Fairy Tales and the Shift in Identity Poetics from Modernism to Postmodernism 1527522865, 9781527522862

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Fairy Tales and the Shift in Identity Poetics from Modernism to Postmodernism

Fairy Tales and the Shift in Identity Poetics from Modernism to Postmodernism By

Ana-Maria Baciu

Fairy Tales and the Shift in Identity Poetics from Modernism to Postmodernism By Ana-Maria Baciu This book first published 2023 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2023 by Ana-Maria Baciu All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-2286-5 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-2286-2

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .............................................................................................. vii Looking Backward ..................................................................................... 1 The Casting of Roles and the Setting on Stage of the “Actors”: Fairy Tale, Modernism, History, Postmodernism, Identity ........................ 9 Part One .................................................................................................... 29 Fairy Tales and the Construction of Identity in Modernism Case Study: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats ................................................................ 34 Case Study: Povesti Basarabene by Simion Teodorescu Kirileanu .... 62 Part Two ................................................................................................... 71 Fairy Tales and Postmodernist Deconstructionist Poetics Angela Carter’s Revisionary Use of the Fairy Tale ............................ 80 Fairy Tale Patterns in the Poetry of Cezar Baltag ............................... 90 Part Three ............................................................................................... 101 A Change in/with Time: A Comparative Approach Fairy Tales and the Poetics of Identity: A Shift of Perspective from Modernism to Postmodernism ............................................ 102 Flann O’Brien: The Author’s Rhetorical Masks ............................... 113 Ruth Ozeki: A Tale for the Time Being ............................................. 125 A Reskilling for New Contexts ......................................................... 136 Conclusions ............................................................................................ 149 References .............................................................................................. 157

INTRODUCTION  Fairy Tale, Modernism, History, Postmodernism, Identity – although picked up from different conceptual fields (genre theory, period terms and the vertical axis of change in politics/poetics along history), are revealed to be related in an explanatory narrative of changes over time in poetics and in its interface with politics even in art phases considered to be exclusively focused on aesthetic form and the autonomy of art, such as modernism. The stage metaphor used is justified by the belief that concepts have a framing effect, that by employing a certain critical vocabulary we already place ourselves on a certain theoretical position in this study of fairy tales, folklore and their carving of identities in the transition from modernism to postmodernism, with all the implications of the transformative process undergone by fairy tales to fit new contexts. One main objective is to show how important the aesthetics of the time is in the interpretation of fairy tales, in the way they are viewed, perceived, felt, and assimilated. In their turn, the philosophy of art and its signifying practices are often (always, according to Michel Foucault in his Order of Discourse, 1971) shaped by the historical context in a very broad sense, that is, including characteristic political ideas, movements, agendas, ideologies, power relationships, social theories, philosophical, aesthetic, or scientific ideas, actually the whole discursive field in which the literary work is embedded. This embedding of discourse in all forms of social activity is the effect of institutionalization. It is various institutions that “impose ritual forms” on discourse, that give it relevance and power. (Foucault 197: web) Reimagining language was crucial for the imagining of modernity. Language is no longer perceived as a transparent medium for conveying the world. The ways of speaking and writing construct social classes, genders, races and nations making them seem real and enabling them to elicit feelings and justify relations of power. In 1927 Martin Heidegger elaborated upon a distinction between Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), which has had a powerful influence on the critical theories that have emerged since then. Time, as measured by the clock, knows of no difference. It is the various outlooks on the world reified as cultural objects that can free the self from the universal death drive and allow it a life of election in the intersubjective order shared with other creative selves (Mitsein- being with others in the world). Being (Sein) is

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revealed as modalised presence (Dasein, being there, before a reflective subject, is interpreted as Sosein: “being such-and-so”). The self appears in something that makes itself known – a reified subjectivity which is inflected for space and time. Unlike temporality, which is irreversible, historicity means continuity: Here, by "history", we have in view that which is past, but which nevertheless is still having effects. Howsoever the historical, as that which is past, is understood to be related to the 'Present' in the sense of what is actual 'now' and 'today', and to be related to it, either positively or privatively, in such a way as to have effects upon it. Thus 'the past' has a remarkable double meaning; the past belongs irretrievably to an earlier time; it belonged to the events of that time; and in spite of that, it can still be present-at-hand 'now' - for instance, the remains of a Greek temple. With the temple, a 'bit of the past' is still 'in the present'. What we next have in mind with the term "history" is not so much 'the past' in the sense of that which is past, but rather derivation [Herkunft] from such a past. Anything that 'has a history' stands in the context of a becoming. In such becoming, 'development' is sometimes a rise, sometimes a fall. What 'has a history' in this way can, at the same time, 'make' such history. As 'epoch-making', it determines 'a future' 'in the present'. Here "history" signifies a 'context' of events and 'effects', which draws on through 'the past', the 'Present', and the 'future'. On this view, the past has no special priority. Further, "history" signifies the totality of those entities which change 'in time', and indeed the transformations and vicissitudes of men, of human groupings and their 'cultures', as distinguished from Nature, which likewise operates 'in time'. Here what one has in view is not so much a kind of Being-historizing-as it is that realm of entities which one distinguishes from Nature by having regard for the way in which man's existence is essentially determined by 'spirit' and 'culture', even though in a certain manner Nature too belongs to "history" as thus understood. Finally, whatever has been handed down to us is as such held to be 'historical', whether it is something which we know historiologically, or something that has been taken over as self-evident, with its derivation hidden. If we take these four significations together, the upshot is that history is that specific historizing of existent Dasein which comes to pass in time, so that the historizing which is 'past' in our Being-with-oneanother, and which at the same time has been 'handed down to us' and is continuingly effective, is regarded as "history" in the sense that gets emphasized. (Heidegger 1962:430-431)

Heidegger is here anticipating the double vision of New Historicism, a school of critical thinking which emerged around 1980. Looking backwards from the present moment, the past will always have a metonymical presence, will be “a bit” of the lived experience of the past generations. The past is filtered through a different sensibility, or, on the contrary, with the

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sense of joy that something of present interest was already lurking in the matrix of old times, offering reasons for trust in its validity over time. On reading this passage, we felt tempted to test Heidegger’s historicizing view against what seems to go against it: the archetypal imagination feeding into mythical narratives or fairy tales. Is it true that myths are just facts of language that are still being created in our times, for instance, by the fashionable industry or the consumerist culture? (Roland Barthes: Mythologies, 1957) Do fairy tales written at various times display an immobile structure and timeless poetics, or are they written in keeping with changes in poetics/politics that can be traced across the canonical works of a cultural phase? The latter is the case with significant changes occurring in the ideological agenda, the construction of characters, the trajectories of plots, etc. even within the century known as late modernity (modernism and postmodernism). As the fairy tale was a genre created by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy in the dawns of the Enlightenment, a look backward to the manifold of ideas that accompanied its birth is necessary in order to look into the initial data or the ideological-aesthetic matrix out of which it has evolved and which was modified in significant ways by subsequent exercises in rewriting the plots to meet the expectations of new generations of readers.

LOOKING BACKWARD

As pointed out by Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs (Bauman & Briggs 2003: 197) modernity developed through two distinct projects: 1. John Locke’s project of a purified language, freed from relationships with society, relying solely on its rationality and intelligibility, and 2. J.G. Herder’s project of nation states, which could be realized through the recognition and promotion of characteristic national features. He saw tradition as a source of social order and political strength, and language as something deeply embedded in the life of the social collectivity and defining for families, communities, regions and nations. The existence of well-defined features in a people’s character seems to have been an idea derived by Herder from a copy of Michael Denis’ Die Gedichte Ossians, eines alten celtischen Dicters, which was a translation of Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian (Wilson 2004: 821). The edition contained the notes written by Melchiorre Cesarotti for the Italian translation of Macpherson, in which Herder discovered Vico’s philosophy of history in light of which there is continuity from one historical phase to another, but, at the same time, each phase displays features shared in common by all the components of the social and cultural order. Herder saw a people’s character rooted in landscape, in the geography of the space it inhabits, and reinforced by language, traditions, customs, etc.: Those peculiar national characters, which are so deeply implanted in the oldest peoples, unmistakably manifest themselves in all their activities on earth. As a spring derives its component parts, its operative powers, and its flavor from the soil through which it flows, so the ancient characters of nations arose from family traits, from the climate, from the way of life and education from the early transactions and deeds peculiar to them. The customs of the fathers took deep root and became the internal prototypes of the race. (Herder 1967: XIV, 84)

Herder’s modernity peopled territories with national citizens and the globe with nation-states. The Grimm Brothers followed his agenda, publishing fairy tales reflective of the German spirit as well as studies in German mythology. They embraced Herder’s nationalist project and provided it with a linguistic and textual base. Their published collections, including the one entitled Kinder – und Hausmärchen – perhaps the most

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Looking Backward

famous “folk” texts of all times – are Herder’s attempt to revitalize German literature. The Brothers Grimm assimilated provincialism and nationalism as their discursive foundation. Thus, two divergent and influential models of language and modernity were available to writers and politicians in Europe. Both perspectives contributed to the shaping of social order and the blueprints to produce it. One cannot fail to notice the relationship between the imperialist politics of the nineteenth century and the corresponding upsurge of nationalist movements, or the interest in the construction of a national identity among peoples fighting for independence (such as the ones at either end of the continent: the Irish and the Romanians). On the contrary, the process of globalization in the postwar period, the massive migration and the emergence of new political concepts, such as imaginary community (one bounded not by language, common past, national literature, racial features and origin but by allegiance to the Constitution), political correctness, multicultural society, etc., have led to a different poetics in the treatment of the fairy tale as a generic form and as a carrier of ideology. The study of this phenomenon helps us understand something of the nature of the relationship between art, politics and history, aesthetic change (which is not merely a question of taste), and generic change (using fairy tales as a case in point). Here is a later, postwar Heidegger, who not only revised his 1927 Being and Time – a change noticeable from the title: Time and Being – but also shifted his emphasis from self-revelation (phenomenology of both self and Being as their coming out of hiding) to institutional control of knowledge and cognition. In a chapter of his Holzwege (Off the Beaten Track), “The Time of the World Picture” (1958), Heidegger states bluntly that the scholar shut up in his library has been displaced by the researcher with a project born of collaborative work with peers at international conferences or with editors who most often than not commission the book he is going to write: What is taking place in this extending and consolidating of the institutional character of the sciences! Nothing less than the making secure of the precedence of methodology over whatever is (nature and history), which at any given time becomes objective in research. On the foundation of their character as ongoing activity, the sciences are creating for themselves the solidarity and unity appropriate to them. Therefore historiographical or archeological research that is carried forward in an institutionalized way is essentially closer to research in physics that is similarly organized than it is to a discipline belonging to its own faculty in the humanistic sciences that still remains mired in mere erudition. Hence, the decisive development of the modern character of science as ongoing activity also forms men of a

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different stamp. The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects. These, rather than the cultivating of erudition, lend to his work its atmosphere of incisiveness. The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses. He contracts for commissions with publishers. The latter now determine along with him which books must be written. (Heidegger 1977: 125)

Later in the century the picture was completed with wealth of arguments by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991), who alleges that “modernity must be understood on an institutional level”, as institutions “undercut traditional habits and customs and [have a] global impact.” The paradox of the new identity construction resides in the buzz word of the day, that is actualization (the full realization of an individual’s potential) but the reflexive project of the self is inspired and monitored by the control systems of modernity. The individual does what his therapist, counsellor, doctor, couch, designer, etc. tell him to do. The role models, including those disseminated by books, movies and games for children, have been displaced from local contexts, they no longer expressing the character of communities, from villages to nations, instead, they are standardized and globally accepted. Under the circumstances, social relations lose the hallmark of specific locales recombining across indefinite time-space distances. By breaking away from their folk-lore, local knowledge and wisdom, individuals get separated “from the moral resources necessary to live a full and satisfying life” (Giddens 1991: 9). It is true that the rewriting of fairy tale plots in postmodernity is pretty predictable: they become narratives of the emancipation of the once marginalized groups of people: racial others, women, children, servants. It never happens the other way round (the affirmation of hierarchical relationships). Nevertheless, they are closest to what Gibbons understands by a moral frame for the self-reflexive projects of both individuals and communities. We may laugh out heartedly when would-be Caesar gives would-be Brutus a bag of crispy pizza to taste, accompanying his gift with the famous words, “And you, Brutus?” but we won’t fail to get the message that modern comforts and trade are better than civil wars or wars of conquest. No matter how odd it might sound, now, at the end of modernity, the way fairy tales have been rewritten, with a transformative ideological agenda in mind, has rendered them closer to a presumable return to realism: At the same time, our culture retains many of the themes and concerns that exercised writers of earlier generations; there is little sign of a radical literary avantgarde sweeping away the old to make way for the new.

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Looking Backward Postmodernism might not be as emphatically over as some critics like to claim, but it does seem to be in retreat. Its devices have become so commonplace that they have been absorbed into mainstream, commercial and popular culture. Postmodernism has lost its value in part because it has oversaturated the market. And with the end of postmodernism’s playfulness and affectation, we are better placed to construct a literature that engages earnestly with real-world problems. This new literature can, in good faith, examine complex and ever-shifting crises – of racial inequality, capitalism and climate change – to which it is easy to close one’s eyes. (Gibbons 2017: web)

The usage of fairy tales at two different stages of what is known as “late modernity”: modernism and postmodernism is quite different. In the early modern period, of the Enlightenment, fairy tales were seen as the roots and the mirror of every people. They were thought by Herder, Goethe, Charles Perrault, the Grimm Brothers, or the British pre-romantics to nourish people’s spiritual hunger and complete their national identity, becoming thus a mark of identity. On the contrary, with the passage of time and the concomitant historical changes, in the postmodern period the perception of the fairy tales as a provider and keeper of any kind of identity or unity is lost, they becoming only a pattern to be re-symbolized, a fragment of a wider and different design, an excuse for something else, a stage on which other plays are performed, keeping up with change, with postmodernist ideas concerning their use and meaning. Fairy tales are a “tool” often neglected in the study of identity poetics. It is true that identity is no longer seen as an “ever-fixed mark” which “looks on tempests, and is never shaken” (as Shakespeare writes of love in Sonnet 116), but as a fluid concept better looked at through the lens of combined disciplines, while fairy tales have been perceived since the publication of Vladimir Propp’s influential book on the Morphology of the Folktale (1928, translated into English three decades later) as immobile structures of a limited set of functions. Following the shift in identity poetics which links the two stages of late modernity, modernism and postmodernism, we set out on a path which links fairy tales to society and its civilizing process. We see fairy tales as a mark of unity, spirituality and an identity maker in the first stage of modernism, while shifting towards a more fluid identity in the second stage of late modernity – postmodernism – based on internationalism and multiculturalism. This is not the first association of fairy tales with epistemological change. It is with full awareness of the premises and assumptions of structuralism and functionalism that Propp pities the latter, whose representative he declares himself to be, against the former, criticizing the Antti Aarne (1867-1925) and the Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (1832 -

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1920) classification of folk tales according to theme or other descriptive element. The “division into genus, species, and varieties” fails to account for the elements that function across the categories: The fairy tales comprise, according to Aarne, the following categories: (1) a supernatural adversary; (2) a supernatural husband (wife); (3) a supernatural task; (4) a supernatural helper; (5) a magic object; (6) supernatural power or knowledge; (7) other supernatural motifs. Almost the same objections pertaining to Vó1kov's classification can be repeated here. What, for instance, of those tales in which a supernatural task is resolved by a supernatural helper (which occurs very often), or those in which a supernatural spouse is also a supernatural helper? (1968: 10)

Propp’s conclusion, supported by references to the pre-existing classifications of the structuralist school, installs another table of invariants with the difference that this time the criteria for divisions are not themes, motifs or geographical and historical distribution, but the limited set of functions from an otherwise similar ahistorical and noncontextualized perspective: 1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale, independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale. 2. The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited. (1968: 21) Propp dismisses the notion of identity (the existence of stable features characteristic of some tale or other) with schemes cutting across all the tales: elements that they share in common. The dramatis personae are nothing special if they are taken separately; they are defined by actions shared in common, by what they do, by the function they fulfill in a universal scheme. If we want to continue our exercise in the dynamics of fairy tale perception, it is enough to compare Propp’s functional classification with the guidebooks written on the issue of gender identity, which has become a matter of personal option. With Propp, identity is relative to the overall structure, whereas the postmodern blog is hooked into current ideas about the self choosing its identity marks while being possessed of a body that has become animal, in the sense of being free from pre-determined features, and which can be written over into whatever category of performance (performing as male, or female, for instance, as in Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body or Gut Symmetries). Within the context of modernism, the fairy tale as subspecies of folk literature, the countryside (see the pastoral poetry written either by

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Looking Backward

Octavian Goga, Lucian Blaga and many others in Romania, or by Anne de Noailles in France) and the national language (see the replacement of classical studies with English Studies in the old British universities of the early 20th century), the inroads into the mythical past (See Mihail Sadoveanu’s Creanga de aur – The Golden Bough, or Blaga’s reassessment of our pre-Roman foundations) were called upon to serve as a mark of identity for a specific culture in the context of the collapse of dynastic rules and the rise of independent nation states. The study of folklore coexisted with emergent romantic nationalistic movements in which scholars searched the folk traditions record not just in order to see how people had lived in by-gone ages, but to discover historical precedents on which to model the present and build the future. Here are Herder’s words, quoted in Robert Reinhold Ergang’s Herder and the Foundations of German Nationalism: Methinks, I see the time coming when we shall return in earnest to our language, to the merits, to the principles and goals of our fathers and learn therefore to value our own gold. (Herder apud Ergang 1966: 222)

The selection, as case studies, of two collections of fairy tales produced by an Irishman associated with Ireland’s search for identity and independence from England: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry by William Butler Yeats and Povesti Basarabene by Simion TeodorescuKirileanu, underwritten by an agenda of cultural unification of Bessarabia with the rest of Romania. In this way, the adaptability of fairy tales as a living and mobile aspect of society takes centre stage. The deconstruction of the national specificity of fairy tales in postmodernism, is exemplified with writers situated again at the antipodes: Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and some of Cezar Baltag’s poems suggestively entitled or subtitled “pattern de basm” (fairy-tale-patterns) which are selected from various cultures. The significance of the present study resides not only in the contextualized approach to fairy tales bespeaking the idea of identity characterising two different phases of late modernity, modernism and postmodernism, using relevant examples, but also in a comparative approach meant to highlight the shift in poetics. This comparative study also reveals the importance of fairy tales as a remedy for a society in distress: the great role they played as a mark of national identity in the period of Bessarabia’s union with the Mother Country (Simion Teodorescu Kirileanu’s Poveúti basarabene recorded by the folklorist in March 1918) or as a mark of identity serving Ireland’s independence

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(Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Pesantry by W.B. Yeats). The two fairy tale collections Poveúti basarabene and Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry are related by their ideological agenda, each, in its culturally distinct context, marking the passage towards new developments in their nation’s history. The adaptability of the fairy tales is also revealed by Angela Carter’s rewriting of some of them in her collection of stories, The Bloody Chamber, where she subverts gender identities and the patriarchal society, refilling a new content. The attempt to relate the concept of identity to fairy tales and the imaginary resides in the consideration of fairy tales as an ideological tool. In revealing the shift in poetics from one stage to another, we intend to grant fairy tales their well-deserved place and unveil their bearing upon the shaping of identity and the patterning of human experience eroded by random historical transformations. We are also trying to reveal their power to “play” with our minds, engaging them in enigmatic or allegorical plots, sometimes – especially in their postmodernist guise – of remarkable ingenuity. This analysis does not aim to favor one period over the other, but to unveil certain meaningful terms of comparison, contrastive features or negotiations between each other.

CASTING THE ROLES AND SETTING THE STAGE FOR THE “ACTORS” OF OUR SCRIPT: FAIRY TALE, MODERNISM, HISTORY, POSTMODERNISM, IDENTITY

People all over the world have been telling stories since the beginning of time. A fascination with the past in the search of origins, roots, identity and the desire to be entertained during leisure time allowed oral tradition to survive from one generation to another. The observation that printing and gunpowder have frightened away Robin-good-fellow and the fairies (Benjamin, F. Fisher, 2010: web) is the metaphorical expression of the powerful impact of the passage from a manuscript culture with limited dissemination to the public sphere of print. It was the great divide between past and present that could be bridged via tradition as a continuum of reiterations by which language, and thereby thought of the past survives into the present and paves the way for the future. Oral tradition or manuscripts converted into printed texts provided a link between a remote past and modernity, triggering a problem of decontextualization and re-contextualization, in which the author was invested with author-ity, the word author becoming a word of power in that it could take embodied forms, at the origin of social transformations. The poststructuralist deconstruction of the author as an autonomous subject and source of illocution (Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author, 1967) or even as embodied instance beyond its purely discursive function (Michel Foucault, What is an Author? 1969) was reversed by the New Historicist turn of the 80s when text and world started to be seen again as mutually influential (texts reflecting on reality and reality being generated by texts). A recognition of the fact that “narrative is central to the representation of identity, in personal memory and self-representation or in collective identity of groups such as regions, nations, race and gender” (Currie 1998: 2) is an argument that identity is not within us, it exists only as narrative: “…we learn how to self-narrate from the outside, from other stories, and particularly through the process of identification with other characters. This gives narration at large the potential to teach us how to conceive of ourselves, what to make of our inner life and how to organize it.” (Currie 1998: 17) To put it otherwise, identity is relational, it does not

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Casting the Roles and Setting the Stage for the “Actors” of Our Script

reside inside a person, but brings the other into question, it is not a matter of substance but of difference. Fairy tales change over time, whether it is from being passed along through an oral tradition, or from being consciously updated to better reflect the norms and values of a given time. Between “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” lies a timeless, ever-changing world, where everything is possible. Originally, stories were passed orally from generation to generation. With the rise and spread of print, the tales became somewhat less mutable for a time. At present the images we see on the movie screen have shaped and implanted themselves into our minds, supplanting the originals which delighted children in the age of print. More significant than the changes themselves, however, is what the evolution of the fairy tale reveals about us and our changing society. The mutable fairy tale has always been both an unrelenting influence on society and a mirror of society. From oral tradition, through the literary fairy tale in print form, and now to cinema or virtual space there is a trajectory spawned by the effects of changes in the historical world, in the medium of production, channel of dissemination, as well as in the historical world or in aesthetics. The name was first ascribed to fairy tales by madame D’Aulnoy in the late 17th century. Although the fairy tale is a distinct genre within the larger category of folktale, its definition is a source of considerable dispute. One consensual matter is that fairy tales do not require fairies. The term itself comes from the translation of Madame D'Aulnoy's conte de fées, first used in her collection of 1697. The English “fairy tale” is a literal rendering of the French contes which often included fairies. The purpose of fairy tales has changed since their origin. Originally, they were morbid tales told by men to other men, that is, palatable stuff for grown-ups. Around the turn of the 17th century, France was already using fairy tales to educate children and adults, whereas Germany reserved the tales for adults who wished to subvert the social and government systems. Germany’s view of fairy tales prevailed until the 19th century, the century of realist poetics, when writers and readership turned to fairy tales as a way to educate children and free their imagination from insubstantial fears and apprehensions. This approach to fairy tales is still present today when the gothic, supernatural paraphernalia is modulated into parody and commercial advertising. The fairy tale, told orally, is a sub-class of the folktale. Many writers have written in the fairy tale genre. These are the literary fairy tales, or Kunstmärchen, which show considerable refurbishing from the oral form.

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The first collectors who attempted to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale, but also the style in which they were told, were the Brothers Grimm, who collected German fairy tales. The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of its character, being less exposed to cross-cultural influences. Fairy tales tend to take on the color of their location, through the choice of motifs, the style in which they are told, and the depiction of character and local color. As Bruno Bettelheim argues in his The Uses of Enchantment (1976), fairy tales are very much the result of common conscious and unconscious content having been shaped by the conscious mind, not of one particular person, but as the consensus of many regarding the universal human problems and the accepted, desirable solutions, which ensured their survival as a carrier of tradition handed down from generation to generation. As a transitional genre, a carrier and holder of the collective imagination, the fairy tale lends itself to a re-creation and re-shaping of the present and future through the past. Fairy tales, embedded in their context, cultural, historical, etc. reflect back on it via mirror as a metaphor. But fairy tales are never innocent; more often than not, they are made to serve specific power relations. Fairy tales are also shaped or refurbished according to changing epistemic notions and norms or conventions of representation put forward by the expressed or implied poetics of the age. They construct identities in different ways in modernism and postmodernism, for instance, when the mirror that throws back real life scenes in tales, such as those written by Ion Creangă, becomes a trope for the mind or for art (Oscar Wilde), whereas, in the later twentieth-century the mirror is the space of the production of the ‘subject’, of the formation of the ‘I’, of the infant’s sense of full autonomy before entry into language, the symbolic order which reduces his selfhood to merely a metonymical presence as allowed by society’s laws and conventions (post-Lacanian theories). Postmodern fairy tales are intent upon revealing their predecessors’ complicity and compliance with exhausted, out of date narrative and gender ideologies, interpreting them anew. It is the adaptability and evolution of fairy tales that have ensured their survival, as they were shown to capitalize on new meanings of interest to the new generations. Modernity was shaped by the development of modern industrial societies, urbanization, the rapid growth of cities, followed by the horrors

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Casting the Roles and Setting the Stage for the “Actors” of Our Script

of WWI (with the nation states freed from dynastic rule as the only fortunate outcome). The Enlightenment – another name for modernity – relied on reason, science, logic, objectivity of truth, freedom, the central role played by the human subject. Reason was the key to a correct understanding of the world in opposition to the medieval idea of cognition as knowledge of divinity. Modernity focused upon the human subject and his ability to save himself by reasonable inquiry. Descartes thought of the individual as a subject observing the world and himself as object of inquiry, with reason no less than his ontological ground (“I think, therefore I am”). Modernism, in a broader sense, is the practice of breaking away with the rules, traditions and pre-existing ways of writing practiced by earlier authors. Modernism departs from the ideology of realism, relating to the past through flashback, recapitulation, and incorporation. This rebellious attitude flourished between 1900 and 1930, the message conveyed being the rejection of European culture for having become too corrupt and artificial. This dissatisfaction led modern thinkers and artists into exploring alternatives, especially primitive cultures. In literature, ‘modernism’ was a negative reaction to realism and naturalism. Tradition was no longer regarded as a purely aesthetic phenomenon but as a depositary of established religious, political, and social views, which carried the responsibility of not having been able to prevent the outbreak of the recently concluded world conflagration. The rise of relativism and quantum uncertainty in physics had spawned the belief that there is no such thing as absolute truth. All things are relative. The emphasis on objectivism legitimated by positivist philosophy (A. Comte, J.S. Mill) was superseded by the priority of the self and of subjectivism. Championship of the individual through the celebration of inner strength is one of the most prominent characteristics of modernism. The notion of being modern, irrespective of a particular phase – early, high or late – always implies a need for change, a trust for the better, for progress and perfection, or, as Stuart Hall explains in Modernity: an Introduction to Modern Societies: What is quintessentially ‘modern’ is not so much any one period…so much as the fact that a society becomes seized with and pervaded by this idea of ceaseless development, progress, and dynamic change; by the restless forward movement of time and history; by what some theorists call the compression of time and space. (Hall 1996: 17)

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In his turn, Brian McHale defines modernism and postmodernism as a list of questions ranging from modernity’s inquiry into self-identity and cognition: How can I interpret the world of which I am part? And what am I in it? ... What is there to be known? Who knows it? How do they know it, and with what degree of certainty? How is knowledge transmitted from one knower to another, and with what degree of reliability? How does the object of knowledge change as it passes from knower to knower? What are the limits of the knowable? (Brian McHale 1992: 32-34,146-47)

Whereas, in modernism, the appeal of and to history and the revisiting of tradition is of utmost importance for shaping a well-defined identity, in postmodernism the expulsion or absence of history and tradition reveals a fragmented identity or even the lack of something in the way of a set of recognizable traits. While modernism focused rather on time, postmodernism focuses prevailingly on space and metaphors of space. Post-modernism is the term used to suggest a reaction or response to modernism and especially to early modernity in the late twentieth century. It is both a critique of modernism, as well as an applied, extended modernism. The late 20th century brought about scientific and technological progress, on the one hand, and instability and terror, on the other. Words such as: ideology, world-war, cold-war, genocide, nuclearwar, petrol-war, options for the poor and the marginalized, alternative identities, … became part of the current vocabulary in use, while the world was caught between poles of power. The critique of the Enlightenment and of its meta-narratives had already started in the dawns of modernism. Darwin’s theory of evolution was countered by narratives of regression, degeneration and entropy (W.B. Yeats, Oscar Wilde, the aesthetics of decadence); Marx’s idea of social progress and historical teleology leading to the triumph of the working class yielded to theories of the unknowable nature of historical agency (Conrad, Heart of Darkness), a pessimistic view of history being meaningless (James Joyce: a nightmare); Freud’s probing into the workings of the unconscious invalidated modernity’s cult of reason, Nietzsche’s theory of the Έbermensch – a sort of superman above norms, morality, religion – exploded the eighteenth-century sermons of the moralists. The idea of identity based on Descartes’ rational, stable, selfsufficient subject, which had been at the roots of Western rationalism and belief in human progress, had to be reconsidered on a new basis.

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Casting the Roles and Setting the Stage for the “Actors” of Our Script

Brian McHale in his Postmodernist Fiction presents postmodernism as an artefact, which has been constructed at the level of discourse by readers, authors, critics, and theorists: Postmodernist? Whatever we may think of the term, however much or little we may be satisfied with it, one thing is certain: the referent of ‘postmodernism’, the thing to which the term claims to refer, does not exist. […] There is no postmodernism ‘out there’ in the world any more than there ever was a Renaissance or romanticism ‘out there’. These are all literary-historical fictions, discursive artefacts, constructed either by contemporary readers and writers or retrospectively by literary historians. […] we can discriminate among constructions of postmodernism, none of them any less ‘true’ or fictional than the others, since all of them are finally fictions. (Brian McHale 1992: 4)

The canonical modernist discourse claims that truth is not mirrored in the human understanding of it, but is rather constructed, as the mind tries to understand its own personal reality. In conclusion, facts and falsehood are interchangeable. Postmodernism rejects such ideas, beliefs, culture, and norms; it dwells on the exterior image and avoids drawing conclusions or suggesting underlying meanings associated with the interior of objects and events. It sees human experience as unstable, internally contradictory, ambiguous, inconclusive, indeterminate, unfinished, fragmented, discontinuous, "jagged," with no one specific reality possible. The postmodern writer creates an "open" work in which readers are called upon to supply their own connections, to work out alternative meanings, and provide their own (unguided) interpretation. There are no predetermined rules, well-established and long-term principles. Events, activities, thoughts, manners do not exist for a long time in postmodernism. It is a very contested term which resists definitions. In an encyclical, entitled “Fides et Ratio”, Pope John Paul II actually used the word postmodernism to condemn extreme relativism in values and beliefs, acute irony, scepticism toward reason, and the denial of any possibility of truth, human or divine, as it is mentioned in Ihab Hassan’s presentation of the concept From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context. (Hassan 2000: web) One of the prominent theoreticians of postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, fuses the concepts of cultural indeterminacy and technological immanence so as to cast some light upon the period term that mostly resists and defies definitions in a refusal to “stand still” for analysis. He uses indeterminacy, or indeterminacies, to mean:

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[…] a combination of trends that include openness, fragmentation, ambiguity, discontinuity, decenterment, heterodoxy, pluralism, deformation, all conducive to indeterminacy or under-determination. The latter concept alone, deformation, subsumes a dozen current terms like deconstruction, decreation, disintegration, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, de-definition, demystification, detotalization, delegitimation, decolonization. Through all these concepts moves a vast will to undoing, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche, the entire realm of discourse in the West. In literature alone, our ideas of author, audience, reading, writing, book, genre, critical theory, and of literature itself, have all suddenly become questionable- questionable but far from invalid, reconstituting themselves in various ways. (Hassan 2000: web)

He goes on to explain the term immanence, used: without religious echo to designate the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and more into nature, act through its own abstractions, and project human consciousness to the edges of the cosmos. This mental tendency may be further described by words like diffusion, dissemination, projection, interplay, communication, which all derive from the emergence of human beings as language animals, homo pictor or homo significant, creatures constituting themselves, and also their universe, by symbols of their own making. Call it gnostic textualism, if you must. Meanwhile, the public world dissolves as fact and fiction blend, history becomes a media happening, science takes its own models as the only accessible reality, cybernetics confronts us with the enigma of artificial intelligence (Deep Blue contra Kasparov), and technologies project our perceptions to the edge of matter, within the atom or at the rim of the expanding universe.” (Hassan 2000: web).

It is, thus, up to the human mind to perform, to transform the world via language and also to construct identity by naming and by attaching normative connotations to the names. The importance of postmodernism resides in its mutation into postmodernity as our global/local condition, alleges Ihab Hassan, as well as in its use as a hermeneutical tool, a way of viewing the world, which is a challenging one, difficult to interpret because, in it, anything goes. Our period of history and the mindset that applies to this period, one of major social, economic and political changes have modulated the meaning of knowledge to fit new contexts, precisely the Age of Knowledge which turned the tables on the Industrial Age. The Knowledge Age is a new, advanced form of capitalism in which knowledge and ideas are the main source of economic growth (surpassing land, labour, money, or other

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Casting the Roles and Setting the Stage for the “Actors” of Our Script

‘tangible’ resources). New patterns of work and new business practices have developed, and, as a result, new kinds of workers, with new and different skills, are required. The “liquid modernity” of today, as Bauman (2007) describes its dynamic character in his Liquid times: Living in an age of uncertainty, reflects its diversity, rapid pace, fragmentation, discontinuity, pragmatism, multiplicity and networks of connections. Consequently, postmodern narratives will draw upon science-fiction, pornography and a multitude of other genres previously considered subliterary in an attempt to close the gap between elite and mass culture. At present, the fairy tale has to carry an unprecedented burden of significance, and it is not surprising that modern versions, re-plotted plots, like Angela Carter’s, produce a darker, more complex, less resolved narrative environment. In conclusion, fairy tales are fluid. Over time many different stories will be created out of the reinscription of precedents. The variations have increased to the point where ridiculous changes are becoming acceptable. With the introduction of the movies, fairy tales are morphing rapidly into stories that are ever-changing. If stories continue to evolve to fit people’s desires, they will last forever. Identity is a very complex, slippery concept, difficult to pin down. It changes with time, playing the chameleon with historical contexts: material goods and immaterial values, space, time and critical theories. The Etymology Dictionary Online traces the origins of the word identity back to the late 16th century Latin identitƗs, equivalent to Latin ident (idem) meaning repeatedly, the earlier idem + -itƗs -ity, also in the sense of "sameness, oneness, state of being the same," from Middle French identité (14c.), from Medieval Latin identitatem (nominative identitas) – "sameness," In former times, the word in English was idemptitie (1560s), from Medieval Latin idemptitas. The term identity crisis was first recorded in 1954; identity theft was coined in 1995, while identity politics has been in use since 1987. The last one refers to the tendency to base one's politics in a sense of personal identity, such as gay, Jewish, Black, or female. The dictionary definition in the quoted source reads like this: “noun, plural – identities” x the state or fact of remaining the same one or ones, as under varying aspects or conditions: The identity of the fingerprints on the gun with those on file provided evidence that he was the killer. x the condition of being oneself or itself, and not another: He began to doubt his own identity.

Fairy Tales and the Shift in Identity Poetics from Modernism to Postmodernism x

x x x

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condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is; the qualities, beliefs, etc., that distinguish or identify a person or thing: a case of mistaken identity; a male gender identity; immigrants with strong ethnic identities. the state or fact of being the same one as described. the sense of self, providing sameness and continuity in personality over time and sometimes disturbed in mental illnesses, as schizophrenia. exact likeness in nature or qualities:an identity of interests.

In the Oxford Dictionary: web, it is defined as follows: x x x x x

the fact of being who or what a person or thing is: he knows the identity of the bomber the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is: he wanted to develop a more distinctive Scottish Tory identity. as modifier (of an object) serving to establish who the holder, owner, or wearer is by bearing their name and often other details such as a signature or photograph: ‘an identity card’. a close similarity or affinity: an identity between the company's own interests and those of the local community. Mathematics – a transformation that leaves an object unchanged. An element of a set which, if combined with another element by a specified binary operation, leaves that element unchanged.

We notice that the dictionary definitions do not cover the sense of national identity or ethnic identity, failing to grasp our present concept of identity. Not only will a dictionary render an atomistic grasp on an entity, but it will not relate it, either to consciousness (the self’s awareness of having an identity) or to the social environment or historical context. What we understand nowadays by identity derives mainly from psychologist Erik Erikson’s concept of “identity crises” as defined in Webster’s New World Dictionary: “the condition of being uncertain of one’s feelings about oneself, especially with regard to character, goals, and origins, occurring especially in adolescence as a result of growing up under disruptive, fast-changing conditions.” (Webster’s New World Dictionary 1979: 696). The term is, thus, getting more and more complicated – a fairly recent social construct, meant to embrace the fast-pacing world of today. Identity became a focus point for anthropologists beginning with the 1970s social movements and ethnicity related issues reinforcing the dual relationship between individual and society – showing how the individual is affected by and at the same time contributes to the social context he inhabits. It gained ground becoming the core of debates concerning the

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identity politics of race, gender, sexuality and ethnicity, that is, it took shape from the intersection of physical body, ideology and subjectivity. Identity is articulated at the trysting place of biology (our sense perceptions) and culture (the total sum of social practices that insert us into the life of some particular social formations. The way we are perceived by social others is determined by ideology – society’s sense of what is valuable or objectional about our presence in the intersubjective/ communication roll order. Unlike Descartes, who rooted personhood in one’s personal reasoning, the present school of Identity Theory takes a pragmatist view of the issue. To a considerable extent, we turn to our peers for an assessment of our social relevance, for a statement about what they see in us. As pragmatism employs a double vision – self-knowledge and reflection of the self in others – its notion of identity is multilayered. In The Principles of Psychology, Vol. I (1890, pages 279-283, 287-288, and 314-316), William James exposes his theory about the discontinuous nature of selfhood or of the self’s knowledge of his make-up. The core of the self is enveloped in the material self, representing our need of possessions as outward prop of our inwardness which is objectified in order for us to be known by others. Jean Baudrillard, in his 1968 System of Objects, would reduce identity to this form of objectification, which is to be understood in the context of the consumer society. Next comes the social self, which is the appreciation we get from others. This theory served Henry James, the philosopher’s brother, in the construction of his characters. There is not a single portrait of each but an array of impressionistic portraits, that is, as many versions of the self as there are characters running into him. The individual depends on his peers for his honour, for prestige. We see the protagonist in Joyce’s “Grace” (a story in The Dubliners) being saved from dejection and drunkenness by friends who revive in him a sense of worth and dignity, whereas, on the contrary, Beckett’s Malone’ demise is caused by his dwarfish image in a rival’s eyes. Around 1900, Romanians felt that their national character was embodied in folklore which offered both a folk costume for the Queen and each lady in waiting and a collection of folk tales for foreigners interested in national character. A new theory about identity set in after World War II. Cognitivist psychologist Ulric Neisser identifies “Five Kinds of Self-Knowledge: the ecological self (perceived with respect to the physical environment); the interpersonal self (manifest in emotional rapport and communication); the extended self (personal memories and anticipations); the private self

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(appears when children first notice that some of their experiences are not directly shared with other people); the conceptual self or the ‘self-concept’ draws its meaning from the network of assumptions and theories in which it is embedded. (Neisser 1998: 35-59) Ulrich Neisser exposes his theory of the self in Five Kinds of SelfKnowledge – the title of his 1988 book – which are responsible for our making into the speaking and acting instance we represent. Jonathan Culler, Jacques Lacan, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, to name just of few of postmodernist thinkers, define the self as signifier in the intersubjective order: writing instance, he who says “I” (position in discourse), a signifier to be read by others, a narrative about oneself. Even characters in fairy tales, which have something of a prototypical character, are seen as mere signifiers that can be assigned other meanings. Whereas, for the luminaries or for modernists, fairy tales guaranteed authentic representation of essential character, postmodernists engage in rewriting them in order to promote their own ideological agenda. We see here epistemology, ideology and the body of the world inextricably bounded up in a common process of cultural fabrication of meaning. It is this trinity – body + ideology + subjectivity – that Identity Studies focus upon. The phenomenological psychological perspective as an approach to psychology acknowledges the social nature of embodiment, turning to embodied experience as a major focus for psychological understanding and identity studies for it is through the body that we relate to other people and the world around us. Our body is the vehicle for communicating with others and for carrying out our everyday lives. It is impossible to separate our bodies from who we are and what we do in the social world. At all levels – individual, relational and cultural – the body becomes entangled in a network of social relations. Thus, the individuals need to be viewed in a broader picture encompassing the biological, the psychological and the social, for: The sense of personhood we possess is at least partly based on the feel we have of our own bodies, as much as in the symbols which define our unique social identity … if the body is not the person, then what is the person? The body image and self-image we develop is based on the sense of being embodied and the way in which this experience is mediated by culture. (Connell 1987:84)

The bodily experience becomes a ‘life-history-in-society’ in which larger societal areas, such as relationships, ideology, and language, also play their part.

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The body as observed by others and with “its own eyes” comes under dual scrutiny. The self-scrutiny and the reflexivity implied in the project of the self (Giddens, 1991) reflect a shift in social conditions, in terms of work and leisure, consumerism and commodification. Bodies become both subject and object, project and projected upon. According to Giddens, since the self is an identity-project, we can “create” ourselves; become the masons of our own identitarian construction. To Giddens, then: The body was a ‘given’, the often inconvenient and inadequate seat of the self. With the increase invasion of the body by abstract systems all this becomes altered. The body, like the self, becomes a site of interaction, appropriation and reappropriation, linking reflexively organised processes and systematically ordered expert knowledge... Once thought to be the locus of the soul... the body has become fully available to be ‘worked upon’ by the influences of high modernity... In the conceptual space between these, we find more and more guidebooks and practical manuals to do with health, diet, appearance, exercise, love-making and many other things. (Giddens 1991:218)

The fact that we can ‘do’ things with our body and present or display ourselves in different ways suggests that our identity is not entirely fixed or determined by our bodies. People have the freedom (at least in some parts of the world) and can make a conscious decision to change their bodies through surgery, dieting, drugs, exercise and the clothes they wear. As people change their bodies in these ways, you could say that they also change how they feel about themselves and their roles in society, and how they are perceived by others (all of which are aspects of identity), as Roseneil and Seymour argue: Questions of identity, individual and collective, confront us at every turn … We are interpellated and interrogated by a multiplicity of voices to consider and reconsider our identities. How we think of ourselves … is up for grabs, open to negotiation, subject to choice to an unprecedented extent. (Roseneil and Seymour, 1999:1)

Illustrative in this sense is the case of the pop singer Michael Jackson who insisted on changing his body. In his autobiography Moonwalk (Jackson, 1988) he confesses that he was deeply unhappy with his appearance, in particular with his wide nose and dark skin. Although he denies all the surgery attributed to him, his body was radically altered. Jackson turned his body into an active project, seemingly designed to blur his identity in terms of sex, race, ethnicity and age. Increasingly, medical and technological advances offer the means for more extreme

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reconstructions of the body. Jackson's apparently personal body project is both socially rooted and socially productive (it produces social effects). His choice to become white-skinned and narrow-nosed was not, therefore, to be blamed on his personal eccentricity, but on the racialized power relations current in Western societies. Although most social psychologists would probably agree that bodies, identity and the social world mutually shape one another, they disagree over the respective weight of these factors. If we place the emphasis on our lived experience of embodiment, arguing that because we have the capacity to reflect on our choices, we have some agency to make decisions about who we want to be, but under the pervasive influence of society, constrained by the ideals, meanings and identities available in culture. Our bodies are discursive in the sense that they both reflect and express cultural ideals and ideologies. ‘Free’ choices are not as free as they may seem. Let us take for example the case of Muslim women entrapped between Muslim culture and ideology, and the emergence of women’s movements worldwide beginning in the 1970s. The movements of activists defended women’s rights and gender equity claiming that women were still viewed in stereotyped ways and denied their ‘right’ place in society. The cultural ideas or “discourses” about appropriate female roles and conduct used to justify restrictions in women’s roles within family and society are what Leila Ahmed calls “the core discourses of Islam,” the Qur’an, (divine revelation), the Sunna (deeds and sayings of the prophet Muhammed), the Hadith (interpretive moral codes based on sayings of the prophet), and other sacred writings as justification for the submission of women to men. Leila Ahmed’s Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate examines discourses on women and gender in periods of Arab history from ancient (pre-Islamic times in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean Middle East) to modern periods (and primarily modern Egypt). She emphasizes the existence of divergent perspectives on gender relations in Islam, all products of societies’ dominant groups and the male legal establishment. In such hands, “ethical Islam” expressing commitment to justice, piety, and equality of all before God decays to a discourse adapted to the patriarchal customs and asymmetric power relationships that perpetuate woman’s discrimination. It is this discourse that women are trying to replace with images that are likely to inspire a new way of life for the Islamic woman. The veil that makes her invisible is discarded and a body comes forward engaged in public activities: the woman-scholar, the woman running a business of her own, etc.

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Muslim women’s body seems today to embody the tensions between modernity and anti-modernity, between traditional ideology, stereotypes and their strive to overcome the stereotypic thought about what others perceive as being a muslim. While the role of Muslim women in some countries is minimized and women have limited rights, in other Muslimmajority countries, increasing numbers of women are participating and excelling in diverse fields and professions. Being entrapped in the category “Muslim woman”, individual women are already given an identity, labelled, at the expense of their own selves. Thus, the veil (as the image of Muslim ideology) determines their position in society and weights more than the person behind it who is denied true identity; although being identified with “body” the Muslim women have not been truly the “owners” of their bodies. The image of the veiling is perceived as oppressive and a symbol of the inferior status of women in Islam. Clothing can also be perceived as a means of self-expression relating the person to the community it belongs, for: Every individual obtains self-awareness only by being an object to others: the individual both internalizes the attitudes of other people towards him/her as social relations and presents herself/himself to others through means provided by the culture to which she/he belongs. This distinction between social role and the culturally determined symbolic presentation of the self, is an important starting point for research on the concept of person. (Kippenberg et al., 1990: 3)

Thus, the Muslim women shape their identity caught in-between the Islamic discourse and a tendency for redefinition in multicultural contexts becoming hybridized individuals in an exercise of constant revision and redefinition to break stereotypes and shift cultural mindset, as it is the case of many Muslim women who participate and have leading positions in different fields and professions. Thus, women’s negociation of identity, seen not as a given, but shaped by different contexts as instances of uncertain cultural meaning in an attempt to make visible their position in society. Questions about who has the authority to interpret the Islamic scripts and of what is the true Islam currently dominates the agenda of Muslim women’s activists worldwide towards a re-reading of the Islamic texts and history so as to deconstruct ideas of womanhood in Islam. By deconstructing gendered Islamic discourse, these Muslim women participate in their own construction of identity. Feminist philosophers such as Elizabeth Grosz have, as a response, sought to articulate a corporeal feminism, where the female body is

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placed centre stage and recognized in all its difference as something both material and social. Grosz draws on a number of different philosophical influences to theorize a notion of sexed embodiment using as a model the Möbius strip – an inverted three-dimensional figure of eight. With the Möbius strip, like the body, according to Grosz, there is no clear distinction between inside and outside and instead a unity in which there is an inflection of mind into body and body into mind. She goes on to observe: The body is a most peculiar ‘thing’, for it is never quite reducible to being merely a thing; nor does it ever quite manage to rise above the status of thing. Thus, it is both a thing and a nonthing, an object, but an object which somehow contains or coexists with an interiority, an object able to take itself and others as subjects, a unique kind of object not reducible to other objects. Human bodies, indeed all animate bodies, stretch and extend the notion of physicality that dominates the physical sciences, for animate bodies are objects necessarily different from other objects; they are materialities that are uncontainable in physicalist terms alone. If bodies are objects or things, they are like no others, for they are centers of perspective, insight, reflection, desire, agency. (Grosz, 1994, p. xi)

Thus, the paradigm proposed for a renegotiation, a rethinking of bodymind dualism is the Möbius strip (a non-hierarchical scientific model), a figure in which one surface is twisted into another, inside becoming outside in a process of endless reversibility and transmutation. In her book Volatile Bodies (1994) she creates two categories: the Inside Out and Outside In. The ‘Inside Out’ approach includes psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories concerned with the psychical inscription and coding of the body and marks the inside of the Möbius surface. The ‘Outside In’ approach includes philosophical positions that focus on the body as a social object, as a text to be marked, traced and written upon by various regimes of institutional power in order to carve out a social subject capable of labor, of production and manipulation, marking the outside of the Möbius Strip. The body, thus, represents both our particular view of the world as well as our Being-in-the-world as stated by Martin Heidegger. (1962[1927]) She used this figure to capture and render the interaction between body and world, as it is the case of a youngster, for example, who gets a gang’s symbol tattooed on his/her arm – both the tattoo and the youngster's reason for getting tattooed tie their body to their social world. In these related ways, through our actions, our bodies – our selves – are seen as being intertwined with the world: we are in the world and the world is in us.

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Casting the Roles and Setting the Stage for the “Actors” of Our Script

Identity Studies emerged in the context of a set of political and social transformations (the collapse of the communist regimes, women liberation movement, ethnic conflicts, green parties, gay and lesbian movements, etc) and offer expression and self-realization to those marginalized. For example, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity is a feminist approach to identity theory where she argues against the biological notion of gender and sexual identity in favor of a performative one. Rejecting the fixed categories of “gay” or “lesbian” she becomes one of the leading theorists of queer theory, reinterpreted by the gay liberation movements of the 1960s and 1979s as a label of selfidentification. All approaches to identity need to be understood in their particular contexts, whether the focus is on race, class, ethnicity, so on… The emergence and importance of identity studies is fuelled by the pervasiveness of identity-related issues in society, different from one stage to another. Nowadays, the contemporary identity-related issues impinging on everyone’s lives are becoming of increasing importance and are scrutinized and researched by the European Union FIDIS project which has the following role: FIDIS is a multidisciplinary endeavour of 24 leading institutions from research, government and industry. Research from states with different cultures on e.g., the identification of citizens and ID cards is combined towards a well-founded analysis of High-Tech ID’s and Virtual Identities, considering aspects, such as, privacy, mobility, interoperability, profiling, forensics and identity related crime. [...] FIDIS is proud to contribute to the future of identity in Information Society, e.g., by shaping the requirements, definition, conception and development of specific security, trust and privacy technologies and infrastructures. This should help to enable a joint or at least a synchronised European approach for identity management. (Kai Rannenberg, Denis Royer, Andre Deuker – editors 2009: 5-6)

As a complex contemporary phenomenon and a field of study, identity touches many aspects of modern life with implications at various levels from personal to the social, with such challenges as virtual identities, which under the veil of pseudonymity and anonymity, much used and abused, feed back into the world offering a mixture of plural identities difficult to cope with, challenging traditional notions of identity. Used in a socio-historical approach identity refers to sameness related to a person’s connection to others and a particular group, defined by objective criteria as common ancestry and common biological characteristics whereas from a social constructionist approach, identity is

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no longer a natural given but carved by a political choice of certain characteristics. Today the word identity is mainly used with the meaning of social identity – standing for a certain social category, a group of people marked by specific features, certain rules regarding membership, having a specific label attached and the meaning of personal identity – expressing distinguishing characteristics important for a person, more or less unchangeable, having socially implied consequences. An implied link can be distinguished between social categories and an individual’s dignity, self-esteem. Although identity is an abstract concept, it can be made evident through language, behavior, manner of dress, choice of space and belonging, with which a group of people associate, identify and is recognized as such by the others. Sociology with its role-behavior concept views identity as a negotiation process between the individual, being encrusted in social roles he learns through personal experience, and society about the meaning of their identity, defining, thus, the social identity of the individual, his group membership. Social identity is the part of the self that is defined by one’s group memberships. Social identity theory, which was formulated by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, describes the conditions under which social identity becomes more important than one’s identity as an individual. As a social construct it implies variation, change over time as a result of human action, thinking and discourse, for, in a web of interrelations social identity constitutes personal identity. The content and rules of membership for a social category can be changed only through collective action that restructures beliefs and expectations and not by one individual’s will. The contextualization of identity within the framework of late modernity, modernism and postmodernism, reveals the shift in identity poetics from one stage to another – in the first stage, as a mark of unity, with a strong sense of belonging, of ethnic, religious, moral identity, of specific local culture entailing a sense of pride, of belonging, all those marks of distinction which transform identity into a trigger of action rooted in deep and powerful emotions. The rise of the nation states gave way to national identity. Margalit and Raz in their National Self-Determination published in the Journal of Philosophy no. 87 in 1990 argue that national identity is appealing as a locus for political rights precisely because it is typically a matter of birth rather than achievement and the good of self-respect is more reliably founded on something that cannot be taken away from us.

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Thus, actions can be motivated by reference to belonging to social categories and consequently, to identity. Explanation of actions by reference to social identity is an explanation in terms of social norms, shared beliefs, desires, habits, on the one hand, and of choice, on the other. It can help explain political actions and the fact that identities are socially constructed according to specific contexts. As we move towards the present under the influence of postmodernism along with globalization and multiculturalism, identity is embroidered in a different, very complex array of meanings. In the liquid modernity we inhabit, it becomes a focus point for anthropologists, scientists, historians, philosophers, humanities scholars... as they address and explore issues related to class, gender, race, sexuality, citizenship, virtual identity and many others raised and developed by the contemporary context. Identity is very difficult to grasp for the notion can cover elements of role identities – labels applied to people in certain situations, who act in a particular way in certain situations, according to consensual social roles and scripts, for example: professor, student, mother, father, a.s.o. or type identities – labels applied to people who share the same characteristics, same values, skills, opinions, experience and may or may not be permanent, referring to sexual identity, ethnic identity, so on. Psychology dwells mostly on personal identity and the characteristics that make a person unique. What does it mean to be who you are? – that is a central question in identity theory. Identity (self-views) relates to our basic values that determine the choices we make in relationships, career, so on. The meaning of an identity includes expectations for the self, about how one should behave. However, few people choose their identities. Instead, they simply internalize the values of their parents or the dominant cultures. People also have many identities as they belong to different networks of organized relationships. For example, a person may hold various identities such as a teacher, father, or friend. Each role or position has its own meanings and expectations that are internalized as identity. In postmodernism, the individual plays his part in social interaction and the construction of identity caught in the web of personal choices, of whom and what to associate with. Postmodernism brings into question the modern construct of coherent, separate individuals or selves who act, think independently of all other individuals. Postmodernism replaced the modern concept of individuality with hybridity, diversity, multiculturalism and globalization. Caught up in a web of relationships and connections people develop many, often conflicting parts, more than one way of being, according to different contexts, cultures, and sets of ideas (and/or between the different

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parts of themselves), they think differently and behave differently in relation to others. They have to adapt and adjust themselves to the dynamics of the world they inhabit. They know that there are different rules of conduct in different contexts, that they are constructed – and can construct themselves – differently, in these different contexts, and that they perform better in some contexts than in others. Thus, they build up their identity, which becomes a process and make use of it as it suits different contexts. They have, not one core, permanent self, but many selves. Their self – and their identity – are not fixed, but continually in process, as the boundaries between themselves and others, and between the different parts of themselves are negotiated. Charles Taylor has a solid ground to explain identity in his Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity as follows: “But in fact our identity is deeper and more many-sided than any of our possible articulations of it.” (Taylor 1982: 29) Anthony Elliott (Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies) comes up with a more comprehensive perspective: If value, meaning and signification reside at the level of both the individual self and the social network, then, there is a sense in which identity is at once psychological and sociological. Social theory, as an interdisciplinary enterprise of social sciences and humanities, has long been attuned to this doubled aspect of identity and has consistently sought to confront this dilemma through the analysis of the dualities of action and structure, subject and system. From many social theorists, from George Simmel to Anthony Giddens the answer to the question “What is identity?” would be something like this: “An enigmatic paradox!” The paradox concerns the complex ways in which identity wraps together subjectivity and objectivity. [...] On the one hand, it can be said that the individuals go about the daily business of forging, reproducing and transforming their identities primarily through the deployment of subtle social skills, emotional receptions to others and interpersonal relationships and intricate understandings of the world around them. On the other hand, however, individuals can only make and remake their identities by virtue of the fact that they are embedded in, and supported by, hugely complex and highly technical systems. From automobilities to aeromobilities, from digital technologies to global finance: the “identity” of any human agent acting in the world is intricately interwoven with the complex technical systems – administrative, technological, financial, governmental – of modern societies. [...] Identity, in this sense, is certainly subjectively fabricated, but it is shot through and through with technologies of the social. (Elliott 2011: xv)

Set against such a complex background, identity can only be studied through interdisciplinary approaches including psychology and psychiatry,

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Casting the Roles and Setting the Stage for the “Actors” of Our Script

as well as political sciences, sociology and poetics, in recognition and acceptance that the postmodern turn has made identity somehow problematic, a phenomenon reflective of its context: a plural, unstable, fragmentated, situationally enacted, a locus for contestation, a puzzle and a chameleon-like.

PART ONE FAIRY TALES AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY IN MODERNISM

Modern philosophers of the Kantian school looked upon imagination as the power to create a world of original value and truth. By pouring their imagination into narratives, such as fairy tales, human beings construct, shape their own identity, out of personal and communal experience, desires and expectations. Fairy tales as the playground of the imagination is a reminder that history is never complete, that there is always room for more possibilities. To reveal the construction of identity in modernism, the focus is on the fairy tales’ importance as a mark of national identity rooted in the context of two countries, Bessarabia and Ireland, in their struggle for national identity. As carriers of tradition into modernism, fairy tales had retained some of the distinguishing features of folklore: oral dissemination, performance, and social uses, which enabled them to absorb and reflect change. Fairy tales are considered to be expressive of a people’s national character. They embed the nation’s Self. By being written down rather than passed on by word of mouth, the oral tradition bridged the gap between a remote past and modernity, helping us to understand its present relation to the literary stories of our own civilization. They point to the foundation, roots of tradition, to the absorption by tradition of many features of the life by which it is surrounded, or to the absorption of some great historical events. The tales embed a rich history of culture and human desires. Fairy tales present basic truths about human experience, truths that have been handed down from generation to generation, from storytellers to audiences for centuries. These tales focus on archetypal human themes of family, good versus evil, love, etc. The functions of fairy tales in society and culture are multiple. They can work to uncover cultural trends, psychological aspects, and moral values of the people who told them, as well as illustrate social expectations and norms in a particular group of people. The cultural details, the flavour of the stories, the characters’ mindset carry the blueprint of the specific

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time intervals and traditions of the people who passed these stories on from one generation to another. The fairy tale also has a specific function in the lives of those who tell and those who listen (the storyteller and the listeners), in different lands and different times, as an important element of culture, with a specific spiritual value. Myth and fairy tales are socially significant, because they allow people to represent elements of their inner selves into stories, out of a need for verbalization and action, a move from inner to outer worlds. As Jack Zipes writes in The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre: Indeed, the world of the fairy tale has always been created as a counterworld to the reality of the storyteller by the storyteller and listeners. Together, storytellers and listeners have collaborated through intuition as well as conscious conception to form worlds filled with naive morality. Fundamental to the feel of a fairy tale is its moral pulse. It tells us what we lack and how the world has to be organized differently so that we receive what we need. (Zipes 2012:14).

Fairy tales offer hope that we can change ourselves while changing the world. Most modern fairy tales reveal a subject and the hierarchical structure of a society’s representations and the positions held by the subject within that society, giving sway to ideologies that legitimate and maintain social practices and institutions, unveil contradictions, the unequal distribution of power and leave room for the conscious and unconscious drives, needs, desires, expectations…to be fulfilled. Sometimes, individual desires merge into collective ideals shared by a whole community. Moreover, biologists and psychologists writing around the turn of the twentieth century disseminated theories about racial or ethnic specificity, and even aestheticians, such as Wilhelm Worringer, extolled the merits of primitive cultures in producing non-realist, abstract configurations, expressing primitive man’s fears and anxiety before the show of a world he could not understand, let alone control, rather than fulfilling a mimetic function of faithfully reproducing the image of that world. No wonder artists turned to folk artefacts and narratives for inspiration and for the truthful portrayal of a people’s soul. Both Queen Elizabeth, the wife of King Charles I of Romania, writing fairy tales under the pen name Carmen Silva, and Queen Mary, Queen Victoria’s niece, used to dress in Romanian folk costumes as a token of their allegiance to the Romanian people whose sovereigns they had become through dynastic alliances. Even the “credentials” of the newly

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unified Romanian state took the form of folk tales or legendary – instead of historical – narratives of the making of the nation and of the great leaders: The link between culture and nationhood is even more explicit in the Preface written by E.B. Mawr for her collections of Roumanian Fairy Tales and Legends published in 1881. The new political identity acquired by the united principalities under Carol I (Karl Eitel Friedrich, Prinz Von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen) in 1866 had drawn upon itself the attention of the big powers in Europe. Mawr is looking for the cultural narratives legitimating the new kingdom, associating politics and textuality, great rulers of the country’s past – Brâncoveanu and Stephen the Great – and their literary representations: [...]The fabled founders are seen by Mawr to be as important as the historical ones, the contents of her collection including Manioli, A Legend of the 13th Century. A people’s identity is also defined, according to Mawr, in concert with other nations, her book of Analogous Proverbs in Ten Languages coming out in 1885. (Barna 2018: 5)

At a time defined by the period term “modernism” the fairy tales published in support of the national fight for independence by William Butler Yeats (Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry) and Simion Teodorescu–Kirileanu (Bessarabean Fairy Tales) were perceived as marks of national identity. Irish specificity served Yeats to claim the nation’s exit out of British rule, while Teodorescu-Kirileanu was trying to prove, on the contrary, the unity of language and imagination on either side of the Prut River, which was a powerful argument for Moldavia’s exit out of the Russian rule and union with the Romanian State. The return to folklore as support for national movements in their fight for independence and shaping of identity originated in Herder’s philosophy of nationalism which stated that each historical age evolves naturally from the preceding one, that each nation has its own cultural pattern and “contains the centre of happiness within itself” (Herder apud Ergang 1966: V, 509) and should be master of its own destiny. He goes on to assert that each nation has a unique, independent culture type with specific national features: which are so deeply implanted in the oldest peoples, unmistakably manifest themselves in all their activities on earth. As a spring derives its component parts, its operative powers, and its flavour from the soil through which it flows, so the ancient characters of nations arose from family traits, from the climate, from the way of life and education [for Herder education and tradition were synonymous], from the early transactions and deeds peculiar to them. The customs of the fathers took deep root and became the

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Part One internal prototypes of the race. (Herder apud Ergang 1966: XIV, 84) for there are no two nations the same, each nation having its own development laid down by nature and history and that “we do justice to no nation by forcing upon it a foreign pattern of learning.” proclaiming that “the most natural state is one people with one national character.” (Herder apud Ergang 1966: XIV,124-XIII, 384)

The national character of each people is reflected in its folklore as a carrier of tradition, representing its archives, its very soul. Setting the trend for collecting folklore, he started himself collecting folk poems in 1778 and 1779 publishing a great part of his collected poems in Volkslieder, retitled by his editors, after his death, Stimmen der Volker in Liedern. Thus, folklore as the irrational and creative force of the people with its revealed passion was set against the rationalism of the Enlightenment. Speaking of identity and moral topography in modernism, Charles Taylor remarks: Our modern notion of the self is related to, one might say constituted by a certain sense (or perhaps a family of senses) of inwardness. . . The unconscious is for us within, and we think of the depths of the unsaid, the unsayable, the powerful inchoate feelings and affinities and fears which dispute with us the control of our lives, as inner. (Taylor 1998: 111)

Fairy tales are, thus, viewed as networks of relationships embedded in time and space, constituted by causal emplotment. They produce meaning, are sense-making and enfold symbolic, institutional, material and cultural practices, as holders of historicity, relationality and identity. Fairy tales allow people to externalize their inner selves into narratives, or, as Jack Zipes puts it in his Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion: [...] the process of reading involves dislocating the reader from his/her familiar setting and then identifying with the dislocated protagonist so that a quest for the Heimliche or real home can begin. The fairy tale ignites a double quest for home (home=identity, my emphasis): one occurs in the reader’s mind and is psychological and difficult to interpret, since the reception of an individual tale varies according to the background and experience of the reader. The second occurs within the tale itself and indicates a socialisation process and acquisition of values for participation in a society where the protagonist has more power of determination. This second quest for home can be regressive or progressive depending on the narrator’s stance vis-a-vis society. In both quests the notion of home or Heimat, which is closely related etymologically to heimlich and unheimlich, retains a powerful progressive attraction for readers of fairy tales. While the uncanny setting and motifs of the fairy tale already open us

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up to the recurrence of primal experiences, we can move foreward at the same time because it opens up to what Freud calls ’unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in fantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will. (Zipes 2006: 174).

Under the veil of enchantment, fairy tales actually take “roots” in the metanarratives- master narrative of their period; in Modernism: the priority of imaginative perception over objective reality, the determining role of the collective unconscious over the individual mind, the fall of dynastic alliances and the rise of nationalism; in Postmodernism: the fall of totalitarian societies, the triumph of liberty and human rights, the holistic philosophy of science, the emergent and non-linear view of phenomena which acted as a battery of change in identity poetics. In his Essay on Human Understanding – On Identity and Diversity, John Locke relates identity to consciousness rather than to some substantial substratum: Self is that conscious thinking thing, — whatever substance made up of, (whether spiritual or material, simple or compounded, it matters not) — which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends. Thus, every one finds that, whilst comprehended under that consciousness, the little finger is as much a part of himself as what is most so. Upon separation of this little finger, should this consciousness go along with the little finger, and leave the rest of the body, it is evident the little finger would be the person, the same person; and self then would have nothing to do with the rest of the body. As in this case it is the consciousness that goes along with the substance, when one part is separate from another, which makes the same person, and constitutes this inseparable self: so, it is in reference to substances remote in time. (Locke 1979: web).

Although there has been of late a keen interest in theorizing about issues addressed in identity formation studies, such as social action, social agency, meaning, and, more recently, individual and collective identity, scholars have paradoxically kept approaches to fairy tales from this perspective at a distance. Fairy tales as identity narratives bridge the gap between sciences and humanities, linking identity and action research to narrative analysis. Through fairy tales, life itself becomes a story; such narratives guide action and construct identities, locating as being located; in such stories people make sense of the world they live in, and integrate this world into

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stories, tales, thereby constructing “experience”. Brought together, the two concepts of Fairy Tales and Identity can offer a new perspective upon the social theories of action. Fairy tales are seen as a “tool” in shaping identity. It is identity narratives that account for the way people act out their social roles or scripts, writing them into existence as “markers” of identity.

Case Study: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1983) by William Butler Yeats The use of Celtic mythology as a carrier of tradition and reification of the past becomes the foundation for the construction of Irish identity. An Irish identity caught in-between: the difficulties of contemporary history, the binarisms of Protestant and Catholic, loyalist and republican, unionist and nationalist, Englishspeaking and Irish-speaking, colonizer and colonized, could be annealed in the enculturation of Irish-sounding names of the land, and in an appeal to a pre-historical notion of Celtism, which ante-dated the political, ideological, and linguistic bifurcations which proved to be problematic. (O’Brien web: 26)

A number of books helped promoting the pre-Christian, pre-historical version of the past, among which: Charlotte Brook’s Reliques of Irish poetry: consisting of heroic poems, odes, elegies and songs, translated into English verse; Charles O’Connor’s Dissertations on the ancient history of Ireland; Sylvester O’Halloran’s A general history of Ireland, from the earliest accounts to the close of the twelfth century; J. C. Walker’s Historical memoirs of the Irish bards and James Macpherson’s An introduction to the history of Great Britain and Ireland, and The poems of Ossian. All of them stand proof of the Celtic tradition of Ireland upon which much of the literature of the second Celtic revival was built with Yeats as an energetic contributor. W.B. Yeats a major modernist poet and a collector of folklore responded to the intellectual and political crises of his times: the rise of Darwinism, his interest in spiritualism and the occult, the varieties of nationalism, the wars and political turmoil in Ireland and Europe in the early twentieth century. It was the period when Ireland engaged in its war of independence and its civil war, events that featured in, and influenced, his poetry. Yeats witnessed the emergence of the Irish Free State, in which he served as a Senator, and the consolidation, in stressful circumstances, of Irish independence during the 1920s and 1930s. Yeats came to believe that

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nationality and literature go hand in hand. Literature was seen as a device to be employed in order to advance the national cause, as national identity is rooted both in the land and in language perceived as culture. Highly aware of the interconnectedness of poetics and politics, that is between literature and nationalism, a nation’s narratives and its identity, his writings became infused with Irish mythology, landscape and peasantry as the locus of the true Irish spirit, as he, himself asserted: “[...] there is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without [...] literature.” (Yeats 1970: 103-104) His aesthetic nationalism with its political dimension becomes a form of resistance opposing to colonial oppression the cultural self-valorization of the Irish people. Thus, on the way out from oppression under the British rule to the emergence as a free state, cultural nationalism weighed heavily along with political nationalism. Cultural nationalism formed a distinctive national movement with a clear focus on the moral regeneration of the people and a basis for its future, a development forging identity in moments of social and political crisis with return to myths, legends, and customs pointing to a remote past hidden in the collective imaginary so as to strengthen national pride. Yeats’ idea of the nation overlaps with that of Ernest Renan from his Nation and Narration: A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form [...] The nation, like the individual, is the culmination of a long past of endeavours, sacrifice and devotion. Of all cults, that of the ancestors is the most legitimate, for the ancestors have made us what we are. A heroic past, great men, glory that is the social capital upon which one bases a national idea.” (Renan 1990:19)

It was on this very embodiment of the nation, on the continuity between past and present, cultural unity, history and identity that Yeats grounded his national project determined by the historical moment, a moment in which Ireland needed national unity rather than diversity or as Yeats would say in his poem The Coming of Wisdom with Time: “Though the leaves are many, the root is one” so as to gather strength to emerge from under the British rule and free itself from all forms of colonial suppression.

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Yeats was a political nationalist, participating in Irish politics and later becoming senator and a cultural nationalist, as well, forging a present and a future for his country based on its traditions, some of which are reflected in his writings. He was committed and believed in the regeneration of his nation via a return to its creative powers, in the evolving Gaelic civilization of its recent past making use of the English language, as in an ironic attempt to turn the tables upon it. He found the creative powers of the imagination and his starting point with folklore in the Western part of Ireland where he discovered a large corpus of myths, legends, customs and ancient beliefs encrusted in the rural life there, which later will become his collections of folklore and reflected in all his writings. His engagement with folklore was influenced by two encounters: with John O’Leary (a Fenian returned from exile with the purpose of restoring Irish pride and self-respect) and Douglas Hyde in his struggle to save Irish folk culture from extinction. All these circumstances led Yeats further to the study of folklore as an opportunity for the creation of a national literature based on tradition, folklore becoming a major part in the Irish literary revival. All this imagery related to the past, myths and legends was extended into his poetry. Such poems as Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea, An Irish Airman Forsees his Death, Easter 1916 are proof thereof, and so is his collection The Rose based on Gaelic legends, especially The Cuchulain sage and the tales of the Fianna. His nostalgia for the old Ireland surfaces in all his poetry, for, he believed in a literature rooted in origins, heritage, passion, otherwise literature would become shallow, a mere chronicle of circumstances and empty fantasies. As Anthony Bradley says in Imagining Ireland in the Poems and Plays of W.B. Yeats: One might argue that Yeats’ (and James Joyce's) modernism comes as much from the Irish colonial experience of fragmentation and discontinuity as it does from a sense of the twentieth-century crisis of European culture. Throughout his career, it is, in the main, the dialectical relation between the Ireland of Yeats’ mind, and the actual Ireland he inhabited, between nation and state, as well as other forms of the ideal and real, which drives Yeats’ poetry and play. (Bradley 2011: 3)

Often thought of as the key literary voice of the Irish independence movement, his poetry reflects a political identity which galvanizes struggle and sacrifice. Yeats supported the idea that part of Ireland’s future must come from its past, from its traditions.

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Fairy and Folk Tales of Ireland combines two books of Irish folklore collected and edited by William Butler Yeats: Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry and Irish Fairy Tales. As the critic Benedict Kiely remarks about this collection: In this delightful gathering of legend and song, the familiar characters of Irish myth come to life: the fairies, as ready to make mischief as to do good; the solitary and industrious Lepracaun and his dissipated cousin, the Cluricaun; the fearsome Pooka, who lives among ruins and has ‘grown monstrous with much solitude’ and the Banshee, whose eerie wailing warns of death. More than an ambitious and successful effort to preserve the rich heritage of his native land, this volume confirms Yeats’s conviction that imagination is the source of both life and art. (Yeats, Kiely: 1998)

As Benedict Kiely observes in its foreword, Yeats was seeking “not for the meaning of any mystery but for what he had already determined to find: a world of the imagination, a world that fed on dreaming and not on the painted toy of grey truth.” (Yeats, Kiely: 1998: xi) Fairy tales caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticeable in his day. In the editor’s view: “these folk-tales are full of simplicity and musical occurrences, for they are the literature of a class for whom every incident in birth, love, pain, and death has remained unchanged for centuries: who have steeped everything in the heart, to whom everything is a symbol.” (Yeats, Kiely 1998: xi) Yeats believed fairies, the “little people” to be not just an expression of the imagination of the people, but manifestations of the “universal mind”. He devoted to this thesaurus a whole book, The Celtic Twilight, later incorporated into a larger volume, Mythologies. In this book, he makes use of folklore and turns it into poetry using the language that ordinary people would use, but it is undoubtedly Yeats’. Yeats saw, believed in and reflected the connection between art and politics in his writings. With his poetry he aimed at educating his readers about Irish cultural history and bringing about a change in his search for national identity, which had been impaired by the British rule. His early compilation of folklore sought to teach a literary history that had been suppressed by the British rule, and his early poems were odes to the beauty and mystery of the Irish countryside. His work frequently integrated references to myths and mythic figures. Yeats believed that art could both educate and form a sense of the Self. Thus, folklore became the source of inspiration for the idea of nationalism and the romantic nationalist movements engaging to support it. Nationalism as well as identity are very complex terms resisting clear-cut definitions. Carlton J.H. Hayes explains

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nationalism as “a fusion of patriotism with a consciousness of nationality” (Hayes 1960: 2), while nationality, he further explains, is “a group of people who speak either the same language or closely related dialects, who cherish common historical tradition, and who constitute or think they constitute a distinct cultural society.” (Hayes 1926:5) Romantic nationalism, rooted in Herder’s philosophy, was built on passion and instinct instead of reason and moreover, it was the building of nations on the traditions and myths of the past, on folklore because folk stories and poetry are a reflection of the socio-cultural pattern they originated in and this meant a return to peasantry, the class that had remained untouched by foreign influences. That was why Yeats and his peers saw their creation and traditions as the vital ground of the resurrection of culture. Yeats’ starting point in the revival of Irish folklore was a rural community in the West of Ireland. In order to regain their national soul, the Irish had to return to the point where their native traditions had been “broken” by foreign influences, that is a pre-Britain time, before colonization. Irish folklore and traditions had been shadowed, to the verge of extinction, by church doctrine and the British control of the educational system. Yeats used his writings to promote the Irish heritage and as a strategy for awakening Irish pride and nationalism. Apart from being a collector and recorder of Irish folklore, he refurbished entire folktales in epic poems and plays, such as The Wanderings of Oisin and The Death of Cuchulain, and used fragments of stories in shorter poems, such as The Stolen Child, which is cast into a parable of fairies luring a child away from his home, and Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea, which presents a fragment from an epic where the Irish folk hero Cuchulain battles his longlost son. Most of his poems are rooted in symbols, topics, images, and themes from folklore. Most importantly, Yeats’ poetry was about Irish culture. Even poems that do not deal explicitly with subjects from myth retain traces of Irish culture. Yeats often borrowed words, expressions, verse form and patterns of imagery directly from traditional Irish myth and folklore. Fairy tales evoke very strongly the spirit of the druids, who felt that all natural things contain the divine. In counter distinction from the fairy tales of mainland Europe (such as H.C. Anderson’s and Brothers Grimm’s fairy tales about godmothers, wicked stepmother and talking animals), the Irish fairy tales deploy a different array of characters: mischievous supernatural creatures, fairies, heroic warriors, dead gods – all of them being rooted in the Celtic culture of Ireland depicting ancient warrior myths, romance and tragedies and strongly asserting the belief in the supernatural.

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The fairy tales show the use of regionalisms, archaisms, simple phrasing, so as to preserve their authenticity. They give expression to the spirit of a whole nation, the human kind coming into its own. The fairy tale Owney and Owney-na-peak relates of peaceful times when Ireland had kings of her own, long before colonial rule, then (in illo tempore) being a time of spiritual unity, of freedom, a world recaptured and kept alive in the minds and the soul of the people. The fairy world mixes up with the human world, fairies and humans share the same landscape which allows of their encounter. Fairies are respected and feared, and the places where they live (mountains, green hills, trees, paths, etc.) are avoided so as not to disturb them, for some of them are scary beings, offering proof of their brutality, a source of melodrama in the Irish supernatural. Yeats’ reliance on fairy tales, tradition, and heroic figures of the past to rewrite Irish cultural history and turn the tables upon the stereotyped and denigrating representation of the Irish character and culture as seen by the British and exemplified by the historian Charles Kingsley’s statement in 1860 quoted in G. J. Watson’s (1979) Irish Identity and the Literary Revival: Synge, Yeats, Joyce and O’Casey: I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw along those hundred miles of horrible country. I don’t believe they are our fault. I believe there are not only many more of them than of old, but that they are happier, better and more comfortably fed and lodged under our rule than they ever were. But to see white chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much, but their skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours.” (Watson 1979: 16-17)

Revealing the rural space of traditions, beliefs, heroic figures and supernatural Yeats spiritualises Ireland and turns it into a counterpoint of the English industrialised metropolitan space reinforcing his anti-colonial statement. Old Biddy Hart, one of the Irish storytellers in Yeats’ collection, is a proof of how the Irish still believe in fairies: “How firmly she believed in them! How greatly she feared offending them! For a long time, she would give me no answer but ‘I always mind my own affairs and they always mind theirs’” (Yeats 1892:2) comments Yeats at the beginning of his collection. He goes on to say: “She did not forget, however, to remind me to say after we had finished, 'God bless them, Thursday' (that being the day), and so ward off their displeasure, in case they were angry at our notice, for they love to live and dance unknown of men” (Yeats 1892: 3). The fairies and their realm are treasured in the people’s imagination and soul as a mark of their spirituality, well guarded, which no one can

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take away, as other assets had been taken away during the colonization process. Fairy tales stand as a mark of unity, of connection with the nation’s fundamental values, with the natural world, with the roots of a people, and that is what has been preserved through fairy tales. They stand for everything Irish people had wanted to regain for centuries: their freedom, their own: Her news about the creatures is always quite matter-of-fact and detailed, just as if she dealt with any common occurrence [...] They are, to her, people not so different from herself, only grander and finer in every way. [...] Heaven and Fairyland - to these has Biddy Hart given all she dreams of magnificence, and to them her soul goes out – to the one in love and hope, to the other in love and fear - day after day and season after season; saints and angels, fairies and witches, haunted thorn-trees and holy wells, are to her what books, and plays, and pictures are to you and me. (Yeats 1892:3,6).

At the beginning of his collection Yeats wonders rhetorically: Do you think the Irish peasant would be so full of poetry if he had not his fairies? Do you think the peasant girls of Donegal, when they are going to service inland, would kneel down as they do and kiss the sea with their lips if both sea and land were not made lovable to them by beautiful legends and wild sad stories? Do you think the old men would take life so cheerily and mutter their proverb, 'The lake is not burdened by its swan, the steed by its bridle, or a man by the soul that is in him,' if the multitude of spirits were not near them? (Yeats 1892:7)

He is thus effectively persuading us, the readers, into pondering, recognizing and accepting the importance of fairy tales as a part of Irish history, spirituality, culture, identity, national character. Yeats attempts to de-anglicize Ireland by writing about Irish themes in English, well aware of the fact that the ideas carried through the medium of language are more important than the language itself. What the Irish people needed to retrieve was repossession of their very Irishness. He wonders: Is there, then, no hope for the de-Anglicizing of our people? Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation’s life, not by trying to do what Dr. Hyde has practically pronounced impossible, but by translating and retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style,

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all that is best in the ancient literature? Can we not write and persuade others to write histories and romances of the great Gaelic men of the past, from the son of Nessa to Owen Roe, until there has been made a golden bridge between the old and the new? (Yeats 1970: 255)

His entire work: poems, plays, novellas, fairy tales enter into a dialogue with each other to give us the entire picture of his full commitment to his Ireland and his desire to empower Ireland again with the self-confidence it had possessed in the old times when the national sense of identity was deeply rooted in Irish folklore. His wish for a revolutionary change through culture to soften the Irish hearts and strengthen their minds is well mirrored in his entire work, especially his poetry. A post-romantic poet in his grasp of nationalism rooted in traditions and folklore, Yeats wanted to instill in his readers a feeling of pride for their origins, an urge for his countrymen to look inwards for there lays their true Self. In his search for the true Irish Self (Identity), he made his poetry distinctly Irish, the myths and fairy tales of Old Ireland opening a window for a better understanding of his writings. The emancipation of the Irish myths, legends, and folk tales into high culture is meant to support Ireland’s independence and to reveal and praise its Irishness: a culture with its own traditions, spirituality, so very distinct from the English one. Actually, all his works are born of an Irish “structure of feeling”, to use Raymond Williams’s phrase for Foucault’s episteme, especially The Wanderings of Oisin, The Rose, The Wind Among the Reeds, and Under Ben Bulben. The Wanderings of Oisin is based on Irish mythology, presenting a dialogue between Oisin, the aged Irish hero and Saint Patrick, the one traditionally responsible for converting Ireland to Christian religion. Most of the poem is spoken by Oisin, relating his three-hundred-year journey to the Isles of faeries. At the moment he found a spear washed up on the shore, he grew sad, remembering Fenians and his times there. Oisin then desired to return to Ireland to see his comrades. Niamh, his fairy-wife, lent him her horse warning him that he must not touch the ground, or he would never return. Back in Ireland, Oisin, still a young man, found his warrior companions dead, and Patrick's Christianity displacing Ireland’s pagan faith. Oisin describes his wanderings and his heroic deeds, creating a sharp contrast between his noble deeds and the degenerate weakness of the present generation. In his attempt to help two men who were trying hard to carry a sack full of sand, he touched the ground, becoming three hundred years old instantaneously. In mythology, Oisin is the son of Finn, the king of the Fianna of Ireland and seen as Ireland’s royal prince in its oldest

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tradition and Tir-na-n-Og or the Realm of the Young, an enchanted afterworld, where he lived for three hundred years among the fairies (seen as deities) and which appears only at the outbreak of national trouble, Oisin’s return to his motherland being interpreted as a call for the rise of a nationalist movement. The poem reflects on Yeats’s attempt to bring to the surface the roots, the very essence of Irishness which relies on its tradition, its past: the glory of the Fenians and the timeless story of a culture and land lost in time. The core motif – the fatal attempt of otherworldly beings to get back into historical time – is also present in Walter Map’s story of Herla, King of the Romanized Celts, included in De Nugis Curialium. Walter Map was a courtier of King Henry II of the Plantagenet dynasty, and although pretty critical of the royal court, he was one of those who served it. King Herla is invited to the wedding of a sly pigmy-king, and upon return, he realizes that he has returned two hundred years later and that all those he used to know are now dead and even that another language is spoken in the land. If he and his retinue were to dismount, they would drop dead, so they ride away ending up in the Wye River. As water is the symbol of revival, their immersion into it may be an allegory of the revival of the Celtic world in the romances and lays of the Angevin Court under Henry II and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine. (Tupan 2015: 11-23). The revival of the Celtic world is also the hidden agenda underwriting the return to the Celtic mythical past attempted by W.B. Yeats and the rest of the Irish intelligentsia contributing to what came to be known as the “Celtic Revival”. In his collection of the same title, The Rose becomes a symbol for Ireland and its people whom Yeats is trying to resurrect as in To the Rose upon the Rood of Time: Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days! Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways: Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide; The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed [...] Come near, come near, come near – Ah, leave me still A little space for the rose-breath to fill! [...] Come near; I would, before my time to go, Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways (Yeats 1991: 21)

He urged his readers to listen to his story and pay attention to its message intended for them to decipher, understand and feel:

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But seek alone to hear the strange things said By God to the bright hearts of those long dead, And learn to chant a tongue men do not know. (Yeats 1991: 21)

It is as if he was trying to reverse the loss of land and language experienced by the Celts – conquered by the Romans, driven to the west by the incoming Anglo-Saxon tribes and colonized by the Normans – as allegorized in Map’s legend of King Herla. According to W. B. Yeats, whether in the symbolist, imagist or high modernist phase of his career, a true sense of Irishness could be revived and preserved only by awakening the latent content of the collective imaginary, its mystical, old, pre-English roots, as stated in the poem To Ireland in the Coming Times: Know, that I would accounted be True brother of a company That sang, to sweeten Ireland’s wrong, Ballad and story, ran and song. (Yeats 1991: 38)

Thus, his writing infused with national pride is his legacy for the Irish people, for their cultural advancement. But, to go further, one needs to look back upon the roots: For the elemental creatures go About my table to and fro . . . Man ever journeys on with them After the red-rose-bordered hem. Ah, faeries, dancing under the moon, A Druid land, a Druid tune! (Yeats 1991: 39)

It was to the Druidic, pre-Christian world of faeries and individual freedom that the Irish people needed to return in order to gain strength for the future. The purpose of his toil and writing is made clear at the end of the poem: the advancement of the national cause of Ireland:

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While still I may, I write for you The love I lived, the dream I knew . . . I cast my heart into my rhymes, That you, in the dim coming times, May know how my heart went with them After the red-rose-bordered hem. (Yeats 1991: 39)

Another collection of poems relevant for his search of a true and independent Ireland is The Wind Among the Reeds which is casting the image of the wandering hero. In the poem The Song of Wandering Aengus, the hero, Aengus, is in search of his true love, a young woman, a beautiful faerie, who embodies Yeats’ romantic idea of Ireland. The poem opens with: I went out to the hazel wood, Because a fire was in my head, And cut and peeled a hazel wand (Yeats 1991: 45)

The rich symbolism in the hazel wand, the hazel tree being an Irish symbol for Knowledge and life. Again, the search for knowledge, tradition, to lay the foundation for the future, a search and a knowledge which must continue, never to be given up: Though I am old with wandering Through hollow lands and hilly lands I will find where she has gone . . . And pluck till time and times are done The silver apples of the moon, The golden apples of the sun (Yeats 1991: 45)

Aengus, the wandering hero is actually Yeats’ alter ego. His plea for the search of the true Irishness, which goes beyond the surface of things, and the support and advancement of Irish nationalism is intended for the future artists of Ireland to carry on, as stated in the poem Under Ben Bulben. Perfection of form, an aesthetic ideal shared by all the fin-desiơcle artists, is not separated here from the other values, moral or political, which had been discarded by the decadents: Irish poets learn your trade Sing whatever is well made, Scorn the sort now growing up.

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All out of shape from toe to top, Their unrembering hearts and heads Base-born products of base beds. (Yeats 1991: 211)

He urges them to mould their art according to the true spirit of Ireland, found in its old days, in tradition, in folklore instead of shaping it as tamed by English norms: Cast your mind on other days That we in coming days may be Still the indomitable Irishry (Yeats 1991: 211)

Self-expressionism or the cult of art for its own sake did not satisfy Yeats; he was bent upon the redeeming of Ireland by creating its anti-mask of spirituality which alone could earn Ireland an unmistakable identity, as Timothy Webb suggests in his introduction to the Selected Poems of William Butler Yeats: Yeats was encouraged in his commitment by his own belief, that underneath the superficial coating of an imported culture, there was still an alternative set of values which could be identified specifically with Ireland and with the poetic imagination. The Irish exhibited an ‘energy of thought about life itself and in Ireland a poet could still turn for support to those ‘who still care, I think, for the high thoughts and high feelings of poetry, if in a somewhat uncultivated fashion’. In the west of Ireland Yeats had discovered that there existed ‘a people, a community bound together by imaginative possessions, by stories and poems which have grown out of its own life, and by a past of great passions which can still waken the heart of imaginative action’. (Webb 1991: xxxv)

Yeats firmly believed that the true Irish spirit could be awaken through appeal to tradition, to their heredity, to their true inner self in a sincere belief that Ireland’s future must come from its past. Thus, to regain its freedom, the Irish needed an inward look inside their own souls and within the confines of their national borders to rediscover their national identity and specificity as Yeats so poetically rendered it in the very title of the poem The Lake Isle of Innisfree (the metaphorical power of the symbolic name Innisfree in which he associates Innis, the Irish word for island with freedom). Yeats’ politics of aesthetic nationalism as a decolonizing endeavor seen as unity of culture and geography (the specificity of the Irish people, as located and belonging within the borders) was the founding principle of

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his national toil. The concept of culture and geography as coming together in the grounding of a struggle was also analyzed by Eduard Said in his Culture and Imperialism where he acknowledges that: “One of the first tasks of the culture of resistance, was to reclaim, to rename and reinhabit the land. And with that came a whole set of further assertions, recoveries, and identifications, all of them quite literally grounded in this poetically projected base.” (Said 1993: 273)

The fairy tales he collected were intended to be a reminder of the Irish roots and bring to the surface the true Irish spirit suppressed by the British rule, as Yeats himself states at the beginning of his collection Irish Fairy Tales: All the words that I gather, And all the words that I write, Must spread out their wings untiring, And never rest in their flight, Till they come where your sad, sad heart is, And sing to you in the night, Beyond where the waters are moving, Storm darkened or starry bright. (Yeats 1892: web)

The mythic history with its powerful symbolism were seen as the tool to revive national culture and build an identity. The remembrance of the old Gods and fairies turned folk stories and poems into anticolonial statements expressing what it felt like and looked like to be Irish more than a mere descriptive history, for, as Ellwood alleges, “a nation is not designated by boundaries, but by its stories; a nation is an idea the people have about themselves that is founded in their myths” (Ellwood 2008: 120) or as Yeats would have it, a “Unity of Being”, a “Unity of Culture”, a “Unity of Image”, the Great Memory or the Spiritus Mundi: Is there a nation-wide multiform reverie, every mind passing through a stream of suggestion, and all streams acting and reacting upon one another, no matter how distant the minds, how dump the lips? A man walked, as it were, casting a shadow, or how many shadows he cast. Was not a nation, as distinguished from a crowd of chance comers, bound together by this interchange among streams or shadows; the Unity of Image, which I sought in national literature, being but an originating symbol? (Yeats 1999: 263)

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He presented in his collected fairy tales the landscape of an Irish past swarming with warriors, kings and fairies. Many of the traditional beliefs and superstitions are rooted in the Celtic way of life standing for the richness and uniqueness of Irish culture. The classification of Irish fairies made by Yeats at the end of his collection Irish Fairy Tales is a proof of their importance in the Irish folklore and way of life. Standing for the battle between good and evil they fall into two classes: the sociable (the kind ones) who go about in troops and quarrel and make love, much as men and women do, are divided into land fairies or Sheoques (Ir. Sidheog, ‘a little fairy,’) and water fairies or Merrows (Ir. Moruadh, ‘a sea maid’; the masculine is unknown). (Yeats 1892: 223) The Sheoques described by Yeats are: the spirits that haunt the sacred thorn bushes and the green raths. All over Ireland are little fields circled by ditches, and supposed to be ancient fortifications and sheep-folds. These are the raths, or forts, or ‘royalties,’ as they are variously called. Here, marrying and giving in marriage, live the land fairies. Many a mortal they are said to have enticed down into their dim world. Many more have listened to their fairy music, till all human cares and joys drifted from their hearts and they became great peasant seers or ‘Fairy Doctors,’ or great peasant musicians or poets like Carolan, who gathered his tunes while sleeping on a fairy rath; or else they died in a year and a day, to live ever after among the fairies. These Sheoques are on the whole good; but one most malicious habit have they — a habit worthy of a witch. They steal children and leave a withered fairy, a thousand or maybe two thousand years old, instead. (Yeats 1892: 224- 225)

One of these Sheoques fairies is Even Trot in the fairy tale The Rival Kempers told by William Carleton. The story describes habits related to marriage in old times: “the north of Ireland there are spinning meetings of unmarried females frequently held at the houses of farmers, called kemps.” A kemp is, indeed, an animated and joyous scene, and one, besides, which is calculated to promote industry and decent pride. (Yeats 1982: 17) The fairy interferes with the chances in marriage of two girls influencing the outcome, helping the one who showed her hospitality according to Irish customs as described: “‘You appear to be tired, honest woman, an’ I think you had better eat a bit, an’ take a good drink of buinnhe ramwher (thick milk) to help you on your journey.’ ‘Thank you kindly, a colleen,’ said the woman; ‘I’ll take a bit, if you plase, hopin’, at the same time, that you won’t be the poorer of it this day twelve months.’

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Part One ‘Sure,’ said the girl, ‘you know that what we give from kindness ever an’ always leaves a blessing behind it.’ ‘Yes, acushla, when it is given from kindness.’ She accordingly helped herself to the food that Biddy placed before her, and appeared, after eating, to be very much refreshed.” (Yeats 1982: 22)

The fairy helped the girl win the kemp and the husband showing their positive influence upon those who respect the custom of hospitality and the interference of faeries in wordly affairs. The Merrows belong to the same category of good fairies, as stated by Yeats in his collection: These water fairies are said to be common. I asked a peasant woman once whether the fishermen of her village had ever seen one. ‘Indeed, they don’t like to see them at all,’ she answered, ‘for they always bring bad weather.’ Sometimes the Merrows come out of the sea in the shape of little hornless cows. When in their own shape, they have fishes’ tails and wear a red cap called in Irish cohuleen driuth. The men among them have, according to Croker, green teeth, green hair, pigs’ eyes, and red noses; but their women are beautiful, and sometimes prefer handsome fishermen to their greenhaired lovers. (Yeats 1892: 225-226)

An illustration of such an encounter with a water fairy is the fairy tale The Lady of Gollerus told by one Crafton Croker relating the story of Dick Fitzgerald and his wishes for marriage. Smoking his pipe at daybreak on the shore of Smerwick harbor he ponders: “I know this, that if I had the luck, or may be the misfortune,' said Dick, with a melancholy smile, 'to have the woman, it would not be this way with me! And what in the wide world is a man without a wife? He's no more surely than a bottle without a drop of drink in it, or dancing without music, or the left leg of a scissors, or a fishing-line without a hook, or any other matter that is no ways complete. Is it not so?'” (Yeats 1892: 78)

The intensity of his thoughts and his firm belief in superstitions make the two worlds: the supernatural and the real meet under the form of a “beautiful young creature combing her hair, which was of a sea-green color; and now the salt water shining on it appeared, in the morning light, like melted butter upon cabbage. Dick guessed at once that she was a Merrow, although he had never seen one before, for he spied the cohuleen driuth or little enchanted cap, which the sea people use for diving down into the ocean, lying upon the strand near her; and he had heard that, if once he could possess himself of the cap, she would lose the power of

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going away into the water: so he seized it with all speed...” (Yeats 1892: 79) By taking possession of the cap, he asserts his power over her and she, still a water fairy “'Twas in no particular an ugly hand, only there was a small web between the fingers, as there is in a duck's foot; but 'twas as thin and as white as the skin between egg and shell.” robbed of her powers (the cap) bids goodbye to her life under the water “bent down her head and whispered some words to the water that was close to the foot of the rock. Dick saw the murmur of the words upon the top of the sea, going out towards the wide ocean, just like a breath of wind rippling along and, says he, in the greatest wonder, 'Is it speaking you are, my darling, to the salt water?''It's nothing else,' says she, quite carelessly; 'I'm just sending word home to my father not to be waiting breakfast for me; just to keep him from being uneasy in his mind.'” (Yeats 1892: 83) He married the water fairy and lived according to the customs of marriage “Everything prospered with Dick – he was at the sunny side of the world; the Merrow made the best of wives, and they lived together in the greatest contentment. It was wonderful to see, considering where she had been brought up, how she would busy herself about the house, and how well she nursed the children.” (Yeats 1892: 87-88) Left alone and minding her business about the house she found her own cohuleen driuth reminding her of an old, forgotten way of life under the sea and she felt a longing to go back: “The sea was lying calm and smooth, just heaving and glittering in the sun, and she thought she heard a faint sweet singing, inviting her to come down. All her old ideas and feelings came flooding over her mind, Dick and her children were at the instant forgotten, and placing the cohuleen driuth on her head she plunged in.” (Yeats 1892: 90) She was never to return again. It was Yeats’ desire that his fairy tales become akin to the cohuleen driuth of the fairy, a trigger towards a way of life long forgotten, enchanted, with firm belief in customs, traditions and supernatural. It was this power of believing illustrated all over the fairy tales that Yeats wanted to bring back to his fellow countrymen and which had been suppressed under the British rule. By the example of his fairy tales, he wanted to restore this true, powerful sense of believing that there is still an Ireland of its own, with its traditions, customs, superstitions, desires, able to construct and reconstruct its future and identity. The motif of the encounter between mortals and immortals – to one of which the Celts owe the birth of their noble king Arthur – is running like a red thread through the Irish imaginary, the Arthurian matter having been searched and used as

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marks of identity by the colonizers as well: the Plantagenets who had themselves represented in the company of Arthur in the St George Oxford Chapel, who patronized the upsurge of Arthur in the medieval romances, and even in later times, when Prince Consort Albert was made by artists into an Arthur figure in the midst of the mid-nineteenth-century Gothic revival. The revival and the personal use of folk myth by Yeats symbolized the attempt to decolonize Arthur and the fairies, to get them back from usurpers. Their counterparts described by Yeats at the end of his collection are the solitary fairies (evil and full of uncharitableness). Among these are the Lepracaun, the Cluricaun whose occupations are robbing wine-cellars and riding sheep and shepherds’ dogs for a livelong night, until the morning finds them panting and mud-covered. The Far Darrig, the practical joker of the other world presiding over evil dreams as in the fairy tale A Fairy Enchantment told by Michael Hart relates his return from Dublin and encounter with some girls milking a cow who invite him to their house for food and some rest, as required by the custom of hospitability for travellers. To their astonishment, the girls vanish and two men come in carrying between them a corpse: “When I saw them, I hid behind the door. Says one to the other, ‘Who’ll turn the spit?’ Says the other, ‘Michael Hart, come out of that and turn the meat!’ I came out in a tremble and began turning the spit. ‘Michael Hart,’ says the one who spoke first, ‘if you let it burn, we will have to put you on the spit instead.’” (Yeats 1892: 50) The men came back after midnight and promised to do him no harm if he can tell a story which he agrees. The story teller remembers: “It was a wild, blowing night; never in all my born days did I see such a night – the darkest night that ever came out of the heavens. I did not know where I was for the life of me [...] and in the morning where was I but in the middle of a green field.” (Yeats 1892: 51) illustrating how spirits can also play practical jokes on people playing with their good fortunes. The Pooka of the devil, as Flann O’Brien would call him in his novel At Swim-Two-Birds, who induces bad dreams, is a spirit in the shape of a horse, a bull, a goat, an eagle, or an ass. His delight is to get a rider, whom he rushes through ditches and rivers and over mountains, and shakes off in the gray of the morning. Especially does he love to plague a drunkard: a drunkard’s sleep is his kingdom. At times he takes more unexpected forms than those of beast or bird. The Dullahan has no head, or carries it under his arm. Often, he is seen driving a black coach called coach-a-bower drawn by headless horses. It rumbles to your door, and if you open it a basin of blood is thrown in your face. It is an omen of death to the houses

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where it pauses. The Banshee is a sociable fairy grown solitary through much sorrow. She wails, as most people know, over the death of a member of some old Irish family. When more than one Banshee comes to cry, the man or woman who is dying must have been very holy or very brave. It was because of this diversity of fairies that Yeats classified his Fairy tales into those which involve land and water fairies, evil spirits and so on, as illustrated above, asserting once again their importance and people’s belief in them. In his 1888 introduction to the collection of Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry Yeats, asserts that they “have caught the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.” (Yeats 1888: xv) All the tales presented are bits of the Irish soul and beliefs that reside in the imaginary under the form of fairy tales voicing the innermost desires: “In dreams we go amongst them, and play with them, and combat with them. They are, perhaps, human souls in the crucible - these creatures of whim.” (Yeats 1888: 2) He presents the fairy realm with such wealth, in such vivid pictures, that it seems to have been part of a real way of life, known in detail, accepted and believed in. He describes them as if speaking of an old friend: Their chief occupations are feasting, fighting, and making love, and playing the most beautiful music. They have only one industrious person amongst them, the lepra-caun – the shoemaker. Perhaps they wear their shoes out with dancing. Near the village of Ballisodare is a little woman who lived amongst them seven years. When she came home, she had no toes – she had danced them off. They have three great festivals in the year – May Eve, Midsummer Eve, November Eve. On May Eve, every seventh year, they fight all round, but mostly on the "Plain-a-Bawn" (wherever that is), for the harvest, for the best ears of grain belong to them. An old man told me he saw them fight once; they tore the thatch off a house in the midst of it all. Had anyone else been near they would merely have seen a great wind whirling everything into the air as it passed. When the wind makes the straws and leaves whirl as it passes, that is the fairies, and the peasantry take off their hats and say, "God bless them." On Midsummer Eve, when the bonfires are lighted on every hill in honor of St. John, the fairies are at their gayest, and sometime steal away beautiful mortals to be their brides. On November Eve they are at their gloomiest, for, according to the old Gaelic reckoning, this is the first night of winter. This night they dance with the ghosts, and the pooka is abroad, and witches make their spells, and girls set a table with food in the name of the devil, that the fetch of their future lover may come through the window and eat of the food. After

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The narrative voice is ushering in a world engaged in ritualistic and customary practices, according to well-established rules and patterns, with no other interference than the supernatural. A good example thereof are the fairy doctors: The most celebrated fairy doctors are sometimes people the fairies loved and carried away, and kept with them for seven years; [...] Great is their knowledge of herbs and spells. These doctors, when the butter will not come on the milk, or the milk will not come from the cow, will be sent for to find out if the cause be in the course of common nature or if there has been witchcraft. Perhaps some old hag in the shape of a hare has been milking the cattle. Perhaps some user of "the dead hand" has drawn away the butter to her own chum. Whatever it be, there is the counter-charm. (Yeats 1888: 163)

Thus, faeries interfere with people’s lives teaching some chosen ones to become fairy doctors to the benefit of everyone. The ones to whom they impart their knowledge become very different people; Yeats’ collection of folk recordings contains the description of such a fairy doctor: "He never touched beer, spirits, or meat in all his life, but has lived entirely on bread, fruit and vegetables. [...] Winter and summer his dress is the same - merely a flannel shirt and coat. He will pay his share at a feast, but neither eats nor drinks of the food and drink set before him. He speaks no English, and never could be made to learn the English tongue, though he says it might be used with great effect to curse one's enemy. He holds a burial-ground sacred, and would not carry away so much as a leaf of ivy from a grave. And he maintains that the people are right to keep to their ancient usages, such as never to dig a grave on a Monday, and to carry the coffin three times round the grave, following the course of the sun, for then the dead rest in peace. Like the people, also, he holds suicides as accursed; for they believe that all its dead turn over on their faces if a suicide is laid amongst them. "'Though well off, he never, even in his youth, thought of taking a wife; nor was he ever known to love a woman. He stands quite

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apart from life, and by this means holds his power over the mysteries. No money will tempt him to impart his knowledge to another, for if he did he would be struck dead - so he believes. He would not touch a hazel stick, but carries an ash wand, which he holds in his hands when he prays, laid across his knees; and the whole of his life is devoted to works of grace and charity, and though now an old man, he has never had a day's sickness. No one has ever seen him in a rage, nor heard an angry word from his lips but once, and then being under great irritation, he recited the Lord's Prayer backwards as an imprecation on his enemy. Before his death he will reveal the mystery of his power, but not till the hand of death is on him for certain.'" When he does reveal it, we may be sure it will be to one person only -his successor. There are several such doctors in County Sligo, really well up in herbal medicine by all accounts, and my friends find them in their own counties. (Yeats 1888: 164)

It most certainly was a time when the spirit of Ireland was free to express itself and live according to its own rules of boundless imagination in a mix of worlds which bear witness to their strange encounters. The peasants are trying hard to favour the faeries and receive their help and acceptance as in the fairy tales The Rival Kempers, The Man Who Never Knew Fear and many others, and avoid what they hate. The communion between the Irish peasant and his faeries is reflected in his way of life; he lives according to their expectations: generous, fair and true to his promise so as not to upset them and attract their malice. Truthfulness in word and deed, hospitability is appreciated as it is the willingness to perform an act of kindness such as feeding a stranger, offering shelter, lending a measure of oatmeal, etc. A hospitable nature towards them is especially appreciated and rewarded, and of course, they expect appreciation for the gifts they bestow. Open, loving, free people are very dear to them as they are fond of cheerfulness, celebration and good fellowship. The appearance and persistence of fairies in stories, although the plots, details, and characters change (as fairies change too, their shape, size, temperament, good or bad) is a proof that the importance of myth at this level resides in the actors of these stories: the fairies and not in a particular story. Fairies, serious spirits, which are not to be made fun of, although present but invisible and powerful also stand as a metaphor for the Irish people who, almost invisible to colonizers, crushed and reduced to a marginal culture, but powerful if provoked. The idea that people (even if in rural areas) still believe in myth, was the continuity needed to reconnect the country to its pre-English world intended to be presented, for, as Herder argued, the need to return to the past where the native traditions had been interrupted, where the break had taken place and resume from there. The fairies are believed to be, according to Irish mythology, the

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descendents of the Tuath(a) Dé Danann, a race of supernaturally-gifted people in Irish mythology, representing the deities of Gaelic Ireland in preChristian times. Defeated in a battle with other otherworldly beings, and then by the ancestors of the Irish, they retreated into the Land of Youth – known as Tir na nOg the where they lived on in popular imagination as fairies. This Fairyland of Youth has been entered by only one man, the bard Oisin who has lived there with his fairy Niamh for three hundred years but when returning to look for his comrades he touched the ground and felt his three hundred years age, as described in Yeats’ poem The Wanderings of Oisin. Thus, living at the intersection of the two worlds, fairies were particularly attractive to Yeats as a metaphor of resistance to colonization and its suppression, thus, fairies seen as symbols of freedom, with a definable identity. As resulted from all his collected fairy tales, these mythical creatures became a powerful literal tool in the fight against colonization and a marker of identity in the way out from under the British rule, paving the way for new stages in history. All this openness of spirit and communion with the faeries was interrupted, broken by harsh events of history such as British rule with its impositions, suppression, remaining encapsulated in tales of the old, free Ireland preserving its spirit in folklore as it spins tales of magic, of marriage and birth, courageous deeds, death and life and all the quiet inbetween. It was with this return to the glorious past, tradition and national peasant culture (as the peasant and his fight for the possession of land is a symbol of true Ireland and its fight for freedom) that the country reached back to its foundations and forged its identity. The Legend of O’Donohue encapsulates the spirit of an Irish people faithful to their chieftain in a time when wisdom, justice, prosperity ruled over the country: In an age so distant that the precise period is unknown, a chieftain named O'Donoghue ruled over the country which surrounds the romantic Lough Lean, now called the lake of Killarney. Wisdom, beneficence, and justice distinguished his reign, and the prosperity and happiness of his subjects were their natural results. He is said to have been as renowned for his warlike exploits as for his pacific virtues; and as a proof that his domestic administration was not the less rigorous because it was mild, a rocky island is pointed out to strangers, called "O'Donoghue's Prison", in which this prince once confined his own son for some act of disorder and disobedience. (Yeats 1888: 218)

During one of his feasts at his court, this chieftain predicts the future of events in the ages to come, a course of events generating at the same time heroism, injuries, crimes, miseries while his subjects listened in wonder, indignation, shame or sorrow at the faith of their descendants.

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At one of those splendid feasts for which his court was celebrated, surrounded by the most distinguished of his subjects, he was engaged in a prophetic relation of the events which were to happen in ages yet to come. His auditors listened, now wrapt in wonder, now fired with indignation, burning with shame, or melted into sorrow, as he faithfully detailed the heroism, the injuries, the crimes, and the miseries of their descendants. (Yeats 1888: 218)

As if burdened and disappointed by his own prophecies, in the midst of his predictions he rose and walked towards the shores of the lake nearby and on the surface of the lake till he reached its centre, turned and bid farewell to his friends and disappeared from their view; such was the end, for it cannot be called death, of O’Donoghue, who at sunrise on every May-day morning (the anniversary of his departure) revisits his ancient domains: “a favored few only are in general permitted to see him, and this distinction is always an omen of good fortune to the beholders; when it is granted to many it is a sure token of an abundant harvest” (Yeats 1888: 218) Years elapse after his last appearance and finally in a May-day morning (May-day turned into a festival, the Celtic Feast of Beltaine celebrated all over Ireland since the pagan times of the Celts – a time when fairies are especially active and the influences from the otherworld can be more visible) he appears again, this time dressed like a fully armed warrior with an army of its own: “The warrior was O'Donoghue; he was followed by numberless youths and maidens, who moved lightly and unconstrained over the watery plain, as the moonlight fairies glide through the fields of air;” (Yeats 1888: 219) as in a call to arms, reminding the Irish people it is time to put the country back to its foundations. Their strength and pride should be rooted in their tradition, inheritance, in their true Irish spirit. Another fairy tale The Enchantment of Gearoidh Irla told by Patrick Kennedy relates the story of Earl Gerald in old times of Ireland and his fight against the English: “He had a great castle or rath at Mullymast (Mullaghmast); and whenever the English Government were striving to put some wrong on the country, he was always the man that stood up for it. Along with being a great leader in a fight, and very skilful at all weapons, he was deep in the black art, and could change himself into whatever shape he pleased.” (Yeats 1888: 313) Convinced by his wife to share some of his secrets concerning his use of magic and ability to change shape, he finally agrees but warns her that if she shows the least fear while he is out of his natural shape, “he would never recover it till many generations of men would be under the mould.” Pray to her own curiosity, she agrees and the earl transforms himself into a goldfinch, when a fierce

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hawk was suddenly after him, finally being killed by it. His wife started to scream in horror and till she realized both goldfinch and Earl Gerald disappeared forever. Under spell “Once every seven years the Earl rides round the Curragh of Kildare on a steed, whose silver shoes were half an inch thick the time he disappeared; and when these shoes are worn as thin as a cat's ear, he will be restored to the society of living men, fight a great battle with the English, and reign king of Ireland for two-score years.” (Yeats 1888: 314) He, together with his warriors are “sleeping” in a cavern under the mountain Mullanghmast waiting for the spell to be raised by “the miller's son that's to be born with six fingers on each hand, will blow his trumpet, and the horses will stamp and whinny, and the knights awake and mount their steeds, and go forth to battle.” (Yeats 1888: 314) In one of his riding rounds, every seven years, a horse-dealer passing by saw the cavern lighted and entered. The sight of men in armor surprised and frightened the man who trembling, escaped a bridle on the pavement. The noise awaked one of the warriors who asked: “Is it time yet?” and the intruder fearful answered: “Not yet, but soon will,” the warriors fell back into their slumber waiting for the moment they could raise to arms and protect their country. Celtic heroism becomes a topos of identity along with bravery, warrior honor, loyalty to one’s land and the image of a pure, free Ireland, before the British invasion, a locus for the true Irish spirit. The story is meant to awaken the “true warrior”, the spirit of sacrifice and the desire to get back their country from under the British rule and rebuild their culture, a spirit Yeats believed lay dormant within each Irish person, such fairy tales being a trigger to awaken this desire. In his fairy tales Yeats presents a type of life gone which entailed the poet’s nostalgia for the past, a former Ireland that offered serenity and tranquility producing a vision of Irish identity focused inwardly, on origins, heritage and tradition, capturing the rich heritage of a Celtic imagination, “the very voice of the people, the very pulse of life”, evoking all the faeries, demons, ghosts, priests, saints, warriors of the past in an encounter with the supernatural. The book of the American researcher and linguist Alexei Kondratiev who studied and taught Celtic languages, folklore and culture entitled The Apple Branch: A Path to Celtic Ritual reveals the Celts as a people who “... held on to the Dreamtime, the eternal present, and the certainty of an unchanging pattern. The pattern was sacred, related to the Otherworld in which our world has its origins – origins that could be seen as remote in the past, or as a process (still) and forever underway. The Otherworld was always there, just beyond perception, secretly empowering human actions, giving meaning to events. Because the barrier between worlds was

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tenuous, it could, according to tradition, be breached in appropriate circumstances.” (Kondratiev: 2003: 4) His study also reveals the core Celtic values upon which the culture of the ancient Ireland was built. These are: honor, loyalty, hospitality, honesty, justice, and courage, forming not an individual code of honor, but a set of values applied to the whole community. As Seamus Deane in his Celtic Revival Essays in Modern Irish Literature 1880-1980, mentions: “Every virtue of the Celt was matched by a vice of the British bourgeois” (Deane 1985: 25) Deane argues that the nineteenth-century Celtic studies advanced the Celts as an idealized form of subjectivity that was still organically attached to wild nature, and thus, “could cure anxious Europe of the woes inherent in Progress.” (Deane 1985:25) These can all be identified in Yeats’ collection of fairy tales. Honor wasn’t just a core value for warriors; it also refers to keeping a good reputation. The Old Irish word for honour is enech, meaning ‘face’. To keep one’s honour in one’s community meant ‘saving face’ so as nobody be able to say bad things about you; The word clú means ‘reputation’ and comes from the Indo-European root ‘to hear’, thus referring to what is being said about you. In what worrior honour was concerned the Fianna, Fionn mac Cumhall’s war band had the following code of honour represented by the following moto: “Glaine ár gcroí, neart ár ngéag agus beart de réir ár mbriathar – The purity of our hearts, the strength of our limbs and our commitment to our promise” as translated by Kondratiev. Relevant in this respect are the following fairy tales The Lady of Gollerus, The Legend of O’Donoghue, The Countess Kathleen O’Shea, The Enchantment of Gearoidh Iarla, to name just a few. Loyalty as in the stories The Knighting of Cuchulain, The Legend of O’Donoghue, The Countess Kathleen O’Shea originates in the Old Irish word tairisiu, which means ‘steadfast’, ‘of trust’ and refers to always being consistent in one’s relationships with others. Kondratiev (2003) illustrates this value with the following example with the Cattle Raid of Cooley, Fergus goes to extreme lengths out of loyalty to Cuchulain. Fergus is Cuchulain’s foster-father, and when Medb sends him out against the young warrior, he begs Cuchulain to yield rather than fight him. Cuchulain agrees on the condition that if they ever meet in battle again, it will be Fergus’s turn to yield. Of course, they come face to face when Fergus leads Medb’s army into the final battle. Rather than kill his fosterfather, Cuchulain reminds him of their agreement, and Fergus duly orders the retreat of Medb’s warriors, risking both defeat and his temperamental Queen’s wrath.

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Hospitality revealed by almost every fairy tale in Yeats ’collections, for example in The Rival Kempers, Frank Martin and the Fairies, etc. In ancient times it was highly valued due to harsh travelling conditions. The Old Irish word for hospitality is oígidecht, derived from oígi, meaning ‘stranger/ newcomer’, someone not of one’s home or kin. Honesty revealed in The Man who Never Knew Fear, Grace Connor, etc. The word indraic in Old Irish means ‘honest/flawless’, but there are also two other words for it cneasta meaning ‘healed/restored’ and macánta, which means ‘to be open, friendly and straightforward’ with others. Kondratiev (2003) illustrates it with the following example: Fionn mac Cumhall displays this quality of absolute honesty as a young boy, when he catches the Salmon of Knowledge for his guide and mentor, the Druid Finegas. He could easily have betrayed Finegas’s trust and eaten the salmon himself, but chose not to, even if it meant passing up on the chance to acquire all that knowledge and wisdom. Justice as in Owney and Owney–na-peack, meaning in accordance with the truth and the prevailing of the good. Courage illustrated by the fairy tales The Man who Never Knew Fear, The Knighting of Cuchulain; The Old Irish word for it is meisnech meaning ‘to keep one’s head’, to stay cool in a situation and not panic. The old legends are full of stories of great bravery and courage enforcing Kondratiev but the greatest example of courage has to be when Cuchulain single-handedly takes on the whole of Medb’s army. At the time, he was only seventeen years of age. British colonization was also a spiritual one, trying to fade away all these core values that remained entrapped in old fairy tales, but at hand to be reactivated when needed. Thus, the basis for a spiritual revival was there akin to the Phoenix from its own ashes. It might have been to these very values that Herder referred to and praised in his writings about nationalism and forging of nations as mentioned by Wilson, in Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism: Much of the stimulation for Herder’s work with folk poetry came from his reading of Bishop Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and James Macpherson’s fraudulent Poems of Ossian, both of which were published in England in 1765. These works-particularly the Ossianic poems-convinced Herder that the earliest Celts, Germans, and Norsemen (at first no distinction was made between these races) had possessed cultural values equal to those of the Greeks. (Wilson 2004: web)

An element of Yeats’ fairy tales not to be neglected, with an important role in shaping Irish identity is the environmental landscape. Herder

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argued that each nation was created by nature and history. Each nation seen as a distinct culture type rooted in a physical environment, for, nature, reminds Herder… has sketched with the mountain ranges she formed and with the rivers she made flow from them the rough but definite outline of the entire history of man …. One height created a nation of hunters, thus supporting and necessitating a savage state; another, more spread out and mild, provided a field for shepherd peoples and supplied them with tame animals; another made agriculture easy and essential; and still another began with navigation and fishing and led finally to trade …. In many regions the customs and ways of life have continued for millennia; in others they have changed … but always in harmony with the terrain from which the change came …. Oceans, mountain chains, and rivers are the most natural boundaries not only of lands, but also of peoples, customs, languages, and empires; and even in the greatest revolutions of human affairs they have been the guiding lines and the limits of world history. (Herder apud Ergang 1966: XIII, 37-38)

Since no two nations shared common environments or common histories, he added, then, no two nations could share common characters; an idea Herder developed from Montesquieu: “In the De l’esprit des lois (1748), Montesquieu had argued that the laws of a nation are merely the necessary relations arising from the nature of that nation’s social character and geographical environment. Since these factors vary from place to place, there are no universal laws-only national laws.” (Wilson 2004: web) In the case of Ireland, the atmosphere of the island’s natural landscape with its seashores, mountains, lakes, hills, ruins and forts is a habitat for both humans as described in the fairy tale Grace Connor who lived “on the borders of a large turf bog, in the parish of Clondevaddock, where they could hear the Atlantic surges thunder in upon the shore, and see the wild storms of winter sweep over the Muckish mountain, and his rugged neighbors. Even in summer the cabin by the bog was dull and dreary enough. Thady Connor worked in the fields...” (Yeats 1888: 146) and faeries, the latter infusing it with a supernatural, sacred quality turning it into a sacred land without borders, for it is imaginatively constructed in its myths and fairy tales. According to Irish beliefs reflected in folk stories, faeries inhabit different places, such as fairy forts or just inhabit the green thorn-covered hills behind houses. One of the fairy poems included in Yeats’ collection entitled The Fairies by William Allingham (an Irish poet thought by Yeats a great but often neglected poet) first published in Allingham’s 1887 collection entitled Irish Songs and Poems, best

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describes this scattering of fairies all over the Irish landscape: mountains, glens, rocky shores, mountain lakes, hill tops, or amongst thorn-trees: The Fairies Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather! Down along the rocky shore Some make their home, They live on crispy pancakes Of yellow tide-foam; Some in the reeds Of the black mountain lake, With frogs for their watch-dogs, All night awake. High on the hill-top The old King sits; He is now so old and grey He's nigh lost his wits. With a bridge of white mist Columbkill, he crosses, On his stately journeys From Slieveleague to Rosses; Or going up with music On cold starry nights, To sup with the Queen Of the gay Northern Lights. They stole little Bridget For seven years long; When she came down again Her friends were all gone. They took her lightly back, Between the night and morrow, They thought that she was fast asleep, But she was dead with sorrow. They have kept her ever since Deep within the lake,

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On a bed of flag-leaves, Watching till she wakes. By the craggy hill-side, Through the mosses bare, They have planted thorn-trees For pleasure here and there. Is any man so daring As dig them up in spite, He shall find their sharpest thorns In his bed at night. Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather! (Yeats 1888: 12-13)

The poem envisions the creation of a new Ireland, its rise “up the airy mountain” through a return to the past “Down the rushy glen” at which all people, not only peasantry “wee folk” as guardians of tradition, but all Irishmen along with “good folk” - the fairies which reconnect them to their past as a strong basis for their future. Thus, an effort into unity “Wee folk, good folk, / Trooping all together” to set free and rebuilt their nation, as the color green is the native color of Ireland, while “red cap” is a symbol of freedom of revolutionary sparks, associated with the American Revolutionary War, French Revolution, as well as part of the symbol of the Irish revolutionary movement also known as the Society of the United Irishmen founded at the end of the 18th century. “White owl’s feathers” stands for birds as a symbol of change. Thus, mythology, tradition, nationalism and landscape come together into one effort to set it free from the rule - be it political, spiritual, cultural – of England and rebuilt the Irish nation in accordance with its true spirit. Irish history, its myths and legends, its customs and beliefs, all combined to inspire Yeats in his attempt to grasp the imagination of Irish nationalism and forge its identity. His writings are proof of his sense of belonging to Ireland, and it was this very sense of belonging he wanted to transmit to his contemporaries. As Edward Said states in his Culture and Imperialism:

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Part One If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of antiimperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical element. Imperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, chartered and finally brought under control [...] Because of the presence of the colonizing outsider, the land is recoverable at first only through the imagination.” (Said 1993: 271)

Case Study: Poveúti Basarabene by Simion Teodorescu – Kirileanu As if they had been schooled in Herder’s philosophy, scholars of the nineteenth and early twentieth century began in earnest to collect and publish folklore in order to recapture the national soul and to put the country back on its cultural foundations. It was by reviving the spirit of the past reified in artefacts that they justified their future destiny in unified Romania. Not only is a culture grounded in a number of master narratives but these very narratives are also constitutive of national character, which is not a matter of biology but of identitarian narrativity. Tradition was the foundation of a shared identity through a connection to a common, resourceful past reflected in fairy tales, proof that individuals are able to construct the narratives that forge their identity. As Herder states in Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, language is a main feature of nationhood, and thus, of identity: [...] whoever was raised in the same language, who poured his heart into it and learned to express his soul in it, he belongs to the nation (Volk) of that language. (Herder 1971: 294-295)

Herder believed that thought is dependent on language and the specific features of a particular language are conditioned by the sensibility and manner of thought of the people that speak it. Another important aspect of folklore is that it preserves the national language unaltered, or, to quote Herder: “a nation … has nothing more valuable than the language of its fathers. In it lives its entire spiritual treasury of tradition, history, religion, and principles of life, all its heart and soul. To deprive such a nation of its language, or to demean it, is to deprive it of its sole immortal possession transmitted from parents to children.” (Herder apud Kohn: 58) On the matter of territory, Herder states that peoples migrate or get dispersed by forces outside their control, and yet, they continue to be identified by their original homeland which imprints on people’s early sensibility, thought and language, and these, in turn get passed on from

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generation to generation. Nationalism creates nations, not the other way round. In Bessarabia, although people lived under a forced Russification of their language and culture, they turned to their past to find strength for the future. In the context of the rising studies in ethnography and of the political moves towards the unification of all the Romanian territories in a unitary state, there was a growing interest in the collection and publishing of folklore in an attempt to recapture the national soul and to restore the country to its cultural foundations. In Central and East Europe – where people were socially and politically less developed than in the west – national boundaries seldom coincided with those of the existing states, hence, nationalism became a twofold movement which capitalized on national identity in order to protect the individual against the wrongs of an authoritarian state and to redraw political boundaries so as to fit the outlines of ethnic bodies. Folklorist Simion Teodorescu–Kirileanu’s concern with tradition and history can be spotted out in his entire work, a special place being held by his collection of Poveúti Basarabene, written during his journey through Bessarabia in March 1918, the annus mirabilis of this province’s union with Romania. His fairy tales, which were as many metaphors of the human plight, support the nation-building project which fitted well into the nationalist politics that saw the collapse of European dynasties and the foundation of nation-states in the aftermath of World War I. It is often at a time of crisis that people become aware of their nation and their connection with their cultural tradition which best reveals their identity. In the last two centuries, this region was continuously disputed by Russia – or the Soviet Union – and the Romanian nation-state in the making, changing repeatedly its state affiliation, until 1991 when it emerged as an independent republic. A space of interruptions and displacement, oscillating between the language of the oppressor and the mother tongue in a quest for roots, foundations and identity, Simion Teodorescu-Kirileanu’s collection of Poveúti Basarabene bears testimony thereof. It is the community’s drive towards identity through language, seen as the locus of identity. The question of language and of language choice is a political, cultural and literary one, for a choice of language is a choice of identity. He collected the fairy tales at the very time of the Union, the year 1918, in the Romanian language, from different counties in Bessarabia, reflecting on Romanian spirituality and the desires and expectations emerging there from.

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It was one of the first collections of Bessarabean fairy tales, collected by a Romanian from the other side of the Prut River, in order to prove that, on both sides of the river, inhabitants thought and felt alike, this spiritual and cultural likeness being the foundation on which the political union was to be edified. His collected fairy tales are imbued with that vaguely conscious wish making – a symbolic representation of the social cultural boundary conditions imposed by the imaginary. These fairy tales are a truthful reflection of the common Romanian spirit, and functioned as a certificate of legitimacy granted by “the people”. Although isolated from the mother county and under a continuous process of de-nationalisation, Bessarabia proved to harbour the same form and substance of the folk tales to be found in Romania judging by Lazăr Săineanu’s typology (1895) or later by that of Arthur Schullerus (1927). Read and interpreted at a symbolic level, these folk tales uncover psychological aspects and moral values speaking about common human experience and creating a counter-reality which, however, borrows different aspects from their storytellers, the audiences, and the social norms of the nation. The collection of Poveúti basarabene relies on and reinforces the social norms of its community. The context in which they were narrated, the identity of the narrator – as the folklorist always mentions the source at the end of his narrative – lend them an air of authenticity similar to that surrounding archives and chronicles. For example, the first fairy tale of this collection includes the following indices of identification: Baba groasă, spaima lumii, (Fat Creepy Hag, Scaring the Whole Land) was heard from Vasile HuĠanu, PârliĠi village, BălĠi County. Each fairy tale of his collection is reflective of its place (BălĠi, Chiúinău, Suceava…) revealing common beliefs and shared norms. For Bessarabeans, as for Romanians inhabiting other regions, the folk tale follows the same pattern and fulfils the same functions. The magical, sacred, religious function of the storyteller is preserved as stated in the folk tale Baba groasă, spaima lumii (Fat Creepy Hag, Scaring the Whole Land): Dumnezeu la noi soseúte! Pe toĠi ne blagosloveúte! De nu-n casă, La fereastră, S-asculte povestea noastră! ...1 (Kirileanu 2014: 38) 1“God

sends His blessings upon us! / His Spirit descends among us:/ in and out of the house, / our story to enjoy! ...” (my translation)

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The Divinity favors, not only the storyteller, but also the one who listens and the tale itself. Religion connected and unified people providing a moral framework to understand the world around them. The individual’s sense of self was constructed within the group. The beginning, middle and end formulas are also common to fairy tales from both sides of the Prut River: “A fost odată…” (Once upon a time…) sets the story in “illo tempore” acting like a frame, detaching the storyteller and the listener from the events. These formulas vary from the simple ones: “A fost odată ca niciodată, că de n-ar fi nu s-ar povesti...”2 to more complex ones: “A fost odată ca niciodată, pe când era lupul căаel Юi leul se făcuse miel de se jucau copiii cu el.” 3 “A fost odată ca niciodată când se coceau ouăle în gheaаă Юi noaptea se făcea de dimineaаă.”4 2“Once

upon a time, a story true enough to tell...” upon a time, when the wolf claimed to be lamb and the lion turned to melt for the kids to play and pet.” 4“Once upon a time/when the eggs were baked in ice/and day became night...” (my translations) 3“Once

„A fost odată ca niciodată, că de n-ar fi nu s-ar mai povesti; de când făcea plopЮorul pere Юi răchita micЮunele; de când se băteau urЮii în coadă; de când se luau de gât lupii cu mieii de se sărutau înfrăаindu-se; de când se potcovea puricele la un picior cu nouăzeci Юi nouă de oca de fer Юi sarunca în slava cerului de ne aducea poveЮti, de când se scria musca pe părete, mai mincinos cine nu crede”.5 5“Once

upon an imaginary place and an imaginary time, a long time ago, the old people say; in the days when animals talked like people and people weremore like animals and things were just plain better; when bears were brethren; when wolves and lambs embraced in friendship; in the old, old, half-forgotten times, when stones were soft and the world was full of wonders, what happened did happen, and, if it had not happened, you would never have heard this story…if you don’t believe me, go see for yourself.” (my translations)

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In the Bessarabean fairy tales, formulas such as: “Era odată…”/ “A long time ago...”,” Amu era…” / “There once was...” show that the line between fantasy and reality is a thin one, the latter being viewed through the lens of the former. The end, “back to reality” formulas, are also abrupt: “ùtiu atâta, că am mântuit de spus povestea…” (There you have it! My story has come to an end), or are entirely absent. The middle formulas – “ù-au mers, ú-au mers, /Ca vorba din poveste, /Că-nainte mult mai este” (“They went on, and on, / Where the story took them, / I hope you won’t fail to be pleased by my tale.”) (my translation) – move the story forward assuring the reader that there is more to come, stirring the interest of the listeners and offering a moment of relief for the storyteller to gather his thoughts. The voice of the narrator and the ‘face to face’ narration fuel its magic, its power to transform, to interfere with the experience of the listeners, who are invited to join in, thus, undergoing a process of transformation. In order to show the important role fairy tales play in proving the spiritual, cultural and linguistic unity of the Bessarabeans with the rest of the Romanians, which finally led to the long waited union with the Mother Country, we shall probe into each layer – fairy tales being a multi-layered narrative, semantically overdetermined – to uncover and interpret symbols, content, characters and their actions, specific generic patterns, the kind of human experience they encompass, the moral values shared by Bessarabeans, their expectations, which were the same for all Romanians, irrespective of the imposed conventional borders. It would be wrong to think of fairy tales as the realm of fantasy only, with supernatural happenings and beings, for they are but the medium in which are conveyed concerns about people and the society they live in, or individual, family and social issues, such as marriage, birth, funeral, physical and moral qualities of people, the psychology of women before and after marriage, the position of men and women in society, the incompatibility in marriage of those belonging to different social strata, the big difference between social classes, the gap between the poor and the rich, the generation gap, the origin of poverty and wealth, the hero’s rites of passage, or details about clothes, architecture or landscape. Notable about Simion Teodorescu-Kirileanu’s fairy tales is also the moral ending, teaching about what the world lacks and needs. For example, the ending of the fairy tale Povestea oftului (A Story of Complaint) urging the listeners to reflect upon the happenings of the story: “Ionică s-a însurat cu fata ceea care l-a scăpat de drac, la iaz, úi s-a gospodărit úi el, a făcut copii, i-a învăĠat úi pe dânúii meúteúugul lui. De-

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atunci au ieúit pe lumea asta, oameni úufări úi înúelători (mehenchi), săminĠenie drăcească de-a lui Ionică.”6 (Kirileanu 2014: 69) or the fairy tale Tu ai câútigat un suflet úi eu două (You Won a Soul and I Won Two) “Au făcut nuntă frumoasă úi la pornire, îi dă Satana: - Tu ai slujit úi Ġi-ai câútigat un suflet, da’ eu am câútigat două! ...”7 (Kirileanu 2014: 145) 6“Ionică

married the girl who saved him from the devil, at the pond, he built a house for himself, had children, whom he taught his craft. Back then was the day, when hard-working, cunning (inventive) people, were born into this world, descended from Ionică’s family”. 7“They had a beautiful wedding and at departure, the Devil says: You served and won a soul for yourself, but I won two!” – my translations.

In many of the fairy tales, next to supernatural beings, objects, happenings, metamorphoses, in order to reinforce the binary opposition good/evil appears the image of Satan – as destructive, disruptive of a given order, of tradition, of moral values, of religion, of identity – the same with the Soviet Union, from the real world, which imposed its programmed denationalization upon the Romanians living in Bessarabia, oppressing, depriving them of their tradition, religion, moral values, language, that is, of identity. Despite all the adversities, the Romanians managed, at the highest cost, to preserve their Romanian spirit, their identity, as stated at a symbolic level in fairy tales, where the Good always prevails. sometimes moral ending shows that a people’s beliefs, tradition, values, identity, although oppressed, crushed, cannot be destroyed. Highly authentic, the fairy tales presented in this collection, speak of the same major themes we find in other fairy tales, from all other areas inhabited by Romanians; what surprises, though, is the presentation of the Fairy Ileana Cosânzeana in the Fairy tale Ileana Cosânzeana din cosiĠă floare-i cântă. A different vision of the Fairy, with consequences upon the theme and the story itself. In this version of the fairy tale, Ileana Cosânzeana is the mother of 21 girls whom she accepts to marry 21 lads, having nothing in mind, but a sheer intention to kill them. The hero, the youngest of the 21 brothers, recalling tradition, says that where they come from it is a tradition that cannot be ignored, for the groom and bride to change clothes during the wedding night. He manages, thus, to fool the Fairy, who murders her own daughters, thinking they were the lads. These episodes were actually borrowed from another fairy tale known from the other side of Prut River and changes dramatically the vision of Ileana Cosanzeana from a positive to a negative one. (This procedure of using fragments from another fairy tale or of inter-influence between fairy tales is named contamination.)

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At the level of language, specific words and expressions, archaisms, and regionalisms, were preserved so as to prove linguistic unity and authenticity, as well. Metaphors of human existence, fairy tales are the foundation of human existence, for, within the tales lays a rich history of culture and human desires. The role of the fairy tales is to animate human life; they work with people, for people, and always fairy tales work on people, affecting what people are able to see as real, as possible, and as worth doing or best avoiding. Fairy tales are informed by a human disposition to action, to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs, while we also try to change and make ourselves fit for the world. Therefore, the focus of fairy tales, whether oral, written, or cinematic, has always been on finding magical instruments, extraordinary technologies, or powerful people and animals that will enable protagonists to transform themselves along with their environment, making it more suitable for living in peace and contentment. Fairy tales have always provided behavioral patterns. Being exposed to fairy tales over and over again, people end up taking them for granted and considering the patterns of conduct or the gender roles they encode as perfectly normal, therefore fairy tales do not just teach moral values, they also provide patterns and value systems. On the basis of projections, memories, expectations contained in a narrative, people are guided to act in certain ways, and discouraged to do otherwise. People act according to a set of fundamental principles and values which Charles Taylor calls “hypergoods”. Fairy tales will assimilate elements of the social world, put them in some order and normatively evaluate these arrangements which define people, offer an identity and precondition action. People identify, act or refrain from acting, as they perceive and understand their place in certain narratives (fairy tales being our case in point here) no matter how enchanted, fragmented or contradictory these might be. Nothing is immune to change. Identity or the Self are neither a priori, nor fixed. People adjust fairy tales to fit their own identity, becoming, thus, a mark of identity and the other way around, they also adjust reality to fit their stories. By way of consequence, fairy tales are constantly being “tailored” in the course of history, for, time, space, place, power, processes and interactions are constantly in flux; identity is neither fixed nor universal. The concept of identity has changed in time by being confronted with a set of extraordinary challenges arising from external political and social transformations which led to inner shifts of perspective and to theoretical attempts to make sense of those social developments.

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Tradition was the foundation of a shared identity, a connection to the past, asserting that to better understand the present and build the future one must look backwards to the roots, to find true meaning; thus, identity becomes deeply embedded in tradition, in the collective imagination, in the past, in society or as David Gross refers to it in The Past in Ruins: Tradition and the Critique of Modernity: “a set of practices, a constellation of beliefs or a mode of thinking that exists in the present, but was inherited from the past” (Gross 1992: 20), strengthening the community and offering a sense of belonging. Fairy tales as expressions of tradition with their rituals and content prove to be a source of shared identity, meaning, values relying on an imagined, resourceful past: “tradition helped to foster certain mental dispositions which then served to strengthen tradition’s hold on the thought and practice of individuals” (Gross 1992: 20), reflecting people’s shared identity. Folklore became the cultural and historical pattern of a people inspiring nationalistic movements and defining its identity. Simion Teodorescu Kirileanu is a performance-oriented folklorist, who made the ties between folklore and literature ever stronger by turning the speaking subject into the spokesperson of a social network. Folklore is not merely a body of tradition to be classified and catalogued but a dynamic force and as long as the story of nationalism continues to be an oft-told story, and a wrong-written one besides, folklore will remain one of its guiding chapters.

PART TWO FAIRY TALES AND POSTMODERNIST DECONSTRUCTIONIST POETICS

As society develops and information explodes, one paradigm replaces another generating cultural transformations. Borderlines, diasporas, migration, refugees, a crisis of values, etc. bring the issue of identity, or rather, lack of it, to the front. It calls for a re-invention of the Self in the context of the new realities. Nowadays, caught in the web of computer technology we step forward into the realm of virtual reality, where the boundaries between life, art and imagination are slowly but surely fading away. A move from “in media res” towards “mediated res”, since everything is mediated, ready-made, and served by all types of print and visual media, to the replacement of the world with its image. Thus, in postmodernism, more than ever before, an awareness of physical and psychological control has challenged the concept of identity. While in modernism there was the nation to serve as an identitarian landmark, the postmodernists are obsessing with a body written over by cultural narratives, a body therefore which has never been simply one’s own. Thus, a limitless fear of self-nomination: “Who am I?” lends itself to a continuous search of identity. The image colonizes the mind nowadays, the culture of the book is being replaced by a culture of the image which constructs identity at present (fairy tales turned into movies, TV series, etc.) and nothing is innocent, it is prefabricated. Thus, an image of identity displaces identity. On screen international reproduction of fairy tales transforms them into a standard set of values and expectations which imposes itself and moulds children in their expectations. Thus, in his work The Wake of Imagination, Richard Kearney remarks: Disinherited of our certainties, deprived of any fixed point of view, are we not being challenged by such images to open ourselves to other ways of imagining? Is our bafflement at the dismantling of any predictable relationship between image and reality not itself an occasion to de-centre our self-possessed knowledge in response to an otherness which surpasses

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While in modernism, the image is an authentic expression, in postmodernism it is not, it displays its own artificiality. The individual does not construct his/her identity anymore; it is given by the “other”. As Richard Kearney states: The postmodernist dances on the grave of modern idealism. He is as far removed from the Sartrean cult of the self-creating consciousness (pour soi) as from the romantic cult of the transcendental Einbildungskraft. Postmodern culture jibes at all talk of original creations. It exclaims the omnipresence of self-destructing images which simulate each other in a limitless interplay of mirrors. (Kearney 1988: 5)

The author becomes, thus, a bricoleur, a player in a game of signs, playing with meaning he himself has not created, endeavoring to piece together bits in order to create new meanings. Thus, the paradigm of identity turns into a paradigm of parody; it no longer functions as a controlling origin of self-expression. Meanings multiply themselves ad infinitum. Postmodern theories reject the model of the humanist subject, consequently, the identity of the narrative self cannot be taken for granted, becoming a continuous reinterpretation of the imagination: To reply the question ’Who?’, is to tell one’s story to the other. And the story is always one which narrates a relation to the other, a tale of creation and obligation that never comes to an end. This is why the model of narrative identity, in contrast to that of ecological identity (permanent sameness), includes change and alteration within selfhood. Such a model constitutes the self as the reader and the writer of his own life. But it also casts each one of us as a narrator who never ceases to revise, reinterpret and clarify his own story – by relating himself in turn to the cathartic effects of those larger narratives, both historical and fictional, transmitted by our cultural memory. The notion of personal identity is thus opened up by the narrative imagination to include that of communal identity. The self and the collective mutually constitute each other’s identity by receiving each other’s stories into their respective histories.” (Kearney 1988: 395396)

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The concept of identity changed by being confronted with a set of extraordinary challenges arising from external political and social transformations which led to inner shifts of perspective, and to theoretical attempts to make sense of those social developments. The external political, social and cultural transformations which led to the shift in identity poetics are best seen in the outer changes that have shaped and reshaped the world: the collapse of the Great Empires, of the communist regimes, the “failure” of the working classes to fulfill their desired revolutionary interest, women’s rights, various ethnic conflicts and all the social movements which responded to these changes. Limiting ourselves to the last three decades or so, the list includes: postcolonial and diasporic search for identity, ecological movements, gay and lesbian movements, etc. All these movements are various facets of the “politics of identity”. From a closed, well-defined identity, people are progressing towards an open concept of identity in a multicultural, present world which valorizes difference as well as its own core and which defines itself in relation to alterity. We can even speak of the priority of the other over the self. Set against the background of vanishing boundaries, both from a geographical and cultural perspective in a new world of multiple and unlimited interconnections, the versatility of identity leads to an array of links between social experiences, social practices, literary forms and political standpoints. Identity is also created from the texts we engage in and the linguistic choices we make transferring it from our inner self, our hidden processes of cognition and place it as our social construct in discourses of the day. Nowadays the dynamics of identity is set between national and international, unity and diversity, losses and gains, games of power and globalization. Identity becomes an open-work, a work in progress of which we are all part of. We become the masons of our own construction of identity. Contemporary views on identity perceive it as part of a social and collective endeavor, as participation in our social groups, reflecting our experience, our relationships with the others and the positions we adopt with regard to others, becoming reinscribed in new patterns according to change. Nationalism and thus, the concept of identity was analyzed by Benedict Anderson, who coined the concept of imagined community, to show the invisible thread that connects people within a nation. An imagined community is different from an actual community in that it is not (and cannot be) based on everyday face-to-face interaction among its members.

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Anderson believes that a nation is a socially constructed community imagined by the people who perceive themselves as part of that group mostly as sharing the same Constitution and not necessarily bonded by language, common past, national literature or origin. Today transnational capitalism is significantly shaping human realities – the movement towards a united Europe is a case in point – thus, the reality of distinctly different peoples with their own particular national features is no longer as obvious as it had once appeared to be, for, multicultural and multiracial societies have become a feature of modern life and will probably continue as refugees and migrant workers follow the global flow of capitalism. So, it becomes not just a matter of “political correctness”, but an attempt to answer this important question: What does it mean to belong to a given nation? Postmodern writings deconstruct the ideal of Englishness as a fixed national identity and change the focus on ethnicity, multiculturalism, etc. revealing, thus, the complexity of Englishness, for, we have to allow a continuous oscillation in the mind between centre and margin, transience and timelessness, commonsense and vision/dream, rurality and urbanity, the gentleman and the common man, reticence and loutishness, commitment and isolation, the acknowledging of stereotypes while at the same time challenging them. It is perhaps this very adaptability which is the hallmark of Englishness, which also provides elasticity to the concept of Identity. To highlight the shift in poetics from modernism to postmodernism, we show how writers used the process of deconstruction to adapt fairy tales to the present needs of the society. This is done by analyzing Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Cezar Baltag’s poetry as study cases. Deconstruction had its starting point at Yale University under the molding of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida along with Paul de Man, becoming a landmark, at the forefront of the American criticism. Derrida’s deconstruction, one of the key concepts of poststructuralist thought, was directed against the system-building pattern of structuralism. Derrida’s concern was to demonstrate the instability of language, the idea of a linguistic free-play and the inconsistencies of interpretation asserting that there are no fixed, final meanings on what texts, institutions, beliefs and practices are concerned leading to an open, never-ending analysis. The term itself is an oxymoron embedding two opposite concepts, destruction and construction, within a single word; the term deconstruction implying because of the prefix de some sort of warning, of a vague threat, of contradiction, of challenge, of undone. Derrida himself has stated,

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“What is deconstruction? Nothing, of course” (Derrida, 1991, p. 275) . . . “deconstruction doesn’t consist in a set of theorems, axioms, tools, rules, techniques, methods… there is no deconstruction, deconstruction has no specific object” (Derrida, 1996, p. 218) for, texts deconstruct themselves as Norris clarifies: “The deconstructive process comes not from the reader/critic but from the text itself; it is already there, it is the tension ‘between what [the text] manifestly means to say and what it is nonetheless constrained to mean.’” (Norris 1987: 19) Barbara Johnson in The Critical Difference (1980) also states that: Deconstruction is not synonymous with “destruction” however. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word ‘analysis’ itself, which etymologically means “to undo” - a virtual synonym for “to de-construct”. [...] If anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is a reading which analyses the specificity of a text’s critical difference from itself. (Johnson 1980: 5)

For Angela Carter, to deconstruct is to retain the shell of a thing (she retains the shell of the original fairy tales) while playing with a different content, a parody, a simulation of the original, an intentional subversion of stereotypes. Deconstruction marks, whether we are willing to accept it or not, an epistemic shift. By placing everything into question, it becomes a challenge for the old ways of thinking and acquiring knowledge, for they can no longer survive and adapt the course of history. At the level of metaphor, Kearney describes this shift of paradigm as follows: This shift is evident once again at the level of dominant metaphors: a level where imagination offers, as it were, an interpretation of its own epochal mutations. While the premodern paradigm was expressed by the metaphor of the mirror (which reflected the light of a transcendental origin beyond itself), and the modern by the metaphor of the lamp (which projected an original light from within itself), the postmodern paradigm is typified by the metaphor of the looking glass, - or to be more precise, of an interplay between multiple looking glasses which reflect each other interminably. The postmodern paradigm is, in other words, that of a labyrinth of mirrors which extend infinitely in all directions - a labyrinth where the image of the self (as a presence to itself) dissolves into self-parody. (Kearney 1988: 253)

The notion of difference feminism can also be included along with deconstruction, under the umbrella of post-structuralism, for it brings to

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the fore and questions the rigidity of fixed gender categories. Feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray have criticized and questioned the patriarchic assumption about the specificity of male and female gender traits that lead to gender stereotypes leading to the suppression of women arguing that gender identity is not something fixed and unchanging, but a process of becoming which cannot be reduced to any fixed norms. Both postmodern notions can serve to undermine the authoritarian imperatives in our culture, both at a theoretical and political level. Feminism as an ideological, intellectual and political movement, originated in the Women’s Movements from the late 19th century and early 20th century in Europe and U.S.; aware of the traditional historical context which valued a patriarchal social order, was set to turn the tables upon patriarchal oppression, to support and promote gender justice and equality in all aspects of life. Under the many changes of the postmodern world, implying a redistribution of wealth and resources, growing consumerism, reallocation of work, fight against terrorism, war and environmental destruction there is need for a constant revision of social scripts, narratives of identity and ways of life, a need for new ways of imagining. MacIntyre, relating it to fairy tales in After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) imagines it as follows: I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’ We enter human society…with one or more imputed characters - roles into which we have been drafted - and we have to learn what they are in order to be able to understand how others respond to us and how our responses to them are apt to be construed. It is enough hearing stories about wicked stepmothers, lost children, good but misguided kings, wolves that suckle twin boys, youngest sons who receive no inheritance but must make their own way in the world, and eldest sons who waste their inheritance on riotous living and must go and live with the swine, that children learn or mislearn both what a child and what a parent is, what the cast of characters may be in the drama into which they have been born and what the ways of the world are. (MacIntyre 1981: 201)

It shadows, indeed, our construction of personal identity (as rooted in the Bible, fairy tales, Greek and Latin classics, etc.) and compels us, as part of the period we inhabit, to subvert these roles in a progressive turn of the mind. Leading examples of such stereotype-breaking narratives are Angela Carter’s fairy tales collected in The Bloody Chamber (1979).

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The fairy tales she refurbishes are no longer innocent lessons for children, but richly fantastical, often satirical comments on sexual power and psychology, a shifter of the mind, stories about fairy stories. Postmodern fairy tales set apart from their traditional versions on what narrative strategies are concerned: deconstructive and reconstructive and also on subject representations: self-contradictory versions of the self. Postmodern retellings, re-interpretations of fairy tales are not only an artistic, but also a social action which leads further to cultural transformations by questioning traditional ideologies and re-creating the guidelines of narrative production to naturalize subjectivity and gender. Angela Carter uses the pattern of old fairy tales which can easily be recognized by the readers’ imagination, creating an easy-going, familiar framework for the readers whom she surprises with a different content, one of feminist implications attuned to the present time, making us aware of radical changes having taken place in our society. In Postmodernism the world is seen as a complicated mixture of interposed, superposed, interrelated events, reality as relations and interrelations, not as substance; thus, the flooding of postmodern texts with intertextuality. No matter the approach to the study of identity, an integral part of this study is language with all its cultural products which play an important part in examining relations of power and redefine identity within a particular social, political and cultural context. Modernism offered a constructivist approach to identity while postmodernism deploys a deconstructionist approach and poetics of identity. A turn towards negotiating identity formation adopting a multicultural, transcultural representation of it. The current proliferation of identity is rooted in the fragmentation of the language codes and metaphors used to describe, represent and interpret it. Thus, texts, narratives perceived as mediators through which individuals discover the sense of self. Deconstruction turns the table on the imposed norms of writing, of ideas, of structure, of a closed-system. Carter’s writings deconstruct norms, everything pre-given and become a place of textual interferences, of intertextuality and pseudo-identity. Derrida’s deconstruction opposes the language as logos, as a system of words with a clear, well-defined meaning (as Heidegger sees it) to the text as a web of words, interrelated, with no fixed meaning, redefined by its interrelations with other words, thus, the text becomes a web, a multitude of dynamic interrelations, a vanishing of borders, no beginning and no end, but a continuous becoming.

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The hybridity of deconstruction lies in its very name: destruction and construction, the activity of constructing by destruction. The deconstruction of old, obsolete concepts and the emergence of new ones adapted to our fractal world. Deconstruction is a concept central to postmodernism which rigorously analyzes and makes apparent the assumptions, judgments and values that underlie social arrangements and intellectual ideas. Deconstruction posits that meaning, as accessed through language, is indeterminate because language itself is indeterminate. It is a system of signifiers that can never fully “mean”: a word can refer to an object but can never be that object; it refocuses attention on a work as open-ended, endlessly available to interpretation, and far beyond the reach of authorial intention. Deconstruction traces how language generates meaning both within a text and across texts, while insisting that such meaning can only ever be provisional. Meaning is always forthcoming in the next word, sentence, paragraph, so on. Deconstruction introduced new methods for the unmasking of ideology. Deconstruction, in the case of fairy tales, also challenges the primacy of speech over writing (Derrida’s écriture) viewing writing as a social institution and its reliance to intertextuality, for, no text can be read in isolation as it is part of a larger structure of texts, conventions, codes and meanings, posing a diffusion of identity, of centre, dissipated in a network of relations and differences. It also shifts attention from communication to representation deconstructing the role and presence of the storyteller as a carrier of meaning perceived as a patriarchal position of self-presence. The storyteller is now displaced by writing, by a plurality of written texts which become “the passageway, the entrance, the exit, the dwelling of others in me” (Cixous: 85-86) Thus, a shaping of identity embedded in writing and rooted in the social context. Literature embedded with fairy and folk tale myths plays an important role in identity formation. Writers subverted and deconstructively rewrote the fairy tale icons of the heroine and the hero masquerading as real, thus, underscoring the conflict between literature and reality. Their use of binary oppositional characters, mirrors, inversions, and metafiction to deconstruct the stereotypical roles of both men and women, underscoring the role that literature plays in creating self-identity problems when women, for example, try to imitate fictional characters. The reader is forced to reexamine literary icons and their role in the real world. Fairy tales have an important role in the formation of stereotyping and the effect of patriarchal society on the individual's achievement and retention of an integrated, acceptable self. They provide a framework for imagining our

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human situation overall and have been adapted or repurposed for newer audiences. The use of intertextuality in the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts can include an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another; it presupposes a multitude of participants: the writer, the speaker, the addressee, the earlier writer and speaker, etc. and meanings emerge in the process of how something is told and valued, to whom, and in relation to other utterances. Stories echo with other stories, adding, thus, force to the present story. Stories summon up whole cultures. It is well-stated by the critic, literary historian and professor Maria-Ana Tupan in her The Key to Change. Interdisciplinary Essays in Cultural History when referring to postmodernism that “The distinguishing feature of postmodernism is the blurring of the boundary between text and world, book and the ‘lived events, historical determinations, concepts, individuals, groups, social formations’ – in a word, the world out there into which it is hooked” and she further explains it using the concept and metaphor of rhizome quoting Deleuze and Guattari: ‘The rhizome is altogether different, a map and not a tracing. Make a map, not a tracing. The orchid does not reproduce the tracing of the wasp; it forms a map with the wasp, in a rhizome. What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters connections between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs, the maximum opening of bodies without organs onto a plane of consistency. It is itself a part of the rhizome. The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation. (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 12)’ (Tupan 2017: 14-15) very representative for postmodern writings, including Angela Carter’s.

Thus, an “ontological continuity between world and texts (the world territorializes into books, the book deterritorializes into the world)” (Tupan 2017: 86) Keeping pace with a more flexible theory of identity, let us consider fairy tales as a “tool” in shaping identity. It is identity narratives that account for the way people act out their social roles or scripts, writing them into existence as “markers” of identity. In postmodernity, keeping up with the changes, they attempt, positively speaking, to shift the balance, to

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restore previously devalued differences in domestic and public life from a feminist perspective, as those of Angela Carter. In postmodernism, fairy tales invite a theoretical approach to alternative role models which transform these devalued features of “female” and “racial” other into a new set of normatized social action breaking such stereotypes. The readings of fairy tale adaptations are highly subjective and are not intended to finalize meanings but to pose questions and comment on specific issues. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber proposes a multilayered and multiperspectival reading of the fairy tale.

Angela Carter’s Revisionary Use of the Fairy Tale Fairy tales are an ever-changing type of story that will stay for a long time. At first, changes happened because of oral tradition, due to failure of memory. Storytellers will not remember certain parts or they will erase and add their own parts to the story which leads to many different versions. These changes help the stories evolve and conform to the public and its needs. Fairy tales come in many versions and are in turn interpreted in different ways which reveal social concerns, struggles, dreams. The explosion of fairy tales in a variety of discourses in postmodernism turned them into a landmark and go beyond “literature of childhood” towards a multidimensional space with changing meanings. The insertion of fairy tales into advertisements, music, films, cartoons and other elements of globalised, consumer culture is proof of our response to the stereotypes embedded in these narratives. In postmodernity, keeping up with the changes, they attempt, positively speaking, to shift the balance, to restore previously devalued differences in domestic and public life from a feminist perspective. The social constructions of identity, sexuality, gender, etc. are identified rather as positionality than essence, leading, thus, to a different way of imagining fairy tales. In postmodernism, fairy tales invite a theoretical approach to alternative role models which transform these devalued features of “female” and “racial” other into a new set of normalized social action breaking such stereotypes. In the very dynamic, fast-changing world of today when identity becomes a game of puzzle, English literature was dominated by sober social realists, she played with disreputable genres – Gothic horror, science fiction, fairy tale – and gave free rein to the fantastic and the surreal. Her work is by turns funny, sexy,

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frightening and brutal, but it’s always shaped by a keen, subversive intelligence and a style of luxuriant beauty. She was concerned with unpicking the mythic roles and structures that underwrite our existences – in particular the various myths of gender identity – …” (Gordon 2016: xii) best describe her writings, attuned with her times.

Her writings are reflective of the new realities, of all the “newness” and its consequences: the orderly, stable, Newtonian world had been displaced by a heterogeneous world picture shaped by the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, fluid and unstable, which provided access to those equipped with the capacity of the mind to accept and understand the mechanics and logic of change. Angela Carter used fairy tales as a place where binary oppositions are viewed as unstable basis for meaning and exactly where the values and hidden ideologies of the text reside. Since binary oppositions are viewed as a hierarchic structure with one part privileged over the other, she deconstructed and subverted such hierarchy, the conscious intention of the narrative, to demask the hidden ideology and subvert it: “Her own passion was for disordering things, exploding categories, undermining divisions.” (Gordon 2016: 392) In reviewing The Bloody Chamber in the Times Literary Supplement, Lorna Sage writes that “‘admirers who like to think of her as all artifice, transgressions and transformations will find this collection uncomfortable, because there’s no escaping the fact that Carter…thinks that the stories we tell ourselves, however bizarrely archetypal, grow out of – and into – particular realities.’” (Gordon 2016: 361) With deconstruction at hand Angela Carter re-visited fairy tales at their best postmodern use; she retained the form, the shell of a fairy tale, dispersing its core for a parody, a simulation of that particular fairy tale for an intentional subversion of gender identity. Fairy tales were for Carter a glide towards our inner selves and further unto our unconscious depths so as to mould new concepts. The realm of fantasy offers her opportunity to refuse a full stop, “an end”, for a more postmodern “to be continued…” It offers the illusion that we can skip reality and its confines, to step outside it and reconstruct another one, a simulacrum. Her fairy tales also stand for life’s resistance to any single interpretation, a freedom of infinite invention and reinvention, the fact that reality is provisional, lacking eternal truths, being rather a construct, an artefact, lead to a crisis of identity, lack of stability, fluidity in postmodernism. Nothing is stable, everything is possible.

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In a famous article of 1983, entitled Notes from the Front Line, Angela Carter wrote about her own rewriting of fairy tales as “putting new wine in old bottles until the pressure of new wine makes the old bottle explode”. She deconstructed the traditional fairy tales in order to construct, to resignify their core, messages, meaning to fit new realities. They become a sum of relations, interrelations, hybridity and intertextuality open to questioning and redefinition. Angela Carter contributed not only to a new construction of female identity in her fairy tales, but also to a theoretical reevaluation of the genre. She always believed that people were imprisoned in patterns at the expense of their freedom and identity: “She refused identification with any of these things, feeling that although alienation could be painful, ‘integration means giving up one’s freedom of being in that one becomes mastered by one’s role.’” (Gordon 2016: xiii) always militating for a continuous self-invention for, in the process of inventing ourselves, we also invent others. Thus, her belief “that our selves are neither false nor true, but merely roles we either master or are mastered by” (Gordon 2016: xiii) and “that one’s personality is not a personal thing at all but an imaginative construct in the eye of the beholder” (Gordon 2016: xv) is a major theme invading all her fiction. The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories is a collection of short fiction by the British writer Angela Carter. It caused shock when it appeared because it turned the bedtime stories into newly configured tales of sex and violence full of gothic intensity. She took the latent content from the traditional fairy tales and used it as the ground for her new stories, new ideas about how things might be different. She used fantasy with conscious radical intent to discuss ideas, to set new grounds. In a letter to her friend Robert Coover, she wrote the following: “I really do believe that a fiction absolutely self-conscious of itself as a different form of human experience than reality (that is not a logbook of events) can help to transform reality itself.” (Simpson 2006: xii) In her narrative constructions, the very notion of identity (identities) is challenged. Being a mise en abîme of the traditional fairy tales, her daring retellings get us out of our comfort zone and produce a sense of logical uneasiness and narrative discomfort, arousing our suspicion regarding our common beliefs, they undermine them. Her fairy tales project possible worlds, worlds-within-worlds, which break the boundaries (of the traditional ones), creating a modified transworld identity in which the individual subject is dissolved into linguistic structures and ensembles of relations. Her characters are expressions of a crisis, that of identity, and in their attempt to construct one they become a rhizome of interrelations.

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Each of the stories reworks a famous folk narrative: the story which gives the collection its title is based on Blue Beard, two of the stories – The Courtship of Mr Lyon and The Tiger’s Bride – are versions of the story Beauty and the Beast with inverted endings and The Werewolf, The Company of Wolves and to some extent Wolf-Alice are based on Little Red Riding Hood; Puss-in-Boots is a version of the well-known tale; The Erl-King draws on slightly more obscure folklore, an evocation of the bearded, elfin creature from German and Scandinavian folklore also adopted in Goethe’s poem Der Erlkönig and The Snow Child on the wellknown Snow White; The Lady of the House of Love draws on the Gothic literary tradition of vampires. With The Bloody Chamber “Angela Carter extends her control over an area of the imagination on which she has already left her mark. Her retellings of European folk and fairy tales have the power, not only to cause us to think again, and deeply, about the mythic sources of our common cultural touchstones, but top lunge us into hackle-raising speculation about aspects of our human/animal nature” writes Susan Kennedy in the Times Literary Supplement. (Gordon 2016: 293) Her reworked fairy tales are no longer digestible lessons for children, but instead richly fantastical, often satirical, comments on sexual power and psychology offering her a means of finding and telling an alternative story, of shifting something in the mind, “stories about fairy stories”, a feminist retelling of traditional fairy tales. According to The Bloody Chamber tales, morality and innocence from conventional fairy tales have been replaced by cultural values and women's free will. Women are spared from becoming victims in the frameworks that are commonly accepted by loosening the fairy tale's framework to include more than one reference to evil. Passivity in women is not an intrinsically virtuous state, she writes in The Sadeian Woman: “To be the object of desire is to be defined in the passive case. To exist in the passive case is to die in the passive case – that is, to be killed. This is the moral of the fairy tale about the perfect woman.” which she also makes clear in her reworked fairy tales. In most of the stories, she dismantles the association between evil and masculinity to demonstrate that wickedness and evildoing are not exclusive to men. The fairy tales from Her Bloody Chamber deliberately express a variety of subjectivities in order to resist the appearance of objectivity and impartiality that is present in master narratives. Her fairy tales viewed as identity counter-narratives, present alternative values which are not contained in the traditional fairy tales. Postmodern re-writings of fairy tales, from a feminist agenda, such as those replotted by Angela Carter, break away from past traditions, well-

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defined and well-established patterns, deconstructing identity and reconstructing it according to the new order of things, drifting away from a local, national identity towards a transnational, global one, brought about by the globalization process. We recognize in Carter’s fairy tales the marks of postmodernist writings: intertextuality, reinscription, metafiction, allusions, irony, multiple-worlds physics (the overlapping of possible worlds or a mixture of fictional worlds and reality), displacement, hybridity, the lack of a common denominator, to name just a few. In conclusion, fairy tales of postmodernist inscription suppose autopoiesis, the emergence of a counter-order where old and new ideologies come to grips, get confused in order to make room for other, new values of the changing world. Her inventions are actually re-inventions of concepts, beliefs, norms, and a passage into a parallel reality via mirror. She strongly believed that human beings are capable of change, that nothing is immutable, that we are always in the making, in a continuous process of becoming, emphasized by the metamorphosing process presented in her stories. Under the veil of metamorphosis (women transformed into beasts, beasts into men, etc.) which becomes a major theme in her work, she contrasts human versus animal nature in an allegory of power and desire to break myths, norms and offer freedom of choice. For example, ‘The Courtship of Mr Lyon’ ends with Beast transformed by Beauty: When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew back into their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists clenched but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, under their soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man … (Carter 1995: 79)

In the story The Tiger’s Bride, Beauty is transformed by Beast: “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” (Carter 1995: 109) With one single question in The Lady of the House of Love “Can a bird sing only the song it knows or can it learn a new song?” (Carter 1995: 155) she makes us wonder and ponder our capacity of changing things; have we got the capacity of changing things, of singing new songs? The protagonist of The Bloody Chamber story changes from a representation of innocence in a white dress at the beginning to a symbol of action at the end; she creates

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her reality, evading her inheritance in the end, being saved by her mother, and learning "to sing a new song" with a new perspective on her future. Angela Carter dresses her ideas in daring, colorful, meaningful language abounding in jokes, cross-cultural references; all her writing is full of cultural and intertextual references, allusions and clues, in a true postmodernist vein, keeping the balance between entertainment and signification. For example, in The Bloody Chamber story, the Marquis refers to the Marquis de Sade and quotes from both authors; the walls of his castle are covered with paintings by Moreau, Ensor, and Gauguin depicting dead women; he smokes Romeo y Julieta cigars and listens to Wagner; and the story is set in Le Mont Saint-Michel, a walled complex built around an 8th-century monastery on a small island in Normandy. Angela Carter views mythic images of women as ‘consolatory nonsenses’ and attacks this mythic inscription, pattern, for dealing in what she calls ‘false universals’ since it ignores the complexity of individuals as well as the mutability of history. The stories collected in The Bloody Chamber explore mythic images of women and show both their violence and attraction. Her female characters are neither representing the good woman to be possessed nor the bad woman to be punished that persist in traditional fairy tale narratives, but a mixture of both archetypes. She examines how persons adopt positions within the visual world and the potentially violent effects of such postures in order to investigate the relationship between gendered identity and visual modes of perception. In the narrative that serves as the collection's title, Carter's female first-person narrator is able to occupy a well-known fairy tale with her own brand of consciousness. By retelling a classic tale and exploring it from her own perspective, Carter is able to highlight her interest in gender politics and the politics of vision. The first and longest story in the book, The Bloody Chamber, makes considerable use of Gothic techniques and imagery to test and cross linguistic limits. The implications of including Jean-Yves in the narrative, as an opposing characterization of masculinity to the Marquis, and the concept of the strong, loving matriarch as the heroine and savior, rather than a traditional male hero, turn the tables on the patriarchal way of imagining the world. These are significant to the representations and revelations of sexual and gender identities throughout the story. The Marquis is a representation of cruelty, depravity, and excess and is the predatory patriarch figure common to Gothic stories. In contrast, JeanYves, the young piano tuner who works for him, personifies compassion and generosity, earning her faith: “My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would come with me if I would lead him”. The Gothic and fairy tale

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form become means to an end for Carter who is exposing and transcending the conventional boundaries of gender identity. In constructing the character of Jean-Yves as the antithesis of the Marquis, Carter indicates the vast spectrum of potential masculine identities. Significantly, however, the young man is powerless to save the female narrator, empowering, thus, Carter’s matriarch, depicted as a bold and brilliant hero, to save her in the end: “one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my father's service revolver and, behind her, the breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice”. This subversive reworking of the typical scene in which a male hero rescues the damsel in distress is incredibly significant to the entire collection and to Carter’s feminist intention. Carter’s narrative restores a figure who is absent from fairy tales: the strong, loving, and courageous mother. This reflects the ways in which Carter constructs new cultural and literary realities. Her mother, who serves as an example of the power and heroism that women are capable of, saves the narrator, once again turning the tables on a patriarchal worldview. The myths and customs that shape society and how they connect to the formation of identity are at the center of Carter's aesthetic interests. Her stories persistently expose, subvert, and reject the stereotypical gender roles seen in classic fairy tales, roles that need men to be powerful and dominant and women to be weak and obedient. Readers are given fresh contexts through the process of revising fairy tales, which can be used to liberate signs and patterns for modern purposes. Carter has created highly symbolic tales that disrupt the antiquated ideology that rules conventional fairy tales through a Gothic medium of excess and possibility, incorporating unique, modern interpretations from one of the oldest literary genres. Challenging the masculine structure/authority inherited from generation to generation as eternal-natural, Carter retells differently so as to bring about change. She deconstructs such hierarchical structures as man/woman, activity/passivity related to the male gaze – (a cinematic concept coined by the film critic Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, (1975)) – a social construct derived from the ideologies of patriarchy moulded in the roles of dominant-male and dominated-women so deeply inscribed in our society, presenting women as passive objects for the male gaze of the active viewer, consequence of the inequality between men and women. The concept actually has deeper roots, in Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, when a child looking at himself in the mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance, thus, the psychological effect of the gaze is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object.

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In some of her stories The Bloody Chamber, The Tiger’s Bride Carter reverses the idea of the gaze as predominantly related to men, empowering also women, reversing the power relationships. In The Bloody Chamber, she criticizes patriarchal society by presenting the male gaze as an attribute of the Marqius’ male desire who transforms the unnamed heroine (an alter ego of Justine from Perrault’s fairy tale Blubeard who is also the object of perverse male desires) into an object of lust for his own sexual needs. The male gaze is multiplied by the image of the mirror: Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on all the walls [...] that reflected [...] The young bride, who had become that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, [...] ‘See’, he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. ‘I have acquired a whole harem for myself!’ [...] I found I was trembling. My breath came thickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfasten the buttons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders.” (Carter 1995: 14-15)

Carter presents the patriarchal values associated with women being objectified by the male gaze as nothing more than bits of flesh and the Marquis as a connoisseur: “I saw him watching me in the glided mirrors with the assessing eye of a connoisseur inspecting horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, inspecting cuts on the slab. [...] that regard of his before, the sheer carnal avarice of it.” (Carter 1995: 8-9) Carter utilizes the unidentified heroine as the narrator of the story despite the fact that she is depicted as a passive object of desire; by giving her a voice, she escapes the confines of the visual portrayal. She observes herself from the outside, making herself "the other" (as in Lacan's notion of the mirror stage), and she objectifies herself in order to see how men perceive her: “When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glancing away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my innocent and confined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away.” (Carter 1995:9) Thus, she becomes both, the passive object and the active viewer. With the use of her female narrator Carter deconstructs the traditional male narrator and presents a woman’s point of view on what it feels like to be a passive object of the male gaze.

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In the Tiger’s Bride she subverts the male gaze by turning the tables upon it. Here, the Beast described as “delicate” and “gentle” creature represents the feminine figure, displaying Carter’s full irony. The narrator of the story, Beauty, in her description of the Beast: “[...] although he wears a mask with a man’s face painted most beautifully on it. Oh, yes, a beautiful face;” (Carter 1995: 84) using ‘beautiful’ in her description she feminizes the Beast, showing a turn of situation regarding the male gaze. However, the patriarchal framework of the story's opening remains. The opening sentence was "My father lost me to The Beast at cards." (Carter 1996: 80) The patriarchal worldview that presents women as belongings, in an exchange from father to husband, in exchange for a gain, and in an economy built on property and exchange, is further reinforced in the narrative when the main character looks in the magic mirror and says: I did not see my own face in it but that of my father; at first, I thought he smiled at me. Then I saw he was smiling with pure gratification. He sat, I saw, in the parlour of our lodgings, at the very table where he had lost me, but now he was busily engaged in counting out a tremendous pile of banknotes. My father’s circumstances have changed already; [...] The Beast had clearly paid cash on the nail for his glimpse of my bosom, and paid up promptly, [...] (Carter 1995: 104-105)

Carter poetically describes in terms of nature, the transition from a harsh, patriarchal world order: “We come from countries of cold weather”, which must be changed, subverted, ‘fought’ with: “at home, we are at war with nature” towards a more egalitarian society: “but here, ah! You think you’ve come to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb.” (Carter 1995: 80) where things might be different. The Beast seems trapped behind his mask, a prisoner, a false identity he cannot truly achieve since it does not represent his true self. This story exposes Carter’s belief that the gaze is not necessarily male as we can also speak of female gaze with Beauty controlling the gaze: “[...] his yellow eyes that strayed, now and then, from his unfurled hand towards me” (Carter 1995:82) and “ [...] my eyes were level with those inside the mask that now evaded mine, as if, to his credit, he was ashamed of his own request” (Carter 1995: 93) showing that his eyes “strayed, now and then”, “evaded mine”, “was ashamed”, which made him uncomfortable in his position as a male viewer. Beauty refuses to play the victim although she recognizes herself as a flesh object, “white meat of contract” (Carter 1995: 106), and acknowledges that “The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he acknowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers.” (Carter 1995:102) As a

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consequence, she demands to see the Beast naked, without his mask representing, thus, a position of mutual gazing “[...] if one should go naked, then all should go naked; without his livery, he revealed himself, as I had suspected, a delicate creature, covered with silken moth-grey fur, brown fingers as supple as leather, chocolate muzzle, the gentlest creature in the world.” (Carter 1995: 107) By ultimately transforming the gaze into a shared, collaborative experience as a representation of gender equality eroding patriarchal institutions that are symbolically connected to the picture of the Beast's castle falling: “[...](his) purr shook the old walls, made the shutters batter the windows until they burst apart [...] tiles came crashing down the roof; [...] rocked the foundations of the house, the walls began to dance. I thought: ‘It will all fall, everything will disintegrate.’” Carter also transforms her heroine into a Beast, on an equal basis with the Tiger: “And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, and left behind a nascent patina of shining hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur.” (Carter 1995: 109) acknowledging that she needs to become more than just a reflection in the scrutinizing eyes of the male gaze: “his appetite need not be my extinction.” (Carter 1995: 108) The end result of this story is what Cixous calls in The Newly Born Woman: “‘the way out’ of a patriarchal system, a delight in difference, in multiplicity, in a continuous awareness of ‘the other’ within the self” (Cixous 1996: xv) This is exactly what Angela Carter does and Cixous calls it écriture feminine, a way out, a ‘sortie’ from the oppressive identities of binarisms, thus, a subversive text which displays fragmentation and slipperiness, word-play, multiple voices within discourse undermining and subverting the dominating male system-based discourse of unity and order, or, as Cixous states at the beginning of her Newly Born Woman: “ Everyone knows that a place exists which is not economically or politically indebted to all the vileness and compromise. That is not obliged to reproduce the system. That is writing. If there is a somewhere else that can escape the infernal repetition, it lies in that direction, where it writes itself, where it dreams, where it invents new worlds.” (Cixous 1996: ix) In her 1983 essay Is the Gaze Male? E. Ann Kaplan argues that the gaze could be adopted by both men and women alike, the man need not always be the controlling subject nor the female the passive object as it is reinforced by Carter’s re-writing of fairy tales to reflect and adapt to the new norms of society.

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Thus, she views gender as performance embedded and shaped by social institutions, not something we are born with. Her revisionary use of the fairy tales addresses society at large, questioning old values and expectations about the role and the relationships of women to men. She exploded patterns, imposed norms, she strongly believed we alone are the bricoleurs of our own identity in the making. She saw herself as the only author of her own identity and happiness, as stated in her biography: One theory is, we make our destinies like blind men chucking paint at a wall; we never understand nor even see the marks we leave behind us. But not too much of the grandly accidental abstract expressionist about my life, I trust; oh, no. I always try to live on the best possible terms with my unconscious and let my right hand know what my left is doing and, fresh every morning, scrutinize my dreams. Abandon, therefore, or rather, deconstructs the blind-action painter metaphor; take it apart, formalize it, put it back together again, strive for something a touch more hard-edged, intentional, altogether less arty, for I do believe we all have their right to choose. (Gordon 2016: 301)

She was an author very much actively engaged in the concerns of her day, in a highly original manner, challenging the dominant symbols of signification. Her postmodern world is a continual change of perspectives, a manifold of changing horizons, with focus on the linguistic and social construction of reality, on interpretation and negotiation of the meaning of the lived world.

Fairy Tale Patterns in the Poetry of Cezar Baltag Cezar Baltag creates a lyric universe in which the mystical bonds between the material and the spiritual worlds need to be retied. The poet considers that it is necessary to follow his ancestors, to return to the roots, to folklore in order to re-create the broken bonds. The approach is rather intellectual combining ancient spells, formulas taken from children`s folklore, characters taken from the Greek mythology, characters from the Judeo-Christian mythology. The solution sought is one formula of recharming the world in order to keep the mystery of the existence alive. There seem to be more ways to re-create the broken bond between heaven and earth: mythology, folklore, sensuality, spells, religion, poetry, etc. His reliance on fairy tales is clearly seen in his volumes Odihnă în Ġipăt, Madona din dud, Unicorn în oglindă, Dialog la mal as it becomes a major theme throughout his entire work, a means of internal liberation in a process of self-recognition. Depicting the rural and its realm fairy tales

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become cultural documents he takes account of in his poetry. With the help of fairy tales, he projected another world in his poems, one of psychological depthness, the only one in which he could set himself free of all constraints, including political ones. In Civilization and its Discontents (1930) Freud argued that civilization was necessarily and tragically built on the suppression and sublimation of instinct. Cezar Baltag’s world is one of conflicts he does not come to terms with, for which the poet finds no answers in a world of limits and limitations, thus, his need to escape in his wandering for answers, in his quest for identity, into another one without limits, finality, closure. A deconstruction of the world, of reality, into fairy tales and into his poems. In an interview in 1971, Cezar Baltag confessed: “M-am apropiat de folclor úi pentru faptul că, în mod paradoxal, aprofundarea lui contrazice părerea comuna despre simplitate.” (“Another reason for which I turned to folklore is that, paradoxically, its in-depth study contradicts the common belief about simplicity.” – my translation.) He turns to folklore, investigating thus, the collective subconscious, using what he calls “pattern de basm” creating his own fairy tales. With “pattern de basm” as a title or subtitle for some of his poems collected in the volume Unicorn în oglindă, he indicates from the very beginning the way the poem should be approached, as a fairy tale – which is a specific way for our people, and not only, to understand the world, its essence. Lost in the reflections of the mirror and of the poetry, the poet looks for identity, for his true, inner self caught in a conflicting world, aware of its faults and also of the passage of time, he becomes a stranger in the outer world where he finds no answers to his questions, thus, he moves his quest inwards. Rooted in fairy tales, some of his poems are a way of re-charming the world, of finding its essence; such a poem is Fata din dafin (The Girl in the Bay Tree) included in the collection Unicorn în oglindă (Unicorn in the Looking Glass). Fata din dafin “Ea trece ca o corabie cu catargele evaporate naufragiază pe o mare de camfor de unde nu se mai poate întoarce Nervii ei sunt raze, inima ei e un nod de lemn împrejurul ei e o secetă înăuntrul ei o fântână.

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În fântână doarme un Юarpe. Din fruntea Юarpelui curge o stea. Ea aude cântând cocoЮii departe în scoarаa copacilor Auzul ei e o iederă genele ei foЮnesc ea aprinde o gură de frunze vorbele ei sunt vrăbii: Deschide-te, Dafine, deschide-te, Dafine, deschide-te, Dafine Dar Dafinul nu o mai aude Эi ea trece ca o corabie cu pânzele evaporate naufragiază pe o mare de camfor de unde nu se mai poate întoarce” (Baltag 1975: 35)

The Girl in the Bay Tree She sails like a ship with no masts she sails on a a sea of camphor from where she can no longer return Her veins are sunrays, her heart a crux of wood around her is dryness within her a well. The well is nesting a snake. The snake has a star on its head. She hears the song of roosters far away in the trees

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Her hearing an ivy her lashes a rustling her mouth just leafs her words are sparrows: Open-up, Bay tree, open-up Bay tree, open-up, Baytree The Bay tree hears her no more She sails like a ship with no masts she sails on a a sea of camphor from where she can no longer return (my translation)

The girl from the bay tree, a fairy tale character, by coming out from the bay tree, descending into the real world loses her way back to her magic world. The impossibility of return shows the rupture between the two worlds. The symbols associated with her have sacred meanings: the ship (corabia) – Noah’s arch, a symbol of salvation; the rays (razele) light as a sign of knowledge; the wood (lemnul) – stands for warmth, life; the well (fântâna) – the representation of wisdom; the snake (úarpele) – a dual symbol, able to reveal wisdom; the roosters (cocoúii) - stand for the passage of time, the coming of morning, warn the girl it is time for her to return to her magic world. Another poem entitled In illo tempore, the same collection of poems, subtitled pattern de basm: In Illo Tempore “Unde timpul úi numele Într-o zi cît alĠii într-un an ùi dacă văzu că nu are încotro: –Mă duc eu, tată ùi plesni de trei ori din palme úi se prefăcu… -Să mă scoĠi la lumea albă… ca vîntul ca gîndul – Ia te uită înapoi, frate úi spune-mi ce vezi…

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94 - Doamne, dar greu somn am mai dormit cu totul úi cu totul de aur Iar eu am încălecat pe o úa úi v-am spus”

(Baltag 1975: 113)

In Illo Tempore Where the time and the name One day as others in a year And seeing no other way: - I will go, father And clapped three times and turned into… - Take me out into the Sun… like the wind like a thought - Look behind, my brother tell me what you see… - God, deep sleep did I slept where everything was gold And so my story ends As told (my translation)

is a fairy tale in verse itself. The title sets the action in illo tempore, where everything is possible, where, without time and name, everything is reduced to its essence, to true knowledge. It keeps with the fairy tale frame, beginning in illo tempore and ending with the fairy tale formula „Iar eu am încălecat pe o úa/ úi v-am spus //” (And so my story ends/ As told//) leaving the reader reflect upon its content and bring his own share. Another re-working of the fairy tale is the poem La Pod (At the Bridge).

Fairy Tales and Postmodernist Deconstructionist Poetics La pod “Tată de atâtea ori visat de atâtea ori uitat iar te depărtezi iar te apropii Ai trecut de mine rămâi în urmă îаi schimbi înfăаiЮarea o iei pe un drum ascuns Юi iar îmi ieЮi înainte la pod mereu îmi ieЮi înainte ca să mă sperii Юi să pot trece de pragul în flăcări al basmului” At the Bridge Father so many times dreamt so many times forgotten you go away you come again You passed by me you stay behind you change your looks you go around another way then again come before me at the bridge always before me to scare me so to pass the threshold in flames of the tales (my translation)

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We have here the image of the father as the one who helps the son in his coming of age. Metamorphosis and the fluidity of time and space help the hero on his way. The bridge is not only one as appears in Harap Alb (The White Moor), but different stages in the way towards true knowledge. The passage into the world of fairy tales is represented by fire, a symbol of change, of renewal. His collection of poems Unicorn în oglindă / Unicorn in the Looking Glass is magic. Its vision, metaphors, music, all refers to metaphysics, autoreflexivity and the process of becoming. The self, identity, become relative concepts reflected in a multitude of mirrors. A dissolving of the subject seen as centre of the world and a progression towards a relative self that knows it is a relative self, a proliferation of roles. Trapped in a deceitful reality, which offers no answers, no meanings, the poet engages in a different search, an inner one. His poem De la capăt (From the Beginning) included also in his collection Dialog la mal (Dialogue on the Bank) is an ars poetica: De la capăt “ùtia că are chip úi nu-l mai găsea úi nu-úi mai găsea nici mâinile cu care să-l caute ùtia că are ochi ùi nu-i mai găsea úi nu-úi mai găsea nici pleoapele care să-l apere ùtia că are un drum úi nu-l mai găsea úi nu-úi mai găsea nici tălpile cu care să-l caute Atunci úi-a auzit inima înăuntrul unei fântâni úi-a coborât înăuntrul ei úi úi-a recâútigat calul úi spada Ca fulgerul într-un ulcior celest Ca bobul de grâu care se trezeúte în pământ úi îúi reaminteúte dintr-o dată de la capăt toată povestea”

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From the Beginning He knew he has a face and he couldn’t find it and he couldn’t fiind his hands either to look for his face He knew he has eyes And he couldn’t find them he couldn’t find his eyelids either to protect him He knew about his way and he couldn’t find it he couldn’t find his soles either to look for it Then he heard his heart within a well and went down in regained his horse and sword A lightening pouring from a divine pot A grain that germinates the earth and suddenly remembers from the beginning the entire story (my translation)

The poet understands fairy tales as a place of contemplation, from where he can interpret his existence, ask question and find answers. Deconstructing reality, his poems become a locus for the spiritual search of meanings, of identity, he builds his own imaginary world to resolve his conflicts and answer his questions. He uses his poetry to interpret and elucidate existence, his poems become a verbal organizing corresponding to a spiritual content: “Cuvântul este principiul verbal suprem ce susĠine ‘toate lumile’” (Baltag 1996:7) (“The word is the ultimate verbal element at the basis of ‘all possible worlds’” – my translation) argued Cezar Baltag in Paradoxul semnelor, connecting it to the Bible and its “La început a fost Cuvântul úi Cuvântul era la Dumnezeu úi Cuvântul era Dumnezeu.” (At the beginning there was the Word and the Word belonged to God and the Word was God.” - my translation) his search for words is also a a search for God, for identity and since God resides inside us, his search is an inner one, into the depths of his being, away from the external world of representation as stated in his poem Ocultare from the volume Chemarea numelui:

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“Pur? Aventura ia sfârúit o dată cu puritatea. Îngerul n-aúteaptă. De nu l-ai înfruntat la prima treaptă urci úi tot urci o scară de nămol úi nu mai întâlneúti nici un simbol Să fie-o uúă, poate, în ne-gând un prag mai aspru un zăvor mai sfânt úi dincolo de pragul ei curat să fie chipul tău adevărat? Cuvintele s-ar stinge dacă-n rugă n-ar fi atrase de un punct de fugă, acolo în adânc tăcerea arde úi Dumnezeu în toate se împarte úi ca-n oglindă dincolo de lume El brusc îúi stinge ultimul lui Nume Orbim úi facem calea înapoi úi nu mai útim că l-am ascuns în noi În jarul úi cenuúa din cuvinte mă-îngroapă, Doamne, să te pot aprinde” (Baltag 1995:20)

Pure? The adventure is over once with purity. The Angel waits no more. If not confronted at the start you climb and climb a a stair of mud no symbol in your way A door, maybe, not in the thought a stronger hold a holier bolt and beyond its threshold might your true face be hold?

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The words would disappear if they were not connected in a prayer deep there the silence burning and God is everywhere and like in mirror beyond the world He suddenly silences his Name We see no more and back we go forgetting we have Him in us hidden In burning truthful words you lost me, God, so I can speak of you (my translation)

The poet himself is a creator of worlds through words, and a use of words for deeper meanings. In his process of creation, he uses not only words but also their music, as seen in his volume Madona din dud, so much imbued with folklore, when words where sung, becoming more than just words. We can well place this volume next to Ion Barbu’s Isarlâc, Tudor Arghezi’s Flori de mucegai or Anton Pann’s writings. With his appeal to folklore, fairy tales, games, rhymes, musicality in his poems, the poet tries to set the balance right, to compensate for the tension created by conflicts, game-like, inviting us not to take anything for granted, but to question it, for there is always more, a plurality of meanings. His poetry poses no finality, but a wandering for answers, a quest for true identity, no closure at all, but a continuous becoming. He has a postmodern approach of re-use and collage, of recycling elements of tradition in his poetry. As seen, both Cezar Baltag and Angela Carter used fairy tales and folklore to enrich and give a distinctive flavor to their writings. Much used and abused, fairy tales remain a rich soil to be exploited. The Network society of today, the nest of capitalism and globalization conditions and responds at the same time to the production of fairy tales. The fairy tale web, a 21st century product, builds on fashionable terminology and remaps the genre. Cashing in on the genre’s worldwide appeal is quite common in globalized consumer capitalism where fragments from and expectations associated with fairy tales pervade popular culture, confirming their spell over both adults and children.

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Horror films are the newest form of fairy tales, with the two genres sharing both structural and cultural elements. Both types of stories function in the same way in society and because of this link, they share their cultural significance. If fairy tales are the dreams of a society, then horror films are its nightmares. Both, the hopes and fears of a culture, a people, a period, or an individual are important to understand, observe, and learn. These tales are as old as their cultures. It is by paying attention to these tales that we begin to better understand ourselves and where we come from. Bruno Bettelheim wrote about the psychological benefits that could be gained by people through the reading and identification with fairy tales in his The Uses of Enchantment, 1989. Bettelheim was one of the founders of the school of psychoanalytical fairy tale research, focusing on the ways in which tales could illustrate parts of the psyche and help people deal with psychological trauma. Perhaps, then, “use them as a psychological tool, for the individual to construct his own story, as a parallel world adapted to his needs, which presents the individual’s “problems” / “questions” and helps him find “solutions” / “answers”, becoming a bandage for the individual as well as for the society he lives in. Wars over identity will apparently never cease, for, to move forward, one needs new discourses. Most worrisome still, as long as identity and self-realization are viewed as fixed categories, there will always be walls to climb or break down. With all the shatters of this world that impinge on our lives, we alone are left responsible to build and shape our own identity in the making. Ihab Hassan’s question “What lies beyond postmodernism?” in his From Modernism to Postmodernity: The Local/Global Context and his answer: “Of course, no one really knows. But my tacit answer has been: postmodernity pulsing on the Internet. This is no cause to cheer.” (Hassan 2000: web), We tend to agree with, for in our quest to grasp identity, it escapes through our fingers more than ever before. It becomes a phantom and a phantasm. All literature, one way or another, is an act of bearing witness in the process of identity formation, which is, at its turn, an on-going process of becoming, continuously re-written, re-read to fit new needs as the world progresses, to perceive and understand the world anew.

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Modernity, unlike the classical and medieval world, is characterized by self-reflexivity building images of the individual or the collective mind. Cultural narratives change from one cultural phase to another, in parallel to changes in the epistemology of the age. The reason we turned to fairy tales rather than some other genre in approaching the issue of identity is that it was to folk traditions that Herder turned to in order to define the character of a people at the beginning of this time span. In the early twentieth century the collective unconscious was still considered (Gustav Jung) to reveal the soul of a people. The epistemology of uncertainty, the deconstruction of the Cartesian self, of metaphysics and of history, undertaken by Nietzsche and his intellectual heritage (Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida), influenced the concept of identity as well, postmodernism leaving behind notions of heroic selves and grand adventures and descending in the historical world of class, gender or race troubles. Anticipating postmodernism, Flann O’Brien depicted the decay of contemporary Ireland through parodies of the Irish folk tradition. On the contrary, canonical postmodernists, such as Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson …a.s.o. hailed the collapse of male heroic stereotypes, using fairy tales for their agenda of women’ s emancipation from patriarchal conventions. According to Ricoeur, we possess the intellectual power to reimagine scenarios so that we make our disjointed lives coherent; thus, when we remember and reimagine, we identify ourselves in the stories we tell. Our evolving narratives, our identity narratives make us understand our lives. Under the constant flux of changes, these narratives are continuously being rewritten, as well as our identities. Changing with each telling/reading, to each person, the story emerges into new understanding and its elements are displaced and replaced. In his major study Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age, Anthony Giddens makes a very challenging exposure of

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modernity and its relation to the self. As a continuity of his ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens describes high or late modernity as a post traditional order with reflexivity as a main feature to describe the dynamism of modern institutions and their global impact. Nowadays the world does not need nation-building, a nineteenth century concept, but to create collective culture, so we move towards culture building. On day-today basis, our present life has been transformed by the global impact of modern institutions, by their dynamism, in an ongoing process of becoming. The narratives of identity support the reflexive project of the self involved in the shaping of modern institutions towards ‘colonizing the future’, offering at the same time the fertile ground to question the orientation of these institutions and provide material for a new political agenda of late-modernity. Modernity, as Anthony Giddens well states in his study, is a posttraditional order which radicalizes and globalizes the pre-established set of values transforming the content and nature of our daily social life. A step away from the certainty of the past into the mists of the future. The apocalyptic feature of postmodernism does not imply calamity but risks, unknown to previous generations and eras but part of our contemporary experience, for: [...] the influence of distant happenings on proximate events, and on intimacies of the self, becomes more and more commonplace. The media, printed and electronic, obviously play a central role in this respect. Mediated experience, since the first experience of writing, has long influenced both self-identity and the basic organisation of social relations. With the development of mass communication, particularly electronic communication, the interpenetration of self-development and social systems, up to and including global systems, becomes even more pronounced. (Giddens 1991:4)

The reflexive self generates an actualization of the old values according to a situatedness in the present in a process of finding oneself of active intervention and transformation.

Fairy Tales and the Poetics of Identity: a Shift of Perspective from Modernism to Postmodernism Having a central theme, a united vision, its own “rules” to follow and a moral to teach, in modernism, fairy tales stand as a mark of identity, having their own recipe. They embed beneath their surface the profound truths of experience and life, they shed light upon them. As nothing stands

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still, with the passage of time, fairy tales change to embed, express and interpret changes making us aware of them. Moving towards postmodernism, fairy tales are reluctant to a pre-given set of beliefs, norms, unity, for they have to express a different world, ambiguous, fragmented, unfinished, becoming, thus, an “open” work. They creatively work with bits of the past and present images that seem relevant from our standpoint in the present like in a game of hide and seek, in a constant interplay of past and present. With each reading we have a new understanding steaming from a weaving of emotional and intellectual information, a reinterpretation of the past from our standing point in the present. As Giddens argues, the self is not a passive entity forged by external influences, but dynamic, for individuals, no matter their context, being it local or not, contribute to and promote social influences and changes having in our postmodern world, a global impact, thus, the important role these narratives played in the culture building project. In postmodernism, fairy tales become, as seen at Angela Carter and Cezar Baltag, a meeting point with the reader who is invited to bring his share of knowledge, to interpret it, for the text lends itself to multiple interpretations. Fairy tale production and reception have become acts of translation, transformation and transcultural communication. Their role is to help us make sense of our world which is in a continuous change, imprinting these changes to fairy tales, in the way they are produced and read, showing the importance of language in constructing the realities by which we live. In pursuing my enquiry into the transformations and changes from a more traditional order of things to the ever-shifting world of postmodernism with focus on identity formation, I shall concentrate on some examples in an attempt to better grasp the flexible, fluid and troubled concept of identity. As a comparative approach, a case in point might be the one between Angela Carter’s postmodern fairy tales collection The Bloody Chamber with their traditional counter narratives so as to shed light upon the transformations suffered by the fairy tale in time. Transformations greatly influenced by the outer changes in society, such as the second wave feminist movement (1970) which has influenced many retellings of fairy tales, such as Jack Zipes’s collection Don’t Bet on The Prince (1986) and The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood (1993) along with Carter’s collection The Bloody Chamber (1979). These re-workings’ intent was to subvert their patriarchal originals by bringing to the foreground the underlying misogyny of the old versions and to reclaim women’s position according to new realities.

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Zipes’ interpretation of revision in his Fairy Tale as Myth: Myth as Fairy Tale fits quite well in the context of our discussion of fairy tales. To better clarify the concept, he mentions that: According to the Oxford Universal Dictionary, revise means “To look or read carefully over, with a view to improving or correcting,” “To go over again, re-examine, in order to improve or amend.” The purpose of producing a revised fairy tale is to create something new that incorporates the critical and creative thinking of the producer and corresponds to changed demands and tastes of audiences. As a result of transformed values, the revised classical fairy tale seeks to alter the reader’s views of traditional patterns, images, and codes. This does not mean that all revised classical fairy tales are improvements and progressive. Revision for the sake of revision is not necessarily a change for the better of stimulating. However, the premise of a revision is that there is something wrong with an original work and that it needs to be changed for the better. (Zipes 1994: 9-10)

This fairy dialogue through time draws our attention to the process of construction by posing problems on our traditional, conventional expectations, recasting the traditional metaphor of the world as book in the view of contemporary philosophy or theories, be it linguistic or literary. In her study Metafiction: the Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, Patricia Waugh draws upon the importance of language in constructing reality: If, as individuals, we now occupy ‘roles’ rather than ‘selves’, then the study of characters in novels may provide a useful model for understanding the construction of subjectivity in the world outside novels. If our knowledge of this world is now seen to be mediated through language, then literary fiction (worlds constructed entirely of language) becomes a useful model for learning about the construction of ‘reality’ itself. The present increased awareness of ‘meta’ levels of discourse and experience is partly a consequence of an increased social and cultural self-consciousness. Beyond this, however, it also reflects a greater awareness within contemporary culture of the function of language in constructing and maintaining our sense of everyday ‘reality’. (Waugh 1996:3)

The postmodern writings seen as texts of identity as those of Angela Carter explore the modes we construct, delimit and understand our personal identities, endowing their characters with the power of playing with their construction of the selves, making us, the readers, question previous modes of being and hinting to new possible moulds of personhood. The Self becomes constructed in discourse which, at its turn

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becomes constructive of social relationships forming a web of interrelations. The postmodernist approach to history is by no means a tabula rasa, an erasing of everything past for a whole new start, but rather an approach of collage or re-use, of recycling tradition in new contexts, new realities, as Angela Carter does with her postmodern retellings of traditional fairy tales using them as frames filled with new content, most visible in the postmodern globalised context, in accordance with current fashion undermining certitudes of knowledge. Postmodern writings turn the table on tradition and authority to fit a whole, new picture, one of postmodern concerns with a sheer need for reinvention. Fairy tales have always entered a cross-cultural dialogue and a dialogue across centuries. Rooted in our grand, collective imaginary, they have always offered a chance for change in a coming together of real and ideal. As poet Charles Bernstein would have it in his poem Of Time and the Line, “the lines of an imaginary are inscribed on the social flesh by the knifepoint of history”. Over time fairy tales enacted human desires shaped in their turn by different histories, ideologies and socio-economical conditions. The fairy tale’s plot is a “mirror” that reflects and frames desires. Modern philosophers of the Kantian school looked upon imagination as the power to create a world of original value and truth. Pouring, thus, imagination into narratives, such as fairy tales, nations constructed, shaped their own identity, out of their historical experience, desires and expectations. Meaning became the immediate invention of the imagination. Fairy tales as the playground of the imagination are a reminder that history is never completed, that there is always room for more possibilities. The purpose of fairy tales has changed since their origin. Originally, they were morbid tales told by men to other men. By the turn of the 17th century, France used fairy tales to educate children and adults, in the spirit of neoclassicism that looked back to Horace’s mix of the useful and the agreeable (utile dulci). The publication of Charles Perrault's collection Histoires ou contes du temps passé, which integrated fairy tales as part of the historical civilizing process and transformed them into historical statements, occurred during the reign of Louis XIV, a time when French culture was setting the standards of civilité for the rest of Europe. In order to address the problems of French court society and to serve as "lessons" about morals

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and manners to civilize children in accordance with the code and standards of the time, he purposefully reworked and adapted the oral folk stories. In order to achieve the absorption of societal standards to the point where they are on the verge of becoming second nature, they ingrained the morality and ethics of a male-dominated Christian civil order. To follow instructions, behave in a specific manner, and to control oneself actually meant social control. Disobedience and social non-conformism were punished harshly in the name of civility and Christianity, pressuring the children to conform to role models. Of great importance was also the fairy tale’s capacity to arise feelings of shame and anxiety in children for breaking rules. Thus, fairy tales became a base for the future development of children, their docile insertion into society, to better serve church and state revealing the powerful role they had at that time, setting the standards of proper behaviour, sending out echoes to our very present day. In Perrault’s fairy tales the male protagonist is educated, wellmannered, devoted, intelligent, ambitious, courageous affirming the standards of civilité while the female model, la femme civilisée, is graceful, polite, beautiful, hard-working, in control of herself at all times, dedicated housekeeper, patient, passive until the right man comes along and marries her. If she fails to obey, she will be punished, as in Red Riding Hood’s case. Even if not explicitly, the political subconscious of the text favours the total submission of the woman to her husband. Perrault even used the manner of speech of the aristocracy in order to reinforce the standards of civilité set by upper-class French society. With so much moralistic manipulation we come to doubt and question the innocence of fairy tales. It is, of course, rather dangerous to perceive fairy tales only in terms of manipulation, but we cannot look sideways either; at least we should identify manipulation as one of its features. To exemplify the above mentioned, let us take a closer look at a very atypical fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood (AT333) for it is the only one from the entire collection (of Perrault) lacking a happy ending. It is a tale transformed into a word of warning, actually, providing the proper model of behavior for girls. In this fairy tale Perrault preaches to the reader about what a decent, well-behaved girl should be like by using the character of Little Red Riding Hood as a negative example, who brings about an unhappy ending for herself and her grandmother. Because of her disobedience and refusal to keep under control her natural impulses she is harshly punished in the end. Thus, her transgression of the rules of good conduct brings about her downfall, so, …be warned!

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Her unhappy ending: “the wicked wolf threw himself upon Little Red Riding Hood and ate her up” (Perrault web 2009:10) might be read as an attempt to destroy female empowerment in favour of patriarchal obedience as well as to relate it to the dangers and miseries of peasant life in the 18th century France. Her curiosity and transgressions are seen as a threat to social order. Rather than warning against the dangers of wild animals in forests, the fairy tale warns girls to keep their natural desires under control. Another turning point in history was the 1812 version Rotkäppchen of the brothers Grimm from their collection Kinder und Hausmarchen. So, a passage from Perrault’s version and French culture to Grimm’s version, which has its roots in the French version, but also in German culture. In an attempt to revitalize German literature, fairy tales were a way to educate children and help give them an imagination without fear. This approach to fairy tales continues today. What is perhaps most significant in the Grimms adaptation of the stories is the sanitizing process that they deemed necessary to accommodate it to a children’s audience. The Grimm version undergoes various transformations: they introduce a warning from mother: “Set out before it gets hot, and when you are going, walk nicely and quietly and do not run off the path, or you may fall and break the bottle, and then your grandmother will get nothing; and when you go into her room, don’t forget to say ‘Good-morning,’ and don’t peep into every corner before you do it.” (Grimm 1976: 91) The little girl promises to obey. The warning not to go peeping as stated above is a recognition of female curiosity seen as one of the most dangerous of female traits. Entering the woods, she meets the wolf, whom she does not fear, because she is not aware of him being wicked, and, suspecting nothing, she readily takes his advice to enjoy the beauty of nature. As in the previous stories, the wolf arrives at grandmother’s first, devours her, and lies in bed waiting for Red Cap to arrive. The Grimms add suspense to the story by making the heroine draw a bed curtain as she enters the chamber because she is afraid of what she will see behind it. The “teeth” become “mouth”, and she too is swallowed by the wolf. This is by no means the end of the story, nor does the narrator proceed to moralizing in verse, as in Perrault’s version. Instead, the wolf gets back into bed and begins to snore, which alerts a passing hunter who decides to investigate. The hunter saves both Red Cap and her grandmother, changing the ending into a happy one. After being rescued she feels guilty and promises to herself: “As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into

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the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so” (Grimm 1976: 93), showing that the little girl has internalized her experience. In the Grimm version, she must rely on an outside, male force – a patriarchal global order – to save her and restore the balance. Red Cap is victimized both inside and outside of the story, by the wolf and readers who hold her responsible for her own disobedience. The Grimms offer Red Cap salvation after she has learned her lesson. Although the two versions, Perrault’s and the brothers Grimms’, are set apart from each other, they are quite similar in presenting gender ideologies. They present women as passive, helpless, and promote a victim mentality in their female readers. As nothing stands still, with the passage of time, fairy tales are modified so as to embed, express and interpret changes, making us aware of them. In the context of postmodernist refurbishing of tradition, fairy tales are underwritten by an agenda which is reluctant to a pre-given set of beliefs, norms, unity, for they have to express a different world, ambiguous, fragmented, unfinished, becoming, thus, an “open” work. The shift in poetics from modernism to postmodernism knew two phases: deconstruction of traditional logocentric hierarchies and concepts (fairy tales were emptied out of their patriarchal, authoritative message) and New Historicism (since the 80s), when fairy tales were adapted to meet the present needs of an egalitarian, liberated society. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber tales published in 1979 reveal new cultural realities in which free will in women replaces the stress on traditional morality and innocence of the traditional fairy tale. Her fairy tales, viewed as identity counter-narratives, present alternative values which are not contained in the traditional fairy tales. In The Werewolf, one of her fairy tales from The Bloody Chamber collection she subverts the traditional version of Little Red Riding Hood so as to expose the outdated, fixed gender ideologies embedded in the classic versions. She spins out a different story, bringing Little Red Riding Hood into the 21st century to make her chime better with our sensibilities. Carter’s intention was to keep the frame and play with the content of previous versions. The story starts with the description of a harsh winter in a northern country, as setting for the “innocent” girl, creating, thus a paradox, from the very beginning. The mother gives her daughter a hunting knife, her father's, and tells her: "You know how to use it" (Carter 1979:109), breaking the stereotype of women as weak and frail. The daughter is told to go and visit her grandma, who has been ill. She is thus ready for a meeting with the (D)evil

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in advance. In response to the wolf's attack, she strikes back, cutting off his paw. She does not enter into a dialogue with the wolf. Carter keeps our curiosity to the limits by making her protagonist keep the paw which afterwards transforms into a hand resembling her grandmother’s. She is frightened when she realizes this and plans to tell the villagers that her grandmother is a witch so that she can be stoned to death. When the heroine moves into her grandmother's home, the readers begin to doubt her "innocence" due to the heroine's actions, which ensure her own prosperity. This reminds them of the cruelty of the Inquisition and its procedures in medieval times. The girl is freed from the conception and limitations of a passive victim by her capacity to endure the brutal, inhumane conditions of the north and her willingness to sacrifice everything for that goal, even her humanity, all associated with masculinity. By turning the tables on the traditional fairy tale and making the wolf her victim, she becomes the empowered woman who can fight back, she subverts the gender roles, she is no longer the naive girl from previous versions, but one who knows what she wants as well as the means to get it. She is no longer the embodiment of the innocent Red Cap, but a girl in “a scabby coat of sheepskin” (Carter 1979: 109) makes us question: is she, too, in disguise? In The Werewolf, she combines the characters of wolf and grandmother to create the character in the title. In doing so, she suggests that man is not woman's only enemy. Women also contribute to the destruction of other women, creating multiple references to evil. Challenging readers' perceptions of such clear-cut notions of "right" and "wrong" Carter challenges the male perspective of the conventional fairy tale by shifting the emphasis to the heroine's experience. Another example of traditional childhood fairy tale is Snow White (AT709) best known in Brothers Grimm’s version of the 19th century Sneewittchen or at present as a Disney movie. In the Brothers Grimm version, the evil queen, Snow White’s stepmother commands a hunter to take Snow White into the forest and kill her (this parallels the Disney movie). In the story, the hunter is asked to bring her back Snow White’s lungs and liver. He feels sorry for Snow White and is unable to kill her, so brings back a boar’s lungs and liver instead. Weeping, Snow White begs for mercy. The huntsman relents and allows her to flee, reasoning that she will eventually be eaten by wildlife anyhow. When the night falls, she seeks shelter in a modest home owned by seven dwarfs who mine in the mountains. In the morning, the seven dwarfs welcome Snow White to their home and offer to let her stay if she becomes their housekeeper. They warn her not to let anyone into the house: her stepmother may still be trying to kill

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her. With two unsuccessful attempts to kill the princess, the evil queen attempts for a third time. Now, the queen gives her the poisoned apple (just like in the movie), Snow White faints and can’t be revived. The dwarfs find her, mourn for her and place her in a glass coffin. A prince comes, falls in love, and wants to take her away. The dwarves hesitantly allow it, and while she is being carried, the carriers trip, causing the poisoned apple to become dislodged from Snow White’s throat. The two get married and live happily ever after. When the queen appears to their wedding, she is sentenced to dance in a pair of red-hot shoes till she dies. The Good has prevailed. Focusing on themes as female development and female jealousy, the traditional story contrasts two images: Snow White, “the angel woman” and The Queen as the “monster woman” reflected in the mirror like a metaphor for Snow White, supporting a narrative strategy which reflects the passive, beautiful heroine with very few options. The conventional fairy tale's patriarchal perspective implies that the two women's self-worth is determined by how beautiful they are. The postmodern version becomes a playground for gender construction under the metaphor of the magic mirror, a space of reflections, refractions and artifice. The beginning of The Snow Child, Carter’s version of the story, mostly mirrors Snow White the difference being in the first words: “Midwinter – invincible, immaculate.” (Carter 1995: 152). Akin to the traditional version, it describes symbolic elements of nature, Midwinter being a symbol for the end of a cycle and the beginning of another one, a parallel for the death of the Queen and the birth of Snow White in the classic story. Of course, Carter’s version will turn the tables upon it questioning how ‘immaculate’ this winter tale really is. Carter presents her birth as a result of her father’s desire, a masculine fantasy, an image of woman: “As soon as he completed her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the Countess hated her.” (Carter 1995: 152) By contrast, the Countess, not-so-white, stands for the inequity of a patriarchal society. The rivalry of the two women mirrors the traditional story, so do the Countess’ attempts to get rid of the girl. The Countess demands the girl to pick up her intentionally dropped glove with the sole intention of abandoning the child, only the Count’s words: “‘I’ll buy you new gloves’” prevent it from happening. The Countess’ second attempt to get rid of the girl turns against her leaving the Countess “bare as a bone and the girl furred and booted.” (Carter 1995:153) The connection between the two women is shaped by the masculine perspective and the Count's change in attitude (he feels sorry for his wife): they are socially and economically turned upside

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down; one's loss is the other's gain, and vice versa. She picks a rose at the Countess' and the Count's request, obeys, and completes her role as a passive object of masculine desires, mirroring the typical innocent heroine. As a result, she is subject to sexual intercourse while she is dead, but unlike in the traditional fairy tale, this "rape" does not cause her rebirth. She transforms back into a black feather, a bloodstain, and a rose as she completes her job, representing her usage and abuse throughout the postinitiation period. Carter manages to shock her readers, playing with their expectations, shattering their sensitivities and familiarity with the traditional story and subverting its ideological basis. Carter’s Snow Child is passive and silent, jealousy leads to deadly rivalry, not to mention, all the lack of credibility and dehumanizing elements of the plot make us question the authority of the mirror, thus, the reliability of gender construction which begins to shatter like a house of cards. All the questions raised by her narrative, leave its readers to find new answers. In her study Postmodern Fairy Tales. Gender and Narrative Strategies, Cristina Bacchilega enforces the idea that: refraction and the shaping presence of a frame mediate the fairy tale’s reflection. As it images our potential for transformation, the fairy tale refracts what we wish or fear to become. Human - and thus changeable ideas, desires and practices frame the tale’s images. Further, if we see more of the mirror rather than its images, questions rather than answers emerge. Who is holding the mirror and whose desires does it represent and contain? Or, more pointedly, how is the fairy tale’s magic produced narratively? (Bacchilega 1997: 28)

Gender is a performative concept in Carter's writings; its legitimacy and visibility depend on repetition. The exaggerated circumstances lead to effects that reveal the norms as fiction, subverting and rewriting them anew exploiting the ‘magic' of fairy tales and their mythopoetic features as fresh lines of inquiry. The performative function transforms into a bridge, a link between senders and receivers outlining the social function and the responsibility of the ideologies presented in such narratives. As seen, postmodernism rejects grand narratives of religion, progress or history itself; with Angela Carter as an example of postmodernist twist – in her rearrangement of traditional fairy tales subverting concepts of gender, sexuality and female subjectivity. According to Bacchilega postmodern fictions, then, “hold mirrors to the magic mirror of the fairy tale, playing with its framed images out of a desire to multiply its refractions and to expose its artifices. […] And while this play of reflection, refraction and framing might produce ideologically

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‘destructive’, ‘constructive’ and ‘subversive’ effects, the self-reflexive mirrors themselves are themselves questioned and transformed.” (Bacchilega 1997: 23 - 24). The readings of fairy tale adaptations are highly subjective and are not intended to finalize meanings but to pose questions and comment on specific issues, to fit the present as any other made-up story. Movie versions of fairy tales, such are the Disney movies, become a standard package of values and dreams, dwelling on children’s expectations and form our response to the stereotypes embedded in these narratives. The disenchantment of the traditional fairy tales stressed by Jack Zipes in Breaking the Magic Spell (1979), Spells of Enchantment (1992), Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale (1994) also outline the changing social function of the genre. As Patricia Waugh underlines in her Metafiction. The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction “Contemporary metafictional writing is both a response and a contribution to an even more thoroughgoing sense that reality or history is provisional: no longer a world of eternal verities, but a series of constructions, artifices, impermanent structures.” (Waugh 1996:7) Thus, the following conclusions might be drawn: the fluidity of the fairy tale in order to reflect an ever-changing world brings about a shift in poetics, turning them into mind shifters, a mechanism for installing roles and behavior patterns. Today, the world being in a continuous change and motion, adds new meanings to the concept of identity. Deconstruction of fairy tales to fit new social roles, a sort of “putting new wine in old bottles until the pressure of the old wine makes the old bottle explode” as Angela Carter metaphorically states. Keeping up with postmodernist requirements, the use of intertextuality, whole cultures are summoned up in a fairy tale, adding to its force and lending it to a multilayered and multiperspectival reading. Fairy tales, in light of the new identity theories of today, give expression and form to the “fractured identities” of what Rosi Braidotti calls “nomadic subjects”. For, nowadays, identity is perceived as being embedded within and constructed by a whole network of relationships and relationality. It can no longer be conceived a priori (“I think, therefore I am”) but rather explored empirically and historically. With all the shatters of this world that impinge on our lives, we alone are left responsible to build and shape our own identity in the making. From oral tradition to writing and on to movies we assist at a remapping of the genre in the context of globalization and capitalism. Fairy tales, … ever changing, but, … everlasting.

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Flann O’Brien: The Author’s Rhetorical Masks Often neglected, O’Brien’s writings, especially At Swim-Two-Birds, gained well-deserved attention and thought with the emergence of postmodernist ideas and theories concerning postmodern writings, a revival of all discourses and genres, a celebration of heterogeneity with all its implications: “The reader is thus made aware of how reality is subjectively constructed. But beyond this essentially modernist perspective, the text reveals a post-modernist concern of how it is itself linguistically constructed. Through continuous narrative intrusion, the reader is reminded that not only do characters verbally construct their own realities; they are themselves verbal constructions, words, not beings. It might seem that in its (to quote Flann O’Brien) ‘self-evident sham’ (O’Brien 1939: 25) metafiction has merely reduced the complex stylistic maneuvers of modernism to a set of crude statements about the relation of literary fictions to the real world.” (Waugh 1996:26) A forerunner of postmodernism, Flann O’Brien brings forth in his writings a multidimensional concept of identity, an interplay of masks, a play of puzzle “solved” in discourse – discourse that is constructive of social relationships. His writings are reflective of the new realities, of all the “newness” and its consequences: the orderly, stable, Newtonian world had been displaced by a heterogeneous world picture shaped by Relativity theory, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, fluid and unstable, which provided access to those equipped with the capacity of the mind to accept and understand the mechanics and logic of change. Reflective of a restless reality: a post-revolutionary site in a war-torn Europe, O’Brien’s writings are dynamic entities, caught, as it were, in progress. Under modernity’s flag, no knowledge is knowledge in the old, traditional sense, where “to know” used to equate with “to be certain”; on the contrary, the very knowledge of the world contributed to a sense of its unstable character and unpredictability. The reflexivity of modern life lies in a constant process of reexamination of social practices in the light of incoming information, altering, thus, their character in representation. Contrariwise, a reflection upon the nature of modernity taking the form of a critique of its claim to adequate knowledge (the subject assuming control of the investigated object) and accurate representation, as well as the belief that nothing can be known with any certainty is the realm of postmodernism, where, the future is regarded as essentially open, a blank page to be written. At this point of history, Flann O’Brien seems to be standing at the crossroads. The loss of order in the outside world, devastated by the first world conflagration and trivialized by the rise of mass and consumer society, was

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tentatively compensated by modernists in the act of creation: the writing of a novel was similar to building one’s own reality. The evaporating story line or forking into parallel plots mapped out a multidimensional space. The novel At Swim-Two-Birds captivates and invites the reader to a game of hide and seek between fact and fiction, realistic pointers and sham, since “a satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham” abandoning the readers at the borderline between meaningful and meaningless, in an uncomfortable position, without providing a definite answer, on the contrary, raising questions, for “answers do not matter so much as questions”. (O’Brien 1961: 201) At the same time, understood against the background of the Irish Literary Revival, At Swim-Two-Birds is intended to be both contemporary and national. His writing was so innovative that it couldn't be satisfactorily be processed by the culture of its creation. His works chime better with our sensibilities, attuned to language games and textual phenomenology. The prevailing mood of irony, its mythologizing of experience, its ambiguity, and its attention to the complexities of the individual consciousness attach the novel to modernism. The overlap of styles and narratives underwriting different historical epochs anticipate New Historicist practices. However, in reading his novels we should keep in mind two perspectives: that of our times and that of the author. Written in a postcolonial context, his works challenge the position of dominant groups. He is a bilingual author, commuting from some undecided location, suspended “in-between” languages, so as to allow his books, half-English, half-Irish, neither one nor the other, to come up with ironic and parodic versions of national and linguistic identity, to turn the tables upon the stereotypes of identity in the colonial context. He refuses restricting forms of identity subverting them, in a context of an on-going process of incomplete decolonization, making the passage from modernist Yeats, who saw folklore as a mark of identity (he even collected “Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry”) to postmodernist deconstruction of fixed identities, mocking the construction of identity through appeal to folklore, to idealized peasants. Where others saw substantial Irishness, he saw cliches, stereotypes, not forms of being but of impersonating, of acting out. Postmodernism refracted reality into endless language games with authors such as Flann O’Brien appearing in the fictional universe of their novel blurring the line between fiction and reality, playing with, acting out, mocking norms and conventions. At Swim-Two-Birds is a novel about the writing of another novel, which becomes a theory about novel writing, his implied poetics of fiction

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paving the way to postmodernism. It is only in relation to “late-modernity” understood as Peter Osborne defines it in his 1992 essay, “Modernity is a Qualitative, not a Chronological, Category” (Osborne 1992: 79-80), as the critique of the despotic Enlightenment since 1900 to the present, that is, incorporating both modernism and postmodernism in light of their common critique of reason. Osborne’s view is endorsed and strengthened by Michel Foucault, whose essay on Georges Canguilhem he quotes in this context: [...] at the end of the colonial era, people began to ask the West what rights its culture, its science, its social organization and finally its rationality itself could have to laying claim to a universal validity: is it not a mirage tied to an economic domination and a political hegemony? Two centuries later, the Enlightenment returns: but now not at all as a way for the West to take cognisance of its present possibilities and of the liberties to which it can accede, but as a way of interrogating it on its limits and the powers which it has abused. Reason as despotic Enlightenment. (Foucault 1991: 12)

The pseudonyms of Brian O’Nolan – Flann O’Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, Brother Barnabas, etc. – enabled him to put on different masks, to assume different authorial selves, becoming in a way, a means to an end: that of questioning and challenging the nationalist and colonial authority, destabilizing the authorial agent in the postcolonial context, making his writings difficult to fit the national canon of his day. O’Nolan’s authorial voice is the sum of its versions and it can only be understood in this fragmentation. Under the many masks of his pen-names, he makes the best use of Gaelic culture and modernist innovation in a postcolonial Irish context. His first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds, becomes a “fictive fiction” about the creation of fiction, a bricolage, challenging notions of time, space, matter, identity, etc. as presented in conventional narratives, highlighting the fact that all narratives are in the end, a fictional product. Thus, as a fictional product of the postcolonial stage, his novel makes its readership question the construction of identity as contained in literary fiction, pressing home the idea of fiction’s incapacity to generate secure meaning. To bring into question two of his best works: At Swim- Two- Birds and An Beal Bocht, we must bring into question the writer’s bilingualism, his duality, his positioning in-between English and Irish, modernism and postmodernism, so as to shed light on his notion of identity. His use of pseudonyms during his literary career is the symptom of his refusal to identify himself with a name. For him, the question of identity represented a far more complicated issue. The postmodern concept of

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human identity, however it may be theorized, maximizes the flexibility, variability and plasticity of human behavior, so that the individual can be and do many different things, in many different situations, without any necessary requirement of continuity between different “acts” in space and time. As soon as the self is viewed as a performance, masking becomes an intrinsic aspect of the self, since there still exists an “I” which directs the performance and which therefore simultaneously “reveals and conceals” itself. The writer conceives his “persona” from within the story: he conceives of himself from within. The effect is the assimilation of himself to another, to his characters, to his nameless narrator as it is the case in his At SwimTwo-Birds. Anonymity hides the key of a traditional interpretation of codes based on identity, on nomen and new codes, new forms of communication emerge. This anonymity favors the imagination, sets it free from all constraints. It is also a means to keep the distance in the journalistic manner typical to O’Brien. It is a symbol permitting the writer not only to set worlds apart but also to reshape them. It is a means to an end; it constructs and refigures identity. All situations deprived by the rites of identity favor freedom and relationships hard to imagine otherwise in an ordinary and constraining social context. Thus, it favors connections of all sorts and a burst of truth for it makes alterity appear in the individual under the form of the unconscious. It makes one “speak his mind”. The sliding of the author under his characters, his alteritas, is also a glide towards his inner self and further unto his unconscious depths so as to reveal all the facets of his personality. Alterity grants him the right to refuse a full stop, “an end”, for a more modern “to be continued…”. It offers the illusion that we can skip reality and its confines, to step outside it and reconstruct another one, a simulacrum. The author reveals himself in terms of alterity, the Other, who in turn becomes part of his work, of himself. He relates to alterity to construct identity. There is no longer any clear and consensual view of how “personal identity” or “human character” should be defined anyway (other than by identity cards) and therefore, it is also no longer clear what it means to “mask” them. Roles are constantly being redefined to manipulate power relationships. In his work Soi- meme comme un autre, Paul Ricoeur also stresses the idea that the life, the story of each and every one of us is incomplete, thus, the need of a fictional model to understand it. (Ricoeur, 1991)

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It is like in a puzzle: each piece fits its meaning in the puzzle and the complete picture is the sum of its pieces. O’Brien dares to innovate from inside of his novel, breaking the rules, making new rules. It is a show of magic; he appears and disappears, he hides behind his characters, making, thus, more visible his literary manifesto. His novel “opens-up” to its readers like a game, one of ideas, opinions, subjectivity. Alain Robbe-Grillet in his Towards a New Novel advances the idea that the novel must overtly assure its function and play its part in constructing the fiction. O’Brien made change happen, stimulated it from within while constructing and deconstructing, the novel not only reflects his beliefs but also builds the relationship with his readers and sets new perspectives. His novel At Swim -Two-Birds reveals the Self in its quest for identity and the novel in its quest for a poetics. The author becomes a bricoleur who constructs his work, where, pretty much as in real life, everything can be restarted, over and over again, where you can devise your own set of values, of rules. The novel also stands for life’s resistance to any single interpretation: a freedom of infinite invention and reinvention. Reflective of the novel’s architecture is the fact that reality is provisional, lacking eternal truths, being rather a construct, an artefact. Looking ahead to postmodernist construction of character, O’Brien reminds us constantly that characters not only construct their own realities but are linguistic constructions at their turn, mere words, signs on a page before anything else. In the novel, the characters perform the impossible: the author of the novel within the novel is sent to trial by his characters (while asleep) for the injustices he has done to them. This celebrates a world that cannot be understood or controlled. The fact that the characters rebel against their author who lacks authority whatsoever, is O’Brien’s intention to diminish this concept of author-authority as source, as creator, as origin, for it was a much too sensitive topic to handle for Ireland in its postcolonial context and to account, of course, for the individual’s quest for identity. As Patricia Waugh well states in her book Metafiction, to make a statement in fiction is to make a character: […] in fiction the statement is the character, is the context. Thus, characters in metafiction may explicitly dissolve into statements. They may act in ways totally deviant in terms of the logic of the everyday ‘commonsense’ world, but perfectly normal within the logic of the fictional world of which they are a part. They may travel in time, die and carryon living, murder their authors or have love affairs with them. Some may read about the story of their lives or write the books in which they

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The mask becomes more important than the face. There is one face but multiple masks. His characters have a job which is to serve the governing principle of the whole book. Every character contributes to our knowledge of every other character and so, to the author’s agenda and his ideas. If we are to consider the psychological depth as a necessary feature of a character, then, we face a bit of a problem… the characters turn into mere masks because of their lack in being. The ideas that these characters stand for are the most important. And sometimes the novel is a better vehicle for ideas than anything else – O’Brien’s novel acts out what it wishes to say about narrative and the way to produce it while itself being a narrative. At Swim-Two-Birds defies traditional understanding of the novel. It reflects change while changing itself – the author’s irony, satirical attitude towards human search for measurable, controlled, dependable truth. Identity of the characters, identity of the world is out of the question, nothing is stable but under continuing transformation. His on-going process of textual self-invention serves to disrupt identity, be it personal or cultural, to reveal its fluidity always open to change. The fictional world is akin to a distorted image in a mirror, as the mirror effect is the appearance of doubles. The author’s use of “frames” in his work is to separate fiction from fiction: the construction of parallel dimensions. The story within story or Chinese-box structures are such framing devices to render the world of interrelations and multiple realities. O’Brien’s superposition of plots and his transfictionality (moving back and forth between fictions like the eye of a camera), the breaking of narrative centers explodes his readership’s expectations, or as Ronald Sukenick’s choice of words in his Death of the Novel and Other Stories: “A story is a game someone has played so you can play it too.” (Sukenick 2003:56-57) A prop for his overall picture, intertextuality favors a dialogue between his cowboy stories, myth, and contemporary fiction helping him construct alternative realities in his process of negotiating the Self in a language puzzle game. In At Swim-Two-Birds, he introduces his nameless narrator in medias res while reflecting on the subject of his spare-time literary activities: “One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings” (O’Brien 196:9) stating crystal clear, from the very beginning, his literary manifesto about producing literature in an age

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of mechanical reproduction. The novel exposes the stream of consciousness of a novelist in the process of creation, under the inner and outer stimuli he is affected by. Thus, placing side by side the image of an Irish mythological hero that comes to his mind and a toothache which distracts his mental activity, vanishing the borderline between his exposed selves, rendering in this way, the chaotic, fragmentary, elusive workings of the human mind. The narrator’s technique of writing, breaking his narrative line into separate fragments signposted by commentaries and short titles, such as: “Extract from my Manuscript”, “Interjection on the part of Brinsley”, “Description of my uncle:”, offer, actually, only an illusion of transparency and structure; they interrupt the flow of narration and further confuse the reader. The novel becomes a chain of illusions and inclusions, one leading to another, a testimony of the “illusion of life”, provided by Trellis’s characters, who transcend their author’s controlled novel, offering the readers a “spiegel im spiegel” play and feeling. In the main, the fictional frames embedded in the novel reach number four: the narrator’s story, the narrator’s novel (with Trellis acting as character), Trellis’s novel (with Trellis as author imposing on his characters) and the story of Trellis’s characters (with Trellis as character); what undermines, actually, this construct of frames is the flexibility of their content: inserts, letters, quotations, etc. an ongoing process of constructing, deconstructing, reconstructing in their process of becoming. Instead of moving from one frame to another, the reader is spinning a rhizome with different narrative digressions, in all directions. The borderlines between texts explode, the characters being able to wander from frame to frame, leading to an overlapping of fictional worlds, positioning the reader “in-between” fictional worlds. Wandering around, the characters bring along in the new context employed, their background and experience acquired before their present employment, contaminating the new context, damaging its integrity. The multi-levelled characters of O’Brien’s book are built in strata, migrating from one frame to another, overlapping, the author subverting the conventions of “make-believing” of the characters, turning them into masked actors on a stage where multiple plays are performed at once, at the same time, while, giving us, the readers/the audience, access back stage, giving us more insight and at the same time, more confusion, making us doubt his characters. Let’s take the case of Trellis, for example, his status changes during the course of the book: he is a character in the narrator’s creation, an author of its own, a character in another book written by his mal-treated characters as an act of revenge against Trellis. The characters are at the same time, authors, readers, and critics, all in one book. The young narrator, who seems to be the last puppet master to be

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pulling the strings of the other authors and characters from the book, is himself a mere character at the mercy of yet another author: Brien O’Nolan (not so clearly identified) hiding behind the mask of an author: Flann O’Brien, one of his pen-names. The encounter of the Celtic heroes Finn Mac Cool and King Sweeny with the working-class modern characters of John Furriskey, Antony Lamont and Paul Shanahan enables a re-assessment in a parodic key of the function of Celtic mythology within the context of national selfconsciousness. It becomes much clearer, when these working-class men refuse to listen to such nationalist discourse (Finn’s narrative of the ‘Madness of Sweeny’) choosing instead to create their own narratives with their own versions of modern heroes (representing modern Ireland’s reception of the image of old Ireland) forwarding the idea that it is ridiculous to look to past imaginary heroes as the only identity markers for the present. At Swim-Two-Birds is a bricolage structure of intra-textual activity between different texts: cowboy stories, encyclopedia entries, poetry, gambling letters, folk tales and details of his own life. For Barthes, the author is not a solitary genius but one engaged in a variety of other texts and discourses, an idea reflected by O’Nolan’s authorial personas or styles, exemplified by the student-narrator from the novel, who, in the privacy of his bedroom thinks about a variety of discourses ranging from Celtic mythology to cowboy stories. He, indeed declares that “the modern novel should be largely a work of reference” (O’Brien 1961:25) sustaining O’Brien’s bricolage aesthetic, where the novel becomes “a self-evident sham” where “characters should be interchangeable as between one book and another” (O’Brien 1961:25) challenging the assigned function of an author and his writing, mocking the seriousness of modernist literary experiments, trying to pave the way for a new postcolonial aesthetic. His writings, perceived as “minor” literature, go against the mainstream of his day, questioning concepts of identity, authenticity, the very concept of development itself, posing a challenge to the development of official ideologies. He disrupts the traditional literary structure relying on authentic identification, linear progression or authorial autonomy, where “control” of content stands in a way for a certain control over “reality”. He disrupts all this in his attempt to evade both imperialistic and nationalistic representations in the postcolonial context of Ireland. His jumbled, unfinished, fluid narratives refer rather to a continuous state of “becoming”, rather than one of fulfilment and achievement. As the bricoleur that he is, he offers new readings of the dominant forms of identification of his day, positioning his work “in-between” Irish and

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English languages, the high-modernist aesthetic and the pastoralism of Gaelic autobiographies, his different forms of writing ranging from the novel to the newspaper column. His characters fail to achieve identity due to the structures of his texts and to the author’s musings and puns attesting his refusal to ground identity on the recovery of origins, roots, tradition only, that is why his reliance on parody, translation, intertextuality, irony, destabilizes identity and language, as well. The unreliability of language, which can also confuse instead of clarifying, shows the unstable nature of signification, the power of manipulating through words, their power to create illusions of experience, of reality. Words evoke other words, the meaning slipping away from the object it was supposed to refer to. The text, thus, refers back to itself, the only existent reality being the one of the text leading to an insecure apprehension of language, a distrust of words. The unstable identity of the characters, who are at the mercy of their author, who acts like a puppet master, is well emphasized by the words of the character Finn MacCool, an Irish mythic hero, who comments upon his own use and abuse in literature, his simultaneously given identities: “I am Cuchulain, I am Patrick. I am Carbery-Cathead, I am Goll. I am my own father and my son. I am every hero from the crack of time. […] I am a tree for wind-siege. I am a windmill. I am a hole in the wall.” (O’Brien 1961:15,19) Thus, the result is a mix, a confusion of selves transgressing humanity. There are no clear-cut, well-defined identities, everything seems to merge, to escape the stability of its own identity: king Sweeny is bird as well as man, Pooka wonders whether his wife is a woman or a kangaroo, or even a “shadow”. This merging of the worlds: human, animal, vegetal, matter, spirit, concrete, abstract, leads towards a dissolution of the self, of a welldefined, distinct identity. The development of his narrator is set against his uncle’s traditional figure: “Rat-brained, cunning, concerned-that-he-should-be-well-thoughtof. Abounding in pretence, deceit. Holder of Guinness clerkship the third class.” (O’Brien 1961:30) He escapes his uncle when he embraces his student life which includes “…shouting, horseplay, singing and the use of words, actions and gestures contrary to the usages of Christians.” (O’Brien 1961:48) Thus, the young narrator himself is a multi-faceted person, in what his attitude towards his uncle is concerned, he hides his true face behind masks, thus, an unstable, unreliable identity. He even leads a double life at home: the lazy student who never opens a book and the hard-working writer, misleading his uncle in his beliefs. He moulds his own identity to fit different contexts.

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In the end, he almost reaches to find and accept his place in Irish society under the approval granted by his uncle, but not quite… for he is a bit out of time, actually – the watch he receives as a present from his uncle is fifteen minutes behind, not quite in time and in tune with society. Also, coming to terms with his uncle suggests that is up to everyone to find a place, the right place, being only a matter of choice. This coming to terms with the world, in the novel: the young novelist decides to save Trellis from the vengeance of his characters, Sweeny had reconciled himself with the church, dying in St. Moling’s arms, is actually an illusion, a misguidance, for, we are constantly being reminded throughout the book that “truth is an odd number”. The novel stands for the artistic freedom of creation, not only what he writes but the way he writes places it between cultural object and critical theory. He shapes the novel from within, thus, strengthening Irish culture from within his very essence. O’Brien produced fictional versions of himself complicating even more the relationship between writer and subject. His in-between English and Irish language complicate even more his identity as an Irish writer. The Poor Mouth, his only Irish language novel, written under the pseudonym of Myles na gCopaleen is a merciless satire on the different texts (autobiographies) that claim to present an authentic picture of Irish peasantry (though they have far departed the harsh reality) as a symbol of Irish identity. The author unveils the associations between Irish language, rural poverty and the picture of the western Gaelic area (seen as a precolonial, un-anglicized area whose poverty, culture, landscape, peasantry, become symbols of authentic Gaelic life) and subverts such symbols of identity to mock the literary representations of the day concerning the idealised, imagined, Irish peasant. In The Poor Mouth, he satirizes the Free State government's schoolbased revival policy, which required students to take Irish at the primary and secondary levels, a requirement that many people found repugnant and which brought Irish identity, with language as a key component, to the fore, turning many people against their mother tongue. He deconstructs, what was perceived in the postcolonial context as the icons of authentic Irishness: the Gaelic peasant and the Irish language presented and promoted as markers and makers of nationalism. His irony is well aimed at language revivalists when he states that “the accuracy of Gaelic (as well as holiness of spirit) grew in proportion to one’s lack of worldly goods…” (O’Brien 2003: 49) The novel begins with Bonaparte, the main character, writing down a record of his life because he is about to die. Myles’s presentation of

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Bonaparte’s autobiographical narrative imitates the Blaskett Island autobiographies which recorded the life of the islanders from birth until old age. He identifies himself by surname, first name and country to describe his Gaelic identity: “O’Coonassa is my surname in Gaelic, my first name is Bonaparte and Ireland is my little native land.” (O’Brien 2003: 11) All his account becomes an illusion of identity, for, as seen in the novel, he cannot remember properly his own biography. The truth behind his Gaelic origins is out of reach, he is not sure if his mother is really his mother, rumor has it he was born by another woman “All that, nevertheless, is only the neighbors’ talk and cannot be checked now because the neighbors are all dead and their likes will not be there again.” (O’Brien 2003: 13) He also has uncertainties about his paternity, confusing, as a child, his grandfather, the Old-Grey-Fellow for his father. The truth regarding his origins, his identity, evades him, as it remains trapped in the disappearing Gaelic culture. The author criticizes the romantic presentation of poverty and peasantry advocated by autobiographies. Placed in-between Englishspeaking rich and Irish-speaking poor, the post-colonial individual is shred into pieces and in an on-going search for a lost identity. His characters’ attempts to locate themselves, to find their roots is set against the description of the formal colonial educational system devoid of meaning, a form without substance, he makes clear that the Irish speaking poor peasantry will never find in it a means for their self-development, to stress their displacement in the new modern Irish state. The annihilation of identity is well presented during the protagonist’s (Bonaparte O’Coonassa) first day of school when he is forced to give up his Irish identity as the English-speaking school master baptizes him “Jams O’Donnell” (O’Brien 2003: 30). Even more, he is deprived of his own individuality for all his classmates are given the same name: “[…] every creature in the school had been struck down by him and all had been named Jams O’Donnell.” (O’Brien 2003: 31) This institutional baptism is a complete suppression of his identity: It was always said and written that every Gaelic youngster is hit on his first school day because he doesn’t understand English and the foreign form of his name and that no one has any respect for him because he’s Gaelic to the marrow. There’s no other business going on in school that day but punishment and revenge and the same fooling about Jams O’Donnell. Alas! I don’t think that there’ll ever be any good settlement for the Gaels but only hardship for them always. The Old-Grey-Fellow was also hit one day of his life and called James O’Donnell as well. (O’Brien 2003: 34)

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The loss of language due to colonial policy implies a disruption of identity, of a sense of self, needed for self-expression, transforming them into passive victims. In his novel, the author uses scenes and characters from other Gaelic texts presenting the idealized image of country life, subverting such images, as well as colonial stereotypes: from the pig sharing the house with Bonaparte’s family to the endless rain pouring down upon the miserable peasants. The author also blurs the distinction between man and beast to cast doubt and question the concept of identity: the description of Sitric O’Sanassa praised for his Gaelic poverty which made him appear “so truly Gaelic” (O’Brien 2003: 88) as Bonaparte O’Coonassa remarks: “I often saw him on the hillside fighting and competing with a stray dog, both contending for a narrow hard bone and the same snorting and angry barking issuing from them both.” (O’Brien 2003: 89). Also, human beings and beasts share the same living area, Bonaparte himself repeatedly fails to make a difference between the people and the beasts surrounding him; the same when his wife gives birth to a baby boy, he imagines that they have “acquired a new piglet in the end of the house.” (O’Brien 2003: 86) The confusion persists to the very end, when in a conversation with the OldGrey-Fellow he wonders out loud whether Gaels are human: “‘Are you certain that the Gaels are people?’ said I. ‘They’ve that reputation anyway, little noble, said he, but no confirmation of it has ever been received. We’re not horses nor hens; seals nor ghosts; and, in spite of all that, it’s unbelievable that we’re humans but all that is only an opinion.’” (O’Brien 2003: 100) The institutionalized suppression of identity is also exemplified towards the end of the novel when Bonaparte O’Coonassa is arrested on charges of murder and theft and left at the mercy of the justice system, a law he cannot follow or understand during his trial because he doesn’t speak a word of English, as he well admits: “I never understood a single item of all that happened around me nor one word of the conversation nor my interrogation.” (O’Brien 2003: 122) Thus, a picture of the injustices suffered by the Irish poor during the colonial period… no wonder the Irish peasant was out of place in his very own Irish society. The Irish peasant is left with no choice, no voice, rootless, to accept his designated role in the process. In the end, Bonaparte follows in his father’s footsteps: the same sentence, the same place to serve the sentence. Powerless. Rootless. Faithless.

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With his mastery of character, use of language and boundless imagination, the author subverts Irish Identity, poses questions and makes the reader search for answers. His use of masks becomes, in their process of revealing a space of uncertainty reflective of his context, a counterpoint and critique of Cartesian epistemology. As shown, O’Nolan’s pseudonyms come together like the pieces of a puzzle to unveil his own authorial identity collecting from social roles in a split and fragmented civilization. The author behind his masks proved to be actively engaged in the concerns of his day, but, in a highly original manner, challenging the dominant symbols of signification, positioning his authorial identity “in-between”, choosing the middle ground of multiple self-positioning.

Ruth Ozeki – A Tale for the Time Being On the contrary, today, a reorientation towards history and myths can be perceived, in a grasp for meaning. As Roland Barthes enforces in his Mythologies writing implies responsibility, a political and moral one, not a mere ‘art for art’s sake’, becoming in the right hands a tool to decode and encode social relations. Such an example is A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki which relates interconnecting histories: the story of a Japanese kamikaze pilot in the World War II and the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan in an overlapping of worlds and identities. It approaches the concept of identity from two overlapping perspectives: an ever-shifting world – the dynamics of social, historical, political, economic evolution and the effect of these changes on individuals, who need to redefine themselves in the new frames of identity. The characters reveal themselves in the postmodern context of fragmentation, rootlessness, alienation, multiculturalism with no sense of belonging in a globalised society. Identities are not biologically determined, but shaped by the environment and lived experience which can be turned eventually into shared experience. Ozeki’s characters, a family of Japanese people become trapped in their own inner selves due to the outer changes, they become misfits, searching to reassess their own identities lost between cultures (the American and Japanese ones) and to redefine themselves in the new framework of double identities, to reassess their role, status, potential and adjustment to new contexts. The characters question their thoughts, feelings, and actions, how they respond to suffering. They ask whether their choices and lives make a difference, what is the meaning of conscience and how to explain the nature of existence and define their own identity. The novel's introduction poses issues with regard to time,

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identity, and the interconnection of today's world. It makes us wonder quite from the start: What is a time-being?

“Hi! My name is Nao, and I am a time being. Do you know what a time being is? Well, if you give me a moment, I will tell you. A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and everyone who is, or was, or ever will be. As for me, right now I am sitting in a French maid café in Akiba Electricity Town, listening to a sad chanson that is playing sometime in your past, which is also my present, writing this and wondering about you, somewhere in my future. And if you’re reading this, then maybe by now you’re wondering about me, too. You wonder about me. I wonder about you.” (Ozeki 2013: 3)

The author introduces a world full of interconnections in which time and identity are related to a transient reality, perpetually in flux, making it impossible to give a complete and definite answer about the nature of a time being, about being and unbeing in time. As its title suggests, the novel is a tale for the time being, it appears to speak to the present, to what we might think of as the “now” metamodern moment. It does this from its opening lines by speaking directly to me or to you as its reader(s). Time is presented as a human construct that allows us to give shape and order to our temporal being, also, time is unstable, and our attempts to inscribe it in language and experience only serve to make it all the more fluid and amorphous. Now from the opening lines refers to both Nao’s subjective reality in the café in Akiba (the so-called speaker/writer now) and the reader’s subjective reality (the receiver now); due to the multitude of readers, this receiver now is even more fluctuating. It also stands for Nao’s name, which is a homophone of the temporal adverb ‘now’: “now always felt especially strange and unreal to me because it was me, at least the sound of it was. Nao was now and had this whole other meaning […] in the time it takes to say now, now is already over. It’s already then. Then is the opposite of now. So, saying now obliterates its meaning, turning it into exactly what it isn’t. It’s like the word is committing suicide or something.” (Ozeki 2013: 98-99) Indeed, the relation of time to writing seems complicated: Nao writes of “your past, which is also my present”, yet understands that the present moment for the reader is “somewhere in my future”. In terms of metamodernism, one can see here recognition of the present as displaced. Our understandings of the present and the future are shifting leaving room for redefinition and hope amidst a web of many worlds and time periods.

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Stories are embedded within stories in this large novel, having a Chinese box effect, reflecting each other like in a large hall of mirrors. The frame story is about Ruth, a novelist who lives with her husband Oliver on Cortes Island in Canada’s Pacific Northwest. Ruth is struggling with writer’s block and trying to finish a memoir that she has been working on for years. She is caught in time like in a fairy tale, feeling her own life passing her by. She feels blocked, trapped, both in her capacity of writing as well as her own life. Narratorial voice is one of the techniques that Ozeki uses as a means of temporal investigation. The novel shifts between the perspectives of two characters: Nao, the first-person voice opening the novel and seemingly directly addressing the reader, and Ruth, whose chapters are written in reflector mode, that is, third person narration but focalised through Ruth’s perspective. Ruth finds a plastic freezer bag encrusted with barnacles washed up on the beach. It contains a diary written in English and some old letters in Japanese and French, and a broken watch. Ruth and Oliver think the package may be part of the debris washed up on the island’s beaches after the tsunami of 2011. Ruth begins to read the diary which presents the story of a teenage girl in Tokyo named Nao Yasutani, who writes about her depressed unemployed father’s suicide attempts, and about being brutally bullied at school. From early childhood, Nao grew up in Sunnyvale, California, where her father had a good job as a computer programmer, but when he was fired, they moved back to Japan, where he feels humiliated by his inability to find a job. Nao is an outsider in her new world, as “Transfer Student Yasutani,” and much more, since her lived experience: biting, cutting, cigarette burns on her flesh and her family’s downfall make her contemplate suicide. So, Nao’s story becomes embedded in Ruth’s story and experience. The pages of Nao’s diary are bound inside an old book cover: À la recherche du temps perdu, par Marcel Proust. Nao is looking into the past and writes about her great grandmother, old Jiko, who becomes the only person who understands her. Jiko is very old having the age of 104, a Zen Buddhist nun, living in an old temple on the mountaintop. Thus, the story of old Jiko becomes enclosed in the pages of Nao’s diary which she writes addressing herself to an unknown “you” who, she hopes, will sometime in the future read her words and understand her: “I will write down everything I know about Jiko’s life in Marcel’s book, and when I’m done, I’ll just leave it somewhere, and you will find it. How cool is that? It feels like I’m reaching forward through time to touch you, and now that you’ve found it, you’re reaching back to touch me!” (Ozeki 2013: 37)

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Ruth is that “you” for whom Nao was writing, though Nao doesn’t know it. Finding and reading Nao’s diary they both become entangled in a writer-reader relationship, into an active world-sharing and world-making process. It emphasizes the boundary-crossing effect of words. Nao’s diary becomes in Ruth’s hands a narrative still under formation at the moment of Ruth’s reading, for, Ruth’s world is transformed by the words she reads. It all becomes a sharing of the world in the process of creating it, in which Nao urges Ruth to give up assumptions and expectations while reading: “Assumptions and expectations will kill any relationship, so let’s you and me not go there, okay?” (Ozeki 2013: 6) Ruth, as a writer, is aware of fiction’s power to demolish temporal and spatial barriers of existing realities: “When she was writing a novel, living deep inside a fictional world, the days got jumbled together and entire weeks or months or even years, would yield to the ebb and flow of the dream [...] fiction had its own time and logic. That was its power.” (Ozeki 2013: 313,314) To keep to her beliefs about the writing of fiction and its hidden power, she attempts to read the diary at the same speed with Nao’s writing: “I was trying to pace myself. I felt I owned to Nao. I wanted to read at the same rate she’d lived.” (Ozeki 2013: 375) As Nao plans to commit suicide after finishing writing her diary, Ruth slow-paces reading to postpone the closure of Nao’s story and her life’s. This creative power of the text, its world-making potential by postponing narrative closure is enforced by quantum mechanics with references to superposition, entanglement... in the novel’s Appendix B. It changes our beliefs about world-formation, introducing new ways of looking at the world and making sense of it in a whole new way. Nao and Ruth’s writer-reader relationship moulds into Roland Barthes’ ideas concerning the death of the author and the birth of the reader, thus, the involvement of the reader opens the text to multiple interpretations. According to Barthes To give a text an Author is to impose a limit to that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. [...] Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author. The reader is a space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted. (Barthes 1968: 147-148)

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Nao ‘hides’ the pages of her diary inside an old book cover: À la recherche du temps perdu, Par Marcel Proust. Ozeki quotes Proust: “Every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument, which he offers to the reader to permit him to discern what, without the book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself. The reader’s recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.” (Ozeki 2013: 109) Ruth and Nao are caught, due to their reader-writer relationship, into an active world-sharing and world-making process. Through the process of storytelling, writing, reading, we restructure the world connecting a web of relations among people, places, memories, ideas, different time spans. Writing and reading the stories of others, both Nao and Ruth, engage in a process of finding, understanding themselves, for, finding the self is a process of connecting to others. Creating Ruth, an “elaborated You,” to read her diary and involving her into the story, Nao builds the premises of the new way of being of the I as a future project. In this way, communication with others is internally connected, accepted and transformed, and, through this internal conversation, the identity of the I is developed in relation with others. Ulrich Beck, the German sociologist, calls the postmodern society, “the risk society” – a global, technological, dynamic world which generates a multitude of possible dangers, risks and possible futures, which places the individual into a “do-it-yourself” identity orientation, offering both stability and change to individuals in a society which provides the individual with a wide array of identity choice, of active engagement with the self, with society, with institutions at large. Also, Charles Lemert and Anthony Elliott came up with the recent theory of “new individualism” which postulates a reinvention (not revision) of identity emerging in our personal and social life. It implies four transformational aspects involved in identity construction: an emphasis on self-reinvention; an urge desire for instant change; a fascination with speed and dynamism and a disposition towards short-term thinking. Giddens and Beck, both view our contemporary identity as reflexive and individualized, as constructed in a dialogue with ourselves, the others and social institutions, by no means an innate one, or as Charles Taylor mentions in Politics of Recognition (1994) This crucial feature of human life is its fundamentally dialogical character. We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression... I want to take language in a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak, but also other modes of expression

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Thus, our definitions and understanding of identity are a result of a reflexive dialogue with ourselves, the others and various cultures: “We define our identity always in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us.” (Taylor 1994: 79) Due to our “liquid modernity” the task of constructing and maintaining an identity relies on the individual, thus, reflexive identity becomes somehow a distinctly modern phenomenon, whereas in pre-modern times the structures were such that identity and its recognition by others, was not a problem as such, is also sustained by Taylor. (Taylor 1994: 80) The process of globalization has undermined the modern sources of identity, and so, its stability: nation-states shuttered by immigration, stable jobs almost gone, the institution of marriage challenged by almost half of marriages ending in divorce, or as Zygmund Bauman presents it: To put it in a nutshell: no one seems to be now in control. Worse still, it is not clear what “being in control” could, under the circumstances, be like. As before, all ordering is local and issue-oriented, but there is no locality that could pronounce for humankind as a whole, or an issue that could stand up for the totality of global affairs. It is this novel and uncomfortable perception which has been articulated (with little benefit to intellectual clarity in the currently fashionable concept of globalization.) (Bauman 1998: 38)

Caught amidst the problems of a globalised world (global warming, climate change, immigration, terrorism, to name just a few) the individuals are forced to reconsider identity in a social and moral sense. The search for new patterns to mould identity after the new world order, to make sense of it and in the absence of grand societal narratives, the search can only be a reflexive one (as it is the search of Ozeki’s characters caught amidst the problems and consequences of a globalised world). On another level, Ozeki’s novel is also about the process of creation, of writing itself, it is also about the relation between an author and its characters. Nao is a diary writer who is trying to write her potential reader into existence, while Ruth becomes the reader of Nao’s diary and writes about this reading process. Ruth herself is aware about the force of writing, its life-giving and time-generating force when she claims: “I’ve always thought of writing as the opposite of suicide [...] that writing was about immortality. Defeating death, or at least forestalling it.” (Ozeki 2013: 314)

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The narrative assumes its share in the construction of the I, both by structuring the Self and creating the You, because it has the function of unifying, of bringing together different individuals and their stories, it allows the recounting of a story to others and to oneself. Through stories we learn not only about ourselves, but also to better connect to ourselves and to others, writing ourselves into the future. According to Ricoeur in Temps et récit: “Narrative identity, constitutive of self-constancy, can include change, mutability, within the cohesion of one lifetime. The subject then appears both as a reader and writer of its own life, as Proust would have it. As the literary analysis of autobiography confirms, the story of life continues to be reconfigured by all the truthful or fictive stories that a subject tells about himself or herself. This reconfiguration makes life itself a woven of stories told.” (Ricoeur 1988: 376) The relationship between Ruth and Nao caught in the network of thoughts, emotions, memories, illusions and reality becomes a fertile ground in the construction of the self. Nao’s lived experience is interpreted by Ruth, who becomes the reader of her diary, the other to whom Nao reaches out in her construction of identity, of meaning-making. Thus, it also becomes necessary to include the other as a part of the subject. As a result, identity becomes constructed in the dynamics of relationships: the other is found in me, as the one who makes my consciousness of reality through his or her interpretation and evaluation possible; and I am found in the other, as the one who makes his or her conception of the world and of me, his or her reflection, and his or her action possible. Ozeki’s narrative demolishes the myth created by Daniel Defoe (1719) of Robinson Crusoe who supposedly is able to live without other people. Actually, even if other people are not physically present on the island where he shipwrecked, he brings them with him in his subjectivity, as is shown in his internal conversation and in his actions, all driven by the culture of his time. The relation with others within one’s subjectivity revises the isolated view of the modern subject, introducing in him or her the idea of mutual belonging: others are part of me, just as I am part of the others. The novel surfaces one of the grandest challenges of our contemporary world: the relation of the self with the other. The other and otherness both reflect the profound crisis of identity we are faced with today. The postmodern subject is a being that is essentially relational, who, in the quest for answers relates with the world and the others. Identity set against the background of a (post)modern society where globalization and multiculturalism left their marks, becomes a work in progress. This evershifting world we inhabit is termed liquid modernity or liquid life by Bauman: “Liquid modernity is a society in which the conditions under

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which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines. Liquidity of life and that of society feed and reinvigorate each other. Liquid life, just like liquid modern society, cannot keep its shape or stay on course for long.” (Bauman 2005: 1) Against a capitalizing drive to earn and to profit, a self-interest that protects and secures the self, prevails an ethical conscience, an altruism that favors a collective good, for we are all part of something bigger: “In essence, everything in the entire universe is intimately linked with each other as moments in time, continuous and separate.” (Ozeki 2013:30) This is part of what Christian Moraru emphasizes when he considers relationality to be a defining feature of the present age, a relation of compassion and understanding, regardless and reverent of difference between social beings who have an obligation to each other in the world, or as he puts it, “the self and other’s foundational corelationality with respect to one another”. (Moraru 2011: 4) To keep up with postmodernity’s vein, the search for identity is caught in the dynamics of the novel which is an entanglement of reality (the Japanese military aggressions during WWII, the global Internet bubble in 1990, the 9/11, 2001 terrorist attacks in US, the earthquake/tsunami that hit Japan in 3/11, 2001, climate change and many others), fiction and autobiographical elements (Ruth Ozeki transposed herself and her writing experiences as a novelist into Ruth, one of the main characters). The impact of the world reality upon postmodern writings and the individual’s active engagement with the world as part of collective experiences is due to the global character of today’s world. It also explores science, philosophy, nature, history, psychology, biology, physics, Japanese culture, Buddhism, meditation and the nature of consciousness. As in real life, the characters are mobile, they move through space and time, live, think, beyond the confines of a nation, compelling us, the readers, to think beyond nations and nationalisms into the global divisions, conflicts and diversity, inviting us to a suspension of national categories, stereotypes, and strict, conventional identity patterns. She breaks the stereotypic images of the West about Japan comprising Kamikaze pilots, unemployed suicidal salary men, etc. by taking us, the readers, deep into the stories of the characters, revealing their fears, hopes and the circumstances of their lives. Her concerns in the novel are very much contemporary; she not only presents people’s death but also the death of the Planet. It’s about our time, the time we are all living in, this time of tsunamis, climate change, species extinction, undeclared war, Internet technology. It resonates with the present in a very human way, not

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giving up hope. It is also about the mysteries of time, how layers of time blend together, how time hurries by and slows down. It’s about past periods of time, the history we think we know about (World War II, for example) and about memory, and how, when we look back and remember, or when we read journals and letters from the past, the layers of time get squashed together in the time being. Everything exists at once. Everything that has happened, or could have happened, all possibilities are present now. This is the time being. This is all time happening at once. Writing about her childhood in Sunnyvale, California, Nao remembers: I used to sit in the backseat of our Volvo station wagon [...] and I kept the window open so the hot, dry, smoggy haze could blow on my face while I whispered Now! . . . Now! . . . Now! . . . over and over, faster and faster, into the wind as the world whipped by, trying to catch the moment when the word was what it is: when now became NOW. (Ozeki 2013: 98-99)

Writing her diary Nao tries to save herself as well as all the moments of now (since her name, Nao, is pronounced like the adverb now), for, to lose now means to lose one’s self, to give up one’s agency to the world of representation. In Nao’s own words, it means “to drop out of time”, and “to exit my existence”. (Ozeki 2013: 7) The novel brings to the fore the fact that reading and writing fiction makes it able to restore memories and lives, showing the open character of the world, pointing to other worlds through words: “[N]o matter what nonsense I write in it [the official letter], please know that those are not my last words. They are other words and other worlds” (Ozeki 2013: 258) Nao’s granduncle, Haruki #1, a kamikaze pilot, wrote his letter to his mother. Ozeki breaks the conventions of a cause-and-effect linearity (temporal distortion becomes an important element of postmodern writings with its fragmentation and non-linear production) defying a realist comprehension of the world, instead, she plays with the use of coincidences, uncertainties, accidents of quantum physics to better grasp our contemporary world. The superposition rule brings to light the possible coexistence of many worlds before the intrusion of an observation. The principle of entanglement makes us imagine the world as a network of connections across time and space. The measurement problem challenges the existence of an objective reality. All the above mixed in a time-space equation of endless calculation and indeterminacy, an endless scope of virtualities, possibilities, akin the creating power of words which builds entanglements that defy time and space into linguistic and epistemic flexibility.

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The stories that are interwoven throughout the book place the characters in relationships and exchanges that cross temporal and geographic boundaries. They are forced to try and make sense of their lives in disparate times and places while being subject to global culture, politics, and economy. This makes them victims of modernity who have no sense of national identity and are trying to piece together a lost identity. For instance, Ruth is a Japanese North American who previously resided in the US, Japan, and Canada. Oliver, a man with German background, is her husband. Nao was born in Japan, raised in Sunnyvale, California, and then returned to her native country. She was born in Japan, although she identifies as American. A connected-disconnected split is further exacerbated by digital culture, where Ruth looks for information about Nao's father and Nao tries to correspond with her Californian friend Kayla who writes to her: “You seem so far away” and “It’s kind of unreal”. (Ozeki 2013: 79) Ruth's desire to leave the island where she feels trapped and the relocation of Nao's family to Japan, along with the cross-cultural disruptions, cause people to try to redefine themselves in the new framework of fragmented identities, reassess their status, their potential, and build their future identities in the process. All these bring to the fore a conflict which disrupts globality, making human beings feel trapped in cosmopolitan experiences of conflicts, confrontations, differences, with no promise for a solution to divisions and human conflicts, but, ever-shifting fragments, pieces of puzzle caught in the process of becoming. Ruth and Nao's writer-reader relationship serves as a metaphor for how connected yet separated the contemporary world is since both characters wonder whether they would recognize one other in the street.: “[…] I find myself wondering about you, what you look like, how tall you are, how old you are, and whether you’re a female or a male. I wonder if I would recognize you if I passed you on the street. For all I know, you could be sitting a couple of tables over me right now, even though I doubt it.” (Ozeki 2013:299, 385, 402) At one point, Nao hypothetically suggests, “we would smile at each other across time like we were friends, because we are friends by now, aren’t we?” (Ozeki 2013:175) Ruth and Nao reflect and love each other throughout the entire book without ever actually meeting, affecting each other's worlds. They support one another as they learn about themselves as time beings who are alive in time. They make us ask (akin Ruth, who “could see that her back was curved like a question mark as she bent towards the screen”) all those important questions about our existence: What does it really mean to be a human being? To be alive and know you’re going to die? How do we understand the cruelty human

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beings are capable of inflicting on each other? How do we have the courage to keep planting trees, as Oliver does, when the forests are being devastated around us? And to help us realize the importance of the present moment: “Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!” (Ozeki 2013: 63)

The novel, impinging on our sensibilities, makes us ask questions all along, driving us in a search for answers and meaning in an overlapping of worlds, where nothing stands still, making us question the very reality we inhabit: “Nowadays, in the modern technological culture, sometimes we hear people complain that nothing feels real anymore. Everything in the modern world is plastic or digital or virtual. But I say, that was always life! That is life itself! Even Plato discussed that things in this life are only shadows or forms. So, this is what I mean by the changing and unreal feeling of life.” (Ozeki 2013: 87) Writing about Jiko’s stories in her diary, Nao remembers: “[...] the stories seem so real when she’s talking, but later, when I sit down to write them, they slip away and become unreal again. The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go? [...] Maybe that Nao of the past never really existed, except in the imagination of this Nao of the present, sitting here in a French maid cafe in Akiba Electricity Tower. Or maybe it’s the other way around.” (Ozeki 2013: 99) One can question at one point in the book if Ruth and her husband Oliver are discussing how and why things happen in the journal Ruth is reading, or whether Ruth, the author is relating some of her experiences while writing the book we are currently reading. Once more, as readers, we are prompted to cast doubt on reality, what we think we understand, and what remains a mystery: “Or maybe none of these things will happen except in my mind and yours, because, like I told you, together we’re making magic, at least for the time being.” (Ozeki 2013: 5) The novel evolves around the “search paradigm” as part of our human existence. In a constant search for Nao, for the future, or for now, the novel A Tale for the Time Being is a story about humanity and the future and, whatever shadows of doubt, about not giving up hope in this constantly changing world which defies stability: “In your diary, you quoted old Jiko saying something about not-knowing, how not-knowing is

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the most intimate way, or did I just dream that? Anyway, I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I think maybe it’s true, even though I don’t really like uncertainty. I’d much rather know, but then again, not-knowing keeps all the possibilities open. It keeps all the worlds alive.” (Ozeki 2013: 402) In the end, it is up to every one of us to imagine and construct our own life, identity but at the same time to construct the world we live in. Thus, a reskilling for new, changing contexts, new types of sensibilities, to adapt and cope with the challenge and the changing power relations of a contemporary world always on the go, opened up and subject to change.

A Reskilling for New Contexts So much fuss about postmodernism, some might say. Why so? What are its consequences? As Anthony Giddens specifies in his major work Modernity and self-identity. Self and society in the late modern age, it implies a rethinking and a reskilling of the nature of modernity; the dynamism of modern institutions and their global impact; a radical change of our most personal experience and day-to-day social life; the emergence of new mechanisms of self-identity, which are shaped, yet also shape our modern institutions; it also implies reflexivity, a reorganization of time and space, a freedom of social relation, unchained from the prison of specific locales; modes of behavior become unsettled, flexible and ‘open’; a post-traditional order which implies “ ‘Reskilling’ – the reacquisition of knowledge and skills – whether in respect of intimacies of personal life or wider social involvements, is a pervasive reaction to the expropriating effects of abstract systems.” (Giddens 1991: 7) Also, reflexivity in Giddens’ theory becomes a key concept of personal and social identity. It implies a renegotiation of individuals’ relation to other, to social institutions and structures in the light of a continuous influx of information. Nowadays caught between information systems, written texts, visual and electronic media and advertising, no one can deny or fail to observe how the world we live in, as well as our lives are influenced and guided by signs and texts. The word and image have displaced reality leading to a need to rematerialize the word, to show the processes needed to make meaning and values, to adjust and learn how to make meaning entrapped in a world of simulation and fabrication. A move away, a step aside from the well-defined Newtonian world and stable Cartesian self towards a deconstruction of such well-determined

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centers, cores, towards endless possibilities, fragments, pieces of puzzle, what if-s, to chime better with our sensibilities today. Might the time of unity be over? As seen in the development of global events, a fragmentation, a de-uniting of the planet seems to be the driving unconscious force in action. Technology and its ‘technosophy’ attempts to create a hyper-connected world with no content, a dissipation, a dissolving of identity. Something that goes beyond postmodernism, transcends it. In Lerner’ words (Ben Lerner’s novel 10.04) we find “the world rearranging itself.” Lerner's novel emerges as an autofiction that goes beyond postmodern games to present the sociological and phenomenological dimensions of human life, presenting the individual caught in a web of interrelations, trying to face or evade reality. It acts out at the edges of postmodernism, with embedded stories, blurring the ontological borders between facts, reality, and fiction, showing the fragmentation of life and of the individual. Therefore, it transcends postmodernism and enters a literature that takes seriously real-world, contemporary issues, such as social inequality, capitalism, climate change, a lost sense of security, stability, and belonging, and the search for identity and ways to cope with them. As Anthony Giddens specifies in his study Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, “[…] modernity radically alters the nature of day-to-day social life and affects the most personal aspects of our experience. […] yet the transmutations introduced by modern institutions interlace in a direct way with individual life and therefore with the self. One of the distinctive features of modernity, in fact, is an increasing interconnection between the two ‘extremes’ of extentionality and relationality: globalizing influences on the one hand and personal dispositions on the other.” (Giddens 1991: 1) When real elements or the author himself, acting out a character, surface in the fiction they become markers of reality, going beyond as mere artifice of the text. The interconnectedness of both reality and fiction set a new playground for the quest of a fragmented identity emphasizing our essential relationality, how we construct ourselves in relation to others and to fictional characters as representations of our selves. In the interconnectedness he shares, the narrator’s identity will always be remnant of the others and others refers not only to people he relates to, but also the influence of the social structures, the media, the environment, the surroundings. Identity becomes a construct in the process of living one’s life, according to one’s environment and interests, the self becomes context specific, fragmented, dynamic and fluid to fit the “liquid

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modernity” it inhabits. The boundaries of new possible identities are quickly expanding to keep pace with the outer world. Lerner presents a life that is too fragmented, diverse, and full of possibilities to be reduced to a single narrative and interpretation by creating the overlapping, collage of stories that make up his novel 10:04. It reflects a positive outlook on life. The way Lerner captures it in all of its diversity and with limitless possibilities reveals his expertise. The title of the novel is taken from the film Back to the Future, 10:04 is the time on the courthouse clock when lightning strikes, allowing Marty to return to 1985 and setting the ground for a multiplicity of pasts, presents and futures, as the author answers when he is asked by his agent about how he plans to write his novel: “ ‘How exactly will you expand the story?’ […] ‘I’ll project myself into several futures simultaneously…I’ll work my way from irony to sincerity in the sinking city, a would-be Whitman of the vulnerable grid.’” (Lerner 2015: 4) The phrase "Everything will be as it is now, just a little different" from the novel's epigraph foretells moments of transience, transcendence, and alternative ways of being and perceiving the world, and these moments abound throughout the book, enhancing its blend of fiction and nonfiction, the present, illusory pasts, and projected futures, foretelling about the various possibilities and reorganization of our contemporary lives or as recognized by Giddens: “Besides its institutional reflexivity, modern social life is characterized by profound processes of the reorganisation of time and space, coupled to the expansion of disembedding mechanisms mechanisms which prise social relations free from the hold of specific locales, recombining them across wide time-space distances, plus the disembedding mechanisms, radicalise and globalise pre-established institutional traits of modernity; they act to transform the content and nature of day-to-day social life.” (Giddens 1991:2) Although it might seem metafictional (like the author himself, the narrator of Ben Lerner’s second novel is a poet who was very successful with his debut novel, The Golden Vanity, that prompted the narrator’s substantial advance, and which transposes names and details of the story and characters introduced in part one. A novel about writing a novel; a narrator who is and is not the author; generally metafictional reflecting both the author’s and the reader’s ambivalence about the novel, blurring the lines between author and character, fiction and reality, different orders of temporality, how past and future affect the present, alternatives of modes and feelings, since the discourse of postmodernism seems to question the very concept of reality itself, placing it under the influence of various mechanisms of disbelief, the individual is forced to keep

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redefining his identity at both personal and social levels, as Anthony Giddens also enforces in his Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age: “The self is not a passive entity, determined by external influences; in forging their self-identities, no matter how local their specific contexts of action, individuals contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications.” (Giddens 1991:2) Lerner’s character claims that he wants to work his way “from irony to sincerity” and, in the end, does not deliver the book that he originally proposes, but rather “the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor non-fiction, but a flickering between them …” (Lerner 2014:194) and asks: “What if everything at the end of the book is the same, only a little different?” (Lerner 2014:157) which, I believe, turns out to be just another ‘frame’, for, 10:04 is mainly about reality, brings to the fore the various ways that human experience could take shape, the options we have, the choices we make, and the results of those choices. As the author acknowledges, we are shown the diversity of life, which becomes open-ended, full of options, and with various futures: “[…] I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now, a work that, like a poem, is neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them; I resolved to dilate my story not into a novel about literary fraudulence, about fabricating the past, but into an actual present alive with multiple futures.” (Lerner 2014:194)

Anthony Giddens in his study Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, reminds us that it is within this change and due to it that we are forced to construct our identities: “Yet because of the ‘openness’ of social life today, the pluralisation of contexts of action and the diversity of ‘authorities’, lifestyle choice is increasingly important in the constitution of self-identity and daily activity.” (Giddens 1991:5) It is among his daily activities, lifestyle choices and relationships that the author/narrator constructs his identity. The world rearranges itself around the narrator with every new experience that adds to it “Everything will be just as it is now, just a little different - nothing in me or the store had changed, except maybe my aorta, but, as the eye drew near, what normally felt like the only possible world became one among many, its meaning everywhere up for grabs, however briefly – in the passing commons of a train, in a container of tasteless coffee.” (Lerner 2014:19) Climate change and its effects are causing the globe to reorganize itself, and the two storms that start and finish the book give the world a sense of a potential resolution: “[…] had discovered that

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the danger and magnitude of the storm felt real to us, maybe because our meal had the feel of a last supper, maybe because eating together produced a sufficient sense of a household against which we could measure that threat. The radio said the storm would make landfall around 4:00 a.m.; it was about ten now and the surges were alarmingly high” (Lerner 2014: 21) or to further reinforce the ecological fragility of the city and the fragility of the present: “An unusually large cyclonic system with a warm core was approaching New York; […] Soon the mayor would divide the city into zones, mandate evacuations from the lower-lying ones, and shut down the entire subway system. For the second time in a year, we were facing oncein-a-generation weather. Outside it was still just unseasonably warm, but there was a sense of imminent, man-made excitation in the air. ‘Here we go again,’ a neighbour said to me, smiling, when he passed me on the street; he only seemed to acknowledge my presence when our world was threatening to end.” (Lerner 2014: 213) The above passage also stands for a collective feeling in front of a natural disaster: “[…] the city was becoming one organism, constructing itself in relation to a threat viewable from space” that prompts people to start talking to each other: “Because every conversation you overheard in line or on the street or train began to share a theme, it was soon one common conversation you could join, removing the conventional partitions from social space.” (Lerner 2014:17) Change, which impacts individuals and their lives, becomes a central theme of the book. The narrator becomes conscious of change, which turns into a “familiar sensation: the world was rearranging itself around me while I processed words from a liquid-crystal display” (Lerner 2014: 32) or the author’s mention: “All this was changing as the technology changed.” (Lerner 2014: 55). A world where every meaning is constructed, everything becomes subject to interpretation, identity, too, becomes a construct of our own making, dissolved and reconstructed in an active process of ‘finding oneself’ in a network of connections between individual and society, amidst the influences of the media, digitalization and endless duplication. Time itself is a constant change: “I’d heard The Clock described as the ultimate collapse of fictional time into real time, a work designed to obliterate the distance between art and life, fantasy and reality. But part of why I looked at my phone was because that distance hadn’t been collapsed for me at all; while the duration of a real minute and The Clock’s minute were mathematically indistinguishable, they were nevertheless minutes from different worlds” (Lerner 2014: 54) or, “On a small cobblestone street that dead-ended unexpectedly, some conspiracy of brik-work and

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chill air and gaslight gave him the momentary sense of having travelled back in time, or of distinct times being overlaid, temporalities interleaved. No: it was as if the little flame in the gas lamp he paused before were burning at once in the present and in various pasts, in 2012 but also in 1912 or 1883, as if it were one flame flickering simultaneously in each of those times, connecting them.” (Lerner 2014: 67) The author’s personal crisis is linked with his artistic one, his literary experiments: in dissolving the self, he also dissolves the novel as we know it and reconstructs a new self and a new novel-writing according to new patterns of becoming. Lerner uses his innovative manner of writing and his unconventional novel, as a type of the self-reflexive new novel, to capture the fragmented nature and unstable temporality of contemporary life. With language to capture new ideas of the real and of the self, capable of transformation, Lerner's novel captures the world as it is without mediating it. He promises to move beyond irony to sincerity. In an attempt to create his own persona and free himself from the constraints of the present by imagining multiple futures, he presents his life in contemporary New York, with all the difficulties it involves, his relationships with others, his struggle with his heart condition, and the writing process, in a reflexive manner. For, when we live, it is like living a story that is still being written or in the process of becoming, a story that is not yet complete but whose ending has already been anticipated, looking back on our present from a possible future in an attempt to better grasp it. Thus, in a way, the past, present and future are always imagined, we endow them with meaning by what we believe them to signify constructing ourselves continuously in an endless process of becoming, a work in progress ad infinitum. The novel may be read as a study of the present, the way we inhabit it among changing perspectives and new perceptions, the way we narrate/construct ourselves, our stories, always on the verge of being rewritten as new information changes the picture akin the digital world today which provides us with unlimited possibilities. Lerner’s narrator is always projecting future, and, in doing this, he questions and brings to the fore the notion of identity, claiming that “…discovering you is not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of a world to come…” (Lerner 1991: 109) asking himself: “Who am I, (still to come)?” thus, as a figure of becoming, he always looks towards the future. The narrator is able to construct his identity by opening the present up to all the disruptions, and because the present is always so elusive and

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slippery, he opens it up like an experiment of discovery in an exploration of himself and the others. Relationships become the important concept. Relationships with other people, how the narrator empties out of himself when hearing their experiences, and in doing so the novel also becomes about other people's stories. As a result of being caught in the web of transpersonal relationships, the characters – including the relationship between Ben Lerner and his narrator – become more open, expressive, and willing to experiment with change. The identity of Ben Lerner becomes a marker of potentiality, and the narrator finds himself "occupied" by it. Everything in the novel happens twice…but a little different; it is like a double: it presents experiences, events, people, in their actuality while affirming their capacity to differ from themselves. Many happenings in 10:04 take place, but, actually, they do not. The author dwells on the potentiality of things. They are potentially fictious, potentially real, depending on the way we look at them, from our perspective. For example, when Noor tells Ben, while working at the Coop, about a friend of hers who confronts his brother over the phone, but, after a long speech, her friend realizes that the call had been disconnected and his brother has heard nothing: “[…] was a major event in his life, but it never really happened: he never did confront his brother because of patchy cell phone service. It happened but it it didn’t happen. It’s not nothing but it never occurred.” (Lerner 1991: 107) It’s very much like our experiences in the virtual world, like social media, for example, at the same time real and not real. Baudrilliard’s hyperreality has become increasingly manifest blurring the distinction between reality and imagined with the end result of collapsing the narratives we tell ourselves. As unrealistic as those movies about Artificial Intelligence seemed in the past, it certainly become reality and will continue to change it. Horrors like 9/11, the Paris terrorist attacks, have surpassed fiction and made it real. Thus, the human being becomes trapped between collapsing and overlapping worlds. Another such illustration found in the story is about a girl who tells her boyfriend that she is fighting cancer. She visits the doctor, takes medication ... everything with the support of her partner. It turns out that it was all a lie, a sham. She is so convinced of her own complex story that she starts to believe it herself. Another such fiction that fools Lerner’s author is Bernard and Natali’s supposed daughter that he meets at a party. He becomes very obsessed with her: “She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an access of joy like the schoolboy that I

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was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world’s possibility and plenitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony, the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard donkeys if it killed me; my mind and body were a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she’d brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.” (Lerner 1991:37) We find out later in the novel that Bernard and Natali never had a daughter. As Richard Kearney states in his The Wake of Imagination: Imagination is like Adam’s dream, he awoke and found it true (John Keats) – the imagination becomes, in modern times, the immediate source of its own truth. Now imagination is deemed capable of inventing a world out of its human resources, a world answerable to no power higher than itself. […] the imagination ceases to function as a mirror reflecting some external reality and becomes a lamp which projects its own internally generated light into things. As a consequence, … meaning … it is now hailed as a transcendental product of the human mind. (Kearney 1988:155)

Narrating, imagining, we invent the world we inhabit, as well as ourselves, our identity. Lerner’s novel becomes a world in which he continuously anticipates himself as the narrated-other (the author) in a story about himself, in a recreation and reinvention of experience in a future declared open for the reinvention of the self according to new patterns of experience. In writing about past possibilities that failed to arrive, the narrator is keeping a sense of the future as possibly open. Because of the constantly changing social situation, the narrator experiences a form of Heideggerian Angst in which the future threatens to destroy the present: “Trying to remember the bustling uptown neighborhoods we’d left an hour or two ago, let alone the Brooklyn we’d set out from early that afternoon, was like trying to recall a different epoch. The sense of stability, the Upper East Side architecture […] seemed to belong to a a former age, innocent and gilded, while the ultrasound technology seemed to me in the dark like a premonition from the future; both were too alien to integrate into a narrative” (Lerner 2014: 235-236) which is prone to a continuous metamorphosis of identity. Giddens acknowledges that “Modernity […] introduces new risk parameters largely or completely unknown to previous eras. These parameters include high consequence risks: risks deriving from the globalised character of the social systems of modernity. The late modern world […] is apocalyptic

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[…] because it introduces risks which previous generations have not had to face.” (Giddens 1991:4) For example, the panic attack he experiences when working with Roberto on his school project. He describes his sudden agnosia, while holding a pair of safety scissors “ceases to be a familiar tool and becomes an alien artefact, thereby estranging the hand itself…” (Lerner 2014:13) His worries about future threats vanish when they fail to arrive, like the expected storm, “Another historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.” (Lerner 2014:230) The author/narrator of the novel attempts to piece together identity in the constantly evolving contemporary landscape, particularly the urban landscape described in the book, whose “reality” will manifest itself in the future. Caught in-between stories, captive between a potential dissolution of identity in an environment corroded by simulation and conformity, and the need to redefine, reshape identity to keep up with the pace of changes, writing a new story of creation, one based on relationality, one that integrates humanity into the process of evolution, humanity making its own history. Since History does not have a full stop, there will always be a search for labels to fit new contexts, new actualizations for the estranged and splintered individuality of our contemporary world and the writers’ engagement with it. With postmodernism being considered outdated, new names, labels, have been searched to replace it (starting with 1990) such as: post-postmodernism, coined by the architect Tom Turner against the ‘anything goes’ of the postmodernism, trans-postmodernism, postmillenialism, digimodernism, or altermodernism, performatism, hypermodernism, metamodernism … all in a search to make sense of the world we inhabit. The new paradigm we entered since 1995 with the wide use of the internet reshaped our society entering into the so-called “Information Age” or “Technological Age” in which individuals / consumers become an active link in the production chain, creating, adapting, personalizing, from books to shoes, from music to television shows, switching from “readers” into “authors”. Thus, digimodernism became the technologically enhanced evolution of postmodernism demanding engaging relationships or as Kirby mentions: There are various ways of defining digimodernism. It is the impact on cultural forms of computerization (inventing some, altering others). It is a set of aesthetic characteristics consequent on that process and gaining a unique cast from their new context: it is a cultural shift, a communicative

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revolution, a social organisation. The most immediate way of describing digimodernism is this: it’s a new form of textuality. (Kirby 2009: 50)

The digimodern text and digimodernism as such, are always “open”, “incomplete”, hard to capture, always shifting textual functional roles: reader, producer, author, etc. It is the great impact of technology and computerization on all forms of art, culture and textuality, becoming a force of the 21st century. Other theories claiming to move on from postmodernism into the future leaving it behind are altermodernism, performatism and hypermodernism. Altermodernism defined by the British art critic Nicolas Bourriaud in his Altermodern Manifesto at the Tate Triennial exhibition in 2009 as: A new modernity […] reconfigured to an age of globalisation - understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects [...] Postmodernism is over, and we don’t know exactly what’s going on after that. Altermodern is in a way a dream-catcher, trying to capture the characteristics of this modernity to come, this modernity which will be specific for the 21st century. Today we are more living in a maze, and we have to get meanings out of this maze, and this is the big stakes around altermodern, what is our modernity, what is the modernity of today? (Bourriaud, 2009)

Performatism also claims the end of postmodernism. The theorist Raoul Eshelman defines it as “an epoch in which a unified concept of sign and strategies of closure have begun to compete directly with – and displace – the split concept of sign and the strategies of boundary transgression typical of postmodernism.” (Eshelman 2008: 1) Or, Sweeney’s approach: A performatist subject is aware of limitations yet acts anyway. A postmodernist may also be aware of limitations, but the approach to life is much more likely to be suspicious and ironic. The performatist is unhindered by those fallibilities (limits of knowledge, lack of appropriate skills or debilitating attributes) because he or she chooses to act because the act itself is identical in meaning with the person acting (the act is no longer a sign that creates or generates meaning – the meaning is in the act). (Sweeney, 2007)

Such examples of meaning being in the act are interactive advertisements, film trailers, etc. Hypermodernity focuses on the liquid society engulfed by rapid changes making it almost meaningless to look back in the past and try to

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understand it, all in a society dominated by hyperconsumption, the third phase of consumption. If we take the Internet and its impact on our daily lives, we can witness the way it has transformed the sense of self – no true self but alteritas, contours emptied out of core, a pseudo-modernism where we can pretend, assume new identities with realities such as Facebook deconstructing the meaning of ‘friend’ to a mere shadow or Twitter, reducing communication to its bare essence of 140 characters, broadcast to everyone and no one at the same time. The technological layer that impinges on our contemporary life is no longer a fiction but a reality we have to cope with. Alan Kirby in his article The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond published in the magazine Philosophy Now sees pseudo-modernism as a new phase, a common participation in culture, society, technology and politics. People phone, click, press, surf, choose, download, being involved, engulfed in an insecure world where identity is nothing but dissolved. The individual becomes the creator of his own digitally contextualized reality. The dissolution of the real within the virtual becomes a new ground articulating identity anew. Reality becomes staged, substituted by various digital environments where everything can be done, undone with one click in a continuous process of transformation. As opposed to reality, the digital world becomes one of endless possibilities, boundless freedom and the absence of any need to conform, a medium of experiencing a completely new dimension of existence, making reality seem a waste land. Caught in the real-virtual conflict, the individual favors the latter and begins to deliberately blur the distinction between the two, legitimating the latter as his chosen mode of personal existence. Thus, an identity constructed within the digital can eventually replace the ‘true’ one (defined by personal, social, economic or gender-based constraints) as inadequate to the individual perspective of the world. In the virtual world each individual can assume multiple identities and is not limited to a single digital alter-ego, for, with each new account created, a new digital extension of the self is created within a rule-free framework: The instantaneity of interaction does not imply that the digital space is characterized by meaninglessness – meaning is always remnant, always validated and re-validated by each and every user, according to each and every individual perspective. Meaning has not disappeared; moreover, it has multiplied itself, its expansion being capable of permanently adjusting in order to conform to any change in the user’s vision. Individuality is simultaneously dissolved in the mass of Internet users and heightened by the limitless possibilities to create, adapt and re-shape one’s identity within

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the cybernetic community. Each individual becomes able to build a particular configuration of his or her own master narrative through the fragmentation and pastiche of the ones previously articulated by society; the new digital identity becomes the contextualization of the user’s personal norms and representations, a unique vision of existence, apart from reality, but visible to the other users as well.” (Athens 2010: 104)

The technoculture and hyperreality of a postmodern world or as Frederic Jameson describes it – the cultural logic of late capitalism, moves us forward towards the stage of information technology leaving capitalism behind. In the Information Age a new type of identity emerges labelled by Scott Bukatman “terminal identity” referring mainly to the end of the subject and the emergence of a new type of subjectivity constructed at the computer or TV screen according to new technological modes of being in the world, challenging the conventional systems of meaning, for, at the intersection of technology with the human subject new patterns of functionality come into existence constructing a new subject-position fit for the Information Age. With more and more sophisticated Artificial Intelligence programs as part of our lives such questions make sense: who tells the computer what to do? Does someone run the program or does the program run itself? The lurking danger behind them is that they modify our perception of self and of identity and leave us facing to the challenges yet to come, or as Richard Kearney in The Wake of Imagination wonders: [...] it will be the human imagination which plays the computer game or the computer game which plays the imagination. Is what we call imagination becoming no more than an ‘epiphenomenon’ - a mere ‘effect’ of an overall systems organization? Or is it still meaningful to talk of a creative imagination at all when the human subject feels caught up in a multiplicity of circuits difficult to master, a society constituting a sort of web extending to infinity which no centre seems to control? These are as we shall see, some of the central questions which increasingly preoccupy the postmodern imagination in search of itself. (Kearney 1988: 298)

In our globalised, increasingly technological world, post-structuralist and postmodern theories of identity are becoming extremely important as the ground for new research in different fields which future compels to extend the notion of identity to non-human entities as Turkle predicts: When we live with implanted chips, we will be on a different footing in our relationships with computers. When we share other people’s tissue and genetic material, we will be on a different footing with the bodies of

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Without clear-cut rules, deteritorialized and elastic, the virtual space becomes equal to individual freedom and questioning the reality of the digital space is questioning the real itself. In Baudrillard’s terms, it is a distinction between the artificial and the imitation of the artificial, an authentic grasp of reality being already cancelled. In a lecture delivered at Cérisy conference in 1980 about the Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy Jacques Derrida posits a deconstructive analysis of the word ‘come’ so as to illustrate the apocalyptic tone in some of his writings: Pas, Survivre, En cet Moment meme dans cet Ouvrage me voiçi. The word ‘come’ is the gesture of a word which cannot be interpreted in the analysis of that word. It is an address without a subject (we do not know who speaks to whom) nor if it is spoken in the past, present or future unable to be temporally situated breaking the linear narrative of human imagination. The word becomes, thus, a paradigmatic figure of postmodern apocalypse because it deconstructs every attempt to decide what it means. It becomes an apocalypse without apocalypse since we cannot figure out what the truth of apocalypse means. By this example he brings to our attention the notion of apocalyptic writing, an ending without end. He concludes: We cannot say what it is ... ‘come’ does not address itself to an identity determinable in advance... and it is derivable from nothing which could be verified, presented, decided, or appropriated as an origin.... What here announces itself as promise or threat, is an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, truth or revelation, dispatches without message or destination, addresses without any fixed addresser or addressee, without last judgement, without any eschatology other than the tone of ‘Come’ itself... an apocalypse beyond good and evil... the apocalypse of apocalypse, ‘come’ is in itself apocalyptic. Our apocalypse now. (Derrida apud Kearney 1988: 295)

Thus, with everything impinging on our lives ad infinitum, there is an openness towards the unknown which cannot be molded after previous patterns, for, “What is to come is, apparently, beyond the powers of imagination to imagine.” (Kearney 1988: 295)

CONCLUSIONS

Postmodernism grew out of modern society with its metanarratives of reason, progress, absolute truth, order, and stability, turning the tables on them, writing them wrong into small, mini-narratives with no claim to absolute truth, reason or stability, always subject to change, provisional and temporary, into a rejection of fixed norms and tradition. Postmodernity viewed as ruled by change, complexity, contradiction, on the edge of chaos, led to fragmentation, a splintered individual, hyperreality, the growth of consumption over production, a jigsaw collage of multiple representations of the self, a puzzle to be solved. Kirby’s “the world has changed and theory must change with it” (Kirby 2009:32) holds true, for, we must adapt and face the changes, chameleon-like, at will. Reified as cultural objects, fairy tales incorporate the changing values of society from love, faith, duty, good and evil, sacrifice, to the changing roles of women, the triumph of human rights; in the postmodern versions, it shows an engagement with history, with its changing practices. As nothing stands still, the concept of identity has changed being confronted with all the challenges and uncertainties of external political and social ongoings, leading to a shift of perspective, of pre-existing patterns of behavior and social practices. Such a shift of perspective regarding gender identity resides in Angela Carter’s revisionary use of fairy tales, for it is in fairy tales (or their Disneyfied versions viewed as entertainment for children) that we are taught from childhood till adolescence, how to perceive and internalize gender representations at a subconscious level, leading to certain behavioral patterns, thus, such narratives of identity may also be viewed as a form of social control. In adulthood, when the learning of gender is finished, the focus changes to maintaining the gender order, through conventions and ideology, mostly of a patriarchal social order, which Carter wanted to subvert so as to reflect the changes in society. Appealing to both adults and children, fairy tales are important in their non-restrictive representation of gender (as Carter’s fairy tales) so that people identify with multidimensional characters, not forced to appropriate certain fixed, stereotypic patterns (as in old versions of the fairy tales or their Disney versions) in order to be accepted in society.

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The body in postmodernism, as well as the nation in modernism, has always been the site of political contention. Postmodernism has intensified the debate, people becoming more and more conscious about the physical and psychological control. In the discourse of high technology and techno-utopians appears a fixation, an obsession with immortality in a belief that one can transcend one’s body through technological accomplishments. Impinging to its very limits, postmodernism can be seen according to Ihab Hassan as a continuous exercise in self-definition. We try to make sense of the fragmented identity of today caught in a web of relations and interrelations; we try to piece it together like a puzzle, always changing its character in the light of incoming information. The reflexive appropriation of knowledge subverted the fixities of tradition coming to terms and incorporating change, with no definite meanings, future is regarded as open, thus, the impossibility to escape an ever-changing identity in-the-process. Our rush, in this runaway world we inhabit, to name things even before they happen, to put the chart before the horses, as it is with the so-called death of postmodernism stands for our search for meaning, for stability, for identity, for something. The opposing epistemological standpoints, the modern and the postmodern, led to different socio-cultural conditions with different perspectives for identity formation. Modernity took an essentialist approach to identity understood as being determined by heredity, tradition, biological traits, geography as we can infer from the study of Bessarabian and Irish fairy tales reflective of these peoples’ fight for independence from the British rule, in the case of Ireland and union with Romania, in the case of Bessarabia, while the postmodern approach to identity unfolds a different story; it becomes a cultural construct in light of which our personhood is shaped by the education, reading, ideas and information we are exposed to, or, to put it otherwise, it is just a matter of language, of the discourse about us. Angela Carter with her fairy tales writes a different woman into being: emancipated, educated, courageous, no longer subject to patriarchal values. Emerging in the second part of the 20th century as a consequence of World War II, postmodernism led to the collapse of big ideologies that were supposed to lead to the utopia of rationality, invented during the Enlightenment period, which further led to the rejection of grand narratives: the fulfilment of utopia and triumph of rationality (Hegel, Marx etc.), an approach generating, at its turn, skepticism and irony. According to Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern philosopher, the end of grand narratives can be a change that leads to small narratives, life

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stories. There isn’t one truth, because everything is in constant change. There are no criteria of judgment, everything is relative. Postmodernism as reaction, answer to modernism becomes post, trans or negation. Thus, if modernism is seen as crystallized, stable, conservative and rational, postmodernism is fluent, changeable, and liberal, does not believe in rationality and is open-ended. As seen in the above contrasts, postmodernism cannot exist without modernism. Postmodernism itself is very protean in character, evolving under many definitions and guises defying consensus. In her article “Postmodernism is Dead. What Comes Next?”, Alison Gibbons revises this shift in paradigm stating that Fredric Jameson perceives it in his Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism as the loss of historicity, a lack of depth and meaningfulness and a waning of emotional affect. Brian McHale, in Postmodernist Fiction, claims that postmodernism is defined by its fascination with the ontological. Taken together, postmodernism seems essentially to involve a questioning of the real, both in terms of the actual world, and in the representational efficacy and fidelity of fiction. The reflexivity of postmodernism as noticed by Giddens leads to selfobservation and self - generated issues such as identity crisis and the construction of identity. Just because postmodern identity is blurred, escapes definitions and clear-cut patterns due to modernity’s liquidity, we might also refer to the so-called obsession of identity. Due to its chameleon-like character, postmodern identity was called by Robert Jay Lifton the Protean self (from the Greek god Proteus that changed his form). The Protean Self became a global phenomenon of the late 20 and 21st centuries. It is concerned with the integration and disintegration of the self correlated with dislocation: there are no limits, no territory, no authorities to tell people what to do. Each person becomes the bricoleur of its own identity in-the-making. The need of the postmodern, Protean self to be able to cope with change, to adapt to the circumstances of a globalised world concerned with mass production and consumption, the boom of technology, hyperreality, uncertainty and changing power relations, dissolution of values which further lead to the diffusion of identity as the self becomes concentrated on the self-image because as Kearney states: “Everywhere we turn today we are surrounded by images. From the home TV or video to billboard advertisements, election-eering posters and neon signs which festoon the public street or motorway, our Western culture is becoming increasingly a Civilization of the Image.” (Kearney 1988: 1) more than the self-conception. Thus, identity lacks a stable meaning, a core and becomes defined as played

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social roles according to different contexts, a fragmented self, losing its sense of continuity (as fostered by modernity). Thus, the individual becomes disintegrated, splintered, loosing itself in the globalised postmodernity, becoming very difficult to answer the questions Who am I, Who are we? in a limitless anxiety of self-nomination. The concept of identity can change and shift in time, to better grasp it we need to consider the context in which it is defined. Identity formation is based on a reorganization of individual action, way of thinking, self reflection, under the influence of the fast-changing factors of the late modern world which requires a shifting expression of one’s self caught in a continuous process of becoming. National identity gave way to identities, multiculturalism and the cosmopolitan world of today: liberal, open, based on international agreements such as European Union. But it can also lead to opposite values because of identity’s diffusion that generates lack of tolerance, confusion, search for stability, that, in paradox, can lead to looking up to the past, recycling nationalism. The pastiche character of postmodern literature, the combining of different elements, their diversity, stand for the plural, fragmented, disordered postmodern context – a state of affairs with contradictions, ambiguity, fragmentation, with no clearly defined organizing principle. Jean Baudrillard argues that the dissolution of identity is a process that started in the nineteenth century and was exacerbated in the twentieth. In the postmodern era, historical processes have undermined the stability of identity, so that it becomes impossible to meaningfully theorize about social identity. Rigid identity and meaning are destroyed due to the rise of global capitalism and the demise of the referents from modernity (truth, purpose, meaning and so on) as he well mentions: “Gone are the referentials of production, signification, affect, substance, history, and the whole equation of ‘real’ contents” (Baudrillard 1988: 125). Identity’s content has no foundation or ultimate meaning. Whilst for Baudrillard this cannot be thought of as a particularly positive or negative phenomenon, as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ no longer have any real meaning in postmodernity, the replacement of grand or meta-narratives with ‘small narratives’, none more valid than another to piece together the social being, postmodernism explodes the old, traditional patterns and opens up new possibilities for interpreting identity and re-theorizing society. In postmodernism, situated amidst a constantly changing environment, the self is also in flux, constantly changing with no continuing identity, becoming open to contestation as there is no longer an ultimate truth,

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knowledge, science, God (as in modern thought) to provide universal legitimation. As Richard Kearney concludes: Where do we go from here? How may we hope to ever escape the endless self-parodying of postmodernism which announces the ‘end’ of everything but itself? And if postmodernism subverts the very opposition between the imaginary and the real, to the point where each dissolve into an empty imitation of the other, we can still speak of imagination at all? Does imagination itself not threaten to disappear with the disappearance of man? Is there life, for the human imagination, after deconstruction? Has the very notion of a postmodern imagination become a contradiction in terms? ... there is ... a danger that the postmodern obsession with the demise of imagination may consolidate the growing conviction that human culture as we have known it - that is as a creative project in which human beings have an ethical, artistic and political role to play – is now reaching its end. (Kearney 1988: 359)

If in modernism one’s identity could be attached to membership into categories such as: class, race, gender, religion, ethnicity, etc., in postmodernism identity becomes fluid, chameleon-like and fixed categorization is rejected. Bauman in his Liquid Times: Living in an age of uncertainty (2007) understands postmodernism as the passage from ‘solid/stable’ times to ‘liquid’ times. The end of “grand-narratives” (Lyotard), of traditional structures and institutions, loss of faith in equality, justice, absolute knowledge and a move towards a celebration of plurality, diversity and difference. Knowledge becomes partial and biased, change and progress are no longer linear but networks of connections and reconnections always subject to change, to new influx of information, in a state of ‘liquidity’ as Bauman describes, with no time to “solidify” in the dynamics of today’s world. Thus, while modernism treasured order, direction, coherence, stability, control, autonomy, simplicity, universality, postmodernism reflects diversity, fragmentation, dynamism, discontinuity, contingency, pragmatism, rhizome-like networks, multiplicity, connections of all sorts and plurality to better fit its context of existence. The “equality” of being, “the same” of the modern system, of measuring up to the norm and be assimilated (while inequality implied contrary to the norm, exclusion) was exploded by the liberation movements of the late 20th century: women, black, gay, disabled people liberation movements, which, in a way, added to the conflict, for, although these groups achieved formal equal rights, equality as “the same” and

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difference as “deficiency, lack” do not fit in the same sentence, fact which gave rise to a new form of activism: the politics of difference which became part of postmodernism thought and viewed equality and difference not in terms of contrast, but related as in “working difference together”, open to new debates, a new dimension of solving conflicts, not in relation to dominant norms but based on mutual understanding among different groups, overcoming difference as “deficiency”. The shared identity of modernism based on tradition, perceived as a mark of unity (as seen in the analysis of Kirileanu and Yeats’ works in the present paper) was displaced as a source of identity in postmodernism where the individual’s existence becomes self-discovery, self-expression and self-actualization (as seen in the analysis of Angela Carter, Ruth Ozeki and Ben Lerner’s writings). A collective identity, a sense of shared identity, based on tradition (especially religious tradition) and norms brought about a sense of belonging, of stability, of powerful community ties as seen in the analysis of Kirilianu’s fairy tales collected in the same year of the Great Union (Bessarabia’s Union with the Mother Country) to prove that on both banks of the Prut River Romanians think, act, behave, feel and have the same goal: the Union. Postmodernism, with its diversity and globalization, provided the framework for an individual pursuit of identity, separating the self from the community or the heritage of history and tradition. In Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Anthony Giddens claims that society has been deprived of the benefits of a shared identity based on tradition and goes on to affirm that “modernity is a posttraditional order, but not one in which the sureties of tradition and habit have been replaced by the certitude of rational knowledge.” (Giddens 1991: 3) Deprived of tradition, the individual was left alone to establish values and make sense of his life while constructing his identity. According to Giddens in the same study, lifestyle choices play an important part in constructing identity, in helping the individuals to come up with reflexively constructed narratives as part of their identity, encouraging individuals to strive to discover their true self amid an everchanging environment (as it is exemplified in the present paper with the case of the main characters from Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being and Ben Lerner’s 10:04). Lifestyle choices in the pursuit of a unique identity are highly influenced in the postmodern, capitalist period by the consumption of goods and services: “modernity opens up the project of the self, but under conditions strongly influenced by the standardizing effects of commodity capitalism.” (Giddens 1991: 107) Thus, the postmodern

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individual is encouraged to construct his reality and identity through consumption, commodification and representation. Postmodern thought becomes a reforming tool in considering identity as seen in Angela Carter’s fairy tales which subvert old notions of gendered identity interpreting them anew to fit new realities, as the women’s liberation movements claimed new articulations of gender identities and promoted the reconstruction of a new system of gender power that needed a reactualization from the norms of patriarchal values. Under the impact of tradition, modernity, postmodernity, the poetics of identity has evolved in a need to adapt to and reflect reality, from a comforting sense of shared identity based on tradition in modernism, to identity as a fragile construction through lifestyle choices, consumption and relation to other in postmodernism, where, identity constructed at will according to different contexts makes the discovery of the self (as an entire picture) impossible, a Sisif-like task and all we are able to discover are bits, pieces of this enigmatic puzzle of identity according to different contexts and perspectives, but never the entire picture of it as the postmodern individual is a fragmented being, in a continuous state of metamorphosis and dissolution. The puzzling concept of identity with its dilemmas was approached by many disciplines turning it into an interdisciplinary topic of an ongoing debate in a search for answers and definitions. Zygmunt Bauman describes it as a process caught in the “liquid life” of modernity; Ulrich Beck speaks of “individualization”, precisely individuals being compelled by the postmodern context they inhabit to make choices about their identities; Anthony Giddens makes “reflexivity” a key concept in the process of identity construction, always subject to the in-coming flux of information. In the name of a pluralist postmodernity Ihab Hassan enforces the need to discover new relations between selves and others, margins and centers, selves and selves, margins and margins in an effort to render this new paradigm meaningful, he goes on to say that: “to put certain ideas, certain words into play, words that we have forgotten in academe, words that need more than refurbishing, reinvention. I mean words like truth, trust, spirit, all un-capitalized, in addition to words like reciprocity and respect, sympathy and empathy.” (Hassan 1987: 6) It is in the same spirit that Amin Maalouf writes in his book In the Name of Identity that we should all make an effort and make the best of this world we inhabit: We must act in such a way, as to bring about a situation, in which no one feels excluded from the common civilization that is coming into existence; in which anyone may be able to find the language of his own identity and some symbols of his own culture; and in which everyone can identify, to

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Conclusions some degree, with what he sees emerging in the world around, and about him, instead of seeking refuge in an idealized past. (Maalouf 2001: 163)

Amin Maalouf’s historicizing comment reinforces the impression we got while documenting this thesis that the concept of identity will continue to be defined, redefined, shaped and reshaped as the world develops, by shifts in ideas throughout history.

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