Signs of Identity : Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices [1 ed.] 9781527515635, 9781527503151

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Signs of Identity

Signs of Identity: Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices Edited by

Emilia Parpală

Signs of Identity: Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices Edited by Emilia Parpală This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Emilia Parpală and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-0315-1 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-0315-1

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ................................................................................... vii Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Part I. Constructs of Fictional Selves Chapter One ............................................................................................... 16 Passing for White: Mythical Journeys in Quest of Freedom Hayder Naji Shanbooj Alolaiwi Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 31 Edith Wharton and the Condition of the American Woman Zainab Abdulkadhim Salman Al-Shammari Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 43 Female Promiscuity: Between Mythology and Demystification Oana Băluică Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 55 Songs of Innocence and Experience: A Neoplatonic Approach Adela Livia Catană Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 66 Food and Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays Xenia Georgopoulou Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 81 A Semiotic Reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe in German Migration Literature Milica Grujicic Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 95 Defining the Postcolonial Writer: A Framework for the Literature of a Diaspora Maher Fawzi Taher

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Part II. Discursive Practices Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 110 The Concept of a “Light Verb” Diana Ani‫܊‬escu Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 122 From Modernity to Modernities: Comparative Methodology in the Study of Modernity Andreea Barbu Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 134 Re-Writing and Memory: The Art of Palimtext Ana-Maria Cornilă Norocea Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 146 Metaphors in Modern Poetry: A Cognitive Approach Mădălina Deaconu Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 157 External Attribute as Illustrated by Medieval Clothing in England and France Iulia Drimala Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 166 Spatial Subjectivity: The Streets in Andrew Davies’s 2001 Modern Re-writing of Shakespeare’s Othello Eleni Pilla Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 181 The Dialogic-Differential Palimpsest in Scott Cairns’ Three Descents Carmen Popescu Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 200 Spaces Other: Dystopias and Heterotopias in Postmodern Fiction Alina ğenescu Contributors ............................................................................................. 213 Index ........................................................................................................ 220

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume features a selection of papers presented at the international conference Comparativism, Identity, Communication, 2016. The conference was initiated in 2008, drawing on the conviction that new perspectives could illuminate “identity”–a crucial concept in our culture. The editors of Cambridge Scholars Publishing deserve to be thanked for their prompt advice throughout the publishing process and for the exceptional graphic quality of this volume. I wish to thank plenary speaker Professor Leo Loveday and Professor Emil Sîrbulescu for their involvement in the initial stages of editing this book. I am grateful to philologist-artist Solimar Eurídice Nogueira Harper for the generous permission to reproduce her Cerulean II on the cover. In particular, for their constant institutional support the editor expresses her gratitude to the University of Craiova, Romania, as well as to her colleagues for their help throughout this ten year project. I would also like to express my love to my daughter Rimona and my son Michael, for their intellectual stimulation and day-to-day support.

INTRODUCTION

A hyper-theorized term, identity1 has come to express nowadays a rather diffuse, fluid, contradictory set of characteristics, instead of stable, homogeneous and independent meanings. In Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’? Stuart Hall (1996) noted the (post)modern explosion of the concept of “identity,” its strategic position and the possibility of connecting it with conceptions of time, discourse, and history. Confronted to global communication effects, sociologists put their emphasis on discontinuity, fragmentation, fracture, and dislocation (Hall 1995: 598). The contemporary interweaving of cultures generates a “multicultural person,” a new way of being “beyond cultural identity,” grounded in both “the universality of the human condition and the diversity of cultural forms” (Adler 1977). The move from essentialism to constructionism highlighted the paradox of identity, its simultaneous impulses to “sameness and uniqueness” (Joseph 2004: 37) and the role of otherness in negotiated identities–collective or personal. To counter the controversial semantics of this concept we preferred to identify the signs of identity discernible in different types of discourses, considering that language is the first semiotic resource employed in the construction and performance of identities. Literature, an exemplary semiotic object, displays a subtle rhetoric of the sign and, although we use the term representation, it should be noticed that some writers make the sign emerge by practicing a strategy of its overthrow, as perceived by Michel Butor (Helbo 1975: 11). Identity is a sign, functions as a sign, and allows writers to emphasise the ways signs of identity are related to those who have been assigned that identity. Literature fictionalizes and “empowers identity” (Holden Rønning 1998), dramatizing its fixity or fluidity, purity or hybridity, its deconstruction, authenticity, dilemmas and interconnectedness. The narratives of the self,

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Identity, a dominant ontological term, was declared in 2015 “the Word of the Year” (McAfee 2015). Four dimensions relating to identity have been singled out by theorists: personal identity, role identity, social identity, and collective identity (Burke and Stets 2009); to this we can add the subcategories of cultural, ethnic, racial, religious, group and gender identity.

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Introduction

in particular postmodern, bring to our attention the imagined1 nature of such identities; therefore, literary codes can be analysed from the imagological perspective of identity–otherness binomial at both thematic and stylistic level. Literary communication requires the connection of signs and meaning with their discursive action. Centred on fictional discourses of identity, this volume implies a semiotic framework and comparative ways to reveal similarities and differences. The horizon of the sign leads us to the constructed space of literature, to the infinite semiosis of iconic, indexical or symbolic signs engaged in processes of signification and communication. C.S. Peirce’s famous phrase that “the entire universe is perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs,” rarely quoted in context,2 was not about the “semiotic imperialism” but about the indeterminacy of signs, so much exploited in arts. The passage explains the relation of the interpreter to the process of semiosis and suggests that the solution is to be found in pragmatics. The signs relate to the world of the interpreter, who has a role to play in the determination and multiplication of meaning.3 If C.S. Peirce implied that all signs are dialogical and interpretable, M.M. Bakhtin imposed the anthropologic principle of dialogism and applied it to language and literature. In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, Bakhtin argued that the self is “never coincident with himself” (1973: 48). His philosophical anthropology introduced the principle of otherness (the notion of “difference”) into the definition of identity: “I realise myself initially through others […]. From them I receive words, forms, and tonalities for the formation of my initial idea of myself” (Bakhtin 1986: 138). Accordingly, from the vantage point of modern philosophy we

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“Image, in the heart of communication” (Boutaud 2005: 29). Our translation. The context is: “It seems a strange thing, when one comes to ponder over it, that a sign should leave its interpreter to supply a part of its meaning; but the explanation of the phenomenon lies in the fact that the entire universe–not merely the universe of existents, but all that wider universe, embracing the universe of existents as a part, the universe which we are all accustomed to refer to as ‘truth’– that all this universe is perfused with signs, if not composed exclusively of signs. Let us note this in passing as having a bearing upon the question of pragmaticism” (Peirce 1974: 302). 3 See Joswick (1996: 93–94). We must distinguish between the abstract meaning of the interpretant and the agentivity of the interpreter. The interpreter is exterior to the triadic model of the sign (object–interpretant–representamen). Writing about Peircean ideology, Augusto Ponzio (2004: 3439) states that “the relation between signs and interpretants is a dialogic relation.” 2

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should not regard identity simply as “being the same”1 or “the first way of being” (Descombes 1980: 35–37) because “it coincides with the principle of otherness” (Skulj 2000: 3). In antithesis to traditional identity studies, Jean Baudrillard, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Francois Lyotard stated that the „self” is a product of both the discourse2 and social field; their anti-essentialist rhetoric of „subjectivity” have promoted the multiplicity, hybridity and liquidity, in an effort to explore the full range of “being.”3 The postmodern “self,” “subjectivity” and “lifestyle” have been added to classic sociological concepts of “gender,” “race,” “ethnicity.” Besides deconstructionists, Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995; Van Dijk 1993) postulated that “discourse” is a social practice (not a vehicle) that shapes personal and social identities. From the viewpoint of literary studies, literary identity requires a comparative approach4 revealing the interconnectedness and action in the extensive context of culture.5 The contemporary practice of rewriting, palimpsest and intertextuality, inspired by M.M. Bakhtin, confirms that fictional identity too is configured by way of negotiation between identity and otherness. There is an intricate connection between the literary construction of subjectivity and the inherent addressivity / transitivity of any aesthetically marked discourse, no matter how self-reflexive or selfreferential: “Tout comme la subjectivité, le dialogisme peut être envisagé sur deux plans: comme inhérent et constitutif au discours, et comme ostentatoire et délibéré, présent dans la structure de surface du texte, pour des raisons expressives et communicatives diverses” (Popescu 2015: 143). 1

Among the parameters of identity, Adler values “a coherent sense of self that depends on a stability of values and a sense of wholeness and integration” (Adler 1977). On the contrary, the concept of a “dialogic self” was promoted, among others, by Hermans (2012) and Salgado (2005). 2 A semiotic definition: “Discourse to me comprises all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of use” (Blommaert 2005: 3). 3 For significant “ways of being” in literary and cultural space see Loveday & Parpală (2016); for a context sensitive and a communicational perspective on discursive identities see Parpală & Loveday (2015). 4 We envisage comparison as an all-encompassing scientific method, which might apply to linguistics, literature, anthropology and cultural studies, while facilitating a discussion about both objects and contexts of comparison. 5 Bakhtin’s argumentation is relevant for the question of cultural interactions: “Literature is an inseparable part of the totality of culture and cannot be studied outside the total cultural context. […] The literary process is a part of the cultural process and cannot be torn away from it” (Bakhtin 1986: 140).

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Introduction

The all-encompassing dialogism of language extends, as expected, on literary style as well, in other words, on literariness itself (Parpală 2012). By the same token, the dialogic-comparative approach to literature may help us reconceptualise the specificity of literature as interliterariness (Gálik 2000), which is produced at the intersection of various literary theories and cultural traditions. Since identity is constituted in and through discourse, this collection of 15 chapters is structured into two intercommunicable parts: Part I. Constructs of Fictional Selves offers critical perspectives on literary representations that can be subsumed within image studies and comparativism, while Part II. Discursive Practices focuses on linguistic, cultural, spatial codes and their performativity. Instead of introducing each chapter based on the two-part division of the book, we will offer instead a unifying guide to its content grouped under seven themes. The following directions of research can be distinguished:

a. Diversity: Racial, ethnic and group / collective identity According to Bianco (2015) our greatest cultural crisis may be the elevation of identity as a form of categorization that structures, and arguably stifles, our lives through the policing of individual identities. These identity categories which we believe make us more real, or even more authentic human beings, are actually weighing us down. They limit us, make us immobile, and prevent us from moving forward as a united human race. The goal, therefore, should be to find a way to move beyond identity without stemming the fight against racism, sexism, and the other forms of political, social, and economic injustices. Identity as a “performative discourse” has become a powerful idea after 1990s, when it had become commonplace to assert that “an identity exists by virtue of the assertions of it people make” (Joseph 2004: 20); group identities (national, sexual, generational etc.), more abstract than personal ones, are made through performance. Karen Christian (1997) also argues for a theory of “performativity” to be melded with research into literature. The result is the creation of a framework for viewing identity as a continuous process that cannot be reduced to static categories. Through their narrative “performances,” writers and their characters move among communities and identities in an ongoing challenge to the notion of “national” essence. Chapter Six, A Semiotic Reconstruction of South-Eastern Europe in German Migration Literature by Milica Grujiþiü focuses on issues of a collective identity and combines cultural, sociological, political and

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literary considerations. The author addresses literary representations of South Eastern Europe in contemporary German-speaking literature and the matters of the identity of the region using the semiotic approach of Yuri Lotman. In addition, she focuses on the subject of migration and analyses several works of authors with a South-East European background, firmly believing that those narrative worlds are presented without appropriation, constructedness or naivety. The novels of Florescu, Troyanov and Bodrožiü depict stories of persons who experience the reality of the socialist regime, migrate to western countries and try to cope with a new life as immigrants. The novels deliver a range of cultural and sociopolitical depictions of South-Eastern and Western Europe and offer substantial material for examining practically every strata and type of identity. The study uncovers many manifestations of the South-East European identity and discusses the self-positioning of the protagonist in relation to the ascribed identities. Some aspects of the semiotic boundary have been highlighted as well as the notion of “cultural creolisation” and the possible existence of a general semiosphere. The poetics of racial, ethnic and collective identity, spotlights some formal effects destined to emphasize “the distinctiveness of certain groups against a diffuse social landscape” (Kerkering 2003). The dynamics of racial and ethnic boundaries that we identify in Hayder Naji Shanbooj Alolaiwi’s essay Passing for White: Mythical Journeys in Quest of Freedom, is illustrative for the historical conditions of modernism and for the issue of authenticity. The author provides a pervasive analysis of the trope of “passing”1 as a literary theme in the early 20th century African American literature, focusing on the social and historical background that initiated such a widespread phenomenon as that of “passing for white.” The researcher offers a comprehensive review of sociological approaches to the passing figure and connects it to the concept of “race”–as developed by W.E.B. Du Bois in his classical text The Souls of Black Folks. The author then takes a step forward from the reality of “passing” to its fictional representation by analysing three African American novels that he considers to be representative of the genre: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, and George Schuyler’s Black No More and demonstrates the extent to which racial belonging, as a sign of one’s identity, is altered by the “twoness” of the mulatto’s existence. 1 “Passing, in my use, signifies the dynamics of identity and identification–the social, cultural, and psychological processes by which a subject comes to understand his or her identity in relation to others”; “the strategic adoption of a culturally empowered identity, as in passing as white or passing as a man” (Caughie 2005: 387).

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b. Role / gender identity and corporality Gender identities are both constituted and constructed. They are frequently plural in the contemporary multicultural world, as a result of geographical and social mobility. Women, in particular, are much more sensitive to subjectivity and belonging. Building on the work of Foucault, the contemporary gender theorists suppose that gender is a rhetorical and linguistic construction, making this theory compatible with literary studies. In Edith Wharton and the Condition of the American Women, Zainab Abdulkadhim Salman Al-Shammari identifies the turn-of-the-century “New Woman” symbols in Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence, highlighting the female characters’ reluctance to readily accept the norms of an already old-fashioned Weltanschauung, their unconventionality, and their attempts at assuming a new role in a changing world. The author deftly underlines Wharton’s views on the hypocrisy of the New York society at the fin-de siècle, and her position in the women’s struggle to achieve a “New Woman” status, without openly adhering to the Feminist movement. Wharton’s characters, according to Zeinab Al-Shammari, have the courage to believe in their responsibilities and to oppose the old traditions, thus challenging the existing structures of femininity. Connections between female body and the moral code are present in Oana Băluică’s paper Female Promiscuity: Between Mythology and Demystification. The essay is based on the analysis of two novels (The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary) and intends to give a comprehensive view upon the double standards that lie at the core of society in regard to women’s sexuality and its expression. Mainly, female promiscuity has been associated with the idea of adultery, and this paper emphasizes the fact that the former implies more psychological aspects than the ones involved in adultery; thus, the public image of the two characters (and implicitly the cultural image of real women) has been a direct result of their lack of freedom and the main tragedy of their lives.

c. Creative identity: Poets, writers, readers and critics The idea of communication needs to be qualified “as a dialogue between writers and their public,” considers R.D. Sell, the pioneer of communicational criticism (Sell 2011: 10). The complexity of the problems faced by the diaspora writers, with a particular stress on the Arab Anglophone literature, is analysed by Maher Fawzi Taher in Defining the Postcolonial Writer: a Framework for the Literature of a Diaspora. The researcher provides an authoritative synthesis

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of the concepts of “colonialism” vs “post-colonialism” as viewed by outstanding theoreticians of the field, such as Cora Kaplan, Albert Memmi, Abdul R. JanMohamed, John K, Noyes, Mary Louise Pratt, and Gina Wisker. He further develops on such notions as “hybridity” and “habitation” in postcolonial theory. As regards the Arab Anglophone literature, the author underlines its concern with displacement, place, and exile–as seen in Ameen Rihani’s novel The Book of Khalid, Diana AbuJaber’s novel Crescent, and Leila Aboulela’s novel, The Translator–to underline its human dimension and unexpected perspectives of development and interpretation. Exploring William Blake’s romantic poetics, Adela Livia Catană (“Songs of Innocence and Experience”: A Neoplatonic Approach) reveals the hermeneutic possibilities of the “avant-texte.” Even if she does not literally apply Genetic Criticism (Deppman et al 2004), the author returns to the origin of literary creativity in order to explain the visions and the parallelisms of the hypertext / final text. Catană’s reconstruction of Blake’s poiesis is a gathering of its Neoplatonic traces that differentiate him from the European poets of his time: the idea of opposition between “Mind and Matter,” between initial purity of the soul and its corruption or salvation through mystical ecstasy. A dramatic poetic sign emerged, combining the significance of Neoplatonic dichotomies with, at the level of the signifier, the romantic rhetoric of antitheses. As the author explains, the title of the volume synthesizes the co-presence of opposites: “Innocence is a technical word for the freedom from sin or moral wrong, while experience indicates the man’s fate after the Fall. The two contrasting parts are cyclical and whenever one ends, the other begins.” The research perspective changes spectacularly in Mădălina Deaconu’s Metaphors in Modern Poetry: A Cognitive Approach, centred on metaphoric mapping and discourse world theory. A corpus of four major modern Romanian poets is scanned through a cognitive module (inspired by the Mental Space Theory), composed of four levels: target, vehicle, focus space; source, tenor, base space; common features / generic space / ground; the blended space (the new emergent understanding). The author concludes that cognitive poetics, without excluding traditional methods, can be successfully used in analysing modern poetry.

d. Dialogic identity: Rewriting and difference The poststructuralist re-evaluation of the context, reference, and subject changed the ontology of the literary text, which is no longer defined as autonomous and semantically closed, but as a work-in-

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Introduction

progress–a trace of cultural memory. The semantic difference (that is, the newness) brought about by rewriting is part of a multidimensional dialogue across world literature. The two tightly argued contributions in this section attempt to shed light on the various implications of this series of concepts. The recycling of literary codes results in sign-texts whose referent is literature itself. In Ana-Maria Cornilă Norocea’s chapter, Re-Writing and Memory: The Art of Palimtext, “palimtext” is in fact a metaphor of textual and temporal symbiosis in the space of cultural remembrance. Palimpsestic writing, which flourished after World War II, reconfigured the concepts of “author” and “reader,” “memory” and “creativity.” Of the numerous palimtexts beneath which the reader can discover previous pre-texts or hypotexts the author mentions: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s When I Was a Work of Art, (rephrasing of The Picture of Dorian Gray), Bernhard Schlink’s novel Homecoming (update of the Odyssey), Michel Tournier’s Friday, or, the Other Island and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (reinterpretations of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) etc. These literary fictions are based on regression–transgression, memory–imagination play. Carmen Popescu’s chapter, The Dialogic-Differential Palimpsest in Scott Cairns’ Three Descents, is concerned with the intertextual dialogism enacted by the juxtaposition of three cultural figures (Aeneas, Orpheus and Jesus Christ) in connection with the literary invariant called katabasis, descensus ad inferos or descent into hell. The American poet Scott Cairns contrasts the ancient mythical script of the heroic descent with the Christian “harrowing of hell”; in the latter scenario, humans are the recipients of a sacrificial gift with cosmic and ontological implications. Vergil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the canonical hypotexts with which the post-postmodernist American poet enters into a polemical but respectful dialogue, thereby implicitly reinforcing his own religious and cultural identity. This comparative analysis also shows that the tenets of the Eastern Orthodox faith are not incompatible with literary ambiguity, subjectivity, multiplicity and polyphony.

e. Linguistic identity: Terminology and metadiscourse Language could be assigned an identity function.1 Chapters Eight and Twelve put forward a coherent view of identity as a (socio)linguistic

1 “identity is at root a matter of language […] I am asserting that the entire phenomenon of identity can be understood as a linguistic one” (Joseph 2004: 12).

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phenomenon, while Chapters Nine and Ten approach the linguistic sign from a comparative and functional angle. Diana Ani‫܊‬escu’s chapter, The Concept of a “Light Verb”, addresses the issue of light verb constructions in English and Romanian. A common property in both languages is that LVCs represent a phenomenon of restructuring–“a form of clause union.” Contrary to Wierzbicka (1982) and Catell (1984), who claimed that LVCs are completely devoid of meaning, the author argues that light verbs are “a subclass of lexical verbs” because they have semantic features of their own and the same syntax as their “non-light’’ counterparts. Ani‫܊‬escu’s future research will concentrate on finding crosslinguistic types of restructuring. In a sociolinguistic diachronic frame, Iulia Drimala (External Attribute as Illustrated by Medieval Clothing in England and France) points out the relation between medieval social terms (king, churl; roi, huissier, vavassour) and clothing codes. The symbolic system prescribed by Sumptuary Laws (1463), for instance, ranked colours, textures, length, and accessories according to the Pyramid of Power. The medieval lifestyle accounts for the fact that, in England and France, “fashion system” consolidated the group identity and distinguished between social categories. Drimala does not discuss the subject in terms of fashion terminology, such as Barthes (1967), but in the referential field of social and cultural relevance. The theory of terminology, as an interdiscipline, focuses on the significance of concepts. Chapter Nine, From Modernity to Modernities. Comparative Methodology in the Study of Modernity, is a subtle reflection on the conceptual transitions of the linguistic sign (modernity) that are directly dependent on the referential context (the pluralization– modernities). For a better understanding of modernity as a global cultural paradigm, Andreea Barbu adopts the critical perspective of Cultural Studies and uses a comparative methodology. The author affiliates to Eisenstadt’s theory: the historical concept of “modernity” needs to be redefined in order to incorporate the experience of the non-Western societies; subsequently, we can no longer use a singular term, but a plural one, such as liquid modernity (Bauman 2000), global modernity (Schmidt 2014), varieties of modernity (Schmidt 2006), multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2003), alternative modernities (Gaonkar 2001). This pluralization–“a cultural turn” in the study of non-Western modernity–is considered to be “a tendency in contemporary culture to over-estimate differences.” The tendency to multiply the metalinguistic terms, instead of standardizing them according to the generalized monosemantism, is also found in Chapter Ten, where it is found that palimtext and rewriting are

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Introduction

synonymous. In order to avoid the polysemy implied by the term rewriting,1 Cornilă Norocea makes use of Michael Davidson’s coined term palimtext, which indicates more clearly the textual product derived from a creative process of reinscribing. A mannerist practice consists in the frequent creation of suitcase terms such as: palimtext (a hybrid between palimpsest and text), afterimage (residual images or post-images), wreaders (a hybrid between a reader and a writer, more precisely the reader from the perspective of its interpretative and creative function).

f. Spatial identity: Discourse on places Eleni Pilla’s Spatial Subjectivity: The Streets in Andrew Davies’s 2001 Modern Re-Writing of Shakespeare’s Othello falls within the “spatial turn” in the humanities and provides an interdisciplinary analysis of the treatment of space in Davies’s Othello with the aid of the theories of Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. Focusing on an analysis of the space of the Streets, which constitutes a key space of this televisual adaptation, this study highlights the multiple functions space serves in the adaptation, and demonstrates how the use and configuration of space creates a new vision of Shakespeare’s play. “Spaces Other”: Dystopias and Heterotopias in Postmodern Fiction by Alina ğenescu focuses on the analysis of dystopic and heterotopic literary representations of the urban space and microspace in the works of Vincent Engel, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Gerri Leen and Yevgeny Zamyatin. Starting from a cognitive-semantic approach and using the comparatist method, this study reveals that the main conceptualizations of the city space and dwellings are built around unconventional images such as that of the city museum as mise-en-abyme or as hypertechnological setting, that of the micro-urban space as environment invaded by artificial intelligence and that of the city-nation as glass prison.

g. Food and identity The metonymic reading of Shakespeare’s gastronomy code, performed by Xenia Georgopoulou confirms Caplan’s remark about “the complexity of concepts around food and the body” (1997: 17). In her essay Food and Identity in Shakespeare’s Plays, Xenia Georgopoulou explores Shakespeare’s use of both literal and metaphorical 1

According to Antoine Compagnon (1979: 32) “all writing is collage and gloss, citation and commentary.” See also Deppman et al. (2004).

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references to food to depict almost every single aspect of human identity, including age, sex, social class, religion, nationality and culture at large, but also particular character elements. The author draws on Shakespeare’s allusions to food quality and quantity with relevance to social class; city and countryside diet; national cuisines and eating customs, European and exotic alike; religious or other dietary restrictions, but also discusses the “unbaked” nature of youth and the “ripeness” of maturity; the “rawness” of low-class people and the sophistication of the “seasoned” courtiers; the presentation of both men and women as “dishes,” also revealing the cannibalistic nature of the supposedly civilized European culture. Repositioning verbal communication and literary semiosis in the present image centric context, contributors from Germany, Greece, Iraq and Romania bring to this volume an interdisciplinary constellation which includes comparative and communicational, semiotic and anthropological, stylistic and performative perspectives. Above all, in spite of the methodological and thematic polyphony, this collection demonstrates unity and coherence with regard to our triple banner of comparativism, identity and communication. Identity as a theme, a rich premise in literary texts, guides the construction of fictional characters, the narrative strategies, and the style. Sinusoidal or self-contained, stereotyped or multifaceted characters, subjectivization or perspectivism, linguistic and gestural performativity– here are some techniques that relativize the image of identity in the literary space. The indeterminacy of artistic signs and the creativity of their interpreters confirm once again the power of symbols and representations, often intersecting and antagonistic but multiply constructed in what Juri Lotman called semiosphere.

References Adler, Peter. 1977. “Beyond Cultural Identity: Reflections on Multiculturalism.” Culture Learning: Concepts, Applications, and Research edited by Richard W. Brislin. 2–41. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii. http://www.mediate.com/articles/adler3.cfm (accessed 17 February 2016). Bakhtin, M.M. 1973. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Translated by R.W. Rotsel. Ann Arbor: Ardis. —. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Barthes, Roland. 1967, Système de la mode. Paris: Seuil. / Barthes, Roland. 2006. The Language of Fashion. Sydney: Power Publications. Bianco, Marcie. 2015. “Should we Choose our Racial Identities?” Quartz, December, 18. http://qz.com/576955/should-we-choose-our-racial-identities/ (accessed March 31b 2016). Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://www.researchgate.net/publication 249387120_Discourse_A_Critical_Introduction_-_By_Jan_Blommaert (accessed Jun 11, 2017). Boutaud, Jean-Jacques. 2005. Comunicare, semiotică Юi semne publicitare. Teorii, modele Юi aplicaаii. Translated by Diana Bratu and Mihaela Bonescu. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Tritonic. Burke, Peter J. and Jan E. Stets. 2009. Identity Theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Caplan, Pat (ed.). 1997. Food, Health and Identity. London and New York: Routledge. Caughie, Pamela L. 2005. “Passing as Modernism.” Modernism / Modernity. 12 (3). 385–406. Compagnon, Antoine. 1979. La seconde main, ou le travail de la citation. Paris: Seuil. Christian, Karen. 1997. Show and Tell: Identity as Performance in U.S. Latina/o Fiction. University of New Mexico Press. Deppman, Jed, Daniel Ferrer, and Michael Groden (eds.) 2004. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-textes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Descombes, Vincent. 1980. Modern French Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fairclough, Norman. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Boston: Addison Wesley. Gálik, Marián. 2000. “Interliterariness as a Concept in Comparative Literature.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 2 (4). http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol2/iss4/6. Hall, Stuart. 1995. “Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Society edited by Hall, Stuart, David Held, Don Hubert, and Kenneth Thompson. Oxford: Polity Press. 594–634. —. 1996. “Introduction: Who Needs ‘Identity’?” Questions of Cultural Identity edited by Hall, Stuart and P. du Gay. London: Sage. 1–17. Helbo, André. 1975. Michel Butor. Vers une littérature du signe. Précédé d’un dialogue avec Michel Butor. Bruxelles: Editions «Complexe».

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Hermans, Hubert & Agnieszka Hermans-Konopka. 2012. Dialogical Self Theory: Positioning and Counter-Positioning in a Globalizing Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holden Rønning, Anne. 1998. “Literature as an Empowerment of Identity” http://www.ifuw.org/seminars/1998/Literature.pdf (accessed March 22, 2013). Joseph, John E. 2004. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Palgrave Macmillan. Joswick, Hugh. 1996. “The Object of Semeiotic.” Peirce’s Doctrine of Signs: Theory, Applications, and Connections edited by Colapietro, Vincent M. and Thomas M. Olshewsky. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 93–102. Kerkering, John, D. 2004. The Poetics of National and Racial Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lotman, Juri M. [1984] 2005. “On the Semiosphere.” Translated by Wilma Clark. ȈȘμ‫׫‬ȚȦIJȚțȒ: Sign Systems Studies. 33 (1). 205–229. Loveday, Leo and Emilia Parpală (eds.). 2016. Ways of Being in Literary and Cultural Spaces. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. McAfee, Melonyce. 2015. “Identity is the Dictionary.com 2015 Word of the Year.” CNN. December 8. http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/08/living/word-of-the-year-dictionarycom-feat (accessed 13 March 2016). Parpală, Emilia. 2012. “Dialogization, Ontology, Metadiscourse.” Spaces of Polyphony edited by Clara-Ubaldina Lorda and Patrik Zabalbeascoa. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 237– 250. Parpală, Emilia and Leo Loveday (eds.). 2015. Contextual Identities: A Comparative and Communicational Approach. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1974. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Volume V. Pragmatism and Pragmaticism and Volume VI. Scientific Metaphysics edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. Ponzio, Augusto. 2004. “Ideology.” Semiotik / Semiotics. Volume 13, Part 4. Edited by Roland Posner, Klaus Robering, Thomas A. Sebeok. Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter. 3436–3447. Popescu, Carmen. 2015. “Subjectivité poétique, dialogisme et transitivité” Interlitteraria. 20 (2). University of Tartu Press. 142–157.

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Salgado, Joao & Hubert J.M. Hermans. 2005. “The Return of Subjectivity: From a Multiplicity of Selves to the Dialogical Self”. E-Journal of Applied Psychology: Clinical Section. 1 (1): 3–13. Sell, Roger, D. 2011. Communicational Criticism. Studies in Literature as Dialogue. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Skulj, Jola. 2000. “Comparative Literature and Cultural Identity.” Comparative Literature and Culture. 2 (4). http://docs.lib.purdue. edu/clcweb/vol2/iss4/5/ (consulted 3 June 2017). Van Dijk, Teun A. 1993. Principles of Critical Discourse Analysis. New York: Sage Publications.

PART I CONSTRUCTS OF FICTIONAL SELVES

CHAPTER ONE PASSING FOR WHITE: MYTHICAL JOURNEYS IN QUEST OF FREEDOM HAYDER NAJI SHANBOOJ ALOLAIWI

1. Introduction In 1996, Australian writer Mudrooroo (Colin Thomas Johnson), who was passing for Aboriginal, was publicly denied the claimed Nyoongah ancestry. As a result, his books were removed from academic courses, and some publishers refused to publish his writings. More recently, on June 15, 2015, Rachel Anne Dolezal, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Washington, resigned following allegations that she had lied about being African American. The issue was raised when her Caucasian parents stated publicly that Dolezal is a white woman passing as black. Our aim is to discuss the concept of “passing,” viewed as a metaphor of race that marks a step forward from the painful reality of the Middle Passage to “passing,” as both physical reality and metaphor. Generally seen as the circumstance when a person belonging to a certain ethnic group is accepted as a member of another ethnic group, in the USA the concept is applied to denominate any person of a minority who willingly assimilates into the white majority to avoid attitudes of racial segregation and discrimination. However, the “passing” narratives cannot be associated with any single school, region, or race of the writers: there were blacks passing for white, or whites passing for Native Americans. In the 1927 movie The Jazz Singer, the protagonist, Jakie Rabinowitz, the son of a Jewish cantor, changes his name into Jack Robin, becomes a vaudeville actor and impersonates a black singer in his performances. His is a double passing: religious and racial. The headline of a 1928 issue of New York World draw the attention of the readers to an alarming reality: “Crossing the Color Line: Social and

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Economic Ambitions Lead Negroes to ‘Pass’ at Rate of 5,000 a Year to White Fold” (quoted in Durow 2010: np). “There is nothing wrong in passing. The wrong is the world that makes it necessary” (Hurst 2004: 244). This quotation from Fanny Hurst’s Imitation of Life suggests that the author assumed that her readers were somewhat familiar with the term passing. In the nineteenth century the same dynamic of light-skinned blacks dissembling whiteness, or simply allowing themselves to be taken for white, was always phrased as “passing for white.” Not so during the period when Harlem was in vogue. But even Carl Van Vechten, in a book that attempted to introduce Harlem to white audiences, includes “passing” in his “Glossary of Negro Words and Phrases” at the end of his controversial novel Nigger Heaven. Somewhere between the definition of “kinkout” and “spagingy-spagade” is the following: “passing: i.e., passing for white” (Van Vechten 2000: 286). If the reader is from another country and unacquainted with American legalities and mores, this definition may seem less than clear. According to F. James Davis, “The phenomenon known as ‘passing as white’ is difficult to explain in other countries or to foreign students. Typical questions are: ‘Shouldn’t Americans say that a person who is passing as white is white, or nearly all white, and has previously been passing as black?’ or ‘To be consistent, shouldn’t you say that someone who is one-eighth white is passing as black?’ or ‘Why is there so much concern, since the so-called blacks who pass take so little Negroid ancestry with them?’” (Davis 2001: 14)

2. The background–historical and social It has been estimated that tens of thousands crossed the colour line, or passed from black to white, particularly in the years between 1880 and 1925, years which saw the publication of many passing narratives. But the history of these stories cannot be easily confined to this narrow time period. Nor can these narratives be associated with any single school, region, or race of the writers. The concept and fact of “passing,” in many ways, challenges the essentialist metaphors of “black” and “white” and romantic beliefs that the outer “face” reflects the inner person. These two beliefs gave strength to the “one-drop rule,” which is unique to the United States. When we examine passing narratives, we must remember that foreign models are not available: this is a uniquely “American” theme with its own literature, which verges on becoming a genre defined not only by the uniqueness of its subject but by its symbolic and structural strategies. Although both the literary event and the actual occurrence of passing

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would change dramatically with the freeing of the slaves in 1865, we should remember that passing did not only help some light-skinned blacks pass into free states but would also allow for other escapes into freedom during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Between 1880 and 1925 thousands of light-skinned blacks crossed a line, the metaphorical line known in the nineteenth and twentieth century to both blacks and whites as “the color-line.” Although the metaphor was as nonspecific as it was ubiquitous, a sociologist in 1903 claimed that across a map, through “nearly every Southern community,” he could draw “a physical color-line.” This sociologist, a Harvard-trained scholar, was W.E.B. Du Bois. In the wake of Reconstruction, Black Migration, and Jim Crow Laws, his The Souls of Black Folk examined the “radical and more uncompromising drawing of the color-line in recent years” (Du Bois 1965: 322, 334). Yet this great work of autobiography, philosophy, and sociology noticeably ignores the figure most associated with the transgression of geographical and metaphysical racial borders: the “passing” figure, referred to sometimes as a mulatto, white Negro, quadroon, Creole, or octoroon. These terms need not refer explicitly to a passing figure, but the additional meaning is sometimes implicit. Mulatto, a term used since the seventeenth century, comes from the Spanish for mule, a hybrid animal incapable of procreation; scholars have become apologetic and even embarrassed by the etymology of this term. With this in mind, we might ask about the history and etymology of passing. Representations of the “passing figure” are inextricably connected to the more pervasive representations of the “mulatto.” But should we, as many critics have done, collapse the two figures into one? A study of “passing” and the “passing figure” can find no better beginning than the insufficiency of terms.

3. On race and racism The concept of “race” is commonly associated with hereditary qualities that manifest themselves in visible physical distinctions. “Race” has been replaced by categories of “birthplace origins,” of “ethnicity” and “culture.” When “race” is not a category, as in sociological studies, it is “a signifier of relational identity politics, a fundamental principle of social organization and identity formation that moves people to act in certain ways” (Luke and Carrington 2000: 5). Racism exists when people act upon ideologies of race differentiation; hence, prejudice, exclusion, discrimination, racial slurs, or feelings of alienation, dislocation or estrangement which are all the consequences of social and legal practices that “racialize” others. Thus,

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race is both about claiming an identity and having a historically and socially constructed identity imposed. When a majority identity separates out a minority or marginalized identity, this creates the concept of the “Other.” Describing race as “the central thought of all history,” W.E.B. Du Bois defined the races as vast families “of human beings, generally of common blood and language, always of common history, tradition and impulses” (Du Bois 1978: 140). “American black people,” he maintained, “must cultivate their racial gifts in order to deliver the full complete Negro message of the whole Negro race” (ibidem: 140) to the world. Du Bois embraced race as an organic distinction between human beings in order to call for the cultural uplift of the black race. W.E.B. Du Bois’s classical The Souls of Black Folk (1903), with its pervasive metaphors concerning “twoness” and “doubleness,” noticeably ignores the figure that most embodies these qualities, especially during the specific literary and cultural juncture which saw its publication. Nine years later, in 1912, James Weldon Johnson will use the passing figure to do much of the same work that Du Bois does: stepping behind the Veil in order to look at the “unvarnished truth,” reflecting on the African American’s “double consciousness,” and, most telling, exploring a dialectics of music, black and white. Johnson’s “ex-colored man,” with his movements across the colour-line and his concern to integrate black and white music, can be read as a fictional vehicle for Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness. In Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), the narrator, after having discovered at school that he is coloured, rushes home to his mother, and asks her: ‘Mother, mother, tell me, am I a nigger?’ I could not see her face, but I knew the piece of work dropped to the floor, and I felt her hands on my head. I looked up into her face and repeated, ‘Tell me, mother, am I a nigger?’ There were tears in her eyes […] she hid her face in my hair, and said with difficulty, ‘No, my darling, you are not a nigger.’ She went on, ‘You are as good as anybody; if anyone calls you a nigger don’t notice them’ (Johnson 2012: 16).

In Chapter 4, “Passing,” of Langston Hughes’s The Ways of White Folk (1934), Jack, a black boy, writes a moving letter to his mother. It is a disturbing picture of the mulatto boy unwillingly passing for white, and who suddenly discovers that his mulatto mother’s “passing” has gone so far that she refuses to recognize her own son in the street. The hypocrisy

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of American politics and the fallacy of the American Dream are unveiled by Jack’s letter. I felt like a dog, passing you downtown last night and not speaking to you. You were great, though. Didn’t give me a sign that you even knew me, let alone I was your son. If I hadn’t had the girl with me, Ma, we might have talked. I’m not as scared as I used to be about somebody taking me for colored any more just because I’m seen talking on the street to a Negro. […] Since I’ve begun to pass for white, nobody has ever doubted that I am a white man. Where I work, the boss is a Southerner and is always cussing out Negroes in my presence, not dreaming I’m one (Hughes 1990: 51).

Whites were not ready to accept blacks as their equals, and even president Harry Truman expressed his belief in political equality but not in social equality; thus he contradicted himself. Nevertheless, when confronted with the problem of the lynching and of violence in the South, he decided to take action and issue an executive order stopping discrimination in federal employment and supporting equal treatment in the army; he also worked towards an end of military segregation. In the South, things seemed rather gloomy at the beginning of the 1950s because few blacks, if any, enjoyed civil and political rights. Generally speaking, they could not vote, and sometimes were kept from voting under the threat of beatings, loss of jobs or credit, eviction from their land. On top of this, Jim Crow laws segregated races in “streetcars, trains, hotels, restaurants, hospitals, recreational activities, and employment.”1 Later on, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. (himself married to a white woman) openly admits his belonging to the black race: I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time–but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color (Gates 1994: xv).

4. “Passing”–reality and fiction The concept and fact of “passing” in many ways challenges the essentialist metaphors of “black” and “white” and romantic beliefs that the outer “face” reflects the inner person. These two beliefs gave strength to the “one-drop rule,” which, as James F. Davis reminds us, is unique to the 1

Outline of United States History. Bureau of International Information Programs: U.S. Department of State (2011: 258).

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United States. For this reason the “phenomenon known as ‘passing as white’ is difficult to explain in other countries or to foreign students” (Davies 2001: 13). When we examine passing narratives, we must remember that foreign models are not available: this is a uniquely “American” theme with its own literature, which verges on becoming a genre defined not only by the uniqueness of its subject but by its symbolic and structural strategies. Where do we locate the beginning of this history? Because it is an act more than a figure, “passing” is defined most effectively through narrative and is present less in expository writing. Nonetheless, the “passing” figure embodies the problem of the colour line, the war between black and white within a single body. For this reason, Du Bois’s study of “the problem of the color-line” surprises us with its evasion of this figure. Although both the literary event and the actual occurrence of passing would change dramatically with the freeing of the slaves in 1865, we should remember that passing did not only help some light-skinned blacks pass into free states but would also allow for other escapes into freedom during the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras. Because of the importance of secrecy to the success of these passings, it has always been difficult for historians to document the phenomenon. It has been estimated that tens of thousands crossed the line, or passed from black to white, particularly in the years between 1880 and 1925, years which saw the publication of many passing narratives. Several scholars and editors attack this problem from the outset. In 1991, Robert Stepto added two pages of reflection to his 1979 study, From Behind the Veil. In the brief section entitled In Terms of Us, he mentions the free use of Black American, Afro-American, AfricanAmerican–terms he “lived under” and “lived in” within his lifetime (Stepto 1991: xii). Stepto may “freely use” all the terms he knows, his practice is pragmatic, and his goals–realistic: At certain turns in my work, I will use particular terms to return in time to an era or circumstance, hoping that a carefully chosen term–‘Negro,’ for example–will take my reader on the same journey (ibidem: xii).

We would like to focus on three novels that came soon after the Depression, and are included in the Harlem Renaissance pantheon: Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing (1928), and George Schuyler’s Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933–1940 (1931). In contrast to

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other “passing” narratives,1 Schuyler’s characters pass with no trauma, angst, or dilemma. Larsen’s story, like most “passing” stories, not only explores the strain of “black” passing for “white” but “primitive” passing for “civilized.” These ambiguities defined the modern sensibility, which felt itself enriched and unsteadied by the existence of other worlds. Black No More struggles with neither the primitive / civilized dichotomy nor with the white / black dichotomy: there are no characters caught in between or in conflict with themselves or their communities. Still, Schuyler’s satire manages to ask the crucial question implicit in all “passing” dramas. Irene nearly asks it directly, but her husband makes the real issue explicit: “But why?” Irene wanted to know [why did Irene need to return to her people]. “Why?” “If I knew that, I’d know what race is” (Larsen 1988: 115).

4.1. Quicksand and Passing More typical of the “passing” genre, Nella Larsen’s characters argue what remains implicit in satire. Using twin characters who can both pass, Larsen creates a dialectic between the racial transgressor and the racial conservator. Irene, a “voluntary Negro,” haunts Clare with her rectitude; while conversely Clare teases Irene with her transgressions into white privilege. In their dialectical relationship–the push and pull of their twin desires–civilization alternately supersedes and submits to “race.” All “passing” stories question the meaning of race, but Clare–that symbol of ambiguity and instability–has this question riddle her entire existence. She dies, like most passing figures, because she is unsolvable. Judith Berzon provides a detailed analysis of the novel of “passing” in her seminal study, Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (1978); she differentiates more between black and white authors than older or more recent texts. Although “there is much similarity in the approach of authors of both races,” she argues that the “primary

1

William Wells Brown, Clotel (1852); Herman Melville, Benito Cereno (1855); William and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860); William Dean Howells, An Imperative Duty (1892); Mark Twain, Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894); Charles Chesnutt, The House Behind the Cedars (1900); James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912); Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (1928); Jessie Fauset, Plum Bun (1929); William Faulkner, Light in August (1932); Fanny Hurst, Imitation of Life (2004); Norman Podhoretz, My Negro Problem–and Ours (1963); Gregory Howard Williams, Life on the Color Line: The True Story of a White Boy Who Discovered He Was Black (1995).

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difference between the treatment of the subject by whites and blacks is the emphasis in black novels on racial pride” (Berzon 1978: 159). According to Alolaiwi, Passing more than typifies the concern with racial pride […] also reduplicates the narrative of the tragic mulatto, a narrative which reverberates with racial angst and questionable racial politics (Alolaiwi 2017: 303).

It is an interesting text with which to explore the theme of passing and to venture even further into questions of genre. “Where do genres come from?” Tzvetan Todorov asks and then answers: “Quite simply from other genres. A new genre is always the transformation of an earlier one, or of several: by inversion, by displacement, by combination” (Todorov 1990: 15). To what purpose, we might further inquire, should we investigate passing narratives for their possible generic status? Not simply as a taxonomic literary exercise but to track the history of passing, both in theme and form, in order to understand how language produces knowledge. There are at least five similarities between Larsen’s novel and most passing narratives: (1) a “Manichean” style that depicts the world primarily in black and white, with particular attention to skin and eye color; (2) a polemic concerned with racial justice woven throughout the plot of passing; (3) a return home, almost of an atavistic nature, that actually structures the novel; (4) secrecy and exposure orchestrated in order to create moments of surprise for both the characters and the readers of the novel, and (5) the death of the heroine. One of the prominent features of Nella Larsen’s Passing is its “cultural dualism”–the contrast of black and white to which the writer gives special attention. Often an intense or mysterious blackness of eye or a distinctive whiteness of skin will precede the explicit introduction of the passing theme. In Larson’s novel, for example, we “see” Irene and Clare as dark-eyed, white-skinned beauties before we learn that they are “mulattoes.” It is the idea of passing that first reveals Irene’s “blackness.” But both Irene and her friend Clare’s blackness is already suggested by the novel’s title and more than a few descriptive markers: “a pale small girl,” “pasty-white face,” “warm olive cheeks,” “red in the face,” “dark almost black, eyes,” “white hand,” “her brown eyes... the other’s black ones” (Larsen 1988: 143–152). Perhaps the strongest feature that argues for a structural similarity between passing narratives is that of the inevitable return. Clotel returns South after escaping, not to return to her roots, but to rescue her daughter. In Charles Chestnutt’s The House behind the Cedars, there is a similar

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familiar obligation that causes Rena Walden to return home to nurse her sick mother. Other novels replace these familial obligations with a vague and mysterious calling of race. This magnetic pull of like for like is provocatively underlined in Larson’s novel. Irene’s husband explains why Clare must return to “her people”: “‘They always come back. I’ve seen it happen time and time again.’ ‘But why?’ Irene wanted to know. ‘Why?’ ‘If I knew that, I’d know what race is’” (ibidem: 185). Clotel throws herself in the Potomac; Clarence Gary dies of heartsickness when the discovery of his blackness ends his marriage plans; Rena Walden dies of spiritual and physical hardships. Literary discussion of these doomed figures is often under the category of the “mulatto”, or the “tragic mulatto.” Nancy Tischler’s description of the tragic mulatto is instructive: Supposedly the black blood and the white blood stage a gory civil war in the mind and body of the mulatto, much as the medieval writer would have had the Body and Soul battling it out over possession of Everyman. […] Through this succinct and perceptive description, we might imagine the passing figure also embodying a struggle of metaphysical proportions. But we must further ask why? What is at stake? Sterling Brown has called this stereotype, of his seven stereotypes that white authors traffic in, to be the one most “doomed to unfortunate longevity (Tischler 1969: 97, 158).

Larsen’s Passing displays its own ambivalence towards color. While it seems to punish Clare for being too white, too “having,” Irene, the passer that few critics acknowledge as such, seems to remain unscathed. It is easy to forget that Irene, who is everywhere judgmental of the act of passing, passes herself. She passes to enter the “whites-only” Drayton; she passes at Clare’s house in order to keep Clare’s secret; and, upon meeting Clare’s husband on the street, she passes again. She progresses from passing for a few privileges to passing for racial loyalty, but in this final act of passing, she fails. She does not pretend to be white for Clare’s husband but instead puts on another mask: “her face had become a mask. Now she turned on him a totally uncomprehending look, a bit questioning” (Larsen 1988: 227). From this point on, Irene acts with little racial loyalty, refraining from warning her friend that her husband may have seen through her mask. But Irene is courting disaster at this point in the narrative, and the familiar story of the tragic mulatto / passer becomes complicated by her desire for Clare’s death. No other passing narrative complicates the tragic death in quite this way, making Irene more the focus than Clare: “Her quaking knees gave way under her. She moaned and sank down, moaned again.

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Through the great heaviness that submerged and drowned her she was dimly conscious of strong arms lifting her up. Then everything was dark” (ibidem: 242). This “dark” ending plays with the expectations of the reader, for though we know that Clare, the novel’s significant passing figure and tragic mulatto, must die, we are surprised when Irene, who has also been passing, must die a figurative death. Irene does not physically fall from up high but from deep within, and the darkness that passes over her is not death, punitive and moralizing, but forgetfulness. It is the darkness she has sought throughout–an ignorance of the passing figure that she could easily become. Positioned provocatively with a hand on Clare’s shoulder and a motive with which to push the tragic mulatto to her death, Irene’s own figurative death–her faint (whether feigned or not)– encourages us to believe her guilt. But Larsen leaves the question of agency ambiguous, evading considerations of Irene’s guilt as easily as past writers evaded considerations of the tragic mulatto’s future by eliminating her. In this way Larsen’s Passing doubles the evasion by death of the tragic mulatto, at the same time that it revises the unambiguous ending familiar to us. This ending may suggest Larsen’s attraction for a very modernist sense of indeterminacy, but it may be more fruitfully explored as response to a felt genre that no longer answered the needs of the “New Negro.” In Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1971), the easy morality of Clarence Garie’s death, for instance, must not yet account for the differences between “New Negroes” and “old Negroes”, or the militant Garvey and the conservative Schuyler. Although intra-racial tensions had always existed, and although The Garies and Their Friends may in part tell that story, it took the well-publicized differences between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as greater sense of the dividedness of “Negroes” and “the Negro”, to allow for a different story of passing to be told. Passing brings us behind the Veil to see what it is like to be a problem, to learn what it is like to desire the privileges found on one side of the line and the heritage and loyalty found on the other side. But Larsen’s novel does more than map out the alternatives as represented by Irene and Clare. Larsen rewrote the passing narrative in such a way that the agency for death is neither the intolerant white man, Bellew, nor the trapped and troubled mulatto, Clare. The novel displays its anxiety in expressing the problem of colour. The passing figure, under Larsen’s handling, becomes not the embodiment of a civil war between black and white, but the symbol of the war between black and black.

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4.2. Black No More–or, on the other side of the color line George Schuyler’s novel Black No More (1931), known for his caustic wit, has been labeled as “the first full-length satire by a black American” (Peplow 1580: 56). Born at the end of the last century and having seen the Great War as a first lieutenant, Schuyler was an iconoclast; he began his literary career writing regular columns for The Messenger and for The Pittsburgh Courier. While W.E.B. Du Bois was fighting to revalue blackness, Schuyler was denying its very existence.1 Schuyler begins his “satire on the American race question” with the most pervasive and entrenched beliefs: colour defines race; “race” is identity; “passing” is a national preoccupation. He adds controversy: “the Aframerican is merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon” (Schuyler 1926: 662). Then he confuses the categories: at the end of the novel, darkness is a sign of whiteness. “Race” essentially loses meaning in Schuyler’s satirical novel of 1931. Set in the United States of the near future, Schuyler’s satire imagines “race” to quite simply disappear with the superficial (and scientific) elimination of blackness. With the invention of a whitening process by Doctor Crookman of Black-No-More, Inc., African Americans become indistinguishable from Caucasians. Max Disher, whitened into Matthew Fisher, easily loses his black identity and his sense of community for the nominal fee of fifty dollars. When he leaves the laboratory, he quickly moves from a now foreign Harlem to a very comfortable South. Matthew, rather than struggling against the call of “race” or “heritage,” or even “history,” answers to the economics of the moment: “He was free! The world was his oyster and he had the open sesame of a pork-colored skin!” (Schuyler 1989: 35) To make a living, he easily assumes the role / job of becoming a white supremacist, rising in the ranks of the order, marrying into its first family. Everything is black or white–to quote the cliché–and the extremes of satire seem to perfectly critique the extremes of racialist thinking. With its characters quite free of racial allegiances, Black No More does not require the same violent elimination of its protagonist, in part, because there is no crisis of identity. Instead, satire unsteadies the stability of racial meaning, which means we must not look to character or narrative but to the play of concepts. In place of the strain created by a character’s dissimulation, Black No More creates friction in the disruption of our 1

Nonetheless, Du Bois, who was at times criticized and lampooned by Schuyler, said the following of this now overlooked writer: “George Schuyler, so far, is talking things that most people do not want to hear [...] One has to read what he says, whether he agrees with it or not” (Du Bois 1965: 6).

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expectations. Free of three-dimensional characters who struggle with their identities, Schuyler’s satire focuses on ideas. What is required to pass? Who wants to pass? What difference would it make to be “white”? What if everyone were white? How far can passing go? In Black No More, the hypothetical, of course, reaches absurd extremes: “The job (turning America white] was almost complete, except for the black folk in prisons, orphan asylums, insane asylums, homes for the aged, houses of correction and similar institutions” (Schuyler 1989: 131). With all these inversions of values, Black No More continuously attacks the many and subtle values that have always undergirded beliefs in “race.” Though we are never asked to believe in the “reality” of Schuyler’s creation, satire requires that we constantly discern “parody” from “reality,” which means readers must find something in life to give meaning (and humor) to Black No More’s national craze for “passing” and the ease with which these transformations (or transgressions) occur. Schuyler’s satire requires that we examine the very ontological assumptions about “race”; it is difficult to constantly follow Black No More’s absurd whitening of America without questioning our own assumptions about “race.” Though traditional “passing” stories also suggest that “race” may be constructed, Black No More requires more reader participation in its active disruption of our expectations of “race.” More than any single “passing” narrative, Schuyler’s work presents a concentrated attack on old beliefs in “race.” Shortly after Sterling Brown’s 1933 essay, Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors, the “passing” figure began to fade from African American literature and much of American literature as well. There is some indication that the reality, or actual occurrence, of passing was also fading. According to James F. Davies, A 1932 study of 2,500 mulattoes showed that many quadroons and persons with three-eighths African ancestry could pass as white and that the octoroons in the sample simply appeared white... [although] most of those who could ‘pass’ apparently were not doing so (Davis 1991: 60).

Conclusion We might conclude by speculating whether the universal “passing” figure would have informed any new symbol that might have been imagined at this particular point in the changing world of African Americans. Perhaps Du Bois, like Irene in Passing, thought it the “kindest thing not to ask.” One may contend that Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness” was so recognizably influenced by images of the mulatto / passer that the figure needed to be ignored so that it might be successfully

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removed. One might also reach the conclusion that the ex-coloured man displays the greater honesty in confronting what is “rarely admitted and hardly ever mentioned” (Johnson 1965: 478). But while the ex-coloured man betrays the secrets of the black world from the safe space of anonymity, Du Bois risked everything without a screen of fiction. His boldness in depicting “twoness” as a struggle between American and “Negro” consciousnesses–and not between black and white ascendance– shows the scholar’s ability to rewrite the script of blackness. That the passing figure recurs almost obsessively in Du Bois’s rhetoric speaks less against his independence and more for the persistence of myth. Thus, one’s racial belonging becomes a sign of one’s identity. It is not fortuitous that Du Bois decided to start each chapter of The Souls of Black Folk with two epigraphs: one from a Negrospiritual, the other from a white poet–not only American, but also British, German, Persian, Hebrew: Arthur Symons, James Russell Lowell, Byron, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Swinburne, Tennyson, Schiller, Omar Khayyam, and King Solomon. It is as if he was bringing evidence in support of his theory that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line–the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (Du Bois 2007: 15). Nella Larsen, George Schuyler, and James Weldon Johnson were contemporary. Nella Larsen was a “mulatto” (born of a dual heritage father and a Dutch mother). Schuyler also had white blood from his maternal side, while Johnson was black. The three of them are indebted to Du Bois in the way they approached the topic of passing and the progress of their characters after crossing the colour-line a widespread phenomenon that had become fashionable during the Harlem Renaissance. There are multiple layers of Larsen’s Passing that a close reading reveals, among them passing for economic reasons (Clare), and sexual passing–Irene’s attraction to Clare, carefully concealed by the narrator. George S. Schuyler pushed the trope of passing to a different level, with his satire directly referring to leaders of the African American nation and the protagonist’s after-passing resolution to make the best of it and laugh at the white folks. Finally, the protagonist-narrator of James Weldon Johnson’s only novel successfully passes for white, only to reveal the ambiguities of the process and his oscillating sympathies for both the black and the white race. The freedom that the protagonists of these novels achieve by passing is only illusory. They always feel and cannot get rid of the burden of their racial heritage. And I would contend that Du Bois himself achieved a different sort of passing–his unique achievement as the first African

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American to obtain a PhD from Harvard and a second one from Berlin, thus exceed the limitations attributed to his race–as a different sign of identity.

Sources Larsen, Nella. 1988. Quicksand and Passing. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Schuyler, George S. 1989. Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, AD 1933–1940. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

References Alolaiwi, Hayder Naji Shanbooj. 2017. “Identity Issues: The Passing Mulatto and the Politics of Representation.” American Scientific Research Journal for Engineering, Technology, and Sciences (ASRJETS). 28 (1). 296–305. Berzon, Judith. 1978. Neither White nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction. New York: New York University Press. Brown, Sterling. 1933. “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors.” The Journal of Negro Education. 2 (April). 179–203. Davis, F. James. 2001. Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition. University Park: Pennsylvania State University http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/ frontline/shows/jefferson/mixed/onedrop.html (consulted October 12, 2016). Du Bois, William E.B. 1978. “The Conservation of Races.” W.E.B. Du Bois. On Sociology and the Black Community edited by Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 238–250. —. [1903] 2007. The Souls of Black Folks. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Durow, Heidi W. 2010. “‘Passing’ across the Color Line in the Jazz Age.” WBUR News http://www.wbur.org/npr/125574331/passing-across-thecolor-line-in-the-jazz-age (consulted March 10, 2017). Gates, Henry Louis Jr. 1994. Colored People: A Memoir, New York: Alfred A Knopf Inc. Hurst, Fanny. 2004. Imitation of Life. Durham: Duke University Press. Hughes, Langston. 1990. The Ways of White Folks: Stories. New York: Vintage Classics.

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Johnson, James Weldon. 1912. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. Boston: Sherman, French & Company http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/ jwj/auto.htm (consulted February 16, 2017). Luke, Carmen and Vicki Carrington. 2000. “Race Matters.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 21 (1). 5–24. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs /10.1080/07256860050000768 (consulted August 8, 2016). Peplow, Michael W. 1980. George S. Schuyler. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Stepto, Robert B. 1991. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Tischler, Nancy M. 1969. Black Masks: Negro Characters in Modern Southern Fiction. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1990. Genres in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Van Vechten, Carl. [1924] 2000. Nigger Heaven. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press. Webb, Frank J. 1971. The Garies and Their Friends. New York: AMS Press. ***Outline of United States History. 2011. Bureau of International Information Programs: U.S. Department of State.

CHAPTER TWO EDITH WHARTON AND THE CONDITION OF THE AMERICAN WOMEN ZAINAB ABDULKADHIM SALMAN AL-SHAMMARI

1. Status of women in American society in the mid-19th and early-20th centuries The period which extended from 1850 to the second decade of the 20th century was a transitional era in American history because it carried the United States from the provincial security to the dangers of international leadership. To cite Richard Hofstadter, “The United States was born in the country, and moved to the city” (cited in Divine 2002: 633). The American cities bustled with energy; they absorbed millions of migrants who came from Europe and other distant and not-so-distant parts of the world. That migration, and the urban growth that accompanied it, reshaped the American politics and culture, and affected every level of American experience social, intellectual, and economic. In 1861 the United States went through the Civil War that ended in 1865, which reflected deep-seated economic, social and political differences. The years between 1877 and 1890s, called the “Gilded Age”, were a soul-searching time for the Americans, as they examined the basic values they lived by. They began to think of themselves as having a national identity, with their own distinct culture and institutions. As important in raising the standard of living as the mere multiplication of wealth were the new inventions, urbanization and immigration which were, on one hand, making life more comfortable, and on the other hand, creating a class distinction as the Americans who achieved wealth celebrated it as never before. The reform ferment of the 19th century “produced new forms of organization through which women could achieve greater participation in social action,” as Eleanor Flexner noted in her

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book, Century of Struggle: The Women’s Rights Movement in the United States (1959: 204). Contemporaneously, the movement for improving women’s legal and political status grew and became focused on women’s suffrage. Thus, the suffrage organization convention–known as the Seneca Falls Convention– was held in 1848, and aimed at the promotion of educational, intellectual, legal and political equality of women, especially the right of suffrage. In New York, the upper-class women of the late 19th century used etiquette as a tool to order their world, and it also gave them power in that world. But the rules of etiquette restricted women and kept them in a subordinate role. Upper-class women played a dual role, both as “active participants in the dominant male class structure” and “male-constructed symbols of class distinctions” (Smith-Rosenberg 1985: 42). The fin-de-siècle period in America was marked by the emergence of the “New Woman,” one of the most dramatic symbols of the crisis of gender relations in this country and not only. According to Smith-Rosenberg, the image of the New Woman was first perceived as a “literary phrase” that most often referred to a “young, unmarried” woman who rejected the established gender roles and social conventions, thus threatening the traditionally established gender roles in American society: The New Woman challenged existing gender relations and the distribution of power. By defining her as physiologically ‘unnatural,’ the symptom of a diseased society, those whom she threatened reaffirmed the legitimacy and the ‘naturalness’ of the bourgeois order. By insisting on their own social and sexual legitimacy, the New Women repudiated that order (SmithRosenberg 1985: 245-46, emphasis added).

Throughout time, literature was (and still is) the best means to reflect life. In the latter part of the 19th century, the urge to portray things as they were and as they really happened was paramount; and this accounted for the more important developments in the American fictional structure and prose style (Clinton and Lunardini 2000: 133). Edith Wharton (1862–1937) emerged from that unparalleled period of changes in the United States and the whole world. She depicted the late 19th and early 20th centuries’ upper social class of New York. She was a social critic and an observer of the shift taking place in the turn-of-thecentury women’s life, and most of her books exhibit her views about the restricted social traditions that imprisoned women, and how some women felt dissatisfied with those traditions, and tried to go against them. The female protagonists often find themselves at odds with the social environment of old New York in the transitional period of the late 19th

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and early 20th centuries, a milieu which they experience as limiting to their desires for a free and satisfying life. The old New York traditions confined women in one domestic sphere, yet Wharton’s heroines feel themselves as important contributors to the development of America’s upper class. Like her characters, she rejected the old New York norms, and she instead chose to prove her character and become an independent woman both financially and intellectually. Consequently, the main objective of this paper is to discuss Wharton’s female characters and their pursuit of freedom and self-fulfillment, and to show why these characters choose to go against the current of their society and to what extent Wharton’s women remain imprisoned by conventions.

2. Edith Wharton: A biographical overview Edith Wharton is best-known for her stories and ironic novels about upper class people. Critics of various dimensions have agreed upon her talent and lavished praise on her writings. Elizabeth N. Monroe, for example, has claimed that Edith Wharton is “the greatest novelist America has known” (Monroe 1941: 111). Edmund Wilson has called her “a passionate social prophet” (quoted in Fournier 2006: 1). Q.D. Leavis has described her as “an extraordinarily acute and far-sighted social critic” (quoted in Fremantle 1951: 15). For Carl Van Doren, she is “first of all a novelist of civilization” (ibidem). Edith Jones was born in New York City on January 24th, 1862, into a patriarchal, moneyed, cultivated and rather rigid family. In her memoirs, Edith described as her “good fortune” that her mother forbade her to read the ephemeral rubbish of the day and so was not distracted from the classics on the paternal shelves: My mother, herself so little of a reader, was exaggeratedly scrupulous about the books I read; not so much the ‘grown-up’ books as those written for children. I was never allowed to read the popular American children’s books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English WITHOUT THE AUTHOR’S KNOWING IT (ibidem: 51, emphasis in the original).

When Edith was eleven years old, she submitted her first attempted novel to her mother, a novel which began, “Oh, how do you do Mr. Brown?... If only I had known you were going to call, I should have tidied up the living room,” the mother returned it with a chilling comment, “drawing rooms are always tidy” (Auchincloss 1964: 12). Lucretia, who had a keen eye and ear for social behavior, was teaching her daughter that

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social observation is based on accuracy of detail, a lesson Edith never forgot. From her youthful writings, Edith decided her direction; she chose to be a social satirist. She wrote her first satire, a novella entitled Fast and Loose (1876) at the age of 14 under the pseudonym “David Oliviri.” Well structured, moving in its characterization, deliciously melodramatic, Fast and Loose–a tale of lives wrecked by a marriage made for social advantage–is among the most accomplished of juvenilia. After 1890, she began to publish poems and stories in literary magazines. A collection of short stories, The Great Inclination, appeared in 1899, and a novella, The Touchstone, in 1900. Her first full-length novel, The Valley of Decision, set in 18th century Italy, was published in 1902. But her first major novel, which caused her something of a sensation, was The House of Mirth (1905). It was written against the clock, for serialization in Scribner’s magazine, an experience which taught her to work hard and regularly. Till 1909, Edith Wharton regularly published major works, such as The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904), and The Hermit and Wild Woman in 1908. In 1910, she published the collection of Tales of Man and Ghosts, the novella Ethan Frome in 1911, and Xingu in 1916. According to Carl Van Doren, most of her short stories and novellas show her swift, ironical intelligence, flashing its light into corners of human life (Doren 1956: 278). Financial security and women’s possibilities for independence were the dominant themes of Wharton’s writings: Madam de Treymes (1907) is a story of an unhappily married American woman whose French husband agrees to a divorce only on the condition that she renounces her right of custody of their son. In The Reef (1912) Wharton deals with the complexities of family and romantic loyalties. This is her most intellectual novel and one of two works in which she constructs a heroine most like herself (the other one is Ellen Olenska in The Age of Innocence). In 1913 she published The Custom of the Country which is generally considered a highly cynical estimation of social mores (Benstock 2003: 35–37). She was preoccupied with women’s problems in relation to their deep aspiration and anguish in an unjust system. In The Age of Innocence (1920) Wharton satirized the fashionable New York society of the 1870s. After that, her novels were always competent and distinguished, but never again great. The Glimpses of the Moon (1922) was sentimental, A Son at the Front (1923) was historical. And the four stories that make up Old New York (1924) evoke the atmosphere of the 19th century. Wharton expounded her theories of art in The Writing of Fiction (1925) and wrote her autobiography, The Backward Glance, in 1934.

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Over the course of her 75 years, Wharton produced 40 novels, 8 novellas, 10 non-fiction book-length works, a number of articles, translations, and prefaces, a host of short stories, many of which were what she called “ghost stories”, and a much shorter list of poetry. She was preoccupied with the women’s problems in relation to their deep aspiration and anguish in an unjust system. The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921, the first time this award was given to a woman, and she was nominated for the Nobel Prize, but did not get it.

3. New vs old values Wharton’s works generally portray the lives of the women of the fashionable and aristocratic New York society from the Civil War to the First World War, taking the responsibility of describing the decline of the New York aristocracy of wealth. In The Novel and Society: A Critical Study of the Modern Novel, Elizabeth N. Monroe says: Mrs. Wharton saw the limitation of her subject even more clearly than her critics. She says that when she was young, she used to think her group was like an empty vessel into which no new wine would ever again be poured. This society was trivial and shallow in the extreme (Monroe 1941: 111).

Edith Wharton believed that a novelist must focus upon a material he / she knows, that is why she limited herself to the social scene of New York of the second half of the 19th century, an era of organized civility under a male-dominated social order. This society was compact and well-to-do, and for most parts, tolerant, except where its own conventions were concerned. The family and the group combined to suppress any deviation from its social code. In the early days divorce was almost unheard of, not because these men and women believed in marriage as a sacrament but because divorce carried with it a social stigma and threatened the solidarity of their rich alliances. In her novels, Edith Wharton is well-known for presenting heroines who have problems fitting into a system of an old-fashioned New York society and who try to find their true character and self-realization by breaking the social traditions of the accepted behavior. These women cannot conform to an empty role, so they become unconventional. Wharton was often critical of the rigidity of that social code, she did not repeat the old story of the male dominance over women, or of women being victims, but instead she focused upon the problems women have faced in the United States, the problems which had more to do with society than with men. Women were strongly suffocated and emotionally

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stagnated by the rules that governed old New York’s polite society during the 19th century. Wharton concentrated on how adhering to those rules deterred people from being true to themselves as well as to the society around them. She wrote of a time and a place where divorce was a moral sin, and where women were taught to be ladies and men to be gentlemen even under the most difficult circumstances. She created a female character that has the power to change even though it is a little change. Her heroine walks the first steps in the way of achieving a new female character, that character who threatens the basis of society. Sometimes, the reader finds some of her female characters trying to go with the society so as to escape the social pressures, by conformity to social norms and suppression of the drives for freedom. This conformity does not save them from trouble; it leads them, in most cases, to suffer from acute inner struggle between their real desire for freedom and their surrender to social conventions. What is interesting about Wharton is that–despite the unconventional nature of her characters–she never joined the growing feminist movements of her time. In response to a campaign in support of scholarships for women, she was of the opinion that women should “much better stay at home and mind the baby” (quoted in Lee 2008: 608), and was commenting on the French women’s passive participation in any debate because, Women are generally far more intelligent listeners than talkers […] for intelligent women will never talk together when they can talk to men, or even listen to them; so that the party, thus disarranged, resembles that depressing dish, a pudding in which all the plums have run into one corner (Wharton 1919: 25).

Such remarks triggered a long-standing debate on Wharton’s antifeminism, that was explained, at its best, through her fear of “social disintegration” (Lee 2008: 607), or her attempts to keep the position acquired as a woman writer in a male-dominated literary environment, and also from her fear of being thought of as being too “emotional and feminine” (Peel 2005: 145).

4. The Age of Innocence According to Shari Benstock, The Age of Innocence creates a world bound by forms and conventions; Edith Wharton wrote the novel in seven months, drawing freely on her youth memories and the memories of her family and friends, mixing and matching their qualities and life experiences as needed (Benstock 2003: 41). The title refers to the New York of the

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1870s, giving the book a historical flavor (Auchincloss 1964: 32). The title is both ironic and poignant; it is ironic because the “age” or the period of the novel, the late 19th century, teemed with intolerance concerning traditions, collusion, and cynicism. This title is successfully taken from Sir Joshua Reynolds’s painting The Age of Innocence (1788), a fetching portrait of a young girl, in which he idealized the childish purity and banished from her mind any knowledge either of juvenile guile or of the brutalities of the social class. According to this, Wharton certainly linked the title to New York society’s comparative youthfulness and self-image of purity. In search of a feminist vehicle, she often used the French background, because “she believed that European society particularly the French had a better understanding of the individual spirit” (Jessup 1965: 17). Wharton saw that women in America played a role of no more than an ‘innocent virgin’, who stayed at home to be trapped within the demands of marriage and motherhood. Therefore, women who wanted to overcome their entrapment had to struggle much harder than men to become powerful. Wharton put Countess Olenska at the intersection of French and American cultures to highlight the problem of the new American identity. The writer uses many symbols to underline the difference between her two main female characters, May Welland and Ellen Olenska. One of these symbols is the “roses.” Archer used to send May the white lilies-ofthe-valley every day as an indication of May’s innocence, purity, and modesty–the way she must look like. While the white fragile flowers are sent to May, he sends the rich, golden roses to Ellen because he sees in her a rich lady, of strong personality. She wrote more to him than May’s very correct but not self-chosen behaviour. It seems that Archer has found a woman with the “experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment,” (Wharton 1948: 41) that he wishes to see in his wife. One of the pivotal issues of Age of Innocence is where to slot “morality.” The writer’s old New York believes itself to be the epitome of rectitude, and holds up for admiration its rigidities about form, family, and financial probity and its hyper-vigilance about female chastity. Wharton deliberately shows readers, however, that “this society is self-deluded and deeply hypocritical” (ibidem: 240). The way May uses to persuade Archer to leave Ellen is a good example that shows her shrewdness, hypocrisy and cunning: when she suspects his love for Ellen, she pretends innocence and nobility. We are told that with transparent, “too-clear” eyes, she asks Archer: “I couldn’t have my happiness made out of a wrong–an unfairness–to somebody else. And I want to believe that it would be the same with you. What sort of a life could we build on such foundations? (ibidem: 148).

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The writer also shows clearly how a personal freedom is socially forfeited in order to keep values of order, loyalty, duty and tradition. These values conduct women to be like May Welland, who knows all along of her husband’s passion for another woman, but chooses to follow the accepted code of ignorance to maintain these social values. May, her family, and the New Yorkers in general, are concerned with keeping the traditions and social mores of the past. For them, marriage is no longer a sacrament; it loses its binding power by depending merely upon conventions. May accepts marrying Archer, though she knows of his love for Ellen, she is only concerned with customs and conventions. She chooses to live a lie, and an artificial happiness. After marriage Archer feels buried alive. He sees nothing has changed in May; she is still the child-like woman that “simply echoed what was said for her… [and] what tradition taught her to make” (ibidem: 80–81). Archer believes that there is no use in trying to emancipate a wife who has not the dimmest notion that she is free. Thus he struggles against the life he has chosen by turning to Ellen, whom he blames for his predicament, ‘You are the woman I would have married if it had been possible for either of us.’ ‘Possible for either of us?’ She looked at him with unfeigned astonishment. ‘And you say that–when it’s you who’ve made it impossible?’… ‘isn’t it you who made me give up divorcing–give it up because you showed me how selfish and wicked it was, how one must sacrifice one’s self to preserve the dignity of marriage…’ (ibidem: 169).

On Archer’s marriage to May, Ellen Olenska decides to put an end to her love with her cousin’s husband. She also thinks of leaving New York mainly because she looks down on the unfavorable qualities that have spread through the city she has once idealized. What she disapproves is the blind belief in traditions borrowed from other places, therefore, she dislikes “the blind conformity to tradition–somebody else’s tradition” (ibidem: 242). For her, “it seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.” She does not suppose that “Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys.” She voices her dismay that America would obey somebody else’s traditions and members of society are trained to disguise their feelings. The bulk of upscale New York society is undeniably vain, superficial and arrogant; all of which are qualities that the free spirited Countess Olenska abhorred. Ellen discovers that New York is not the place where she can get her desires; she “had grown tired of what people called ‘society’…so she had decided to try Washington” (ibidem:

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241). Archer follows Ellen to Washington, and they spend a day together. By this meeting Wharton implies that Ellen’s and Archer’s love is not physically, but intellectually and emotionally motivated. They confess their love to each other, yet they also promise not to go farther. Three months later Archer finds it difficult to live this sham life; he seizes Ellen’s return to New York after her grandmother, Mrs. Mingott, has a stroke–to meet her at the train station. He suggests running away together to “a world… where we shall be simply two human beings, who love each other; who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.” (ibidem: 293) In his opinion, the only practical solution to their problem as lovers is the New York way of the secret affair, which he has already experienced before meeting May. But Ellen, the honest woman who has been despised by New York society, which “tolerated hypocrisy in private relations” (ibidem: 261), voices the real objection to a clandestine affair. Ellen refuses to lower herself and violate her true nature by an illicit affair. “Is this your idea, then, I should live with you as your mistress–since I can’t be your wife?” (ibidem: 292) Ellen Olenska asks Archer, who is shocked to hear the word mistress: The crudeness of the question startled him: The word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closet about the topic. He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognized place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from (ibidem: 292–93).

The old New York hypocritical system is shown quite well in Archer’s startled reaction when hearing the word mistress while he suggests putting the word into action, a system that implies doing anything without making it publicly. Yet, for Ellen, honor is much more important than love, and a human being cannot build his or her happiness on the pain of others. Wharton is often concerned with examining the situation of the individual within a conventional social context, putting individuality against custom or habit. She presents Ellen Olenska as one of “those figures […] who struggle pathetically and unsuccessfully against their stifling surroundings” (Lewis 1975: 57). Throughout Wharton’s fictions, and especially in The Age of Innocence, “custom” (convention, habit) is an ambiguous notion: it stifles the individual, and yet prevents social chaos. Habit is a key word for Edith Wharton. In her autobiography, The Background Glance, she writes that “habit” is:

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Chapter Two The other producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. […] Habit is necessary; it is the habit of having habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive (Wharton 1934: vii).

Ellen Olenska is unsuccessful in her attempt to go against the old traditions and taboos because she has been forbidden from freeing herself of them. Despite the fact that Ellen Olenska has failed to live in the conventional New York, Edith Wharton has succeeded in presenting her as a “test” of the limits to female power to her fellow women. Her power is far more obvious than May’s. Surely, Ellen Olenska and May Welland are two different characters with two different histories as Ellen grows up in France away from the traditional New York, while May grows up in the cage of New York society. Ellen has to live in New York according to its rules, but she finally makes her way away from them, whereas May never tries to develop herself and remains blindly obedient to these rules. And Ellen has the power to change at least Archer’s ideas concerning marriage and love, and control his actions as he realizes these new ideas. This is perhaps the reason for the growing interest in the novel as shown by prominent feminist critics as Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who identify telling examples of feminism in her work that, despite all this evidence that Edith Wharton was neither in theory nor in practice a feminist, her major fictions, taken together, constitute perhaps the most searching–and searing–feminist analysis of the construction of ‘femininity’ produced by any novelist in this century (Gilbert and Gubar 1980: 128).

Last but not least, a similar feminist approach to Edith Wharton is held by Carol J. Singley who, in accordance with the general view that women’s powers are repressed by Western culture, “Wharton criticizes Western culture’s repression of women and shows the need to integrate the multiplicity of feminine energies” (Singley 2003: 25).

Conclusion The central focus of this study has been Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence and the writer’s treatment of the struggles of the heroines–May Welland and Ellen Olenska–in relation to the themes of divorce and free love, and to the image of the New Woman in their

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societies. The novel introduces the New Woman protagonist predominantly through the eyes of their male counterparts who attempt to construct the picture of the protagonist according to their own expectations; there is an implied invitation to the readers to question the reliability of such a view. Edith Wharton succeeded in picturing the New York society of the mid-19th and early 20th centuries that was sheltered behind its traditions. She was fascinated as well as alarmed by the rapid changes in material culture and science and every facet of that transitional period, and she hoped that these changes would alter woman’s status as a possession into a refined position. She saw the struggle of woman in that prison-like society against traditional bans and the silent power of customs. That is why she took an opposite stance against the restricted New York standards which she has been bred by; she had the desire for self-sufficiency that enabled her to confront society through the only thing she had which is: writing. Wharton wrote about women who try to transit themselves to cope with the changes that occurred in their society, refusing the wrong manners, customs and social ideas. She gave her heroine a sufficient courage and integrity to believe in her intellectual responsibilities and to go against the old traditions. She has shown that woman struggles neither for being man’s peer nor his master but for being an independent entity. The novel displays features of New Woman fiction: the discourses of marriage, divorce and sexuality are presented as imposing certain female models on the heroines, bringing them psychological turmoil and threatening them with individual suffocation. By casting this figure in various guises through their fragmented, decentralized narratives, Wharton’s heroines challenge existing structures of femininity. Within this struggle, the New Woman assumes new roles, trying on one self after another, only to reject each in turn.

Sources Wharton, Edith. 1919. French Ways and Their Meaning. New York: Appleton. —. 1934. A Backward Glance. New York, London: D. Appleton-Century Company Incorporated. —. 1948. The Age of Innocence. New York: The Modern Library.

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References Auchincloss, Louis. 1964. “Edith Wharton.” Seven Modern American Novelists: An Introduction edited by William Van O’Conner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 11–45. Benstock, Shari. 2003. “Edith Wharton, 1862–1937: A Brief Biography.” A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton edited by Carol J. Singley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 19–50. Clinton, Catherine and Christine Lunardini. 2000. The Columbia Guide to American Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press. Divine, Robert A. et al. 2002. The American Store. New York: Longman. Doren, Carl Van. 1956. The American Novel. New York: The MacMillan Company. Flexner, Eleanor and Ellen Frances Fitzpatrick. 1959. Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Fournier, Suzanne J. 2006. Edith Wharton’s Ethan: A Reference Guide. Washington DC: Library of Congress. Freemantle, Anne. 1951. “Edith Wharton: Values and Vulgarity.” Gardiner, Harold Charles (ed.). Fifty Years of the American Novel; a Christian Appraisal. New York: Scribner’s. 15–32. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. 1980. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and The Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Jessup, Josephine Lurie. 1965. The Faith of Our Feminists: A Study in the Novels of Edith Wharton, Ellen Glasgow, Willa Cather. New York: Biblo & Tannen. Lee, Hermione. 2008. Edith Wharton. London: Vintage. Lewis, R.W.B. 1975. Edith Wharton: A Biography. London: Harper and Row Publishers. Monroe, N. Elizabeth. 1941. The Novel and Society: A Critical Study of the Modern Novel. New York: The University of North Carolina Press. Peel, Robert. 2005. Apart from Modernism. Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Singley, Carol J. 2003. A Historical Guide to Edith Wharton (New York: Oxford University Press. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. 1985. Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER THREE FEMALE PROMISCUITY: BETWEEN MYTHOLOGY AND DEMYSTIFICATION OANA BĂLUICĂ

1. Introduction The female body has been subjected to multiple inquiries throughout time; in the field of literature the representations of promiscuity have been profusely analysed, therefore, implicating a whole spectrum of forms and expressions. Among these, the image of the prostitute has been depicted constantly in literature, allowing a diachronic perspective upon literary works: Fanny Hill, Moll Flanders, Nana, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. Most of the time this image has been viewed as a distorted version of the prevailing idea–the female body as a pinnacle of virtue and domesticity. Moreover, some elements and professions have been linked to prostitution without having anything to do with the act itself–the dancer, the actress, the sexually liberated woman, the adulteress have been envisaged as promiscuous women, and often compared to prostitutes. This paper shall focus on the manner in which literary female characters have been portrayed as promiscuous and malignant due to their sexual choices or immoral behaviour. In her study concerning literary and historical problems of the nineteenth-century European novel, Elizabeth Amann has revealed some “puzzling phenomena” of this particular period: “the recurrence of the plot of female infidelity in literature and the frequent canonization of adultery novels” (Amann 2006: 2). This is certainly the case, considering the fact that a large number of novels dealing with this problem have been published during that time and some of those are nowadays considered masterpieces: Madame Bovary (1856), La Regenta (1885), The Scarlet Letter (1850), Le Rouge et le Noir (1830), Anna Karenina (1878), to mention just a few of them, but the essence of the problem is much older

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and far more complex. In fact, adultery and promiscuity have been placed under the same semantic spectrum in order to describe women’s sexual affairs without a clear demarcation between them. An adulterous woman has been perceived as promiscuous by public opinion and by the law, and even nowadays this fallacy continues to hold an important place in society. My paper is based on the idea that, throughout centuries, fluctuating issues–religious, social and cultural–have been envisaged and developed by society in order to convey an immoral aspect of female behaviour. I have used the term mythologies to designate these kind of judgements, and in the following lines I shall try to present the reiteration of this concept (i.e. “promiscuity”) and the manner in which promiscuity has been used mostly in relation to adultery, even though these two concepts are not interchangeable; I have chosen two novels dealing with female promiscuity: The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary, whose heroines commit adultery under very different circumstances and with disparate consequences upon their lives, although both of them have been categorized as promiscuous. Moreover, I shall try to emphasize the cultural and social role played by the historical context regarding the aforementioned novels, given the fact that for a long time public education and divorce have not been an option for women.

2. The concept of “promiscuity” and its reiteration throughout centuries As it has been magnificently researched and depicted by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot, the editors and authors of History of Women in the West, a five-volume long inquiry into the lives of women throughout history, the roles assumed by them have not been a result of independent and autonomous choice; instead, these attitudes were reinforced by a patriarchal structure of society in order to fit predetermined roles; consequently, as stipulated by historians and theorists, there have been specially designated categories and a certain status for women, which contrasted with the idea of powerful roles: In the minds of the ancients, they were associated with cold: they were inert constituents of an immobile world, while men, burning with heat, were active. Remote from the stage of history, upon which the men who controlled their destinies clashed, women were poorly placed to serve as witnesses. At times they might play minor roles, but they rarely took the leading parts, and when they did their weaknesses were all too apparent (Duby, Perrot 1992: ix).

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Both the image and definition of an ideal woman have been established predominantly by male authors. Ovid, for example, makes a very clear distinction between the respectable woman and the overtly erotic one, thus tracing a line of thought which would prevail and dominate for centuries to come, imposing an unquestionably subjective scale. In what has been considered his masterpiece, Metamorphoses, the ideal woman was portrayed in juxtaposition with her counterpart, the obscene prostitute in most cases, and the one that enjoyed sexual activities more often than not, whilst the reputable woman was thought to engage in these activities only with the sole purpose of procreation. Women’s sexuality has also been demonized or wrongly perceived in the next centuries, culminating with drastic punishments that often included total reclusion or a death sentence (depending on the situation), but the existence of double standards cannot be more conspicuous, and the authors of a very influential volume regarding the idea of body and its representations have stated this clearly when writing about adultery: As far as adultery is concerned, there was a certain double standard that gave men a greater sexual freedom whilst, at the same time, this standard was responsible for imposing chastity among women [...]. Female adultery seems to be much rarer, because women’s sexual reputation was more fragile (Matthews-Grieco 2008: 237).1

An evocative example is exactly the case of marital infidelity or promiscuity, and for a long time they have been considered inextricably linked, although nowadays we have a better understanding of what promiscuity really means due to ground-breaking discoveries in psychoanalysis, and also due to women’s emancipation movements. The field of literature is crowded with fashionable examples of this unfortunate state of affairs, the most notorious ones being the case of Hester Prynne, Hawthorne’s heroine in The Scarlet Letter, or the image of Emma Bovary, punished for her idealism and for breaking the rules of society altogether. The ambivalence and ambiguity of this particular idea (“promiscuity”) relies on the concept itself: The Oxford Dictionary simply states that it refers to immoral, indecent and sexually immodest behaviour. Among its synonyms, one can find terms like immorality, wantonness, debauchery, dissoluteness, dissipation, incontinence and, among the antonyms, chastity and celibacy.2 1

Translations that are not specifically marked otherwise are mine. For more details, see the online page of Oxford Dictionaries https://en.oxforddictionaries. com/thesaurus/promiscuity.

2

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What is interesting though is the fact that being linked to wanton and wantonness, an archaic term which designates a cruel, violent and deliberate action, promiscuity is perceived as an intentional and deliberate act itself; furthermore, there is a discernible difference between the significance of this term (wanton) and its nuance in Middle English (wantowen)–meaning rebellious and lacking discipline.1 Not only the adulterous woman has been regarded as immoral or promiscuous: other categories of women have been subjected to ridicule and scrutiny for their supposed immorality, even in the absence of this phenomenon, such as the actresses, whose profession has been viewed as a scandalous affair and a less than respectable way for a woman to make a living. In 1660, when women were finally allowed to perform in theatres in England, William Prynne (in Histriomastix) denounced them as “notorious whores,” after seeing a group giving a performance at the “Red Bull” and “Fortune” theatres (Fraser 2012: 427).2 As Antonia Fraser has stated in her lucid and extremely well-researched volume, The Weaker Vessel, in the 1680’s, the word “actress” was virtually a synonym for indecent, promiscuous and shallow; this connotation will accompany the profession for almost 300 years, in fiction and in reality (ibidem: 427), a matter that simply converges with the idea of socially and culturally established patterns. Further on, I shall examine the solid nucleus of these “mythologies” used methodically in literature to convey the image of promiscuity by analysing two novels: The Scarlet Letter and Madame Bovary, both of them dealing with female adultery; a critical examination shall reflect the mere fact that the relationship reiterated in The Scarlet Letter is not a deliberate form of adultery, committed in propitious circumstances by an overindulgent female subject (Hester thought her husband was dead), whilst the one Madame Bovary engages in is a result of bourgeois boredom and anxiety. Additionally, as Theodor Adorno has stated, there might have been other factors that one should place at the core of such moment in history, when “adultery filled Victorian and early twentiethcentury novels,” mainly “the dissolution of the high-bourgeois nuclear family and the loosening of monogamy” (Adorno 1997: 4).

1

See https://en.oxforddictionaries. com/ definition/wanton. The same situation regarding actresses has been depicted in Émile Zola’s famous novel Nana. There are several lines in the novel where Bordenave, the director of a theatre advised his friends or clients: “call it a brothel” (Zola 2015: 17).

2

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3. Instances of promiscuity 3.1. Hester Prynn: the awakening of a new consciousness The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850, but the plot of the novel takes place in the 17th century Puritan society, a timeframe that has allowed Hawthorne to issue some serious considerations regarding the role played by the church in people’s lives, both personal and communitarian. Therefore, Hester Prynne and her evolution are described in a manner that emphasizes the inherent rigidity of a Puritan lifestyle that associates crime with sin and, as such, holds no place for rebellious attitudes that do not follow the prescriptions of the church. Hester’s affair with the local pastor while her husband is presumed dead is not accepted by this kind of society, and the protagonist is imprisoned under the charge of adultery later on, and condemned to wear the scarlet letter “A” for the rest of her life, as an ultimate example of sin. From the moment of her alienation she would be seen as a symbol of evil and as a negative example for the young ones: The scene was not without a mixture of awe, such as must always invest the spectacle of guilt and shame in a fellow-creature, before society shall have grown corrupt enough to smile, instead of shuddering at it [...]. Accordingly, the crowd was sombre and grave. The unhappy culprit, sustained herself as best a woman might, under the heavy weight of a thousand unrelenting eyes, all fastened upon her (Hawthorne 2010: 60–61).

In a broader sense, the religious implication in these matters can be described as a form of cultural suppression of female sexuality, and given the fact that throughout centuries (present times also included) the domination of the church has been strictly male domination, the opinion expressed by Roy F. Baumeister and Jean M. Twenge regarding this cultural suppression is noteworthy, especially considering the correlation between femininity, vice, and their insatiable eros in the public opinion of the time: The mechanisms by which men suppress female sexuality remain somewhat unclear. Men might refuse to associate with women who desire or enjoy sex beyond an acceptable minimum. Because men have controlled political power, they can institute heavy penalties for female sexual activity while permitting themselves to indulge. They may punish promiscuous or sexually responsive women in other ways. (Baumeister and Twenge 2002: 170).

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Therefore, even if not intended as such, an adulterous relationship would have been the first sign of promiscuity because it would imply breaking the patterns of a traditional marriage, something that nowadays is almost ubiquitous, due to the changes that have affected the institution of family throughout the ages. Virtue has been a value of particularly great importance; in the Victorian period, which was ultimately a Puritan-like society, there has been proliferated an expression that emphasizes this kind of perception of women–“the angel in the house”1 (Coventry Patmore’s idea of nurturant and domestic femininity), referring to the pinnacle of virtue and domesticity that was supposed to be represented by females. “The angel” was, in fact, a reiteration of a “Victorian ideal of closeted, domesticated, desexualized, disenfranchised femininity” (Dekoven 2011: 215), an ideal that has been satirized by Virginia Woolf in her essays, stating that: “She [the perfect wife] was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life” (Woolf 1966: 285). The subversive nature of Hester Prynne’s character is also depicted in her behaviour following the adulterous relationship; she does not perceive the affair as being immoral or incorrect, thus she acts accordingly–and it is precisely the lack of atonement that makes her more disgraceful in the eyes of the church and the crowd standing in front of her at the same time: “Of an impulsive and passionate nature, she had fortified herself to encounter the stings and venomous stabs of public contumely, wreaking itself in every variety of insult” (Hawthorne 2010: 61). But Hester’s attitude is not as cut and dry as it might seem; she sincerely regrets her “misdemeanor” in the beginning, thinking she has both humiliated and hurt her husband, Roger Prynne, a character that, at least at first, seems to be the real victim in the novel; as Robert C. Evans points out in his depiction of Roger, the husband turns out to be the real villain in the story–“the darkest and most malignant figure in the novel” (Evans 2010: 251), and Hawthorne often refers to him as “Old Roger,” a term which has been used as a nickname for Satan (Green 1998: 867). It is after discovering all these faults in her husband’s character that Hester stops blaming herself, in the light of his infinite quest for vengeance which, taking into consideration the fact that he was a learned man makes matters reprobable, as Robert C. Evans has stated in the aforementioned study: 1

In a paper dedicated to this particular matter, Aihong Ren stipulates: “The word ‘angel’ becomes a synonym for woman. She was expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband. The angel was passive, meek, charming, graceful, gentle, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all–pure” (Ren 2014: 2061–2065).

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Indeed, one of Chillingworth’s1 greatest sins is that he eventually perverts the gift of reason–the gift that traditionally distinguishes man from the lower animals–by pursuing his ungodly vengeance. The fact that he is such a highly learned man eventually makes him all the more subtle, all the more cunning, all the more dangerous (Evans 2010: 252).

Analysing all these descriptions and Hester’s suffering as well, one can conclude that the alliance was not a happy one in the first place, the heroine of this novel being a “representative who suffers from irrational marriage” (Wang, 2010: 895); moreover, there is a great age gap between Hester and Roger. All things considered, she is not a promiscuous creature, despite her affair, being mainly a victim of a Puritan society, “a feminist in advance of the season”, as Austin Warren calls her in his biography dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne (Warren 1934: xxix). In the end, Hester Prynne, despite her position as a “weak vessel” in a Puritan and rigid régime, manages to defy the rules according to which she is supposed to live her life, and evade the traditional image of women in that particular time. Recent critical works dedicated to Hawthorne and to Hester’s personality in particular point out the indubitable character of feminist consciousness, depicting the idea of a new female image, one that would come to play an important role starting with the emancipation of some of the Modernist female writers, such as Virginia Woolf, whose accurate and, at the same time, tragic description of female subordination has materialized in a pioneering attempt to establish a line of equality through the publication of her extended essay, A Room of One’s Own (1929); in this major piece of criticism, Woolf has also stipulated that “the history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself” (Woolf 2014: 53).

3.2. Madame Bovary and the domestic crisis Described by Margaret Cohen as “a Quixote of the nineteenth century, intermittently lucid in the throes of her longing,” and at the same time “suffering from her recognition of insurmountable gap between reality and imagination” (Cohen 2005: ix–x), Madame Bovary is certainly one of the most analysed and complex characters in the history of literature. Her affair is quite different from the one portrayed in the previous novel, being fuelled by her strong desire to replicate in her own marriage the romantic 1

Roger Chillingworth is, in fact, Roger Prynne, and this is the name that he has adopted in a symbolic manner.

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ideas about love and sexuality that she has discovered in novels. One may argue that, at the same time, there are many similarities between the two women and their extramarital affairs, taking into consideration the role played by the society and the established standards that women have felt obliged to respect; however, Emma Bovary is cultivated, well-read and aware of the fact that she is committing adultery; unlike Hester’s actions, hers are determined by a major eagerness to achieve a certain idealistic romance. In fact, the dangers of reading, especially regarding women, have been a common perception among all members of society in that particular time1. According to Alexandru Ofrim, in the XVIIIth century the idea and the practice of reading have been considered perverse and shameful and denounced by church men as being immoral and useless, periculosa in fide” (dangerous for the faith), because they [women] were associated with chastity, fidelity, modesty and candeur; the process of identifying themselves with the characters in the novels was part of a demonic reading pathology (Ofrim 2008: 17).

In this regard, Flaubert manages to emphasize the role of fiction and romantic idealization in a surprisingly misogynistic manner2, although not without irony, disappointed by the meaninglessness of marriage and irritated by life’s boredom, Emma will “discover in adultery all the platitudes of marriage” (Flaubert 2005: 231). Her suicide, after being betrayed by her lover and upon discovering that fiction cannot replace common life, is both tragic and ironic, and her entire experience of “tantalizing phantasmagoria” (Flaubert 2005: 33) has come to indicate an attitude towards life, a trait of one’s personality: “bovarism.” However, the practice of reading could not have been a singular cause for Emma’s behaviour (there were plenty of women reading in that time, which did not lead to adultery), and many critics have preferred to focus on the social and cultural climate itself, more precisely, on the bourgeois society and its inherent code for women: they were unable to pursue their personal freedom and happiness and be morally honourable at the same time. In other words, there was a definitive contradiction and ambiguity in the bourgeois condition, something that Caius Dobrescu has called “indeterminacy” and “bourgeois anxiety” (Dobrescu 2001: 56), reiterating 1

In 2006, Lauren Adler and Stefan Bollman have published Les femmes qui lisent sont dangereuses, analyzing the impact which books have had upon women in the 14th–20th centuries. 2 “When Flaubert made his Quixote a woman, he fleshed out the misogynistic commonplace [...] that women were overly sensitive readers stimulated by fiction to neglect their duties for romantic delusions” (Cohen 2005: x).

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the tension between private and public space: “The ambiguity implied in the very definition of home both as an altar of parents’ selfless sacrifice, and as a place of birth for a voluptuous individual selfishness becomes a core tension of modernity” (ibidem: 58). In the end, Emma’s idealization represents a trait of universal human tendencies, given the problematic nature of human interaction, and the intricacies that follow any romantic involvement; moreover, the belief that art should somehow function as a shield against a mundane reality is also an idea expressed by Flaubert himself in one of his letters: “Life is such a hideous thing that the only way to put up with it is to avoid it. And one avoids it by living in art”, quoted in a popular study of Dominick LaCapra, Madame Bovary on Trial (LaCapra 1982: 76), which attempted to contextualize Flaubert’s novel by providing details and a complex view upon society and the trial for obscenity that followed the publication of Madame Bovary. There are other aspects that differentiate Emma Bovary from Hester Prynne, two of the most important ones being Emma’s attitude towards maternity, a situation that does not make her more sympathetic, nor willing to abandon her escapades and the ideal of living in comfort and free of all domestic duties; the literary rejection of motherhood was one of the reasons why Flaubert’s novel has been considered scandalous: The model of sanctified motherhood, surfacing time and again in various mid-century public debates [...] would have influenced Flaubert’s construction of women’s sexuality in Madame Bovary. At the same time scientific and moral investigation was cementing new ideas of orthodox sexuality. Flaubert’s novel was scandalous given the widespread belief in women’s innate lack of sexual drive compared to men’s (Rooks 2014: 3).

Another aspect which might be regarded as a proof for her promiscuity would be the fact that, unlike Hester Prynne, Emma Bovary decides to abandon herself in the arms of her lovers (Leon and Rodolphe) knowing that both her reputation and the respectability of her family would be destroyed; likewise, she is spending a great deal of money trying to achieve a certain level of luxury in her life, believing that this would help her escape from the prosaic, mundane life that she shares with her husband, and ultimately, she drives both of them to financial ruin. Hester, on the other hand, leads a modest life trying to raise her daughter (Pearl), and finding comfort in doing collective tasks, such as knitting and sewing, activities that make her feel useful and productive; but, of course, the main difference between them is mainly given by the fact that whilst Hester lives in a Puritan society, well-known for its principles of austerity and modesty, Emma lives in a society that is genuinely preoccupied with the

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idea of comfort and welfare, and thus, she feels that her expectations have been betrayed: romantic love proves to be as boring and predictable as marriage, and she is forced to stay by her husband’s side no matter what– divorce was illegal in France from 1816 to 1884.

Conclusion The “mythologies” employed in order to convey the aspects of female promiscuity have been convoluted, elaborate, and diversified: clothes, gestures, professions and, more importantly, the problem of adultery. These aspects and the idea according to which female sexuality is dangerous are inextricably linked; as many researchers have pointed out, women have been perceived as a destabilizing factor in most cultures, and adultery was one of the main issues approached in this regard. In the eighteenth century–as this study has emphasized–romantic novels have been blamed for the spread rate of adultery, since women have been considered too sensitive and too impressionable to adapt acceptably to the reading process; in many countries, an educated woman would have been viewed as a problem, therefore, public education for women has remained a project for a long time. Due to society’s rules, adultery has been seen in multiple and different ways: as a subversive action, associated with a feminist consciousness; as a result of patriarchal domination and bourgeois boredom; as a deeply immoral behaviour etc. The novels dealing with this problem have flourished, especially in France and in Great Britain. Adultery and promiscuity are not the same thing (not often, at least), since promiscuity implies a lot more psychological aspects than those involved in adultery; this paper has analysed only two literary cases in order to show how women’s public image and morality are far more fragile than men’s, and therefore their actions and their extramarital affairs have been harshly scrutinized. In the light of the two examined cases, one may argue that this public image of women has been a direct result of their (i.e. women) lack of freedom, and that is the main and acute tragedy of Emma’s life, a tragedy unfolded by the character itself. Subsequently, Mario Vargas Llosa, in his marvellous interpretation of Flaubert’s novel, has stated that “even the privilege of dreaming is a masculine one” (Llosa 2013: 162) The aim of this paper was to indicate how socio-cultural ideologies and aspects have translated into literature, and the manner in which the public image of promiscuous women has been fashioned throughout time, using two novels (a French one and an American one) precisely in order to evaluate accordingly this ubiquitous image.

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Sources Flaubert, Gustave. 2005. Madame Bovary. A Norton Critical Edition. Translated by Eleanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. 2010. The Scarlet Letter. London: Collins Classics.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Amann, Elizabeth. 2006. Importing Madame Bovary. The Politics of Adultery. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Baumeister, Roy F. & Twenge, Jean M. 2002. “Cultural Suppression of Female Sexuality.” Review of General Psychology. 6 (2). American Psychological Association. 166–203. Cohen, Margaret. 2005. “Introduction to the Second Edition.” Madame Bovary. A Norton Critical Edition edited by Margaret Cohen. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Dekoven, Marianne. 2011. “Modernism and Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Modernism edited by Michael Levenson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Diamond, Stephen A. 2011. “What Motivates Sexual Promiscuity? The Psychodynamic Meaning of Nymphomania.” Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evil-deeds/201111/whatmotivates-sexual-promiscuity. (accessed: 15 December 2016). Dobrescu, Caius. 2001. Semizei Юi rentieri. Despre identitatea burgheziei moderne. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Nemira. Duby, Georges et al. 2002. A History of Women in the West. I. From Ancient Goddesses to Christian Saints. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Evans, Robert C. 2010. “The Complexities of ‘Old Roger’ Chillingworth: Sin and Redemption in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter”. Sin and Redemption edited by Harold Bloom and Blake Hobby. New York: Infobase Publishing. Fraser, Antonia. 2012. Vasul mai slab. Destinul femeii în Anglia secolului al XVII-lea. Traducere de Raphael Cristian Cîrlig. Buharest: Curtea Veche. Green, Jonathon. 1998. Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang. London: Cassell. LaCapra, Dominick. 1982. Madame Bovary on Trial. Ithaca, London: Cornwell University Press.

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Matthews-Grieco, Sara F. 2008. “Corp ‫܈‬i sexualitate în Europa Vechiului Regim.” Istoria corpului. I. De la RenaЮtere la Secolul Luminilor editat de Georges Vigarello. Traducere din limba franceză de Simona Manolache, Gina Puică, Mugura‫ ܈‬Constantinescu, Giuliano Sfichi. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Grupul Editorial Art. Ofrim, Alexandru. 2008. “Cum citeau femeile. Reprezentări ale lecturii feminine.” Dilemateca (31). Bucure‫܈‬ti: Megapress. 15–24. Ren, Aihong. 2014. “A Fantasy Subverting the Woman’s Image as ‘The Angel in the House’.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies. 4 (10). Academy Publisher. 2061–2065. Rooks, Amanda Kane. 2014. “Motherhood and Sexuality in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.” Comparative Literature and Culture. 16 (3). http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.i?article=2415&context=clc web. (accesed: 25 December 2016). Vargas Llosa, Mario. 2013. Orgia perpetuă. Flaubert Юi Doamna Bovary. Traducere din limba spaniolă de Lumini‫܊‬a Voina-Rău‫܊‬. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Humanitas. Wang, Yamin. 2010. “A Representative of the New Female Image– Analyzing Hester Prynne’s Feminist Consciousness in The Scarlet Letter.” Journal of Language Teaching and Research. 1 (6). Academy Publisher. 893–897. Warren, Austin. 1934. Nathaniel Hawthorne. New York: American Book Company. Woolf, Virginia. 1966. Collected Essays. London: Hogarth Press. —. 2014. A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas. London: Collins Classics. Zola, Émile. 2015. Nana. Traducere de Iulia Feldrihan. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Corint.

CHAPTER FOUR SONGS OF INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE: A NEOPLATONIC APPROACH ADELA LIVIA CATANĂ

1. Introduction William Blake (1757–1827) is not only an iconic figure of the British Romantic poetry but also “a revolutionary visionary and a visionary revolutionary” (Woodcock 1994: v). His works combine imaginative themes with traditional and mythical elements, revealing the poet’s original views about life and death, purity and sinfulness, love and loss, the eternity of nature and the transience of the human being. Blake’s connection to Neoplatonism was first underlined by literary critic S. Foster Damon, in his study William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), and Milton O. Perivale in William Blake’s Circle of Destiny (1938). However, it was not until George Mills Harper published his book, The Neo-Platonism of William Blake (1961), that the poet’s theoretic affiliation was truly confirmed. Nowadays, the analysis of Blake’s Neoplatonic sources of inspiration is still interesting and challenging, given the fact that his texts cannot be fully understood in academic terms alone. Examined from the standing point of Neoplatonism–in other words, from a continuum of experience between the spiritual and the physical–Blake’s poetry begins to make sense. As a man who believed in visions, Blake tried to convey the visionary experience into his lyrics. He did not attempt to reproduce his own experience but to evoke a similar sense of spiritual vision in his readers. One of the techniques in guiding his readers toward the visionary realm is the evocation of the sublime in his texts doubled by presence of the serpentine line of beauty in the illustrations that accompany them. Inspired by William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), Blake’s “S”shaped curved line is the materialization of energy and movement; the

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total opposite of the straight line whose right-angled intersections suggest stasis and death. It delights the eye of the viewer and gives play to his imagination.

2. Understanding Neoplatonism Neoplatonism is a modern term coined by German scholars to define a philosophical school of thought that initially emerged in Alexandria, Egypt, and then flourished in the entire Greco-Roman world of Late Antiquity, beginning with the middle of the 3rd and lasting until the middle of the 7th century (Birch 2009: 707). More particularly, it is used to designate the Platonic theories upheld by Plotinus (c. 204/5–270 AD) and later on, by his disciple Porphyry of Tyre (c. 234– c. 305 AD), which were opposed to the ancient materialist or corporealist approaches such as Epicureanism and Stoicism, and offered a comprehensive understanding of the universe and the role of the human being (ibidem). In the beginning, ancient thinkers had only an eclectic collection of philosophical and religious teachings to work with. Over time, however, Neoplatonism became a heterogeneous doctrine which absorbed, synthesized and appropriated, with more or less exceptions, the entire Hellenic tradition of philosophy, religion, and even literature. It synthesised and created a fruitful dialogue between the scientific and moral ideas of Plato, Aristotle’s objections, the ethics of the Stoics, various myths and religious practices as well as new other theories which derived from them. In essence, Neoplatonism is a speculative brand of philosophical enquiry. The knowledge it provides is obtained through intuition and heuristic techniques which illustrate the final philosophical goals but do not guarantee them to be optimal or perfect. In this respect, it can be criticised as being implausible, yet it cannot be seriously dismissed especially since no assumption is entirely wrong or right. At its core, Neoplatonism is a type of idealistic monism built on several fundamental assumptions. The most important one states that the mindful consciousness, also called “Nous,” “thought” or “intellect,” is ontologically prior to the physical realm usually considered to be the ultimate reality. In turn, “reality,” in all its forms and manifestations, is defined by unitary and singularity. Its evolution and transformations have a single cause, the “divine,” or as Neoplatonism indiscriminately referred to, “the One,” “the First,” “the Good.” These premises hamper the Neoplatonic struggles to explain the emergence of the universe, with all its diverse phenomena, as the effect of a singular principle of consciousness that is in every sense

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unlike its result, but also approaches them to Christianity and modern cosmology. “The One” or the infinite, incogitable, perfect “source of unity and plurality,” is not only the ultimate reality of the universe but also the origin of “Nous”–the pure intelligence, which emanates the “Psyche” (the world soul) and other lesser souls (Harris 2002: 124). The “Psyche” is conceived as an image of the “Nous,” just as the “Nous” is seen as an image of the perfect “One.” In other words, the “Nous” and the “Psyche” are consubstantial with the perfect “One,” despite their differentiation. The “Psyche” is intermediate between the “Nous” and the “material world” and, therefore, it has the choice to preserve its integrity or abandon it, becoming sensual and corrupt. Similarly, each of the “lesser souls” engendered from the “Psyche” has the same choice. Ignorant of its true nature and identity, the human soul becomes subject to a false sense of separateness and independence. This also brings it a step closer to arrogance, depravity and perdition. The Neoplatonics maintain the idea that the human soul is free to choose its destructive course but also to obtain its final salvation, if it really wants it. The process of salvation involves a return to the original purity that existed before its degeneration. Thus, in order to be saved, the human soul must go back to its original fountainhead. The quest for salvation can be accomplished only through mystical experience and ecstasy. The Neoplatonic doctrine highlights the absolute opposition between the spiritual and the carnal, or as in Plato’s elaboration, the opposition between “Mind and Matter” (qtd. Ostenfeld 1982: 81). The two spheres attract but also reject each other following a metaphysical cycle mediated by various agencies. The “Nous” and the “world soul” help transfer the divine power from the perfect “One” towards the many, leading the latter towards an ascetic existence torn from the sensual world. Moreover, Neoplatonists are particularly interested in the “compresence of opposites that sensible objects suffer” (Remes 2014: 40). Certain objects or entities can be larger and smaller, good or bad, at the same time, depending on the context. In this case, Paulina Remes underlines, for instance, the situation of Simmias, who is both taller than Socrates and shorter than Phaelo (ibidem). Such examples of incorporated oppositions can be infinite and extremely challenging especially since nothing can be truly estimated in terms of right and wrong. The evolution of Neoplatonism is compared by Kathleen Raine “to an underground river that flows through European history, sending up from time to time, springs and fountains; […] fertilizing [several] periods of great art and poetry” (Raine 2002: 2). From Alexandria, Neoplatonism

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gradually conquered Europe and the entire world, due to its profound views and versatility. Though appealing to the Fathers of the Christian Church due to its elements of asceticism and unworldliness, Neoplatonism was later criticised by the Roman Catholic Church and even banned by Emperor Justinian I in 529. In the 15th century, this system of thought was brought back to light by German philosophers such as Nicholas of Cusa or by the Italian Humanists. Once the Neoplatonic works written by Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus were translated into English, they became food for thought for the Cambridge philosophers, for the Romantic poets such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats and Perch Bysshe Shelley and later on, for the Modernists including W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and many others.

3. Blake’s Neoplatonic Songs Just like other writers of his time, William Blake discovered Neoplatonism through the translations made by Thomas Taylor (1758– 1835), also known as “the English Plethon” or “the English Pagan.” The complete works of Aristotle and Plato disclosed the idea that human life is an infinite row of interacting oppositions and made Blake state that: “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence” (Blake 1994: 196). These equations fail when one part begins to dominate the other one. In this case, the outcome is disastrous in all its forms. Blake’s illustrated collection of poems Songs of Innocence and Experience appeared in two phases: Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794), and reflects several Neoplatonic equations and contrasts; the poet offering, on one hand, simple moral lessons for children to learn, with lyrics often focusing on nature, and on the other, a much harsher view of a world corrupted by humans. The title of the volume is itself a Neoplatonic dichotomy. Innocence is a technical word for the freedom from sin or moral wrong, while experience indicates the man’s fate after the Fall. The two contrasting parts are cyclical and whenever one ends, the other begins. Blake’s use of innocence becomes synonymous to “ecstasy,” whereas experience is nothing more but “despair” or the anticipation of loss. The poet continues to encourage such contrasts as it happens with the titles Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow or The Divine Image and A Divine Image. Other times, however, he focuses on various parallels between abstract and concrete elements such as the two Chimney Sweepers, the two Nurse’s Songs or the two Holly Thursdays. The themes of the poems are

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also adjoined and contrasted. Thus, “the Lamb,” which embodies God’s love, is paired with “the Tiger” or God’s worth; The Blossom with The Sick Rose and, perhaps, The Echoing Green can stand near The Garden of Love, and The Shepherd near London. Surprises never cease to emerge, and some of Blake’s poems, although they seem to mirror each other due to their similar titles, focus on different subjects. For instance, The Little Girl Lost deals with the pain of losing a child, while A Little Girl Lost describes a young maiden’s first affair and fear. Similarly, The Little Boy Lost depicts a child’s agony at being misled, while the second poem with a similar title talks about the boy’s martyrdom for having his own ideas. William Blake’s poems raise numerous questions that cannot be answered using conventional thinking. The Neoplatonic system of thought offers, therefore, a helpful theoretical framework for understanding the poet’s cogitation. The first poem in Blake’s volume, The Introduction to the Songs of Innocence, indicates two contrary states. At the first tune of the piper (a clear reference to the Greek god, Pan or to Orpheus himself), an angel-like child, sitting on a cloud, begins to laugh. At the second tune, the child “weep[s] to hear” (Blake 1994: 3). The two emotional states, happiness and sorrow, are contradictory in meaning and expression, but do not remain separated by an infinite abyss. They merge and synthesize during the third performance of the piper, when the child “weeps with joy” (ibidem). The piper is able to induce various emotions due to the beautiful sounds of his pipe but he is able to master and unite them only through words; words which have to be written and preserved. Once again, the opposition between the sound which fades away and the written word, which is meant to last, is a clear reference to Neoplatonism. In The Introduction to the Songs of Experience, the piper is replaced by the Bard, a worldly-wise counterpart, whose prophetic voice claims to see the past, present, and future all the same. Through divine revelation, he hears The Holly Word and calls the fallen Man to reclaim the world he lost to the “starry pole” of Reason (ibidem: 39). Yet, in order to awake from his slumber of materialism, the man has to go back to his fountainhead, namely the state of childlike innocence. His spiritual redemption is possible only by recognizing the pre-eminence of the “perfect One,” namely God, and the singular potency of His will. The piper’s songs of praise from The Introduction to the Songs of Innocence are also echoed in the second poem of the volume, titled The Shepherd, but here they are meant, in the Neoplatonic tradition, to unite the two important spheres of existence–the material and the spiritual. The Shepherd’s blessed life is not one merely of leisure but one of constant work and movement “from morn to the evening”, his careful eye watching

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the flocks of sheep (ibidem: 5). He is blessed as he is the one who listens to the “innocent call” of the lamb and the “tender reply” of the ewe, embodying the call and the answer, the beginning and the end, and from a Biblical perspective, God himself (ibidem). The beautiful and peaceful rural life is, nevertheless, contrasted by the image of the fallen city in the poem titled London. This is a dismal place, ruled by poverty, fear, chaos and disease. People are week both in strength and soul; the “cry of every man” shows the lack of hope and the installation of despaired (ibidem: 65). The prophetic voice of the Bard, the counterpart of the Shepherd, returns here to condemn the existence of such a place and the “Marks of weakness, marks of woe” (ibidem). Like Amos or the Biblical Jonah, the Bard calls London to repent of its wickedness and pray for its salvation. Blake evokes the cycle of life in the third poem of his volume, The Echoing Green, when he parallels, the image of “Old John with white hair” and other elderly observers who sit under the oak (a Celtic symbol of endurance as well as psychic vision or soul-thought) with that of the young boys and girls playing “on the echoing green” and the little ones gathering round their mothers’ laps (ibidem: 6). The joyful spring day is contrasted by the human winter and the approaching separation from the material world. The youth and the old coexist and face each other as part of the natural course of life. While watching the young playing, the old men remember their childhood but also expect the “darkening green” or the sunset of their lives; thus, memory and intuition help them unite their past, present and future–time becoming insignificant in the spiritual evolution of the human being (ibidem: 7). In The Garden of Love life and death are, once again, brought together. A speaker visits a garden where he used to play as a child, only to find out with great remorse that “Love lay sleeping,” the flowers were replaced by tombstones and the songs by weeping. The chapel “built in the midst” offers no comfort as its gates “were shut” and “Thou shalt not’’ was written over its door. In fact, Blake criticises the church and its narrow views regarding the natural course of human life. Moreover, the presence of the “priests in black gowns” and implicitly, the denial of a life of “joys and desires” reveal Blake’s frustration at a religious system that obstructs the divine creation and man’s purpose on earth (ibidem: 50). In The Lamb, one of Blake’s most strongly religious poems, the oppositions (material–spiritual, youth–old age, beginning–end) continue to be maintained and developed. The speaker, identifying himself as a child, asks a little lamb a series of poetic rhetorical questions, trying to find out who created it and who takes care of it. The answers do not cease to appear as the speaker knows that the Creator is God and that his presence

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as well as that of the lamb is a living proof of His love and compassion. Likewise, The Lamb fuses the Biblical symbolism of Jesus Christ as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1: 29). The Tiger, perhaps the counterpart poem to The Lamb, continues the questions about God but this time the speaker does not suggest His tenderness and mercy, but His ferocity and power. The great creator of the gentle Lamb is also the forger of a terrifying beast. His “immortal hand or eye” can frame the “fearful symmetry”; bringing the good but also the bad together (ibidem: 53). Infant Joy and Infant Sorrow are two brief songs which continue to contrast the state of perfect innocence, in this case, that of a newly born child and the dangerous world that he is brought into. At two days old the baby knows only the “sweet joy” and the “blessings” of his mother–an endless source of life and love (ibidem: 28). As the time flies, the baby becomes “helpless, naked, piping loud, / Like a fiend hid in a cloud” (ibidem: 43). His “father’s hands” squeeze him hard just like the social institutions which constrain individual freedom. Thus, the baby (who is actually the human soul or the “Psyche”, in Neoplatonic terms) finds consolation only when he goes back to his “mother’s breast”–the source or spiritual salvation. In The Little Boy Lost and The Little Boy Found, Blake’s family analogy continues to be developed and enriched. In the first brief piece, a little boy (once again the human soul) cannot keep up with his father (perhaps the earthly institutions or religious practices) and is left behind, “wet with dew,” in the dark night (ibidem: 14). He desperately calls the man but his cries have no answer. In the companion poem, however, God hears the weeping child and appears to him in the image of his father dressed in white. Through divine intervention, the boy is saved and arrives home, to his mother (the source of pure bliss) where he weeps again but this time, with tears of joy and relief (ibidem: 15). In the end, A Little Boy Lost features a child as an inquiring Psyche which becomes aware of its own limitations in relation to God almighty: “Father, how can I love you, / Or any of my brothers more?” since “I love you like the little bird / That picks up crumbs around the door’’ (ibidem: 55). His sincerity is confused with blasphemy and the church condemns him to a terrible death–burning at the stake. Here, Blake parallels the God with the earthly institution, meant to represent it–the Church–and condemns the latter for its narrowness and terrifying methods. The perfect “One” remains above the corrupted religious institution, its views and practices. Following the Neoplatonic tradition according to which the spiritual prevails over the material surface, Blake encompasses this fundamental difference in his poem The Little Black Boy. The poet suggests that the black body

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“bereaved of light” and the “sun-burnt face” are just like a cloud or a “shady grove” that hide beneath a pure shiny soul just like that of a white child (ibidem: 9). The outside appearance is strikingly different from the inner essence of the black child, yet they exist side-by-side making his early life extremely hard but also his spiritual reward sweeter. In The Clod and the Pebble, Blake offers two dialectic definitions of love. This complex emotion can build a “Heaven in Hell’s despair” but also a “Hell in Heaven’s despite” (ibidem: 49). It can comfort and raise the human soul on the higher peaks of divine happiness but also to throw it into the abyss of sorrow and perdition. The heavenly love is sang by a “little Clod of Clay,” a pure hearted child, who lacks selfishness but also experience (ibidem). The whims and pains born out of love are, however, invoked by “a Pebble,” a grownup whose life experience makes him tougher and much more reluctant. Just like in many other poems written by Blake, the two extremes have to coexist and unite. Love requires altruism and innocence but also selfishness and experience or just as Blake states: “a Clod and a Peddle” (ibidem). The poet also shows how sexual love can corrupt and destroy the divine beauty that the human soul was enriched with. In The Blossom, the speaker contemplates “A happy blossom” with sparrows hiding under its green leaves and robins singing on its branches (ibidem: 11). Far from its corruption, the human soul, the Psyche, is at a state of natural beatitude just like the blossom. This state is not to last and just as the Neoplatonics maintained, the soul is subject to corruption before seeking its redemption. In The Sick Rose, Blake describes the way in which a worm, a dual creature, corrupts a pure soul and a virgin body: “O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm: / Has found out thy bed / Of crimson joy: / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy” (ibidem: 47). From a Neoplatonic perspective, we can state that The Sick Rose echoes Psyche’s marriage to Eros from The Metamorphoses of Apuleius (late 2nd century AD), also called The Golden Ass (Asinus aureus) by St. Augustine in his The City of God (426 AD). The “flying worm” is Blake’s version of Eros, the winged god of love from the Greek legends (ibidem). Eros is known to take various forms, thus the idea of becoming a worm fits very well the ancient scenario. Moreover, he is involved in the coming into being of the universe but also in corrupting it through mischievous interventions in the affairs of gods and mortals. From this point of view, Eros helps create and enforce the primordial circle of birth, death and rebirth. Blake’s “rose” (or Psyche) becomes the symbol of maidenhood, whose beauty is ruined through sexuality. The rose is seek and seems to be condemned to death,

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yet as nature has the power of regenerating itself there is still a chance for the human soul and body to recover and go back to their initial state. The soul can be spared from sin and its state of purity can be preserved only through death. This idea is made clear in the poems The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found which parallel the similarly titled Little Boy Lost and Little Boy Found from the Songs of Innocence. Here, a sevenyear-old girl, Lyca, symbolises the human soul, wandering “in desert wild” while searching for meaning or consolation. Unlike the little boy, who is brought back, through divine intervention, to his home and source of bliss, the girl finds her eternal rest in a cave; a wild paradise guarded by a lion and a lioness. After desperate searches her parents find her sleeping in a cave and the lion (in this case a representation of Jesus Christ) guides them to her, death becoming just a natural stage in human existence which should not be received with sorrow and “weeping” but with the rejoice of reencountering the loved ones. The poems The Little Girl Lost and The Little Girl Found can also be interpreted as telling the story of Core or Persephone, whose death, or, as Blake calls, “sleep,” is watched with grave wonder by the man and woman. The mother and father “descend” (just like Porphyry suggests) through the moon-governed Tropic of Cancer and drink a draught of Lethe from “the starry cup placed between Cancer and the lion”; “hence oblivion, the companion of intoxication, there begins silently to creep into the recesses of the soul” (qtd. Uždavinys 2009: 255). When they arrive at the Lion (the empire of Pluto), the descending souls enter upon their new condition–the eternal life within death.

Conclusion Neoplatonism offered William Blake a complex symbolic system which helped him differentiate himself from the writers and poets of his time in Europe. The works of Porphyry and Plotinus helped the British poet enrich his field of allusions and introduce new themes and images, without destroying the unity of his own symbolic structure. This way he was able to combine references to Greek gods and ancient theories with Romantic views about life, love and death as well as religious criticism. Likewise, it seems possible that the source of inspiration from which Songs of Experience arose, as a whole, was actually the Neoplatonic theory according to which spiritual evolution and redemption cannot be obtained, unless the soul “descends” to Hell / Hades and carries back with it the knowledge of its suffering in its fallen state” (qtd. in Raine 1993: 152).

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Each of Blake’s poems talks about the human condition and the journey of the soul from its state of initial purity to its corruption and salvation. Adopting the Neoplatonic system of thought, Blake was able to fuse together stages of human existence and spiritual quests, and reveal them as interdependent elements. Moreover, this system of thought enabled him to individualise himself as a poet and artist, simultaneously addressing social, political, psychological, imaginative, historical and spiritual or cosmic levels. He contrasted rural and city life, richness and poverty, peace and violence, the young and the old, the maidenhood and the carnal experience, the divine and the religious constraints, happiness and sorrow – all of these dichotomies revealing the human Psyche as “fractured into competing faculties and capacities” in search for its redemption (ibidem: 152). At each level, William Blake’s poetry seeks to release the human potential and vitality from the rational mind and material surroundings, following the Neoplatonic tradition of the coexistence of oppositions as a condition of the spiritual evolution.

Sources Blake, William. 1994. The Selected Poems of William Blake. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth.

References Birch, Dinah (ed.). 2009. Oxford Companion to English Literature. Seventh Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, R. Baine (ed.). 2002. Neoplatonism and Contemporary Thought. Albany: State University of New York Press. —. 1982. Neoplatonism and Indian Thought. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publishing. Ostenfeld, E.N. 1982. Forms, Matter and Mind: Three Strands in Plato’s Metaphysics. Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Raine, Kathleen. 1993. “C.G. Jung: A Debt Acknowledged.” Jungian Literary Criticism edited by Richard P. Sugg. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 167–78. —. 2002. Blake and Antiquity. London: Routledge. Remes, Pauliina. 2014. Neoplatonism. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. The Bible. 2001. The New Oxford Annotated Version, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Uždavinys, Algis. 2009. The Heart of Plotinus: The Essential Eneads Including Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs. Bloomington: World Wisdom. Woodcock, Bruce. 1994. “Introduction: William Blake, Art, Vision and Revolution.” William Blake. The Selected Poems of William Blake. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth. i–xiv.

CHAPTER FIVE FOOD AND IDENTITY IN SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS XENIA GEORGOPOULOU

1. Introduction “As I do live by food,” Jacques starts his phrase in As You Like It (2.7.14),1 to proclaim that what he is about to say is as true. In Jacques’s words food figures as the most natural thing, the source of life itself. It is not surprising, then, that almost every aspect of life is described in such terms in Shakespeare’s plays. In recent anthropology and sociology, food figures as a marker of identity and difference, denoting sociological variables such as gender, age, class and ethnicity (Caplan 1997: 9); so do food production and consumption patterns (Beardsworth and Keil 2000: 5). According to Alan Beardsworth and Teresa Keil, “the act of eating lies at the point of intersection of a whole series of intricate physiological, psychological, ecological, economic, political, social and cultural processes” (ibidem: 6). Food works as a boundary marker, distinguishing between different subcultures, the town and the country, nations and regions, and also marking rites of passage (wedding cakes), season changes (Halloween pumpkins), festive as opposed to everyday life (Christmas puddings) (Lupton 1996: 25). Structuralist anthropology regards food as a cultural system analogous to language (Caplan 1997: 1, 2), and food practices and habits are read as linguistic texts (Lupton 1996: 8), which often work metaphorically and symbolically (Caplan 1997: 1, 3).2

1

The numbers signify act, scene, line. All quotes from Shakespeare’s original follow the compact edition of the Oxford Complete Works (Shakespeare 1997). 2 The most influential works exploring the relation between food and language were Claude Lévi-Strauss’s books The Raw and the Cooked and The Origin of

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In Shakespeare’s plays food references define a character’s identity, touching on aspects such as age, sex, class, religion, nationality, cultural background at large, but also particular character elements.

2. Food and age Since food is the prerequisite of life and growth, it is only natural that it is often used to indicate a person’s growth with reference to age. In Richard II, Harry Percy describes himself as “tender, raw and young” (2.3.42) and hopes that his virtues will “ripen” with time (2.3.43). Although raw here may allude to an unripe fruit, it may also refer to the natural state of uncooked food, a metaphor found elsewhere in Shakespeare, also connected with youth. In All’s Well That Ends Well, Lafeu understands why Bertram was “misled” by a “fellow” “whose villainous saffron would have made all the unbaked and doughy youth of a nation in his colour” (4.5.1–4). Youth here is regarded as “unbaked,” which alludes to the “rawness” mentioned by Henry Percy in Richard II, but also “doughy,” which means that a cunning “fellow” like that described by Lafeu can turn youngsters into whatever he desires by giving their “doughy” nature the shape he wants and by “colouring” them with his “saffron.” The mention of added saffron here defines youth as “unseasoned,” a metaphor we find earlier in the same play within the same context: according to the Countess of Rousillon, her son Bertram is “an unseasoned courtier” (1.1.68), who needs instruction. In Shakespeare, inexperienced youth is also illustrated by the greenness of raw food: in Antony and Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt refers to her “salad days, / When [she] was green in judgement” (1.5.72–73).1 But food references regarding age are not limited to youth in Shakespeare’s plays. In As You Like It, Jacques quotes the fool’s words: “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, / And then from hour to hour we rot and rot” (2.7.26–27); later on, Touchstone regards twenty-five as “a ripe age” (5.1.20). Ripeness in such cases is mostly related to judgment; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Lysander, in an attempt to justify his change of mind to Helena, admits the following: “Things growing are not ripe until their season / So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason” (2.2.123–124). In The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Valentine describes

Table Manners, which constitute the first and third volumes of his four-volume work Mythologiques. 1 Lisa Jardine notes that in Renaissance Italy salad was regarded as “food for peasants” (1997: 52).

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Proteus to the Duke in similar terms: “His years but young, but his experience old; / His head unmellowed, but his judgment ripe” (2.4.67– 68). In the beginning of Henry V, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of Ely discuss the young king’s reign, and the latter concludes, referring to young Henry’s past comportment: “The strawberry grows underneath the nettle / And wholesome berries thrive and ripen best / Neighboured by fruit of baser quality” (1.1.61–63). The reference here is not only to the new king’s grown ability and ripened wholesomeness but also to his former fellows, and the issue raised here is not solely age but also class. The “fruit of baser quality” refers to the brutality of the lowclass people whom Hal used to frequent.

3. Food and class In Shakespeare’s plays food references are often used to discriminate between classes.1 In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock notes the difference between the Christians of Venice and their slaves, whose “palates” are obviously not “seasoned with such viands” as those tasted by their masters (4.1.95–96). Similarly, in Antony and Cleopatra, the Egyptian queen visualizes herself, as well as her attendant Iras, on display in Rome, dragged by some slaves whose breath is “[r]ank of gross diet” (5.2.208). However, in Shakespeare’s time the servants often tasted the same dishes as their masters. Speaking of the English nobility in his Description of England (2nd edn, 1587), William Harrison observes that when they have taken what it pleaseth them, the rest is reserved and afterward sent down to their serving men and waiters, who feed thereon in like sort with convenient moderation, their reversion also being bestowed upon the poor which lie ready at their gates in great numbers to receive the same (qtd in Wilson 1954: 278).

Thus, the same dishes are eventually consumed by members of different classes. But class difference is not indicated merely by the quality of food; it is also related to quantity. An over-abundance of food characterizes a king’s everyday life or a gentleman’s or rich middle-class man’s festive provisions. In Antony and Cleopatra, food abundance reaches the point of exaggeration so that Maecenas asks to confirm: “Eight wild-boars roasted whole at a

1

On food as a class indicator see Caplan 1997: 11–12. On the same matter in Shakespeare with reference to fruit see Fitzpatrick 2010: 129–130.

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breakfast, and / but twelve persons there; is this true?” (2.2.186–187).1 Quantity, however, is not measured only by the abundance of one dish; it is also connected with variety.2 A plethora of ingredients and dishes are implied in Romeo and Juliet, since Capulet requires “twenty cunning cooks” for the preparation of a feast that would correspond to his high class (4.2.2).3 A similar variety may be expected from the title character’s “great banquet” in Timon of Athens (1.2). The scarcity of food, on the contrary, indicates either a low-class person or a gentleman that has lost his former wealth, a phenomenon not at all rare in Shakespeare’s time. In Cymbeline, Cloten comments on Posthumus’s baser descent and present condition (Posthumus is described in the dramatis personae as a “poor gentleman”) using a dish metaphor: Innogen’s husband is “a base wretch, / One bred of alms and foster’d with cold dishes, / With scraps o’th’ court” (2.3.110–112), which equates him with the servants or even the poor that wait at the gates of the rich in Harrison’s Description. A difference similar to that between high-class and low-class people is that between people who live in the city and those who dwell in the countryside. People who have lived in the court in particular, regardless of class, regard the rustics whom they end up frequenting, for one reason or another, as “raw.” “God make incision in thee, thou art raw” (3.2.70), are Touchstone’s words to the young shepherd Corin in As You Like It. Agnes Latham interprets raw as “inexperienced or unseasoned”, and remarks that one of the interpretations of “incision” is “to score and salt meat for roasting” (1996: 64). However, seasonings are used not only metaphorically, to indicate the sophistication of the court; they may be related to wealth, and even help to define rank. T.F. Thiselton Dyer mentions the position of salt on the table as a means of discriminating between the higher- and lower class people 1

The exaggeration of such a meal was even more significant to the English audience of Shakespeare’s era, considering that breakfast as a regular meal was almost eliminated at the time. Fynes Moryson in his Itinerary (1617) points out that “in general the English eat but two meals (of dinner and supper)” (qtd in Wilson 1954: 276), which seems to be confirmed by Harrison (qtd in Wilson 1954: 281–282), who nevertheless makes clear that it was not always so. 2 In his Epigramme no 101, Ben Jonson promises a variety of dishes to tempt his friend to dinner (qtd in Evans 1989: 120–121). 3 If we believe Moryson, then a feast like Capulet’s might as well claim a counterpart in Shakespeare’s time: the English “at feasts for invited friends are so excessive in the number of dishes, as the table is not thought well-furnished, except they stand one upon another” (qtd in Wilson 1954: 276–277).

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positioned on its two sides (the salt-cellar being located in the middle), which is possibly alluded to by Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, when he talks about “[l]ower messes” in 1.2.227 (1966: 494).1 As for pepper, Lisa Jardine (1997: 55) reminds us that it was also used as currency during the Renaissance. Salerio’s allusions to contemporary trade in The Merchant of Venice include spices among the goods brought from the new colonies (1.1.33).2 Spices were definitely part of a rich man’s table, as we can see in Romeo and Juliet, where Lady Capulet asks for “more spices” (4.4.1). However, in Shakespeare’s time spices had apparently reached low-class people too, even though they were purchased on special occasions, such as the sheep-shearing festival in The Winter’s Tale, where the Clown’s list for the feast includes “saffron,” “mace,” “nutmeg,” “ginger” (4.3.44–46).3

4. Food and cultural difference Apart from age and class, food references in Shakespeare’s plays also define cultural difference, touching on particular aspects such as religion or nationality. Pat Caplan observes that in literature “religious distinctions are often marked in culinary fashion” (1997: 13), and so they are in Shakespeare, too, where dietary restrictions commonly refer to a character’s religious identity. In Shylock’s famous monologue in The Merchant of Venice (the popular “Hath not a Jew eyes?” speech), a Jew is “fed with the same food […] as a Christian is” (3.1.56, 59). However, this is not altogether so; earlier on, in an aside, Shylock has expressed his reluctance to dine with the Christians, who eat pork (1.3.31–33).4 On the other hand, Christians have their own dietary restrictions. Fasting is often mentioned, most commonly connected with prayer5 or associated with priesthood, and is also reflected in plays whose plot is set in a non-Christian context, such as Coriolanus, where “priest-like fasts” (5.1.56) are mentioned, or Pericles, where the Master fisherman promises the title character that they will have “flesh for holidays, fish for fasting-

1

On the inferiority of Leontes’s “[l]ower messes” see Kermode 1963: 50; Orgel 1996: 107; Schanzer 1985: 169. 2 According to John Wheeler’s Treatise of Commerce (1601), the English merchants got the spices from the Portuguese (qtd in Kaplan 2002: 234). 3 On the growing popularity of ginger and nutmeg see Jardine 1997: 53, 56. 4 On Shylock’s view of pigs see Ungerer 1985: passim. 5 On fasting and prayer, regardless of the religious context, see The Comedy of Errors (1.2.51); Cymbeline (4.2.349); Measure for Measure (2.2.155–158); Othello (3.4.40).

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days” (5.122–123).1 Fasting is also associated with repentance, as in The Winter’s Tale (3.2.210). The dietary references to different cultural backgrounds are not limited to religion; Shakespeare’s plays include occasional mentions of various national diets, European and exotic alike. Apart from “porrage” (obviously “porridge,” misspelled by the French Alençon) and “fat bull beaves,” mentioned in Henry VI, Part 1 as an indispensable part of English diet (1.2.9), there is also the “Dutch dish,” “half stewed in grease,” in The Merry Wives of Windsor (3.5.110) and the “French withered pears” in All’s Well That Ends Well (1.1.157–158). Shakespeare’s references to international cuisine extend to more exotic dishes. The “fine Egyptian cookery” mentioned by Pompey in Antony and Cleopatra (2.6.64) could be taken literally, apart from alluding to the queen of Egypt, who is later referred to as an “Egyptian dish” (2.6.126). The word fine defines Egyptian cuisine as refined; however, exotic diet also involves more savage dishes. The Moor’s stories in Othello include “the cannibals that each other eat, / The Anthropophagi” (1.3.142–143), and the title character in King Lear refers to “[t]he barbarous Scythian, / Or he that makes his generation messes / To gorge his appetite” (1.1.116– 118).2 Here, along with the unidentified cannibal, Lear mentions the Scythian, who was also said to be one (Muir 1997: 10). As for Caliban in The Tempest, whose name is commonly seen as an anagram of cannibal,3 he is obviously not one.4 Despite the play’s allusion to Montaigne’s essay Of the Canniballes, pointed out by several critics,5 the diet of Sycorax’s son involves mostly fruits and nuts,6 whereas the rest of it goes so far as fish and eggs (2.2.160, 168).7 1

In the Oxford edition used, Pericles is divided in scenes only; the numbers here correspond to the scene and lines. 2 The reference is from the Folio text. 3 See, for example, Brown 1985: 62; Fiedler 1974: 195; Orgel 1987: 56; Watts 2000: 198. As Stephen Orgel remarks, “Caliban’s name seems to be related to the word Carib, the name of a fierce West Indian tribe, who were said to have been cannibals, and from which the word cannibal derives” (1987: 56). 4 On the identity of Caliban see Fitzpatrick 2010: 128–129; Loomba 1996: 171; Marienstras 1981: 262. Interestingly, A.D. Nutall associates Caliban with Jacques in As You Like It (Nutall 1972: passim). 5 See, for example, Fiedler 1974: 193–194; Gillespie 2005: 118–121; Kermode 1965: 41; Ploritis 2002: 308. 6 Caliban mentions, among other things, “berries” and “crabs,” “pig-nuts” and “filberts” (2.2.159, 166–167, 170). 7 Here Caliban mentions fishing and a jay’s nest talking about his food-providing methods.

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5. Cannibalism The mentions of actual cannibals are scarce in Shakespeare; interestingly, cannibalism in his plays tells us more about the supposedly civilized European world. As Cedric Watts remarks, “[i]n Shakespeare’s works, exotic cannibalism is mentioned, but the cannibalism enacted is closer to home” (2000: 198).1 David B. Goldstein also observes that the playwright’s “concerns about food” are those of “a radical skeptic prodding the permeable divide between self and other” (2013: 30). The Anthropophagi were commonly located among a variety of African peoples mentioned by Pliny (qtd in Loomba and Burton 2007: 45) but also by Robert Gainsh, an early modern writer, who lists them among the Ethiopians (qtd. in Loomba and Burton 2007: 128); however, they also seemed to have their “closer to home” counterparts: according to Harrison’s Description, the name Anthropophagi was given to “a parceil of the Irish nation [...] which were giuen to the eating of man’s flesh” (qtd in Muir 1997: 10).2 Still, the existence of a cannibalistic people so close to the English is obviously not Watts’s point. As Kim F. Hall observes, although cannibalism “seemed to be one of the final lines drawn between the savage Other and the civilized self,” there was “a sense that the dividing line is not as clear as one might like” (2000: 118). Hall bases her argument on Richard Hakluyt’s Discourse of Western Planting, where the author argues that the overpopulation of England combined with unemployment will make people “readie to eate upp one another” (qtd in Hall 2000: 118).3 In addition to that, Hall shows how this anxiety is reflected in contemporary drama, drawing an example from Philip Massinger’s The Maid of Honour, where Bertoldo also argues that overpopulation, this time combined with a lack of resources, may make people “eat up one another” (Hall 2000: 118).4 Shakespeare, too, seems to have touched on the issue of cannibalism within a similar context in the piece he contributed to Anthony Munday’s Sir Thomas More, where the title character warns the riotous Londoners that if “insolence and strong hand should prevail, / [...] men like ravenous

1

As Crystal Bartolovich observes, several critics have also pointed out the “closer to home” preoccupations of The Tempest (2000: 20). 2 On the Irish and cannibalism also see Fitzpatrick (2007: 89–91); Motohashi (1998: 120). 3 These ideas are also found in Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations, mentioned by Ania Loomba (2002: 13). 4 On cannibalism in cases of crisis see Fitzpatrick (2007: 92).

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fishes / Would feed on one another” (6.93–97).1 In this play, the problem lies between people of different national groups; elsewhere in Shakespeare, the fish metaphor denotes social cannibalism between classes: in Pericles, the Master Fisherman observes that “the fishes live in the sea” “as men do a-land–the great ones eat up the little ones” (5.68–70).2 However, in Shakespeare the opposite is possible, too. In Coriolanus, Menenius remarks that the wolf loves the lamb “to devour him; as the hungry plebeians would the noble Martius” (2.1.7–10). Although no actual cannibalism takes place in Shakespeare other than Tamora’s eating of her own children in Titus Andronicus, the metaphor of cannibalism is particularly strong in his dramatic canon. Before his revengeful act, Titus identifies Rome as “a wilderness of tigers” preying on his family (3.1.53–55). Apart from Titus’s revenge, which leads to actual cannibalism, the latter is alluded to elsewhere in Shakespeare with relevance to revenge. In Much Ado about Nothing, Don John ruins the relationship between Claudio and Hero seeking “food to [his] displeasure” (1.3.61), stemming from the Count’s advancement after his own overthrow. In The Merchant of Venice, Antonio’s pound of flesh makes the same image more realistic, as it is intended to “feed [Shylock’s] revenge” (3.1.50).3 However, cannibalism is also traced in apparently friendly contexts. In Timon of Athens, Apemantus also refers to a cannibalistic action: “O you gods, what a number of men eats Timon, and he sees ’em not! It grieves me to see so many dip their meat in one man’s blood” (1.2.38–40).4 Through his metaphors Shakespeare describes a whole society based on cannibalism, and so he does when he speaks of personal relations, too. Both men and women are presented as dishes; however, in a patriarchal society, it is not surprising that such allusions mostly relate to women, as will be discussed below.

1

In the Oxford edition used, Sir Thomas More is divided in scenes only; the numbers here correspond to the scene and lines. 2 The Master Fisherman’s metaphor is rather elaborate: “I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale: a plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful. Such whales have I heard on o’th’ land, who never leave gaping till they swallowed the whole parish: church, steeple, bells, and all” (5.70–75). 3 On Shylock and cannibalism see Fiedler (1974: 91–93); Hall (2000: 118–119). 4 John Jowett observes that in this banquet Timon “virtually offers himself to be consumed,” echoing Christ’s Last Supper (2004: 34). Jonathan Bate also traces possible allusions to the Eucharist in Titus Andronicus (1997: 20), and so does Goldstein (2013: 55–57).

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6. Cooking, consumption and the sexes Food references in Shakespeare’s plays relate to both men and women, as we have seen above discussing other issues, such as age; so is cooking. Recent studies have proved that “provisioning and food preparation remain largely the work of women,” but also that women and men prepare and consume different types of meals (Caplan 1997: 9). In Shakespeare this difference between the sexes is not really underlined. In Cymbeline, Arviragus may be impressed by the “neat cookery” (4.2.50) of Fidele (the disguised Innogen); however, this fact does not make him suspect that he is actually a woman. Likewise, the professionals mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays are not necessarily female; next to the “kitchen wench” “all grease,” described by Dromio of Syracuse in the Comedy of Errors (3.2.96–97), we have Petruccio’s (obviously male) “rascal cook” (4.1.48). The presence of both sexes in the kitchen is also indicated by two of Capulet’s servants in Romeo and Juliet, who answer to the names of Potpan and Susan Grindstone (1.5.1, 9). However, we must admit that, in a modest domestic environment, the one who cooks is the wife, as it used to be with the Shepherd’s late wife in The Winter’s Tale. Contemporary views of cooking also involve both sexes: Gervase Markham’s ideal cook is the protagonist of his English Hus-wife (1615), whereas John Earle’s cook in his Microcosmographie (1628) is male.1 Like cooking, food consumption is also related to both sexes in Shakespeare’s plays. However, in a patriarchal society, a woman’s eating habits depend on her husband’s, with the exception of the special dietary requirements of the pregnant woman, whose craving for a certain type of food is echoed in Measure for Measure, where Mistress Elbow, “great with child,” is “longing [...] for stewed prunes” (2.1.87–88). In The Comedy of Errors, Dromio of Ephesus informs Antipholus of Syracuse (whom he takes for his twin brother of Ephesus) that his wife Adriana “doth fast till [he] come[s] home to dinner” (1.2.89). In a society where a wife is supposed to obey her husband, diet may also be used by men to control women. In The Taming of the Shrew, Katherine’s subversive behaviour is attributed to her “choleric” nature (4.1.160), which Grumio apparently takes into account when he tempts his starving mistress. The dishes proposed–and, most importantly, denied–by Petruccio’s servant2 are all bovine meat, which was considered, according to Robert Burton, as

1

Both quoted in Wilson (1954: 287–289). Grumio proposes “a neat’s foot,” “a fat tripe finely broiled,” “a piece of beef, and mustard” (4.3.17, 20, 23).

2

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detrimental to people of a dry complexion (1964: vol. 1, 217–18 [1.2.2.1]).1 Considering that choler is hot and dry, Grumio regards bovine meet as unsuitable for his choleric mistress. Obviously, he is schooled by his master, who intends to cure Katherine of her choler. Just like his literal references, Shakespeare’s metaphoric use of food and cooking in his plays illustrates the position of the two sexes in a patriarchal society. Ripeness, mentioned above with relevance to age, is not always considered in absolute terms; with regard to women it is often related to a certain rite of passage, most commonly marriage. In Pericles, Gower describes Philoten, Cleon’s daughter, as “[o]ne daughter, and a full-grown lass, / E’en ripe for marriage-rite” (15.16–17). For Capulet, Juliet will be “ripe to be a bride” at the age of sixteen (1.2.11). Although here, as elsewhere, the reference to ripeness also alludes to the natural growth of a fruit, the connection with food is more than evident. In the patriarchal society of Shakespeare’s time, which is reflected in his plays, women are seen as goods to be consumed, and are described as such, too. However, men are occasionally also presented as dishes in Shakespeare’s plays. The most elaborate metaphor of the sort is found in Troilus and Cressida: in 1.2, Pandarus regards “birth, beauty, good shape, discourse, manhood, learning, gentleness, virtue, youth, liberality” as “the salt and spice that season a man,” and Cressida replies: “Ay, a minced man–and then to be baked [...] in the pie” (1.2.249–253). Likewise, in Henry V, the English king presents himself as a dish to the Princess of France, when he tells her to “[l]et [her] eye be [her] cook” (5.2.149–150). Still, such references are mostly connected with women. In Much Ado about Nothing, Hero, Beatrice and women at large are seen as “meat” (2.1.188, 3.4.83 and 2.3.226, respectively) and Hero’s cousin is also characterized as a “dish” (2.1.256);2 in Troilus and Cressida, women are described as “viands” (2.2.69–71), “cake” (1.1.15–26), “food” (5.2.159);3 in Antony and Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt is described as an “Egyptian dish” (2.6.126), as was mentioned above. The Moor in Othello also adopts a relevant vocabulary, intending to “chop” Desdemona (previously regarded as “food” by Iago [1.3.347]) “into messes” (4.1.195), alluding to Lear’s Scythian, though no consumption is mentioned here. Such a relationship between men and women is synopsized by Emilia in Othello: 1

Burton’s original numbering is in square brackets. Lisa Hopkins gives a detailed account of the food imagery used by Shakespeare in the play (1998: 70–71). On Shakespearean heroines as dishes also see Spurgeon (1996: 321). 3 For a discussion of the play from this point of view see Greene (1983: 134, 136– 138, 144). 2

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“They are all but stomachs, and we all but food. / They eat us hungrily, and when they are full, / They belch us” (3.4.102–104). A similar metaphor is used by Iago, in his attempt to appease Roderigo; referring to Othello and his wife, he assures Desdemona’s suitor that “[t]he food that to him now is as luscious as locusts shall be to him shortly as bitter as coloquintida”1 (1.3.347–349). The purgative role of the plant mentioned by Iago may imply that the Moor will purge his stomach of Desdemona just as men “belch” women in Emilia’s metaphor above. The man’s role as eater of more than one woman, which is implied in Iago’s and Emilia’s words, is articulated in All’s Well That Ends Well, where Parolles describes Bertram as “a whale to virginity” that “devours up all the fry it finds” (4.3.225–226). Food also contains the danger of contamination, which is echoed in the fruit metaphors used to disqualify women–the bride in particular: the shrewish Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is paralleled to a rotten apple (1.1.133–134), and the defamed Hero in Much Ado about Nothing is characterized as a “rotten orange” (4.1.32). Here Leonato soon returns to the meat metaphor regarding his defamed daughter, arguing that “the wide sea / Hath […] salt too little which may season give / To her foul-tainted flesh” (4.1.141–144). Elsewhere, however, female chastity is not regarded as a thing to be preserved, and the young virgin is seen as both a merchandise and a commodity for personal use. In Pericles, Boult, who has bought Marina from the pirates, is promised “a morsel off the spit” for having “bargained for the joint” (16.126–127). However, it is soon realized that Marina is a “dish of chastity” (19.175), whose “peevish chastity […] is not worth a breakfast in the cheapest country under the cope” (19.148–149).

Conclusion Food, along with its preparation and consumption, seems to be a prominent theme in Shakespearean imagery. Shakespeare uses both literal and metaphorical references to food to depict almost every single aspect of human identity. Raw youth and ripe maturity, class differences in food quality and quantity, city and countryside diet, national dishes and religious restrictions, dishes for the pregnant woman or the choleric wife, are some of a plethora of references to food that contribute to the creation of the Shakespearean characters. Moreover, a brief look at Shakespeare’s dramatic canon reveals the cannibalistic nature of the supposedly civilized European culture. However, all these people that feed on one another, in 1

Coloqynth, a purgative, as Walter Cohen informs us (1997: 2114 note 5).

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one way or another, have something in common. Regardless of age, sex, class, religion, nationality, culture, there is one thing all people share: as the Danish Prince reminds us in Hamlet, using yet another reference to food, “[w]e fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service–two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end” (4.3.22–25).

Sources Shakespeare, William. 1997. The Complete Works. Edited by Stanley Wells et al. Introduction by Stanley Wells. Oxford: Clarendon Press. —. 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. Edited by Walter Cohen et al. New York: Norton. —. 1996. As You Like It. Edited by Agnes Latham. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge. —. 1997. King Lear. Edited by Kenneth Muir. The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-on-Thames: Nelson. —. 2004. Timon of Athens. Edited by John Jowett. Oxford World’s Classics. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1997. Titus Andronicus. Edited by Jonathan Bate. The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-on-Thames: Nelson. —. 1963. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by Frank Kermode. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: New American Library. —. 1996. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by Stephen Orgel. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon. —. 1985. The Winter’s Tale. Edited by Ernest Schanzer. The New Penguin Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

References Bartolovich, Crystal. 2000. “‘Baseless Fabric’: London as a ‘World City’.” “The Tempest” and Its Travels edited by Peter Hulme and William H. Sherman. Critical Views. London: Reaktion. 13–26. Bate, Jonathan. 1997. “Introduction.” Titus Andronicus by William Shakespeare edited by Jonathan Bate. The Arden Shakespeare. Waltonon-Thames: Nelson. 1–121. Beardsworth, Alan and Teresa Keil. 2000. Sociology on the Menu. An Invitation to the Study of Food and Society. London: Routledge. Brown, Paul. 1985. “‘This Thing of Darkness I Acknowledge Mine’: The Tempest and the Discourse of Colonialism.” Political Shakespeare:

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New Essays in Cultural Materialism edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 48–71. Burton, Robert. 1964. The Anatomy of Melancholy. Introduction by Holbrook Jackson. 3 volumes. Everyman’s Library London: Dent. 886–888. Caplan, Pat. 1997. “Approaches to the Study of Food, Health and Identity.” Food, Health and Identity edited by Pat Caplan. London: Routledge. 1– 31. Cohen, Walter et al. (eds.). 1997. The Norton Shakespeare. New York: Norton. Dyer, T.F. Thiselton. 1966. Folk-Lore of Shakespeare. New York: Dover. Evans, G. Blakemore (ed.). 1989. Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama: A New Mermaid Background Book. London: Black. Fiedler, Leslie A. 1974. The Stranger in Shakespeare. St Albans: Paladin. Fitzpatrick, Joan. 2007. Food in Shakespeare. Early Modern Dietaries and the Plays. Aldershot: Ashgate. —. 2010. “‘I Must Eat my Dinner’: Shakespeare’s Foods from Apples to Walrus.” Renaissance Food from Rabelais to Shakespeare. Culinary Readings and Culinary Histories edited by Joan Fitzpatrick. Farnham: Ashgate. 127–143. Gillespie, Stuart. 2005. “Shakespeare’s Reading of Modern European Literature.” Shakespeare and Renaissance Europe edited by Andrew Hadfield and Paul Hammond. The Arden Shakespeare. The Arden Critical Companions. London: Thomson. 98–122. Goldstein, David B. 2013. Eating and Ethics in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greene, Gayle. 1983. “Shakespeare’s Cressida: ‘A Kind of Self’.” The Woman’s Part: Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare edited by Carolyn Ruth Swift Lenz, Gayle Greene and Carol Thomas Neely. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 133–149. Hall, Kim F. 2000. “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Colonization and Miscegenation in The Merchant of Venice.” Shakespearean Criticism. Volume 5. Detroit: Gale. 116–127. Hopkins, Lisa. 1998. The Shakespearean Marriage: Merry Wives and Heavy Husbands. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Jardine, Lisa. 1997. Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance. London: Papermac. Jowett, John. 2004. “Introduction.” Timon of Athens by William Shakespeare edited by John Jowett. Oxford World’s Classics. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1–153. Kaplan, M. Lindsay (ed.). 2002. The Merchant of Venice: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s.

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Kermode, Frank. 1965. Shakespeare: The Final Plays. Writers and their Work 155. London: Longmans. —. (ed.). 1963. The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. The Signet Classic Shakespeare. New York: New American Library. Latham, Agnes (ed.). 1996. As You Like It by William Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare. London: Routledge. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1990. The Origin of Table Manners. Mythologiques 3. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —. The Raw and the Cooked. 1983. Mythologiques 1. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loomba, Ania. 1996. “Shakespeare and Cultural Difference.” Alternative Shakespeares. Vol. 2. Edited by Terence Hawkes. New Accents. London: Routledge. 164–191. —. 2002. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford Shakespeare Topics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loomba, Ania and Jonathan Burton. 2007. “Introduction.” Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion compiled and edited by Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 1–36. Lupton, Deborah. 1996. Food, the Body and the Self. London: Sage. Marienstras, Richard. 1981. Le proche et le lointain: Sur Shakespeare, le drame élisabéthain et l’ idéologie anglaise aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles. Arguments. Paris: Minuit. Motohashi, Ted. 1998. “Canibal and Caliban: The Tempest and the Discourse of Cannibalism.” Japanese Studies in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries edited by Yoshiko Kawachi. Newark: University of Delaware Press. 114–140. Muir, Kenneth (ed.). 1997. King Lear by William Shakespeare. The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-on-Thames: Nelson. Nutall, A.D. 1972. “Two Unassimilable Men.” Shakespearian Comedy. Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 14. London: Arnold. 210–240. Orgel, Stephen. 1987. “Shakespeare and the Cannibals.” Cannibals, Witches, and Divorce. Estranging the Renaissance. edited by Marjorie Garber. Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1985. New Series, no 11. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 40-66. —. (ed.). 1996. The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon. Ploritis, Marios [ȂȐȡȚȠȢ ȆȜȦȡȓIJȘȢ]. 2002. ȅ ʌȠȜȚIJȚțȩȢ ȈĮȓȟʌȘȡ: Ǿ IJȡĮȖȦįȓĮ IJȘȢ İȟȠȣıȓĮȢ [The Political Shakespeare: The Tragedy of Power]. Athens: Kastaniotis.

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Schanzer, Ernest (ed.). 1985. The Winter’s Tale by William Shakespeare. The New Penguin Shakespeare. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Spurgeon, Caroline F.E. 1996. Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ungerer, Gustav. 1985. “Shylock’s Gaping Pig.” Elizabethan and Modern Studies. Presented to Professor Willem Schrickx on the Occasion of his Retirement edited by J.P. Vander Motten. Seminarie voor Engelse en Amerikaanse Literatuur. Gent: R.U.G. 267–276. Watts, Cedric. 2000. “How Many Shakespearian Cannibals?” Henry V, War Criminal? and Other Shakespeare Puzzles by John Sutherland and Cedric Watts. Introduction by Stephen Orgel. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 197–202. Wilson, John Dover (comp.) 1954. Life in Shakespeare’s England. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

CHAPTER SIX A SEMIOTIC RECONSTRUCTION OF SOUTH-EASTERN EUROPE IN GERMAN MIGRATION LITERATURE MILICA GRUJIýIû

1. Introduction The following chapter examines literary presentations of South-Eastern Europe in contemporary German-speaking literature and uncovers several facets of the identity of this region. Although a plethora of scholarly papers on this subject has been written so far, there is a lack of studies which address South-Eastern Europe from the semiotic point of view. In this regard, our analysis will reveal fresh insights into matters of SouthEast European collective identity as well as offering new ways of applying Yuri Lotman’s semiotic model on literary works. For the corpus of the study, we have chosen three novels dealing with migration, written by German authors of South-East European origin: Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s Time of Wonders (2001), Iliya Troyanov’s The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner (1996) and Marica Bodrožiü’s A Player of an Inner Hour (2005). Although the biographies of the authors aren’t the subject of this study, we admit to having taken them into account, as all of the chosen authors point to the same region of origin– South-Eastern Europe (Romania, Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia respectively). We have built this study upon the hypothesis that the narrative worlds of authors–when they write about things they have experienced in person–appear to be authentic and free from naivety, constructedness or appropriation (see Previšiü 2009: 189). By examining the literary image of South-Eastern Europe in correlation to migration processes, we hope to open synergies between these two categories. Last but not least, two further purposes of this study are to detect similarities between these authors and to demonstrate their significance to German-speaking literature.

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Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s novel Time of Wonders (Wunderzeit) tells a story about a thirteen-year-old boy, Alin. He sits at the border and waits for his father, who is being interrogated by the border police. In the few minutes of his father’s absence, the reader learns about Alin’s previous life. The boy depicts his memories, his childhood in socialist Romania, the failed trip with his father to Italy and America, as well as the recent preparations for the renewed escape to the West. By the time his narration comes to an end, the father is being released and the family proceeds with their journey towards the West. Iliya Troyanov’s novel The World is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner (Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall) depicts the story of a boy called Alex and his parents who, dissatisfied with the situation in Bulgaria, flee towards Western Europe. After the unpleasant but successful act of illegal border crossing, the family seeks asylum in the nearest refugee camp. After a while they leave the camp and try to start a life in another western country. The storyline breaks off at this point, but the reader finds out in the course of the text that Alex in the meantime has been living alone because his parents died in a car accident some time before. The grown-up Alex is an alienated human being. He spends days at home, in hospital or at the train station, waiting for his grandmother, with whom he has no contact whatsoever, to come. In the last part of the novel the reader tracks his encounter with his godfather Bai Dan, who is sent by the grandmother to search for her grandson. Bai Dan takes Alex on a trip around the world on a tandem bicycle and rekindles the boy’s joie de vivre. Their final stop is his grandmother’s home. Marica Bodrožiü’s poetical novel The Player of the Inner Hour (Der Spieler der inneren Stunde) thematises a long farewell: a girl, Jelena, goes to Germany to live with her parents and leaves her grandfather behind. The reader follows her adaptation to a new life with her parents, her growing up, the visits to her grandfather, and her relationship with her mother. The novel resembles a mosaic of pieces of memories, visions and observations, because Jelena oscillates between family members, her past and present, and her “old” and “new” place of residence. Finally, she manages to reconcile all the fragments of her being and find inner peace.

2. Yuri Lotman’s concept of the “semiosphere” The roots of Yuri Lotman’s concept of “semiotic spaces” can be traced to the theses of Saussure and the Prague school. Lotman develops his concept of “culture” on an observation that isolated mono-semantic structures cannot exist in reality (see Lotman 2005: 206). He introduces a

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semiotic system regarded as an organised unity and names it semiosphere1 in analogy to Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere. The term has an ambiguous character and can be understood differently: it can refer to one culture as a whole (Frank, Ruhe, Schmitz 2010: 391f.); it can be applied to a specific cultural space, often with a real geographical topology (ibidem: 391f.; Nöth 2015: 12), and finally it relates to metaphorical spaces and topologies deriving from different social functions and “plot spaces” (Nöth 2015: 12), such as the characters of the mother, the hero, the villain etc. In this article, we observe the South-East European region as a unified semiotic system, identify its characteristics, and examine the sociopolitical and cultural elements of its collective identity. The discourse about a negative South-East European image (Todorova 1997: 188) cannot be avoided here, since the authors (in particular Florescu and Troyanov) give a critique of the socialist system. The way in which South-Eastern Europe relates to the West cannot be disregarded either, since the protagonists of the analysed novels flee to Western Europe, which they initially identify as the “promised land” (Ger.: “Das Gelobte Land”, Troyanov 2009: 87). The idea of spotlighting the South-East European region and regarding it as an organised structure that participates in a dialogue with another semiotic space (Western Europe) can contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of identity, and furthermore of the processes of migration that lie at the core of the analysed texts. According to Lotman, the semiosphere represents a unified “organism” with two main characteristics: a semiotic homogeneity and individuality. The principle of the homogeneity represents its prerequisite and makes the semiosphere differ from other (non-)semiotic structures. The internal diversity of the semiosphere is based upon the principle of asymmetry and it ensures the dynamic development of its elements (Lotman 2005: 219). Lotman notices that this diversity “does not destroy the integrity of the semiosphere, as the basis of all communicative processes lies in the invariant principle, making them similar to each other” (ibidem). Although South-Eastern Europe consists of specific cultures with individual national histories, their own myths and different ethnic and religious patterns (the principle of individuality), the homogeneity of the region is to be understood through its very similar socio-political situations, its multicultural history, and not least its ethnic conflicts (Sterbling 2006: 113; ûaliü 2016: 9). The concept of the “collective” (Lotman 2005: 209) is 1

“[A]ll semiotic space may be regarded as a unified mechanism (if not organism). In this case, primacy does not lie in one or another sign, but in the ‘greater system’, namely the semiosphere. The semiosphere is that same semiotic space, outside of which semiosis itself cannot exist” (Lotman 2005: 208).

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especially to be found in the feeling of subordination throughout history (the domination of the Turks, the Habsburg monarchy), in the slower economic development, in the feeling of being a collective subject during the Soviet era, in the initial excitement about open access to the market after the fall of the Iron Curtain as well as in the feelings of uncertainty and instability during the time of transition (Haines 2007: 215–217).

3. Manifestations of the semiotic personality Lotman argues that every semiosphere has its own “personality” (Lotman 2005: 209) that is essential to the notion of the “semiotic boundary.” This “semiotic personality” of the South-Eastern European region has a similar realisation in all the examined texts. The images of socialist Romania are represented through the eyes of Alin and his father. Alin shares stories from the time he was very young as well as his observations from yesterday. This is why some of his statements sound childish and some rather more grown-up. The usage of a child’s perspective relates to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt (“alienation effect”) and represents a method of exposing the narrow-mindedness and misunderstanding of another social group, usually that of grown-ups (Baßler 2002: 29). In the novel, the child’s perspective is used in the service of a critique of the dominant socialistic ideology. “Dicke gab es wenige, denn nur wenige hatten genug, um dick zu werden”1 (Florescu 2001: 20), comments Alin about his homeland. This area suffers from corruption and bribery. If one needs an administrative matter taken care of, one should offer some kind of treat to a party secretary. Not uncommonly, the area suffers from upside-down situations in many aspects of one’s life: if one needs potatoes, one goes to a bookstore and buys some. The books aren’t being sold anyway, so the bookstore manager can blur the boundaries of products for sale. Here, everybody can be eavesdropped or followed. Each neighbour is a possible spy of the Romanian Securitate, which is why every action or every word should be carefully measured. Alin is aware that his father belongs to the “dissidents” (Florescu 2001: 40) and also considers himself to be a representative of this group. In order to conceal this, Alin accepts the rules and uses the categories of collective pronouns excessively when he speaks: “our soldiers,” “our homeland” etc. The narrating Alin concludes: “In diesem unserem Land wohnten wir überhaupt alle eng 1

“Few were fat, as only few had enough to grow fat” (Florescu 2001: 20). Our translation of German excerpts.

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beieinander. Das stärkte unser sozialistisches Lebensgefühl. [...] Enger wäre es nur gegangen, wenn wir alle in der gleichen Wohnung gelebt hätten”1 (ibidem: 9). The narrator handles irony in a masterly way. He talks about socialist awareness and uses an expression of possession and intimacy (“our” for the country), but his words produce the opposite meaning: there is no privacy, one is not safe. The South-East European semiotic space appears to be a space of paradox: It is full of feelings of collectivity, but people choose not to share their intimacy. Alin’s father describes his homeland as a space where one goes in circles. This signifies a depressing way of living, without any progress: “Beim Milchkauf seien sechs Menschen dreimal im Kreis gegangen. Es gab nur einen Liter pro Mal”2 (ibidem: 38). Alin’s mother, who also doesn’t identify herself with the system, describes the conditions in her homeland in the following lines: “Bei uns gab es immer viele Fliegen. Die fühlten sich als einzige wohl. ‘Nur diese Fliegen, diese verrückten Fliegen, wollen nicht ausreisen’, meinte Mutter dazu”3 (ibidem: 45). Troyanov’s novel is also to be read as a critique of the socialist system. At the very beginning, when the narrator depicts the birth of Alex, he uses expressions such as “town of silence” (“Stadt der Stille”), “gloomy room” (“düsterer Saal”) and “windows with bars” (“vergitterte Fenster”) (Troyanov 2009: 12–13). The relationship between the description of the boy’s birth and the given negative attributes of his place of birth directs the reader’s horizon towards a criticism of the society: The text is about the presentation of a life in a totalitarian regime, where people keep their opinions to themselves, are imprisoned or have no perspective whatsoever. Of particular note is that the narrators4 do not name the country of origin of Alex’s family. The expression “Bergen, die Balkan heißen” (“Mountains that are called the Balkans”) (ibidem: 9) points directly to Bulgaria, for “the Balkans” stands for the toponym Stara Planina in Bulgarian. Also, the New York taxi driver Topko says he comes from

1

“In this country of ours we all lived very close to each other. It strengthened our socialist attitude towards life. Closer would have only been possible if we had all been living in the same apartment” (Florescu 2001: 09). 2 “Six people stood in line three times when they bought milk. There was only one litre permitted per time” (ibidem: 38). 3 “We have always had many flies. They were the only ones who felt fine. ‘Only those flies, these damn flies, do not want to leave’, my mother thought” (ibidem: 45). 4 There are three narrators in this novel: Alex, Bai Dan and an extradiegetic omniscient narrator.

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“Belovo”1 and is labelled afterwards a “countryman” (ibidem: 262). A careful reader, however, notices that the whole text is full of hidden references to Bulgaria and its culture. The characteristics of the semiotic space of South-Eastern Europe literalised in Troyanov’s novel coincide with the identity construction of South-Eastern Europe given in Florescu’s novel. This semiotic space represents an illusion of wellbeing, for here “liberty” signifies merely a hollow word. When the narrator describes dissatisfied people, he uses the allegory of the “subversive carrots” (“subversive Rüben”) (ibidem: 22) which die at the end. The reader follows the circumstances in the life of Alex’s father, who at one point declares: “Ich will unbedingt weg” 2 (ibidem: 69). The urge of Alex’s father to leave his country is based upon his inability to identify himself with the postulates of the regime. At the same time, this urge is regarded by the authorities as part of the hostile imperialistic ideology and as betrayal of the homeland (Boitcheva 2006: 98–100). A similar image of this semiotic space is given in the description of the “lady” whom the family meets at the refugee camp. From the story about her faith, the reader recognises the efforts of the authorities to punish, humiliate or blackmail the individuals who return home or are being caught escaping. They then change their testimonies, criticize the “outside world” and praise their homeland. The narrator often uses the grotesque, e.g. when he depicts the solemn funeral of the “father of the nation” (“Vater der Nation”) (ibidem: 62), or more often irony, when he gives a critique of Bulgaria: “Eines Tages starb der greise König, und alle waren traurig und weinten. Der Name des Königs war Güte, zwischen seinen Augen pendelte die Waage der Gerechtigkeit, auf seiner Zunge standen weise Worte Spalier wie Friedenspreisträger”3 (ibidem: 59). This ironic presentation is in accordance with totalitarian projections about a world that resembles the ones in fairy tales. The poetic representations of visions and pieces of Jelena’s childhood memories dominate in Bodrožiü’s novel, whereas the socio-political elements are pushed into the background. Also, only a partial image of a South-Eastern European region can be evoked here, because the novel depicts the life of a child in the Dalmatian countryside.

1

A town in south-west Bulgaria. “I absolutely have to get away” (Troyanov 2009: 69). 3 “One day the old king died and everyone was sad and cried. The name of the king was Goodness, between his eyes oscillated the scales of justice, on his tongue stood the wise words honour guard as well as peace prize laureate” (ibidem: 59). 2

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The people of Dalmatia live simple lives; they buy basic food and use basic furniture. Their way of living comes down to routine actions such as eating, working in a field and sleeping. The village slowly dies because its younger inhabitants go to the West and never come back. The ones who stay spend their time in taverns drinking and playing cards. The village is associated with a lack of prospects, immobility and finally with death. There are several references to church bells during a funeral, to a grave yard, to abandoned cars, homes and yards. The narrator explains that people leave and only come back to die. The child Jelena identifies herself entirely with this region. At the same time, she sees no connection between her parents and their homeland and considers them to be representatives of the Western world. The older Jelena, however, fluctuates between South-East European and West European identity.

4. Organisation of the semiosphere Lotman argues that the internal organisation of the semiosphere is based upon a relation between the core and the periphery. The core of the semiosphere encompasses dominant semiotic elements, whereas the periphery represents an area of weakened influences. However, the periphery plays an important role as it represents a site of accelerated semiotic processes (Lotman 2005: 212). In the case of the novels under examination, the periphery refers to all narrative elements which correspond to the Western sphere of semiosis: different products from the West, history classes or simply children playing as American soldiers. The periphery also correlates with the willingness of the characters to leave their homeland. Music, books, television shows, as well as banned night-time radio broadcasts, represent the connection of people from the South-East European region with the Western sphere of the semiosis. The characters watch foreign movies that reinforce the idea of a better life in the West. Troyanov and Florescu both refer to the Fellini’s film La dolce vita and describe how the film’s spectators associated it with a smooth, easy-going life and dreams becoming fulfilled. Troyanov notices that the literarised spectators didn’t mind the irony of the film because they were so blinded by the carefree life presented in it (Troyanov 2009: 23). Beside the critical attitude of the authors that is stated quite clearly in both texts, and the observation that television serves as a connection to the “outside world,” we need to emphasise its opposite function here: in totalitarian systems, national television remains one of the main means of securing the illusion of a progressive life, wherein the information about a fruitful harvest or

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the successful defence against hostile attacks is being pointed out on a daily basis. In this sense, television is to be regarded not as the periphery, but as an element of the core of the South-East European semiotic space. Lotman argues that, just as the semiosphere creates its internal organisation, it postulates a certain “external disorganisation” (Lotman 2005: 212). It defines a “chaotic” external system or even constructs it “in cases where this does not exist” (ibidem). Although this aspect generally seems to relate more to the Western semiotic space,1 indisputable manifestations of these observations can be found in literarised images of South-Eastern Europe in the analysed texts. We may recall the mentioned television news and everyday propaganda on the mercilessness of the West or the interpretation of one’s act of leaving the country as an influence of imperialistic ideology. In the scene of Alex’s christening in Troyanov’s novel, the priest Nikolai associates the East with salvation, as the home of the Sun and of Jesus Christ, whereas he denotes the “West” as “Reich der Finsternis und des Todes”2 (Troyanov 2009: 56–57). Bodrožiü’s characters “warn” the readers about the “dangerous” stay at the German hospital where one barely gets out alive (Bodrožiü 2005: 17). Finally, the narrator presents Jelena’s parents (who, as has already been said, in the eyes of their daughter represent the sphere of Western Europe) as insensitive, materialistic people.

5. The “boundary” concept Lotman identifies a boundary between the semiosphere and the extrasemiotic space that surrounds it. He defines the semiotic border as the most important functional and structural element that provides the semiosphere with its substance (Lotman 2005: 210). It is represented by the sum of “filters,” which “translate” the information from extra-semiotic space into the “internal language of the semiosphere” (ibidem: 208) and vice versa. The boundary around the semantic space of South-Eastern Europe touches the boundary of the Western European semantic space. This boundary has several realisations in the analysed texts. A material, geopolitical border between countries situated in Western and South-Eastern Europe respectively can be considered as its primary literary manifestation. The nature of a geopolitical border implies on one hand the enabling of communication between two sides, and on the other hand it represents a “politically and economically inflected system of triage, that reinforces 1 2

See Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” (Said 2014: 1). “the kingdom of darkness and death.”

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itself by determining who can pass and who not” (Uritescu-Lombard and Müller-Richter 2006: 8). Similarly, in the observations of Alin, the border post has an ambiguous meaning: The border crossing is the place where wonders take place and one is given permission to leave the country (see the title of the novel: Time of Wonders). But it also refers to a context in which one could be arrested and sent into imprisonment indefinitely. We can add one more perspective to this second reference: the protagonist’s fear that his father’s faith is under threat. Similarly, the scene with a border crossing in Troyanov’s novel is characterised by a range of opposites. The thorough preparations for the escape of the family, which lasted several months, lead to an unplanned situation at the border: the arranged accomplices do not show up, but an unexpected border fence appears. The border officer catches the family in the act of going across the fence, but he behaves as if nothing has happened. Without thinking it through, the father tosses his three-year-old son over the fence. The child lands on the soft hay of a passing carriage, while the parents hurt themselves by jumping over the fence afterwards. Finally, the West doesn’t welcome the parents, but takes away their son, who gets to a nearby town by sitting in the back of the carriage. The parents start to search for their son. The depiction of border crossing in the Bodrožiü’s novel also corresponds to ambivalent feelings on the part of the protagonist. The happiness Jelena feels about meeting her grandfather after a long time is suspended by feelings of fear as the border police and their dogs perform their control of the passengers and goods, by feelings of guilt as her suitcase is examined, and finally by the feelings of shame when the grandfather gets an already-opened present. Her first border crossing had a different character; it was manifested through her visions about conquering new places and never coming back to her homeland. Let us now analyse some characters who cross the above-mentioned geopolitical border. These protagonists operate in a Lotmanian sense as “interpreters” and represent the “filters” involved with two different spheres of the semiosis. In the case of some of the characters, the role of interpreter implies a reconsidering of how these characters identified themselves. As the name of Alex’s mother is misspelled after getting to the West, the first thing that crosses her mind is to claim that this misspelled person wasn’t her. She links her identity with her homeland, which is now associated only with positive values. The accursed homeland suddenly gets the attributes of a warm and happy place. A similar situation happens to Jelena, who misses

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her grandfather and her village in Dalmatia as she initially tries to get acclimated in Germany. The negotiation of identity is also to be seen in the character of Alin’s father. In the “promised land”1 he unwillingly changes his former occupation of engineer to that of debt collector and thief. The individuality he had hitherto praised turns out to be inhuman. He concludes that the Western world is actually more dangerous: crazy people are everywhere, with the objection that in the West they even carried guns around (see Florescu 2001: 168). These observations of the protagonists shed new light on the previously identified image of South-East European region. The previous lines demonstrate that the novels deconstruct the image of the West European space as well. Western Europe is initially presented as an opposite to the South-East European sphere as it offers wealth, happiness, security and a bright future. However, due to the situations faced by the protagonists, their evaluations are being subject to many transformations. Alin’s “promised land” turns out to be a land of drunken men, a place where one easily goes to the other side of the law and where one can get killed as soon as one enters the street. Troyanov depicts the merciless leader of the refugee camp or the journalists who only care about asylum seekers in order to obey the politically correct sentiments. The state hands citizenship to those who correctly pronounce the word “Hohenzollern” (Troyanov 2009: 207). An old man is attacked in the subway and instead of helping him, people turn their heads. A promised land per se seems not to exist. Lotman emphasizes the double nature of the boundary mechanism: it unites two semiospheres but it divides them at the same time: “To realise itself in a cultural-semiotic sense means a realisation of its specific character, in terms of its opposition to other spheres” (Lotman 2005: 211– 212). The analysed texts support this claim on several occasions. When Jelena’s mother identifies herself as German, she loses any common feature with the sphere of her origin. Vice versa, her identification with the South-East European region implies an immediate exclusion from the opposite sphere. In those moments the mother declares: “Die Deutschen lieben uns nicht. [...] Wenn alle Arbeit gemacht ist, schicken sie uns wieder zurück”2 (Bodrožiü 2005: 81). .

1

This particular text passage refers to America, but we’ve decided to simplify the analysis by considering America as analogous to Western Europe. 2 “The Germans do not like us. [...] After all the work is done, they will send us back” (Bodrožiü 2005: 81).

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Alin tries to identify himself with both spheres of the semiosis at the same time, but he fails due to unforseen circumstances. Belonging to one semiosphere unconditionally excludes the affiliation of this character to another group. Jelena from from Bodrožiü’s novel tries the same and fails as well. Her method of forced hybridisation leads to her being excluded from both systems. The narrator explains: Her red sandals bought in Germany seem like luxury to the poor Dalmatian people. Among her new classmates, the same sandals point to cut-price goods and exclude her from this group as well. Finally, Alin’s father experiences an identical double exclusion after he returns from the failed trip to Italy and America.

6. “Creolisation” within the semiotic structures The analysed texts present, however, characters who validate the possibility of the existence of “double” belongings. When Lotman elaborates on the semiotic “periphery,” he introduces the notion of “creolisation”: All great empires, bordered by nomads, whether ‘steppe’ or ‘barbarians’, settled on their borders members of those same tribes of nomads or ‘barbarians’, hiring them to protect the borders. These settlers formed a zone of cultural bilingualism, ensuring semiotic contacts between two worlds. Areas of multiple cultural meanings carry out the very same function on the boundaries of the semiosphere: town, trade route and other areas forming a kind of creolisation of semiotic structures (Lotman 2005: 211).

According to Lotman, people on the borderline come into contact with both systems, actively participating in the process of creolisation. The character Mirko from Troyanov’s novel lives by the Italian-Yugoslav border and owns a tavern. His family, his possessions, and his tavern guests, all originate from both the South-East and the West European region. Although this character technically belongs to the Western European system and not to the semiosphere of our main interest, he is of great importance because the literary presentation of his life embodies the principle of the abovementioned “cultural bilingualism”1 (ibidem: 211). Another literary manifestation of the notion of creolisation is to be found in the modelling of the Western semiotic system–in the depiction of the refugee camp in Troyanov’s novel. Situated at the border, the camp 1

The second character who could rank among this group is Alex’s godfather, the cosmopolitan Bai Dan, who has visited every corner of the world and acknowledges no boundaries.

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combines many different cultures. People from the East (broadly speaking) interact with each other here; simultaneously, they come into contact with people from the West in whose territory the camp is situated. In his observations on the semiosphere, Lotman discusses the possibility of the existence of a “higher” semiosphere that would include different spheres of semiosis (ibidem: 220). Various presentations in the novels, as well as some observations we have made, offer a positive answer to the question of whether the examined South-East European and West European semiotic systems can fall within a more general (global) semiosphere. The existence of a higher sphere is supported by the literarisation of characters who introduce the idea of hybridisation. Similarly, the narrator of Bodrožiü’s text explains that Jelena finds peace in the reconciliation of elements that belong to opposite spheres. A third argument correlates to the principle of deconstruction of the given literary images. We have already mentioned the protagonists’ observations on the “brighter sides” of South-Eastern Europe and showed that the initial image of the West European region is deconstructed as well.

Conclusion This chapter addressed literary constructions of South-Eastern Europe and the matters of its identity using the semiotic approach of Yuri Lotman. In addition, we focused on the subject of migration and we analysed three representative authors of a South-East European background, firmly believing that their narrative worlds are presented without appropriation, constructedness or naivety. The novels of Florescu, Troyanov and Bodrožiü present stories of persons who experience the reality of the socialist regime, migrate to western countries and try to cope with a new life as immigrants. The novels deliver a range of cultural and socio-political depictions of SouthEastern and Western Europe and offer substantial material for examining practically every strata and type of identity. This article focused on issues of a collective identity and combined cultural, sociological, political and literary considerations. We have uncovered many manifestations of South-East European identity and have discussed the self-positioning of the protagonist in relation to the ascribed identities. Some aspects of the semiotic boundary have been highlighted as well as the notion of “cultural creolisation” and the possible existence of a general semiosphere.

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The texts show that the examined semiotic systems have common features that were invisible at first glance. By using various narrative means (irony, grotesque, sarcasm, child’s perspective) and by criticising not only the South-East European but the West European region as well, the authors introduce a certain opportunity to level the differences between them. This correlates with their intention of overcoming prejudices through their works and of pointing out the reality of cultural hybridisation. We hope to initiate further studies within similar interdisciplinary contexts.

Sources Bodrožiü, Marica. 2005. Der Spieler der inneren Stunde. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Florescu, Cătălin Dorian. 2001. Wunderzeit. Zürich, München: Pendo. Troyanov, Iliya [Trojanow, Ilija]. 2009. Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall. München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.

References Baßler, Moritz. 2002. Der deutsche Pop-Roman: Die neuen Archivisten. München: C.H. Beck. Boitcheva, Snejana. 2006. “Verbrechen in Euphemismen verkleidet: Zum Bulgarienbild in Ilija Trojanows Roman Die Welt ist groß und Rettung lauert überall.” Wider Raster und Schranken: Deutschland–Bulgarien– Österreich in der gegenseitigen Wahrnehmung. Wissenschaftliche Beiträge, Essays, Unterrichtsprojekte edited by Marie-Christin Lercher and Annegret Middeke. Göttingen: Universitätsdrucke Göttingen. 97– 103. ûaliü, Marie-Janine. 2016. Südosteuropa: Weltgeschichte einer Region. München: C.H. Beck. Frank, Susi K., Cornelia Ruhe and Alexander Schmitz. 2010. “Jurij Lotmans Semiotik der Übersetzung”. In Yuri M. Lotman [Jurij M. Lotman]: Die Innenwelt des Denkens. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 383–416. Haines, Brigid. 2007: “German-language Writing from Eastern and Central Europe.” Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic edited by Stuart Taberner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 215–229. Lotman Yuri M. 2005 [1984]. “On the Semiosphere.” Translated by Wilma Clark. ȈȘμ‫׫‬ȚȦIJȚțȒ: Sign Systems Studies. 33 (1). 205–229.

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Nöth, Winfred. 2015. “The Topography of Yuri Lotman’s Semiosphere.” International Journal of Cultural Studies. 18 (1). 11–26. Previšiü, Boris. 2009. “Poetik der Marginalität: ‘Balkan Turn’ gefällig?” Von der nationalen zur internationalen Literatur: Transkulturelle deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur im Zeitalter globaler Migration edited by Helmut Schmitz. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi. 189–203. Said, Edward. 2014. Orientalism. 25th Anniversary Edition, with a New Preface by the Author. New York, Toronto: Vintage Books. Sterbling, Anton. 2006. “Migration aus Südosteuropa: Ein Überblick”. Migrationsprozesse: Probleme von Abwanderungsregionen, Identitätsfragen edited by Anton Sterbling. Hamburg: Krämer. 113–130. Todorova, Marija. 1997. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Uritescu-Lombard, Ramona and Klaus Müller-Richter. 2007. “Preface.” Imaginäre Topografien: Migration und Verortung edited by Klaus Müller-Richter and Ramona Uritescu-Lombard. Bielefeld: transcript. 7–10.

CHAPTER SEVEN DEFINING THE POSTCOLONIAL WRITER: A FRAMEWORK FOR THE LITERATURE OF A DIASPORA MAHER FAWZI TAHER

I am a citizen of two worlds–a citizen of the Universe; I owe allegiance to two kingdoms. In my heart are those stars and that sun, and the LIGHT of those stars and that sun (Rihani 2016: 177).

1. Introduction When East, West was published in 1994, Salman Rushdie stated that his short stories are neither about the East, nor the West, but about the comma in the title, which both unites and separates the two. In his novels, the writer–who more than anyone else felt the abyss between the two cultures and willingly jumped into it, which almost brought him closer to his death–illustrates the enigmas of postmodern postcolonialism, namely the fascinating mystery of the uniting / separating comma. In fact, this comma draws attention to another aspect, more and more visible in the theoretical and critical materials published nowadays: those terms which can no longer be defined because their meanings proliferate so much to mean nothing in the end. Regarding such concepts as “colonialism” and “post-colonialism,” there have always been misunderstandings in using these concepts, mainly caused by certain confusions between imperialism and colonialism. One clear-cut distinction is provided by Gina Wisker in her “Introduction” to Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing, where she distinguishes between imperialism and colonialism:

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Chapter Seven Imperialism is usually taken to mean [...] ‘of the empire’; authority assumed by a state over other states or peoples. It is often accompanied by symbolism, pageantry as well as military power, and Roman imperialism was a prime example of this–military power and ways of life, symbols and beliefs taking over from those of indigenous peoples, absorbing difference under the power of empire (Wisker 2000: 5).

In a logical succession, Gina Wisker leads us to a definition of postcolonial which, according to the author, “describes a period of time, after colonialism [...] Here it will be taken to mean writing in opposition to colonialism, which has been written after colonial rule has ended; but roots prior to this ending will be mentioned” (ibidem: 5). Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra think that colonialism was experienced differently in different parts of the world: In the Indian subcontinent the colonial experience seems to have affected the cities only; in Africa it worked hand in hand with evangelical Christianity; in Southeast Asia the use of migrant labor–notably Chinese and Indian–mediated between the British and the Malays. In the West Indies slave labor, and later Indentured Indian labor, again made the relationship less combative and more accommodating (Hodge and Mishra cited in Chrisman and Williams 1993: 282).

Defining the different assumptions of the term postcolonial, Arif Dirlik identifies three distinct uses of the term: (i) it is a “literal description of conditions in formerly colonial societies”; in this case, it has “concrete referents,” as in “postcolonial societies” or “postcolonial intellectuals”; (ii) it defines “a global condition after the period of colonialism”; it is a more abstract and less concrete in reference, similar to the equally vague “Third World” concept, for which it is intended as a substitute, and (iii) it describes “a discourse on the above-named conditions that is informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of those conditions” (Dirlik 1994: 332). “Otherness” leads to “doubleness”; both concepts refer to identity and difference, and may be easily applied to define the writings of Australian writers as well. Postcolonialism is one of the terms already criticised in the ’90s by Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock as having been so intensively used, and on such a large scale, that it only suggests an era subsequent to colonialism. A famous definition is the one formulated by Ashcroft, Griffith & Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back (1989): the term under discussion covers the whole culture that imperialism affected. As such, it is “most appropriate as the term for the new cross-cultural criticism which

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has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted” (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 2). Any discussion of postcolonialism should then start by defining the three phases in the history of postcolonial theories. The first one, situated around 1960–1970, is marked by the cry of protest from the representatives of the colonized nations, positively ascertaining their difference, and drawing attention to some communities which want to be appreciated as much more than an otherness devalued by the colonizing process. Mention should be made of the contributions of Edward Said (2000), Franz Fanon (1990), Albert Memmi (1991) and Homi Bhabha (1997), already classical in their field. The second phase refers to the last two decades of the 20th century. It is a period of the great ambiguities, of the identity unrest, of the inability to define, circumscribe, and objectify the characteristics, to go to the depths and clearly draw the differences. It is because, on the one hand, of a certain movement of resistance to everything connected to the colonial period, and, on the other hand, because the colonized countries–though politically independent–never managed to completely liberate themselves from the colonizers’ influence. Finally, there is a more recent phase, marked by a passage to a “neo-” or “super-” globalizing colonialism, where the differences are no longer opposed but complimentary–like the knots in a horizontal network, in which the vertical hierarchies have been abolished. The colonial past, more and more distant in time, is serenely accepted, its ambiguities are seen from a rather positive perspective, and the transnational elements become “translational,” that is fertilizing and powerful. When they were first formulated–even if they had a wide political, anthropological, and historical basis–the postcolonial theories mainly focused on the literature of the former colonies, trying to capture the specificity of that particular location, with its people and their existence, with the dilemmas of the national and cultural identities their multiculturalism and its problems, with the manner and extent to which the colonized people’s civilization was used to the full advantage of the colonizers, or the way the fictional discourse was constructed to justify the colonial oppression.

2. Celebrating difference What are these postcolonial authors doing, after all? They are “celebrating difference.” Many writers of the former colonies of the British Empire have been celebrating their difference, a difference which defined

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them. According to Cora Kaplan, “celebrating difference” should finally lead us to thinking about these texts through an unintentionally imperialist lens, conflating their progressive politics with our own agendas, interpreting their versions of humanism through the historical evolution of our own (Kaplan 1986: 185).

The postcolonial “imaginary” and the discourses available to us interfere with our experiences as readers. “Location” as a notion is much richer merely than that of the cultural, historical, and geographical context of writing and reading. Location and the “loci of enunciation” are the places or contexts from which we experience and speak, where we place ourselves ideologically, spiritually, imaginatively. In everyday language, it answers the question “Where are you coming from?” and so gives us a sense of the differences we need to negotiate, the information and feelings we need to find out about in order to gain a better understanding of writing by those who come from and speak from contexts different from our own. We are dealing, after all, with a concept that, according to Mignolo, “foregrounds the politics and ethics of location in the construction of knowledge.” We are given two reasons for this foregrounding: (i) the concept “clarifies the theorizing of colonial experiences as non-neutral with respect to where the act of theorizing is […] located or performed”; (ii) it “inserts the personal signs of the understanding subject […] into an imaginary construction” (Mignolo 1994: 508). What is definitely rejected in these theories is the distinction between Occident and Orient, according to which the Westerners were “superior” by their more advanced technology, by their better organized administration and army, by their culture and rationalism. The Orientals, on the other hand, are devoid of qualities, and “inferior” due to their “emotivity.” This opposition would justify the leadership destiny of the white race, and the presence of the Westerners on territories that had never belonged to them, knowingly contributing to the solidification of a number of stereotypes proliferated, on the one hand, to impose the colonial rule, and, on the other hand, to prevent the colonizers from constructing an independent socio-cultural space, based upon the historical stratification and the political destiny of their own country. One of the theoreticians of postcolonialism, Albert Memmi thinks that the colonizer–colonized relationship does not reduce to a power relationship only, but also includes an important imagological component. It is based on a series of clichés by which the colonized appears to be everything that the colonizer is not: each and every of the colonizer’s fault

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is projected upon the colonized, while each of the qualities the colonized does not have projects itself upon the colonizer. According to Memmi, there are three stages of this project: (1) the other is seen as an absence, as something devoid of all the qualities appreciated in the West; (2) the other turns opaque, his humanity disappearing as mysterious and impenetrable; (3) the collectivity he belongs to is associated–by its faults–with organizational inability, chaos, corruption, and evil. Uncontrollable because of their marginality, the colonizers can only be malicious (Memmi 1991: 83–85). Memmi’s considerations should be connected to Edward Said’s wellknown concepts of “Orient” and “Orientalism,” seen as stereotypes built by the Westerners to dominate, restructure, and gain authority over the colonized. It is both an imaginary and real discourse which creates, defines and strengthens the Westerners’ position. Confronting otherness, there are two options opened to the Westerners: either to ignore the differences and accept it or to prefer the security offered by their own cultural position and refuse the Other’s point of view (Said 1978: 176). It follows that colonial literature, as stated by Abdul R. JanMohamed (1985), might be divided into two categories: symbolic and imaginary. The former, based upon the egalitarian imperatives of the Western societies, reflects the efficiency of the European values, customs, and skills, while the latter is based upon objectivity and aggression, highlighting numerous differences and inner rivalries among nations. On the other hand, if imperial colonialism had a distinct geographical form and well defined borders, winning the independence generated a series of ambiguities. Even if the former colonies won their own governments and administration, the break with the past was far from final. They preserved that peculiar mixture of continuity and change that connects the pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial periods in one single area of investigation, to which the difficulty to recognize, integrate and reflect their own ethno-cultural diversity was added. The frontiers of the postcolonial world are no longer political or linguistic only; they have become imaginative, based upon stereotypes. There is also another erroneous assumption, that the former colonies cannot do anything important, and that whatever is happening there is due to the colonizers. For example, an ancient culture, such as the Indian culture, cannot and should not be considered inferior to the British culture. Similarly, corruption, criminality and violence may be the direct or indirect result of colonization. Moreover, the precolonial times should not be underestimated: along its long history, India witnessed waves of invaders

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other than the British. Historical amnesia would mean an idealization, and a positioning not very correct to the British. Thus, literature has turned into a space that renders the trajectories of each nation at their best. Writers decompose and recompose the meanings of history, asking themselves questions and striving to solve the ambiguities. Sometimes delicately and subtly, some other times aggressively and vocally, they struggle against a homogenization triggered by levelling imagological paradigms. The cultural dissonances, part of an anachronical and conservative vocabulary, no longer belong to the postmodern, globalizing and hybridizing discourses. Not willing to be accused of a cultural provincialism, the postcolonial writers prefer to enter an area of transition where the differences are erased, where the overlappings and ambiguities appear, and–according to Ngugi wa Thiong’o–“language and literature separate us from ourselves to other identities, from our world to other worlds, separating the minds from the bodies” (wa Thiong’o 1996: 81). Nevertheless, if the term postcolonial cannot be defined, even if it implies a lot of ambiguous meanings, it is practical and easy to use as a suitable instrument in numberless situations. Moreover, the attractive and provoking postcolonial literature proves to be a postmodern puzzle of very different texts. The post- element in “postcolonialism” could be interpreted as a later addition, and it might suggest an ending, but in fact it only organizes the postcolonial literatures towards a promising new beginning. Language is another element worth mentioning. The former colonies borrowed from their colonizers whatever they needed most: the international languages. English is the best example: due to its imperial coverage it has become a lingua franca, developing an immense vocabulary. Through the medium of the colonizers’ language, the colonies win their independence, asserting their postcolonial identity in such a way that all the speakers of English on the planet Earth will understand. It is language which brings together such different writers as Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka), George Lamming (Barbados), Nuruddin Farah (Somalia), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (India), Nadine Gordimer (South Africa), Chinua Achebe and Ken Saro-Wiwa (Nigeria). On the other hand, even if their writings are English, they are also heteroglossic, abounding in words from the writers’ native languages. But, whenever English threatens with the perpetuation of a certain type of linguistic colonial domination, it is abandoned, and the writers resort to their original tongue. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, for example, preferred to return to his mother tongue as a celebration of Kenya’s independence. One may wonder why the writers of a former colony prefer to continue writing in the language of the colonizers even after independence? Could

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it be the chance of a speedier publication and more numerous readership? Or the wish to achieve an equality status with the most powerful nations on the face of the earth? Or perhaps an ontological anxiety, with an apparently less “developed” past–nowadays, when tradition seems obsolete, and is not appreciated any longer? There is an answer to all these questions: the modern reader, interested in the archetypal experiments of George Lamming’s protagonists, or the way Vasanji’s Indian families face racial discrimination, or the black–white relations in Nadine Gordimer’s South-African novels, implicitly learns about all the fluid, transcultural and cross-border implications of a distinct era in which the idea of nationality becomes ambiguous, and the diaspora highlights the absence of a central point, of a clear-cut directing principle. Verbs such as to come and to leave imply a profound sense of suffering, of dislocation and defeat. It is not very easy to define the national identity of a writer like Salman Rushdie, born in India, educated in the United Kingdom, and continuously on the move, following his destiny of a nonconformist Muslim. Nor is it easy to outline the identity of Naipaul, the descendent of an Indian family, born in the West Indies, who travelled to London to start a writing career to culminate with the Nobel Prize for Literature. The only way is to accept the postcolonial “inbetweenness,” leaving aside the trodden path. Postcolonial literature flourishes in a situation which, in the beginning, implied repression and resistance, hatred and victimization, and in which, nowadays, the common language sets a bridge between cultures–just as Rushdie’s comma. Máire ní Fhlathúin is convinced that Britain was affected, socially and politically, by the fall of the British Empire, triggering an intensive exodus of inhabitants of British colonies and former colonies to Britain after WWII. This wave of immigration was met with a hostile response from many of the indigenous inhabitants, their fear of economic competition compounded by their long-established sense of the racial superiority of white people. […] Their [immigrant communities] continued presence and their contribution to the cultural life of an increasingly multicultural country, serve as a reminder of Britain’s imperial past (Fhlathúin 2007: 31).

A discussion of post-colonial literature necessitates a consideration of a few traits of colonization, and the aftermath of the fall of the British Empire. First and foremost, colonization implied a violence of a geographical kind, involving dispute over land and natural resources.

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3. Postcolonial locations: Hybridity and habitation In a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society, racist attitudes manifested themselves from top to bottom, from the top ruling group down to the working populations, with each group feeling superior to those who had lower status. Considering the centre–fringe relationship, it is obvious that the white superiority ideology created the well-known model of Eurocentrism; the same model, when applied to the Caribbean, did nothing but generate certain patterns of racism meant to prevent the unity of the inhabitants and maintain European control over former colonies. According to Pratt, the ordering mechanism is a means that makes “a picture of the planet appropriated and redeployed from a unified, European perspective” (Pratt 2008: 36). Thus we have a legitimization of Eurocentrism, and the peripheral positions of those who do not belong. To further develop this idea, we do not envisage a termination of the process of knowledge formation at the level of scientific exploration. Europe, in most cases the centre of former colonial empires, encouraged the exploration of alien lands. It is noteworthy to mention John Noyes who–having studied colonial travel writings and exploration texts–argues that these texts contributed in the making of the colonial space. According to Noyes, colonial space signifies “the formation of a spatial entity through a process that has been adapted in almost all settler colonies and even partly in colonies of occupation,” while division and hierarchy form the basis of the trajectory of colonial space. If colonization is “an expression of social forces which structure subjectivity in a certain manner” (Noyes 1992: 19), then, combining the psychoanalytic theories of Jacque Lacan with Henry Lefebvre’s theory of space, Noyes goes on explaining how the production of subjectivity coincides with the production of social forms in the colonial spaces. As Noyes argues, the colonial social space is formed through the dialectic between the colonizer’s imago and the Other, onto which the subjectivity of the colonizer is mapped out. One conclusion would be that a strategy that writers and strategists alike should adopt and propagate is decolonizing places towards an independent identity of place. The role of postcolonial literature in this reimagination of new decentred and decolonized territories could be crucial. Narratives have the capacity to re-imagine new places, new ideas and applicability of intellectual ideas in particular contexts. According to Michel de Certeau, “every story is a travel story, a spatial practice’ and the vehicle of this traverse in space and means of organizing places are ‘metaphors’” (De Certeau 1984: 118). Stories “carry out a labour that constantly transforms places into spaces or spaces into places”. Stories

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have had a decisive role in the “formation of myths; however, they also have the capacity to challenge boundaries set by those myths and engage in the process of demythologization” (ibidem: 126). As a consequence, postcolonial literature contributes to demythologize the grand narratives of colonialism. According to Gillian Rose, “everyday experience of fragmentation and dispersal’ requires intellectuals and critics to reconsider geography as fragmented and un-fixed.” Also, “white masculine ideology of a polarized geography should be replaced with the idea of geography as uncertain, multiple and diverse” (Rose 1993: 159). We can conclude that in the particular case of postcolonial literature places are informed by the situational complexity as well as the shared experience of systematic implementation of racial, gender and geographical boundaries. Colonisation rendered empire what Elleke Boehmer calls an “intertextual milieu,” meaning that it generated cultural symbols that exhibited a remarkable synonymity (Boehmer 1995: 52).

4. Language matters Language is one of the main characteristics distinguishing individuals according to ethnicity and ethnic identity; it can act as a marker of identity. However, regardless of how old a language is, with the current transnational and global trends the purity of the language is altered depending on the degree of contact with other groups and languages. As a result, individuals discontinue using some of their native terms, while unavoidably adopting new ones as a result of continuous contact with people from diverse language and cultural backgrounds. The section devoted to “Language” in Post-colonial Studies Reader starts with a clearcut statement of the position that language occupies in the general context of post-colonial studies (Ashcroft et al. 1995). For Elleke Boehmer, Language is a fundamental site of struggle for post-colonial discourse because the colonial process itself begins in language. The control over language by the imperial centre remains the most potent instrument of cultural control (Boehmer 1995: 283).

Bakhtin developed an early theory of intertextuality, which he referred to as heteroglossia (different “voices” within a language). At any given moment of its evolution, language is stratified not only into linguistic dialects in the strict sense of the word (according to formal linguistic markers) but also into languages that are socio-ideological: languages of social groups, professional languages, languages of generations and so forth. Heteroglossia is a state in which every utterance has contained

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within it components (direct or simply influential) of other utterances. It is also culturally specific. This phenomenon is also spoken about in terms of hybridity. A hybrid construction is an utterance that belongs by its grammatical, syntactic and compositional markers, to a single speaker, but that actually contains two utterances, two speech manners, two styles, two “languages,” two “belief systems” (Bakhtin 1986: 305). There is no formal boundary between these utterances. Hybrid cultural constructions combine two sets of “voices,” creating an even more specific community of speakers or readers who will be able to interpret an utterance without translation.

5. The Arab Anglophone fiction as a postcolonial development The main concerns of postcolonial theory, then, are “displacement,” “place,” “exile,” and what Ashcroft terms as “the problem of finding and defining ‘home’” (Ashcroft et al, 1989: 26), while Andrew Smith suggests that “the relationship between narrative and movement takes on a new and qualitatively different significance in the context and aftermath of colonialism” (Smith 2004: 242). Postcolonial scholars are also strongly interested in migration because of its potential to invoke interactions among different cultures, as Smith aptly summarizes: “Fundamental to postcolonial criticism has been the puzzle of how aspects of life and experience in one social context are impacting on worlds that are geographically and culturally distant” (ibidem: 244). Previously inaccessible spaces have now become accessible as a result of the rapid migration and the increase in migrant narratives, which are communicated faster than ever. Migrancy has become a symbol of the possibility of shattering the “fixed relationship between place and identity” in general (Carter 2005: 54). For many postcolonial theorists, the “migrant writer” became the representative figure of this new direction. Edward Said, himself an Arab American citizen and also a citizen of the world, underlined the unique vision of the migrants who can easily draw a comparison between their present condition and the not so distant past: Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, awareness that–to borrow a phrase from music–is contrapuntal (Said 2001: 186).

Ameen Rihani’s novel The Book of Khalid (1911) is centred on the reconciliation between East and West, and the mutual acceptance of each

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other’s culture and values. This is the main concern of the Arab American writer’s work which equally marked his approach to life. A new member of the Arab American diaspora, the author / narrator is musing on the present and future of his adoptive country to which he relates the Arabs’ resistance to the Ottoman Empire and the internal conflicts and religious intolerance in the Arab world. Just like his author, Khalid struggles for the reconciliation of the American and Arab culture and, after his American experience, he returns to his native Lebanon and eventually emerges as a prophet with a complex message, simultaneously spiritual, cultural, and political, an advocate of a profound spiritual understanding between the East and the West. Almost one century later, Matussem–the protagonist of Diana AbuJaber’s novel Arabian Jazz (1993) and the head of a Jordanian family displaced to America–is the drummer of a jazz band, and a great fan of John Coltrane. After his American wife’s death while visiting Jordan, Matussem and his two daughters struggle to secure their position in racist America, trying to cope with their cultural heritage in the new environment. Their existence spans the two cultures, two opposing identities, and the linguistic dualism. It is a hyphenated existence, which explains their disposition towards improvisation (just like in jazz), to finally combine their Arab past and the American present into a completely new identity– the Arab American. Matussem’s short visit to Jordan towards the end of the novel only strengthens his desire to return to America. In the United Kingdom, Sammar–the protagonist of Leila Aboulela’s novel, The Translator (1999)–is a Sudanese woman who uses her knowledge of both Arabic and English to work as a translator from / into Arabic at a university in Aberdeen, Scotland. Alone in the cold, grey Scottish city, she longs for the warmth of her Sudanese home, and feels isolated and marginalised. Her sudden friendship with Rae, professor of Islamic culture and civilization and a specialist in extremist movements, awakens in her the long-forgotten desire to live life at the fullest. However, Samar has to cope with Rae’s agnosticism and hope for his conversion to Islam. Her return to her home country only deepens her feelings and Rae’s final acceptance of–if not conversion to–Islam brings a happy end to this love story. On a different level, The Translator is a deep meditation on love, both human and divine, and the story the protagonist’s determination to stay true to her beliefs, herself, and her newfound love. Leila Aboulela’s novel Minaret (2005) brings a Muslim feminist approach to the condition of the Arab woman in London, facing displacement and intolerance. It is the story of Najwa, the daughter of an upper-class westernized Sudanese family, who unwillingly escapes from

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oppression to London where, completely renouncing her Western manners and appearance (wearing the traditional hijab), she finds solace in the Mosque, where she can enjoy the companionship of other Muslim women. It is her way to end her displacement and to avoid the disintegration into the rich Arab immigrant families in London and the mainstream culture. Wearing the hijab, Najwa experiences a sense of re-discovering her identity, and finds refuge in the faith of her own people.

Conclusion As an epigraph for this article, I have chosen a quotation from Ameen Rihani’s The Book of Khalid, the first novel written in English by a member of the Arab diaspora in the U.S. It is a surprising statement of the Lebanon-born American author, suggesting the duality of the immigrant’s identity, simultaneously belonging to two worlds, his “allegiance to two kingdoms” that deeply marks the literature of the great majority of diasporic writers. The author narrates his own life experience, and his allegiance to the two worlds that entitles him to declare himself “a citizen of the Universe.” Writing about Auerbach Levy’s 1920 etching Levi the Emigrant, Rihani described it by interpreting the expression on the emigrant’s face, reading in it “a past rich with culture, tradition and persecution” (Rihani 1999: 127). The Arab American art critic’s statement is obviously self-referential: he sees himself–and not a German emigrant– in Levy’s etching. It is the contradictory legacy of rich culture and persecution that most emigrants fully understand even more so if they are intellectuals, and Rihani defines it as a mixture of “light and flame extinguished by centuries of brooding silence” (ibidem: 127). It is out of this silence that the literature of the Anglophone (migrant) Arab writer emerges as an intensely human dimension and unexpected perspectives of development and interpretation. Rihani’s words set the framework for a new wave of diaspora writing that extends the boundaries of postcolonial literature.

Sources Aboulela, Leila. 2005. Minaret. London: Bloomsbury. —. 1999. The Translator. Edinburgh: Polygon. Abu-Jaber, Diana. 1993. Arabian Jazz. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. Rihani, Ameen. 2016. The Book of Khalid. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.

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References Ashcroft Bill, Griffiths Gareth, Tiffin Helen. 2002. The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature. Second edition. London: Routledge Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist; translated by Vern W. Hobbs. Texas: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1997. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Boehmer, Elleke. 1995. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature: Migrant Metaphors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carter, Sean. 2005. “The Geopolitics of Diaspora”. Area 37 (1). 54–63. https://www.academia.edu/12948092/The_geopolitics_of_diaspora. (consulted February 15, 2017). De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Chrisman, Laura and Williams, Patrick (eds). 1993. Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory. Hemel Hempstead: Prentice Hall. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20. 328–356. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343914 (consulted January 20, 2017). Fanon, Frantz. 1990. The Wretched of the Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fhlathúin, Máire Ní. 2007. “The British Empire.” The Routledge Companion to Postcolonial Studies edited by John McLeod. New York: Routledge. 21–31. JanMohamed, Abdul R. 1985. “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature.” Critical Inquiry. 12 (1). 59–87. Kaplan, Cora. 1986. Sea Changes: Essays on Culture and Feminism. London: Verso. Memmi, Albert. 1991. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston, MA: Beacon Press Ltd. Mignolo, Walter D. 1994. “Editor’s Introduction.” Poetics Today. 15 (4). 505–521. NgNJgƭ wa Thiong’o. 1998. Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press. —. 1981. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Currey.

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Noyes, John K. 1992. Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa 1884–1915. Chur, Reading: Harwood. Pratt, Mary Louise. 2008. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Rose, Gillian. 1993. Feminism and Geography. London: Polity Press. Said, Edward W. 2000. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Harvard: Harvard University Press. —. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Smith, Andrew. 2004. “Migrancy, Hybridity, and Postcolonial Literary Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies edited by Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 241– 261. Wisker, Gina. 2000. Post-Colonial and African American Women’s Writing. London: Macmillan Press Ltd.

PART II DISCURSIVE PRACTICES

CHAPTER EIGHT THE CONCEPT OF A “LIGHT VERB” DIANA ANI‫܉‬ESCU

1. Introduction This paper is part of an extended research on light verb constructions in English and Romanian that started in 2015 as an MA thesis. We aim at discussing the main properties of “light verbs.” Thus, we address the issue of their categorical status, starting from the distinction between lexical and functional categories. Since light verb constructions (LVCs) are formed by a light verb in combination with a nominalization, there has been general consensus that the two form a complex predicate. We first present Grimshaw and Mester’s (1988) argument sharing theory, Samek-Lodovici’s (2003) semantic theory based on indexation and Karimi’s (2004) syntactic theory on complex predicate formation, the latter resembling the one we proposed ourselves (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015, 2016). Our analysis will provide arguments that LVCs are formed via restructuring, in the sense that the internal argument of the nominalized verb receives case in the functional domain of the light verb. The outline of the article is as follows: Section 2 deals with the main properties of light verbs, concentrating on the problem that their categorial status raises. Section 3 focuses on complex predicate formation and on the theta structure of a light verb construction. Additionally, in Section 3 we offer a syntactic account on the formation of light verb constructions based on the crosslinguistic phenomenon of restructuring. The last section includes the conclusions of the paper.

2. “Light verbs”–properties The term light verb was first used by Jespersen (1956) for English expressions such as “have a rest, give a shout” (Butt & Geuder 2001). One

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property of both English and Romanian light verbs is that they take nominal complements that are related to verbs, both morphologically and semantically, i.e. VP nominalizations, and together they form light verb constructions (LVCs), as can be seen from the following examples: (1)

James did a painting. James has taken a walk. James made a promise this morning. (Sarmadzic 2008). Cei doi au făcut cumpărături pentru Crăciun. “The two did some shopping for Christmas.”

These verbs are claimed to not have any descriptive content, but only formal and functional content (Wierzbicka 1982; Catell 1984). In other words, it is claimed that they do not have meaning, but they do carry inflection. Indeed the meaning of the entire LVC is given by the second, nominalised verb, as can be seen in example (1), while the light verb is the one which carries inflection. However, as we have previously argued on many occasions (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015, 2016) it is not the case that light verbs are completely devoid of meaning. This can be easily shown if we observe the following examples: (2)

Make a joke–joke // take a joke–the joke is on your expense Make a promise- promise // *take a promise A face lecturi–a lectura // a avea lecturi–to have read a lot “to read”

In the examples above we can see that the light verbs are not interchangeable. One may say make a promise, but not take a promise and one may say both make a joke or take a joke, but the meaning of the phrase changes. The same happens in the case of the Romanian language, the choice between the two light verbs a face (make / do) and a avea (have) has consequences on the whole interpretation of the construction. This shows that light verbs are not completely devoid of meaning and they contribute features of their own. Another interesting aspect of this issue is that they also contribute aspectual features. For instance, we have shown that the English verb have and its Romanian counterpart avea behave differently in LVCs. When they are lexical verbs, they are both stative and express possession (3a), but as light verbs avea remains stative, while have may be both stative and dynamic.

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(3)

a. Tom are o ma‫܈‬ină. Tom have 3rd P a car. “Tom has a car.” John has a house. b. Tom *are / face o plimbare. Tom *have 3rd per / make 3rd per. a walk. “Tom has / takes a walk.” Tom is having a shower. (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015: 6).

This is the reason why in (3b) avea cannot combine with plimbare, since it requires a dynamic verb, and so it selects face, while have may also receive the progressive aspect in English, an aspect which is not compatible with state verbs. In addition, Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 291) noticed the fact that the aspect of an LVC may differ from that of its lexical counterpart. Thus, they explain that there is a difference between He screamed and He gave a scream in that the second one can be seen as a bounded event, one with an end point, while the lexical verb can be seen as a potential continuous or intermittent action. A second property of light verbs is that they combine with result nominalizations. The nominalizations which are compatible with the light verbs exhibit the properties of Grimshaw’s (1990) result nominalizations. Grimshaw (1990) makes a distinction between deverbal nominals that designate (complex) events (4a) and the ones that designate results of processes (4b). (4)

a. The examination / exam was on the table. Æ result nominal b. The examination / *exam of the patients took a long time. Æ event nominal

All nominalizations come from verbs and may or may not have an event variable, but only event nominals have argument structure and aspectual event structure, i.e. only this type of nominals requires arguments and theta-marks them. An event nominalization must case mark the IA, since it is the case licensing of the IA which triggers the event reading, aspectual components, etc. On the other hand, result nominals lack an argument structure; they do not have obligatory arguments, or aspectual properties (Baciu 2004: 98).

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Event nominals realize their internal argument inside the nominalization, while the result ones need not, the zero suffix being the most widespread in English, which does not realize an internal argument. (5)

take a walk *of the dog.

The nominalizations which appear in a LVC are result nominals, since one of the characteristics of event nominals is that they cannot be modified by the indefinite article. (6)

a. They inspected the project site last week. b. They made an inspection last week.

Furthermore, when it comes to Romanian event-result doublets, only the result ones are grammatical in a LVC (7): (7)

A face cumpărături. “do shopping” *A face o cumpărare. A face o declara‫܊‬ie / *declarare “make a statement” A avea o percep‫܊‬ie / *percepere “have a perception”

2.1. Light verbs–lexical or functional categories? An initial hypothesis has been that light verbs represent an intermediate category, as they resemble auxiliaries from the point of view of their impoverished content and lexical verbs regarding their syntax (Karimi Doostan 2004; Butt 2010). In what follows we will discuss both the properties they share with auxiliaries and those they share with lexical verbs and we will state our own hypothesis. 2.1.1. Functional verb properties Light verbs have been argued to bear a resemblance to auxiliaries because they have an impoverished descriptive content, and theta-role assignment has been attributed to the lower nominalised verb, as will be discussed in the next section and because the selectional restrictions are also provided only by the nominalization (see Cattell 1984).

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a. Jennifer dashed across the road. b. Jennifer made a dash across the road. (Examples taken from Cattell 1984: 1).

Cattell (1984: 1) explains that in the examples above the selection of subjects for the b) example is governed by the same constraints as for the a) example. The same reasons apply for the subjects of the following two examples provided by the author, making them ungrammatical. Both examples are ungrammatical, even though the first one includes a lexical verb and the second one the correspondent light verb construction. Therefore, Cattell (1984) concludes that the selection of the subject is made by the nominalised verb and is independent of the light verb. (9)

*a. The stone dashed across the road. *b. The stone made a dash across the road. (examples taken from Cattell 1984: 2)

The absence of selectional restrictions is another property typical of auxiliary verbs. On the other hand, as we have already discussed, light verbs are not completely devoid of content and they do imply some selectional restrictions, as in the case of avea / have. Furthermore, they do provide argument positions for the nominalised verb, which is an internal argument and which is theta-marked by the light verb as Theme. 2.1.2. Main verb properties Since light verbs have been argued to resemble auxiliaries from the point of view of their impoverished content and their inability to assign theta roles, let us see some differences between the two. First of all, auxiliaries spell out functional features such as aspect, voice, mood, while light verbs spell out the lexical categorical feature [+V]. Secondly, as discussed in our earlier articles, the contrast between auxiliaries and light verbs can be seen when discussing NICE properties, i.e. negation, inversion, coda, emphasis. With respect to NICE properties, light verbs behave as lexical verbs, and not as auxiliaries. For example, they always need DO support, while auxiliaries do not (10). (10)

a. takes a walk. Take a piece of cake. b. He didn’t take a walk. He didn’t take a piece of cake. c. *He tookn’t a walk. *He tookn’t a piece of cake. (examples taken from Elenbaas 2011: 5).

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However, the most significant main verb property of light verbs is their syntax. They project both a functional domain and a complete lexical VP, thus providing argument positions for the nominalised verb and (possibly) its arguments (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015). Butt and Geuder (2001) propose that, in Urdu, where LVCs are V+V mostly, complex predicates consist of a main, full verb and a lexically defective verb, i.e. the light verb. According to them, these lexically defective verbs are not completely devoid of meaning and they contribute to the meaning of the LVC. The authors show that light verbs act like lexical categories in many cases, and not like auxiliaries, having a regular syntax. Moreover, the authors argue that “the relation between the light verb use of a verbal item and its use as a full verb is identified as a case of lexical polysemy’’ (Butt and Geuder 2001: 326). Our proposal is that light verbs are, in fact, a subcategory of lexical verbs because they have the same syntax as their “non-light’’ counterparts. This view has also been argued by Bruening (2015) who provides several other arguments supporting their status as a subcategory of obligatory control verbs. Thus, in the examples provided by the author (11), (12), the subject of the verb decide, which is a verb that enforces obligatory control, controls the subject of the non-finite clause and this is precisely what happens with the arguments of give which control the logical arguments of kick, since kick is the complement of the verb give. (11) Did you decide [to portray yourself/ *oneself /*herself as a victim]? (12)

She gave him a kick in the teeth. (kicker = she, kickee = him) (examples taken from Bruening 2015: 8).

To show contrast, the author (2015: 8) discusses an example with be a good idea (13), which does not enforce control. He goes on to explain that, in this case, the subject of the non-finite clause is contextually determined and this is also what happens with the noun kick in other contexts (14). (13)

I believe it would be a mistake [to portray yourself / oneself / herself as a victim].

(14)

I think a kick in the teeth is warranted. (kicker and kickee determined by context).

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As a preliminary conclusion, we consider light verbs to be a subcategory of lexical verbs and not functional categories and we may talk about true light verbs only in well-defined contexts, as will be discussed in the last section of this paper.

3. Light verb constructions and complex predicate formation 3.1. LVCs and theta structure Light verbs take as complements VP nominalizations and they are both argument–taking words. Therefore, a new problem arises: How are the two theta-structures combined? An important study which aims at providing a solution is Cattell’s (1984), who analyses LVCs as implying complex predicate formation, with the light verb only providing a syntactic skeleton, while the nominalization assigns the theta-roles and is responsible for selectional restrictions. Since then, complex predicate formation has been reanalysed in many different studies and we will try to present some of these analyses. Grimshaw & Mester (1988) propose a plausible hypothesis, that of Argument Sharing: the two verbs share the subject, while internal arguments (other than the nominalizations themselves) are supplied by the lower nominalised verb. For Samek-Lodovici (2003), complex predicate formation is an operation that integrates two theta grids (a form of clause union). He proposes that complex predicates are formed by means of two operations which manipulate a-variables (which encode argumenthood) and thematic indices (the LCS link responsible for the interpretation of arguments). Within his analysis, LVs lose their original thematic indices (the ones they had as lexical verbs), via index-erasure (2), but receive the indices in the argument structure of the nominalization via index-transfer (3). (1)

Dare una lavata alle camicie To give a washing to the shirts “To wash the shirts”

(2)

Light verb formation via index erasure. Before index erasure: After index erasure: dare (ui(vj(wk))) ĺ dare light (u(v(w)))

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Thematic transfer via index transfer Before: dare light (u(v(w))) + lavata (zev(i(yk))) After: dare light (ui(vk(wev))) + lavata (zev(i(yk))) (SamekLodovici 2003: 838).

The author explains that the result of these two operations is having two argument structures, “one for the light verb and one for the nominalization, but the arguments of the light verb refer to the same LCS variables of the arguments of the nominalization, determining the overall meaning” (Samek-Lodovici 2003: 838). There is yet another problem to be taken into consideration: whether the Subject / External argument comes from the light verb or the nominalised verb. As we have already seen, many authors consider all arguments to come from the deverbal noun and the external argument makes no exception. For example, Davidson, examining complex predicates in Hindi and Urdu, observes the fact that, even though “the case of the external argument is determined by V”, thus receiving the nominative, ergative or dative, “the subject has the role of experiencer, following the meaning of N, rather than agent associated with the subject of V” (Davidson 2004: 5). Therefore, the subject of the complex predicate is case-marked by the verb and theta-marked by the noun, as in the following example provided by the author: (4)

maiN-nee / *mujhee -[[un-kii yaad] kii] “I remembered/recalled them” I-erg / *dat 3pl-gen-fs memory-fs do-pf-fs

(Davidson 2004: 3).

On the other hand, Grimshaw’s (1990) view is that nominalization implies suppressing the external argument of the original verb which may only be a modifier: a genitive phrase or a by-phrase, both of them optional. This view may be supported by our analysis on a face LVCs in Romanian (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015: 39) where we have not found subjects which necessarily come from the nominalized verb and we could not prove that the theta roles are not assigned by the verb a face. The subject is always agentive, and nominalizations of state verbs select the LV a avea. If the subject came from the nominalized verb, it would have a different theta role, namely that of Experiencer in the examples below. However, as we have discussed, such examples are in fact infelicitous.

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*Ion face o dorinĠă–a dori “Ion makes a wish–to wish” *Maria face ură–a urî “Maria hates”

This is only a tentative answer to this problem, as more research is needed in order to provide a clear-cut solution.

3.2. LVCs and restructuring 3.2.1. Hypothesis Our main hypothesis is that light verb constructions represent a form of clause union, a form of restructuring. This amounts to claiming that the LVCs are bi-clausal and light verbs are lexical, having a complete functional domain. 3.2.2. Our previous analysis Our 2015 research included in the MA dissertation focused on a face/ make, do LVCs in Romanian. Within the analysis we had some difficulties in clearly separating full lexical uses of a face / make, do from light verb uses. However, he found one situation where the difference between the full and the light verb is clear-cut: when an argument of the nominalization is assigned case by a functional head of the light verb (6). (6)

Ion a făcut romanului o prezentare elogioasă. “Ion did an eulogistic presentation of the novel.” Cizmarul a făcut o lipitură pantofilor. “The shoemaker glued up the shoes.” (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015: 34).

The Romanian verb a face has a transitive core construction, but it also has the possibility of adding a non-core Dative argument, in ditransitive configurations, as can be seen in the examples above, where the third arguments prezentare and respectively lipitură are added to the argument structure of the verb a face. The Dative case on this non-core argument (Pylkkanen 2002) is valued by a functional head, called Applicative head in the domain of the LV (see Ani‫܊‬escu 2015) and it receives its theta-role, that of Theme, inside the nominalization.

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3.2.3. Restructuring Restructuring implies turning a biclausal structure into a monoclausal one, thus creating a complex predicate (see Rizzi 1976). Wurmbrand (2006: 2) defines restructuring by stating that restructuring constructions result in “a single mono-clausal domain as diagnosed by a range of phenomena that are typically clause bound (such as certain movement operations, case assignment, or scope)”. Some examples of restructuring phenomena include: (7)

Licensing of the internal argument of a nominalized clause Ministerul a făcut o inspecĠie spitalelor din oraú. “The Ministry did an inspection of the hospitals from the town.” (Ani‫܊‬escu 2015: 35).

(8)

Clitic climbing Lo vengo [a prendere t domani] “(I)it come to fetch tomorrow.” (Cinque 2002: 1).

(9)

Subject raising There can be a party as long as it’s not too loud (Wurmbrand 2003: 188). There has to be a reason.

(10)

Subject–Object raising I had him wash the floor.

Following the literature, we propose that the examples under (6) and (7) represent a form of restructuring. Since restructuring may be diagnosed by case assignment, which is considered to be clause bound and since it implies the use of a functional category (in our analysis an Applicative head) to assign case to an argument of the second clause, we believe that it may explain the formation of LVCs. Our examples contain two DPs which apparently realize the theta role Theme: the nominalization which is a theme assigned by the verb a face and the Dative theme, the IO, which is clearly assigned by the deverbal noun; this has been disallowed by Theta theory ever since Fillmore (1969). To solve this problem, we propose that the internal argument of the nominalized verb receives its theta role from the deverbal noun, but it is case-marked in the functional domain of the light verb, via restructuring. Samek-Lodovici’s (2003) semantic analysis mentioned above represents again a form of clause union which implies the indexation of the LV a-

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positions by the theta roles of the nominalized verb. From a syntactic point of view, Karimi Doostan (2004) within his analysis of Kurdish, Korean and Persian Light Verb Constructions consisting of a semantically light verb (LV) and a verbal noun (VN), an intermediate category between nouns and verbs, proposes that the subject of the verbal noun is caselicensed by a functional head in the domain of the light verb, through raising. This analysis is similar to ours and represents a case of restructuring.

Conclusion After reviewing the main properties of light verbs–they are a subclass of lexical verbs because they have a complete functional domain and are not completely devoid of meaning, they combine with result nominalizations and form complex predicates–we may draw the preliminary conclusion that LVCs are formed via restructuring. In our opinion, LVCs represent a form of restructuring, of clause union, as shown by the assignment of Dative case by a functional head of the light verb to an argument of the lower clause, i.e. nominalization. Our further research will concentrate on finding a solution to the problem of the subject and also on finding other types of constructions both in Romanian and English that are formed through restructuring.

References Ani‫܊‬escu, Diana. 2015. MA Dissertation: Light Verb Constructions in English and Romanian (unpublished). —. 2016. “On Romanian Light Verb Constructions Headed by a face.” Convergent Discourses. Exploring the contexts of communication. Language and Discourse. 4 (4). 519–530. Baciu, Ileana. 2004. English Morphology: Word Formation. A Generative Perspective. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii Bucure‫܈‬ti. Bruening, Benjamin. 2015. Light Verbs are Just Regular Verbs. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/PLC/plc39/abstracts/talks/Bruening PLC39.pdf (consulted 5 December 2016). Butt, Miriam. 2010. The Light Verb Jungle: Still Hacking away. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Butt, Miriam and Wilhelm Geuder. 2001. “On the (Semi)lexical Status of Light Verbs”. Semilexical Categories: On the content of function words and the function of content words edited by Norbert Corver and Henk van Riemsdijk. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 323–370.

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Cattell, Ray. 1984. Composite Predicates in English. Sydney: Academic Press Australia. Cinque, Guglielmo. 2002. Restructuring and Functional Heads. New York: Oxford University Press. Davidson, Alice. 2004. Argument Licensing and Interface Conditions: The Motivation for Complex Predicates In Hindi / Urdu. https://clas.uiowa.edu/sites/clas.uiowa.edu.linguistics/files/ complpred.pdf (consulted 10 September 2016). Elenbaas, Marion. 2011. The Diachrony of English Light Verb. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/Events/DIGS13/elenbaas.pdf (consulted 5 December 2016). Grimshaw, Jane. 1990. Argument Structure. Cambridge: MIT Press. Grimshaw, Jane and Armin Mester. 1988. Light Verbs and ș- Marking. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karimi-Doostan, Gholamhossein. 2004. “Light Verbs and Structural Case.” Lingua 187 (115). 1–20. Pylkkännen, Liina. 2002. Introducing Arguments. Doctoral Dissertation. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Samardzic, Tanja. 2008. Light Verbs and the Lexical Category Bias of Their Complements. http://www.unige.ch/lettres/linguistique/samardzic/dea2.pdf (consulted 5 December 2016). Samek-Lodovici, Vieri. 2003. “The Internal Structure of Arguments and Its Role in Complex Predicate Formation.” Natural Language & Linguistic Theory. 137 (4). 835–881. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1982. “Why can you ‘Have a Drink’ When you can’t ‘*Have an Eat’?” Language. 58 (4). 753–799. Wurmbrand, Susi. 2006. “How Complex are Complex Predicates?” Syntax 19 (10). 243–288. —. 2003. Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

CHAPTER NINE FROM MODERNITY TO MODERNITIES: COMPARATIVE METHODOLOGY IN THE STUDY OF MODERNITY ANDREEA BARBU

1. Introduction Modernity is not only a widely discussed subject in specific literature, but one that still generates academic debates which combine retrospective and prospective views. In this paper I will focus on the comparative methodology regarding the conceptual transition from modernity to “modernities” that authors such as S.N. Eisenstadt (1996; 2003), Volker H. Schmidt (2006; 2014), Gaonkar (2001) and Liang Shuming (1921) have used in their works, and I will analyse the potential and the limitations in each case. These debates about the use of the term in singular or plural form regard the nature of the modern contemporary world and the trajectories of the modern project. The recent theoretical framework has rebounded with the emergence of new terms such as liquid modernity (Bauman 2000), global modernity (Schmidt 2014), varieties of modernity (Schimidt 2006), multiple modernities (Eisenstadt 2003), alternative modernities (Gaonkar 2001). Are these terms only nuances of the same concept or distinct ones? Since modernity had a long path in the European space and is nowadays present in different cultural spaces, comparison is needed for a better understanding. Furthermore, all developments call out for a farreaching analysis of the classical visions of modernity and modernization, and recent approaches insist that different features of non-Western cultures should be seen as the indication for the multiplication of modernity. In this paper I will approach modernity from the perspective of Cultural Studies and I will focus on the recent points of view regarding the conceptual transition from “modernity” to “modernities” and also on the

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comparative methodology used for it. Through this analysis I will try to provide an answer to the following questions: What makes various phenomena from different cultural contexts be assigned to modernity? Do differences make us talk of “modernities,” or on the contrary, the similarities are so important that we can only discuss about varieties of modernity? How does the comparative methodology direct the meaning of modernity? In the present article, modernity is viewed as a cluster of features that, since the seventeenth century or even the sixteenth century (early-modernity 16th–17th centuries), produced a tremendous cultural shift in the ways of seeing or relating to the world as compared to the medieval ones.

2. European modernity Modernity has different meanings and implies diverse phenomena, but the most commonly accepted ones are: rationalism, scientific knowledge, capitalism, new concepts and practices in the political field (nation-state, democratic representation, constitutional system and liberalism), individualism, industrialization, secularization. Even if they expanded in different cultural spaces at different rates, the fact that these phenomena were initially developed in the European space gave a Eurocentric meaning to modernity. One of the important adepts of this perspective is the philosopher Jürgen Habermas who considers that the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution were essential to modernity and through colonialism modernization was exported around the world. Modernity is intrinsically linked to Western rationalism and he makes a distinction between modernity, which is essentially a Western creation, and modernization which tends to be global (Habermas 2000: 20–21). The term modern is one of the legacies of the late Latin and has a temporal connotation, which means “recent,” “right now” (Patapievici 2008: 138). From the very beginning if we look at the etymology of the term modernity, there is a temporal reference which is relevant since it captures the orientation towards progress and novelty, which were some of the essential characteristics of modernity. This meaning is also retained in other cultural areas such as Japan and China: in Japanese, “modernity” was translated as kindai-sei䘁ԓᙗand 1

The word ㏆௦ ᛶ (kindaisei) is formed from 3 kanji: the first one ㏆ (chikai) means “near” or “early,” the second ௦ (kawaru, or dai) means “change,” “period” or “era”; for the Modern period the term ⌧௦ (gendai) is used, the first kanji ⌧ (pronunced dai in this construction) means “present,” “current.”

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in Chinese as xiandaixing 䍘ẋ⿏In these cases, differing conceptions of what is “modern” start much earlier, when terms long available in both languages acquired new connotations, as the region felt the impact of the West. The classical Chinese jin ௒(“close, nearby”) provided the root for the Japanese kinsei ㏆ୡ, or “recent epoch,” popularized in the sense of “modern period” by translations of European works in the Meiji period. It was soon replaced by kindai to remove the Buddhist implications of sei ୡ. These then returned to China as loanwords and gave way to xiandai in the early 1920s, indicating not “recent” but “present age” (Jansen 2000: 333–339). These shifts meant learning from both the Western Enlightenment perspectives and the material advances, and struggling for equal position with the West in national, cultural, and intellectual terms. This implied an inevitable element of borrowing or imitation, bringing with it anxieties of collective identity (De Bary and Bloom 2008: 283). S.N. Eisenstadt, one of the most important promoters of the theory of a multiplied modernity, uses Chinese and Japanese societies as relevant examples for it. As mentioned above, modern science is one of the key elements in the birth of European modernity and later also provided an entrance to other cultural spaces, as the scientific knowledge generated technical development which created breakthroughs based on optimism and confidence in human reason. The new scientific methods led to a change of mental frames in Europe, which meant that “God was excluded” from the realm of objective knowledge. Postulating the autonomy of the physical world, which until then had been God’s creation, is one of the greatest changes brought by modernity in the European space (Taylor 2007: 221–260). This kind of autonomy was central for the cultural program of modernity and entailed a conception regarding the future, which was characterized by a number of possibilities realizable through the actions of human agency (Eisenstadt 2003: 46). Scientific knowledge and rationalism have contributed to secularization or “disenchantment of the world,” a concept which Max Weber took over from Schiller to describe the secular and bureaucratic character of Western society, where scientific knowledge is more valued than traditional beliefs (Jenkins 2000: 15). Capitalism and the new “nation-state” concept are other essential attributes of modernity which will spread beyond the Western world starting in the 19th century. There are also other elements http://jisho.org/search/modern. 1 For Chinese we have 䎗௦ (xiàndài) which means “present,” “recent.” http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page=worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb= modern.

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being exported: the rule of law, the legally protected private sphere, the market economy (Schimidt 2006: 79).

3. Modernity vs “modernities” Another approach is the one that considers that once modernity stepped out of its territory, through interaction with other cultural and historical contexts, we can no longer use the singular term, but the plural one, modernities (Eisenstadt 2003). This perspective starts from the idea that in each society there is an effort of adjustment to the acculturation known under the name of modernization which took the concrete form of a process of change and adaptation. The modernization theory identifies some points of convergence between different modern societies: capitalism, the diffusion of secular terms, transformations in politics (growing participation of the population, the expansion of the nation-state and liberal democracy), individualism, rationalism, education (the spread of mass education), science (systematic knowledge production), mass media and the formation of a public opinion (Schmidt 2014: 207). Thus, the perspective gradually diversified and attention was shifted to a model of diversity, which in turn led to “alternative modernities” or the kindred term “multiple.” Multiple modernities can also be regarded as an incisive critique against the assumption that modernity is an exclusively Western project. This statement reflects dissatisfaction with a universal approach to modernity biased towards Western experience which is influenced by the vast colonial projects of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

3.1. Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s comparative modernities S.N. Eisenstadt is one of the most influential promoters of the theory of “multiple modernities,” and he analysed different processes of modernization across the globe in order to study the evolution of modernity. The notion of “multiple” operates to explain how societies have responded to what most Western scholars consider to be the universal claims of Modernity. His work was conducted in the framework of a comparative study of civilizations, and modernity is placed in a macro-historical perspective. His approach is a multi-dimensional theoretical description of a structural evolution of modern institutions and agencies. The concept of “multiple modernities” does not assume that

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Chapter Nine ‘Global modernity’ is derived from the West as a single pattern and does not describe a plurality of societal structures. Therefore, modernization is neither a way towards universal evolution, nor is it based on it (Eisenstadt 2006: 537).

In this case, comparison is a method of research through which Western modernity and other modern societies are explicitly contrasted to each other in order to explore parallels and differences. In the work mentioned, Eisenstadt analyses how a consciousness of discontinuity between different historical times was developed in these civilizations and in Japan (a non-Axial civilization1) since modernity is understood to be a turning point. Modernity is defined in cultural terms and its history is “a continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs” (ibidem: 535). Moreover, modernity is perceived first and foremost as “a new crystallization and developments of a mode or modes of interpretation of the world” (ibidem: 496) that, “by radicalizing the reflexivity which first crystallized in the axial age, question(s) the givenness of social and political orders, thus raising awareness of their malleability and undermining traditional forms of legitimation” (Schmidt 2011: 321). The belief that society could be actively formed by human agency and the idea of progress are also other common characteristics of it. Regarding the “common core” of modernity, Eisenstadt (2006: 493– 519) mentions: - the transformation of the concepts and premises of the political order (the openness of the political arena), - the emphasis on the autonomy of man, - a new mode of constructing collective identities, - the incorporation of the periphery’s theme of protest into the center, - an awareness of a great range of transcendental visions and interpretations, - a confrontation between pluralistic and universalizing orientations and the idea of a new order and - the growing autonomy of the political, cultural and societal centres, and the adoption of the nation state.

1

Eisenstadt identifies axial civilizations as major civilizations which have shaped the contours of human history in the last two to three millennia–the monotheistic civilizations, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Hinduism, Confucianism and Buddhism (Eisenstadt 2003: 195).

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Besides these similarities, there are peculiarities and adaptations that generated different modernities in many areas and Japan is a test-case for Eisenstadt’s theory: One of the many paradoxes Japan presents for comparative historical analysis is that this first, and at least until recently only, fully successful non-Western modernization has been that of a non-Axial civilization, a civilization that could not be seen–to use terms employed by, among others, Max Weber–as a great religion or a world religion (Eisenstadt 1996: 428).

Between Western Europe and Japan there is a structural similarity in the “causes” of modernization or industrialization (ibidem: 436). For example the spread of education and the growing marketization of large sectors of the economy had developed in Japan before Western influence and they later contributed to a fast modernization. In Japan, the openness, combined with the tendency “to Japanize,” formed a pattern of changes which allowed extensive transformations within a familiar symbolic context, thus softening the sense of rupture. Despite the Western revolutions which contributed to modernity, the political changes from the Meiji period (1868–1912) are proclaimed as renovation of an older archaic system which in fact never existed (Schmidt 2011: 441). Another example of differentiation is the process of secularization in Japan that began in the second half of the 19th century, but at the same time Japanese nationalism took elements from the Shinto religion which became a state-religion. Modern Japan, he argues, exhibits peculiarities that are not just local variations of the Western model, but distinguish it fundamentally from this model (Eisenstadt 2006: 23). Limitation: S.N. Eisenstadt emphasizes the particularities and discovers convergences and deviations of modern phenomena in order to explain the differences across apparently similar modern societies. His arguments are very general and it is difficult to identify which those variations are, since modernity from its very beginning assumed to be a construction and reconstruction project. This comparative approach gives arguments against the unique pattern of the Western modernity, but the similarities are not discussed at large, nor are the differences. Also, it does not tell us how fundamental these differences are.

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3.2. Alternative “modernities” As Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar notes in his introduction to Alternative modernities, “born in and of the West some centuries ago, modernity is now everywhere” (Gaonkar 2001: 2) and needs to be investigated at this level. In his essay, Gaonkar considers “modernity” in terms of the dialectic of accommodation and resistance which is implied in the phrase “alternative modernities.” It is composed of the endless pluralism of differing cultural experiences. He also makes a distinction between societal modernization and cultural modernity, the latter one being an opposite reaction to the former. Societal modernization implies both cognitive aspects such as scientific knowledge, secular outlook, the doctrine of progress, instrumental rationality, individualistic understanding of the self, the fact-value split, and so on and social transformations like industrialization, bureaucratically administrated states, rule of law, massmedia, urbanization etc. As regards the cultural part, especially from the mid- nineteenth century, it was focused on cultivation and the self (selfexploration and self-realization) (ibidem: 1–2). This approach of the two sides of modernity is not entirely portable in other contexts, and the uniqueness of each kind of modernity is given by the combination of these modern elements. Similar to the notion of “multiple modernities,” this idea holds that modernity always unfolds within specific cultures or civilizations and that different starting points of the transition to modernity lead to different outcomes. In this case, alterity consists most importantly of perceived differences from an imagined model of Western modernity that has been upheld in the past as a universal model. As a difference to the multiple modernities theory, the alternative approach uses Western modernity as a reference point, and thinks “through and against” this model (ibidem: 15), and focuses on what is different in order to contest universalistic assumptions. As the author himself recognizes, the angle from which modernity is questioned changes the perspective on it. So in order to see what is alternative, one has to see which combination of modern phenomena manifested in and how they responded to the local context. Limitation: It is not clear what modernity is an alternative to or what does the plural modernities stand for and how the selection of differences is made. The plural term is prominently used in reference to non-Western societies and it is considered to be a tendency in contemporary culture to over-estimate differences.

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3.3. Varieties of modernity Another perspective on modernity, one which also takes into account the particularities of different modern societies, is the one of “varieties of modernity,” a view proposed by Volker H. Schmidt in his article Multiple modernities or varieties of modernity (2006). In other studies he analysed on a large scale the social changes in East Asia and beyond, and the characteristics of global modernity (Schmidt 2014). His new approach is inspired by the new theory regarding the variety of capitalism: I believe a better alternative to accommodate whichever differences may exist between different modern societies would be a concept of ‘varieties of modernity’ rather than ‘multiple modernities.’ The main source of inspiration for this proposal is the new political economy literature on ‘varieties of capitalism’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001; Streeck and Yamamura, 2001; Yamamura and Streeck, 2003) (Schmidt 2006: 82).

This is a more focused approach than the previous ones and takes into account not only the differences at the inter-civilization level, but also those at a subnational level, for example in India (ibidem: 84). Schmidt goes beyond culture and politics to examine the entire structure of society, and proposes an emphasis on regularities rather than peculiarities, arguing that “not just any differences will do to justify multiple modernities” (Schmidt 2011: 322). In some fields, for example medicine in India, Egypt, Belgium or Italy, the variations of practices or institutional organization do not overcome the scientific truths or methods. He criticizes the theory of multiple modernities because it is just an objection against the classical theory of modernization without clearly defining what modernity is and which exactly the differences are: The trouble with much of the multiple modernities literature is that it does not really tell us a great deal about what precisely these differences consist in, how significant they are and why they might justify speaking of modernity in the plural, rather than in the singular (Schmidt 2006: 80).

Limitation: The theory of varieties of modernity regards the concrete form and functioning of the institutions composing the structure of modernity and it tries to emphasize the convergent points more, rather than the differences. It focuses its theoretical attention on specific modern phenomena such as democracy, science or capitalism, and does not make general assumptions, disregarding the cultural aspects of these subjects.

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3.4. Liang Shuming: Western modernity, China and India Furthermore we have another cultural comparative perspective on the Western world, China and India, which takes the shape of a critique of the Western model of modernity. In The Cultures of East and West and their Philosophy (1921), Liang Shuming makes a plea for a contemporary relevance of Confucianism. Actually he rejects the Western model of modernity and he pronounces himself in favour of using China’s own matrix as an alternative path to modernity. Shuming places moral Confucian metaphysics in opposition to Western rationalism and scientism; in his comparison, he uses the concepts from Yogacara Buddhism regarding the three natures of the Will: 1. To struggle to get what we want and to change the environment in order to satisfy our desires; this nature is associated with Western culture. 2. Not to fulfill our desires, but to harmonize them with the environment; this is the Chinese specific nature. 3. To not solve the problems, nor to leave them unsolved, but to try to get rid of the desires that caused them; this is the Indian case. (Shuming 1921: 62–72). The three cultures are in fact three ways of life, and the Chinese one is more valuable due to jen, often translated as “benevolence,” which goes beyond rationality–the core of Western Modernity. European sciences are considered useful for Chinese culture, but Confucianism is the proper attitude towards life. First is the conquest of nature on the material side of Western culture. This China has none of. Second, there is scientific method on the intellectual side of Western culture. This also China has none of. And third, there is democracy on the social part of Western culture. This too China has none of… (Shuming apud Theodory de Bary 2000: 381).

As Guy Alitto (1974) clearly presented, Liang’s philosophical orientation can be seen as part of a worldwide reaction against secularism, scientific rationality, and the industrial organization of production and the fact that modernity does not have a universal application. Limitation: This is a moral idealist perspective, and the philosophical approach is combined with the religious one. Also, the comparison is general, and based only on one dimension of these cultures.

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Conclusion This transition from the singular to the plural points out that not only otherness and differences can no longer be ignored, but also that there are complex ways in which different societies respond to the universal claims of modernity. Various phenomena, modified by local traditions, are considered to be modern because they reflect a change in the interpretation of the world and the autonomy of human agency and its privileged place in the flow of time, as Eisenstadt remarked (2006: 496). Regarding my second research question about the relevance of the differences that lead to the pluralization of modernity, I will consider it as still open since the ceaseless production of novelty and alternatives continue to define the characteristics of modernity. The comparative methodology has influenced the way we perceive these peculiarities and it changes the way we analyse modernity, revealing the tendencies to overrate or underrate the differences. The option for one perspective or another changes the course of the research and opens up new questions such as: how fundamental are the differences between modern societies? And if we choose the plural variant, how many modernities are there? One answer could be “as many as nation states,” while another option would be to consider the groups of countries around civilizational centres (Schmidt 2011: 322). Western modernity remains a reference point whether it is considered to be the centre of modernity, or whether its centrality is contested. The main point in this perspective is that there are modernities outside Western space, which cannot be fully understood only by using Western lenses.

References Allito, Guy.1974. The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dillemma of Modernity. Berkeley and Los Angles, California: University of California Press. Arjomand, Said Amir. 2010. “Three Generations of Comparative Sociologies.” European Journal of Sociology. 51 (3). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 363–399. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 23998920 (consulted on December 13, 2015). Arnason, Johann P. 2005. “The Axial Conundrum: Between Historical Sociology and the Philosophy of History.” Comparing Modernities, Pluralism versus Homogeneity. Essays in Homage of Shmuel N. Eisenstadt edited by Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg. Leiden and Brill: Brill. 57–81.

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Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers Ltd. De Bary, William Theodore and Irene Bloom. 2008. Sources of East Asian tradition. Bd. 2. The Modern Period. New York: Columbia University Press. 380–384. Eisenstadt, Shmuel, Noah (ed.). 2003. Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. Lieden, Boston: Brill. —. 1996. Japanese Civilization. A Comparative View. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar (ed.). 2001. “On Alternatives Modernities.” Alternative Modernities. Durham & London: Duke University Press. 1–24 Jansen, Marius B., 2000. The Making of Modern Japan. Cambridge, London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Jenkins, Richard. 2012. “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Reenchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium.” Mind and Matter. 10 (2). 149–168. Habermas, Jürgen. 2000. Discursul filosofic al modernităаii: 12 prelegeri. Traducere de Gilbert V. Lepadatu, Ionel Zamfir si Marius Stan. Studiu introductiv de Andrei Marga. Bucure‫܈‬ti: All. Masterman, Margaret. 1965. “The Nature of a Paradigm.” Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge. Vol. 4. Proceedings of the International Colloquim in the Philosophy of Science edited by Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave. London: Cambridge University Press. 62–65. Patapievici Horia-Roman. 2008. Omul recent. Edi‫܊‬ia a V-a. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Humanitas. Schmidt, Volker H. 2006. “Multiple Modernities or Varieties of Modernity?” Sage Journals. Current Sociology. 54 (1). 77–97. —. 2011. “How Unique is East Asian Modernity?” Asian Journal of Social Science. 39 (3). 304–331. —. 2014. Global Modernity. A Conceptual Sketch. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43498790 (consulted on December 18, 2015). Shuming, Liang. 1921. Civilization and Philosophy of the Orient and Occident. Shanghai: The Commercial Press. Shuming, Liang and Guy S. Allito. 2013. Has Man a Future? Dialogues with the Last Confucian. Heidelberg: Springer. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press. 221–260.

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Vi‫܈‬an, Florentina. 2011. “The Chinese Model of Modernity. The Problem of Creative Conservatism.” Traditions in Dialogue. Vol. 3. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura Universită‫܊‬ii din Bucure‫܈‬ti. 11–33. Chinese Dictionary. http://www.mdbg.net/chindict/chindict.php?page= worddict&wdrst=0&wdqb=modern (consulted on January 5, 2016). Jishǀ Dictionary. http://jisho.org/search/modern (consulted on January 5, 2016).

CHAPTER TEN RE-WRITING AND MEMORY: THE ART OF PALIMTEXT ANA-MARIA CORNILĂ NOROCEA

1. “Palimtexts”–redefining a concept The post-war novels contribute to the edification of the cultural memory by the practice of rewriting the reference books belonging to the universal literary heritage. Updating some canonical writers’ texts is part of an anamnesis process, implying the act of recalling previous meanings as well as the act of revealing new significances. To name the product of rewriting / recreating a previous literary text, I have adapted a term used by Michael Davidson–palimtext. In Ghostlier Demarcation: Modern Poetry and Material Word, 1997, Davidson shows that the palimtext illustrates a double quality of modern writing, both intertextual and interdiscursive, and engages the historicized perspective, linked to the persistence of some cultural traces in the texture of the literary work.1 According to the theorist, the meaning of the suggested term does not strictly circumscribe the reference of a text to the previous ones, but it aims to evoke an entire socio-economic, ideological and historical frame embedded within the textual layers. Thus, as Michael Davidson puts it, the term palimtext includes both the traces of the previous writings and the marginal areas of writing (such as paper, ink, advertising, validating systems) that highlight, one way or another, the “body” and spirit of the literary work. The palimtext places high value on 1

“I would like to retain poststructuralism’s emphasis on writing as trace, as inscription of an absence, but emphasize the material fact of that trace, an inscribing and reinscribing that, for lack of a better term, I have called a ‘palimtext.’ By this word I mean to emphasize the intertextual–and interdiscursive–quality of modern writing as well as its materiality. The palimtext is neither genre nor object, but a writing-in-process” (Davidson 1997: 67–68).

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the history of the textual and extratextual factors that have mediated its genesis, validated its existence, and provided access to the literary circuit. The present paper envisages a semantic redimensioning of Davidson’s term, emphasizing the elements that would sustain its usage as an alternative to the term rewriting. As regards the signification that this research puts forward, the term palimtext would designate only the recent text, obtained by recycling and remodelling a previous one, thus being a result of the rewriting process. I have opted to make use of Michael Davidson’s coined term–and to reconfigure its meanings–in order to avoid the polysemy implied by the term rewriting that designates both the act / art of recreating a text and the artistic product of this recreating act. The term palimtext (an inspired hybrid between palimpsest and text) indicates more clearly the textual product derived from a creative process of reinscribing, a product that is aesthetically valorised and represents the final result of the endless practice of rewriting. I have considered that the term coined by Michael Davidson allows the rephrasing of its initial array of meanings, inasmuch as it partially overlaps the meaning of rewriting as strategy of triggering a relation between a matrix text and its artistic avatars. In my own coinage, relying on the palimpsest connotations, Davidson’s term could insist on the idea of a new text, obviously suggesting the coexistence present–past, visible–hidden, the overlapping of what is written on top (the recent discourse) with what is written beneath (the previous discourse). Davidson emphasizes the idea that a palimtext combines textual vestiges and recent responses to these cultural reminiscences: “The palimtext retains vestiges of prior inscription out of which it emerges. Or, more accurately, it is the still-visible record of its response to those earlier writings” (ibidem: 68). Thus, we can argue that literary texts, similar to language itself, establish a dialogue1 across time, revealing their interconnectedness and a fluidity of their boundaries. The present work opens to the past one, and in response, the past work opens its boundaries to the present one. It is not a case of losing aesthetic independence, but it is a way of mutual empowering. The present text ensures new approaches to the previous one and, in return, the previous text provides new insights into the present one. Palimtexts clearly imply the metaphor of textual and temporal symbiosis. Starting from Davidson’s observation, it must be pointed out that the concept of “vestiges” shouldn’t be misconceived as a negative coinage, related either to ruins (obsolete, decayed, fragmentary elements) or to barren places of worship. Literary vestiges are parts of the valuable 1

See Bakhtin (1981; 1984) for the dialogical word, “polyphony” and heteroglossia.

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cultural heritage encapsulated and redefined in present texts, without disintegrating the unity and values of the matrix text. The palimtext works like the human memory–a palimpsest in itself–as this kind of writing selectively stores the literary experiences of the past; the text thus obtained by rewriting a previous literary work contains the so-called mnesic layers (textual “vestiges”), whose investigation leads to the retrieval of the initial text, and consequently, to the consolidation of the cultural memory. Nevertheless, the innovative elements added during the process of rewriting are also of great importance as they ought to make the new text as memorable as the prior one. The palimtext is the result of a rewriting process applied to the literary works. In order to distinguish between the act of rewriting and its product, thus avoiding the semantic overlapping between rewriting as a creative process and rewriting as an aesthetic product, I have considered that the term palimtext can be used as a synonym to rewriting as an aesthetic product. Thus, the term designates the work that encodes the fascination of translating a matrix text, a dual task of closeness to and remoteness from the re-written literary model. Yet, this meaning attached to the term palimtext feeds on the theories built around rewriting–cultural phenomenon that has manifested itself under different forms since Antiquity till today, starting with the pedagogical habit of copying to the original habit of reinventing.

2. Rewriting–a theoretical framework Christian Moraru dedicates an extensive analysis to the concept of “rewriting,” illustrating his theories with examples from the American literature in a book entitled Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning, 2001. The reception of rewritings generates a “déjà-lu” experience, the “already-read” being the catalyst for the act of comprehending a text that revisits, recycles and revises a previous text. Going back to the literary tradition becomes a cultural trend, a practice spread within the post-war literary field.1 Moraru tackles the memory– creativity relation evinced in rewritings, suggesting that turning to memory does not fill the void of imagination, but it is the sign of cultural rebirth through reinterpretation: “Rewriting is, to my mind, hardly the cultural

1

“One can easily notice the all-pervasiveness of rewriting in fiction by Toni Morrison, Michel Butor, Leonardo Sciasia, Christa Wolf and J.M. Coetzee among countless others in various languages” (Moraru 2001: XI).

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symptom of a ‘dead end’ […]”and obviously it is not the case in which “prodigious memory makes up for the ailments of creativity” (ibidem: 8). Rewriting does not stand for lack of inspiration and plagiarism, but for a new vision, a new language, for a renewed identity of both the author and reader, and perhaps it could stand for playgiarism, in Ray Federman’s terms (1993: 51)–a play between repetition and originality. Rewriting is a literary species strongly cultivated in the post-war literature: a recent text beneath which the reader can discover / recover a previous literary work. I will hold that rewritings / palimtexts bring to attention the idea that literature is a mnemonic art. Moreover, this literary genre reconfigures the reader and author, both as empirical entities and theoretical constructions, underlining the highly important role played by the contemporary reader who becomes a wreader–a reader-writer whose original imagination is stimulated by seminal mastertexts (or by the “déjà-lu”). Defining rewriting, Douwe Fokkema (2000: 139) notices that any attempt to write presupposes turning to models. We can argue that the model assimilated by the creative consciousness can dissolve almost imperceptibly into the abyss of the text or it can keep its traces visible, surfaced, becoming the core around which the author, intentionally and explicitly, writes the new text. Developing his theory, Douwe Fokkema distinguishes rewriting from mimesis, according to the focused referent: the mimesis focuses on the extratextual world, whereas rewriting focuses on the textual tradition. Also, Fokkema differentiates between rewriting and intertextuality, as long as intertextuality involves the plurality of the textual relations and rewriting relies upon a single text. Thus, rewriting is defined as a technique concentrated on a certain pre-text or hypotext: The emphasis in intertextuality is on that which is between texts (how many?); it diverts from the text, whereas rewriting activates the notion of text […]. I would argue that rewriting is a technique which focuses on a particular pre-text or hypotext and thus confirms the notion of text as structured and having a clear beginning and end (ibidem: 140–141).

Fokkema also emphasizes the significant role that the subject assumes within rewriting as opposed to intertext, in which the subject is effaced. Starting from this observation, we can draw on the idea that the subject, in his double quality of author and reader, reclaims his privileges and takes on responsibilities. Rewriting places value on two hypostases of the reflexive-creative subject: the resuscitated figure of the author (after his proclaimed disappearance) and the emancipated figure of the reader (endowed with the incontestable right of interpreting): “the notion of rewriting includes an ego, hic and nunc” (ibidem: 143). Fokkema concludes

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that humanity is at the cultural age when rewriting becomes the writer’s natural (and still original) gesture.1 Rewriting transgresses the limits of simple repetition inasmuch as the creative act is recontextualized, being in tune with the historical realities and cultural practices. It is to be mentioned that Fokkema’s last remark shows that rewriting is a natural gesture, although it does not represent the ultimate and unique way of expressing the new in literature. The poetics of reiteration does not rule out original invention; it is not a symptom of cultural exhaustion or idleness but, on the contrary, it demands the innovative contributions. A more recent study on rewriting belongs to the young Romanian researcher IonuĠ Miloi, the author of Cealaltă poveste. O poetică a rescrierii în literatura română contemporană (The Other Story. A Poetics of Rewriting in Contemporary Romanian Literature).2 Just like Christian Moraru, whom he quotes, IonuĠ Miloi emphasizes the importance of rewriting in the literary field: “Outdoing the minor values with which the derivative practices are often associated, rewriting […] comes to have a central position in the present literary field” (Miloi 2015: 26). Rewritings do not belong to a minor register, although they derive from exemplary literary works whose value may not be entirely achieved. The stake of rewriting does not ultimately mean winning a competition against the past, but it is rather the recognition, the updating and the interpretation of the past values in the present. On the other hand, the recent text asserts its own identity fed on the model’s substance, but differentiated from it, reclaiming itself a place in the literary field. Moreover, Miloi analyses the relation between rewriting and memory: “the derivational texts turn into actual black boxes, places that preserve the memory of the transformations that the cultural, political or social codes have recorded” (ibidem: 140). Rewritings are depositories of cultural remembrance; henceforth, reading the derivative texts is the equivalent to the process of cultural anamnesis, of retrieving the past, which is twisted by the present’s perspective. The relation between rewriting and memory is also approached in Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney’s Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory: Introduction; the authors identify a triple status of literature: (1) as medium of cultural remembrance, (2) as object of remembrance and (3) as observation medium for cultural memory production. The first two hypostases of literature support the approach of the present article, according to which rewritings activate cultural memory: 1

“Yet, rewriting is always more than repetition, since our conditions differ from those of our predecessors. At this late hour of our cultural history, rewriting is the normal way of writing” (ibidem: 145). 2 Our English translation of Romanian titles and excerpts.

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A significant part of literary production consists of the rewriting of canonical texts and, more generally, of earlier cultural narratives such as folk tales and myths [...] contribute in a very specific manner to the ongoing production and reproduction of cultural memory, as well as to our reflection on that memory” (Erll and Rigney 2006: 113).

As medium of cultural remembrance, literature becomes a space for reflection on the literary past, such a space being offered in a more obvious way by rewritings or palimtexts. As object of cultural remembrance, literature becomes the central referent of a work, a situation which is also illustrated in rewritings / palimtexts. The palimtexts call into play the resemblance vs difference, likeness vs otherness binomials inasmuch as they preserve elements (traces) of the rewritten works. At the same time, they differ from their sources of inspiration, creating another author, another work, alternatives more or less remote from the identity of the originals. This type of novel that developed almost programmatically in the post-war period offers a new image for the concepts of “author” and “reader,” speculating on the relation between life and literature, work and interpreter, the images (vestiges) of the past and the imagination / innovations of the present.

3. Palimtexts and re-reading The palimpsestic writing depicts the image of the reader from the perspective of its interpretative and creative function. Wolfgang Iser shows that the author and the reader have in common their conditions as creators, as participants in a “fantasy game” (Iser 2006: 245). The author and the reader are imaginative beings, collaborators to the building of fictional worlds. The readers, converted into authors of palimtexts, have expanded these creative attributes, inherent to the reader’s condition, and have materialized their readings into new works. Matei Călinescu (2007) emphasizes the creative influence of reading, showing that a “seminal” text triggers a creative reaction in the reader’s consciousness, which explains the use of re-reading as a strategy of stimulating the original writing. The great writers’ works function as seminal discourses which generate new literary texts. The status of the interpreter-reader that has become a co-author is also underlined by the Romanian scholar Eugen Negrici: “Imagining different strategies so that he can enhance the possibilities of meaning, the innovative reader is, knowingly or unknowingly, a co-author” (Negrici 2014: 23). The author who rewrites a text is a creative reader that sets himself free from his status of co-participant to the elaboration of the text,

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asserting himself eventually as the single author with the right to sign the cover of his book. Therefore, rewriting calls into play the concept of “reader,” an instance with multiple valences: interpreter, critic, creator / author. This literary species is characterized by intentio lectoris and inventio lectoris; the reader applies his intentions and inventions to the text, metamorphosing it, estranging it from itself or rediscovering a new self, a textual alter ego. The privileged status of the interpreter-reader–sometimes changed into a re-writer–is defined by Liviu Papadima in the particular context of literary communication: the reader “is allowed, even invited, required and stimulated to actively participate in communication, to build his own ‘reading,’ his own ‘realization’ of the text” (Papadima 1999: 190). Palimtexts are personalized “realizations” of some matrix-texts, “realizations” born of the reader’s freedom of rewriting what he / she reads. The reader’s privilege is favoured by the nature of the discourse that brings together what Liviu Papadima calls “the categories of the whole and the categories of the emptiness or void” (ibidem: 191), that is what is clearly said / shown by the text and what is kept silent, unrevealed. The authors of palimtexts assume the condition of readers “specialized” in revealing the subtextual / transtextual meanings, in weaving some connections or in completing the gaps, elaborating their work on the edge (or by virtue of) these categories “of the whole and of the void” fixed in the matrix-texts. Bernhard Schlink–the author of a palimtext called Homecoming–reads and rewrites Homer’s Odyssey, multiplying, updating and amplifying known sequences of the classical epic; starting from the same Odyssey, Margaret Atwood atones in Penelopiada for the gap left in the Homeric text by the voice of Penelope, faithful wife who has been kept waiting for a long time. The Iliad knows, in its turn, a number of updated variants: Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles, narrating the history of the war between the Achaeans and the Trojans from Patroclus’ perspective, and respectively Cassandra by Christa Woolf, evoking the same history from the perspective of the Prophetess whose warnings have been ignored. Other rewritings which need in-depth reading to reveal the allusive connections, disguised or twisted, with a mastertext are, for instance, Cassandra’s Brand by Cinghiz Aitmatov, and Nutshell by Ian McEwan (a recent retelling of Hamlet from the unexpected perspective of a fetus). The palimtexts are the result of creative readings converted into acts of writing; they illustrate the beneficial effect of reading, the reactions of some readers (subsequently turned into authors) when meeting–through the literary text–representative writers of the universal heritage. The palimtexts render the reader’s status more complex inasmuch as they

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highlight the role of stimulus acquired by reading the reference texts of the universal literature: in love with a fundamental text (a mastertext), the reader turns into an author. This kind of novel subsumes under the task of extracting values from the cultural archive, of updating some writers and writings, proving that reading and writing can become tools of integrating the past values into the aesthetic circuit of the present.

4. The art of the palimtext and the cultural memory Numerous post-war novels contribute to an inevitable, necessary process of activating the cultural memory, in the conditions in which they propose an aesthetic experience of re-reading and rewriting some representative works included in the universal literary canon. These fictional discourses based on classicized cultural referent fall into what might be called a mnemonic paradigm,1 summing up the discourses that preserve, recall and disseminate cultural tradition. Referring to the pre-existing cultural data in the collective consciousness, the palimtexts are thus endowed, besides their aesthetic function, with a cultural anamnesis function: they update and make the literary past visible in the present. Consequently, the reading experience deals with two textual layers–on the one hand, the recent text (the palimtext), and on the other hand, the matrix-text of a canonized work. In a study dedicated to Shakespeare’s topicality, published in România literară, Pia Brînzeu analyses the phenomenon of updating / recalling the past: “The primordial philosophical gesture of humanity is to play with their own spectres and gain a new perspective on the world, using spectrelike avatars” (Brînzeu 2016: 30). The spectre-past rephrases the meanings of the present, just like the present itself gives other meanings to the past. The past-present relationship requires a creative approach in order to preserve the past values and to enhance the present ones. Pia Brînzeu’s remarks rely on the theories put forward by Jacques Derrida in Spectres of Marx regarding the spectral dimension of literature.2

1 Recontextualizing a paraphrase used in the study Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature (Erll and Nünning 2008: 301). 2 “That all literature is inhabited by spectres is also Derrida’s statement in Spectres of Marx (1993): hauntology is linked to ontology through a historical disjunction where the present is replaced with a deceased and live, seen and unseen spectre. Hauntology opposes the romantic nostalgia of the past and guides things towards a future seen from a different perspective, most of the times polemical” (ibidem).

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Palimtexts bear within the spectre of an author and of a literary work that prove their viability and reclaim their visibility in the present literary field, implicitly in the consciousness of the present audience. Hauntology, past insinuating into the present, turns into an ontological constant, the present exorcizing its fears of the past spectre. Thus, tradition is metabolized and re-embodied in the epic formula of palimtexts. These kinds of novels in which the spirit of the cultural past materializes do not have a nostalgic mood, they are not the fruit of a sick melancholic reverie but they illustrate the recreating, polemical and energetic intervention of the present upon the past. Palimtexts feed on a series of afterimages, a term used by Pia Brînzeu in her study, meaning phantasms left after an important writer has disappeared and the next generations do not want, under any circumstances, to part with him [...]. Phantasms enchant the readers, cast a spell on them and through unexpected forces they turn them into writers, that is ‘wreaders.’ The process follows the stages of a precise itinerary: reading, revealing, penetrating, comprehending, loving and rewriting (ibidem).

The posthumous images persist in the individual consciousness of the reader in love with a literary work and they materialize in texts dedicated to that beloved literary work. These afterimage–residual images or postimages–stimulate the creative impulse of the reader turned into wreaders, a hybrid between a reader and a writer. The proper act of creation (of rewriting) is naturally preceded by reading, revelation, comprehension, passion, all settled in the composition of palimtexts. In Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature, Renate Lachmann observes the literature’s dimension of ars memoriae and tackles the memory–interpretation interdependence. According to the author, literature seems to be the “mnemonic art par excellence” inasmuch as writing is also an act of recalling, “an act of memory and a new interpretation,” as long as writers gloss on the edges, virtualities of other texts, “ancient and recent, belonging to their own or another culture and refer to them in various ways” (Lachman 2008: 301), transgressing borders of ages and cultural spaces. The researcher identifies new facets of memory, related to those of imagination. Lachman’s study establishes a series of similarities between fantasy (basis of literature) and memory (basis of history) to support literature’s dimension–the result of fantasy–as ars memoriae. Both fantasy and memory propose the image of an absent object, a true as well as false image: “They both represent absent objects with images. For both the image is ambiguous, both true and false” (ibidem: 303). The paradox of

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memory as the absence-presence functions in the case of palimtexts where absence-presence is the rewritten literary work. Also, palimtexts engage the true and false play determined by memory and imagination. In Schlink’s novel, Homecoming, the first truths of the Odyssey are rephrased, transposed to the present, disguised, redimensioned, to a certain degree “falsified”; the meanings of Homer’s world are completed, reformed by the meanings of the contemporaneous world. In his research dedicated to the author-reader relation in Romanian literature between 1830 and 1860, Liviu Papadima enlarges upon the Memory–Imagination binomial with regard to literature: The regressive step is definitely constitutive for any kind of fictional discourse, inasmuch as any imaginative act has to circumscribe a certain reference field of the reader in order to become comprehensive. Moreover, the regressive moment is inevitably complemented through a transgressive movement inasmuch as we stay within fiction space or at least in its proximity (Papadima 1999: 83).

The quoted excerpt delineates the relation between memory and imagination in literature, two forces that collaborate to generate the text by calling into play regression (whose vector is memory) and transgression (whose vector is imagination). Thus, memory and imagination are mutually involved in making / comprehending the fictional discourse. They update in different degrees, prevailing either the regressive / mnemonic factor or the transgressive / imaginative one. Palimtexts are founded on this regression–transgression, memory–imagination play. Contributing to the cultural memory edification, palimtexts are pleadings for going back to the classicists, a eulogy to the literary past and materializations of some creative readings: transgressing the letter of the initial text, they generate new memorable worlds.

Conclusion Palimtexts are artistic products of the rewriting process, depositaries of the cultural memory and evidence of the way in which the reader’s intentions can be converted into auctorial artistic inventions. Of the numerous palimtexts published during the post-war period we can mention novels such as: Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s When I Was a Work of Art, (rephrasing of The Picture of Dorian Gray), Carlo Frabetti’s The Hell Book (ludic reinvention of Dante’s Inferno), Stelian ğurlea’s Relatare despre Harap Alb (Account of Harap-Alb–the matrix-text of which is a well-known Romanian fairy tale–, Bernhard Schlink’s novel Homecoming

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(update of the Odyssey), Michel Tournier’s Friday, or, the Other Island) and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe (reinterpretations of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Christa Woolf’s Cassandra (reinterpretations of the Illiad) or Vesna Goldsworthy’s Gorsky (contemporary retelling of Great Gatsby). Thus, the post-war palimtexts prove that the old fascinating stories can turn into new captivating narratives, throughout an auctorial and reading play between memory and interpretation.

References Bakhtin, M.M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. —. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited by and translated by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Brînzeu, Pia. 2016. “Pornind de la Shakespeare.” România literară. 18–19 / 29 April. Calinescu, Matei.1993. Rereading. First Edition. New Heaven: Yale University Press. Davidson, Michael. 1997. Ghostlier Demarcation: Modern Poetry and Material Word. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Erll, Astrid and Ann Rigney. 2006. “Literature and the Production of Cultural Memory: Introduction.” European Journal of English Studies. 10 (2). http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/pdf/geschiedenis/EJES%20Intro% 20final.pdf (consulted 18 March, 2017). Federman, Ray. 1993. Critifiction: Postmodern Essays. Albany: State University of New-York Press. Fokkema, Douwe. 2000. “The Concept of Rewriting.” Cercetarea literară azi. Studii dedicate profesorului Paul Cornea edited by Liviu Papadima and Mircea Vasilescu. Iaúi: Polirom. Iser, Wolfgang. 2006. Actul lecturii. O teorie a efetului estetic. Translation from German, notes and foreword by Romani‫܊‬a Constantinescu. Pite‫܈‬ti: Paralela 45. Lachman, Renate. 2008. “Mnemonic and Intertextual Aspects of Literature.” Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook edited by Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Walter de Gruyter GmbH&Co http://michaeljgoodnightcom/Memes%20Books/ Netzach-Hod/Media-and-Cultural-Memory.pdf (consulted 22 February 2016).

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Miloi, Ionu. 2015. Cealaltă poveste. O poetică a rescrierii în literatura română contemporană. Cluj-Napoca: Casa Căr‫܊‬ii de ‫܇‬tiin‫܊‬ă. Moraru, Christian. 2001. Rewriting: Postmodern Narrative and Cultural Critique in the Age of Cloning. Albany: State University of New York Press. Negrici, Eugen. 2014. Emanciparea privirii. Despre binefacerile infidelităĠii. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Cartea Românească. Papadima, Liviu. 1999. Literatură úi comunicare. RelaĠia autor-cititor în proza paúoptistă úi postpaúoptistă. Ia‫܈‬i: Polirom.

CHAPTER ELEVEN METAPHORS IN MODERN POETRY: A COGNITIVE APPROACH MĂDĂLINA DEACONU

1. Modern poetry: A very brief theoretical insight Poetry is the working of mind and soul; both intellect and feeling must be used to discover its nature. Poetry fascinates and intimidates, it attracts and rejects. There was a classical time when the poetic art was focused on lexical selection, rhyme and the rules of prosody. Metaphor was considered to be a common poetic instrument, similar to the others. Throughout time, the word has become increasingly important and a more and more refined art of word generated a real cult of metaphor. Clarity and direct expression are left behind for the sake of suggestion and imprecision, for the sake of an allusive, vague poetry tending to suggest, not to express, tending to substitute the explicit for something which is blurred, implicit, and hermetic.1 Modern poetic language becomes autonomous, self-supporting, selfreflected (Jakobson 1963). Modern poets consider (symbolic) metaphor an essential poetic instrument, the most important off all–the very essence of poetry. The larger the distance between the terms of the metaphor, the most striking the effect generated by it, the context playing an essential part. Hugo Friedrich stated the “reflexive dramatism” of modern poetry: conflicting themes and motifs rather than coordinated ones, as well as “a

1

Our translation from Romanian: “The new language, naked and essential, freed from any oratorical and rhetorical ornament […] is characterized by linguistic concentration and ambiguity”; “the complete elimination of the initial referent of the word and the construction of an ambiguous referent” (Ro‫܈‬u-Stoican 2006: 28; 26).

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restless stylistic movement which puts an immense distance between the sign and the signifier” (Friedrich 1969: 25). The present article aims at giving a brief insight into modern poetry from a cognitive point of view. After a short theoretical presentation of main characteristics of modern poetry and a similar short introduction into the main methods–both traditional and modern–of analysing poetry, we proceed by excerpting relevant examples from Romanian modern poets. Focus is laid on metaphoric mapping and discourse world theory.

2. Modern and traditional methods of analysing poetry Along time, there have been many paths to be followed in order to analyse and interpret literary works. Basically, they were divided into traditional paths and modern ones. Soon, traditional, referring mainly to methods prior to the XX-th century and considered extrinsic, became rather pejorative, whereas modern, beginning with the Russian formalism and structural poetics, considered intrinsic, tended to be widely accepted. However, an idea is to be underlined: no matter what the approach of the literary work is, this approach is continuously changing; the elements that are considered literary valuable, the signs of true poeticity, are continuously re-ranking. Literary research is complex, one being able to notice contradictory trends: on the one hand, the stress laid on a certain direction of analysis, and, on the other hand, integrative trends, aiming at associating perspectives and methods, at combining approaches (the semiotic trend, for example). For those agreeing with the fact that the value of the artist consists in creating a new and original form of expression, a new aesthetical view, the idea that metaphor is rooted in a conceptual system can be bewildering. Since the emergence of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, stating the fact that metaphor is not only a stylistic figure but that thought itself has a metaphorical nature,1 literary research has undergone significant changes. A new approach, cognitive poetics, aims at relating the structures of the work of art to the psychological effects on the receiver. From this perspective, literature / poetry is perceived as a form of cognition and communication. From the cognitive point of view, which also resorts to the Mental Space Theory (Fauconnier 1994), the process of metaphor is perceived as a mapping of properties between the base space and the focus space, a “conceptual blending.” The focus space is structured or restructured using concepts from the base / source domain. The process of 1

See Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Lakoff 1993.

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vehicle-construction is complicated in the case of modern poetry, requiring greater creativity on the part of the reader. The stylistic figure seriously disturbs the logic of the discourse. In fact, there is only an apparent textual incoherence, the meaning is hidden below several layers of figures of speech, waiting to be dismantled.

3. Romanian modern poetry from cognitive perspective We begin the illustration of the metaphoric process in Romanian modern poetry by picking an example from Dragostea e pseudonimul morĠii (Love is the Pseudonym of Death), one of Ion Caraion’s volumes of poems written in 1980, the last one before his exile. The volume seems to be “a stylistic sign of decomposition: words run one from the other, break the topic, do not join, as a killed wall, the empty space.” (Zisu 2009: 301). The poem to which the below lines belong is called Desprimăvărare cu frig: (1) “Sky had been filled with waters. People from the after world. God, it does no longer fit in– Sky is like pond grass” (Caraion 1980: 158)1. In this example, we can identify the following elements: a. Sky–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain. b. pond grass–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground2–obscurity, darkness, jumble. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–a strange poetic universe in which one can find biblical symbols whose meaning is changed: water, flood, snake, sun, man. Water no longer means life but death. The flood contains dead people. It is a gloomy universe suffused with sadness in which “waters is cross / And the road is coffin.” It means that individual destiny is a cross that has to be carried no matter if the end is death: “God […] your creation 1

The original verses: “Cerul se umpluse de ape. / Lume de pe lumea cealaltă. / Doamne, nu mai încape– / Ceru-i ca iarba de baltă”. Our translation from Romanian for the qouted verses. 2 Containing “common general nodes and relationships across the spaces” (Stockwell 2007: 97).

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cries.” Sacrifice is necessary: “God, it is going to be late / And dark. And bold”; “If it is going on raining, it will not end well.” It is an universe in which the poet himself can’t find a place: “I don’t have a world, a shore / Neither have tents.” Cognitive linguistics refers to the process of metaphor as a mapping of properties between the two spaces or domains. It is a visible metaphor, as both the source and the target are present. The above example can also be seen from the point of view of the discourse world theory, which considers the cognitive tracking of entities, relations and processes to be a mental space. In order to understand and represent reality, Caraion builds a mental space which contains mental representations of everything that can be perceived in real space (also called base space). Caraion’s poem is a blended space that combines the other spaces and which has specific features emerging from the mapping. The stages that can be referred to are: cross-space mapping, generic space and blend. In the base space (real space), there are basic level categories and objects. It is a familiar representation of life, with familiar entities and familiar structure. Thus, sky is full of rain clouds. There are too many clouds and they seem not to have room enough up there. So, everything is gloomy. The generic space contains the commonalities of the two spaces, namely common general nodes and relationships across the spaces. In our example, mention should be made of “sky” and “grass.” In the projected hypothetical space, Caraion creates a world that seems to be like the Idealised Conceptual Model but, however, it is an entirely different world– a counterpart of the base space. Lucian Blaga theorized and made great use of the symbolic metaphor which he named metafora revelatorie (revelatory metaphor). He approached the problem of metaphor both in his poetics and philosophy, mainly in Geneza metaforei (The Genesis of Metaphor), 1935. According to Blaga, the real poetic language must be an initiation language. In Trilogia culturii (The Trilogy of Culture), he assesses the fact that metaphor can’t be regarded only as the research object of stylistics. It can’t be reduced to one of the reasons by means of which poetic style is created, as it has a style of its own which differs from one epoch to another. Metaphors steam from collective unconsciousness, being a matrix of culture. According to Blaga, trying to reveal the hidden mystery is equivalent to turning a “revelatory metaphor” into a suggestive one– metafora plasticizantă (plasticizing metaphor), thus destroying the mystery. Or, the poet has to contribute to increasing it. Dislocating a

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metaphor in order to analyse it destroys the meaning of the entire poem, which has to remain intact. The inner meaning of the poem depends on the whole, undivided body of the poem. Here are some examples: (2) “All creatures, as runes, forgotten for ages, Carry with them a signature” (Blaga, Runes, 2012: 179).1 In the above example, we can identify the following elements: a. creatures–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain. b. runes–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–mysterious nature; carrying a mystery. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–Blaga creates a world with deep hidden meanings; everything has a deep essence which is concealed. (3) “Brother, a defeated disease seems to be any book” (Blaga, Ending, 2012: 162).2 In the above example, we can identify the following elements: a. book–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain. b. defeated disease–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–both the act of writing a book (of creating something, in general) and a disease have in common pain, suffering. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–a book is a creation. In fact, it is the utmost creation. In order to write a book, one needs to surpass one’s humble condition of a mortal being. Thus, disease can be understood as a metaphor of the mortal condition of any human being. (4) “It is the disease night of the world [...] Everything is waiting” (Blaga, The Colt, 2012: 238).1

1

“În chip de rune, de veacuri uitate / poart-o semnătură, făpturile toate” (Blaga, Rune, 2012: 179). 2 “Frate, o boală învinsă ‫܊‬i se pare orice carte” (Blaga, Încheiere, 2012: 162).

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In the above example, we can identify the following elements: a. night–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain. b. disease–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–black, darkness, hidden, concealed nature. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–Blaga creates a world with deep hidden meanings; everything has an essence which is concealed but waiting to understand its true nature and to manifest itself accordingly. Tudor Arghezi, a brilliant modernist poet, created amazing symbolic metaphors, which “compress very long enunciations up to the level of axioms” (Micu 1985: 32). Arghezi shocked the readers by creating an original poetics of code transgression (in the volume Cuvinte potrivite, 1927) similar to Baudelaire by his “baroque, oxymoronic poetics” (Parpală 1984).2 The lines written in prison, in the dark, “with the left hand,” with the devilish hand, are “inscriptions” which use the negative categories of modernism in a fascinating manner. (5) “When my angelic nail worn down I left it then to grow And it did grow no more– Or I did not know it again” (Arghezi, Flowers of Mustiness, 1980: 118).3 The reader can identify the following elements: a. inspiration–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain; it is absent in the text but it can be inferred. b. angelic nail–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–sharpness; sudden, unexpected character.

1

“Este noaptea de boală a lumii [...] Totul este în a‫܈‬teptare” (Blaga, Mânzul, 2012: 238). 2 Formulated in ars poetica poems: Testament (Will), 1927, and Flori de mucigai (Flowers of Mustiness), 1931. 3 “Când mi s-a tocit unghia îngerească / Am lăsat-o să crească / ‫܇‬i nu a mai crescut–/ Sau nu o mai am cunoscut” (Arghezi, Flori de mucegai, 1980: 118).

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d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–a poetic universe in which the poet operates the conversion of aesthetic categories, turning the ugliness into aesthetic. In meager conditions–incarcerated–in order to alleviate pain, a man can still write lines. However, they do not heal, they do not even solve basic needs: “These verses are without age / verses from the grave, / Verses of thirst for water / And hunger after cinders.” The loneliness is absolute, there is no connection with the transcendence: “With the powers helped / Not by the bull nor by the lion nor by the vultures / Who used to work around / Like, Mark and John”1 (Arghezi 1979: 65). The third type of Tudor Arghezi’s poetics refers to the “minor transcoding”, which focuses on the model of the world in miniature. The volume MărаiЮoare (March Necklaces) imitates the “crafty model of the world”2; the poem Nu am… (I have not…) symmetrically builds the macro- and the microcosm: (6) “I forgot to gather and to keep A bowl of heavenly silver. The moon had laid it down on my tool bench And I might have made jewels in plenty…” (Arghezi, I have not…, 1980: 198).3 The following elements can be identified: a. inspiration–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain; it is absent in the text but it can be inferred. b. heavenly silver–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–preciousness, something very valuable. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–a poetic universe in which the poet recognizes the absolute power of divine inspiration in the absence of which true poetry cannot exist. Unlike 1

“Cu puterile neajutate/ Nici de taurul, nici de leul, nici de vulturul / care au lucrat împrejurul / Lui Luca, lui Marcu ‫܈‬i lui Ioan”. (Arghezi, Flori de mucegai, 1980: 97). 2 See the chapter “Performative enunciation” in Parpală (1984: 70–92). 3 “Am uitat / Să culeg ‫܈‬i să opresc / O strachină din argintul ceresc. / Mi-l a‫܈‬ternuse luna pe masa cu scule / ‫܇‬i puteam să fac giuvaere destule...” (Arghezi, Nu am…, 1980: 198).

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the poetic universe in the above mentioned example, in this case the poet himself is guilty for not being able to recognize it and keep it. He is guilty for not having remembered the essence of all things: the Divine, in the absence of which nothing can be created, nothing lasts, nothing cures people. Ion Barbu represents poetic hermeticism. Out of the three stages of his poetics (Vianu 1970) only the third one (1924–1929) can be considered a hermetic one. The poet refuses to write poems for “lazy” readers. Barbu’s readers have to work hard in order to decipher the hidden meaning of his poems, nothing being taken for granted. Barbu attempted to create “truly essential lines” (Barbu 1928). Joc secund (Secondary Game), 1930, is an essential volume for the Romanian hermeticism: (7) “Let not trickle, fall The alive spirit within it, Let it rise up to white unleavened loaves of bread” (Barbu, Being / Body, 2000: 45).1 The reader can identify the following elements: a. The Absolute / God–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain; it is absent in the text but it can be inferred. b. white unleavened loaves of bread–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–purity; nourishing and comforting, initiation. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–a poetic universe in which the non-created, the Absolute, is to be found in a baby, too. The unleavened loaves of bread point to the religious ritual of eucharisty. Here is another example: (8) “Cut, heavy, stove light” (Barbu, Dioptry. 2000: 41).2 The following elements can be identified:

1

“Să nu se prelingă, să nu pice / Viu spiritul, robit în ea, / La azimi albe să-l ridice” (Barbu, Statură, 2000: 29). 2 “Lumina tunsă, grea de sobă” (Barbu, Dioptrie, 2000: 41).

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a. decayed nature of human being–target, vehicle, focus space. It is in attribute relation with the base domain; it is absent in the text but it can be inferred. b. Cut, heavy, stove light–source, tenor, base space. c. Common features / generic space / ground–imperfection, decayed light. d. The blended space (the new emergent understanding)–a poetic universe in which the search for Absolute prevails; the very title of the poem points to it: Dioptry. There is an antinomy between the light of the sun, often seen as the symbol of the Absolute in Barbu’s poems, and the light present in most human beings. The stove is man-made and, therefore, imperfect.

Conclusion As it could be seen, the present article aimed at giving a brief insight into modern poetry from a cognitive point of view. After a short theoretical presentation of the main characteristics of modern poetry and a similar short introduction into the main methods of studying poetry (both traditional and modern), some examples taken from modern poems were analysed, focus being laid on metaphoric mapping and discourse world theory. All examples showed, without doubt, the innovation of the poetic language that modernism has brought, the difficulty of its interpretation as well as its absolute novelty. Ion Caraion provided metaphors in which the association of the metaphoric terms loses almost completely its motivation. Lucian Blaga created, as he himself theorized, two types of metaphors: revelatory and plasticizing. The revelatory metaphors, revealing an essential mystery, are mainly used. The poet focuses on the signified, on knowledge (Scarlat 1986: 280); poetry and philosophy intertwine to create a unique poetry, suffused with celestial sensibility. Tudor Arghezi, poeta faber, has introduced in Romanian literature the aesthetic of ugliness (his debut volume, Flowers of Mustiness). Thrilling, bewildering metaphors masterly dose triviality with suavity, the crude expression with the refined poetic language. Ion Barbu uses metaphors scattered in a hermetic poetic language. The semantic distance between the elements of the metaphor is completely blurred, the context becoming very important for the process of understanding.

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Cognitive metaphors enable us to process the phenomena of encoding / decoding poetry; therefore, the cognitivist paradigm can be successfully used for a better understanding of modern poetic language.

Sources Arghezi, Tudor. 1979. Selected Poems. Princeton: Panopticum Press. —. 1980. Versuri. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Cartea Românească. Blaga, Lucian. 2012. Opera poetică. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Humanitas. —. 1994. Geneza metaforei úi sensul culturii. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Humanitas. —. 2011. Trilogia culturii. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Humanitas. Barbu, Ion. 2000. Opere. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Academy Publishing House. Caraion, Ion. 1980. Dragostea e pseudonimul morаii. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Cartea Românească.

References Barbu, Ion. 1928. “Poezia lene‫܈‬ă”. Viaаa românească. 77 (3). 22–23. Fauconnier, Gilles. 1994. Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language. New York: Cambridge University Press. Friedrich, Hugo. 1974. The Structure of Modern Poetry: From the Midnineteenth to the Mid-twentieth century. Northwestern University Press. Jakobson, Roman. 1963. Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Minuit. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason. A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 1993. “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor.” Metaphor and Thought edited by A. Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 202–251. Micu, Dumitru. 1985. Modernismul românesc. Vol. II. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Minerva. Parpală, Emilia. 1984. Poetica lui Tudor Arghezi. Modele semiotice úi tipuri de text. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Minerva. Ro‫܈‬u-Stoican, Oana. 2006. Tehnici de ermetizare a limbajului poetic românesc din secolul XX. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Editura UniversităĠii din Bucureúti. Scarlat, Mircea. 1986. Istoria poeziei româneЮti. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Minerva. Stockwell, Peter. 2007. Cognitive Poetics. An Introduction. London, New York: Routledge.

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Vianu, Tudor. 1970. Ion Brabu. Bucure‫܈‬ti: Minerva. Zisu, Aurelian. Ion Caraion. Sfârúitul continuu. I. Poezia. Craiova: Aius Print.

CHAPTER TWELVE EXTERNAL ATTRIBUTE AS ILLUSTRATED BY MEDIEVAL CLOTHING IN ENGLAND AND FRANCE IULIA DRIMALA

1. Introduction English and French medieval social rank terms such as king, churl (Engl.), roi, huissier, vavassour (Fr.) represent a particular category, the lexical structure of which is different from that of other categories of terms (natural categories, artefacts), due to the specificity of the classes of objects they denote. Their properties will be revealed through a diachronic analysis, by applying a set of criterial features which Dahlgren (1985) proposed for their identification and description. These features refer to physical appearance, social function, social relations, internal attributes and cultural stereotypes and are found in the conceptual nature of the studied terms, opposing them to other categories of terms. According to Lehrer (1974), this type of description illustrates the constitutive nature and the systematic character of these words. In this paper, these terms will be analysed according to the external / appearance attribute. This attribute refers to the way in which people would dress in the medieval period as well as to their accessories, which were symbols of wealth and status. It will also be shown that the words we study exhibit a systematic character because they come in systems of terms denoting social roles in the medieval period. We start from the hypothesis that the properties of social categories are reflected by the characteristics of the institutional framework in which they exist. Therefore, we expect the terms to have a different set of features according to which they are categorized, as compared to natural categories (“lion”) or artefacts (“chair”). This may also predict more complex

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information in their cognitive representation and a distinct lexical structure from that of other categories of terms. The corpus of our research comprises those terms which, in our opinion, describe best the high and lower social rank status in the medieval French and England, as social terms encapsulate a layman’s theory of social relations: baron, duke, knight, king, squire, peasant, churl (Engl.), roi, duc, prince, brigand, vassal (Fr.) etc. These words will be approached in a sociolinguistic perspective (Dahlgren 1985, Hughes 1988, 2000), which means that they are studied according to the way in which they adapted to the various social, historical and political changes which have occurred. The diachronic study of terms against the social background of the medieval period is mainly based on the theory of Hughes (1988) who claims that words do not enter the vocabulary in an isolated manner, but grouped in conceptual fields which reflect social and historical realities. New concepts appear out of the need to name (new) things or people. Hughes’ theory is reflected in the rise and development of the feudal vocabulary which is motivated by changes in the constitutive laws that regulated the English society in the tenth century and before. These laws changed following an outstanding historical event, the Norman Conquest (1066). Not only were these consequences reflected in the social life, but they also affected the English vocabulary, either gradually or abruptly. New terms emerged in order to denote the newly formed social categories, with their roles within the medieval institutions (duke, count, baron, prince etc). Social terms are also described according to the cognitivist view on frame, categorization and prototype (Rosch 1978; Lakoff 1987; Taylor 1989). These features are attributes with specific values which give the prototype structure of social rank terms.

2. The “appearance attribute” as illustrated by medieval clothing in England and France Studying and comparing historical books (Gibbs 1953; Trevelyan 1953; Calmette 1942) as well as various electronic resources1, we notice that medieval clothing in both countries is similar, a fact which can be historically explained. When the Normans came from Scandinavia at the end of the tenth century, they adopted the dress of the French. In the following century, 1

http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Fashion.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/English_medieval_clothing, http://www.middle-ages.org.uk

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when they invaded Britain, they started to make changes in the Saxons and Britons’ way of dressing, eliminating the last traces of the Roman fashion in their clothing. The Anglo-Saxons’ (fifth and sixth centuries) main clothing items had been a cloak, a tunic, trousers and leggings, regardless of their social rank. Shoes were made of leather and tied with straps. They used to work bare feet. However, towards the end of the tenth century, they adopted the French way of clothing. Though this one was quite similar to that of the previous centuries, a distinction between social classes started to be noticeable through ornamented garments: tunics, cloaks, jackets, pants and shoes. According to rank, the tunic and the coat were ornamented or not (the peasants’ tunics and coats were rather plain). Length was another symbol of social status. The higher the status, the longer the tunics were. Another garment which also appeared during these centuries was the waistcoat. The upper classes used to wear fur jackets, while the jackets made of linen were destined to the less wealthy people. In the ninth and tenth centuries, the military clothes did not differ much from the civil attire. The only difference consisted of the fact that the tunics had metal collars. The warriors wore swords, spears, shields and helmets. Until the ninth century, the king used to wear, as symbols of royalty, a square crown, some rings which were sewn upon a leather tunic, a long cloak, a shield and a sword. Such long cloaks were going to be worn later by the eleventh century nobility. These cloaks, referred to as mantles, were elegant and beautifully ornamented. The twelfth and the thirteenth centuries brought some changes regarding the way in which people used to dress. All social classes wore shoes or boots which were usually made of cow and ox leather or even cloth. The nobility used to wear shoes made of silk, the bands of which were adorned with decorations and designs, symbol of wealth and high social status. The twelfth century accessories became more sophisticated. Gloves started to be worn for the first time by the nobility, while jewels like gold or silver brooches and rings were a symbol of their wealth. In the fourteenth century, the well-known tunic was replaced by the cote-hardie. This outer garment was low- necked, knee- length and buttoned to waist level, where it “flared into a full skirt which was open in the front”, as C. Cunnington (1969: 57) describes. A belt was worn with this garment. Cloaks and capes continued to be worn as in the previous centuries, while gloves started to be worn even by the working class1. All these changes showed the differences between men’s and women’s garments and accessories, giving indications of the social status of people 1

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who wore them. The clothes, materials and colours specific to each social category were recorded in the Sumptuary Laws of the time.

2.1. Sumptuary Laws, a way of maintaining the social division of classes Medieval clothing, like everything else, was dictated by the Pyramid of Power, the principle according to which the feudal system was organized. Medieval clothes did not only have the role of dressing the people, they also provided information about the social status of the person wearing them. In this respect, there appeared the Sumptuary Laws (1463), also called “acts of apparel”, which served to regulate the clothing choice of people during that time. These laws played a significant role in dividing the classes, as they were used to “ensure that a specific class structure was maintained.” They also emphasized the distinctions between the classes and defined what those were. The Sumptuary Laws gave details about the clothes which were destined to be worn by the people below the king’s status. These details referred to coat length and shoe height. The intention of this legislation was to prevent men from acting as if they were from a higher class by way of how they dressed. According to these laws, a man would have to dress within the status he was born. The acts mentioned what clothes were to be worn and stated how the classes were ranked with kings and nobles at the top and servants at the bottom.1 Thus, while lower classes could not wear clothes made for the upper classes and were restricted in their right to spend money on clothes, the nobility could wear anything that suited them. The wives and daughters of servants were not allowed to wear veils that cost more than twelve cents. The wives of yeomen (freeborn servants raking between an esquire and a page) were not permitted to wear any veil or kerchief made of silk (which were considered expensive veils). Silk, velvet and fur could only be worn by the upper classes and the king / queen.

2.2. An overview of the differences in the attire of the main medieval social classes This description deals with the differences in the ways in which social classes used to dress and it is motivated by the fact that some clothing

1

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items or accessories gave clear indications of the social status of the person wearing them. The peasants’ clothes were basic and practical. The dress of the men belonging to the lowest ranks of society consisted of breeches, tight tunics and capes or cloaks of coarse brown wool. The tunic was tightened with a belt to which there were attached the working tools and a knife. Serfs were even poorer in the way they dressed. They wore a blouse of cloth fastened with a leather belt round the waist, a woollen mantle which was half-way down the legs (very long mantles could be worn only by the upper classes), short woollen trousers and shoes or boots. Most of the time, they went bareheaded, a symbol of their poor social condition. This detail is important, as in the twelfth century, a person’s rank or social position was determined by the headdress.1 The noblemen’s garments were representative of their high social status: the headdress, the coat, the surcoat, the breeches, the stockings, the long cloak, the massive belt and the closed shoes. Their wealth could be seen in the gold, silver jewels and precious stones which were sewn on their clothes as well as in the massive belts of gold. They were usually dressed in blue or green. They also wore velvet caps, a symbol of their richness and high social status. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when luxury was at its height, gold, silver, pearls and other precious stones embellished their clothes. In the fourteenth century, the garments were sumptuous and extravagant: the belts were adorned with ornaments and precious stones, while robes required thousands of ermine furs.2 The noblewomen used to wear long, red or purple dresses made of silk. The colours and the material used for such dresses displayed their richness. In the Middle Ages, only the royal members were allowed to wear red or purple clothes. Their main dress was called a kirtle (a tuniclike garment) over which they wore an overskirt fastened with a belt. The headdress of noblewomen consisted of caps with nets holding their hair in place and they used to wear scarves around their neck. The knights’ garments consisted of underclothes, woollen stockings, armour and surcoat (a robe with a belt around the waist, which was put over the armour). The armour was the clothing item which defined the knights, distinguishing them from other social categories. It consisted of a series of garments, chain mail and iron plate. The armour was destined to protect the knight’s most vulnerable parts of the body. Medieval knight armour was essential in battlefields in the Middle Ages. It protected the 1 2

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knight from various weapons used in battle like swords, bows and arrows, axes, daggers or lances. The knight suit of armour was also a symbol of status. The better the quality of the armour, the more important the knight was considered to be. The knight armour weapons were a dagger and a sword. A shield was carried for defence and recognition purposes and displayed the knights’ heraldic blazon (the coat of arms). The heraldic blazon had different colours (blue, red, black, green and purple) and different symbols depicted on it (lion, eagle, stag or hart, boar or hound, fabulous creatures like dragons, unicorns etc).1 A description of the social classes’ attire would not be complete without an account of the specific clothing and accessories of the kings and queens during the Middle Ages. The royal family’s garments and accessories clearly distinguished them from the upper classes. The symbolic colours of royalty were red and purple, while the sceptre, the crown and the long mantle represented the main symbols of the king’s absolute power. Silk and fur were the main materials used. Some changes in the royal clothing took place during these many centuries. If in the ninth century the king’s garments were rather plain, with a square crown and some rings sewn on his shoulder as the only symbols of his supremacy, some centuries later they became sophisticated and extravagant, showing the highest status and the richness of the royal figure(s). Thus, between the thirteenth–sixteenth centuries, a king would wear clothes with precious stones and jewels sewn on them, pointed shoes, a girdle embellished with gilded ornaments and precious stones, a robe made of ermine furs, a conical hat ornamented with gold chains and various jewels or a broad-brimmed hat covered with feathers. Here is a description of King Louis IX of France’s clothing (1214-1270): At the consecration of Louis IX., in 1226, the nobles wore the cap (mortier) trimmed with fur; […] Louis IX. With his hair short, and wearing a red velvet cap, a tunic, and over this a cloak open at the chest, having long sleeves, which are slit up for the arms to go through; this cloak, or surcoat, is trimmed with ermine in front, and has the appearance of what we should now call a fur shawl. The young King has long hose, and shoes similar in shape to high slippers.”2

A queen’s attire was distinguishable by the fact that she used to wear clothes and shoes made of satin, velvet or ermine. Her silk gowns were 1 2

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long and trailing. Unlike inferior class women, she was allowed to wear expensive veils. The skirts were decorated with complex embroidery. Similar to the king’s clothes, the queen’s clothes were adorned with pearls and gold and silver jewels, symbols of her wealthy life. Fig. 1 resumes the main characteristics of the way in which both high and low social categories would dress in the medieval period. Fig. 1 Medieval social categories and medieval clothing SOCIAL CATEGORY King

CLOTHES

Queen

Coloured and adorned clothes (red, purple especially) made of silk, velvet and ermine (silk shoes, long and trailing gowns, embroidered skirts)

Crown, sceptre, expensive veils, expensive jewels

Nobleman

Coloured clothes (blue, green, red) made of silk, velvet, fur (coat, surcoat, long cloak, breeches, stockings, closed shoes)

Massive belt adorned with precious stones, gold and silver jewels, headdress

Noblewoman

Coloured clothes (blue, green, red) made of silk, velvet, fur (long dresses, kirtle, overskirt), silk shoes

Fine belt, precious stones and jewels, scarves, expensive veils, headdress (caps with nets for fixing the hair)

Knight

Underclothes, armour, surcoat

Dagger, sword, shield

Peasant

Undyed, simple, rough material clothes (breeches, tunic, short cloak of coarse wool, shoes / boots).Simple dresses of coarse material for women

Belt, knife, working tools, cheap veils (women)

Serf

Blouse of cloth, woollen mantle, woollen trousers, shoes / boots.

Leather belt

Coloured clothes (red, purple especially) made of silk, fur, velvet (tunic, long mantle, silk pointed shoes)

ACCESSORIES (symbolizing social status) Crown, sceptre, shield, sword, expensive jewels, hat ornamented with jewels, ornamented girdle

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Conclusion The Middle Ages witnessed some changes in the clothing style especially with regard to the upper classes, as they were more interested in fashion and could afford having expensive, luxurious garments. While lower classes (peasants, serfs) used to wear simple clothes made of rough material (wool, leather),without ornaments on them, the upper classes enjoyed a wealthier lifestyle and could afford having expensive, sophisticated and accessorized clothes. Only the nobility and the royalty dressed in silk, velvet and fur and adorned their garments with precious stones and jewels. The colour of clothes was also a symbol of social status. Red and purple were the colours of royalty, blue and green (and sometimes red) were worn by the noblemen and noblewomen, while the lowest status people were only allowed to wear undyed clothes. The length of the mantles and dresses was another symbol of social position. The longer a mantle was the higher in rank a person was. The peasants’ cloaks were short, unlike those of nobles and kings which were long. The queens and the noblewomen’ dresses were long and trailing. All this accounts for the fact that in the medieval England and France, the fashion system clothing helped distinguish between social categories.

Sources Cambridge International Dictionary of English. 1994. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dubois, J., Mittérand, H., Dauzat, A. 2005. Grand dictionnaire étymologique et historique du français. Paris : Larousse. Greimas, A.J. 1968. Dictionnaire de l’ancien français jusqu’au milieu du XIV e siècle, 1ère éd. Paris: Librairie Larousse. Greimas, A.J., Keane, T.M. 1992. Dictionnaire du Moyen Français. La Renaissance. Paris: Larousse. Hawkins, J. & Allen, R. 1991. Oxford Encyclopaedic English Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McArthur, T. 1991. Lexicon of Contemporary English. Longman. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary. 1995. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rey, A. 2005. Le dictionnaire culturel en langue française. Paris: Le Robert. Simpson, J.A., Weiner, E.S.C. 1989. Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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http://www.medieval-spell.com/Medieval-Fashion.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_medieval_clothing http://www.middle-ages.org.uk http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/medieval-peasant-clothing.htm http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/medieval-lord-clothing.htm http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/knights-armor.htm http://www.middle-ages.org.uk/medieval-kings-clothing.htm

References Barthes, Roland, 1969. Systeme de la mode, Paris, Ed. Seuil. Calmette, Jean. 1942. La Société féodale. Paris: Armand Colin. Cunnington, C. Willet and Phillips Cunnington. 1969. Handbook of English Medieval Costume. Boston: Plays Inc. Dahlgren, Kathleen. 1985. “Social terms and social reality.” Folia Linguistica Historica. Societas Linguistica Europaea. 6 (1). 107–125. —. 1985. “The cognitive structure of social categories.” Cognitive Science. 9 (3). 379–398. Gibbs, Marion. 1953. Feudal Order. New York: Schuman’s College Paperback. Hughes, Geoffrey. 1988. Words in Time. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —. 2000. A History of English Words. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago and London: University .of Chicago Press. Lehrer, Adrienne. 1974. “Semantic fields and lexical structure.” North Holland Linguistic Series edited by S.C. Dick and J.G. Kooij. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company. 469–474. Rosch, Eleanor & Lloyd, B. 1978. Cognition and categorization. Hillsdale: Erlbaum. Taylor, R. John. 1989. Linguistic Categorization, Prototypes in Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Trevelyan, G.M. 1978. English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria. London & New York: Longman.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN SPATIAL SUBJECTIVITY: THE STREETS IN ANDREW DAVIES’S 2001 RE-WRITING OF SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO ELENI PILLA

1. Introduction The concept of “space” has become increasingly central in the Humanities and in English Studies. As Sarah Dustagheer accentuates, [i]n recent years, there has been a new attentiveness to space in the humanities–the so-called spatial turn–prompted by the work of philosophers Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau and Gaston Bachelard (Dustagheer 2013: 570).

According to Denis Cosgrove, the “spatial turn” grew out of “the recognition that position and context are centrally and inescapably implicated in all constructions of knowledge” (Cosgrove 1999: 7). Space is important because “where things happen is critical to knowing why and how they happen” (Warf and Arias 2009: 1). For the purposes of the present study, space is defined as the aggregate encompassing both the physical space and location, i.e. the setting that provides the framework within which characters are interacting and events are happening, and the totality of the events, happenings/ interactions taking place there (Pilla 2006: 51–52).

Benno Werlen’s conception of space as a “frame of reference for actions” (1993: 3) and Michel de Certeau’s notion of “practiced place” (1988: 117) are fundamental to this definition of space. This definition entails that “a space exists because of what is happening inside it and it acquires its meaning from that” (Pilla 2006: 52).

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With the technological resources at their disposal, directors and adaptors of Shakespeare’s plays for the screen have more flexibility than stage directors in treating space in ways which enable them to communicate their unique visions of Shakespeare’s early modern texts. Focusing on Andrew Davies’s 2001 rewriting of Shakespeare’s Othello,1 a police drama depicting the rise and fall of the first black Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, this chapter explores the adaptation’s treatment of space. It should be noted that this chapter is not intended as an exhaustive study of all the spaces in this televisual adaptation. The primary focus is on the space of the Streets, which is a key space of the 2001 Othello. The related space of the Grand Hall, which is penetrated by the Streets, is also analysed. The chapter begins with a brief introduction to the Davies 2001 Othello and proceeds to an exploration of the space of the Streets and the space of the Grand Hall. The analysis is aided by the theories of Gaston Bachelard, Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. After establishing a brief dialogue between the Davies Othello and Shakespeare’s text in terms of the Streets and the themes they evoke, basic conclusions are drawn concerning the use and configuration of space in order to create a new vision of Shakespeare’s play.

2. The Andrew Davies 2001 Othello The 2001 Othello was directed by Geoffrey Sax and adapted for television by Andrew Davies.2 It was broadcast on ITV on 23 December 2001 and updates the setting, bringing it to London some time in the near future. Davies provides modern names for the characters and updates the setting. The adaptor gives the film explicit contemporary and topical relevance by alluding to Stephen Lawrence who was murdered at a bus stop in Feltham in a racist attack in 1993. This adaptation’s depiction of the killing of Billy Coates (Morgan Johnson) in his own flat by police officers emphasizes the intrusion of institutional aggression and corruption into domestic space. The Lawrence murder brought the race debate to the 1

Textual editors indicate that Othello was composed between 1601–1604; the “traditional date” for Othello’s composition is 1603 or 1604 (Honigmann 1997: 1). 2 In this chapter I refer to the 2001 Othello as the Davies Othello because the primary focus is on the new spaces which have been created by the adaptor, Davies. All references are to Othello as broadcast on ITV on 23 December 2001. References to the script of Othello (Davies 2000) are clearly indicated within the text of this chapter. The script was kindly provided by Andrew Davies and contains no pagination.

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forefront of media representation in Britain. The Macpherson Inquiry into the case suggested that the Metropolitan Police was incompetent and racist. The report from this inquiry made the way for a change in the law so that suspects could be brought to retrial after acquittal. In the 2001 TV adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy, John Othello (Eammon Walker) is made Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police after he quells a riot stemming from the attack on the young black Coates. Ben Jago (Christopher Eccleston), Othello’s senior and “excellent friend,” plots to avenge him. Jago had also arranged for Commissioner Sinclair Carver (Bill Paterson) to be removed from his position by secretly exposing his racism. Othello’s fall is inextricably linked to his sexual jealousy. Overwhelmed by sexual jealousy after Jago intimates that his wife, Dessie (Keely Hawes), is being unfaithful with their colleague, Michael Cass (Richard Coyle), he attacks Cass, kills Dessie and then takes his own life. Cass had been sent to their flat to protect Dessie because she had been subjected to a racist attack. This assault was instigated by Jago as he posted a racist comment on a Neo-Nazi chatroom. In the professional sphere, Othello fails to prosecute the police officers who beat Coates to death and “cracks up” during a live TV programme.

3. A dialectics of outside and inside Bachelard’s influential study The Poetics of Space focuses on the signification of intimate domestic space, the poetics of the house. The philosopher and phenomenologist concentrates on the interior of the house, “the human being’s first world” (1994: 7), but also discusses the wider outdoor world through the poetic image. “Inhabited space transcends geometrical space” (ibidem: 47) and our daily experiences of domestic space and its outdoor context, as Bachelard’s study entails, are guided by our tendency of conceptualizing a division between two fundamental contrasting spaces: outside (exterior) space and inside (interior) space. External and internal space form a “dialectics of outside and inside” (ibidem: 211) which shapes our experience. The outside / inside contrast is particularly visible in Davies’s rewriting of Othello for television in that the adaptation repeatedly constructs a “dialectics of outside and inside” (ibidem: 211). This dialectics, as we will see, is associated with the character of Othello. The interplay of outside and inside is evident in Davies through the juxtaposition and interpenetration of two spaces, the Streets (outside) and the Grand Hall (inside). The division of exterior and interior space is heightened as shots of the rioters outdoors in the streets interrupt

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Commissioner Carver’s speech indoors in the Grand Hall of the Grand Hotel. Carver explicitly articulates that the police should exercise their power to subdue the streets: “we are not about to surrender the streets to mob rule,” and announces the initiative to recruit more Asian and black officers to the highest levels. The rapid and very brief transition from the Grand Hall to the Streets, in combination with Carver’s words about the streets, suggests that there is friction and contradiction between the two spaces. De Certeau indicates that stories are “actuated by a contradiction that is represented in them by the relationship between the frontier and the bridge, that is, between a (legitimate) space and its (alien) exteriority” (1988: 126). The technique whereby the Commissioner’s speech is interrupted by shots of the crowd in the streets causing havoc, constructs the indoor Grand Hall as an institutionally legitimate space penetrated violently by the outdoor, alien exteriority of the streets. The legitimacy of the values embodied in the Grand Hall is queried. After Carver emphatically declares “we are pretty bloody good,” the cut to a shot of a man throwing a bomb and starting a fire functions as an ironic statement on Carver’s words. The applause Carver receives is interrupted, thus it is rendered with skepticism. From the beginning we have our doubts about the ethics of the revolution in the Met because this Othello introduces us to the Grand Hall and Carver’s announcement after the young black Coates has been attacked in his own domestic space by white police officers. Furthermore, the hideously racist statements Carver makes to Jago in the Lavatory cancel out the ethics and ideals he trumpeted in the Grand Hall. The police culture and the street culture jostle for dominance over the streets. The street community’s power of intervention creates cultural anxiety and destabilizes legitimate space. The adaptation’s visual presentation of the streets penetrating the Grand Hall affirms Lefebvre’s postulation that social spaces are not clearly separated from each other because “they interpenetrate one another and / or superimpose themselves upon one another” (2004: 86). Even “visible boundaries, such as walls or enclosures in general, give rise for their part to an appearance of separation between spaces where in fact what exists is an ambiguous continuity” (ibidem: 87). Bachelard also stresses that one should not consider “outside” and “inside” into “a basis of images that govern all thoughts of positive and negative” (1994: 211). The interpenetration of the two spaces in Davies gives rise to an ambiguous continuity by signalling that both the street community and the police force are not dissimilar when it comes to violence and they do not fit into a positive / negative dichotomy. Both groups exhibit violence but their fierceness finds a

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different form of expression. The police employ unnecessary physical abuse behind closed doors and the street culture resort to overt violence when brutality has been directed at one of their members. The aggression of the people on the streets before Othello manages to appease them is intimidating. The Grand Hall and the high officials of the police also display a menacing quality, as outlined in the script. The Grand Hotel should have the atmosphere of “a big formal dinner, the almost scary roar of established power” (Davies 2000). Overall, while the clash between outside and inside juxtaposes the individuals and the values embodied in each space, at the same time it highlights their subtle similarities. The “dialectics of outside and inside” pertains to the dialogue Othello establishes between the police force (inside) and the people on the streets (outside) and facilitates the development of Othello’s character. Othello is the negotiator between the street community and the police force. By concentrating not on the applause Carver receives for his speech, but on Othello’s departure from the Grand Hall to go to the riot, the adaptation associates Othello with the streets. Spatially, Othello occupies a dual and liminal position in relation to the streets: he is both near to and distanced from them. The police officers are inside the police station behind Othello. He goes outside alone and stands on the steps just above the crowd. The conflict between outside and inside together with Othello’s liminal position contribute to a disturbing experience for Othello. Outside and inside, according to Bachelard, “are both intimate–they are always ready to be reversed, to exchange their hostility. If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides” (1994: 217–218). Othello’s marginal position is evocative of the Bachelardian boundary between external and internal space, and the torment it entails. Othello is a representative of institutional power but at the same time he identifies with the street community, as explicitly articulated through his words: “brothers and sisters” and “we.” He refers to two worlds: “we” and “them.” The “world” is the dominant culture, the hegemonic force. The “we” is the racially “other” culture that is marginalized and feared. It is a potentially radical subculture which threatens to subvert hegemony by challenging institutional power. Othello’s skin is a visual signifier of his relation to this community. He replies: “It is best if they just see me” when Cass offers to accompany him. Othello appears to know the people in the streets better than any other person, as also heightened by the chief superintendent’s relief when Othello arrives at the scene: “Thank God you’re here, sir. Complete bloody cock up I’m afraid.” In a similar vein, on the way to the scene, Cass affirms to Othello: “I knew you’d want to deal with this

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yourself sir.” Othello is under pressure from the chief superintendent not to reveal Coates’s death to the crowd, “One dead man’s enough, we don’t want a bloody revolution,” but he bravely decides not to lie: “you know you’ll get nothing but the truth from me.” The reaction shot of the chief superintendent standing behind the glass doors, exclaiming “Jesus Christ,” after Othello discloses that Coates died in hospital, communicates his certainty that violence will culminate. Othello and the crowd will not confirm the expectations of the police. Othello’s position on the steps higher than the crowd, his relationship with the people on the streets and the police, his knowledge of Coates’s death, in combination with his ability to subdue the aggression of the crowd and to enable them to channel their energy in constructive ways, all consolidate Lefebvre’s suggestion that “altitude and verticality are often invested with a special significance, and sometimes even with an absolute one (knowledge, authority, duty)” (2004: 236). The way Othello interacts with the street community further aids the development of his character and also brings to the fore ideas related to subjectivity and its relationship to representation, space, and cultural power and control. Othello invites the people on the streets to seize the opportunity to mold public opinion in their favour: “The world is watching us tonight.” He asks the street community, the “we,” to transcend the stereotypes through which “the world” habitually sees them. Othello is determined to attempt a mode of self-definition for the rioters by asking them to resist definition in terms of violence and anarchy: “Is that the way we want the world to see us? Looting our shops, burning our cars, trashing our whole community? What will the world call us then? Ignorant fools.” Othello asks the crowd to dissociate themselves from socially disruptive forms of subjectivity. Urging them not to cooperate with the assumption of their otherness, Othello encourages the enraged rioters to seek other forms of representation. Appealing to the crowd to “rescript” their lives in the same way that he has done, Othello indicates that there are new social opportunities for them. He grew up in “these streets,” and has become a successful police officer. Othello’s words reinforce his attempts to safeguard dignity and justice for the people on the streets and to enable them to realize their own ideals through peaceful means: “We have our dignity and we want justice under the law. Justice under the law!” The script indicates that the only way Othello can keep the aggressive crowd on his side is by implying that its members are “writing” this historic moment:

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Othello promises them that “if Billy Coates was unlawfully killed, there will be no escape for his killers. There will be no place for them to hide. Believe me, that is a promise.” Othello and the street community begin a revolution which aims to create a space under the law that will prevent unlawful racist killings such as that of Coates, and to allow the street community to create a new space for themselves, where they can be represented in new ways which do not confirm stereotypes. The importance of the creation of a space to subjectivity is highlighted by Lefebvre: “groups, classes or fractions of classes cannot constitute themselves, or recognize one another, as ‘subjects’ unless they generate (or produce) a space” (2004: 416). Othello’s performance in the streets demonstrates his bravery, his ability to resolve extreme conflicts, his insistence on justice, and his measure of cultural power and control. Othello invests the streets and the community on the streets with new meaning. They are no longer associated with violence. If producing a space means giving it a meaning, then this act of creation informs us about the producer. Andrew Hiscock proposes that “the ability to invest a space with status and meaning denotes a measure of cultural power and control” (2004: 179). Othello’s cultural power is evidenced as he emerges as a hero in the streets. The script indicates his glorification: “He stands with his arms spread wide, as the photographers’ flashes go off, the cameras angle for good shots of him. It’s an extraordinary personal triumph” (Davies 2000). The Prime Minister (John Harding) also accords Othello heroic status by affirming: “what you achieved the other night that really hit the spot for us.” The negotiation between outside (the Streets) and inside (Grand Hall) with Othello positioned as a mediator, as we have seen above, indicates social issues such as race, politics, hegemony, subjectivity, cultural power and control. Thus, the viewer is invited to challenge the dialogue between external and internal space which appears at the beginning of the film whereby the adaptation shifts from the bedroom (inside) where Othello watches Dessie dreaming, to Jago (outside) at the back seat of a car. Jago, in his police uniform, states: “it was about love, that’s what you’ve got to understand. Don’t talk to me about race, don’t talk to me about politics, it was love, simple as that.” The streets have multiple functions as we have seen thus far. They mark Othello’s association with the street community, they are the

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emblematic scene of his public triumph1 and authority, and they also articulate issues concerning subjectivity, representation, and the production of a space. The 2001 Othello also employs a “dialectics of outside and inside” that involves a street near the canal (outside) and the flat Othello shares with Dessie (inside) to add a different dimension to Othello’s character. This instance of the distinction between outside and inside signals the collapse of Othello’s faith in his wife, his alienation from her, and his submission to jealousy. When Othello starts to suspect Dessie of infidelity, he is shown in a street near the canal looking up at his flat. In other screen adaptations of Othello, such as that of Orson Welles (1952) and that of Oliver Parker (1995), it is other characters–Iago and Roderigo–who gaze up at the couple’s bedroom from below. This strategy, which has Othello, as opposed to another character, looking up at his flat, stresses his psychological alienation from his wife (Pilla 2006: 249), the disintegration of his subjectivity and his descent into sexual jealousy. The low position Othello occupies, as opposed to the flat being high up, functions as a reversal of the altitude he occupied above the crowd. Othello watches Dessie while she is dreaming in their flat, but now that he views the flat from a distance, from outside and below, his feeling that he lacks knowledge of her is even more pronounced. The centrality of the wife’s fidelity to the husband’s sense of self is delineated in Dana Percec’s statement regarding the plays of Othello and Cymbeline: like in Othello’s case, Imogen’s actual betrayal is of less importance than the face the husband loses in a man to man confrontation (symbolic or not– the Venetian general in front of a man inferior in rank, Posthumus in front of a man with whom he made a bet (therefore a commitment) (2015: 91).

The division of outside and inside offers insights into Othello’s psychic state. After Jago “informs” Othello that Dessie had “wild times” and insinuates that she is sexually promiscuous, Othello is shown at the canal as he walks to his flat. He looks up at his flat and close-ups register his insecurity and uncertainty. The aural and the visual fields construct a special interplay between outside and inside because we, the viewers, can hear the laughter of Dessie and Cass in the flat while we view Othello looking up at his flat. Not only Othello’s distrust of Dessie but also his perceived exclusion from his own flat is encoded. The tension between 1

For a discussion of this idea see Pilla 2006: 246–250; Cartelli and Rowe 2007: 127–128.

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outside and inside is further amplified as soon as Cass has left and the couple are alone. Othello is depicted immersed in thought and the cut to outside where the block of flats is reflected upside down in the canal, reinforces the idea that Othello’s interior world is starting to turn upside down. Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe also comment on Othello’s distance from Desdemona, suggesting that this is evoked through Othello’s act of voyeurism outside their flat: [t]he film begins to distance John from Dessie by twice making him seem a suspicious (and suspect) voyeur, looking up at the opaque windows of their flat from the vantage point of the reflecting pools at his feet (2007: 134).

Othello’s sense of displacement and loss of self is encoded through another variant of the distinction between outside and inside when Othello looks into the dark waters of the canal below his flat and views an image of Dessie’s face in the waters. She is dreaming and her lips are moving. Othello’s feeling that Cassio has displaced him in bed is rendered visually when Othello utters Dessie’s name but her image opens its hands out to Cass. The ‘adulterous couple’ are shown making love. Othello’s face is portrayed in close-up and part of Cassio (face and chest) is reflected and projected over Othello’s face, reinforcing the idea that Othello feels he has lost his face with Dessie’s supposed infidelity. Othello’s kneeling in this sequence demonstrates that he has fallen low because he has succumbed to Jago’s false insinuations. Othello tries to access Dessie’s interiority when he goes home by watching her while she is dreaming. His self-engendered visions of Dessie and Cass affirm Kathleen M. Kirby’s suggestion that “Space is a slippery entity that filters through the screens between such categories as the psychic, the social, and the physical. It is an objective material and site for inserting the subjective” (1996: 8). The adaptation heightens Othello’s decline before he goes home to murder Dessie. Othello is shown in close-up near the canal after Jago misinforms him that the results of his robe, which was DNA tested for “sexual secretions,” “prove” that Dessie is having an affair with Cass. Initially the camera portrays Othello’s face in close-up with the block of flats in the background, suggesting that he is as tall as the block of flats. The camera then moves upward, framing him in a high angle shot looking away from his flat and facing in the opposite direction, thereby making him appear smaller. Now that he no longer trusts his wife, and will murder her, his stature has decreased. Overall, the street sequences near the canal where Othello looks up at his flat, signal Othello’s gradual descent into sexual jealousy and inscribe his feelings of insecurity and displacement.

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Thereby, the outside/inside divide entails Jago’s success and Othello’s distance from his wife. Although the 2001 Othello juxtaposes the streets with the Grand Hall, both spaces, as has been shown, strive for social transformation. A negative continuity is shared by the two spaces in that both attempts at social transformation are hampered. The first black Commissioner has killed his wife and committed suicide, and the court trial regarding the racist killing of Coates has collapsed. We hear Othello’s promise to the people on the streets in voice-over when justice is not administered at the Old Bailey. Othello’s defeat is also registered spatially in the Old Baily when the verdict has been announced and the camera concentrates on his viewpoint. Othello had previously stated his desire to see the accused “all go down” but now he sees Jago and the accused standing in a higher position than him. The hope for justice dies with the key prosecution witness, Roderick, who does not turn up at the trial and dies mysteriously having taken alcohol and sleeping tablets. According to Lefebvre, “[a] social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and on space” (Lefebvre 2004: 54). Daily life, language and space are left untouched by the failed attempt at social transformation. The language employed by Jim Gordon (Gerrard McArthur) and the Prime Minister communicate their refusal to examine the real causes of the tragedy and its magnitude: the first black Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police has murdered his wife and committed suicide. In the adaptation, Gordon strips Othello of masculine power in relation to Dessie’s elevated social status and suggests in a sexist way that Dessie is impossible “to handle”: “Woman trouble, I gather. The wife. A rich man’s daughter. Bit of a handful.” The Prime Minister’s words that the Met should go to “a safe pair of hands” is even more alarming, as the Met goes to Jago. The vicious white Jago’s racist deeds have remained a secret. Jago is not punished; instead, he is strangely elevated by being promoted to the highest authority. There is no mention of when the institutional initiative on race, to allow black and Asian officers to rise to the highest levels in the Met, will be taken up again. The original decision to promote Othello to the highest level of the hierarchy of the Metropolitan Police may very well have been for publicity purposes. Othello’s promotion, as the Prime Minister clearly told him, was the suggestion of Gordon who “handles presentation.” Othello ends with Jago being photographed in the new Commissioner’s uniform. There has never been a black Commissioner of the Met. Will there ever be one again? The film implies that by denying racism in our society, we cannot go forward.

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The utopian possibilities of Othello’s interracial marriage and his hopeful and vigorous initiative have been closed down.

4. ȉhe Streets and Shakespeare’s Othello This section establishes a dialogue between Shakespeare’s Othello and Davies’s Othello in terms of the themes which arise from the presentation of the streets in the televisual adaptation. Othello’s enduring popularity is largely due to its dramatization of social conflict, a subject matter which was also employed by other dramatists of the period. Michael Neill notes, Although Renaissance dramatists consistently defended themselves against the enemies of the stage by maintaining the impeccably didactic virtues of their work, their real concern lay in exploiting the theatrical potential of social conflict (Neill 2006: 178).

In the 2001 Othello, the arresting spectacle of social disorder and racial tension in the Streets, which is communicated through the juxtaposition between external and internal space, is reminiscent of the anxiety in Shakespeare’s text resulting from Iago’s racist insinuations regarding Othello’s racial background and his union with Desdemona. This prevalent anxiety in Shakespeare’s Othello is evoked with “a dialectics of outside and inside” at the very beginning of the play. In a street outside Brabantio’s house, Iago and Roderigo wake up Brabantio and taunt him about his daughter’s interracial marriage: “[e]ven now, now, very now, an old black ram / I tupping your white ewe!” (1.1.87–88). Brabantio roars his furious opposition. Similarly to the 2001 Othello, where Othello is glorified in the streets, Shakespeare’s Othello presents Othello as a figure of nobility and confidence in a street outside the Sagittary. This street scene aids the characterization of Othello. Informed by Iago of Brabantio’s intentions to “punish” Othello for his marriage to Desdemona, Othello shows confidence and security: “Let him do his spite; / My services, which I have done the signiory, / Shall out-tongue his complaints” (1.2.17–19). He appears proud of his background and his words emphasize his nobility: “I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege, and my demerits/ May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune / As this that I have reached” (1.2.21–4). His military glory is crystallized through his words when both his men and Brabantio’s raise their weapons: “Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust / them” (1.2.58–9).

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The juxtaposition of the Grand Hall and the Streets echoes very strongly the contrasting spaces of Venice and Cyprus in Shakespeare’s Othello. The two central spaces in Shakespeare’s text are fundamentally evocative of two different worlds. Venice is symbolic of order and civility. Cyprus evokes an “other” world. Neill describes Venice as “a true polis” and Cyprus as “another country” (1984: 117), a “colonial outpost of civilization where the worst Venetian values can flourish unchecked by any normative order” (ibidem: 118). James A. McPherson also draws attention to the contrast between Venice and Cyprus: “Venice and its Senate embody order, reason, justice and concord-binding forces that hold the city together. Cyprus, on the other hand, is associated with chaos and violent storms, the Turk, the Ottoman, and the unharnessed forces of nature–the ‘Other’” (1997: 56). To use de Certeau’s terms, Venice can be considered as the “legitimate space” and Cyprus as “its alien exteriority” (1988: 126). Similarly to the struggle between the police and the crowd for domination of the streets in Davies, Venice and “the Turk” compete over Cyprus in the Shakespearean original: “So let the Turk of Cyprus us beguile, / We lose it not so long as we can smile” (1.3.211–212). In a similar manner to the 2001 Othello, which displays continuities between the Grand Hall and the Streets, Shakespeare’s text also encourages us to question the values Venice embodies. This is epitomized in Othello’s mocking salutation–“You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!” (4.1.263)–to Ludovico and the other Venetian Senators when they are sent to Cyprus to instruct him with a mandate to return to Venice. They inform Othello that Cassio will take his place. Now that the wars with the Turks are done, it is as if the Venetian state no longer appreciates Othello’s services. Othello “subverts the wisdom, intellectual and cultural supremacy of the Venetians” (Pilla 2013a: 66; Pilla 2013b) and “undermines the sixteenth century conception of Venice as the epitome of civilization, freedom, justice and wisdom” (ibidem: 66–67). The play depicts Cyprus during the Venetian occupation at the time of the Turkish threat and the winged lion of St. Mark features prominently on the military architecture of the Venetian era. Othello explicitly mocks the symbol of the lion by equating sir, a rank of nobility with goats and monkeys. In the televisual adaptation, Othello is portrayed as knowing the people in the streets better than any other person. He has a special relationship to the streets, a space of social disorder and chaos. Similarly, in the dramatic text, Othello has a special affiliation with Cyprus, the “warlike isle” (2.1.43), because he is reputed to be the most knowledgeable of the island and is sent there to protect it. As the Duke emphatically admits, “Othello, the fortitude of the place is best / known to you” (1.3.223–224). The

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Duke’s words entail that Othello has cultural power and control in that he can assign meaning to the space of Cyprus. Othello also has another very important relationship to Cyprus. His origins are unspecified in the same way that the location in Cyprus where the four central acts of the tragedy are dramatized remains unnamed (Pilla 2013a: 62–63). In the 2001 Othello, Othello’s racial origins are specified: he is from St. Lucia. Othello’s kneeling when he views Dessie and Cass reaching out to each other, in the street near the canal, in the 2001 Othello, enters into conversation with the temptation scene in Shakespeare’s Othello. While Othello and Iago kneel, Othello vows to avenge Cassio and Desdemona, and Iago swears to help him achieve this. During this exchange of vows, Othello is deceived into placing his trust in Iago, “Now art thou my lieutenant” (3.3.481), and Iago proclaims his false duty: “I am your own for ever” (3.3.482). Their exchange of vows, while they kneel, constitutes “a parody of the wedding rite whose knot [Iago] has patiently untied” (Neill 2006: 169). The instances of Othello looking up at his flat and his “visions” of Dessie and Cassio’s “union,” in the televisual adaptation, register Iago’s progressive ascendance over Othello’s psyche and the effects of his insinuations. Othello’s displacement which is displayed visually in Davies, is evident in the Shakespearean original. As Neill explains: “As Iago progressively colonizes Othello’s mind, the Moor’s gathering sense of displacement is registered” (ibidem: 154). Since Othello views his flat from the outside, after Jago is presented planting the seed of jealousy in Othello’s mind, images such as that of Cass making love with Dessie, visually evoke the Shakespearean character’s “panic of erotic displacement” (ibidem: 151).

Conclusion As the previous analysis has revealed, a “dialectics of outside and inside” is a prominent strategy of the 2001 Othello. This strategy is also evident in Shakespeare’s early modern text. In the TV adaptation, this dialectics juxtaposes the individuals and the values embodied in each space while also uncovering their subtle similarities. Thus, the relationship between spaces and characters comes under scrutiny and the use of space offers insights regarding the characters and their relationships. The viewers are asked to engage critically with each space and not to simply read the various spaces in terms of binaries (positive and negative). The collapse of the Coates trial indicates that the borderline between outside and inside can be a traumatic experience, as crystallized by Othello’s liminal position and his futile attempt to reconcile the two

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spaces. Altitude can signify knowledge, authority and duty, and the use of shots can convey a decline in stature, loss of power and lack of knowledge. A low position in combination with a “dialectics of outside and inside” can communicate the disintegration of the self as suggested when Othello views his apartment from a street near the canal. Subjects are created through the production of a space and a person’s ability to assign meaning to a space signals their cultural power and control. The 2001 Othello foregrounds the social character of space and negotiates ideas related to hegemony, race, politics, subjectivity, language, representation. We, as viewers, resist Jago’s presentation of the tragedy exclusively in terms of love. Almost four hundred years after the composition of Othello, Davies rewrites the spaces in the play in order to communicate a new vision of the Shakespearean original for television. Social conflict energizes the spaces of the adaptation.

Sources Davies, Andrew. Othello. 2000. Script. Adapted for television by Andrew Davies. UK: LWT. Othello. 2001. Television. Directed by Geoffrey Sax and adapted by Andrew Davies. UK: LWT. Shakespeare, William. 1997. Othello. Edited by E.A.J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson.

References Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space: The Classic Look at How We Experience Intimate Places. Translated by Maria Jolas. Reprint. Beacon: Grossman Publishers. Cartelli, Thomas and Katherine Rowe. 2007. New Wave Shakespeare on Screen. Cambridge: Polity Press. Cosgrove, Denis. 1999. “Introduction: Mapping Meaning.” Mappings edited by Denis Cosgrove. London: Reaktion Books. 1–23. De Certeau, Michel. [1984] 1988. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. Reprint. Berkeley: University of California Press. Dustagheer, Sarah. 2013. “Shakespeare and the ‘Spatial Turn’.” Literature Compass. 10 (7). 570–581.

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Hiscock, Andrew. 2004. The Uses of this World: Thinking Space in Shakespeare, Marlowe, Cary and Jonson. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. Honigmann, E.A.J. 1997. “Introduction.” Othello by William Shakespeare. Edited by E.A.J. Honigmann. The Arden Shakespeare. Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson. 1–111. Kirby, Kathleen M. 1996. Indifferent Boundaries: Spatial Concepts of Human Subjectivity. New York: The Guilford Press. Lefebvre, Henri. [1905] 2004. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. Reprint. Oxford: Blackwell. McPherson, James A. 1997. “Three Great Ones of the City and One Perfect Soul: Well Met at Cyprus.” Othello: New Essays by Black Writers edited by Mythili Kaul. Washington D.C.: Howard University Press. 45–76. Neill, Michael. 1984. “Changing Places in Othello.” Shakespeare Survey. 37. 115–131. —. 2006. “Introduction.” Othello by William Shakespeare. Edited by Michael Neill. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1–179. Percec, Dana. 2015. “It’s a Private Matter. Space and Gender Issues in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Romanian Journal of English Studies. 12 (1). 88–94. Pilla, Eleni. 2006. “The Renegotiation of Space in Three Screen Versions of Othello.” PhD dissertation. University of London Royal Holloway and Bedford College. —. 2013a. “‘Tis Certain then for Cyprus’: The Interaction of Historical Reality and Fiction in Shakespeare’s Othello.” Literary Paritantra (Systems): An International Journal on Literature and Theory. 3 (1&2). 61–70. —. 2013b. “‘You Are Welcome, Sir, to Cyprus. Goats and Monkeys!’: An Intertextual Exchange between Shakespeare’s Othello and two Theatrical Versions by Cypriot Directors. Mediterranean E-Journal of Communication & Media. 2 (1). http://mediaejournal.org/an-intertextualexchange-between-shakespeares-othello-and-two-theatrical-versions. (accessed 14 June 2017). Warf, Barney and Santa Arias. 2009. “Introduction: The Reinsertion of Space in the Humanities and Social Sciences.” The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias. London: Routledge. 1–10. Werlen, Benno. 1993. Society, Action and Space: An Alternative Human Geography. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN THE DIALOGIC-DIFFERENTIAL PALIMPSEST IN SCOTT CAIRNS’ THREE DESCENTS CARMEN POPESCU

1. Introduction It is my opinion that the alliance between comparativism and intertextuality may open new possibilities for the study of interliterary relations (Popescu 2016; 2017). At the same time, comparative studies need to undertake a reappraisal of the intertextual methodology by taking into account the latter’s dialogic basis (Bakhtin 1981), in its overlapping with literary communication.1 The issue of palimpsest or “literature in the second degree” (Genette 1997), although undeniably a form of dialogue which stimulates comparison, is often approached in the rather abstract frame of intertextuality and hypertextuality.2 Palimpsest is in fact a heuristic metaphor frequently used in literary studies as a synonym for rewriting. Intertextual or palimpsestic strategies have been described as “the normal way of writing” at “this late hour of our cultural history” (Fokkema 2000: 145). Due to the overlayering, multi-layering, and hence mutual relativization of the textual 1

By drawing on Bakhtin’s concepts (“dialogism” and “polyphony,” primarily), but also on semiotics, pragmatics, speech act theory and discourse analysis, literary scholars have tried, in recent times, to configure a viable field of literary communication, on a par with other types of communication, verbal and nonverbal (Fishelov 2010; Mey 1999; Parpală 1994, 2015, 2017; Sell 2000, 2011; Weigand 2013). 2 Genette has developed a very elaborate and complex account of the various forms of transtextuality¸ that is, everything that puts the text in a relation with its own “transcendence.” Within this framework, hypertextuality covers a multitude of forms of rewriting and functions as the more technical term for the “palimpsest” per se.

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components, but also the intermingling, hybridization and grafting involved in the logic of palimpsest, this strategy of rewriting as overwriting generates polyphony or multivocality and involves a complex dialogic interaction with the otherness of texts and discourses from the cultural “archive.” Hypertextual rewritings, especially in (post)modernity, display a range of possible attitudes towards the models. These attitudes are usually perceived on a continuum whose extremes are pastiche, homage, and obedient imitation vs reversal or radical transformation of meaning– very often by way of parody. Moreover, rewriting as a device entails authorial, subjective agency1 and an intention to communicate difference in similarity. In the Eastern Orthodox mindset, which will be focused on here, textual dialogue is particularly important, as a sustained and fruitful interaction with tradition–which, in its turn, is seen as a source of energy, rather than generating “anxiety of influence” (Bloom 1973) or being a hindrance for one’s originality and self-expression. The dialogue between literature and religion has long been recognized as a legitimate and valuable preoccupation of comparative studies (Remak 1961: 3). I intend to focus mainly on the poem Three Descents by Scott Cairns,2 who was born into a Protestant family but later converted to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. His writings are an ongoing dialogue with the theological and literary tradition. Cairns’ Three Descents3 is divided into three sections, entitled Aeneas, Orpheus and Jesus. By juxtaposing these three figures’ descents, the poet stimulates us to compare and contrast them, to be alert to similarities and dissimilarities between three different instances of katabasis (țĮIJȐȕĮıȚȢ or descensus ad inferos–“descent into hell”). The strategy also provides a polyphonic modulation of the ancient mythical script and engenders semantic difference while maintaining a textual dialogue with the featured sources. The theological tenets are reinforced by the dialogiccommunicational rationale of the palimpsest, which involves a dynamics of recuperation, integration and transcodification. The communicational 1

This aspect can make us question the poststructuralist theory of intertextuality and the so-called “death of the author.” 2 Scott Cairns (b. 1954) is an American poet, essayist, and academic, author of several collections of poetry: The Theology of Doubt (1985), The Translation of Babel (1990), Figures for the Ghost (1994), Recovered Body (1998), Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (2002), Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (2006). 3 Three Descents, from the volume Philokalia: New and Selected Poems (2002), is reprinted in Scott Cairns’ Compass of Affection: Poems New and Selected (2006). All further references are to the latter edition.

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dimension is also involved in the most basic form, as far as the relationship between the writer and his readership is concerned. But the more mystical connotations of communication as communion cannot be ignored either. In light of Scott Cairns’ “sacramental poetics,” poetry does not simply “express” pre-existent contents, but “does” something, through interaction and dialogue. “Like the Holy Mysteries, then, the poetic is involved with communication […] in the sense that something of each communicant is imparted to the other, and necessarily in the sense that new creation is the result” (Cairns 2005: 1, author’s emphasis).

2. Archetypal descents into hell Among the archetypes and thematic invariants which are widespread in world literature, katabasis contains a rich cluster of symbolic meanings, both in religious and in literary-aesthetical terms. In its various guises, the descent into hell has been studied extensively in a comparative framework, just like the “harrowing of hell” by Jesus Christ.1 The topos is entirely relevant for the circulation or “migration” of motifs and literary myths, as well as for the mechanisms of a more conscious and deliberate appropriation, by literature, of the mythical grammar. Especially in modern literature, the re-emergence of hell imagery can be part of the personal(ized) mythology of a particular writer. Pervasive in antiquity, the theme of the journey to the underworld, with the two variants, katabasis (“descent”) and nekuomanteia (“the calling of the dead”), was usually a part of epic (as in Homer’s Odyssey, Vergil’s Aeneid or Lucan’s Pharsalia), a “mythical category” (Morales Harley 2012), but also a myth in itself, whose protagonist was either a god / goddess (especially the deities of vegetation, like Inanna, Aphrodite, Dionysius, Demeter) or an exceptional human, a hero (Herakles, Theseus, Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, and even the young woman Psyche, in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or the Golden Ass). Along with the solemn, serious version of the mythical descent, we also find the parodic and satirical counterpart in Greek literature: for instance, Aristophanes’ Frogs, where the god Dionysus is terrified to descend to Hades and needs help from Hercules, or Lucian of Samosata’s parodic Dialogues of the Dead.

1

For the persistence of hell as a metaphor and a way of making sense of extreme experiences, even in secular contexts, see Pike (1997) and Moreira and Toscano (2010).

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The descent scenario involves a plethora of spiritual and cultural meanings and implications. It has attracted attention from anthropologists and historians of religion, due to the inextricable relation between myth and ritual and the more or less detailed depiction of the underworld, as well as for the knowledge it offered about archaic beliefs in the immortality of the soul. For instance, Ioan Petru Couliano in Out of this World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gilgamesh to Albert Einstein (1991) underscores the importance of shamanism and resorts to cognitive theories to argue that the “worlds” being explored are in fact mental universes. While studying nekua and descensus averno from a comparative and structuralist perspective in a selective corpus (Homer, Vergil, Dante Alighieri and Paul Claudel), Pierre Brunel emphasized, in L’évocation des morts et la descente aux enfers (1974), several aspects which might be considered elements in a possible “grammar” of katabasis: he pointed out problems of terminology, of legality, toponymy, topography, architecture, taxonomy, theology, meaning, poetics, genre and “purpose.” Every new occurrence of the theme, especially in Western canonical literature, will also allude to previous literary treatments of the myth and emulate them, in a more or less explicit way, thus establishing a complex and multi-stratified palimpsest. While the archaic, mythic core remains constant, the level of personal involvement through consciously fictionalized retellings is considerable in later epochs. A paradigmatic example of the consequences of continuous enrichment of the script is Aeneas’ descent in Book VI of Vergil’s epic, Aeneid: myth, history, imperial ideology, literary allegory, Homeric and Platonic intertexts are all incorporated and integrated in the Augustan poet’s eclectic eschatology. As an archetypal story about the most perilous adventure that a mythical actant was expected to carry out, the Vergilian descensus has pathos, heroism, initiation, mystical overtones and an undeniable universal human appeal. It is to this highly sophisticated appropriation of the theme that later authors respond dialogically. As will be shown later, in Three Descents, Scott Cairns initiates a “conversation” with Vergil’s opus magnum, but also with the polyphonic, manifold, multi-authored hypotext of the Orphic katabasis, which includes Vergil himself, in the fourth book of the Georgics, then Ovid, then the many subsequent poetic retellings, including Rilke’s Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes.

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2.1. The Orthodox Christian difference My interest in this reassessment of the myth will be particularly in the unique dialogic features of Cairns’ Christian Orthodox1 rewriting. Dialogism (of the polemical variety) underlies the early Christian attitude towards classical, “pagan” texts, which had to be, according to the Fathers of the Church, perused with caution and discernment. Saint Basil the Great, in the 4th century, for example, addresses the youth on the subject of reading pagan literature: similar to the bees that gather honey from various flowers, the Christian readers are urged to extract wisdom and lessons of virtue even from the ancient poets, orators and philosophers. Therefore, there is a complex connection between “Parnassus and Tabor” (Coman 1995: 9), as regards the Christian mode of reading prior texts. As a topic of myth, religion and literature, the overarching notion “hell” may be characterized as ambiguous or polysemantic. Christian Orthodox scholars usually insist that we should not confuse “hell” as the abode of the dead or the condition of being dead (designated by Hades or Sheol) which has been changed for ever by Christ’s sacrificial death and resurrection, with hell as Gehenna, which is a place of torment for the unrepentant sinner, defined by the “outer darkness, weeping and gnashing of teeth” (Matthew 25: 30). Into Hell and Out Again is a poem where Scott Cairns proposes a poetic ekphrasis of the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection (or the “Harrowing of hell”): In this Byzantine-inflected icon of the Resurrection, the murdered Christ is still in Hell, the chief issue being that this Resurrection is of our aged parents and all their poor relations. […] Long tradition has Him standing upon two crossed boards – the very gates of Hell – and He, by standing thus, has undone Death by Death, we say, and saying nearly apprehend. […]

1

For more on the Orthodox interpretation of Christ’s descent as an event of cosmic significance, and its soteriological implications, see Alfeyev (2009). The theme of Christ’s descent into Hades is inextricably connected to the Orthodox view on death: see Rose (1980), Schmemann (2003), Larchet (2012). For more on the Orthodox faith in general, see Ware (1963) and Vlachos (1998).

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The poem, an intersemiotic palimpsest, is very informative about theological doctrine, just like the icon itself is essentially theology conveyed through an image. Also, a crucial intertext is the troparion1 alluded to in the poem: “Christ is risen from the dead / trampling down death by death / and upon those in the tomb / bestowing life.” This would be the “verbal” icon for Pascha (or Easter), an abrégé of the Resurrection, and, ultimately, of what Eastern Christianity is all about. Here dialogism pertains to the dynamics of salvation (which has already occurred but at the same time is to be subjectively appropriated by each person, since it is eschatologically oriented): “they have yet to enter bliss” is certainly a reference to the Parousia or Second Coming. The ambivalence towards death itself is undoubtedly also related to this eschatology. After Christ’s sacrifice, which meant a “life-creating death” (a phrase taken from Saint Basil’s Liturgy2), death is to us both “tragedy” and a “blessing”: We see death as unnatural, abnormal, as contrary to the original plan of the Creator, and so we recoil from it with grief and despair. But we see it also as part of the divine will […]. It is […] a means of grace, the doorway to our recreation. As we confess in the Creed, ‘we are expecting the resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come’ (Ware 2000: 32).

A striking feature in Orthodoxy is that the meaning of life is, to a large extent, determined by the meaning of death: “Orthodoxy accurately reflects an ethical framework that is thanatomorphic, literally ‘formed by death’” (Hamalis 2008: 184). While the aetiology of death is identified in the “wages” of sin (Romans 6: 23), mortality is also “the last enemy” to be destroyed (1 Corinthians 15: 26). On the other hand, according to the Orthodox understanding, the fire of hell is not a material fire. Hell, understood as the love of God, might be a counterintuitive notion, but it is the Orthodox way of dealing with this issue. Often quoted are Saint Isaac the Syrian’s words about God’s love being perceived as light by those who embrace it and as fire by those who reject it. To say that God punishes the sinners in hell and takes revenge on them would be blasphemous, Saint Isaac contends (Sirul 2007: 377). At the same time, eschatological realities 1

A troparion (a term of Greek origin) is a short hymn sung on the occasion of a religious festival, for instance Easter. 2 apud Kalistos Ware, The Inner Kingdom (2000: 29).

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are unfathomable and surrounded by mysteries. Both in mystical experiences and in literature, the vision of Hell is primarily a metaphor for repentance and conversion, or spiritual death and rebirth / resurrection. Along with revisiting archetypal narratives, another way of appropriating descent is precisely as mystical experience (and at the same time as ascetic practice), when katabasis is reinterpreted and relived as metanoia (by which one should understand repentance and endless conversion). A very influential version of the inner, spiritual descent is synthetized in Saint Silouan’s epiphany, and the words he received from Christ in a moment of utter despondency and hopelessness about his salvation: “Keep thy mind in hell and despair not.” Although uniquely articulated, this is the experience whereby the Athonite monk re-enacts, in a dialogic and palimpsestic manner, the spiritual struggles of the Desert Fathers: Father Silouan, like certain great Fathers–St. Antony, St. Sisoë, St. Makarios, St. Pimen–during his lifetime actually descended into the darkness and torments of hell. They did this not once but over and over again until their hearts were so permeated that they were able to repeat the movement at will. They took refuge in it when passion–especially that most subtle of passions, pride–reared its head (Sakharov 1991: 120).

The inner, personal or subjective dimension of descent is thus present both in the classical accounts and in the Christian one. This is where the notion of the “spiritual unconscious” (Larchet 2005) comes into play. This perspective is necessary in order to understand the Christians’ spiritual warfare against the logismoi (“evil thoughts”). Christians are called to become aware of their ontological vocation, which is theosis or “deification,” “growth from image to likeness,” “striving toward personhood” (Hamalis 2008: 204) and also of the necessity to actualize that “kingdom of God” which is “within us” (Luke 17: 21). In order to freely respond to Christ’s universal act of redemption, the faithful will experience their own katabasis, the aim being to acquire a humble mind. In a certain sense, initiation is still tantamount, but due to the irreducible anthropological framework as handed down by Patristic tradition, the heroic model present in ancient epic is no longer tenable.

3. Scott Cairns’ literary-religious dialogue with myth and epic In a reading given on Ancient Faith Radio (Cairns 2009), the poet spoke about Three Descents as an attempt to contextualize the quintessential “descent,” from the Christian perspective, against a background of the

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many accounts of mythic descents, in classical literature. This (re)contextualization of the harrowing of hell takes the form of a rereading and reassessment of ancient, pagan katabasis as opposed to the narrative of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. A truly remarkable feature about Cairns’ poetry is that he manages to convey to what extent the dogmatic framework of Orthodox Christianity is compatible with the intrinsic ambiguity of poetic language and with the polyphonic effects of the intertext and the palimpsest. As a matter of fact, we could say that, due to the apophatic essence of Orthodoxy, the poetic medium is very appropriate to convey the mysteries of the faith in a manner that combines subjective engagement with the communal, shared truths.1 His poetic practice is informed by the Church Fathers (the Patristic tradition) and the Philokalia but also by the Rabbinic tradition of midrashim (“commentaries”) to Biblical stories and episodes. In the poem As we see, he refers expressly to this type of commentary, meant to give life to the word in books: “I love the Word’s ability to rise again / from chronic, homiletic burial” (idem 2002: 36). This is, of course, a metapoetic allegory, referring to the poetic process and to the function assigned to a type of poetry which is grounded in faith. Equally relevant for the way Cairns conceives of the creative process are his considerations on theologumena,2 to be read as figures for his own scriptural and liturgical palimpsests. According to Scott Cairns, it was “the postmodern turn” which enabled Christian writers to find a discursive space, in the aftermath of a latemodernist taste for “denotative” texts. “Poets of faith,” he maintains, “have begun to embrace postmodern epistemological troubling” and have learnt to “trust their developing facilities with language to lead them into speaking discovered matter, rather than spouting familiar, safe, and therefore reductive, soul-crippling clichés” (idem 1999: 61).3 1

For more on Cairns’ dialogic engagement with various traditions, see Popescu (2014). 2 “By and large, the Orthodox Church–in keeping with the rabbinic tradition of its Lord–is relatively comfortable with theological speculation […]. The Eastern Church even has a word for the more provisional, interpretive activity; it is theologoumena (ĬİȠȜȠȖȠȪȝİȞĮ), which is to say, simply, ‘to speak of God.’ […] Our ‘God talk’ must be understood always to be an interpretation, and no interpretation should occasion idolatry–which is what happens when we allow our terms to eclipse the Mystery we hope to serve. When confronted with a mystery, speculative interpretation is to be expected, as is humility” (ibidem 2010: 1). 3 In a similar vein, Amy Hungerford (2010) has argued that postmodernism and religious faith are indeed compatible.

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Genette has shown that the modern devaluation and revaluation of a classical hypotext can sometimes take the form of an “aggravation” (Genette 1997: 355) of certain traits of the original. In the present case, the implicitly subversive elements in Vergil’s epic The Aeneid (the ones which render his apparently optimistic, celebratory epos really problematic, ambiguous or self-contradictory) are taken over and emphasized by the palimpsest. Orpheus’ katabasis, as a myth of failure par excellence, is another dimension which the rewriting “aggravates.” It is as if the retelling unmasked the truth that the hypotext refused to admit, although it worked as an explanation to this indisputable fact: that no person, no matter how exceptional and gifted, no matter how prone to sacrifice and selfless love, can act as a redeemer of fellow human beings from the realm of the dead. Only God incarnated could reverse the curse that humankind brought on themselves when they lost paradise and the communion with God. Nevertheless, on a level of comparison, Aeneas (the “true-souled” or “true-hearted,” as Vergil repeatedly calls him) and Orpheus could appear as genuine precursors for the Christian worldview because in their respective stories, a powerful representation of love is present: the conjugal, inconsolable love of Orpheus for his wife (and we should not forget how important the metaphor of the wedding is in both Testaments), and also, Aeneas’ love manifested as pietas, as duty and commitment, the kind of love that transcends personal attachment (like that for the queen Dido in the fourth book of the epic). One might be tempted to say that the first two descents display modes of love that can be seen as stages towards agape as the ultimate, selfless love. And still, Scott Cairns seems to be dismantling the ideology of the epic. He brings to the fore the “beloved” Palinurus who “sank beneath wave, and memory” (idem 2006: 100). In the deep structure of the mythical hypotext, the helmsman was the sacrificial victim necessary for any majestic feat or heroic exploit: By the tumbling seas I swear, the terror that gripped me Was not so much for my own sake as that of thy ship, Lest, stripped of her tackle, her helmsman tossed in the sea, She might come to grief in that welter of towering waves (Vergil 2004: 384).

Aeneas will encounter him in the netherworld, unable to cross the river Acheron because he had remained unburied. The fall into forgetfulness asserted by Cairns’ version can also be accounted for in religious terms: although Aeneas had promised him post mortem fame, this kind of perpetuity is not a consolation from the Christian perspective, where the

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expectation is to be remembered in God’s kingdom (cf. Luke 23: 42), and not by future generations. The “god’s red fist” which “fell hard into the sea” (Cairns 2006: 100) concentrates metonymically on the mythological apparatus of the epic, with the gods governing and determining every aspect of the mortals’ fate. Later on, Apollo will be designated periphrastically and irreverently as a “petty god” (ibidem: 101) whose temple Aeneas searched in order to consult the god’s priestess, the Sybil. In Book six of the Aeneid, this temple was described in detail, with reference to its builder, Daedalus, who was himself an exile, like Aeneas. While in Vergil the Trojan hero appeared engrossed in contemplating the engravings of the temple, here the narrator claims that Aeneas barely looked, so used he had become to how little pleasure Time could bring, so engaged by the prospect of stepping briefly out of it, if only to return to Time’s demands when he returned to light (ibidem).

In the lines quoted above, Cairns suppresses Vergil’s original motivation for the protagonist’s behaviour and substitutes it by a new one: Aeneas wants to escape the demands of Time, the expectations of his own destiny as pre-figured and pre-established by the gods. At the same time, the American poet ignores Aeneas’ stoic reply to the Sybil’s gloomy prophecy (that in Italy he will have to face a new “Achilles”, the Rutulian Turnus, that a new war will break, because of a foreign bride, Lavinia, thus mirroring the Iliad): Aeneas the hero began: ‘There is no kind of hardship, O maiden, said he, that come to me fresh or unlooked for; All have I thought of beforehand and run through my mind’ (Vergil 2004: 126).

And then he confesses his true intention, which is to travel to the underworld so that he can see his departed father once more.1 Equally irreverent and baffling are, in Cairns’ text, the depiction of Anchises (in Vergil’s version, represented as residing in the Blessed Fields of Elysium) as the “wretched figure” of the father, “nearly indistinguishable amid / that mass of shades like dogs tied together / whining,” and of the Sybil herself 1

Another reason for debunking the heroic gesta by Cairns might be the very fine line between necromancy and katabasic initiation. Aeneas’ gesture acquires this ambiguous overtone of transgression, especially in the light of a faith grounded in the Bible, where the interdiction against witchcraft is so strong.

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as “likewise bound, then tossed, a bent toy skipped across / a marble floor” (Cairns 2006: 101). The elaborate topography of the underworld is also changed in Cairns’ hypertext: there are no more separate zones, dividing the dead according to their deeds or way of death. No Fields of Mourning, no Elysium, and no Tartar. In fact, the descent itself is abbreviated, reduced to its preparatory, preliminary moments. As for the primary goal of the katabasis, which was, traditionally, the acquisition of knowledge or wisdom, a short prolepsis in the form of rhetorical interrogation suggests that this type of initiation-centred descent is in fact futile: And what would he remember years from now of what he’d find? Little, save the wretched figure of his own father coupling death…(ibidem)

The whole endeavour is delegitimized by recasting prophecy as “the infernal terms Aeneas / believed he sought” (ibidem). Aeneas thus becomes the reluctant hero of a culture whose codes and meanings he feels compelled to use but which do not really make sense to him. In the larger logic and dynamic of the Christian palimpsest, this could also mean that Aeneas (or, better said, Vergil himself) is likely to undergo a radical metanoia (“change of mind” and “repentance”) like that required by a conversion to Christianity. Although ancient writers lived before the Incarnation of the Logos, it is believed, according to Scriptural interpretation, that they were able to hear Christ preaching in Hades: “He went and preached to the spirits in prison” (1 Peter 3: 19).1 The services of the Orthodox Church closely and richly reflect this teaching. According to one troparion sung on Holy Saturday, Jesus Christ, after His crucifixion, was in several places at once, including in the abode of the dead: In the tomb according to the flesh, As God in hell with the soul, In paradise with the thief, And on the throne with the Father and the Spirit wast thou, O Christ, omnipresent, incircumscript.2

Definitely, Aeneas’ piety is of a different sort from that engendered by Christian belief. With Vergil, the katabasis is somewhat secondary, subsidiary to the larger picture of the birth of Roman identity. It has a 1

Cf. also 1 Corinthians 15: 3–4. From the Orthodox Liturgy of the Patriarchal and Stavropegic Monastery of St. John the Baptist, Essex (1982: 63).

2

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crucial role and a strategic positioning, but the descent is actually instrumentalized, subordinated to politics, to mundane affairs of this world. Redemption or eternal communion with God is not the main goal of the poem, nor could it be, in that particular context. The eschatology serves its complex and manifold purpose–dynastic glorification and artistic emulation with the Greek model being among the most outstanding aspects of this effort. The undifferentiated underworld in Scott Cairns’ account “corrects” Vergil’s philosophical theodicy, and notably, his representation of Elysium, where the souls are waiting for their reincarnation as Roman heroes. This pseudo-paradise has no place in the new Christian eschatology. Even if the enunciation is attributed to an apparently impersonal narrator, displaying the so-called “enunciative fading out” (Monte 2007), there are definitely marks of subjectivity in Scott Cairns’s poem, especially axiological markers, and fewer deictic markers, at least not associated with the speaker of the poem. Many of the evaluative adjective, such as “petty god,” are indicative of the authorial perspective. While retelling Orpheus’ descent, the poet relies on shifts in the deictic centre: first, he assumes the perspective of those in the realm of the dead, the anonymous mass of “shades,” who, by their frightened reactions, suggest that Orpheus should not be understood as a soteriological figure, a foreshadowing or adumbration of Christ the Saviour (notwithstanding the analogies many have noticed across the centuries): they are “hurt” by his “lit gaze,” they “shrink,” they “slip back into the Dis” (Cairns 2006: 102). As if they were disappointed when they saw that this protagonist of descent is not the one they were so eagerly expecting. This is the perfect anti-myth of Orpheus, because in the paradigmatic story, all the dead, including the damned and tortured, and all the fearful guardians of the underworld (Charon, the monstrous Cerberus, together with Hades and Persephone), they were all enthralled and mesmerized by Orpheus’ song. It was his art which made possible the descent in the first place and which persuaded Hades and his wife to give him back Eurydice. Instead, Cairns talks about an “unaccustomed silence,” a “barren stillness” and “the image he had shaped” (ibidem) (as if Orpheus was a Pygmalion, and Eurydice was his own creation). When the focal point moves on Eurydice, it is the indisputable fact of her death (she is “crumbling clay,” not just a shade, an image, or an eidolon) that will be emphasized; also, the “sudden suffering” she experiences, “as if a boy has held a surgeon’s glass above // a shrivelling midge now stricken by the sun’s light drawn / and focused to a beam” (ibidem). She is so fragile and disturbed by her husband’s attempt at resuscitating her, that we are tempted to conclude that Orpheus’

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katabasis is seen as a transgression, or hubris, and not the ultimate proof of love. As a matter of fact, ancient accounts of the bard’s heart-breaking failure are not as romantic as the later tradition will have it: for example in Vergil (Book fourth of the Georgics), probably the first to give a negative ending to the myth, Orpheus, “forgetful” and “impassioned,” is seized by a sudden “frenzy” which makes him look back to Eurydice and she reproaches him this before disappearing: “What frenzy is this? Lo, again the cruel fates call me backward, and sleep hides my swimming eyes” (Vergil 1905: 117). Of course, this madness should be understandable and forgiven, if the spirits from below knew what forgiveness was. Ovid, in his turn, underlines the singer’s passion and his fear that Eurydice was not following him, but this re-motivation could be determined by his literary emulation with the predecessor, the great Vergil: Here, anxious in case his wife’s strength be failing and eager to see her, the lover looked behind him, and straightaway Eurydice slipped back into the depths. Orpheus stretched out his arms, straining to clasp her and be clasped; but the hapless man touched nothing but yielding air. Eurydice, dying now a second time, uttered no complaint against her husband. What was there to complain of, but that she had been loved? (Ovid 1995: 4).

According to Scott Cairns’ version: As their eyes met, her loss was total and immediate. When he returned alone to the sunlit world of things, his life became one long attempt at shaking free his culpability in her undoing. And later, as his own flesh was torn, his body sundered by the famished hands of famished women, he breathed a last, a single note, contrite at how his lesser love had hurt her (Cairns 2002: 102).

By this ending, the American poet again makes emendations to the original myth, if we bear in mind that in most versions, after his sparagmos (Orpheus was torn by the enraged and vindictive Bacchantes), his head continued to sing. The awareness of his ineffectual, “lesser” love seems to be the only catharsis admitted for this tragic, pathetic story. All these clues converge towards the interpretation that Orpheus should not be mistaken for the Logos (another name for Christ), although he might have used language and music in a brilliant way.

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The reactions of Hades’ denizens in the final section, entitled Jesus, are very different. If Orpheus’ presence is downright mortifying, as if bringing more death and more gloom to the Dis, Christ’s presence “gained for hell itself / a vivifying agency…”, and each shade “acquired at his approach an aspect far // more limpid than the lot that lay ahead” (ibidem: 103). “The withered crowd,” the “multitude” was “made glad by his descent,” just as He “was glad,” even though “his several wounds continued to express / a bright result” as “He walked to bless the bleak, / plutonic path with crimson script …” (ibidem). Christ’s living presence among the dead conveys the essence of salvation and resurrection. His blood, a sign of life but also of sacrifice, is already Eucharistic, and testifies to the fact that the shades will not be shades for ever, but living human persons, called to the fullness of life; and not just a restored life, exactly as it was before (a resuscitation) but eternal and redeemed life. To sum up: Scott Cairns’ Christian Orthodox rewriting of the ancient descents is implicitly critical or polemical, suggesting a strategy of transmotivation, which is “one of the major procedures of semantic transformation” (Genette 1997: 324) in palimpsests. However, this revaluation is different in spirit and attitude from the modernist hypertexts analysed by Genette, and, I could add, from the many postmodern deconstructions of classical texts which resort, as a rule, to an ideologicalethical revision of various canonical text-worlds (such are, for instance, the many feminist or postcolonial rewritings which dismantle Western works of art from the standpoint of a contemporary value-system). In trying to pin down the defining attitude of Cairns’ transformative retelling of epic and mythic descensus, one cannot help but notice how he emphasizes the difference between the first two descents (Aeneas, Orpheus) and the ultimate, salvific descent of Christ into Hades (Jesus). There are two different bodies of faith and two types of Weltanschauung which are contrasted in the poem, the rationale behind the demystifying retellings of Aeneas’ and Orpheus’ descents being given by an Orthodox Christian commitment. The poet reconstructs the meaning of mythos and epos in light of the Christian revelation. In Three Descents, Cairns strips the aura of Vergil’s palimpsest away, along with the various layers of the Orphic palimpsest, but he does it in a manner which remains conversational, as it is undertaken for the sake of the Christian truth, whereby the past is redeemed and integrated, assimilated in the history of salvation. One could describe such a view of cultural history as teleological.1 At the same time, we should bear in mind the specificity of 1

Cf. Galatians 4: 4–7 and the reference to the “fullness of the time.”

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the Judaeo-Christian perspective on time and history in general. According to Mircea Eliade, the Bible differentiates itself from the mythical, cyclical interpretation of cosmic stages by perceiving historic events as theophanic, as manifesting the will of God (Eliade 1954: 102). The whole of Christian life is felt as an eschatological longing for the Kingdom, the Judgment and the Resurrection of the dead, which is in fact the desire to grow in the communion with God and the other human beings.

Conclusion In the grammar of palimpsests, where myths and motifs migrate and are appropriated, by conflating and conciliating old and new material, dialogism provides a helpful framework. A more general argument of this paper pertains to the specificity of an Orthodox Christian dialogism, which could be seen as vacillating between polemic and the transformative recuperation and recycling of previous, alien utterances, discourses and worldviews. It works by “redeeming” the hypotexts while firmly marking its semantic difference, and by engaging (inter)personally with fictional characters and historical authors. Christians are called to redeem the time (Ephesians 5: 16), but also the textual history, by evoking and embracing, with discernment (diakrisis), and also with a difference, the literary tradition. Thus, differential rewriting from the standpoint of a Christian allegiance of the most conservative type (Eastern Orthodox) generates genuine poetic ambiguity. It also confirms that “genuine literary dialogues” (Fishelov 2010: 15) and “epistemic dialogues” (Cowart 1993: 198) do not necessarily need to be consensual. At the same time, intertexts and rewritings function as signs in what Michael E. Moriarty (1996) calls “the semiotics of world literature.” Although the rewriting in Three Descents is agonistic (through demotivation of the heroic and the shamanic mythical script), it remains dialogic. Rewriting emerges as a re-enunciation and a re-uttering of the pre-texts, no matter how differential. Revisiting mythic descents occasions a contemporary rewriting which is irreducible to postmodern deconstruction or revision. Instead, this type of palimpsest models itself after traditional types of commentary / metatext (like the rabbinic midrash and the Patristic interpretation), thus dialogically inscribing the speaker’s subjectivity and identity in the texture of inherited wisdom. Between theologumena and holy mysteries, Scott Cairns regards poems as inherently dialogic and open-ended, as quasi-epiphanies, as it were or provisional intimations and glimpsed discoveries.

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Poetic creation is perceived by the post-postmodernist Orthodox poet as part of the ascetic path, as an effort to acquire the “mind” of the Church (Vlachos 1998), in other words the Orthodox manner of reading the world, but also world literature (and culture).

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Sirul, Isaac (Sfântul). 2007. Cuvinte către singuratici despre viaаa duhului, taine dumnezeieЮti, pronie Юi judecată, Partea II. Traducere de Ioan Ică Jr. Sibiu: Deisis. Vlachos, Hierotheos. 1998. The Mind of the Orthodox Church. Translated by Esther Williams. Levadia: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery. Ware, Kallistos. 1963. The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —. 2000. The Inner Kingdom. New York: Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press. Weigand, Edda. 2013. “Words between Reality and Fiction.” Language and Dialogue. Special Issue: Literary Linguistics edited by Anja Müller-Wood. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 147–163.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN SPACES OTHER: DYSTOPIAS AND HETEROTOPIAS IN POSTMODERN FICTION ALINA ğENESCU

1. Introduction Following the growing changes brought by rapid urbanization in the 20th and 21st centuries, the issues of perception and representation of space became essential, as did the attitudes of individuals toward the city, city spaces and landscapes. As urban landscape derives from the perception of a whole defined in terms of a dichotomy: nature and human environment and, as our vision of the urban world is influenced by the environment and by individual traits, we grow aware of the fact that the attitudes of individuals who inhabit or cross the city space vary according to social, economic, psychological and cultural criteria. All these criteria should be taken into account as they help us understand peculiar mental mappings, logical schemas (Tuan 1977: 36), landmarks and reference points, as well as scales of values that other individuals use when they describe their experience of space in nonspecialized oral discourse, in specialized discourse–geography, architecture, philosophy, anthropology–, or in fiction. While the issue of representation of spaces and “spaces other”1 is tackled by specialists and non-specialists, as well as by novelists, the wide array of modalities of perception of urban place goes beyond mere 1

The syntagm spaces other was first used by Michel Foucault in 1967 and was conceived by the philosopher so as to describe spaces of otherness, revealing more layers of meaning and unconventional relationships to other spaces, that are at the same time mental and physical, and which work under non-hegemonic conditions.

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objective depiction so as to include both personal memory and imagination of city inhabitants and passers-by. Thus, subjective relationships that an individual entertains with his environment or space are the ones that constitute the subject-matter of our fiction corpus analysis. Perception of a particular place emerges from the specific relations that an inhabitant or a passer-by as sensory receptor maintains and develops with the objects and with the space he inhabits or crosses every day. Spatial information is received by the individual through the sensory system and then transmitted in terms of vision, orientation, touch, smell and hearing to the brain, and organized in a precise detailed manner. It thus becomes fascinating to study the specificities of this sensory processing and thought process so as to better understand what influences and determines the unique attitude of an individual or of a novel character towards space. Personal memory enables the travellers to retain significant messages from the places they transit (Hoelscher and Alderman 2004: 348), before they decode, order, and structure the spatial information. It is this information that provides the schematic representation of elements giving rise to the attitude that an individual develops regarding space. This process corresponds to the probabilities of organization of disparate thoughts in relationship to our particular experience of a place. Our research is aimed at identifying in the fictional city the relevant elements that mark the representation, the perception, the memorisation of “spaces other” and the attitude toward them. By comprehending the perceptive mechanisms proper to writers or to the characters that populate their novels and their attitudes toward space, we can reveal the manner in which these “spaces other” (heterotopias and dystopias) are represented in postmodern fiction and we can analyse their meaning. The perception of the city is based upon an accumulation of information that is perceived as inhabitants or travellers stride and move following different walking trajectories. Without movement, the mental mapping of an inhabitant would be very poor or reduced to the common residential area. That is why we chose to tackle the topic of “spaces other,” spaces that are characterized by the aggregation of itineraries and walking trajectories and by the subjective perception of objects and space. The selectivity of perception, the particular traits of the urban dwellers have a consequence on the behaviour and personal attitudes they reveal toward space. That is why it is important to know the major descriptors of the landscapes perceived on the occasion of a stride or walk through the town by the auctorial instances or by the fictional characters in postmodern literary communication.

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As fiction represents a privileged space of manifestation of perception, we discover, as readers, that Francophone, Russian and English-American literature provides many examples of forms of perception, behaviours and attitudes toward the city. Whilst characters’ movement through space facilitates the description, ambiance is created alongside a particular feeling of place. They all contribute to reflecting, illustrating images of the city. When opening a proposition to a comparative approach of “spaces other” in Postmodern English-American, Russian and Francophone literature, we assert that we can readily acknowledge that the urban space which emerges in postmodern fiction is often conceived as space endowed with more layers of meaning or relationships to other places than instantly meet the eye of the reader. Heterotopias and dystopias as spaces of otherness (Hetherington 1997: 4–5; Foucault 1984: 47), simultaneously physical and mental (Saldanha 2008: 2080), pervade the fictional space of novels that make up our corpus of study. It is represented by novels and short stories by four authors: two Francophone writers (Vincent Engel, Opera Mundi, 2009, Jean-Philippe Toussaint, La télévision, 2006), an American writer (Gerri Leen, The Woman I Used to Be, 2014 / 2016) and a Russian novelist (Yevgeny Zamyatin, We, 1924 / 1983). Starting from a cognitive-semantic approach (Lakoff and Johnson [1980] 2003), our objective is to organize conceptualizations of space into several categories of urban heterotopias and dystopias, identifying their main characteristics, function and role. If in a previous study, Discourses of City Identities in Postmodern Fiction we explored “surrealistic literary representations of the postmodern urban landscape” (Loveday & Parpală 2016: 8) by examining three distinct city images that are created in the works of Serge Brussolo, Philippe Soupault and Paul Auster, this research will focus more on heterotopic and dystopic literary representations of the postmodern urban space and microspace.

2. Urban imagery, spatial identity and subjective perception of space 2.1. The museum as heterotopia of time in Opera Mundi In the novel Opera Mundi, readers are guided through the halls of a museum, very close to the author’s heart. They follow in the characters’ steps as they discover their relationships with art, as if they were looking at the works of art through the characters’ eyes so as to seize the indescribable emotions driven by this multisensory experience. Readers follow the main character, Mr. Black, as he daily wanders from one hall of

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the museum to the other, spending his time recopying old masters’ works, until, he hopes, the copy has disassociated itself from the original model. His sometimes erratic, sometimes purposeful movements inside the space of the museum make him cross the path of other visitors who either vow their admiration to a French statue which will be soon removed for restoration and lead him to interlace his steps with those of parents who try to explain the meaning of a work of art to their sons, by transmitting the souvenirs associated with a painting or with a drawing. Their specific choices of itineraries and paths whilst they discover the artefacts displayed in the museum halls, their different perceptions of the same artefact, as well as their particular walking practices are revealed by the photographer Emanuel Crooÿ who joins the writer Vincent Engel to better capture and render the ineffable instant when the visitor reacts to the work of art in an unconventional manner (Greenberg et al. 2007: 307). As heterotopia of time or as heterochronotopia (Osman et al. 2016: 935), the imaginary museum in Opera Mundi encases and wraps in one place artefacts from various periods and styles, which exist in time, but also out(side) of time, since they are conceived, made and preserved so as to be physically unaffected by the passing of time and fleeting fashion trends. While visitors take a distance from the works of art in order to get a better view or perspective, they make use of a technique of displacement: that is a method that enables them to think of themselves by comparison to cultures of other spaces and other times (Pagani 2014: 34–35). Strange though it might seem, readers find with this heterotopia of time a perpetual mise-en-abyme. Even if Mr. Black follows every day a predetermined path, working in the same museum hall on copying old masters’ paintings, he eventually breaks this routine, by choosing to work for a few weeks in the new art exhibition gallery, recopying a painting entitled Regard d’azur by an artist M. D.**, known as the mayor’s brother. The continuous strive for reproducing as accurately as possible a piece of sky draws the attention of the guardian, of the curator and of the visitors who are furtively sliding a glance at his sketch. When the reproduction work is over, the curator surprisingly discovers that the exhibited copy is La calomnie d’Apelle by Sandro Botticelli: […] nous étions tous massés dans la salle, face au tableau blanc taché de bleu–pompeusement intitulé Regard d’azur–, face aussi au dos de la toile réalisée par Mr Black. […] - Vous savez que j’ai pour l’art une grande passion [...] Je n’ai aucune préférence particulière, ou du moins, je ne méprise aucune période, aucun artiste, pourvu qu’il ait accompli son art avec authenticité, de toute la force de son âme et de ses capacités. […] Mon travail n’est pas une création,

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Convinced that his work is not creation, but rather a homage to art, Mr. Black unmasks the fact that M. D.** did nothing but copy a detail found in a sky placed beneath an ignominious quartet made by the Fraud, the Envy, the Calumny and the Resentment. Both readers and characters understand that the original unveils the motivations of he who inspired himself from it and that the copy reveals the imposture, as visitors come to regret the absence of the true plagiarist, the artist M. D.** The museum hosts collections of original paintings and works thought to be original that reveal themselves to be copies of old masters’ works. Paradoxically, it is the work of a copier that helps the curator and the visitors to trace back the original and unmask that the “original” is a copy. The original is to be found within a copy and the copy is to be found in the original: En disant ces mots, il a retourné son chevalet et une exclamation s’est aussitôt élevée; ce qui était peint n’avait rien à voir avec le tableau exposé. C’était, ainsi que l’a identifié d’une voix amusée et surprise le conservateur, La calomnie d’Apelle, peinte par Sandro Botticelli et exposée aux Offices de Florence. […] - Mais, reprît le conservateur, je ne comprends pas... Quel rapport? Voulezvous vous moquer? - Me moquer ? Jamais de ma vie je ne me suis livré à cette pratique dégradante! Non : j’ai voulu démasquer. Voyez... […] Le tableau de M.D** se trouve ici, dans ce bout de ciel au-dessus du quatuor ignoble que 1

“We were all massed in the room, facing the white painting stained by blue– pompously titled Regard d’azur–, also facing the back of the canvas painted by Mr. Black. ‘You know that I have a great passion for art. [...] I have no particular preference, or at least I despise no period, no artist, provided that he has performed his art with authenticity, with all the strength of his soul and his abilities. […] My work is not a creation, but rather a tribute. […] I know that you have wondered about my decision to come and reproduce a painting by Mr. D **, whereas I have never done this for any of the works shown here. It is because, on seeing this painting Regard d’azur, I was intrigued. I took some time to discover by what. And then I found it. I then reproduced this magnificent work of art…’” (My translation; all the subsequent translations from the French are mine).

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constituent la Fraude, l’Envie, la Calomnie et le Ressentiment. Très précisément: le blanc du ciel et deux petites taches bleues. Un travail de microscope, en quelque sorte (ibidem: 15–16).1

Incongruously enough, it is the artist who lacks originality and the copyist who brings touches of creativity, by altering the original composition, breaching the rules of strict reproduction: erasing women from the work and personifying Resentment with M. D.**’s traits. Copyist painting proves to be a controversial topic with lookers-on often unaware of the difference between copy and original, but as a copyist painter, Mr. Black safely demonstrates that there is a precise difference between the two, as he exposes the lack of authenticity of M. D.**’s work. Far from producing a cheap copy, Mr. Black, the copyist painter, painstakingly recreates a great masterwork like La calomnie d’Apelle by Sandro Botticelli. But to create copyist painting as opposed to seemingly but not necessarily genuine work of art (like M. D.**) there are several rules to follow by the curator and the visitors to draw a clear line between creation and imposture. Mr. Black’s copyist painting is the recreation of paintings from great masters that look exactly the same as the original, even though they are copied, whereas M. D.**’s work is exhibited as original, but eventually proves to be a rough magnification of a detail in Botticelli’s painting, nothing but a fake.

2.2. Museum, urban heterotopia and digital space In the novel La télévision by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, the museum where the art historian carries on his research on Titian Vecellio turns into a “space other” invaded by video monitors and digital cameras which multiply the images of artefacts exhibited in different halls. Crossing from one hall to another, the narrator does not notice the works of art anymore; his attention is only drawn to the pipes that cover the walls and the 1

“In saying these words, he turned his easel and an exclamation was immediately raised; what was painted had nothing to do with the painting on display. It was, as the curator identified, with an amused and surprised voice, The Calumny of Apelles, painted by Sandro Botticelli and exhibited at the Uffizi of Florence. ‘But,’ resumed the curator, I do not understand. Do you want to make fun of us? ‘Making fun of you?’ Never in my life have I engaged in this degrading practice! No: I wanted to unmask. See ... […] M. D. **’s painting is here, in this piece of sky above the ignoble quartet constituted by the Fraud, the Envy, the Calumny and the Resentment. Very precisely: the white of the sky and two small blue spots. A microscopic job, somehow...”

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ceilings. The hypertechnological setting renders the place impersonal and dreadful, transforming the museum into a space where the narrator loses his way: Au sortir de la cafétéria, comme je suivais un long couloir vitré pour rejoindre le musée, je poussai une porte tout au bout du couloir […]. Me retournant de temps à autre, je continuais de longer ce couloir sur quelques mètres, et je finis par déboucher dans une chaufferie. La pièce était dans la pénombre, les murs et le plafond entièrement recouverts de tuyaux de différentes tailles, certains épais, ronds, coudés […] je m’engageai dans un couloir étroit et bétonné que n’éclairaient que des néons blafards, où […] se trouvaient des cabines blindées inquiétantes, à haute tension vraisemblablement, sur les portes desquelles étaient fixés des pictogrammes expressionnistes explicites, éclairs noirs stylisés et hommes foudroyés, tordus sur place, immobilisés dans leur chute asymétrique. J’avais dû m’égarer (Toussaint 2006: 193–194).1

The art historian moves across a space filled with monotone black and white video images that run on the screens of monitors hung on the walls of each museum hall. These images help to form a counter-space, by creating hyperreal images which infiltrate the narrator’s reality. This hyper-digital space builds a platform for the visitors to virtually explore the museum sites and to watch other visitors’ reactions in front of the artefacts; it also allows them to visualize historical and cultural-based information about antiquities. The real space bears the fingerprints of digital space, understood as virtualized reality that makes up a horizon of possible expectations for those who interact with it and whose attention is diverted from observing real artefacts to admiring the images of works of art reflected on digital cameras. The dense hyperreal images are reflected everywhere and turn the museum into a place of uniform homogenous reflections that standardize

1

“Walking out of the cafeteria, as I followed a long glass corridor to reach the museum, I pushed a door at the end of the corridor […]. Turning back from time to time, I continued to walk along this corridor for a few meters, and finally ended up in a boiler room. The room was in the dark, the walls and the ceiling entirely covered with pipes of different sizes, some of which were thick, round, bent. […] I entered a narrow corridor made of concrete, lit only by pale neon lights, where […] there were disquieting, high-voltage, armored cabins, on the doors of which were fixed explicit expressionist pictograms, stylized black flashes, and men struck by lightning, twisted on the spot, immobilized in their asymmetrical fall. I must have lost my way.”

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the routes and itineraries chosen by visitors, as well as the spatial perception of lookers-on: Des rangées de moniteurs vidéo étaient fixées au mur en hauteur, qui diffusaient en continu les images des différentes salles du musée à l’étage supérieur. Toutes ces images en plongée, très denses, en noir et blanc, mal réglées, un peu baveuses, évoquaient des plans fixes de parking souterrain, on ne distinguait presque rien sur les écrans des moniteurs vidéo (Toussaint 2006 : 195).1

Understanding the museum as spatial metaphor that helps describing media networks and digital devices inside it enables further comprehension on the narrator’s techno-cultural vision of this institution. If the museum is designed with a media interface meant to resolve the visitors’ problem of getting lost in this hyper(real)space, Toussaint’s museum metaphor attempts to render the structure of spatial and information systems easier to understand by drafting a cognitive map of architectural and information space. Hyper and digital texts displayed on monitors are visualized as fragments in the informatized museum using architectural knowledge from urban planning so as to build an information environment that helps the visitors navigate the space inside. Once images and spatial practices are uniformized and rendered similar to one another by the video surveillance system of the museum, the narrator is under the impression that a visitor coming from the next floor to the painting room is moving silently on the snowy monitor screen, leaving behind a slight trail of himself in his track, before progressively reintegrating his material garment, when stopping in front of a painting to admire: Je m’étais arrêté un instant derrière les vitres de cette cabine déserte, et je regardais tous ces écrans grisâtres devant moi, où l’on apercevait parfois un visiteur aller et venir lentement à l’étage supérieur dans une salle de peinture du musée, qui se déplaçait en silence sur l’écran neigeux en laissant une très légère traînée de lui-même dans son sillage, avant de se rejoindre et de réintégrer progressivement son enveloppe corporelle quand il s’arrêtait devant un tableau. Il était impossible de reconnaître le moindre

1

“Rows of video monitors were fixed to the high wall, which continuously broadcast the images of the various museum rooms on the upper floor. All these bird’s eye view images, very dense, black and white, poorly adjusted, somewhat fuzzy, evoked fixed shots of the underground parking, and hardly anything could be distinguished on the screens of video monitors.”

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The superposition of real and digital images makes it possible for the visitor to perceive the prolongation of a body movement from the video screen to a close real space inside the museum as well as the transposition of a body from the screen, where it leaves an imperceptible trace, to the painting room where the looker-on rejoins his earthly body.

2.3. Urban dystopia and artificial intelligence Unlike heterotopias which are defined by settings whose spatial architecture seems to encourage conviviality, communication and care, but paradoxically cannot hide the indifference and neutrality towards others, dystopias are characterized as antitheses of utopia, as community spaces or societies that are undesirable or frightening, being used by the authors to warn against the evils of the world or about corruption and corrupted governments. Literary dystopias are pervasive in postmodern fiction as “an extreme extrapolation of the now” (Golder 2015: 24). With Gerri Leen, in the science fiction short story The Woman I Used to Be, the study of the urban paradigm might be employed as a fundamental tool in order to delimit dystopian science fiction from another fictional category with which it is sometimes confounded (the Fantastic), and in order to deepen and increase the readers’ understanding of the implications of modern artificial intelligence on people’s lives. In The Woman I Used to Be, urban space and micro-urban spaces like houses run by artificial intelligence are represented as environments encouraging modern media communication. Susanna’s house, entirely governed by artificial intelligence, constitutes a display-case for the boundless and threatening possibilities of a future intrusion of house AI and its corresponding effects, both positive and negative, upon the inhabitants’ and dwellers’ lives and upon their perception of reality. The house AI answers to its master’s questions about things and people she has

1

“I stopped for a moment behind the windows of this deserted cabin, and I looked at all those greyish screens in front of me, where one could sometimes see a visitor coming and going slowly on the upper floor in a museum painting room, moving silently on the snowy screen, leaving a very slight trail of himself in his wake, before joining and gradually reintegrating his body envelope when he stopped before a painting. It was impossible to recognize a single painting on all these rows of monitors fixed to the wall of this cabin.”

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forgotten in a deep male voice, “resonant with pain,” as she has programmed it when she is alone: I’ve asked the house AI also. Just in case they never met the man–just in case I was having an affair. The house AI doesn’t recall any visitors that match the description except an appraiser that came to the house when we were thinking of taking out another mortgage. But the picture the AI brought up wasn’t the man from my dreams. ‘Susanna?’ The house AI’s voice never startles me now that I’ve programmed it to be male when I am alone. I’ve given it a deep voice, resonant with pain–or that’s how the voice option I chose struck me. It’s also how I imagine the dark man sounding. I could only hear what he’s saying (Leen 2016: 194).

The hypertechnological city and house are chosen for the values they stand for, such as community, progress, industrialization and hypertechnology. The woman protagonist of dystopian fiction is gradually alienated from human collectivity and one of her major challenges consists in convincing others to trust the unbelievable that is the incursion of the irrational in her reality, as she attempts to explain her life in the AI house before the shuttle crash. Not only does she herself have to believe in the irruption of the beyond of rational in her life, but she also progressively gives up confiding in her family and friends and relies solely on AI’s truth, on its way of answering with no hesitation and “no making excuses”. The house AI turns into the individual’s best friend and artificial intelligence truth becomes the character’s unfledged truth: The AI is my best friend. It knows me better than I do, obviously, but it also seems to know me better than my family does. The AI goes by Drew. Louisa named it when we first moved into this house, or so I’m told. [...] When I’m not alone, the AI speaks in a nurturing female voice that sounds like a grandmother. It has told me Louisa picked the default voice. It has also told me–when I asked–that Nathan keeps it this way when he’s alone. [...] ‘Drew, are you sure I lived here before the shuttle crash?’ This is not the first time l have asked this question. Perhaps I keep hoping for a different answer. Although isn’t that the definition of crazy? ‘Yes, you lived here before the shuttle crash.’ I love the way it answers. No hesitation. No making excuses. Just the truth (ibidem: 195).

2.4. Urban dystopia and the city of glass In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We, readers get familiar with another type of dystopia which does not convey an “elsewhere and an else-when”

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anymore, but a “here and now” (Basile 2015: 22). Consequently, dystopia is understood this time not as the opposite of a utopia of space, but of distortion of a utopia of time and it takes the shape of a perverse variant of a totalitarian state made entirely of glass. The narrator imagines a city nation built entirely of glass, so that the authorities can keep a close eye on citizens and their actions, and where servile inhabitants wearing numbers instead of bearing names march and walk in unison. The ultimate goal of the United State is not only to subjugate the unknown beings who “live on other planets,” but also to bring the glorious principles of the Well-Doer to space: The great historic hour is near, when the first Integral will rise into the limitless space of the universe. One thousand years ago your heroic ancestors subjected the whole earth to the power of the United State. A still more glorious task is before you: the integration of the indefinite equation of the Cosmos by the use of the glass, electric, fire-breathing Integral. Your mission is to subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason the unknown beings who live on other planets, and who are perhaps still in the primitive state of freedom. If they will not understand that we are bringing them a mathematically faultless happiness, our duty will be to force them to be happy. But before we take up arms, we shall try the power of words (Zamyatin 1983: 3).

The story is set in the thirtieth century and the United State reflects a society where all inhabitants live for the collective good and where individual freedom is not allowed, as citizens are ruled by the Well-Doer, and presided over by the guardians who spy on them. All citizens live in apartments made of glass so that they can be perfectly and incessantly observed and so that trust in the system can be implemented as the absolute principle, not only on Earth, but also on other planets where beings might live “in a primitive state of freedom.” The dystopia in We resembles a conglomerate of hermetic glass houses surveyed by IT engineers and state mathematicians who admire numbers and computers more than they love human beings and who consider citizens to be a part of a perfect flawless machine. In the name of the Well-Doer, the following is announced herewith to all Numbers of the United State: ‘Whoever feels capable must consider it his duty to write treatises, poems, manifestoes, odes, and other compositions on the greatness and the beauty of the United State.’ ‘This will be the first cargo which the Integral will carry.’ ‘Long live the United State! Long live the Numbers!! Long live the WellDoer!!!’ (ibidem: 4).

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Both the guardians and the Well-Doer of the One State commend people to live like machines in order to prevent them from failing, but paradoxically enough, the state mathematician D-503, who is meant to carry on the space craft the Integral the records of the One State principles, commits the fatal mistake of experiencing the most disturbing emotion imaginable: falling in love with another human being. He is thus in danger of undergoing a complex surgery that will remove the part of his brain linked to passion, feelings and creativity. The seemingly perfect glass city nation takes the shape of a prison designed by a coercive and dangerous totalitarian power whose main objective is humankind regimentation in an aseptic glass environment meant to repress any kind of individual freedom: spiritual, cultural, personal, ethnic, economic, social.

Conclusion From the analysis of conceptual metaphors associated with heterotopias and dystopias in our corpus of study, we can assert that the conceptualization of city space does not revolve around the common organic metaphor. In fact, peculiar images (such as that of the city museum as mise-en-abyme or as hypertechnological setting, that of the micro-urban space coordinated by artificial intelligence, and that of the city-nation made of glass) reveal conceptualizations of the city space and dwellings as unconventional or beyond the rational experiential realm. All of the cityscape images in our corpus of study constitute examples of “spaces other” meant to warn the readers against the dangers and evils of postmodern world excesses: hypertechnologization, uniformisation and depersonalization.

Sources Engel, Vincent. 2009. Opera mundi. Bruxelles: Le Grand Miroir. Leen, Gerri. 2016. “The Woman I Used to Be.” Dystopia. Utopia–Short Stories. Foreword by Dave Golder. London: Flame Tree Publishing, 193–198. Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. 2006. La télévision. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. [1924] 1983. We. Glasgow: Harper Voyager.

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References Basile, Giovanni Maniscalco. 2015. “Utopias of Totalitarianism. A Text of Hope and Despair.” Quaestio Rossica. 4 (4). 19–39. Bursiquot, Fabienne, “Musée et anthropologie. Chronique d’une separation.” https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/as/2014-v38-n3-s01745/1029030ar .pdf (accessed 25 June, 2017). Golder, David. 2015. Gothic Dreams. Dystopia–Post-Apocalyptic Art, Fcition, Movies and More, London: Flame Tree Publishing. Greenberg, Reesa, Ferguson, Bruce W., Nairne, Sandy. 2007. Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge. Foucault, Michel. 1984. Conférence au Cercle d’études architecturales (14 mars 1967). Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité. 10 (5). 46–49. —. 1994. Conférence de 1967 “Des Espaces Autres”. Dits et écrits. Tome IV. Paris: Gallimard. 752–762. Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. New York: Routledge. Hoelscher, Steven and Derek Alderman. 2004. “Memory and Place: Geographies of a Critical Relationship.” Social and Cultural Geography. 5 (3). 347–355. Lakoff, G. & M. Johnson. [1980] 2003. Metaphors We Live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loveday, Leo, Parpală, Emilia. 2016. Ways of Being in Literary and Cultural Spaces. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Osman, Robert, Daniel Seidenglanz and OndĜej Muliþek. 2016. “Urban Place as Heterochronotopia: A Case Study of Brno Locality.” Czech Sociological Review. 52 (6). 927–962. Pagani, Camilla. 2014. Politiques de reconnaissance dans les musées d’ethnographie et des cultures au XXIe siècle. https://tel.archivesouvertes.fr /tel-01175973/document (accessed 25 June, 2017). Saldanha, A. 2008. “Heterotopia and Structuralism.” Environment and Planning. 40 (9). 2080–2096. Tuan, Yi Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ğenescu, Alina. 2016. “Discourses of City Identities in Postmodern Fiction.” Ways of Being in Literary and Cultural Spaces edited by Leo Loveday and Emilia Parpală. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 106–121. www.shmoop.com/utopia-dystopia/(accessed 25 June, 2017). www.gerrileen.com/ (accessed 25 June, 2017).

CONTRIBUTORS

Hayder Naji Shanbooj Alolaiwi is a PhD student at the Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, Romania. His research project is Metaphors of the American Novel: Lifting the Veil and Passing of the Color-line–or, the Multicultural Dimensions of Racial Identity. He has an MA in English Literature from Faculty of Arts in the University of Pune, India (2011), and a BA in English language from College of Education of the University of AL-Qadisiya, Iraq (2007). He participated in several conferences on English literature both in India and Romania. His research interests include American literature, multiculturalism, racial studies. He is equally interested in cross-cultural studies and the study of religions and their representation in literature. E-mail: [email protected] Zainab Abdulkadhim Salman Al-Shammari is a PhD student at the Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, Romania. Her research project is The Postcolonial Triangle: Stances of Feminism in Selected Works of Shashi Deshpande, Nadine Gordimer, and Margaret Atwood: A Comparative Study. Her research interests include English literature, Comparative literature, literatures in English, feminism, and postcolonialism. Zainab Al-Shammari has a BA in English Language from the University of Baghdad, Iraq (2009), and an MA in English from the Osmania University, Hyderabad, India (2013). She worked for two years as an assistant to the General Director of the Curriculum at the Iraqi Ministry of Education. She has had a successful teaching career in Baghdad, for which the Ministry of Education in Iraq conferred to her “The Ideal Teacher Award.” She has been involved in a number of projects concerning women’s issues and children care. E-mail: [email protected] Diana Ani‫܊‬escu is a PhD student at the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Bucharest and is currently writing her doctoral thesis entitled Light Verbs and Nominalizations in English and Romanian. She works as an external collaborator at the University of Bucharest and as an English teacher at “Iulia Ha‫܈‬deu” National College, Bucharest. She holds a Master degree in English philology

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Contributors

and a Bachelor degree in English and German Language and Literature. Her academic interests are syntax, morphology and semantics. She is the author of three articles: “Equivalence and Compositionality in a face / make, do Idioms” (Pite‫܈‬ti, 2016); “On Deriving Idiomatic Readings around the Light Verb a face” (Bra‫܈‬ov, 2016) and “On Romanian Light Verb Constructions Headed by a face” (Tîrgu Mure‫܈‬, 2016). E-mail: [email protected] Andreea Barbu is a PhD student at the University of Bucharest. Her thesis concerns the process of secularization in Meiji Japan and unites two strands of inquiry: the impact of European Modernity in the Japanese space and the influence of Neo-Confucianism on the reconceptualization of secularity. She has participated in many international conferences and in 2015 she made a research stay at the University of Trier, Germany. She has an MA in European and International Cultural Studies and a BA in European Studies. Her main research interests are: modern intellectual history, 19th century, history of religions, cultural anthropology. She is currently an intern at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Bucharest. E mail: [email protected] Oana Băluică, PhD student, is currently studying at the University of Craiova, Romania, and writing a thesis about brothels and prostitutes in the nineteenth and twentieth century literature. Her research interests are: cultural studies, cinematography and contemporary literature. She published book reviews monthly in a local literary magazine and she participated in some national conferences as a student, in Brasov, Sibiu, Ia‫܈‬i. The first international conference she attended was held in Prague, organized by Oxford University, her paper focusing on the cyber anxieties depicted in the novels of Dave Eggers. A second paper based on new forms of anxiety concerning feminism was presented at Oxford University, United Kingdom, 2016. E-mail: [email protected] Adela Livia Catană has a PhD from the University of Bucharest (2015) as well as two Master degrees, one in Modern Languages and another one in American Studies, and a double Bachelor in Foreign Languages and Literatures, and in International Relations. Along her career, Adela Catană has been a visiting researcher in several institutions such as: the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, Free University, Berlin, Germany and University of Glasgow, United Kingdom. Nowadays, she

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is currently working at the Military Technical Academy of Bucharest and her research focuses on English grammar and literature. Her works have been presented in numerous national and international conferences and published by various IDB indexed journals. E-mail: [email protected] Ana-Maria Cornilă Norocea is a PhD student at the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest. Her research field is the analysis of the postwar novels (biofictions and palimtexts) which deal with cultural memory and with the process of reinventing the author and the reader. She graduated the Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest; she has a Bachelor’s Degree in Comparative Literature with the thesis Utopian and Dystopian Morphologies–the Therapeutical and Pathological Imaginary and a Master’s Degree in Comparative Literature with the thesis The Aesthetics of the Invisible. She currently teaches Romanian at “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” National College in Foc‫܈‬ani. Since 2003 she has published over 20 articles on literary theory and criticism in specialized reviews: Limbă Юi literatură (Bucharest), Vatra Veche (Târgu Mure‫)܈‬, Saeculum (Foc‫܈‬ani). She attended the international conference “Territories. Borders. Communities.” (Bucharest 2016) and the colloquy “People, background, object. An introduction into the character’s universe” (Bucharest 2016). E-mail: [email protected] Steliana-Mădălina Deaconu is the Head of the Department of Communication, Foreign Languages and Public Relations, Faculty of Social, Political and Humanistic Sciences, “Titu Maiorescu” University, Bucharest. She graduated the Faculty of Letters (Romanian–English) at the University of Piteúti, 2001, and the Faculty of Economic, Legal and Administrative Sciences at the University of Piteúti, 2007. Her PhD is in Linguistics (2010), and she also has an MA degree in Economics and European Finance (2009). Her research areas include: communication, poetics, cognitive semantics applied on literary corpus. She has participated in national and international conferences and has published articles and books out of which mention should be made of the following: English for IT, “Titu Maiorescu” Publishing House (2011), The English Verb: Theory and Practice. A Grammar Coursebook for IT Students, “Titu Maiorescu” Publishing House (2011), Limbajul artistic în poezia lui Ion Barbu, Ars Docendi Publishing House, University of Bucharest (2009), Semantica simbolului în poezia lui Ion Barbu, Ars Docendi Publishing House, University of Bucharest (2009), The

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Contributors

Deconstructions of Identity and Postmodernist Criticism, “Cartea Universitară” Publishing House (2003). E-mail: [email protected] Iulia Drimala is an English teacher at the “Iulia Haúdeu” National College of Bucharest and a former external collaborator of the University of Agronomic Sciences and Veterinary Medicine of Bucharest and of the Polytechnic University of Bucharest. Between 2009 and 2012 she attended the doctoral programme of the Doctoral School of Languages and Cultural Identities of the University of Bucharest. In 2012 she defended her doctoral thesis entitled The Evolution of English and French Social Rank Terms, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Alexandra Cornilescu (University of Bucharest) and Prof. Dr. Petra Sleeman (University of Amsterdam). Between November 2010 and May 2011 she was a guest researcher at the University of Amsterdam, Holland. Her academic interests are cognitive semantics and historical sociolinguistics. Since 2010 she has participated in several national conferences and has published many articles among which “Patterns of semantic development in the evolution of English and French social rank terms” in Proceedings of the International Conference. Constructions of Identity (VII, Cluj-Napoca, 2014) and “English high rank terms as instances of folk sociology” in Reprezentări ale identităĠii în spaĠiul literar, lingvistic úi cultural edited by Emilia Parpală (Craiova, 2015). E mail: [email protected] Xenia Georgopoulou teaches Shakespeare at the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Athens, Greece. She got her Ǻǹ from the Department of Theatre Studies of the University of Athens, her MA (in Contemporary Practice of Shakespearean Theatre) from the University of Essex, her MPhil in English Literature from The Shakespeare Institute (University of Birmingham), and her PhD in English Literature from the Department of English Language and Literature of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She is author of Issues of Gender in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama [ǽȘIJȒȝĮIJĮ ijȪȜȠȣ ıIJȠ șȑĮIJȡȠ IJȠȣ ȈĮȓȟʌȘȡ țĮȚ IJȘȢ ǹȞĮȖȑȞȞȘıȘȢ] (Athens: Papazisis, 2010) and The Body as Text in Shakespeare’s Plays. The Fashioning of the Sexes (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 2011). Her work deals with Shakespearean and Renaissance drama and her particular interests include issues of gender, otherness, dramatic genre, but also Shakespearean adaptations and references in modern popular culture. E-mail: [email protected]

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Milica Grujiþiü is a volunteering research associate at the Austrian Academy of Science. She holds an MA Degree in Comparative Literature with focus on the South-East-European and Germanspeaking area. She is about to defend her PhD thesis on Migration Literature at the University Friedrich-Schiller, Jena, Germany. From 2011 until 2016 she was a DFG scholar at the same university. Her areas of interest include Literature of Migration, German-speaking Literature, South-East-European Literature as well as methods for teaching German as Foreign Language. E-mail: [email protected] Emilia Parpală is Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, Romania. Her academic interests include stylistics, poetics, semiotics, imagology and verbal communication. Her first book, Poetics of Tudor Arghezi. Semiotic Models and Text Types (in Romanian), Bucharest, 1984, pioneered the practice of generative poetics in Romania. Semiotic Poetry. The Generation of the Eighties (in Romanian), 1994, based on the idea of isomorphism between theory and literary practice, was reconsidered in the fourteen articles of her volume Romanian Poetic Postmodernism. A Semio-pragmatic Perspective which she edited in 2011, as a result of a research project she coordinated between 2009–2011. She is the author of four theoretical syntheses on stylistics (1998, 2005, 2006), poetics (1998), general semiotics (2007) and verbal communication (2009). Since 2008 she has coordinated an international conference in Craiova and edited ten volumes of its proceedings. She has published more than 100 articles in scholarly journals in Romania and abroad (by De Gruyter, John Benjamins, Mimesis, Salamanca University Press and others). She is the vice-president of the Romanian Association for Semiotic Studies (ROASS) and a member of the Romanian Writers’ Union. In 2015 she was co-editor (with Leo Loveday) of Contextual Identities: A Comparative and Communicational Approach appearing with Cambridge Scholars Publishing and in which her research on “Speech Acts in Postmodern Poetry” appears. In 2016 she co-edited with Leo Loveday Ways of Being in Literary and other Cultural Spaces with Cambridge Scholars Publishing. E-mail: [email protected] Eleni Pilla completed her PhD in Shakespeare on Screen at Royal Holloway (University of London) in 2006. She also holds an MA in Shakespeare Studies (Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham)

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Contributors

and a BA in English Language and Literature (University of Cyprus) with Distinction. She has designed and taught courses in Shakespeare, Theatre Studies, and English Poetry, at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels at Northern Arizona University, Goldsmiths, Royal Holloway, University of Cyprus, and the Open University of Cyprus. She has published articles on theatrical and screen adaptations of Shakespeare, space in literature and film and the translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets into Greek. Her research has been presented at international interdisciplinary conferences. She currently works as a Cultural Officer in European Affairs at the Cultural Services of the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Cyprus. E-mail: [email protected] Carmen Popescu is Senior Lecturer, PhD, at The Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova. She is the author of the book Scriiturile diferenаei. Intertextualitatea parodică în literatura română contemporană (2006) which is based on her doctoral dissertation. She has also published the book Intertextualitatea Юi paradigma dialogică a comparatismului (2016). She has edited a volume of conference proceedings entitled Comparatism, identitate, comunicare / Comparativism, identity, communication (2012) and has co-edited other volumes of conference proceedings as well as a collective volume. She has published many articles and chapters in books, both in Romania and abroad. Between 2008 and 2011 she was a member in a research project dedicated to the study of postmodernist poetry from a semio-pragmatic and cognitive perspective. Her research interests are: world literature and comparative literature, Romanian literature, intertextuality, dialogism and literary communication. E-mail: [email protected] Maher Fawzi Taher is a PhD student at the Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, Romania. His research project is Veiling and Unveiling Identities: Cultural Negotiation in the Works in English of Selected Anglophone Arab and Muslim Women Writers. Maher Fawzi has an MA in English from SHIATS University of Allahabad, UP, India (2011), and BA in English from the College of Education for Humanities of the University of Babylon, Hillah, Iraq (2006). He participated as teacher in secondary school for two years in Babylon, Iraq (2007–2008) and as a university professor for one year in Al-Hilla Jamia university An-Najaf Al-Ashraf, Iraq (2013). He worked as Manager of International Marketing of ASIAN Hospital, New Delhi,

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India and facilitator of the Iraqi patients for two years (2013-2015). His research interests include: Identity studies, Arabic literature in English, Diaspora Studies. He is equally interested in the study of organs of speech and Phonetics Science. E-mail: [email protected] Alina ğenescu is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Letters, University of Craiova, Romania. She holds a BA (French major–English minor) and a BSc in Communication and Public Relations. She also holds two MA degrees (in French literature and Intercultural communication) and one MSc degree in Business management and communication. She defended her PhD thesis, The non-places in Francophone mediatic literature–the example of Frédéric Beigbeder, in 2008. Her postdoctoral research focused on the perception and representation of space and place in postmodern Francophone literature. Her areas of interest include contemporary French and Francophone literature, the semiotics of space, cognitive metaphors in literature and media discourse, discourse analysis, the anthropology of supermodernity, mass and intercultural communication among others. She has participated in international and national research projects dealing with the analysis of manuscripts from Belgian Francophone Literature, on the semiopragmatic and cognitive aspects of postmodern Romanian poetry and on intercultural communication issues in cross-border areas. She is a member of AEEF (European Association of Francophone Studies) and AFJSC (Association of Trainers in Journalism and Communication). In 2015 she edited the volume Identity and Discursive Variation (in Romanian). E-mail: [email protected]

INDEX A Aboulela, Leila 7, 105, 106 Abu-Jaber, Diana 7, 105, 106 action 2, 3, 20, 31, 39, 46, 52, 73, 84, 112 addressivity 3 Adler, Peter 1, 3, 11 Adorno, Theodor W. 46, 53 ambiguity 8, 22, 28, 45, 50, 97, 99, 100, 188, 195 analysis 5, 6, 10, 22, 40, 55, 81, 90, 110, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 127, 136, 147, 157, 167, 178, 181, 201, 211, 215, 219 comparative analysis 8 Critical Discourse Analysis 3, 12, 14 interdisciplinary analysis 10 semantic analysis 119 anthropology 2, 3, 66, 200, 214, 219 structuralist anthropology 66 Arghezi, Tudor 151, 152, 154, 155, 217 Aristotle 56, 58, 197, 216 authenticity 1, 5, 204, 205 author 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 17, 22, 24, 29, 33, 44, 45, 72, 81, 83, 87, 92, 94, 96, 97, 105, 106, 114, 115, 117, 122, 128, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 143, 182, 183, 184, 195, 202, 208, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218 B Bachelard, Gaston 10, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 179 Bakhtin, M.M. 2, 3, 11, 103, 107, 135, 144, 181, 196

Barbu, Ion 122, 153, 154, 155 Barthes, Roland 9, 12, 165 Bhabha, Homi 97, 107 Bianco, Marcie 4, 12 Bible 64, 190, 195, 196 Biblical stories 188 blackness 20, 23, 24, 26, 28 Blaga, Lucian 149, 150, 151, 154, 155 Blake, William 7, 53, 55, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65 Bloom, Harold 53, 124, 132, 182, 196 Bodrožiü, Marica 5, 81, 82, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 body 10, 21, 24, 45, 61, 62, 134, 150, 161, 193, 208 female body 6, 43 boundary 5, 66, 84, 88, 90, 92, 104, 170 Burke, Peter J. and Jan E. Stets 1, 12 C Cairns, Scott 8, 181, 182, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 198 Calinescu, Matei 139, 144 cannibalism 72, 73 Caplan, Pat 66, 68, 70, 74, 78 character 1, 4, 6, 11, 22, 23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 43, , 48, 49, 50, 52, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 75, 76, 83, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 97, 103, 113, 123, 124, 126, 129, 131, 140, 146, 147, 151, 154, 157, 163, 166, 167, 168, 170, 171, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 185, 195, 201, 202, 204, 208, 209, 215

Signs of Identity: Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices female character 36 China 123, 130 Christianity 57, 96, 126, 186, 188, 191 Eastern Orthodox Christianity 182 city 10, 11, 31, 38, 60, 64, 69, 76, 105, 177, 200, 201, 202, 209, 210, 211 cloth 52, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 closing 157, 158, 159, 160, 162, 163 Medieval closing 9, 158, 160 code 6, 38, 50, 151, 191 clothing code 9 gastronomy code 10 literary code 2, 8 social code 35, 138 spacial code 4 Coetzee, J.M. 8, 136, 144 colonialism 7, 77, 79, 95, 96, 97, 99, 103, 104, 123 post-colonialism / postcolonialism 7, 95, 97, 98, 100, 213 communication 1, 2, 6, 11, 88, 120, 140, 147, 180, 181, 183, 198, 201, 208, 215, 217, 218, 219 communicational criticism 6, 14, 198 intercultural communication 219 literary communication 2, 140, 181, 201, 218 transpersonal poetic communication 198 verbal communication 11, 217 comparison 3, 104, 122, 126, 130, 181, 189, 198, 203 comparatist method 10 comparativism 4, 11, 181, 218 comparative methodology 9, 122, 123, 131 Confucianism 126, 130, 214 Cosgrove, Denis 166, 179

221

construction 1, 3, 6, 9, 11, 40, 51, 86, 98, 104, 111, 118, 119, 120, 123, 137, 146, 148, 166, 216 deconstruction 1, 92, 194, 195, 216 light verb constructions 9, 110, 111, 116, 120, 214 meaning construction 155 reconstruction 4, 7, 18, 21, 81 context 2, 3,7, 9, 11, 39, 44, 54, 57, 67, 70, 72, 73, 78, 89, 93, 98, 102, 103, 104, 115, 116, 120, 123, 125, 127, 128, 140, 146, 154, 166, 168, 192 contextual identities 13, 198, 217 referential context 9 social context 104 symbolic context 127 Couliano, Ioan Petru 224, 239 creativity 7, 8, 11, 136, 137, 148, 205, 211 creolisation 5, 91, 92 culture 1, 3, 9, 11, 12, 18, 31, 37, 41, 52, 77, 82, 83, 86, 92, 95, 96, 98, 99, 101, 104, 105, 106, 107, 128, 129, 130, 142, 149, 169, 170, 191, 196, 203, 212, 216, 218 Cultural Studies 3, 9, 94, 122, 214 European culture 11, 76 subculture 66, 170 Western culture 37, 40, 122, 130 multicultural 1, 6, 83, 101 multiculturalism 11, 97, 213 D Dahlgren, Kathleen 157, 158, 165 Davidson, Michael 10, 117, 121, 134, 135, 144 Davies, Andrew 10, 21, 27, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 176, 177, 178, 179

Index

222 de Certeau, Michel 10, 102, 107, 166, 167, 169, 177, 179 Derrida, Jacques 3, 141 dialectics of outside and inside 168, 170, 173, 176, 178, 179 dialogue 6, 8, 12, 14, 56, 83, 132, 133, 135, 167, 170, 172, 176, 181, 182, 185, 187, 188, 199 dialogic(al) 2, 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 135, 144, 181, 182, 184, 185, 187, 188, 195, 196, 198, 218 dialogism 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 181, 185, 186, 195, 218 intertextual dialogism 8 diaspora 6, 95, 101, 105, 106, 107, 219 difference 2, 7, 8, 9, 23, 25, 27, 31, 37, 46, 51, 61, 66, 68, 69, 70, 74, 76, 79, 93, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 107, 112, 118, 123, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131, 139, 159, 160, 182, 185, 194, 195, 198, 205 semantic difference 8, 182, 195 discourse 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 75, 77, 79, 83, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103, 107, 120, 135, 139, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 149, 154, 182, 195, 200, 202, 212, 219 metadiscourse 8, 13 performative discourse 4 doubleness 19, 96 Du Bois, W.E.B. 5, 18, 19, 21, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29 Duby, Georges 44, 53 dystopia 10, 200, 201, 202, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 215 E Eisenstadt, Shmuel, Noah 9, 122, 124, 125, 126, 127, 131, 132 Eliade, Mircea 195, 197 Engel, Vincent 10, 202, 203, 204, 211

English 9, 33, 46, 58, 64, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 79, 100, 105, 106, 110, 111, 112, 113, 120, 121, 138, 144, 157, 158, 159, 160, 164, 165, 166, 180, 202, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 219 enunciation 98, 151, 152, 192, 195 Europe 4, 5, 31, 58, 63, 78, 81, 82, 83, 86, 92, 93, 102, 127 South-Eastern and Western Europe 5, 92 Eurocentric 123 Eurocentrism 102 European 5, 7, 11, 37, 43, 57, 71, 76, 81, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 99, 102, 122, 123, 124, 130, 144, 214, 215, 217, 218, 219 F Fairclough, Norman 3, 12 Fauconnier, Gilles 147, 155 Federman, Ray 137, 144 feminism 36, 40, 107, 108, 213, 214 feminist movement 6, 36 fiction 8, 12, 20, 22, 28, 29, 30, 34, 35, 39, 40, 41, 46, 50, 93, 104, 136, 143, 180, 199, 200, 201, 202, 209 critifiction 144 postmodern fiction 202 science fiction 208 fictional 2, 5, 19, 32, 36, 97, 201, 208 fictional characters 11, 195 fictional discourse 2, 141, 143 fictional identity 3 fictional selves 4, 15 fictional space 202 fictional worlds 139 Flaubert, Gustave 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 Florescu, Cătălin Dorian 5, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 90, 92, 93 Fokkema, Douwe 137, 138, 144, 181, 197

Signs of Identity: Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices food 10, 11, 13, 58, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 87 Foucault, Michel 3, 6, 166, 200, 202, 212 freedom 5, 6, 7, 16, 18, 21, 22, 28, 33, 36, 37, 38, 45, 50, 52, 58, 61, 140, 177, 210, 211 Friedrich, Hugo, 146, 147, 155, 217 G Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar 9, 122, 128, 132 Genette, Gérard 181, 189, 194, 197 genre 5, 11, 17, 21, 22, 23, 25, 30, 107, 134, 137, 184, 216 God 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 69, 73, 124, 148, 149, 153, 170, 183, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 195 H Habermas, Jürgen 123, 132 Hall, Stuart 1, 12 hauntology 141, 142 happiness 37, 38, 39, 50, 59, 62, 64, 89, 90, 210 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 45, 47, 48, 49, 53, 54 hermeticism 153 heterotopia(s) 10, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 208, 211, 212 Hughes, Geoffrey 19, 20, 29, 158, 165 hybridity 1, 3, 7, 102, 104, 108 I identity 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 31, 37, 57, 66, 67, 70, 71, 76, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 124, 126, 137,

223

138, 139, 191, 195, 202, 213, 216, 218, 219 identity construction 86 collective identity 1, 4, 5, 81, 83, 92, 124 cultural identity 1, 8, 11, 12, 14 discursive identity 3 ethnic identity 1, 4, 103 fictional identity 3 gender identity 1, 6 group identity 1, 9 personal identity 1 racial identity 1, 13, 213 religious identity 1, 70 role identity 1 social identity 1 spatial identity 10, 202 image 2, 6, 10, 11, 27, 32, 37, 40, 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 54, 57, 58, 60, 61, 63, 73, 76, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 92, 139, 142, 168, 169, 174, 178, 186, 187, 192, 197, 202, 205, 206, 207, 208, 211 image studies 4 afterimage 10, 142 digital image 208 literary image 92 public image 52 self-image 37 imagination 8, 49, 56, 102, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 201 indeterminacy 2, 11, 25, 50 indeterminacy of signs 2 India 99, 100, 101, 129, 130, 213, 218 individuality 39, 83, 90 intertext 137, 184, 186, 188, 195 intertextuality 3, 103, 137, 181, 182, 189, 218 J Jakobson, Roman 146, 155 Japan 123, 126, 127, 132, 214 Joseph, John 1, 4, 8, 13

Index

224 K Kaplan, Cora 7, 98, 107 katabasis 8, 184, 187, 189, 191, L Lakoff G. & M. Johnson 147, 155, 202, 212 language 1, 2, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 19, 23, 54, 66, 88, 93, 98, 100, 101, 103, 108, 111, 120, 121, 135, 137, 146, 149, 154, 155, 175, 179, 188, 193, 199, 213, 214, 216, 217, 218 heteroglossia 103, 135 poetic language 149, 154, 155 Larchet, Jean-Claude 185, 187, 197 Leen, Gerri 10, 202, 208, 209, 211 Lefebvre, Henri 10, 102, 166, 167, 169, 171, 172, 175, 180 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 66, 79 linguistics 3, 199, 215 cognitive linguistics 149 literary linguistics 199 linguistics semantics 216 sociolinguistics 216 literature 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 17, 21, 27, 32, 43, 45, 46, 49, 52, 54, 56, 64, 70, 78, 81, 95, 97, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 108, 119, 122, 129, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 154, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 195, 197, 198, 202, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217, 218, 219 Arab Anglophone literature 7 world literature 8, 183, 195, 196, 198, 218 interliterariness 4, 12 literary constructions 92 Lotman, Juri 5, 81, 82, 92, 94 Loveday, Leo 3, 13, 198, 202, 212, 217

M Memmi, Albert 7, 97, 98, 99, 107 memory 8, 60, 117, 136, 137, 138, 139, 141, 142, 144, 189, 201, 212, 215 cultural memory 8, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 143, 144, 215 metanoia 187, 191 metaphor 7, 8, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 67, 69, 73, 75, 76, 102, 107, 135, 146, 147, 149, 150, 154, 155, 181, 183, 187, 189, 207, 211, 212, 219 cognitive metaphor 155, 219 conceptual metaphor 211 Conceptual Metaphor Theory 147 metaphoric mapping 7, 147, 154 revelatory metaphor 149 symbolic metaphor 149, 151 method 3, 7, 10, 61, 84, 91, 124, 126, 129, 130, 147, 154, 198, 203, 219 methodology 9, 122, 123, 131, 181 Mey, Jacob L. 220, 240 Miloi, Ionu‫ ܊‬138, 145 mimesis 137, 217 model 2, 12, 17, 21, 41, 51, 81, 102, 125, 127, 128, 136, 137, 138, 149, 152, 155, 182, 187, 192, 195, 203, 217 Western model 130 modernism 5, 12, 42, 53, 151, 154, 155 modernities 9, 122, 125, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132 multiple modernities 9, 125 modernity / Modernity 9, 12, 51, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 182, 212, 214 Western Modernity 9, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131

Signs of Identity: Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices modernization 122, 123, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129 Monroe, N. Elizabeth 33, 35, 42 Monte, Michèle 233, 240 Moraru, Christian 136, 138, 145 Moriarty, Michael E. 237, 240 myth 28, 56, 83, 103, 139, 183, 184, 185, 187, 189, 192, 193, 194, 195, 197 mythology 6, 43, 44, 46, 52, 79, 183 N narrator 19, 28, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 92, 105, 190, 192, 205, 206, 207, 210 archetypal narratives 187 narrative strategies 11 narrative worlds 5, 81, 92 Neill, Michael 213, 214, 216, 218 nominalization 110, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 213 novel 5, 6, 7, 8, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 33, 34, 36, 40, 41, 43, 44, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 95, 101, 105, 106, 118, 134, 139, 141, 142, 143, 201, 202, 205, 209, 214, 215 O Occident 98, 132 ontology 7, 13, 141 Orgel, Stephen 84, 86, 93, 96, 97 Orient 88, 98, 99, 132 Orientalism 88, 94, 99, 108 Orthodoxy 186, 188 Other 8, 11, 19, 24, 34, 58, 72, 80, 99, 102, 107, 108, 138, 140, 144, 177 otherness 1, 2, 3, 96, 97, 99, 131, 139, 171, 182, 200, 202, 216

225

Ovid 12, 56, 225, 234, 238 P palimpsest 3, 8, 10, 135, 136, 181, 182, 184, 186, 188, 189, 191, 194, 195, 197 palimtext 8, 9, 134, 135, 136, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 215 Papadima, Liviu 140, 143, 144, 145, 197 Parpală, Emilia 3, 4, 13, 151, 152, 155, 181, 198, 202, 212, 216, 217 passing 2, 5, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 89, 203 passing for white 5, 16, 17, 19 Peirce, C.S. 2, 13 performativity 4, 11 Plato 56, 57, 58, 64 Neoplatonism 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64 Plotinus 56, 58, 63, 65 poem 34, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 182, 185, 186, 188, 192, 194, 195, 210 poet 7, 8, 28, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 146, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 168, 182, 183, 184, 185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 193, 194, 196 poetics 5, 7, 138, 147, 149, 151, 152, 153, 168, 183, 184, 215, 217 poetry 35, 55, 57, 64, 146, 147, 148, 152, 154, 182, 183, 188, 196, 218, 219 British Romantic poetry 55 Christian Orthodox poetry 198 modern poetry 7, 134, 144, 146, 147, 148, 155 postmodern poetry 198, 217, 219

Index

226 semiotic poetry 217 polyphony 8, 11, 13, 135, 182 polysemy 10, 115, 135 Popescu, Carmen 3, 8, 13, 181, 188, 198, 218 postcolonial 6, 7, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 194, 213 postcolonialism 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 213 postmodern 2, 3, 10, 95, 100, 136, 144, 145, 188, 194, 195, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 208, 211, 212, 217, 218, 219 postmodernism 188, 217 post-postmodernist 8, 196 power 9, 11, 12, 32, 36, 38, 40, 41, 47, 57, 61, 63, 79, 96, 98, 152, 160, 162, 169, 170, 171, 172, 175, 178, 179, 210, 211 pragmaticism 2 promiscuity 6, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 52, 53 protagonist 5, 16, 26, 28, 32, 41, 47, 74, 83, 89, 90, 92, 101, 105, 183, 190, 192, 209 R race 3, 4, 5, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 79, 98, 167, 172, 175, 179 racism 18 reader 6, 8, 10, 16, 17, 21, 23, 25, 27, 33, 36, 37, 41, 50, 55, 82, 85, 86, 88, 98, 101, 104, 137, 139, 140, 142, 143, 148, 151, 153, 185, 202, 203, 204, 208, 209, 211, 215 reference 7, 11, 59, 63, 67, 68, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 86, 87, 89, 96, 123, 128, 131, 134, 141, 143, 166, 167, 182, 186, 190, 194, 200, 216 referent 8, 96, 137, 139, 141, 146 self-referential 3, 106

representation 1, 4, 5, 10, 11, 18, 43, 45, 63, 86, 123, 149, 158, 168, 171, 173, 179, 189, 192, 200, 201, 202, 213, 219 restructuring 9, 110, 118, 119, 120 rewriting 3, 8, 9, 10, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 167, 168, 181, 185, 189, 194, 195, 197 Rihani, Ameen 7, 95, 105, 106, 107 rite 75, 178 ritual 153, 184 Romanian 7, 9, 84, 110, 111, 113, 117, 118, 120, 138, 139, 143, 146, 147, 148, 153, 154, 180, 213, 215, 217, 218, 219 S Said, Edward 88, 94, 97, 99, 104, 108, 131 satire 22, 26, 27, 28, 34 satirical novel, 26 Schmidt, Volker H. 9, 122, 125, 126, 127, 129, 131, 132 Schuyler, George 5, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30 Sell, Roger, D. 6, 14, 181, 198 semiosis 2, 11, 83, 87, 89, 91, 92 semiosphere 5, 11, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 91, 92 semiotic 1, 2, 3, 5, 11, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 147 semiotic space 83, 86, 88 semiotic system 83 sexuality 6, 41, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52, 53, 54, 62 Shakespeare 10, 11, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 141, 144, 166, 167, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180, 216, 217, 218 Shuming, Liang 122, 130, 132

Signs of Identity: Literary Constructs and Discursive Practices sign 1, 2, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 20, 26, 28, 29, 48, 83, 98, 136, 140, 147, 148, 194, 195 rhetoric of the sign 1 signs of identity 1 signification 2, 135, 168 sociology 18, 29, 66, 77, 131, 132, 216 space 2, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 28, 50, 82, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 98, 100, 102, 104, 122, 123, 124, 131, 139, 142, 143, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 188, 200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211, 214, 218, 219 blended space 7, 149, 150 city space 10, 211 digital space 205, 206 mental space 149 metaphorical spaces 83 urban space 10, 202, 208, 211 spaces other 10, 200 spatial turn 10, 166 Stepto, Robert, B. 21, 30 strategy 1, 17, 21, 102, 135, 139, 173, 178, 181, 182, 194 style 4, 11, 23, 32, 104, 149, 164, 203 lifestyle 3, 9, 47, 164 subjectivity 3, 6, 8, 10, 13, 102, 166, 171, 172, 173, 179, 180, 192, 195, 198 Sumptuary Laws 9, 160 symbol 6, 11, 22, 25, 27, 32, 37, 47, 60, 62, 96, 103, 104, 148, 154, 157, 159, 161, 162, 163, 164, 177 T televisual adaptation 10, 167, 176, 177, 178

227

term 1, 9, 10, 17, 18, 21, 44, 45, 46, 48, 55, 56, 57, 61, 66, 68, 75, 83, 90, 95, 96, 100, 103, 104, 110, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 134, 135, 136, 137, 142, 146, 154, 157, 158, 165, 167, 171, 176, 177, 178, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 191, 200, 201, 216 medieval social rank terms 157 suitcase terms 10 text 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 22, 23, 55, 66, 71, 82, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 93, 98, 100, 102, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 167, 176, 177, 178, 181, 182, 185, 188, 190, 194, 195 avant-texte 7 hypertext 7, 191 hyper and digital texts 207 hypertextuality 181 hypotext 8, 137, 184, 189, 195 palimtext 8, 9, 10, 134, 135, 136, 140, 141 theme 4, 5, 11, 17, 21, 23, 34, 40, 55, 58, 63, 76, 117, 119, 126, 146, 167, 176, 183, 184, 185 theory 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 28, 40, 53, 54, 63, 102, 103, 107, 110, 119, 124, 125, 127, 128, 129. 137, 147, 149, 154, 155, 158, 180, 215, 217 linguistic theory 121, 165 Mental Space Theory 7, 147 multiple modernities theory 128, 129 postcolonial theory 7, 104, 107 poststructuralist theory 182 semantic theory 110 sintactic theory 110 theory of terminology 9 Todorov, Tzvetan 23, 30 Todorova, Marija 83, 94 Tournier Michel 8, 144

Index

228 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe 10, 202, 205, 206, 207, 211 transitivity 3 troparion, 186, 191 Troyanov, Iliya 5, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93 Tenescu, Alina 10, 200, 212, 219 V Van Dijk, Teun A. 3, 14 verb 9, 11, 23, 93, 101, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 181, 186, 213, 214, 215, 217 lexical verb 9, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 120 light verb 9, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 213, 214 Vergil 12, 223, 224, 229, 230, 231, 232, 233, 234, 236, 238 W way(s) of being 1, 3, 13, 212, 217 Western 5, 9, 40, 64, 72, 82, 87, 88, 90, 91, 92, 99, 106, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 131, 184, 194 Western Europe 5, 82, 83, 88, 90, 92, 127

Western rationalism and scientism 130 Wharton, Edith 6, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42 woman 6, 11, 16, 20, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54, 63, 73, 74, 75, 76, 78, 105, 106, 159, 175, 163, 183, 193, 202, 205, 208, 209, 211, 213 New Woman 6, 32, 41 word 1, 2, 4, 7, 13, 17, 39, 46, 48, 50, 55, 57, 58, 59, 66, 67, 69, 71, 76, 84, 85, 86, 90, 100, 103, 106, 111, 116, 120, 134, 135, 144, 146, 148, 157, 158, 165, 169, 170, 171, 175, 176, 178, 186, 187, 188, 196, 205, 210 wreader 10, 142 writer 1, 4, 6, 10, 16, 17, 23, 24, 25, 26, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 49, 58, 63, 72, 79, 95, 96, 97, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 134, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 180, 183, 188, 191, 201, 202, 203, 217, 218 Z Zamyatin, Yevgeny 10, 202, 209, 210, 211