Symbolism 16 9783110465938, 9783110462524

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Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Editorial Board Heinz Antor ‧ Susan Bassnett ‧ Daniela Carpi ‧ Marc Chénetier ‧ Cristina Giorcelli Yasmine Gooneratne ‧ Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht ‧ María Herrera-Sobek Linda Hutcheon ‧ Eva-Marie Kroeller ‧ Francisco A. Lomelí ‧ Susana Onega Frédéric Regard ‧ Kiernan Ryan ‧ Ronald Shusterman ‧ Stefanos Stefanides Toshiyuki Takamiya ‧ Richard H. Weisberg ‧ Walther Chr. Zimmerli

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 16 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Kläger and Klaus Stierstorfer

ISBN 978-3-11-046252-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-046593-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-046590-7 ISSN 1528-3623 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Konrad Triltsch, Print und digitale Medien GmbH, Ochsenfurt Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck ♾ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors This year’s volume of Symbolism presents a regional focus on symbolic forms: Keith Sandiford has brought together an impressive group of scholars exploring signifying practices in the Caribbean. Placing an emphasis on contemporary modes of expression, but always with a view to their historical origins and trajectories, contributors to this special focus consider such varied fields of symbolism as literature, the visual arts, song, architecture, and other cultural media and codes. In its breadth and richness, this collection of essays will certainly stimulate further research into the complex symbolic networks of the Caribbean and their relevance for the discourse on symbolism, especially its bearings on the development of regional, gendered, and diasporic identities. “Caribbean Symbolic Forms” is an admirable specimen of the kind of pioneering interdisciplinary research that Symbolism aims to facilitate. Opening the general section, Kristen Deiter offers a penetrating analysis of symbolism used in various commemorations of the New York terror attacks of September 11, 2001, by way of response to Ursula Hennigfeld’s contribution on 9/11 novels (Symbolism 14). Jack Stewart’s analysis of A. S. Byatt’s “Cold” likewise connects with the author’s own earlier contributions on Byatt to Symbolism 8 and 11. Michael T. Smith and Timothy Collins both focus on the psychoanalytical dimension of symbolism in their Lacanian readings of semiotic practices in Joyce and Poe, offering reflections on the annual’s main concern from a perspective that has, unduly, not often featured in recent years. In a programmatic assessment of academic anthropological practice, Amba J. Sepie identifies desiderata in the discipline’s theorization of symbols on its way towards decolonization. Next to a number of individual book reviews, this year’s general section also returns to Symbolism’s tradition of review essays, offering three surveys of recent publications on the lyrical elegy, comics and graphic novels, and astropoetics. As Symbolism continues to attract stimulating research from across the world, the editors take pleasure in welcoming Florian Kläger, the annual’s assistant editor since 2008, as co-editor. For her meticulous work on the volume’s index, thanks are due to Chris Wahlig at the University of Münster, and to Stella Diedrich at De Gruyter for her patience and support. Rüdiger Ahrens University of Würzburg

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Florian Kläger University of Bayreuth

Table of Contents Foreword from the Editors

V

Special Focus: Caribbean Symbolic Forms Corresponding editor: Keith Sandiford Keith A. Sandiford Introduction: Caribbean Symbolic Forms

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María de Jesús Cordero An ‘Altermodern’ Reading of Ermán González’s Relicarios: 15 The Flight of the Sign and the Artist as Semionaut Sarah Senk Mourning’s Spiral: Trauma, Time, and Memory in Derek Walcott’s Omeros

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Maryam Farahani The Case of Melancholy Metaesthetics: Reading Teresa de Los Andes and Caribbean Lamentation Narratives

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Supriya Nair Defying Social Death: Magic, Medicine, and Masquerade in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable

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Paul Griffith Spiritual Adventure through Song

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Mario Nisbett African Diasporic Traditional Symbols and Claims: The Case of the Maroons 117 Chérif Saloum Diatta Earl Lovelace and Caribbean Gender Symbolic Forms: Revisiting Masculinity and Reconstructing National Identities

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Table of Contents

Henning Marquardt Familial Spaces: ‘Yard’ and ‘Matrifocal Family’ in Pre-Independence Jamaican Literature Paula Saunders The ‘Janet House’: An Endangered Vernacular House Form in Grenada

General Section Kristen Deiter Symbolic Buildings and Conceptual Blends: How The Concert for New York City and 209 9/11 Poetry Humanized the Twin Towers Jack Stewart Byatt’s “Cold”: A Marriage of Fire and Ice

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Michael T. Smith The Dedalus Complex: A Lacanian Analysis of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 251 Timothy Collins Metaphor in the Text of Psychoanalysis: Lacan, Poe and the Poetic Symbol 271 Amba J. Sepie Symbolic Malfunctions and the Failure of Nerve: Heretical Anthropology 295 Book Reviews

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List of Contributors Index

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Special Focus: Caribbean Symbolic Forms Corresponding editor: Keith Sandiford

Keith A. Sandiford

Introduction: Caribbean Symbolic Forms Ubiquitous in nature and culture, symbols by broad consensus across disparate fields of human knowledge are held to derive their genesis with the evolutionary history of the human race. The taxonomic category homo significans identifies members of our species as expressive and communicating subjects with language, a highly sophisticated symbolic system, one of the principal tools with which we perform these functions. With the tools of language and other systems like it, we imagine and invent the codes by which to name objects in our world, develop the social practices on which our communities are founded and function, and enunciate the rules by which our societal institutions are ordered. This is an evolutionary and dynamic process defined by social theorists as creating the world and instituting the “social imaginary” from the presentation of the social-historical world. Both Foucault and Castoriadis agree that these practices are mediated by symbols which come to be embodied in the institutions of law, economy, religion and the like.¹ Two persistent themes that run through the ontogenesis/historicity of symbols and symbolism are inseparability and indispensability. In the philosophical and imaginative system of the Caribbean author Wilson Harris, the legacy of inseparability is traced back to “our symbolic maps, bodily prejudices, the houses of superstition in which we dwell.”² Symbols in this formulation, then, would appear to be the gene pool of signifiers we inherit from the past which, in Salma Bannouri’s interpretation of Harris, we continue to tap for meaning throughout our life cycle in “an active process of selecting, [of] sifting through […] the [contents of the] load.”³ If symbols are indivisible from our moral consciousness, they are also indispensable to our behavior as social beings, to the way we constitute social order, and to the way we shape cultural and ontological concepts.⁴  Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, ): ; Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, ): .  Wilson Harris, Palace of the Peacock (London: Faber and Faber, ): .  Salma Bannouri, Consumption of Bias and Rep[e]tition as a Revisionary Strategies [sic] in Palace of the Peacock and in the Thought of Wilson Harris (MA Thesis, University of Montréal, Département d’Études Anglaises, ): ; (acc. March , ).  Rory Ryan, “Towards a Geography of the Symbolic,” Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies . ():  – , ; see also Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, ): . DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-001

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In the Caribbean contexts in which this volume was conceived and produced, symbols bear a particular relation to the region’s history of political oppression, unequal power distribution, and resistance to those social and economic arrangements that shaped the region’s cultures, its world view, and the ways the world has come to view its people. Symbols grant legitimacy to dominant groups, to segregate and categorize subordinate groups.⁵ The different groups positioned along the axes of power in the historical Caribbean have projected their positionalities with symbols of real power and symbols of powerlessness. The slavocratic elites deployed these symbols through the architectural symbolism of the Big House, through their alignment with forces of law (militias, unequal access to justice, the power to discipline and punish), through ownership of slaves and their labor power. For plantation and postcolonial elites, the trappings of state power and the accumulation and distribution of wealth would be the categorical symbols by which these classes create and control power. The slaves’ powerlessness was figured both negatively and positively. Loss of cultural identities, reduction to the status of objects, alienation from the value of their labor, subjection to the rigors of whippings, the rack, rape, and murder were some of the negative conditions that carried their own symbolic relations. Even the ostensibly politically powerless may seize resources to subvert the systems and symbols that hold them in thrall. In the case of Caribbean peoples, they have historically appropriated, attacked or destroyed the symbols of their oppression: by arson and poison, by dance, song and other performance rituals which interrogate and resist hegemonic power, and by socially subversive practices, rites and ceremonies (marronage, obeah, vodun) which destabilized slave society, and in certain cases continue to subvert the power structures, while affording the subordinate classes resources for political organization and for communal and spiritual sustenance. Symbols define reality, conferring power on those who create and control the systems in which the symbols are reproduced, and may exercise power to circumscribe the existence of the subordinated groups.⁶ These dialectical power relations not only highlight the hegemonic designs of colonial politics; they also produce effects that have been established as the constitutive elements of and descriptive terms for Caribbean cultures. Nobel laureate, poet, playwright and

 Cynthia Fuchs Epstein finds consistent articulation for these functions in the work of both Foucault and Bourdieu. Her discussion also includes the implication of symbols with coercive violence; see Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, “Tinkerbells and Pinups,” in Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality, eds. Michele Lamont and Marcel Fournier (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ):  – , .  Fuchs Epstein extends these relations in “Tinkerbells and Pinups,” .

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St Lucian-born intellectual Derek Walcott has minted from his imagination the figures of fragments and shards to represent the violent explosive effects of deracination and invasion that have been the formative conditions of the colonial Caribbean.⁷ The inherent logics of these terms have traditionally invoked a vision of irremediable loss that haunts the Caribbean moral imagination. Such a permanent construction of loss tends to legitimize an ethics of nostalgia, mourning and melancholy which, without the right symbols of healing and restoration, could be fatalistic and disabling. In this volume Sarah Senk’s essay explores Walcott’s aesthetic and philosophical (sometimes polemical) pursuit of symbolic strategies for surviving these traumas. “Fragments of memory” and “shards of a huge tribal vocabulary” are Walcott’s terms that call our attention to the symbolic archaeology of cultural formation and are suggestive for understanding the role of creative minds in gathering and piecing together the vibrant and viable organisms that are Caribbean peoples and the societies they have built. Instead of an obsessive preoccupation with the traumatic social and psychological residues of loss, the creative forces of history and intercultural relationships have produced in the region the social and symbolic values of multi-ethnicity. The obvious and subtle manifestations of interracial mixing symbolize themselves on the visages, the skin colors, the vocal timbres of speech and music, the distinctive habitus of acts and symbols. In a formulation that is remarkable for its veracity, as for its irony and wit, Daniel J. Crowley inscribes this observation in the record of the region’s persistent practices of connectedness and transferability: “A Trinidadian feels no inconsistency in being a British citizen, a Negro in appearance, a Spaniard in name, a Roman catholic at church, an obeah practitioner in private, a Hindu at lunch, a Chinese at dinner, a Portuguese at work and a coloured at the polls.”⁸ The signifiers of mixtures and cultural diversity in identity, customs, and social practices contained in the foregoing definitions are symbols of the operations of some processes defined by traditional terms like metissage, creolization, and transculturation. But now they are often being folded into and subsumed by the complicated concept of hybridity. This concept is now increasingly being deployed to label the experiences and performances of racial, class, sexual and gender identities, but also of discourses concerned with theorizing anticolonial politics, postcolonial nationalisms, and diasporic imaginaries  Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory,” Nobel Lecture (December , ) (acc. March , ).  Daniel J. Crowley, “Plural and Differential Acculturation in Trinidad,” American Anthropologist  ():  – , .

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in broad terms. Supriya Nair’s work on Maria-Elena John’s Unburnable in the present collection performs a similar broadening of the theoretical terms by substituting diaspora for hybridity in her analysis of the dialogues she discovers among the significant places in the Atlantic plots of John’s life and her novel.⁹ The expansive complexities of a concept like hybridity expose the limits of the very concept that defines this collection and launched the imaginative and conceptual energies of editor and authors on the road to elaborating the volume’s contents. The varied paths the authors followed to explore symbolic meanings, and the multiple objects they selected around which to focus their theoretical and analytical projects illustrate that a truly productive pursuit of the concept of symbolism must reach far beyond the identification of correspondences, the decoding of ciphers, the recognition of archetypes and iconographies, and the determined search for invisible and intangible qualities and ideas that may lie within the mostly textual forms of their study. The greater challenge and the more compelling interest for authors and their readers will have been to reframe the meaning of the symbolic, to focus the lens on symbols of inwardness, to find the principles that inform the genesis and evolution of Caribbean consciousness, to weave from the objects of study a single complexly woven fabric of theory and criticism. Different ways to focus the lenses of cultural inquiry have yielded new images of selves and societies that define the postcolonial, transnational Caribbean. To study Caribbean symbols in these ways has been to study the knowledge processes by which Caribbean people develop a system to adapt and orient themselves to the world. There is appreciable shared agreement on how to reach this ideal state of the cultural consciousness. The consensus envisions the marshalling of mind, memory and imagination to conceptualize the symbols and practices of culture into a mythopoeia. I use the term here in its original sense as it arises in the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien, as an invented body of myths crafted into fiction by a single writer or groups of writers to serve the needs of modern societies. The concept emerges inferentially in the writings of Derek Walcott and Wilson Harris, who both allude to the invention of mythopoeias from the real and imagined worlds of the region’s peoples.¹⁰ Ar-

 For a related discussion of the relationships of hybridity to symbolic representations of race and ethnicity in the politics of nationalism and cultural performance in the Caribbean, see Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ),  – .  For Walcott’s ideas on the sources of mythopoeia, see Walcott, “The Antilles,” and Gregson Davis, “Reflections on Omeros” in The Poetics of Derek Walcott: Intertextual Perspectives, ed. Gregson Davis, issue of The South Atlantic Quarterly  ():  – . Critics of Harris’ writings perceive his mythopoeic quest in the aesthetics of his precolonial, colonial and postcolonial

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chive of narratives, fiction, poetry, images, characters, gods and villains, a mythopoeia is a system that would include symbolism but is not synonymous or coterminous with it. Applying this idea to Walcott’s work, Paula Burnett writes that “[a] mythopoeic art is related to symbolism but does not confine itself to fixed correspondences as symbolism tends to do. Rather its characteristic mode is narratological: it unfolds and develops meanings in process, in an open ended continuum.”¹¹ The stakes for this revisionary expansive deployment of symbolism are huge and attract their own share of skepticism and critical debate. In his reading of Fanny Buitrago’s Los pañamanes (1979), Antonio Benitez-Rojo seems (at least hypothetically) to endorse this desire for a new integrationist myth which would unfold in a utopian setting where skin color has been rejected and transcended.¹² In this volume, Chérif Diatta weighs the possibilities of resolving the colonial tensions around identity, race and class by affirming the power of folk traditions like carnival and neo-African religions like Spiritual Baptists as represented in Earl Lovelace’s fictions. The Trinidad and Tobago novelist articulates in his own voice the ethos of inclusiveness and unity that could materialize within the symbols of respect for diverse tribal origins, willingness to abandon practices of social exclusion, and a desire to embrace the dream of a humane future: It seems to me that we need to update the vision of who we really are. We need to recognise that wherever we have come from and whatever we have brought from different regions, even in awkward circumstances – all of it – is really our heritage. And if we realise that we are preparing for our future, and not for our past […] we might just discover that the tribes said to be in contention are seeking what we have been always seeking – the same things: a sense of belonging, psychic ease, the valuing of our contributions, a space in which to grow and the natural acknowledgement of our worth and dignity as human beings.¹³

Lovelace’s meditation on history and the choices available to us within it is often articulated as an imperative to embrace the separate strands of past, present, and future for some aesthetic and philosophical project of unity and forward movement. For an epigraph to his essay, Mario Nisbett uses a text which figures symbol-making; see Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, ): , and Hena Maes Jelinek, “Wilson Harris: A Life of Writing. Dream, Psyche, Genesis: The Works of Wilson Harris,” (acc. April , ).  Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, ): .  Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island (Durham, NC: Duke UP, ):  – .  Earl Lovelace, “Requiring of the World,” in Growing in the Dark, ed. Funso Aiyejina (San Juan, Trinidad: Lexicon, ):  – , .

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the symbol of the sankofa bird. Traditionally represented as a bird lifting an egg from the tail end of its body to the front end, the sankofa is understood to be enacting the meaning of the Adinkra symbol, translated as a proverb “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.”¹⁴ The sankofa is a potent symbol of the need for continuing discourse with disparate temporalities for mutual edification and nurture within cultures. Norbert Elias characterizes this use of symbols as “[t]he ability to transmit knowledge from one generation to another, a crucial condition of the growth of knowledge.”¹⁵ The best of our creative and theoretical minds seem to concur that we can exploit hybridity for its resources of improvisation and imagination, look to our inner resources of ontology and consciousness, dig deep down to those submarine roots Brathwaite and Glissant identify as the fundaments of our being to tap our cross cultural relationships that “extend in all directions in our world through its network of branches […] to find that we have the good fortune of living, this shared process of cultural mutation, this convergence that frees us from uniformity.”¹⁶ Up to now in this introduction I have made only brief references to the core authors and essays that make up this volume. I want now to satisfy the full critical formalities of the genre by previewing all the contributions to the volume and putting them into some dynamic relationships to one another and to the objectives of the volume. The search to discover the mythopoeia of symbolic forms that consciousness and imagination must invent to reestablish the terrain of Caribbean people’s existence after the traumas of slavery, violence and death takes flight with the exploring figure of the artist as semionaut which Maria Cordero borrows from Nicolas Bourriaud. This term functions as a polyvalent trope wearing within its etymology the suggestive amplitude of signs (semio‐) and the allusion to sailing (‐naut), navigation and traveling, which all bear historical and cultural resonances with the origins and existential continuities of Caribbean societies. One of two pieces on a Latin American subject, the only piece profiling the visual arts of the Caribbean, Cordero’s essay focuses on Ermán González’s Relicarios (Reliquaries), bringing his Cuban origins, his aesthetic and material practices to wider notice. Her interest in the way the artist combines factors of high and low, language and image, the formal and the everyday offers fertile

 The term sankofa itself is a word in the Twi language which means “go back and get it.” Adinkra is a system of symbols used among the Akan people of Ghana to represent proverbs, philosophical concepts, mores; see Dee Galloway, “African Tradition, Proverbs, and Sankofa,” (acc. March , ).  Norbert Elias, The Symbol Theory (London: Sage, ): .  Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, ): .

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sites for gathering a symbolism from the diverse practices and experiences of Cuban in situ, exiles, and immigrants. A suggestive aesthetic category with capacious potential for contributing to the evolution of symbolic systems and high mythopoeic objectives, the neologism “altermodernism” (a new kind of modernism, between modernism and postmodernism) creates a fresh, generative space for Caribbean artistic and cultural expression. That positioning is very useful in locating the cultural statuses of different generations of Cuban immigrants, and, in particular, in defining the members of the “one-and-a-half” generation. The symbolic meanings of fluidity, perpetual flight, and oscillating progress developed in Cordero’s essay find continuities in Sarah Senk’s “Mourning’s Spiral: Trauma, Time, and Memory in Derek Walcott’s Omeros.” Tropes of repeated movement in the figures of the spiral and the circle occupy Senk’s analysis of Walcott’s mythopoeic ideology. She reads these two Walcott symbols as productive exchanges for the obsessive attachment to trauma and mourning. Resisting the familiar traveled route of reading Omeros as a poem constructed on a linear model of closure, with extended grieving and pathological attachment to melancholy as the curative options for traumatized Caribbean subjects, the author adopts a model of the return with the trope of the spiral which eschews conventional models of mourning and easy promises of healing. Instead, this approach to the poem proposes holding the wounds of history open, accepting that total forgetting is never completely possible. The problem of history (specifically, the problem of Caribbean history, to which Walcott dedicates so much of his time) benefits from close reading. The author reads Omeros closely and imaginatively, taking noticeable pains with selecting and connecting narrative events (Philoctete’s hacking the yam roots in his garden; Achille’s hallucinatory travel back to Africa), with the explication of key illustrative passages (Ma Kilman’s conjure rituals) and with tropes like the cultural formation “soldered by the slime / of the sea slug,” and the symbolic meaning of the lakoshe (white snail). Closely aligned to Senk’s essay in its triangulation of the aesthetic, the problematics of mourning, and its resistance to (in her case male) linear models, Maryam Farahani’s “The Case of Melancholy Metaesthetics: Reading Teresa de Los Andes and Caribbean Lamentation Narratives” extends the categories of Caribbean identities far down the Western coast of South America and deep into the recesses of a Carmelite monastery. The interest of the essay resides on multiple grounds. It suggests some new sources for a mythopoeic search: the symbolics and aesthetics to be recovered in the writings of St. Teresa, certain Caribbean authors, and certain European post-Romantic male writers. Positioning Chilean St. Teresa in an identity with Caribbean writers inscribes the subject in some hitherto uncharted (at least in this reader’s experience) cultural and aesthetic interstices. The essay’s theoretical meditations on the aesthetics of melancholy and

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lamentation, and on the allegories of light and darkness challenge some of our preconceived assumptions about the valorization of the gendered and racialized practices of lamentation and melancholy, and the radically individualized notions of perception and selfhood. The paper holds interest in its recovery from St. Teresa’s practices of epistolarity of a harmonious compatibility between the private interiority of the emotions and the social exteriority of joy in family life and friendships. It pursues St. Teresa’s discursive journey beyond the private and the social to the mystical and the metaphysical, powerfully glimpsed in light and silence. Farahani’s contribution performs its own liberatory gestures by recovering from St. Teresa’s epistolary texts evidence that elides the (post-Romantic European) male linear hegemony over aesthetics and melancholia. Against that hegemony Farahani dialogically positions the voices of Caribbean women authors Jean Rhys and Nancy Morejón, with an exceptional privilege to Walcott’s understanding of female metaesthetics in her reading of his poem “The Light of the World.” In a continued tracing of this thread of female aesthetics, Supriya Nair pursues the liberatory power of the symbolic in the hands of another female author. In her essay “Defying Social Death: Magic, Medicine, and Masquerade in MarieElena John’s Unburnable,” Nair positions the way John represents the transgenerational female attitudes to death as negating its presumed permanent order and so interrogates Orlando Patterson’s category of social death. This critique faults Patterson’s theory for not according sufficient efficacy to the “continuous subversive struggles of the slaves to break these fetters, and their ultimate, if hard fought and dearly paid, success in doing so. Nor does he pay significant attention to gender difference in the theory of social death.” Nair reads John’s work in Unburnable oppositionally, as symbolic resistance work, and ascribes countervailing power to African cultural retentions, ancestor worship, and tribal systems of belief, traditional religions, and competitive healing practices. Nair’s analysis hews close to Cordero’s presentation of the altermodernist aesthetics of Gonzalez’s visual productions. Those aesthetics are reflected in Nair’s privileging of philosophical systems that elide closure and fixed resolutions. She writes: “John’s symbolic work in the novel confronts and challenges social and actual death as absolute conditions, converting their seemingly inexorable finality to a more open-ended process that enables a provisional resurrection of the endangered subject.” Nair recovers these as the evidence of “discredited social structures” and “submerged histories of resistance,” properly related to women, that are germane to creating a revisionist Caribbean mythopoeia. Although the politics of resistance has been a persistent theme in the previews given for Cordero’s, Farahani’s and Nair’s essays, the ideological tag “resistance consciousness” applied to related responses in Paul Griffith’s “Spiritual

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Adventure through Song” seems to provide a concise rubric for this theme. Focused on two work songs from Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry, Griffith works to excavate the ways “residually oral” forms become inserted into the secular acts and performances of daily life and transform places into ritualized spaces. This author’s theoretical analyses demystify ritual, giving it the definition of symbolic action persons employ to negotiate their relationships with other persons “to institutions, spirits, and nature, and with all the various permutations of which these themes are capable.” Perhaps the one symbolic action Griffith returns to most consistently is that image of ritual energy, imagination and faith Brathwaite denominates “tidalectics.” Now undoubtedly elevated to the status of a master trope, the power of the tidalectic resides in its efficacy as a reversal rite. Continuing the pattern of oppositional relationships manifested in these authors’ recoveries, tidalectics stands as the “ ‘ natural’ discoursive [sic] alternative (alter/native) to” Hegel’s dialectic. The actions of the old Jamaican woman Brathwaite used as the central agency in his tidalectic figure a complex of symbolic forms: arcs, circles, back and forth. This combination is at once accommodationist and disruptive. What might appear ambivalent or dichotomous is in fact a ritual to negotiate disordered time, “a structural irony that inaugurates a release from the tyranny of history.” The structural forms of Brathwaite’s tidalectics, its accommodationist and disruptive potentials, and the definition of the temporalities of slavery as disordered time invoke processes of and responses to diaspora, which are the focus of Mario Nisbett’s “African Diasporic Traditional Symbols and Claims: The Case of the Maroons.” The serial abscondings from hegemonic plantation and state control practiced by the Maroons wrought deep disruptive impacts on colonial order. Their willingness to collaborate with the official forces of law and order signals their willingness to practice paradoxical politics in part to secure their own pragmatic self-interests. Movement back and forth between white controlled slavocratic spaces and the remote, often impenetrable, hideouts of maroon communities illustrates their agency in creating symbolic flows and constructive liminality. Nisbett associates his approach with a number of theorists, including Stuart Hall, who defines diasporics in part as people scattered and dispersed and forced “to make some kind of difficult ‘settlement’ with the new, often oppressive, cultures with which they were forced to come into contact.” Pointing to the Maroons’ unwavering historical determination to preserve traditional symbols both in their everyday life and in their formal rituals, Nisbett locates the subject claims in their vernacular architecture (the asafu yard), in their furniture (where they carve images of the sankofa bird), their use of the abeng (a cow’s horn used to warn communities or summon them to assemblies), and their wearing of traditional African garments and jewelry in ceremonial observances, among others. Nisbett argues that the persis-

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tence of African traditional forms of government, community organization, land tenure systems, kinship and hereditary traditions of leadership all provide the bases on which Maroons make the claims his essay takes as its object. That symbols and symbolic behavior surrounding aspirations for political leadership persist transnationally within the region is illustrated in the close critical readings Chérif Saloum Diatta gives to novels from Trinidad and Tobago in his “Earl Lovelace and Caribbean Gender Symbolic Forms: Revisiting Masculinity and Reconstructing National Identities.” Diatta’s essay focuses his lens intensively on the desire to sustain masculinist hegemonies, to privilege male desire, and on the routes aspirants take in pursuit of respect and social status. He grounds these aspirations in traditions of masculinist privilege in Trinidad’s multi-ethnic communities, and he extends the field of reference to the masculinities of both that nation and other cultures within Caribbean society. In this essay symbols and symbol systems emerge distinctly in the author’s analysis of lower class (Bolo and Fisheye) and middle class (Ivan Morton and the Schoolmaster) differentiations in the experiences of masculinity and the pursuit of power. The delineation of differentiated practices and features of Indo-Trinidadian culture reveals certain sometimes overlooked dynamics of how that culture reproduces difference by gender and class. In the exemplary case of Pariag in The Dragon Can’t Dance, the analysis is especially poignant; the reproduction of Pariag’s self-conscious reflections on the oppressive weight of masculine patriarchy, the assessment of his determination to change that order in the summary section at the end of the essay should call attention again to the mythopoeic desire inscribed in Lovelace’s statement quoted earlier in this introduction, and to the promise of Diatta’s work on this author. If Diatta’s scholarship here is focused intensively on the role of Caribbean men in sustaining male privilege, it must be acknowledged that he widens his critical lens to include a vision of how women and certain other men might change the traditional paradigms. At least part of the project of what would provide an authentic role for women in the historicization of sources for a Caribbean mythopoeia is envisioned in Henning Marquardt’s essay. A suggestive framework for thinking about the structural and social meanings of the Jamaican yard and Jamaican matrifocality as symbolic markers for class distinctions and political agency, Marquardt’s work here is contextualized to historical antecedents and sociological scholarship. In selecting John Hearne’s short story “Morning, Noon and Night,” Rudolph L. C. Aarons’ short story “Madam,” and Cicely Waite-Smith’s one act drama Africa Sling Shot as the principal subject texts, Marquardt invites a fresh examination of these texts that recovers their functions as mirrors of the pre-independence historical reality of Jamaica, and also as projective lenses into certain realities of the country in the late twentieth century. The thematic rela-

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tionships he identifies and the conceptual ideas he intimates suggest the cultural meanings that could be recovered from the representation of yard space in these texts and the social power residing in matrifocality which could be transvalued as revolutionary politics. The themes of dwelling and habitational space as markers for class are reworked in the linkages that emerge in Paula Saunders’ essay, “The ‘Janet House’: An Endangered Vernacular House Form in Grenada.” This contribution excavates some significant symbolic relations that emerged from the Janet houses, built in Grenada in the aftermath of Hurricane Janet (1955), the social and cultural memories of the natural disaster itself, and the new relationships residents developed from living in the houses. The work is useful for the attention it draws to Grenadians’ traditional pride in their houses and the way Janet transformed the social imaginary about home and social status. Like Marquardt, Saunders explicates the ways these houses functioned as markers for class and interprets how their rejection or restructuring symbolized the upward aspirational trajectories of Grenada’s people. In a collection presenting mainly the scholarship of critics and theorists deliberating on primary texts ranging from poetry to fiction, to drama, to epistolary forms and visual art, Saunders’ work provides the answer to the hypothetical question: “Where will all the denizens of the Caribbean mythopoeic space live?” For their historical authenticity the Janet houses might very well offer models for the architectural design and structural execution of truly creative mythic minds. In addition, Saunders brings the values of her training and expertise in anthropology and historical anthropology to add the dimension of field work interviews with survivors of the hurricane and government officials. She further amplifies the significance of her work by including the opinions of postmodern Grenadian teenagers on the symbolic meaning of the houses for them. All of these diverse sources mark this contribution with its own exceptional merit. The oral accounts given to her by survivors have the potential to develop into a richer and more extensive historical and cultural archive. The physical transformations wrought on the landscape by the new prefabricated structures, and the new patterns of migration and abandonment that followed in the wake of their installation, weave narratives that authenticate the intellectual search for the sources of Grenadian history and for the meaning of dwelling. As I read the essay, it gave me a deeper appreciation for the similarities and contrasts between Grenadian and Barbadian attitudes to Janet Houses. Some Janet houses still dot the Barbadian landscape, though most have been upgraded, extended, or transformed beyond recognition. Saunders’ work emphasizes that at the intersection of hurricanes, similar disasters, and the history of vernacular architectures of the Caribbean, there lies a fertile field for additional work that will enrich comparative and interdisciplinary studies in the region. Saunders’ interest

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in the field and her knowledge gained from the materials of this study position her well to make that significant contribution. Reviewing the call for papers originally published for this volume, I am favorably impressed by the degree to which the collective range, weight, and insight of the essays gathered consist with the rubric of its framing statements. That high correlation attests to the consistency of the volume’s conceptual desire with its eventual accomplishment. It should augur well for the readers’ pleasure and profit. The call contemplated a search for meanings, locations, forms and transformations of the broadest particularities and conceits of Caribbean symbolic forms. Some responses unpacked the mythic, religious, and spiritual symbolisms that are to be found in the literatures and orators of the Caribbean. Others illuminated how vernacular architectures, gendered histories and diasporic nationalisms may be revalorized as narrative and narrative forms that are socially symbolic productions. This list by no means constitutes the totality of responses but it names a representative selection of themes and categories specified to recover the sites and meanings of the symbolic in this region marked by the multi-ethnic, transhistorical and transnational dynamics that shaped the region’s cultures. Already prefigured in the topical and processual markers listed above, the correlated textures of similar and differentiated experiences, the complex pathways of the moral and creative imaginations, and the mystifying cosmologies of time and space find fascinating expression in the comparative and interdisciplinary methodologies practiced by the scholarly authors of the volume’s essays. These authors have underscored Norbert Elias’ axiom that “[e]verything which has a place in time and space also has a place in the symbol dimension […, and] everything which has a place in the symbol dimension also has a place in space and time.¹⁷ Origins in our evolutionary gene pool assign symbols unerringly to the innateness of our ontology. This collection unveils the channels through which those symbols pass into the social order, into existences as significant objects, images, ideas and agencies that institute the meanings of the past, present and future. We hope you will find in the pages of the special focus section that follows copious evidence that at the intersection of the primary and secondary materials explored there lies a fertile field from which could spring some of the narrative germs essential to imagining a Caribbean mythopoeia.

 Elias, Symbol Theory, .

María de Jesús Cordero

An ‘Altermodern’ Reading of Ermán González’s Relicarios: The Flight of the Sign and the Artist as Semionaut In his early sculptural series called Relicarios (Reliquaries), the Miami-based, Cuban-American artist, Ermán González, assumes what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “the journey form,” which reflects within art the limitless individual and mass migrations of the twenty-first century. Within each work included in this series, the artist empties signs – the royal palm, a coffee cup, a guayabera, a clothesline, traveling shoes, and white rice and black beans – of the meaning which they held in their original, Cuban context. These signs float in a void and, to borrow Bourriaud’s term, the artist becomes “a semionaut” who transforms signs into endlessly new configurations, according to the different contexts that he encounters as he travels. For instance, a palm tree rises up out of the top of a headless mannequin, and a quilted landscape with clothesline spills out of a wooden cigar box. In Ermán’s work, signs are constantly in flight; they arrange themselves in constellations, disperse, and realign themselves endlessly, not unlike the images of a kaleidoscope. Despite the fact that they are constantly shifting, the works in this series nonetheless move along a path, creating a narrative. While they do not represent a modernist, linear progression, neither do they suggest the hopeless fragmentation of postmodernism. They constitute instead the kind of oscillating progress that Bourriaud denominates “altermodernism.” In “Challenging Orthodoxies: Cuban-American Art and Postmodernist Criticism,” Mark E. Denaci explains that, while Cuban artists whose artistic formations were completed in Cuba and who came to the United States as adults tend to engage more fully in the internationally acclaimed postmodernist project, those who left the island at a young age, before they could develop a stable cultural identity, often exhibit an ambiguous relationship to postmodernism or reject its critical paradigms altogether. This is because postmodernist fragmentation is at odds with the need of the artists of the latter group to construct some kind of subject position for themselves by means of their art.¹ Because these artists, who Gusta-

 Mark E. Denaci, “Challenging Orthodoxies: Cuban-American Art and Postmodernist Criticism,” in Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities, eds. Isabel Álvarez Borland and Lynette M.F. Bosh (Albany: State U of New York P, ):  – , – . DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-002

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vo Pérez Firmat calls the one-and-a-half generation,² do not engage fully in the postmodernist program currently in vogue, their works are often disparaged or, worse yet, ignored within the world of art criticism. In Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House, Andrea O’Reilly Herrera suggests an alternate model for understanding the work of Cuban-American artists, especially those of the one-and-a-half generation. She uses Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of the “altermodern” to elucidate the “repetition and difference” so clearly present in the works of these exiled Cuban artists. As quoted in O’Reilly, Bourriaud explains the etymology of his new term in the following way: ‘alter’ “designates a different relationship with time: no longer the aftermath of a historical moment, but the infinite extension of the kaleidoscopic play of temporal loops in the service of a vision of history as a spiral, which advances while turning back upon itself.”³ Thus, the “altermodern” ultimately frees us from the illusion of progress extolled by Western modernism, but it also releases us from the obsessive state and melancholic posturing of postmodernism. In the present essay, I offer an “altermodern” reading of the Relicarios (Reliquaries) of the Cuban-American artist Ermán González who, having left Cuba at the age of thirteen, is part of the one-and-a-half generation. My analysis will show that, as a diaspora artist working at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Ermán has managed to evade the Scylla and Charybdis of these two opposing and yet inextricably linked Western art movements. While Ermán’s work reaches back to the past, it is also forward moving. It constantly transforms itself, not unlike a “kaleidoscope,” the metaphor which Bourriaud borrows from the French poet Charles Baudelaire who over a century ago similarly sought to articulate the role of the artist in an increasingly industrialized society and define the concept of modernity.⁴ As we shall see, Ermán’s work is comprised of mixed-media drawings, sculptures, and installations. While I will touch on the full body of Ermán’s work in this essay, my primary focus will be on his relicarios because of their unique position at the intersection of his mixed-media drawings and sculptures. In this way, Ermán’s relicarios constantly look back to his mixedmedia drawings and forward to his most complicated installations. Before engaging in a detailed analysis of Ermán’s work, however, I will turn to Nicolas Bourriaud’s The Radicant, a treatise on art in the first decade of the twenty-first century, which will serve to provide both a historical context and a theoretical framework within which to better understand the artist and his work.  Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba (New York: Doubleday, ): .  Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora: Setting the Tent Against the House (Austin: U of Texas P, ):  – .  O’Reilly Herrera, Cuban Artists Across the Diaspora,  – .

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In The Radicant, the French art critic and curator, Nicolas Bourriaud, discusses the demise of a Eurocentric modernism, the postmodernist fragmentation which took its place, and the possibility of reclaiming a more inclusive concept of modernity in the new millennium. For Bourriaud, modernism was a twentiethcentury philosophical movement which reduced society and its cultural production to Western expressions and was complicit in the evils of colonialism.⁵ He explains that modernism was a tribute to the root and was, therefore, radical: In the course of the twentieth century, artistic (and political) manifestos appealed for a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification with the aim of rediscovering their essence. It was a matter of cutting off useless branches, subtracting, eliminating, rebooting the world from a single master principle that was presented as the foundation of a liberating new language. (R, 22)

While recognizing the racism and phallocentrism beneath the surface of the foundational literature of modernism and the totalitarian bent of colonialist applications of modernist thought, Bourriaud laments the disorientation and fragmentation created by postmodernist critics who, beginning in the 1980s, set out to deconstruct modernist discourse using the tools and techniques of Jacques Derrida. The most serious criticism that Bourriaud levels against postmodernism is that it perpetuates the divide between colonizer and colonized by focusing on the peripheries and ascribing, to those groups catalogued as “Other,” identities strictly derived from the cultures of their native lands; in fact, for Bourriaud, the continued insistence on the existence of the “Other” suggests that the modernist framework has not been completely dismantled. Dissatisfied with the identitarian politics and the essentializing tendencies of postmodernism, Bourriaud seeks to reclaim the concept of modernity by opening it up to include hybrid identities and creole cultural expressions. He ascribes the moniker “altermodernity” to this new phenomenon, which he already sees manifested in the works of artists of the early twenty-first century. Citing the 2002 International Migration Report of the United Nations, Bourriaud apprises the reader that, from the 1970s until the filing of this report, the number of migrants had doubled worldwide. According to the United Nations, in 2002, there were about 175 million people living outside of their homelands, in a kind of voluntary exile. Bourriaud explains that this figure was not only likely to have been underestimated but that it was expected to increase by about ten million every year (R, 17– 18). Thus, according to Bourriaud, “the

 Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant (New York: Lukas & Sternberg, ): ; further references in the text, abbreviated “R.”

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immigrant, the exile, the tourist, and the urban wanderer” are the central figures of the aesthetic production of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and its principal form is the journey. Continuing with the botanical metaphor that he employs earlier in his discussion, Bourriaud identifies these displaced individuals as radicants and positions them in opposition to the radicals whom he associates with modernism: [T]he individual of these early years of the twenty-first century resembles those plants that do not depend on a single root for their growth but advance in all directions on whatever surfaces present themselves by attaching multiple hooks to them, as ivy does. Ivy belongs to the botanical family of the radicants, which develop their roots as they advance, unlike the radicals, whose development is determined by their being anchored in a particular soil. (R, 51)

Bourriaud states in no uncertain terms that the radicants are not expected to reject their cultural heritage altogether but rather “to squander it, […] to scatter and invest its contents” in foreign lands and expect metamorphosis (R, 56). Thus, they are dialogically situated between the need for a homeland and a stable identity, on the one hand, and the reality of dislocation and exposure to diverse cultures, on the other, and their identities are constantly subject to negotiation. Bourriaud is careful to differentiate his concept of the radicant from the trope of the rhizome first developed by the French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari⁶ and subsequently utilized by the Martinican poet and literary critic Édouard Glissant to describe Caribbean culture and thought processes.⁷ According to Bourriaud, “unlike the rhizome which is defined as a multiplicity that brackets out the question of the subject from the beginning, the radicant takes the form of a trajectory or path, the advance of a singular subject […], but one that is not reducible to a stable, closed, and self-contained identity” (R, 55). According to Bourriaud, contemporary artists do not represent their cultural origins as much as the journeys that they undertook to the various contexts that they have subsequently experienced. Thus, while modernists achieved a return to their roots by means of subtraction, contemporary artists arrive at new destinations by means of selection, addition, and multiplication (R, 52). As Bourriaud explains, however, they do not achieve this through mere accumulation but rath-

 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, ).  Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, ): .

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er by performing acts of translation as they go. He describes the aspirations of contemporary artists in the following way: What these artists aim for in their works is not to accumulate heterogeneous elements, but to make meaningful connections in the infinite text of world culture. In a word, to produce itineraries in the landscape of signs by taking on the role of semionauts, inventors of pathways within the cultural landscape, nomadic sign gatherers. (R, 39)

Bourriaud explains that, in the late 1970s, postmodernist aesthetics began to be defined by “the creation of an imaginary universe of flotation and fluidity” that reflects the collapse of modernism and the migratory trend of the time (R, 47). Signs were severed from the significations that they once held within a given social and historical context and were set adrift in an increasingly chaotic universe, not unlike that imagined by Epicurus. According to Bourriaud, “Epicurus wrote that the universe was nothing but a rain of atoms before the clinamen (spontaneous deviation) caused a pile-up accident, a collision that was the origin of worlds. Before the encounter takes place, the atoms fall like drops of rain, without meeting […]” (R, 75). Contemporary artists combine these tumultuous forms into precarious constructions which contain fragments from the past and also new elements, forming configurations which ultimately break down and are subsequently reorganized in some new way, a process which is repeated ad infinitum in kaleidoscopic fashion. Thus, in the making of their works, these artists oscillate constantly between “repetition and difference.” They demonstrate a healthy regard for their origins, yet do not shy away from progress and change. As their bodies of work begin to take shape, they construct a new, more expansive, ever evolving subjectivity for themselves. As an immigrant artist working at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Juan Antonio González, better known today as Ermán, is precisely the type of artist that Bourriaud heralds in The Radicant. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1956, just three years before the triumph of the revolution, Ermán was profoundly impacted in his formative years by economic hardship and political repression. When their plan to leave Cuba was discovered, his father and uncle were imprisoned and forced to work in labor camps to earn the family’s exit visas. In the absence of the men of the family, Ermán’s mother, Gladys María García Grandío de González, who had been a Carnival beauty queen and the daughter of a prominent cattleman, became the family’s sole provider during increasingly difficult economic times. The artist recounts that his mother and grandmother took apart all of his deceased grandfather’s wardrobe and used the fabric to make boys’

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clothing which they traded on the black market for food and soap.⁸ The many sacrifices of the matriarchs of his family, their fortitude, compassion, and their sewing skills which sustained Ermán in his childhood, would later have a powerful influence on his art as evidenced by his use of reclaimed fabric and the techniques of sewing, quilting and appliqué in his mixed-media drawings, reliquaries, and more complex installations. In November 1969, Ermán’s father was released from prison, and the family immigrated to Miami. Ermán was only thirteen years old at the time, making him part of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat calls the one-and-a-half generation of immigrants who left Cuba in childhood or adolescence, before their cultural identity had fully developed.⁹ As his father had become a broken man after his incarceration, Ermán and his mother worked in sewing factories doing piece work for pennies in order to help support the family in exile. After high school, Ermán studied Fashion Design and Merchandising in Miami. In 1979, he relocated to New York City where he established himself as a fashion designer and launched his own label, “Ermán.” His designer dresses and separates sold nationally and internationally to specialty shops and department stores such as Bonwitt Teller, B. Altman’s, and Bergdorf Goodman. After his highly successful, ten-year stint in New York City, Ermán returned to Miami in 1989 to pursue his dream of becoming an artist. He was accepted as a resident artist at Art Center South Florida where Ellie Schneiderman, the Center’s founder and director, took an interest in him and helped him to regard his fiber-based artistic expressions as sculpture. Since then, Ermán has participated in numerous international cultural exchanges and exhibitions, in the United States and throughout the Caribbean, under the auspices of Rosie Gordon-Wallace’s Diaspora Vibe Gallery which has helped to nurture and promote the work of emerging and more mature artists from both the Caribbean and its diaspora. Today his works form part of the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum (PAM), The Miami-Dade Public Library System, Florida Craftsmen Incorporated in St. Petersburg, The AEBEU Gallery in Salvador, Brazil, The Sacatar Foundation in Haparica, Brazil, and of numerous private art collectors. In 2002, Ermán began a series of ongoing, mixed-media drawings of landscapes with still lifes which he titled The Book Pages. In these works, Ermán fittingly uses reclaimed fabrics and quiltmaking techniques in order to depict a world that has been split apart and reconfigured in new and unexpected ways. In this enigmatic, new world, windows float, dislocated and toppled chairs

 Ermán González, personal interview, November , .  Pérez Firmat, Next Year, .

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adorn the landscape, and royal palm trees grow out of cafecito cups or demitasses used to serve Cuban coffee. Cut off from the cultural context which had previously given them meaning, they have become floating signs suggesting feelings of estrangement. As The Book Pages series progresses, the same images continually reappear but in different, kaleidoscopic configurations. In this way, the artist begins to develop his own iconographic language, or allegory, which his astonished viewers must interpret in order to comprehend his work. In the case of The Book Pages, Ermán’s work seeks to convey the artist’s state of “interior exile,” a phrase coined by José Lezama Lima¹⁰ and subsequently employed by Reinaldo Arenas in his autobiography Antes que anochezca ¹¹ to denote the point at which, prior to physically extricating himself from his birthplace, the artist begins to distance himself emotionally and psychologically from the world around him. In Sale, entra y siéntate (Exit, Enter, and Sit Down, 2005), which forms part of The Book Pages series, the artist superimposes, over a white background filled with handwritten, stream of consciousness writing rendered in graphite, a quilted landscape depicting a cloud-filled, blue sky and a lush, green, mountainous terrain (Figure 1). To the quilted landscape, he appliqués a series of white, paper cut-outs representing a clothesline with bleached garments; two doors and a window with the traditional, Cuban medio puntos or fanlights intended to disperse the intensely bright sun of the Caribbean; scattered and toppled chairs; a ladder; and a chair that appears to be morphing into a ladder. This piece, which Ermán refers to as a “mixed-media drawing,” represents a disfigured world and conveys the artist’s feelings of disaffection and unease. The two doors and the window with Cuban medio puntos appliquéd on either side of the clothesline appear to float in midair. They are, in effect, floating signs that have been emptied of their intended meanings. Similarly, the ladders and chairs, including the one chair transitioning into a ladder, are cut off from the original significations which once connected them to a specific context. In this piece, the chair turned ladder on the left and the slanted ladder that reaches a door on the right suggest the alienated artist’s need for escape routes. Over time, Ermán develops an iconographic language which he uses to construct an allegorical narrative of exile and transculturation. By means of this allegorical indirection, which the viewer must decipher, the artist carves out within his works a private space of mourning. In a thought-provoking article on the British artist of Guyanese descent, Hew Locke, Kobena Mercer discusses the postcoloni-

 O’Reilly Herrera, Cuban Artists, .  Reinaldo Arenas, Antes que anochezca (Barcelona: Planeta, ): .

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Figure 1. Sale, entra y siéntate, 2005. From The Book Pages, 2002, ongoing. Mixed media, 48″ x 22″. Private collection. Reproduced by permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

al artist’s use of allegory and excess in order to create a mask behind which he can engage in the difficult process of mourning without making himself vulnerable to the public: “in the midst of abundance […] this mask contains unbearably painful traces of death. Without pathos, rage, or blame, there is a mournful place of contemplation hollowed out by allegorical indirection.”¹² Similarly, the automatic writing in Sale, entra y siéntate is only partially visible toward the bottom half of the work, which suggests to the spectator the artist’s feelings of vulnerability in the face of traumatic change and loss and his reluctance to expose himself fully to the spectator. It is important to note that the title of this piece and the uncensored script are written in Spanish, the artist’s native tongue from which he has been exiled but which he cannot bring himself to leave behind completely. The title, Sale, entra y siéntate (Exit, Enter, and Sit Down), is an extension of the automatic writing that forms part of the background, and it alludes more explicitly to the artist’s apprehension and restlessness as he tries to come to terms with his psychological break with his homeland. In obscuring a part of the written text underneath the quilted landscape in this work, the artist creates for himself a safe place in which to grieve for all that he has lost.

 Kobena Mercer, “Hew Locke’s Postcolonial Baroque,” Small Axe  ():  – , .

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In Sale, entra y siéntate, Ermán creates a sense of the “ruggedness” of the terrain by folding, creasing, and stitching earth-toned fabrics. Although the frayed edges of the green textiles contribute to the illusion of grass, the artist cuts into the edges further with a pair of scissors in order to enhance this effect. Furthermore, he incorporates and adjusts white tulle obtained from reclaimed wedding dresses and veils in order to create clouds and the perception of depth and toning in the sky. Ermán boldly and deliberately displays the stitching that he himself performs by hand and machine, and that he, in fact, uses as a way of “drawing” on the fabric, in order to underscore his use of craft materials and techniques in the making of his art. In a highly industrialized age, these features serve to remind the viewers of the human hand behind this work, and they invite them to engage both intellectually and somatically with it.¹³ Bourriaud borrows the phrase “post-medium condition” coined by Rosalind Krauss to refer to artistic representations “in which not only language and image but high and low and any oppositional pairings one can think of freely mix” (R, 137). As we have seen, Ermán combines both written text and image in this work. But he also uses the materials and techniques traditionally associated with quilting in order to render a kind of “drawing” or “painting” of an abandoned and forlorn landscape. Thus, he erodes the border between art and craft and ultimately collapses them. In fact, by working within the traditionally feminine medium of fabric, Ermán obscures the line between masculine and feminine, which is particularly significant given the rigid gender roles that we find in Cuban society to this day. Ermán explains that he suffered physical abuse at the hands of his mother who did not want him to be an artist because she considered it a profession suitable only for women and gay men.¹⁴ It is significant that the fabrics which Ermán pieces together to create his quilted landscape are reclaimed materials which he purchased at flea markets or which were given to him by friends all too happy to find a second home for once cherished items that have since become superfluous and irksome. These reclaimed materials or found objects which Bourriaud refers to as “homeless,” not unlike the exile himself, reflect an unstable modern world driven by a “globalized consumerism whose glorious face is the shopping malls and whose miserable underside is the flea markets and the slums” (R, 81). According to Bourriaud, in the twenty-first century, the artist increasingly chooses “poor materials” rescued from flea markets, in order to reflect a society in which global competi-

 María Elena Buszek, “The Ordinary Made Extra/Ordinary,” in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art, ed. María Elena Buszek (Durham and London: Duke UP, ):  – .  Ermán González, personal interview, November , .

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tion causes employees to become dispensable and fall on economic hard times. Thus, in a world marked by overproduction and wastefulness, in which individuals consume and are themselves consumed, the artist avails himself of discarded goods found at flea markets or garage sales to make his art. In this way, in a clever twist of irony, his art may be considered to be a monument to that which is precarious and fragile in our world. According to Bourriaud, art in the twentyfirst century consists of “fragile compositions” which seek “the exaltation of instability” through the use of commonplace and tenuous materials (R, 87– 88). In Estoy/Me voy (I Am Here/I Am Going, 2005), also included in The Book Pages, the artist once again superimposes a quilted landscape onto a white surface filled with automatic writing, rendering the handwritten text only partially visible. He utilizes much the same iconography as he does in Sale, entra y siéntate but creates from it a vastly different, kaleidoscopic configuration. In Estoy/ Me voy, he appliqués onto the quilted landscape, like so many “floating signs,” a clothesline with bleached garments, an empty, white chair, and an abandoned satchel. From the balance of the white paper with spontaneous, graphite script, Ermán cuts and appliqués at bottom-center of this piece a human figure which appears to view the bleak panorama before him with an air of detachment. Having become increasingly familiar with the artist’s iconographic language, the viewer learns to interpret the allegory. No longer at ease in his place of origin, the human figure depicted in this piece is about to abandon his familial connections and a sedentary life, represented by the clothesline and the chair, in order to pick up his satchel and migrate to a foreign land. His position at the bottom of this extremely vertical piece serves to emphasize the subject’s current psychological alienation and the physical distance that he is about to place between himself and the scene before him. The fragmented text inscribed onto his person suggests his thoughts and feelings as he stands at the threshold of aquí/allí (here and there). Ermán seldom includes human figures in The Book Pages, but here he may have sought to clarify that the feeling of malaise exuded by the works included in this series is related to an implied subject’s state of interior exile just prior to his departure from his homeland. As we have seen, throughout The Book Pages, Ermán continually revisits the iconography that he has built up over time for his artistic expression. Viewing it with new eyes, he arranges it in surprisingly new configurations each time, as he works to advance his allegorical narrative. Thus, his mixed-media drawings can be likened to a kaleidoscope which creates playful images that repeat and renew themselves endlessly. Ermán continues to employ the same iconography and artistic practices in his Relicarios (Reliquaries), a series of sculptures which he began in 2004. These works are deserving of critical attention in that they represent a pivotal moment in the artist’s career. They stand at the juncture

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between his two-dimensional, mixed-media drawings, titled The Book Pages, and his more elaborate sculptures, such as La Sangre Llama (Blood Calls, 2004) and El Plato Nacional (The National Dish, 2004), which form part of the installation Los Trapos Sucios (Airing Dirty Laundry, 2004). By blurring the traditional boundaries between the two-dimensional image and sculpture in the Relicarios, Ermán’s work continues to be symptomatic of the “post-medium condition” which Bourriaud describes (R, 137). In her book, Relicarios: Devotional Miniatures from the Americas, Martha Egan clarifies that the relicarios (reliquaries) ranging from simple arcs, urns, and small coffers to the more elaborate and ostentatious vessels used to house the physical remains of saints did not originate in medieval Western Europe as has long been thought. Instead, they can be traced as far back as Greek and Roman times in which “the physical remains of gods or heroes were thought to have magical properties, and possession of such treasures conferred religious and political status upon the owner.”¹⁵ According to Egan, relicarios were brought to the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Christian travelers from Europe who used these portable, treasured religious objects as amulets or talismans “to inspire, comfort, and protect [them] from harm.”¹⁶ Toward the beginning of the colonial period, the relicarios, predominantly made in the form of pendants containing miniature paintings, engravings, and boxwood sculptures with a religious image, usually of the Virgin Mary, Christ, or one of the saints, permitted the New World immigrants to maintain a sense of connection to their European, religious traditions. As Egan explains, before the conquest, the indigenous peoples of the Americas engaged in practices similar to the making of relicarios and so adapted well to it and even applied their own materials and techniques to the process, turning the relicarios into a syncretic cultural expression. This led her to believe that the Christian practice of making relicarios “is but one example of the universal human need to establish tangible connections to revered figures, real or mythical.”¹⁷ As separation and loss are an inevitable part of life, people of every culture and historical time period have had to develop mechanisms such as the making of relicarios to help them to maintain a physical connection to the object of loss, be it a person or a way of life. It was a similar need for a connection to the past which drew Ermán to the relicarios in the first place. Their status as syncretic cultural expres Martha J. Egan, Relicarios: Devotional Miniatures from the Americas (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico P, ):  – .  Egan, Relicarios, .  Egan, Relicarios, .

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sions also makes them ideal crucibles for the continued mingling of new, creolized cultural materials. Ermán’s use of the relicarios as a source of inspiration for his art suggests that there is a connection to be made between today’s Cuban exiles and their itinerant ancestors, in this case to the Spaniards that came to the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries toting their portable altars, saints, and relicarios for solace and reassurance in a foreign land. The extent to which we are able to see the past in the present by means of Ermán’s Relicarios is uncanny. According to the Cuban literary geniuses José Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and Severo Sarduy, Latin American and diaspora writers and artists today strongly identify with their European, Baroque counterparts because of a shared, Spanish cultural heritage and a common experience of rupture and discontinuity within their respective societies.¹⁸ Ironically, Ermán calls upon us to see continuity precisely in the mutability and flux in human fortunes across the ages, something that is both hauntingly beautiful and reassuring. Like our ancestors, we too must pack up our gods and journey on to an unknown part of the world. The artist attempts to assuage our fears and anxieties in the face of the vicissitudes of life by recalling the past in a way that makes the uncertainty of the present seem less menacing. We are made to abandon our concept of linear time and enter a world in which, according to Bourriaud, the past can be experienced in a way that is immediate, much like the way we occupy physical space (see R, 122– 123, 128 – 129). While many of the relicarios made in Europe and the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were the creations of the best artists of the day, they went unsigned and were considered handicraft because they were made manually, with a specific function in mind – that of facilitating religious devotion. They included miniature oil paintings and watercolors, indigenous featherwork mosaics, engravings in wax, ivory, and tagua nuts, as well as tiny boxwood sculptures intricately worked. The position of the Baroque relicarios at the intersection of art and craft would have been an additional allure for Ermán, whose own work typically occupies this same, ambiguous creative space. Interestingly enough, the escudos de monjas (nuns’ escutcheons) so popular in the New World in the eighteenth century were often made by both monks and nuns using silk embroidery. Thus, Ermán’s connection to the relicarios is further reinforced by the fact that he often works in fiber in order to honor his mother and grandmoth See José Lezama Lima, Chapter  from La expresión Americana; Alejo Carpentier, “The City of Columns”; and Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” all in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, eds. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (Durham, London: Duke UP, ):  – ,  – ,  – .

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er who used their sewing skills to help sustain their family unit during his father’s political imprisonment in Cuba. With the growth of secularism in the nineteenth-century Age of Independence, the relicarios came to be used more frequently for purposes of personal and familial remembrance. It was not uncommon to find tucked between the two religious images on the obverse and reverse sides of the relicario pendants some small object of sentimental value such as a lock of a loved one’s hair, a pressed flower, or a personal missive. With the rise of industrialism, the miniature portraits of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints executed in oils or watercolors came to be replaced with inexpensive, mass-produced chromolithographs, photographic prints, or photocopies. The silver or gold casing which held them were reduced to base metal, and the glass protecting these images was exchanged for crude materials such as clear plastic or the concave lens of a discarded pair of eyeglasses.¹⁹ As we shall see, Ermán similarly employs commonplace and found objects in the making of his Relicarios. In Relicario VI (2005), Ermán covers the inside panels of an open, wooden cigar box with an automatic writing which he partially obscures by placing over it a two-dimensional, quilted landscape containing the appliquéd, white chairs and clotheslines that we so often find in the mixed-media drawings included in The Book Pages, such as Sale, entra y siéntate and Estoy/Me voy discussed above. In addition to appliquéing a white, paper clothesline onto the two-dimensional, quilted landscape, however, the artist attaches, to each end of the open, hinged box, embroidery floss from which he suspends white, paper garments, bringing the image into the third dimension (Figure 2). As in Sale, entra y siéntate, one of the paper chairs that he appliqués onto the two-dimensional, quilted landscape appears to be morphing into a ladder. Positioned haphazardly across the landscape, these chairs appear as so many floating signs that have been violently severed from their intended significations. As in Sale, entra y siéntate, this disordered world evokes feelings of despondency and alienation. It is significant, however, that, in addition to the two chairs appliquéd onto the quilted landscape, the artist positions a miniature, white, wooden chair in three dimensions on top of the box itself. This represents the beginning of the process of transformation of the mixed-media drawings of The Book Pages into sculpture. In this case, the chair/ladder is a symbol of the transition from mixed-media drawing to three-dimensional relicario. Figuratively speaking, the ladder is the conduit by which the chair is transformed from a two-dimensional, appliquéd paper cut-out of a chair into a three-dimensional,

 Egan, Relicarios,  – .

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Figure 2. Relicario VI, 2005. Mixed media, 23″ x 23″ x 3″ closed. Collection of ACBEU, Salvador, Brazil. Reproduced by permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

wooden chair. In this way, this piece is positioned at the intersection between mixed-media drawing and mixed-media sculpture. The relicario Al Fresco (Out In the Open, 2006) contains yet another iteration of the quilted landscape rendered, as in The Book Pages, by piecing together reclaimed, blue fabric and then stitching onto it white tulle in the form of clouds. In this piece, the artist covers the lid of a reclaimed, wooden box with green fabric and grains in order to create a grassy landscape with multicolored, braided fibers hanging from it in the form of roots, no doubt representing the multiracial heritage of much of the island’s population. He fastens this piece onto the wall in order to render an image of the landscape in three dimensions. From a brass wire suspended from two wooden, cruciform stakes at opposite ends of the wooden platform, the artist suspends a series of ceramic garments that he has fashioned himself. Thus, by including ceramic pieces here, Ermán utilizes a traditional medium for the making of sculptures, except that he has not altogether relinquished his use of the more precarious and humble materials such as paper and wood. The result is a kind of mixed-media sculpture which ironically serves as a testament to the precariousness of modern life.

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At times, we find that the artist has expanded his simple relicarios into installations. For instance, in Para subir al cielo (In Order to Reach the Sky, 2006), the artist secures onto the gallery wall a reclaimed cigar box, the inside of which he has covered with the customary automatic writing and quilted sky. He positions on the gallery floor wooden steps which lead to a ceramic island surrounded by rice. Between the ceramic island on the floor and the quilted sky in the open cigar box on the wall, he positions a long, wooden ladder. The iconographic language is developed into an allegorical narrative of the exile’s journey in search of his dreams. In this instance, the exile’s dreams have been fulfilled; the ladder touches the sky. In Aquí/Así (Here/In This Way, 2006), the artist sets on the gallery floor a wooden platform with a brown and green ceramic mound and scattered grains inside, intended to represent the island. It is significant that, in lieu of a royal palm, a wooden chair with an extended back in the form of a long, wooden ladder appears to grow from the land. This represents yet another instance of signs that have been severed from their original, intended meanings and reconfigured in an unusual and provocative fashion. It is important to note that, unlike Para subir al cielo, in this piece the ladder does not quite reach the quilted sky set inside a wooden frame on the gallery ceiling. We are asked to consider the story of the exile that has fallen short of his goals. Ascención/Descención (Ascent/Descent, 2006) consists of a wooden table whose legs are in the form of ladders. Underneath the table, two miniature, wooden ladders are positioned leaning in opposite directions against the legs of the table. From brass wires, the artist hangs, underneath the table, a series of ceramic garments in order to form a clothesline as in Al Fresco discussed above. On top of the table, the artist situates a ceramic sky in the form of a woman’s torso. This is an elaboration of the ceramic landscape of Aquí/Así. Thus, the quilted sky has morphed into a ceramic one. The land is represented by a green, ceramic slab and grains which cover the tabletop. The artist leans another, small, wooden ladder against the ceramic sky torso, an elaboration on Para subir al cielo, and several white, ceramic garments lie on the tabletop intended to represent the ground. As the title suggests, depending on the perspective of the viewer, this installation can be interpreted in two different ways: as either an ascent or a descent, by way of the ladders. In the diptych Los Que (No) Llegaron (The Ones Who Did [Not] Arrive, 2006), which was installed as part of the 2013 exhibit Rough and Tumble, the artist covers the insides of both halves of a wooden cigar box with the customary, quilted landscape. On the bottom half of the cigar box, representing the land, he positions a white, ceramic chair whose back is morphing into a ladder. The back of the ceramic chair is touching the quilted blue sky on the lid of the cigar box, as

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in Para subir al cielo. The artist situates a smaller, white, ceramic chair against one of the legs of the larger chair, suggesting a process of ascension. At the foot of the chair, the artist sets in topsy-turvy fashion a number of small, white, ceramic shoes in various styles and sizes. These shoes are intended to represent the balseros (boat people) who, in this case, have safely reached land; the chair is touching the sky. In the second half of the diptych, however, the artist situates only a wooden base with a flat, fabric representation of the green landscape on which lies a pile of small, white, ceramic shoes, this time representing the balseros who did not make it. According to the artist, the castaway shoes of souls who have been lost at sea trying to reach the Florida coast often wash up on the shore, becoming objects of contemplation and scrutiny.²⁰ This piece is a somber meditation on the disparate fortunes of those balseros who made it and those who did not. It is, ultimately, a monument intended to honor the lives of countless, unnamed refugees lost at sea, one of the few that they will probably ever have. Thus, like Derek Walcott’s epic poem Omeros, Ermán’s sculptural series Relicarios harkens back to and transforms an ancient Western tradition, rendering it capable of conveying a creolized Caribbean identity and commemorating the unsung heroism of ordinary people. As the critic Robert D. Hamner explains in his widely acclaimed Epic of the Dispossessed, the image of the spiral as an alternate trope for the authentic Caribbean experience is one which the Saint Lucian Nobel Prize Winner, Derek Walcott, also privileges in the writing of Omeros,²¹ with respect to both the process of composition and its internal structure. Rather than assume the daunting task of beginning from the void in writing Omeros, Walcott unabashedly avails himself of the ancient Greek and Roman epic tradition which he loosely draws on for his characters, episodes, images, and themes. While Walcott clearly holds in high esteem the Western cultural traditions inculcated in him by means of the colonial education system of which he is a product, he bends, distorts, even breaks with the classical epic formula in Omeros, in order to represent and celebrate the creolized Caribbean identity of the peasants of Saint Lucia who had previously been relegated to the margins of their own narratives.²² Unhindered by what Harold Bloom has famously termed the “anxiety of influence,” Walcott uses Western classical traditions as vehicles for his innovative representation of West Indian  Ermán González, personal interview, November , .  Derek Walcott, Omeros: A Poem in Seven Books of Circular Narrative Design (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ).  Robert D. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros (Columbia: U of Missouri P, ): ,  – ,  – .

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cultural materials and forms of expression. While Walcott’s debt to Western tradition is such that he never completely breaks from it, he occasionally exhibits the kind of self-reflexive writing associated with postmodernism: Structurally, Omeros converts linear narrative development into incremental loops of selfreflexive exposition. No matter how far the leading characters may wander literally or imaginatively, their lives continually revolve around each other, and much as they learn, they inevitably return to their point of origin. The result is a layered and essentially reciprocal complex of interrelated narrative lines that uncannily approximates the subversive type of postcolonial fiction […].²³

Thus, as Walcott’s Omeros resides in the interstices between modernism and postmodernism, it too may be considered an “altermodern” work, to borrow Bourriaud’s term. In The Radicant, Bourriaud includes the following in his description of the “precarious aesthetics” of sculpture at the beginning of the twenty-first century: “clutter, indeed saturation; the use of ‘poor’ materials; a failure to distinguish between scraps and objects of consumption; between edible and solid; and the rejection of any fixed compositional principle in favor of installations that seem nomadic and indeterminate” (R, 86 – 87). According to Bourriaud, contemporary artists employ such fragile materials not in order to demonstrate the power of art to immortalize the tenuous achievements of mortals but, rather, to highlight the precariousness of the modern world. Citing the sculptor Thomas Hirschorn, Bourriaud observes that “monuments come ‘from below’ ” (R, 88). This is the case in Erman’s Relicarios, and even more so in his more elaborate installations such as Los Trapos Sucios (Airing the Dirty Laundry, 2004) discussed below. As we shall see, in Los Trapos Sucios, Ermán challenges the principles behind the classical monument not only through his choice of unstable materials but also through his preference for unassuming human subjects, commonplace Caribbean natives whose virtues have previously gone unrecognized. In 2004, Ermán participated in a two-man exhibition called Surviving Memories where he first installed Los Trapos Sucios (Airing the Dirty Laundry, 2004), a life-size, indoor clothesline from which hung various, gargantuan textile creations considered “stations,” as in the Stations of the Cross in a Catholic church. While he himself has rejected Roman Catholicism, Ermán’s parents were devout Catholics who forced him to become an altar boy in his youth. As a result, Ermán is well-versed in the beliefs and symbols of the Catholic Church which he boldly

 Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed,  (italics mine).

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mines and utilizes in his work.²⁴ One of the “stations” in the Los Trapos Sucios installation was La Sangre Llama (Blood Calls, 2004), a mixed-media work displaying a group of translucent coats with linked sleeves and a sewn surface of multi-colored threads that resemble the circulatory system. This alludes to the mixed-race bloodlines and the hybrid cultural identities of the Caribbean peoples, inclusive of the artist’s own African-Spanish-Norwegian heritage which he seeks to celebrate. In El Plato Nacional (The National Dish, 2004), another colossal garment included in Los Trapos Sucios, the artist stitches together brick-like segments of fabric representative of hearth and home in order to create an eight-foot, transparent, tulle robe which he hangs on the clothesline with real clothespins. He stitches little packets of uncooked black beans, rice, and bay leaves into the blocks of fabric to represent the main ingredients in the Cuban national dish “Moros y Cristianos” (Moors and Christians) whose name refers to the occupation of Spain by the Berbers of North Africa in 711 which resulted in the centuries-long convivencia (cohabitation) of peoples of different ethnicities and religious creeds on the peninsula. Of course, the term “Moors,” which today would be considered pejorative, corresponds to the black beans and “Christians” to the white rice, emblematic representations of a long history of struggle which, at the same time, produced beautiful, hybrid cultural expressions. This mammoth robe pays tribute to Ermán’s Cuban mother, Gladys María, who used her sewing skills to ensure her family’s economic survival and struggled to make meals out of food rations to feed her children during her husband’s political imprisonment. In The Radicant, Bourriaud discusses the interrogation of the values and formulas of the classical monument evident in the works of sculptors at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He quotes the sculptor Thomas Hirschhorn who in discussing his work dedicated to authors such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Baruch Spinoza, and Michel Foucault, has said: It’s a critique of the classical monument, in its choice of whom to memorialize and in its form. The monumental tradition celebrates warriors and men of power in the central squares of cities; I make monuments to thinkers in locations on the outskirts, where people live, precarious monuments that don’t try to impress anyone and eschew the immortality of noble materials, marble or bronze. (qtd., R, 89)

In a discussion of the improvised altar of “lowly” materials that he made for Diana, the People’s Princess, outside of the Paris tunnel where she lost her life, Hirschhorn states, “I wanted to show that monuments come ‘from below’ ”

 Ermán González, personal interview, November , .

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(qtd., R, 88). Similarly, through his use of the fiber arts traditionally associated with women’s work, Ermán constructs a monument dedicated to the women in his family who sold their handmade, repurposed sartorial wares on the Cuban black market in order to put food on the table during economically difficult times. Thus, Ermán’s sculptures and installations can be compared to Derek Walcott’s Omeros not only in their transformation of Western traditions into conduits for Caribbean cultural expressions, but in their measured celebration of the heroic struggle for survival of ordinary Caribbean people. According to Hamner, Walcott’s “fascination with the inevitable luminaries of art, history, and literature is equaled only by his obsession with commemorating the unsung heroism of outcasts whose greatest achievement may be their survival.”²⁵ Artists working at the beginning of the twenty-first century have inherited a world that has been blown apart. In the afterword to The Radicant, Bourriaud employs the image of an explosion (R, 177– 178). He indicates that, with the demise of modernism at the end of the previous century, theoretical treatises and aesthetic expressions have become rife with images of ruins and debris. Like many artists working today, Ermán uses in his artistic expressions a heterogeneous array of superfluous and discarded objects and undercuts the traditional distinctions made by art criticism between written text and image, art and craft, and drawing and sculpture. These postmodernist materials and practices suggest the precariousness and instability of modern life. And yet Ermán’s art does not give the impression of being violent, unsightly, or unwieldy. On the contrary, it is rendered all in white and exudes a sense of peace and tranquility, even celebration, for which he credits the use of the color white in Santería rituals of initiation.²⁶ Ermán’s work reflects postmodernist fragmentation, but as he works in series, he continually returns to his previous works, using them to advance his newer creations. As his work develops, he creates an iconographic language that he uses to build an allegorical narrative of exile, trauma, and transcendence. By means of this narrative, he establishes a much-needed subject position for himself (albeit one that is more flexible and complex than before) and for the marginalized peoples of the Caribbean. Thus, he engages postmodernist practices but does not get caught up in the postmodernist obsession with the past, nor does he assume the melancholic posture of postmodernism. At the same time, he recognizes the

 Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, , .  Ermán González, personal interview, November , . While Ermán is not himself a practitioner of Santería, the synchretic, Afro-Cuban religion practiced by many in Cuba, he exploits its visual trappings in the making of his art, even as he does those of the Catholic religion also widely practiced on the island. According to the artist, his inspiration here is the use of the color white by the practitioners of Santería in their rituals of initiation.

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dangers of the modernist program involving master narratives and linear progress. His artistic strategy navigates between modernism and postmodernism, in an approach that is aligned with what, at the threshold of a new millennium, Bourriaud has termed “altermodernism.”

Sarah Senk

Mourning’s Spiral: Trauma, Time, and Memory in Derek Walcott’s Omeros This paper reads Derek Walcott’s apparent embrace of woundedness in his long poem, Omeros, in the context of recent trends in trauma theory, particularly the tendency to reframe a melancholic attachment to loss as productive rather than pathological. Centrally concerned with problem of “return” to the past and corresponding site of psychological wounding, Walcott’s poem’s repeated tropes of the circle and spiral undermine a simplistic framework of mourning-as-closure, a framework normalized in recent trauma theory. The symbol of the spiral figures a model of return that is incompatible with the stereotypical notion of closure and thus opens up new ways of thinking about how literature might contend with the wounds of colonial history. Kamau Brathwaite’s middle passages, Édouard Glissant’s open boat, Derek Walcott’s unhealing anchor-wound, Aimé Césaire’s “demasted hulls, old sores, rotten bones” and “suppurating syzygy of blisters;”¹ all are part of a lexicon of wounds inscribed again and again into the canonical texts of Caribbean poetry. Given that postcolonial literature generally positions colonial violence – physical, epistemic, historical, linguistic – as its condition of possibility, it is unsurprising that these preeminent examples of Caribbean poetics seem so incurably wounded. Indeed, Caribbean poetry is ultimately tied up in the politics and poetics of trauma. It is precisely this saturating of wounds, however, that Walcott condemns in “The Muse of History” when he insists that Caribbean writers abandon the melancholic reiteration of colonial violence and opt instead for a literature that eschews the “servitude to the muse of history” – a mode of writing which has in Walcott’s view “produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of masters.”² Postcolonial poetry – undeniably wounded, markedly elegiac – should offer some conciliatory relief from the pain of its subject matter, or so it seems. At one point towards the end of Walcott’s  Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land in Aimé Césaire, the Collected Poetry,  – , trans. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith (Berkeley: U of California P, ): .  Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History” in What The Twilight Says (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ): . DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-003

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lauded epic poem, Omeros, we bear witness to and partake in the conventional compensatory strategies of the elegy when his obeah-woman, Ma Kilman, declares, “We shall all heal.”³ Of course, contrary to his critical denouncement of despair, Walcott’s characters do not heal; all the pain that reenters his poem testifies to the incommensurable wounds at its heart: the colonial trauma of “one pain / that is inconsolable, the loss of one’s shore / with its crooked footpath” (151) and, more generally, “[t]he incurable / wound of time” (319). Walcott’s poetic rendering of the legacy of European colonization forms part of a large body of work by postcolonial writers addressing historical trauma, as well as an expanding body of criticism theorizing postcolonial literature as a “memorializing project,”⁴ which attempts to grapple with the same traumas that permeate Omeros. The tension between the call to heal and the wound’s apparent resistance to healing speaks to recent trends in literary studies that inform my reading of Walcott, particularly the now common tendency to privilege a melancholic attachment to loss as productive rather than pathological. Advocates of this reversal insist that mourning assimilates, normalizes and makes normative our relationships with lost others; Freudian melancholia becomes the critical framework which replaces a politically, ethically, or even spiritually defunct work of mourning.⁵ In this essay I read Walcott’s wounded poetics in the context of these recent critical trends, showing how his long poem undermines a rigid opposition between mourning and melancholia – a dominant trope in literary trauma narratives. Fundamentally, those who privilege a refusal to mourn problematically misunderstand mourning or “working through” trauma as a closing down of the past (and by extension, a closing down of future possibilities). According to this view, Ma Kilman’s promise that “we shall all heal” is tantamount to a decision to move on from loss in a way that renders impossible a dialogic engagement with the past. I too am interested in this potential for resistance in continuous recognition, but I am reticent to adopt the overly simplistic understanding of mourning as “closure” which prompts trauma theorists to valorize melancholic attachment to loss without taking into account the

 Derek Walcott, Omeros (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ): . Further references in the text.  Sam Durrant, Postcolonial Narrative and the Work of Mourning (Albany: State U of Albany Press, ), .  See in particular David Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: U of California P, ); Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents (Durham: Duke UP, ); Patricia Rae, ed., Modernism and Mourning (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, ); Tammy Clewell, Mourning, Modernism, Postmodernism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ). Khanna valorizes not only melancholia, but trauma as such, for its potential to disrupt “totalizing” master narratives.

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potential pitfalls of such a position. One such pitfall, as Dominick LaCapra has pointed out, is the conflation of loss with absence and the failure to address the specificity of a particular experience of loss when endless melancholy renders it “enveloped in an overly generalized discourse of absence.”⁶ Fixating on a specific loss, even recasting it as foundational, might, as Eng and Kazanjian suggest, leads to new forms of creativity, politics, and community. Alternatively, however, it might also result in an inability to break out of cycles of violence and traumatization and an eschewal of truly future-oriented thinking in favor of an impossible fantasy of what LaCapra calls a “new totality” for whom “any process of working through the past and its historical losses is foreclosed or prematurely aborted.”⁷ Ultimately, I argue, Walcott problematizes the distinction between closure and openness (an opposition implicit in trauma theory’s recent turn to melancholia) by deploying the spiral as a model of non-pathological return. The spiral, which emerges as an implicit model of temporality in the poem’s staging of various “returns” to the past, works as both a symbol and an aesthetic strategy where, on the one hand, one can acknowledge unknowable, ostensibly unrepresentable collective traumas, and on the other hand, register the necessity of continuously marking and layering more marks on the figurative body of this traumatic history. The symbolic wounds at the heart of the poem, in other words, appear and reappear between the lines of its temporal spiral; its lines mark loss while making the fulfillment of complete closure impossible. While Omeros’s ultimate failure to heal might be construed as a melancholic lingering on the wounds of the past, the poem’s model of time problematizes a conception of successful mourning as totalizing in the first place; in this way, Walcott symbolically deploys a model of return that is incompatible with the stereotypical notion of closure and thus opens up new ways of thinking about non-totalizing mourning practice. On the surface Omeros is a poem that seems to privilege the totalizing narratives of closure and openness that it comes to contest. Marked, injured, and scarred, its characters are engulfed in past atrocities; whether they are descended from colonizers or slaves, the physical pains inflicted by or upon their ancestors materializes symbolically in physical and psychological wounds that, at least provisionally, seem to “heal” as a result of each character’s discovery of cultural origins. In what seems like a break from earlier work, like Dream

 Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ):  – .  LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, .

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on Monkey Mountain, in which Walcott mocks the trope of the restorative return to pre-colonial Africa, Omeros appears to stage two instances of such return. The first occurs when Ma Kilman, the poem’s Obeah-woman, brews a restorative broth from a West African plant that finally heals the continuously open wound on Philoctete’s shin, a wound which comes to represent the trauma of colonialism’s violent iterations. The second occurs when Achille experiences something like a flashback (‘something like’ because it is not his actual memory) to a slave ship bound for the Caribbean from Africa. Through the flashback, “a light inside him wakes, / skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself” (134); a hallucination transports him back in time to Africa where he meets his ancestors, learns about their culture, and eventually comes to witness the raid that turned them into slaves, seeing first hand the radical break from his ancestral past that has haunted him in the present. Walcott’s symbolic appropriation of the wound as a marker of inherited loss in Omeros surfaces most prominently in the form of the physical wound on Philoctete’s shin, whose apparently incurability the character attributes to ancestral violence: “He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles / of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?” (19). Walcott insinuates that it is Philoctete’s endless grief for his enslaved ancestors that scars him mentally, creating an open wound of the psyche allegorized by the physical lesion.”⁸ Echoing the psychological woundedness of the poem’s other characters, Philoctete’s double wound – that of the actual injury inflicted on his body and the metaphorical trauma of bearing the wounds of a colonial past – testifies to a pain universally experienced by victims of the Middle Passage and their descendants; its uncontainable hurt is transmitted through generational lines as collective trauma where, as Omeros implies, “The son’s grief was the father’s, the father’s his son’s” (146). These physical and psychological wounds are related to the trauma of dispossession, a trauma that Philoctete acts out in the beginning of the poem when he viciously hacks away at the roots of yams in his garden. For Philoctete, whose own body is figured as a prison restraining a grief-induced rage (21), the history of transatlantic slavery is encapsulated by the sugar plantation ruins in which he grows his yams. When a thorn pricks the wound on his shin, exacer-

 See Jahan Ramazani, “The Wound of History: Walcott’s Omeros and the Postcolonial Poetics of Affliction,” PMLA . ():  – , . For Ramazani, who has also explored the duality of Philoctete’s wound as both physical and psychological trauma, the unhealing wound not only embodies Philoctete’s lament over the tribulations of his ancestors, but is the result of the physical sensation of their actual pain, passed on to subsequent generations as part of “the inherited wound of European colonialism.”

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bating the physical pain, the sting triggers a violent outburst in which Philoctete reproduces his own sense of figurative rootlessness: He stretched out the foot. He edged the razor-sharp steel through pleading finger and thumb. The yam leaves recoiled in a cold sweat. He hacked every root at the heel. He hacked them at the heel, noticing how they curled, head-down without their roots. He cursed the yams: “Salope! You all see what it’s like without roots in this world?” Then sobbed, his face down in the slaughtered leaves. A sap trickled from their gaping stems like his own sorrow. (21)

For Philoctete, who here acts out his own trauma of being severed at the figurative root of his ancestral culture, the collective memory of dislocation represents the predominant source of his woundedness. Here, the wilted “curled, headdown” yams echo what is later called the “homesick shame” of the poem’s other prominent traumatized West Indian character, Achille, whose mental anguish comes to a climax as he handles a bundled sail on his fishing boat, and is shocked by a vision of the Middle Passage: The tied bundle huddles like a corpse. Oui, Bon Dieu! I go hurl it overside. Out of the depths of his ritual baptism something was rising, some white memory […] (129)

When Achille lifts the sail – a “bundle” which “huddles like a corpse” (129) – on his fishing boat, he experiences a flashback to a slave ship bound for the Caribbean from Africa, on which the not unusual act of discarding the dead bodies of prisoners into the Atlantic is taking place. Achille’s role in all of this is muddled by the shift from his point of view (“Oui Bon Dieu! I go hurl / it overside”) to the speaker’s description of a ritual baptism that religiously figures Achille’s submersion in memory and somewhat perversely refers to the bundle/corpse plunging into the ocean water, figuring death and dismemberment as the corpse’s baptismal naming. We might recall Édouard Glissant’s description of the open boat in Poetics of Relation, in which the hull of the slave ship is figured as a “womb abyss […] pregnant with as many dead as living under the sentence of death.”⁹ Here, the memory-inducing sea, which paradoxically forgets those bodies in its  Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, ): .

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mist and “crash / of breakers,” becomes a conduit through which historical horrors return. In this passage, it is the trauma of dislocation, figured in the abandonment of corpses into an ocean that disgorges them, swallows and empties them of individuality only to cast them into a permanent state of collectivity that returns to traumatize Achille. The visceral experience of tribal sorrow on the fishing boat invokes within Achille a vision in which he is compelled to feel “the homesick shame / and pain of his Africa” (134); immediately after the insurrection of tribal memory, Achille finds himself in Africa, three hundred years in the past, a hallucination that Walcott – before he evokes too great a tone of magic realism – credits to sunstroke. As Achille slips into his vision, “a light inside him wakes, / skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself” (134). He is transported back into his ancestral past where he meets “himself in his father” (136), the West African Afolabe – Achille’s namesake before his name was changed by slavers. This “homecoming” highlights the nature of the dislocation that proves to be the root of Achille’s pain. Africa is set up, not merely as the site of an inherited trauma, but as Achille’s originary home. His trauma is that of a dislocation portrayed as “one pain that is inconsolable, the loss of one’s shore” (151) against one’s will, a loss that comes to a climax during Achille’s interaction with Afolabe as he shares the pronunciation of his name with his ancestral “father.” Achille’s vision becomes a parable of the return to the homeland in order to heal the trauma of dislocation; the raid that Achille witnesses constitutes the radical break from his ancestral past that has haunted him in the present. Similarly, Philoctete undergoes a version of such a return during the climactic healing of his lesion. Philoctete’s wound heals finally as the obeah-woman Ma Kilman turns to Africa only to discover that it is not really forgotten; rather, it is waiting to be invoked. Conjuring up the spirits of her African past and a seemingly implicit knowledge of remedies transplanted from African soil, Ma Kilman mixes a broth to bathe the wound in and utters incantations in a language she has never been taught, but whose “sounds were within her, / subdued in the rivers of her blood” (242). As in the case of Achille, Ma Kilman’s ancestral knowledge of the gods is lost and forgotten, but at the same time contained in her blood, transmitting through generations both the wound and its cure, catalyzed by the transplanted African flower that possesses the antidote for the lesion on Philoctete’s shin:

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Erzulie, Shango, and Ogun; their outlines fading, thinner as belief in them thinned, so that all their power, their roots, and their rituals were concentrated in the whorled corolla of that stinking flower. (243)

Upon being possessed by this tribal memory, Ma Kilman gains the power to heal and “Philoctete shook himself up from the bed of his grave, / and felt the pain draining, as surf-flowers sink through sand” (245). However, the poem ultimately questions the curative efficacy of the return to the homeland and its traditions. During a Boxing Day celebration after this healing ritual, Philoctete cuts up yams for the party and is overcome with anguish that undermines his, and the poem’s, faith in this cure: “All the pain / re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold / closing over their heads, […] / their memory still there although all the pain was gone” (277). Although the physical wound on his shin has been healed, the injury Philoctete inflicts upon the yams somehow becomes a cue, summoning him back to his memory, and the ancient trauma previously embodied in the open wound ultimately remains incurable. Although Philoctete’s pain drains away temporarily with the advent of the cure, he is still pained after Ma Kilman heals him. Similarly, Achille still suffers from “that obvious wound / made from loving the sea over their own country” (302). He still partakes in “the laugh of a wounded race” (299). The prototypical return to the site of wounding appears not to have worked for either character; though both have been made aware of their reasons for suffering, even a re-visitation to that site of wounding cannot seem to halt the ceaseless appearance of those traumatic images associated with imprisonment and dislocation. In both this symbolic return, and the overdramatized recuperation of African “roots” that takes place during the ritual that heals Philoctete, Walcott’s poem resonates with the concept that a return to origins is necessary to assuage the trauma of dispossession. For Achille, too, Africa is positioned as the site of symbolic wounding, the location in which the first atrocities of colonialism committed against his ancestors take place; consequently, only a symbolic return to that site can heal the wound of its legacy. This etiologic narrative seems at odds with the poet’s critical stance. From early in his career, Walcott has resisted essentialist ideas about looking to Africa to articulate black West Indian identity on the grounds that, firstly, this history is already latent in Caribbean identity and does not need to be actively sought out, and secondly, that such a turn is

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part of a nostalgic “longing, even a slave longing, for another master”¹⁰ which leads to the neglect of contemporary, local realities. While violence of forced migration means that cultural identity in the Caribbean contains a history of splitting from its “originary” sources, Walcott has consistently suggested that an obsession with those origins amounts to a potentially escapist fantasy that precludes a focus on the future. However, close attention to the poem’s ending reveals that this symbolic return fails to heal those wounds, and ultimately, Omeros never fulfills the promise of return and the resolution of complete healing. While this failure of symbolic return stays in line with Walcott’s critical position regarding the need to focus on a Caribbean present and future rather than manifest nostalgia for an African past, the fact that his characters remain wounded throughout the poem still seems to position Omeros firmly in the realm of despair. Even as the poem repudiates a nostalgic longing for Africa, it risks remaining stuck repeating the wound of separation that it seems unable to mourn and move on from. The poem’s ostensible perpetuation of a melancholic attachment to past wounds is my predominant focus in this essay. I question whether or not the poem is ultimately melancholic in its refusal of consolation, and suggest that, in the end, it problematizes the very distinction between closure and openness, finitely mourning or endlessly grieving old wounds. I take issue with readings of the poem that have attempted to recuperate its contradictions into a conventional elegiac narrative in which a lament for the losses of colonialism is followed by a consolatory gesture that somehow heals the wound of history, “figuratively reverses the Middle Passage,”¹¹ or “suggests an easing of the wounds caused by imperialism,”¹² despite the fact that, in the end, these wounds ultimately remain very much open and painful. Though at first Achille’s and Philoctete’s wounds seem to heal very much in accordance with a notion that one must psychically return to the site of wounding to recover from a traumatic experience, the return to Africa in the end fails to cure the traumatic legacy of colonialism which haunts both characters. This refusal of immediate closure is key to Walcott’s articulation of a different model of time, one that might challenge assumptions about the possibility of working-through-as-closure which informs conventional models of mourning. Walcott invites understandings of the poem’s time and history as non-linear when the speaker of Omeros claims that Ma Kilman “aimed to  Edward Hirsch, “An Interview with Derek Walcott ()” in Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, ): .  Paul Breslin, Nobody’s Nation: Reading Derek Walcott (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .  Joe Moffett, The Search for Origins in the Twentieth-Century Long Poem (Morgantown: West Virginia P, ): .

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carry the cure / that precedes every wound; the reversible Bight of Benin was her bow, her target the ringed haze / of a circling horizon” (239). Though they toy with a linear model of the forced departure from the Bight of Benin as reversible, these lines end up positing a cyclic model where a cure might precede the wound, and where the past that one targets is also always a future circling around.¹³ Understanding the poem in terms of a circular model of time and history (which Walcott constantly figures as the churning movements of the ocean), in which a return to Africa is not a nostalgic return to the past but a move forward, it becomes clear that all wounds must in some regard remain open because they are not subject to the simplistic possibilities of rupture and closure. Of course, one might argue that by rejecting the promise of a curative return to African origins, Walcott is merely launching another critique of nostalgia, consistent with one of his well-known critical positions. Ultimately, the poem leaves it unclear whether or not Africa can still be a homeland for a people who have existed for three hundred years away from that land of origin. Africa is not the soil of Achille’s birth, but the birth of his ancestors. Walcott subtly inscribes this difference into his poem during Ma Kilman’s invocation of Shango, Ogún, Erzulie, and Damballah as the gods she turns to are not entirely derived from the African tradition, but represent a combination of New World and West African beliefs ruptured and reformed by the mass migrations of the slave trade. While Shango and Ogún feature prominently in pre-colonial Yoruban religious and cultural history, Erzulie and Damballah only emerged in the Caribbean as a result of the mixing of multiple religions and cultures. Walcott’s references are almost exclusively examples of sub-Saharan African art and culture, which found their way to the Americas on slave ships, but were distorted and syncretized during the journey. The invocation to Shango, the Yoruban thunder god associated with moral action, is therefore not an invocation of the original deity but of the many transformations of Shango/Xangô/Changó that appeared in the Caribbean and South America with the mixing of tribes and their slow adaptation to Christianity over time.¹⁴ Even Ogun, the Yoruban deity of war who nominally survives the journey across the Middle Passage, seems out of place in Omeros, transplanted to the paradoxical idleness of former St. Lucian battlefields where lizards crouch on inactive cannon. Finally, the references to Erzulie, the “Dahomean-derived goddess of lovers” further embodies the effects of dia-

 See Breslin for an analysis of how Walcott’s model of an “oceanic eternal present” destabilizes the “determinism of cause and effect” (Nobody’s Nation,  – ).  Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage, ): .

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spora on religion as the goddess, as art historian Robert Farris Thompson points out, is not actually an African deity at all, but is derived from a hybridization of African tradition with the New World.¹⁵ While the critique of falsely homogenous national or terrestrial origins is central to the characters’ failure to heal, the poem also frames the ocean as a wound, a wounded voice, and perpetrator of the wounds of others. If Walcott insinuates that Africa is not the place of healing by the fact that neither of his characters is healed by their return, then perhaps it is the ocean in Omeros that must be returned to – the literal Middle Passage that embodies the ancestry of the West Indian writer; that “ancestral swell / of the ocean” (127) which joins Africa and St. Lucia, St. Lucia and England. Both the imperial past and the prehistory of the New World, for Walcott, meet on the very ocean which separates the Empire from the Caribbean and Africa from those colonized islands which are characterized as fragments broken off from the original continent. This complex and continuously moving site of wounding is especially important when we consider the poem’s skepticism about its return to originary African roots. If the Middle Passage represents the most forceful cultural trauma for the poem’s black West Indian characters, what might we make of the fact that it takes place on an expanse of water where roots could not possibly take hold? The figure of the ocean as the primary site of wounding, which repeatedly conjures and re-submerges the memories of the dead, complicates the linear model of rupture and return because there is no rupture immediately distinguishable from regeneration. Taking this into account, I suggest that the ocean is not a model for “memory-as-forgetting,”¹⁶ as much as it is a model for memory in which complete forgetting (and complete healing) is never completely possible. This model begins to address the potentially melancholic outlook engendered by the persistence of the poem’s unhealable wounds. By rethinking the poem’s model of temporality, we can see again why the attempt to recuperate the poem as something like a conventional elegiac narrative of consolation must necessarily fail. This failure has to do partly with the cyclic narrative structure of Omeros to which to which many of the poem’s other readers allude. If Omeros is centrally concerned with the trope, act, and problem of “return” we must ask what mode of return is possible in a non-linear narrative. The critique of linear historical time, so central to Walcott’s work, ultimately provides an alternative a model of psychic rupture and closure. One might argue that the poem’s unhealing wounds are, in fact, incompatible with an anti-elegiac refusal of consolation because, from the outset,

 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, .  Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, .

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Omeros refuses to subscribe to a model in which that consolation or closure would be possible. Throughout his work, Walcott has consistently criticized a linear, sequential understanding of time on the grounds that it perpetuates a world view in which the history of the Caribbean is seen as a product of and supplement to the history of European colonialism; for Walcott, “[t]he vision of progress is the rational madness of history seen as sequential time, of a dominated future”¹⁷ in which a narrative of historical progress renders former colonies endlessly subordinate. In order to break out of this subordinating model of temporality, Walcott has often employed non-linear models. Many critics have pointed to the way that Walcott continues this trend in Omeros, suggesting that a circular model of history is a mode of resistance against a linear progress narrative that produced (and was produced by) colonial discourse. Robert D. Hamner makes a similar claim that the poem’s nonlinear structure testifies to Walcott’s lack of “faith in the rigidly logical dictates of historians.”¹⁸ This critique of linearity is deeply engrained in Caribbean criticism, notably in Kamau Brathwaite’s adoption of the term “tidalectics” as a model of creative interaction that repudiates the linear model of the Hegelian dialectic. Indeed, Walcott’s concern with disrupting what Hamner calls the “logical dictates of historians” has been central to his own formulation of the continually cycling sea as a nonlinear figure for history, a trope that Walcott employs in the famous last line of Omeros: “When he left the beach the sea was still going on” (325). This continuous, non-linear model also comes across in one of Walcott’s more memorable examples of the way that cultural growth might be produced by loss. In one of the closing sections of Omeros, the narrator asks: Why waste lines on Achille, a shade on the sea floor? Because strong as self-healing coral, a quiet culture is branching from the white ribs of each ancestor, deeper than it seems on the surface; slowly but sure, it will change us with the fluent sculpture of Time. it will grip like the polyp, soldered by the slime of the sea-slug. (296)

This section of verse, which appears in the last of Omeros’s seven books, seems at first glance like the poem’s climactic moment of consolation, in which Walcott

 Walcott, “The Muse of History,” .  Robert D. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s Omeros (Columbia: U of Missouri P, ):  – .

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employs the image of self-healing coral as a metaphor for cultural growth. Recasting the foundational myth of Eve branching from Adam’s “white ribs,” Walcott’s amorphous “culture” branches from lost ancestral currents and springs from a wasted “shade on the sea floor.” The fact that this cultural formation is “soldered by the slime / of the sea slug” evokes an outmoded medical use of the term ‘solder,’ “to cause (wounds) to close up and become whole; to reunite (tissues or bones)” (OED), further evincing the suggestion of wholeness and reestablished unity. As such, it registers the potential for regrowth as a compensatory gesture that might enable one to procure something productive out of historical trauma. But crucially, while Walcott seems to locate the potential for cultural formation in death and decimation, thus positioning cultural formation as a compensatory aftermath to loss, loss here is rendered temporally indistinguishable from production; the verse continues, “where coral died / it feeds on its death, and the bones branch into more coral, / and contradiction begins” (297). The contradiction, of course, is the simultaneity of destruction and regeneration; in this rhizomatic model where newness branches from ancestors who, in the forced rhyme (“sea floor” with “ancestor”), are paralleled with the amorphous, ephemeral image of a “shade on the sea floor,” there is no singular discernible origin. This image of self-healing coral, then, echoes Walcott’s alternative model of temporality in which there is no distinct origin, and no complete progress that might lead to closure, in the case of the wounded psyche. Significantly, the obsessive reiteration of the characters’ attempt to return to the origin of their trauma poignantly echoes a reference to West African symbolism of the shell of the lakoshe, or white snail, which is “patient, slow moving, teaching deliberation in [its] careful motion”¹⁹ For Thompson, the spiraling of the shell that contains this fluid is emblematic of temporality itself; it grows with passing time and that passage is marked visibly on the pattern of the shell. Any damage done to the shell becomes marked in an eternal imperfection of its surface. The shell itself becomes what Thompson calls, “Time: Corporealized.”²⁰ I bring this up here not to suggest that the snail shell represents some kind of African cultural recovery in the poem, but to posit it as a suggestive model for the new modes of memory and memorialization the poem is suggesting. Walcott alludes to the snail early in Omeros, in another instance where the word “time” is rhymed with “slime” as it is in the passage above:

 Thompson, Flash of the Spirit, .  Thompson used this phrase while elaborating on the symbolism of the white snail in a lecture at Yale University, January, .

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a red sail entered the drifting tree of a rainspout, and the faint pirogue slow as a snail whose fingers untie the reef-knots of a common horizon left a silvery slime in its wake; yesterday, in that sea without time, the golden moss of the reef fleeced the Argonauts. (36)

Here, the reference to Greek myth of the Argonauts and the search for the Golden Fleece (all words recapitulated in the last line of this stanza) doubly references the argonaut, or Paper Nautilus, a species of octopus that also has a spiral shell, which hides, or is “fleeced” in the “golden moss of the reef.” While it is “without time,” the sea temporarily registers the traces left by the wake of the boat that the speaker watches in this passage, the trail of slime left by the snail, the traces of Greek mythology evoked by the natural world. The snail-shell, or nautilus shell evoked here, serves as a marker from that natural world, which throughout the poem is the ultimate catalyst for buried memory – memory prompted by the sound of the waves or the movement of the sea-swift, or the seed of a transplanted root. The spiral shell, in this sense, evokes and modes the different repetitions of memory left in traces and wakes, but registering repetition with a difference, employing the same circular movement I’ve discussed while marking the impossibility of complete return. Reading Omeros with this emblem of the spiral in mind, we might consider Walcott’s construction of the text as a “fluent sculpture of Time” (296). As the passage of time is corporeal in the form of the shell, so the infliction of trauma becomes corporeal in the form of the wound or scar. In Omeros, bodily wounds become markers of the past, of a past trauma, the physical marker of the passage of an event in history, tangible evidence of the passage of time. And while the form of the spiral demands re-visitation to the site of the wound, it does so in a way that never allows a moment of complete convergence with the past. The spiral, then, becomes a subtle marker of the different kind of traumatic temporality Walcott’s poem produces – one in which a complete fullness of return is impossible, but one which still enables a productive engagement with the future. Though other critics of the poem have already pointed out the centrality of a cyclical model of time in Omeros, I offer the mode of the spiral as a corrective precisely because it cannot accommodate any sense of completion. Focusing on the figure of the circle as the manifestation of the poem’s non-linear narrative, for instance, Breslin has noted that “since Philoctete is already healed at the time of [the poem’s opening],” that the action of the poem takes place “between the ritual of communal wholeness, about to be shattered, and the restoration

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of wholeness through the cure of the wound.”²¹ So while Breslin upholds a nonlinear understanding for the poem’s narrative structure, he still understands that circle as somehow punctuated by a “restoration of wholeness.” Arguably, a cyclic model presupposes some kind of complete return, even if it is a continuous one; the spiral, on the other hand, figures a temporality in which that restoration is utterly unthinkable. At first glance, Omeros stages these instances of a restorative return to the past based on a false promise of completed repetition, which would be figured, ostensibly, by the perfect, impossibly restorative closure of Philoctete’s wound. Walcott’s spiral offers a model of temporality that is incommensurable with an ill-conceived notion of “closure,” in which the wound – once it is “worked through” – leaves no mark, returning the subject to a sort of prelapsarian state in which there is no memory of the wound. But taking into account the way that Walcott’s spiral-based model of time might problematize this idea of closure, and thus the critique of closure central to the movement to depathologize melancholia, the poem finally discards a model of return completely, tantalizing its readers with a dream of ‘original skin’ but giving us only the concrete reality of the scar. An appropriate metaphor for this model of time can be seen in the examination of a wound in itself. The victim characteristically returns to the place of wounding only to find a scar which has healed the wound and concealed the force of its trauma. While an exemplary model of healing would be the re-formation of the original skin, the actuality of healing includes the formation of a scar. Even the successful healing of a lesion therefore implies a continual manifestation of the wound itself. That is, once a wound is inflicted, it can never be truly healed because the scar remains as a trace of its former presence. In the case of Philoctete, “[so] an anchor / had hooked its rust in one sufferer, and the scar shows / on the slit bone still” (298), and while by the end of the poem, Philoctete’s wound is healed, the scar stays behind as a vestige. Like the unhealed wound itself, the scar is a constant marker of the infliction of the trauma. While it carries with it all of the connotations of the cure, it is fundamentally inseparable from the wound itself. It is indicative of both cure and wound, permanently written on the body – hence the paradox of “the stitched, sutured wound that Philoctete / was given by the sea” (242). The wound is at once sutured and open, cured and incurable. It is cured as the suture closes the cut and it is incurable as it never rids itself of the mark of the initial trauma. Crucially, as Ramazani has also noted, “[e]ven though the wound has scarified in these descriptions, Walcott never reduces the bitterness or pain to a condition

 Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, .

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that can be repaired completely; rather, it is constitutive of the new synthesis.”²² For Ramazani, that new synthesis extends to the new hybridized cultural developments that Walcott also figures with the scar: “More somber than Walcott’s tropes of webbing and weaving, let alone popular metaphors like melting pot, tossed salad, or callaloo, the scar signifies cultural convergence in the Americas without effacing its violent genesis.”²³ Though it embodies a site of healing, the scar, not unlike the incurable lesion, maintains the memory of the wounding and marks a fundamental temporal difference. The spiral, similarly, signifies both the inability to heal and a signature of futurity that is so central to Walcott’s critique of linear models of history. The scar as a marker for memory’s wound synthesizes the question of time and the question of place in ways that also render problematic any simplistic model of recovery. The oceanic Middle Passage – arguably the poem’s biggest open wound – marks (in its inability to be marked) what Elizabeth DeLoughrey refers to as an “impossibility of spatial return.”²⁴ Crucially, this represents a shift in thinking about the presumed inability to represent trauma. Throughout Omeros, Walcott toys with the conventional connection established between wound and writing as both are a form of inscription – wound upon flesh and writing upon parchment, a connection that serves as a foundation for Walcott’s portrayal of language as a wound forced upon colonial subjects. However, the association simultaneously connotes Walcott’s implied question of what kind of language, if any, is capable of portraying suffering. As in the case of the wound itself, language offers no ideal healing. Philoctete’s wound, with “its crusted, agonized O: the scream of centuries” (246), involves a conflation of wound with the verbal expression of pain; but even at the moment when sound and body are rendered most equivalent, Walcott emphasizes the poetic mediation of that pain, evoking the O of lyric apostrophe he employs throughout the text. While there is an implied catharsis in the mediation and subsequent release of the trauma through that language, an ideal healing is impossible because, as Walcott implies, language offers no true return to origin. In one of Walcott’s borderline deconstructive gestures, the scar, like the spiral, becomes a signifier for language; however, the inability to return to the unmarkable oceanic space has less to do with some kind of aporia or undecidability of the traumatic (and some intrinsic lack accompanying language) than it has to do with the  Jahan Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .  Ramazani, The Hybrid Muse, .  Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, ): .

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kinds of movements and shifts Walcott outlines, both in terms of the changes a culture undergoes over time, and the changing motions of the sea which figure those fluctuations. Trauma in this new model is not something abstractly unknowable, and as such becomes something that might be addressed in ways that do not merely recapitulate the silence of some unsymbolizable “abyss of sorrow, a noncommunicable grief.”²⁵ When DeLoughrey turns our attention to the question of “how to mark – and thus materially make meaningful – ocean spaces that were traversed by slave ships when one cannot locate the exact coordinates of the places where, for instance, Africans died in the passage or drowned at sea,”²⁶ she implicitly raises the question of how to mourn or commemorate the losses that took place in those spaces – losses that are “unrepresentable” in the sense that there is no definitive way of marking exactly where or when they took place, and no distinct trace left behind, only a wake that flows and dissipates into the larger body of water. Omeros raises the important question of how to talk about trauma without becoming trapped in a repetitive obsession with origin. In the same Boxing Day ritual in which Philoctete’s pain returns, the poem suggests that while the trauma of the Middle Passage cannot be “marked,” it can be iterated in controlled scenes of performance in a way that enables their communication to others. Crucially, when “[a]ll the pain / re-enter[s] Philoctete” (277), it does so during a performance that he and Achille stage every year, not to celebrate Christmas, but “for something older; something that he had seen in Africa” (275). When the pain of Philoctete’s wound returns, the poem recounts how “The drummer’s wrists / whirred like a hummingbird’s wings, and, to Achille, the / faster they flew, the more he remembered, blent / to his rite; then suddenly the music ceased” (277). While the scene ends with Philoctete weeping, it is important to consider how the reappearance of the wound here takes place during a performed rite to which that memory is “blent” or fused. The fact that the return of Philoctete’s pain happens in the context of a public performance (even if that performance isn’t ever explicitly aimed at vocalizing that pain) means that it happens in a way that counters melancholic isolation, in a venue where the very process of countering isolation is what is communicated to others. While the loss is never fully worked through, the somewhat ritualized process of grappling with it represents a way out of the isolation of melancholia. Re-performing the pain (as opposed to compulsively repeating it in isolation) becomes a way of communicating the pain to Achille and others. In the debilitating isolation of melancholia,

 Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia UP, ): .  DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, .

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loss is arguably, totally cut off from history. Philoctete and Achille’s re-entry into a community, the participation in a shared language and ritual, becomes a way of putting that pain back into a historical context. In these final pages of Omeros, the suggestive way in which trauma’s “mark” is mutable – on the spiral’s formal circumvention, on the fluctuating oceanic body – evokes another important site of mutability: that of the newly forming future itself. It is through this commitment to futurity and engagement with the present that Walcott imagines a mode of mourning historical traumas that neither lead to dead-end perpetuations of grief, nor the endless repetition of traumatization. Rather than privileging an unqualified openness to these wounds – a stance that might risk fetishizing traumatic experience – Walcott investigates what modes of language we might imagine that could allow both individuals and communities to move beyond trauma and loss without foreclosing it.

Maryam Farahani

The Case of Melancholy Metaesthetics: Reading Teresa de Los Andes and Caribbean Lamentation Narratives In this study, I address the process of melancholy aestheticism in Caribbean narrative form, focusing on the nature of aesthetic epistolarity in written records by Teresa de Los Andes, O.C.D. (1900 – 1920); reading her memoir and letters which remain as a testimony not only to her lamentations and devotions, but also showcasing overlaps of Caribbean and Carmelite traditions of epistolary musing. Drawing upon Caribbean literature with symbolic genres, I argue that the process of emotional development in St. Teresa’s writings demonstrates a phenomenological line of inquiry, unlike her collection’s seemingly theological façade. This comparative study argues that Caribbean female-authored symbolics of melancholy – neither based on religious feeling nor entirely adhering to European male-authored renditions of emotional metaphors – are centred on positive attributes such as light and joy. This overlooked literary phenomenon in Caribbean literature registers a poetic contrast to varieties of literary aestheticism by their European counterparts. Refuting orthogonal ¹ principles of melancholy imagery and aestheticism, St. Teresa’s letters and diaries communicate textual characteristics, preserved within religious circles to challenge European post-Romantic male writers’ views on aesthetics and melancholia. Reading textual characteristics in St. TerThis work is circuitously drawn from a research project I am completing in the School of the Arts at the University of Liverpool, where I work on women’s prose and verse narratives. I am especially grateful to Siobhan Chapman, Ian Schermbrucker, and Nick Davis for their support. I also thank Chris Routledge at the Centre for Lifelong Learning, whose cross-cultural take is inspirational for both lecturers and students. This particular critical analysis is also the fruit of my continuous reading of St. Teresa de Los Andes, which started nearly a decade ago during one of my academic trips to Latin America. Colleagues from the University of Ibagué to whom I am grateful, discussed her life and also introduced me to Caribbean poetry and folk music. I dedicate this work to the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Cartagena, Colombia, whose hospitality and kindness facilitated my search for Caribbean writers.  In this study, “orthogonal” principles of melancholy symbolism reflect a set of overlooked iconographic characteristics, constituting a Romantic aesthetic criteria, ascribed to literary or/ and artistic depictions of melancholia in portraiture. Such productions primarily represented the European fixation on white middle-class contemplative male or sad female figures as focal points for the portrayal of superior individuality; e. g. Constance Marie Charpentier’s Melancholy (). DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-004

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esa’s writings and other Caribbean narratives across ages, I discuss shared symbolics between European Carmelite epistolarity and Caribbean narrative form, offering a counter-argument to ubiquitous conceptions of melancholy metaesthetics within the European literary geography of thought.

A triangulation of metaphorical, theological, and epistolary practices In the literary context of mobilized melancholy² in relation to emotional and symbolic development of poetic narratives in World Literature and Comparative Studies, two particular areas are noteworthy. On the one hand, the past decade has witnessed varieties of interpretations in the critical discourse of negative emotions within cross-cultural studies of literature by recourse to poetic symbols and literary definitions of religious feeling. In this flourishing area of literature and religion, fostering an analytical and conjunctional narrative mode is crucial to humanities scholarship of religious narratology, for which different projects have so far come to fruition.³ These scholars have extensively elaborated on Matthew Arnold’s view that “the true meaning of religion is thus not simply morality, but morality touched by emotion.”⁴ On the other hand, critics constantly attempt to clarify the aesthetics of poetic emotion by referring to and raising controversies over historical binaries of feminine beauty and the masculine sublime.⁵ In this critical discourse, while beauty persists as a fundamental principle for femininity, sublime literature is predominantly attributed to canonical European male poets and novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

 By “mobilized melancholy,” I mean to emphasize the transportation, transmission, and transformation of conceptual definitions and analyses across different literary genres and geographies, which communicate melancholy as a complex emotion, personality trait, and state of mind.  See Michael Lieb, Emma Mason, and Jonathan Roberts, eds., The Oxford Handbook of the Reception History of the Bible (Oxford: OUP, ); Mark Knight and Louise Lee, eds., Religion, Literature and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds (London, New York: Continuum, ); Mark Knight and Emma Mason, Nineteenth-century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: OUP, ).  Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma: An Essay Towards a Better Apprehension of the Bible [] (New York: MacMillan, ): .  A fitting example of this type of literature may be brought forth as contemporary readings of Romantic binaries, e. g., Elizabeth A. Dolan, Seeing Suffering in Women’s Literature of the Romantic Era (Farnham: Ashgate, ).

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This study, however, offers a counter-argument particularly to this second premise, addressing melancholy “aestheticism” and “meta-aestheticism”⁶ in poetic comparisons of emotional development within the Caribbean literary domain as neither meticulously based on religious feeling nor on discovered models which emphasize cognitive bias.⁷ Today, we know that unlike melancholy versification, traditionally imbued with white, male, and middle-class autonomy, and primarily credited to British Romantic symbolism, women’s narratives have principally refuted such socially constructed or biological attributions. To clarify this line of aesthetic inquiry in its historical, cultural, and geographical nature and process, I propose that a triangulation of metaphorical, theological, and epistolary practices in the Caribbean domain is of paramount significance. In so doing, I focus – later in this essay – on St. Teresa de Los Andes, O.C.D. (1900 – 1920), whose writing can be culturally placed at the cross-roads between Caribbean and European stylistic practices as it displays this particular triangulation. Even though positioning St. Teresa (a Chilean) in an identity with Caribbean writers inscribes the subject in some hitherto uncharted literary interstice, I offer a re-reading of her literary practice for its considerable “shared symbolics”⁸ with both Caribbean and European intellectuals. By focusing on St. Teresa’s idea of the soul in slavery, I introduce a series of dialectic relations that challenge aesthetic processes of melancholy glorification in European literary-cultural stylistics versus Caribbean lamentation narratives, Caribbean slaves’ literal and allegorical experiences, and transmission of historical slavery. To this end, returning to Caribbean and Anglo-Caribbean traditions of twofold lamentation (both joyful and melancholic) is necessary. In this direction, I explore iconic narratives of notable writers and artists who provide sufficient examples, includ-

 “Metaesthetics” and “meta-aestheticism” are befitting terms in this study as such terminology “has a wider extension” mainly for its focus on the nature of aesthetics, “since the meta-discipline is always more general than the disciplines it deals with.” See Robert Hartman’s “Axiology as a Science: Reply to Hector Neri Castaňeda, ,” in Formal Axiology and Its Critics, ed. Rem B. Edwards (Amsterdam, Atlanta: Rodopi, ): .  Current scholarship of psycho-literary reading of narratives and critical attention to confirmed psychological details such as “cognitive bias” is fairly elementary and non-scientific in scope within the field of cognitive poetics and stylistics, but new projects are taking shape to address the exact position of scientific overlaps with narrative form, e. g., the series Psycho-literary Perspectives in Multimodal Contexts (acc. March , ).  A series of symbolic textual properties and characteristics, especially in the poetic and epistolary arena, are shared among Caribbean writers, Europeans, and the Carmelites, which also come together in St. Teresa’s writing. I phrase these symbolic textual characteristics as “shared symbolics.”

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ing allegories of light ≠ dark, joy ≠ melancholy, noise ≠ silence, selfhood ≠ individuality, and mystical ≠ metaphorical, a comprehensive valorization of the gendered and racialized practices of lamentation and melancholia.

Theological-metaphorical binaries in Caribbean poetics and European icons In one of his public interviews, the 1992 Nobel laureate poet of Saint Lucia, Derek Walcott (b. 1930) reiterates that the Caribbean conception of poetic joy is best discernible in its textual aesthetics and realism, rather than for its religious form or spiritual beauty. Reading and discussing one of his own poems, “The Light of the World,” Walcott emphasizes that it is the poet’s aim to “reach out directly to the reader” in order to be “clear,” suggesting that it is more befitting than necessary for the poet’s aestheticism to take poetic shape and transpire “without projection of fantasy.”⁹ Walcott’s understanding of the reality of each moment, as he put it, and his poetic style of negotiating such reality is at the heart of the Caribbean tradition of aestheticism. Unlike European oeuvres of masculine sublime in fantasy and symbolism transpiring in The Light of the World (1851– 1853) by William Holman Hunt (1827– 1910), Walcott carefully attends to his audience’s immediate audio-visual perception rather than concentrating on their imaginary hope and its allegorical light. While Hunt portrays a white man as Jesus, provoking light and hope in a European male portraiture, Walcott communicates the hopeful and enlightened feminine power. Such paradoxes exist between European and Caribbean art and literature, where white masculine iconicity (the seemingly superior figure in Western art) is opposed by Caribbean examples of non-white feminine power and beauty, such as in Walcott’s poem. While the figure of Jesus in Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World is the preRaphaelite symbolic property of white divinity in silent reflection, Walcott’s feminine figure of light and hope comes to being through the voice and music of Bob Marley.¹⁰ The light surrounding the woman – after whom the poet-narrator lusts – is not an idealized or idolized portraiture of fantasy. Walcott’s “The Light of the World” follows the modernist aesthetic of allegorical realism. Singing about Bob Marley’s song among a familiarly unfamiliar group of folks, Wal-

 Derek Walcott’s full interview is available on Youtube: “Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott on his life and work” (November , ) (acc. March , ).  Bob Marley’s music transpires throughout the poem to resonate with both female and male collective appearance as well as with light, nostalgia, and melancholy.

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cott instantly conjoins the reality of allegorical light of life (in his own visual perception) to that of the audience, reciting a joyful melancholy which can be noted in his interview. He describes light in watching women as reality rather than as a symbol of God’s creation. This same line of connection appears early in his poem, where he admires the female figure, noting: “I could see where the lights on the planes of her cheek / streaked and defined them; if this were a portrait” (ll. 3 – 4).¹¹ Walcott has re-created the light by attending to minute details of life, such as the figure of a woman together with the environmental significance of the poem. He interacts with nature, music, silence, noise, and people. Paula Burnett’s apt argument resonates in this example as “Walcott endorses Hearne’s claim that the fundamentally different human relations are not just a matter of aspiration but of reality.”¹² Walcott further argues that, for him, this poetic light is quite real and “not necessarily religious,” but also “a magical experience.”¹³ Similar analogies as such may be drawn from Caribbean literary symbolism to British pre-Raphaelite tradition of poetry, portraiture, and painting, notwithstanding palpable variation in structure and the construction of aesthetic emotions. Examples of this kind are also culturally and geographically wide-ranging in Caribbean and Anglo-Caribbean narratives.¹⁴ As a poetic development of recounting reality, the Caribbean tradition of compositionality¹⁵ – be it in painting, performance, or writing – has, in fact, gone through different stages of cultural transformation in modern history. If we consider a multimodal case, for example, the most relevant to this argument is the dynamism in the twofold notion of life-lamentation in its light and dark actions as well as in joyful and melancholy moments, permeating allegorical paradigms as they resurface in successful performances of Sir Sidney Poitier (b. 1927). The conception of the joyful light ultimately found its terminological pathway to the title of his documentary, Sidney Poitier: One Bright Light (2003). Where Walcott denigrates diverse gendered and figurative aspects of

 “The Light of the World” is taken from Derek Walcott, The Arkansas Testament (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ). The poem is also available online: (acc. March , ).  Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics (Gainesville: UP of Florida, ): .  See Walcott’s interview, “Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott on his life and work.”  Jean Rhys’s metaphors of light and dark work in a similar way.  “Compositionality” is considered here as the “constraint on the relations between syntax and semantics of language,” demanding the meanings of complex expressions by the meanings of syntactic parts and their placing together in the text (Markus Werning, Wolfram Hinzen, and Edouard Machery, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Compositionality [Oxford: OUP, ]; see Gottlob Frege, “Logic in Mathematics,” in Posthumous Writings [Chicago: U of Chicago P, ]:  – ); Richard Montague, “Universal Grammar,” Theoria  []:  – ).

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light in his poetry, Poitier unifies the collection of lights in the title as “One Bright Light,” introducing the first-person narrative type as an act of enlivening selfhood via real performance rather than adorning a fictional one or a fantasybased individuality. Identifying the aesthetic scope and cognitive process by which melancholy and joy are formed and observed in artistic life has an altogether complex, and often contradictory, structure in European pre-Raphaelite tradition which broadly influenced post-Romantic British compositionality up until the early twenty-first century. Similar to Holman Hunt’s idea of fantasy light, The Beloved (1865 – 1866) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), for example, communicates contradictory symbols, impregnating the portrait with light shades in the centre, while re-telling the Song of Solomon by positioning the white European woman at the heart of the painting – instead of portraying the real black bride. Therefore, a Biblical narrative of joyful darkness is re-framed, re-shaped, and scandalously retold as if the concealed joyfulness of the black bride is observed in the allegory of white melancholy beauty; hence, brightness brushed against the face of the white woman.¹⁶ For Rossetti, constructing a point of aesthetic convergence in such a limited portraiture-environment created a sharp conflict between subjective and objective visual dimensions. This concealment of reality, of course, conformed to social norms of prevalent poetic or artistic behaviors in England at the time. Notwithstanding the aftermath of the Enlightenment, and since the introduction of the constructivist theory of education (1966) by Jerome Brunner (b. 1915), and consequent developments in the first wave of multicultural movement in the arts during the 1970s, finding such dishonest re-framings of symbols is near to impossible nowadays. Modernist aesthetics, however, is observed to be expansively diverse in symbolism and allegorical construction. It is also argued that “in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Anglophone Caribbean writers established national literatures as part of the development of cultural and political nationalism in the region.”¹⁷ Therefore, disagreements as to the convergence of aesthetic and poetic symbolics based on the geographical spread of Caribbean literary tradition do not consist in literary productions alone. In a similar fashion, varieties of subjectivity and objectivity observed or formulated by contemporary Caribbean authors may be found in the dialogue between shared textual characteristics versus identity symbols. Among writers whose poetic compositionality is in Another example of this type is Allegory of Melancholy () by Lucas Cranach the Elder ( – ).  Leah Rosenberg, “Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Works of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys,” Modernism/modernity . ():  – , .

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grained in Caribbean traditions, Andrea Levy (b. 1956) must be mentioned, who is known to have established her fondness for defining and redefining such textual aesthetic processes of identity formation and emotional development. Reading Levy’s style, Eva Pirker argues that “without exception, Levy’s texts are written from a first-person perspective, and many of her themes seem to have been inspired by events in her life.”¹⁸ Therefore, unlike Caribbean male-authored narratives, such as Walcott’s poetry of lamentation, light, and life, Levy’s narratives are more akin to the Humean construction of “selfhood” as well as to Poitier’s dynamic performances. However, Levy’s narratives are composed as textualities rather than instances of acting. The historical notion of self-perception according to David Hume (1711– 1776) is to be acknowledged here that: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without perception, and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are remov’d for any time, as by sound sleep; so long am I insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist.¹⁹

Hume’s intense engagement with the topic of “perception and selfhood” suggests an enduring symbolics of Romantic and post-Romantic individuality and subjectivity which, to this date, demonstrates the significance of non-collective European manner of existence in British literature and the arts. Anglo-Caribbean writers, whose literary productions are composed within the British Isles’ geographical domain, in the main, conform to this definition in relation to notions such as collective light, the self, and its surrounding emotions. By contrast, Caribbean female writers such as Jean Rhys (1890 – 1979) aspire to varieties of conflict between selfhood and perception against the backdrop of others’ perception. Rhys, whose nude-posing career as a young Caribbean is documented in her writings, “rejected European nationalism and had little or no contact with national literary or political movements in the Caribbean,” but her “depiction of the primitive as a European construction furthers the deconstruction of whiteness in many of her works.”²⁰ Moreover, her specific demonstrations of women’s lonely escapades, the possibility of their exploitation by the superior society in foreign places, and their emotional burdens, juxtapose feminine individuality and autonomy in order to secure her characters’ survival and self-defense strategies.  Eva Ulrike Pirker, Narrative Projections of a Black British History (Oxford: Routledge, ): .  David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Oxford: Clarendon P, ): .  Rosenberg, “Caribbean Models,” , .

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Considering a different genre, Caribbean female poets such as Nancy Morejón (b. 1944) have developed this deconstruction of a non-collective whiteness to a unified and collective joy, via a psycho-literary process of reflexivity, juxtaposing poetic photography and photographic poems, as well as individuality of a photographed portrait with the collectivist plural form of feminine autonomy as “women.” In her verse narrative, “Mujeres Nuevas” [New Women], which is based on a photo depicting a single woman winding thread, Morejón re-enacts the self’s perception of herself by singing a collective song of joy in the final allegory of light, despite the darkness alongside the melancholy journey of womanhood.²¹ The poem ends by redefining the woman, as she notes: Oh, simples mujeres nuevas simples mujeres negras dando el aliento vivo de una luz nueva para todos. [Oh, upright new women, upright black women, bringing the blessed breath, of a new light for us all.]²²

The composition of a “new light” for the benefit of all, in this poem, counteracts the Humean perception of selfhood as envisaged in early Caribbean and AngloCaribbean symbolics²³ – particularly during the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when want of mobility in Caribbean geographies of slavery made it almost impossible for plantation workers to recognize the extent to which European perception of selfhood was indicative of individual leadership. Morejón’s careful recognition of the other group of women, be it even new women, consolidates selfhood with Bhabha’s reading of cultural consciousness and realism, as he argues that “to exist is to be called into being in relation to an otherness.’²⁴

 Taken from Nancy Morejón, With Eyes and Soul: Images of Cuba (New York: White Pine P, ).  See full poem and relevant photo online: (acc. March , ).  The linkage between fertility and earth-eating presents an early Caribbean symbolics of immobility and dependence on attachment to a certain piece of land. This linkage emerges in depictions of pregnant women and children in tribal geophagy. For more details, see Kenneth F. Kiple, The Caribbean Slave: A Biological History (Cambridge: CUP, ) and Kristen Block, Ordinary Lives in the Early Caribbean: Religion, Colonial Competition, and the Politics of Profit (Athens and London: U of Georgia P, ).  Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, ): .

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Similarly, Morejón calls women into being in relation to this new otherness which carries with itself the positive weight of “a new light”; a metaphorical song to inspire hopefulness and raise joyfulness through depth of darkness. This symbolic call into bringing about and becoming light preserves the poet’s selfhood by defending the soul of the female community and attempting to free their sense of selfhood from slavery of any kind. In this aesthetic process, Morejón juxtaposes brightness and weightlessness and shapes them into one terminological unity in “light,” proposing not only a new hope in collective action, but also an instance of emotional development from melancholy to joy. Interestingly, Morejón’s figurative language collaborates with the pictorial symbol of noise²⁵ in the photograph for which the poem is written. The photographed girl, winding threads, seems to be wearing an electrostatic pair of headphones, with a twofold application to reduce industrial noise while keeping the workers busy by way of musical indoctrination. Morejón’s imagery corresponds with Walcott’s application of Bob Marley’s music in the poem, as if both have aimed to blend nostalgia of the past with the present realities of life. In such a noisy environment, the concept of voicelessness is a poignant one, to which Morejón objects by calling out to “new women” in her poem. Scholars of Caribbean literature have rightly argued that “the concept of voicelessness necessarily informs any discussion of Caribbean women and literature,” by which “we mean the absence of a specifically female position on major issues such as slavery, colonialism, decolonization, women’s rights and more direct social and cultural issues.”²⁶ Simultaneously, this Caribbean twofold lamentation of voicelessness could also mean “silence” as “the inability to express a position in the language of the “master”, as well as the textual construction of the woman as silent,” while also denoting an “articulation which goes unheard.”²⁷ This comparative example of Caribbean male and female poetics of melancholy and the inherent twofold lamentation in both works is, in a different way, communicated within epistolary practices. Noting that epistolarity is a contested area within Caribbean studies, while emerging as a bourgeois subject in the eighteenth century, it is possible to problematize this fact with relative restrictions of epistolary access to only a small cohort of privileged slaves. As Lynn Hunt argues, the heyday of the epistolary novel “coincides chronologically

 “Noise” is used in this study as the sound or sounds configured in Geographies of Urban Sound like “an aversive component of a setting” (Torsten Wissmann, Geographies of Urban Sound [Farnham: Ashgate, ]: ).  Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Fido Savory, eds., Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, ): .  Boyce and Savory, Out of the Kumbla, .

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with the birth of human rights,” which “surged as a genre between the 1760s and 1780s, and then rather mysteriously died out in the 1790s.”²⁸ A literary example of this thematic sub-genre within the Caribbean and Latin American spectrum only appeared after the genre had somehow died out in the European domain. For instance, Sab (1841) written by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814– 1873) – who is comparable to her British contemporary, Felicia Hemans (1793 – 1835), in fame and literary productivity – was published decades later. Sab is a story of a Cuban mulatto slave, working on a plantation and falling in love with a white girl, namely the daughter of the plantation owner. Avellaneda applies the letter writing genre for parts of her communication of objection to the soul in slavery. Although this novel is a female-authored version of indirect lamentation of slavery, there are other examples which may be extended in this direction. The Autobiography of Manzano (1836) written by a Cuban slave, Juan Francisco Manzano (1797– 1854), only appeared years later, followed by his poems and play, Zafira (1842). Another comparative case is that of Cirilo Villaverde (1812– 1894), whose fight for freedom of slaves was rooted in his bourgeois position, witnessing slavery in a Cuban sugar plantation where he was born to the owners and brought up noting the sufferings. Published in 1839, Cecilia Valdés o la Loma del Angel, likewise, registers a narrative of slavery and anti-slavery textualities. Beyond slavery and melancholy aesthetics, I argue that these comparative works of communicative language adhere to the light ≠ dark, joy ≠ melancholy, and mystical ≠ metaphorical binaries, for their triangulation of metaphorical, theological, and epistolary practices. These features, in effect, constitute a shared symbolics which emerges – in a different language and cultural paradigm – within European women writers’ literary productions such as those by Felicia Hemans. Furthermore, these works convey a collective form of voicelessness which can be heard in the disparity of their emergence within different geographies and cultures. Returning to Walcott’s understanding of light, this voicelessness is almost entirely structured to be heard. In the final lines of Walcott’s “The Light of the World,” we hardly hear about or observe Marley’s emotional depiction, nor do we see any trace of the woman’s feelings. Instead, the narrator’s emotions can be heard, whose conversational conclusion resonates with feminine voicelessness. Walcott confirms that as the daylight was departing, so was joy disappearing from the face of the earth, “except the line of her profile, and the highlit cheek, / and I thought, O Beauty, you are the light of the world” (ll. 18 – 19).

 Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, ): .

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While Walcott’s take on light showcases a masculine selfhood addressing the feminine as performed by Romantic male writers in its aesthetic process, Morejón’s provides a poetic type of self-defense by enlivening and unifying women’s voices rather than their physical attributions. In critical analyses of these comparative cases, we may note the aesthetic process of melancholy divergence, according to metaesthetic style, gender attributes, and finally class divergence. Despite structural and aesthetic divergence in the works of Caribbean men and women, there is also a historical difference between their social classes, emerging in Caribbean narratives. For example, during the 1950s, the majority of novelists “such as Roger Mais, Edgar Mittelholtzer, Neville Dawes, Andrew Salkey and Jan Carew were all middle-class Caribbean colonials educated in the bourgeois Great Tradition of English colonialism, yet ‘the substance of their books, the general motives and directions, are peasant’.”²⁹ Focusing on other literary genres and conceptions of noise, tradition, and social order, David Hart contends that: Following Brathwaite’s lead, we may look into Caribbean writing (that is not poetry), and we will still see an engagement with “noise” in Caribbean literature. George Lamming, Barbadian author and intellect, refers specifically to noise multiple times in describing identity issues in The Pleasures of Exile (1960). He discusses that when reciting his poem in London, he made a heaven of a noise which is characteristic of my voice and an ingredient of West Indian behavior.³⁰

Walcott aimed for making a noise by voicing his attempt to sing the beginning of “The Light of the World” in his interview, but it is arguable that he withdrew, perhaps in a redefined attempt, to give his audience that specific opportunity of registering the noise of their collective laughter. These multimodal characteristics and their multimedial varieties are materialized, more vividly, in Caribbean and Latin-American women’s writings of various genres. Further to this comparative background, textual characteristics that classify shared symbolics in Caribbean and Caribbean-inspired literature, particularly by female writers, include: repetitious lamentation of the human soul in slavery instead of glorifying psycho-physical pain; merging dichotomous metaphors (e. g. solar and lunar) rather than focusing on lunar and nocturnal depression; debating spring-bound melancholy rather than autumnal discontentment; and por Christian Campbell, “Folking up the Criticism: The Politics of ‘the Folk’ in Caribbean Discourse,” in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, ed. Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (London: Routledge, ):  – , .  David W. Hart, “Erosions, Noise, and Hurricanes: Kamau Brathwaite’s History of the Voice,” Revista Mexicana del Caribe  ():  – , .

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traying cyclical transformation of emotions. Consisting in stylistic and psychoaesthetic features in compositionality – specifically by Caribbean women writers – these shared symbolics challenge melancholy imagery normalized by Romantic male writers, who claimed to compose “divine authority,” as a result of which male-authored verse was understood as canonical and interpreted as a collective symbolic of intellectual superiority and “poetic genius.”³¹

Caribbean and Latin American epistolary symbolics of reciprocity In the context of Caribbean literature with Latin American symbolism, the epistolary form has a long history in feminism, theology, and postcolonial studies. Among modern and contemporary epistolary advocates, Audre Lourde (1934– 1992) and her correspondents offer much insight into reading and writing in Caribbean epistolary styles, including epistolary verse.³² Female proponents of Caribbean epistolary culture in prose fiction are active writers as well as educators, among whom Beryl Gilroy (1924– 2001) was prominent.³³ Despite its significance for the geographical and political history of Caribbean literature, this literary genre is a fairly overlooked area of study in contemporary scholarship of Latin American female writers. Reflecting on the psycho-poetical import of correspondence, I argue that we can distinguish Caribbean epistolary style for its pivotal role in emotional and informative reciprocity, showcasing their writers’ interest in human and divine yearning for mutual love. By contrast, critics of European epistolary culture have overlooked the psycho-aesthetic process of emotional development in this creative art by concentrating on stylistic features of texts in the works of English writers alone. I contend that where critics fail to substantiate a cross-textual and cross-cultural comparison, originality and superiority of a certain epistolary text can hardly be argued, let alone established. Particular concepts such as mutuality between writer and reader are among major principles of letter-writing, having so far remained rather embryonic in European critical discourse. Predominantly focused on “consciousness” and the so-called originality of this mode within eight-

 Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England,  –  (Bloomington: Indiana UP, ): .  See a particular example by Lyndon Gill online: (acc. January , ).  Others writers merited with epistolary culture are Paulette Ramsay and Alecia McKenzie.

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eenth-century and Romantic literature, critics argue that “the sophisticated way in which it [the epistolary novel] represents consciousness instead makes it central to the achievements of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel.”³⁴ Similar studies have failed to note that the epistolary styles of fiction and non-fiction corroborate longevity and mutuality beyond consciousness and intense textual complexity. The epistolary genre, informed by Caribbean allegories, metaphorical conversations, and mythological tropes, for example, can be understood as a symbol of longing and reciprocity, as Linda Kaufman argues: “If the beloved were present, there would be no need to write.”³⁵ Critics often emphasize that Caribbean and African-American traditions of epistolary fiction are rooted in European models. However, psycho-literary experts read novels – such as Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) – based on a different psycho-epistolary principle, mainly that of “reflexivity,” rather than third-person imaginary reflections of a narrative.³⁶ While the characters of Jane Austen’s and Samuel Richardson’s epistolary style reframe individuality and consciousness, the Caribbean mode takes its corresponding values from Latin American collective culture, which encourages reciprocity between firstand third-person narratives as well as writers’ and readers’ mutual reflexivity. For this reason, I see the Caribbean epistolary tradition in an entirely different category, one which, similar to Mediterranean epistolary symbolism but unlike its European analogue, presents its textual originality and stylistic value in a realistic process of mutual emotional development rather than demonstrating a thematic and idealized narrative. This major difference in Caribbean and European epistolary form depicts two pre-modern areas. To begin with, mythological and story-telling correspondence modes in the Caribbean region were developed long before the invention of eighteenth-century European epistolary novels. Both indigenous civilizations and colonial history of the Caribbean region are implanted in Caribbean story-

 Joe Bray, The Epistolary Novel: Representations of Consciousness (New York and London: Routledge, ): .  Linda Kauffman, Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (Ithaca: Cornell UP, ): .  “Reflexivity” is a psychological process by which a circular-bilateral relationship between cause and effect is drawn and documented via bilateral understanding in psycho-social reports as well as in self-reflexive texts. See Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities P, ) and Werner Huber, Martin Middeke, and Hubert Zapf, eds., Self-Reflexivity in Literature (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, ).

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telling and epistolary style.³⁷ Second, the importance of religious correspondence should not be overlooked in the literary field, specifically corresponding multimodal representations of Caribbean symbolism between monasteries, convents, and practicing lay societies in Latin America. It is noteworthy that, over the centuries, the Carmelites have proficiently advanced the art of letter-writing along with hand-writing. Although enclosed religious communities such as the Carmelite tend to keep their documents and diaries locked up, away from open investigation, there are fortunately several examples by which we can further our understanding of their literary mode of emotional development. The writings of Juanita Fernández Solar, known today as Teresa de Los Andes, O.C.D. (1900 – 1920) provide such insight into the modern aesthetics of Latin American literature which is closely tied to Caribbean symbolic literature. Beatified on April 3, 1987, and subsequently canonized by Pope John Paul II on March 21, 1993, St. Teresa is not only a religious nun, a mystic of Chile, and a symbol of piety, but also a prolific writer of letters and diaries – despite struggling with social norms, her age, health, and familial objections to her religious vocation. St. Teresa is regrettably an overlooked writer in Comparative Studies’ literary syllabi. However, her letters and biographies shed light on the Caribbean tradition of epistolary reciprocation of aesthetics and emotional development. She lived a short life, spending a total of eleven months in the Monastery of Los Andes, where – as a result of declining health – she was allowed early profession of final vows before she died of septicemia. Following Michael Griffin’s translation of her letters and biography, I agree that St. Teresa’s letters demonstrate her gift of an “analytical mind” with “deeply emotional” personality traits that one may encounter in Latin American epistolary culture and symbolism.³⁸ Reading St. Teresa provides an invaluable experience of understanding melancholy and joy, particularly for the abundance of structural and communicative simplicity in her writing. St. Teresa’s style, however, is arguably original, considering her keen enthusiasm for creating terms of endearment or crafting repetitive PS-styled post-endings. Her work is also illuminating in terms of Biblical and literary references, while her system of information-sharing consists of repetitive joyful cycles of reminder to friends and family. In this aesthetic process of emotional develop-

 See Lucía M. Gonzalez, “Storytelling and Recently Arrived Latino Children,” in Jamie Campbell, ed., Celebrating Cuentos: Promoting Latino Children’s Literature and Literacy in Classrooms and Libraries (Santa Barbara: Libraries Unlimited, ):  – .  Michael D. Griffin, in St. Teresa of Jesus of the Andes, Letters of Saint Teresa of Jesus of the Andes, trans. Michael D. Griffin (Hubertus, WI: Teresian Charism P, ): i–ii; further references to the letters in the text.

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ment, St. Teresa’s letters evoke profuse instances of melancholy and joyful moments together with light and dark days which, much surprising for any literary reader, offer specific insight into her psycho-poetic stylistics of Caribbean symbolism. Her language is allegorical and yet simple, rather than a complex one for which certain theological study would be necessary. Interestingly, despite her grave struggles with a series of health problems during every year, St. Teresa never gave up on writing to those whom she considered closest to her heart.³⁹ Demanding reciprocity is a key symbolic feature in her writings.

Melancholy metaesthetics of light and joy in St. Teresa’s writings A series of textual features, which I call shared symbolics, inhabit St. Teresa’s letters and diary, which remain comparatively recognizable in other Caribbean women’s writings. The translated body of her letters showcases instances of her profound concern for her soul’s state of contentment, and for her family’s and friends’ emotions. This psycho-ideological concern has its stylistic and textual presentations in her letters, specifically where repetition of the image of the soul in slavery emerges in copious correspondences. Likewise, contradictions of an emotional understanding of reality press upon her epistolary discernment process. Providing a didactic tradition, St. Teresa advises, “Let’s overcome ourselves. Let’s be obedient in everything. Let’s be humble. We’re so miserable! Let’s be patient and as pure as the angels” (13). This seemingly confident structure and guidance disappears, time and again, in other letters where she questions her emotional development, stating, for example, “my normal state of soul is one of terrible dryness” (49) and “I feel a love for solitude, silence, detachment from everything worldly, and above all for prayer” (88). Escaping the noise which comes with family parties and social gatherings, St. Teresa looks for the depth of her soul in emotional development, saturating simple words with complex self-reflexive accounts which are documented in her letters. She often declares this twofold state of mind, noting: “I am in such an atrocious state of doubt that I don’t even know how to make a decision as to whether I should become a Carmelite or a Sacred Heart Sister. That’s why I am searching for light” (85). To relieve this conscious process of questioning her

 St. Teresa suffered continuous anaemia, gripe, physical pain including chest pain, fatigue, liver problems, and on one occasion she had endured insufferable pain from two procedures for a tooth extraction. See her words on her health in Letters, , , , , and .

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soul, St. Teresa seeks reciprocity of emotions, information, and common daily news, looking for guidance from her extended family, school teachers, friends, religious nuns, and priests. Derek Walcott’s “The Light of the World” resonates with St. Teresa’s admiration of the ordinary light, but her stylistic and theological search for light is totally different from Walcott’s. St. Teresa looks for light not in social structure or reality of Latin American sociability and collective culture, but in an unusual solitude-seeking manner for a girl of her age. Connecting light and joy with silence, St. Teresa’s letters are emotional but not passive. Merging dichotomous metaphors inspired by South American nature, St. Teresa corresponds with her readers in twofold allegories of illumination. On the one hand, she follows a Platonic style of reiterating light by referring to the sun. In a letter, dated August 2, 1919, she writes to her mother: Let’s adore Him with faith. Everything changes when we look at this Divine Sun. May faith, Mommy, be the lens that reveals to you your creator. A soul that has faith has everything because it has God. Sufferings are transformed by faith. The important thing is not to concentrate on the external. We should examine the source from which things are born, and faith will make it known: it’s God’s love which tries, refines, and purifies the soul. (280)

Although, for St. Teresa, this allegory of light resonates with the joy in the Platonic symbolism of intellectual illumination, it restores St. Augustine’s stance of spiritual illumination.⁴⁰ However, unlike European or Caribbean male-authored symbolism of sunlight, St. Teresa reflects on the effect of moonlight, particularly in letters where she exemplifies love. In a letter dated January 16, 1918, St. Teresa corresponds with readers about her life and the environment in which she enjoys life. Writing to one of her closest girl friends, Carmen de Castro, she says: Last night was an ideal night. We went outside and sat on the sand. It was the first time the moon could be seen, since every day it had clouded up at night. It would be impossible to describe anything more perfect. I felt that you were right there beside me. That’s how strongly I was thinking of you. Carmen, does it ever happen to you that you are looking at the ocean, you feel a longing for the infinite? We feel in our soul an inexplicable loneliness that only God can fill, because everything seems so very small. (31)

The originality of this thought-pattern is crucial in reading St. Teresa. It is clear that this young girl has enjoyed, in her coastal observation of night sky, a paradoxical symbolics of life in melancholy and joy, by equating moonlight with love and friendship. Interestingly, this passage registers with Viktor Frankl’s epistolary style in Man’s Search for Meaning, where he communicates a similar per-

 See St. Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine of Hippo (New York: Dover, ): .

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spective, and documents his yearning for affection, joy, and reciprocity by looking at night sky and realizing that the light of love is the reason for continuing life, despite the atrocities taking shape around him in the Shoah. Frankl recounts how stumbling in the darkness, he kept his attention above big stones and large puddles, remembering: Occasionally I looked at the sky, where the stars were fading and the pink light of the morning was beginning to spread behind a dark bank of clouds. But my mind clung to my wife’s image, imagining it with an uncanny acuteness. I heard her answering me, saw her smile, her frank and encouraging look. Real or not, her look was then more luminous than the sun which was beginning to rise […]. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. ⁴¹

St. Teresa’s recollections, by comparison of light, depart from such melancholy symbolics of love, where she styles her idea of affection with repetitious circles and transformational stages in her diverse, and often doubtful, emotions. Nevertheless, always ending in joy, St. Teresa establishes an aesthetic process in her letters, which – despite showcasing the paradoxical cycles of emotional struggle – transmit the intuition of hope for “the other” more comprehensive light. Alister McGrath argues that “this sense that our true destiny lies beyond this transient world is heightened by several factors” including “deep intuition that this is not where we belong.”⁴² This sense of yearning for another place, love, or light, is present throughout the Caribbean symbolics of story-telling. For example, embodied with light is the character of mythological creatures such as birds with light-emitting eyes (e. g., Alicanto) or melancholy women in search of lost loved ones, such as a mythological character called “La Llorona,” communicating the myth of the weeping woman who is believed to appear at night in search for her drowned kids.⁴³ In line with St. Teresa’s recurring struggles of emotions in repetitious circles, Cecília Meireles (1901– 1964) documents both light and darkness, and melancholy and joy. In her poems, Meireles suggests a similar continuity in final contentment, surrounding poetic stylistics with reciprocal dimensions which resonate with Caribbean epistolary tradition

 Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust (London: Rider, ): .  Alister McGrath, Mere Apologetics: How to Help Seekers and Skeptics Find Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, ): .  Note that this myth has expanded in popular culture and reshaped in contemporary multimodal narratives. See Belinda Vasquez Garcia, The Witch Narratives Reincarnation (Magic Prose Publishing, ), and La Llorona (), directed by René Cardona in Mexico.

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of mutual reflexivity. In “Motivo,” for example, Meireles sings of paradoxical symbolics of life: “Eu canto porque o instante existe / e a minha vida está completa. / Não sou alegre nem sou triste: / sou poeta” [My singing is a sign of the existence of moments, neither joyful nor melancholy, I am a poet].⁴⁴ It is also possible to argue that the natural environment, political state, and weather in which Latin American and Caribbean epistles are set, have different stylistic effects on the writings, which cannot be found in Britain’s productions of epistolary fiction and non-fiction. For instance, David Dabydeen (b. 1955) recognizes this source of difference, suggesting that “living in England, the landscape for me is a literary landscape,” while “[t]he Guyana landscape” proposes the unspoken fears, as it “has a terror, the terror of the unwritten.”⁴⁵ Perhaps, for these unknown or unwritten terrors, the writings of St. Teresa and Cecília Meireles portray such shared symbolics as the cyclical development of paradoxical emotions by referencing beauty in nature. Such melancholy metaesthetics and emotional reappearances, according to Dabydeen, may invoke “three rhythms of the classical Indian raag [raga], with the reversal of rhythms informed by the yogic view that there is no beginning and no end, just cycles to and from consciousness.”⁴⁶ This stylistic characteristic of texts in Caribbean epistolary culture have corollaries in Indian and Mediterranean fiction, displaying certain likeness to an “elaborate exposition of some Indian classical raag which, again, is like the narrative process in which some main themes recur through a wide range of diversifications.”⁴⁷ Speaking of recurring and reciprocity symbolics, St. Teresa reflects on the concept of “infinity” in emotional correspondence. She declares; “Oh, how great is this infinite love. A love unknown, a love not returned by most humanity” (242). Knowing that detachment is a necessary step to her ultimate joyfulness, she argues that “God makes my soul insensitive to their tears when I am with my loved ones. But once I am by myself, I feel my soul torn with sorrow” (201). This is a complex process of aesthetic realization, where joyful embodiment is only possible via longing and yearning for reciprocal affection. St. Tere-

 This translation is mine. For the complete original version, see “Motivo” online: (acc. March , ).  See “Interview with David Dabydeen,” in The Art of David Dabydeen, ed. Kevin Grant (Leeds: Peepal Tree P, ):  – , .  “Interview with David Dabydeen: Mongrelisation is Our Original State” in Altered States: Postmodernism, Politics, Culture, ed. M. Perryman (London: Lawrence and Wishart, ):  – .  Rama Kund, “Seth’s Use of Rhyth, in A Suitable Boy” in Critical Responses to Indian Fiction in English, ed. Amar Nath Prasad (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, ):  – , .

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sa’s elaboration on this complex metaesthetics of symbolic melancholy extends beyond religious beauty as she notes: And since we are miserable, we are attached to feelings of fervor, to feeling God’s love at a sense level. Sometimes we tend to go to prayer in search of God’s consolation, not God Himself. This is an imperfection, and Our Lord sometimes purifies souls He loves by giving them aridity, and when they no longer care about feeling sensible fervor or not, only then does he favor and console them. This is the greatest suffering, since it is the suffering of the soul. (140)

While St. Teresa’s perception of suffering and joy sacrifices the selfhood in attachment in order to better grasp the beauty of affection for her loved ones, a European understanding of detachment and beauty draws upon Elaine Scarry’s objectification of the source of beauty. Scarry argues that “if instead we are persuaded that beauty distracted us from suffering, and that our attention to that suffering will help reduce the harm, we will have to assume that human perception, far from poisoning each object it turns toward, is instead fully capable of being benign.”⁴⁸ St. Teresa suggests quite the opposite of this argument, by an attempt to practice detachment from objects of belonging, be it family, friends, and familiar environment. She emphasizes that the soul could be victimized in the process of offering love and remaining in close proximity with loved ones; thereby, scolding her self-comfort and self-love in attachment and familial bonding. To free the soul from such slavery of love and beauty, instead, she seeks epistolary reciprocity where she can best describe her yearning for an altogether higher beauty. In a letter to her brother, dated June 11, 1919, St. Teresa communicates this argument, declaring that Everything on earth, Luís, seems to shrink, to lose value before the Divinity which, like an infinite Sun, continues to shine upon my miserable soul with its rays. Oh, if you could go to the depths of my soul even for an instant, you would see me captivated by that beauty, by that incomprehensible goodness. (242)

Knowing how heart-broken her brother is of giving her away to Carmel, she argues – in order to convince him – that “when people love, they can’t help speaking of their loved one,” questioning the impossibility of transformation in certain souls. She clarifies her observation of this impossibility as “martyrdom,” while meeting “noble and well-bred hearts, hearts capable of loving good, not loving the good that never changes” (243). In this observation, St. Teresa’s anxiety of noting the soul in slavery is central to her letters, specifically for her younger sis Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ): .

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ter, Rebecca. On different occasions, she tries to make Rebecca understand the importance of joy and light in life by focusing on the highest perception of light in God. On Rebecca’s fourteenth birthday, St. Teresa reveals that she would be setting her soul afire (xxxiv, 10 – 11).

Silent closure, Caribbean forest, and the allegory of abundance St. Teresa’s writing is infused with metaphorical signifiers of nature. This textual characteristic of her work resembles the Latin American artistic tradition of melancholy-joy symbolism. Frida Kahlo’s forest paintings provoke a certain silence, which echoes the idea of paradoxical continuity in conversation with the viewers. Her Two Nudes in the Forest (1939) communicate this silence by recuperating primitivistic symbolics.⁴⁹ By contrast, European allegorical works, with Biblical and non-Biblical symbolist structure presenting the forest, counteract silence via motion in structural form and the number of figures portrayed in paintings. Examples of this type may be found in classical mythological paintings of pre-modern Europe, such as Allegory of Abundance: Venus, Ceres and Bacchus (1608) by Flemish Baroque painter, Hendrick van Balen (1575 – 1632).⁵⁰ Unlike the communicative silence sought in Caribbean symbolist narratives of the forest, the European model portrays noise and movement – but not necessarily reciprocity of conversation with the viewers. Grace Nichols (b. 1950) establishes this communicative and quiet theme in her poem “For Forest.”⁵¹ Shared symbolics of paradoxical repetition of emotional development is evident in this poem, specifically in Nichols’s repetition of one phrase, “forest could keep secrets” and the final epistolary form which calls out to the readers “and we must keep forest.” Keeping forest is, in a metaphorical way, a silent pronouncement of yearning for unity with the beloved which must be concealed through these cyclical moments of joy and melancholy in nature. St. Teresa’s epistolary juxtaposition of girls and forest conforms to the Caribbean tradition of feminine strength in nature, which emerges in both Kahlo’s

 Frida Kahlo, Two Nudes in the Forest () (acc. April , ).  Hendrick van Balen, Allegory of Abundance: Venus, Ceres and Bacchus () (acc. May , ).  See the poet’s own account of the poem online: (acc. June , ).

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painting and in Nichols’s poem, although St. Teresa reveals her emotional need for masculine symbolics in the scene. On February 1, 1918, St. Teresa wrote to her father: Yesterday, we had a trip that was beautiful and comfortable for everyone since it was just girls. We organized an outing with Miss Julia Freire de Rivas, since we are all close friends of her daughter. There were 11 of us in all who went to have lunch at a waterfall called Las Petras. There is a huge forest where not a ray of sunshine gets in, and where the finest and most precious ferns grow like weeds […]. You don’t know how bad I feel when I see the other girls so happy with their fathers. (34– 35)

The same complaints recurs in her subsequent letter to Carmen (her close friend), although her yearning for affection and silence takes a different textual format. St. Teresa reveals her paradoxical and circular lack of interest in attachment as she notes: Look, you can bet that when I think of there being times when I’ll be forced to go to such gatherings, it makes me want to cry, and more than ever I long for a little place where there’s true solitude and happiness, because there I’ll have God […]. As I was telling you, we’ve gone on many jaunts. The other day we went to have lunch in a lovely forest, where the sun’s rays never get in and where ferns grow like weeds. (38)

This allegory of abundance in the forest, in St. Teresa’s writing, is an epistolary symbol of Caribbean paradoxes. The Biblical take of darkness and sin is that: There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths. […] The eye of the adulterer watches for dusk; he thinks, ‘No eye will see me,’ and he keeps his face concealed. […] For all of them, deep darkness is their morning; they make friends with the terrors of darkness. (Job 24:13, 15, 17)

St. Teresa’s vision of light is a testimony to her beatification and canonization homily offered by the Pope, and her life can be understood as an allegorical symbol of light, for which she adhered to joyfulness rather than settling for or glorifying melancholy darkness. Her collection of letters testify to her Caribbean literary associations of the epistolary style as well as her Biblical upbringing. Her letters and diaries reflect the mythological symbolics of light, in addition to the Biblical as we read: “You are all sons of the light and sons of the day. We do not belong to the night or to the darkness. So then, let us not be like others who are asleep, but let us be alert and self-controlled. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, get drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be self-controlled” (1 Thes 5:5 – 8a).

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Defying Social Death: Magic, Medicine, and Masquerade in Marie-Elena John’s Unburnable The article focuses on Marie-Elena John’s novel Unburnable, which critiques the repression and distortion of African cultures and customs in the black Atlantic diaspora. Drawing upon Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death, the article argues that actual and social deaths in the novel are not just inflexible conditions of enslavement and domination but also have liberating potential, similar to Abdul JanMohamed’s formulation of symbolic death. Various Caribbean cultural forms that emerge from Africa gain new resonance and symbolic power in the contexts of slavery and its aftermath. Through these forms, John challenges the claims of justice, rationality, and order of colonial regimes of thought and reveals their traumatic legacies in plantation societies. The symbolic instruments may be seen as the cultural counterpart to the physical instruments used to control the slave’s body. In much the same way that the literal whips were fashioned from different materials, the symbolic whips of slavery were woven from many areas of culture. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death ¹

In his comparative study of slavery, Orlando Patterson identifies three constitutive elements in its structure of bondage: powerlessness, social death, and lack of honor. To keep this exceedingly inhuman and dehumanizing system in place required at its most basic level “naked force,” the physical brutality “necessary continually to repeat the original, violent act of transforming free man into slave.”² As long as the slave was coerced into the site of subjection and operated under the master’s control, the threat of terminal violence, in other words, death, would be conditionally suspended, reinforcing another constitutive aspect of the slave’s existence: social death. The “natal alienation” that is a corollary of social death rendered the slave subject an objectified instrument, wrenched from his or

 Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ): .  Patterson, Slavery, . Patterson’s three elements of slavery are by no means uncontroversial, but my focus here is not on debating the infallibility of all these terms so much as critically working within his discussion of social death. DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-005

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her own cultural and genealogical milieu and violently displaced into the master’s inhospitable and alien culture. Patterson notes: Slaves differed from other human beings in that they were not allowed freely to integrate the experience of their ancestors into their lives, to inform their understanding of social reality with the inherited meanings of their natural forebears, or to anchor the living present in any conscious community of memory.

That slaves constantly did reach out to their collective and sometimes imagined past or draw upon memory and lived experience was not in doubt, but “doing so meant struggling with and penetrating the iron curtain of the master, his community, his laws, his policeman or patrollers, and his heritage,” he concludes.³ It is not surprising, then, that the zombie emerged as a distinctly Caribbean figure from its wider African origins after the catastrophic Middle Passage, since the condition of the “living dead” aptly enacted the tragic, evacuated subjectivity of the slave’s social death.⁴ The confinement of not just individuals but entire communities of slaves into this terrifying state of (non)being was accomplished through brute force and also by various social rituals and symbols that disfigured, deflated or repressed the slave’s social history and human status. For instance, using similar names for livestock and plantation slaves (or satirically inflating their names); shipping, branding, and publicly selling them; disregarding filial bonds or kinship in how they were sold were all means of effectively signifying and reinforcing the slave’s place as chattel. Another experience enforced upon the slave was the rejection of the slave’s “own gods and ancestral spirits” and substitution with the master’s religion and culture, albeit in a partial, selective process that neither bestowed full and empowered participation in the latter nor accomplished a total expurgation of the former.⁵

 Patterson, Slavery, .  One of the Congo words that is linked etymologically to the zombie is nzambi, which can mean “soul,” “God,” and “spirit.” Maureen Warner-Lewis notes that the term is associated with the ancestor worship of Central African religions, where ancestors are a form of the “living dead,” and can be powerful benevolent or malevolent forces that are worshipped and appeased (Maureen Warner-Lewis, Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures [Barbados: U of the West Indies P, ]:  – ). The living death of the Caribbean zombie, however, usually conveys an abject and terrifying condition of social death rather than the more productive afterlives of the African ancestors invoked at the end of Marie-Elena John’s novel.  Patterson, Slavery, , , . Insisting on the chattel status of slaves sold like animals is a stock feature of Caribbean and African American slave narratives. It is noteworthy that “Maroon” was derived from cimarrón, Spanish for a feral animal.

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While Patterson’s portrayal of social death poignantly articulates the slave subject enfettered by the hegemonic alliance between physical force and symbolic power, he does not provide adequate space in the theory of social death for the continuous, subversive struggles of the slaves to break these fetters, and their ultimate, if hard fought and dearly paid, success in doing so. Nor does he pay significant attention to gender difference in the theory of social death.⁶ Unburnable (2006), Marie-Elena John’s debut novel, which shuttles between the present and past while shifting from New York to Dominica, graphs multiple cultural survivals across the black diaspora, even if they also extract a heavy price in colonial and metropolitan societies that persistently disavow them.⁷ My analysis will link her novel to a rich Caribbean literary tradition of counter-hegemonic conflict and confrontation with social death. Africanized religions, rituals, masking ceremonies, medicinal lore, and magical rites, while forced into an underground and threatened existence, erupt at frequent intervals to rupture the entombment of social death in the novel. John’s professional experience in human rights and gender empowerment programs in Africa, together with her UN advocacy work on ending violence against women and on other women’s issues, align with her Caribbean upbringing and her North American domicile to bring different diasporas in dialogue with each other. Antiguan by descent, educated in New York, and well-traveled in Africa, she is deeply invested in charting a transatlantic black diasporic community that has specific historical, regional, and cultural differences, but can still lay claim to a primal connection with African beliefs and practices centuries after the Middle Passage. The plot unfolds almost like a thriller or detective novel, beginning with an accusation of mass murder against Lillian Baptiste’s grandmother Matilda. Despite Matilda’s confession to the crimes, Lillian is determined to uncover what really happened, a difficult task, given the passage of time and the paucity of actual evidence, which is further compromised by report, rumor, and hearsay. In striking conjunction with Lillian’s increasing mental af-

 This is not to say that Patterson discounts slave resistance altogether in his work. But in his chapter “The Mechanisms of Resistance to Slavery,” for instance, it is significant that he calls slave suicide “the most extreme form of passive resistance” (Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery: An Analysis of the Origins, Development and Structure of Negro Slave Society in Jamaica [London: Associated University Presses, ]: ). John’s portrayal of suicide challenges the assumptions of passivity, madness, irrationality, and so on, especially in women, without romanticizing the act of suicide. In a later work, Patterson associates enslaved women in Greece with accentuating the value of freedom (“Slavery, Alienation, and the Female Discovery of Personal Freedom,” Social Research . []:  – ).  Marie-Elena John, Unburnable (New York: Amistad, ); references in the text.

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fliction, the mystery is solved piecemeal fashion, leading to a shattering, if inconclusive, resolution. As a young human rights activist working in New York on black social justice issues, the dismissal of rape charges against five young men in the city (a reference to the historic “Central Park jogger” case)⁸ inspires Lillian to connect the notorious case with the guilty verdict against her grandmother in Dominica, which resulted, unlike the accused in the rape case, with her grandmother being publicly hanged in 1950. Haunted by her conviction of her grandmother’s innocence and linking the latter’s confession with the coerced and later recanted confessions of the boys, she seeks the help of Theodore Morgan, her old college chum and now divorced romantic interest. Teddy, as he is known, is a charismatic, successful African American New Yorker who has made his name with various celebrated books on the biased American criminal justice system, several of which Lillian has helped him write. “She demonstrated how White America’s assumptions and fears about Blacks were institutionalized in laws; she showed how those laws were interpreted, how they were implemented, how history kept being repeated” (39). This recurring history, she is convinced, crisscrosses the Atlantic from the modern American racialization and profiling of crime to travesties of justice and lynch law in colonial Dominica and even further back in the past to the public lynching of slaves carried out with impunity in various plantation regimes.⁹ Of the many intertextual echoes in John’s novel, some of which I will discuss below, the intergenerational trauma that is a female legacy in Caribbean women’s writing links it to texts like Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of  In , five black and Hispanic teenagers were charged, amid sensational reporting, with the brutal rape and assault of a young investment banker, Trisha Meili, in Central Park. They later claimed that their confessions were coerced and after they languished for some years in prison, the convictions were vacated when DNA evidence challenging their involvement emerged in . Those accused, now young men referred to as the “Central Park Five,” sued New York City for millions of dollars for wrongful conviction. Although the city under Mayor Bloomberg fought the lawsuit for years, Mayor de Blasio subsequently agreed to settle.  For similar arguments, see Valerie Smith, “Black Life in the Balance:  Years a Slave,” American Literary History . ():  – ; Colin Dayan (previously Joan Dayan), The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ). See also Joan Dayan, “From the Plantation to the Penitentiary: Chain, Classification, and Codes of Deterrence,” in Slavery in the Caribbean Francophone World: Distant Voices, Forgotten Acts, Forged Identities, ed. Doris Y. Kadish (Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, ):  – . For the Black British context, see Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (London: Macmillan, ) and Vikram Dodd, “Racism ‘rife in justice system’” (March , ), Guardian (London) (acc. March , ).

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Salem (1986) and Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory (1994).¹⁰ Just like Lillian’s bitter recollection of her grandmother’s execution, Tituba’s narrative opens with the violent memory of her mother’s death by hanging for striking a white man who attempts to rape her. Herself the child of rape aboard the ship transporting her mother Abena as a slave to Barbados, Tituba intones three times at different intervals on the same page: “They hanged my mother.”¹¹ Her “other mother” Mama Yaya, mourning the slayings of her partner and sons for planning a slave revolt, introduces Tituba to the magical practices that will earn her an almost forgotten place in the archives of the Salem witchcraft trials and eventually make her one more “strange fruit” in a long history of lynching.¹² The lethal accusation of sorcery against women is ultimately tied to a long history of the role of obeah in African cultural retention and slave resistance, and although Matilda is hanged in 1950, the later colonial context is informed by the history of slave revolts and Maroon involvement invoked in Condé’s novel. In ultimately identifying Matilda as a magisterial priestess and lawgiver maligned and unjustly prosecuted in a regime still deeply tied to slavery, colonialism, and Christianity, Unburnable critiques the distorted perception of Africanized systems of belief and structures of worship that automatically criminalized them. As Patterson and other scholars note, the religious and eventually racialized distinctions between Christianity (divine, superior, civilized, rational, white) and animist West African religions (demonic, inferior, savage, superstitious, black) literally situated the first group on top of the deck and consigned the latter below it in the ship’s holds.¹³ The fact that what was stereotypically understood as demon worship and black magic in the novel actually turns out to be the judicial system of a secretive Maroon community reveals the inconsistencies and inequalities in colonial codes of reason and rationality that stripped black people of legal rights and deprived them of the very possibility of being lawful subjects or of practicing a legitimate religion of their own.

 Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Ballantine, ); Edwidge Danticat, Breath, Eyes, Memory (New York: Vintage, ). In Danticat’s novel, however, the violence is postslavery and neocolonial, implying, like John, that structures of violence against women are inherited.  Condé, Tituba, .  Condé, Tituba, . The paradox of the black subject is that of being caught between being invisible and being hypervisible. Ironically, while Tituba is vilified as a black witch, she was no more than a marginal footnote in the U.S. annals of the Salem witchcraft trials from which Condé resurrects her and gives her a story.  Patterson, Slavery, .

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In “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” Kamau Brathwaite calls for a more creative, conscious connection with African cultures, using obeah as an example of tenacious diasporic bonds. Dismissed by colonial regimes of knowledge as at best charlatan mumbo-jumbo and at worst a devil-worshipping cult, obeah was not officially given credit for its extensive ethnobotanical knowledge, its complex philosophical and eschatological features, or its protective psychological and spiritual capacities. Instead, the word obi (translated from West African languages to mean poison or evil) was carried over into obeah, the entire practice, rendering invisible its healing and protective measures against harm, attributed to sorcery or other sources. Brathwaite concludes, “In this way, not only has African science been discredited, but Afro-Caribbean religion has been negatively fragmented and almost (with exceptions in Haiti and Brazil) publicly destroyed.”¹⁴ The practice of obeah actually has a long presence not just in Caribbean writing, but in British literature and popular culture as well, where, as Alan Richardson notes, it had actually become “notorious” as far back as the late eighteenth century.¹⁵ In some ways, he claims, the popular literary representations of obeah in the Romantic period functioned like the actual practice in its remedial aspect, and worked like a charm to allay anxieties raised by its more menacing character. The dread it evoked not just in the British colonies but in the “mother country” had not only to do with fears of witchcraft, sorcery, and human and animal sacrifice that circulated in sensationalist accounts across the Atlantic, but with its very real influence in provoking slave uprisings initiated by secret rites and promises of protection through various prophylactic accessories, amulets, potions, blood oaths, and other religious and magical insignia. Once the practice became increasingly associated with revolts like the Tacky Rebellion in 1760, obeah “shifts from denoting a harmless and appropriable ‘primitive’ belief underscoring the cultural superiority of the British, to a ‘savage’ custom which evinces African barbarity and must be outlawed and obliterated by the whites.”¹⁶ Even well-meaning abolitionists played into prevailing sentiments

 Kamau Brathwaite, “The African Presence in Caribbean Literature,” Roots (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, ):  – , fn. In this essay, Brathwaite takes Patterson to task for what he considers the latter’s dismissive assessments of African cultural retention and of the resilient vibrancy of slave culture, which, in Brathwaite’s view, Patterson tends to flatten in extreme depictions of the master’s power.  Alan Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo: Obeah and British Culture,  – ,” Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, eds. Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, ):  – .  Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” .

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about the savagery of Africa, anticipating Britain’s “dual mandate” to colonize Africa in the nineteenth century in the guise of civilizing it and to exploit its other resources after the abolition of the slave trade. Fearing the power of the alien and mystical cultural reserves that slaves stubbornly continued to draw upon despite various attempts to stamp them out, the English also imagined obeah as standing in for slave revolts and all the threat and treachery associated with those insurrections. However, about fifty years after the Tacky revolt, it had again lost its dreadful aura as the abolition of the slave trade marked a new phase in colonial history.¹⁷ The attitudes toward obeah in the Caribbean also fluctuated through time and context, although early accounts of the practice were inevitably filtered through the prejudiced reports of Creole planters, English writers, and European colonialists. This is not to say that all of them were partisan narratives. Hamel, the Obeah Man (1827), attributed to Cynric R. Williams, presents the eponymous rebel leader as a noble figure, even if what some might consider his puzzling loyalty to his white master has more to do with his aura of grandeur and self-sacrifice than any leadership role in slave rebellion.¹⁸ However, the decidedly more ferocious and resolute nature of the Jamaican folk hero Jack Mansong, otherwise known as Obi or Three-Fingered Jack, does not prevent another nineteenth-century writer like William Earle from admiring this legendary figure in his dogged fight for freedom.¹⁹ As a rule, though, colonial portrayals of obeah were generally negative, relegating it, like zombies and other religions like Vodoun, to the horror tradition of the Caribbean Gothic.²⁰ Even when there was no evidence of obeah-inspired poisoning, planter hysteria over mass deaths of livestock and people attributed any mysterious death to obeah practitioners who had knowledge of toxic herbs and potions.²¹ Meanwhile, as Tituba’s brutal end indicates, torture, whipping, maim-

 Although later scholars would note obeah’s syncretic character which drew upon Christian, Amerindian, and East Indian religions, Richardson insists that European colonialists tended to present obeah as black and African, allowing them to suppress both the occult practice and the rebellious slaves who turned to it (Richardson, “Romantic Voodoo,” ).  Cynric R. Williams, Hamel, the Obeah Man, eds. Candace Ward and Tim Watson (Ontario: Broadview, ).  William Earle, Obi or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack, ed. Srinivas Aravamudan (Ontario: Broadview, ).  See Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Colonial and Postcolonial Gothic: The Caribbean,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: CUP, ):  – . The Gothic as a genre, however, has its own subversive tendencies.  John Savage, “Slave Poison/Slave Medicine: The Persistence of Obeah in Early NineteenthCentury Martinique,” in Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing,

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ing, and hanging of slaves not only continued, but conveniently gained legal sanction and moral high ground amid panic by the same groups who were attributing savage violence to the slaves and their African cultures. Even years later, some scholars note, “anthropological and historical studies have frequently contributed to understandings of the beliefs and ritual practices of mainly Afro-Caribbean people as the other to what is modern, civilized, and desirable.”²² Negative stereotypes of obeah as harmful sorcery rather than healing work were prevalent across most of the Caribbean as the internal variations of African religions it was linked with were simplified and immobilized into lawless tendencies not just by whites but, ironically, by anti-obeah propensities among Myalist and Rastafari groups. Indeed, as Diana Paton and Maarit Forde argue, part of the problem with the terminology and perception was the refusal to accord obeah the more respectable status of religion, restricting it instead to the pejorative position of magic, witchcraft, and the occult.²³ They insist that official discourses and state treatment of obeah reveal ethnocentric designations tied to colonial regimes of power. Paton notes in another context that concepts of religion were also “race-making,” elevating the apparently rational, monotheistic religions of civilized cultures over the irrational superstitions of the primitive mind.²⁴ Although the severity of punishment of obeah practitioners was reduced in the centuries following slavery, modern attitudes toward the religion in the Caribbean, while sometimes ambivalent, echo the eventual dismissal that Richardson finds in England. The very routinization of its criminalized status and updated anti-obeah laws meant more prosecutions than in earlier periods, even if punishment was less harsh in the modern era, and the devaluation of obeah from any

eds. Diana Paton and Maarit Forde (Durham: Duke UP, ):  – , , . This is not to deny that there were poisoning episodes on plantations, but the pharmakon character of obeah as including both remedy/medicine and poison/harm was less acknowledged than the tendency to attribute evil and poison to it.  Diana Paton and Maarit Forde, “Introduction,” in Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, eds. Diana Paton and Maarit Forde (Durham: Duke UP, ):  – ,  (my italics).  Paton and Forde, “Introduction,”  – . See also the slight differentiations between magic, witchcraft, and sorcery in Jerome S. Handler and Kenneth M. Bilby, Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean,  –  (Mona, Jamaica: U of West Indies P, ):  – .  Diana Paton, “Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the Caribbean,” Small Axe  ():  – ,  (acc. March , ).

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kind of serious threat to a nuisance crime connected to fraud reduced its believers from potentially fearsome revolutionaries to gullible victims. Although negative attitudes toward obeah were not simply a matter of racial difference or geography, Paton believes that what is known of the religion has been so much a construction of colonial power that its more realistic, ambivalent, and complex realities have been distorted beyond recognition: Dominant definitions of the term were produced through colonial law-making and law-enforcement practices that continue, along with Protestant theology, to influence popular understandings of obeah in the Caribbean. In that sense, obeah is a creation of colonialism as much as it is a construction of Africans in the Caribbean. Because the stigmatized status of obeah was produced to symbolize African culture, African-ness, and ultimately blackness, it has helped to perpetuate the persistent race, class, and cultural hierarchies that continue to play a significant role in Caribbean dynamics of power and control, despite the emergence of powerful black leaders in many walks of life in the period since independence.²⁵

Kenneth Bilby and Jerome Handler have similarly focused on the criminalization of obeah from eighteenth-century Jamaica to various Caribbean nations, even today. Anti-obeah legislation and ordinances, they argue, reduced a multifarious and complicated belief into a unitary and demonized dark art and made it the target of colonial ideologies of superiority, rationality, and even religion. “Partly through the force of law, obeah became an emblem of all that was held to be wrong about Africans’ understandings of the cosmos – understandings that were repeatedly denigrated with terms such as savage, depraved, or debased,” they conclude.²⁶ While the redoubtable obeah practitioner Matilda is even more overpowering than her literary predecessors such as Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)²⁷ and Condé’s Tituba, in the way John portrays her, the fact remains that the novel begins with her hanging by colonial authorities²⁸ ostensibly not for practicing obeah but for her presumed guilt in the alleged mass murders uncovered in the remote mountain village of “Noah,” a crime easily ascribed to her “black magic” rituals. That lethal outcome offers a cautionary tale of how much power we can ascribe to the enigmatic, misunderstood, unheeded subaltern, especially when Matilda is executed as a result of the same cultural stereotypes,

 Paton, “Obeah Acts,” .  Handler and Bilby, Enacting Power,  (emphasis in text). Anguilla, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and St. Lucia are the ones that have so far deleted anti-obeah language (xiii).  Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, ed. Judith Raiskin (New York: Norton, ).  Dominica did not gain independence until , by which time the British had taken over from the French, who had succeeded the Spanish.

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I want to argue, as those that criminalized her entire belief system.²⁹ The fact that Noah, the biblical figure whose curse is said to have sanctioned African slavery, is misheard as the name of the Maroon community hideout, which is really “Noir,” the French word for black, recollects the religious collusion with slavery and racism, as well as the ambivalent heritage of the black diaspora. In the (mis) translations and (dis)articulations of diaspora that Brent Hayes Edwards tracks, the mobile status of keywords such as negro, nigger, négre, and noir reveal ingroup distinctions as well as externally imposed terminology.³⁰ “The Negro is a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety,” Fanon declares. He reveals that it is an unease internalized by Antillean subjects, who distance themselves from their “coal-black” compatriots and in Martinique, he adds, these subjects associate that color with “bad luck.”³¹ In Unburnable, the repetition “noir-noir-noir” (261) both invokes and challenges that anxiety, but unlike Fanon, locates the black woman as the source of that disturbance. When the American nun Mary-Alice tries to persuade Matilda to follow her Christian moral and domestic codes of marriage and motherhood for the latter’s daughter and Lillian’s biological mother Iris, whom Mary-Alice tries to rescue from concubinage, Matilda pays no attention since she views concubinage as legitimate, if negotiable. As she adjusts her pagne, the wrapper of West African origin, around her chest, Mary-Alice is riveted by the sudden glimpse of her breasts. “She [Mary-Alice] had never imagined that black could be so black,” the narrator says, and follows with a detailed description of the varying shades of black of “Matilda’s breasts in their infinite blackness – a black that was too far beyond beautiful to be categorized as merely black, a black that needed to be taken out of the category of color, shifted up to the category of feelings – had threatened her [Mary-Alice], had deeply stirred her to fear.” Recognizing the nun’s dread, Matilda steps up and jerks her body so that her breasts contemptuously slap Mary-Alice on either side of her face (222). In some ways, if obeah both exceeded and defied representation, so too, Keith Sandiford claims, does the black female body, which is described through

 For a related debate on the subaltern status of Christophine in Wide Sargasso Sea, see Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ); Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, ); and Carine M. Mardorossian, Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, ).  See Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ):  – .  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, ): , .

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the exaggerated embodiments of the female grotesque in “historical” accounts such as Ligon’s. But what such fecundity accomplishes is a “counterordering” against the classical body, which the breasts of the black women disturb while simultaneously signifying an overpowering productive and reproductive labor.³² Although, according to Edwards, noir stands above négre as closer to whiteness in the racial taxonomy, John uses the term defiantly to construct a literal Maroon space of black African retention.³³ On an island that presents a wide spectrum of races, cultures, and colors, the village of Noir is inhabited, the narrator emphasizes, by people of “unadulterated African descent” (3). The fact that an author who includes Carib and Lebanese characters (rather unusual in Anglophone Caribbean fiction) would ultimately revert to an emphasis on the AfroCaribbean suggests a deliberate strategy to critique, as Fanon does, the ingroup contempt for black Africa. When, therefore, the native police discover Matilda and the Maroon community’s hideout in the novel, they are repelled by the evidence of African customs, lifestyle, deities, and domestic arrangements. The police, the narrator says ironically, “were well accustomed to altars” (264), Catholic shrines, statues, rosaries and crucifixes – the more legitimate and sacred emblems, they assume, of religious belief, unlike the profane and demonic “fetishes” of heathen worship (264). They might even wink at a little obeah practice on the side. But to go back to the fear inspired by Matilda’s breasts, to see Africa embodied in the flesh leads them to kill several villagers and destroy the communal structures, outraged as they are to realize that the polygamous villagers “openly engage in their devil worship and aberrant sexual practices” (264). Their ruthless violence is constructed as a just aggression against the satanic stranger in their midst as opposed to the gratuitous bloodlust they assume in the discovery of many skeletons on the mountainside, sparking charges of serial killing and human sacrifice, to them the only logical explanation for the exposed bones lying on the outskirts of an “African” Maroon village. But what leads the police to investigate this hidden village way up in the remote mountain is itself another

 Keith Sandiford, Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah (New York: Routledge, ):  – .  Various accounts of Maroon communities emphasize their survival in the inaccessible mountainous terrain of some islands. While their militaristic regimes were sometimes attributed to the particular West African groups that were considered more belligerent, there is no doubt that Jack Mansong’s ability to disappear into the landscape when hunted, for instance, aided both his guerrilla tactics and his fearful legendary status as one who came and went at will. Maroon Nanny is one of the few female slaves who has acquired the force of legend, suggesting that John has both historical and literary influences in the figure of Matilda.

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instance of the refusal to grant Matilda’s community or a female subject ultimate power, the authority to execute capital punishment or even bring to bear disciplinary wrath against those accused of crimes.³⁴ The difference, moreover, is that unlike most of the original African sources or even their Maroon descendants in the Caribbean, here the woman becomes the chief, the primary masker, the priestess, and the main executioner.³⁵ The reason the police track down Matilda in her mountain hideout is because she is suspected of leading a masquerade during Carnival in order to seek vengeance against the elite Creole family of the Baptistes (signifying internal class and color tensions). Iris, her infatuated daughter, is callously discarded by her lover John Baptiste, and then viciously beaten through the agency of his mother-in-law Mrs. Richard, for stripping naked and humiliating her daughter Cecile, the upper-class woman he eventually marries, in a scandalous Carnival imbroglio. After her hired men batter Iris, Mrs. Richard sexually assaults the latter with a broken Coke bottle in a scene described in unflinchingly bloody detail. When the sympathetic and fearful washerwomen who are hovering outside finally hear Iris screaming like an animal (she has until then taken the brutal blows in silence like “a Carib”), they assume that some kind of obeah “was being done in there” (120). But against this vision of obeah as a particularly violent secret rite, Matilda’s healing powers, the narrator reveals, conjure and bring Iris back to health, even though she never really recovers from the psychic damage. Matilda is described as “drawing out the infections from every crevice of her [Iris’s] body, from her very blood; realigning joints that had been twisted out of their proper places, constructing complex traction devices with rope and stones for the limbs that had been broken, taking needle and catgut to sew back together the gashes” (128). And, just as it is difficult to separate magic from religion in obeah, so does Matilda’s “medical science” merge into magic, “with the fresh blood of white chickens spilled up and down her child’s body […] with the lighting of black candles and the incantation of unintelligible words” (129).

 One of the functions of obeah, Patterson notes, was “in preventing, detecting and punishing crimes among the slaves” (Sociology, ).  In this respect, Matilda is allegorical in her role, what Carole Boyce Davies calls “a kind of female principle that is able to execute justice,” a figuration that is literally emphasized by Matilda’s masking (Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cultural Resistance and the Rehumanizing Project,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick [Durham: Duke UP, ]:  – , ). Wynter’s point that African customs indigenized the landscape for slaves is also important in the project of rehumanization after the Middle Passage.

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One year after Iris’s thrashing, Matilda attends the Carnival as a masked dancer to hunt John Baptiste down. Noir is founded by women who escape from another Maroon camp. These rebellious women led by Matilda remind us of the forgotten or understudied history of female healers and revolutionaries who struggled for authority and agency in a doubly alienating slave society. Karol Weaver reveals the significant contribution of female slaves who brought their knowledge of tropical diseases, of febrifuges, vermifuges, hot and cold baths, and herbal remedies. She notes that in certain parts of Africa women enjoyed status as healers that was transferred to their descendants in the Caribbean until the hegemony of Western medicine, male surgeons, and doctors suppressed the role of Indigenous and African medical knowledge. The combinatory practices of magic, medicine, religion, mesmerism and so on came to be condemned as pernicious, and the women’s knowledge of abortifacients and poisons, which they admittedly did use, was regarded with fear and loathing.³⁶ Thus both the African influences and the Caribbean practice of obeah together attract the hostility of colonial law, which recognizes no other code of justice, and certainly not that meted out by a black woman. In a dramatic chapter simply titled “Clash,” the narrator describes a terrifying, uncannily familiar yet strange masked band that descends in a “dance of fury” on John Baptiste, and he collapses in terror after the main masquerade figure is perceived as flying over him to the frenetic beat of drums. The narrator, as in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, ³⁷ refuses to establish if Baptiste dies of a heart attack, as his doctors insist, or if the magic of the “so-called Flying Masquerade” kills him, as the stunned observers believe. Rather than emphasizing the European aspect of Carnival, John draws attention to the African character of the bandes mauvais, the sensay costumes, the cow horns, and the threatening aspect of Matilda’s masquerade. In recalling the varying sacred, sublime, and profane traditions of such performances across West Africa, John uses masks as the primary device indicating the slippage between appearance and reality, not just because they imply a deeper symbolism, but also because they offer a performative, philosophical, and political platform for her critique of col-

 Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (Urbana: U of Illinois P, ). While medical practices on plantations would, like the religions, have been creolized, just as in the case of obeah, subaltern knowledge, while utilized, would have been marginalized by the official authorities.  Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, ). The narrative of Makandal’s execution provides two accounts, one suggesting that he perished in the flames and another implying that he flew away, without explicit editorial comment.

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onial and neocolonial entitlement. The novel refers to magical realism in a metanarrative to further destabilize the conventional understandings of magic, science, and religion, and also to emphasize the divine rather than demonic character of the fearsome masks: They [the public] did not know that thousands of miles across the Atlantic, there were a few men who, during the times of African festivals, during harvest celebrations, during religious and political and judicial ceremonies, initiations, births and deaths, would adorn themselves in exactly the same attire, wear their masks and horns, and for a time become the embodiment of the gods of the savannas and the forests, representations of the spirits of the ancestors, wherein lay the highest authority. (130 – 131)

It is telling that the entire masquerade is explained not by a native of the island, but from the rather pompous perspective of Alfred Drummond, an “older British colonialist” with some knowledge of West Africa, where he has spent a couple of decades. Ironically, the white man has to be interlocutor and cultural guide, struggling “to explain it to people who, although so obviously African, were yet and still not African at all” (139). Because they no longer have an unbroken connection to the mytho-religious costumes and masks that retain traces of largely, if not entirely, repressed ancestral traditions, many of them do not understand that Matilda’s uncanny band members “were now possessed by the spirits represented by their masks and head-dresses, their full-body covering of raffia” (139). So neither the viewers at the parade nor the police later seem to recognize the strangely familiar masks that represent death, war or those that signal the policing of the area by a band that materializes from its secret location to terrify the community, exert social control, and enforce tribal laws. Even Matilda is not herself anymore, but the embodied spirit that upholds tradition, doles out punishment, and exacts retribution. As one author notes, the solemn role of masking and costuming is not a primitive convention since the role of the mask in changing one’s identity is still with us in modern society. We may observe it in the change in the behavior of a person when he steps out of his uniform. The black robe of the American judge and the wig of his English counterpart aim to transform the individual into something larger, to change his individual personality into an impersonal institution of the law.³⁸

But this comparison only reminds us of what trappings and attire are perceived as solemn adoptions of the rational habit of law and justice in civil society and what others seem merely totemic, monstrous talismans. The therimorphic masks,

 Ladislas Segy, Masks of Black Africa (New York: Dover, ): .

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in particular, inspired such fear that it is not surprising that the horned oxhead mask in Caribbean Jonkonnu, for instance, was banned for a while.³⁹ It was also no accident that the drumming and dances, which were frowned upon by colonial authorities in the name of social order, bodily decorum, and Christian morality, were an integral element of masked performances. Not all masks of West Africa were danced, but many that were had an elaborate, meaningful, and established choreography connected to the functions and materials of the masks and sometimes manifesting the possession by ancestral spirits and forest divinities. Watching the movements of the band surrounding the main figure, Drummond finds an identical arrangement reminding him of both the figuration on the specific West African mask (slit eyes, grimace, nails and metal, feathers, enormous headdress) and the whirling momentum that gives the impression of the masquerade flying. He tries to explain that “the masquerade on King George V Street had not really flown, that the pounding drums were designed to intoxicate, so that your head became light and what you were seeing became magical in quality; you thought the masquerade was flying when in fact it was only jumping and twirling” (142– 143). The trance-like participation of the attendants and audience is also a communal feature of these dances.⁴⁰ The fact that John deliberately invokes an almost unchanged ceremony from West Africa but makes it only faintly recognizable to a modern, creolized, diasporic audience, and that she also syncretizes various masking traditions from different nations in West and Central Africa suggest that this scene is a staged and invented primal memory rather than an assertion of authentic and purist tradition.⁴¹  Sandra L. Richards, “Horned Ancestral Masks, Shakespearean Actor Boys, and Scotch-Inspired Set Girls: Social Relations in Nineteenth-Century Jamaican Jonkonnu,” in The African Diaspora: African Origins and New World Identities, eds. Isidore Okpewho, Carole Boyce Davies, and Ali Mazrui (Bloomington: Indiana UP, ):  – , . See also Judith Bettelheim, “Jamaican Jonkonnu and Related Caribbean Festivals,” Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link, eds. Margaret E. Crahan and Franklin W. Knight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ):  – ,  – .  However, one source notes that masking is rare, even incompatible, with trances, since masking required “such conscious dance skill” (Anne Marie Bouttiaux, Persona Masks of Africa: Identities Hidden and Revealed [Milan: Five Continents Editions, ]: , n). One of the plates shows a full-body Egungun mask, a Yoruba mask made of multi-colored fabric, cowrie shells, glass buttons, and bells that completely covers the wearer and represents the “ara orun, ancestral spirits from the after-world” (). The cloth is woven in such a way that its voluminous material spreads out like wings when the figure whirls, probably giving the impression of flight. See also Lucie Pradel, African Beliefs in the New World (Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, ):  – . Pradel notes that Egungun appears like a “whirlwind.”  It goes without saying that masking traditions would not be static but also change in the countries of origin, but John shows certain continuities. Descriptions of traditional Devil Mas’

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While she is well aware of the indelibly mixed characteristics of Caribbean cultures and Carnival figures, John’s evocation of African features and the consequences she outlines for them support the contentions by different scholars that obeah was demonized for its Africanized connections. Although the police do not directly persecute Matilda for being an obeah professor, and have no evidence that she killed John Baptiste, they nevertheless hang her for supposed murders tied to her “black magic.” In one of the intermittent flashbacks through which the story develops, we return to the site of the supposed victims of black magic and are told at the end of the novel in a series of deferred disclosures that the skeletons discovered on the outskirts of the Maroon village were the bodies of people sentenced to death and punished further by not being buried for their crimes in the community. In the chaos of the trial, Matilda’s estranged Carib husband and Iris’s father Simon had unavailingly called out “Magistrat, Magistrat” to indicate Matilda’s role as chief judge (287). In yet another act of the unheard or mistranslated subaltern, Iris’s own attempt to utter the word is heard only as “magie,” which is taken to imply Matilda’s magic, thereby reinforcing the official conviction that black magic rather than a judicial system, however alien, had played a role in these deaths and justifying Matilda’s death by hanging (253). In a legal structure that refuses some people the right to live as free subjects or to execute summary justice, those that pronounce the sentence of death and those that die are valued differently. A number of uncounted, belittled deaths, historical and fictional, are commemorated in the novel: Carib’s Leap in Grenada, where the cornered and outnumbered Kalinago people leaped to their deaths in the early seventeenth century rather than be captured by colonial invaders; the innumerable slaves of the Middle Passage who leaped across the decks of

in Trinidad Carnival also echo, with variation, some of the masked performances of West and Central African cultures. Red-clad costumers wear masks, horns, and tails, and the beasts are held by imps with chains, their leaps and pulls suggesting a struggle to control the beasts. Some of this dragon dance movement is present in John’s description of the Flying Masquerade (). See Bruce Procope, “The Dragon Band or Devil Band,” Caribbean Quarterly ./ ():  – , . Like Earl Lovelace, John seems to distinguish between the more radical, older forms of Mas’ and the more modern, consumerist appropriations of Carnival, although she seems to imply in her novel that the traditional Africanized aspects of Mas’ in Dominica are overwhelmed when the more commercialized Trinidad Carnival takes over (). See also Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance (New York: Persea, ). In a chapter titled “To be Dragon and Man,” Aldrick believes the fire of the dragon dance will be “drowned amidst the satin and silks and the beads and feathers and rhinestones” (). In contrast to Matilda, who is as fierce as any dragon, Lovelace disapprovingly introduces a note of femininity in the “prettification” of Carnival.

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ships in despair, resistance or fear and drowned in the ocean; the Maroons in Noir, who hurled themselves down the mountainside rather than be taken captive; Matilda herself, who “offered the man her neck,” because she believes she has failed her daughter and can do more for her as an ancestor rather than as a woman in a society that neither has room for her authority nor will tolerate the existence of her Maroon community that is killed off or scattered (273). By posing different orders of law and justice against each other, John is not necessarily affirming the code of justice in the Maroon community or even favoring African laws and social regulations, but making visible the inextricable connection between sovereignty and legal rights.⁴² As the boys in the rape case in New York and the leap to judgment in Matilda’s hanging show, neither metropolitan nor colonial law necessarily guarantees that ideal justice is served. In fact, for many diasporic black people from colonial to contemporary times, it can be quite the reverse, especially when they are minorities.⁴³ As the suspenseful narrative speeds towards Teddy’s final discovery of the truth about Matilda’s role in the community, we expect him to share this revelation with Lillian, to exonerate her grandmother, and justify her faith in the latter’s innocence. Instead, in a shocking twist, as Teddy races to find Lillian, she stands at the edge of a cliff apparently poised to join her ancestors and “fly through the air” (292). Her desire to become a haggish soucouyant who flies around as a ball of fire or the cleft-footed, seductive La Diablesse, female vampiric or devilish figures from Caribbean folklore, rather than a Flying African, indicates that she has no desire to fly back to Africa but nor does she want any part of a constricting social structure that led to the untimely deaths  Denying the sanctity of burial was a way of penalizing those who died shameful deaths in some West African cultures. It must be noted that however idealized Matilda and African customs may be in the novel, there would have been inequality and injustice in these societies as well. But wresting “the power of administering the death sentence” from the Maroons and other social restrictions weakened their autonomy considerably, even though they were not defeated militarily by colonial governments, notes Mavis C. Campbell (The Maroons of Jamaica,  – : A History of Resistance, Collaboration and Betrayal [Trenton, NJ: Africa World P, ]: ). As the subtitle implies, Campbell is not interested in romanticizing or homogenizing the Maroons, but she does point out the unifying African features of cohesive Maroon societies: “The commonalities, for the most part, are reflected in sex roles, attitude to warfare, familial arrangements, attitude to hierarchy, but above all in religion, which was pivotal to all resistance in the area,” and provided “the ideology, the mystique, and the pertinacious courage and leadership” necessary to confront the formidable force of colonial mercantilism, she claims ( – ). John presents these “commonalities,” but also overturns traditional sex roles by emphasizing Matilda’s leadership.  The “Black Lives Matter” movement in the United States has emerged within the context of this recognized disparity.

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of the women in her family.⁴⁴ The deliberate invocation of demonized figures embraces her entire family, from Matilda convicted of black magic murder; Iris, who is regarded as the local whore; and Lillian, who is believed to be cursed and schizophrenic. The ambivalence of the ending and the image of the burning woman complicate the title Unburnable, especially as the reader is led to believe that Lillian will jump to her death, but is not provided the final confirmation since the narrative ends. The unfinished ending recalls the similarly incomplete conclusion to Wide Sargasso Sea, where Antoinette, galvanized by flashing images of her childhood companion Tia, the flaming parrot, and her red dress that recalls the fiery color of the poinciana tree, walks purposefully down the dark passage, a lit candle in her hand, ready, we presume, to burn down her husband’s English manor like the emancipated slaves burned down Coulibri. Bertha Mason’s self-immolating leap over the blazing battlements in Jane Eyre (1847) hovers intertextually in both texts, but Rhys truncates the narrative without repeating that self-annihilation from Brontë’s novel.⁴⁵ Likewise, if one were to compare what remains implicit in Unburnable to the ending in Tituba, Lillian’s potential leap down the mountain to certain death gains affirmative implications. Condé’s novel does not end with Tituba’s hanging, but presents her as a flying spirit free to do the occult work that was hampered by racism and sexism during her lifetime. Despite her “bitter, bitter story,” Tituba rejoices in the song that people sing about her and claims to be the guiding spirit behind every fresh insurrection, fire, and poisoning, evoking obeah’s role in such events. “I do not belong to the civilization of the Bible and Bigotry,” she declares.⁴⁶ She tries to prevent a slave from committing suicide, but the young bossale girl kills herself by consuming poisonous plants. Although Tituba remains silent on this young woman’s fate after death, it is telling that she reads “despair” in this act and discourages slaves from killing themselves by whispering to them of imminent freedom. Even if Tituba’s aerial spirit seems to roam free, slave suicide in this context seems to endorse Durkheim’s notion of suicide

 Although John does not have Condé’s often fractious and fraught relationship with African heritage, it is significant that for all her emphasis on African retention, there is no literal or spiritual back-to-Africa trajectory here but rather a metaphorical and historical bridge from the continent to the islands. For more on the soucouyant, see Giselle Anatol, The Things That Fly in the Night: Female Vampires in Literature of the Circum-Caribbean and African Diaspora (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers UP, ).  Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, ).  Condé, Tituba, .

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to “bring out the ineluctable and inflexible nature of a rule against which there is no appeal [… as] fatalistic suicide.”⁴⁷ But given the spirit world and ancestor worship of certain African belief systems elicited by John, Lillian’s suicide is not fatalistic, and as we shall see, neither is it inevitable. In the uncertain conclusion to the novel, Lillian insists she is not mad, although she hears voices calling to her. She not only prepares to meet her ancestors, she thinks “of the people of Noir, the Maroons, [who] had jumped to their heaven, as people were wont to do when enslavement was not an option” (291).⁴⁸ And with less pleasure but more defiance than Tituba, she anticipates a “chanté mas” (a satirical song emerging from Carnival maskers in Dominica) about her supposedly unfulfilled life, a song that will unite her with her grandmother and mother who also have ribald lyrics related to them. Abdul JanMohamed’s concept of symbolic death negotiates the binary options of actual versus social death by suggesting that actual death, when deliberately chosen, overcomes the seemingly uncontrollable disablement of social death. When the slave’s choice to die usurps the master’s control over the slave’s subjectivity, actual death then paradoxically becomes the site of freedom, a belief also implicit in the legend of the Flying Africans, which posits that once a slave dies, his or her soul flies back to Africa. The calcified condition of social death is cracked open and the negation that death conventionally signifies is transformed by the self-conscious if lethal choice made by those who leaped to their deaths into the water or over the cliffs. JanMohamed is careful to note that the subject does not actually have to die, since a symbolic death could also mean the death of a previous subject position rather than of the subject itself, leading to a rebirth, a liberation of a different self.⁴⁹ He adds, however, that the “transformation that defines symbolic-death cannot be merely a shift in the epistemological position of the subject; it must also include a destruction of practices, values, and attitudes that have been sedimented as habits, which are only partly conscious and predominantly unconscious. Only when the total structure of the subject has been significantly disrupted can a markedly new

 Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A. Spaulding and George Simpson (Glencoe, IL: Free P, ): , n (emphasis in text).  Suicide, which is taboo in some traditional African cultures, is sanctified under conditions of slavery, where slaves who commit suicide can fly back to Africa.  Abdul R. JanMohamed, The Death-Bound Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death (Durham: Duke UP, ). For JanMohamed, Frederick Douglass’s attack on Covey and the risk he runs of being killed signifies such a moment of symbolic death, when Douglass “renegotiate[s] the death contract” and is reborn as a new subject ( – ).

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subject be born.”⁵⁰ While acknowledging that modern black writers like Richard Wright operate from a significantly different location than slaves in the condition of social death, JanMohamed notes that the former’s writing “take[s] the form of symbolic work; precisely through writing he articulates and externalizes the terror, the power, and the value of death.”⁵¹ One can argue that John likewise constructs the women of three generations as “negating presence[s] in the permanent order”⁵² and offers multiple critiques of racial, gendered, and class conflicts inherited from colonialism and taking on virulent new life in modern transatlantic diasporas. Against this enervating inheritance of the old order, John also allows for a rebirth-in-death oppositional scenario, particularly in the insistence that, contrary to everyone around her, Lillian is convinced she is not insane (any more, Rhys would observe, than Bertha Mason was a madwoman who indiscriminately set fire to the manor and jumped to her death). Death becomes for Lillian a rational, conscious, intentional choice even if as a means of spiritually communicating with her beckoning ancestors. However, despite the various scenarios that Lillian imagines about how her body would be found, floating in the water or shredded of her skin as she tumbles down the mountainside, it is significant that the leap into actual death is not completed in the narrative. In thus suspending us between death and life, John allows us to perceive a ubiquitous history of death, including suicide, but also leaves what Wilson Harris would call the limbo gateway open, so that life is not disqualified and death is not the end. The convenient tropes of the dying slave in abolitionist narratives and the vanishing Indian in American colonialist fantasies are thus not legitimized here. John refuses to foreclose either life or death, leaving the reader perplexed as to what the ending of the novel might be. Recalling a black African heritage several decades after Brathwaite’s call to do so might be debatable in a contemporary multi-ethnic context that some would say demands less of an emphasis on any one cultural heritage. But John’s novel suggests that the Afro-Caribbean legacy of social death as a “symbolic whip” still needs to be confronted and overcome centuries after the official end of slavery. Lillian’s perilous state of mind and the deaths of her grandmother and mother draw attention to actual and social death in different contexts from

 JanMohamed, Death-Bound Subject, . Such rebirth compels agony and suffering, a “painful, repetitious wrenching, purging destruction of the subject” (). The Christian symbolism is apparent here, and in John’s novel, despite the attention to the African legacy, the Catholic rituals would imply a similar albeit syncretic sense of resurrection.  JanMohamed, Death-Bound Subject,  (emphasis in text).  JanMohamed, Death-Bound Subject, .

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that of the slaves, but they also trace synchronic and diachronic connections across black diasporic spaces, even as they emphasize gendered, national, and class conflicts. What is uncovered, then, in the reconstruction of crime and punishment is not just the story of individual injustice to Matilda but also a larger and continuing history of violation against Africa and its diaspora. By rallying the countercultures of magic, obeah, and masking, John also rehabilitates submerged, discredited social structures and celebrates their endurance despite colonial and neocolonial disavowals. Just like Wright, John’s “symbolic work” in the novel confronts and challenges social and actual death as absolute conditions, converting their seemingly inexorable finality to a more open-ended process that enables a provisional resurrection of the endangered subject.

Paul Griffith

Spiritual Adventure through Song The work songs “Wickham” and “Mango Pond” demonstrate the synchronistic energies in art and ritual through which postcolonial actors re-constitute Caribbean space. The colonial arena is a symbolic underworld out of which the spirit is conjured, word and action functioning as ceremonial forms that restore the sacredness that colonized Caribbean persons deem intrinsic to their humanity. As Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic praxis and tidalectic concept suggest, these imaginative constructs integrate past and present, spatio-temporal and psychic sites of self. They channel self-revelatory routes amid the multiple images, currents, and rhythms, the fusion and diffusion Antonio Benitez-Rojo sees as “instability” and Brathwaite theorizes as an inverse dynamics of resistance consciousness embodied in the fluid and timeless personage of the Nana, incarnate mythic archetype of the self-creating energies in nature. Declaring that “consciousness of self seems to constitute itself at its lowest level by means of symbolism,” Paul Ricoeur publicizes a hermeneutic exegesis from which we may begin to examine amalgamated political and mythic substructures of meaning in Afro-Caribbean song rites.¹ Examining folk ceremony as expression of religious intuition and pragmatic resistance to the colonialist crisis is of paramount importance to this investigation of the symbolic subtexts informing Caribbean folk culture and expressive art. As such, this paper seeks to illuminate imaginative acts in the region through cultural and hermeneutical theories laid out by Kamau Brathwaite and Ricoeur, respectively. The cultural structures that, for Brathwaite, relay the political imperative of decolonization in the Caribbean may also be extrapolated in terms of the archetypes of sacred symbols, which transmit, as Ricoeur explains, the signifying group’s total immersion in the mythic realm. The preoccupation with art as symbolic act, which Brathwaite theorizes and practices in his own poetry, derives from an aesthetic and cultural tradition of postcolonial resistance that informs Caribbean “residually oral forms.”² Stylistic and thematic elements of this convention form distin-

 Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, ): .  African American author Bernard W. Bell describes the “residually oral forms” as derivatives of cultures “in which oral forms compete with print.” While the “residual” element, he says, has been “formed in the past,” it is still “an effective element of the present.” He adds that “certain experiences, meanings, and values,” which fall outside the purview “of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practiced on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-006

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guishing features of the two work songs “Wickham” and “Mango Pond,” “residually oral” expressions, that this paper will analyze to demonstrate the synchronistic energies through which these ritual acts re-constitute Caribbean space as symbolic arena. These performances appear as mythic markers, reenactments of a mode of religious consciousness Robert J. Quinn describes. Quinn observes that identity is transformed via the “ritual of space-making,” a symbolic activity wherein people “by taking possession of a place ritualize that place.” Importantly, moreover, he adds, such “ritual movement transforms not only the place but also the participant.”³ Motivated by such phenomenological intentions, folk artists in the diaspora set out to remap the terrain of humanist ethics, radically to revise their moral estimate in the colonial space, which, Orlando Patterson reminds us, was a site of “social death.” Cultural anthropologist Christopher Crocker defines ritual as an expression of “those fundamental categories by which men attempt to apprehend and to control their social existence – categories that refer both to social positions and to mystical entities.”⁴ Social groups, he adds, are inclined to confront situations of crisis with ritual, which presents the enduring validity of certain principles of order. Symbolic action affirms something: it makes a statement about the conditions of existence in terms of the relations of persons and groups. Ritual, then, is essentially communication, a language in which societies discuss a variety of matters. It deals with the relationships a man has to other men, to institutions, spirits, and nature, and with all the various permutations of which these themes are capable. […] Moreover, ritual not only says something; it also does things: it changes one season into another, makes boys become men, transforms ill persons into healthy ones, and the ghosts of the dead into the souls of the ancestors.⁵

of some previous social institution or formation.” Bell contrasts “literate cultures” with “residually oral cultures”; the latter “are basically aural, functional, collective, and direct,” and “stress performance, mnemonics, and improvisational skills.” They employ “some kind of formulaic mode of expression,” and unlike literate cultures, which rely “primarily on sight and the written word,” residually oral cultures emphasize “sound” and “the spoken word.” An interplay between these two expressive modes is also typical of the “residually oral,” which, as Bell observes, African Americans have configured into five performative categories: “oratory, myth, legend, tale, and song” (Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition [Amherst, Mass.: U of Massachusetts P, ):  – .  Patrick J. Quinn. “Ritual and the Definition of Space,” in The Roots of Ritual, ed. James D. Shaughnessy (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, ):  – ,  – .  Christopher Crocker, “Ritual and the Development of Social Structure: Liminality and Inversion,” in The Roots of Ritual, ed. James D. Shaughnessy (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, ):  – , .  Crocker, “Ritual,”  – .

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Resonantly complex modes of expressions through image and gesture, metaphor and performance, Caribbean folk forms probe beneath form, beneath what Harry Hoetink identifies as “ego-oriented, body-related behavior and activity.”⁶ Coordinating rhythm and sound, these self-transformational media present psychospiritual realization formally. “Wickham,” for example, effects innovative typologies through the sound intensity and tone modulations of the drum, a feature that Brathwaite, significantly influenced by the residually oral culture of Africa, illustrates in “Atumpan”: Kon kon kon kon kun kun kun kun Funtumi Akore Tweneboa Akore Tweneboa Kodia Kodia Tweneduru […] Funtumi Akore Tweneboa Akore Spirit of the Cedar Spirit of the Cedar Tree Tweneboa Kodia […] The Great Drummer of Odomankoma says The Great Drummer of Odomankoma says that he has come from sleep that he has come from sleep.⁷

Via the repetition and play of sound patterns, as Gordon Rohlehr explains, the word takes on a “deeper symbolic dimension.”⁸ The drum tones communicate the complex constituents of the logos. In that sound reverberates from the drum as reincarnated spirit, the musician anthropomorphizes the deified ancestor and gives utterance to the persistent life-force. Buried layers of vital energy, it is implied, awaken through the performance that here ritualizes a tradition of mythic self-enactment, a world-view that continued to inform art performances in the Caribbean. It is this comprehension of ritual as regenerative energy that, as Rohlehr remarks, finds resonant expression in Masks where, in his words, Brathwaite’s

 Harry Hoetink, “The Cultural Links,” in Africa and the Caribbean: The Legacies of a Link, eds. Margaret E. Crahan and Franklin W. Knight (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ):  – , .  Kamau Brathwaite, The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (Oxford: OUP, ): .  Gordon Rohlehr, Pathfinder: Black Awakening in The Arrivants of Edward Kamau Brathwaite (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Rohlehr, ): .

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treatment of “ceremony, prayer and ritual is generally symbolic, and pertinent to the poet’s struggle for faith and form in the face of the forces which negate life.”⁹ Even more complexly, this tropological application of form is seen to impact the use of ritual as a statement, accented metaphorically, about fundamental paradoxes the actors intuit at the heart of human existence. Crucial to this existential enigma, the performances – registers of faith in the creative life force, despite the insistence of evil – suggest that human beings, through ritual, become other, that is, transform into opposites of their familiar identities.¹⁰ It is the transforming power of myth that informs this principle; on display is that same alignment of ritual with the self-reversing energy inherent in paradox, whereby primitive peoples consistently recovered or reenergized personal and group identities. Brathwaite invokes this energy through the mythic homology shaping consciousness in “Bosompra”; the “returning” candidate’s spirit quest is inaugurated through his faith in essential links between psyche and space, being and cosmos. Thus his thrice repeated invocation “asuo merensen” is a mantra, a formality that ritualizes his river crossing as structuration of his reintegration with the vital energy of the fecund earth he identifies with being rooted in the place of his ancestors’ birth. “Bosompra,” thus, is a prelude to “Arrival,” the final chapter in Masks suggesting that the route across the river is a return to self-actuating roots: “Some- / where under gravel / that black chord of birth / Still clings to the earth’s warmth of glints.”¹¹ The memorial journey connects the initiate to a place of beginnings that the rite affirms, paradoxically, to be both old and new. The extent to which myth has been critical to colonialist constructs and the counter-orders of the colonized, logically suggests the importance of defining this concept. For Ricoeur, myth is the agency of a critical hermeneutics. He detects in this symbolic medium the inaugurating energies “for the ritual actions of men of today and, in a general manner, [for] establishing all the forms of action and thought by which man understands himself in his world.”¹² Ricoeur suggests further that, responding to this epistemological desideratum, our imaginations crucially look to “connect that [mythical] time with the time of history as we write it [… and] mythical places with our geographical space.”¹³ He observes fur-

 Rohlehr, Pathfinder,  – .  This perception also informs African American spirituals and blues – an outlook that Ralph Ellison conceptualizes as “double vision” (Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act [New York: Vintage Books, ]:  – ).  Brathwaite, The Arrivants, .  Ricoeur, Symbolism, .  Ricoeur, Symbolism, .

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ther that myth contributes to understanding through “its symbolic function – that is to say, its power of discovering and revealing the bond between man and what he considers sacred.”¹⁴ Drawing on David Maclagan’s insights, Jamake Highwater emphasizes this homological or symbolic function: Myth, in its deep structure as well as in its superficial content, is about this compound relation between body/mind and word/world. It is metaphoric, not in the sense that it uses what we call ‘figures of speech,’ mere rhetorical devices, but in the root sense of the word: ‘carrying across’ the convenient boundaries we establish between sexes, seasons, species and stars.¹⁵

Highwater adds: I also include in the definition of mythology the metaphoric capacity of myth to shape intellectual and social forms of thinking and behavior, to transcend the sacred cosmogonies of religion and to become secular forms that give value to absolutely everything we do in art, science, communications, and every other experience of life.¹⁶

In the folk forms examined here, this “symbolic function” inheres in the mythic perceptions ritual and art orchestrate. These imaginal forms, patent gestures of resistance to distorting colonialist ideologies, underscore the unifying force of the imagination. These radical tropes, which Antonio Benitez-Rojo explains as “repetition” and Derek Walcott calls “cunning assimilation,” carry a definitive double charge: tensional, centrifugal, and centripetal energies that move toward entropy and engulfment even as they generate synchronistic, creative reversals in consciousness to suggest what Rojo calls “chaos” – the conflicting and coalescing forces that hybridize identities in the region. It is this tensional configuration that Brathwaite recognizes in the tidalectic ¹⁷ rite. The activity that Brathwaite identifies as tidalectics, and juxtaposes against

 Ricoeur, Symbolism, .  Jamake Highwater, Myth and Sexuality (New York: Meridian, ): .  Highwater, Myth and Sexuality,  – .  Tidalectics is Brathwaite’s coinage for a ritual of resistance to marginalization. He interprets a sweeping act as symbolic assertion of psychic subjectivity and defiant political will. The inverse dynamics of Caribbean consciousness are embodied in the fluid and timeless personage of the Nana. The old woman identifies as incarnate mythic archetype of the creative mother that Brathwaite sees manifest as performer of a circular or reversal rite. Her ritual action mimics the enduring tidal rhythm as cosmic dance that communicates a symbiotic, life-assuring correlation between psyche and space (Kamau Brathwaite, Conversations with Nathaniel Mackey [Cowpastor, Barbados: We Press, ]:  – ).

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G. F. W. Hegel’s concept of dialectics to correlate the political function of the former with the anagogic manifestations of myth, charts a spiritual awakening of the sort Ricoeur posits in the visionary complex of poetic symbols.¹⁸ Such symbols, as Ricoeur observes, compress oneiric and cosmic expressivities.¹⁹ It is in reading in Caribbean cultural process the urgency of decolonization that Brathwaite declares tidalectics the “ ‘ natural’ discoursive [sic] alternative (alter/native) to” Hegel’s dialectic. This “tidal ebb&flow” constitutes a creative, death-rebirth life cycle rather than the linear route he rejects as a “Euromissilic,” aggressively apocalyptic entity.²⁰ This insurgent idiom reformulates an ageless initiation symbolism Brathwaite differentiates from the spiral of death rituals or the instinct for abusive power he sees symptomized in Western culture and politics and exemplified by the nuclear arms race. The life-affirming balance Brathwaite sees in the folk art objectifies the radical intent Bill Ashcroft et al. explain as colonized people’s inclination to disrupt Europe’s “ordering of time” by running its “history aground in a new and overwhelming space which annihilates time and imperial purpose.”²¹ “Wickham” and “Mango Pond” are two work songs that similarly deconstruct the imperialist paradigm. They reflect the amalgamation of verbal and nonverbal categories of Caribbean art that manifest in the tidalectic complex. Informing these acts is the mythic, or “special world-creating, world-sustaining power” whereby, as Joseph Campbell states, the “lower powers become spiritualized.”²² Self is reconstituted via art or relocated in sacred space. Campbell stresses this magical saturation of form in his observation that the fifth chakra on the yogic path to enlightenment situates the “lotus” of purification at the level of the larynx.²³ Lawrence J. Evers further explains this immanent power in the word that, in primal consciousness, serves as a nucleus of creative energy. He describes the Navajo belief in this animate authority: “A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.” The Navajo’s “One Word,” the name for the original state

 Brathwaite, Conversations, .  Ricoeur, Symbolism, .  Brathwaite, Conversations, .  Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures (London: Routledge, ): .  Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, ed. Diane K. Osbon (New York: Harper Collins, ): .  Campbell, Reflections, .

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of the universe signifies that speech confers sacred immanence.²⁴ It is the universal creative or transformative aspect of the animate word that Highwater emphasizes as a link between mythology and metaphor. Moreover, it is the perception that speech is self-creating and sacred that, as Campbell too observes, is basic to human recognition of the “true self,” to the capacity of persons to be spiritually at home in, and thus able to control, their environments. This is a core value called “self-mastery,” which, as Dominique Zahan explains, the Bambara, Dogon, and Fon “valorized religiously.”²⁵ Self-validating processes of acculturation and self-enactment are conspicuously at work in these two work songs or ritual forms. Speaking of African retentions in the new world, Lawrence Levine observes that despite cross-cultural musical exchanges, slaves used song in ways similar to their African ancestors as “a central, living element in their daily expression and activities.” Their song style, with its “functionality, improvisational character, its strong relationship in performance to dance and bodily movement and expression” continued to reflect ancestral designs.²⁶ An ideology that is framed in this design is the African perception Basil Davidson advances, that the world is both godmade and manmade. Through ritual, human beings coordinate their social endeavors with holistic cosmic destinies; the mundane and supramundane cooperate in a comprehensive framework of balance and unity, an observation Terese Washington also makes regarding the mythic role of Àjé in Yoruba thought.²⁷ Resonating deep structural content pertaining to the slaves’ perception of slavery as a perverse ritualizing of the topography in the Caribbean, “Wickham” critiques the plantation, associated therein with a hostile sense of place. A litany of parodic images frames the aesthetic and spiritual recoil from the alien topography the song ridicules as an incongruously oppressive symbolic [dis]order.

 Lawrence J. Evers, “Words and Place: A Reading of House Made of Dawn,” in Critical Essays on Native American Literature, ed. Andrew Wiget (Boston: G. K. Hall, ):  – , . This same idea of a creative or sacred endowment in speech informs the Hebrew creation myth in Genesis and is basic to the Dogon myth of the Nummo, who is master of speech and creator of the world. See Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (London: Oxford UP, ): .  Dominique Zahan, The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa, trans. Kate Ezra Martin and Lawrence M. Martin (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .  Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (Oxford: OUP, ): .  Terese N. Washington, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations of Àjé in Africana Literature (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, ): .

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Tell Mr. Wickham To tell Mr. Ingram To tell One Dumpling To tell those starve out people Stan’ to duh wuk Stan’ to duh wuk Stan’ to duh wuk Stan’ to duh wuk To stan’ to duh wuk Stan’ to duh wuk To duh wuk, to duh wuk, To stan’ to duh wuk, to duh wuk.²⁸

As Levine notes, the work song is a form which preserves African communal values to help individuals transcend, at least symbolically, restrictions of their environment and society. “Wickham” demonstrates such psycho-cultural desideratum; the singers diagnose the plantation hierarchy as a flawed system they indict morally, the song a derisive parody. These images attribute the humanist default at the heart of the colonialist crisis to the system of capitalist economics in which the worker ceases to be human. It is this transformation of the philosophy of work from a system of organic even religious relations between human beings and nature to a mechanistic, clock regimentation that Alamin Mazrui and Lupenga Mphande explain in their essay “Time and Labor in Colonial Africa: The Case of Kenya and Malawi.” These authors highlight Richard Burton’s racist derision, according to which Africans were sub-human: marked by “ ‘ stagnation of mind, indolence of the body, moral deficiency, […] and childish passion.’ ” ²⁹ They indict the cultural myopia inherent in the proscriptions whereby Europeans aimed to sever Africans from the authenticating structures of their traditions and impose upon them, instead, the ethical value of labor as socially organizing and redemptive principle. The “ideology of laziness and idleness” served therein, these authors observe, “as a colonial offensive” meant to sanction the manifold abuses that such thinking justified.³⁰ Westerners impressed upon the African space the value of “the clock as the model of social behavior,” bringing about “the complete conquest of the social

 “Stan’ to duh wuk” is a dialect expression for “stay put and do their work.”  Alamin Mazrui and Lupenga Mphande, “Time and Labor in Colonial Africa: The Case of Kenya and Malawi,” in Time in the Black Experience, ed. Joseph K. Adjaye (Westport, CT: Greenwood P, ):  – , .  Mazrui and Mphande, “Time and Labor,” .

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body and its reorientation from a precapitalist to a capitalist time frame.” It was necessary to reinforce human “control over the management and organization of time” in a system that preached that “time is money,” an advantage that could be lost through being “too oriented toward the past.” Moreover, “in the majority of cases, blood and torture were necessary to instill a memory of these new rules of human time relations and breed an animal whose behavior would be regular, uniform, and calculable, all in an attempt to maximize the exploitation of labor within a given work schedule.”³¹ The cultural and human distortions inherent in this conceptual shift are targeted in Brathwaite’s Mask. The candidate returns through history, lamenting the diaspora experience as a devastating holocaust: History bleeds behind the exile’s “hollowed eyes”; he traverses “burnt- / out streets” with his “brain limp- / ing pain.”³² Thus the candidate prays for rejuvenation of cultural identity in farming metaphors that implicitly mirror his own self-cultivation as a religious undertaking – a spirit quest meant to recover the creative essence of soul: Asase Yaa, You, Mother of Earth, on whose soil I have placed my tools on whose soil I will hoe I will work the year has come round again; thirsty mouth of the dust is ready for water for seed; […] And may the year this year of all years be fruitful beyond the fruit of your labour: shoots faithful to tip juice to stem leaves to green; and may the knife or the cutlass nor cut

 Mazrui and Mphande, “Time and Labor,” .  Brathwaite, The Arrivants, .

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me; roots blunt, shoots break.³³

Intertwined here are rituals of space-making and self-making; word and action formulate the constituents of social and moral orders in evident contrast to the displacement dramatized in “Wickham.” In other words, Brathwaite’s candidate, like the folk singers, validates the ideal Quinn describes as the ritualizing of sacred space. Pertinently, cultural anthropologist Dominique Zahan observes that there is a correlation between poet and priest in African traditions. These figures, as John Mbiti too observes, are cultivators of symbolic orders, their acts identified with processes of hallowing the ground of being, commensurate with the ritualizing of space. The poet or praise-singer calls on words to nurture the success of the community and thus shares roles with farmer and priest – other cultivators of life energies. Zahan explains this correspondence: The praise-singer’s action presupposes the existence of a latent force which resides in any living element in the universe and which certain words or actions have the capability of drawing from dormancy and of exalting. ‘This force is the nyama […] and is the common principle of all beings, identical in inorganic matter and living beings.’³⁴

This community-creating function of the word is an integral feature of the tradition that “Wickham” replays. The performance demonstrates that in the diaspora culture, the work song operates not purely for the purpose of timing work to rhythmic chant and thus to relieve the burden of work. Instead, as William Piersen has noted, the music is also a form of creative ridicule and moral indictment of abusive social protocols. The workers’ onomatopoeic mime of the plantation’s twelve o’clock lunch bell spoofs the management’s heartlessness, conveying, in so doing, the politically conscious use of this traditional form in the colonial context. Life is characterized here by domination based on race, political systems, class relations, and modes of production. The capitalist social structure is defined through an oppressive hierarchy of operations. Each rung in this ladder compounds the weight of the relentless driving force that bears down on the workers who use their song to decode the bell’s disingenuous mockery. While it strikes to announce noon, the time for lunch, the real message is not lunch, relief for the workforce, but the conspiracy of meanness passed down from pro-

 Brathwaite, The Arrivants,  – .  Zahan, Religion, .

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prietor, to bookkeeper-manager, and finally the overseer whose duty it is to exploit the workers they despise or prize merely as beasts of burden. It is for this pattern of “disidentification” that Brathwaite coins the theory tidalectics. Mime functions as both copy and transformation – a message he sees incarnated in the ritual drama performed by a “traditional early morning old woman of Caribbean history.” Brathwaite explains this manifestation as the woman’s dogged acts of “sweeping the sand of her yard away from her house” overhanging an ocean cliff in Jamaica. He speculates that she “believes that if she don’t do this,” her “‘poverty-stricken’ household […] would have somehow collapse [sic].”³⁵ Trope for a refiguring of space and time through the radical scope of the imagination, the ritual Brathwaite witnesses constitutes a structural irony that, as in “Wickham,” inaugurates release from the tyranny of history. Tidalectics is the term via which Brathwaite conceptualizes the paradox ritualized here in terms of the capacity of mind and imagination simultaneously to accommodate and invert disordered time and space. In a similar fashion, the plantation workers in “Wickham” improvise on and mock (or morally invert) the disorder. It is this disorder the semantics of the bell broadcast, unwittingly betraying the distortion the planter class imposes on the environment as a presumption on its hegemony or metaphysical ascendancy. In Graham Huggan’s words, the act of mimicry constitutes a “de/reconstructive reading” of the colonialist signifier.³⁶ The aesthetic borrowing – via pastiche or intertext – becomes a radical countertext, the imitation a gesture of political revolt. Similarly, the work song “Wickham” inaugurates the decolonizing potential that informs tidalectics; this song, too, is a metaphor for the tensional fusions and diffusions Antonio Benitez-Rojo explains as the complex language games that complicate identity in the archipelago: the syncretic exchanges of immediate and remote, temporal and timeless, diachronic and synchronic constituents. The improvisation in “Wickham,” the voice miming and mocking the bell’s tolling generates an intertextual weaving, which functions as a strategic means of destabilizing the colonial episteme. The rhythmic drumbeat layered over the bell’s clamor supplants the master text (the colonialist narrative the bell authors) by a flux of signifiers – the combined choral (and competing) constituents now communicating the linguistic plurality or symbolic diversity – what Rojo calls the language games replicating through the Caribbean.

 Brathwaite, Conversations,  – .  Graham Huggan, “Decolonizing the Map,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, nd ed. (London: Routledge, ):  – , .

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The imaginative revision indexes what Rojo calls a visionary structure that depicts a landscape without center or circumference.³⁷ The result, Rojo adds, is the “ironizing” of “values taken as universal.” Taking on the tortuous task of transforming monologue to fugue, the workers enter the entropic swirl of “social violence produced by the encomienda and the plantation.” In penetrating the Caribbean limbo depth, they confront “their otherness, their peripheral asymmetry with regard to the West.”³⁸ The welter of voices signifies, in Rojo’s words, the region’s “historiographic turbulence,” “ethnographic and linguistic clamor.”³⁹ The “genealogical instability” is the outcome of the hybrid constituency: dissonant energies compressed in a repeating or bifurcating insular system. The singers in the spirit of Elegbara declare new order in the disorder. Presiding over words, mysteries, processes, and changes, the spirit of the god offers a fresh look at the hegemonic authority. The lyricism deconstructs the West’s signifying system. The religious intuition and its practical application to the colonialist crisis are of paramount importance in this investigation of the symbolic subtexts informing Caribbean folk culture and expressive art. The cultural structures in which Brathwaite envisages the political imperative of decolonization in the Caribbean radiate designs of the archetypes or sacred symbols, which transmit, as Ricoeur explains, the signifying group’s total immersion in the mythic realm. Informing this symbolic transmission, the amplified or choral interweavings of drum, voice, and bell functions as redundant signifiers the singers here employ to contest their silence and marginality. Voicelessness, George Lamming observes, is a signifier of the stranglehold of slavery. Language, he says, is Caliban’s curse and gift, in that by this means Caliban is denied his name; yet this language, a channel through which Caliban inaugurates his “curse” (desecrates his oppressor’s symbols), is the mark of his self-awareness.⁴⁰ Weighing in on this imperative, Frantz Fanon remarks that to the extent that the colonizer’s myths and archetypes are internalized (assumptions regarding Europe’s cultural authority as the basis for its domination and violence in conquering, subjugating, and exploiting others), the colonized can be controlled and shaped.⁴¹

 Antonio Benitez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean, the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James Maraniss (Durham, NC: Duke UP, ): .  Benitez-Rojo, Repeating Island, .  Benitez-Rojo, Repeating Island, .  George Lamming, “The Occasion for Speaking,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, eds. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, nd ed. (London: Routledge, ):  – , .  Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, ): .

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“Wickham” orchestrates such vocal revolt. The song lifts the spirit out of the abyss of silence and asserts the workers’ liberation from the ontological anxiety they associate with the plantation as a desolate underworld ruled by a misanthropic pantheon. This self-fashioned authority-structure parallels the colonialist “mock chain of being” that Edward Said attributes to Kipling: Mule, horse, elephant, or bullock, he obeys his driver, and the driver his sergeant, and the sergeant his lieutenant, and the lieutenant his captain, and the captain his major, and the major his colonel, and the colonel his brigadier commanding three regiments, and the brigadier his general, who obeys the Viceroy, who is the servant of the Empress.⁴²

While this “deeply forged […] monstrous chain of command” arrogates the “harmonious working” of the colonialist machinery, the beleaguered workers’ mime deflates such arrogance. The hierarchical order wryly recalls the West’s boast, in the form of Enlightenment proselytizing, of its pride of place in a metaphysical chain. That chain or privileged order is shown up as a hermetic and morally insensate establishment. The language of infernal containment emblazoned on the bell that controls time and orders space on the plantation is memorialized as a register of the conflict between natural rhythms and the rhythms of the exploitative capitalist machinery. The humanist inadequacy validated on the gong is telescoped through the song as a normative deviation. It was during preadolescence in the years before mass education that this spirit-abduction was forged. When initiated into fieldwork, children, called the “third-class gang” (in Ernestine Jackman’s “Village Games”: the “cricket gang,” or the “perry gang”⁴³), were encouraged to be caretakers of the planter’s profits. One chanted exhortation said: Willing pickney shit Big, big, suh. Unwilling pickney shit Tiny so Puny, puny little button.⁴⁴

 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, ): .  Ernestine Jackman, “Barbadian Village Games of Yesterday,” in Everyday Life in Barbados, ed. Graham Dan (Bridgetown, Barbados: U of the West Indies P, ): .  “Pickney” is abbreviation for “picanninny.” White indentured children also performed this service. See Ann W. Yates’s reference in Bygone Barbados (St. Michael, Barbados: Blackbird Studios, ): .

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Hand-gestures signaled the supposed bounteous return while forefinger and thumb came together to register the meagerness of the second output. This “gang,” a unit of child labor, was supervised by a whip-bearing elder to ensure steady production – a requirement of the sort that Mazuri recalls as the blood and torture needed to drill in memory the rules of the capitalist machine. A battle-charge for such materialist assault, the gong unfurls, simultaneously, the spirit of dutiful allegiance to profit and a requiem of the compromised soul. Begrudging the workers sustenance, the bell clarions death rather than life. Oracle of the disabling materialist ego, it highlights the paradox of the workers’ status: their economic instrumentality and their social marginality – a mode of “double-consciousness” that informs the chant. The mimicking or improvising voice is a product of what Rojo calls Caribbean “metarhythm.” This is an orchestration of history’s concord and discord, the symbolic aspects of cultural discourse used to “sublimate social violence” by privileging “the transhistorical codes of Nature.”⁴⁵ This elevation is made commensurate with the conjuring of space as an intuitive initiative Rojo attributes to poetic expressivity, a desire to reprogram life through symbols, on terms analogous to nature’s death-rebirth rhythm. Since trans-Atlantic slavocrats had resolved that satisfying their monstrous greed ineluctably bound them to a pact to sacrifice humans and the humanist virtues they glorified as the prestige of Enlightened Christendom, the slave ship was asked to service not just the economic system celebrated in “Wickham,” but also a perverse Eucharistic rite. It is this moral travesty that Brathwaite interrogates in “Jah”: “Has the quick drummer nerves / after the stink Sabbath’s unleavened / cries in the hot hull?”⁴⁶ This curious phenomenon references the creative resilience that defied the Middle Passage devastation. The poem’s subversive iconography indicts the religious sanction the West accorded slavery, the ships’ holds seen as analogues of the holocaust ovens wherein black bodies were baked as unleavened bread to serve as sacrament at the communion of the capitalist gods. Yet, as “Jah” suggests, such perversity failed to suppress the subjugated group’s tenacious spirits. Cultural preservation helped the captives figuratively to redirect the abducting vehicles bound for the excoriating inferno that would ensure blacks’ historical limbo. Piersen, too, has examined the countermanding power of the black imaginary in plantation songs and, like Levine, has provided an in-depth look at the restoration of the sacred songs and the resistant power in verbal rituals. Vodun and

 Benitez-Rojo, Repeating Island, .  Brathwaite, The Arrivants, .

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myal dances underscore the power the folk ritual made resonant as self-validating psycho-religious epistemes. Laura Ramey extrapolates the compelling nature of this religious force as a distinct property of the poetic lyricism in the Spirituals.⁴⁷ It is this functionality of art as metanoia, as an imaginary frame of psychic loss and recovery that informs the opening lines of “Jah.” The poem points to the “bridges of sound” as psycho-spiritual structures that permit communication on frequencies at lower and transcendent spheres. Moreover, this multiplex media links cultures: Nairobi (Africa), Havana (Caribbean), and Harlem (America). It explores the transformative resources that are creatively conjoined by a principle of mythic continuities that persist in consciousness across the colonial landscape and that witnesses to the adaptive and resilient force of cultural memory. As Brathwaite suggests in proclaiming his art a ritual passage that moves from “Genesis […] [to] Revaluation / Possession [… and] Re / creation of the Gods / Cosmos,” symbolic forms serve as the visionary frameworks of new self-conceptions.⁴⁸ Art and ritual constitute media that channel a religious ideal of sacred inherence. The politics of postcolonial reinvention outline, thus, a configuration of the nekyia, a spirit passage closely identified with the archetypal descent to and return from the underworld. Via this symbolic outline, the imagination correlates the will to self-authentication with the indomitable life-force (or spirit) that links mortal beings with the ever-living essence of God. In mediating such psycho-spiritual fulfillments, the ritualist reenacts the primal supposition that survival must be affirmed publicly in the face of cosmic insecurity. The folk art, identified through forms like vodun, myal and limbo, thus assumes moral and religious significance of the sort that, as Ricoeur says, recounts “the final victory of order over chaos”⁴⁹ These forms, all preoccupied with initiatory trajectories of death and rebirth, with movements of descent and ascent, project the mystical intersection of ontologies associated with horizontal and vertical poles symbolized through the cross. Such integration is identified with the transforming agency of the redeemer, whether Nommo or Christ. The archetype of redemptive agency, Jung explains, is “the descending, incarnate God, and the ascending Gnostic Christ who returns to the Father.”⁵⁰ Maya Deren

 Lauri Ramey, Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ):  – .  Kamau Brathwaite, “The Poet and His Place in Barbadian Culture,” in Sir Winston Scott Memorial Lectures (Bridgetown, Barbados: Central Bank, ):  – , .  Ricoeur, Symbolism, .  C. G. Jung, Aspects of the Masculine, trans. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ): .

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further explains this religious trajectory of submission and elevation, death and rebirth or ritual morphology: “The hero of man’s metaphysical adventure – his healer, his redeemer, his guide and guardian – is always a corpse. He is Osiris, or Adonis, or Christ.”⁵¹ Mircea Eliade contextualizes this visionary conception in images that speak for the anti-colonialist stresses that permeate the folk art and rite. Eliade explains that for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and efficacy. The polarity sacred-profane is often expressed as an opposition between real and unreal or pseudoreal. […] Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be, to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.⁵²

To see the sacred revealed in the objective world is also to recognize in one’s familiar reality a bond with the absolute. A world endowed with the numinous, says Eliade, becomes “wholly other.”⁵³ “In other words,” as Eliade adds, “for those who have a religious experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.”⁵⁴ Religious communities call upon myths and rites to link the elementary ground on which the group plots its being with the supra-terrestrial or divine temenos. An essential paradox here is that this religious orientation helps the group members secure their vital identity in history. It is this inverse dynamic that represents “Wickham” as life-affirming in contrast to the bell’s death knell. Implicitly, it is noon, the sun, the life source, is at its zenith, but life on the plantation is at its nadir. Yet it is from this social crypt that the life-affirming activity of song emerges. The song is a version of the creative word that liberates reified lives from the deadly materialist limitations engineered by the capitalist restrictions. Bereft of balance of spirit, the secular plantation privileges the kind of thralldom that Frederick Douglass passionately associates with the institution he saw as a site of perverse transformations, a symbolic underworld or death state into which kidnapped Africans were violent-

 Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (London: Jarrold and Sons,): .  Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper Torchbooks, ):  – .  Eliade, Sacred, .  Eliade, Sacred, .

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ly immersed. Thus the plantation was but “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell,” through which he as a slave was fated to pass.⁵⁵ This tension associated with the plantation as a hell to be excoriated has been allegorized in the Barbadian Crop-over ritual. The figure of Mr. Harding, ambivalent planter-as-employer and agent of hardship, is placed on high and celebrated or worshipped during the ceremony in which he is translated into a larger than life effigy. Recognized also as imprisoning agency, he is sacrificed through a climactic ritual burning for the restoration of the communal wellbeing – a necessary violence analogous to the rite through which Makak initiates psychic healing in Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain. ⁵⁶ The communal reversal rite is similar to the symbolic beheading of the white goddess in the drama. Similarly, “Mango Pond” (a phonetic corruption of “Mangrove Pond,” site of a plantation in Barbados) recaptures the pain and release through song which children in the plantation workforce called upon to ease the stress of their assignments. School age children were employed to hoe land, care for domestic animals, and also to chase the birds from the corn fields. This song seeks, more directly, to lighten the tedious task: Blackbird come from Mango Pond [Mangrove Pond] Eat up all of de Masta corn Hold up blackbird Hold up outa de Masta corn Fly away blackbird Fly away and leave The masta corn. Don’t land blackbird Fly away and leave The masta corn.

The harassed child makes a plea to the birds in song much like the girl under duress in “Strange Fruit.”⁵⁷ He seeks protection, however, not from a supernatur-

 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, ed. David W. Blight (Boston: Bedford, ): .  Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (London: Jonathan Cape, ):  – , .  This folk narrative is retold in Paul Griffith, Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ).

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al spirit as the girl does in the folk narrative, but from nature’s encroachment on the capitalist underworld into which the child worker is abducted. The incantatory or ritualistic quality of the language is a prayer or mantra against the ironic agency of evil, the blackbird, which the child must keep from preying on the master’s divinely sanctioned space. As in “Strange Fruit,” the birds’ descent on the corn is an act of violation. In the narrative, though, the violation is an ambivalently symbolic profane and sacred rape of soul; here it is the insufferable secular act of squeezing the master’s profit margins. The voice pleading against the bird’s trespass seems in awe of the master’s godlike authority, much like the village folk in Lamming’s The Castle of My Skin. ⁵⁸ The estate the child is asked to guard is akin to the seemingly sacred space presided over by the exalted Creighton, the white landlord. It is this same lofty rank the white planter-devil affects in Walcott’s Ti-Jean and His Brothers, his economic will, a cosmic imperative, his desires dominating the landscape as elemental force.⁵⁹ The evident paradox in the work song points to the presumed divine authority of the master as a power seeking to legitimize his selfish appetite in the landscape (a theme that also informs Ti-Jean). The text thus scrutinizes the ideological edifice that is the plantation. The planter, the one who dictates temporal and spatial boundaries within this microcosmic sphere, is played up as ultimate referent in the scheme of ethical authority the child worker is required to uphold. Nevertheless, the capitalist order seems but the glorification of the master’s triumphant ego power, his pathological fixation on the appetite. Conscripted to cater to this infirmity, the child faces the task as a cosmic ordeal, the sterile routine of a veritable Sisyphean affliction to which he is condemned but that his song penetrates creatively, thus offering a degree of renewal or, as in the Blues aesthetic, a temporary respite or transcendence. Responding to the epistemological ideal voiced in the orally expressive forms, Rojo remarks that Caribbean cultures have evolved around multiple popular expressions of myth, music, dance, song, and theater. Such a catalogue of residually oral forms constitutes a coherent narrative that fills the void between past and present, spatio-temporal and psychic sites of self. The texts, in other words, refract extratextual points of culture and identity. Instruments in the imaginal reconstitution of self, they channel self-revelatory routes amid the multiple images, currents, and rhythms, the fusion and diffusion Rojo sees as “insta-

 George Lamming, In the Castle of My Skin (Port of Spain, Trinidad: Longman, ).  Derek Walcott, Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (London: Jonathan Cape,):  – .

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bility” and Brathwaite theorizes as a tidalectic arc. In such a context, the empowered and the disempowered are destabilized rather than made to appear as binary absolutes. Song and gesture are conjured as levelers; the ritual text inverts the hierarchical presumptuousness of autocratic authority; it liberates the spirit by imaginatively revising and reconstructing identities. Such a text orchestrates emotionally heightened forms of speech and action; it positions song and gesture as registers of conflict and architects of restorative energy. In this new world landscape where the gods are rendered invisible, the “cosmogonical cycle” is carried forward through human drama – the body, as Herbert M. Cole explains, achieving compelling prominence as sacred and secular emblem.⁶⁰ The circle (a motif that is implicit in tidalectics) is a prominent design in the new world ritual gestures. Douglas Fraser explains this symbolic structure as a “complex visual form” among the Yoruba.⁶¹ Seen, for example, in the diviner’s tray, its motifs, such as “copulating couples,” represent luck and fertility. Importantly, the curve links the participants to the supernatural or spirit world; the linear system as mythic construct is informed by a crucial “double vision,” paradoxical interpenetrations of backward and forward as well as downward and upward trajectories that constitute the salvational arc of memory and the redemptive process outlined through the nekyia. Basic to the health of a social order, as these work songs suggest, are the human principles that inhere in perceptions of action and utterance as primary symbols – as sources of creation and self-creation.

 Herbert M Cole, Icons: Ideals and Power in the Art of Africa (Washington, DC: Smithsonian P, ): .  Douglas Fraser, ed. African Art as Philosophy (New York: Interbook, ): .

Mario Nisbett

African Diasporic Traditional Symbols and Claims: The Case of the Maroons This article explores the nuanced approach of communities of African descent, particularly Jamaican Maroons, to means of making diasporic connections. It analyzes the symbolic significance of African traditional claims of Maroons as they relate to the articulation of diaspora. Maroons use African traditional claims as ways of anchoring and linking themselves to an African homeland and other peoples of African descent. The essay identifies and systematically examines what Maroons have specifically deemed to be African traditions and the symbols associated with them in their communities’ material and non-material culture. Specifically, what is explored is not so much the veracity of such claims but the symbolic significance that is given to them. Thus, the essay argues that Maroons, similarly and at times differently to others of African descent, use traditional symbols and claims to articulate diaspora. The essay highlights the importance of symbols and claims in understanding the working of diaspora. The Sankofa bird is significant of what the Maroons have been, are today, and our intention, too, as well. The eggs represent the future. Now the bird takes oil from the tail feather so that it can maintain the rest of the body to preserve the future. So what we say is that we take things from a long time ago from our fore-parents’ time and keep [them] today for the generation to come. Marcia Douglass, Charles Town Maroon Council Member¹

Introduction African descended communities have nuanced and unique ways of making diasporic linkages. In order to fully understand how diaspora works, it is important to know that each community of African descent has similar and at times different means of making these connections. This is so in the case of Jamaican Maroons which are the oldest autonomous polities in the Caribbean that were established by escapees from slave-holding authorities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Jamaican Maroons have traditions that are multifarious. Herein, the notion of tradition refers to enduring cultural patterns that  Marcia Douglass, interview by the author, Accompong Town, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, January , . DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-007

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evoke continuity with the past. In Maroon communities, tradition is both a view of actual continuity and the belief that certain practices are legitimate because of their antiquity.² In these respects, Maroons’ traditions, like those of the wider Jamaican and other Caribbean populations, are in many instances hybrid, with African, European, and Amerindian influences. In this, Maroons give great significance to African traditional practices which is also used to articulate diaspora. As Stuart Hall affirms, articulation is both enunciation and forming linkages.³ In so doing, Maroons have given symbolic significance to what they have specifically deemed are African traditions in their communities’ material and non-material culture. In this pursuit, what is explored, in particular, is not so much the veracity of such claims but the symbolic significance that is given to them. Therefore, the article argues that Maroons, at times similarly to, other times differently from other African-descended peoples, utilize particular symbols and claims to articulate diaspora.

Diaspora Before going any further, it is important to clarify how I am defining and applying the term “diaspora.” The concept of diaspora is being used with increasing sophistication and wider application nowadays. The increasingly popular use of the term “diaspora” has incited a fierce scholarly debate about its definition. Some academics, such as Brent Hayes Edwards, Darlene Clark Hine, and Khachig Tölölyan, have expressed a reasonable concern that diaspora may be “in danger of becoming promiscuously capacious.”⁴ As a category, it can include adjacent phenomena such as globality, migrancy, and transnationality.⁵ For this reason, scholars such as Kim Butler and James Clifford have argued that the term has no clear definition.⁶

 Craig Calhoun, Dictionary of the Social Sciences (New York: Oxford UP, ): .  John Fiske, “Open the Hallway: Some Remarks on the Fertility of Stuart Hall’s Contribution to Critical Theory,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (New York: Taylor & Francis, ):  – , .  Khachig Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment,” Diaspora . ():  – , ; Brent Hayes Edwards, “The Uses of Diaspora,” Social Text . ():  – , ; Darlene Clark Hines, Trica Danielle Keaton, and Stephen Small, eds., Black Europe and the African Diaspora (Urbana: U of Illinois P, ).  Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s),” .  Kim Butler, “Defining Diaspora, Refining a Discourse,” Diaspora . (): ; James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology , no.  ():  – , .

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However, it is in fact possible to define diaspora precisely, particularly the African Diaspora. In my way of thinking, it is the condition that produces the collective consciousness of sameness rooted in the idea of common origins based on a common experience of Black abjection. We find the three major principles embedded in this definition – sameness, common origins, and common abjection – implicitly and explicitly expressed in popular and well-established conceptualizations of the African Diaspora. It is important to see in most attempts at defining diaspora an effort to understand not only what diaspora is but also what it does – not in a literal sense but as a critical practice. The term “diaspora,” as Stuart Hall suggests, can be used in a literal or “closed” way, to describe peoples who have been dispersed from their “countries of origin,” but who attempt to maintain links with the past through endeavors to preserve their traditions, “seeking eventually to return to the homeland – the true ‘home’ of their culture – from which they have been separated.”⁷ However, Hall also proposes what could be called a more “open” or critical sense in which diaspora could be seen, one that is much more complex. It is worth quoting: Diaspora also refers to the scattering and dispersal of peoples who will never literally be able to return to the places from which they came; who have to make some kind of difficult “settlement” with the new often oppressive, cultures with which they were forced into contact; and who have succeeded in remaking themselves and fashioning new kinds of cultural identity by, consciously or unconsciously, drawing on more than one cultural repertoire. These are people who, as Salman Rushdie wrote in his essay in Imaginary Homelands, “having been borne across the world … are translated men (and women)” […]. They speak from the “in-between” of different cultures, always unsettling the assumptions of one culture from the perspective of another, and thus finding ways of being both the same as and at the same time different from the others among whom they live.⁸

This critical – rather than literal – usage of diaspora opens up many possibilities. Diaspora in its critical sense complicates the literal interpretation. As an alternative to a literary interpretation, Percy Hintzen argues that diaspora, when “transferred as a signification of the Black social reality, served as a powerful metaphor to publicize the even more devastating, brutal, and pervasive violence

 Stuart Hall, “New Cultures for Old,” in A Place in the World?: Places, Cultures and Globalization, eds. John Allen and Doreen B. Massey (Oxford: OUP, ):  – , .  Hall, “New Cultures for Old,” ; referencing Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism  –  (London: Granta, ) and, in the final sentence, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, ).

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that constituted the common history of colonialism and slavery.”⁹ The point is that when diaspora is shorn of its literal definition, the way becomes open for consideration of the African Diaspora as constituted not by a single people but by a variety of different identities, cultures, and communities; or, as Stuart Hall asserts, by a “necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives in and through, not despite, difference.”¹⁰ In other words, it is an expression of the common experience of oppression and alienation, is rooted in a sense of racial identity, and is oriented toward a notion of common origins. This understanding of diaspora opens the way to see that the uses of the concept are varied. This approach to diaspora challenges conventional debates in the humanities and social sciences on whether the concept is either a grouping of peoples, a process, or a method, making it possible to simultaneously engage all three modes along with their conceptual and theoretical contributions. In addition, this study demonstrates how diaspora, not race, as a unit of analysis for understanding the connection of peoples who are considered Black. I view race here to be a social construct that has no biological basis. Thus, in its articulations, diaspora is not a matter of subscribing to an essentialist racial agenda, but incorporates significant differences across diverse Black peoples to fully understand their lived realities and experiences. Furthermore, this view of diaspora permits an interdisciplinary approach to engage the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and political philosophy in the study. Such a comparative and interdisciplinary approach helps to explore systematically the significance of diaspora to Black peoples in general and at site-specific locations. In this case, it de-centers Americo-centric analysis by focusing on the Caribbean.

Claiming African tradition The communities of Jamaican Maroons, like Maroons throughout the Americas, are places where liberated men and women from slaveholding regimes or other hegemonic authorities attempt to implement their own idea of a self-governing community. These communities of mainly people of African descent emerged throughout the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Americas. In present  Percy C. Hintzen and Jean Muteba Rahier, “Introduction,” in Global Circuits of Blackness: Interrogating the African Diaspora, eds. Jean Muteba Rahier, Percy C. Hintzen, and Felipe Smith (Urbana: U of Illinois P, ): ix – xxvi, x.  Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherfold (London: Lawrence & Wishart, ):  – , .

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day Jamaica, there are two groups of Maroons in four different communities. The Windward Maroons, established primarily in the eastern mountains of Jamaica, have the settlements of Charles Town, Moore Town and Scott’s Hall. The groups that formed the Leeward Maroons came from a settlement in the west central interior of Jamaica which is called Accompong Town. Although Maroons draw on several traditions, they claim African traditions as the most important. For this reason, this essay focuses on these claimed African traditions and their symbolic significance. However, this essay is not intended to argue the factual veracity of the “tradition” or not but to explore how it is understood as African by the Maroons and other people of African descent. In this respect, the article looks at rhetorical strategies as they pertain to claims about traditions in attempt to explore the hermeneutics of Maroons in the matter. To create a framework for exploring Maroon traditions, it is important to engage hermeneutics as it relates to the claims of the communities. As Paul Ricoeur suggested, hermeneutics is a way of interpreting textual and non-textual materials to attain the meaning and significance of phenomena.¹¹ Hermeneutics permits an interrogation of verbal and nonverbal communication and semiotics. In other words, I want to examine how Maroons express and represent their traditions and provide meaning to them by examining the hermeneutics and semiotics of their texts, oral histories, performances and rituals, and artifacts, and what they signify. Fundamentally, the essay examines the claims of Maroons to an African tradition and significance of these claims. In this paper, I am arguing that different forms of culture (material and nonmaterial) signify African origins through which particular claims to diaspora are made. These include both objects and forms of organization. It is African originary claims, signified by the presence of these forms, that are articulated in diaspora. These different signifying forms and practices in both material and nonmaterial culture are explored in this essay.

Material culture In Maroon communities, an examination of some of the most significant objects of material culture symbolically reveals links to Africa. There are a number of objects that different communities of African descent use to claim African connections. A few objects that are unique and some shared with other African-de-

 Karl Simms, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, ): , ; Paul Ricoeur and George H. Taylor, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (New York: Columbia UP, ): .

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scended peoples are deemed to originate in Africa. The most popular of these items that are linked to Africa are musical instruments. Perhaps, the most significant object is the Abeng which is the most ubiquitous and celebrated claimed African traditional item in Jamaican Maroon communities. The instrument is indeed of African origin. It is also used and called an Abeng in the Twi language of present-day Ghana.¹² The instrument is made from a cow’s horn in a similar manner to how it is made in Ghana. The history of the Abeng’s use has been traced to the emergence of the Maroons in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Throughout the centuries, the Abeng has been a centerpiece of Maroon history and culture.¹³ In the islands of the Caribbean, it is unique to the Jamaican Maroons.¹⁴ In the view of the Maroons, the Abeng is originally from Africa and was influential in the founding and subsequent development of their communities. In fact, the use of the Abeng has been institutionalized in the form of an Abeng Blower who is an official in the governing Maroon Council. In 2011, the Chief Abeng Blower of Accompong, Hansley Reid, explained the origins and other significance of the Abeng in the following way: The Maroons carried four Abengs from Africa to Jamaica, and there were four men who were in charge of blowing the Abeng, which was the only source of communication in Jamaica for the Maroons at the time. One was in Stone Gutter Spanish Town, St. Jago de la Vega, the other was in Manchester at Williamsfield, [an]other was in Balaclava, and one on top of the Peace Cave as a community blower to tell the people how far away the enemy was from them. So the person from Spanish Town would send the echo, telling them that the enemy is coming and how far away they are, the person from Williamsfield would receive that echo, then send it to the person in Balaclava, then the one in Trelawny Town Accompong picked it up and sent it out; then it was scattered all around so they could know how to ambush the British.¹⁵

 Milton C. McFarlane, Cudjoe of Jamaica: Pioneer for Black Freedom in the New World (Short Hills, NJ: R. Enslow, ): .  Robert Charles Dallas, The History of the Maroons, from Their Origin to the Establishment of Their Chief Tribe at Sierra Leone: Including the Expedition to Cuba, for the Purpose of Procuring Spanish Chasseurs, and the State of the Island of Jamaica for the Last Ten Years: with a Succinct History of the Island Previous to That Period (London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, ), ; Katherine Dunham and Ted Cook, Katherine Dunham’s Journey to Accompong (New York: Henry Holt, ), .  The Abeng can be found among the Maroons of Suriname and French Guyana.  Hanley Reid, interview by author, Accompong Town, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, December , .

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The Abeng, considered to be one of the only few physical objects that came over from Africa, is important for a number of reasons. Originally, it was useful for the protection and preservation of Maroon culture against the British colonialists. Its long and ancient use in Africa and the Caribbean makes it also an important symbol of Maroon independence. It appears on the national flag of the Accompong Maroons. It is also an instrument used to play the unique African-derived Kromanti music of the Maroons. In addition, according to Reid, the Abeng is still blown to acknowledge special occasions such as community gatherings and the passing away of community members, and for the annual Maroons’ Independence Day celebrations. Furthermore, the Maroons, similarly to the Akan people, use the Abeng to facilitate communication with their ancestors.¹⁶ The author witnessed this at the Asante’s Akwasiade Festival on June 22, 2014 in Kumasi, Ghana. Essentially, its origin in Africa is important to the Maroons and is symbolically significant in articulating diaspora. Maroons associate other instruments and items with their African heritage. For instance, in Moore Town, some of the other instruments that are considered African include: gumbay and oprenteng drums; kwat (made from bamboo); and adawo (a machete struck with a piece of metal).¹⁷ Also, on ceremonial occasions, a few objects are displayed to showcase African connections. For example, Maroon leaders and cultural performers often wear traditional African garments at many public gatherings. African traditional symbols in material culture are most significantly used in the Maroon communities during their annual celebrations, such as Kojo Day (in Accompong Town), Nanny Day (in Moore Town), and Quaco Day (in Charles Town). A full-page spread of Maroon elders dressed in “traditional African gear” was displayed in the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper in 2009.¹⁸ Furthermore, as former Deputy Colonel (title of political head of Maroon communities) Melville Currie of Accompong indicates, a few jewelry items are worn that are made from trees such as the kakoon and nikala or walli which he and other community members claim are used in Africa.¹⁹  Lawrence Rowe and Lance Ricketts, interview by author, Accompong Town, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, December , ; Werner Zips, Nanny’s Asafo Warriors: The Jamaican Maroons’ African Experience (Kingston: Ian Randle, ): xix; Kenneth Bilby, “The Kromanti Dance of the Windward Maroons of Jamaica,” New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids . ():  – , .  Wallace Sterling, interview by author, Moore Town, Portland, Jamaica, December , .  Keril Wright, “Accompong Town Maroons Celebrate  Years of Freedom,” (Kingston) Jamaica Observer (January , ) (acc. December , ).  Melville Currie, interview by author, Accompong Town, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, August , .

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Larger objects, such as structures and grave sites that are associated with African roots, are also found in Maroon communities as well. In general, the Maroons consider their settlements as African communities in the Caribbean. Accompong, which Maroons say is a derivation of the popular Akan name of Acheampong, is an African named community.²⁰ In Maroon communities, Accompong in particular, there are a number of landmarks or significant cultural and historical sites, which are in a sense symbols of African traditions in material culture. Symbols of African tradition are kept alive and marked into the physical place. For this reason, the communities claim to be uniquely more African than the rest of Jamaica and the Caribbean. One can see signifying elements of African connections in architecture and community artwork to a limited degree. Many Maroons believe that African architecture was much more popular in the past of the communities, mainly the building of thatched houses.²¹ In contemporary times, Maroons identify only a few structures which they claim could be directly linked to an African past. In Charles Town, there is an “Asafu Yard complex” that has a stage, courtyard, and museum. The idea of an Asafu comes from the Akan concept and word that has been use in Charles Town and neighboring Moore Town communities to refer to a meeting place, usually of warriors. The Asafu complex is seen as a meeting place for the community in Charles Town. In other words, it signifies the sacred space of the Maroons in the African tradition. In addition to the architectural complex, there are a few murals and works of art related to Africa in Charles Town. One mural tells the story of the Maroons’ origins in Africa as “kings and queens,” their journey through the Middle Passage, and their struggles in Jamaica. A sankofa bird is carved into different pieces of furniture and displayed on the door of the community’s museum.²² In summer 2014, I saw images of the sankofa bird in numerous Ghanaian cities, such as Kumasi, Accra, and Elmina. Sankofa is an Akan word meaning to “reach back and get it.” It represents the idea that Maroons take pride in living and developing. As indicated in the introductory quote, Maroons try to live up to the idea of this significant iconic and persistent symbol of Akan culture. Indeed, as the Gleaner mentions, for Colonel Lumsden of Charles Town the images epitomize the preservation of

 Rowe and Ricketts, interview; “Renewing the JA/Ghana Link,” Jamaica Gleaner (Kingston), July , .  George Huggins, interview by the author, Accompong Town, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, January , .  “Maroon Stories Artfully Etched in Wood,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (June , ) (acc. March , ).

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Maroon history and heritage through art.²³ African forms are being inscribed in Maroon identity. Of the four Maroon communities, Accompong Town has the most historical and cultural sites that are symbolically linked to Africa, including the African Burial Grounds, Sealed Grounds (sites of supernatural occurrences), and (Asante) Herbal Garden.²⁴ They are sites symbolic of African connections and uniqueness linked to the autonomous communities’ viability and success. Perhaps, the most significant cultural site is the Kindah Tree, an ancient mango tree, which represents African unity for the Maroons. According to Deputy Colonel Norma Edwards-Rowe, the word Kindah is an African word that means “We are family.”²⁵ It has been claimed that for centuries, on Kojo Day (Accompong’s Independence Day), people first gathered at the Kindah Tree.²⁶ Melville Currie, the Maroon historian and former deputy colonel, states that under the Kindah Tree is where Kojo and the other Maroon leaders came together.²⁷ It was where the different groups of Africans – especially the Asante, Kromanti, and Congo – came together in a blood pact to unite to fight the British. For the Accompong Maroons, the Kindah Tree represents the unity of different groups of Africans – a site of building solidarity based on claimed African traditions. In all of this, one can see the symbolic significance of material culture in originary claims about Africa, relating to the production and reproduction of the “African-ness” of Maroon identity. Such significance is related to the claims that “African” material (and non-material) culture has allowed the Maroons to preserve their identity and independence as a distinct community.

Non-material culture In claiming African connections, it is perhaps more in non-material culture that the rhetoric or symbols of African traditions are substantial. As Bilby asserts, the culture of the Maroons “came to reside almost entirely in intangibles such as val-

 “Maroon Stories Artfully Etched in Wood.”  Rowe and Ricketts, interview; “Spirit Possession in Afro-Jamaican Religions and the Kromanti Play,” African Caribbean Institute/Jamaica Memory Bank (acc. March , ).  Norma Rowe-Edwards, My Father Said: A Story about the Accompong Maroons  –  (Riviera Beach, FL: Emerge Publishing Group, ): .  Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo: History, Music, and Gender in the January Sixth Celebration of the Jamaican Accompong Maroons,” Black Music Research Journal ./ ():  – , .  DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” .

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ues, ethics, and consciousness of a shared past – as well as coded forms of expressive culture.”²⁸ In fact, more than intangibles, symbols of other non-material cultural traditions of Maroons associated with Africa are discernible in many forms but most evident in the political system and the arts. Perhaps, the political system surrounding these non-material Maroon cultural traditions deemed most important. All of the Maroon communities consider a traditional African system as the foundation of their current political and land-tenure structure. Maroons argue that they have maintained their African political system for more than three hundred years in Jamaica. Furthermore, Maroons specifically claim the Akan political system in the founding of their communities.²⁹ Hence, the symbolic and hermeneutic role of political practice can be seen in the articulation of diaspora. In Maroon oral history, the African chieftaincy or kingdom type of governing system was established by the Maroons during the founding of the communities in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. As the Maroon descendant and author Beverly Carey asserts, the early Maroons attempted to re-create an “African village” with an “Asante-like political system.” ³⁰ The Moore Town Maroon author Milton MacFarlane makes connections to African governing systems by stating that “Kromanteen laws and customs” from West Africa were used in the organizing and governing of Maroon communities.³¹ Furthermore, according to Colonel Wallace Sterling of Moore Town, Maroons had a long history of governing themselves all the way back in Africa, where there was a “chief or chieftainess.”³² For Colonel Frank Lumsden of the Charles Town Maroons, their governing structure was based on an “Akan system.”³³ Colonel Noel Prehay of the Scott’s Hall Maroons states that the political system of the Maroons came from their Asante ancestors.³⁴ Maroons often proclaim that their governing system is similar to African chieftaincies. Maroons argue that although the current official title of the head of the Maroon government is a colonel, his or her role has some resemblance to an African chief. The former Deputy Colonel Melville Currie of Accompong

 Kenneth M. Bilby, True-Born Maroons (Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, ): .  Michael Angelo Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, ): .  Bev Carey, The Maroon Story: The Authentic and Original History of the Maroons in the History of Jamaica,  –  (Gordon Town, Jamaica: Agouti P, ): , , .  McFarlane, Cudjoe of Jamaica, .  Sterling, interview.  Frank Lumsden, interview by author, Charles Town, Portland, Jamaica, June , .  Noel Prehay, interview by author, Scott’s Hall, St. Mary, Jamaica, August , .

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states that the colonel were known as “chief” during the period of the war between the Maroons and the British in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.³⁵ Deputy Colonel Norma Rowe-Edwards asserts that the “leaders were given the honorary title as Chief. I am not sure at what time the subsequent leaders were called colonel, a colonial title, but that is what the leader is called today.”³⁶ According to Colonel Prehay of Scott’s Hall, the political system of the Maroons came from their Asante ancestors, but the title “colonel” did not; and although he uses the title, he sees himself more as a chief, which he believes is more in line with his African ancestors’ view.³⁷ Similarly, Melville Currie acknowledged that Accompong Town is ruled by a colonel, but “you can call him the chief, as they were in Africa.”³⁸ As in other Maroon communities, the colonel (or chief) is head of the governing body of Accompong Town.³⁹ According to former Colonel Harris Cawley, in The Sound of the Abeng, the colonels have responsibilities of acting as a judge in internal disputes and representative of the outside world for the people. The colonel is also responsible for the political and economic development of the communities.⁴⁰ Maroons believe the colonels’ relationship to the land is similar to the African land tenure system. As the supreme authority figure among the Maroons, the colonel holds the titles of the land for the entire community (a position that is viewed as African in tradition). He or she apportions the land among the Maroons.⁴¹ Most Maroons associate the communal land idea to their African ancestors. The Moore Town Maroon writer Milton MacFarlane was told by his grandfather: Cudjoe was taught, and observed, that the land the maroons occupied belonged to all of them, and its amicable distribution and use must be perpetuated. In short, the old West African code of communal living was transported almost intact to the Jamaican mountains,

 Melville Currie, interview by author, Accompong Town, St. Elizabeth, Jamaica, December , .  Rowe-Edwards, My Father Said, .  Prehay, interview.  Currie, interview.  Colonel Martin-Luther Wright, “Accompong Maroons of Jamaica,” in Maroon Heritage Archaeological, Ethnographic, and Historical Perspectives, ed. E. Kofi Agorsah (Barbados: Canoe P, ):  – , .  Harris N. Cawley, The Sound of the Abeng: A Short Synopsis on the Accompong Maroons (Accompong Town, Jamaica: Speedy Prints, ).  Wright, “Accompong Maroons of Jamaica,” .

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enabling the Maroons to govern themselves with internal peace, according to the old ways.⁴²

Many Maroons, particularly in Accompong Town, believe that they have preserved an African lineage system of political leadership. Often, in over three centuries of leadership in Accompong, the leaders, all males, have been selected not from a royal family per se but from influential Accompong Maroon families in the community, with many Rowes, Wrights, and Cawleys serving as colonels.⁴³ According to former Colonel Wright of Accompong Town, at least one member of these influential families “was made Chief at some point in time. The fact that they were also related shows that there was a strong tendency towards a kinship-based network or that leadership rested with a dominant family group.”⁴⁴ Mann O. Rowe, along with a number of other Maroons, argues that some of the community founders, such as Kojo and Nanny, were a part of this ruling “Rowe royal family.”⁴⁵ The rhetoric of African connections is important in claiming tradition. Another important claimed African tradition is the arts. The art forms are interconnected with other claimed African traditions, whether in non-material culture such as Kromanti (Maroon language) words, or material culture such as murals. In the Maroon communities, specific art forms are celebrated and linked to African traditions: literary (story-telling), visual, and performance arts. A significant art form is ceremonial/ritual performance, which holds great symbolic significance to the connections with African traditions. Ceremonial performance is usually in the form of singing, drumming, and dancing. The Maroons see it as a continuation of African traditions. It is an activity shared with many other peoples of African descent. At just about every community or public event, the Maroons sing, drum, and dance. These events include conferences, burials, marching, and the annual Independence Day celebrations.⁴⁶ The ceremonial rituals are also interconnected to the Maroons’ belief systems (Myal, Obeah, and Kromanti Play), their political system, and their language. The Maroons trace their performance rituals to Africa. According to Hansley Reid, the Abeng Blower of Accompong Town, the music and dance of the Maroons come from Africa:

 McFarlane, Cudjoe of Jamaica, .  Cawley, Sound of the Abeng, .  Wright, “Accompong Maroons of Jamaica,” .  Mann O. Rowe, interview by unknown interviewer, undated, interview T, African Caribbean Institute of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica.  Currie, August , ; Cawley, Sound of the Abeng, .

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Cudjoe, Nanny, and Dundi learned that their people were being captured as slaves on the ships, so they joined them on the slave ship with their four-corner drums, their shakers, and their square drum and came to Jamaica at Morant Point in St. Thomas in the east. They worked with the slave masters there for about three to four days, then they started to play the drums and the shakers and dance and sing their Kromanti, and there came the evil spirit from the Kromanti song which dealt with them [the British].⁴⁷

This is an etiological or origin myth referring to marronage, but it also makes claims to African origins as well. The Maroons claim that their songs originate in Africa. As the Maroon writer Beverly Carey asserts, Maroons’ “songs were woven into their stories of long past Africa, of the experiences and victories of their ancestors.”⁴⁸ According to former Colonel Martin Luther Wright of Accompong, reporting Jacqueline DjeDje: The language of many of the songs is mixed. In the old day they [Maroons] sing it in African, but we doesn’t [sic] do it in African, because a lot of the African songs and language has died out now. But if you go over to Moore Town and Scott’s Hall, their [African] language is fluently spoken. But in Accompong, they just remember a few of these songs.⁴⁹

The Kromanti songs in and of themselves might not be about Africa or necessarily identical to any specific African tradition of music, but symbolically their roots are viewed as being based in Africa by Maroons. George Huggins, chief drum maker of Accompong Town, sees the songs as originating in Africa.⁵⁰ Lance Ricketts, a farmer and tour guide of Accompong, considers Kromanti song to be African songs.⁵¹ He argues this view includes such songs as “Buddy Oh, Bell Ring a Money,” “Whole Night Me Up a Hill Top,” and “Bring Me a Fowl.”⁵² The tour guide Lawrence Rowe of Accompong, in agreement with Ricketts, sees Kromanti songs as African and includes “Bark In Da,” “Land Title Alone,” and “Maroon Law Hold Already” as the most important songs.⁵³ These songs may more strongly mark Maroon identity, but they are significantly used to make African originary claims. Although the songs are significantly creolized, Maroons insist that the Kromanti songs continue their African tradition.

      

Reid, interview. Carey, Maroon Story, . DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” . Huggins, interview. Rowe and Ricketts, interview. Rowe and Ricketts, interview. Rowe and Ricketts, interview.

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As the musicologist DjeDje observes, the Kromanti songs are a fusion of elements from various African and European cultures in form, melody, and rhythmic organization. She notes that the African component is similar “to a West African drum ensemble, where the master drummer is the primary improviser; the vocal leader in a Maroon ensemble can be regarded as the ‘master’ musician because she freely and spontaneously changes her part.”⁵⁴ DjeDje also noticed that, as in most African musical traditions, call-and-response was central to the performance, and the melodies of the songs performed are based on additive rhythms, a hallmark of African music.⁵⁵ Call-and-response may or may not have African origins, but they do signify blackness and hence make claims of origins in Africa. Maroon identity is hybridized, but the people claim African origins through Kromanti songs. The eastern Maroons share similar and at times different Kromanti songs with the Accompong Maroons. As former Colonel C. L. G. Harris of Moore Town avers: the songs sung during Kromanti Play are “categorised as Coromante, Sa Leone, Pappa and Jawbone. The first lends itself to fierce dancing; the next two are of a slow galloping rhythm and are sung mostly when it is pleasure time, the last named is the sad and soulstirring.”⁵⁶ The “heavier” categories of songs are named after a number of “tribes” or “nations” that are said to have contributed to the early Maroon society.⁵⁷ These names refer to certain regions or peoples in Africa, hence articulating diaspora. The arts, especially music, are deployed to signify African origins. These are some of the most visible of the art forms – whether story-telling, architecture and artwork, and ceremonial/ritual performance. They speak to a claimed African past, and some of these art forms are positioned and believed to be shared with many groups of Africans, especially Akan peoples. These practices serve as enunciations of African origins that are critical in diasporic articulation.

Articulating Diaspora Maroons deem particular traditional practices to be African and use them to connect to other people of African descent throughout the globe. In this, the symbolic significance of these traditions is accentuated. In sharing and celebrating claimed traditions with mainly other peoples of African descent, Maroons are ar   

DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” . DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” . Harris, “Spirit of Nanny.” Harris, “Spirit of Nanny.”

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ticulating a diasporic consciousness. Maroons’ commemorations of tradition take place in their communities, wider Jamaica, and beyond. In other words, Maroons create space to enunciate and make linkages through the use of African traditional claims that are mutually recognized as such by other African-descended peoples. Maroon leaders, cultural performers, and other individuals have gone to other parts of Jamaica and beyond to share their African heritage. These cultural ambassadors have travelled as far away as Barbados, United States, Canada, and Ghana.⁵⁸ The work of these cultural ambassadors is paramount. It is how the circulation of knowledge of marronage and its importance as a signifying trope of African origins and connection occurs. It is the recognition in encounters among peoples of African descent that is critical. Through the use of particular symbols, many people have recognized the Maroons as strong bearers of African traditions. However, what is really important here is the mutual recognition of African traditions. The Jamaican state often invites Maroon leaders to participate in national or historically significant events to showcase and celebrate African tradition. For example, in 2007, the political leader Portia Simpson Miller, who organized a year-long series of activities to highlight the contribution of “our African ancestors in ending the Trans-Atlantic slave trade,” included the Maroons in this activity.⁵⁹ Colonel Sterling of the Moore Town Maroons, along with the renowned African writer Chinua Achebe, and a member of the Rastafari community and African Heritage Development Association of St. Thomas, was included in such activities.⁶⁰ Another example of Maroon travel is the women’s groups of Accompong Town, who have made trips to Devon House in Kingston, the University of the West Indies, and universities in the United States to display or give guest lectures on their African traditions of herbal plant use for medicinal and spiritual purposes.⁶¹ All of these visits are made in the spirit of celebrating African traditions with other peoples of African descent.  “Maroons to Re-trace Footsteps of Ancestors,” (Kingston) JIS News (July , ) (acc. March , ); “Canadians Learning About Maroon Culture,” (Kingston) JIS News (August , ) (acc. March , ).  “Slave Trade Abolition Bicentenary Celebrations Launched,” (Kingston) JIS News (January , ) (acc. March , ).  “Slave Trade Abolition Bicentenary Celebrations Launched.”  Yvonne Chin, “The Herb Women of Accompong,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (November , ) (acc. December , ).

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Maroons generally encourage people to not only visit but stay in their communities to share African traditions, heritage, and culture. The largest population of visitors is peoples who are themselves of African descent, particularly Afro-Jamaicans. The Afro-Jamaicans include a range of governmental officials, from head of state, such as prime ministers Portia Simpson Miller and P. J. Patterson, to officials in minor governmental offices. In addition, cultural artists and performers such as the Stone Love musical entertainment, Sizzla Kalonji, and local Capoeira groups have visited the communities. Moreover, each year hundreds of high school and university students visit and sometimes make extended stays in the Maroon communities. Many other African-descended people have visited. For instance, high-profile scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Dunham, and Linton E. Mordecai have visited the Maroons, seeking to explore African retentions in their communities.⁶² In the last few decades, more and more people have been visiting and staying in Maroon communities. Many of the peoples of African descent coming from overseas are individuals of Afro-Jamaican descent from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, who sometimes see Maroon communities as sites to explore their “true” Afro-Jamaica or African heritage. Hence, the semiotics of marronage is framed in African connections. Also, based on newspaper accounts and the log books of Accompong Town, in the last few years, the visitors of African descent have come from North America (United States and Canada), the Caribbean (Bahamas, Barbados, and Haiti), Latin America (Belize, Colombia, and Suriname), Africa (Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria), and Europe (United Kingdom).⁶³ Clearly, Maroon communities have become sites of pilgrimage to share African heritage for African-descended peoples. Many African Americans visit these communities as well, including high-profile ones such as Rapper Snoop Dogg and U. S. Ambassador Pamela Bridgewater. From the Caribbean, Black leaders such as Maroon leaders of Suriname and Barbadian governmental representatives; and from Africa, many diplomats and even heads of state, such as Jerry Rawlings, have visited Maroon communities. Clearly, this is related to the recognition and articulation of diaspora. Maroons encourage people to visit their communities throughout the year. There are almost daily visitors among the four different Maroon communities. It is under the recasting of heritage tourism that this commemorating of shared African traditions is being positioned. Accompong Town, with virtually daily vis “Off to B. W. I.,” (Baltimore) Afro-American (February , ).  “A Colourful Maroon Celebration,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ); “Maroons Celebrate – Mark th Anniversary Signing” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ); “No Filming of Maroons’ th Anniversary,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ).

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its, is the most visited of the Maroon communities. Maroons promote visiting to share just about all of their traditions, with the African cultural traditions being most emphasized. Visitors and sojourners are taken mainly to the seven (Africaninfluenced) cultural sites in Accompong Town: Accompong Museum; Sealed Grounds; Asante, Kromanti, and Congo Burial Ground; Herbal (Asante) Hut; Kindah; Kojo Monument (also a Sealed Ground); and Old Town. Additional activities include excursions into the wider Cockpit Country areas through hiking, bird watching, and caving. Furthermore, arrangements can be made to explore other deemed African traditions of the Maroon such as herb-lore, crafts (especially drum-making), story-telling, and local foods. Albeit not as varied, similar experiences centering on claimed African traditions can be experienced in other Maroon communities, especially Charles Town and Moore Town. For instance, in 2011, the Jamaican Information Service (JIS), the country’s information-provider agency, stated that with the nation’s school systems attempting to make Black history an important part of the school curriculum, Maroon communities are “the perfect opportunity for students to dig deep into their past, to learn about aspects of the Jamaican cultural heritage.”⁶⁴ Hence, visitors to Maroon communities like Charles Town are encouraged. The JIS indicates the following sources and activities as examples of the richness of Maroon communities for cultural development: Visitors to the Charles Town Maroons’ Museum and Safu Yard in the Buff Bay Valley, Portland, can get the thrilling experience of tracing the footsteps of their ancestors into the hills, as they ascend the Sambo Hill Hiking Trail. As a practical re-enactment of the Literature Text, “The Young Warriors,” a story depicting the struggles of some young maroons, approximately 200 students and teachers of Meadowbrook High School, Kingston, embarked on the historical adventure, as they grasped the opportunity to retrace a part of their history on Friday, February 11. Excited about the journey to Sambo Hill, the students and their teachers, led by enthusiastic tour guides, carefully maneuvered the challenging terrain with its slippery rocks and damp vegetation. Literature teacher at Meadowbrook High School, Trisan Brown, said it was a good practical experience for the students. “It was designed to give them a direct purposeful experience, as they recounted the history of the maroons.” She said although the terrain was challenging, it was important for them to understand the struggles of their ancestors, as it taught them to be more appreciative of the sacrifices they made.⁶⁵

 “Meadowbrook High Students Follow Nanny’s Trail,” (Kingston) JIS News (February , ) (acc. December , ).  “Meadowbrook High Students Follow Nanny’s Trail.”

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This verifies the centrality of marronage in Jamaican identity but also the recognition and articulation of the diaspora of Black Jamaican nationhood. In the last few decades, a range of activities in Maroon communities has appealed to Jamaican peoples of African descent. The public events vary year by year, depending on the particular leadership of the community at any given time. The most popular events are the annual Maroons’ Independence Day celebrations, conferences, and community tours. The importance of these is their emphasis on the role of the Maroons as signifying figures of Blackness. Many Maroon leaders have used their administrations to highlight linkages with Africa and other peoples of African descent. For instance, in 1998, former Colonel Meredie Rowe of Accompong announced in the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper: I also want from the Maroon perspective to remind all Jamaica as well as the wider regions that the Accompong Maroon State in Saint Elisabeth has taken the decision to hold three major events each year. All these are of cultural and historic importance carrying message of the most effective figures of the Diaspora of the Maroons of Jamaica. [Unlike the annual Kojo Day celebration,] [t]hese events will carry a no entry fee so come with all cultural skills be it kumina, drumming, dancing, gerreh, myal, revival, skit, acrobatic skills, folklore or even anancy story, they will be all welcome.⁶⁶

As an additional example, in October 2011, Colonel Lumsden of Charles Town organized a weekend retreat with Capoeira and Maroon performance, while linking the two communities through a celebration of forms of African resistance.⁶⁷ These are all instances of bringing Black people together and articulating diaspora. Most significantly, the event that happens year in and out is the Maroons’ Independence Day celebrations, with significant claims of African expressive forms in the communities. It is the one given time of the year that Maroon traditions are always shared and celebrated with others. In the late 1990s, as the musicologist DjeDje states: For the Accompong Maroons, the event is not only a reminder and signifier of their collective identity, it is one of the few occasions in their culture when music, history, religion,

 Meredie Rowe, “Maroons Salute Emancipation Heroes,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (July , ).  Charles Campbell, “Can Ketch Quakuh …,” (Kingston) Jamaica Observer (June , ) (acc. March , ).

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politics, and economics intersect to create an experience in which all are free and proud to actualize their heritage.⁶⁸

Most of the activities in these events significantly signal the important of African traditions. It is the largest single Maroon event experienced by the majority of people who visit Accompong Town. In Accompong, although traditions are practiced throughout the year, expressive forms are displayed especially in the annual January 6 celebration. Most Maroons consider their practices at the celebration as being African. Currie considers the dancing, food, and libation all a part of the “African Diaspora” experience and “African system.”⁶⁹ This is how the Maroon leader M. L. Wright describes the celebration: The greatest community event is the festival which is held every January to celebrate Kojo’s victory over the British which led to the treaty. This festival is planned to coincide with Kojo’s birthday and celebrates Kojo’s remarkable leadership and the sacrifice he made fighting for his people. In this wild, rugged Cockpit country for so many long dreary years. The celebrations also remind all Maroons of the hard days of the struggle to maintain their freedom. Maroons reunite in their dedication to stand firm on their traditional values for freedom, liberty and respect for human dignity.⁷⁰

The public events, the activities linking diverse diasporic African peoples, the celebration of heritage in food, drink, and ceremony say many different things. But in each, African heritage is an important component. There is multivalence and polysemy in the figuration of the Maroons. However, the Maroons argue that Africa is at the root of their identity. Many Accompong Maroons believe that the January 6 (Kojo Day) celebration started in the late 1730s right after the victory against the British and has continued up to present day.⁷¹ Apart from missing two or three years, this celebration has certainly been happening in Accompong Town for most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Henry Rowe, who was colonel in the 1920s and 1930s, mentions that the celebration was in existence in the early 1900s.⁷² In the mid-1930s, Zora Neale Hurston on her visit to Accompong Town said that the cel-

 DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” .  Currie, interview, August , .  Wright, “Accompong Maroons of Jamaica,” .  Currie, interview, August , ; DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” .  Wright, “Accompong Maroons of Jamaica,” ; “Maroons Celebrate: Bicentenary of Freedom,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (March , ).

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ebration was still one of the few major events in the community.⁷³ In the late 1970s, Kenneth Bilby noted that he saw thousands of outsiders at the annual January Six celebration in Accompong Town.⁷⁴ As the years go by, the figures have fluctuated: 17,000 in 1992, 14,000 in 1998, and 25,000 in 2007. Although the Independence Day celebration is the most popular event in all of the Maroon communities, there are others activities, such as community tours, conferences and drum sessions. Maroons in their words link these celebrations to their African roots. These celebrations and festive events are similar to other festive events among other Black peoples in the Americas and Africa. Other Maroon groups from as far away as Suriname and Africans from Ghana come and share with Jamaican Maroons their various festive expressions and performance. Based on an idea of shared traditions (and origins), a range of African-descended individuals and cultural groups connect through celebrating at different festivals, conferences, and celebrations, including ceremonial ritual and cultural performance. Throughout the decades, local Jamaican groups such as the Hartford Culture Group and the Mighty Beeston Mento Band have performed folk song and dances, which are from the shared tradition of Maroons, Black Jamaicans, other people of African descent, and from Africa itself.⁷⁵ Performers coming from as far away as Africa and South America celebrate with Maroons. For instance, in the late 1990s, Nigerian dancers performed cultural items at the Accompong Kojo Day celebration.⁷⁶ Also, Kifoko Cultural Group members, traditional dancers of the Matawai Maroon nation from Suriname, sang, danced, and drummed at the Accompong Maroons celebration as well.⁷⁷ At these Maroon sites that often serve as a place of diasporic connecting, a number of things occur. Dialogue on a variety of topics is explored on these occasions. For instance, in 1991, the annual Kojo Day celebration was dedicated to Nelson Mandela and it was designated as a time to give verbal support to the Anti-Apartheid struggle.⁷⁸ In 2007, at the Kojo Day celebration, Colonel Prehay

 DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” , .  DjeDje, “Remembering Kojo,” , .  Garfield Myers, “Maroons Hold ‘Mother of all Celebrations’ at th Annual Festival,” (Kingston) Jamaica Observer (January , ) (acc. December , ); Garfield Myers, “Maroons Unite in Defence of Cockpit Country,” (Kingston) Jamaica Observer (January , ) (acc. March , ).  “A Colourful Maroon Celebration”; “Accompong Maroons Reunited,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ).  “A Colourful Maroon Celebration.”  “Maroons to Honour Mandela,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ).

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of Scott’s Hall called for reparations to all Africans who suffered from the effects of 500 years of slavery, linking it to the genocidal acts against the Jews in the twentieth century.⁷⁹ It is a place where African garments and symbols are showcased with a sense of pride and unity.⁸⁰ Through these acts and celebrations, mutual intangible benefits are derived from sharing cultural expression and art forms. ⁸¹ Often, connections with Africa and African-ness are made through claims of shared African traditions. They are times of sharing and dialoguing on the common acts, symbols, and images of what it is to be part of the African Diaspora. In the post-colonial era, Maroons have developed greater contact with African-descended leaders in Africa and the Americas. Increasingly, from the other side of the Atlantic, Africans are evolving the discourse on diaspora, especially claiming connections of shared traditions with African descendants in the Americas. In many respects, Maroon performative space (as a performance scape) constitutes a materialization of diaspora organized around the idea of African originary symbols and claims, the enunciation of blackness, and Black linkages. This is particularly evident in the rituals and ceremonies performed at Maroon Heritage sites, especially Accompong.

Conclusion All groups or members of the African Diaspora connect their cultural practices to Africa, often in symbolic forms. But different groups of African descendants may articulate diaspora in a variety of symbolic forms, varying their practices with distinct nuances and approaches to the concept. This article has argued that Maroons significantly make rhetorical and symbolic claims about their African traditions. As demonstrated in the foregoing discussion, it is the claims and the symbolic meanings that are given to these articulations and practices that are important, not their consistency with empirical “fact” or their verifiability with some “truth” about Africa. Most significantly, the claims around African traditions and what they symbolize are deployed to make Black linkages. In many instances, the Maroons claim exceptionalism in continuing African practices through these different symbolic acts. Inside and outside Maroon communities, the symbols and claimed African traditions are shared with tens of thousands of  Myers, “Maroons Hold ‘Mother of all Celebrations.’”  “Fashionable Maroons,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ).  “No Filming of Maroon’s th Anniversary,” (Kingston) Jamaica Gleaner (January , ); “J’can Delegation Participate in Panafest.”

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Black people through public events, community tours, and short-term stays. These symbols are deployed to make diasporic connections. Even in a given diasporic community, these diasporic enunciations and symbols may change over time. This is significant in furthering our understanding of what diaspora is and how it works. Symbols and claims are vital in this process.

Chérif Saloum Diatta

Earl Lovelace and Caribbean Gender Symbolic Forms: Revisiting Masculinity and Reconstructing National Identities Early gender and feminist theories often viewed gender mainly in relation to women. Truly, gender epistemologically involves both women’s and men’s identity specificities as viewed by many social scientists today. This article emphasizes the symbolic forms of masculinity and their significance in gender dynamics and conception of national identities in Lovelace’s novels, namely The Wine of Astonishment, The Dragon Can’t Dance, and Is Just a Movie. I argue that the construction of masculinity in relation to race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in Lovelace’s novels, demonstrates the ways in which patriarchal power can be directed against both men and women. Hegemonic masculinity, therefore, constitutes an obstacle to bringing diverse ethnic and gender groups into the national space. Based on gender and nationalist perspectives, the analysis in this article will first examine the dynamics and significance of the various Caribbean symbolic forms of masculinity in relation to class and ethnicity. These symbols include Afro-Caribbean elitist masculinities (education and political leadership), Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinities (warriorhood and performative arts), and Indo-Caribbean masculinities (land and plantation ownership). Then, the analysis will explore the marginalization of masculinities and the disruption of gender and ethnic relations. Finally, the analysis will investigate the renegotiation and reinterpretation of diasporic masculinities. To grasp the fundamentals of Earl Lovelace’s philosophical and socio-political vision, it is essential to undertake a phenomenological analysis of his fiction. As a Caribbean writer, immersed in the local cultures, traditions, and folklore, his literary creation involves the production of knowledge and meaning through various aesthetic forms. The Trinidadian novelist and playwright resorts to symbolic forms to merge “expression,” “representation,” and “significance” into a unified whole as a way of producing Caribbean culture. In Ernst Cassirer’s terms, these symbolic forms constitute the different avenues by which culture is produced, mainly through the spheres of symbolic representation such as art, re-

DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-008

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ligion, language, and science.¹ Thora I. Bayer argues in this respect that “[a]ny content of culture can be comprehended genetically beginning from its mythical origins and developing to its acme as religion, language, art, history, science, and so forth.”² This study does not attempt to look at all the symbolic forms and spheres of symbolic activity relevant to Lovelace’s fiction. Its aim is to elaborate on particular Caribbean gender symbolic forms pertaining to the symbols of identity. Most specifically, the analysis, here, focuses on the symbolic forms of masculinity and their significance in gender dynamics and conception of national identities in Lovelace’s novels, namely The Wine of Astonishment, The Dragon Can’t Dance, and Is Just a Movie. Lovelace’s treatment of symbolic forms of masculinity brings to light the intricacy and problematic involving gender identity construction and national community building. The various avenues through which masculinity is built show that there exists not a single masculinity, but multiple masculinities. The construction of masculinity in relation to race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality in Lovelace’s novels demonstrates the ways in which patriarchal power can be directed against both men and women. Hegemonic or dominant masculinity, therefore, constitutes an obstacle to bringing ethnic and gender categories into the national space. However, without intent to exclude or overlook any minor ethnic group in Trinidad, this study emphasizes the Afro-Caribbean and IndoCaribbean groups, which constitute the main segments of Trinidadian population and dominate the political landscape, and are mostly depicted in Lovelace’s fiction. These groups are roughly in equal numbers, representing about 40 percent each in the overall population of Trinidad.³ Hence, based on gender and nationalist perspectives, the analysis in this study will first examine the dynamics and significance of the various Caribbean symbolic forms of masculinity in relation to class and ethnicity. These symbols include three main categories: Afro-Caribbean elitist masculinities (education, political leadership, wealth, etc.), Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinities (warriorhood, performative arts, etc.) and Indo-Caribbean masculinities (land, plantation, etc.). Then, the analysis will investigate the negotiation and reinterpretation of diasporic masculinities as a pathway towards the rebuilding of national identities and reshaping

 See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. : The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, eds. John M. Krois and Donald F. Verene (New Haven: Yale UP, ).  Thora I. Bayer, “The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms as a Philosophy of Pluralism,” The Pluralist . ():  – , .  Shalini Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equity, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ): ; Stefano Harney, Nationalism and Identity: Culture and the Imagination in a Caribbean Diaspora (London & New Jersey: Zed Books, ): .

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of national-diasporic consciousness in the postcolonial Caribbean and Trinidad in particular.

Caribbean masculinity and its symbols Social scientists have defined patriarchy as a social organization ruled by men who function in their role as heads of household. This definition of patriarchy evolved throughout time and included men’s victimization of women. Some feminists and gender theorists like Sylvia Walby conceive of patriarchy as a system of cultural practices and norms through which men control, oppress, and exploit women.⁴ This theory excludes patriarchy as a system of men’s domination over other men. The conception of masculinity through race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality shows that both men and women can be subjected to patriarchal domination. As such, masculinity signifies culturally generated gendered ideologies and practices negotiated through hegemonic conceptions of ethnicity, class, race, religion, sexual orientation and age.⁵ Socially constructed, the symbols of masculinity are not embodied by men only. Women also assimilate masculine ideologies. In her essay, “O Gosh, Boy George,” feminist and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick claims that “as a woman, I am a consumer of masculinities, but I am not more so than men are; and, like men, I as a woman am also a producer of masculinities and a performer of them.”⁶ As Sedgwick adds, “when something is about masculinity, it isn’t always ‘about men’.”⁷ Here, she suggests a repositioning and refiguring of masculinity. This notion permeates through binary gender categories as some women display masculine traits alongside men. Masculinity, therefore, constitutes a notion of male identity whose definition goes beyond essentialist terms. In various societies, masculinity is usually reproduced through myths and symbolic forms. In Caribbean societies, the existence of different ethnic groups and class categories entails the reproduction of symbols of masculinity based on their respective cultural specificities and preferences. The co-habitation of

 Sylvia Walby, “Theorizing Patriarchy,” Sociology . ():  – , .  Linden Lewis, “Caribbean Masculinity at the Fin de Siècle,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: UP of the West Indies, ):  – , .  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “O Gosh, Boy George, You Must Be Awfully Secure in Your Masculinity,” in Constructing Masculinity, eds. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watso (London: Routledge, ):  – , .  Sedgwick, “O Gosh,” .

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the different masculinities provokes gender dynamics that hierarchically position some masculinities above others. This power relation determines some masculinities as hegemonic and others as marginalized. Hegemonic masculinity is not, however, a fixed pattern. Some marginalized masculinities can also assume dominant positions not only in relation to femininity, but also to other masculinities. Lovelace’s fiction captures this complex power relation through the representation of various symbolic forms of masculinity.

Afro-Caribbean elitist masculinities Caribbean elitist masculinities are built upon the symbols of colonial white masculinities. These symbols range from political leadership to Western education and wealth. The Afro-Caribbean middle class that dominated the political landscape during the early years of independence inherited Western standards of masculinity to a large extent. In Lovelace’s novels, Afro-Caribbean educated men and political leaders mostly embody elitist masculinity. Educated men usually assumed political roles. Education and political leadership are, thus, essential symbols of masculinity for the Afro-Caribbean middle class. In Wine, Ivan Morton constructs his masculinity through education and politics. He occupies a position of authority and power not only for being an educated man, but also as a representative of the Bonasse village Council. As Bee tells us, Ivan creates “manness” with books and position.⁸ Through his social ascent, Ivan isolates himself from his community. He demonstrates a moral superiority, rejecting his people’s cultural and spiritual practices, which he views as heathen and barbaric. Similarly, Mr. Warrick, the schoolmaster in The Schoolmaster builds an image of masculinity based on his function as a teacher and the political leadership he provides for the council of the Kumaca community. Though a stranger, the schoolmaster’s role in the village as an educator and counselor gives him authority and power. However, he uses his position not only to rape and subsequently impregnate young Christiana, but also to attempt to force the Kumaca community to give him the girl in marriage. Ivan’s and the schoolmaster’s display of their masculinity shows us that education and political leadership are often joint as symbols of manness. These protagonists’ masculinity is emphasized by an expression of superiority or abuse against the community they are supposed to serve.

 Earl Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment [] (London: Heinemann, ): .

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Besides education and political leadership, wealth constitutes another symbol of elitist masculinity. Wealth not only allows social ascension, but it also provides the individual with power. In Dragon, Philo, the Afro-Trinidadian calypsonian, embodies such aspects of bourgeois masculinity. He has acquired riches and social mobility, as a successful calypsonian, and therefore has access to privileges he did not have as a former member of the Afro-Trinidadian lower class on the Hill. With his success, Philo conquers girls and goes around with them to show off in the destitute community of the Hill. Miss Cleothilda, the mulatto woman who used to despise him and reject his love, allows him to woo her. Like Ivan, Philo upholds the haughty attitudes of the Afro-Caribbean middle class. This is seen in his move from the Hill establishment into a residential bourgeois district. Ivan, the schoolmaster, and Philo all enact a hegemonic masculinity that replicates the Western patriarchal system. These protagonists demonstrate ideals and symbols of bourgeois and middle-class white men: dominance in economic, intellectual, and sociopolitical leadership etc.⁹ Their masculinity is directed against both women and other men from inferior social class or different ethnic groups, as will be elaborated below.

Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinities Non-elitist masculinities are constructed upon values that do not represent the standards of “manness” conceived by the Caribbean bourgeois class. These masculinities are developed in relation to warriorhood, performative art, and ideals of non-possession, among others. These symbols characterize lower-class AfroCaribbean masculinity. Stickfighting, the “badjohn,” and overall physical ability are symbols of warriorhood, which principally represent Afro-Caribbean nonelitist masculinity. Bolo in Wine, Fisheye in Dragon, and Sonnyboy in Is Just a Movie embody masculinity built upon warriorhood. Bolo, Fisheye, and Sonnyboy are literal warriors who excel in stickfighting, which gives them status as heroes in their own communities. Stickfighting emerged during a period of scarce economic opportunities when street bands, known collectively as “calinda,” and set up to defend their respective turfs, would settle disputes in combats and with

 Aviston D. Downes, “Boys of the Empire: Elite Education and the Construction of Hegemonic Masculinity in Barbados  – ,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: UP of the West Indies, ):  – , .

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weapons.¹⁰ Stickfighting was introduced into Carnival celebration and was viewed as an expression of manhood and warriorhood, as Lovelace depicts it in Wine, Dragon, and Is Just a Movie. Lovelace’s warrior-characters’ tendency to fight and use physical violence identifies them as “badjohns.” Bolo and Fisheye, for instance, would go to rum shops, drink, and decide not to pay, for the purpose of inciting people into fights. Likewise, Sonnyboy provokes confrontations with men by forcing girls to dance with him during school “fetes.”¹¹ These protagonists’ inclination to exert violence is not only a way to address their social problems and anger, but it is also a means to prove their manhood, and thereby find a sense of meaning. The “badjohns” are a socially stigmatized category, but also a symbol of warriorhood and “manness.” In Trinidad, the figure of the badjohn is historically linked with masculinity. According to Kenneth Ramchand, The term itself has early and strong associations with the yard, the ghetto and lower-class Afro-Trinidadian life […]. If it was formed by analogy with other combinations ending with “john” (a common male name, applied to anyone the speaker does not consider worthy of individual notice), it is possible that it was first used to indicate persons repeatedly flouting colonial attempts to regulate and civilize them.¹²

Ramchand’s elaboration on the term “badjohn” shows that, although this figure is historically associated with second-class citizenship, it is connected to rebelliousness. Furthermore, performative arts are a cultural symbolic space where Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinity is expressed. As he defines the symbolism of art, Cassirer says it “is not the mere reproduction of a ready-made, given reality. It is one of the ways leading to an objective view of things and of human life. It is not an imitation but a discovery of reality.”¹³ For instance, in its symbolic function, the ability to perform steel pan is seen as a measure of manhood. The steel band competitions are more about displaying masculinity than just being an expression of talent. In Dragon, the steel band battles in which Fisheye participates go beyond mere cultural performance. They involve an enactment of manhood,

 Gordon Rohlehr, Calypso and Society in Pre-Independence Trinidad (Trinidad: Rohlehr, ): .  Earl Lovelace, Is Just a Movie (London: Faber and Faber, ):  – .  Kenneth Ramchand, “Calling All Dragons: The Crumbling of Caribbean Masculinity,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: UP of the West Indies, ):  – , .  Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, ): .

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which appeals to “badjohns.”¹⁴ Besides steelpan, masks and masking underscore another symbolic form of masculinity. Male performers dominated masking and masquerade in Carnival, although, as Pamela Franco argues, women were involved in this cultural celebration through “dressing up and looking good.”¹⁵ The masquerading art of “dressing up and looking good” resonates with a representation of femininity. In contrast, however, male performers’ masking underscores a symbolism of masculinity and power, especially with characters like Midnight Robbers, Moko Jumbies, Bats, Bears, Jab Jabs, Red and Blue Devils, and Jabs Molassi.¹⁶ For Franco the revival of these traditional characters constitutes a reaction against women’s increasing presence in contemporary Carnival.¹⁷ In Dragon, Aldrick’s enactment of the dragon costume reconstitutes “ole mas” (traditional Carnival) as a space of masculinity reconstruction. His performance of the dragon mask dance during Carnival season inspires fear and terror in the spectators, which gives him a sense of worth, authority, and power that he does not normally have throughout the rest of the year. Aldrick’s masculinity is built on warriorhood and intimidation.¹⁸ Lower-class Afro-Caribbean people dominated the cultural scene and used it as a privileged means to assert their masculinity. The question to ask, therefore, is: where do Indo-Caribbean masculinities fit between elitist and non-elitist masculinities?

The problematic of Indo-Caribbean masculinities Indo-Caribbean masculinity is not traditionally defined in terms of physical ability and warriorhood or intellectual and political leadership capacity. It does not, however, mean that Indo-Caribbean people do not possess these qualities of masculinity. In the evolution of Caribbean society and Trinidadian society in particular, Indo-Caribbean men have acquired Western education and occupied political leadership positions. Like the Afro-Caribbean middle-class men, they embody a type of masculinity that replicates aspects of the Western conception of

 Earl Lovelace, The Dragon Can’t Dance [] (New York: Persea Books, ): ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “D.”  Pamela R. Franco, “ ‘ Dressing up and Looking Good’: Afro-Creole Female Maskers in Trinidad Carnival,” African Arts . ():  – , .  Philip W. Scher, “The Devil and the Bed-Wetter: Carnival, Memory, National Culture, and Post-Colonial Consciousness in Trinidad,” Western Folklore ./ ():  – , .  Franco, “Dressing up,” .  Linden Lewis, “Masculinity and the Dance of the Dragon: Reading Lovelace Discursively,” Feminist Review  ():  – , .

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the ideal man. In Samuel Selvon’s A Brighter Sun, Tiger’s migration to the city and his quest for Western education and a more fulfilling profession away from the plantation is a yearning for the bourgeois type of masculinity. Dr. Kennos, an Indo-Trinidadian lawyer, and Sonan Lochan, a representative of the Democratic Party in Salt, and Mr Bissoon, the leader of the Democratic Party in Is Just a Movie are Indo-Trinidadian male characters that define their identity in relation to the standards of the middle-class man. They seek intellectual development and control of political power. Initially, however, Indo-Caribbean masculinity is seen as effeminate. In Dragon, Pariag is described as thin and physically weak. In addition, he is not endowed with the ability to fight, unlike Afro-Creoles – people of primarily African descent in Trinidad and other parts of the Caribbean. He, in fact, sees himself lacking in masculinity within the Afro-Creole community of the Hill. As Pariag says to Dolly, “I ain’t big. I mean, I ain’t have no huge muscles, and I don’t sound tough, and I ain’t tough, and I can’t fight” (D, 105). His definition of AfroCaribbean masculinity echoes racial and class stereotypes, which makes him see his own masculinity as impaired. Pariag thereby desires Afro-Caribbean lowerclass masculinities. Moreover, the Indo-Trinidadian custom of arranging marriage between young girls and young men denies the Indo-Trinidadian men the choice of their own wives, and thus seems to undermine their masculinity. This is the case with Pariag, who is forced to marry Dolly, a girl he neither knows nor loves (D, 79). Though Pariag initially resists, he eventually succumbs to the pressure of his culture and traditions. He visits the selected girl, Dolly, and accepts the marriage (D, 79 – 80). His acceptance of the marriage indicates his inability to withstand the rigid Indo-Trinidadian patriarchal system. With Pariag’s case, Lovelace shows us that gender dynamics includes generational power relations. Patriarchal domination is also directed against the younger male generation. Audre Lorde argues that in oppressive societies, the “generation gap” remains an essential means of control. She further underscores that the domination of the older members fosters contempt from the younger members, which provokes the inability of collaboration between both generations.¹⁹ An essential symbol of Indo-Caribbean masculinity is the possession of land and plantations. Some Indo-Caribbean men, in Trinidad for instance, gained authority and power through wealth accumulation related to land ownership and agricultural production. Pariag’s uncle in Dragon is an embodiment of that type of masculinity. He owns a cinema in New Lands, a sawmill, trucks, a lumber

 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing P, ):  – , .

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yard, and an entire settlement he names Ramlogan village (D, 146 – 147). His masculinity is not only linked with wealth accumulation, but is also associated with the rural feudalism of traditional Indian villages.

Marginalizing masculinities: Disrupting social and ethnic relations Hegemonic masculinity is a concept introduced in gender studies by Raewyn Connell in 1987. He took the term “hegemony” from Antonio Gramsci and used it to describe men’s dominating behaviors and practices.²⁰ The Italian Marxist defines “hegemony” as a process by which dominant ideology or the consciousness of the dominant class is maintained. The term underscores leadership dominance of a group over others in a society. Connell defines hegemonic masculinity as the “image of masculinity of those who control power.”²¹ Aviston Downes similarly views hegemonic masculinity as “a discursively constructed masculinity which gains and maintains its preeminence through its ideological linkages with socially dominant men.”²² As such, hegemonic masculinity is not just defined in opposition to femininity, but also against other masculinities, marginalized or subordinate. Michael Messner and Donald Sabo point out that, “hegemonic masculinity is constructed in relation to various subordinate masculinities as well as in relation to femininities.”²³ This helps us to understand that the imbalances in gender power relationships in a patriarchal system are not only between men and women, but also between men and men.²⁴ The power relationship between different masculinities thus posits masculinity as a hierarchical

 Qtd. in Antonio de Moya, “Masculinity in the Dominican Republic,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: UP of the West Indies, ):  – , .  Raewyn W. Connell, “La organización social de la masculinidad,” Masculidad/es: poder y crisis, eds. T. Valdés and J. Olavarría (Santiago, Chile: Ediciones de las Mujeres, ):  – ,  – ; qtd. in De Moya, “Masculinity,” .  Downes, “Boys of the Empire,” .  Michael Messner and Donald Sabo, “Toward a Critical Feminist Reappraisal of Sport, Men, and the Gender Order, in Sport, Men and the Gender Order: Critical Feminist Perspectives, eds. Michael Messner and Donald Sabo (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, ):  – , .  Patricia Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History: The Negotiation of Gender Relations among Men and Women in Post-Indenture Trinidadian Society,  – ,” in Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective, eds. Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (New York: St. Martin’s P, ):  – , .

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paradigm.²⁵ Historiographical studies have shown that subordinate masculinities have been constructed as effeminate and infantile compared to hegemonic masculinities.²⁶ While Jewish and Asian masculinities are conceived of as desexualized and effeminate, black men are described as infantile, due to their dependence on Europeans’ economic and political leadership.²⁷ These categorizations of subordinate masculinities emanate from a Western cultural universalism, which standardizes and validates hegemonic masculinities and ostracizes other masculinities.²⁸ Lovelace’s fiction not only examines the marginalization of non-elitist masculinities, but also demonstrates how marginalized masculinities radicalize and become dominant masculinities. As expressed earlier, Lovelace depicts three main types of masculinities, cohabiting and contending with one another: elitist masculinity exhibited by the educated middle-class, which draws its substance from Western patriarchy; non-elitist masculinities embodied by lower-class Afro-Caribbean people; and the Indo-Trinidadian patriarchal system. The elitist masculinity functions as the dominant, hegemonic masculinity with regard to the other non-elitist masculinities. Early black middle-class Caribbean writers have developed narratives that focus on black male protagonists who construct their maleness in relation to their intellectual superiority and control over political leadership. Examining early Caribbean literature, Leah Rosenberg identifies “brown heroes” who demonstrate supremacy in intellectual, moral, and political leadership capacity as in the example of the Creole protagonist who is a lawyer and politician in Steven Cobham’s Rupert Gray. ²⁹ Also, in Adolphus, the brown hero Adolphus stands out for his education and noble character.³⁰ The coexistence of these three types of masculinities in Trinidad creates a dynamic of hierarchy and dominance between men as they negotiate the national space. Patricia Mohammed characterizes this “patriarchal context,” as a “a competition between males of different racial groups, each jostling for power […] – economic, political, social, and so on.”³¹ The dynamics in the struggle for power results in  De Moya, “Masculinity,” .  Keith Nurse, “Masculinities in Transition: Gender and the Global Problematic,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: UP of the West Indies, ):  – , .  Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, ): .  Nurse, “Masculinities,” .  Rohlehr, Calypso, .  Adolphus, A Tale is a novel whose writer is anonymous. It was published in the Trinidadian (January  through April , ).  Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History,” .

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the marginalization of the subordinate masculinities by hegemonic masculinities. Lovelace exemplifies the marginalization of subordinate masculinities through the way in which the celebrated intellectual, middle-class man outplays the traditional warrior hero. This is evident in Wine when Eulalie Clifford, the voluptuous Afro-Creole woman, chooses Ivan, the educated man, as a boyfriend and dumps Bolo, the warrior and champion in stickfighting.³² Eulalie’s attitude is indicative of the general view of the educated man as the new hero, of education as a medium to control power and win battles. Another similar instance is Ivan’s victory over Rufus Georges during the elections for the council representative. Rufus is a woodcutter from Charlotte, earning his bread with his muscles. He has a good relationship with the men in Bonasse, but his disadvantage is that he lacks education.³³ Similarly, in Is Just a Movie, Sonnyboy, as a “badjohn,” is excluded from holding the position of the Hard Wuck Party representative, and is therefore disqualified to take part in the revolution. As Kingkala, a member of the party, says, “We were revolutionaries and although we were willing to grant him a role in the revolution, his being a badjohn did not quite qualify him as a revolutionary.”³⁴ Sonnyboy lives in a modern Trinidad when being a badjohn does not represent an ideal of masculinity or leadership anymore, and therefore makes him unfit for political responsibilities. The cases above show the educated men’s control over political leadership in pre- and post-colonial Caribbean society. Lovelace also demonstrates the marginalization of Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinities through the ban and denaturalization of the cultural institutions and practices by which lower-class Afro-Caribbean people construct their masculinity. Under colonization, Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinity was hampered with the prohibition of Carnival celebrations in Trinidad. Wine shows how with the ban of Carnival in 1917, warriors like Bolo become nonentities. Carnival is a medium through which these men show their manhood and gain a sense of worth. The outlawing of Carnival goes along with the interdiction of stickfighting and steel band battles. Together, these forms of control inhibit the possibilities for these men to assert their masculinity. In the absence of stickfighting, Bolo indulges in drinking as a substitute for building a sense of self. His feeling of emasculation is further accentuated by the arrival of the U.S. soldiers who become the new heroes. Their popularity marks an end to the reign of the

 Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment, .  Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment, .  Lovelace, Is Just a Movie, .

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stickfighters. Moreover, in the post-independence period, the commodification and commercialization of Carnival by the Afro-Trinidadian political elite stripped this celebration of its original meaning as a social critique and its display of resistance and masculinity. Dragon provides the example of how the intrusion of commercials and inclusion of fancy costumes estrange the lower-class Afro-Trinidadian men during Carnival. This is the reason why Aldrick, the dragon masker, withdraws from the celebration. Carnival therefore goes from a lower-class to a middle-class affair. The ban and estrangement of the cultural institutions that involve lower-class Afro-Trinidadian men constitute a disruption of a fundamental basis upon which they build their manhood. Like Afro-Caribbean non-elitist masculinities, Indo-Trinidadian masculinities are subject to marginalization. It is paradoxical that this marginalization sometimes comes from likewise subordinate masculinities embodied by lowerclass Afro-Caribbean men. Lovelace provides a significant instance of this type of marginalization in Dragon with Pariag’s experience among the poor Afro-Creole men of the Hill. Pariag’s move to an urban area on the Hill, known as Laventille, a poor suburb in Port-of-Spain, is motivated by his desire to be part of the bigger world and be a man. However, in a community where the standards of masculinity are measured by physical abilities, warriorhood, and skills in Afro-Creole cultural performances, Pariag has difficulty integrating partly because he is lacking in this type of Afro-Creole masculinity. He views his rejection by the community as a result of the men’s inability to see him as a man. In addition to his lack of physical strength, Pariag knows little about Carnival, cannot play steelpan or perform calypso, and has no stickfighting skills (D, 105). At the political level, the standards of heroism and warriorhood in Afro-Creole masculinity are ironically used to prevent Indo-Caribbean people from assuming major political roles. This is the main means of excluding Indo-Trinidadians from political responsibility as both the Afro-Trinidadian and IndoTrinidadian elitist groups are distinguished from their nonelitist social inferiors by relatively similar levels of education. The incident of the red flag in Is Just a Movie indicates the marginalization of Indo-Trinidadian men in the political battlefield. The revolutionary group’s refusal to let Indo-Trinidadian Manick carry the red flag during the Black Power demonstration is based on the premise that since the flag symbolizes black struggle, Indo-Trinidadian men are not entitled to carry it.³⁵ The red flag is a symbol of warriorhood and manhood, expressing the historical struggles, ordeals, and victories Afro-Caribbean people experienced. By denying Manick the right to carry the red flag, Indo-Trinidadian

 Lovelace, Is Just a Movie,  – .

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men are thus excluded from the heroic past of Trinidad, and are consequently seen as not eligible to take leadership roles in contemporary revolutionary struggles. The above types of marginalization of Indo-Trinidadian masculinities show that in the hierarchical coexistence of patriarchal systems in Trinidad, the IndoTrinidadian occupies the bottom of the ladder.³⁶ The marginalization of subordinate masculinities, both Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean, fosters their radicalization. The rigid character that some subordinate masculinities eventually take is motivated by the desire to overcome the sense of emasculation experienced with dominant patriarchal systems. The marginalized subordinate masculinities either become oppressive towards both men and women or adopt aspects of hegemonic elitist masculinity. Afro-Caribbean marginalized men resort to violence as a way of dealing with their emasculation. Having undergone relatively similar types of marginalization as described above, Bolo in Wine and Fisheye in Dragon try to rehabilitate their masculinity in similar ways. Both protagonists go around drinking at rum shops, refusing to pay, and then looking for someone to challenge them to a fight. Fisheye goes even further, as he organizes a mutiny with Aldrick and seven other Afro-Creoles, hijacking a police jeep and roaming around the city, claiming to represent Black Power. Additionally, Bolo and Fisheye abuse women as a response to the systems that keep Afro-Creole men down. Bolo kidnaps Primus’s daughters in order to rebel against the hegemonic colonial system and his community, which seems to reinforce the very practices that denigrate men in his community.³⁷ His victimization of the girls comes out of his frustration with the authorities’ refusal to grant him land, so he can get himself a woman, set up a household, and consequently be a man. Bolo is denied the right to “assert domestic authority as a husband and a father,” denials suffered by the black man during the plantation system.³⁸ Hilary Beckles’s study on black masculinity during the Plantation System shows us that during slavery, the child enters social relations through the mother, from whom he or she takes the name. This colonial rule not only prevents the children born from slave women to inherit, especially in case their father is a white master, but also makes it difficult for male slaves to establish family and perform household leadership roles. In contrast, while Bolo cannot settle down with a woman, the educated Ivan wins Eulalie and later marries a mulatto  Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History,” .  Lovelace, The Wine of Astonishment, .  Hilary Beckles, “Black Masculinity in Caribbean Slavery,” in Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities: Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, ed. Rhoda E. Reddock (Kingston, Jamaica: UP of the West Indies, ):  – , .

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woman. US soldiers have become popular among girls in the community of Bonasse. Bolo’s oppression of Primus’s daughters is a critique of a social system that denies the warriors and allows privileges to Caribbean middle-class and foreign white men. As for Fisheye, he brutalizes his girlfriend Yvonne for warning that she will replace him with a more decent man if he does not get a job and act like a responsible man (D, 64). Yvonne’s observation hurts Fisheye because it brings his masculinity into question. Yvonne suggests that in order for Fisheye to be a man, he needs to renounce his life as a badjohn, earn a living and take care of her. In making this point, however, she replicates the bourgeois conception of the ideal man against which Fisheye defines his masculinity. Marginalized Indo-Caribbean masculinity, unlike Afro-Caribbean subordinate masculinity, tends to radicalize by replicating the standards of the bourgeois hegemonic masculinity. In Dragon, Pariag resorts to material acquisition in order to respond to his rejection and marginalization by the Afro-Creole men. He believes that by acquiring a bicycle, he will be able to restore his impaired masculinity, and hence be seen as a man. His bicycle, however, represents an object related to modernity and technological advance that he can afford. Linden Lewis argues that Pariag opts for a bicycle because “a car was out of his immediate reach.”³⁹ Pariag’s rehabilitation of his manhood through material acquisition is motivated by his inability to embrace the type of masculinity proposed by the Afro-Creole world. Since warriorhood and violence do not appeal to him, he identifies with the alternative, bourgeois hegemonic masculinity. The bicycle confers on Pariag both a masculine and a higher economic status. Like Pariag, Biswas in V.S. Naipaul’s A House of Mr. Biswas seeks to rehabilitate his limited masculinity in line with bourgeois hegemonic masculinity. Being entrapped and isolated by rural life in an emasculating matriarchal Hindu system represented by the extended Tulsi family, his in-laws, Biswas moves to the city, acquires a house of his own, and earns an independent revenue. The matriarchal aspect of the extended Hindu family contributes to the emasculation of Indian men in Naipaul’s early novel. It reduces their authority as heads of households as they are subject to subordination by their in-laws. It is therefore by relocating to a new house and earning an income that Biswas not only achieves freedom, away from his in-laws, but also reinforces his shaky manhood. Naipaul’s evocation of the Indo-Trinidadian matriarchal system in his novel refers to the earlier period of indenture when East Indian women were empowered by their role as breadwinners alongside East Indian men, and when the original Indian patriarchy initially collapsed. For Mohammed, the Indo-Caribbean matri-

 Lewis, “Masculinity and the Dance,” .

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archal power was influenced by the indenture system, which provided Indian women with roles as wage earners, and thus weakened the original Indian patriarchy in Hindu and Muslim households.⁴⁰ This induced Indian immigrant men to use domestic violence as a way to reinstate the traditional Indian patriarchal power. Lovelace depicts the oppressive Indo-Trinidadian patriarchal system in Is Just a Movie through Manick’s father who locks his wife and daughter away from the outer world.⁴¹ The confining character of this type of patriarchy is additionally seen in the fact that Indian girls are prevented from playing netball, volleyball, cricket, and athletics.⁴² Mohammed, in her article “Writing Gender into History,” notes “the absence of Indian women from the public records as mouthpieces of the Indian community” as a proof of their marginalization by Indian patriarchy.⁴³ In her research on Indian women and politics, Reena Routan, a student at the University of the West Indies in Salt, reveals that the Indian men’s impotence before the white man and later the African political power forced them to “keep the Indian woman hidden away, unexposed, cocooned by whatever means available to him.”⁴⁴ Keith Nurse argues in this sense that although Asian masculinities are constructed as effeminate, they are also liable to “despotism.”⁴⁵ The typical oppressive male figure is found in older Indo-Caribbean men who replicate the rigidity of homeland Indian patriarchy as in Manick’s father in Is Just a Movie and Pariag’s uncle in Dragon. Unlike the Indo-Caribbean older generation, young Indo-Caribbean men like Pariag and Manick tend to reshape their masculinity in reference to non-traditional Indian patriarchal systems and social organization, accommodating Afro-Trinidadian bourgeois and lower-class masculinities. The adoption of such masculinities by Pariag and Manick expresses a desire to integrate the national space. The Afro-Caribbean people’s indifference and rejection of these young Indo-Trinidadians, however, prompts their isolation, which hampers the possibilities of consolidating the national space.

 Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History,” ; Patricia Mohammed, “The ‘Creolisation’ of Indian Women in Trinidad,” in Engendering Caribbean History: Cross-Cultural Perspectives, eds. Verene A. Shepherd, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, ):  – , .  Lovelace, Is Just a Movie, .  Lovelace, Is Just a Movie, .  Mohammed, “Writing Gender into History,” .  Earl Lovelace, Salt (New York: Persea Books, ): .  Nurse, “Masculinities,” .

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Negotiating masculinities: Redefinition of national-diasporic identities Lovelace’s representation of hegemonic masculinities, as elaborated above, indicates how patriarchal systems disrupt social, gender, and interethnic relations, which constitute a platform upon which multi-ethnic Caribbean nations like Trinidad might be consolidated. Lovelace’s novels successfully reveal the excesses, and the destructive and exclusive character of dominant masculinity, directed against other men and women, as stated earlier. Lovelace, however, advocates the reassessment of masculinity as a means to restore the imbalances between gender and ethnic groups as they negotiate the national space. The balancing of the hierarchical relationship between the coexisting masculinities in Trinidad entails a renegotiation of power, which involves men of the same ethnic group, as well as men of different ethnic groups. Through the character of Philo, the calypsonian, in Dragon, Lovelace describes the reconversion of dominant, hegemonic Afro-Creole masculinity. Philo who initially isolates himself from his community, establishing himself in a bourgeois neighborhood, eventually comes to realize that his place is among his community on the Hill. His reassessment of his social mobility constitutes a revision of his bourgeois hegemonic masculinity. Reflecting on the middle-class world around him, Philo says, “I is a’ ole nigger, you know. I is a Calvary Hill man. I ain’t no hifalutin Diego Martin jackass” (D, 234). This interior introspection marks Philo’s severance from his new bourgeois ascent and his reconnection with his community on the Hill. His reconnection with his people, according to Lewis, stems from his reassessment of his cultural values and revaluation of bourgeois manhood (D, 182). Philo finds meaning as a “nigger” and not as a middle-class man. In Is Just a Movie, Lovelace introduces the rehabilitation of Indo-Trinidadian masculinity in his characterization of Manick’s evolution and political responsibility in the Afro-Creole world. Lovelace’s earlier novels show how Afro-Caribbean people assert manhood through the acquisition of education and control of political leadership. The example of Ivan in Wine is worth noting. The Bonnasse community’s choice of Ivan as a council representative is based on his education, as well as on his being a son of the soil. His election reveals his community’s unexpressed acknowledgement of the standards upon which elitist masculinity is built. However, in Is Just a Movie, Lovelace’s most recent novel, the paradigm in constructing masculinity in relation to the control of political responsibilities changes. In the election of the representative of the Hard Wuck Party in Cascadu, Indo-Trinidadian Manick is chosen over Carlos Nan

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King, a part-time resident geologist.⁴⁶ This choice is an acknowledgement of Indo-Trinidadian leadership capacity, and consequently a recognition of a new Indo-Trinidadian masculinity, transcending ethnic borders, in an Afro-Creole dominated community. Manick’s experience in Cascadu tells us that in modern Trinidad, the conception of the political leader and masculinity evolves and extends across ethnic boundaries. Elections of female political leaders from different communities also suggest an expanded sense of presence and power. The negotiation of masculinity does not only implicate the balancing of hierarchy between masculinities. It also concerns the reassessment of manhood in regard to femininity by both Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean men. The new order of Indo-Trinidadian masculinity displayed by Pariag in Dragon is an instance of the ways in which Indian masculinity is negotiated in relation to Indian women in the national space, which symbolizes the cosmopolitan world. In the city, Pariag and his wife Dolly develop a relationship on relatively equal terms, a relationship that would probably not exist in their patriarchal rural Indo-Trinidadian community where a wife was expected to be submissive and the husband dominant. On many occasions, Pariag consults Dolly on the issues he faces in the urban community of the Hill. The scenes that represent the Indo-Trinidadian couple’s interactions describe a growing sense of solidarity between two individuals without any hierarchical pretense. Pariag attentively heeds Dolly’s opinion and advice. When Pariag comments that he did not address Aldrick when he walked across his shop, Dolly acknowledges that he should have indeed talked to him (D, 212). After his rejection by the Afro-Creole community, Pariag does not take out his anger on Dolly. Instead, he confesses to her: “We have to start to live, Dolly, you and me.” This statement surprises Dolly, who chokingly replies: “you and me?” (D, 212). Dolly is astonished at Pariag’s transformation. The phrase “you and me” characterizes both of them as partners, which indicates that Pariag, having experienced rejection, is now able to see Dolly as an individual, a living subject, and not as the submissive, docile, silent Indian wife. She remembers the former Pariag who, on the eve of their move to the capital, paternalistically tells her: “You going to have to live in Port of Spain” (D, 212). Pariag’s revaluation of his masculinity in his relationship with his wife is a natural process, stemming from the fact that the young Indian couple is embattled in an urban place where they live as a minority. The newly balanced power relationship between Pariag and Dolly determines how Indian gender relations can change when they are transplanted from rural to urban areas, although this is not to say that women in rural areas were always meek and submissive.

 Lovelace, Is Just a Movie, .

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The balancing of hierarchy between Indian men and women in Lovelace’s fiction is also seen in the relationship between Afro-Caribbean men and women. The reduction of the imbalances in Afro-Caribbean gender relations not only stems from the gradual empowerment of Afro-Caribbean women, but also from Afro-Caribbean men’s reshaping of their masculinity. This indicates that women’s self-fulfillment and emancipation is closely linked with the deconstruction of dominant masculinities.⁴⁷ The relationship between Aldrick and Sylvia in Dragon takes a new turn as the former reinterprets his traditional sense of masculinity. Aldrick, as it is said earlier, builds his masculinity through masking. It is also important to add that besides the dragon mask, he constructs his masculinity against a colonial capitalist conception for masculinity. Aldrick lives in dispossession and uses it as a form of asserting manhood, because it allows him to resist the consumerist forms of neo-colonization. The issue with this type of masculinity is that it encourages Aldrick not to participate in any sort of work, social responsibility or stable relations with women. This justifies Aldrick’s earlier rejection of Sylvia’s love, as mentioned above. In the progression of the novel, Lovelace allows his protagonist to grow from this unfulfilling notion of masculinity. Sylvia prompts Aldrick to see that his life is only a surface rebellion. He ultimately takes responsibility and commits to her. The relation between Sylvia and Aldrick echoes Lovelace’s portrayal of Pariag and Dolly given that both male protagonists assert a new form of manhood that collaborates with a new femininity embodied by the two women.⁴⁸ This mutuality in gender relations is articulated in Salt in the way in which Bango reconfigures his traditional march, allowing women to take leading roles. In the march Bango organizes at the end of the novel, he and his wife Myrtle stand side by side at the front of the line. The woman is not just present at the march, but she stands beside the man, not behind him. Bango’s revision of his march stands for a reassessment of his masculinity, which symbolically attributes roles to women in the creation of the Trinidadian nation. Lovelace’s national political vision thus transcends ethnic, gender, and class borders and paves the way to a more just diasporic nationhood.

 Bell Hooks, “Doing it for Daddy,” in Constructing Masculinity, eds. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, ):  – , ; see Nurse, “Masculinities,” .  Ramchand, “Calling All Dragons,” .

Henning Marquardt

Familial Spaces: ‘Yard’ and ‘Matrifocal Family’ in Pre-Independence Jamaican Literature In Jamaican literature of the first half of the twentieth century the yard and the matrifocal family have come to symbolize the black lower classes. This article demonstrates the interconnection of these two symbols via a sociological family definition as well as with the help of one non-fictional and several fictional texts that make use of family and space representations. The most basic function of these symbols, as will be shown, is the representation of clear-cut boundaries between the black lower classes and the white and black middle classes. Beyond that, their function is ambiguous, ranging from reproducing colonially established social orders to subverting these very structures by legitimizing black lower-class lifestyles as valid and normal.

Introduction In 1946, the British lawyer and sociologist T. S. Simey published his study Welfare and Planning in the West Indies that derives from his work as an advisor for social welfare in the West Indies in the early 1940s. Drawing on the 1943 census, as well as on other sources, Simey sets out “to investigate the nature and operation of the social forces which have shaped West Indian society and caused so unhappy a gulf to yawn between governments and the governed”¹ and thus grants his British readers rather biased insights into the social structure of the British Caribbean. To illustrate what he calls a gulf that yawns in the social structure of the West Indies, Simey uses families and dwellings, among others, symbolizing social differences between black Jamaican lower classes and white European or North American middle classes. Starting from Simey’s elaborations, I will examine the interrelated representations of dwellings, especially yards, and matrifocal families in late colonial Jamaican literary texts. In this essay I will show that these interrelations in particular function as complex literary symbols for the black Jamaican underclasses that can confirm or question social

 T. S. Simey, Welfare and Planning in the West Indies (Oxford: Clarendon P, ): vi–vii, further references in the text, abbreviated as “Welfare.” DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-009

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structures organized along socio-economic and racial lines. These demarcating structures were induced or reinforced through colonialism and thereby, in a larger context, represent the ambivalence of colonialism and Jamaican endeavors for independence. The different shades of meaning these symbols can take become especially apparent in the literary texts from the 1950s, the decade immediately before Jamaican independence, in focus in this essay. Rudolph Aarons’ “Madam” and Tom Redcam’s Becka’s Buckra Baby use yards and matrifocal families to disvalue the black lower-class characters. John Hearne’s “Morning, Noon and Night” employs these symbols to illustrate the need for improvement of their living conditions, and Cicely Waite-Smith’s Africa Sling-Shot legitimizes matrifocal yard-life as a valid part of Jamaican society. In the following, I will first enlarge upon Simey’s representations of yards and matrifocal families to show how similar their function is, before theorizing the connection between these tropes with the help of a sociological family model, showing its use for literary analysis with Becka’s Buckra Baby as an early example of dwellings and families as markers of class and race, and discussing both tropes’ subversive potential. On this basis I will then analyze “Madam,” Africa Sling-Shot and “Morning, Noon and Night” from the 1950s to argue that literary representations of yards and matrifocal families specify and complement each other. In Welfare and Planning in the West Indies, Simey uses the family as an “obvious starting-place” (Welfare, 79) to elaborate on the organization of West Indian societies. In doing so, he differentiates two types of families, of which “one centres in the mother (or grandmother), another in the father. The first is more frequently encountered in the lower levels of society, the second in the higher” (Welfare, 79). It is important to note that these families differ in structure, with the family focusing on a father being based on a conjugal partnership and the one focusing on the mother categorized as a matrifocal family, which the anthropologist Maurice Godelier defines as follows: A family or domestic group is matrifocal when it is centred on a woman and her children. In this case the father(s) of these children are intermittently present in the life of the group and occupy a secondary place. The children’s mother is not necessarily the wife of one of the children’s fathers.²

After the above, Welfare and Planning in the West Indies moves on to further specify the family forms and the groups representing those lifestyles: “the first type is an obvious continuation of the social pattern on the slave estate, and the other an obvious reaction from it towards ‘white’ systems of behavior” (Wel Maurice Godelier, The Metamorphoses of Kinship (London and New York: Verso, ): .

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fare, 80). The text not only reinforces the class division between the family types pointed out above by ascribing one of them to slaves, but it also adds the notion of race to this depiction, making them black and white families. Simey not only describes different family models, but he uses family depictions to illustrate and emphasize the differences within society along the lines of class and race. However, these are not necessarily objective considerations; he obviously disvalues one of those family forms, for example, by quoting the Annual Report of the Board of Supervision, Jamaica, for the Year 1943 – 4: “In the majority of cases the children of the working classes have not the normal background of father and mother (whether married or in concubinage) living together for the period of their childhood, and being jointly responsible for them” (qtd., Welfare, 80). The term ‘normal’ sets conjugal families as the standard and defines the black lower-class matrifocal family as deviating from this norm. Welfare and Planning in the West Indies then reinforces the ideal (or ideology) of conjugal partnerships through its discussion of marriage rates: “The marriage rate, which worked out at 272 per thousand for Jamaica in 1943, contrasted very unfavourably with the rate of 645 per thousand obtained in the 1931 Census in Great Britain” (Welfare, 82). The key term here is ‘unfavourably’, which leaves no doubt that the author does not simply report on his findings but that he is highly judgmental while doing so. The study clearly establishes a correlation between matrifocal families and poverty. Yet, according to Simey, poverty, the key difference between “governments and the governed,” is illustrated by other features of West Indian social life, such as the housing situation: “The most striking fact about the West Indian peoples, as exemplified in their houses, is the poverty” (Welfare, 11). Simey describes the houses of the black West Indian lower classes as small and built from insufficient materials (Welfare, 8 – 9). Quoting a report on Barbadian housing published in 1943, he illustrates the consequences of, among others, the houses’ restricted size: Sometimes there is a small lean-to shed which serves as a kitchen, but as often as not cooking is done in the open air. Bath rooms are non-existent, and what is called “toilet” accommodation consists of an outside open pit closet which, in many cases, is shared with a neighbour. (Welfare, 10)

Simey here points out that vital activities of daily life take place outdoors, which he explains as a consequence of small houses which are a consequence of low incomes. The importance of the outside space in the social life of the Jamaican lower classes is illustrated by a comment of the British collector of Jamaican stories and songs, Walter Jekyll, which serves the linguists Cassidy and LePage as an

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example in their Dictionary of Jamaican English: “The immediate surroundings of the house are called the yard. They seldom speak of going to a friend’s house. They say they are going to the yard.”³ This description either indicates that people seldom enter the house when visiting others, which means that the yard functions as what would be the front room in middle-class British family homes, or the term yard metonymically comprises the house. Probably both is true and at least since the 1950s, as Cassidy and LePage show, a metonymic extension of the meaning of ‘yard’ has occurred and yard can be translated with the concept of ‘home’.⁴ Simey is less explicit and judgmental when it comes to the housing situation than he is concerning matrifocal families. However, he equally uses housing to distinguish the black lower classes from the more advantaged classes of West Indian societies: “These districts [of small and simple houses] are generally in close proximity to middle-class residential areas, where the houses erected according to designs copied from North America demonstrate a striking clash on the standards of living” (Welfare, 9).

Matrifocal families, yards, and their literary representations A number of scholars in family sociology have recently replaced the question of which definition to apply with the question of whether a fixed definition of family should be applied at all. This stems from the assumption that a definition necessarily directs research – phenomena that go beyond the definition are possibly undetectable and if they are, they can only be perceived as deviations. For these reasons, the British sociologist Jon Bernardes introduced his concept of ‘family pathways’ which he defines as “those situations in which individual life courses come together and some or all of the participants regard their shared lives as somehow being ‘a family’.”⁵ Bernardes focuses on individuals’ perceptions of families and thereby allows for a large variety of family models. While this is a valuable approach for sociological studies, it is rather difficult to apply in literary analysis because characters and narrators may indicate what they consider

 Walter Jekyll, Jamaican Song and Story. Anancy Stories, Digging Sings, Ring Tunes, and Dancing Tunes [] (New York: Dover, ): ; see also F. G. Cassidy and R. B. LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English (Cambridge et al.: CUP, ): .  Cassidy and LePage, Dictionary of Jamaican English, .  Jon Bernardes, Family Studies. An Introduction (London and New York: Routledge, ): .

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to be families but if they do not – which is the more common case – a definition is necessary to recognize textual configurations as families. For this definition I will draw on the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who describes a dominant middle-class family as “a set of related individuals linked either by alliance (marriage) or filiation, or, less commonly, by adoption (legal relationship), and living under the same roof (cohabitation).”⁶ This definition is helpful when not applied too strictly and rather in the flexible sense Bernardes outlines. Therefore, I will use Bourdieu’s definition as a basis but extend it to include constellations featuring couples living separately, unmarried couples and children living with a family that has not legally adopted them in the analysis. An essential aspect of Bourdieu’s elaborations on families is that he considers families to be realized categories “which, while seeming to describe social reality, in fact construct it.”⁷ Bourdieu therefore concentrates on the ideologies that underlie family representations, which are most important for the following analyses. On the basis of these ideologies, socially influential agents construct families via symbolic actions and representations and thus construct dominant family models that are considered ‘normal’ by large parts of society.⁸ This is exactly what Simey contributes to in Welfare and Planning in the West Indies; he constructs white, middle-class, British families as the norm. Bourdieu makes no difference between textual representations of families and ‘real’ families, a non-differentiation that would include literary texts as relevant aspects in the (re‐)constructions of social realities. However, from a literary studies point of view, some translational effort is necessary to apply the sociological category ‘family’ in textual analysis. First of all, Bourdieu’s term ‘representation’ needs clarification; I follow Stuart Hall and use it as “the production of meaning through language.”⁹ Hall’s concept of representation fits Bourdieu’s thoughts on families as realized categories very well, both emphasize that meaning is not inherent to social phenomena but that these are constructed. Secondly, narratological categories are helpful to identify families in texts because, as mentioned above, in many cases textually represented families do not explicitly call themselves families. The main aspects of Bourdieu’s family definition are interpersonal relations and cohabitation, which can be represented in (literary) texts by character constellations and settings. Applied to Simey’s text (and oth-

 Pierre Bourdieu, “On the Family as a Realized Category,” Theory, Culture & Society . ():  – , .  Bourdieu, “On the Family,” .  Cf. Bourdieu, “On the Family,”  – .  Stuart Hall, “The Work of Representation,” in Representation. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall (London et al.: Sage, ):  – , .

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ers) this means that his depictions of dwellings, which also include yards, can be analyzed not only as a juxtaposition to families but rather as an essential part of his construction of black lower class families. The way different family models can be represented via character constellations and settings can be exemplified with the help of Tom Redcam’s short novel Becka’s Buckra Baby, one of the first Jamaican texts drawing heavily on both yards and matrifocal families to represent social differences in early twentiethcentury Jamaica. Thomas MacDermot published Becka’s Buckra Baby under his pseudonym, Tom Redcam, in 1903 as the first volume of his All Jamaica Library. Originally planned to comprise twelve texts, this series was discontinued after only four of them had been published. According to Anthony Boxill this was due to financial issues and the fact that not enough manuscripts of sufficient quality could be acquired.¹⁰ A certain lack of quality is a frequent accusation made towards Redcam as an author, too. Kenneth Ramchand, for example, states that “Redcam’s poetry and fiction are disappointing, but his activity helps to illustrate the connection between national feeling and the growth of a literature.”¹¹ In his rather constructive comment Ramchand nonetheless acknowledges a certain value in Redcam’s writing, which also extends to the developing tropes of the yard and the matrifocal family. Leah Reade Rosenberg comments that “MacDermot introduces tropes that would become defining elements of West Indian literature for decades, and his hierarchical ideology served as the foundation for the ostensibly liberating aesthetics of the yard.”¹² Becka’s Buckra Baby is the story of two families living in Kingston, the white Bronvollas and the black Gyrtons. With the help of these two families the text illustrates fundamental social differences in early twentieth-century Jamaican society. Redcam constructs a very clear-cut difference between the black lower classes and the white middle classes, and in doing so he heavily draws on constructions of families and their dwellings. In the first two out of four chapters, the text focuses on the white Bronvollas, a nuclear, conjugal, patriarchal middle-class family. The family’s father provides for his ‘dependants’ financially, even after he has passed away: “The money that he left his wife and only child, gave them decent support, since he owned the house in which he passed

 Anthony Boxill, “The Beginnings to ,” in West Indian Literature, ed. Bruce King (London: Macmillan, ):  – , .  Kenneth Ramchand, The West Indian Novel and Its Background (Kingston and Miami: Ian Randle, ): .  Leah Reade Rosenberg, Nationalism and the Formation of Caribbean Literature (New York et al.: Palgrave Macmillan, ): .

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from his life.”¹³ The Bronvollas are a nuclear family based on a married couple. The father is explicitly in charge of financial aspects since he owns the house and they are financially well of. Furthermore, the Bronvollas are portrayed inside their spacious family home, which is especially telling in contrast to the Gyrtons, the second family portrayed in Becka’s Buckra Baby. The black Gyrtons are clearly a matrifocal family. Even though Mrs. Gyrton claims to be married, her husband is not present at her home (nor, in fact, as a character in the novel). She forms the emotional and economic center of the family. The family’s dwelling can equally clearly be identified as a yard – significant parts of daily life take place outside the small house. Redcam connects matrifocal families with yards, just as other Caribbean writers do after him: The literary critic Robert Hamner asserts in his typology of West Indian yard novels from the 1930s to the 1970s that “the typical yard home [in literature, my addition] comprises a man (usually absent), his female companion (not usually his wife) and from one to ten teenagers and bare bottomed children (not necessarily legitimate).”¹⁴ Hamner shows the connection between the two literary symbols I focus on. Furthermore, he displays a distinctly middle-class perspective on these issues by emphasizing marriage and legitimacy as well as by naming the usually absent man first and the woman as “his companion.” Matrifocality is (implicitly) considered a deficiency. Hamner also unreflectively observes “a desire to escape the yard”¹⁵ in the characters from yard novels, without commenting on the middle-class ideology of self-improvement that underlies this desire. Here literary criticism takes over the bias Redcam introduced decades before and that prevails in literature to some extent. In her analysis of Redcam’s text, Rosenberg notes the disvaluing attitude towards the yard the text displays: MacDermot emphasizes the yard’s physical dilapidation and poverty. We enter the yard by looking ‘over that part of the fence which was mended with kerosine tins,’ to overhear two sisters argue apparently about chicken. The perspective of looking down into the yard to catalogue its faults reproduces the colonizing and ethnographic hierarchy between writers and subject.¹⁶

 Tom Redcam, Becka’s Buckra Baby: Being an Episode in the Life of Noel (Kingston: Times Printery, ): .  Robert Hamner, “The Measures of the ‘Yard Novel’: From Mendes to Lovelace,” Commonwealth: Essays and Studies . ():  – , . I work here with Hamner’s helpful comments on the yard but do not introduce his typology of the yard novel because its use for short fiction and drama is restricted.  Hamner, “The Measures of the ‘Yard Novel’,” .  Rosenberg, Nationalism, .

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Redcam clearly constructs a picture of the Jamaican social structure similar to Simey’s almost forty years later, associating matrifocal families with the semipublic space of their yards, both representing the black lower classes and thereby reinforcing each other’s connotations. As opposed to that, conjugal middleclass families are represented within the confined space of their houses, which reproduces established middle-class ideologies of private family life. Rosenberg claims that Redcam uses the yard as a literary symbol to establish his hierarchical class ideology; I add that matrifocal families carry out the exact same function here. Both construct clearly visible differences along the lines of class and race, which the text mainly uses to valorize middle-class lifestyles and at the same time to disvalue those of the lower classes. Due to the tight connection of the categories class and race in Jamaica through the history of slavery and plantation economy, Redcam upholds colonial power-constellations. Even though Simey indicates that these connotations still exist by the middle of the twentieth century, they have been challenged in post-Redcam Caribbean literature and scholarship. Rosenberg argues that Redcam provided the basis for the critical function the yard has in later Jamaican literature. Indeed, once the (literary) symbols ‘yard’ or ‘matrifocal family’ are charged with meaning, they can be used not only to represent and reproduce existing power structures, but also to uncover these conditions and to ascribe agency to the oppressed. This is what Rosenberg and others see, for example, in George Lamming’s writing.¹⁷ In his essay “The Foundational Generation – From The Beacon to Savacon,” Norval Edwards even goes beyond this to describe the yard as an anti-colonial symbol linked to emerging nationalism in the Caribbean. He argues that, by breaking with literary conventions, yard fiction can construct and represent common identities and nationalistic tendencies.¹⁸ The subversive potential, however, is not a purely textually constructed feature, but it is already inherent in the setup of yards and the small houses they comprise, as the architectural historian Louis P. Nelson illustrates in his essay “The Architecture of Black Identity.” Nelson focuses on the houses of free blacks in the nineteenth-century West Indies; however, his depiction of the dwellings is very similar to that of T. S. Simey of the 1940s. Nelson argues that the system of adjoining yards and houses with two doors made these settlements ideal hiding spaces for runaway slaves, who could exit homes through one door to escape to a neighboring house via the yards when the search party would enter through  Rosenberg, Nationalism, .  Norval Edwards, “The Foundational Generation – From The Beacon to Savacon,” in The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, eds. Michael A. Bucknor and Alison Donnell (London and New York: Routledge, ):  – ,  – .

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another.¹⁹ This implies that indeed not only the association of yards with the black lower classes in literature cater to the subversive potential but that the architectural tradition of these dwellings contributes to its critical stance. In Jamaican society, matrifocal families are considerably less well researched in literary and cultural criticism than yards, which is why I have to resort to sociological texts to comment on a change in meaning in relation to Redcam’s and Simey’s representations. While throughout the twentieth century various anthropologists and sociologists have considered matrifocality a deficiency, from the 1970s onwards a school of thought developed that acknowledges them as fully functional families that are not per se inferior to conjugal families. One of those scholars is Raymond T. Smith who in his influential essay “The Matrifocal Family” argues for the existence of a family system in which legitimate paternity is not a pre-requisite for the development of a full social personality (or psychological health), and in which the central relationships can tolerate an attenuation or elimination of the conjugal bond without becoming pathological.²⁰

This approach has subsequently been used by scholars concerned with Caribbean family constellations such as the sociologist Christine Barrow and the historian Marietta Morrissey who explore the reasons why different family models developed (and thereby uphold the association of matrifocal families and the lower or working classes) without considering some as superior and others as inferior.²¹ They argue that matrifocal families were and are not victims of their circumstances, economic or otherwise. Notable among them, Morrissey stresses that slave women (on whom she concentrates her elaborations) could actively take decisions. This firstly opposes the middle-class ideology of nuclear, conjugal families being a natural state or at least one universally aspired after. Secondly, it ascribes agency to the slaves and the black Jamaican lower classes emerging from the slave populations. Thirdly, this fundamentally subverts middle-class gender ideologies by not only making women the heads of families but also by assuming that they were able to actively choose this role for themselves.²²  Louis P. Nelson, “The Architecture of Black Identity,” Winterthur Portfolio ./ ():  – , .  Raymond T. Smith, “The Matrifocal Family” [], in The Matrifocal Family – Power, Pluralism, and Politics (New York and London: Routledge, ):  – , .  Cf. Christine Barrow, Family in the Caribbean – Themes and Perspectives (Kingston and Oxford: Ian Randle and James Currey, ) and Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence: UP of Kansas, ).  Cf. Barrow, Family in the Caribbean, , and Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World, .

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On this basis, matrifocal families can serve as critical comment on, rather than reproductions of, colonial situations in (literary) texts, and they offer a potential for developing a feeling of communality and for constructing a self-conscious, specifically Caribbean black lower class. Having shown the connection between the yard and the matrifocal family as well as the ambiguous role they can play as textually constructed symbols, I will now turn to a number of literary examples from 1950s Jamaica to further illustrate the critical yet ambiguous role these interrelated symbols play in Jamaican pre-independence texts.

1950s representations of yards and matrifocality The first text I want to turn to is John Hearne’s short story “Morning, Noon and Night,” which was published in Edna Manley’s 1956 collection Focus. I will show that Hearne uses the symbols matrifocal family and yard to represent the black Jamaican lower classes as victims of colonialism and the resulting social structures. He therefore takes a more liberal stance towards the lower classes he represents with the help of these symbols than Redcam, but at the same time still sees matrifocality and yard life as symptoms of deprivation that need to be tackled and eliminated in order for the Jamaican society to rid itself of colonial structures and oppression. “Morning, Noon and Night” thus uses matrifocality and yard representations to argue that middle-class values and lifestyles are the basis of social inclusion and agency. “Morning, Noon and Night” is the story of the unemployed Reuben who looks for work to support his wife Lyn who is expecting his baby. Desperate to earn money, Reuben decides to rob people by the beach and eventually kills two persons in attempting to do so. Even though large parts of the story are set in the city center and by the seaside, the episodes in the beginning and the end of the short story are set in the yard, which is thereby emphasized. Just as is the case in Redcam’s text, yard inhabitants frequently come into contact with their neighbors. In the case of “Morning, Noon and Night” this contact is even closer because the protagonists live in a barrack yard, where they have an apartment or room in close proximity to others and not an individual house. The function and symbolism of the yard, though, remains the same. “He pulled on his trousers and went out of the room, down the three rough-set concrete steps, to the yard. His wife Lyn was washing at the pipe; […] He waited his

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turn among the people from the house.”²³ The couple’s indoor dwelling only consists of one room and it does not include a bathroom, so that the everyday activity of washing, considered private by middle-class standards, has to be done outside in public. This clearly illustrates the poverty and – from a middle-class point of view – insufficiency of their domestic amenities. The matrifocal family structure is less obvious in the story but it is nevertheless there. The protagonist Reuben is married to his partner Lyn, which often is not the case in matrifocal families, but which is not unusual, nonetheless. They do not have a child yet, but Lyn is expecting one. The day in Reuben’s and Lyn’s lives depicted in the story suggests that she will be both the economic and the emotional center of the family, since she works while he does not, and she emotionally comforts her husband. Matrifocality is further established by the fact that Reuben may or may not be present and contribute to their upkeep, since he kills two people; crimes for which he may be sent to prison. Both matrifocality as well as the yard contribute to the construction of the couple as part of the lower classes. Reuben’s desperate attempts to provide for his family, however, indicate that he wants to break out of this structure, just as Hamner has described for the protagonists of his ‘yard novels’ and just as Simey has identified as an aim for the West Indian lower classes. This patriarchal middle-class focus of the action can be identified in the narrative structure of the story, too. The heterodiegetic narrator uses the character Reuben as a focalizer and thereby creates a patriarchal frame in which Lyn is far less present and relevant. She and the baby she carries are the cause for Reuben’s activities and therefore propel the plot, but the character Lyn herself is hardly elaborated; she is in fact interchangeable. The story is really one about a man struggling with unemployment in late colonial Jamaica rather than about a woman’s life as a pregnant breadwinner. Consequently, Lyn only appears as a character when the setting is their home, narrated from Reuben’s point of view. Her work place, where she spends the day, does not serve as a setting for “Morning, Noon and Night.” After Reuben finishes his morning routine, he goes downtown to look for a job but does not find one. It becomes clear that he feels the strong need for supporting his family financially. He thinks of “how good it would be if he got a job and Lyn wouldn’t have to work when her time came near.”²⁴ The story comments on the colonial structures that were once able to help Reuben fulfill his envisioned role with the help of the character Gerald Hayes. Gerald is a white lawyer

 John Hearne, “Morning, Noon and Night,” Focus ():  – , .  Hearne, “Morning, Noon and Night,” .

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for whose family Reuben had been the yardboy. Ever since then, Gerald feels responsible for him; however, he can do little besides give him some money, which Reuben invests in food. Gerald literally feeds Reuben, but he cannot help him find a job, and thus critically he represents the liberal, white upper middle classes who once tried and helped their individual ‘protégés’ but at the fictional time fail to fundamentally change the social and economic conditions. The short story thereby criticizes the fact that the black lower classes have to rely on a colonial structure that appears unable to help them. All this, however, is based on the Protestant middle-class ideology of self-improvement that assumes that the working classes strive towards middle-class lifestyles, here represented by Reuben’s urgent desire to be his family’s breadwinner. Matrifocality is hence used in Simey’s sense; alongside the yard it symbolizes poverty but it is not accepted as a family model worth living. Rather, it is one that needs to be abandoned in favor of a patriarchal system with a male breadwinner. I read “Morning, Noon and Night” as a critical comment on the coloniallycaused economic systems in 1950s Jamaica, which the text describes as not allowing black men to participate in and financially benefit from. From a middle-class point of view the text emasculates Reuben and strips him of social power because it is indeed possible for women to find jobs, as Lyn’s example shows, but not for men. The fact that he even allows an old acquaintance to talk him into robbing couples at the beach shows how important male breadwinning is to the protagonist after all, and how closely he connects it to power and agency. This turning point of the story leads to its climax when Reuben is surprised by the man he robs and in the subsequent fight kills both him and his wife. Reuben’s middle-class aspirations lead to a catastrophe, which clearly illustrates the hopeless situation he is in. “Morning, Noon and Night” ends with Lyn and Reuben together in the yard, just as it began. The matrifocal family and the yard symbolically frame the story that depicts Reuben’s attempt to break out of these very structures. Just as in Simey’s text, matrifocality and yards represent poverty which needs to be overcome. Yet, violence is not the way out of the poverty for Hearne, but rather reform, which the white (upper) middle classes represented by Gerald Hayes in the story have not accomplished. I therefore read the story as a liberal critique of the (economic) oppression of the black Jamaican lower classes. Yards and matrifocal families play a key role in this criticism in that they characterize lower class family and social life as deficient and desperate. Hearne’s story hence supports Simey’s claim of the necessity to overcome these structures. “Morning, Noon and Night” represents an attitude towards black working class lifestyles that is still a far cry from what Raymond Smith demands in his 1973 essay, namely the full recognition of matrifocal families (see above). Yet,

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judged by most of the non-fictional texts from the mid-twentieth century, Hearne displays a rather open mind towards the lower classes simply by representing their lives in his fiction at all. Thorough searches of large quantities of Jamaican journals, magazines and newspapers I conducted show that these publications virtually exclusively represent middle class families in their respective surroundings in the first half of the twentieth century and beyond; married couples occupying stereotypical middle-class gender roles predominate. Since Hearne’s text addresses a similar readership, it is remarkable that he engages with matrifocality as explicitly as he does. Hearne’s contemporary Rudolph L. C. Aarons approaches yards and matrifocal families in a much less explicit manner, which is closer to the above-mentioned publications focusing on middle-class life. In his short story “Madam,” first published in 1953, Aarons tells the story of a black lower-class girl, Madam, who is adopted by a white middle-class family. She keeps contact with her biological mother who tries to blackmail her. Madam’s adoptive mother does not step in, which leads to Madam withdrawing from her new family because she cannot bear the pressure of standing between the two worlds represented by the two families. Like others, Aarons uses matrifocal and conjugal families to characterize and contrast middle- and lower-class families – Madam’s mother is a single mother who provides for the family economically. However, “Madam” connects matrifocality and yard life only indirectly through their alleged opposite. The short story tellingly avoids the dwellings of Madam’s biological mother and only depicts the adoptive family’s home. In stark contrast to (literary) depictions of yards, Aarons describes middle-class life as taking place indoors in rather impressive surroundings: “Between them they lifted the child to its feet and led her across the wide polished floor of the dining room.”²⁵ This brief quotation illustrates the size of the house. It is wide and the existence of a dining room suggests a house with several rooms, at least a living room, a bed room, and a kitchen, in addition to the dining room. Later on it becomes clear that Madam also has her own room. Furthermore, the quoted sentence indicates the good condition the house is in. A possible implicit contrast to this depiction can be found, for example, in another text from the All Jamaica Library: In his sequence of short stories, Maroon Medicine, E. Snod focuses on a black, lower-class protagonist living in a yard. When describing the dwelling, the narrator comments that the inside

 Rudolph L. C. Aarons, “Madam” [], in The Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature, eds. A. L. Hendriks and Cedrik Lindo (Kingston: Ministry of Development and Welfare, ):  – , .

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“had taken to itself several coatings of soot and was very black and dirty especially near the fire corners.”²⁶ The size becomes especially obvious when the function of the interior is described: “This room was Mr. Watson’s study, dining hall, pantry and kitchen.”²⁷ In this literary context, to which, for example, also “Morning, Noon and Night” contributes, and especially in connection with the representation of a matrifocal family, Aarons’s description clearly figures the yard as an implicit counterpart in a symbolic framework designed to distinguish classes in a racialized society. The fact that the yard is only implicit emphasizes the story’s detachment from the black working classes, a detachment which is obviously much greater than that of “Morning, Noon and Night.” Indeed “Madam” makes no attempt to bring the black lower and the white middle classes together. The text is set at the white family’s home, which Madam leaves again in the end of the story. This makes her merely a passing visitor in a story that focuses on her white adoptive parents. The opposition between the middle and lower classes that the text constructs through families and dwellings is negotiated by her, the black lower-class girl, who obviously lacks the maturity to do so, and the white, middle-class adults who took her in. Through this character constellation the status difference between the racialized social groups the text constructs could not be greater and the text’s white, middle-class bias becomes apparent. My final example of the symbolic use of yards and matrifocality in 1950s Jamaican literary texts is the one-act drama Africa Sling-Shot, written by the Canadian-Jamaican author Cicely Waite-Smith. Dramatizing the rural population’s superstitions as well as their attitudes towards their history of slavery, the play was first produced in 1957 and published in print in 1966. I will show that it takes a more liberal position towards its lower-class representations and considers the respective lifestyle not as a deficit but rather as a lifestyle in its own right. Yet, the (politically) ambiguous function of yard and matrifocality remains. Africa Sling-Shot juxtaposes discussions of the rural characters’ superstitions and their remembrance of slavery. It does so from a distinctly black lower-class perspective, which is established through the setting and the character constellation. The text is set in “Miss Mary’s back-yard in a country village in the West Indies. The yard is poor, but it is swept clean and given charm by an ackee tree, a few stalks of corn and a flowering poinsettia.”²⁸ These stage directions establish the yard as an indicator of poverty and, at the same time, as a respectable dwell E. Snod, Maroon Medicine (Kingston: Times Printery, ): .  Snod, Maroon Medicine, .  Cicely Waite-Smith, Africa Sling-Shot (Port of Spain: U.W.I. Extra-Mural Department, Trinidad and Tobago, ): .

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ing. This ties in with the yard’s connotation as a textual symbol established above but rids the symbol of its disvaluing facets by constructing (middleclass) respectability through its well-mended state. However, even though Miss Mary does not live in a tenement yard as Reuben and Lyn do, she explicitly lives in a hut, not a house, which in Jamaica’s less densely populated areas indicates a social status corresponding to that in “Morning, Noon and Night.” Furthermore, the text adheres to near-canonical aspects of literary yards, such as the outside toilet that plays a role throughout the play. The quotation above also hints at matrifocal family structures, because it refers to Miss Mary and therefore emphasizes that she is unmarried, which is not necessary but common for a matrifocal head of a family. Furthermore, the text ascribes the yard to her directly, not to a family or even to a man, which emphasizes her central role in the family. Even though her relationship to other characters is not made explicit, it becomes clear that she is responsible for Gordie, a boy of undefined age who shoots off the nose of a statue commemorating the emancipation of the slaves. This responsibility becomes obvious when she prepares to punish him for his deed: “You come right here, Gordie Thomas! I going flog you so hard, you see, you not going remember how fe sit down!”²⁹ Furthermore, she apologizes for his boyish misdeeds towards others: “Lord, that Gordie! Him always making trouble. Him did hit you, Mass Nathaniel? You hurt?”³⁰ Therefore, she can be considered a matrifocal head of a family, especially because no father is represented or mentioned by the characters. Furthermore, drawing on a literary tradition established by earlier texts, the yard-setting itself already suggests matrifocality. Similar to “Morning, Noon and Night,” Africa Sling-Shot significantly differs from “Madam” in its depiction of matrifocality because it does not juxtapose a matrifocal family to a conjugal one. As opposed to Hearne’s short story, though, Waite-Smith’s play is entirely set in a yard. This may partly be due to the genre of the one-act play, which is by nature restricted to one setting. It is telling, however, that Waite-Smith chooses a yard, of all places. Furthermore, Waite-Smith’s characters do not display any aspirations to climbing the social ladder; they appear satisfied with the lives they are living. Consequently, there are hardly any characters representing the middle classes in the play. Africa Sling-Shot properly focuses on the black lower classes and respects them and their ideologies as ordinary parts of Jamaican society in the 1950s.

 Waite-Smith, Africa Sling-Shot, .  Waite-Smith, Africa Sling-Shot, .

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Yet, at several stages in the play Waite-Smith addresses tensions and ambiguities arising from the island’s history of slavery and the persisting colonial structures. First of all, this becomes manifest in the language of the one-act play – the characters speak Jamaican Creole while the stage directions and paratext are in standard English. On the textual level the depiction of black lowerclass life in its own right is framed by the colonizer’s language; hence, colonial power structures are represented and kept up. The incident of Gordie shooting off the nose of a statue that was erected in celebration of emancipation takes up this issue. It represents the ambiguities of 1950s political Jamaica approaching independence, a time of simultaneous universal adult suffrage and colonial domination. The statue represents emancipation from slavery, but it depicts a white man and therefore ascribes agency to the colonizers and not to the freed slaves. The black characters in Africa Sling-Shot, however, assume agency themselves when they decide to take down the damaged statue and store it in a (highly symbolic) outside toilet. This act of virtually dethroning the colonizers/ liberators only becomes possible because the scene is a yard. The text therefore attributes this symbolically charged space for maneuver especially to the black lower classes and not to middle-class agents, who are generally considered to have been the driving force behind Jamaican independence. Yet Mary and her neighbors decide to replace the statue after all, partly because they are afraid of being punished and partly because they remember that they have benefited from the white man’s achievements. This ironic ending pinpoints the Jamaican position between the approaching independence and historically rooted dependencies that will stay intact. These ambiguities are equally taken up via the policemen who turn up at Mary’s yard to investigate the case of the missing statue. The policemen are the only characters representing state authority, and Mary and her neighbors are afraid of the police because they have indeed taken the statue. At the same time, the policemen speak Creole, just as the other characters, which places them among the Jamaican rural population. Hence, in their role as policemen they are ambiguous – they represent the newly established self-government and at the same time they indicate that the Jamaican population itself upholds colonial structures by becoming representatives of the colonial state. Their search for the statue symbolizing white domination and emancipation at the same time is telling. Africa Sling-Shot represents colonialism and the upcoming transition into independence as highly ambiguous. In this perception it is quite similar to John Hearne’s representation of the political and social circumstances in 1950s Jamaica; both emphasize the continuous existence of oppressive structures and foresee the central role they will be playing in independent Jamaica. Nevertheless,

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the two texts differ in the role the symbols yard and matrifocality play in these critical discussions. Both use them to represent the black lower classes, but while Hearne utilizes them to illustrate the struggle towards a transition into the middle classes which is desirable and necessary from the text’s perspective and which would require the black lower classes to leave their yards behind (both literally and figuratively), Waite-Smith is less judgmental and considers lower-class black social structures as a relevant and functional part of society which does not need to be overcome.

Conclusion It becomes clear from all the examples analyzed here that the fundamental opposition between matrifocal families living in small houses and yards and conjugal families living in more spacious dwellings that Redcam and others establish in Jamaican literature is still intact and in use in Jamaican texts by the midtwentieth century. Moreover, the basic function of this constellation to symbolically denote and differentiate lower-class black and middle-class white and black families prevails. This is the case for literary as well as non-literary discourses, as the example of T. S. Simey’s study of West Indian social systems illustrates that precedes the literary texts analysed in this article. The selection of one non-fictional and a number of literary texts discussed suggests that yards and matrifocal families are symbols suitable to represent a continuum of attitudes towards Jamaica’s black lower classes, ranging from absolute and liberal disapproval to radical acceptance as a valid part of an emerging independent society. These symbols are not per se anti-colonial, but they may be used in such a way to different degrees, as has been shown, depending on whether they are used to represent the (disastrous) outcomes of colonial rule or to grant normality and validity to those deviating from the ideologies imported to Jamaica by the colonialists. With the help of Bourdieu’s definition of family, I have shown how closely (literary) texts connect character constellations and settings to represent family models and ideologies. In all texts considered here, yards and matrifocal families serve as contrastive structures to middle-class family ideologies. These symbols, however, turn out to be highly ambiguous because texts can utilize them both to positively acknowledge lifestyles deviating from those of the middle classes as well as to disvalue them. This grants these literary symbols a certain subversive power, because what is clearly considered a deficiency from a middle-class perspective can be ‘normalized’ by literary texts, as can be seen in Africa Sling-Shot. Waite-Smith not only avoids depicting conjugal families as a contrast to matrifo-

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cal ones, as Redcam and Aarons do, she also renders her characters free of aspirations towards middle-class values, unlike Redcam, Aarons and Hearne. Due to the history of slavery that significantly influenced Jamaica’s social structure, matrifocality and yards can be read to comment not only on class structures but also on colonial structures. Hence, representing these character constellations and settings as somewhat ‘normal’, i. e., not contrasting them with others and thereby disvaluing them, can be read as an acknowledgement of the black lower classes and therefore of slaves and slave descendants as being an integral part of Jamaican society. Yet, as my examples have shown, even by the mid-twentieth century only few texts consider matrifocal yard life as a way of life in its own right. Rather, the majority expresses the urge to get rid of this social form either by marginalizing and condemning it or by adapting it to middle-class morality, mainly through marriage and the characters’ aspirations for self-improvement. This imbalance of representations of yards and matrifocality very much fits the nature of Jamaican nationalism, which was, after all, a middle-class movement.³¹ Tellingly, both “Morning, Noon and Night” and “Madam” are more or less closely connected to Jamaican independence through their publication history: Aarons’ text was re-published in The Independence Anthology of Jamaican Literature by the Jamaican Ministry of Development and Welfare, Hearne’s story was edited by Edna Manley, wife to the last Jamaican Chief Minister before independence, Norman Manley, and mother of Michael Manley, Jamaican Prime Minister from 1972 to 1980, and from 1989 to 1992. Furthermore, the connection to the political establishment also becomes apparent from the authors’ biographies; Aarons worked in public administration³² and Hearne worked in the Jamaican government’s Public Relations Office and as an assistant to Michael Manley.³³ Their use of matrifocality and yards therefore illustrates the intermediate position of the Jamaican middle classes between abandoning colonial political structures and adhering to colonial social structures. Closeness to public administration and political elites seems to be more important to the positions the texts take than the type of text, since Simey’s (nonfictional) elaborations do not fundamentally differ from those of Aarons and

 Cf. Rosenberg, Nationalism, .  Donald E. Herdeck, ed., Caribbean Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical-Critical Encyclopedia (Washington, DC: Three Continents P, ): .  D. H. Figueredo, “John Hearne ( – ),” in Encyclopedia of Caribbean Literature (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, ):  – , , and David Ingledew, “John Hearne,” in Fifty Caribbean Writers. A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Daryl Cumber Dance (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood P, ):  – , .

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Hearne. Yet, the distribution of matrifocality and yards across different text types is telling, these elements are for fiction; they do not play much of a role in nonfictional texts, especially not in journalistic ones but rather in the social sciences if at all. In this case, the relevant publication is even intended for a British readership. This indicates that the Jamaican middle classes of the mid-twentieth century, who are clearly the addressees of all the fictional texts discussed above, as well as of the journalistic publications that omit yards and matrifocality, in tendency require a potential detachment from reality to engage with black lowerclass social forms.

Paula Saunders

The ‘Janet House’: An Endangered Vernacular House Form in Grenada The Janet house was a pre-fabricated, government-issued two-room house distributed to residents on the island of Grenada in 1955. Named after Hurricane Janet which devastated the island in that year, this simple dwelling was the first – and only – government-funded housing provided on the island and has since virtually vanished from the island. In Grenada, self-help was the historical mantra for accessing material goods and one’s dwelling was the ultimate marker of her/ his socio-economic status, with continual “upgrades” reflecting economic progress. The house itself was the primary object of material culture on which resources were expended and where individual owner’s choices were illustrated. Thus, long-term residence in the free-standing government-supplied Janet house not only became a marker of lower class status, but was perceived by neighbors as a failure by its residents to pursue and achieve economic advancement. Eventually, owners abandoned the Janet house as their primary residence, while most incorporated theirs into their new hybrid homes by building additional rooms around them. Today, only a handful of free-standing Janet houses exist on the island, making it an endangered house form that will soon only exist in the memories of those who lived at the time of their introduction. More than the dwelling itself, people recall the difficulties during and after the powerful hurricane, as well as the communal support provided by neighbors. In this way, the Janet house represents more than just a dwelling, but is instead an important symbol of Grenadians’ memory of a collective and traumatic experience.

This ethnographic research was the result of interviews, walking surveys, and examination of documentary records in Grenada and England. I wish to thank the many kind people of Grenada for sharing their stories and knowledge with me and for allowing me to assess and study their homes. Special thanks to the residents who shared their first-hand experiences during the hurricane. I am also grateful to Michael Jessemy from the Grenada Ministry of Culture for sharing his knowledge on Janet houses; to the Grenada Department of Surveys who provided population and housing data; and to my field assistants who were instrumental in the completion of this project. I also wish to thank the staff at Senate House Library, University of London who guided me to the newspaper accounts of Hurricane Janet. This paper is dedicated to the memory of Cuthbert Roderique ( – ) and Frederick Hosten ( – ). DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-010

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Introduction On the night of September 23, 1955, Hurricane Janet slammed into the tri-island nation of Grenada.¹ So vast was the devastation – the likes of which was not seen again – that it caused lingering trauma for all those who experienced it, as well as those who provided shared communal support. Oral accounts from those who lived through the force of the hurricane recall very vividly their experiences the night of the storm. Some informants were young children at the time of the hurricane and “Janet” remains the subject of most of their stories they tell to the younger generation. Universally, their most intense memory was of the loss of their homes, the symbol of stability. One male informant, Anthony, who was ten years at the time of the hurricane, told of how his family’s home disintegrated like “a matchstick house.”² Mere mention of the hurricane seemed to trigger a passionate response in survivors who excitedly competed to tell of their own individual experiences during the hurricane, as well as the difficulties they experienced in the aftermath. An estimated four million dollars in damages resulted in the Grenada alone, with an additional hundred million in damages resulting in the entire Caribbean basin as a result of the storm.³ This category three hurricane with winds of 120 miles per hour was especially scary considering that most people lived in small, wooden houses with galvanized roofs. With Grenada located just outside the major hurricane belt, it is rare that storms of this magnitude develop in this Southeastern Caribbean nation. Several informants recalled the very moment that they “felt” the hurricane with vivid clarity.⁴ One woman, Mary – who was eight years old at the time – recalled that a window in her house flew open and banged loudly against the exterior wall.⁵ As rain pelted into the house, her mother reached to try to close the window, but the violent wind prevented her from pulling it shut. As her younger brother cried, Mary grabbed onto her mother as she saw that the wind literally lifted her mother off the ground. Eventually, her mother abandoned her attempt to close the window and instead crouched with her two children in a far corner, praying that her family would survive the storm. Similarly, Anthony – who was ten years old at the time of the hurricane – recounted that  Paul Kennedy, “Hurricane Janet Rips Into Yucatan,” New York Times (September , ): .  Anthony N., personal communication (June , ).  Gordon E. Dunn, Walter R. Davis, and Paul L. Moore, “Hurricanes of ,” Monthly Weather Review (Miami, December ): .  See for example, Carlton F., personal communication (July , ).  Mary F., personal communication (July , ).

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there was a great calm and silence, then out of nowhere, a large gust of wind descended and blew the entire roof from his house.⁶ In the wake of hurricane Janet, Grenada and the other Grenadine islands were left devastated, with one hundred and twenty two lives lost; harbors, warehouses, and crops destroyed; bridges washed away; and most houses destroyed.⁷ News of the devastating hurricane were published in papers across Britain, where efforts were mobilized to help the victims. The islands, and others in the direct path of the hurricane experienced complete devastation. The most dramatic damage was in their housing, with more than 10,000 homes destroyed and the rest damaged. One newspaper account claimed that “about 75 per cent of all buildings have sustained major roof damage and the same percentage of peasants’ huts levelled.”⁸ This damage to shelter had the largest impact on the lives of the people. Led by efforts in Britain, the government’s solution was the introduction of pre-fabricated houses that were brought in to house the newly homeless people. These houses were built in a uniform style called “the Janet house” and were unique not only in form, but also because they were the first government-funded housing for residents.⁹ While the house was initially welcomed as a shelter for those in need, over time it became a symbol of the lower class and was summarily abandoned. Despite the fact that people grew to have a negative opinion about the house, it remains a fond subject in the memories of the people who were familiar with these buildings. Its near extinction status is mourned, not because of the loss of the object itself, but because it represented the material manifestation of a collective, traumatic experience. In this paper, I discuss how the Janet house served as a symbol of transformation both in vernacular architecture and in larger cultural practices. I examine the factors that contributed to the process of transformation and interrogate how traditions of vernacular architecture were embedded in the cultural memories of those who lived at the time of the hurricane. I follow Eric Mercer’s definition of “vernacular” to refer to housing that has been built and used by common people

 Anthony N., personal communication (July , ).  “Hurricane ‘Flattened Everything that Grew,’ ” Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer (September , ): .  “Aid on Way to Stricken Islands,” Aberdeen Evening Express (September , ): ; “Destructive Trail of the Hurricane,” (London) Daily Mail (September , ): .  Robert Potter, “Housing and the State in the Eastern Caribbean,” in Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean, eds. Robert Potter and Dennis Conway (Kingston: U of the West Indies P, ):  – .

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in their local custom.¹⁰ Here, vernacular refers to the architecture in rural Grenada that had a tradition of self-help and community involvement. In particular, I discuss the symbolic meaning of the Janet house as a transient value alongside long-standing traditions of self-help housing. Here, I follow Alan Eyre’s definition of self-help to refer to the practice of house building in which residents contributed all or most of the materials and construction labor of their residences.¹¹ Grounded in place identity and transient-transcendent theories, I argue that the Janet house represented a break in tradition of self-help housing and a transformation in the form that it took and the lifestyle of the people. In Grenada, one’s house was traditionally the key symbol of the owner’s identity through their economic accomplishments. As a result, the house, including the associated yards, furnishings, and material goods, served as a symbol of the owner’s identity, socio-economic status, and achievements which served as models for others to emulate. Built at a moment of crisis and as a product of government funds, the Janet house represented an interruption in self-help, independence, resourcefulness, house pride and the communal character of house building. Within years, it fell out of favor mostly because people associated it with poverty. Residents soon abandoned the homes as primary residences or adapted them into larger houses, often disguised by the additions built around them. Through this adaptation into larger and “better,” the Janet house fostered a new way of living from migratory residents to more permanent houses. Further, the continued use of the Janet house in its hybrid adapted form was the people’s solution to the tension between their desire to create their own dwellings and their economic struggles to start from the beginning. Today, it is not only a cultural artifact of the hurricane, but it also serves as a symbol of the traditional two-room house that was once the standard form since slavery, that people no longer desire. Instead, it serves as a symbol of identity, the interconnectedness of memory, nature, human desires and aspirations, as well as the processes of tradition and change.

 Eric Mercer, English Vernacular Houses: A Study of Traditional Farmhouses and Cottages (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, ): . See also John Michael Vlach and Dell Upton, Common Places: Readings in American Vernacular Architecture (Athens: U of Georgia P, ); Dell Upton, “The Power of Things: Recent Studies in American Vernacular Architecture,” in Material Culture Research Guide, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Lawrence: U of Kansas, ):  – .  L. Alan Eyre, “Self-Help Housing in Jamaica,” in Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean, eds. Robert Potter and Dennis Conway (Kingston: U of the West Indies P, ):  – , . See also Dennis Conway and Robert Potter, “Caribbean Housing, the State, and Self-Help: An Overview,” in Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean, eds. Robert Potter and Dennis Conway (Kingston: U of the West Indies P, ):  – .

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This paper was the result of historical and ethnographic research conducted in Grenada in 2012. It was part of a larger study on the vernacular house forms on the island from slavery to the present. It is based on informal and formal interviews with thirty-six informants, newspaper and documentary records, and surveys of vernacular house types. This paper focuses primarily on the external physical features of the Janet house and the ways in which it symbolizes cultural change. The rest of this essay includes discussions on the theoretical approaches to dwelling house as identity, history of vernacular houses in Grenada, how introduction of Janet house represented a transformation in vernacular architecture and other cultural practices, as well as the legacy of the house today in its near extinction status and the collective memory people have of the house.

The vernacular house as symbol of identity Studies of dwelling houses are usually part of the larger studies of lifestyle and material culture, including how a home dwelling exhibits a “sense of identity.”¹² These studies illustrate how one’s homes could reflect social, cultural, and political meanings. A common theme in these studies is the idea of the residents’ drive towards a “better” (i. e., socio-economic) future, and this is often represented in some way in one’s dwelling for consumption by neighbors and others in the community and larger society.¹³ For example, James Holston’s research in Brazil illustrates the ways in which people focus their efforts to “becoming”

 The studies on households and houses are abundant and varied to address all here; see for example James Holston “Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil,” Cultural Anthropology . ():  – ; Caroline Humphrey, “The Villas of the ‘New Russians’: A Sketch of Consumption and Cultural Identity in Post-Soviet Landscapes,” in The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies after Socialism, ed. Caroline Humphrey (Ithaca: Cornell UP, ):  – ; Christien Klaufus, “Dwelling as Representation: Values of Architecture in an Ecuadorian Squatter Settlement,” Journal of Housing and the Built Environment . ():  – ; Laura Lien, “Home as Identity: Place-making and its Implications in the Built Environment of Older Persons,” Housing and Society . ():  – ; H. Proshansky, A. Fabian, and R. Kaminoff, “Place-identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self,” Journal of Environmental Psychology  ():  – ; Ziad Senan, “The House as an Expression of Identity: The Case of the Palestinian House,” Forum  ():  – .  Here I use ‘dwelling’ to refer to the combined physical structures (house, yard, furnishing, and material goods) of an individual or family unit. ‘Home’ is used here to refer to both the physical spaces of an in individual/family and their community; it also includes the experiences one has in that space that usually reflects a sense of belonging or origin. ‘Home’ is often used interchangeably with ‘dwelling.’

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something else.¹⁴ Here, they use material goods to attain prestige as a means to gain self-respect and to counter social stigmas. Similarly, Caroline Humphrey’s work among the “New Russians” shows how they elevated themselves through purchases of luxurious and expensive dwellings. In this way, their social identities were defined by economic attainment and prosperity within a social hierarchy.¹⁵ As Christien Klaufus demonstrates, residential architecture serves as “a means of communication that broadcasts that identity and established the boundary between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ ” ¹⁶ Other studies focus on cultural identities of dwellings.¹⁷ Zaid Senan presents a model to identify relationships between the house and the constructs (the building materials, shape, size, etc.) of the house.¹⁸ He concludes that the façade of the house, for example, is symbolic of group membership and expresses personal, social, and national identities.¹⁹ Jay Edwards’ study of the creole townhouse in New Orleans depicts the challenges of cultural identification in ethnically complex settings, as well as the varied perceptions people have of the origins of resulting architecture.²⁰ He also cautions against cultural generalizations in vernacular architecture and encourages close examinations of historical circumstances that create dwellings.²¹ In another study, Edwards applies the creolization theory in the evolution of historical material culture, here in the form of vernacular cottages in New Orleans.²² In his classic study of the shotgun house, John Michael Vlach presents a detailed analysis of an individual type of house, where he shows the African contribution to architecture in the Americas.²³ This study illustrates the persistence of the shotgun house over vast time, spaces, and socio-political changes.  Holston, “Autoconstruction in Working-Class Brazil,” .  Humphrey, “The Villas of the ‘New Russians.’”  Christien Klaufus, “Dwellings as Representation,” .  For recent and classic examples, Senan, “The House as an Expression of Identity”; Jay Edwards, “Cultural Identifications in Architecture: The Case of the New Orleans Townhouse,” Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review . ():  – ; Jay Edwards, “Creolization Theory and the Odyssey of the Atlantic Linear Cottage,” Etnofoor . ():  – ; John Milbauer, “Common Houses in Eastern Oklahoma,” Material Culture . ():  – ; John Vlach, “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy, Part I,” Pioneer America . ():  – ; and John Vlach, “The Shotgun House: An African Architectural Legacy, Part II,” Pioneer America . ():  – .  Senan, “The House as an Expression of Identity.”  Senan, “The House as an Expression of Identity,” .  Edwards, “The Case of New Orleans.”  Edwards, “The Case of New Orleans,”  – .  Edwards, “Creolization Theory.”  Vlach, “The Shotgun House, I and II.”

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Some scholars have expanded the theme of houses as central to identityfashioning to focus on the psychological connections to the environment and offer place-identity theories.²⁴ For example, Laura Lien focuses on the intersections of sense of place, place attachment, place dependence, or place identity to arrive at a good definition of an individual’s own meaning of home and place.²⁵ One of the first detailed study of place identity is by Proshansky, Fabian, and Kaminoff, who examine how individuals relate to both the physical and social environments.²⁶ They argue that “individuals do indeed define who and what they are in terms of such strong affective ties to ‘house and home’ and/or neighborhood and community […].”²⁷ In this way, there is an overlapping of activities, memories, experiences, with the environment, and these vary for individuals. These include specific functions of how values, actions, and experiences define identity through the environment. These functions include the recognition function, meaning function, expressive-requirement function, mediating change function, and an anxiety and defense function.²⁸ These functions are especially useful in assessing the role of the Janet house in Grenada. The recognition function relates to “stability of place and space” which serves as continuity that supports one’s self-identity.²⁹ Here, this relates to traditional practices and meanings of dwellings. The meaning function deals with the “intended purpose and activities in relation to its design,” which is understood by the individual.³⁰ In relation to the vernacular houses on the island, the meaning function serves to identify one’s house as both a dwelling and as a symbol of the owner’s identity. The expressive-requirement function allows individuals to match their expectations of the environment through their tastes and preferences.³¹ In regards to architecture, the expressive-requirement function manifests in the choices owners make in creating their homes. In this way, homes represent the physical dwelling structures,

 See Lien, “Home as Identity”; Lynne Manzo, “Beyond House and Haven: Toward a Revisioning of Emotional Relationships with Places,” Journal of Environmental Psychology . ():  – ; Harold Proshansky, Abbe K. Fabian, and Robert Kaminoff, “Place-Identity: Physical World Socialization of the Self,” Journal of Environmental Psychology  ():  – ; Clare Twigger-Ross and David Uzzell, “Place and Identity Processes,” Journal of Environmental Psychology  ():  – .  Lien, “Home as Identity.”  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity.”  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,” .  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,”  – .  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,” .  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,” .  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,” .

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yards, furnishings, trees and landscape, smells, and memories. The mediating change function appears when there are “discrepancies between their place identity and the characteristics of an immediate physical setting” and there would be an assessment of what is needed to reduce or remove the discrepancy.³² This manifests in an acknowledgement of a change in their housing situation and how they can return to taking control over their dwelling spaces. The anxiety and defense function engages the negative factors in an individual’s environment, as a way of identifying what should not be in a given space.³³ Here, it is the trauma created at the moment of crisis which results in a transformation in home acquisition and choices. It was out of the mediating change and the anxiety and defense functions that the Janet house emerged. These were moments when individuals lost their sense of empowerment and independence in defining their homes. The loss of this power to control their environment at a moment of crisis represented a time of instability – i. e., when housing and identity were in transition. This is indicative of the dynamic relationship between the physical and social environments. Along this vein, the Janet house symbolized what Daniel Miller referred to as a dualism of transient and transcendent values.³⁴ Miller argued that in a given society, transient values are associated with the present moment, short-term memory, change, and sought renewal. Transcendent values go beyond the here and now, are related to long-term memory, and are passed on from generation to generation. As an example of transient value, people’s acceptance of the government-funded Janet house in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane represented their immediate need for housing. This very basic form was seen as “old-fashioned,” while it simultaneously led to innovations in building. Their gradual rejection or adaptation of the Janet house into more complex house forms represents ways in which people renew their transcendent value of self-determination in house acquisition. Recognition of both of these values helps explain the seemingly contradictory views people have of the Janet house; some recall the romantic times of communal togetherness in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane, while others view it as a government “handout” and indicative of old-fashioned values.³⁵

 Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,” .  Proshansky et al., “Place Identity,” .  Daniel Miller, Modernity: An Ethnographic Approach. Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad (Oxford: Berg Publishers, ).  Informants who have experienced the hurricane first hand tended to recall the closeness of people as they struggled to rebuild their lives, while the younger generations view it as simply a symbol of old-fashioned values. This was true in the case of -year-old Pat and his -year-old

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Influenced by globalization, the younger generation claim to have an immediate need for greater material goods now, instead of “when I’m too old to enjoy it,” claimed 32-year-old Peter. Peter’s view is in marked contrast to a long-standing value of acquiring only things considered necessary over a long period of time. This allowed for people to “save up” for large purchases and improvements on homes, often using the communal practice of susu, an informal group savings scheme.³⁶

Socio-historical contexts: Self-help, community, and improvement in Caribbean housing Grenada is made up predominantly of people of African descent, some of Indian descent, a handful of Europeans, and a large number who are a variety of combinations of these ethnic groups. The majority of the 103,000 population are largely descendants of people tied to plantation-based agricultural economies, as enslaved, indentured, or wage laborers.³⁷ With one major town, St. George, the vast majority of people reside in rural areas and rely on fishing and agricultural practices for their livelihood. This dependence on primary activities is reflected in their major export of nutmeg, cocoa, bananas, and spices.³⁸ It also is derived from heritage as an agriculture-based plantation society.

father, Gabriel, who was twelve years old when the hurricane hit (Pat and Gabriel Houston, personal communication, July , ). All informants’ names are pseudonyms.  This scheme is found throughout the Caribbean and has a variety of names. It is based on a trust and involves the regular payment into a pool by a group of individuals who take turn in withdrawing the amount. It allows people to accumulate a large sum of money that they would otherwise not be able to, allowing them to make large purchases. See Aubrey Bonnett, “Structured Adaptation of Black Migrants from the Caribbean: An Examination of an Indigenous Banking System in Brooklyn,” Phylon . ():  – ; Edward Maynard, “The Translocation of a West African Banking System: The Yoruba Esusu Rotating Credit Association in the Anglophone Caribbean,” Dialectical Anthropology . ():  – .  See CARICOM Capacity Development Programme,  Round of Population and Housing Census Sub-project, National Census Report (Georgetown, Guyana: CARICOM Secretariat, ): ; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), “The World Factbook: Grenada” (acc. on December , ).  CIA, “World Factbook”; CARICOM Capacity Development Program, “ Population and Housing Census,” .

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Typical descriptions of Caribbean architecture accounts for the absence of vernacular housing in popular and tourism texts.³⁹ Like the vernacular architecture of the other small islands in the Southeastern Caribbean, Grenada’s traditional architecture remains understudied. When Grenada dwellings are mentioned, it is generally the Georgian and French style stone dwellings in the towns, especially in St. George.⁴⁰ The most comprehensive studies of vernacular architecture in the region are Robert Potter’s Low-income Housing and the State in the Eastern Caribbean, and an edited volume by Robert Potter and Dennis Conway, Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean. ⁴¹ Potter was the first to study the evolution of vernacular housing and the role of the state in housing provision. He identified that, in the case of Grenada, there was no government housing plan and in most cases no state-regulated housing guidelines, despite the stress for sustainable housing.⁴² Traditionally, this necessity to acquire and define one’s dwelling was one of two interrelated transcendent cultural values among the people. In Grenada, people traditionally exhibited self-determination through their dwellings. A second related characteristic was the dependence of communal support in the building of the houses, as well as in the social meanings given to the resulting house and the meanings they convey about the owner’s identity. Changes in vernacular housing tended to be in the form of changes in the materials used, size, and adoption of amenities. Up until the 1990s, the moments of transformation were gradual and few, with the introduction of the Janet house as one key moment. It was after the introduction of the Janet house that the traditional house, one that was generally of two rooms, was transformed to larger structures with improved amenities.

 See Andrew Gravette, Architectural Heritage of the Caribbean: An A-Z of Historical Buildings (Kingston: Ian Randle, ). Suzanne Slesin and Stafford Cliff, Caribbean Style (New York: Clarkson Potter, ); Suzanne Gordon and Anne Hersh, Searching for Sugar Mills: An Architectural Guide to the Eastern Caribbean (Northampton, MA: Interlink Publishing, ).  See for example David Buisseret, Historic Architecture Caribbean (London: Heinemann, ); Michael Connors, Caribbean Elegance (New York: Harry N. Abrams, ); Michael Connors, Caribbean Houses: History, Style, and Architecture (New York: Rizzoli Publications, ); Edward Crain, Historic Architecture in the Caribbean Islands (Gainesville, FL: UP of Florida, ).  Robert Potter, Low-income Housing and the State in the Eastern Caribbean (Kingston: U of West Indies P, ); Robert Potter and Dennis Conway, eds., Self-Help Housing, the Poor, and the State in the Caribbean (Kingston: U of the West Indies P, ).  Robert Potter, “Housing and the State,” in Low-income Housing and the State in the Eastern Caribbean (Kingston: U of the West Indies P):  – .

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The need to define their own home emerged from practices during slavery when people were responsible for building their own homes and providing the majority of their foods.⁴³ This meant that individuals built the most basic houses they could afford and made improvements over time as needed and when they could afford to do so. While it was customary to “make do” with the resources available, this pattern of house building allowed for individual preference and choice. Personalization of one’s house became an important characteristic in home building because it allowed individuals to display their identity and status to the viewing community. This independence in choice and preference fostered a practice of resident owners, where more than 95 percent of all homes were owned by their residents or their relatives.⁴⁴ Self-help housing also resulted in a sense of pride in the creation and maintenance of their homes and associated yard spaces. Sweeping the yard, for example, became an important task as it was viewed as a reflection of the homeowner’s housekeeping skills.⁴⁵ In this way, not only were community members involved in the construction of the house, but they were also expected to consume the meanings that improvements of the house conveyed. Similarly, improvements in one’s dwelling not only served the changing needs of the residents, but also conveyed their economic advancement to neighbors. This resulted in a type of community architecture that was developed out of a shared identity in behavior and desires. As a result, improvements in one’s home were, and continue to be, one of the most important investments for most Grenadians.

Evolution of vernacular architecture in Grenada During slavery With origins from plantation villages during slavery, the most popular vernacular dwelling in Grenada was a modest two-room, unattached house, with the yard spaces functional as integral parts of one’s home. During slavery, the typical village dwelling was very rudimentary and functional. It was made in the wattle-

 See Barry Higman, Jamaica Surveyed: Plantation Maps and Plans of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Kingston: U of West Indies P, ):  – .  Caribbean Community,  –  population census of the Commonwealth Caribbean (Georgetown, Guyana: CARICOM, ).  Several informants noted the importance of yards as an extension of the home. -year-old Claire, -year-old Sharon, and -year-old Mavis all indicated that sweeping was the first task they taught their children.

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and-daub style with thatched roofs and packed dirt floors. Because the plantation owners and managers did not invest in building materials for their laborers, the residents themselves were responsible for acquiring building materials and constructing them. As a result, the village residents were limited to the natural materials available in their environment, (usually clay, trees, and stones) to build their homes. They also enlisted the support of neighbors, relatives, and friends to help with the construction of their homes.⁴⁶ In contrast, main plantation dwellings and town houses were made from more permanent materials and had more manufactured materials, such as glass and various metals.⁴⁷ One good example of a main plantation house was depicted in an image from 1822 of the dwelling of Thomas Duncan, a Scottish resident planter, on his Maran Estate.⁴⁸ The watercolor depicts a romanticized view of a large stone house, set above a bustling works factory.

Post-Emancipation: c. 1838 to 1955 After full emancipation in 1838, the first dramatic changes in the house forms came in a change in the material used to build the walls of the house and the raising of the floor up from the ground. These houses maintained a two-room standard and the roofs remained thatched until well into the early twentieth century. The immediate replacement of the wattle-and-daub house, then associated with enslavement, reflected the change in their status as free people. Most residents not only moved away from the plantation villages in droves and settled in “squatter” settlement villages along the main road that ringed the edge of the island.⁴⁹ By the 1840s, most of the new houses were constructed in wood and had wooden floors that were raised onto wood or makeshift stone or pillars. From 1861 onward, the island experienced dramatic increases in its population, including an average of almost ten thousand each decade until 1901, as well as corresponding increases in the wood frame houses.⁵⁰  Higman, “Jamaica Surveyed,” .  See Higman, “Jamaica Surveyed,”  – .  Unknown artist, “The Buildings of Maran Estate in the Island of Grenada. The Property of Thomas Duncan Esqr. Novr. ,” (), image at John Carter Brown Library, JCB Archive of Early American Images (En M).  For an illustration of a typical village with wooden houses, see Percy William Justyne, “Negro Squatter Houses” (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, ).  C. H. Johnson, Grenada: Report and General Abstracts of the Census of  with Graphic Tables, and Notes Thereon (St. George: Government Printing Office); The Colonial Secretary, The Grenada Handbook, Directory, and Almanac for the Year  –  (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, ).

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This new house form was depicted in a series of images by English illustrator Percy William Justyne, then private secretary to Governor Charles Joseph Doyle (c. 1841– 1848) and later acting stipendiary magistrate of the island.⁵¹ One image, “Exterior of Negro Squatters House, Grenada,” depicts the basic form of the typical house-associated activities in the yard that lasted well into the twentieth century.⁵² It was a close-up of a small house with wood walls and thatch roof, which illustrated the typical house that endured for decades. A woman sits in the yard in front of the house and appears to eat from a dish. The house already indicates the typical shape that came to be standard on the island. On the long side that fronts the house was a wooden door in the center framed by two wooden windows on each side; there is a second door on the short side of the house that led into the yard. This second door was likely the one used to enter the house (rather than the front door) and likely led into the “hall.” At least the side door and one window are opened. The woman sits under the tree that shades the yard and is surrounded by several chickens and goats. There are several domestic items in the yard – including a ceramic water jug and bowl, as well as two makeshift stands that likely served as tables – reflecting the use of the yard as a site for domestic chores. In addition to changes in house form, emancipation also brought changes in the lifestyle of people. The use of wood to build most houses during this period and the incorporation of a wooden floor also symbolized their changed status, including their ability to relocate from one area to another. Like the chattel houses of Barbados, houses in Grenada during this period were built on foundations that allowed their easy “breaking down” and removal to other locations to pursue work opportunities, a practice that continued into the twentieth century.⁵³ This ability to move marked their freedom to move around, rather than their forced confinement on a single plantation during slavery. It also represented their new-found mobility and their progression to an improved status. This new wood-framed house remained the standard – with few structural changes – until the mid-1900s.

 Lionel Henry, “Justyne, Percy William,” in Lee, Sidney, ed., Dictionary of National Biography (London: Smith, Elder & Co., ): .  Percy William Justyne, “Exterior of Negro Squatters House, Grenada” (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London: [c. ]).  Robert Potter, “Urban Housing in Barbados, West Indies,” The Geographical Journal . ():  – .

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In the late-nineteenth century, wooden shingles were common on walls and on roofs.⁵⁴ Solid wood windows were replaced by louvres or jalousie shutters, which allowed breeze and light, while maintaining privacy. By the turn of the twentieth century, zinc galvanize was imported into the island and became cheaper, allowing some people to replace their thatched roofs with that material.⁵⁵ However, many continued to use thatch well into the first two decades of the twentieth century, and by the mid-1940s galvanize became the most popular roofing material used on the island. Starting in the 1930s, paint and cement were also imported into the island on a regular basis, but these too remained materials used by those who were economically well off. During the difficult years of the first world war, the Great Depression, and the second world war, few were able to afford these new upgrades in building material. By the mid-1940s, paint became increasingly standard in dwelling houses in successive years. Cement too experienced an increase in use but was generally used in conjunction with wood. By 1950, people began to use more glass in their houses, often replacing wooden windows and doors. By the time hurricane Janet arrived, the island’s building tradition was already experiencing gradual transformation through adoption of materials viewed as “improvement” markers. Rebuilding after hurricane Janet, then, fostered a transition to new forms of architecture that incorporated these features.

Hurricane Janet and the introduction of the Janet house (1955) When hurricane Janet hit the island on the early morning hours of September 23, 1955, it was not only a traumatic event, but the rebuilding of lives represented the most dramatic changes in vernacular architecture since emancipation. In the aftermath of the hurricane, a state of emergency was declared in the affected Caribbean region and Yucatan basin. With debris scattered across the island, food and water in short supply, and the majority of the residents effectively homeless, there were major efforts throughout the Caribbean and in Britain to provide immediate assistance to the survivors.⁵⁶ Still a British colony at the time of the hurricane, the devastation of the hurricane on the islands was regularly featured in newspapers across Britain, from Glasgow to London. Some of the issues faced by the authorities were difficulties in delivery of supplies to the islands, destruction  John May, Buildings Without Architects: A Global Guide to Everyday Architecture (London: Rizzoli, ).  Colonial Secretary, Grenada Handbook.  “Havoc in W. Indies: Grenada Suffers a ‘Major Disaster, Governors Report,” (Edinburgh) The Scotsman (September , ).

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of roads that caused further transportation problems, and lack of a coherent emergency scheme within local communities.⁵⁷ Most prominent among the charity advocates was Princess Margaret, who sought contributions in a series of fundraising activities.⁵⁸ Local governments requested assistance for food, water, portable electric generators, and building materials, such as aluminum sheeting to help provide shelter. British and American ships were diverted to carry food and supplies to the region, but there was never enough, prompting Grenada’s government to ask its residents to refrain from hoarding the limited supplies. The damage in Grenada was particularly devastating, mostly because of the nondurable materials used to build the houses. An estimated 25,000 people – roughly one-third of the island’s population – had no shelter, while an additional 25,000 were living in temporary accommodation with relatives, neighbors, or other make-shift shelters.⁵⁹ The majority of the houses that survived the hurricane had some damages, which limited the normal use of these homes. Recognizing the need for more permanent building materials, some governments in the region passed stricter laws that required new houses to be built with sturdier materials.⁶⁰ In Grenada, however, no such laws were enacted, so people continued to build their homes with the materials they could afford, mostly of wood walls and galvanized sheet roofs. In response to their loss or extensive damages to their homes, people “bunked down” with those who still had their structures standing, usually those made from concrete and more permanent materials.⁶¹ Several families slept on the floors in the homes of their generous and fortunate neighbors who still had most of their walled dwellings intact. Accounts of this post-hurricane period all indicated a time of great trauma and difficulty for all. Mary, an informant who was eight years old at the time of the hurricane, mentioned that she moved with her mother and brother to her grandmother’s small, damaged house in the aftermath of the hurricane.⁶² Her family was one of those who relied  “Destructive Trail of the Hurricane,” (London) Daily Mail (September , ).  “W. Indies Hurricane Victims: Appeal for Relief,” (Edinburgh) Scotsman (November , ); “Princess Margaret and the Hurricane Fund: A Visit to the London Office,” The West India Committee Circular (December ): .  “Destructive Trail of the Hurricane,” (London) Daily Mail (September , ); “Tornado Islands,” (London) Evening Standard (October , ).  Robert Potter, “Urban Housing in Barbados,”  – .  All informants who have lived through the hurricane tell a common story of community sharing in this moment of crisis. They tell of how the shared trauma made them rely on their communal spirit to support each other in whatever ways they could.  Mary C., personal communication (June , ).

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on government food handouts, which were limited at best. Another informant, Jojo, who was eleven years during the hurricane, said his family lost their entire house except for his mother’s trunk of clothing.⁶³ He wore his mother’s dresses because all of his clothing was lost in the hurricane along with all his family’s material possessions. Having lost of their homes and all of their material possessions, shelter, food, and basic goods were only some of the immediate needs of the people that needed to be reestablished. Their economic activities also needed to be rebuilt because more than 75 percent of the crops were destroyed and infrastructure devastated. With their homes lost or damaged, most people viewed the aftermath of the hurricane as a time for new beginnings in all facets of life. The most critical need as they began to reconstruct their lives was the acquisition or repairing of homes. For the first and only time in their long history, the independent people relied on the Grenada government for help with accommodations. This was a very dramatic development in a country where people were historically expected to provide their own housing. The response by the authorities was a state-funded effort to provide housing through the importation of pre-fabricated houses to residents in Grenada, Barbados, and other affected islands.⁶⁴ Within weeks of the hurricane, more than ten thousand units of a similar pre-fabricated house were imported into Grenada to house those considered homeless – those with no shelter at all. It is still unclear exactly where these materials came from, but some oral accounts claimed that the wood for the houses came from Surinam, while others claimed they came from Trinidad, where a “caretaker agency had been set up to look after the relief needs of the Grenada Government.”⁶⁵ There were delays in distribution of the houses and people were frustrated with waiting to rebuild their lives. Individuals who attempted to repair their houses or to create make-shift shelters were generally not considered eligible for these government-issued housing. In the meantime, the government offered some others who were willing to rebuild their homes some of the materials, but according to oral accounts, the handful of lumber offered was not sufficient to

 Jojo K., personal communication (June , ).  “Rehabilitation After the Hurricane: Large Grant and Loan for Grenada,” (London) The West India Committee Circular (January ); Our Correspondent, “Relief Measures in B. Honduras: Victims of Hurricane Evacuated,” (London) The Times (October , ).  The Daily Mail Reporter, “ Dead as ‘Janet’ Goes On: Food is Rushed to Spice Isle,” (London) Daily Mail (September , ).

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rebuild dwellings that were completely destroyed.⁶⁶ In a group discussion on the handling of the rebuilding, several informants claimed that there were unfair practices in the distribution of the houses.⁶⁷ The most prevalent complaint was the perception that these houses were given to middle- and upper-class relatives and supporters of government officials who did not need them for housing, but instead used them for storing and drying crops.

The “female” Janet house When it finally arrived, the house was revealed to be a uniform structure that resembled the most basic traditional house form and was interpreted as distinctly “female.” It was a two-room dwelling with walls made of wood, roofs made of galvanized sheeting, and foundations and steps made of concrete blocks. There were four windows in the structure, one on each wall, and two doors, one on each of the long sides. A long side fronted the public road, but the door in the rear was the typical entrance used by residents. The roof was made of unpainted galvanize – the most popular roofing material on the island since its introduction in the late nineteenth-century. Shaped in the popular Georgian style with gabled roof, the walls of the house were made up of two parts that residents referred to as “the skirt” and “the bodice” (see Figures 1 and 2). The skirt was the lower portion of the walls made of small wood slats laid out vertically, which in the imaginations of some informants resembled the pleats in a skirt.⁶⁸ The bodice consisted of the two upper portions, just under the roof. The top part of the bodice resembled the skirt because it used the same small slats and ran vertically, while the bottom part of the bodice was made up of broader wood slats and ran horizontally. The bodice was separated from the skirt with a wood rail – referred to as a “seam” that covered the space where the bodice and skirt meets. The bodice also included the windows, which also used smaller wood slats and ran vertically. The portion of the bodice immediately below the roof ran vertically and was shaped to accommodate the gabled galvanized roof.

 Tom G., personal communication (June , ); Sandra J., personal communication (June , ).  This discussion included twelve informants who had some version of unequal treatment in the distribution of supplies. Most were very young at the time, but they do recall it as a topic of discussion among their families.  See for example, Mary C., personal communication (July , ); Munro M., personal communication (June , ).

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No informant was able to recall why the terms skirt and bodice – items of clothing that were associated with women – were used. However, they all think of the Janet house, although not all houses, as a “female” house because of its perceived physical shape which many suggest resembled the stereotypical woman’s body shape. Other explanations also referenced localized gender roles, including one by Alistaire, who was sixteen years old at the time of the hurricane. He speculated that it was because the interior of houses was generally viewed as “women’s spaces” and so the house was considered to have a “woman’s vibe.”⁶⁹ For him and many others, the interiors of the houses were culturally perceived as female spaces because they were defined by women. The general belief was that not only did women decorate the interiors of their houses, but these were also spaces where women performed their “female duties.” Alistaire went as far as saying that traditionally, a man did not stay inside the house unless he was sleeping, eating, or sick. For him and many of his generation, a man who spent too much time inside the house suggested that he was lazy and not engaged in the task of “providing” for his family.⁷⁰ Similarly, Sara, a 55-year-old nurse, supported Alistaire’s claim that the interiors of the houses were sites controlled by women, which challenged men’s manhood and their roles as providers. She supported her argument by claiming the houses provided women with a space to create home economic activities (such as baking, cooking, and ironing) that supplemented their families’ incomes.⁷¹ However, 62-year-old Daniel countered Sara’s argument that there were no fixed gender roles for men and women, only a perception of such by some residents. Instead, he argued that in reality, women have always been providers and heads of household for centuries, with or without male partners. In addition to explanations based on the shape of the house and the dwelling as a site of gendered activities, the fact that the house was named after a female hurricane was also significant. Some male informants have also speculated that “female hurricanes” were much more destructive than those with male names. Here, they looked beyond hurricanes in the Caribbean to reference two of the most destructive hurricanes in recent history, such as Katrina (2005) and Sandy (2012).⁷² Their reference of these two hurricanes were countered by women who reminded them of Ivan and Andrew (1992), arguing that they only

 Alistaire D., personal communication (June , ).  This view is currently changing among the younger generations who now spend a considerable amount of time inside the home. The main reasons for the change were the incorporation of amenities into the home, such as presence of television and other forms of entertainment.  Sara S., personal communication (June , ).  Sam J., personal communication (November , ).

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remember Katrina and Sandy because of the broad media coverage those hurricanes garnered. Regardless of these arguments, some people continue to perceive hurricanes with female names as being more destructive and dangerous.

Figure 1. A Janet house in Mount Granby, St. John, showing the rear entrance. Photographed by the author.

Despite these varied accounts of the symbolic association of the Janet house with the female form, this gendered association of space with symbolic values was the concern of numerous studies too many to treat here.⁷³ These spatial distinctions are socially constructed, but so too are the social relationships caused in these processes. As regards architectural space, Daphne Spain argues that “dwellings reflect ideals and realities about relationships between women and

 Numerous studies have focused on the relationship between space and gender, especially domestic spaces, over time and across cultures. Some good examples are: Elizabeth Collins Cromley and Carter Hudgins, eds., Gender, Class and Shelter: Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture (Knoxville, TN: U of Tennessee P, ); Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, ); Leslie Weisman, Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-made Environment (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, ).

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men within the family and in society. The space outside the home becomes the arena in which social relations (i. e., status) are produced, while the space inside the home becomes that in which social relations are reproduced.”⁷⁴ Gendered status, then, is played out both within and outside of the home. While all of the theories for why the house was considered female may be true for various people, in the context of pre-1955 Grenada, the domestic realm was associated with the family, which was traditionally controlled by females. Traditionally, it was in the domestic realm that women had elevated status and they typically were the ones who drove the need for continued improvement to the home. Likewise, the tasks performed in and around the house were generally performed by women, including cooking, sewing, washing, and cleaning. However, women’s control of the domestic sphere did not include them from the public sphere and most women in Grenada have historically performed some work outside the home. Thus, the seemingly contradictory views presented by Alistaire and Sara mirror the historical and cultural roles of women in both domestic and public spheres. The gendered association of the Janet house not only identified the physical shape of the house as a stereotypical woman’s body, but also reflected the cultural association of the home as a “woman’s space.” The interior of the house was made up of two rooms, which also reflected traditional patterns of having a bedroom and “hall.” The hall was the room into which one entered into the house and served multiple functions, including a formal sitting room, dining room during special occasions, a general storage area, and a sleeping area for some members of the family. The hall was where special guests were welcomed and entertained, and it was here that the finest furnishings and material goods were displayed. It was in the hall that the residents’ “good” dishes, ceramic figurines, and ornamental flowers were housed and displayed, often within a cabinet. As this was a most basic house, there was no internal bathroom, toilet, or kitchen, and their associated activities were performed in spaces outside of the home. For most people, latrines served as the main space for toileting; bathing and washing took place in some space near the back of the house or in nearby rivers; and a kitchen was also improvised near the back of and adjacent to the house. These were not unusual practices at the time, but some people had already become accustomed to additional amenities within the dwelling. The entire structure sat on pre-fabricated concrete block foundations that were placed near the four corners and a few also had concrete steps that led into the dwelling with the majority having improvised wooden steps (see Figure 1). The concrete foundations and steps created prob-

 Spain, Gendered Spaces, .

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lems for many potential recipients of the Janet house because concrete material represented permanence and many people did not own the land on which they lived. Many of them were temporary residents on plantation lands who had continued in the established post-emancipation patterns of moving to areas wherever work was available or where relatives were located. As a result, it became customary to build houses of wood that could be “broken down,” then rebuilt in new locations, which accounted for the large number of people who resided on land they did not own. Most owners of the land were hesitant to allow non-owners to install permanent structures on their land, but some allowed it. The large amount of concrete foundations that dot the landscape in many areas attest to the fact that many non-owning residents continued to migrate, taking their houses with them. Another tradition that the Janet house followed was the communal character of erecting, breaking down, re-erecting, and repairing following the long standing custom of reliance on relatives, neighbors, and friends in the setting up of homes. These activities were important social gatherings with very distinct gender roles where men actually constructed the house and associated features, while the women cooked food and prepared drink to feed the working crew. Similarly, community members were also instrumental in “consuming” the final product of the home. They were the ones who “read” the messages sent by the house’s residents of their socio-economic situations. Traditionally, people dressed up their houses to demonstrate their gradual improvement. For example, one informant, Florie, noted that she always placed her curtains with the design facing the exterior so that her neighbors and other people going by could see when new curtains were hung.⁷⁵ However, people soon realized that the house had some limitations that reinforced stigmas about the house.

Transforming the traditional: Adapting after Janet The Janet house arrived in Grenada at a moment of crisis, and although it retained the traditional house form, its introduction served as a symbol of transformation in architectural practices. The fact that it was accepted from the government as dwellings during the period of disruption marked it as transient. On the other hand, its later abandonment and adaptation as people regained control of defining their dwellings marked it a symbol of their transcendent value of self-help. The Janet house came to symbolize the tension between the transi-

 Florie R., personal communication (June , ).

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ent need for basic dwellings and the transcendent need to control and define dwellings. After the hurricane, people were more open to adapting and building new types of housing, as well as to incorporating new amenities into their homes. Not only did the Janet house serve as an artifact of the hurricane, its tworoom form symbolized the past, while its adaptation to more complex house forms represented change in dwelling preferences. In this way, the Janet house came to represent the house type of the past, a period of decay and renewal, when one house form – the traditional two-room, wood dwelling – ceased to be the standard form. The socio-historical context in which the Janet house emerged inaugurated changes in vernacular architecture that many residents have identified as pre- and post-hurricane Janet. Thus, the Janet house became a key symbol of vernacular building practices that led to social and economic progress. Nevertheless, complaints about the Janet house soon circulated among residents. One common complaint was that the seams between the wood slats were magnets for bedbugs, which led some people by extension to perceive the residents as being unclean. Some bemoaned that the houses did not always fully fit back into position after a “break down” and instead left gaps between the grooves in the wood. Others also complained that wooden windows did not let in light and made the house hotter. The underlying message from these complaints was that people viewed this uniform house made up of “foreign” parts as a government handout that, over time, marked long-term residents as being low class, and in contrast offended their tradition of self-help. Rejection of these houses also symbolized a rejection of state involvement in dwellings and of the colonial past. By the 1960s, with the onset of the global independence movement, there was even more zeal not only for both individual and national selfdetermination. In Grenada, labor unions led the movement for fair working conditions and for independence from Britain. Rejection of the free-standing dwelling houses as a primary residence is evident in the fact that owners never “dressed up” their Janet houses. For example, there was a longstanding tradition of painting one’s dwelling regularly, but residents of Janet houses never painted them, and the dark brown unfinished wood is still the color of the handful of free-standing houses on the island. This was unusual, given the prevalent use of color to personalize one’s home and the custom of painting one’s home annually during the Christmas season to both show off one’s hard work during the past year and to anticipate renewal for the coming year. Once the immediate need for dwellings was satisfied and some time had passed, home owners returned to rebuild their homes to reflect their renewed

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identities. For them, the Janet house represented the past. Owners of the Janet house were faced with the difficult task of having to choose between their need to display their identity in their dwellings, even as they disliked the fact that they were not economically able to start over. The economic status of owners tended to dictate whether to adapt or abandon the Janet house as primary dwelling space. The few owners of the Janet house who were able rebuilt new homes, often keeping the Janet house for secondary detached kitchens or for storage. However, the vast majority simply could not afford to rebuild entirely new homes and instead adapted the Janet house into a hybrid house form, through additions of several rooms to the Janet house to build larger houses and the adoption of amenities like piped water and electricity.⁷⁶ One informant, Maudlin H., whose aunt was the recipient of a Janet house, noted that “people wanted to make their house look decent, look posh and make it nice.”⁷⁷ Although they could not start to build from scratch, they had to paint, “change its style and make it nice,” in order to make it unique. Thus, the emergence of the Janet house served as an opportunity of renewal and change in vernacular architecture practices which endure into the present. This incorporation of the Janet house into larger homes reflected traditional values of re-use and improvement, as well as newer values of expansion and adaptation. The ways in which all of these values manifested varied considerably, but adaptation and improvement was most persistent through the present. These improvements were usually gradual, but they represented a shift in aspiration from simple basic accommodations of the two-room traditional house. While not everyone could expand their Janet houses and most could only build houses similar to the Janet, they nevertheless preferred to build their own modest homes with their own materials. In fact, by 1962 when ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax went to the island to study musical instruments on the island, his photographs of people performing or posing outside of their homes provided information on some types of houses that were in use.⁷⁸ By far, the greatest number of the ones he documented were simple two-room houses that were similar in form to the traditional dwelling house as well as to the Janet house. Although they too were made of wood, they were not made of the uniform slats used in the Janet house. Instead, they were from a variety of wood types, shapes, and sizes, reflecting their acquisition at different times.  Newspapers regularly advertised implements associated with the installation of electricity and water. For an example from the hurricane time, see Grenada Government Gazette . (September , ): .  Maudlin H., personal communication (July , ).  See (acc. March , ).

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This expression of self-help and independence continued despite the people’s economic challenges. However, in the aftermath of Janet, there was an overwhelming desire to adapt the Janet house into larger ones. This new trend in house building coincided with a series of cultural, social and historical factors that contributed to the need for renewal in vernacular housing, one which was larger, had newer building materials, and included amenities. The first reason why people built larger houses was to better accommodate the growing population, which had doubled from the previous half century.⁷⁹ The second reason was an effect of the first significant wave of emigration in the 1950s to Britain and to Canada. The main goal for emigrants was to work and save enough money to build a house back home in Grenada. They also served as models to emulate by aspiring individuals who hoped to display their economic advancement in their house. Third, these new homes incorporated new materials that became more affordable after the second world war. For example, glass replaced wooden windows and door features, while imported cement became cheaper.⁸⁰ These houses were usually made up of a combination of materials, so that most were made using both wood and concrete. The expansion and improvement of the house changed people’s way of living from the practice of continual relocation and fostered a more stable residence location. In addition, the additional rooms allowed for the movement of some tasks from outside to the interior of the house. For example, kitchens and bathrooms were now attached to the new dwellings, but there were more rooms to conduct specific tasks, such as dining rooms, which previously did not have a dedicated space in most homes. Verandahs also became critical additions to homes because they served as transitional spaces between the interior and exterior, as well as spaces to perform a variety of chores and to socialize. Universally built on the “front” of the house (the side that faces the road), it allowed residents to communicate with neighbors and passersby without having to invite them into the interior of their house. Its presence in a home was meant to convey to viewers that the residents of the house were economically well off enough to enjoy leisure time, instead of engage in work. The verandah soon became the must-have feature in most homes and itself was a symbol of dwelling houses after hurricane Janet.

 Trinidad and Tobago – Central Statistical Office, “Eastern Caribbean Population Census” (Port of Spain: C.S.O. Printing Unit, ); Colonial Secretary, Grenada Handbook.  Grenada Government Gazette (St. George, September , ): .

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Similarly, having piped water and electricity in the home meant that more individuals could now add interior baths and kitchens, although these were adopted at different times. Having water delivered to one’s home replaced the need to collect water “at all ungodly hours” from public taps.⁸¹ The shift from outdoor to indoor cooking also allowed for the use of gas and kerosene stoves, which replaced the traditional coal pot.⁸² Internal bathrooms were adapted much later than kitchens because there was a cultural dislike of having toileting functions in the house, especially in close proximity to the kitchens.⁸³ Electricity was another amenity that everyone aspired to have in their homes. Over time, these improvements freed up time once spent on chores and allowed people to spend more time socializing or in leisure activities. All of these changes symbolized the home owner’s new consumption of modern living that emerged after the second world war, even while they maintained traditional values of self-determination after a period of disruption. After the hurricane, the dwelling continued to be a symbol for the owner’s reflection of self, an expression of their socio-economic status, pride, hard work and achievement, all born out of self-determination during and after slavery. These changes also brought about and reflected changes in behaviors around the home. The expansion to the new larger homes, the addition of more rooms, and the addition of amenities moved some of these tasks to the interior of the home. The addition of amenities like electricity and piped water also reflected the owner’s good economic standing because they required steady income to pay monthly rates. These amenities also allowed the use of the latest gadgets and helped reduce the amount of time spent on chores. Similarly, home owners continually replaced architectural features when newer, more fashionable forms became available. While the physical house served as a model of the traditional two-room house that was standard before the hurricane, it also was a symbol of the many transitions that occurred in the vernacular home after hurricane Janet. As vernacular architectural practices evolved, the free-standing Janet house became a symbol of the past. While it was acceptable for short-term accommodation, it represented a contradiction in people’s desires to define their dwelling. Its rejection through abandonment as primary dwellings and adaptation represented people’s aspirations beyond basic, functional needs. The hybrid homes and other forms that emerged after the hurricane marked a shift to embrace val Janey G., personal communication (July , ).  The coalpot was a traditional earthenware coal cooking stove.  Numerous informants mentioned taboos around having one’s kitchen “too close to the toilet.” There was a general fear of the mixing of the functions in both spaces.

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ues of modernity in the home. Thus, these houses came to figure decay and renewal, leading to social and economic progress. This pattern of adaptation through incorporation of new trends in architecture remained in place until the 1990s. Until then, house building continued to rely on community involvement and self-funding, often through assistance from relatives abroad. By the 1980s, cement and glass became more available and cheaper which saw a dramatic increase in their use. By the 1990s, the availability of bank loans and professional architects fostered a new trend in house building. People now aspired to build large homes from the onset, with the use of professional builders. Already established houses were also improved through expansion and through the replacement of building materials, especially the replacement of wood with concrete. Some individuals now frowned upon houses built with wood walls, judging them as dated and lower-class.⁸⁴ From this perspective, the Janet house was then viewed as technologically ancient and relegated merely to the fond category of a folk house.

The last of the species: Cultural memories of the Janet house Today, most of the free-standing Janet houses have since disappeared as a result of their incorporation into larger homes and from abandonment over time. According to Heritage Officer Michael Jessamy, the island has only five free-standing Janet houses in use today.⁸⁵ Two of the houses are in small towns, while three are in rural villages. Two houses are located in St. John parish, one each in Grand Roy and Mount Granby (Figure 1); one in Victoria, St. Mark; one in Snell Hall, St. Patrick; and the last in La Digue, near Grenville, St. Andrew. All five houses remain unpainted, except for the one in Grand Roy which had a window and door painted during a recent nearby road renovation. During my survey, I located five additional houses, as well as remains of abandoned ones in various states of decay (for example, see Figure 2). Three of these newly identified ones were located in St. John parish (two in Gouyave, one in Clozier, and one in Concord) and a fifth in Victoria, St. Mark. It is possible that these new finds were missed in previous counts because they were located in hillier terrain and were hidden from view by houses built in front of them, and

 Dora L., personal communication (July , ); Sarah S., personal communication (June , ).  Michael Jessamy, personal communication (July , ).

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by overgrown bushes. All remaining Janet houses currently in use show evidence of repair, mostly caused by long-term water damage to the untreated wood. Repairs usually included replacement of wood in windows, doors, and walls, sometimes with galvanized sheeting to protect from further water damage. For example, the house in Snell Hall used galvanized sheeting to “patch up” a rotting lower “skirt” portion of the house. The damage to the exterior wood was likely caused by the rains, which residents say tend to fall diagonally onto the southwestern side of the house.

Figure 2. A decayed Janet house near Bon Jour, St. Mark. Photographed by the author.

The near-extinct status of the Janet house is not mourned for the object of the house itself. Instead, for those who lived through the hurricane, the house triggers the memories of shared trauma of the hurricane, as well as their desperation and communal spirit in its aftermath. For younger generations, it has come to symbolize traditional house building, one they fondly showcase to tourists as a part of their heritage and past. When all free-standing Janet houses disappear, people will no longer have a physical object to reference when they tell stories of the hurricane. Most of the individuals who can recall their experiences during the hurricane have either died or are now in advanced years and were at least

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seven years or older on the night of the hurricane. For them, the Janet house was an artifact of a moment in time and of tradition. With their death, the first-hand accounts of the events of the hurricane and its immediate aftermath also die with them. In this way, the disappearance of the physical house is mirrored by the disappearance of the first-hand stories told about the event. Thus, hurricane Janet was one of the most memorable events on the island in the recent past and for most people, it is the event they remember with great nostalgia. For many, it is not just romantic ideas of the devastating event, but the spirit of the people who triumphed in its wake, despite difficult circumstances. For Anthony, hurricane Janet remained the single most memorable event he had ever experienced and one that he loved to share with others. Beyond the hurricane’s powerful forces, the greatest memory is of the people’s generous and communal spirit that he revered most. His eyes were clear and focused as he told stories of his experiences, but his consistent words and vivid descriptions took the listener to the center of the action, beginning on the night of September 23, 1955. He weaved his words with drama and feeling which transported you back in time to relive the event with him. More importantly, he recalled the goodness of people who banded together to support their neighbors and share what little they had. More than anything, it was people’s characters and actions in the post-hurricane period that forever endeared them to him. He told the story to anyone who was willing to listen and he claimed that he would keep on doing so because “there are not a lot of us left” to talk about Janet. Sadly, with no discussion for preservation or protection of the remaining Janet houses, hurricane Janet might soon become a footnote in history books. But for people like him, hurricane Janet is a shared experience that will live on in his memory. Simultaneously, for the younger generations, the Janet house symbolized a time of the past and of “old fashioned” housing. People in their fifties or younger can only recall second-hand stories told to them of devastation about the hurricane and having lived in or interacted with one of these houses. These younger people simply know that “a really bad hurricane called Janet” happened and the Janet house was a “starter” home for people to get back on their feet.⁸⁶ For them, the Janet house represented a time before “material progress.” Members of this group were more likely to recall details of hurricane Ivan, which caused widespread destruction on the island in 2004. It was Ivan that served as their traumatic hurricane experience and it was the temporary blue tarps that served as a reminder of government-assistance.⁸⁷

 Jonah M., personal communication (June , ).  Samuel B., personal communication (June , ).

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Despite their status of near extinction as individual, free-standing units, the Janet houses continue to exist within the fabric of many dwellings on the island. Many Janet houses served as foundations for larger houses that were expanded as residents endeavored to “better themselves” by adding rooms over time, as needed and when able. In this way, the Janet house represented a significant part of the rebirth of the domestic architectural realm in the post-hurricane period, a fact that many people seem to have forgotten. But, by far, most people continue to seek means to build their own homes, even if it means a small simple house, as long as it was through their own hard work. Notwithstanding its short-lived history and endangered status, the Janet house was a key feature in Grenada’s history and culture, as well as in the memory of people who experienced both the hurricane and interacted with these dwellings. Its adapted form served as a symbol of people’s achievements and identity, even as it served as a reminder of how cultural practices as house building are disrupted by nature and cultural change. In this way, it represented both continuity and change in the island’s vernacular architecture.

General Section

Kristen Deiter

Symbolic Buildings and Conceptual Blends: How The Concert for New York City and 9/11 Poetry Humanized the Twin Towers In this essay I argue that artists and New Yorkers have consciously associated Americans with the World Trade Center (WTC) Towers, and incorporated the Towers into Americans’ self-fashioning, through various tropological devices that conceptually blend the Towers with people and represent the buildings as human. To demonstrate this cultural practice, I analyze representations of the Towers, first in pre-9/11 American culture and then in two post-9/11 cultural materials that showcase textual and/or visual rhetoric: The Concert for New York City, a video production of a benefit concert staged in October 2001; and poetry published within a year of the attacks. In the 2014 volume of Symbolism, Ursula Hennigfeld analyzed several French and Spanish novels that represent the events of September 11, 2001.¹ While a number of critical studies, like Hennigfeld’s, focus upon 9/11 novels, scholars have produced very few analyses of 9/11 poetry² or the post-9/11 symbolism of New York City’s World Trade Center (WTC). Long before 9/11, Michel de Certeau called the WTC “the most monumental figure of Western urban development.”³ On 9/11 and in the months that followed, the WTC’s former Twin Towers’ signifi-

I wish to thank Jason Deiter, Kristine Miller, Brian Williams, Paulina Bounds, Martin Sheehan, Ula Klein, Scott Stenson, Jeremy Ekberg, and Beth Powell for commenting on drafts of this essay. My thanks also to Jeffrey Fisher and Anthony Baker for astute observations that inspired revision, and to Holly Mills and Sonya Bowman for their persistence in obtaining research resources. I greatly appreciate the careful reading and revisions suggested by the editors at Symbolism. I presented a version of this essay at the Between Places and Spaces: Landscapes of Liminality Conference at Trinity College Dublin in . I am grateful for the Tennessee Tech University Faculty Research Grant, and the Tennessee Tech University College of Arts and Sciences Faculty Development Grant, which funded that opportunity.  Ursula Hennigfeld, “Discourses of Terror in French and Spanish Novels after /,” Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics  ():  – .  One is Pavla Veselá, “A Highly Charged Pronoun: ‘We’ in Three September  Poems,” Poetics Today . ():  – .  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life [], trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: U of California P, ): . DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-011

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cance increased exponentially, as the Towers, more than any other architectural structure in recent history, became symbolic embodiments of the United States and its people. In the relatively brief timespan of about thirty years, these buildings evolved through an astonishing range of symbolic meanings, many of which humanized the buildings in various ways. In this essay, I will analyze the processes through which these buildings acquired this symbolic humanization, by examining their representations in American culture, especially The Concert for New York City (2001) and poetry that was anthologized within a year of the attacks. How and why do individuals, organizations, and creators of literary and other cultural texts shape the symbolic meanings of buildings such as the WTC? One answer lies in the emergent field of cognitive literary studies. As Joseph Carroll has recently noted, it is part of human nature to incorporate literary and other cultural meanings into one’s self-fashioning: “In fashioning images of themselves and the world they inhabit, individuals adopt roles and narrative structures that prevail within their own cultures. [… E]veryone fashions some sense of his or her identity in relation to [his or her] culture.”⁴ Self-representation, self-fashioning, or “deliberate shaping in the formation and expression of identity”⁵ within one’s cultural-geographical context, as I will argue about the WTC, takes place, in part, through the associative, metaphorical, and symbolic process of conceptual blending. Scholars in various fields have noted the significance of association, metaphor, and symbolism for interpretation. In fact, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have argued that the human conceptual system, “in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”⁶ In other words, human beings understand and experience “one kind of thing in terms of another.”⁷ Research in cognitive science disciplines has supported Lakoff and Johnson’s claim that “metaphor lies at the heart of abstract thought and symbolic expression.”⁸ Since the late 1980s, architectural critics, too, have emphasized that association, metaphor, and symbolism are significant for interpreting architecture. Nelson Goodman writes that a built structure may become a symbol through association with a historical event that took place there or with the

 Joseph Carroll, “The Truth about Fiction: Biological Reality and Imaginary Lives,” Style . ():  – , .  Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, , italics in the original.  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, .

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building’s purpose.⁹ Lawrence J. Vale has argued that these types of “associations seem central to the way that most people think about buildings”; thus, metaphor and symbolism are “valuable analytical tools” for comprehending a building’s cultural significance.¹⁰ Similarly, Neil Leach expounds that buildings may “come to embody identity through a process of symbolic association.”¹¹ It is essential to examine this process more fully, not only to develop techniques for interpreting buildings’ symbolic meanings in general, but also because understanding the process can help individuals resist when it is used to manipulate them, as I will show below. In 2014, both the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the Freedom Tower opened in New York City, and already these built structures are being fashioned in ways that humanize them. The WTC website personifies the Freedom Tower and other new WTC buildings as an “extraordinary place [that] steps boldly into the future.”¹² And the National September 11 Memorial and Museum website officially describes this space metonymically, in bodily terms, as “located within the archaeological heart of the World Trade Center site.”¹³ Now, with these two new built structures that represent post-9/11 American resilience in place, and with two more WTC buildings under construction as the fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches, it is critical to examine how those buildings’ predecessors at Ground Zero – the original WTC Towers – have come to symbolize Americans and American national identity, and how many (not all) Americans have, in turn, used the Twin Towers to characterize themselves.¹⁴ This symbolism has developed, in part, through the unconscious psychological process that Leach, drawing upon Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, calls “mirroring.” Leach explains mirroring as a “process of identification which involves a twofold mechanism of grafting symbolic meaning onto an object and

 Nelson Goodman, “How Buildings Mean,” in Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, ):  – , , .  Lawrence J. Vale, Architecture, Power, and National Identity, second ed. (London: Routledge, ): .  Neil Leach, “/,” Diacritics ./ ():  – , .  “World Trade Center Timeline of History,” World Trade Center (acc. February , ).  “About the Museum,” National September  Memorial & Museum,  (acc. February , ).  See Angus Kress Gillespie, Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, ): ; and David Lehman, “The World Trade Center,” , in Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians, eds., Poetry after /: An Anthology of New York Poets (Hoboken: Melville, ): xv.

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then reading oneself into that object, and seeing one’s values reflected in it.”¹⁵ The components of mirroring are introjection and projection. Buildings are “introjected – absorbed within the psyche,” primarily through vision; and people “project something of ourselves onto the other in order to recognize […] ourselves in the other.”¹⁶ Leach argues that mirroring occurs in relation to the post-9/11 Twin Towers when Americans, having unconsciously “introjected” the Towers into themselves and “projected” some aspect of themselves onto the buildings, recognize themselves in the Towers and vice-versa.¹⁷ He also acknowledges that people can “see buildings as selves” or “anthropomorphize them”;¹⁸ that is, perceive the human form in buildings’ general shape and proportions. Building upon Leach’s claims and Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory, I argue for a more intentional explanation for Americans’ self-identification with the Towers: that artists from various cultures, along with New Yorkers, have inscribed cultural meanings upon the Towers by consciously associating the buildings with Americans and incorporating the Towers into Americans’ self-fashioning. Cultural creators and many New Yorkers have intentionally, and for various purposes, used rhetorical tropes to associate the Towers with human beings, specifically Americans, fostering Americans’ self-identification with the Towers. Since the Towers’ construction, and particularly since 9/11, these acts of selffashioning have exemplified Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s theory of “conceptual integration” or “conceptual blending.”¹⁹ According to this extension of Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphor theory, conceptual blends combine, or integrate, elements from two or more sources or “input spaces,” into a “blended space,” as shown in Figure 1 below.²⁰ Conceptual integration is a mental operation in which “structure from two input mental spaces is projected to a new space, the blend.”²¹ The authors define “mental spaces” as “small conceptual packets constructed as we think and talk, for purposes of local understanding and action.”²² Fauconnier and Turner explain that people “are exceptionally adept at integrating two extraordinarily different inputs to create new emergent structures, which

 Leach, “/,” , .  Leach, “/,” .  Leach, “/,”  – .  Leach, “/,” , .  Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, ): .  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors,  – ; see also  – .  Fauconnier and Turner, Way, , .  Fauconnier and Turner, Way, .

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Figure 1. A Conceptual Blend

result in […] new ways of thinking.”²³ As an illustration, Bruce McConachie has shown that when an actor performs in a play, two input spaces – the actor and the character she portrays – meld in the actor’s body, which, for playgoers, becomes a composite space.²⁴ As shown in Figure 2 below, the composite space of the humanized Twin Towers conceptually integrates two input spaces or concepts: humans and the WTC.

Figure 2. Conceptual Blend of the Humanized Twin Towers

Fauconnier and Turner argue that blending occurs mostly unconsciously.²⁵ However, if admixtures that humanize the Towers occur unconsciously, it is partly because such amalgamations have circulated within American culture, as many individuals have deliberately – through their actions and rhetoric – interfused humans with the Towers, and thereby humanized the Towers in literature and culture, especially since 9/11. Understanding these conceptual integrations can empower the public to resist when composites are used as propaganda to advance an agenda such as supporting a war, as some have used the Towers to do. As I will show, very little resistance took place when the Towers were humanized as American symbols to support the War on Terror in 2001. Understanding how conceptual blends operate can help people working in many disciplines interpret representations of place in texts of all kinds.

 Fauconnier and Turner, Way, .  Bruce McConachie, Engaging Audiences: A Cognitive Approach to Spectating in the Theatre (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ): .  Fauconnier and Turner, Way, .

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In James S. Duncan’s analysis of Kandy, Sri Lanka, as a text, he examines “the tropes by which narratives are encoded in the landscape.”²⁶ These tropes include allusion, allegory, synecdoche, metonymy, simile, and recurrent narrative structure.²⁷ Similarly, individuals have used various tropological devices to create mixtures that humanize the Towers. To demonstrate these cultural practices, I will analyze representations of the Towers, first in pre-9/11 American culture and then in two under-researched post-9/11 cultural materials that best and most concisely illustrate the range of blends, and their underlying tropes, that have humanized the Towers: The Concert for New York City (hereafter, Concert), a video production of a benefit rock concert staged in October 2001;²⁸ and anthologized poetry published within a year of the attacks. Many more 9/11 poems exist, but I focus upon early 9/11 poetry because it was written near the time of the Concert, an artistic event that exemplifies how “the dominant rhetoric about 9/11,” which the Bush Administration and the American news media promoted, as Pavla Veselá has recently shown, was circulating in American culture in the weeks after 9/11.²⁹ Both forms of artistic representation, part of what Jeffrey Melnick calls the “multimedia culture” of 9/11,³⁰ employ poetic images and texts: many of the Concert’s song lyrics, visual images, short films, and speeches resemble poems in their imagery and economy of words. As this essay will demonstrate, these images and texts concatenate the Towers and people, specifically Americans, to humanize the buildings and foster Americans’ selfidentification with the Towers. This essay will analyze the respective artistic media and how they contributed to these symbolic meanings. In the Concert, a cultural text produced by many artists, conceptual fusions generally demonstrate American resilience and defiance and promote a military response to the attacks in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. While these syntheses unify Americans, they also silence dissenting perspectives. These representations oversimplify the Towers’ meanings to promote national unity, partly for comfort during a national crisis but also because, in October 2001, many Americans wanted some kind of retaliatory action, as the Concert’s performers, speakers, and audience progressively demonstrate. By contrast, in poetry composed by individuals

 James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom [] (Cambridge: CUP, ): .  Duncan, City,  – .  The Concert for New York City, dir. Louis J. Horvitz (Sony, ), DVD, hereafter cited as Concert.  Veselá, “Highly Charged,”  – ; the quotation is from .  Jeffrey Melnick, / Culture: America under Construction (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, ): .

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throughout the year following the attacks, blends represent the Towers and Americans more empathetically – as suffering, wounded, mortal. While the poetry does not necessarily resist the military call, it exhibits less aggression than the Concert and constructs a more diverse post-9/11 American nationhood that more accurately represents the range of American attitudes about 9/11.

Conceptual blends of humans and the WTC before 9/11 Although 9/11 transformed the Twin Towers’ symbolism, it was not the first time their cultural significance had changed. Rather, from the start, the Towers were complex symbols with multiple meanings crafted by individuals who built their own reputations throughout the Towers’ construction. Frequently, those meanings have fused two input spaces into a new mental space that represented the Towers as human. As I will show, through several tropological devices, the types of symbolic and metaphoric associations that Goodman, Vale, and Leach discuss above helped create these conceptual blends. Roughly chronologically, these pre-9/11 tropes began with anthropomorphism and personfication and gradually expanded to include juxtapositions of the Towers with humans, metonymy, synecdoche, and apostrophe. Even before the Towers were built, they had “tremendous symbolic significance” for the planners and government officials who used the WTC to express their ideas of themselves and America.³¹ By 1968, when the WTC’s construction began, various individuals and organizations were “struggle[ing] to manipulate public perception” of both the buildings and themselves.³² For instance, chief architect Minoru Yamasaki was an American whose reputation hinged on the structures’ success after he had been criticized for “distancing himself from the [popular] International Style.”³³ Perhaps responding to the human-rights struggles of the time, Yamasaki wrote to Austin Tobin, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, that the buildings must be “scale[d …] to the human being” to make them “friendly and humane.”³⁴ Yamasaki’s letter humanizes the WTC in two ways. It first anthropomorphizes the

 Gillespie, Twin Towers, .  Eric Darton, Divided We Stand: A Biography of New York’s World Trade Center (New York: Basic, ): .  Gillespie, Twin Towers, ,  – .  Qtd. in Darton, Divided, .

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buildings, or represents them in human form, and then personifies them as having the human quality of friendliness. These tropes demonstrate his goal of fostering people’s “identification with” the WTC.³⁵ His concept of a human scale for the Towers evokes the work of fifteenth-century Italian architect Francesco di Giorgio, who inscribed human figures into building elevations with an “anthropomorphically derived modular grid in which the proportions of the human body [were] used to determine a temple plan.”³⁶ Di Giorgio mapped human faces or bodies within building façades and plans, to scale his architecture to the human form.³⁷ Yet, for Yamasaki, the Towers’ form was not merely human but also fundamentally American. Following the suggestion of an expert at shaping identities, Lee K. Jaffe in the Port Authority’s public relations office, Yamasaki designed the Towers to be, at least briefly, the world’s tallest buildings.³⁸ Skyscrapers being an American invention, the superlative Towers symbolized the nation’s “deepest aspirations.”³⁹ Their enormity embodied the American spirit of ambitious dreams and awe-inspiring size. After the Towers’ completion in 1973, as I will show, many more Americans contributed to the buildings’ cultural meanings by associating the Towers with American national identity and conceptually integrating themselves with the Towers through their professional or political self-fashioning. Despite Yamasaki’s aim, the newly-built WTC “didn’t exactly warm the hearts of New Yorkers.”⁴⁰ Some criticized the Towers’ size – each filling the area of a city block – or considered them to be “brutal and bland.”⁴¹ Other architects ignored or ridiculed their design, as architectural taste was shifting toward more environmentally-conscious projects.⁴² Paul Goldberger, shaping the Towers’ identities and his own as the architectural critic for The New Yorker, called them “the dullest buildings in New York.”⁴³ The criticism was nationwide: Los

 Leach, “/,” .  Creighton Gilbert, ed., Renaissance Art (New York: Harper, ): ; see also Leach, “/,” .  Gilbert, Renaissance Art,  – .  Gillespie, Twin Towers, .  Cathleen McGuigan, “Requiem for an American Icon,” Newsweek (September , ): .  Christopher Hume, “Towers an Emblem of the U.S. Empire,” Toronto Star (September , ), Ontario ed.: B, LexisNexis [acc. January , ].  McGuigan, “Requiem,” ; see also “Towering Symbols,” in One Nation: America Remembers September ,  (Boston: Little, ):  – , .  Gillespie, Twin Towers,  – ; McGuigan, “Requiem,” .  Qtd. in World Trade Center: Anatomy of the Collapse, dir. Ben Bowie (Artisan, ), DVD.

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Angeles Times critic Wolf von Eckardt complained that the design was “straight and stark and simply sawed off at the top.”⁴⁴ Over time, entertainers inadvertently began to advance Yamasaki’s goal of humanizing the Towers whenever they deliberately placed the buildings at the center of their art. Using the WTC as a setting for various stunts and spectacles, performers transformed the buildings into stages for human exploits; extended the range of positive, human associations with the Towers; and expanded their own identities through association with the skyscrapers. For example, “in 1974 the French aerialist Philippe Petit walked a tightrope that was stretched between the north and south towers” as hundreds watched from below.⁴⁵ Although Petit’s stunt was beyond the World Trade Centers Association’s (WTCA) control, WTCA leaders intervened to shape the event to their advantage, refashioning both the buildings and the Association. When authorities arrested Petit, WTCA President Guy F. Tozzoli asked the judge to pass a light sentence in the hope that he could give the Towers positive publicity if Petit were released. The judge sentenced Petit to perform a show in Central Park for disabled children, “break[ing] the ice” between the Towers and the public.⁴⁶ In 1975, skydiver Owen J. Quinn parachuted off the North Tower, drawing attention to his cause, which he stated as “the plight of the poor.”⁴⁷ And in 1977 toy maker George H. Willig scaled the South Tower for hours as television cameras broadcast the scene worldwide.⁴⁸ Although the City sued Willig for the cost of police overtime, Mayor Abraham Beame ultimately realized “that going after a folk hero would be a public relations disaster” and settled on a US$1.10 fine – a penny a floor – which Willig paid him at a press conference, advancing both of their professional reputations.⁴⁹ Likewise, Hollywood humanized the WTC in the 1976 remake of King Kong, in which Kong, himself a personified creature, climbs and falls from one of the Towers, an event that “validate[d] the Twin Towers as the new American icon.”⁵⁰ These events “humanize[d] the Twin Towers”⁵¹ by using them as a backdrop for Petit’s, Quinn’s, and Willig’s human stunts, and Tozzoli, Willig, and Beame’s humanitarian displays, and by juxtaposing the Towers with Petit’s, Quinn’s, Willig’s, and Kong’s human form, all demonstrating Goodman’s

       

Qtd. in Darton, Divided, . “Towering,”  – . World Trade Center. Gillespie, Twin Towers,  – . Darton, Divided, ; Gillespie, Twin Towers, . Gillespie, Twin Towers, . Gillespie, Twin Towers,  – . Gillespie, Twin Towers, .

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point that a building’s symbolism depends upon its association with events that occur there. The repeated associations of people with the Towers conceptually blended the two. These occasions also enabled individuals to craft their own reputations and careers through the buildings. After terrorists bombed the South Tower on February 26, 1993, killing six people, the media and other writers surpassed earlier efforts to humanize the Towers. They began to depict the buildings as human beings, often through conceptual blends. The attempt to destroy the Towers, and their new, tragic prominence “soften[ed] images of their rigidity,”⁵² revealing them to be vulnerable, like people. The media began to represent these “more ‘human’” Towers with images of clothing or body parts, as in a 1994 advertisement for The Gap, in which a pair of shoes stood together, a metonymy for the human body through close association with it, as “New Twin Towers,” or a 1995 cover of The New Yorker, in which the Towers represented “the high points on a punk rocker’s mohawk hairstyle,” a synecdoche in which the body part stands for the whole person.⁵³ Each of these images presents a composite space that conceptually integrates the Towers with people. In 1999 the subtitles of both Eric Darton’s Divided We Stand: A Biography and Angus Kress Gillespie’s Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center personified the buildings as having life stories. Anthropomorphizing the “flesh-and-blood steel and concrete towers” and personifying the WTC as “becoming a living building,” Darton goes so far as to apostrophize the Towers when he imagines readers asking the buildings, “Who are you?” and conversing with them.⁵⁴ He even humanizes the Towers visually through a 1993 photograph of two adults in Twin Tower costumes, exemplifying people’s appropriation of the Towers for their self-expression.⁵⁵ By representing the Towers as having “flesh” and “blood,” and representing people whose body parts or clothing depicts the Towers, Darton traces how Americans have humanized the buildings through close physical association with them, demonstrating the Towers’ inte-

 Darton, Divided, .  Darton, Divided, . Although “definitions of synecdoche and metonymy have always overlapped,” Wallace Martin defines synecdoche as “a trope […] in which part is substituted for whole.” See Wallace Martin, “Synecdoche,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, eds. Roland Greene et al., fourth ed. (Princeton: Princeton UP, ):  – . Lakoff and Johnson treat synecdoche as “a special case of metonymy” in which “the part stands for the whole” (Metaphors, ).  Darton, Divided, , , , . Apostrophe is directly addressing something that is nonhuman and, typically, personified. See Ross Murphin and Supryia M. Ray, “Apostrophe,” in The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms, by Murphin and Ray, third ed. (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, ):  – .  Darton, Divided, .

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gration with Americans. After the 1993 bombing in particular, the WTC was recognized as “symboliz[ing] American exceptionalism, or American capitalism, or even America itself”;⁵⁶ poet David Lehman called it “A great symbol of America.”⁵⁷ Consistent with Mark Turner’s description of conceptual blending, such flattering impressions of the Towers, constructed within the amalgamated space, then projected back onto humans, specifically Americans, in the source input space, as shown in Figure 3 below.⁵⁸

Figure 3. Conceptual Blend of the Humanized Twin Towers, with the Blend projecting back to the Source Input Space

As this model suggests, just as Petit, Quinn, and Willig had done in the 1970s, many New Yorkers used the Towers’ image as an emblem of economic and cultural dominance to promote their careers, deliberately humanizing the buildings and engaging in self-fashioning by interfusing the Towers with themselves and benefitting from the nexus. They realized that “the very name, World Trade Center, conjure[d] up visions of globalization and the organizations that control[led] the world economy” and that these buildings “represent[ed] a concentration of people and power unequalled even in New York.”⁵⁹ Those who worked in the WTC therefore often used the Towers to symbolize their professional achievements: “To have your office in the tallest building meant something. The higher you went, the more prestige you accrued.”⁶⁰ Companies valued “The World Trade Center address […] as a symbol of achievement and power,”⁶¹ which reflected upon – or, in Turner’s model, projected back to – the Towers’ tenants. In April 2001, New York Governor George Pataki promoted himself and his state by calling the WTC a “world-famous symbol of the vitality and economic might of the

 Gillespie, Twin Towers, .  Lehman, “The World Trade Center,” xv.  Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford UP, ): .  Hume, “Towers,” B.  Tony Wong, “Landmark Decisions: Towers Just Lost Prestige,” Toronto Star (September , ), Ontario ed.: C, LexisNexis [acc. January , ].  Gillespie, Twin Towers, .

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New York region.”⁶² By associating the Towers with the dominance of the regional or global marketplace, Pataki in this speech, and many of those who worked in the WTC, shaped the buildings’ image and used that image to fashion their identities. They self-identified with the Towers as the ultimate symbols of capitalism and the financial power of New York City. In Gillespie’s words in 1999, “The choice of an impressive office address is closely linked with attitudes toward work, wealth, consumption, and achievement. While the long-term goal of the business is the accumulation of wealth, along the way it may be necessary to spend a little extra on rent to establish the firm’s social rank and to validate its achievement.”⁶³ A firm’s social rank, competitiveness, and accomplishments reflect upon its owners and employees and shape their attitudes about themselves, the value of their work, and their career success. Likewise, Lucy Bond has recently noted that the WTC “was arguably the most prominent symbol of market globalization.”⁶⁴ Such superlatives contributed to the self-images of those who worked in the WTC, and to New Yorkers in general. Perhaps for these reasons, by 9/11, most people had accepted the WTC “as a piece of architecture. They may not have loved it, but they liked it.”⁶⁵ After 9/11, however, the Towers were extensively humanized – no longer merely liked but “beloved.”⁶⁶

The Concert for New York City Six weeks after 9/11, the Concert was staged at Madison Square Garden, and broadcast on television and online, for a dual purpose that likewise associated the Towers with Americans: “to benefit the victims of the World Trade Center attack and honor the heroic efforts of rescue workers.”⁶⁷ At one point during the Concert, Harrison Ford acknowledges “the efforts of the companies that joined together to produce this event: VH-1, Cablevision, Miramax Films, and AOL, as well as thousands of volunteers across the country.”⁶⁸ Organizers invited five

 Qtd. in Sally Jackson, “Most Potent Symbol of US Fiscal Power – War of Terror: The Nightmare Unfolds,” (Sydney) The Australian (September , ): .  Gillespie, Twin Towers, .  Lucy Bond, “Intersections or Misdirections? Problematising Crossroads of Memory in the Commemoration of /,” Culture, Theory and Critique . ():  – , .  Qtd. in World Trade Center.  Anna Quindlen, “Weren’t We All So Young Then?” Newsweek (December , ): .  “Concert for New York City: Over $ Million Raised,” VH.com, MTV Networks,  (acc. February , ).  Concert :: – .

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thousand of the City’s fire, police, and rescue personnel to see performances by some of the United States’ and Great Britain’s most famous musicians, as well as internationally prominent actors, athletes, and politicians.⁶⁹ In keeping with the Concert’s fundraising purpose, its organizers integrated the destroyed Towers with the human victims, urging viewers to feel personally connected to both – and therefore motivated to donate: the show raised US$30 million.⁷⁰ This amount suggests the Concert’s power, both to shape the Towers’ cultural meanings and, as I will show, to humanize the Towers through conceptual blending, while constructing the performers’ personal, professional, and political identities and gradually, throughout the Concert, promoting retaliation for the attacks. In the Concert, the conceptual blends utilize two of the tropological devices that helped blend the Towers with humans before 9/11: associative juxtapositions and metonymy, strengthening Goodman’s, Vale’s, and Leach’s claims about the significance of association and metaphor in creating a building’s symbolic meanings. The DVD production of the 20 October 2001 event exemplifies how the organizers, performers, and audience used words and images to represent the Towers and conceptually integrate them with Americans. The audio track begins with a roaring audience, apparently cheering for the Concert’s first image, a close-up video of the pre-9/11 Towers, aurally melding the audience with the buildings. A photograph of a uniformed firefighter and a police officer is superimposed over the video of the Towers, and the images merge into one, epitomizing how the Concert’s producers juxtaposed the people and buildings to signify that the nation was mourning both the victims and Towers, synthesizing the two concepts. As a keyboard begins to play, the image cuts to a photograph montage of construction workers building New York skyscrapers, again fusing the Towers with people. Soon David Bowie begins singing Paul Simon’s 1968 ballad “America,” reminiscent of when the Towers’ construction began. The audience roars with approval, both supporting, and encouraging viewers to support, the Towers’ integration with humans, specifically Americans. The images then shift to footage of New Yorkers, including a group carrying a gigantic American flag in a parade. As Bowie sings the word “America” for the first time, the video depicts the Statue of Liberty, an anthropomorphic representation of American national identity. The audience again screams its support. The montage’s final image of the Statue is similar in composition to the film’s first image of the Towers. The Concert’s opening montage, therefore, visually fuses the Towers with American na-

 “Concert.”  “Concert.”

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tional symbols and Americans. Moreover, the show strategically emphasizes solidarity between the military allies, the United States and Great Britain: after performing “America,” English-born Bowie, who had been living in New York City for nearly a decade and had recently purchased a home there, greets his “fellow New Yorkers,” especially “the folks from [his] local ladder.”⁷¹ The Concert maintains two focal points – the Towers and human victims and survivors – and amalgamates them by representing both as objects of mourning. As the second song begins, the stage is lit, dramatically revealing the backdrop: a forty-foot, grey metallic framework like the base of a Twin Tower façade. During the show, spotlights illuminate this backdrop and sometimes project shadows over it in the shape of the Gothic “arched cathedral-like window frames” that decorated each Tower’s base.⁷² At other times, projected shadows make the framework seem broken. The backdrop thus represents the Towers both as they stood and after they fell. On each side of this framework stands a narrow, gray, rectangular grid, representing the pre-9/11 Towers as viewed from a distance. Human victims and survivors compose the show’s other focal point. Throughout the Concert, celebrities and politicians introduce emergency personnel who describe 9/11 rescues at the WTC. Others bring onstage firefighters’ widows and children, further associating the Towers with the victims. Besides reacting to events onstage, audience members sing, dance, and hold up victims’ photographs or memorial cards. Concertgoers also display posters of the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and the Towers, uniting the Towers with American icons through repeated association. The juxtaposition of memorial cards and posters of the Towers reinforces the Towers’ personification as lost lives that are mourned. The first politician to take the stage is Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. He connects the Towers and Americans, and establishes the Concert’s symbolism in which each stands for the other, when he describes a visual image, a cartoon taped to a wall in the United States Capitol, depicting the New York skyline with a police officer and a firefighter standing at Ground Zero. “The caption reads, ‘America’s Other Twin Towers,’” he exclaims as applause builds to a roar. Pointing at the crowd, he shouts, “And tonight we salute those Twin Towers right here.” He receives a standing ovation for this metonymy as spectators scream

 Steven Kurutz, “David Bowie: Invisible New Yorker,” New York Times (January , ) (acc. February , ). The opening montage occurs at Concert :: – ::; Bowie speaks to the audience at :: – ::.  Alex Walker, “Reporter’s Notebook: A Visit to Ground Zero,” CNN.com, CNN (November , ) (acc. April , ).

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and wave American flags, affirming Daschle’s compounding the Towers with themselves. Likewise, as Daschle refashions the Towers as American symbols, he gains political capital by introducing himself to new demographics of voters and brandishing his personal strength, his office having been targeted, days earlier, with anthrax.⁷³ The Concert visually and textually elaborates upon the Towers as American symbols. A video screen is sometimes lowered above the stage to juxtapose images of the Towers, the Statue of Liberty, and the American flag, strengthening the Towers as American symbols through frequent association with more established symbols. Throughout the production, this screen displays several short film tributes to New York City. One film, in which Americans from across the country self-identify as “New Yorkers,” concludes with a printed statement of metonymy that blends all Americans with New Yorkers and extends the Towers’ symbolism beyond New York, to the nation: “On September 11th, all Americans became New Yorkers.”⁷⁴ Thus, the associative juxtapositions of the Concert’s opening video montage establish that the Towers represent America and Americans. Less than fifteen minutes after this montage, Daschle metonymically states that New Yorkers, particularly the first-responders in the audience, represent the Towers. And the filmic assertion that all Americans are New Yorkers expands this symbolism, metonymically representing Americans as symbols of the Towers. These rhetorical moves strengthen the Towers’ conceptual integration with Americans by the beginning of the Concert’s third hour. The Concert builds upon this conceptual blend throughout the next two hours as the show’s tone grows progressively militaristic. Just as Daschle added a new dimension to his public image through the Towers, subsequent politicians and celebrities integrate the Towers with American resilience while crafting their public images and developing their careers. Several speakers, including Mayor of New York City Rudolph Giuliani, assert that the attack has strengthened New York and America.⁷⁵ Giuliani, too, had already fashioned himself as an emblem of New York’s and America’s might, a metaphoric “Tower of Strength,” through his “displays of tenderness” and “sternly reassuring presence – on the early-morning TV shows, at press conferences and memorial services, in frequent visits to the smoky rubble of the towers.”⁷⁶ Reshaping

 “Daschle: ‘They Were Trying to Kill Someone,’” CNN.com, CNN (October , ) (acc. April , ). Daschle’s introduction and speech occur at Concert :: – ::.  The video occurs at Concert :: – ::.  Giuliani’s speech occurs at Concert :: – ::.  “Tower of Strength: Commanding and Compassionate, Mayor Rudy Giuliani Bravely Leads His City through Its Darkest Hour,” People (October , ): +.

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the Towers and himself as symbols of post-9/11 American resilience, Giuliani mixed his image with that of the Towers, humanizing the WTC while building for himself a reputation that later underwrote his campaign for the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination. The Concert was staged in New York while Operation Enduring Freedom took place in Afghanistan, and some of the Concert’s performers engage in the struggle for the Afghan War’s meaning and the Towers’ role in its justification, even as they struggle to define their own post-9/11 political and professional identities. However, the Concert only promotes one viewpoint: that of jingoistic support for war. To illustrate, after firefighter Mike Moran honors those who perished at the WTC, and insults Osama Bin Laden, the audience spends nearly a minute cheering and chanting, “U-S-A! U-S-A!,” pumping their fists overhead.⁷⁷ Some performances support the war through song lyrics, incorporating 9/11 culture into their songs’ meanings. When The Who performs “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” the video screen appears in front of the Twin Towers backdrop and, for several minutes, depicts the British Union flag between two American flags, in brilliant color, followed by images of the Towers and the Statue of Liberty, reinforcing the solidarity of military allies and intermixing the Towers with national icons.⁷⁸ Similarly, Bon Jovi’s performance of “Wanted Dead or Alive” echoes President George W. Bush’s remark that Bin Laden was “Wanted: Dead or Alive.”⁷⁹ Indeed, many of the Concert’s performers turn the Towers into a nationalistic symbol to promote a military response to 9/11. In Paul McCartney’s 2011 documentary The Love We Make, McCartney, who had been on a plane awaiting take-off from New York City when the WTC attacks took place, articulated his position while planning the Concert on 12 October 2001: “If someone like Hitler [were] invading Britain, I don’t think I could be a pacifist anymore. […] I’d […] try and fight it.”⁸⁰ While introducing McCartney as the Concert’s final performer, Jim Carrey quotes from The Beatles’ song “The End”: “[McCartney] once said, ‘The love you take is equal to the love you make.’ [… H]e’s here tonight because New York City deserves a little payback.”⁸¹ Carrey’s introduction sets the stage

 The Mike Moran segment occurs at Concert :: – ::.  Concert :: – ::.  Toby Harnden, “Bin Laden Is Wanted: Dead or Alive, Says Bush,” The Telegraph (September , ) (acc. February , ). Bon Jovi performs “Wanted Dead or Alive” at Concert :: – ::.  Paul McCartney, performer, The Love We Make, dir. Albert Maysles (Eagle Rock, ), DVD.  Jim Carrey’s introduction of Paul McCartney occurs at Concert :: – ::.

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for McCartney’s performance, which clarifies payback not merely as a reward for heroism but also as retaliation. McCartney has written that “[p]eople blend with places,”⁸² and his self-presentation in the Concert combines first-responders with attacked spaces, especially the Towers. He identifies with the audience, describing his hometown under attack and at war: “My dad was a fireman in World War II in Liverpool,” he says. “She took some heavy bombing. So I’m proud of him tonight. I’m proud of all you guys, the Port Authority, the cops.”⁸³ McCartney’s integration of people and places encourages concertgoers to do the same – and they do. Throughout the Concert, emergency personnel in the audience hand their uniform headgear to celebrities and politicians onstage, who wear the caps and helmets. This headgear, evocative of 9/11 WTC rescues, reinforces the connection between Americans – especially 9/11 survivors and victims – and the Towers. McCartney’s apparel, too, concatenates the first-responders and Towers. He asserts, “I’m proud to be wearing this [FDNY] t-shirt, which came from one of the guys who survived the Twin Towers,”⁸⁴ embodying the Towers’ and Americans’ conceptual integration. Besides reinforcing the audience’s image of the Towers, McCartney’s performance allows him to fashion himself as a supporter of the war. He authoritatively claims to speak for the global community when he thanks the first-responders “on behalf of the British, on behalf of America, on behalf of the world.”⁸⁵ When he performs “Let It Be,” the Concert’s other performers sing with him in an ironically militarized recasting of the lyrics’ traditionally peaceful meaning: “There will be an answer” – a military response to 9/11. McCartney concludes this song with a spoken imperative to support, or at least accept, the war: “Let it be, America.”⁸⁶ This “answer” motif carries into his song “Freedom,” which McCartney performs twice during the Concert. He gives a solo performance of “Freedom” immediately before “Let It Be” and then performs it again with the Concert’s other performers immediately after “Let It Be,” as the Concert’s closing credits roll. When he introduces “Freedom” for the first performance, he says he wrote it the day after 9/11, further incorporating the Towers into his political and artistic identity. “It’s about freedom,” he exclaims, adding with a raised fist, “That’s worth fighting for.” The lyrics promote this belief:

 Paul McCartney, “In Liverpool,” Blackbird Singing: Poems and Lyrics,  –  (New York: Norton, ):  – .  Concert :: – ::.  Concert :: – ::.  Concert :: – ::.  McCartney performs “Let It Be” at Concert :: – ::.

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I will fight for the right to live in freedom. Anyone who wants to take it away Will have to answer.⁸⁷

McCartney’s full performance exemplifies how the Concert integrated human beings with the WTC to support the show’s progressively militaristic tone. The Concert humanizes the Towers; yet, in its generally single-minded support for retaliation, it also oversimplifies Americans’ attitudes, manipulates viewers into supporting military reprisal for the attacks, and rejects opposing viewpoints. In fact, the audience’s mood grows progressively belligerent over the course of the nearly five-hour Concert. Fifteen minutes into the Concert, Billy Crystal receives cheers and applause for his considerate words: “We have learned something in all of this mess. We have to be kind to people who are different from us, who look different, who talk strange [sic], who have different beliefs.”⁸⁸ Although he follows this statement with a punchline about people from New Jersey, this segment of the Concert shows that, early on, the audience is open-minded and compassionate toward people from other cultures. However, when Richard Gere takes the stage nearly halfway through the Concert’s fourth hour and suggests that Americans turn their energy not into “more violence and revenge,” but rather “into compassion, into love, into understanding,” the agitated crowd silences his lone voice of dissent. As the audience heckles Gere, he acknowledges that his attitude is “unpopular right now.”⁸⁹ Thus, even as The Concert humanizes the Towers by uniting them with Americans, at times it seems to dehumanize the concertgoers by promoting conformity and groupthink.

9/11 poetry While the Concert encourages its 2001 audience and viewers to identify with the Towers as a multitude, 9/11 poetry from that year teaches readers to identify with the Towers as individuals, and utilizes more tropes to evoke a wider range of emotions and views. Like the images and words that humanized the Towers and reshaped them as symbols of America and Americans in the Concert, poetry published during 2001 and 2002 humanizes the buildings through conceptual

 McCartney performs “Freedom” for the first time at Concert :: – ::. He and the concert’s other performers perform it again at :: – ::.  Concert :: – ::.  The Richard Gere segment occurs at Concert :: – ::.

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blending. At the same time, such literature provided poets a medium through which to construct their own post-9/11 identities. By 2002, many Americans opposed responding to 9/11 with war.⁹⁰ Therefore, unlike the Concert’s organizers and performers, who synthesize the Towers with Americans to emphasize a defiant American nationalism and support a military response to the attacks, poets integrated the Towers with humans to represent post-9/11 Americans as suffering, injured, and mortal, fashioning a nationalism based on vulnerability, empathy, and hope, rather than aggression. Most 9/11 poems of literary quality published by 2002, and most of those treated here, appeared in one of three anthologies: Allen Cohen and Clive Matson’s An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11, comprising poems by American, English, and Australian poets;⁹¹ William Heyen’s September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond; and Dennis Loy Johnson and Valerie Merians’ Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets. ⁹² Humanizing the Towers in poetry typically involves one or more of seven tropological devices, several of which also humanized the Towers before 9/11 and in The Concert. I discuss them here in order of increasing complexity: imagery juxtaposing the Towers with humans; synecdoche; “orientational” or “spatialization metaphors” suggesting human spatial orientation;⁹³ anthropomorphism; apostrophe; personification; and the metonymic substitution of humans for the Towers. The great majority of 9/11 poems that represent the Towers humanize the buildings by juxtaposing them with people, bodies, and/or body parts; a few of these poems do so with arresting complexity. For instance, Robert Vas Dias describes deceased New Yorkers’ bodies that are “compacted into the foundations of tall buildings” and “resurrected again each time a building falls.”⁹⁴ This imagery incorporates human bodies into the fabric of humanly-scaled structures. It also transforms human catastrophe and death into hope by imagining that when buildings fall, as on 9/11, these bodies experience not death but rebirth. Vas Dias’ juxtaposition conceptually integrates the Towers with people,

 Noam Chomsky,  –  (New York: Seven Stories, ):  – .  Allen Cohen, “Introduction,” in An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on /, eds. Allen Cohen and Clive Matson (Oakland, CA: Regents, ): i–iv, iii.  Cohen and Matson, Eye; William Heyen, ed., September , : American Writers Respond (Silver Spring, MD: Etruscan, ); Johnson and Merians, Poetry. Veselá also identifies these three anthologies in “Highly Charged,”  – , and she similarly notices in / poetry a shift in tone from “[t]he bellicose rhetoric of the establishment” ().  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors,  – .  Robert Vas Dias, “Song of the Cities: After //,” in Heyen, September,  – , .

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the human condition, and bodily renewal, and suggests, through this integration, that loss can bring forth rejuvenation. September 11 poets often combine human-building juxtaposition with other devices, integrating multiple inputs into the blend. In David Ray’s “Six Months After,” published in 2002 and canonized by 2007 in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, a rescue worker recalls victims jumping from the burning Towers as he discovers a dismembered foot at Ground Zero: – “It was raining bodies,” said another [firefighter], holding an axe, “I found a foot encased in the rubble.”⁹⁵

Ray amalgamates humans with the Towers, not only by juxtaposing bodies and Towers that are reduced to fragments and intermixed, but also through synecdoche. Here, although the victim’s foot is detached from the body, it stands for the whole body, just as the rubble, detached from the buildings it once composed, stands for the Towers. The word encased further suggests a body enclosed in a coffin. These various inputs create a concatenated space in which the humanized Towers’ experience of the attacks resembles the human victims’ experience, inviting readers to empathize with both the Towers and human victims. Adding depth to this analysis of the bodily and human experience, Lakoff and Johnson have shown that “[o]rientational metaphors” or “spatialization metaphors” derive from “physical and cultural experience.”⁹⁶ For example, downward-oriented metaphors, like “[h]e dropped dead,” are based on negative human physical and social states such as “sad[ness],” “sickness and death,” “low status,” and “bad.”⁹⁷ Such metaphors humanize the Towers in poetry by integrating the buildings with negative human bodily experiences through the body’s downward “spatial orientation.”⁹⁸ In Ray’s poem, then, because rain falls, “raining” implies an up-down orientational metaphor, suggesting the spatial orientation of falling objects. Ray reinforces this bodily, spatialization metaphor, as the “raining” objects are actual bodies falling from the Towers. Bruce Bond similarly employs this combination of tropes. He emphasizes an orienta-

 David Ray, “Six Months After” (), in The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Vol. E, eds. Jerome Klinkowitz and Patricia B. Wallace, seventh ed. (New York: Norton, ):  – , lines  – . The poem also appears in Cohen and Matson, Eye, .  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, , .  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors,  – , italics in the original.  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, .

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tional metaphor and juxtaposes the Towers with the human body when he envisions the Towers falling “still deeper through the floor / of the mind” in a woman’s dream.⁹⁹ These tropes visually and textually fuse the Towers with the people who suffered on and after 9/11, evoking sadness and empathy. Alternatively, some post-9/11 poets shape the Towers in the human image through anthropomorphism. Jack Hirschman calls the Towers “those giant / Twins”; Marj Hahne, “the Twins”; and Ishmael Reed, “twin brothers of mayhem and death,” all suggesting human twin bodies.¹⁰⁰ F. D. Reeve’s epithet “gold-skin towers” evokes the Towers as vulnerable, embodied buildings, as do D. Nurkse’s lines: as if the plane entered the eye and it was the mind that began burning.¹⁰¹

Nurkse’s speaker invites readers to empathize with the Towers by imagining them not merely with human proportions but with human bodies and minds in pain. Similarly, Judith Minty’s description of the attacks suggests a murder: “the plane stabs the tower”; and Samuel Hazo represents the Towers’ collapse as death by drowning: both towers drowned in their own dust.¹⁰²

Some poets combine a human-building juxtaposition with the anthropomorphized Towers: Eliot Katz represents the Towers “with 50,000 individual heartbeats working in Twin Bodies.”¹⁰³ In each of these anthropomorphic images, the poet compounds the buildings with people in a new mental space that represents the Towers as physically human, and thus as co-victims with the suffering people, encouraging readers to empathize with and mourn the Towers and victims.

 Bruce Bond, “The Altars of September,” in Heyen, September,  – , .  Jack Hirschman, “The Twin Towers Arcane,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – , ; Marj Hahne, “A Blessing for New York,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye, ; Ishmael Reed, “America United,” in Heyen, September,  – , .  F. D. Reeve, “Sunset, New York Harbor,” in Heyen, September, ; D. Nurkse, “October Marriage,” in Johnson and Merians, Poetry,  – , .  Judith Minty, “Loving This Earth: Lake Michigan: //,” in Heyen, September,  – , ; Samuel Hazo, “September , ,” in Heyen, September,  – , .  Eliot Katz, “When the Skyline Crumbles,” in Johnson and Merians, Poetry,  – , .

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Other poets extend the Towers’ humanization beyond anthropomorphism, through conceptual blends that personify the buildings. Nikki Moustaki’s imperatives in “How to Write a Poem after September 11th” illuminate the poet’s power to bring the Towers to life through human feelings and behaviors: Don’t call the windows eyes. We know they saw it coming. We know they didn’t blink. Don’t say they were sentinels. Say: we hated them then we loved them then they were gone. Say: we miss them.¹⁰⁴

Here, Moustaki draws upon the pre-9/11 conception of the WTC by reminding readers of the progression from “we hated them” to “we loved them,” evoking an evolving human relationship. She ironically advises poets not to personify the WTC, yet insists that the Towers “saw” and “didn’t blink,” fashioning their humanity as fact, as if they faced their attackers without fear. Daniel Berrigan compares the Towers’ literal fall to the metaphoric fall of “Lucifer,” and Jeff Poniewaz describes them as “twin Molochs,”¹⁰⁵ both poets alluding to personified biblical demons in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” Similarly, Allen Cohen combines an up-down orientational metaphor with biblical and classical allusions to personify the Towers as Goliath and Polyphemus, humanlike giants wounded by adversaries’ weapons: The towers of commerce collapse from the blow of a sling shot and the fire of the eye blinding torch.¹⁰⁶

Katz personifies the fallen Towers as “Twin Bodies” with a “gaping hole blowing dark smoke out a new mouth”;¹⁰⁷ like Moustaki and Cohen, he anthropomorphizes the impact site as a facial feature and then evokes a human activity, smoking, to advance from anthropomorphism to personification. Ray likewise personifies the Towers: having juxtaposed the buildings with rescue workers’ dialogue, he concludes,

 Nikki Moustaki, “How to Write a Poem after September th,” in Johnson and Merians, Poetry,  – , .  Daniel Berrigan, “After,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – , ; Jeff Poniewaz, “from ‘September , ,’” in Heyen, September,  – , .  Allen Cohen, “Whatever Happened to the Age of Aquarius? April , ,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – .  Katz, “When the Skyline Crumbles,” line .

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Some say the debris also speaks.¹⁰⁸

And in “Home,” Carlos Martinez describes “the refusal of flesh to die and of concrete refusing to crumble,” doubly humanizing the Towers by juxtaposing them with 9/11 victims and personifying them as resisting death. Each of these personifications creates a blended space that affirms the Towers’ symbolic humanity.¹⁰⁹ Still other poets humanize the Towers through conceptual integration by combining human-building juxtaposition and anthropomorphism with apostrophe or personification. Nancy Mercado’s speaker in “Going to Work” addresses the WTC as a person: “My subway travels through / The center of your belly,” implicitly juxtaposing a Tower’s body with her own as a commuter. She also evokes the human by apostrophizing the Towers as deceased people in phrases like “Afraid I’ll forget your façade” and “your twin ghosts.”¹¹⁰ Several poets go beyond anthropomorphizing or apostrophizing the Towers by personifying them as having human characteristics, feelings, or behaviors. Kelly Levan’s “To the Towers” imagines people carrying pebbles from the destroyed Towers in their pockets, enabling the people to “see Your / Heart.”¹¹¹ Here, Levan juxtaposes human beings with the Towers by representing the Towers in small, vulnerable pieces, held close to human bodies and carried in pockets, in much the same way that the Towers once served as large, protective, compartmentalized containers for respectively small, vulnerable people. The poet personifies the Towers as “You” and as having a “Heart” or personality that can be “see[n]” or understood, and apostrophizes them through the ode, a poetic form of direct address. Likewise, the mononymic poet Antler personifies the Towers as performing a bodily function: “How the jet appeared to be / swallowed by the Tower.”¹¹² Star Black alternatively personifies the Towers as friendly giants who nuzzle dreams in tiny apartments, as if, tired from standing, they roll back, as a shoulder onto a pillow, to let a neighbor know the nightmare’s over.¹¹³

     

Ray, “Six Months After,” lines  – . Carlos Martinez, “Home,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – , . Nancy Mercado, “Going to Work,” in Johnson and Merians, Poetry, . Kelly Levan, “To the Towers,” in Heyen, September,  – , . Antler, “Skyscraper Apocalypse,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – , . Star Black, “Skyscrapers,” in Johnson and Merians, Poetry, .

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Black’s considerate Towers resemble New Yorkers comforting each other after 9/11. The Towers’ empathy for their neighbors suggests a community of buildings and people and evokes compassion for both. When poets combine multiple tropes to humanize the Towers as victims, as Mercado, Levan, Antler, and Black do, the cumulative effect is that readers begin to think of the buildings as people. As Leach suggests, “the corollary to reading” buildings as people is to read people as buildings,¹¹⁴ and some poets represent Americans as the Towers through metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche, usually evoking anger, vulnerability, and humility. R. D. Armstrong metonymically substitutes America for the Towers, America itself being a metonym for American people: “America has been sucker punched.”¹¹⁵ Similarly, Mariah Erlick recasts Americans as the Towers when the human speaker of “On T.V.” states, “We said we couldn’t burn. But we did.”¹¹⁶ When Lawrence Ferlinghetti calls the Towers “the beating / heart of Skyscraper America,” he represents them metaphorically as a heart and synecdochically as part of a living being, “Skyscraper America,” then metonymically substitutes skyscrapers for the nation and its people.¹¹⁷ As shown above, Levan’s “To the Towers” illustrates a size-reversal and role-reversal between people and the Towers, with humans effortlessly holding, in their pockets, pebbles of the once giant Towers that had held comparably tiny people. And Stephen Dunn combines an up-down orientational metaphor with metonymy to represent Americans as the Towers: “Even if we’ve scraped the sky, we can be rubble.” Dunn then reinforces the composite: “Now we had a new definition of the personal.”¹¹⁸ Like the Concert, these last few poems read 9/11, in Leach’s words, as “an attack on the American people as a collective”; that is, when people identify with an “architectural environment, any damage to that environment will be read as damage to the self.”¹¹⁹ Whereas the Concert used words and images to integrate the WTC with Americans and jingoistically shaped the crowd’s reading of those amalgams as symbols of renewed nationalism to justify war, 9/11 poetry leaves such interpretation up to its individual, rather than mass, audience. These poems use words and images to blend the Towers with Americans to evoke a variety of emotions: anger, vulnerability, humility, sadness, empathy, hope. And they draw upon a

     

Leach, “/,” . R. D. Armstrong, “The  Wakeup Call,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – , . Mariah Erlick, “On T.V.,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye, . Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “History of the Airplane,” in Cohen and Matson, Eye,  – , . Stephen Dunn, “Grudges,” in Johnson and Merians, Poetry, . Leach, “/,” .

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greater number of tropes, often combined in more complex ways, to create the conceptual blends and to engage in self-fashioning and the fashioning of the American nation.

Conclusions As President Barack Obama demonstrated in 2011, many of these poetic tropes continued to be used, in another kind of text, for self-fashioning and to reintegrate Americans with the absent Towers. On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, at A Concert for Hope at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., Obama employed conceptual blends to humanize the Towers. He used light and dark images to reinforce an up-down orientational metaphor, beginning with downward spatial orientation: “Ten years ago, America confronted one of our darkest nights. Mighty towers crumbled.” Obama contrasted this metaphoric darkness and downward-orientation with the light of hope and upward-orientation by personifying the Freedom Tower, then under construction: “Where the World Trade Center once stood, the sun glistens off a new tower that reaches toward the sky.” He juxtaposed Americans and their fingers – body parts that synecdochically represent bodies and, like the personified buildings, reach – with new monuments: the Freedom Tower and the National September 11 Memorial. “Decades from now, Americans will visit the memorials to those who were lost on 9/11. They’ll run their fingers over the places where the names of those we loved are carved into marble and stone.”¹²⁰ These words combine buildings that memorialize the Towers with Americans who touch victims’ names – names being metonyms for people – inscribed upon those buildings. Ten years after 9/11, Obama’s speech demonstrated the conceptual blending process through which the Concert and early 9/11 poetry had evoked the human in the fallen Towers, to humanize the Freedom Tower and the National September 11 Memorial and to fashion his political identity as an empathetic president as he prepared to campaign for his second term. For decades, people have deliberately fashioned Americans’ identities alongside the Twin Towers – the fashioning of identity being inherently deliberate – and humanized the buildings through conceptual blending, cumulatively transforming the buildings into American symbols. The Concert and the 9/11 poems I have discussed here exemplify the buildings’ humanization, and I have attempt-

 “Remarks by the President at ‘A Concert for Hope,’” Whitehouse.gov., The White House, Office of the Press Secretary (September , ) (acc. February , ).

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ed to demonstrate the conceptual integration process that facilitated it. Whereas those who organized and performed in The Concert blended the Towers with Americans to demonstrate the nation’s resilience and defiance after the attacks, these poets did so to represent post-9/11 Americans more empathetically, as suffering and vulnerable. While early 9/11 poetry shares the Concert’s impulse to conceptually integrate Americans with the Towers, it inspires individual reflection rather than mass hysteria and encourages multiple voices rather than a singular one that sought to move a mass of people toward a jingoistic interpretation of the WTC. These poems resist totalizing American identity into an indiscriminate whole, as American national identity is, in fact, a vast, diverse network of interconnecting and competing ideas.

Jack Stewart

Byatt’s “Cold”: A Marriage of Fire and Ice In her short story, “Cold,” A. S. Byatt exploits fairytale or folktale form, particularly “northern tales about ice, glass, and mirrors,” to symbolize a magical “conjunction of opposites.” A fairytale prince uses fire in glass-blowing to construct a microcosmic world in glass-sculpture – a gift to an ice-princess that self-reflexively displays Byatt’s inter-artistic imagination. In this fable of creativity, the four material elements are transformed into spiritual and aesthetic forms of love and art. An examination of Byatt’s imagery reveals a subliminal use of alchemical symbolism that supports her themes of individuation and transformation. A. S. Byatt’s postmodern fairy tales or “wonder tales” appear either as freestanding works or embedded in novels. In her essay “Ice, Snow, Glass,” she recalls that “[t]he fairy stories which […] provided much of my secret imagery as a child are northern tales about ice, glass, and mirrors” (151).¹ Recalling the impact “Snow White” made on her imagination as a girl, she muses: “I think I knew, even then, that there was something secretly good, illicitly desirable, about the ice-hills and glass barriers” (“Ice” 155). Byatt cites Coleridge on “frost at midnight [as] a ‘secret ministry’ making beautiful forms of the ‘silent icicles / Quietly shining to the quiet Moon’” (“Ice” 159); she also cites Kubla Khan’s “sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice” (“Ice” 159) – a symbol of art as fusion of opposites. She suggests that “Coleridge is happier with the balance between the inanimate beauty of ice, crystalline forms, and warm organic ones than Hans Andersen [in ‘The Snow Queen’]” (“Ice” 159). Her own imagery accentuates the elemental. In “Cold,”² Princess Fiammarosa sacrifices her icy isolation to marry her opposite, fiery Prince Sasan, yet retains a unique identity in art-making. Feminist critics

 A. S. Byatt, “Ice, Snow, Glass,” On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, ):  – , ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “Ice.” Michael J. Noble relates Byatt’s use of “the wonder tale [or Märchen]” to “self-reflexivity and [a] sense of magical transformation” (“Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Fiction: A. S. Byatt’s Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice,” Anglistik . []:  – , ). Jessica Tiffin notes that “fairy tale’s […] presentation of the marvelous […] [helps to] draw attention […] to tale as crafted object, artifact” (“Ice, Glass, Snow: Fairy Tale as Art and Metafiction in the Writing of A. S. Byatt,” Marvels and Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies : []:  – , ).  A. S. Byatt, “Cold,” in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (London: Vintage, ):  – ; subsequent references in the text. DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-012

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tend to cite her losses,³ but these are transcended by ecstasies of lovemaking and aesthetic pleasure, through which extreme temperaments harmonize and achieve a miraculous balance. “Cold” is a fable of creativity in which the four elements of matter are transformed into spiritual and aesthetic forms of love and art. My aim is to examine the polarity of ice and fire in this story, along with symbolism of the Four Elements and the marriage of opposites. I will also trace Byatt’s subliminal use of alchemical symbolism (not previously observed) to support her themes of transformation and adaptation. Princess Fiammarosa’s name contrasts with her icy whiteness, for she is threaded through with veins of rosy fire. This elemental but internal duality is vividly expressed in Edvard Munch’s painting, Red and White (1894),⁴ reproduced on the cover of the paperback, that relates two aspects of woman, virginal and passionate, to color polarities. Fiammarosa’s dreams have a pagan-Scandinavian aura: “She dreamed of dark blue spaces, in which she travelled without moving a muscle, at high speeds above black and white fields and forests” (121).⁵ She is descended from an icewoman, “[who] was seen dancing naked with three white hares, which were thought to be creatures of witchcraft, under the moon” (130). Threatened with burning and condemned to prison, she is carried off to her own kingdom by armed northmen on white horses, abandoning her newborn son. Fiammarosa has inherited the icewoman’s aura: her breath causes frost, “[freezing] into white and glistening feathers and flowers on the glass, into illusory, disproportionate rivers with tributaries and frozen falls” (122). She looks through a veil of frost at snow and icicles and a touch of her cheek against the frost-patterns ambiguously delivers “a bite, a burn” (122). Responding to a mystique of ice and snow, she conceives “[a] desire to be out there, on that whiteness, face-to-face with it, fingertips and toes pushing into the soft crystals” (122– 123). Jane Campbell observes that “[Fiammarosa’s] favourite childhood possession was a mirror and [that] she is now narcissistically ‘possessed’ by the

 Jane Campbell, A. S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier UP, ), sees “Cold” as “an extended fantasy about love and art [… whose] subject is the attraction of opposites and the price that may be paid for this attraction” ( – ); Mariadele Boccardi, A. S. Byatt (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ), sees it as “[a fable] about a woman’s place and limited opportunities in life” (). Tiffin sees the story as “us[ing] warmth and cold to polarize male and female” (“Ice, Glass, Snow,” ), but this view narrows down a wider range of elemental, temperamental, and imagistic polarities.  See Edvard Munch: Symbols and Images (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, ): .  Cf. Edvard Munch, Moonlight and Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) (both ), in Kirk Varnedoe, Northern Light: Realism and Symbolism in Scandinavian Painting  – , second ed. (New York: Brooklyn Museum, ): , .

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image of herself lying in the snow.”⁶ The sensuality of this elemental embrace has an ascetic frisson; it is desirable, but potentially self-destructive. Fiammarosa is ambivalently attracted to the opposite element that threatens her dissolution. Returning to her room one night, “she took her wrought-iron poker and broke up the banked coals of her fire, feeling faint as she hung over it [… until] the reds burned darker, and were replaced by fine white ash, like the snow” (124). Fire is symbolically transmuted into silvery ash, as in an alchemist’s retort. Her tutor, Hugh, takes her to an open window and points to her tracks in the snow, reminding her of the icewoman. “Fiammarosa did not blush; her whiteness became whiter, the ice-skin thicker. She was alive in the cold air of the window” (129). Hugh tells her that she is “framed for cold” and that to protect herself she must inhabit “ice-houses in the palace gardens” when the warmer weather comes. She replies: “You have read my desires […]. Out there in the cold, I am a living being” (132). But at this stage her makeup is ambivalent: “It may be,” she tells Hugh, “that I have ice in my veins, like the icewoman, or something that boils and steams at normal temperatures, and flows busily in deep frost” (132). The ice princess has warm red blood, but does not feel emotions like love. For her, “[t]here was more life in coldness. In solitude. Inside a crackling skin of protective ice that was also a sensuous delight” (133). While the fairytale plot dramatizes a marriage of opposites, the style is selfreflexive and aesthetic,⁷ highlighting color, artifice, structure, and symbol. Contrasting her childhood reading of fairytale and myth, Byatt observes that “[the] fairy stories were in my head like little bright necklaces of intricately carved stones and wood and enamels. The myths were cavernous spaces, lit in extreme colours, glowing, or dazzling […].”⁸ “Cold” draws on both kinds of response, featuring the intricately constructed art objects associated with fairytale and the elemental forces and sublime spaces of myth. This is an example of the “ambivalence” that Christien Franken considers a vital key to Byatt’s writing.⁹ For Byatt, “artists recognise the distancing of glass and ice as an ambivalent matter, both chilling and life-giving, saving as well as threatening” (“Ice” 156). Franken re-

 Campbell, Heliotropic Imagination, .  Tiffin argues that, for Byatt, “[i]ssues of story are […] inextricable from issues of art itself […]. Byatt’s keen sympathy for the aesthetic and creative value of art is rendered complex by its reflective and refractive capacities” (“Ice, Glass, Snow,” ). Julian Gitzen, “A. S. Byatt’s Self-Mirroring Art,” Critique : (Winter ), also notes the self-reflexive quality of Byatt’s fiction.  A. S. Byatt, Ragnarök. The End of the Gods (Toronto: Knopf Canada, ): .  Christien Franken, A. S. Byatt: Art, Authorship, Creativity (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, ): .

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lates Byatt’s “portraits of writers” to images of water, light, and glass and sees them as “metaphors of creativity.”¹⁰ She points to “[t]he relation between aesthetic pleasure, sensuality and rationality” as a possible “hermeneutic key to Byatt’s fiction” and observes that “[t]he idea of glass as solid matter and transparent liquidity can […] be read productively in the context of aesthetics”¹¹ – part of my aim in this essay. Glass can also be read in the context of alchemical symbolism. Marie-Louise von Franz observes that “[in] some alchemical writings, glass was compared to a miraculous substance. It was ‘immaterial’ because you could see through it as if it were not matter, and like crystal, it was a symbol of ‘spiritual matter’.”¹² “[E]arth, air, water and fire are still the four elements of imaginative experience,” according to Northrop Frye,¹³ and all four are interwoven in Byatt’s intermedial and inter-elemental tale. Prince Sasan plays “songs of the goat-herds” on his Pan-pipe and, listening to the music, “[t]he Princess’s mind was full of water frozen in mid-fall, or finding a narrow channel between ribs and arches of ice” (150). Sensory responses to ice, water, earth, air, and fire are keys to Byatt’s verbal-visual creativity in “Cold.” Synesthesia¹⁴ comes into play, as words relate to music, music to water, and water to ice. Clear cold air is the element of aesthetic vision and design: “the black branches brittle with the white coating frozen along their upper edges. It was full moon. Everything was black and white and silver” (125). Everything stands out clear-cut in this moonlit Nordic world where cold air stimulates the blood. Byatt’s creation of visual objects through words is the real magic of this tale. Through the “transparent” medium of language, a microcosmic world of intricately designed objects appears before the reader’s eye.¹⁵ At the textual level, words and images parallel the solid but transparent world of glass. Emphasizing self-reflexivity, Noble comments that “glass

 Franken, A. S. Byatt,  (my italics).  Franken, A. S. Byatt, .  Marie-Louise von Franz, Individuation in Fairy Tales (Boston, Mass. : Shambala, ): .  Northrop Frye, “Preface,” in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, by Gaston Bachelard, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon, ): vii.  David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage-Random, ), observes that “[d]irect, prereflective perception is inherently synaesthetic, participatory, and animistic, disclosing the things and elements that surround us […] as expressive subjects, entities, powers, potencies” ().  Ellen J. Esrock, The Reader’s Eye: Visual Imaging as Reader Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ), notes that “[to] achieve an aesthetic experience of the literary work […] the reader must visualize,” a process associated with “the concretization of the literary text […] [which] is a fleshing-out […] that brings the fictional work into a synthetic, quasi-sensory immediacy before the reader” ().

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is […] paradoxically doubled here – it has the appearance of ice but is crafted in the furnace of flame, and it is a metaphor for both elements and states of matter, as well as for the tale that springs from their conjunction.”¹⁶ The glass castle that Sasan builds from a microcosmic model is both an architectural tour de force and a symbol of the body one lives in and looks out of. In Campbell’s words, it is “a multiple signifier,”¹⁷ inviting a variety of interpretations, as well as a freestanding artwork. A text (tessera) is woven together of words and Byatt’s skill is exercised in matching the colors, shapes, and textures of painter, sculptor, and weaver in a single flexible medium. Aesthetic vision and the creative process are structural, as well as stylistic, elements in this self-reflexive fable: indeed, they constitute its central focus. Fiammarosa experiences a surge of creative energy in response to cold and ice. Despite being named “Flame-Rose,” she is an Ice Princess in a vast realm of cold space. Escaping from her warm room into the cold night, [her] body was full of an electric charge, a thrill, from an intense cold. She threw off her silk wrap […] and lay for a moment […] with her naked skin on the cold white sheet. She did not sink; the crust was icy and solid. All along her body […] she felt an intense version of that paradoxical burn she had received from the touch of the frosted window. The snow did not numb Fiammarosa; it pricked and hummed and brought her, intensely, to life. […] She stared up, at the great moon with its slaty shadows on its ice-gold disc, and the huge fields of scattered, clustered, far-flung glittering wheeling stars in the deep darkness, white on midnight. (125 – 126)

As a child of moon and ice, she responds to the electrical charge of the starry night and “crackling with energy […] beg[ins] a strange, leaping dance, pointing sharp fingers at the moon, tossing her long mane of silver hair, sparkling with ice-crystals, circling and bending and finally turning cartwheels under the wheeling sky” (126 – 127). Her acrobatic movements harmonize with cosmic rhythms and her ritual dance, if more abandoned, recalls the “Waltz of the Snowflakes,” with its brittle, silvery beauty in Balanchine and Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker. Acting from her elemental being, she becomes a living, performing artwork: Her whole body was encased in a transparent, crackling skin of ice, that broke into spiderweb-fine veined sheets as she danced, and then re-formed. The sensation of this double skin was delicious. She had frozen eyelashes and saw the world through an ice-lens; her tossing hair made a brittle and musical sound, for each hair was coated and frozen. The

 Noble, “Earth, Water,”  (my italics).  Campbell, Heliotropic Imagination,  (my italics).

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faint sounds of shivering and splintering and clashing made a kind of whispered music as she danced on. (127– 128)

The “ice-lens” gives Fiammarosa a glittering view of a world in which she herself is a glittering artwork. Her experience is multisensory – musical, visual, kinetic – with crystal-frozen hair tinkling to the swing of the dancer’s head. Fiammarosa’s parents, the King and Queen, accommodate her need for cold, so that she flourishes: [T]he new Fiammarosa was full of spiky life. She made little gardens of mountain snowplants around her ice-retreats. […] She studied snow-crystals and ice formations under a magnifying glass, in the winter, and studied the forms of her wintry flowers and mosses in the summer. She became an artist […]. (134)

The magnifying glass symbolizes an artist’s perception of design as well as a scientist’s study of natural forms. Fiammarosa has a penchant for crystallography¹⁸ and transforms flowers and colors into art that expresses her sensibility: “Now she began to weave tapestries with silver threads and ice-blue threads, with night-violets and cool primroses, which mixed the geometric forms of the snow-crystals with the delicate forms of the moss and rosettes of petals, and produced shimmering, intricate tapestries” (134).¹⁹ Studying the life of plants, she develops artistic talents while seeking scientific knowledge²⁰ and “writ[es] to gardeners and natural philosophers, to spinners of threads and weavers all over the world” (135). She is a creature of sensual and intellectual extremes – “in winter, when the world froze again under an iron-grey sky, she was ecstatic” (135), reveling in her chosen element of snow and ice. Byatt’s fairytale narrative involves competitive wooing of the princess by a series of suitors, who present exotic gifts through envoys. “A small golden

 For C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, trans. R. F. C. Hull, second ed., Bollingen Series  (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ), “[t]he only thing that remains constant [in the crystal] is the axial system, or rather, the invariable geometric proportions underlying it,” while “the concrete form of the individual crystal” varies. “The same is true,” he claims, “of the archetype” (). This structural relation between individual and archetype is reflected in Byatt’s story.  Tiffin notes that “[g]lass and ice are often structured in [Byatt’s] works: geometrically patterned paperweights or the snowflakes and the plethora of glass creations of ‘Snow’ [i. e. ‘Cold’]” (“Ice, Glass, Snow,” ).  Byatt relates “the brain’s excitement about making connections between disparate things” – such as art and science, fantasy and manual crafts – to “the nature of metaphor” (A. S. Byatt, “Fiction Informed by Science,” Nature  [March , ]:  – , ).

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envoy from the East brought a silken robe, flame-coloured, embroidered with peacocks, light as air” (139). Prince Boris from the North offers “a robe of silver fox-fur” and “[a] bonnet hung with the black-tipped tails of ermine stoats, and a whalebone box […] containing a necklace of bears’ claws, threaded on a silver chain” (140). These Eastern and Northern gifts present a symbolic contrast of gold and silver, fire and ice, life and death. Prince Sasan, from a remote country,²¹ presents Fiammarosa with a miniature glass castle that: appeared at first sight to be a rough block of ice. Then, slowly, it was seen to be a glass palace, within the ice […] as hallucinatory turrets and chambers, fantastic carvings and pillars, reveal themselves in the snow of mountain peaks. (141)

The chambers of this “transparent castle” have “curtains of translucent glass” (141– 142), and its arabesque architecture and color tones are a masterwork of translucency and texture: It was all done in a crystal-clear glass, with a green-blue tinge to it in places, and a different green-blue conferred simply by thickness itself. […] Solid walls of light glittered and, seen through their substance, trapped light hung in bright rooms like bubbles. (142)

In all this rococo play of light and color, another element shines through: From the dense, invisible centre little tongues of rosy flame (made of glass) ran along the corridors, mounted, gleaming, in the stairways and hall-ways, threaded like ribbons round galleries, separated, and joined again as flames do, round pillars and gates. Behind a curtain of blue, a thread of rose and flame shone and twisted. (142– 143)

In alchemical symbolism, “red means blood and affectivity, the physiological reaction that joins spirit to body, and blue means the spiritual process (mind or nous).”²² The miniature glass palace displays an internal conjunction of opposites,²³ ice and flame, blue/green and rose, solid and transparent, while a “thread of rose and flame” runs through it, as it does through Fiammarosa’s

 Sasan’s name may be derived from “the famous [fourteenth-century] Sasanian palace […] on the Tigris, a few miles below Baghdad,” with its “galleries […] wall[ed] with gilt tiles” and its numerous apartments “adorned with the tile-work of blue and gold with many other colours” (Wilfrid Blunt, The Golden Road to Samarkand, A Studio Book [New York: Viking, ]: ).  Jung, Archetypes, .  See Jung, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. R. F. C. Hull, second ed., Bollingen Series  (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, ), on the symbolism of coniunctio oppositorum or marriage of opposites, including anima/animus, male/female, sun/moon, day/night, light/darkness, good/evil, and conscious/unconscious (, , , , ).

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body, showing that its designer has intuited a clue to her being that connects with his own. Prince Sasan sends a second gift also artfully constructed of glass, that transforms a natural process into art: It was a beehive, a transparent, shining form constructed of layers of hexagonal cells, full of white glass grubs, and amber-coloured glass honey. Over the surface of the cells crawled, and in the solid atmosphere hung and floated, wonderfully wrought insects, with furry bodies, veined wings, huge eyes and fine antennae. (143 – 144)

The surroundings of this labyrinthine object are equally elaborate: “Around the hive were glass flowers with petals of crumpled and gleaming yellow glass, with crowns of fine stamens, with blue bells and fine-throated purple hoods. A fat bee was half-buried in the heart of a spotted snapdragon” (144). This exotic glass sculpture represents a frozen moment from the warm heart of nature. Fiammarosa is enchanted: “She had laid her cheek against the cool glass dome, as if to catch the soundless hum of the immobile spun-glass wings” (144) – a paradox of stillness and motion, sound and silence that only art or dream could capture. Sasan’s third envoy, arriving “bloody and incoherent” after an attack by bandits,²⁴ performs a miraculous construction before Fiammarosa’s eyes. It is “an extraordinarily complex web of branches and twigs” made from “a series of fine, fine glass rods, olive-green, amber, white” (145). She watches fascinated as the man unpacks “a pleroma of small spherical parcels […] from which [he] took a whole world of flowers, fruit, twining creepers, little birds, frost-forms, and ice-forms” (145 – 146). This cornucopia of fragments is assembled by the technically gifted envoy to form a paradisal garden, symbolizing an Eden of love and fruitfulness. The assembly of pieces into a luminous and transparent whole self-reflexively matches Byatt’s creative process of assembling and interrelating images in a fictional text.²⁵

 Vladimir Propp notes that fairy tale structure involves “trebling,” in which the third in a series outdoes the first two in heroic adventures, surviving dangers to win the prize or princess (Morphology of the Folktale, first ed. trans. Laurence Scott, second ed. rev. Louis A. Wagner [Austin: U of Texas P, ]: ).  Byatt notes: “I see any projected piece of writing as a geometric structure, various colours and patterns” (“Still Life/Nature morte,” Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings [New York: Turtle Bay-Random, ]:  – , ). She told an interviewer: “It’s at the point when I begin to see what my whole framework of metaphors is that the whole thing starts tightening up and moving very fast” (Olga Kenyon, “A. S. Byatt,” The Writer’s Imagination: Interviews with Major International Women Novelists [Bradford: U of Bradford P, ]: ).

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Then he hung blossoms of every kind, apple and cherry, magnolia and catkins, hypericum and chestnut candles. Then he added, radiating between all these, the fruits, oranges, and lemons, silver pears and golden apples, rich plums and damsons, ruddy pomegranates and clustered translucent crimson berries and grapes with the bloom on them. Each tiny element was in itself an example of virtuoso glass-making. (146)

Visualizing and constructing the text is, for Byatt, like building a glass palace or garden – the process is geometric and architectonic, the medium transparent or translucent. A photograph of a seventeenth-century Venetian-style goblet forms an emblematic frontispiece to the story and Byatt’s baroque elaboration of glass-art suggests the aesthetic of Art Nouveau²⁶ that she explores in The Children’s Book. Various colorful birds are perched on the tree of life, a red cardinal, a white dove, a black-capped, rosy-breasted bullfinch, a blue Australian wren, an iridescent kingfisher, a blackbird with a gold beak, and in the centre, on the crest of the branches, a bird of paradise with golden eyes in its midnight tail, and a crest of flame. (146)²⁷

Jung notes that “rainbow colours […] are the colours of the peacock’s eye, which plays a great role as the cauda pavonis in alchemy,” where the radiating spread of the tail symbolizes “the unfolding and realization of wholeness.”²⁸ Byatt’s tree of birds culminates in “a crest of flame,” appropriate to the ripening sun of summer or to the alchemical opus. Regarding alchemical motifs, Byatt notes that the biologist Lysgard-Peacock, in her novel A Whistling Woman, was named originally for the alchemical thread of my patterns – he was the cauda pavonis, the peacock’s tail of multi-coloured light before the single white light of the opus, the phi-

 Jennifer Hawkins Opie notes: “Glass offered the magical, intense and multi-layered experience that artist and collectors were looking for at the end of the century” (“The New Glass: A Synthesis of Technology and Dreams,” Art Nouveau  – , ed. Paul Greenhalgh [London: Victoria and Albert Museum; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, ]: ). See extensive references to Art Nouveau in A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (Toronto: Vintage Canada, ); the paperback edition sports a glittering cover image of René Lalique’s Dragonfly Woman (c.  – ), in “[g]old, enamel, chrysoprase, moonstones and diamonds” (Art Nouveau .).  Marie-Louise von Franz notes that birds, in fairytale, “represent creative fantasies” and are “symbols of unconscious spiritual contents” (Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales [Toronto: Inner City Books, ]: , ), Bachelard that “often the creator of fire is a little bird bearing on its tail a red mark which is the mark of fire” (Psychoanalysis of Fire, ).  Jung, Archetypes, , .

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losopher’s stone. (Lysgard is a common Danish name meaning garden of light, a paradisal reference).²⁹

The glasswork garden is a microcosmic image centered on the Tree of Life and embracing all elements and seasons. Its construction demonstrates the creative process. To symbolize winter, the cunning artificer “decorat[es] sharp black twigs with filigree leaf skeletons, flounces of snow, and sharp icicles, catching the light and making rainbows in the air” (146) – a further allusion to the rainbow colors of alchemy.³⁰ At a sensory level, the text appeals to visual imagination, so it is not surprising that the Princess repeats the imperative “Look,” in showing off her glasswork. Byatt simultaneously challenges the reader to look through the transparent medium of words and visualize these objects of fantasy with the eyes of sensory imagination rather than logical mind: Look […] at the rich patterning of the colours, look at the way the light shines in the globes of the fruit, the seeds of the pomegranate, the petals of the flowers. Look at the beetles in the clefts of the trunk, like tiny jewels, look at the feathers in the spun-glass tail of the bird. (147)

The glasswork object presents an amazing conjunction of natural observation, artistic expression, and symbolic allusion. Campbell maintains that Byatt’s fantastic constructions – glass castle, beehive, tree of life – “[are all] exquisitely wrought metaphors through which [Sasan] expresses his intuitive understanding of Fiammarosa’s body and its needs” (202) – bringing art and biology together. In conjuring this dazzling world of glass from words, Byatt’s verbal art has the power to make the reader see colors and forms with more than usual clarity – a hallmark of the scientific magnifying glass or fairytale form. Glass is made from the sand of Sasan’s desert country, “melted and fused in a furnace of flames” (151), and he identifies with his native materials and the elemental force that fuses them: “These are the things I am made of, he said, grains of burning sand, and breath of air, and the blaze of light, like glass” (173). In alchemy, Bachelard notes, “fire is […] the male principle which vitalizes the female substance”³¹ – just as the heat of Sasan’s love penetrates Fiammaro Byatt, “Fiction Informed by Science,” .  According to Jung, “[t]he appearance of [rainbow] colours in the opus represents an intermediate stage” in the alchemical process (Archetypes,  – ).  Bachelard analyzes “the animistic and sexualized intuition of fire” in ritual and myth and notes that “[to] assert that fire is an element is […] to set up sexual resonances; it is thinking of the substance in its propagation, in its generation; it is rediscovering the alchemistic inspiration which spoke of a water or an earth elemented by fire” (Psychoanalysis of Fire, ,  – ).

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sa’s ice-bound eroticism. Candles invite the lovers to exchange a hypnotic look that is mutually reflective: “she saw golden flames reflected in his dark eyes, whilst he saw white flames in her clear ones” (151– 152; my italics).³² Their honeymoon is an ecstatic marriage of fire and ice, an attraction of opposites that accentuates intrinsic qualities, yet brings out elemental affinities: “Ice burns, and it is hard to the warm-skinned to distinguish one sensation, fire, from the other, frost. Touching Sasan’s heat was like and unlike the thrill of ice” (156). His touch leaves “faint rosy marks on [Fiammarosa’s] skin […] that respond[s] to every touch by blossoming red” (155, 157). Through passion for her fiery prince, she becomes even icier – “[her] face grew sharper, and her eyes grew bluer and clearer” (154). The lovers’ experience of orgasm resembles an alchemical conjunction of elements: “Fiammarosa [felt] as if her whole being was becoming liquid except for some central icicle, which was running with waterdrops that threatened to melt that too, to nothing” (154). The coming together of fire and ice climaxes in water, followed by a renewal of being that parallels the desired transformation of matter in alchemy. On their sea-voyage to Sasan’s hot country, he lets down “a bucket with a glass bottom” in which he collects marine creatures. As an artist with a feel for textures, “[he] liked also to look at the sleek sea-surface in the moonlight, the gloss on the little swellings and subsidings, the tracks of phosphorescence. Fiammarosa was happier in the moonlight. It was cooler” (158). But when they reach their desert destination, she is exposed to her contrary element: “the stone of the harbour-steps was burning to the touch, and the sun was huge and glaring in a cobalt-blue sky” (159). Why has she, whose element is ice, set foot in this land of burning sunlight and hot sand? She has fallen in love with a man who has the power to fuse fire and sand in glass that looks like ice and to build a palace of art that will house and harmonize opposite temperaments. This glass palace creates an intricate play of refracted light: It was designed to keep out the sun, and inside it was a geometric maze of cool corridors, tiled in coloured glass, lit only by narrow slits of windows, which were glazed in beautiful colours, garnet, emerald, sapphire, which cast bright flames of coloured light on the floors. It was a little like a beehive, and inside its central dome a woven lattice-work of coloured light was spun by tiny loopholes and slits in the surface, shifting and changing as the sun moved in the dark bright sky outside. (160)

 Frye notes that “[the] flickering movement [of fire] is analogous to vitality; its flames are phallic symbols” (Preface, vii).

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The style of this artwork is arabesque, resembling that of an Arab mosque or a labyrinth.³³ It brilliantly expresses Byatt’s elemental and alchemical symbolism with its flame-colored motifs, “coloured light,” and oxymoronic “dark bright” sky.³⁴ “Icewomen like bright light, bright cold light, off-white” (160), but Fiammarosa is glad to see cool dark corridors, as in many oriental buildings, where she can escape from the heat. “And there was so much in the palace to delight her senses. There was fruit on glass dishes, pearly and iridescent, smoky amber, translucent rose and indigo” (160) – combining color motifs of red and blue and merging opposite ends of the spectrum. As an artist in weaving, Fiammarosa abstracts patterns from the decor of her room, which has “a circular window of stained glass, a white rose, fold on fold, on a peacock-blue ground. Within the heavy doors hung curtains of tiny glass beads of every conceivable colour, shimmering and twinkling” (161). Her decor has the symbolic colors of the cauda pavonis and the opulent tones of Matisse’s interiors.³⁵ Sasan, who has created these labyrinthine interiors, is in love with open space and desert mirages, illusory images caused by heat – “[t]he brilliance of the shimmering unreal cities in the distance, which had given him many ideas for cityscapes and fantastic palaces of glass” (162). The climate of his country fosters creative illusions that he reconstructs in intricate art objects that complement Fiammarosa’s “imaginations of lost glaciers and untrodden snowfields” (162). Glass made from the natural resources of his country was discovered by the first prince of the line, “[who] had found some lumps and slivers of shining stuff in the cinders of his fire on the seashore” (163). A line of ancestors “had discovered how to blow the molten glass into transparent bottles and bowls, and […] to fuse different colours onto each other” (163). These traditional processes of fusing and blending parallel the human merger of icewoman and desert prince. Glass-blowing, as Fiammarosa observes, dramatically employs the element of fire: “[a workman] had a long tube raised to his mouth […] blowing his breath into the flaming, molten gob at the end of it which flared and smoked, orange and scarlet, and swelled and swelled” (164). Eros and art are closely allied. The molten glass ball seems tumescent and “[its] hot liquid bursting put the

 Noble points out that “in ‘The Glass Coffin’ as elsewhere in Byatt’s work, glass imagery is used to signify and elaborate on both entrapment and imaginative release” (“Earth, Water,” ).  For Jung, flame bright or “rainbow” colors, in a mandala painting, “spring from the red layer that means affectivity” and “by integrating the unconscious [we] add to ourselves a bright and a dark, and more light means more night” (Archetypes, , ).  E.g., Matisse, Interior with a Phonograph (; Pierre Schneider, Matisse, trans. Michael Taylor and Bridget Strevens Romer [New York: Rizzoli, ]: ).

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pale princess in mind of the ferocity of her lovemaking” (164). Missing her kindly and moderate ex-tutor, she walks into her husband’s “cave-like” workshop, where “[d]imly, dazzled, she saw the half-naked men, the spinning cocoons, like blazing tulips” and “[Sasan’s] dark face illuminated by the red-hot glow from the still-molten sphere of glass he was smoothing and turning” (168). This seemingly demonic, yet artistic, activity recalls alchemy. Bachelard points out that “[if we] take a look at the alchemist at work beside his furnace in his underground workshop […] [we will see] that several of the furnaces and retorts used by the alchemists had undeniable sexual shapes.”³⁶ So do the products of Sasan’s wokshop. His colored “latticino [sic] vases”³⁷ are serially arrayed like magical objects in fairy tales: The first was pencil-slender and took one rose. It was white. The next was cloudy, tinged with pink, and curved slightly outwards. The third was pinker and rounder, the fourth blushed rosy and had a fine blown bowl beneath its narrow neck. When the series of nine was completed, cherry-pink, rose-red, clear-red, deep crimson and almost black with a fiery heart, he arranged them on the table in front of her, and she saw that they were women, each more proudly swollen, with delicate white arms. (166)

The white, pink, red, crimson, and black tones of these pregnant forms suggest Matisse’s compositions with decorative gradations of color.³⁸ A nostalgic letter from Fiammarosa’s former tutor touches on transcendent beauty and the mutual attraction of opposites. He writes: No-one, who has ever seen you dance on the untrodden snow or gather ice-flowers from bare branches, will ever be entirely able to forget this perfect beauty […]. I see now […] that extreme desires extreme, and that beings of pure fire and pure ice may know delights we ordinary mortals must glimpse and forgo. (167)

Heightened experience is the essence of fairytale and Fiammarosa believes she is “delighting in extremity […] living a life pared down to extreme sensations” (164). Ice inspires her, as fire inspires Sasan. But suddenly she is exposed to the hot heart of the opposing element, as a workman “swung open the door

 Bachelard, Psychoanalysis of Fire, .  Latticinio is defined as “an opaque white glass first produced in Venice during the Renaissance, often used in thread form to decorate clear glass pieces” (Random House Dictionary of the English Language, unabridged ed., ed. Jess Stein [New York: Random, ]).  E.g., Matisse, The Egyptian Curtain and Large Red Interior (both ; Schneider, Matisse, , ); see also The Pink Nude (; Schneider, Matisse, ), reproduced on the back cover of Byatt, The Matisse Stories (London: Vintage, ).

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of the furnace. [She] had time to see shelves of forms, red and gold, transparent and burning, before the great sun-like rose of heat and light hit her” (169). Succumbing to an external excess of the “Flame-Rose” element that exists within her own body, she collapses “[as if] melting […] becoming hot and liquid, a white scrap, moaning in a sea of red blood, lit by flames” (169). The alchemical experiment for producing the philosopher’s stone³⁹ has failed and Fiammarosa loses the child in her womb. In Fiammarosa’s convalescence, the couple take a journey across the desert toward a distant mountain range. Mirages, combined with her nostalgia for the frozen North, transform “sand and stones” in Fiammarosa’s mind into “great lagoons of clear water, great rivers of ice with ice-floes” (173). The element of ice and water is layered over the elements of earth and fire. Trudging upwards through a tunnel, the couple come to: a palace built of glass in the heart of the mountain. They were in a forest of tall glass tubes with branching arms, arranged in colonnades, thickets, circular balustrades […]. All the glass pillars were hollow, and were filled with columns of liquid – wine-coloured, sapphire, amber, emerald and quicksilver. (175)

Byatt’s aesthetic imagination conjures up rococo variations: “In the dark antechambers, fantastic candles flowered in glass buds, or shimmered behind shades of figured glass set on ledges and crevices” (175 – 176). Light interacts with glass in gleaming objects of fantastic shape and color: The strange pipes rose upwards, some of them formed like rose bushes, some like carved pillars, some fantastically twined with glass grapes on glass vines. And in this room, there were real waterfalls, sheets of cold water dropping over great slabs of glass, like ice-floes, into glassy pools where it ran away into hidden channels, water falling in sheer fine spray from the rock itself into a huge glass basin, midnight-blue and full of dancing cobalt lights, with a rainbow fountain rising to meet the dancing, descending mare’s-tail. (176)

Fantasy and reality coexist: nature flows into art and art transforms nature. Alchemy again offers an analogy, as “rainbow fountain” and “mare’s tail” are variant forms of the cauda pavonis. Fiammarosa observes that “[t]he air was cold […] [and] her icewoman’s blood stirred to life and her eyes shone” (176 – 177). Her room in the palace is “cut into the rock, with its own high porthole window, shaped like a many-col-

 Jung associates the lapis (or stone) with the archetype of “the child” (Archetypes,  – ). Von Franz notes that “in Western alchemy […] the Philosopher’s Stone is often called the elixir of life” (Archetypal Patterns, ).

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oured rose with real snow resting on it,” a fusion of motifs, while “[h]er bed [is] surrounded by curtains of spun glass, with white birds, snow birds, snowflowers and snow-crystals woven into them” (177). As engineer and glassmaker, Sasan has constructed “an artificial world” with various devices to gauge pressure in “the ocean of elementary air in which they moved” (177). The mercury and quicksilver in glass columns that help to control the atmosphere recall experiments of the alchemists. Sasan adjusts temperature and environment to his and Fiammarosa’s contrasting needs. He aims to adapt material elements to diverse sensibilities and create an art that enhances life. Sasan takes Fiammarosa up a spiral stairway to a place high on the mountainside, where: [she] stepped out under a black velvet sky, full of burning cold silver stars, like globes of mercury, on to a field of untouched snow […]. And she took off her slippers and stepped out on to the sparkling crust feeling the delicious crackle beneath her toes, the soft sinking, the voluptuous cold. (180)

Again Byatt alludes to alchemy in the “globes of mercury” that suggest Mercurius, trickster and spirit of transformation.⁴⁰ Sasan plays his flute and Fiammarosa, back in the land of childhood memories, strips naked in the snow: As she danced, a whirling white shape, her skin of ice-crystals, that she had believed she would never feel again, began to form along her veins, over her breasts, humming round her navel. She was lissom and sparkling, she was cold to the bone and full of life. The moon glossed the snow with gold and silver. (180 – 181)

As in alchemy, gold and silver symbolize successful transmutation of matter into spirit. Jung writes: “Gold expresses sunlight, value, divinity, even. It is therefore a favorite synonym for the lapis, being the aurum philosophicum or aurum potabile or aurum vitreum.”⁴¹ The last phrase signifies “pure gold, like transparent glass” (Revelation 21:21; my italics). After Sasan stops playing, hands and lips almost frozen, the couple go back to her room and “make love in a mixture of currents of air, first warm, then cooling, which brought both of them to life” (181). By modulating atmospheres to suit each other’s bodily needs, they share and adjust to each other’s being. Twins are born of this love:

 Jung observes that “[f]or the alchemists quicksilver meant the concrete, material manifestation of the spirit Mercurius” (Archetypes, ).  Jung, Archetypes, .

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a dark boy, who resembled his mother at birth, and became, like her, pale and golden, and a pale, flower-like girl, whose first days were white and hairless, but who grew a mane of dark hair like her father’s and had a glass-blower’s, flute-player’s mouth. (181)

Their physical appearance crosses gender boundaries and symbolizes an internal balance of male and female, fire and ice. Genetic traits are chiastically intertwined, like the glass tubes in Sasan’s artwork or the Manichean elements of light and dark in alchemy. Byatt’s narratorial and pictorial aims in “Cold” are self-reflexively aesthetic. Her intermedial focus is on creativity in the arts and crafts of glass-blowing, glass-sculpture, weaving, music, and dance. The story’s fairytale structure highlights intense sensation and intricate design, displaying a baroque imagination. Sasan creates a transparently symbolic world from material elements, constructing elaborate patterns in glass as Fiammarosa does in weaving. The elemental contrast of their beings sets up an intense vibratory attraction that leads to fusion – a state comparable to the coniunctio oppositorum of alchemy. Extremes are more fully individuated or rounded out in meeting and merging and the marriage of opposites ultimately produces equilibrium, as each gives to and gains from the other. Although there are limits to will and idea, “for no one has everything they can desire” (182), Fiammarosa extends the range of her being with scientific “study of the vegetation of the Sasanian snow-line, and […] of which plants could thrive in mountain air under glass windows” (182). Sasan accepts her radically different nature and she his: the mutual attraction of opposites, rather than setting them apart, brings them more passionately together. In understanding each other’s divergent needs and talents, they become truly creative and achieve mutual individuation and wholeness.

Michael T. Smith

The Dedalus Complex: A Lacanian Analysis of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man In a cross-disciplinary approach using Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist, I invoke Freud’s frequent forays into literature to explore a father-complex I deem the “Dedalus complex.” Using Lacan’s le nom du père, I argue that the Symbolic father (or fathers) is a source of desire for “the son,” who yearns to be the father. In this desire, a subject fluctuates between the dual positions of Father and son in what I term a “rotational Oedipal triangle.” This redefined Oedipal triangle is one in which each point of said triangle is a signifier, a placeholder that defines the subject. Initially serialized in The Egoist from 1914 to 1915 and then published in book form in 1916, James Joyce’s semiautobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man focuses on the life of Stephen Dedalus (Joyce’s alter ego). In fact, Joyce even states, “Portrait was the picture of my spiritual self.”¹ As a prime example of the künstlerroman, Joyce’s groundbreaking work thematically outlines Stephen’s coming-of-age through his rebellion of traditional Catholic and Irish conventions. Symbolically, our protagonist’s cognomen is a pointed allusion to Daedalus, the genius craftsman and inventor of Greek mythology; regarding Stephen’s name, Joyce writes:² Now, as never before, his strange name seemed to him a prophecy […]. Now, at the name of the fabulous artificer, he seemed to hear the noise of dim waves and to see a winged form flying above the waves and slowly climbing the air. What did it mean? Was it a quaint device opening a page of some medieval book of prophecies and symbols, a hawklike man flying sunward above the away, a prophecy of the end he had been born to serve and had been following through the mists of childhood and boyhood, a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth a new soaring impal-

 Willard Potts, Portraits of the Artist in Exile: Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, ): .  Also, in the period of Romanticism, Daedalus came to denote the classic artist: “Daedalus is a mixed blessing as a pseudonym for an aspiring artist” (Don Gifford, “James Joyce and Myth,” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies . []:  – , ). Moreover, in an autobiographic link, it is the pseudonym over which Joyce – at the beginning of his career – published his first three short stories in  (Gifford, “Joyce and Myth,” ). DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-013

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pable imperishable being […]. His heart trembled his breath came faster and a wild spirit passed over his limbs as though he were soaring sunward. His heart trembled in an ecstasy of fear and his soul was in flight. His soul was soaring in an air beyond the world and the body he knew was purified in a breath and delivered of incertitude and made radiant and commingled with the element of the spirit.³

The myth of Daedalus and his son Icarus is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (VIII). Daedalus, a master architect, builds a Labyrinth for King Minos to house the bestial Minotaur, but in order to protect the knowledge of the Labyrinth, Minos imprisons Daedalus and his son in a tower in Crete. With no recourse to sea routes, Daedalus fashions artificial wings for himself and his young son, warning the latter not to fly too close to the sun as it would melt the wax used in their wings’ construction. After safely passing Samos, Delos, and Lebynthos, Icarus forgets himself and soars towards the sun, plummeting to his death after his wings dismantle. Daedalus curses his own invention and once in Sicily builds a temple to Apollo – Greek god of the sun – where his wings are hung as an offering.⁴

The “no” father In his Preface to The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes: “I shall speak of Joyce, who has preoccupied me much this year, only to say that he is the simplest consequence of a refusal – such a mental refusal! – of a psycho-analysis, which, as a result, his work illustrates.”⁵ What, specifically, Lacan perceived Joyce’s work illustrating one can only guess. I will, however, ask the following simple question: what is the extent of the link of the multi-layered myth of Daedalus to Stephen? To begin, in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen is “imprisoned” by his various “fathers.” And I will qualify this statement and its link to the Greek myth by first using Lacan’s “Name-of-the-Father.”

 James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [ – ] (New York: Signet Classics, ):  – ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “P.”  Alternatively, in Book  of Virgil’s Aeneid, Daedalus flies to Cumae and founds his temple there.  Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis [], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, ): ix.

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In The Psychoses, Lacan largely develops this concept of the Name-of-the-Father (Nom du père). ⁶ In French, Lacan is punning off of two homophonies, le non du père (the “no” of the father) and le nom du père (the name of the father), to define this Symbolic concept. As seen in the former homophone, the concept is entrenched in a notion of prohibition. The nom-du-pere (or Symbolic father) psychoanalytically originates from the mythical father-figure in Freud’s Totem and Taboo; it is neither the actual father nor an imagined father (the paternal imago, a concept highly related to “image” in Lacan’s writing). Rather, it considers the “signifier” of the father, which Lacan claims in “Of a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis” Freud linked to the appearance of the “signifier of the Father, as the author of the Law, to death.”⁷ Thus, whatever signifies “the father” constitutes the symbolic father.⁸ In Greek mythology, Dedalus-as-father gives the immortal warning to his son Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. In Portrait, Stephen faces no lack of prohibitive “fathers”: his biological father Simon, Mr. Tate (“the English master”), Fathers Dolan and Arnall in chapters I and III, and even Vincent Heron in chapter II (to name a few key signifiers). Even God, Ireland, and the Catholic Church can represent symbolic fathers.⁹ Moreover, all of these fathers act as catalysts in each new chapter forcing Stephen to change his path through a repressive stance. What is striking is how ubiquitous the “no” of the father is for Stephen. For example, The Name-of-the-Father has a type of imprint, branding effect on Stephen’s life, as when he sees his “father’s initials” carved at school (P, 98). To clarify, this “imprint” stays with him; when he once leaves school, “he could still hear his father’s voice” and at a later date is said to depart “rapidly lest his father’s shrill whistle might call him back” (P, 177– 178). Additionally, throughout the novel, Stephen needs to affirm his being (and his name) in relation to his father: “I am Stephen Dedalus. I am walking beside my father whose name is Simon Dedalus” (P, 101). Likewise, in the religious-dimension of his life, Stephen’s multiple-father complex is steeped in the omnipresent “no:”

 Jacques Lacan, Seminar III: The Psychoses [], ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W. W. Norton, ).  Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection [], trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, ): .  Lacan also states that the foreclosure of this signifier, of being excluded from the Symbolic Order, will result in Psychosis.  These symbolic fathers are, in turn, embodied by such figures as Fathers Arnall and Dolan.

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While his mind had been pursuing its intangible phantoms and turning in irresolution from such pursuit he had heard about him the constant voices of his father and of his masters, urging him to be a gentleman above all things and urging him to be a good catholic above all things. (P, 92)

One of the most profound experiences Stephen has in Portrait is the sermon of Father Arnall; following this, an absolute fear of God (of burning in hell) compels Stephen to change his entire life: “On each of the seven days of the week he further prayed that one of the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost might descend upon his soul and drive out of it day by day the seven deadly sins which had defiled it in the past”; moreover Stephen “did not allow himself to desist from even the least or lowliest devotion” (P, 154, 156). In religious contemplation, Stephen believes that breaking from this “no” would result in a plunge akin to Icarus’s: The snares of the world were its way of sin. He would fall. He had not yet fallen but he would fall silently, in an instant. Not to fall was too hard, too hard: and he felt the silent lapse of his soul, as it would be at some instant to come, falling, falling but not yet fallen, still unfallen but about to fall. (P, 167)

And this fall is connected to fire (or hell). During said sermon, Father Dolan mentions the fire of the ultimate father, akin to the fiery sun which melts Icarus’s wings: “The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has every subjected his fellowcreatures [sic]” (P, 128; much more follows in this paragraph). God is the judge. The fire of hell is one giant “no.” Also worth noting – as shown above – is that Stephen himself repeatedly acknowledges the fact that this is the signifier of father (the role of father that is filled). Joyce writes: “At the same moment he thought he saw a likeness between his father’s mind and that of this smiling welldressed [sic] priest” (P, 193). Stephen connects these fathers in his own mind. This trajectory leads to arguably the most important component of the Name-of-the-Father. In the Lacanian realm, le nom du pere (perhaps not surprisingly) is akin to the phallic signifier, meaning it is the fundamental signifier which allows the act of signification to proceed normally. It will, therefore, confer identity to the subject, name it, and position the subject within the Symbolic Order. Lacan writes that the “no” element comes from its signification of the Oedipal prohibition (namely, the incest taboo).¹⁰

 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .

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A parallel to this component of Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen in Stephen’s conversation with his father in which he states: “We were chatting, you know, and one word borrowed another” (P, 81). The exchange, or deference, of one word for another is fundamental for the structure of signification. Lacan writes: “Now what is a signifier[…] a signifier is that which represents a subject. For whom? – not for another subject, but for another signifier.”¹¹ Lacan continues to provide a (surprisingly) clear explanation of this concept in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: In order to illustrate this axiom, suppose that in the desert you find a stone covered with hieroglyphics. You do not doubt for a moment that, behind them, there was a subject who wrote them. But this is an error to believe that each signifier is addressed to you – this is proved by the fact that you cannot understand any of it. On the other hand you define them as signifiers, by the fact that you are sure that each of these signifiers is related to each of the others. And it is this that is at issue with the relation between the subject and the field of the Other.¹²

Regarding Stephen Dedalus, I’ll continue to argue that the father signifiers – often impersonal to Stephen (as foreign hieroglyphics) – are of a similar structure. Thus, more than words, the relation of Stephen to his Symbolic fathers creates a structure of his own signification, primarily in the Oedipal triangle (but one with many fathers to fill the “father” component). However, I have intentionally left a gap in my structure, and the one question I expect the reader to form at this point is: Who is the father? Is it Dedalus or Icarus? Stephen or Simon (or other, Lacanian pun intended)? Literary critic Don Gifford, for one, claims: “Stephen, as aspiring Daedalus, has metamorphosed into the fallen Icarus.”¹³ This is revealed most directly in the last sentence of the novel during what Gifford deems as Stephen’s “unconscious” prayer: “Old father, old artificer, stand by me now and ever in good stead” (P, 253). Furthermore, Stephen’s flight-of-Icarus to the artist-haven of France at the book’s end is only one of many “flights”: “[Portrait] is not only structured to end with the flight of Icarus, but that it is a sequence of flights of Icarus: each chapter ends with a soaring aloft on the wings of exaltation.”¹⁴ A psychoanalytic analysis of the original Greek myth will further analyze this dual-persona of Stephen.

 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts,  – .  Gifford, “Joyce and Myth,” .  Gifford, “Joyce and Myth,” . And not just each chapter; this symbolism even follows Stephen into Joyce’s follow-up work Ulysses. For example, immediately following the initial passage I quote (with the line “his strange name seemed to him a prophecy”), Joyce writes:

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The sun father I’ll start this portion by exploring the sun as father. In his famed analysis of “The Psychotic Dr. Schreber,” Freud states rather directly: “The sun, therefore, is nothing but another sublimated symbol for the father.”¹⁵ Freud elaborates that the sun-as-father is not only an established symbol through his case studies, but a prevalent one; he states: One of my patients, who had lost his father at a very early age, was always seeking to rediscover him in what was grand and sublime in Nature. Since I have known this it has seemed to me probable that Nietzsche’s hymn “Vor Sonnenaufgang” [“Before Sunrise”] is an expression of the same longing. Another patient, who became neurotic after his father’s death, was seized with his first attack of anxiety and giddiness while the sun shone upon him as he was working in the garden with a spade.¹⁶

Freud further relates Schreber’s relation to the sun in his Postscript, to recognize its wealth of associations with mythology. He does so by stating that as a sublimated “father-symbol,” the sun was Schreber’s target at which he would scream obscenities, and after his “recovery,” he boasts he can stare at it without any difficulty. This act of staring at the sun has a totemistic origin for Freud as stated in Totem and Taboo (from which Lacan derives his conception of the mythical, symbolic father – le nom du pere); Freud writes: We read in Reinach that the natural historians of antiquity attributed this power only to the eagle, who, as a dweller in the highest regions of the air, was brought into especially intimate relation with the heavens, with the sun, and with lightning. We learn from the same sources, moreover, that the eagle puts his young to a test before recognizing them as his

“O, Cripes, I’m drownded!” – further cementing the extensiveness of the parallel to the original myth. As Gifford comments: “That crude comment intrudes to warn us that Stephen as Icarus is soaring too high once again – just as he does at the novel’s end – and when we catch up with him at the beginning of Ulysses, he is once again picking the seaweed out of his teeth the flight of Daedalus has once again metamorphosed into the fall of Icarus” (Gifford, “Joyce and Myth,” ). Furthermore, Gifford sees further links between father-figures in Ulysses and The Odyssey relatable to this analysis: “Odysseus’ central purpose (his central ambition) is to return home to Ithaca, to be reunited with his wife, to take his place as his father’s son and his son’s father” (Gifford, “Joyce and Myth,” ).  Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories [], ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone, ), .  Freud, Three Case Histories, .

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legitimate offspring. Unless they can succeed in looking into the sun without blinking, they are cast out from the eyrie.¹⁷

Both the mythological Daedalus and Icarus assume the personage of a bird to escape from Crete (due to Minos’ imprisonment); they were the “eagle” who challenged the sun. In addition to seeing himself as a “hawklike man,” Joyce has Stephen specifically associate himself with the eagle: “His throat ached with a desire to cry aloud, the cry of a hawk or eagle on high, to cry piercingly of his deliverance to the winds” (P, 174). Joyce even includes a reference to meeting “the sun’s” – the symbolic father’s (?) – gaze in a conversation already quoted above: “Stephen mumbled his bread without answering his father’s gaze” (P, 81). Later, in humility, Stephen hides his sight on principle: “In order to mortify the sense of sight he made it his rule to walk in the street with downcast eyes, glancing neither to right nor left and never behind him” (P, 156). Even gazing at the clergy is too much for Stephen: As he strove to look at them with ease and indifference, a faint stain of personal shame and commiseration rose to his own face. Angry with himself he tried to hide his face from their eyes by gazing down sideways into the shallow swirling water under the bridge but he still saw a reflection therein of their topheavy [sic] silk hats, and humble tapelike [sic] collars and loosely hanging clerical clothes. (P, 171)

In fact, the only time Stephen assumes a “strong gaze” is in connection to Dedalus’s / Icarus’s / the eagle’s flight: “An ecstasy of flight made radiant his eyes and wild his breath and tremulous and wild and radiant his windswept limbs” (P, 174). Also at the novel’s end, Joyce writes of another instance of “gazing:” “She was alone and still, gazing out to sea; and when she felt his presence and the worship of his eyes her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze, without shame or wantonness. Long, long she suffered his gaze and then quietly withdrew her dyes from his and bent them towards the stream” (P, 176). Such statements as these seem to confuse Stephen’s dual position as Dedalus and/or Icarus even more.¹⁸

 Freud, Three Case Histories, , referencing Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions (Paris: E. Leroux, ), .  Additionally, to play off of phonic puns, Alan Friedman notes that “no one in or out of Joyce’s fiction calls his protagonist ‘Sunny Stephen,’” and notes how Joyce mockingly alludes to his nickname as “Sunny Twimjim” in Finnegan’s Wake (Alan Warren Friedman, “Stephen Dedalus’s Non Serviam: Patriarchal and Performative Failure in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” Joyce Studies Annual  []:  – , ). From this unique comic angle, Stephen is not

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Lineage of the father What is the importance and function of this gaze? Freud gives a direct answer to this question as well, stating “the procedure gone through by the eagle with his young is an ordeal, a test of lineage, such as is reported of the most various races of antiquity.”¹⁹ He adds: The assumption underlying these trials leads us deep into the totemistic habits of thought of primitive peoples. The totem – an animal, or a natural force animistically conceived, to which the tribe traces back its origin – spares the members of the tribe as its own children, just as it itself is honored by them as their ancestor and, if need be, spared by them […]. The eagle, then, who makes his young look into the sun and requires of them that they shall not be dazzled by its light, is behaving as though he were himself a descendant of the sun and were submitting his children to a test of their ancestry.²⁰

In light of this fact, consider this edited page-long conversation from Portrait: – Then he’s not his father’s son, said the little old man […]. – Your father, said the little old man to Stephen, was the boldest flirt in the city of Cork in his day. Do you know that? […] – Now don’t be putting ideas into his head, said Mr. Dedalus. Leave him to his Maker. […] – […] And, more than that, I can remember even your greatgrandfather, old John Stephen Dedalus, and a fierce old fireeater he was. Now then! There’s a memory for you! – That’s three generations – four generations, said another of the company […]. – Well, I hope he’ll be as good a man as his father. That’s all I can say, said Mr. Dedalus (P, 103 – 104).²¹

the sun, not the father as D(a)edalus is trumped by a higher sun. I’ll state more on this as I proceed.  Freud, Three Case Histories, .  Freud, Three Case Histories,  – .  There is a further (albeit looser) connection between the Freud and Joyce on this matter I do not intend to emphasize but think is worth noting. Regarding cultural tests of lineage, Freud writes, “Thus, the Celts living upon the banks of the Rhine used to entrust their new-born babies to the waters of the river, in order to ascertain whether they were truly of their own blood” (Freud, Three Case Histories, ). The “testing of the water” is somewhat reminiscent of Icarus’s fate at the hands of the sun-father when he “fails to prove his lineage” upon approach (drowning). Even more removed – while the Rhine River is in mainland Europe – the Celts did (by the later Iron Age) travel as far West as Ireland, and today (as in Joyce’s time) “Celtic” commonly refers to the regions of Ireland and Great Britain. There is, thus, a potential connection to Portraits’ setting of Ireland. This is strengthened by the fact that Stephen recounts a similar tale of “a mother [who] let her child fall into the Nile” (P, ). She then bargains for a crocodile to get the infant back. Also, to this story, Stephen also alludes to the sun: “This mentality, Lepidus would say, is indeed bred out of your mud by the operation of your sun” (P, ).

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There are many factors at work in this quote relevant to Freud’s analysis. First, the phrases “he’s not his father’s son” and “I hope he’ll be as good a man as his father” are straightforwardly an “ordeal” – and I might stress a test of worth (“good”). Second, the references to “greatgrandfather” and “four generations” reveal this test to be one of a long-lined lineage. Third, the ultimate source – the sun – of lineage is revealed in the allusion to our “Maker.” What’s unique from this perspective is that the sun is a symbolic “grand”father, grand in the ultimate, ontological sense. The religious connections to this myth are hard to avoid. In fact, Freud claims his present analysis leads to a “psychoanalytic explanation of the origins of religion.”²² What symbolic Father is this? Is it an incomplete Father? A faulty Father? The source Father (perhaps grand-father, to use my above term)? The next section will revisit something of Stephen’s interactions with the symbolic father(s) of religion.

The exalted father A duality akin to Daedalus vs. the sun exists in Stephen’s exposure to religion as well – namely Adam vs. God. During Arnall’s aforementioned sermon he alludes to the tale of Adam and Eve: “He came to the woman, the weaker vessel, and poured the poison of his eloquence into her hear, promising her – O, the blasphemy of that promise! – that if she and Adam ate of the forbidden fruit they would become as gods, nay as God Himself” (P, 125). Is not this act parallel to Icarus flying towards the sun? Here we have the act of becoming the Father (to “become as gods”), the capital father (God or the sun), which is, psychoanalytically, the death of the other father(s), in Lacanian terms “the dead father.”²³ In another parallel to the Greek myth, Joyce writes: “In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack,” a la Icarus’s fate (P, 130). Depending on the father – Adam or God, Daedalus or the sun – it seems “the symbolic father” plays the part as punisher and reason to be punished. There are, therefore, always in operation two fathers (or two types of fathers) – the father and The Father. And to this pair, Joyce’s hero faces two responses: servitude or rebellion. Joyce writes of Stephen: “of the end he had been born to serve” (P, 196). Servitude is what is expected of Stephen, specifically, servitude of the father: “In the

 Freud, Three Case Histories, .  Lacan, Ecrits, .

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profane world, as he foresaw, a worldly voice would bid him raise up his father’s fallen state by his labours” (P, 93). Moreover, Alan Friedman comments how Simon’s pushes of Stephen to revere the patriarch influence his artistic persona: “[Stephen’s father’s] most intense passion is expended in mourning for another defeated patriarch, a lesson Stephen transmutes into the artistic credo of withdrawal that comes to define his ultimate alienation and failure.”²⁴ Yet, Stephen does not accept the will of the father. The above section focused mainly on Stephen’s last name – Dedalus, yet his first name also is a pointed allusion to Saint Stephen, the first Christian martyr. Aside from dying for God, the Father (as martyr), Saint Stephen further parallels Joyce’s hero as he historically had conflicts with the established religion. In Portrait, Stephen witnesses the graceless patriarchy of Father Dolan at an early age, particularly in being pandied for not doing his school work when his glasses are broken, and/or for failing to explain this lapse to the satisfaction of Father Dolan. Due to this occurrence, Friedman makes the claim that “the Church’s representatives (even Father Conmee, as his subsequent mocking ‘account of the whole affair’ indicates) are powerful patriarchs, often arbitrary in their wielding of authority, as likely to be wrong as right.”²⁵ Stephen continues to rebel against all Symbolic fathers. As Stephen declares in his climactic non serviam: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church” (P, 248). Additionally, Joyce writes: “It seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served” (P, 190). Later, Cranly notices Stephen’s altered view on church and state in claiming: “you used to address the Jesuits and father” and “you talk against the Irish informers” (P, 205).²⁶ On the one hand Stephen’s flight to France is viewable as an assumption of the paternal (of Icarus’s flight towards the sun) – to be an artist, to be a father to creative work, and appropriately, he invokes the spirit of Daedalus in connection to this: Joyce writes, “He would create proudly out of the freedom and power of

 Friedman, “Non Serviam,” .  Friedman, “Non Serviam,” .  A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in addition to being largely autobiographical is set in Joyce’s native Ireland (especially Dublin) and deals with many Irish issues of the day, such as the quest for Irish autonomy (an issue very relatable to the symbolic father’s dominance and control). One particular real-life figure mentioned in the book (as well as in Dubliners and Ulysses, and briefly alluded to in Finnegan’s Wake) is political leader Charles Stewart Parnell. As found in The Critical Writings of James Joyce (collected in ), following the approval of Irish Home Rule, Joyce prophesied in  that the celebration would be weary: “there will be a ghost at the banquet – the shade of Charles Parnell … The ghost of the ‘uncrowned king’ will weigh on the hearts of … the new Ireland,” providing yet another example, another layer, of the mourning for the lost father (P, , ).

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his soul, as the great artificer whose name he bore, a living thing, new and soaring and beautiful, impalpable, imperishable”; he is “a symbol of the artist forging anew in his workshop out of the sluggish matter of the earth and a new soaring impalpable imperishable being” (P, 197,196). And furthermore, in this pursuit, he does begin to receive acknowledgement from the Dean (one father) who states, “you are an artist, are you not, Mr. Dedalus?” (P, 189). In fact, after writing his first poem, he stares into his mother’s mirror. Here he enacts Lacan’s fundamental theory of subject formation as outlined in “The Mirror Stage.”²⁷ On the other hand, if it is not only towards artistic creation, “Stephen’s flight is essentially negative: from his father and all that he embodies – familially, culturally, politically, historically, and performatively – rather than toward his goal of artistic creation.”²⁸ It is a flight from familial oppressive, if not punishing position. Thus, flight away from the symbolic father towards being a father constitutes the same desire. But this is not to forget that Stephen is the hybrid of Daedalus and Icarus; whether through artistic creation or self-autonomy, Stephen strives to be a father himself– and this is the essential desire illustrated in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. ²⁹ For example, Stephen’s artistic drive (to create) and his final flight to France are the most overt pursuits of/to this position, yet even earlier: “the ‘message of summons’ to the priesthood that Stephen receives [P, 167] at first seems the definitive call that will exclude all others, a means of escaping failed patriarchy by becoming ‘father’ to himself.”³⁰ For instance, Stephen is asked by the clergy, “”Have you ever felt within yourself, in your soul, a desire to join the order. Think” (P, 163). Stephen-as-Icarus (as opposed to Dedalus) is at least partially an assumption of Icarus, or in psychoanalytic terms: this is a faux-partial drive. More ironic is the fact that Stephen’s flight is paradoxically one towards and away from fathers and fatherhood – the conflation of the noun and the adjective, the symbolic and the Lacanian real, a play of signifiers. However, it ought to be asked: why is Stephen’s writing so important psychoanalytically? We can connect this concept to Lacan’s concept of the Real as out-

 Lacan, Ecrits,  – .  Friedman, “Non Serviam,” .  On a uniquely meta note, Joyce’s use of Dedalus as pseudonym to write himself (as mentioned) and the fact that Portrait is semi-autobiographical might offer this paper up as an analysis of Joyce, himself. This makes sense that, in theory, the psychoanalytic principles used to analyze this novel should be applicable to real life as well.  Friedman, “Non Serviam,” .

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lined in his twenty-third seminar, operating in “Joyce’s fiction to embody the changing of people’s minds as they enact freedom and creativity.”³¹ In Le sinthome, Lacan notes that we enter the real through “little bits of writing.”³² For Lacan, language is seen as creating reality rather than simply representing it as something established a priori. Thus, “the Real works to supplement reality by calling into question these mysterious signifiers.”³³ Hence, we can read Stephen’s short poems as a play of signifiers questioning and reestablishing reality – a circular pattern will be increasingly seen. Moreover, in Looking Awry, Žižek sees the emergence of the Real as a spot or stain likened to an anamorphosis (a distorted figure that must be seen from the side to become comprehensible.³⁴ The most famous psychoanalytic allusion comes from Lacan’s analysis of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, in which a skull must be viewed from askance to be seen.³⁵ Interestingly enough, Lacan turns to art to explain this concept. Turning back to Stephen’s art as a rebellious function, Brivic explains that “if the power to reshape the structure of perception is the invention of language free from authority, then to go beyond the law of the Father, one must uproot the fundamental traditional basis of language.”³⁶ Thus, Stephen-as-artist can attempt to unlink himself from his world as a sinthome: “The movement toward the Real creates the subject, and this is why all of Joyce’s novels focus on voyages into the unknown, such as the new path that Stephen sets out on in each chapter of Portrait.”³⁷ In fact, le sinthome adds that the mirror-stage cited earlier may be reflected by art.³⁸ However, this faux-identity formation is more complicated, previously described here as a play of signifiers. In a later work, Žižek expands on his notion

 Shelley Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan and Žižek: Explorations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ): .  Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire, livre XXIII: Le sinthome, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: Editions du Seuil, ): .  Lacan, Le sinthome, .  Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, ).  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts,  – .  Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, .  Lacan, Le sinthome, .  In fact, Brivic writes: “Lacan begins the section of Le sinthome called “The Track of Joyce” by defining the knowledge characteristic of Joyce the sinthome as “savoir faire,” which he refers to as the artifice that gives art its remarkable value (Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, ). Savoir faire can mean not only “knowing how to do,” but “knowing how to make” (Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, ).

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of the “stain,” citing a hypothetical statement by Lacan: “as Lacan would put it, there is no I without the stain.”³⁹ Thus, in order to understand itself, the subject must ironically project itself as a stain that cannot be understood. It is correlative to the very non-being of the subject. This is another way to view Stephen’s flight as a paradoxical one both towards and away from fatherhood. He is stuck in a psychoanalytic swamp of signifiers.

Sins of the father Lacan himself revisits le nom du pere in his Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Citing the last chapter of Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Lacan identifies a dream “in a category of its own” through its suspension around mystery.⁴⁰ In the dream, as he is falling asleep, a father sees the image of his son rise up in front of him, who says Father, can’t you see I’m burning? In reality, the son actually is burning in the next room: What is the point then of sustaining the theory according to which the dream is the image of a desire with an example in which, in a sort of flamboyant reflection, it is precisely a reality which, incompletely transferred, seems here to be shaking the dreamer from his sleep? Why, if not to suggest a mystery that is simply the world of the beyond, and some secret or other shared by the father and the son who says to him, Father, can’t you see I’m burning? What is he burning with, if not with that which we see emerging at other points designated by the Freudian topology, namely, the weight of the sins of the father, borne by the ghost in the myth of Hamlet, which Freud couples with the myth of Oedipus? The father, the Name-of-the-father, sustains the structure of desire with the structure of the law – but the inheritance of the father is that which Kierkegaard designates for us, namely, his sin.⁴¹

Daedalus’s son, Icarus, certainly inherits his father’s “sins” in the form of his imprisonment in Crete at the hands of Minos as well as his consequential “burning” at the hands of the ultimate symbolic Father – the sun: Father, can’t you see I’m burning. Likewise, Stephen is crowned with his various fathers’ sins throughout Portrait. As regards his biological father: “The domestic scene recapitulates the family’s downward spiral that results from his father’s wastrel behavior.”⁴² National Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke UP, ), .  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts,  – .  Friedman, “Non Serviam,” .

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istically, Stephen cries in angst: “My ancestors threw off their language and took another […]. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?” (P, 205 – 206). In the religious domain, Arnall asserts that “death and judgment [were] brought into the world by the sin of our first parents” (P, 122). The original sin of all mankind is the sin of the father. Why introduce the Name-of-the-Father at all in light of this dream? Lacan claims it had “no other purpose, in fact, than to put into question the origin, to discover by what privilege Freud’s desire was able to find the entrance into the field of experience he designates as the unconscious.”⁴³ Yet the above dream is not the realization of desire; instead, what it contains “almost for the first time” is a function of a secondary kind of dream – one which satisfies only the “need to prolong sleep.”⁴⁴ Yes, Lacan continues to say that there is such a thing as somnambulistic activity, but – “Father, can’t you see I’m burning” – those words wake the sleeper. And what are they? “What is it that wakes the sleeper? Is it not, in the dream, another reality?”⁴⁵ Ultimately, it is the missed reality that caused the death of the child (and the remorse of the father): Is not the dream essentially, one might say, an act of homage to the missed reality – the reality that can no longer produce itself except by repeating itself endlessly, in some never attained awakening? What encounter can there be henceforth with that forever inert being – even now being devoured by the flames – if not the encounter that occurs precisely at the moment when, by accident, as if by chance, the flames come to meet him? Where is the reality in this accident, if not that it repeats something actually more fatal by means of reality, a reality in which the person who was supposed to be watching over the body still remains asleep, even then the father reemerges after having woken up? Thus the encounter, forever, missed, has occurred between dream and awakening, between the person who is still asleep and whose dream we will not know and the person who has dreamt merely in order not to wake up….For it is not that, in the dream, he persuades himself that the son is still alive. But the terrible vision of the dead son taking the father by the arm designates a beyond that makes itself heard in the dream. Desire manifests itself in the dream by the loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object. It is only in the dream that this truly unique encounter can occur. Only a rite, an endlessly repeated act,

 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, . However, this is perhaps not for “the first time” as Lacan states. In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, Freud states: “[T]he sleeping ego, however, is focused on the wish to maintain sleep” (Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis [], trans. James Strachey [New York: W. W. Norton, ]: ).  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts,  (emphasis in original).

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can commemorate this not very memorable encounter- for no one can say what the death of a child is, except the father qua father, that is to say, no conscious being.⁴⁶

The no man’s land between dream and awakening is precisely where Icarus flies in the mythopoeic realm, where he must fly – neither to Earth (Dedalus, the father), nor too close to the sun (the Father). Yet the desire of the son is to approach the father, defeat the father, be the father. This is true to the classic Oedipal complex. But the Daedalus myth is focused on a multiple father structure – at least two, the father and the Father, in which one is defined by the other. And, in which, psychoanalytically, no one can be the father. Similarly, Stephen’s missed reality is a middle folded ground between the “no” of the Symbolic paternal of Simon/Father Dole/God and his quest for artistic and personal autonomy.⁴⁷ But how can Stephen occupy the dual positions of Father and son? The answer is that the Symbolic father is a floating signifier. Imagine a rotating Oedipal triangle, in which each of the three points are placeholders – and this is what a signifier is a Lacanian realm, a placeholder yet one that defines the subject. The oscillation of the fathers is a structure to define the subject. Stephen’s identification as understood in Joyce scholarship can further expand this analysis. In “The Portrait in Perspective,” Kenner points out that “the action of each of the five chapters is really the same action. Each chapter closes with a synthesis of triumph which the next destroys.”⁴⁸ Brivic suggests that as a conservative Kenner sees Stephen as ‘indigestibly Byronic’ out of opposition to the “idea of changing the world.”⁴⁹ Regardless, with the onset of each new chapter, Stephen’s current phase of identity (i. e., rebellious stance against the father) ultimately will stand: “the paternal threat forces him to be displaced from the phrase that he has occupied and to set out in a new direction.”⁵⁰ In fact,

 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts,  – .  Lacan references the “go-between” of images in relation to the Father (divinity): “Indeed, God is the creator of certain images – we see this in Genesis, with the Zelem Elohim. And iconoclastic thought itself still preserves this when it declares there is a god that does not care for this. He is certainly alone in this. But I do not want to go too far today in a direction that would take us right to the heart of one of the most essential elements of the Name-of-the-Father: a certain pact may be signed beyond every image. Where we are, the image remains a go-between with the divinity – if Javeh forbids the Jews to make idols, it is because they give pleasure to the other gods. In a certain register it is not God who is not anthropomorphic, it is man who is begged not to be so” (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, ).  Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, ): .  Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, .  Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, .

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Stephen’s entire being is defined by the disparate “fatherly” roles he hopelessly tries to sustain. Thus, Stephen should be read as not an identity, but as a series of displacements. As Brivic notes: “For many readers, Stephen is usually more sympathetic after the middle of each chapter, when he is needy and disoriented, than he is at the start, when he thinks that he knows who he is. Neither of these two states can identify him, for he is made up of the shift between them.”⁵¹ On this concept, Lacan states that the initial (or initiating) link between one signifier and another creates a gap, in which “it is possible for this fault we call the subject to open.”⁵² I claim, psychoanalytically, these oscillations come from the imposition of the father structure (and desire towards the father structure). Thus, desire is the rotation of the Oedipal structure (which rotates precisely because of the desire to be the father); hence, desire of the father and desire to be the father are ultimately the same.

An addendum: The father in dreams What the Dedalus myth adds to the Oedipal relation is the bi-father, that we need two fathers – not just the father’s father (think of God, the sun), but a signifying agent in which the condition of “fatherhood” and the traits of the father can be defined by one another – true to Lacanian laws of signification. Interestingly enough, Portrait concludes with Stephen recounting “a troubled night of dreams:” A long curving gallery. From the floor ascend pillars of dark vapours. It is peopled by the images of fabulous kings, set in stone. Their hands are folded upon their knees in token of weariness and their eyes are darkened for the errors of men go up before them for ever as dark vapours […]. Strange figures advance from a cave. They are not as tall as men. One does not seem to stand quite apart from another. Their faces are phosphorescent, with darker streaks they peer at me and their eyes seem to ask me something. They do not speak. (P, 250 – 251)

I would analyze this dream as follows: First, what do the “pillars of dark vapours” signify if not the phallus – the ultimate signifier mentioned above? And it is the phallus of “kings,” of multiple, symbolic Fathers (the capital Father)

 Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, .  Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis [ – ], ed. JacquesAlain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, ): .

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displaced in the Freudian sense. It is the phallus that allows this group to be signified. And it is this group who “hold a place” – as signifiers do – in their reign. Yet, it is crucial to note that these are not kings but the “images of fabulous kings”: the in-between that Lacan writes of above. Lacan was quoted above as stating: “Desire manifests itself in the dream by the loss expressed in an image at the most cruel point of the object,” which is always the dead father Lacan writes of in defining the Name of the Father. For, what is the “most cruel” point of the object but the objet petit a, that which is inaccessible yet consistently desired? And what else is constantly desired – to Stephen as both Dedalus / Icarus – than to be the Father? Also note, this idea is true in Lacan’s famous mantra “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”⁵³ Thus, the “no” of the father is literally that: the “no” of [being] the father. This as a thesis of equal importance. Joyce continues to write: “Strange figures advance from a cave. They are not as tall as men.” These are the Symbolic fathers (the lower case), of which “one does not seem to stand quite apart from another.” This indistinguishable characteristic of the Symbolic father is precisely what was quoted above, and why focus was centered on the manifold image of the symbolic father, what was termed the rotational Oedipal triangle. Finally, Joyce concludes with the line, “they peer at me and their eyes seem to ask me something”; the gaze – the eagle’s test (Icarus’s ordeal) that their ancestor is the sun, the Father. All these dead kings – whose “hands are folded upon their knees in token of weariness and […] eyes […] darkened” – present a test of lineage through a gaze, which they, themselves, can never pass. Lacan writes: The gaze may contain in itself the object a of the Lacanian algebra where the subject falls, and what specifies the scopic field and engenders the satisfaction proper to it is the fact that, for structural reasons, the fall of the subject always remains unperceived, for it is reduced to zero. In so far as the gaze, qua object a, may come to symbolize this central lack expressed in the phenomenon of castration, and in so far as it is an object a reduced, of its nature, to a punctiform, evanescent function, it leaves the subject in ignorance as to what there is beyond the appearance, an ignorance so characteristic of all progress in thought that occurs in the way constituted by philosophical research.⁵⁴

Thus, what is a father in a dream but our very selves? Or a son in a dream? In psychoanalysis no one can be the Father. Just as Icarus does (or Dedalus), the “subject falls.” Thus, here, we have psychoanalysis qua psychoanalysis. If I were to define you by me – Lacan would agree. In other words, we’re always at mercy of the object a. If we were to define us by the Oedipal complex, we  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .  Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts,  – .

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show said complex defining itself. In other words, in my analysis, we can now take the gaze (the eagle’s test of lineage to the sun, the Father) to explicitly symbolize the object petit a (the cause of the subject to fall as Icarus, to be reduced to an algebraic zero); transitorily, the sun is a punctiform that leaves the subject in a dream, that space discussed above. We are all birds, and we will all fall. To add to this idea: Stephen certainly sees others as such too: “we are all animals. I also am an animal” (P, 208). Additionally, he describes Emma’s image as the “birdgirl” on the tram: “her image had passed into his soul for ever and no word had broken the holy silence of his ecstasy” (P, 81). Likewise, Joyce writes: “He had often thought it strange that Vincent Heron had a bird’s face as well as a bird’s name” (P, 85). This might be why Friedman phrases Stephen’s flight to Paris as “answering the call of the birds.”⁵⁵ We can even connect Stephen’s artful foray into the realm of the Lacanian Real as a destiny to fall. It is also worth examining the bird-like Heron, of whom Brivic writes: “Vincent Heron in II follows this [fatherly] pattern by being an Irish youth who imitates the English.”⁵⁶ For example, he keeps using British phrases like “what a lark,” “ripping” (twice), “your governor,” and “deucedly” (P, 75 – 77). Additionally, he insists that Tennyson is the greatest poet, accuses Stephen of heresy, and forces him to confess (P, 78 – 82). In Brivic’s analysis, with which I agree, the father-repressors do grow more subtle. For example, Dolan beats Stephen seriously while Heron beats him merely at play: “This advance in subtlety shows how Stephen moves toward increasing freedom.”⁵⁷ Still, this movement is Stephen’s flight which will ultimately lead to a fall. Brivic writes: “One branch of the pattern of changing is the image of molting […]: whenever Stephen feels strong emotion, it falls away from him like peel dropping from a fruit.”⁵⁸ Lacan’s most elaborate examination of a scene is his account of the formation of the sinthome in Portrait, specifically within the paternal aggression as embodied by Heron when Stephen is assaulted by him and his friends for defending his artistic values (P, 80 – 82). Lacan first focuses on the molting image extensively, arguing that Stephen’s Imaginary or ego is displaced from the knot of his subjectivity (hitherto discussed in detail as an oscillating formation) by this brutal confrontation with the Real.⁵⁹ In other words, a father-confrontation pits Stephen against the Real.     

Friedman, “Non Serviam,” . Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, . Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, . Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, . Lacan, Le sinthome, .

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This fact is highly significant as Lacan describes the Real as “always coming back.”⁶⁰ Or, to say this another way, the Real leads to a fall back to one’s jumping point. Thus, it is Stephen’s acceptance of this shock of the Real – which corresponds to the molting of his emotions – that becomes the sinthome “that allows him to change through an act of movement.”⁶¹ Falling is inevitable with the rotation of the father figures in Stephen’s life. Stephen assumes the gaze at novel’s end: “Eyes, opening from the darkness of desire, eyes that dimmed the breaking east. What was their languid grace but the softness of chambering?” (P, 234). The function of gazing is the function of falling in the desire to be a Father (symbolically, of course), of which there are always at least two in a movable oedipal triangle. This is what the myth of Dedalus and Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man tells us.

 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, .  Brivic, Joyce Through Lacan, .

Timothy Collins

Metaphor in the Text of Psychoanalysis: Lacan, Poe and the Poetic Symbol

Much attention has been given to the ways in which Edgar Allan Poe influenced French literature and theory. Critics point out that Poe’s short stories ultimately led to the genres of science fiction and the crime novel, while Poe’s poetry has been seen as a major influence on Symbolist and Surrealist poetry. The readings of “The Purloined Letter” by Lacan and Derrida have been looked at by critics exhaustively. Owing to the way in which Poe’s works were translated into French, these analogies of Poe’s influence – the short stories and fiction, the poetry and Symbolism, and “The Purloined Letter” and theory – have remained surprisingly static. There has not been much criticism that looks at Poe’s influence in ways that the aforementioned parallels do not touch on. The thesis of this paper is that Poe’s poetry sets a precedent in literary representation, specifically the catachrestic symbol, which ultimately finds its way into Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis. I will read “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” paying close attention to Lacan’s critical discourse on language, then analyze Poe’s poem “Ulalume,” focusing on diction and metaphor. In Jacques Lacan’s essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” Lacan not only qualifies structuralism to define his theory of psychoanalysis, he more specifically uses literary representation as a metaphor to explain the way in which the unconscious expresses itself. In the same way that the signifier is closed off from the signified in language, for Lacan the unconscious is divided from consciousness entirely. Accordingly, the unconscious can only indirectly hint at its content because it is a system of signification. Lacan explicitly refers to the way in which the unconscious does represent as a form of writing: “it is precisely the fact that […] the dream run[s] up against a lack of taxematic material for the representation of […] logical articulations […] that proves [it is] a form of writing.”¹ In the same way that the signifier finds an obstacle in representing the signified, the dream also cannot find adequate modes to give form to the unconscious. The dream, strangely, uses literary tropes. For Lacan, structuralism, and by extension poetry, become the founda-

 Jacques Lacan, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology. Second Edition, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Oxford: Blackwell, ):  – , ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “Instance.” DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-014

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tion of his conceptualization of psychoanalysis because language and the unconscious have parallel structures in that they are both closed systems which achieve representation by figural displacement. This paper will argue that Lacan’s theory, indebted as it is to literary representation, is well demonstrated in the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, because Poe had a profound influence on French poetic language in the generation that preceded Lacan’s career, from Baudelaire to the Surrealists.² Much attention has been given to the ways in which Edgar Allan Poe has influenced French literature and theory. Michael Ziser goes so far as to suggest that Lacan’s conceptual apparatus is “built atop” Poe’s writings in his ecocritical reading of non-human signification in the authors’ twinned works.³ Critics point out that Poe’s short stories ultimately led to the genres of science fiction and the crime novel, while his poetry has been seen as a major influence on Symbolist and Surrealist poetry.⁴ The readings of “The Purloined Letter” by Lacan, Derrida and Barbara Johnson, among others, have been looked at by critics exhaustively. Owing to the way in which Poe’s works were translated into French, these analogies of Poe’s influence – the short stories and fiction, the poetry and Symbolism, and “The Purloined Letter” and theory – have remained surprisingly static. In other words, there has not been much criticism that looks at Poe’s influence in ways that the aforementioned parallels do not touch on. As Henri Justin explains, despite these ostensible contradictions in Poe’s oeuvre, he was very consciously creating “a unity that few readers, even admirers of Poe, could actually grasp.”⁵ These hard and fast divisions of Poe’s work are merely cosmetic; there is a larger conceptual schema that runs through the poems and the stories. Accordingly, there is a clear correspondence between the linguistic theory of Lacan’s essay and the tropes of representation in Poe’s poetry, especially because Lacan’s essay explicitly uses literary devices as metaphors for the unconscious. As Lydia Liu notes, it is “a common mistake is to fetishize Lacan’s textural excursions in the ‘Seminar on “The Purloined Letter”’ as a virtuoso performance in psychoanalytic criticism” and consequently overlook important nuances in

 See Jonathan Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” in Critical Insights: The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Steven Frye (Pasadena, CA: Salem P, ):  – , .  Michael Ziser, “Animal Mirrors: Poe, Lacan, von Uexküll, and Audubon in the Zoosemiosphere,” Angelaki . ():  – , .  See Henri Justin, “The Paradoxes of Poe’s Reception in France,” Edgar Allan Poe Review . ():  – .  Justin, “The Paradoxes,” .

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Lacan’s work.⁶ Although “The Purloined Letter” certainly did influence poststructuralist theory, Poe’s poetics were equally formative for the latter, if not more so. To make this argument, I will do a close reading of Lacan’s essay “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud” paying close attention to the literary devices that Lacan uses to explain his notion of the unconscious, and the way in which he qualifies structuralism. Then I will do a close reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Ulalume” in this light, paying close attention to literary representation, particularly diction and metaphor. The thesis of this paper is that Lacan’s thinking provides an ideal lens for reading Poe’s poetry because the literary devices used by Poe essentially set a precedent in literary representation which ultimately finds its way into Lacan’s theory of psychoanalysis by way of these French poetic movements. Poe’s practice of poetic language was certainly influential for French poetics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and these schools of poetry, in turn, were formative for the development of structuralist and poststructuralist theory. This genealogy of symbolism can be demonstrated by reading Poe through Lacan.

The authority of the letter In “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason since Freud,” Lacan attempts to dispel a trend in the psychoanalysis of his day which oversimplified Freud’s interpretation of dreams and diagnosis of neurosis. The essay is an attempt to change the direction of psychoanalytic practice at the time; the trend Lacan is fighting against, he contends, oversimplifies Freud’s interpretation of dreams and neurosis. He argues that “bad psychoanalysis” can be recognized by the appeal to “natural analogy” which reduces dreams or neuroses to prefabricated Freudian concepts (“Instance,” 455). He argues that psychoanalysis has begun codifying Freud’s work instead of practicing the same kind of interpretation that made that work possible. Contemporary practice, Lacan argues, has become reductive, one-dimensional, and even harmful: “psychoanalysts are busy remodeling psychoanalysis into a right-thinking movement whose crowning expression is the sociological poem of the autonomous ego” (“Instance,” 460). For Lacan, this tautological analysis is simply an alibi for avoiding confrontation with the unconscious, which is essentially irreducible. On the one hand, the “sociological poem” is the fossilization of Freudian concepts which robs them of

 Lydia H. Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious: Rethinking Lacan, Poe, and French Theory,” Critical Inquiry . ():  – , .

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their immediacy. On the other, the ego for Lacan is not autonomous because it is formed through language which is communal and through desire which is the relationship with the Other. Ultimately, the goal of psychoanalysis is an intersubjective experience of the unconscious, known as transference, which allows the analyst to read the analysand’s consciousness in the same way that one would read a literary text. He sees the initial resistance to psychoanalysis and the consequent blunting of Freud’s methods as a reaction to the profound implications of Freud’s discoveries and the unwillingness of analysts to enter the radical uncertainty of the psyche. In this essay there are two means by which Lacan attempts to describe the unconscious abstractly. The first is a qualification of structural linguistic theory and the second is literary representation. Given the fact that the unconscious has the same structure as language, it expresses itself in the same ways. Instead of trying to reduce the content of dreams and neurotic symptoms to easily understandable causes or simple concepts, Lacan is trying to outline how this content comes into being, insisting that it is the analyst’s individual act of interpretation which is paramount: “[t]he unconscious is neither primordial nor instinctual, what it knows about the elementary is no more than the elements of the signifier” (“Instance,” 459). There is a distinction between the unconscious and what it represents. The unconscious is not itself a root cause, but, instead, it signifies what is “elementary.” For Lacan, it is not so much that there are not root causes, as it is that the unconscious does not understand them any better than we do and does not have some key or code to understanding or representing the “elementary.” It follows that the unconscious is no more than a system of signs that attempts to represent its content – trauma or desire – which is ultimately unattainable and inexpressible. The analyst’s job is to read these expressions of the unconscious in the same way that one reads literature: through an act of creative interpretation. He often mentions Freud’s frequent references to philology, mythology, literature, and other cultural phenomena, and explains that many of Freud’s key concepts are equivalent to poetic and rhetorical devices. Because this makeup of the unconscious is synonymous, and even interchangeable, with the structure of language, Lacan uses structural linguistic terminology to explain the unconscious. He writes that psychoanalysis “does nothing other than establish that the unconscious leaves none of our actions outside its field […] It is a matter, therefore, of defining the topography of the unconscious” (“Instance, 456”). Because the ego does not exist autonomously from the unconscious, but within it, there is no set of concepts that can translate the content of the unconscious. The only task left for the psychoanalyst is to “define the topography of the unconscious” or represent its structure of meaningmaking, thus facilitating better interpretation. The signifier has total primacy,

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in both psychoanalysis and literature, and is completely autonomous from the signified, unlike the structural sign in which this relationship is comparable to the sides of a coin, ideal for free and easy exchange. Even more than contending that language and the unconscious have the same makeup, Lacan argues that the discipline of psychoanalysis actually leads to a discovery of linguistic structure: “what the psychoanalytic experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language” (“Instance,” 457). He explains that this insistence on textuality is due to the autonomy and primacy of language in the face of the subject: “language is not to be confused with the various psychical and somatic functions that serve it in the speaking subject – primarily because language and its structure exist prior to the moment at which each subject at a certain point in his mental development makes his entry into it” (“Instance,” 458). Language exists prior to anyone who uses it and therefore is independent of both subject and external reality. In this way, language, as an autonomous structure, defines the ways in which the subject can relate to reality, and is, accordingly, essential in understanding the unconscious. The way that Lacan describes the relationship between these three realms is novel because he underscores the primacy of language which curbs the agency of the human subject. He says that the “psychical functions” of the speaking subject serve language because the subject is in a subordinate position vis-àvis the authority that is language. In this vein, the title of the essay could also be translated “The Authority of the Letter in the Unconscious.” What Lacan calls the “self’s radical excentricity to itself” is the ultimate consequence of the autonomous structure of language and the subject’s subaltern position (“Instance,” 460). Because language defines the subject and the way the subject relates to reality, the ego is decentered instead of autonomous – which accounts for the slippages and modes of representation in both poetry and the unconscious. The goal of both psychoanalysis and literary criticism is to read into these slippages and identify with the decentered subject. Lacan also qualifies how it is that language and the external world it refers to remain independent. He writes “[i]f we try to grasp in language the constitution of the object, we cannot fail to notice that this constitution is to be found only at the level of concept, a very different thing from a simple nominative” (“Instance,” 459). A name describes one particular thing. A concept, on the other hand, refers to a whole category of things without indicating the constitution of the particular thing referred to. Through these concepts, the closed order of language is shut off from the external world of particular things. Language mediates between the speaking subject, whose emotions do not become language or create language but simply embody it, and the external world, whose particulars are not named but simply referred to. The signified of the structural

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sign is not the object referred to but merely a concept, and, paradoxically, the concepts of language actually define the object more than they are defined by it. When Lacan writes “the concept […] engenders the thing,” he means the particular object is understood through the category in which it is placed; instead of mediating transparently, concepts create “a particular language’s universe of sense in which the universe of things will come into line [my emphasis].”⁷ The gap between words and things is deeper than mediation – language defines the way we perceive the world. It goes without saying that language still works as a convention to communicate in everyday life; Lacan simply insists on the obvious but weighty fact that language mediates between subject and object and defines the possibilities of this relationship. He writes: “[discourse] lays down the elementary structures of culture. And these very structures reveal an ordering of possible exchanges which […] is inconceivable outside the permutations authorized by language” (“Instance,” 448). On one hand, language defines and delimits the relationship between subject and object. On the other, the terms of this relationship do not account for all the nuances of its actuality. In other words, we can experience phenomena which cannot be expressed through the finite avenues of mediation provided by language. This gap is filled by figurative language in writing, and by dreams or neurotic symptoms in the unconscious. Language can “signify something quite other than what it says” and the gap is bridged (“Instance, 452). Lacan calls this “creative subjectivity” which “has not ceased a militant struggle to renew the never-exhausted power of symbols.”⁸ The creative use of symbols takes place throughout society, from science to politics and advertising.⁹ Given the formative role of symbolism for both the human psyche and linguistic structure, literary tropes permeate every aspect of culture. The definition of symbolism can be extremely muddled; for the sake of this article, I will remain faithful to Lacan’s usage quoted above. Symbolism is language’s potential for figural substitution, whether as poetic metaphor, discursive rhetoric, or merely as the very process of signification itself. This figure permeates society because the rigidity of the concept, on one hand, and the fluidity of phenomena, on the other, are incessantly in conflict wherever there is human consciousness. Given the fact that, in Lacan’s notion of structuralism, language is a completely independent structure which exists between subject and object, the  Jacques Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. Anthony Wilden (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ): .  Lacan, Speech and Language, .  Lacan, Speech and Language, .

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way in which meaning is created bears significant weight. There is an unbridgeable gap between signifiers and signifieds. One important distinction to make about these terms in English is that there is a sense of temporality which is lost in translation. Signified comes from the French signifié which is the past participle of the verb signifier whose primary definition is “to mean” and whose secondary denotation is “to signify.” Signifier is the translation of signifiant, the present participle of signifier. So, the signified has the connotation of “meant” or “that which was meant” while signifier has the connotation of “meaning” or “that which is producing meaning.” Even if we consider that the translation of signifier as “to signify” is ultimately correct, there still is this temporal nuance to the original French. The temporal difference between the terms in a sense widens the gap, not to mention elucidates the act of speaking insofar as speaking is pictured as expressing something that is always already past. The two sides of the structural symbol, rather than forming two sides of the same coin, are in fact displaced in different moments in time. Lacan outlines how meaning is created in the face of this gap: “it is in the chain of the signifier that the meaning ‘insists’ but that none of its elements ‘consists’ in the signification of which it is at the moment capable” (“Instance,” 451). Given the facts of language, meaning cannot consist of its referent, but only insist on what is being represented. When we use language we understand that words and things are mediated by concepts, and we cannot simply name the things we see, but instead have to insist on what exactly we are trying to describe. The words we use only refer to the object spoken of and do not capture what exactly constitutes it. At the same time, the “chain of the signifier” does have a quantifiable meaning insofar as language creates meaning independent of that which it is referring to. The quantifiable meaning that language does create could be close to the intended meaning of the speaker or not at all. In terms of psychoanalysis what this means is that the analyst should look for the slippages in the analysand’s speech for a pathway into the contents of the unconscious in the same way that literary criticism tracks the slippages of rhetoric or poetic devices in a text. On the one hand, language does create quantifiable meaning insofar as it is a closed system whose purpose it is to create meaning. On the other, there is always some ambiguity as to whether the meaning created expresses the object that the speaking subject was referring to. This is a major concern for Lacan. For Saussure this problem is accrued over time – language changes and accordingly the composition and connotations of words change, creating obscurity which ultimately leads to different dialects and new languages. For Lacan, this problem is inherent in every speech act: “[w]e are forced, then, to accept the notion of an incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier” (“Instance,” 451).

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The object referred to is always at least somewhat elusive – the best the speaker can do is insist on a meaning and be concise. The subject, thankfully, is aware of this disparity and plays an active role in trying to create meaning that is not ambiguous: [a]ll our experience runs counter to this linearity, which made speak once […] of something more like ‘anchoring points’ […] as a schema for taking into account the dominance of the letter in the dramatic transformation that dialogue can effect in the subject. (“Instance,” 451)

Despite this “sliding of the signifier” communication is effective because the intended meaning is insisted on or “anchored” beneath discourse. The subject has a stake in meaning and dialogue can insure that the intended meaning was received. A psychological content is anchored beneath the signifier of the dream or neurotic symptom and it is the analyst’s job to locate this signified through psychoanalytic interpretation. Literature is one form of this “dramatic dialogue” and Lacan makes many explicit references to literature throughout the essay. For example, he writes that Freud’s concept of condensation is “the structure of the superimposition of the signified which metaphor takes as its field, and whose name […] shows how the mechanism is connatural with poetry to the point that it envelops the traditional function proper to poetry” (“Instance,” 455). Condensation, which describes how dreams work, is ultimately just another term for metaphor. Lacan is certainly stretching Freud’s definition of the term, but Freud does explicitly refer to the dream-work as a form of writing: [T[he dream content appears to us as a translation of the dream-thoughts into another mode of expression, whose symbols and laws of composition we must learn by comparing the origin with the translation […] The dream-content is, as it were, presented in hieroglyphics, whose symbols must be translated, one by one, into the language of dream thoughts. It would of course be incorrect to read these symbols in accordance with their values as pictures, instead of in accordance with their meanings as symbols.¹⁰

Condensation, then, is the rhetorical gesture of dreaming whereby the dreamthoughts (or latent content) are translated into the dream-content (or manifest content). This opposition of latent and manifest content, in terms of the process of paradigmatic substitution, is comparable to not only Saussure’s opposition of signified and signifier but also, and perhaps more appropriately, to the opposi Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams [], trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Modern Library, ): .

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tion between tenor and vehicle in metaphor theory. There is a stark opposition between the literal and figurative interpretation of symbols, where the symbolic is composed in a kind of visual language. In Lacan’s reading of Freud, not only is the dream comparable to poetry, it essentially is a form of poetry which psychoanalysis tries to decipher, drawing an equivalence between his poststructuralism and poetics. Without drawing this equivalence exactly, Freud does admit that “the essential condition of poetical creation includes a very similar attitude [to the method of dream interpretation].”¹¹ Freud goes on to allude to Friedrich Schiller as an example of this hermeneutical-poetic method, much in the same way as Lacan appeals to Paul Valéry and Victor Hugo in “The Instance.” Given the fact that Lacan essentially makes these two disciplines interchangeable, we can think about his appeal to poetry in terms of structuralism itself. For Lacan, poetry is the paragon of the unconscious and, accordingly, of structuralism. In other words, poetry is analogous to how the unconscious works on the one hand, and demonstrates structural linguistic theory in practice, on the other. Poetry, in fact, influenced structuralism and without doubt played a role in its formation. Lacan says so much in the essay. He writes “one only has to listen to poetry, which Saussure was no doubt in the habit of doing, for polyphony to be heard, for it to become clear that all discourse is aligned along several staves of a scale” (“Instance,” 451). Lacan imagines that Saussure must have been in the habit of listening to poetry at least in part because, before his linguistic theory, Saussure established a theory of poetics which he never published. Les cahiers d’anagrammes, posthumously, would be a major influence on poststructural theory. Saussure’s poetics was centered on an idea about groups of repeated phonemes – something strikingly similar to “polyphony” and “staves of a scale.” In listening to poetry, one understands that language is ultimately an amalgamation of spoken sounds. When one does understand that language is a “scale” of sounds, one has to reach the conclusion that there is a gap between the word and the thing it refers to. A word is itself a material thing insofar as it is a spoken sound. In this passage Lacan implies that this realization is the foundation of structural linguistic theory. For Lacan, this substance of language serves as the prison house of subjectivity, to borrow Fred Jameson’s term, as it defines “that literal (phonematic) structure in which the signifier is articulated and analyzed in discourse” (“Instance,” 455). The materiality of the signifier defines its radical difference from that to which it refers. In this sense, poetry underscores the bar that indefinitely segregates signifier from signified in its celebration of language as phonemic

 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, .

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substance. Because language is ultimately vocal sound, it is an independent, closed system. The relation language then has to that which it refers to is a major question. Lacan appeals to literature as a way to describe how this question is resolved. Lacan seems to implicitly refer to poetic representation when he tries to describe structuralism. For example, he writes that a structuralist parable he uses demonstrates “from what radiating center the signifier sends forth its light into the shadow of incomplete significations” (“Instance,” 450). His language here becomes poetic and this passage also seems to be an apotheosis of the signifier as the fodder of poetic inspiration in that it can “send forth its light” from a “radiating center.” This kind of language is very different from the idea of the “sliding signifier” where the signifier is never aligned with the signified owing to the closed structure of language and the rigidity of the concept. Here, Lacan is describing what happens when the signifier does “shed light on incomplete significations” and he is qualifying this resolution in language that points to poetic expression. Poetics influence Lacan’s variety of poststructuralism in this essay in two ways. The first is the way in which poetry makes one conscious of the gap between language and referent because poetry is grounded in diction. When spoken sounds are given a particular form, the fact that language is spoken sound becomes evident. The second is the way in which poetic tropes bridge this gap between language and that which it refers to, and successfully. Most notably, metaphor bridges this gap. What is so intriguing about this essay is how it contradicts itself. On the one hand, Lacan argues that language is a closed order and that there is an impenetrable barrier between signifier and signified. On the other, at points in the essay like the one quoted above, Lacan seems to celebrate ways in which the signifier can “send forth its light into the shadow” of the signified. So, the essay, while insisting on the division between signifier and signified, at the same time explains how signification is accomplished through literary tropes. This contradiction can be understood by the difference between the metaphoric and metonymic poles in Lacan’s conception of language, which borrows heavily from Roman Jakobson. Lacan’s reading of Jakobson is, rather fittingly, very creative. For Lacan the metonymic pole represents the repressive, yet necessary and ineluctable, structure of language in which “the code sets limitations” that are not “invented by the speaker who uses them.”¹² The subject is a “word user, not a word coiner” in the face of a prefabricated linguistic code and, ac-

 Roman Jakobson, On Language, eds. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, ): .

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cordingly, possesses an excentric agency under the authority of the letter.¹³ While Jakobson defines metonymy as contiguity or the syntagmatic field of language and metaphor as substitution or the paradigmatic field of language, Lacan establishes the two poles as the coordinates of subjectivity, where the former stands for the repressions of socialization and the latter for the articulations of the unconscious. Jakobson’s definition of the dimensions of language accrues these connotations for Lacan. Rather than delineating the syntagmatic and paradigmatic fields in tandem, Lacan insists on the difference between the two terms, following Jakobson’s notion that “A competition between both devices […] is manifest in any symbolic process, be it intrapersonal or social.”¹⁴ In this way, there is a stark opposition between the poles for Lacan. Metonymy, as “the word-to-word connexion,” is “the effective field constituted by the signifier, so that meaning can emerge there” (“Instance,” 453). Lacan emphasizes Jakobson’s idea that there is a certain inertia in the structure of language owing to syntagmatic logic that not only establishes grammatical rules, but privileges a given framework of semantic content, a given manner of unfolding meaning. Metonymy “gives its field to truth in its very oppression” and manifests “a certain servitude” insofar as it defines the rigidity of the linguistic code (“Instance,” 454). Metaphor, by contrast, is “the precise point at which sense emerges from non-sense” and consequently, the space wherein “man defies his very destiny when he derides the signifier” (“Instance,” 454). Thus, metonymy, for Lacan, represents the finite conventions of everyday discourse, while metaphor is the means by which the unconscious expresses its content, whether in the language of poetry or dreams. Metaphor connotes defiance, spirit, and the immediacy of the unconscious, while metonymy connotes servitude, the law of the letter, and the narrow avenues of conscious thought. Naturally, Lacan has a very particular notion of what constitutes metaphor; before moving on to my reading of Poe I will take a moment to clarify apropos terminology. Following Jakobson’s understanding of metaphor as paradigmatic substitution, Lacan equates metaphor with Freud’s notion of condensation which is “the structure of the superimposition of the signified” (“Instance,” 455). Because there is not a transparent relation between signifier and signified, but instead a bar blocking mediation, a willful substitution or “superimposition” is essential to give the signified voice. It is this gesture of substitution itself that gives the signified form, rather than a simple correlation between terms. In that

 Jakobson, On Language, .  Jakobson, On Language, .

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sense, Lacan chides “psychoanalysts lacking linguistic training” for a hermeneutic practice that traces “a symbolism deriving from natural analogy, or even of the image as appropriate to the instinct” (“Instance,” 455). Given the structure of subjectivity and language, any appeal to codified or “natural” semantic content is reductive, and ultimately repressive. Analogy simply reduces a metaphorical image to a prefabricated concept, much in the same way as traditional theories of metaphor understand the latter as no more than simile with rhetorical panache. Instead of making a one-to-one comparison in the form of a simile, such as “my love is like a red rose,” a metaphor (understood in the traditional sense) makes an analogical equation that is explicit: “my love is a red rose.” For Lacan, on the other hand, metaphor is defined by the absence of an analogical relationship and the departure from established codes. Metaphor is imagery divorced from any simple conceptual scaffolding; for example, a surrealist might quip “blooming scarlet wounds” without explicitly alluding to “love,” it being understood that the concept “love” is inadequate to convey the immediate experience referenced. Metaphor is catachresis in which there is a radical difference between terms, rather than simile in which there is an analogical relation. On imagery, Lacan writes “Freud shows us in every possible way that the value of the image as signifier has nothing whatever to do with its signification” (“Instance,” 455). The “natural analogy” between an image and its concept is inadequate to decipher the rhetoric of metaphor. Instead, the signified is “superimposed” on the signifier in a militant act of substitution that defies analogical relationships between images and concepts in the linguistic code. Metaphor is forged in catachrestic imagery in which “sense emerges from nonsense” to create new semantic structures in the paradigmatic field. I would like to read the tropes in Poe’s poem in light of Lacan’s theory of metaphor.

Militancy of the symbol: Representation in Poe In reading Poe’s poem through the lens of Lacan, I would like to contend that the poetic form and tropes prevalent in Poe’s poem anticipate, and indeed ultimately influence, poststructural theory. To do this I will read Poe’s poem with close attention to diction and metaphor. My thesis is that its diction consciously underscores the way in which language is a “scale” of sounds in Poe’s verse. The diction itself becomes a form of expression instead of a simple formal framework which underscores the gulf between the signifier as a material thing and the referent as another, different material thing. Also, the poem’s use of metaphor, as well as its insistence on metaphorical images to create meaning, highlight the disparity between signifier as image and signified as abstract concept. To put

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it another way, words are used solely for the connotations they carry with almost no regard for their literal, referential, conceptual meaning. These tropes of representation are what account for the dream-like quality of Poe’s verse. The most obvious way in which the poem underscores the musicality of language is the fact that it is a ballad – a form which was intended to be sung; the title actually qualifies the poem as a ballad.¹⁵ The title itself draws immediate attention to the sound of spoken language. “Ulalume” is a very strange name and it was almost without doubt chosen for the way it sounds. Its pronunciation has a kind of lamenting or even howling feel to it and seems to imitate sobbing or moaning. Also, the word in a sense rhymes with itself. The vowel /u/ of the first syllable rhymes with the same /u/ of the third syllable. It seems as if this invented word was chosen for the gesture it forces one to make in pronouncing it. When one pronounces “Ulalume,” one is well aware of the corporeality of speaking. The vowel sounds of the rhyming /u/ are bisected by a soft /a/. The /u/ sounds are pronounced with the lips while the soft /a/ is guttural, which forces the speaker to make maybe the largest possible physical transition in pronouncing these vowel sounds in succession. Also, the two /l/ sounds seem like nothing more than partitions for the plaintive vowels. The /m/ which completes the word clearly marks the end of this succession of vowels and, in that sense, the pronunciation could be read as an allegory for the poem itself. The melancholy of the first three stanzas of the poem is mirrored in the last three stanzas. This lugubrious atmosphere is bisected by an interval of respite and hope. The narrator’s experience ends at his beloved’s grave where there is no hope of redemption, much in the same way as the final /m/ of “Ulalume” marks an abrupt end to these wavering vowels. In any event, this evocative title draws attention to the gesture and sound of articulated language which underscores the gap between signifier and concept. The physical being of words as sounds is emphasized in the poem through the use of repetition. As Barbara Johnson notes on repetition in “The Raven,” “the intentional relation to a signified is denied through the nonhuman repetition of a pure signifier.”¹⁶ Through this device, it is clear that the signifier has priority over the signified; I would add to Johnson’s remark that repetition also highlights the materiality of language. Repetition is just as much a part of “Ulalume” as it is “The Raven” and is one of Poe’s favorite poetic devices. The difference in “Ulalume” is that repetition is clearly a major element of the

 Edgar Allan Poe, The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Killis Campbell (New York: Russell & Russell, ):  – .  Barbara Johnson, A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ): .

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poem’s form even without the “nonhuman.” Repetition is a trope that is ubiquitous in the poem: For the sake of brevity, I will look at the first stanza. “They were” is repeated in the first three lines. In the second and third lines “the leaves they were” is repeated and both lines end with “sere.” Then the fourth, sixth, and eighth lines begin with “it was.” The sixth and eight lines end with “Auber” while the seventh and ninth lines end with “Weir.” In this first stanza it is clear that repetition as such is insisted on. This repetition is then furthered through the use of internal rhyme and alliteration. In the first line, the /s/ of “skies” is echoed in the /s/ of “sober.” This /s/ sound is then carried over into the “sere” which ends the third and fourth lines. In the fifth line the /m/ of “my” is repeated in “most” and “immemorial.” In the seventh line the /m/ of “misty” is repeated in “mid.” Also in the seventh line, there is internal rhyme between the hard /e/ vowel of “region” and “Weir.” In the eighth line there is alliteration between “down” and “dank” and there is internal rhyme between “dank” and “tarn.” Finally, in the ninth line there is alliteration between “woodland” and “Weir.” This tapestry of repetition, alliteration, and internal rhyme is continued throughout the poem. On the one hand, diction is being used expressively. Repetition expresses a sense of recurrence and possibly grief, while the labyrinthine syntax conveys a sense of mystery and sophistication. On the other, these different forms of repetition mirror the themes of the poem. The narrator is experiencing a macabre kind of déjà vu. In the same way that the narrator cannot seem to escape the burial site of “Ulalume,” the reader is bombarded with the repeated descriptions of this burial site and the recurring musicality of the language as if the diction of the poem were a kind of requiem. This insistence on the materiality of the signifier is, in part, what gives the poem its fantastic quality; the hyperbolic repetition gives the poem a hypnotic or even incantatory mood, which is echoed in the imagery with its cast of ghouls, goddesses and chimerical landscapes. Expressive diction, which employs the signifier purely as phonemic material, is used in one of the most repeated images of the poem. In lines 28 – 29, the narrator says “We remembered not the dank tarn of Auber, / Nor the ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir.” The diction in these lines is expressive in the same way as it is in the name “Ulalume.” In the phrase from the first line “not the dank tarn of Auber” there is an insistence on hard consonants and open vowels until the last word. The mouth opens to say “not the dank tarn of.” In the second line, the phrase “ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir” insists on guttural consonants and closed vowels, where the mouth stays closed, until the last word. In both lines, the last word is underscored in that it has a different kind of vowel than the preceding phrase. There is a sense that the first line is ascending in that the vowels are produced with an open mouth and the consonants are pro-

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nounced from the front of the mouth. The second line is the opposite; there is a sense that it is descending from the first in that vowels are produced with a closed mouth and the consonants are pronounced from the throat. This could be read as mirroring the narrative of the poem. The narrator has an ascending hope that he has found some kind of peace and freedom. This is opposed by Psyche who warns him not to trust the moon which is the symbol of his revelry. After Psyche’s warning, Ulalume’s tomb is found and the narrator’s hopes descend. The ascending and descending gesture in the diction of these lines parallels the same movement in the narrative of the poem. This could explain why the lines are insisted on and repeated several times. Poe gives absolute priority to the signifier by encoding the poem’s narrative within the diction. Poe’s use of metaphor could be summarized by these lines as well. Metaphor does not take the form of analogy or glorified simile, but is instead dislocated imagery which is trying to express an unattainable signified. The idea that the signified is unattainable is inherent in the fact that the image is not paired with its conceptual analogue: The image, like the sound of language, is absolutely divorced from the conceptual realm of the signified. This kind of metaphor which does not say “this is like that” but instead simply depicts an image, does so because there is an implied understanding that “this is not like that.” In other words, there is an understanding that language is inadequate to express the object that it tries to depict because language is a closed system altogether. In this way, this type of imagery “insists” on meaning by creating and repeating images which it is understood can never “consist” of the object they signify. For example, “the ghoul-haunted woodlands of Weir” further qualifies the imagery created by “the dank tarn of Auber.” There is a landscape that is being inscribed with impressions. It would be obvious to reduce this imagery to a word or two – it is “dark,” “depressed” or “vertiginous.” But, the point of this kind of metaphor is not to replace a signifier. The impression created by this landscape goes beyond any simple correlative, and that is the point of using metaphors without simple analogies. Poe’s poetics differ from the conventions of his day not in the process of substitution itself, which is part and parcel of poetry as such, nor in the insistence on the materiality of language, which is also synonymous with poetry at large, but in the willful insistence on substitution and materiality. The poem is qualified as a ballad in the title, but rarely does one find ballads with this kind of diction. Like all metaphors, Poe’s are based on the process of substitution, but it is the gap between image and concept that makes Poe’s metaphor distinctive, and which can be found in the French schools under his influence. As Lacan notes on the Surrealists, “any conjunction of two signifiers would be equally sufficient to constitute a metaphor, except for the additional requirement of the greatest possible disparity between the images signified”

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(“The Instance,” 453). Again, this trope of metaphor moves beyond the comparison of simile and uses images in a catachrestic manner to give voice to an immediate impression. As in Lacan’s understanding of psychoanalysis, there is not a simple key to deciphering the meaning of the image, because language is simply inadequate to give shape to the particular phenomena of the unconscious. The poem, like the dream, is a rebus willed by an excentric subject. Although metaphor ultimately is not a simple one to one analogy in “Ulalume,” it is qualified as a kind of analogy; but, this will only further complicate what an analogy is. For example, where the first stanza reads “The skies they were ashen and sober” as a way to set the scene and introduce the poem’s rich imagery, the ninth stanza reads “Then my heart it grew ashen and sober.” Through this analogy we know that the entire poem, in essence, was an analogical metaphor for “my heart.” The poem does explicitly make all this imagery metaphoric. By making this landscape a metaphor for “my heart” in the ninth stanza and second stanza – “my heart was volcanic” – it is clear that we are entering a realm of the metaphoric. Although the poem is set up as a metaphor, “heart” is itself merely another metaphor. This is essentially Lacan’s idea of the signifying chain in action. For what the “heart” is a metaphor is ultimately inexpressible. One could exhaustively unpack the connotations of the word, but essentially it is a metaphor used in common parlance because that which it signifies is beyond expression because it involves a somatic experience which cannot be reduced to language. Consequently, there is a metaphor which is severed from analogy and imagery is used in and of itself to create impressions that are not grounded in simple comparison but exist autonomously. Another aspect of structural linguistics demonstrated in the poem is temporality. When Lacan notes that “[a]ll our experience runs counter to this linearity” he means that while language is structured through a linear temporality and the metonymic relations that this structure implies, human subjectivity is not so neatly compartmentalized (“Instance,” 451). Consciousness jumps between the present and past as subjectivity is shaped by an active dialogue with memory. In the same manner, Poe uses the temporal nature of the signifier/signified relationship as a medium for poetic symbolism. In the first line, the narrator is speaking in the past tense, so of course he knows how this poem ends. The chronology of the poem is not exactly strange, but it is multilayered. For example, the whole poem is in the past tense, which alone brings this temporality of signification into play. This temporal nuance is furthered as the second stanza chronologically precedes the first stanza and we have a story within a story. Temporality is then somewhat blurred between the second and third stanzas as it is not made explicit whether or not this narrative is an extension of the second or third stanzas. Of course the orthodox way to read it is that the third stanza is a continua-

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tion of the first. It could also be read, though, that because the first stanza follows the second temporally, that the third stanza is simply a continuation of the second. All this is not extremely important besides the fact that temporality is being underscored in these stanzas and it is a theme that will be returned to at the end of the poem. In the fourth through eighth stanzas we are told the narrative which ends at Ulalume’s grave linearly. This is noteworthy because the memory of Ulalume introduces a new moment in the past. It would seem that the point in the narrator’s life when Ulalume was alive would be depicted in the second stanza where the narrator’s “heart was volcanic / As the scoriac rivers that roll.” But, in this scene the narrator is not with Ulalume, but only Psyche, which draws an interesting parallel between Ulalume and Psyche that should be unpacked. Because these two figures are parallel, it seems that Psyche is the ghost of Ulalume, which would be supported by the “ghoul-haunted” landscape. This is further supported in the last stanza where the narrator wonders “can it / Have been that the woodlandish ghouls – / The pitiful, the merciful ghouls – / To bar up our way and to ban it […] / Have drawn up the spectre of a planet / From the limbo of lunary souls.” Now the ghouls are a parallel with Psyche, insofar as they both are directing the narrator away from the grave of Ulalume. This conflation of Ulalume, Psyche, and the ghouls is possible because of the temporal feedback loops in the narrative. Three characters are invented to express one impression: Such a representation is facilitated by the temporal drag between signifiant and signifié. If the poem were simply about a single “beautiful dead lady” it would not be nearly as complex or lush. The memory of Ulalume in a sense becomes reified in the figure of Psyche and this accounts for the gothic, “haunted” ambiance of the poem which could not be explained simply by the tomb or the “ghoul-haunted woodlands.” There is something vertiginous and ghostly running through the entire poem and it is the result of this reification of the “beautiful dead woman.” This again is made possible through the representation of temporality. Ulalume and Psyche become parallels and ultimately conflated through temporal layering. As the poem itself moves forward linearly to its conclusion, Psyche is conflated with the ghouls in this last stanza where it is the ghouls and not Psyche who direct the narrator away from the tomb. Through the temporal difference between the signified which is past and the signifier which is present, representation becomes creative instead of literal. In the poem this is predictably self-conscious, but this also points to the underlying foundation of language. The poem uses this temporal gap as a creative space because it understands that there is a gap between the signifié and signifiant. The amassment of signification is being constructed in a continuous present where, to use Lacan’s language, signifiers slide over the anchoring points to insist on meaning.

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Time is refracted to heighten the impression it makes in the same way that the characters of Ulalume, Psyche and the ghouls are essentially a refraction of a single figure. The ninth stanza seems to follow chronologically from the eighth, but this is confused in that this experience of finding Ulalume’s grave is described as something that happened “last year.” So, there are two ways it could be read. If the ninth stanza follows from the eight, then this is a recurring experience of actually finding the tomb. If we read the ninth stanza as parallel to the first, and we read these stanzas as representing a different time than the third through eighth stanzas, then there is not an actual recurrence but a memory invoked by the landscape. This is an extremely important conflation – of actuality and memory – because it makes a memory material, in the same way that Psyche makes Ulalume material. This would account for the uncanny, seemingly endless recurrence of finding this tomb. It is a memory that becomes material through this multilayered and conflated temporal representation. The narrator explicitly refrains from using analogy in the first stanza. Indeed, the whole poem would read very differently if the first line read “My heart was ashen and sober.” The fact that the narrator chose not to begin the poem in this way ultimately defines the way in which metaphor is used in the poem. Because the materiality of language is understood, and consequently the ultimate inadequacy of language to arrive at the signified, the poem consciously avoids qualifying the imagery that will follow as an analogy. In the body of the poem we can read how, as Lacan would have it, “from what radiating center the signifier sends forth its light into the shadow of incomplete significations” or, in other words, how metaphor works without analogy. What the metaphors of the poem represent are what Lacan is calling here “incomplete significations.” The fact that Poe insists on the signifier by highlighting the diction and musicality of language on the one hand, and pure, disjointed imagery on the other, is comparable to the “radiating center” of the signifier. The musicality of the language, the gothic imagery, and the idealized feminine which have been mocked by critics are examples of the primacy of the signifier in the face of the barrier to signification.¹⁷ All these uses of language which seem gaudy and histrionic are baroque because it is understood that signification entails something much more elaborate than a simple nominative. Accordingly, to accrue meaning, the signifier has to be a “radiating center,” or almost foolishly ornate, because it does not have the power to name. When language is understood

 See Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” . Also, Laura Riding, Contemporaries and Snobs [] (Tuscaloosa, AL: U of Alabama P, ) and Jane Blevins-Le Bigot, “Valéry, Poe and the Question of Genetic Criticism in America,” L’Esprit Créateur . ():  – , .

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to be an entity unto itself, ironically words become more expressive because the basic function they serve is understood. Johnson writes about “The Raven,” Sense has been made through the absorption of the subject by the signifier. The poem has sealed, without healing, the trauma of loss. What began as a signifier empty of subjectivity has become a container for the whole of the reader’s soul. A poetry of the pure signifier is just as impossible to maintain as a poetry of the pure signified. Repetition engenders its own compulsion-to-sense. Poetry works because the signifier cannot remain empty – because, not in spite, of the mechanical nature of its artifice.¹⁸

Johnson’s reading of Poe speaks for itself, but there is one distinction I would like to make. Johnson mentions the way in which the “pure signifier” becomes a container for the “reader’s soul” and that the subject is absorbed by the signifier. Also, she writes that the signifier was “empty of subjectivity” before it was reached by the reader. From the reader’s perspective, I think this is all completely correct. The distinction I want to make is: Where does the poet fit into this equation? Does every reader project her own emotion onto the “pure signifier”? I would argue that this idea of the “pure signifier” is a kind of floating autonomous metaphor that signifies beyond the concept, rather than simply absorbing the reader’s projections. On the one hand, it does take deciphering and maybe even projection on the part of the reader for it to gain signification. On the other, the poet is aware of this and ultimately shares the same perspective on language with the reader. In other words, the signifier is only a “pure signifier” for the poet as well. Through these autonomous metaphors, the poet’s subjectivity can be transferred onto the reader’s subjectivity through this act of “compulsion-to-sense” or search for signification, much like Lacan’s practice of psychoanalysis. The notion of “transference” explicitly defines the relationship between the analyst and the analysand in this way: It is an intersubjective experience that tries to transcend the obstacles of the linguistic code so the analyst can interpret the symptom as a kind of catachrestic metaphor. Similarly, the act of the reader deciphering the “pure signifier” is parallel to the act of the poet creating the “pure signifier” – both project emotion onto the signifier and through the autonomous metaphor the subjectivities become mirror images of one another. The signifiers in this kind of poetry are empty because they are divorced from the conceptual framework of language, but they gain meaning in pointing to the “psychical or somatic function” that anticipates the concept. For example, in the first two stanzas, the landscape is juxtaposed through imagery and temporality; it is also metaphorical and bereft of simple analogical

 Johnson, A World, .

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meaning or banal symbolism. The first stanza creates a landscape in a boggy forest which is dead, impotent, autumnal, nocturnal, solitary, shadowy, foggy, and musty. This place is given names – “Auber” and “Weir” – which are ominous and unsurprisingly “ghoul-haunted.” The fact that this imagery is given proper names is worth mentioning. Even within this metaphoric imagery, language is still used as expressive diction. These named places will be juxtaposed in the second stanza with “Mount Yaanek” and “the Boreal Pole.” It would be hard to imagine exchanging these proper names – they sound like the landscapes they name. Nietzsche, the great progenitor of the poststructuralists, writes about language: “[e]ven the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a necessary one.”¹⁹ The emotion of the subject does not segue neatly into an abstract concept or even an image; it can be encoded in other ways, namely though sound. Although the proper names of the second stanza do have mythological connotations, they still are expressive as nominatives in juxtaposition with the proper names of the first stanza. Poe is using language as a kind of nominative through this technique of expressive diction. The second stanza creates imagery which completely reverses the connotations of the first stanza. Temporally the second stanza precedes the first and represents an idyllic past; how this stanza is juxtaposed with the first defies our expectations. We would expect to find some kind of paradisial garden here, full of lush greenery. Poe, though, moves past tautological symbols and creates a novel image. Instead of an Edenic valley, we have “an alley Titanic / Of Cypress.” This image counterpoints the first stanza but in a novel way. There is an opposition to the impotent, autumnal forest except here it is not a Whitsuntide festival full of green forests, but a super-human “alley” of cypress trees. The solitariness of the first stanza is juxtaposed with the image of the narrator “with Psyche, my Soul.” Instead of breaking the solitude, “my Soul” populates the narrator’s solitude and increases the latter, which makes the second stanza, ironically, more vertiginous and isolated than the first despite the appearance of Psyche. The autumnal landscape of the first stanza is not juxtaposed with forestation or spring, but with a volcanic mountain on the North Pole. In this way the “scoriac rivers” and “lavas” of the second stanza are juxtaposed with the “ashen” and “sere” imagery of the first stanza. These images are connected through connotations more than they are through natural relations or tautological symbolism. The opposition established between these landscapes is bridged temporally in the way in which the “lavas” of the second stanza become “ashen” in the first stanza. Put in an-

 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Continental Aesthetics Reader, ed. Clive Cazeaux (London: Routledge, ):  – , .

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other way, it would logically follow that the boggy forest of the first stanza is juxtaposed with a mid-summer plain or a beach and that a volcanic mountain would logically be juxtaposed with a peaceful river or the ocean. This binary that Poe sets up is unorthodox, but it works because these images relate through their connotations. The stagnant ash of the first stanza is juxtaposed with flowing lava in the second. “Down by the dank tarn” is counterpointed with “In the ultimate climes.” In the way in which this binary is unorthodox, Poe moves beyond simple common place oppositions and creates completely novel imagery via catachresis. (This kind of symbolism is the essence of how his poetry influenced Symbolism and Surrealism).²⁰ On the one hand, Poe is not interested in analogic metaphors, on the other, he is also not interested in tautological symbols such as the opposition of autumn and spring. The poem is interested in completely unique, new-forged symbols. These images represent subjective states of the narrator and do not at all describe real, physical places. When the narrator says “[t]hese were days when my heart was volcanic” it makes us read this stanza as a metaphor. At the same time, as this imagery accumulates there is a sense that the narrator is transposing us to this other “clime” and we are encouraged to take this as a cue to read metaphorically, but not analogically, even when the landscape is not explicitly qualified as a metaphor. It goes without saying that the use of metaphor is unsurprising, considering we are dealing with a poem. Roman Jakobson explains that the metonymic pole corresponds with prose and “[t]he principle of similarity underlies poetry; the metrical parallelism of lines or the phonic equivalence of rhyming words prompts the question of semantic similarity and contrast.”²¹ But, the point to be made is not so much the fact that this is a poem which uses metaphor as opposed to prose which uses metonymy, as it is the particular trope of metaphor Poe uses. Poe’s poetic symbols which function via similarity, but not by explicit analogy, are the defining feature of his work and the hallmark of his legacy. In this manner, we might consider analogical metaphor or “glorified simile” to be much closer to the metonymic pole, as this trope operates through the principle of contiguity, although in a semantic rather than syntagmatic sense. The tropes in Poe’s poetry approach the metaphoric pole in the most radical manner possible. As Barbara Johnson points out, “Poe aims to maximize the difference be-

 See Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” . Also, Eric Touya de Marenne, “Poetics and Poetry: Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Poe, and Mallarmé’s ‘Eternal Logic’,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies . ():  – , .  Jakobson, On Language, .

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tween prose and poetry.”²² The poem without a doubt functions through the principle of similarity, but the question I want to ask is: similarity to what? The musical, expressive diction of the poem uses “phonetic equivalence” and the imagery is vivid: but with what are they similar? There are juxtapositions and oppositions but there are decidedly not one to one comparisons. This complication defines the conception of language that is inherent in the poem. Metaphors are not given analogies because there is an underlying assumption that language is inadequate to express what the poet wants to express. If, for example, Poe wrote “my depression is like the dank tarn of Auber” the whole image would be reduced to this single concept before it had an opportunity to gain signification. Even beyond that, when there is an analogy, there is no need for the meaning to “insist” because it already “consists” of its analogue. Imagery without an analogy forces the poet to insist on the chain of signification which, instead of being obscurantist, actually breaks the mold of pre-fabricated language and creates meaning in novel ways. Nietzsche writes “each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore able to elude all classification.”²³ Nietzsche counterpoints this idea of a “perceptual metaphor” with concepts and explains that these metaphors ultimately are the root of all concepts. Concepts then become standardized and lose their original impression, but there is always the opportunity to create new “perceptual metaphors” – a fact that is too often forgot. A concept, then, would be comparable to analogous metaphor, while these “perceptual metaphors” are defined by the fact that there is no analogy because the “nerve stimulus” which they refer to simply does not have an adequate concept. Through this trope of metaphor, a meaning or “anchoring point” is selected and then approached through invented metaphors. These invented metaphors do not substitute one signifier for another, but instead try to insist on a signified through innovative uses of language, much like the unconscious does in Lacan’s psychoanalysis. This does not mean that language does arrive at the signified, it simply means that through this device language can perhaps come closer to the signified because it is essentially being bent to insist on meaning in spite of preexisting signifiers. The poem is retracing the steps of language to before the concept was constructed. Nietzsche writes: There is no regular path which leads from these intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combi-

 Johnson, A World, .  Nietzsche, “On Truth,” .

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nations of concepts. He does this so that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.²⁴

Nietzsche also uses poetic devices to express how these “intuitions” are ultimately represented in the face of the closed order of language. Through the imagery, we can feel the aura of this experience as a “powerful intuition” or “psychical or somatic function.” Essentially, this kind of imagery is trying to become a nominative; ironically it does this not by naming with a concept, but by describing with impressions. There is a sense in this poem that Poe’s use of unorthodox symbols and his gaudy diction are “shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers.” This “shattering and mocking” could shed light on Poe’s diverse reception. Such an act of “creative subjectivity” is radical and will undoubtedly be received differently in various circles, which accounts for the stark polarity between Poe’s reception in the US and France. A celebration of this symbolic “militancy” resulted in the apotheosis of Poe in France and his almost inconceivably profound influence on French letters. At the same time, one act of mockery tends to breed another; the contempt for Poe and the dismissal of his poetry in the States could be thought of as reactions to Poe’s own opposition to and mockery of orthodox linguistic paradigms and poetic conventions. What I think should be acknowledged in Poe’s work, whether he is considered laudable or absurd, is his approach to language. As the poststructuralists have taught us, symbolism and “creative subjectivity” are the very stuff of human culture, insofar as the latter remembers how to communicate. This paper has been more concerned with tracing the theoretical correspondences between Poe and Lacan, rather than spelling out the literal, historical lines of influence. As T. S. Eliot observed, Poe’s influence on French letters involved a theoretical conception of poetics developing within “an increasing consciousness of language,”²⁵ rather than mere aestheticism or a cult of personality. A more historicist paper that traces the biographical influence could certainly be written. But, ultimately, the genealogy of influence is rather unimportant if it is not coupled with significant theoretical implications, and the historical connection between Poe and Lacan is practically superfluous next to the major thrust of this paper: the centrality of catachrestic metaphor to, beyond poetry, both subjectivity and culture. In that sense, the work of Poe and Lacan could not be more contemporary. Whereas it was once practically scandalous  Nietzsche, “On Truth,” .  Culler, “Baudelaire and Poe,” .

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for Nietzsche to claim that all language is inherently metaphorical, today cognitive linguists and practitioners of conceptual metaphor theory such as George Lakoff and Raymond Gibbs teach us that, not only is language inherently metaphorical, but the same holds true for thought, culture, subjectivity and, indeed, the entire range of human endeavors.²⁶ Lacan’s encounter with Poe was certainly one step on the road to this realization.

 See George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By [] (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ) and Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., “Evaluating Conceptual Metaphor,” Discourse Processes . ():  – .

Amba J. Sepie

Symbolic Malfunctions and the Failure of Nerve: Heretical Anthropology When is a symbol not a symbol at all? When is it not claimed, admitted, or expressed by ‘participants,’ but rather, assumed, as an intended or unintended byproduct of an over-arching metaphysical assumption embedded in a dominant paradigm? The creative and cosmological orders implicit to traditional and indigenous contexts have encountered substantial, if often subtle, resistance within academic environments, especially when attempting to communicate, and translate what are considered liminal aspects of experience and knowledge. As debated by anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard during his work in the Sudan, and reiterated in the frustrations of later generations of anthropologists, the burden of the scientific method can still be deterministic in whether what were formerly called animistic lifeways and belief complexes are taken seriously, as knowledge, by those who are informed by the signature metaphysical understandings of the world. The on-going project of decolonizing anthropology requires a substantial shift in the guiding cosmological orientation of the field, and one that has not yet been adequately engaged. This paper outlines some of the methodological and philosophical obstacles that are yet to be overcome in response to these outstanding obligations.

The legacies of twins and birds The project of decolonizing anthropology, which will likely have no authoritative denouement, hinges upon the respectful engagement with the content of other worldviews that have historically defied explication. The musings of one of the earliest ‘armchair anthropologists,’ James Frazer, insisted that “it must always be remembered that every single profession and claim put forward by the magician as such is false; not one of them can be maintained without deception, conscious or unconscious.”¹ This was reflective of a view that had, for many years, been steadfastly maintained within the discipline. However, when the Oxfordtrained anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard encountered the Azande (in 1926) and the Nuer (1930) in the Sudan, his ethnographies of these peoples un James G Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion [, sixth abridged ed.] (New York: Macmillan, ):  (emphasis mine). DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-015

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wittingly provoked a debate within anthropological circles which has never quite been resolved.² Evans-Pritchard, dissatisfied with the popular contentions that religious activities were simply functional, and practices involving a belief in magic, ritual, prayer, or spirits had no basis in reality, set out to determine how one might engage with these sorts of things by understanding them as a different kind of rationality; without automatic deference to ethnocentrism or imperialistic presumptiveness. Inspired by the early work of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and others, the time Evans-Pritchard spent in the Sudan challenged him on a number of levels. His time spent with the Nuer, in particular, presented him with an ethnographic puzzle as to how he would best interpret their claims as to the spirit and substance of things. Most famously, the Nuer ‘theology,’ as he called it, included the notion that crocodiles, or rain, or snakes, are Spirit (or kwoth); however, this was only true on some occasions and in particular ways, but not on/in others. The identity of a crocodile may be as an ‘animal’ in some contexts, yet an aspect of divinity in others. Nuer identity boundaries and notions of personhood were not stable in the manner Evans-Pritchard was accustomed to. This difference in classification set him on the frustrating path of explaining what was actually meant by these assertions for the remainder of his career, especially what had been meant by the Nuer statement that twins are birds. As noted by T. M. S. Evens, these notions “became an exemplar of the anthropological problématique in the study of so-called primitive thought and religious life.”³ Lévy-Bruhl, as recounted by Daniel Pals, had been fascinated by similar claims made by the Bororo. “When, in the report of a European explorer, a South American native declared ‘I am a red parakeet,’ those words were meant literally.”⁴ Evans-Pritchard admired Lévy-Bruhl, but thought he had ‘missed’ some crucial elements of primitive experience in his conception of

 E. E. Evans-Pritchard and Eva Gillies, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande [] (Oxford: Clarendon P, ); E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion [] (Oxford: Clarendon P, ).  T. M. S. Evens, “Twins Are Birds and a Whale Is a Fish, a Mammal, a Submarine: Revisiting ‘Primitive Mentality’ as a Question of Ontology,” Social Analysis . ():  – , . See also Raymond Firth, “Twins, Birds and Vegetables: Problems of Identification in Primitive Religious Thought,” Man . ():  – ; E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Rodney Needham, and Raymond Firth, “Twins, Birds and Vegetables,” Man . ():  – ; Raymond Firth and Edmund Leach, “Twins, Birds and Vegetables,” Man . ():  – ; Terence Turner, “ ‘ We Are Parrots,’ ‘Twins Are Birds’: Play of Tropes as Operational Structure,” in Beyond Metaphor: The Theory of Tropes in Anthropology, ed. J. W. Fernandez (Stanford: Stanford UP, ):  – .  Daniel L. Pals, Eight Theories of Religion, second ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, ): .

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the mentalité primitive. ⁵ Fortunately, when Evans-Pritchard discovered that the Nuer made similar claims, this allowed him to fully explore these types of assertions. He chose a close analysis of their speech and its relation to meaning as the foundation for his explanations, formulating an idea he called social refraction, which involves the figuration, or symbolization, of kwoth, in a range of forms, people, and objects. He struggled to articulate this without recourse to representation. Specifically, when the Nuer said that twins are birds, or crocodile is spirit, he emphasized that this was really a similarity drawn between two special types of things, as in metaphor, or analogy, based on like-substance or shared qualities. At no time does he allow that twins may actually be birds: they cannot be, for twins are twins and birds are birds, and to this we must attest as the alternative would involve contradiction, despite what the Nuer may claim. Symbolic representation certainly has its usefulness; in fact, there are countless occasions in which symbolization is readily claimed as a conscious component of ritual, and many fine studies which detail the interactions between symbol, language, meaning, and practice. For instance, consuming loc in Vietnamese (kinh) ritual practice, which is the reclamation of offerings believed to have talismanic power, or the widely spread notion in Vietnam, China, Laos, Japan, Indonesia, and elsewhere, that rice is a symbolic index for the community, the ancestors, the divine order, the nation, and luck conferred to future generations, are clearly representative.⁶ To suggest otherwise would no doubt be a source of great amusement, largely at the expense of the anthropologist. Furthermore, as the concept of culture in anthropology has long been conceived of as a system of symbols and meanings, which are the fundamental units of analysis for indexing relations between different socio-cultural elements, there can be no argument that cultural complexes will include symbolic behaviors.⁷ The nature of humankind as a remarkable symbolic species, animal symbolicum, is

 Defined as a kind of ‘prelogical confusion’ common to primitive peoples which culminates in the failure to distinguish properly between dream and reality, or subject and object – as summarized in Patrice Ladwig, “Ontology, Materiality and Spectral Traces: Methodological Thoughts on Studying Lao Buddhist Festivals for Ghosts and Ancestral Spirits,” Anthropological Theory . ():  – , .  Alexander Soucy, “Consuming Loc – Creating On: Women, Offerings and Symbolic Capital in Northern Vietnam,” Studies in Religion–Sciences Religieuses . ():  – . On rice, see Nir Avieli, “Vietnamese New Year Rice Cakes: Iconic Festive Dishes and Contested National Identity,” Ethnology . ():  – .  For instance, Talcott Parsons’ concept of culture (as extended by Clifford Geertz and others) was as “an objective thing, a collection of symbols – objects, gestures, words, events, all with meanings attached to them – that exists outside the minds of individual people yet works inwardly to shape attitudes and guide actions” (Pals, Eight Theories of Religion, ).

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not in dispute; rather, it is the reductionist effect that the recourse to ‘symbolism as explanation’ may have on any literal references to objects, concepts, beliefs, and so forth, which do not conform with the subtle positivism of ethnographic inquiry. Such an assertion has the effect of scaffolding the entire terrain of human behaviors to be a priori symbolic or metonymic. Whilst we cannot ultimately say if the Nuer meant something other than symbolic reference by what they were saying, the point here is that there was never any possibility and, perhaps, this is still the case, for an alternative. A semiotic solution, as it were, has become the normative means of explication. To be fair, Evans-Pritchard was rather revolutionary for the time in which he was writing. If anything, he takes his ideas to the absolute limit of the paradigm within which he was operating, yet he remains obligated to the rules of modern, rational, scientifically secular, and scholarly thought. James Littlejohn relates the great lengths that some anthropologists (not only Evans-Pritchard, but other notables such as émile Durkheim and Claude Lévi-Strauss) went to in order to exclude the ‘irrational’ from analysis of the relations claimed between humans and other species.⁸ As A. David Napier writes, The responsibility for explicating other modes of thought that are focused on a systematic and structural coherence between microcosmic and macrocosmic relations has frequently devolved upon anthropologists who have committed themselves, often tirelessly, to the systematic study of alternative categories of thought.⁹

The goal was to relate ethnographic particulars to a systematic anthropological understanding in a manner that would not conflict radically with positivism, and yet, could overcome some of its limitations. As with the scientific quest for a grand unified theory of everything, the hope was to present, finally, a ‘complete’ account of one aspect or another of social life, with diligent attention to even the most radical of claims and explain how these ‘fit’ into the study and comprehension of humankind. Godfrey Lienhardt, who studied under Evans-Pritchard at Oxford, reported that the men of the Sudan told him numerous times of the transformation of men into lions. He argued this could not be interpreted simply as metaphor, nor could it be entirely conceived of as reality. Rather, he conceived of this as perceiving in two modes simultaneously, to allow two distinct ‘natures’ to be

 James Littlejohn, “Twins, Birds, Etc,” Bijdragen tot de Taal–, Land– en Volkenkunde . ():  – , .  A. David Napier, Foreign Bodies: Performance, Art, and Symbolic Anthropology (Berkeley: U of California P, ): xxii.

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co-present in the one being.¹⁰ Lienhardt thought that the major obstacle to acceptance of such claims had arisen through the modern predisposition to equate belief with historical or scientific fact; when in fact, as with ‘our fiction,’ not every claim was meant as ‘true’ in the sense familiar to the anthropologist.¹¹ In this he followed his mentor, as Evans-Pritchard’s view was that anthropologists had been sorely deficient in appreciating the richly poetic habits of speech adopted by primitive peoples. In their imaginative way of describing the world, analogies, figures, symbols and metaphors are the rule of language, not the exception.¹²

What is of interest here are the occasions in which such symbolization is not claimed, admitted, or expressed by ‘participants,’ but rather, assumed – when the occasion is the exception, rather than the rule. This is not necessarily obvious, given the manner in which metaphor is often employed as an acceptable sub-set of human symbolic behaviors. According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, metaphor operates in language and human thought processes as if it were actually literal.¹³ Because the use of metaphor is ubiquitous, and can be demonstrated to both highlight, and hide, aspects of experience, application of the metaphorical concept as the most likely device being employed by the Nuer and others conforms to Occam’s Razor, which has the effect of obscuring references that are not metaphorical, or not only metaphorical. What is most critical here is that singular, or binarized explanatory frameworks do not necessarily apply to situations wherein subject-object relations, identity, personhood, and species classification may be multiple and complex. This complexity or multiplicity is also comparative, or becomes evident only in the attempt to submit the phenomena in question to a framework that is neither native, nor local: such as the frameworks often employed within scholarship. Confinement to a native framework, however, is not sufficient for translation, which creates an impasse. The contention that ‘this phenomenon is complex’ is also insufficient, as this assertion prompts another reduction of the phenomena to the relativity of truth claims as if this is an adequate explanation. If truth is subjective, and if

 Godfrey Lienhardt, “Modes of Thought,” in The Institutions of Primitive Society: A Series of Broadcast Talks, eds. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Raymond Firth, Meyer Fortes, Max Gluckman, John Layard, Edmund Leach, Godfrey Lienhardt and J. G. Peristiany (Oxford: Blackwell, ):  – , .  Lienhardt, “Modes of Thought,” .  Pals, Eight Theories of Religion,  – .  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (London: U of Chicago P, ).

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cultural contexts differ, then the final and most logical way out of any such ontological quandary is to classify that which is uncertain, in terms of perceived rational weight, to the realm of the imaginal. Symbolic analysis makes impossible things possible. For example, on the topic of ghosts in Vietnam, Heonik Kwon argues that whilst such apparitions continue to play a role in modern life, they are only permitted to do so because their “domain of existence has changed from the natural to the symbolic.”¹⁴ As discussed, the prevailing concept of culture as a system of symbols readily allows for this, analysis of linguistic forms supports it through the deployment of devices such as trope, analogy, and metaphor, and the predominance of symbolic elements within ritual, art, and social life in general can be observed as functional in such a range of human communities as to be easily termed ubiquitous.¹⁵ Except (and here is the step into what is still widely considered to be academic heresy) – when the ‘symbol’ is not actually a symbol at all.

Hunters, healers, and dreamers Edith Turner, who (with her late husband, Victor) spent her entire anthropological life earnestly studying the content of other worldviews, eventually came to the realization that sometimes claims must stand for what they are; and that the work of examining these would add to the knowledge of humanity, which is what anthropology is all about.¹⁶ Patrice Ladwig, in her study of ghosts and ancestral spirits in Buddhism, considers a number of examples, such as the ‘unstable bodies’ of those who transform into animals in Amazonia (among these, the jaguar, anaconda, or wild pig), the gods of Nepal and Laos who are ‘living entities’ residing within statues, and the dilemma’s regarding consubstantiation

 Heonik Kwon, Ghosts of War in Vietnam (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ): .  For example: “Because art behavior occurs in all known cultures, it is reasonable to assume that this proclivity is universal (that is, biologically predisposed) in all members of the species.” Ellen Dissanayake, “‘Aesthetic Primitives’: Fundamental Biological Elements of a Naturalistic Aesthetics,”Aisthesis: Pratiche linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico . ():  – , .  See Edith L. B. Turner, Experiencing Ritual: A New Interpretation of African Healing (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, ); Edith L. B. Turner, “The Making of a Shaman: A Comparative Study of Inuit, African, and Nepalese Shaman Intitiation,” in Spiritual Transformation and Healing: Anthropological, Theological, Neuroscientific, and Clinical Perspectives, eds. Joan Koss-Chioino and Philip J. Hefner (Lanham, MD: AltaMira P, ):  – ; Edith L. B. Turner, “Advances in the Study of Spirit Experience: Drawing Together Many Threads,” Anthropology of Consciousness . ():  – .

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and transubstantiation surrounding the Eucharist in the history of Christianity.¹⁷ Frank B. Linderman, in his study of the Crow Nation in the 1920s, documented reports of speaking with, and learning from, other species, also supported by the ethnographic work (in Canada) of A. Irving Hallowell in Ojibwe territory, and Paul Nadasdy’s work with the Kluane.¹⁸ Hugh Brody recounts the uses of dreams among the First Nation bands in British Columbia for moose, deer, and bear kill, and Daniel Everett writes of the Pirahã (with whom he lived in the remote Amazon), who consider dream knowledge to be part of a continuum of that which informs day-to-day experience.¹⁹ From the annals of ethnomedicine, Wennifer Lin discusses traditional birthing practices in the Hawai’ian Islands, which involved the physical transference of pain by a skilled kahuna ho’ohanau, or healer; and Irving Goldman describes the central tükübü of the Hehénewa, which is a gathering place of the visionary souls of all existing payés, or medical experts. “There they confer, exchange information, and share professional knowledge. [They attend] local and specialized gatherings in the same manner of each of the transformative agents.”²⁰ None of these sorts of accounts (nor others of a similar stripe), can be easily reduced to their symbolic content as an alternative to considering them as experiential, legitimate, and truthful claims. In 1965, Evans-Pritchard published Theories of Primitive Religion, which would put to rest a degree of speculation as to his view on the materials in question. However, he never ultimately resolved these questions to the satisfaction of his audience (nor probably, to himself). This has not escaped Evens, who writes:

 In this example, the statues in particular are both symbols of, and vehicles to attract the gods, in the first instance, and the instantiation of the deity following supplication rituals, in the second (Ladwig, “Ontology, Materiality and Spectral Traces,” ). Also, see Wade Davis, One River: Science, Adventure and Hallucinogenics in the Amazon Basin (London: Simon & Schuster, ); Wade Davis, The Clouded Leopard: A Book of Travels (Gordonsville; London: Tauris Parke, ); Oliver J. T. Harris and John Robb, “Multiple Ontologies and the Problem of the Body in History,” American Anthropologist . ():  – ; Aparecida Vilaça, “Chronically Unstable Bodies: Reflections on Amazonian Corporalities,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . ():  – .  Frank B. Linderman, Pretty-Shield: Medicine Woman of the Crows [] (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, ); A. Irving Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior, and World View” [], in Readings in Indigenous Religions, ed. Graham Harvey (New York: Continuum, ):  – ; Paul Nadasdy, “The Gift in the Animal: The Ontology of Hunting and Human-Animal Sociality,” American Ethnologist . ():  – .  Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams: Indians and the British Columbia Frontier (Illinois: Waveland P, ):  – ; Daniel Leonard Everett, Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (London: Profile, ):  – .  Irving Goldman and ed. Peter J. Wilson, Cubeo Hehenewa Religious Thought: Metaphysics of a Northwestern Amazonian People (New York: Columbia UP, ): .

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Notwithstanding the many fine studies bearing on problems of this kind that have appeared since Evans-Pritchard’s time, I suspect that the crucial lesson remains to be learned from the ethnographic challenge presented by the Nuer statement.²¹

He pushes for a more nuanced reflexivity, stating that one’s construal of other people’s understandings critically depends on the instrument and capacity of one’s own. It must follow that implicit in every anthropological enterprise is the reflexive and comparative study of one’s own meaningful universe.²²

With a similar resolution in mind, Littlejohn suggests that we ought to begin “by examining the grounds for our sense of an absurdity rather than first seek the grounds for the Nuer assertion, for our disbelief rather than their belief.”²³ Perhaps this is easier said than done, as the challenge of direct engagement, or taking seriously what others say, do, and believe, is not only opposed to the signature metaphysical parameters guiding modern life, thought, and societies but, if validated, would entirely undermine (or, at the very least, threaten) the certainty perceived therein. This is evidenced by the on-going anthropological debates regarding the topic of how to engage respectfully with ‘other worlds,’ especially those which might be classified as animistic. In fact, the entire field of cultural and social anthropology has undergone such substantive change over the last three decades as to be possibly unrecognizable to earlier luminaries in the discipline. Direct engagement with ontological impossibility is still absent, however, perhaps due to the failure of nerve to adequately attend to the core metaphysical issues; despite the excess of neologisms, typologies, and so forth, which are earnestly put forward as suitable theoretical solutions.²⁴ Yet herein lies the issue: these problems

 Evens, “Twins Are Birds and a Whale Is a Fish,” .  Evens, “Twins Are Birds and a Whale Is a Fish,” .  Littlejohn, “Twins, Birds, Etc,” .  For instance, consider Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who is brilliant in his ethnographic work but appears overly attached to complex explanatory frameworks for dealing with difficult subjects. He has, for instance, coined the terms perspectival multinaturalism, controlled equivocation, translative comparison, and others in the attempt to address what he calls analogies between domains within Amerindian worlds, and yet is very dedicated to the anthropological project of ‘taking seriously’ (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism,” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute . []:  – ; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Intensive Filiation and Demonic Alliance,” in Deleuzian Intersections: Science, Technology, and Anthropology, eds. Casper Bruun Jenswen and Kjetil Rodje [New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, ]; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Zeno and the Art of Anthropology: Of Lies, Beliefs, Paradoxes, and Other Truths,” Common Knowledge . []:  – ).

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cannot be addressed at the level of ontology, precisely because ontology is informed by cosmology, which limits what can, and cannot, be considered possible, or existent, within a worldview. If the dominant or signature cosmology is not reckoned with at the most fundamental level, then there can be no relief from the issues regarding twins, birds, or any other impossibility. Nadasdy writes, and this is a relatively common assertion: “most anthropologists […] generally maintain that we do not need to (indeed, should not) adopt the beliefs of the people we study to theorize about those beliefs.”²⁵ The name for this approach is methodological agnosticism, which may appear reasonable, sensible even, for a scholar in pursuit of impartiality, yet it has the undesirable effect of collapsing any radical differences of experience, or belief, into the dominant worldview. When this approach is critiqued from the perspective of decolonization, it becomes evident that the on-going effort to overcome the marginalization of worldviews is still very much ‘in process.’

Bracketing truth, or, when relativism isn’t relative Paul Rabinow, who occupies an interstitial zone between philosophy and anthropology, targets the relations between truth and power as operative on multiple levels when it comes to these issues; pointing out, for instance, that the relations between “the university and science are somehow exempted from the hard analysis to which other cultures are subjected.”²⁶ He emphasizes how the relations between truth and power in this alliance are maintained, yet, concealed, as it were, using various devices: symbolic (or interpretive) anthropology and cultural relativism among them. For Rabinow, these devices are at best reductionist and nihilistic, bracketing truth through the failure to acknowledge the covert power relations implicit to the positioning of the anthropologist, the university, scientific materialism, and the ‘West’ in general as against, and in a dominant position over, the submissive Other. We seek to describe and interpret the taken-for-granted assumptions of an Other’s world that makes what at first seems terribly exotic seem normal […]. We cast our interpretations

 Nadasdy, “The Gift in the Animal,” .  Paul Rabinow, “Humanism as Nihilism: The Bracketing of Truth and Seriousness in American Cultural Anthropology” [], in The Accompaniment: Assembling the Contemporary, ed. Paul Rabinow (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ):  – , ; further references in the text, abbreviated as “HN.”

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in terms in which we imagine the natives themselves conceive their own experiences, in terms of the symbols that formulate that experience. But this certainly does not mean that we are trying to be native or, more importantly, that such interpretations are the ones the natives use. After all, we are the anthropologists. (“HN,” 28)

When the anthropologist engages with cultural difference, frames of meaning are translated by way of universals, which creates a second text in Western discourse; and for Rabinow, discourse (which is always academic) can only ever be Western (“HN,” 30). This discourse must also, being Western, be agnostic: “The anthropologist thus succeeds in studying what is serious and truthful to Others without it being serious and truthful to him” (“HN,” 31). Cultural relativism, therefore, cannot work, or at the very least requires the first step of reflexive analysis to be re-envisioned. For Rabinow, symbolic anthropology is even further from the goal. He explains: In this act of anthropological purification – ridding ourselves of ethnocentrism – we take no culture at its word. We start by bracketing the truth claims or value positions of our own culture, and then we do the same for the culture we are attempting to comprehend. (“HN,” 21)

He calls this the ‘second bracketing’ of truth; one step further from agnosticism, or neutrality with respect to truth claims, to the suspension of belief in the idea that a truth claim can be intelligible (“HN,” 31). The subjectivity of truth, which is ironically a ‘truth’, has historically served avoidance very well. It is not limited to twins and birds, but extends to the entire supernatural realm, from the level of how personal identity or species divides are bounded and conceptualized, to cosmological claims, figuratively, and within the materiality of culture. When such claims break the rules with which the anthropologist is familiar, truth becomes subjective and, as Rabinow writes, “[t]he proposed ‘conversation of mankind’ takes place not in many tongues but only in one” (“HN,” 24).

The ritual retreat from the ‘real’ What does it mean for a land to be inlaid with ancestral memories, or for a totem to be carved as a permanent referent for something important to be recalled when interacting with the spirits, or for a trumpet to literally be a spiritual

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entity?²⁷ Creativity, in traditional and indigenous contexts, can often be conceptualized as transformative, sacred, ecological, holistic, and participatory (or relational), not a set-apart aspect of religion, or culture, but integral to the continuance of the community. The anthropological sub-fields of performance, ritual, religion, and art are all clustered around a common a priori, in which (to borrow from Ellen Dissanayake) the nonverbal, nonsymbolic, intermodal, participative, affinitive and intersubjective aspects of aesthetic experience are insufficiently understood.²⁸ Such aspects may also (via analysis) be amplified and reified in a manner which may conceal the mechanisms of relation to both substance and meaning within their cultural contexts. This is what Hallowell went to great lengths to explain regarding the conception of other-than-human beings in his work with the Ojibwe; a project engaged with how to understand differently, and in a way which is inclusive of creativity and symbolic expression, rather than reinterpretation and classification – as if ‘the creative’ occupies a separate domain.²⁹ Charter myths, or stories of origin, for example, cannot be simply reduced to fiction, or ‘storytelling,’ or an aesthetically important ritual performance. Paula Gunn Allen, in her study of the discrepancy between modes of analysis for Native American myths, notes that the word myth is not only synonymous with lie, or ignorance, but its use is intended to discredit “the perceptual system and worldview of those who are not in accord with the dominating paradigm.”³⁰ She highlights that, although myth has an expanded definition and numerous technical uses within literary studies, anthropology, and folklore, it remains colloquially bound to the products of imagination and fiction, which (consistent with the over-arching cosmology) are a classificatory zone for what cannot exist. Instructively, she includes a standard definition of the term to reveal that the explicators used to describe what a myth is include words such as ‘alleged,’ ‘determinable,’ ‘fictitious,’ ‘imaginary,’ ‘unproved,’ ‘invented,’ ‘with a natural explanation,’ and so forth.³¹ She writes that this emphasis

 See Carlos Andrade, Hāʻena: Through the Eyes of the Ancestors (Honolulu: U of Hawaiʹi P, ); Goldman and Wilson, Cubeo Hehenewa Religious Thought, xxxiv.  Dissanayake, “‘Aesthetic Primitives,’” .  See Hallowell, “Ojibwa Ontology.”  Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions (Boston: Beacon P, ): .  Allen, The Sacred Hoop,  – .

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imputes factuality to certain assumptions that form the basis of western perceptions without acknowledging that it does so. Part of this meta-myth is the belief that there is such a thing as a determinable fact, natural – that is, right – explanations.³²

Contrary to assumption, people do know the difference between facts, or truths, and deliberate acts of fiction: myth (for Native American peoples, among others) fits neither category well.³³ To compound this difficulty, the development of ritual theories in the study of cultures has established a rubric for determining how aspects of material culture can be perceived as supernatural when they are employed in ritualized ways to create a correspondence between the object as a symbolic referent, and the concept, deity, or power that is signified. In Joseph Kitagawa’s early studies with the Ainu, for example, he describes a type of action which involves singing, telling, and acting out the content of myths, legends and epics, which are called yukar (which means to imitate). He writes: “It is taken for granted by the Ainu that just as each animal, bird, and insect has its unique mode of singing, each person in every situation can and should express himself in the appropriate form of singing or chanting.”³⁴ The kamuy, loosely translated as ‘spirit,’ is imitated and ‘followed’: this does not simply mean impersonate, but to become. ³⁵ “One can, by the magical potency of the rhythmic language, fully participate in the person or being whose words he is reciting or chanting.”³⁶ It is a cultural, religious, and mythological set Kitagawa describes here, and, importantly, he offers little in the way of interpretative interference, but as a representative of the myth and ritual school and an historian of religion, he is not obligated to explain. Twice-removed from the business of ‘taking seriously,’ the folklorist, the literary expert, and the religious historian do not have to elucidate beyond documenting the minutiae of aesthetic life. Ethnographic work on the Ainu by Takashi Irimoto, some thirty years later, reveals a different type of analysis: Irimoto explains how the mythologies make

 Allen, The Sacred Hoop, .  See, for multiple examples, Karen L. Von Gunten-Guidry, “The Experience of Knowing in Lakota Oral Literature” (PhD, U of Colorado at Boulder, ); Brianna Burke, “On Sacred Ground: Medicine People in Native American Fiction” (PhD, Tufts U, ).  Joseph M. Kitagawa, “Ainu Myth,” in Myths and Symbols: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade, eds. Mircea Eliade, Joseph Mitsuo Kitagawa, and Charles H. Long (Chicago: U of Chicage P, ):  – , .  Kitagawa, “Ainu Myth,” .  Kitagawa, “Ainu Myth,” .

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sense of the behavioral strategies important in bear-hunting practices.³⁷ Yet he does not consider the myth as anything other than a way to encode cultural practices; his opening sentence is very clear on this: The Ainu imagined hunting to be a visit of the spirit (kamui) of the game animal, from the world of kamui (Kamui moshir) to the world of man (Ainu moshir). Thus, bear hunting is a human behavioral operation through which the bear spirit is enabled to visit the world of man.³⁸

He proceeds accordingly with phrases such as ‘the dog symbolizes,’ the bear ‘was believed to have,’ and so on; an excellent example of the correct explanatory approach in modern anthropology, but entirely missing the depth which Kitagawa gives, yet does not, and perhaps cannot, explain. The broader metaphysical universe which informs the study of traditional creative arts also evokes the rule of aesthetics as a guiding concept, determining that certain types of human behaviors, such as art, story, ritualizing of material objects, and so forth, must belong to the same domain. Obedience to the tenets of scientific naturalism, and the cosmology which underpins it, requires the spectrum of artistic and religious behaviors to be neurologically situated, inclusive of the occasions when these are thought to ‘collapse’ into mental instability. Whole disciplines, such as that occupied by Kitagawa, also fall under this rule of classification. Creativity has been theorized as a kind of ‘bolt-on extra’ to being human, perhaps related to leisure, studied within the art theory and history worlds without much consideration for what Ellen Dissanayake calls “the aesthetic experience and art behavior of pre-modern (and ancestral) humans,”³⁹ and historically neglected as worthy of ‘serious’ study in anthropology. Whilst creativity and innovation are considered to be important as fundamental aspects of the human developmental process, these are often relegated to an historical epoch which ‘evolves’ into an aesthetic epoch, as if one follows on from the other, rather than as integrated elements of an on-going process that is central to human experience.

 Takashi Irimoto, “Ainu Worldview and Bear-Hunting Strategies,” in Shamanism and Northern Ecology, ed. Juha Pentikäinen (New York; Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, ):  – .  Irimoto, “Ainu Worldview,” .  Dissanayake, “‘Aesthetic Primitives,’” .

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Beyond aisthetika: Technologies of enchantment Among the many astute observations of the late Alfred Gell was that the Western gaze had long ago submitted to the aesthetic ‘spell’ of art as pure and decorative, as art for art’s sake, or, what he calls the Art Cult, thus obscuring the nature, substance, and purpose of art in any other frame.⁴⁰ The effect of this on anthropology was that, firstly, the anthropologist was not obliged to take primitive art seriously, but could simply catalogue it as a representation or fossil of Western modern prehistory (an aesthetic ‘heritage’ piece, if you will); and secondly, that whilst direct representative or symbolic functions were relatively easy to document, the relations between art objects and magic (as a kind of spiritual technology), or art objects and ritual, though explicit and fundamental to the social-relational context, remained almost entirely misunderstood.⁴¹ Against the notion of ‘art for art’s sake,’ and albeit in the service of methodological agnosticism (of which he was an advocate), Gell proposed seeing material culture as a technology of enchantment, but noted that this could only be achieved if the anthropologist could bring the necessary impartiality to the problem; which was impossible if the anthropologist (being Western) was himself enchanted by art.⁴² Gell conceives of a kind of ‘halo-effect’ that had been attributed to desirable, but unobtainable objects, which provokes a symbolic process in the desiring individual that is, itself, compelling.⁴³ His observation of the artist as an occult technician has not proved useful (and is perhaps, obstructive) to progress in the anthropology of art. As Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins state, [the] view that emphasizes the unique characteristics of the Western category of art, with its Eurocentric biases, is thus itself often both a simplification and something of a stereotype [… involving] the conjunction of a number of themes: an emphasis on the autonomy of aesthetic experience, where art consists of a set of objects set aside for aesthetic contemplation, with no other overt purposes; the development of a progressive evolutionary view of Western art history […] and the placing of an emphasis on individual creativity – if not genius – and a premium on innovation.⁴⁴

 Alfred Gell and Eric Hirsch, The Art of Anthropology: Essays and Diagrams, no.  (New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone P, ): .  Gell and Hirsch, The Art of Anthropology, .  Gell and Hirsch, The Art of Anthropology, .  Gell and Hirsch, The Art of Anthropology,  – .  Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins, “The Anthropology of Art: a Reflection on Its History and Contemporary Practice,” in The Anthropology of Art: A Reader, eds. Howard Morphy and Morgan Perkins (Malden, MA; Oxford: Blackwell, ): .

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The seduction of being a creative-type, or a musician, or an artist (although transgressive, or liminal, in societal terms, and often restrictive in terms of economic opportunities), is offset by the idea of divine inspiration, or art as a public good; although the latter emerges from a context that is largely forgotten. In traditional and indigenous practices, there is an ethical obligation to create purposeful art as a social practice, separate to the modern realm of political art (which, it can be argued, still serves this function), and recognition of artistic qualities across an entire community (rather than as an elite aesthetic practice). On this, and with scathing accuracy, art historian Suzi Gablik writes: What we clearly do not have, at this point, is any working framework for a socially or ecologically grounded art [… and] we can’t have such a concept as long as we remain hooked on the myth of pure creativity and the inherent purposelessness of art for art’s sake – which acquiesces willingly in the value vacuum that keeps art separate from any social, moral, or practical use. We can’t have such a concept as long as our idea of what constitutes ‘good art’ follows the patriarchal ideal of an autonomous aesthetic culture that translates, finally, into the refusal to take on social tasks.⁴⁵

Modern art has an author, an individual who can be deified as a representative of the divine, whereas many traditional and indigenous art forms have neither author, nor a purely aesthetic purpose, but may be absolutely central as a technology, tool, invocation, as a sacred and/or living being, or a vessel for such an entity. Sometimes these objects also have an intended duration, which is in direct opposition to the preservation practices of museums – some items were deliberately crafted to not be preserved.⁴⁶ Morphy and Perkins give the example of the effigy of the Zuni war god, Ahayu:da, which “must be allowed to decay in order to release its dangerous power back into the environment.”⁴⁷ Historically, the museum and the art gallery have worked together as kin: art objects classified as ‘primitive’ have a lesser value, though are of more recent vintage, than the finest of Greek vases, which is the ancestor to the Picasso. Another presumption, as Napier confirms: at the very heart of Western tradition we can see how absolutely contrived is the romantic opposition of neoclassical and primitive […] a direct metaphysical connection exists – at least in early Greek thought – between one’s sense of oneself and one’s sense of the visible

 Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, ): .  As discussed in Morphy and Perkins, “The Anthropology of Art: a Reflection,” .  Morphy and Perkins, “The Anthropology of Art: a Reflection,” .

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world […]. At issue here is not simply what used to be called ‘animism,’ but an ontology, a system of connectedness.⁴⁸

Morphy, in his study with the Yolngu of Australia, writes that (separate to its more recent commodification as a part of an economic strategy), Yolngu art and body painting is “the major means of recreating ancestral events, ensuring continuity with the ancestral past, and communicating with the spirit world.”⁴⁹ Paintings are inscribed on the bodies of initiates before circumcision, signifying the passage from boy to man, and yet they are often only glimpsed from a distance. They take many hours, but last little more than a day, they are not explained to the boys themselves, and they are not meant to be examined up close or in detail.⁵⁰ As Morphy writes: “To attempt to understand [the significance of body painting] without reference to this wider context is as meaningful as trying to learn the meaning of a word from its occurrence in a single sentence.”⁵¹ Unfortunately, this is precisely what the separation of art from context has achieved. In the first instance, marking it as primitive and as an exhibit of ‘our origins,’ in the second instance, constructing, in evolutionary terms, the creative processes which lead to the production of art (and thus, connected to the art of children, or the insane), and in the third, recapturing and re-colonizing ‘primitive art’ as a valued commodity, by the application of the same aesthetic standards for innovation and appreciation that are used to evaluate and trade in modern art. Whilst this last shift has been economically helpful to traditional and indigenous artists, it cannot be romanticized to be anything other than salve for problems brought initially by colonizing parties – the trade in Australian Aboriginal Art, as both commodity and act of desperation, is a fine example of this.

Conclusion: Beyond ontology If the guiding principle for anthropological practice, philosophy, and theory is to not only acknowledge, but to understand better what it is to be human, then it appears that we have only come so far in attending to the work at

 Napier, Foreign Bodies, .  Howard Morphy, Ancestral Connections: Art and an Aboriginal System of Knowledge (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ): .  Morphy and Perkins, “The Anthropology of Art: a Reflection,”  – .  Morphy and Perkins, “The Anthropology of Art: a Reflection,” .

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hand. Presently, the aforementioned debates in anthropology have become fixated upon ontology as a key concept for overcoming the sorts of difficulties encountered by Evans-Pritchard and others ‘in the field.’⁵² However, ontology (in literal translation) is the knowledge, account, or philosophical study (logos) of Being (ontos), which determines the conditions of existence and relations of dependency for ‘entities’ deemed as possible, according to the over-arching cosmological frame. Simply put, a guiding ontology contains the fundamental, or base level concepts, entities, or ‘things’ out of which a view of the world is built. If the existence of something is not ‘possible’ or is denied at the ontological level, then it cannot ‘be.’ The ‘facts’ of the matter are not accessible from this level of analysis at all: there is only ontological agreement, or disagreement, if indeed there are ‘facts’ to be determined at all. The very notion of ‘facts’ emerge from shared (or consensual) ontological foundations via which reality is sifted into ‘truth’ and ‘falsity’ – or ‘real’ and ‘not real.’ Understanding the implicitness and importance of these two basic notions, ontology and consensus, to the construction and maintenance of the presently dominant paradigm of scientific naturalism reveals why ontology cannot liberate anthropologists from the quandaries of twins and birds. Ontology is derived from cosmological predicates, and for the study of anthropology, these parameters were re-set at the dawn of the Enlightenment, when a Greco-Christian legacy surrendered (at least, in part) to the new origin stories formed from scientific inquiry. This cosmological hybrid, as derived from a convoluted series of ‘important thoughts’ incubated in religious complexes, philosophical dens, and laboratories, has determined the limits of the human, the environment and other species, and prescribed the nature of the world: faithfully, we have accepted this. Twins can never be birds, and nor can a man converse with one, no matter how elegantly the problem is re-framed. As Michel Serres puts it: “Apples fall for everyone, but a little differently under Newton’s gaze.”⁵³ The popular idea that ‘we all inhabit different worlds,’ which is suspended between philosophy, on the one hand, and constructivist practice, on the other, has not overcome the assumption that nature is innate and universal, and cul-

 Any search of the best in Anthropological journals online will retrieve several hundred articles, all published in the last ten years, in which the authors use an ontological argument to deal with untenable subject matter.  Michel Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, Studies in Literature and Science (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, ): .

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ture is acquired, local, and contingent.⁵⁴ Overcoming the nature-culture divide or, at the very least, discontinuing its imposition, has certainly been a recent priority, but the actual application of what are advanced theoretical moves to ethnographic fieldwork is complicated.⁵⁵ Furthermore, recent additions from the stables of neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and genetics (which appear quite next-generation to the novice anthropologist) evoke such confidence and rational weight leveled against what Allen calls “thousands of years, and thousands of cultures,”⁵⁶ as to seriously destabilize the project of decolonizing anthropology. It is perhaps not only the nature-culture divide that needs to be queried but, also, the assumption that we have sufficient grounds for de-limiting what we consider ‘the human’ to be, regardless of how convincing scientific explanations appear. After all, it is not common for ‘irrational’ thought and behavior to undergo scientific analysis, and when it does, the objective is often to disprove, not explore. As Edith Turner noted, the scholarly opportunity to comprehend, understand, and perhaps, experience kinship or recognition with what are non-local or ‘spiritual’ aspects of other human ways of being in the world remains untapped.⁵⁷ The anthropological endeavor, instead of continuing to pretend affinity with a science with which it has been shown to be fundamentally incompatible, might take inspiration from this. Whilst ‘private space’ is granted for the beliefs and practices of the Western individual, without serious consequence, the ‘strange’ beliefs and practices of those who are set apart from ‘the West’ by location or a culturally bounded frame, remain of public concern. In the process of ‘becoming Western,’ one must subscribe to the privacy rule; in remaining ‘othered,’ one remains exposed, which is among the many motivations for becoming modern and leaving ‘superstition’ behind. The consequences for those who are denied validation for their truths (or, symbols that are not symbols) has been sorely underestimated. When an ‘ontological set’ contains impossible things, and these impossibilities are continually reframed through substitution, reduction, representation, and so forth, the result

 Lorenzo Bartalesi and Mariagrazia Portera, “Beyond the Nature-Culture Dichotomy: A Proposal for Evolutionary Aesthetics,” Aisthesis: Pratiche linguaggi e saperi dell’estetico . ():  – , .  For a notable example, see Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago; London: U of Chicago P, ).  Allen, The Sacred Hoop, .  Turner, “The Making of a Shaman: A Comparative Study of Inuit, African, and Nepalese Shaman Intitiation,” .

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is the progressive adoption of a less cohesive, less contentious, Westernized metaphysics in which the impossible objects within the ontological set are gradually dissolved and replaced with more acceptably ‘modern’ content. The institutions that accompany this (schools, hospitals, bureaucratic structures) enforce a perpetual ideological substitution which leads conclusively to a range of violences against the local worldview, and eventually, ethnocide; albeit over such a long period as to appear benignly as industrialization, modernity, or globalization. The most scandalous part of this entire process is that, mid-way through colonization, assimilation appears as a desirable alternative to ongoing marginalization and discriminatory practices, and the colonized may became complicit and accepting of this in service to their own survival. This occurs through the perpetuation of a particular and narrow concept of reality that is rarely upheld in the private lives of ‘Westernized’ individuals. There is some irony in the realization that the beliefs and practices of many people in these Western societies do not, and have never, matched the cosmological tenets that continue to powerfully dictate social performances and institutional criteria. A fitting line from Isabelle Stengers may articulate concisely just where the fear catches us: we shall not regress, nor betray hard truths, nor acknowledge the ‘smoke of the burning witches’ still lingering in our nostrils.⁵⁸ Can several thousand years of well-documented religious, transcendental, and spiritually transformative or otherworldly experience, in combination with the substantial scholarship reporting similar experiences in traditional and indigenous cultures, be so readily dismissed? Diverse worldviews can be said to correlate with one another in terms of ethical disposition far more frequently than they are found to correlate with the dominant cosmology. If there is an exemplar for what might be termed Western arrogance and ethnocentricity, then surely, this is it? There remains a phenomenal, essential, and yet-to-be-realized body of work to be done in our anthropologies, or studies of humankind, although this continues to have the appearance of heresy. To discuss the implications of cosmological dominance evokes relations between power, religious origins, and an implicit threat which continues to stall the wider project of decolonization and, yet, has not been rectified. Like Rabinow, who in his paper leaves the reader midstream with an unanswered query as to the deceptions of presenting a solution when none has yet appeared, there is a necessary pause here that awaits a response to the challenge (“HN,” 39). It would seem that Evens was correct in his estimation that the crucial lesson remains to be learned from an ethnography publish-

 Isabelle Stengers, “Reclaiming Animism,” e-flux  ():  –  , accessed March , .

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ed seventy-six years ago, and it is well past time to calculate the costs of our methods.⁵⁹

 Evens, “Twins Are Birds and a Whale Is a Fish,” .

Book Reviews Review Essay: Nowhere to Go But Everywhere: Locations of the Contemporary British Elegy Diana Fuss. Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013. x + 150 pp. ISBN 9780822353898, USD 74.95. Edward Hadley. The Elegies of Ted Hughes. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. viii + 182 pp. ISBN 9780230232181, USD 105.00. Katharina Lempe. Poetics of Loss: The Elegy in Andrew Motion’s Poetry. Erlanger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik 15. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2015. 244 pp. ISBN 9783643906069, EUR 29.90. Iain Twiddy. Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Bloomsbury Literary Studies. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. viii + 286 pp. ISBN 9781472523792, GBP 24.99. In the introduction to her “meditation,” Diana Fuss calls her work a “literary exhumation, an attempt to revive a literary genre” (3) while Katharina Lempe observes as a dominant characteristic in contemporary poetry “[a]n intensely elegiac quality” (5). Elsewhere Fuss exalts the “new and increasingly creative ways” (1) death is made the topic of artistic discourse in our day and age, while Iain Twiddy, faced with “recent critics [who] have worried about the ability of poets to write any kind of elegy” (6), sees the need to assure his readers that the elegy is indeed alive and well. The elegy would thus appear to inhabit a peculiar position in current literary criticism, making it simultaneously ubiquitous and in danger of disappearing altogether; outmoded and timely; full of life and practically moribund. Just like the form of the elegy itself, current criticism on the elegy seems destined to a perpetual negotiation of its subject’s polarities, its presence and its absence. One critic relatively unconcerned by such fundamental questions regarding the nature and current state of the elegy is Edward Hadley, whose The Elegies of Ted Hughes proceeds from a fairly unquestioning acceptance of received notions of elegy. Like the other two studies focusing on British poetry discussed here, he references the four standard works on the subject: Eric Smith’s By Mourning Tongues (1977), Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy (1987), Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning (1994), and David Kennedy’s Elegy (2007); but he does so DOI 10.1515/9783110465938-016

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to set the scene in his introduction rather than to engage with them regarding their main contentions. Thus in the introduction to the book we learn that “[t]he elegy is there to preserve the dead as long as possible so they may coexist with the living” (1). We learn that in Virgil’s Eclogues, “nature absorbs grief” (2), and that modern elegists have problems “situating the deceased in a heavenly afterlife” (5). First and foremost, however, we learn that Hadley’s primary interest is in the poetry of Ted Hughes rather than in the genre of the elegy. This is also mirrored in the structure he gives his book whose chapters follow Hughes’s career and retrace a chronological development in his changing attitudes toward elegiac ideas. Beginning with the war elegies in The Hawk in the Rain (1957), we follow a trajectory from poems of mourning for relatively concrete war victims toward a more general sense of mourning in the face of “the natural energies at work in Hughes’s verse” (9), by way of Moortown Elegies (1978), back to personalized mourning in Birthday Letters (1998) and finally on to the translations of Hughes’s later life. Since none of these career stages took place in isolated compartments quite as watertight as the structural subdivision into book chapters might suggest, there must have been some temptation on Hadley’s part to turn this into a neatly linear narrative. If so, it is a temptation he has laudably resisted. What is on offer instead is a book of chapters so independent of one another that the reader will encounter the occasional redundancy: a line already quoted elsewhere, a poem already discussed in a previous chapter. But as the reader progresses through the book, these ostensible repetitions will take on a fugue-like aspect, introducing a subtle pattern of repetition and variation into Hadley’s study, weaving unobtrusive continuities into and across chapters. Take, for instance, “View of a Pig.” When Hadley first references this poem, it is in the context of empathy and internalization in earlier elegies. To these, “View of a Pig” presents a counterpoint as the poem’s speaker offers a description of the dead animal almost aggressively devoid of any sense of the carcass as a formerly living creature. When the poem is brought up again in the fourth chapter, it is as an echo, but one sounding into a new context: now the poems “View of a Pig” is contrasted with no longer mourn the deaths of men and women (where relative apathy regarding the death of an animal might be more excusable) – they mourn the deaths of other animals, thus letting “View of a Pig” grow even more cold and remote in the reader’s mind. If this layering effect and the underlying structural properties of the book will not necessarily ingratiate Hadley with students in a rush to identify quotable passages, the excellent index certainly will. As the idea of what constitutes an elegy is expanded from poems mourning the victims of war to poems tracing Hughes’s more general “preoccupation with violence and death” (1) all the way to the confessional mode of mourning in

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Birthday Letters and the literary translations that follow, the reader is given an insightful survey of Hughes’s poetry liberally complemented by documentary evidence (from letters and interviews), comparative readings of other poems from English literary history, anthropological as well as mythological discussions, references to other secondary sources and, first and foremost, Hadley’s own readings of Hughes poems or – more commonly – passages from poems. It is in these readings of individual poems and the connections Hadley combines them into that the book comes fully into its own. Having first been introduced to Hughes’s earlier elegiac sensibility in The Hawk in the Rain (1957), Wodwo (1967), Crow (1970), Moortown Elegies (1978) and Remains of Elmet (1979), the reader is given a new understanding of Birthday Letters (1998), not primarily through the secondary sources or the documentary evidence (though both of these help) but through Hadley’s exemplary explications of the poet’s work. Hadley’s primary focus, then, is the development of Ted Hughes’s work. Here or there his investigation may shed some light on the nature of elegy in general, but this is mostly incidental. His intended audience clearly consists of students and scholars interested in a new angle on Hughes’s poetic development. And the elegy is indeed a helpful tool in understanding Hughes’s development. In being in evidence throughout – even if that means stretching its definition to include notions of transformation and the general contemplation of mortality as featured in Tales from Ovid (1997) – it offers a telling indicator of the wider development of Hughes’s artistic sensibility. One study in which Hughes may feature prominently but is by no means the sole focus of attention is Iain Twiddy’s Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry, which picks up Hughes at the mid-point of his career and devotes two full chapters to him, all in the service of discussing the pastoral elegy in Britain and Ireland today. Twiddy’s study is generally divided into chapters dedicated to individual poets, and some of these chapters have appeared in earlier incarnations in journals such as Essays in Criticism, English, and Irish Studies Review. Before Twiddy embarks on his studies of individual poets and their relation to pastoral elegy, the introductory section of his book presents a plea for an inclusive approach to the definition of the terms of “elegy” and “pastoral.” It is interesting to note that even though he generally accepts the terms in which Smith, Ramazani and others see the elegy as quintessentially imitative of the psychological processes of mourning, his differs considerably from their assessment of the elegy as a near-impossibility in modern times. While Smith and Ramazani both argue that modern elegy no longer manages to provide consolation and thus can only be termed anti-elegy, Twiddy has a more finely differentiated understanding of the poetic form under investigation:

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An elegy which simply laments, or which fails to console […] is still an elegy, not something which mourns its own loss or which serves as evidence that the form has died […]. [I]ts success or failure in achieving consolation seems an unnecessary way of assessing its value. (8)

Twiddy’s approach to his second central term, that of pastoral, is equally inclusive and lucid. As the opening sentence of his book playfully warns us, “[r]eaders hoping to find shepherds and lambs in this study may well be disappointed” (1). Picking his way through schools of critics who have called into question the necessity, viability, or even the very existence of pastoral writing in modern times, Twiddy successfully abstracts certain properties of pastoral until he arrives at a point at which the most basic structures of pastoral and of elegy meet the changing patterns of literary tradition: Pastoral elegy is constitutionally about change and accepting change, and so intrinsically the pastoral elegy is provisional – every time a poet mourns, the form itself must be adapted, made to work, and inherited from. The difficulty involved in making past conventions productive – in keeping with the basic convention of turning winter into spring, taking dead matter and making it fertile – is part of the challenge of mourning. (14)

By placing the challenge of “making past conventions productive” at the very heart of his study, Twiddy skillfully provides a frame for his readings of individual poets that offers a lot of flexibility by making the differences in approach the main subject of his book. From the very lucidly structured introductory section with its highly communicative section headings (“What Happens in a Pastoral Elegy?”), the book takes the reader into several sections discussing individual poets or distinct stages in the careers of individual poets. The first to be discussed here is Michael Longley, a poet whose pastoral and elegiac outlook is generally determined by his preoccupation with various forms of memory and remembrance. From here the book moves on to discuss the writings of Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Peter Reading, Paul Muldoon, and Douglas Dunn as well as Christopher Reid. These individual sections offer solid close readings and interesting insights not only into the works of the respective poets but into the variability of pastoral and the elegy. In general terms, these sections do tend toward the equation of real-life mourning and artistic expression to an extent that may not always be helpful. Did, for instance, “Muldoon wait[] twenty years before elegizing his mother” out of “Oedipal anxiety” (213)? We may never know. But this overt psychologizing is to be taken as par for the course where discussions of the elegy are concerned, as it is a genre notorious for inviting biographical readings to an almost irresistible degree.

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If one had to find an issue with this book, its principal problems would seem to lie in the domain of its presentation rather than in its substance. The chapter entitled “Contemporary Female Poets and Pastoral Elegy” would present an interesting if unduly brief discussion if published as an essay in its own right. Printed as it is in a book devoting at least a chapter each to several individual (male) poets, it does have the unfortunate appearance of a reluctant afterthought. In substance the chapter makes an honest attempt at avoiding clichéd notions of gender-specific forms of mourning while still sketching an interesting approach to women’s elegies, but in presentation its inclusion on these terms seems a little odd. The same can be said for the time span covered by Twiddy’s book as a whole: while the author is at pains to justify his conceptions of both the pastoral and the elegy, a third word from his title is never fully explained: “contemporary.” Again, the substance of what he sets out to do and indeed does is wholly unobjectionable, but one does wonder whether a less misleading designation might not perhaps have been found. After all, of all the poets given his full attention in this study, the only one born in the second half of the twentieth century is Paul Muldoon (b. 1951), and nearly half are dead or have died since the date of publication. This is simply a question of engendering (and managing) expectations: a book published in 2012 (paperback edition 2013) and supposedly concerned with the “contemporary” becomes a slight anomaly when the only two historical events referenced in its index are the First World War and the Easter Rising, important though they both undoubtedly are. In these circumstances, Twiddy’s concluding chapter entitled “The Future of the Elegy” faces an uphill struggle to convince his readers that by “future” he actually means things yet to come. None of this invalidates the good work Twiddy does on his principal subjects, and as his intended audience is an informed academic reader well-enough versed in twentieth-century poetry not to be confused by these things it may seem churlish for the present review to take issue with them, but the fact of the matter is that most critics tend to emphasize current global events when discussing elegies that may more legitimately be said to fall into the “contemporary” category: recent wars, massacres, epidemics, plane crashes, and terrorist attacks tend to feature quite prominently in any discussion of current cultures of mourning. One contemporary poet not considered in Twiddy’s study – presumably for a lack of identifiable pastoral elements in his poetry – is Andrew Motion, to whose elegies Katharina Lempe dedicates her full-length study, Poetics of Loss: The Elegy in Andrew Motion’s Poetry. In a near-encyclopedic effort, Lempe finds impulses for Motion’s elegiac writing in many aspects of his life,

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his work, his poetic precursors and contemporary society, to name but a few. Having identified it as his “most continuous mode” (7), Lempe sees the elegy as the nexus where all the diverse influences on Motion’s writing meet. Thus while she spends her first one hundred pages on the elegy in general, on its history and conventions, its relation to the psychological processes of mourning and trauma, her study is most convincing where it brings all these considerations to bear on the discussion of Motion’s life and work. As in Twiddy’s book, then, and certainly no less so than in Hadley, the biographical mode of criticism is central to Lempe’s study. While it cannot escape notice that there is a slight problem with her book, it is easy to see that it is not of her own making: Lempe’s text is a barely revised doctoral dissertation originally produced in accordance with the expectations of German academia. As such, it carries with it certain structural flaws such as an overzealous subdivision into sub-chapters (many of which extend to hardly more than a page); a near-paranoid need for constant documentation (the book’s third footnote offers an entirely incidental 125-word adumbration of the sublime and its importance to eighteenth-century culture); a curious mixture of English and German in linguistic and cultural aspects (texts originally written in German are given in English editions while texts originally written neither in German nor in English are frequently referred to in their German translation; editors of German publications are occasionally – but not consistently – listed as “Hg.” for “Herausgeber;” and the rigid division of sources into primary and secondary literature seems to have fallen prey to a small misunderstanding when it ends up listing Auden’s Collected Poems as secondary material, while giving Motion’s biography of Philip Larkin as a primary source); and a publishing house not unduly worried about developing a style sheet to reflect the formal conventions of English texts. What is immediately obvious is that the book is divided into twelve chapters of equal weight that are supposedly designed to reflect a logically unassailable compartmentalization. A second glance will yield the realization that no such clear-cut division is actually to be expected. After all, chapter headings such as “Influences on Motion’s Poetry” and “Characteristics of Motion’s Poetry” may seem like logically distinct entities for a second or two, but significant overlaps will be found. Or they would be if these chapters were not only 13 pages apiece (and included seven and five sub-sections respectively). It soon transpires that the real strength of Lempe’s book is to be found particularly when you ignore what seems like a superimposed structure and follow her instinctual logic instead. Once you have worked your way past these initial hurdles, you can see acute observations being brought to bear on Motion’s poetic career. Ignore the numbering, ignore the headings of chapters, simply read the text,

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and you will find an interesting dialectic applied to Motion’s writing: Lempe sees Motion’s elegies as caught between various binary oppositions, which form the real structuring devices of her text: for one thing, she sees Motion’s poetry in its often overtly autobiographical mode as akin to prose narrative, so that she can discuss an interesting verse/prose dichotomy that also extends to encompass the contrastive pair of factual and fictional writing. A similar approach is chosen when discussing different forms of mourning as several dichotomies offer themselves up for investigation, such as that of mourning for the self or for others. It is as the reader follows Lempe from these general dichotomies into ever more concrete discussions of individual aspects of Motion’s writing that her book offers its most rewarding insights. Some of the observations are truly striking and well worth the wait. A short sub-section of barely more than two pages (including eleven footnotes) is titled “7.1.5 Self-Corrections” (121). Here Lempe notes the frequency with which Motion will qualify his own choice of words in the published text of his poems, will point out a more accurate way of expressing an idea already expressed or will add an explanatory parenthesis. Her observations are astute, particularly where they maintain their focus on concrete examples of Motion’s poetry. Similarly insightful discussions are to be found in the sections dedicated to individual poems, and an interview Lempe conducted with the poet rounds off the book, even though oddly enough this is primarily concerned with Motion’s writing technique and does not contain a single query pertaining to the form of the elegy. As to the question of its intended readership, Lempe’s book only offers one conceivable answer: it is clearly addressed at her thesis supervisors. Only in terms of academic assessment could its over-documentation and its piecemeal subdivision be seen as a virtue. A 250-word footnote explaining schema theory, for instance (73), will offer neither sufficient information to the novice nor anything of interest to the initiated – it is simply intended to cover all conceivable bases. But among the generalities, summaries and references of her thesis work, Lempe offers some original insights of much broader interest than the outer appearance of her book may at first suggest. In the shortest of the four books reviewed here, Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy, Diana Fuss has little to no time for the standard name-checking of previous studies on elegy, although of course her text contains meticulous references. At first glance, her unusual approach may even raise readers’ suspicions. Here is a book calling itself a “meditation,” failing to rehearse once more the standard definitions of elegy, and apparently misunderstanding – or at least misrepresenting – the term altogether. After all, what Fuss is primarily concerned with is not

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what we would call elegy but what she terms “last-word poem,” “corpse poem,” and “surviving lover poem” (79): the imagined utterances of a figure dead, dying or departing, presented in verse form. The three types of this poetry she identifies are identified here with “the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who loves a dramatic exit” (2). The poems she chooses to investigate in detail are not necessarily at the center of the elegiac canon: no evangelizing Milton here, and no grieving Bradstreet, though the book’s more modern remit does allow for the inclusion of numerous canonical writers such as Tennyson, Yeats, and Plath, and understandably has a lot of time for the introspection and occasional ventriloquism of Emily Dickinson. By eschewing the standard notions of elegy as well as the standard specimens of the genre, Fuss manages to tear her readers away from received notions of the psychologically accurate imitative nature of elegiac writing to ask what she terms the ethical questions of elegy: if these are the words we imagine the dead or dying would want to or ought to say, what does that tell us about the mutual obligations and expectations between the living and the dead? Fuss is confident enough to take this idiosyncratic detour in order to elucidate the age-old question of whether the elegy is a poem written for the living or for the dead. That the elegy, a poem ostensibly composed in memory of the dead, may actually be written first and foremost with the living in mind, is not a highly original idea in and of itself. But the path Fuss chooses to approach this question from an entirely new direction is as refreshing as it is useful. Her book consists of three main chapters corresponding with the three types of corpse poem she identifies: “Dying … Words” dedicates itself to poems composed around deathbed scenes and containing more or less famous last words of the dying. The 34 pages making up this chapter are full of pertinent examples and interesting realizations, such as the fact that modern last-word poems rarely end with last words as their writers tend to display a “preference for anti-closure, poetic endings that favor irresolution and indeterminacy over the conclusiveness and clarity that last words would seem to provide” (42). Even at this early stage in the book, the constant mediation of elegy between various oppositional poles becomes a prominent feature. It is continued in the second chapter, “Reviving … Corpses,” concerned as it is with the “curious paradox” of the corpse poem: A dead body and poetic discourse are mutually incompatible, two formal states each precluding the other. A poem implies subjective depth while a corpse negates interiority. A poem signals presence of voice while a corpse testifies to its absence. (44)

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Fuss identifies different categories of corpse poem – from comic to religious and political – as well as the fact that this type of poem undergoes an “incredible surge in popularity in the modern period” (46). Referencing poems by Dickinson and Tennyson as well as a host of lesser known writers, Fuss comes to the conclusion that “poetry can ventriloquize the dead because literature, as a medium, already incorporates death” (77). The logical contortions necessary to arrive at this conclusion are too many to be rehearsed in this short review, so that one example must suffice: Fuss’s assertion that “poetry’s concentrated attention to words and their histories highlights the status of all words as dead letters” (74) speaks to a categorically different understanding of words as dead than Celan’s “analogizing a word to a corpse” quoted on the next page (75). Both have to be treated as equal, though, in order to arrive at sweeping conclusions in the shortest time possible. That said, the important thing to note is that while not every step of the way may appear entirely note-perfect, the way itself can hardly ever be questioned. The third type of poem under investigation, this time in a section entitled “Surviving … Lovers,” is that of the aubade with its focus on the parting of lovers. This is introduced by means of a medieval example, though the focus soon turns to modern specimens, which are in turn divided into several subsets such as the classic aubade, the anti-aubade, and the single-lover aubade, a subdivision that helps Fuss to make clear the similarities and differences between elegy and aubade, which in turn help to elucidate the very nature of elegy itself. While none of this is designed as a substitute for the standard works of Kennedy, Ramazani, Sacks, Smith, and (in an American context) Cavitch and Hammond, it does provide a welcome addition in investigative angles and a timely reminder of the ethical dimensions the elegy provides as it “negotiates this tightrope between the dead and the living, loss and language, in particularly imaginative ways” (5). It is this mediatory role that provides the most consistent angle we have on the form of the elegy. As Twiddy says, elegy’s “purpose is mediation, to negotiate between inside and outside, past and future, and between loss and consolation” (1). Far from being exclusive to elegy, this is the very nature of art, even the very nature of language itself: to portray what is not, to make present what is absent, and to interpose itself between these oppositional states. As the poetic form most openly and most immediately identified with these cultural endeavors, then, the elegy will continue to undergo change, but it will be certain to endure: the elegy is dead. Long live the elegy. Patrick Gill

University of Mainz

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Raymond John Howgego. Encyclopedia of Exploration. Invented and Apocryphal Narratives of Travel. A Comprehensive Guide to Invented, Imaginary, Apocryphal and Plagiarized Narratives of Travel by Land, Sea and Air, From the Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century. Potts Point, NSW, Australia: Hordern House, 2013. xi + 543 pp. ISBN 9781875567690, AUD 149.00. When the fourth volume of Raymond John Howgego’s Encyclopedia of Exploration was reviewed in Symbolism 12/13 (2013), the series was described as “complete.” The work had been brought up to the twentieth century and had covered all the geographic terrain it had set out in its bibliographic explorations. What is more, it had reached a point in time (1940) by which most white spots on the maps would have been conclusively filled and there seemed nothing left to describe in an encyclopedia of exploration. It therefore came with some surprise that, almost like an afterthought, a fifth volume has now appeared which takes on the “invented and apocryphal narratives of travel” as the subtitle announces. Referring back to the short article “Fictitious Voyages, fabulous travel literature to 1800”, included “only as a guide to the unwary” in volume 1 (378 – 381), Howgego now announces that, while compiling the preceding tomes of his Encyclopedia, the number of non-authentic travel narratives became so vast that he felt a separate volume was in order. In the preface (vii), he further deplores the alleged lack of scholarly rigor applied to such works so far, as “misattribution was rife” and questions of authenticity had been wrongly decided either way. The scope of existing scholarship, moreover, was always restricted to specific periods or regions, so that “no single work had so far been published that embraced the entire genre from the earliest times to the present day” (vii). This is what Howgego now lays before the reader: an attempt to chart the entire “literature of the imaginary or contentious journey” of all times and all places. He offers a systematic subdivision of what he means by this kind of literature (vii – viii) by establishing eight categories including “the apocryphal narrative,” “the invented narrative”, “the plagiarized narrative,” “the utopian narrative,” “the spoof narrative,” “the Robinsonade,” “the extraterrestrial voyage,” and the “futuristic narrative.” With this volume in hand, even the “unwary reader” Howgego had in mind in his earlier reference to this kind of text may, however, begin to wonder about the sheer discrepancy between the size of the present volume’s 543 pages against the 1168 pages of volume one alone, bringing the list of exploration narratives up to only 1800. Although Howgego himself seemed surprised to discover, while working on the preceding volumes of his Encyclopedia, that “the literature of invented and apocryphal travel extended to around a thousand volumes” (vii), readers only vaguely familiar with the masses of such travel literature produced in nineteenth-century Britain alone will wonder in their turn

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how this could be all. Are we to assume, from Howgego’s compilations, that the bulk of travel narratives were authentic and the fictive travel story is the exception? This seems surprising. And looking closer, a comparison between volumes 1– 4 and volume 5 seems in itself difficult, as the earlier volumes had clearly defined their topic as narratives of exploration, whereas now all kinds of travel literature are included, which makes the disparity in quantity even more unlikely. Clearly, Howgego is out of his depth in this venture, and this not only in the definition and categorization of the subject of his volume, but in the understanding of the vastness of this kind of fiction in particular. The volume is beautifully produced but its value seems marginal, as it cannot pretend even to begin to catalogue all fictitious travel literature or to advance its understanding in any significant way. It is an eclectic collection of entries on fictitious travel writing, but the entries rarely add anything of value to the existing state of research, neither can the collection itself bring much added benefit. It seems supercilious to start listing entries that would have needed to be included, and everyone will immediately have their own list ready, which will include instances from the Alexander novels of yore to C.S. Lewis’s Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and many readers will be puzzled by the fact that an author like Joseph Conrad appears in the third volume (145 – 147) with the “authentic” travel narratives and not in the final volume with Daniel Defoe or Jonathan Swift where his reception history certainly would tend to place him. Although it further adds to the bibliographic aesthetics of the entire set of the Encyclopedia on the shelf, this last volume is to be read as an afterthought or as an aside, and its true value lies, perhaps, in casting into relief the precarious reliability of the claims to authenticity in the earlier volumes and to show how porous the line between fact and fiction will generally remain. Howgego’s scholarly merits remain, but they will primarily be found in the former four volumes. Klaus Stierstorfer

University of Münster

Anna-Margaretha Horatschek, Yvonne Rosenberg, and Daniel Schäbler, eds. Navigating Cultural Spaces: Maritime Places. Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography and Literature. Vol. 18. Amsterdam et al.: Rodopi, 2014. 340 pp. ISBN 9789042038622, USD 96.00. The eighteenth volume of the Spatial Practices series focuses on the development of the sea from an abstract space to a concrete, historical place. Its specific functions regarding the formation of individual and national identities, the globalisation of the economy, cultural exchanges, and the sea’s effect on technolog-

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ical progress are explored in seventeen chapters. The contributions in this book, originally presented as talks at the conference Navigating Cultural Spaces: Images of Coast and Sea in Kiel, Germany, in 2010, are here organized in four sections: I: Voyages, II: Heterotopic Places, III: Liminal Spaces, and IV: Maritime Border Aesthetics. In the introduction, Anna-Margaretha Horatschek remarks that literature has been a central agent of the cultural imaginary throughout history and is therefore particularly suitable to negotiate competing versions of sea and coast that form the basis of this maritime discourse (20). As its title indicates, the overall topic of this volume is the hermeneutic study of the sea based on the topographical turn and the spatial turn (21– 22). These established and prominent branches of research in cultural studies have only been applied to the sea as a historicized space since the early 2000s. Methodologically, the analysis of the sea as a historical, social and political place is based on a publication by Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean, rendering them “initiators of this new approach” adopted by the present volume (19).¹ Regarding the terms ‘space’ and ‘place,’ Horatschek refers to key studies by Edward Soja, Henri Lefèbvre, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault. She cautions that the volume’s chapters are not concerned with ahistorical interpretations of the sea but instead focus on political and social readings (25), thus highlighting the historical perspective they take on the sea as sketched by Michael Crang: “Spaces become places as they become timethickened [sic]. They have a past and a future that binds people together around them” (20).² Focusing on the sea as such, she observes that the individual experiences of the sea represented in literary texts such as those discussed in the volume can be read as “ ‘ acts of resistance’ against concepts of the sea as ahistorical space” (25). Closely connected to the historical reading of the sea as a place is its development from an ‘other,’ non-human realm to a heavily frequented place. This accounts, in particular, for the time from the eighteenth century onward due to the institutionalization of overseas trade and global imperialism, as Horatschek emphasizes (26).

 Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, eds., Sea Changes. Historicizing the Ocean (New York: Routledge, ).  Michael Crang, Cultural Geography (London: Routledge, ): .

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I: Voyages The journeys analyzed in this section focus on the Atlantic ocean and its development from a space of projections to a place that travelers experienced differently due to the individual circumstances of each overseas voyage. Among the key references for this section is Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993). Focusing on the identity formation of Africans who were transported as slaves across the Atlantic and the concomitant shift from land-based to sea-based concepts of identity, thus “replacing roots by routes” (30), Gilroy’s historicized concept of the sea serves as a central conceptual point of reference in this section. It opens with Gesa Mackenthun’s contribution, advocating a historical approach that emphasizes the role of the sea as “a social site at which history is shaped, battles fought, human destinies decided” (55). In her chapter she interprets the sea charts documenting routes of whales mentioned in Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) as “secret bearers of subaltern knowledge” (53) that cast a different light on the ocean itself. Apart from the ocean, the voyagers and ships travelling across the sea can be historicized in a similar fashion; interpreting the biographies of Olaudah Equiano and Heinrich Schliemann based on their travels, Mackenthun concludes that both can be defined as “agents who connect different oceanic topographies” (56) and thus indicate “a sense of interconnectedness” (58) across the ocean. While this perspective on the lives of travelers, ships and Melville’s use of sea charts only provides a brief glimpse, Mackenthun’s contribution underlines that the historicizing approach can be transferred to diverse historical and literary sources. Therefore, her appeal “to recognize the less imaginative side of oceanic routes, voyagers, and ships” (61) is particularly compelling. The chapter by Joanna Rostek explores political and aesthetic discourses of the Atlantic. Rostek approaches the Atlantic from the perspective of two postcolonial texts written in the 1990s: David Dabydeen’s poem “Turner” (1994) and Fred D’Aguiar’s novel Feeding the Ghosts (1997). Both are based on historical events. Rostek stresses two ambiguous functions of the sea in regard to slavery in Dabydeen’s poem and D’Aguiar’s novel: first, the break it represents in African history due to Western colonization, and second, the transformative function, openness, and the instability that the sea embodies (65). In a detailed analysis of the two literary sources, Rostek convincingly establishes a connection between representations of the instability of the sea and the “destabilised history of the African diaspora” (78). Jens Martin Gurr discusses the Atlantic in terms of Edward Young’s maritime poem “Imperium Pelagi” (1730). While Gurr judges Young’s naval poetry aesthetically as “poetic failures” (83), his historicizing approach proves fruitful: it reveals a conflict over mercantilism versus free trade regarding the role of the sea in the eighteenth-century poems. The everyday issues of international competition and in particular the feared Chinese domina-

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tion of trade are addressed in “a proto-nationalist discourse of competition and British naval power” (83), Gurr argues. On the one hand, the sea is presented as “a global arena” (99) marked by competition between naval and trading powers; on the other, it is used at the same time “to underline British naval power and dominance” (99). Gurr’s perspective on the sea as a conflicted, historical space in Young’s poetry corroborates the valuable potential of the historicizing approach. Joachim Schwend analyzes the Atlantic from the perspective of Irish migrants to the US on transatlantic voyages in the nineteenth century. A direct connection to Paul Gilroy’s approach is established by Schwend as he applies the spatial-cultural concept of the Black Atlantic and transfers it to Irish migration, thus turning it into a “Green Atlantic” (104). Schwend draws many parallels between African slaves and Irish migrants in his analysis, describing both as “cargo” (107) and pointing to their shared perception as “one underclass of unskilled labourers” (105) in the US. Comprising a variety of literary and historical sources, Schwend’s analysis of Irish migration only scratches the surface of this vast topic and provides a brief overview of its historical development. His finding that “[n]avigating cultural spaces means transporting and transforming collective memories and narratives of people and of places of significance” (112) based on the example of travelling across a Green Atlantic falls a bit short.

II: Heterotopic Places This section draws on the well-known heterotopia of the ship by Michel Foucault³ and connects it to the sinking of the Titanic, as well as negotiations of myth and history in Treasure Island and The Beach, coastal figurations of Caribbean pirates and the topic of wilderness and survival on a desert island in three novels from the early 2000s. Jonathan Rayner’s chapter discusses the sinking of the Titanic that inspired Thomas Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” (1912), James Cameron’s movie Titanic (1997) and his documentary Ghosts of the Abyss (2003). Analyzing the different interpretations of the Titanic disaster in the poetic and cinematic texts, Rayner concludes that these analogous perspectives “serve to modify the transformative potential of the sea voyage into the parabolic punishment of the sea wreck” (133). In addition to the sea’s surface, it is the seabed that is historicized through technological progress. The other three chapters examine islands as heterotopic places and consider their influence on identity formation: Alexandra Ganser focuses on the Caribbean pirates as a threat to existing, land-based systems of identity and order; the Caribbean thus serves as a

 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics  ():  – , .

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heterotopia for developing alternative “coastal” (135) and liminal identities and systems. The ambivalence of a “violent” (147) yet alluring Caribbean is also reflected in pirates’ ambivalent characters: they are described as “exotic, transgressive, and spectacular” (147) as Ganser conclusively argues on the basis of Exquemelin’s Zee-Rovers (1678). Nadja Palitzsch’s contribution discusses the depiction of islands and in how far external and internal wilderness are linked and in three recent novels: James Hawes’s Speak of England (2005), Scarlett Thomas’s Bright Young Things (2001), and Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001). Her analysis of island settings in the novel and of the way they influence and reflect the characters’ behavior and identities is compelling and insightful. Palitzsch also explores how the three novels combine traditional castaway stories with “postmodern, sometimes ironic or fantastic, and culturally critical elements” (173). The last chapter in this section, by Johannes Riquet, juxtaposes the representation of islands in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996). In Riquet’s contribution, the two fictional islands are contrasted as mythical, cultural spaces marked by different utopian (and heterotopian) visions; over the course of the novels, these islands change from “space[s] of desire” into “terrifying war zone[s]” (183). While insularity and its influence on the construction of identities in these heterotopic places are analyzed in great detail, the historicizing perspective at the methodological core of this reading is not considered to a satisfying extent.

III: Liminal Spaces The chapters in the third section consider liminal spaces and examine the sea and, in particular, the beach as a threshold of transformation on various levels. The first contribution by Wolfgang Klooss identifies various concepts of the beach and its role as a “liminal space of encounter and exchange” (195). As a site of identity formation, the beach can strengthen or question and even transform existing identities. In a wide-ranging and excellent discussion, Klooss provides an overview of the role of the beach for constructions of identity in various sources from the Bible and The Tempest to contemporary Canadian writers. Illustrating the different conceptualizations of the beach in these texts, he traces their development from negatively connoted border zones (197) to positive spaces of exchange in the Romantic period and back to recent, more critical perceptions. A more specific case study is offered in Liz Ellison’s chapter on the beach in Australian texts and the ways in which they confront the myth of the beach as an egalitarian space in Australian culture since the 1980s. As Ellison argues, more recent texts largely deny this egalitarian function and instead present these liminal spaces as places that underline different identities, mark con-

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trasts and embrace differences (233). Ursula Kluwick’s contribution suggests an ecocritical reading of sea and beach in Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea (1978) and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). This perspective is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s concept of the “ecological haunting” (238).⁴ Even though the novels “never broach environmental issues” (253), the experience of the instable and unpredictable sea leads to a re-positioning of characters and their decentering within the universes of the novels. Kluwick argues convincingly that these novels can be defined as environmental literature and presents an elaborate approach to literary ecocriticism. Patrizia A. Muscogiuri argues in her chapter for a historical and political reading of sea and coast in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room (1922) and The Waves (1931). While metaphorical readings of the sea in Woolf’s works dominate in Woolf scholarship, Muscogiuri illustrates that the sea and the coastal settings can also be interpreted from a historical and political standpoint that reveals “Woolf’s inscription of WWI” (258) in them. In both novels, coast and sea are tied to “war and empire” (261), for example, the spray of waves is likened to a “tossing of lances and assegais” in The Waves. ⁵ Furthermore, Muscogiuri demonstrates in her insightful analysis that the connection between sea and war is clearly “set against Britain’s celebratory nationalism” (258).

IV: Maritime Border Aesthetics The chapters in this section represent work by members of the Border Aesthetics Research Project at the University of Tromsø, Norway, and they focus on maritime borders in literature and history. In Stephen Wolfe’s chapter, representations of the sea in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature are analyzed. He explores how the perception of the coasts of the English island nation changed from being regarded as a means of protection to an entrance to the world that also threatened invasion, thus reflecting a changing notion of national identity during this period. Wolfe considers different literary sources in this context: John of Gaunt’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II (1594 or 1595), Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Alexander Pope’s “Windsor Forest” (1713), as well as other poems from the later eighteenth century. Wolfe detects a decreasing role of the sea as a space of exclusion and otherness. He illustrates how in later literary texts, border crossings are more frequent and the sea itself is charged with “complex geological and geographical constructions” (285) turning it into

 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, ): .  Virginia Woolf, The Waves [] (London: Hogarth, ): .

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a well-defined and historicized place. Ruben Moi’s contribution focuses on conceptualizations of the sea and their influence on contemporary Irish poetry by Desmond Egan, Seamus Heaney, and Paul Muldoon. Moi identifies the role of the sea for the poets as a source of inspiration anchored in Irish literary tradition; even the rhythm of the poems reminds him of waves (289). Moi gives a concise overview of the sea’s influence on Irish literature, the earliest example being The Book of Invasions written in the eleventh century (292). Analyzing the diverse roles of the sea in the different poems, Moi elucidates historicizing perspectives and political readings and emphasizes their tradition in Irish literature. Inspired by Percy Shelley’s description of a boat trip in Naples in 1818, Timothy Saunders offers a close reading of Shelley’s particular “coastal aesthetics” (304) and his sea-based perspective. Taking two levels of aesthetics in the letter and of the letter into account, Saunders’s well-structured reading discloses a perspective of “[s]ynchronic coherence” (308, emphasis in original) regarding Naples and its ancient history. Through the specific coastal aesthetics that are defined by his seabased perspective, Shelley even overcomes temporal borders according to Saunders. The last chapter of the section, by Søren Frank, deals with the genre of Scandinavian sea novels and the tensions they describe between maritime and domestic life. In contrast to other writers of the sea, such as Melville or Conrad, whose writing is set in a “predominantly male, anti-domestic universe” (319), Frank shows that Scandinavian authors “proposed an aesthetic […] compromise” (318) between male and female, domestic and anti-domestic, land and sea. Frank provides an astute reading of Jonas Lie’s The Pilot and His Wife (1874) that emphasizes how this novel challenges these strict distinctions, in particular through the character of Elizabeth who occasionally accompanies her husband across the sea. In conclusion, this volume of the Spatial Practices series serves as an insightful and diversified contribution to hermeneutic sea studies that encourages further discussion and analysis of maritime literature, films, and historiographical sources. Through the coverage of so many different types of material, the collection provides a good overview of the emerging discipline of sea studies. As the metaphorical reading of the sea predominates in literary and cultural studies, the historicizing approach preferred in this volume opens up new directions. The different interpretations of this historicizing perspective explored in the practical case studies illustrate the method’s wide and varied utility. Eliza Richter

University of Münster

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Stephen Ross and Allan C. Lindgren, eds. The Modernist World. London: Routledge, 2015. 615 pp. ISBN 9780415845038, GBP 130.00. Interdisciplinarity and transnational modernisms are the key approaches in The Modernist World, as sixty-one essays discuss modernism in literature, the visual arts, theatre, dance, architecture, music and film, as well as intellectual currents. The essays themselves are geographically divided into eight sections: East and Southeast Asia, South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and Oceania, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and the Arab World, and finally Canada and the United States. Indeed, a real indication of the new approach taken in this volume is precisely the order of these geographical subdivisions, where Europe and the West no longer begin the conversation, but instead appear half way through and at the end. The above methodology thus foregrounds the editors’ intentions from the outset, as the excellent introduction affirms: The reconceptualization of modernism is an ongoing and collective project. Until the end of the last century, Anglo-American and European writers and artists dominated the landscape, with the rest of the world reduced to a mere standing reserve upon which canonical geniuses drew for inspiration. (1)

For those readers who have not engaged with global modernisms before, the editors explain the move away from what Hugh Kenner termed The Pound Era (1971), with its mostly male, literary, Western practitioners, towards the “new modernist studies” concept of 1999, when modernism was deliberately reconceived to restore the “vibrant plurality” (1) that had marked its origins. In addition, the notion of a carefully delineated time period of 1890 – 1940 (particularly for Western modernist literature), now saw a “temporal, spatial and vertical expansion” (1), with Ezra Pound’s famous dictum “Make it new,” applied in an interdisciplinary and transnational way. The richness of the seam uncovered by such an approach is revealed in the essays assembled for this volume. Literature (with a peppering of visual arts) no longer holds sway; the study of modernism now rightly accords a place at its table for a multitude of disciplines. Many of the chapters engage in the socio-political implications of modernism, and especially the relationship between modernism and imperialism, given the volume’s broad transnational coverage. Over time, an historical dichotomy emerged, whereby it was possible to crave “imperialist modernity for the sake of becoming modern,” whilst at the same time abhorring “the imperialism by which it arrived and was established” (8). One caveat noted by the editors is that disputes over terms such as modern, modernism and modernity “will re-

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main unresolvable in large part because they are so context-dependent” (2). Thus, plural, global modernisms necessitate a “shifting terminological, as well as conceptual and aesthetic, terrain” (3). The Modernist World is not the first volume to discuss global/geo-modernisms, but it is the first to offer such comprehensive coverage in an accessible way, for both the scholar and lay reader. There are two possible reading approaches: by region (thus encouraging interdisciplinarity, which is the approach taken in this review), or by art form (thus encouraging a transnational perspective). Both work admirably. All the essays are of a uniformly short length, and clear subheadings allow for directional and purposeful arguments. The first section on East Asia and Southeast Asia encompasses an enormous geographical area. The contextual chapter on intellectual currents by Christopher Bush offers a fascinating introduction to the modernist cultural production in this vast and diverse region, “though the range of its application and its relevance to East Asia remain subjects of debate” (17). Kevin J. Wetmore Jr.’s chapter on modernist theatre and drama offers an absorbing discourse on how the region’s theatre tradition was influenced by the West, whilst at the same time the West was looking East, with authors such as Yeats, Brecht, Artaud, Craig and Pound seeing Japan, in particular, as “a model to bring life to what they perceived as a tired, spiritually dead theatre” (77). In the book’s second section, on South Asia, the focus of attention shifts to the Indian subcontinent, where nationalist art, “one form of counter-colonial sensibility, appealing to bourgeois nationalists, was replaced by a modernist anti-imperial imaginary” (93). For Vinay Dharwadker, South Asia’s literary modernism […] begins in the early 1880s as an aesthetic outcome of a quest for social reform and self-modernization under colonialism, and not merely as an imitative offshoot of Euro-American modernismo or modernism. (129)

This is defined in four distinct phases: realism and reform, 1880 – 1920, nationalism and experimentation, 1922– 1947, independence and nation-building, 1950 – 1980, and finally diaspora and cosmopolitanism, 1980–present. The region delineated in the third section is Sub-Saharan Africa, where, for Yahia Mahmoud, “modernity is a multiple and shared condition” (157), and where the confrontation and deconstruction of Western representations of Africa is essential to approaching the continent’s realities through a lens of modernity: “Some see African ruling elites as bearers and defenders of modernity, but others as a hindrance to it” (159). Lizelle Bisschoff, in her chapter on African cinema, indicates the problems associated with trying to view modernism as a purely Western construct, since “any application of modernism on African artistic

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and aesthetic practice would then indicate a Eurocentric approach to understanding this time period in Africa” (174). Tsitsi Jaji takes a slightly different approach in an essay on African music, by suggesting that African modernism in fact can be viewed as an aesthetic response “to the shock of modernity in the violent encounters with European colonization and the haunting histories of internal, Arab, and trans-Atlantic slavery” (197). For Jaji, there is a “global circulation of black aesthetics” (198), viewed in the way that African diasporics seek out African culture, whilst Africans themselves seek out African-American literature and music. The process might be viewed as an unwieldy pendulum, swinging back and forth. Section four covers the region of Australia and Oceania. David Macarthur’s compelling chapter on aboriginality and the radically new views modernist art as a Western response to tribal culture, “and Australasian modernism [as …] a Western response to Aboriginal culture,” quoting Henry Moore’s famous words: “All art has its roots in the ‘primitive’ or else it becomes decadent” (228). Macarthur cites Picasso’s influence of African masks in Les Demoiselles D’Avignon, and the influence of Tahiti in paintings by Gauguin, who saw exposure to the primitive as an essential tool for recreating art; in these instances, the fact of being confronted with “otherness” engendered creativity. Matthew Hall, in his chapter on literature, believes that “[t]he incipient modernism of earlytwentieth-century Australian literature is strongly correlative with the creation and legitimisation of a hegemonic national identity” (265). In New Zealand, on the other hand, a strongly puritanical grip by the literary establishment shaped much of the nation’s literature, which remained both patriarchal and colonial for the first half of the twentieth century at least. For Hall, the social homogeneity of the Maori and the Pakeha (white settlers) was a myth which imploded in the 1970s with the ascent of Maori culture and writing: Twentieth-century literature in New Zealand represents less a literary tradition than a social transformation in which the barriers of access were broken and New Zealand literature was redefined by the representation of the country’s multi-cultural, post-colonized voices. (271)

The section on Europe begins with an essay discussing modernist intellectual currents by Irene Gammel and Cathy Waszczuk, where they observe how, against the cataclysmic backdrop of WWI, radical thought provided a breeding ground, both intellectually and culturally, for the move towards modernity. Michael Johnson’s essay on European modernist architecture focuses by necessity on the German Bauhaus and its adherents, as well as the Swiss-born architect known as Le Corbusier, with his infamous declaration: “A house is a machine for living in”

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(317). The closure of the Bauhaus by the Nazis in 1933 “launched a diaspora of modernist architects and designers throughout the world” (319). Michael Valdez Moses offers a comprehensive overview of European modernist cinema, that “seventh art,” which would provide a new lens through which to view life, with its fractured representations of time, and which offered, for the first time, the power “to move the spectator – figuratively, but most important, virtually” (322). In their essay on dance, Juliet Bellow and Nell Andrew posit the thesis that modernist dance predates painting in its use of abstraction and that, as a result, it should be accorded an equally important place with those other art forms perceived to be at the heart of modernist expression. The subject of section six is Latin America. According to Amy A. Oliver, there is a general consensus among scholars that “literature is the medium most associated with modernism in Spanish America,” where anti-bourgeois, as well as anti-imperialist, modernist literature created its own very distinct literary style. Felipe Hernández in his chapter on architecture makes the point that modernism in Latin America is anchored in the decades 1930 – 1960, slightly later than in Europe and North America, “precisely to exceed the limitations imposed by EuroAmerican curation” (383). Emily McGinn relates how Buenos Aires quickly became the hotspot of modernist literary activity in the Latin American literary world, led by writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Macedonio Fernández. Alejandro L. Madrid notes that Latin American composers were also forging a new kind of music, invigorating and renewing “their inherited European musical languages through the self-exoticizing recourse to Indigenous or Afro-Latin American musics” (410). The penultimate section of the volume engages with modernism in the Middle East and the Arab World, which, as Kaveh Tagharobi and Ali Zarei affirm in their opening chapter on intellectual trends, “is a very fitting endeavour, as ‘Middle East’ itself is a ‘modern’ term, which has only become common since the early twentieth century” (439). They argue, however, that as a result of political instability in the region over the last hundred years or so, together with the West’s colonial presence, the transition to modernity in the region has not been easy, since it “was thrown into a developed experience of modernity while its nations were still struggling with issues like illiteracy, dictatorship, and underdevelopment” (444). Indeed, Anna Bernard takes this argument further in her chapter on literary modernism in the region, when she states that demands for political and cultural autonomy from European imperialism were closely allied to the region’s modern literary production. Dina Amin, in her discussion of Arab theatre, makes some important points concerning Arab culture in general, condemning the colonial viewpoint that prior to the twentieth century the Arab World “had experienced some 500 years of cultural wasteland”

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(482). For Amin, “this period-division of a ‘dark age’ and an ‘age of enlightenment’ initiated by colonial presence only benefited Orientalists’ view of Arab history and ignored five centuries of creative output” (482– 483). Thus, a prime aim for Arab modernists was to connect “the modern self with its ancient roots” (487). The final section of the volume turns to Canada and the United States, where, according to Leif Sorensen, the region’s artists and thinkers developed their own domestic versions of modernism, shaped by their growing sense of independence from Europe. Rhodri Windsor Liscombe asserts that after the second world war, North America’s developments in architecture and design “attained an apogee but also a nadir” (509) as modernist architecture sought “the creation of a more efficient, entire and equitable urban demos” (514). According to Juan A. Suárez, modernist cinema in the region had to fight the overwhelming reach of Hollywood and its “exclusive reliance on escapist storytelling” (520). Early modernist films were influenced by expressionism as a means of rendering psychological interiority. Allana C. Lindgren explains how New York quickly became the center of dance experimentation outside of Europe, emphasizing how moral superstition was overcome by positioning such dancing as a serious art form. Ballet helped to promote this modernist dynamism with the founding of the New York City ballet by George Balanchine, who had originally worked for that most celebrated of early modernist European dance companies, the Ballets Russes. The reader’s journey through this volume, then, is a rich and varied one. Several chapters stand out from the rest: Michael Johnson’s “Modernist Architecture and Design in Europe” is a tour de force: brilliantly researched and at the same time a pleasure to read; Alejandro L. Madrid’s “The Modernist Musical Experience in Latin America” presents a fascinating discussion of the importance of this genre to the region’s modernist heritage; and Nada Shabout’s “Modernism and the Visual Arts in the Middle East and North Africa” offers an excellent overview of modernist art from a postcolonial viewpoint. Overall, The Modernist World is a ground-breaking volume in the field of modernist studies, and the editors are to be congratulated for assembling so many expert contributors covering such a diverse range of modernist genres and geographical locations. One minor point: the volume would have been better served by a more stimulating cover. I assumed it must be a standard one for the whole series until I examined the Routledge website and saw that all the other volumes in the series have striking covers, each depicting an iconic image from the subject at hand. The vague ink swirls on this cover don’t even offer a hint as

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to the volume’s contents and, in effect, are the only real disappointment in this otherwise captivating volume. Gerri Kimber

University of Northampton

Review Essay: Between Formalism and Social, Cultural, and Ideological Approaches: Comics Studies in Transition Nick Sousanis, Unflattening. Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard UP, 2015. 196 pp. ISBN 9780674744431, USD 22.95. Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel. Trans. Bruce Campbell. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2015. 375 pp. ISBN 9781628464818, USD 60.00. Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji, eds. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities. New York, London: Routledge, 2015. 264 pp. ISBN 9780415738132, USD 145.00. Those who are new to comics studies may find themselves irritated by a pervasive tendency of the field: the insistence on finding an essential, catch-all definition of the medium. The search for a definition of what distinguishes comic books as a medium has considerable impact on the direction most research takes. Lukas Wilde sums up the two often diametrically opposed poles in what he, alongside Meskin,¹ calls “the definitional project” of comics studies: on the one hand, there are those who try to define comics by focusing on “the medial signs, production, distribution, and cultural reception of comic books.”² The adherents of this culturalist branch of the definitional project typically produce monographs and essay collections that can be grouped by the labels “comic books as” or “comic books and”: they study superheroes as capitalist icons,³ think of Comics as a Nexus of Cultures,⁴ focus on Comics and the History of Twen-

 Aaron Meskin, “Defining Comics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism  ():  – , .  Lukas Wilde, “Comic,” Glossar der Bild-Philosophie (acc.  April ). My translation.  Dan Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age (Winchester and Washington: Zero Books, ).  Mark Berninger, Gideon Haberkorn, and Jochen Ecke, eds., Comics as a Nexus of Cultures: Essays on the Interplay of Media, Disciplines, and International Perspectives (Jefferson: McFarland, ).

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ty-First Century Storytelling,⁵ or examine Comics as Performance ⁶. On the other hand, there are those who largely disregard historical, cultural or ideological concerns and instead propose a “formal or semiotic definition” (Wilde). American comics scholar Scott McCloud and French theorist Thierry Groensteen are the most important representatives of this tendency. It is important to invoke this fundamental divide in comics studies in the context of this review, since it has a palpable influence on the three books to be reviewed here: two monographs and an essay collection that make some strides to arrive at a productive merger of the two camps, with varying success. Some context for the ongoing debate is needed to understand the state of transition comics studies is currently experiencing. Scott McCloud, in Understanding Comics (1994), explicitly sets out to define the essential nature of the comics medium, and instead of deducing it from examples from comics’ rich history, he mostly chooses to produce the examples himself – Understanding Comics is, famously, comics theory in the shape of an actual comic book. While McCloud’s work is widely admired, this arguable forging of the evidence has had a somewhat counterproductive effect on comics studies. Many of McCloud’s concepts have proved of relatively modest analytical value. His taxonomy of different transitions between comics panels, for example, is not frequently cited because the examples he conjures have very little to do with actual transitions between frames in comic book practice.⁷ Instead, comics scholars have most of all taken to McCloud’s idea that comics are, as he puts it in the monograph’s subtitle, “the invisible art.” To McCloud, the gutters between the panels of a given page are what is essential to the medium, not the narrative cues given in the panels themselves. Readers have to fill the sizable gaps left between panels themselves, in a cognitive operation he calls “closure.”⁸ In a sense, one of the most important theoretical texts in comics studies has thus given researchers permission not to talk about what can actually be seen on comics pages – after all, what is supposedly essential about comics is invisible, an abstract process taking place in readers’ minds. Thierry Groensteen, too, believes in a common formal core of all comics, and finds it in what he calls “iconic solidarity,” that is, the uniquely spatial configuration of the comics medium that allows ar-

 Jared Gardner, Projections: Comics and the History of st Century Storytelling (Stanford: Stanford UP, ).  Annalisa Di Liddo, Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, ).  Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York: William Morrow, ):  – .  McCloud, Understanding Comics, .

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tists to establish thematic, narrative, visual, or purely abstract links between comics pages and panels in a decidedly non-linear fashion – a phenomenon he describes through the metaphor of “braiding.”⁹ Until recently, there has been relatively little common ground between these two factions. But the latest batch of monographs and essay collections in what has been a highly dynamic field in the past few years show a certain movement towards change and compromise. Those who view comics from a culturally, ideologically, and historically contingent perspective especially are slowly discovering the ways in which the formalist position is able to enrich their readings and provide a solid foundation for their complex cultural analyses. To varying degrees, the three books to be reviewed here are testament to this gradual change in the landscape of comics studies. Unflattening, by Nick Sousanis (2015), continues Scott McCloud’s tradition of comics theory in the shape of a comic book, and can be seen as both an expansion of McCloud’s ideas and a corrective, specifically to the idea of comics being an “invisible” art. Sousanis, instead of insisting on the importance of the gutter, draws our attention to what can be seen on the comics page. In particular, he wants comics readers to question the western bias against visual communication, which he traces all the way back to Plato’s distrust of (visual) perception. Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities (2015), an essay collection edited by Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji, locates the comics medium’s potential to “enter colonial discourse deconstructively” precisely in the unique ways in which comics “employ visual grammars, image-texts, and graphic performances that reconstitute ‘image-functions’ in established social texts and political systems and thus, perhaps, re-envision competing narratives of resistance or rights” (Mehta and Mukherji 2/3). Santiago García’s On the Graphic Novel (2015), the first monograph to chart a long-form history of the graphic novel as distinct from, for example, monthly serialized genre comics, is doubtless the most conservative in this trio of new releases. García dismisses “formalist definitions” as “overly restrictive,” and instead opts to define comics “as a social object” that “we identify […] as an object in print […,] a book, a pamphlet, a magazine, a booklet or a section of a newspaper or other publication, but reproduced for mass consumption” (28/29). But García is hardly dogmatic in his anti-formalism. At various points, he charts the evolution of graphic novel form and aesthetics from the beginnings in innovative newspaper serials such as Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (1918) to the contemporary formalism of Chris Ware. Together, all three books make important contributions to comics studies: they expand and map the field and are certain to spark de-

 Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, ): .

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bate. Most of all, they are clear evidence of the slow merger of the previously competing tendencies of comics studies, and a reassuring indication of the field’s maturation.

Nick Sousanis, Unflattening It would do Nick Sousanis’s Unflattening a disservice, though, to say that it is only concerned with the comics medium. The summary on the dust jacket calls it “an experiment in visual thinking” in which Sousanis “defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge.” In fact, Sousanis only begins to address the topic of comic books directly from page 60 onwards. Instead, he spends more than a third of the book developing his own theory of perception and ontology. These four initial chapters are – like the rest of the book – aesthetically impressive and very inventive in their search for visual metaphors and evocative page layouts. At the same time, the philosophy Sousanis develops is neither original nor complex. What makes Unflattening a worthy contribution to comics studies regardless of its relative philosophical shallowness is the way it puts the comics medium to use for purposes other than the purely narrative, and its wealth of ideas. Sousanis excels at demonstrating the medium’s potential, both for the practitioner and the academic looking for ways of talking about comics. Sousanis’s preferred metaphor throughout the book is spatial: he constantly juxtaposes what he considers the disconnected flatness of contemporary mental habits with new, “unflattened” ways of seeing and thinking. Instead of being “flatlanders,” we are to perceive the world in depth and volume, as a “de-centered, laterally branching, rhizomatic structure, where each node is connected to any other” (39). To Sousanis, the comic book, with its fundamentally spatial configuration and complex network of interconnected panels and page layouts, is the ideal medium for communicating such a complex way of seeing and thinking. A double page from the first chapter of the book is fairly typical of Sousanis’s project. Here, he diagnoses the contemporary human being, “this creature,” as “confined, boxed into bubbles of its own making… Row upon row… Upon row. Thought and behavior… aligned in a single dimension. Lockstep, they walk the line… They have become” (14– 15, punctuation in the original). These verbal captions detailing the supposed flatness of the contemporary human being’s experience are juxtaposed, in a double-page spread, with images that mostly make the spatial metaphors in the verbal captions redundant in inventive ways. Naked, non-individuated humans are shown trapped in round panel borders, sometimes straining against the borderlines, sometimes resigned to their con-

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finement. A number of uniform, human-shaped cut-outs are strung up on a line, at various angles; the figure in the middle faces the viewer at a 90-degree angle, so that it appears as a perfectly flat, thin line. On the opposing page of the diptych, hundreds of human figures are shown from a very high angle. They are arranged in perfectly straight queues. Both the angle of the splash page and the arrangement of the bodies ensures that the arrangement shows barely a hint of volume or depth. What we are to take away from these two pages is that a change of perspective is necessary to escape the literal and metaphorical flatness: assuming different points of view will reveal the lack of depth to be purely illusory, and breaking through (panel) borders both literal and imaginary will make this adoption of multiple vantage points possible. There is no doubt that Sousanis’s mise-enpage is inventive and effective, not just in the case of this diptych, but throughout the book. But the redundant, hardly subtle presentation and the conclusions it all but forces upon the reader put some strain on Sousanis’s emancipatory project. In this sense, too, these two pages are representative of the whole. The didactic redundancy on display here is systemic, and it is difficult not to ask: are we truly “unflattening” our cognitive habits if we have to be told to do so time and again for sixty pages? Unflattening is more convincing when it leaves philosophical abstraction behind and turns its attention to its own medium. To Sousanis, the verbal and visual multimodality of comics offers an effective antidote to western logocentrism. While the Platonic origins of logocentrism and Descartes’s further privileging of verbal communication are well known, Sousanis does a thorough job of giving an historical and philosophical outline. It is of great importance to draw attention to this particular bias in the context of comics studies, since the neglect of the visual aspect of the medium is no doubt directly tied to the west’s intellectual bias against images. Sousanis associates logocentrism with flatness: “When represented through any single mode, this world of our experience, of endless horizons, is necessarily flattened,” he writes (57). Comics, by combining the visual and the verbal while (often) privileging neither, supposedly open up new perspectives and shed new light on both modes of communication. But to Sousanis, it is not just multimodality that imbues the comics medium with rich potential. Comics’ constitutive spatiality grants them unique affordances as well. It is the “spatial interplay of [the] sequential and [the] simultaneous” on the page which “imbues comics with a dual nature – both tree-like, hierarchical and rhizomatic, interwoven in a single form” (62). To understand what is meant by this, we need to consider the temporal makeup of the comics medium. Comic books do not know a phenomenon comparable to the screen or performance time that we experience in the cinema or in the theatre. The images on the

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page are fixed and arranged in spatial relation to each other. Time and narrative causality – what Sousanis calls “the hierarchical” – only enter the equation once a reader starts making sense of the mise-en-page. By “connecting the dots, traversing the gaps between fragments and stitching them together,” as Sousanis puts it, “a meaningful whole emerges” in a “participatory dance” in which the cues on the page are transformed into a temporal, spatial, and causal whole by the reader. But the medium’s spatiality can be used for other purposes than telling a linear story, as Sousanis himself demonstrates by making Unflattening a comic book itself. “Meaning is thus conveyed not only by what’s depicted, but through structure: the size, shape, placement and relationship of components – what they’re next to and what they’re not, matters” (66). Sousanis also cites comics artist Art Spiegelman, who refers to a comic book page as “an architectonic unit – ideas made spatial”, to be roamed and made sense of by the reader (66). Sousanis even believes that because of their unique spatiality, comics “can hold the unflat ways in which thought unfolds,” that is, they can mediate subjectivity and thought processes in ways that other media cannot (66). Not all of these ideas are new. Scott McCloud has pointed out the centrality of space for the comics medium in Understanding Comics, and Thierry Groensteen has developed the idea at length in The System of Comics. It has since shown up in various monographs and essay collections, for example Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women (2010), where she draws a similar connection between the medium’s affordances and human cognitive processes as well as memory work.¹⁰ Sousanis makes some additions to McCloud, Groensteen, and Chute, however. For one, he further explores the notion of comics as mediating (inter‐)subjectivity. From a quasi-phenomenological perspective, for example, he suggests that “drawing is a way of seeing and thus, a way of knowing, in which we touch more directly the perceptual and embodied processes underlying thinking” (79). Comics, then, especially in the autobiographical mode, could be seen as a way of mediating embodied subjectivity while also stepping outside of that subjectivity and evaluating it – both for the comics artist and for the reader. In a medium so preoccupied with life writing and autobiography, such suggestions are certainly worth exploring. While these ideas are only rarely fully developed or put to the test, Unflattening offers a rich store of them in its second half, inviting the reader to further enquiry. In the chapter entitled “The Fifth Dimension,” for example, one of Sousanis’s page layouts all but proposes that comics can convey how new ideas are

 Hillary Chute, Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (Columbia: Columbia UP, ).

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produced, “bringing input from distinct sources together in a third space” (91). Unflattening follows Fauconnier and Turner’s as well as Lakoff and Johnson’s theorization of metaphorical thinking here (2002/1980),¹¹ but in characteristically Romantic fashion, Sousanis changes the terminology: while cognitive researchers usually speak of metaphoric blending, Sousanis prefers the much more traditional “imagination.” This recasting of terminology in Romantic and idealist terms probably partly accounts for the success of Unflattening (it is currently in its third printing): in almost all cases, Sousanis will choose the lyrical over the matter of fact, emotion over intellectual rigor. Sousanis’s undeniable artfulness and skill will likely make Unflattening a great popularizer of ideas previously formulated elsewhere. In particular, much like Understanding Comics, individual chapters of Sousanis’s experiment should make for good conversation starters in courses on comic books. If Unflattening proves instrumental in avoiding logocentrism, and encourage researchers to enquire into the comics medium’s unique affordances, Sousanis is to be applauded.

Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji (eds.), Postcolonial Comics: Texts, Events, Identities Binita Mehta and Pia Mukherji’s project could, at first glance, not be any further removed from Sousanis’s abstract exploration of the comics medium’s formal and philosophical potential. In their introduction, the editors make a clear mission statement that is very much in keeping with traditional concerns of postcolonial studies. Postcolonial Comics, they write, “seeks to introduce a timely intervention within current comic-book area studies that remains firmly situated within the ‘US-European and manga paradigms’ and their reading publics” (4). Mehta and Mukherji’s criticism of comics studies is justified. Most of the monographs and essay collections published by the various university presses focus on US comics; publications about European and Japanese comic books trail behind somewhat in numbers, but they still greatly outnumber books and essays on graphic narratives from other cultures or countries. There are some notable exceptions, however, such as John A. Lent’s International Journal of Comic Art, which has focused on comics as a global phenomenon since 1999, or the essay collection Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at

 Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, ); George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, ).

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the Crossroads. ¹² Still, it is undeniable that comics studies could greatly benefit from further diversification, and a broader, more international canon. While Postcolonial Comics does offer perspectives on firmly canonical comic book artists such as Joe Sacco or Osamu Tezuka, the collection can already be considered an important contribution to the field on the basis of how many new books and serials are brought to our attention. The contributors have unearthed a treasury of relatively obscure comic books, from Lebanese war comics, editorial cartoons from Palestine dating back to the 1940s, to Delhi Calm (2010), a critically neglected graphic novel on the Indian Emergency of 1975 – 77. But in their introduction to the collection, Mehta and Mukherji see the comics medium as more than just a previously ignored store of postcolonial texts. They consider comic books as “an effective category of ‘postcolonial textuality’ ” that is “uniquely able to perform the ‘deconstructive image functions’ that remain a central paradigm of resistance” against the “dominant […] signifying cultures of current global neo-liberalism, because of the medium’s “complex signifying resources” (2– 3). Comic books are inexpensive to produce and relatively easy to circulate; their authors can thus invent “new postcolonial vocabularies” using comics’ “visual grammars, image-texts, and graphic performances that reconstitute ‘image-functions’ in established social texts and political systems.” To Mehta and Mukherji, comics can thus be employed to “re-envision competing narratives of resistance or rights” (3). The editors’ terminological choices belie their background in literary studies: the inclination to consider images from a logocentric perspective, as “grammar,” “text,” and “vocabulary” is strong. But the fundamental impetus of the collection is nevertheless strong and productive. To Mehta and Mukherji, the “distinct methodologies of reading comics, as textual compositions and as cultural forms” – echoing Wilde’s opposite poles of the definitional project – are “both organized around a common enquiry: how can we think about comics as both meaningful and political?” (2). Formal choices, mise-en-page, and different modes of visual representation are conceptualized as meaningful and informed by ideology, and therefore important to any postcolonial consideration of comics. Occasionally, such theoretical frameworks are spelled out in the introduction, but then neglected in the essays proper. Happily, this is not the case in Postcolonial Comics. Mehta and Mukherji’s acknowledgment that form and aesthetics are political does not amount to an actual theory of comics form; these considerations are left to the individual contributors. For the most part, they offer in-

 Shane Denson, Christina Meyer and Daniel Stein, eds., Transnational Perspectives on Graphic Narratives: Comics at the Crossroads (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, ).

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triguing ideas. Michelle Mumatay, in an essay on Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Les Visiteurs de Gibraltar, proposes that Stassen uses the unique affordances of the comics medium to “challenge existing discourses – mainly from countries in the European Union and in North Africa – used to describe global migration, discourses that generally seek to reduce the multifaceted reality of migration to renewed binaries inherited from the colonial era” (29). Echoing Thierry Groensteen, Mumatay considers “the surface of a bande dessinée [the French term for comics]” with its manifold connections between panels and representations, the interplay between the visual and the verbal, as mediating “the public sphere as dynamic place” (32). Similar to Sousanis, she also theorizes that comic books are particularly well suited to represent memory work, or a “multidirectional memory that takes into account plural and overlapping histories and identities,” all co-existing simultaneously on the spatial configuration(s) of the comic book page and incorporating “both individual and collective memories” (32). With comic book form as her point of departure, Mumatay can convincingly analyze how Stassen, in his documentarian project on global migration, “offers a plurality of different perceptions of the Mediterranean and of migrants that situates contemporary global migration in a broader framework informed by and in dialogue with the past” (41). By choosing the comics medium, Stassen is able to make this past uniquely present, juxtaposing past and present in his page layouts. Ann Miller, in an essay on “Memory and Postmemory in Morvandiau’s D’Algérie,” makes an equally strong case for the merger of formalist and culturalist approaches. D’Algérie (2007) is an exploration of the author’s family history, inextricably bound up with the history of French colonialism in Algeria. Morvandiau’s ancestors were so-called “pieds-noirs,” white settlers in French Algeria, and as such, Miller writes, “not on the side of the victims […] but on that of the perpetrators” (83). As Morvandiau sets out to investigate his family history, “there is no question [for him] to celebrate a Pied-Noir heritage in the way that [French-Iranian graphic novelist Marjane] Satrapi celebrates a Persian heritage” (83). Miller is a particularly strong reader of the many suggestive choices in visual representation that D’Algérie makes. As the narrator sets out to return from his first exploratory trip to Algeria, for example, Miller analyses the depiction of the journey as almost overdetermined with political symbolism: the central panel is “drawn as if from the camping-car window and thus surrounded by a thick black frame, suggesting the author’s inability to penetrate ‘the complex legacy of France’s colonial presence in North Africa’ ” (79). A “queue of heavily loaded Peugeots” shown on the same page is “testimony to other return journeys made by economic migrants” (79). Such readings are, again, made possible by

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the medium’s spatiality, where the reader can roam each page at length, taking in every detail and formulating hypotheses as to its significance. In the verbal narration on the same page, the narrator makes the tensions that characterize Morvandiau’s project explicit, posing “the question of the relationship between public and private histories,” namely: “How can nostalgia, memories, and fantasies of childhood be reconciled with the history of a place that no longer exists, the three French departments of colonial Algeria” (79)? Miller does not think that D’Algérie even attempts to find reconciliation; instead, she describes Morvandiau’s approach as one that heightens the tensions and foregrounds conflict and contradiction. This central strategy is once again convincingly linked to the comics medium’s affordances, and in particular its spatiality: Images and documents are carefully juxtaposed to each other and often to a verbal narrative text. However, the public and private narratives are not presented as complimentary; the latter is not used to exemplify and personalize the wider historical canvas of the former. Instead, they jolt and jar uncomfortably against each other, making connections that force the reader’s attention onto the gaps and silences of what has been repressed, within the family and by the collective unconscious. Neither do the images illustrate the texts or the texts explain the images. Visual and verbal tracks […] co-exist on the page, with words and images in a “high-tension” relationship. (83)

Incisive analyses such as Miller’s and Mumatay’s thus make a strong case for considering comic books from the framework of postcolonial studies: not just as a largely untapped store of texts, but also as a medially distinct form of cultural resistance able to express a non-linear, densely layered and tense “politics of testimony” (Miller’s phrase, 81) in unique ways. Most of the essays in the collection are equally successful in making a convincing argument for comic books as unfairly neglected objects of study for postcolonial analysis. Some of the contributions do not quite engage with comics as comics to the same extent as Miller and Mumatay, though. Harleen Singh, for example, focuses on action/adventure comics from Indian publishing house ACK with the intent of exploring them as “active participants in a postcolonial mythology of revolution, masculinity, and youth” (143). Unlike the graphic novels by Morvandiau and Stassen that Miller and Mumatay discuss, these comics are part of Indian mass culture and focus on the depiction of physical action and clearcut, unambiguous action plots. In these action comics, the constitutive spatiality of the comics medium is typically never foregrounded; linear and causal progression is practically always privileged over establishing abstract, non-linear thematic connections or creating tension by juxtaposing different representations of the present and the past. Whenever forward momentum in terms of linear

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plot development is prized to such an extent, the comics medium itself becomes almost invisible: such straightforward norm-driven storytelling is difficult to talk about precisely because of its supposed banality. Small wonder, then, that Singh only occasionally touches upon questions of visual representation. When he does, though, his observations are always useful and incisive. He notes, for example, that [v]iolent acts perpetrated by the revolutionaries remain precise and result in “bloodless” injuries on the colonial bodies, whereas British force is always excessive, brutal, and undiscriminating. While the revolutionaries’ bullets and bombs always find their mark, the police batons rain blows on the old, young, women, and men alike. (149)

In other words, the resistance to colonial forces expresses itself in mass culture in terms of extrinsic narrative norms, imposed on comics practitioners by years of artistic practice and editorial policy: only colonialist violence draws blood. To Singh, these comics about Indian revolutionaries “form significant contemporary representations of colonial and postcolonial politics, even in an informal, non-institutional engagement with historiography” (143). Arguably, though, these serials are significant to postcolonial studies because their cultural framework is informal and non-institutional. By considering products of mass culture such as serialised comic books, researchers can assess the extent to which postcolonial politics are determined by narrative norms, editorial dictate, decadelong artistic practice, censorship, and reader participation – e. g., in the fan culture typical of the comics landscape and letter columns. Singh’s essay is an enticing first step in this direction, and a greater engagement with some of the core concerns of comics scholarship – fan studies, research into seriality, a solid foundation in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century mass culture – is likely to produce even greater insights. Other contributions explore Jewish and Arab editorial cartoons in Palestine in the 1940s, comic books in the Middle East, and Joe Sacco’s work as a journalist working in the comics format. They all share the same strong editorial focus, carefully unearthing the postcolonial work that comics writers and artists do while demonstrating how this particular work could only be achieved in the comics medium. As a first step in merging comics and postcolonial studies, Postcolonial Comics is doubtless a success, then, pointing the way towards an even deeper integration of the research interests of the two fields.

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Santiago García, On the Graphic Novel Both Sousanis’s Unflattening and Postcolonial Comics are testament to the fact that comics studies is a relatively young field. Unflattening can be seen as one of the first monographs to challenge McCloud’s foundational Understanding Comics. Postcolonial Comics addresses the obvious problem that the field has thus far exhibited a considerable western bias. García’s On the Graphic Novel is further proof that comics studies is not a fully matured research area yet: it is, in fact, the first exploration of the history of the graphic novel. This is not to say that there have not been any historiographic works on comics. Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation and Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men are some of the most recent (and thorough) examples.¹³ But so far, these books have focused on comic books, as opposed to graphic novels. These terms doubtless require some explanation. Comics studies distinguishes between newspaper strips, comic books, and graphic novels. Comics in the sense of mass-produced graphic narratives were born in late-nineteenth-century newspapers, as humorous comic strips that, in the first decades of the twentieth century, evolved and began to occasionally support longer serialized stories and tackle different genres (e. g., the action/adventure story). Newspaper strips are, of course, published to this day, and they constitute the first distinct category of comics. In the 1930s, American publishers discovered that they could turn a profit by reprinting strips outside of the newspaper context, in weekly or monthly pamphlets that soon became independent of the newspaper context altogether. This development gained traction at roughly the same time as the original superheroes were invented. Superhero stories were serialized in the pamphlet format from the very beginning of the genre – the comic book, as a distinct format from the comic strip, thus gave rise to characters such as Superman (1938), Batman (1939), and Captain America (1941). It is still economically dominant in the American comics industry. The comic book market is dominated by two large publishing houses, Marvel and DC Comics, both owned by multinational entertainment companies by now (Disney and Warner Bros., respectively). This brings us to García’s topic: the beginnings of what is known as “the graphic novel.” A variety of self-censorship measures instituted in the 1950s by the comics publishers themselves put an abrupt end to the maturation of the comics medium in the US. The Comics Code, as it was called, made it impos-

 Bradford W. Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins UP, ); Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (Jackson: U of Mississippi P, ).

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sible to depict graphic violence or adult themes, at least in books published by mainstream companies. Partly as a reaction to this, comics artists began to found small presses and self-publish, with the movement picking up steam in the 1960s, in tandem with the countercultural movement. None of the hippie and countercultural artists working at the time would have called their comic books “graphic novels,” however. The most widely used terms for these new books for mature audiences were “commix,” “alternative comics,” or “underground comics.” García nevertheless considers this development as an essential step towards the graphic novel as a category distinct from comic strips and comic books. The economic and artistic viability of the underground comics made it possible for the next generation of comics writers and artists to produce challenging work outside the large publishers like DC or Marvel. The term “graphic novel” itself is impossible to trace to a single point of origin: comics artist Will Eisner began to use it for his work in the late 1970s, but researchers and fans have found various other instances where the term was supposedly used for the first time. It would only gain traction in the 1980s, when publishers were scrambling to offset declining comic book sales by targeting a mature audience. Suddenly, it wasn’t just Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980 – 91), a complex exploration of the Holocaust, that merited the label, but also traditional superhero stories from mainstream publishers, who thought that square binding as opposed to the much more pedestrian stapling of regular comic books was enough to label a publication a “graphic novel”: if the comic will not keel over when put into a book case without any physical support, it must be a graphic novel. In other words, the term “graphic novel” is fundamentally ambiguous: it may denote a type of comic that evolved from underground comix, the counterculture, and various other artistic traditions. But “graphic novel” is also a marketing term just as much as an attempt to magically confer cultural distinction on comic books. Small wonder, then, that any number of supposed “graphic novelists” reject the term themselves, and would rather talk about their work as comics, pure and simple. García’s history of the graphic novel is inextricably bound up in the comics industry’s stride for cultural distinction (just like comics studies is perpetually keen to point out its relevance and validity as an academic field). At this point, the accepted history of the graphic novel is still unstable and amorphous; there is no such thing as a consensus on origins, filiations, and important practitioners. The first choice that García has to make, then, is to determine a point of origin. This is not an easy decision to make at all. Arguably, there is no such thing as a clear genesis of the graphic novel, especially if, like García, one is set on locating this origin not in the 1960s, but with nineteenth-century European illustrators such as Wilhelm Busch and Rodolphe Töpffer on the one hand

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and the historical avant-gardes of the early twentieth century on the other. In the early chapters of On the Graphic Novel, García does an admirable job tracing various early attempts at graphic storytelling, particularly in Europe. He covers the aforementioned Wilhelm Busch, well known to German readers, but also Gustave Doré and Rodolphe Töpffer, a Swiss author and artist of proto-comics that he called “histoires en estampes.” But García implicitly acknowledges that the connection between these nineteenth-century artists and contemporary graphic novelists is tenuous at best. Of Rodolphe Töpffer, he writes: If the comic had followed the path blazed by Töpffer, a teacher whose greatest admirer was none other than Goethe, the father of German letters, it is quite possible that it would have developed as a literary form, emphasizing its character as a print medium, and that the graphic novel would have appeared very early on. But its development from the Sunday supplements of the American newspapers of the late nineteenth century onward situated it at the intersection of audiovisual culture. A print medium, yes, but it does not belong to the world of the written word. (48)

In other words, Töpffer is a non-starter as a potential “father of the graphic novel,” as are most of the European artists García cites in these early chapters (admittedly, García later suggests that Töpffer’s spontaneous and expressive linework had an impact on the graphic novel, but he does not produce any evidence for this claim). To García, this lack of a connection between European proto-comics and the graphic novel is lamentable, especially from a logocentric perspective that defines “literariness” as a purely verbal phenomenon: for some reason, he identifies Töpffer’s work as belonging to “the world of the written word,” while the newspaper strips, which have a much greater claim to be at the origin of the graphic novel, are “situated at the intersection of audiovisual culture,” that is, they are not a “literary form.” In short, García’s definition of literariness is too narrowly logocentric, and his historiography in these early chapters of the book too transparently driven by a desire to establish a highbrow genealogy of the graphic novel. The wish for cultural distinction gets in the way of a cohesive argument. Still, this first third of On the Graphic Novel offers a very solid overview of graphic narratives in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and García proves himself highly competent in tracing the origins of long-form storytelling in the comics medium. It is fascinating to see, for example, that the daily newspaper strip (as opposed to comic strips published only in the Sunday edition of a given paper) were originally a result of economic rather than artistic considerations. Bud Fisher, the artist of the serial A. Mutt, lobbied for a daily strip of three to four panels on the sports page. “[T]he idea of creating a continuous strip was born from the author’s desire to acquire greater notoriety,” García points out,

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having unearthed an interview with Fisher, who was primarily interested in securing “a prominent position across the top of the sporting page,” which “pleased [his] vanity” and was “easy to read in this form” (qtd., 50). But the new daily format allowed the artist a new kind of seriality, where he or she could rely on the fact that the reader would remember what happened the day before. “With the continuity of the daily strip, the apogee was reached by a genre that would triumph in the second decade of the century: the family series,” García writes, citing such serials as George McManus’s Bringing Up Father (1913) and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley (1919) as important steps in the development of (American) graphic narrative (50). There is no difficulty in establishing more or less direct connections between these ambitious newspaper strips and contemporary graphic novelists, and García is quick to point them out: Chris Ware, author of Jimmy Corrigan (2003) and Building Stories (2013), for example, has expressed his admiration for Frank King time and again (52). As an overview of the development of “literary” storytelling in US comics, García’s book quickly becomes an excellent resource in this second half of chapter two, establishing connections with ease and providing insightful readings. Occasionally, though, his account of American comics history is still plagued by the desire for cultural distinction. Talking about the origins of American action/adventure serials as distinct from graphic novels, García points out that Milton Caniff’s adventure serial Terry and the Pirates (1934) “created, in fact, the formula for American comics – and, by extension, for Western adventure comics […]. Even today, the style created by Caniff continues to be considered the standard style” (67– 68). This is partly a correct assessment, since many contemporary comic book artists still cite Caniff as an influence. But García also displays a tendency towards monocausal thinking here in calling Terry and the Pirates the sole originator of the American action/adventure serial: this is hardly the case and blatantly ignores, to name just a few other points of origin, pulp serials such as Doc Savage, the adventure novel, nineteenth-century melodrama as well as countless other newspaper comic strips. Calling Caniff’s style the “standard” for the American comic book mainstream is equally reductive: the mainstream mode of practice allows for a large variety of styles and a great deal more aesthetic variety than García is prepared to admit (and likely familiar with). García’s implicit agenda of elevating graphic novels to the status of high art compared to the banality of mainstream comic books becomes especially apparent when he calls Caniff’s panel frame (and by extension that of the entire US comics mainstream) an impenetrable window that defines the limits of the drawn image, and of what happens in it, just as what happens on the movie screen is a simulation of reality that commands

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exclusively all of our attention […]. In other words, Caniff shattered all of those incursions into the meta-language of the frame that played around with the medium’s conventions. Now all that mattered was to bear witness to the drama unfolding before our eyes without any formal element distracting us. (67– 68)

It is somewhat bewildering that García seems to think that the only way to operate self-reflexively in a comic book is to break or otherwise draw attention to the panel frame. It is equally problematic that García considers Caniff’s page layouts and paneling fundamentally cinematic. Comic book panels usually make for very bad film storyboards. They chunk information in a very different manner than film frames, are often much more densely packed, and heavily rely on the fact that they are simultaneously visible with other panels on a single page or diptych. This is why comics do not require a system similar to the cinematic continuity editing; they do not need angle/reverse angle panels either, since they establish the spatial relationships of characters to each other in ways that differ fundamentally from spatial representation in film. Finally, García’s contention that mainstream action/adventure serials just blankly mediate material reality and abstain from any abstract self-reflexivity is wrong. Mainstream comic books make metafictional references on practically every page. These references are used to inspire reader participation and fandom; they incentivize the acquisition of knowledge about characters, storyworlds, narrative techniques and conventions, publishing houses, and the history of the comics medium. A history of the graphic novel does not benefit from such broadly generalizing claims clearly only made to elevate the graphic novel to a higher cultural status than mainstream comic books. This is not to say that García is consistently opposed to the American comics mainstream (although Caniff firmly remains in place as the bogeyman of banality throughout the book). He even concedes that mainstream comic books supply an important part of the DNA of today’s graphic novels. As the superhero genre went into a steep decline after the Second World War, its propaganda value suddenly not a valid cultural currency anymore, “[o]ther genres began to proliferate,” García writes: Teen comics, funny animal comics (featuring anthropomorphic animals, mimicking those of Disney), Westerns, detective comics, romance, terror, war comics, and so on. The post-superhero era seemed to offer something for every sector of society. Some of these genres carried within them the seed of a true adult comic that just needed a little time to definitively mature. (75)

The mainstream influences that García is willing to allow once again display a certain tendency towards monocausality, however. It is widely known that the 1950s

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horror publisher EC Comics had a great impact on many children and young adults that would go on to become comics professionals themselves. EC were so influential for many reasons: for one, they were among the first to show graphic violence, breaking with one of the central narrative norms of mainstream comics: that bodies are to be practically invulnerable. Their horror stories were cleverly written; writers and artists treated their young readership as equals and made an effort not to be condescending. Their themes were relatively mature, broadly existentialist, and their presentation often highly self-referential. EC Comics were also among the first to foreground authorship. They published paratexts on their writers and artists such as short biographies and essays, and made sure that the stories were properly attributed to individual writers and artists (a practice that was not at all widespread in 1950s American mainstream comics). García only mentions these manifold ways in which EC had an impact on the current comics landscape in passing. Instead, he is really only interested in one story EC published, “Master Race,” by Bernie Krigstein (1955). García analyses this short story about the Holocaust for two reasons: for one, he sees “Master Race” as the point of origin for a new formal(ist) approach to making comic books (i.e., the graphic novel approach). Additionally, there is no doubt that “[a] fine thread runs from ‘Master Race’ to Maus” (86), Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir that first brought the graphic to the attention of a wider public in the 1980s. This assessment is entirely correct: Spiegelman has repeatedly cited “Master Race” as an important influence on Maus. Where García struggles is in his analysis of the formal innovations of Krigstein’s story. At first, he defines Krigstein’s achievement ex negativo: “What Krigstein did in ‘Master Race’ was, in fact, to break with the model of cinematic narration, Caniff’s model […,] in order to reclaim the inherent values of narration in drawn images” (85). It is entirely unclear how Caniff’s comics would not be the product of “narration in drawn images,” however. García clarifies this point somewhat in the course of his analysis, and his ideas clearly echo those of Sousanis and various other comics theorists. Krigstein, to him, establishes “relationships […] that […] go beyond page design, and […] communicate across separate pages” in “systems of iconic solidarity” (85). García cites Thierry Groensteen’s terminology here, but with a fundamental misunderstanding. To García, iconic solidarity – the fact that Krigstein’s imagery makes meaning in a non-linear fashion, conceiving of the comic book as a spatial object – is exceptional and unique to “Master Race.” To Groensteen, though, iconic solidarity is foundational to all comic books. García struggles when analyzing comics aesthetics and form, then, but he is thorough and informative as a historian. He diligently charts the genesis of alternative or underground comics in later chapters, from the creative explosion on the pages of EC Comics’ Mad Magazine to Gilbert Shelton’s The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix, both born in and charting the

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counter- and hippie culture of the 1960s. He explains underground comics’ origins in university humor magazines and self-publishing in painstaking detail, and points out how this alternative comics scene must be considered a direct reaction to the self-censorship of the comics mainstream: these “were comic books published without the seal of approval of the Comics Code, which is to say, completely outside any mechanism of censorship.” They were also often “self-published, meaning that authors did not have to answer to any editorial staff, nor did they need to adapt themselves to formulaic plotlines or someone else’s commercial interests” (102). This is not the same as saying that the underground comic artists (and subsequently the graphic novelists) also chose topics that were as far removed from the comics mainstream as possible. Mad Magazine made its debut with a parody of Superman called “Superduperman.” Gilbert Shelton’s Wonder Wart-Hog is a superhero parody. Robert Crumb constantly makes oblique references to old newspaper strips in Zap Comix. The relationship of contemporary graphic novelists like Daniel Clowes with the comics mainstream is equally ambiguous. Clowes’s The Death-Ray (2011), for example, makes use of both superhero aesthetics and narrative conventions. His most recent graphic novel, Patience (2016), is very much a long-form version of an old EC Comics science fiction/horror story. To divorce the graphic novel from these popular frames of reference is to impoverish any approach to the form. García offers a useful if partly problematic history of the graphic novel, then: an overview that especially those new to the form will surely find informative and inspiring. At the same time, On the Graphic Novel is indicative of a field whose state occasionally resembles that of its research object: a comics studies fascinated with the popularity, seriality, and occasional subversiveness of the comics medium, but clearly feeling no small amount of anxiety about its own relevance and validity as a research interest. And much like Unflattening and Postcolonial Comics, On the Graphic Novel is also evidence of comics studies slowly coming to terms with comics as a medium with unique narrative affordances; in García’s case, one only has to read the book slightly against the grain. What emerges is a history of the graphic novel that is not anti-formalist at all, but that tacitly recognizes the fact that any engagement with the form must not stop short at its aesthetic and formal specificities – and somewhat struggling with how to describe them. But there can be no doubt that Unflattening, Postcolonial Comics, and On the Graphic Novel all show signs of a field well on its way to fully engaging with its object of study. Jochen Ecke

University of Mainz

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Review Essay: From Astroculture to Astropoetics Katherine Ebury. Modernism & Cosmology. Absurd Lights. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. vii + 210 pp. ISBN 9781137393746, USD 95.00. Judy A. Hayden, ed. Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery. From Copernicus to Flamsteed. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 224 pp. ISBN 9781137583451, USD 95.00. Anna Henchman. The Starry Sky Within. Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. x + 294 pp. ISBN 9780199686964, GBP 62.00. Sonja A. J. Neef, Henry Sussmann, and Dietrich Boschung, eds. Astroculture. Figurations of Cosmology in Media and Arts. Morphomata 17. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014. 234 pp. ISBN 9783770556175, EUR 30.00. The relationship of humankind to the stars has long been a subject of study not only for historians of science and historians of ideas, but also for students of literature, culture, social history and the history of arts, anthropology and philosophy, to name only a few disciplines participating in the study of what has come to be called ‘astroculture’. As a field of study in its own right, astroculture has been generating a steady stream of publications in recent years, mainly from cultural historians studying the ways in which humankind, as a resolutely and selfconsciously terrestrial species, has made sense of its own place in the universe.¹

 Notable recent examples include Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds., Societal Impact of Spaceflight (Washington, DC: NASA, ), Robert Poole, Earthrise: How Man First Saw the Earth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UP, ), Kendrick Oliver, To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane and the American Space Program, — (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, ); James S. Ormrod and Peter Dickens, eds., The Palgrave Handbook of Society, Culture and Outer Space (Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, ); and particularly the ‘astroculture trilogy’ edited by Alexander C. T. Geppert as part of the Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine series commencing with Imagining Outer Space. European Astroculture in the Twentieth Century (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, ) and to be continued with the forthcoming Limiting Outer Space: Astroculture After Apollo () and Militarizing Outer Space: Astroculture, Dystopia and the Cold War (). See also Geppert’s programmatic introduction, “Rethinking the Space Age: Astroculture and Technoscience,” in a special issue of History and Technology (. []:  – ) exploring “Astroculture and Technoscience.” Next to the history of US spaceflight, Soviet astroculture has also received particular attention; see Asif A. Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare. Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination,  –  (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ); Eva Maurer, Julia Richers, Monica Rüthers and Carmen Scheide, eds., Soviet Space Culture. Cosmic Enthusiasm in Socialist Societies (Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmil-

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As one of the prime exponents of the emerging discipline defines it, “astroculture comprises a heterogeneous array of images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe meaning to outer space while stirring both the individual and the collective imagination.” As such, it is a highly interdisciplinary field: Research on the history of astroculture […] critically focuses on the intentions, actions, categories and explanations provided by actants [in phenomena related to outer space], because they are part and parcel of the ways in which human beings attempt to come to terms with and make sense of the infinite universe that surrounds us. And [viewing these phenomena together under the rubric of] astroculture will lead to the controlled import of elsewhere long-established analytical key categories such as ‘language,’ ‘consumption,’ ‘representation,’ ‘appropriation,’ ‘memory,’ ‘materiality,’ and, above all, ‘meaning,’ in addition to numerous others into space history, where they have played no more than a minor, dramatically undervalued role.²

The key categories Geppert identifies here derive, to a large extent, from the research concerns of various theoretical schools and movements in literary and cultural studies, and indeed, his call to action came in the wake of a number of studies that examined the ways in which astronomers, astronomical knowledge, and astronomical pursuits have been reflected and represented by literary authors.³ What is missing, so far, however, is a concerted agenda for astropoetics: an attempt to spell out how we may study the specific nature of literary engagements with astronomy and cosmology, as opposed to – while still in dialogue with – other astrocultural phenomena. What are formal consequences of such engagements? How is cosmological knowledge represented, transformed, perhaps even constituted in and through literature? How is the pursuit of such knowledge linked, in an identifiably ‘literary’ way, with other epistemological lan, ); and James T. Andrews and Asif A. Siddiqi, eds., Into the Cosmos. Space Exploration and Soviet Culture (Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, ).  Alexander C. T. Geppert, “European Astrofuturism, Cosmic Provincialism: Historicizing the Space Age,” in Imagining Outer Space,  – ,  – .  Notable recent predecessors to the publications reviewed here include Holly Henry, Virginia Woolf and the Discourse of Science: The Aesthetics of Astronomy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ); De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Astrofuturism. Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia, PA: U of Pennsylvania P, ); David Amigoni, Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-century Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, ); Pamela Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (Aldershot: Ashgate, ); as well as Frédérique Ait-Touati, Fictions of the Cosmos. Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: U of Chicago P, ). The reprinting of Simeon K. Heninger’s magisterial Touches of Sweet Harmony: Pythagorean Cosmology and Renaissance Poetics [] (Tacoma, WA: Angelico P, ) should also be seen in this context.

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concerns? How does the subject of cosmology – the self-conscious reflection ‘from within’ of the nature of our cosmic environs – impact the literary text’s self-conscious reflection about its own nature? How are ‘meaningful’ literary texts negotiated against more or less value-neutral scientific conceptions of the cosmos? How have these questions been answered historically at various points in the development of both cosmology and literature as categories and subjects of study? Clearly, these questions hinge upon (and contribute to) a very definite understanding of what ‘literature’ is at any given point in time, and thus need to be answered with the utmost historical specificity. Various attempts to do so preoccupy the publications reviewed in the following. The volume edited by the late Sonja A. Neef, Henry Sussmann and Dietrich Boschung undertakes to put ‘astroculture’ on the map of literary and cultural studies in a way that the earlier publications mentioned above have only begun to do. The editors conceive of astroculture “as the dominant and unavoidable language transcribing the impact of space and its exploration, as well as the history, archaeology, and rhetoric of astronomy, within the evolving record of cultural critique” (7) and they believe, with the hyperbole that is often difficult to resist with a topic so grand, that Astroculture embraces not just the entire set of cultural representations of celestial bodies in literature, arts, visual culture, science, philosophy, and the media, but it questions the aesthetic and rational, or cultural and scientific, forms of the world and the universe as a possibility, and, in this sense serve [sic] as an imperative to the impossible. (9)

To study astroculture thus means to question radically all kinds of cosmologies, and to open them up for revision, re-imagination, reformation. As an indication of the domains challenged by such astrocultural analysis, the bilingual collection is divided into four parts, titled ‘How to think the world?’, ‘Mediated worlds’, ‘Possible worlds’, and ‘Meta (Astro) Physics’. All four sections include innovative and fruitful readings of astrocultural phenomena ranging from classical art, philosophy and cosmography to twenty-first century cinema, installations and web newscasts. A number of chapters partake of an astrocultural approach much in tune with historical research of the kind practiced by Geppert, Launius, and Siddiqi. Thus, Gerd Graßhoff’s opening chapter discusses Claudius Ptolemy’s integration of empirical data on the locations of cities and stars in his Geography and Almagest and his comments on observational practice, situating his work firmly in the context of ancient measuring practices and the history of science. Other contributions widen the focus from the work of astronomers to its popularization: Bruce Clarke’s excellent chapter on “Mediations of Gaia” establishes a

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strong connection between the increasing acceptance of James E. Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis by scientists, concomitant developments in systems theory and epistemological constructivism, and the hypothesis’s popular reception through Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and its reproductions of images of earth from outer space in the 1960s and 1970s. Clarke makes a convincing argument for the communicative appeal and potential of the ‘Gaia’ label within and beyond the scientific community. Lucía Ayala considers Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686) as an Enlightenment popularization of astronomical theories, reading it in context with an illustration to its first edition, produced by the Spanish artist Juan Oliver, and with Bernard Picart’s contemporary illustrations representing a multi-ethnic, decentralized world. The illustrations to this and the other chapters are lavish (black and white throughout, with eight additional color plates appended), especially considering the price of the volume. In Ayala’s reading, astronomy and colonialism displaced humankind, respectively, Europeans, from the center in what came to be seen as the non-hierarchical systems of the universe and earth. (This connection between early modern astronomy and colonization is pursued in greater detail in a number of contributions to Judy A. Hayden’s collection discussed below.) A chapter that is likewise sensitive to the political ramifications of astronomy is David Aubin’s absorbing study of “the observatory sciences in the nineteenth century as a cosmopolitical project designed for displacing the basis of political authority from God to the people without falling into anarchy” (61). In his ‘thick description’ of four ostensibly unrelated anecdotes from Paris in the long nineteenth century, Aubin attests to the links between the shift from a belief in a divinely ordered universe to a materialistic, ‘atheist’ one, and the contemporaneous development of representative democracy in France. Hans-Christian von Herrmann’s German-language chapter offers a fascinating discussion of material visualizations of the cosmos from the ancillary globes of early modernity to the modern planetarium and their interconnections with viewing practices and media history, stressing the ways in which viewers are variously placed within or without the universe they observe. In von Hermann’s account, planetaria such as the Zeiss Planetarium in Berlin, opened in 1926, fused the Copernican and Ptolemaic worldviews in a purely optical presentation stressing the importance of the observer’s perception and position. A brilliant reading of responses to this medial innovation by Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute indicates how the popularization of astronomy impacted the theorization of the forms and functions of literature: thus, von Herrmann shows Brecht to explain his idea of the ‘epic theater’ by analogy to planetaria, in which the show is also regularly interrupted by the presenter and their light pointer and which

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aim, not at representing nature ‘as it is’, but in a self-consciously secondary, mediated way. The focus is shifted even more strongly from science to its aesthetic representations in a German-language contribution by co-editor Dietrich Boschung on classical philosophy and art. Boschung sets out to explore how concepts and knowledge of the stars manifest aesthetically, and how these manifestations in turn affect the way people think about the stars. His discussion ranges from cosmogonies in Homer and Hesiod to the astronomical theories of Thales of Miletus, Anaxagoras of Klazomenai, Aristarchos of Samos, and Pliny the Elder, among others. These brief sketches are contrasted with a number of astronomical ideas in classical mythology, and the impact of both is demonstrated on a number of architectural ornaments, such as the gable of the Parthenon in Athens and the Arch of Constantine in Rome, on illustrations on plates and vases and on sculptures. In a further shift of focus towards representation, Monika Bernold discusses various aesthetic renditions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries of total eclipses of the sun. Her readings of Virginia Woolf as well as of newspaper, television and web reports of eclipses across the world and even on Mars, Bernold stresses the way in which astroculture partakes of the more general shift toward an increasingly mediated experience of the world. Similarly, Henry Sussman’s magisterial essay, “From Léon to Hollywood Boulevard by Way of Paris: Astro-celebrity Over the Broader Modernity,” offers a wide-ranging contemplation of the scope and potential of astrocultural analysis, including readings from the Zohar through Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project to Sunset Boulevard, integrating Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, as well as Goethe, Büchner, Blanqui and Proust. Both Bernold and Sussmann make much of the metaphor of the star for modern conceptions of celebrity and suggest ways in which the contemplation of astronomical phenomena offers structural analogies for understanding celebrity culture. In a reading that is almost exclusively focused on aesthetics, Patricia Pisters considers the representation and semantization of space in the tradition of what she terms ‘galactic cinema’ (a category including such films as Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Haskin’s War of the Worlds, Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Lucas’s Star Wars trilogy). In her analysis of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011) and Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain (2006), Pisters argues for a movement from the representation of ‘Outer Space’ to ‘Inner Space’ she views as part of a movement towards “contemporary cinema as ‘neuroimage’” (182– 183). This shift is certainly further borne out, albeit in very different ways, by two recent blockbuster contributions to the genre, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014). Co-editor and spiritus rector of the collection Sonja Neef takes a further step away from astroculture’s material dimension in astronomical observation and to-

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wards aesthetic representation and its philosophical import. Neef traces cosmopolitan thought from Kant to Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak and highlights, in compelling readings of various sculptures and installations by German artist Ingo Günther, how ‘exospheric’ views of the planet come to disturb traditional epistemologies. Cosmopolitanism, Neef argues, presupposes a cosmic perspective, and artists such as Günther help visualize and communicate the sense of planet called for by Spivak (155). It is in this sense, too, that astroculture emerges from this wide-ranging and ambitious collection as a utopian site with considerable political force. What the volume – based on the proceedings of a 2011 conference in Cologne – lacks in conceptual focus, it makes up by the immensely suggestive and compelling readings of a wide range of astrocultural phenomena and artefacts, demonstrating the richness of the field as a subject of research. In terms of charting its “epistemic and methodological potential,” one is inclined to agree with Martina Leeker’s German-language afterword that figurations of cosmology in the arts and media (admittedly, like any attempt at world-making) must be examined for their often implicit “political and ideological appropriations” and “contingent production,” but also appreciated for the “(utopian) thought experiments on the im/possible” they allow from an outside perspective (my transl., 218 – 219). In a welcome concretization of astrocultural research, Judy A. Hayden’s edited volume, Literature in the Age of Celestial Discovery: From Copernicus to Flamsteed undertakes to narrow the focus on literary representation. In doing so, it tackles a period that has been the subject of research by Frédérique Ait-Touati, Elizabeth Spiller, Fernand Hallyn, Ladina Bezzola Lambert and others on the ‘literary’ nature of science writing and the ‘making’ of scientific insight by poetic means. Hence, it is somewhat surprising, but perhaps wise, that the editor’s introduction refrains from defining that complex term, ‘literature,’ for the period in question. The programmatic statements made in the introduction leave it open what understanding of literature the collected essays gravitate around. Hayden speaks of an “Early Modern literary discourse” (2) that appears unexpectedly homogeneous, considering that the term ‘literature’ only begins to acquire its present-day meaning well into the eighteenth century. As a number of contributors to the volume demonstrate, early modern natural philosophy and proto-scientific texts used rhetoric and ‘invention’ liberally and self-consciously, making it difficult to set this type of writing apart from literature by its content, by formal aspects such as prosody, imagery, or narrative strategies, by fictionality, or by its appeal to a certain kind of audience. However, this difficulty only stresses the timeliness of the volume, as its implicitly raises the question of how we can study ‘literature

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and science’ in a period that has not conceptualized either in a sense that would square easily with present-day academic disciplinary fault-lines. Pietro D. Omodeo’s chapter on dialogues presenting the Copernican worldview in sixteenth-century Italy illustrates the broad intersection between ‘scientific’ and ‘literary’ writing: in his knowledgeable discussion of Anton Francesco Doni’s I Marmi [The Marbles] and I Mondi [Worlds] and Giordano Bruno’s Spaccio de la bestia trionfante [Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast], Omodeo does not comment explicitly on why these texts should be seen as ‘literary.’ However, he does argue, by way of conclusion, that literary treatments of the new astronomy allow for a “mediated” expression of “concerns and hopes” that contemporaries attached to heliocentrism, and that the dialogue genre allowed authors to distance themselves from such theories (38). David Cressy’s essay on “Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon” is the first of several chapters in the volume to address the ‘canonical’ English-language lunar fictions by Francis Godwin (The Man in the Moone) and John Wilkins (Discovery of a New World in the Moone), both published in 1638, a year described as “England’s lunar moment” (51). In this reprint of a 2006 article, Cressy traces representations of the moon in English fictions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to show how they raise “important questions about humanity’s location within the universe and the interplay of science and the imagination with the truths of revealed religion” (46 – 47). Cressy allows that in early modernity, we must beware of distinguishing between science and religion when the two were much more closely aligned than today, and he points out that authors from a broad range of denominations and religious inclinations produced fictions of moon travel. Aside from an interest in the contexts and intertexts of these fictions, and in their authors’ biographical backgrounds, Cressy also considers their form, pointing out that in the seventeenth century, the Man in the Moon developed into “a standard trope in Early Modern humor, a marker of preposterous absurdity” (61). He relates the trope to its classical precedent in Lucian of Samosata and to other forms of utopian writing, pointing out that writing on lunar voyages shared with these earlier forms an attitude that mixed the parodic and the serious – a hybrid mode perhaps appropriate to a time of disorientation, “perhaps a response to a shuffled world, a world turned upside down, in which systems of hierarchy, authority, religion and gender, as well as planetary revolutions, were called into question” (65). Catherine Gimelli Martin also engages with similar texts in a chapter that offers welcome reflections on genre – specifically, on science fiction. Like Cressy, Martin references Lucian, whose writings appeared in English translation in 1634, as a classical predecessor also imagining journeys to the moon, but she claims that he played no part in the modern tradition. Instead, she argues

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that Godwin’s Man in the Moone should be seen as the first English-language specimen of a “newly invented mode of ‘materialist’ science fiction” (122) only made possible by the new astronomy that suggested the existence and accessibility of a plurality of habitable and inhabited worlds. These worlds, and the means by which they might be observed and even reached, could then serve as foils for the new genre’s explorations of “the hopes, fears and anxieties raised by technological progress” (127). Focusing specifically on Shakespeare’s reception of sixteenth-century advances in optics and observational astronomy, David H. Levy and Judy A. Hayden speculate about “a sort of English Renaissance Astronomy Club” made up of the playwright and his possible acquaintances, Thomas Digges and John Dee (86). The bard’s use of a number of metaphors taken from the domain of visual perception and telescopy – which has been variously examined as part of Shakespeare’s wider concern with philosophical skepticism in recent scholarship – is suggested as evidence. Ben Jonson’s dramatic work, in particular his 1620 masque, News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, is the subject of Gabrielle Sugar’s poignant discussion of comic uses of the New World in the Moon on the early modern stage. By reference to Jonson and some later playwrights, Sugar makes a compelling argument against seeing the new astronomy as primarily disorienting and disturbing to contemporaries: like the readers of the prose fictions Cressy and Martin discuss, theater audiences also laughed at the ludicrous ways in which the new astronomy could be misinterpreted. In his critique of the London news industry, Jonson establishes parallels between news from the moon and remote places on earth, and he presents the inhabitants of the moon as sub-human and hence, ridiculous. The editor’s own contribution, on Edward Howard’s play The Six Days Adventure, or the New Utopia (1671) similarly explores “the correlation between scientific production and public performance” (150), specifically in the parallels that a seventeenth-century audience might see between public experiments, lectures and debates and the dramatic stage. Again, the theater is shown to have a particular tendency to satirize contemporary lunar theories. By reference to other texts, non-dramatic (Godwin, Wilkins, Cyrano de Bergerac, Fontenelle) and dramatic (John Lyly, Aphra Behn, Thomas Shadwell), Judy Hayden perceptively detects a fascinating gender dimension in Howard’s stage representation of a utopian lunar society: his play features “Amazon ladies who clearly usurp masculine privilege in claiming a right to govern” (160). This provides another compelling illustration of the ‘stage moon’ as an ambiguous site for the negotiation of identities. Technology and the production of astronomical knowledge are subjected to scrutiny in Samuel Butler’s well-known poem ‘The Elephant in the Moon’ of the

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1670s. J. Ereck Jarvis discusses the ways in which Butler targets the telescope and lunar observation to censure the Royal Society’s “engagement with the forms of collective vision burgeoning in the seventeenth century” (133), stressing that the poem does not attack telescopy per se as a cause or source of false knowledge, but rather as a medium that may distort the vision of already deluded users. This is convincingly situated in the context of the gradual development of a reading public adjudicating on the plausibility of published scientific findings. Jarvis also astutely comments on the retrospective application by present-day academics of anachronistic categories such as ‘popular science,’ which not only blur[ ] distinctions between natural philosophy and science but imply[] authoritative distinctions inapplicable during the seventeenth century, specifically the notion that research is conducted on the frontlines by preeminent scientists and popularized by less fully engaged, less specialized writers of science. (141)

He points out that the term, with its current connotations, can serve “to emphasize ‘publicity’ ” as one of the goals of early modern books thus described (141). The same holds true, of course, for the category ‘literature’: it works to bring into focus certain aspects of texts that today fall into the purvey of literature and literary studies, highlighting the applicability of conceptual, theoretical and methodological tools from that discipline. In a similar fashion, Daniel J. Worden’s chapter on Tyssot de Patot’s Voyages et avantures de Jaques Massé addresses, not a literal exploration of the cosmos, but an exploration of how knowledge of the cosmos comes to figure for knowledge itself. In the Huguenot’s novel, published sometime between 1714 and 1717 in the United Provinces, the first-person narrator uses his knowledge of astronomy to manipulate his less educated companions. Worden’s careful reading teases out the analogies established implicitly in this and other contemporary fictions between reading them and reading the ‘book of nature’ (through the telescope), as both reading texts and telescopic gazing rendered distant objects of knowledge accessible in mediated form, but did so only at the cost of unpredictably distorting the information that they relayed across gulfs of space (and in the case of texts, time as well). (193)

This perspective helps chart the common ground between literature and science in the period with an informed sensitivity for its formal and conceptual ramifications. A different, but no less fruitful approach is taken in Brycchan Carey’s excellent chapter on analogies between colonial and lunar fictions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The colonial and imperial dimension of such texts is also noted in passing by Cressy, Hayden and Martin, but Carey makes

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it his declared goal to trace the implications of the moon as “a symbol, metaphor or analogy for the New World” (167). Godwin and Wilkins make a final appearance in the volume as Carey examines their representation of American Indians as the outcast progeny of the moon (Godwin) and of the moon as a potential colony (Wilkins). Most centrally, however, Carey discusses the pseudonymous Voyage to Cacklogallinia (1727) as a spirited attack on slavery featuring a ludicrous scheme, by an Englishman marooned on a Caribbean island populated by a bird people, to mine gold from the moon – a satire, Carey points out, on the South Sea Bubble. The moon, he concludes, “is often represented as offering the same opportunities for exploration, discovery and colonization as America, but also the same opportunities for mismanagement, corruption and cruelty” (180). In this way, lunar and colonial discourse intersect, and like other utopian texts, lunar narratives have implications much closer to home than their settings. What emerges from these readings in early modern astroculture is less a coherent program for astropoetics than, again, an indication of the directions further research might take. Narrative fiction, drama and poetry are each shown to engage in specific ways with the new astronomy, developing formal traditions that merit much closer attention. Thematically, the literary representation of astronomy can be seen to be in dialogue with early modern re-conceptualizations of self and other and with epistemological problems, specifically with the roles of technology and of collectivity in producing new knowledge. It is in this context that meta-reflections such as Tyssot’s begin to emerge that characterize a ‘literary discourse’ of a recognizably modern kind in which poets present themselves as creators, circulators and critics of astronomical and cosmological knowledge. As ‘literature’ is increasingly institutionalized from the eighteenth century onwards, this kind of meta-reflection gains in importance for its constitution. The two monographs discussed in the following attest to the ways in which ‘readings in the stars’ come to figure as analogies for reading fiction in later periods. Anna Henchman’s The Starry Sky Within. Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature identifies, as a central problem shared by Victorian astronomers and literary writers, the question of optics and perspective. “Grand-scale narrative works” by authors such as Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy and Tennyson “constantly telescope from the cosmic to the personal, and from the personal to the cosmic,” Henchman finds (1). She parallels the development of the “ ‘ polycentric’ multiplot novel” into “the dominant form of fiction” with the development of “a universe with many centers” into “the prevailing astronomical model” of the nineteenth century (2) and argues that this brings out four otherwise “under-recognized norms” of the Victorian novel: the way in which charac-

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ters tend to misperceive themselves as centers of their world; the way in which narrative space is manipulated between characters and narrators; the way in which characters are aligned vis-à-vis each other in terms suggesting “orbiting celestial systems”; and the way in which the reading process is rendered as the assumption of various spatial positions (2). The title of the book is adapted, of course, from Kant’s famous dictum on the moral law within and the starry sky above him, both of which fill him with wonder. Henchman declares that she is not interested in the moral law at all: “I want to think instead about the starry sky within, the question of how we interiorize something as vast as the cosmos” (33). Thankfully, this rather vague notion of ‘interiorization’ is, for the most part, replaced by a focus on how the vastness of the cosmos is rendered verbally, on the ways in which this interiorization is rendered a subject of literary representation, and on the ways in which – through the aforementioned novelistic norms – science impacts literary representation. This constitutes a splendid demonstration of how the interrelations between astronomy and literature can be studied to produce nuanced insight into the formal shape of literary works. The book is divided into two parts, the first focusing on optics, specifically lines of sight and point of view. Nineteenth-century authors find that the challenges offered by astronomy to visual perception, with its objects both distant and in motion, prove an attractive metaphor for the struggle to capture the external world intellectually: “Astronomy, I am suggesting, helps makes [sic] visible the relationship between seeing and theorizing when that relationship is at its most strained, when what we see and what we know directly contradict each other” (32). In that sense, astronomy metonymically brings into focus the larger problem of epistemology. In order to introduce this complex, Henchman reviews a number of key nineteenth-century philosophical interpretations of astronomy, illustrating the way in which the science increasingly came to suggest that a comprehensive vision of the cosmos was impossible to achieve, owing to the limitations imposed on the human observer in terms of both time and space. Chapter 2, which focuses mainly on Thomas De Quincey’s 1846 essay “System of the Heavens as Revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescopes,” examines how that text, through sudden shifts of perspective, creates a sense of vertigo in the reader as they are denied a resting place in the textual cosmos, aiming at their cognitive exhaustion to render them aware of the instability of human knowledge. Henchman points to an analogy De Quincey draws between the human mind and the universe as he conceives of both as dynamic, rather than stable. The view of the cosmos in constant flux, with each object having its own proper motion, no apparent regularity and no fixed point of rest for an objective observer “upsets the idea of an objective truth to which human beings have access” (69) – an insight that resonates with received wisdom about the intellectual crisis of the mid- to

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late Victorian period, but which jars somewhat with claims for such a crisis as germane to modernism (a point I will return to in the context of Katherine Ebury’s book). The chapter on Tennyson’s In Memoriam considers parallax (defined as “the apparent rearrangement of objects in the world as the result of the observer’s own motion,” an effect most prominent in astronomical observation) as a way of understanding “literary point of view as involving constant comparisons between what one can see from different spatial positions” (85). Henchman argues that Tennyson uses parallax in In Memoriam “to figure the self as emotionally and intellectually torn between different views of the world” (99), rendering it a metaphor taxed, not with solving perceptual problems, but with giving them form (98). In comparing In Memoriam to Shelley’s ‘Adonais,’ Henchman demonstrates how Tennyson revises and updates the traditional elegiac ‘stellarization’ of the deceased to contrast with Shelley’s almost Aristotelian sidereal imagery – for the grieving Tennyson, parallax comes to show how “conceptual ideas are just as subject to emotional distortion as are sensory perceptions” (116). The book’s second part introduces the idea of Victorian “novels as celestial systems,” characterized by “numerous centers of consciousness,” “crisscrossing points of view,” and their actualization “in the reader’s mind as complex systems of characters in shifting relation to one another” (121). By contrast to Tennyson’s lyric practice, this entails a shift from “thinking about the self in relation to the universe to thinking about complex acts of observing people” (122) in novels by Thomas Hardy (Two on a Tower, Return of the Native, Tess, A Pair of Blue Eyes, chapter 4), George Eliot (Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch) and James Joyce (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, both in chapter 5), and in Hardy’s The Dynasts, Dickens’s Little Dorrit, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (all in chapter 6). Henchman demonstrates that like De Quincey, Hardy was interested in the mental negotiation between sensory and theoretical knowledge (such as the reconciliation between the sense impression that the sun rotates around the earth and the knowledge that the opposite is the case). Crucially, in Hardy, failures of astronomical observation are juxtaposed with the failure to observe other people and their needs, thus raising the question of their moral commensurability. “In Hardy’s scenes of stargazing, the ability to release oneself from one’s subject position is analyzed as both a cognitive and a moral activity” (154) as Hardy, like De Quincey, shows his readers what their minds are capable of as they shift perspective abruptly. Hardy and Tennyson likewise focus on the straight lines of sight entailed in parallax, on foregrounding certain characters over others, and on positional shifts made by the narrator/speaker. While also preoccupied with the astronomical relationship between the local and the remote, George Eliot, on the other

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hand, is shown to employ the conceptual set of the circle, encompassing the idea of the horizon, radius of vision, concentricity and contracting and expanding awarenesses. Henchman argues that while Hardy focuses on celestial bodies themselves and the problems involved in their observation, Eliot “uses astronomy to think through the connection between a person’s spatial perception of herself in relation to the outside world and the way an individual moves between a deeply embodied perception of the world and a more theoretical one” (191). In her novels, movements from far to near or near to far exist on every scale, from the movement between epigraph and chapter, to the movement from one scene to the next, to the shifts in narrative from paragraph to paragraph, and even in the shifts within sentences through Eliot’s use of free indirect discourse. (182)

Here, Henchman is alive to the assumption, encouraged by both authors, that their novelistic worlds may be read as cosmoses in their own right, observed and – to a degree – co-created by the reader. The internal logic of such cosmoses “makes an entire narrative space feel stable or unstable, coherent or incoherent, complete or partial” (196). In chapter 6, Henchman shows how Dickens presents fictional universes or systems that, while they are astronomically informed enough to be in motion, can still be grasped by the narrator and the reader as a homogeneous system, resulting in “a fantasy of total knowledge that is by turns reassuring and claustrophobic” (208 – 210). Hardy, in The Dynasts, on the other hand, offers a cosmic perspective on events of the Napoleonic wars made by the chorus of celestial observers, but he still makes a point of their limited knowledge, while Tolstoy, in his rendition of similar battle scenes, pieces together a mosaic from a variety of perspectives, including the subjective view of the individual soldier and the objectivity of the narrator to create a panoramic view. As Henchman stresses in her concluding chapter, the recurrent theme in her book, and the intersection of astronomy with more general epistemological questions that proves most consequential for literary form, is the way in which nineteenth-century novelists encourage their readers “to revel in competing ways of seeing that coexist despite contradicting one another” (233). This attempt to create, in the multiplot novel, a unitas multiplex must be seen to “grow out of contradictory impulses found in all aspects of nineteenth-century life: the desire to see things as a whole paired with a growing realization that such a goal is impossible” (39). While in isolation, this may read like a critical commonplace on Victorian literature, it attests to the sound footing this admirable monograph has in existing scholarship and the firm links it establishes between literary and

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other forms of cultural self-reflexion. If faults had to be found, it could be said that a few stray references to earlier literary treatments of cosmology (notably, Milton) appear somewhat arbitrary and the beautiful illustrations might have been more fully integrated into the argument. Katherine Ebury’s monograph on Cosmology and Modernism takes as its subject three Irish writers: W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett. Painstakingly recovering their reading of contemporary popularizations of astronomy and cosmology, she examines them “as test cases for modernist aesthetic responses to a universe that had been newly imagined by scientists, teasing out the reception of the findings of Einstein and others in the literary culture of the day” (2). In doing so, she stresses a contrast between an orderly, rationalist Newtonian worldview and the expanding and dynamic universe of relativistic cosmology that stretched the imagination of readers of popular science just as much as of literature. As the juxtaposition with Henchman’s book makes plain, this dualism is less than obvious, since Victorian astronomy had already damaged any sense of a mechanistic universe. Ebury declares as her goal to present an argument that foregrounds the specifically Irish (and, presumably, male) perspective of the three authors of her choice. She locates this specificity in their allegiance to an “object of national identification” (15): Berkeleian idealism, a philosophy much more in tune with relativistic physics and cosmology than with a materialism Ebury associates with the Newtonian worldview. As far as the colonial implications are concerned, it is much to her credit that Ebury cautions from the outset that Yeats, Joyce and Beckett were largely influenced by English popularizations of the new physics (e. g., by Arthur Eddington, Bertrand Russell, and James Jeans), mitigating the subversive associations of that science with entropy, uncertainty, and chaos (for which cosmology is often taken to task as a paradigmatic representative). In any case, the argument about their counter-colonial utilization (whatever it might have been) is not developed as fully as the introduction might suggest. Instead, the readings of the poetry of Yeats and the fiction of Joyce and Beckett offered in the book focus on the adaptation and integration of some key ideas of the new physics – identified as “a network of related themes […] centred around time, difficulty, absurdity and desire” (181) – into the authors’ literary practice. This programme derives from the keen observation that “both modernism and contemporary popularisations of the new physics simultaneously teach readers how to read them and demonstrate that no full and complete reading is possible” (8). The introduction soundly develops this point by reference to existing work on other modernist writers’ uses of astronomy and physics, briefly discussing Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Flann O’Brien.

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The chapter on “Yeatsian cosmology” considers poems from Yeats’s early phase as well as from the late A Vision and The Tower. Ebury finds, in the poet’s cosmic and apocalyptic imaginations, both an excitement over and an alarm at the counter-intuitive force of the new discoveries. Especially in the later phase, Yeats utilizes astronomical imagery to present an ordered world “which is constantly undermined by uncertainty, disorder and the unintelligible” (57). Ebury’s argument here is at its strongest when it is most specific, as in her analysis of the prosodic rendition of apparent astronomical chaos in ‘The White Birds,’ where she reads the poem’s “exuberantly flowing anapaestic meter” as “suggesting that the chaotic influence of the stars may be a liberating influence, both erotically and aesthetically” (34). Yeats, she attests, finds in the relativistic universe “a sense of the inescapable involvement of the observer’s mind in the perception of the material world” (70) that is congenial to his poetics (which in this respect resonates with Tennyson’s, as described by Henchman). The same is true of Joyce, the subject of chapters 3 (on Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake) and 4 (on spectroscopy in the Wake). In Portrait, Ebury contrasts Joyce’s deconstruction of the bildungsroman with his reading about galactic dispersal and degeneration. Just as the Newtonian order is said to have been subverted by recent discoveries, so the traditional genre is rejected as a model for identification. In Ulysses, on the other hand, Newtonian and Einsteinian cosmologies actually clash. Ebury here relativizes, on the basis of her excellent familiarity with Joyce’s reading of popular science, earlier critical work on the anti-imperial thrust of the treatment of science in ‘Ithaca.’ She highlights narratological consequences, as well: on the basis of a profound doubt derived from his reading on cosmology, Joyce increasingly rejects, in his fiction, the role of the author-god in favor of a multiplicity of meanings, piling up details in order to “deliberately slow narrative time” (96). This is most true, of course, of the Wake, for which Ebury plausibly highlights spectroscopy as a central metaphor. As light captured by newly improved spectroscopes, so the Wake’s prose must be ‘seized’ and refracted by readers in order to decipher it, although any reading of the Wake, as our readings of the universe, only allow for probabilities and a partial understanding – the chapter thus establishes a convincing, if not entirely original parallel to the quantum physics of the day. The observation that Joyce implies “that art might restore a sense of human centrality to the narrative of the universe, not unlike that found in astrology” (81) is highly persuasive. The section on Beckett is introduced by a discussion of recent work on Beckett and science in general and the repetition of the claim that Beckett, like Yeats and Joyce, “valued the difficulty and mystery that the new physics brought into the twentieth-century worldview, rather than the new knowledge which this sci-

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ence provided” (131). In Murphy, Ebury finds a conflict between the protagonist’s and the author’s cosmologies – whereas Murphy clings to a Newtonian understanding of the world, his fictional world is actually ruled by chaos, as his death in what appears to be a random gas explosion illustrates. This passage occasions one of the most fascinating and compelling readings in Modernism and Cosmology, as Ebury discusses the interrelations between the origins of the universe from primeval gas, the etymological origin of the term ‘gas’ in Greek ‘chaos,’ and its Hiberno-English meaning of ‘joke’ (150). In her chapter on the Trilogy, Ebury considers the protagonists’ possible nature as either atoms or stars, identifying light as “the central mystery” that in Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable unites “the ideas of difficulty, time, desire and absurdity to form a self-contained cosmology” (154). The night sky becomes a text (e. g., in Malone Dies) which the characters as much as the readers strive to decode, but the ‘absurd lights’ of the stars turn out to be illegible: “these are heavenly bodies that offer no map of the universe” (168). In a brief epilogue, Ebury makes a concession to the emerging academic preoccupation with modernism as an international phenomenon (cp. the review of The Modernist World in the present volume). Glancing in passing at Musil, Kafka, Valéry, Proust, Borges, and Miyazawa Kenji, she attests to “a determined interdisciplinary creativity coming from the crisis in the Newtonian worldview” in which modernist artists across the world “see the new cosmology as an opportunity for play, for the creation of difficult, absurd and desiring textual worlds” (187). Especially in the context of Japanese modernism, this appears somewhat out of character for a book that pays great attention to soundness of detail elsewhere, as there are complex philosophical, religious and cultural non-Western traditions that would need to be accounted for and simply cannot be adequately registered in the available space. On the whole, however, Ebury’s book offers excellent observations on the origins and functions of a vast number of astronomical references she traces in Yeats, Joyce and Beckett, and the author constructively brings together and builds on the large number of recent studies on the scientific reading of her subjects. Like Henchman’s monograph, Cosmology and Modernism offers an enticing roadmap for novelistic astropoetics that will surely generate further explorations of the field. Florian Kläger

University of Bayreuth

List of Contributors Timothy Collins is a Lecturer in the College Writing Program at SUNY Buffalo State where he completed his M.A. He has published peer-reviewed articles in This Rough Magic (“ ‘ Rokkes Blake’: Metonymy, Metaphor and Metaphysics in The Franklin’s Tale”) and The Journal of Popular Culture Studies (“Wu-Tang Clan versus Jean Baudrillard: Rap Poetics and Simulation”). His article “Mapping Class in Lorde’s ‘Royals’ ” was published in The New Union where Collins also served as US editor. He has presented by invitation at professional academic conferences and graduate student colloquiums. His poetry appears in literary magazines and peer reviewed journals, most recently BlazeVOX, The Quint, The Waggle and Ishaan Literary Review. María de Jesús Cordero is Associate Professor of Spanish at Utah State University. The great-granddaughter of Lebanese/Syrian and Spanish immigrants, she was born in Matanzas, Cuba and immigrated to the United States with her family when she was only two years old, and thus forms a part of the “one-and-a-half generation” which refers to Cuban exiles who arrived in the US at a young age. She graduated summa cum laude from Loyola University and later received an M.A. in Comparative Literature from New York University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University. Her areas of specialization include Colonial Latin American Literature and Caribbean Studies. Her first book, Transformations of Araucania from Valdivia’s Letters to Vivar’s Chronicle analyzes the rhetoric of representation employed in the first historical documents produced as a result of the conquest of Chile. She has published a series of articles on Afro-Cuban and Puerto Rican poets and is editing a collection of essays about the narrative works of the exiled, Cuban writer Zoé Valdés. Dr. Cordero teaches in the Department of Languages, Philosophy, and Communication Studies and in the Latin American Studies Program at Utah State University, and especially enjoys teaching courses which she developed on the Human Rights Literature of Latin America, Caribbean Women Writers, and Latin American and Caribbean Art. Kristen Deiter is Associate Professor of English at Tennessee Tech University in the United States, where she teaches courses on medieval and early modern English literature and literary criticism and theory. She has published articles on the Tower of London’s representations in early modern English literature and culture in Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, Comparative Drama,

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List of Contributors

and Philological Quarterly, and a book, The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama: Icon of Opposition (Routledge, 2008). Chérif S. Diatta is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar, Senegal, where he completed a B.A. and a M.A. in English as well as a pre-doctoral diploma (D.E.A.), with thesis written on Caribbean literature. He also graduated from Tulane University (New Orleans) with a Ph.D. in (Anglophone) Caribbean literature in May 2015 as a Fulbright Student Fellow. He currently teaches Caribbean literature as well African diaspora and postcolonial studies. His publications include an article on Lovelace’s fiction (“Violence and Mimicry in Earl Lovelace’s Fiction: A Social Criticism in the Anglophone Caribbean,” in Réalités et représentations de la violence en postcolonies, eds. Jean G. Bidima & Victorien L. Zoungbo [Perpignan: Presses Universitaires de Perpignan, 2015]: 257– 276). Chérif’s research interests include Caribbean and African diaspora studies. He focuses on literature, symbolic forms, gender, nationalism, politics of religions, identity, resistance, post-colonialism, and utopias of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Maryam Farahani (Ph.D., M.Sc., M.A.Ed., M.A., B.A.) is research and teaching associate in the School of English and CLL at the University of Liverpool. She works in three main areas: verse narratives, psychology of aesthetics, and philosophy of mind. Her research interests specifically include: nineteenth-century literature to contemporary corpus of visual-verbal hybrid narratives; iconicity and creativity; aging and otherness; multimedial-multimodal narratology; phenomenological and theological aesthetics; compositionality; gender and emotions; Abrahamic faiths and World Literature. She is the co-editor of a new series, entitled “Psycho-Literary Perspectives in Multimodal Contexts” at the University of Liverpool and the author of British Women’s Poetry and the Psychology of Aesthetics, 1770 – 1850 (Newcastle: CSP, 2016). Paul Griffith completed doctoral research in Black Diasporic and Postcolonial Studies at Pennsylvania State University (1995). He taught English at the University of Georgia (1996 – 1997) and at Lamar University in Texas (1997– 2013); he currently teaches at Texas Southern University (2014– present). Dr Griffith has published several articles on Caribbean and African American literature and culture, and two books: Afro-Caribbean Poetry and Ritual (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Wha’ Sweeten Goat Mout’: Short Caribbean Tales (Publish America, 2011). Rowan and Littlefield has accepted for publication his second scholarly manuscript titled “Archetypes of Transition in Diaspora Art and Ritual.” This manuscript emerges from his research focus on and comparative analysis of

List of Contributors

373

the influence of residual oral African forms on cultural production across the diaspora. Henning Marquardt works as a project manager at the Agency for Adult and Further Education, Hanover, Germany, where he coordinates multilateral EU-funded projects as well as a regional qualification scheme. He worked at the English Department of Leibniz University at Hanover as a researcher and teacher from 2010 until 2015. He completed his Ph.D. on families as (anti‐)colonial metonymies in Jamaican and South African literatures in the first half of the twentieth century in 2014 and has published on Jamaican as well as on South African literatures (e. g., “Negotiating Family Models in Jamaican Literature – Class, Race and Religion”, in Postcolonial Studies across the Disciplines, 2013; “South African Literary History and the Publishers – Mission Presses and Secular Publishing from the Nineteen-Twenties to Forties”, published in Listening to Africa: Anglophone African Literatures and Cultures, 2012). In 2014, he co-edited the collection South African Short Stories in English (published with Edition Oberkassel, Düsseldorf). Supriya Nair is Professor of English at Tulane University. She is the author of Caliban’s Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (Michigan, 1996) and Pathologies of Paradise: Caribbean Detours (Virginia, 2013), which won the Nicolás Guillén Award for Outstanding Book in Philosophical Literature from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She is the co-editor of Postcolonialisms: An Anthology of Cultural Theory and Criticism (Rutgers, 2005) and editor of Teaching Anglophone Caribbean Literature (MLA, 2012). She has published widely in Caribbean, African, and postcolonial literatures. Mario Nisbett earned his Ph.D. in African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (2015). He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, East Africa. His research expertise and interest are in diaspora studies, development and post-development studies, African and African diaspora histories, interdisciplinarity, critical epistemology, Caribbean studies, and political sovereignty. As a scholar, he has presented his work at the African Studies Association, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and at other academic meetings in American cities, Jamaica, and Kenya. Through exchange programs in recent years, Mario has been privileged to be involved in conversations with scholars in different disciplines at the University of the West Indies, Mona; Columbia University; and University of Ghana, Legon.

374

List of Contributors

Amba J. Sepie is completing her doctorate in the department of Geography at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. She has previously taught and assisted with undergraduate courses in Anthropology, Sociology and Music. Her research is centered upon academic and social resistance to traditional and indigenous ways of knowing, being, and healing, non-verbal communication, transpersonal education and holistic medicine. Her most recent publications on these topics include a chapter in Damned Facts: Fortean Essays on Religion, Folklore and the Paranormal, ed. Jack Hunter (Cyprus: Aporetic P, 2016) and “Conversing with Some Chickadees: Cautious Acts of Ontological Translation,” Literature and Medicine 32.2 (2014): 277– 298. Keith Sandiford is Robert Penn Warren Distinguished Professor and James F. Cassidy Distinguished Professor in the English Department at Louisiana State University. Born in Barbados, he received his formative education there at The Combermere School. His university degrees were conferred by Inter-American University of Puerto Rico (San German), and the University of Illinois (Ph.D., Urbana-Champaign). He holds graduate study certificates in Restoration and Augustan literature from the University of London, and in advanced linguistics from the Inter-American Institute of Linguistics. His core doctoral training is in Eighteenth-century British Literature; his research, publication and teaching combine the canonical texts of that field together with others in colonial Caribbean literatures, antislavery, Atlantic Studies, and African American literature. In 2012 he was honored by the Caribbean Philosophical Association with the prestigious Frantz Fanon Award for lifetime achievement, with a specific citation for his contribution to Africana Studies. His most recent book is Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah (Routledge, 2012). Paula Saunders is currently an associate professor of anthropology at the City University of New York (BMCC) where she teaches classes in anthropology and history. She is an anthropologically-trained historical archaeologist who uses an interdisciplinary approach that engages methodology from anthropology, history, folklore, and religion. She has conducted extensive research in the Caribbean, West and Southern Africa, and in the USA. She has written on landscapes, dwellings, mortuary, and daily life experiences associated with African people in the Atlantic world. She is co-editor of Materialities of Ritual in the Black Atlantic (2014) and is author of a forthcoming book titled Spirituality and Duality: Negotiating Life on a Coffee. Sarah Senk is an Assistant Professor of Literature in the Department of Culture and Communication at CSU Maritime. She earned a B.A. in Literature from Yale

List of Contributors

375

University, an M.St. in English (1900 – present day) from the University of Oxford, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University. Her research focuses on twentieth-century and contemporary Anglophone writing and trauma studies. Michael T. Smith is an Assistant Professor of the Polytechnic Institute at Purdue. He teaches classes in the digital humanities, film, business writing, and crossdisciplinary technology courses. His work has been most recently published in Renascence, Journal of Documentary Film, SONUS, Kinema, and Bright Lights Film Journal. He has most recently presented at the 2016 CCCC conference and 2016 NeMLA conference. Jack Stewart, professor emeritus, University of British Columbia, is the author of Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers (2008; illustrated in color), on visual elements in texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Joyce Cary, and A. S. Byatt; The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (1999; with 23 black-and-white illustrations); and The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock (1990). His research focuses on interrelations of literature and painting, ekphrastic poetry, landscape and travel writing, art and ontology, and his essays have appeared in D. H. Lawrence Review, Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Style, Mosaic, Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, Studies in the Humanities, Journal of Narrative Theory, Philological Quarterly, Anglistik, and Symbolism (vols. 8, 11, and 12/13).

Index Aarons, Rudolph L. C. 12, 158, 169–170, 173– 174 aboriginality 334 Abram, David – The Spell of the Sensuous 238 Accompong Town, Jamaica 120–137 Afghan War 224 Africa 32, 37–44, 75–77, 79–83, 85, 87–89, 91–93, 95, 99, 117–118, 121–130, 132, 134–137, 334, 345 Akan 8, 123–124, 126, 130 alchemy, alchemical symbolism 235–236, 238, 241, 243–250 allegory 21–22, 24, 29, 58, 60, 68, 72–73, 214, 283 All Jamaica Library 162, 169 altermodernity 15–34 America 78, 94, 209–211, 213–217, 219, 221– 227 227, 232–234 American flag 221–224 Andersen, Hans 235 Antler – “Skyscraper Apocalypse” 231–232 arabesque 241, 246 Arab theatre 335 Arab World 332, 335 architecture, vernacular 179–182, 186–187, 190, 198–199, 205 – adaptations after Hurricane Janet 180, 197–202 – evolution in Grenada up to 1955 186–190 – vernacular house 179, 181, 183, 186, 190, 200–201 Arenas, Reinaldo 21 Armstrong, R. D. – “The 911 Wakeup Call” 232 Arnold, Matthew 54 Art Nouveau 243 Asia 332–333 astroculture 355–370 astropoetics 355–370 Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) 68 aurum philosophicum 249 aurum potabile 249

aurum vitreum 249 Australia 309–310, 329,334 Bachelard, Gaston – The Psychoanalysis of Fire 244, 247 Balanchine, George 239, 336 Ballets Russes 336 baroque 26, Bataille, Georges 32 Baudelaire, Charles 16 Bauhaus 334–335 Beame, Abraham 217 The Beatles – “Let it Be” 225 – “The End” 224 Beckett, Samuel 368–370 Beckles, Hilary 151 Benitez-Rojo, Antonio 97, 101, 107–108, 110 Bernardes, Jon 160–161 Berrigan, Daniel 230 – “After” 230 Black, Star – “Skyscrapers” 231–232 Bloom, Harold 30 Blunt, Wilfrid – The Golden Road to Samarkand 241 Bond, Bruce – “The Altars of September” 228–229 Bon Jovi – “Wanted Dead or Alive” 224 Borges, Jorge Luis 335, 370 Boschung, Dietrich 355, 357, 359 Bourdieu, Pierre 161, 173 Bourriaud, Nicolas 16–19, 23–26, 31–34 Bowie, David 221–222 Brathwaite, Kamau 35, 45, 63, 80, 94, 97, 99–102, 105–108, 110–111, 115 Brecht, Bertolt 358–359 Brontë, Charlotte 92 Buenos Aires 335 Bush, George W. 224 Byatt, A. S. 235–250 – Children’s Book, The 243 – “Cold” 235–239, 250

378

Index

– Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice 235 – “Fiction Informed by Science” 240, 244 – “The Glass Coffin” 246 – “Ice, Snow, Glass” 235–236 – Matisse Stories, The 247 – On Histories and Stories 235 – Passions of the Mind 242 – Ragnarök. The End of the Gods 237 – Whistling Woman, A 243 Campbell, Jane 236–237, 239, 244 Canada 131–132, 200, 332, 336 Caribbean epistolary culture 12–13, 53–55, 62, 64–70 Caribbean Gothic 81 Caribbean lamentation narratives 53, 55, 57, 59, 61–63 Caribbean masks 88–90 144–145, 156 Caribbean religion 43, 80–83, 86–87 Caribbean ritual 82, 97–103, 107, 111, 113, 115, 128, 130, 136 Caribbean symbols 3–14, 57, 66, 67–68 72, 94, 97, 139–140 Caribbean women’s writing 55, 59, 61, 63– 64, 67, 78–79 Carpentier, Alejo 26, 87 Carrey, Jim 224–225 Carroll, Joseph 210 Cassirer, Ernst 139–140, 144 Castoriadis, Cornelius 3 catachresis 282, 291 cauda pavonis 243, 246, 248 Celan, Paul 323 Central Park jogger case 78 Charles Town, Jamaica 121, 123–124, 126, 133–134 Chile 66 Christianity 25, 32, 43, 79, 84, 89, 94, 260, 301, 311 Chute, Hilary 342 cognitive linguistics 294 Cohen, Allen 227, 230 – “Whatever Happened to the Age of Aquarius? April 23, 2002” 230 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 235

colonialism 17, 38, 41–42, 45, 61, 63, 79, 83, 94, 119–120, 158, 166, 172, 345, 358 color 198, 236–237, 239–241, 243–244, 246–248 conceptual integration 212–213, 221, 223, 225, 231, 233–234 Concert for Hope, A 233 Concert for New York City 209–210, 214, 220–226 condensation 278, 281 coniunctio oppositorum 241, 250 cosmology 14, 295, 302–305, 307, 310–313, 355–357, 360, 364, 368–370 cosmopolitanism 58, 155, 333, 358, 360 creativity 236, 238, 239, 242, 244, 250, 305, 307–310 Crystal, Billy 226 crystallography 240 Darton, Eric 215, 217–219 Daschle, Tom 222–223 de Certeau, Michel 209, 326 Deleuze, Gilles 18, 32 Denaci, Mark E. 15 De Quincey, Thomas 365–366 Derrida, Jacques 17, 271–272, 330, 359–360 design 13, 20, 108, 115, 216–217, 238, 240, 250, 336 diaspora, African 84, 117–120, 135, 137, 327, 334 Diaspora Vibe Gallery 20 diasporicity 77, 80, 89, 91, 95, 117, 130–131, 135–138, 140–141, 156 Dickens, Charles 364, 366–367 Dickinson, Emily 322–323 diction 271, 273, 280, 282, 284–285, 288, 290, 292–293 di Giorgio, Francesco 216 dreams 20, 29, 216, 229, 236, 242, 263– 268, 271, 273–274, 276, 278–279, 281, 286, 297, 301 Duncan, James S. 214 Dunn, Douglas 318 Dunn, Stephen – “Grudges” 232

Index

Ebury, Katherine 355, 368–370 “EC Comics” 353–354 Egan, Martha 25 ego 99, 110, 114, 268, 273–275 elements 236, 238–239, 244–245, 248–250, Elias, Norbert 8, 14 Eliot, George 364–367 Eliot, T. S. 293, 368 Epicurus 19 epistolary novel 61, 64–65 Erlick, Mariah 232 – “On T.V.” 232 Europe 25–26, 53–56, 59–60, 71–72, 130, 132, 332, 334–336, 350 fables 235, 239 fairy tales 235, 237, 240, 247, 250 fall 227–233 , 256, 267–269 family 157–175 Fauconnier, Gilles 212–213, 343 femininity 54, 90, 142, 145, 147, 155–156 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence – “History of the Airplane” 232 Fernández, Macedonio 335 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bouvier 358, 362 Foucault, Michel 3–4, 32, 326, 328, 359 Franken, Christien 237–238 Freedom Tower 211, 233 Freud, Sigmund 36, 253, 256–259, 263–264, 271, 273–274, 278–279, 281–282 Frye, Northrop 238, 245 Gap, The 218 García, Santiago 337, 339, 348–354 Gauguin, Paul 334 gaze 257–258, 267–269, 308 gender 5, 10, 12, 23, 63, 77, 139–142, 146– 147, 153–156, 165, 169, 194–195, 196, 250, 319, 361–362 geometric forms 240, 245 Geppert, Alexander C.T. 356–357 Gere, Richard 226 Gillespie, Angus Kress – Twin Towers: The Life of New York City’s World Trade Center 211, 215–220 Ginsberg, Allen – “Howl” 230

379

Giuliani, Rudolph 223–224 glass, glass-art 235–250 – glass-blowing 235, 246, 250 – glass-sculpture 235, 250 Glissant, Édouard 8, 18, 35, 39 Godwin, Francis 361–362, 364 Goldberger, Paul 216 Goliath 230 González, Ermán – Al Fresco 28–29 – Aquí/Así 29 – Asención/Descención 29 – Book Pages, The 20–22, 24–25, 27–28 – El Plato Nacional 25, 32 – Estoy/Me Voy 24, 27 – La Sangre Llama 25, 32 – Los Que (No) Llegaron 29–30 – Los Trapos Sucios 25, 31–32 – Para subir al cielo 29–30 – Relicarios 8, 15, 24–27, 31 – Sale, entra y siéntate 21–24, 27 Goodman, Nelson 210–211, 217–218 Gordon-Wallace, Rosie 20 gothic fiction 81 Great Britain 59, 80, 159, 179, 190, 222, 258 Griffith, Paul 10–11 Groensteen, Thierry 338–339, 342, 345, 353 Guattari, Félix 18 Hahne, Marj – “A Blessing for New York” 229 Hall, Stuart 11, 118–120, 161 Hamner, Robert D. 30, 33, 45, 163, 167 Hardy, Thomas 328, 364–367 Harris, Wilson 3, 6, 94 Hayden, Judy A. 358, 360, 362–363 Hazo, Samuel – “September 11, 2001” 229 Heaney, Seamus 318, 331 Hearne, John 166–168, 173–175 hegemony 4, 10–12, 77, 87, 107–108, 120, 139–143, 147–149, 151–152, 154, 334 Henchman, Anna 365–369, 371 Hennigfeld, Ursula 209 Herrera O’Reilly, Andrea 16 Heyen, William 227

380

Index

Hirschman, Jack – “The Twin Towers Arcane” 229 Hirschorn, Thomas 31–32 Holman Hunt, William 56, 58 homo significans 3 housing, transformation of in crisis 180–184, 197–200, 190–191, 199–200 Hughes, Ted 316–318 Hugo, Victor 279 Hume, David 59–60 identity 5, 7, 9, 15, 18, 20, 41, 55, 58–59, 63, 88, 98, 105, 112, 114, 120, 125, 134– 135, 139–140, 180–187, 199, 205, 210– 211, 216, 221, 225, 233–234 imagery 53, 61, 64, 214, 227, 235, 246, 282, 284–286, 288–293, 354, 361 imperialism 42, 44, 326, 333, 336 improvement (of house and status) 158, 185, 187, 190, 196–197, 199–201 India 70, 152–153, 155–156, 185, 333, 344, 347 individuation 235, 250 interior exile 21, 24 interpretation 3, 119, 210, 232, 234, 239, 273–274, 278–279, 303–304 Jaffe, Lee K. 216 Jakobson, Roman 280–281 Jamaican Maroons 11–12, 76, 79, 84–93, 117–138 Janet (hurricane) 13, 177–179, 190, 198, 200–201, 204 – “Janet House” 177–205 – “Janet House” (adaptation and decline) 199–205 – “Janet House” (as symbolism) 178–189, 193–199, 201, 203–205 JanMohamed, Abdul 75, 93–94 Japan 297, 333, 370 John, Marie-Elena 6 Johnson, Barbara 272, 283, 289, 291 Johnson, Dennis Loy 211, 227 Johnson, Mark 210, 212, 228, 299, 343 Joyce, James 251–252, 257, 259–260, 261– 262, 265, 267–269, 366, 368–370

Jung, C. G. 111, 240–241, 243–244, 246, 248–249 – Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self 241 – The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious 240–241, 243, 246, 248–249 Kahlo, Frida 72 Katz, Eliot 229–230 – “When the Skyline Crumbles” 229 Kennedy Center 233 Kenner, Hugh 265, 332 King Kong 217–218 Krauss, Rosalind 23 labyrinth 242, 246, 252 Lacan, Jacques 211, 251–256, 261–269, 271– 282, 286, 288–289, 292–294 Lakoff, George 210, 218, 228, 294, 299, 343 lapis 248–249 Latin America 26, 62–66, 68, 70, 72, 132, 332, 335–336 Launius, Roger D. 355, 357 Leach, Neil 211–212, 215, 221, 232 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard JeanneretGris) 334 Lehman, David 219 Levan, Kelly – “To the Towers” 231–232 Lewis, Linden 152, 154 Locke, Hew 21–22 Lorde, Audre 146 Los Angeles Times 216–217 Lovelace, Earl 90, 139–140, 142, 144, 146, 148–150, 153–154,156 MacDermot, Thomas 162–163 magic 75, 77, 79–80, 82–83, 86–90, 92, 95, 238, 247, 296, 308 Malick, Terrence – Tree of Life 243–244 Manley, Edna 166, 174 Manley, Michael 174 Manley, Norman 174 Mansong, Jack (Three-Fingered Jack) 81, 85 Maori 334 Marley, Bob 56, 61–62

Index

marriage of opposites 235–250 Martinez, Carlos – “Home” 231 masculinity 139–156 Matisse 246–247 – The Egyptian Curtain 247 – Interior with a Phonograph 246 – Large Red Interior 247 – The Pink Nude 247 matrifocality 157–175 Matson, Clive 227 McCartney, Paul 224–226 – “Freedom” 226 – “The Love We Make” 224 McCloud, Scott 338–339, 342, 348 McConachie, Bruce 213 medicine 82, 87, 301 Mehta, Binita 339, 343–344 Meireles, Cecília 69–70 melancholia, melancholy 58, 60–73 Melnick, Jeffrey 214 memory 35–50, 76, 79, 89, 105, 110–111, 115, 177–178, 180–181, 184, 191–197, 199, 203–205, 286–288, 318, 342, 345 Mercado, Nancy – “Going to Work” 231–232 Mercer, Kobena 21–22 Mercurius 249 Merians, Valerie 211, 227, 229–232 metaphor 16, 18, 45, 48, 53, 57, 63, 68, 99, 103, 105, 107, 119, 210–212, 221, 227– 228, 230, 232–233, 238–239, 271–294, 297–298, 300, 339–343, 359, 362, 364–366, 369 metonymy 280–281 Middle East 332, 336, 347 Middle Passage 38–39, 42–44, 49–50, 76– 77, 86, 90, 110, 124 Milton, John – Paradise Lost 230 Minty, Judith – “Loving this Earth: Lake Michigan: 9/12/ 01” 229 modernism 16–19, 31, 33–34, 332–336, 366, 368, 370 – global modernisms 332–333 – transnational modernism 332

381

Mohammed, Patricia 148, 152–153 Moore, Henry 334 Moore Town, Jamaica 121, 123–124, 126–127, 129–131, 133 Moran, Mike 224 Morejón, Nancy 60–61, 63 Motion, Andrew 319–321 mourning 21–22, 35–37, 42, 51, 221–222, 260, 316–321 Moustaki, Nikki 230 – “How to Write a Poem after September 11th” 230 Mukherji, Pia 339, 343–344 Muldoon, Paul 318–319, 331 Munch, Edvard 236 – Moonlight 236 – Red and White 236 – Summer Night’s Dream (The Voice) 236 myth 6–7, 46–47, 65, 69, 72–73, 100–103, 108, 111–112, 114–115, 129, 141, 237, 244, 251–253, 255–257, 259, 263, 265– 266, 269, 274, 290, 305–306, 309, 317, 328, 334, 346, 359 Naipaul, V. S. 152 “Name-of-the-Father”/Nom du père (Lacan) 252–254, 263–265, 267 National September 11 Memorial 211, 233 nationhood 134, 156, 215 Neef, Sonja A. 357, 359–360 New Jersey 215, 226 New York 209–234, 336 New Yorker, The 216, 218 New Zealand 334 Nietzsche, Friedrich 256, 290, 292–294 Nurkse, D. – “October Marriage” 229 Nurse, Keith 148, 153 Obama, Barack 233 obeah, obi 36, 38, 40, 79–92, 95 objet petit a (Lacan) 267–268 Oceania 332, 334 Oedipus complex 254, 265–267, 318 oedipal triangle 251, 255, 265, 267, 269 Operation Enduring Freedom 224 opus 243–244

382

Index

orality (see also ‘memory’) 177–178, 180– 181, 184, 191–197, 199, 203–204 Orientalism 336 Osama Bin Laden 224 Pakeha 334 paradisal garden 242, 290 pastoral 317–319 Pataki, George 219–220 Patterson, Orlando 75–80, 86, 98 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo 15–16, 20 Petit, Philippe 217, 219 philosopher’s stone 248 Picasso, Pablo 309, 334 place 22, 24, 44, 48–49, 69, 98, 100, 103, 109, 124, 136, 154–155, 180, 183–184, 267, 290, 325–329, 331345–346, 355 Plath, Sylvia 322 Poe, Edgar Allan 271–273, 282–283, 285– 294 Poitier, Sidney 57–59 Polyphemus 230 Poniewaz, Jeff – “September 11, 2001” 230 Port Authority of New York and New Jersey 215–216, 225 postcolonial comics 339, 343–345, 347–348, 354 post-medium condition 23, 25 postmodernism 15–17, 31, 33–34 poststructuralism 273, 279–280, 282, 290, 293 Pound, Ezra 332, 368 Propp, Vladimir – Morphology of the Folktale 242 psychoanalysis 255, 267, 271–292 Ptolemy, Claudius 357 quicksilver 248–249 Quinn, Owen J. 217 radical 17, 38, 90, 101–102, 107, 173, 274– 275, 279, 282, 291, 293, 303, 334 Ray, David – “Six Months After” 228, 230 Real, the (Lacan) 261–262, 268–269

Redcam, Tom 158, 162–166, 173–174 – All Jamaica Library 162, 169 Reading, Peter 318 Reed, Ishmael – “America United” 229 Reeve, F. D. – “Sunset, New York Harbor” 229 Reid, Christopher 318 representation 30, 84, 139, 142, 145, 154, 157, 161, 170, 172, 214, 221, 271–275, 280, 283, 287–288, 297, 308, 312, 344–347, 352, 356–357, 359–360, 364– 365 rhizome (Deleuze/Guattari) 18, 46, 340, 341 Ricoeur, Paul 97, 100–102 108, 111, 121 Rhys, Jean 59, 92, 94 rococo 241, 248 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 58 Sandiford, Keith 84–85 Santería 33 Sarduy, Severo 26 de Saussure, Ferdinand 277–279 Scarry, Elaine 71 Schiller, Friedrich von 279 Schneiderman, Ellie 20 Scott’s Hall, Jamaica 121, 126–127, 129, 137 sea 325–331 self-help 177, 180, 185–187, 197–198, 200 self-reflexivity 31, 65, 67, 235, 237–239, 242, 250, 352 Selvon, Samuel 146 September 11, 2001 (9/11) 209–234 Siddiqi, Asif A. 356–357 Simey, T. S. 157–161, 164–165, 167–168, 173–174 Simon, Paul – “America” 221 sinthome (Lacan) 262, 268–269 slavery 38–39, 55, 60–63, 67, 71, 75, 79, 82, 84, 93–94, 103, 108, 110, 119, 136, 151, 164, 170, 172, 174, 180–181, 187, 189, 201, 327, 334, 364 Smith, Raymond T. 165, 168 Snod, E. 169 Sousanis, Nick 339–343, 345, 348, 353

Index

space 9, 13–14, 26, 49–50, 85, 94–95, 97– 98, 100–102, 104, 106–107, 109–110, 114, 124, 130, 137, 139–140, 145, 148, 153–155, 157, 159, 164, 172, 181, 184, 194–196, 199–200, 211–212, 215, 218– 219, 228–229, 231, 246, 268, 281, 287, 312, 325–331, 343, 359, 364–365, 367 spatial turn 326 Spiegelman, Art 342–343, 353 Spinoza, Baruch 32 Stassen, Jean-Philippe – Les visiteurs de Gibraltar 344–345 Statue of Liberty 221–223 status 25, 76, 82–85, 87, 110, 143, 152, 170– 171, 177, 179–181, 187–189, 196, 199, 201, 205, 228, 323, 351–352 structuralism 271, 273, 276, 279–280 subordinate 45, 147–152, 275 Surrealism 271–272, 282, 285, 291 Sussmann, Henry 357, 359 symbolism 3–14, 27, 31, 35, 37–38, 41–42, 53–73, 75–77, 87, 93–95, 97–115, 117– 118, 121, 123–131, 137–138, 139–146, 150, 157–158, 161, 163–164, 166, 170– 171, 173, 177–184, 195, 197–198, 200– 201, 205, 209–226, 231–233, 235–251, 253–257, 259–261, 263, 265–269, 271– 273, 276–282, 285–286, 290–291, 293, 295, 297–301, 303–308, 312, 345, 364 synesthesia 238 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich – The Nutcracker 239 temporality 37, 44–49, 97, 107, 114, 277, 286–289, 331–332, 342 Tennyson, Alfred Lord 268, 322–323, 364– 366, 369 tenor 278–279 Teresa de Los Andes 53, 55, 66 tidalectics 101–102, 107, 115 time 26, 35–38, 40, 42–49, 100, 102, 105, 107, 109, 288, 341–342 368–370 Tobin, Austin 215 Tolkien, J.R.R. 6 Tozzoli, Guy F. 217–218

383

trauma 33, 35–41, 44, 46–51, 78, 178, 184, 191, 203, 274, 320 Trinidad 83, 90, 140–141, 144–146, 148–– 155, 192 Turner, Mark 212–213, 219, 343 unconscious 240, 243, 246, 255, 264, 271– 277, 279, 281, 286, 292 Union Jack (British flag) 224 United States of America 15, 20, 131–132, 210, 221–222, 332, 336 Vale, Lawrence J. 211, 215, 221 Valéry, Paul 279, 370 Vas Dias, Robert – “Song of the Cities: After 9/11/01” 227 vehicle 30, 110, 278–279 Veselá, Pavla 209, 214, 227 Virgil 252, 316 vision (aesthetic) 239 von Eckardt, Wolf 216–217 von Franz, Marie-Louise 238, 243, 248 – Individuation in Fairy Tales 238 Waite-Smith, Cicely 158, 170–174 Walcott, Derek 30–33, 35–38, 40–51, 56–59, 61–63, 68, 101 – Omeros 30–31, 33, 35–51 War on Terror 213 The Who – “Won’t Get Fooled Again” 224 Washington, DC 233 Wilde, Lukas 337–338, 344 Wilkins, John 361–362, 364 Willig, George H. 217–219 World Trade Center (New York) 209–211, 213, 215–220, 222, 224–226, 230–234 – World Trade Center Association 217 World War I 190, 319, 330, 335 yard 157–158, 160, 162–175, 181, 187, 189 Yamasaki, Minoru 215–217 Yeats, William B. 322, 333, 368–370 zombies 76, 81