Literature on the Move 9042011556, 9789042011557

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Literature on the Move

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Intemationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft

In Verbindung mit Dietrich Briesemeister (Friedrich Schiller-Universitat Jena) - Guillaume van Gernert (Universiteit Nijmegen) - Joachim Knape (Universitat Tiibingen) - Klaus Ley (Johannes Gutenberg-Universitat Mainz) - John A. McCarthy (Vanderbilt University) - Manfred Pfister (Freie Universitat Berlin) - Sven H. Rossel (University of Washington) - Azade Seyhan (Bryn Mawr College) - Horst Thome (Universitat Kiel) herausgegeben von

Alberto Martino (Universitat Wien)

Redakteure: Norbert Bachleitner & Alfred Noe Anschrift der Redaktion: Institut rur Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Berggasse 11/5, A-l090 Wien

Literature on the Move

Ottmar Ette Translated by Katharina Vester

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003

Originally published as: Ottmar Ette: Literatur in Bewegung. Raum und Dynamik grenziiberschreitenden Schreibens in Europa und Amerika. Velbriick Wissenschaft (Marz 200 I)

Cover illustration: Jean-Honore Fragonard, Les hasards heureux de / 'escarpo/ette, 1767. Le papier sur lequel Ie present ouvrage est imprime remplit les prescriptions de "ISO 9706:1994, Information et documentation - Papier pour documentsPrescriptions 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". ISBN: 90-420-1155-6 ©Editions Rodopi B.Y., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003 Printed in The Netherlands

Table of contents Signposts ................................................................................................... 9 One ........................................................................................................... 17 Parcours Mapping a world on the move Approaching movement. Dimensions of the travelogue. Literature and traveling. Travel literature as frictional literature. The places of the travelogue: parting, climax, arrival, return. Travel literary place and hermeneutic movement: circle, pendulum, line, star, jump. A travelogue without journey?

Two ........................................................................................................... 51 Traverse From the surfacing of America to the disappearing of Europe America in a bird' s flight. Discovery and conquest, circle and line. Experience of the border and border experience. America as divided space. Mobile border texts. American dreams and spaces and the landscapes of theory. The acceleration and disappearing of Europe.

Three ......................................................................................................... 69 Passage Eye, ear and the place of writing Eye and Ear. Place of writing and burning glass. Authorization and textpansion. The eye and the doubled place of writing. Bestseller and longseller, image and text. The gaze upon the reader. Iconotextuality and the staging of the desk. A desk in the jungle. A desk in Berlin.

Four ........................................................................................................... 111 Passage Writing in modernity "Only happy when I do something new." "For the first time I saw the ocean." "To understand the various elements of a wide landscape." "The uniform, hopeless picture of divided mankind." "It narrows the steppe as well as the spirit ofthe wanderer." "Humboldtian Writing."

Five ........................................................................................................... 129 Traverse From the modem narrative space to the Orbis Tertius Story against love. The sculptor and his model. Balzac and his model. The modem narrative model. Balzac's readers. A reader of Balzac. The framing of the reading. Between fiction and diction. Fictions of reading. Encyclopedia, chance and reading. In Tlons world. The dissemination of the fantastic within the real. The reality effect. The complete fiction of a modem literature.

Six ............................................................................................................. 153 Passage Proteus in Uruguay Cinematograph and mirror of eternity. Sermon and example. A book in permanent becoming. Fragments of a discourse of the soul. Continuous and discontinuous readings. Textmobile and spiritual autobiography.

Seven ......................................................................................................... 177 Passage Iphigenia in Mexico Question of identity and cultural space. New cultural horizons. Model of antiquity and deviation. Iphigenia, cruel. European expansion and American space. Latin American avant-garde and European hearing impairment.

Eight .......................................................................................................... 199 Traverse Avant-garde, Post-avant-garde, Postmodemism Everything is invented. Cubist writing after cubism. Break with the break of tradition. A global painting. The vaccination (of the) avant-garde. A little avant-garde. The rearguard of the avant-garde. Places of reading. Post-avantgarde past-avant-gardian. Post-avant-garde or postmodernism? Post-avantgarde postmodern. Pictures of avant-garde, post-avant-garde and postmodernism. After postmodernism - before the avant-garde?

Nine ........................................................................................................... 225 Passage The world inside the head Of images and after-images. Approaching the city. The city as inner space the inner space of the city. The struggle of the images. Pictures and counterimages of the city. The city in the underground. After-images of the Shoa.

Ten ............................................................................................................ 243 Passage On the swing Pfeiffer with three f s, and the limits of youth. The baron in the trees and the limits of the game. The girl, the leaves and the limits of showing. The limits of love in the book of youth.

Eleven ....................................................................................................... 255 Passage as Traverse Crossing the mangroves The laboratory of humankind. The logic of the neither - nor and the time of the "dads". The laboratory of Maryse Conde. Novel structure and space structure. Structuring and movement. Hermeneutic movement and transitory identity. Transcultural identity and transitory figuration. The mangroves as tree. The mangrove as root. The mangrove as rhizome. The tree as mangrove. Two logics and the landscapes of theory.

Twelve ....................................................................................................... 295 Return How the New World appeared in the Old and became in the New the Old World At the end of movement? Movement and death, movement as death. Letters from the end of the world. Personal description as travelogue. Europe as movement.

Short selected bibliography ...................................................................... 309 Index of names .......................................................................................... 311

Signposts The experience of living after history, in a posthistoire, seems to repeat itself in modem Europe with a certain regularity. It can be found in various grades, for instance, in Georg Forster l at the end of the 18th century, in Jules Micheld around the middle of the 19th century or in the recent present. 3 The experience of after-historical periods is intertwined with the evolution of historical thinking in general in a particular way. There are a number of clues that we have overcome the sensation of living in a post-history that was widely held in North America and Europe, but also in other places. And so begins a period of the second half of the 20 th century, which was labeled postmodernity, often interpreted as an epoch by itself, but which apparently settles in a common space of modernity and postmodernity.4 This book has been written against the background of this new situation and in expectation of a fresh evaluation of cultural aims, which have to be shaped by a structure of space that has been fundamentally changed in territorial and non-territorial respects: this shall serve as a first determination of a room for maneuver that started to move again. It embraces, therefore, in the chronological sense, the time/space of modernity and postmodernity between the second half of the 18 th and the end of the 20 th Century. At the same time it interrogates literature regarding the evolution of spatial concepts, which often also in dialogue with other media, particularly the visual arts - were meaningful for the last quarter of the second millennium and that emerge above an aesthetic and "spatiality" of the modem. The point of departure for a bordercrossing literature on the move will be constituted by travel literature, from which the view should be opened up on other spaces, dimensions and patterns of movement, which will shape the literatures of the 21 st Century. And these will become - one needs no prophetic gift to see - for a major part literatures with no fIXed abode. When our ten-year-old daughter asked me what the title of this book was to be and heard that it is concerned with "Literature on the move," she was visibly disappointed and surprised. Literature actually would be not on the move; indeed, all the letters stayed firmly and did not move at all - in contrast to the images of film or the Internet. After a lengthier pause she added that she had already thought about letters changing their place in the book overnight and that they might not be in their proper anymore place the next morning. Was this what I meant by movement? She had hit upon an idea that had caused already fear, but probably also fascination, in Jorge Luis Borges - a figure who perhaps more than any other stands at the interface of the modem and the postmodern - when he was a child, according to his own statement. Books can indeed change overnight. "All of a sudden" texts are read differently, and readers rub their eyes in surprise since they always believed they know their authors well. Simply standing still does not help: the texts move along, even without us, and leave us behind.

1 1 1 1

See Lepenies, Wolf: Das Ende der Naturgeschichte. Wandel kultureller Selbstverstiindlichkeiten in den Wissenschaften des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1978, p. 118. See the essay, published first in April 1951, by Barthes, Roland: Michelet, I'Histoire et la Mort. In (idem.): Oeuvres completes. Edition etablie et presentee par Eric Marty. 3 vols. Paris: Seuil 1993-1995, here vol. 1, p. 94. See Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich: Posthistoire Now. In: Gumbrecht, Hans-Ulrich I Link-Heer, Ursula (eds.): Epochenschwellen und Epochenstrukturen im Diskurs der Literatur- und Sprachhistorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1985, pp. 34-50. See Ette, Ottmar: Roland Barthes. Eine intellektuellc Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1998, pp. 487-489.

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But that is only one part of the movement, which I will focus upon. What would it mean, if not only letters (and single texts), but literature in general would be on the move, or if we look at it from this perspective? Ifliterature - as Umberto Eco thought, inspired by the moveable pieces of art by Calder - would turn as a mobile, with which the observer moving themselves - would constitute constantly new configurations?5 But would it then be still possible to understand the dynamics of such a complex space and to distinguish diverse patterns and basic figures of movements, as in a choreography at which we can look, but whose steps we can follow and dance by ourselves? It is these questions, which have fascinated me for a long time, that I will try to follow, in a literary sense, in this volume not to answer them in totality, but to depict basic figures ofliterature's being on the move and to open up new perspectives of analysis. If we look out of a train window at another train on the neighboring track, we often cannot tell whether our train, the other one or both are moving. These short, transposing, temporary moments, which we eliminate quickly with the help of an alarmed activation of body sensation in a kind of self-securing of one's own standpoint via fixed objects, can be given to us by literature - but these moments are then longer and more intense. Not only the places described, but also the places of writing and the places of reading are in reciprocal as well as in independent movement. Far too seldom we see - and reception theory has heretofore hardly contributed anything - that we, the reader, also move constantly. That does not only concern the fact that our readings are embedded into diverse contexts of other readings (texts, sign, everyday life experiences, etc.), but also the phenomenon (which is little considered in all its consequences) that we only rarely read a longer book in the same place. Certainly, the traditional places for reading still exist. The apparently least mobile of these places is the bed at home, the reading before falling into slumber - here the book is the ideal transition into a world of dreams. We take the book with us on our way to work, we read while traveling or we finish it after we return home. The journey reading contains a no less spatial and temporal dynamic than the one that emerges when we start to read a book but finish it months later. Are these movements without influence on our perception, our reading of the book? Would our appropriation of the text be the same if we were to read it exclusively in the closed-up world of a library? Is the world as a will and imagination the same if we perceive it as bedtime reading or as train reading? The motivation and the conception of this book goes in a sense back to the question of literary space, which came up a few years ago. 6 It became obvious how fast coordinates change that are built up between literary texts and other texts, other authors, cultures and continents. This is not only true for single texts but also for text groups. Actually it concerns - to name a geocultural example - a historically changing asymmetry of literary relationships between Europe and America in general. It was apparent that the synchrony of the analysis of "static" spaces in a given point of time could be complemented and dynamized by diachrony. What are the consequences of these findings for the analysis of concrete single texts, which shall stand in the foreground of the following "Passages"? The political, cultural, economic, social and also literary spaces surrounding us have changed since the second half of the 18 th century with increasing rapidity. Literatures acknowledged this fact, while literary studies mostly ignored the problem - even in the field

1 6

See Eco, Umberto: Opera aperta. Milano: Bompiani 1976, p. 157. My first publication focused on this question was: "Cierto indio que sabe frances": Intertextualitiit und literarischer Raum in Jose Martis "Amistad funesta"." In: Iberoamericana (Frankfurt am Main) IX, 25-26 (1985), pp. 42-52.

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of travel literature, which seems to be made for investigations of this kind. The present study tries to give a couple of answers to these problems and to point out how the dynamics of space and space relations on various levels as well as in concrete single texts can be analyzed within the context of greater temporal development. The "Passages" and the "Traverses" focus on these movements, each from different, but never static viewpoints. The new mappings, the new cartographization of the cultural, which co-shaped at least the last quarter of the past century under the sign of the postmodern, start to lose their efficacy and their ability to represent. New movements, which indeed had been announced by the discussions in the shadow of postmodernity debates, claim new spaces for themselves and demand, especially for literary texts, new modes of thought and possibilities of analysis. It seems to me that this concerns in particular imaginations and concepts that tum into a changed and still rapidly changing spatiality. Besides an unmixed phenomenon of multiculturalism and the intercultural phenomenon of mixing, we now have a transcultural phenomenon that is all mixed up (I do mean this in a positive sense), in which the different cultures penetrate and alter each other. Constant habitats and residences of cultures belong in their majority to the past. The discussion about cultural hybridity, forced from the "margins" to the "centers" but increasingly worldwide, points unmistakably to these new, irreversible developments. The much cited and often rightfully criticized as fashionable/non-committal discourse of globalization has not been considered sufficiently in its consequences for literature and even more so to those studies and fields of knowledge which are concerned with literature. The thoughts presented here start with the conviction that whatever shape a further evolution might take, whatever might come "after" the postmodern - not considering whether we declare it ended or not - in any case the problem field and the experience of space will be of decisive importance (determining meaning?). But might this be a basically erroneous evaluation? Is the object we focus on not threatened by minimization, indeed even extinction? There are good reasons to claim that space will disappear in the future. On the one hand, we all see that an infrastructure modernized with increasing rapidity reduces and minimizes the time necessary to overcome distances. Thus the spaces within which we move constantly become bigger but the time connected to them smaller and smaller. To put it differently: the more we stretch space, the smaller the world becomes. The situation is a paradox: while we widen our space of movement, we minimize with improving velocities of movement this space and those spaces neighboring it in more and more radical ways. Contrary to the space in space, the space on Earth is limited. Today, the boundaries of the ecumene are accessible within hours. The quantity of crossings of its borders - be it polar regions, high altitude mountain regions or broad deserts - questions the limits of the anecumene itself and often couples these spaces that are not only scientifically but increasingly touristically used spaces to our space of experience. At the same time new spaces are yielded to literature. While modernity from its start always sought borderspaces with Rousseau, for example, the high mountain area - as visual foci for (selt)reflection, in the postmodern - with at times surprising consequences - new landscapes of theory have been developed, which - as evident as in the (for postmodernity characteristic) desert - are also regions beyond or close to the border of spaces on this planet where human beings can settle permanently. But it is not done with this world-wide expansion and at the same time reduction and minimization of space, which also result in those touristic offers to travel around the globe - left or right - in a few hops and a couple of stop-overs. It has been convincingly pointed out that empirical space is annulled by rapid evolution of electronic media and the related

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creation of virtual space. 7 When we interconnect in almost~simultaneousness the most different spaces of our planet via the Internet or satellite and put them into the same virtual temporality, then we have brought the empirical space close to zero. Why should we then speak about space ~ and especially about space that is empirical to experience: Why should one choose this species which is in the process of disappearing as a point of departure for new reflections? Whoever in the devolution of his own life (not only occupational) experienced the introduction of the personal computer undoubtedly recollects the commentaries and forecasts that the writing on a virtual surface would very quickly make the use of paper superfluous, or if not, reduce it drastically. As is well known quite the opposite is the case, and we wonder with concern how we can possibly master the ever-growing avalanche of paper that is now electronically produced. What if this experience can be transferred to the problem of space? What if we did not face the creation of a world-wide homogenized space that extinguishes all differences successively, but if we actually experienced a differentiating of spaces that can play with their differences because of a reciprocal communication that is fundamentally eased? The dream of modernity, the creation of an increasingly homogenized space before the background of world traffic, world trade, world economy, has, to a large extent, become true ~ a dream that started with the modem age and that has in Christopher Columbus, who necessarily has to be included, one of its multi-layered symbolic figures. But simultaneously with this development that has been quickening since the end of the 18th century, new cultural spaces have been developed, which do not stand for disdifferentiation but for new phenomena of differentiation. One might therefore confidently assume an ongoing simultaneousness of both developments. That is why the problem of processes configuring space seems to me of such decisive meaning, not least for the literatures that are unfolding right now and that will be written in future, and the studies that are focused on them and try to learn from them. Globalization is at once a fact and a fiction, better still: a staging. Nothing has made this more apparent than the worldwide raging millennium fever. The broadcasting of the start of the new millennium moving forward in planetary rotation speed offered a gigantic scenery, whose actual main figures were the worldwide networked media themselves. The medium has been not only the message, but at the same time transmitter, receiver, protagonist and channel in one. There was no lack of supernumeraries. Choirs of schoolchildren in the South Seas or Big Wheel installations in Paris, rejoicing celebrations in Asia, rites of shamans in the Andes, or orgies of fireworks in the United States: it was always a superlativist global show, staged by Western media for Western media. The global village celebrated "its" media. The world-wide broadcasting showed the globalization and even more so its imaginative character, insofar as the most different cultures seemed to participate that indeed have nothing in common with the Western Christian embedding of the worldwide and irresistible expansion process hidden behind codes and number symbolism besides being dragged into this vortex ~ admittedly a fundamental fact. That, of course, was fact enough. It manifested itself in the way in which the most different of cultures have been telegenic ally and datatransfcrably set into movement worldwide. These evolutions have picked up speed in the range of literatures as well, even if it has not been acknowledged in Europe yet ~ in contrast to the United States. A little oversubtly one could say that the Germans did create the term "Weltliteratur" with Goethe's concept

1

This has especially impressively and originally been described by Schmidt, Aurel: Von Raum zu Raum. Versuch fiber die Reiseliteratur. Berlin: Merve Verlag 1998.

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and brought it into play, but since then have not bothered with it anymore. Actually, it is not done with an internationalization of the literatures in the sphere of G7 countries or of the utterances made by the First World, but it is a real planetary - even if certainly not universal - development. When do we take these evolutions seriously in literary studies and when do we adjust our concepts to them? Why have we so rarely dealt with the question of why crucial innovations and changes at least in the second half of 20th century in such an astonishingly large amount did not come from the "centers" any more, but from the supposed "margins"? Also in this sense literature is on the move, a process that has been constantly strengthened since the end of the 19th century, and has reached meanwhile a breadth and dynamic that changes and will change the literatures of the supposed "centers" in a more fundamental way. Scholarship will change too, especially in Europe. At least in the field of information technology and tradition of knowledge - and literature belongs to this as much as science - the dream of the Italian futurists of ubiquity and simultaneity became everyday reality. While for the French theoretician of the 60's a fixed canon of self-evident European texts (moreover texts from only certain parts of Europe supplemented by a few North American works) was still unchallenged, today such a binding canon no longer exists to a comparable degree. Here, too, things are on the move. In this sense, the study of bordercrossing literatures also means that these are literatures beyond clear-cut national, continental, and territorial borderlines, that these are literatures that cross through and over the until now valid borders of national-literary, literature-historical, genre-historical, or cultural kinds. The present volume turns to borderlinings that not only concern physical geography, nation-states or the stratification of society, not only the various media, the arts, or nature, but also the scholarly disciplines, the literary genres, the landscapes, the myths, the sexes, age. A related goal is to support a new understanding of the studies of these literatures beyond the borderlines between the single disciplines, beyond a scientifically disciplined construction of objects. It is highest time for it: not only because of the unending streams of migration that have for a long time grown to planetary dimensions, the literatures of the 21 st century will be literatures without a fixed abode, literatures that evade attempts at clear territorialization. Goethe's remark from January 31, 1827, has received its meaning only recently: "national literatures do not want to say much today, it is the tum of the epoch of world literature, and everybody must now work to speed up this epoch. "S This volume intends to make its contribution to the task. In its own way this book is many books, but it is especially two books. Be it at times based on a rhizomatic, sometimes even only proliferating thinking (and writing), it nonetheless does not intend to be a rhizomatic book in the sense of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. It resembles, rather, two other types of books, which have been distinguished by the always stimulating French theoreticians. Because it is on the one hand a "root book"9 that absolutely is structured hierarchically and whose stem is a group of basic questions that have already been touched upon. On the other hand it is also the kind of book in which the

1 1

Eckermann, Johann Peter: Gespriiche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens. Herausgegeben von Fritz Bergemann. Bd. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag 1981, p. 211. Deleuze, Gilles I Guattari, Felix: Rhizom. Translated by Dagmar Berger et al. Berlin: Merve Verlag 1977, p. 8.

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"tufty root or the system of small roots" prevails, a type that - as Guattari and Deleuze cunningly added - "modernity likes to claim for itself.,,10 This has not least do to with the fact that the majority of the following chapters developed out of lectures ll that have been supplemented by additional texts and chapters. These lectures have been written - with exception of the 7th chapter - focused on a unified book, whose conception naturally changed during the past five years. Originally a book on travel literature with the title "Travelers and those left at home" was supposed to be written. During the lectures and the following discussions the topic broadened significantly. New chapters had to be written that were completely different from those planned at first; originally planned chapters have been uncoupled and published separately. The volume in its recent version turns among others to texts by Aub, Balzac, Barthes, Baudrillard, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Borges, Butor, Calvino, Cohen, Columbus, Conde, Diderot, Goethe, A.v. Humboldt, Kristeva, La Condamine, La Perouse, Le Clezio, Raynal, Reyes, Rod6, Stadler and Flora Tristan. At the same time it was intended to maintain the possibility of reading the book not only in its totality but also each chapter separately. I do hope that this possibility it still given in spite of all the crossings-over and reciprocal references among the chapters. Besides this linear reading that can be extended to the entire book or single chapters, numerous subtitles should also enable different readings and routes. They serve the orientation and are supposed to enable in the spirit of basic figures of movement that are presented in the first chapter, not only linear, but also circular, discontinuous-jumping, starand pendulum-like readings; and in this way the movement is not only the object and the

10 II

Ibid., p. 9. Further thoughts that are of importance for the concept of this volume can be found in "Continuous and discontinuous readings" in chapter six of the present study. First versions of single chapters that were more or less revised later on already have been published partly in foreign languages. These are in detail for chap. 1: Est-ce que l'on sait oil l'on va? Dimensionen, Orte und Bewegungsmuster des Reiseberichts. In: Bernecker, Walther L. / Kromer, Gertrut (eds.): Die Wiederentdeckung Lateinamerikas. Die Erfahrung des Subkontinents in Reiseberichten des 19. Jabrhunderts. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert Verlag 1997, pp. 29-78; Chap. 3: Diderot et Raynal: l'oeil, l'oreille et Ie lieu de l'ecriture dans I'''Histoire des deux Indes". In: Liisebrink, Hans-Iiirgen / Strugnell, Anthony (ed.): L'''Histoire des deux Indes": reecriture et polygraphie. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation 1996, pp. 385-407 and La mise en scene de la table de travail: poetologie et epistemologie immanentes chez Guillaume-Thomas Raynal et Alexander von Humboldt. In: Wagner, Peter (ed.): Icons - Texts - Iconotexts. Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin - New York: Walter de Gruyter 1996, pp. 175-209; Chap. 5: Unterwegs zum Orbis Tertius? Balzac - Barthes - Borges oder Die vollstlindige Fiktion einer Literatur der Moderne. In: Bremer, Thomas / Heymann, Jochen (eds.): Sehnsuchtsorte. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Titus Heydenreich. Tiibingen: Stauffenburg Verlag 1999, pp. 279-305; Chap. 6: "Una gimnastica del alma". Jose Enrique Rod6, Proteo de Motivos. In: Ette, Ottmar / Heydenreich, Titus (eds.): Jose Enrique Rod6 y su tiempo. Cien afios de Ariel. Frankfurt am Main - Madrid: Vervuert - Iberoamericana 2000, Chap. 7: "Una minuscula Grecia para nuestro uso". Mito griego, identidad mexicana y vanguardia latinoamericana en Alfonso Reyes. In: Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (Liverpool) LXXII (1995), pp. 327-343. I am grateful to the editors of these publications as well as to the organizers of conferences in Mainz, Osnabrock, Ithaca (USA), Mexico and Berlin for their permission to print here the reworked versions. Not in this volume but separately published have been the following essays that were written in the same context: Fernandez de Lizardi: "EI Periquillo Sarniento". Dialogisches Schreiben im Spannungsfeld Europa - Lateinamerika. In: Romanistische Zeitschrift flir Literaturgeschichte / Cahiers d'Histoire des Litteratures Romanes (Heidelberg) XXII, 1-2 (1998), pp. 205-237; Albert Cohen: "Jour de mes dix ans": Riiume und Bewegungen interkultureller Begegnung. In: GroBe, Sybille / SchOnberger, Axel (eds.): Dulce et decorum est philologiam colere. Festschrift fUr Dietrich Briesemeister zu seinem 65. Geburtstag. vol. 2. Berlin: Domus Editoria Europaea 1999, pp. 1295-1322; 'Tres fines de siglo" (Teil I). Kulturelle Riiume Hispanoamerikas zwischen Homogenitiit und Heterogenitiit. In: Iberoromania (Tiibingen) 49 (1999), pp. 97-122; and "Tres fines de siglo" (Teil II). Der Modernismo und die Heterogenitiit von Moderne und Postrnoderne. In: Iberoromania (Tiibingen) 50 (1999), pp. 122-151.

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proceeding of this book but also the way to appropriate it. This volume does not seek to be a tome but a page turner that invites different directions of reading. This book has emerged from movement: more precisely, from movements - the movement of traveling as well as the movement of staying home. It is based fundamentally on those changes of location that come with lectures, conferences and guest lectureship. At times it seems to me the best (and most fertile) places for discussion are those that are beyond the every day horizon of discussions. Therefore this book itself is a result of a movement of literature and scholarship insofar as it is obliged to discussion partners in various American and European countries. I would like to take the opportunity to thank them here. I am especially grateful to my colleagues in Mexico who, in combination with a guest lectureship that was supported by the German Academic Exchange Service, made it possible for me to examine this book another time critically together with students and faculty of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico and the Colegio de Mexico. This foreword was begun in Germany and finished in Mexico. It testifies about the movement, in the sense of motion and emotion to which this book is indebted, and which should be presented from differing, changing perspectives on the following pages. PotsdamlMexico City, MarchiApril2000

Ottmar Ette

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Mapping a world on the move What would a travelogue be, in which it is said, one would stay but without ever having arrived, one would travel but without ever having left - in which it is never said, once departed, if one has arrived or not arrived? Such a report would be a scandal, the exhaustion of readability through loss of blood. Roland Barthes, S / Z

Approaching movement Literature and scholarship are based on an immense number of changes of location that rarely become conscious and upon which it is seldom reflected in literature and even more rarely in scholarship. Whether train or plane, Internet or World Wide Web: Our processes of thinking and writing are based on a multitude of movements that are aimed not so much at space but rather at overcoming space. Disturbing distances should be overcome and relations and forms of exchange that are as direct as possible should become established. Scholarly as well as literary communication lives through overcoming, and at times also through the admittedly problematic cutting-out of space. If literature and scholarship are inevitably connected to space and its overcoming, then it might be meaningful to search for an approach to both via a genre that is open for both fields and forms of knowledge. The travelogue is fundamentally this type of literary and scholarly writing, in which writing becomes perhaps the most conscious about its reference to space, its dynamics, and its needs to move. It might seem paradoxical, but even in the study of travelogue the question about its locations has surprisingly seldom been raised. I do not mean primarily the problem of referentiality of the travelogue, i.e. its organization, either according to the country of origin of certain travelers (for example, the investigation of French, Spanish, German, Chilean or Chinese authors) or according to their geographical goal Gourneys to America, to Europe, to Asia). Because space and movement are omnipresent in the travelogue, they often remain unreflected. But the investigation of literary, hermeneutic, philosophical or writing-specific aspects of travel literature can not only inform us about itself but also allow us new insights about literature and its forms and stagings of knowledge in general. The fascination that travelogues, especially of the 18 th and 19th centuries, had for their contemporary readership is impressive and stayed constant over extended historical periods; it is with these texts of the early modem epoch that we want to begin our Parcours. In the 20th century too, the literary travelogue has lost nothing of its radiance - as can be proved by the extensive and intensive study of this genre during the last 30 years - not only as the object of a however defined (literary-)historical interest or an interest in the history of scholarship, but at the same time as a lively literary form of expression, although the travelogue now has to fight with new competitors and new media on various levels. Not only traveling, but also the forms of writing of the travelogue - as the following chapter will

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demonstrate - have become ubiquitous in contemporary literature. It is well known how a travelogue of the 18th century - Bougainville' s Voyage autour du monde of 1771 - together with other, more or less literarily successful travelogues, like the one by Anson, or by Byron, captivated an audience beyond educated French society, and directly started a "Tahitian fashion," coupled with a longing for other social forms and times. Still, Georg Forster, who, on James Cook's second journey following the traces of Bougainville, entered what the latter had named the so richly referential Nouvelle Cythere, and who later reported about this experience in his impressive (and for the German travel literature of the 19th century exemplary)' travelogue, could not escape the charm of the Frenchman's creation that was well known to his contemporaries. He too, was not free from the "South Seas intoxication" that rolled over the European audience in the last third of the 18th century. Undoubtedly, the fascination produced by travelogues, especially about far-away cultures, is not least shaped by the perception of cultural, social and political aIterity, but our example shows how high the part of the Self can be in the perception of the cultural Other: Since Forster's enthusiastic description, impressive in its poetry, of ensembles of scenic beauty, generous abundance of nature, healthy climate with naive morals, loveliness and pleasurable body shapes of the inhabitants of this Island was now published, the South Seas-drunken audience read from this 'joumey around the world" only that which fit into the concepts they have grown fond of?

The complex play between the reported and that which is not known by a contemporary audience on one side, and the existing amount of knowledge of scientific and literary origin on the other (which often is able to transfer the unknown unconsciously but sometimes in well calculated fashion into structures of pre-knowledge), here appears obvious. This is about function modes of perception of cultural alterity, that have been - especially during previous decades - worked out and presented in an increasingly differentiated manner,3 therefore a discussion seems to be superfluous here. The geography offers such considerable advantages that only a few estimable and brilliant human beings exist who do not tum its knowledge into pleasure. It is beautiful, useful and moreover easily approachable. One might even say that it is necessary for everyone, because without its help one could not hold even the most simple discussion or understand a gazette. 4

Although this statement that Martineau placed in 1700 at the front of his Nouvelle Geographie ou Description de I'Univers is about geography that is accessible to everybody, "to the kids as well as to the adults, to the vulgar people as well as to the well-educated, to women as well as to men,'·5 it can certainly be transferred to the travelogue and its varied forms of reception by a broad and therefore quite heterogeneous audience. Travelogues

1

1 1 4

1

In the second volume of his Kosmos, Alexander von Humboldt put up a literary memorial for his "teacher and friend Georg Forster." He let him start "a new era of scientific journeys, whose aim is the comparative study of people and countries." In him he found the author who, because of his imagination and power of expression, did justice to the depicted objects: "Everything that permits one to see the truth, individuality and vividness of exotic nature can be found united in his works." Humboldt, Alexander von: Kosmos. Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung. Second volume. Stuttgart - Tiibingen: Cotta 1847, p. 72. The European perspective of this utterance is conspicuous. Steiner, Gerhard (ed.): Georg Forsters "Reise um die Welt". In: Forster, Georg: Reise um die Welt. Frankfurt am Main: Inse11983, p. 1029. Referring to the European-Latin American area of conflict, this has been done by, among others, Tzvetan Todorov in his classic study Die Eroberung Amerikas. Das Problem des Anderen. Translated by Wilfried Bohringer. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1985. Quoted in Broc, Numa: La Geographie des Philosophes. Geographes et voyageurs franr;ais au XVIlle siecle. Paris: Editions Ophrys 1975, p. 231. Ibid. The parallels between the single "couples" of this quotation are informative.

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fascinate the most diverse social clusters; this fascination also finds expression in the way travelogues rapidly become the popular topic of the day - as shown in our quotation, but also in, for example, the embedding of Diderot's Supplement au voyage de Bougainville into the frame of a conversation between two fictive dialogue partners. Can the reasons for the fascination and radiance of the (literary, scientific and perception-specific) genre of the travelogue be found only in its concern with determined objects, the examination of cultural otherness, or - as the preceding quotation proposes - in the apparently easy appropriation of the text by a (contemporary or historically backwards-looking) audience? Both aspects seem to me to refer equally and from two different perspectives to a deeper motive that serves the following thoughts as thesis of departure. The fascination of the travelogue according to my thesis - is based fundamentally on the movements of understanding that are omnipresent in travel literature, understood as movements of understanding in space, which transfer the dynamic between human knowledge and acting, between pre-knowledge and the unknown, between the places of reading, the places of writing and the places reported as spatially concrete - or to say it more vividly, into a dynamic model of space that can be easily understood by the reader. Understanding is presented as a closed - but for the reader open - process, as an experience that is understandable in its specific processuality. Each travelogue therefore presents visual models of understanding that are unfolded in their spatial-temporal dimension to the reader. The travelogue is a staged model of experience that is based on the appropriation of the perception modes of foreign cultural elements and not primarily on these elements themselves. Such a perception model, of course, contains proceedings and practices that - so it seems to me - are of fundamental meaning for the understanding of literary communication in its totality.

Dimensions of the travelogue In reference to a remark by Claude Levi-Strauss, who stressed in his Tristes Tropiques that traveling can be placed in at least five dimensions,6 it must be emphasized firstly, that the first two dimensions of space become visual, especially in the cartographic registration and evaluation of the examined journeys. The traveler moves practically within a twodimensional system of coordinates along a line, which becomes obvious in the first handwritten notes and the first cartographic elaborations based upon them. Probably the best known German-speaking traveler of the 19th century, and certainly the most famous Latin America researcher of his time, Alexander von Humboldt, drew in his travel diaries cartographic recordings of the rivers he had traveled that show the linearlike advancing of the traveler - and partly also that of the travelogue, where it follows this axis. Humboldt's drawings of the Rio Magdalena in today's Colombia are confined to a multiple meandering line and complemented by sharply limited, small, indicated hatchings for mountains left and right of the river, that the Prussian natural scientist could put in from his own experience. 7 Written notes supplement the optical figures that testify how tunnellike remained the perspective, which the traveler had from the river. A finished topographical map covers up this perspective of the slow palpitating of one line, since it

1 1

See Levi-Strauss, Claude: Tristes Tropiques. Paris: PIon, 1955. See the reproduction of his maps of the journey through Colombia in Humboldt, Alexander von: In Kolumbien. En Colombia. Bogota: Publicismo y Ediciones 1982, pp. 29a-34a.

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always produces one broad, all-embracing gaze from above, a "floating above things"S from an angle of view that is no longer that of a concrete subject and of his limited field of vision. The creation of a topographical map is therefore equivalent to the transfer oflinear, individual experience, via diverse intermediate phases, into a two-dimensional extended overview that refers to a (map-)net that suggests a perfectness that can never be produced by the traveler alone. At the same time, it must remain partial and, while doing so, gives a frame in which space, time and action of the actual travelogue are situated. The diaries of the Prussian natural scientist and author offer the fascinating spectacle of how the frame and content of his so often conjured "painting of nature," of how line and expanse bring forth each other. This is pointed to not least by the materiality of his notes. The free spaces on the paper of Humboldt's diaries are - not only for economical reasons in the use of the valuable material - filled with extensive written notes that follow the shape of the river and fill what was left empty. Image and text not only illustrate, but also penetrate each other. Herein one may not only detect an expression of the horror vacui that decorated the unknown areas of early modem maps with various monsters and fable creatures. Rather one has to award the intertwining of image and written text an epistemological status, insofar as the range that was recorded by the eye is extended by those data that the researcher collected during the journey from other informants. What has been seen joins what has been heard or read, the unknown and the pre-known or approachable reservoirs of knowledge, eye and ear'l relate to each other to dispel the emptiness of the unknown from the definitive image of the map even if this cannot always be complete. In a journal entry the Prussian scholar himself, facing initially skeptical and deprecatory reactions on the part of the colonial Spanish administration, pointed out the processuality of his cartographic work, certainly without a lack of necessary self-confidence: The details are very applicable, the smallest laderas are noted down, it is the first map (Plan) that was ever made from this river, in spite of all the engineers who traveled it during the past 300 years. I am unlucky, because I am a foreigner [... ]. To whatever extent and with good reasons I believe my map to be exact, it will always be believed to be bad, because it was made by a Prussian. Besides, my map is a first attempt, and I have no doubts that it still could be corrected. 10

Still, on the gorgeous double page of Humboldt's Atlas Geographique et physique du Nouveau Continent that shows the Magdalena river in a section from today's Colombia, 11 there exist areas without registrations, but here the gaps are filled by cartographic details of single river segments. The field of knowledge is greatly expanded, far beyond what can be caught by the eye of the single traveler. The transformation from the travel journal to the travelogue goes parallel to this devolution, even if according to its own rules of the literary genre. The third dimension of space is the one that the travelogue at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century discovers and makes its task. There is hardly one travelogue of these times in which you do not find some kind of mountaineering. The view from above designs a theory of the landscape as well as a landscape of theory, whereby the

1 1 10

11

This formulation comes from a letter by Alexander von Humboldt from April 28, 1841 to Varnhagen von Ense in which he writes in regard to his Kosmos: "The actual goal is the floating above things that we know in 1841." Briefe von Alexander von Humboldt an Varnhagen von Ense aus den Jahren 1827 bis 1858. Edited by Ludmilla Assing. Leipzig: Brockhaus 1860, p. 92. See chapter 3 in this book. Humboldt, Alexander von: In Kolumbien, p. 31. Ibid. This map is easily accessible in Hein, Wolfgang-Hagen (ed.): Alexander von Humboldt. Leben und Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Weisbecker Verlag 1985, p. 244.

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transparency of this view has as much a literary as an epistemological meaning. Literature and scholarship, theory and practice often combine closely in such landscapes of theory. 12 The mountaineerings by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Voyage al'ile de France are exemplary and serve as a literary model that, entirely in line with Rousseau, seek clarity and transparency from the mountain summit and lead up to a first aesthetization of nonEuropean mountain worlds. Referring to the range of specific scientific expeditions and their results, Alexander von Humboldt's achievements have to be mentioned once more. They are by no means limited to the famous climbing of the Chimborazo, l3 but led to new modes of cartographic depiction of altitude and elevations that show the traveled areas faithfully in relation to one another like schematized profiles. Once more eye and ear supplement each other; the experiences and results collected by the traveler himself are complemented through the conclusions from other researchers and travelers and through the study of primary sources in archives and libraries. Certainly the most famous result of these works is the Tableau physique des Andes et pays voisins which Humboldt had outlined on his joumey in 1803 during a stay in Guayaquil, and later, in Paris, rearranged into an - also artistically - impressive work. Picture of nature and ideal profile, aesthetic artifact and scientific result in one, it presents an accumulation of research results that refer to a wide geographical space depending on levels of altitude and that step far beyond the single traveler's field of vision. Here, as well, image and text penetrate each other and refer to the scientific-historical and epistemological fundaments of Humboldt's journey evaluation. Parallel to the two-dimensionality of the topographical map the depiction of profile, too, shows the transformation from the sketch in the travel journal to the depiction satisfying scientific demands in the ideal-profile that, once more, presents the already-treated expansion of perspective and field of vision. At the same time two different places of writing face each other: one place during the travel - that has been presented, according to Humboldt's own account, in later copperplate engravings and paintings - and a second place of writing, that is located in the traveler's country of origin - this also is a place that has been often filled in with details in the iconography of the Prussian scholar. 14 The fourth dimension of the travelogue, in the sense of Levi-Strauss, is made by time. The traveler thereby moves in the time of his country of origin: We should not forget that only increasingly reliable clocks permitted the sailors of the 18 th century an increasingly precise determination of length, that is bound, in a truly material sense, to the time of departure from the country of origin's 10ngitude. ls Space and time are not only closely related to each other but also coupled to the time of one's own space. The traveler, not only the one of the 18th century, takes his own time with him. On the other hand the traveler also moves within the journey's own chronology which doubtlessly creates its own temporality. Moreover he also jumps during his time-travel back 12 l3

14 15

I will repeatedly come back to this term; see especially chapters 2 and II. See the extraordinary movie by Rainer Simon Die Besteigung des Chimborazo (Koproduktion DEF NZDF 1989) as well as the volume by Schafer, Paul Kanut / Simon, Rainer: Die Besteigung des Chimborazo. Eine Filmexpedition auf Alexander von Humboldts Spuren. Koln: vgs Verlagsgesellschaft 1990. On the aesthetical dimension of this mountaineering see Pimentel, Juan: EI volclin sublime. Geografia, paisaje y relato en la ascension de Humboldt al Chimborazo. In: Ette, Ottmar / Bemecker, Walther L. (ed.): Ansichten Amerikas. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert 2000. See chapter 3 in this volume. On the technology of the "horloges marines" and its meaning for shipping see Broc, Numa: La Geographie des Philosophes, p. 280. A declination of only two minutes after a ship voyage of six weeks (an aim that was approached by the precision instruments of the 18th century) produced a mistake of a halflongitude (p. 282), an enormous distance that made cartographic location and the later finding of islands difficult.

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and forth between different cultural and historical times. For instance, Du Tertre l6 tries in his thoughts about the bon sauvage to come to insights about the development of humankind starting from observations about the foreign, so that it becomes possible to receive knowledge about the pre-history of one's own through a time travel focused backward. Yet not only traveling backwards, but also traveling forwards is possible. One's own present can, through the concern with the Other, be illuminated as future past. For example, Alexis de Tocqueville finds out in his fundamental work De I 'Amerique, based on a journey through North America in 1831, about the opportunities that the American Constitution offered to the European states and especially France, which therefore would be the future aspects that one can hope for or be afraid of. 17 One important point of departure constituted hereby is the simple question: "Where does the journey lead us?" Does one indeed believe that democracy, after destroying feudalism and monarchs, will back off from the bourgeoisie and the rich? Will it, after it became so strong and its enemies so weak, simply stand still? Where do we go then? Nobody could say that, since we lack points of reference: the life circumstances are today among Christians more equal than was the case in any other country at any other time; this is how the greatness of what has been done already hinders the prediction of what still can be done. [ ... J It is not necessary that God himself speak; for us to receive a secure sign of his will, it is enough to investigate what is the normal proceeding of nature and what is the constant tendency ofhappenings. 18

The epoch-specific experience of an historical development that increasingly evades the well-known models and that, especially in post-revolutionary France, denies Historia as Magistra Vitae any legitimization,19 leads here (the phrase OU allons-no us done? seems already to hint at it) to a movement of evasion in space: an investigation of democracy in the United States is supposed to illuminate its development in Europe. The journey westwards becomes here a political time machine that was started by Alexis de Tocqueville as the first in a long series of travelers. Have not German or Italian travelogues about the United States from the post-war period in this tradition also often been reconnaissance expeditions that were not so much concerned with the understanding of the present circumstances of the foreign but with the reflection of the future possibilities of one's own? So can the journey in space become - exactly as the famous Cuban author Alejo Carpentier has expressed in his Orinoco novel Los pasos perdidos - a journey in various times and to various epochs, a form of journey that, like the tum from utopia to uchrony, was much more evident to the traveler of the late 18th century in its possibilities regarding the openness of the future. Here, too - not unlike in our century - travel literature stands for literature in general. The European traveler of the 18 th and maybe also the one of the 19 th century believed indeed in a common time of humankind, a time axis to which they could linearly relate the different time-levels that they have stated. In such a concept time travel becomes necessarily a movement of the traveler between various grades of cultural, historical, economic and social development not dependent on whether the development is positively 16

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18 19

See Funke, Hans-Gunter: "Barbare cruel" 0 "bon sauvage"? La funcionalizaci6n ambiva1ente de 1a imagen del indio en 1a "Histoire genera1e des Antilles" (1667-1671) del Padre du Tertre. In: Dispositio (Ann Arbor) XVII, 42-43 (1992), pp. 73-105. See also Neumeister, Sebastian: Alexis de Tocqueville. In: Lange, Wolf-Dieter (ed.): Franz6sische Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts. vol. II. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer 1980, p. 85. Tocqueville, Alexis de: De la democratie en Amerique. Premiere edition historico-critique revue et augmentee par Eduardo Nolla. vol. I. Paris: Librairie Phi10sophique J. Vrin 1990, p. 8. See also Koselleck, Reinhart: Historia Magistra Vitae. Uber die Auf10sung des Topos im Horizont neuzeitlich bewegter Geschichte. In Koselleck, Reinhart: Vergangene Zukunji. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1984, 2nd ed., pp. 38-66.

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or negatively connotated, whether the deployment is read as an evolution or degradation. The discovery of particular times that are indefendent from each other gains a place - as far as I see - only in the travel literature of the 20 century. Flora Tristan's journey to Peru (Peregrinations d'une paria) does not lack the experience of time travel either, since the author of the still fascinating travelogue believes she is shifted into European Medieval time when faced with the "mystery plays" in Arequipa that she describes. For me, a child of the 19th century and coming from Paris, the staging ofa mystery play beneath the portal ofa church and in front of an immense group of people was something new; but the instructive spectacle was the brutality, the coarse clothes, the rags of just this people, their extreme illiterateness, their stupid superstitiousness that led my imagination back into the middle ages. 20

While Flora Tristan also notes how quickly French fashion dictated the garments of the Peruvian women, she cannot avoid concluding from what she calls superstitions, that the Peruvian people still are in childhood21 and will be subjected to the power of the church for a long time. The literary point of reference for Flora's description of mystery play certainly does not stay unmentioned: The narrator herself refers to Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris22 that was published only a few years before. While Alexis de Tocqueville'sjourney in 1831 to the USA led the French man into the future, Flora Tristan's journey in 1833 to Peru led the French woman into the past. But both relate the Other and the time of the Other to their own time and chronology - an interesting chasse-croise; it even adds to its charm that both had highly different values oriented to the past or future. The fourth dimension contains the coexistence, the overlapping of different axes of time and time concepts including the spaces (geographical, cultural, political etc.) that are connected to it. The confrontation of different time levels contributes essentially to the appeal and to the attractiveness of the travelogue and each literature on the move. The fifih dimension that is mentioned by Levi-Strauss is concerned with the social dimension. The traveler moves through the various social clusters and stratas of the country that he travels, often with a lightness that is unapproachable for the inhabitants, especially of strongly hierachized societies of the 18 th and 19th century. Flora Tristan, who, contrary to the predominant scientific alignment of the travelogue, follows a stronger political orientation and who, with the help of family relations, had access to the elite of the young Peruvian republic, is in this regard gifted with abundance, and not just by chance does she ask for a broad social panorama as a precondition for every statement that makes a claim for legitimate depiction. 23 Fray Servando Teresa de Mier learns about members from different strata of Spanish society as intensely as his contemporary Alexander von Humboldt on his journey through New Spain.24 The travelogue therefore moves closer to a literary genre that is also not far from the reports of the Mexican Dominican monk Fray Servando: I think of the picaresque novel, the novela picaresca, which incidentally at just the same time in New Spain, today's Mexico, opened up the way of Spanish colonial 20

21 22

23 24

Tristan, Flora: Les peregrinations d'une paria 1833-1834. Paris: La Decouverte - Maspero 1983, S. 143. In the title of this easily approachable, but unfortunately slightly shortened edition the definite article is wrongly used. The original two-volume issue (Paris: Arthus Bertrand) was published in 1838 under the title Peregrinations d'une paria 1833-1834. Ibid., p. 130: "This is how the peoples are in their childhood." Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., p. 85: "to describe a city, even if it only has little importance, one has to spend time, talk with all classes of its inhabitants." See Ette, Ottmar: Transatlantic Perceptions: A Contrastive Reading of the Travels of Alexander von Humboldt and Fray Servando Teresa de Mier. In: Dispositio (Ann Arbor) XVII, 42-43 (1992), pp. 165-197.

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literatures into the world of novels of the modem Latin American literatures with Fernimdez de Lizardis El Periquillo Sarniento at the beginning of the 19th century. The consistent up and down in the foreign society offers especially the traveler of the 19th century the possibility to enter into competition with the historical novel of a Walter Scott or with the realistic novel model of a Balzac and to catch from his own (hermeneutic) movement a society's totality. At the same time the novel can be outdone insofar that the claim of depiction can be supported by the reference to the eyewitness-status of the reporter by the facticity of provable travel ways: easily referentable locations and attached maps provide the reader with a certain faithfulness to facts pretending to be a frame for the reading of the text. Travel literature is not least the literature that puts its audience into movement insofar that it prompts it to "follow" on appropriate topographical maps the described travel ways. There can of course be no doubt that this fifth dimension is complemented by a sixth dimension,25 that of imagination and fiction, which makes the travelogue, especially in reference to literary patterns, attractive and readable for its contemporary readers and perhaps even more so for the female readers who were hindered from traveling. Humboldt, too, saw at the end of his historical hindsight to the "Stimuli for the Study of Nature" in his Kosmos from 1847 no contrast between the scientific and the specific poetical dimension and function of the travelogue: Descriptions of nature, I repeat here, can be sharply limited and scientifically exact, although the animating breeze of imagination is detracted from them. The poetical must merge from the sensed connection of the sensual with the intellectual, from the feeling of omnipresence, the mutual limitation and the unity of natural life?6

The teamwork of scientific accuracy and poetic imagination in the travelogue shall be traced more deeply in the thoughts about the frictionality of the genre. The exceedingly complex seventh dimension of the travelogue could be termed the one of literary space. It concerns the mode of how a certain travelogue relates itself to other texts of other authors (intertextual) or to texts of the same author (intratextual). Thereby one can distinguish between an explicit and an implicit literary space, insofar as other texts are "faded in" through direct references or through indirect allusions that are not transparent for all readers immediately. Especially explicit references often have a discoursesupporting, legitimating function. For example the question whether a European traveler refers only to reports by his or her compatriots or also to texts that came from the inhabitants of the traveled areas is instructive and meaningful. This dimension always includes also the question to what degree the objects of the travelogue (may) have the word as subjects, too. A basic change can be detected in broader terms only in the 20 th century, since now those who are traveled become involved in the process of sense making, for example by European travelers. An eighth dimension is concerned with the genre-specific references, whereby here the question to which norm and model-giving single text the analyzed travelogue is referring is no longer investigated, but which literary subgenres and traditions, which scholarly and especially scientific reference systems are considered and to what extent genealogies of travelogues are worked into the text. For the genre of the travelogue that is referring to space but also literature in general always takes certain positions within specific literary and genre-historical spaces and therefore locates itself within its own mappings. 25

26

See also Pagni, Andrea / Ette, Ottmar: Introduction. In Pagni, Andrea / Ette, Ottmar (eds.): Crossing the Atlantic: Travel Literature and the Perception of the Other. Double issue of the journal Dispositio (Ann Arbor) XVII, 42-43 (1992), p. iv. Humboldt, Alexander von: Kosmos, vol. II, p. 74.

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This is equally true for the ninth dimension that is named here as last, although it has basically a superordinate meaning, because it is constituted by the cultural space that crosses in a certain way the other spaces or dimensions. In regard to travel literature, but also in view of bordercrossing literature, in the broadest sense, the positioning of the respective text towards certain cultural poles receives a fundamental significance. In this context a heteropolar European-American field of tension shall be introduced in chapter seven. The ninth dimension of the cultural space is present in any, even a monocultural text - if this exists - but especially in travel literature it gets an immense succinctness and significance with a focus on the question of how different cultural phenomena are treated and weaved in literarily and aesthetically but also politically, socially or philosophically. The different dimensions that are presented here will, in the following, be treated flexibly and investigated within various different contexts. Certainly, it would be possible to find further dimensions of the travelogue as well as of literature in general - for example, a political or gender-specific dimension, but also one of theory or epistemology or of the virtuality of spaces that can be realized by the audience. Much of it will be developed in the following chapters with the help of concrete examples. Yet firstly, the manifold and often surprising relations between literature and traveling have to be worked out more precisely.

Literature and traveling One cannot determine a borderline between fictional and travel literature. But we can name categories of historically changing pertinence that supply us with reasons to assign a given text to the genre of travel literature or not (whereby travel literature at anyone time is historically differently defined). The consideration of the fact that the sixth dimension of the travelogue is referring to the reader in a fundamental way and is dependent on his relation to collective assumptions and convictions regarding the historically true is of great meaning. Many texts that we assign today to fictional literature have been read from the perspective of the travelogue or even as a travelogue. Conversely, reports, focused on facts, have been misunderstood or interpreted as fictional. Examples for both forms of "diverging" readings can be found easily; Wolfgang Neuber has drawn from it this following conclusion: From this point fictionality does not mean the intentional differing from a pre-given reality but rather from what a society at a certain historical location believed to be credible. The criteria "fictive" vs. "conform to reality" become obsolete as scholarly analytical categories for the poetics of the travelogue. 27

Thereby we free ourselves from a focus that is oriented on production-aesthetic aspects and on a schematic questioning of the author's intentions and get to the problems of a viewpoint that includes reading functions of the travelogue and of literature in general. The quotation mentioned above from Humboldt's Kosmos showed that the poetical function is by no means decorative padding or even a source of friction, but a principal factor also of the Western travel literature in its modem form (and to the latter belongs Humboldt's Relation historique, which has the position of a hinge between the 18 th and 19th century as well as in regard to laying the foundation of the modem travelogue on Latin America). The effet de reel that is achieved by a text may not be naively equated with an assumed "faithfulness" to reality; the actually attained reality effect is rather coupled to historically effective and 27

See Neuber, Wolfgang: Zur Gattungspoetik des Reiseberichts. Skizze einer historischen Grundlegung im Horizont von Rhetorik und Topik. In: Brenner, Peter J. (ed.): Der Reisebericht. Die Entwicklung einer Gattung in der deutschen Literatur. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1989, pp. 51

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changing fonns of writing and their "credibility" in a socio-historical and epistomologicsociological definable audience. The necessary mediation of the Other has authors of travel literature always obliged to a very conscious inclusion of that kind of question. Like the autobiography, travel literature, too, is based on an explicit pact with the reader. The relations especially between travelogue and novel are as intense as they are complex. Both genres, each of them shattered into a multitude of subgenres, are literary hybrid fonns, which are able to include the most diverse literary and non-literary text types and fragments. Here we will mention as representative of the genres and text types that are integrated into the travelogue only the diary and statistics, images and map material, political treatise and literary narration, philosophical essay and scientific discussion, legend and autobiography, but also geographical disquisition and ethnographic field studies. All these kinds of texts can of course also be found in the novel. Therefore it is not difficult to understand not only the novel but also the travelogue, in reference to Bachtin, as a cosmos of "variety of speech, ,,28 since one can often find in it expressions parallel to the most diverse weaved-in texts, of a multitude of (narrative) foci and partly hidden foreign speech. The "polyphony" of the word is not limited to the novel; it also might be considered valid for the travelogue. Especially for the latter, dialogicity should be recognized as fundamental for all experience and all writing, since here the Other is related in however hierachized reference to one's own and therefore brought to speak. The oscillation between foreign and self, with the help of whichever literary process however shaped, stands for the dynamic of a literature which is not limited to a topographical dimension. The travelogue is a translating genre insofar as each individual experience is transfonned into collective reservoirs of knowledge or at least will be set into relation with them but also because cultural fonns of expression of the Other as foreign have to be rendered into the language of one's own. The reports of European travelers to Latin America as well as those of Latin American travelers to Europe in the 19th century have therefore to be understood as linguistic and socio-cultural translation processes. The spatial transport to the New World corresponds with the European traveler's semantic translation of the experienced for the Old World. This is always based on the insight that geographical knowledge cannot be understood as the result of a linear progress, of a constant accumulation and expansion of knowledges, but that it proceeds by leaps and bounds: regional reservoirs of knowledge go astray and are - if at all - approachable and useful again only later. The undoubtedly expansion of geographical knowledge in the 19 th century does not mean at all that such an expansion of knowledge could be observed in all regions of the subcontinent. Databases and infonnation superhighways today do not save us from a submersion of knowledge reservoirs, which, due to time, seem to be not relevant or pertinent. That which cannot be data specifically incorporated underlies more than ever a process of removal on whose criteria an intercultural consensus has never been found. Let us return to the poetological dimension of our question. The movement of traveling is inscribed onto literature itself. It is well known that the first novel of the modem ages (not only in the Bachtinian sense), Cervantes' Don Quijote, is based on the fundamental structure of the journey. The novel not only goes back to travel structures, it also tries to let the reader actively participate in this journey (in the Don Quijote, for example, through the Mancha, the geography, the history and society of Spain, but also all over literary and folk

28

See Bachtin, Michail M.: Das Wort im Roman. In Bachtin, Michail M.: Die Asthetik des Wortes. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979, pp. 154

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cultural patterns of imagination).29 The travelogue is in this respect - and also in reference to other kinds and subgenres such as the picaresque novel - literature raised to a higher power, since it doubles the travel structure of the novel as communicable structure of experience with the (sometimes pre-determined) facticity of a provable travel route. Therefore it is no surprise that Honore de Balzac compares the romancier to the traveler in his famous "Avant-propos" for the ComMie humaine: Because the critique ignored the basic plan, the more I forgave it, since one can hinder the critique as little as one can hinder seeing, speaking, judging. Well, the time for impartiality has not yet come for me. Besides, an author who decides not to expose himself to the fire of the critique should start with writing just as little as a traveler should set off who always counts on a clear sky.30

The comparison between author and traveler concerns not only the necessity and perils of the se mettre en route - whereby the writing process itself is symbolized as spatial movement - it refers also to the relation between each route and the great plan, whose understanding is a precondition for the understanding of concrete travel movements as well as a comprehensive experience project. When the "fire" of the critique is compared with the forces of nature to which the voyageur is subjected, this shows that not only the dimension regarding the content of writing, but perhaps even more so the writing experience of the author is understood as a movement that probably follows the great plan, the one of the ComMie humaine, but at the same time is exposed to coincidence which for Balzac, as it is well known, was "the greatest romancier of the world."31 But coincidence and plan themselves constitute reciprocal empowering poles in the travelogue as well. Reading, too, is a kind of traveling. The Peruvian author Clorinda Matto de Turner, for example, impressively connected the journey of the protagonist of her novel Aves sin nido (1889) with reading when her travelers prefer reading instead of paying attention to the Andean landscape which they have to cross on their way to Lima. 32 The place of traveling as reading is taken here by the modem travel reading, which is supposed to bridge an assumed lack of input while traveling. Another definition of travel literature imposes itself which is almost familiar to us through our daily reading praxis, namely the one that understands travel literature as a literature that - as for instance the Twenty Poems to Read in the Streetcar by the Argentine avant-garde author Oliverio Girond0 33 - is made to be read while traveling. This too, is a literature on the move and refers to the fundamental connection that exists between literature and traveling. A hundred years after Matto de Turner's impressive unfolded scenery, a more radical connection between reading and traveling can be found in the form of air travel that is interesting not only in regard to mentality history. Reading can now completely exclude traveling, if this is nothing else but as short as possible a time-space between start and landing - as it is with flying. The disturbing bridging of space is faded out with the help of a literature on the move. In the ninth chapter of ltalo Calvino's Se una notte d' inverno un

29

30 31 32 33

It is well known that the tourism strategists of the Spanish government concretize this activity so pragmatically and profitably that tourists nowadays can follow precise route of the knight and so transform the travel movement of the protagonist into one's own travel movement. I will return to this problem later. Balzac, Honore de: Avant-propos. In Balzac, Honore de: La ComMie humaine. Vol. I. Edition publiee sous la direction de Pierre-Georges Castex. Paris: Gallimard 1976, p. 15. Ibid., p. 11: "Le hasard est Ie plus grand romancier du monde: pour etre fecond, il n'y a qU'ill'etudier." See Matto de Turner, Clorinda: Aves sin nido (novela peruana). Lima: Imprenta del Universo, de Carlos Prince 1889, p. 264. Girondo, Oliverio: Milonga. Zwanzig Gedichte im Tangoschritt. Obersetzt von Thomas Ahlers u.a. Giittingen: Schlender 1984.

45 Reyes continues: For us the nation is still something pathetic, and this why we owe ourselves to it. In the broad field of human duties we have been given a part, which leaves us still much to do. 46

40 41

42

43 44

45 46

Ibid., Vol. XVII, p. 254. In a letter from the 3nl of April, 1925, Reyes, who had moved to Paris, wrote irritably but unwaveringly to his friend Daniel Cosio Villegas: "I believed [ ... ] that I could kindly associate with the youngest. But now it looks as if some youngsters believe me to be a denigrator (descastado), one who is obsessed with idle wide reading, an aristocrat, and I do not know what else, and they will skewer me and do other atrocities to me." In: Enriquez Perea, Alberto (ed.): Testimonios de una amistad Correspondencia Alfonso Reyes I Daniel Cosio Villegas (1922 -1958). Mexico, D.F.: EI Colegio de Mexico 1999, p. 40. See, for instance, Repilado, Ricardo: Contorno de Alfonso Reyes. In: Reyes, Alfonso: Paginas escogidas. Seleccion y prologo de Ricardo Repilado. La Habana: Casa de las Americas 1978, p. XV; or Mendez Plancarte, Gabriel: Resurreccion de Ifigenia. In: Paginas sobre Alfonso Reyes (1911 - 1945). Vol. I. Monterrey: Universidad de Nuevo Leon 1955, p. 572. Paz, Octavio: "Eljinete del aire 1889 - 1959." In: Lectura. Revista critica de ideas y libros 134 (abriI1960), p. 120. Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Completas, p. 438 f. Similar quotations could also be found from other authors who like Jorge Luis Borges - were themselves confronted with similar reproaches. Ibid. Ibid.

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The reading of Ifigenia cruel proposed in the following shall try to demonstrate not only the importance of this work for Mexican reality but also for the question of the cultural identity of Latin America. In this context we need not only deal with the dialectic relationship (in Alfonso Reyes' sense) between the Mexican and the universal but even more with the positioning of this play within literary and cultural space, that is according to our division the sixth and eighth dimension of a text. Indeed Ifigenia cruel, which was celebrated by Octavio paz but also today by a number of authors and critics as a climax not only of the works by Alfonso Reyes but also of Latin American literatures in general, stands in the interface of so many different texts, that one, facing such an intertextual burning glass, cannot avoid connecting admiration with the question of who the readership is that this lyrical play claims. This implicit reader is familiar with Greek antiquity and the different mode lings of the Orestie. But Ifigenia cruel demands not only a thorough knowledge of the ancient handling of the subject of Orestes and Iphigenia, it includes in its utterly complex literary space also modem adaptations, among them Bachofen's already mentioned interpretation and especially Goethe's Jphigenie auf Tauris with its "holy Iphigenia of humanity." Reyes himself has pointed to the contamination ofmyths47 but also to the references in this "quasisonnet" of Orestes to the Spanish baroque theater. Scholarly analyses could show references to texts by Ramon Maria del Valle-Inchin or Stephane Mallarme, to Gustave Flaubert's Salammb6 and primarily to Paul Valery's La Jeune Parque, which, tellingly enough, would first receive the title "Poem ofMemory.',",8 All this should not lead us to read Ifigenia cruel as a geoculturally decentralized play, which due to predominately non-American sources had put itself in an extremely skewed position. The intertextual relations mentioned here are certainly of great importance for a comprehensive understanding of this text that reaches back to Alfonso Reyes' early readings, but these references should not only be related to the newly emerged contexts that the work offers but also to the paratextual and intratextual network of references (and therefore also other texts that Reyes wrote). We cannot follow all traces ofthis intertextual play with false bottoms and to investigate the complexity of this truly encapsulated literary space up to the last details and finest angles. Therefore only a few threads and nets of references can be picked up that are especially valuable for our question of the specific dynamic of a border-crossing literature. However, a response shall be found to the question of what Ifigenia cruel has to do with Mexico, a question that was often polemically repeated and has awaited an answer since the making of the play. I would like to start with that element that first meets the reader of this climax of Mexican theater. The title speaks already to the cruelty of Iphigenia and stresses this aspect. Primarily this crueldad consists in Iphigenia's occupation as "butcheress" (carnicera) - so the wording of the author - in the service of the goddess Artemis. While Euripides has emphasized in his Jphigenie in Tauris that Iphigenia as a Greek of course did not participate in the sacrifice of the foreigners, Reyes, who in many passages follows Euripides very closely (for instance in the report of the messenger), especially stressed this aspect. He notes in a letter to Jose Maria Chacon y Calvo in December 1922:

47 Ibid.,Vol.X,p.315. 48 See, next to the already mentioned works, Patout, Paulette: Reminiscences valeryennes dans «Ifigenia cruel» d'Alfonso Reyes. In: Hommage

aMarcel Bataillon. Paris: Didier-Erudition 1979, pp. 416-437.

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Literature on the move She is called Ifigenia cruel [ ... ] and is cut with ax strokes not from wood but from rock. I don't want her to be tender, no: I, myself, am full of scratches from working with her [ ... ]49

The cruelty of the protagonist as well as that of the Artemis cult refers to the text Vision de Anahuac, written in 1915 in Spanish exile, in which Reyes describes how not only the wonder but also the cruelty of the Aztec culture presented itself to the European sight. 50 This served as superficial cause and justification for the conquistadors to brutally push through their culture and belief with fire and sword, so that the supposed "cruelty" of the Aztecs was not only negatively connotated but was also functionalized for centuries in European claims for power. The Mexican pointed out in one of his later texts that already Montaigne in his famous essay Des cannibales recalled that the atrocities committed by Christians in the name of religion and justice have been no less bruta1. 51 In Montaigne's essay, which was so important for the self-critique of European expansion on a territorial as well as an intellectual level, one can read: We can certainly call them barbarians, if we relate them to the rules of our intellect, but not if we compare them with us, since we supercede them in any kind of barbarism. Their war is entirely noble and generous and has as much excuse and beauty as human illness can have at all. With them it does not find any other grounds than alone the jealousy of virtues. 52

Reyes used this canonical text which is informative not only for the reception of cultural alterity but also for the foreign within the self for his attempt to show the element of cruelty differently no longer steered by European discourse. The human sacrifices of Reyes' Iphigenia have much in common with Aztec rites of sacrifice - which has been pointed out by the author himself. 53 But this hint has been little followed so far. So the chorus asks the new priestess at the beginning of the play, in evident allusion to the "heart on the sacrifice stone" of the Aztecs: "Who shows you the side where the foreigner/the shipwrecked has hidden his heart?,,54 And even in the statue of the goddess this autochthonous, indigenous past is chiseled clearly, since her posture shows "the X of your decorated and anointed anns.,,55 But the X is the sign, which for Reyes was always the symbol of MeXico and the intersection of cultures and destinies. 56 There could be more examples for elements in this "Aztec" level of meaning in Reyes' Ifigenia cruel. They allow one to read the play from a thus far neglected level. 57 Iphigenia is Greek - and not Taurer. In this sense she is - on divine council - thrown into another cultural context, almost deplaced and deterritorialized. Herein too might lie an element of autobiography, since in this position Reyes' own standpoint is displayed. He, for his 49

50 51 52

53 54 55 56

57

Quoted in Patout, Paulette: "Reminiscences valeryennes," p. 421. Moreover Reyes later mentions the relation between the Artemis Tauropolos and the "men-hating" amazons; see Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Completas, Vol. XVI, p. 294. This level of meaning could undoubtedly be further extended and included in a new production. Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Completas, Vol. II, pp. 15 and 20. Ibid., Vol. XI, p. 59. Montaigne: Essais. Vol. 1. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion 1969, p. 259. Ibid., Vol. X, p. 357 f: "One day the Taurer at the feet of their goddess hear their new sacrifice priestess sing about the heavenly nature of the human sacrifice as a priest of the Aztec sanctuaries might have done it." Ibid., Vol. X, p. 319. Ibid., p. 325. See also Robb, James W.: "Alfonso Reyes al Cruce de los Caminos." In (idem.): Par los caminos de Alfonso Reyes (estudios 2a. serie). Mexico: Centro de Investigacion cientifica y tecnologica de la Universidad del Valle de Mexico 1981, pp. 13 ff. An exception is Roger Bastide, who admittedly has not interpreted Reyes' play, but who understood its basic pattern as "archetype" of the problem of cultural dependence. See Bastide, Roger: "Iphigenie en Tauride ou Agar dans Ie desert? (Essai d'analyse critique des m6canismes de penetration culturelle au Bresil)." In: Ideologies, litterature et societe en Amerique latine. Bruxelles: Universite de Bruxelles 1975, pp. 11-30.

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version, has chosen the perspective of the culturally transplanted and not that of the "natives," the Indian culture, and therefore has taken his intertextual texts of reference from a model whose intercultural dimension he now gave a new dynamic. With Iphigenia, too, the division between civilization and barbarism is taken over from antiquity to transplant it then into another geocultural context and to set it into movement. In the movement of civilization and barbarism, as will be shown in the following, the one of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is inscribed. The "forgetting" of her first life made Iphigenia into a weak-willed slave of the sacrifice cult of Artemis. With the recovery of her memory, she finds a new approach to her Greek past, which helps to overcome her numb alienation and splitting of consciousness - "I am me and I am the other.,,58 The memory triggered by the appearance and the claims of dominance by Orestes gives her power over her own history. But at the same time she is in danger of falling anew into complete dependence: this time on the family history and the role assigned to her in it. Through her return a circle structure was completed, which spatializes the hopelessness of her passively being handled. Iphigenia then must slip back into a role in which she has been led, without her active participation, out of raison d'etat to her sacrifice before Artemis saved her and enraptured her to Tauris (and into "barbarism"). The young Iphigenia was in her first life the object, not the subject, of a long and bloody history, which the journey of Orestes with its circular movement now tries to bring back. In swerving from this circle, in her turning her back on this history, she breaks throughunlike her brother Orestes in Euripides - the curse, which lies on her family, on her "race." (In his comment Reyes speaks about raza, which terminologically can also be used for the members of the Hispano-American world.) She becomes, like Goethe's Iphigenia, the true figure of salvation. This Mexican Iphigenia becomes a savior, who has despite all references to Goethe's version little to do with the humanity of the Weimarian classic. Because she is and remains cruel, she returns into her Artemis temple - and therewith, so we can assume - to her sacrificial rites. Her reterritorialization happens not in the "civilized" Greece, but in the land of grief of "barbarism," far away from the bloody history of the Atrides. Exactly in this point, in her declaration to the land of grief, she becomes again cruel, an Iphigenia in Tauris who decides herself for Tauris, for her second home. She becomes the "high mistress, cruel and pure,,,59 as the chorus calls her with good reason; her declaration of what from the Greek perspective has to be called barbarism includes the rejection of that other cruelty of the so-called civilization of which Montaigne spoke and which confronts us in the history of the Atrides again and again. So the decision in favor of Taurian barbarism frees the woman who before was only an object, but never a subject of history, from the unbroken chain of murders, which is the history of her house, her origin, but also that of the civilization that begins in ancient Greece. Orestes' and Pylades' journey triggers the movement of understanding ofIphigenia who in a sudden act of recognition becomes conscious of her own inability to move as being the one who is handled. Only now can the movement being handled become the movement of acting: Iphigenia stays in the temple of Artemis and confirms in this way the line that leads out of the center of the supposed center of civilization. This is how she crosses geometrically her brother's plans to bring her back, which would mean for her to return to the vicious circle of dependence. In this movement she exposes the self-evidence of Orestes

58 59

Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Comp/etas, Vol. X, p. 320. Ibid., p. 349.

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gaze, the gaze of the "civilized" on the "barbarians," with the help of a different, contrary reading of theogeny as barbarism. Iphigenia decides against the dissolution of her just found individual identity in the collective dominant identity of Greekness that she has learned to see anew frolll the distance of the exile in Tauris. It belongs to the deliberate anachronisms of the play that Iphigenia outlines in the confrontation with Orestes and between "civilization" and "barbarism," which always has been a basic theme of the subject of the Taurian Iphigenia, a model of history in whose beginning stand always the Greeks: Hellens: rapist of the virgin of the soul: The peoples still sat before you began to walk. Here began history and the reminding of the evil, at which one forgot to conjugate a single horizon with a single valley.60

This model of historical development metaphorically dressed in the image of a progressing movement, corresponds to that of the author, as he for instance has depicted it in Die Weissagung Amerikas61 and Die Kritik in der Epoche Athens. 62 This motivation for the transfer of the Greek myths, the Western paradigm to the current situation of Mexico. Mexican history finally flows into a historical progression, which, according to Alfonso Reyes, had started with the humanization of the human being in the Eastern Mediterranean area.

European expansion and American space One notices in this history conception as well as these verses how deep Alfonso Reyes, an enthusiastic and engaged expert on the writings of Alexander von Humboldt, was penetrated by ideas, which interpret the expansion of Europe in the sense of a constant development. Hardly any text expressed this movement and the hope connected to it more clearly than that passage in Alexander von Humboldt's second volume of the Kosmos, which - undoubtedly with greater historical depth - outlined under the title "Hauptmomente einer Geschichte der physischen Weltanschauung" a process of impressive linearity: The form of the three times narrower Mediterranean sea had a great influence on the earliest restriction and later expansion of Phoenician and Greek expeditions. The latter were for a long time restricted to the Aegean and the Syrtic sea. In Homeric times continental Italy was still an "unknown" land [ ... ] But what, as has been often noticed already, has made the geographical location advantageous in its influence on the traffic of peoples and the progressing expansion of world consciousness, is the proximity of the Eastern continent jutting into the peninsula of Asia Minor; the abundance of the islands of the Aegean sea which was a bridge for the passing cultures [... ] Through all these spatial conditions the influence of the ocean as the connecting element in the quick expansion of the circle of ideas of the people has been revealed in the growing power of the Phoenicians and later the Hellens. 63

The Humboldtian depiction develops so that the progressing movement of the EuropeanWestern in the 15 th century shall "reveal the unchangeable movement towards a set aim." Due to the infringing of this all-embracing movement from Europe to America, the transition of the 15 th to the 16th century could become for the author of the Kosmos the 60 61 62 63

Ibid., p. 330. (The term "Historia" appears in the original in the sense of a collective singular with capital first letters and is in italics in the translation). Ibid., vol. XI, p. 141 f. Ibid., vol. XIII, p. 46 f. Humboldt, Alexander von: Kosmos, vol. II, pp. 152 and 154.

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decisive "transition epoch," which "belonged to both the Middle Ages and the beginning of a newer time."64 The Eastern Mediterranean has - in this time-lapse vision of human history - jumped over to America. Therefore the presence of the Greek myths in the American world is somehow historically-philosophically founded. The caravels of Columbus, which always tried to follow a circle with the necessary return to Europe, provide that figure of movement also obeyed by the ship of Orestes and Pylades, the legates of civilization in the barbaric Tauris, where human sacrifices are on the agenda. The territorial, political and cultural expansion of the occident provides the historical basis for the phenomenon that even at its Western limits the figure of Greek antiquity can be present. Admittedly: Mexican history and Mexican culture do not disappear entirely in this movement, in this alleged unfolding of humanity and world consciousness that was already, by the way, quite skeptically viewed by Humboldt. They do not disappear in this expansionist vortex. The finding of Iphigenia's individual identity takes place only in confrontation with the other, which is also one's own: Orestes, Greek civilization, etc. Only out of the knowledge of her own history is this history directable and does it lose its blind omnipotence. As an aside, we should note the stark existentialistic charging, philosophical as well as literary-historical, hidden in the decision, the conscious choice by Iphigenia. Jean-Paul Sartre's Flies buzz unmistakably in the air. The mastering of her own destiny presupposes a re-memorization, and this happens in exile, in distant Tauris, from an ex-centric perspective. It is the ocean, the in the Humboldtian sense connecting element,65 that brought the message: "Oh sea, yours was the message."66 It is the ocean, which at the end of the play is twice called on and stands for memory and therefore life; and it is the ocean which brought Orestes to Tauris but which will lead him back to Greece. Iphigenia's decision with which the oppressive curse and the chain of the atrocities will be broken, rests on the knowledge of her own origins and transforms exile into home: The one who blindly followed her destiny and the predetermined movement has become the one who designs her fate and determines her own movements, who at the same time also fights off the overly powerful presence of men and creates her own space. Read on the "Mexican" or "Latin American" level of meaning that exists throughout the text, this means that the transformation of exile into home, the full declaration to one's own situation, has to be based on a full knowledge of one's own culture and history. A process of deterritorialization turns into a further reterritorialization, which culminates in Iphigenia's exclamation No quiero! A cultural identity beyond homogeneity becomes apparent. An extensive identity finding of the collective kind needs a prerequisite: thus we can read Alfonso Reyes' position, as well the preoccupation with autochthonous history, and with the history of colonization. Here Reyes sees the specificity of Mexican culture in the intersection of different cultural ways. From his Paris exile the Mexican recognized the difference between the almost historyless character of "new" countries such as Argentina and the meaning of indigenous history for countries like Mexico. 67 In exile he became increasingly conscious of the cultural space outlined at the beginning of this chapter. To this

64

65 66 67

Ibid., p. 266. See also chapter 4. Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Camp/etas, vol. X, p. 349. See Patout, Paulette: Alfonso Reyes, p. 82.

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insight he ties the hope that European culture could be newly fertilized in confrontation with the autochthonous American. 68 On the other hand it was especially colonial history which Reyes believed made it possible for the countries of Nuestra America - here he consciously picked up Marti's term - to produce not only in the realm of literature but also of culture in general an overall synthesis: "We are a race of human synthesis. We are the true historical balance."69 And due to the experience of the World War as well as the Spanish civil war, Alfonso Reyes supported, like many Latin American intellectuals at this time such as the already mentioned Pedro Henriquez Urena or Jose Vasconcelos, the belief that the course of history has made the American continent the place of concrete utopia (in Bloch's sense), a utopia which was a responsibility for the Latin Americans: At the present time the continent is embraced by a hope and it offers Europe a reservoir of humanity. Either this is the meaning of history or there is not any meaning in history. If this is not now, then it will be in the future, and we Americans all know this. [ ... ] America is a utopia. 7o

The space as object of European expansion has become the space of a hope of planetary extent. America appears here - certainly in a long line of tradition which reaches from Christopher Columbus and Thomas More to Jean Baudrillard, but which since the second half of the 18 th century predominantly was replaced in the north of the hemisphere 71 - as the continent of the future. Now Reyes moves the Latin American part of the continent into the strong position of a hope of humankind and humanity, which threatens elsewhere to sink into barbarism or already sank a long time ago. Tauris became a hoard of a culture of humankind, the seat of a cosmic race in the sense of Vasconcelos, which presents the "historical balance" of all times and epochs, all histories and all cultures which become simultaneously present. Like in the transformation of the Erinyes into the Eumenides in Aeschylus' Ores tie, the old is not eradicated and repressed but integrated and takes its new place in the new society, so here the past and especially colonial history may not be repressed. In a time in which the study of Spanish history and culture was done only secondarily, Alfonso Reyes demands in an article from 1921, a short time before the writing of his Ijigenia cruel in the Spanish, the intensive preoccupation with strengthening the connections with Spain after a century of mutual forgetting --a re-appreciation with a future perspective which would have the same meaning for both sides: As America will never discover the sense of life entirely as long as it does not recover piece by piece its "Spanish consciousness," so there is no better task for Spain in the world than to take up again its role as big sister of the Americas. 72

On the individual as on the collective level, memory is of decisive importance for finding life and identity: "Perhaps the immediate task of life consists in creating a well of memories.'>73 This decisive role of memory for free self-determination on an individual as well as on a collective level Alfonso Reyes meant to emphasize through his design of the Iphigenia myths, in the sense of a "moral allegory. ,,74 Beyond his allegoresis Reyes had a 68 Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Comp/etas, vol. XI, p. 104. 69 Ibid., vol. XI, p. 134. 70 71 72 73

74

Ibid., vol. XI, p. 60. See the fIrst chapter of this volume. Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Comp/etas, vol. IV, p. 572. Quoted in Iduarte, Andres: Alfonso Reyes, p. 18. Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Comp/etas, vol. X, p. 354.

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clear idea of the peculiar position and role of the Latin American author who, due to the political and social conditions of his native country, did not know yet the specialization and limitation of a purely literary section in contrast to the European author: Everything contributes to placing the author in the first row. Noblesse oblige. There may be no ivory towers. The man ofletters exceeds himself and is engaged sometimes more, sometimes less in endeavors in the public service which attract and demand him. 75

Reyes has been very conscious of this special responsibility of the Latin American author who should become active not only in the literary but also in the intellectual and political field. This not only becomes evident in his ljigenia cruel which, as we saw, is not only a bare play within a setting of European education and reading. The significance of this fundamental piece of Latin American theater literature has already been sensed by Carlos Fuentes, admittedly without elaborating it later: Jfigenia Cruel, one of the most significant and most transitive instances of our literature: a true limit transition, passion and appetite - our sense of exile, being orphaned and ex-centricity in the transition to the ground of community, the identity and universality.76

The great Mexican novelist rightly respected in ljigenia cruel a border text and maybe even more a border-crossing text, not only in reference to the two poles of Western and indigenous cultures he predominantly deals with as well as the phenomena of overlapping but also in regard to work on the myths which charged the workability of the ancient, Western paradigm. Thereby Reyes' play deals with the problems of deterritorialization produced by exile, which leads to new movements that change the borders between civilization and barbarism. The experience of exile is not repressed but integrated in one's own development: Orestes is not killed, he can return as a free person to his native country, admittedly without being allowed to exercise any power over his sister in the future. This is how in Fuentes' sense the being orphaned, the being without parents is overcome. All this includes a declaration to the at least temporary ex-centricity, to the periphery within historical and cultural development, which according to Reyes is not coupled anymore to Europe. The cruel Iphigenia decides for the barbarism of Tauris and saves, Reyes makes us understand, this space as a reservoir for the humanity that hides behind this cruelty.

Latin American avant-garde and European hearing impairment Out of this peripherical position ljigenia cruel is written - and from the self-confident allusion to one's own cultural meaning and the future centrality of this culture which would reterritorialize as the culture of all humankind in America. This play is not "only" a purely literary work on the Greek myth, whose rewriting happens from a position which is still marginal in 1923, a work on cultural heritage, on Western cultural memory which selfconfidently claims it as part of its own heritage and at the same time also changes it and which is newly directed towards very different cultures in Latin America. Consequently it can be seen today as an important detail that in 1923, during a first reading of the play in the house of the Ecuadorian legate in Paris, Bolivian Quena-flutes substituted for the Greek

75 76

Reyes, Alfonso: Ptiginas escogidas, p. 649. Fuentes, Carlos: Alfonso Reyes. In: Presencia de Alfonso Reyes. Homenaje en el X aniversario de su muerte, p. 26 (italics by the author).

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pan-flutes. 77 Very different spaces were culturally connected in this manner and in a bordercrossing fashion set into movement. The revision to and work on the Western myth from a Latin American perspective admittedly has its limits. The surprising tum at the end of Iphigenia's refusal to return to Greece on Orestes' side, has been later and partly autobiographically included by Reyes. This is the real meaning of the play but leads at the same time to a number of fruitful contradictions, which from today's perspective show the limits of Reyes' version. The decision by Iphigenia is in the first line a denial. The "empty shells" of the No Quiero/ at the end leave open the future of Tauris. The space that is opened up through Iphigenia's decision is not positively filled. It is not clear whether the return to the temple, as Reyes has proposed in a comment, means that the human sacrifices continue in Tauris or whether - which could actually be expected from this Mexican humanist - Iphigenia has a humanizing influence which is, by the way, already indicated at the end of the play by the mildness and generosity of the Toas towards the Greeks. For Reyes, his protagonist's breaking out of a chain of fatalities was more decisive than the further course of development. But due to the negativity of the ascertainment of the new limits of the workability of the Western myth for the design of an identity that can claim validity for Mexico and Latin America in general, the revision of the ancient paradigm leaves open further developments between Greece and Tauris, between old and new home. Old - and in the outline - new cultures are to be designed. Orestes' sails, so much is certain, have disappeared over the horizon. If one distinguishes following Adalbert Dessau's slightly schematic four variants, in the confrontation of Latin American literatures with world literature in Goethe's sense namely imitation, rejection, cosmopolitizing tendency and creative appropriation78 - then the Ifigenia cruel of the Mexican author is certainly not a myth adaptation which is abstracting from the historical relationship and retiring into a purely literary realm, for which Reyes had indeed been criticized. It is rather a complex and ambiguous transformation which is highly conscious of its belonging to Latin American literatures and the therewith connected problems and which included this intercultural question as an important level of meaning in its construction. The long-predominant readings of the playautobiographical, individual-psychological and ontological - have concealed the dynamic on which we have focused here. It is time to question this work anew. Not only new analyses but also new productions could contribute to it essentially. Iphigenia in Tauris as paradigm of cultural dependence and its possible solution - this presents a possible interpretation of the ancient myths that can be achieved only from the specific situation of a literature and culture which is about to free itself from its manifold relations of dependence. The asymmetry of the literary relations within the contradictory space of the literatures of Europe and Latin America shows itself primarily in the revision of the myth but above all in its fashioning; but at the time the will becomes evident to participate vividly and not merely museally in the Western cultural tradition which is confronted with other indigenous cultural traditions. The bloody history of which the priestess of Artemis speaks does not refer to the victims in the temple but to the history of the Artrides and the history of Western civilization in its continuous, today even accelerated movement of expansion. Ifigenia cruel integrates itself in a creative manner into a world literary frame of reference that characterizes from the beginning the literary space of the 77 78

Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Camp/etas, vol. X, p. 12. See Dessau, Adalbert: "Das Intemationale, das Kontinentale und das Nationale in der lateinamerikanischen Literatur des 20. lahrhunderts." In: Lateinamerika (Rostock) (Friihjahrssemester 1978), p. 51.

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play but which through the many references to other cultural traditions is put into motion. The possibility but also the limits of a future world-literature beyond asymmetric power structure become recognizable. The cultural project of the young Reyes breaks on the one hand with a part of the Mexican literary tradition and even more with the academic and solemn discourse of the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. On the other hand this project connects to the basic convictions and traditions of the modernistic lyricists and essayists and their search for new forms of Latin American identity. It consequently is not a complete break with the literary tradition but rather a break with a quite definite type of official discourse. Behind the pointed break with tradition, which is also evident in the surprising tum of the play, important continuities become visible. So the question arises to what extent one can understand Ifigenia cruel as an avant-garde play. In his Theorie der Avantgarde, Peter Burger has, as is well known, characterized that artistic practice which he calls "historical avant-garde," by its radical break with the predominant artistic procedures and even more with the institution of art itself. 79 The attitude of the avant-gardists that is aimed at producing a shock effedo in the readership, obeys according to Buger's understanding their attempt to radically change the status of art within bourgeois society81 and to let implode the borders between art and life as well as the attempt to seduce the audience into a conscious transgression of this border. We know today how much the Theorie der Avantgarde owes on the one hand to the discussion of the events and experiences of May 196882 and on the other hand to Theodor W. Adorno's "critical theory." Carlos Rincon has rightfully pointed out that the hoped-for convergence between the political and the artistic avant-garde in the 60s and 70s has become a much beloved Fata Morgana,83 which has admittedly become apparent as a concrete dream in the artistic and political practice of the Italian futurists. In spite of Burger's insistence on the leading idea of this break which above all is shown in dadaism and early surrealism - and which was questioned by the critics over and over again because of a very monocausal emphasis on this aspect - there is no lack of elements in the Theorie der Avantgarde which reduce the break to a self-critique of the institutions of art and culture. At the same time Burger works out a new availability of very different artistic procedures, which could be taken from the most different epochs.84 It is surely correct, that especially in the area of the theater big gaps remain within the research on the avant-garde in regard to Latin America. 85 Nonetheless there can be no doubt that the avant-gardian play by Alfonso Reyes - and here can be seen, in my view, a common characteristic in the different avant-gardes in Latin America - was not a total break with previous literary and artistic traditions. With respect to the self-critique of the institutions of art and literature in Burger's sense as well as the conscious application of literary methods which are borrowed from earlier epochs of literary history, numerous agreements with contemporary developments in Latin America can be seen in Reyes in 79 80

81 82 83 84 85

BUrger, Peter: Theorie der Avantgarde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1974, p. 44. Ibid., p. 108. Ibid., p. 66. See chapter 8 in this book. Rincon, Carlos: "La vanguardia en Latinoamerica: posiciones y problemas de la critica." In: WentzlaffEggebert, Harald (ed.) Europiiische Avantgarde im lateinamerikanischen Kontext, p. 57. Biirger, Peter: Theorie der Avantgarde, p. 24. On the meaning of the long influential theories of Peter Biirger see also the following eighth chapter. See Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Harald: "Sieben Fragen und sieben vorlaufige Antworten zur Avantgarde m Lateinamerika." In: lberoromania (Tiibingen) XXXIII (1991), p. 127 f.

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general and especially in his version of Iphigenia. While the Ateneo de fa Juventud had also successfully demanded and propagated a more active role for the intellectual and the artist in the present as well as future Mexican society, the political just like the artistic position of this group within a still largely precarious and unstable literary and intellectual field was not at all comparable with the radicalness of certain positions of the European avant-gardes. Before this background, Alfonso Reyes' attitude towards a strategy characteristic of the avant-gardes primarily in Europe, but also to a lesser degree in Latin America, is remarkable: Moreover I believe that the fashion of aesthetic manifesto, platforms and programs is a useless and even a damaging intervention of a political technique into the realm of literature. If this mania also has its own origin, these declarations serve only - to say it refinedly - the fixation of border marks and dating, but not the inspiration of those who sign and propagate them. 86

For Harald Wentzlaff Eggebert87 - and I follow his assessment - the avant-gardes in Latin America are characterized altogether on the one hand by a lower degree of organization in different movements which are accompanied by coherent and spectacular manifestos and on the other hand by their position as counter-discourses to the official rhetoric in Latin America. Regarding these two aspects the avant-garde work of Alfonso Reyes, which to be sure is only a part of his complete works, may very well be regarded as representative. While the avant-garde in Latin America proves increasingly to be not a break with Hispanoamerican modernismo but a critical continuation and radicalization88 of certain aspects of this influential movement (although it was hardly acknowledged in Europe outside of Spain), Alfonso Reyes' texts especially in regard to identity outlines, to which the Mexican essayist returns repeatedly, would support such an assessment. If we take the military metaphor of the Avantgarde seriously, than the enemy line broken through by the vanguard can be found within one's own national borders. Correspondingly the position of the Ateneo de la Juventud in Mexico as a counterdiscourse is primarily directed against the apparently impregnable positions of the so-called "scientific positivism" of the Porfirists. These positions admittedly proved, due to the trying length of the Pax Porjiriana, just as obsolete and unstable as the dictatorial system itself. But the attacks of these young literati and intellectuals within a literary field, which compared to a development in Europe was far less stabilized and differentiated, could not be directed against the existence of this only rudimentarily developed field itself. They would have cut the ground from under their feet, so to speak. Not a destruction of the institutions of art and literature in Burger's sense, not a destruction of the literary field, but its reversal was what the Mexican avant-gardist but also the Latin American in general were interested in. Neither a Vicente Huidobro nor a Cesar Vallejo put his own realm of literature on view. In a continuation of modernist positions, it sought a much greater influence, even the claims to leadership by certain groups, which now saw them able to bring the symbolic capital that they gained in the fields of literature and art to validity within the political field. Even the authors of the so-called boom of Latin American literature - as the in the end "inseparable" Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel Garcia Marquez - remained in debt to this idea until today. From this view it is not surprising that Alfonso Reyes did not make connections to the spectacularly staged Tabula-Rasa aesthetics of a Marinetti (which had their models that are admittedly denied) but rather cautiously made highly complex connections to an immense 86 87 88

Reyes, Alfonso: Obras Camp/etas, vol. VIII, p. 438 f. Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Harald: "Sieben Fragen und sieben vorlaufige Antworten," p. 132 f. Ibid.

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number of literary texts in his avant-gardistic creations. Walter Pabst rightly remarked about the avant-gardist method of the Mexican poet: But his most original challenge Reyes presented behind the mask of a long passed on poetic form with whose old manners of view and sensation he plays on the one hand virtuously but with which he breaks fundamentally. 89

This statement also throws an illuminating light on the place of ancient tragedy in the Mexican context. For this profound play of tradition break and artistic continuity Alfonso Reyes' Ifigenia cruel might stand exemplarily as hardly another text within the complete oeuvre. At the same time Ifigenia cruel catches almost paradigmatically the pole that came into movement of that intercultural field of tension within which the texts of the Latin American avant-garde locate themselves. Alfonso Reyes' work on the myth led to one of the most fascinating and most informing adaptations of Iphigenia. The play became a true counter-design, a Latin American Iphigenia, which from a non-European perspective questions the old myth anew. In Europe, where the productions by Peter Stein in Germany or Ariane Mnouchkine in France impressively prove the broad interest of the audience in the Orestie, this Latin American work on the Western inheritance still has not found an echo. The distinctive European hearing impairment is not only a sign of the continuous asymmetry between European and non-European worlds but a true scandal. To clear it up would not require a human sacrifice.

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Pabst, Walter: »No pude decirte 10 que queria«. L'inconnu und l'inexprimable in der Poetik und Lyrik von Alfonso Reyes. In: Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Harald (ed.): Europiiische Avantgarde im lateinamerikanischen Kontext, p. 422.

Eight Traverse Avant-garde, Post-avant-garde, Postmodemism Everything is invented In August 1997, in the window of a well-known bookstore in Frankfurt decorated with recent art-historical publications, one could see the book of an author whose Germansounding name is still not familiar to many German-speaking readers. To the translation of Max Aub's Jusep Torres Campalans - to the consternation of his editor! - a little slip of paper was added that might sound like a warning and at the same time like a temptation: "everything is invented!" The original Spanish text of Max Aub, the son of a German father and French mother and who has Jewish origins, born in Paris, raised in Spain and later living in Mexican exile who became a novelist, essayist and playwright, devotes his text to an avant-gardistic artist, who - this much shall be said - did not exist: that Catalan painter to whom Max Aub pretended to have found again in the fifties and whom he dedicated a tome dressed as a monograph about an artist and moreover an exhibition with paintings and drafts which both came from his own pen and brush. Even if the artist-protagonist is an invention of Max Aub, not "everything" is invented. Rather, that painter, to whom Aub ingeniously imputed the authorship of the term "cubism" (as a reaction to the medium of photography), is so convincingly presented in the political, social and artistic context of his time, that during long years the existence of the avantgardist and early friend of Picasso seemed certain, and essays on his artistic oeuvre started to appear. If the fictional character of this work had not spread during the 90s, it might have been possible to give the German foreign minister Klaus Kinkel, who was engaged in negotiations with Russia about the so-called "bounty art," a list of the outspokenly avantgardistic creations which Max Aub's book included in catalog form like any other serious artist monograph. The opportunity passed unused; it seems as if the time for spectacles in the best avant-gardistic tradition is over. A book in which "everything is invented" cannot easily confuse a literary critic. Max Aub, born in Paris in 1903 and died in Mexico-City in 1972, who undoubtedly belongs not only among the most extraordinary authors of the Spanish exile but also to the literature of the 20th century in general, was familiar with the literati and philosophers of the Spanish "generation of 1898" as well as with the artists who in the circle of influence of the historical avant-gardes on the Iberian peninsula until his departure from Spain and the dramatic circumstances of his ultimately successful escape into Mexican exile, knew what he said when he dealt, in the volume published for the first time in 1958 in Mexico, with an avant-gardist in whose name he also created pieces of art which were included as reproductions in his artist monograph, designed according the conventions of the text geme. Jusep Torres Campalans is undoubtedly a gaze on that avant-garde that we call today historical, from a post-avant-gardistic perspective. The much-writer and much-reader Aub,

1

The Gesammelten Werke of Max Aub was edited in Germany by Mercedes Figueras in the Eichborn Verlag. I owe her this anecdote and many conversations.

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who was formed by the styles of thinking of the so-called "98ers" and the aesthetical procedures of avant-garde art, was as hardly any other able to think anew the demands of the European avant-gardes for an explosion of the institution of art and a radical opening of literature towards life-practice from a point of view that goes far beyond Europe's globally internationalized art production. Even in his intermedial, the artist-monograph that refers the different arts and media to each other, he proved his familiarity with avant-gardistic procedures and techniques, but he did not substitute them under an aesthetic of shock or break, as might be suspected. As an (almost) perfect illusion Jusep Torres Campalans can be read as a connecting link that connects the historical avant-gardes not only of Spain and France with literatures (and arts) that - so we could cautiously formulate - stand under the sign of postmodernism. The question of whether we are dealing in this forging of links between the second and first half of the 20 th century with a post-avant-gardistic or maybe even post-modem text now serves as a starting point for our considerations about the relations that result from today's perspective, between the avant-garde, post-avant-garde and postmodernism.

Cubist writing after cubism Firstly, the convincing embedding of Jusep Torres Campalans in the social and artistic contexts of his time, which pulled the leg of more than one critic, and his placement in a network of relations to a number of real artists, draws our attention to the circumstance that this text between reality and imagination or - in the words of Gerard Genette - between diction and fiction, is an oscillating,frictional texf in a way which is analogous and inverse to the historic novel, and that pulls out all the stops of mimetic reality formation. He does this not only to achieve a reality effect (effet de reel) and thereby an illusion, but at the same time to extract through this faking a truth expressed on a higher level. 3 In the artist figure peppered with autobiographical allusions, Max Aub is able to show in the oscillating procedure of frictionality not only the difficulties of his own creating, but especially those of an avant-garde art which from the perspective of the 50s has become historical, not only in the eyes of a Catalan simultaneously found again and invented in Mexico and at the same time socially appropriated. Aub's text substitutes the seldom examined hinge function the 50s had in the mediation of the (not only avant-gardistic) aesthetics of the first half of the century after the experience of World War II and the Shoah (which Aub himself escaped only with good luck) and the second half of the century which stood in the sign of the debates on modernity. And he does that from a perspective that reflects his own busy journey through life between Spain, France and Mexico. The Catalan avant-gardist is presented with a number of pieces of art and in a "Necessary Prologue" (Pro logo indispensable) is briefly introduced and then historically and artistically placed in the more extensive part "Annales." In the following "biography" he is presented, in the "Green Journal" he speaks himself and in "The conversations of San Crist6bal" he is interviewed in his later years. In this monographic study neither is a catalog of the pieces of art missing nor an acknowledgment of the author. The artist becomes under

1 1

On this term see especially chapters 1 and 5. Mercedes Figueras has devoted to this question her afterword to the German-language edition, translated by Albrecht Buschmann and Eugen Helmle; see Figueras, Mercedes: "Wie kann es Wahrheit ohne Luge geben?" Max Aubs Jusep Torres Campalans. In: Aub, Max: Jusep Torres Campalans. Frankfurt am Main: Gatza bei Eichborn 1997, pp. 419-440.

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the eyes of the readership a figure in which the cultural impulse, creative potency and artistic failure or falling silent of the historical avant-gardes together with the situation of the author in the 50s are reflected in highest density. Representative for many artists' lives, the career of the natural talent from the province is followed as he is pulled into the great storms of politics and art in the first half of the century in Europe and - here even more consistent than Antonin Artaud, who followed his "Mexican dream'''' with a return ticket moved to Mexico to live together with Indians and exchange artistic with reproductive creation. Torres Campalans, due to his invented curriculum vitae, which not accidentally could be "saved" from being forgotten only because of a coincidence, transforms into a kind of memorial, which is erected for the unknown artist of the 20 th century (not quite unselfishly lined with autobiographical data) by Max Aub. The three-dimensionality of this memorial which the reader can look at from different positions and which through time as the fourth dimension is set into movement like a mobile, seems to be produced with an almost "cubist" writing technique in which the figure of the artist is anew outlined and illuminated from different standpoints again and again. All dimensions are consistently integrated in this "invented" and at the same time "true" figure and text: Besides the three dimensions of space and that of time step the dimensions of society, which the Catalan crosses in Spain, France and Mexico, the frictional dimension of the oscillation between diction and fiction, the dimension of literary space, which has to be further investigated, the genre-specific dimension which in this hybrid text is especially complex, as well as a cultural dimension which refers the different cultural spaces to each other. Hereby different methods can be singled out which Max Aub uses to set this dimension into movement. In a procedure which in many regards reminds one of Jorge Luis Borges' Ficcianes and above all in the construction of the invented Pierre Menard, autar del Quijate, a basic problem of literary and artistic mimesis is raised which is already paratextually introduced in the mottoes of the text and which one is made aware of in the "Necessary Prologue." It is not only the oscillating between the dictional and fictional text genres or the intrusion of the imaginary into the "real" world as desired by the historic avant-gardes - as for instance was demonstrated in Borges' Tlan, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius in a more avant-gardistic connotationS - but also it is the simultaneity of reception6 that the early avant-gardes were striving for as expressed in cubist art. The meta-literary reflections of the first-person narrator who is equipped with biographems of Max Aub bring, concerning the question of the order and design of the "existing" material, the art of the biographer and the art of the biographed into an immediate connection: The life and work follow which are so dependent on each other. (The paintings and drawings, necessary accessories, are put there where they shed their light the most.) Separated from this are his writings. From these are separated his explanations as well as the few articles that were written on his work. Finally come both conversations that I had with him in San Cristobal without knowing who he was. That means dismantling into components, the appearance of the biographed from different viewpoints, perhaps like a cubist painting, even if this is unintentional. 7

14 1 1 1

The attempt of certain parts of the historical avant-gardes to reach a melting or at least simultaneity between non-European and Western cultures, is only pointed to here. lean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio has used for this the formula of the "Mexican dreams"; see Le reve mexicain ou la pensee interrompue. Paris: Gallimard 1988, as well as the debate over this text in the second chapter of this volume. See also chapter 5. On the difficulties with simultaneity see, for instance, Wehle, Winfried: "Lyrik im Zeitalter der Avantgarde," pp. 419-422 as well as 453-459. Aub, Max: Jusep Torres Campalans. Mexico: Tezontle 1958, p. 16.

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This "cubist" construction of the object from different perspectives is as little staged as the shocking breaking in of the fictional and imagined into the reality of life but is carried out tenderly and successively - similar to Borges. The aims and procedures of an avantgardistic aesthetic are implanted into new contexts and integrated in such a way that the limits between fiction and reality, between art and life, are not broken through but are softly undermined. Jusep Torres Campalans is surely border-crossing literature, not only because Max Aub has his fun by pulling the reader's leg and thereby tests the boundaries ofliterary play. An aesthetics aimed at the shocking perception on the side of the recipient is now presented in the mode of a tender disarrangement and displacement, which clearly differ from the intention of the historical avant-gardes. The presence of the avant-gardistic world of experience is in this forgery of the former avant-gardist Aub nonetheless detectable not only on the level of content but also on the level of expression. But how can this aesthetic after the avant-garde be characterized?

Break with the break of tradition The already-mentioned structure of Aub's Jusep Torres Campalans, which is subdivided into seven different parts, assigns an active, text-designing role to the reader. The great number of "pieces of information" on the Catalan avant-gardist, the historical background, the author of the monograph and the design of the book allow in their mutual complementarity and partial contradiction such an immense possibility of combination of the different text elements, biographeme or auto-reflexive insights that cannot be exhausted by any reader. Only the facts that are presented in the "Annales" - which at first sight are quite harmlessly organized and which contain besides historical, technological, social, literary and artistic data also some conscious misinformation (and therefore the intrusion of the imagined also on this "factual" level is almost not receivable), propose a reading procedure which can be called interrelational reading and which asks the reader to jump between the different parts of the text of the monograph. The fundamental pattern of movement of understanding is therefore less the one ofa line (a linear, progressing line) but that of constant jumping. It is basically, as the first-person narrator stresses already in the first sentence of the "acknowledgements," a riddle, a rompecabezas 8, which because of this does not exclude - similar to Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones - logical, rational patterns of structuring or interpretation. The universe of texts in which Max Aub's pseudo-monograph inscribes itself is very well structurable and possesses an analyzable explicit and implicit literary space. Even if it is not possible for me to examine thoroughly only the works that the Anales name for every single year between 1886 and 1914 with which Aub's text constantly corresponds, it should be stated that through the mutual networkings an understanding process emerges which does not progress anymore in the book from the front to the back linearly, but relationally, laid out regularly in network-like form and including the different dimensions (according to the first chapter). Not only the text-internal designed archive (or imagined museum) of art - how it might be expected in a monograph on an artist - but also the library of literature opens towards the reader which draws the attention to the ability of double reference on the biographed and the biographer and creates a space which is intertextual and intermedially structured at the same time.

1

Ibid., p. 25, literarily translated a "head breaker."

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The back and forth jumping reading conditioned by the order of the material and which reminds one of the reception of a painting is directed through constant cross references, remarks, and footnotes to the catalog as well as the series that are produced between the single (picture-) elements. This is how a non-linear way of reading is tested, which in a more radical way a few years later in Julio Cortazar's Rayuela right at the beginning puts the reader ultimately before the choice in a "signpost," a Tablera de direccion to read this novel published in 1963 either linearly until chapter 56 and to ignore the "rest" or to "jump" in the manner of a hopping game in a predefined manner through the entire 155 chapters. 9 Elements of this branching, interrelational way of reading can be found - even if less dirigistically presented - in the cubist way of writing in Max Aub's Jusep Torres Campalans. It therefore takes up an avant-gardistic element - the destruction or disturbance of a linear reading in a playful manner. It would be easy to find a great number of avant-gardistic techniques, as for instance the intermedial interlacing of picture and text, the inclusion of papiers calles, of assemblies and collages in Max Aub's novel, which enter a dialog with the avant-gardistic elements on the level of content and are faded in through the biography of the artist. The network of relations and the relation of tension itself is not at all shaped by the will to finish with the predominant conventions, traditions, and discourses so characteristic for the historical avant-gardes. The resulting mutual references that the avant-gardistic procedures themselves have become available and usable and part of the archive of art and literature that the actual text (as the actual art) understands to use under the renunciation of any tradition break. The break is here available as tradition; it breaks only with the break of tradition. 10 The task of a central perspective, motivated avant-gardistically by the object of depiction, enables an interrelational network structure in which experiments as well as results of avant-gardistic action are integrated into a piece of art that escapes frictionally every possibility of a clear genre-specific as well as literature-aesthetical assignment. The at first sight centralized structure of seven parts, in whose center stands in the fourth part Torres Campalans' Biografia, proves upon closer investigation to be an open structuring whose center is empty insofar as this Catalan artist, in spite of all mimetic procedures under inclusion of eyewitness reports and credibility-lending photographs, "actually" did not exist. The invented becomes - similar to Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius - especially produced and set into movement with dictional text genres. In Torres Campalans' "Green Journal," the "scrawling book" of the Catalan artist published by the first-person narrator, we find a number of short reflections which refer often to the gradual unfolding of an avant-gardistic understanding of art as well as on the level of auto-reflexivity and implicit aesthetic of Aub's own text. Some utterances allegedly dating to the year 1908 return to the problem of a multi-perspective manner of representation:

1 IO

Cortizar, Julio: Rayuela, p. 7. Of course the break, which was either made or intended by the historical avant-gardes, referred only to certain traditions and inscribed itself again in other traditions (not least certain aspects of Decadence and Fin de siecle). In the break with the break of tradition a basic contradiction, we can see almost a "weakness of the immune system" of the new aesthetic.

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Literature on the move Why only painting from a single point of view? This anybody can do. A painter has the duty, just because he is a painter, to include more. An object is always better kept if portrayed simultaneously from several angles; the ideal: to see it from all viewpoints, as God did, or from the inside. A global painting.!!

This passage is readable at least on one of the both outlined levels, but it moves then in different contexts of meaning. While in regard to the first decade of the first half of the century it marked the unfolding of an, in Apollinaire's sense "entirely new aesthetic" which was promoted by different countries in Europe and by different groups that were connected with each other, then it means in regard to the first decade of the second half of the century a statement which especially illuminates the intermedial relationship between image and text. While on the one hand simultaneity, cubist multi-perspective and claims of totality are elements of the historical avant-gardes which during the first three decades of the 20th century (and also beyond) have demanded in the again and again changing combinations in the manifestos and that were carried out at the same time, the discussion on the simultaneity of painting acquires a new meaning from the standpoint of literature. The cubist fading of different perspectives concerns on a literary-aesthetical level the view from the inside (desde adentro) which is especially demonstrated by the Cuaderno verde as well as the application of certain literary techniques which allow the transporting of the linearity of literature into the quasi-simultaneity of painting and therewith the creation of that pintura global whose portrait - if we believe Torres Campalans - will last. As in Borges' Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote, the same sentence can be read and understood in very different ways, if put into another semantic and narrative context. While it means on one level the more or less radical break with the norm-giving patterns of depiction and habits of reception at the beginning of the century, it unfolds on another level just the integration of the different perspectives in a global production and perception, meaning in a context of a new interpretation of the (iconotextual-) relations between illustrativeness and textualness as is demonstrated by the artist figure Jusep Torres Campalans. Put into a different context, avant-garde becomes differently readable. The letters and signs are set into movement - in the sense of the foreword, as it were, overnight. Avant-gardistic art is thereby made available post-avant-gardistically. The break with the break of tradition is so well camouflaged that it is no longer receivable as such. The "entirely new aesthetic" is latent and manifests itself in the movements, in the play between both levels.

A global painting Besides many other text elements, the years keep the different parts of the entire text together, especially in the "Annales" and in the "Green Journal." A manner of reading that continuously swings between the different sections and dates imposes itself easily. But if we look at the layout and the structure of the Anales as (art-)archive and library, then it is immediately obvious that from the beginning the artists, literati and their works that are named after the single years and in the different sections are not only Catalan, Spanish, French or European. They rather consciously form a literary (and artistic) space which also contains a number of references to non-European literature and culture - so the birth date of

11

Aub, Max: Jusep Torres Campalans, p. 204.

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Borges is not forgotten, who is often underestimated in his importance for the mediation of avant-gardistic positions to Latin America. As the life of Jusep Torres Campalans and that of Max Aub - not different from that of the Spaniard Ramon Games de la Serena, the Mexican Alfonso Reyes, the Chilean Vicente Huidobro or the Argentineans Julio Cortazar and Jorge Luis Borges - is situated on both sides ofthe Atlantic, in this elaboration of the text, too, an inner-literary space is created in which non-European art and literature, although not playing a dominant role, are made conscious in their existence. This is how the development and unfolding of the historical avant-garde, undoubtedly promoted by the pluricultural origin of Max Aub and the painful, but culturally immensely enriching experience of exile, put into a context of reflection, which is to a greater extent thought of and discussed only since the 80s of the 20th century.12 We find in Jusep Torres Campalans references to Spain and France, Italy and Germany, to England, Russia, Norway and other European countries, but also to the USA and the different nations of Latin America. A strikingly wide space in the "Annales" is not only dedicated to testimonies and events from Mexico, but also those from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean - primarily Cuba and Santo Domingo. Max Aub was aware - although it remains unknown to many Europeans today - that in almost all countries of Latin America different avant-gardistic groups had constituted that were not only in contact and exchange with Europe but also among each other - and this was not self-evident in Latin American cultural relationships.13 Beyond the elaboration constituted by the text, meaning the spatial-temporal frame of the novel, a view of the avant-garde becomes recognizable in which the non-European world does not appear any longer as more or less short-term escape or meeting-place of avant-gardistic artists but appears as a space within which art and literature unfold. So arises an obviously internationalized culture horizon, which respects and presents the actual networking of avant-gardis tic artists and artist groups long before World War II. The international communication and intercontinental transportation possibilities that were emphasized by the Italian futurists and which were often pointed out from the European perspective, may not push the fact into the background that this potential, for the first time seemingly reachable ubiquity had consequences, not only in the sign of an often stated technique euphoria for the artistic forms as expression of the European avantgardists, but moreover for the unfolding of the historical avant-gardes within as well as outside Europe. Only the full awareness of this fact will lead to a new mapping. Rightly it has been brought to attention that shortly after the publication of the first futurist manifesto in 1909, Marinetti's text was made popular in Buenos Aires through the mediation of the modernist Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario. 14 Simultaneity and ubiquity are not only programmatic projections induced by technological progress and aesthetic categories of European avantgarde art, but basic experiences and starting points of a networking international avant-garde which establishes itself beyond the familiar cultural borders, that can no longer adequately be

12 13 14

Paradigmatic for this new horizon of questioning is the essay by Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Harald: Sieben Fragen und sieben vorUiufige Antworten zur Avantgarde in Lateinamerika, pp. 125-l39. See Ette, Ottmar: ,,Asymmetrie der Beziehungen. Zehn Thesen zum Dialog der Literaturen Lateinamerikas und Europas." In: Scharlau, Birgit (ed.): Lateinamerika denken. Kulturtheoretische Grenzgiinge zwischen Moderne und Postmoderne. Tiibingen: Gunter Narr Verlag 1994, pp. 297-326. See Wentzlaff-Eggebert, Harald: Avantgarde in Hispanoamerika. In (idem., ed.): Europiiische Avantgarde in lateinamerikanischem Kontext, p. 8, as well as the previous chapter. Since the last third of the 19th century the speed of intercontinental communication has also been observable and effective in literature.

22 The following 33 pages unfold in a multiple, fragmented texture a sequence of scenes in which the various figures are shrilly lit as if by projectors that sometimes have a voice and finally disappear back into the darkness of the vie nocturne. From the beginning the first-person narrator outlines a world that is subject to an unstoppable decadence. Already in the second fragment the life of one of the protagonists is outlined with a few lines: The daughter of my gardener became a whore and on her old face of twenty years disappears the nobleness of a wild life. Pauline, with her side parting, discusses, shows with pride the quick rubies of her tongue. She flicks the ash away and laughs right up the musty nose of the cocaine addict. She pushes the smoke up the mouth that twists with mechanical charm. The yellow water from which Pauline sips tells me about the stinking end of her affairs. 23

The dense concentration of the drugs, of the fragmented and shrilly illuminated body parts, the snapshots of certain stereotypical movements, lead to a world of images that is perceived from a subjective perspective and in spite of its colorfulness reminds one of the projection of a silent film. Changes of pictures and cuts, but also explicit references to the movies, connect this inner space of the nightclubs with a world of images projected into a dark auditorium, which were also (as in this text) accompanied by the music of an orchestra. Such a scenery could be located, so it seems at first sight, everywhere, in any metropolis of the West. However, these nightly projections are already through the title paratextually situated in Geneva where Cohen lived since 1914. How does it happen within this text itself, which is obviously shaped by avant-gardistic writing procedures? Towards the end of the "projections" the first-person narrator returns to his luxury hotel, whose name is not only well-known to the cab driver, especially since now the light of the Savoyan banks become visible. 24 These few elements - and especially the fading in of unmistakable buildings such as the Beau Rivage are for Cohen the basic procedures for locating a certain text in a certain city. Geneva is evoked through a few identity markings and the movement of the narrator, but it appears almost exclusively from the perspective of inner space. As the first-person narrator leaves the ballroom, he goes directly to the cab, from whose protected inner space the markings shortly appear. Then the inner space of the luxurious hotel is reached, which is used to the caprices of its guests, where this time a tired porter eases the transition and he passes through a gate, which closes again behind him. The "local color" is brought into the inner spaces. It is the Geneva of the just-established Societe des Nations that neglects or disregards its intercultural relations connecting the peoples. The women and men of the nightclub came from the entire world without that between the different cultures, raises and sexes a true dialog would happen. One observes and puffs away into each other's faces, and calculates the personal disadvantages and advantages of acquaintances. It is the draft of a city and of a society whose portrait is elaborated in epic breadth in the novel Die SchOne des Herrn, begun in the 30s and finished in 1968. One meets, sometimes starts a brief and mostly physical relationship, but does not care for the other as such. Geneva became a city with international flair but no more: the rules of the game stay entirely unquestioned - as already the fragments of the early prose

22 23 24

Cohen, Albert: "Projections ou Apres-Minuit 1922), p. 414. Ibid. Ibid., p. 441.

a Geneve." In: Nouvelle Revue Franr;aise (Paris)

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text, which is strongly influenced by avant-gardistic writing strategies - that of an (or every) occidental city. In the projections a sequence of incoherent movements in space unfold, whose motivations do not reveal themselves to the observer. So it is not surprising that the jazz musician Prospero, who is befriended with the first-person narrator, has earlier earned his money with movements, with just that movement in which movable goods are moved from one inner space to the next. These inner spaces and movements offer views of history, since Prospero tells us about his movings with Russian students whereby also the name Trotsky is mentioned - who not only sounded good to the French surrealist. The Swiss pre-history to the Russian revolution - with which historically more precisely the name of Lenin is connected - is faded into the inner space as well as some other references to contemporary events that are the decor of an epoch of which one only could know later that is was a time between the wars. In this manner a city appears in the nightly Genevan projections that is only fragmentarily illuminated in the darkroom of the inner space and which asks complementation from the readers to permit the emergence of the city of Geneva in the age of the League of Nations. This allows conclusions about the implicit reader, but it also allows one to guess that any European city could take the place of Geneva. Geneva seems to have no specific quality for this historical role. Argentineans and US-Americans, Russians and Japanese, British lords and Genevan servants unfold the portrait of a city without that the author or reader would have to approach it systematically: the city is just there and is called upon with its name and the namings of the unmistakable identity markings. These would be easily interchangeable, and indeed Cohen in his novel cycle sometimes changed through slight modifications the settings of certain scenes. The concrete city is for Cohen basically only of secondary significance. Its picture is assumed to be wellknown. The projections evoke in the reader already existing pictures saved in the brain (literary or originally produced through outer impulses) that as after-images fill in the gaps of Cohen's city-image. The movement that is produced by it is a double one: on one side the city appears as an inner space, in this case as a darkened ballroom which is artificially and temporarily lit up by spotlights in which gentlemen from all countries spend time with their or other ladies; on the other side the city becomes inner space insofar as in it people are concentrated who shape that city. Here, too, the inner space is a cirque du monde in Cohen's sense; moreover, it has the character of a circus or zoo. The space of projection of the image sequences that are produced through constant overlaying and overlapping of single images, metonymical to the city, the city becomes in its tum an inner space on whose (dance-) floor the couples as well as the lonely execute their movements. The feeling of solitude, as in Cohen's autobiographical narrations, also dominates these so much busier inner spaces. So one figure, "L'Isole," reports: I create a little world that belongs all to myself and where my pursuers fare badly! This is philosophy. Metaphysics, to be more exact. Or rather a kind of religion. This is quite complicated; and, of course, I cannot explain my whole system to you within a few minutes,z5

Similarly Albert Cohen's views on the city are not physical but metaphysical, not images but rather after-images of the city. This, however does not mean that these are static constructions. Therefore we tum now to the dynamics of this space-image.

25

Ibid., p. 425.

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The struggle of the images In the second chapter of Albert Cohen's novel Mangeclous, published in 1938 as always in Gallimard, before the eye of the reader the colorful swirling of the Jewish Ghetto of Kephallenia unfolds where the five friends, the Valeureux de France, meet. While here it is the traders and merchants who dominate the streets, there the Talmud pupils who pray in front of their door or two rabbis who lean over a passage of the text and discuss it in detail. Mangeclous, probably the most droll figure Cohen created, tries to disturb and to provoke the men of faith by shouting loudly that there is no God. His opponents put their hands over their ears. Mangeclous, who - as the author confides to us - actually "often believes in God," but likes to see if one believes him to be a "modem mind," turns now to other means: "A beautiful naked woman!" he screamed suddenly out of pure malice towards the more pious of the two researchers of the Holy Ghost, a pale young man with shadows under his eyes, who immediately imagined how repulsive this shameless lady would be if she would be skinned alive. 26

Naileater's insidious attack is aimed at a vulnerable spot in his present opponent. His words could not penetrate into the inside of the religious Jews since they put their hands over their ears; they also could have closed their eyes and so avoid an excitement of the retina which would have disturbed their religious meditation. This is why the smart aleck has the idea to produce with a few words an effect on the inside of his favored opponent that forces him to project unwillingly within himself a picture that opposes his meditation. Through an outer impulse, Mangeclous' words, a process is triggered which, almost necessarily and independently of the will of the concerned, bring the picture of a naked woman before the "inner eye." Ancient rhetoric already knew about the effect of the hypotyposis that is demonstrated to us here by Albert Cohen. The projection of an image in the inner space of the listener by speech can evidently not easily be repressed. But the pale young man who obviously experiences such a contestation not for the first time responds with a quite informative strategy when he changes the image of the dame impudique, which he has not deliberately created within himself, deliberately with the help of his imagination so that he can make it harmless in its eroticizing effect. The applied method is based once more on the play between identity and difference, since the lady stays the same, while the condition of her nakedness is radicalized when the man takes her last cover from her living body in a series of after-images. One surely could rightfully ask whether the transformation of the projection of an erotic woman's body in a scene of sadism one can hardly miss might help the religious Jews contemplation. But without question this procedure shows on the one hand the power which the pictures projected within ourselves gain and moreover that finally a struggle of the images will decide what dominates the "inner spaces" of the human being. There can be no doubt that here a political dimension is adjuncted of which the author was very well aware. The mechanisms of anti-Semitism - as the current discussion about the parades of flagwaving neo-barbarians though the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin show clearly - rests not least on a struggle of the worlds of images of the other in the mind. But at the same time it can be seen in that at first sight so harmless scene from Albert Cohen's Naileater that the impulse coming from outside does not have to have a direct influence on the retina to trigger the struggle of the images since it is possible in a more mediated way to evoke after-images within us and almost in Goethe's sense on our retina or 26

Cohen, Albert: "Mangeclous." In (idem.): Oeuvres, p. 377.

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- as we also could say - to play them cinematographically within the complex data transmission system of our choroid. The procedure of a revoking of the after-images is not managed by a closing and opening again of the eyes but happens hypotypoctically through the pointed words of the other. Thus the exact arranging of the image produced in the recipient - whether (depending among other things on our experience and our desire) it be a naked woman with fair or dark hair, with white or black skin color - is not of primary significance, as the reader of these lines might have noticed. For the desired exciting, thus moving effect, it is decisive that the detailed arrangement of the images of the unwillingly produced image refer to "imagined" and "real" after-images that are stored within the reader. Authenticity and force of conviction are based on the seemingly individually arranged faithfulness to detail; on it and a great number of superfluous details the effet de reel depends, the reality effect in Barthes' sense with whose help the self-projected images catch us or not. It is the pictures of the world inside our heads, which cause our conception of the world. Hypotyposis is a rhetorical method but at the same time a means of struggle to order anew from the outside the sequences of these images on the inside of the other and to put them into movement. Albert Cohen's writings work with a great number of stored images and counter-images that are used purposefully. Moreover it could be said that the entire economy of his writing is rested on the creation of poles or images diametrically set against each other. The bipolarity of these contrasts introduced from the beginning - for instance, inner space and outer space, Judaism and Christianity, man and woman, life and death - is then in the further course of his writing always worked off without that the basic bipolarity is entirely extinguished. The border-crossing antinomical structures enforce their contrasting qualities in a new and dynamic way, for instance with the complex femaleness (maybe also the femaleness-complex) of the male Solal, the continuation of his life after his death, the Jewish essence of Christianity, the presence of the outer space in the inside, etc. The bipolarity that is introduced from the beginning is only partially transposed into ambivalence, and it is never dissolved into indifference. 27 This might be the reason - and not only the often observable moralizing basic tendencies of Cohen's narrating figures that Albert Cohen's work is obviously located within an aesthetic of modernity that has not yet radicalized towards postrnodern writing strategies. But how is the working-out and working-off of contradictions in Cohen's writing expressed in regard to the images and after-images of the city that are designed in his texts?

Pictures and counter-images of the city On a wonderful April morning of the year 1936 - flower perfumes flood the Greek island Kephallenia - the small Salomon Solal, perhaps the most lovingly designed figure in Cohen's novel world, executes dry swimming exercises on his balcony. As always he likes to talk to himself: "The April of Kephallenia," said the lonely swimmer, "is more beautiful and more sweet than the July in Berlin! Undisputed. But why the hell does everybody layout their capitals in cold and sad places, and why are

27

On the definition of the terms ambiguity, ambivalence and indifference see Zima, Peter V.: Moderne / Postmoderne. Gesellschaft, Literatur, Philosophie. Tiibingen - Basel: Francke - UTB 1997, ch. IV.

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me.,,28

Those capitals that played an important role in his novels - and with the exception of Berlin also in his life - are compared to the Greek island world, indeed, to the darker regions of the lroidure, and to the rivers that might not be black, but definitely not light blue. Who wants to deny the climatic opposition between Paris, Berlin, London and Geneva on the one side and the Ionic scene on the other? But the North-South contrast, which in Salomon's words seems almost black and white, is based on a contrast structuring the entire oeuvre between lightness and darkness, and it seems as irreconcilable as the one between the first person singular and the third person plural. During the text it is repeatedly established and undermined. Solal, the central figure of the tetralogy, became a man of the north who still feels obliged to the Mediterranean South, while the Valeureux are convinced inhabitants of the Jewish Ghetto but without a lack of appreciation for the big cities of the North and without being blind towards the ideational values that are embodied by France, Switzerland and Great Britain. Germany is the counter-image. The parting from his father Gamaliel, who does not want to leave his ruelle d'Or in the Ghetto in the shelter of the citadel, and even more from his uncle Saltiel, who mediates between the different cultural worlds of the novel without giving up being Jewish, is contrasted with the arrival of the Valeureux in the capitals of "coldness and sadness" repeatedly, lovingly staged by Cohen. The arrival of the gang in Paris opens the 18th chapter of the novel Solal, published in 1930: And at the very first, just when he got off the wagon, uncle Saltiel took it as his duty to greet the Ville Lumiere with an exaggerated gesture of his cap. [ ... j Mangeclous stopped now and then, took the starer to task who made fun of them. [ ... j Then the Valeureux moved around in Paris with the only aim of greeting the statues of the benefactors of mankind. In the evening at seven, these unsuspecting men stood in front of the Foreign Ministry and bared their heads before the tricolor [... j?9

The picture of the Ville Lumiere, the ciudad-Iuz and the cradle of human rights which is not elaborated but evoked in this scene is an image of Paris that the five Jews had tried not only through the symbolic greeting of the French flag but also through the visit of the statues of the great benefactors of mankind to give a concrete shape. The darkness in the city of light is yet invisible. The same, not a little pathetic procedure is used by Saltiel and Salomon during their walk through the city of Geneva, since they visit in the city of the League of Nations not only the university (where Cohen had studied once) but above all the statues of reformators,3° that like those in Paris do not stand for a national but an entire human dimension. The stereotypically shaped images are afterwards embossed by their own "experience" and image impressions even if - as in the passage quoted above - the residents of these cities make fun of the strangely dressed newcomers from the East and quickly fuse the anti-Semitic world of images with the Valeureux de France. In conscious reference to the "struggle of the images," one can recognize the actual reason for the fact that Cohen, during the performance of his play Ezechiel in 1933, the year 28 29

30

Cohen, Albert: "Mangeclous," p. 366. Cohen, Albert: "Sola!." In (idem.): Oeuvres, p. 226. Cohen, Albert: Belle du Seigneur, p. 132: "Then we visited the wall of reformation, which is great. We bared our heads before the four great reformators and were silent for a minute, since Protestantism is a noble religion and moreover the Protestants are very honorable, very correct, that is well known." This scene is in contrast to the less tolerant and correct behavior ofthe Genevan population towards the Valeureux.

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of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany, kept the projection of the anti-Semitic world of images and stereotypes on stage, which was understood as scandalous from (especially Jewish) parts of the audience as well as the contemporary critics. Cohen did not agree that the time for such projections was badly chosen: for him, only the struggle of the images counted, which he admittedly lost. Albert Cohen therefore stayed away from the stage for ever after and tried afterwards to outline his world of images in prose texts. Independently of each chosen genre he followed the cliches that were hypotypotically produced by the "Jew" in a Central-European readership in the 30s and later, starting from the projection of these easily mechanically evocable after-images in the anti-Semitic atmosphere of Europe to cause changes within the image world of his readership. In the end it was not important whether his images were, as in the theater, predominantly produced through outer, or, as in the literary text, inner impulses on the retina and/or within the visual center, even if for us his decision to place importance on an "inner" world of images is not without an inner logic. Also in this case the play of identity and argument is effective and a bare counter-image would not have been enough in the struggle of the images. Therefore first the positive images of cities are evoked to subject these after-images in a second step to deliberate changes. This happens - to remain with the two cities Paris and Geneva - with the help of those nightmarishly designed scenes in which the protagonist Solal, as incarnation of the juif errant, roves through the streets of the large Central European cities just like the small boy in his Jour de mes db: ans through the streets of Marseilles. Solal, who due to his engagement on behalf of the German Jews has been long since chased out his leading position in the League of Nations, and who has been deprived of his French citizenship, wanders - temporarily freed from the pain of a love that has devolved into a "chemically pure love" (amour chimiquement pur) with Ariane - through a Paris whose walls, with their stereotypical writing "Mort aux Juijsf, "tum him into a "chemically pure Jew." The streets and squares of Paris that are mentioned as markings of way and identity could allow the reader to follow Solal's ways through Paris with the help of a map. They also point at the same time to a pattern of movement and processes of understanding of an individual and collective figure that the attention of the audience is drawn to and which is located in always new city landscapes. And yet: the writing "death to the Jews!," which drives him back again into the "little ghetto, our little ghetto,,31 of his hotel room, connects all the cities of Christianity, all the cities of the West, and wipes out the apparent differences presented by the multiplication of the names of well-known Parisian streets and squares: "How many death wishes for the Jews in these cities of brotherly love.,,32 Beyond the differences between the single cities, an identity appears which the heterogeneous proliferation of those images that are evoked by famous names of streets does not mask, in which the identity of the homogenous death expressed in them becomes apparent: "Mort aux Juijsf All over, in every country, the same words.'>33 It therefore is no surprise that Cohen lets his hero Solal wander in an immediately following chapter of his novel no more through the streets of Paris but now through Geneva - on a no less hopeless search for a place in the League of Nations, the Societe des Nations. In a long letter to his lover almost without punctuation, Solal reflects upon his life situation and the alternatives that are left to him in a very conscious stream of consciousness: 31 32 33

Ibid., p. 849. Ibid., p. 852. Ibid., p. 861.

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outside I walked the streets and pulled my misfortune behind me and longed for my uncle Saltiel oh to see him again to live with him no impossible he would be so unhappy to see me so fallen I cannot let him suffer stopping before the large lake I tear both letters my two nice memories my great hopes and throw them into the lake and see how the current takes them with it the streets the streets the streets and think to free you from me to leave you all my dollars to deposit them in a bank for you and to live with them in the basement, I have been tired today have not eaten stooped over my typewriter [... ]34

The wandering in Geneva that, like the errance in Paris in the previous chapter, shapes the entire text structure of this long letter, Solei can set against only three alternatives: firstly, the return to the island, to his uncle Saltiel, a return into the ghetto, which is admittedly an impossible alternative; secondly, the possibility of suicide, the physical destruction under the legacy of all his possessions that comes close to the "Endlosung" which was the goal of the Nazis; and finally "Ia cave, " a life in the underground, that can be referred to several passages that are scattered over Cohen's complete works. Here the movements of escape are outlined that could free the juif errant from his wandering, his errance through the Western cities. A deterritorialized existence searches desperately for a possibility of a reterritorialization in this or another world. But none of the possibilities outlined here offers the hero of the novel cycle an escape so that his end must necessarily coincide with the ambivalent end of the cycle itself in Belle du Seigneur. A fourth possibility, the one of Zionism and the foundation of the state Israel, is at least outlined in the novel as the chance of the Jews to return into the Societe des Nations, but it can only be briefly mentioned here, since this theme is connected with the question of reterritorialization that I already have tried to illuminate in another passage. 35 It remains to be said that from this critical point of a menacing physical destruction of the Jews all images of European cities fall almost into one. Their identificatory markings adhere only at the surface but beyond their surface ends the play of the differences. The borders between the different cities are set into movement and become blurred. In the struggle of the images the Ville Lumiere and the statues of the benefactors of mankind are confronted with a city in the underground in which the figures of a people banned from the surface reach epic greatness. Within and even more beyond the city of light that Albert Cohen had hastily to leave before the Nazis advancing on Paris, another city opens up whose images and after-images we dcal with now in conclusion.

The city in the underground The Valeureux arriving in Geneva or Paris always knew where to tum to find the spiritual center, the essence of the cities visited by them. But for Solal, banned from the society of Europe, there is no center anymore: he wanders around in the cities that, although they do not consciously present a decentralized city structure, have lost their original centers. The emptied nucleus of the city can only be compared with the more or less protected inner space of the ghetto, whether it is a hotel room or a house, shared with the loved one and shielded from the outer world. Inner spaces are constructed as counter-spaces. But there is another form of ghetto that in connection with the images of the city has earned our attention. In the first novel of the cycle, Solal, thc outsider who has climbed to high office has bought a medieval palace, in which he lives together with his lover Aude. Only by chance she manages to discover the secret of the purchase of the Commanderie, the 34 35

Ibid., p. 875. See the final part of my essay "Albert Cohen: ,Jour de mes dix ans. '"

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name presenting one of the numerous allusions to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. 36 Here indeed a Jew bought up a place of Western-Christian tradition and changed it into a world of Judaism. Aude notices that her lover climbs down through a secret door into a gigantic, catacomb-like cellar, from which she believed to have heard voices coming up earlier. Solal, who because of his love for Aude and because - as one could paradoxically formulate - of his orientation towards the Western tradition, had temporarily broken with his father Gamaliel and Judaism, reports to his belle about the reconciliation with his father and its consequences: "I have thrown myself before my father's feet and this merciful man has forgiven me. He has given me the order to layout a secret living place in my European living place. T have obeyed. - He is wise and understands that I have to continue my Western life. - I have let come the Solals who come from Kepellenia and from other places. A biblical city teems under the place of residence of his excellency. During the day in the department, in the chamber, at the meetings of the party. And at night I go to my country. And during the day, as at night, I am so sad, so sad.,,37

The Western world on the surface is confronted with a non-Western world, a "biblical world," invisible for the uninitiated in the underground. The protagonist is split between the spaces of night and day, "Western" and "Jewish" worlds, as the city now falls into two parts, a "Christian" surface and a "Jewish" underworld. Here for the first time in this chapter of Solal a spatial junction of those two poles takes place, which emboss the picture of the city in the novel work of Albert Cohen. The Jewish ghetto of the Mediterranean island Kephallenia is projected into an inner space of the occidental city through which a tension is produced between the two cities that is presented as not dissolvable (and which is not bearable for Aude). The sad lover wants him to decide between one or the other world, one or the other city. When he refuses, she leaves him and expels him at the same time from the Ville Lumiere: Solal rapidly loses all his offices. The tension which is already not soluble in Solal intensifies under the historic circumstances of Hitler's seizure of power in a way that now one city tries to extinguish the other entirely. While Salomon had already at the beginning of Mangeclous frightfully mentioned the pogroms that were committed against German Jewry from a safe distance, Solal's visit to the Berlin of the 30s transforms into a journey to the end of night, through a city sinking into horror. This journey stands again for a process of becoming aware, even if it adapts nightmarish qualities. Only by coincidence can Solal save himself before howling barbarians, the Nazi hordes, into a basement in which the dwarf Rachel has become the central figure of a Jewish world radically threatened in its existence. Here, too, a ville biblique is created, which is built up as an at times grotesque, bizarre counter-world to an outer-world, which in its deadly logic became in the novel the administrator of the occident. From the dark world of the basement the outer world can now be perceived only acoustically. But also on this level there is a sharp contrast: A great noise suddenly rose outside once more and at the same time with the hammering of the boots German singing can be heard, the song of malice, the song of German desire, the desire for the blood of Israel, as it spurts under the German knives. Wenn ludenblut unter'm Messer spritzt sang the young hope of the German nation, while from a neighboring basement another singing arose, the singing of the praise for the Eternal, the heavy singing of love that emerged from the ground of the centuries, the song of my king David 38

36

37 38

The allusions to Proust are numerous in the entire cycle and start already with the first sentence of Solal: "L'oncle Saltiel s'etait reveille de bonne heure." Un incipit peut en cacher un autre: An anti-Proust can be sensed, since one novel starts with the early going to bed, the other with early getting up. Cohen, Albert: Solal, p. 290 f. Cohen, Albert: Belle du Seigneur, p. 514 (the italicized phrase is German in the original).

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In the singing the dissonance of these two worlds culminates whereas - as often in the representation of religious convictions in Cohen39 - the sound has taken the place of the image, the ear the place of the eye. In place of the images are now sound images that bring for a last time that which has become unrepresentable in the image, the spurting blood articulated in a foreign language. Cohen's pictures of the city darken increasingly in the novel cycle; and they are also after-images in the sense that the images are of an antiSemitism that has become virulent and of the Shoa. The after-images become night-images as images of the night that fell over the on the surface so civilized Occident. This is how a three-stage process was produced which leads from the retinal perception of the city to the evocation of some cliche-like and over-laying after-images of single cities to a situation in which the play of differences weakens and homogenous spatial structures are created in which the steps of the juif errant get lost. The projection of the city into the inner space is followed by an unfolding of the city within the inner space, which increasingly darkens under the burden of historical events. It is not difficult to connect this last, darkened and with death threatened inner space with those images (at first sight) of romantic origin that Cohen evokes for a last time in his Camets 1978. Here the aimless movement of the I in the streets of Marseille transforms into an almost complete closure and captures the transition in that manner in a time-lapse (and in a concentrated use of the same elements) - this, too, a border-crossing - moving from the city of the living to the city of death: Back again at the Canebiere, I lower my eyes while walking and bite my lips so that I do not cry. "Tired of life," I write into the air with my finger. Then I write the word "catalepsy." It is a word which I have read in a book, and I have learned from the dictionary that it means that one does not move any more, that one is as if dead. As long as no one buries me alive, mistakenly. I will wake up in my coffin and I will scream and hear the steps of the living who walk over the cemetery, and I will scream that they should come and free me, but they will not hear me, and I will scream, I will beg, I will suffocate, the lid of the coffin presses on my nose which is alive. On my way back I will ask Mama that she should make sure that I am really dead when I have died, and that for greater certainty she should push a knife into my heart. It is enough to think no longer about catalepsy.40

After-images of the Shoa The development depicted in Albert Cohen's work is that of a constant deterritorialization, which couples the persecuted Jewish culture as well as Jewish writing to inner spaces that do not have to be established locally. The images of the city derived from this are finally always owed that perspective of an inner space. This means at the same time that the images of the city are increasingly less distinguishable from each other and that their marking do not refer anymore to basic differences so that these city images in a sequence of after-images become mutually interchangeable. The borders become blurred. The overlapping of the different picture structures is carried out in a manner so that every picture represents the result of the earlier depicted structures, so that into the concrete picture of a certain city has always already entered the after-images of other cities. In Cohen's writings we deal with a highly sensitive literary retina which, unlike a canvas or a mere projection surface area, saves within it the successive events of exposure and therefore has on its surface different grades of sensitivity. The images of one city always contain the after-images of other cities, the "succession of images" seems pure to us, but in Goethe's 39 40

This becomes especially evident in his final book, the Carnets 1978. Cohen, Albert: Carnets 1978, p. 1129.

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sense some of the previous has crept into the following.41 The textual image of the city is also co-shaped by an advancing intertextuality, a literary tradition of images. Therefore Cohen's city images may seem to be stereotypical at first sight - and here could also be the reason that (as far as I know) so far no study on Cohen's image of the city has been presented; but it unfolds its dynamic and polymorphy in that retinal net of relations that the different images of cities produce among each other. We have seen how much the interior perspective of the city in Cohen owes the condition juive of his writing and the processes of understanding and the hermeneutic of the movements in the outer space. Being pushed into the perspective of the basement already appearing in Cohen's Solal and in Belle du Seigneur equipped with a different historical background might clarify in which inhuman way the ghettoization of the Jews has been driven forward in the 20 th century. It is a development that in its logical consequence led to the concentration camps of the Third Reich and developed a spatial structure that played such an important and structurally sometimes omnipresent role in Albert Cohen's texts since 1945. The vision of Berlin from a basement darkens the image of the city and replaces it by a world of noises and sounds which through the mechanics of destruction that they announce becomes even more threatening. Through the activation of after-images and aftersound this threat can easily be projected into the heads of their contemporaries through the hammering steps of the Neo-Barbarians. After the Shoah, the large cities of Central Europe have become other cities - Berlin foremost among them, although it stands paradigmatic ally for many others. From this perspective the repeatedly recurring debates about a resurrection of the "Golden Twenties" in Berlin seem to be as breathtaking as they are childlike. Without the Jews the "Golden Twenties" are simply unimaginable. How can one write about these cities? We know that in spite of Adorno's famous and already in its time controversially discussed phrase, that poetry is not possible anymore after Auschwitz, the city has returned into the post-Shoah literatures of Europe and takes there as before a broad space, that might be today of even greater importance than before 1933. Cities were created whose deterritorialization admittedly has not happened in the manner demonstrated by Cohen. Maybe the representation of the city that is proliferating on the surface (and not into the depth) could be representative for a new sensation of the (post-) modem city, which is restricted to areas and surfaces that ignore centers and is run through by unsettled as well as unaimed movements. 42 The French philosopher and culture-theoretician Jean Baudrillard approached this city of the second half of the 20 th century in the USA - if we follow Nestor Garcia Canclini's idea - in the manner of a sociologist, namely over the highway and freeway, and connected the thus-perceived metropolis in his travel book Amerique metonymically with surfaces of the broadly stretching-out deserts of the North American South. 43 As is well known, the desert characterizes itself like Baudrillard's city by a defect in the underground, a lack of water, so that its characteristic too is the physiognomy of the surface(s). Could it not be that the still observable difference of the European city perceived by Baudrillard and (even from the author of Simulacres et simulation also appreciated plane perspective)44 has to do with 41 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Farbenlehre, p. 69. 42 See also the fine report by Brissac Peixoto, Nelson: "Periphere Modernen." In: Haus der KuIturen der Welt 43 44

(ed.): Die anderen Modernen. Zeitgenossische Kunst aus Afrika, Asien und Lateinamerika. Heidelberg: Edition Braus 1997, pp. 29-32. See the beginning and the first chapter of Baudrillard, Jean: Amerique. Paris: Grasset - Fasquelle 1986, as well as the second chapter of this book. As we have already seen, this is according to Canclini the preferred perspective of the communication scholar.

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the fact that in them a process of marginalization and destruction took place that is unparalleled in history? How do the European cities remember this dark past? Is the destruction of the (historical) depth reflected at the (present) surface or do the surfaces of today's cities produce depths only where they feign or simulate an apparently historical continuity, which plays over the breaks? What are the traces of absence and even more the missing? It would be too simple to connect the answer to this question with a plea for a Holocaust memorial in Berlin. And yet, what a sad fact it is that this complementary counter-city does not want to be a city for all groups of victims and those deterritorialized by barbarism, and so painfully perpetuates the separation of the spaces. It does not reterritorialize, but deterritorializes anew. What can we expect from this missed opportunity of the descendants of not only the perpetrators but also the victims but a new drawing of borders? Literature is more fertile and more open. The images of the city as Cohen has designed them have with their dominant inner space certainly moved into oblivion: their after-images and not least their inner perspective and caves or cave pictures have faded steadily, not least due to the effectiveness of his images of love. For Solal it nevertheless would have been impossible in the streets of Geneva not to see the after-images of Marseille, Paris or other cities. More important than an enormous monument - whose underground memory- and documentation rooms in their currently debated form admittedly are an expansion of the original plans45 - might be the attempt to awaken critically on our retina in Goethe's sense the faded after-images, literary and artistically, in everyday life. Ifwe close our eyes and open them again we may recognize in the image of our city that grows into the surface those basements, those cities under the cities as pictures under the pictures, which Albert Cohen outlined, accompanying and illustrating the most cruel antiSemitic centuries of the last millennium. The spaces of the city tum into a world in the mind in a new, invigorating dynamic. As after-images, in contrast to photos, they adjust dynamically to our quickly changing urban spaces and are therefore constantly in movement. They come into being as hypotypotical after-images beyond our retinal perceptions and present symbolic products of memories that far beyond our purely personal individual world of experience unfold their own new dynamic.

45

The discussion of these subterranean rooms that began just after the completion of this chapter is still not finished. Nonetheless such a lieu de memo ire in the underground of the city in the Caves de Berlin would be a fascinating thought, not only in the light of Cohen's imagination.

Ten Passage On the Swing Pfeiffer with three f's, and the limits of youth Not only physical geography, nation-states or the stratification of society, not only the different media, the arts or nature, the scholarly disciplines, literary genres or national literatures, not only landscapes, myths or gender have borders, but also the different phases of life, youth and aging. The question of the borders of youth has therefore become of interest, next to many disciplines of knowledge, for literature as well as literary theory. One characteristic that cannot be circumvented in this discussion of the topic of youth is that it is dealt with by authors and teachers do not at least biologically possess it and even might have gotten on in years in the view of their readers or their students. So the approach to the topic may be attached to some tender melancholy, even nostalgia. A clear border seems to have been drawn between the investigating subject and the investigated object of desire that cannot be reached either biographically or biologically and even in a "remembrance of things past." This border drawing is subjective; but however we might define the term youth (and only at the end of the chapter will a proposal be made): especially those who teach at a school or university have to do with youth, but do not possess it - and I mean that in the double sense of the word. The borders are sometimes erected subtly, but often follow the modality of exclusion: "Don't trust anybody over 30." This motto of the 60s and 70s presented a border originating from a fascination with the zero that we on both sides of the erected borders can not entirely escape. Maybe the popularity of the topic "youth" has to do with that border situation only briefly outlined here. Can anybody think about "youth" without being implicated in his own experience? Can one reflect on "youth culture" without fading in at least the reflection of an old-fashioned and therefore no longer valid past in the not at all finite chain of mois successift? Proust's Remembrance of Things Past offers an excellent starting point to think about the chances to overcome this in everyday life unavoidable successivity on the level of art and to cope with it - which always means in a playful manner. But there might be at first sight an even more surprising way to approach this topic in a different, in a more "casual" way. It could very well be that there is a key scene in German everyday culture: that famous movie adaptation of a novel by Heinrich Spoerl and Hans Reimann that was published in 1933 and in which Heinz Riihmann plays a leading role that is well known to most people who were socialized in the German-speaking culture. I am speaking about the Feuerzangenbowle, a movie that decades after the premiere managed by the Nazis in 1944, in the midst of bombardments, was still screened regularly on German TV. In the opening scene within the circle of aged gentlemen who look back on their own time in school, it is not possible for the protagonist, who was raised on an estate far from public school, to join them when they remember nostalgically and excitedly their

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time at school, since the now 24-year-old man never attended a gymnasium, never experienced the community of a class. The missing youth feels heavy, it makes him old: Hans Pfeiffer is quite dejected and full of envy. It must be something marvelous, such a school with real teachers, real classes and real comrades. In spite of his 24 years he felt like an old man in contrast to the aged gentlemen around him. I

But because of this it is possible for him to do what we cannot: to jump over the border to youth, to become young again and to return like a famous author with a Ph.D. to the school bench (in the city of Babelsberg - this already should have suggested a movie adaptation)2 and to enter the area that we understand as an important context of youth culture. The continuing success of the novel, which is undoubtedly in its literary as well as cinematic version one of the most well-known fictions of the German-speaking world, could probably be explained by its play with the borders of our youth, since it is the distinguished author Dr. Hans Pfeiffer - "Pfeiffer with three f's" - who is allowed to revive a part of his own unlived "youth" and then to return full of happiness back to his own present. As a symbol of existential enrichment through the playing with these limits, he is given the daughter of the director of the school, whom he seduced with his impish tricks and hoaxes, and at the same time receives lifelong happiness that one can read in a multiple meaning as the interpretation of a metaphor: it is the high-school sweetheart he never had, but that he experiences now not only as the love of his own youth but also as being loved by this youth. The nature of this first love is narcissistic; perhaps any preoccupation with "youth," and not only one's own, contains a narcissistic undercurrent. 3 To prevent misunderstandings: with what has been depicted so far, I did not want to suggest that, let us say, a group that would come together during an author reading or at a conference would be comparable with that old men's circle that celebrates three slightly drunken memories of their youth and then every member of this group would return to their own youth - even if not for the length of a film, but for the length of a text section or a lecture. But we see that, while talking about youth and youth culture, we must deal from the beginning with a border (and at the same time a free space). Youth, so it could be said, is an object of research, a continuous transition that is separated from its research subject - as long as this is no youth - through an (if not in art) irreconcilable border. This admittedly does not mean that within the district of youth the problem of the border is nonexistent. In contrast it is just the crossing of the border that produces pleasure of life and love but at the same time brings forward an irreversible parting with one's own youth. For the elaboration of this not at all banal fact, the following thoughts on Italo Calvino's novel first published in 1957, II barone rampante, shall serve, even if they are not to be reduced to that question.

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Spoerl, Heinrich: Die Feuerzangenbowle. Eine Lausbiiberei in der Kleinstadt. Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag n.d., p. 12 f. Babelsberg is home to the UF A movie studios. The subject has been made into a movie three times so far 1934, 1944 and 1970. The most famous version is still the one that premiered in 1944, directed by Helmut Weill, with Heinz Riihmann in the main role, when he was not 24 but 42 at the time. The movie adaptation was already laid out in the text itself: "Pfeiffer was concerned. Certainly it will be a great hoax, maybe even material for a novel or a movie." Spoerl, Heinrich: Die Feuerzangenbowle, p. 13. This is also not changed by the fact that the novel, on its last page, takes the entire story back into the realm of the imagined, and calls only the beginning true. But what resonance might the last sentences of the novel published in 1933 have had in the movie from 1944, within the context of a Third Reich that was drifting towards its fall, for the contemporary movie audience: "True are also the memories that we carry with us; the dreams that we spin, and the desire that drives us. We want to be content with that." (ibid., p. 191) The figure and the experience of Dr. Hans Pfeiffer are undoubtedly more complex and more multi-layered than the narrator's discourse wants to make us believe.

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The baron in the trees and the limits of the game In the center of that novel that is structured in 30 continuously numbered chapters that certainly belong to the best within the extensive and variously shaped oeuvre of Calvino, stands the phenomenon of the border. Already at the beginning of the first chapter dated in the first sentence the 15 th of June, 1767, an event is depicted from the perspective of Biagio, the young brother of the protagonist Cosimo, that could have happened that way or similarly at many lunch tables, and not only in Italy. Not accidentally it reminds one of another key scene of German culture, the Suppenkaspar.4 Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, oldest son of the baron of Rondo and his German wife, the daughter of the general of Kurtewitz, refuses to eat a snail soup which is supposed to be followed by a snail meal. This well-calculated infamous compilation refers to Cosimo's sister Battista, who plays a cruel game with a number of critters in her environment and whose hobby, tolerated by the family, is not only to catch and behead snails, but also to torture many other animals such as worms, mice or birds, and to offer them as a variety of gastronomical specialties. Before this background the first chapter contains a number of border crossings, exclusions and violations of the borders. One day the then 12-year-old Cosimo and his 8year-old brother Biagio discover the barrel, that "snail hell,"s in which Battista keeps the snails she has collected - that due to their slowness present something like the counteranimals of modernity, which begins just at this time and accelerates increasingly. It was easy for the two scamps to drill a hole into the barrel and to lead the snails to the desired freedom. But the deed is discovered the same night by their sister and understood as a double violation of the border, theirs and that of the snails, and is punished by the strict father with corporal punishment and condemnation to a detention cell on a bread and water diet. The violation of the border is answered with a temporally limited spatial exclusion. The reintegration into the circle of the daily lunch table is marked by the consumption of the already mentioned snail meal and the rebellion of the future baron, the young, impetuous Cosimo. He not only refuses himself but he also anticipates the new excluding exclamation by the father -"Away from this table!,,6 - and leaves the circle out of his own free will and climbs a nearby tree with the promise to never leave it again. He will keep his word given to his father and will not step again on the ground of his native country during his lifetime, but lives a couple of meters higher in the trees. A truly singular deterritorialization. The abandonment of the dining room and the family contains a vertical crossing of the border that is admittedly dynamic and labile at the same time, as a number of following situations in the novel will show. Through the precarious situation of the crossing of the border by the 12-year-old boy, the border as such is made visible and kept within the consciousness of the audience. So the acrobatic reterritorialization within the trees and its no less skillful literary representation become the lastingly effective phenomena of a border text that opens up to transgression in a manifold way. The topic of the border, since the freeing of the helpless snails from snail hell, is connected with the topic offreedom - which is also one of the leitmotifs of the 18th century,

1 1 6

Figure in a famous German children's book. Calvino, Italo: 11 barone rampante. Presentazione dell'autore. Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore 1993, p. 11: "It seemed to be some kind of hell, in which the snails moved upwards over the barrel hoops with a slowness that was already a prediction of their deadly struggle." Ibid., p. 14.

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and is therefore at the same time also diegetically rooted - and it determines the further course of life of Cosimo no less than that of the individual and collective self-realization. The border becomes the central element of a process of identity creation within which, from the perspective of a youth, the real world (at least in the novel) is presented with a counterworld. That this counter-world is located as a concrete realized utopia in such immediate proximity to the official, "actual" world (firstly that of the adults) shows that both worlds are more connected to each other than separated from each other, that the border between the worlds, set by Cosimo, does not separate them from each other but refers them to each other within their characteristic rules. 7 A relation of exchange is quickly established between the two worlds, which does not diminish the peculiarity of the world in the trees. The latter is the outline of freedom and growing insight into the necessities inherent in freedom. The obviously pubescent nobleman tries first in his new environment some meters above the ground to create his own world with its own typography, places and infrastructure in which the border of the world that he now sees from a kind of bird's-eye view that for him is not necessarily valid. Therefore he already moves in the second chapter into the neighboring garden which is separated by a wall from the Rondos' piece of land, which contains a number of objects that were unknown to the future baron, that stimulate his sensual world. In this previously entirely unknown world beyond the wall he finds an almost magic garden, since the piece of land of the noble family Ondariva is a park characteristic for the 18 th century in which the seeds brought from that century's voyages of discovery overseas created their own, "dense" world. In this park of a reterritorialized vegetation the trees of different regions and climates now grow in a narrow space into a new, artistically conceived landscape element. In the further course of this chapter we will see the meaning of the landscape that becomes a true landscape of theory. 8 Here in a fenced area a world has come into being whose borders became perforated for the baron in the trees. In the garden of the Ondariva not only the vegetation makes Cosimo's heart beat faster. Soon he sees a pretty young girl who, in dresses too big for her age, sits on a swing, glides, as it were, through the trees and therefore is in a position between heaven and earth. And indeed this encounter with the still unknown girl, this chance meeting that will shape Cosimo's further life, from the beginning is a question of the border: She was a fair girl with a strange piled-up hairdo for a child, with a blue dress that was too big for her and was overly embroidered with lace, the underskirt gathered up for the swinging. The little girl had her eyes slightly closed and held her nose in the air as if she were used to playing the grand lady; she bit into an apple and at every bite bent her head towards her hand, clasping the apple and holding onto the rope of the swing; every time the swing hit the deepest point of its course, she pushed herself off, and her little shoes sank into the soil and blew the rest of the peels of the consumed apple pieces from her lips; and meanwhile she was singing "Oh Iii Iii Iii! La ba/a-n