Fear and Fantasy in a Global World 900430603X, 9789004306035

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Fear and Fantasy in a Global World

Textxet Studies in Comparative Literature

Series Editors C.C. Barfoot Theo D’haen

VOLUME 81

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/tscl

Fear and Fantasy in a Global World Edited by

Susana Araújo Marta Pacheco Pinto Sandra Bettencourt

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Corrida / Running, 1983. Tinta acrílica sobre papel montado em tela / Acrylic on paper mounted on canvas, 239 × 202 cm. Col. / Coll. Paula Rego, em comodato na / under loan for use Fundação Paula Rego – Casa das Histórias Paula Rego, Cascais. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015948136

issn 0927-5754 isbn 978-90-04-30603-5 (paperback) isbn 978-90-04-30604-2 (e-book) Copyright 2015 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Susana Araújo, Marta Pacheco Pinto, and Sandra Bettencourt Introduction

1

Part 1: Local Fears, Global Anxieties Christopher Bollas The Transmissive Self and Transmissive Objects in the Age of Globalization

15

James Rushing Daniel Dreamlandic Fantasy: Consumerism and Control in Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets

35

David Vichnar “Territories of Risk” within “Tropological Space”: From Zero to 2666, and Back

55

Edith Beltrán Mexico’s Fearscapes: Where Fantasy Personas Engage in Citizenship

75

Part 2: The Limits of Knowledge: Fantasy and Identity Formation Martijn Boven The Site of Initiative. Towards a Hermeneutic Framework for Analysing the Imagination of Future Threats

101

Christin Grunert Conflict with the Perception of Time as Fertile Ground for Collective Insecurity: The Frightening Reality of Scientific Facts and their Transformation in Literary Fiction

123

Gero Guttzeit Fearful Fantasy: Figurations of the Oedipus Myth in Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)

143

Marija Sruk Laugh Away the Fear! The Satisfaction of Comical Fantasy in the Holocaust Film Comedies of the Late 1990s

163

Alexandra Hills Viennese Fantasies, Austrian Histories: Space, Fantasy and Fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter

185

Part 3: Boundaries and Performance: Language, Memory and Fantasy Harriet Hulme A Politics of Form: Fantasy and Storytelling as Modes of Resistance in the Work of Atxaga and Kundera

213

Ana Filipa Prata Memory and Fantasy in Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels

239

Hande Gurses The Fantasy of the Archive: An Analysis of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence

259

João Pedro da Costa The Digital Meta-Dissemination of Fear in Music Videos. A Transdisciplinary Textual Analysis of Two Case Studies: Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free

279

Part 4: Uncanny Representations of the Self and the Other Ortwin de Graef Shaft which Ran: Chinese Whispers with Auerbach, Buck, Woolf and De Quincey

303

Brecht de Groote The Phantom in the Mirror: Duplication, Spectrality, and the Romantic Fear of Fantasy in Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey

323

Margarita García Candeira Habitability and Spectres in the House of Language: Approaching (Post)Modernity in Las flores del frío, by Luis García Montero

351

Daniela Di Pasquale War on Fear: Reinterpreting Dante’s View of the “Infidel”

373

Notes on Contributors

397

Index

405

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editors would like to thank the members of the Hermes Consortium for Literary and Cultural Studies for the ongoing and stimulating venture which is the Hermes Doctoral Summer Seminar and Symposium: The University of Aarhus (Denmark), University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Charles University (Czech Republic), University College London (UK), Justus-Liebig-University Giessen (Germany), University of Helsinki (Finland), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), University of Lisbon (Portugal), Stanford University (USA), University of Santiago de Compostela (Spain), and University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA). The editors also wish to thank the research Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon (CEC) for institutional and financial support. We are thankful to Helena Buescu, who supported this project since the beginning, and to the current Director of CEC, Manuela Ribeiro Sanches, for her continuing support. Special thanks are due to Francisco Serra Lopes for his revision to the volume’s Introduction and to Everton Machado for his comments. This work follows the scientific goals of Project CILM (reference PTDC/CLELLI/110694/2009). Thanks are also due to Masja Horn from Rodopi for her precious collaboration, as well as Textxet’s series editors, Theo D’haen and Cedric Barfoot, for their editorial support. Last but not least, the editors will always be grateful to the painter Paula Rego and to her museum Casa das Histórias: Rego’s fearless art work and bold approach to fantasy have been major sources of inspiration to the conception and editing of this volume.

INTRODUCTION SUSANA ARAÚJO, MARTA PACHECO PINTO, AND SANDRA BETTENCOURT

At a time when the mass media insists on bombarding us with news about natural, political and economic disasters, from flu pandemics to terrorist threats, thus acting as “weapons of massive communication”,1 words, ideas and images associated with such “crises” and “catastrophes” shape to a great extent collective memory and current imagination. However, the way concepts such as “crisis” and “catastrophe” depend upon and depart from fear and fantasy still needs in-depth analysis and further discussion. Fear and Fantasy in a Global World seeks to stir the debate on the processes and meanings of, as well as on the relations between, fear and fantasy in the globalized world. Collective fears and fantasies will be analysed here from a number of cross-disciplinary perspectives. Such diversity is promoted by the epistemological underpinnings of comparative literature, particularly in terms of the wide range of textual corpora this field is able to embrace as well as in terms of the critical and theoretical paradigms it is capable of bringing together. The volume explores the multiple ways in which culture, theory and the arts (literature and visual representations in particular) absorb, rework or challenge many of our collective fears, fantasies and anxieties in late global capitalism. In various ways and from different disciplinary angles, the essays respond to and scrutinize key questions related to the imaginaries of fear and fantasy, as well as their relations to trauma, crisis, anxiety, and representations of both the conscious and the unconscious. Despite their origins in psychoanalytic theory – namely in the work of Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, among others – “fear” and 1

Paul Virilio, City of Panic, Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005, 32.

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Fear and Fantasy in a Global World

“fantasy” have become pivotal terms in cultural and literary studies, and, as the essays show, they have recently seized the attention of theorists in a number of academic fields, such as literature, philosophy and politics. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud highlights the distinction between fear and anxiety through the tertium comparationis of danger.2 While he believed anxiety to be a state of expectation and preparation for a danger or threat which could be unknown (that is, have no object or an object not yet grasped), fear implied more specific and determinate objects. Anxiety and fear therefore elicit defensive reactions. In this light, fantasy is also devised or brought forth as a defensive architecture that morphs yet is percolated by Wirklichkeit – reality perceived as surrounding and external, in contrast to Realität, the psychic principle. For Freud, fantasy (Phantasie) was mainly a defence mechanism, a construction that allows one to deal with reality. Phantasizing was thus thought of as a means to sidestep certain elements of reality somehow ancillary to the pleasure principle. In turn, daydreaming was considered a resourceful mental elaboration stemming from the unconscious: “These day-dreams are cathected with a large amount of interest; they are carefully cherished by the subject and usually concealed with a great deal of sensitivity ... such phantasies may be unconscious just as well as conscious.”3 For Freud these play a central role both in everyday life as well as in art: The energetic and successful man is one who succeeds by his efforts in turning his wishful phantasies into reality. Where this fails, as a result of the resistances of the external world and of the subject’s own weakness, he begins to turn away from reality and withdraws into his more satisfying world of phantasy, the content of which is transformed into symptoms should he fall ill. In certain favorable circumstances, it still remains possible for him to find another path leading from these phantasies to reality, instead of becoming permanently estranged from it by regressing to infancy. If a person who is at loggerheads with reality possesses an artistic gift (a thing that is still a psychological mystery to us), he can transform his 2

Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), trans. James Strachey, New York: W.W. Norton, 1961. 3 Sigmund Freud, On Psychopatholgy, ed. Angela Richards, London: Penguin, Penguin Freud Library Penguin, 1988, 88.

Introduction

3

phantasies into artistic creations instead of into symptoms. In this matter, he can escape the doom of neurosis and by this roundabout path regain his contact with reality. 4

Fantasy, it should be noted at this point, also became a central issue with the development of the Kleinian group within the British PsychoAnalytical Society. For Kleinian psychoanalysts the unconscious was made up of innate phantasies of relations with objects. Indeed, Melanie Klein has extended Freud’s concept of fantasy to cover the developing child’s relationship to a world of internal objects.5 For her, play inner activity is known as “unconscious fantasy”. In Kleinian psychoanalysis, “phantasies” (spelled with “ph”) correspond to the state of mind of an infant child during “pre-linguistic” stages of development, through which the baby tests the relation between internal and external world, imagination and reality. These differed from ordinary daydreams or “fantasies” (spelled with an “f” in Kleinian terminology), which would correspond to the normal reverie, daydream, an imagined construction for the fulfilment of our basic needs and wishes. Lacan, however, relates fear to fantasy in the emergence of anxiety as inherent to the “mirror stage”: the one who sees the horizontally inverted image on the mirror experiences the anxiety of loss. Indeed that imago is the phantasmatic appearance of the lost or fallen phallus.6 Such anxiety is enhanced by the motherly engulfment of the subject, primarily mediated by the objectal ambivalence of the breast, indicating the lack of separation of the mother in opposition to the danger of the Freudian separation from the mother. Thus, anxiety takes hold as an intrinsic loss with no full match or fulfilling object in the realm of Wirklichkeit or the reality perceived as external. Nevertheless, anxiety as determined by desire has indeed an object of a different kind, the objet (petit) a (the remainder of the division of the subject), the object-cause of desire: agent of the unpredictable and therefore of things both desirable and undesirable over which the subject will never gain full grasp or mastery, as they remain portended 4

Sigmund Freud, Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, London: Penguin, 1995, 81. Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works 1921-1945, London: Karnac Books, 1975. See also Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946-1963, London: Vintage, 1997. 6 See especially Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan X. Anxiety: 19621963, trans. Cormac Gallagher, London: Karnac Books, 2002. 5

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Fear and Fantasy in a Global World

or at the very least adumbrated by A, l’Autre, the position of the Utterly Other. This desire towards the other, who is expected to reciprocate by making that object accessible again, is constructed through fantasy, since the object has never quite been there in the first place – it was revelled in as a fundamental misunderstanding, an effect of meaning (effet de sens). Fantasy is a symbolic rendition of the proportion (rapport) between the Imaginary and the Real that may allow the subject to repeat the traumatic encounter of loss (the notbeing-there of the object) as something less unbearable and tied to jouissance. Such fundamental fantasy operates like a screen for the performance and agency (projection) of memory in the sense of “screen memory” as defined by Freud. Screen memory refers to unconscious reconstructions of infancy events that would mask and reconcile repressed experiences. As a surface for the deployment of desire, fantasy becomes a sort of play where the not-being-there of an object is not only experienced as belonging to the past but also being trapped in the future. It is also a symbolic compact with an ideally undivided Other (A) which is supposed to grant access to and satisfaction of that very lack the fantasy stands for. The shocking encounter with the Real reveals the desert of such hopes of fulfilment leading to a state of anxiety that is experienced when that “lack is lacking”, when the desire (lack of the object) becomes consciously insatiable (lack of the lack). This may lead to a sense of great threat and to major defences such as phobias. Phobia appears as a lesser evil or a less unbearable way of witnessing lack as it replaces anxiety with fear. Both being of the symbolic order, fear and phobia may be further elaborated by means of a symbolic object which seems to be further concealed or gone for good in the case of anxiety. Laplanche and Pontalis present an ontology of fantasy by reviewing Freud’s formulations on trauma and fantasy. They reject the binarism between reality and illusion, and rather support the notion of a third category – Freud’s “psychical reality” – in which fantasy is perceived as latent content of specific manifestations.7 In this way, the internal and external, subjective and objective, experiences become interdependent and reality is contained in the fantasy structure, evident in the Oedipus complex and primal fantasies, directly linked to the 7 See especially Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Formations of Fantasy, eds Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, London: Methuen, 1986.

Introduction

5

drive. Desire is rooted in fantasy and the subject is always present in a subjectivized or desubjectivized status. Hence, fantasy is not only the setting of desire but of defensive reactions as well. Fantasy is, thus, a mixed entity – a “metapsychological” status – which precludes the division between conscious and unconscious fantasies about the impossible recovery of primal experiences and objects replaced with phantasmatical substitutes. It leads to the awareness of difference and the dramatized condition of perception, understood as an interplay between the presence and the absence of such signifiers. Fantasy, therefore, becomes the setting of unstable identity formations. Some of the philosophical and political implications of the concept of fantasy and the way these have shaped contemporary academic thought can also be understood through the work of Slavoj Žižek. For the last four decades, Žižek has famously recovered the term “fantasy” to re-examine the effects of ideology in the Western psyche. For Žižek fantasy hides the shock of what Lacan called the Real, while it simultaneously attempts to create the replacement of what it conceals. Ideology, for Žižek, is not merely an illusion that masks the actual state of things, more significantly it is an unconscious fantasy that is produced so as to shape social reality. In fact, Žižek points out that “fantasy creates a great amount of ‘subject positions’, among which the free floating subject is able to move from one identification to the other”.8 This shows the complex nature of fantasy at work. Not only does fantasy recast desire through hallucinatory images but it also aims at redistributing subjective positions in terms of a foreign desire. Ideology is, thus, not merely powerful or dangerous because it lacks of Real. What is important is to understand why ideology gets in the way of the figurations of the Real. For Žižek it is fantasy which “teaches to us how to desire”,9 how to domesticate desire and define, all the while shaping, one’s place in social reality. For literary and cultural studies, Žižek’s overall work has been an enticing and challenging territory to explore many of the contradictions inherent to artistic and cultural representation in a world dominated by total capitalism and global market speculation. Influenced by many of the above concepts and ideas, Fear and Fantasy in a Global World seeks to take that exploration further by examining the profound and wide-ranging impact of the workings of 8 9

Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997, 16. Ibid., 17.

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Fear and Fantasy in a Global World

fantasy in a neoliberal context shaped by financial anxieties, economic insecurity and cultural fearfulness. The book also departs from the premise that our fears and fantasies are symptomatic or symptomcapable, and are thus subjectively productive, of change. While they may be interpreted as a way to escape or replace reality, they also lead us to question, rewrite and act upon reality. The essays gathered in this volume attempt to interrogate the causes of collective fantasies and what their impact is, or might be, as they are translated into social dialects and protocols. Some of them explore current manifestations of fantasy and creativity in contemporary philosophical, political and cultural landscapes, while others examine how literature and culture have engaged with or reacted to the pressures of globalization in reproducing fears and fantasies. Some essays also analyse how modern media and other means of intercultural and intermedial communication changed the way fears and fantasies are constructed and disseminated. This collection includes articles by well-established and reputed literary studies scholars, whilst also embracing selected essays by promising young scholars in contemporary literature from internationally recognized academic institutions. The seventeen articles are thematically grouped into four dialoguing parts which take up the topics above and illustrate the wide range of disciplines dealt with from a comparative perspective, such as literary studies, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, film studies, economics, politics, and philosophy. Part 1, “Local Fears, Global Anxieties”, looks at how globalization has not only changed the way of perceiving and consuming objects, but also reshaped or dissolved the boundaries between the public and the private. The author and psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas opens the book with a provocative stance on the notions of communication, media and transmission. In “The Transmissive Self and Transmissive Objects in the Age of Globalization”, Bollas focuses on social media to reflect about “transmissive spaces” and their “transmissive objects”, which enable real-time virtual communication. According to Bollas, transmissive communication molds the way information flows as well as individuals’ interaction and identities, both virtual and transmissive,

Introduction

7

thus shaping contemporary responses to global anxieties, all the while blurring the borders between fantasy and reality. James Rushing Daniel in “Dreamlandic Fantasy: Consumerism and Control in Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets” offers an analysis of Ólafsson’s novel The Pets (2001) as an insight into the collapse of Iceland’s economy following the 2008 global financial crisis. Daniel interweaves Icelandic reality with the narrative of the novel, problematizing the effects of consumerism, marketing agency and financial speculation, at the same time posing fantasy as a possibility of dealing with financial and social crises. David Vichnar examines two Latin American novels, Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s Zero (1979) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), in “‘Territories of Risk’ within ‘Tropological Space’: From Zero to 2666, and Back”. Vichnar argues through these case studies that committed literature reaffirms itself as a “territory of risk”, the medium through which violence, real fear and fantasy can be better represented and questioned, not only aesthetically but also ethically. Edith Beltrán explores a different kind of engaged literature in “Mexico’s Fearscapes: Where Fantasy Personas Engage in Citizenship” by offering the “fearscape” as the space/escape of a “culture of fear” in virtual worlds such as blogs. Beltrán analyses the enactment of virtual identities and the construction of fantasy personae in such “fearscapes”, where individuals feel secure from violence. By shuffling private and public spheres, fearscapes become the only possibility of political and social performance and engagement in Mexico’s drug wars and narco-discourse. Part 2, “The Limits of Knowledge: Fantasy and Identity Formation”, challenges the power of imagination and fantasy by focusing on different representations of fear and threats. In “The Site of Initiative. Towards a Hermeneutic Framework for Analysing the Imagination of Future Threats”, Martijn Boven revisits the later works of Paul Ricœur to elaborate on the importance of the “site of initiative” as the place of action and transformation in society. This site of agency is determined, though, by the tension between two orders of imagination: experience (productive imagination) and expectation (reproductive imagination). The dynamics of both orders inform constructions of unknown worlds, and thus unknown threats, that is, utopias and dystopias. Ultimately, for Boven, this positive

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space resulting from the tension between both orders is threatened by current anxieties and fears of an imagined future. Christin Grunert, in “Conflict with the Perception of Time as Fertile Ground for Collective Insecurity: The Frightening Reality of Scientific Facts and their Transformation in Literary Fiction”, discusses nineteenth-century literary representations of scientific discoveries, archaeology and geology in particular, and how they lead to exciting but fearful fantasies of past and future societies. Such discoveries contributed to a fin-de-siècle insecurity fuelled by the dissemination of archaeological and geological findings as portrayed in English and German dystopian narratives. Travelling forward to the twentieth century, Gero Guttzeit explores in “Fearful Fantasy: Figurations of the Oedipus Myth in Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010)” the genre of detective fiction. He departs from Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, which is considered the first of its genre, to draw a parallel with cinematic narratives, namely Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010). Guttzeit examines the development of anxiety into fear and the ways of restraining it. Through his case study he reflects upon the representation of the Oedipus myth as a journey from ignorance to knowledge, as embodied in the fantasy of a detective character. Marija Sruk, in “Laugh Away the Fear! The Satisfaction of Comical Fantasy in the Holocaust Film Comedies of the Late 1990s”, undertakes an inverse movement from knowledge to enacted ignorance. Such a movement is discussed in relation to the cinematic representation of secondary and/or collective trauma in three films that deal with the horror of the Holocaust: La vita è bella (1997), Train de vie (1998), and Jakob the Liar (1999). Sruk grounds her analysis on three concepts, “fear”, “fantasy” and “comedy”, which she relates to psychoanalytical theory from Freud and Lacan, in order to question the ethics of comic representation and appropriation of past historical events. Alexandra Hills, in “Viennese Fantasies, Austrian Histories: Space, Fantasy and Fascism in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter”, reflects on urban and psychological representations in the literary work of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) and Liliana Cavani’s film The Night Porter (1974). The question of trauma and Holocaust remains a focus of analysis while the author examines private and public identities and sexual/gender

Introduction

9

issues, as well as the role played by fear and fantasy in the (re)interpretation and (re)presentation of the fearful past. Part 3, “Boundaries and Performance: Language, Memory and Fantasy”, deals more closely with language performance, national identity, different kinds of pleasure seeking, and memory-related issues. Harriet Hulme, in “A Politics of Form: Fantasy and Storytelling as Modes of Resistance in the Work of Atxaga and Kundera”, explores language as a form of belonging. Hulme interrogates the way minor languages make use of magical realism not only as a form of escapism from fearful and authoritarian societies but also as performance of political statements. Hulme analyses the novels Obabakoak (1988), by Bernardo Atxaga, and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1970), by Milan Kundera, to discuss the interplay between linguistic, literary and political fantasies and how counter-discourses can emerge from such interplay and contribute to the making of a nation. Ana Filipa Prata, in “Memory and Fantasy in Antoine Volodine’s Minor Angels”, offers an analysis of Volodine’s Minor Angels (1999) from a “post-exotic” perspective, as developed by Volodine himself. “Post-exoticism” mainly deals with dystopias: worlds destroyed by catastrophes, a “post-crisis” reality where language has lost its referent. In the author’s work, Prata argues, reality and fiction, memory and discourse become undistinguishable, a new fantasy of the self and the world that helps dealing with individual and collective traumas and renewed fears. In contrast with Minor Angels, which Prata discusses as a recollection of events that the novel’s protagonist feels as punishment, Hande Gurses picks up a novel where recollecting becomes a reward. In “The Fantasy of the Archive: An Analysis of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence”, she analyses Pamuk’s novel The Museum of Innocence (2008/2009) by examining the process of transformation of a subject into an object of fantasy as a result of a profound fear of loss. Gurses discusses the love story of the protagonist of the narrative, its public legitimation and imperial reverberations through the fantasy of the archive as the desire to command and control based on the theoretical works of Derrida and Lacan. Discussion builds on the boundaries between public and private, agency and passive experience, archive and museum.

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From literary to digital representations, in “The Digital MetaDissemination of Fear in Music Videos. A Transdisciplinary Textual Analysis of Two Case Studies: Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free”, João Pedro da Costa adopts a transdisciplinary approach to textually analyse two music videos concerning the treatment of fear in the fantastic landscape of digital, musical and visual spheres. Such an approach crosses the borders between public and private realities and, consequently, the transfer of the fearful experience from the fictional to the real world. Part 4, “Uncanny Representations of the Self and the Other”, looks into the relationship between self-representation and otherness, and the associated fears and fantasies, as depicted and explored across different media. In “Shaft which Ran: Chinese Whispers with Auerbach, Buck, Woolf and De Quincey”, Ortwin de Graef questions Auerbach’s tragic realism by re-reading Pearl Buck, Virginia Woolf and Thomas De Quincey and their representations of the fetishism of a sinophobia as aestheticization and fantasy of human sympathy. Brecht de Groote in “The Phantom in the Mirror: Duplication, Spectrality, and the Romantic Fear of Fantasy in Wordsworth, Coleridge and De Quincey” investigates the interconnections between fantasy, spectralization and fear in Romantic imagery. In order to develop such an examination of the shift from duplication to spectrality, de Groote analyses the aesthetics of De Quincey and Coleridge’s poetry in terms of their lyrical representations of fear and idealism. Other lyrical representations of fear and fantasy are discussed by Margarita García Candeira as regards the poetics of the Spanish poet Luis García Montero in “Habitability and Spectres in the House of Language: Approaching (Post)Modernity in Las flores del frío, by Luis García Montero”. Focusing on the uncanny, the spectral and the phantasmagorical, Candeira questions the possibility of understanding post-modern poetical practices as a return to Modernity and its horrors (such as the Holocaust). Representation through poetic language is thus posed as a problem originating in the modern estrangement of language. Those concepts that linger in contemporary lyrical compositions also evoke Romantic and Enlightenment aesthetics, which shed light on the reading of Montero’s poetry.

Introduction

11

Daniela Di Pasquale takes a journey into the medieval representations of the Muslim in Dante’s Divine Comedy in “War on Fear: Reinterpreting Dante’s View of the ‘Infidel’”. Di Pasquale argues that the approach of the Italian poet to the “infidel”, the “other”, is a positive fantasy, understood as an identity-construction process, against (re)current fantasies of terror and fear in many Western literary depictions of the Oriental otherness, mainly during the Crusades.

PART 1 LOCAL FEARS, GLOBAL ANXIETIES

THE TRANSMISSIVE SELF AND TRANSMISSIVE OBJECTS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION CHRISTOPHER BOLLAS As the world becomes globalized people make certain adjustments that become slight changes in personality. Through innumerable objects that transmit information – from radio and telephone to the new age of iPads, iPhones, and new venues such as Facebook, Twitter and other forms of ichat – we are increasingly reliant upon “transmissive objects” that communicate information in real time. We are entering, in part, a “transmissive space” and we ourselves are now accustomed to transmitting information in real time in an unprecedented manner. How does this change our life? How does this change aspects of the self?

As each generation ages it inevitably finds the next generation’s transformations of the world disturbing. Confucius not only mourned the passing of the golden age, he viewed trends in Chinese society so disturbing that The Analects could be viewed as a literature of reproach. Heidegger’s first sentence in “The Thing” is: “All distances in space and time are shrinking.”1 Through television and modern media we have brought the world closer together, he argues, although in fact such immediacy has actually created a disguised form of distance: we are not closer, but further apart: “Everything gets lumped together into uniform distanceless.”2 We lose contact with the thingness of the world. The cure? We have to be with things, “the thing things” and “thinging gathers”.3 “Thinging”, he concludes, “is the nearing of the world”.4 When we try to think of “globalization” – a cluster of ideas comes to mind that is an amalgamation of curiously conjoined images. The 1

Martin Heidegger, “The Thing”, in Poetry, Language, Thought, New York: Harper and Row, 1971, 165. 2 Ibid., 166. 3 Ibid., 174. 4 Ibid., 181.

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Christopher Bollas

word enacts itself. Try as one might to come up with a singular definition, we find that hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the world would define it differently. As the word spins off the lips or graces the iPad screens, each appearance is a word acting upon our world. This is most interesting especially if we are – as now by invitation – asked to address “it”. In doing so one cannot escape this collective enactment which immediately puts one into the global community, or as some would have it, we are automatically membered into being “globals”. And it would indeed seem to be irrefutable that the world has not done this before. Whether one lives in rural Mississippi (where the high cost of landlines makes cell phones mandatory), whether one is in a small village in Kenya, or Perth, or New York, we are all now literally connected to one another. Google is not a search engine, it is an “aka” for global community. Have we ever walked into a mass social transformation backward? Coming from so many differing directions, so many diverse backgrounds, and with so little idea of where our enactment takes us? Shortly I shall turn to a narrow and limited reading of globalization, one that will focus more on the mobile selves of this world, which Elliott and Urry in their passionate and brilliant book Mobile Lives stress.5 The world, they argue, is now divided between those who are genuinely mobile, able to be part of a “mobility field” in which “meetingness” takes place and automatically divides the world between an elite who create a new economy of “network capital” and those people (most of the world) who are still locals and are fixed to the spot and less able to take part in the vital formation of social networking. I think their argument is compelling up to a point. For the reality, it seems to me, is that we are embracing a term that has no precedent in our lexicon. The signifiers “democracy” or “freedom” or “justice”, although overdetermined, are delimited by historicity and locality. The term “globalization” has no meaningful history (indeed it is an eruptive afterthought), no locality, and is not so much overdetermined as annihilated. Thus when speaking of “globalization” we not only enact what the word means, but in so doing we take part in the 5

Anthony Elliott and John Urry, Mobile Lives, London and New York: Routledge, 2010.

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elimination of human meaning. As the word means more than nothing, but operates in the realm of what the psychoanalyst Bion would term -K (not knowledge, but the eradication of knowledge), the signifier is a mental virus attacking the world of thought itself.6 I shall, however, play the game. I will proceed to take part in this discourse much like, I suppose, anyone who wished to speak in a fundamentalist Christian society that knew no other language than Christ-talk had to find some way to use the words of that society and that time. I am aware, however, that what is to follow is rather like writing one’s way into a delusion, or deciding that psychotic thinking – in this respect the elimination of signification through the eradication of the semantic – is of no consequence. So ... ... turning to Facebook where the world is now coming close to one vast social network, all of us seem on the same page so to speak. Diasporas that have separated people from their homelands can now, we are warmly encouraged, commune through differing networks which are surely of benefit. Families divided by the ordinary world of work can see one another on Skype. How can that not be a good thing? If Heidegger’s wariness speaks to an aspect of a long transformation of human being into mediated inter-relatedness, surely this begins with the printed word itself. There has been anxiety that such mediations separate us from some more primal experience of the real. Indeed memory itself is arguably a mediation: we call up the thing all the time in differing forms of the imaginary. Wordsworth’s definition of the power of poetry – “emotion recollected in tranquillity” – implicitly argues that Grasmere lies not in the immediate grasp of the real, but in the self’s recollection of it – separated from it – much later on. Is it more accurate to say that we live in multiple worlds? We walk about in the real and have direct experiences of things which are highly evocative. We walk down memory’s lane and see these things in a different way. We live in the unrepresentable private world of the self’s inner life, we live in the thing we call a family, in a community, a nation, and we now live in the global community. We are both many things to many people but also many “me’s” to our self. 6

Wilfred R. Bion, Learning from Experience, London: Heinemann, 1962.

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With the above as a given, let me ask a question. Are “we” changing as a result of being “globalized”? I do not mean are we now doing things we have not done before. Clearly we are. A century ago we did not fly in planes, we did not have the internet, and so forth. So we are able to do new things and human beings are remarkably resilient and adaptive so we can do many things without the doing changing the structure of human being. But in acquiring new ways of living, do such transformations change who we are in any discernible way? Do they effect what we think of as character or personality? It is arguable, for example, that the Homeric self did not conceive of its having an internal world but viewed the self as a medium for the inspiring effect of the many differing Gods. Some will point to Hamlet as a defining moment in Western culture that establishes the self encountering its internal world, effected as much by the vicissitudes of mental life as by the impact of the actual world. All the figures in the play note that Hamlet is preoccupied by his inner thoughts, by what Hannah Arendt terms “the invisibles” of mental life.7 With the arrival of the self’s internal world comes neurotic conflict (another way of stating that any self that entertains the contents of the mind is witness to a theatre that deploys conflict) and modernism is the launching of a long project that centres on self-disclosure, self-scrutiny, selfknowledge. We may be in the post-modernist world in that if the centre cannot hold, then there are so many centres to any self that the idea of introspection seems quaintly fictive as who is looking into whom, for how long, with what intent, to what end, and to what conclusion? As the self decentres, the era of introspection seems delusional. Whatever were we thinking? Psychoanalysts are part of a project begun in the name of Freud that still claims it can listen to the many parts of a self, attending to its many registers, one of which is the figuration of character. From the hysteric, to the borderline, to the bi-polar, the world of psychiatry, psychoanalysis, dynamic psychology, have recognized formations of disturbance, some of which are very ancient (hysteria for example) and others of which are meant to be new or significantly different (the borderline).

7

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, New York: Harcourt, 1977.

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So, to return to our question, what is new about us in the era of globalization? It helps to map some of the psychological territory, it seems to me, to divide relationships now being lived between “actual ones” and “virtual ones”. Quite simply I mean by this, those relations we are having in real time with actual people and those relations we are having in cyberspace. I may get closer to this distinction by giving an example. Four people have agreed to have lunch together. Each has an iPad or the equivalent. As they talk to one another they also receive phone calls, emails, and text messages that take them away from those who are actually present in order to communicate with the virtuals. Whereas in the past four people dining were just four people dining, now along with the four actuals there may be twenty virtuals. As recently as five years ago such a group might have been offended by a member of the group glancing at his lap a lot and texting a virtual, or another taking a rather long phone conversation with another virtual. But in our new age people seem to have adjusted to the new dining scene, unless by consent they have decided to turn themselves off. It can be argued that actuals give way to virtuals in such moments because one’s social network also includes those actuals who on another occasion would be virtuals. Further, the ability of people to remain in emotional and psychological contact with family and friends emanates even as actuals are trying to converse whilst being interrupted by virtuals. A new word, “multi-tasking”, has become a virtue of any self able to perform several functions at the same time. Our operant capacities become not only admirable but essential – indeed, part of the function of social networking. While in the past we could simply sit and watch television or talk on the phone – leaving it to the technological object to function for us – we are now part of the function of the world. If the multi-tasking self is indeed a new formation in self we might think of this part of our lives as transmissive. We use all kinds of objects that transmit information, from old and familiar ones, such as the printed word, the radio, television, and telephone, to newer forms, such as the iPad and Facebook, that allow us to become part of the show so to speak. But we are not simply visible now, within our own private televisions, transmitting ourselves to the world, we are also a function in that new order. We distinguish then between our

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substantive self as a transmissive one from our formative self as transmissive. There is what we say (a matter of content) and there is how we say it, or rather, that we are sayers. Indeed, however interesting cultural issues remain as matters of substantive knowledge, in order to keep up with the transmissive object world we must be “techies” able not simply to operate the latest products passed on to us by Macintosh or Google but we must learn to perform our function within that order. To my way of thinking this has introduced a new version of the self that I believe is indeed interesting. We have always had our functions, whether as a farmer, fisherman, builder, teacher, accountant, journalist and so forth. Our work has defined in part who we are to ourselves and to others; indeed, function necessitates form and the way we have lived our lives has been largely fated by our vocation. A farmer has to live his life according to the seasons, he or she has to think carefully about crop selection, placement, and planting, to think of exactly when to harvest according to the weather. A teacher has to think according to the scheduled lessons expected by the school, when and how to introduce which subjects, in which order, and how to allocate private time to the individual student as opposed to the whole group. The form of a teacher’s year will follow the multiple functions of teaching. The question is, have we identified with our functions? When a farmer farms or a teacher teaches would he or she mimic the function such that it became a part of the self? A farmer who is calving heifers or a teacher who is grading term papers are in the midst of crucial decisions that effect the respective outcomes (a birth, a grade) but would the farmer’s delivery or the teacher’s grading become identificates:8 that is, identities derived from performance? Are we what we do? More likely than not it seems to me a farmer would shy away from being so defined as would a teacher: one delivers calves now and then, 8 The term “identificates” was first used by the psychoanalyst Leslie Sohn, although he defines the term differently. An identificate is an object, for Sohn, that is the object of such excessive identification that the term identification is too weak for a description. I think the term can be used to describe any ordinary object in the world with which the self identifies, thus becoming an identificate within the ego. For the original and different use of the term, see Leslie Sohn, “Narcissistic Organization, Projective Identification, the Formation of the Identificate”, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 66 (1985), 201-13.

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the other grades papers but the farmer would not want to be known as a deliverer any more than a teacher would think of himself as a grader. They perform these functions but they are not the function so performed. Unless by that common and ancient act we term “hysteria” they did indeed cross over and identify with what they were doing or for that matter what anyone was doing. Kids coming out of a scary movie will usually identify with the monster in the film and try to freak each other out. Identifications of this kind, especially in a group, reverse anxiety from the passive to the active position and transfer private terror into a group process that detoxifies things. Kids watching a terror film rather like anyone on a roller coaster have to make very quick judgments about how to overcome their fears. Both will mime the act they have endured but such mimetic representations of the shocking will be transitory and soon identification gives way to memory. The globalized world, at least as it is being marketed, seems to demand something more than simple mastery of the newly changing objects of transmission. It seems we are being asked to continue to perform a role as part of the function of the network; indeed, to identify with it in order to reverse our initial passive position into an active one. If the constant presentation of new transmissive objects arouses anxiety, it is our function to pro-actively reverse the anxiety by eagerly awaiting the new transmissive object so that we can be ahead of the game. Indeed, if our next role is announced to us some months ahead of time, with new technological inventions giving us a heads up as to expected functional changes, we can be in-role when the commodity comes off the production line. If we imagine two conveyer belts, one that rolls the product down the line and the queue of consumers waiting to grab the product, then transmissive object and transmissive self meet up. Farmers, teachers, accountants, actors and others may be said to have differing mentalities specific to their vocations. Their tasks require different frames of reference, and as Howard Gardner would put it, call upon differing forms of intelligence.9 Any person’s mentality is to some extent the differing types of intelligence they bring to bear on the way they perceive, organize, and communicate 9

Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, New York: Basic Books, 1983.

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their specific lived experience. What are we to make, then, of let us call it “the global self” – not a vocation in waiting, but more a necessity imposing itself upon us – in which the commodified transmissive objects unify us as common transmitters across the entire globe? A farmer, teacher, accountant, or actor in any city or village in the world is invited now into a community of fellow practitioners who are not simply participants in a new form of media, but are actually transmissively essential to the function of the object world. The up sides of this new world order are more than obvious and I shall not take time to enumerate them. As with any radical change – especially if it is worldwide – time may be well spent on mulling over the down sides. Why? As we learned in the early twentieth century in the Great War, group psychology trumped the individual self and fellow individuals. When any large group, from tens of thousands to millions, begins to trumpet a new age, new visions, and the world starts to change it is time to think about what kinds of new selves we are becoming and how this will or will not affect human relations. (On the other hand, we can take a page from the several thousand years of Chinese history to see how a people have interwoven individual into mass psychology, so that of all the people it is as if they preconceived this era and are rather well positioned – psychologically for it.) Let us return to lunch. Our four diners are talking about events in Egypt that lead to the ousting of Mubarak. The events have been on CNN for 24 hours a day over two weeks, covered in all the mass media, and indeed Facebook, Twitter, email, and so forth were important parts of the Egyptian revolution. Jill, Jake, Martha, and Tony are talking about those events. Martha is mid paragraph on how brave she thought the demonstrators were when she gets a cell phone call that she must take, but Jake steps in where Martha left off and talks about what he saw but he gets a text message as does Tony, so Jill steps in with a few “uhs” and “uhs” but Martha is back and Jill continues to talk about Egypt. Over the next twenty minutes Egypt is still the object of talk but people drop in and out of the conversation. They are talking to virtuals who are not present. What is intriguing about Egypt as a discourse is that it comes in interchangeable parts. Any part of the narrative that is dropped by one speaker can be picked up by another. Indeed, each speaker learns how to drop out or take over another speaker’s unit in time so that the

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speakers become interchangeable. We have a group made up of interchangeable parts of discourse and interchangeable speakers. Or, if Egypt has a short shelf life then narrative contents are easily interchanged. When Martha takes her call, Jill might have talked about whether the group knew that grapefruit can be used now as a skin lotion that will deter mosquitoes. The rules of discourse, here, are that no topic should be so significant that it would preclude anyone from dropping out to talk to virtuals. Discourse has to be shallow enough to be disposable, a fast food-for-thought, that can be gobbled up and thrown away as one moves from one fast-food-for-thought to another fast-food-for-thought. The ease with which groups of people can do this is impressive. Although talk can be suspended at any time if all four are otherwise engaged, leaving a table of such people looking like a group of strangers sharing space together, they can re-animate as actuals and come back into space and time together. They have just been away for awhile, fulfilling their tasks in the social network of virtual reality. When we hang out together we often say we “associate” with one another. A teacher may refer to his fellow teachers as “colleagues” but a lawyer may refer to his partners as “associates”. One way or another, we associate with each other. But when we leave actuals to talk to virtuals we have actually left our associates and are momentarily dissociated. Indeed, if all four are talking to virtuals, then they are in a state of mutual dissociation. This, however, is an important function of the new world. We split the self into the associating self and the dissociating self. One part of us is involved in one world while the other part of us is present but not active. The group’s function is to tolerate both acts of association and dissociation emanating from each member of the group. Indeed, the days of just sitting on a subway as people watching, or strolling down an esplanade doing the same are dwindling as our associations with actuals is now firmly displaced by our associations with virtuals. Of interest are the actual-space socials: a group of dissociates. Interchangeable discourse is ideal for the transmission of information. As transmitting selves our obligation is to pass on what we have seen or heard mimicking the function of the transmitting objects. Transmissive discourse is information (of one kind or another) that is passed on without reflection, analysis, or discernibly unique interest to the self. For example, recently at a dinner where we

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had indeed been transmitting information about Egypt, Obama, and other commodities of discourse, I asked a question: “What is globalization?” The group was startled – as indeed was I – because this question asked the group to think. All members of the group are erudite and vocal but we were into transmission and not into thinking, and so I had violated the norm. On reflection, however, I realized that my question would have been typical of social discourse some forty years before when questions in themselves provoked thinking and discord in group discussions. Adam Phillips, one of the great writers of our time, is an intellectual out-take as he does one thing unique within his era: he asks question after question after question. To his own interrogative style he proffers transitory answers that never block the power of the question to keep on rolling, as does he, riding the waves of thought that seem to generate his prose. Phillips for all the critical acclaim heaped on him is more than familiar with the fact that he seems to irritate a fair number of orthodox psychoanalytic readers. He is too clever. Or he seems to jump from one point to the next like an island hopping intellectual. In fact, however, like Socrates Phillips is annoying because if you read him you will have to think. And you will not agree with him anymore than he agrees with himself as his prose idiom has an ironic inflection to it: catch him if you can as he moves with unerring skill to avoid certainties. Like Freud who also was most annoying, writers like Phillips will never seed comforting group life: they will, by challenging the mind, bring about a wide diversity of views and exercised minds are not contented states of being. Phillips elects not to drive a car. He does not have a cell phone. He is not on email. If you want to get hold of him you either write or leave a message on his answer machine that has not changed its greeting in twenty years. He is decidedly not a global being. But worldly he is. What does it mean to be worldly and yet not global? If one is global is one worldly? As discussed, this is not necessarily so. To be global is to know nothing per se, other than how to take part in networking. Indeed, however grandiloquent the signifiers captured by the global movement – climate change, social justice, water for all the people etc. –, each element of this vast sea of ideas is sufficiently empty (you just need to transmit credit card money to an account and

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you have contributed) that great ideas, grand projects, are reduced to feel-good networks: the narcissism of self trumping ironically enough the needs of the existents in the world. I shall take it that a person whom we think of as worldly is an individual who has invested in knowing as much as possible about the world surrounding the self and who has reflected upon this. It takes curiosity, access to literature of some kind, conversants with whom one can learn and share views, but above all, it takes time. A global person is not someone who necessarily knows about the world but who is in touch with people all around the world – as are they with him – in an act of unification that finds comfort in the shared, the familiar, the same. Worldliness recognizes difference and the impossibility of a synthetic integration of the object world. Globalization produces products and a lexicon that imposes sameness on the world and enacts a homogenic integration of the world that annihilates it at the moment it is uttered or printed. To be global is to be participant not only in those market forces that drive the world to go global, it is to identify the self as an object within the market – indeed, to be marketable, interchangeable, and transmissive. That is, the self has found a way to lose the slow and discordant dimension inherited from reflective thought in order to be fluid and therefore part of the market. In the world of psychoanalytical practice this means that one of the interesting features of working with global people is the high degree of emphasis placed on a commodified discourse, on transmissive communicating, and on the marketable self. We are compelled, however, to ask if this is a structuring observation (one observing a change in personality) or simply an adaptive solution to the changing world. To go further down this road let us think a bit about the idea “globalization”. It sprang according to some sources out of opposition to GATT (The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) meetings when a motley group of opponents viewed the mere word as onerous, symptomatic of some widening disease. And yet, our world – much of it – has been globalized for a thousand, or two thousand years. Each of the great religions provided common texts for millions of people to share a common experience, by walking into a church, one form of temple or another, or a mosque. Sharing these texts, chanting common

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prayers, believing in a cosmology usually overseen by a god, brought people from the far corners of the world into a vast and complex community of ideas. It was not necessary for a Muslim in Indonesia to personally visit with a fellow Muslim in Iraq to feel that both were deeply in touch with one another. Further down the roads of time, with the emergence of certain fictional narratives, and eventually the novel, in the West, tens of thousands of readers eventually began to share common texts, like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, or Milton’s Paradise Lost, or Dickens’ Great Expectations, Melville’s Moby Dick. Indeed, eventually the novelist knew his audience was worldwide and even though writing within a dialect the writer developed a relationship to his readership. As with Jane Austen that readership would be posthumous for the most part, as with many other novelists, but narrative fiction was as much a psychic development as it was a technological step forward. A reader could enter another person’s world, according to the reader’s pace, allowing time for daydreaming, occasional conversations with others about the book. The writer had created an illusion that he or she was writing for everyone and yet the reader was singularly alone. In a moment of solitude the world was in one place. One could not count the number of times the death of the novel has been proclaimed, although it does not match the apocalyptic ramifications of the statement that God is dead. Putting aside the fact that the greater mass of people still floods the churches, mosques, and temples of this world, the idea that God is dead seems to have become a widespread intellectual assumption. Even if one disagrees, it cannot be denied that the statement is a resounding one and signifies something. One need not be a theist to see in the mosque, the temples, or the church the great theatres of the human imagination where through the allegoric power of scripture men and women have imagined their existence. Someone who is not a theist may in fact regard the death of God as a metaphor for the ending of the great theatres around the world, and in like manner, the death of the novel may seem a metaphor for some inkling that the individual no longer seeks through the solitary act of immersing the self in the novel communion with all those – living and dead – who have lived in the fictive worlds. Indeed, although it is much too soon to write an intellectual history of our time, there is certainly a decline in the dramatic arts, as fewer

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and fewer playwrights invite us into those darkened chambers where several hundred people live within the world of powerful dramatic illusion. To offset this, however, through television and film, we find a new type of theatre that stages all the dramas previously projected in the religions, the novel, and the dramatic arts. Or, certainly tries to. And the novel, the religious venues, and the performing arts do continue – even if with a different significance – than before, so how do these musings figure in our mind’s eye as we attempt to see what might be taking place? However orthodox any of the religions might seem, the vast complex of ideas rendered in scripture left a great deal to the individual imagination. Whether Priest, Pastor, Rabbi, Guru, or Mullah, individuals lead groups in differing interpretations of scripture as the believers struggled to live within the terms of the imaginary. Dickens, Thackeray, and Hardy posed intriguing questions for his readership, but Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner demanded the arrival of literary critics who could engage groups of students in the act of deciphering the novel, just as many had done with the works of Shakespeare and Milton to name only a few before them. That is, these theatres of and for the mind demanded a great deal of work on the part of the thinker. Whatever the field of thought, any self engaged within one of these venues was not simply a simple self within an experience, but later compelled to be a complex self thinking about the experience. In differing ways all these venues demanded confrontation of the self, with the “I” and the “me” embroiled in the after effects of the encounter. Solace was taken in knowing this was indeed a collective experience and that individual encounters were contributing to an evolving bank of ideas that we understand to be the history of ideas. Our limited time on earth would one way or the other be some form of contribution to our world and on occasion one thinker alone – a Confucius, Plato, Shakespeare, Milton, Joyce – transformed our understanding of ourselves. Let us for local purposes say that such engagements are those of the “reflective self”. The reflective self mirrors both the object of his or her attention (a scriptural text, a novel, a play), the effect of that encounter – what we could term an emotional experience – and finally the interpretive after-effects of the encounter. Like a stone cast into a pond there will be many rivulets of meaning moving through the mind over time; indeed, in some cases lasting a life time.

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The reflective self is not limited to any culture and can be found around the world and would of course include many global selves. The question addressed here is whether the reflective self is being compromised by the transmissive self? Bearing in mind that the transmissive self has always been a part of self-experience, from the beginning of time, when one person passed on undigested facts to another person, it would be false to lay this self state at the doors of globalization. One might think that the internet is fast, but in the Greek polis – essentially a small village – one rumour begun in the morning would be everywhere by noon, just as in the small farming villages of North Dakota where I live everyone seems to know the morning gossip by lunch time. In transmitting an idea, however, one does not think about what one is passing on. Naturally, some do. But that rather defeats the spirit of transmission. This is the self speaking in an excited way even if the subject matter is alarming, depressing, or comparatively dull. But the aim is to receive and to transmit, perhaps to own up to where one heard what one did and to whom one passed it on. Fast as transmissions can be in small towns it is now an undeniable fact of our era that globalization in part means the world as social network with ideas being transmitted at lightning speed throughout the world simultaneously. A transmission is a dissemination as ideas go into people, succeeded by new ideas, in a sequence that is now not controlled by any theistic, novelistic, or dramatic narrator, but by the machinery of transmission itself. Looked at from Bion’s point of view, such ideas could only be “beta” elements – undigested facts – not yet subject to the work of “alpha” (the mind interpreting the data and thus transforming it) simply because the transmissions are moving at too great a speed. Again, this is not new. In ancient times, in small villages, or the drumming communities of central Africa, ideas could be transmitted very quickly and people would be passing beta on to beta, as raw data entered minds and left through the mouth or some representational medium (a drum perhaps) that passed on the “news” without thought. When we look at the content of the idea being passed around – rather than the form of transmission – this might need to become a matter of some thought; or, rather, it should. When the Hutus went on a genocidal rampage against the Tutsis in Rwanda, it was not the

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internet or mobile objects that transmitted the idea “kill the Tutsis”, it was word of mouth spreading a murderous idea with terrifying speed. But the global community now offers ideas to move without thought; indeed, so quickly that they are ingested and not transformed. Take the word “terrorist”. If an organization is deemed a “terrorist” group by the Western powers and so transmitted in one day, then people in the western world will regard such an organization as a terrorist group. Little thought may be given to whether such a group’s act of violence may in fact be political as opposed to evil. Many groups use violent means for highly limited aims, as for example when the Zionists murdered the English, Palestinians, and others in order to set up the state of Israel. Hamas and Hezbollah – pariahs in the West – are more likely to be political groups using terrorist means than nihilist organizations using terror for its own sake against a nominated enemy: as in Rwanda. When transmitting news hieratic orders of thought usually collapse giving way to horizontalization. “Horizontalization” refers to the inherent democracy of any news that is intellectually non-selective but based on the sequencing of ideas determined by their temporal transmission. So, for example, CNN might be following events in Egypt, then be interrupted by an earthquake in Japan, then break to a shooting on a shopping mall, then break to Libya, then break to the death of a celebrity, then break back to Japan, then break to the arrest of a politician, and so forth. Although some events will in themselves demand vertical presentation (that is, assume greater import than another) such as the earthquake in Japan leading to the melt down of nuclear reactors, such a hieratic order is based more on a form of the “market economy”, but here using that term in its psychological correlate: “the market force of ideas.” If we shorten this to the “force of ideas”, marketed according to supply and demand, with demand being transmitted to the suppliers through the competitive transmissions of tweeting or Facebook compelling media like CNN to go from one hot topic to another, then we can see how news is less and less mediated and increasingly transmitted according to ideaforces in the global market. This is simply a fact of our lives now. But it is a fact worth thinking about. As I understand it, if global ideas are transmissive forces, moving through transmissive objects, according to the horizontal demands of

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the market, then to play on Bion, these are not ideas looking for a thinker, but ideas that could not use one no matter how hard a thinker tried to think them. That is, the thinking self, or thinking selves, however earnestly they might try, are not equivalent to forces: indeed, live in a different category. The market force of ideas are commodities moving at lightning speed through transmitting minds, impacting the receivers and their own acts of transmission, at deeply unconscious levels, and not intended ordinarily to be subjected to thinking. The fact that CNN or its equivalent, or the print media, might run stories on select aspects of the marketed ideas does not mean that those ideas themselves have in fact been subjected to mediation. They have not been thought. Indeed, a concerning issue is that pundits, experts, scholars, and others who are attempting to analyse real-time transmissions are interrupted by breaking news as they speak, or seemingly displaced by a few hours as the new itself (that is new news) is of greater significance because in following the laws of horizontalization latest is always most important. Think of the Dow Jones Index. It is not important where the Dow closed yesterday when compared to where it is today and how people look forward to it tomorrow. If we see this as an enactment of market forces in which new objects are meant to automatically seem more important than a dated object, then a pseudo-vertical order is established based on the production of ideas (in themselves, as commodities) with the consumer eager to purchase the new idea so as to be up with and part of the global world. Not knowing the news is less akin to being socially out-of-it and more like risking functional obsolescence. Consumers of the transmitted are now identified with the means of production, so, if the self is not up with the news then he or she is literally out dated. Hysteria as a group process works according to the self’s unconscious identification with some emerging idea or process. One’s own identity or set of ideas are interrupted, suspended, or completely abandoned in favour of another identity or set of ideas. Just as the individual hysteric could, for example, successfully identify with a figure in a novel or a public figure and do so convincingly, a mass hysteria is even more effective in that the feedback loop of collective identifications supports the surge toward the new identification. This

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is visible in the consumer world all the time and usually benignly so. From hoola-hoops to skate boards, from roller blades to clothing fashions, people en masse purchase a product and in part identify with it. Of interest here, however, is the more subtle possibility of a sudden group hysteria moving across borders that could lead to widespread panic or worse. If the self is open to hysteria, if a self is open to hysterization – to abandonment of the self’s psychic structures and the assumption of structures imported from the outside to be identified with –, then although there might be good mass hysterical movements, there can also be very deadly ones. So, for example, when the people of Tunisia rose up in opposition to their government and sent the regime packing, the people of Egypt who up until then had no imminent political intent to challenge their country, much less oust Mubarak, suddenly rose up en masse and eventually ousted their leader. In turn, citizens of other states in the Middle East – Yemen, Jordan, Libya, Syria, etc. etc. – who showed little apparent interest in pursuing democratic governmental structures were rising up against dictatorial regimes. For those in the West and much of the world these were heartening sights and who could ever say that this sort of mass movement was in-itself concerning? The fact is, however, there is no psychological difference between a generative or a destructive force that operates according to hysterical processes. There is little difference between instantaneous rebels fighting an oppressive government and ignited fighters committing genocide. In the same way, there is little difference between a market that rises to high profits and a market that crashes. If we focus on the complexity of those forces (including hysterical processes) that can ignite a rise or a fall of a market, one that overwhelms thoughtful economist’s predictions, or careful government pro-activity, we get close to the point I wish to make: that the global world now is one of forces and not people, or individual thinkers, or government leaders, or hieratic structures that can mitigate such force. As we walk into our “brave new world” where mass psychology is the matrix of social culture, where not simply societies but now the world dreams through the transmission of images, we are now dreamers without the companionship of consciousness, moving from day events straight into dreaming – because mobile links allow us to bring forward the night into the day and dream-work the news in real time.

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Given the psychotic fluidity of global networking what sort of anchors does the large group employ to coagulate the community so that these disseminations do not lead to a permanent hypertrophied hippomanic state? As always, the group finds enemies and if they are not there, it creates them. So Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, North Korea, and so forth bind the Western World’s manic disseminations through paranoid coherence. The wonderfully simplifying effect of paranoia slows down hype, it brings the group together under different circumstances, ones that seem depressive, sobering, worrying. That these enemies may have been shoved into enmity with the West must be lost on the world community which could not for a moment own responsibility for the need to “paranoize” the world. It would mean not only reading history, it would mean entering it at a time when existing in the ahistorical present of transmissive reality must be seamless with no impediments to effect the market forces of thought. To see that AlQaeda is no more, no less, than our inverted selves, that it is simply a mirror of globalization, only that it is visibly destructive -K thinking rather than apparently constructive -K thinking, but that we are world partners in social networking all after the same thing – the elimination of reflective thought which impedes global commerce – is most inconvenient. It does seem a rather open secret, however, that AlQaeda needs us as much as we need them in our joint project of globalizing the world. Some of the work of psychoanalysis is to objectify unconscious processes, based on unthought axioms, that govern behaviour to the detriment of the self. Although there have been a few half-hearted attempts to move psychoanalysis towards some role as a socially interpretive presence, thus far analysis has rarely left the consulting room, other than to analyse novels or distant cultures. Psychoanalysts are accustomed to being acted upon by the analysand in real time in highly complex ways that cannot be thought in the here and now. There will be a delay between such actings which leave impressions within the analyst part of whose task is to think through the impression, to objectify it, so that it can be thought about and talked about. Were we able to find a way to position psychoanalysis in the global community, so that otherwise rather lightening fast global enactments that would simply be transmissive could become objects

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of thought and reflection, then we take the next logical step in the project begun in the name of psychoanalysis. This would mean creating time where thus far no time exists. It would mean the development of a consensus, around the world, that we are indeed imperilled by transmissive communications if they are not subjected to thought. Creating time also allows for the development of a hermeneutical hierarchy as differing voices from differing perspectives comment on crucial states of affairs. To some extent, Obama’s hesitation over immediate intervention in Libya created time. This was to many almost unbearably slow on his part and to others he never should have acted at all, but in the end thought was given to the events in Libya and action taken. What the psychoanalyst can bring to the analysis of real-time world events is an understanding of the unconscious as a force field, one remarkably akin to the market forces of life, or as I have argued to the self as force. Analysis of the unconscious – as a force moving through signifiers in the stunning logic of free association, as a force moving through the forms of speech, as a force moving through the transference and so forth – the psychoanalyst develops skills in translating the forceful into the thought about. There may be no turning back from globalization but there is a way for the world community to develop new structures for thinking about it and developing reflective selves that offset the inevitable rise of the transmissive self that would ultimately annihilate the meaning of human communication.

DREAMLANDIC FANTASY: CONSUMERISM AND CONTROL IN BRAGI ÓLAFSSON’S THE PETS JAMES RUSHING DANIEL With the global financial crisis of 2008, the consumerist ethic of early twenty-firstcentury Icelandic life was suddenly and violently shattered by the collapse of the country’s economy. What had once been a thriving nation with an enormously successful banking sector and a culture of conspicuous consumption abruptly became a country hopelessly in debt and reeling from its numerous financial miscalculations. Following the crisis, the dream of Icelandic prosperity was revealed to have been a fantasy constructed through dangerous financial speculation and rampant consumer borrowing. This article examines the hegemony of Iceland’s financial fantasy through the lens of Bragi Ólafsson’s The Pets (2001), a novel critical of the country’s unbridled materialism. In the novel, a man named Emil inexplicably hides under his bed while uninvited guests hold a party in his apartment. I argue that the novel’s dramatization of Emil’s timidity may be read as a critique of materialism’s theft of Icelandic agency. Just as Emil is unable to intervene in his own life, Iceland was powerless to halt its culture of borrowing and spending in order to ensure its economic security and to protect its national resources. While Ólafsson’s novel offers no solution to this dilemma, I argue that the protests and upheavals following the Icelandic crisis, the “Kitchenware Revolution”, offer an encouraging example of how moments of crisis may allow for the reclamation of agency from the grips of fantasy.

In the winter of 2008, some Icelanders set their cars on fire. These acts, as journalist Michael Lewis explains in his April 2009 Vanity Fair article “Frozen Assets: Wall Street on the Tundra”, were the reaction to the sudden and overwhelming devaluation of the national currency precipitated by the crisis of the Icelandic economy. During the pre-crisis period of the early and mid 2000s, Icelanders opted to purchase vehicles with borrowed foreign currency rather than face the high interest rate of the Icelandic króna. When the economic downturn capsized the Icelandic economy in 2008, a crisis driven by the failure of Iceland’s three largest banks and the subsequent plummeting of the value of the króna, Icelanders were faced with the unpleasant reality of paying enormous sums of money to foreign lenders with their

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greatly devalued currency.1 The solution, as many saw it, was to burn their vehicles in an attempt to collect the insurance money. This unique example of economic anxiety, a product of Icelandic geography, economic policy, and consumer culture, echoed the far more familiar but proportionally less devastating drama of the United States “mortgage crisis”, in which thousands of individuals who had taken out adjustable rate mortgages for homes during a period of economic prosperity were suddenly unable to pay their interest. Both examples and countless others from wealthy nations under similar circumstances point to the fantasy of consumerism and credit that dominated much of the developed world in the years prior to the 2008 financial crisis and that continues to dominate in its aftermath. This fantasy, in which both buyer and lender are complicit in a process exposing both to enormous risk, relies upon the general presumption of continued growth and economic prosperity for first-world nations and functions not merely to suggest but encourage citizens of Europe and the United States to live beyond their means. With regard to the globally rampant ideology of consumption and accumulation, Iceland’s Kitchenware Revolution, a period of unrest following the financial crisis in which Icelanders took to the streets, ousted their government, and burned their SUVs, suggests how the fantasy of accumulation may be unravelled when the material conditions propelled by such a fantasy shift and expose the ideology of consumption. Post-Marxist orientations of critical theory have traditionally posed fantasy as the supplement to ideology. In this relation, ideology is framed as a grand mechanism of control that conditions alterations and prioritizations of worldviews while fantasy, alternately, is characterized as the substratum of ideology, that which works “within ideology”.2 As Slavoj Žižek argues, “[fantasy] provides a ‘scheme’ according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects of desire”.3 According to Žižek’s reading, fantasy functions as an object-oriented interpretation of experiential reality, a means of perceiving the world such that certain objects become prioritized over 1

Michael Lewis, “Frozen Assets: Wall Street on the Tundra”, Vanity Fair (1 April 2009): http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/04/iceland200904 (accessed 17 September 2012). 2 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 1997, 6. 3 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006, 40.

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others as desired: “‘[Fantasy] teaches us how to desire’.”4 Žižek asserts that this prioritization operates as a dual movement, a process whereby fantasy simultaneously cultivates desire while managing and protecting the relation between subject and object against external disruption: “[Fantasy] obfuscates the true horror of a situation.”5 For the Icelanders and their burned Range Rovers and Porsche Cayennes, fantasy was the mechanism that provided the desire for such objects and protected the subject from the antagonism of the overwhelming risk of currency speculation in a fragile market. According to Žižek’s understanding of fantasy, as a “scheme” of desire, there may be no greater fantasy on the contemporary world scene than that typified by Iceland’s burning cars. Late capitalism, a system of commodity aggregation and loosened trade restriction on the national and supranational levels and of consumption and commodity fetishism on the personal scale, is the organizing system for both the aggregation of wealth and goods worldwide and, as the Icelandic example demonstrates, the crisis of overconsumption. As evidenced by the rapid boom and bust of the Icelandic economy and the associated financial ruin of those citizens who actively participated in the process, Iceland may be said to be one of the contemporary era’s most salient examples of the promise and control of the fantasy of late capitalism. This article will investigate late capitalism’s mechanisms of control as they are exerted upon contemporary subjects through the cult of the object, specifically through a national context as offered by the Icelandic crisis. I argue that understanding a specific national instance of late capitalism operating as object-oriented fantasy and mapping the bond between subjects and objects under such an ideological system offers a valuable understanding of the lived realities of late capitalist control. I will specifically examine the novel The Pets (2001) by Icelandic novelist Bragi Ólafsson regarding the ways in which contemporary subjects exist within a free market fantasy space, subsisting in a global financial network comprised of objects of desire. Written before to the 2008 financial collapse, the text is of particular interest due to Iceland’s unique position as perpetrator and victim of the economic collapse, having erected a banking industry it could not sustain and suffering significant repercussions. Iceland, as a 4 5

Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 7. Ibid., 6.

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microcosm of desire in the age of late capitalism, offers a glimpse of a culture dominated with the desire for accumulation and without the awareness of sufficiency. As a document of the eroded subjectivities and overwhelming desires in a nation transformed by global consumer culture, the text provides a grave reading of the diminishing capacities of the subject and the regimes of fantasy at play in the globalized world. Overall, I argue that exploring Iceland’s fantasy life and its violent end provides lucidity regarding the process by which individuals may use moments of crisis to emerge from the bond of fantasy’s control, namely by understanding the nature of regimes of desire when they are exposed by moments of rupture. With respect to the recent mass protest movements in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East that have signified general antipathy towards regimes of political and economic control, such insights are increasingly vital for conceptualizing dissent within the context of the contemporary world scene. Encompassing both the object-oriented bonds of ideological control and the means by which these bonds are ruptured, this article aims to contribute to scholarship of capitalist ideology, individual agency, and social change by charting the changing terrain of capitalist fantasy and the relations between consumers and the objects of desire through their dramatization in Ólafsson’s novel. I will begin with a reading of theories of late capitalism concerning the relations between subjects and objects with particular attention to the changing conditions of agency precipitated by the regimes of desire late capitalism has enacted. The text will then historicize the economic and cultural conditions of late twentieth- and early twentyfirst-century Iceland surrounding the publication of The Pets with particular interest toward the competing narratives of tradition and modernity that functioned to transform the national identity and ideological mechanisms of Iceland prior to its collapse. This section will attempt to delineate the nature of the transformation of the Icelandic worldview and take account of criticisms against this transformation through the work of one of Icelandic capitalism’s most prominent critics, Andri Snær Magnason. I will subsequently turn to an analysis of The Pets with particular interest to the role of the objects populating the lives of its characters. This section will analyse how The Pets explicitly delineates the resilient bond of desire and the fantasy prevalent under the ideological structure of late capitalism. In my conclusion, I will look beyond the critiques of Ólafsson and

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Magnason towards the rupture of this fantasy with the economic collapse of 2008 and Iceland’s Kitchenware Revolution, arguing that, taken in conjunction with the critiques of consumer complicity that preceded it, the collapse provides insight regarding how fantasies may be transcended when socio-economic ruptures are judiciously examined. Fantasy in late capitalism Regarding the eminence of capitalist logics in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, countless theorists have engaged in a critique of the growing supremacy of financial power in the context of late capitalism. In Critique of Cynical Reason (1987), Peter Sloterdijk critiques the conditions of the subject under late capitalism regarding the emergence of an “enlightened false consciousness”,6 a prevailing worldview that inhibits and manages individual agency. As Sloterdijk writes, “Capitalism has long since swallowed up its critics”, arguing that the contemporary fantasy, what Sloterdijk regards as a regime of “cynicism”,7 is the consequence of such failure of leftist critique to evade capital’s dominating logics. Fredric Jameson develops Sloterdijk’s critique of the failures of the left and the eminence of neoliberal rationality in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), in which he argues that the struggle of late capitalist ideology to propose the market as a nonrhetorical and non-ideological facet of human existence, against vocal leftist arguments to the contrary, has succeeded. Effectively, Jameson, continuing Sloterdijk’s observations, suggests that the failure and indeed complacency of anti-capitalists critics to arrive at a substantive critique of capital, hedging their own assault on the system in timidity and compromise (the “Third-Way social democracy” may be regarded as a contemporary analogue of such quietism), has paved the way for the triumph of capitalist neo-liberal ideology.8 Continuing the lineage of this critique, Mark Fisher discusses twenty-first-century market domination in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative (2009), arguing that the fundamental strategies of neoliberal rhetoric have 6

Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, 3. 7 Ibid., 320. 8 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Culture of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

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resulted in the proliferation of “capitalist realism”, “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible to imagine a coherent alternative to it”.9 Fisher argues that neoliberal ideology functions to present itself in terms of an undeniable default premise, a condition of reasonability that would be illogical to critique for a lack of viable alternatives, but also unwise as it purports to maximize the greatest social, economic, and political good. The ethical consequence of capitalist realism, as Fisher argues, functions to eliminate the ethical component of value, inaugurating a “‘business ontology’ in which it is simply obvious that everything in society... should be run as a business”.10 This self-evidence, Fisher claims, is reliant upon a fantasy structure in which, “resources are infinite ... and that any problem can be solved by the market”.11 Such business ontology rendered via fantasies of consumption has had direct consequences for consumer behaviour and belief. As Jameson argues, due to the discursive victories of market ideology, contemporary subjects engage in fantasy practices organized by and in affirmation of the various mechanisms of capitalist control.12 Jameson argues that current consumer culture reflects a dissonance between the freedom alleged by the free market rhetoric of late capitalism and the supposed choices consumers confront when, for instance, choosing one model of automobile over another or whether or not to purchase a flat screen television are not the unrestrained decisions promised by the dominant market discourse but rather the false freedoms of subjects under the control of capitalist ideology.13 According to Jameson, the master-fantasy of the current era of late capitalism is the illusory freedom offered by the plethora of consumer options, a false freedom that constrains the contemporary subject who is unaware of the extent to which he or she is controlled.14 Critic Jodi Dean has furthered this critique, writing persuasively regarding the way fantasies maintain the faith of the subject in hollow concepts and the means with which fantasies institute limitations on 9 Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, Hants: Zero Books, 2009, 2 (emphasis in the original). 10 Ibid., 17 (emphasis in the original). 11 Ibid., 18. 12 Jameson, Postmodernism, 271. 13 Ibid., 273. 14 Ibid., 47.

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behalf of subjects to imagine realities beyond the horizon of their perception. Regarding late capitalism’s continued propagation of a hollow concept of democracy, another concept offering the subject the false sense of agency and whose antagonisms have been mitigated under global capitalism, Dean writes: The hold of these fantasies on the political imaginary, the promises and aspirations they inscribe in the ideological structure of our most basic communicative activities, helps account for the persistence of belief in democracy in the face of knowledge of the way democratic form continues to strengthen the place and power of the wealthy and diminish the lives and opportunities of the poor. 15

While Žižek accords fantasy the capacity to organize a subject’s relation to desire and insulate such desire, Dean presents situations in which the subject’s horizon of imagination manages that subject’s agency so comprehensively as to profoundly transform or denature subjectivity, rendering subjects entirely constrained but embodying a fantasy of freedom. Such a construction of the false freedom managed under the regime of late capitalism provides a framework for understanding the Icelandic context of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In particular, it provides a means of understanding the relation between the discourse of the market and the individual behaviour of consumers, namely the way in which Iceland’s rise from a non-entity in the financial marketplace to a global contender spurred individual consumption, extreme borrowing practices, and complicity in the fraught project of exponential Icelandic expansion. As Iceland grew wealthy following the privatization of its banks, individual borrowing and purchasing similarly increased, suggesting the validity of Jameson’s thesis concerning the freedom of the subject under capitalism. As the discourse of the market grew, consumer actualization of false freedom through purchasing grew in tandem. In the following section, I will discuss how Icelandic consumers’ agency diminished due to their consumption practices and sympathies with the national rhetoric of financial growth.

15

Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Liberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009, 217.

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Crisis and Icelandic national identity Ólafsson’s novel, published in 2001, arrived following the most significant period of cultural revision and economic growth in Icelandic history. The majority of Icelandic wealth was accumulated after 1998 when Iceland’s three largest banks (Kaupthing, Landsbanki, and Glitnir) began to privatize; within nine years, the three rose to the ranks of the top 300 banking institutions in the world.16 The banks borrowed heavily thanks to an excellent credit rating and the underwriting of the Icelandic government, which despite the country’s small population had become increasingly less transparent, pro-growth, and purged of critical voices.17 Even the media, largely criticized for complicity in the rapid-growth financial agenda, was uncritical of such practices largely because of their ownership by the Icelandic banks.18 This combination of a pro-growth agenda government, a culture of complicity, and a lack of oversight allowed high-risk borrowing and speculation practices to flourish, allowing Iceland’s GDP to grow by 130 % between 2000 and 2007.19 Compounding the government’s sympathies toward the financial industry were significant issues of nepotism, in part explained by Iceland’s small population, and consequent failures in ethics and oversight by banking employees, employees of an anaemic overseeing institution, and the Icelandic government.20 Similarly to the financial institutions of the United States, Iceland enjoyed a bubble economy over these years, reaping the profits from its financial institutions and engaging in practices of high risk borrowing and mortgage lending while facing little to no censure on its own soil.21 As a consequence of these economic changes, Iceland’s social and cultural transitions over these years were significant. Like the banks,

16

Robert H. Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdottir, “Iceland’s Rise, Fall, Stabilisation and Beyond”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, XXXVI/1 (January 2012), 129. 17 Ibid., 129. 18 Vlad Vaiman, Throstur Olaf Sigurjonsson and Páll Ásgeir Davídsson, “Weak Business Culture as Antecedent of Economic Crisis: The Case of Iceland”, Journal of Business Ethics, XCVIII/2 (January 2011), 267. 19 Elliot Wilson, “The Failed State of Iceland”, Euromoney (5 March 2010): http://www.euromoney.com/Article/2406144/The-failed-state-of-Iceland.html (accessed 13 September 2012). 20 Vaiman et al., “Weak Business Culture”, 269. 21 Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir, “Iceland’s Rise”.

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consumers borrowed heavily.22 As Wade and Sigurgeirsdottir suggest, toward the end of its miraculous growth period, Iceland was a nation transformed by comfort and abundance: [In 2008] the average income in Iceland was almost $70,000 per annum, the fifth highest in the world and 160 per cent of that of the United States. Reykjavik’s shops brimmed with luxury goods, its restaurants made London look cheap, and SUVs choked its narrow streets. Icelanders were the happiest people in the world, according to an international study in 2006.23

From these observations of the nation buoyed by the wealth of its financial industry, it is worrisome, though not unsurprising, that the Icelandic population, enjoying historic success, was uncritical and largely unconcerned with the financial risks taken by their financial institutions, their government, and indeed themselves. A salvo against the overwhelming changes in Icelandic culture and the dominant discourse of economic growth during this period appeared with the 2006 publication of Andri Snær Magnason’s Dreamland: A Self-Help Guide for a Frightened Nation.24 An analogue to Ólafsson’s critique of consumer culture, Dreamland was one of the few calls for temperance in a period of complacency and proved to be enormously prescient of the subsequent rollback and recriminations Iceland was to later face. The text, enormously popular among Icelandic readers upon its publication, critiques the rapid transition of Icelandic national identity from self-reliance to a hunger for modernization, global relevance, and wealth at the cost of Iceland’s natural beauty. Framing the transition as a form of mass social hysteria or fantasy, a “dreamland” founded upon false aspiration, Magnason critiques the rhetoric of development and financial growth distancing Iceland from reality. As Magnason suggests, Iceland’s rapid transition from a nation steeped in tradition and cognizant of its poor agrarian past to a globalized modern Iceland with a standard of living among the highest in the world may be credited to a capitalist fantasy in which the desire 22

Wilson, “The Failed State”. Robert H. Wade and Silla Sigurgeirsdottir, “Lessons from Iceland”, New Left Review, 65 (September-October 2010), 5. 24 Andri Snær Magnason, Dreamland: A Self-Help Guide for a Frightened Nation, trans. Nicholas Jones, London: Future Citizen Press, 2008. 23

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for the accumulation of wealth and energy is posed as the obvious direction for a nation with abundant natural resources. Magnason argues that the previously dominant Icelandic narrative, that of sustenance and sufficiency, has been replaced by the pathos driven call for dominance and expansion: “Our whole thinking about energy has become associated with ‘magnificent ideals’, grand plans and the struggles of men of vision.”25 This rhetoric, Magnason suggests, successfully colonized the minds of the Icelandic population to whom progress is met with the heady excitement of expansion and exploitation: “Where before there was pessimism and torpor in Iceland’s rural areas, now there is boom and a sense of expectancy.”26 The central dichotomy Magnason establishes in the text lies between mutually irreconcilable discourses of Iceland as a national space. The first, what may be regarded as the historical or traditional conception of the nation, and one espoused by Magnason himself, considers Icelandic beauty as non-operational, a unique natural condition of the place inhabited by Icelanders that has no generative function rather than to exist “as Iceland”. For the emerging ethic of exploitation, however, Magnason suggests that such natural beauty cannot be seen sui generis by those eager to develop the nation, but rather as a symbol to be used for capital gain and a physical space to be mined and dammed. Of Iceland’s symbolic potential, Magnason writes, “The beauty and uniqueness of the Icelandic landscape has been used to sell motor cars ... attract tourists and create not only spiritual wealth but also hard cash”.27 Disturbingly, the images that span the pages of travel brochures are precisely those sites that aluminium and power companies regard as potential sites of exploitation. This leads to a troubling irony in which Icelandic beauty has a dual purpose, used as both an advertisement for those wishing to see such landscapes and those wishing to transform them. Magnason argues: Within this technocentric ideology there seems to be not a single thing in Iceland that possess a uniqueness or beauty that is worth preserving. Such beauty as might survive might be called a residue, vestiges,

25

Ibid., 176. Ibid., 158. 27 Ibid., 224. 26

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something left behind despite the people living there rather than because of them.28

Though the views of Iceland, as an advertising symbol and as exploitable land, may seem an untenable contradiction, Magnason suggests that both are employed under the same ideological desire for wealth and accumulation. Magnason argues that exploitative desire coupled with the inability to see Icelandic resources as inherent and non-exploitable often results in the pitting of Iceland’s dual capitalistic identities, symbol and resource, in comical and ironic contradiction. Magnason exemplifies this in his analysis of a 1995 brochure, Lowest Energy Prices!! in Europe for New Contracts: Your Springboard into Europe, published by the Icelandic Energy Marketing Agency, Landsvirkjun, and the Ministry for Industry and Commerce: Reykjavik, as an example of such incongruity in which “‘low wage bills and 30 terawatt-hours’” are buffered with such phrases as “‘Iceland is pure and beautiful ... nature is remarkably undisturbed ... clean air and unpolluted water’”.29 This apparent contradiction, that Icelandic sites rendered as symbolic purity are used to advertise the exploitation of those very sites, exposes the central mechanism of the fantasy of late capitalism – fantasy’s obscurantism is so pernicious and so dissociative as to be able to reconcile a contradiction as stark as that of natural purity marshalled to advertise its own exploitation. Magnason’s most significant fear in the transition of the Icelandic mindset is the loss of individual agency and self-interest with respect to the rhetoric of expansion and the growing dominance of energy companies. In touting the benefits of expansion, Magnason argues, corporations and the Icelandic government have effectively positioned expansion as a necessity without alternative, precisely paralleling Fisher’s concept of “business ontology”30 and, as such, have secured the complicity and apathy of the Icelandic population: It is so easy to hoodwink us. It is such a short time since life was raw materials. Meat was life. Fish was life. But aluminum is what? We have so little true knowledge of the world, we do not see how small 28

Ibid., 175 (emphasis in the original). Ibid., 185. 30 Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 17. 29

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James Rushing Daniel we are. We do not look for information, we do not ask questions, do not understand the broader context. We fail to see that just a tiny fraction of the rubbish tips of the world market could swamp Iceland and its economy in a matter of moments. 31

It is this self-same fear of the diminishing freedom of the Icelandic subject to pursue her unadulterated desires and to understand the ideological mechanisms governing her compliance that concerns Ólafsson. Like Magnason, Ólafsson critiques the modern complacent subject unable to confront the horror of economic exploitation, even when it threatens her own life and property. As I will detail in the following analysis, Magnason’s fear of the Icelandic subject’s horizon of imagination being colonized by the rhetoric of expansion and accumulation is fully dramatized in the insular object-reality inhabited by the characters of Ólafsson’s novel. Ólafsson’s object-world In The Pets (2008), published in Icelandic as Gæludýrin in 2001, Bragi Ólafsson offers a critique of the diminishing agency and growing materialism of Icelandic culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.32 Of particular concern for the novel is the relation between subjects and the objects of desire, namely how a culture of desire for accumulation of wealth and physical objects supplants the agency of subjects. The novel dramatizes this tension through the character of Emil, a man on the cusp of middle age with no discernible profession or direction. Throughout the novel, Ólafsson depicts Emil’s diminishing agency in his transition from an agent in his own life to a passive object, perceiving events but unable to intervene in them. For Ólafsson, Emil embodies the predicament of the contemporary Icelandic subject, comfortable and placated by material luxury but muzzled by such security and unable to intervene on his own behalf. In depicting Emil as an inactive witness in his own downfall, The Pets functions as the antithetical sequel to Halldór Laxness’ Independent People (1955), a book that touts the indefatigable stubbornness and

31

Magnason, Dreamland, 219. Bragi Ólafsson, The Pets, trans. Janice Balfour, Rochester, NY: Open Letter Books, 2008. All references in parenthesis in the text.

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resilience of the Icelandic character, a character that, according to Ólafsson, has grown guileless on the fantasies of consumption.33 The novel begins with Emil’s return to Iceland from a short trip to London where he has gone to spend his winnings from the Icelandic lottery. Returning to Iceland, Emil is surprised by the sudden appearance of his former roommate, a mental patient named Havard. Rather than confronting Havard, Emil hides under his bed, increasingly unwilling or unable to act as Havard breaks into his house and proceeds to listen to his CDs, drink his alcohol, and hold a party with Emil’s friends. The tension of the narrative is provided by Emil’s cowardice: hiding under the bed, Emil is unable to act as his possessions are consumed and destroyed and the facade of his consumer-oriented existence is bared. Events deteriorate as Emil’s hollow relationships with his friends are exposed, his casual relationship with his girlfriend, Vigdis, is destroyed, and Emil’s new love interest, Greta, is seduced by Havard as Emil passively observes. Emil, never able to bring himself to intervene, is the immobilized modern subject, ignorant and complicit in the conditions of his own powerlessness. In the novel, the activity that provides the occasion for its setting and functions as a pretence for all social interactions in the text is the acquisition of objects. Shopping, an ostensibly teleological act, is here rendered as a pursuit in itself, a means of passing time, gaining pleasure from acquisition, and fetishizing the objects driving the capitalist apparatus. In the opening pages of the novel, in which Emil is returning from London where he has purchased books and CDs, movement itself, the crossing of the border, is structured according to this activity of acquisition – the crossing of space and border is conceptualized solely as a means to have access to more objects and to navigate tax laws in the accumulation of the most quality objects at the most reduced price. On the return flight, Emil’s seatmate, Armand, peruses the duty-free catalogue with intent, muttering to himself. Upon landing, though Emil is anxious to return home, he heads to the duty-free shop to prolong his spree. After making several purchases, Emil looks forward to returning home and “unpacking the CDs, books, and videos ... and arranging the wine bottles, cigars, and cigarettes from the duty free store” (10). This interest is not merely in acquiring 33

Halldór Laxness, Independent People, trans. J.A. Thompson, New York: Vintage, 2009.

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objects but indeed in ritualistically fetishizing them, arranging them in his home as a confirmation of their acquisition. Through his desire to organize and display the objects of his sojourn, the emptiness of the process is exposed in that such objects seem only to serve the purpose of enhancing Emil’s own pleasure. The process of consumption, here detailed in the text, merely functions as fuel to its own process rather than nourishing the subject/consumer. That the purchasing of such objects serves no identifiable purpose is concealed by the desire held in place by Emil’s fantasy. The newness and evanescence of the litany of objects populating Ólafsson’s novel offers a further critique of the tenuous relationship between tradition and past. No object, with the exception of a stolen toy ship and a first edition of Moby-Dick, which Havard intends to return to Emil, carry any historical or emotional value. Rather, the value of things lies in their shimmering newness, their readiness to be consumed. Over the course of the novel, the space of the apartment becomes a miasma of clinking glasses, the sound of cellophane from unwrapped CDs, the pop of uncorked wine bottles, smoke from duty tobacco, the clamour of music and videos, all issuing as these items are used and used up. Of Emil’s purchases at the Keflavik airport, Ólafsson provides a clinical list: “... a good cognac and some Belgian chocolates ... a liter of dry Martini and two cartons of Camel filters, as well as cigars that looked like they were one hundred percent tobacco ... six cans of beer too” (43). In this list, the implicit focus with regard to the objects is quality and value, rather than personal or affective relation to the goods themselves. The cognac is a good one, the chocolates are specifically Belgian, the liquor and cigarettes are brand names, and the cigars are quality because they are all tobacco. Absent in this description is any discussion of why such goods are purchased, or Emil’s expectation of their enjoyment. Rather, there is the implicit understanding that because of their quality, value, and status, their acquisition is an unquestionable good. Compounding the association of acquiring new brand-name objects, Ólafsson’s depiction of the fantasy of the enjoyment of consumption of new things is dramatized in overtly detailing the acoustic and physical textures of new objects being opened. Ólafsson writes: “He started on the whiskey. I can hear him unscrew the lid and fetch a glass” (70). Later, “the cork is pulled out of the Rémy Martin bottle” (86). And once again, “They clink their glasses. There is the

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sound of cellophane” (110). The unscrewing, uncorking, and unwrapping of Emil’s possessions provides the ambient noise of the text, a constant reminder of the novel’s central teleology – the enjoyment of objects, passing through them, and moving on. The novel’s secondary activity, in service to the first and accompanying the action throughout, is that of consuming (and, if possible, physically imbibing) the objects of acquisition. Each character seems bound by an oral fixation, unable to proceed without constantly dosing or thinking about the next act of imbibing a product. Armand, the man seated next to Emil on his return from London, is depicted as ceaselessly assuaging his sweet tooth with a box of Icelandic Opals. Describing Armand’s attention to a large box of them in the duty-free catalogue, Ólafsson writes: “‘Maybe this is something one should try,’ he said. ‘They are those giant sized packs, much bigger than these here,’ he added, shaking the half full box of Opals ... [he] helped himself to one and began to tab the box with his index finger” (17). In this minor example that recurs throughout the opening pages of the novel, Ólafsson depicts consumption as neurosis, the schizophrenic fixation on the opportunity to accumulate the object while simultaneously consuming it. Such an instance acutely dramatizes a paradoxical detail of the fantasy of consumption – that the fantasy of the thing’s acquisition, the duty-free sized box of Opals, bears no relation and indeed has no capacity to assuage the desire for it. Armand is able to consume the thing he desires while mainlining desire for it, suggesting the dynamic of the fantasy of consumption as a feedback loop without satisfaction, sufficiency, or end. The novel offers its most substantive critique of fantasy through depicting the inability of characters to perceive the innate vapidity of consumption practices. Though Emil should want to intervene in those taking over his life, his thoughts continually return to the cigarette he wants to smoke. As the novel progresses, this desire heightens and is comically dramatized in the hypothetical exchange Emil envisions: “[I think of] the thing for which I would almost be ready to give this original edition of Moby-Dick: a cigarette” (126). It is the cigarette, lethal and ephemeral, that becomes the novel’s focalizing object, constantly desired by its protagonist, smoked by its secondary characters, and the locus of desire through which the world is frequently framed. Twice during the novel, once in its initial pages and later as Emil languishes under the bed, he perceives Armand’s

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hair as “tobacco-colored” (10 and 119). Though each instance is a passing description, this characterization of Armand in terms of Emil’s desired object exposes a further facet of the extent to which Emil is dominated by fantasy, namely that objects take the highest priority in his worldview. That Armand reminds Emil of a cigarette suggests a clear de-emphasis of the individual in Emil’s fantasy life. Emil is unable to see Armand without thinking of objects. Symbolically, such desire to exchange an irreplaceable and nonconsumable object of inestimable value for an instantly consumable cigarette represents the Faustian bargain both Ólafsson and Magnason perceive in Iceland’s contemporary culture of consumerism and exploitation. Iceland, like Emil, is unable to take action on its own behalf on account of its fixation with material wealth. The conflation of the human and the object is dramatized most poignantly towards the novel’s conclusion, when, in a moment of reverie, Armand recalls deceiving his former girlfriend, Anna, during a vacation in New York: “I managed to hoard a few dollars and I brought home one CD that I bought without telling Anna; it was a disc that I literally had to own.” This moment in the text, following much of the ordeal Emil suffers under his bed, most acutely displays his complicity in his object-oriented relation to others. In scheming to purchase the CD, Emil shows himself as unable to prioritize the needs of his pregnant girlfriend over his own compulsive acquisition. Regarding the false freedom of fantasy Jameson elaborates in his discussion of late capitalism, this act displays Emil as unable to break the bonds of such a system of control to offer an act of humanity and compassion as his freedom only allows for the choices of the consumer rather than the revolutionary decision not to consume. Upon making this statement, Emil immediately turns to his own mortality: “Today I have brought home thirty-six discs, more than the years that I have lived. And probably more than the years that I have left to live” (138). This realization is Emil’s only flirtation with the taking of responsibility for his worldview. In linking the objects he has purchased with his future death, Emil seems to glimpse how his life is subsumed to consumption. In reducing his own life to a calculus of consumption and death, Emil touches on the recognition of the innate corruption of such existence. However, Emil is unable to perceive the horror, qua Žižek, of his actions because the dominance of his fantasy

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continues to obfuscate the antagonisms that, if confronted, would dissuade Emil from his practice. Though Emil sits on the cusp of such a realization by virtue of his own self-assessment, he is unable to come to terms with the nature of the deceptions that hinder his agency. At the end of the text, Emil does not emerge from under the bed, but remains there as the novel closes, having lost the capacity to be an agent in the unfolding action. This ultimate impotency functions to undergird a transformation in Emil himself from a subject capable of imposing his own will to an object acted upon by others, no different or more agentive than his own possessions. With the arc of the narrative closing here, a parallel may be drawn to Magnason’s depiction of contemporary Icelanders’ unwillingness to intervene in the exploitation of their country. Magnason’s descriptions of Icelanders’ apathy, and indeed the enthusiasm on behalf of rural Icelanders to support the exploitation of Icelandic resources, bears striking resemblance to Emil’s own hesitancy to intervene in the destruction of his own life. In desiring along with his captors, he is shown to be unable and indeed unwilling to intervene. In addition to Emil’s striking apathy is his own complicity in the events of his own undoing. Despite the antagonisms of his own life being exposed, Emil’s overwhelming desire is for a cigarette for himself. Like Magnason’s Icelanders, even when faced with the loss of agency over what is his, Emil longs to take part in the process. A final irony here is such that though Emil’s existence lies entirely with the objects he accumulates and desires, he is not able to take ownership of them. The apathy engendered by an object-centric existence has, as the narrative suggests, weakened his ability to claim even those most ephemeral and transient objects that form the central project of his life. A line that seems to express this loss of humanity and agency comes from Havard, singing Kraftwerk’s “Computer World” while urinating into Emil’s toilet: “‘Business... numbers... money... people...’” (81). In the lyric, people are interpolated in to a financial and quantifiable system in which humans are the last item. Conclusion: fantasy, rupture, event In depicting a character such as Emil who is so disempowered by the fantasy of late capitalism as to be unable to claim agency to prevent the invasion of his home, the destruction of his possessions, and the ruin of his romantic relationship, Ólafsson offers a bleak statement on

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the agentive capacities of the contemporary Icelander and indeed the modern subject under late capitalism. As he alleges, those under the control of such a fantasy, despite personal intention or the contingencies that might bring them to the brink of the realization of their own powerlessness, there is little the individual subject can do to break out of such a system. To return to the structure of fantasy, Jameson and Žižek both suggest that fantasy is that which, strictly speaking, prevents a subject from seeing what is right in front of them, the “horror of a situation”.34 Both theorists suggest that the bind of fantasy is such that the subject held in its sway is not equipped with the tools to distinguish and dispose of the fantasy that organizes her desire. However, though the subject held in a fantasy space may not hold the agentive capacity to alter that situation, the example of the global financial collapse appears to hold evidence for understanding how fantasies may end through external rupture. Regarding the example with which I began this article, that of Icelandic citizens burning their SUVs in the aftermath of the financial collapse, it is evident that the transformation of the logic of a situation from the outside has the potential to disabuse those living in fantasies beholden to its logic. In the case of Iceland, when the financial collapse rendered deep economic liabilities out of previously cherished luxury objects, Icelanders were capable of taking an active stance towards their objects of desire, burning that which they had previously taken great risk to purchase. Beyond this act, Icelanders furious at the exploitation of their government took strong action in opposition to the previous status quo of high-risk borrowing. Recriminations followed and citizens seemed to express that Iceland, and indeed the global financial sector, had been the victim of immense hubris. In this instance, the fantasy was no longer able to obfuscate the antagonisms of the economic bust. In what is now known as the Kitchenware Revolution, citizens protested in the streets, elected the Besti-Flokurin, an anarcho-surrealist party whose platform ousted the previous Prime Minister for Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, a liberal, socialdemocrat radically dissimilar to the previous government.35 These changes, in the light of what they reject, represent a denunciation of the values of the pre-crisis Iceland and a recognition that the values of 34

Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, 6. John F. Burns, “Iceland Names New Prime Minister”, The New York Times (1 February 2009).

35

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unchecked accumulation are those that accounted for Iceland’s downfall. This arc of the Icelandic fantasy suggests that the potential of overcoming fantasy lies in the subject taking on a hermeneutic rather than a purely agentive role. As Jameson and Žižek suggest, to realize a fantasy from within is an impracticable task, the role of the subject should be to make use of those ruptures that expose fantasies and operationalize the knowledge gained so as not to repeat past mistakes. This also naturally includes practising the correct interpretation of a moment of rupture as to take the appropriate conclusions from it. In specific moments where the regimes of thought are exposed and the horror of situations is bared for public scrutiny, subjects must recognize that their desires have been organized from without. Regarding the economic crisis, both for Iceland and the other nations affected, the imperative for current generations is that the lessons learned from the crisis be those that recognize the perniciousness and unsustainability of fidelity to a system that prioritizes unrestrained consumption and exponential growth. As is evident in other parts of the world, calls for overhaul of the economic system have been quietly replaced with a return to the status quo. These quiet returns represent an amnesiac homecoming to the space of fantasy, a deep inability to leave the fantasy behind and reach for alternative modes of being. As Žižek suggests, fantasy obfuscates its own realization as fantasy; the case of Iceland suggests that the imperative to understand our collective task as conscious political subjects is not the identification of fantasy in situ, but rather the judicious and ethical understanding of our past fantasies and the commitment to not return to them.

“TERRITORIES OF RISK” WITHIN “TROPOLOGICAL SPACE”: FROM ZERO TO 2666, AND BACK DAVID VICHNAR The essay examines the subversive treatment of discourses of fear and anxiety on both local and global scales to which they are subjected within what Michel Foucault has described as the “tropological space” of literature. The two case studies under focus are Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s 1979 novel Zero and Roberto Bolaño’s 2004 novel 2666. Brandão’s fictitiously journalistic narrative of a complex discursive collage subverts the hypocrisy of some of the official political discourses of the 1970s Brazilian dictatorship, while Bolaño’s epically broad narrative revolves around Ciudad Juárez, the scene of some of the most terrifying, yet continuously silenced, crimes of post-World War II history. The essay hopes to demonstrate that although incapable of competing with social sciences in their analytic depth and methodological breadth, literature engaging with evil, violence, fear and fantasy can aspire to enrich their viewpoints in two broadly conceived fashions: in staging the problematic nature of writing and writability, and in calling attention to the medium through which any such writing must take place. Ugliness, shapelessness and repulsiveness are no longer the concerns of aesthetic novelty, but the very condition of writing that takes its task (of an ethical engagement with the complex present) seriously.

Mapping the territory of risk The “territory of risk” is an area which, according to Roberto Bolaño, great literature must seek to inhabit, taking its readers “where they don’t wish to go”.1 The “risk” in question, as will become apparent, is both an aesthetic (formal) and a conceptual (thematic) one – and the “territory” is a hybrid semantic space where meaning is generated out 1

Henry Hitchings, “The Mystery Man”, The Financial Times, 8 December 2008: http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/7c4c7cd2-c264-11dd-a350-000077b07658.html#axzz2 MBrad7iO (accessed 3 October 2012).

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of the interplay among multiple discordant discourses. “Tropological space”, according to Michel Foucault, is the structural condition of any such territory; for tropology is what marks off language as, in any cogent sense, literary – in that it exploits the words’ ability to be “turned away from their original meaning to take on a new one which is more or less removed but that still maintains a connection”.2 This double meaning opens up a tropological space of vocabulary which is “that neutral space within language where the hollowness of the word is shown as an insidious void, arid and a trap”.3 A fitting analogy for this tropology is found in the mask: “The hollowness that opens within a word would not simply be a property of verbal signs, but a more basic ambiguity, perhaps even more dangerous: it would show that a word, like a gaudy cardboard face, hides what it duplicates.”4 The objective of the present essay is, then, to sketch out the coordinates of the territories of risk within the literary spaces of Ignacio de Loyola Brandão’s Zero and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666. As theoretical compasses by which to navigate these territories, the work of Sigmund Freud, Susan Sontag and Zygmunt Bauman will be used alongside Foucault’s, for their theories of violence and representation can be regarded as forming three crucial commonalities between the two fictional texts: their ontological, ethical and epistemological parallels, respectively. At an intriguing moment in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, an analogy is drawn between the evolution of civilization and the libidinal development of the individual, with three parallel stages in which each occurs: character-formation (identity acquisition), sublimation (the channelling of primal energy into other physical or psychological activities), and renunciation of instincts (repression of aggressive impulses in the individual; imposition of the social rule of law). Here is the key passage: First, renunciation of the drives, resulting from fear of aggression from the external authority (for this is what fear of the loss of love amounts to, love being a protection against this punitive aggression), then the setting up of the internal authority and the renunciation of the

2

Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth, trans. Charles Ruas, London and New York: Doubleday, Continuum, 1986, 17. 3 Ibid., 18. 4 Ibid., 20.

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drives, resulting from this fear of authority, fear of conscience .... The aggression of the conscience continues the aggression of the external authority. The effect that the renunciation of the drives has on the conscience is such that any aggression whose satisfaction we forgo is taken over by the super-ego and increases the latter’s aggression (towards the ego) .... A considerable measure of aggressivity must have developed in the child against the authority that deprives him of his first (and most significant) satisfactions, no matter what kind of deprivations were required. The child is obliged to forgo the satisfaction of his vengeful aggression. 5

It is here, then, that Freud’s logic of the Hegelian Aufhebung (“sublate”), a notion famously combining the apparently contradictory dialectics of both preserving and changing a duality in order to advance onto a higher plane of sublation, comes to bear upon the real and profound subject of Civilization and Its Discontents: aggressiveness inherent in the essentially dysfunctional human sexuality. The repressiveness of civilization’s substitutions and complementarities is not only the cause but also the effect of man’s aggressive destructiveness that forms the basis of human beings. The relationship between the fundamental concepts, here, is not one of simple opposition or cause and effect, but much rather one of supplementarity and undecidable vicious circle – in the drama staged by Freud, civilization can be said to inhibit aggression by merely referring it back to where it arose. Every renunciation, thus, augments that which it renounces – aggression. The stages of this process are, again, three: the internalization of the authority that presumably inhibits the drive, the increase in the ego’s sense of guilt by way of intensification of its desire for satisfaction, and submission of the ego to the wrath of aggressiveness originally meant to inhibit external authority. At its heart, Civilization and Its Discontents witnesses a stage in which Freud’s thought undertook the project of deconstructing the hitherto prevailing binary oppositions or dualisms (for example, sexuality-repression, aggressiveness-civilization) into a state of aporia, of undecidability. Let us also note in passing that Freud’s theory of the subject’s civilizing process here engages in as much fear (“fear of aggression”, “fear of authority”, “fear of conscience”) as fantasy or, rather, imagination: in the inner theatre of 5

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock, London: Penguin Classics, 2002, 65.

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the threefold human mind, the scenario by which the subject comes about as “civilized” is one of imaginary substitutions, fantastic creations, and subject-object projections. Susan Sontag’s 2003 treatise entitled Regarding the Pain of Others, her meditation on the imagery of warfare, revisits the concerns first staked out in her 1977 study On Photography, dealing with the history of sensibility in a culture shaped by the mechanical reproduction of imagery. Photography, to her mind, has itself created an ecology of images in which fragments of the world are torn from their context and history, both mixed together in a way comparable to surrealism. This kind of promiscuous aestheticizing of experience, Sontag contends, “makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own”.6 However, in her latter work, Sontag observes how with war photography, photographic images produce “the understanding of war among people who have not experienced it”.7 Photos, a mere semblance of knowledge though they may be, do nonetheless have a function within the moral order of the world, showing what words cannot express, or what words struggle to conceal. Thus, Sontag quotes, and argues with, Virginia Woolf’s comment that photographs “are simply a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye”.8 For one thing, every picture arrives surrounded (in print and otherwise) by thousands of words. Two, visceral impact is not meaning and photographs are not simply documents of combat and its aftermath, but instead they form part of the rhetoric of warfare: they are endowed with, and put to, strategic uses. And the “good taste” exercised by editors and others in positions of authority in choosing which images to circulate “obscures a host of concerns and anxieties about public order and public morale ... as well as pointing to the inability otherwise to formulate or defend traditional conventions of how to mourn”.9 While Freud elsewhere spoke of “the work of mourning” as acceptance of the truth of the object’s loss (here, the beloved departed), Sontag speaks of a work of imagination of sorts which goes beyond the primary response of fear or sympathy – and 6

Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977, 57. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003, 21. 8 Ibid., 7. 9 Ibid., 68-69. 7

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can be analogically described as realization of the subject’s participation in the object’s (the depicted sufferer’s) loss: So far as we feel sympathy we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering. Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence. To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent – if not an inappropriate – response. To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a consideration of how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may – in ways that we prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only the initial spark.10

Photographs outside the narrow delineations of good taste, then, have the capability of stirring up further work of imagination, which by placing “our privileges ... on the same map as their suffering” also produces an awareness of our own complicity with the suffering depicted. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents and Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others exemplify the concerns of the two novelistic texts treated in this essay: the former useful in explicitly addressing what appears to be the implied, if never fully thematized, object of Brandão’s and Bolaño’s critique, the latter invaluable in opening up a more general topic of violence and representation, which again runs the length of both texts. As long as there is an ontological commonality between Brandão’s Zero and Bolaño’s 2666, it lies in their depiction of aggressiveness not as an individual aberration, but as a general, most fundamental trait of the human condition. If there is an ethical commonality between the two, it seems to lie in their appeal to the reader’s further work of imagination which would lead beyond horror or sympathy toward a realization of one’s own complicity. It is precisely their joint preoccupation with fear and violence, and the work of imagination and fantasy solicited by their representation, that places both Brandão’s Zero and Bolaño’s 2666 at variance with the opening premise of Zygmunt Bauman’s essay City of Fears, City of Hopes:

10

Ibid., 102.

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David Vichnar Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky warned his contemporaries against the not just vain and silly, but also potentially dangerous habit of jumping to conclusions about the state of the world and about the direction the world takes: “Don’t paint epic canvasses during revolutions; they will tear the canvass in shreds.” Mayakovsky knew well what he was talking about. Like so many other talented Soviet writers, he tasted to the last drop the fragility of fortune’s favours and the slyness of its pranks. Painting epic canvasses may be a safer occupation for the painters of our part of the world and our time than it was in Mayakovsky’s time and place, but this does not make any safer the future of their canvasses. Epic canvasses keep being torn in shreds and dumped at rubbish tips.11

The variance is as follows: both Zero and 2666 are attempts at painting epic canvasses during or about revolutions, and both secure their tangibility and survival in that they are produced as already “torn in shreds”. Brandão’s Zero (1979) has been termed “the first literary videoclip” on account of the strong visual component of its material,12 typographical realization, and of the highly fragmentary nature of its mimetic and narrative strategies; while Bolaño’s 2666 (2004) has been widely hailed as “the first great epic of the 21st century”13 if also commonly described as “a morass of unconnected details”,14 and refers to itself, in one of its frequent self-reflexive moments, as a book of “images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world, fragments, fragments”.15 If there is an epistemological commonality between the two texts, it lies in their shared conviction (as old as Modernism) that language is instrumental in our understanding – and largely responsible for our misunderstanding – of the horrors of our world, and that in order to come to terms with them, one has to puncture it. “Various tones of voice”: Brandão’s Zero Fragmentary are already the epigraphs of these two novels and deserve to be discussed in their own right: 11

Zymunt Bauman, City of Fears, City of Hopes, London: Goldsmiths College, 2003, 2 (emphasis in the original). 12 Brandão himself related this readerly opinion in an interview for the São Paulo journal Shopping News. 13 The online book review site The Complete Review on 2666: http://www.completereview.com/reviews/bolanor/2666.htm (accessed 10 August 2012). 14 Hitchings, “The Mystery Man”. 15 Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, London: Picador, 2009, 206.

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An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom. – Charles Baudelaire16 fear’s going to have everything yes everything and we will all almost all each by his own road become mice yes mice from “A Slightly Original Poem of Fear” by Alexandre O’Neill17

Bolaño’s is a line from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Le Voyage”, and is further thematized in his lecture entitled “Literature & Illness = Illness” as the most “lucid diagnosis for the illness of modern man” in that “to escape boredom, to escape deadlock, all we have at hand, though not so close at hand, because even here an effort is required, is horror, or in other words, evil”.18 Brandão’s Zero is prefaced by an excerpt from the Portuguese poet Alexandre O’Neill’s “A Slightly Original Poem of Fear” which predicts a strange reversal in which fear will metamorphose humanity into mice, an age-old object of its horror and disgust, and also the recipient of its most univocal aggression. “Mice” are also the first recipients of the aggression of the novel’s very unheroic hero: José kills mice in a dingy movie theater. He’s an ordinary guy, age 28, who eats, sleeps, pisses, walks, runs, laughs, cries, has fun, gets sad, screws, keeps both eyes open, has a headache every now and then but takes Anacin, reads books and newspapers regularly, is always going to the movies, doesn’t wear a wristwatch or lace-up shoes, is single, and limps a little in the presence of strong feeling – good or bad.

16

Ibid., 206. Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, Zero, trans. Ellen Watson, London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2004. 18 Quoted in Natascha Wimmer, “Notes toward an Annotated Edition of 2666”, n.d.: http://us.macmillan.com/uploadedFiles/FSGAdult/finalessay2666.pdf (accessed 16 September 2012). 17

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David Vichnar Lately, José has been troubled by the Pope’s declaration that Christmas is in danger of becoming a purely secular holiday. 19

Already in this opening paragraph, the catalogue comprising human activities as diverse as pissing and reading books serves an important function: in José’s life, everything is levelled out, down to the lowest common denominator. The narrative follows this John Doe, this modern-age Brazilian everyman, scraping the bottom of the barrel, making both ends meet, but leading a comfortably levelled existence, where the lack of things desired is placated by the lack of things desirable. As the novel progresses and José confronts the obstacles of finding and providing for his promiscuous (that is to say – in the twisted logic of the novel’s fictional world – raped by José’s friends) wife Rosa, he becomes entangled with a group of political subversives who rip off and shoot random people on the street, rob banks and stores, and eventually attempt political assassinations. Loyola makes it clear that José’s motivation never goes beyond the simple ambition of getting out of the rat killing business to pursue more gainful endeavours, that his political affiliations are tenuous at best, if not entirely built by association. Gradually, José pushes himself – or is pushed – outside the system and in opposition to it, finding himself a robber, rapist and murderer – his ethical creed is that under a regime to which he himself does not matter at all, everyone else should matter as little to him, and so should, ultimately, the regime itself. As in Freud’s theatre of the mind, institutional violence breeds its bastardized, brutalized individual offshoot. Everything is forbidden, ergo everything is allowed. The final scene, appropriately for this novel ridden with Biblical allegory, is of José engulfed in a ball of fire, his last bomb attack also his apotheosis. Brandão’s novel, though completed in 1969, waited for another decade until it saw the light of publication in Portugal, and only in 1981 was it finally made available in Brazil – the history of its publication is thus one of protracted repression and censorship. Zero was written in mid-60s, at “a zero point” in Brazilian history, right after the 1964 military coup seized power from the civilian government (with the aid of the CIA), when the country was suffering the most repressive regime in Brazilian history, during which the 19

Brandão, Zero, 5.

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disintegration of the society as a whole was paralleled by the shattering of all individual moral value systems. As Brandão himself observed, his ambition in Zero was “to make a literature that documents, that pictures, just like the camera filming the country in order to show it on the screen of the book; later this screen was obscured by censorship”.20 Chaotic, gruesome in detail, and initially banned, Zero challenges its English readers to engage with the violence of daily life in the city and suburbs of Brazil in the 60s. Some of the most compelling vignettes are the most brutally expressed: for example, the epic passage of the sniper who embeds himself in a massive bronze statue in a city square, picking off passers-by one-by-one for no reason, epitomizing the breakdown of social norms and values under the military rule; or the Kafkaesque tale of the father carrying his sick son to hospital in hope of his cure, and spending instead two years running from one window and counter to another, trying to get the documents in order, winding up a wreck with just the bare skeleton of his longdead son in his hands. Given this historico-social background, it is not difficult to regard how Zero’s experimental typographical layout – parallel columns, different letter fonts, decomposition and recomposition of word formations, footnotes, visual emblems, collage of texts from several sources – signals the presence of the chaos that permeates the story itself. Or, on another level, the disruption and deformation of Zero’s typography serves the mimetic purpose of enhancing its main line of plot which shows its protagonist overwhelmed, and ultimately defeated, by what can be understood as the inhuman forces that control his world. Zero succeeds in connecting – even through disconnectedness – the many disconnects, the many failures, of a repressive regime. Even semantic congruity between a newspaper article and its headline falls apart, the captions in Brandão’s text soon resembling an ironic convex mirror reflecting the contents of the textual clips:

20

Latin American Science-Fiction Writers: An A-to-Z Guide, ed. Darrel B. Lockhart, Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, 33.

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David Vichnar QUOTE OF THE DAY “If they have no bread, let them eat styrofoam. It’s soft and white and, when sliced, looks just like Wonder Bread.” (Presidential Declaration)21 HOME SWEET HOME my father has a liver disease my mother is epileptic no one wants to give me a job because I’m old enough to be drafted that’s why I steal things22 HOME SWEET HOME mother stabs son in the middle of the street at three in the afternoon and son asks mother’s blessing before he dies 23 HABITS AND CUSTOMS the government has been requested to establish gallows and guillotines and electric chairs and gas chambers in addition to the firing squads and lynch mobs24 HOME SWEET HOME lesbian kills homosexual accusing him of lesbianism: she found him in bed with her woman25 VISION cadavers mounting up in the National Medical Institute and there’s no more room so doctors proclaim the collapse of the N.M.I. and go home26 VISION thieves shoot at flying saucer which appears in a vacant lot: they say they thought it was police in disguise.27

What renders Zero much more than yet another – however authentic and vivid – dystopian account of a dictatorship machinery grinding to a halt is its insistence on language as a medium of state21

Brandão, Zero, 181. Ibid., 228. 23 Ibid., 231. 24 Ibid., 233. 25 Ibid., 236. 26 Ibid., 237. 27 Ibid., 242. 22

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generated terror. Language, throughout Zero, is constantly unmasked as an imperfect tool for the dissemination of state ideology, failing to conceal what it should not reveal, and seldom managing to deliver the sole message it is meant by the univocal ideology to communicate. In Brandão’s parodic redoublings and détournements, the Foucauldian “tropological space” opens, with words turned back or above or beyond their meaning, and a polyvocity opens unmasking the violence of the language of ideology: VARIOUS TONES OF VOICE It was easy to look at death and revolution at the movies, in photographs, and history books. Now, José, you see it all right in front of you. Death is real; blood is really blood; the revolution marches on. And you’re in it, whether you want to be or not. There’s no way out. You’re so cowardly, so timid, so resigned. Think about it: from now on the wounds are going to hurt, and people are going to suffer because of you, just like you’re going to suffer because of them. No, José, no more fun and games with a play gun, hands up, come on boy, bang-bang you’re dead. Now it’s for real,1 accept the challenge, win or lose. You have to try to win. Read this passage in the following tones of voice:

1

A)

like a sermon, in a monotonous voice

B)

like advice, in a serious voice

C)

like a prayer, in a sorrowful voice

D)

like a warning, with the voice of the arbiter of truth

E)

like a prankster, in a falsetto voice

José thinks it’s boring to play serious all the time. 28

Brandão’s experimentation with the semantic admixture of voice alternates with subversions from the category of the visual or concrete textuality:

28

Ibid., 204.

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David Vichnar FRACTIONS OF THE DAILY DRAMA Commun taken prisoner: Bambam BAM. Whap, whap. Plaft, pleft, shit, he’s hit in the mouth, all his teeth are knocked out, his nails pulled out one by one, he’s been burned, they’ve drilled a hole in one eye, thrown acid in the other, stuffed a rat in his mouth, razor slashes and briny water, wires stuck in his asshole, shocks, tear him apart, smash his finger, his cock, jab him in the stomach, make him eat shit, cut out his tongue, prick his veins, give him an injection in the head, shred, tear him into a thou a

i

s

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p

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c29

Ultimately, this process of constant overturning finds an appropriate climax in the conclusion of the novel, where resolution is subjected to deferral of turnings-around, or revolutions: GRAND FINALE And José, Joe, Joseph, José saw reflected in the incandescent metal (screen, TV, mirror) the new order, the chains, the nakedness (finally, all the illegal words), the immobility (finally, all the prohibited gestures), the executed communs, Gê (but I thought Gê fled, I thought he was hidden on a chicken farm, raising chickens and selling eggs, manure, day-old chicks.) Did they really get Gê (again?) – they got everyone, and they’ll keep on getting everyone until we find a way to fight and organize. And turn things around. And turn things around again. Whoever is right will be wrong, whoever is wrong will be right, whoever – later – will be wrong – today – sure, unsure – whoever will be sure, wrong – later will be right or wrong. And the metal plate hotter than hot, the ball of fire. The earth enclosed, the intrepid sphere.30

“What could be written”: Bolaño’s 2666 It is a curious bibliographical coincidence that the regime Brandão had so deftly satirized and wryly criticized and out of which he wrote, was largely similar to the excesses and incidents Roberto Bolaño (195329 30

Ibid., 292. Ibid., 305.

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2003) witnessed very early on in his life and chose, in fact, to flee from more than once. Bolaño’s parents left their native Chile in 1968 for Mexico, the year of the massacre of hundreds of protesting students on Tlatelolco Plaza. In 1973, aged nineteen and then an avowed Trostkyite and literary provocateur, Bolaño decided to journey back to Chile, thus witnessing how General Augusto Pinochet had overthrown the democratically elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende. Bolaño got caught up in the anti-Pinochet opposition, and within weeks after the coup he was himself arrested, mistaken for being a foreign terrorist because of his acquired Mexican accent, and expelled from the country, to go on to live in Mexico and later Spain. “I had lost a country / but won a dream / Nothing else mattered”,31 he writes in the title poem of The Romantic Dogs, the first volume of his poetry published in English. However, similarly to so many other literary exiles, it was in his fiction that Bolaño kept inhabiting the two spaces of his youth: the beautifully drawn scene of The Savage Detectives (1998) is Mexico City in the 1970s, Amulet (1999) revisits the 1968 army raid, while Distant Star (1996) and By Night in Chile (2000) both deal with the aftermath of the Pinochet regime, its corruption of both morale and culture. 2666, then, is a posthumously published, 900-page massive text combining the two chief concerns in what many have regarded Bolaño’s chief and master statement. If the numerology of Brandão’s title is in no need of further elucidation, it is worth stating that nowhere in 2666 does the particular numeral appear, and one needs to look into the 1999 novella Amulet for an explanation of sorts: Then we walked down the Avenida Guerrero; they weren’t stepping so lightly any more, and I wasn’t feeling too enthusiastic either. Guerrero, at that time of night, is more like a cemetery than an avenue, not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else. 32

31

Roberto Bolaño, The Romantic Dogs, trans. Laura Healy, London: New Directions, 2008, 7. 32 Roberto Bolaño, Amulet, trans. Chris Andrews, New York: Penguin Books, 2006, 86.

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2666, in a sense, is an obverse endeavour: it strives to remember one particular thing, and in so doing recalls everything else. It is a grand recapitulation of the author’s main concerns and motifs in its preoccupation with parallel lives and secret histories. Largely written after “9/11”, the novel manifests a new emphasis on the dangerousness of the modern world. In the poetic universe of 2666, the very word “civilization” seems somehow inappropriate – one character wonders, “Isn’t reality an insatiable AIDS-riddled whore?”33 The novel consists of five very different sections. Each could be treated as a discrete novella, were it not for a slow accumulation of cross references. Despite Bolaño’s posthumous instructions for them to be published separately, his family and executors demurred, choosing to publish the 900-page whole in one book. These parts relate to one another, not as instalments or sequels but, as critic Adam Kirsch has put it, “rather as five planets orbiting the same sun”.34 With their very different stories and settings, they seem to describe a single plummeting arc: the trajectory of a universe on the verge of apocalypse. 2666 thematizes its own sheer bulk and torrential quality as not only an aesthetic concern, but also an ideological preoccupation: He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard et Pécuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies them all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench. 35

33

Bolaño, 2666, 588. Adam Kirsch, “Slouching toward Santa Teresa: Roberto Bolaño’s Utterly Strange Masterpiece”, Slate Magazine (November 2008): http://www.slate.com/articles/ arts/books/2008/11/slouching_towards_santa_teresa.single.html (accessed 8 December 2012). 35 Bolaño, 2666, 227. 34

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The divergent plots of 2666 threaten never to converge but its ugly lyricism keeps up the engagement, alternating between brisk vignettes and passages of meandering opulence. While the ironic juxtaposition of journalistic terseness and typographical exuberance was the hallmark of Brandão’s Zero, Bolaño’s 2666 is studded with aphorisms, many of them calculated to invite passionate disagreement, and cluttered with deranged similes, many of them meant to defy and ridicule rational linkage: “The sky, at sunset, looked like a carnivorous flower”; or a university is “like a cemetery that suddenly begins to think, in vain”.36 Every now and then a character might start to discuss the problems of revelation and concealment in semblances and metaphors – the doubt raising issue of representation as such. Here is a metaphorical reflection on the nature of metaphor itself, a meta-metaphorical passage: Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming. In that sense a metaphor is like a life jacket. And remember, there are life jackets that float and others that sink to the bottom like lead. Best not to forget it. 37

2666 is not unique in blurring the margins between realism and fantasy, between documentary and invention; its boldness lies in how it kicks away the divide between playfulness and seriousness. At its best, 2666 inhabits what Bolaño calls “the territory of risk” – it takes us to places we might not wish to go. Bolaño’s big risk was turning his back on being merely a Latin American. After he won the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives, he commented that “a writer’s homeland is ... his tongue”. But, characteristically, he then undercut this, saying that sometimes “a writer’s only homeland is ... his courage”. This statement rings true particularly in relation to 2666. And Bolaño, ever ready with a prank, could not help adding: “I feel like Pinocchio.”38 However, just as in Brandão’s case, his concern with the medium of words as the all-too easily misused means for communicating the horrors of our age is far from jocose. Repeatedly, the question of writability and readability of 36

Ibid., 129, 185. Ibid., 153. 38 Quoted in Hitchings, “The Mystery Man” (as in n.14). 37

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the trials and tribulations of individual or collective histories is raised, like, for instance, in the connection with American slaves or the Paris Commune: In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of the society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible.39

The core of 2666, its absent centre, the blinding sun around which the planets of the various stories orbit, is precisely “an illegible event” to which Bolaño seeks to respond with his unwritable statement: the epidemic of female homicides in the area of Ciudad Juárez – disguised in 2666 as Santa Teresa – where, since 1993, hundreds of women have disappeared, sometimes to resurface as gruesomely violated corpses, sometimes without a trace, and the police and local authorities have seemed unable or unwilling to do much about it – this to the present day, with the figure meanwhile reaching horrendous heights above a thousand. So after “The Part about the Critics”, “The Part about Amalfitano”, and “The Part about Fate”, “The Part about the Crimes” enters the stage, altering it for good (and for bad):

39

Bolaño, 2666, 267 (my emphasis).

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The girl’s body turned up in a vacant lot in Colonia Las Flores .... This happened in January 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted. But it’s likely there had been other deaths before. The name of the first victim was Esperanza Gómez Saldaña and she was thirteen.40 Midway through February, in an alley in the center of the city, some garbagemen found another dead woman. She was about thirty and dressed in a black skirt and low-cut white blouse. She had been stabbed to death, although contusions from multiple blows were visible about her face and abdomen. 41 In the middle of November the body of another dead woman was discovered in the Podesta ravine. She had multiple fractures of the skull, with loss of brain matter. Some marks on the body indicated that she had put up a struggle. She was found with her pants down around her knees, by which it was assumed that she’d been raped, although after a vaginal swab was taken this hypothesis was discarded.42 The last case of 1997 was fairly similar to the second to last, except that the bag containing the body wasn’t found on the western edge of the city, but on the eastern edge, by the dirt road .... The victim, according to the medical examiners, had been dead for a long time. She was about nineteen, five foot two and a half or three. She was naked, but a pair of good-quality leather high heels were found in the bag, which led the police to think she might be a whore. 43

What makes Bolaño’s narration of these crimes – spanning almost 300 pages – so characteristic, and transforms it from popular truecrime writing to fiction addressing issues of the representability of violence, is his utter refusal to fantasize, to imagine his way into the murders. He rejects the writer’s key privilege of fantasy, allowing him to go wherever he pleases – into the mind of the victim as she suffers or of the killer as he kills – preferring on the contrary the eeriness of complete exteriority, the deadening and deadened affect of relentless cataloguing of deaths. The violence becomes simultaneously banal and unbearable in its sheer reiteration; the individuality of the 40

Ibid., 353. Ibid., 355. 42 Ibid., 524-25. 43 Ibid., 633. 41

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suffering of each and every victim levelled down to the lowest common denominator of highly restricted forensic terminology. Repetition, again, opens up a space of hollowness in which words like “raped”, “strangled”, “bruised”, “mutilated” soon reach the point of their semantic emptying. Yet in this way, Bolaño succeeds in restoring to physical violence something of its genuine evil and horrid banality. Time and again, Bolaño hints that what is happening in Santa Teresa is a symptom of a universal derangement in which hidden dimensions of reality are coming to light. Hence, much of the activity of 2666 takes place not along the ordinary novelistic axes of plot and character but on the poetic, even mystical planes of symbol and metaphor. It is in Bolaño’s allusions and unexplained coincidences, in his characters’ frequent, vividly disturbing dreams, in the mad recitations of criminals and preachers and witches, in its deranged metaphors, that the real story of 2666 gets told. The relentless gratuitousness of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which builds into something overwhelming that impacts all the harder because its arrival cannot be seen: You have to listen to women. You should never ignore a woman’s fears .... No one pays attention to these killings, but the secret of the world is hidden in them. 44

Conclusion: the language of violence What has hopefully emerged from the present discussion is that, in thematizing the problems entailed in writing the unwritten and possibly the unwritable, and in calling attention to the medium in which any such writing must take place, the literary treatment of notions of fear and fantasy, as presented in the case studies provided, offers a critical and active reflection on historical, social and scientific issues, while aesthetically exposing and problematizing conceptions and practices of violence. This is also the reason why the present essay has opted for a chiefly literary analysis: a political scientific or historiographical investigation would easily find both Brandão’s and Bolaño’s accounts riddled with personal bias and faulty omissions – the most marked one (strangely enough, in both cases) being the omission of the role of the CIA in the putsch of 1964, the complicity of American democracy in 44

Ibid., 348.

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the ensuing Brazilian dictatorship, in Brandão’s text; and in Bolaño’s text, the criminal history of the USA entanglement in the Mexican drug trade and its boost of the local cartels. However, both Brandão and Bolaño seem to have chosen the challenge of tackling, on the basis of an authentically experienced particular, something of such a global concern as Freud’s investigations into the composition of the ego or Sontag’s explorations of image, photography and pain: the roots of human aggression and the problematic nature of its representation. For literature is representation – whichever fear its reality may induce in its perceiver is “fantasmatic”, since it is mediated through language. Zero’s achievement lies in its foregrounding of how stateorchestrated terror and dictatorship, however real, still depends on language for its dissemination and mass fear-inducement. And it is Brandão’s redeployment of the language of propaganda in the Foucauldian “tropological space” of literature that unmasks the violence inherent in the state practices this ideology seeks to vindicate. Bolaño’s 2666 gives the language of scientific, forensic discourse the literary twist by casting it in the form of a (seemingly endless) inventory. The reiteration of the graphic violence entailed in every single individual suffering in the list renders it simultaneously banal and unbearable. Repetition, as in Brandão’s text, opens up a space of hollowness in which language soon reaches the point of its semantic emptying. Thus, Bolaño’s and Brandão’s fantasmatic, literary renditions of the real, and the fearful physical violence of their depicted realities imbue it with something of its genuine evil and horrid banality. Both Brandão and Bolaño take one step further beyond the lesson taught by avant-garde that the defining property of major new art is its ugliness, while only minor art is perceived as beautiful, reflecting back to its viewer the preconceived notion of what beauty is or should be. Ugliness, shapelessness and repulsiveness, both Brandão’s and Bolaño’s texts seem to suggest, are no longer the concern of novelty, but the very condition of writing that takes its task seriously.

MEXICO’S FEARSCAPES: WHERE FANTASY PERSONAS ENGAGE IN CITIZENSHIP EDITH BELTRÁN This article focuses on demonstrating how in a “fear culture” in the twenty-first century the virtual sphere can function as a “fearscape” which, in certain contexts, is the only realm where political and social identities can be enacted. First, I will concentrate on how a culture of fear is defined and how the public sphere is eroded. Secondly, I will argue that the Internet provides a virtual space where a fearless reality is constructed and then projected onto the public space, thus transforming it. Here I will first discuss the particularity of the creation of fantasy personas (e.g. avatars or usernames), and then I will explore the comment section of El Blog del Narco, which functions as a performance space that enables individuals to work through the experience, operating as what I call a fearscape, where individuals, through perceived anonymity, act and re-enact a political and social identity. Thirdly, I will show that when the fearscape is studied as performance, it can be examined and researched with regards to its impact on the public sphere.

In past cultures of fear, it has only been after the bringing down of the agents of fear, such as those promoted by authoritarian regimes, that societies which have dealt with trauma were able to reconstruct themselves and regain a collective identity, either through the creation of archives seeking accountability or by holding trials on the fear bringers.1 Examples are the Nuremberg trials (1945-1946), Argentina’s Truth Trials (1985-present) and the National Commission after its military dictatorship (1976-1983), and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1995-present), which staged public hearings post-Apartheid (1948-1994). As French philosopher Jean 1

I would like to thank Ksenija Bilbija, David Korfhagen, the 2011 Hermes Symposium organizers and attendees; Global Studies and the Centre for Latin American, Caribbean and Iberian Studies of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; the World Literature/s Mellon Workshop, and the editors of this volume for their valuable comments and support, all shortcomings are my own.

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Baudrillard states, the act of resistance works as a positive “no”. The act is not shaped into a social identity but it is a reaction towards a specific event.2 The reconstruction of collective identities starts only after the authoritarian regime is brought down. Today, however, public space is not the only place where collective identities are enacted. The twenty-first century offers the virtual sphere, which, according to idealistic cyber-utopian John Perry Barlow in his “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996), offers individuals a unique place of freedom of expression. Like other cyber-utopians,3 he believes the Internet presents a “world where anyone, anywhere, may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity”.4 In such a place the individuals may enact their fantasies and raise their voices and opinions without fear of repression. As he states: I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Though the optimistic ideas from the techno-utopians might be farfetched, the virtual sphere does offer a new and different space where social interactions occur. In this essay, I focus on a particular and current fear culture: Mexico, and a virtual space I term as the “fearscape”. I shall argue that a fearscape is different from the virtual sphere, for in it there is a usage of the virtual space to create a political and social identity which cannot be constructed in the public sphere. In order to justify this, first, I will concentrate on how a fear culture is defined and how the public sphere is eroded in it and therefore gives the conditions to create a fearscape. Secondly, I shall argue that certain spaces of the 2

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, London and New York: Verso, 1993. 3 See Peter Shane, Democracy Online: The Prospects for Political Renewal through the Internet, New York and London: Routledge, 2004; James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, Cambridge, MA: Westview Press, 2004; or the website for e-democracy.org. 4 John Perry Barlow, “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, 1996: https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html (accessed 22 March 2011).

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Internet provide a virtual space where a fearless reality is constructed and then projected onto the public sphere, thus transforming social identity. Thirdly, I will discuss the fearscape as performance and propose a theoretical structure for analysing its impact on the public sphere. Fear culture – context of the “fearscape” During the past seven years, Mexican social reality has changed greatly: both a culture of fear and social reality of fear5 have permeated everyday life, which traditionally has heavily relied on open and public spaces to enact social identity. On 11 December 2006, the government claimed to start a battle against organized crime and has bellicosely named the ground of its internal, national politics as a “war on criminality”.6 This symbolic terminology and the rhetoric of the sublimation of language through war euphemisms numb the perception of atrocities committed by the state. For example, the usage of these terms implicitly denies the human rights abuse by deeming all the victims of state as “criminals”.7 The usage of this term in official discourses and mainstream media now corresponds to anyone caught or killed by the police or the military.8 Accordingly, the media maintains that citizens or children are seldom affected in this war. However, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch document that in the past six years (2006-2012) 63 human rights defenders have been killed9 as well as over 4,000 children.10 These 5

Whereas a culture of fear refers to the rhetoric the government uses in order to manipulate the population for a particular political gain, the social reality of fear refers to the acts of extreme violence and surveillance conducted by the military, the police, and the organized crime on the population in order to terrorize them. 6 This war is also referred to as the war on drugs or the drug war. 7 This persecution of the population, especially left-wing activists and indigenous populations under the guise of attacking criminals from the “drug war”, has been heavily documented. See Peter Watt and Roberto Zepeda, Drug War Mexico: Politics, Neoliberalism and Violence in the New Narcoeconomy, London and New York: Zed Books, 2012, 29-38; Diego Enrique Osorno, El cártel de Sinaloa: Una historia del uso político del narco, Mexico City: Grijalbo, 2010, 77; or any information on Operation Condor. 8 “The Female Journalists of Juarez”, Vice News, 2012: www.vice.com/vice-news/ the-female-journalists-of-juarez (accessed 12 June 2012). 9 Tim Wilson, “Mexico Violence Threatens all Sectors of Civil Society”, Insight, 1 January 2012: insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/2023-mexico-violencethreatens-all-sectors-of-civil-society (accessed 23 May 2012).

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organizations have spoken out about abuses committed by the Mexican military. Such categorical substitution of the presumed activity for the person justifies their murder in the view of the state. For in this rhetoric it is the activity that is being destroyed, not the human being behind it. Alongside the sublimation of violent terminology, there is a high level of censorship in the media in conformity with the state backed regulation “Acuerdo para la Cobertura Informativa de la Violencia”.11 In addition to this law, journalists report being under a two-headed master, the government and the drug lords,12 which indicate what or how they can report. This is no empty threat: by June 2013, ninetynine journalists had been killed in the last seven years and seventeen more have disappeared for publishing information related to the drug lords or abuses by the military or police.13 Michael O’Connor, who has been registering how attacks against news reporters have increased in recent years, states that organized crime controls the local press.14 Most of the drug-related events are not even accounted for in the media. A reality where politics of fear15 operate has been created by the environment composed of the violent terminology of the official discourse and censorship in the media, together with dead bodies, many subjected to torture, that show up every day on the streets or hanging from bridges, as well as numerous incidents of kidnappings,

10

Alejandro Cruz, “CDH: 4 mil niños muertos, saldo de la guerra al narco”, Periódico La Jornada (25 November 2011), 39. 11 “Acuerdo para la Cobertura Informativa de la Violencia”, Milenio, 2011: http://www.milenio.com/ (accessed 2 September 2012). 12 Narcotraffic organizations are the illegal worldwide industry that consists in the harvesting, manufacture, distribution, and commercialization of illegal drugs. The narco is the person who deals with illegal narcotics, either in its production, distribution, payment collections, and/or enactment of retributions. A drug lord would be defined as the leader of one of such organizations. 13 “List of Journalists Killed in Mexico”, Wikipedia, 27 October 2013: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_journalists_killed_in_the_Mexican_Drug_War (accessed 29 October 2013). 14 Michael O’Connor, “Corresponsales del infierno: la mutación del periodismo ante la violencia narco”, MZA Blog, 21 May 2011: http://mzablog.wordpress.com/2011/05/ 21/corresponsales-del-infierno-la-mutacion-del-periodismo-ante-la-violencia-narco/ (accessed 6 October 2011). 15 David L. Altheide, “The Social Reality of Fear”, in Terrorism and the Politics of Fear, Banham, NY, Toronto and Oxford: Altamira Press, 2006, 16.

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car bombs, explosions, fires, and roadblocks on a daily basis.16 The military, the local and the federal government, as well as the drug lords, have taken the streets and have made citizens withdraw into private spheres. Therefore, participation in the public space has been severely limited, ranging from brief excursions to get basic supplies to short excursions during the daylight hours for brief leisure activities. It is known that any congregation in the public space becomes a target and that the very real possibility of being the victim of an attack restricts much of the movement in the public sphere. The selection of the victims varies, it can be based on their involvement in or closeness to social movements, government, journalism, or criminal activities; their income can also make them targets for kidnapping, robbing, or extortion; their age, gender, or nationality can make them subject to rape, human trafficking or extortion; or they can even be selected by mere chance. This makes individuals become victims of fear for their bodies and possessions. The sociologist Norbert Lechner, who studied post-authoritarian societies, defined fear “as the perception of a threat that is either real or imaginary”.17 This perception guides and constructs the spaces into which people feel safe to venture. This authoritarianism creates a “culture of fear” in the northern part of Mexico: the term, coined for Argentina by Guillermo O’Donnell, refers to the “everyday experience of human-rights abuse”18 which the population is subjected to by those in power. There is a feeling of distrust of both police and government among the majority of the population, and to a lesser degree of the military. The line between criminal violence and state violence is quite thin in Mexico, and to the average citizen both are the same.19 What happens, according to 16

According to CIDAC, from 2006 to August 2012, in Mexico there have been 90,000 deaths related to these types of homicides and 300,000 forced disappearances. David Martínez, “300 mil desaparecidos y 90 mil muertos en seis años de FCH”, Terra.com, 2012: http://noticias.terra.com.mx/mexico/seguridad/300-mil-desaparecidos-y-90-milmuertos-en-seis-anos-defch,297cb25cb0069310VgnVCM20000099cceb0aRCRD.html (accessed 28 August 2012). 17 Norbert Lechner, “Some People Die of Fear: Fear as a Political Problem”, in Fear at the Edge: State Terror and Resistance in Latin America, eds Juan E. Corradi, Patricia Weiss Fagen, and Manuel Antonio Garretón, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 26. 18 Guillermo O’Donnell, “La cosecha del miedo”, Nexos, VI/6 (1 January 1983): http://www.nexos.com.mx/?p=4147 (accessed 30 August 2012). 19 For specific examples of collusion in corruption and the involvement of the state and the criminal gangs in recent years, see Karin Brulliard, “In Tale of Millionaire

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Lechner, is that as the streets become unsafe, they are transformed into a physical barrier that immobilizes communication and thereby fragments the collective. This “culture of fear” thereby affects a society, rendering it with a feeling of powerlessness and imprisonment.20 The government has tried to eradicate the discourse of doubt from the public opinion claiming the only option is the war on drugs and the use of the Mexican army in the streets, who can detain anyone deemed suspicious. Through censorship in the media and similar laws to that effect, there is an attempt to create an ideology which is aimed at eliminating all opposition, in addition to the rhetoric of war. This is what British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas defines as a “Fascist State of Mind”,21 and rarely are other solutions discussed publicly or in the media. Lechner states that the most serious political effect of the culture of fear, which the authoritarian aggression creates, is “the erosion of collective identities”.22 First of all, the censorship to which the media is subjected limits the information available to the people; secondly, the unfeasibility of social gatherings isolates the individual; and lastly, the self-regulatory censorship of personal opinions and dissidence makes citizens distrustful and paranoid. All of these issues create an erosion of the social and political identities which define the Drug Suspect, Mexicans Judge Government Guilty”, Washington Post, 29 July 2007: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/28/AR2007072801261. html (accessed 16 April 2012); Thomas A. Constantine, “DEA Congressional Testimony”, 1997: http://www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/cngrtest/ct970225.htm (accessed 16 April 2012); Tony Gaza, “Mexican Army Major Arrested for Assisting Drug Trafficking Organizations”, Wikileaks, 2009: http://www.warmongersinc.net/files/ mexican-army-major-arrested-for-assisting-drug-trafficking-organizations/ (accessed 16 April 2012); Carlos Fazio, “Mexico: The Narco General Case”, Transnational Institute, 1997: http://www.tni.org/article/mexico-narco-general-case (accessed 16 April 2012); John Burnett, Marisa Peñaloza and Robert Benincasa, “Mexico Seems to Favor Sinaloa Cartel in Drug War”, National Public Radio, 2010: http://www. npr.org/2010/05/19/126906809/mexico-seems-to-favor-sinaloa-cartel-in-drug-war (accessed 16 April 2012); Bruce Livesey, “Drug War or Drug Deal? Mexico’s Biggest Cartel Banks on Powerful Friends”, Montreal Gazette, 2010: http://embamex. sre.gob.mx/canada/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=363:drug-war-ordrug-deal-the-montreal-gazette&catid=41:lunes-24-mayo-2010&Itemid=61 (accessed 16 April 2012). 20 Lechner, “Some People Die of Fear”, 29. 21 Christopher Bollas, “The Fascist State of Mind”, in Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self-Experience, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 200-201. 22 Lechner, “Some People Die of Fear”, 32.

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individual in the participative social arena. He adds that “the distance between one’s own reality and the official version, the difference between self-value and social value, is such that the individuals are unable to recognize themselves in collective referents”.23 A result of the culture of fear is the erosion of public spheres and, in consequence, the corruption of the idea of the individual as a part of the collective. Patricia Weiss Fagen, who works with reconstruction and post-conflict reintegration in Latin America, indicates that as people are drawn to the private sphere social interactions become more limited, newcomers are distrusted, and personal achievements are affected. In addition, as people retract to the private sphere, the impossibility of real social change increases, “as people turn inward, there is less contact or communication among different social sectors, fewer possibilities for collective action, and greater personal frustration”.24 However, past fear societies did not have what the twentyfirst century offers us: the virtual space. Recently, the importance of virtual space and social networking was again brought to our attention by the civil uprising in Egypt in January 2011, where Twitter and Facebook were used to unite and coordinate protests, leading to the government taking down the Internet on January 26 in an attempt to quell the rebellion. It is, thus, clear that the Internet provides a real space of interaction which can be projected onto the social sphere and can have concrete consequences in transforming it. It has even been stated by many techno-utopians that, basically, as quoted by Evgeny Morozov, in “The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?”: “if you have enough connectivity and devices, democracy is almost inevitable.”25 Nonetheless, it must be noted that communication and interaction in these virtual spaces are generated by real individuals who project their bodies onto fantasy personas (avatars) who engage in the virtual world. The interaction in these spaces is a projection of the individual who will be held accountable for his or her actions. Morozov has been documenting Internet use in political situations and demythifying 23

Ibid., 30. Patricia Weiss Fagen, “Repression and State Security”, in Fear at the Edge, 67. 25 Evgeny Morozov, “The Internet in Society: Empowering or Censoring Citizens?”, RSA Org, 14 March 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk8x3V-sUgU (accessed 22 March 2011). 24

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cyber-utopians by pointing out, among other arguments, that the Internet allowed authoritarian states to use social networking to detect and detain the participants of the opposition. The “fearscape” It is not the purpose of this essay to argue for or against anonymity on the web. However, related literature states that anonymity in communication aids minorities,26 promotes active involvement,27 and allows individuals to reduce behavioural constraints.28 In the case of Mexico, alleged anonymity and the virtual space enable individuals to “work through” the trauma of the experience of living in fear. And the fearscape is the part of the virtual sphere that functions as a performance space where individuals, through perceived anonymity, act and re-enact a social and political identity. While some state laws have prohibited communication about drug lord-related violence through social media, calling it an act of terrorism and sabotage,29 authorities have imprisoned people for “spreading rumors” that cause “fear”.30 The importance of the virtual sphere in Mexico has been documented in the international media. For example, the New York Times analysed how social networks and other similar virtual media in Mexico are used for local survival. Quoted in this report, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, who researches how such environments are used for civic engagement and creative collaboration, stated that “social media is filling the gap left by the press [... given that] in different regions of Mexico, both the state and the press are weak, while organized crime is becoming stronger and, 26

Michael A. Froomkin, “Flood Control on the Information Ocean: Living with Anonymity, Digital Cash, and Distributed Databases”, Journal of Law and Commerce, II/15 (1996), 395-96. 27 V.J. Siegel, S. Kiesler Dubrovsky and T.W. McGuire, “Group Processes in Computer-mediated Communication”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 37 (June 1986), 157-87. 28 L.M. Jessup, T. Connolly and J. Galegher, “The Effects of Anonymity on GDSS Group Process in Automated Group Problem-solving”, MIS Quarterly, III/14 (December 1990), 312-21. 29 According to articles 311 and 314 of the present Penal Code of the State of Veracruz: Código Penal para el Estado Libre y Soberano de Veracruz de Ignacio de la Llave, Veracruz: Gaceta Oficial, 2005. 30 “Mexico: Two Face 30 Years in Prison for Tweets”, Huffington Post, 9 April 2011: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/04/gilberto-martinez-vera-maria-de-jesus-bravo -pagola-twitter_n_948602.html (accessed 24 September 2011).

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in some places, replacing the state”.31 Therefore Mexico’s citizens have to rely on social media for trustworthy information on how to navigate daily life through secure routes. According to the study made by the Mexican newspaper El Universal, “Los mexicanos en la red”, from 2006 to 2011 the number of Internet users in Mexico went from 20.2 million to 40.6 million; furthermore, according to that study, 77 % of the time spent on the Internet is used to access social media.32 In 2011 it was reported that “Twitter has more than four million users in Mexico” and 95 % of the people with regular Internet access had profiles on Facebook.33 Mexicans use these social media to communicate hazards almost instantaneously; as O’Connor claims, “people’s lives are saved with Twitter”.34 But as I mentioned previously, not all virtual space is the fearscape. The fearscape provides a space for the development of social and political identity going beyond simply offering information about the censored reality. The “fearscape” – elements I focus this study on El Blog del Narco as an exemplary case of a fearscape since, during its peak, it had more readers than the most important printed newspapers in Mexico (Reforma, El Norte, etc.), and frequent updates, more than six a day on average. It was created in March 2010, administered by an individual who remained anonymous until recently.35 The blog functioned as a type of news outlet created by anonymous contributions, and had an uncensored comment section where anyone could post with optional anonymity. This blog posted information, photographs, and videos of the violent events related to the Mexican drug war that were not usually shown in any other outlet; in late July 2011 the option of anonymous comments was removed 31

Damien Cave, “Mexico Turns to Social Media for Information and Survival”, originally published in the New York Times, republished on Bordelandbeat.com, 21 September 2011: http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2011/09/mexico-turns-to-socialmedia-for.html#more (accessed 24 September 2011). 32 “Los Mexicanos en la Red”, El Universal, 18 May 2012: http://www.el universal.com.mx/graficos/graficosanimados12/EU_mexicanos_red/ (accessed 18 May 2012). 33 Cave, “Mexico Turns to Social Media”. 34 O’Connor, “Corresponsales del infierno”. 35 One of the alleged administrators of the blog came forward in an interview at the same time of the publication their book, Dying for the Truth: Undercover inside Mexico’s Violent Drug War by the Fugitive Reporters of Blog del Narco, Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2013.

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and in 2013 the blog ceased to update posts. I focus this study on the interactions that occurred in the months immediately preceding and following the change in the comment section, specifically from March to late September 2011. An important element of the fearscape is its perceived anonymity. In El Blog del Narco, after July 2011, the comment section was linked to a Facebook or Gmail account, which associated the user to his or her non-virtual life identity, and this modified the way users interacted (a point which will be discussed later). At the same time, the newspaper Milenio reported that the United States’ Homeland Security had authorized the NOC (National Operations Centre) to place Mexican citizens under surveillance.36 The NOC would gather their browsing information from Internet searches in order to create profiles by which to identify them (known as Personally Identifiable Information). Searches about certain key topics or words would produce profiles of people who would be treated as suspects of terrorism and drug dealing.37 El Blog del Narco had a Facebook group page, where the same posts were updated via that platform. However, Facebook poses a greater threat than a blog in the sense that it gives visibility and identity to each individual that comments, making them easier targets. While the group had 6,534 followers by 19 March, the reactions to the posts in Facebook were quite limited. For example, after the execution in Acapulco of an unidentified woman and her child on 17 March, 2011, there were 1,279 comments in El Blog del Narco; however, only three comments were made on the Facebook page. The blog’s comment section allowed the individuals greater freedom to exercise different fantasy personas (or masks) in their reaction to the event by not limiting each individual to a single comment identity. Each time a comment was posted, people were given a choice whether to use any name or link to an identification site (such as an e-mail, Facebook profile, Twitter) or remain anonymous. Most of the time, authorship declined in favour of anonymity. For example, in a post on 17 March 36

Homeland Security, “Privacy Impact Assessment Office of Operations Coordination and Planning Publicly Available Social Media Monitoring and Situational Awareness Initiative Update”, 6 January 2011: http://www.dhs. gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_pia_ops_publiclyavailablesocialmedia_update.pdf (accessed 28 August 2011). 37 Víctor Hugo Michel, “EU recopila datos privados en México”, Milenio.com, 2011: http://monterrey.milenio.com/cdb/doc/impreso/8995197 (accessed 20 June 2011).

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2011, about the shooting of Ltn. Víctor Manuel Gil and his companion, which shows the image of the two bodies mutilated by bullets, there were 1,620 reactions (by 19 March). The Facebook post, however, only had four “likes” and five comments (by 19 March). It is noteworthy that the Facebook group was taken down in March 2011 after operating for only about six months. Second, the users commenting in the blog realized that the information had a direct connection to themselves, be it personal or local. After the involvement of NOC and the new requirements for identifying users who posted comments on the blog, the contributions diminished greatly (from 2000+ a day to about 100). Also, the comments on El Blog del Narco warned users about the monitoring and the possibility of becoming targets. Moreover, users described methodologies of surveillance, for example, in the comments on “Ejecutan a mujer policía en Chihuahua” on 23 July 2011,38 users warned other users of a tactic to obtain personal information: first, certain regular avatars or user names were cloned; second, these cloned avatars would offer pornographic or extremely graphic pictures in order to lure users to have a personal conversation through their MSN (a chat network); third, this way, the cloned avatars would extract personal information from the users. On 15 September, two mangled and disembowelled bodies were found hanging from a bridge next to a sign that read in Spanish: This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet. You better [expletive] pay attention. I’m about to get you. 39

If we assume that it is the fear of bodily harm that drives the individuals to these comment sections, the creation of a fantasy persona who discusses and reacts to the national reality in the comment section is then the result of embodied practice. On 21 September, El Blog del Narco then eliminated the comment section for a couple of months and deleted old posts, comments, forums,

38

“Ejecutan a mujer policía en Chihuahua”, El Blog del Narco, 23 July 2011: http://www.blogdelnarco.com/2011/07/ejecutan-mujer-policia-en-ciudad-juarez.html #more (accessed 24 July 2011). 39 Mariano Castillo, “Bodies Hanging from Bridge in Mexico Are Warning to Social Media Users”, CNN, 15 September 2011: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/ americas/09/14/mexico.violence/index.html?&hpt=hp_c1 (accessed 25 September 2011).

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pictures and videos. These actions forced users to mostly migrate to other fearscapes.40 Third, it is perceived as a trusted or semi trusted source of information, or at least it is perceived that the information offered there is less censored than in the media, which are extremely controlled and limited in the material they cover. El Blog del Narco offered additional news or details to the people. For example, in the post mentioned earlier about the executed four-year-old on 17 March 2011, El Blog del Narco showed the photograph of the bloodied girl killed by two shots to the head, which was barely mentioned in the media, and included the message that was left with the bodies, which had no mention at all in the media. On 2 March 2012, El Blog del Narco turned two years old. The majority of the comments made explicit remarks on the important activity the blog was conducting in relation to sharing information and fighting the censorship of the media, though other comments discussed the changes that the blog had made in the past. There was a general perception that this kind of virtual space was the only one that offered real and vital information about what was occurring in Mexico. Studying the “fearscape” In addition to daily survival, the anonymity in the fearscape creates a realm where political identities are enacted. This interaction can be studied as performance. According to the sociologist Erving Goffman, a performance is any action or activity on a given occasion by a participant that influences other participants.41 Regarding the definition of “occasion”, Adriene Jenik has challenged many assumptions on how a performance is enacted and who its performers are. Her “desktop theatre” is played by avatars on a computer screen controlled by users in different parts of the world.42 She proved that performance can exist even when separated from the body, the voice, and shared space. Another aspect of performance that we must 40

Such as websites: Narcotráfico en México, http://narcotraficoenmexico. blogspot.com (accessed 9 October 2012); Tierra del Narco, http://www.tierradel narco.com.mx (accessed 6 September 2012); Narco Tijuana, http://narcotijuana. wordpress.com/ (accessed 27 February 2010), etc. 41 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959, 15. 42 Adriene Jenik, “Desktop Theatre”, Adrienejenik.net, 2006: http://www.adrienejenik. net/desktoptheater.html (accessed 30 August 2011).

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recognize is that this influence can only be measured in its aftermath.43 That is, the impact of such interactions will be reflected in non-virtual life only after the event has taken place. This type of comment-interaction in a fearscape is a performance, triggered by an event and executed by individuals engaging in a determined space and time. The space of action is no longer the public space. The virtual space gives the appearance of a safe area where the bodies are safe from violence through the creation of their fantasy personas, at the same time that they are given the opportunity to perform identities through the perceived anonymity that the collective format offers. It is important to note five levels of representation of the event. The first level is the event per se: it can be the public act of violence, as in the cases already mentioned, or an act of simultaneous communication – it is the moment when the violence is executed and thereby falls under a public gaze. For example, the dismembered bodies hanging from the bridge or the message asking the army to join forces with Carteles Unidos, sent simultaneously to the President of Mexico, in the forms of billboards (narcomantas) placed in several states of the country, and to El Blog del Narco. The second level of representation is the documentation of the event, the photographs or videos – because of the nature of the documents being shown on the blog it is clear that the sources derive from various spaces of action. Some show civil participation or recordings of the event by bystanders or witnesses, either civilians who happened to be at that space in that time and had a recording device, or news reporters leaking photographs to the site. However, the nature of other documents makes it clear that the participants in the event, the victimizers, are the ones documenting the event, such as any of the several videos of torture and dismemberment of men belonging to rival gangs, which most of the time include a message to the rival gangs.44 These types of documents show both the government, either the police or the army, and/or the drug lords as 43

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd edn, New York and London: Routledge, 2006, 258-59. 44 For example, this post collects twenty-two such videos corresponding to the first half of 2012: “Lista de Videos, Ejecuciones, Interrogatorios y Otros ...”, Mund0narco.com, 27 June 2012: http://www.mund0narco.com/2012/01/lista-devideos-ejecuciones.html (accessed 17 July 2012).

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participants in the violence. Due to the nature of the violent events, there have been no documents that come from the victims. The third level is codifying the document into the virtual sphere by sending it via email to the blog, which promised absolute anonymity. Thus, this third level engages the civilian in linking his or her particular reality to a wider audience – it links the individual to a community. The fourth level is the actual construction of the blog, which involves making the sent document anonymous, encrypting the source and posting it on the blog with a narrative. This level is intrinsically linked to the body of the blogger, who in order to perform this task must remain unidentified, and thus safe. The fifth level, which is the primary concern in this study, is the participation in the comment section which is triggered by all levels of the event. It involves a reaction to the events and a response that is determined in correlation to the time of the posted event. Because of mediated reality, many users do not identify the different levels of the event and may reply as if the actual participants of the first level were present in the fifth level. The vast majority of the comments appeared on the day the post was shown, with a notable reduction afterward. For example, the day the photograph of the executed child was released, there were almost 1,200 comments; a week later there were only 1,272 total comments (22 March 2011). That is, in the first hours the event triggered 94.3 % of the responses, and the percentage dwindled down to 5.7 % during the following eight days. The fifth level – the “fearscape” The comments, the fifth level of representation of the event, had two tendencies: one that directly responded to the event, which I will call “effect comments”; and the other that responded to the other commentators, which I will call “retort comments”. It must be clarified that sometimes these could be intertwined, resulting in a retort comment that was also an effect comment, or an effect comment that included a retort. I would like to point out two tendencies in the retort comment: the first one deals with the legitimacy of who is making the claim and the second one deals with the discussion of the event and the validity of the claims made by the initial effect comment, which will be discussed

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later. The retort comment is deeply rooted in the body of the user, who has a very concrete nationality and an identifiable age and gender. If there is any linguistic evidence that the author of the comment is not Mexican and makes any type of generalization regarding cultural behaviours or any sort of political commentary, he or she receives insults from the other commentators, immediately claiming that the individual has no place in the discussion either by clearly stating that or by merely insulting the individual’s nationality. A representative example could be an effect comment in the post “Sicarios causan terror en sala de cine” (15 August 2011), one of the seven retort comments directed to someone (Picolurio) who used the Argentinean expressions “vos” and “boludeces”: Stupid little Argentinean, first learn to write and do not stick your [expletive] where no one is calling you, take care of your problems with your dirty president who wants to get re-elected and your bunch of soccer players who are good for nothing, we do not ask for your opinion about our problems.45

This interaction first identifies the commentator by nationality according to his usage of expressions and words. Secondly, it does not remark on the actual nature of the comment (which encouraged the killing of all Mexicans) but on how a non-Mexican does not have the authority to criticize any particular event occurring in the country. Other retort comments were similar, identifying the nationality of commentators by their idiomatic expressions. As Searle states, “speaking a language is engaging in a rule-governed form of behavior”46 and thus these behaviours are linked to a geographical space which is rule-governed. The utterance forms part of a system where interactions are determined by social factors which can be displayed in a language. The possibility of identifying one’s

45

All comments from El Blog del Narco are my translations from Spanish, unless otherwise indicated. Original: “Pinche argentinito pendejo, primero enséñate a escribir y no metas tu culo, donde nadie te llama, ocúpate de tus problemas con su mugre presidentita que se quiere reelegir y con su bola de futbolistas que no sirven para nada, no te pedimos opinión de nuestros problemas.” “Sicarios causan terror en sala de cine”, El Blog del Narco, 15 August 2011: http://www.blogdelnarco.com/2011/ 08/sicarios-causan-terror-en-sala-de-cine.html#more (accessed 15 August 2011). 46 John R. Searle, Speech Acts, London: Cambridge University Press, 1969, 16.

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nationality (and, therefore, his or her social structure) would determine idiolects as a performance of speech-acts. Another factor which can be transmitted through language use is age. When the content of a comment is interpreted as indicative of the commentator’s youth (for instance, because of its simplistic or naïve nature), other commentators insult the commentator and then ignore him or her. A representative example is the gleeful effect comment by user Israel07_perez_sustaita on the post “Ejecutan en Guatemala al trovador Facundo Cabral” (9 July 2011).47 Israel07_perez_sustaita declares his lack of knowledge of the famous composer, singer, and political activist Facundo Cabral and diminishes the magnitude of the event. In addition, the user uses the style of writing employed by teenagers on chat and cell phone text messages: in this case, the substitution of k for qu and i for y,48 lack of punctuation, lack of originality in the insults, and description of the user’s own laughter. This comment was responded to with three retort comments which made explicit reference to the age of the user: “why do you even comment, teenager” (Arlene9);49 “you are an ignorant idiot who is happy to be an idiot, good luck with that, man, a great future awaits you” (XLV);50 and, “hope you are less than 15 years of age, or there is no way of helping you” (Sensipot).51 His lack of knowledge on the topic, the usage of the vocabulary, and the style of writing evidenced his age and he was shunned. On the other hand, most of the styles of the retort comments that deal with the insults are quite witty, following the rules of the albur, which is of a sexual nature, and relies heavily on language games that relate parts of the body to the nature of sexual power manifested through possession or penetration, which must show imagination and creativity in order to be effective. Because of space limitations I will 47

“Ejecutan en Guatemala al Trovador Facundo Cabral”, El Blog del Narco, 9 July 2011: http://archivo.blogdelnarco.com/ejecutan-en-guatemala-al-trovador-facundo-cabral/ (accessed 9 July 2011). 48 I copy the comment in Spanish to illustrate this aspect. He stated: “si que la verga se lo cargue jejejeje i no se ni kien mergas era este we pa ser sincero ni lo e odid ni nada m vale madre i ke ajajajaja ia ven paq se meten sino le atoran pts.” 49 “Y pa q jodidos te metes inche puberto.” Grammatical and spelling mistakes are left as written. 50 “Eres un Pendejo ignorante que se jacta de serlo, buena serte con eso wey!, lindo futuro te espera.” 51 “Ojalá tengas menos de 15 años, sino ni como ayudarte.”

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not discuss in detail the usage of this particular form of Mexican humour.52 For example, it is common to find utterances that cheer the drug lords, “arriba los narcos”, implying support for a certain drug lord, but the retort comment takes the other meaning of “arriba” to be “on top of” and then states “arriba de mi verga” or “on top of my penis”, which implies the opposite of an approval and presupposes that the retort commentator is male. This reaffirms what I said earlier, that fantasy personas embody a citizen, who has a very concrete nationality, age, and gender, which are identified in the language games. Studying the nature of the speech-acts and its relation to the usage of this particular type of Mexican humour in the construction of a political identity can be just as effective as the study of social interactions. The retort comments, which deal with the discussion of the event and the validity of the claims made by the initial effect comments, and the effect comments themselves, are similar in content. They might go from a simple reaction to the event in the form of an interjection, such as “Wow!”, to logical discussions about the national situation or descriptions of the context with concrete facts, such as names, dates and certain activities, or conjunctures of the type of involvement of the people in the event which may be answered by someone in the comments. Effect comments are usually in the range of support/lack of support, veracity verification (doubt), and personal experience. In the post “Video: Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación anuncia creación de Grupo Mata-Zetas” (28 July 2011), which had 3,239 comments by 29 July 2011, a video was sent by a group that stated that they were a new cartel that would execute everyone in the Zetas Cartel.53 They also stated that the police and the government were involved and pointed out which specific individuals cooperated with the drug lords. The video was only available online and was never 52

Many studies focus on its nature and several books and blogs have been published with examples and compilations of the albur. See Jorge Mejía Prieto, Albures y refranes de México, Mexico City: Panorama, 1985; Héctor J. Ayala Breves, “Apuntes sobre la ciudad de México: albures, imprecaciones y frases hechas”, Debats, 78 (2002), 87-91; Ivonne Szasz, “Masculine Identity and the Meanings of Sexuality: A Review of Research in Mexico”, Reproductive Health Matters, XII/6 (November 1998), 97-104. 53 “Video: Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación anuncia creación de Grupo MataZetas”, El Blog del Narco, 28 July 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= HAp1cymqDvg (accessed 29 July 2011).

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mentioned in the media. The majority of its comments were retort comments that adopted the nature of the albur, jokes, or social interaction. The effect comments related to this event varied in nature but essentially revolved around three key aspects: first, the effect comments that supported the new cartel; second, the effect comments that doubted the efficiency of this new cartel or its intentions, linked to a personal analysis of what was going on regarding corruption, economy and international participation in the crisis in Mexico; and third, effect comments that observed the personal reality of the user and their personal experience as a member of the society. First, the effect comments that supported the new cartel focused on celebrating the video and on their rejection of the Zetas Cartel. Eloquent comments such as the one by Jimmy_Neutrón_Robles were present: Really, it was time that someone came and took those dogs out of Veracruz. And though the ones who arrive are no charity nuns or do not do it for the social benefit, at least, they focus only on their business and do not mess with the people, so it is the lesser evil. And I say that that is good because those corrupt parasites who still feel as they own Veracruz will now, just like us, suffer sleepless nights and fear that a brother or a family member is kidnapped (levantar). They will be afraid and nervous every time they go out to the street and a truck blocks their way and that is the best thing, their peace is over. Good luck CDJ [the new cartel] and let’s hope that the remedy is not worse than the sickness ....54

This articulation received eight “likes”. The event sparked a reaction which in turn did an analytical study of the situation, thus expressing the prevailing fear in the public sphere while discussing how the new cartel might change the power structure in the city. The repeated use 54

“De verdad, ya era tiempo que alguien viniera a sacar a esos perros de veracruz. Y si bien los que llegan no son hermanitas de la caridad o no lo hacen por el bien social; al menos, se dedican solamente a su negocio y no se meten con el pueblo, asi de los males el menor. Y digo que que bueno porque esas lacras, parásitos, que aún se sienten dueños de Veracruz van a pasar ya como nosotros noches sin dormir, van a tener miedo de que les levanten a un hermano o algún familiar. Van a sentir miedo y nervios cada que salgan a la calle y se les cierre una camioneta y eso es lo mejor de todo esto que se les acabó la paz. Suerte CDJ, y esperemos que el remedio no termine saliendo más caro que la enfermedad ....”

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of “they will be afraid”, directed at the Zetas Cartel, projects the personal fear (the fear of Jimmy_Neutrón_Robles) and the shared fear (shared by the civil population subjected to powerlessness), and transforms it into a threat. Ironically, this threat is to replicate the same culture of fear, or expand the culture of fear to include the Zetas Cartel. The articulation denounces the abuses the population is subjected to (as many other comments do) and there is an underlying tone of distrust or hopelessness. Nonetheless, it also appropriates the violent nature of the narco-discourse in order to victimize the aggressors. It reproduces the vocabulary uttered in the videos and billboards created by the cartels which refer to a particular mode of extreme violence. For example, the usage of the term levantar for kidnapping is a word appropriated directly from the cartel vocabulary.55 Other effect comments discussed the economic and social condition of the nation. “Why not enlist in the army if they want to combat crime”, said user Pablo_Escobar, to which user Elver_Galarga replied that they will be paid nothing and that salaries should be increased for people in the army and navy to be equivalent to the ones received by the senators. The discussion of unfair wages in contrast to overpaid state workers is another element present in the discussions, which deliberated in detail on the nature of the insecurity that the forces are subjected to and how corruption and social injustice are the underlying cause of national problems. Increasingly, effect comments go beyond a direct response to the event to a further analytical discussion which tries to explain the essence of the problem. Such is the comment by Raul_Milan: Look, I know that the drug problem is a cancer. It will not end when an opposing group attacks another and they kill each other. There will always be someone else who wants to be a part of that luxurious movement. More than a bullet is needed to end the system rooted in our society, in ourselves. We need more civic courage to withstand this fight, like the guy says we have to denounce this, but even for that we need courage. We need to encourage moral values in our children,

55

A relevant report about the topic: “(U//LES) LulzSec Release: EPIC Language of the Cartels Narco Terminology Report”, Public Intelligence, 28 January 2011: http://publicintelligence.net/ules-lulzsec-release-epic-language-of-the-cartels-narcoterminology-report/ (accessed 29 October 2013).

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Analytical discussion centred on a socio-political and/or economic analysis was also used to encourage the population to denounce the criminals and start a change. The event triggers participatory discussion which forges a political identity where the official discourse is questioned57 and participants encourage each other to get more personally and locally involved in the situation. Effect comments which encourage denouncement also imply that a deep structural change is needed. In addition to these comments, sometimes precise data concerning names and addresses were given indicating which politicians or policemen were corrupted. This information is usually not given directly to the police or army or to the SEDENA (National Defence Office) for fear of retaliation; however, these facts are declared online in the comment sections for use by the population. For example, Informador12 gave the names of the three people depicted in the photo related to this event, and stated their names and addresses along with their links to different cartels. A retort comment by user Baphometh threatened the user by saying that he hopes he will be decapitated for giving out information that is only based on suppositions. However there was no link to the profile of Informador12, whose fantasy persona protected him or her. This effect comment emphasized the personal reality of the user and his or her experience as a member of the society. In several cases the user asked for help by stating a city or town where he or she was from and saying that it was occupied by a certain cartel, and asking the new cartel to exterminate them. However, others were clearer in their accusations or

56

“Miren yo se que el problema del narco trafico es un cancer no acabara por que un grupo contrario ataque a otro y se maten entre ellos siempre habra alguien mas que quiera ocupar un lugar en ese lujoso movimiento, se necesita mas que una bala para acabr con el sistema enraizado en nuestra socieddad en nosotros mismos, nos hace falta tener un poco mas de valor civil para enfrentar esta lucha, como dice este señor hay q denunciar pero hasta para eso hace falta valor, hace falta inculcar valores en nuestros hijos mayor educacion y fuentes de trabajo asi quizas se compondria un poco la situacion del pais.” 57 For example, then-president Calderón’s project was focused on more militarization of the country, but did not create any social programmes for the population.

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denouncements, like user Carteldeseucrates, who stated concrete names, dates, and addresses: This [comment] is a document that denounces the massacre of two families in the city of Valle Hermoso at 313 Zaragosa St. It was carried out by an armed group linked to the Cartel del Golfo and 5 federal police officers of the locality. On April 21 of this year, 9 people were massacred ....58

Sometimes, when certain information was posted in the comments it could make its way to the main section of the blog (the fourth level), especially if photographs or videos accompanied the comment. However, many comments, such as the one posted by Carteldeseucrates, could be found any given day with no mention of them in the main section of the blog or in the media. Other comments were calls to action, demanding a social revolution and proposing the idea of joining forces in order to combat all the levels of the system, similar to the acts of political sedition or the real-time attempts to bring the change in government mentioned for Egypt or Libya. For example, Yaolt_Mexica urged: I say more blood should run, but [it should be that] of all the corrupt politicians, especially the ones of the (Racist Right Wing) and what we should do is commandos of 3-6 cells, public trials (lynching) to the governors, [and] evil politicians. Those of us who know where they live and sleep, [we should] unite with other neighbours [and] catch them as the rats they are[,] and even if it is with Molotov cocktails, [we should] annihilate them ....59

More and more messages that galvanize support are appearing on the blogs and other social media, seemingly representing a bigger 58

“Este es un documento que denuncia la masacre de dos familias en la ciudad de valle hermoso en el 310 de la calle Zaragoza llevada a cabo por un grupo armado perteneciente al cartel del golfo el cual estan implicados 5 policías federales de la localidad el día 21 de abril de este año fueron masacradas 9 personas ....” 59 “Yo digo que si debe de haber mas sangre pero de todos los políticos corruptos, y principalmente la de (Derecha racista) lo que debemos hacer es comandos de 3 a 6 cédulas, aser jucios publicos (Linchar) a los GOVERS, POLITICOS LACRAS los que sepamos donde viven, en donde duermen, nos unamos con otros vecinos y los agarremos como a las ratas que son y aunque sea con bombas molotov los ANIQUILEMOS ....”

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concentration of the population who would be willing to act. We know for a fact that other instances in which social media, such as Youtube or Facebook, have been used have had consequences in the public sphere. There are, for example, the march for peace by poet Javier Sicila in May 2011 after the assassination of his son; the “No violencia” (“No Violence”) march on 26 August 2011, in several states of the country in response to the massacre of over fifty people in Monterrey, Mexico;60 the #YoSoy132 protests, debates, and marches after the recently elected president of Mexico, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the media outlets, dismissed and denied the authenticity of a group of students in the Ibero-American University. What all of these movements have in common is the existence of the collective identity forged as a reaction to a specific event, though the drive, or definition of the movement’s identity, that was created and structured through social media. The fearscape, however, offers a series of events, not just a single one, which are shaping the social and political identity. As my argument suggests, these effect and retort comments on the event illustrate a social interaction directly related to local and national levels, the political direction of the country, and a particular analysis of individual situations which affect the citizens directly. These interactions go beyond a simple narration of the event because they work through a response which includes the context and the idea of a national future where the users participate as members. The interactions in the fearscape go beyond the trauma of the culture of fear to create an environment of possibilities and explanations, of a system of intertwined citizens who congregate to find support and answers to the reality they face. The fearscape allows social and political identities to be enacted. “Fearscape” as escape from fear There is a distinct difference between most social media and the fearscape. First, interactions have a uniqueness exclusive to these spaces. In a study conducted in 2010 regarding the use of blogs and forums, Navarro Rodríguez et al. admit that participation in the narcoblogs carries a particular language and group identity different from other blogs or physical spaces. However, the focus of Navarro et al.’s 60

See for example: “Sicarios realizan masacre en Monterrey: 27 muertos”, El Blog del Narco, 8 July 2011: http://www.blogdelnarco.com/2011/07/sicarios-realizanmasacre-en-monterrey.html#more (accessed 9 July 2011).

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study is to prove that participation in the narco-blogs creates a loss of moral values, detachment from reality, and violence. Though their hypotheses go unproven, through their methodology in collecting data and comparing variables they are indeed able to determine a codified rhetoric that distinguishes this virtual sphere from other kinds of media.61 Secondly, the biggest difference between normal networking and the fearscape is the reason why individuals go there. Navarro et al. argue that the users of the narco-blogs do not reproduce their modes of interaction there in their social interactions in the public sphere, therefore, they conclude, participation in this media creates depersonalization and detachment from reality.62 I contend that such a reaction in the public sphere is not depersonalization, but fear. The discussions are held in the fearscape, since it is a secure space where the citizens can escape to. The danger surrounding the public sphere has driven them to this location because it offers a realm where they can embody fantasy personas and form a community of support and citizenship. Finally, the fearscape enables individuals to work through the experience by responding to the event and engaging in performative discussions that are sometimes impossible to have in the public sphere. It allows social and political engagement between fantasy personas based on the discussion of the national reality, supported by their own personal experiences and the documents and archives of fear and violence related to the war on drugs. The fact of its popularity seems to suggest that the fearscape is a much needed space. During its peak, more than three-million users visited El Blog del Narco per month.63 When I started this inquiry in 2010, a limited number of fearscapes thrived,64 but as the government became more and more repressive of information being made available to the public and the users became 61

Miguel Navarro Rodríguez et al., “La cultura de violencia social y narcotráfico en los jóvenes, una mirada a los blogs y sitios públicos de gran impacto, sus implicaciones educativas”, Red Durango de Investigadores Educativos REDIE, IV/3 (2011), 74. 62 Ibid., 79-80. 63 Raul Gutierrez, “Leaking Secrets, Leaking Blood: Blog Del Narco, the Anonymous Tracker of Mexico’s Ultraviolent Drug War”, Boing Boing, 14 September 2010: http://www.boingboing.net/2010/09/14/narco.html (accessed 23 March 2011). 64 See n.44.

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targets of violence and forced disappearances, these spaces rapidly vanished. Detailed examination of how this vanishing process took place is outside the scope of this study. In any case, in 2013, as I am concluding my research, almost none remain of those that existed in 2010, including El Blog del Narco. However, other virtual spaces have sprouted up, some that give regional timely warnings and denounce narco/military aggressions.65 Though they do not seem to outwardly offer anonymity, such as El Blog del Narco once did,66 they still host online conversations similar to the ones referred to in this study, but explicitly warn users about posting personal information. The question that prevails is whether or not these comments and this performance space, the fearscape, will actually have an effect on political and social identities. Yet, the violent and repressive actions of the government and drug lords for the purpose of destroying them seem to indicate that they do.

65 For example, popular Facebook pages: Valor por Michoacan SDR, https://www.facebook.com/ValorPorMichoacan?fref=ts (accessed 5 November 2013); Balacera Mty, https://www.facebook.com/pages/BalaceraMTY/195637243793051? ref=ts&fref=ts (accessed 7 July 2013); Valor por Tamaulipas, https://www.facebook. com/ValorPorTamaulipas?fref=ts (accessed 5 November 2013). 66 A couple of sites that in 2013 promise anonymity, but do not have much comments from the public, include: Historias del narco, http://www.historiasdelnarco.com/ (accessed 5 November 2013); Borderland Beat, http://www.borderlandbeat.com/ (accessed 5 November 2013).

PART 2 THE LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE: FANTASY AND IDENTITY FORMATION

THE SITE OF INITIATIVE. TOWARDS A HERMENEUTIC FRAMEWORK FOR ANALYSING THE IMAGINATION OF FUTURE THREATS MARTIJN BOVEN In this article, I will take a first step towards a hermeneutic framework for analysing the way imminent future threats are represented. This framework will be derived from the later works of Paul Ricœur in which he relies on the concept “imagination” rather than “fantasy” (both of which terms go back to the Greek term phantasia). Ricœur argues for the importance of what I will call “the site of initiative”. It is on the site of initiative that two types of events come together: events that happen to us and events that we make happen. Moreover, the site of initiative is constituted between two orders of imagination: the space of experience (reproductive) and the horizon of expectation (productive). To make the framework relevant for political and social theory, I will extend it by including Ricœur’s analysis of ideology and utopia. This makes it possible to give a preliminary and still underdeveloped analysis of contemporary dystopias in which fears are exploited for political gain. I will argue that these dystopias have the tendency to spur a society into arbitrary and unwarranted actions that eclipse the site of initiative.

Introduction In the third volume of Time and Narrative (Temps et récit), Paul Ricœur stated that his age was characterized by a narrowing of the space of experience and the withdrawal of the horizon of expectation.1 In his view, the formation of social identities was increasingly dominated by an impoverished imagination of the inherited past (ideology) and an inflated imagination of a better future (utopia). In a sense this is still the case today. However, I will argue that today the inflated imagination of the future takes not only place in the utopian mode of progress (spreading democracy), but even more in the

1

Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3, le temps raconté, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985.

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dystopian mode of threats (preemptive wars).2 The possibility of threats that will materialize in the future confronts our society with the task to imagine a future that may be worse than today. At the same time, this imagination of a worse future threatens to leave us paralyzed in fear and to spur our governments into arbitrary and unwarrantable actions. In the past decades political discourses have increasingly stressed the emergence of a new kind of threat that will materialize in the future, when it is too late to prevent it. Such political discourses appeal to exceptional circumstances that call for immediate action in the present, regardless of the consequences for human rights and individual freedom (e.g., the Patriot Act in the United States, the increasing use of closed-circuit television in both sides of the Atlantic, drone attacks on terrorist targets in areas of Pakistan that are populated by civilians). To deal with the imminent future threats of terrorism, the United States started a preemptive war in Iraq3 and ordered the targeted killing of dozens of suspected terrorists by drones.4 To deal with the threat of pandemics security measures were taken and countless animals were killed (e.g., the 2003 outbreak of avian influenza in the Netherlands which led to the preventive killing of 30 million birds).5 To deal with the threat of climate change largescale projects of geo-engineering are proposed like altering the chemistry of seawater or placing mirrors in space.6 In all these cases threats are dealt with by acting on the future, even though in most 2 The English word “utopia” comes from the Greek oú (not) and topos (place), it literally means “no place”. However it is often used in the positive sense of eutopia, which literally means “good place”. For my purposes I want to restore the literary meaning of utopia as “no place” which covers eutopia (good place) as well as dystopia (bad place). 3 See Melinda Cooper, “Pre-empting Emergence”, Theory, Culture & Society, 23/4 (2006), 113-35; Brian Massumi, “Potential Politics and the Primacy of Preemption”, Theory & Event, 10/2 (2007): https://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v010/ 10.2massumi.html; Brian Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency”, Theory, Culture and Society, 26/6 (2009), 153-85. 4 See Thomas Byron Hunter, “Targeted Killing: Self-Defense, Preemption, and the War on Terrorism”, JSS Journal of Strategic Security, 2/2 (2009), 1-52; Avery Plaw, Targeting Terrorists. A License to Kill?, London: Ashgate, 2008. 5 See M.A. Gerritzen et al., “Slaughter of Poultry during the Epidemic of Avian Influenza in the Netherlands in 2003”, Veterinary Record, 159/2 (2006), 39-42. 6 Peter Irvine, and Andy Ridgwell, “‘Geoengineering’ Taking Control of our Planet’s Climate”, Science Progress, 92/2 (2009), 139-62.

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cases the effects of these actions are uncertain and potentially disastrous. Various authors have already shown that the imagination of imminent future threats is often used to legitimate political actions that are normally considered to be either unethical or too risky.7 I do not aim to repeat this analysis, nor do I want to criticize concrete cases in which the imagination of imminent future threats is used to legitimate questionable political actions. Instead, I will address two related problems. The first problem is that of collective initiatives and their relation to the emergence of threats. Are threats caused by our own actions or do they happen to us? The second problem concerns the imagination of threats. Can we make a distinction between a credible and an incredible imagination of a catastrophic future that threatens us? Rather than addressing these problems directly, I will develop a hermeneutic framework that can be used to analyse the imagination of imminent future threats that call for immediate action. I will derive this framework from the later works of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur.8 In doing this, I will combine two elements from Ricœur’s 7

See Louise Amoore, “Lines of Sight: on the Visualization of Unknown Futures”, Citizenship Studies, 13/1 (2009), 17-30; Ben Anderson, “Preemption, Precaution, Preparedness: Anticipatory Action and Future Geographies”, Progress in Human Geography, 34/6 (2010), 777-98; Cooper, “Pre-empting Emergence”, 113-35; Marieke de Goede, “Beyond Risk: Premediation and the Post-9/11 Security Imagination”, Security Dialogue, 39/2-3 (2008), 155-76; Marieke de Goede, “The Politics of Preemption and the War on Terror in Europe”, European Journal of International Relations, 14/1 (2008), 161-85; Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, Cultural Critique, 31 (1995), 83-109; Massumi, “Potential Politics”; Massumi, “National Enterprise Emergency”, 153-85; Annie McClanahan, “Future’s Shock: Plausibility, Preemption, and the Fiction of 9/11”, Symploke, 17/1 (2009), 41-62. 8 Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 1, l’intrigue et le récit historique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983; Temps et récit. Tome 2, la configuration du temps dans le récit de fiction, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984; Temps et récit. Tome 3, le temps raconté; Du texte à l’action, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985; Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, New York: Columbia University Press, 1986; “L’Identité narrative”, Esprit, 7/12 (1988), 295; Soi-même comme un autre, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1990; Time and Narrative. Volume I, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990; Time and Narrative. Volume 2, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990; Time and Narrative. Volume 3, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990; From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991; “Life in Quest of Narrative”, in On Paul Ricœur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood, London: Routledge, 1991, 20-33; Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey, Chicago: The University of

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thought. (1) The basic contours of the framework will be derived from Ricœur’s theory of historical imagination. In this theory, the present is defined as a site of initiative that is determined by a tension between the reproductive imagination of the past (space of experience) and the productive imagination of the future (horizon of expectation). (2) The proposed hermeneutic framework will be further extended by incorporating Ricœur’s theory of social imagination. According to him, society is the result of an imaginary construction that always oscillates between the imagination of an existing society (ideology) and the imagination of a future society that does not yet exist (utopia). The imaginary construction of a history In the first part of this article, I will derive from Ricœur a theory of historical imagination. In his as yet unpublished Lectures on Imagination, Ricœur gives an extensive analysis of the problem of imagination and its various alternative designations.9 He traces the history of this concept from the Greek phantasia (Aristotle) and its Latin translation, imago, through the German notions Einbildung, Darstellung, Vorstellung (Kant) and Phantasie (Freud), to its English equivalents “fancy”, “fantasy” and “imagination”. According to Ricœur, this competition between words points towards a cluster of problems that can only be adequately addressed by a philosophy of imagination that combines various perspectives on the problem of the image. The Freudian notion Phantasie, for instance, only covers the involuntary and illusory aspects of the image;10 it does not take into account the creative and active side of the imagination. Ricœur writes, “what we call imagination is in fact a space of variation according to several ranges of possibilities”.11 For Ricœur , this space of variation includes but is not limited to Phantasie (or one of the other, more specific terms). Chicago Press, 1992. All my references are to the original editions of Ricœur’s works. After a quote I will refer to the original edition, but add the pagination of the English translation after the slash (except when the original is in English). 9 I thank George H. Taylor for giving me access to these unpublished lectures. See also George H. Taylor, “Ricœur’s Philosophy of Imagination”, Journal of French Philosophy, 1/2 (2006), 93-104. In footnote 3 of this article, Taylor gives an explanation of the genesis of the transcript of these lectures. 10 See Paul Ricœur, “Introductory Lecture”, in Lectures on Imagination (given in 1975). Unpublished. 11 Ibid.

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Ricœur tries to order the ranges of possibilities of “imagination” by mapping them on two axes. The first axis concerns the distinction between a productive imagination that refers to an already existing original (trace, portrait) and a productive imagination that does not refer to an original, but creates its own reference. The second axis has to do with the difference between a critical distance to reality (novels that function as a social critique) and a non-critical involvement in it (illusions/deceptions). In a diagram: Critical distance  Novel

Reproductive imagination

 Portrait

Productive imagination  Trace  Illusions/

deceptions

Non-critical involvement

It is on this diagram that Ricœur grafts his theory of historical and social imagination. The two axes provide criteria to distinguish between healthy forms of imagination that are reliable (critical distance) and potential unhealthy ones that need to be questioned (non-critical involvement). Moreover, it shows that the imagination oscillates between two orders: a reproductive one that refers to an already existing reality and a productive one that imagines new realities and shapes the world in a new way. In relation to threats, the imagination is free from the immediate fear that these may invoke. According to Ricœur, the imagination gives us a certain amount of freedom in the sense that it has the power to free us from the overpowering force of our affections. At this point, Ricœur cites Aristotle: “when we think something to be fearful or threatening, emotion is immediately produced, and so too with what is encouraging; but when we merely imagine we remain as unaffected as persons who are looking at a painting of some dreadful or encouraging

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scene.”12 Although the imagination can be used to exploit emotions, it differs from these emotions and is independent of them. This indicates again that there is nothing illusory in the imagination as such, but that it can give rise to a non-critical involvement with reality (escapism, paranoia) as well as a critical evaluation of it (alternative scenario’s, inventive counter-measures). Imagination and time In his Time and Narrative (volumes 1-3), Ricœur connects his theory of historical imagination to the problem of time. According to him there are two opposing perspectives on time: a cosmological and a phenomenological perspective. (1) The cosmological perspective is Aristotelian in origin and sees the present as a cosmological instant that marks the boundary between the past and the future on a timeline. Time as a whole is seen as a natural phenomenon that is constantly progressing into the future. In this cosmological conception time has a linear course. (2) The phenomenological perspective is Augustinian in origin and focuses on the way we experience time. Our experience of time is not structured as a line, but is constantly switching between perceptions of the present, memories of the past and expectations of the future. This threefold present constantly shatters the unity of time.13 In Ricœur’s view the cosmological and the phenomenological perspective are mutually exclusive. Only within a poetics of narrative can we find a structure in which both perspectives are combined: that is, in the plot. On the one hand, the plot organizes occurrences in linear episodes. On the other hand, it creates an overarching structure that relates the various episodes to each other. The plot combines linearity and fragmentation in a temporal unity that is neither linear nor fragmented. In this way a new temporal structure is invented: a narrative time. Moreover, Ricœur points out that a narrative not only refigures time through a plot, but also expresses and shapes “characters” whose lives are structured into a succession of meaningful episodes. For this reason, Ricœur claims, it is within the

12

Aristotle, “On the Soul”, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Volume 1, ed. Jonathan Barnes, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, 49 (427b23-427b25). 13 Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3.

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interplay between narratives that personal and collective identities are made and unmade.14 By appealing to narrative theory, Ricœur tries to find a middle way between the one-ness of the timeline and the fragmentation of historical experience. However, he is acutely aware of two reductions that threaten to undermine his project from the outset. First, the reduction of history to a frozen past that has lost its connections with the present and the future (historiographical reduction). Second, the reduction of history to a totality which preserves within it all the previous stages it has gone through (the Hegelian reduction). To overcome these reductions, Ricœur adopts two categories that were first introduced by Reinhart Koselleck:15 the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. The space of experience is the gathering together of past events that we observe from the perspective of the present, for that reason these past events are constantly reinterpreted in the light of the present (reproductive imagination). The horizon of expectation indicates the hopes and fears, the wishes and desires that direct our actions towards futures that we want to realize or that we try to prevent (productive imagination).16 For Ricœur , however, there is something missing that connects the space of experience and the horizon of expectation with each other. For that reason he introduces a third category: initiative. To highlight the parallelism between this third category and the other two, I will call it “the site of initiative”. Ricœur introduces the site of initiative to emphasize that the present is a site of observation as well as action. On the one hand, we are part of a history that we have not made but that we can observe. On the other hand, we are actively involved in the unfolding of a history that is made by our actions, but that we cannot observe as a “history”. With this dynamic between a received history that we observe and the making of a history of which we are the agent, Ricœur overcomes the historiographical and the Hegelian reduction without losing the possibility to give a narrative unity to large periods of time. With the introduction of the site of initiative, Ricœur has developed a flexible analytical framework to analyse the historical 14

Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 1; Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3. Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. 16 Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3. 15

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condition of human experiences. On the one hand, this framework can zoom in on to analyse specific individual actions. On the other hand, it can zoom out to analyse collective actions that define a society as a whole or even an entire era (e.g., the Middle Ages). Because of his flexibility in zooming Ricœur can highlight the constantly changing, dynamic relationship between past, present and future without losing the possibility to think the continuity of history. Within this framework it is the site of initiative that is most important to Ricœur. It is there that human actions interfere with the course of the world and will either change its direction or be changed by it.17 As I will show, the site of initiative is determined by two factors. (a) The entanglement of “events that we make happen” (acting) and “events that happen to us” (suffering). (b) The tension between two orders of historical imagination: the “space of experience” (reproductive imagination of the past) and the “horizon of expectation” (productive imagination of the future). The entanglement of acting and suffering To understand the nature of the threats we are dealing with today, we first need to unravel the entanglement of human initiatives that make events happen and the course of events that happen to us. Only then can we determine which initiatives are causally related to the emergence of a threat and how we can ascribe these initiatives to concrete agents. Moreover, only then will it be possible to understand if this threat is an intended or an unintended consequence of these initiatives. Ricœur gives an extensive and nuanced account of the various aspects of the entanglement of man and world. Here I will not be able to do justice to this account; I will have to restrict myself to four brief comments. The most basic entanglement of acting and suffering can be found in the human power to act. Ricœur situates this ability in the human body that is simultaneously a physical object in the world and a subjective perspective on the world. As physical object my body is passively affected by circumstances; as subjective perspective it has the ability to actively intervene in the world and react to or anticipate on these circumstances. My combined knowledge of my circumstances and abilities creates the human power to act.18 17 18

Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3; Ricœur, Du texte à l’action. Ricœur, Du texte à l’action; Ricœur, Soi-même.

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The structure of action is the second element that is of importance to Ricœur. He points out that we have to live life forward (doing), but can only comprehend it backwards (seeing). Ricœur argues that we cannot be an agent of initiative and an observer of that initiative at the same time. As the agents of our own actions we produce events that we cannot directly observe, but that will only become visible gradually. For that reason action has a paradoxical structure. On the one hand, the action can be ascribed to an agent. On the other hand, the action will have unforeseen consequences that were never intended by this agent.19 An even more complex entanglement of acting and suffering can be found in the interweaving of causality and intentionality. Following Georg von Wright, Ricœur argues that a human action is a cause as well as an intention.20 As a cause it intervenes in the world, as an intention it is directed towards the actualization of a goal. This interweaving of causality and intentionality makes it hard to analyse human actions. If the analysis only focuses on “action as a cause” it threatens to reduce it to an event that simply happens but is not made to happen. However, if the analysis only focuses on “action as an intention” it threatens to reduce it to a psychological fact that has no impact on the course of the world. As long as the initiative is still going on and belongs to the present, Ricœur argues, it is not possible to connect causality and intentionality. However, when the initiative has come to an end and belongs to the past, it is possible to combine these two perspectives. Ricœur calls the interweaving of causality and intentionality a form of quasi-causality. Quasi-causality makes it possible to evaluate intentions not only in terms of aims but also in terms of consequences.21 The entanglement of acting and suffering also becomes clear in the way our actions are directed towards the world. Ricœur shows that actions can be directed towards “a knowable world that already exists” (space of experience) or towards the actualization of an “unknown world that does not yet exist” (horizon of expectation). Ricœur is aware of the mutual implication of

19

Ibid.; ibid. G.H. von Wright, Explanation and Understanding, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971. 21 Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 1. 20

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these two directions of action. However, he still argues that it is important to distinguish them from each other.22 An action that is directed towards a “knowable world that already exists” (space of experience) can be explained by looking for an implicit justification that grounds the action. When after a long walk a man runs to the tap, we can explain his action by describing it in terms of means (drinking water) and ends (satisfying his thirst). To explain this action we do not need to ascribe it to an agent. However, Ricœur emphasizes that a description of this action becomes misleading if it is not acknowledged that this action is part of an orientation of an agent. This agent recognizes himself as the subject of his own actions. An action that is directed toward the actualization of an “unknown world that does not yet exist” (horizon of expectation) cannot be explained in the same way. Take for instance the strategy of targeted killing that the United States has implemented to annihilate members of terrorist groups like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Yemen, etc. This strategy is based on new tactics and techniques (e.g., drones) that will have unknown consequences. For that reason it would be misleading to evaluate it solely in terms of means and ends. Even though the United States have the means (drones or UAVs) to reach their end (annihilate a particular terrorist group), it still may not be a good idea to use a strategy of targeted killing; it could very well have unintended consequences that only make the situation worse.23 The strategy of targeted killing has to be evaluated from the perspective of the intention that underlies it. This means that it cannot be evaluated in terms of truth, but only in terms of veracity. Is the intention behind this strategy really in accordance with the way it is implemented? And is this intention really in agreement with the other intentions that are formulated by the American government (e.g., human rights, justice, etc.)? The silence and secrecy surrounding the strategy of targeted killing suggests otherwise.

22

Ricœur, Du texte à l’action; Ricœur, Soi-même. See Mia Bloom, Dying to Kill: The Allure of Suicide Terror, New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 23

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The tension between two orders of historical imagination According to Ricœur, the site of initiative is not only defined by the entanglement of acting and suffering, but also by a tension between the two orders of historical imagination mentioned above. It is because of this tension that we can distance ourselves from the existing reality and direct our gaze to a future that will be different than what we have experienced before. This tension between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation can be fruitful, but it can also turn into a harmful schism. In that case the distance between the two poles becomes either too great or too small. Ricœur formulates two imperatives to determine whether a fruitful tension has turned into a harmful schism.24 Ricœur’s first imperative simply states that we have to prevent the space of experience from becoming too narrow. This happens when we perceive the past as something that is closed and necessary instead of a living tradition that is still connected to a site of initiative. In that case we are no longer able to recognize the unrealized possibilities of the past that will reopen it towards the future.25 Concerning threats, this means that we have to investigate the connection between the imminent future threat that calls for immediate action and our experience of the past. In relation to terrorism, for instance, it has often been noted that terrorists did not appear out of nowhere. On the contrary, not infrequently they emerged in the wake of power politics by the United States and its allies (e.g. supporting Sadam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the nineteen eighties).26 This could mean that a specific military project in the past has become part of a chain of reactions that in the end has led to an act of terrorism. This information is relevant because it shows something about the unintended consequences of past actions. It could be a sign to stop with these kinds of actions and to develop other military strategies to deal with foreign enemies. Ricœur’s second imperative states that we have to keep our horizon of expectations from running away from us. We can do this by means of “a series of intermediary projects that we can act upon”.27 Without 24

Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3. Ibid. 26 See, for instance, Joost R Hiltermann, A Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. 27 Ricœur, Temps et récit. Tome 3, 312/313. 25

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this connection the horizon of expectation is running away from us and turns into a delusion. This happens when we get lost in dreams or nightmares that are no longer directed towards “a determined future, outlined in terms of distinct, discernible steps”.28 In that case we project our ideals or anxieties into an abstract future, while we lack a practical path that can bridge the gap between the present situation and the imagined future that we want to realize or prevent. In relation to catastrophic future threats that call for immediate action, we have to investigate if this catastrophic future can really be connected to the present. If not, then we have to ask ourselves if we can determine a way to anticipate this future that is not completely arbitrary. If it turns out that arbitrary actions are our only option it makes no sense to act upon the future. The imaginary construction of society In the second part of this article, I will incorporate Ricœur’s theory of social imagination in the proposed hermeneutic framework. Ricœur develops this theory in Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. First I will present Ricœur’s interpretation of ideology and utopia. Then I will show how Ricœur places these two opposing orders of social imagination in a fruitful tension with each other. This will make clear that ideologies constitute the space of experience of a society; whereas utopias constitute its horizon of expectation. The site of initiative of a society is thus defined by the tension between these two orders of imagination. The incorporation of ideology and utopia in the proposed hermeneutic framework provides it with a critical apparatus, which can be used to formulate a critique on the social imagination of imminent future threats. Moreover, it also makes clear how a society can imagine a worse future without being spurred into arbitrary actions or being paralyzed by fear. Ideology: between integration and distortion The social imagination of threats is not easy to criticize because it always gets trapped in what Clifford Geertz dubbed “Mannheim’s paradox”.29 This paradox can be formulated as follows: if every position reflects a biased ideology that is influenced by hidden 28

Ibid., 312/313. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, 1973, 194-98.

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interests and desires, then this also holds for anyone who tries to criticize such an ideological position. Or, as Paul Ricœur has it: “if everything that we say is bias, if everything we say represents interests that we do not know, how can we have a theory of ideology which is not itself ideological?”30 In the light of Mannheim’s paradox, a critical analysis of the social imagination of threats can easily be dismissed as just another ideological position that itself tries to push a political agenda. Ricœur suggests that we can avoid this paradox by questioning the premises on which it is build. “Perhaps”, he writes, “the problem of Mannheim’s paradox lies in its epistemological extension of a Marxism founded upon the contrast between ideology and science”.31 Ricœur rejects the implicit opposition underlying Mannheim’s paradox between a biased standpoint that is imaginary (ideology) and a neutral standpoint that is real (science). In his view ideology has to be contrasted with praxis – what I have called the site of initiative – and not with science. Science strives for truth (vérité) and neutrality, but this is not what is at stake in the social sphere. The social sphere is always already mediated by imaginary constructions; for that reason we cannot escape ideology and can only aim at veracity (véracité, being true to oneself). It makes no sense to criticize ideology solely from the perspective of science, that is, truth. Instead, we should focus on the relation between ideology and praxis, that is, veracity.32 On the one hand, as Ricœur argues, ideology can have a positive, integrative function. This happens when the ideology in question is in agreement with the site of initiative it mediates (it fruitfully configures the space of experience). In that case ideology constitutes the social sphere and ensures the preservation of individual and collective identities. On the other hand, however, ideology gets a negative, distortive function when it is no longer true to itself (that is, it narrows the space of experience). In that case it does not stand in opposition with science, but with its own site of initiative. The initiatives that are taken in the name of this ideology are not in conformity with it, but rather contradict it. This happens “when the integrative function becomes frozen, when it becomes rhetorical in the bad sense, when schematization and rationalization prevail”.33 In other 30

Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 8. Ibid., 9. 32 Ricœur, Soi-même. 33 Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 266. 31

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words, when an ideology is no longer directed towards the integration of a community but is used to dominate it. Ricœur finds in the notion of legitimacy the turning point between the neutral concept of ideology as integration and the political concept of ideology as distortion. Following Max Weber he emphasizes that “legitimacy can be ascribed to an order only by reference to the beliefs and representations held by those acting subject to it”.34 This means that the ruling authority can never legitimate itself, but need the consent of the people under its rule. For Ricœur this is the root of the problem of ideology. This problem consists of three elements: (a) the ruling authority’s claim to legitimacy must be answered with the citizens’ belief in this legitimacy. However, the spontaneous belief of the citizen will never entirely overlap with the claim to legitimacy of the ruling authority. This has to do with the fact that the motives and intentions of the people under a given rule are never completely in agreement with that of the rulers. (b) It is the role of ideology to bridge the gap between the claim to legitimacy of the ruling authority and the lack in consent of the people under its rule. (c) Ideology bridges this gap by adding a supplement to the people’s spontaneous consent. For Ricœur this supplement indicates “that there must be something more in the belief than can be rationally understood in terms of interests, whether emotional, customary, or rational”.35 This “something more” is the product of social imagination and is always directed towards the preservation of the collective identity through time. When a group organizes itself in a certain structure that gives it shape, it already implies a distinction between claim and belief. The initiatives of the group are grounded in the consents of its members, however the individual members of the group will not always agree with these initiatives. Ricœur argues that this lack of consent can be supplemented by an ideology that provides a belief in the group as a whole. From this perspective ideology can be seen as a narrative that integrates several individual perspectives in a collective identity that can be ascribed to larger groups or even a society as a whole. As long as this identity is the outcome of the integrative function of ideology it has a positive impact on the group. This identity is never frozen, but

34 35

Ibid., 189. Ibid., 201.

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constantly adapts to the difference between its group members by way of a struggle for recognition. Quite often a group not only organizes itself, but also creates a hierarchical order in which rulers and ruled are differentiated. The initiatives of the group are still partly grounded in the consent of its members, but now there exists a hierarchical distance between the ruling authority and the people under its rule. In that case the order of the group is no longer the product of a collective effort, but is at least partly imposed by rulers who ask for obedience and conformity. According to Ricœur, this will widen the gap between the ruler’s claim to legitimacy and the spontaneous belief of the people in this legitimacy. Ideology bridges this gap and supplements this spontaneous belief. However, in this process of legitimation ideology can easily turn into a form of domination. In that case ideology becomes distorted and gets a negative function. Ricœur suggests that distortion is the outcome of “a lack of reciprocity between claim and belief. The claim does not rely on the belief, but the belief is extorted by the claim”.36 Ricœur mentions the example of the contractual relation between employer and employee that replaces the unequal relation between master and slave. Marx already analysed that the industrial powers legitimized their power with the help of this contractual relation. Here the belief is extorted by the claim. The legitimacy is not based upon the acceptance of a rule that is the outcome of a struggle for recognition; on the contrary, it is the outcome of a struggle for power in which the winning side proclaims the rules that the losing side just has to swallow. Ricœur contrasts the claim to legitimacy with the belief in it – supplemented by ideology – to highlight that the problem of ideology can only be understood in relation to real individuals under definite conditions. Orthodox Marxism ignores this dimension and interprets ideology in terms of abstract devices (dispositifs). In this way, as Ricœur indicates, it reduces the site of initiative to an anonymous zone of forces. The possibility of domination comes even more to the fore in the state. The state is not only organized in a hierarchical structure, but also has the monopoly on the use of legitimate violence against individuals. The legitimation of this violence can again easily degenerate in a process of domination. 36

Ibid., 212.

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To conclude, Ricœur claims that ideology can have a positive, integrative function as well as a negative, distortive function. In the first case, ideology gives a configuration of the collective space of experience that connects it with the site of initiative. In the second case, ideology narrows the space of experience in order to extort the people’s belief in the legitimacy of the existing order. I will argue that imminent future threats that call for immediate action can be easily used as an instrument of extortion. However, this will only become clear when ideology is placed in tension with utopia. The nowhere of utopia In his interpretation of utopia Ricœur primarily focuses on the imagination of a better future (eutopia or “good place”). In order to make room for the notion of threat, I will emphasize that the concept of utopia also covers the imagination of a worse future (dystopia or “bad place”).37 The two manifestations of utopia are interrelated; every eutopia implies a worse future that it wants to prevent, whereas every dystopia implies a eutopia that it wants to realize. Nevertheless, I think it is important to distinguish these two manifestations of utopia from each other; it will make us more conscious of the rhetorical dimension that underlies political discourses that appeal to imminent future threats. Moreover it provides us with a critical apparatus to resist a false rhetoric of threats and makes it easier to answer this rhetoric with an alternative. Ricœur starts his investigation of utopia with “the kernel idea of nowhere implied by the word utopia”.38 It is from this nowhere or no place that “an exterior glance is cast on our reality, which suddenly looks strange, nothing more being taken for granted”.39 Ricœur is not so much interested in literary utopias – like Thomas More’s Utopia – that formulate an alternative to present reality, even though this alternative is not realizable. Ricœur redefines the concept of utopia and detaches it from its literary origin. For him utopias serve as collective horizons of expectation that formulate alternative versions of the present reality and are directed towards the realization or prevention of this alternative. In this sense utopia has a positive 37

Ricœur would probably not deny this, but his characterization of utopia shows that he is primarily focused on the imagination of a better future. 38 Ricœur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 16. 39 Ibid., 16.

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function. It is the imagination of a future that may seem impossible under the present conditions of reality, but that can become possible in the future if a series of concrete steps is taken in order to realize a better future or to prevent a worse future. For Ricœur a utopia “introduces a sense of doubt that shatters the obvious”40 in order to make room for a new perspective on what presently exists. Although utopia has a broader range than just the political domain, Ricœur claims that it is the problem of power that is ultimately at stake in utopia. It is in relation to power that we find a similar turning point between the positive and the negative functions of utopia, as we found earlier in ideology. Utopia is not only the exploration of the possible, but it also presents an alternative to the ruling power. In this way, it can reveal the supplement that ideology constructed to bridge the gap between the claim to legitimacy and the spontaneous belief of the people in this legitimacy. When this ideological supplement has a positive, integrative function, utopia will only reveal that its legitimacy is contingent and can be disputed. However, when this ideological supplement has a negative, distortive function, utopia will unmask its claim to legitimacy as being an unjust form of extortion. In both these cases utopia will have a positive effect on society. However, when utopia’s alternative is nothing more than a leap in the impossible, it will get a negative function and will turn into a form of escapism. Ricœur describes this escapism in terms of a disjunction between social reality and the utopia that aims to transform it. “This disjunction”, Ricœur writes, “allows utopia to avoid any obligation to come to grips with the real difficulties of a given society”.41 In Ricœur’s view this escapism has a paralyzing effect that eclipses the collective site of initiative. I propose to extend Ricœur’s negative evaluation of unrealizable utopias to the dystopian notion of imminent future threats that call for immediate action. Ricœur does not address the impact of dystopian calls for action. I suggest, however, that they can have a similar negative impact on society as the escapist dream of an ideal, unrealizable society. The notion of an imminent future threat appeals to a logic of necessity. The suggestion is: there is no time for deliberation, we have to act now before it is too late. In this way the proposed action is presented as an unavoidable fact, instead of a 40 41

Ibid., 299. Ibid., 17.

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choice that is informed by a specific ideological position. This logic of necessity is the exact opposite of the flight in escapism, but it has a similar effect: it eclipses the site of initiative. Today we see this logic of necessity at work in the way unknown threats are used to legitimate collective initiatives. The legitimacy of these initiatives is not build upon the beliefs of the people, but it is extorted by appealing to future threats that call for immediate action. Here we see that a distortive ideology and an unrealistic projection of the future reinforce each other. The best example of this is probably the American invasion of Iraq. This invasion was legitimated by appealing to a dystopian threat (weapons of Mass destructions) in combination with a eutopian aim (spreading democracy). In the buildup to the war the collective site of initiative was shattered by presenting an imminent threat that could only be prevented by starting a preemptive war. Here a dystopian vision of the future is used to appeal to a logic of necessity and to strengthen the force of ideological extortion. Another example can be found in the way Western societies handle the series of economic crises that threaten to culminate in a devastating “financial meltdown”. This dystopian threat of a financial meltdown is often used as an ideological supplement that can bridge the gap between the claim that it is legitimate to break down the welfare state and the people’s spontaneous belief in this claim. A false rhetoric of imminent future threats cannot be countered by simply ignoring the possibility of such a threat. Instead, we have to take this possibility seriously and try to develop dystopian scenarios that sketch concrete and specific steps to prevent a worse future from happening. In these scenarios we need to imagine a future that may be worse than today, but in which the common good of all the people in a society is still the leading idea. This will reveal that none of the proposed actions are necessary; they are always the outcome of a conscious or unconscious choice that is made on a site of initiative as defined by the tension between ideology and utopia. To conclude, Ricœur claims that utopia can have a positive function as well as a negative one. In the first case, utopia provides a collective horizon of expectation that can be connected with the site of initiative. This utopia can resist an existing ideology by offering an alternative, but it can also enrich it by opening up new possibilities within this ideology itself. In the second case, utopia projects an unrealistic future that cannot be connected to the site of initiative. I

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have suggested that such utopias can have a negative impact on society in at least two forms. First, in the form of a eutopia that projects an ideal future that is unrealizable and leads to escapism. Second, in the form of a dystopia that projects a disastrous future that calls for immediate action and appeals to a logic of necessity. In both these forms of utopia the site of initiative is eclipsed. The tension between ideology and utopia In Ricœur’s view we are not completely captured by our own historical conditions, but have the capacity to reflect on it. After the rise of totalitarianism (extensively analysed by Hannah Arendt), ideologies and utopias were increasingly viewed as unhealthy and oppressive constructs.42 Ricœur argues, however, that the social sphere will always be constituted by ideologies and utopias, regardless of our attempts to substitute the social imagination for science. He would argue that we have to embrace the social imagination, rather than reject it. Only then will it become possible to combine the positive effects of the social imagination with a critique of its negative effects. According to Ricœur, we are always caught in the circle of ideology and utopia, the only thing we can do is to turn this circle into a productive spiral. This only works when we are conscious of our own biased position, without becoming too afraid to formulate such a position in the form of an ideology as well as a utopia. Ricœur thinks that the double perspective of ideology and utopia can avoid Mannheim’s paradox, because it opposes two orders of imagination rather than imagination and science. Ideology is defined as a “model of” an already existing reality. It is an imaginary construction of the space of experience and has a preservative function. Utopia is a “model for” a future reality that we want to realize or try to prevent. It is an imaginary construction of the horizon of expectation and has a disruptive function.43 The tension between these two imaginary constructions makes it possible to criticize ideological and utopian positions from the perspective of each other. Ricœur writes that

42

See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973. 43 Ibid., 311.

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We can only do this from the perspective of the site of initiative. It is there that we have to judge if an ideology is true to itself or has become distorted by extorting its own legitimacy. This will come to light in the initiatives that are started in the name of this ideology. It is again on the site of initiative that we have to determine if a utopia is the imagination of a possible future or an unreal chimera. This will become clear by examining the concrete steps that are proposed to realize or prevent this utopia. Conclusion Given the limited space of this article, I have not been able to undertake a full evaluation of the imagination of imminent future threats. My only aim was to develop a hermeneutic framework that can be used towards such an end. At the heart of this framework lies what I have called the site of initiative. On the basis of my reading of Ricœur, I have suggested that the site initiative is determined by two factors. The first factor is the entanglement of acting and suffering. Our actions produce events that we can only adequately observe when the unintended consequences of these actions have become clear. This is why it is so difficult to determine whether threats are somehow caused by our own actions or simply happen to us. The second and most important factor concerns the role of the imagination. I showed that Ricœur defines this imagination as a tension between two orders. In relation to the past, the reproductive, historical imagination constitutes a space of experience; in relation to the future, the productive imagination constitutes a horizon of expectation. According to Ricœur, however, the tension between these two orders of imagination can easily turn into an unhealthy schism. This happens when one of the two orders of imagination (or both) is cut off from the site of initiative. In that case, the imagination is running wild and will provide a false and misleading orientation for action. In this way, fears can be exploited and used for political gains that are no longer healthy for the society as a whole. All these aspects together can be integrated 44

Ibid., 312.

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into a dynamic framework. This framework can zoom in to individual sites of initiative that have a limited time-span or zoom out to collective sites of initiatives that extend over long periods of time or even over entire eras. To make this general hermeneutic framework relevant for political and social analysis, I have proposed to incorporate Ricœur’s conception of ideology (as a configuration of the space of experience of a society) and utopia (a configuration of the horizon of expectation) in it. According to Ricœur, ideology will have a positive function as long as it integrates the diverging perspectives of single individuals in a belief in the community as a whole. However, ideology becomes harmful when the legitimacy of ideological decisions is extorted by misleading claims about what is good for the community as a whole. In a similar manner, eutopias and dystopias will have a positive function as long as they formulate alternative futures that can be connected to the site of initiative. However, they will have a negative influence when the social imagination loses itself in unlikely and unfounded scenarios that eclipse the site of initiative. These scenarios will either lead to escapism (eutopias) or will introduce a logic of necessity (dystopias). In light of the contemporary discussion about imminent future threats, I have especially focused on dystopias that offer an imagination of a worse future. By placing ideology in tension with utopia, Ricœur offers a way to evaluate the harmful effects of the one in terms of the other. His suggestion is that distortive ideologies can be cured by valuable utopias, whereas inflated utopias can be unmasked by critical ideologies.

CONFLICT WITH THE PERCEPTION OF TIME AS FERTILE GROUND FOR COLLECTIVE INSECURITY: THE FRIGHTENING REALITY OF SCIENTIFIC FACTS AND THEIR TRANSFORMATION IN LITERARY FICTION CHRISTIN GRUNERT This essay examines a selection of literary texts dealing with both fascination and fear caused by scientific discoveries in the field of geology and archaeology. By focusing on English and German authors Jane Loudon, Herbert George Wells, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Adalbert Stifter as exponents of the fictional transformation of anxieties and hopes related to the ongoing debates in natural history in the nineteenth century, I will show how the preoccupation with archaeology and geology as a literary theme has changed the perception of past, present time and future. The works of the above authors depict scenes, of which the limits surpass that of previous scientific discoveries, by transforming archaeological excavations of contemporary cultures into the future and adapting “plots without man”1 to describe the Earth’s own future. As the texts reveal, geology and archaeology as literary themes could undermine the prominent position of the human subject. The slow transformations in human culture and Earth’s history brought to light by natural sciences may have contributed to some collective insecurities which spread throughout the nineteenth century. These collective insecurities were triggered, on the one hand, by the awareness of the slow development in human culture and Earth’s history and, on the other, by the fast rate of technological progress. Regarding the perception of the past, the conception of a teleological progress is undermined by the long period of mankind’s absence and by natural history pursuing no higher goal. The disturbing effects of realizing man’s marginal position in the history of the Earth are the source for either fantastic or fearful literary visions of past and also of future societies.

The interrelatedness of fear and fantasy has fascinated scholars and literary authors for a long time. Fear can promote or inhibit fantasy just as fantasies trigger or lessen fear. This process is not limited to 1

Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots. Evolutionary Narratives in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

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subjective perceptions of individuals, but can be effective for nations, cultures and global movements. Nowadays, fear and fantasy seem to have reached a new global level: war, terror, global warming and natural disasters dominate imagined constructions of the Earth’s future. Not only do fearful fantasies play an important role in presentday culture and literature, but also many kinds of threatening possible past and future worlds are conceptualized.2 Fiction in general and literary fiction in particular offer the possibility to act out hopes and fears of contemporary culture and also to compose images without any link to extra-literary reality. In my essay, I aim to open up perspectives on fear and fantasy, their connection to scientific discoveries and the resultant change in the perception of time. In the first section, some general thoughts related to the relativity of time measurements are addressed: in the same way as there is a cultural consensus that a day is divided into twenty-four hours, the conception of past and future and their respective scope varies from one cultural period to another. One fact which radically changed the perception of the past was the scientific exploration of the Earth’s history. Archaeology and geology3 were two new disciplines which challenged the commonly held notion of the Earth’s age. The fear of, and fascination with, new sciences and technologies are not as recent as one might think. They played an important role in the culture and literature of earlier periods too. The destabilization of the human subject – which was characteristic of the dawn of modernism – is increased by the accelerated present but at the same time by the findings of natural science. Space and distance diminished due to modern transportation, contrary to the dimension of time which expanded the past. Even if the effects were not global at the time, similar reactions in culture and literature can be examined, even if they occurred in different countries and literary genres. Therefore, the article focuses on the chronologically restricted period of the early nineteenth century and the geographically circumscribed field of 2

See the possible-worlds theory in literary studies based on concepts of logic unless it houses its own system of modality which consists of actual and possible worlds. E.g. Dolezel Lubomír, Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998; or Thomas G. Pavel, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. 3 I will use the currently conventional terms even if the scientific disciplines and terminologies were not fully established in the nineteenth century.

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European literature and culture, especially in England and Germany. It will become apparent that the idea that the world and time have got out of control is not a specific problem of the globalized world of the twenty-first century, but has troubled people for a long time. A selection of literary texts will be examined, dealing with both the fascination and the fear caused by scientific discoveries in the field of geology and archaeology. The focus will be on English and German authors Jane Loudon (1807-1858), Herbert George Wells (18661946), Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797-1848) and Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) as exponents of the fictional transformation of fears and hopes related to the ongoing debates in natural history in the nineteenth century. As the texts show, the interaction with scientific achievements – ranging from fear to fascination – cannot be simplified to a transition from one to another. On the contrary, fear and fascination can co-exist. On the one hand, literary fiction tends to reflect the fascination with and the trust in natural science as a realm of security and comfort depicting an optimistic view of future society, which makes use of scientific knowledge and technical skills. On the other hand, archaeological and geological research methods and findings can lead to pessimistic literary fantasies which may undermine the prominent position of the human subject, and depict a past as well as a future without human beings. The preoccupation with archaeology and geology as a literary theme in the nineteenth century thus raises questions about the past and future and the relevance of human cultures. These imagined scenarios reflect the feeling of collective insecurity because they pose questions that could not be readily answered by science. But literature instead found creative strategies to use this fear and to provide some possible answers to these complex questions. In addition to the scientific topic chosen as a literary theme, the interpretation of the selected literary texts will likewise show that the preoccupation with the disciplines of archaeology and geology also influenced the narrative techniques. In observing the mutual interaction of literature and science, my essay contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the two cultures of

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humanities and science,4 whose division was not recognized in the nineteenth century,5 and is nowadays again controversially discussed.6 Fear caused by changing temporality In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the perception of space and time changed in various ways, amongst others due to scientific discoveries. On the one hand, the perceived acceleration of the present at that time was caused by various factors: the invention of railways and steam ships led to a reduction in travel time and a diminution of space, the application of time-reduction machines in the industry reduced production time and effort, and the use of pocket watches and calendars trained the citizens to use their time as efficiently as possible. On the other hand, as a result of the discoveries of archaeologists and geologists, the past, however, was extended to an immeasurable period of time exceeding the clearly limited framework of the Christian genesis which, at that time, dated back to 6,000 years. Compared to previous epochs, the subject time was increasingly discussed in the eighteenth century because it underwent a pluralization of possible definitions. The theory of the infinitely slow geologic evolution had a deep impact on the nineteenth-century culture too. It challenged the perception of the past, present and future in a frightening way, and was reflected in literature. Apart from the aim to find an absolute definition of time by means of mathematical calculation and by observing astronomical motions, philosophical researchers discussed the possibility of a variable time dependent on subjective perception and cultural and historical 4

Literature and Science as Modes of Expression, ed. Frederick Amrine, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989; The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. Elinor S. Shaffer, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1998. 5 Laura Ottis, Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century: An Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; and Joseph Vogl, Poetologien des Wissens um 1800, München: Fink, 1999. 6 See One Culture. Essays in Science and Literature, ed. George Levine, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987; Stephen Jay Gould, The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities, New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004; Nicolas Pethes, “Poetik/Wissen – Konzeptionen eines problematischen Transfers”, in Romantische Wissenspoetik. Die Künste und die Wissenschaften um 1800, eds Gabriele Brandstetter and Gerhard Neumann, Würzburg: Königshausen, 2004, 341-72; and Literatur und Wissen, ed. Tilmann Köppe, Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011.

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changes.7 Even if the clock became a symbol of the regulated and measurable time in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its objectivity was based on a cultural agreement and not on its absolute status.8 The aim of this essay, however, is not to examine the different conceptions of time in philosophy or natural science. In fact, the analysis will demonstrate that literary adaptations of scientific discoveries, specifically those relating to disciplines dedicated to the history of the Earth, man and culture, not only affect the respective perception of past periods, but also of the present and the future. I follow the methodological concept of the knowledge-related functions of literature which can, among others, add, popularize, problematize, or anticipate knowledge,9 to show the strong influences as well as the contrast between the imagined world of literature and the scientific knowledge of that time. The rapidity of the present, which Goethe described as “velociferic”,10 made up only one aspect of time perception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The collective feeling of insecurity in this period – according to the argument – did not only result from the acceleration of the present and the diminution of space.11 It was also fed to a significant degree by the discovery of a slowness and an enlargement of the past, which had become widely accepted due to the findings in geology and archaeology. The study of the past initiated reflections on past, contemporary and future civilizations. How urgent and troubling these questions about the past, 7

Different conceptions of time e.g. cyclical or linear models re-enter the discussion. Some of the figures of thought were already derived from the antiquity or the middleages. 8 The French Revolution and its creation of a decimal calendar and watches testify to the variability of the measurement. 9 Köppe, Literatur und Wissen, 5ff. 10 Goethe created the neologism of “velociferic” from the Latin velocitas (velocity) and Lucifer to describe his era to G.H.L. Nicolovius (draft, end of November, 1825?). Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Die letzten Jahre. Briefe Tagebücher und Gespräche von 1823 bis zu Goethes Tod, Teil I von 1823 bis zum Tode Carl Augusts 1828, Abt. 2, Bd., ed. Horst Fleig, Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1993, 334. 11 See Walter Erhardt, “‘Das Wehtun der Zeit in meinem innersten Menschen’. Über Biedermeier, Vormärz und die Aussichten der Literaturwissenschaft”, Euphorion, 102 (2008), 129-62, who defines disorientation as a result of the changing temporality which deprives individuals and collectives of the capacity to coordinate temporal with spatial categories.

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future and the value of the human being were becomes apparent in many literary and philosophical texts of this period. In the nineteenth century, the past and future became highly relevant, and were also considered in entirely new terms. The future seemed to get closer and closer through technological progress. With Lord Kelvin’s formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics in 1852 and its subsequent popularization, the decline of the Earth’s energy, and thus something like the end of time, suddenly seemed predictable. Also, the past became a central public interest thanks to the popularity of scientific disciplines exploring the history of Earth. The sciences opened up another dimension of depth to the past that had been inconceivable until then. Once again, a shattering blow struck the anthropocentric world-view. As the American historian of science Stephen J. Gould noted in 1987,12 one central blow to human narcissism is missing in the three described by Sigmund Freud in his work A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis. To the “cosmological” outrage, caused by the Copernican revolution, which banished the Earth from the centre of the universe, the “biological” blow by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which degraded men into the rank of animal parentage, and the “psychological” blow by Freud himself, which deprived mankind of the illusion that the Ego is “master in its own house”,13 Gould adds another outrage, which exploded the time frame of the Christian world view and thus challenged many ontological concepts. This “geological” blow shook the established frame of reference after the Copernican revolution and before Darwin’s work. The discussion about the modern perception of time and its aesthetic implications is often focused one-sidedly on the dramatic acceleration of life. In looking to the intense debate of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on the “deep time”14 – in John McPhee’s beautifully apt words – it becomes clear that the impetus of acceleration must always be placed in relation to the simultaneous awareness of slowness, which is equally fundamental to modern 12

Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle. Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. 13 Sigmund Freud, “A Difficulty in the Path of Psycho-Analysis”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (19171919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, London: Hogarth Press, 2001, 135-44. 14 John McPhee, Basin and Range, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982, 127ff.

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aesthetics. In addition to the tendencies of acceleration that can be found in many narratives of modernity, there are also narrative techniques which elaborate the slow and the static. The following subsections deal with the two natural sciences archaeology and geology and their impact on literary texts and narrative techniques. While human culture still plays an important role in those fictional texts mainly influenced by archaeology, literature inspired by geology opens up to more general reflections about the past and the future of the Earth beyond human existence itself. Archaeological discoveries stimulate reflections of future cultures It was only in the eighteenth century that a systematic study of the past through its physical remains began to be carried out in a manner recognizable to modern archaeology. In spite of all the contrasts between past and present civilizations, scientists tried to relate ancient artefacts to the contemporary in a meaningful way. One example of constituting meaning could be the emphasis on continuity in the light of a faith in progress. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Egyptian relics were considered as tokens of a vanished civilization, and the present one as a more perfect civilization. The fascination with extinct cultures came along with an increasing interest for exotic and oriental customs and habits. The arts15 as well as everyday life (fashion, furniture, decoration) began to imitate certain aspects of ancient cultures. At the same time, archaeological excavation of classical heritage reminded people that any developing culture must reach an end. This notion became prominent in the context of the artistic decadence of the fin-de-siècle. The vision that one’s own world could one day be the subject of excavations inspired many with fear. Archaeological activity and its anxiety to connect the past and present led to an amalgamation of different levels of time which could be evaluated in different ways: with enthusiasm, if archaeology was considered as an enlightening scientific approach to time; with fear, if the disturbing dimension of the merging of eras was accentuated. In scientific observations, this disconcerting element could be controlled by restricting it to rational explications or tentative hypotheses. 15 Paintings (e.g. Eugène Delacroix, The Women of Algiers [1834]), literature (e.g. Edgar Allan Poe, Al Aaraaf [1829]), music (e.g. Giuseppe Verdi, Nabucco [1842]), architecture and decorative arts.

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Literary fiction, however, could intensify the unsettling effect of reconstructing the past in the present. One of the first novels which testified to this fascination with archaeology and co-founded the Science Fiction genre was the novel published anonymously at first in 1827, The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century. The English author Jane Loudon treats the theme of temporality in a highly innovative way. Similar to the transcendence of space, literary fiction invents the possibility of travelling through time. The exploration of present and future cultures resembles archaeological methods for excavating ancient cultures. The disturbing past appears in the person of the mummy Cheops who is supposed to be revived in the twenty-second century with a galvanic battery. By transposing the plot into the future and by qualifying it as a “tale”, the disturbing aspect of the past is modified into a sciencefiction story. The setting in the future, which offers the technical requirements to actually bring the past back to life, has no immediate impact on the present, due to its distance in time. By doing so, Loudon cuts the ties to the present of her readers and to the extra-literary reality. This chronological distance is one way of playing down the disturbing effect of an unusual perception of time. In the introduction, the first-person narrator explains this twist with a dream he had before finding the hero of his novel. A flower-crowned spirit appeared and told him: [This] is the Chronicle of a future age. Weave it into a story. It will so far gratify your wishes, as to give you a hero totally different from any hero ever appeared before .... the whole face of society will be changed: new governments will have arisen; strange discoveries will be made, and stranger modes of life adopted.16

Loudon depicts a future society in the year 2127 where a catholic England is under the domination of a woman and Education became universal, and the technical terms of abstruse science familiar to the lowest mechanics; whilst questions of religion, politics and metaphysics, agitated by them daily, supplied that

16

Jane Loudon, The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century, London: Colburn and Bentley, 1828, vi-vii.

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stimulus, for which their minds, enervated by over cultivation, constantly carved.17

The novel offers an illuminating insight into some of the current beliefs and attitudes in the early nineteenth century, such as the enthusiasm with which technological developments are welcomed and the almost unlimited trust in science. Preparing their journey to Egypt, the adventurers Father Morris and the hero of the novel, Endric, share a talk about the power of Egypt’s culture: Egypt is rich in monuments of antiquity; and all historians unite in declaring her ancient inhabitants to have possessed knowledge and science far beyond even the boasted improvements of modern times. For instance could we attempt to erect stupendous buildings like the pyramids, where enormous masses are arranged with geometrical accuracy ... and in every point, excepting in their religion, they surpassed us.18

The idea which is depicted in that talk is that even if the extinct culture of Egypt was inferior in the field of religion the ancient Egyptians had a knowledge and wisdom that modern culture and even future societies cannot compete with. The journey to Egypt and the appearance of the mummy can be seen as a direct response to the Egyptian fascination that swept Europe in the early nineteenth century, which arose from the rediscovery of Ancient Egypt in the late eighteenth century.19 By using the mummy as a disturbing element, Loudon anticipates a whole tradition of Egypt novels, time travel and science fiction stories.20 The reanimated mummy Cheops, first described as a horrible creature, adopts an advisory role within the twenty-second century society. He restores peace and order after various intrigues and corruption during the preparations for the election of the future queen. In doing so, he attempts to make up for the crimes he had committed 17

Ibid., 3-4. Ibid., 107. 19 See Napoleon’s campaign in the Orient (1798-1801). 20 E.g. Théophile Gautier’s Le Roman de la momie (1858), Jules Verne’s Voyage au centre de la terre (1864), H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), and Bram Stoker’s novel The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903). 18

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in his former life. The end of the novel depicts Endric wanting to know the secrets of the tomb and the history of the mummy, and Cheops answers: How would this knowledge avail you? Has any thing but misery attended your former researches? And can any thing but misery attend the knowledge you now covet? Learn wisdom by experience! Seek not pry into secrets denied to man!21

With this last scene, Loudon offers a critical description of the enthusiasm for science and stresses the responsibility of the scientist. In contrast to the scientific education and the technological progress emphasized at the beginning of the novel, Loudon counters that one must respect the limits of knowledge. However, all in all, Loudon depicts a highly educated society with a responsible monarch which forms a positive contrast to the actual political and social conditions of the early nineteenth century. In creating a utopian future society radically different from her own reality, Loudon uses the techniques of a prophetic archaeology to register her own cultural present as a science fictional past. Archaeological methods are transferred into the future to analyse and criticize contemporary culture using temporal distance. H.G. Wells paints a much more pessimistic view of the future and also criticizes the current state of his own civilization in his novel The Time Machine, published in 1895. Here, the archaeological theme serves to reflect on the decadence of his own civilization. The time traveller, arriving from the late nineteenth century, only encounters ruins and artefacts in a dilapidated museum, in the place that once was London. Apart from this, there are the degenerate successors of mankind: the decadent Eloi and the brutal Morlocks, who live underground. Both evolved from two opposed social classes of Victorian England.22 The encounter with the earthly future demonstrates identity in the difference: the human devolution is in fact a relic of the time traveller’s own future and confirms the continuity of social degeneration. Wells criticizes social injustice in the late 21

Loudon, The Mummy!, 307. See Silke Strickrodt, “Die Zukunft als Ruine. Die architektonische Welt in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine”, Inklings: Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik, 15 (1997), 60-77.

22

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nineteenth century by indicating a drastic gap between the upper and lower classes. With the growing gap, he imagines a radicalization of the status quo and reflects his own socialist political view, his opinion about life and abundance, and the contemporary fear of industrial relations. Wells’ novel is also highly influenced by the work of the British zoologist Ray Lankester (1847-1929) who – modifying the ideas of Darwin – formulates his theory of social degeneration in his book Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880). Wells depicts the time traveller successfully escaping from the Morlocks by using the time machine and travelling millions of years into the future. He finds himself in a world where the moon disappears, the sun, instead of racing across the sky, bobs on the horizon like a dull, red light, and the earth has ceased to rotate. Apart from some green lichens the only living creatures he encounters are gigantic crabs which attack him. Moving forward in time he sadly describes his impressions: At last, more than thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless. And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; ... I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained .... But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea .... Beyond these lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives – all that was over.23

The narrator imagines an apocalyptic scenario where the degeneration of mankind seems to be only the beginning of a whole series of catastrophes. Theories of ice ages, natural selection and the 23

Harry M. Geduld, The Definitive Time Machine. A Critical Edition of H.G. Wells’s Scientific Romance with Introduction and Notes, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1987, 86.

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cooling of the Earth, already known from the research of natural science, are prolonged into the future and applied on living creatures in general. Similar to Loudon, Wells keeps a chronological distance to the extra-literary reality by depicting a scenario thousands of years away from the present but the epilogue of his novel clearly refuses the teleological advancement of mankind. The present civilization is described as “a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end”.24 The novel is an enlightening contrast to the dominant belief in a teleological evolution which implies improvement, progress and hope. Here, some of the fears and imaginable negative consequences of evolution are expressed. The innovative potential of literature creates a world where time travel is as possible as transcending space. It is not only a question of enhancing transitions but also of radicalizing archaeological research methods. Whereas archaeology extended the possibility of travelling back in time to vast periods of time, the prophetic archaeology of literary fiction depicts a world where even the ability of time travel into the future becomes thinkable. Geology as a marginalization of the human subject The origin of geology consists of two different sources: on the one hand, the practical know-how of ancient miners and ore searchers, who provided their cultures with natural resources, and on the other hand philosophy.25 Even in antiquity, theories of creation, sedimentation and transmutation were common, but the retaining of the biblical myth of Earth creation inhibited the continuation.26 With the law of superposition27 formulated in the seventeenth century by the Danish scientist Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), first steps in the

24

Ibid., 90. Thales of Miletus (624-546), a pre-Socratic philosopher, tried to replace the mythological ideas of the Earth with rational explications. 26 Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) rediscovered the organic origin of fossils and negated the biblical deluge but since his notes remain unpublished, his findings remain without consequences. 27 The law or principle of superposition is a key axiom based on observations of natural history that is a foundational principle of sedimentary stratigraphy and so of other geology-dependent natural sciences. Sedimentary layers are deposited in a time sequence, with the oldest on the bottom and the youngest on the top. 25

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direction of a scientific and historical approach were made.28 Despite those systematic identification techniques of the Earth strata,29 which further propelled the interest in the Earth, the heated debate between religion and science interfered with the scientific progress. Two contradicting theories developed to explain the Earth’s origin with designated followers: the Neptunists,30 whose theory confirmed the biblical Great Flood, and the Plutonists,31 who believed that the Earth was gradually formed over an immeasurable amount of time. In 1749, the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon (17071788) published his Histoire naturelle in which he attacked the popular concepts of Christian theorists on the topic of the history of Earth. From experimentation with cooling globes, he declared that the age of the Earth is not just about 5,500 years as inferred from the Bible, but rather 75,000 years. By the mid-eighteenth century, it became acceptable to question the age of the Earth. This questioning represented a turning point in the study of the Earth. It was now possible to study the history of the Earth from a scientific perspective rather than a religious one. In the early nineteenth century, the story of the history of the Earth once again became a popular topic of discussion in society with the two conflicting groups of the uniformitarians32 and the catastrophists,33 both of who argued over the

28

Such profound approaches remained rare and their impact relatively low because they were accompanied with theological calculations, e.g. James Usher (1580-1556) who computed Monday the 23.10.4004 as date of the Earth’s creation. The dominant opinion was that the deluge was the only event which changed the form of the Earth and it was hold to be responsible for the existence of fossils, boulder clays and for the continental drift. 29 The Earth’s strata can be defined as horizontal layers of rock having approximately the same composition throughout. 30 Neptunism is a discredited and obsolete scientific theory of geology formulated by Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817) in the late eighteenth century that proposed rocks were formed from the crystallization of minerals in the early Earth’s oceans. Novalis (1772-1801) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) were one of the prominent supporters. 31 The theory of Plutonism (or Vulcanism) assumed that the rocks forming the Earth were formed in fire by volcanic activity with a continuing gradual process of weathering and erosion, wearing away rocks which were then deposited on the sea bed, reformed into layers of sedimentary rock by heat and pressure, and raised again. James Hutton (1726-1797) is a relevant theorist. 32 The assumption of uniformitarianism is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now have always operated in the universe in the past and

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real age of the Earth. The aim of the catastrophists was reconciling geological science with religious traditions of the biblical Great Flood. In the early 1820s, English geologists interpreted fossils as the outcome of Noah’s flood. On the opposite side, Charles Lyell challenged in 1830 the advocates of catastrophism with the publication of the first volume of his book Principles of Geology – which presented a variety of geological evidence from England, France, Italy and Spain – to prove Hutton’s ideas of gradualism correct.34 Lyell provided evidence for the theory of uniformitarianism stating that processes occur at the same rates in the present as they did in the past and account for all of the Earth’s geological features. Until well into the nineteenth century, in the case of science, and especially geology, the dissemination of the new knowledge derived from scientific discoveries was often curtailed by the Church. It shattered people’s religious values that scientific hypotheses were proved correct even though they contradicted the Bible. The extension of the time frame triggered by the findings of geology had a most disturbing effect. It was a challenge to accept a rational view on the Earth’s history without losing confidence in the biblical order. Compared to archaeological themes, questions about future and past became all the more disturbing in geology, since in these disciplines the ties to human culture were cut. It came as a considerable shock to learn that mankind is not the crown of creation, but only made up one phase of life on Earth among many – and one that could equally face extinction. But that was not enough: while thinkers tried to reconcile the immense periods of geology with the biblical view of the six days of creation,35 there were even more difficult challenges to face. Even more disconcerting than not knowing the real age of the earth were the conclusions drawn from fossils. In Cuvier’s words:

apply everywhere in the universe. Prominent supporters were James Hutton (17261797), Charles Lyell (1797-1875) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882). 33 Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, violent events. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was one of the advocates. 34 Hutton argued that most geological change had occurred very gradually in the Earth’s history. 35 In the mid-nineteenth century, some geologists sought to harmonize science and Scripture by interpreting the days of Genesis as epochs in cosmic history stating that the Hebrew word yom, in the context of Genesis, can be properly interpreted as age.

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All of these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe. Beings whose place has been filled by those who exist today, which will perhaps one day find themselves likewise destroyed and replaced by others. 36

Theories about fossils, now classified as extinct creatures,37 fed speculations about human petrifactions and led to an intensification of the crisis of the modern subject. Among many extinct animals, no remains of a human that drowned in the biblical Deluge were found.38 Due to the research in geology and archaeology, man became aware of the fact that his occurrence on Earth is ephemeral compared to the history of the Earth. Initiated by the findings of natural science – namely the certitude that the Earth is much older than supposed – the world view shaped by the Holy Scripture was challenged, and theology as well as fictional literature tried to find ways to deal with it. The certainty of the long history of the Earth and also the assumption that the evolution of man does not proceed teleologically, both had a frightening effect. The results of archaeological excavations proved that ancient cultures had already possessed remarkable technical skills and had been culturally advanced. Literature and its imaginary potential offered the possibility to discuss fears and visions about the Earth’s history as well as the future of the human race on a fictional level. As an expression of that fascination for the geological, literature of the early nineteenth century turned its interest to the very slow processes of natural change, to the study and classification of fossils and the analysis and interpretation of different geological strata. In her poem The Marl Pit, written in 1842, Annette von DrosteHülshoff, an unmarried Westphalian noblewoman and the most famous female German writer of the nineteenth century, was 36 As cited in Martin J.S. Rudwick, Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997, 24. Rudwick points out that for Cuvier the present world had no finality, and the catastrophe that had made the mammoth extinct was certainly not a unique event, and perhaps not even the last of its kinds. 37 Over a long period, fossils were considered as inorganic objects comparable to gemstones. 38 Except for the fossil giant salamander which was misinterpreted by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733) as human remains.

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remarkably well-informed for a woman of her time concerning the scientific controversies in geology. Apart from the volcanic and neptunist theories of creation of the Earth, the poem also refers to Cuvier’s theory of catastrophism. In verses 15-17, the origin of drifted rocks is explained by the theory of Neptunism, which stated that changing water levels could also change positions and formations of rocks: “few were begotten by this soil; this one saw the shore and that one the mountaintop. The angry wave, Leviathan with his gigantic shovel, scared them hither.”39 To prove the Bible’s authenticity, the Neptunists felt the need to demonstrate with scientific evidence that the Great Flood had in fact occurred. With this enhanced desire for data the interest in observing the Earth’s composition increased. Goethe, who remained convinced of Neptunism his entire life, refused to believe any other theory – which claimed the incredible: that the dynamic element of the water was not responsible for the changes in the Earth’s surface on its own and that even the apparently static mountains were subject to changes that were taking place at an extremely slow pace. In 1830, the geologist Charles Lyell formulated the thesis that it is not the sea itself that rises and falls, but the supposedly solid earth itself. Droste-Hülshoff reflects this theory just a few verses later when she writes: Ah, on this slab of slate there are jelly-fish; they seemed still to be brandishing their pointed rays at the moment when they were hurled from the bosom of the sea and the mountain sank down to crush them. Of a certainty the ancient world is no more, and I am a fossil, the bone of a mammoth, in it!40

These verses describe the fascination and at the same time confusion surrounding the slow pace of geological evolution revealing that even the stones, as the embodiment of the static, were equally subject to slow dynamic processes. The theory that static elements can be subject to dynamic processes was irreconcilable with the biblical Genesis and the belief that God created the surface of the Earth and – apart from Noah’s Flood – no further changes could occur. 39

Margaret Laura Mare, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, trans. Ursula Prideaux, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 296. 40 Ibid., 297.

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The awareness that mankind had arrived at the beginning of a new era and – with respect to the infinite past – had reached a new account of time is expressed in the verse “Of a certainty the ancient world is no more” describing the transition to a new era. Re-thinking the history of Earth within new parameters engenders anxiety and insecurity, since this new view of the past changed the living conditions of the present and meant that the future world ahead was still completely unpredictable. The protagonist describes himself as a “fossil” of a mammoth, an animal which died out a long time ago. With this self-attribution, he considers himself as part of the ancient world even though he is well informed about the scientific facts. The fear of profound changes which affect the future world-view holds him back from entering the new era: indeed different scientific approaches are reflected but none of them is favoured in the end. Even if the stone-digging protagonist chooses no geological position in the end, the irreversible beginning of a new period is clearly indicated by the shepherd, depicted as the naïve antagonist whose primordial belief in the book of Genesis is obsolete due to the scientific research of the period. In Adalbert Stifter’s novel Indian Summer41 published in 1857, the geological discourse plays an important role as well. The protagonist Heinrich Drendorf42 is fascinated by the history of the Earth: If any history is worth pondering, worth investigating, it is the history of the Earth, the most promising, the most stimulating history there is, a history where man is only an interpolation, who knows how small a one, and can be superseded by other histories of perhaps higher beings.43

In his vision of a future world, the human race, degraded as an “interpolation”, does not play a role any more, since the dimensions in which Drendorf is thinking considerably vaster than the history of mankind. With these lines articulating how marginal the history of mankind is compared to the Earth’s history, Stifter composes a vision

41

Adalbert Stifter, Indian Summer, trans. Wendell Frye, Bern, Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Oxford, and Wien: Peter Lang, 2009. 42 Almost every thought and action of Stifter’s protagonist with reference to natural science has his counterpart in the glaciologist Friedrich Simony. 43 Stifter, Indian Summer, 192.

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where – even if men were able to measure the change – only the Earth itself knows its secrets and men or other species must learn to read it: The Earth itself preserves the sources of this history in its innermost parts just as in a room for records, sources inscribed in perhaps millions of documents; it is only a matter of our learning to read and not falsify them by eagerness or obstinacy. Who will one day have this history clearly before his eyes? Will ever such a time come, or will only He know it completely, Who has known it for all Eternity? 44

Drendorf’s interest in geology is often one-sidedly interpreted as an evidence for the plot’s lack of development and the general inertia which prevails throughout the novel. But read in the context of contemporary science, namely geology, it becomes obvious that the text, apart from its ostensible ideal to be removed from the current of time, is characterized by the knowledge of the relativity of each culture with regard to the history of the Earth. The novel does not depict a world without change and is no utopian escape from the present. It is rather a detailed reflection on the almost inconceivable dynamics of Earth’s history. Drendorf is fascinated and affected by the dynamic of the mountains. In a series of questions, he switches from the otherwise consistently used past tense to long passages in the present: If through the influence of wind and water the mountains are constantly broken off, if the rubble falls down, if they are further split and the river ultimately brings them to the lower areas in the form of sand and stone, how much can that continue? Has it been going on for ages? ... Or will the action through which mountains are formed continue even today, replacing or even exceeding through some inward power the heights lost by external forces? Will this elevating force cease? Has the Earth cooled more after millions of years, is its crust thicker so that the hot steam in its core is no longer able to force its crystals up? Or is it slowly and inconspicuously eating away at the edges of this crust when it pushes stones through it? If the Earth radiates heat and is growing progressively colder, will it not diminish?45

44 45

Ibid., 192. Ibid., 192.

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With his pressing questions, Stifter’s protagonist ignores the future of his own civilization, and of mankind in general, and focuses on the Earth’s changes. Stifter’s novel does not depict the end of the world in a way as radical as in Wells’ text, but with Drendorf’s questions, some of the unsolved mysteries of natural science are expressed. To summarize, geology as a literary theme reflects the past and future of the Earth beyond human existence. With their potential for innovation, Droste-Hülshoff’s and Stifter’s texts surpass the contemporary reality of natural science and develop scenarios which refer not only to geology but also to the physical law of thermodynamics to reflect the past as well as the future of the Earth in entirely new temporal dimensions. Conclusion Literature, as demonstrated, functions as experimental ground for fantasies and utopias that deal with scientific and technological progress. This progress elicits feelings of both fear and fascination. While optimistic fantasies focus on the infinite possibilities of science and new technologies, the fearful view emphasizes danger and the marginal position of men. With the interpretation of these literary texts, this essay shows that the focus on the slow transformations in Earth’s history can be considered as a strong reason for the collective insecurity of the nineteenth century, which is often subjectively thought to be a symptom of the accelerated present. As the analysis of the literary text reveals, more reasons for collective insecurity than the rapidity of the present must be taken into account. Due to natural sciences and their preoccupation with the past, the idea of a teleological progress is undermined by the long periods in Earth’s history without man, by extinct species and cultures and by natural history pursuing no higher goal. These disturbing effects are another reason for anxiety and the cause for fantastic and fearful literary visions. As their reflection in literature illustrates, the scientific evidence of archaeology and geology changes not only the perception of time in the immediate present, but also makes it possible to consider the past and future in entirely new dimensions. Archaeology as a literary theme carried forward into the future serves as a method to analyse, criticize and change contemporary conditions. Although both Wells and Loudon depict future societies, Loudon creates an optimistic

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future scenario in contrast to Wells who implies a radical shift of the status quo of the extra-literary reality and even imagines a world without men and, at the end of the novel, even the end of the world. This finality is also on the mind of Stifter’s protagonist, who is not only frightened but also fascinated by the slow transformation of the Earth. Unlike Wells and Loudon, Stifter is not using the narratological twist of transforming the plot into the future but raises the question of the beginning and the end of geological processes. Especially at a time when the importance of natural science increases and challenges the existing order, not only does science inspire literature, but literature also composes fantasies of scientific progress and its limits. Droste-Hülshoff reveals the limits of this progress in depicting a protagonist who hesitates to follow any scientific opinion and thus stays undecided, but also deprived of the certainty of religious faith. The contextualization of these selected texts reveals that literature has at times reflected contemporary science on a high level and, within the bounds of fiction, has tried to find answers to the frightening questions some scientific disciplines posed. Especially in times where the perception of the temporal dimension is subject to radical changes, two modes of behaviour can be observed to deal with the conflict: in one instance, the attention focuses on the immediate present and tries to keep up with the accelerating pace of life and, in another, the focus turns to the slow evolution of the past in putting contemporary changes into a broader perspective.

FEARFUL FANTASY: FIGURATIONS OF THE OEDIPUS MYTH IN SCORSESE’S SHUTTER ISLAND (2010) GERO GUTTZEIT The myth of Oedipus and psychoanalysis share a uniquely strong connection in academic work and popular culture, but the myth and its dramatic form in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus have also played a major role in poetics, especially in genre theory. It furnished Aristotle with his prime example of tragedy in the Poetics, and it has become a commonplace to call Oedipus Tyrannus the first piece of detective fiction. In this essay, I argue that the myth of Oedipus embodies that type of dangerous journey from ignorance to knowledge which constitutes the transmedial narrative form of detective fiction. This archetypal narrative works towards the transformation of anxiety into fear and ultimately the containment of fear. Hence, this essay elaborates on the generic relation between the myth of Oedipus and the genre of detective fiction. Rather than focusing on the parricidal and incestuous content of the Oedipus story, I reinterpret it in terms of narrative form as a drama of knowledge, which is structurally similar to the generic form of the detective’s story. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010) does not only evince this form of the detective’s story, but is remarkable for the way in which particular anxieties and fears are shown as elements of the constitution and reconstitution of identity by means of investigation. By identifying the investigator with the perpetrator, the film constitutes an example of a (doubly) Oedipal subgenre of detective fiction. Shutter Island, the genre of detective fiction, and the Sophoclean drama are all testament to the power of the mythical narrative form of the journey from ignorance to knowledge to transform anxiety into a fearful fantasy and open the two to an investigative process.

1. Figurations of Oedipus Not only did Oedipus Tyrannus (c.429 BCE) furnish Aristotle with his prime example of tragedy in the Poetics, but the play is also often cited as the first example of detective fiction. Based on the debate surrounding the modern popular genre and the ancient tragedy, this essay focuses on a later, cinematic drama of knowledge, Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), which evinces striking similarities to Sophocles’ play. To understand them both as dramas of knowledge is to aim at transcending a certain type of reading, especially based on a reductive version of psychoanalysis that reduces the play to its content

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and disregards its form. Due to the eponymous complex, the myth of Oedipus shares a connection with psychoanalysis which is arguably unique in its strength both in academic work and popular culture. But the myth in its magisterial dramatic form in Sophocles has also – beginning with Aristotle – played a major role in poetics, especially in genre theory. In contrast to a narrowly psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth which focuses on the patricidal and incestuous content of the story, I shall here interpret the similarities between the Oedipus myth and Shutter Island in light of its formal characteristics and the interplay between fear and fantasy. The aim of this essay is thus an examination of the transmedial archetypal narrative of the detective as a figuration of the Oedipus myth. One of the defining features of this transmedial genre is that it works towards the transformation of anxiety (as a state of extreme insecurity without any specific object) into fear (that is, of a specific object) and ultimately the containment of fear, a transformation that is dependent on an increase of knowledge.1 This stabilizing effect has often been interpreted as the ideological function of detective fiction, a function which is usually viewed negatively as restorative rather than subversive. Detective fiction in its cinematic guise is of particular interest here, since Hollywood cinema remains one of modernity’s biggest fireplaces for myth-telling in the West; moreover, at 294 million dollars Shutter Island is the highest-grossing of Scorsese’s films as of late 2012, making it influential far beyond academic and other specialist discourses.2 My central hypothesis is that the myth of Oedipus in its Sophoclean form embodies that type of dangerous journey from 1

This distinction of anxiety and fear is often associated with Freud, yet Freud himself, in his Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse, traces the two notions to everyday language; he defines that “Angst bezieht sich auf den Zustand und sieht vom Objekt ab, während Furcht die Aufmerksamkeit gerade auf das Objekt richtet” (Sigmund Freud, Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [1916-1917], 8th edn, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, Gesammelte Werke 11, 1986, 410). “[A]nxiety is related to a state with no direct allusion to an object, while in fear the person’s attention is precisely focused on the object” (Claude Bursztejn, “Fear”, in International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, ed. Alain de Mijolla, Detroit: Thomson/ Gale, 2005, 563). For Kierkegaard’s earlier notion of angest, see Marcus Balzereit, Kritik der Angst. Zur Bedeutung von Konzepten der Angst für eine reflexive Soziale Arbeit, Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2010, 63-73. 2 “Shutter Island”, Internet Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt1130884/ (accessed 29 November 2012).

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ignorance to knowledge which constitutes the transmedial narrative form of detective fiction. Consequently, this essay elaborates on the generic relation between the myth of Oedipus and the genre of detective fiction and, in a second step, examines the mythical Oedipal undercurrent at work in Shutter Island. Finally, these findings are interpreted in light of the interplay between fear and fantasy and used to suggest a definition of a certain type of transmedial detective narrative as Oedipal in a narrower sense, of which both Oedipus Tyrannus and Shutter Island serve as examples. 2. Investigating Oedipus: the myth of the detective Scholars disagree on the question of whether Oedipus Tyrannus can be regarded as detective fiction. Some scholars name it the first instance of the genre and see Oedipus as the prototype of the detective. Shoshana Felman, for instance, calls the play “the classical analytic detective story”.3 Others deny altogether that it can be compared to modern detective fiction. Gerald Gillespie, for example, holds that the suggestion that “the ancient Oedipus myth is the nuclear form of the later detective tale is a formalistic exaggeration”, making the commonplace of detective Oedipus a contested one.4 The trouble already begins with the question of what we mean when we talk about the myth of Oedipus. Is it the myth as it was recounted, a story of ancient Greek oral culture? Since stories are not fixed in oral narrations in the same way as in a literary text, this first notion is problematic in itself, since it can be quite difficult to find the themes or mythologemes of which individual tellings of the myth are variations, especially since there are only written records extant. Or does the myth of Oedipus mean Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Tyrannus?5 This straightforward question can either be understood in 3

Shoshana Felman, “De Sophocle à Japrisot (via Freud), ou pourquoi le policier?”, Littérature, 49 (1983), 24. The translation is Richard E. Goodkin’s in “Killing Order(s): Iphigenia and the Detection of Tragic Intertextuality”, Yale French Studies, 76 (1989), 81. 4 Gerald Gillespie, “The Detective Story and Novel”, in Romantic Prose Fiction, eds Gerald Gillespie, Manfred Engel and Bernhard Dieterle, Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008, 347. 5 Oedipus also figures prominently in Oedipus at Colonus and indirectly in Sophocles’ third Theban play, Antigone. Yet, as Bernard Knox cautions, the three should not be regarded as a unified trilogy. Bernard Knox, “Greece and the Theater”, in The Three Theban Plays, by Sophocles, ed. Robert Fagles, Harmondsworth:

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terms of content or form. The first is the more obvious choice, since myths only become myths through a continuous and repeated cycle of production and reception and what stays (more or less) the same could be said to be the myth itself, a story that can be narrated and presented in different ways. Historically, however, it is not so much the content of the myth, which is already told in Herodotus, for example, that has made Sophocles’ drama so influential. As Colette Astier notes: “More than any other myth, that of Oedipus has been bound up with one poet’s work, to the point where for generations of westerners ... the myth itself [was confused] with the dramatic tragedy.” 6 Astier’s argument is that psychoanalysis has opened up the way back to the myth itself. Yet this insight comes with its own blindness, since psychoanalysis has also obscured what is the specific quality of Sophocles’ drama in contrast to other versions of the myth: its form. The defining feature of Oedipus Tyrannus is that it presents the myth through the investigation of Oedipus. Sophocles’ drama presents a development from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. At the beginning of the play, Oedipus and the polis of Thebes are both ignorant as to who killed Laius and this thus becomes the quaestio of the play. Indeed, the focus on the investigation is so strong that the divine revelation by the seer Tiresias is not enough as a proof, but as Michel Foucault observes, it is the lowest ranks of society, the shepherds, who are the empirically grounded witnesses of the deeds.7 Oedipus continually pushes forward the investigation and the drama consists of the various steps in this journey to the truth about his own biography and the collective situation of Thebes. The play begins with the presentation of the disruption of societal order by the plague, a result of the fact that Laius’s murderer has not been apprehended and put to justice, as the oracle at Delphi later reveals. The investigation into the murder is Penguin, Penguin Classics, 1982, 29. Oedipus at Colonus was produced in 401 BCE, after Sophocles’ death, and does not represent the decisive narrative form which we find in Oedipus Tyrannus. 6 Colette Astier, “Oedipus”, in Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes, ed. Pierre Brunel, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 903 (my emphasis). 7 Foucault writes: “The most humble slave of Polybus and, decisively, the most hidden herdsman of the forest of Cithaera pronounce the final truth and provide the final piece of evidence”. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Juridical Forms”, in Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. III, ed. James D. Faubion, London: Penguin, 2002, 23.

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conducted by Oedipus; he says: “I’ll bring it all to light myself!”8 At the beginning of the play, he has already sent Creon to the Oracle at Delphi.9 He also searches for witnesses of the murder among the Thebans.10 When asked to call upon Tiresias, Oedipus has in fact already done so.11 Later, he sends for the surviving witness of the roadside murder in order to interview him and to find out about the identity of the murderer. The translation by Fainlight and Littman even goes so far as to have Oedipus use a detective’s vocabulary: “From one clue / much can be deduced.”12 At one point, Oedipus refers to one of the central questions of the murder mystery, namely whether the murder was committed by a single person (Oedipus) or by a group of people (thieves), and argues that “if he [the shepherd] still holds to the same number, / I cannot be the killer. One can’t equal many.”13 The dramatic form of the play is thus defined by the course of Oedipus’ investigation. As opposed to a chronological recounting of the story, we find in the form, that Sophocles chooses, the defining feature of the play. In what way then is Sophocles’ play related to detective fiction? Both are stories or dramas of knowledge – not of, say, love or war. Both portray a development from a state of ignorance to a state of knowledge. In terms of narratology, the form they share is one of the best, if not “the” best, example of the difference between the “what” and the “how” of a narrative, of “story” and “discourse”.14 In the same way that Oedipus Tyrannus is characterized by its form as a drama of knowledge, detective fiction is a genre defined by its narrative form, and not by its “criminal” content. Since crime fiction is often used as an umbrella term that is supposed to include detective fiction, a clarification about their 8 Sophocles, “Oedipus the King”, in The Three Theban Plays, by Sophocles, ed. Robert Fagles, Harmondsworth: Penguin, Penguin Classics, 1984, 167, l. 150. 9 Ibid., 162, l. 81. 10 Ibid., 171. ll. 251-65. 11 Ibid., 174, l. 327. 12 Sophocles, Theban Plays: Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone, eds Ruth Fainlight and Robert J. Littman, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, 72, ll. 120-21. 13 Sophocles, “Oedipus the King”, 208, ll. 933-34. 14 Seymour Chatman defines: “The what of a narrative I call its ‘story’; the way I call its ‘discourse’.” Seymour B. Chatman, Story and Discourse, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978, 9.

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relation is necessary at this point. One and the same story can be presented as either a crime narrative or a detective narrative, depending on whether we go along with the criminal as the crime originates or we follow the detective figure as the crime is being investigated. Taking as an example one of the oldest extant crime narratives, the story of Cain and Abel, Richard Alewyn argues that this exact story could also be told in the different narrative form of the detective story: A corpse is found. Who is it? Answer: Abel. – How did he die? – Through violence. – Accidentally? No. – Then murder! Who is the culprit? Well, the human family was very small back then. There are only three who could have done it: Adam, Eve, Cain. They are questioned one after the other. Who could have been at the crime scene at the time of the murder? Who had a motive? Result: Only Cain has no alibi. Only he has a motive. Only Cain can be the culprit.15

This version does not differ from the one in the Bible with regard to its content – both render the murder of Abel by Cain – but it differs very much in its form. This, for Alewyn, marks the distinction between a crime novel (Kriminalroman) such as Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and a detective novel (Detektivroman).16 Alewyn’s is an extreme example as it could not be played out in a drama without the introduction of an additional character: an investigator, apparently not present in the original version since the omniscient biblical god needs no investigation to arrive at the truth about the murder. Despite its simplicity, Alewyn’s story evinces the characteristics of the uniquely clear-cut narrative form of detective fiction; it consists, firstly, of the discovery of the criminal deed – most often a murder though sometimes the disappearance of a person; secondly, the investigation into “whodunnit”, “howdunnit”, and “whydunnit”; and 15

My translation. “Eine Leiche wird gefunden. Wer ist es? Antwort: Abel. – Wie ist er umgekommen? – Durch Gewalt. – Ein Unglücksfall? Nein. – Also Mord! Wer ist der Täter? Nun, die Menschheitsfamilie war damals noch klein. Es kommen nur drei in Frage: Adam, Eva, Kain. Sie werden nacheinander befragt. Wer konnte zur Tatzeit am Tatort gewesen sein? Wer hatte ein Motiv zur Tat? Ergebnis: Kain allein hat kein Alibi. Er allein hat ein Motiv. Kain allein kann der Täter gewesen sein.” Richard Alewyn, “Anatomie des Detektivromans”, in Der Kriminalroman: Poetik – Theorie – Geschichte, ed. Jochen Vogt, München: Fink, 1998, 53. 16 Ibid., 53.

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finally, the dénouement in which the results of the investigation are revealed. The main argument against interpretations of the Oedipus myth as a detective story, put forward by Roger Caillois for example, is that the audience was aware of the fact that Oedipus is the murderer.17 Thus, what would be suspense without this foreknowledge on the part of the viewer constitutes dramatic irony in Sophocles,18 since Oedipus’ own actions lead to his discovery of himself as the culprit and, one might say, his downfall (which, in a sense, has already occurred when the prophecy becomes fact). Yet, it should be kept in mind that while the effect of curiosity on the viewer’s part is no longer constrained to the question “whodunnit”, the question of “how” Oedipus finds out that he is the culprit still evokes curiosity. The classic examples in detective film are the Columbo mysteries, starring Peter Falk (19682003). The form of the investigation that is shown in the play thus still produces an effect of the same kind. In fact, the investigative characteristics of Oedipus Tyrannus have been obscured by the popularized version of Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, though they were not lost on Freud himself, at least the early Freud, as the following quotation from the Traumdeutung shows: The action of the play consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, with cunning delays and ever-mounting excitement – a process that can be likened to the work of a psycho-analysis – that Oedipus himself is the murderer of Laius, but further that he is the son of the murdered man and of Jocasta.19

The general similarity between the Oedipus myth as found in Oedipus Tyrannus and detective fiction lies in their narrative form which epitomizes the transition from ignorance to knowledge, a form which is often self-reflexively foregrounded within the tradition. Such a view 17 Roger Caillois, “The Detective Novel as Game”, in The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory, eds Glenn W. Most and William W. Stowe, San Diego: Hancourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983, 1-12. 18 A good example of this is: “I will speak out now as a stranger to the story, / a stranger to the crime. If I’d been present then, / there would have been no mystery, no long hunt / without a clue in hand.” Sophocles, “Oedipus the King”, 171, ll. 248-51. 19 Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), ed. and trans. James Strachey, New York: Basic Books, 2000, 262.

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differs markedly from a psychoanalytic interpretation of the myth which concentrates on the level of content, that is Oedipus’ murder of his biological father and his incestuous relationship with his biological mother. The tendency towards an interpretation of the Oedipus myth in terms of its patricidal and incestuous content is shown by its cinematic history. Since the first on-screen Oedipus in 1908 (Œdipe Roi, directed by André Calmettes), there have been adaptations of the play, of which the best-known is probably Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo Re (1967), in which Pasolini frames the ancient myth with a twentiethcentury narrative. In his overview of the film versions of Sophocles’ drama, Martin M. Winkler estimates that period dramas are less prominent than modernizing adaptations.20 Tyrone Guthrie’s Oedipus Rex (1957), a filmed stage version, in which the actors wear theatrical masks, might be one of the closest to the ancient play in terms of the viewer’s experience, while the most unusual adaptation is probably Jason Wishnow’s animated short film, Oedipus (2004), in which vegetables embody the characters: a potato Oedipus fights a broccoli Laius with kitchen instruments and later shares a bed with tomato Jocasta. The number of films based on Oedipus Tyrannus remains relatively low, if we compare them to the Oedipal motifs and allusions that Winkler and others have found in many films ranging from John Huston’s Westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers to Woody Allen’s comedies and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films. The analysis of the adaptations as well as of the motifs and allusions to Oedipus Tyrannus usually follows in the footsteps of Freud in the sense that they focus on the content, which is not surprising, since interest in Oedipus is so bound up with an interest in Freud in general. How, then, would a focus on its formal characteristics alter our understanding of the Sophoclean version of the myth? Among others, American studies scholar John Irwin has developed a reading of the Oedipus myth which takes into account the pervasive epistemic aspect in Sophocles’ play: As the myth of a hero of consciousness, Oedipus’s story illustrates the link between the structure of the self’s cognitive relatedness to itself (the splitting and doubling that constitutes self-reflection) and the two 20

Martin M. Winkler, “Oedipus in the Cinema”, Arethusa, 41/I (2008), 67. Online at: doi:10.1353/are.2008.0008 (accessed 29 November 2012).

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major scenarios dramatizing the extremes of love and hate in the self's emotional relatedness to itself (incest and the suicidal duel with a double).21

Foregrounding the form rather than the content of the story, Irwin reinterprets the material elements of the play in terms of the structure of self-consciousness. Viewed as incarnations of the structure of reflexivity, Jocasta and Laius represent the positive and the negative relation of the self to itself. Adopting Freud’s terminology, we might say that the manifest content of incest and patricide hides the latent structure of self-consciousness, a structure that appears indirectly in the Sphinx’s riddle (which animal is a quadruped, a biped and a threefooted creature during the course of a day: a human being).22 Such a reading can further be supported by the fact that Jocasta is quite blunt about the son’s desire to sleep with the mother and Greek myths usually do not shy back from the portrayal of patricide via castration, as in the story of Cronos who castrates his father Uranos.23 Based on such a reading, Oedipus figures as the self-reflexive mythical archetype of the modern-day detective, an archetype that can help us to understand contemporary cultural documents which involve the detective as figurations of the Oedipus myth. The generic relation between the myth and the genre lies in their representation of the transition from ignorance to knowledge which defines the narrative form of both drama and genre. The next part is devoted to an interpretation of Shutter Island in these terms. 3. Modern Oedipus: the example of Shutter Island Beginning with the likes of Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), a oneminute short film in which a magically disappearing burglar confounds the most famous of literary detectives, the history of the detective film dates back to the very beginning of the twentieth century. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, a look into the cinematic calendar suggests that the physical prowess of a 21

John T. Irwin, The Mystery to a Solution, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994, 216. 22 Characteristically, Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent is one of the content of dreams, not their form. See Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 160. 23 Jocasta says: “And as for this marriage with your mother – / have no fear. Many a man before you, / in his dreams, has shared his mother’s bed.” Sophocles, “Oedipus the King”, 215, ll. 1073-76.

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Hercules rather than the intellectual ability of an Hercule Poirot dominates popular film culture, and this to such an extent that even Sherlock Holmes has been transformed into yet another action hero in Guy Ritchie’s Hollywood franchise (Sherlock Holmes 2009, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows 2011).24 Historically, one of the strongest connections between the detective film and the Oedipus myth occurred in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film, Chinatown, which depicts an investigation that reveals corruption, incest, and murder. As the story of detective J.J. Gittes, Chinatown shares a focus on questions of knowledge with Oedipus Tyrannus, yet it does not demonstrate the self-reflexivity that, as I will argue, defines the Oedipal subgenre of detective fiction: namely that Oedipus is not only the discoverer but also the discovered, not only the investigator, but also the perpetrator. Shutter Island (2010), as of 2012 Martin Scorsese’s commercially most successful film, is based on a 2003 novel of the same title by American writer Dennis Lehane. The film mixes the historically intimately related genres of Gothic and detective fiction, a relation that dates back as far as the works of the inventor of the detective story, Edgar Allan Poe. The motion picture plays with the continuum between accurate perception and hallucination, and happily confuses (what is in the film) reality and dream by means of an unreliable narration and such devices as a dream-within-the-dream. The form of Shutter Island corresponds to the three-part structure of the detective story in that the initial disappearance of a person is investigated and finally cleared up in a dénouement. The story is set in 1954 at Ashecliffe Hospital, a mental institution and prison for the so-called “criminally insane”. U.S. Marshal Edward “Teddy” Daniels (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) are sent to Shutter Island just off the coast of Boston in order to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a female patient. They learn from the head psychiatrist, Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley), that the woman, Rachel Solando, who was imprisoned because of drowning her three children, must have escaped from her cell. The set-up thus combines the generic elements of the missing

24

Quite the opposite holds true on television where Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat have successfully reinvented Sherlock Holmes’ prodigious intellectual powers in Sherlock (BBC 2010-).

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person and the locked room of which detective fiction makes such frequent use. The second phase of the film is structured along Teddy’s investigation of Ashecliffe hospital. Teddy and Chuck investigate the cell from which Rachel Solando is said to have escaped and where they find a note of hers that says: “THE LAW OF 4 / WHO IS 67?” (00:14:31).25 They also partake in the search for the disappeared patient. Teddy, in an interrogation of the orderlies and nurses, discovers that one of the men left his post for a short while (00:17:28). His prowess as an investigator is also shown when he identifies one of the doctors, Dr Naehring (Max von Sydow), as a German immigrant; Naehring speaks very good English but tellingly pronounces the question “who raised you?” with a sharp s (00:23:04). This in turn makes Teddy, who served in Europe and was present at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, suspect that Naehring has a Nazi past. The head psychiatrist, Dr Cawley, also seems to be intent on hindering the investigation from the outset, as Teddy and Chuck recognize studied patterns when they are interviewing several patients about the disappeared Rachel Solando (00:35:39). The investigations are complicated by the fact that Teddy is plagued by headaches and (day)dreams of his past as a soldier fighting in Germany, and of his dead wife, Dolores Chanal, who was killed in a fire. His reason for coming to the Island, Teddy reveals to Chuck, is that he suspects that the arsonist, Andrew Laeddis, is institutionalized on Shutter Island. He also harbours suspicions or rather fears about the institution as such, since an informant, George Noyce, has told him that experiments are being conducted on the patients, financed by the anti-communist House Committee on Un-American Activities. When Dr Cawley presents them with a mysteriously reappeared Rachel Solando, neither Teddy nor Chuck believe that she is the real Rachel Solando (00:50:17). Beside his dreams, Teddy starts to hallucinate, and dead children from Dachau and his dead wife intrude upon his perception. The mysterious lighthouse, Teddy surmises, is a place where patients are being operated on in order to turn them into brainless, ghostly soldiers, and he finds his suspicions justified when he alone speaks to who he thinks is the real Rachel Solando in a cave in the cliffs. She also seemingly explains to him that he is being 25

The times are given in hours:minutes:seconds and have been taken from the English audio track on the German DVD release of Shutter Island.

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drugged by the doctors and that his walking nightmares are a result of that. In the third and last phase of the film, all of Teddy’s conspiracy theories and hallucinations are discovered to have a convincing explanation. Teddy finally makes it to the lighthouse, where Dr Cawley awaits with a truly Oedipal dénouement (01:45:03). Piecing together the fragments of memories, dreams, and hallucinations, Cawley explains that Edward “Teddy” Daniels has been the 67th patient at Ashecliffe hospital for two years, ever since he murdered his wife, Dolores Laeddis, née Chanal, a manic depressive who had drowned their three children. At the origin of the story there thus lies a Medean madness that Laeddis’s later madness mirrors. The disappeared Rachel Solando is a figment of his imagination, a delusional fantasy, created because of his deepest anxiety. It is in fact Andrew Laeddis who killed Dolores Chanal, but Teddy, with his full name, Edward Daniels, is exactly that same person; the missing woman, Rachel Solando, corresponds to none other than Andrew Laeddis’s wife, Dolores Chanal. The four names are anagrams (according to the already-mentioned “law of 4”): Edward Daniels and Andrew Laeddis, Rachel Solando and Dolores Chanal. Teddy’s partner Chuck is actually Andrew Laeddis’s primary psychiatrist, Dr Lester Sheehan. Andrew Laeddis has only been able to sustain his schizophrenic world view as Teddy because it has been supported by virtually all the staff for four days. Cawley and Sheehan have constructed “the most cutting edge role play ever attempted in psychiatry” (01:51:54) to allow Andrew as Teddy to act out his fantasy and simulate – in the positive sense of the word – the process of arriving at self-knowledge, to enable him to reconstruct his memory. The doctors’ motivation for this elaborate plot, this fiction-withinthe-fiction, is a scientific struggle that took place in the 1950s in the United States and elsewhere and which is fictionalized in a historically quite accurate way. The 1950s saw the introduction of the first psycho-active drugs against mental illness, chlorpromazine, which supplanted what had become the standard surgical method, the transorbital lobotomy, where a patient’s brain is partly destroyed by means of an ice-pick-like instrument.26 Dr Cawley presents his version 26

The most prominent example of lobotomy in a film is arguably Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), based on Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel, in

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of psychotherapy as the third faction in this scientific war; it works from dialogical interaction, the specific form of which, however, is never specified. In opposition to chlorpromazine and lobotomy, it is not far from Freud’s famous “talking cure”, as Cawley explains: “I have this radical idea that if you treat a patient with respect, listen to him, try and understand, you just might reach him” (00:31:10). The motivation for trying this cure on Andrew Laeddis is that he is the most dangerous of the patients at Ashecliffe due to his fantasy world but even more so because he is a former USA marshal and war veteran trained to commit murder. The talking cure is arguably even better described as an “acting cure”, since the aim is to make Andrew act out his delusional fantasy. This acting-out is Oedipal in that Teddy/Andrew investigates and through his investigation discovers himself as the murderer of his own wife. In fact, we can detect Oedipal elements as early as the first scene. Chuck/Sheehan, who acts as if he is meeting Teddy/Andrew for the first time, puts him on an Oedipal pedestal when he addresses him as “Teddy Daniels, the man, the legend” (00:02:00), similar to the way in which the people of Thebes address their King when they ask Oedipus to end the plague. When the deputy warden of Ashecliffe asks the two marshals to hand over their revolvers, Teddy/Andrew jokingly likens psychic disorders to a plague-like disease: “You act like insanity is catching” (00:07:39). The situation on the island in general is one of extreme tension, as the guards keep fiddling with their weapons and the deputy warden admits that they are all “on edge” (00:05:17). The storm that rages over the island for much of the film can be seen as the natural disaster equivalent of the plague. When Teddy/Andrew tells Dr Naehring that he was raised by wolves, this allusion to Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome, effectively stages him as an orphan, as is Oedipus. Shutter Island often explicitly foregrounds its own status as a drama of knowledge. Truth as the aim of the investigation is frequently played off against the relation of the investigator to himself, which the main character McMurphy is lobotomized despite being mentally healthy. Generally, lobotomy occurs both in realistic settings (e.g. Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959; Graeme Clifford’s Frances, 1982; Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table, 1990) and fantastic ones (Franklin J. Schaffner’s Planet of the Apes, 1968; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, 1985). Shutter Island might well be said to be a combination of both types of setting.

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as it is in Oedipus Tyrannus, most strongly in the dialogue between Teddy/Andrew and his informant, George Noyce (Jackie Earle Haley): NOYCE TEDDY NOYCE

This isn’t about the truth. Yes, it is. It’s about exposing the truth. It’s about you. (1:11:11)

The explicitness of some sentences makes them seem slightly odd at first sight, but all the more striking on a second viewing. For instance, Noyce essentially describes the theatrical nature of the situation and opposes it to real action: “This is a game. All of this is for you. You’re not investigating anything. You’re a fucking rat in a maze” (01:11:59). Then again, Teddy/Andrew is able to reinterpret this as a description of how the “evil doctors” lured him onto the island and are now trying to drive him insane. The paradox that emerges in both stretches of dialogue, however, is that Noyce’s description is correct and incorrect at the same time. Noyce’s opposition of truth and investigation vs. Teddy/Andrew is correct insofar as Andrew is only acting out his fantasy and not discovering a real conspiracy. Yet, it is an investigation insofar as the process is the only way of reaching the dénouement, and this disentanglement is neither solely about the truth nor solely about himself, but rather about the truth about himself. All of Andrew Laeddis’s fantasies are based on the principal epistemological dilemma posed by sanity and insanity, especially within a mental institution, and this is explicitly discussed at various points in the film: if someone in a mental institution asserts their own sanity, it is highly unlikely that they will be taken seriously (McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest comes to face the same dilemma). When Andrew as Teddy thus thinks of himself as being of sound mind, it is only logical that he will interpret every attempt to convince him otherwise as an attempt to declare him insane. The resulting causal gap for why the doctors would attempt to declare him insane is filled with a fantasy in which the United States attempts surgically to transform innocents into “ghosts”, that is soldiers who cannot feel pain, in the same way that the Nazis experimented on the Jews in the concentration camps and the Soviets on inmates of the Gulags (01:25:31). As the fantasized Rachel Solando has it in Teddy/Andrew’s strongest delusion: “That’s the kafkaesque genius of it .... Once you’re declared insane, then everything you do is called part of that insanity. Reasonable protests

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are denial. Valid fears ... paranoia.” To which Teddy/Andrew adds: “Survival instincts are defence mechanisms” (01:23:06). This continuum between the waking perception of reality and delusional fantasy can be represented especially well in moving pictures.27 It dates from early on in cinema history; take, for instance, Robert Wiene’s famous expressionist silent film, Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920), in which it turns out that the protagonist has reimagined his own psychiatrist as the nightmarish Dr Caligari. In Shutter Island, visions, dreams and hallucinations dominate large parts of the film; only rarely does there arise an unproblematic or more or less accurate perception. Likewise, all of Teddy/Andrew’s memories of his time as a soldier are more correctly described as half-memories, mixtures of memory and fantasy, with the sole exception of the last flashback that shows how he kills his wife. As early as the first scene, while speaking to Chuck, Teddy/Andrew has, for lack of a better term, a vision of his wife, Dolores, that could be seen as a factual memory, were it not for the picture of the vinyl record of Mahler’s Quartet for Piano and Strings in A Minor: Allegro (00:02:38) that can be seen in Teddy/Andrew’s half-memory of freeing the prisoners of Dachau later on (00:22:41). Teddy/Andrew’s visions are activated by diverse triggers, yet most of them seem to be arranged by the doctors such as the picture of the fake Rachel Solando and the Mahler record. Teddy/Andrew also repeatedly dreams when he is asleep and sometimes the elements of the outside world are taken over into his dreams, thus re-enforcing both the intricate continuity between waking and dreaming and an ultimate causality that links the two aspects of reality. For instance, it starts to rain in the burning apartment building in which Andrew and Dolores used to live, and when Teddy/Andrew wakes up he discovers that there is water leaking from the ceiling and dripping onto him (00:29:52). The second time he wakes up from a dream, however, it turns out later that he only dreamt of waking up (00:56:12; 01:02:45). The dream-within-the-dream is so strong that the borders between perception and fantasy start to dissolve. This is compounded by his hallucinations which start 27

See Laura Rascaroli, “Oneiric Metaphor in Film Theory”, Kinema: A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media (2008): http://www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id =141 (accessed 29 November 2012). I would argue that the ending of the novel, in which Andrew Laeddis regresses into his delusional fantasy, differs from the ending of the film for this reason. See the argument below.

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roughly half-way through the film (1:13:10) and reach a climax in the dénouement scene when his fantasized wife Dolores urges him to “get out of here, Teddy. This place is going to be the end of you” (01:46:20). This undecidability between (cinematic) reality and (cinematic) fantasy carries over to the last scene of the film in particular, a scene which sparked controversy among cinema-goers about what was real within the fiction and what was Teddy/Andrew’s projection. Not only does the scene evince an Oedipal mythical undercurrent, but we can find in it a way to re-interpret the Sophoclean drama itself. Once Andrew Laeddis accepts that, because of murdering his wife, Dolores Chanal, he has fantasized a second self in Teddy Daniels, Dr Cawley tells him that he had actually already been able to reconstruct his life story once before, nine months earlier, but had subsequently regressed back into his delusional fantasy (02:04:55). Since he has been taking chlorpromazine for two years, there is only one treatment left if the “acting cure” does not work. If he were to regress again, the only treatment left would be the aforementioned transorbital lobotomy, the irreversible destruction of brain tissue. The last scene focuses on Andrew’s fantasy of being Teddy; yet this time Andrew Laeddis “play-acts” that he is still living out his fantasy even though he is not. In a marked contrast to the rest of the film (if we except the scene of the murder), the sun is out and birds are chirping when Dr Sheehan sits down next to him on the stairs to one of the buildings. Andrew addresses him as the partner from his fantasy: “I gotta get off this rock, Chuck .... Whatever the hell’s going on here, it’s bad” (02:06:48). Sheehan signals to the other doctors and the warden that he thinks that Andrew has regressed again and Andrew’s next line reinforces his conviction: “Don’t worry partner. They’re not gonna catch us” (02:07:17). After a brief pause, however, Andrew continues: ANDREW SHEEHAN ANDREW

You know, this place makes me wonder. Yeah, what’s that, boss? Which would be worse? To live as a monster or to die as a good man?

The moment of choice has already been foregrounded throughout the course of the film, as Dr Cawley tells Teddy/Andrew that “Sanity is not a choice, Marshal, you can’t just choose to get over it” (00:14:07);

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or in the almost prophetic words of George Noyce: “You can’t dig out the truth and kill Laeddis at the same time. You gotta make a choice” (01:12:52). To live as a monster or to die as a good man is the choice that Andrew Laeddis arrives at through his Oedipal investigations. Clearly to perceive such a choice shows Andrew’s sanity in this very last scene. When Sheehan calls after him, using the name Teddy, Andrew does not react, literally leaving his fantasy behind him. The ending of the film thus shows us an Andrew Laeddis who – in the manner of that other Oedipus, Hamlet – feigns his madness with the aim of getting himself lobotomized so as to prevent himself from injuring other people and himself. Knowing that he will not be able to retain the knowledge of his anagnorisis, it is an act of free choice in a moment of freedom which he has attained with the help of Dr Cawley and Dr Sheehan. He reverses the story of their role play, as he stages another drama in order to affirm his will and to allow himself that last and most existential(ist) of possibilities, the freedom to choose death, in his case mental death. There is a parallel between Laeddis thus ending his mental life and Oedipus blinding himself. The moment of choice in Shutter Island makes us question the very idea that Oedipus’ self-blinding is merely a self-inflicted moral punishment. When we read the archetype of Oedipus through the later avatar of Andrew Laeddis, the latter’s choice is a choice for the future – to avoid harming others – whereas Oedipus’ choice is more about his crimes in the past. In terms of what they know and see (the Greek root οἶδα is the same for both), one might even argue that what Oedipus gains in his self-blinding is a different type of sight, that is, a knowledge of the societal order. This order would be the symbolic order that differentiates between biological parents and, for lack of a better term, symbolic parents. As with the blind seer Tiresias, Oedipus’ insight would then transcend the blindness with which he was struck when he killed his biological father and married his biological mother, a blindness that is the result of a lack of knowledge as much as the logic of socio-symbolic disorder presented as fate by Sophocles. Yet, this aspect of the ending of Oedipus Tyrannus also makes problematic the very notion of choice implied in Shutter Island. Even if Andrew Laeddis has one brief moment of lucidity in which he makes a conscious choice, this choice entails the same consequences as if he had regressed into madness: in both cases, he is lobotomized.

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That he does not see any possibility of a cure might be indicative of the situation of the modern day Oedipus. Andrew thinks he knows that he cannot retain his insight and that he can only choose blindness. Whether that is necessarily so, is left to the onlooker to decide. 4. Fearful fantasy in the Oedipal detective film In terms of (societal) order, detective fiction is seen not only as a popular but also as a conservative genre. The disruption of order, normally in the form of a murder, questions the way society is organized, since anyone might have been the murderer. This produces a state of extreme anxiety. This type of disruption is mirrored in the plague in Oedipus Tyrannus and also in the (albeit play-acted) reactions to the impossible disappearance of Rachel Solando on Shutter Island. The investigation then functions as the restoration of the old order and the eventual discovery of the perpetrator constitutes the singling out of a scapegoat who is sacrificed to relieve the community of its guilt. As Slavoj Žižek has it: “The role of the detective is, again, to dissolve the impasse of this universalized, freefloating guilt by localizing it in a single subject and thus exculpating all others.”28 This process of the restoration of order on the collective level of the genre could correspond to the individual level of the protagonist, yet this is only rarely the case. While the sleuths of the Golden Age of detective fiction like Hercule Poirot remain aloof and are never really involved in the drama beyond the position of an acute observer, the private eyes in the hard-boiled fiction by the likes of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, for instance, only just manage to make it through each story alive. In fact, a different picture of the dynamic of the detective story as a drama of knowledge emerges from Shutter Island. Here, the aim to restore order is precisely projected onto the individual level. The anxiety at the collective level is fictionally constructed by the doctors in order to make possible for Andrew Laeddis the recognition of his anxiety which is in fact so strong that he cannot even face it. He has to fantasize a second self in order to turn this anxiety into the fear of a specific object, or person, namely the homonymous imagined arsonist, Andrew Laeddis. Once this externalization and specification is achieved, Andrew as Teddy is able to work on it and investigate it. 28 Slavoj Žižek, “Two Ways to Avoid the Real of Desire”, in Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism, ed. Maud Ellmann, London: Longman, 1994, 117.

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This investigation is, one might say, a fearful fantasy, a fantasy full of fears that is at the same time the only way to overcome the fear. The knowledge that Andrew gains through his investigation ultimately works to dissolve his fear of the imagined Laeddis and makes him see the guilt and anxiety at its origin. With increasing knowledge he becomes able to contain fear, anxiety, and guilt and can finally take action again, even if this action involves the most limited of choices. In terms of content, Shutter Island deals with a variety of fears. The anti-Communist state apparatus, the fabrication of soulless soldiers, war crimes, and a possible Nazi past, are only a few of the fantasies that emerge from Andrew Laeddis’s fundamental anxiety. What is remarkable about the film, however, is the way in which identity formation and re-formation, the construction and reconstruction of identities is shown at work, in process. It is not so much the fears that are important, but the structure of the selfawareness of self-consciousness: in a word, the film has an oedipal form. This form goes beyond the generic similarities of Oedipus Tyrannus to the transmedial form of detective fiction which I outlined at the beginning of this article. The duplicity of perpetrator and investigator might be said to constitute its own subgenre of detective fiction. While this sometimes strains credibility both in Oedipus Tyrannus and later works, it is present in a number of contemporary detective films such as Shutter Island but also, for instance, in Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). To what extent other films modify the Oedipal detective subgenre is a desideratum of further research. Generally, analysis in the sense of investigation, the search for truth, is a way, if not “the” way, to turn anxieties into fears and ultimately contain them. This is a general, indeed a generic feature of the genre of detective fiction that stages the transition from ignorance to knowledge, since it is a re-entry of the very form of the investigative process into fiction. Hence, it is no surprise that the figure of the detective has become a metaphorical stand-in for all types of researchers: the scientist, the psycho-analyst, the critic, the child, and, of course, the reader of books and the viewer of films. The reason why we are interested in the modern Oedipus would thus not be so much the particular fears that make up the material fabric of the stories, but rather the power of the mythical narrative form to

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transform anxiety into a fearful fantasy and open the two to an investigative process. Yet, Shutter Island also makes us question any tendency to ascribe the power of changing a situation solely either to fantasy or rational investigation. The investigation at the heart of the film is at the same time a fantasy and the limited choice that Andrew Laeddis makes is possible only by play-acting and re-creating in a fiction his fantasy of himself. Thus, Shutter Island constitutes a figuration of the Oedipus myth as a fearful fantasy, and – for us as viewers – ultimately a figuration of the power of fiction to show how knowledge about the world and oneself can be lost and gained.

LAUGH AWAY THE FEAR! THE SATISFACTION OF COMICAL FANTASY IN THE HOLOCAUST FILM COMEDIES OF THE LATE 1990S MARIJA SRUK The second half of the 1990s saw the release of several films often described as Holocaust comedies. A juxtaposition of the comic with one of the most tragic events of the twentieth century proves an interesting and provocative subject, as can be shown in an analysis of the interplay between fear and comical fantasy in three selected films of the time: Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (1997), Radu Mihaileanu’s Train de vie (1998) and Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar (1999). The theoretical framework of the analysis is informed by Freud’s thoughts about the humorous attitude and the Lacanian concept of the Other. Concentrating on the specificities and ethical challenges of the genre, the essay discusses the values and the functions of the comical fantasy with regards to the following questions: do Holocaust comedies treat viewers as children? Can these comedies mediate secondary trauma? Why do the films use the comic and the fantastic to depict such a traumatic historical event as the Holocaust?

Much has been said on the subject of the Holocaust comedy – especially since the late 1990s, when, as a result of the popularity of Roberto Benigni’s Oscar-winning film La vita è bella,1 this subgenre of the Holocaust film2 attracted wide public interest. The first 1

See Knäpple and Lorenz, who regard Benigni’s film as the beginning of the “little boom” (“Kleinstkonjunktur”) of the Holocaust film comedy. Lena Knäpple and Matthias N. Lorenz, “Holocaust als Filmkomödie”, in Lexikon der “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” in Deutschland: Debatten- und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus Nach 1945, eds Torben Fischer and Matthias N. Lorenz, 2nd edn, Bielefeld: Transcript-Verl, 2009, 332. 2 On the discussions of the terminology, especially the oxymoronic term Holocaust comedy, and its specifics, see e.g. Sander Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Shoah Be Funny? Some Thoughts on Recent and Older Films”, Critical Inquiry, 26/II (2000), 279-308; Yosefa Loshitzky, “Verbotenes Lachen. Politik und Ethik der Holocaust-Filmkomödie”, in Lachen über Hitler – Auschwitz-Gelächter? Filmkomödie, Satire und Holocaust, eds Margrit Frölich, Hanno Loewy and Heinz Steinert, München: edition text + kritik, 2003, 21-36; Aaron Kerner, Film and the

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generation of the Holocaust survivors and the so-called second generation3 opened through this “new” filmic trend a debate about whether it is acceptable to make a comedy on the topic of concentration camps and ghettos, and about whether such comedy leads to inappropriate laughter, or to a false picture of history being passed on to younger generations, or indeed whether it represents blasphemy and Holocaust denial. Once again Theodor W. Adorno’s well-known dictum on there being no poetry after Auschwitz was brought to the table (mostly taken out of the specific historical and philosophical context of Adorno’s writings, including his further explanations and revisions of the dictum).4 Furthermore, the discussions opened some old questions – going, so to speak, one step back from the comic genre to the very origins of the debates on Holocaust representations – asking whether it is possible to depict the Holocaust and its trauma at all, no matter that the Holocaust had been written about and represented in film for decades. In comparison to that, less was said on the specific subject of the interplay between fear and fantasy in the Holocaust film comedies of the late 1990s. To my knowledge this was done rather sporadically. Examples include the remarkable text “Who Owns Auschwitz?” by Imre Kertész – where he, as a survivor and Nobel prize-winning author, comments on (the fuss about) La vita è bella; Sander Gilman’s well-informed and informative article “Is Life Beautiful? Can the Holocaust. New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films, New York and London: Continuum, 2011, 79-100. For the history of the Holocaust film comedies (including satire and grotesque), see the film list compiled by Hanno Loewy, which starts with Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (USA, 1940) and ends with what was at the time of the book’s compilation the newest film, Goebbels und Geduldig (Germany, 2001), in Lachen über Hitler – Auschwitz-Gelächter? Filmkomödie, Satire und Holocaust. 3 The director of Jakob the Liar Peter Kassovitz, a Hungarian Jew by origin, was as child hidden during the Holocaust by a Catholic family, and his parents survived the camps. Radu Mihaileanu, the director of Train de vie, born to Jewish parents in Romania who survived the Shoah, is a representative of the second generation. Roberto Benigni’s father was imprisoned in the work camp of Bergen-Belsen for two years. 4 See Michael Rothberg, Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, 25-58; and Andrew S. Gross, “After Auschwitz: Adorno, Postmodernism, and the Anti-Aesthetic”, in The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo. Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, eds Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010, 205-25.

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Shoah be Funny?”; and Slavoj Žižek’s review of several films of the genre with the provocative title of “Camp Comedy”.5 Focusing on the questions of the interplay, rivalry and collaboration between fantasy and fear in late 1990s Holocaust film comedies, this essay will analyse Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Italy, 1997), Radu Mihaileanu’s Train de vie (France/Belgium/Netherlands/Israel/Romania, 1998) and Peter Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar (France/USA/Hungary, 1999). The analyses will follow the interdisciplinary paths established in Holocaust studies, film studies, philosophy and literary studies, which have all dealt with the topic of Holocaust film comedies, and will use a psychoanalytical framework when focusing on the characteristics and functions of comic fantasy and fear in this specific subgenre of the Holocaust film. Moving from the immanent functions of (comic) fantasy to the broader cultural context, the article will, furthermore, examine the connection between trauma and the comic modes of representing the Holocaust, asking whether the film comedies in question potentially expose the viewer to secondary trauma. As discussed by Geoffrey Hartman and Ernst van Alphen, representations of the Holocaust can themselves be traumatizing and can potentially have the power to offend and wound the audience.6 Whereas primary trauma is the result of a delayed response to an overwhelming event,7 secondary trauma refers to the trauma of the viewer or more generally to the trauma of the recipient, who was exposed to very disturbing imagery, but was not part of the historical event itself: “primary and secondary trauma do have one thing in common, and that is the impossibility of coming to terms with the event, of working through it.”8 5

Imre Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?”, trans. J. MacKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14/I (2001), 267-72; Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful?”, 279-308; Slavoj Žižek, “Camp Comedy”, Sight & Sound (April 2000): http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ feature/17 (accessed 9 January 2012). 6 Geoffrey F. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, 151. 7 On primary trauma see Cathy Caruth, “Introduction”, in Trauma. Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 3-12; as well as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge, 1992. 8 Ernst van Alphen, Caught by History: Holocaust Effects in Contemporary Art, Literature and Theory, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997, 165. I very much agree with Wulf Kansteiner that one should be careful when using the term “trauma”, that is, mindful of the difference between the traumatized survivors of the Holocaust

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Finally, the question of the ethical responsibility of the Holocaust film comedy as a medium of cultural memory cannot be avoided. Questions that come to mind, and that will be thought upon during the whole of this discussion, are: why does this specific subgenre of the Holocaust film deploy the comic as a mode of depicting or rather dealing with this historical subject? And why in such manner at the very end of the twentieth century? Fantasy, defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the faculty or activity of imagining impossible or improbable things”, plays a central role in the Holocaust film comedies of the late 1990s. Moments of insecurity, danger and fear – of the Nazis, of the rumours or real knowledge about the existence of the camps, of death – usually work in these films as triggers for employing fantasy. Fantasy steps in to create alternative worlds, a way of standing back to the anxieties and fears of the figures depicted, and indeed from the viewers’ own uneasiness and fears of haunting ghosts of the past. In the three comedies considered here, the terrifying everyday (if we can call it an everyday) of the camp, ghetto or banishment is unexpectedly fought against with fantasy, and this interplay of fear and fantasy becomes the central point of the film narrative. In La vita è bella the father Guido (Roberto Benigni) creates an imaginary world for his son, in which hunger and camp rules are passed off as a game to score points and win a prize. Shlomo (Lionel Abelanski), the village lunatic in Train de vie, comes up with an idea for the shtetl community to organize a fake deportation train and escape from the Nazis. In Jakob the Liar the title figure (Robin Williams) provides the ghetto inmates with false radio news about the upcoming turn of the war fares and

and the “outsiders” or the later generations, which take part in the collective/cultural memory of the Holocaust, as for example film viewers do. In his excellent text Kansteiner expresses concern about the inflationary and often imprecise metaphorical usage of the term “trauma”, as in the case of applying it to different collectives (second and third generation, perpetrators and their children, etc.), or medial effects (viewers, readers), which subject the term “trauma” to a difficult “elasticity test”. See Wulf Kansteiner, “Menschheitstrauma, Holocausttrauma, Kulturelles Trauma: Eine Kritische Genealogie der Philosophischen, Psychologischen und Kulturwissenschaftlichen Traumaforschung seit 1945”, in Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften. Themen und Tendenzen, eds Friedrich Jaeger and Jörn Rüsen, Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2004, 109-38. On a similar point also see Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, 23.

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release of the ghetto in order to keep the town community feeling positive, infusing strength and hope into their suffering. In the already mentioned text by Slavoj Žižek, the author brings the three films down to a common denominator, claiming that they are all centred on a lie. Still, this is to be seen as benevolent and worthy of approval because it “allows the threatened Jews to survive their ordeal”.9 In addition to this, the films have in common the fact that the origin of the fantastic idea comes from one central character with the qualities of a picaro figure. Although the similarities between the films are rather obvious, there are also some differences which need to be mentioned. Whereas in La vita è bella and Train de vie the main characters used to be humorous, eccentric, creative, not to say crazy, even before the war (Guido in the romantic pre-story of the film, Shlomo as a self-proclaimed village fool), Jakob is the only one who, by more or less pure coincidence, has to play such a role due to the conditions of the ghetto, where he at first actually dwells on the moral dilemma whether he should continue lying about the radio news. While in La vita è bella and Jakob the Liar the viewer is an accomplice to the benevolent lies of Guido and Jakob, in Train de vie it is not only the fictive persons but the viewer as well who are fooled by the central character. That is, throughout the film the viewer is lulled into a fantasy that the false deportation actually happened (in the framework of a filmic fiction, of course) and might have succeeded. Last but not least, another difference has to be pointed out concerning the actors chosen for these films. Whereas Lionel Abelanski, playing the role of Shlomo in Train de vie, is a rather unknown (comic) actor, the comical quality of the characters Guido and Jakob is even more accentuated by the fact that they are played by internationally well-known comedians, Roberto Benigni and Robin Williams, respectively. Pleasure’s demand on reality – laughing at the Other We may argue, in Freudian terms, that Guido, Shlomo and Jakob use their creative imaginations to preserve the pleasure principle which follows from the principle of constancy. Using a fantastic shield as a defence mechanism, they are the carriers of the pleasure principle which seeks to avoid the unpleasure of the surrounding reality and 9

Žižek, “Camp Comedy”.

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desperately tries to restore the earlier state of affairs,10 that is, the more or less harmonious family or communal life of the times before, which function, in Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi’s words, as a romantic Edenic centre of gravity.11 Even when the reality principle of the camp, ghetto or the upcoming deportation is seeking to be the dominant and more powerful one, the central figures of the three films manage to push their imagination to the limits. This keeps their game working, prevents their own and their nearest ones’ fears from gaining bigger dimensions, and keeps the viewer’s attention focused on the comical aspects of this mechanism. A comical switch thus functions like a translation process, where anxiety and fear are – through the creative translator/mediator – passed on as a joyful fantasy about winning a game against life-threatening enemies. Talking about the translation of fear through fantasy into the comic, a sequence of La vita è bella, in which Guido voluntarily offers to translate commander’s words from German into Italian, serves as a good example of the transferral of the unpleasure of the reality to the pleasure of the fantasy. The sequence is shot from inside the camp barrack, which is claustrophobically narrow, grey, dirty, and full of exhausted and famished men. An armed camp commander yells the rules in German, which should be translated into Italian. His appearance and instructions turn him into a representative of the reality principle of the camp. Even though the content of the commander’s orders might not be understandable to every viewer (if the German sentences are not subtitled), the commander’s uniform, hoarse voice and gesticulations, in a setting where he is obviously the one in power who decides about life and death, appear threatening. Yet, Guido translates the language of the reality principle into the language of the pleasure principle, that is to the commander’s orders, which tell of hard labour and death punishments, are passed off by Guido to others (primarily to his son) as rules of a children’s game, in which a real tank could be won, nobody should ask to eat marmalade or lollipops, and the biggest offence is to carry a sign marked “donkey” on one’s back. The funny (but possibly dangerous) translation makes Guido’s son wonder about what his father is 10

Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, New York and London: Norton, 1995, 594-624. 11 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, “After Such Knowledge, What Laughter?”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14/I (2001), 294.

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translating. Other barrack inmates do not say a word as accomplices in protecting the child from the reality, and the viewer laughs about the subversive act of undermining the rules. This sequence of translation is more than just a defensive mechanism for the sake of the child: it also functions as a critique, which Millicent Marcus describes, in what follows, as a contrastive perspective on ways of organizing experience: As the translation process proceeds, we see that the ostensible gap between the German and Italian versions is really a gap between diametrically opposed ways of organizing experience. In Guido’s translation, the German system of oppression turns into a system of play, the regime of forced obedience becomes one of voluntary adherence, the imposition of arbitrary punishment gives way to reassurance of familiar behavior guidelines, and the audience of victims becomes a team of possible winners.12

Through the fantastic translational act, the dominant system – the inhuman system of the Nazi regime in the camp – gets destabilized (even if only temporarily, since the rules of the camp continue to be valid and those in power can still decide between life and death for the inmates). Still, in these few moments of the comical translation a certain satisfaction overcomes the demand of the reality. The very Other of the symbolic order, associated, in a Lacanian sense, with language and the law,13 becomes suspended, impotent to do anything about the joyful comedy. The translational shifts of comical fantasy thus also depict the very mechanisms and constructed nature of the Symbolic itself – the commander’s authoritative yelling shows itself to be no different from Guido’s blabbering on about lollipops and marmalade, except that the former is destructive, while the latter brings hope, or as Aaron Kerner puts it, “Guido’s system ... was designed to save life, whereas the Nazis’ systemized brutality was 12

Millicent Marcus, After Fellini: National Cinema in the Postmodern Age, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, 276. 13 See Dylan Evans, “other/Other”, in An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, London: Routledge, 1996, 133. See also J.W. Hokenson, who points to the fact that in comic theory the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis is used primarily as a definition of language and subjectivity. Jan Walsh Hokenson, The Idea of Comedy: History, Theory, Critique, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006, 191.

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designed to humiliate and kill”.14 The Other does not vanish completely from the scene though; it is our knowledge about the power relations at stake that keeps it in the state of suspension, impotence, non-intervention, that is, from not disappearing entirely.15 Still, more than just having a laugh over Guido’s childish translation, it is actually laughing at the Other that brings so much humorous joy to the viewer. The Other is degraded; it is “hanging, dangling suspended in the air, powerless to do anything, to stop or clear up this mess and confusion, unable to exercise its ‘office’, its function”, as Alenka Zupančič describes it. This is a place where the comedy manages, as an agent of pleasure, to produce certain, unexpected, surplus doses of satisfaction.16 As argued, all three films build on the premise that fantasy is employed as a defence mechanism against fear, anxiety and potential trauma, and this – bringing calming hope to the frightened (whether persons in the story or the viewer) – challenges and subverts reality/history. A notion of comical fantasy as a pleasure and fearlessness preserving mechanism corresponds to Sigmund Freud’s argument on humour. For Freud, the joke is a contribution made to the comic by the unconscious, whereas humour contributes to the comic through the agency of the super-ego: “Like jokes and the comic, humour has something liberating about it, but it also has something of grandeur and elevation.”17 Humour, in this tradition of thought, also signifies the triumph of the pleasure principle. The humorist can, as Freud points out, play the role of the father and treat the others as children – like Guido does in relation to his son Giosué, or Jakob does in relation to Lina, a girl he takes care of, lying to her about the radio and the circumstances of the ghetto. Both adults create comedy for the youngsters with good, life-preserving intentions. On the other hand, one can also use humour in relation to others, including oneself, to ward off possible suffering – just as Jakob does in relation to the ghetto inmates and himself, or Shlomo to the

14

Kerner, Film and the Holocaust, 99. Alenka Zupančič, The Odd One In: On Comedy, Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 2008, 90-91. 16 Ibid., 90-91. 17 Sigmund Freud, “Humour” (1927), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, vol. XXI, London: Vintage, 2001, 162. 15

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whole shtetl community and even the viewers.18 In all cases, then, the humorous attitude gains value from the experienced, more knowledgeable, calming authority of the super-ego, which speaks “such kindly words of comfort to the intimidated ego”,19 and thus teaches it not to fear, but rather encourages the ego to be joyful, open to pleasure, and to celebrate its (narcissistic) victory over the demands of the reality principle: The grandeur in it [humour] clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocation of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.20

The introduction of the Lacanian concept of the Other into the Freudian theory of humour opens a view onto one further dimension of comic satisfaction. The comical fantasy manages to suspend not only the fear, but also the Other, covering it as a powerless, laughable spectator. The satisfaction of comedy, therefore, not only successfully and productively challenges or undermines the demands of the reality, but also shows that it is able to outreach this demand, emphasizes Zupančič: “The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really meet demand, but rather the demand can never really meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction.”21 Pleasurable comedies against the tragic background of the Holocaust Is the pleasurable moment of the comic fantasy the place where Holocaust film comedies appear to be so provocative? Does the provocation lie in the fact that such films can bring laughter and satisfaction to the viewers – and this despite their main reference point, which is the fearful historical reality of the Holocaust? As is well known, La vita è bella caused a major international debate upon its release. On the one hand, many critics and scholars, not to mention 18

Ibid., 164. Ibid., 166. 20 Ibid., 162. 21 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 131. 19

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cinema viewers, praised the film, which, among many other awards, won the Grand Prize of the Jury in Cannes, three American Academy Awards and even the Award for the Best Jewish Experience at the Jerusalem Film Festival. Yet, on the other hand, some accused Benigni of mocking the victims – The Guardian, for example, described the film as “a hopelessly inadequate memorial to the vile events of the Holocaust”22 – and even argued that Benigni not only borrows from but gives support to the central arguments of Holocaust deniers.23 Although released a relatively short time after La vita è bella, the other two films discussed in this article were not debated as much. In the case of Train de vie, this probably had to do with the limited international presence of the film, which, although shown and awarded prizes at several international film festivals, has mostly been shown in European “art house” cinemas. Furthermore, unlike in the case of Roberto Benigni or Robin Williams, Train de vie was not promoted by star actors or directors (until this film, Mihaileanu was a rather unknown director). In the case of Jakob the Liar, the absence of debates can be explained, I would argue, by the rather melodramatic second part of the film, which includes the organizing of the resistance, the torture of the main figure by the Nazis, and Jakob’s rather heroic death at the end, to which I will come later. For the sake of the argument it is fruitful to examine the main points of the debates around the subgenre the Holocaust film comedy in general. As we nowadays know from historical sources and the survivors themselves, the victims of the Holocaust also used comic fantasy in the form of jokes, caricatures, writings, and theatre plays, as a means of making the harsh reality somewhat bearable, chasing away the fear, to criticize the oppressive system, and even to laugh about themselves.24 Nevertheless, this historical fact did not and still does not soften the debates about the inappropriateness of the comic genre to depict the Holocaust, since there is an undisputable difference between the comic from the point of view of the victims, the “insiders”, which was a life-preserving mechanism, and the comic 22

Cited in Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful?”, 294. This argument is developed in Kobi Niv’s book Life is Beautiful, but Not for Jews: Another View of the Film by Benigni, trans. J. Beyrak Lev, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2003. 24 See e.g. Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), trans. Ilse Lasch, Boston, MA: Beacon Press 16, 2006, 43-44. 23

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from the point of view of the “outsiders” to the subject of the historic event, which was anything but comical. Opponents of Holocaust film comedy argue that it is not the comic produced by the victims in the camps and the ghettos which is problematic, but rather the way later generations remember them and what happened. In other words, the question at stake is whether the comic, and the laughter possibly resulting from it, is an appropriate way to honour the victims and to teach new generations about their history? Are we allowed to fantasize comic scenarios and happy endings as part of the story of the Holocaust? Even though the comedy as a genre is a pronounced non-mimetic, non-documentary and usually non-didactic medium, when it comes to the Holocaust comedy, the “real dimension” of the historical event and its importance for memory culture open debates about its appropriateness and ethics, which usually also include questions of mimesis, documentation and didactic value. One of the reasons for a reserved stance towards Holocaust comedy has also to do with a conservative stance on comedy in general. It is often considered to be a trivial, low-culture phenomenon, especially when shown in the cinema or on the television, the medium which attracts a larger audience than any other.25 It would be too general to say that every comedy made on the subject is a high accomplishment, as it would be too simple to decline one whole genre as unworthy of the topic such as the Holocaust. A critical discussion of the comical subgenre of the Holocaust film is necessary, not least because of the importance of the memory of the Holocaust itself. But this should be done productively,

25

It definitely did not help the Holocaust film comedy to be taken seriously when Benigni provocatively stated that with his film he wanted to make a “Donald Duck in an extermination camp”. On the debates about the ethics of Holocaust film comedies, see Anja Oster and Walter Uka, “Der Holocaust als Filmkomödie. Komik als Mittel der Darstellung des Undarstellbaren”, in Die Shoah im Bild, ed. Sven Kramer, München: edition text + kritik, 2003, 249-66. The authors argue that such debates usually open a discussion along the lines of three opposing concepts: Namely, prohibition of images vs. voyeuristic curiosity; fact/document vs. fiction; and high vs. low culture.

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based on concrete analyses, and as impartially as possible26 – a point Kertész himself sharp-wittedly made when reviewing Benigni’s film and the discussions surrounding it: [I] can’t well imagine what it is in the film that has provoked such debate. I suppose that once again a choir of Holocaust puritans, Holocaust dogmatists and Holocaust usurpers is being heard, asking: “Can, should the Holocaust be treated in this way?” But what is “this way”, more precisely considered? Those who have seen the film (or better: not seen it) with the ideological blinders on will reply: “with so much humor, and using the devices of comedy” – and they won’t have understood a word, not one single scene of the film. Above all, they fail to see that Benigni’s central idea isn’t comic at all, but tragic. 27

Following Kertész’s final remark it could be stated that every comic scenario that takes place against the background of the Holocaust appears to gain tragic qualities. It is not so much the jokes, gags and eccentric ideas – they always have and will bring laughter – which seem to be so provocative on the Holocaust film comedy, but the fact that the fearful memory of the Holocaust is brought up in the same filmic context with them. The very idea of putting these two radically opposing areas together – the area of comical laughter and the memory of the Holocaust – seems comical itself, if not absurd. If comedy develops “out of two mutually exclusive realities”28 (which is the main point of the incongruence theories on comedy), then the Holocaust comedy is a most radical version of it, since the juxtaposition of the radically opposed worlds lasts from the very beginning till the very end of the films. 26

This corresponds to Hilene Flanzbaum’s appeal in an excellent text on the subject: “the critic falls back on the safer position: No, he says, every time, not close enough. But that negation, too, has become an intellectually hollow position, a tired refrain that both obscures more specific and noteworthy details of a particular piece, and places the critic in a straitjacket of good intentions .... It has become too easy a response, and a form of intellectual chic, to look disdainfully at popular representations of the Holocaust. Let’s all agree right now that no artistic representation of the Holocaust will ever sufficiently depict the horrors of that event – and move on to more explicit and meaningful discussion.” Hilene Flanzbaum, “‘But Wasn’t It Terrific?’: A Defense of Liking Life is Beautiful”, The Yale Journal of Criticism, 14/1 (2001), 274-84. 27 Imre Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?”, 270-71 (emphasis in the original). 28 Zupančič, The Odd One In, 57.

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The incongruities of the comedy, the short circuit sparks, can appear on and between several levels of a film – narrative, visual and auditory – gaining both comic and tragic qualities, that is, appearing as ambivalent, if not grotesque and absurd moments. There is certainly some uncanny ambivalence in Guido’s goose stepping into his own death while the music in the background is relatively cheerful; or when Jakob turns out to be more concerned with how to keep the lies flowing and not disappointing the inmates, than he is afraid of the Germans who might shoot him and punish the whole ghetto for possessing a radio; or when the fake deportation train in Train de vie (an idea of self-deportation which is already a discrepancy) keeps running into obstacles of any possible kind – like a near crash with another vehicle, which turns out also to be a fake deportation train, only one with Gypsies! Still, unlike in tragedy or drama, comical misunderstandings in comedy, ambivalent as they might be, do not lead necessarily to tragic consequences (or at least not until the very end, as in the case of most of the Holocaust comedies), but become in themselves a source of pleasure, a well of (ambivalent, possibly even fearful) laughter. Smiling at the deadly shadow of the Holocaust What makes the Holocaust comedy different from other more traditional comedies is that it declines the happy ending – since there is and was no happy ending when making reference to the Holocaust, where one’s survival happened more by a pure chance, than by the rule. Even before the end of the films themselves, the reality of the past, the well-known history of the Holocaust, comes to intrude on the comical fantasy, to show in traces appearing once in a while that it was there the whole time and will stay there until the very end. Death and the dead are an honoured place of the Holocaust, a place where even comedy acknowledges its limits when facing the past. In this sense, the Holocaust film comedy appears to be humble before the reality of the facts, perhaps even realist, with respect to the nonexistence of the happy ending, which the comic genre would usually incorporate into its narrative structure. Despite the pleasure which thrives on comical discrepancies, the Holocaust comedy does not know the usual survival, the victory of love and youth, the reunion or the reestablishment of the former life as occurs in the usually happy endings of romantic/cartoon/Hollywood comedies.

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The fearful reality of the Holocaust setting accentuates the temporality of the fantasized happy scenario. At the end of Jakob the Liar the central character is tortured and executed by the Nazis in front of the whole ghetto, whose inmates are about to be put on the deportation train. It is a moment where fantasy shows its shadowy side as potentially harmful in its consequences and not powerful enough to stop the destructive machinery of the real historical events it refers to. Similarly, the fake deportation train in Train de vie leads to no life in the Promised Land, even if for a very long time viewers might be tucked into a protective fantasy about overcoming obstacles and approaching a happy ending, as they see the train reaching the border with the Soviets. Nevertheless, the fearful truth lies in details: in the image of an empty and later burned shtetl, of a villager yelling in panic, “Will we come back? Will we come back?”, or in a panicking train-like sound of heavy breathing, repeated several times as a leitmotif in the background of the film. They all remind the viewer of the ominous shadow over the story of the fantastic rescue of the Jews. At the end, a careful viewer’s eye can recognize that the grenades falling around the train are of an intentional artificiality, which “unsettles any remaining verisimilitude in the culmination of a story that has long since taken on the dimensions of a caricature”.29 At the very end of the film, Shlomo’s face is shown in a choker shot30 as he tells the unbelievable story of the miraculously surviving train passengers. The camera zooms out to a medium close-up shot and we see Shlomo smiling sadly, almost ashamedly, in camp clothes behind the barbed wire fence. While the image of Shlomo freezes, in his own voice-over we are told: “It was like that. That is the real story of my shtetl ... Well, almost the real one.” And then the final credits begin to roll with a melancholic Yiddish song in the background. That fantasies do not have a long life and must at the end be revealed as short-term relief, when the Holocaust is depicted, is in a somewhat different manner also shown in La vita è bella – with the difference that Train de vie and Jakob the Liar reveal their plots as stories told by the main protagonists, narrators who, at the end of the 29

David A. Brenner, “Laughter amid Catastrophe: Train of Life and Tragicomic Holocaust Cinema”, in Visualizing the Holocaust Documents, Aesthetics, Memory, ed. David Bathrick, Brad Prager and Michael Richardson, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008, 263-64. 30 A shot half-way between a close-up and an extreme close-up.

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respective films, expose themselves as unreliable storytellers, who fantasized a happy or heroic ending for their sufferings. In Benigni’s film, however, the narrative frame is given to Giosué, Guido’s son, whom the viewer can hear as an adult voice-over at the beginning and at the end of the film, thanking his father for the amazing rescue (at the end) and introducing the film as a fable with sorrow, as well as with wonder and happiness. Even before the very end of the film – which is partially happy, since the son and the mother are reunited,31 but the father is missing –, the disturbing reality intrudes on Guido’s game. Although he does his best to hide his own fear from the son, he cannot find the means to keep it away from himself, except for taking a little comfort in saying “Maybe we are only dreaming”, and eventually opening his eyes wide in fearful surprise when he runs into a shocking night scene. The special features of the medium ensure that an atmosphere of seriousness is provided – a point of view shot (subjective camera), blue colour filters, melancholic music, and a short, but still long enough, frame accentuate the overwhelming scene as Guido accidentally discovers a pile of skeletal corpses in the camp. The protective fantasies turn out to be a foggy curtain around the briefly visible, in what for Guido is certainly a shocking, possibly even traumatizing event “outside the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of comprehension, of recounting and mastery”.32 For the first time in the narrative, Guido appears speechless, powerless to make another game out of this discovery. It seems as if his framework, which so far functioned well against all odds in the camp, brakes at this very moment. And it is sleep that coincidentally shuts down the boy’s eyes in front of a pile of corpses, not the father. Even as comedies, Holocaust films in most cases do not, and cannot, escape death, probably one of the main issues raised in any reference to the historical fact of the Holocaust. What they manage to pinpoint, though, is the surprising fact that victims managed to live with the surrounding death on their own terms, thus subverting temporarily the rules of the dominant power in charge, even if death 31

For a critical reading of the happy ending in La vita è bella and the reuniting of mother and son, respectively, see Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful?”, 303. 32 Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening”, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, eds Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, New York: Routledge, 1992, 69.

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wins at the end. Still, more than its weakness, this is the comedy’s strength. Guido in La vita è bella is shown to be walking into death as if he would take it willingly and – what is more terrifying – cheerfully, thus symbolically becoming a master over his own fate. His goose steps are of a carnivalesque quality, one last moment of pleasure before the deadly shots. Jakob manages to keep one whole community hopeful, so even the suicide rate in the ghetto drops to nil and the doctor, Prof. Kirschbaum, without any drugs in his cupboard, prescribes Jakob’s “medicine” – his fictive radio news – as the only working drug left. When the Other’s suspension through comedy becomes invalid, Jakob takes the deadly shot with a smile on his face in front of the whole ghetto. A similar smiling encounter with death happens in the case of Train de vie, too, where the miraculous story of the rescued shtetl is shown to be a phantasmagoria – the one told by Shlomo, who narrated the story of death on his own terms as a comical adventure. With Guido’s, Jakob’s and Shlomo’s making fun of the Other, the law and the order, the viewers get to laugh at this Other as well, relieved of the burden of the history, willingly ignoring the fact that they are accomplices to the lies constructed around the very centre of the death. It is a moment of unexpected satisfaction that somehow still does not lose its tragic quality. It would indeed be hard to imagine a viewer stepping out of the cinema smiling and laughing in good spirits. Holocaust comedies – childish treatments or secondary traumas? Just as Jakob, Shlomo and Guido use comical fantasy to protect their families and friends from the fearful reality that surrounds them, so, Žižek argues, Holocaust comedies do the same – treating the viewers as children to be protected from the horror of the Holocaust through a “sentimental and funny fiction”.33 This is only partially true. As I have argued, the comic element in the films is intentional and only temporarily may make viewers believe in the protective fantasy in which children survive the camps and whole Jewish communities escape the Nazis to the Promised Land, thus relieving viewers of the burden of the past. Whereas the fantasy might work completely in the fictional world, for the viewer it definitely turns out to be deprived of its power by the more or less subtle images of piles of clothes and 33

Žižek, “Camp Comedy”.

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corpses, burned synagogues, hunger and illnesses, suddenly missing characters – all obvious references to historical facts. Ultimately, with the absence of a (real) happy ending and with the death of the protagonists – or their deportation to concentration camps, which symbolically stand for the same thing – the viewer has to face the fearful truth, the burden of the collective history. Through the organization of the mise-en-scène and by directing the attention of the viewers to certain characters and objects, they often do take the point of view of the characters who might truly believe in the fantastic scenario (the son in La vita è bella, the girl in Jakob the Liar) but this perspective is doubled through viewers’ own cultural and historical knowledge, so we come to be aware of the certain impossibility of such fantastic scenarios in the camps, ghettos, and shtetls. The way the deadly reality breaks in to the fantastic scenarios – for example through images of violence, subtle threatening music in disaccord with the main narrative, change of colour – keep unsettling the viewer throughout the film, even if he or she is temporarily lulled by the pleasurable fantasy. Considering the scenes where the comedy “breaks down” and naked violence or death is shown, one can reverse the claim about comedies providing protective fantasies for their viewers, and ask if they are potentially traumatizing for the viewers. When Jakob is brutally tortured by the Nazis,34 when Shlomo’s exhausted grey face is shown behind the barbed wire fence of the concentration camp, or when Guido discovers the pile of corpses – these and similar images and their structural position in the filmic plot are shocking, disturbing moments for the viewer, also because of their sudden narrative/ auditory/visual break into the fantastic story of the film, sometimes even a disturbing triple filmic “attack” on the senses of the viewers. These disorienting, uncanny moments are possibly the places where it

34 Kassovitz’s Jakob the Liar is based on Jurek Becker’s novel Jakob der Lügner, first published in the GDR in 1969. The first screen adaptation of Becker’s novel (originally written as a screenplay, but at first rejected as a film by the GDR authorities), directed by Frank Beyer, was premiered in 1975 and remained the only GDR film ever nominated for the Academy Award. In Beyer’s and Becker’s adaptation of the novel there are no scenes of torture and Jakob does not get shot or die in front of the ghetto, but is put on the transport train with others. For a comparative reading of Beyer’s and Kassovitz’s versions of Jakob der Lügner see Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful?”.

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is perhaps most likely that the traces of the Holocaust can be seen,35 and where the viewers are asked to confront “the ultimate signified of the Holocaust, the referent that all [fantastic] machinations have sought to mask”.36 Having in mind Hartman’s and van Alphen’s distinction between primary and secondary trauma, where the latter can result if the viewer is exposed to disturbing imagery of a potentially traumatizing event, without being part of this event himself or herself, the question which comes to mind in this context is: can Holocaust film comedies, with the shocking, unexpected outbursts of the “realness” into the comic universe of their plots, possibly mediate trauma “not only in content but also in structure” through “a performance that is itself traumatic”?37 I believe that there is no simple answer to this question, even if applied only to the three selected films. Whereas the pile of corpses in La vita è bella is shown in a brief frame and becomes almost unrecognizable due to the blue filter and the fog surrounding the scene (probably representing the smoke from burnt bodies) so the viewer hardly has time to recognize what the scene shows; the last scene of Train de vie is indeed very disturbing, especially because it reveals the whole story of the fake deportation train as a lie to the viewer. This last shot of the film has much potential to put the audience into a state of shock, which persistently lingers within the viewer, since the image freezes and, in this way, it almost gains the value of a “real” photographic document of the time. In comparison to Benigni’s and Mihaileanu’s films, where most of the disturbing and possibly traumatic scenes are subtly incorporated into the main narrative, Kassovitz’s film confronts the viewer with many images of brutal violence. The scenes of Jakob’s torture are repeated several times by the end of Jakob the Liar, and these are the places where the film functions less like a comedy but more like a mainstream Hollywood drama of “a post-Schindler’s List sensibility”.38 According to van Alphen docudramas, journalistic images, and reports that “attempt to expose ‘bare truth’ and ‘naked facts’” are 35

Hanno Loewy, “Fiktion und Mimesis: Holocaust und Genre im Film”, in Lachen über Hitler – Auschwitz-Gelächter? Filmkomödie, Satire und Holocaust, 56. 36 Marcus, After Fellini, 271. 37 Van Alphen, Caught by History, 164 (emphasis in the original). 38 Gilman, “Is Life Beautiful?”, 305.

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modes of representing the Holocaust which are most capable of causing secondary trauma since they “strive to convey historical truth”.39 Film comedies are modes of representation which, generically, are eminently anti-mimetic, so in this sense they would not count as usual modes of representation which are potentially traumatizing. Given the nature of the historical event they are depicting, one cannot claim that even such genres as film comedies cannot produce disorientation, uncanny emotions or even shocks, potentially resulting with an “attenuated secondary trauma”.40 That such disturbing images are even shown in comedies may be regarded as an expression of respect to the historical context and the victims. This is why Holocaust film comedies stick to the “necessary minimum of realness”,41 reminding the viewer that in the Holocaust, as a real event, there was no fantastic, and especially no comical, excuse for the reality of extermination and death. It would surely be interesting to find out whether Holocaust film comedies shock viewers, and whether this happens through the sudden irruption of disturbing images or whether viewers rather feel shocked by the comical way of dealing with the history, which can open a well of satisfaction. Maybe it is one’s own laughter that shocks the most. The comical fantasy of Holocaust films can be seen in a double perspective. First as an “imminent reaction” of the fictional world to the terrifying circumstances, that is, as the story of Nazi persecution, where the victims subvert the imposed, life-threatening rules through their comical behaviour, and even manage to survive it. The enjoyment of this comical subversion on a fictional level potentially releases the viewer from the burden of history – one laughs at Nazis being ridiculed, and at their inhuman rules and practices, and enjoys for a moment that the victims are not only victimized, but winners in a comical fantasy. Moreover, Holocaust comedies can also be seen as reactions to certain phenomena on the discursive level, as an indirect response to possibly (more) traumatizing or generally standardized

39

Van Alphen, Caught by History, 165. Ulrich Baer, “Zum Zeugen werden. Landschaftstradition und Shoah oder Die Grenzen der Geschichtsschreibung im Bild”, in “Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen”: Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah, ed. Ulrich Baer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000, 243. 41 Dietrich Dopheide, Das Groteske und der schwarze Humor in den Romanen Edgar Hilsenraths, Berlin: Weißensee Verlag, 2000. 40

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depictions of the Holocaust,42 such as documentaries, photos or dramas – with an awareness of the generality of such claims and mindful of the differences and specifics of every work that would be subcategorized in these groups. In 1987 Terrence des Pres wrote that a “certain weariness” had settled upon the common means of depicting the Holocaust. He even argued for the existence of a “Holocaust etiquette” as a sort of a decorum that encourages depictions of the Holocaust representing it in a serious manner, as a unique, solemn event, mindful of historical facts and accuracy43 – everything that Holocaust film comedies do not stick to radically. Interestingly, Des Pres saw a “further resource” for the depictions of the Holocaust to be found in the “energies of laughter”.44 The last decade of the twentieth century, thus several years after Des Pres’s prognostic text, really found those energies in the fantasy of the comedy – bringing some viewers to react with anger, some with laughter (which can be a satisfied, but also unsettled response). In this way the genre of the Holocaust comedy refers not only to comical fantasy and laughter as a source of resistance to the fear, to deprivation of one’s individuality and to death, but also functions as a meta-comment on the problems and challenges of depicting the Holocaust. Just as many jokes show the mechanisms of language at work, the Holocaust film comedy questions the very construction of cultural/collective remembrance, which can be very much influenced by fashions and shifts of power and dominance. Next to the traditionally preferred genres such as 42

See Susanne Rohr: “[The Holocaust] comedies – in a sometimes comic, sometimes shocking manner – draw our attention to the standards of Holocaust representation and the fact that the worldwide circulation of theses [sic] stories has generated specific aesthetic patterns and norms that are endlessly reproduced and merchandized.” Susanne Rohr, “‘Genocide Pop’: The Holocaust as Media Event”, in The Holocaust, Art, and Taboo: Transatlantic Exchanges on the Ethics and Aesthetics of Representation, eds Sophia Komor and Susanne Rohr, Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2010, 165. See also Umberto Eco’s distinction between the comic and the humour: “Humor is always, if not metalinguistic, metasemiotic: through verbal language or some other sign system it casts in doubt other cultural codes. If there is a possibility of transgression, it lies in humor rather than in comic. Semiotically speaking, if comic (in a text) takes place at the level of fabula or of narrative structures, humor works in the interstices between narrative and discursive structures.” Umberto Eco, “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom’”, in Carnival!, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam: Mouton, 1984, 8. 43 Terrence Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” (1987), in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1988, 217. 44 Ibid., 220.

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survivor autobiographies, diaries, memoirs, documentaries and dramas – as dominant master narratives of the Holocaust until the very end of the twentieth century – the film comedy proves a challenging form, willing to resist accusations and fears, and able to fight back with its own fantastic means to gain a deserved place among the ways in which we remember and depict the Holocaust.

VIENNESE FANTASIES, AUSTRIAN HISTORIES: SPACE, FANTASY AND FASCISM IN INGEBORG BACHMANN’S MALINA AND LILIANA CAVANI’S THE NIGHT PORTER ALEXANDRA HILLS1 This article investigates the psychological and topographical traces of the traumatic Fascist past through a comparative analysis of Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974). An assessment of the role of low-brow culture on canon formation of Holocaust fiction and film will complement an evaluation of the films’ depiction of the displacement of anxieties relating to the Nazi past and the World War II onto the realms of sexuality, gender and architecture. An analysis of the description and role of Vienna in both works will determine the city’s role as an interface between public and private concerns relating to a complex Austrian past marked by Imperial and Fascist histories. This article brings two unique voices together for the first time in order to evaluate the transposition of an ineffable historical moment into a visual vocabulary that highlights the importance of historical, traumatic memory and its repercussion on gender and subjectivity, visual and fictional representation, as well as cultural manifestations of history.

I think we will all soon forget Auschwitz again if we remember it only as a collection of subjective brutalities.2 My imagination is killing me. Lieutenant A.B. Scott, 19183

More than thirty years after the end of the World War II and the Liberation of Auschwitz, Shoah director Claude Lanzmann declared 1

I wish to express my sincerest gratitude to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with a scholarship to fund the research upon which this article is based. 2 Martin Walser, “Unser Auschwitz”, ed. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Kursbuch, 1 (1965), 199. 3 Cited by Joanna Bourke, “The Body in Modern Warfare”, in What History Tells us. George L. Mosse and the Culture of Modern Europe, eds Stanley G. Payne, David J. Sorkin, and John S. Tortorice, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2004, 205.

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that “a film devoted to the Holocaust can only be a counter myth, that is an investigation into the presentness of the Holocaust”.4 This statement underlines two important motifs in post-war European culture: firstly, the Holocaust is a founding myth of contemporary Europe; secondly, the memory of the Holocaust persists through its cultural and literary manifestations.5 Lanzmann’s 1979 assertion stems from an era marked by a significant shift in the representation of Nazism and the Holocaust after 1968, when a new post-war generation began to challenge their parents’ acceptance of and involvement in the Nazi past. The student revolts that swept across Europe in the spring of 1968 were a symptom of this distrust of the older generation as well as a backlash against the repressive bourgeois culture of the baby-boom and the economic miracle which revivified most of Western Europe’s economies. Peace and recovery were the priorities of the post-war years, and the wounds of the past were left to heal by themselves. According to psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich in their seminal work The Inability to Mourn (Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, 1967), the pathological relationship of the German wartime generation to its past had three main causes: firstly, a “striking emotional rigidity” to the traumatizing images of violence and destruction on a mass scale; secondly, the refusal to identify with the past which “helped ward off the sense of being implicated”; thirdly, the drive toward economic recovery amounted to a “manic undoing of the past”.6 Yet, the realities of Auschwitz and the atomic bomb were an overwhelming legacy for the generation born during or immediately after the war to digest: the 1968 generation was angry, and curious, about the toxic historical legacy their parents had bequeathed to them, which had become “this exotic unknown”.7 One of the most powerful slogans of the 1968ers was “all Power to the Imagination” illustrating 4

Claude Lanzmann, “From the Holocaust to Holocaust”, Telos, 42 (Winter 1979), 143. 5 I have chosen the word “Holocaust” to describe the Nazi genocide of Jews from 1933 to 1945 because it is a term preferred by the victims themselves, as well as being the most common word chosen to describe this historical event as well as its cultural reverberations. 6 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Cultural Behaviour, trans. Beverly R. Placzec, New York: Grove Press, 1975, 28. 7 Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), in A Susan Sontag Reader, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983, 323.

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how a younger generation of Europeans born too late to remember the reality of recent history approached the Nazi past. A shift in the representation of the past, and particularly the Holocaust, resulted from this change of parameters: a younger generation of film-makers and writers engaged in this “rememory” of the past in order to explore the limits of fantasy in relation to horrific historical realities. I borrow the term “rememory” from Janet Walker who coins this helpful word to illustrate a “use of the imagination to realise a latent, abiding connection to the past”.8 The fascination for fascism as an “exotic unknown” began to mitigate the notion of the Nazi as the evil incarnate, as he is often portrayed in Italian post-war neorealist films such as Federico Fellini’s Roma, città aperta (Rome, Open City) (1945). Following this representational turn, an enigmatic intimacy between the victimizer and the victimized becomes a new representational strategy to imagine this taboo historical content, leading to a disturbing dynamic whereby the fear of being a victim becomes mingled with the desire to be one. The relaxation of censorship laws after 1968 and the new lure of fascism as a visual trope contributed to the increase in popularity of so-called Nazisploitation films during the 1970s, of which Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) is the international standard bearer. In Italy specifically, Luchino Visconti’s La Caduta Degli Dei (The Damned) had made the sadiconazista genre popular from 1969. Daniel Magilow describes these two genres as low-budget, violent, erotic and/or pornographic, highly commercialized and not generally appreciated for their artistic merit. The films’ emphasis on sex and violence in the taboo context of Holocaust suffering earned them an infamous place in the history of film censorship: by the 1980s most films of the Nazisploitation genre were banned according to Great Britain’s “video nasties” censorship list.9 Therefore, the 1968 generation’s call for an unbridled imagination and a new fascination for Nazism as a synonym for sexual adventurism prompted artists to rethink the presentness of the past in contemporary society. 8

Janet Walker, Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005, 17. 9 Daniel H. Magilow, “Nazisploitation! The Image of the Nazi in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture”, in Nazisploitation! The Image of the Nazi in Low-Brow Cinema and Culture, eds Elizabeth Bridges, Daniel H. Magilow, and Kristin T. Vander Lugt, London: Continuum, 2012, 4.

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Thus, the past, far from being undone, was represented and reiterated time and again in the mode of fantasy, which displaced anxieties relating to it. In one of the foundational texts on trauma and coping with loss, Sigmund Freud notes that compulsive repetition and play are ways of coping with the original fear triggered by an unpleasant earlier experience. In his famous case study of his grandson, coping with the absence of his mother through the “fort da” game, Freud notes: “It is clear that in play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of an impression and ... make themselves master of the situation.”10 The child’s fantasy spatializes, repeats and externalizes fears about loss and separation which enables him to dominate the overwhelming emotional legacies of past experience: this is the model of the fear and fantasy dialectic that I will adopt in this essay. The essay examines the presence of the past in two works from the 1970s which use fantasy, sexuality and topography to explore the legacy of the Holocaust and Nazism. Firstly, I consider Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971), which dramatizes subjectivity and the role of sexuality in a post-Holocaust context. Secondly, I discuss Italian film-maker Liliana Cavani’s Il portiere di notte (The Night Porter), released in 1974 amid enormous controversy as it portrays the relationship of a concentration camp guard Max with a female prisoner, Lucia, and questions the relationship between historical and sexual violence. By reading The Night Porter alongside Malina, I will be drawing parallels between two works whose significant convergences have never been explored; in so doing, I assess how the past lives on as fantasy and the role of sexuality in the imagination of historical violence. Whilst Bachmann and Cavani’s works engage with the sexual aftershocks of a traumatic history, I am far from suggesting that they rank among Nazisploitation literature or film. However, I am interested in observing how Malina and The Night Porter borrow from low-brow art to examine how society at large engages with its past demons. Of course the so-called Nazisploitation genre’s commercial strategy relies on sex and violence in the Holocaust irrespective of flagrant inaccuracies and exaggerations and is therefore ethically dubious, but critic Vincent 10 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, New York: Vintage, 1961, 601.

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Canby helpfully asks “whether it’s possible to reconstruct the interests, attitudes and values of a lost society from its garbage”. 11 By examining how these works draw inspiration from the underbelly of the artistic mainstream, this essay seeks insight into the “very mechanisms of canon formation”, according to Magilow, a canon made of an amalgam of cultural influences that has much to say about “particular political, cultural or ideological agendas at particular historical moments”.12 Indeed, in his book Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Saul Friedländer had already noted that the imaginary would dictate new attitudes to the past: “the new discourse of Nazism will develop at the level of phantasms, images and emotions.”13 The process whereby fears and emotions relating to a traumatic historical event are displaced and transformed in the imagination is crucial to an understanding of Cavani’s and Bachmann’s works. In this essay, I will follow Freud’s terminology which defines fear as the “perception of an external threat” and “depend[s] largely on our knowledge of and our feeling of power over the outer world”.14 Thus, fear is a feeling of powerlessness and exposure as a reaction to an external threat to life and bodily integrity. From the 1920s onwards, Freud saw anxiety and fear as synonymous, but his emphasis on the “release of energy” accompanying anxiety suggests that he conceptualized it as a form of defence against the external threats perceived by fear responses. Furthermore, the afterlife of the Holocaust in the subject’s fantasy poses important questions as to the definition of the gendered subject in relation to historical experience. Cavani and Bachmann both engage very differently with the ways in which gendered individuals gain access to the past. Also, the compulsion to repeat the past and the necessity to carve out a position from which the experience of that past can be represented are two conflicting necessities in Malina and The Night Porter, which both explore the potentially deadly consequences of experimental subject positions. The re-imagination of the Holocaust as a psychosexual scenario blurring the boundaries 11 Vincent Canby, “And Now for a Look at Some Really Bad Movies”, The New York Times (30 November 1975), D13. 12 Magilow, “Nazisploitation!”, 9-10. 13 Saul Friedländer, Reflections on Nazism: An Essay on Kitsch and Death, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, 14. 14 Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, 1920: http://www.bartleby.com/283/25.html (accessed 20 June 2013).

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between victim and victimizer is explored in different ways in Malina and The Night Porter. Anxiety and desire, fear and fantasy: these are the emotive modes in which Cavani and Bachmann explore issues of feminine subjectivity and historical experience in their works. Yet, the private, relational imagination of the Holocaust can also be translated to the context of national identity as issues of victimhood and perpetration are as crucial to a subject’s self-definition as to that of a nation. I believe that the representation of the city of Vienna, where both works are set, reveals a broader anxiety about the memory and forgetting of fascism in Austria and Italy. The connections between city and psyche, architecture and emotion are sketched out in Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents (1930). For Freud, a map of the psyche is analogous to a map of a city as both cases show how various developmental stages co-exist. The dialogue between city and psyche, both at a collective and individual level is based on the fact that people receive meaning from the world, and in turn give meaning to their surroundings. Yet, after World War II, most major European cities were reduced to ruins and the practical business of urban reconstruction after 1945 has interesting consequences on a psychological reading of city spaces. Unlike pre-war cities whose various stages of development were obvious to the naked eye (Freud uses Rome for his analogy), post-war cities present telling gaps, symptoms of a disremembered past. These architectural lacunae are potent invisibilities. In Bachmann’s and Cavani’s Vienna, objects, bric-a-brac, alleyways and even building works are enough to summon the old city into existence, which is both a reason for pleasure and anxiety. According to Siegfried Kracauer, film critic and former architect, “Spatial images are the dreams of society. Whenever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image is deciphered, there the basis of social reality presents itself”.15 Thus, in my discussion, public space acts as an interface between the private and the collective, past and present. This essay will explore how the images and fantasies regarding the traumatic past inflect the desires and anxieties of the present: I will firstly discuss the nature of fantasy in Malina and The Night Porter in relation to the works’ aesthetic portrayals of Nazism and the Holocaust. I will then discuss how the past problematizes the 15

Siegfried Kracauer, “Über Arbeitsnachweisen”, in Schriften, vol. 5.2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990, 186.

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gendered individual’s self-definition with regard to history. This will lead me to engage with the architectural setting of Vienna, which will expand on the works’ psychosexual content to show how the city also signifies this specific emotional, representational and historical moment. I will conclude by discussing the role of Holocaust fantasies in the creation of erotic taste during the 1960s and 1970s, which will enable me to assess the interrelationship of private and public forms of memory and desire. Space and fantasy in Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina (1971) is a landmark text in German-language women’s writing, despite it being an unfinished novel which, at first, reads as a rather conventional love triangle set in Vienna between an unnamed female protagonist known as “I”, and two men, Ivan and Malina. It has received a vast amount of critical attention for its interrogation of patriarchal discourse and the possibility of representing the Holocaust from a feminine subject position. However, in this essay I wish to problematize how the protagonist speaks for victims of the Holocaust in order to underscore the close relationship between the fear generated by past events, the anxiety relating to their presentness and reiteration, and the implications of these for national and private identities, and how this complex past becomes converted into fantasy with respect to both the psyche of the narrator and the public space that she navigates. I wish to discuss two significant fantasies in the novel, in order to show how the quest for feminine subjectivity is worked out through the articulation of an aesthetics of the Holocaust and its repercussions on gender roles and reconfiguration as a form of sexual violence. I will then engage with the Viennese setting of Malina to highlight attitudes to the Austrian fascist and imperial periods in the novel and in Austrian society at large. The first flight of fantasy in Malina occurs in the first chapter called “Glücklich mit Ivan” [Happy with Ivan]. The protagonist, the nameless female “I”, is a famous writer who is solicited by the world’s poor and suffering from across the world, yet she fears interacting with the public and needs Ivan, her lover, to protect her. From the outset, despite her intellectual capabilities, the protagonist is utterly dependent on Ivan, who is idolized as “my Mecca and my

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Jerusalem!”.16 Yet, she senses that this need for affection from the detached Ivan is destructive and she begins to write a novel called “Todesarten” [Death Styles]. When Ivan finds out about the gloomy text she is working on, he urges her to write something more cheerful, corresponding with the personality he would like her to have: “You’re always mad with joy, why can’t you write like that?”17 In response, the narrator writes a fairy tale, “the Mysteries of the Princess of Kagran”, which concedes to Ivan’s traditional conceptions of gender as a construct of patriarchal discourse. In it, the beautiful princess is rescued by a knight in shining armour in Kagran, on the plain of the Danube, which prefigures the formation of the cosmopolitan AustroHungarian Empire. The fairy-tale of the Princess of Kagran relies on visual vocabulary associated with crowns and fragmented territories around the Danube plain; this pre-figures not only the future historical demise of the Austrian empire, but also associates the idyllic origin of the Imperial Austria with conventional gender categories, highlighting the narrator’s ambivalent attitude to the Imperial past, and to her selfdefinition as a female writer. Thus, the narrator is describing herself as she is perceived by a male subject: “One day all women will have golden eyes, they will wear golden shoes and golden dresses and she combed her golden hair, and she tore her, no! And her golden hair blew in the wind when she rode up the Danube.”18 The fragility of the narrator’s princess fantasy is evident as she begins to think about torn hair, foreshadowing the violent splitting of the self which intensifies as the novel progresses. The fantasy of conforming to gender stereotypes is shown to be impossible in the fairytale as external forces begin to shatter this precarious ideal image, marked by interruptions in the text. Fear is a reactive emotion, whereas anxiety is a coping mechanism, born out of the survival of the experience of fear. With the constant deferrals and interruptive tactics in the narrator’s fantasy, fear is re-actualized and the coping work of anxiety (that of sublimating current anxieties by focusing on future happiness in the fairy tale) is undone.19 The legacy of the recent Fascist past will 16

Ingeborg Bachmann, Malina, trans. Philip Boehm, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990, 23. 17 Ibid., 30. 18 Ibid., 86-87 (my emphasis). 19 I follow Freud’s analysis of the differentiation of fear and anxiety here. Please see Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

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have disturbing consequences on the spatial and gender idylls described in the first part of Malina, as will become clear in the second chapter of Malina entitled “The Third Man”. This chapter is an extended dream sequence, in which the narrator imagines that she is brutalized by a man she only calls “my father”. The Father figure in “The Third Man” adheres to the fascist aesthetic of the black leather clad SS guard as we see him in The Night Porter as well as that of more low-brow Nazisploitation cinema, “he’s wearing silver and gold with black boots in front of an electrically charged barbed wire”.20 Whilst Bachmann’s work is universally considered as a cornerstone of modern European literary high culture, she is clearly borrowing from “trashy” imagery of Nazism combining sexual adventurism mingled with the threat of punishment and death. Indeed, Sontag highlights the fascination of the fascist aesthetic as follows: “The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.”21 The oppressive father figure is a Nazi, and his suffering victim, the narrator, who at no other point in the novel is described as Jewish, begins to associate herself with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Her punishment for disobeying her father is extermination in a gas chamber; she vicariously feeds on the imagery of Jewish suffering and portrays herself as the sole victim of this violence: “My father has imprisoned me ... I am in the gas chamber, that’s what it is, the biggest gas chamber in the world and in it I am alone.”22 She also describes her father’s special attentions towards her despite the fact that she is ostensibly the same as the others: “I am wearing the Jewish Siberian coat like everybody else.”23 But the act of portraying the gas chamber as a cipher for personal victimization is not the only taboo in the narrator’s fantasy of oppression: the father’s violence is sexual and incestuous; he films his daughter naked causing her to feel shame “because it was incest”.24 The narrator always battles with the gaze of others in her fantasies, and Bachmann’s manipulation of the incest taboo mingles the shame of voyeuristic exposure and sexual 20

Ibid., 123. Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism”, 323. 22 Bachmann, Malina, 114. 23 Ibid., 126. 24 Ibid., 119. Janet Walker asserts the importance of the visualization taboo with regard to both incest and the Holocaust in her book Trauma Cinema: Documenting Incest and the Holocaust, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. 21

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defilement in a way that renews and repositions fears about the violent voyeurism of Nazi persecution and the abjection felt by the victims. Many references to trampled flowers (symbolizing lost virginity) and children born out of incest increase the narrative adventurism of the novel which not only dares to visualize death in a gas chamber, but also associates the Holocaust with deviant sexual practises as well. Indeed, this tactic was deployed to great commercial success in 1970s sadiconazista films. However, I disagree with Hänitzsch, who claims that the violation of the incest taboo is a way of detracting from the Holocaust.25 Rather, I suggest that incest reflects the loss of trust in the family home as a guardian of civil values which points to the failures of “the house of Austria” in its alliance with Nazism. In a sense, the association of the Holocaust with the by-now familiar imagery of the pyjamas26 and stars of David in Malina (which also appear in The Night Porter) suggest that the incest taboo is a more powerful way of representing the exposure and violence at the heart of the Holocaust experience, whose representation is threatened by becoming desensitized and clichéd. The “I”’s dreams of her sexual victimization are described by the protagonist herself and interrupted by questions put to her by Malina, the third character in the Ivan-I-Malina triangle.27 Actually, it transpires that Malina is not a character at all but the masculine side of the narrator’s split self. In criticism of the novel, the “I”’s masculine alter-ego is described as a stifling, murderous presence who disables the “I” and causes her to die.28 He is masculine and rational; he works at the Austrian Army Museum which associates him with chauvinism and dominant historical narratives. And yet, he is attentive to the “I”’s experience of brutalization in her dreams and allows her to broaden 25

Konstanze Hänitzsch, “Der Inzest als Symptom der Shoah: Zur Wiederkehr des Verdrängten in Max Frischs Homo Faber und Ingeborg Bachmanns Malina”, in Geschlecht als Tabu, eds Ute Frietsch et al., Bielefeld: transcript, 2008, 162. 26 Bachmann, Malina, 120. 27 For an illuminating psychoanalytic reading of Malina see Katya Krylova, “The Function of the Analyst. Bachmann’s Malina Read through Lacan”, Focus on German Studies, 14 (2007), 37-49. 28 See Georgina Paul, Perspectives on Gender in Post-1945 German Literature, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2009. For a reconsideration of the view of women as victims in Bachmann, see Sarah Lennox, Cemetery of the Murdered Daughters: Feminism, History and Ingeborg Bachmann, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006.

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their significance. In fact, through her conversations with Malina, the narrator understands how her dreams of brutalization exceed her personal circumstances and touch on Austria’s shadowy engagement with its recent history. Her identification with the Holocaust victims is problematic as it shows both empathy and a willingness to shirk historical responsibility. In fact, she mentions that her fellow prisoners reproach her for her lack of solidarity for their plight due to her closeness to “The Father”. According to Walter Benjamin, “The narration of dreams brings a calamity because a person is still half in league with the dream world, betrays it in his words, and must incur its revenge. Expressed in more modern terms: he betrays himself”.29 The narrator of Malina repeats the phrase “There is a disturbance in my memory”30 obsessively throughout the book, and when her dreams reach an emotional crescendo she is unwilling to acknowledge the latent historical content of the images that haunt her, “I have suffered too much, I know nothing, I won’t say anything, how am I supposed to know, I know too little”.31 The female “I” is trying to visualize and vocalize thoughts that resist symbolization in language, and the reality of these intuitions is impoverished as soon as they enter language. As the narrator confirms, “These dangerous impulses of great consequence are often first felt in the body, where they cause certain words to be pronounced”.32 The nature of the narrator’s dreams destabilizes and overwhelms her private and national identities, as Bachmann herself remarks, “I don’t think that you can express the terrible things happening in the world today ... by talking in platitudes, that everyone thinks they can say. But in dreams I know how I should say it”.33 Thus, Bachmann’s novel Malina dramatizes how dreams mediate between fantasies pertaining to national and personal identification. The third man of the dream chapter is by no means an unequivocal “father figure” in Malina. Rather, he stands for the symbolic order of patriarchal discourse and dramatizes the shady boundary between power and powerlessness, victimhood and perpetration. Whilst I have 29

Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, London: Verso, 1985, 46. 30 Bachmann, Malina, 172. 31 Ibid., 145. 32 Ibid., 174. 33 Ingeborg Bachmann, Wir müssen wahre Sätze finden: Gespräche und Interviews, Munich: Piper, 1983, 69-70 (my translation).

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hitherto described how the “I” is violated by her father, she is also violent towards him, which prompts her to see him as her mother as well as her father: “I don’t know exactly when he’s my father and when he’s my mother.”34 Victimhood and perpetration are aligned with femininity and masculinity respectively, which places the “I” in a serious double-bind illustrated by the quotation below: should she remain a passive victim or join the rank of the oppressors? Me: I covered up all the tracks, that’s what you’re supposed to do isn’t it? Malina: Why did you cover for him? ... Me: I don’t know. I just did, it seemed like the right thing for me to do at the time.35

The question the novel tries to resolve is whether there is a third way, outside the victimizer/victim, masculine/feminine polarity. But resolution cannot be achieved. Indeed, the narrator’s disappearance into a crack in the wall at the end of the novel can be interpreted as a voluntary exit from the need to define the self according to the binary of sexual difference, which amounts to power versus powerlessness. In this sense, I agree with Krylova’s view that the death of the female “I” at the end of the novel amounts to “the acceptance of death as an alternative to an unsatisfactory existence in the symbolic”.36 The autonomous female subjectivity, like the controversial couple in The Night Porter, is an irritant to the symbolic order which regulates power and existence in society, and is therefore expunged; the “I” disappears through a crack in the wall. Furthermore, private anxieties are reflected in public space in Malina, set in the city of Vienna which like the narrator’s dreams also conflates private, historical and sexual fantasies behind a physical facade. The protagonist describes her sense of happiness in her relationship with Hungarian Ivan, who, like the narrator, lives on the “Ungargasse” (“Hungary Street”). Her relationship with Ivan betrays her desire for the borderlessness of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as their relationship occurs in her fantasy of an “Ungargassenland” (“Hungary Street Land”). But her yearning for the former empire does 34

Bachmann, Malina, 153. Ibid., 135-36. 36 Krylova, “The Function of the Analyst”, 46. 35

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not acknowledge Austria’s complicity with the rise of Nazism nor does it allude to Vienna’s pivotal role in the annexation of Austria, furthermore this desire is far removed from the reality of present-day Vienna. This selective view of the city, according to Stephanie Bird, “reflects [the narrator’s] identification with an idealised past and concomitant reluctance to analyse the reality of its failures”.37 The city and the psyche are analogous spheres working in dialogue and as Pile notes, cities, like fantasies, are the dramatization of an idea or desire: “The city is a collection of images ... which is put together in a situation – or a series of situations in which desire can be dramatised.”38 In post-war Vienna, a drive to restore Habsburg monuments took priority over new developments: the Nazi past which had been responsible for the destruction of over 20 % of Vienna’s infrastructure was erased from the city’s urban fabric. Architectural historian Elisabeth Lichtenberger confirms: “in the post-war period the limited economic powers of the small country ... made it possible for urban preservationists to triumph over property speculation.”39 Yet, the associations of post-imperial Vienna with Nazism do transpire in the novel. In “The Third Man” dream chapter, famous Viennese institutions are complicit in the brutalization of the “I” such as the Hotel Sacher (“My head rolls onto the plate in the restaurant of the Sacher hotel, spraying the lily-white damask tablecloth with blood, my head is fallen and exhibited to the guests”40) and the Vienna Opera, where the “Father”, this time in the guise of an opera director, makes his daughter perform for him. The Viennese Opera also features prominently in The Night Porter as it lures Lucia back to the city, and sparks her reunion with Max. Thus Bachmann presents us with two differing psychotopographies of Vienna, firstly, the idyllic location of Kagran as the origin of Vienna on the plain of the Danube, secondly, the violent turmoil of the fascist past, hidden behind the museal facades of Vienna’s modern cityscape. As Krylova puts it, the reader is given 37

Stephanie Bird, Women Writers and National Identity: Bachmann, Duden, Özdamar, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 88. 38 Steve Pile, “Sleepwalking in the City: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud in the World of Dreams”, in A Companion to the City, eds Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003, 75-86. 39 Elisabeth Lichtenberger, Vienna, trans. Dietlinder Mühlgassner and Craig Reissner, London: Belhaven Press, 1993, 86. 40 Bachmann, Malina, 200.

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Thus, Malina dramatizes the ineffability of the Holocaust and its displacement onto the incest taboo in order to convey the difficulty of establishing feminine subjectivity out of the ruins of historical and sexual violence. The city of Vienna also acts as a screen for these identity conflicts. As Bird notes, the narrator is “governed by her emotional perception of experience”:42 or, in the words of the protagonist, “I submit ..., I react ..., I suffer”.43 As in The Night Porter, the Holocaust and the suffering of the narrator are staged against the backdrop of various performances; “The Father” appears as an opera director, a film director, a preacher, in drag: “my father forces me into a costume with pins. He’s so clumsy.”44 Just as Lucia is staged as a Marlene Dietrich-style cabaret singer for the pleasure of the SS guards, the narrator of Malina performs her own suffering at the hands of her father. Malina then berates her for letting herself be emotionally damaged by her visions, “your imagination always did perform too much”.45 Therefore, performance is associated with a great deal of fear in Malina: the narrator’s inability to control her “no!” when she pretends to be the Princess of Kagran and her association of victimization with stage performance reveal her unwillingness to be constrained according to the powers of history and patriarchy. Furthermore, her fantasies show the dynamic of anxieties relating the past and her implication in it through the networks of patriarchy and nationalism turning into fear, a reactive emotion against the father. Bachmann’s “I” is therefore simultaneously accessing her latent anxiety about past experiences, as well as experiencing a reactive fear against them, thus rendering the presentness of the toxic National Socialist legacy all the more immediate. On the one hand, emotion is undermined as a paralyzing and unproductive route into the past. On 41

Ekaterina Krylova, The Legacy of the Second World War, Topography and Identity in the Works of Ingeborg Bachmann and Thomas Bernhard, PhD thesis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 152. 42 Bird, Women Writers, 69. 43 Bachmann, Malina, 164. 44 Ibid., 123. 45 Ibid., 144.

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the other, an identification with patriarchal, and by extension perpetrator, discourse disallows the possibility of a feminine voice. Whilst this dilemma is not resolved in Malina, at least the narrator is asking the questions that might allow new subject configurations to emerge. Furthermore, after the narrator’s disappearance through the crack in the wall at the end of the novel, the novel’s last words are uttered from an unclear subject position “it was murder”: who is speaking if the subject is dead? Mark Anderson suggests that these last lines equate to a physical trace on the space of Vienna: “The crack is there, a hieroglyph and uncanny epitaph and the only enduring sign of the narrator’s life in the necropolis of Vienna.”46 The city of Vienna therefore acts as an interface mediating between inner conflicts surrounding patriarchy, gender and history and external facades of Imperial glory. Thus, fantasy in Malina registers the aftershocks of the Holocaust which continue to reverberate in the present at the level of aesthetics, feminine subjectivity and the politics of national identity. In the following section, I will discuss the afterlife of the Holocaust in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter. The undeadness of the Holocaust in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (1974), set in Vienna in 1957, shows the reunion of an ex-SS guard turned night porter, Max, with his former lover Lucia, a beautiful concentration camp inmate at a glamorous hotel. The film is structured around the visual recalls of the traumatic past the couple shares. The film shocked and fascinated critics because it violated not only the taboo of visualizing the Holocaust – by imagining life in the concentration camp for both guards and inmates – but the film was also perceived to aestheticize and eroticize the suffering of the victims of the Third Reich. The year of The Night Porter’s release, Foucault criticized the fetishization of Nazism as an unethical denial of the suffering of victims as well as a derealization of the actual atrocities committed: “All the shoddiest aspects of the erotic imagination are now put under the sign of

46

Mark Anderson, “Afterword”, in Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, trans. Philip Boehm, New York: Holmes & Meier Mark Anderson, 1990, 240.

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Nazism.”47 However, this film does not make any attempts to describe what it was “really” like: Italo Moscati, the writer of the Night Porter, explicitly states that “it is not a history book, it is a fantasy, with the possibilities that that entails”.48 It is also worth noting that the film does not deal with Italian fascism at all but instead “projects Italian fascism onto German Nazism”.49 Thus, given Cavani’s statement that “as dreams do, my film brings back to the surface a repressed ‘history’”,50 The Night Porter explores three intersecting “repressed histories”: that of Max and Lucia, that of Austria’s involvement with its Nazi past and that of Italy’s complicity in Nazi crimes as a close ally of the Third Reich until 1943. Cavani and Moscati explore the limits of the human imagination thanks to an event that probes the limits of comprehension and representation, hence the film’s uncomfortable mix of fantasy and violence. I hereby assess how the film dramatizes the historical reality of the Holocaust, and how it is transposed into the realm of sexuality which, conversely to Foucault’s negative appraisal of this cultural trend, may shed light onto the reverberations of traumatic history at the level of emotion and fantasy.51 Cavani claimed that The Night Porter was related to her previous project for Italian RAI television called The Women of the Resistance (1965) for which she had interviewed women who survived concentration camps interrogation by the SS. The women she spoke to stressed the ambivalence of the victim/perpetrator divide. In her description of one interview, Cavani mentions that one woman “was still haunted by the fact that in the Lager, she could fully test her own nature, what she was capable of doing in good and in evil”.52 Like Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina which visualizes the Holocaust in order to articulate the politics of personal and national identity, Cavani’s film uses an extreme situation in order to imagine the moral limits of human nature and explore the implications of fantasizing about the 47 Interview with Michel Foucault, Cahiers du cinéma, 251-252 (July/August 1974), 11. 48 Italo Moscati, “Interview”, in The Night Porter, Anchor Bay DVD, 2006. 49 Marcus Stiglegger, Sadiconazista: Faschismus und Sexualität im Film, St Augustin: Gardez! Verlag, 1999, 11 (my translation). 50 Cavani cited in Friedländer, Reflections on Nazism, 129. 51 Following Saul Friedländer’s statement about the new discourse on Nazism; see n.13. 52 Liliana Cavani, “Interview” (1974), in The Night Porter, Anchor Bay DVD, 2006.

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Holocaust. However, Cavani’s version of the Holocaust as it is presented in the film draws on visual clichés and images from lowbrow erotic cinema in order to demonstrate how a discreet historical moment is transferred to the plane of fantasy. My first point will examine how Cavani breaches the visualization taboo in The Night Porter, which will lead me to a discussion of the replacement of documentary veracity with fantasy and performance. I will conclude with a comparison of the treatment of the city in Malina and The Night Porter which will highlight the fantasies and anxieties pertaining to Nazism operating at public, private and architectural levels. Firstly, The Night Porter can be interpreted as a voyeuristic fantasy which mixes the traumatic suffering of the concentration camp with visual pleasure. The first visual manifestation of the camp occurs after Max and Lucia see each other again for the first time at the beginning of the film. Lucia is waiting in a line with Jewish families, presumably about to be put in the concentration camp. The reason for Lucia’s arrest is that she is the daughter of a communist, not because she is Jewish; however she takes her place among a line of Jewish prisoners which immediately associates her ordeal with that of the Jews in the Holocaust and accords her the redemptive position of the victim. Max uses a movie camera to film Lucia’s face: his first violation. The violence of voyeurism consists in the object of the voyeur’s gaze being possessed. As Sontag notes, “to photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves; it turns people into objects that can symbolically be possessed”.53 Another scene shows Max shooting at a naked Lucia in a clinical room: this demonstrates the progression of Max’s symbolic possession of Lucia’s image into a literal mastery over her life. Furthermore, the scene is shot from his perspective. Max’s voyeurism is matched by the spectator’s compulsion to look at the images, as Sontag points out: “we talk about ‘loading’ and ‘aiming’ a camera, about ‘shooting’ a film.”54 Here there is a mise en abyme as Max watches and shoots Lucia, and we watch the shot of Max shooting at Lucia from his perspective. The film encourages identification with the powerful and objectification of the powerless as objects of a pleasure-seeking gaze. The geometrical composition of The Night Porter’s cinematography 53 54

Susan Sontag, On Photography, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, 14. Ibid., 14.

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and the fact that the objects of Max’s scopophilic gaze are beautiful indicate a refusal to allow traumatic effect (the suffering and brutalization of the prisoners) to ruin visual pleasure. Lucia is not the only object of Max’s scopophilia (sexual pleasure gained by looking): the homosexual ballet dancer Bert performs for the guards in an empty room under the kitsch, stylized banners bearing the imprint “SS”. After the war, Bert continues to depend on Max’s voyeurism for the definition of his own identity. Max continues to film him dance and Bert remains stuck in the visual and libidinal economy of the concentration camp. However, Cavani does not allow us to conclude that Max always controls the visions of Lucia and the camp. I discussed the variation of masculine, analytical and feminine, hysterical modes of responding to experience in Malina, described by the protagonist as reason and emotion, productivity and self-destruction. Max and Lucia’s memories do not vary in their emotional content, only in their point of view and whilst the content of the visions may well be violent, they are mingled with desire. Lucia and Max both have equal access to the memories of the past which seen together create a narrative of their shared past. The scenes at the opera show Max and Lucia entertaining a sort of telepathic dialogue through the use of flashbacks as they both tap into their memories of the camp. Unlike the protagonist of Malina, who shakily articulates fragmentary snippets of the past, Max and Lucia remember coherent blocks of memory without shirking from the more abject and vilifying memories. We see Lucia perform oral sex on Max, and Max offers Lucia a severed head. Whilst they may well both be traumatized by their experiences, they indulge in the visual pleasure of reconstructing their narrative. As we know from Freud’s interpretation of dreams, dreams represent a “(disguised) fulfilment of a (suppressed or repressed) wish”.55 Lucia then chooses to leave her husband and rekindle her relationship with Max. Lucia’s journey to Vienna where she is greeted as Max’s “little girl” becomes a homecoming of sorts, where she can rejoin the constellation of oppressors who lend her her identity and character. Lucia’s fears relating to Max are produced by her past suffering as well as the fact that the time and space of the past (which happens to coincide with the war-time, concentration camp setting) are unrecoverable. Trauma 55

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey, London: Pelican, 1976, 244.

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theorist Cathy Caruth notes that trauma can only occur when one has survived the horrible experience that produced it in the first place, and therefore she defines it as “the perplexing experience of survival”56: Lucia’s choice to return to Max evokes Freud’s observation of play and fantasy as an attempt to obtain mastery over a traumatizing experience, and Lucia’s experience of survival, as a pleasurable one, is being re-enacted in The Night Porter. Unable to rewind time, Max and Lucia rekindle their affair based on internalized behaviour inherited from the camp. In the Neuroses of Defence Freud suggests that repressed memories of sexual experience “have the possibility ... of subsequently reproducing a more powerful release than that produced by the corresponding experience [themselves]”.57 Max and Lucia are living the past in the present and it becomes clear that they are trying to retrieve the setting of the Lager itself: for them, the Holocaust becomes an object of desire which is reperformed in the present. But Cavani’s camp bears no resemblance to archival material which informs our knowledge of the appearance and structure of actual concentration camps. Cavani’s camp is a pastiche, an amalgam of different iconographies of the Holocaust. The Lager in the film recycles the stock images which were first used to convey the horror of the camps: Max masquerades as a doctor; there is a cabaret scene echoing the cliché of the music-loving prison guards, and the film shows inmates being shot at random on a merry-go-round, conveying the sense of spectacle and random brutality evoked in accounts by Primo Levi and Bruno Piazza.58 The victims are also highly clichéd: they wear striped pyjamas and stars of David. This makes the experience of the Holocaust seem even more unreal, as Max and Lucia’s memories are clearly conditioned by this iconographical and cultural influence. Fantasy and reality therefore become cross-contaminated. Furthermore, Max’s stylized uniform of 56 Cathy Caruth, “Departures: Survival and History in Freud”, in Trauma and Self, eds Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn, London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996, 31. 57 Sigmund Freud, “Neuroses of Defence (A Christmas Fairy Tale)”, 1926. Cited in Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality”, in Formations of Fantasy, eds Victor Burgin, James Donald and Cora Kaplan, New York: Methuen, 1986, 10. 58 See Primo Levi, If this Is a Man (1958), trans. S. Woolf, London: Abacus, 2004; Giacomo Debenedetti, October 16, 1943: Eight Jews, trans. Estelle Gilson, Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2001.

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black leather with the SS insignia and silver skulls is pastiched in his night porter uniform, which also features black leather and crossed keys, a secret signal to the initiated about his shady past. At the end of the film, Max and Lucia dress up in their former uniforms to meet their deaths: he wears his SS uniform, she the virginal nightgown. The uniform therefore condenses the dialectic of fear and fantasy regarding the past: Max in his uniform embodies power, Lucia in her white nightgown powerlessness. In her seminal essay On Photography, Susan Sontag asserts that “images anaesthetise” and that “the shock of photographed atrocities wears off with repeated viewings”.59 Just as Ingeborg Bachmann sees fantasy as being a dangerous product of fears relating to the legacy of the past in the present, Cavani works with these fears to produce fantasies which can only culminate in impasse and death, despite their erotic content. I suggest that Cavani’s film feeds off and contributes to a clichéd representation of the Holocaust, reduced in popular culture to “a replay of a by-now familiar atrocity exhibition”.60 The visual aesthetics of the performative camp setting and the nostalgia for the uniform as a symbol of power and community, brutality and masculinity, overrides the rather drab contemporary surroundings of 1957 Vienna. History is thus re-performed in 1957, the year the film is set, as a phantasm transposed into present day reality. As Deleuze suggests in Cinéma 2, history is a “crystal of time” which is a repository for “dreams and nightmares, ideas and visions, impetuses and actions of the subjects involved”.61 The return of the concentration camp setting is actually an impossible site of redemption for Max and Lucia and their death at the end of the film underlines the impossibility of any alternatives to a relationship that flourished in the brutal conditions of the concentration camp. Unlike the protagonist in Bachmann’s text, who is afraid to acknowledge the full extent of her awareness of and involvement in her past, the two lovers in the film acknowledge their roles in their past. Far from merely being a victim of Max’s violence, Lucia also participates in the brutality of the camp. A close-up shot reveals her serenity when she accepts the severed head of a Kapo from 59

Sontag, On Photography, 20. Ibid., 19. 61 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989, 222. 60

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Max. Nevertheless, Malina’s protagonist’s affective descriptive of her inability to articulate her experience of suffering awakens more empathy than Max and Lucia’s plight: their re-enactment of their past as a violent, claustrophobic sexual relationship is almost without feeling. As the couple chain each other to the bed and make love, Lucia never utters a word but is obviously sexually satisfied. The spectator is witnessing a performance here into which he is dragged, reflecting Kafka’s own anxieties about film spectatorship expressed 50 years prior to Night Porter’s release: “The pictures master your sight. They flood your consciousness. The cinema involves putting your eyes into uniform, when before they were naked.”62 One may even go so far as to argue that Max and Lucia are not really re-living anything at all, that they are simply undead disposable remnants of the past. According to Christopher Bollas, the fascist state of mind results from a purification process that eliminates all contaminants and effectively empties the mind, a process which can be enacted on others too: On the verge of its own moral vacuum, the mind splits off this dead core self, and projects it into a victim henceforth identified with the moral void. To accomplish this transfer, the Fascist mind transforms a human other into a disposable nonentity (mirror of what has already happened to the Fascist’s self).63

Not only have the violent experiences of their past conditioned their mode of fantasizing, but also Max and Lucia are asocial and unable to live under the conditions of everyday life due to their fixation on their past which they compulsively repeat. Their performance is inflexible and conditioned by the clichéd repetition of the past; in this sense, one may be able to describe them as “undead”. Further to this, there is a clear relationship between the undeadness of the Nazi past in the private and public spheres brought to the fore by the depiction of public space in the film. Before concluding, I focus on how the clichéd imagery of the Holocaust transposed to erotic scenarios did much to shape sexual taste at a collective level, which 62

Gustave Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees, New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1953, 88-89. 63 Christopher Bollas, “The Fascist State of Mind”, in Being a Character, New York: Routledge, 1997, 203.

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was based on the voyeuristic pleasure procured by the power/ powerlessness dialectic in so-called Nazisploitation cinema. In my discussion of the representation of urban space in Malina, I showed how the restoration of the surfaces of pre-war, imperial Vienna smoothes out the calamities of Nazi occupation. Baroque splendour effaces the architectural legacy of World War II which accounted for much of Vienna’s destruction. A notable example of this in The Night Porter is a view of the St Stephen’s Cathedral, a major landmark of the old imperial city. Max views it from a rooftop which shows that the Cathedral’s famous roof is engraved with the date 1831. However, the Church was destroyed in the last years of the war by the invading Soviet troops and extensive restoration was completed in 1952. Rather than acknowledging the circumstances of the monument’s restoration, the choice to date the Cathedral 1831 (the date of a previous restoration) erases the trace of the recent past, a telling absence in Vienna’s urban fabric. Thus, I would agree with Paul Ricœur’s assertion that forgetting is the “sphere of activity so close to public space”.64 Yet the modest building projects (of which the cranes and road blocks are a sign) that did occur within the city centre which feature in the opening credits Cavani’s film, cohabited with the monuments commemorating the bygone splendour of the empire, which had also provided the setting for the annexation of Austria by the Third Reich. Two protagonists of post-war Viennese urban planning embody these pressures: Franz Schuster and Karl Heinz Brunner. Schuster founded Der Aufbau in 1926, a journal to promote architectural innovations in Vienna and then became an official planner in the Nazi modernization plan of Vienna. When the war ended, he became an official planner for the reconstruction of the city.65 In The Night Porter this continuity is preserved as prestigious institutions such as the Viennese Opera and the Hotel zur Oper organize the city’s performance of its imperial heyday. The opera shows The Magic Flute by Mozart, Austria’s most famous cultural export and the hotel problematizes a culture’s way of seeing others and itself, according to Matlock:

64

Paul Ricœur, History, Memory, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004, 447. 65 See Jeffry M. Diefendorf, “Planning Post-war Vienna”, Planning Perspectives, 8 (1993), 5-6.

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The cinematic hotel does not so much mirror the society that watches its film. It problematises the very kinds of watching – surveillance, spectacles, sideshows, stripteases – that society deploys for political and cultural purposes.66

The desire to gloss over the continuities between Nazi and post-war Vienna stages the city in the period costume of the imperial metropolis.67 Vienna is designed as a relic of times past, just as Max and Lucia are still jammed in their past roles which are no longer tenable. Therefore, the city is a large-scale fantasy construct which dramatizes the private fantasy’s connection to its past and the presentness of this past. Pile plays on Freud’s metaphor of dreams as guardians of sleep to create the following analogy: “Dreams – and cities – remain the guardians of the moderns’ sleep: an elaborate play of remembering and forgetting; showing and disguising.”68 Finally, I will expand on the extent to which The Night Porter borrows from a low-brow iconography which links sexuality and fascism and locates pleasures vicariously in the suffering of the Holocaust. In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”, Freud argues that the repetition of fearful experiences in imaginative works produces an enjoyment “proceed[ing] from a liberation of tensions in our minds, enabling us to enjoy our own daydreams without self-reproach or shame.”69 Yet the depiction of violence against women, and kitsch reworking of Jewish suffering, are far from innocent play with the imagination of a past event, and are revealing about the nature of spectatorship in continental Europe in the mid-1970s. In this sense, I agree with Kaja Silvermann, who, in The Subject of Semiotics, demonstrates that The Night Porter shows the “inevitable collaboration between the preconscious and the larger cultural regime”.70 Whilst The Night Porter has high artistic merit and points 66

Jann Matlock, “Vacancies: Hotels, Reception Desks and Identity in American Cinema”, in Moving Pictures/Stopping Places: Hotels and Motels on Film, eds David Clarke, Valerie Crawford Pfannhauser, and Marcus A. Doel, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009, 78. 67 Lichtenberger, Vienna, 86. 68 Pile, “Sleepwalking in the City”, 83-84. 69 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Daydreaming”, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, New York: Vintage, 1995, 443. 70 Kaja Silvermann, The Subject of Semiotics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 72.

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to the impasse of the erotic lure of fascism, Elissa Mailänder in her study of The Night Porter concludes that the film’s exploitation of the themes of Nazisploitation cinema makes it complicit in a process whereby a heterogeneous group of young European men formed their erotic tastes based on these films throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mailänder notes that the sadico-nazista, Women-in-Prison and Nazisploitation genres were not shown in seedy pornographic theatres but were on general release in cinemas, where spectators could watch matinees most days of the week. The fascination for the victimizers as symbols of power and violence, as well as the desire to subjugate women based on the consensus surrounding the erotic lure of this power earned this genre great commercial success and controversy. Mailänder’s interview with one spectator reveals that going to see a Nazisploitation film was just as normal as doing one’s homework, as the man reveals how he and his friends would meet after school to see an erotic movie. The spectator rejects the significance of the Nazi context to focus instead on the erotic content of the films.71 One can conclude from this that the Holocaust and the taboo surrounding it were the “sexy” for the 1968 generation, which sedimented the dialectic of power/powerlessness as the ultimate erotic titillation. Furthermore, this sexualized the victim as an object of visual pleasure, and in Nazisploitation films, as in The Night Porter and Malina, the victim is defined as female, Jewish and exposed. Concluding remarks Both Malina and The Night Porter dramatize the afterlife of the Nazi concentration camp as a sensory and visual fragment, whose reality has become fantasy through the repetition of images that sublimate traumatic history and the fears surrounding it into desire and play. As Žižek suggests, for a generation that saw fascism as an “exotic unknown”, what precedes the transformation of historical fascism into fantasy is not “reality but a hole in reality, its point of impossibility filled with fantasy”.72 A recent publication Nazisploitation: The Nazi Image in Low Brow Cinema and Culture (2012) inventories the indefatigable presence of Nazis in culture from the Norwegian Nazi Zombie film Død Snø to Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds (both 2009) 71

Elissa Mailänder, “Meshes of Power: The Concentration Camp as Pulp or Art House in Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter”, in Nazisploitation!, 189. 72 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, London: Verso, 2008, xiii.

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to the Israeli documentary about Nazi-porn Stalagim (Stalags, 2007). It is clear that this is a past that simply will not die. The scenarios of Cavani and Bachmann have much to reveal about the fears and fantasies about Nazism at this particular historical juncture of the 1970s: the works reveal the process of canon formation, which borrows from diverse modes of cultural representation, from urban architecture to low-brow erotica, in order to explore the undigested anxieties relating to traumatic memories of the recent history of Nazism.

PART 3 BOUNDARIES AND PERFORMANCE: LANGUAGE, MEMORY AND FANTASY

A POLITICS OF FORM: FANTASY AND STORYTELLING AS MODES OF RESISTANCE IN THE WORK OF ATXAGA AND KUNDERA HARRIET HULME This article interrogates the connection between linguistic fantasies and political fears through a comparative study of Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak (1988) and Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978). Issues of internal and external colonialism and the dialectics of major/minor languages inform both texts and are discussed within the broader theoretical context of the relationship between magical realism and postcolonial discourse. The article explores Atxaga and Kundera’s use of magical realism and the supernatural as part of a palimpsestic layering of escapism and politics and evaluates to what extent this layering offers a form of textual resistance to reductive and fear-inducing political fantasies of unity and linguistic performativity.

And we all lived happily... at any rate, even without the traditional last-sentence fiction of fairy-tales, my story does indeed end in fantasy; because, when Basic Democrats had done their duty, the newspapers – Jang, Dawn, Pakistan Times – announced a crushing victory for the President’s Muslim League over the Mader-i-Millat’s Combined Opposition Party; thus proving to me that I have been only the humblest of jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case.1

When Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, comments upon the victory of the President’s Muslim League in Pakistan’s 1965 presidential election, he draws a powerful parallel between fantasy within fiction and fantasy within politics. In Saleem’s Pakistan, fantasy is no longer solely the preserve of the storyteller; instead, in the hands of the politician, it has become 1

Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, London: Vintage, 2008, 452-53.

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a dangerous tool of political manipulation and distortion. Saleem’s comment is particularly interesting because it reformulates as interconnected a relationship which, ever since Plato banned the tragic poets from his ideal Republic, has often been posited as oppositional. For Plato, the establishment of the ideal Republic required a truthseeking discourse such as the Dialectic which, while thriving off disagreement, would strive to attain a synthesis between contradictory elements in order to uncover the truth of a concept or a situation. By contrast, representative art, “by nature at third remove from the throne of truth”,2 engaged in a fantasy recreation of reality, a form of escapism which might threaten the political goals of the Republic. For Plato, such fantasy-based escapism was bad art; the only valuable form of art was one which rejected fantasy and sought to educate and instruct. Yet this Platonic opposition between fantasy and politics only seems tenable if the terms reality and fantasy maintain or can attain distinct definitions in relation to the political. However, as Rushdie’s narrator – himself an inveterate weaver of stories and fantasies – asserts, there are occasions when the real political situation is more incredible than anything any storyteller could create; occasions when the phrase “political fiction” not only applies to fictional texts which discuss political questions, but in fact becomes an apt description for the process by which certain political parties themselves seek to attain and maintain power. On such occasions, when the truth might indeed be stranger than fiction, where can fiction turn in order to challenge these political discourses? One answer, as Rushdie demonstrates in Midnight’s Children, is to create worlds within which the imaginary and the factual, the supernatural and the natural, the fictional and the political, are deliberately made to collide. Dream-sequences, magical storylines and characters with paranormal powers offer textual challenges to dominant political discourses for two reasons. Firstly, by combining fantastic and unbelievable events with commentary, analysis or accounts of the political, such texts draw attention to the fantasies inherent within the political worlds which they describe and from which they arise. Highlighting these fantasies offers a challenge to their normalization and naturalization, revealing such “political fictions” as ideologically-constructed narratives masquerading as 2

Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, 2nd edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974, 425.

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authentic truths. Secondly, through the inclusion of elements of the magical and the supernatural, such texts problematize the idea that any one system, be it political, theological or philosophical, can attain a total grasp of the world. By revealing and revelling in the unknown and the unknowable, fantasy texts disrupt the stability of the epistemological assertions upon which such systems are based. Literary texts which draw upon the magical and the supernatural in this way might be categorized as either fantastic or magical realist. Theories of both literary forms focus upon their effectiveness in problematizing simplistic, unilateral or reductive modes of thought and their ability to challenge the preconceptions and limitations we place upon our perceptions of the world. In Eric S. Rabkin’s The Fantastic in Literature, for example, he writes that “The fantastic is a quality of astonishment that we feel when the ground rules of a narrative world are suddenly made to turn about 180°”;3 in Wendy B. Faris’s Ordinary Enchantments, she speaks of magical realism as an “irreducible magic” which “frequently disrupts the ordinary logic of cause and effect”.4 Given the theoretical proximity of such readings, it is important to note that the fantastic and the magical realist are not identical. In his seminal text The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov focuses on the idea of “hesitation” in the face of supernatural events. In fantastic texts, he suggests, this hesitation is always resolved in some way: either the disruption of the laws of nature is revealed as only trickery or a failure of perception (the uncanny) or such laws have indeed been broken and we (the readers and characters) have moved into the realm of the marvellous, an imaginary space.5 In contrast to the fantastic, magical realist texts neither explain magical events nor reject realism entirely in order to encompass them: as Stephen M. Hart notes, such texts do “not offer a place to which the reader can retreat, a world that is either just real or just magical”.6 In this article I will be using Christopher Warnes’ definition of magical realism as “a mode in 3

Eric S. Rabkin, The Fantastic in Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976, 41. 4 Wendy B. Faris, Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004, 10. 5 Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard and Robert Scholes, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975, 41. 6 Stephen M. Hart, “Magical Realism: Style and Substance”, in A Companion to Magic Realism, eds Stephen M. Hart and Wen-Chin Ouyang, Woodbridge: Tamesis Books, 2005, 4.

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which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of equivalence”.7 By representing such apparently opposed elements as equivalent, magical realist texts refuse to prioritize or validate one perspective upon events over another, thereby challenging discourses which seek to promote one belief system at the expense of all others. In this article I will draw upon the terms “fantastic” and “magical realist” when the difference between the two seems particularly pertinent. Of the two, it is magical realism which has garnered more discussion for its connection to political, and specifically postcolonial, issues. In “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers”, Theo L. D’haen suggests that, by re-asserting the value of the unrealistic, magical realism seeks to construct a space through which the “ex-centric”, those excluded from hegemonic discourses, on the margins or in the minorities can be enfranchised: It is precisely the nature of the ex-centric, in the sense of speaking from the margin, from a place “other” than “the” or “a” center, that seems to me an essential feature of that strain of postmodernism we call magic realism ... the privileged center discourse leaves no room for a “realistic” insertion of those that history – always speaking the language of the victors and rulers – has denied a voice ... an act of recuperation can only happen by magical or fantastic or unrealistic means.8

Here, it is reality, understood as the dominant, ideologicallyconstructed perception of a culture or society, which rejects those on the margin. This marginalization reflects the fears of the dominant system: those who exist on the fringes of a society exceed the limits of the understandable and so highlight concerns about the potential fragility of the hegemonic social structure. Such fears then become the rationale for a continued marginalization: those on the fringes must remain there, mistrusted and reviled, in order that the hegemonic structure can continue intact. By suggesting that reality can never be perceived or constructed as unitary, magical realist texts open a 7

Christopher Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 3. 8 Theo L. D’haen, “Magical Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged Centers”, in Magical Realism: Theory, History and Community, eds Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995, 194-97.

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textual space where those excluded from the narratives of the dominant system are allowed to speak. In so doing, they draw out and confront the fears upon which such narratives are based, re-claiming the margins as a space of creativity rather than jeopardy. Such acts of recuperation are frequently equated with specifically postcolonial texts, such as Midnight’s Children, which attempt to give a voice to those whose language and culture has been appropriated, dominated or destroyed by colonization. This article examines the role which modes of fantasy, specifically dream sequences, supernatural storylines and magical realism, can play in relation to dominant political discourses through a comparative analysis of Basque author Bernardo Atxaga’s 1988 book Obabakoak (self-translated from Basque into Spanish in 1989 and into English in 1992) and Czech writer Milan Kundera’s 1978 text The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (first published in French translation in 1979, and translated from Czech into English in 1980). Obabakoak is a series of connected short stories based around the fictional Basque village of Obaba, which intersperses relatively realistic discussions of village life with intertextual stories, dream sequences and tales of the supernatural. While The Book also includes magical sequences and dream interludes, its content is, ostensibly, more political: the seven different threads which make up the novel are broadly connected by a discussion of the rise of the Czech Communist Party (KSČ) and the impact of its victory in 1948 in the years that follow. Through their focus upon language, fantasy and the pressures of the political moment, these texts offer a productive comparative analysis. Both texts were written from a culture and in a language considered to be minor (Basque and Czech respectively) and subjected to potential domination by an external culture or language (Spain/Castilian in the Basque Country and the Soviet Union in the then-Czechoslovakia). While such external pressures could permit a reading of each text as postcolonial, this is not the purpose of this essay. For, as I will discuss, the use of magical realism and the supernatural within both texts is not employed, as one might anticipate, to challenge “external” colonization, but rather to reveal the potential dangers of a form of “internal” colonization based around fantasies of unity and linguistic performativity. For Atxaga, such an internal colonization takes the form of a dominant Basque nationalism, based around the use of Euskera, the Basque language;

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for Kundera it is the dominance of the KSČ and its attempt to “forget” elements of Czech history and culture which provide the focus of his book. In these texts, fantasy and magical realism thus do not contend with the dominant discourses imposed from “outside” the culture they describe, but rather with those which have arisen “inside” it, whether as part of an act of collaboration with external forces (the KSČ) or as an act of resistance to them (Basque nationalism). In their texts, Atxaga and Kundera suggest that these dominant “internal” political discourses seek to consolidate their power by developing narratives of absolute linguistic, cultural or political harmony. These narratives depend upon the creation and exploitation of fantasies and of fears: fantasies of perfect linguistic unity and unilateral political or national thought; fears relating to those on the margins who, in their very existence, preclude the possibility of such perfection. In this article, I will suggest that Atxaga and Kundera employ textual modes of fantasy in Obabakoak and The Book respectively in order to explore, interrogate and ultimately challenge the fantasies and fears upon which such political narratives are built. As I will discuss, Atxaga has seen his fiction play a political role, offering the possibility of a “nation-state” founded upon, and through, a national imaginary, embodied within his texts.9 Through his use of the fantastic and dream sequences, Atxaga interrogates the link between imagination and nation, revealing the Basque “nation-state” as a fantasy in its own right, one which depends upon fear-mongering to sustain its own fictions. In The Book, Kundera’s use of elements of magical realism emphasizes the dangerous role of fantasy discourses within politics, showing such discourses to be dependent upon a total acquiescence which marginalizes those who do not conform. Fantasy, as an extension of imagination, is of course inherent in the process of fictional and literary creation: to represent the political fictionally is inevitably to problematize the boundaries between politics and fantasy. Ultimately, therefore, I will suggest that, for both authors, it is not through modes of fantasy per se that they seek to resist and challenge the fears generated by the powerful political discourses

9

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson suggests that a nation-state is, first and foremost, an imagined political community. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 2006.

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which they confront, but rather through the very act of storytelling and fiction writing itself. Obabakoak: a fantasy of linguistic and national politics Bernardo Atxaga’s Obabakoak is a series of interlinked stories about the inhabitants of Obaba, a fictional town in the Basque Country. Unlike some of Atxaga’s more recent fiction which deals with the world of ETA terrorism,10 Obabakoak does not discuss politics directly; it is, above all, a playful exploration of literary theory and intertextuality which touches upon elements of the fantastic and magical realism. Yet in spite of this apparent distance from the political, by focusing upon the importance of literature and writing, Obabakoak is in many ways the text which deals most directly with the Basque political situation as it concerns Atxaga. As one of only around 300 authors writing originally in Euskera, Atxaga has seen the very act of writing itself become politicized. Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, literature written in Euskera was widely considered to be fundamental to the creation of a national imaginary in the Basque Country which would promote and reinvigorate the Basque language and culture.11 Such a cultural and linguistic revival was itself perceived as integral to the concept of a Basque nation-state. As John Sullivan notes in his discussion of Basque separatist group ETA, linguistic unity was considered a powerful political weapon during ETA’s formation in 1959: ... it was argued that, as modern research had shown that forms of thought depended on the language used, Basque socialism must be led by people who spoke Euskera and that there must be a struggle to restore it as the language of the whole Basque country. 12

10

Atxaga’s The Lone Man (published in English translation in 1996), The Lone Woman (published in English translation in 1999) and The Accordionist’s Son (published in English translation in 2008), all explore the experiences of members, or ex-members of ETA. 11 Ur Apalategui, La Naissance de l’écrivain basque. L’Évolution de la problématique littéraire de Bernardo Atxaga, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000, 63-72. 12 John Sullivan, ETA and Basque Nationalism: The Fight for Euskadi, 1890-1986, London: Routledge, 1988, 130.

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In this context, Euskera – and texts written in the language – were positioned not just as a symbol of Basque unity, but also as a central element in the establishment of that unity itself. A text such as Obabakoak, which was originally written in Euskera and which focuses upon the central role language and literature play in the preservation of cultural autonomy, could thus be read as a text which performs rather than articulates its political and national goals. Yet such a reading confronts two problems. Firstly, as a member of the “Literary Autonomy Generation”, Atxaga has explicitly rejected the idea that a literary work can or should conform to any overt political agenda.13 Such an autonomous project is inevitably difficult to achieve in an environment where language and literature are so integrally connected to the political. But, as Ur Apalategui discusses in La Naissance de l’écrivain basque, a growing desire amongst authors of Atxaga’s generation to separate the political and the literary, coupled with the changing political situation in Spain after the death of General Franco in 1975, has led, in the last 30 years, to an increasing liberation of the Basque literary scene from ostensibly political concerns.14 To read Obabakoak as an emblem of Basque linguistic nationalism would, then, be somewhat simplistic. Secondly, such a literary agenda, even were Atxaga to attempt it, is undermined by the very nature of literary production in a minor language which inevitably relies heavily upon translation. As César Domínguez notes in “Historiography and the Geo-Literary Imaginary”, much of the success which Obabakoak garnered, both nationally and internationally, was based not on the original version written in Euskera but upon the author’s self-translation into Castilian, a translation which was the only means by which anyone who did not read Euskera could access the text.15 In this sense, the viability of creating a powerful political agenda around Atxaga’s work seems flawed from the outset: if it remains in Euskera it is only accessible to a small minority and therefore its wider political impact is diminished; if it is translated, it 13

Mari Jose Olaziregi, Waking the Hedgehog: The Literary Universe of Bernardo Atxaga, trans. Amaia Gabantx, Reno, NV: Center for Basque Studies, University of Nevada Press, 2005, 5. 14 Apalategui, La Naissance de l’écrivain basque, 64-65. 15 César Domínguez, “Historiography and the Geo-Literary Imaginary. The Iberian Peninsula: Between Lebensraum and espace vécu”, in A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, eds Fernando Cabo, Anxo Abuín and César Domínguez, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010, 1 and 103.

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enters into a more hegemonic literary language and thereby loses its power as an exemplar of Basque linguistic unity. Originating within this complex literary environment and focusing predominantly upon non-political concerns, Obabakoak cannot be read as a direct political commentary or critique. Yet Obabakoak does offer a powerful insight into the Basque political situation as it relates to the Basque literary culture, an insight which Atxaga develops through his use of the fantastic. In Waking the Hedgehog Mari Jose Olaziregi writes that, for Atxaga, “fantastic literature ... is above all, revolutionary”.16 Olaziregi quotes Atxaga’s own comments on the fantastic in his “Alfabeto francés en honor a J.L. Borges” [French Alphabet in Honour of Jorge Luis Borges]: ... the adjective often applied to fantastic literature is well justified: it is a true literature. I think this is so because it is born largely out of fear, one of the truest, most transcendent feelings that exist. Fear is everywhere, fear generates all sorts of behaviors, fantastic characters are born out of fear.17

In Obabakoak, these fears relate to the desire, both personal and political, to establish cohesive communities, and the terror that can arise when such communities come under a perceived or real threat. Atxaga uses the supernatural not only to draw attention to such fears, but also to highlight how they inform social structures and ideologies, thereby subjecting such structures to a powerful critique. Under the definition I discussed in the introduction, the use of the term “fantastic” might suggest that the supernatural events which Atxaga relates are designed to exist in an imaginary realm and not to trouble such real social structures and ideologies. Yet the reality Atxaga presents in Obabakoak is one where real and fantastical events repeatedly separate and coalesce, where the characters who insist certain events are unbelievable ultimately fall victim to how very real they are, where the inability to accept the magical becomes symptomatic of a dangerously narrow vision of the world. It is by placing the possibility or impossibility of the magical at its heart that Obabakoak challenges reductive internal political agendas while

16 17

Olaziregi, Waking the Hedgehog, 120. Ibid., 120.

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simultaneously drawing upon what is unique, and powerful, within the Basque culture. Although Obabakoak does not comment directly upon the political use of Euskera, Atxaga develops a supernatural storyline which highlights the dangers of treating language in general as a performative tool. In The Fantastic, Todorov comments upon the link between language and the supernatural within a text: The supernatural often appears because we take a figurative sense literally ... the appearance of the fantastic element is preceded by a series of comparisons of figurative or simply idiomatic expressions, quite common in ordinary speech but designating, if taken literally, a supernatural event – the very one which will occur at the end of the story.18

In the final chapter of Obabakoak, “In Search of the Last Word”, we see just such supernatural shift from a figurative to a literal use of language, with terrifying consequences. The narrator, a writer born in Obaba, returns there on a linguistic quest to prove that a Basque old wives’ tale is not metaphorical but, in fact, empirically verifiable. Having uncovered a photograph which reveals a lizard approaching the head of a child who subsequently developed a mental illness, the narrator attempts to prove that the warning: “Never go to sleep on the grass .... If you do, a lizard will come along and climb inside your head .... Through your ear .... To gobble up your brains”19 was not merely “an augury of all that happened to [the child] later on ... purely symbolic”,20 but in fact the rational cause of his madness. The narrator initially uncovers nothing more than the excessive nature of his own imagination. Yet, having spent the night asleep in a hut full of lizards as part of his research, the narrator suddenly loses his own ability to use, or understand, language in any abstract or metaphorical sense. When his uncle, attempting to make him comprehend what has happened, says “before, your head was like a flaming torch ... but that torch is burning lower by the minute” the narrator replies: “I didn’t

18

Todorov, The Fantastic, 77-79. Bernardo Atxaga, Obabakoak, trans. Margaret Jull Costa, London: Vintage, 2007, 155. 20 Ibid., 156. 19

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say anything at the time but I really think my uncle is going mad. My head has always been round, it’s never been anything like a torch.”21 The loss of the narrator’s abstract language could be read as a metaphor for the dangers of failing to conserve Euskera in general; his status as outsider who returns to the insular world of Obaba and, having rejected it once, falls foul of its mystical laws, might seem to assert the importance of maintaining Basque linguistic unity not only symbolically but as a political action. Yet, the view of language which Obabakoak presents is by no means this simplistic. The end of the text sees the narrator abandoning his literary career to remain enclosed in Obaba, living a life which is circumscribed by his inability to comprehend and therefore engage with anything which is not functional or concrete; he states: “I get bored sitting here in the library. Just as well there are some flies here. I mean later on I can go fishing ... and they’ll come in really handy then, these flies I’m catching now.”22 This adoption of a purely utilitarian language is accompanied by a rejection of the world he inhabited outside Obaba, with the multiple literatures, languages, and complexities this world contained. This rejection of the world outside Obaba cannot, I would assert, be read as positive, for the linguistic narrowing of the narrator’s universe is accompanied by a fundamental sense of loss and isolation. Given the way in which a text such as Obabakoak could be employed politically, this linguistic narrowing has important connotations. The loss of the narrator’s ability to use abstract language occurs precisely because of his initial decision to attempt to assign a performative rather than metaphorical role to the lizard story. The suggestion here is that a reduction of language to a purely functional role involves a similar reduction in one’s ability to relate to the world in a complex and nuanced way. If we connect this idea to the political use of Euskera, the implication is that an attempt to establish Euskera as a purely political tool would not only undermine the ability of that language itself to articulate more imaginative goals, but also itself be a fantastical, and dangerously isolationist, pursuit. This is not to assert that Atxaga rejects the importance of writing in Euskera; indeed he has stated that “I undertook two jobs, my own as a writer and that of

21 22

Ibid., 322. Ibid., 322.

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‘defender of Basque culture’; and you’ll find I’m still doing that”.23 But, for Atxaga, defending Basque culture is not the same as making that culture a political tool. Indeed, as his decision to self-translate Obabakoak into Castilian would attest, defending and promoting Basque culture is fundamentally at odds with an attempt to attain linguistic and cultural isolation. For while his decision to write Obabakoak in Euskera highlighted the importance of continuing to create literary works in this marginalized language, his decision to translate the text into Castilian, a much more widely-spoken language than Euskera, refused to maintain this linguistic marginalization. Atxaga’s self-translation enabled Obabakoak to be subsequently translated into over 25 other languages, and it was these translations which brought Atxaga and, through his text, the wider Basque literary culture to the attention of a global audience. Translations from a minor to a major language can create a lopsided dynamic, in which cultural and linguistic specificity is sacrificed to or altered for the more dominant claims of the target language, and translations of Obabakoak are no exception: Atxaga’s self-translation leaves out one story included in the Basque original “for it was deemed too difficult to translate into the Spanish language”;24 Margaret Jull Costa’s English translation begins with a poem conceived by Atxaga specifically for that version to explain the Basque literary and linguistic situation to its UK readership.25 But if, by employing the fantastic within his text, Atxaga suggests that linguistic isolation as a productive way to engage with the question of Basque national identity might be a dangerous and limiting fantasy, his self-translation of Obabakoak into Castilian challenges such a fantasy, demonstrating the importance of opening rather than closing linguistic and literary borders. If the supernatural in Obabakoak reveals the dangers of a political model based upon a fantasy of linguistic unity, it also works to reveal the dangers of a model based upon choker shot unity. In Thought and Change Ernest Gellner claims that “Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not

23

Hasier Etxeberria, Cinco escritores vascos, Irun: Alberdania, 2002, 323. As quoted in Olaziregi, Waking the Hedgehog, 47. 24 Olaziregi, Waking the Hedgehog, 150. 25 Domínguez, “Historiography and the Geo-Literary Imaginary”, 107.

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exist”.26 Gellner’s definition connects fantasy to the nation-state by suggesting that nation-building is not an organic process arising from irrevocable links between certain groups of people but rather a process which establishes such links by, initially at least, inventing them. As Benedict Anderson notes in Imagined Communities, such an imaginative process has many positive and productive effects, but it is also “this fraternity that makes it possible ... for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”.27 In relation to the idea of the Basque nation-state such a comment resonates powerfully: in the name of nation-building, the Basque separatist group ETA has been responsible for the deaths of over 800 people since its creation in 1959.28 In Obabakoak, Atxaga again develops a supernatural storyline which reveals that such an “imagined community” can be dangerously and destructively isolationist. In the chapter “An Exposition of Canon Lizardi’s Letter”, Atxaga narrates, via fragmented letters, the tale of a Basque child who, having been excluded from the local community because he is illegitimate, runs away and is transformed into a beautiful white boar. The reaction of the rest of the community in Obaba to such a magical metamorphosis becomes a lens through which Atxaga reveals the unity of Obaba to be predicated upon an imagined consensus which rejects what it does not understand. For, faced with an event which transgresses the coherence of their world, the people of Obaba unite in their desire to eliminate the anomaly and attempt to hunt down the boar and kill it. In the narrowness of their perspective, the violence of the situation escalates, as the boar turns on those hunting him and attacks them, killing some and maiming others. Given Atxaga’s position as a Basque writer writing after the collapse of General Franco’s regime in Spain which, from the end of the Spanish Civil War until Franco’s death in 1975, systematically repressed the Basque culture and language, it might be expected that the employment of the magical in his work would seek to disrupt a hegemonic Spanish discourse. The rejection of the boar by the community in “An Exposition of Canon Lizardi’s Letter” could then be read as a parable for a narrow-minded rejection of Spain’s regional 26

Ernest Gellner, Thought and Change, London: New Left Books, 1964, 169. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7. 28 Wayne Anderson, The ETA: Spain’s Basque Terrorists, New York: The Rosen Publishing Group, 2003, 4. 27

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– here specifically Basque – literature and culture by the dominant Spanish subsystem. Yet Atxaga’s use of the magical in this story reverses such an expectation: the magical element of the narrative is designed not to challenge those “outside” the Basque community who seek to interpret or appropriate this culture through their own dominant discourses but rather those “inside” it. For the only character who does not react to the boar with fear and violence is Matías, “an old man ... born outside of Obaba”29 who accepts from the start the metamorphosis of the child and seeks to help and understand him. It is Matías, the outsider, who is capable of accepting the supernatural and natural events he experiences as equivalent, as simultaneously magical and real; those born in Obaba are bound by their inability to transcend the limits of their own narrow universe, insisting upon rationalizing or destroying elements which they cannot grasp within their epistemological framework. Atxaga’s decision to contrast the limited vision of those born in Obaba with the ability of Matías, the outsider, to accept the flexibility of the laws of nature puts a twist on theoretical discussions which see magical realism as “the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world”.30 As John D. Erikson notes, magical realism “has often been considered a marginal or outsider discourse”,31 which “frequently if not usually takes the form of a narrative of resistance against dominant or master narratives touting so-called universal truths that reject all other narratives”.32 Yet the narrative of resistance articulated through Atxaga’s use of magical realism is turned against a Basque community which, he suggests, limits itself through an insistence upon its cultural and linguistic marginality. By focusing upon the dangers of this marginality within Obabakoak via the use of magical and supernatural events, Atxaga critiques not an “external” colonization of the Basque culture, but rather an “internal” colonization which, he suggests, can be just as damaging. In this internal colonization, those within the Basque community, rather than those outside it, seek to profit from and exploit the 29

Atxaga, Obabakoak, 37. Homi K. Bhabha, “Introduction: Narrating the Nation”, in Nation and Narration, London: Routledge, 1995, 6-7. 31 John D. Erikson, “Magical Realism and Nomadic Writing in the Maghreb”, in A Companion to Magic Realism, 247. 32 Ibid., 248. 30

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marginality of the Basque culture. Such an exploitation, Atxaga suggests, consolidates a cultural isolationism which is fundamentally detrimental to the Basque Country itself. The final story of Obabakoak focuses upon the dangers of such an internal colonization through an exploration of a dream sequence which, whimsical as it appears, in fact contains a vehement critique of the way the Basque community has been complicit in its own isolation. In this story, another outsider to Obaba, “the uncle from Montevideo”,33 falls asleep and has a dream in which he is transported to a “tiny and cramped”34 island by the seventeenth-century Basque writer Axular. The narrator describes his incredulity upon realizing precisely where he has been transported by his dream companion: “Incredible though it may seem, the geographical feature I was looking at was none other than my own language”.35 Approaching the island is a ship containing groups of people – politicians, journalists, financiers – who represent the various challenges the Basque community faces from within its own borders. Amongst these are the banausians ... much to be feared because ... it suits them perfectly that the island should remain just as it is, tiny and cramped. If the island came to enjoy a stronger position, it would be much harder for them to balance their books.36

The adjective “banausian”, derived from the Greek banausos, etymologically suggests something mechanical or commercial to the point of vulgarity. As such this group represents those who seek to profit from the isolation of the Basque language and culture by turning the fantasy of Basque marginality into a money-making scheme and colonizing the island they inhabit for their own gain. By presenting this critique through a dream sequence Atxaga maintains an element of distance from political questions. Yet this critique is powerful precisely because it comes in the middle of what otherwise appears to be a story concerned with a metafictional account of the writing process itself. It is this metafiction which contributes to a rejection of the very isolationism which Atxaga condemns. In A 33

Atxaga, Obabakoak, 212. Ibid., 261. 35 Ibid., 261. 36 Ibid., 262. 34

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Companion to Magical Realism Wen-Chin Ouyang comments upon the idea of a nation-state: “As an epistemological system, the nationstate is equally ambivalent towards, if not suppressive of, difference.”37 Under this reading an imagined community, such as the Basque one, requires difference to be suppressed in order to sustain itself, for if the people of one nation are not similar to each other, and different from the people of another, then the idea of the nation-state collapses in upon itself. Yet, within the pages of Obabakoak, Atxaga refuses to be complicit in setting out a view of Basque culture which would imprison it within its own boundaries. In its content Obabakoak is a text which opens the doors wide upon a world which teems with life and with personalities who do not correspond to a homogeneous image. And within “the uncle from Montevideo’s” dream, Axular’s project is to call contemporary Basque writers to engage in “plagiarism”38 – the rewriting of stories from other languages into Euskera – as the best method to help resuscitate the language and prevent the dominance of groups such as the banausians. Through Obabakoak, Atxaga himself responds to this call. Drawing upon texts such as A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, he intersperses Obabakoak with parodies and plagiarisms of authors such as Dante, Théophile Gautier and Michel Tournier. By appropriating texts from more hegemonic European discourses, Atxaga enacts a reverse colonization, or perhaps pollination, process, attempting to fertilize the Basque cultural scene so that it can produce its own unique literary blossoms. In her book Configuring Community, Parvati Nair writes that “whilst Atxaga has undoubtedly put Basque literature on the world map, his narrative strategies reveal the former to be a hybrid site of inter-connections”.39 In Obababakoak, these inter-connections build a narrative which rejects literary or linguistic isolationism as the sole, or even best, way to create a sense of community. If the “practice of intertextual interpretation is an attempt to struggle against complicity and exclusion”40 such a hybridity offers its own form of resistance. By 37 Wen-Chin Ouyang, “Introduction: Empire, Nation, Magic”, in A Companion to Magic Realism, 227. 38 Atxaga, Obabakoak, 264. 39 Parvati Nair, Configuring Community: Theories, Narratives, and Practices of Community Identities in Contemporary Spain, London: MHRA, 2004, 62. 40 Michael Worton and Judith Still, Intertextuality: Theories and Practice, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991, 33.

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permeating Obabakoak with a myriad of other texts taken from a variety of different linguistic models, Atxaga challenges discourses which seek to construct a Basque identity by excluding anything, be it language, literature, or culture, which threatens it through difference. As Willis Barnstone wrote succinctly, “In art no man or woman ... is an island”;41 as Atxaga discusses at the end of Obabakoak it is by accepting this fact and engaging with “the whole of the literary past, be it from Arabia, China or Europe”42 that the Basque literary culture can grow and develop. While fantasy as a textual practice thus offers a mirror in which Atxaga can reflect the fantasies of a political agenda based upon an illusion of Basque linguistic and cultural unity, Obabakoak as a fictional space ultimately comes to offer a challenge to this through the very diversity and complexity of perspective which it reveals. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: a dangerous unity; an idyll for all Like Atxaga, Milan Kundera has a challenging relationship with the political environment in which he began writing. Born in the thenCzechoslovakia, Kundera saw his books banned under the KSČ and, in 1975, he moved to France; following the publication of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he lost his Czech citizenship. As an exiled writer from a minor language, Kundera found translation as crucial to the dissemination of his early works as it was to the dissemination of Atxaga’s: indeed The Book was published for the first time in French translation. While Kundera did not self-translate his Czech texts into French, he revised the French translations between 1985 and 1987 and has stated that they now have the same authenticity as the Czech originals. Since 1993 Kundera has written only in French, a choice which, as Michelle Woods notes, has been “regarded by some Czech critics ... as a conscious decision to move from the peripheries of European culture to its centre, and in doing so, seeking fame and recognition”.43 While Atxaga has suffered the political consequences of choosing to write in a minor language, Kundera has thus seen his 41 Willis Barnstone, The Poetics of Translation, London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995, 88. 42 Atxaga, Obabakoak, 324. 43 Michelle Woods, Translating Milan Kundera, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd., 2006, 5.

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decision not to do so subjected to an equal amount of scrutiny. It is somewhat ironic then that the major themes of The Book focus upon the political dangers of “forgetting” a nation’s language and history, for Kundera’s choice to write in a major literary language has been perceived as a betrayal of precisely these elements of Czech culture. Many of Kundera’s novels focus upon Czechoslovakia and the impact of the KSČ upon the lives of ordinary people. In spite of this political focus, Kundera is emphatic that fiction should not and, in fact, cannot be employed as a political tool. Indeed, he has somewhat polemically accused critics who insist upon reading a text by an Eastern European writer according to “some wretched political code” of “murder[ing] it, no less brutally than the work of the Stalinist dogmatists”.44 Kundera then, like Atxaga, emphasizes the importance of maintaining literary autonomy. But this autonomy does not mean that Kundera’s texts are apolitical: in The Book Kundera’s use of magical realism and dream sequences draws attention to the fantasies of political unity through which the KSČ consolidated its power. Indeed, in his theoretical texts, Kundera suggests that the fictional form can offer a powerful and productive alternative to unilateral ideologies through its ability to give a heterogeneous rather than homogeneous perspective upon lived experience. Whether such a project is utopic or not, Kundera reveals a fascinating faith in the power of fictional forms to help us re-evaluate, and re-envision, the ideologies which surround us. In The Book, Kundera employs fantasy to reveal what occurs when political ideology turns to a predominantly abstract use of language, employing fantasy discourses to attain and maintain its power. The narrator, like Kundera himself, has been exiled from the KSČ. In the opening section of The Book he describes the means by which the KSČ came to power in 1948 by “turning their dream into reality: the creation of an idyll of justice for all”.45 This “idyll for all” is itself a fantasy, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, 44

Milan Kundera, “Comedy Is Everywhere”, Index on Censorship, 6/6 (NovemberDecember 1977), 6. 45 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. Michael Henry Heim, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981, 8.

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where the world and all its people are molded from single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is a fire burning in the hearts of men. 46

In The Book this idyll becomes reality for one character, Tamina, as she seeks to escape both the memory of her dead husband and her fear that she is indeed forgetting him. Kundera creates a fantasy island, which can be reached from the shores of the real world, but which closes its borders once Tamina arrives, rejecting any connection with that reality. Tamina’s arrival in this idyll is prefigured by an interesting linguistic shift; the narrator states: “As in a fairy tale, as in a dream (no it is a fairytale, it is a dream), Tamina walks out from behind the counter where she has spent several years of her life.”47 The shift here from simile to metaphor in fact becomes a shift from metaphor to metonymy: Tamina’s move from reality to fantasy is not just comparable to a dream, nor does it resemble a dream; instead in a metonymic transfer, the dream takes the place of a reality which itself disappears so that the only space which remains is a fantasy one. In a world in which the concept of the idyll has triumphed, Kundera suggests, there is no other pole of reality, no other form of experience to refer back to: what should be symbolic and abstract has become lived experience itself. As for Saleem in Midnight’s Children, in such a world reality literally ceases to exist. The island which Tamina reaches is one designed to enable her to forget her past. Populated entirely by children, it is a world of endless play, where repetition of games and routines creates an eternal, unified present. Kundera entitles this chapter “The Angels”, creating a link between the children and the “angels of rationality” he discusses earlier in the text whose “shout rejoiced in how rationally organized, well conceived, beautiful, good, and sensible everything on earth was”.48 These angelic children appear diametrically opposed to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history whose “face is turned toward the past” as he wrestles with a storm which “irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned”.49 Kundera’s angels are the angels of an eternal present for, as the narrator notes, “Children, after all, have no

46

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 164. 48 Ibid., 62. 49 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Jonathan Cape, 1973, 259. 47

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past whatsoever”.50 Facing the future, they do not deny the need for history: the word simply has no meaning for them. Within The Book, this rejection of history is positioned as symptomatic of a political movement which bases itself around the fantasy of the idyll. The oftemployed political soundbite “children are the future” becomes another example of a terrifyingly performative statement; they are the future not, the narrator notes, because “they will one day be grownups. No, the reason is that mankind is moving more and more in the direction of infancy, and childhood is the image of the future”.51 In James Joyce’s Ulysses the character Stephen Dedalus famously stated: “history ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”52 In The Book Kundera suggests that the converse is true: in a world where the idyll has triumphed, mankind will have turned its back entirely upon history, creating a nightmare of an eternal present from which no one will even attempt to awake. The idyll is thus a rejection of history, and an attempt to “leave nothing but an unblemished age of unblemished idyll”.53 As an adult however Tamina is neither able, nor willing to turn her back on her personal history. In his initial description of the idyll the narrator stated: “every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”54 This is precisely what happens to Tamina. As soon as she refuses to engage in the fantasy games of the children she is subjected to violence, abuse and, ultimately, while attempting to escape back to some reality, drowns as the children look on impassively. The idea of “an idyll for all” is of course precisely one which requires total acquiescence. As Žižek noted in relation to anti-Semitism, it is only through a rejection of the other, however that otherness is ascribed, that any fantasy of social and ideological unity can be maintained: What appears as the hindrance to society’s full identity with itself is actually its positive condition: by transposing onto the Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces in the social organism

50

Kundera, The Book, 187. Ibid., 187. 52 James Joyce, Ulysses (1924), Teddington: Echo Library, 2009, 26. 53 Kundera, The Book, 24. 54 Ibid., 8. 51

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disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible.55

Here, as in Atxaga’s exploration of the Basque community in “An Exposition of Canon Lizardi’s Letter”, harmony is contingent upon the exclusion and repression of the foreign. In The Book the fantasy of the idyll which Kundera depicts, a fantasy which, he suggests, has triumphed over reality during the rise of the KSČ, is maintained precisely through what it represses: history, complexity and otherness. As in Obabakoak, The Book draws upon textual fantasy not only to reveal the fantasies inherent within certain political discourses but also to challenge these. In the third section of The Book the narrator reflects upon his own expulsion from the KSČ as he watches people dancing in the streets to celebrate an unknown political anniversary. As he watches the groups singing and dancing in collective harmony, they begin to rise slowly from the ground: ... they were taking two steps in place and one step forward without touching the ground ... they floated on ... and down below ... in the crematorium they were just finishing off one Socialist representative and one surrealist.56

The rising figures floating above the crematorium appear untouched by the laws of gravity but their transgression of these laws does not reflect a desire to open up the hermeneutics of existence. Rather, through a collective decision to interpret the world as they desire, these groups feel empowered to ignore any elements of reality which challenge their own perspective. Kundera’s magical interlude thus offers a different use of fantasy to the one which Wen-chin Ouyang highlights in A Companion to Magical Realism, within which “Resistance to, subversion and reconfiguration of what may be termed ‘modern Western epistemology’, whether in the form of empiricism or empire, are uncovered, discussed and packaged as magical realism”.57 As the political dancers rise above the crematorium, Kundera’s use of a fantasy sequence appears to be less about resisting such an empirical 55 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out, London: Routledge, 1992, 90. 56 Kundera, The Book, 67-68. 57 Wen-Chin Ouyang, “Magical Reality and Beyond: Ideology and Fantasy”, in A Companion to Magic Realism, 16.

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epistemology than about critiquing those who believe themselves able to transcend the concerns of the empirical world entirely. As Wendy B. Faris notes, flight in Kundera reflects a dangerous type of escapism which seeks to “evade questions of mortality and history”.58 But this is not the Platonic escapism of fiction which allows the reader to retreat into a fantasy world; rather this flight of fantasy is a danger inherent within a political model which seeks to avoid those aspects of human existence which do not correspond to the vision of society it wishes to present. In seeking to rise above human mortality and history, symbolized within the smoking crematorium below their feet, the floating figures of The Book demonstrate the extent to which such a political model is detached from the complexity of human existence itself. As Atxaga does in Obabakoak, Kundera seeks to challenge such a model through the fictional form itself. Kundera has written extensively on the potentially revelatory and resistant power he perceives within the novel as an aesthetic form: his theoretical texts The Art of the Novel, The Curtain, Testaments Betrayed and An Encounter all explore the idea that the novel offers a vision of human experience which other discourses, particularly political ones such as those he challenges in The Book, choose to ignore. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera writes: “Outside the novel, we’re in the realm of affirmation: everyone is sure of his statements: the politician, the philosopher .... Once it is part of a novel, reflection changes its essence: a dogmatic thought turns hypothetical.”59 The novel’s ability to alchemize dogma into hypothesis, Kundera suggests, hinges upon its focus on the individuality of existence, “man’s concrete being, his ‘world of life’”,60 and its refusal to transcend this in the name of a unifying ideology. At the heart of the novel genre for Kundera is thus an “ambiguity” which accepts the contradictions and contingencies of human existence rather than attempting to rise above them. As discussed previously, in The Fantastic, Todorov describes hesitation as a crucial element of the fantastic as a literary genre: confronted with events they do not understand within the normal laws of nature, the characters of the text, and indeed the readers themselves, 58

Faris, Ordinary Enchantments, 58. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher, New York: Grove Press, 1988, 78-79. 60 Ibid., 4. 59

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hesitate over how such events should be interpreted.61 For Kundera, however, even without including explicit elements of textual fantasy, the novel always contains within it such a hesitation, for it revels in the fact that its meaning cannot ever be firmly pinned down: other interpretations, other perspectives, are, as every critic knows, always possible. Such a fluidity of meaning, Kundera suggests, is anathema to ideology. As he writes: Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language and relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right.62

In The Fantastic, Todorov suggests that the hesitation in a fantastic text is always resolved: aberrations are either explained or the context of the events is shifted so that the “‘norm’ need not be disturbed”.63 For Kundera however, the idea of such a resolution in relation to the novel reveals an ideological desire to grasp, and constrain, the fluidity of the novel form. His project is thus to create texts which ensure that this hesitation is not resolved. In his eyes, fiction “is” fantasy, in the most positive sense, precisely because it refuses to accept the idea that there can be any single truth to be attained. Whether Kundera achieves this endless ambiguity through his use of the novel form is of course questionable, although given the level of debate generated by both his fictional and theoretical texts, his writing could certainly be considered to resist cohesive interpretation. The Book itself is notoriously hard to categorize: its multiplicity of storylines, characters and perspectives, its interweaving of politics and philosophy, the public and the private, the fantastical and the realistic, mean that any attempt to provide a synopsis or assign it to a specific literary genre founders from the start. Indeed, even Kundera’s use of fantasy has aroused debate: while Faris defines Kundera’s text as magical realist, John McCormick believes that Kundera has attempted to write like Garcia Márquez but in the process only produced 61

Todorov, The Fantastic, 32. Kundera, The Art, 7. 63 Todorov, The Fantastic, 41. 62

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something which is “neither magical nor realistic”.64 The question of whether Kundera’s use of fantasy in The Book can be defined as an explicit form of magical realism is one beyond the scope of this article. However, I would argue that whether the rising figures in The Book are examples of magical realism or not, Kundera’s use of fantasy here replicates one element of magical realism without necessarily encompassing all the myriad elements of this textual practice. As Stephen M. Hart notes, magic realism reveals the lacunae in our understanding of any culture; it exists in “the gap between the belief systems of two very different groups of people”.65 It is these gaps between systems which Kundera draws attention to through his use of fantasy. Yet the belief systems which do not coalesce in Kundera’s text are not those of two different political systems, but rather those of two very different ways of perceiving and articulating the external world: an affirmative and an ambiguous mode mirrored within the division between politics and fiction. Conclusion The potential for modes of fantasy to challenge dominant political discourses has garnered much debate. As Stephen M. Hart notes in A Companion to Magical Realism: One of the most contentious areas of fantasy surrounding the analysis of magical-realism is the intrinsic depth attached to the use of fantasy .... Is fantasy ... simply a case of escapism or does it voice a concrete political critique? Does the fantasy in a magical-realist novel indicate the hallucinations of an artist in the process of retreating from the world around him, or does it embody the desire for a more just political world?66

Here, the fundamental question surrounding textual fantasy seems itself mired in Platonic oppositions: is fantasy “at third remove from the throne of truth”67 or can it offer a valid form through which to engage with political questions? Such an either/or mode of 64

John McCormick, Another Music: Polemics and Pleasures, Somerset, NJ: Transaction, 2008, 85. 65 Hart, “Magical Realism”, 3. 66 Stephen M. Hart, “Introduction: History, Nightmare, Fantasy”, in A Companion to Magic Realism, 101. 67 Plato, The Republic, 425.

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questioning continues to position fantasy as fundamentally distinct from politics: the two possibilities which it can offer, escapism or critique, depend to a certain extent upon the idea that fantasy is different enough from the discourse it seeks to escape or critique to be able to achieve these aims. Yet for both Kundera and Atxaga, such an either/or formulation seems somewhat limited, for while their use of fantasy offers a form of escapism from certain dominant political discourses it does so without negating the importance of questioning those discourses themselves. Such a dual approach to the use of fantasy is not contradictory, for fantasy is a concept which itself hinges upon a duality and an uncertainty in relation to the laws and structures which govern our world. As Wen-Chin Ouyang writes: “The politics of fantasy ... are driven by a desire at one level to grapple with reality and the epistemological systems in place for knowing it, and at another level to transcend here and now and imagine an alternative world.”68 Both Obabakoak and The Book reflect such a double desire: while using magical realism and the supernatural to draw attention to the fear-inducing fantasies inherent within certain political discourses, both texts also stake claims for the power of fiction itself to imagine an alternative world which can challenge dominant ideologies. Such a project could itself be read as a fantasy, one which ascribes to fiction a power which could never be imposed in reality. Yet, given the focus of both Obabakoak and The Book, such a fantasy is, at the very least, a productive one. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera described the purpose of the novel as “an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become”.69 If, as both Kundera and Atxaga suggest, a key element of this trap is its basis in dangerous fantasies, whether of national, linguistic or ideological unity, then perhaps the best, or indeed, only way to investigate it is through a form which itself is based upon fantasy: fiction. In Psychoanalysis and Feminism Juliet Mitchell writes that “the only thing you can do if you are trapped in a reflection is to invert the image”.70 By inverting the image that fantasy is solely the preserve of fiction through the use of textual fantasy, both 68

Ouyang, “Magical Reality”, 19. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, 221. 70 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (1974), New York: Basic Books, 2000, 278. 69

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Atxaga and Kundera create a fictional space in which the fantasies of the political are thrown into relief. Such a space does not perhaps constitute an alternative world, but it does offer a fictional environment in which ambiguity is not resolved, in which different voices and ideas come together but do not subsume each other, in which difference is not eradicated but is allowed to remain in play, in which fantasies and fears combine and coalesce in a challenging and productive textual form.

MEMORY AND FANTASY IN ANTOINE VOLODINE’S MINOR ANGELS ANA FILIPA PRATA The fictional world of “post-exoticism” created by Antoine Volodine commonly shows ravaged worlds or characters struggling to survive, following a catastrophe. Minor Angels, published in 1999, is an important example of this project: it is a novel consisting of forty-nine “narracts” or testimonies of survivors of a major and unpredicted disaster; imprisoned men, immortal witches or hybrid creatures emerge from these peculiar narratives challenging temporal and spatial boundaries. In this essay, I will be looking at Minor Angels from the perspective of memory formation within a “post-exotic” realm that focuses on revolutionary failures, post-crisis situations, and dystopic scenarios narrated by several personages, fashioning a complex and multiple universe, in which fantasy can hardly be distinguished from reality. This article aims to discuss how in this novel recollection and repetition are discursive reactions foreseeing a stabilization of major historical traumas and fears of the last century, depicting at the same time the abject experienced in a world where meaning has collapsed.

Strangeness is the form taken by beauty when beauty has no hope.1 How can I be without border?2

Antoine Volodine published his first novel in 1985 at Delanöel, in the series “Présence du futur”, winning the French Science-Fiction Prize in 1987 with Rituel du mépris [A Disdain Ritual]. Even if he has been associated with fantastic or science-fiction imaginaries, he claims no literary affiliation – except to an international, combative and responsive writing – occupying a peculiar place in contemporary French literature partially due to the presence in his books of a complex and inventive universe aiming to blur our logical 1

Antoine Volodine, Minor Angels, trans. and pref. Jordan Stump, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, 70. 2 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, 4.

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understanding of reality. Antoine Volodine’s work can hardly be framed within a literary programme or in a well-referenced literary genre. The author of Minor Angels (Des Anges mineurs, 1999) actually emphasizes this ambiguous position his literary production occupies, and he takes advantage of this strangeness to cultivate his post-exotic imaginary, which intends to present a “foreign literature written in French”.3 Post-exoticism is theorized and defined in his own fiction and summarizes an auto-reflexive fantastic world where humans are no longer protagonists. Instead, as a sort of Untermensch,4 they are characters suffering the damages of a ravaged civilization wounded by atomic disasters and successive failures of political and social systems. In Le Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze,5 Antoine Volodine, which is also a pseudonym, argues that he and other invented writers (he created several heteronyms such as Lutz Bassman, Manuela Draeger or Elli Kronauer), decided to call postexoticism the literary constructions related to revolutionary shamanism and oral tradition developed in a time paper and books were not allowed by the government. As a fictional world invented by the author himself, post-exoticism structures an inward universe, a secret hider, but also a language displaying an offensive feature opposed to capitalism and its injuries, acting as a sort of “terrorist” literature. The designation of post-exoticism as “internal literature”6 outlines the foreignness or strangeness we testify when reading some of Volodine’s volumes and specifically Minor Angels, in which the presented universe can only be understood inside its own narrative structures and without clear references to external facts, time or space, but still evoking them. This ambiguity in relation to the referentiality of the world enlightens what Volodine may understand by “foreign literature in French” when theorizing about post-exoticism: it is not a literary movement or style, but as his English translator states, “it is 3

Antoine Volodine, “Écrire en français une littérature étrangère”, Chaoïd, 6 (Autumn/Winter 2002), 53. Online at: http://www.chaoid.com/pdf/chaoid_6.zip (accessed 10 February 2012). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 4 Untermensh is a German word for “sub-man” or “under man”. The Nazi regime used this term referring to “inferior people”, such as Jews, Gypsies and Eastern peoples. 5 Antoine Volodine, Le Post-exotisme en dix leçons, leçon onze, Paris: Gallimard, 1998. 6 Charif Majdalani, “Post-Exoticism, or Internal Literatures”, SubStance, 32/2 (2003), 65.

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rather a sort of insistence on everything that is outside”.7 That amounts to saying that if it can be conceived as an internal or inward literature, post-exoticism is also a convention based on “an exteriority that is the mode of being both of his characters ... lying outside the traditional literary filiations”.8It is precisely this simultaneously internal and external imaginary issue I will consider in this article, first discussing the testimonial nature of the textual structure of the “narract” (1) to subsequently examining it in relation to the role of fantasy in the construction of memory (2). Moreover, this article aims to demonstrate how, in Minor Angels, both familiarity and eccentricity unfold a discursive conflict and textual uncertainty portraying the horror of the experience of the abject, once fictional, spatial and temporal boundaries are blurred (3). 1 Volodine does not claim a literary affiliation. Although the novel Minor Angels, where frames between reality and fiction are not clear and the polyphony of voices and discourses are intended to haze our interpretation, can be considered within a particular historical and epistemological context: the domain of post-catastrophe narratives and testimonies that changed our way of considering history and literature in the twentieth century. Within its own specificity, Minor Angels promotes a debate on the limits of what can be narrated and how. Furthermore, it discusses what can be perceived as “real” or verisimilar, after experiencing tremendous human catastrophes. By portraying visions of the camps, nuclear disasters, the rise and fall of political and social systems, capitalism, communism and surveillance methods, this book can be conceived as a questioning of the possibility of living after such great disasters, but also of the importance of keeping memory alive in fragmented episodes displaying disrupted characters, incorporating oblivion and stirring reality and fiction in accounts permeated by oral tradition. Featuring forty-nine “narracts”, that is small narratives entitled with the name of a character that often do not have a clear connection to the story, Minor Angels is composed of “100 percent post-exotic”9 texts. 7

Jordan Stump, “Preface”, in Minor Angels, by Antoine Volodine, trans. Jordan Stump, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2004, x. 8 Ibid., x. 9 Ibid., vi.

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As Volodine argues, narracts “are novelistic snapshots capturing a situation, a set of emotions, a conflict forever oscillating between memory and reality, between recollection and imagination”.10 This undefined narrative form of the narract (as shaggas, murmuracts in other Volodine’s books) emphasizes, however, the testimonial nature of the discourse. As snapshots imbued by emotion and history, and performed by an individual recalling the past in relation to his present, narracts seem to be influenced by the testimony genre. Considered in relation to the universe described in Minor Angels, they feature a sort of memoir, encapsulating some of the most representative events of the last century, personified in several voices, which are simultaneously narrating the past and acting in the present. The performative duality structuring these fragments, relating them to both discourse and action, is mainly unfolded in the trial scene running through the novel in which Will Scheidmann, to whom we are introduced only at the seventh narract, is under an endless audition headed by his own female creators, at “one of the rare regions of the globe where exile still had some meaning”.11 Scheidmann, the herald of these narracts, is tied to a post while waiting for his sentence execution after being charged with the crime of the reinstatement of the capitalist system, an action he assumes and justifies, but not without regret: “It is a terrible thing to say, but for years a great many people had been longing just for that .... there was nothing left. We had to re-establish something.”12 Seligmann-Silva in O Local da diferença13 points out the three characteristics defining testimonial discourses: the trial undertaking, together with literalization and fragmentation. These features can be helpful to understand the formal configuration and narrative organization of Minor Angels, in which the trial symbolizes the reunion of a community trying to understand the meaning of past events in order to reinstate a moral state through the gathering of several discursive fragments. In this novel, the prosecution leads a structuring function: here the assembly is judging the acts of Will Scheidmann, but the trial also constitutes a performed reminder of other moments of union, other fraternal meetings, as for instance the 10

Ibid., vi. Volodine, Minor Angels, 15. 12 Ibid., 16-17. 13 Márcio Seligmann-Silva, O Local da diferença, São Paulo: Editora 34, 2005. 11

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one when the group of old women, now “lost in the hallucinations of their smoking pipes”, gave birth to Will Scheidmann from shamanic and enigmatic procedures, “under strict surveillance in their experimental home”.14 In the past, Will Scheidmann was fashioned and designated to be a redeemer: he should have been responsible for the re-instauration of an egalitarian society, since humanity had entered a crepuscular stage after a period of great hope, when everything predicted a bright future for mankind. He should have therefore fulfilled the frustrated dreams of brotherhood and collective happiness these women kept alive in their spirits. Within the logics of this unsuccessful conception, the trial scene assumes the role of a historical justification: the judgment of the failed redeemer will be the redemption of the collective. Described as a mutant or a ragman, Scheidmann is attributed the role of the saviour and the martyr, in the Greek sense of martyros, in whose skin history is carved to remember the remaining debris of a dying society trying to reconstruct itself. As penalty, he is nominated the official witness of this vanishing human or almost post-human existence, so he will be forced “to archive their childhood dreams, now growing sparse through amnesia”.15 Will Scheidmann is the one who survives to tell the story, but he is also the one who suffers the disaster in his own body and pays for a collectivity: “Who will tell us who we are when the day comes that we can no longer say, when no one is left who remembers? ... Who will reckon up our existence in our absence ...?”16 To eternally recollect and recall events from the past and never forget all fears, hopes and catastrophes is conceived as the supreme punishment for Will Scheidmann. But at the same time, it is a penalty pursuing a catharsis that the martyr, as a tragic hero, will offer to the audience. Minor Angels is consequently structured as a collection of Scheidmann’s narracts, one for each day of captivity. He will keep telling his incomplete and “odd non-conclusions”17 stories as he still survives, as Scheherazade. Nevertheless, contrary to the narrator of One Thousand and One Nights, he does not act in order to subsist, he performs as he is still alive, agonizing and enduring the passage of

14

Volodine, Minor Angels, 13. Ibid., 67-68. 16 Ibid., 55. 17 Ibid., 69. 15

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time while this ambiguous sub-human world does not seem to reach a definitive end. Literalization and fragmentation are also qualities that can be identified in the narract form dealing with the realm of echoes and suggestions. Since narracts do not result from an intellectual reconstruction, they never drive us either to a clear interpretation or to non-arguable intertextual issues. In these odd narratives, nothing is as it was expected to be, and language seems to have lost its referentiality. In Minor Angels, discursive haziness is thus present in several ways. There is a connection to reality, however it is successively corrupted while grasping the limits of what can be conceived as credible: not only concerning remote historical events, myths or narrative voices, but also in relation to topography choices. Several locations’ names can be related to real places, others occur just as strange sounds evoking oriental or Russian territories, “in the days when words printed on maps still had meaning”.18 The narracts Will Scheidmann tells, the ones related to him or to the last survivals of human species, expose a post-catastrophe era, describing a wasteland that is not completely dead yet, where humans are incapable of reproduction, animals and people live together and where cannibalism arises; there is no leadership, nor organizations of any kind. Cities are devastated, covered by ashes and ravaged by tempests. At the same time, these narracts are the memory, the document of major traumatic episodes of last-century history that lead to this postapocalyptical world. Events such as the fall of communist system, Holocaust or even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are reminded in the portrayal of the old women. They recap communists and terrorists, not only because of their political ideals and execution methods, but also for their vaguely resembling Russian or Israeli names, as for instance those of Varvalia Lodenko or Yaliane Heifet. Also their discourses suggest genetic manipulation and clinical birth assistance, alluding to great fears of recent times, such as cloning or eugenics procedures. Historical echoes and resonances cross all the forty-nine narracts Will Scheidmann will recite testifying the memories of what is still remaining from human civilization, acting in the space left from what we can identify as history and simultaneously as fiction.

18

Ibid., 106.

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As a fragment, the narract operates in an in-between field where historical time is no longer perceived as a linear evolution, pointing out to the discussion on the end of history and on the end of literature advocated after the Second World War and especially after Shoah testimonies. Minor Angels participates therefore in the debate on the (im)possibility to write and to recall the past when it was so terribly atrocious that no one could even consider it as real: these post-exotic narracts are “post”-catastrophic, “post”-apocalyptical or “post”-human discourses, but, as we intend to demonstrate, they do not portray a release from the trauma experienced. Instead, they present the trauma itself through repetitions and reinstatements highlighting its immanence and, as the “post” prefix suggests, the hopelessness of overcoming such events: “To live in a post-catastrophe time means to dwell in all those catastrophes.”19 A significant example of this difficulty in expressing traumatic occurrences from the past can be clearly recognized in the following narract performed by Will Scheidmann, when Varvalia Lodenko reproduces anaphorically the memory of Artiom Vessioly, in the name of Marina Koubalghaï, as if she was a living grave, Here lies Nikolai Kochkurov, alias Artem Vessioly, here lie the brutes who beat him and the brutes who cracked his skull, here lies the glass of tea that no one ever finished ... each time she said “here lies”, Marina Koubalghaï touched her forehead, raising her hand and pointing to the precise area of her skull from which memory flowed. 20

Other than mentioning a persecution and homicide episode, this narract illustrates the inner structure of the book as a succession of fragmented and literal memories engraved in the rag body of Will Scheidmann, losing small pieces of his skin each time he hums a tale. This textual reiteration, which can be recognized when dealing with terror and unpredicted events, stresses a primal way of remembrance. In Minor Angels, recollection is often presented as repetition and, simultaneously under the lacanian forms of the automaton and the tuché,21 it points out a desire to stabilize the traumas experienced but, 19

Seligmann-Silva, O Local, 63. Volodine, Minor Angels, 26. 21 “[T]he tuché, which we have borrowed, as I told you last time, from Aristotle, who uses it in his search for cause. We have translated it as the encounter with the real. The real is beyond the automaton, the return, the coming-back, the insistence of the 20

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at the same time, an impossibility of overcoming them, since in its encounter with the present, repetition always produces an awakening of its original manifestation and a reinstated sufferance. Working rather at the level of “traumatic neurosis” and “beyond the principle of pleasure”,22 this reiteration by Varvalia Lodenko, outlining literalization operating in the narrative process, unveils this important dual issue structuring the process of memory formation in this book, portraying at the same time the immanence of disasters still haunting this post-exotic world and the irresolvable conflict between past and present and between reality and fiction. Besides, if in Minor Angels to remember is depicted as collective action related to a primitive instinct of survival of mankind, it is also conceived as a punishment involving loss and pain which is metaphorically endured in the ached body of the protagonist. Will Scheidmann was designed to accomplish the revolutionary hopes of his immortal grandmothers, but since his procedures turned out to be the wrong ones, he was condemned to satisfy the emptiness of their memory. He is forced to not forget and he is asked to tell narracts each day, under the menace of guns until the point in which he is “not shootable anymore”.23 2 The forty-nine narracts of this book assume therefore the structure of an anthology of fragments enacting the preservation of memory of this wasteland, while the survival of the mutant hangman Will Scheidmann saves the chaotic world from its final end. In this postapocalyptical scenario, the narrator does not only survive the catastrophe in order to be able to tell it, but he also testifies the disaster itself by returning to it each time he proclaims a different narract, amplifying the tragedy in time and space. Will Scheidmann embodies memory but, at the same time, mortality that paradoxically brings him closer to humanity. In opposition to the old women depicted as immortal and amnesiac, he executes a historical and transgressive action while he is still alive. For this reason, he can be signs, by which we see ourselves governed by the pleasure principle. The real is that which always lies behind the automaton ....” Jacques Lacan, “Tuché and Automaton”, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Book XI), New York: Norton & Company, 1998, 53-54. 22 Sigmund Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle”, in The Penguin Freud Reader, ed. Adam Phillips, London and New York: Penguin Classics, 2006, 303-434. 23 Volodine, Minor Angels, 111.

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compared to the figure of the árkhonte who is responsible for preserving the memories of his time and for putting them together safely in a sort of archive. He is thus a tutelary and powerful character, not only because he assumes a redemptory role for the old women, but also because his absence would suggest the implosion of the world he lives for. If he dies, if he stops telling his narracts, mankind will definitely vanish. While Scheidmann subsists, a remaining idea of civilization will last, as distorted as it might be. In this novel, the act of testimony is then conceived as a performance: Will Scheidmann is fashioned as a speaking body, repeating and reinterpreting acknowledged gestures and narratives, while he also represents a collectivity of people. He is dependent on the audience not only to validate and legitimate his discourses, but also to accomplish his documental mission. His narracts constitute a statement aspiring to the conservation of a collective memory and identity, nonetheless pointing out to its transgressive nature. Jacques Derrida claims that the Greek word prior to the term “archive” accumulates two different meanings both important to the discussion of this mechanism working in the field of collective and cultural memory. The word arkhè means simultaneously “beginning”, “start” and “command”. “Beginning” stands for historical nature, whereas “command” underlines the idea of power and law that guides its organization. An archive, in its classical version, is the monument of a certain tradition. Will Scheidmann and his fragmented narracts seem to represent exactly the opposite; they work as documents or testimonies of a fading era and they are structured meanwhile they are recited and as time goes by. Yet, the archive is a source of conflicts, since it works always and a priori against itself,24 that is, the archive also portrays its opposite and implicates a constant desire for renewal, reinstatement and forgetfulness, which Derrida designated as le mal d’archive. Testimonies and recollections are therefore complex negotiations of memory and oblivion, also incorporating fantasies, especially when dealing with traumatic or shocking realities, since they envisage a “fulfillment of a wish, a correction of unsatisfying reality”, as Freud mentioned in Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming.25 24

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, 12. 25 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”, in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay, New York: Vintage, 1995, 439.

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Will Scheidmann thus plays a crucial role in this process since he is responsible for keeping the memories alive while preserving and soothing the old women’s conscience and traumas. He did not reestablish the egalitarian society as he was meant to do, but he can at least restore their memory, which is understood by the immortal women as a key to the survival of their ideals: It had been established that the strange narracts flowing from Scheidmann’s mouth plugged the leaks in their memory: even if, rather than concrete events, they summoned up dreams or nightmares the old women once had, this experience of their singing yesterdays helped to stabilize their dying visions. 26

Minor Angels is the sum of individual stories and memories whose exactness and legitimacy do not need to be put under the scrutiny of historical discourses. The events from the past are brought into the present through the impact of its damages on humanity conceived as a whole resulting from the totality of anonymous parts. This book can therefore assume the role of an alternative account of the twentieth century in which fantasy, oblivion and imagination, as variations of the same pattern of repetition, challenge our understanding of language limitations to recall past events and the conception of reality itself as stable territories. A further interesting issue within this matter is that these forty-nine episodes incorporate meta-reflexive considerations on this crisscrossing poetical dimension of the narracts: What matters is not whether the things I’m telling you are realistic or not, skillfully recounted or not, surrealistic or not within the postexotic tradition .... I propose no ideology of poetic distortion or of magical or metaphorical transmutation of the world. I speak the language of today and no other .... Everything happened exactly as I describe it, everything has already taken place just like this at some moment of your life or mine, or will take place later, in reality or in our dreams.27

The logic of Minor Angels relies on its absence: narracts must be considered within the realm of uncertainty between truth and invention, between fantasy and reality. This experience of strangeness 26 27

Volodine, Minor Angels, 115. Ibid., 138-39.

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underlies beneath the process described by Tzvetan Todorov as “hesitation”, drawn up from the Freudian Unheimlich, restraining the reader to relate a certain event to reality or even to dreams, to a concrete space or to a specific period of time, for instance. It is actually this same indecision that distinguishes narracts from sciencefiction or fantastic literature: the reader should never choose either one or the other universe, he should stand irresolute.28 Once he accepts without questioning the information displayed by the narrator, hesitation disappears. As we mentioned before, Minor Angels is a simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal narrative, whose logic relies on a strong internal structure; on the one hand, dealing with haziness and eccentricity of meaning and, on the other, distorting time, space, reality and fiction notions. Therefore, it occupies the ambiguous space of negotiation in between these different territories. The memories and testimonies Will Scheidmann collects mirror the image of their own language: they reflect a post-babelic stage and they are constantly misleading: “a new era was dawning, and not only the human species but even the meaning of language was dying away.”29 In Minor Angels, there is a permanent confusion of episodes and voices, which in this case are related to the realm of subjectivity and memory, the “undisciplined activity that troubles the clear waters of historiography”.30 These narracts operate at the level of “communicative memory”31 where the echoes of different testimonies replicate each other in order to reach a collective understanding of this dying dimension of the human. The twentieth-fifth narract is essentially representative of this dialogue, not only because it stresses the

28

“The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighboring genre, the uncanny or the marvelous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event. The concept of the fantastic is therefore to be defined in relation to those of the real and the imaginary ....” Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975, 25. 29 Volodine, Minor Angels, 129. 30 Aleida Assmann, “History, Memory, and the Genre of Testimony”, Poetics Today, 27/2 (2006), 263. 31 Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity”, New German Critique, 65 (Spring/Summer 1995), 126.

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interdependence between “I” and “We”, but also between past and present, fantasy and reality: While we’re recalling events of the distant past, we may as well regress all the way back to the primal time, whose images always come to me when I go rummaging in some corner of my memory. Alas the images are very clear, as clear as if it were yesterday. It was amid fear and chaos that I came into this world, it was surrounded by a circle of howling old women that I came to be, and when I speak of coming into the world or coming to be I do not use the words lightly, this is my own birth and no one’s else, and from that day forward, a date that myself mark with a black stone, everything began to go wrong for me ....32

At this time we know that the name identifying the narract (in this case, Wulf Ogoïne) has nothing to do with its narrator and we take it for one of Will Scheidmann’s considerations, a very significant one regarding his own traumatic birth. This narract underlines the coexistence of a collective entity validating an individual account, as the community of old women attested the birth of their redemptory son. This is an example of what in this book is a constant misunderstanding regarding narrative voices: “I”, “you” and “we” are frequently mixed in order to contribute to the same purpose, which is to blur the reader’s logical interpretations and expectations. At the same time, it outlines the idea that there is no longer a sense of individuality or collectivity, since these two categories are dependent on one another. In this altercation of different voices, Volodine gives us an interpretation of the great events of the last century through the eyes of its survivors, war dissidents, terrorists, but he does not present them as historical facts. Minor Angels is structured over resonances and blurred images of the past that we can recognize but that we cannot identify within a precise time or space. In this process, the confusion between individuals and collectivity, as well the incongruence in relation to places and topographical references, plays a decisive role. Memory cannot be made exclusively from an individual perspective because it asks for a sort of common legitimating by an otherness that additionally contributes to its formation. 32

Volodine, “Écrire en français”, 78.

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Maurice Halbwachs argued that our memories, even personal souvenirs, are always collective, because others must constantly validate them. The veracity of an event comes out from the confrontation and negotiation between several testimonies. An event is legitimated when individuals reach an agreement, despite the divergences they may claim. Therefore, social groups define what is “memorable” and the ways things will be remembered.33 Following Halbwachs’ considerations, Jan Assmann proposed three levels for structuring memory. The first level is the one related to individual memories and the third level is defined by collective memory. To reach this stage, information must cross the second level – the one of communicative memory –, which is a mechanism that provides the intersection between individual and collective realms.34 To Jan Assmann, communicative memory refers to a reduced temporal horizon and it deals with everyday discourses; it is different from cultural memory for it does not yet constitute a normative repertoire of past events. Communicative memory is then a negotiation. This oral tradition realm is the place Will Scheidmann’s narracts occupy: the stage of discussion that integrates different and fuzzy elements, or as Jean-Louis Hipollyte put it: “the post-exotic chronotope [as] a limbo from which there is no physical escape.”35As a “supranarrator”, he must be able to reproduce different voices while preserving his own propriety, that is why we recurrently read sentences like: “I say I but I mean we” or “I say you, I use the second person singular to avoid continually saying Bella Mardirossian, and so it won’t seem that I only talk about myself and my own experiences”.36 The same can be understood if we consider the names of different characters: from 33

“Our memories remain collective, however, and are recalled to us through others even though only we were participants in the events or saw the things concerned. In reality, we are never alone.” Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. F.J. Ditter, Jr. and V.Y. Ditter, New York: Harper & Row, 1980, 23. 34 “For us the concept of ‘communicative memory’ includes those varieties of collective memory that are based exclusively on everyday communications. These varieties, which M. Halbwachs gathered and analyzed under the concept of collective memory, constitute the field of oral history. Everyday communication is characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic instability, and disorganization. Typically, it takes place between partners who can change roles.” Assmann, “Collective Memory”, 126. 35 Jean-Louis Hippolyte, “Antoine Volodine: Inside Wars”, in Fuzzy Fiction, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006, 184. 36 Volodine, Minor Angels, 130.

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Sophie Gironde to Naïsso Baldakchan, they represent the diversity of human survivals, but they expose simultaneously the chaos in which the world has been delivered. In his book, Volodine portrays a world where there is no longer a place for real human feelings (to cry, to give birth) or to exhibit origins or nationalities. Consequently, if he highlights, on the one hand, the absence of individual freedom, on the other, he superposes an idea of a collective destiny. Within this fragmented action of telling the past as a remembrance, the kaleidoscopic voice and the ragged body of Will Scheidmann echo other characters such as the baudelairian rag-picker or the benjaminian collector. He, as these modern protagonists, produces new discourses – his narracts – from historical, linguistic, cultural and social debris. Additionally, he organizes this heteroclite universe in order to give it some meaning by the re-interpretation of elements from the past and the remaining present in a new context. Anne Roche, in an article on Volodine’s work, argues that the poetics of ruins guide the author’s narrative choices and not exclusively in Minor Angels. They constitute a wider concern, she argues, since Volodine retrieves fictional elements and several characters’ names from one book to another.37 Nevertheless, Will Scheidmann’s narracts somehow organize the “chaos and fear” in which he was born: for instance, the same characters’ names appear in several of these stories, and they also exchange the role they play. In this blurred universe the last ruins of humanity inspire Scheidmann’s narracts and he reports on what remains by giving an order to them, even though this organization is specific to an inner reality, incomprehensible outside the structure of the described world. Anne Roche also states that one of the difficulties of writing the truth in Volodine’s works has to do with this shredded and holey memory depicted. Past is not a clear setting, but instead refers to a territory haunted by debris of events and by fears and fantasies, which consequently emphasize the temporal disturbances in the volodinian universe.38 This is actually a very important aspect of this book since these stories are often presented as dreams: Will Scheidmann’s dreams or another character’s dreams, which lead to a confusing understanding about who is dreaming or who is telling what. 37

Anne Roche and Dominique Viart, Antoine Volodine: fictions du politique, Paris: Minard, 2006, 10. 38 Roche, Antoine Volodine, 14.

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Therefore it problematizes the limits of documents and memories produced by Will Scheidmann, not only because of the presence of different narrative voices, as we have been arguing, but also because of the reliability of the witnesses. Individuals who testify are often terrorists, dissidents, war prisoners, old or the sick, those who are excluded from the main discursive system; for instance, the old women or the character Khiril Gompo, who is responsible for observation missions to evaluate the state of the world and to collect information about people still inhabiting earth. Therefore, displaying such individuals, as the main narrator himself – Will Scheidmann –, Volodine questions the value of testimonies. As Freud argued, fantasy can be an artifice to fulfil a wish or to stabilize an unsatisfying reality; it is thus the basis of creative writing. One of the ways in which humans give sense to life is by telling stories or playing games especially in order to expiate bad experiences and keep surviving using and re-fashioning “ready-made and familiar material”.39 That is precisely what happens with Will Scheidmann and with the characters and episodes he dreams of and reproduces orally, but not without the consequences of their reinstatement within repetition. Following a cataclysm that is slightly driving human existence on earth to an end, topography, onomastic and narrative conventions are shattered, which means the collapse of an ontological system. How to write after the end of the world? How to testify its last ruins? If Volodine takes the great historical moments of the twentieth century as a background to his fiction, such as the failure of communist society, the damages of capitalism, world wars, nuclear disasters and the haunting presence of camps and genocide, he fashions an alternative discourse, where references to our reality coexist with strange names, places and fuzzy narrative organizations. Past and present collide and the end of the world is conceived as a babelic network of traces from primitive times, from recent past and futuristic visions. Will Scheidmann’s narracts operate in this territory of collective unconsciousness where memories are structured as they are remembered not only as a compensatory answer for recent traumas, but mostly as a universe anchored in an everlasting catastrophe. The post-exotic landscape is thus plunged in a dimension of ambiguity, stressing an experience of deterritorialization. 39

Freud, “Creative Writers”, 442.

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3 The represented world may be dysphoric, but formally Minor Angels is a complex novel written over a mirror scheme where the last narract in the book matches the first one and the penultimate resounds the second and so forth. Developing this misleading but complex organization of different testimonies, Volodine also explores authorial limits. The different and plural narrative voices crossing the book are not apparently enough to structure this complex imaginary. The narracts two, eight and forty-seven introduce the character of Fred Zenfl, a prose writer who had survived the camps. His texts were hardly classified within the existent literary styles, the narrator states; they constitute a sort of assemblage of considerations and hallucinations related to the extinction of humankind. Recurrently, it is said, he wrote bad books, namely “The 21st of October”, “a separate text that is incontestably the worst of all but which for my part I particularly enjoy, since it says we were companions in our travels and in disaster”.40 Also in narract forty-three, the narrator refers to the supposed author of a novel called “Minor Angels”: As on every sixteenth of October for what it will soon be one thousand one hundred and eleven years, I dreamt last night that I was named Will Scheidmann, even though my name is Clementi, Maria Clementi .... After a minute my dream stated up again, and once again I’d been cast as Will Scheidmann. I use the passive voice with some regret, of course, not knowing the name of my dream’s director.41

Nearly reaching the end of the book, the reader faces again a misunderstanding of narrative voices evocating now the topos of teatro mundi. In this narract Maria Clementi seems to be introduced as the author of “Minor Angels”, “a strange romance or simply a bundle of forty-nine strange narracts”, although she is not sure about her own existence: “I no longer knew if I was Will Scheidmann or Maria Clementi, I said I purely at random, I didn’t know who was speaking inside me or what minds had conceived me or were observing me.”42 Are Will Scheidmann, Maria Clementi or even Fred Zenfl dependent on each other’s intentions, or are they all marionettes of a much wider 40

Volodine, Minor Angels, 162. Ibid., 148. 42 Ibid., 150. 41

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entity – maybe some kind of god – responsible for the organization of this book, of this world? The narracts of Minor Angels constitute a well-designed fantasy of a multiple but concentric universe directed by an unknown master who simultaneously appears and fades away: That night, that October 16, I suggested he give his next bunch the name Minor Angels. I’d once used this title for a romance, in other circumstances and in another world, but I thought it well suited to the summum that Scheidmann was now finishing, the last bunch of all. 43

The novel ends when the forty-nine narracts are recited. Once finished, Will Scheidmann and his archive should disappear. Nevertheless, before the 21st October, the day coinciding with the end of the story and with the end of human civilization, the birth of a new female redemptory figure is announced. She will be named Rim Scheidmann, the daughter of the last capitalist mafioso’s niece. On the 20th October humanity is entering its last days of existence and fire begins to spread over the earth and the last days of Will Scheidmann will be narrated by Fred Zenfl, who becomes a sort of Scheidmann’s (or Maria Clementi) alter ego. Civilization seems to have reached its end, but from the disaster emerges Verena Yong, the protagonist of the first narract. She is looking for a tear-fixer lost in a post-nuclear catastrophe scenario. This open end, as the odd and complex – still well-designed – structure of the narracts, points to the perpetuity of human suffering as if the end of the world assumed the form of eternal agony. Waiting for a cathartic culmination, the reader foresees instead endless misery in this haze conclusion to humankind, as if there was no place for hope at all. In the preamble to the original French edition, Antoine Volodine writes: “In this book you will find forty-nine such prose moments. In each as on a discreetly doctored photography, you will glimpse the trace left by an angel.”44 Following the logics of non-logic portrayed by post-exoticism and taking into account this definition of narract in relation to what we have been arguing, it is impossible not to mention the melancholic figure of the angel of history, who contemplates the ruins of the past while advancing to the future, where Volodine displays a disaster as a result of successive catastrophes murmured in 43 44

Ibid., 149-50. Stump, “Preface”, vi.

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Will Scheidmann’s narracts. In his theses of history, Walter Benjamin, inspired by the angel of Paul Klee, illustrates his conception of history not as a continuum of events, but as an endless catastrophe wiping out any possible redemption: Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.45

As in Walter Benjamin, Volodine’s angels are victims of successive disasters and they testify the history of the last century as a sequence of dramatic events leading to a hopeless future through the voice of the archangel Will Scheidmann, the failed-redemptory figure. The title of the book itself, Minor Angels, suggests this intertextual feature and it thus can be interpreted as a reverence to those who died, suffered and fought for vain purposes during the last decades of our existence. Volodine thus resuscitates their voices in order to give an account of an alternative or “terrorist” history of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the title Minor Angels also condenses a reference reinforcing the simultaneously internal and external nature of this novel: “minor literature”46 as a practice of a minority in a major language. As “foreign literature in French”,47 Volodine conceives a collective language and action looking for new discourses since the “traditional” forms do not seem to be able to describe the reality depicted. If Volodine claims no literary filiations, it is because there is no language capable of expressing the post-apocalyptical horizon he foresees as the future for humanity condemned to experience the abject “draw toward the place where meaning collapses.”48Minor Angels’ narracts focus on the after-disaster and display internally the impossibility of overcoming it. There is no hope for human life, there is no after: “You were right to show how the joy of remaking the 45

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1998, 257-58. 46 Gilles Deleuze, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 47 Volodine, “Écrire en français une littérature étrangère”, 53. 48 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.

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world has been stolen away from us forever”, mutters Will Scheidmann.49 Post-exoticism, as the imaginary convention enclosing this composite world is nourished by moments of hesitation between real and fantastic imaginaries, and such duality of meanings can only be engendered by the erosion of civilization and by the erosion of traditional narrative forms. Volodine is a partisan of the dissident, of the victimized and the explored human beings, the “trivial and marginal angels” recalling and recollecting the fragmented memories of the twentieth century still running through our collective subconscious. As Julia Kristeva suggested, all literature is a version of the apocalypse rooted on the fragile borders where “identities are double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject”.50 Nevertheless, and besides being affiliated to this literary legacy, Minor Angels, within its complex formal structure, can also be read as a sublimation of the horror permeating our history and our contemporary reality, by portraying the form of strangeness, the one “taken by beauty when beauty has no hope”.51

49

Volodine, Minor Angels, 69. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 208. 51 Volodine, Minor Angels, 70. 50

THE FANTASY OF THE ARCHIVE: AN ANALYSIS OF ORHAN PAMUK’S THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE HANDE GURSES The Museum of Innocence is Orhan Pamuk’s latest work of fiction, published in Turkish in 2008 and in English in 2009. The novel depicts the obsessive love that Kemal, a member of a bourgeois family, feels for a distant relative Füsun who works as a saleslady. The novel spans a 30-year period starting in 1975 and portrays the different directions that the relationship between Kemal and Füsun take. The Museum of Innocence not only focuses on this possessive yet enduring relationship but also offers an exhaustive representation of the social, political and cultural atmosphere of the era. It successfully recreates the various cultural landmarks of the social life, which far from acting as a background to the story, become the very space where the dynamics of the relation between Kemal and Füsun are conceived. As the title of the narrative also indicates, Kemal’s passion for Füsun results in his becoming a devoted collector, which culminates in the idea of creating a museum where these collected objects will be exhibited. In this essay I will analyse the implications of the act of “collecting” mainly focusing on the formation of Füsun as the object of fantasy. I will aim to explore how the collection and the desire to archive affect the formation of Füsun as a space of fantasy in need of domiciliation. Mainly using the writings of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida as my theoretical framework I will try to illustrate le mal d’archive and its implications on the construction of the beloved. I will analyse the intrinsic connection between the desire to preserve and fantasy, using the archive of Kemal and the construction of Füsun as the main focus of this essay.

“Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects”1 claims Benjamin, writing about his passion for collecting books. Collections are the documentation of how this relationship can develop into various directions, assigning different meanings to objects while also turning their owner into a collector. Once part of a collection, the use value of the objects is altered and the objects acquire new meanings within the collection in which they appear. Similarly the collector acquires a new role in relation to his/her collection, gaining authority over the objects and their significance. 1

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Pimlico, 1999, 69.

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The scope of this transformation that includes both the objects and the collector – and the viewer of the collection in a collateral manner – corresponds to the work of fantasy. The collection creates the fantasy of meaning for the objects and authority for the collector. It would be safe to argue that the fundamental appeal of the act of collecting lies in this sense of authority and control that is granted to the collector through the possession of objects. In The Museum of Innocence Orhan Pamuk explores the process that prompts the act of collecting and its eventual impact through the unfulfilled love affair between Kemal and Füsun. The novel portrays the process of transformation that both the objects and the collector undergo while also changing those that are affiliated with them. Published in 2008 in Turkish and in 2009 in English translation by Maureen Freely, The Museum of Innocence spans a period of over 30 years starting in 1975. Kemal, both the narrator and the protagonist, is the son of the wealthy Basmaci family. His future plans to marry Sibel are interrupted when he initiates a passionate love affair with Füsun, the daughter of a distant middle-class relative. The secret meetings of Kemal and Füsun at his bachelor flat in Merhamet2 apartments come to an end as Kemal proceeds with his engagement to Sibel. Füsun vanishes from Kemal’s life leaving him in a melancholic state. Unable to overcome his longing for Füsun, Kemal breaks off the engagement and leads a secluded life in the apartment where they used to meet in the company of the various objects that have remained of her. It is through these objects that Kemal aims to alleviate the pain caused by Füsun’s absence. Following his father’s death, Kemal reconnects with Füsun only to discover that she has married Feridun, a failed scriptwriter, who promises Füsun a glittering career in the movie industry. Kemal, as a way of remaining close to Füsun, decides to fund the movie that they are going to shoot. He thus not only reconnects with Füsun but also initiates the process of collecting as he starts stealing objects from 2

Merhamet in Turkish means mercy, compassion. In the seventh chapter of the narrative entitled “The Merhamet Apartments”, Pamuk gives extensive information about the name of the building explaining how it was named after the surname of a rich man who made his fortunes by selling sugar in the black market during the First World War. Orhan Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, London: Faber and Faber, 2010, 20. This information establishes a parallel with the Pamuk apartments that were built by Pamuk’s grandfather who built railroads during the early years of the republic.

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Füsun’s house each time he pays them a visit. Following the failure of Füsun’s marriage the two lovers reunite yet their reconciliation is short-lived. During their journey to Paris, the car driven by Füsun crashes into a tree killing her and leaving Kemal heavily wounded. Whether this tragic ending was caused by an accident or Füsun’s suicidal attempt remains ambiguous. It is following Füsun’s death that Kemal decides to build a museum with the objects that he had collected over the years. With a final metafictional twist he explains how he had commissioned the novelist Orhan Pamuk to write the catalogue for the museum in the form of a novel. The scope of The Museum of Innocence is not limited to the love affair between Kemal and Füsun; the narrative also offers an extensive portrait of the cultural, social and political atmosphere of the era in which the novel is set. The values of the Turkish upper-middle class during the 1980s as well as the hypocrisy of these values and their political implications are depicted meticulously. The different neighbourhoods of Istanbul and their symbolic value in the cultural memory do not appear as ornamental details in the background but play an active role in the portrayal of the relationship between Kemal and Füsun. The actual Museum of Innocence3 built with the objects that appear in the novel opened on 28 April 2012, drawing worldwide attention and praise. The creation of a museum that is based on a work of fiction not only problematizes the binary positioning of fact and fiction but also creates a new narrative that requires further analysis. Within the scope of this essay I will focus on the novel The Museum of Innocence and use textual analysis as my principal method of enquiry. I will primarily concentrate on the process of collecting and the creation of an archive as a method of consignation. Using the theoretical perspective offered by the writings of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, I will discuss how the fantasy of the archive reverberates within the wider framework of the metaphysical desire to produce and control an originary meaning. Why does Kemal resort to objects as a means to assuage the pain caused by the loss of Füsun? What is the relation between the objects and Füsun? How does the archive created with the everyday objects affect the relation between Kemal and Füsun? In the light of these principal questions I will 3

More information about the museum can be found online at www.masumiyet muzesi.org/.

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discuss the imperial reverberations of the archive in the relation between the “self” and the “other”. The title of the narrative is obtained by the bringing together of two conflicting words: museum and innocence. The museum being the space of the archive, collection, preservation and exhibition is far from innocent. The museum is the space that tames, organizes and recontextualizes. Whether it is a history, science or art museum all museums collect their data in order to obtain a new narrative with certain meanings. The collected data is exhibited following certain curatorial norms, which results in the creation of a not-so-innocent discourse. In the space of the museum there is no room for arbitrariness as every object is taken out of its original ‘innocent’ context and brought into a new, artificial space to generate additional, desired “guilty” meanings. Through the use of an oxymoron the title of Pamuk’s narrative highlights the impossibility of innocence that Kemal wishes to exhibit through the objects in the museum. As I will show, the objects exhibited in the museum are for Kemal evidence of the “original innocence” that his relationship with Füsun is made up of. Kemal fails to take into account, however, that the objects do not contain any inherent meaning and hence they can never be “innocent” once they become part of their relationship. In addition to the title of the narrative, the names of the protagonists are also highly significant. Emblematic of Pamuk’s oeuvre, the proper names are never coincidental but always reverberate within the wider scope of the narrative in which they appear. In The Museum of Innocence the proper names Kemal and Füsun reflect the tension that finds expression in the creation of the archive. The name Kemal is immediately associated with Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Etymologically the word derives from the Arabic word kamal meaning perfection, the state of being intact. The name Kemal emerges as the embodiment of the modern Turkish identity that Mustafa Kemal aimed to establish with the modernization movement during the early years of the republic. Coming from a bourgeois family, Kemal is a well-educated, intelligent man whose European taste in life epitomizes the ideal modern Turkish man. The name Füsun, on the other hand, derives from the Persian word fus’n, which means magic or enchantment. Füsun with her female sexuality and unpredictability stands in contrast with the rational and informed portrayal of Kemal. Füsun, in other

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words, emerges as the uncontrollable, unknown, exotic “other” as opposed to the familiar “self” represented by Kemal. Consequently it could be argued that the proper names of Kemal and Füsun reflect the underlying trope of the archive as they convey the tension that marks the desire to control through the collection. Kemal’s archive built with the familiar everyday objects emerges as an attempt to transform the Dionysiac realm of the “other” into a commendable space. Kemal’s archive represents the modern Turkish identity’s desire to control and command that which is designated as the unknown “other”. Desire and fantasy Addressing one of the most complex aspects of the human psyche, Jacques Lacan uttered what probably remains as his most widely known motto: “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other.”4 This formula while, on the one hand, underlining the ambiguous constitution of desire, on the other highlights the indispensable role, played by the other in the formation of the subject’s desire. The use of the preposition “of” in Lacan’s definition of desire reveals how desire does not merely originate in the self but is rather constituted by the other. Lacan provides the following explanation to this highly controversial statement: “man’s desire is the désir de l’Autre (the desire of the Other) in which the de provides what grammarians call the ‘subjective determination’, namely that it is qua Other that he desires (which is what provides the true compass of human passion).”5 In order to understand the impossibility that Lacan accords to desire, it is important to clarify the initial process that enables the formation of desire. According to Lacan: Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regard to the Other, under the form of the possible defect, which need may introduce into it, of having no universal satisfaction (what is called “anxiety”). A margin which, linear as it may be, reveals its vertigo, even if it is not trampled by the elephantine feet of the Other’s whim. 6

4

Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Routledge, 2006, 292. 5 Ibid., 345. 6 Ibid., 344.

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As a result of being intricately tied up to the other, desire emerges as volatile and impossible to satisfy for the self. According to Slavoj Žižek this link between the other and desire is important not merely because it establishes the desire of the other as a mystery but also because it demonstrates the impossibility of knowing what the self desires. The great anxiety of desire does not result from the impossibility of knowing what the other desires but rather from the unsettling realization that the scope of his/her desire is a complete mystery for the self: ... the subject desires only in so far as it experiences the Other itself as desiring, as the site of an unfathomable desire, as if an opaque desire is emanating from him or her. Not only does the other address me with an enigmatic desire, it also confronts me with the fact that I myself do not know what I really desire, with the enigma of my own desire. 7

It is at that stage that fantasy comes into picture and “provides an answer to the enigma of the Other’s desire”.8 As Žižek notes, the impenetrability of desire can only be overcome through fantasy, that “teaches us how to desire”.9 Through fantasy the subject discovers what he or she means for the other while also alleviating the anxiety caused by the impasse of desire. From a Freudian perspective, fantasy is defined in opposition to reality as the manifestation of the imaginary. Freud10 differentiates between fantasies that are the product of a conscious mind and the fantasies that are connected to the unconscious desires. Although these two operate on two distinct levels, fantasy nevertheless remains within the subjectivity of the self. Lacan,11 however, focuses on the link between desire and fantasy and thus offers a distinct definition: for Lacan fantasy’s link to desire is further problematized insofar as desire is not something that simply belongs to the subject, but rather is, as discussed, the desire of the other with the different meanings the phrase entails. Thus fantasy according to Lacan cannot be explained exclusively in terms of the individual’s subjectivity, for it embodies 7

Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan, London: Granta Books, 2006, 42. Ibid., 47. 9 Ibid., 47. 10 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. V, London: Vintage, 2001. 11 Lacan, Écrits: A Selection. 8

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the other and his or her desires. In other words, fantasy allows the subject to construct an image of the other’s desire yet it does not transform the subject’s desire into an evident reality. Fantasy rather creates an ambiguous space where the boundary between the subjective and the objective is blurred. As Žižek describes the fundamental paradox of fantasy, it resides in the fact that it subverts the standard opposition of “subjective” and “objective”: of course, fantasy is by definition not objective (referring to something that exists independently of the subject’s perceptions); however, it is also not subjective (something that belongs to the subject’s consciously experienced intuitions, the product of his or her imagination). Fantasy rather belongs to the “bizarre category of the objectively subjective – the way things actually, objectively seem to you even if they don’t seem that way to you”.12

Consequently fantasy lingers in a blurred space, which is neither subjective nor objective; it is this ambivalence that defines fantasy as that which cannot be acted out. This ambiguous nature of fantasy is present in modern forms of art, which according to Žižek rather than presenting an “objective reality” depict the “objectively subjective” fantasy. Žižek claims that the “ethical duty of today’s artist ... is to stage fantasies that are radically desubjectivized, that cannot ever be enacted by the subject”.13 Within this framework The Museum of Innocence emerges as a narrative that depicts the desubjectivized fantasy through the archive that Kemal builds. The initial desire that Kemal feels for Füsun, far from enabling him to act out his desire, turns into a source of anxiety. Kemal’s desire as “the desire of the other” not only establishes Füsun as an unknown other but also emerges as the source of Kemal’s anxiety in the face of the mystery that is his own desire. It is by collecting various objects that Kemal aims to turn this “unknown other” into a controllable entity, which eventually takes the form of a fantasy of the archive. It is through this archive that Kemal wishes to turn Füsun, his desire, into a meaningful entity that can be tamed and controlled. 12 13

Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 51. Ibid., 57.

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The archive Following Kemal’s engagement to his long-term girlfriend Sibel, Füsun puts an end to their affair and stops coming to the Merhamet apartment. Disappointed and saddened by this abrupt ending Kemal starts seeking refuge in the objects that have remained from their secret meetings: I would usually spend my two hours in the apartment daydreaming in bed, having selected some object charmed with the illusion of radiating the memories of our happiness – for example, this nutcracker, or this watch with the ballerina, with Füsun’s scent on its strap, with which I would stroke my face, my forehead, my neck, to try to transfer the charm and soothe the ache – until two hours had passed, and the time had come when we would have been awakening from the velvet sleep our lovemaking induced, and, depleted, I would return to my everyday life. 14

The time that Kemal spends in the Merhamet apartment with the objects offers him consolation. It is by smelling, touching and looking at these objects that Kemal can enliven the memories of Füsun. And it is this palliative effect that the objects have on him that prompts Kemal to initiate a collection; he thus starts putting together an archive “not with the eyes of a collector” but rather as “a patient taking stock of his medicines”.15 The initial private archive that Kemal assembles operates as a soothing remedy that also offers the possibility of controlling Füsun, who remains in the realm of the unknown other. The museum that is built with the objects in the archive, on the other hand, displays Kemal’s desire to re-construct his relation with Füsun as he wishes. The museum thus enables Kemal to re-create a new narrative for his love affair. According to Thomas Richards the archive as the “utopian space of comprehensive knowledge”16 emerges during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Richards notes that the archive is not limited to a physical construction but rather connotes the desire for universal knowledge:

14

Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 157. Ibid., 178. 16 Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire, London and New York: Verso, 1993, 11. 15

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The archive was not a building, nor even a collection of texts, but the collectively imagined junction of all that was known or knowable, a fantastic representation of an epistemological master pattern, a virtual focal point for the heterogeneous local knowledge of metropolis and empire. 17

The archive, in other words, represents a fantasy of domination by becoming the expression of the desire to assemble all the knowledge of the world. Its connection to the empire highlights how knowledge emerges not as an innocent data but rather as a very powerful weapon of dominion. Thus the concept of the archive originally represents an imperial ideal to confine and master knowledge as an exhaustible source. Jacques Derrida focusing on the etymology of the word “archive” highlights the shift from the private to the public: ... the meaning of “archive”, its only meaning, come to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded .... It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently, marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the nonsecret.18

The etymology of “archive” draws attention to the shift from the private to the public both in content and form. An object that is incorporated within the archive acquires new meanings depending on the different contexts within which it is included. The contents of Kemal’s archive too undergo such a shift not merely because they will be exhibited in the museum but also because they appear as part of a story in The Museum of Innocence. Cigarette stubs, earrings, china dogs or hair clips are everyday random objects with no specific significance; once they appear in Kemal’s story as cigarette stubs that belong to Füsun or china dogs that sit on top of the television at Füsun’s house, they acquire new meanings and become significant objects. As they appear in Kemal’s story they turn into emblems of his love for Füsun. Kemal’s collection of these objects assigns them with 17

Ibid., 11. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2 (emphasis in the original).

18

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new meanings and it is his decision to exhibit these objects in a museum. Such a decision marks the shift from the private to the public. Füsun’s hair clip was only meaningful for Kemal, once exhibited in the Museum of Innocence it becomes a public object that is appreciated by a wider audience. In terms of the spatial arrangements, the shift from the private to the public is made explicit in the narrative when Kemal decides to turn Füsun’s house into a museum. Despite having initiated his collection in the Merhamet apartment where he and Füsun used to meet secretly, Kemal prefers to use Füsun’s house to build his museum. This house, which is initially a private space of dwelling, gains its public status later on following Kemal’s acquisition. Kemal’s choice is far from arbitrary, as he prefers to use the space where he has always been a passive observer rather than the space where he was an actor. If the Merhament apartment represents the space of their “guilty” lovemaking, then Füsun’s house emerges as the space of “innocence” where they used to meet in the company of Füsun’s parents. Thus the space of the museum becomes the emblem of Kemal’s fantasy; it allows him to reconstruct both Füsun and their relationship as innocent while portraying himself as the devoted lover. The public dimension of the museum enables Kemal to reconstruct both himself and Füsun as objects of his fantasy. In addition to the shift from the private to the public, the Greek origin of the word “archive” also connotes two significant acts: commencement and commandment. Derrida notes that the archive is the space of not only the origins but also the control exercised over that origin: Arkhe, we recall, names at once the commencement and the commandment. This name apparently coordinates two principles in one: the principle according to nature or history, there where things commence – physical, historical, or ontological principle – but also the principle according to the law, there where men and gods command, there where authority, social order are exercised, in this place from which order is given – nomological principle.19

19

Ibid., 1 (emphasis in the original).

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The Museum of Innocence shows Kemal’s wish to both control and command Füsun and recreate their originary happiness through his archive. The commencement is highlighted and expressed in the opening lines of the narrative in Kemal’s longing for an originary moment of happiness: “It was the happiest moment of my life, though I didn’t know it.”20 By collecting the objects that are tokens of their relation Kemal aims to recreate that lost moment of commencement. Since Füsun, with her sexual liberty and beauty emerges as the emblem of the domain of the unknown other, Kemal also uses fantasy as a space where he can emerge as the one that dominates and controls such an uncontrollable source of passion. Kemal’s desire to command and the authoritative nature of the archive is made explicit during the early stages of his relationship with Füsun. He admits that his feeling of overwhelming happiness was also generated with his ability to dominate Füsun, socially and physically. But when we made love that day, rather than tumbling into the usual childish bliss, in which playful curiosity mingled with exuberance, I found myself in the grip of what the newspapers call the urge to “master her”, and making my own desires plain with ever harsher force, I was surprised by my own behavior. 21

Kemal thus makes explicit the power struggle that marks his relationship with Füsun. Despite all his love and admiration for her, there is a deeper and stronger desire within him that compels him to exercise authority over Füsun. Kemal perceives Füsun as someone in need of mastering not merely because she is the object of his desire but because she is also the subject of his desire; Füsun as the unknown domain of the other holds the enigma that is Kemal’s desire. She thus presents Kemal with the mystery of his own desire, which becomes the source of anxiety for Kemal. The “urge to master her” that becomes evident long before his collection hints at an initial attempt to put an end to this feeling of anxiety. Unable to master her, Kemal eventually turns to objects as an alternative method through which he could exercise authority over what Füsun represents. It is by

20 21

Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence, 3. Ibid., 60.

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exercising authority over Füsun through the archive that Kemal aims to alleviate his anxiety caused by his desire “for the other”. The desire to control and dominate that is made explicit through the archive is not limited to the relationship between Kemal and Füsun but reverberates within the wider framework of an imperial desire to master. Kemal by comparing himself to an anthropologist confirms the underlying imperial trope of his fantasy of the archive. Füsun is portrayed as the unknown exotic other whose significance can only be attained by becoming the self’s object of study: I was coming to see myself as someone who had travelled to distant countries and remained there for many years: say, an anthropologist who had fallen in love with a native girl while living among the indigenous folk of New Zealand, to study and catalog their habits and rituals, how they worked and relaxed, and had fun (and chatted away even while watching television, I must hasten to add). My observations and the love I had lived had become intertwined. Now the only way I could ever hope to make sense of those years was to display all that I had gathered together – the pots and pans, the trinkets, the clothes and the paintings – just as that anthropologist might have done.22

Kemal by comparing his experience to that of an anthropologist positions himself as the superior observer rather than an equal actor in his relationship with Füsun. Only by transforming his desire into a fantasy can he overcome the anxiety caused by the mystery of his desire, as the desire of the other. Kemal’s desire that is transformed into a fantasy not only puts into perspective the unknown nature of this desire by marginalizing Füsun as the exotic other, but also assigns Kemal the role of a superior observer who through his tools and knowledge can command that unknown other. Kemal can thus study this objectified, unknown other and domesticate her through his archive. Addressing the reader – and the future visitor of the museum – Kemal explains his decision in putting the objects collected on public display: Having become – with the passage of time – the anthropologist of my own experience, I have no wish to disparage those obsessive souls 22

Ibid., 496.

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who bring back crockery, artefacts, and utensils from distant lands and put them on display for us, the better to understand the lives of other and our own. Nevertheless, I would caution against paying too much attention to the objects and relics of “first love”, for these might distract the viewer from the depth of compassion and gratitude that now arose between us. So it is precisely to illustrate the solicitude in the caresses that my eighteen-year-old lover bestowed upon my thirtyyear-old skin as we lay quietly in this room in each other’s arm, that I have chosen to exhibit this floral batiste handkerchief ....23

Although Kemal is trying to underline the nuance between him and an anthropologist, he nevertheless acts like one, as it is through the objects that he wishes the viewer to understand his feelings towards Füsun. All in all, the objects rather than exposing Kemal’s love and passion for Füsun become symbols of his anxiety caused by the mystery of his desire. The stability of the objects for Kemal represents a safe refuge as opposed to the unpredictability of Füsun. This anthropological perspective not only turns Kemal’s desire into fantasy by domesticating Füsun, but also allows, as seen, Kemal to reinvent himself as a superior observer. The archive enables Kemal to reverse the hierarchy that was established by Füsun’s departure. Kemal is no longer the passive man that Füsun had deserted but becomes a figure of authority as he assigns the objects of his collection with new meanings. Kemal with the archive hopes to transform the uncontrollable and unknown domain of the other that is represented by Füsun into a manageable entity to which he can assign the meanings he wants. His initial yearning for the commandment and the commencement of the unknown other however turns out to be a fantasy that remains in the ambiguous space of the “objectively subjective”. The archive that Kemal builds with the various everyday objects, far from enabling him to have authority over Füsun as the object and subject of his desire, prove the impossibility of commandment and commencement. Kemal’s fantasy of the archive fails to take into account the ephemerality of meaning as such. The objects of the archive rather than remaining confined within the meanings that Kemal assigns them create their own narrative. Once they are exhibited in the museum their interaction with the viewers introduces 23

Ibid., 30.

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yet further possibilities of meaning thus condemning Kemal’s fantasy of commandment and commencement into the domain of the “objectively subjective”, thus making it impossible to enact. The objects Kemal, in his attempt to reconstruct Füsun as a controllable entity, creates an archive with the everyday objects that he collects. With these random objects, he hopes to create a new narrative that would rid him of the anxiety of the mystery of the other by bestowing upon him commandment and commencement. The significant role that the objects play throughout the narrative is made explicit even before Kemal starts collecting them, since it is through the intervention of an object that their relationship begins. As Kemal explains, “the series of events that were to change” his life begins when Sibel, his fiancée, spots “a handbag designed by the famous Jenny Colon in a shop window”24 in the Nişantaşı25 neighbourhood. Later on, when Kemal walks into the store to buy the bag as a gift for Sibel, he runs into Füsun who is working there as a sales assistant. Following their initial encounter the bag still remains in focus as Kemal finds out that the bag is not an original. The fake bag not only triggers the interaction between Kemal and Füsun but also attests to the artificial nature of the relationship between Kemal and Sibel. Eventually this unfortunate incident turns into an effective excuse for Füsun to visit Kemal at the Merhamet apartment to reimburse him. The apartment itself already operates as an archive as Kemal’s mother keeps old and unused furniture and objects there. Unlike an archive, however, an order or classification system is absent; the objects are just piled around the apartment randomly. While trying to make Füsun comfortable Kemal also explains how these objects got there: I told her how my mother had bought all these things on impulse from the most fashionable shops of Beyoğlu and Nişantaşı, pashas’ 24

Ibid., 4. Nişantaşı, today is still the symbol of upper-middle class with its Western-style coffee shops and boutiques. Both Kemal the narrator and Orhan Pamuk are residents of the area. The Pamuk apartments, a possible analogy to the Merhamet apartments, are also located in this neighbourhood. The Nişantaşı district also operates as a social boundary between Kemal and Füsun, who lives in the rather decadent neighborhood of Beyoğlu. 25

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mansions whose furnishings were being sold off ... but after using them for a short while she brought them here and forgot all about them. At the same time I was opening trunks packed with clothes (my mother was in the habit of giving our old ones to poor relations), a chamber pot, and finally the Kütahya vase that my mother had asked me to find for her; then I showed her the hats, box by box. 26

The Merhamet apartment thus operates as a storage space where these outdated objects are kept. Unlike Kemal, his mother evaluates the objects according to their use value and is thus depicted as a person who does not establish an emotional connection with these belongings: after using them for a short time she disposes of them by sending them to the Merhamet apartment. As Kemal and Füsun are contemplating the pile, one particular object stands out: A crystal sweet bowl reminded us of holiday feasts she [Füsun] had attended. When she’d arrive with her parents for their holiday visit, they’d be offered an assortment of sugar and almond candies, marzipan, sugar-covered coconut “lion bars”, and lokum, or Turkish delight.27

As soon as Kemal, the narrator, interacts with the objects they stop being mere things but acquire more significant roles. The crystal bowl brings back not only common memories that Kemal and Füsun share but also the flavour of those days, while revealing the social and familial conventions. The hierarchical position of the two families is thus made explicit through the sugar bowl, which also displays the wealth of Kemal’s family with its wide selection of candies. Another pair of significant objects, Füsun’s earrings,28 appears in the first chapter of the narrative. During their passionate lovemaking both Kemal and Füsun fail to notice that one of Füsun’s earrings has fallen. These are the only objects throughout the narrative that hold an emotional value for Füsun:

26

Ibid., 22. Ibid., 22. 28 These earrings will re-appear later on in the narrative when Füsun and Kemal reunite. They will also be the subject of the last conversation that Kemal and Füsun have. 27

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Hande Gurses her earring must have come free and, for all we knew, hovered in midair before falling of its own accord .... When we met the next day, Füsun told me she had lost one of her earrings .... “Please bring it tomorrow. Don’t forget,” Füsun said, her eyes widening. “It is very dear to me.”29

Füsun’s emotional attachment to the earrings stands in opposition with Kemal’s obstinate urge to collect. Unlike Füsun, Kemal never acknowledges his emotional affection to the earrings. He keeps his passion to himself, only revealing it later, through the museum, to the readers who are also assumed to be prospective visitors of the museum. Kemal gives detailed information about the objects that he collects throughout the narrative, not to explain his emotional connection to them but rather to ensure that the reader receives the required information; that is to say his explanations allow him to yet exercise further commandment, this time on the readers. He wants these objects to transmit his meanings and that is why he offers an extensive account. The collection as fantasy “Why does Kemal collect?” remains an important question. As I have so far tried to illustrate, the creation of an archive emerges as Kemal’s fantasy through which he hopes to have command over the unknown domain of the other, represented by Füsun. The collection, however, is not initiated with a desire to establish a museum but results from his melancholia generated by his longing for Füsun: Eight to ten minutes later I was lying on the bed at the Merhamet Apartments, trying to pick up Füsun’s scent in the sheets, and it was almost as if I was trying to feel her inside me, almost as if I wanted to become her .... With all the strength I could muster, I embraced the sheets and then reached out to pick up the glass paperweight on the table, desperate for traces of the scent of her hands. As I inhaled deeply from the glass, I felt instant relief in my nose, my lungs ... it was not with the eyes of a collector. I was a patient taking stock in his medicines.30

29 30

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 177.

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Kemal turns to these objects hoping to find a cure for his illness. He expects these objects both to free him of the pain that Füsun’s departure had caused and to eliminate the anxiety that Füsun as the unknown desire of the other generates. In other words, the uncertainty created with his inability to access his desire is alleviated through the fantasy of the archive that Kemal hopes to construct with these objects. Gradually, however, the curing effect of the objects is replaced by Kemal’s automatized desire to collect and preserve leading to an obsessive process whereby every object is transformed into something else through the meanings that Kemal assigns them: Slipcovered armchairs, a table, a buffet holding a candy bowl, a set of crystal tumblers, and a television crowned by a sleeping china dog – I found these things beautiful, because they had all assisted in the making of the wondrous miracle that was Füsun. 31

The ultimate illustration of the uncanny status that Kemal assigns to his object of fantasy is made explicit with the cigarette stubs. Kemal collects 4,213 cigarette butts that allegedly belong to Füsun. He meticulously collects, orders, and categorizes these thousands of cigarette stubs. To the meaningless, desubjectivized cigarette butts he assigns new meanings so that they become part of a homogenous whole, a whole that can be tamed through the archive by the collector. These apparently futile objects of his collection are indeed the most beneficial ones for Kemal; cigarette stubs, unlike more significant objects, leave more space for Kemal to fill. In other words, the meaninglessness of the cigarette butts allows Kemal to infuse them with the meanings that he wishes to attain, thus turning them into controllable entities. The meticulous collecting and arrangement of the cigarette stubs elucidates Kemal’s yearning to command and control by assigning meaning. He thus hopes to compensate for his inability to dominate Füsun through the collection of cigarette stubs. Kemal aims to transform the unknown desire into an intelligible and controllable fantasy. These objects far from reflecting Füsun replace her with a fantasy that Kemal has constructed and which ultimately remains impossible to enact.

31

Ibid., 162.

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Concluding remarks Although the archive that Kemal builds aims to reflect his subjective experience of the relationship with Füsun, it eventually displays the impossibility of that experience. Füsun, both as a socially unsuitable candidate for Kemal and as a sexually liberated woman, is thus reconstructed with the collected objects so that she can be a controllable domesticated item. Such domestication would allow Kemal to experience his fantasy by turning the unknown domain of the desire of the other into a commendable actuality. The archive, however, rather than becoming the site of commandment and commencement as Kemal wishes it to be, emerges as the epitome of the impossibility to enact this fantasy. The collection far from enabling Kemal to realize his desire to command becomes the site of the impossibility of domesticating meaning as such. The archive thus rather than indicating Kemal’s control over Füsun emerges as the token of the impossibility of the fantasy of the archive as the space of commencement and commandment. In other words Kemal is infected by what Derrida terms le mal d’archive: It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminable, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something in it archives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commancement.32

The impossibility to enact the fantasy of the archive enables Pamuk to call into question the metaphysical desire to command an originary meaning. In The Museum of Innocence, the archive fever rather than enabling reconciliation makes evident the impossibility of an archive that generates and commands an originary meaning. The novel thus portrays how the desire for meaning operates within the metaphysical tradition, resulting in the creation of a fantasy of meaning that is impossible to enact. Within the framework of the imperial fantasy of the archive it could be argued that the self’s desire to command over the unknown other through the production and commandment of meaning is doomed to fail. The desire for meaning remains within the 32

Derrida, Archive Fever, 91.

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domain of the desire of the other and is possible only through the constant difference and deferral enabling dissemination rather than confinement.

THE DIGITAL META-DISSEMINATION OF FEAR IN MUSIC VIDEOS. A TRANSDISCIPLINARY TEXTUAL ANALYSIS OF TWO CASE STUDIES: ESBEN AND THE WITCH’S MARCHING SONG AND M.I.A.’S BORN FREE1 JOÃO PEDRO DA COSTA In order to elicit the growing importance of music videos in today’s emerging digital landscape, this essay aims, via a transdisciplinary approach between Web and Literary Studies, a textual analysis of Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free that will focus on the way both of the clips emulate and disseminate a readable sensation of fear that is directly related to the dissolution of the border between the public and private spheres of Web users.

Introduction Though there has been much enthusiasm about the freedom opportunities brought by the Internet,2 several authors have, in recent years, called our attention to the reverse side of this proclaimed new digital freedom: The basic intuition and popular belief that the Internet will bring greater freedom and global equity has been around since the 1990s. It has been the technophile’s belief, just as the horrors of cyberporn, cybercrime and cyberterrorism have been the standard gut-wrenching fears of the technophobe.3

1

This essay has been written within the Project Interidentities/Lyra Compoetics of the Institute for Comparative Literature Margarida Losa, Faculty of Letters of Porto University, an R&D Unit financially supported by Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, within the “Programa Operacional Ciência e Inovação 2010 (POCI 2010) do Quadro Comunitário de Apoio III (POCI 2010-SFA-18-500)”. 2 Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, 173-76. 3 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006, 131.

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But even far beyond this technophile/technophobe dichotomy, some scholarship from both polarizing camps has been, at least since the mid-1990s, particularly interested in studying the “digital divide”, that is, the social inequalities caused by our access to and use of digital media.4 What is ultimately at stake here is not only the health of global economy or even the guarantee that people share the resources to participate in a political space one may call democracy,5 but a deeper notion of digital literacy that enables mere consumers to be participating citizens without succumbing to the often epitomized “end of privacy” in their digital cultural practices. In fact, any definition of the digital divide that only considers the access to computers and the Internet is simplistic:6 some people who have access may not be skilled users of the Web; in case they have the skills, they may not find relevant content online to become consistent users;7 and even if they are consistent users, they may not be literate enough to fully and safely participate in it. If we assume that the “Network Society” is not just a descriptive name, but also an elaborate discourse that, by describing a set of social contemporary dynamics, provides a script that set out roles, norms, expectations and the terms of dialogue,8 one of the converging key features of this digital libretto is “the culture of participation”, a term that replaces older notions of passive media spectatorship and individual media consumption with active and collective practices located in the social interactions between Web users.9 But there lies an irony or possible paradox: if the participatory culture has enabled the presentation of a multitude of self-identities through the participation possibilities of Web users in the emerging digital media landscape, it has also eroded the cultural boundaries between public and private 4

Nick Couldry, “The Digital Divide”, in Web. Studies, eds David Gauntlett and Ross Horsley, London: Hodder Education, 2004, 192. 5 Oscar H. Gandy, “The Real Digital Divide: Citizens versus Consumers”, in The Handbook of New Media, eds Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone, London: Sage Publications, 2002, 448-60. 6 Lisa Servon, Redefining the Digital Divide: Technology, Community and Public Policy, Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002, 4. 7 Last Moyo, “The Digital Divide: Scarcity, Inequality and Conflict”, in Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, eds Glen Creeber and Royston Martin, Berkshire: McGraw Hill Education, 2009, 123. 8 Darin Barney, The Network Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004, 179. 9 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture, New York: New York University Press, 2006, 3-4.

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spheres.10 Therefore, does everybody have the socio-technological conditions to aptly participate in this brave and digital new world nowadays? If not, is there a “readable” fear of participation in Web users’ active and collective practices? And, if so, how to read it and where? This essay will try to answer these questions via a transdisciplinary approach between Web and Literary Studies of what has become the most disseminated media format in today’s digital media landscape: music videos. The textual analysis of Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song11 and M.I.A.’s Born Free12 will focus on the way both clips incorporate textual references to vlogging (or video blogging) and other media in order to emulate and disseminate a sensation of fear through digital platforms. Finally, it will be also argued that this readable fear is textually related to the mentioned and decisive characteristic of today’s globalized world: the dissolution of the border between public and private spheres of Web users.13 The importance of music videos in today’s digital media landscape Music videos are everywhere. On computer or Smartphone screens, big and small, the medium allegedly responsible for the death of a radio star whose body remains to be found14 has survived the shift of MTV from music television to reality shows. It has become, rather surprisingly, the most consumed and disseminated genre in today’s digital media landscape. Once the exclusive domain of television programmers, music videos are nowadays the chosen audiovisual genre of digital users and websites, which are constantly seeking for new content in order to satiate their audiences’ hunger for media. Users can reach them from almost everywhere via laptops, smartphones, PDAs, CD-ROMs, DVDs, PSPs, iPods, iPads and other 10

Matt Hills, “Participatory Culture; Mobility, Interaction and Identity”, in Digital Cultures: Understanding New Media, eds Glen Creeber and Royston Martin, Berkshire: McGraw Hill Education, 2009, 116. 11 Peter King and David Procter, “Esben and the Witch’s The Marching Song”, 2010: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VP0Nv_ivTaw (accessed 1 June 2011). 12 Romain Gavras, M.I.A.’s Born Free, 2010: http://vimeo.com/11219730 (accessed 1 June 2011). 13 Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction, London: Oxford University Press, 2009, 71-83. 14 Video Killed the Radio Star is the title of the hit by The Buggles whose music video was the first to be broadcasted by MTV at 12:01 AM on 1 August 1981.

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tablets. More than a habitat, the Internet has become a genuine and generous ecosystem for music videos, turning it into an increasingly accessible, widespread and omnipresent digital medium. In 2010, 37 of the 65 most watched online videos were music videos, which represented 62 % of the overall visualizations.15 In the same year, seven out of the ten most watched videos on YouTube were music videos16 and 77 % of the users who consumed music on the Web did so via music videos.17 In fact, the music video possesses structural characteristics, such as its average short duration, which fit the media consumption habits of Web users, who typically have a short attention span. In 2008, only 16 % of Web users watched videos with more than three minutes of duration and only 9 % of them consumed videos with more than five minutes.18 In the last quarter of 2010, the average fruition time of online videos was of 3’53” in the North-American market and 3’34” in Europe.19 Make no mistake: if audiovisuality is, nowadays, the dominant form of online communication, then music videos have become the most popular genre of the digital media landscape reaching both niche and global audiences.20 The massive importance of music videos is detectable both quantitatively and qualitatively. No other medium makes and shapes our everyday culture like music videos do: film, art, literature, politics and advertising – they are all clearly under the impact of the music video, namely in their aesthetics, technical procedures, visual worlds and narrative strategies.21 Think about the major works of novelists like William Gibson, Jasper Fforde or Daniel Z. Danielowski; think 15

Visible Measures and True Reach, Hundred Million Views Report, 2010: http://www.visiblemeasures.com/hundred (accessed 1 June 2011). 16 Read Write Web, Top 10 YouTube Videos of All Time, 2011: http://tinyurl.com/ yu8lvr (accessed 1 June 2011). 17 Nielsen, US Online Video Rankings, 2011: http://tinyurl.com/6admhjr (accessed 1 June 2011). 18 TubeMogul Industry Analysis, How Much of a Typical Video Online Is Actually Watched?, 2008: http://www.tubemogul.com/research/report/18 (accessed 1 June 2011). 19 Brightcove and TubeMogul Industry Analysis, Online Video & the Media Industry: Quarterly Research Report, 2011: http://www.tubemogul.com/research/ report/38 (accessed 1 June 2011). 20 Chris Anderson, The Longer Long Tail, London: Random House, 2009. 21 Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wubbena, “Introduction”, in Rewind, Play Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video, eds Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wubbena, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010, 7.

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about the cinematic achievements of music video directors like Michel Gondry, Spike Jonze, Jonathan Glazer, David Fincher or Mark Romanek; think about the massive importance of will.i.am’s Yes, We Can music video in Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign; think about the most successful advertisements for huge brands such as Apple, Coca-Cola, PlayStation or Nissan; think about video art installation by artists like Chris Cunningham, Tyler Shield or Richard Phillips; think about popular TV series such as Glee, Californication or Breaking Bad: they are all intimately inspired by music videos and the medium keeps on being openly inspired by all of them. This all goes to show that the music video continues to do what it has done for decades: to look for all kinds of possible inspirations, to try to do something new with it and to thus inspire itself as well as other media forms.22 Towards a textual analysis of music videos In spite of uniting the two most influential media of post-World War II – popular music and filmmaking –, music video remains an underappreciated, critically unnoticed and rather elusive media subgenre.23 In the last thirty years, the music video has been conceptualized by academics as advertising, a new form of television, visual art, popular artefact, electronic wallpaper, dreams, a cinematic genre, nihilistic and chauvinistic media, neo-Fascist propaganda, metaphysical poetry, shopping-mall culture, cultural cannibalism, visual LSD, semiotic pornography and viral content.24 All this confirms that there still might be some truth in Simon Frith’s words that the study of music videos has produced more scholarly nonsense than anything since punk.25 Throughout the years, the music video has also been the subject of a large number of approaches that are sometimes biased in their critical study by orthodoxies such as Neo-Marxism, Post-Modernism, Psychoanalysis and Feminism. Nevertheless, in all

22

Ibid., 19. Saul Austerlitz, Money for Nothing: A History of the Music Video from the Beatles to the White Stripes, New York: Continuum, 2007, 1. 24 Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, 3. 25 Simon Frith, “Making Sense of Video: Pop into the Nineties”, in Music for Pleasure: Essays in the Sociology of Pop, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988, 205. 23

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those approaches, an extraordinary amount of textual analysis has been produced by academics.26 Before going further, it must be acknowledged that any textual analysis of music videos should always consider two important epistemic constraints: - music videos are an audiovisual medium, that is, a potentially complex amalgam of images, sounds and verbal speech that may use a vast and heterogeneous array of representation techniques to correlate its parts;27 - there is no method of analysing music videos (or any other audiovisual medium) that produces a genuine replica or that totally captures its complexity.28 Given these important restrictions, a textual analysis of music videos always implies its “translation” into a series of texts through a descriptive and dialectic process that aims to cover the object’s complexity in order to avoid the effects of a potentially reductive approach.29 The analysis of these texts will, in its turn, produce a discourse that consists of a system of dispersion that correlates its elements.30 In other words, a textual translation of a music video (Figure 1) never produces a genuine replica but a new outcome (discourse) that interactively relates its parts (texts) with the analysed object (music video).

26

Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 3. Carol Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004; Joachim Strand, The Cinesthetic Montage of Music Videos, Saarbrücken: Verlag Dr Müller, 2008. “From my experience, what a music video has to say is located in the relation of all of its parts as it plays out in time – in a play between both the visual and the musical codes.” Vernallis, Experiencing Music Video, 10. 28 Basil Bernstein, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, London: Taylor and Francis, 1995. 29 Diana Rose, “Analysis of Moving Images”, in Qualitative Researching with Text, Image and Sound, eds Martin W. Bauer and George M. Gaskell, London: Sage Publications, 2010, 246. 30 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan, London: Tavistock Publications, 1972, 37. 27

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discourse text music video

textual translation

text

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Figure 1: Textual translation and analysis of a music video.

The theoretical configuration of audiovisual media contents as texts and of its audience as readers has been used with interesting results by authors since the ground-breaking work of John Fiske,31 Stuart Hall,32 David Morley33 and Andrew Goodwin.34 Therefore, I do believe that a transdisciplinary epistemic approach between Web and Literary Studies can be truly effective and fruitful in the study of music videos on the Social Web. In fact, sometimes even without acknowledging it, that is what most authors who studied music videos have been doing in the last three decades: this can be easily verified by their use of technical terms such as “narrative”, “performativity”, “reception”, “reader”, “intertextuality”, “parody”, “pastiche”, “pseudonym”, “canon” or “diegetic”, to name but a few.

31

John Fiske, “Carnival and Style”, in Television Culture, London: Routledge, 1987, 240-64; Understanding Popular Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1989; “The Cultural Economy of Fandom”, in Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media, ed. Lisa A. Lewis, New York: Routledge, 1992, 30-49. 32 Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”, in Culture, Media & Language, eds Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson and Andrew Lowe, London: Routledge, 1992, 128-38. 33 David Morley, “Texts, Readers, Subjects”, in Culture, Media & Language, eds Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson and Andrew Lowe, London: Routledge, 1992, 16373. 34 Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory.

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music video

music video

other media

music video

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Legend Synesthetic readings Transtextual readings Transmediatic readings Figure 2: Textual correlations in a textual analysis of digital music videos.

To put it rather concisely, a textual analysis of digital music videos has to consider the following facts (Figure 2): - music videos have potentially three texts (lyrics, music and images) with hypothetical “synesthetic” correlations;35  music videos are created by a potentially large array of authors (musicians, directors, producers and/or users), who can be conceptualized as Social Web users;36

35

Nicholas Cook, Analysing Music Multimedia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 36 Axel Schmidt and Klaus Neumann-Braun, “Concerning the Transition of the Reception of the Music Video due to a Change in the Politics of Distribution of the Music Videos and the Music(-TV)-Market”, in Rewind, Play Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video, eds Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wubbena, Bielefeld: Transcript, 2010, 77-88; Gianni Sibilla, “It’s the End of Music Videos As We Know Them (But We Feel Fine)”, in Rewind, Play Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video, 225-32.

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- music video texts are read and diffused through digital platforms by an active audience that may ultimately perform during their collaborative fruition process a large series of:  “synesthetic readings” between the texts that constitute a music video;37  “transtextual readings” between several music videos;38 and  “transmediatic readings” between music videos and other media;39 - the distinction between music videos’ authors and readers is blurred due to the participative possibilities of the Social Web40 and the “producerly” nature of music video texts.41 Case studies Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video was uploaded to YouTube on 16 August 2010 and has so far reached the quite impressive amount of 400,000 views for a new and alternative UK act. The concept of the music video is quite simple (Figure 3). It opens on rotating fixed close-ups of the three naked band’s members, each cut timed to a chord change. As the song escalates through a descending bass line and a knee-trembling wall of guitars, their faces and upper parts of their bodies grow progressively bloodier and more battered. The martial motif of both the music’s strong and regular rhythm and the images’ gore style echo the lyrics narrative (a battlefield scene) and lexicon (blackness, veins, moans, arms, legs, teeth, nail, etc.), which are sung in the lead singer Rachel Davies’ fullthroated wail.42

37

Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory; Kevin Williams, Why I (Still) Want My MTV: Music Video and Aesthetic Communication, New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2003; Strand, The Cinesthetic Montage. 38 Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes. La Littérature au second degré, Paris: Points, 1982. 39 Cook, Analysing Music Multimedia; Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue and the Way We Tell Stories: Entertainment in a Connected World, London: W.W. Norton & Co, 2011. 40 Jenkins, Convergence Culture. 41 Fiske, “Carnival and Style”, 251. 42 Jayson Greene, “Review of Violet Cries by Esben and the Witch”, Pitchfork Magazine (2011): http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15082-violet-cries (accessed 1 June 2011).

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The tight and meticulously built synesthetic correlations between lyrics, music, voice and images turn the music video into an increasingly difficult and fascinating thing to watch. One of the video’s top comments on YouTube expresses quite blatantly this paradox: “I don’t want to admit that I find this beautiful, but I really do. It’s absolutely mesmerizing” (@VizualConqueror). One of the main reasons why the fruition of this music video is so intense relies on the fact that we only get to see the cumulative effects of the physical violence and never its source or origin. It is just as if the aggressions of each band members are purposely hidden from us due to the video’s circular editing and as if they occur during the gaps that separate each of the three recurrent cuts, thus reflecting their passivity, impotence and fear on our own fruition experience. Once again, a YouTube user comment expresses this feeling quite eloquently: “Why [do] you all stand here and watch them? Someone, call an ambulance!” (@vanrok).

Figure 3: Screenshots of Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video.

John Fiske defined and applied the concept of “producerly texts” to media products that allow their audience to participate in the production of their meaning through an exercise of what he calls “excessive reading”. Producerly texts have loose ends that escape their control, meanings that exceed its own power to discipline them, gaps

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wide enough for whole new texts to be produced in them by their readers.43 In other words, a media product does not have to give up having a clearly defined message, but in so far as it limits its potential meanings, it limits its potential circulation. A producerly text is, therefore, one that can be enjoyed, accessed and read on multiple levels: it can be taken at face value, but it also leaves room for other preferred readings,44 which may include deeper and more active interpretations.45 If a literal reading of Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video text can be anchored to the song lyrics (the band members’ battering portrays the injuries of soldiers in a battlefield), its producerly nature is directly related to an unanswered question: “Where does all this violence come from?” An excessive reading of the music video text, based on its hyper and metatextual references,46 might give us some clues on how to tie up this loose end.

Figure 4: Transmediatic and converging similarities between Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video and other media genres. 43

Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 104. Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”, 128. 45 Henry Jenkins et al., If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead. Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace, Massachusetts: Convergence Culture Consortium, 2009, 8182. Online at: http://tinyurl.com/y49cw32 (accessed 1 June 2011). 46 Genette, Palimpsestes. 44

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The framing of the fixed cuts of the music video and the lip-sync of the song lyrics by the band members are analogous to television “pundits” or “talking heads”, in which someone with a certain expertise broadcasts his or her commentary on a particular subject. Due to the “convergence”47 of music videos to the Social Web, both framing and lip-sync options tend to rather refer to vlogging, one of today’s most emblematic forms of online communication (Figure 4). Vlogging is not only the dominant genre of online “user-generated contents”,48 but also an audiovisual genre that is critical for the construction of the sense of community among users of video sharing websites. Therefore, Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video contains quite “readable” hypertextual references49 to vlogging through its “vernacular” aesthetic configuration:50 fixed framing of talking heads, lip-synching, brevity51 and the simulacrum of authenticity,52 metaphorically represented in the music video’s visual text by the nudity of its three characters. But there is more to it. Vlogging is also a “grassroots” medium genre53 that tends to generate engagement and criticism through Web users’ harsh verbal comments and video responses.54 YouTube is filled with numerous examples of vloggers that suffered the effects of the dissolution of the border between their private and public spheres and their inability to deal with trolls and haters. In fact, it is highly probable that many of us have participated in forums, blogs or other social networks and felt, one way or the other, the effects of the virtual arena that digital platforms sometimes turn into. 47

Jenkins, Convergence Culture. Sacha Wunsch-Vincent and Graham Vickery, Participative Web: User-Created Content, Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007. Online at: http://www.oecd.org/internet/ieconomy/38393115.pdf (accessed 1 June 2011). 49 Genette, Palimpsestes. 50 Tom Sherman, “Vernacular Video”, in Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, eds Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer, Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008, 161-68. 51 Jill Walker Rettberg, Blogging, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008, 21. 52 Jean Baudillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2003. 53 Dan Gilmore, We the Media, Cambridge: O’Reilly Media, 2004. 54 Jean Burgess and Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009, 58-74. 48

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As it was referred to in the introduction of this article, it is crucial to always have in mind that the often mentioned “participation gap”55 is not only related to users’ difficulties of accessing digital platforms, but also to their incapacity of dealing efficiently with the fear of online exposure during their participatory journey. Therefore, based on the identified hypertextual references to vlogging, one feels rather tempted to read the portrayed violence in the music video text as a metatextual allusion,56 or a quite pungent metaphor, of the ferocity that frequently typifies communication exchanges between YouTube community members (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Mixed framing of Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song music video with vlogging screenshots.

Just like its three characters, each one of us has already potentially felt as helpless victims of this invisible and anonymous crowd called “the others” during our participative journey through the digital media landscape. In the end, what makes this music video fruition so intensively difficult and fascinating is how easy it is for most Web users to identify with its characters. 55

Henry Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture Media Education for the 21st Century, Chicago: MacArthur Foundation, 2006. 56 Genette, Palimpsestes.

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One should not be surprised if this emotional cleansing reminds Aristotle’s famous definition of “catharsis” in his Poetics:57 after all, this is a performative music video, perhaps the closest modern medium genre to ancient Greek drama one might ever find on YouTube’s vast and growing cultural archive. In this digital drama, Web users’ hamartias (or injuries) are a consequence of their digital illiteracy or, to be more precise, their fear and/or inability of fully communicating with their peers. M.I.A.’s M.I.A.’s

Born Free music video Born Free music video was uploaded to Vimeo on 25 April 2010 and until June 2011 reached 3.7 million views, turning it into one of the website’s most popular videos. The music video was also uploaded to YouTube on 26 April 2010, but was removed one week later due to its graphical violent content. After a strong reaction of the YouTube community against the website’s censorship, the music video was made available again a few days later with an over-18 viewing disclaimer.58

Figure 6: Screenshots of M.I.A.’s Born Free music video.

Unlike Esben and the Witch’s performative music video, M.I.A.’s Born Free is a rather conventional narrative. It depicts a USA military SWAT 57 58

Aristotle, Aristotle Poetics, trans. Malcolm Heath, London: Penguin Classics, 2003. http://tinyurl.com/65cr5qe (accessed 28 October 2011).

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team, staging a raid in a building, during which they force a young red-haired man violently into a detainee transport vehicle along with other redheads that have been rounded up. The detainees are then driven out to the desert, where they are brutally treated and forced to run across a live minefield. During this course of events, a young red haired boy is shot in the head and another is blown to pieces after stepping on a live mine, while the soldiers continue to chase, beat and shoot the other redheads (Figure 6). All this is shot with a handy camera, which confers the music video a documentary or TV reportlike plausibility. The music’s relentless drums, prodding keyboards and M.I.A.’s baleful vocals intensify the violence of the images, while the “I was born free” chorus creates a fierce contrast, or disjuncture,59 with both displayed images and music. As the song’s wiki page reports,60 the music video has been widely described by the media as a political allegory, drawing parallels to many indigenous resistance movements around the world. This transtextual reading is supported by images seen on the music video: a mural displaying the Our Day Will Come slogan (the historic motto of the Irish Republican Army); and redheaded young people wearing Palestinian kufiya who throw rocks and glass bottles at the military armoured vehicles (Figure 7).

Figure 7: Screenshots of M.I.A.’s Born Free music video with political allusions (Irish Republican Army and Palestinian Intifada).

Once again, the main producerly feature in the music video text is directly related to an unanswered question: “why cast redheads to portray this alleged political allegory?” An obvious answer is the absurdity, randomness and vast symbolic scope of this choice: chasing redheads demonstrates the absurdity of any ethnic, religious, or 59 60

Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 88. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Free_(M.I.A._song) (accessed 1 June 2011).

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political persecution. It also disseminates fear through its readers quite efficiently: if something as arbitrary as one’s hair colour can be used as an argument for genocide, then there are no guarantees that in the future a person may not be persecuted for being tall, short, fat, skinny or even for being a fan of music videos. Nevertheless, the question remains unanswered: Why cast “specifically” redheads to depict the symbolic absurdity of any mass persecution? An excessive reading of the music video text based on its transmediatic references might give us some enlightening answers to this question.61

Figure 8: M.I.A.’s Maya album cover.

The first medium I would like to invoke is the cover artwork of M.I.A.’s Maya, the album that the Born Free single was supposed to promote (Figure 8). It is a typically busy, trippy, disorienting piece of art that features the singer’s face almost completely hidden by a composition of YouTube player bars as if she were wearing some kind of digital burqa. We need not have read one of M.I.A.’s several interviews in which she assumed that the cover was “a statement about 21st century privacy”62 to identify in it a strong and readable metatextual reference to the dissolution of the border between the private and the public spheres of Social Web users. In fact, Maya’s 61 62

Rose, The Art of Immersion. http://tinyurl.com/3paj7yd (accessed 1 June 2011).

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advertising campaign constitutes a genuine case study of online participative promotion, and it is quite obvious that, due to its graphical violent images, the Born Free music video was created to be Web-streamed and not broadcasted by music television. The fact that the Born Free music video was conceptualized and produced as a digital medium is potentially an important factor to the producerly structure of its text and a strong guideline for its digital readers. What do Social Web users, and specifically YouTube community members, know about “gingers”?63 Actually, quite a lot. First of all, one of the most popular South Park cartoon episodes on the Web is Season 9 Ginger Kids originally aired on 9 November 2005. In this episode, Cartman, a character widely known for his antiSemitic tendencies, channels his hatred to people with red hair, freckles and pale skin, proclaiming that they have no souls. The popularity of this episode was boosted among YouTube community members four years later thanks to a rather surreal video of user @CopperCab uploaded on 14 January 2010.64

Figure 9: Screenshots of South Park’s Ginger Kid episode and @CopperCab’s Gingers Do Have Souls video blogging.

In this classic piece of vlogging, an 18 year-old ginger kid expresses, with a disarming naivety, his anger at the South Park episode, declaring that, against all odds, he did have a soul (Figure 9). Web users’ response was massively brutal and transformed this video into one of YouTube’s most famous phenomena of popularity: on 1 June 2011, the video ranked #57 in the website list of most viewed videos with 17 million views and #2 in the list of most commented ones. 63 The Anglo-Saxon cultural and racial prejudice towards red-haired people (which is at the basis of the derogatory term “ginger”) may, obviously, also be considered as an explanation for the popularity of the music video, but definitely falls short once we consider the worldwide scope of YouTube’s community members. 64 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY39fkmKBM (accessed 1 June 2011).

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I think that the Born Free music video text’s loose end is now easy to tie up. M.I.A. and director Romain Gavras chose a “gingercide” to portray their allegory, because they were aware that redheads were already a strong and readable cultural reference in the Social Web, as it will be illustrated shortly. When the music video was originally released, conventional media failed to identify these crucial transmediatic references, but Web users did not.

Figure 10: Identification of two paratexts on a screenshot of a YouTube page playing M.I.A.’s Born Free music video.

A definitive proof of this awareness resides in the fact that, nowadays, both @CopperCab’s Gingers Do Have Souls video and South Park’s Ginger Kids clips appear as some of the first suggested videos on the several YouTube pages that contain copies of the original music video, which means both can be topologically conceptualized as paratexts65 in YouTube’s graphical user interface (Figure 10). This is a valuable indication because YouTube’s video recommendation system consists of a collaborative filtering algorithm based on its users

65

Genette, Palimpsestes, 10.

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browsing history.66 Another proof is, obviously, the undeniable success of the music video in the Social Web: there is absolutely nothing viral to it,67 because Social Web users are not passive hosts (as the marketing contagion metaphor would suggest), but active agents who deliberately and consciously disseminate what is culturally relevant to them. Conclusion This article has tried to conceptualize and demonstrate the usability of a textual analysis of the most pre-eminent audiovisual medium genre of today’s emerging digital landscape: the music video. This theoretical tool demonstrates that a transdisciplinary approach between Web and Literary Studies can be truly effective and fruitful in the study of the digital diffusion mechanisms prompted by the participative possibilities of the Social Web68 and the “producerly” nature of media texts.69 Finally, it has also been argued that the successful dissemination of media texts depends greatly on open, loose ends and gaps that foster “excessive readings” by its viewers and that these readings prompt potential synesthetic,70 transtextual71 and transmediatic72 correlations between texts, music videos and other media (Figure 11).

66

http://tinyurl.com/49dvj5r (accessed 3 June 2011). Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time: How to Waltz the Social Media/Viral Marketing Dance”, Business Horizons, 54 (2011), 253-63. 68 Jenkins, Convergence Culture. 69 Fiske, “Carnival and Style”. 70 Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory. 71 Genette, Palimpsestes. 72 Rose, The Art of Immersion. 67

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TV pundits

Marching Song music video

Born Free music video

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South Park’s Ginger Kids

Figure 11: Systematization of analysed correlations (or readings) between Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free music videos.

All this theoretical apparatus was used in a textual analysis of two case studies (Esben and The Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free music videos) that aimed at the detection of readable expressions of “fear” related to Social Web users’ active and collective cultural practices. The textual analysis tried to demonstrate that, on the one hand, this fear is related to users’ incapacity of dealing with online exposure and participation;73 and, on the other, that there is nothing “viral”74 in its meta-dissemination. On the contrary, its dissemination strongly depends on users’ social affiliations and it often re-articulates or reconfirms their shared values.75 Therefore, the violence portrayed in both Esben and the Witch’s Marching Song and M.I.A.’s Born Free music videos can be read as more than a mere “visual hook” that aims to catch viewers’ attention 73

Jenkins et al., Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. Kaplan and Haenlein, “Two Hearts in Three-Quarter Time”. 75 Jenkins et al., If It Doesn’t Spread, It’s Dead, 81. 74

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for commercial purposes76 and rather as a set of elaborated and readable references to one of the main side-effects of today’s digital culture of participation: the dissolution of the border between the private and the public spheres of Social Web users.

76

Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory, 90-96.

PART 4 UNCANNY REPRESENTATIONS OF THE SELF AND THE OTHER

SHAFT WHICH RAN: CHINESE WHISPERS WITH AUERBACH, BUCK, WOOLF AND DE QUINCEY ORTWIN DE GRAEF The conclusion to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which anticipates “the approaching unification and simplification” of “a common life of mankind on earth” has been interpreted more than it has been read. What has rarely received attention is the sudden intrusion in its final paragraph of Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants, deflecting attention from the troubled focus on the face of Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse that informs the final chapter of Mimesis. Traces of Thomas De Quincey in Woolf’s novel recollect the sinophobic fetishism spelling the crisis of sympathy in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and recover “the tyranny of the human face” as humanity’s first and final challenge.

It is finished. We are finished. Let’s face it. We’re fucked. “What does it mean then, what can it all mean?”1 What does it mean to be fucked? The OED is characteristically cautious yet inspiring. “Fuck, v. .... Probably cognate with Dutch fokken to mock (15th cent.), to strike (1591), to fool, gull (1623), to beget children (1637), to have sexual intercourse with (1657), to grow, cultivate (1772).”2 “Fokken” starts out as mocking, suggesting a form of deforming imitation, morphs into striking, testifying to a certain violence in the practice of mimesis, then turns into procreation and copulation and ends up in cultivation or breeding, where it lives to this day. One sense in which we may legitimately be said to be fucked is this: we are grown, cultivated, bred, reproduced, multiplied, copied in numbers that have been increasingly rising since the fifteenth century, reaching the 1 billion mark around 1800 and then soaring with increasing speed into the sublime – currently 7 billion and counting, with forecasts for mid1

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927), ed. David Bradshaw, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 121. 2 “Fuck, v.” in OED Online, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/75197?rskey=vdGI1I& result=2&isAdvanced=false (accessed 3 January 2012).

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century of between 7.5 and 10.5 billion members of our species growing on the planet – a spectacular instance of sustained and arguably unsustainable monoculture. But counting is easy and can produce a certain resigned comfort even in the catastrophe scenarios it generates, digitising all humans into figures collectively spinning out of control while conveniently remaining human units all the same – all the same. The reduction to figures at the heart of such figurations of fear helps us to face the future by relieving us of the impossible responsibility to face these figures as so many faces resembling our own. We all look the same. It is not just the Chinese. Here is a mythical moment from the history of late philology which prefigures these trivial thoughts. Around Easter 1945, Erich Auerbach finishes the study on the representation of reality in Western literature he set out on some three years previously to “trac[e] the combination of the everyday with tragic seriousness” that is the distinctive feature of “tragic realism”.3 What Mimesis seeks to record is the emergence of ordinary life as a serious cause of concern, as something that used to go without writing. A decisive turning point in this development is the “tremendous phenomenon” (M, 185) of the Divina Commedia, whose defiant vernacular “is a well-nigh incomprehensible miracle” (M, 182). As Auerbach’s extreme qualifications suggest, the stakes are high. Mixing the monstrous and the miraculous, Dante has unleashed the human. He has driven the systems of signification of Christian figural realism to the limit and has shattered the frame: “The image of man eclipses the image of God” (M, 202). In previous dispensations, the representation of ordinary life receives its legitimacy from its understanding as a figural anticipation of the final fulfilment, when all shall be revealed in a dialectically conclusive repetition of the miracle of the Incarnation in the mode of Comedy. Dante essentially perverts this logic by working an apparently more mundane but ultimately far more disturbing miracle: 3

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition. With a New Introduction by Edward W. Said, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003, 282 and 231. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition (M, plus page number). A modified and condensed version of my comments on Auerbach here appears in: Ortwin de Graef and Pieter Vermeulen, “Virgilian Incarnation: Hartman and the Issue of Auerbach’s Jewishness”, The Jewish Quarterly Review, 103/2 (2013), 142-44.

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... a direct experience of life which overwhelms everything else, a comprehension of human realities which spreads as widely and variously as it goes profoundly to the very roots of our emotions, an illumination of man’s impulses and passions which leads us to share in them without restraint and indeed to admire their variety and their greatness. And by virtue of this immediate and admiring sympathy with man, the principle, rooted in the divine order, of the indestructibility of the whole historical and individual man turns against that order, makes it subservient to its own purposes, and obscures it. (M, 202)

Dante’s human beings constitute the auto-incarnation of the human and at once invite all to cannibal thanksgiving, urging the human to partake of the human without restraint. Not yet half way through the dark wood of Western writing Mimesis explores, the lurid fervour of Auerbach’s original phrasing – “heiβe Teilnahme ohne jede Hemmung” [fervid participation without restraint],4 oddly tempered in Trask’s translation – marks the intensity of this miraculous release of the human figure from the logic of fulfilment. The flames of Dante’s explosive deflection of Christian apocalyptic realism flicker and flare up again over the following centuries until they fade into an alternative fulfilment in the final pages of Auerbach’s final chapter, “The Brown Stocking”. Crucially, this alternative apocalypse does not coincide with the convulsions of war ravaging Europe diagnosed by Auerbach from his position on the margins, as an exiled Professor of Philology in Istanbul. For these convulsions are only the last clashes between increasingly incoherent ideological constellations seeking to contain the human in new, mutually competing sectarian frames of significance always already shattering under the strain of what is to come. In the representational practices of serious realism in the decades following the First World War, the formal counterpart of this frame-breaking is the “dissol[ution of] reality into multiple and multivalent reflections of consciousness”, which produces “a certain atmosphere of universal doom” and “leav[es] the reader with an impression of hopelessness”, of “something confusing, something hazy ..., something hostile to the reality which they represent” (M, 4

All quotations in German are from: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis. Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur, Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1946, 193. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition (page number only).

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551). We seem to have come a long way since the miraculous outburst of “immediate and admiring sympathy with man” triggered by Dante, but Auerbach reassures us we are getting close to the goal. Announcing “something entirely different” (M, 551) that also characterises contemporary realist writing, he returns us once more to the human. He first briefly revisits the analysis of To the Lighthouse opening his final chapter, with its celebrated proto-narratological reconstruction of Woolf’s deconstruction of Edwardian shabby genteel upper-middle-class charitable stocking-knitting. Admittedly atypical in its moments of “good and genuine love” (M, 552), the novel is still, like the other gloomy works of modern serious realism reflecting “the decline of our world” (M, 551), filled with “an air of vague and hopeless sadness” (M, 551), “with irony, amorphous sadness, and doubt of life” (M, 552). And then a miracle happens and Auerbach exclaims: “Yet what realistic depth is achieved in every individual occurrence, for example the measuring of the stocking!” (M, 552). Mrs Ramsay’s knitwork-worrying becomes a prime example of “the random moment” (M, 552), “der beliebige Augenblick” (513), through which Auerbach redeems modern realism from its impotent implication in “the controversial and unstable orders [Ordnungen (513)] over which men fight and despair” (M, 552). We recall how Dante’s denizens of Hell, too, broke through the “göttliche Ordnung” (193) [divine order] in a claim to “unmittelbaren und bewundernden Teilnahme am Menschen” (193) [immediate and admiring participation in the human]. Yet there is a subtle but decisive difference: Dante’s characters are uniquely individuated in their representation of themselves against the Order that frames them, while “der beliebige Augenblick” that is uniquely the moment of Mrs Ramsay knitting away at her stocking is transfigured into evidence of “the elementary things which men in general have in common” (M, 552) irrespective of the various “Ordnungen” they fight about. Dante gives us the “self-fulfilment” of the human individual, depicted with such power of independence that “even in Hell there are great souls, and certain souls in Purgatory can for a moment forget the path of purification for the sweetness of a poem, the work of human frailty” (M, 202). The paradox of the Divina Commedia is its interruption of the eschatological drive that structures it, giving the singular soul in limbo “einige Augenblicke” [a few moments] pause to

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forget “den Weg zur Reinigung” (193-94) [the path of purification]. Modern realism’s counter-paradox is that in its emphatically contingent “Darstellung des beliebigen Lebensaugenblicks der verschiedenen Menschen” [representation of the random moment in the lives of different people], “das Ziel ... der langer Weg zu einem gemeinsamen Leben der Menschen auf der Erde” (514) [the goal ... the long way to a common life of humans on earth] stands revealed. In Dante the representation of the human obscures the goal; in modern realism the representation of the human exposes the goal. In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent – below the surface conflicts – the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. There are no longer even exotic peoples. A century ago (in Mérimée for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; today the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants. Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible. And it is most concretely visible now in the unprejudiced, precise, interior and exterior representation of the random moment in the lives of different people. So the complicated process of dissolution which led to fragmentation of the exterior action, to reflection of consciousness, and to stratification of time seems to be tending toward a very simple solution. Perhaps it will be too simple to please those who, despite all its dangers and catastrophes, admire and love our epoch for the sake of its abundance of life and the incomparable historical vantage point which it affords. But they are few in number, and probably they will not live to see much more than the first forewarnings of the approaching unification and simplification. (M, 552-53)

In this strangely poised passage, Mimesis comes to an end. That end has proven hard to read, involving as it does the undecidable difference between “solution” and “dissolution”, between “the goal”, “common life of mankind on earth”, surely a Good Thing, and the process of “levelling”, with its unsettling undertones of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Much as Auerbach’s own bewilderment at Woolf’s worrying over Mrs Ramsay’s knit work delivers the triumph of judgement (real life

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at last!), critical paralysis in the sustained analysis of this closing passage in Mimesis paradoxically tends to generate conviction. A good instance is Sarah Pourciau’s superb reading of Auerbach’s “Philology of Extremity”, which unpacks his apocalyptic rhetoric and documents its constitutive indecision, yet seems unable not to decide that the book’s conclusion is “unambiguously pessimistic”.5 Pourciau seeks to determine this pessimism as “anchor[ed]” “in a moment of crisis experienced at the furthest boundary of European time and space, in the liminal predicament of the philologist writing from Istanbul in the year 1945”.6 Yet in order to establish that predicament as the ground of her conviction that Mimesis ends in unambiguous pessimism, she dissolves without argument the basic grammatical distinction that renders its final paragraph so memorably unreadable – precisely the deictic distinction that secures and suspends discursive anchoring. The final paragraph of “The Brown Stocking” opens with a statement – “But something entirely different takes place here too” – followed by an invitation: “Let us turn again to the text which was our starting-point” (M, 551). The community of readers accompanies the guide, who proceeds to show us how little we really know about Mrs Ramsay’s world, and then transforms that uncertainty into the triumph of the stocking-measuring as an index of “realistic depth” revealing random yet “determining factors in our real lives” (M, 552), “unser wirkliches Leben” (513). In Auerbach’s original German, this last “unser” is the last but one occurrence of the first person plural. The text continues in passive, generic third-person and impersonal constructions up to the penultimate sentence, with its speculation that the approaching “simple solution” might be all “too simple” to “those [diejenigen] who, despite all its dangers and catastrophes, admire and love our [unsere] epoch”. Ignoring this us-them distinction, notwithstanding its reinforcement in the final sentence – “But they are few in number” –, Pourciau categorically identifies Auerbach as one of this number: For regardless of how one chooses to interpret his final lines, there is no escaping the paradoxical fact that the epoch for which he professes 5

Sarah Pourciau, “Istanbul, 1945: Erich Auerbach’s Philology of Extremity”, Arcadia, 41/2 (2006), 438. 6 Ibid., 438-39.

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such nobly understated loyalty, the epoch he loves “trotz aller Gefahren und Katastrophen, wegen ihres Lebensreichtums und des unvergleichlichen geschichtlichen Standorts, den sie bietet”, is none other than the era of fascism, genocide, and a Europe torn apart by two world wars.7

Granted, there is no logical reason why Auerbach could not be counted as one of those loving “unsere Epoche”, but grammatically and ideologically – philologically – the distinction must stand, or at the very least be read. By firmly positioning Auerbach on the “incomparable historical vantage point” his text qualifies as the object of love and admiration of those who find the simple solution too simple, Pourciau further consolidates the myth of Auerbach’s exile he himself began to draft in the “Epilogue” to the study and in other later comments. The upshot is that the putative “liminal predicament” of exile and crisis turns into a self-serving posture of confidently “pessimistic” dark irony, “tasteless[ly]” flirting with the apocalyptic as a matter of style.8 Yet the fact that Auerbach himself contributes to this aestheticization should not be allowed to obscure the resistance to this turn in his text – not only in its deictic indecision, but also and arguably more importantly in its faltering profession of a philology of the present for the future.9 Recent research by Kader Konuk carefully reconstructs the actual conditions of Auerbach’s exile in Istanbul from 1936 to 1947 and brings valuable corrections to the received image of the lone witness to the end of Europe lovingly shoring its fragments against its ruins from memory.10 Konuk offers a compelling account of Auerbach’s residence in Istanbul as one of a considerable academic community of 7

Ibid., 439. Ibid., 439. 9 In the first half or so of “Philologie der Weltliteratur”, a 1952 text Pourciau turns to for support, Auerbach does spell out the predicament of philology of the present in dark detail that chimes with Pourciau’s ungrammatical elision of the difference between “them” and “us” (Erich Auerbach, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Romanischen Philologie, Bern: Francke Verlag, 1967, 301-10). Yet the point stands that the final sentences of Mimesis keep that elision suspended – while the conclusion to “Philologie der Weltliteratur” reinforces an understanding of philology as a method – a “Weg” – to win the “rechte Liebe zur Welt” as “terra aliena” (310) and thereby dissociates Auerbach anew from the company of the latter-day “them”. 10 Kader Konuk, East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010. 8

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émigrés who did not just happen to land there in their flight from the catastrophic turns in the West, but were also actively recruited by a modernising Turkish state determined to claim its share of European belonging. Among the many fascinating findings she collects and discloses, one is particularly instructive here: a lecture held by Auerbach in 1941-1942, probably in French, and published, in Turkish translation, in Istanbul University’s annual collection of lectures. The topic is “Realism in Europe in the Nineteenth Century”, and here is how it ends: ... the art of realism is in a developing state, and works to show forth to the mind our life on earth and its increasing tendency to become a life shared in common. Those who understand this should not be shaken by the tragic events occurring today. History is manifested through catastrophic events and ruptures. That which is being prepared today, that which has been in preparation for a century, is the tragic realism I have discussed, modern realism, the life shared in common which grants the possibility of life to all people on earth.11

These lines clearly prefigure the finale, some four years later, of Mimesis. Here, too, contemporary catastrophe is encoded as a passage to a new state, and here, too, that new state is named “a life shared in common” for “all people on earth”. What is missing is the undecidable ambivalence of Mimesis – if anything, the perspective here is reassuring, and specifically designed to ease the distinction between the third person and the first person that would later trouble Mimesis. Evidently, abstracting even from the generic differences between a lecture to the Rector and assorted company and the conclusion to a 500-page monograph, the four years separating both texts are so disastrous that a change of mind would hardly be surprising. Yet there is one further remnant from the earlier lecture in the finale of Mimesis that suggests a more subtle continuity. The one sentence from the finale to Mimesis that is almost always glossed over is a left-over from the opening movements of the 19411942 lecture. Practising what Geoffrey Hartman has called his

11

Erich Auerbach, “Realism in Europe in the Nineteenth Century”, trans. Victoria Holbrook, in East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey, by Kader Konuk, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010, 192-93.

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“urbane, undogmatic Marxism”,12 Auerbach informs his Istanbul audience that in the nineteenth century the realist novel was the literary form which, “as an economist might put it”, “occupied production and found the most consumers”.13 He then tries to specify what characterises these novels as “realist” by labouring two terms “in need of precise definition”: “contemporary” and “ordinary”.14 The latter term is familiar to readers of Auerbach – it covers what his big book routinely refers to as the “everyday” (M, 282), “Alltäglichkeit” (269), whose combination with “tragic seriousness” is his high argument. The “contemporary”, on the other hand, is more elusive: For a topic to be contemporary in the realistic sense, it must be modern ... and must not be distant from the reader’s environment. Those of our contemporaries who are still living at a civilizational level we have already surpassed, for example, the Ethiopians of Africa or the Australian aborigines, cannot be subjects of the realist novel. They could be subjects only of an exotic novel. This distinction is in itself quite obscure and relative. For Frenchmen living in 1835, the customs of Spaniards and the inhabitants of the Isle of Corsica described by Mérimée were so different from their own that Colomba or Carmen seemed more exotic than realistic. However, today a Parisian doctor may find the life story of a laborer in San Francisco to be a contemporary tale. We rightly consider the wonderful Chinese novels of Madame Pearl Buck to be realist novels.15

The post-exotic “contemporary” represents the “commonality” of the increasingly interconnected “life of human beings on earth”, which in the nineteenth century was still “common only to Europe, or a part of Europe”.16 In Mimesis, this implicit tactical deference to Turkey in its aspirations to be “a part of Europe” is muted, and we are left with the Chinese: “There are no longer even exotic peoples. A century ago (in Mérimée for example), Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; 12

Geoffrey Hartman, “Erich Auerbach at Yale”, in A Scholar’s Tale: Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe, New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 169. My argument is indebted throughout to the acute comments on Hartman’s particular reception of the conclusion to Mimesis in: Pieter Vermeulen, Geoffrey Hartman: Romanticism after the Holocaust, London: Continuum, 2010, 21-26. 13 Auerbach, “Realism”, 181. 14 Ibid., 182. 15 Ibid., 182. 16 Ibid., 182.

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today the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants” (M, 552). As the last author named in Mimesis Pearl Buck carries a considerable burden. No longer the writer of “wonderful Chinese novels”, she here and now only supplies figures of post-exotic human life on earth: “die chinesischen Bauern von Pearl Buck” (514). This is the here and now of the contemporary everyday concluding “the crowding of mankind on a shrinking globe” (M, 550) which the philologist calls to our attention as a first “Anzeichen” [indication] of “the approaching unification and simplification”. Reading seems no longer required, seeing suffices: the end becomes “sichtbar” [visible] in neutrally noted Chinese peasants. To register the significance of this suspension of reading, it helps to recall Auerbach’s quotation of a “well-known and strangely arresting passage” from La Bruyère, about two thirds through Mimesis, as an indication of the kind of life unavailable for representation in seventeenth-century classical French literature: One sees certain ferocious animals, male and female, scattered over the countryside, black, livid, and burned by the sun, bound to the soil which they dig and turn over with unconquerable stubbornness; they have a sort of articulate voice, and when they stand up they exhibit a human face, and in fact they are men. They retire at night into dens, where they live on black bread, water, and roots; they spare other men the toil of sowing, tilling, and harvesting in order to live, and thus deserve not to be without the bread which they have sown. (M, 366)

What distinguishes these wild animals from Buck’s peasants is that the animals “exhibit a human face” which arrests the onlooker and challenges representation, while the Chinese peasants represent humanity as the self-evident that goes without saying. La Bruyère’s “concrete and serious treatment” of these barely human animals “attribute[s] to an everyday contemporary subject greater weight than is aesthetically its due” (M, 366) within the representational limits of his time; Buck just records available humanity. And Auerbach registers that record as a matter of course: there is no need any more for philology to read the release of the human from the strictures of representation. La Bruyère’s peasants prefigure Buck’s who fulfil them, and in this fulfilment lose face in the sense that they cease to figure and remain to be seen as more of the same. No “heiβe

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Teilnahme ohne jede Hemmung” (193) here, nor the miraculous recovery of human reality from “amorphous sadness, and doubt of life” (M, 552) in random stocking-knitting: what is ready for seeing goes without saying and is taken as read – it is always already said, le dit, the moralistic; as distinct from what always needs saying as writing requiring reading, the ethical. For such is the distinction Auerbach, with his customary maddeningly cavalier accuracy, confers on La Bruyère’s vision: the “moralizing emphasis” (M, 366) of the passage on the peasants is not what makes it arresting; it is “packend” [arresting] because it is “ernsthaft ethisch” [seriously ethical] (348), and it is ethical, other than moralistic, because it is haunted by an uncanny feature its writing responds to but cannot exhaust: “une face humaine” (349). Buck’s Chinese peasants, by contrast, just feature as so many familiar faces in which we recognise and forget ourselves. Who reads Buck anymore? She has been read more than most: the most widely translated American author of the twentieth century, 1938 Nobel Laureate, the only American author to make it into Mimesis (to the understandable chagrin of some).17 Auerbach did not read Buck. Not as a philologist. Yet by not dropping her name when recycling his Istanbul lecture and instead dropping it into the final paragraph of Mimesis, he passed the buck to the philologists of the future, who have by and large chosen to ignore the challenge – or have decided it was not, or was not yet, enough of a challenge to write about, at least not while reading Mimesis. Buck’s prose is indeed undeceptively easy and responds well to being processed as just another indication of “the approaching unification and simplification” (M, 553) as the aftermath of history in unarresting human homogeneity. Yet when read, it spells the haunting return of the face as the trace launching human history. The best-known of “the wonderful Chinese novels of Madame Pearl Buck” was and still is (if at all) The Good Earth (1931). It charts the life of Wang Lung, who starts out as a poor peasant but thanks to thrift, effort, some good luck, considerable cunning and the unflinching selfless service of his first wife, O-lan, dies as a wealthy land-owner and head of a big family. Plot and characters are 17

Carl Landauer, “Auerbach’s Performance and the American Academy, or How New Haven Stole the Idea of Mimesis”, in Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996, 179. The most solid single study of Buck is still: Peter Conn, Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

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profoundly unpuzzling and the narrator generally withholds overt judgement and explanation, because what transpires explains and judges itself. The presentation of the plight of Chinese women is a good case in point. Buck does not explicitly criticise the deep structural misogyny of Chinese culture but deftly displays it as ideology in practice. O-lan has already given Wang Lung two sons – here is the description of delivery three: “What now – has your time come?” The voice of his wife answered from the bed more feebly than he had ever heard her speak: “It is over once more. It is only a slave this time – not worth mentioning.” Wang Lung stood still. A sense of evil struck him. A girl! 18

What is not worth mentioning is that to consider a baby girl not worth mentioning, not to mention downright evil, is bad. We all know that, and eventually they will learn: after all, they are already human, without fully knowing it. The same representational strategy informs other descriptions of the communication, or lack of it, between Wang Lung and O-lan: Then Wang Lung turned to the woman and looked at her for the first time. She had a square, honest face, a short, broad nose with large black nostrils, and her mouth was wide, a gash in her face. Her eyes were small and of a dull black in colour, and were filled with some sadness that was not clearly expressed. It was a face that seemed habitually silent and unspeaking, as though it could not speak if it would.19 Wang Lung, watching her move steadily and slowly about the rooms on her big feet, watching secretly the stolid, square face, the unexpressed, half-fearful look of her eyes, made nothing of her. 20 Sometimes, working over the clods in the fields, he would fall to pondering about her .... What had been her life, that life she never shared with him? He could make nothing of it. And then he was

18

Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth, London: Methuen, 1953, 60. Ibid., 18. 20 Ibid., 27. 19

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ashamed of his own curiosity and of his interest in her. She was, after all, only a woman.21 ... she looked at him piteously and sadly out of her strange dumb eyes that were like a beast’s eyes that cannot speak....22

We, as Buck’s readers, know that O-lan is, after all, only human, not a beast, not only a woman, and that the unexpressed sadness in her eyes expresses the years of abuse she suffered as a young girl. It is Wang Lung who can make nothing of her; for us, Buck has already made her what she always was: human – and as she lies dying toward the end of the book, she grants O-lan a margin of expression in halfconscious murmured memories of her childhood, and Wang Lung, sitting by her, finally a measure of our understanding: “for the first time Wang Lung saw into her heart.”23 In contrast, we, as readers, see into the hearts of Buck’s characters all the time and can recover what we find there for an implicit ideal humanity – free from brutalisation, ignorance, tyranny, and sadness – which Buck invites us to imagine as already embodied in ourselves. It brought her the Nobel Prize, honouring her “notable works which pave the way to a human sympathy passing over widely separated racial boundaries”.24 As Bertil Lindblad’s 1938 introduction to Buck’s Banquet Speech put it, Mrs Pearl Buck, you have in your literary works, which are of the highest artistic quality, advanced the understanding and the appreciation in the Western world of a great and important part of mankind, the people of China. You have taught us by your works to see the individuals in that great mass of people. You have shown us the rise and fall of families, and the land as the foundation upon which families are built. In this you have taught us to see those qualities of thought and feeling which bind us all together as human beings on this earth, and you have given us Westerners something of China’s soul. When by the development of technical inventions the peoples of the earth are drawn closer to each other, the surface of the earth shrinks, 21

Ibid., 27. Ibid., 192. 23 Ibid., 243. 24 Per Hallström, “Nobel Prize Presentation Speech”, in Nobelprize.org., 1938: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1938/press.html (accessed 3 January 2012). 22

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One year later, “us Westerners” began to tear the world apart again over claims to land on which to found our families, and in this light the survival of this grammar of human unification and global understanding in Auerbach’s wartime citations of Buck is all the more remarkable. As the last Nobel Prize in Literature laureate before the outbreak of the Second World War, Buck represents an emphatically idealist investment in literature as an apparatus for the advancement of understanding and sympathy. To point out that the intended increase in understanding apparently did not prevent another great war, as Auerbach could have done but did not, would have been to overrate understanding and to buy into the fantasy of sympathy as the solution to all conflict. There is no question that literature can generate understanding and sympathy; the question is what that understanding is of, what that sympathy is with, or for. And for a philologist the pursuit of that question must engage with writing that challenges rather than assumes the possibility conditions of sympathy and understanding. What makes the final passage of Mimesis so difficult to read is its deadpan avoidance of the affective-ideological rhetoric of sympathy and understanding, all the more conspicuous in the presence of Pearl Buck. Admiration and love are qualified as felt only by those who feel the future looks too simple, the others – all of us, readers of Auerbach, not Buck – are left without feeling. So we supply it ourselves, celebrating or denouncing Auerbach’s finale to the extent that we feel it does or does not properly represent the fears or the fantasies we happen to harbour in the face of the past as a forewarning for our present. Yet all the text itself delivers is the difference between La Bruyère and Buck: there was a time when seeing peasants as human was a shock to the regime of representation, requiring the ethical 25

Bertil Lindblad, “Pearl Buck – Banquet Speech”, in Nobelprize.org, 1938: http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1938/buck-speech.html (accessed 3 January 2012).

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recognition of these ferocious male and female animals as, indeed, human; now is the time when all peasants are always already human and should be enjoying the rights this entails – the only thing shocking is that in China they do not, hardly a shock to the regime of representation, only a shock to the system of distribution of goods and rights, which to a philologist, no matter how Marxist, is the business of others – who may not like this unification of the human, but that is their problem. For the philologist loves language and feels that love most when it is tested or thwarted and feeling fails into passion. Mute in her world, O-lan’s face communicates its essence to the reader as an irresistible and unsurprising call for sympathetic understanding. No need for philology here. Philologists are only of any use in the face of the unreadable – such as the face of Mrs Ramsay, or indeed the face of Lily Briscoe, facing the reader as the final chapter of Mimesis opens: “And even if it isn’t fine tomorrow”, said Mrs Ramsay, raising her eyes to glance at William Bankes and Lily Briscoe as they passed, “it will be another day. And now”, she said, thinking that Lily’s charm was her Chinese eyes, aslant in her white, puckered little face, but it would take a clever man to see it, “and now stand up, and let me measure your leg”. (M, 525)

Mimesis comes to its conclusion in a stretch of reading between two instances of the proper adjective “Chinese”. The first is used improperly, for the elusive charm of the painter Lily Briscoe; the second is used properly, for a people whose representation prefigures the advent of the “common life of mankind on earth”. The improper use of the adjective at the start throws a spanner in the dialectical works, preventing the argument from coming to rest in the proper use at the end as a mark of revelation, be it the apocalypse of harmonious humanity or the post-apocalypse of horrible homogeneity. Chinese is not coming – it was always here, not as a cipher of abstract humanity but as one figure among many of the challenge to reading put up by the human face which no ideology of sympathy can short-circuit in the name of the human, and no ideology of apathy can put down as a thing of the past.

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Lily’s Chinese eyes. Auerbach cites them twice, Woolf records them five times.26 They are, trivially, the slits of her vision, as she sits painting Mrs Ramsay’s figure, unable to finish her picture until well after Mrs Ramsay’s death, and finishing it finally only after a prolonged crisis of sympathy resolves itself as a matter of fact, breaking through the limitations of “the human apparatus for painting or for feeling”, that “miserable machine” that “always [breaks] down at the critical moment”.27 “With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”28 The content of that vision, Auerbach remarks, remains “enigmatic, only dimly to be conjectured” (M, 551). As a philologist, he could have refined his earlier exploration of the enigma of representation in the narratological scandal of the passage on Mrs Ramsay’s uniquely sad face by articulating the metafictional coincidence of author and artist in the novel’s last “I”, as a figure for Woolf’s claim to the vision she hopes to have had – the I as the finishing line in the centre. Yet Auerbach stops reading and instead imagines Mrs Ramsay’s “beliebiges Augenblick” as disclosing “the wealth of reality and depth of life” we share with Chinese peasants. The task for future philology is to pervert the course of this vision by returning to what remains of Mrs Ramsay’s face after it “blazed up” into the “rapture of sympathy” Lily remembers but fails to feel.29 Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, halfway down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad. 30

“Who is speaking in this paragraph?” (M, 531), Auerbach asks. The text offers no answer other than its own writing: 26 For alternative readings of Lily’s Chinese eyes, see: Eric Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, Modernism and Chinese Pain, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 181-88. Hayot’s study is a superb exploration of things Chinese as demarcation lines for ideologies of sympathy in Western modernity, also engaging with Buck (Hayot, The Hypothetical Mandarin, 207-14). 27 Woolf, Lighthouse, 158. 28 Ibid., 170. 29 Ibid., 125. 30 Ibid., 26.

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Virginia Woolf wrote this paragraph. She did not identify it through grammatical and typographical devices as the speech or thought of a third person. One is obliged to assume that it contains direct statements of her own. But she does not seem to bear in mind that she is the author and hence ought to know how matters stand with her characters. (M, 531)

Auerbach’s mock-exasperation marks the difference between Woolf and Buck: O-lan’s sad face speaks for itself, Mrs Ramsay’s face eludes “proper interpretation” – all we get is “the shock received by one looking at Mrs Ramsay’s face”, in a sequence that “verges upon a realm beyond reality” (M, 532). To receive that shock philologically requires mapping that realm as the reality of writing and reading words like “shaft which ran”, whose force of inscription interrupts the representation of reality and translates the generic “random moment” back to the “beliebige Augenblick”, the glance of an eye that bespeaks the excessive economy of love. At the time she was writing To the Lighthouse in 1926, Woolf was reading Thomas De Quincey for an essay in the TLS. Here is the record of this reading that concerns us here: When he was a child he stood by his sister’s dead body and suddenly a vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up for ever. I, in spirit, rose as on billows that also ran up the shaft for ever; and the billows seemed to pursue the throne of God; but that also ran before us and fled away continually. 31

The direction is reversed but the shaft which ran runs from Woolf to De Quincey as the trace of the face. In the passage Woolf quotes from here, De Quincey revisits his visit to his sister’s bed chamber, recalling her “angel face” changed utterly by death, the “solemn wind” that “began to blow – the saddest that ear ever heard”,32 and the 31

Virginia Woolf, “Impassioned Prose” (TLS, 16 September 1926), in Collected Essays by Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, London: The Hogarth Press, 1966, 167. Some of De Quincey’s impact on To the Lighthouse (though not the shaft which ran) is documented in: John Ferguson, “A Sea Change: Thomas De Quincey and Mr Carmichael in To the Lighthouse”, Journal of Modern Literature, 14 (1987), 4563. 32 Woolf’s “Impassioned Prose” picks up this sad wind too (170).

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“trance” that fell upon him as this “one great audible symbol of eternity” “settled upon the frost which overspread my sister’s face”: “A vault seemed to open in the zenith of the far blue sky, a shaft which ran up forever.”33 Woolf reads the passage as a writer reading a precursor in the impossible quest for prose without precedents, “modes of impassioned prose” in De Quincey’s own phrase. For De Quincey, Woolf writes, as “for all writers”, the “indispensable condition” for any measure of success in this quest was “adjusting the perspective to suit his own eyesight”: “Nothing must come too close”; “A mist must lie upon the human face.”34 As her diary for the days on which she is reading and writing this reveals, Woolf suffered this imperative of perspective as an acute personal challenge. She records how on seeing two girls, “city clerks, or secretaries, tramping along the road”, her “instinct at once throws up a screen, which condemns them”.35 Condemning the screening instinct as “a great mistake”, she suspects that it also “preserves our sanity”: If we had not this device for shutting people off from our sympathies, we might, perhaps, dissolve utterly. Separateness would be impossible. But the screens are in the excess; not the sympathy. 36

In the essay on De Quincey, just before the “shaft which ran” passage, she notes how he was “incapable of a sustained and passionate interest in the affairs of other people” and illustrates this with an unreferenced allusion to the Confessions of an English OpiumEater: “He would follow a poor family who went marketing on a Saturday night, sympathetically, but at a distance.”37 De Quincey’s 33

Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey. Volume 19: Autobiographic Sketches, vol. 1.1, eds Grevel Lindop and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2003, 12 (emphasis in the original). 34 Woolf, “Impassioned Prose”, 169. Mist as a figure for what shelters us from others is a central trope in To the Lighthouse, e.g. 61, 74. In the former passage, the claim of the other conjures up “the whole world spread out beneath ... as if it were Constantinople seen through a mist”, and demands attention for its distinctive features “emerg[ing] from the mist” (62). Down in Istanbul, Auerbach must have sensed being seen. 35 Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume III: 1925-1930, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, assist. Andrew McNeillie, London: Hogarth Press, 1980, 104. 36 Ibid., 104. 37 Woolf, “Impassioned”, 167.

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interested distance from the poor seems to strike a liveable balance between screen and sympathy, and the passage in “The Pleasures of Opium” in the Confessions initially confirms that impression. De Quincey describes how he habitually took opium on Saturday nights and then ventured out to wander the “parts of London, to which the poor resort”, intent on expressing his “interest in the concerns of the poor” not, as most men do, by “sympathy ... with their distresses and sorrows”, but by “sympathising with their pleasures”.38 But these memories of happy slumming end with a twist: “For all this, however, I paid a heavy price in distant years, when the human face tyrannized over my dreams”.39 “The Pains of Opium” details that price. De Quincey reconstructs his increasing mental deterioration as evident in the decisive decline of pleasurable reverie into tormenting nightmare. But now that which I have called the tyranny of the human face began to unfold itself .... now it was that upon the rocking waters of the ocean the human face began to appear: the sea appeared paved with innumerable faces, upturned to the heavens: faces, imploring, wrathful, despairing, surged upwards by thousands, by myriads, by generations, by centuries: – my agitation was infinite, – my mind tossed – and surged with the ocean.40

And the moment this downturn sets in, it turns East, “transport[ing]” the dreamer “into Asiatic scenes” unleashing fullblown sinophobia: In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence, and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyze. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals.41

38

Thomas De Quincey, The Works of Thomas De Quincey. Volume 2: Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, 1821-1856, ed. Grevel Lindop, London: Pickering & Chatto, 2000, 49. 39 Ibid., 50. 40 Ibid., 70. 41 Ibid., 70-71.

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But the Chinese are not brute animals. On the contrary, southern Asia – comprising China in De Quincey’s geography – is “the cradle of the human race”, it “is, and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life, the great officina gentium. Man is a weed in those regions”.42 What Auerbach engineered as the advent of shared humanity delivered by Western tragic realism stands revealed here as the persistence of the human as an oriental weed. The sinister sinophobia of this deranged vision is ultimately only a fetishist displacement of the sad wisdom it harbours, as witness its origin in the tyranny of the human face as the hangover after overindulgence in interested sympathy with the Caucasian poor seeking pleasure in the West End: not that our future is about to finish in drab homogeneity or sober if noble equality, but that we have always just been badly finished beings unable to live up to the love of the other and doomed to denial to preserve our sanity. The fantasy of Christ as the fulfilment of the human which finds a secular finish in Auerbach’s tragic realism is only ever a screen on which humanity projects its excessive aesthetic investment in sympathy to forget the fearfully unreadable face of the human. What prevents this sad wisdom from losing itself in an aestheticization of autist authenticity is the love of language, that is, the world, not the earth. This is where it starts.

42

Ibid., 70.

THE PHANTOM IN THE MIRROR: DUPLICATION, SPECTRALITY, AND THE ROMANTIC FEAR OF FANTASY IN WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE AND DE QUINCEY BRECHT DE GROOTE This essay examines two related Romantic figures: the figure of the mirror and the figure of the spectre. A focussed rhetorical reading of some exemplary texts will demonstrate that the former corresponds to a self-contained structure of redoubling or self-duplication, which generates a paradoxically egotistical sense of community; and that the latter stands in for a structure of dedoubling, which is generative of alterity. The two also point to different strategies in reading, writing, and interpreting: the spectral emerges from the spectacle, presenting itself as a thoroughly disruptive revision, as a secondary event, or as an allegory. The contemporary term for this kind of disruptive structure is fancy or fantasy, and as the essay shows, it is a term that was specifically used to name a dynamic of trauma and fear. The essay develops this argument in tracing the shift from duplication to spectrality in key writings by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, and in using for its conclusion a reading of a highly self-conscious and integrative commentary by Thomas De Quincey. In addition, the discussion frames this shift by taking up at crucial turns a debate between Geoffrey Hartman and Paul de Man.

A lady once asked me whether I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity, No, madam! I have seen far too many myself. I have indeed a whole memorandum book filled with records of these Phaenomena, many of them interesting and data for Psychology, and affording some valuable materials for a theory of perception and its dependence on the memory and imagination. 1

1. Reflections The prevalence of mirrors, echoes and related effects in Romantic literature and the singular enthusiasm that Romantic authors express for such instances of reflection have long been key points of reference. 1

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Friend”, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. IV.1, ed. Barbara E. Rooke, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969, 146.

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The modern history of the critical reception of reflection goes as far back as M.H. Abrams’ The Mirror and the Lamp, which was first published in 1953. Abrams’s central argument revolved around the duplicity of duplication. Romantic writers, he argued, certainly take great delight in mirrors, but their point is precisely to leave behind such emblems of a strictly mimetic conception of writing. Art, that is, was no longer to be imitative of reality but prophetic of ideality: be the lamp, not the mirror; see and then break through seeing.2 Subsequent generations of readers have significantly revised Abrams’ assumptions and presumptions, but they have remained faithful to his essential intuition: Romantic mirrors are far from straightforward devices of one-on-one duplication. It is in its duplicitous capacity to conform as well as to deform, to redouble and to dedouble,3 that reflection has continued to excite interest, especially from those quarters of a more or less deconstructionist affiliation: Geoffrey Hartman has written widely on the topic as has Paul de Man; as have such commentators as Tilottama Rajan, Sean Gaston and Éric Dayre. So very persuasive has the hold of mirrors on the critical imagination become that in one essay Hartman develops the motif as an “emblem of interpretation”; as a critique of criticism itself.4 The following essay relies heavily on these texts and their critical or metacritical engagement with reflection: it develops from them the devices to conduct a persistently “rhetorical” reading of reflection, which means that it will ground its concepts in such terms as metaphor, symbol, metonymy and allegory. Its specific contribution is a nearer examination of the ways structures of duplication, which establish a paradoxically egotistical community, intersect with two other critical questions in keeping with the guiding themes of the present volume: “fear” and “fantasy”. To that end, the section immediately following 2

M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. 3 I am using this word to translate the French dédoubler, a term used by Paul de Man in his essay on Baudelaire’s use of ironical reflections. See Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd edn, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, Theory and History of Literature VII, 1983, 187-228. 4 Pieter Vermeulen, “The Suspension of Reading: Wordsworth’s ‘Boy of Winander’ and Trauma Theory”, Orbis Litterarum, 62/6 (2007), 480. I am referring to Geoffrey Hartman, “Centaur: Remarks on the Psychology of the Critic”, Salmagundi, 43 (1979), 136-39.

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this very brief introduction will deal with fear and trauma; the section after will treat of fantasy; and the fourth and final section will attempt to bring together into one model the various threads that compose fear and fantasy. The purpose of this structure is to recreate a debate between Hartman and de Man, or at least between the two perspectives on Romanticism and reflection that they represent, and to offer a partial resolution. First, however, a more pointed typology of Romantic reflections is in order. 2. Mirrors In its most straightforward and most unambiguously idealized manifestation, reflection appears simply as a mirror. William Wordsworth uses the following arrangement to illustrate what he means by “highest beauty”: In a deep pool, by happy chance we saw A twofold image; on a grassy bank A snow-white ram, and in the crystal flood Another and the same! ... Each had his glowing mountains, each his sky And each seem’d centre of his own fair world: Antipodes unconscious of each other. 5

Or there is Samuel Taylor Coleridge: his “Frost at Midnight” represents the mystery of nature in icicles that repeat the scene overhead, “quietly shining to the quiet moon” and in clouds that repeat the landscape underfoot, “imag[ing] in their bulk both lakes and shores / And mountain crags”.6 Whether they write in liquid, gaseous, or frozen water, these are all examples that operate optically: their medium is light. There is another type of reflection, too; one that is reliant for its reduplications on sounds and echoes. It is this type that has received most critical attention: the debate between de Man and Hartman that was referenced above has for its primary subject William 5

William Wordsworth, The Excursion, eds Sally Bushell, James A. Butler and Michael C. Jaye, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, The Cornell Wordsworth XXI, 2007, 287, ll. 442-52. 6 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”, in Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. XVI.1, ed. J.C.C. Mays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 452-59, ll. 73-74, ll. 57-58.

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Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy, &c.”.7 In the middle of a set-piece landscape of reflective lakes this poem plants a new element, a Boy, who engages in what later editions of the poem paratextually gloss as a “transfer of internal feelings, co-operating with external accidents”.8 This is what such a transfer looks like:9 [The Boy] blew mimic hootings to the silent owls, That they might answer him – And they would shout, ... And shout again, Responsive to his call, – with quivering peals, And loud halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Redoubled and redoubled.10

Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey” reprises this very basic template of sounds doubling and redoubling as they travel between two points. True, its resident speaker is the poet’s literary persona rather than a childlike innocent, and its addressee is not an excitable owlet but the speaker’s sister. The poem’s structure is still one of reproduction. After all, what the lyrical speaker admires in his sibling hardly depends on what she actually says or does. It depends on what he can recognize as his “own” in her words or appearance:

7

Vermeulen, “The Suspension of Reading”, 466ff. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and Other Poems, 1797-1800 (1798), eds James Butler and Karen Green, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, The Cornell Wordsworth VI, 1993, 379. 9 “There was a Boy” has rather an involved editorial history. The first draft is dated 1799; its first and significantly altered publication is in the 1800 second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. The poem was integrated in The Prelude from its second 1805 edition onwards, continued to appear in the Lyrical Ballads with an added bit of paratextual commentary in 1815, and kept changing all the way up to 1850. The version used in this essay is this last one. While Wordsworth’s many alterations impact the poem’s interpretation at several crucial points, only one of these, the inclusion of the Boy’s death, will be relevant to this essay, and it does not absolutely require a close comparison of all the different editions. For more detailed accounts and analyses, see especially Neil Hertz, “Wordsworth and the Tears of Adam”, Studies in Romanticism, 7/I (1967), 15-21; and Vermeulen, “Winander”, 463-66. 10 William Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W.J.B. Owen, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, The Cornell Wordsworth IX, 1985, 103-104, ll. 37580. 8

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In thy voice I catch The language of my former heart, and read My former pleasures in the shooting lights Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while May I behold in thee what I was once ....11

What this I requires from this “thou” is not exactly an interlocutor: his eyes are in search of a mirror; his voice needs an echo chamber. Thus also Coleridge’s lyrical voices, who freely indicate their struggle to secure some target for their speeches external to themselves yet entirely like themselves, “every where / echo or mirror seeking of [themselves]”.12 They do not need their counterparts to speak, or even to share their time and space; only to be acquiescent presences, “companionable form[s]”.13 In “Frost at Midnight”, for instance, the “infant”14 to whom the poem is dedicated is soundly asleep, and at any rate far too young either to understand or to respond; the sister who receives a short apostrophe as “my play-mate when we were both clothed alike” is no more than a memory.15 In other words, while the accepted term for these and similar texts is “conversation” poetry, their set-up is really more akin to “a species of ventriloquism, where two are represented as talking while in truth only one man speaks”.16 They are “monologues rather than conversations”,17 but monologues that do require a dual structure to maintain their single-mindedness: a speaker and a reflective surface for that speaker to bounce ideas off. The question is what kind of poetical ideal it is that requires this kind of rhetorical set-up for its description. Rajan points the way when she suggests that a distinct advantage of redoubled structures is that they make for a “self-confirming” form of writing.18 Dayre further specifies what self-confirmation might mean in this context: there is “un autre dispersé ou disséminé” [a dispersed or disseminated other], that is, “restitué au même d’un soi-même ... sous la forme d’un 11

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 119, ll. 117-21 (my emphasis). Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”, 454, ll. 22-23. 13 Ibid., l. 19. 14 Ibid., l. 7. 15 Ibid., l. 43. 16 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, vol. 2, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983, 109. 17 Tilottama Rajan, Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986, 212. 18 Ibid., 212. 12

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pronom intensif ‘se ipse’ [literally, itself itself] qui revient sans cesse sous la plume de Coleridge” [restored to an itself itself ... in the shape of the intensive pronoun se ipse, which Coleridge constantly keeps returning to].19 Conversation poetry is certainly in need of such selfconfirmation figured as the restitution of an Other. Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s personae construct their addresses around their fears, and they define these fears as experiences of a radical and insuperable alienation from all of nature; as a divorce of cosmic scale between “das Göttliche” [the godly] and “das Erdliche” [the earthly].20 It is difficult to capture the full force of this problem of duality except to keep on restating its essential dichotomy through new pairings of contrasting terms; suffice to say that Hartman unequivocally refers to the separation of man and nature as a “trauma”, and that he is certainly not one to use that word as empty hyperbole.21 The trauma that Hartman speaks of is a linguistic affliction; an inability to grasp that crucial complement of language that is its referential link, its access to and grounding in reality. Sure enough, when Wordsworth considers his emblematic Boy and his chorus of responsive nightfowl, he presents himself as “mute”: it is not that he cannot write or speak, but that he can only do so to report on others’ successful engagement with nature. Similarly, when Coleridge devises a vignette to explain what it means to be dejected, he opts for a parody of the Boy’s joyously redoubled cries: ‘Tis of a little child, but she hath lost her way, And now moans low in bitter grief and fear, And now screams loud, and hopes to make her mother hear.22

The instance of fear adds significantly to Rajan’s analysis of conversation. If the speaker’s mother, sister or wife is silent or absent, 19

Éric Dayre, L’Absolu comparé: essai sur une séquence moderne: Coleridge, De Quincey, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Paris: Hermann, 2009, 31. 20 Jean Paul Richter, Vorschule der Aesthetik. Nebst einige Vorlesungen in Leipzig über die Parteien der Zeit, 2nd edn, Vienna: Gräffer and Härter, 1815, I, 55. 21 Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry, 1787-1814, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964, XVI; see Vermeulen, “Winander”, 466-67. 22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Dejection: An Ode”, in Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. XVI.2, ed. J.C.C. Mays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 695-702, ll. 121-25.

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or if her voice is described only for its sound and not for its actual contents, it may be less a case of self-glorification and more a case of “representation”; one among a great many attempts to restate the very abstract problem of duality through some suitable and very concrete dual trope: in this case, the dual trope of a man speaking to a woman. It is significant that the speaker never presents his female foil as absolutely silenced, only as silent to “him”; and if she is silent to him, it is because she is speaking a language not his, “that eternal language” that she “see[s] and hear[s]” in clouds and mountain crags.23 She does continue to communicate, then, but her interlocutor is nature, and in this specialization she is accomplished enough to attain a perfect reflection: “to her all things live, from pole to pole, / Their life the life of her eddying soul.”24 Woman represents Nature; man represents Man. What sets apart the male speakers and their assorted Dear Ladies from other dual tropes is that they manage to be far more than illustrations. They are metaphors, which is to say that they are “impure substitutions”: rather than be handy momentary stand-ins for nature, they add in a new element; they inject a new and aberrant logic into descriptions of duality. Rajan yet again points the way when she uses the term “naïve auditors”25 to describe the host of female characters. She is not herself aware of the oxymoronic quality of the phrase, or at least foregoes its detailed consideration in favour of more pressing concerns, but there it is: it ought to be impossible to be both naïve “and” an auditor; to be both a wild-eyed creature of nature “and” to respond to man, nature’s diametrical opposite. The inverse holds true for their counterparts, the knowing orators, to adapt Rajan’s terminology. And yet both those that are naïve and those that know strike precisely that unexpected balance: no matter how strongly they are identified with nature or with civilization, they never entirely relinquish their status as mothers or fathers, sisters or brothers, wives or husbands. They are addressed as such; they address as such. If this pivotal paradox escapes Rajan’s notice, it is because her argument never sufficiently leaves its preferred mode of abstraction to acknowledge that analogies might deviate, and that in deviating, they might achieve things unavailable to the abstract themes that they 23

Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”, 456, ll. 58 and 60. Coleridge, “Dejection”, 702, ll. 135-36 (my emphasis). 25 Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 213. 24

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embody. When she observes that “the hermeneutics of conversation as a self-duplication ... heals and absorbs duality”,26 she certainly names the reason why the despondent writer might choose conversation poetry over other genres, but she never quite explains how this hermeneutical process might operate in more practical terms. Rajan’s explicit choice of a “focus on representation not in terms of tropes”, as she calls it in a recent critical self-reappraisal, is a useful strategy in many ways, but not when a very precise analysis of the structures that make up reflection is called for.27 De Man does recognize what is different about the humanizing metaphors of orator and auditor; what it is that is at stake in “the passage ... from tropes to anthropomorphisms”.28 There is, he argues, a “deadly negative power invested in the figure” or trope, which is its changeless repetition of the established patterns of duality: tropes “[freeze] into stone”, freeze into conformity, the play of language. 29 Anthropomorphosis manages to jolt this arrangement into action: it reconfigures language into “one single system of motion and circulation, with corresponding economic and metaphysical benefits”.30 Coleridge’s dejected speaker in “Frost at Midnight”, for instance, takes great solace in his movement towards ever more human imagery: he starts with inanimate objects, imbues them with human characteristics, and finally progresses to various classes of people, to “the stranger’s face, / Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved”.31 This “apparent enumeration”, de Man observes, “is in fact a foreclosure”;32 it locks in the human as the only possible image apposite to nature. What is especially significant about this poem is that its orator announces his search as one for a form amenable to

26

Ibid., 215. Tilottama Rajan, “Romanticism and the Unfinished Project of Deconstruction”, European Romantic Review, 23/III (2012), 299. 28 Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984, 245. While de Man’s essay is almost exclusively concerned with Nietzsche and Baudelaire, there is nothing to prevent its application to Wordsworth, Coleridge and so on, especially since the essay ends by revisiting the interplay of allegory and symbol, two terms that de Man developed through close readings of British and German Romanticism (see de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, 187-228). 29 De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 247. 30 Ibid., 251. 31 Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”, 455, ll. 41-42 (my emphasis). 32 De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 214. 27

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“sympathies with me”.33 It is this term, “sympathies”, that puts de Man’s somewhat impenetrable talk of circles and motions to interpretive use. In his own history of the mind/body dichotomy, Jonathan Lamb argues that what personal imagery uniquely brings to the table is its capacity for “sympathetic substitution”.34 He further clarifies what this term might mean through an example of Eve marvelling at her riverside reflection in Paradise Lost, and, more usefully for the purposes of this essay, through Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Sympathy, the Theory argues, is “an ‘imaginary change of situations’ with another person .... ‘This imaginary change is not supposed to happen to me in my own person and character, but in that of the person with whom I sympathize’”.35 This describes the texts that this essay has been examining exceedingly well: what sympathy names is in effect the outrageous paradox of Romantic conversation, the fact that there might be a logic that runs counter to the double egotism of duality; the fact that “how selfish soever man [or woman] may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others”.36 Consider as an example of the movements of sympathy the following interaction between brother and sister in Wordsworth’s “Lines”: If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief, Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts Of tender joy wilt thou remember me, And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance, If I should be, where I can no more hear Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams Of past existence, wilt thou then forget That on the banks of this delightful stream We stood together; and that I, so long A worshipper of Nature, hither came, Unwearied in that service: rather say

33

Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight”, 454, l. 18. Jonathan Lamb, “Imagination, Conjecture, and Disorder”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 45/I (2011), 54. 35 Ibid., 54. 36 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments; to Which Is Added a Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (1790), ed. R.P. Hanley, London: Penguin, 2011. 34

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What gives this exemplary dramatization of sympathy a dynamic complexity beyond what Lamb’s fairly constrained schematics provide is that “both” sides are actively involved in the “imaginary change of situations”. That is, the brother-speaker affectively attends to and shares in his sister-listener’s joys and worries only because she affectively attends to and shares in “his”.38 It should not be possible to conjoin these two clauses: they forward the reader to a logical circle, a dizzying rotation of cause and effect between the two protagonists, a constant shifting of the question who it is that kicked off the process. There is a second circle at work in this poem, one that is even more difficult to trace very effectively: the speaker not only sympathizes “because” of his listener’s prior moment of sympathy (and so on); he also sympathizes “with” her sympathizing (and so on). He imagines not only her emotions, but also what emotions she might feel as she imagines his: he commiserates with her commiseration with himself. What Wordsworth is describing here is an economy of affect where emotions are being passed back and forth between a creator and a taker, and where this circulation of feelings “adds” to what it passes round. That is, it keeps stacking moments of mediation; it keeps appending with-him with-her tags. It is exactly this combination of exchange and increase that de Man called a “single system of motion and circulation”, and it is this combination that Smith repeatedly acknowledges as foundational to his thought, despite his and his commentators’ unrelenting use of the term “circulation” sans further qualification.39 In Smith’s Theory, a prevalent image for sympathy is 37

Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, 120, ll. 146-56. A careful reader will point out that this is not entirely correct: since the only actually accessible perspective on the lyrical situation is the “speaker”, his listener cannot properly be said to “share in his joys and worries”. It is the “speaker” that attributes empathy to his listener: this is a rhetorical process that obscures a crucial aspect of its constructedness. The following section develops this more skeptical position into a fully-formed alternative reading of conversation poetry. 39 For a more refined analysis of the oddly vortical nature of what superficially appears to be a circulation, see Ortwin de Graef, “Suffering, Sympathy, Circulation: Smith, Wordsworth, Coetzee (But There’s a Dog)”, European Journal of English Studies, 7/III (2003), 319-26. De Graef’s article treats of the increasing exorcism of sympathetic ethics from a system that is ostensibly based on it. This essay’s next section ties in very well with his analysis; regrettably, the very close examination of 38

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that of the “mirror”, but it is a mirror that does not exactly double but continually “redoubles”: ... all his passions will immediately become the source of new passions ... his desires and aversions, his joys and sorrows, will now often become the causes of new desires and new aversions, new joys and new sorrows.40

In order to be “self-confirming”, as Rajan put it, conversation poetry must structure itself into reflections; what appears from the above is that these reflections are of that bewildering kind that entails reverberation and interference; that involves mirrors mirroring mirrors (and so on). The “motion” that this “and so on”, this pattern of endless recursion, bestows on circulation is a drive towards ever greater interinvolvement of emotions, towards ever closer characters and finally towards the communal pronoun “we”: that is, towards “healing” and bridging the duality. This “we” is emphatically not the kind of climax that Lamb expected; nor is it the type that Rajan predicted. The former spoke of “substitution”; the latter argued that the results of conversation ought to satisfy the “utopian drive to identify imagination and perception”.41 The problem with their analyses is not that there is no substitution or identification at work in these texts; it is that substitution or identification has for their targets not the sympathetic “interface” of man and woman but those two personal images “in themselves”. Before man and woman can speak or listen, they must be, and anthropomorphosis, the rhetorical strategy that ensures their being, is in effect an identification on the level of substance. It takes one entity for another .... Anthropomorphism freezes the chain of tropological transformations and propositions into one single assertion or essence which, as such, excludes all others. 42

Man and woman, to unpack this, come into being because they are declared analogous to the almighty problem of duality; they further aesthetic ideology needed to accommodate it in more than a footnote would take the argument well beyond its scope. 40 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 134. 41 Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 212. 42 De Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 241.

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fortify their hold over the text because of their displacement of all other possible analogies. These two acts of identification and substitution are foundational as much as they are final: the authority that the anthropomorphic figure gives to its images depends on its absolute “foreclosure” of all other “associations and propositions”.43 As such, when those images enter into an economy with each other, they could never dissolve into one another: if they did, they would instantly explode the very principles that enable them. Speaker and listener inch ever closer, but their essential functions are preserved: one should be a knowing orator, another should be a naïve auditor. In other terms, even in their most achieved form, the addresser and the addressee will always turn out “another and the same”, as Wordsworth found as he was considering his mirroring sheep. This is perfectly in line with Coleridge’s description of the ideal poetical form, the symbol, which he argues awakens language to new movement in that it establishes through “analogy” a “likeness not identity”:44 ... it is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual, or of the General in the Special, or of the Universal in general: above all by the translucence of the Eternal through and in the Temporal. [W]hile it enunciates the whole, [it] abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative. 45

This is a process that Coleridge admits is “hard to express”,46 and his reader surely sympathizes, but then that is the point: in order to defeat fear, conversation must dare twist the patterns of logic into new shapes. 3. Spectres Coleridge’s “Constancy to an Ideal Object”, a particularly dense poem even by his own standards and written some time after the texts

43

Ibid., 241. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae: From the Unpublished Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, London: Heinemann, 1985, 87. 45 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual in Lay Sermons, London: Moxon, 1852, 33. 46 Coleridge, Anima Poetae, 87. 44

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considered above,47 contains much that follows the template laid out in the previous few paragraphs. The text prominently features an experience of intense “Despair”, and it indicates for the origins of that despair a division of “brain” from “life”.48 True to form, it responds to this duality by structuring itself into two scenes of reflection, and it is technically self-conscious enough to neatly separate them into two stanzas. The first is a prolonged monologic address with a view to affective exchange involving eye and ear; the second is a mountaineer chancing on his refraction in the “viewless snow-mist”.49 Where this poem starts breaking away from stereotype is in the order of its argument. The creative use and the critical examination of reflection always develop on a trajectory from literal to increasingly figurative applications: they move from mirrors over echoes to conversations. In “Constancy”, by contrast, this evolution is neatly reversed: conversation comes first, mirrors come last. This is a fairly straightforward rhetorical manoeuvre, a simple change of direction, but it is one that completely upends the dialectic between abstraction and concretion that drove the resolution of duality in the previous section of this essay. The auditor, always a more difficult image to get into focus than the more obviously analogous speaker, is a particularly strong index of the disruptions that spread from this reversal. In a typical conversation poem the listener ought to humanize a lost other half in order to open it up to sympathetic exchange; in “Constancy”, by contrast, listeners both actual and potential resist all approaches to any such reading: Rajan even observes that the poem is marked with “an absence of conversation and community”.50 This is how the first stanza opens: 47

There is considerable debate as to when “Constancy” was written. The authoritative Collected Works places it in 1804 but admits that it “might date from the 1800s as plausibly as from the 1820s” (Mays, Poetical Works I, vol. XVI.1, XCIII). Critics generally prefer the latter range for stylistic and thematic reasons: Rajan refers to it as a typical example of the “late poems” (Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 244); Gaston assumes a date somewhere between “c.1817-1828” (Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest, London and New York: Continuum, 2006, 52). 48 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Constancy to an Ideal Object”, in Poetical Works I: Poems (Reading Text). The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, vol. XVI.2, ed. J.C.C. Mays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, 777, ll. 4 and 8. 49 Ibid., 778, l. 28. 50 Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 245.

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All that this speaker has to work with is “THOUGHT”: his is not an auditor that is female, or properly anthropomorphic, or even in any way concrete. It is almost surprising to find that the format is still that of an address, but then it is not an address as it has hitherto been defined. Like his (or its) name suggests, the listener sides with the brain, and the brain is this poem’s code for man, not for nature. When “Constancy” does insert some personal imagery after all, and even contrives to relate it to nature, it is only to further confirm the breakdown of conversation. This is the second stanza: And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when The woodman winding westward up the glen At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze, Sees full before him, gliding without tread, An image with a glory round its head; The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues, Nor knows he makes the shadow, he pursues!52

The rustic is a man, which is apparently bad enough; what is worse is that he is too much of a rustic ever to be a proper auditor. His communication is a performance of concrete actions; it is thoughtless and wordless: as such, he remains forever divided from the speaker who resides in the first stanza, and vice versa. Stanza one and stanza two are both built around reflection, but what reflection builds clearly in no wise conforms to the typologies and the structures drawn up in the previous section. Rajan proves serviceable one final time. When she discusses “the poems of Coleridge’s later years”, of which she takes “Constancy” to be among the “finest” examples, she introduces two theoretical concepts: in spite 51 52

Coleridge, “Constancy”, 777, ll. 1-8. Ibid., 778, ll. 25-32.

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of her own decision to keep far from tropological issues, they are “metonymy” and “allegory”.53 This essay would add a third concept: “fantasy”. These three terms recur time and again in Hartman, in de Man, in Dayre, and in Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s own writings, who both “voluntarily ... give us tools that can be used to dissect [their] own poetic production”.54 While Coleridge’s and Wordsworth’s definitions of allegory and fantasy greatly emphasized the importance of metonymy, later commentators generally mention the term only in passing; a brief qualification on their way to the two other, theoretically more engaging terms.55 This move ignores its continuing critical power in unravelling the basic structures of allegory and fantasy. The figure of metonymy provides a successful outline of what it is that happens in reflections that do not operate in metaphors; that do not pair off things in analogies that impurely substitute the concrete (man, woman) for the abstract (Man, Nature) in order to bridge on the concrete level what seems like an insuperable gap on the abstract level. A metonymic reflection does not redouble and confirm but dedouble and doubt: it creates its doubles in such a way as “separates” the abstract and the concrete. What is even more provocative about this dedoubling is that it lumps together the abstract and the human thinker on the one hand, and the concrete and the natural rustic on the other: thus stanza one and stanza two in “Constancy” – the poem even interposes a blank between the two as the visual mark of their disjunction. Not even the one overarching master figure, that of reflection, evades this being disjoined into a monologue and a mirror, into a human-centred and figurative reading, and a nature-centred and literal reading. The point of metonymy, in other terms, is that it divides Man from Nature as much as it divides 53

Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 236-47. Ibid., 237. 55 This is partly due to some entirely appropriate exasperation over Coleridge’s and others’ counterintuitive examples: Edwin Honig observes that Coleridge develops the distinction between symbol and allegory as one between synecdoche and metonymy (Edwin Honig, Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959, 46). The problem is that synecdoche is typically taken as a type of metonymy: René Wellek consequently dismisses the entire problem as an unfortunate confusion on Coleridge’s part. Nicholas Halmi helpfully suggests that synecdoche is not properly metonymy in that metonymy is based on a relation of contiguity, whereas synecdoche operates causatively (Nicholas Halmi, “Coleridge on Allegory and Symbol”, in The Oxford Handbook of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Frederick Burwick, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 351). 54

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man from nature, and as much as it divides the linguistic and the bodily. What is more, the force that is behind metonymy carries it well beyond this initial separation. Even within the radius of either the abstractly human or the concretely natural it continues to perform its action, which is to link two images solely on the basis of their contiguity: thus Thought and brain for man; thus the woodsman for nature. These doubles do not enter into the kind of relationship characteristic of metaphorical reflection: if brain refers to man, it is simply because they happen to touch, not because the one analogizes and credibly substitutes for the other. Images caught in metonymic reflections do not offer deep meanings: they do no more than point at one another. Metonymy describes the interface of Man and Nature in terms of their respective images and the relations between those images; allegory narrativizes those basic structures: it develops a story about what goes on in texts that contain metonymies.56 Allegory, that is, determines what the instance of metonymy and the way that metonymy handles relations between images might mean for the interpretation of the entire text, for textuality as such, and for the resolution of fear. The distinction between metonymy and allegory is not unlike the one between metaphor and symbol, except that whereas symbol bridges dyadic difference, allegory burns those bridges. Before a closer definition of allegory can be attempted, let alone its precise link to fantasy can be assessed, a clearer view of the precise structure of “Constancy” is required, as is a better understanding of the ways “Constancy” reads and rewrites all those metaphorically and symbolically designed conversation poems that this essay previously inspected. “Constancy” is a poem that reverses and that thereby perverts, but that does not mean that it is a poem that “reverts”; that it returns to 56

The idea that allegory is properly a narrative of interpretation derives especially from Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979; an excellent account of which is Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1998, 18-34. The narrative nature of allegory is also present in what a following paragraph will refer to as its propensity for emblem and parable, in Coleridge’s descriptions of allegory, and in his definition of symbol, which he argues “enunciates”. The fourth section will demonstrate how symbol and allegory essentially reflect one another: narrativity is certainly part of what is reflected between them.

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some point where all other forms of conversation never happened. It is a poem that explicitly presents itself as a secondary event, as a text that derives from a set of inherited conventions.57 Consider the following excerpt: though well I see, She is not thou, and only thou art she, Still, still as though some dear embodied Good Some living Love before my eyes there stood With answering look a ready ear to lend, I mourn to thee and say .... 58

The speaker quite accurately recognizes that his literary aspirations ought to be for sympathetic conversation, and that sympathetic conversation depends on embodiment; on analogy and anthropomorphosis. And yet he does not manage to integrate that device into his own speech: he falls short of actually achieving the image of a lost or silenced mother, wife or sister. The obstacle to this expected “passage from trope to anthropomorphism” resides in the speaker’s rather abstruse first two lines, which note that “thou” and “she” are the same and yet are not the same. Like much else in “Constancy”, these lines have generally remained entirely unanalysed. What the present essay would suggest is that they present a parodied return of that paradoxical combination of naïveté and auditorship, that odd conjunction of sameness and otherness, that so drives sympathetic conversation. “Constancy” applies a crucial difference to this wellestablished scheme in arguing that the identity of “thou” and “she” holds true only for “thou”, not for “she”. That is, it holds up when viewed from the second-person perspective “thou” that is generated by conversation, a metaphorical reflection; but it “collapses” when viewed from the third-person perspective “she” that is asserted as separate from its role as a second person by a metonymic reflection. To rephrase this: the appropriation of anthropomorphized nature to a second person works perfectly well on the level of rhetoric, on the level of what the speaker says and reads, but it fails on the level of 57

The secondariness of metonymy and allegory with respect to metaphor and symbol appears from as trivial a fact as the structure of every single critical or metacritical engagement with the problem, which always works its way through symbol and next stages an allegorical event in order to break through symbol. 58 “Constancy”, 777, ll. 11-16 (my emphasis).

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reality, on the level of what the speaker actually sees. This obviously complicates the entire project for reconciliation, and the text accordingly rushes to respond (“still, still”). Its response is still marked with a trace of fatal reserve, however; hedged as it is with an “as though”. “As though” continues to add under its breath but not really: it continues to question the relation between rhetoric and reality, and in so doing, it continues to question the bases of sympathetic conversation. It is an “avowedly sinister” question that “Constancy” asks in interjecting its “as though”; the same question that de Man asked of Hartman in their dispute over “There Was a Boy”.59 Hartman is largely supportive of Wordsworth’s resolution of fear, much like the first section of this essay was; de Man pushes back in wondering if the connection between “heaven and earth” can really “be called a ‘marriage’ and whether the mediating entity is indeed nature”.60 The question that “as though” asks, to put this in terms closer to this essay, is whether conversation is not a game of rhetorical pretend ill-suited to the real nature of duality; whether its initial attempt to “replace” the almighty dichotomy of Göttlichkeit and Erdlichkeit, godliness and earthliness, for more manageably sized images has not come to altogether “displace” it; and whether that displacement is not especially designed to remove nature from the picture: nature, as “Constancy” insists, is after all concrete, embodied and non-linguistic. One need not even answer these questions to feel “as if, at the very moment that the analogical echo fails us, the stable ground of an interwoven world were taken from under our feet”.61 This “fall of reading”62 has often been interpreted as de Man’s definition of trauma.63 Rajan implies the same thing when she observes that Romanticism

59

Paul de Man, “Heaven and Earth in Wordsworth and Hölderlin” (1966), in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism: The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, 138. 60 Ibid., 138 (my emphasis). 61 Ibid., 142 (my emphasis). 62 Vermeulen, “Winander”, 466. 63 Cathy Caruth, “The Falling Body and the Impact of Reference (de Man, Kant, Kleist)”, in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, History, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 73-90.

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accepts the arbitrariness of its own signs, yet constantly seeks ways to deny the traumatic implications of this recognition ... by denying the real as a place of realization, and thus making the unreal into the only reality. But such an elision of actuality is impossible.64

“As though” marks the moment where the elision of actuality is demonstrated to be impossible. As reality reclaims its proper place, it invalidates and incapacitates the one tool that the dejected orator still had that might forestall his fears, his analogical rhetoric. Of course, it is not because de Man’s wording is so well-suited, down even to an inclusion of that crucial as if, that Wordsworth’s “There was a Boy” can be considered a straightforward analytical blueprint for Coleridge’s “Constancy”. De Man makes much of Wordsworth’s repeated revisions of his poem, most notably his addition of a second stanza, separated from the first by a blank line. This is a blank that is positioned very differently from the one in “Constancy”, however. Wordsworth uses his to flag a sobering counterpoint to his poem’s self-confirming first stanza: “this Boy”, he adds, “was taken from his mates, and died / ere he was full twelve years old.”65 What Wordsworth’s new passage dramatizes is that “as though” kills off those who live through metaphor; what makes “Constancy” so markedly different is that its blank line does not at all signal a fall of reading. Coleridge’s text does not divide between the joys of life-giving speech and the deathly muteness of fear: it has already chosen to side with death. Its blank establishes a meaningful contrast “within” a language dead to its analogical potential; it indicates the development of metonymic structures into a narrative of what it means to read and write metonymies. It is this narrative that Coleridge, like de Man and like the other commentators previously referenced, will come to call allegory. Even without its very exact definition in hand, the allegorical tendency in “Constancy” is unmistakeable.66 The poem is structured as a sequence 64

Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 249. Wordsworth, The Fourteen-Book Prelude, 104, ll. 391-92. 66 These three surface markers, emblem, personification and multitude, derive from Walter Benjamin, “Allegorie und Trauerspiel”, in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Berlin: Rowohlt, 1928, 157-257. Benjamin in his turn relies on a considerable critical tradition which goes back as far as classical antiquity; he himself especially singles out texts from the late Renaissance and baroque period. A detailed overview can be found in Honig’s Dark Conceit, among many other sources; also see 65

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of skewed emblems; or rather, it is structured as a series of distorted parabolic episodes, the literary equivalents of emblems. What renders these parables so distorted is that they supply a general theme without its proper embodiment in a narrative illustration, or that they do the exact reverse. The views offered are either purely conceptual or purely concrete; either of “Hope and Despair meet[ing] in the porch of Death”, or of the “Helmsman on an ocean waste and wild”.67 The entire second stanza is one prolonged parable of the latter type: it is generous in pictorial detail, but exceedingly mean in explication. The effects of this strategy become a clearer still with the next mark of allegory, personification. The poem’s parables are populated by a multitudinous host of personified characters: Thought, of course; but Nature, Home, Love and Constancy all put in appearances, too. As the second stanza approaches, a somewhat differently structured type of personification takes over from these animated concepts: enter the Helmsmen and the woodsmen. These two types of characters, if they can be called that, are nowhere near as fleshed-out as anthropomorphosis would have provided. They are either abstractions in search of human bodies, or they are bodies that are yet to acquire discernible meaning. Either way, any kind of analogical interpretation, any kind of expectance of a symbolic logic, could not but find itself baffled. When Coleridge finds occasion to actually define allegory, he premises it on the bafflement that his own “as though” and de Man’s “as if” set off. The narrative of interpretation that allegory tells, he argues, grows from the shock when reality breaks through symbolic expectations: think of the sloping orchard or hill-side pasture-field seen in the transparent lake below. Alas, for the flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures! It shall even be as when a hungry man dreameth, and behold, he eateth, but he awaketh, and his soul is empty.68

Allegory is the system that develops from this fall of reading: it maps textual relations as shifts, jumps and separations, and it is geared towards increasing and exaggerating those separations until they have Jeremy Tambling, Allegory (The New Critical Idiom), London and New York: Routledge, 2010. For a summary of de Man’s understanding of allegory, see Gasché, The Wild Card, 30-32. 67 Coleridge, “Constancy”, 778, ll. 10 and 23. 68 Coleridge, The Stateman’s Manual, 33-34 (emphasis in the original).

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come to determine every level of interpretation. The previous section has shown that a symbolic narrative intensifies reciprocity into ever more involuted conversation; allegory is possessed of a similar drive for self-affirmation, except that it travels in precisely the opposite direction: it intensifies division into ever more devolved “spectralization”. Allegory, in short, organizes a system of circulation and motion towards total breakdown of total unity. The concept of “spectralization” is originally Jacques Derrida’s, and while Derrida uses it in a somewhat different context, it is certainly apposite to the present argument.69 In its simplest sense, spectralization denotes the splitting of a single self in the face of a traumatizing return.70 While this is a tidy enough confirmation of what has been suggested so far, spectralization is significantly more interesting than this: it highlights an image of decisive importance to descriptions of allegory, the spectre. The import of this image appears even from its basic meaning: the spectre is an image iconic of fantasy, and fantasy fills a role of note in Romanticist criticism as arguably among the most powerful, enigmatic and contentious tools that Coleridge offers his readers for his own and his contemporaries’ dissection. In a chapter of his Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge explains fantasy through its radical difference from imagination: the imagination, he posits, is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM ... at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital ... FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, but fixities and definites. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode of memory emancipated from the order of time and space. 71

Imagination and fantasy start out in the Biographia as mental faculties, as two types of perception of reality; the one is empiricist, rational and orderly, the other naïve, superstitious and whimsically associative. In the climactic chapter the above excerpts come from, they end up as two broad positions in the reception of texts (and beyond); the one generative of symbols, the other generative of 69

Jacques Derrida, Spectres de Marx: l’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. 70 Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest, 43-54. 71 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 304-305 (my emphasis).

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allegories: if allegory thinks through what goes in texts that contain metonymies, fantasy thinks through what goes in those writers, readers and critics that assert the presence of allegory. Fantasy, that is, indicates the kind of mind and the kind of person that produces allegorical narratives of metonymic structures; or it indicates the kind of mind and the kind of person that allegorical narratives produce, which in their turn account for the question of metonymy. The significance of the phantom extends well beyond its etymological link to fantasy. In a passage that Gaston in spite of his interest in specimens of Romantic and Coleridgean spectrality ignores, and de Man in spite of his fascination for allegory never comments upon, Coleridge asserts that “the fruitful matrix of ghosts” signals “the heights of Allegory”.72 “Constancy to an Ideal Object”, it turns out, scales these same heights not only in its structure, but also in its images: in his reading of the poem, Thomas De Quincey, a contemporary of Coleridge’s, names the “image with a glory round its head” in the second stanza as the “Spectre of the Brocken”.73 Critics have widely endorsed his identification,74 and Coleridge himself is quick to refer to forms of duplication very similar to those in his poem as “Brocken Spectres”: ... in the mist of a mountain, a traveller beholds his own figure, but the glory [halo] round the head distinguishes it from a mere vulgar copy; or as a man traversing the Brocken in the north of Germany at sunrise, when the glorious beams are shot askance the mountain; he sees before him a figure of gigantic proportions and of such elevated dignity, that he only knows it to be himself by the similarity of action.75

Coleridge is not alone in his fascination: there is a most voluminous body of writing on the Brocken in place at the time, ranging from picturesque travellers’ guides over literary uses to

72

Dayre, L’Absolu comparé, 42-51; Coleridge, “The Friend”, 140-41. Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis: Being a Sequel to the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1845), ed. Frederick Burwick, London: Pickering & Chatto, The Works of Thomas De Quincey XV, 2003, 182. 74 Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 244; Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest, 52. 75 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Coleridge on Shakespeare: The Text of the Lectures 1811-12, ed. R.A. Foakes, London: Routledge, 2008, 123. 73

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scientific publications.76 This last type of literature, the considerable amount of scientific handbooks on the Brocken, is especially helpful in understanding the attraction that spectres excited. Nineteenthcentury scientists were wont to use them as test cases for empiricism; in order to demonstrate the superiority of scientific knowledge over popular superstition, or as Coleridge would have phrased it, in order to celebrate the victories of imagination over fantasy. David Brewster’s 1832 Letters on Natural Magic are a case in point. Brewster opens his chapter on the eye, which he notes is “a particularly fertile source of our illusions”, with a report on the Brocken, describing at some length the “fears” that the sight inspires.77 The role of the Spectre is to be comprehensively dispelled through a series of experiments, which prove that its manifestation, glory included, is no more than a perfectly mundane example of optical refraction. Far from attesting to the epistemological validity of paranormal fantasies, it conclusively shows how imagination defeats fear. “Constancy” accommodates a Brewster-like voice in noting that the rustic does not “know ... he makes the shadow, he pursues”, but it certainly does not follow a Brewster-like model. In Brewster, the experiencer is brought to new and superior knowledge: imagination destroys magic and displaces fantasy. In Coleridge, the experiencer does not at all have his fantastic frame of mind challenged: the rustic occupies a different narrative level entirely from the voice that observes his worship of the Spectre and that passes destructive comments on his alleged idiocy; as such, the “empiricist” could never displace the “empirical”. So strong is the hold of allegory in “Constancy” that its logic of spectralization disarticulates even the voice that is supposed to undo its force: it turns the tables on the last attempt at an imaginative perspective, thereby demonstrating the victory of fantasy. The structure that allegory assumes at this point of climax is not unlike that of dramatic irony, and irony, as de Man well realized, institutes the fall of reading: where irony appears, “before long the entire texture of the self is unravelled and comes apart”.78 76

C.J. Wright, “The ‘Spectre’ of Science: The Study of Optical Phenomena and the Romantic Imagination”, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 43 (1980), 193-200. 77 David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (1832), London: Murray, 1834, 129 and 147. 78 De Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, 215.

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There is a point to all this splitting and unravelling: even though “Constancy” integrates Brewster’s methods for curtailing fear in the face of spectral apparitions only to stage a parody, it does not contain a single trace of fear: to defeat fear, allegory argues, trust to fantasy. 4. Interpreters De Quincey has already been mentioned above, and it is good to attend to him more closely as this essay enters its fourth and final section: his work neatly repeats what the previous sections have argued at length, and it raises matters to a new level of theoretical and practical complexity. At first blush De Quincey’s writings appear a fairly standard Romantic attempt to grapple with themes of fear and fantasy through structures of reflection: their only break from Lake School-type exercises is that their preferred mode is essayistic prose rather than poetry. Other than that, they demonstrate the typical dual investment in symbolic and allegoric schemes. The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821 and 1856), De Quincey’s first major publication, is divided into two parts, the first of which centres on a prototypical example of sympathetic exchange, affective female character and all, and the second of which mournfully records the loss of that exchange. The Confessions, then, are structured around a fall from “pleasures” into “pains”, as they label their two main chapters; from sentimentalism into scepticism, from imagination into fantasy, or from well-ordered biography into a jumbled collection of Gothic nightmares and parabolic hallucinations.79 It is in recognition of these and a great many other instances of De Quincey’s gift for dramatizing the stakes of Romantic reflection that Rajan’s Dark Interpreter uses for its epigraph an excerpt from De Quincey’s 1845 Suspiria de Profundis: the book even takes its title from that excerpt. If it really is true that there is in De Quincey a capacity to be all-embracing, a capacity to introduce and contain all that happens in the discourses of Romanticism, however, it seems very odd indeed that Rajan’s actual argument feels no need to situate or to explain its title and its epigraph: it makes hardly any mention of De Quincey whatsoever. This absence is all the more glaring in light of the origins of the Suspiria epigraph. Rajan is quoting from a section 79

Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: Being an Extract from the Life of a Scholar (1821, rev. 1856), ed. Grevel Lindop, London: Pickering & Chatto, The Works of Thomas De Quincey II, 2001, 5 and 76.

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that De Quincey explicitly intends as a critique of Coleridge’s “Constancy to an Ideal Object”: “Constancy” is surely a text that informs Dark Interpreter at crucial turns. The situation has not improved even in Rajan’s recent reappraisal of Dark Interpreter, which has persisted in leaving the Quincey-shaped lacuna at the heart of the book wholly unaddressed. Rajan does recognize that there is something “unfinished” to her book, and that this unfinished thing requires some kind of “return and retreat of origins”,80 and, finally, that this return demonstrates that her early work stands “on the threshold of an age of prose, not wanting to give up on the spirit of poetry yet not quite knowing how to carry it forward”.81 This is all very incisive, but Rajan does not pursue her insights into the retreated origins of her book’s title, which would bring to her an author who made a career of crossing the threshold between conversational poetry and confessional prose, and who in so doing redefines Romantic reflection for a new literary age. If “Constancy”, the emendations of “There Was a Boy” and the second chapter of the Confessions are all secondary events, the “Dark Interpreter” chapter in the Suspiria is a tertiary event. This means that its analysis requires a sound understanding of imagination as well as fantasy, of symbol as well as allegory, and of metaphor as well as allegory. It specifically requires a way to determine what this as well as might entail; a way, that is, to develop the interface of imagination and fantasy. The previous section has provided the first hints of what that interface might look like. “Constancy” has been demonstrated to reverse the set order of conversation, and that same reversal has been shown to divide “There Was a Boy” and the Confessions. This reversal is little more than the practical articulation of a principle halftheorized by Coleridge when he calls allegory the “phantom proxy” of symbol:82 allegory is the “reflection” of symbol, however distorted that reflection may be. To theorize this in full: the allegorical tendency to totalize separation is little more than a reconfigured mirror image of the symbolical tendency to totalize sympathy. The reverse is as true. Yes, allegory and fantasy are secondary to imagination and symbol, but the Latinate imaginatio, as Coleridge points out with some distress, is in fact the translation of the Grecian fantasia: there is 80

Rajan, “Romanticism and the Unfinished Project”, 293. Ibid., 295. 82 Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual, 33. 81

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nothing necessarily derived and antecedent in fantasy that cannot also be attributed to imagination.83 Reflection, that is, describes not only the processes that go on within symbol and allegory; it also describes what happens “between” them. De Quincey’s “Dark Interpreter” pursues what this rather conceptual point might mean in practical terms. His text stages multiple moments of reflection, multiple occasions where a character grapples with an experience of doubling and provides his personal perspective on that experience. There are roughly four characters; as such, there are four sets of descriptions. The first character is a serial killer, who “as he rushed on in his hellish career perceived distinctly a dark figure on his right hand, keeping pace with him”;84 in the end, he grows convinced that this phantasm must be the devil himself. The second character is a naturalist who performs a number of self-styled “experiments” to ascertain the nature of what is explicitly identified as the Brocken Spectre; in the end, he is satisfied that the apparition is a simple optical illusion.85 The third character is a bereaved brother: he maintains that doubles are “dark symbolic mirror[s]” created by writers to represent their traumas and “afflictions”.86 The fourth and final perspective of interpretation is that of an opiated dreamer: his double is a drug-induced hallucination, but it is an oddly conscious one, outside of his control.87 In short, a single fact, the one phenomenon of reflection, ceaselessly travels from one point of appreciation to another, and each point of appreciation attributes to reflection its own set of defining properties. What is crucial to this fourfold structure is that each perspective on reflection itself reflects the other three perspectives on reflection, and that this metareflection “itself” wavers uncertainly between opposing definitions of agreement and reversal. To unpack this: to some, the double is an effect of controlled and speaker-created mirroring (scenes 2 and 3), to others it is an effect of largely autonomous haunting (scenes 1 and 4); and it as relevant to the description of the double that some insist that it is properly external, objective and empirically verifiable (scenes 1 and 3), while others insist that it is internal, subjective and entirely 83

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, vol. 1, 82. De Quincey, Suspiria, 272. 85 Ibid., 183. 86 Ibid., 184. 87 Ibid., 185. 84

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imagined (scenes 2 and 4). The reader is free to choose how he assigns numbers: the scene that this paragraph has chosen to mention first, the one narrated from the perspective of a serial murderer, is known only from a posthumously published fragment, whose intended position in the eventual Suspiria will forever remain uncertain. Regardless where one places this scene, however, the logic of reading will always assume the same shape, and that shape is that of “a cross-shaped reversal of properties that rhetoricians call chiasmus”.88 It is only when every perspective in the chiasmus has been comprehensively described and displaced by another, when the chiasmus has performed its X-shaped twists and turns, that the Dark Interpreter appears, and it is only as long as the chiasmus continues its action that it remains. Here he (or it) is: ... the Interpreter sometimes swerves out of my orbit, and mixes a little with alien natures. I do not always know him in these cases as my own parhelion. What he says, generally is but that which I have said in daylight, and in meditation deep enough to sculpture itself on my heart. But sometimes, as his face alters, his words alter; and they do not always seem such as I have used, or could use. No man can account for all things that occur in dreams. Generally I believe this – that he is a faithful representative of myself; but he also is at times subject to the action of the god Phantasus, who rules in dreams.89

Chiasmus is a structure that charts the different possible actions of reflection and the tensions between them: the Dark Interpreter is the figure of that chiasmus. While the description of the “double” (demon, refraction, representation, hallucination) sometimes partakes of qualities associated with imagination, and sometimes veers closer to traits typical of fantasy, and sometimes appears a hybrid form, the Interpreter manifests itself at the very precise moment where imagination reverses into fantasy, or vice versa. It is true that the Interpreter wavers between perspectives, between imagination and fantasy, between symbolical and allegorical narratives of interpretation, between metaphorical and metonymic structures, but that in no wise means that it pretends to centre, harmonize or unify: it is simply the figure of that “between”. As such, the Interpreter is a 88 89

De Man, Allegories of Reading, 113. De Quincey, Suspiria, 185.

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figure that is programmatic neither of symbolically bridging dichotomies and suppressing fears, nor of allegorically reinforcing dichotomies and reaffirming fears: it declares fear to be the creation of a language that insists on one kind of reflection alone. The defeat of fear requires equal helpings of imagination and of fantasy, and everything those terms encompass, but most of all it requires a capacity for motion, ceaseless and ever more rapid.

HABITABILITY AND SPECTRES IN THE HOUSE OF LANGUAGE: APPROACHING (POST)MODERNITY IN LAS FLORES DEL FRÍO, BY LUIS GARCÍA MONTERO MARGARITA GARCÍA CANDEIRA The aim of this essay is to examine both the poetics and the poetry of Luis García Montero, who has been considered the most renowned representative of the Spanish experiential lyric, in order to identify and understand the fractures and discontinuities that a neoclassical aesthetics betrays when confronted with the negativity inherent to the poetic language. In this sense, García Montero’s strong confidence in representation and referentiality can be seen as a kind of “defensive fantasy” against the “fear raised by the poetic word”, which resists all fixation of meaning; this is a tendency that appears to be symptomatic of certain lacks in the Spanish tradition and can be better understood within the debate on the poverty of its Romanticism. A close attention to the spectral forms in which this reluctance results provides a very useful rhetorical repertory to analyse his poetical texts: a reading of the composition “Casa en ruinas” (Las flores del frío, 1991) will allow us to perceive how a sense of habitability based on Enlightenment foundations appears to be questioned by the eruption of certain phantasmagorical presences: they introduce an instability of meaning that obliges us to reconsider the (im)possibility of approaching postmodernity as a naïve return to modernity.

The aim of this essay is to examine both the poetics and the poetry of Luis García Montero, who has been considered one of the most renowned representatives of the Spanish experiential lyric,1 in order to 1

Luis García Montero (Granada, 1958) has a large career both as a poet and scholar. Professor of Spanish Literature in the University of Granada, he has written essays on Bécquer (Gigante y extraño. Las Rimas de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, 2001) and on Alberti and Lorca (La palabra de Ícaro, 1996). In Poesía, cuartel de invierno (1987), El sexto día (2000) and Los dueños del vacío (2006), he displays a personal and polemic view of the European and Spanish modern poetical tradition, and in other texts he proposes a “poetry of experience” that would compensate the excesses of Romanticism and avant-garde with a new insight into the relations of individuality and community, intimacy and history. This theoretical programme supports an extensive production, departing from the early and experimental Y ahora ya eres dueño del puente de Brooklyn (1980) until Un invierno propio (2011), the most

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evaluate his specific response to a poetic and historical modernity that is felt as powerfully threatening. His project perfectly shows the fractures and discontinuities that a neoclassical aesthetics betrays when confronted with the negativity inherent to the poetic language, which is extremely reinforced by modern resistance to figuration. In this sense, García Montero’s strong confidence in representation can be seen as a kind of defensive fantasy against the fear raised by poetic modernity, and informs about a tendency that appears to be symptomatic of certain lacks left by the absence of a strong Romantic movement in Spain. This reluctance results in a singular fantastic figure: the spectre, which conforms to a very useful rhetorical image to analyse his poetical texts, especially those that attempt a thematic reading of historical modernity. A study of some poems from Las flores del frío (1991)2 will allow us to perceive how modernity is depicted in terms of a menacing isolation and coldness, which is somehow avoidable through the recovery of the social contract proposed by Rousseau. It is easy to notice that a similarly defensive stance encourages García Montero’s postulation of a renewed habitability based on Enlightenment foundations. Nonetheless, the impression of shelter and safety that these pieces build appears to be questioned by the eruption of certain phantasmagorical presences, which reduce the security based on language to a deceptive fantasy. These figures introduce the so-feared instability of meaning, obliging us to reconsider the problematic association between history, horror, and verbalization, and to interrogate the possibility of approaching postmodernism as a naïve return to modernity. The work of Luis García Montero acts as a touchstone of a series of questions related to modernity, and the phantom helps to assess the poetical discontinuities of a theoretical project that shows a solid trust in reason and in communicative language. The author’s poetics is made explicit in several essays, where the poet and professor offers an recent. Collections such as Poemas de Tristia (1982), El jardín extranjero (1983), Diario cómplice (1987), Las flores del frío (1991), Habitaciones separadas (1994), Completamente viernes (1998), La intimidad de la serpiente (2003) and Vista cansada (2008) turned García Montero into one of the most renowned, successful and bestselling Spanish authors, winning several prizes as the Adonais (1982), the National Poetry Prize (1994) and the Critics National Prize (2003). 2 The title of the collection can be translated as Flowers of Coldness. Since there are no English versions of Luis García Montero’s work, all the approximate versions provided here are my own translations.

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intense and personal reading of the European tradition, but is specifically formulated in some normative texts about what contemporary poetry should be like. In “La poesía de la experiencia” (1998), his proposal draws upon three notions – poetic persona, verisimilitude, and urban setting – that are immediately defined in terms of a neoclassical understanding of representation and realism: these are the tools which will provide “an Enlightened look” in order to effectuate “a precise reading of postmodernism”: To recover the future, as things are nowadays, has more to do with an Enlightened way of thinking, capable of learning from romantic lessons, than with a strong romantic perspective, obsessed with the collapse of Enlightenment. In the “poetry of experience” a precise reading of post-modernism is produced. The much-criticized poetry of experience does not intend to create a war between generational aesthetic tribes, but rather a return to this research into modernity. When it talks about poetical persona, verisimilitude, urban and realistic settings, rather than renounce oneself to the ambitions of poetry, it tries to recover a given concept of art, one that sleeps at the root of modernity. (my emphasis) 3

It is not difficult to identify the strong link of this position with the stance defended by Habermas, in his defence of communicative reason and of the need to recover the programme of the first modernity in order to build a positive postmodernism4 and, also, Calinescu’s idea of postmodernism as being a part of modernity is easily recognizable.5

3

The original text is written in Spanish: “Recuperar el futuro, según están las cosas, tiene más que ver con unos ojos ilustrados capaces de aprender las enseñanzas del romanticismo que con unos ojos románticos empeñados en acabar con la Ilustración. En la llamada poesía de la experiencia se produce una lectura precisa de la postmodernidad. La denostada poesía de la experiencia no pretende una guerra de tribus estéticas generacionales, sino un regreso a esta indagación en la modernidad. Cuando habla de personaje poético, de verosimilitud, de escenarios urbanos y realistas, más que renunciar a las ambiciones de la poesía, lo que hace es volver a un concepto del arte que duerme en la raíz de la modernidad ....” Luis García Montero, “La poesía de la experiencia”, Complicidades. Litoral, 217-218 (1998), 16-17. 4 Jürgen Habermas, “La modernidad: un proyecto inacabado”, in Ensayos políticos, trans. Ramón García Cotarelo, Barcelona: Península, 1986, 265-83. 5 Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Durham: Duke University Press, 1987.

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The problem of modernity, as García Montero’s critical work on Baudelaire perfectly shows, is that the collapse of the social contract (proposed by Rousseau) led to an extreme individualism, something that the author identifies with Romanticism. The poète maudit would be a perfect personification of a given social dynamics: the artist who escapes from a capitalist society, which has expelled and condemned him to isolation. For Luis García Montero, Baudelaire represents the poetical isolation from a hostile urban environment. In order to escape from modern life, Baudelaire writes a series of poems which draw an increasingly negative line from the complaints expressed in “Moesta et errabunda” to the portrayal of several travels to paradisiacal and utopian places, as “Le Voyage” and in “Le Voyage à Cythère”.6 The final image of this last poem, the subject’s rotten corpse, reveals the negativity of this escape. A positive and collective integration should be chosen instead, and García Montero’s Las flores del frío attempts a writing of urban poetry that explores this other option. The solution, for García Montero, consists basically in recovering the modern proposal of public happiness, through a more participatory democracy based on the constant and real negotiation of social mechanisms. This project would lie on Habermas’ defence of communication as an emancipating tool, which helps in the task of creating a new harmonious and public space. A similar faith in history and progress is also evident in what can be perceived as a discourse of fantasy that reveals its precariousness before radical modernity, whether sociological or poetic. In fact, other readings of Baudelaire have emphasized the deception and the ontological dimension of Baudelaire’s evil, relating it to the failure of his project of the “Correspondances”7 and the “analogie universelle”,8 through which the French poet tried to use poetical imagination to establish a cosmic harmony that is later frustrated. The discovery of allegory as an unavoidable barrier between the poet and the world is in one or another way identified at the core of Baudelaire’s conception of evil

6

Luis García Montero, Poesía, cuartel de invierno, Madrid: Hiperión, 1987, 12-14. Charles Baudelaire, Las flores del mal, trans. Alain Verjat and Luis Martínez de Merlo (bilingual ed.), Madrid: Cátedra, 1997, 94. 8 Charles Baudelaire, Œuvres complètes, Paris: Seuil, 1968, 471. 7

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by critics as Benjamin,9 Cowan,10 Jauss,11 Bürger,12 Cuesta Abad13 or De Man.14 The emphasis on social isolation scarcely hides the author’s semiconscious fear of modern complexity. In fact, García Montero’s own poems, though allegorically conveying the possibility of this return to first modernity, reveal certain signals of meaning instability and some ghostly figures, which oblige us to consider the unavailability of his solution, and also to acknowledge the existence of modern history as consisting of events of devastation which resist conventional verbalization. Instead of a rational and communicative language, maybe it is necessary to address the experience of destruction through a broken or fractured language, as Emily Apter15 proposed. Also, it will seem necessary to see how these spectral entities help to question a sense of habitability and history which does not radically differ from the traditional one, since it is based on the premises of homeliness and chronology. It is useful to underline the emphasis given by some contemporary theory to the figure of the ghost, and its relationship with modern language and history, in order to approach Luis García Montero’s specific position. The Freudian concept of unheimlich16 has given 9

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, 336. 10 Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory”, New German Critique, 22 (1981), 120. 11 Hans Robert Jauss, “El recurso de Baudelaire a la alegoría”, in Las transformaciones de lo moderno. Estudios sobre las etapas de la modernidad estética, Madrid: Visor, 1995, 154. 12 Christa Bürger and Peter Bürger, “El origen de la modernidad estética a partir del ennui: Constant, Flaubert y los surrealistas”, in La desaparición del sujeto: una historia de la subjetividad de Montaigne a Blanchot, Madrid: Akal, 2001, 208. 13 José Manuel Cuesta Abad, “Poética psicotrópica. El lenguaje alegórico en Baudelaire”, Castilla: estudios de literatura, 20 (1995), 62. 14 Paul de Man, Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism. The Gauss Seminar and Other Papers, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992, 108. 15 Emily Apter, “The Language of Damaged Experience”, in The Translation Zone. A New Comparative Literature, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006, 149-59. 16 As widely known, in The Uncanny (1919), Freud develops this concept departing from Jentsch’s 1906 work. Besides relating the unheimlich to liminality between the living and the dead, Freud links the concept to the “double”, as it presents something once familiar that, having been secularly repressed, has become a strange and unfamiliar entity. The double is intimately related to death since this continues to be a

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place to a series of theoretical reformulations that, having arisen mainly from the areas of psychoanalysis and deconstruction, have conformed a real “hauntology” devoted to explore the new epistemological possibilities derived from the imaginary of the “phantom”: a liminal entity combining the familiar with the strange that is closely linked not only to an experience of language fully conscious of its radicalism but also to an experience of history that is not teleological and is not easily relatable either. In both senses, the ghost disturbs the Enlightenment legacy and its claims on linguistic harmony and historical optimism. The figure appears as a rhetoric image produced by the repression of the fear that modernity inspires, enacted through recourse to a fantasy of security that ends up revealing its failure and producing its own dreamy images. And this dialectic of fear and fantasy, of persistent danger and precarious protection, is developed around the three basic elements of reason, history and word. According to Michael Arnzen, spectrality executes a “disruption” on the commands of rationality, completeness and representability.17 Other authors as Masschelein,18 Derrida19 or Royle20 have explained how the non-systematic, disturbing and bordering dimension of the Freudian notion implies certain links with history and language that do not depart from the classical understanding of these spheres: it is projected upon an idea of “time” dissociated from a fixed teleology and upon a “word” that questions the possibility of representation and mystery for modern man, who still relies on mythical explanations for it; that is why the uncanny portrays a somehow regressive experience of death. Some thematic configurations of the uncanny as the spectres, haunted houses or spirits clearly derive from this association. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny in Freud – Complete Works, ed. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: The Hogarth Press, 2000, 241. Online at: http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/burt/uncanny.pdf (accessed 7 January 2012). 17 Michael Arnzen, “The Return of the Uncanny”, Paradoxa. Studies in World Literary Genres, 3/4 (1997), 316. 18 Anneleen Masschelein, “A Homeless Concept. Shapes of the Uncanny in Twentieth-Century Theory and Culture”, Image and Narrative. Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative (2003): http://www.imageandnarrative.be/uncanny/anneleen masschelein.htm (accessed 24 August 2009); “The Concept as Ghost: Conceptualization of the Uncanny in the Late Twentieth-Century Theory”, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 35/1 (2002), 53-69. 19 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, New York and London: Routledge, 1994. 20 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

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the taming of meaning.21 In particular, Anneleen Masschelein defines the uncanny as a “homeless concept” precisely because of its lack of a stable meaning, since it is “a concept which paradoxically thematizes the impossibility of conceptualization”.22 This kind of incompleteness allows for a radical opening of new epistemological possibilities, all them characterized by a negation of exhaustivity. In The Uncanny, Nicholas Royle underlines the anti-dogmatic quality of the uncanny’s semantic inexhaustibility. According to Royle, even Freud ends up caught in the very process he tries to apprehend. This imprisonment in the concept provides, for Royle, “ways to think in less dogmatic terms about the nature of the works, ourselves and a politics of the future”.23 From a complementary perspective, Jacques Derrida talks, in Specters of Marx, about the specific anachronic rhythm that revolutionary events possess and defended another model of history that, based on that revolutionary frequency, is configurated as a time “out of joint”, employing a Hamletian expression.24 Peter Buse and Andrew Stott link this collapsing task to the rupture of that unlimited faith in Reason that the Enlightenment view of the world possessed, and which was presented as a guarantee of ontological security. In Ghosts. Psychoanalysis. Deconstruction. History (1999), these authors highlight the breakdown of this strong confidence and of the repression of other modes of thought and knowledge that were perceived as challenging and defiant of stability. The emergence of phantoms can be thus partially explained departing from these lacks and deficiencies of Enlightenment: Why do ghosts continue to occupy such a prominent position in debates over the boundary between real and unreal? Why do they furnish such workable tropes of untruth? The answer lies in their relationship to reason and rationality. The current understanding of ghosts owes less to the Reformation, which denied their return from purgatory, than it does to the Enlightenment. With the advent of the Enlightenment, a line was drawn between Reason and its more shadowy others – magic and witchcraft, irrationality, superstition, the 21

Some linguistic considerations of the uncanny have been developed by Masschelein, who describes the unheimlich as a metaphor that permits to circumscribe certain gaps in the theory. Masschelein, “A Homeless Concept”, 5. 22 Masschelein, “A Homeless Concept”, 7. 23 Royle, The Uncanny, 3. 24 Jacques Derrida, Specters, 38.

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Besides, a spectral reality seems to palpitate beneath the very essence of the poetic word, according to certain authors. If language’s autonomy and mediation power refer to a sphere that eludes figuration and rational communicability, modern poetry exploits linguistic intransitivity. If Julia Kristeva26 located the revolutionary potential of poetry in the “signifiance” (a preconscious and material quality of language that escaped all confinement in referential meaning),27 Giorgio Agamben28 and Paul de Man29 investigate the strong awareness that certain writers have of an ontological liminality that transcends the mimetic vocation and presents a phantasmagorical condition intimately related to linguistic self-reference. It is undoubtedly meaningful to see how the tropes of haunting, fear and courage inform the distinction between two approaches to poetry: one, based on the acceptation of the void its language opens, and another that tries to disguise this vacuum through a recourse to realism and figuration. Agamben departs, like Kristeva, from the strong link between word and passion. In Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Agamben defines the ontological status of the poetic word in Western thought as taking part of a phantasmatic condition. Agamben explores the tradition of certain troubadour poetry to find a crucial connection between language and love, which would be later undermined by 25

Ghosts. Psychoanalysis. Deconstruction. History, eds Peter Buse and Andrew Stott, New York: MacMillan, 1999, 3. 26 Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique, Paris: Seuil, 1974. 27 Julia Kristeva links the “signifiance” to the instinctual elements that are usually repressed by capitalism. Opposite to the “engagement” postulated by Sartre, “signifiance” operates a revolution that exceeds the sphere of content in the extent to which it implies an excess in respect to rational and social linguistic control. Kristeva, La Révolution, 15. 28 Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas. Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993; Language and Death. The Place of Negativity, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. 29 Paul de Man, Romanticism; Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983; The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

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Western metaphysics. Another theory of linguistic sign, closer to affects than to abstraction, arises from the medieval doctrine of pneumo-fantasmologie: Eros and poetry, desire and poetic sign are thus linked and involved through their common participation in a pneumatic circle within which the poetic sign, as it arises from the spirit of the heart, can immediately adhere both to the dictation of that “spiritual motion” that is love, and to its object, the phantasm impressed in the phantastic spirits. In this way, the poets freed themselves from the “primordial positing of the signified and the signifier as two orders distinguished and separated by a barrier resisting signification”, which, in its fidelity to the original metaphysical positing of the word as “signifying sound”, governs every Western conception of the sign. The pneumatic link, uniting phantasm, word, and desire, opens a space in which the poetic sign appears as the sole enclosure offered to the fulfillment of love and erotic desire in their roles as the foundations and meaning of poetry, in a circulation whose utopian topology can be imperfectly exemplified ....30

The repression of this affective mode of signifying is obviously a response to the threat imposed by an emotional language that resists reduction to abstract meaning, and it can be also related to the inability of Western culture to establish bonds with the epistemologies of other cultures, as Boaventura de Sousa Santos has explained.31 Paul de Man also explores the absence in which language acts. In works already mentioned such as Blindness and Insight (1983), The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984) and Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism (1992), de Man explains how poetry places itself in the hiatus that exists between language and empirical world. True poetry arises from the perception and exploration of a “consciousness” that “does not result from the absence of something, but consists of the presence of a nothingness”.32 Since it expels reality, poetry implies a self-referential movement that relates to death. Literary history consists of several moments that explore this nothingness and this self-reference; this brave act is what de Man identifies and admires in 30

Agamben, Stanzas, 128. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, “A Non-Occidentalist West? Learned Ignorance and Ecology of Knowledge”, Theory, Culture & Society, 26/7-8 (2009), 103-25. 32 De Man, Blindness and Insight, 18. 31

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some Romantic authors as Rousseau and Wordsworth and is, also, what constitutes the real literary modernity. In opposition to these few names, a whole tradition characterized as regressive struggles to escape this consciousness with the help of symbolism but, as de Man perfectly conveys, it is doomed to leave traces of its insufficiency: Wide areas of European literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries appear as regressive with regards to the truths that come to light in the last quarter of the 18th century. For the lucidity of the preromantic writers does not persist. It does not take long for a symbolic conception of metaphorical language to establish itself everywhere, despite the ambiguities that persist in aesthetic theory and poetic practice. But this symbolical style will never be allowed to exist in serenity; since it is a veil thrown over a light one no longer wishes to perceive.33

Jonathan Mayhew34 and Philip Silver35 have explored this tradition of self-consciousness in twentieth-century Spanish poetry as a source of fear for certain authors. Whereas Mayhew talks about the neotraditionalism of the 1980s poetry,36 Silver finds a whole anti-modern trend: instead of being fully conscious of the negativity inherent to poetic language, most Spanish poets would hold on to the empirical word as a defence against the menacing nothingness implicit in poetry.37 The absence of an explicit reflection on the powers of poetical language can be understood within the debate about the secular lacks derived from the poverty of Spanish Romanticism, as some critics have studied.38 The position of Luis García Montero, who opts for a 33

Ibid., 208. Jonathan Mayhew, The Poetics of Self-Consciousness. Twentieth-Century Spanish Poetry, London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994; The Twilight of the Avant-garde. Spanish Poetry, 1980-2000, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009. 35 Philip Silver, La casa de Anteo. Ensayos de poética hispana, Madrid: Taurus, 1985. 36 Mayhew, The Poetics, 18, 129. 37 Silver, La casa, 36. 38 The question of the (non)existence of a strong Spanish Romanticism has been treated in classical essays by numerous critics, as Silver summarizes in his essential Ruin and Restitution, where he focuses on the socio-historical causes that impeded a romantic revolution, in particular the strategic alliance between nobility and clergy. See Philip Silver, Ruin and Restitution: Reinterpreting Romanticism in Spain, Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997, 35. In Los hijos del limo. Del 34

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strongly realistic poetics, can be fruitfully assessed within this debate. The ghosts who haunt his poetic texts constitute the fantastic elaboration of what has been subjected to repression: the radical elusiveness of poetic language, which exiles reason and reference. This dialectics is extremely useful to address García Montero’s aesthetic attempt to reinterpret post-modernity as a return to Enlightenment. The collection Las flores del frío perfectly illustrates this theoretical aim of rescuing first modernity as the basis of a habitable space in the current global world. It is worth noting that the book was published in 1991, soon after the fall of the Berlin wall. The project obviously departs from the intention to undertake a rewriting of Les Fleurs du mal (1857), the collection through which Baudelaire inaugurated a certain modernity in European lyrics.39 This rewriting is based on a simple re-symbolization  a “swerve”, if we are to employ the terminology used by Harold Bloom40 to label those intense reformulations of poetic precursors: García Montero substitutes the escapism typical of the negative modernity that Baudelaire comes to represent in the idea of evil (mal) by the notion of coldness (frío), to refer to the result of the solipsism and of the removing of human romanticismo a la vanguardia, but first published in 1972, Paz explains how the vigorous religious Reforma had frustrated the possibility of a real Enlightenment and, consequently, of a real romantic reaction against the excesses of rationalism. See Octavio Paz, Los hijos del limo. Del romanticismo a la vanguardia, Santiago de Chile: Tajamar Editores, 2008, 88. Casado relates the lack of linguistic consciousness typical of some Spanish poetic traditions to a weak understanding of romanticism as strong individualism. See Miguel Casado, Los artículos de la polémica y otros textos sobre poesía, Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2005, 136. 39 Baudelaire has been considered the symptomatic representative of modernity by classical authors as: Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry: from the MidNineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974, 19; Hans Robert Jauss, Experiencia estética y hermenéutica literaria. Ensayos en el campo de la experiencia estética, Madrid: Taurus, 1986, 374; Hans Robert Jauss, “El proceso literario de la modernidad desde Rousseau hasta Adorno”, in Las transformaciones de lo moderno. Estudios sobre las etapas de la modernidad estética, Madrid: Visor, 1995, 70; Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 54; Antoine de Compagnon, Los antimodernos, trans. Manuel Arranz, Barcelona: Acantilado, 2007, 12; and de Man, Blindness and Insight, 185. Baudelaire’s modernity had probably been definitively set by Walter Benjamin in the 1930s: in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (1997), Benjamin explained the Baudelaire’s allegoric reaction to modern conversion of the world into commodity. 40 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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bonds in which the desire to leave aside an unpleasant reality results. The only way of confronting that coldness would be through an attention to empirical reality made possible by a referential language that re-establishes those lost links between the individual, the world and the community. This plan is perfectly summarized in the poem “Canción ofendida” [Offended Song]: It is not the flowers of evil those who have survived. It is the flowers of coldness, Baudelaire.41

The project crystallizes in a movement that is shaped as an allegorical “return”. The first sections of the book show an exploration of Baudelaire’s dialectics of modernity by means of a metaphorical journey to the past: a simulated memory acts as the device which would allow the poetical persona to travel to the origin (both historical and literary) of modernity, and to discover the particular nature of an evil that is redefined in terms of coldness. In the second part of the collection, this exercise of remembrance identifies those roots of modernity with the firm proposal to recover the constructive power of Reason before this was disallowed by its instrumental (ab)use. Such a retrospective movement has two strongly allegorical settings as points of arrival: “Invitación al regreso” [Invitation to Return] recalls the Baudelaire’s obsession for travelling in a reformulation that attempts to rescue the remnants of the “dreams” (“sueños”) of Enlightenment. Despite having been destroyed by the wreckage of modernity, these can still be restored and reinstalled in a positive experience of postmodernism, one based on community and collective ideals. Those remains are read as a legacy of the Enlightenment and are consequently identified with the ruins of “Casa en ruinas” [House in Ruins]. “Invitación al regreso” obviously rewrites Baudelaire’s “L’Invitation au voyage” and, more explicitly, “Le Voyage”.42 The 41 “No son las flores del mal lo que ha vivido. / Son las flores del frío, / Baudelaire.” Luis García Montero, Poesía (1980-2005), Barcelona: Tusquets, 2006, 226. 42 “L’Invitation au voyage” is the title of two different poems written by Charles Baudelaire, one belonging to the collection Les Fleurs du mal and the other to Petits poèmes en prose. Charles Baudelaire, Las flores del mal, trans. Alain Verjat and Luis Martínez de Merlo (bilingual ed.), Madrid: Cátedra, 1997, 238; Petits poèmes en prose. Les Paradis artificiels, ed. Michel Lévy, Paris: Lévy, 1869, 50. Online at:

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poem depicts the return of the seamen from a trip into the sea. The discovery they have made is a kind and positive temporal conscience – “they will come to tell us: / it is the time, / let’s go back with the tide” – in sharp contrast with Baudelaire’s negative experience of “le Temps” as “l’ennemi vigilant et funeste” that constitutes the “amer savoir” acquired in the travel.43 Also, Baudelaire’s thirst for novelty – “au fond de l’Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau!”44 – is replaced by the security given by “the bottom of what is already known”. Both “swerves” serve to portray the faith in the possibility of a new start, conveyed in the boy: Because with human voice, like old seamen, above the blurred pain in their backs, they will come to tell us: it is the time, let’s go back with the tide. The courage and the strength of the twilight will lead you to the bottom what is already known, and we shall see frigates over the black puddles, but a boy’s doubled silhouette will not be fragile or tired.45

They return and bring with them the “dreams”.46 The dreams mean here the remains of the Enlightenment project and its proposals of public or collective happiness. The design of a common project would http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Petits_Poèmes_en_prose (accessed 7 January 2012). Nonetheless, the references made by García Montero in “Invitación al regreso” point to “Le Voyage” as their main intertext. Baudelaire, Las flores del mal, 482. 43 Baudelaire, Las flores del mal, 492. In the English version: “To trick the vigilant fatal enemy, / Time! There are, alas, continual runners.” Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil and Other Works, trans. W. Fowlie (bilingual ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 1964, 101. 44 Baudelaire, Las flores del mal, 494. In the English version: “To the bottom of the Unknown in order to find something new!” Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil, 103. 45 “Porque con voz humana, / como marinos viejos, / sobre el desdibujado dolor de sus espaldas, / vendrán para decirnos: / es el tiempo, / dejémonos volver con la marea. / El coraje y la fuerza del crepúsculo / os llevarán al fondo de lo ya conocido, / y veremos fragatas sobre los charcos negros, / pero la silueta desdoblada de un niño / no será frágil ni tendrá cansancio.” García Montero, Poesía (1980-2005), 203-204. 46 Ibid., 204: “sueños.”

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guarantee a space of living together and a new social harmony, as conveyed in the verse “the dreams taken to the streets”.47 This new reality would make escape unnecessary, and so we will know that “the trip has never been our treasure”.48 It also comes to question the socalled suffering (spleen, anguish) typical of modernism – “the famous pain in the poems”49 – which is somehow reduced to a literary or artificial stance. The return to the past would also be the end of a history made out of wars and enemies, since this “dual history”,50 which caused “noisy tears”, will be finally overcome and converted into “necessarily past, banished misery”.51 The presence of somebody else – “beside your hair”52 – symbolizes the existence of new human bonds and of a new sense of community: And the sea, the very tragic and sweet sea, condemned to its own distance, will give written testimony of (the fact that) the trip has never been our treasure, not even the famous pain in the poems, but rather the dreams taken to the streets, their beds and their mist, the awakening after so many long nights during which we could only foresee sense, talk about out wishes in shadows. Beside your hair, capital of the winds, the dual history, the noisy tears, have to be necessary(ly) past, banished misery, things to be told after some years, if somebody happens to ask for us.53 47

Ibid., 204: “los sueños puestos en la calle.” Ibid., 204: “el viaje nunca fue nuestro tesoro.” 49 Ibid., 204: “el dolor famoso en los poemas.” 50 Ibid., 204: “historia en dos.” 51 Ibid., 205: “pasado necesario, / alejada miseria.” 52 Ibid., 204: “al lado de tu pelo.” 53 Ibid., 204: “Y el mar, el dulce mar tan trágico, / a su propia distancia sometido, / sabrá dejar escrito / que el viaje nunca fue nuestro tesoro, / ni tampoco el dolor famoso en los poemas, / sino los sueños puestos en la calle, / los lechos y su bruma, / el despertar de tantas noches largas / donde sólo pudimos presentir, / hablar de los deseos en la sombra. / Al lado de tu pelo, capital de los vientos, / la historia en 48

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But it is quite meaningful that, in the last stanza, the success of this formulation is questioned by the emergence of a ghostly presence. The familiar and homely space where the lyrical “I” usually writes is perturbed by a strange presence that is related to the very act of writing – “where I usually write”54 – and also linked to amnesia – “a shoulder made out of glass and other made out of oblivion”55 – and to confinement: “love prisoner.”56 An uncanny figure seems to appear where the poet writes, recalling certain theoretical approaches to the spectre as an index of the Enlightenment reason57 and, especially, as a symbol of the estrangement caused by the act of writing: Though also, and necessarily, between the sunset and this house where I usually write, I will wait for the lips which, with a strange call, ask me again: Love prisoner, for whom are you taking one shoulder made out of glass and the other made out of [oblivion?58

The shadow of what has been forgotten in this allegorical recovering of a certain modernity is embodied in the spectre who inhabits the house. And this house, besides, is in ruins. “Casa en ruinas” can be, thus, interpreted as an allegory: it portrays the reappropriation of modern space by a subject who discovers a new sense of habitability in it. The connection with Habermas’ consideration of modernity as an unfinished project is obvious even in the metaphor employed by the poet. His proposal develops a new Bloomian swerve: dos, el ruido de las lágrimas, / tienen que ser pasado necesario, / alejada miseria, / cosas para contar después de algunos años, / si es que alguien pregunta por nosotros.” 54 Ibid., 205: “donde suelo escribir.” 55 Ibid., 205: “un hombro de cristal y otro de olvido.” 56 Ibid., 205: “prisionero de amor.” 57 Buse and Stott, Ghosts; Arnzen, “The Return of the Uncanny”; Masschelein, “The Concept as Ghost” and “A Homeless Concept”. 58 “Aunque también, y necesariamente, / entre la baja noche y esta casa / donde suelo escribir, / yo esperaré los labios / que con llamada extraña de nuevo me pregunten: / ¿Prisionero de amor, para quién llevas / un hombro de cristal y otro de olvido?” García Montero, Poesía (1980-2005), 205.

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the conception of the ruins as foundations that would certify a kind of renewed usability for the modern ideology that has been sunk into oblivion.59 García Montero obviously relies on an intense faith in the power of memory, temporal progress and language as the tools to generate a space of familiarity deserving to be inhabited. The poem, which is quite long,60 presents a poetical voice that talks within a closed frame, in a meditative stance that recalls some Romantic poems of the British tradition (Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey”).61 The voice walks through a natural space, where it feels progressively and harmonically integrated62 – and comes across a house that, though in ruins, appears to be perfectly recoverable for a future dwelling. This house in ruins, thus, is a metaphor for the possibility of starting over and represents an infinite potentiality, as it is conveyed in the verses that say: “... a house in ruins where one can be a child, where one can be alive and whatever is most convenient for us”: I walk as the fabricating light, speculating in the corner that waits for a look 59

In Siervos con sangre diferente, Concepción González-Badía Fraga explores the influence of Rousseau and Diderot on García Montero’s work. According to her, postmodern uncertainty leads him to formulate “su propuesta de retorno a las bases ilustradas por su status de origen del ideario actual” [his proposal of returning to the Enlightenment basis because of its condition as origins of the current cosmovision]. Concepción González-Badía Fraga, “Siervos con sangre diferente”: relectura de la modernidad a través de la obra de Luis García Montero, Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2005, 88. Laura Scarano also examines this ideological affiliation in: Luis García Montero: la escritura como interpelación, Granada: Atrio, 2004, 32. 60 It is constituted by 180 verses, divided into four sections. Due to its length, only the most pertinent stanzas for the argument that is being developed will be quoted here. 61 The enunciative stance and the reflective mood arising from an intense look at the surrounding world can be interpreted in the light of Robert Langbaum’s definition of the poetry of experience composed by certain English authors. See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition, New York: Norton, 1957. Jiménez Heffernan has linked this poem with Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, on the basis of the importance given to memory and ruins. See Julián Jiménez Heffernan, “Literatura en España (1939-2000)”, in Historia de la literatura. V. VI. El mundo moderno. 1914 hasta nuestros días, ed. Erika Wischer, Madrid: Akal, 1993, 465. 62 There is a meaningful verse where the lyric voice says: “Memoria de sentirme / añadido en aquella lentitud”, that is, “Memory of feeling myself / integrated in that slowness”. García Montero, Poesía (1980-2005), 244.

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to get to be like a ship, a castle with battlements, lost forest, reachable sky, territory of dreams, house in ruins where one can be a child, where one can be alive and whatever is most convenient for us. 63

Nonetheless, the association between ruins and suitability for rebuilding is highly problematic and raises some issues related to the narratability of history. On one side, ruins seem to easily act as new foundations. Even Freud, relying on Bachofen, compared ruins to the unconscious in Civilization and its Discontents (1929) and to infantile memories in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), implying that those were somehow recoverable through verbalization. In a way, this stance toward ruins runs parallel to a confidence in mourning as a process that comes to a positive end.64 This view is perfectly summarized in Laurent’s statement about the existence of a “blank space” or hole in ruins, waiting to be fulfilled with a new meaning: There is in the spectacle of the ruin something such as a “reserve” of the text, a margin from which the text will be susceptible of being deciphered. A new text will arise from this presence of silence in the margins of the text.65 63

“Yo voy como la luz fabricadora, / especulando / en el rincón que espera una mirada / para ser como barco, castillo con almenas, / bosque perdido, cielo traspasable, / territorio de sueños, / casa en ruinas donde ser un niño, / donde ser lo que viva y nos convenga.” Ibid., 245-46. 64 In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud compares the unconscious to urban ruins which, despite being buried, maintain their legibility for the exercise of anamnesis. See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents in Freud – Complete Works, ed. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 16-17. Online at: https://ia600301.us.archive.org/34/items/Civili zationAndItsDiscontents/freud_civilization_and_its_discontents.pdf (accessed 7 January 2012). Freud seems to be relying on Bachofen’s reflections on ruins as spaces of silence and emptiness that can be recovered. See Johann Jacob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967, 12. This trust on return through therapeutic anamnesis is related to an identical faith on ruins as a manageable tool, which does not offer any interpretative resistance. 65 My translation. The original version: “Hay en el espectáculo de la ruina como una ‘reserve’ del texto, un blanco, un margen de donde el texto podrá ser descifrado. Un texto nuevo podrá surgir de esta presencia del silencio en las márgenes del texto.” Eric Laurent, “Ciudades psicoanalíticas”, Virtualia. Revista digital de la Escuela de la Orientación Lacaniana, 8/2-10 (2003), 5. Online at: http://virtualia.eol.org.ar/008/ default.asp?notas/elaurent-01.html (accessed 8 January 2012).

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The poem reveals, though, that this rebuilding is not easy. Ruins are the symbol of a history that has been lived as devastation and can no longer provide a familiar space. The walls of the house are full of writings whose meanings are not explicit, and the boy who symbolized the possibility of a new beginning suddenly appears as an uncanny figure. There are not blank pages, but rather erased signs. As the next stanza shows, the boy is defined as “a strange familiar person”,66 in a perfect conveying of the uncanny according to Freud. What was supposed to be a symbol of initiation acquires a ghostly connotation that comes from a specific experience of a past that has been removed “as the boy of the erased days”.67 The rubbles also appear as paradoxical now: while being the guarantee of new spaces, their potentiality seems to be depending on a certain paralysis.68 It seems necessary to respect them in their residual state, since any attempt to reuse them would neutralize them and “unbeing, they are able to survive”:69 You are like a strange familiar person, like the child of the erased days, the print that redeems this silence made out of young rubbles which, unbeing, are able to survive.70

Also, contact with the past represented in this house reveals history as a traumatic event. The walls are filled with names, dates, and

66

Ibid., 242: “un extraño familiar.” Ibid., 242: “como el niño de los días borrados.” 68 The impossibility of accessing the past has been explored by David Lowenthal in The Past is a Foreign Country, where he explains that ruins’ “strangeness” is “domesticated by our own preservation of its vestiges” but is never eradicated. See David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, xvii. Paul Zucker finds this condition symbolized in ruins: the temporal abyss impedes to know the intention with which it was once constructed, and this fact questions the very possibility of its recovery. See Paul Zucker, “Ruins. An Aesthetic Hybrid”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 20/2 (1961), 120. 69 “A costa de no ser se sobreviven.” García Montero, Poesía (1980-2005), 242. 70 Ibid., 242: “Eres como un extraño familiar, / como el niño de los días borrados, / la huella que redime este silencio / de jóvenes escombros / que a costa de no ser se sobreviven.” 67

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drawings whose meaning is not made clear at all and seem to point to the indescribable.71 They seem to portray a problem of representation: The boy walks alone, slowly, his figure is small and thoughtful, in the meanwhile the air crackles like a poisoned step and on the walls some names, dates, drawings float, confessions without a public. They are words written on a wall, they know less of love than of sadness. 72

The wall paintings, as well as the spectral shadow of the child, create a disturbing atmosphere in the house, in a manifestation of what Anthony Vidler defined as the “spatial uncanny”. In The Architectural Uncanny (1992), an essay on the connections between postmodern estrangement and new spatial conceptions, Vidler relates the sudden conversion of a familiar space into a strange place to a response to the shock caused by modernity. The uncanny appears in those spatial conceptions that attempt an impossible recovering of the past, and it certifies the impossibility of achieving new senses of comfortable habitability in a global world, something already acknowledged by Adorno and Horkheimer and stressed by Bauman.73 71 The possibility of a reliable representation of history has been questioned after the World War II events by certain psychoanalytical currents of thought. Lowenthal talks about the non-correspondence between the writing of historical reports and the past they try to convey. See Lowenthal, The Past, 215. LaCapra also illustrates the problems of representation raised by the Holocaust and the traumatic events related to silence. See Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994, 209-10. Felman and Laub treat, in Testimony, the conflict between verbalization and trauma, between “the imperative to tell” and “the impossibility of telling”. See Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, New York: Routledge, 1992, 76. 72 “En soledad va el niño, lentamente, / pequeña su figura y pensativa, / mientras el aire cruje / como un peldaño envenenado / y en las paredes flotan nombres, fechas, dibujos, / confesiones sin público. / Son palabras escritas sobre un muro, / saben menos de amor que de tristeza.” García Montero, Poesía (1980-2005), 243-44. 73 Instead of the nostalgia for the Bachelardian maison natale, other authors as Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize the “the complaint of uninhabitability” that would impede the rebuilding of home basing it “on more stable foundations”. See Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny. Essays in the Modern Unhomely, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992, 66. Such a critique can perfectly be applied to García

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The poetic solution of this poem implies that, in a certain way, the only way of inhabiting postmodernism maybe is by means of renouncing to the closure or security imposed by homeliness or familiarity. To recognize one’s own space always means to signal one’s own territory. The distinction made by Jane Jacobs between “a monogamous sense of place” and “promiscuous models of dwelling” seems interesting. In the last ones, those who inhabit or possess a house “might also at the same time be in various states of homelessness”.74 Though Jacobs talks about postcolonial issues, the interference of a feeling of dispossession in one’s intimate and private space seems suitable to point to the tension exemplified by García Montero’s poem. The spectral and residual ruin could be a sign of emergence, employing Williams’ term,75 but emergence of a new hybrid habitability, which relied more on the respect for ghosts rather than on a returning to Enlightenment. These questions also pose, as LaCapra has argued,76 a close link between uneasiness, history and no symbolization. In this way, the familiar space that the house seems to promise acts as a fantasy of security that hides, in certain redoubts, spectral shadows that come to confirm that, as Buse and Stott argued, “the Enlightenment never succeeds entirely in exorcising its own ghosts”.77 The prevalence of a fearful atmosphere in the poems calls for a further exercise of reflection on the links between language, modernity and poetry. This would imply a reconsideration of Habermas’ trust in communicative reason as a way to recover the basis of a positive modernity. The emphasis on the first element cannot be separated from a search of consensus that, in its Montero’s poetical attempt in “House in Ruins”. In fact, Antonio Jiménez Millán identifies in this poet’s work a “nostalgia de las posibilidades” [nostalgic of the possibilities] that in a way recognizes the unworkability of the return. See Antonio Jiménez Millán, “El espacio y la memoria”, Complicidades. Litoral, 217-218 (1998), 105. 74 Jane M. Jacobs, “The Consequence of Ruins: Contemplations on Social Memory and Loss of Place in Australia”, Journal of Historical Geography, 23/4 (1997), 504505. 75 Raymond Williams, “Dominant, Residual, and Emergent”, in Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 121-27. 76 Dominick LaCapra, History and Memory after Auschwitz, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998; Historia en tránsito: experiencia, identidad, teoría crítica, Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2006. 77 Buse and Stott, Ghosts, 5.

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undermining of conflict, meets the very objectives of the current politics of fear that are being promoted from several instances, as Altheide78 and Furedi79 have studied. In fact, the inequality in the access to communicative platforms in contemporary societies has quite meaningfully leaded some scholars to qualify Habermas’ Ideal Speech as an impossible dream.80 Though García Montero acknowledges the aporia of an epoch in terms of the conflict between individuality and social or communal bonds, maybe a more detailed reflection on the reasons of Enlightenment’s collapse should be taken into account. Zygmunt Bauman has showed how the very causes of modern atrocity (Holocaust) are inherent to a dynamics that is still working in the current global order.81 It could be suggested that the spectres who inhabit the verses of allegorical “return” derive from those areas that testify, in Guillermo Carnero’s words, “la cara oscura del siglo de las Luces” [the dark face of the Age of Enlightenment]82 has not been completely overcome. In this context, modern poetry keeps being a testimony of a threatening excess. The difficulty of conforming its discourse to the commands of reference and communication is conveyed by the appearance of ghostly presences that only reaffirm modern estrangement. If Buse and Stott claimed that “perhaps we need to inspect the inside of reason and see how it too is haunted by what it excludes”,83 modern poetry constitutes a privileged tool to assume such a challenge. It is no wonder that Bruns commented on Paul Celan, one of the most radical poets of modernity, that his poetry

78

David L. Altheide, Terrorism and the Politics of Fear, Lanham, New York, Toronto, and Oxford: Altamira Press, 2006, 39. 79 Frank Furedi, Politics of Fear. Beyond Left and Right, London and New York: Continuum, 2005, 124. 80 M.M. Day, “Habermasian Ideal Speech: Dreaming the (Im)possible Dream”, School of Accounting & Finance, University of Wollongong, Working Paper 13, 1993: http://ro.uow.edu.au/accfinwp/100 (accessed 15 November 2012). 81 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, New York: Cornell University Press, 2000. 82 Guillermo Carnero, La cara oscura del Siglo de las Luces, Madrid: Cátedra/ Fundación Juan March, 1983. 83 Buse and Stott, Ghosts, 5.

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was “uncanny ... in the way things are strange when they are no longer subject to our concepts and categories, when they escape us”.84

84

Gerald L. Bruns, “The Remembrance of Language: An Introduction to Gadamer’s Poetics”, in Gadamer on Celan, by Georg Gadamer, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997, 20.

WAR ON FEAR: REINTERPRETING DANTE’S VIEW OF THE “INFIDEL” DANIELA DI PASQUALE In his book Orientalism (1978), Edward Said interprets Dante’s approach to the East as an obliteration of otherness and an incorporation and assimilation of the point of view of the Western Orientalist. From this perspective, Said analyses the presence of Muslim philosophers and Islamic leaders in Dante’s Divine Comedy (probably written between 1307 and 1321) and describes the presence of Oriental characters as anachronistic: they are condemned according to the Christian Eschatological system and thus treated as ignorant sinners. Similarly, several other scholars have interpreted the presence of “infidels” such as Muhammad and his cousin Ali in the 28th canto of the Inferno as an act of condemnation of the Islamic world, and thus not far from the traditional outlook represented by the Crusades’ medieval propaganda and the notorious process of construction of religious identity through the sequence fearrejection-eradication of the non-Christian. However, a more careful analysis of the outcomes of the Medieval European imagination in its textual and iconographic media reveals that the main strategy based on intellectual, religious and ethnic censure of the infidel enemy is very far from Dante’s attitude towards Oriental otherness. The Italian poet’s point of view can thus be seen as belonging to an exceptional group of positive approaches to the “stranger”, previously identifiable in the works of Christian writers as well as in some examples of medieval iconography between the eleventh and the thirteenth centuries. Dante’s writing can be seen to contain elements of resistance to and textual struggle against the propaganda of terror, conflict and violence against the “other” of the time.

Immediately after 9/11, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote a series of articles for the national newspaper Corriere della Sera entitled “The Rage and the Pride”, where she made the following assertion: “What sense is there in respecting those who don’t respect us? What sense is there in defending their culture or presumed culture when they scorn ours? I want to defend ours and I am letting you know that I prefer Dante to Omar Khayan.”1 1

In the original: “Che senso ha rispettare chi non rispetta noi? Che senso ha difendere la loro cultura o presunta cultura quando loro disprezzano la nostra? Io voglio

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By positioning Dante as the counterpart of the Muslim world, Oriana Fallaci assumes that a particular choice of cultural scripts can influence and shape one’s response to the fear of the “other”. Indeed, as the sociologist Frank Furedi explains, “the conversion of a response to specific circumstances is mediated through cultural norms that inform people about what is expected of them when confronted with a threat and how they should respond and feel”.2 In preferring Dante (whose masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, was probably written between 1307 and 1321) to Omar Khayan, an eleventh-century Persian poet and scientist who was attacked by his contemporary Muslim leaders for his radical skepticism towards religion and philosophy, Oriana Fallaci’s assertion shows a misinterpretation of Dante’s message that reinforces the cultural justification for a presumed anthropological difference between Western civilization and Oriental otherness. She confuses two different levels of significance of Dante’s works, the moral and the fictional, thus failing to distinguish the construction of a narrative illusion from a reader’s interpretation. In other words, Oriana Fallaci does not seem to understand the difference between the ambiguity of the literary sign in the Divine Comedy and the traditional moral interpretation. This distinction was formulated, for example, by the American Dantist scholar Teodolinda Barolini in 1992.3 The point stressed by Barolini is that it is necessary to detheologize our interpretation of Dante’s Comedy. More critical attention should be paid not to what he said but to what he did and, above all, a closer look should be given to the textual construction of Dante’s characters in the Afterworld. Only by suspending our suspension of disbelief, as Barolini states, can we finally see Dante for what he does poetically, and not just for what he says theologically. Indeed, the gradatio technique Dante uses in the Comedy, the constant pursuit of something new both rhetorically and materially, was a way to reorient the medieval perception of otherness. Even if not explicitly stated, Oriana Fallaci’s words seem to suggest that Dante is the antidifendere la nostra, e v’informo che Dante Alighieri mi piace più di Omar Khayan.” Oriana Fallaci, “La rabbia e l’orgoglio”, Corriere della Sera (29 September 2001). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 2 Frank Furedi, “Our Culture of Fear”, in Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear, eds Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy, Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007, 20. 3 Teodolinda Barolini, The Undivine Comedy: Deotheologizing Dante, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992.

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Islamic cultural norm that should mediate European responses to the threat of the Muslim attack on the West. Most certainly, this is due to the fact that Dante’s eschatology put Christian crusaders in Paradise and Muslim characters in Hell: Saladin, Avicenna, Averroes, Muhammad, and his cousin Ali. Does this simplistic approach, the argument of position, provide a solid ground for understanding Dante’s poetics and his view of the “infidel”? Dante’s work as a mere recipient or a sounding board for the medieval crusade propaganda clearly constitutes a conceptual misunderstanding about the imaginative and fictive nature of narrative. Consequently, I try to follow Barolini’s advice and pay closer attention not only to what Dante says, but also to what he does textually and rhetorically. Therefore, through a rhetorical analysis of Dante’s masterpiece (Inferno 4, 15, 28; Purgatorio 6, 16; Paradiso 10, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21, 27) and letters, I will show how a close reading of Dante’s Comedy seems to prove that in the medieval fear-oriented approach to the Muslim could be subjectively depicted through literary fantasy, in particular through images of the “infidel other”. According to John Tolan’s research on the way the infidels’ image has been constructed in the Middle Age Europe, since the first encounter between Christians and Orientals in the fourth century, cultural scripts were produced in order “to fit the new infidels into already existing Christian categories, that is, through the filter of the Bible. Thus, Arabs were depicted as a divine punishment for the sins of the Christians, or as pagan idolaters, heretics, followers of Satan, devotees of Antichrist”.4 In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville described Saracens as heretics who believed in reincarnation. Eusebius of Caesarea (Palestine), even before the rise of Islam, used the rhetorical strategy of the animalization of the enemy by describing the Arabs as bloody-thirsty cannibals or wolves of Arabia. Sophronios, patriarch of Jerusalem since 634, stated that the invasion of Saracens, called “godless Saracens”, can only be a “punishment for countless sins and very serious faults” of the Christians.5 In 640, Maximus the Confessor, talking about Oriental infidels, depicted them as “a barbarous nation of the desert overrunning another land as if it were their own [and we] see our civilization laid waste by wild and 4

John Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, 20. 5 Ibid., 42.

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untamed beasts who have merely the shape of a human form”.6 Pseudo-Methodius in his seventh-century Apocalypse says much the same thing about Muslims describing them as wild, savage and precivilized people: “they used to walk naked; they ate flesh from the vessels of flesh and drank the blood of animals .... These barbarian rulers are not men ... they will take babies by force from their mothers’ arms and dash them against the rock like unclean animals.”7 In 850, Eulogius of Córdoba, despite his first positive description of the Córdoba emirate, called Muhammed “impure dog”,8 and he invented that the Islamic prophet “claimed ... that in the next world he would deflower [Jesus’ mother]”.9 At the same time, many Christian writers, like Pelagius, Raoul de Caen and the author of the Chronicles of the Archbishops of Salzburg, reinforced the story of Islamic religion as idolatry. Even the interlinguistic difficulties were seen as proof of Muslims’ devil nature, as Petrus Tudebodus explicitly affirmed: “they are our enemy and God’s ... saying diabolical sounds in I know not what language.”10 It is particularly relevant in this context that even the earlier medieval iconography was used to reinforce this constant vilification of the “other” through what David Altheide in 2002 called a feargenerating endeavour. Although Altheide referred to this endeavour as a form of contemporary propaganda, its description as “an act of mass media terrorism on the ‘public body’”11 seems to me also appropriate for the crusade propaganda context. The potential relevance of this material as a form of visual terrorism was already grasped by medieval cultural agents, for whom, as Debra Higgs Strickland wrote, “enemies of the medieval church not only followed the wrong religion, they were also literally ugly as sin”.12 Saracens as dogs can be found in the tympanum of the Abbey church of La Madeleine (Vézelay), which dates back to the 1125 and was a very important pedagogic medium for the Christians, since the Abbey was built on a 6

Ibid., 43. Ibid., 48. 8 Ibid., 93. 9 Ibid., 93. 10 Ibid., 112. 11 David L. Altheide, Creating Fear: News and the Construction of a Crisis, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2002, 12. 12 Debra Higgs Strickland, Saracens, Demons, & Jews: Making Monsters in Medieval Art, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003, 29. 7

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pilgrimage road to Jerusalem. Even the idolatric mystification of polemic writings about Islam had its visual completion, as we can see from a first crusade miniature in William of Tyre’s Estoire d’Eracles, composed between 1295 and 1300. Figurative representations of Saracens as devils were widespread, like the image from an illustration of the Bible moralisée (1220). Muslims as monsters are portrayed in a marginal Saracen threatening praying Christians in the Oscott Psalter (1260). Muhammed himself was portrayed as a monster, for example, in the twelfth-century manuscript of De Generatione Machumet. The traditional iconographical representation of military and religious enemies zoomorphicized is, furthermore, evident in the association between Muslims and dogs or ram-likes, from a thirteenth-century image of Alexander’s Expositio in Apocalypsim, where Muhammad is depicted as The Beast of the Earth. Finally, Muslims are seen as the figuration of Bible’s predictions, since three Muslims leaders were identified as the heads of the Apocalypse dragon in thirteenth-century Joachim of Fiore’s Liber figurarum: Mohammed/Muhammad, Mesemothus and Saladin. It is already clear that FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) is not, as Hebblethwaite and McCarthy wrote in 2007, only a modern concept “in sales or marketing to disseminate negative (and vague) information on a competitor’s product”.13 Although the FUD concept was coined in the 1970s by IBM, in order to sell more competitive products, I think we can easily transpose it from its marketing field to medieval literary competition and propaganda agenda. In fact, it was already evident in the denigration of the “other”, in medieval iconography and accounts, produced first of all with an identityforming function. Actually, a function that served as justification for a presumed religious threat to hide a more pragmatic military and political purpose: to stop the Muslim raids into Europe. As is well known, the strategy of medieval Christian writers was basically to place the crusades in an eschatological context using the language of the Gospels to make acceptable the idea of a war on Islam. As the ancient martyrs did in Roman times, “if the crusaders are the new apostles, the Saracens play the role of the pagan Roman persecutors”.14 This attitude explains the manipulation of the “fear” 13 Kate Hebblethwaite and Elizabeth McCarthy, “Introduction”, in Fear: Essays on the Meaning and Experience of Fear, 16. 14 Tolan, Saracens, 112.

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concept and its transformation from its nature of innate response to a real danger to human life into a transcendent fear of punishment in the Afterworld for those whom refused to fight the infidels. This is a clear intention in Petrus Todebodus’ Historia. He reports the words of the bishop of Nicaea exhorting the crusaders to fight against the Turks: “Be everywhere strong in the faith of Christ, and fear not those who persecute you. As the Lord said: ‘Fear not those who kill the body; indeed they cannot kill the soul’.”15 Nonetheless, along with the medieval literature on interreligious encounters, positive accounts on otherness emerge from other medieval writers, such as Sabeos, an Armenian monophysite, who, according to Tolan, wrote in 661 that Muhammad “abandoning the reverence of the vain things ... turned toward the living God, who had appeared to their father Abraham”.16 A (c.)670 Nestorian chronicler reports that “the Arabs do nothing new when they adore God ... but continue the ancient usage, as is proper for people who honor the ancestor of their race”.17 Even orthodox Christian writers share such an evaluation. Bede, for example, who initially praised the Saracens for their tolerance, after Mavia, king of the caliphate Umayyad, built and consecrated a church for his own people and invoked Christ as “savior of the World”.18 Eulogius, the same writer who had called Mohammed a dog, described in his Memoriale sanctorum the Córdoba emirate govern by Abd al-Rahmân as exalted by him above all, elevated with honors, expanded in glory, piled full of riches, and with great Energy filled with an abundance of all the delights of the world, more than one can believe or express. So much so that in every worldly pomp he exceeds, surpasses, and excels the preceding king of his race.19

And a most explicit idea of a Christian preference for the Muslim medieval world is in Paulus Alvarus’ Indiculus luminosus (seventh century):

15

Ibid., 112. Ibid., 45. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Ibid., 73. 19 Ibid., 86. 16

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The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves. 20

Judging by these accounts, it becomes more understandable why Saladin, the Kurdish sultan who conquered Jerusalem in 1187, Avicenna, an eleventh-century Persian doctor and philosopher, and Averroes, a twelfth-century Arabic philosopher and commentator of Aristotle’s works, are in Dante’s Limbo, together with other famous pagan poets and philosophers like Homer, Plato, Seneca and Tolomeus, and not in the heretics circle as the crusade propaganda would put them. Scholars have generally explained the presence of Saladin in Limbo for his generosity, liberality and clemency toward Christian prisoners. The justification for the presence of the two Muslim philosophers is, however, more controversial. Averroes, for example, was first condemned to death for heresy in 1195 and then he was exiled in Córdoba. According to María Rosa Menocal, who reminds that the philosopher had incurred the condemnation of Islamic religious authorities, even if “Dante felt some compunction about damning the man who had, after all, made Aristotle and Plato available to his generation ... what Dante says directly about the Islamic world certainly confirms that he was little interested in it and nonchalant or even negative about its value”.21 By presenting textual, rhetorical and biographical proofs, I will assume a different position on this debate that will become clearer as my arguments further unfold. Indeed, it seems to me that in the Divine Comedy we can also read a parallel tradition of non-pejorative descriptions of the infidel otherness, proved not only by the argument of position but most of all

20

Ibid., 86. María Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987, 127. 21

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by the connotation of Limbo’s physical geography, as an edenic one (Inferno IV, 108-44): We reached the base of an exalted castle, encircled seven times by towering walls, defended all around by a fair stream. We forded this as if upon hard ground; I entered seven portals with these sages; we reached a meadow of green flowering plants. The people here had eyes both grave and slow; their features carried great authority; they spoke infrequently, with gentle voices. We drew aside to one part of the meadow, an open place both high and filled with light, and we could see all those who were assembled. Facing me there, on the enameled green, great-hearted souls were shown to me and I still glory in my having witnessed them. ... I saw that Brutus who drove Tarquin out, Lucretia, Julia, Marcia, and Cornelia, and, solitary, set apart, Saladin. ... Euclid the geometer, and Ptolemy, Hippocrates and Galen, Avicenna, Averroes, of the great Commentary.22

It is the Limbo light that allows us to correlate Inferno 4 with the connotative construction of Dante’s Paradise, where luminosity is the main characteristic, to a less or greater extent according to the progression of Dante’s journey toward God. As for the rhetorical structure of these lines, the position of Saladin alone, set apart from the other souls, is of textual relevance, since the name of Saladin is the 22

My emphasis. Dante’s Comedy with the Allen Mandelbaum translation. Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011).

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last word of the tercet and the two commas slow down the rhythm of enunciation, forcing the reader to pay more attention to him. Many Dante’s commentators have explained Saladin’s isolation based on his religious difference in contrast with other illustrious characters in Limbo. But how can we explain the position of two other Muslims in Dante’s Limbo, Avicenna and Averroes, next to Euclid, Ptolemy, Galen and Hippocrates? I believe that the syntactic disposition of words and punctuation in the tercet on Saladin functions as a slow zoom effect, reflecting the disposition of the character himself, isolated not because of his otherness, but because of his very uniqueness. But there is more. Even the representation of Mohammed and his cousin Ali in Inferno 28 needs to be reinterpreted in the light of the rhetorical argument of Dante’s syntactic construction. When Dante and Virgil appear at the ninth bolgia, the ditch where the fraudulent souls are punished, the Muslim prophet and his cousin are depicted as schismatic, that is, as former Christians who have abandoned the Church to start a new religion, neither heretics nor infidels. Their punishment is to be mutilated: No barrel, even though it’s lost a hoop or end-piece, ever gapes as one whom I saw ripped right from his chin to where we fart: his bowels hung between his legs, one saw his vitals and the miserable sack that makes of what we swallow excrement. While I was all intent on watching him, he looked at me, and with his hands he spread his chest and said: “See how I split myself! See now how maimed Mohammed is! And he who walks and weeps before me is Ali, whose face is opened wide from chin to forelock. And all the others here whom you can see were, when alive, the sowers of dissension and scandal, and for this they now are split.

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Daniela Di Pasquale Behind us here, a devil decks us out so cruelly, re-placing every one of this throng underneath the sword edge when we’ve made our way around the road of pain, because our wounds have closed again before we have returned to meet his blade once more. But who are you who dawdle on this ridge, perhaps to slow your going to the verdict that was pronounced on your self-accusations?” “Death has not reached him yet,” my master answered, “nor is it guilt that summons him to torment; but that he may gain full experience, I, who am dead, must guide him here below, to circle after circle, throughout Hell: this is as true as that I speak to you.” More than a hundred, when they heard him, stopped within the ditch and turned to look at me, forgetful of their torture, wondering. “Then you, who will perhaps soon see the sun, tell Fra Dolcino to provide himself with food, if he has no desire to join me here quickly, lest when snow besieges him, it bring the Novarese the victory that otherwise they would not find too easy.” When he had raised his heel, as if to go, Mohammed said these words to me, and then he set it on the ground and off he went. 23

As established by the exegetical tradition, Mohammed is punished here for preaching against the Christian faith (Jacopo Alighieri, 1322),24 or because he was the most detrimental person for the Church 23

Ibid. (my emphasis). “Therefore, this sin is committed in two ways, firstly causing a schism, a less severe sin, since it involves falsely believing in another faith. Among them there is a great

24

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(L’Ottimo Commento, 1333),25 a heretic and an idol for his followers (Chiose Cagliaritane, 1370).26 In addition, in one of the last comments on Dante’s Comedy by Nicola Fosca (2003-2006), Dante’s description of Muhammad, who shows his wounds when asking for pity, is interpreted as the traditional intolerance towards the medieval mentality for the Muslim prophet and as the fear for the islamization of Europe.27 Nonetheless, there are at least three details concerning the prelate of Spain, by the name of Mohammed, with a fellow by the name of Ali. Long ago he was sent overseas, with great promise, by the Pope of Rome, out of envy of his great skills in preaching Christ. He returned with many victories of faith, but the promises were not kept. He returned there again and preaches the opposite, spreading the Saracens’ religion. As he and his companion preached opening the mind and intellect against our faith, so their bodies are figuratively open here and it happens to other bodies too.” In the original: “Conciosiacosa che per due modi la presente colpa si contiene, in prima qui dello scismatico, siccome per men grave, si conta, il quale lo scommettere d’una fede in altra errando s’intende. Tra’ quali d’alcun grande prelato di Spagna, nominato Maometto, con alcuno suo conpagno nominato Ali, qui si concede, il quale anticamente essendo dal papa di Roma alcuna volta mandato oltremare, per invidia di sua facultade con grande inpromissione a predicare [di] Cristo, e con vittoria di fede tornando, e non trovando alle promessione fermo volere, ritornato di là e il contrario predicando ridisse, affermando la credenza che al presente pe’ saracini si ritiene. Onde per cotale aprire d’animo e d’intelletto, come per lui e simigliante per [lo suo] compagno contra nostra fede predicando si fece, così figurativamente aperti qui i lor corpi si fanno e così simigliantemente degli altri s’intende.” Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dartmouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=132251280310&cmd=goto result&arg1=0 (accessed 13 June 2011). 25 “After that, he spoke about the sinners in the eighth bolgia in general, here he spoke about the punishment of one of the schismatic leaders in particular, that is Mohammed, who has done more damage to the Church of God and to the Christian faith with his schism that no another, or most incomparably.” In the original: “Poi che in genero ha parlato di tutti quelli della VIII bolgia, qui in particulare tratta della qualità della pena d’uno principe di questi scismatici, cioè di Maumetto, il quale con la sua scisma hae più danno dato alla Chiesa di Dio, e alla fede cristiana, che nullo, o tra tutti gli altri incomparabilmente.” Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dart mouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=133351280220&cmd=gotoresult&rg1=0 (accessed 13 June 2011). 26 “He preached against the Christian faith to the point that, because of him, everyone became more hostile to Christians than before and they worshipped Muhammad as their idol sent by god.” In the original: “Predicò contra la fede christiana onde per lui tucti se fecero contr’ai christiani più contrari ch’ei non erano stati de prima et adorano maometo per loro idolo mandato da dio.” Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dart mouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=137051280310&cmd=gotoresult&rg1=0 (accessed 13 June 2011). 27 The way Dante describes Mohammed (flaunting their wounds in order to arouse compassion) is a consequence not only of intolerance in the medieval mentality (for

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oratorical construction that reveals ambiguity in the supposed transmission of the traditional anti-Muslim discourse. First, the repetition of the prophet’s name, at the beginning and at the end of his speech, an unusual consideration for a sinner in Dante’s Comedy, since there are only four other characters in Hell talking with Dante or Virgil, whose first name is repeated twice in the same canto. Second, it should be pointed out that these four characters also convey a positive message. In canto 6, Ciacco, whose sin was gluttony, talks of a political digression about the situation of Florence in a mixture of love and melancholy; Dante’s schoolmaster, Brunetto Latini, punished in the eighth circle as a sodomite, is called by the author as “the dear and good paternal image” (Inferno 15, 84);28 Sinon, a falsifier of word, is not a real person, since in the Greek epic he was the Achean warrior who persuaded the Trojans to accept the giant wooden horse as a gift from the Greeks that would later cause the outbreak of the war and, consequently, Aeneas’ journey to Italy, Dante’s moral model. Finally, count Ugolino, betrayer of the Ghibelline faction, embodies one of the most moving feelings of father love. Even the terrible image of the Islamic prophet opening his chest with his hands may suggest such an interpretation of Dante’s approach to Muhammad story, thus compelling us to admit the heterogeneity of the medieval cultural community for his knowledge of the sources. I may add as evidence of this connection Miguel Asín Palacios’ revolutionary book on the relations between Dante and the Islamic eschatology, published in 1919.29 He presents a version of the mi’rag, the tale of Muhammad’s journey to the Afterworld written prior to ninth century, describing how Gabriel the Archangel opens Muhammad’s chest, extracts his heart and washes it with the water of the holy Zamzam Well, in Mecca. Then, he fills Muhammad’s chest with faith and hope, closes the incision and takes him by the hand to Paradise. This evident Arabic intertextuality in Dante’s work (without denying that the mi’rag itself relates back to other Jew and Christian those who believe to possess the only truth, that is the truth), but also of the fear for the advance of the Arabs, who had invaded Europe (Sicily, Spain). Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dartmouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=200351280280&cmd=goto result&arg1=0 (accessed 13 June 2011). 28 Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011). 29 Miguel Asín Palacios, Dante e l’Islam. L’escatologia islamica nella Divina Commedia, trans. Roberto Rossi Testa and Younis Tawfik, Milan: Nuove Pratiche, 1997.

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apocryphal texts, as Carlo Saccone argues)30 is confirmed not only by the 600 pages of Asín Palacios’ comparative study between the Arabic literature and Dante’s poetry, but also by other scholars. Abdelwahab Meddeb, for example, who found an Islamic inspiration in Dante’s Comedy and a close correspondence with Ibn ‘Arabi’s poetry, a thirteenth-century Arabic poet whose main work, the Futūhāt, shows an infernal architecture and topography very similar to Dante’s Hell configuration: the same plan, the same longitudinal section. Moreover, in Convivio (The Banquet), Dante mentions other Arabic scientists and philosophers: the astronomers Albumasar, Alfagrano, Alpetragio and the philosopher Algazali. Another point of interest in Asín Palacios’ book is the explanation of Ali’s presence in Inferno 28. His presence could lead to a demonstration of Dante’s knowledge of the Islamic literature, since Ali, punished as the schismatic responsible for the separation between Shia Islam and Sunnism, is described exactly the same way in Arabic chronicles, “whose face is opened wide from chin to forelock” (Inferno 28, 33).31 In fact, Ali was murdered by a fanatic of the kharijite sect with a sword stroke on his head, the blood streaming down his face and his beard. Such an image is totally absent from the Christian writings prior to Dante. The spread of the Arabic philosophy and science in Middle Age Europe, mainly due to the arabicization of Spain, is demonstrated by the presence of many medieval documents: an eleventh-century Arabic-Latin glossary; the translations of Arabic books promoted by Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, in the twelfth century; Robert of Ketton’s Latin translation of Quran in 1142; twenty-five manuscripts of Mark of Toledo’s Quran translation composed in 1212; and many other medieval translators and scholars like Michael Scot, Moses of Palermo, Stefano of Messina, the Jew from Girgenti Farag ibn Salen, the Jew from Arles Kalonymous ben Kalonymus. But there are many other examples: king Alfonso the Wise, who creates in 1245 a chair in Arabic studies at the University of Seville; Raymund de Peñafort, promoter in Murcia of a studium arabicum between 1265 and 1275 to teach the Arabic language to more than twenty Dominicans friars; Ricoldo of Monte Croce, a Dominican monk, who spent many years 30

Carlo Saccone, “Muhammad’s Mi’raj: A Legend between East and West”, Rivista di Studi Indo-Mediterranei, 1 (2011): http://www.archivindomed.altervista.org/pagina -472441.html (accessed 12 September 2012). 31 Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011).

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in Bagdad, Mossul and Tikrit, where he studied the Quran at the beginning of fourteenth century; the thirteenth-century friar Pedro Pascual, prisoner of the Saracens in Granada and a writer with a very deep knowledge of Islamic culture. Finally, the finding in 1949 of the Latin and French versions of the Book of the Ladder of Muhammad, a Castilian translation, composed between 1260 and 1264 by Bonaventura of Siena, an Arabic mi’rag relating the ascent of Muhammad to Heaven and one the missing links (according to Saccone, there is also another European offshoots of the mi’rag in the twelfth century)32 would prove Dante’s knowledge of Islamic eschatology. Moreover, as Angelo De Fabrizio observed in 1907 and as reported by Lieberknecht, “Vergil’s speech explaining in the face of Mohammed Dante’s divine mission to visit the Other World might indicate that Dante, the author, was aware of Mohammed’s own, similar presumption to have visited the Other World during his lifetime”.33 The second rhetorical feature that can show an ideological switching in Dante’s view of the Islamic prophet is the use of the third person singular in Muhammad’s speech: “See now how maimed Mohammed is!” This choice is generally explained as an attempt to make himself known by his first name (Lodovico Calstelvetro, 1570),34 or as a way to introduce himself as a famous person and a 32

Saccone, “Muhammad’s Mi’raj”. Otfried Lieberknecht, “A Medieval Christian View of Islam: Dante’s Encounter with Mohammed in Inferno XXVIII” (1987): http://www.lieberknecht.de/~diss/ papers/p_moham.pdf (accessed 12 September 2012). It is the interpretation of the verses of canto 28: “‘Nor death hath reached him yet, nor guilt doth bring him’, / My master made reply, ‘to be tormented; / But to procure him full experience, / Me, who am dead, behoves it to conduct him / Down here through Hell, from circle unto circle; / And this is true as that I speak to thee’.” Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt. columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011). According to Angelo De Fabrizio, “Virgil would mean: The journey he [Dante], alive, conducted by me, dead, makes through this painful place, is true and real, it’s not a falsehood such as the one told about you”. In the original: “Virgilio vorrebbe dire: Il viaggio che costui, vivo, accompagnato da me, morto, fa per questo luogo di pena, è vero e reale, non è una fandonia, come quella che si conta di te.” Angelo De Fabrizio, “Il “mirag” di Maometto esposto da un frate salentino del secolo XV”, Giornale Storico della Letteratura Italiana, XLIX (1907), 312. 34 “He talks about himself in the third person, in order to be known by his first name, and it seems that he is improperly defined storpiato for cut.” In the original: “Parla di sé in terza persona, acciocché abbia occasione di farsi conoscere per lo nome proprio; e pare non propriamente detto Storpiato per tagliato.” Dartmouth Dante Project, 33

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renowned man with millions of followers (Francesco Torraca, 1905).35 Nevertheless, other interpretations are possible if we consider the spread of false legends made up in the European Middle Age about Muhammad’s life, career as a prophet and, above all, about his death, with the purpose of denigrating the origins of the Muslim religion. As reported by John Tolan, in early Middle Age four polemical lives of Muhammad were made known “in which the prophet of Islam is painted not only as a heresiarch but also as a trickster and magician”:36 Embrico of Mainz’s Vita Machumeti, Gautier de Compiègne’s De Otia Machometi, Adelphus’s Vita Machometi, and Guibert of Nogent’s Gesta, report that Muhammad’s visions of Gabriel were invented to justify his epilepsy and that his presumed miracles were produced by the black arts of magic. Many other Christian writers variably present Muhammad as a heretic, a pagan or the Antichrist. According to Guibert of Nogent,37 he was torn apart by pigs, symbols of uncurbed sexuality, also represented in Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora, which dates up to 1240-1253, with Muhammad positioned atop a pig. In my point of view, all these pejorative and false medieval accounts, made up for Christian readers who could have never met the Muslim enemies, and created to denigrate them, as John Tolan wrote, “so their readers could not take them seriously”,38 are the literary image of Muhammad mutilation mentioned in Dante’s poem. Indeed, the Italian word “storpiato” (maimed) means not only a physical mutilation but also a misinterpretation, since in the fourteenth century the verb “storpiare” had already the meanings of impeding and stultifying.39 Thus the use of the third person together with the word “storpiato” could also be related to the tradition of medieval injurious http://dante.dartmouth.edu/search_view.php?doc=157051280310&cmd=gotoresult&arg 1=1 (accessed 13 June 2011). 35 “He speaks about himself as another person, giving emphasis to his name by pronouncing it to the end, it seems almost that he wants to say: I am that famous Mohammed, that many millions of men honor in the upper world.” In the original: “Parla di sé come d’un’altra persona; dà rilievo al suo nome, pronunziandolo per ultimo, quasi intenda: quel Maometto famoso, che tanti milioni di uomini onorano su nel mondo.” Dartmouth Dante Project, http://dante.dartmouth.edu/search_view.php? doc=190551280310&cmd=gotoresult&arg1=0 (accessed 13 June 2011). 36 Tolan, Saracens, 137. 37 Ibid., 142. 38 Ibid., 147. 39 Manlio Cortellazzo and Paolo Zolli, DELI – Dizionario etimologico della lingua italiana, Bologna: Zanichelli, 1999.

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stories about Muhammad’s life, since the Italian term has a second figurative meaning, standing for “mispronounce”. It is, therefore, possible to read in Muhammad’s sentence a subtext through which Dante adopts a stance towards the traditional account of the Islamic prophet, seen as “storpiato” by the crusade propaganda scripts. The third aspect I would like to discuss to explain my thesis of a kind of ambiguity in Dante’s description of the traditional enemies of Christianity is a quantitative argument. The number of lines Dante uses to describe Muhammad’s presence in Hell, 42 verses, that is, almost 30 % of canto 28. This aspect is very important if we compare it with the twelve lines the Italian poet uses for the souls of the medieval warriors for the Christian faith in the Holy Land, in Paradiso 18 (39-48): Then, just as soon as Joshua was named, I saw a splendor thrust along the cross, nor did I note the name before the act. And at the name of noble Maccabeus, I saw another flame wheel round itself, and gladness was the whip that spurred that top. So, too, for Charlemagne and Roland-my attentive eye held fast to that pair like a falconer who tracks his falcon’s flight. The next to draw my eyes along that cross were William and Renouard and, too, Duke Godfrey and Robert Guiscard.40

Not only does Dante mention these crusaders simply by listing their names (Charlemagne, Roland, Renouard, Duke Godfrey and Robert Guiscard), without a direct dialogue that would highlight them (as, on the contrary, he does with Muhammad), but two of them (Roland and Renouard) were just fictional characters of medieval songs on heroic deeds of the Crusade cycle. Moreover, the last passage occupies less than 9 % of Paradise 18. Even more surprisingly is Siger of Brabant’s presence in Paradise 10, an Averroist forced to leave his chair at the Faculty of Arts in Paris in 40

Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011).

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1276 after the bishop’s prohibition from teaching the philosophical ideas of the Muslim philosopher. Dante, who meets Siger in the circle of the wise souls, describes him as “the everlasting light of Siger, / who when he lectured in the Street of Straw / demonstrated truths that earned him envy” (Paradiso 10, 136-38).41 As we have seen, Dante’s first concern is not with the Muslim problem, since the ninth and last crusade in 1272 had made it clear that the Christian army would not be able to defeat its religious enemy in the East. Therefore, I am not totally convinced that Dante’s masterpiece was an apologia for Christianity, for its serious challenging of the authority of such a system and for creating a countertext to the mi’rag, as Menocal argues.42 It is true that the lower part of hell is a city of mosques and that he puts in hell friends like Guido Cavalcanti or Brunetto Latini even for their fascination with Arabic-Andalusian-Sicilian modes of thought, but his main criticism is internal to the Church of Rome that, as Dante writes, “into the filth / it falls” (Purgatorio 16, 129).43 He explicitly attacks the greed of the contemporary clergy (Paradiso 21, 130-35): But now the modern pastors are so plump that they have need of one to prop them up on this side, one on that, and one in front, and one to hoist them saddleward. Their cloaks cover their steeds, two beasts beneath one skin: o patience, you who must endure so much!44

He criticized the corruption of the popes, called “rapacious wolves” (Paradiso 27, 55),45 who transformed the Church into a “sewer / Of blood and stench” (Paradiso 27, 25-26).46 He blames the wickedness of the European Christian kings, described in Paradiso 18 as arrogant, insane, lecherous, avaricious and coward men (115-48). After all, in Paradiso 27, Dante had already said that the enemies of the pope are not Jews or Saracens (87), they are only Christians. 41

Ibid. Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History, 127. 43 Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011). 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid. 46 Ibid. 42

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Although Cacciaguida, the great-great-grandfather of Dante and a crusader too, describes in Paradiso 15 the Saracens as “that execrable race”,47 people whose law’s iniquity usurped the just possession of the Holy Land; he is a twelfth-century man, who lived two centuries before Dante’s time. Indeed, it seems to me that Dante establishes immediately a chronological difference, and maybe an ideological one, between him and Cacciaguida, who initially speaks in Latin and not in the vulgar Italian Dante uses in the Comedy. In addition, at the beginning of the following canto (Paradiso 16), the narrator explicitly criticizes the importance of the genealogic link: If here below, where sentiment is far too weak to withstand error, I should see men glorying in you, nobility of blood-a meager thing!-I should not wonder, for even where desire is not awry, I mean in Heaven, I too felt such pride. 48

This is another possible evidence of the complexity and ambiguity of Dante’s rhetorical construction, which allows us to look differently at the fictional creation processes, from its visual conceptualization to its verbal concretization. The final stage of Dante’s writing shows, in fact, such an intricate web of subtexts, in a rhizomatic form, that reinforces the idea of linking the historical and the factual to the textual and rhetorical, thus solving the problem of Dante’s identity: theologian, mystic or simply a poet? According to Teodolinda Barolini, Dante blurs the differences and sacrifices the clarity of the dogma in order to achieve a more lively textuality, thus conveying doubtfulness, uncertainty and polysemy. In other words, far from sustaining any indulgence or admiration for the Islamic prophet in the Comedy, I agree with Lieberknecht in thinking that Dante was, at the same time, “far from sharing the attitude of emotional hatred coupled with ignorance, which many commentators have found expressed in [Muhammad’s] episode and taken to be the typical medieval Christian attitude”.49 47

Ibid. Ibid. 49 Lieberknecht, “A Medieval Christian View of Islam”. 48

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What encouraged Dante’s progressive conceptualization to develop such a significant re-evaluation of the world around him? The victimization and the feeling of being disowned by his mother country, caused by his political exile in 1302, would have probably changed his attitude towards those considered “illegitimate” or in some way “other”. It really was a “kind of orphanhood”, as Edward Said described the condition of exile,50 since in Dante’s writings lies the psychological response to the feeling of being banished and disowned from one’s country and life. First, the resentment against his homeland. He constantly and harshly criticized Italy and Florence, for example, in Purgatorio 6 (76-78): Ah, abject Italy, you inn of sorrows, you ship without a helmsman in harsh seas, no queen of provinces but of bordellos!51

Second, on the one hand, he needs to distinguish himself for his anthropological diversity from his persecutors and, on the other hand, he pursues a sort of future compensation, as in Brunetto Latini’s prophecy on Dante’s exile (Inferno 15, 63-78): But that malicious, that ungrateful people come down, in ancient times, from Fiesole – still keeping something of the rock and mountain – for your good deeds, will be your enemy: and there is cause-among the sour sorbs, the sweet fig is not meant to bear its fruit. The world has long since called them blind, a people presumptuous, avaricious, envious; be sure to cleanse yourself of their foul ways. Your fortune holds in store such honor for you, one party and the other will be hungry for you – but keep the grass far from the goat.

50

Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000, 182. 51 Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011).

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Daniela Di Pasquale For let the beasts of Fiesole find forage among themselves, and leave the plant alone – if still, among their dung, it rises up – in which there lives again the sacred seed of those few Romans who remained in Florence when such a nest of wickedness was built.52

A strong demand for a compensation of his suffering life is even more evident in Paradiso 17, in Cacciaguida’s prophecy (55-69): You shall leave everything you love most dearly: this is the arrow that the bow of exile shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know how hard a path it is for one who goes descending and ascending others’ stairs. And what will be most hard for you to bear will be the scheming, senseless company that is to share your fall into this valley; against you they will be insane, completely ungrateful and profane; and yet, soon after, not you but they will have their brows bloodred. Of their insensate acts, the proof will be in the effects; and thus, your honor will be best kept if your party is your self.53

Furthermore, in a letter to Moroello Malaspina, who gave hospitality to Dante in 1306, Dante introduces himself as “a Florentine undeservedly in exile” (exul inmeritus),54 and in an epistle to his leading patron, Cangrande della Scala, he defines himself as “Florentine in birth but not by disposition” (florentinus natione non moribus).55 52

Ibid. (my emphasis). Ibid. (my emphasis). 54 Paget Toynbee, trans., Dantis Alagherii Epistolae: The Letters of Dante, Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1921, 27. 55 Ibid., 195. 53

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Third, he is always looking for a new father restorer of the homeland and of his own life. This father could only be the Holy Roman Emperor, the German Henry VII, who Dante calls “the noble Henry” (Paradiso 17, 82),56 the only men who could pacify Italian internal fights, bringing the country back to the imperial control and breaking up the temporal power of the Church. Only after this restoration could Dante return to Florence, as the prodigal but innocent son. Unfortunately, it would never happen. Meanwhile, Henry is depicted as the “great sire” (magni genitoris, letter to Henry, 1311)57 who can defeat Florence, a “baleful pest”58 in Dante’s words, “regenerat[ing] the human family of this crazy age”59 and “our heritage which was taken away, and for which we lament without ceasing, shall be restored to us whole again”.60 As in the modern idea of a culture of abuse, Dante sees himself as victim of a metaphorical family break-up, since his mother country disowned him and his putative father (Henry VII) was incapable of helping him. Even the consequences of this culture of abuse are evident in Dante’s literary behavior, as they were explained by Frank Furedi in 1997: “The culture of abuse flatters personal weakness and lowers the aspirations of people.”61 In fact, the fear Dante expresses in Paradiso 17 (102-35) is the non-acceptance and the oblivion of his works for posterity. He needs to fight his lack of self-esteem hearing Cacciaguida’s words of reassurance: After that holy soul had, with his silence, showed he was freed from putting in the woof across the web whose warp I set for him, I like a man who, doubting, craves for counsel from one who sees and rightly wills and loves, replied to him: “I clearly see, my father,

56

Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011). Toynbee, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, 103. 58 Ibid., 104. 59 Ibid., 111. 60 Ibid., 105. 61 Frank Furedi, Culture of Fear: Risk-Taking and the Morality of Low Expectation, London and Washington: Cassell, 1997, 90. 57

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Daniela Di Pasquale how time is hurrying toward me in order to deal me such a blow as would be most grievous for him who is not set for it; thus, it is right to arm myself with foresight, that if I lose the place most dear, I may not lose the rest through what my poems say. Down in the world of endless bitterness, and on the mountain from whose lovely peak I was drawn upward by my lady’s eyes, and afterward, from light to light in Heaven, I learned that which, if I retell it, must for many have a taste too sharp, too harsh; yet if I am a timid friend of truth, I fear that I may lose my life among those who will call this present, ancient times.” The light in which there smiled the treasure I had found within it, first began to dazzle, as would a golden mirror in the sun, then it replied: “A conscience that is dark – either through its or through another’s shame – indeed will find that what you speak is harsh. Nevertheless, all falsehood set aside, let all that you have seen be manifest, and let them scratch wherever it may itch. so shall your outcry do – the wind that sends its roughest blows against the highest peaks; that is no little cause for claiming honor.” 62

I can agree with Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile when he says that exiles transform a state of disowned into an exaggerate intransigence since they can sublimate their conditions in creative terms: “Willfulness, exaggeration, overstatement: these are characteristic styles of being an exile, methods for compelling the world to accept your vision.” He explains: “Most people are 62

Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011).

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principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions.”63 In Dante’s case, creativity could be a way to fight his personal fears and, in this sense, his resistance to the fear of otherness could be what Nordstrom and Martin call the “alternative and oppositional practices [that] continually emerge within dominant culture”.64 The arguments put forward throughout the essay have made it clear that this interpretation of Dante’s view of the infidels is neither a sort of islamophilia ante litteram nor a kind of tolerance for medieval Muslims, and I agree with Menocal when she says that Dante “was a true believer and a true defender of the faith”.65 But I cannot totally share the opinion of a cultural anxiety that impelled Dante to “[fight], and in many ways [defeat], the enemies that so threatened him and his view of what was right”.66 He did not even show the westernization of the Oriental otherness, as Edward Said wrote in his book on Orientalism (1978): The discrimination and refinements of Dante’s poetic grasp of Islam are an instance of the schematic, almost cosmological inevitability with which Islam and its designated representatives are creatures of Western geographical, historical, and above all, moral apprehension.... Mohammed, Saladin, Averroes, and Avicenna are fixed in a visionary cosmology – fixed, laid out, boxed in, imprisoned, without much regard for anything except their “function” and the patterns they realize on the stage on which they appear.67

According to Barolini’s notion of textual privilege, I think that Dante claims for a new comprehension of the narrative structure of his poem, as the complexity of the Divine Comedy on the formal level has clearly shown. This new comprehension is grounded on two fundamental assumptions: the well-known arbitrariness of the relation between signifier and signified, and the capacity of the poetic modelling system to reorient our reading’s methodology. Only in this 63

Said, Reflections on Exile, 182. Paths to Domination, Resistance, and Terror, eds Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 6. 65 Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval, 130. 66 Ibid., 132. 67 Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), New York: Vintage, 2003, 70. 64

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sense can one talk about a reinterpretation of Dante’s vision. It seems to me that Dante shows a progressive imagination rather than being a vehicle of the traditional outlook represented by the Crusades’ medieval propaganda and the notorious process of construction of a religious identity through the sequence fear-rejection-eradication of the non-Christian. I believe that Dante’s masterpiece and life question the very notion of fear of external dominations and the constant request for identity safety and salvation. In fact, his words lead to a positive reshaping of the concept of “identity” by understanding that, as suggested by Altheide, “we don’t ‘have’ or own an ‘identity,’ but rather, identity emerges and is acknowledged in situations; we live in the identity process”.68 Every identity process is dialectic, historical, and determined by the level of cultural evolution at any given time and place. Hence, should a war be fought, then a textual and rhetorical one is preferred, sometimes with the aim of defeating the very concept of “war on otherness”. Two tercets of Paradiso 11, about Saint Francis of Assisi’s mission in Egypt in order to convert the Muslims, show Dante’s clearly pacific solution to the conflict, for they propose the idea of the necessity of the dialogue with the “other”: And after, in his thirst for martyrdom, within the presence of the haughty Sultan, he preached of Christ and those who followed Him. But, finding hearers who were too unripe to be converted, he – not wasting time – returned to harvest the Italian fields. 69

68 69

Altheide, Creating Fear, 8. Digital Dante, http://dante.ilt.columbia.edu/comedy/ (accessed 13 June 2011).

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Susana Araújo (PhD Sussex, MA Warwick, Lic. Lisbon) is Principal Investigator at the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon (CEC-UL), where she holds a Development Grant. She is currently Vice Director of CEC-UL and Principal Investigator of Project CILM – City and Insecurity in Literature and the Media, a research project funded by the national research council (FCT). She is the author of Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror (forthcoming, Bloomsbury) and of the poetry book Dívida soberana (Mariposa Azual, 2012); she is the editor, with Sandra Bettencourt and Raquel Fernandes, of the book (In)seguranças no espaço urbano (2012) and edited, with Marta Pacheco Pinto and João Ferreira Duarte, the book Trans/American, Trans/Oceanic, Trans/lation: Issues in International American Studies (2010). She is also guest-editor of a number of special issues for the Review of International American Studies (2008/2009), Reconstructions: Studies in Contemporary Culture and Estrema, among others. Araújo has published articles in internationally recognized peer-reviewed journals such as Atlantic Studies, Studies in the Novel, Women Studies, Critical Survey, Symbiosis as well as chapters in books and anthologies. Edith Beltrán is teaching assistant at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish Literature from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (1993-1998) and received her Master of Arts in Spanish with a Minor in Women Studies from the New Mexico State University (Las Cruces, New Mexico). In 2008 she started her PhD in Spanish with a Minor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her field of study is contemporary Latin American Literature focused on archives, violence, and representation of identity. Sandra Bettencourt holds a doctoral scholarship from FCT and is currently a doctoral student in the FCT PhD Programme in Advanced

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Studies in the Materialities of Literature at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra. From 2011 to 2013 she was a research fellowship holder in Project CILM – City and Insecurity in Literature and the Media at the Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon. She holds a degree in Art Studies, as well as an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies. Her research interests include aesthetics, new media, and cultural studies, with a special preference for transcultural dialogues and interart studies. She has taken part in different scientific meetings and her papers are printed in several peerreviewed journals and publications. Christopher Bollas (BA in History from the University of California Berkeley, 1967) is member of the British Psychoanalytical Society and the British Association of Psychotherapists. He took his PhD in English Literature at the University of Buffalo. After his graduation, he worked with autistic and schizophrenic children at a day treatment center in Oakland, and while preparing his PhD thesis he worked at the University Health Centre (Department of Psychiatry) where he received training in adult psychotherapy. He founded, along with the director, Lloyd Clarke MD, a training programme in psychoanalytic psychotherapy for graduate students in the humanities. After graduating, he moved to England where he qualified from the Institute of Psychoanalysis in 1977 in London, where he also taught courses at Richmond College, the University of East Anglia and the North East London Polytechnic. From 1975 through 1978, he trained in the Adult Department of the Tavistock Clinic and ended up as a practicing analyst of the Independent School in London, where he lived for 35 years, except for a brief interlude in the United States in the middle 1980s when he was Director of Training at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, and Professor at Cambridge Hospital of Harvard University. He currently divides his time between London and North Dakota. He has authored many books, the most recent include The Infinite Question (Routledge, 2009), The Evocative Object World (Routledge, 2008), Hysteria (Routledge, 2000), The Mystery of Things (Routledge, 1999), and Cracking Up (Routledge, 1995). The Christopher Bollas Reader has recently come out with Routledge (ed. Arne Jemstedt, 2011).

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Martijn Boven is a PhD student at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. He is working on a project that is called Rhizome, Discourse and Brain. Constructing Comparables between Three Incomparable Theories of Cultural Change: Gilles Deleuze, Paul Ricœur and Cognitive Science. His main research interests focus on twentieth-century French Philosophy (Paul Ricœur, Gilles Deleuze) and literary strategies in Philosophy (Søren Kierkegaard, Johann Georg Hamann, Walter Benjamin). Margarita García Candeira has graduated in Journalism and Hispanic Studies at the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC). She gained a Fundación Caixa Galicia Scholarship to do a Master of European Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge, where she was also a Cambridge European Trust Scholar. She has worked as an Assistant Teacher and researcher in the Department of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature of USC. She is interested in contemporary poetry and has recently finished her PhD dissertation on the visions of poetic modern tradition in the work of Luis García Montero. Her articles “Psychoanalysis and Literary Tradition: The ‘Anxiety of Influence’ in Luis García Montero’s Reformulation of Rafael Alberti” and “La naturaleza como modelo de resistencia. Azar, emergencia y voluntarismo en la poesía de Jorge Riechmann” were both recently published in volumes by Rodopi and Peter Lang. João Pedro da Costa graduated in Portuguese and French Language and Literature in the Faculty of Arts of Porto University and is a Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) fellow and a PhD student in Information and Communication on Digital Platforms at Porto and Aveiro Universities (Portugal), as well as a collaborator of Instituto de Literatura Comparada Margarida Losa. Digital Propagation of Music Videos in the Social Web is the working title of his research project that aims at the definition of a theoretic model for the analysis of the propagation of music videos in the Social Web, based on an interdisciplinary epistemic approach between Web and Literary Studies. In the mentioned model, propagation is viewed as a dynamical process framed by Convergence Culture that involves a) the propagation potential of the medium as a socio-technological rhizomatic channel of diffusion; b) the participative fruition of Web users as agents of propagation; and c) its overall systematization

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through videomusical transfluency, a concept inspired by the notion of Gérard Genette’s transtextuality. James Rushing Daniel did his PhD in Composition and Rhetoric at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His work draws upon the traditions of critical and rhetorical theory in exploring institutional and popular discourse in the context of globalization. His dissertation, The Future of Dissent: Anarchy, Invention, Rhetoric, explores the ways in which contemporary radical groups (WikiLeaks, Anonymous, and Voina) have located a means of enacting global agency through the adoption of “eventual” discourses which have challenged the prevailing logics of the global power structure. Daniela Di Pasquale received her BA in Modern Literatures from the University of Milan (2002) and her PhD in Comparative Studies from the University of Genova (2006). Her PhD thesis on the Portuguese translations of the eighteenth-century Italian melodrama was published in 2007: Metastasio al gusto portoghese. Traduzioni e adattamenti del melodramma metastasiano nel Portogallo del Settecento (Roma: Aracne). Her research interests fall in the area of translation studies, reception and intertextuality, the relationship between Italian literature and Portuguese literature. Since December 2007, she has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon, working on Dante’s reception in Portugal. In 2009, she published a book on literary exchanges between Portugal and Italy: Studi Portoghesi (Roma: Aracne). At the Centre for Comparative Studies, she is also member of TETRA, Theatre and Translation, a research project that proposes to undertake a historical and critical survey of theatre translation practice in Portugal from the nineteenth century through to the present day. Ortwin de Graef is Full Professor of English Literature at the University of Leuven (Belgium), where he also directs the interuniversity advanced Master’s programme in Literary Studies. His current research focuses on aesthetic ideologies of sympathy and the State in the post-Romantic condition, on trauma and representations of extremity, and on materialist challenges to models of cultural transmission. Other research topics include: ethics, history and determinism in the Post-Romantic condition; theoretically informed

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post-hermeneutic interpretations of modern (English-language) literature; figurations of the State in nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourse; trauma theory; and the legacies of post-structuralism. He is the author of two books on Paul de Man and has widely published on Romantic and post-Romantic writing and literary theory in internationally reviewed scientific journals. He has also co-edited several books, such as Acknowledged Legislators: Essays on English Literature in Honour of Herman Servotte (Pelckmans, 1994) and Under Construction: Links for the Site of Literary Theory (Leuven University Press, 2000). Brecht de Groote (University of Leuven and University College Brussels) is currently working on a PhD research project provisionally entitled Thomas De Quincey, Aesthetic Ideology, and the Translation of German Idealism. He does research on aesthetic and literary theories as they intersect with ideology, and how national and international exchanges of such theories shaped British nineteenthcentury literature and discourse. On this topic he has given a number of talks. Before commencing his PhD research he read Western Literature at the University of Leuven (summa cum laude with congratulations) and Literary Studies at the Universities of Leuven, Antwerp, Ghent and Brussels (summa cum laude). Christin Grunert is a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the University of Giessen, where she is writing a dissertation on German Literature about the poetological poems of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and the role(s) of the poet and her conception(s) of poetry. She analyses her work from a cultural perspective, taking into account the discussion of scientific discourses as well as religious issues. From 2004 to 2009 she studied German, French and Spanish at the University of Tübingen and Lyon (France). Current research interests are the relation of knowledge and literature, theories of metaphors, metalyric and Droste-Hülshoff. Hande Gurses holds a BA in English Language and Literature (Bogazici University, Istanbul, 2005) and an MA in Cultural Studies (Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2006). She is currently completing her PhD at the French Department, University College London. Drawing on the theoretical background provided by the

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writings of Jacques Derrida, her study focuses on the role of displacement in the works of Orhan Pamuk. She is interested in the experience of liminality that marks Pamuk’s narratives and explores how it is used as an attempt to forge something new – the self, the story, the text – by displacing old, tired, dichotomies that include East/West, word/image, reality/fiction, original/imitation. Some of her publications include: “Mirroring Istanbul” in Global Perspectives on Orhan Pamuk’s Literature: Existentialism and Politics, edited by D. Buyze and M.M. Afridi (Palgrave MacMillan, 2012); “An Analysis of the Paratextual Elements in The White Castle” in Journal of Turkish Literature Orhan Pamuk – Special Issue 7 (2010); “Who Has the Author-ity? An Analysis of the Concept of Signature in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red” in Redefining Modernism and Postmodernism (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Gero Guttzeit is a doctoral candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) at the University of Giessen and a part-time research assistant in the English Department, also holding a scholarship from the German National Academic Foundation. He holds an MSc in Creative Writing from the University of Edinburgh and an MA in English and American Literature and Culture, Philosophy, and General and Comparative Literature from the University of Giessen. He is also a member of the International PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies, and his main research interests are in the theory and history of rhetoric, authorship, and Edgar Allan Poe. Alexandra Hills graduated from New College, Oxford University with a First Class BA in Modern Languages (German and Italian) in 2009. She did her MA in German Studies in 2009/2010 at University College London (UCL) thanks to an Arts and Humanities Research Council scholarship. Her MA thesis focused on the issue of comedy, laughter and remembrance. She examined the possibility of engaging with National Socialism through comedy and how this underlined an ethical problem of representational and memory politics as well as issues of “appropriate” forms of remembrance of Nazism in Austrian literature of the 1960s. Thanks to an Arts and Humanities Research Council Scholarship, she started her PhD at UCL in October 2010. She is working on a research project entitled Emotional Rever-

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berations of War; its aim is to establish emotions as a viable category of historical and literary research with regards to the Second World War and the Holocaust. Issues of representation and fantasy are central to her project, which focuses on the emotional expressions of victimhood in Austrian and Italian literature and are intertwined with the guilt and shame of participation in the Third Reich. At UCL, she is also the co-founder of a research workshop and reading group named “Thoughts Forward”, which seeks to define and explore the fields of academic research as well as its role within the UK educational establishment, with particular focus on such issues as research impact, interdisciplinarity and public engagement. Harriet Hulme is a PhD student in the Department of French at the University College London (UCL). Her research is currently focused upon the “novel of ideas” as a space of productive interaction between philosophy, politics and fiction. She is particularly interested in exploring the way in which the novel form offers a mode of resistance to ideological appropriation. She graduated from the University of Leeds in 2007 with a First Class Joint Honours degree in English and French, and subsequently completed an MA in Comparative Literature at UCL in 2010. Her MA dissertation was concerned with the dialogue between philosophy and fiction in the work of Milan Kundera, Michel Tournier and Iris Murdoch. Marta Pacheco Pinto is member of the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon and holds a PhD in Translation History (2013) from the same University for her dissertation entitled Translating the Oriental Other: The Configuration of the Female Figure in Turn-of-the-Century Portuguese Literature (António Feijó and Wenceslau de Moraes). Her main areas of interest range from translation history to reception and intercultural studies, and her research has mainly focused on oriental otherness and cross-cultural encounters under the perspective of cultural translation. She is assistant director of the literary journal Textos e Pretextos and copyeditor of the international professional communication journal connexions. Her recent publications include “(Dis)quieting the Canon: A Book Review Article of New Work by Fishelov and Papadema, Damrosch, and D’haen” (CLCWeb 14/1, 2012) and the co-edited volumes Trans/American, Trans/Oceanic, Trans/lation: Issues in

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International American Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010) and Macau na escrita, escritas de Macau (Húmus, 2010). Ana Filipa Prata, Research Fellow at the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon, was granted a PhD for her thesis Práticas narrativas da cidade: crónicas urbanas de Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Maria Judite de Carvalho e Jacques Réda (March 2011) at the same University. She was in the meanwhile Teaching Assistant of Portuguese language and culture at the University of Strasbourg (France), and was also invited to hold a seminar on Portuguese Culture and Literature at the University Mohamed V – Rabat at Morocco. She is currently working on her post-doctoral research project and her main interest subjects are: urban narratives, Portuguese and French contemporary literature, interart studies. Marija Sruk studied German Language and Literature and Comparative Literature at the Universities of Zagreb, Konstanz and Vienna. As a member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the International PhD Programme in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen, she is currently working on her PhD project on the ethics and aesthetics of the Holocaust film comedy. Her research interests include Holocaust studies, film history and theory and theories of laughter and the comic. David Vichnar is adjunct lecturer at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University, Prague. His recently defended PhD thesis (with Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris) entitled The Avant-Postman: James Joyce, the Avant-Garde, and Postmodernism is forthcoming in a book form. He works as an editor, publisher and translator. His publications include Joyce against Theory (2010), Hypermedia Joyce (co-edited, 2010), Thresholds: Essays on the International Prague Poetry Scene (edited, 2011) and, most recently, Praharfeast: James Joyce in Prague (co-edited, 2012). He co-edits the VLAK magazine, co-organizes the annual Prague Poetry Microfestival, and manages Litteraria Pragensia Books and Equus Press.

INDEX Abrams, M.H., 324 Agamben, Giorgio, 358 Altheide, David L., 371, 376, 396 Anderson, Benedict, 218, 225 Anderson, Mark, 199 Apalategui, Ur, 220 Apter, Emily, 355 Arendt, Hannah, 18, 119 Aristotle, 104-105, 143-44, 245, 292, 379 Arnzen, Michael, 356 Asín Palacios, Miguel, 384-85 Assmann, Jan, 251 Astier, Colette, 146 Atxaga, Bernardo, 9, 213, 21730, 233-34, 237-38 Auerbach, Erich, 10, 303-13, 316, 318-20, 322 Bachmann, Ingeborg, 8, 185, 188-191, 193, 195, 197-98, 200, 204, 209 Bachofen, Johann Jacob, 367 Barlow, John Perry, 76 Barnstone, Willis, 229 Barolini, Teodolinda, 374-75, 390, 395 Baudelaire, Charles, 61, 324, 330, 354, 361-63 Baudrillard, Jean, 76 Bauman, Zygmunt, 56, 59, 369, 371

Benjamin, Walter, 195, 231, 256, 259, 341, 355, 361 Bion, Wilfred R., 17, 28, 30 Bird, Stephanie, 197-98 Bloom, Harold, 361 Bolaño, Roberto, 7, 55-56, 5961, 66-73 Bollas, Christopher, 80, 205 Brandão, Ignacio de Loyola, 7, 55-56, 59-63, 65-67, 69, 7273 Brewster, David, 345-46 Bruns, Gerald L., 371 Buck, Pearl S., 10, 303, 307, 311-316, 318-19 Bürger, Christa Bürger and Peter Bürger, 355 Caillois, Roger, 149 Calinescu, Matei, 353 Canby, Vincent, 189 Carnero, Guillermo, 371 Caruth, Cathy, 203 Casado, Miguel, 361 Cavani, Liliana, 8, 185, 18890, 199-204, 206, 209 Chatman, Seymour, 147 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 10, 323, 325, 327-28, 330, 334, 336-38, 341-45, 347 Confucius, 15, 27 Cowan, Bainard, 355

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Cuesta Abad, José Manuel, 355 D’haen, Theo L., 216 Dante, 11, 228, 304-307, 37375, 379-81, 383-93, 395-96 Dayre, Éric, 324, 327, 337 De Fabrizio, Angelo, 386 de Graef, Ortwin, 332 de Man, Paul, 323-25, 330-32, 337-38, 340-42, 344-45, 355, 358-60 De Quincey, Thomas, 10, 303, 319-23, 344, 346-48 Dean, Jodi, 40-41 Deleuze, Gilles, 204 Derrida, Jacques, 9, 247, 259, 261, 267-68, 276, 343, 35657 Domínguez, César, 220 Eco, Umberto, 182 Elliott, Anthony, 16 Erikson, John D., 226 Ezrahi, Sidra DeKoven, 168 Fagen, Patricia Weiss, 81 Faris, Wendy B., 215, 234-35 Faulkner, William, 27 Felman, Shoshana, 145, 369 Fisher, Mark, 39, 40, 45 Fiske, John, 285, 288 Flanzbaum, Hilene, 174 Foucault, Michel, 55-56, 146, 199-200 Freud, Sigmund, 1-4, 8, 18, 24, 56-59, 62, 73, 104, 128, 144, 149-51, 155, 163, 170, 188-90, 192, 202-203, 207,

247, 253, 264, 355, 357, 367-68 Friedländer, Saul, 189 Frith, Simon, 283 Furedi, Frank, 371, 374, 393 García Montero, Luis, 10, 35152, 354-55, 360-61, 363, 366, 370-71 Gardner, Howard, 21 Gautier, Théophile, 131, 228 Geertz, Clifford, 112 Gellner, Ernest, 224-25 Gillespie, Gerald, 145 Gilman, Sander, 164 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 127, 135, 138 Goffman, Erving, 86 González-Badía Fraga, Concepción, 366 Goodwin, Andrew, 285 Gould, Stephen Jay, 128 Habermas, Jürgen, 353-54, 365, 370-71 Halbwachs, Maurice, 251 Hall, Stuart, 285 Halmi, Nicholas, 337 Hänitzsch, Konstanze, 194 Hart, Stephen M., 215, 236 Hartman, Geoffrey F., 165, 180, 310-11, 323-25, 328, 337, 340 Hayot, Eric, 318 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 17 Hokenson, Jan Walsh, 169 Honig, Edwin, 337, 341 Irwin, John T., 150-51

Index Jacobs, Jane M., 370 Jameson, Fredric, 39-41, 50, 52-53 Jauss, Hans Robert, 355 Jiménez Heffernan, Julián, 366 Jiménez Millán, Antonio, 370 Joyce, James, 27, 232 Kansteiner, Wulf, 165-66 Kerner, Aaron, 169 Kertész, Imre, 164, 174 Klein, Melanie, 1, 3 Konuk, Kader, 309 Koselleck, Reinhart, 107 Kracauer, Siegfried, 190 Kristeva, Julia, 257, 358 Krylova, Ekaterina, 197 Krylova, Katya, 196 Kundera, Milan, 9, 213, 21718, 229-38 Lacan, Jacques, 1, 3, 5, 8-9, 259, 261, 263-64 LaCapra, Dominick, 369-70 Lamb, Jonathan, 331-33 Langbaum, Robert, 366 Lanzmann, Claude, 185-86 Laplanche, Jean, 1, 4 Laub, Dori, 369 Laxness, Halldór, 46 Lechner, Norbert, 79-80 Levi, Primo, 203 Lewis, Michael, 35 Lichtenberger, Elisabeth, 197 Lieberknecht, Otfried, 386, 390 Lindblad, Bertil, 315 Loewy, Hanno, 164

407 Loudon, Jane, 123, 125, 13032, 134, 141-42 Lowenthal, David, 368, 369 Magilow, Daniel H., 187, 189 Magnason, Andri Snær, 38-39, 43-46, 50-51 Mailänder, Elissa, 208 Marcus, Millicent, 169 Masschelein, Anneleen, 35657 Mayhew, Jonathan, 360 McCormick, John, 235 McPhee, John, 128 Menocal, María Rosa, 379, 389, 395 Mitchell, Juliet, 237 Mitscherlich, Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, 186 Morley, David, 285 Morozov, Evgeny, 81 Nair, Parvati, 228 O’Neill, Alexandre, 61 Ólafsson, Bragi, 7, 35, 37-38, 42-43, 46-51 Olaziregi, Maria Jose, 221 Ouyang, Wen-Chin, 228, 233, 237 Pamuk, Orhan, 9, 259-62, 272, 276 Paz, Octavio, 361 Pile, Steve, 197, 207 Plato, 27, 214, 379 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand, 1, 4 Pourciau, Sarah, 308-309

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Rabkin, Eric S., 215 Rajan, Tilottama, 324, 327-30, 333, 335-36, 340, 346-47 Richards, Thomas, 266 Ricœur, Paul, 7, 101, 103-21, 206 Roche, Anne, 252 Rohr, Susanne, 182 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 352, 354, 360, 366 Royle, Nicholas, 356-57 Rudwick, Martin J.S., 137 Rushdie, Salman, 213-14 Saccone, Carlo, 385-86 Said, Edward, 373, 391, 39495 Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, 359 Searle, John R., 89 Seligmann-Silva, Márcio, 242 Shakespeare, William, 27 Sigurgeirsdottir, Silla, 43 Silver, Philip, 360 Silvermann, Kaja, 207 Sloterdijk, Peter, 39 Smith, Adam, 331-32 Sohn, Leslie, 20 Sontag, Susan, 56, 58-59, 73, 193, 201, 204 Stifter, Adalbert, 123, 125, 139, 141-42

Strickland, Debra Higgs, 376 Sullivan, John, 219 Todorov, Tzvetan, 215, 222, 234-35, 249 Tolan, John, 375, 378, 387 Urry, John, 16 van Alphen, Ernst, 165, 180 Vidler, Anthony, 369 Volodine, Antoine, 9, 239-42, 250, 252-57 von Wright, Georg H., 109 Wade, Robert H., 43 Walker, Janet, 187, 193 Warnes, Christopher, 215 Williams, Raymond, 370 Winkler, Martin M., 150 Woods, Michelle, 229 Woolf, Virginia, 10, 27, 58, 303, 306-307, 318-20 Wordsworth, William, 17, 323, 325-26, 328, 330-32, 334, 337, 340-41, 360, 366 Žižek, Slavoj, 5, 36, 37, 41, 50, 52-53, 160, 165, 167, 178, 208, 232, 264-65 Zucker, Paul, 368 Zupančič, Alenka, 170-71