalls of history, language as (the vehicle of) literature faced the tireless theoretician-interpreter with the huge and therefore more rewarding task of the poet’s fundamental aim, that of possibly reaching back to the primordial meaning of things, from times before time. For time was perceived as alienating distance. ‘History’ itself has a history, to use a paraphrase of Joseph Mazzeo’s view of the history of ideas based on the Burckhardtian understanding of history as change. 2 Impossible thus to approach other than in the regimes of historicity within which they are encountered, history and historicity, modernity and historicity, modernity and temporality and, indeed, modernity and cultural identity appear as unavoidable pairs in the literature and in literature.3 They point to the complex experience of time that humans, whether collectively or individually, have lived in their given present. They also indicate representations of the past and of the future as measured from the vantage point of the present and bring in the issue of continuity vs. discontinuity in time as a cultural value. Needless to say, this presupposes correlation with space in a chronotopic matching without which we would not 1 2

3

See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962) In “Some Interpretations of the History of Ideas” in Journal of the History of Ideas (Vol. 33, No. 3, Jul. – Sep. 1972) Joseph Mazzeo provides an overall definition of historical writing as of necessity “as old as literature.” Mazzeo’s found solid theoretical terrain in Jacob Burckhardt’s dichotomic view: while nature observes its ancestral rules of uncorrupt identity and identities, historical life is hybrids all through, which “appear to be an essential element for fertility in the generation of great intellectual movements. The essence of history is change.” (379) See François Hartog, Régime d’historicité: présentisme et expériences du temps (Paris: Seuil, 2003)

8 Mihaela Irimia be able to grasp our identity. Time valorized, expressed and experienced in terms of space underlies the various modes of articulation of the past, present and future, and of their concatenated succession. Which is as much as saying that time cannot be perceived outside axiological patterns or devoid of heuristic goals. Recent studies have looked into the mechanisms processing time as mere physical coordinate into cultural time. To the ancient regime of historicity based on the conviction that the past is an undeniable model, replete with exemplary events, personages and values is symmetrically displayed the new regime of historicity looking to the future as a time of accomplishment. Leftwards and rightwards of our lived present, metanarratives of history cannot and will not circumvent the tradition-innovation relationship, yet another guise assumed by the modernity discourse. What is modernity? Where can we place its beginning? How long is/has been its course? Has it been unfolding smoothly, or has it known overflows, stops and hindrances? Is it still going on? The Löwith-Blumenberg debate springs to mind, with its crucial argument: is modernity legitimate or is it illegitimate in its fundamentals and, by way of consequence, in its historical occurrence? For Karl Löwith, it was all a matter of secularization, the one massive process which has, in modern times, brought down providence to the level of everyday life. Secularized, so split from its religious origin, providence has come to be progress and manifest itself in and as history. This is why we find ourselves astride an illegitimate phase of history, or, rather, in the gap between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. Illegitimate, because torn off from its background, modernity has curtailed its own venerability, as it were. To this discontinuist thesis Hans Blumenberg opposed his continuist stance. He came up with the occupation thesis maintaining that the human appropriation of infinite creativity, far from acting as a hybris, is to be held in high esteem. Modernity, from this perspective, is a legitimate age, because it fills the gap with the vision of modern man’s victory of reason. By the same token, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic legitimized by human self-assertion. 4 If to secularization and rationalization we add the Weberian disenchantment of the world, we fall upon the definition of modernity as the result of a new way of thinking about the world. A more comprehensive description of the Western project called modernity takes on board cultural values, practices and institutions that fall without modern bounds. Could 4

See Karl Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1949) and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1983)

Why the Long Modernity 9

anybody nowadays conceive of any modern society without its market and banking system and without its university network? In the mid-late 1950s the French Mentalists pleaded for the late Middle Ages as part of what we now call Early Modernity. Merchants and bankers, intellectuals, academics and students were understood as securers of valuable exchanges, from the very material and pecuniary type to the spiritual and cultural one, from pedestrian sales to symbolic legacy. Town and Gown were seen assuming the shape of distinct categories in the history of modern city life.5 So, while it hinges on the break with the past and can be defined as a set of symbolic acts of violence, modernity is not crudely an utter disenchantment with such ‘anti-modern’ things as myth, superstition, dreams or hierarchies. It does not stand in a relation of irreversible breach with its predecessor(s). Rather, it can and does create its own enchantments, as the Frankfurt School theorizers discerned in troubled WWII times. Horkheimer and Adorno saw in the scientific heritage of modern civilization a complex Enlightenment product with roots in Odysseus’s Greece and fruit in Hitler’s Germany. They were wise witnesses to the mechanized history of a mechanistic society set in motion by pragmatized thought with the factory as the very space of modernity: a space of alienation, reification and the idolization of the reproducible. More acutely inhuman they found the culture industry engendered by modern society, with its own myth: number as calculability, regulative thought and reason deprived of its emancipator force and reduced, instead, to the status of instrumental reason, in the grip of its own will-to-power over nature.6 Empowered with the dream of mastering nature, the human race has, along the ages, devised reading grids to apply to the world and make it meaningful. I have called this elsewhere the isomorphic model. 7 By it I mean the theologico-metaphysical evaluation of the world extending between the Classic Antiquity and what we now call the Scientific Revolution. For roughly two millennia the fundamental value according to which the world is made sense of is ƴƯƪơƫƯƪơƣơƨƼƭ, the good, the true and the beautiful as one indistinguishable condensation of perfection. I take it that, after the first revalorization of Platonism in the Christian Middle Ages and the first return 5

6

7

See Jacques Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956) and Les Intellectuels au Moyen Age (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1957) See Max Horkheimer & Theodore W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002) See Mihaela Irimia, “The Collapse of the Isomorphic Model,” in Lures and Ruses of Modernity / Leurres et ruses de la modernité, International Colloquium / Colloque international, New Europe College, 28-29 Nov., 2005 (ed. 0LKDHOD,ULPLD%XFXUHûWL Institutul Cultural Român, 2007, 30-39)

10 Mihaela Irimia to classic values in the Western Renaissance, what we now call Early Modernity becomes irreversibly engaged in a future-oriented project valorizing a secular vision and adjacent practices. There follows the ‘crise de la conscience européenne’ 8, literally a hiatus in the inherited set of values. In my critical vocabulary this is Classic Modernity originating in the eighteenth century with its newly erected public sphere and physico-scientific scaffolding rising on the correct as its central value. High Modernity and its offspring, Late Modernity, give full vent to technological evaluation and place at the centre of their pragmatic scrutiny the value called the efficient. The irreversible fall from the supreme good of the Classic Antiquity into the various forms of approximation cultivated by one phase after another of Modernity – the Long Modernity 9 – I call the collapse of the isomorphic model. We can speak of a Janus-faced modernity. There is Early Modernity with its imitation-geared Weltanschauung and Petrarch identifying in the pagan classics of the Greco-Roman Antiquity gems to be treasured. His belief in the worth of a rinascimento dell’antiquità as advancement of knowledge sets in paradigmatic opposition il buio dei medi evi. References to the Dark Ages even nowadays show the impact of such critical acumen. To this first, a second return to the Classic Antiquity, aka Neo-Classicism, proves the validity of past-looking modern attempts. All the way into Classic Modernity, Western culture legitimizes itself as modern by imitating the pre-modern. And there is High-Late Modernity valorizing invention 10, individual identity, diversity and emancipation from unconditional observance of inherited rules. Leftwardlooking modernity stands for the analeptic view of reading the present. Rightward-looking modernity evinces the proleptic view of reading the present. Part and parcel of modernity, progress is commonly regarded as the most outstanding success of this long historical process. But even this, it can be maintained, is subject to debate, inasmuch as the linear progression of history is, in effect, subsumed to a much more comprehensive Western Weltanschauung – the figuram implere vision advocated by St. Augustine and reformulated in secular terms. In the same spirit Carl Becker once made the crucial remark that the eighteenth-century philosophes had demolished the

8 9

10

See Paul Hazard, La crise de la conscience européene (1685-175) (Paris: Boivin & cie, 1935) See Mihaela Irimia, “The Long Modernity: The Valorization of Time and Memory from Early to Late Modernity,” %XOHWLQXO 8QLYHUVLWĈŗLL 3HWURO – *D]H GLQ 3ORLHûWL, and Philology Series, Vol. LXII, No. 4/2010, 9-14 See Mihaela Irimia & Dragoû,YDQDHGV , Imitatio – Inventio: The Rise of ‘Literature’ from Early to Classic Modernity, International Interdisciplinary Conference, New Europe College, 13-1RY%XFXUHûWL,QVWLWXWXO&XOWXUDO5RPkQ)

Why the Long Modernity 11

Augustinian heavenly City only to rebuild it with up-to-date materials.11 At about the same time in the 1930s Ferdinand Tönnies saw the precedence, in modernity, of the nomological and physical sciences over the idiographic humanities. In the name of rationalized authority, he acknowledged as modern the evolution of human organization from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft, or else from natural blood ties to socially instituted socialization. 12 Concurrently Max Weber identified the modern attitude towards work in the most modern form of the Christian faith, Protestantism.13 The routine term ‘work ethic’ stems from his ‘Protestant ethic,’ which not many are able to pinpoint nowadays, as they are not capable of culling ‘collective consciousness’ in the thought of Émile Durkheim, the sociologist of modernity.14

* This is the theoretical background against which the Centre of Excellence for the Study of Cultural Identity (CESIC), University of Bucharest, has unfolded its research activities and organized annual academic events bringing together academics of the highest reputation. Winner of the first place in the competition run by Romania’s National Council for Scientific Research (CNCS) back in 2009, CESIC has unfolded a three-year project under the overall title The Cultural Institution of Literature from Early to Late Modernity in British Culture, with the following annual components: ImitatioInventio: The Rise of ‘Literature’ from Early to Classic Modernity; Author(ity) and the Canon between Institutionalization and Questioning; Literature and the Long Modernity. The Centre of Excellence has promoted a policy of consistent dissemination of the proceedings, for which it is grateful to the Romanian Cultural Institute and its then Director Horia-Roman Patapievici. This forthcoming volume gracefully accepted by Rodopi stands proof to our endeavours. The Literature and the Long Modernity International Interdisciplinary Conference hosted by the Central University Library (Bucharest, 10-12 November 2011) was prefaced by doctor honoris causa ceremonies during 11

12

13

14

See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932) See Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011) See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Routledge, 1992) See Émile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (Mansfield, CT: Martino, 2012)

12 Mihaela Irimia which Prof. Linda Hutcheon (University of Toronto) and Prof. Pat Rogers (University of South Florida) were awarded honorary degrees by the University of Bucharest. There followed two and a half days of intense academic performance, with the papers that make up this volume as concrete results. As a corollary to the overall project dealing with the Long Modernity (‘from Early to Late Modernity’), the event benefited from twenty-four choice contributions covering the various phases of modernity, as well as the theoretical-conceptual agenda underlying this nuanced Western phenomenon. C.W.R.D. Moseley’s ‘Forging the Key of Remembrance: Books, Cultures and Memory’ proceeded from a mentalité position, with focus on the manner in which we read books and halting to discuss what books we read and which assist us in assembling an image of the past. It took into account three seminal authors – Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare – and evinced forms of reading and misreading responsible for the construction of authority and the canon. Basically a case study (Othello in Romanian, versus German and French translations) MĈGĈOLQD 1LFRODHVFX’s ‘Mediating Between East and West in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Translations of Shakespeare’ approached the sensitive issue of national identity at the problematic time of emerging nationhood in Europe. It put the marginal position of the Romanian Principalities in relation to the West (‘Europe’), for which Wallachia and Moldavia passed as part of the East (the ‘Levant’) and discussed the cartographic inclusion/exclusion dynamics ensuing from this game of power(s). Yet another Shakespearean case study formed the substance of 6WHIDQ +HUEUHFKWHU’s ‘Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist: The Case of Hamlet’, which, as a matter of principle, put forth the difficulty of reading Shakespeare’s work and its Early Modern context with the tools of Late Modern critical culture. It underlined the threshold position held by the great Elizabethan humanist’s texts in relation to our posthumanist culture, which attempts to understand the human from the perspective of ‘its’ repressed others (aliens, monsters, animals, machines, etc.) from such directions as eco-critical, systemic-technological or new networked media approaches. 0DâJRU]DWD *U]HJRU]HZVND’s “‘Pictures like a summer’s cloud”: The Phenomenology of the Visual in William Shakespeare’s Plays and on the Stage of the Contemporary Theatre’ posited the question of the epistemological change occurring between Early and Late Modernity’s ‘visual’ as an imbricated cultural category. It tackled this fundamental identitary change in terms of the fully autonomous subject emerging in Early Modernity, assuming referential shape in Classic and High Modernity

Why the Long Modernity 13

and asserting its sovereignty in Postmodernity. 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ contributed an exciting paper entitled ‘Spectres of the Old World in the New’ which looked into the cultural translation of English narratives of the New World in Early Modernity. It broached texts indebted to natural histories further reformed for the commercial circuit in the colonial context. The author insisted on the anticipatory quality of such renditions in relation to novelistic ‘true adventures’ produced in Classic Modernity, while it pointed out religious and political purposes in (re)shaping geography and knowledge in general for/as the map of the European mind. &KULVWRSK (KODQG’s ‘The Laws of Piracy: Pirates as Messengers of Modernity in Thomas Heywood’s Fortune by Land and Sea’ laid the question of principle by opining that the text under scrutiny offers an insight into the sea change that thought undergoes in Early Modernity only to ascertain the interdependence between modernity and mobility in the long process of subject construction. Considering the cultural readjustment from handbook to dramatic text, it presented Heywood’s play as a carrier of modern selfidentity in relation to the spatial order negotiated between land and sea, ‘the biggest sea fight that appears in any early modern play.’ In ‘The Five Radical Modernizations of Long Modernity’ Herbert *UDEHV offered, in his own personal view of the Long Modernity, a comprehensive tableau of the crucial changes that have traversed British literature and culture since the close of the Middle Ages. He recalled the prevailing view that the Renaissance, the late eighteenth century, modernism and the postmodern era are the distinct phases of the process, but brought in the later seventeenth century as a turning point. Cautious in using the blanket term modern for all these phases; he insisted on the socio-cultural component of Early Modernity, the socio-political shift of the eighteenth century, the meditative approach to nature rather than culture in the Romantic age, the technological revolution of the nineteenth century and the utmost reconceptualization of communication in the contemporary world. Concluding on the sense of insecurity fostered by the Long Modernity, he called the participants’ attention to the illusive use of apparently cool rationality. Of how relative the notion of modernity may appear to the critic 3DW 5RJHUV warned us in his paper ‘Modernity Then and Now,’ which described ‘the long march of modernity [as] a journey beset by sudden jolts, arbitrary changes of direction, and contradictory purposes.’ From an implicitly presentist position he observed that the interval 1660-1760, which he would rather call pre-Enlightenment, does not currently qualify as full historic modernity because it had not experienced the canonical definitions provided by Kant an Hegel, if it does normatively qualify as ‘some form of progress.’

14 Mihaela Irimia Moderation towards progress as the modern attitude was shown by )UDQFLV O’*RUPDQ, the historian to whom we owe the Long Eighteenth Century as a concept. In ‘An Alternative to Whig Modernity: An Analysis of Britain in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ he questioned the Whig Interpretation of History – and of Modernity, for that matter – by doubting the existence of a pattern in the past conferring upon the further evolution of things a certain form or degree of intelligibility. Teleology, in other words, remains a compelling narrative manifest as an organizing theme, but only in the interpreter’s mind. In strictly historical terms, he made us alert to the emergence, in the late seventeenth century, of ‘a structure – or (…) architecture (…) of society’ to be later replaced by a ‘new paradigm, a modern one’, in the mid-nineteenth century. With his well-known theoretical verve, &OLIIRUG 6LVNLQ spoke about ‘Literary History in the Long Modernity’ engaging ‘current problems in knowledge as problems of scale.’ From our hi-tech vantage point he tracked the concept of historia in the late eighteenth century, a time of the disciplinary separation, to propose a new form of history as the history of mediation. He was persuaded that conferences such as the one he was attending called our attention to change in the past, because of our sense of change in the present. As author, with William Warner, of the history of mediation, he insisted on mediation’s virtue of not discriminating against any form of agency. He placed this in the Long Modernity perspective as ‘the power (…) to embrace both the technological and the human (…), point[ing] us past the increasingly unproductive binary of technodeterminism.’ In ‘Modernity during the Long Romanticism: The Case of Byron,’ 6KREKDQD %KDWWDFKDUML acquiesced the slippery nature of modern, modernism, modernity and embarked upon what she called the Long Romanticism, helped by her case study – Byron. She saw in Byron an author ‘of his time, as well as modern,’ and analyzed ‘the complex relationship between him and the early twentieth-century moderns.’ A number of questions deriving from this pointed to the Long Modernity, despite the fuzziness of its phases. Thus, the issue of Byron’s symbolic survival in our Late Modernity, the possibility of his being simply a relic of the past, or, on the contrary, coming back with renewed modern force stirred a heated debate and drew our attention to new readings of his oeuvre in the Long Romanticism. -UJHQ 3Leters focused on the related concepts of anti-moderne and arrière-garde developed by Antoine Compagnon and William Marx. His paper entitled ‘Literature and the Long Search for Modernity: the CounterHistories of Antoine Compagnon and William Marx’ pondered on the complex and vexed relationship between literature and modernity, as suggested by the conference conceptual scaffolding, and discussed the gradual

Why the Long Modernity 15

autonomization of the literary field. It raised the question of a new attempt at the historiography of modern(ist) literature, while it overtly admitted that literature finds itself in a state of crisis nowadays, because it has ceased playing the social and political role that it once had. A lively delivery, followed by as lively a debate, was /DXUHQW 0LOHVL’s ‘Speeds of (Post)Modernity,’ which emphasized the importance of speed in the emergence of modernity with its new technologies and modes of transportation. Organized as a short cultural history of speed, the paper attempted to use this as a ‘conceptual lever’ in understanding the differential construction of Saussure’s linguistic sign and of Bhabha’s time lag, against the backdrop of progress and modernity, with a view to further charting a postmodern evolution of speed via Derrida’s aporia of speed. It recalled the critics’ passion for periodically redrawing the temporal boundaries of their fields and identified in Burckhardt’s writings a Long Modernity originating in the Renaissance, while reminding the audience of French and English versions of the Long Seventeenth Century, of O’Gorman’s Long Eighteenth Century, Anderson’s Short Eighteenth Century, and of Hobsbawm’s Long Nineteenth Century and Short Twentieth Century. It envisaged the ‘perverse consequences of the annulment of time and space by technological advances.’ 7KRPDV 'RFKHUW\ explored the Long Modernity ‘under the specific rubric of what constitutes the “now” (…) focus[ing] on the logic of a “confessional” literature that proposes an access to truth.’ It premised the emptying of the ‘I’ as an extension of ‘a modern moment beyond the time of that moment itself ’ and indicated the here-now context of subjective experience as such. By differentiating between now and then, it asked the crucial question of ‘problematic[ing] the idea of truth (…) as a possible characterization of a long modernity.’ Being modern, it concluded, is a matter of being displaced, of expanding the here-now of lived experience into the ‘democratic community, a community that is always evolving, historical still-to-come.’ Engaged in a modernist-postmodern dialogue, $GULDQ2ŗRLX’s ‘In the Wake of Finnegan? Wordplay in Malcolm Lowry and Flann O’Brien: Modernism as a Punceptual Dead End’ was a theoretical regale with an original author’s direct contribution. Critic and novelist, Oŗoiu declared his admiration for the two avid punsters analysed in his paper. He looked at Lowry’s Under the Volcano as a cascade of Freudian (in)voluntary puns leading to disaster, and at O’Brien’s Keats-and-Chapman pun-stories as ‘elaborate jokes engineered backwards, from the pointe to the origin.’ He identified in the former a ‘tyranny of the signifieds’, and spotted in the latter the sacrifice of verisimilitude and of identity, ‘for the sake of a bon mot’ – modernist excess of meaning versus postmodern ambiguity and depthlessness.

16 Mihaela Irimia +DQV-3HWHU6|GHU made his audience sensitive to the question of world literature in relation to the literature of globalization. His ‘The Globe is Not Enough: In Defense of National Literature(s)’ referred to the various national epistemologies countering ‘the past monumentalism of European national literature’ at a time of postcolonial reassessments ranging from the crudely political to the overtly aesthetic and cultural. It considered the ‘repossession of the canon [as] a reappraisal of literary history from ‘the outside’ of literary time,’ while it defined cultural memory as ‘a collective cultural and social achievement.’ Nowadays, when the age of parochialism is over, we were warned, readers of national literatures cannot, nor should they avoid interacting with new literatures, leaving behind ‘the provincialism of large nations and its counterpart, small-context terrorism.’ /LQGD +XWFKHRQ gave a wonderful paper on ‘Literature in the Long Modernity: Its Reception in the Digital Age,’ in which she insisted on the sweeping reconfiguration of concepts and values in ‘the brave new digital world of today.’ Her main concern with the reception of literature and book reviewing in our customer-friendly reality sided with her awareness that ‘[t]he term ‘the long modernity’ is much older and has a much more broad and inclusive meaning than either modernism or postmodernism.’ Her contribution underlined the ever expanding area of the institution of book reviewing, from the eighteenth-century mediation between author and reader to the twenty-first-century relation between author and the ‘empowered consumer’, a role that can be assumed by everybody and anybody. $ODQ 5LDFK introduced Scottish modernism in relation to Irish and AngloAmerican modernism by gauging the distance taken from tradition. ‘Scottish Literature and Anglo-American Modernity: What Makes It New?’ set in contrast the aesthetics of modernism with its multiple perspectives and the imperatives of politics with its singleness of purpose. It identified individualism as the modus vivendi of Irish and Anglo-American modernist writers, while it recognized that their Scottish equivalents reclaim traditional forms. Riach further pointed to the ‘[f]our moments of entering modernity in the Scottish literary tradition,’ namely the sixteenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ‘lead[ing] to the independence referendum of 2014, making it new in an unpredicted context.’ He concluded that ‘in Scotland the engagement with modernity demanded the regeneration of the idea of a coherent nation that was not one thing, but made out of differences.’ (YH 3DWWHQ provided an excellent Irish counterpart to Alan Riach’s paper. Her ‘Modernity and Nineteenth-Century Ireland: The Making of a “National Reader”’ examined national reading in relation to concepts of Irish modernity. Starting from William St Clair’s ‘reading nation,’ it considered reading against the grain of Irish cultural nationalism and the actual practice

Why the Long Modernity 17

of reading at the time of the Irish Revival. It analyzed ‘Ireland’s exposure to a European modernity through print culture [as] much broader than nationalist portraits of an ‘Irish reader’ permit,’ given the traumatic process of becoming national. How modern women travelers in the first quarter of the nineteenth century were was the object of ,VDEHO2OLYHLUD0DUWLQV’s ‘Marianne Baillie’s View of Portugal or British Femaleness Abroad.’ Breathing the Romantic air of emancipation, these female agents faced with alterity behaved not only differently from their male counterparts, but – even more tellingly – in ways clearly distinguishing them from most of the female population who stayed at home. Marianne Baillie’s travel narrative laid down during her visits to Lisbon in the interval 1821-1823 was chosen as a relevant case study. A sui generis contribution came from 0LFKDHO +XWFKHRQ, whose amazing musical erudition won the audience in no time. His paper ‘The Musical Modernism of Olivier Messiaen’ familiarized those present with the composer’s singularity at a time of avant-garde innovation. Messiaen was, we were told, even more innovative, in that, rejecting neoclassicism and serialism, he eventually came up with a unique modernist formula recognizable in his matchless melody, harmony and rhythm. Culling no few elements of his music from nature, more precisely the song of birds, he applied his musical selection to Saint François d’Assise, his only and outstanding opera. ‘The Other’ on ethnic-cultural grounds was /XGPLOD 9ROQi’s focus in her ‘Towards Indian Modernity and the Birth of Indian Writing in English: The Case of Rammohan Ray.’ The paper approached the difficult and as such the more exciting issue of modernity outside Western civilization. It analyzed the role played by Rammohan Ray in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a prominent reformer among Indian intellectuals. Involved in reshuffling institutions in his society, he militated for English-speaking education and opening India to the outer world. His name remains associated with Europocentrism versus other modernity values. %RJGDQ útefĈQHVFX brought in yet another distinctive note with his ‘Late (for) Modernity: Transition and the Traumatic Colonization of the Future of Postcommunist Cultures.’ This has been part of a comprehensive debate, especially in post-1989 countries that were formerly outside institutionalized Western civilization, albeit European by location, tradition and history. This is certainly the case of Romania, in whose academic and intellectual circleV úWHIĈQHVFX’s opinion is worth serious attention. In his view capitalist Western coloniality and Soviet communism fared in the same waters of power relationships, leaving behind more than one model of modernity and modernization sensitive to syncopated, asynchronous or even suspended modernities.

18 Mihaela Irimia $UOHHQ,RQHVFX dealt with ‘Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature: Adrian 2ŗRLX’s Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita.’ From the Derridean position of a Western hauntology still at work, she developed her own view of ghosts of modernity and emphasized the separation of the ‘spirit’ from the ‘spectre’ and from the ‘king,’ and looked at the commodification of language. In &HDXûHVFu’s Romania this was the language of madness encapsulating predetermined communist doctrines and forced down people’s throats as the only officially acceptable linguistic code. Such fetishistic exaggerations could not last and eventually proved that ‘to prolong itself, modernity needs to become its own spectre.’

Bibliography Borsey, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660-1800 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989) Borsey, Peter, The Rise of the New Urban Society (1995) Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the Eritish State, 1688-1783 (New York: Knopf, 1989) Clark, Jonathan Charles Douglas, English History, 1688-1832 Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancient Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985) Clark, Jonathan Charles Douglas, Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986) Clark, Peter, British Clubs and Societies 1580-1800: the Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000) Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707--1837, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) Harvey, David, What is Modernization? The Condition of the Post-Modern (Oxford, 1989), pp. 42-44. Langford, Paul, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727-1783 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989) Langford, Paul, Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1689-1798 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991) O’Gorman, Frank, ‘Ordering the Political World: the Pattern of Politics in Eighteenth Century Britain’ in Ordering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. by. Diana Donald and Frank O’Gorman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital and the European States, 990-1990 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992)

C.W.R.D. Moseley Forging the Key of Remembrance: Books, Cultures and Memory This essay, recognizing the importance of how we read books, and which books we read, to our construction of our past, looks at three instances that have been seminal in English culture: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey Chaucer, and William Shakespeare. It argues that one important job of the critic and scholar is to recover as far as is now possible the mentalité in which these books were written in order to criticize and evaluate our own, and that a canon agreed over time is both inevitable and essential. Keywords: adaptation, authority, bardolatry, Britain, canon, Chaucer, Dante, Garrick, history, identity key, Geoffrey, Shakespeare, Stratford, mentalité, Polydore, memory, Monmouth, nation, remembrance, Troy, truth, Vergil Than mote we to bokes that we finde, Through which that olde thinges been in minde, And to the doctrine of these olde wyse, Yeven credence, in every skilful wyse, And trowen on these olde aproved stories, Of holinesse, or regnes, of victories, Of love, of hate, of other sundry thinges, Of whiche I may not maken rehersinges. And if that olde bokes were a-weye, Y-loren were of remembraunce the keye. Wel oghte us than on olde bokes leve, Ther-as ther is non other assay by preve. And, as for me, though that my wit be lyte, On bokes for to rede I me delyte […] If that olde bokes were aweye, Yloren were of remembraunce the keye. 1

The key of remembrance would be indeed lost without old books: true enough, for books are the fundamental way we know about the past. But what do we remember, or, more pointedly, what do we want to remember? A disturbing thing about Geoffrey Chaucer’s work is that, in House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde and elsewhere, he demonstrates to us that a book that is taken as authority, as ‘true’ in whatever sense, may in fact be a serious misreading of its now inaccessible sources. Yet that misreading will become truth, ‘authority/auctoritas’, for the future. We watch the very process at work – indeed, he asks us to – in Troilus. Furthermore, he stresses that what survives, the actual books and documents and memorials, what Fame and the accidents of time have left us and which we in turn bequeath to the 1

Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘Prologue to Legend of Good Women’ in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987), pp. 17-28

20 C.W.R.D. Moseley future, may be patchy, one-sided, or just plain wrong. Piquantly enough, he underlines that his own work may be misread, miscopied, that some of it may not survive – and that may be why he gives us a list of his works not all of which did survive – in that problematical apology for having written them, at the end of some MSS of Canterbury Tales. But books don’t just inform; they and their authors are themselves that about which a later age is informed. This essay, which after all originated in a conference devoted to the place of literature in the way we construct ourselves and, by extension, that image of the otherness of the past by which we know who we are, will glance at two things: first, how a clever author in tune with the needs of his time can create a fiction that becomes a potent truth for later centuries, and, second, how succeeding generations have made a canon and a narrative out of the disiecta membra the tide of time has left on our shore, and how those writers who constitute it often become more talismans of some sort of cultural identity than actually read. We cannot help constructing canons: even when we deconstruct them we simply replace one with another. Obviously, I must write about what I know, which is England, and I must finally look at those two giants, Chaucer and Shakespeare. But I am sure the principle would hold good for other literatures and cultures too. I make no apology for talking about old authors: all times were once modern. Dante might well have welcomed the canonical position he now holds in Italian and Western culture, but it is very far from that which that bad-tempered exile had in his own day, and the biting topicality of his Commedia, which we ignore, was as important to him as the theology. So too with Chaucer or Shakespeare: their current cultural status could be of small concern to them, for nobody but a fool writes for posterity. First, a book few moderns now know: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain.2 Written about 1135, in a scholarly Latin that restricted its readership to an administrative, clerical and influential male intelligentsia, it traced the history of Britain from its founding by Brutus, grandson of Trojan Aeneas, to the collapse of the Arthur’s realm into strife and chaos. Despite Geoffrey’s perhaps disingenuous protestations – he had his own clear and pressing agenda – as fact in our sense it is totally bogus, and some contemporaries said so. But tracing the British polity back to Troy authorised, legitimised, the new Norman dynasty which his contemporary Dudo of St Quentin 3 had claimed were the returning descendants of 2

3

The most recent edition is Michael D. Reeve, ed. Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain, tr. by Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007) Dudo of St Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae Ducum, ed. Jules Lair, (Caen: F. Le Blanc-Hardel, 1865)

Forging the Key of Remembrance 21

Trojan Antenor. Geoffrey and Dudo were colonising the past as the Normans were colonising the space of Europe. And they were believed. For five centuries Geoffrey’s account of Britain’s origins was standard; over 200 MSS survive. His kings – Lear, Cymbeline, Brutus – appear wholly seriously in the genealogies of the English kings, from Edward I to Elizabeth 4. London is frequently, down to 1620 or so, called ‘New Troy’. 5 When Polydore Vergil, in the time of Henry VIII, questions Geoffrey’s veracity, he gets little welcome: the myth is too useful. And Geoffrey is the source from which the huge corpus of Arthurian material across Europe flows. Here is a perfect example of how a book’s fiction can become a truth by which, in the vastly differing circumstances of five centuries, a country can define its identity, dynasties their legitimacy, and a culture its changing values. And at any given point in that long span of time they did not know they were mediaeval: they, like we do, thought they were modern. Geoffrey pretends to be fact, and was so taken. What about writers of explicit fiction? Chaucer (and others) has been hi-jacked, straitjacketed, made to stand for all sorts of things that matter to us, as reassurances of our attitudes. Beyond question, the Chaucer revered by his English and Scottish successors, admired by the Elizabethans, deplored by the Augustans, is only obliquely related to the real Chaucer and his work in his time. Although the last two centuries of serious historical research have given us far more to go on as far as concerns context, there is no guarantee that the Chaucer we have conferences about is any less reflective of our own visions, our own myopia. One has to keep reminding students that he was not a post-modernist avant la lettre, any more than Shakespeare was Freudian, Marxist, feminist, structuralist or whatever. Yet in all those different responses is a common thread: the recognition that in some way this poet represents a sort of starting point from which we construct a canon of ‘Great Writers in English’ and, as canons do, that defines, in the testimony of writers we value, as much what we, now, then, consider important as it does the nature of the experience of the people who utter the world in English. For a century after his death, Chaucer was revered explicitly as the man who gave English a vocabulary and rhetorical resource, a flexibility of utterance, that enabled it to challenge comparison with smart French and

4

5

A good example is the genealogical roll of Henry VI in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries of London. As for example by John Gower, line 38 of Prologue to Confessio Amantis (1390s) and the Eighth Song of Michael Drayton, Polyolbion (1612)

22 C.W.R.D. Moseley authoritative Latin.6 His massive stature casts a long shadow, and for many writers what was his originality became a mannerism – rather as Milton’s manner similarly constrained even good minor writers for over a century. Even the really original ones, who altered the map, like Wordsworth or Keats, could not ignore it. Chaucer in the sixteenth century was the only English author to have a ‘Collected Works’: single-volume editions in which a canon began to cohere. But these editions also reconstructed and frequently invented Chaucer’s biography, as well as his works. For example: Pynson, Printer to Henry VIII for twenty years, the first to produce something like a collected edition, included five works we know are not Chaucer’s. In 1532, Thynne’s important edition included even more, bringing the total apocrypha to 28. John Stow‘s edition in 1561 brought the number up to more than 50. Once included, these bogus texts stayed in the canon. Even more were added in the seventeenth century, remaining till as late as 1810, long after Thomas Tyrwhitt pared the canon down in his 1775 edition. Why? The compilation and printing of Chaucer’s works was, from the start, politically and ideologically slanted. He, and his century-old authority, mattered: printing him was intended to establish an English, non-Latin, national identity and culture. The most significant aspect of this growing apocrypha is that it included things that made Chaucer look protoProtestant to an England perilously divided by Reformation quarrels. The Testament of Love, actually by his friend Thomas Usk, and the anonymous Plowman’s Tale which Thynne included in his second, 1542, edition, present Chaucer, who cannot have not been Catholic, and who is more than a little guarded about Lollard or Wyclifite – what Europe would later know as Hussite – ideas, as a Protestant avant la lettre. As Thynne’s headnote makes clear, the ABC which is actually addressed to the Blessed Virgin, has to be presented so it blames John of Gaunt’s wife Blanche for this bit of Mariolatry: ‘Chaucers A.B.C., called La Priere de Nostre Dame: made, as some say, at the request of Blanch, Duchesse of Lancaster, as a praier for her priuat vse, being a woman in her religion very deuout’. Even the thoroughly Catholic Parson’s Tale, which translates a French confession manual, is turned round to an anti-Catholic position by marginal glosses asserting Chaucer’s opposition to its doctrine. ‘Chaucer’ was simply too important to be left to the opposition. For Spenser in the 1590s, Chaucer is still, as for Caxton over a century earlier, the ‘well of English undefiled’, and a major source of his very artificial poetic diction in another intensely political and ideological poem, 6

See the citations in Caroline Spurgeon, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 1357-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925)

Forging the Key of Remembrance 23

intended as the epic for England as the Aeneid was for Rome – and one, significantly, furiously anti-Catholic. But linguistic change, sonic as well as lexical, had already begun to make Chaucer less accessible to general readers, and by Dryden’s time he has become one of those authors whom everyone has on their shelves but who is less and less read. Dryden in all sincerity can call him the ‘Father of English Poetry’, but feels that his poetry has reached that antiquity when it can be re-presented to suit the taste of the later seventeenth century.7 He does it very well indeed in reworking some of the tales. But note: it is now the unfinished Tales that are seen as Chaucer’s key work; Troilus, regarded as his masterpiece through the fifteenth century, with its intense philosophical discussions, its courtly focus, its pseudo-historical connection to London, New Troy as Chaucer’s friend Gower called it, is dropping below the horizon for most. It is what Dryden calls the ‘God’s Plenty’ of the Tales, the narratives that seem realistic, the range of character types, that now appeal, and here one discerns the effect of a growingly mercantile, urban, middle class, culture and a taste influenced by the drama that had developed long after Chaucer’s times. And for Alexander Pope, Chaucer is a giant of the past whose fate, respected oblivion, awaits all writers: Our sons their fathers’ failing language see, And such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be. 8

His homage to Chaucer is oblique indeed: a trivial 26 line bawdy joke, intended as pastiche, as if the only work Chaucer wrote had been the Miller’s Tale. 9 Yet, just when scholars begin to recover the real Chaucerian canon, and his genius begins that long process of being re-evaluated which still continues, that is exactly the fate that awaits him: for the common reader, or no reader at all, Chaucer, arguably one of the half dozen greatest European writers, is now no more than a cheerful roly-poly sort of chap who goes on pilgrimages and tells bawdy stories, a useful source for bad West End shows that pander – Chaucer’s word, as it happens – to popular taste for the sexual and scatological. He has become a myth. But everyone knows he is the ‘Father of English Poetry’. My students are astonished when for the first time they read the man they thought they knew about, for here is not the comfortable reassurance, easily pigeonholed, they expected, but someone far more challenging and astringent. In little, that is 7

8

9

See the preface to Fables Ancient and Modern; translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer: with original Poems (London 1700) Alexander Pope, ‘An Essay On Criticism’, in Poetical Works, ed. By H. Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), p.77 In Pope’s ‘Imitations of English Poets’, published 1727, but written much earlier.

24 C.W.R.D. Moseley a fable of how a modern culture can be fooled by its own images, and selfimages, and how it needs to explore the past to know who and what it is: to unlock memory. And so to Shakespeare. The scripts of plays are not the same things as poems, even if Chaucer’s poems have built into them the ambiguity of oral performance and delivery. How have we been made to remember, think of Shakespeare? What mysterious places of the mind, if any, does his text unlock for us? The fact is that often we are not reading him when we say we are, or watching his plays when we see the actors speaking his words: but ‘Shakespeare’ stands for both activities. Different centuries and different cultures have made him mirror themselves and their preoccupations, and of all writers he par excellence has been bent to suit agendas of which he could have had no inkling. This story is not without interest, and had I world enough and time I could have a gentle canter through some of the more amusing byways of the career of that idea we call ‘Shakespeare’; for the man himself, what he thought he was doing, has become unknowable in what has become of his work. The beginning is the divorce, which the Preface ‘To the Reader’ in the First Folio of 1623 makes, between Shakespeare as authoritative text according to his ‘true copies’ – an idea very far from any working dramatist’s mind then – and Shakespeare as writer of plays that are performed and cut and adapted and altered to get audiences so that the actors can buy their dinner. It has been said that the title page of that first folio is the first piece of lit. crit., with its division of a very diverse and inconsistent canon into the rigid straitjacket of genre: ‘Comedies, Histories and Tragedies’. And smart Folio editions put the man who never bothered to see any of his plays through the press on the shelves of the cultured, the people who like Ben Jonson will see him as the Swan of Avon, the National Poet of Britain, as Homer was the Swan of Maeander and Vergil the Swan of Mantua. 10 They will see the text as the ‘precious lifeblood of a master spirit’, as Milton claimed books to be, to be established, authorised, interpreted, categorised. But the theatre knew little of that: adaptation, and bottoms on seats was and is the name of the game, for young men – i.e. actors – must live even if not all can play Falstaff. Tate’s adaptation of King Lear, now in notoriously bad taste, did not raise an eyebrow when he had Lear restored to his kingdom and settle in geriatric comfort with Cordelia, happily married to Edgar – indeed, it was felt that Shakespeare was improved thereby, and return to the trajectory of the old story originating in Geoffrey of Monmouth decorous. 10

See Ben Jonson’s wonderful panegyric in the Prelims of the First Folio of 1623.

Forging the Key of Remembrance 25

A string of such adaptations – Shakespeare ‘made fit’ for an age that saw itself as more enlightened than the barbarous days of Elizabeth – followed through the long eighteenth century11, and it was only with actormanagers like Macready in the early 1800s that many plays were done in anything like the narrative form Shakespeare wrote them. And that development was followed by the fashion for what one may call an archaeological Shakespeare: real rabbits hopped around the stage in Beerbohm Tree’s London production of As You Like It in 1911, and his King John (1899) not only had a cast of thousands and a massive backdrop of the battle of Angers in the style of Uccello’s battle of San Romano but added a scene with the signing of Magna Carta – which event was of no importance to Shakespeare and his generation. Scholars spent acres of paper seeking to contextualize the never-never world of, say, Romeo and Juliet in a real fourteenth century Verona, and such towns became places for visiting English tourists simply because Shakespeare happened to set a wholly fictional play there. And the last century has seen an equally bizarre development of Shakespeare as the prophet of grunge, with a contempt for all human relationships and values – a fair reflection of major strands in life-denying late 20th century culture. So, to general approval, in a Royal Shakespeare Company production (1993) of The Tempest, Ariel spat in Prospero’s face and Caliban was made the virtual hero. Is any of this, Tree’s rabbits or Peter Brook’s menacing Midsummer Nightmare’s fairies, what Shakespeare would have recognized? I do not think so: but it alerts us to the fact that plays ‘with words by Shakespeare’ are Protean, and can be made what we want them to be: and this can be valuable. But it precludes hearing the voice of the past, it precludes that dialogue that might challenge us to re-think. Yet I doubt whether that challenge of the Other can be done in theatre, because theatre has to speak to its paying audience where that audience is, in time and space and culture. Reading might be different. The Folio and its successors rapidly put Shakespeare in an impregnable position, and from Rowe in 1709 onwards he attracts the scholarship of editors, including the magisterial Dr Johnson. Glossing, the ascertaining of the ‘correct’ reading, the emendation of the text, the comparison of the different printings of the plays – all great stuff, fascinating, and giving us a wonderful insight into the material world of the ‘Jacobethan’ print culture as well as the difficult interface between performed script and printed text: but not things he himself bothered 11

See for example Sandra Clark’s Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare, (London: Everyman, 1997)

26 C.W.R.D. Moseley about. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the frequent editions are often in cheap octavo format, and if you look at the numbers and the print runs against the total English population – 5,000,000 in 1800 – you realize that few households above the humblest level would have not had a set of Shakespeare. Charles Knight’s editions in the 1840s and 1850s were cheap, heavily framed by informative essays, mainly historical and wholly irrelevant, on the background of the plays, and copiously illustrated. Were they read? Or were they just furniture, signs of a culture to which one had pretensions? I suspect the latter: for several copies I have seen have uncut pages: they have never been read. But Shakespeare was a badge of all sorts of desirable social things, his work a talisman of value and wisdom – almost a secular text as companion to the sacred text of the Bible. Above all, safe, a Classic: and he sold like hot cakes. So, from the early eighteenth century to our own time, ‘Shakespeare’, however defined, is a cultural fixed point. But often it is what Shakespeare is taken to stand for that has the potency. For example, think of the Jubilee that the great actor David Garrick mounted in Stratford in 1769. Garrick loved Shakespeare, and loved being painted in the Shakespeare roles he played – as he was, marvelously, by Hogarth, as Richard III. At his house he built a Temple, modeled on the Temple of Apollo at Delos in Claude le Lorrain’s painting, stuffed with portraits and mementoes of Shakespeare. Centrepiece was the statue by Roubiliac which has more than a hint of Garrick in it. Gainsborough’s portrait of Garrick shows him embracing a bust of Shakespeare. Garrick was also easily flattered. The Stratford town council decided to build a new town hall but ran out of money. A lawyer, Francis Wheler, suggested that if Garrick was offered the freedom of the Town where Shakespeare was born, he might be persuaded not only to part with one of his busts of Shakespeare for the new building but also help with funding. Thus was conceived the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769: to furnish a new town hall for a parsimonious town council. Stratford up to that point had had small interest in Shakespeare; it little realised that what Garrick would do would alter its economy radically, and within ten years draw visitors from all over, as it still does. Garrick mounted a three day festival, with serenades, public breakfasts and dinners, an oratorio – de rigueur at any sort of public celebration then – by Dr Arne, two balls (one in masquerade, tickets one guinea, of which James Boswell gives a hilarious account 12) – an Ode spoken by Garrick, a 12

See ‘A Letter from James Boswell Esq; describing the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon’, The London magazine, or, Gentleman’s monthly intelligencer, Volume 38 (September 1769), pp. 452-4

Forging the Key of Remembrance 27

chorus, fireworks, and horse races, and a Procession of Shakespeare’s characters. But note: no performance of anything so demanding as a play was threatened: the characters in the procession were wholly detached from their matrix. Garrick’s devotion to Shakespeare was genuine, but the Jubilee also celebrated David Garrick, who almost took on the persona of Shakespeare himself. As Steward his insignia was a medallion, made from the wood of that mulberry tree Shakespeare, perhaps, planted, with Shakespeare’s portrait on it. The climax of the festivities was Garrick reciting his Ode to Shakespeare. He ceremonially crowned Shakespeare’s bust with laurel, and his ode makes clear that for him poets are essential to the healthy commonwealth. Ye guilty, lawless tribe, Escap’d from punishment, by art or bribe, At Shakespeare’s bar appear! [...] 13 When law is weak, and justice fails, The poet holds the sword and scales. 14

With extraordinary hyperbole, he calls Shakespeare, the ‘Sweetest bard that ever sung’, ‘The god of our idolatry’: ‘To him the song, the Edifice we raise/ He merits all our wonder, all our praise!’. 15 And the pictures that were published of Garrick declaiming, surrounded by the chorus, with Shakespeare’s bust in the background, deliberately borrow the semiotics of religion. 16 By 1800 we have full scale Bardolatry, Shakespeare almost as holy text. Of course, the little known about Shakespeare’s life was a godsend, for in constructing myths, the less fact there is to go on the better. Legend grows about everything, from Shakespeare’s love life to his drinking habits. And in these last decades of the eighteenth century, when the world was so visibly changing, a nostalgia begins to develop for a ‘lost’ England, that never was: sturdy honest peasants and Jolly Jack Falstaffs in every tavern, an England of thatched cottages, brave Elizabethans, Francis Drakes and Walter Raleighs with expensive cloaks – a never-never land that everybody in some way needs. Round Shakespeare grows a sort of secular saint’s life epitomizing this imagined time, edifying and reassuring. Shakespeare the 13 14

15 16

The point is emphasised by the semi-chorus singing David Garrick, An Ode upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, At Stratford upon Avon (London: T. Becket and F.A. De Hondt, 1769), p. 6 Ibid., p.6 See, for example, the print ‘Mr Garrick reciting the Ode in honour of Shakespeare at the Jubilee in Stratford’ in the Mary Evans Picture Library

28 C.W.R.D. Moseley genius is accessible as a man. But the Shakespeare biographical myth is becoming more important than what he wrote, and indeed today there is a whole branch of totally bogus scholarship devoted to ‘authorship studies’ which ignores what the plays and poems have to say. Indeed, the uses of Shakespeare are deeply interesting. Given the number of references to Shakespeare at all levels in English culture from the 1700s onwards, it is easy to slip into thinking that the experience of the plays in some form or another had reached the man in the street. I do not think this is so, any more than the casual way my students refer to, say, Marx or Darwin or Einstein, accurately, means they have read them. Theatre was and is an urban form, and its patrons are a self-selecting group with disposable income: it is not a universal form. So the use of Shakespearean references, say, in political cartoons is no evidence of universal knowledge, but of allusive, even anecdotal, knowledge among the same sort of chattering classes who buy theatre tickets and are nostalgic about a lost past. I am thinking of the use, particularly of the political plays, as a means of political comment in cartoons by for example, Hogarth, Dent or Cruickshank. This is for a market that is the Town: not the hoi polloi who hew wood and draw water. Certainly Shakespeare is an allegorical vehicle for political satire, but the market for those prints – and they were for selling, to make a living for their artists – is the elite. For example, Hogarth in 1728, for sale to individuals, not as he would now for a widely circulated newspaper, could engrave a scene from Henry VIII, giving Wolsey the face of Robert Walpole, the Prime Minister, and be sure that everyone who mattered would get the political point. Later cartoonists – Gillray, Cruickshank and Dent – also making a living by sale, could use Henry IV I and II to satirise the antics of the Prince Regent and Mrs Fitzherbert and Charles James Fox. This is I suppose a variant on Garrick’s ‘guilty lawless tribe’ appearing at ‘Shakespeare’s bar’: but it is a long long way from engaging with Shakespeare’s work itself. All this is (to me anyway) fascinating, and much more could be said. But the question persistently forming in my mind is whether we can get behind this entertaining cultural history and let old books loose in our imaginations, whether we can be open enough to hear what they had to say. Shakespeare, like Chaucer, has been appropriated, revalued, remade in ways that make lying on Procrustes’ bed look like a mere gentle massage. It does not seem to have bothered him as it bothered Chaucer, and perhaps that was in the nature of the job of being a writer of plays. It bothers me, for once canonical, given that august authority of moral guide, it is a ducking of the responsibility of reading that falls on us as scholars – not on everyone, but on the clerisy, us, whose job it is to do the thinking and ask the awkward questions for, and of, our society. Scholarship has the

Forging the Key of Remembrance 29

important job of recovering the vision old books had and still can show us if we are patient and listen to them: if we stop completing their sentences for them. We need the old books, as Chaucer put it in another poem 17, to teach us new wisdom, to destabilise our certainties, to question our myths: that is what keys are for: to unlock the fetters of our minds. In education we ought to be forging those keys. The past has made us; but it questions us.

Bibliography Boswell, James, ‘A Letter from James Boswell Esq; describing the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-upon-Avon’, The London magazine, or, Gentleman’s monthly intelligencer, 38 (September 1769), pp. 452-4 Chaucer, Geoffrey, ‘Prologue to Legend of Good Women’ and ‘Parlement Of Foulys’, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1987) Clark, Sandra, Shakespeare Made Fit: Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare (London: Everyman, 1997) Drayton, Michael, Polyolbion (London, 1612) Dryden, John, Fables Ancient and Modern; translated into Verse, from Homer, Ovid, Boccace, & Chaucer: with original Poems (London, 1700). Dudo of St Quentin, De moribus et actis primorum Normanniae Ducum, ed. by Jules Lair (Caen: F. Le Blanc-Hardel, 1865) Garrick, David, An Ode upon Dedicating a Building and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, At Stratford upon Avon (London: T. Becket and F.A. De Hondt, 1769) Gower, John, ‘Confessio Amantis’ in The English Poopms of John Gower, ed. by G.C. Macaulay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, for the Early English text Society, repr. 1957) Monmouth, Geoffrey of, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. by Michael D. Reeve, trans. by Neil Wright (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007) Pope, Alexander, ‘An Essay On Criticism’, in Poetical Works, ed. By H. Davis (London: Oxford University Press, 1966) Pope, Alexander, ‘Imitations of English Poets’ in The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Henry W. Boynton (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1903)

17

See Parlement Of Foulys 22ff.

30 C.W.R.D. Moseley Spurgeon, Caroline, Five Hundred Years of Chaucer Criticism and Allusion, 13571900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925)

MĈdĈlina Nicolaescu Mediating Between East and West in 19th Century Romanian Translations of Shakespeare The paper sets out to investigate the historical context of the 19th century Romanian translations of Othello. The paper traces the anxieties of the public of the translation over the liminal position of the Romanian principalities, in between the East (the Ottoman Empire) and the West (Europe), and in particular over the perceived danger that Romania might disappear from the map of Europe. The negotiation between ‘east and west’ in the texts of the translations are further traced by discussing the similarities and the differences between these texts and the 19th century canonical German and French versions. Keywords: Shakespeare, Othello, translations, 19th century Romania, the Ottoman Empire

I. The 1868 Romanian translation of Othello provides an unexpected version for Othello’s famous question in Act 2 scene 3 ‘Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that/Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?’.1 Instead of the Romanian equivalent for Turks [‘turci’], it employs the word ‘pagini’, meaning pagans or heathens [‘Devenit-am pagini’ – Are we turned pagans?]. The departure from the original is all the more striking as it does not occur either in the previous 1848 translation or in any other version of the play in French or German circulated at the time. The translator, P.P. Carp, is known to have studied Baudissin’s version in the Schlegel-Tieck edition of the play, yet the departure of Baudissin’s text from the original differs from the Romanian translation. The German text leaves out the processes of ‘turning’, of degenerating into the condition of infidel Turks. Baudissin’s ‘sind wir denn Turken? – [‘what are we – Turks?’] comes close to Vigny’s lines – ‘sommes nous des turcs?’ in his Le More de Venise. 2 The omission of the idea of turning/becoming in the German and French versions indicates that by the late 18th and early 19th century the danger of Christians turning Turk that Shakespeare referred to, was no longer a possibility in Western Europe. 3 Why should Carp have left the Turks out of the picture while still 1 2 3

William Shakespeare, Othello, the Moor of Venice, ed. by Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.49-50 (1.3.) Alfred de Vigny, Le More de Venise, in Theatre (Paris: Flammarion, 1932), vol. 2, p. 95 On the early modern danger of Western Christians turning Turk , see Daniel Vitkus, ‘Turning Turk in Othello: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, 48:2, 1997

32 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu preserving the possibility of conversion – of ‘turning’? Further omissions related to the Turks in Carp’s translation are similarly puzzling. Carp significantly changes the description of the Turk in Othello’s final speech: ‘where a malignant and turbaned Turk/Beat a Venetian and traduced the state/I took by the throat the circumcised dog/And smote him – thus’. 4 In the first place Carp leaves the description of the Turk as a ‘circumcised dog’ altogether. 5 Secondly, the Turk is no longer ‘turban’d’ but wears a ‘fez’, i.e. a headgear that was introduced in the 19th century in the Ottoman empire as part of the wholesale adoption of European clothes. Sultan Mahmud Khan II adopted the fez as a closest approximation to the European hat, as a hat’s brim would have made it difficult for a Muslim to pray with his forehead pressed to the ground. Carp’s audience, who encountered and interacted with Turks on a regular everyday basis, would have found a Turk with a fez a familiar person, whereas a ‘turban’d Turk’ would have reminded them of the arch enemy of the 16th and 17th century. Furthermore the Romanian version of the Duke’s line ‘we must straight employ you/against the general enemy Ottoman’ (my emphasis) replaces the adjective ‘general’ with that of ‘common’ or ‘mutual’ [the Romanian comun]. As Michael Neil has pointed out in the note to this line in Oxford edition, the adjective ‘general’ signifies in Shakespeare’s text that the Turks are the enemy of all Christendom. 6 The replacement in the Romanian text suggests that the Turkish threat is not a global but rather a local affair, the Turks becoming Othello’s and Venice’s mutual enemy. 7 These examples clearly indicate that Carp’s omissions are meant to protect the image of the Turks. In this respect Carp’s version of the play resembles the Turkish translations, which until the 1920s expunged all negative references to Turks and to the Ottoman Empire. The paper will start from the above mentioned changes Carp introduced in his version of Othello and will discuss the complex political and cultural negotiations across the East-West divide that Romanian translation of Shakespeare performed. The paper will also explore the uncertainties and anxieties Carp’s translation voiced in the translated text with respect to the precarious position of Romania as a border-land, occupying a marginal 4 5

6 7

Shakespeare, Othello. The Moor, pp. 353-56 (5.2.) See William Shakespeare, Othello. Tragedie in cinci acte, trans. by P.P. Carp (Iasi: Editiunea si imprimeria societatii Junimea, 1868) See Neill, notes: 218 The French translations of Letourneur and Guizot also use a similar term ‘notre enemie comun’, the German translation, however, uses the word ‘allgemein’, meaning general. Carp’s choice of words is all the stranger as he used the German version as support for his work.

Mediating Between East and West 33

position in relation to the West (identified as Europe) and to the East, namely to the Levant.

II. Why should Carp have been so protective about the Turks in 1868, at a time when the first priority of the Romanian cultural and political elite was to break with the Ottoman Empire and set up a sovereign state that would be recognized by ‘Europe’? Why should such a strategy be employed in the translation of Othello in a cultural and political context where the assimilation of Shakespeare was viewed as a token of allegiance with the West and was expected to go a long way towards legitimating a nation’s claim to cultural and even political membership in Europe? 8 One explanation for the omissions and changes in Carp’s translation can be found in the political situation in which the united principalities of Moldova and Wallachia found themselves around 1868, the year of the translation. At the time, Romania was de jure even if not de facto still tributary to the Ottoman Porte; it had previously been under Russia’s protection – Russia had occupied Romanian principalities three times – and was now under the protection of the western European powers – France, Britain and Austria – which warranted its recognition as an autonomous state. The foremost desire of the population in the Romanian principalities was for complete independence from the Ottoman Porte and for their integration within the family of ‘European countries. In a nutshell, their desire was to become fully European, or to play upon the phrase ‘to turn Turk’ used in Shakespeare, the Romanian desire was the very opposite, namely to turn European. 9 This, however, went against the interests of the Western powers in the Balkans. The West was interested in maintaining the ailing Ottoman Empire as a counter power to imperial Russia. 8

9

On the association of the assimilation of Shakespeare and the ‘integration in Europe’ in Eastern Europe, and particularly in Hungary, see Peter Davidhazi, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998). Mention must be made of the importance attached to translations of Shakespeare in this project as they could foster imaginative communities in which E-W cultural differences could be reconciled and Romanian readers would be enabled to participate in the Western European culture. Hence the almost bardolotrous eagerness in the reception of Shakespeare, a cultural phenomenon which Peter Davidhazy has identified in 18th and 19th century Hungary as well. I am playing on the meanings of the verbs ‘turn’ so as to project a counterpart of ‘turning European’ to the phrase ‘to turn Turk’ in Shakespeare’s text.

34 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu Consequently, for all its Enlightenment rhetoric of liberty and sovereignty, it strongly discouraged any national liberation movements in the Balkans. Romania had therefore to toe the line traced by the European powers and accept the Ottoman rule; otherwise it might run the risk of having its autonomy and its status as a European country withdrawn. P.P. Carp, the first translator of Othello from English (a previous translation from French had been made in 1848) was fully aware of Romania’s political situation. He was not only an outstanding member of the intelligentsia but also a foremost politician in the conservative party and editor in chief of the official newspaper of the party – Terra. He was convinced that the best way for Romanian principalities ‘to become/to turn European’ was to comply with the political conditions imposed by the Western powers, even if that meant delaying all projects of liberating action. This is the reason why Carp and his opposition party criticized the government’s covert attempts to set up an anti-Ottoman alliance in the Balkans. 10 He argued that ‘today’s Turkey is no longer a threat to Europe’ but a dependable ally, the real threat being Russia, who would not miss any opportunity to occupy Romania again. 11 The [Ottoman Grand] Porte was described as a protector of Romanian interests, having never impinged upon the facto autonomy of the Romanian principalities. 12 The omissions and changes in Carp’s translation discussed above dovetail with the political views he made public in Parliament and in the press. In his view, a translation of Shakespeare’ play, which in itself signified a gesture of identification with Western/European culture, was bound to reinforce the political message the European powers had given to Romania. The Romanian version of Othello was, therefore, not the right place to demonize the Turks as the ‘general enemy’. I do not think Carp deliberately thought of appropriating the play to any particular political purposes but as a politician he could not but enhance the political value that accrued to a Shakespeare text. What I would further like to argue is that Carp’s omissions are indicative of deeper fears and anxieties in relation to the cultural and national identity of the population of the Romanian principalities at the time when the very political and cultural existence of a Romanian state inside the borders of Europe was still vulnerable to political and geographical exclusion.

10 11 12

Terra. Ziar politic, literar si comercial, ed. by Petre Carp and others (Iasi, 1867-68), p. 555 Terra (1867, p. 132 and 1868, pp. 591-92) Terra (1867), p. 132

Mediating Between East and West 35

III. In 1846, the French consul in Bucharest, Doré de Nion asserted that the Romanian principalities were nothing but Ottoman provinces, fully integrated in the system, their princes Turkish pashas and their populations Turkish raias’. 13 This position not only blatantly disregarded both historical and juridical facts but dismayed the Romanian elite who looked to France for support of their national liberation project. The association with the Turks signified nothing less than Romania’s political and geographical exclusion from Europe. The fear of exclusion persisted in the 1860s, even after the United Principalities had been officially acknowledged in Europe. Several articles in the first issue of Carp’s newspaper – Terra expand on the international pressure on Romania to close its embassies in Europe, an action which was tantamount to excluding it by not recognizing its status as an autonomous country. The paper warns against the danger that Romania ‘might be wiped off the map of Europe. 14 Under these conditions the question ‘Are we turned Turk?’ in Shakespeare’s play was likely to bring to mind to the Romanian public (which would identify with the ‘we’ in the question) the present danger of being re-integrated in the Ottoman Empire as well as the possibility of a relapse into the identity of Europe’s other. Both actions would have involved a move back in history that was too painful to contemplate. Carp was not simply overreacting to the Realpolitik of western powers. The political context of the post-Crimean war was favourable to such exclusion. At the same time the literal meaning of the phrase used in Terra, ‘Romania was going to be wiped off the map of Europe’ was used to refer to the long history of exclusion in European cartographical representations of the Romanian principalities. Maps that excluded the Romanian states from ‘Europe’, by placing them outside its the borders and within those of the Ottoman Empire, can be traced as far back as Ortellius’s first world atlas in the late 16th and early 17th century. The 1603 and 1606 English versions of Ortellius’s atlas positioned only one principality, Transylvania, inside the border that marked off Europe from the Ottoman Empire. Though the three principalities – Transylvania, Walachia and Moldavia 15, enjoyed 13

14 15

Viorel Panait, 5Ĉ]ERLVLSDFHLQ,VODPFXUHIHULUHVSHFLDODODUHODtiile romano-turce din secolele ;9,-;9,,(Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii Bucuresti, 1995), p. 511 Terra (19 December 1868 and 2 January 1868) The principality of Moldavia (Moldova in Romanian) is not to be confused with the present state of Moldova, which represents the Eastern part of the former principality.

36 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu identical status in relation to the Grande Porte, though their legal position was the same as Raguza’s, namely as tribute paying vassals, the maps allotted them different political status and included them in different geo-political spaces. Raguza, to begin with, was not at all identified as belonging to the Ottoman Empire on the maps. Transylvania appears as part of the Ottoman Empire only in the 1603 version of Ortellius’s map, whereas the 1606 epitome of the atlas no longer included Transylvania in the Ottoman empire and drew the border separating the Turks from Europe north of Wallachia. Moldova and Wallachia were always treated as if they provinces of the Ottoman Empire and not states in their right. Consequently the atlas did not provide any separate maps or descriptions of the two states. The denial of individualized cartographic existence implied a denial of their political and cultural existence. The Romanian principalities were not the only victims of cartographic exclusion. Not even the Ottoman Empire was shown on the map of Europe but was relegated to the map of Asia, although by the end of the 16th century the Turks had included within the borders of their empire almost half of Europe’s territory. In this respect, cartographic representations can be viewed as a form of psychological denial of the Turkish threat or an attempt to placate fears about the proximity of the Turks to the Western countries. Thomas Newton wrote in 1575, in the dedication to his translation of Curione’s Sarracenicae Historiae, that ‘They [the Turks] were indeed at first very far from our Clyme and Region, and therefore the lesse to be feared, but now they are even at our doors and ready to come into our Houses’. 16 Maps in the 16th century were important both as products of knowledge and as political objects that reflected the territorial and trade interests of the 16

Ortelius’s atlas acknowledges the impressive magnitude of the Ottoman Empire, albeit only in the descriptive text accompanying the map of the Ottoman Empire: ‘[it] occupieth a great part of the world, for in Europe he possesseth all the sea coast from Ragusa until Tanais, and from Buda until Constantinopole…it is a strange and mervaillous thing to consider how that within the time of 300 years the house and race of the Ottomans have purchased so huge an Empire’. (Quoted from Daniel Vitkus, Turkes and Jews in the Jew of Malta, 150). Richard Knolles, whose Histroy of the Turks served as source for Othello, also informs his readers that the Turkish Empire occupies ‘so much of Christendom as far exceedth that which is left thereof’ and that ‘it prefigures to itself no other limits than the bounds of the Earth, from the rising of the sun unto the going down of the same.’ Knolles considers the Ottoman Empire ‘not inferior in greatness and strength unto the greatest monarchies that ever were upon the face of the earth, the Roman Empire excepted’. See Richard Knolles, The General Historie of the Turkes together with The Lives and Conquests of the Ottoman Kings and Emperors (London, 1603), p. 3

Mediating Between East and West 37

great powers. Mercator and Ortellius were known to be under the patronage of the House of Habsburg, which wanted maps to represent and promote its interests.17 Though the two cartographers had acquired fame for the accuracy and objectivity of their maps, they were still vulnerable to political manipulation, particularly with respect to the cartographic establishment of borders. From the perspective of the Habsburg policy, the border of the Ottoman Empire was of utmost political importance given the siege of Vienna earlier that century and the wars waged at the close of the 16th century. The further south the border was pushed, the better it was. Transylvania, with its German burgs and population, was clearly an object of imperial desire and could not be shown as part of the Ottoman Empire. The other two principalities Moldova and Wallachia were more difficult to lay a claim to and were hence less attractive. 18 Consequently they were not of cartographic interest and were relegated to the status of simple provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Given this status, they were not provided with separate maps nor with a discursive description of the territory and its population. The denial of full cartographic recognition and their displacement outside the border of Europe had a lasting effect upon the Western perception of these countries. Ortellius boasted that his maps helped political, commercial and scholarly communities to estimate the daily progress of the wars in Europe. 19 Historical treatises such as Martin Fumees’ or Knolles’s History of the Turks as well as the ‘news’ circulated in Europe on the latest exploits of the Turks relied upon his maps to locate the events they discussed. It should therefore come as no surprise that both historical works and ‘news’ did not include the Romanian countries within what was considered to be the territory of Europe. One such ‘news’ was the report written at the time of the rebellion of Wallachian prince, Michael the Brave [Mihai Viteazu] against Sultan Selim II; it is called ‘Newes from Rome, Venice, and Vienna, touching against the present proceedings of the Turkes against the Christians in Austria, Hungarie and Helvetia, otherwise called Sevenbergh’. Helvetia or Sevenbergh (in German 6LHEHQEXUJHQ) was the name given to Transylvania. There is no mention of Wallachia, although it was there that 17

18

19

Jerry Brotton, Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 176 In the late 16th century the emperor Rudolf made an abortive attempt to claim sovereignty over them as well and was rebuffed by Michael the Brave. Brotton quotes Johannes Raedemaecker who stated that ‘Ortelius also bought all the geographical maps that could be had for the sake not only of calculating from distances, the freight of merchandise and the dangers which they were exposed to, but to estimate the daily reports regarding the European Wars, in Brotton, p.171

38 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu the respective war with the Turks had been initiated.20 The ‘newes’ is published along with a ‘lamentable petition’ of the Christians in the East to the ‘happy Christian kingdoms’ in the West. The petition points to a newly emerged divide between east and west in Europe with respect to the Turkish threat, with the East being defined as the ‘poor afflicted Christian brethren’. The location of ‘the afflicted brethren’, exposed to the attacks of the Turks, was carefully indicated: ‘Boheme, Hungarie, Austria, Polonia and Helvetia[ that is Transylvania]’. The ‘Christian brethren’ east and south of Transylvania are not mentioned. Maybe to the writer of the petition they were no longer Christians but had already ‘turned Turk’. A ‘Zeitung’ (news) from Nurnberg reporting the resounding defeat of the Turks in Wallachia in 1595 did not mention this principality. Not only was the contribution of its prince, Michael the Brave, left out, but still worse, he was reported to have turned Turk and then, God punishing him, to have died. 21 The French historian Martin Fumée must have relied on similar sources when he wrote in his +LVWRLUH JHQHUDOOH GHV WURXEOHV GH +RQJULH HW 7UDQV\OYDQLH published in English in 1600, that the Wallachian prince turned ‘demy Mahummetiste’ and was happy to die in battle rather than by the sword of justice. 22 Richard Knolles acknowledges the role Wallachia and Moldavia played as ‘warlike and frontier countries, the surest bulwarks of that side of Christendom’ (my emphasis) and unlike Fumée even praises Michael the Brave’s actions, which were ‘to the great benefit of the Christian commonweale and the hurt of the turkes’.23 However, in The Brief Discourse on the Greatness of the Turkes Ɇ an introduction to his Historie of the Turkes, Knolles includes Moldavia (the state east of Transylvania and north of Wallachia) among the ‘core’ Ottoman provinces in Europe that were governed by a ‘beglerbeg’ (beyleybeyi) and were ruled by the law of sharia. That was indeed the case of Buda as well as Cyprus, or of Asian provinces like Anatolia, but not of any of the three Danubian (i.e. Romanian) principalities. Very much like Ragusa, they were Christian vassal states that

20

21

22

23

On the absence of the Wallachian prince in the reports circulated in Europe at the time, see Panait , 5D]ERLVLSDFHLQ,VODP W.S.R., True newes of DQRWDEOHYLFWRULHREWDLQHGDJDLQVWWKHWXUNHVE\WKHULJKWKRQRXUDEOH/RUGH $GROSK%DURQRI6ZDUW]EXUJWKHGD\RI0DUFKODVWSDVWDQQRZKQHKHDQGKLVDUPLH WKUHHKRXUVEHIRUHGD\FDPHEHIRUH5DDEDQGWRRNLQWKDWZHOOIHQFHGKROGDQGFLWLH/ translated out RIWKHKLJKGXWFKFRSS\SULQWHGILUVWLQ1XUQEHUJ FE\:65London 1598 (STC 2nd ed) /20595.5 Quoted in Andrei Veres, &DPSDQLDFUHVWLQLORULQFRQWUDOXL6LQDQ3DVDGLQ(Bucuresti: Cultura Nationala, 1925), p. 50 Knolles, The General Historie of the Turkes, p. 1122

Mediating Between East and West 39

paid a lump sum as tribute to the Sultan but maintained their autonomy and traditional Christian institutions. 24

IV. It is against this background of fears of exclusion that one should also consider Petre Carp’s translation of the derogatory descriptions of Othello as ‘an extravagant free-wheeling stranger’ and ‘an erring barbarian’. Comparisons with Letourneur’s French version which was used for the first translation of the play into Romanian in 1848 as well as with Baudissin’s German translation that Carp used provide interesting insights into the process of the recontextualization of the meanings of Shakespeare’s play in the various 19th century translations. Letourneur’s equivalent for ‘an extravagant free-wheeling stranger’ is ‘un vagabond étranger ici et partout’. 25 The representation of Othello as a vagabond [un vagabond] seems to have had a great appeal to French readers as it re-occurs in Vigny’s adaptation Le More de Venise in 1828 and in F.V. Hugo’s translation in the 1860s. The French translators established an equivalence between the English description, ‘extravagant and freewheeling’, and the anarchic and undisciplined behaviour that the 18th century and 19th century French elite ascribed to the vagabonds. As a vagabond, Othello was, by implication, associated with destitution, homelessness, begging and criminality. Vagabondage was an offence punishable by 5 to 6 months imprisonment and in certain cases 5 to 10 years police surveillance. The first ‘dépots de mendacite’, prisons for vagrants and beggars, were set up in 1624, and were reorganized and expanded in the 1760s when Letourneur was working on Shakespeare. The dépots increased in number in Napoleon’s time – there were 96 depots by the end of the Empire when Guizot started revising the translations of Shakespeare’s plays. 26 The plot of Shakespeare’s Othello was read to support the French 24

25

26

The status of the principalities in relation to the Porte was called ‘ahd ad-dhimma, meaning “tributary protection” which was to be distinguished from that the annexation of the country to the dar-al’Islam. This position of quasi autonomy was ensured in the 14th and 15 the century and reasserted by Mihai Viteazu in the wars of 1595-1601. See Mihai Maxim, ‘Romano- Otomanica’, in Essays and Documents from the Turkish Archives (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2001), p. 20 Œuvres dramatiques de Shakespeare traduites par Letourneur. Nouvelle édition, précédé d’une notice biographique et littéraire par M. Horace Meyer. (Paris: Imprimerie D’ Amedé Saintin, 1835), p. 3 Timothy B. Smith, ‘Assistance and Repression: Rural Exodus, Vagabondage and Social Crisis in France 1880-1912’, Journal of Social History, (Summer, 1999), pp. 20-23

40 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu view on vagabonds. Othello, though the husband of a Venetian aristocrat, cannot stay in Venice but has to go to Cyprus immediately after his wedding. Like all vagabonds, he is continuously on the move. This reading of Othello is in tune with Bauman’s finding that ‘the vagabonds’ mobility, unlike that of the tourists, is not a form of freedom of choice. If vagabonds had the choice they would stop wandering and stay inside.’ 27 Unlike the French translations, which appropriated Othello as a domestic other and read at least some of the reasons for his exclusion from a social and economic perspective, the German versions insist upon Othello’s status as a foreigner. To Baudissin, Othello is not merely a homeless vagabond, he is ‘heimatlos’, which means that he has no homeland, or rather he has no nation. The lack of attachment to a particular territory, or worse the nomadic refusal of territorialization, has always been regarded as a potential crime.28 Such an individual is easily capable of treason and is often suspected of complicity with the enemy. No wonder that for Baudissin ‘Othello is a “heimatloser Abenteurer”‘, an adventurer, which is as much to say that he is of dubious morality, reckless and deceitful. Carp obviously relied upon Baudissin in his version: Shakespeare’s ‘freewheeling stranger/from here and everywhere’ becomes ‘un aventuros si YHQHWLF VWUĈLQde aici si de acolo’ [an adventurer and a foreign ‘venetic’/from here and there]. Othello is an adventurer and not a vagabond like in Letourneur. Carp further uses two words for ‘stranger’: the word ‘VWUĈLQ’ – meaning foreigner/stranger and the word ‘venetic’, coming from the neo-Greek venetikon, which denoted the Venetian merchants who displaced the Greek ones in the Byzantine East Mediterranean. The Romanian ‘venetic’ preserves the Greek pejorative overtones which suggest an intruder that insinuates himself into important positions and milked the country of all its riches. The increasingly xenophobic and anti-Semitic audience of the late 1860s, tended to associate the ‘venetic’ with Greek, Armenian or Jewish merchants who seemed to reap all the profits of Romania’s early industrialization. Carp’s translation unlike the French versions plays down Othello’s nomadic mobility. Othello is less a vagabond than a stranger of dubious morality, coming from nowhere. It is his failure to belong to a nation and to have legitimate geographical and cultural roots that denies him access to a stable position in the Venetian society.

27

28

Zygmund Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998), p. 54 Etienne Balibar, Europe-constitutiton-frontieres (Paris: Flammarion, 2005), pp. 111-113

Mediating Between East and West 41

The gist of this definition of Othello becomes apparent when one remembers that in Romania as well as in Bulgaria, 29 the audiences tended to identify with Othello’s position as the despised eastern outsider in the western world. Like Othello they felt that their claim to ‘parts and merits’ was not considered to be legitimate to Venetians like Jago or Brabantio. Whenever they insisted on their rightful position in Europe, they could run the risk of being called ‘insolent’, just as earlier in the 17th century Knolles had considered them earlier in the History of the Turks, where he calls Michael the Brave ‘proud’, ‘presumptuous’ and driven by greed or inordinate ambition because he insisted on staying autonomous and rejected the Habsburg rule. 30 Knolles’s comments that small countries like Wallachia or Moldova should not presume to raise claims to sovereignty were rehearsed in the 1850s and 60s. Carp’s equivalents for ‘an erring barbarian’ also relies on Baudissin, who had called Othello ‘einen abenteuerlichen Afrikaner’ [an adventure loving/a reckless African], by replacing the equivalent of ‘barbarian’ with that of an ‘African’. Carp avoids the term ‘barbarian’ [in Romanian ‘barbar’] and powerfully racializes Othello in order to establish some distance between Othello and the audience. The term ‘barbarian’ belonged to the othering discourse employed in describing the Balkan societies in the 18th and 19th centuries, a discourse that was partially internalized by the populations in this region. 31 Carp must have deemed that the identification with Othello as a ‘barbarian’ would have been too painful for his audience and so decided to introduce some distance by using the term ‘African’. However, Carp departs from Baudissin as well and no longer calls Othello an adventurer [‘abenteuerlich’]. Instead he uses the word ‘pribeag’, coming from the Slavic ‘prebegu’ – which refers to an emigrant, a refugee or a runaway, a person deprived of shelter and protection. Romanian radical thinkers exiled in the West after the 1848 Revolution described themselves as ‘pribegi’. In the late 18th and early 19th century this condition seemed to have applied to the Romanian population at home as well as abroad: according to an 18th century source, Romanians were ‘pribegi’, consequently excluded and vulnerable, both at home and anywhere else. In Carp’s view Othello could not abandon his position as rootless outsider even in his self-description. While in Shakespeare’s text Othello’s 29

30 31

Alexander Shurbanov, Boika Sokolova, Painting Shakespeare Red (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), p. 47 Knolles, p. 1140 See Maria Todorova. ,PDJLQLQJWKe Balkans (Oxford: Oxoford University Press, 1997) and Larry Wolf. ,QYHQWLQJ (DVWHUQ (XURSH. The 0DS RI &LYLOL]DWLRQ RQ WKH 0LQG RI WKH Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)

42 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu qualifies his progress to Venice, the sacralized centre, as a ‘pilgrimage’ (‘That I would all my pilgrimage dilate’), 32 in the Romanian version this is but another form of roaming and ‘erring’. Carp’s choice of the word ‘pribegii’ links the action with the previous description of Othello as a ‘pribeag’, an exile, a runaway. Carp does not consider Othello’s life journey a pilgrimage that finally brings him to Venice and to the ‘divine’ Desdemona. The value of Venice, representing (Western) Europe for Carp’s audience, as an object of utopian desire is questioned and denied redeeming moral value. Neither does Carp take on board the sacralization of borders which according to Gillies is intrinsic to the discourse that defines Othello as a barbarian intruding upon the centre and polluting it. 33 Carp rewords Othello’s lines: ‘Here is my journey’s end, here is my butt/And very sea-mark of my utmost sail’, 34 where ‘here’ means not only next to Desdemona’s body but also Cyprus, the place in the Levant, outside the civilized world. In Carp’s translation ‘here’, is not clearly projected as the site of Othello’s (re)lapse into barbarism and the play does not end by pitting up the East against the civilized West. Carp reads Shakespeare’s text from the margins inhabited by the excluded, where the ‘erring barbarian’ is reread as a ‘pribeag’, a refugee, an immigrant. His translation tends to deconstruct the dichotomy between East and West, the Orient/the Levant and Venice, while at the same time projecting this dichotomy as a construction that entraps Othello. To go back to the questions raised at the beginning of the paper, Carp’s replacement of the term ‘Turks’ with ‘heathen’ in the translation of Othello’s ‘Are we turned Turks?’ suggests his desire to avoid divisive geographical and political borders.

Bibliography Anonymous, News from Rome, Venice and Vienna Touching the The Present Proceedings of the Turks against the Christians in Austria, Hungary and Helvetia, RWKHUZLVHFDOOHG6HYHQEXUJKV (London, 1595) Bagdat, Toma Alecsandru, Biografia lui William Shakespeare dupe Le Fourneur [Tourneur]. Urmata de Romeo si Julieta si Othello. Tragedii in cinci acte. Compuse de Williame Guillaume Shakespeare, WUDGXVH VORERG GH 7RPD $OHVFDQGUX %DJGDW (Bucuresci: Tipografia lui Iosef Copainir, 1848) Balibar, Etienne, Europe-constitutiton-frontieres (Paris: Flammarion, 2005)

32 33

34

Shakespeare, Othello. The Moor, pp. 153 (1.3.) John Gilles, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), pp. 25-37 Shakespeare, Othello. The Moor, pp. 264 (5.2.)

Mediating Between East and West 43

Bauman, Zygmund, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor (Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1998) Brotton, Jerry, Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997) Davidhazy, Peter, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998) Fumeé, Martin, 7KH+LVWRULHRIWKH7URXEOHVRI+XQJDULH&RQWDLQLQJWKH3LWLIXO Loss of the Kingdom and the Warres Happened There in That Time (London, 1600) Gilles, John, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) Hugo, Francois Victor, Othello (Paris: Librairie Generale, 1987) Knolles, Richard, The General Historie of the Turkes together with The Lives and Conquests of the Ottoman Kings and Emperors (London, 1603) Maxim, Mihai, ‘Romano-Otomanica’ in Essays and Documents from the Turkish Archives (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2001) Newes from Rome, Venice and Vienna, touching the present proceedings of the Turkes DJDLQVW &KULVWLDQV LQ $XVWULD +XQJDULHDQG +HOYHWLD RWKHUZLVHFDOOHG 6HYHQEHUJK (Bridge Gate: London, 1595) Ortelius, Abraham, His Epitome of the Theatre of the World (London, 1603) Ortelius, Abraham, The Theatre of the Whole World (London, 1606) Ortelius, Abraham, 7KHDWUXP2UELV7HUUDUXP(Antwerp, 1603) Ortelius, Abraham, TKHDWUXP2UELV7HUUDUXP, trans. by John Norden (London, 1606) Panait,Viorel, 5Ĉ]ERLVLSDFHLQ,VODPFXUHIHULUHVSHFLDODODUHODWLLOHURPDQR-turce din VHFROHOH;9,-;9,,Bucuresti: Editura Universitatii Bucuresti, 1995) Shakespeare, William, Othello. Der Mohr von Venedig. 8EHUVHW]W YRQ *UDI Baudissin. Project Gutenberg. Shakespeare, William, Othello. The Moor of Venice, ed. by Michael Neill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) Shakespeare, William, Othello. Tragedie in cinci acte, trans. by P.P. Carp (Iasi: Editiunea si imprimeria societatii Junimea, 1868) Shakespeare, William, Œuvres dramatiques de Shakespeare, trans. By Letourneur (Paris: Imprimerie D’ Amedé Saintin, 1835) Shurbanov, Alexander and Boika Sokolova. Painting Shakespeare Red (Newark: University of Delaware Press and London: Associated University Presses, 2001) Smith, John, The 7UXH7UDYHOV$GYHQWXUHVDQG2EVHUYDWLRQVRI&DSWDLQH-RKQ6PLWK in Europe, Affrica and America, from Anno 'RPLQLWR (London, 1630) Smith, Timothy B., ‘Assistance and Repression: Rural Exodus, Vagabondage and Social Crisis in France 1880-1912’, Journal of Social History (Summer 1999)

44 0ĈGĈlina Nicolaescu Terra. Ziar politic, literar si commercial, ed. by Petre Carp, N. Blaramberg and Aristide Pascal (Iasi, 1867-1868) Todorova, Maria, ,PDJLQLQJ WKH %DONDQV (Oxford: Oxoford University Press, 1997) Tupan, Ana Maria, ‘Shakespeare and the Revolution’, in 6KDNHVSHDUH LQ th Century Romania, ed. by Monica Chesnoiu (Bucuresti: Humanitas, 2006) Veres, Andrei, &DPSDQLDFUHVWLQLORULQFRQWUDOXL6LQDQ3DVDGLQ(Bucuresti: Cultura Nationala, 1925) Vigny, Alfred, Le More de Venise in Theatre, 2 (Paris: Flammarion, 1932) Vitkus, Daniel, ‘Turning Turk in Othello.: The Conversion and Damnation of the Moor’, in Shakespeare Quarterly, 48:2 (1997) W.S.R, 7UXH QHZHV RI D QRWDEOH YLFWRULH REWDLQHG DJDLQVW WKH WXUNHV E\ WKH ULJKW KRQRXUDEOH/RUGH$GROSK%DURQRI6ZDUW]EXUJWKHGD\RI0DUFKODVWSDVW DQQRZKQHKHDQGKLVDUPLHWKUHHKRXUVEHIRUHGD\FDPHEHIRUH5DDEDQG took in that well fenced hold and citie/ translated out of the high dutch coppy; printed ILUVWLQ1XUQEHUJ FE\:65, STC 2nd edn (London 1598) Wolf, Larry, ,QYHQWLQJ(DVWHUQ(XURSH. The 0DSRI&LYLOL]DWLRQRQWKH0LQGRIWKH Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994)

Stefan Herbrechter Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist: The Case of Hamlet 1 Reading Shakespeare’s work and its early modern context through current trends in theory and late modern culture is illuminating both from a historical and theoretical point of view. It is Shakespeare’s ambivalent relationship to humanism, which makes his threshold position helpful in critically evaluating our contemporary, arguably ‘posthumanist’, location. The contemporary erosion of borderlines between the ‘human’ and the ‘nonhuman’, mainly due to technocultural change, can be seen to have interesting prefigurations in Shakespeare’s work and early modern culture more generally. This is particularly true of Hamlet, when placed alongside new readings in animal studies, ecocriticsm, early modern science studies and posthumanist theory. Keywords: Shakespeare, Hamlet, early modern culture, theory, posthumanism, nonhuman, animal studies, ecocriticism

Shakespeare and Humanism Hamlet: [...] What is a man If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused.2

From the outset, the question of identity and in particular the identity of the human is at the centre of Hamlet. The play shows all the characteristics of a horror story: a gothic setting, an eerie ghost, a dreadful secret, murder and suicide, (political) intrigue, tragic misjudgements, a tortured self-doubting hero on the edge of madness and a general massacre in the end. With great regularity, the existential question of meaning and the question of the place of the human are being asked (‘man’s’ position within the cosmos, ‘his’ particularity, ‘his’ indeterminacy, etc.). So it’s not surprising that Hamlet, the character and the tragedy, play a central role in the discussion about the relationship between Shakespeare and humanism. 1

2

See also Stefan Herbrechter, ‘Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare’, in Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Stephan Laqué (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 261-78, and Posthumanist Shakespeares, ed. by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012) Shakespeare, pp. 33-39 (IV.4.). All references are from the Signet Classics edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which is based on all three versions of the text: first and second quarto and first folio edition.

46 Stefan Herbrechter Humanism, ever since the Renaissance and early modern period, is founded on some basic assumptions that are currently being challenged by posthumanist approaches: the cosmic centrality of the human as the pinnacle and end point of ‘nature’ (anthropocentrism), a species-specific, shared, inner core or essence that all humans have in common (e.g, a mind, language, a consciousness of being and finality, etc.) and which radically differentiates them from all other species and organisms; also under attack is the existence of values such as personality, individuality, identity, emotion, freedom, moral responsibility, dignity and perfectibility no longer seems as intrinsic to every human being. Shakespeare is regularly understood in this context as the example of essential human genius, most forcibly by Harold Bloom. 3 According to Bloom, the great characters of Shakespeare, and Hamlet in particular, are the expression of a fundamental humanity. The fascination with Hamlet as a character lies mainly in his hesitation and his proto-existentialist self-doubt. Particularly relevant, in relation to ‘posthumanist’ questions, is therefore Hamlet’s insistence on the question, ‘What is man?’, as basically a protoKantian approach to philosophical anthropology. A good summary of these issues can be found in Levy’s Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (2008), which traces the confrontation between the Aristotelian-cum-Thomist and the classical humanist notion of the rational animal in connection with the role of human reason within the tragedy of Hamlet: At bottom, what happens in Hamlet concerns a redefining of what is man, through interrogation and reinterpretation of the faculty of reason through which man is man, and not some other animal. 4

Posthumanisms Hamlet: The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right! 5

Humanism’s claim of historical and transcendental universality was already the main target for anti-humanist literary and cultural theory in the second half of the 20th Century (esp. poststructuralism, postmodernism, new historicism and cultural materialism). Theory provoked a historical reinterpretation and a politicisation of the genealogies of early modernism, 3 4

5

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human (London: 4th Estate, 1999) E. P. Levy, Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008), p. 18 Shakespeare, pp. 188-189 (I.5.)

Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist 47

Shakespeare and his relation to the present (cf. presentism), according to Ryan, in ‘Shakespeare and the Future’: Shakespeare’s plays anticipate the impending displacement and disappearance of their world, and they solicit the reciprocal recognition that our world, likewise, conceals the evolving past of a prospective present. Their aim is to project us forward in time to a point where we can look back on Shakespeare’s age and our own as the prehistory of an epoch whose advent humanity still awaits. 6

Just as Shakespeare can be located at the beginning of or on the threshold of Western humanism, the present (i.e. the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century) can be understood to be the final stage of this humanist and anthropocentric worldview. It would be wrong of course, to understand humanism as a purely conscious and consistent mindset, since its establishment and triumph has not occurred without major philosophical disagreements, bloody religious wars, political revolutions and colonial power struggles. A major expression of the contradiction that resides within humanism – namely the contradiction between the peaceful ideal of a universal humanity and the ‘inhuman’ cruelty of human reality – has been the ambivalent attitude towards the idea of ‘human rights’ as a possible continuation of Eurocentrism and Western imperialism under the conditions of globalisation. The tension within humanism seems to lie largely in the fact that the universal validity of a humanistic ideal is always presupposed, while it can be clearly shown to be merely based on historically and culturally specific norms and values. It is in opposition to this ambivalence within humanism that a number of posthumanist approaches have been developed and introduced within Shakespeare studies. However, as is the case for humanism, it is better to speak of these approaches in the plural: posthumanisms. Furthermore, it makes more sense, from a temporal point of view, not to envisage posthumanism as being in linear progression from and as supersession of humanism, but rather as an ongoing critique of and within humanism. One can perhaps best describe the meaning of the prefix ‘post’ in analogy with Lyotard’s idea of ‘Re-writing Modernity’ [‘réécrire la modernité’] understood as its ‘perlaboration’ or Durcharbeitung, 7 or indeed as a gradual deconstruction of humanism (i.e. as a kind of self-disintegration and mutation).8 6

7 8

Kieran Ryan, ‘Shakespeare and the Future’, in Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium, ed. by Deborah Cartmell and Michael Stott (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), p. 199 Jean-François Lyotard, L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988), p. 33ff Cf. Neil Badmington, ‘Theorizing Posthumanism’, Cultural Critique 53 (2003), pp. 1027

48 Stefan Herbrechter Undoubtedly, however, it is the historical material and technological conditions that have favoured the emergence of the current posthumanist dynamics. However, just like Shakespeare’s work posthumanism can both be understood as situated historically as well as a cultural constant with ongoing relevance (i.e. as a form of evolutionary adaptation). Both Shakespeare’s work, with Hamlet in particular, and posthumanism deal with the question of the place of the human; both ask if there really is such a thing as true (i.e. essential) human nature. Posthumanist approaches attempt to understand the human from the perspective of ‘its’ repressed others (e.g. non-human animals, machines, monsters, aliens, matter, things, or the ‘inhuman’ in general) and to recontextualize ‘its’ relations with these others. In particular, Donna Haraway’s work on cyborgisation of the human, and N. Katherine Hayles’s work on human digitalisation and computerisation, as well as the ongoing critique of human or humanist forms of speciesism (mostly understood, in analogy to racism, as irrational prejudice against non-humans, in order to legitimate the oppression and exploitation of the latter by humans) for example in Cary Wolfe’s work and work by representatives within the emerging fields of animal studies and ecocriticism. Additional statements qualifying the humanist world view can be found in the neuro- and cognitive sciences, which call into question the humanist ideas of free will and traditional forms of morality, as well as in biotechnology and the life sciences, which challenge the special status of humans from an evolutionary perspective. Various post-metaphysical approaches within philosophy and technics also contribute by questioning any instrumentalised relationship between humans and technology, systems and environments, language and thought, etc., and thus undermine the anthropocentric values on which humanism is based (cf. Derrida, Stiegler, Sloterdijk, Latour). 9

9

Cf. Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993); Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Peter Sloterdijk, Du musst dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009); and Bernard Stiegler, La Technique et le temps. 3 vols. (Paris: Galilée, 1994-2001)

Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist 49

Shakespeare and Posthumanism [...] they imitated humanity so abominably [...] 10

The special role Shakespeare plays in the current debate between humanists and posthumanists arises mainly from his central position within the canon of English, if not ‘world literature’. Advocates of Shakespeare’s universal value and humanist centrality, like Bloom, argue that Shakespeare’s great characters, and Hamlet in particular, are the expression of essential human personality and modern identity. However, very much against Bloom, the predominant theoretical orientation of the last decades (at least since the 1960s, as mentioned above), has been radically anti-humanist, particularly in the Anglo-American context. Figures associated with post-structuralism and postmodernism (Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Lyotard, Derrida, Baudrillard – i.e. the main protagonists of so-called ‘French theory’), as well as the representatives of the New Historicism (Greenblatt) and Cultural Materialism (Dollimore, Sinfield, Drakakis, Belsey, Hawkes) have attacked ‘liberal humanism’ in order to expose its pseudo-universalism as an ideology. As a result, Shakespeare has been repositioned through a historical recontextualisation and politicisation, and the renewed relevance of his work has been founded on a basic analogy between early and late modernity, or, one could say, between early and late (anti-)humanism. What distinguishes current posthumanist forms of reading Shakespeare from earlier anti-humanist readings by poststructuralists and New Historicists, however, is that current posthumanist approaches seem to be taking the merely implied critique of anthropocentrism in the earlier antihumanist stances more seriously, even literally, and as a result, they actively promote a post-anthropocentric worldview. This means that the new key questions for Shakespeare studies are: how can one interpret a world in which the human subject is no longer the main focus, but is being increasingly ‘de-centred’ by technology, on the one hand, and questions concerning the ‘environment’, on the other hand? In what way can Shakespeare possibly remain relevant under these conditions? To what extent might he even become more relevant, or in other words, how might he be repositioned as a mirror image between a proto- or pre- and a posthumanist age?

10

Shakespeare, pp. 36-37 (III.2.36)

50 Stefan Herbrechter

Hamlet as Posthumanist? Hamlet: To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. 11

Hamlet in particular plays an important part in critically evaluating the ongoing process of ‘post-humanisation’ since early modernity. The spectrum of reactions to this posthumanising process range from apocalyptic fears of dehumanisation to spiritual fantasises eagerly embracing scenarios of transhuman bliss. In this context, Shakespeare and Hamlet might become allies for a critical posthumanism that keeps its distance to both of these extremes and which instead looks for points of connection with and prefigurations of a critique of humanism and anthropocentrism. One such approach would start, for example, from Derrida’s well-known recourse to Hamlet as a main character within the deconstruction of metaphysical notions of truth, existence and presence, in Specters of Marx. 12 In a parallel reading of Hamlet and Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, Derrida shows how the ontological difference of the ghost (i.e. the ghost of Hamlet and of communism) challenges any ontology based on the ideal of presence and instead exposes ontology as ‘hauntology’ (from French ‘hanter’, to haunt). Hamlet stands here allegorically for the human doubting his own possibility to experience himself ontologically (‘to be or not to be [...]’) and the resulting impossibility to justify humanist reflexes, especially faith placed in rational explanation (‘Marcellus: Thou art a scholar, speak to it, Horatio’ [I.1.42]) and the possibility to reveal any transcendental forms of truth. Similarly, Jacques Lacan’s famous reading of Hamlet moves beyond a traditional individual-psychological approach in reading the central character. 13 Psychological and psychoanalytic interpretations of Hamlet in the wake of Freud and Jones usually limit themselves to an analysis of the Oedipal conflict between Hamlet and Claudius and tend to explain Hamlet’s hesitation by referring to his guilty conscience, as a result of his own desire to kill his father and possess his mother. Lacan instead sees Hamlet as the tragedy of human desire par excellence. Hamlet, as a typical representative of the modern human, has lost access to his own desire. Hamlet’s hesitation is 11 12 13

Shakespeare, pp. 56-60 (III.1.) Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Galilée, 1993) Jacques Lacan, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’ [1959], in Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 11-52

Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist 51

explained by Lacan as a result of the loss of the object of desire, through which basically any control over time also disappears. This, in return, leads to the ‘spectralisation’ and mystification of the phallus and thus of authority. Both Derrida’s and Lacan’s readings of Hamlet with their critique of humanist metaphysics prepare the terrain for contemporary postanthropocentric and posthumanist approaches.

Posthumanist Readings of Hamlet Hamlet: What piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god - the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so. 14

Taking the idea of a postanthropocentric reading of the present situation seriously, based on a posthumanist reassessment of human history, different options arise resulting in different posthumanisms or posthumanist readings. What these have in common, however, is their intention to re-examine texts with a view to asking how these texts address the question, either implicitly or explicitly, of what it mean to be human? ‘To read in a posthuman way is to read against one’s self, against one’s own deep-seated self-understanding as a member or even a representative of a certain “species”’. 15 However, to think ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ anthropocentric and humanist assumptions does not necessarily have to be understood in this context as a form of ‘keeping apace with technology’. There is also a much ‘slower’ posthumanism, a posthumanism ‘without’ technology, which reinterprets the meaning and the importance of the human within ‘its’ environment from the point of view of humanism’s diverse displaced ‘inhuman’ others. This is, in fact, a move that has proven particularly fruitful for Shakespeare and Early Modern Studies. First, animal studies re-examine the borderline between human and animal, as it was being redrawn within early modernity, from a late modern postanthropocentric and posthumanist perspective. In this context, work by Erica Fudge and Bruce Boehrer on Shakespeare’s zoology plays a major part. It becomes clear that what we have in Shakespeare is an ideological 14 15

Shakespeare, pp. 312-319 (II.2.) Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, ‘What is a posthumanist reading?’ Angelaki 13.1 (2008), p. 95

52 Stefan Herbrechter permeability between the category boundaries of the human and the animal that is at least as important as current challenges arising out of (bio)technological developments. Current processes of rewriting the history of technology are also interested in the analogies between early and late modernity, and in the analogies between pre-modern cultural technologies and postmodern technoculture. Here, in particular, Jonathan Sawday’s, Adam Max Cohen’s, Jessica Wolfe’s and Henry S. Turner’s work needs to be mentioned. Sawday uses provocative expressions like ‘renaissance cyborg’ and ‘renaissance computer’ to show how early modern notions of physicality, machines and automata already problematise the Cartesian-humanist worldview in its inception. Hamlet’s letter to Ophelia (II.2.123-124), signed ‘Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, Hamlet,’ for example, already represents ‘pre-Cartesian’ proof of the human idea of selfinstrumentalisation as a machine and thus already locates the beginning of an ontological crisis of human autonomy within the era of the first machines. The problematisation of human autonomy is also at the centre of emerging ecocritical approaches in literary and cultural theory. These approaches question the traditional humanist anthropocentrism and, instead, focus more on natural and systemic-technological networking of humans and environments and on the importance of non-human actors (cf. Latour). Gabriel Egan for example, shows that ‘our understanding of Shakespeare and our understanding of Green politics have overlapping concerns and can be mutually sustaining’. 16 What is at stake here is to interpret Shakespeare ecologically, as well as to critically evaluate Shakespeare’s pre- or earlymodern ecology and to illuminate its relevance, especially with regard to the relationship between nature and culture, and between nature and technology. On the one hand, the digitalisation of Shakespeare’s text corpus demands an engagement with the role of cultural change in the information age (the phrases ‘digital humanities’ or ‘humanities computing’ are signs of this), and on the other hand, the question of Shakespeare’s pre- or early modern understanding of information arises. 17 Similarly, the so-called ‘cognitive turn’ and the resulting new insights into human (and nonhuman) thinking has a bearing on approaches within Shakespeare Studies. Breakthroughs in current scientific understanding of cognitive processes 16

17

Gabriel Egan, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 1 Cf. Alan Galey, ‘Networks of Deep Impression: Shakespeare and the History of Information’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010), pp. 289-312

Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist 53

call, of course, for new approaches to reading literature (cf. cognitive poetics, cognitive criticism): Some of the most significant advances in science over the past thirty years have been in cognitive science and cognitive theory, helping us to understand both biologically and culturally how we as human beings think and do what we do – both in Shakespeare’s time as well as in our own. 18

Furthermore, the emergence of new networked media and the convergence with and remediation of mass media through information technology and new code-based digital and interactive media, represent a huge potential for the future of Shakespeare Studies, in particular in terms of corpus access and new forms of knowledge production. What may be specifically posthumanist about this, is the departure from traditional textual philology to a more dynamic and pluralistic aesthetics of variants, interactivity and generativity – which could of course be understood as an immense philological and pedagogical opportunity: The text itself alters as we look at it from different points, just as the mass and dimensions of subatomic particles vary as they are examined from different points. The holding of multiple texts in the computer, in multiple forms, may dramatize this variance and better permit us to search for a one among the many; or not, as we prefer. 19

The digitalisation of Shakespeare in general and of Hamlet in particular, acts in this context in two directions at the same time: Shakespeare promises to remain a privileged ‘object’ in the transition or translation towards digital culture. At the same time, Shakespeare also remains an autonomous ‘subject’, in the sense of a proper name that perpetually anticipates ‘current motives and motivations’ (see Galey 2010). 20

18

19

20

Arthur F. Kinney, Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. viii Cf. Paul M. W. Robinson, ‘Is There a Text in These Variants?’, in The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 99; see also Jerome McGann, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), and Graham Holderness, Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003) Cf. Galey, ‘Networks of Deep Impression’ (2010)

54 Stefan Herbrechter

Bibliography Badmington, Neil, ‘Theorzing Posthumanism’, Cultural Critique 53 (2003), pp. 10-27 Belsey, Catherine, Why Shakespeare? (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2007) Bloom, Harold, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (London: 4th Estate, 1999) Boehrer, Bruce, Shakespeare Among the Animals: Nature and Society in the Drama of Early Modern England (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002) Bruster, Douglas, Shakespeare and the Question of Culture: Early Modern Literature and the Cultural Turn (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2003) Cartwright, Kent Theatre and Humanism: English Drama in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Charnes, Linda, ‘The Hamlet Formerly Known as Prince’, Shakespeare and Modernity: Early Modern to Millennium, ed. by Grady, Hugh (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 189-210 Charnes, Linda, Hamlet’s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium (New York: Routledge, 2006) Cohen, Adam Max, Shakespeare and Technology: Dramatizing Early Modern Technological Revolutions (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006) Cook, Amy, ‘Staging Nothing: Hamlet and Cognitive Science’, SubStance 35.2 (2006), pp. 83-99 Crane, Mary Thomas, Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading With Cognitive Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) Davies, Tony, Humanism (London: Routledge, 1997) Derrida, Jacques, Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris, Galilée: 1993) Dollimore, Jonathan, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries, 3rd edition (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2004) Egan, Gabriel, Green Shakespeare: From Ecopolitics to Ecocriticism (London: Routledge, 2006) Fudge, Erica, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000) Fudge, Erica, ed., Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004) Fudge, Erica, and others, eds, At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period (Houndmills: Palgarve, 1999) Galey, Alan, ‘Networks of Deep Impression: Shakespeare and the History of Information’, Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010), pp. 289-312 Grady, Hugh, Terence Hawkes, eds, Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2007)

Shakespeare – Early, Late or Posthumanist 55

Graham, Elaine L., Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002) Halliwell, Martin, and Andy Mousley, Critical Humanisms: Humanist/AntiHumanist Dialogues (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003) Haraway, Donna, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’ [1985], The Haraway Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 7-45 Hayles, N. Katherine, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) Herbrechter, Stefan, Posthumanismus: Eine kritische Einführung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009) Herbrechter, Stefan, ‘Shakespeare Ever After: Posthumanism and Shakespeare’, in Humankinds: The Renaissance and Its Anthropologies, ed. by Andreas Höfele and Stephan Laqué (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), pp. 26178 Herbrechter, Stefan, and Ivan Callus: What Is a Posthumanist Reading? Angelaki 13, 1 (2008), 95-111 Herbrechter, Stefan, and Ivan Callus, eds, Posthumanist Shakespeares (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2012) Holderness, Graham, Textual Shakespeare: Writing and the Word (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2003) Kinney, Arthur F., Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (New York: Routledge, 2004) Lacan, Jacques, ‘Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet’ [1959], Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. by Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 11-52 Latour, Bruno, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993) Levy, E.P., Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2008) Lyotard, Jean-François, L’Inhumain: Causeries sur le temps (Paris : Galilée, 1988) Maisano, Scott, ‘Infinite Gesture: Automata and the Emotions in Descartes and Shakespeare’, in Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. by Jessica Riskin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 63-84 McGann, Jerome, The Textual Condition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) Mousley, Andy, Re-Humanising Shakespeare: Literary Humanism, Wisdom and Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007) Pincombe, Michael, Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the later Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge, 2001)

56 Stefan Herbrechter Rhodes, Neil, and Jonathan Sawday, eds., The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print (London: Routledge, 2000) Robinson, Paul M. W., ‘Is There a Text in These Variants?’, in The Literary Text in the Digital Age, ed. by Richard J. Finneran (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 99-115 Ryan, Kieran, ‘Shakespeare and the Future’, in Talking Shakespeare: Shakespeare into the Millennium, ed. by Deborah Cartmel, and Michael Scott (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 187-200 Sawday, Jonathan, ‘“Forms Such as Never Were in Nature”: the Renaissance Cyborg’, in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, eds Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan Wiseman (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 171-195 Sawday, Jonathan, Engines of the Imagination: Renaissance Culture and the Rise of the Machine (London: Routledge, 2007) Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. by Edward Huber, The Signet Classic Shakespeare (New York: New American Library, 1963) Sloterdijk, Peter, Du musst dein Leben ändern: Über Anthropotechnik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2009) Stiegler, Bernard, La Technique et le temps, 3 vols. (Paris : Galilée, 1994-2001) Turner, Henry S., Shakespeare’s Double Helix (London: Routledge, 2007) Turner, Henry S., ‘Life Science: Rude Mechanicals, Human Mortals, Posthuman Shakespeare’, South Central Review 26.1-2 (2009), pp. 197-217 Wells, Robin Headlam, Shakespeare’s Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) Wolfe, Cary, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010) Wolfe, Jessica, Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)

0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND ‘Pictures like a summer’s cloud.’ The Phenomenology of the Visual in William Shakespeare’s Plays and on the Stage of the Contemporary Theatre In order to connect the theatrical poetics of Shakespeare’s plays with some nuances of stage image, the author of the paper outlines the changes in the phenomenology of the visual from the early modern period through to our times. This change corresponds with the emergence of the fully autonomous subject, proclaiming his dominion over the ‘external world’ at the beginning of the modern era and rehearsing this sovereignty through late modern and postmodern times. It is also argued that the process described may have changed the theatrical image into an idol which had no other function but to reflect the captivated sight of the viewer. Keywords: Shakespeare, Marion, early modernity, theatre, phenomenology of the visual, icon, idol.

1. The fixed gaze It always helps to start with the most obvious: the evidently noticeable, the unquestionably given, the clearly discernible, but the play I have chosen to refer to forces us first and foremost to deal instead with the deviously spectral, the teasingly doubtful and neurotically imaginary. ‘Can such things be/And overcome us like a summer’s cloud,/Without our special wonder?’1 asks Macbeth, answering his wife’s reproach that he has broken up the merry feast with ‘most admired disorder’. The murderer has been frightened out of his wits by a spectre with ‘marrowless bones’ and cold blood, in whose eyes ‘no speculation’ is to be discerned. No wonder he is disturbed! We can assume that in describing the ghost of Banquo, Macbeth seeks to dispel his own fear, trying to convince himself that his best friend, who was the source of his anxiety before, is now dead and must therefore also be safely buried deep underground. Macbeth’s anxiety is thus based, through and through, on rational premises: if Banquo is dead, he cannot walk the face of the earth; and following this, as Macbeth tries to convince himself, he FRXOGQRWKDYHVHHQ what he has seen. But all his desperate attempts to calm himself yield contrary results. It is much more difficult to rid oneself of fears than of dead bodies. Of course the audience who came to see the play in the Elizabethan open air theatre could also enjoy Macbeth’s compelling verbal rendering of 1

7KH 2[IRUG 6KDNHVSHDUH 7KH &RPSOHWH :RUNV, ed. by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 110-111 (3.4.). All further quotations from William Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets refer to this edition.

58 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND the mysterious apparition. Probably very few of the spectators would choose to glance around or upwards during the performance to catch a glimpse of the picturesque backdrop of summer’s clouds which, as Shakespeare reminds us through Macbeth’s words, ‘overcome us [including everybody on stage and around it ...] without our special wonder’. Could the playwright find a better example of what would almost certainly escape the audience’s attention during each and every performance in those public playhouses, than the blue canopy of the sky and the passing clouds? What the viewers, pursuing the actions of Shakespeare’s villains or lovers, would surely miss, even though it was always within their range of vision? On the other hand, the casual remark about summer clouds might equally imply exactly the opposite: perhaps we should infer from it that spectators in the Globe theatre FRXOGEH distracted by the insignificant background and therefore KDG WR EH reminded about what they ought to focus on while watching the performance. One way or another, we need to remember that Shakespeare was well aware of the difference between the ‘unfaithful gaze’ and the ‘attentive look’. Sonnet 20, for instance, offers a surprisingly modern version of this distinction, which allows us to connect it with the ‘gendered’ theory of gaze. The poem associates the inattentive, unconcerned look with female inconstancy and praises the eyes of the speaker’s male lover for being ‘more bright than theirs [women’s], OHVV IDOVH LQ UROOLQJ/JLOGLQJ WKH REMHFW ZKHUHXSRQ LW JD]HWK’ (lines 5-6; emphasis added). This praise sounds somewhat ambivalent, though; on the one hand, the eye of the man is complimented for embellishing reality, as the gilt of sunlight does, but on the other, the glamour of gilded things proves to be superficial. One may therefore discern in these lines a note of irony, if the superficiality of ‘gilding’ the object is associated with the inattentiveness of the nearly homophonic ‘gliding’ over it. Alternatively, we could say that the young friend’s Midas-like gaze changes any object into a golden calf (in this case we should say: a JLOGHG calf) of his desire, or, more precisely: the idol of his gaze. We shall look further into the far-reaching implications of this second reading later in the course of this paper. In 7KH 7HPSHVW, on the other hand, Shakespeare reminds us that the director of an indoor performance is a magician who can control what the spectators see by ‘framing’ their view with the help of a curtain. When we hear Prospero call upon Miranda with the command, ‘The fringed curtains of thine eyes advance/and say what thou seest yon […]’,2 we may assume that he seeks to discipline his daughter’s careless (indeed, one might almost say ‘wanton’) sight, to bring it into focus and fix it on the spectacle he has 2

7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH, pp. 411-412 (1.2.)

‘3LFWXUHVOLNHDVXPPHU’VFORXG’ 59

prepared. A feminist critic could make much of this implied link between the politics of gaze and paternal (or more generally: male) authority, but at the same time Prospero’s utterance takes us back to Shakespeare’s open-air theatres, where the audience in general may have been tempted to turn their eyes sideways or upwards, yielding to the fleeting charm of the visible that surrounded them during the performance. And it is this theatrical context of ‘seeing’ that I propose to investigate a little further. If we are looking for a contemporary conceptual framework for Shakespearean metaphors concerning the phenomenology of the visible, there is no better place to start than the following observation by Jean-Luc Marion: The visible surrounds us. Wherever we turn, it is unveiled, ready, brilliant, ironic. When I open my eyes, I fall on it, unfolded from head to foot all across the horizon. […] Would I escape from it in turning my back on it and fleeing? But if I turn I always run into it, as it has preceded me and gets around me in advance. When I raise my head, it was already hanging over me. When I lower my eyes, it always still expects me. The visible obsesses us because it lays siege to us. Wherever I turn, it surrounds me. […] To be exposed unwillingly to all that which emerges that is visible does not yet allow us to see anything, but only to let us be affected by the extravagant rhapsody of the accident as it happens. […] In order to see, it is enough to have eyes. To look demands much more: one must discern the visible from itself, distinguishing surfaces there in depth and breadth, delimiting forms, little by little, marking changes and pursuing movements. 3

Marion’s diagnosis perfectly exposes (indeed ‘brings to light’) the irony of Macbeth’s dilemma: in the Scottish play, the ‘extravagant rhapsody’ of the casually visible, symbolized by the shape-shifting clouds that float overhead, keeping watch over the Elizabethan amphitheatre, contrasts perfectly with the spell-binding verbal image of a spectre which in the actual performance may not even have been seen by the audience. Whether present on the stage or absent from it, the ghost of Banquo seems to provide the real follow-spot for this scene, either forcing the audience to look where Macbeth is looking, thus making them focus on the (possibly) empty space occupied by the formidably invisible, or, conversely, fixing their attention on the horrorstricken figure of the murderer, wherein they may find a reflection and likeness of the unwelcome and invisible visitor.4 3

4

Jean-Luc Marion, ,Q ([FHVV 6WXGLHV RI 6DWXUDWHG 3KHQRPHQD, trans. by R. Horner & V. Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), pp. 54-55 From Gothic stage adaptations to camera close-ups of silent movies, spectators have been frequently encouraged to choose the latter option and look straight into the face and the spell-bound eyes of Macbeth, as if they might find there both a reflection of Banquo’s dead look (in other words, the look of someone who has seen

60 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND

2. The rise of an object Although Shakespeare invited his audiences ‘gently to hear, kindly to judge’5 his plays (+HQU\ 9, Prologue, emphasis added), in the 20th century the phenomenology of the theatre focused mainly on the visual quality of theatrical performance. Ever since Roman Ingarden prompted us to reflect on what it actually means ‘to see’ e.g. Schiller’s 'RQ&DUORV in the theatre 6, our considerations of theatrical performance are inevitably connected with the study of the visual. We may invoke for instance Merlau-Ponty, who describes the tacit eloquence of the theatrical, contemporary ‘speaking’ image in the following manner: If I imagine a theatre with no audience in which the curtain rises upon illuminated scenery, I have the impression that the spectacle LV LQ LWVHOI YLVLEOH or ready to be seen, and that the light that probes the back and foreground, accentuating the shadows and permeating the scene through and through, in a way anticipates our vision. Conversely, our own vision merely takes up on its own account and carries through the encompassing of the scene by those paths traced out for it by the lightning, just as, when we hear a sentence, we are surprised to discover the track of an alien thought. We perceive with conformity with the light, as we think in conformity with other people in verbal communication. 7

5 6

7

a Gorgon) and a faithful representation of their own petrified gaze. In this case, it is the murderer’s bewilderment that becomes something ‘most admired,’ wondered at (ad-PLUH), as he stands enthralled and bewitched by the wonderful return of his friend and rival from the otherworld. Cf. AQGU]HM ŮXURZVNL’s recollection of Booth’s 0DFEHWK in ‘The Forgotten Craftsman’, in 6KDNH[VSHULHQFH(VVD\VLQ +RQRXURI3URIHVVRU 0DUWD*LELQVNDHGE\-DFHN)DELV]DN0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVNDDQG-HU]\/LPRQ Forthcoming. ŮXURZVNL ZULWHV ‘[The ghost] exists only in Macbeth’s imagination, and it is the actor’s task to make the ghost ‘visible’ by portraying the hero’s reaction to the hallucinations that fill him with horror’. 7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH, pp. 20-21 Roman Ingarden, 7KH/LWHUDU\:RUNRI$UW$Q,QYHVWLJDWLRQRIWKH%RUGHUOLQHVRI2QWRORJ\ /RJLF DQG WKH 7KHRU\ RI /DQJXDJH, trans. by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986), p. 318 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 3KHQRPHQRORJ\ RI 3HUFHSWLRQ, trans. by Colin Smith, (London: Routledge, 1962), p. 278. Merleau-Ponty’s description obviously refers to the modern, in-door theatre with artificial light; he takes it for granted, for instance, that ‘darkness is needed […] to show up the performance’ (p. 87). Cf. Bert O. States: *UHDW 5HFNRQLQJV LQ /LWWOH 5RRPV 2Q WKH 3KHQRPHQRORJ\ RI WKH 7KHDWUH (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 51

‘3LFWXUHVOLNHDVXPPHU’VFORXG’ 61

In other words, our intention encounters in the performance the intention of its creators: it may even happen that our curious gaze, rummaging carelessly through the obscured parts of the stage like a little mouse searching the corners of an empty room, may be ‘trapped’ in the course of the performance by an accusatory counter-look; somebody, Prince Hamlet perhaps, has treacherously planted a theatrical mirror there that reflects our readiness to judge the crimes of others or reproduces our own sense of guilt, shame or regret […] 8 On the other hand, we need to make an important distinction here, for the ‘alien thought’ of which Merleau-Ponty speaks does not originate in the performance from the authoritative mediator (the narrator, i.e. story-teller) whose subjectivised account would determine our point of view. Instead, the stage, in most cases ‘enlivened’ by the faces of the actors, itself becomes a Levinasian ‘face’ which burdens us with the living gaze; it thus appeals not only to our senses, but also to our consciousness and conscience, calling for an ethical response. Like each face, this one, too, has a physical and metaphysical depth (each face is a concrete phenomenal three-dimensional ‘object’ and at the same time it refers the viewer to the unseen, transcendent and elusive Other which determines our ethical choices) that no flat semblance or visual likeness can render, whether it is a static photograph or a motion picture. In other words, the creator’s intention endows the whole stage and each of its elements with some peculiarly ‘human’ features. Since the text of the play is not only ‘enacted’ but also ‘embodied’ in the 8

The title of Hamlet’s inset play, ‘The Mousetrap’, speaks volumes for this possibility. ‘The stage, like the ghost of a murder victim, cast its accusing gaze upon the audience’, explains Philip Armstrong in his analysis of Hamlet. Armstrong’s psychoanalytical reading of Shakespeare’s revenge tragedy yields thus similar results to our description of the face of the stage, when he argues: ‘Theatrical representation appears ambiguous […] because of its XQSUHGLFWDEOHDQGXQFRQWUROODEOH‘UHIOHFWLYH’FDSDFLW\LWV WHQGHQF\ WR UHYHUVH DQG WXUQ XSRQ WKH EHKROGHU’ [‘Watching +DPOHW watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the mirror/stage’, in $OWHUQDWLYH 6KDNHVSHDUHV , ed. by Terence Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 216-237, (p. 220), emphasis added]. But although Armstrong’s reading compellingly emphasizes the ‘ambivalence between the mirror as a passive reproduction of the image, and its more active role in constituting the beholder’, his model may not suffice to render fully the phenomenal nature of the theatrical performance. Thus, in contradistinction to this Lacanian, ‘mirror-centred’ perspective, I wish to argue that the penetrating look that this is not merely a UHYHUVH gaze (a reflection of the viewer’s intention), but a sovereign, transcendent appeal visible in the face of DQRWKHU human being. Having assumed this perspective, we cannot stop at the accusation formulated by ‘the ghost of a murder victim’, but we (I) must also take into account the appeal which comes from our (my) living neighbour, for whom we (I) bear unlimited and unconditional responsibility.

62 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND performance, every performance can thus be said to ‘enliven’, ‘animate’ and, in the ultimate instance, even ‘personify’ the theatrical space. When we witness the making (the saying) of the sentence, we know that until it is finished (said), it remains open to fortuitous change: even if we feel sure of what is about to be said, the speaker may suddenly digress, forget the initial intention, choke due to coughing, or be interrupted by somebody else. The unfolding, or ‘unwrapping’, of the theatrical ‘present’ (in the double sense of a ‘present moment’ and a ‘gift’) is accomplished through the ongoing development of the temporally extended events. The sense of surprise is therefore inseparable from live performance, where the presence (the ‘being here’) of an actor inscribes the theatrical image in the haphazard and HYHQWPHQWDO 9 present moment (the ‘being now’), which is still in progress and by definition cannot attain the status of a finished, complete and therefore already unalterable statement, rooted in the then-and-there realm of literary fiction or film narrative.10 In order to connect these subtle nuances of stage image with the theatrical poetics of Shakespeare’s plays, we need to inscribe our reflections in a wider historical perspective that should help us understand some changes in the phenomenology of the visual from the early modern period through to our times. Regardless of the circumstances, whether it is a matter of gazing vacantly from a train at the constantly changing landscape, surveying the display in a chance shop window, catching a careless glimpse of other people in the street, or striving to understand a meaningful message formulated by the director and actors in a theatre, we are constantly engaged in the activity of selecting and framing the particular objects of our vision. 11 Jean Luc-Marion, clearly indebted to Husserl’s responses to Descartes, reminds us in this context that looking cannot ever be an innocent activity: To look at [UHJDUGHU] – to keep watch over [JDUGHU GX UHJDUG], to keep an eye on [JDUGHU G-XQ RHLO], to keep in custody [PDLQWHQLU HQ JDUGH D YXH] – comes back to imposing ends on the visible, and little by little, to PDNLQJREMHFWVof it. (emphasis added). 12

9

10

11

12

This neologism is used in the English translation of Marion’s essay on ‘The Event or the Happening Phenomenon’ included in his study: ,Q ([FHVV, p. 32. It designates Marion’s original term: pYpQHPHQWLHO. Jerzy Limon, ‘3RF]HNDOQLD 2 Krystiana Lupy—Kilka Uwag Teoretyka Teatru’ [Krystian Lupa’s 3RF]HNDOQLD2 A few remarks by a theatre scholar], 7HDWU2 (2012), 39-44 (pp. 43-44) Eli Rozik, *HQHUDWLQJ 7KHDWUH 0HDQLQJ $ 7KHRU\ DQG 0HWKRGRORJ\ RI 3HUIRUPDQFH $QDO\VLV (Eastbourne and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), p. 165 Marion, p. 56

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There can be no doubt that the careful observation of objects as they emerge from the flux of the anarchic visible is a hallmark of the early modern period. For one thing, it corresponds with the emergence of the fully autonomous subject, proclaiming his dominion over the ‘external world’ at the beginning of the modern era and rehearsing this sovereignty through the modern and the late modern and the postmodern, as described by the editors of the thought-provoking volume of essays entitled 6XEMHFWDQG 2EMHFWLQ5HQDLVVDQFH&XOWXUH Their reading, however, was meant to reverse the direction of Cartesian meditations, asserting the priority of the hitherto neglected material objects over the (false) transcended subject: The very ambiguity of the word ‘ob-ject,’ – they maintain – that which is WKURZQ EHIRUH suggests a more dynamic status for the object. Reading ‘ob’ as ‘before’ allows us to assign the object a prior status, suggesting its temporal, spatial and even causal FRPLQJ EHIRUH. The word object could thus be made to designate the potential priority of the object. So defined, the term renders more apparent the way the material things – lands, clothes, tools – might constitute subjects who in turn own, use and transform them. The form/matter relation of Aristotelian metaphysics is thereby provisionally reversed: it is the material object that impresses its contours upon the noumenal subject. And this reversal is curiously upheld by the ambiguity of the word ‘sub-ject,’ that which is WKURZQXQGHU, in this case – in order to receive an imprint. 13

Although I fully appreciate the value of this revolutionary proposition for the understanding of the material history of the Renaissance, I suggest we can gain as much in theatre studies by returning to the post-Cartesian reflection on the ‘making of the object’ by the alert viewing subject (the spectator), when he manages the excess of the visible. The development of monocular perspective, offering the viewer a faithful reproduction of what the eye sees, was often regarded as a practical extension of Descartes’ rationalism – of his search for ontological and epistemological certainty. Ervin Panofsky, for instance, connected the unified visual field of a vanishing point with the historically modern, mathematical conception of infinity and the modern understanding of space ‘rationalized by Cartesianism and formalized by Kant’. 14 In a similar vein, it was also argued that the introduction of the perspective grid and vanishing point based on the notion of the centric ray were responsible for the making of an autonomous subject who imagined himself as the objective focus of 13

14

Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, Peter Stallybrass,‘Introduction’, in 6XEMHFWDQG 2EMHFW LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH /LWHUDWXUH, ed. by Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1-13 (p. 5) Lyle Massey, ‘Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry’, 5HQDLVVDQFH4XDUWHUO\ 50(4) (1997), 1148-89 (p. 1148)

64 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND representation. Although these connections and continuities have recently been called into question, in English Renaissance studies the development of the linear perspective was directly linked with the development of the court stage under the early Stuarts. Catherine Belsey, for instance, has described the allure of the Jacobean court stage in an overtly Lacanian manner, which stresses the totalizing effect of Inigo Jones’s illusionistic stage design. ‘The pleasure of the gaze is the pleasure of imaginary plentitude, a mapping of space, LQZKLFKWKHYLHZLQJVXEMHFWPDVWHUVXQFKDOOHQJHGWKH REMHFWVRILWVYLVLRQ’ (emphasis added). 15In tracing the emergence of the 6XEMHFW RI7UDJHG\ in the early modern period, Belsey devotes considerable space to the process which ultimately led to the emergence of the ‘lightened, framed space of the stage’, containing ‘the unified subjects’, a mirror image of their own ‘imaginary unity’. 16 It is worth noticing in this context that, like many similar New Historicist/cultural materialist accounts, Belsey’s reproduces here the mythical paradigm of origin which stresses the inevitability of separation as a prerequisite for the emergence of an autonomous self. As in the Book of Genesis, light must be separated from darkness, the heavens from the earth, the field from flood; so in the modern period the stage, flooded with artificial light, must be separated from the darkened auditorium before the viewing subject can recognize itself in its mirror-image presented on stage, and then distance itself from this representation. The change was of course piecemeal, but Belsey argues that the decisive innovation had already appeared by the 1660s when the playhouses reopened after the war. She writes: In the Restoration theatre the action took place in front of the painted scene which simulated perspective, with whatever uncertainty, the place (and time) of a specific fictional event. The curtain rose after the prologue and was not lowered until after the epilogue. 17

A little later, all action withdrew behind the proscenium arch. The ephemeral event set against the backdrop of summer clouds and constantly struggling to wrest a moment of attention from the spectator’s vagrant gaze was then finally transformed into a fixed picture contained in a double frame: the proscenium arch and the curtain, which marked the spatial and temporal limits of the performance. Having dispensed with excessive and destructive visibility, the modern theatrical stage was ready to submit itself to the undivided and admiring attention of the viewers, as they peeped 15

16 17

Catherine Belsey, 7KH 6XEMHFW RI 7UDJHG\ ,GHQWLW\ DQG 'LIIHUHQFH LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH  'UDPD (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 25 Belsey, p. 25 Belsey, p. 24

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through the ‘keyholes’ of their eyes from within the sombre cave of the auditorium. In this manner, the classic realist, modern theatres of the 18th and 19th centuries seem to have managed to curb the anarchy of the visible – at least to the extent allowed by the concomitant, but larger, in-built anarchy of each and every live performance.

3. The wonder of the picture Having reached this point, we must digress for a moment to include an important element in this story, which has so far received little attention. It was the obsessive preoccupation of early modern painters and mapmakers to project dimensional reality on to the flat surface of canvas or paper. In ‘Hymne to God, my God, in my sicknesse’, John Donne, for instance, seemed to argue contrary to reason that ‘West and East/In all flatt Maps […] are one’, but in his sermons he hastened to explain that one needs only to ‘paste that flat Map upon a round body, and then West and East are all one’. 18 The daunting task of translating three-dimensional objects into mathematically equivalent flat pictures was taken up by 19th century technological innovations which allowed life-like images to be produced on iodine-sensitized silver and developed in mercury vapour. Visiting the grave of his parents in Charles Dickens’s *UHDW([SHFWDWLRQV, young Pip is forced to guess what his dead parents looked like from the inscriptions of their names on a tombstone, ‘for these were the times before the invention of photography’. 19 Dickens’s narrator thus brilliantly draws our attention to the change which had taken place with the appearance of the first daguerreotypes, named so after their inventor, the French scene designer and panorama painter. The history of modernity is inseparable from the invention of Daguerre’s plates which ‘aroused the awe and fear of a radically new way of presenting the world in two dimensions’. 20 This opinion is based on an eye-witness account by one Charles Dauthendey, who bequeathed us the following confession: ‘At first we did not dare look at the images he produced. We were frightened by the clarity of the men, imagining that these small, indeed tiny faces fixed on a plate could in turn look back at

18 19 20

John Donne, :LHUV]H Z\EUDQH [Selected Poems], bilingual edition, ed. by 6WDQLVâDZ %DUDľF]DN.UDNyZ:URFâDZ:\GDZQLFWZR/LWHUDFNLH p. 148 Charles Dickens, *UHDW ([SHFWDWLRQV, ed. by Norman Page (Penguin Books: Harmondworth 1984), p. 1 Paul Johnson, 7KH %LUWK RI WKH 0RGHUQ :RUOG 6RFLHW\ - (New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1991) p. 607

66 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND us’. 21 Later, the same images, transferred to ‘brisk celluloid tape’, became motion pictures, and Shakespeare’s plays could also enter the late modern (and now postmodern) playhouse: cinema theatre.22 Perhaps unexpectedly, however, it is once again Shakespeare’s 0DFEHWK that provides us with a wide range of useful metaphors which can help us describe more accurately some phenomenological implications of this historical development. In fact this should really be no great surprise, since the play is evidently concerned with the manifold possibilities of manipulating the visual perspective: turning reality inside out, bringing depths to the surface, reducing three dimensional objects to flat pictures and vice versa. ‘The sleeping and the dead/Are but as pictures. ‘Tis the eye of childhood/That fears a painted devil’, 23 argues Lady Macbeth when her husband hesitates, unwilling to return to the scene of the crime in order to plant the bloody daggers there, the forged evidence of the servants’ guilt. Lady Macbeth’s thoughtless disregard for painted pictures, however, contrasts sharply with the fear-inspiring image of a Gorgon, invoked in the same play by Macduff. 24 On discovering the body of the king in act 2, scene 3, Macduff announces what he has encountered behind the stage, at the ‘heart of darkness.’ He then calls upon others to ‘approach the chamber and destroy [their] sight/With a new Gorgon’. 25 Although both parties point to the difference between reality and its ‘dead’ countenance, the emphasis falls on different aspects of this distinction. For Lady Macbeth, reality amounts Johnson, p. 607. Let us not forget, though, that Marion’s analysis is precisely concerned with the distinction between the living face that indeed looks back at us, and therefore can challenge our intention and our expectations, on the one hand, and its ‘dead’ semblance (either painted or photographed), on the other. Neither a picture nor a painting can look back at the viewer, but the stage can and does look back at the spectator. 22 On the differences between the flat canvas of a painting, the flat, but moving image of cinematographic drama and the three dimensional performance which develops in time cf. Ingarden: ‘[Cinematographic drama presents to us] a discontinuous manifold of “images” that conceals its discontinuity, each image being a reconstruction by photographic means of a visual aspect of a determinate object or objective situation. As these “images” succeed one another, they cause the appearance of determinate objectivities just as paintings do, yet in a manner expanded and altered, since in their succession and fusion they permit the appearance of temporally extended HYHQWV LQ WKHLUWRWDOFRQFUHWHGHYHORSPHQW. The latter is precluded in a “painting”‘, p. 323 23 7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH, pp. 51-53 (2.2.) 24 &I 0DâJRU]DWD *U]HJRU]HZVND ‘*âRZD *RUJRQ\ F]\OL QLHSROLW\F]QLH R 7UDJHGLL 0DNEHWD)’ [The Head of the Gorgon, or speaking unpolitically about 7KH 7UDJHG\ RI 0DFEHWK], .URQRV, 3, (2011), 178-186 (pp. 178-186) 25 7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH, pp. 71-72 (2.3.) 21

‘3LFWXUHVOLNHDVXPPHU’VFORXG’ 67

to material existence, while for Macduff it is death, the non-being, that is ultimately real. Moreover, Macduff draws our attention to the peculiar appeal a visual work of art has for the viewer (or, equally, a picture painted with words, appealing to the mind’s eye). On the one hand, images allow us to detach ourselves from the original: the painted devil will not snatch the sinner’s soul away to hell, and Perseus managed to defeat the Gorgon by deflecting her deadly look in a mirror. On the other, flat pictures can easily allure, captivate and enthral us. When we stop in front of a picture, we cannot divert our eyes from it, since the picture, unlike the objects which it represents, seduces us and arrests our sight. 26 Marion writes: The painter does not have […] any other aim than this – to dazzle us, to offer to our usually vagabond and aesthetically unfaithful sight (in short, a free child who passes from one spectacle to another without ever stopping there) a visible such that it cannot, for once, perhaps even for the first time, turn away from it and go to the next thing, but finds itself fascinated with it, a prisoner, and dependent on it for quite a long time. The painter aims to capture sight in fascinating its attention. […] All at once, a sum and organization of the visible is imposed in such a way that it overwhelms and blocks the errant view, making the look dedicated to what it keeps watch over. Instead of the common gaze passing from one visible to the other […] the look comes up against the painted semblance, being swallowed up and engulfed there. […] 6LJKWFDSWLYDWHGEHFRPHVDQDVVLJQHGORRN. (emphasis added). 27

Our gaze glides over real objects, rather than paying them attention, because we know from experience that the other side of the leaf is faded green, the butterfly’s wing is dull brown downside, and that when we turn the page of this book we will read different sentences. In other words, ordinary things ‘overcome us like a summer’s cloud,/Without our special wonder’. 28 On the other hand, the painter’s work is meant to capture the spectators’ attention and win their admiration. It performs the role of an idol. Its excessive brightness not only evokes fascination, but also carries the hazard of bedazzlement, which may result in a temporary loss of sight. The idol – explains Marion – accomplishes the phenomenological reduction of the given visible to the pure seen. It takes back this given to the surface, without

In the case of poetry, which has been rightly termed a speaking picture, we should say that we cannot divert our ears from it. 27 Marion, p. 60 28 7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH, pp. 110-111 (3.4.) 26

68 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND withdrawal, emptiness, or depth. The visible finds itself again without subterfuge, crushed on the plane, whence it will never leave, except in full visibility.29

We can say therefore that the imaginary realms created on the stage of the classical realist theatre and arranged in accordance with the principles of the linear perspective could have had a similar impact on the viewers, despite the fact they occupied the three-dimensional space of the stage-box rather than being ‘crushed on the plane’ of the canvas. The strife towards full visibility might have changed the theatrical image into an idol which had no other function, but to reflect the captivated sight of the viewer. In other words, the desire to depict accurately the fictional world of the play brought theatre in line with the hypnotizing glow of the painted, absolute and therefore ‘dead’ semblance of reality.

3. The theatre now: the present moment It remains to consider the possible similarities and differences between the radiance of an idol and the impact of the (theatrical) ‘living’ image with regard to a concrete example taken from the contemporary theatre. In view of what has been said in the previous sections of this paper, it appears that contemporary performances which break through the surface of illusion and crack open the frames of the (theatrical) picture are better suited to render the visual impact of Elizabethan plays than the classic realist stage conventions aimed at copying the ‘radiance’ of the flat canvas. Macbeth’s ‘summer clouds’ can be said to return, for instance, in such performances as in Oskaras Korsunovas’ Lithuanian masterly adaptation of 7KH 7HPSHVW (0LUDQGD 2011). When the spectators enter the auditorium, Prospero’s room is already waiting for them, ready to be seen, watched and examined. While they concentrate on finding their seats, they catch glimpses of what have not yet become the objects of their attention: an old-fashioned bookshelf with a cupboard for glasses and bottles of alcohol, a TV set which shows a balletdancer performing Tchaikovsky’s 6ZDQ /DNH, endlessly reiterated and crushed on the flat screen, and Miranda asleep in an armchair. If we stop for a moment and start looking at the stage, we may chance to spot the shadow of a man nervously trotting from right to left and back again behind a glass door. The performance awaits our attention, but for the time being the stage is like everything else we see around us: the faces of our friends (we quickly exchange greetings and smiles), the feet of those who have already taken their seats in the same row, the white ceiling with its plaster decorations.

29

Marion, p. 75

‘3LFWXUHVOLNHDVXPPHU’VFORXG’ 69

Once again we need the help of Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology to understand the precise nature of the strategy employed by the Lithuanian theatre director. This dynamic model has little to do with the closure and fixity of the linear perspective employed in classical realist theatre: The object learns how to behave itself, how not to cede to the indistinct flux of the visible. In this way it mimes the stability that each visible left to itself nevertheless denies to it. The look limits the visible in order to distinguish there the object that is not yet. 30

In other words, on entering the theatre auditorium we witness the DUULYDO of the performance. Although everything is already ‘in its place,’ it nevertheless will be out of focus until we, I, finally start paying attention and set it right in the middle of the scene I choose to watch. Korsunovas brilliantly activates the meta-dramatic potential of the original text: in his version Prospero is not only the director of the masque within the play and the probable master-mind behind the plot of the entire play, but he actually ‘reads’ (i.e. interprets) the printed version of Shakespeare’s play to his handicapped daughter. He then starts impersonating the fictional characters from the story, as we often do when we read fairytales to children. ‘Reading’ becomes ‘performance,’ as a middleaged man in old-fashioned glasses and a ludicrously short bathrobe that disgracefully reveals his thighs, begins to play the part now of Prospero, the rightful Duke of Milan, now of his usurping brother Antonio or the grotesque Ferdinand, or, most ominously for Miranda, Prospero’s lecherous slave Caliban. On the other hand, the ailing daughter is not just a passive victim of her father’s incestuous lust. She too torments Prospero, who displays severe physical and cerebral symptoms of alcohol addiction and alcohol withdrawal syndrome, as she performs Ariel, who in Korsunovas’s production, lives imprisoned in a cupboard containing […] spirits. Despite all the evidently narrative frame of the performance (with obvious allusions to the poetics of the Grimm brothers’ dismal and, QRPHQ RPHQ, grim fairy tales), drama prevails, as the ‘story’ unfolded on stage by Prospero and his daughter lacks the single focus of an epic narrator or the monocular perspective of a camera image. 31 Everything takes place on a stage whose 30 31

Marion, p. 57 The difference between the perception of a life spectacle and its monocular cameraimage becomes apparent when we watch the television version of the performance, where the objects of vision (e.g. the fork which Prospero uses to fix the cable of his radio aerial on to the shelf of his bookcase) are all constituted by the focus and the movement of the ‘camera eye’ that picks up single details, follows the actor’s movements, shows facial expression: in brief, en-frames the picture. This reduction

70 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND fictional time overlaps with the real here-and-now of the spectacle (a Friday evening in August 2011 in *GDľVN for example), as we follow the course of the performance, carefully observing the smooth succession of scenes, and – to recall Marion’s words once again – ’distinguishing surfaces there in depth and breadth, delimiting forms, little by little, marking changes and pursuing movements’. The phenomenological status of this rotating and three dimensional, magical theatrical mirror changes only once, in the brilliantly focused, mesmerizing grand finale in which we see Miranda, Prospero’s crippled and mentally retarded daughter who also appears to be his soul, finally transformed into a graceful swan; she performs her first and last, appallingly painful dance in the frame of the back door, lit by sudden explosions of dazzling, artificial lightning. Our gaze is then truly ‘swallowed up and engulfed’ for the time of this brief, extraordinary episode. But as soon as the wonder that has taken us by surprise is gone, we are once again reminded that Prospero’s room has indeed been nothing else but a story-bound island surrounded by a bare stage which betrays the illusory and ephemeral status of the theatrical representation. The performance indeed cedes to the flux of the visible, as once again our eyes begin to wander from one point to another over Prospero’s deadly quiet room. At last we realize why the old man does not get up from his armchair to answer the phone, which rings so persistently that we think it could (or, no, it could not!) wake even the dead. Thus when the lights come on in the end, we feel that some invisible theatrical demiurge has finally put his hands over our eyes, as if another Prospero were whispering to each of us: ‘now drop the fringed curtains of your eyes […]’. Unlike in classic realist theatre, however, we leave the auditorium well aware of the fact that we have not stolen anybody’s secret, nor have we spied on anybody’s story. Rather, we should admit that in our times it is the theatrical performance that steals the secret of our unfaithful gaze, carried as it is by ‘the flux of the visible that runs inorganically, without a rupture or a caesura, like a slow river of formless colours’. 32 We may say thus that history has reached a full circle. Like many other contemporary directors, Korsunovas opens up the visual/phenomenal frame of the spectacle, inserting the spectacle ‘proper’ in a wider context, taking into consideration the HYHQWPHQWDO nature of the theatrical space, whether indoor or outdoor. The mechanism appears to be exactly the same as in Shakespeare’s times. And it does not really matter that instead of being distracted by the picturesque clouds, the spectators today cannot stop

32

affects other senses as well: ‘The intersensory object is to the visual object what the visual object is to the monocular images of double vision’ (Merleau-Ponty, p. 209) Marion, p. 55

‘3LFWXUHVOLNHDVXPPHU’VFORXG’ 71

looking round the well-known theatre hall before they catch the first glimpses of Prospero’s (dis-)enchanted island. The provisional, temporary separation of the ‘real’ from the ‘imaginary’, the ‘stage’ from ‘the auditorium’ was then and is now part and parcel of the event. Its success largely depends on the consent of the spectator, who must start paying attention, make the spectacle the sole focus of his or her interest, so that it can fully occupy his or her imagination, feelings and thoughts.

Bibliography Armstrong, Philip, ‘Watching +DPOHW watching: Lacan, Shakespeare and the mirror/stage’, in $OWHUQDWLYH 6KDNHVSHDUHV , ed. by Terence Hawkes (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 216-237 Belsey, Catherine, 7KH 6XEMHFW RI 7UDJHG\ ,GHQWLW\ DQG 'LIIHUHQFH LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH 'UDPD (London: Methuen, 1985) De Grazia, Margreta, and others, eds,6XEMHFWDQG2EMHFWLQ5HQDLVVDQFH/LWHUDWXUH (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Dickens, Charles, *UHDW ([SHFWDWLRQV, ed. by Norman Page (Penguin Books: Harmondworth 1984) Donne, John, :LHUV]H Z\EUDQH [Selected Poems], bilingual edition, ed. by 6WDQLVâDZ%DUDľF]DN.UDNyZ:URFâDZ:\GDZQLFWZR/LWHUDFNLH *U]HJRU]HZVND0DâJRU]DWD‘*âRZD*RUJRQ\F]\OLQLHSROLW\F]QLHR7UDJHGLL 0DNEHWD’ [The Head of the Gorgon, or speaking non-politically about TKH 7UDJHG\RI0DFEHWK], .URQRV, 3 (2011), 178-186. Hawkes, Terence, ed., $OWHUQDWLYH 6KDNHVSHDUHV , (London and New York: Routledge, 1996) Ingarden, Roman, 7KH/LWHUDU\:RUNRI$UW$Q,QYHVWLJDWLRQRIWKH%RUGHUOLQHVRI 2QWRORJ\/RJLFDQGWKH7KHRU\RI/DQJXDJH, trans. by George G. Grabowicz (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1986) Johnson, Paul, 7KH %LUWK RI WKH 0RGHUQ :RUOG 6RFLHW\ - (New York: HarperCollins Publishers 1991) Limon, Jerzy, ‘3RF]HNDOQLD 2 Krystiana Lupy – Kilka Uwag Teoretyka Teatru’ [Krystian Lupa’s 3RF]HNDOQLD 2 A few remarks by a theatre scholar]. 7HDWU2 (2012), 39-44 Marion, Jean-Luc, ,Q ([FHVV 6WXGLHV RI 6DWXUDWHG 3KHQRPHQD, trans. by R. Horner & V. Berraud (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002) Massey, Lyle, ‘Anamorphosis through Descartes or Perspective Gone Awry’, 5HQDLVVDQFH4XDUWHUO\ 50(4) (1997), 39-44, 1148-89 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 3KHQRPHQRORJ\ RI 3HUFHSWLRQ, trans. by Colin Smith, (London: Routledge, 1962) Rozik, Eli, *HQHUDWLQJ 7KHDWUH0HDQLQJ $ 7KHRU\ DQG 0HWKRGRORJ\ RI 3HUIRUPDQFH $QDO\VLV (Eastbourne and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2010)

72 0DâJRU]DWD*U]HJRU]HZVND Shakespeare, William, 7KH2[IRUG6KDNHVSHDUH7KH&RPSOHWH:RUNV, ed. by Gary Taylor and Stanley Wells (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994) States, Bert O., *UHDW 5HFNRQLQJV LQ /LWWOH 5RRPV 2Q WKH 3KHQRPHQRORJ\ RI WKH 7KHDWUH (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) ŮXURZVNL $QGU]HM ‘The Forgotten Craftsman’, in 6KDNH[VSHULHQFH (VVD\V LQ +RQRXU RI 3URIHVVRU 0DUWD *LELQVND HG E\ -DFHN )DELV]DN 0DâJRU]DWD Grzegorzewska and Jerzy Limon. Forthcoming.

3HWUXŗa NĈLGXŗ Spectres of the Old World in the New The article sets off to explore the problems of cultural translation in early modern English narratives of the New World. My point of departure is Thomas Harriot’s %ULHIH DQG7UXH5HSRUWRIWKH1HZ)RXQG /DQGRI9LUJLQLD (1590), a text indebted to natural histories reformed for commercial and colonial purposes and, together with Ralegh’s 'LVFRYHU\RI *XLDQD (1595), anticipating the ‘true adventures’ of 18th-century fiction. It is my wish to trace the extent to which early modern travellers resort to a rhetoric that forces them to render their experience of space, time and people in terms familiar to their audiences. Due to rhetorical and mimetic constraints and in the absence of common linguistic and gestural codes, the geographic and historical translation of the encounter with the New World seems to amount to a familiar utopia or romance where travellers and, subsequently, their publishers resort to maps, drawings, historical and biblical references in an ideological endeavour to re-frame this experience both spatially and temporally on the mental maps of their countrymen. Keywords: travel writing, natural history, romance, ethnography, translation

On returning to England, Thomas Harriot published $%ULHIHDQG7UXH5HSRUW RIWKH1HZ)RXQG/DQGRI9LUJLQLDin 1588. The report was part of a greater enterprise in which Harriot’s verbal narrative was to be illustrated by John White, a Renaissance limner. Two years later, Theodore de Bry published his own engraved version of the report. White’s watercolors suffered some changes, and so did the initial page layout. These changes underpin a rather complex story of authorship and translation. One year after Harriot’ s return, Hakluyt had it published again, and in 1590, de Bry supposedly obtained White’s illustrations with the help of Richard Hakluyt and 9LUJLQLD, as the report was now called, appeared with letter-press texts followed by engraved plates in Latin, German, English and French. The plates could also be purchased separately, and so de Bry’s version was could reach a wider readership.

Questions of generic ambiguity Beyond its history, the material and social factors that influenced the subsequent publication of Harriot’s 5HSRUW, there is a certain generic ambiguity that emerges from the tension between facts about and fictions of the New World, on the one hand, and from its indebtedness to other genres of knowledge production, such as natural history, on the other. To put it simply, the Report is a ‘voyage,’ yet “it is a voyage of quite another kind than those recounted or manufactured by the lone and self-serving sensibility of Columbus, Ralegh and Thevet” (Campbell, 2004, 51). Campbell remarks on the work’s relationship with natural history and on its ethnographic qualities,

74 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ arguing that it departs from the former with a clear commercial purpose which it does not abandon when describing the Algonquins, although Theodore de Bry’s insertion of illustrations to the Bible and of the Picts and Britons does add to its ethnographic character (55). In fact, Campbell’s discussion of the heterogeneous, ambiguous nature of this ‘voyage’ may well serve to make a point of the generic challenges it creates, perhaps as a consequence of the various interests it attempts to meet: The scientific study of colonized territories has generally absorbed natural history into the more immediate plot of commercial exchange, of nature as transformable into product. In this plot, it is no surprise that the Algonquins are described in terms of their potential for transformation: into Christians, into British subjects, into laborers on future plantations and in future mines. But it is notable that the resulting ethnography is structured by a concern with raw materials, that the watercolors are used in de Bry’s book to illustrate a verbal discussion of ‘commodities.’ 1

In fact, with de Bry’s mannerist focus on the natives’ appearance, dress, weapons, food, agriculture, Harriot’s text veers from its indebtedness to natural history, more striking if we consider its initial illustrations by White, toward the Algonquins’ Europeanness. It may be an example of exoticism, of European fantasies projected onto the strange of the New World, a rhetorical strategy of rendering the unfamiliar in familiar terms so it may appeal to its European readership. If we take $Q,QGLDQPDQDQGZRPDQHDWLQJ, the plate leaves room for discussion as to White and de Bry’s different intentions, yet common vision. If in White’s watercolor drawing, the Indians are portrayed as unaware of an inquisitive English eye, in de Bry’s engraving, they turn their eyes to a larger audience that has access to the Frankfurt printing fair. The richness of detail, the stylization of their faces to the point that they have European features and the theatrical nature of this display of natural resources give rise to numerous considerations. If we choose to focus on the commercial and political interests at stake, then the illustration may be seen as part of a remarkable advertising tract advocating the plantation of Virginia. Considering the rest of the illustrations, regardless of whether they were authored by White or de Bry, Virginia emerges as a most suitable place for settlement. 7KHWRZQRI6HFRWDQ 7KHWRZQRI3RPHLRF,QGLDQVILVKLQJ list successfully the commodities available to prospective settlers in an utopian theatre of life in the New World. To informed readers of travel reports, the topos of the salvation of man by relocation in the New World could only be echoed by these illustrations. The theatrical display of the Algonquins’ life in de Bry’s plates was a 1

IELG, p. 55

6SHFWUHVRIWKH2OG:RUOGLQWKH1HZ 75

confirmation of previous expectations concerning the restoration of man’ s welfare in this world. Paradise could be regained.

The relocation of Eden: description as a scientific pursuit Biblical commonplaces were not unfamiliar to late Renaissance readers, regardless of the type of text. Harriot’s original work underwent some changes: the engraved plates are replete with details that did not exist in White’s illustrations and in many cases not even in Harriot’s text, the Europeanization of Indians is rather evident and they seem to be looking at an audience as if aware of their performance. Virginia opens with an engraving after Winghe 2 in which Adam and Eve are depicted picking fruits from the Tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. De Bry offers a key to its interpretation in the foreword as he compares ‘the early and privilege deprived humankind and its capability to thrive to the humble, but satisfying lifestyle of the “savage nations”, which deserves the recognition and the admiration of the English’. 3 The engraving is followed by two maps and twenty-one plates with social Indian types and their community life. The second set of engravings consists of images of the Picts, included, as de Bry suggests, ‘for to showe how that the Inhabitants of the Great Bretannie have bin in times past as savage as those of Virginia’.4 What Hariot and White were trying to achieve was the impression that this paradise could be regained and cultivated, that the plantation of Virginia was a feasible project. That it was a garden that could only benefit from the presence of Englishmen. The engravings argue in favour of planting English people in America and thus making the English presence permanent on the continent. The inhabitants, depicted while hunting, fishing, eating, praying, are engaged in peaceful activities. Their community life and family structure are well and clearly organized, they are highly productive, their clothes indicate the existence of a hierarchy, their mores render them rather familiar to English and European audiences. The garden of the New World is full of commodities from which the English could benefit: PAGATOWR, akinde of graine so called by the inhabitants; the same in the West Indies is called MAYZE: English men call it Guinney wheate or Turkie wheate, according to the names of the countreys from whence the like hath beene brought. The graine is about the bignesse of our ordinary English peaze and not much different in forme and shape: but of diuers colours: some white, 2

3 4

Kim Sloan, $ 1HZ :RUOG (QJODQG’ V )LUVW 9LHZ RI $PHULFD (London: The British Museum Press, 2007), p. 85 IELG., p. 85 IELG., p. 85

76 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ some red, some yellow, and some blew. [...] It is a graine of marueilous great increase; of a thousand, fifteene hundred and some two thousand fold. [...] Of these graines besides bread, the inhabitants make victuall eyther by parching them; or seething them whole vntill they be broken; or boyling the floure with water into a pappe. There is also another great hearbe in forme of a Marigolde, ahout sixe foote in height; the head with the floure is a spanne in breadth. Some take it to bee 3ODQWD6ROLV of the seedes heere of they make both a kinde of bread and broth. There is an herbe which is sowed a part by it selfe & is called by the inhabitants Vppowoc: In the West Indies it hath diuers names, according to the seuerall places & countries where it groweth and is vsed: The Spaniardes generally call it Tobacco. The leaues thereof being dried and brought into powder: they vse to take the fume or smoke thereof by sucking it through pipes made of claie into their stomacke and heade; from whence it purgeth superfluous fleame & other grosse humors, openeth all the pores & passages of the body: by which meanes the vse thereof, not only preserueth the body from obstructiõs; but also if any be, so that they haue not beene of too long continuance, in short time breaketh them: wherby their bodies are notably preserued in health, & know not many greeuous diseases where withall wee in England are oftentimes afflicted. 5

De Bry’s reworking of Harriot and White’s report is indicative of a mindset that conflated the New World with Paradise and thus removed Paradise from the East on the mental map of Europeans. The Garden of Eden was now across the ocean. Between the pilgrimage of the Middle Ages and the exploration and colonization of the Renaissance, the mental map of Europeans was reconfigured in the post-Columbian era. The riches of the New World were documented not only in natural histories, but also in travel reports with which they did have something in common: illustrations and the attempt at accurate descriptions. Travel writing was far from anything but a genre hovering between history and literature, between economics and faith. One of the major publishers of travel reports, Richard Hakluyt, saw in the plantation of the New World a panacea for all the woes that haunted the English at home (Mancall). It is no wonder that around the time of the publication of the 3ULQFLSDOO 1DYLJDWLRQV de Bry produced 9LUJLQLD with its biblical overtones as an attempt to make a catalogue of the resources and a description of the inhabitants.

5

Thomas Harriot, $%ULHIHDQG7UXH5HSRUWRIWKH1HZ)RXQG/DQGRI9LUJLQLD (1588), pp. 13-14

6SHFWUHVRIWKH2OG:RUOGLQWKH1HZ 77

Merchants of knowledge and the restoration of man At the turn of the 16th century, the exploration of the New World emerged as an accident of decouverte manquée, in the sense that the English had set sail in search of a Northwest Passage to China. It was a passage not to be discovered for centuries and, form this point of view, the expeditions of Gilbert, Frobisher, Pet and Jackman were utter failures.6 During the 16th and 17th centuries, there were others looking for a new way to reach the Orient since ‘the notion of a northwest passage through the Arctic waters of North America dominated the minds of English, Dutch and French explorers.’ 7 The attempt to circumvent the Spanish and Portuguese ‘monopoly of trade with the Orient and the Indies’ 8 engaged enormous resources and ended in failure, at best, if not in death. Among the consequences of the voyages of discovery and exploration undertaken by the English in the early modern age we count an influx of information about the natural world which created the need to accommodate such novelty. Numerous scholars focus on the pivotal role of geography in reshaping knowledge and the hybrid texts of geography in the early modern period can be used to make a case in point. 9 Their heterogeneous nature seems to either obliterate or anticipate the birth of new disciplines such as ethnography or the reshuffle of old ones. Francis Bacon appears to have taken the challenge of novelty by advancing a new model of gaining 6

7

8 9

Peter Mancall, +DNOX\W’V3URPLVH$Q(OL]DEHWKDn’V2EVHVVLRQIRUDQ(QJOLVK$PHULFD (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp. 40-102 Angus Konstam, +LVWRULFDO$WODVRI([SORUDWLRQ- (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2000), p. 145 ,ELG, p. 145 Despite the efforts of several cultural historians of geography to present the role of this changing discipline as crucial in the instauration of a new scientific tradition, there is a contending discourse about the work of Renaissance naturalists whose natural histories faced serious taxonomic challenges and played a significant role in the reformation of knowledge. For further reference see Brian W. Ogilvie, ‘The many books of nature: Renaissance naturalists and information overload’ in JHI, Vol. 64 (N. 1), Jan 2003, pp. 29-41, Lesley B. Cormack, ‘Good Fences Make Good Neighbours’: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England, Isis, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), pp. 639-661, John Brian Harley, 7KH1HZ1DWXUHRI0DSV(VVD\VLQ WKH +LVWRU\ RI &DUWRJUDSK\ (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). Lesley B Cormack, &KDUWLQJDQ(PSLUH*HRJUDSK\DWWKH(QJOLVK8QLYHUVLWLHV (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1997) and David Livingstone, ‘Geography, Tradition and the Scientific revolution: An Interpretative Essay’, 7UDQVDFWLRQVRIWKH,QVWLWXWHRI%ULWLVK*HRJUDSKHUV, New Series, Vol. 15, No. 3 (1990), pp. 359-373

78 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ knowledge of the world, a model in which natural history is given great scope. Late in the 16th century, Lime Street in London was inhabited by a community of naturalists who engaged in experiments and trade with flowers and other herbs as well as rare animals from all corners of the globe. Gifts of plants poured into the drug stores and gardens of Lime Street. James Cole was envied by his uncle, the famous Antwerp antiquarian Abraham Ortelius, for his garden containing rare tulip, narcissus and lily specimens. Gaspard Bahuin completed his 3LQD[WKHDWULERWDQLFL (1623) with plants from London-based Mathias de L’Obel. South American sunflower seeds and North American chestnuts arrived in Lime Street courtesy of Abraham Ortelius and his friends with connections in the New World. James Cole received double daffodils from Fabri Claude de Peiresc along with the message ‘I hope that you will find within some curiosity worthy of your beautiful little garden since they grow here in France’ but are not very ‘common where you live’. 10 The naturalists of Lime Street invested their energy into years of observation, fieldwork, travel, correspondence, collaboration and collection. Sarsaparilla and rhubarb were celebrated as cures for syphilis and the vernacular market for practical manuals 11 on the uses of flowers and other herbs grew considerably. One John Gerard, a man with connections on Lime Street, had a particular project. 1597 saw the publication of John Gerard’s +HUEDOO RU *HQHUDO KLVWRULH RI SODQWHV, but not without much controversy. The massive work that promised much to housewives and physicians alike was a collection of inaccurate and plagiarized information. Its publication held a great stake, since ladies could trace the illustrations in their embroidery and consult its medical lore and ‘plant fanciers purchased the item to be conversant with all the newest discoveries of flora from around the globe’. 12 Despite its significance, the book that promised a systematic insight into flowers and other herbs turned out to be replete with translations from Mathias de L’Obel’s work and a famous Flemish herbal by Rembert Dodoens. Now that, contrary to present-day copyright laws, was not much of a problem since ‘the standards for plagiarism were notoriously low’ 13 during the Elizabethan period. And so, after a partial revision by de L’Obel himself, the publishers went ahead. The community of natural historians in Lime Street disapproved of Gerard’s 10

11

12 13

Deborah E. Harkness, 7KH -HZHO +RXVH (OL]DEHWKDQ /RQGRQ DQG WKH 6FLHQWLILF 5HYROXWLRQ (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 38 Brian W. Ogilvie, 7KH 6FLHQFH RI 'HVFULELQJ 1DWXUDO +LVWRU\ LQ 5HQDLVVDQFH (XURSH, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 37 Harkness, p. 15 IELG, p. 17

6SHFWUHVRIWKH2OG:RUOGLQWKH1HZ 79

work and method, but the success of the +HUEDOO was undeniable. Indeed, it brought him exclusion from the community of Lime Street but it remained for quite some time the most popular work of natural history produced on English soil. 14 In his dedication to Sir William Cecil, Gerard begins by praising the aesthetic and practical qualities of plants as he compares the delight they bring to whoever contemplates, smells or tastes them to the sheer necessity by which men consume them or use them to restore their health. He thus makes reference to the ‘hidden virtue’ of plants, which beasts have not failed to discover and goes on to cite many ‘Philosophers’ who pursued this science. Among the manifold creatures of God (right Honorable, and my singular good Lord) that haue all in all ages diuersly entertained manv excellent wits, and drawne them to the contemplation of the diuine wis|dome, none haue prouoked mens studies more, or satisfied their desires so much as Plants haue done, and that vpon iust and worthy causes; For if delight may prouoke mens labor, what greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparelled with plants, as with a robe of embroidered worke, set with Orient pearles, and garnished with great [...] of rare and costly iewels? [...] But these delights are in the outward sences: the principall delight is in the minde, siugularly enriched with the knowledge of these visible things, setting forth to vs the inuisible wisedome and admirable workmanship of almighty God. The delight is great, but the vse greater, and ioyned often with necessity. [...] Furthermore, the necessary vse of these fruits of the earth doth plainly appeare by the great charge and care of almost all men in planting and maintaining of gardens, not as ornaments onely, but as a necessarie prouision also to their houses. [...] Besides these and other causes, there are many examples of those that haue honored this science: for to passe by a multitude of the Philosophers, it may please your Honor to call to remembrance that which you know of some noble Princes, that haue ioyned this study with their most important matters of state. 15

What science is that? And would it be accurate to call it a ‘science’? Does it have a method? Natural history, what I would call a discipline related to ‘medicine and natural philosophy’, 16 had, for a considerable span of time, no place among the disciplines cited by Renaissance encyclopaedists such as Giorgio Valla, Polydore Vergil and Juan Luis Vives. Rather, ‘it was subordinated to natural philosophy and medicine; at best, it represented a

14 15

16

IELGpp. 18-19 John Gerard, 7KHKHUEDOORU*HQHUDOOKLVWRULHRISODQWHV*DWKHUHGE\,RKQ*HUDUGHRI/RQGRQ 0DVWHULQ&KLUXUJHULHYHU\PXFKHQODUJHGDQGDPHQGHGE\7KRPDV,RKQVRQFLWL]HQDQGDSRWKHFDU\H RI/RQGRQ (1597), pp. 4-5 Ogilvie, 7KH6FLHQFHRI'HVFULELQJ , p.1

80 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ stage in the production of valid knowledge about nature’. 17 With Francis Bacon, however, natural history acquired a status of its own, it became a discipline whose purpose and subject matter was the investigation of nature and, in Bacon’s $GYDQFHPHQW RI /HDUQLQJ (1605), 18 it corresponded to ‘the mental faculty of memory’. The crux of the matter was whether there was a method in the discipline. Doubtless, it was a particular kind of knowledge with its own set of practitioners. Natural history entailed the study of both ancient and modern sources, the investigation of nature and a matter of practice, of artful work which involved particular care. In other words: in the late Renaissance, becoming a naturalist meant mastering not only a set of concepts but also a specific set of techniques that granted meaning to interactions with the world. Naturalists also granted meaning to natural history as an activity; natural history was implicated in broader cultural forms and social formations, and participated in the reproduction of those forms. 19

In light of this reformation of the practice, it seems that natural history did emerge as a discipline per se, governed by a set of principles, and relying on a social network which overarched nations and religion. In his 6FLHQFH RI 'HVFULSWLRQ, Brian Ogilvie claims that ‘description as both process and result is the central concern of Renaissance natural history’. 20 However, such a claim, beyond its concern with accuracy and adequacy, fails to encompass topoi that were a common currency among late Renaissance scholars and which were rhetorical commonplaces at the time. I will refer here only to the salvation of man and the location of the Garden of Eden. The possibility of saving man by investigating nature and restoring him to a condition of control over it is often invoked by Renaissance students of nature and advocates of a reformation of knowledge. In Gerard’s discussion of the uses of his Herball, we learn that his work is grounded in the conviction that: Manifold will be the vse both to the Physition and others: for euery man delighteth in knowledge naturally, which (as $ULVWRWOH said) is in prosperitie an ornament, in aduersitie arefuge. But this booke aboue many o|thers will sute with the most, because it both plenteously ministreth knowledge, which is the food of the minde, and doth it also with a familiar and pleasing taste to [...] capacitie. Now as this com|moditie is communicated to all, and many shall-receiue much fruit thereof, so I wish some may haue the minde to returne a 17 18 19 20

IELG., p. 1 IELG., p. 4 IELG., p. 5 IELG., p. 6

6SHFWUHVRIWKH2OG:RUOGLQWKH1HZ 81 benefit againe; that it might not be [...] in all that ,XYHQDOO saith, 6FLUHYR_OXQW RPQHV PHUFHGHPVROXHUHQHPRL $OOGHVLUHWRNQRZQRQHWR\HHOGUHZDUG Let men think, that the perfection of this knowledge is the high aduancement of the health of man that perfection is not to be attained, but by strong indeuor: neither can strong indeuor be accomplished without free maintenance. 21

Thus, the study of nature is bound to allow man to restore his health. Only a strong endeavour can guarantee that knowledge is perfected, a concern familiar to natural historians who were eager to study their predecessors and amend their work with the higher purpose of improving the condition of man on earth. Such an endeavour is praised by Gerad, who mentions some of his predecessors and their patrons. Gerard then goes on to specify that his main goal in compiling the +HUEDOO was ‘the perfection of his profession’ and, by consequence, ‘the healthy lives of men’. 22 Such conviction is attached to further speculation on the old topos of the Garden of Eden, which, in the age of exploration and colonization, tends to be relocated in most cases in the New World. The natural historian goes as far as to say that: When notwithstanding the world can brag of no more antient Monu|ment than Paradise and the garden of Eden: and the fruits of the earth may contend for seigniori|tie, seeing their mother was the first Creature that conceiued, and they themselues the first fruit she brought forth. Talke of perfect happinesse or pleasure, and what place was so sit for that as the gar|den place where $GDPwas set to be the Herbarist? 23

With Adam as an herbalist, it seems that Gerard draws, like many of his contemporaries, on biblical commonplaces to appeal rhetorically to his readership and to substantiate the claim that natural history is an old practice.

Romance in the New World Accounts such as the ones collected and translated by Hakluyt and which include Harriot’s report hover between political analysis and fiction 24 between colonial propaganda and theological allegory, not to mention the variety of styles and the heterogeneity of the genre which stands between and engenders fact and fiction, science and literature. Thus, works of history, geography and ethnography, on the one hand, and works of fiction, on the other, all seem to take their cue from this body of miscellaneous texts that 21 22 23 24

Gerard, p. 7 IELG., p. 8 IELG., p. 10 Andrew Hadfield, /LWHUDWXUH7UDYHODQG&RORQLDO:ULWLQJLQWKH(QJOLVK5HQDLVVDQFH(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 7

82 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ serve political, scientific and religious goals and where one can discern an interest in practicality which is consistent with a general trend at British universities at the turn of the 16th century 25 and with ‘the rise of a more systematic approach to Western discovery and reporting’. 26 Among the miscellanea of texts that make up 7KH3ULQFLSDO1DYLJDWLRQV, we find letters, reports and other kinds of documents availed to him by merchants, mariners and allegedly by his cousin, the lawyer. Many of them had been held secret for some time, yet they were made public for different political purposes,27 relevant to ‘recent national experience’ if we are to quote on Hakluyt in his Dedication to the Right Honourable Sir Francis Walsingham. Hakluyt’s praise of English enterprises at sea echoes what Linton would call ‘adventure in other worlds’, the stuff of romance:28 It cannot be denied, but as in all former ages, they have been men full of activity, stirrers abroad and searchers of the most remote parts of the world, so in this most famous and peerless government of Her most excellent Majesty, her subjects, in compassing the vast glove of the world more than once, have excelled all the nations and people of the earth. 29

There seems to be little doubt that English adventures and ventures of exploration had an impact on the imagination. The text that accompanies 7KHDUULYDORI(QJOLVKPHQ in Harriot’s report specifies that the explorers faced great perils before landing. Their courage becomes the stuff of romance in Raleigh’s 'LVFRYHU\ RI *XLDQD, as the narrative of the quest takes dramatic turns at times. Linton discusses at large the gendered representation of the New World justified by rhetorical constraints of modes of representation in the Renaissance, but also by political and economic reasons calling for the femininization of the land.30 To use this reading grid in the case of Harriot’s account may look slightly far fetched, yet not entirely amiss as he lists the natural riches. De Bry made further contributions by adding details to the plates that did not exist in White’s watercolours and which reveal the beauty 25

26

27 28

29 30

Lesley B. Cormack, &KDUWLQJDQ(PSLUH*HRJUDSK\DWWKH(QJOLVK8QLYHUVLWLHV- (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1997), p. 39 Paul W. Depasquale, “Re-Writing the Virginian Paradise. The Conflicted Author(s) of a Late Sixteenth-Century Travel Account” in 0DNLQJ &RQWDFW 0DSV ,GHQWLW\ DQG 7UDYHO, ed. by Glenn Burger, and others, eds. (Alberta: the University of Alberta Press, 2003), p. 147 Mancall, p. 61 Joan Pong Linton, 7KH5RPDQFHRIWKH1HZ:RUOG*HQGHUDQGWKH/LWHUDU\)RUPDWLRQVRI (QJOLVK&RORQLDOLVP (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 2007), p. 1 Richard Hakluyt, 9R\DJHVDQG'LVFRYHULHV (London: Penguin Group, 1985), p.33 Linton, p. 5

6SHFWUHVRIWKH2OG:RUOGLQWKH1HZ 83

and resources of the land. If, however, we consider its advertising purpose, the 5HSRUt emerges as a description of a land onto which the English may project their desires of economic and social welfare. The discussion does by no means exhaust the generic problems raised by travel narratives in the Elizabethan age. In fact, it only establishes several directions in the exploration of generic distinctions slowly emerging at the time. Certainly, works such as the 5HSRUW can be read at different levels of representation, thus becoming a rich source of interpretation. The work’s indebtedness to several genres accounts for the variety of purpose with which Renaissance observers of the New World recorded information.

Bibliography Campbell, Mary Baine, :RQGHU  6FLHQFH ,PDJLQLQJ :RUOGV LQ (DUO\ 0RGHUQ (XURSH (New York: Cornell University Press, 2004) Cormack, Lesley B. &KDUWLQJ DQ (PSLUH *HRJUDSK\ DW WKH (QJOLVK 8QLYHUVLWLHV - (Chicago & London: Chicago University Press, 1997) Cormack, Lesley B., ‘“Good Fences Make Good Neighbours”: Geography as Self-Definition in Early Modern England’, ,VLV 82:4 (Dec., 1991), 639661 Depasquale, Paul W., ‘Re-Writing the Virginian Paradise. The Conflicted Author(s) of a Late Sixteenth-Century Travel Account’ in 0DNLQJ&RQWDFW 0DSV,GHQWLW\DQG7UDYHO, ed. by Glenn Burger, and others, eds. (Alberta: the University of Alberta Press, 2003) Gerard, John, 7KHKHUEDOORU*HQHUDOOKLVWRULHRISODQWHV*DWKHUHGE\,RKQ*HUDUGHRI /RQGRQ0DVWHULQ&KLUXUJHULHYHU\PXFKHQODUJHGDQGDPHQGHGE\7KRPDV,RKQVRQ FLWL]HQDQGDSRWKHFDU\HRI/RQGRQ (1597) Hadfield, Andrew. /LWHUDWXUH 7UDYHO DQG &RORQLDO :ULWLQJ LQ WKH (QJOLVK 5HQDLVVDQFH-(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) Hakluyt, Richard, 9R\DJHVDQG'LVFRYHULHV (London: Penguin Group, 1985) Harkness, Deborah E. 7KH -HZHO +RXVH (OL]DEHWKDQ /RQGRQ DQG WKH 6FLHQWLILF 5HYROXWLRQ (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007) Harley, John Brian, 7KH1HZ1DWXUHRI0DSV(VVD\VLQWKH+LVWRU\RI&DUWRJUDSK\ (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) Harriot, Thomas, $ %ULHIH DQG 7UXH 5HSRUW RI WKH 1HZ )RXQG /DQG RI 9LUJLQLD (1588) Konstam, Angus, +LVWRULFDO$WODVRI([SORUDWLRQ- (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 2000) Linton, Joan Pong, 7KH 5RPDQFH RI WKH 1HZ :RUOG *HQGHU DQG WKH /LWHUDU\ )RUPDWLRQVRI(QJOLVK&RORQLDOLVP (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 2007)

84 3HWUXŗD1ĈLGXŗ Livingstone, David N., ‘Geography, Tradition and the Scientific revolution: An Interpretative Essay’, 7UDQVDFWLRQV RI WKH ,QVWLWXWH RI %ULWLVK *HRJUDSKHUV, 15:3 (1990), 359-373 Mancall, Peter. +DNOX\W’ V 3URPLVH $Q (OL]DEHWKDQ’V 2EVHVVLRQ IRU DQ (QJOLVK $PHULFD (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007) Ogilvie, Brian W.,‘ The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload’ , -+, 64:1 (Jan 2003), 29-41 Ogilvie, Brian W.,7KH6FLHQFH RI'HVFULELQJ1DWXUDO+LVWRU\LQ5HDQDLVVDQFH(XURSH, (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 2008) Sloan, Kim, $ 1HZ :RUOG (QJODQG’V )LUVW ‘9LHZ RI $PHULFD (London: The British Museum Press, 2007)

Christoph Ehland The Laws of Piracy: Pirates as Messengers of Modernity in Thomas Heywood’s Fortune by Land and Sea Despite its obvious generic limitations Thomas Heywood’s adventure drama Fortune by Land and Sea offers an insight into the processes of modernisation of thought during the early modern period. As a text that takes the rapid movements of its main protagonist as its main principle of dramatic organisation it showcases the close interdependency between modernity and the experience of mobility. In particular, Heywood’s representation of the pirates Purser and Clinton questions the ideological stalemate of the Jacobean period and points to the changing patterns of sensibilities in the society of his day. Heywood utilises the pirates as agents of modernity whose sad end on the gallows creates an ambiguous antithesis to the successful restitution of the main protagonist. Keywords: Keywords: Thomas Heywood, Fortune by Land and Sea, Captain John Smith, An Accidence for Young Sea-Men, Piracy, mobility, law, justice, James I

1. Introduction: Seafights and the early modern period Right at the beginning this essay has to rely on the ‘imaginary forces’ of its reader for a remarkable theatrical scene: Above Boy: Ho there. 1. Mariner: Ha boy. Boy: A Sayl. 1. Mariner: Whence is she? Boy: That I cannot kenne; she appeares to me out of our hemisphear no bigger then a Crow. Young For: Discry her better, oh that it were the desperate Pirates Ship, on that condition we might grapple straight, and try our desperate fortunes on even change, [...] Boy: Arm rather, for I see them from a far make all provision for a present fight, they have managed their hatches, hung their pendants out, display’d their Ensignes, up with all their feights, their matches in their cocks, their sinoaking Linstocks are likewise fired within their Gunners hands, and hark they shoot already. (A peece goes off) Young For: Come descend; the Pirat, Fortune thou art then my friend. Now valiant friends and souldiers man the deck, draw up your feights, and lace your drablers on, whilst my self make good the Forecastle, and ply my Musket in the front of death, quarter your selves in order, some abast, some in the Ships waste, all in martial order; our Spright-Sayl, Top Sail, and Top-gallant, our Main-Sail, Board-Spright, and our Mizen too are hung with waving pendants, and the colours of England and St. Georg ply in the Stern. We fight against the foe we all desire, Alarum Trumpets, Guner straight give fire. Exeunt.

86 Christoph Ehland Alarm.Purser and Clinton with their Mariners, all furnisht with Sea devices fitting for a fight. Clin: Give them a full broad-side; oh Mr. Gunner your upper tire of Ordnance shot over; you gave not one shot betwixt wind and water in all this skirmish. Gun: Sir, your speak not wel, I pierc’d them with my chase piece through and through; part of their Capstring too I with a Piece abast shot overboard. Pur: Oh’twas a gallant shot, I saw it shatter some of their limbs in pieces: Shall we grapple, and lay their Ship aboard? Where be these Irons to hook’em fast? Clint: I fear they’re too well man’d; for see the Gunner ready to give fire unto their Murderers if we stay to board’em: Shall we set sayl and leave’em. Pur: How can we when our Ship has sprung a leak? Being ready now to founder in the sea; some ply the Pump: oh for one lucky bullet to take their Mainmast off, he that can make it shall have a treble share in this next prize. Gun: I shall go near it from my lower tyre. Clin: Gunner do that,’tis all that we desire. Exeunt. Alarm: Enter young Forrest and his Mariners. 1. Mar: Where is the Gunner Captain? Young For: Where he should not be, at his prayers I think: Is this a time to pray, when the Seas mouth seems to spit fire, and all the billows burn. Come hand with me, and we will board the Pirates instantly. 1. Mar: Hoyst up more fails, and fetch’em roundly up, and with their gallant vessel grapple straight. [...] Young For: It blows a stiffe gale, it makes all for us, every Commander once more to his charge, he that this day shall dye dies honourable; the Canon Basilisks, and Ordnance shall tooll his funeral peale, and some now found, shall dye three deaths in one, shot, burnt, and drown’d. Come spare no powder till you see our Ship, whose hard though ribs hewed from the heart of oak, Now black with pitch be painted blew with smoak. 1

This thrilling scene is taken from Thomas Heywood’s adventure romance Fortune by Land and Sea (1607). The confrontation between the protagonist Young Forrest and the pirates Purser and Clinton represents the dramatic climax and the turning point of the play. Most significantly, the scene functions as a catalyst for the conflicts in the play. The scene itself is the biggest sea fight that appears in any early modern play. It shows the entertainment industries of London’s Southbank not only at their most boisterous but also in terms of staging at their most technically advanced. 2

1 2

See illustration page 75: excerpt Fortune by Land and Sea (1655) See illustration page 76: excerpt An Accidence for Young Sea-Men (1626)

The Laws of Piracy 87

Despite the fact that this particular play does not seem to offer its audience much more than rather shallow action and simple-minded emotions one should not discard it too lightly. As the scene of the sea fight shows this play is charged with the energies of the beginning of modernity. In fact Heywood’s text is a good example of the fact that in the early modern period the boundaries between fiction and reality are more transmutable than one might expect to find in a popular text. With regard to this one might ask how ‘imagined’ the sea fight really is. Obviously, Heywood is not as prone to relying entirely on the ‘imaginary forces’ as others playwrights are: not only has he cannons fired and muskets shot but his scene shows a close relationship to one of the most widely read maritime handbooks of the early 17th century. When one puts the original texts side by side it is not difficult to spot the correspondences. Unfortunately, the dates of the two texts do not allow us to establish in which direction the intertextual transfer between handbook and stage play has taken place. John Smith publishes An Accidence for Young Sea-Men in 1626 and explains in the advertisement for his book that such a text has never been published before. 3 With regard to the scenic representation of a sea fight there is indeed no other parallel in any of the surviving maritime handbooks of the period. One learns a lot about artillery, calculation of the tide and even the pirates’ individual shares in their plunder but dramatic interplays are not to be found. 4 However, the obvious analogies between the texts point to the fact that their representational strategies are not limited by generic considerations: the static stage must become a moving space and the encyclopaedic handbooks must be turned into dramatic action. The point of reference is experience itself. However, the obvious analogies between the texts point to the fact that their representational strategies are not limited by generic considerations: the static stage must become a moving space and the encyclopaedic handbooks must be turned into dramatic action. The point of reference is experience itself.

3

4

Smith writes’ I have beene perswaded to Print this discourse, being a subject I never see writ before’ —John Smith, An Accidence for Young Sea-Men: Or, Their Path-way to Experience (London, 1626) Cf. Susan Rose, ‘Mathematics and the Art of Navigation: The Advance of Scientific Seamanship in Elizabethan England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (December 2004), pp. 175-184

88 Christoph Ehland

The Laws of Piracy 89

90 Christoph Ehland

2. Mobility and literature In what follows I want to investigate the essence of this experience. In this context one needs to point out that especially on the stage the sea fight represents a scene of the utmost mobility. My argument is that it is the evidence of this experience and the discourse of mobility which gives relevance to Heywood’s text beyond its entertainment value. It is true that movement and mobility have always been functional elements of literary texts – just think about the Odyssey or the medieval knight-errants. However, the literary and cultural signification of mobility changes fundamentally in the moment when its representation is informed by the experience of movement itself. In Heywood’s texts one can detect this particular experience. His plays activate tableaus of differentiation that order and explore their world according to binary oppositions such as the known and the unknown, the familiar and the exotic, home and away. However, these differentiations do not remain mere projections in the symbolic realm of signification. Many of Heywood’s plays give evidence of the shifting socio-economic patterns in English society at the time. It follows from this that one must read the relatively unknown adventure romance Fortune by Land and Sea as part of a whole group of texts by Heywood, such as the better known adventure play The Fair Maid of the West, which explore the impact of the widening horizon of the early modern period. The representation of piracy by Heywood belongs in this context. The pirates who appear in Fortune by Land and Sea are intimately connected with the experience of mobility. They are its symptom, at the same time a problematic and an essential part of it. The widening horizon of the early modern world and the establishment of global trade routes in the wake of the colonial period meant for them and their operations primarily ideal business opportunities. The modern interest in the play has been revived by the fact that Heywood is almost the only author of the period who introduces pirates into his plays not just for decorative purposes but to give them a central role in the dramatic argument. However, the obvious analogies between the texts point to the fact that their representational strategies are not limited by generic considerations: the static stage must become a moving space and the encyclopaedic handbooks must be turned into dramatic action. The point of reference is experience itself.

The Laws of Piracy 91

3. Heywood’s Fortune by Land and Sea Almost mechanically the play follows two storylines which are organised around two families and the ties that exist between them. On the one hand there is the Forrest family, impoverished gentry, consisting of two sons, a daughter and a widowed father. On the other hand there is the family of the Hardings, the former tenants of the Forrests, who have exchanged roles with their old landlords and taken over the estate. Old Harding is a widower but has recently remarried a significantly younger wife who is the same age as his three grown-up sons. From this situation Heywood develops two parallel plots around the two families which become ever more deeply entangled with each other during the course of the action. The play begins with the murder of the older of the Forrest brothers. The deed remains unpunished until his younger brother kills the murderer in a duel. At the same time the oldest of the Harding brothers marries the Forrest daughter. Since this marriage does not have the blessing of the old Harding the son loses his primogeniture to his brothers and as a punishment he and his wife have to live as servants in the Harding household. When Young Forrest – chased by the local militia – climbs into the garden of the Hardings the situation is already pretty muddled. In the garden, however, he meets the young wife of Old Harding who is not only easily convinced of his innocence and good character but will also become the means of arranging his escape from England. If the play has so far been strictly limited in its perspective – not to say claustrophobic with regard to the hopeless situation of its protagonists – the flight of Young Forrest signals a radical extension of the setting from land to sea. This extension is followed by a public proclamation which announces a reward and an amnesty for the man who captures the notorious pirates Purser and Clinton. The path towards a happy ending is thus clearly marked in the play. In fact, the pirates will be caught, the honour of the Forrests will be restored and the rightful man will marry the virtuous woman at the end of the play. The case of young Forrest makes it clear that the play does not intend to show an uprooted mobile individual but that it aims to display movement and mobility at sea as the prerequisite for the establishment of a new, stable order on land. The row of restitutions at the end of the play – official pardon, knighthood, marriage and restoration of the primogeniture – is an integral element of Heywood’s generic and meritocratic logic in the play. With regard to the popular genre of the play the somewhat simple-minded plot seems to concur with an equally simple set of values. On the surface level, this undoubtedly holds true. However, under closer scrutiny the swiftness of the resolution of the conflicts in the play reveals subtle

92 Christoph Ehland inconsistencies in the otherwise smooth surface of the adventure story. These inconsistencies have to do with two closely interlinked concepts of order which structure the sequence of spatial settings in Heywood’s play. The first concept is linked with the principles of a new economic order. The second comprises the relationship between law and an immanent feeling of justice. In what follows I want to follow up these two aspects of the play and show their relevance for the structure of Heywood’s text before trying to contextualize them in the particular discursive universe of England’s world at the threshold of modernity.

4. Spatial order between land and sea The title of the play already anticipates that its setting is divided between land and sea. At first the action of the play strictly adheres to this division. The complications of the plot, however, will gradually begin to relate the two settings to each other before eventually they are functionally intertwined. With regard to this development the sequence of events means that what happens on land is brought to a point at which ever greater obstacles stand in the way of the protagonists until the action needs to be transferred to the sea in order to find a way out. To begin with the maritime aspect remains obscure. The two families at the centre of the play are part of a landed order. Only when their difficulties with each other become more and more hopeless is the horizon opened up – almost by a deus ex machina. In this context two characters are particularly significant and function as plot facilitators: Anne Harding and her brother, a merchant in the port of Gravesend at the mouth of the river Thames. The appearance of the merchant brother on the scene marks the beginning of a process by which the two settings are now increasingly interwoven with each other. His profession and the particular location of his business in the harbour make him the ideal mediator between land and sea. The contact is established by Anne Harding who sends the fugitive from the law, Young Forrest, to her brother for a passage to the continent. In the merchant’s office one can witness not only the exchange of polite pleasantries between the fugitive and his generous helper but also the symbolic negotiation of a liberating mobility. For Young Forrest the journey with the merchant ship represents not only his last resort but also the starting point of a new identity. In this sense the harbour and the merchant’s office are seen as liminal spaces in which the old order comes into contact with the new and will eventually be replaced. At sea one can observe that the system of social order is increasingly becoming meritocratic and thereby implicitly undermines hierarchical privileges. These are revealed as the illusions of an outdated ideology and

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replaced by a dynamic system of social mobility.5 In this context, it is important that the audience loses sight of Young Forrest whom it believes to be only crossing the Channel to France. When he reappears a few scenes later he has been made captain of what appears a privateer ship. For the social agenda of the play it is significant that we learn that he has been voted into his new position by his crew in recognition of his achievements and character. He acquires his social status himself and does not depend on the help and protection of a third party. On the contrary, his earlier benefactor and passage-maker, the merchant from Gravesend, has been taken hostage by pirates and will eventually be rescued after a sea fight by his former protégé. The fight itself – as has been mentioned at the beginning – has a catalytic effect for the plot. Firstly, Young Forrest can balance his accounts, as it were, with the generous merchant. In turn the merchant regains his ship and his valuable cargo through Young Forrest’s intervention. At the same time the protagonist succeeds in arresting the notorious pirates and thus paves the way for justice and punishment. At this point the action of the play can return to its setting in the countryside, since the protagonist will now be rewarded for his bravery and receive a royal pardon for his earlier breach of the law. In this context it is almost comic that while this is going on Old Harding dies of a stroke since he erroneously believes that the money he had invested in the merchant’s journey has been stolen by pirates. Within the prosaic logic of such plots his death serves a useful purpose since it paves the way for the marriage between Young Forrest and the new widow. While the play’s action clearly does not deserve too much attention and should be read solely for its amusing simplicity it is still significant to draw attention to the fact that Heywood’s text exemplifies a new social and economic order: capital has replaced land as the dominant factor of production. The impoverished Forrests must come to terms with the success of the Old Harding, who in turn has invested a critical amount of his funds in the trading business of his wife’s brother. The fact that the success or failure of such investment is decided at sea and not on land metaphorically projects the fluidity of the sea as the new space of experience and activity on to the economic order on land. Thus the text cunningly undermines Old Harding’s worldview as the contradictory attitude of someone who is a representative of the class which profits as no other from the new mobility of the capitalist order but refuses to accept for himself bits 5

Mark Netzloff notes in his analysis of Heywood’s play: ‘[T]he text emphasizes the possibility of social mobility enabled through trade and travel, presenting overseas commerce as the solution to domestic economic crisis and tensions of status’ (2003: 57-8)

94 Christoph Ehland essential uncertainty. The punishment for such unadaptability – as we shall see – follows suit in Heywood’s text. In the end, the courage and initiative of Young Forrest prevail against all the odds since he is able and willing to adapt to the rules of a new order. Seen in this light Heywood’s text shows the experience of mobility to be the decisive force of socio-economic change and modernisation. One could rest one’s case here since this conclusion fits well with our expectations of the agenda for change in the early modern period. However, the play is more complicated than this: most compelling are the incongruencies in Heywood’s representation of the pirates. Despite the fact that Purser and Clinton’s existence in the play is only needed to serve the plot development Heywood gives significantly more attention to these two characters than is required by what should be their rather mechanical role for the denouement of the play. With regard to this one needs to explore the contexts in which these characters are embedded. More precisely one has to investigate the character of law and justice in the dramatic discourse.

5. Law and justice If it holds true that the main plot of Heywood’s play follows a rather simpleminded set of values the subplot of the pirates adds a subtle undercurrent to this simplicity. In fact, their life and death in the play draws attention to the conflict between the practice of the law and an implicit feeling of justice or rather injustice. As one looks more closely it becomes apparent that the law as a principle is omnipresent in the play. It provides the energy which drives the plot, creates a change of setting and defines the destiny of the individual characters. The law drives the sequence of events that leads from the unpunished murder of Frank Forrest to the flight and restitution of the protagonist. At a different level of the plot it also facilitates, as it were, the execution of the pirates on the gallows. All these events draw attention to a feeling of justice which implicitly evaluates the events and orders them. In this context Heywood’s meticulous care for the fate of his pirates is striking. In particular the scene of their execution seems like a premature final chord in the play which may not overshadow the general denouement but undoubtedly marginalises the impact of the happy ending. The pathos and composure with which Purser and Clinton face their final exit into another world resonate in the final scenes and turn the concluding reallocation of property between the Forrests and the Hardings into a particularly prosaic procedure. Michel Foucault has drawn attention to the fact that it is the crucial function of capital punishment to turn the triumph of the law into a

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physical symbol. With regard to this it is clear that in Heywood’s play this sort of triumph comes with a strange aftertaste. 6 Since the subplot of the pirates is based on real events Heywood deliberately constructs analogies between fictional discourse and the real case. At the surface level he thus achieves a smooth integration of the fate of his pirates with the official policies of his times. The apparent logic of this is that Purser and Clinton received the just punishment for their crime since they had turned against their own countrymen. Historically, Purser and Clinton – alias Thomas Walton and Clinton Atkinson – are indeed rather suitable candidates for any exemplary measures taken against piracy. In 1582 the English admiralty felt compelled to act against their notorious brutality towards the crews of captured ships. Their execution in 1583 was meant to set an example and allow the government to regain control over the activities of Elizabethan privateers. 7 Nonetheless, the two pirates quickly experienced posthumous fame as folk heroes in the ballad tradition and Heywood himself would embellish their memory as late as 1639 by the publication of a pamphlet with the title: ‘A True Relation of the Lives and Deaths of the two most Famous English Pyrats, Purser and Clinton, who lived in the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth’. The pamphlet also emphasises the stoic composure of the pirates in face of their death. There can be little doubt that Heywood’s position as to the pirates’ fate is ambiguous. This complication partly arises from the fact that we are dealing with a Jacobean play which nostalgically looks back to the time of Queen Elizabeth. The action takes place before the year 1583 but the manifold references and allusions in the play point to the policies of King James I. 8 With regard to the treatment of the pirates one may even be inclined to ask whether the discourses on justice do not have particular significance for the time of the play’s publication in 1655 and therefore for the period of the English Republic. With regard to the popular genre of Heywood’s play one may easily fail to notice the more subtle contradictions which energise the argument of this text. Beneath the smooth surface of the story, however, the analogies between the case of the pirates and that of the protagonist Young Forrest raise more than a few questions. It may sound hair-splitting but how can an 6

7 8

Cf. Claire Jowitt, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 20-1 and Mark Netzloff, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003), p. 70 Jowitt, p. 19 For a detailed description of British naval policies and the issue of piracy from the government of Elizabeth I to that of James I cf. N.A.M. Rodger 2004: 344-350

96 Christoph Ehland outlawed murderer such as Young Forrest obtain a letter of marquee? And if he does not have one aren’t his activities at sea to be judged as acts of piracy? The smooth mechanism of the plot make us forget about these more complicated questions but it is obvious that the protagonist has to break the law more than once to be able to free himself from its strangling grip. In this muddled situation the precise sense of justice in the play is made highly ambiguous and poses as its major provocation.

6. The Libertarian element In the context of what has been outlined so far it is important to distinguish between the actions of the pirates in the play and what the Heywood text allows them to say. Their actions mark them as stereotypical pirates: they are brutal and reckless, driven by insatiable greed. However, some of the things they say make one hesitate. At the beginning of the maritime part of the play the pirates make their entrance just after they have captured the merchant’s ship. Given this success it is not surprising that we find Clinton and Purser in high spirits. The particular way in which they express their triumph, however, deserves closer attention: Purser: Now valiant mates you have maintained this fight With courage and with wanted hardiment: The spoil of this rich ship we will divide In equal shares, and not the meanest of any, But the custom of the Sea may challenge According to his place, rights in the spoil: Though Out-laws, we keep laws amongst our selves, Else we could have no certain government. 9

The elaboration of such detail must sound rather strange in a popular adventure play which basically should cater for the entertainment of the audience: the coldblooded pirates come across as law-abiding accountants. In fact, it is the presence of such detail in the play which reminds us time and again of the close link which exists in Heywood’s text between fiction and reality despite the generic fog that hides it. Research into the early modern phenomenon of piracy has shown that pirates practised a quasidemocratic system of checks and balances among themselves. The fact that Purser’s laborious explanation reminds one of this system by stressing their egalitarian order and democratic principles of allocation point to a far more 9

Thomas Heywood, Fortune by Land and Sea (New York: Russel & Russel, 1964), pp. 410-1

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serious intention in a ‘blockbuster’ such as Fortune by Land and Sea. The play exemplifies in this scene the explicit self-image of the pirates as free individuals who act within a self-chosen and self-regulated order. Heywood’s text foregrounds this kind of freedom of the will in various places. In another scene, for example, the merchant recognizes in Clinton one of his former captains and offers him an opportunity to return to his former legal occupation. Clinton’s refusal of this offer displays his particular sense of individual freedom and choice of profession: Clinton: We know we are Pirates, and profess to rob, And would’st not have us freely use our trade? 10

It is a nice pun that the pirates call their own activities ‘trade’ and thus align it with the honourable business of the merchant. The pirates serve in the text to emphasise a particular libertarian tone. Repeatedly they call themselves ‘Kings of the Sea’. Within the logic of the popular plot this kind of hubris is punished by Young Forrest. Nonetheless, the tragic fate of the pirates contrasts almost accusingly with the activities of the protagonist: Young Forrest embodies a meritocratic value system which rewards the initiative and the courage of the individual beyond the petty pitfalls of a narrow law. Yet, how precisely does he differ from the pirates? On the day of his execution Purser abstracts from his personal fate and asks: How many gallant spirits, Equal with us in fame, shall this gulf swallow, And make this silver oare to blush in blood? How many Captains that have aw’d the seas Shall fall on this infortunate peace of the land? 11

Here one encounters once again the antagonism between land and sea which structures the action and argument of the play, since what the pirates call their ‘Empire of the Seas’, in other words the open sea, is governed by an adamant law made on land. It remains as the bitter irony of this play that the protagonist as the plot’s instrument of justice is on closer inspection nothing better than a pirate. His name further highlights this particular irony: For(r)est does not simply mean a woodland but it signifies a piece of forested land under the authority of the king. The Oxford English Dictionary explains the early modern connotation of the word as ‘a woodland district, usually belonging to the king, set apart for hunting wild beasts and game, 10 11

Ibid., p. 411 Ibid., p. 428

98 Christoph Ehland etc.; having special laws and officers of its own’. 12 If one transfers this thought to the situation of the play this means that technically the maritime adventures of the protagonist expand the reach of the royal prerogative to the sea and Young Forrest formulates – ad personam – the royal claim. As one follows the trajectory of this subversive element in the text one can identify as its target the cruel force of the anonymous law. Safely and strategically wrapped in the cloak of the historical events – that is the execution of the pirates at Wapping in 1583 – Heywood’s text makes sure that the ironic undercutting refers to the reign of Elizabeth I and not to current affairs under James I. Despite this precaution it is remarkable that Heywood mentions these aspects at all. In fact research shows that in the seventeenth century the precise demarcation between the spheres of governmental intervention and early-capitalist maritime entrepreneurship remained unresolved. In the play one can see that the inherent egalitarian element of the pirate constitution not only undermines the official ‘raison d’état’ with regard to its treatment of pirates and privateers under James I but also implicitly criticizes the principles of distribution and concentration of capital in the new economic order. The play explicitly speaks about the egalitarian allocation of the plunder among the pirates and contrasts this with the practice followed on board the merchant ship which gives a return based proportionally on the investment. Young Forrest: Such prisoners as these Pirats keep in hold, Release them straight, the riches of their ship We’mongst you will divide in equal shares, To every mans desart [sic], estate, and place. 13

Significantly, when distributing the plunder among his men Heywood has Forrest repeat words used by the pirates in the same situation earlier on. The direct contrast between the scenes sheds light on the fact that ‘equal shares’ can mean quite different things depending on the legal order under which one lives. 14 The contrast is implicit and the play does not offer any comment on it.

12

13 14

The Oxford English Dictionary: Compact Edition, ed. by Weiner, E.S.C. and John Simpson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), p. 1055 Heywood, Fortune, p. 418 In his study of early modern pirate constitutions Peter T. Leeson contrasts the egalitarian system of checks and balances on board pirate ships with the authoritarian practices on board merchant ships—Peter T. Leeson, ‘An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization’, Journal of Political Economy, 115:6 (2007), p. 1055ff

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7. Conclusion Generally it is assumed that Heywood’s play nostalgically tries to evoke the times of Elizabeth I with their thrilling opportunities. This notion fits other plays of Heywood such as the afore-mentioned The Fair Maid of the West and would also be typical for a sense of public nostalgia during the early years of James I’s reign. An indication of what is here at stake can be found in the final words granted to the pirates in the play: Purser: But now our Sun is all setting, night comes on, The watery wilderness over which we reign’d, Proves in our ruins peaceful, Merchants trade Fearless abroad as in the rivers mouth, And free as in a harbour, then fair Thames, Queen of fresh water, famous through the world, And not the least through us, whose double tides Must o’erflow our bodies, and being dead, May thy clear waves our scandals wash away, Keep our valours living [...]. 15

Reading Purser’s speech on the gallows one finds a vision of a peaceful trading nation which allows for two different interpretations. One the one hand, Purser expresses his remorse for the pirates’ crimes and thus acknowledges the justice of the law. This, of course, would be in tune with James I’s official yet unpopular policy against piracy. On the other hand, however, the picture alludes to the cost of this sort of governmental intervention in the maritime realm. In this context one is reminded of the libertarian spirit which the pirates embody in the play. The dispute between them and the merchant over the’ [free] use of their trade’ implicitly questions the official verdict on them by undermining by comparison what should be an unbridgeable contrast. With regard to the wider socioeconomic contexts which here are shown to the audience the evocation of libertarian or democratic elements is not insignificant. Whether this represents a proto-republican spirit of freedom must remain open until the dates of the text or text elements have been established beyond doubt. Nonetheless, the fact that only the pirates are allowed to speak of ‘certain government’ is one of the subtle undertones of the play. At the end of Fortune by Land and Sea, however, the echo of the pirates’ death reveals them as messengers of a modern order that will only be established centuries after their execution.

15

Ibid., p. 430

100 Christoph Ehland

Bibliography Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977) Heywood, Thomas, Fortune by Land and Sea (New York: Russel & Russel, 1964) Heywood, Thomas, The English Traveller (New York: Russel & Russel, 1964) Heywood, Thomas, A True Relation of the Lives and Deaths of the two most Famous English Pyrats, Purser and Clinton, who lived in the Reigne of Queene Elizabeth (London, 1639) Jowitt, Claire, The Culture of Piracy, 1580-1630: English Literature and Seaborne Crime (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) Leeson, Peter T., ‘An-arrgh-chy: The Law and Economics of Pirate Organization’, Journal of Political Economy, 115:6 (2007), pp. 1049-94 Netzloff, Mark, England’s Internal Colonies: Class, Capital, and the Literature of Early Modern English Colonialism (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2003) Rodger, N.A.M, The Safe Guard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain, 660-1649 (London: Penguin, 2004) Rose, Susan, ‘Mathematics and the Art of Navigation: The Advance of Scientific Seamanship in Elizabethan England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (December 2004), pp. 175-184 Smith, John, An Accidence for Young Sea-Men: Or, Their Path-way to Experience (London, 1626) Weiner, E.S.C. and John Simpson, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary: Compact Edition (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979)

Herbert Grabes The Five Radical Modernizations of Long Modernity While, under closer observation, it becomes evident that historical change is constant and continuous, historians found out long ago that it has not been uniform, but there were times of more radical change separating periods of relative stability. This paper concentrates on the times of more radical change in Britain since the close of the Middle Ages. What it seeks to show is that whereas according to the prevailing view among historians there are three or four such periods (the Renaissance, the late eighteenth century, modernism, and perhaps also the postmodern era) one will have to grant that in Britain there is also a period of more radical change with far reaching consequences in the later seventeenth century. Keywords: modernity, long modernity, modernization, radical modernizations, radical change, historical change, cultural change, changing Britain

When we speak of ‘long modernity’ we obviously mean the exceedingly long historical period from the Renaissance to the present day. This way of speaking has become so common that it is hardly even asked any more whether the early modern and the postmodern view of the world and the self, as well as the actual conditions of living, are sufficiently similar to be joined together under the same term of ‘modernity’ – or, to use a more theoretical phrasing, whether there is a common concept of ‘modernity’ pertaining at least to important foundational features of such apparently dissimilar historical periods. In order to get near to a halfway acceptable answer to this overarching question, I will choose the via negativa and concentrate on change, though of course in the hope of finding something important that persists or is constantly reproduced on a level underlying all visible changes. And while, under closer observation, it becomes evident that historical change is constant and continuous, historians found out long ago that it has not been uniform, but there were times of more radical change separating periods of relative stability. On a ‘cosmic’ or evolutionary level, an analogous argument has been framed by Ernst Mayr, 1 Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge 2 within post-Darwinian biology, in terms of ‘punctuated equilibrium’, and

1

2

Ernst Mayr, ‘Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution’, in Evolution as a Process, ed. by J. Huxley, A.C. Hardy and E.B. Ford (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954), 157180 Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, ‘Punctuated Equilibria: the Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered’, Paleobiology 3:2 (1977), 115-151

102 Herbert Grabes this concept was subsequently used by Connie Gersick3 to describe change in complex social systems and by D.A. Levinthal4 to technological change. The important point is always that longer periods of fairly static equilibrium are ‘punctuated’ by short periods of more radical change. To put to the test the conception of ‘long modernity’, I will therefore concentrate on the times of more radical change to be found since the close of the Middle Ages and see by what right we may call them ‘modernizations’, and in order to be sufficiently specific I will limit my observations to the situation in Britain. According to the prevailing view among cultural historians, there are at least three such periods: the Renaissance, the late eighteenth century, and modernism, and there is a debate whether postmodernism is merely a continuation and intensification of modernism or a new period of its own. When looking more closely at developments in Britain, however, one will have to grant that there is also a period of more radical change in the later seventeenth century and that the influence of postmodern thought was definitely slighter than in France and, under French influence, in the United States. There are different opinions about the relative importance of the manifest innovations that occurred between the mid-fifteenth and midseventeenth centuries, spreading from the south to the north, from Italy to France and Germany, and from there to the Low Countries and Britain. First, there is, of course, Renaissance humanism with its revival of the study of classical Antiquity, fostered by the intelligentsia who had fled to Italy with ancient Greek texts in their luggage after the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Already in 1490, Greek language and literature was taught in Oxford by William Grocyn after he had studied it in Rome, and he was soon supported not only by Thomas Linacre and John Colet, but also by Erasmus of Rotterdam, who had studied with him, establishing another centre of humanist studies in Cambridge that was to have a major influence on the further development of education in the sixteenth century. Cambridge humanists such as Richard Cox, John Cheke, William Grindal, and Roger Ascham were, significantly, to become tutors of the later Queen Elizabeth. 5

3

4

5

Connie Gersick, ‘Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration of the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm’, The Academy of Management Review 16:1 (1991) 1036 D.A. Levinthal, ‘The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change’, Industrial and Corporate Change 7:2 (1988) 217247 Cf. The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. by Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

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It is also worth mentioning that many of the renowned scientists of the time who contributed to the development of an entirely new world picture, such as Tycho Brahe, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, William Gilbert, Vesalius, and William Harvey, were humanists, although in their own work they replaced the tradition of quoting the sanctified authorities by acute observation or the method of induction as promoted by Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (1605). Especially the turn from a geocentric to a heliocentric world picture was not merely a cognitive matter but also felt like a humiliation on account of the former belief that the world was the habitat of man and man was just below the angels at the pinnacle of Divine creation. Of a similarly spectacular impact was the new anatomy of the human body, the result of which was soon disseminated by the many tables of Vesalius’s De humani corporis libri septem from 1543 that found their way into England in a pirated edition as early as 1545. The reason was that the ‘anatomy’, literally designating the dissection of the body in order to obtain precise and reliable knowledge of its interior, soon began to replace the ‘mirror’ as the leading metaphor of inquiry in a quite general sense. The mirror, as exemplified in the title of the most compendious encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages, the Speculum maius of Vincent of Beauvais from 1244 with its three parts, the Speculum historiale, Speculum doctrinale, and Speculum naturale, or in William Caxton’s Mirrour of the Worlde from 1481, metaphorically represented a merely descriptive approach to any kind of object, and was founded on the belief that God’s creation could be represented but must not be harmed or destroyed in the process. In contrast, the new metaphor of the anatomy implied that it was not only permissible but actually indispensable to take apart and thus in most cases destroy the object of investigation in order to obtain reliable knowledge about it. In Britain, the career of the anatomy-metaphor began in the 1580s, first in the titles of satires like Philip Stubbe’s Anatomy of Abuses (1583) and Thomas Nashe’s Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), but soon in those of more serious works like John Donne’s Anatomie of the World (1611) and Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and we can see that in the seventeenth century it became the favourite metaphor of a more critically investigative approach to the world and the self. Yet the early modern period is not only notable for its turning inward, its anatomizing first of the human body and then of all sorts of objects of inquiry; it is also famous for its audacious outreach, its adventurous voyages into quite unknown and merely hazarded terrestrial zones, leading to discoveries of the new worlds of ‘both Indies’ of America and the West Indies as well as East India – territories with a quite different flora, fauna, human population, and culture. And even though these ‘new worlds’ were approached and evaluated from the colonialist point of view of the European discoverers, the rapidly emerging notion of the ‘noble savage’ as

104 Herbert Grabes against that of the mere barbarian or, for instance, Walter Raleigh’s description of Guiana as a veritable paradise can be taken as evidence that these discoveries not only created a sense of European superiority, but also contributed to the invalidation of many of the traditional notions of the world and the self. The fact that the voyages of discovery were made in search for gold or other treasures, leading soon to the formation of investment companies with the necessary capital such as the London Company of Merchant Adventurers, may remind us of the significant economic and social changes taking place in this period. The increasing tendency of the great land owners to enclose formerly common pastures and to turn arable land into grazing for sheep farming in order to take part in the profitable wool industry was one of the major reasons for the strong movement of country people into the cities, in particular London, and only the stern Elizabethan vagrancy laws prevented the worst. And one has only to recall that inflation in the second half of the sixteenth century was higher than in the three previous centuries altogether to realize how significant and disruptive these social changes actually were. That the eminent problems bound up with these changes did not lead to more social unrest was most probably due to the strongly religious view of life prevailing, especially after the Reformation. Already in 1520, shortly after their first publication in Germany, Martin Luther’s attacks on the supreme authority of the Pope and the Roman view of the sacrament of the altar were available at the bookshop of John Dorne in Oxford, and what was called the new heresy spread so fast that Henry VIII put his name to a written counter-attack in the following year that brought him the title of ‘Defensor fidei’. Yet although Luther’s writings were burned at St. Paul’s Cross in 1521, and Tyndale’s translation of the Bible in the same place in 1625, and in the last years of King Henry’s reign the reading of the Bible by lay persons was prohibited and many of the so-called ‘reformers’ were persecuted by the Bishop of London and had to flee to the Continent, the Protestant creed subsequently took hold firmly enough under the protectors of Edward VI to survive the severe measures of the counter-reformation under Mary Tudor and to turn England into a Protestant country. That this reorientation took place so quickly on a broad scale was, of course, largely owing to the founding of a national Anglican Church headed by the monarch, a development strongly supportive of the early modern rise of a national identity as against the medieval dynastic one. When speaking of the role of the Reformation as an important factor in the shaping of the early modern period, what comes to mind is the fierce persecution and the polemical controversies not only between Protestants and Catholics but also between the fundamentalist ‘Puritans’ of the so-called Low Church

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propagating Presbyterianism and the adherents of the Anglican Bishops’ Church or High Church. It stands to reason that the spread of the ‘new religion’ shaped by Luther and Calvin, especially regarding its principle of sola scriptura, could not have become such a powerful antagonistic alternative to Roman (and Irish) Catholicism without the perhaps most incisive innovation of the time, the invention of the printing press and the subsequent possibility of a wide dissemination of written texts. It was not only that knowledge could be easily replicated at comparatively low cost, and both reading and writing began to spread rapidly, especially since reading the Bible began to be held essential for eternal salvation. What was equally important was the fact that disseminating textual messages in great quantities largely beyond the control of secular or ecclesiastical powers facilitated the emergence of a ‘public sphere’, an open system of communication fostering the effective criticism of all and everything. It is, of course, true that since the advent of the first of Luther’s writings censorship in Britain was steadily enforced; yet despite the threat to authors and printers of having their ears cut off, their noses split, or even their being executed, such gagging proved largely ineffective, even if at times oppositional or recusant pamphlets had to be smuggled in from the Low Countries in herring tuns. Before the introduction of the new medium it was easy enough to silence those who preached or uttered in public things that were forbidden, but now it was practically impossible to seize the majority of the 900–1000 copies of a normal print run that were soon dispersed in all directions and well hidden by those who treasured them.6 The significance of this aspect for the inception of Britain’s long modernity becomes evident when we look at the impact in our own times of the possibility of spreading uncensored messages through the new media, especially the internet, in what has optimistically been called the ‘Arab Spring’ but in the meantime is beginning to look more like a lingering on of winter. Regarding literature in a narrower sense, the proliferation of writing and the printing of written texts led over time to the development of a much greater variety of genres, subgenres, and styles, ranging from an epic like Spenser’s Faerie Queene to adaptations of the sonnet, from the highly artificial prose of John Lyly’s Euphues to the simulation of the spoken language of the street in the Marprelate Tracts, from the creation of a pastoral world in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia to the social satire in Nashe’s Pierce Penniless, His Supplication to the Divell, and from the epitome of Elizabethan tragedy in the

6

Cf. Herbert Grabes, Das englische Pamphlet I. Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit (1521-1640) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990)

106 Herbert Grabes shape of Shakespeare’s Hamlet or King Lear to his lighter comedies such as All’s Well that Ends Well – to mention just a few examples. If such a plenitude of possibilities and options appears as great wealth in the field of literature, it also involves a degree of contingency that in most other areas of individual life and society was to create a sense of insecurity. Whether the dissolving of former certainties by the new discoveries of astronomers, seafarers, and anatomists, or, even more, the controversies of the theologians: the radical changes undoubtedly caused great anxiety. And the documented reaction to this anxiety was twofold: on the one hand, the increased desire to regain certainty motivated further inquiries and a turn to empirical investigation, on the other, it strengthened conservative views and led above all to a fundamentalist belief in what one considered to be ‘right religion’ – to the point of being ready to give one’s life for it but also to take the life of those who disagreed. What looks like ‘self-fashioning’ from a great historical distance was therefore more often than not the result of a desperate choice between physical or spiritual survival. If one lived, for instance, the life of an adult citizen of London between 1545 and 1565, it was generally prudent to conceal any sympathy for or belief in the new or old creed, depending on the situation. After the death of Henry VIII in 1547 and under the Lord Protector Somerset, less caution was necessary for the Protestants, and even less after 1549, when the general turn to Protestantism under Somerset’s successor Northumberland allowed one to openly confess one’s creed. But not for long, because, after Mary Tudor’s accession to the throne in 1553, they had to decide between staying true to their conviction and dying a martyr or heretic, or beginning to regularly attend the Catholic mass on Sundays and thus physically surviving, though with a guilty conscience and the fear of eternal damnation. If one had decided for the latter, better times arrived again when Mary died in 1558, but certainly not for one’s neighbour who had remained Catholic or was freshly converted. This situation changed considerably after the Civil War, with the demise of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution, when at least dissenters were tolerated and Catholics, though still discriminated against, were no longer persecuted. This is one of the major reasons why I hold that we can speak of another period of radical modernization at that time. After the attempt to establish a New Jerusalem in England had failed and at least a partial distinction between professed religion and the State became possible, if under the aegis of a national Anglican Church, we can observe the upcoming of what T.S. Eliot called the ‘dissociation of sensibility,’ the rise of different attitudes regarding religious and mundane affairs. Otherwise it would have been impossible, such a short time after the Puritans’ closing of the theatres, for the frivolity of Restoration comedy to enjoy toleration and even great success among both the court of Charles II

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and a much wider audience. While the long tradition of theological quarrels about the right interpretation of Scripture had considerably reduced the reputation of revealed religion, after the founding of the Royal Society in 1662 and the publication of Newton’s Philosophia Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 the new natural science began to dominate opinion regarding the world picture. The new task, therefore, was to combine the still strong belief in a supreme Divine being with the new, post-alchemical world picture of the natural sciences. The solution presented by Deists like John Toland (in Christianity Not Mysterious, 1696), William Wollaston (in The Religion of Nature Delineated, 1722) and Anthony Collins (in A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of Christian Religion, 1724) was a ‘religion of nature’ based on the belief that it was better to study Divine Creation and read the Book of Nature than to take the Bible as one’s literal authority. It is not surprising that the Anglican bishops thought of countermeasures. In 1666 they were successful in persuading Parliament to pass a bill against atheism, and it was not without reason that John Locke’s famous Letter Concerning Toleration from 1689 had to be published anonymously (as did the French and German editions translated from his Epistula Tolerantia). Even after the Old Licensing Act had expired in 1695 and journalism began to flourish, Daniel Defoe had to stand in the pillory three times and was imprisoned for six months for publishing in 1702 his fierce satirical pamphlet The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. But there were also unmistakable signs of a rapid modernization in the social world, such as the founding of the Bank of England in 1694 and of the London Stock Exchange in 1698. Even the bursting of the South Sea Bubble in 1717 is an indication of the arrival of a modern system of economy. But every bit as strong an indication of a further radical modernization is the rigorous reflection on human understanding. From John Locke’s radically empiricist Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Bishop George Berkeley’s radically idealist Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) to David Hume’s materialist Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1739), the questions of how and with what degree of certainty we may obtain knowledge were clearly the most urgent ones at the beginning of what was to be called the Age of Reason. In the title of his theory of understanding, Hume used the term ‘enquiry’, which from the Restoration onwards was the favourite title-trope for all kinds of investigation. 7 While the dominance of mirror-titles lasted several 7

Cf. Herbert Grabes, ‚Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment’, in Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory, ed. by Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning and Sibylle Baumbach [REAL 25] (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009), pp. 65-80

108 Herbert Grabes centuries, that of anatomy-titles hardly persisted for more than half a century. Already in the period from 1661 to 1700 the still remarkable number of 94 metaphoric ‘anatomies’ was topped by the 299 ‘enquiries’ published during that time. This popularity of enquiry-titles arose quite suddenly, for there are only seven in all from before the Civil War and 23 from the years 1640 to 1660. Once in place, the ‘enquiries’ continued into the eighteenth century, reaching the overall number of 1017 in that period (with a peak around the mid-century and no significant drop towards the end). While in the very early examples ‘enquiry’ signified a formal investigation by a superior authority, it comes as no surprise that by far the most frequent ‘enquiries’ from the time of the Civil War and the Commonwealth are either in a quite partial manner religious or political or both. Due to the ongoing religious and political turbulence this remained so until the end of the seventeenth century and beyond, yet at that time the ‘enquiries’ pertain to a wide range of cultural domains, from science, medicine, political economy and language learning to spectacular events. Typical of the early eighteenth century are titles like The Deist’s Manual: or, a Rational Enquiry Into the Christian Religion (1705) by Charles Gildon or A Brief Enquiry into Free-thinking in Matters of Religion; and Some Pretended Obstruction to it (1713) by Samuel Pycroft, while later we find social and substantial legal ‘enquiries’, quite numerous medical ones, scientific and historical treatises, and famous aesthetic discussions such as Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1764) and Frances Reynolds’ Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty (1785). All in all, it can be said that the advent and astonishing career of this trope reveal a deep sense of insecurity regarding all aspects of individual life and society, and a serious endeavour to reduce or even eliminate it by means of a rational process of investigation and argumentation. And it may sound surprising that this attitude, which is generally held to be a significant trait of the later eighteenth-century Enlightenment, can already be found in Britain so much earlier. As far as literature in a narrower sense is concerned, what appeared in the decades after the Restoration is quite varied. On the one hand, there are works like Milton’s great religious epic Paradise Lost (1667) and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), on the other Samuel Butler’s burlesque of Puritanism, Hudibras (1663) and frivolous comedies like Wycherley’s The Country Wife (1675). And though John Dryden in his early tragedies attempted to revive the heroic mode, he excelled in satire, with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) being a brilliant, though vicious example. Satire was perhaps the most significant genre of the age, and also one that suited best the spirit of modernization, something that is borne out by further excellent examples, including Swift’s The Tale of a Tub (1704) and Gulliver’s Travels

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(1726) and Pope’s The Dunciad (1728). Also persistent irony (that was to become a prominent stance in much later modernism) can already be found, for instance, in Pope’s mock heroic Rape of the Lock (1714). While on the Continent the period of the late eighteenth century is marked by such a spectacular modernization that many historians consider it to be the historic moment of the real advent of modernity, it is not so surprising that this does not apply to the same extent to Britain in view of the earlier developments, during which many of the later ideas of the Enlightenment can already be found in Hobbes, Locke, and Hume as well as among such disciples of Locke as Anthony Collins who published a Discourse on Freethinking in 1713. There were, of course, some important contributions to the development of modern views in the late eighteenth century – for instance, Thomas Warton’s first narrative literary history of 1774 with its evolutionary historical sense, Adam Smith’s new economic theory presented in The Wealth of Nations (1776), and Edmund Burke’s psychological interpretation of the Sublime, which, as already mentioned, was to have a considerable influence on the later development of aesthetics. Thanks to his incisively critical Reflections on the Revolution in France of 1790, Burke was also to a considerable extent responsible for the belated impact of the French Revolution on political and social modernization in Britain. Neither William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice from 1793 nor Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason from the year before (of which no fewer than 50,000 copies were immediately sold) could cope with the rigorous anti-reformist measures of the Tory government under the younger Pitt, above all because their freethinking atheism was widely disliked by the masses after the Methodist revival of religious sentiment by John Wesley. The Acts against ‘Seditious Meetings’ of 1792 and ‘Seditious Practises’ of 1795, including the temporary suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act in 1794/5 and 1798-1801 as well as the revival of strict press censorship were actually massive movements running counter modernization, and the Tory government even went to war with France in 1793 in order to ward off any influence of revolutionary democratization. It was only the Evangelical Movement under Wilberforce that achieved some humanitarian reforms during that time and finally the abolition of slavery in 1833. Social and political modernization on a wider scale only progressed after the end of the Tory government in 1831, not least under the growing influence of the utilitarian ideas of Jeremy Bentham. Thus, the only significant thrust towards modernization around 1800 in Britain was the one that took place in the domain of literature, a radical change from neo-classicist ideals to what soon was to be called Romanticism. There is neither the time nor the need to deal here in detail with the often described and discussed innovations introduced in the Lyrical

110 Herbert Grabes Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 and explained in the manifesto-like Preface to that collection of poems. The obvious move towards modernization consisted in a meditative approach to nature rather than culture and a searching concentration on the inner self, especially on the creative process of the poetic imagination, as in Wordsworth’s Prelude. Increased interest in this process was already noticeable in the formation of the cult of genius as expounded, for instance, in Edward Young’s Essay on Original Composition of 1759; yet it was turned into poetic practice only somewhat later, not only by Wordsworth, but also in the craze of ‘Byronism’ after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The shift of attention to the powers of the imagination , perhaps most visible in Blake, also involved a lively interest in the irrational, in myths and legends, as found, for instance, in the poetry of Coleridge and in the collection Minstrelsy from the Scottish Border edited by Walter Scott. One of the most lasting features of all these changes, however, was the abandoning of the traditional archive of symbols that had been in place since the Middle Ages, in favour of private symbols created anew by each poet and literary work – a feature that was to become largely responsible for the ‘difficulty’ or even obscurity of much of modernist poetry. All in all, it can be said that at the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century the revival of religious sentiment in Britain (which was not least so successful because of the negative effects of early industrialization on the life of the masses) allowed a conservative or even retrogressive course in politics and social policy, while the literature of the time, thanks to its largely meditative, individualist, and subjectivist character, was able to unfold its modernizing potential. * The next phase of radical change in the domains of literature and art, later by critics termed ‘modernism’, came about a century later, on the continent around 1890, and in Britain around 1912, and it lasted until about 1930, with a long afterglow until the late 1960s. Whether this change can be called a modernization on a more general scale seems, however, to be not so obvious, and a critic like Peter Nicholls in his study Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995) even writes, of the early phase of modernist literature in Britain, that ‘the “Men of 1914” version of modernism derived much of its energy from an attack on modernity’ 8. There can, of course, be no question that in the field of technology and industry some inventions were made in this period that revolutionized, for instance, both travel and communication and to a large extent shaped the 8

Peter Nicholls, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 251

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modern world. In the 1880s the first motor car was developed by Daimler, and 1903 saw the first flight of a motor-driven aeroplane by Orville and Wright; in the late 1870s Bell developed the first telephone, in the 1890s the first motion pictures appeared, and in the 1920s radio and radio stations soon became widely disseminated. Yet, when we consider how little the most potent ideas in other fields agree with earlier optimistic hopes regarding a reign of the non-rational, the overall picture looks quite different. After Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859), eighteenth-century physico-theology no longer appeared possible; Herbert Spencer’s application of the principle of evolution to the social sphere in the 1870s cast more than a little doubt on the notion of a moral universe; and Nietzsche in his On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) even interpreted morality as the revenge of the weak on the more powerful. In 1889, Bergson made clear in his Time and Free Will that our inner experience of time is by no means in agreement with the shared clock time that had become dominant on an international scale under the influence of technology and economy. Marx in Das Kapital (1867–94) set out to demonstrate that the whole development of capitalism that went along with increasing industrialization was wrong from the start, and Freud in Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) from the year 1900 and his subsequent studies showed that our behaviour is determined at least as much by our unconscious desires and drives as by reason. And when Vaihinger published his theory of fictions As If in 1911 and Einstein presented his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905 and the General Theory of Relativity in 1916, the relativizing of what was hitherto firmly believed in was complete, save for quantum theory with its thorough relativization of Einsteinian relativity. To sum up the epistemology of the period of modernism, one could say that it still included an ontological assumption, a trust in what T.S. Eliot, in an ad-hoc moment, termed an ‘objective correlative,’ yet at the same time there was the insight that we would never have direct access to the Kantian ‘thing in itself’. Or, to use a comparison: we are always in the situation of having to find out what something or somebody ‘really’ is like merely on the basis of a photo, or at best of several photos taken from different angles, but without ever having a chance to compare these photos with the original in order to find out how similar they actually are. And this epistemological uncertainty seems confirmed by both Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Erwin Schrödinger’s frustrating conundrum of the cat both alive and dead. The antidote to all these new insecurities was at that time a strong belief in one or other ideology as a kind of secular religion, and, as is all too well known for their disastrous consequences, there were three ideologies offering an overall meaning in a seemingly meaningless historical process:

112 Herbert Grabes nationalism (including racism), fascism, and communism. In Britain in the heyday of modernism it was still nationalism, a period in which the modernization of society was considerable. From the founding of the Fabian Society in 1883/4 to that of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and finally the Labour Party in 1906, the influence on politics of the working class, or the largest part of the population, was significantly strengthened, especially since the House of Lords, under Lloyd George as Chancellor of the Exchequer, lost the power to stop or change any financial law passed by the House of Commons and, for instance, a general health insurance was introduced. Also, women, after a determined struggle, acquired the right to vote. Regarding aesthetic modernism, the most spectacular changes were in the domain of art, from Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, and the collage to total abstraction, Dada, Surrealism, and the later American Abstract Expressionism. Of course, there was also the literary expressionism of Strindberg in his plays Till Damaskus (1904) and Stora landsvägen (1909) as well as the German expressionist drama and poetry from the time of World War I and after. Apart from Gertrude Stein’s heroic attempt, in Tender Buttons of 1914, at writing Cubist poems, most modernist poetry in English, in particular the earlier poetry of Eliot and Pound, was structured like a collage. But due to its ineradicable semantic aspect, language art could never became wholly abstract, not even in the shape of the arbitrary arrangement of ‘free words’ on the page by the Futurists or the Dadaist strategy of turning something trivial into a work of art simply by pretending and saying it was. This did not work so well in literature – at least not at that time. The turn to a modernist aesthetic is also evidenced by the flourishing of aesthetic theory and the numerous manifestoes by writers and artists. Of particular significance were Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy) of 1908 and Kandinsky’s Über das Geistige in der Kunst (On the Spiritual in Art) of 1912, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto (1909), the Russian Futurist Manifesto of 1912, and Breton’s Manifeste du surrealisme: Poisson soluble of 1924. As I have argued in detail in my recent study Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ (2008) 9, modernist literature and art are no longer beautiful or sublime but strange, and the strangeness to be found in early modernism leaves no doubt that there was a turn to a new aesthetic. The impression of strangeness was sought by various means: there were the highly unfamiliar metaphors of Expressionism; the distorting objectivism of the Cubists; the puzzling montage of the heterogeneous in the collage; the scandalous break with the 9

Herbert Grabes, Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008)

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entire tradition in abstract painting; the provocative expansion of the concept of art in Dada and the Duchampian ready-mades; the irrational world-making of the Surrealists; and the disorderly, psychology-driven sequences of details in the stream of consciousness. Most of these innovations were clearly not popular in England at that time, and so few of them were introduced or perfected by English writers that there is some truth in the view that literary modernism was established in England by foreigners: Henry James, Pound, and Eliot were Americans, and Yeats and Joyce were Irish. On the same level, there was only Virginia Woolf as a truly modernist English writer. Nonetheless, there was a reason why Pound and Eliot chose to come to London – during the modernist period, the city was still a politically and culturally most powerful centre. * Regarding the last phase of modernization, postmodernity, there is hardly any need to rehearse all the details, because it began only five decades ago and in some respect still lingers on. Some critics behave as if it were still alive and kicking, but things have changed so much in the last twenty years regarding life, letters, and art that it seems better to limit its extension heuristically to the time from somewhere in the 1960s to the later 1980s. It was a period marked by incredible technological progress, but even more by what in the United States was soon called a ‘cultural revolution’. The technological advances with the most spectacular impact were made in the areas of transportation and communication. From the electric trains to jet planes and even space travel, from audio cassettes, video recorders, colour TV, digital cameras and mobile phones to personal computers, email, and even the beginnings of the internet, most of the prominent features of contemporary life were developed and introduced in these decades. And the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ that was part of the cultural one became possible not least by the introduction of ‘the Pill’ in the 1960s. But it would be unfair to limit the reasons for the significant changes in the domain of social values to advances in medical chemistry, not to speak of the motivating effect of the American hippie movement. In Britain, the 1960s saw a raft of significant liberal legislation on sexual equality, divorce, abortion, homosexuality, censorship, and the death penalty. And it was, after all, also a time of transatlantic youth culture, shaped by a vital and protean pop-music scene, from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, and The Who in the ’60s, through Bruce Springsteen, David Bowie, Elton John, and Gary Glitter in the ’70s, to techno, heavy metal, hip hop, rap, Michael Jackson and Madonna in the ’80s. In the 1970s, the most visible aspect of postmodern sensibility, the hybrid integration of pre-modern and pop elements in architecture, also reached Britain, and so did the – at least in part from a late-modernist, purist

114 Herbert Grabes point of view quite kitschy – assemblages and installations in the art scene. Yet, regarding the domain that is of most interest in the present context, it has to be said that in comparison with developments in the United States and elsewhere, British contributions to postmodern literature were initially few, generally came late, and remained rather tame. There are, of course, exceptions such as B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969), a novel demonstrating the postmodern focus on contingency by leaving it to the reader to determine the sequence of its 27 chapters presented loosely in a box, Christine Brooke-Rose’s novel Thru (1975) with its experimental arrangement of words on the page, and to a lesser extent also John Fowles’s early bestseller The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) with its pastiche makeup and auto-reflexive insertions. But the influence of postmodern and poststructuralist thought only became more evident on a broader scale in the 1980s, above all in the shape of the hybrid mixture of styles and genres as found, for instance, in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), the historiographic metafiction of Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), or Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger (1987); in the simulation of authenticity in such fictional biographies as Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987); and also in the sophisticated return to earlier dramatic conventions like the medieval passion play (as in Tony Harrison’s The Passion from 1985), Elizabethan tragedy (as in Howard Barker’s Seven Lears from 1990), Restoration comedy (as in Edward Bond’s Restoration from 1988), and boulevard comedy (as in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage from 1989). Postmodernity was, as is well-known, also very much the age of theory, above all of French and American origin. In Britain, the strong political orientation of the ‘New Left’ from Raymond Williams to Terry Eagleton and Cultural Materialism as represented by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield has prevented the radical relativism that, in terms of a preference for the ironic, parodic, or travestying ‘repetition’, is a hallmark of the postmodern sensibility. On the other side, the at least partial survival of an unorthodox Marxism (mostly of the Althusserian kind) has in Britain also put a brake on any urge to revive religion in the search for a reliable set of values, an urge noticeable elsewhere after the heyday of the postmodern trend was over. This means that we have in important some ways come full circle: there is still the same mechanism at work as at the very beginning of ‘long modernity’. On the one hand, a rigorous testing of all kinds of assumptions and values by the cool application of reason, and, on the other, a strong desire to balance out the enormous sense of insecurity resulting from that merciless process of de-mythologizing by espousing a religious or quasireligious belief. Perhaps it will take a second radical phase of evolution for

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us humans to live comfortably with the insecurity of constant modernization.

Bibliography Ackroyd, Peter, Chatterton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987) Bacon, Francis, De augmentis scientiarium: tomus primus (London, 1623); trans. The Advancement of Learning (Oxford, 1640) Barker, Howard, Seven Lears; The Pursuit of the Good; Golgo; Sermons on Pain and Privilege (London and New York: J. Calder; Riverrun Press, 1990) Barnes, Julian, Flaubert’s Parrot (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984) Bergson, Henri, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris: Alcan, 1889), trans. by F.L. Pogson, Time and Free Will (London: Allen, 1889) Berkeley, George, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (Dublin: Aaron Rhames, 1710) Bond, Edward, Restoration. A Pastoral. A Progamme/Text (London: Methuen, 1988) Breton, André, Manifeste du surréalisme (Paris: Edition du Sagittaire, 1924) Brooke-Rose, Christine, Thru (London: Hamilton, 1975) Bunyan, John, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to that which Is to Come (London: Nathaniel Ponder, 1678) Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1764) Burke, Edmund, Reflections on the Revolution in France (J. Dodsley, 1790) Butler, Samuel, Hudibras (London: s.n., 1663) Byron, George Gordon, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (London: John Murray, 1812) Caxton, William, Mirrour of the Worlde, transl. from Gossuin of Metz (Westminster: Caxtton, 1481) Collins, Anthony, Discourse on Freethinkers (London: s.n., 1713) Collins, Anthony, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of Christian Religion (London: s.n., 1724) Darwin, Charles, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: John Murray, 1859) Defoe, Daniel, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters: Or Proposals for the Establishment of the Church (London: s.n., 1702) Dryden, John, Absalom and Achitophel (London: J.T., 1681) Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969) Freud, Sigmund, Die Traumdeutung (Leipzig und Wien: Deuticke, 1900) Gersick, Connie, ‚Revolutionary Change Theories: A Multilevel Exploration oft the Punctuated Equilibrium Paradigm’, The Academy of Management Review 16:1 (1991), 10-36

116 Herbert Grabes Gildon, Charles, The Deist’s Manual (London: A. Roper, 1705) Godwin, William, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and It’s Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (Dublin: Luke White, 1793) Gould, Stephen Jay and Niles Eldredge, ‘Punctuated Equilibria: the Tempo and Mode of Evolution Reconsidered’, Paleobiology 3: 2 (1977) 115-151 Grabes, Herbert, Das englische Pamphlet I: Politische und religiöse Polemik am Beginn der Neuzeit (1521-1640) (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990) Grabes, Herbert, ‘Metaphors Shaping Research and Knowledge from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment’, in Metaphors Shaping Culture and Theory, ed. by Herbert Grabes, Ansgar Nünning and Sibylle Baumbach [REAL 25] ,(Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2009), pp. 65-80 Grabes, Herbert, Making Strange: Beauty, Sublimity and the (Post)Modern ‘Third Aesthetic’ (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008) Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) Hume, David, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London: John Noon, 1739) Johnson, B.S., The Unfortunates (London: Panther Books, 1969) Kandinski, Wassily, Über das Geistige in der Kunst: insbesondere in der Malerei (Munich: Piper, 1912) Kraye, Jill, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) Levinthal, D.A., ‘The Slow Pace of Rapid Technological Change: Gradualism and Punctuation in Technological Change, Industrial and Corporate Change 7:2 (1988) 217-247 Lively, Penelope, Moon Tiger (London: André Deutsch, 1987) Locke, John, Letter Concerning Toleration (London: Awnsham Churchill, 1689) Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London: Thomas Basset, 1690) Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ‘Manifeste du futurisme’, Figaró, 20 February 1909 Marx, Karl, Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Hamburg: O. Meissner, 1867); Wage-labour and Capital, transl. by J.L. Jones (London: 1893) Mayr, Ernst, ‘Change of Genetic Environment and Evolution’, in Evolution as a Process, ed. by J. Huxley, A.C. Hardy, and E.B. Ford (London: Allen and Unwin, 1954) pp. 157-180 Milton, John, Paradise Lost. A Poem in Ten Books (London: Peter Parker, 1667) Newton, Isaac, Philosophia naturalis principia mathematica (London: Thomas Murray, 1687) Nicholls, Peter, Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005)

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Nietzsche, Friedrich, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Leipzig: C.G. Naumann, 1887); On the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Random House, 1967) Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution (Carlisle, PA: George Klines, 1891) Paine, Thomas, The Age of Reason; Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology (Paris: Barroes, 1894) Pope, Alexander, The Rape of the Lock (London: Bernard Linton, 1714) Pope, Alexander, The Dunciad (Dublin: G. Faulkre et alii, 1728) Pycroft, Samuel, A Brief Enquiry into Free-thinking in Matters of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1713) Raleigh, Walter, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guiana (London: Robert Robinson, 1596) Reynolds, Frances, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty (London: Barker and Galabin, 1785) Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981) Scott, Walter, ed., Minstrelsy from the Scottish Border (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1802) Shaffer, Peter, Lettice and Lovage. A Comedy in Three Acts (London: André Deutsch, 1989) Smith, Adam, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Dublin: Messrs. Whitestone et alii, 1776) Spencer, Herbert, First Principles (London: Williams & Norgate, 1862) Stein, Gertrude, Tender Buttons (New York: Claire Marie, 1914) Strindberg, August, ‘Till Damaskus’, in Samlade Dramatiska Arbeten, Series 1, Romantiska Dramer, 3 (Stockholm: Hugo Gebers Forlag, 1904) Strindberg, August, Stora Landsvägen (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1909) Swift, Graham, Waterland (London: Heinemann, 1983) Swift, Jonathan, The Tale of a Tub (London: John Nutt, 1704) Swift, Jonathan, Travels Into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts.By Lemuel Gulliver )London: Benjamin Motte, 1726) Toland, John, Christianity Not Mysterious (London: Sam Buckley, 1696) Vaihinger, Hans, Die Philosophie des Als Ob (Berlin: Reuther und Reichard, 1911), The Philosophy of As If, transl. by C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1924) Vesalius, Andreas, De Humani Corporis Libri Septem Basle: Oporinus, 1543) Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum Maius (1247-60), printed Douai, 1473-1574 Warton, Thomas, History of English Poetry (London: Dodsley et alii, 1774) Wollaston, William, The Religion of Nature Delineated (London? Privately printed, 1722) Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems (London: T.N. Longman, 1798)

118 Herbert Grabes Worringer, Wilhelm, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (Munich: Piper, 1908); Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, transl. by Michael Bullock (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1948) Wycherley, Wlliam, The Country-Wife (London: Thomas Dring, 1675)

Pat Rogers Modernity Then and Now This essay compares the current notion of modernity with that found in the period 16601760, here defined as one characterized by pre-Enlightenment attitudes. It explores linguistic usages surrounding the word modern and its derivatives, to show how writers conceptualized the idea prior to the canonical descriptions of Kant and Hegel. We sometimes suppose that writers and thinkers of that age did not qualify for full historic modernity, because they had not yet come to a Kantian sense of what the concept implied. In reality, this marked just one stage in the long march of modernity, a journey beset by sudden jolts, arbitrary changes of direction, and contradictory purposes. Keywords: Enlightenment, Modernity, History of ideas, Early modern history, Periodization

1. The long modernity – ah yes! It is a striking phrase: but what does it mean exactly? Does it exist indeed? How do we recognize it? How long has it been going on, and has it already ended? If so, what comes next? These are some of the questions that we are likely to find ourselves asking at this conference. Rather than attempting to explore such large issues directly, I shall simply try to lay down a foundation for our discussions, and to consider some of the ways in which the ‘modern’ has been construed over time. This undertaking will involve actual usages, as opposed to a timeless conceptual definition. Plainly modernity is and always has been a historicized notion. One approach would be to trace a narrative of longue durée, sketching out an entire teleology leading from the ancient world to the point we have reached in the twenty-first century. Instead, I shall look first at recent and current expressions of the modern, and compare these with the presence of the idea at one historic juncture that arguably marks its beginnings as a key cultural determinant. The period in question is the end of the era we now tend to call ‘early modern’, but which I shall label pre-Enlightenment, meaning from around 1660 to around 1760. In one sense this means going back to Walter Benjamin called the Ur-past. The discussion will drawly chiefly from British examples, with a few from France, but it would apply to most of Western Europe and colonial America – I leave it others better qualified to assess how far the situation to be described relates to Eastern Europe. In the course of the argument, some thoughts will be offered in our habits of periodization at large. To avoid a possible ambiguity, the title had to take the form ‘Modernism then and now’, but the order in which the periods follow from this point will revert to ‘now and then’.

120 Pat Rogers The whole picture is clouded at present by the status of the postmodern. Three complexities stand out. First, the unresolved question as to whether postmodernism is simply a critique of (and reaction against) modernism, more precisely Modernism as a widespread cultural movement – or is it rather in some ways an extension of modernism by other means? Second, problems arise from the fact that the term has expanded and entered general currency, often in quite a loose sense. Third, we have to take account of a time-lag in adopting the ‘postmodern’ in different branches of enquiry. The muddle engendered by the last two of these factors can be illustrated by an article which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph in September 2011 1. This claimed that the term postmodernism became ‘synonymous with the most vacuous side of modern culture.’ According to the writer, ‘the post-modern technique of playfully quoting the past […] infiltrated a host of different disciplines, include fine art, design, pop music and fashion.’ By the end of the 1980s, the movement had imploded, when its products ‘began to be marketed as part of a luxurious lifestyle coveted by moneymen […] It definitely got commoditized and capitalist.’ But, despite the fact that it has turned into ‘such a dirty word,’ it was a valuable phase because it introduced ‘so much possibility in art and design.’ Here the author’s total avoidance of anything prior to 1977 is the main agent of confusion, along with the lack of recognition that the notion was well established in philosophy, literature, history, music and other disciplines long before 1980. Nor does the argument reveal any awareness that early uses tended to mean something like anti-Modernism, with a capital M, rather than simply ‘ultra-modern.’ What, though of plain unregenerate ‘modernity’ in recent times? The most obvious feature is that there is so much more of it around than was available to earlier generations – for the past century, we have been surrounded by appeals to this notion. Consider the following, selected from hundreds of equally good examples: Les Temps Modernes; Fowler’s Modern English Usage; the Museum of Modern Art; Modern Philology; The Modern Library; ‘Modern Masters’, and soon. This surely relates to an unprecedented desire to fix where we are now, that is to define the present in some kind of historical context. For one thing, the digital age has led to a huge expansion of memory, despite our fears about virtual information leaking into the ether, or about the impermanence of primitive devices such as photocopiers. To tell the truth, men and women in the past could not experience, if not a shorter attention span historically, then certainly a more rapid process of 1

Alastair Sooke, ‘Post-modernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, V&A’, Daily Telegraph, (18 September 2011)

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attrition involving loss of data. If Jane Austen had wanted to read early eighteenth-century women novelists such as Eliza Haywood or Mary Davys, she would have found almost nothing in print, or available anywhere except in a very few public libraries (and very few there). The new circulating libraries did not carry stock of books published fifty years before, accessible as these titles are for today’s readers in reprints or online texts. Likewise when Mozart wished to help revive the music of J.S. Bach in the 1780s, only a tiny selection of printed scores lay to hand as representative of the composer’s oeuvre. (We have, too, a much better idea of the location and date of many compositions by Mozart, especially in the case of fragments and aborted works, than he himself could have had. He did not keep a regular count until he had reached what is now famous as K452, the sublime piano and wind quintet; and from watermarks in the score-paper we can tell that he misdated several of his own pieces.) To put the matter more generally: new technologies have enabled us to stand on the shoulder of giants, and a key part here is played by specifically ‘modern’ aide-mémoires that preserve the past more efficiently than any previous mechanism. Of course we have lost a lot, in particular much of what was created in antiquity or the Middle Ages. But scarcely any of these losses occurred in recent years: it is a millennium or more since these materials first went missing. To say this is not to make a complacent assumption that we have arrived at some extraordinary point of culmination, least of all the end of history in Fukuyama’s sense – which turned out to mean not much more than the conclusion of a particular phase of liberal thought in the West, and a phase so limited than it does not go back much beyond the French Revolution and cannot stretch to include even the Enlightenment.2 And that is precisely where many narratives of modernism begin. Commonly the story is traced back to Kant’s short and rather gnomic essay, ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’ (1784): most of the influential discussions, such as those of Michel Foucault and Jürgen Habermas, regard this as the seminal text. What is endemic to this stream of thought is the idea that the modern can be interpreted not just chronologically but normatively, with an insistence on some form of progress: it is always at root present-directed. Kant’s key word-cluster includes mündig/Mündigkeit/Unmündigkeit. Literally the notion here relates to the age of majority, and it would often be best translated by a word such as ‘mature’ or ‘adult’. By contrast, the period before the Enlightenment, where my later discussion will centre, is seen in this analysis as implicitly a kind of prolonged childhood or adolescence. The other main figure in this narrative would be Hegel, and frequently the 2

See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992)

122 Pat Rogers invention of a historicist dialectic is seen as a necessary precursor of the modern ‘modern’. Another sense that existed in the time of Kant and Hegel, but does not figure importantly in their work, is that of the fashionable – as in Thoroughly Modern Millie. That line of thought seems to go back to Baudelaire, with Le peintre de la vie moderne (1863). The argument stresses the dandy’s concern with what is rélatif and circonstentiel: qualities valued are the fugitive, ephemeral, or contingent, rather than the eternal, absolute, or essential. To that extent the Baudelairean modern does anticipate the postmodern in obvious ways. Before moving back to the pre-Enlightenment phase, I want to isolate another distinctive feature of present-day usage. This takes the form of a curious slippage whereby the term ‘modern’ is preserved even when time has moved on. Consider linguistic forms such as ‘Modern English’, whose inception in place of Late Middle is placed somewhere around the fifteenth century. Just as William Pitt the Younger can never grow old, so the idiom of Spenser and Shakespeare remains obdurately modern in the technical sense, a paradox we seldom observe. A similar thing occurs in the transition from Mittelheutdeutsch about the same time. Many of the divisions here owe their existence and their nomenclature to Jakob Grimm in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when philology began to establish a more systematic classification in both synchronic and diachronic directions. We might think too of the Regius Professorship of Modern History, set up at Cambridge by George I in 1724. This terminology simply meant ‘not relating to the ancient world’, and in subsequent years the post was held by medievalists such as David Knowles. Only as late as 2010 (sic) was the word ‘modern’ dropped from the title. Nobody sane would employ that word today in drawing up a job description if the area of competence expected did not reach into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Occasionally terms do change, when their anachronistic nature becomes too pressingly obvious, as when style moderne of the 1920s and 1930s belatedly morphed into art deco. But these are the exceptions. This issue connects with that of periodization, to which I shall come back shortly. However, it also owes a great deal to the much more developed taste for celebrating anniversaries which has evolved over time. Outside a limited range of examples, dating back to the Israelite jubilee or the golden years of the Catholic Church, our ancestors did not go in very much for this kind of calendric festival. Many large events in history went uncommemorated as they reached what seem to us obvious markers (a passage of 50, 100, 250, 500 years, say). Little pedantry attended such occasions when they did take place. David Garrick wanted to signalize the bicentenary of Shakespeare in 1764, but did not manage to put on the Stratford Shakespeare Jubilee until 1769. Many people criticized the strange

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junketings that ensued, but nobody raised much of a complaint on the grounds of belatedness or irrelevance. On the other hand, the commemoration of Handel took place in Westminster Abbey in April 1784: this was a few months too soon, as the organizer Charles Burney believed that the year marked not just twenty-five years since the composer’s death, but also the centenary of his birth.3 Today we keep more precise score, and can hardly wait to do the anniversary waltz to remind ourselves of the most minor episodes that can be arbitrarily linked to a given date. If the modern, then, is a movable feast, whose menu displays a shifting terminology, it is peculiarly subject to revision on interested, tendentious, or polemical grounds. A question arises as to whether our present manipulation of the idea performs different rhetorical tasks than what went on in a previous generation?

2. To speak of pre-Enlightenment modernity will obviously beg some questions. When we terms like pre- and pro-, we nearly always mean what comes immediately before or after: thus, pre-Romanticism, postwar, and so on. In the period I am choosing to isolate here, people did define by a sort of negative: but for ‘modern’ the stock opposition was invariably ‘ancient’. They were never thinking of a recently overtaken past. 4 A small but representative sample of usages in English books of the early-to-mid eighteenth century shows that fully half had the express word ancient or its derivatives within a Boolean range of three words. So we find over 100 works with ‘Ancient and Modern’ in the title – though of course the collection of Hymns Ancient and Modern did not appear until 1861, by which 3

4

Moreover, the ‘sudden dissolution of parliament’ meant that the commemoration was deferred until a month after the anniversary of Handel’s death, ‘which seems to have been for its advantage as many persons of tender constitutions, who ventured to go to Westminster-Abbey in warm weather, would not have had the courage to go thither in the cold’. See Charles Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster Abbey, and the Pantheon, May 26th, 27th, 29th; and June the 3d and 5th, 1784. In Commemoration of Handel (London: sold by Payne and Robinson, 1785), p. 5. The mistake arose through a confusion of Old Style and New Style dates. A very few exceptions can be found, where a different antonym is implied. Most obviously, the ‘Old Whigs’ against whom the ‘Modern Whigs’ were ranged around 1700 were traditional pre-Revolution thinkers, civic humanists, sometimes commonwealth men or republicans. The new breed had come up since the Revolution of 1688, and placed more emphasis on commerce, wealth and progress. Edmund Burke developed a new distinction between old and new Whigs in the 1790s, but along a different axis.

124 Pat Rogers date the phrase had acquired the comforting air of a dependable cliché. By contrast, Modernism would define itself against the Edwardian, the late Victorian, or the Vicwardian. As everybody knows, some apostles of Modernism, not least Joyce, sought to coopt features of ancient literature to their own project. An additional feature of the divergent practices between the earlier and later periods in terms of their definition of modernism lies in what is sometimes called the acceleration of history. The past recedes more quickly as time goes on, but it also returns more quickly – so that retro fashions need go back only ten or fifteen years in today’s world, whereas once they needed twice or three times as long. Mention of ancients and moderns in this context would naturally lead us towards the famous Querelle. We might naturally suppose that if we wished to know what men and women meant by modern at that time we should only have to consult the terms of that debate. But that assumption overlooks three facts. First, the controversy never full took off outside France and Britain. Second, it focussed narrowly on literary issues and for the most part downplayed science, the very area of enquiry where we might expect modern habits of thought to come into circulation following Bacon’s Great Instauration, the Royal Society and other harbingers of the new science. Third, it obsessed about Homer to a remarkable and unhelpful degree. Besides, its main players, the Ancients and the Moderns, had a life of their own outside the Querelle. The normal processes of literary adaptation and integration went on, as regards classical and contemporary influences. Only a small handful of major creative talents, headed by Boileau and Swift, had a frontal engagement with the affair. Even for Pope it was something of a storm in a teacup, with weaker Homeric resonances than a lover’s tiff over a lock of hair. Still, the Querelle does hold one area of important relevance to my theme here. This relates to the almost total elision of the Middle Ages, and to a lesser degree the Renaissance, throughout the debate. Even Joseph M. Levine, the fullest and most and perceptive chronicler of the episode, hardly touches on this omission. He does say in passing that the proponents of the Ancients had no ‘new neoclassical critical standards to apply’, and so they were ‘unwilling to propose Dante or Milton, let alone Shakespeare’, for the vacant modern throne. 5 It surely goes further than that, and the explanation for this silence has to do with the absence of a live concept of the medieval, as distinct from the Gothic or the barbaric. Here I need to summarize something I once wrote on the issue.

5

Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 131

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When the original Oxford English Dictionary reached the letter M in about 1905 r the editors were unable to find any examples of middle age(s) earlier than 1722 r with two further citations from the eighteenth century. The illustrations show that the usage took off properly in the next century, and it was probably Henry Hallam’s work entitled A View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages (1818) which confirmed the currency of the phrase as a historiographical marker. The recent supplement to OED has found earlier citations, from a Donne sermon and from the historian Henry Spelman: both date from the first quarter of the seventeenth century, but neither seems to be the easy use of a widely recognizable or accepted label. The locution existed, but it did not trip off the tongue, since it had still to acquire the force of a technical term. As for the entry mediæval, medieval, OED finds nothing prior to 1827. The second instance given is dated 1856, and comes from Ruskin; he provides the first example for both mediævalist (1874) and mediævalism (1853). The supplement cannot antedate these cases: so recent is the adoption of expressions which seem so necessary and natural in the scholarly world today. In fact, we cannot understand the current semantic state of the keywords under review without some understanding of what happened to them in their lexical adolescence. As far as English goes, this is intimately tied up with a complex set of historical, political, cultural and social factors. The story carries a sub-plot, in the form of the fortunes of the Gothic. Our neutral and technical use of medieval in the present century goes back to developments in the language two hundred years ago. 6 One hidden paradox lies behind all this: both Ancients and Moderns had more confidence than we do that in cultural matters they had outdone their immediate predecessors. For the party of the Ancients, this had been achieved not by opening up undiscovered continents but by restoring classical virtues that had been lost through the intervening centuries. This amounts to the whole rational of neoclassicism, in whatever guise, and it deserves notice that even an ardent proponent of the Ancients like Sir William Temple would have conceded that Dryden (whilst a pygmy by the side of Homer) had comfortably outstripped Spenser or Donne. The influence about which these early moderns felt anxiety was seldom recent: they were awed by emote ancestors, not forbidding father figures. One of the ways in which the Enlightenment would make a distinct break lay in the fact that for the first time people identified themselves as modern by critiquing the present or the lately past. Voltaire and Diderot separate their

6

This paragraph contains a shortened version of remarks in my essay, ‘Thomas Warton and the Waxing of the Middle Ages’ in Medieval Literature and Antiquities, ed. by M. Stokes and T.L. Burton (Ipswich: Boydell, 1987), pp. 175-86

126 Pat Rogers aims and procedures from those of the age of Louis XIV, not those of Periclean Athens. Let us examine more closely pre-Enlightenment habits of reference – those current in a phase which is now generally described as a part of early modern history, but anticipates the world of Kant and Hegel. One obvious place to begin is the Dictionary (1755) of Samuel Johnson. Here the main definition of modern runs, ‘late; recent; not ancient; not antique’ (note the last two elements). 7 Similarly the moderns are ‘those who have lived lately, as opposed to the ancients’, while to modernise is ‘to adapt ancient compositions to modern persons or things; to change ancient to modern language’.8 As for modernness, this simply means ‘novelty’. The most interesting of these entries concerns modernism, ‘deviation from the ancient or classical manner. A word invented by Swift.’ Significantly Johnson adds a potentially evaluative notion, ‘ancient or classical,’ and cites a late letter from Swift to Pope, dated 1737, about ‘the corruption of English by those Scribblers, who send us over their trash in Prose and Verse, with abominable curtailings and quaint modernisms.’ This refers unambiguously to recent neologisms in language, which Swift had criticized as far back as 1712 in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue. Very well, this is what the dictionaries say. But what of literary and general usage, in practice? Obviously we find a wide range of connotation, as well as denotation. In 1732 Henry Fielding wrote a play called The Modern Husband, which centres on a ‘complaisant’ husband named Mr Modern, who pimps for his wife. The plot concerns the efforts of the hero to implicate her, together with an aristocratic lover, to create grounds for a lawsuit for ‘Criminal conversation’. The prologue expresses mock disbelief at the existence of ‘a willing Cuckold’ who ‘sells his willing Wife!’ Of course, the dramatist’s aim is to show ‘Modern Vice’ as ‘detestable’, in order to restore ‘the sinking Honour of the Stage’.9 Here the sense could be paraphrased as undesirably up-to-date, that is not up the old standards. A contemporary parallel would be Swift’s ‘Journal of a Modern Lady’ (1727), depicting fashionable ladies as they play cards and gossip. As for Fielding’s good frie4nd William Hogarth, his painting A Midnight Modern Conversation (1730) shows a debased version of conversation, where an all-male group of debauchees disport themselves in a 7

8 9

Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols (London: Knapton and others, 1755), II, sig. 16Q 2r-v. The first citation for modern is from Bacon, and explicitly contrasts ancient and modern. In fact OED has no example of modernise prior to a usage by Horace Walpole in 1754 The Modern Husband. A Comedy. As it is acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. By His Majesty’s Servants (London: Watts, 1732), sig. A3v.

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way very different from the intellectual symposia of classical antiquity. Just afterwards, in his Epistle to Augustus (1737), Pope has this passage, which renders Horace’s views on the length of time needed to cement the reputation of an author: Who lasts a Century can have no flaw, I hold that Wit a Classic, good in law.’ Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? And shall we deem him Ancient, right and sound, Or damn to all Eternity at once, At ninety-nine, a Modern and a Dunce? 10

The implication here is that modernity equates with impermanence, or short-term and shallow success. It will not have passed without notice that the usages we have just considered, taken from works of satire, all have a negative connotation. But things would start to change. An obvious straw in the wind comes with the essay by Horace Walpole, On Modern Gardening, written in the 1760s but not published until 1782. ‘We have discovered the point of perfection’ in landscape design, Walpole confidently avers. He contrasts the qualities of modern gardens with ‘the gigantic, the puerile, the quaint, and at last the barbarous and the monkish’, displayed in turn by the taste of earlier ages. 11 It may surprise us to find the pioneer of the Gothic novel and the builder of Strawberry Hill using ‘monkish’ in this disparaging way. Such appropriations of the modern for positive purposes become increasingly common as the century proceeds. The most vehement supporter of the progressivist cause in the Querelle would scarcely have dared to write off previous ages in quite such a savage manner. But does this indicate that a whole paradigm shift had taken place, or simply that the Moderns had so far outpaced the Ancients to a point that the world was almost ready for Kant’s mature and enlightened dispensation? The answer is not quite, I think, in either case; but it is undoubtedly true that hostile uses of modern and its derivatives do start to fall away steadily between 1680 and 1780.12 10

11

12

Alexander Pope, The First Epistle of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated (London: Cooper, 1737), p. 4 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England; with some Account of the Principal Artists (London: Dodsley, 1782), pp. 306-07 Some conservative thinkers went on using the word in a sceptical manner: for example Burke, conservative in this regard when he criticized Charles James Fox’s group as ‘modern’ and revolutionary in An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs (1791)

128 Pat Rogers Let us take a cognate term, in order to broaden the scope of the evidence. The word contemporary had existed in English since the middle of the seventeenth century, but it appears less often than ‘co-temporary’, or most commonly ‘co-temporal’. Yet Richard Bentley, in is counterblast to the Christ Church wits who espoused the Ancients in the British sector of the battle, deplored the use by Charles Boyle (or more likely Francis Atterbury) of co-temporal, which he described as a ‘barbarism’. As late as 1762 the Gentleman’s Magazine still had to insist that the word should also be spelt ‘contemporary’, a view with which the grammarian Lindley Murray concurred in 1824. But the most notable point here is one that seems to have been largely missed. The word is invoked as a comparative term – as in, his or her contemporary – and applies to the past. It has to do with the relationship of two entities at a particular moment, and it is very seldom used in any sense implying here and now. This means that a current ambiguity is avoided – today we might say ‘contemporary attitudes to the Council of Trent’, suggesting either views held in 1560 or those held in 2010. The latter usage had not become idiomatic in the pre-Enlightenment context. Between 1700 and 1760 I was unable to find a single example of the coupling ‘contemporary age’, whereas the phrase attracts nearly half a million hits on Google, or of ‘contemporary history’, which yields 1,800,000 hits. This cannot be a matter of the precise form of words: the huge gap reflects our vastly greater self-consciousness as modern moderns, and our desire to mark ff our own times as decisively different in some qualitative way. Lastly, in surveying this group of ideas, we must return to the issue of periodization, touched on earlier. One of the most striking features of recent temporal description concerns the hypertrophy of words referring to centuries, decades and generations. The quattrocento did not, so far as I am aware, refer to itself eo nomine . A clear indication of the way things changed comes from these figures, showing the prevalence of the expression ‘the nth century’ across earlier and later spans of years: Approximate number of texts using periodic terms 1770-1800 1700-1740 Fifteenth century 1150 150 Sixteenth century 1700 200 Seventeenth century 600 60 Eighteenth century 1100 , access: 2510-2003) Mitra, Kisorichand, ‘Conversation with Rammohan Roy’ (Bengal Harkaru, 12 February 1834)

24 25 26

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Robertson, (pp. 27-52) p. 40 Pathak, p. 47, cited Samit Sarkar Verma, K. D., The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 131 Pathak, p. 47, cited Samit Sarkar Verma, p. 131

354 Ludmila Volná Mukherjee, Meenakshi, The Perishable Empire, 2nd edn (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002) Mund, Subhendu, The Indian Novel in English: its Birth and Development (New Delhi - Bhubaneswar: Prachi Prakashan, 1997) Pathak, Avijit, Indian Modernity: Contradictions, Paradoxes and Possibilities (New Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 1998) Robertson, Bruce Carlisle, ‘The English Writings of Raja Rammohan Ray,’ in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (London: Hurst & Company, 2003), pp. 27-52 Verma, K.D., The Indian Imagination: Critical Essays on Indian Writing in English (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000) Volná, Ludmila, ‘The Beginnings of Indian Writing in English,’ Archtv Orientálnt Quarterly Journal of African and Asian Studies: Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic, 66, (1998), 95-108. Zbavitel, Dušan, Eliška Merhautová and Jan Filipský, Bohové s lotosovýma RÿLPD KLQGXLVWLFNp PëW\ Y LQGLFNp OLWHUDWXőH Wőt WLVtFLOHWt [Gods with Lotus-like Eyes: Hindu Myths in Indian Literature of Three Millenniums], (Praha: Vyšehrad, 1997)

%RJGDQúWHIĈQHVFX Late (for) Modernity: Transition and the Traumatic Colonization of the Future of Postcommunist Cultures1 Associating the notion of modernity to coloniality reinforces the question of time in an otherwise space-dominated understanding of colonization as the conquest and exploitation of territories. This article contends that the capitalist West colonized the very concepts of time and historical progress as templates for positioning and evaluating any culture as either modern (civilized) or pre-modern (primitive), while the Soviet East counter-colonized the discourse of temporality with its own version of utopian futurism. Locked by the Cold War in an ‘ideological potlatch’ 2 and similarly rooted in modernity, the capitalist West and Soviet communism generated different calendars of coloniality but operated with the same logic of forcible modernization and generated structurally similar power relationships. Accordingly, I am pleading for the interpretation of the Romanian (post)communist experience as one of (post)coloniality, wherein modernity is often represented as cultural trauma. 3 The paper also illustrates some of the alternative strategies by which postcommunist discourse copes with the trauma of Soviet and Western colonial models that generated syncopated, asynchronous or suspended modernities in recent Romanian history. Keywords: communism and representations of futurity, postcommunism and transition discourse, colonization of time, alternative calendars of modernity, temporal metaphors, multiple subalternity.

Associating the notion of modernity to coloniality reinforces the question of time in an otherwise space-dominated understanding of colonization as the conquest and exploitation of territories. This article contends that the capitalist West colonized the very concepts of time and historical progress as templates for positioning and evaluating any culture as either modern (civilized) or pre-modern (primitive), while the Soviet East countercolonized the discourse of temporality with its own version of utopian futurism. Locked by the Cold War in an ‘ideological potlatch’ 4 and similarly rooted in modernity, the capitalist West and Soviet communism generated 1

2

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4

This work was supported by the strategic grant SOP HRD/89/1.5/S/62259, Project ‘Applied social, human and political sciences. Postdoctoral training and postdoctoral fellowships in social, human and political sciences’ cofinanced by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007-2013 Boris Groys, ‘The Postcommunist Condition’, %HFRPLQJ)RUPHU:HVW29th November 2009 (2004) Piotr Sztompka, ‘Cultural Trauma. The Other Face of Social Change’, (XURSHDQ-RXU QDORI6RFLDO7KHRU\, 3:4 (2000), 449–466 Groys

356 Bogdan úWHIĈQHVFX different calendars of coloniality but operated with the same logic of forcible modernization and generated structurally similar power relationships. Accordingly, I am pleading for the interpretation of the Romanian (post)communist experience as one of (post)coloniality, wherein modernity is often represented as cultural trauma. 5 The paper also illustrates some of the alternative strategies by which postcommunist discourse copes with the trauma of Soviet and Western colonial models that generated syncopated, asynchronous or suspended modernities in recent Romanian history. It is generally accepted that Western colonialism is indissolubly linked to modernity from its debut in the age of discoveries, through the age of modern empires, and into the age of the globalized Western model. The conceptual backbone of PRGHUQLW\DVFRORQLDOLVP is the Eurocentric ideology of domination and hegemony which procured its legitimacy through the allegedly universal notions of progress and civilization as the opposites of primitive, sluggish or backward cultures.6 Colonialism brings with it forced modernization as an aggressive, persistent act of collective submission and domination. The colonizer inflicts physical and psychological traumas that generate by means of social solidarity a collective victimization in the entire local culture. The effect of this sense of victimhood is to constrain the process of identity (re)construction by forcing the colonized to represent themselves as primitive and to adopt the direction and timetable of civilization which the colonizer exemplifies. Associating the notion of modernity to the understanding of coloniality reinforces the question of time in an otherwise space-dominated understanding of coloniality as the conquest and exploitation of territories. Mignolo’s resemantization of the coinage ‘double colonization’ – a Protean phrase that is used for the simultaneous subordination of women to foreign and male dominance, but also of Eastern European countries to Western and Soviet dominance – proposes that Western modernity colonized both space and time, by which he means ‘the invention of the Middle Age in the process of conceptualizing the Renaissance’.7 The argument can be extended to mean that the West colonized the very concepts of time and 5 6

7

See Sztompka Bill Ashcroft, and others, 3RVWFRORQLDO 6WXGLHV 7KH .H\ &RQFHSWV (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 131; Walter D. Mignolo, ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’ Modernologies, &RQWHPSRUDU\ $UWLVWV 5HVHDUFKLQJ 0RGHUQLW\ DQG 0RGHUQ LVP &XOWXUDO6WXGLHV, ed. by Sabine Breitwieser, and others (Barcelona:MACBA, 2007; repr. 2009), p. 39, and Couze Venn, 2FFLGHQWDOLVP 0RGHUQLW\ DQG 6XEMHFWLYLW\ (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 2000), p. 53 Mignolo, p. 41 and passim

/DWHIRU 0RGHUQLW\ 357

historical progress as templates for positioning and evaluating any culture as either modern/civilized or pre-modern/primitive.8 It appears that for modernity-as-colonization time is of the essence. Historians of colonialism like Giordano Nanni have aptly described the ‘colonization of time’ as the complement of territorial colonization (2012). What Nanni suggests from the vantage point of an entire line of critical work on ‘the role of time as an instrument of colonial power’ 9 is that the imposition of a standardized time is not just a necessity of Western (colonial) pragmatism, but also a symbolic gesture of colonial supremacy. Replacing local times with the Greenwich Mean Time in 1884 was a technical solution to the much older replacing of alternative temporalities by the standardized calendar of modernity in Western historiography. 10 Communism brought about one of the most interesting twists of modernity. While for many, communism was an unexpected abolition of the values of modern civilization, some critics claim that communism was simply a modulation of modernity. 11 Historically, the USSR and its satellite cultures saw themselves as alternatives to capitalist modernity. Romanian historian Adrian Cioroianu is adamant in describing the Sovietization of Romania as an economic and political colonization which presented itself as a ‘variant of (pseudo)modernization’.12 Cioroianu also describes (but fails to 8 9

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12

Ashcroft, p. 131 Giordano Nanni, ‘Time, empire and resistance in colonial Victoria’, 7LPHDQG6RFLHW\, 20:1 (2011), p. 8 See Nanni, p. 6 and Barbara Adam, ‘Time’, 7KHRU\&XOWXUHDQG6RFLHW\ 23:2-3 (2006), p. 119 3RVWPRGHUQLVPDQG6RFLHW\(London: Macmillan, 1990), ed. by Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi, p. 3; Jean-François Lyotard, 7KH 3RVWPRGHUQ &RQGLWLRQ $ 5HSRUW RQ .QRZOHGJH (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 11-14 and passim; Zygmunt Bauman, ,QWLPDWLRQV RI 3RVWPRGHUQLW\ (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 166-7; Wayne Gabardi, 1HJRWLDWLQJ 3RVWPRGHUQLVP (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. 3; François Furet, 7KH 3DVVLQJ RI DQ ,OOXVLRQ 7KH ,GHD RI &RPPXQLVPLQWKH7ZHQWLHWK&HQWXU\(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999), p. 29, p. 268; William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, 6RFLDO 7KHRU\ DQG 3RVWFRP PXQLVP (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), p. 92. No doubt, communism displayed a IHXGDO mentality as well, together with SUHPRGHUQ practices and mentalities like the gerontocratic organization of decision-making and the use of forced labor employed in the very process of modernization (Outhwaite and Ray). Communist dictatorships did use nepotism and vassality, personality cults and courtly fawning on such a scale that they at times resembled an absolutist monarchy, rather than a modern democracy. Adrian Cioroianu, 3HXPHULLOXL0DU[. 2LQWURGXFHUHvQLVWRULDFRPXQLVPXOXLURPkQHVF (BuFXUHûWL &XUWHD YHFKH   S  S  SS -8, p. 365. Interestingly, Boris

358 Bogdan úWHIĈQHVFX name it as such) what can only be seen as a cultural colonization which is documented by other researchers. 13 Whatever the direction or origin of this contest between capitalist and Soviet modernity, Boris Groys makes it clear that the Cold War meant that the capitalist West and the Soviet communism were locked in an ‘ideological potlatch’, 14 with the USSR trapped in its mimic-and-outperform model of modernization. In their compulsion to regulate time and make it predictable through planned production and social synchronization, they both incarnated the colonial impulse to dominate our representations of futurity.15 After the disappearance of the USSR and the collapse of its colonial empire, the colonization of time by the victorious West still remains. Both the postcolonial and the postcommunist conditions are constructed through acts of epistemic aggression and retaliation that involve metaphors of (under)development (progression/regression/stagnation, growth/decay, temporal lag/advance) that force the postcolonial/postcommunist subjects into an essentialized inferiority position from which they need to be rescued by local postdependence elites or by the postcolonial/postcommunist critics. The process of recovery in the postdependence interval is held captive by the treacherous imagery of evolution promoted by modernist theories of ‘directional transformation’. 16 Maria Todorova speaks of a similar act of epistemic violence through the metaphor of the race (i.e., contest) in which some nations have taken the lead and stride comfortably in front as models or standards of the speed of civilization, whereas late-comers trail behind and are bound to imitate those models. This critical imagism binds together the Second and Third Worlds and their efforts to catch up with the Western model:

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Groys opines that the reverse was also true, that under a Cold War compulsion to legitimate itself as an achieved utopia, the capitalist West recommended itself to the world as an outperformer of the communist ideal: ‘Western capitalism’s selfdepiction as Utopia stems from the rhetoric of the Cold War. During that period, western capitalism came under considerable pressure to prove its legitimacy, leading the West more and more to advertise itself to a global audience as superior to the communist ideal.’ (Groys) $QGUDGD)ĈWX-Tutoveanu, ‘Soviet Cultural Colonialism: Culture and Political Domination in the Late 1940s-Early 1950s Romania’, 7UDPHV 16 (66/61), 1 (2012), 77-93 Groys Adam, p. 119 5HWKLQNLQJ3URJUHVV0RYHPHQWV)RUFHVDQG,GHDVDWWKH(QGRIWKHWK&HQWXU\ ed. by Jeffrey C Alexander and Piotr Sztompka (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), p. 247 and passim

/DWHIRU 0RGHUQLW\ 359 Granted, all the discursive characteristics of the relationship of the new [Third World and eastern European] nation-states to the west are shared, and they are all based on the premise that Europe or the west is the model of imitation, and that modernizing is articulated in terms of catching up, in which time will be accelerated, so that one would accomplish in a decade or two what others have achieved in a century or two. 17

Cultures that have allowed themselves to be colonized together with their future, generally feature the experience as a FXOWXUDOWUDXPD in their historical narratives. The concept of cultural trauma captures the aggressive, abrupt, and alien nature of modernity-as-colonization. In Piotr Sztompka’s view, a culture can experience collective anguish at historical disruptions. Colonial subjects and critics of coloniality, for instance, adhere to communal practices of registering colonial change as ‘sudden’, ‘alien’, and ‘traumatic’. 18 Perceiving modernization as a strain on one’s culture is typical of marginal European cultures. Jacques Le Rider claims that the belatedness of the second wave of modernization in Central Europe came with an additional sense of ‘cultural destruction, loss, and destabilization’ and that twentiethcentury history was ‘cruel and unfair’ to Central Europe and it inculcated a distrust in the rational fables that explain historical development.19 Wariness towards history and modernity became a WRSRV in interwar Romanian intellectual discourse.20 The traumatic colonization of temporal representations is nowhere clearer than in the general acceptance of the notion of this ‘post-’ interval as a ‘transition’ that confiscates and conducts the future of the former Western 17

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Maria Todorova, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism’, 6ODYLF5HYLHZ, 64:1 (Spring 2005), p. 160 Sztompka, p. 452 and passim. The sense of cultural trauma in the consciousness of those who see themselves as victims of history has already been convincingly documented: See 7UDXPD([SORUDWLRQVLQ0HPRU\, ed. by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Cathy Caruth, 8QFODLPHG([SHULHQFH7UDXPD 1DUUDWLYHDQG+LVWRU\ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Kirby Farrell, 3RVWWUDXPDWLF &XOWXUH ,QMXU\ DQG ,QWHUSUHWDWLRQ LQ WKH 1LQHWLHV (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); :RUOG 0HPRU\ 3HUVRQDO 7UDMHFWRULHV LQ *OREDO 7LPH, ed. by Bennett, Jill and Rosanne Kennedy (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Rebecca Saunders and Kamran Scot Aghaie, ‘Introduction: Mourning and Memory’, &RPSDUDWLYH6WXGLHVRI6RXWK$VLD$IULFDDQGWKH0LGGOH(DVW, 25:1 (2005) and Sztompka’s 2000 article. Jacques Le Rider, (XURSDFHQWUDOĈVDXSDUDGR[XOIUDJLOLWĈаLL (Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom, 2001), pp. 5657 Bogdan ‫܇‬WHIĈQHVFX‘Voices of the Void: Andrei Codrescu’s Tropical Rediscovery of Romanian Culture in 7KH+ROH,Q7KH)ODJ’, 8QLYHUVLW\RI%XFKDUHVW5HYLHZ, X:2 (2008), p. 13 and passim

360 Bogdan úWHIĈQHVFX and Soviet colonies. The postdependence period is often conceptualized as a ‘historical transition’ for postcolonialism and postcommunism alike. 21 Transition models work on a putative unified calendar of monodirectional progress where less developed countries compete to replicate and catch up with the Western economy FXP democracy model. 22 Obviously, the arbiter of postcommunist performance is the West. Consequently, both a hierarchy and a calendar of transition separate postcommunist countries. Failing to take the lead in this race quite naturally causes further cultural trauma.23 The concept of transition has recently come under considerable attack for its teleological premises.24 Students of postcommunism are also reserved 21

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Benita Parry, 3RVWFRORQLDO 6WXGLHV $ 0DWHULDOLVW &ULWLTXH (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 3; Leszek Balcerowicz, ‘Understanding Postcommunist Transitions’, -RXUQDORI'HPRFUDF\, 5:4 (1994), 75-89, as well as his 3RVW&RPPXQLVW7UDQVLWLRQ 6RPH/HVVRQV (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2002); Ghia Nodia, ‘How Different Are Postcommunist Transitions?’, -RXUQDORI'HPRFUDF\, 7.:4 (1996); 7KHRUL] LQJ7UDQVLWLRQ7KH3ROLWLFDO(FRQRP\RI3RVW&RPPXQLVW7UDQVIRUPDWLRQV, ed. by John Pickles and Adrian Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1998); $OWHULQJ6WDWHV(WK QRJUDSKLHV RI 7UDQVLWLRQ LQ (DVWHUQ (XURSH DQG WKH )RUPHU 6RYLHW 8QLRQ, ed. by Daphne Berdahl, and others (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000) Michael D. Kennedy, &XOWXUDO )RUPDWLRQV RI 3RVWFRPPXQLVP (PDQFLSDWLRQ 7UDQVLWLRQ 1DWLRQDQG:DU(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) Various authorities like the European Union, NATO and the United States, the rating agencies, and great creditors like the IMF or the World Bank are in the business of sanctioning postcommunist countries’ overall economic and political performance, and in their books it seems that the Central European (the Visegrad Four) and the Baltic states (the first wave of postcommunist states to be admitted in the EU in 2004) have overtaken the Eastern-European and the Balkan countries (Romania and Bulgaria are late comers into the EU that still need monitoring in certain areas), which in turn seem to be doing better than the former Soviet republics. Transitologists seldom agree on whether all postcommunist countries will eventually become capitalist democracies (or even whether they are all really heading westward), on the basic concerns and strategies for a successful transition, or on whether one and the same postcommunist country has just taken the first steps or has already completed its transition. Perhaps the discrepancy between critical evaluations is all quite understandable given that postcommunism is a VXL JHQHULV phenomenon with a considerable portion of the world having embarked on a daunting and unprecedented project in history, ‘the attempt to construct a form of capitalism on and with the ruins of the communist system’ - 7KHRUL]LQJ7UDQVLWLRQ7KH3ROLWLFDO(FRQRP\RI 3RVW&RPPXQLVW 7UDQVIRUPDWLRQV, ed. by John Pickles and Adrian Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). The task is more difficult and uncommon than what other nations had to face before because communist economies were not so much underdeveloped, as misdeveloped – 3RVWFRPPXQLVP )RXU 3HUVSHFWLYHV, ed. by Michael Mandelbaum (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Books, 1996) – which

/DWHIRU 0RGHUQLW\ 361

as to the appropriateness of ‘deficit models’, in Michael Burawoy’s phrasing, whereby postcommunist countries are described in terms of what they lack, rather than by features of their own which they actually exhibit.25 The complaints against traditional transitology expose the hidden discursive mechanisms of the colonization of time and of the domination of the futures of subordinate cultures. As part of her comparative study of nationalism, Maria Todorova exposes traditional representations of the Eastern European and Balkan area for operating on prefiguring tropes of the lag, of the painful need to catch up with the speedier and more developed West, of the planting on the native soil of imported or ‘pirated’ Western ideas etc., which have all ingrained an image of the Balkans and Eastern Europe as a backward area, with a separate, slower or belated flow of time and she finds these descriptions to be similar to those of the postcolonial countries: Accordingly, the main categories of analysis of the past are ones that pertain to emptiness: lack, absences, what one is not, incompleteness, backwardness, catching up, failure, self-exclusion, negative consciousness, and so on. And in both cases the reasons for the backwardness are external. 26

Todorova suggests that the asymmetry between Western and Eastern Europe be evened out by the historical corrective of ‘relative synchronicity. Hers is hardly the disinterested and objective proposal of a cool-headed scholar, but has the intensity of one whose background in an East European culture has taught her the hard way that the backwardness trope has long been a WRSRV in the popular and academic mentality informed by Balkanism, a cliché that is difficult to shake off and that can still work to perpetuate the anguish of the postcommunist subject.27 Larry Wolff amply documented in

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means that these new capitalist democracies are not going to arise spontaneously and evolve at a natural pace, but will have to be force-grown in unusual conditions and rushed ‘back on track’ at a dazzling historical speed. Jordan Gans-Morse, ‘Searching for Transitologists: Contemporary Theories of PostCommunist Transitions and the Myth of a Dominant Paradigm’, 3RVW6RYLHW$IIDLUV 20:4 (2004), p. 334; Richard Sakwa, 3RVWFRPPXQLVP (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999), pp. 119-22 Todorova, p. 160 Todorova also notices something surprising: that the lag-and-lack trope is not a stranger to Western European cultures themselves and illustrates it with the examples of Germany, Italy or Spain. Moreover, she reminds us that some Balkan and East European states were created at the same time or even slightly before Italy and Germany (Todorova p. 145). She consequently suggests that the trope (and ‘trap’) of East European backwardness be replaced with the concept of ‘relative synchronicity’ within the broader historical paradigm of the ORQJXHGXUpH, where the quest for

362 Bogdan úWHIĈQHVFX his imagological study ‘Inventing Eastern Europe’ how the stereotype of depicting Eastern European, Balkan, and Slavic peoples as barbarians was constructed by the Enlightenment and has been perpetuated until as late as the 1990s. Such references to the backwardness of East European and Asian cultures have constantly shaped the popular opinion as well as the foreign policies and military strategies of Western governments. This cliché of barbarism and backwardness obviously permeated into Eastern European intellectual circles and generated a traumatic inferiority complex which the vocabulary of transition theories could only reactivate. One of the ways in which the traumatized personality of the Eastern European dealt with this burden was by what Alexander Kiossev has called ‘self-colonization’ in which these marginal and ailing cultures ‘import alien [Western] values and civilizational models by themselves and that they lovingly colonize their own authenticity through these foreign models’.28 The pattern of self-colonization which characterizes the pre-communist history of marginal Europeans spills over into the communist age which John Connelly has described, using Manfred Heinemman’s coinage, as a partial ’self-Sovietization’. 29 The pattern of emancipation from Soviet communism after 1989 is achieved in similar fashion by welcoming Western neocolonialism. It looks, then, like postcommunist countries, especially those at the edge of Europe, are caught in the alternation of different colonial subalternities. Their postcommunist freedom is constricted by the self-imposed urge to join the global political and economic networks with a painful sense of their lacks and imperfections and of the need to shape up in the vain hope that they will become equals in this game30 and ‘return to normalcy’. 31 Burdened with a tradition of Western and Soviet subalternity postcommunist countries are cultures in distress. This may partly explain the reluctance of such posttraumatic states to cope once more with rules imposed by the new world powers and the dominating authorities of the

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national emancipation and the push for civilizational progress were the common outcomes of a modernization process that spread through the whole of Europe, making the east and the west of the continent contemporary for all practical reasons. Alexander Kiossev, ‘Notes on Self-colonising Cultures’, in $UW DQG &XOWXUH LQ SRVW &RPPXQLVW(XURSH, ed. by B. Pejic. & D. Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), p. 114 John Connelly, &DSWLYH 8QLYHUVLW\ 7KH 6RYLHWL]DWLRQ RI (DVW *HUPDQ &]HFK DQG 3ROLVK +LJKHU(GXFDWLRQ– (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000), pp. 45-57 Kennedy, pp. 272-4 and passim Leslie Holmes, 3RVWFRPPXQLVP$Q,QWURGXFWLRQ (Oxford: Polity Press, 1997), p. 335

/DWHIRU 0RGHUQLW\ 363

day. Postcommunist elites in Romania rediscover the colonial theme which runs parallel with the process of modernization-as-Westernization of a marginal, minor or backward culture. The (neo-)colonization of Romania is sometimes openly invoked in public discourse to deplore the country’s failures in European or international politics, 32 in economy, 33 and in cultural wars. 34 Postcommunism presents interesting complications of modernity-ascolonization. Central and Eastern European cultures have been subjected to several colonizations in modern times and consequently evince the particularity of having developed historically as complex sites of multiple

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Interim President of Romania and current Chairman of the Senate Crin Antonescu – ’Crin Antonescu: RomkQLDQXWUHEXLHVĈVHFRPSRUWHFDRFRORQLH’ (=LDUHFRP, 17 August 2012) – Current prime minister Victor Ponta – ’Victor Ponta, deranjat de criticile Angelei Merkel: Ce, suntem colonie?’, ЭWLULOH 795 (9 July 2012) – former prime minister Adrian NĈstase – ’$GULDQ1ĈVWDVH5RPkQLDWUDWDWĈGH%UXxHOOHV FD R FRORQLH 1X DP GH JkQG VĈ FHU JUD‫܊‬ierea’, 5HYLVWD  (7 Nov. 2012) – ournalist and National Liberal Party member Sorin Ro‫܈‬FD 6WĈQHVFX – Andrei Cornea, ‘Este România o colonie?’, 5HYLVWD (13 Nov. 2012) Former Minister of Finance Ilie ‫܇‬HUEĈQHVFX – Ilie ‫܇‬HUEĈQHVFX‘Noi suntem o colRQLHûLEĈQFLOHFDUHVXQWWRDWHVWUĈLQHVHFRPSRUWĈFXQRLFDûLFXRFRORQLH’, &ULWL F$WDF (12 April 2012) – former MEP Mircea Co‫܈‬ea – Mircea Co‫܈‬ea, ‘România–a cui colonie?’ [accessed 12 April 2013] Adrian Marino – Sorin Antohi, ‘România ‫܈‬i Occidentul. Dialog cu Adrian Marino’, 2EVHUYDWRU FXOWXUDO, 261 (2005) – Andrei Cornea (See Cornea’s article), former vicepresident of the Romanian Cultural Institute Mircea MihĈLH‫ – ܈‬Anca Dobrescu and Mircea MihĈLH‫܈‬, ‘Cultura romkQĈ nu e cunoscutĈvQLGHQWLWDWHDHLUHDOĈ’, =LDUXOGHGX PLQLFĈ (20 May 2005) – historian Dinu C. Giurescu of the Romanian Academy – Dinu C. Giurescu., ‘9DORULILFDUHD LGHQWLWĈŗLORU FXOWXUDOH vQ procesele globale.’ Keynote address, Romanian Academy International Conference (20-21 April 2012)

364 Bogdan úWHIĈQHVFX subalternity.35 The more recent colonization by the USSR was no more than a temporary suspension of an older and stranger form of the consensual colonization by the West.36 Western [self-]colonization was so embedded in the cultural mentalities of these nations, that it was ‘naturally’ resumed as soon as the Soviet interlude was over. The process of modernization in Romania and other former members of the Soviet bloc often took this halfmasochistic form of submissiveness both before and after the communist interlude. While Westernizing/modernizing the country has constantly been presented by parts of the local elites as a strategy for recovering from Ottoman, Tsarist or Soviet domination, the fact remains that cultures like that of Romania or Bulgaria willfully position themselves as subaltern, minor, peripheral to a superior West. Both the push for Westernization (modernization) and the resistance from nativists (autochthonists) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which are constitutive of the rise of modern national identities in marginal Eastern European cultures, are no more than West European ideologies imported by the mediating FRPSUDGRU elites acting under the trauma of internalizing their unavoidable inferiority. ‘Willfully’ embracing this cultural asymmetry, the self-colonized subjects are placed in the perplexing situation where their emancipation and assimilation by the ‘civilized world’ and into ‘universal culture’ can only be achieved after first having embraced a subservient status. Theirs is the self-mutilating shame of having been culturally estranged from their own future which is always already mapped out by the Western time-colonizing modernity.

Bibliography Adam, Barbara, ‘Time’, 7KHRU\&XOWXUHDQG6RFLHW\ 23:2-3 (2006), 119-126 ‘AGULDQ1ĈVWDVH5RPkQLDWUDWDWĈGH%UX[HOOHVFDRFRORQLH1XDPGHJkQG VĈFHUJUD‫܊‬ierea’, 5HYLVWD (7 Nov. 2012)

Anderson, Benedict, ,PDJLQHG&RPPXQLWLHV5HIOHFWLRQVRQWKH2ULJLQDQG6SUHDGRI 1DWLRQDOLVP (London & New York: Verso, 1983; repr. 1991) Antohi, Sorin, ‘România ‫܈‬i Occidentul. Dialog cu Adrian Marino’, 2EVHUYDWRU FXOWXUDO, 261 (2005)

35

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Bogdan ‫܇‬WHIĈQHVFX‘Reluctant Siblings: Methodological Musings on the Complicated Relationship between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism’, :RUGDQG7H[W, II:1 (2012), pp. 22-3 See Kiossev

/DWHIRU 0RGHUQLW\ 365

Ashcroft, Bill, and others, 3RVWFRORQLDO 6WXGLHV 7KH .H\ &RQFHSWV (London and New York: Routledge, 2000) Alexander, Jeffrey C. and Piotr Sztompka, eds., 5HWKLQNLQJ3URJUHVV0RYHPHQWV )RUFHV DQG ,GHDV DW WKH (QG RI WKH WK &HQWXU\ (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990) Balcerowicz, Leszek, ‘Understanding Postcommunist Transitions’, -RXUQDORI 'HPRFUDF\, 5:4 (1994), 75-89 Balcerowicz, Leszek, 3RVW&RPPXQLVW 7UDQVLWLRQ 6RPH /HVVRQV (London: The Institute of Economic Affairs, 2002) Bauman, Zygmunt, ,QWLPDWLRQV RI 3RVWPRGHUQLW\ (London and New York: Routledge, 1992) Bennett, Jill and Rosanne Kennedy, eds., :RUOG0HPRU\3HUVRQDO7UDMHFWRULHVLQ *OREDO7LPH (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Berdahl, Daphne, and others, eds., $OWHULQJ6WDWHV(WKQRJUDSKLHVRI7UDQVLWLRQLQ (DVWHUQ(XURSHDQGWKH)RUPHU6RYLHW8QLRQ, (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2000) Boyne, Roy and Ali Rattansi, eds., 3RVWPRGHUQLVPDQG6RFLHW\ (London: Macmillan, 1990)

Caruth, Cathy, ed., 7UDXPD ([SORUDWLRQV LQ 0HPRU\ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995) Caruth, Cathy, 8QFODLPHG([SHULHQFH7UDXPD1DUUDWLYHDQG+LVWRU\ (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) Cioroianu, Adrian, 3H XPHULL OXL 0DU[. 2 LQWURGXFHUH vQ LVWRULD FRPXQLVPXOXL URPkQHVF %XFXUHûWL&XUWHDYHFKH005) Connelly, John, &DSWLYH 8QLYHUVLW\ 7KH 6RYLHWL]DWLRQ RI (DVW *HUPDQ &]HFK DQG 3ROLVK+LJKHU(GXFDWLRQ– (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000) Cornea, Andrei, ‘Este România o colonie?’, 5HYLVWD  (13 Nov. 2012)

Co‫܈‬ea, Mircea, ‘România–a cui colonie?’ [accessed 12 April 2013] ‘Crin Antonescu: RomkQLDQXWUHEXLHVĈVHFRPSRUWHFDRFRORQLH’ (=LD UHFRP, 17 August 2012) Dobrescu, Anca and Mircea MihĈLH‫܈‬, ‘Cultura romkQĈ nu e cunoscutĈvQ LGHQWLWDWHDHLUHDOĈ’, =LDUXOGHGXPLQLFĈ (20 May 2005)

Farrell, Kirby, 3RVWWUDXPDWLF&XOWXUH,QMXU\DQG,QWHUSUHWDWLRQLQWKH1LQHWLHV (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998)

366 Bogdan úWHIĈQHVFX )ĈWX-Tutoveanu, Andrada, ‘Soviet Cultural Colonialism: Culture and Political Domination in the Late 1940s-Early 1950s Romania’, 7UDPHV 16 (66/61), 1 (2012), 77-93 Furet, François, 7KH3DVVLQJRIDQ,OOXVLRQ7KH,GHDRI&RPPXQLVPLQWKH7ZHQWLHWK &HQWXU\(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1999) Gabardi, Wayne, 1HJRWLDWLQJ 3RVWPRGHUQLVP (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) Gans-Morse, Jordan, ‘Searching for Transitologists: Contemporary Theories of Post-Communist Transitions and the Myth of a Dominant Paradigm’, 3RVW6RYLHW$IIDLUV20:4 (2004), pp. 320-349 Giurescu, Dinu C., ‘9DORULILFDUHDLGHQWLWĈŗLORUFXOWXUDOHvQSURFHVHOHJOREDOH’ Keynote address, Romanian Academy International Conference (20-21 April 2012)

Groys, Boris, ‘The Postcommunist Condition.’ %HFRPLQJ)RUPHU:HVW29th November 2009 (2004) Holmes, Leslie, 3RVWFRPPXQLVP$Q,QWURGXFWLRQ (Oxford: Polity Press, 1997) James, Wendy and David Mills, eds., 7KH4XDOLWLHVRI7LPH$QWKURSRORJLFDO$S SURDFKHV (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005) Kennedy, Michael D., &XOWXUDO )RUPDWLRQV RI 3RVWFRPPXQLVP (PDQFLSDWLRQ 7UDQVLWLRQ1DWLRQDQG:DU(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002) Kiossev, Alexander, ‘Notes on Self-colonising Cultures’, in $UWDQG&XOWXUHLQ SRVW&RPPXQLVW(XURSH, ed. by B. Pejic. & D. Elliott (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1999), 114-8 Le Rider, Jacques, (XURSDFHQWUDOĈVDXSDUDGR[XOIUDJLOLWĈаLL (Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom, 2001) Lyotard, Jean-François, 7KH3RVWPRGHUQ&RQGLWLRQ$5HSRUWRQ.QRZOHGJH (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)

Mandelbaum, Michael, ed., 3RVWFRPPXQLVP )RXU 3HUVSHFWLYHV (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Books, 1996) Mignolo, Walter D., ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality’ Modernologies, &RQWHPSRUDU\$UWLVWV5HVHDUFKLQJ0RGHUQLW\DQG0RGHUQLVP &XOWXUDO6WXGLHV, ed. by Sabine Breitwieser, and others (Barcelona: MACBA, 2007; repr. 2009), 39-49 Nanni, Giordano, 7KH&RORQL]DWLRQRI7LPH5LWXDO5RXWLQHDQG5HVLVWDQFHLQWKH %ULWLVK(PSLUH (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012) Nanni, Giordano, ‘Time, empire and resistance in colonial Victoria’, 7LPH DQG6RFLHW\, 20:1 (2011), 5-33

/DWHIRU 0RGHUQLW\ 367

Nodia, Ghia, ‘How Different Are Postcommunist Transitions?’, -RXUQDO RI 'HPRFUDF\, 7.:4 (1996), 15-29 Outhwaite, William and Larry Ray, 6RFLDO7KHRU\DQG3RVWFRPPXQLVP (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) Pickles, John and Adrian Smith, eds., 7KHRUL]LQJ7UDQVLWLRQ7KH3ROLWLFDO(FRQR P\ RI 3RVW&RPPXQLVW 7UDQVIRUPDWLRQV (London and New York: Routledge, 1998) Parry, Benita, 3RVWFRORQLDO 6WXGLHV $ 0DWHULDOLVW &ULWLTXH (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004) Sakwa, Richard, 3RVWFRPPXQLVP (Buckingham and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1999) Saunders, Rebecca and Kamran Scot Aghaie, ‘Introduction: Mourning and Memory’, &RPSDUDWLYH6WXGLHVRI6RXWK$VLD$IULFDDQGWKH0LGGOH(DVW, 25:1 (2005), 16-29 6WĈQHVFX6RULQ5R‫܈‬ca, ‘Este România o colonie a SUA?’, '&1HZV (10 June 2012) Sztompka, Piotr, ‘Cultural Trauma. The Other Face of Social Change’, (XUR SHDQ-RXUQDORI6RFLDO7KHRU\, 3:4 (2000), 449–466 ‫܇‬HUEĈQHVFX,OLH‘1RLVXQWHPRFRORQLHûLEĈQFLOHFDUHVXQWWRDWHVWUĈLQHVH FRPSRUWĈ FX QRL FD ûL FX R FRORQLH’, &ULWLF$WDF (12 April 2012)

‫܇‬WHIĈQHVFX%RJGDQ‘Voices of the Void: Andrei Codrescu’s Tropical Rediscovery of Romanian Culture in 7KH+ROH,Q7KH)ODJ’, 8QLYHUVLW\RI%XFKDUHVW 5HYLHZ, X:2 (2008), 11-21 ‫܇‬WHIĈQHVFX %RJGDQ ‘Reluctant Siblings: Methodological Musings on the Complicated Relationship between Postcolonialism and Postcommunism’, :RUGDQG7H[W, II:1 (2012), 13-26 Todorova, Maria, ‘The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism’, 6ODYLF 5HYLHZ, 64:1 (Spring 2005), 140-164 Venn, Couze, 2FFLGHQWDOLVP 0RGHUQLW\ DQG 6XEMHFWLYLW\ (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage, 2000) ‘Victor Ponta, deranjat de criticile Angelei Merkel: Ce, suntem colonie?’, ЭWLULOH 795 (9 July 2012) Wolff, Larry, ,QYHQWLQJ(DVWHUQ(XURSH7KH0DSRI&LYLOL]DWLRQRQWKH0LQGRIWKH (QOLJKWHQPHQW (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994)

Arleen Ionescu Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature. $GULDQ2ŗRLX’s Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita The essay locates the ghosts of modernity in the novel The Skin of the Matter or Dancing with the Flayed, written by the RRPDQLDQFRQWHPSRUDU\ZULWHU$GULDQ2ŗRLX,QDQDWWHPSW to exorcise the ghosts of communism, it uses Derrida’s Spectres of Marx to separate the ‘spirit’ from the ‘spectre’ and from the ‘king’, by mourning with the protagonist, and exploring the commodification of language. Via Hamacher’s schema to decode Marx’s ‘Cloth speaks’, the ghosts of ‘wood language’ are traced. Finally, in the Blanchovian sense that the ‘spirit of the spirit’ is work, the essay reconstructs what the novel ‘posed’ and ‘decomposed’. KH\ZRUGV $GULDQ 2ŗRLX PRGHUQLW\ -DPHV -R\FH 'HUULGD %ODQFKRW ZRUN VSHFWUH communism

To prolong itself, ‘modernity’ needs to become its own spectre, turned towards the future, in order to live on: it needs to be inherited and transmitted to the next generations as a lesson of justice to be taught yet improved and continuously updated to the new laws. ,WQHHGVWo remember the spirit of those who preceded us and to do justice in a future to come, since, as Appelbaum remarks, ‘only a limited view would locate the specter in the past’.1 As Derrida pointed out in his Spectres of Marx, WKH*HUPDQ,deology 2 and Stirner in particular distinguished the spectre or the revenant from the Spirit. According to Simon Choat in his Marx through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze ZKDW FDQ EH VHHQ LQ WKH *HUPDQ ,GHRORJ\ LV OHVV Marx’s obsession with ghosts and his impossibility to stop writing about them, as Lyotard remarked. Stirner made ‘the mistake common to other young Hegelians’, more precisely he took ‘a crude, uncritical version of Hegel at his word’. Stirner believed ‘ideas really do rule the world and hence he only has to combat these ideas in order to achieve liberation’. 3 For Marx ‘spectres’ are not the enemies to be chased, while for Derrida ‘spectres’ are something to believe in. The ghost for Derrida is always a revenant, a returning one, and this always begins by ‘coming back’.

1

2

3

David Appelbaum, Derrida’s Ghost. A Conjuration (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009), p. 3 Critique of Modern German Philosophy, whose main representatives were Feuerbach, B. Bauer and Stirner. Simon Choat, Marx through Post-Structuralism: Lyotard, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), pp. 78-79

370 Arleen Ionescu Here is – or rather there is, over there, an unnameable or almost unnameable thing: something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some thing, “this thing’ but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us [qui nous regarde], comes to defy semantics as much as ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy. 4

A ghost is ‘also, no doubt, the tangible intangibility of proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other.’5 This ghost, modernity, that seems to continuously tell itself “, am thy Father’s Spirit”, looks at us, ‘we feel ourselves looked by it’, as Derrida puts it ‘outside of any synchrony, even before and beyond any look on our part, according to an absolute anteriority (which may be on the order of generation, of more than one generation) and asymmetry, according to an absolute1y unmasterable disproportion.’ 6 For Derrida ‘to feel ourselves seen by a look that is impossible to cross’ (what the French thinker calls the visor effect, 7 coming from King Hamlet’s visor that did not allow the others see his face) means that the spectre will always be behind us, that we need to believe in it, to ‘fall back on its voice’,8 to swear we will obey its rules, without seeing it, as Marcellus and Horatio did in front of Hamlet. ,Q WKLV SDSHU , ZLOO WU\ WR ORRN IRU the ghosts of modernity via Coaja lucrurilor sau dansând cu jupuita [The Skin of the Matter or Dancing with the Flayed], written by contemporary writer, translator and essayist Adrian Oŗoiu. The novel plays with the literary intertext in the vicinity of philosophy, architecture and science 9 and can be read as a book of death, 10 being at the same time both a fictional counterpart to Heidegger’s concept of finitude and to Blanchot’s notion of a future death that is already past. Remaining faithful to the Derridian paradigm, in my analysis of Oŗoiu’s novel, , ZLOO XVH ‘the three things’ that Derrida proposes to separate the 4

5 6 7

8 9

10

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and The New InternationalWUDQVE\3HJJ\.DPXIZLWKDQ,QWURGXFWion by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, (Routledge: New York and London, 1994), p. 6 Ibid., p. 7 Ibid., p. 7 Nicholas Royle makes a subtle reference to Derrida’s misreading of the play when he theorizes the ‘visor’: ‘when it comes to secrets non manifestation is never assured’ – Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 252. The text was first read in translation at the 1997 Cerisy décade on L’Animal autobiographique, ed. by Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 1999), pp. 547-62 – trans Derrida, p. 7 The book displays a full array of technical details concerning high speed cars, aerodynamics, and computer science, among others. 6HH 6DQGD &RUGRû ‘Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita’, in 'LFŗLRQDU analitic de opere literare URPkQHûWL ed. by ,RQ3RS vol. ,&OXM&DVD&ĈUŗLLGHúWLLQŗĈ S69

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 371

‘spirit’ from the ‘spectre’ and from the ‘king’, for the king has three possibilities: ‘to keep the place of the father, to take it, or usurp it’. 11 1. 2. 3.

The first ‘thing’ Derrida proposes is mourning which would force us ‘to ontologize remains, to make them present’, by identifying a body and by ‘localizing the dead’ 12. The next method to trace the ghost is through language: ‘one cannot speak of generations of skulls or spirits (Kant quit genuit Hegel genuit Marx) except on the condition of language’ 13. And finally, ‘the thing works, whether it transforms it or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the ‘spirit of the spirit’ is work. 14

Conjuring Oŗoiu’s ghosts of modernity ‘5,3’ 15 Rest in peace, one of the symbolical characters of the novel writes on his window pane. He is the one in charge of repairing watches, thus mending ‘disjointed’ time. As we follow Oŗoiu’s ghosts, we prepare for mourning in order to take care of the dead. But in order to mourn, we need to identify the body and to ORFDOL]H WKH WKLQJ WKDW ZDV JLYHQ GHDWK RU WKDW JDYH LWVHOI WR GHDWK 2ŗRLX gives death to his text by burying other texts in it and sometimes it is hard to see who the ghost is or rather who is haunting whom, since the frequencies of other texts contained in Oŗoiu’s novel, the insistence, the rhythm in which these texts are immersed in the big one cannot be quantified (a ghost, Gil, mentions, the novel is the grave of whatever would have fitted inside). 7KH PHPRU\ RI 2ŗRLX’s text with its fugitive images from other arts (architecture, graphic art, choreography, music), combined with fragments from various novels, poems (such as The Song of Songs, Joyce, Pynchon, Poe, Barth, Borges, Greene, Aitmatov) is, to use Appelbaum’s phrase ‘the prime locale of the ghost’.16 ,QD'HUULGLDQIDVKLRQWH[WVDOORZWKHPVHOYHV‘to be presumed, reconstructed, phantasized.’ 17

11 12 13 14

15

16 17

Derrida, p. 8 Ibid., p. 9 Ibid., p. 9 By ‘Spirit’ he meant ‘a certain power of transformation [...] the spirit [...] works’. (Derrida, p. 9) $GULDQ 2ŗRLX Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita %XFKDUHVW &DUWHD 5RPkQHDVFĈ 1996), p. 171. Hereafter with page references in the text. All translations from the QRYHO DUHPLQH,DPJUDWHIXOWRWKHDXWKRUDQGWR/DXUHQW0LOHVLIRUFKHFNLQJWhe translation of the most difficult passages. Appelbaum, Derrida’s Ghost, p. 47 Derrida, p. 21

372 Arleen Ionescu We deal with a whole constellation of spectrality in Oŗoiu’s book: both actual and virtual ghosts. ‘Oh my God! Look there! A ghost!’18 yells the librarian, unaware of the presence of Vera, úWHIDQ’s lover in the cellar. Later on, in a bar, the curtains move: ‘,WFDQEHWKHZLQG,WFDQEHWKHGUDIW,WFDQ be a being that could not find its peace there.’19 One character lives in what the narrator calls ‘a phantom bachelor’s flat’. 20 A secondary character (Gil) seems to be the ghost of Elvis Presley: ‘Elvis Presley’s ghost leans, pretending to feel like casting a stone at him’.21 A spectral voice asks: ‘Que sera demain, début (sic!) ou la fin?’. 22 ,QVSLWHRILWVHQWHUWDLQHU-like-role, this is the main ghost of the novel, called by the narrator, ‘a secondary character’ (this character is the one who KHOSVúWHIDQDQG9HUDRXWRIWKHODE\ULQWK in a chapter in which the character reminds us of Tarkovsky’s Stalker – Chapter ‘A Secondary Character’).23 Neither dead, nor alive, but ‘infinitely dead’, he is Gilgamesh, the one whose diary and novel are inserted in Oŗoiu’s main text. He is the builder of the labyrinth, ‘a spiritus loci’.24 ,WLVWKLVFKDUDFWHU whose ‘time is out of joint’, who has ‘neither past nor future’,25 whose ‘past LVWKH,QIHUQR’. 26 ,Q WKH VKDGRZ RI WKH ORQJ PRGHUQLW\ Oŗoiu’s ghosts have frequented many libraries and many books, so many that it is impossible to trace them all, to control the comings and goings of these ghosts that play with our cultural background. The main sub-text on which the main character – the arcKLWHFW úWHIDQ – builds his paradoxical fate and staircase is the Joycean ODE\ULQWKRI'HGDOXV,WLVQRWRQO\WKHQDPHDQGWKHSURIHVVLRQWKDWúWHIDQ shares with his Joycean counterpart, Stephen Dedalus, it is his whole evolution throughout the novel and his status as a marginalized artist (his nickname is Yostephanos, reminiscent of Stephen’s nickname ‘Stephanos Dedalos! Bous Stephanoumenos’ from A Portrait). Gil, the creator calls him ‘Stephen Dedalus’.27 The architext is built in the spirit of Joyce, Oŗoiu being one of the few Romanians who dedicated comprehensive studies to Joyce, one of which being published in the huge volume comprising The Reception of

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 141 Ibid., p. 144 Ibid., p. 147 Ibid., p. 214 Ibid., p. 222 Ibid., pp. 214-224 Ibid., p. 219 Ibid., p. 220 Ibid., p. 225 Ibid., p. 220

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 373

James Joyce in Europe. 28 Therefore, pre-originary spectral anteriority of Ulysses can be seen in the long Joycean day: this time the 16th of June 1904 becomes 30th of October 198729; the first episode structures itself as a ‘Telemachiad’, in which a different form of Introibo ad altare Dei appears, a dead Nestor (in a car accident) haunts the text in the second chapter, a ‘Calypso’ is configured as well, (with the difference that the cat Ko-To-Yu, reminiscent of Bloom’s cat disappeared and the protagonist is looking for it), a ‘Sirens’ this time changes the Ormond Hotel barmaids, Lydia Douce and Mina Kennedy, with NuŗL DQG &LFD Tabacica who gossip, giggle and sometimes sing in a communist shop, a mini-’Cyclops’ episode takes place in a tram crammed with people who start quarrelling, an ‘,WKDFD’ without aspiring to a 309 list of questions and answers transforms the narrative style into a scientific one. At the same time, the novel contains symbols, names, military commands, special numbers; a fragment in which the washing machine, the source of water (regarded as the source of life) is reminiscent of the washerwomen or ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ chapter in Finnegans Wake. The epitome of the Leninist formula of the ‘fight between old and new’ WKHURRWRIKLVWRULFDOPDWHULDOLVP LVGHVLJQHGE\2ŗRLXWKURXJKD-R\FHDQ loop. The whole book becomes the labyrinth where communism, the Romanian Minotaur (half human, half monstrous) is kept; yet the name of the labyrinth is the Civic Centre and Ariadne’s thread is this time M.C. Escher’s 30 impossible structure Ascending, Descending that obsesses the main character all day long. ,QDJHVWXUHUHPLnding of Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Oŗoiu’s narrator, Gil, OHWVXVVHHWKHIXWXUHRIKLVFKDUDFWHUúWHIDQDVZHOODVWKHHQG RIWKHQRYHO,WLVWKHWH[WWKDWLVDOUHDG\ILQLVKHGLQWKHIXWXUHSRSXODWLQJWKH memory of the computer, and ready to jump from the book on page 28 as File 666 (which stands for the Number of the Beast in the Apocalypse). Yet unlike Fowles’s journey in a carriage back to Victorian Britain, Oŗoiu’s glimpse into the future is a matter of a mouse click. ‘You click MEMORY,

28

29

30

$GULDQ2ŗRLX‘Le sens du pousser’. On the Spiral of Joyce’s Reception in Romanian, in The Reception of James Joyce in EuropeHGE\*HHUW/HUQRXWDQG:LP9DQ0LHUOR, (London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), pp. 198-213. The protagonist hears from his lover that they should keep the pumpkin they are HDWLQJLQWKHGDUNIRUWKHQH[WGD\LQ&HDXûHVFX’s age, at night electricity was cut, for economical reasons). She tells him that she heard at Vocea Americii (The Voice of America, radio channel forbidden during the communist age) that Americans would FHOHEUDWH+DOORZHHQWKHQH[WGD\úWHIDQGRHVQRWNQRZWKDW+DOORZHHQLVLQVKRUW ‘the day of the dead’ (321). M. C. Escher was a Dutch graphic artist, known for his mathematically inspired woodcuts, litographs, and mezzotints.

374 Arleen Ionescu FOLFN35,17DQGORRNZKDW\RXJHW’ 31 says the main character. The ghost is strongly included in the future perfect, Lyotard’s temporality of the postmodern by excellence: the protagonist of the novel will have died before the novel started. The time of the book is therefore the ‘void of the future’, and as Blanchot would say, ‘there death has our future’. 32 Yet Oŗoiu sets the narration back to the past: as Blanchot would say: ‘there death has its tomb’. 33 The narrator shouts: ‘STOP! Hell! What the hell is this text doing here? Aargh! Let’s try in the dead memory’. 34 Thus, the memory of the book becomes the dead memory (Read Only Memory). $EEUHYLDWHGLQWR520DV, mentioned somewhere else, it might be a critique of communist Romania to ZKRP2ŗRLX bids farewell, like many other writers of the same generation. 35 ,I 'HUULGD ZURWH KLV Spectres of Marx, at a time when the death of Marxism had been so confidently proclaimed, Oŗoiu chose to dig through the dead memory of communism whose vestigial buildings in Romania could not be pronounced alive or dead in 1996, the year when Coaja lucrurilor or Dansând cu jupuita appeared. As Wortham claims in his Derrida Dictionary, ‘[...] beyond any attempt at masterful exorcism of the kind practised in the ‘end of history’ type of discourse, the spectres of Marx will always return, their gaze preceding our own. The burial of the (supposed) dead is always accompanied by a work of mourning – however triumphalist it may be – which hopes to ontologize the remains, to inter them in a knowledge that thinks itself incontrovertibly apposite in relation to its referent or, in other words, which keeps the body in the ground.’ 36 Oŗoiu writes about the troubled memory of Romanian communism, in which the ghost is not only a figure that looks from behind, but also a projection of what the Romanian writer hopes to exorcize. He chooses to be the spectre’s contemporary, its witness and its detractor, reminding of Blanchot’s assertion: ‘Death exists not only, then, at the moment of death; at all times we are its contemporaries.’ 37 The funeral of communism takes a long time and Oŗoiu’s mourning is different from what we would expect; the 31 32

33 34 35

36

37

2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 28 Maurice Blanchot, The Step Not Beyond, trans., Introduction by Lycette Nelson (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 15 Ibid., p. 15 2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 28 6HH $UOHHQ ,RQHVFX ‘Artifices of Construction: The Unlimited Space of Literature in $GULDQ 2ŗRLX’s Coaja lucrurilor sau Dansând cu jupuita’, Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics,11), 101-10 (p. 106) Simon Morgan Wortham, The Derrida Dictionary (London, New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 194 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans., Introduction by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), p. 132

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 375

writer’s separation from the suffering of that age in communist Romania takes the form of a huge roar of laughter in which everything is criticized and mocked at. 7KHDUFKLWHFWVLQúWHIDQ’s institute discuss the Civic Centre that they need to build. This is a district in central Bucharest, completely rebuilt in the 1980s as part of the scheme of systematization. The leader’s speech to the architects gathered in the room is evocative of Ceauûescu’s own public speeches, in which he would assign his citizens’ duties, displaying his total ignorance of culture, history (therefore mixing notions and ignoring grammar rules): The tracer traces the final instructions. To proceed urgently with the systematization of the Civic Centre. Historical Centre, Boris corrects him. Whatever, be it historical, this is why the Historical Centre is historical in order to keep up with history, with the New. 38

The spectre RI WKH ILQDO IHZ \HDUV RI &HDXûHVFX’s tenure still haunts any Romanian, remembering the significant portions of the historic centre of Bucharest which was demolished to accommodate the monstrous blocks, government buildings of the grandiose Civic Centre and the House of the People, the second biggest building in the world, being surpassed only by the Pentagon. Oŗoiu’s novel can be the memorial of what vernacular Romanian language retained as Ceauûima, that sarcastically links the former Communist leader’s demolitions of the 1980s of the historic town, leaving behind vast empty fields, to the destruction of Hiroshima during the WW2. Oŗoiu’s novel is the political rewriting of mysterium tremendum, in which religion is LQYHUVHG LQWR VHFXODU SROLWLFV ,I E\ mysterium tremendum, we understand the holy as mystery that repels, interpreted as the fear of God, Oŗoiu translates it into the fear of the political leader who passes himself off as a Supreme Being. The walls of Old Bucharest (which used to be called Le Petit Paris for its architectonic splendour) DUH SXW GRZQ úWHIDQ WKH VXFFHVVRU RI WKH Balkan Master Manole, 39 like many of his colleagues, helplessly witnesses the death of old Bucharest; the appropriate way to do it is through what Romanians call ‘a face haz de necaz’ (to laugh in tragic situations): The construction area will extend up to [...] Ah, no matter how delicately the pointing stick has come near, the Old Mint has laid its walls flat in the street! The tracer makes a nervous gesture with the stick. The Bell Tower of Holy Friday lets out a single plaintive toll and founders in a cloud of rubble. The tracer, 38 39

2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 109 Ibid., p. 356

376 Arleen Ionescu involuntary conductor of the disaster, gesticulates pitifully. Ah, his baton is bewitched, it seems, all it touches turns to ruin! 40

The buildings are all in delirium tremens: The building shakes from fear of him+P,WVKDNHVUDWKHUa lot. ‘Hold on, mate! Don’t move!’ Big Bro hollers. ‘Ker-plunk’ goes the building. And flops round on the other side. 41

6\PEROLFDOO\ úWHIDQ OLYHV LQ DQ ROG KRXse that is close to the demolishing site that he calls the Apocalypse: The first shift starts at 6.30. The second shift at 14.30. What are the plans of the Apocalypse for us? When does our turn come? We don’t know. We all VKDNH, shake, full of dreams. The house shakes, full of cracks. 42

The coldness of the house reminds us of the 1988 decree according to which all public spaces had to be kept to a temperature of no more than 16 degrees Celsius (about 63 degrees Fahrenheit) in winter. Since gas and heating were often turned off, people had to resort to natural gas containers, or charcoal stoves, in spite of being connected to the mains úWHIDQ complains in his diary: ‘,WUHPEOH7UHPHQVWUHPEOHVin me. The cold burns my guts.’43 The protagonist’s speech becomes here the discourse on madness and his language the delirium (Verrückheit) of expression. 44

Speaking of (to) the ghost a few considerations on spectral language The second method to trace the ghost proposed by Derrida is through language: ‘one cannot speak of generations of skulls or spirits (Kant quit genuit Hegel genuit Marx) except on the condition of language’. 45 ,QKLVGLVFXVVLRQVZLWK'HUULGD&DSXWRFRQFOXGHGWKDW‘the irrepressible energy of Joycean textuality’ was ‘not pure abandon, sheer play, and gambol, but a structured movement of acquisition, an accumulative, in-gathering, encircling, encyclopaedic movement which attempts to summarize the ‘infinite

40 41 42 43 44 45

Ibid., p. 111 Ibid., p. 112 Ibid., p. 27 Ibid., p. 22 See Derrida, p. 163 Ibid., p. 9

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 377

memory of humanity’.’ 46 This is why the action of Ulysses was compared by Derrida to Hegelian Erinnerung, inwardly appropriating and making one’s own the entirety of the preceding historical process, not by way of lifting it up (aufheben) “vertically” into an ingathering, spiralizing concept (Begriff), as in Hegel’s Logic, but, let us say, by way of releasing “horizontally” the infinitely associative power of signifiers to link on to other signifiers across an endless surface of language. 47

,Q WKH VKDGRZ RI WKH -R\FHDQ SRVWPRGHUQLW\ 2ŗoiu’s language is nevertheless a memory of humanity. At least four languages are quite present in the book, with no translation provided: English and French combining in the second person or third person narrator’s ludic voices always ready to create a new pun, a new sonorous joke, Leopold Krebb’s German which onl\ 2OLYHU úWHIDQ’s lover understands and responds to, Pol’V ,WDOLDQ 3RO UHWXUQHG IURP 7RULQR ZKHUH KH VSHQW HQRXJK WLPH WR WUDQVIRUP 5RPDQLDQ LQWR D NLQG RI ,WDOLDQ GLDOHFW  Whole dictionaries are buried in the texture of Oŗoiu’s novel (lists of fruit, vegetables, wines), maps, scientific discourse, formulas, mountaineering rules, car mechanics. ,WLValso the evolution of social organization that somehow Oŗoiu imports from Vico through Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. With Oŗoiu, the gestural precedes the written and the written precedes the oral. ,QKLV‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and the Spectres of Marx’, Werner Hamacher starts from the words that Marx uses in the chapter which opens Das Capital, in the first volume The Production Process of Capital under the title ‘Commodities’, in the section ‘The Form of Value or Exchange Value’: ‘Cloth speaks.’ Hamacher shows in that the language of Marx, this is ‘translated into the analytical - and ironic - language of the critique of the very same political economy which defines the categories of cloth language’. 48 Marx’s theory was very much concerned with the concept of commodity fetishism, which linked the subjective aspect of economic value to the objective one. Relating this form of speaking to Jacques Derrida’s use in Specters of Marx ‘of something like a cloth’, a screen, ‘a projection surface for phantoms’, Hamacher concludes that ‘both references to the cloth sustain an uneasy relationship to one of the most 46

47 48

John Caputo, Deconstruction in a Nutshell. A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), p. 184 Caputo, p. 184 Werner Hamacher, ‘Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and the Specters of Marx’, in Ghostly Demarcations, A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. by Jacques Derrida, and others (London, New York: Verso, 1999), p. 168

378 Arleen Ionescu powerful metaphors of the philosophical tradition: the metaphor of covering, veiling, mystification and fetish.’ 49 Oŗoiu’s language is sometimes not cloth, but to translate mots-à-mots the Romanian phrase limbaj de lemn, deriving from the French langue de bois, it is wood. A fetish. ,W LV a commodity language. We know from Hamacher that semantically, pragmatically and grammatically speaking, commodity-language is characterized by abstraction and speculation. Disregarding any all ‘natural determinations’, it can be considered not only ‘a language of exchange’, but it can be connected to ‘turning’, ‘reversal’, and ‘specular inversion.’50 Marx had associated the discourse of fetishism to the religious world and described commodity language as a discourse of madness ,Q &HDXûHVFX’s age, religion was replaced by socialist materialism and God by the Party OHDGHU7KHDJH2ŗRLXGHVFULEHVLQKLVQRYHO was characterized by a language of madness which encapsulated the predetermined communist doctrines that had to be communicated to people through mass media and different other oral formulations (in public meetings, workplace minutes). Derrida’s ‘dancing table’ 51 coming on stage is LQ2ŗRLX’s novel the wooden language which no longer expressed a reality, but was considered to confer special powers to the ones using it. This language was characterized by the disproportionate use of passive forms (a situation was reported, we were informed, we were instructed), by verbal phrases replacing simple verbs, by abundance of words expressing obligation (things being ‘necessary’, ‘obligatory ‘, ‘mandatory’, ‘compulsory’), the use of the plural ‘we’ instead of ‘,’ as a form of politeness, the excessive use of comparatives, placing adjectives before the noun (in the syntax of a language in which they are normally placed after the noun) in order to emphasize the ‘wonderful’ effects of communist dogma. There was a cast of mind of the communist discourse that almost resembled Manichaeism (people and countries were divided into only two categories: good or bad, faithful or traitors, friends or enemies). 2ŗRLX’s protagonist lays this language to rest, yet from time to time different ‘comrades’ exhume its worst tentacles in almost untranslatable fragments, VXFK DV WKH SUHVHQWDWLRQ RI WKH HPSOR\HHV RI WKH ,QVWLWXWH RI Architecture,52 the chapter ‘Arhi-tectonica’, the minutes of the 29th of October ‘party meeting’ (made up of four parts: Political information, Report, Discipline, Duties, 53 the chapter containing the opinions of all social classes on the pool that was formed near a construction site (‘The Flood 49 50 51 52 53

Hamacher, p. 169 Ibid, p. 171 Derrida, p. 160 2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, pp. 92-99 Ibid., pp. 100-120

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 379

Face-to-)DFHWR,UVRS’ [Potopul faŗĈ FX,UVRSXO]) 54 are historical documents of a language that Romanians used for almost forty years. This language is a Minotaur that needs to be lost there in a hallucinatory maze of fake, surrogate language, which conveys no meaning. One fragment combines linguistic clichés which are classified as in an opinion poll: people are asked about their views on a kind of artificial lake that was formed from a building site that tempered with the sewage system,QVWHDGRIVHDUFKLQJWKHURRWRI the architectonic mistake, úWHIDQ LV IDVFLQDWHG E\ ‘the opinions of the population caught out in all their dodecocacophonous polyphony’. 55 An engineer explains scientifically: The network’s in overdrive. Sir, those canals are killing us! We are infuriated [...] we’re up to our necks in sh [...] – delete – in sludge discharged by the network. Look it rejected staff again! No, mate, you spelt it wrong, not dejected, but rejected!’. 56

Censoring himself, being aware that his explanation will be analysed by Security people, he censors the spelling mistakes of the reporter too. A major-lieutenant says: ‘We do not know, coz’ we didn’t get instructions. We are here to defend the revolutionary conquests of our people.’57 The lesson he learned and that he has to give to other people is that he is innocent and other people are to blame, for not having given ‘instructions’. Delivering speeches on the defence of the conquests of the socialist revolution was a fetish that gave people the illusion they were in control of their life, while in fact getting instructions on how to think from somebody higher allowed false models of causality for events. Waiting for instructions jogs our memory of the communist slogan ‘we work, we do not think’. Somebody shouts: ‘Comrade, hold off the provocations, or else ,’m calling the Militia right now.’58 Comrade Secrieru, a security officer disguised as an ‘economic secretary’, mentions: What does this pool mean? Vote of censorship with warning, this is what it PHDQV,I,GRQRWJHWLQVLGHZLWKWKLVILOH,FDQNLVVmy career goodbye! Lad, can see you’re handy [...] want to do me a favour? Take me on the other side! How? Well, carry me on your EDFN,LPSORUH\RX,’ll give you a twenty lei note. No? Two! A KXQGUHG$QG,’ll get you in on our buffet, coz’ they put all sorts of goodies: crystal vodka, popcorn, Vietnamese shrimps, untipped Carpathian

54 55 56 57 58

Ibid., pp. 83-87 Ibid., p. 82 Ibid., p. 83 Ibid., p. 83 Ibid., p. 84

380 Arleen Ionescu cigies, 59 Or, coz’ ,VHH\RXGHOLFDWHPD\EH\RX’d care for some toilet paper, the one they make in Prund! You don’t? You don’t want to take me? You ungrateful sod! Parasite! Hooligan! 60

,Q RUGHU WR VDYH KLV FDUHHU SUHVHQWLQJ QHJDWLYH UHSRUWV RQ WKH RQHV ZKR fight against socialism, reports that may send them to jail or condemn them to death), he would offer through commodity language any commodity to the one who is ready to help him save his precious career. Somebody called ‘Blue Eyes’ 61 says ‘Well met! Still from Section Five, right? Good idea about the poll! Not blindingly obvious [...] 2N,’m going back to my sector. Keep up the good work, colleague!’. 62 ,QWKLVFRGHGODQguage, he recognizes one colleague similarly working undercover and using ‘wood language’ he creates people the illusion that their ‘good’ work is useful for the society. Knowing the duplicitous effects of communist discourses of truth and lie, and being aware of how ‘good’ their work was, we can only see the delirium (Verrückheit) of expression and ask, similarly to Derrida: ‘This madness here? Those ghosts there? Or spectrality in general?’ 63 Written and published in a capitalist Romania, Oŗoiu’s book reminds us through language that the ghost never dies, and coming-back can always take place in a future-to-come.

‘The spirit of the spirit’ is work The last part of this paper attempts to claim that the ‘thing works, whether it transforms or transforms itself, poses or decomposes itself: the spirit, the ‘spirit of the spirit’ is work.’ 64 Oŗoiu believes that there is nothing outside the text. My feeble cry for help was met with a candid smile and the promise to write another novel in which to explain his intentions. A book to come. Therefore, in spite of dealing with a contemporary writer who is there, alive, to testify to the spirit of his work, in this chapter , KDYHQR FKRLFH EXWWR resort to my own limited critical tools. Using Jean-Michel Rabaté’s terms, Oŗoiu’s novel can be classified as ‘theory not of literature, but as literature’. 65

59 60 61 62 63 64 65

The poor men’s cigarettes in communism. 2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 84 The Security people were called ‘blue-eyed boys’. 2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 86 Derrida, p. 164 Ibid., p. 9 See Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Future of Theory (Cornwall: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), pp. 117-40

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 381

One of Oŗoiu’s narrators (the first-SHUVRQQDUUDWRU,as witness, claims his omnipresence and his All-mighty powers – he is himself ‘an agent of the Apocalypse’. 66 He further claims to be one of the crane operators, the one who is awake in the darkness and who can pick up one building to destroy. Through a window he sees a blue light coming from a computer screen on which a writer wrote in darkness. Near it there is a writer who died drowned in his own vomit. 67 ,QWKLVsetting, the screen of the computer displays two messages: Canon and Word processor. The literary canon in the communist age did not spare writers who criticized socialism; quite on the contrary, the ones who ‘entered the canon’ praising the mother and father of the nation- Elena and Nicolae Ceauûescu, escaped the cannonball. The rest ended up in death similarly to the writer on the floor. That writer who chose to criticize the atrocities of his contemporary age ‘achieved’ his death, to use one more time a Blanchovian expression: he tied ‘himself tight to his death with a tie of which he was the judge. He made his death; he made himself mortal and in this way gave himself the power of a maker and gave to what he made its meaning and its truth.’68 Such a writer chose his death because he transformed his word processor into a ‘world processor’, 69 yet the world he chose to analyse was ‘a world about to perish.’70 This time the crane operator chooses to destroy the church near the blue window and to spare the new writer who processes the world. Could he be an alter- ego, the traitor of Oŗoiu himself? This is the way we enter the literary space of Oŗoiu’s novel. Blanchot called the literary space (l’espace littéraire or l’espace de l’oeuvre) the ‘distance’ of the work not only to ‘every other object which exists’, but also with respect to itself. The writer never finishes his work which is doomed to remain permanently undone, unfinished, alone. The radicality of the experience of writing leads the writer to the de-individualizing ordeal of désoeuvrement, that characterizes the ordeal of the writer who remains the victim of what he writes, but ultimately in the dark, at the mercy of the reader whose reading never illuminates the text. Therefore, in order to distance himself from his own work, Oŗoiu proposes a second beginning of the novel, which he entitles Bloody 66 67

68

69 70

2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 9 An obvious reference to Clarence Malcom Lowry, the author of Under the Volcano, RQH RI 2ŗRLX’s favourite novels. However, Marin Preda, a Romanian author was allegedly ‘made’ to die in this way, after having criticized the communist regime and having escaped censorship a few times. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, p. 95. Translation modified (changing Present to Past for the coherence of my text) 2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 10 Ibid., p. 10

382 Arleen Ionescu Morning, yet the morning starts with the same future perfect ‘,WLVWKHHQG’ the architect shudders, suddenly awake from the shock wave of the roar’.71 úWHIDQ the architect can relate his own death, but he has no time to do it, his Omega watch broke some time ago and was taken to be repaired by Leopold Krebbs. Apart from the striking similarities EHWZHHQúWHIDQ’s drawing an omega on the window steamed by his breath and Leopold Bloom’s writing on the sand, ‘, AM. A.’ (reminding of Jesus in the New Testament book of Revelation, the ‘alpha and omega’ of this world, the beginning and the end, the first and the last), úWHIDQ’s commentaries on advertisements of Omega watches can make us think of at least two of the other meanings of Omega: in physics, the Greek letter represents the ohm – 6, unit of electrical resistance, and in astronomy it refers to orbital mechanics, and to the longitude of the ascending node of an orbit. Gil, the creator is already dead (or rather dead-drunk, similarly to the self-destructive Geoffrey Firmin, the protagonist and narrator of Malcom Lowry’s Under the Volcano): Hic, we are here and now. Hic (this is not a hiccup) et nunc. Neither in the past, nor in the future. As the past is the inferno, don’t you think? 72 Soon our meeting from the earths will end. By Marin Preda.73

He would vanish as a ghost, not because a new day is dawning, but because ‘his bottle of cognac is almost over: ‘, WKLQN P\ hour has almost come. Already! O cursed spite,DPZDNLQJXS0\SDVVSRUWLVH[SLULQJ’ 74 Hamlet’’s residual survival in Gil’s narrative helps him step towards autothanatography, a report of ‘an experience that can be rendered possible only through an unthinkable sur-vivre which would make it possible to configure a writing d’outre tombe’, a ‘tale of death’s beyond’. 75 Gil’s diary is not (auto)biography because it proceeds ‘from the tomb, where it is (auto)thanatography that would be – impossibly – at home.’ 76 71 72 73 74

75

76

Ibid., p. 11 Ibid., p. 220 Ibid., p. 221 Ibid., p. 223. Translation modified with a view to make the spectre of Hamlet more obvious. >&UHGFĈ-PLVXQĈGHûWHSWĈWRUXO'HMD2VRDUWĈFUXGĈ0ĈWUH]HVF,PLH[SLUĈ passportul!] ,YDQ Callus, ‘(Auto)thanatography or (Auto)thanatology’, Forum of Modern Language Studies, 41, 4 (2005), 427-38 (p. 427) ,YDQ &DOOXV ‘Comparatism and (Auto)thanatography: Death and Mourning in Blanchot, Derrida, and Tim Parks’, Comparative Critical Studies 1, 3 (2004) , 337-58. (p. 339)

Hauntologies of Post-Joycean Modernity in Romanian Literature 383

Gil’s QRYHO WDNHV DV LWV SURWDJRQLVW úWHIDQ DV 0DQHO and entombs not only úWHIDQ’s former marriage which ended on the ‘historical day’ of March, 3rd, 1987 77 and his repeated falls (deaths) and returns to life, but the communist age, which it ‘resists’, as writing in those days was regarded as a form of resistance: +RZ FDQ , ILJKW DJDLQVW WKH $SRFDO\SVH" 6LPSOH , SUHVV D EXWWRQ DQG WKH machine-gun of the typewriter starts chattering, spitting ink and word jets, emptying its memory. Memory? Yes, since it is an electronic typewriter. 78

The way to write and (possibly) to get published is to transform reality into ILFWLRQ,QWKHVDPH/HQLQLVWhistorical materialism, Gil-the writer imposes to himself a way of writing his novel, blurring and burying events in an intertextual tomb, as the author is aware not to expose himself dangerously, and tries to protect himself against the pressure of the age: ‘Well, what about Reality...?! Reality, old and bothersome hag, should do well and re-orientate, to admit its mistakes, to adapt itself to fiction!’ 79 ,QLWVWUDQVIRUPHGIRUP‘the writing of the dead resists being understood as anything but the script of the living’.80 The astronomic meaning of omega, longitude of the ascending node of an orbit is reversed in the novel into a descending node. Through M.C. Escher’s mould of Ascending and Descending, that represents his permanent VRXUFHRILQVSLUDWLRQúWHIDQPDQDJHVWRmake his friend write the disaster, the falling of communism. ,Q VSLWH RI ZDLWLQJ IRU WKH sunrise, the protagonist is kept inside an already Orphic space, reminding us of book of disaster: the dis-aster caused by the falling of the star (aster, astre): Light breaks forth: the burst of light, the dispersion that resonates or vibrates dazzlingly – and in clarity clamours but does not clarify. The breaking forth of light, the shattering reverberation of a language to which no hearing can be given. 81 77

78 79 80 81

Quite accidentally, the third of March is a memorable form of ‘mysterium tremendum’ in Romania, 3rd of March 1978 being the day when a devastating earthquake decimated the population of Bucharest. Therefore the numerological SDWWHUQVRI2ŗRLX’s novel would be 03.03 and 30.10; 3X3+9 (which is different from 78 (03.03.1978) transformed into 87 (30.10.1987). The day of the novel is a 3D day, HQFRXQWHULQJPDQ\WKUHHVDPRQJZKLFKWKUHHIRUPVRIZULWLQJLQVLGHRQHúWHIDQ’s GLDU\úWHIDQ’s autobiographical novel, Pol’s notes, etc. 2ŗRLXCoaja lucrurilor, p. 27 Ibid., p. 30 Callus, ‘(Auto)thanatography or (Auto)thanatology’, p. 437 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 39

384 Arleen Ionescu The transformation of reality, Oŗoiu’s conjuration can be inscribed in what Eugen Negrici called in his book Literatura româneascĈ sub comunism [Romanian Literature under Communism] ‘metaprose’. For Negrici, ‘the metaprose meditates (with effects in the order of parody, pastiche and intertextuality) on its poetics and makes its subject precisely from this tireless narration of the way the book is written.’82 Thinking of his own experience as a writer, Gil becomes soon what Blanchot called a désoeuvré writer, a writer ‘idled or out of work’. 83 On the spur of the moment, pray to what Oŗoiu calls ‘an excess of exigence’, Gil would erase his work. ,QZKDW%ODQFKRWXVHGWRFDOO‘the madness of writing’, an ‘insane game’ that ‘lies between reason and unreason’, the writer of the text feels like departing from his own text, and falls ‘between the act of writing and the absence of the work.’ 84 Yet, he declares: +LF,DPSUD\WRDQDFFHVVRIH[FHVVRIH[LJHQF\,WHDURXWIURPWKHW\SHZULWHU WKHWH[WVDVWKH\DUHFKXUQHGRXWE\WKHGHEDXFKHU\RIPHPRU\,WHDUWKHPRXW and stuff them into the stove, as in Alecsandri’VZRUN