Mimesis: Conversations with a Concept 9786155682407

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MIMESIS Conversations with a concept

Edited by Áron Bakos, Imola Püsök and Miklós Vassányi

MIMESIS Conversations with a concept

Mimesis: Conversations with a Concept Edited by Áron Bakos, Imola Püsök and Miklós Vassányi First published 2023 by Museum of Ethnography, Budapest. © 2023 Áron Bakos, Imola Püsök and Miklós Vassányi (editors). Copyright of individual chapters is maintained by the chapters’ authors. Publisher: Lajos Kemecsi Scientific advisors: Judit Balatonyi, Jelena Ćuković, Zsolt Dobrai, Tibor Fabiny, Judit Faludy, Hannah Daisy Foster, Gábor Kendeffy, Gergely Kutai, Ákos Nagy, Sarolta Püsök, Elena Rimondo, Miklós Sárközi, Dávid Veress, Gábor Wilhelm and István Zalatnay Language review: espell Ltd. Bibliography review: Borbála Mészáros Desktop Publishing: Co-Print Kft., www.co-print.hu Cover image Malul turnurilor de piatră, Crișul Pietros river, Bihor county, Romania. Photo by Áron Bakos, 2022 ISBN 978-615-5682-40-7 (PDF)

Content Editors

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Contributors

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Acknowledgments

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Mimesis in interdisciplinary perspectives. By way of introduction

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PART I – MIMETIC (RE)PRESENTATION: ART AND AGENCY 1. Art, artefacts and agency. Some examples and questions Gábor Wilhelm 3 2. Mimesis or mimicry? Analysis of Jean Rouch’s ethnographic ‘cult film’ The Mad Masters Elemér Szabó 27 3. BLOW UP “Anti-mimetic” framing methods in Attila Szűcs’s Lidice and other “traumatic” artworks Laura László 57 PART II – IMITATION AND INNOVATION: FORM AND FUNCTION 4. Two theories of social imitation. Richard Dawkins and Gabriel Tarde on the meme Ádám Lovász 87 5. Mimetic practices concerning the summer kitchen. Examples from thematic research Zsuzsanna Nagyné Batári 119

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6. Imitation-based innovations in the First World War Tamás Szegedy-Kloska 151 PART III – MIMETIC TEXT: COMPOSITION AND CONTEXT 7. Mimesis as a narrative mode in The Thousand and One Nights. Preliminary remarks on the study of narrative discourse in mediaeval Arabic prose literature Gyöngyi Oroszi 177 8. Mimesis and sin in László Németh’s novel Sin Enikő Polyák 207 9. The ambivalence of mimesis in the worlds of video games Dániel László Pogány 225 PART IV – MIMESIS AND RELIGION: ON BODY AND MIND 10. Votive offerings and early modern Marian pilgrimage in the Czech lands Tereza Kolmačková 255 11. Roman Catholic liturgy and mimesis. A dynamic paradox Benjámin Varga 299 12. Mimesis in Part VII of Denys the Areopagite’s On the Divine Names. God as archetypal wisdom, mind, intellect, “logos” and faith Miklós Vassányi 319

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Editors Áron BAKOS, PhD, is currently a curator of the Museum of Ethnography, Budapest and a teaching assistant at the Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. He defended his thesis in 2021 based on an ethnographic research of war and military narratives. His further research interests include life stories, conflicts and war, the anthropology of writing and ethnographic methodologies. Imola PÜSÖK is currently a PhD student of Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the Faculty of Humanities of the Georg-August University of Göttingen. She is a social anthropologist by training, interested in understanding the dynamics of social and ecological relations in post-industrial landscapes. She focuses on stories and histories of dwelling, deindustrialisation processes, human-environment relations, post-socialism, and navigating micro- and macro-worlds among others. Miklós VASSÁNYI, PhD dr. habil, is currently associate professor at the Karoli University, Budapest. He holds a doctorate in philosophy from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and a doctorate in history from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His main research interests are Patristics, Neoplatonism, and Scholasticism.

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Contributors Tereza KOLMAČKOVÁ, Mgr., is a PhD student at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University, Prague. Her research focuses on early modern Marian pilgrimage in the Czech lands, particularly on votive offerings and visual and material aspects of pilgrimage Laura LÁSZLÓ, PhD, is currently an editor at Irodalmi Magazin (Literary Magazine), and a museologist at the Hungarian Olympic and Sports Museum, Budapest. She holds a doctorate in aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her main research interests are Postmodernism, Narratology, and the theory of Open Work. Ádám LOVÁSZ is a doctoral candidate and researcher at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Adam’s research interests include process philosophy (Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Whitehead), postmodernism, ontology, post-anthropocentric research paradigms such as Latour’s ANT, New Realism, New Materialism, Speculative Realism and complexity theory. Zsuzsanna NAGYNÉ BATÁRI, PhD, is currently head of the Department for Science and Interpretation in the Hungarian Open Air Museum, Szentendre. She holds a doctorate in ethnography, from the University of Debrecen. Her main interests are open air museology, exhibition methodology, rural architecture and way of life.

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Gyöngyi OROSZI is currently a research fellow and librarian at the Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, Piliscsaba. Her main interests of research include: pre-modern Arabic prose literature with special attention to the Mamlūk period (1250-1500), adab and popular literature, The Thousand and One Nights, discourse analysis, and genre theory. Dániel László POGÁNY is currently a doctoral student in the Language and Communication Doctorate Program at the University of Pécs. He started his university studies in 2010 as a liberal arts major, and from 2011 he studied communication and media studies alongside his first degree. His main research interest has always been turned to video games, especially on interdisciplinary approaches to the study of these games and on the structure of videogame trailers. Enikő POLYÁK is currently a fellow resercher at the Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg (iASK) and a PhD student at the University of Debrecen. Her dissertation is about the works of László Németh’s. Her main research topics are affect studies, memory studies, hungarian literature in 20th century and the works of Agota Kristof. Elemér SZABÓ is currently a PhD candidate at the Doctoral School of History and Ethnography at the University of Debrecen, recently teaches visual culture, cinema and media studies in several grammar schools in Debrecen. He holds an M.A. diploma from Miskolc University in cultural and visual anthropology. His research interests include the theoretical, practical and ethical dimensions of anthropological cinema.

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Tamás SZEGEDY-KLOSKA is currently museologist, curator and scientific secretary at the Hungarian Open Air Museum, Szentendre. He is also a doctoral student with a pre-degree certificate in the Modern and Contemporary World History Programme at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. His main research interests are the First World War and the interwar period in Europe, British and Hungarian veteran organisations after the Great War and 20th century Transylvanian urban history. Benjámin VARGA is currently research fellow of the Research Group of Liturgical History at the Eötvös Loránd University (funded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences through the Lendület “Momentum” program). He is also a visiting lecturer at the Church Department of the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music, teaching various liturgical study classes in both BA and MA programs. His main research interests are liturgical history of the western church, liturgical phenomenology, liturgical philology and ritual studies. Gábor WILHELM, PhD, has been working at the Museum of Ethnography since 1991 as curator of the Asian collection. He studied ethnology in Cologne and Budapest. His main topics and interests have been shamanism, ethnicity, urban ethnography, and anthropology of artifacts. He has been involved in several exhibitions and research projects, concerning the relationship of objects, people and museums.

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Acknowledgments We wish to thank all the people who contributed to this volume. Foremost we would like to thank the authors for their individual contributions and their patience and cooperation during the long editorial process. We are also grateful for the selfless assistance of peer reviewers, who carefully read the manuscripts and helped both the authors and the editors raise the standards of this volume. While we were not able to compensate them any other way, we are forever grateful, that they assisted us in our efforts to complete this project. We would like to thank Judit Balatonyi, Jelena Ćuković, Zsolt Dobrai, Tibor Fabiny, Judit Faludy, Hannah Daisy Foster, Gábor Kendeffy, Gergely Kutai, Ákos Nagy, Dávid Petruț, Sarolta Püsök, Elena Rimondo, Miklós Sárközi, Dávid Veress, Gábor Wilhelm and István Zalatnay for their reviews. The present volume is also the first and last grand project of the Somló Bódog Association, an initiative of young scholars, who wished to promote interdisciplinary dialogue and organised different informal seminars and lectures. We would like this book to commemorate both the successes and failures of this circle, and we would like to take this opportunity to also thank all the people who contributed to its work in the past years. Finally, we would like to thank two institutions, which played pivotal roles in furthering this endeavour. Firstly, we thank the Hungarian National Museum, which in 2019 kindly hosted the conference The Concept of Mimesis in Interdisciplinary Perspective, which as a first forum, proved to be a ground for fruitful conversations, and inspired us to take a bold step and initiate a call for papers for this volume. Secondly, we thank the Museum of XI

Ethnography in Budapest for accepting the role of publisher for this book. We would also like to express our gratitude to the professional editorial team of the Museum of Ethnography for their work and help during the publishing process.

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Mimesis in interdisciplinary perspectives. By way of introduction Áron Bakos and Imola Püsök “It has thus dawned on social scientists that they did not need to be mimic physicists or closet humanists or to invent some new realm of being to serve as the object of their investigation. Instead, they could proceed with their vocation, trying to discover order in collective life, and decide how what they were doing was connected to related enterprises when they managed to get some of it done…” – this is how Clifford Geertz (1983: 21) envisioned the interpretative, hermeneutical turn in the social sciences and humanities, and understood it as a liberation, a break from the one-sided mimetic relation these fields of study had long held with natural sciences. Instead of desiring the same objects, “laws like Boyle’s, or forces like Volta’s, or mechanisms like Darwin’s” (Geertz 1983: 22) they find their own calling “in constructions like Burckhardt’s, Weber’s, or Freud’s: systematic unpackings of the conceptual world in which condottiere, Calvinists, or paranoids live” (Geertz 1983: 22). According to Geertz, as the social sciences interpret certain actions, people, and cases, rather than discover general laws, they apply analogies that orient them towards the humanities, a process which also promotes the blurring of genres (Pogány; Szabó in this volume) and of disciplinary borders (Geertz 1983: 24). These analogies both reflect and form how we think about culture and society (see also Wilhelm; Lovász in this volume). As natural sciences XIII

cease to be the model in this mimetic relation, the social sciences abandon the mechanical and biological analogies in their interpretations and understand culture and society in more ludic terms: “as social theory turns from propulsive metaphors (the language of pistons) toward ludic ones (the language of pastimes), the humanities are connected to its arguments not in the fashion of sceptical bystanders but, as the source of its imagery, chargeable accomplices” (Geertz 1983: 26). Many years have passed since Geertz advocated for this turn towards interpretation, and while restoration of the one-sided mimetic relation between the social and natural sciences did not come about in recent decades, the attempt to redraw and blur disciplinary borders has met with some serious criticism. To a certain degree, the myth of the possibility and desirability of universal interdisciplinarity has been challenged, and the endeavours to return to a golden age of science that is liberated from disciplinary constraints and would, thus, become a means to solve not only scientific but educational and social problems as well, have been delayed and criticised (Graff 2016: 784–791). While we do credit the validity of such claims and understand that the myth of interdisciplinarity might have exaggerated its benefits, we also follow the euhemeristic reasoning of René Girard that there are good reasons to believe that there is a historical reality behind every myth (cf. Girard 1977). Of course, Girard claimed this in the context of the scapegoat and sacrifice, and however important the parts are that these notions play in his culture theory, this still has little to do with the merits of interdisciplinarity. Yet, when looking into Girard’s lifework, one hardly finds any introduction that does not stress how his scientific endeavours crossed disciplinary borders, reshaped both the social sciences and humanities and affected such diverse fields as anthropology, history, litXIV

erary studies, psychology, sociology, theology, etc. (Golsan 2002; Palaver 2013; Tóth 2017; Williams 2000). While Girard’s work did influence these different disciplines, through the multifaceted use and the many derivations of mimesis, his writings also crossed their various borders – as if Geertz’ idea on the ludic metaphors and their potential for blurring genres was inspired by Girard’s concept of mimesis. It is fair to say that Girard’s work significantly impacted our work on this volume, and in many ways, inspired our endeavour to seek the thread of historical truth underlying the mythical appeal of interdisciplinary thinking. For us, this emerged in what we experienced as the reality of a dialogue between the different fields of study. As ours is a more humble aim than that of advocating for a dissolution of disciplinary boundaries, we believe that our attempt for an interdisciplinary dialogue may be pardoned, and even welcomed by scholars of many subjects. This does not mean, however, that there are no dangers, even to such a minor enterprise. In her case study on the problems of interdisciplinarity, Sarah Maza (2004) – interestingly echoing Geertz’s observation – uses a ludic metaphor to explain the problems surrounding attempts for interdisciplinarity. As she concludes, “scholarly gestures towards interdisciplinarity in the humanities are often governed by the logic of preschool: I want to play with your toys, but not by your rules; we tend to borrow each others’ objects while ignoring each others’ methods” (Maza 2004:265). As far as we, the editors of this volume were able to judge, the players of our game here adhered to disciplinary rules, even to an extent that may position the book in the nebulous borderland between interdisciplinarity and multidisciplinarity – if we understand the latter term as an approach to the same issue from the different angles of different disciplines (Graff 2016: 779; cf. Jones 2010: XV

76). Still, while the primary disciplinary background of most of the studies is clear, our contributors engage theories from outside of their line of study. Many of the disciplinary overlaps are also the result of the specific topics, which so naturally utilise methods and analytical tools from related disciplines. History and European ethnology (Kolmačková; Nagyné-Batári), philosophy and theology (Vassányi), philosophy and anthropology (Lovász; Wilhelm), art and history (László; Szegedy-Kloska) for example, merge and converse in the individual chapters. Oftentimes, the exercise of untangling the many disciplinary backgrounds proves to be impossible, as – for example – film, game, museum, cultural, narrative or religious studies are already interdisciplinary “languages” (see Oroszi, Pogány, Szabó, Varga and Wilhelm in this volume). To use Maza’s (2004) ludic metaphors: from cautious hobbyists to professional gamblers, one finds many approaches when it comes to the game of interdisciplinarity. The game we proposed for this volume was for everyone to reach the meeting point, mimesis, while being constrained only by rules that are defined by, and inherent in the (studies of the) concept itself. It seemed to us that this notion would engage scholars from literary theory to philosophy, from Biblical to gender studies, from art, through analogies of science to social sciences, who would take up the game to reach, circle or start from the meeting point by travelling through very different dimensions. As far as the entirety of the volume is concerned, therefore, our authors contributed to a multi-faceted discussion of mimesis that – like Girard’s analyses of the notion – considers not only minute imitative actions and products (Kolmačková; Nagyné Batári; Polyák; Szegedy-Kloska), but also creative mimetic processes (László; Oroszi; Polyák; Szabó), the mimetic underpinnings of social and cultural life (Lovász; Wil-

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helm), and the mimesis in understandings of religion or the divine (Varga; Vassányi). The volume is divided into four parts, each of which consists of three chapters. The contributions in each part share approaches, ideas and topics or make use of similar notions in their conversations with the core concept of mimesis. The chapters in Part I. (Mimetic (Re)presentation: Art and Agency) share an interest in the notion of agency, while also understanding mimesis as a creative engagement with the truth. Read together, these writings complete a full circle in discussing agency in artistic and ethnographic representation, from tackling (theoretical approaches to understanding) the agency of objects and artefacts (Wilhelm), through discussing the agency of ethnographic and artistic models and subjects (Szabó), to analysing the creative contribution and the agency of artists in creating (anti-)mimetic frame(works) (László). In Part II. (Imitation and Innovation: Form and Function) we identified commonalities in the way imitation and innovation as two sides of the same practice, are identified and dissected. Starting from an analysis of the meme as the primary carrier of cultural code (Lovász), we then follow through the socio-historical processes of cultural imitation and innovation that continue to impact everyday practices in both regional-local (Nagyné Batári) and in a more global context (Szegedy-Kloska). Part III. (Mimetic Text: Composition and Context) brings together literary texts, narrative techniques and the visuals of video games based on how textual and metatextual elements are intertwined in our interpretations of mimetic underpinnings of narrative worlds. From the narrative interplays between the isnād and matn of mediaeval Arabic texts (Oroszi), through the dialogue between literary character and biographical data (Polyák), to the aggresXVII

sive race toward overcoming the imitated reality by video games (Pogány), this part balances our attention on the borderlands between imitation and imitated, echoing in many respects the arguments of the chapters in Part I. The contributions in Part IV. (Mimesis and Religion: On Body and Mind) approach mimetic relations in religious practice and thought. Apart from the common religious language, we also discovered hints to varying degrees of mimetic proximity. From imitating the concrete, something that is within reach, in the narrower sense of the word (Kolmackova), through events that are distant in time but testified in sacred texts and remembered in rituals (Varga), to deep theological problems of the “universal mimesis” (Vassányi). Through their engagement with mimesis, most of the chapters can interact with each other. Although we did identify more commonalities between some of the chapters, than between others, our groupings have more to say about what we see, than about what they say, and we urge all readers to name partners of their own and join in the game of finding ways to the meeting point. Two of us being ethnographers, our journey was one of a process of participant observation during which we were focused on classifying data, describing the observed, determining structures, establishing similarities, analysing differences, and preparing thoughts and impressions to ground theory, but ended up – as anthropologists so often do – reflecting. While we do not consider that this should be the sole result of all anthropological work, as editors, we accepted our role in this game to be mere learners.

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REFERENCES Geertz, Clifford 1983 Blurred Genres. The Refiguration of Social Thought. In Local Knowledge. Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology. Clifford Geertz, 19–35. New York: Basic Books Girard, René 1979 [1977] Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick Gregory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Golsan, Richard J. 2002 [1993] René Girard and Myth. London – New York: Routledge. /Theorists of Myth/ Jones, Casey 2009 Interdisciplinary Approach. Advantages, Disadvantages, and the Future Benefits of Interdisciplinary Studies. ESSAI 7:76–81. Harvey J. Graff 2016 The “Problem” of Interdisciplinarity in Theory, Practice, and History. Social Science History 40:775–803. https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2016.31 Maza, Sarah 2004 Stephen Greenblatt, New Historicism, and Cultural History, or, What We Talk About When We Talk About Interdisciplinarity. Modern Intellectual History 1(2): 249–265. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479244304000149 Palaver, Wolfgang 2013 René Girard’s Mimetic Theory. Trans. Gabriel Borrud. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press

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Tóth Péter 2017 Ember, erőszak, vallás. René Girard mimetikus elmélete [Man, Violence, Religion. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory]. In Metszet és perspektíva. Tanulmányok az alkalmazott valláskutatás területéről. Réka Szilárdi – Zsuzsanna Szugyiczki, eds. Szeged: JatePress 247–266. Williams, James G. ed. 2000 [1996] The Girard Reader. New York: Crossroad.

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PART I MIMETIC (RE)PRESENTATION: ART AND AGENCY

1. Art, artefacts and agency. Some examples and questions Gábor Wilhelm In our everyday life, we frequently base our activities on the fact that our physical environment behaves similarly to human agents. They might mimic intentional or social behaviour, in a manner analogous to our own. We may group this into a folk-psychological intentional stance, as it seems that in uncertain situations we are often inclined to attribute intentions not only to animals but to artefacts, too. In this chapter, I focus on how this notion of agency might help in relating object-oriented approaches to each other or to seemingly different types of research, with the help of a small set of examples. My intuition is that from the late 1970s onwards the potential categories to which agency was attributable enlarged drastically. It seems as if this activity, which played a role in social life began seeping into the world’s ever-widening strata. It eventually became obvious in human technology, cognition, language, symbols, social structures, institutions, the body, the environment, non-human species, objects, tools, networks and assemblages. Its scope, mechanism and role vary widely according to specific approaches, but a general trend seems to be a continuous enlargement of the circle in which it was supposed to be located. The notion of agency, therefore, has extended to include the body and some (or even most) of the immediate or even larger environment (brain, body, biological organisms, objects, and society). According to this approach the brain, the body and the larger 3

world work in concert in an environmental context. Cognition, in this sense, is wider than the biological brain, it resides in the world (see for example Ingold 2000; Hutchins 1995). But it remains to be asked: in the end, will we be happier using an extended kind of model, or not (Sidelle 2002:118)? My goal here is to think about the consequences. If we accept that physical objects can have agency, how does this push us, on the other side, to change paradigms in considering cultural or societal activity? The examples Through three (at first glance) extreme examples, I would like to introduce the basic problem: how we relate to the intentionality of the objects in our environment. Two of them are from South America, and one is from Japan. The first example is made up of some representations of the Moche culture of the Pre-Columbian era, on the northern coast of Peru (which flourished between 100 and 600 AD). These depict everyday utensils, pots, pans, clothes and weapons, which grow human arms and surround and threaten seemingly frightened and hiding people (Quilter 1990; 1997). These scenes are known in Moche art as ‘The Rebellion of the Objects’ and are preserved partly on the walls of the Huaca de la Luna shrine or temple, and partly on ceramics. The second example can also be linked to the previous one as a kind of textual background. It is from a well-known Mayan text from the book Popol Vuh (Goetz–Griswold Morley 1954; I, Ch 3): Then came the small animals and the large animals, and sticks and stones struck their faces. And 4

all began to speak: their earthen jars, their griddles, their plates, their pots, their grinding stones, all rose up and struck their faces. “You have done us much harm; you ate us, and now we shall kill you,” said their dogs and birds of the barnyard. And the grinding stones said: “We were tormented by you; every day, every day, at night, at dawn, all the time our faces went holi, holi, huqui, huqui, because of you. This was the tribute we paid you. But now that you are no longer men, you shall feel our strength. We shall grind and tear your flesh to pieces,” said their grinding stones. The third example is a traditional Japanese Buddhist text and a related ritual. The text is about household utensils that are no long­er used by their owners and are, therefore, thrown away during the end-of-year cleaning. For example, the Tsukumogami-ki illustrated scroll text from the Muromachi period (1392–1573) contains a story about old, discarded objects. According to this story, objects that had lived for hundreds of years became demons and then rebelled against their owners because of unfair treatment. The Hari Kuyo festival is not entirely unconnected to this story. In this ritual, which has been on the decline in Japan in recent years, women bring their sewing utensils to the temple every year at the beginning of the lunar new year as a sign of their respect and appreciation for them.

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The contexts These three examples could easily lead one to look for closer, even historical, links between these events. Although this might be successful in the case of the first two examples, since a cultural link between these two areas can be safely assumed, I would not consciously take advantage of this possibility here. It is in no small part for this reason that I am looking for comparable, similar examples from Western culture. It is also noteworthy, that examples from both Western and non-Western cultures are to be found at the everyday level (although not necessarily in the same role and significance), with rebellious objects in non-Western societies being more strongly linked to a mythical, overarching interpretation of the world, and in Western societies belonging more to the realm of art. The question immediately arises, therefore, of how universal the phenomenon itself is, and how far it can be interpreted within a universal, for example, scientific framework. How can we capture this kind of relationship between people and their everyday objects? What the three introductory examples have in common is that the objects here resign themselves to being treated by humans as substitutable, secondary things, subordinate to humans at any time, i.e. to being eventually destroyed by humans. By reversing this relationship, therefore, they want the humans to share the same fate. They rebel against them in that they start treating people as objects. But this can only succeed if they themselves function as persons. The usual relationship between object and human, between instrument and person is, thus, reversed, and this reversal is made possible by the animation of objects. It is important to note that there was initially no difference at all between the (degree of) animacy of objects and people in the given examples. Objects existed as an6

imate beings just as much as their owners and users, only the latter did not notice or did not want to acknowledge this. Through rebellion, objects simply warned their masters of this fact. Similarly, during the rebellion of the things, people did not become inanimate objects, but only began to be treated as such. I will now look at some examples from Western societies, partly to make the specificities of these examples more tangible, and partly to see how similar phenomena are present in cultures that are, perhaps, more familiar to or even close to ours. The Western examples are, of course, contingent in the sense that they are merely illustrative, without any systematic collection of materials behind them. The aim here is rather to map the areas and forms in which they might be present. There are at least four main areas in which they appear in our world. First, in childhood, there are frequent signs of the animacy of objects. Second, an ambivalent relationship with objects is also a characteristic feature of (some) Western art. Ironically, this ambivalence often appears in images, movies, and performances from the first third of the 20th century onwards. Thirdly, our relationship with robots, whether in literary or scientific form, is constantly haunted by the fundamental question of how much we are - or can be treated as - objects or as humans by robots. Fourthly, philosophical ontology also continues to return to the problem of the status of objects (in one way or another). Kelemen (2004) cites several studies showing that children tend to interpret natural phenomena (including the creation and behaviour of objects) in an intentional manner. Although this basic assumption appears first in Piaget (1929), subsequent research has somewhat clarified its content. Accordingly, young children interpret not only biological but also natural things as existing for a purpose, as acting to achieve a goal, and also as having mental 7

states to do so. This means that under given circumstances, these children do not draw a sharp line between the animacy, purposefulness and intentionality of biological beings and natural things and objects. In modernist writing again, the object can escape systematic classification. In Lukács (1978:87) for example, objects are left with only their exchange value, which determines meaning as the only value. For Adorno, puppets are alive insofar as they step away from exchange value and become of use value without any goal (Barnett 2005:380). This kind of animacy of objects, and in many cases the unpredictable behaviour of things, is a common theme in modern and postmodern Western literature and film as well (Barnett 2005). When our objects are animated, they often cause problems, i.e. they easily leave our everyday framework and the familiar routine we have with them (e.g. when we are waiting for an impor­ tant call, the telephone somehow becomes almost animated). This is not only a source of fear, but also one of comedy. But even if they do not step out of the familiar, they are simply there (Barnett 2005:379). The objects of Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Taps are all part of a world where they live their own lives, and this in turn, starkly shapes human worlds (Barnett 2005:378). For Rilke again, the dolls are animated by their absence, by what they (partly or completely) do not do. And in the movie The Lost Room (Michael Watkins), the objects designated there have their own personality as individuated things, unlike in the case of the ordinary lives of ordinary objects. At certain times, in rare moments, all objects around us come to life. When habituation weakens, objects arise. Karel Čapek fears that the bloodthirsty knives will rush out of the drawer and threaten his very life (Barnett 2005:381). 8

The intrinsic dynamic of objects is of course not a new observation, either in life or in literature, as it can be observed in Grimm’s tale “Herr Korbes’’ or the Austrian writer Heimito von Doderer’s (1896-1966) biting teapot, for example. In Andersen’s (1805–1875) fairy tales, objects affect people, and people and objects often become one and the same (instead of the scientific anthropomorphic perspective that was fashionable at the time) (Barnett 2005). In addition to literature and film, of course, works or manifestations of many genres and forms recall the animacy of objects in the Western world. For example, one need only think of animated movies and the role of dolls (for example in games, art, design, or surrealism) (Kuwamura–Yamamoto–Hashimoto 2005:141). Judy Attfield (2000), for example, uses the concept of wild things to understand design and to emphasise the precarious nature of objects. Here, things with attitude are not within the realm of good design but are outside the collection of objects that obey basic visual patterns. However, these hidden and wild things also help to orientate us in our everyday lives by counterpointing the objects in the foreground. Sarina Basta’s exhibition The Happiness of Objects (SculptureCenter, 2007) asks the question - influenced by these objects of a strange nature and behaviour - What do objects want? (echoing W. J. T. Mitchell’s [1996] similar question – ’What do pictures really want?’). The struggle with the strange material world is often the subject of comedy. The object world is sometimes tricky (tückisch) towards us (Haubl 2000:13). It seems as if the intentions of objects intersect with human intentions. If something succeeds, it is because things allow it. Thus, successful action is provided by things. But these same things can make life hard (Haubl 2000:13).

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These ambivalent relationships between object and man, for which animism is perhaps the most common term, are illustrated in detail in the exhibition organised by Anselm Franke. The exhibition (and its catalogue) (Franke, ed. 2010) itself focuses - very deliberately - not on exotic cases (although Edward Tylor’s animism was a basic concept and even the interpretative framework of anthropology at the time of the emergence of this science in the second half of the 19th century), but rather on similar phenomena in our modern and postmodern, global world. From the fetishism of the commodity (Marx) and the animism of movies (in both of which, work and creation remain hidden) (Franke 2005:47), from biometrics to Latourian hybridity (Latour 2005), from Benjamin’s use of the term ’language of things’ (which refers to how the world of objects reveals structure for the living) to robot technology, there are countless examples from the worlds of culture, psychology, technology, media, art, film, photography and museums that vividly manifest the agency of things. Nature and culture, facts and fantasies (symbols) are all results and manifestations of the Great Divides, the gesture of separation of the modern age, in the world Franke constructs (Franke 2005:11). Animism, as a concept, makes the boundaries visible. The absurd (animated, superfluous, wild, fetish-like) objects point to unreflected relations and functions, highlighting what was previously taken for granted. Moreover, the museum as an institution occupies a special position to illustrate the animated objects of the modern world. This is because the museum is in a special position to translate: it renders animated things unanimated (through collection-making), but also animates dead things (through interpretation and re-contextualisation). An art project in Budapest excitingly drew our attention, to the problem of the relationship between objects and people. An10

ikó Szövényi’s exhibition The Will of Objects (2001) on display in the Studio Gallery, featured objects and video films that showed objects with self-will. The autonomy and will of objects became the central theme of the show. For example, when objects are seen from the point of view of humans, their function is brought to the fore, and then we tend to look at them as if they were there to serve us. In this way, the sports equipment seems to crave to move people. The strategy of the exhibition here was to highlight a particular feature and then place it in a context that artificially prevented it from being used. In this way, this same property was revealed through confrontation. There is a similar fear of robots in modern societies. “They could rebel at any time”, we read, we see this in science fiction, in movies. Here too, the issue of control seems to be a central element. Who can control nature, technology, and how much can we control nature, and how much does it control us? The problem of robots, as it seems, starkly raises the issue of the dividing line between the living and the inanimate. As you can see from the examples, our everyday objects can surprise us (in very different ways). And we tend to put some of their extreme behaviours directly into an intentional framework, i.e. we assume some degree of animacy. But what types of explanations can be offered to interpret this particular relationship? One type of psychological theory of children’s relationships with objects emphasises the innate nature of a teleological stance (Kelemen 2004). According to this theory, there is a kind of evolutionary advantage in applying our intentional, teleological model to as many cases as possible. In other words, we should initially try to treat everything as alive and do so until this kind of interpretation becomes impossible.

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Phenomenological interpretations, on the other hand, emphasise that man encounters a kind of resistance in the material world, which then forces him to recognise it as an objective reality (Haubl 2000:14). Although we believe that in doing so we control the material world, it nevertheless seems to control us even more (hence the tragicomedy). Barnett (2005) argues that the livingness or deadness of objects is a relative question if we look at it from the point of view of culture, that is, if we are interested in how objects appear to us. This is because if something fits into our world, i.e. it is in its place (in the background), then animacy and intentionality become less important in our judgments about it than when things come to the foreground and start to cause problems. In this way, the animated objects leave the usual sphere of their function, they fall out of the role of being only part of something else (see also Heidegger’s instrumentality, which functions precisely through its imperceptibility). Objects challenge us through their appearance and their distinctness. An object that leaves its (to us) familiar place evokes both fear and admiration in the user. For it is the institutionally supported objects that are our real, everyday objects (Barnett 2005:388). But what happens when objects do not behave as we expect them to? At the same time, the departure from the normal order of objects, strangely enough, reinserts them much more deeply into the system from which they have left or are leaving. The denial of values does list the same things, that is, the values which are denied. In effect, the negation of objects makes us aware of our own autonomous existence, our independence (or dependence) on things. This negation highlights and emphasises the distinctions that exist in language. This way, it brings the opposites within us, to the fore.

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To be an object or a person in a given system of meaning is also to be inevitably in a place where a break from the system lurks, but it is also where the incorporation that defines language takes place (Barnett 2005:393). Meaning is created where language draws us around it and will be rebuilt where we try to break away from it (Barnett 2005:393). In other words, a key point in human object use is that it takes into account the possible, desired states of things when dealing with concrete items. This concrete, present object is thus also a representation of the thing that can be. The ‘rebellion’, that is the inadequate, unusual functioning of objects is also partly related to this issue: they do not realise sufficiently, adequately or at all, in their given state of being their supposedly possible state (either in their function: for example, my chair cannot support my weight; or in their material, thing-like nature: for example, they are simply in one’s way). So, if our intended model does not match the behaviour of our environment, we are in conflict with the object: it no longer works or behaves as we expected. For example, it slips out of our hands, even though we do not expect it to, because we think it will stay there. The object rebels. In the case of objects, one of their signatures is their relation to the body (for Uexküll, this is more a kind of counterpoint relation (von Uexküll 1982): i.e. there exists a whole chain, and this continues even between objects). The cup, for example, “tells” me how to put it there, how to hold it (this relation is often described in terms of Gibsonian affordance). If we do not obey its demands, the object rebels (see, for example, how left-handed objects could behave for right-handed users, or vice versa). Objects have intentions in this sense (although they are not always easy to understand): for example, the sacrificial stone wants 13

to be put where it belongs (and the stone is here presented as something transformed from a natural thing into a cultural object). However, it is also important to note how our ontological assumptions about the world affect our models for understanding the relationship between objects and humans, and the material world as such. For we give very different explanations of this relationship if we assume the independent nature of things than if we characterise things as relational phenomena. In the former case, the objects and things in our interactions are not merely passive pieces of material waiting to be shaped or ‘created’ by their particular relations, but have a given and often hidden nature, responding to certain influences according to our expectations and not to others. Objects are an integral and active part of certain processes, sometimes interfering with our expectations, sometimes conforming to them, while at other times not significantly influencing them. In this way, objects can ‘rebel’ against us when their properties and the conditions of their environment radically cross our expectations. In this way, our objects are capable of eliciting a range of emotions (Haubl 2000:17). People invent and produce objects, through the mastery of which they invent and create themselves – and they do that on many levels, and these are transparent to consciousness in different ways and to different degrees (Hartmann–Haubl 2000: 11). This type of interpretation radically breaks with the idea that objects are ’empty’, that is, that as relational things they are merely symbolic surfaces that receive meaning only through human actions. Since the 1980s, more recent ideas have increasingly taken account of the agency of objects. This approach now has considerable anthropological literature, for example in the works of Marilyn Strathern (1991) and Alfred Gell (1998). They have argued that objects can embody social relations and intentions. Things and people form a common social and cultural system where things 14

mediate between people, in that they regulate and condition their relationships. This is so partly because people use them to do so. But people also mediate between things, by assembling them into ensembles (networks, assemblages) that make up their material environment. A more general version of this approach is the hybridity argued for by Latour (2005), in which all existing things can only act as agents as a combination of living and material things. There is, however, a not insignificant difference between the two interpretations, precisely because of the more general level of Latour’s approach. That is, Strathern’s (1991) and Gell’s (1998) theories are still situated in a humanist ontological framework, i.e. the agency of objects is emphasised, but in all cases, they are the consequence of social praxis, i.e. human actions and intentions. Latour’s (2005) approach, on the other hand, is based on a kind of post-humanist ontology, where the social world (humans, people) does not occupy a prominent place in relation to the rest of the world (hence the name: flat ontology). Things are not readable and do not speak; they are specific through their materiality. They contain possibilities (they appear to us as strange aliens in this sense), so it is important to contextualise them, that is, to evaluate the possibilities they contain. There exists of course a kind of hybrid model for explaining objects in the everyday world, too. In this interpretation, non-animated objects are given a role in a predictable world in which they remain stable in shape, meaning and aspect. In a given, unchanging system of meanings, they acquire content and significance through being used. Otherwise, they are passive in themselves, they mean nothing in themselves. If they are problematic, however, we easily tend to animate them (Barnett 2005:377). Here, problematic, wild objects are constantly on the edges, on the surface, drawing 15

our attention to themselves, even though this property of theirs is not inherent or permanent. For example, the car may be part of your daily routine as a means of travel, but after a friend of yours has a car accident it may easily become an object of fear (Barnett 2005:378). When habituation recedes into the background, objects become animated and active, stepping out of their everyday context. Suddenly we are asked. We create, design and make artefacts for specific purposes. But in doing so, we are not creating something fundamentally new, but rather, we are limiting the existing, given situations of things and processes. In other words, we start from something given, and modify, control, or limit the circumstances of it. This means that the given, material part of the thing is there, it does not disappear. We control certain properties of the object (Kirchhoff 2009), but not many others (for various reasons: some of them we do not have time or tools to do so, some of them we do not notice, etc.). The properties that are given in advance, or those that arise over time and change independently from us, are part of the nature of the object, just as much as the properties that we change or modify. This is why an object is so dense, why it can surprise us constantly, why it has tendencies and why it can be used in countless contexts, i.e. why it has openings and possibilities, and why it is not easily ‘readable’. Part of the semiotics of objects, then, if we take the wholeness of objects seriously, is their strangeness, their unknowability, a kind of material surplus. The homeliness of objects is thus a simplified part of this semiotic whole, just as the material object is itself an abstract part of the richness of the object. The complexity and richness of objects and the possibilities they contain also represent their strangeness, their unknowable side, their surprising properties and relations. But the things we imagine, create and use represent only a narrow slice of these pos16

sibilities. If we step outside of this, we may be confronted with a series of surprises. In this way, objects always carry with them strangeness (and the possibility of rebellion), and a constant confrontation with this strangeness. Perhaps this is what each (sub) culture emphasises in its description of the rebellion of objects. At the same time, it is precisely through this strangeness that objects describe or circumscribe for us the (well-)known world. However, one more thing is worth noting. The European examples cited concern the control of objects: the possibility of control, or the contingent lack of it, and more precisely, the relationship between the two. The tension between the possibilities of the thing itself and the unrepeatable movement of the body, between expectations and the autonomy of the thing, is the central theme here, which manifests partly in the world of everyday experience and partly in the world of artistic reflection. The two American (and partly the Japanese) examples, however, seem to go one level further. Here, the issue is no longer merely, or not primarily the degree or possibility of controllability (i.e. the temporary absence or existence of control, or its violation), but the possibility or need for reversibility in this very relationship. It seems, therefore, important to introduce and use the concept of perspective and the related anthropological trend of perspectivism, together with the associated anthropological ontological turn as a possible model of interpretation (see, for example, Viveiros de Castro 1998; Holbraad 2012). The beginnings of perspectivism as an anthropological approach go back to the 1990s and a new wave of ethnographic research on Amazonian tribes. Studying local worldviews, ethnographers there encountered phenomena among indigenous groups that were beyond the scope of anthropological theories. Very briefly, among these groups (and, as it later turned out, among many other indigenous groups in other areas), it is difficult to describe the 17

world in a single framework without quickly becoming embroiled in serious contradictions. For in these worlds, the very appearance of the world depends on the point of view of the particular kind of actor. To make matters even more complicated, these actors can easily transform into some other form of being (where they see things from a different perspective again). I will cite a simple and well-known example to facilitate understanding (see Viveiros de Castro 1998). Here, humans see the jaguar as a wild animal that drinks blood and eats raw meat, while for them, humans are hunters who eat meat and cassava and drink beer. In contrast, the jaguar sees itself as a human drinking beer and to the jaguar, humans are a beast drinking blood. It is important to note that here the participants do not think of beer as blood (and vice versa), but beer is in reality blood (and vice versa). I stress that this example represents only a fraction of the complex world that these groups inhabit. Perspectivism itself, according to these relevant ethnographies, permeates their whole world, from social relations to their relationship with objects. Here, the objects can be either hunters or hunted, but they are always and by definition animated. It is clear that in this world the question is not whether the objects conform to our expectations or whether they radically violate them from time to time, but rather what the relationship between the hierarchy of humans and objects is who live side by side, and between whom the boundaries are not impenetrable. Perspectivism assumes that if we can only describe the ontology of different groups absurdly, then our ability to describe it is poor. Perspectivism seeks a solution to the fundamental anthropological question of what underlies the difference of views and what lies behind alterity. From this approach, the anthropological notion of ‘rationality’, previously so popular, is radically reinterpreted: the irrational here simply means a failure to understand. 18

Anthropology must therefore interpret not why observations are the way they are, but what they are. Perspectivism is in some cases anthropomorphising concerning these groups, but it is by no means anthropocentric. This is why this approach, which is also a reconstruction of a particular world, cannot be captured by the concept of anthropological cultural relativism. For relativism posits a plurality of representations without ontologically characterising the world, whereas perspectivism holds a plurality of ontologies that are substituted for a given, shared world (Holbraad 2012). Conclusion But what have we learnt from all this? It seems, attributing agency to objects is a universal feature of human thinking. We often extend our agency-loaded human world to non-human organisms and even further, to physical objects. The degree varies across languages, models and possibly situations. This kind of model reappears in scientific thinking, too, in the form of scientific models. The degree of this attributed agency varies across these theories that we have reviewed so far, at least we exhibit weak and strong varieties of it. What is clear is that regarding the metaphysics of material things in recent decades, several coexistent approaches and descriptive schemes have appeared. These concern what there is, how things change, how they exist and act in time, and how our everyday views fit into all of it. In doing so, they make seemingly different assumptions about how actors in their modelled worlds can be described, their relationship with each other, and where the boundaries between them lie. But the conclusion is: it is not possible to tell from the world alone which view is true. Metaphysically, each is at least as good as the other (Sidelle 2002:118).

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These approaches – best conceived of as packages – do not presuppose different things about the world but only provide different ways of describing the material contents of spacetime. The difference between them, thus, seems to be semantic, rather than factual. Despite appearances, each provides an acceptable description of the (same) world. Whereas Gell’s secondary agency separates objects from people, and Latourian actants emphasise similarity, the latter statement can easily be translated into a methodological statement, where the aim is to treat objects and people on the same level, but methodologically (and not ontologically). It is, thus, possible to close the gap between Gell’s and Latour’s viewpoints. Similarly, the seemingly radical ontological basis of perspectivism can be relatively easily interpreted as a model where these agents are embedded in a particular simulation of the world, but to different degrees and in different ways. To attribute agency to objects, one key move is to embed them into some kind of human activity. That is, the core idea is to expand human intentional activity beyond its scope, to put it into a relational and asymmetrical ontology (see also Kirchhoff 2009). Therefore, since the 1990s embodied cognition has gained strength as an approach, frequently in distributed form. Embodiment has become one of the cornerstones of contemporary cognitive science, the foundation of the pragmatist approach (which holds that the function of cognition is action). Its philosophical background comes from phenomenological thinking and pragmatism (Ramstead 2019:50–51). In cognitive science, this approach has helped to break out of the constraints of the symbolic paradigm, which was the basic framework for early cognitive studies and artificial intelligence. In the 1990s, this led to the externalist paradigm, according to which, the brain is a dynamic system, with stark interaction with its environment. 20

What is more radical and still controversial, however, is the extension of cognition to the external world (i.e. to things outside the body). Here, of course, the boundaries of the system again become a central question (see also Ramstead 2019). There are essentialising positions in this, as well as a view based on a kind of context-dependence (Ramstead 2019). However, Ramstead (2019:22) argues that the boundaries of cognitive systems are contingent: they are diverse, embedded, interest-dependent, and, moreover, they are created by the dynamic relationship between the inside and the outside (Allen–Friston 2018:2474). The inside and the outside exist as a chain of contexts, embedded into each other (Allen–Friston 2018:2477), where the inside continuously shapes the outside according to its own endowments, and the outside, thus modified, conforms to particular expectations (from time to time and on occasions) in the form of affordances. In this framework, cultural affordance as an approach is, thus, able to replace the concept of folk psychology (Ramstead 2019:241–242), as it starts from the relational model of organism-environment. One reason is that it provides a much more finely-graded and integrated framework than folk-psychology for the understanding of ‘culturally-specific sets of expectations’ (Ramstead 2019:59), and it does so in a relational manner (Ramstead 2019:242). It distinguishes between ‘natural’ and ‘conventional’ affordances, both of which seem to play a basic role in social life, but in different ways. Moreover, this framework also takes into account the embeddedness of human action, learning, culture and cognition in its biological and physical environment. With all this said, however, one should also keep in mind that the idea of cultural affordance comes at least partly from research and theories in anthropology (see Ingold 2001).

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REFERENCES Allen, Micah – Friston, Karl J. 2018 From Cognitivism to Autopoiesis. Towards a Computational Framework for the Embodied Mind. Synthese 195:2459–2482. Attfield, Judy 2000 Wild Things. The Material Culture of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350070745 Barnett, Richard-Laurent 2005 Of hermeneutics and Difference. Genet’s (Dys)functional Objects. Orbis Litterarum 60(5): 377–396. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0730.2005.00844.x Franke, Anselm ed. 2010 Animism. Vol. 1. Antwerp: Sternberg Press. Gell, Alfred 1998 Art and Agency. An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goetz, Delia – Morley, Sylvanus Griswold ed. 1954 The Book of the People. Popol Vuh. Los Angeles: Plantin Press. Haubl, Rolf 2000 Be-dingte Emotionen. Über identitätsstiftende Objekt-Beziehungen. In: Von Dingen und Menschen. Funktion und Bedeutung materieller Kultur. Hans Albrecht Hartmann – Rolf Haubl, Hrsg. 13–36. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag.

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Hartmann, Hans Albrecht – Haubl, Rolf 2000 Von Dingen und Menschen – Eine Einführung. In: Von Dingen und Menschen. Funktion und Bedeutung materieller Kultur. Hartmann, Hans Albrecht – Haubl, Rolf, Hrsg. 7–12. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. Holbraad, Martin 2012 Things as Concepts. Anthropology and Pragmatology. In Savage objects. Godofredo Pereora, ed. 17–32. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional Casa de Moeda. Hutchins, Edwin 1995 Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ingold, Tim 2000 The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London – New York: Routledge. 2001 From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention. In The Debated Mind. Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography. Harvey Whitehouse, ed. 113–153. Oxford: Berg. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474215688.ch-004 Kelemen, Deborah 2004 Are Children „Intuitive Theists”? Reasoning About Purpose and Design in Nature. American Psychological Science 15(5):295– 301. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00672.x Kirchhoff, Michael David 2009 Material Agency. A Theoretical Framework for Ascribing Agency to Material Culture. Techné 13(3):206–220. https://doi.org/10.5840/techne200913323

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Kuwamura, Hiroyuki – Yamamoto, Tomoyuki – Hashimoto, Takashi 2005 What is Animacy in Dynamical Movement? In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems. L. Berthouze et al., eds. 141–142. Lund: Lunds universitet. /Lund University Cognitive Studies/ Latour, Bruno 2005 Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lukács, Georg 1978 The Ontology of Social Being, Vol. 3. Labour. London: Merlin Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1996 What Do Pictures Really Want? October 77:71–82. https://doi.org/10.2307/778960 Piaget, J. 1929 The Child’s Conception of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Quilter, Jeffry 1990 The Moche Revolt of the Objects. Latin American Antiquity 1(1):42–65. https://doi.org/10.2307/971709 1997 The Narrative Approach to Moche Iconography. Latin American Antiquity 8(2):113–133. https://doi.org/10.2307/971689 Ramstead, Maxwell James 2019 Have We Lost Our Minds? An Approach to Multiscale Dynamics in the Cognitive Sciences. McGill University. http://dx.doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.13457.17765 24

Sidelle, Alan 2002 Is there a true metaphysics of material objects? Philosophical Issues 12(1):118–145. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1758-2237.2002.tb00064.x Strathern, Marylin 1991 Partial Connections. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Szövényi Anikó 2001 Tárgyak akarata [The Will of Objects]. 2001. 04–24. Stúdió Galéria (Budapest). von Uexküll, Thure 1982 Introduction: Meaning and science in Jakob von Uexküll’s concept of biology. Semiotica 42(1):1–24. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.1982.42.1.1 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo 1998 Cosmological deixis and Amerindian perspectivism. The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 4(3):469–488. https://doi.org/10.2307/3034157

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2. Mimesis or mimicry? Analysis of Jean Rouch’s ethnographic ‘cult film’ The Mad Masters Elemér Szabó This article focuses on the legendary figure of modern ethnographic cinema, Jean Rouch, and his work, The Mad Masters (original title in French: Les maîtres fous). His perplexing and much-debated film, The Mad Masters is a cornerstone of his oeuvre regarding both ethnographic filmmaking and the question of mimesis. During the filmed ritual, emblematic figures of colonial rule come to life as spirits in front of Rouch’s camera. Many diverse interpretations were proposed for the witnessed ritual after the film’s controversial reception. Is it an anti-colonial parody, mimicry, collective therapy, or the carnivalesque reversal of the world as Bakhtin described it? Or, according to one of the many interpretations, are the mimetic practices presented in the film the manifestations of the “colonised psyche”, as theorised by Frantz Fanon? I will first briefly introduce the director, his films, and theoretical as well as methodological innovations, emphasising this French ethnographic filmmaker’s significance in a history of ethnographic cinema. After that, I will offer a close reading of The Mad Masters, a “cult classic” for both cinema and anthropology, according to Marc Piault, Africanist anthropologist and filmmaker (cited in Henley 2006:731). To clarify the social function of the ritual and the film itself I use relevant ethnographic, postcolonial, film theory and aesthetic approaches. Having addressed mainstream postco27

lonial interpretations, I revise the classic ‘tool-kit’ and insights of ethnography and discuss what written ethnography reveals about the religious ceremony presented in The Mad Masters. The ethnographic analysis of the film – apart from allowing me to highlight the director’s poetics – also allows valuable conclusions to be drawn about the constraints of the film’s widespread anti-colonial readings. The French-born Jean Rouch (1917, Paris – 2004, Niger) is an ethnographer of black, modernising Africa, and a pioneer of African cinema. His work as a film director has central place in the history of ethnographic cinema and exemplifies the interdisciplinary attitude that surrounds this film genre. Rouch is both a monumental figure of cultural anthropology (visual anthropology) and ethnographic cinema, and also a highly acclaimed director of the French new wave and world cinema. Thus, his heritage is best understood from an inter- and multidisciplinary perspective: his body of work is explored in the historical contexts of documentary cinema, art (and cinema) history, ethnography, media studies, postcolonial studies and African Studies. European film aesthetics credits Rouch with the ‘invention’ of the cinéma vérité film style, which is primarily defined as a technical and stylistic innovation characterised by flexible and improvisatory handling of the camera, dense feedback and interview techniques. At the same time, for Rouch cinéma vérité is not (just) a style: it carries the ars poetica of the director who conceives of ‘filmic truth’ not only as a reflection of reality but as a force capable of creating a new social reality. In other words, cinema is both the representation of something and a proactive tool to recreate reality. According to James Clifford, the camera of Rouch functions as a kind of catalyst: it tries to alter the reality beyond the film to create new qualities, content and – in the case of the 28

characters – generate new knowledge and attitudes as they practise self-reflexivity1 (Clifford 1988:77). In the words of Rouch “I learnt from the Dogons that the main character of stories is not God, the representation of order, but the enemy of God, Pale Fox, who is the demon of chaos. When I am making a film, I tend to treat the field I am working with as the work of God and the presence of the camera as intolerable confusion. This intolerable confusion becomes a creative momentum (…) The presence of the camera generates events that might otherwise never happen” (cited in Kovács 1985:40). Rouch believes in the creative energies and transformative powers of fantasy and play; he hopes to channel this power into his films by using the camera as a tool to liberate the possibilities that exist in reality. This provocative relationship with reality is the formative element of Rouchian cinéma verité. Rouch’s ethnographic cinematic work posed a serious challenge to the ethnographic approach since classical anthropological views question the legitimacy of the camera intervening in local culture, and therefore, the manner in which the filmmaker in Rouch’s work provokes, interrogates and transforms what is unified under the term of culture.2 1 At this point it is worth comparing the methods of cinéma verité and the fieldwork method of postmodern anthropology, where the basis of comparison is the postmodern idea that “the anthropologist not only collects, but with his or her being-there he or she also creates data during intercultural encounters, (…) continuously brings about and modifies the definitions of self and otherness. (…) The perception of the anthropologist is part of the interpretation.” (Heltai 2002:93) 2 Perhaps the most extreme example of intervening into the life of a filmed community is Rouch’s Sigui project. His “largest ethnographic venture” is a film series about the Dogons, the first part of which was made in 1951 and the last in 1981. The backbone of the series is the recording of ritual ceremonies which take place only once in every sixty years and last for several years. Filming the rite which re-enacts the origin myth of the Dogons is “a significant fact in itself, but if we consider that the rite prescribes that no one can see more than two Siguis (this is the name of the ceremony), this

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Rouch occasionally ‘mythifies’ the camera. “He calls these instances ciné-transe: the camera not only records people possessed by spirits but its presence and movement provoke and intensify it. Coordinated movements with photographed subjects is a rudimentary element of the Rouchian method” (Kovács 1985:41). In his ciné-trans theory, Rouch regards the viewfinder as a shamanistic tool with the help of which, he also goes into a trance while making a film about an African god and natives, who are likewise in trance (Rouch 2007: 107). Another feature of Rouch’s filming method is the feedback technique, a reflexive form of filmmaking in which people featured in the film are shown the edited version, they can make comments on it, and their interpretations will be included in the final version of the work.3 This form, introduced to film history by Rouch himself, marks his intention to share authorship between filmmaker and filmed subject. This intention also articulates his conviction that representatives of a culture captured on screen have certain rights concerning the representation of the community they are a part of.

natural taboo is broken, since even the Dogons can now watch the ceremony more than twice. One must also mention that Rouch also filmed the cave of initiation, which only a few initiated can enter, thereby he made visible what nobody can see for ritualistic reasons. What changes Jean Rouch’s camera brought into the ancient ceremony of the Dogons will only come to light in 2029.” (Kovács 1985:43) As an answer to the critical remarks of positivist ethnographers keen on salvaging autochthon cultures, that were directed at Rouch’s intervention into Dogon culture, the director said that we do not have to worry about the Dogons, “they will come up with a new cosmology”. On the other hand, The Mad Masters cannot be accused of outside interference, since, as we will see, Rouch makes his “observational” film specifically at the request of the audience. 3 It should be noted that Rouch handles his ‘mediums’ carefully. He does not use the feed-back method in the case of his possession films at all, after an incident in which the spectators in the cinema watching themselves in trance entered the state of trance again without the controlled circumstances of the original ritual. (Rouch 2007:103)

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The reflexive film form adopted by Rouch allows one to filter out prejudiced representations; since he includes the feedback and interpretations of characters in the finished documentary, his films often lack an ‘ultimate’ reading. Rouch conceives of anthropological cinema as a representational medium which, similar to other resources, must be shared with the subjects represented, in accordance with the principles of fairness and justice. In his ethnographic work, he follows the principles of “shared anthropology”, that is, the anthropology shared with the representative of the Other (see Henley 2009). His extensive opus contains more than a hundred films – these can be put into different categories based on their style: ‘pure’ ethnographic film, ethno-fiction, which merges fiction and documentary, and pure fiction with tints of absurd surrealism4 (Kovács 1985:40). While Kovács András Bálint’s categorisation of the director’s films can be regarded relevant in terms of stylistic differences, it fails to recognise the unifying directorial thread, which strings together the separate filmic forms mentioned earlier. As a matter of fact, Rouch’s methods, motives and mixed genres permeate the films themselves and give each other context. Instead, I suggest these categories be examined in the context of a geopolitically divided space permeated by the power relations of the colonial system. If we take into consideration the socio-cultural context 4 Scholars usually put in the first category Rouch’s films portraying African obsession rituals, including The Mad Masters. At the same time, there are researchers who emphasise the stylistic traits of surrealism in this film (see Cooper 2006:18). The best known examples of the second category include I, a Negro and Jaguar. As for the third category, András Kovács Bálint only mentions one title, Gare du Nord, Rouch’s joint film about Paris, segments of which were directed by Godard and other representatives of the French new wave. But we could enumerate here Cocorico, Mr Poulet and all those films that show signs of absurd surrealism in both narration and film language. As we shall see later, Parisian surrealism of the thirties had a significant influence on Rouch’s ouvre.

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to which the actual film language is adapted, these categories can be related to each other. The Rouchian work spans between the geopolitical centre and periphery, between Paris and the land of the African Dogon people. While Rouch’s perhaps most well-known film, Chronicle of a Summer is set in the city centre and is about the “Parisian tribe”, many of his other films take place on the barren plains of the Sahel area. The Mad Masters is set approximately in the middle of the aforementioned geopolitical space and since it is connected to a colonial city, Accra, it refers to both directions (Paris and the African plains of the Sahel Area). The Mad Masters – Plot, Dramaturgy and Narration The film explores the hauka possession cult which originated from the Songhai tribe in Nigeria, Africa. The plot is set in the outskirts of Accra, the colonial capital of Gold Coast (today Ghana). The film was made in 1955 just before the country gained independence from Britain. The characters are seasonal migrant workers who travelled about a thousand kilometres to the south from the Sahel area of French Nigeria’s deserts, crossing the French-English border to make a living by attempting to immerse themselves in the dynamically growing economies of the big cities on the coast. They are part of the Songhai group of people, and their life as economic migrants, and their religious beliefs respectively, represent one of the core topics of Rouch’s ethnographic research and films.5 5 Rouch’s film with the title Jaguar also deals with Songhai migrant workers. The word ‘jaguar’ here does not refer to the animal but the car brand, as a symbol of social status. In the film three villagers from Nigeria set out for Ghana in hope of a better life. Each take up different jobs and decide that at the beginning of the wet season they return to their native village. They spend all their saved money on souvenirs which they give to the villagers. At home they return to their original line of

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The film’s opening sequence showcases the noisy streets of Accra, where Africans are displayed doing various marginal urban jobs, such as window cleaning, dock work, mosquito disinfection and smuggling. We also see on the streets a parade of a Christian religious community named “Jesus’s Sister”, and the prostitutes of Accra protesting for higher payment. The protagonists depart from this bustle, this colourful, vibrant chaos captured in a sequence with rapid cuts, and leave the city in a van to get to the site of a secret ritual, the hauka rite, which takes place at the cocoa farm of the hauka priest, the religious expert and leader of the ceremony. First, they hold the initiation rite of a new member, then the priest performs animal sacrifices to secure ‘absolution’ for some of the penitents. After this, the possession chapter of the rite begins, during which certain initiated members get possessed by hauka spirits. As a provocative plot twist to the European mind, these spirits “embody” the classical figures of colonial powers and emerge as the familiar characters of colonial times. Possessed hauka-members take up the roles of the military and administrative elite and parade as the general, the first lieutenant, the governor, the guards of the governor, the “evil mayor”, and Madame Salma, who was originally the African wife of a French officer at the end of the 19th century. Spirits of the modern world are also represented: that of the truck driver, the locomotive engineer,

work: one is a farmer, the other a shepherd and the third one a fisherman. While The Mad Masters describes the metropolis-savannah-metropolis cycle of physical movement, in Jaguar this movement is reversed (savannah-metropolis-savannah). Jaguar offers a captivating depiction of how the ‘adventure’ of migration increases the social capital and social status of the men returning to their village: “the film represents the mixing of ancient tribal and modern urban cultures in present day Africa.” (Kovács 1985:41) The Mad Master fits both Rouch’s films about economic migration and the large corpus of works on obsession rituals.

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and so on. The location of the ritual is an open field in the woods, where different kinds of sacred objects lie on the ground: a shrine, a painted termite mound symbolising the governor’s palace6, and a small wooden statue with a moustache, sunglasses and a sword in his hand: the sculpture is supposed to be the governor itself. During the rite, objects connected to the colonial armed forces are placed in a sacred context, such as the whistle, the rifle, the topee helmet, the red-coloured armband and the Union Jack, which is replaced by colourful, patterned drapery. At the climax of both the film and the ritual a dog is slaughtered, cooked and consumed, participants drink its blood and reach into the hot cooking pot for bits of meat with their bare hands. The final scene is again set in Accra on the day following the ritual with its participants doing ordinary jobs like digging trenches or serving as traffic wardens. Thanks to hauka, these people have been cleansed of the harms of civilization and return to the daily routine of the colonial capital as satisfied citizens. As we watch the happy, clear gazes of the members of the sect,7 Rouch declares 6 The termite mound evokes with some humour the busy administrative life of the colonial government. 7 Rouch uses parallel editing to create contrast between these faces and the ecstatic faces they wore the previous day with foam around their lips and in a state of trance. The flashback employed here is a formal device of the framed narrative as the rapid introductory sequence already contained a shot of the ritual. In the flashforward we see a composition of a man in ritualistic obsession. One might wonder if this is a Vertovian serial montage or an Eisenstein dialectical montage. In the first case, hauka comes through as an element of exotic African culture. In the second, it is a reaction to the ‘civilisational’ hazards of a colonial metropolis. The dramatic composition and narrative of the film suggests the second, as people from the calm savannahs are forced to participate in the ritual in order to balance the dangers of the “mechanical civilisation” characteristic of the colonial capital. The night close-ups of the ecstatic faces are associated and formally contrasted with the establishing shots of people parading in daylight on the busy streets. The final sequence of the film conveys the same meaning, relating it to the model of the Eizensteinian dialectical montage.

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in his voice-over narration: “When comparing the smiles with the contractions of yesterday, one really wonders whether these men of Africa have found a panacea against mental disorders. One wonders whether they may have found a way to absolve our inimical society.” We see the image of the local mental asylum, the building of the “Mental hospital” in front of which the characters stand with wide smiles on their faces as a way of suggesting that this would be the last thing they need. The structure of the film thus consciously follows a traditional narrative form, that of exposition, climax and closure, and is closely linked to the motifs of escape, cure, and return.8 I believe Rouch chooses this structure deliberately but not to salute the cinematic tradition of classical narration, since – as one of the most influential representatives of the French new wave – he also despised the traditional forms of le cinéma de papa (Daddy’s cinema).9 The choice of conventional form is coupled with the choice of an unconventional topic: Rouch balanced the unordinary subject matter with classical structure. 8 The structure is parallel with the controlled drama of the classical stages of initiation rituals: isolation, trial, re-integration. According to Arnold van Gennep, ritual processes consist of three stages. Those subjected to the ritual are first isolated from the ordinary flow of life and through a “threshold” state enter the ritual world, a spatial and temporal sphere distinct from everyday reality. This is followed by the mimetic acting out of the crisis that prompt isolation, during which structures of everyday existence are both refined and questioned. In the final stage they return to the world of the everyday (cited by Turner 1977:94). The theories of Van Gennep were further developed by Victor Turner during his African fieldwork. 9 Jean-Luc Godard, a major representative of the French new wave, who directed his films in Paris, a centre of civilisation, and for whom the ethnofictions of Rouch were an inspiration and a major influence, appraised Rouch by calling Moi, in noir “the greatest French film since the Liberation” (see Rothman 2009:8). Godard pursues a similar kind of ‘deconstruction’ but from the formal side of the structure. He has famously claimed that “every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end … but not necessarily in that order” (Kelecsényi 2014:43).

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The classical form of the film is also enhanced by the narrative: the director himself takes up the role of the omniscient voice-over narrator in line with the traditional ethnographic films, persistently interpreting for the audience what is happening on screen. Even though in terms of form the film looks like a classical work of art, the theme is certainly not classical, as instead of focusing on tradition and the perpetuation of traditional cultural phenomena (as many salvage ethnographers of the time would do), the narrator suggests that we will witness a cultural innovation, the novel and “grand adventure” of the African colonial cities (Henley 2006:732).10 Rouch shot the film on colour stock at the request of the hauka priest, and this information marks the creative idea of the film as originating from the local community. The filmmaking process, thus, can be seen as a continuous dialogue between filmmaker and film subjects. It is worth mentioning that Rouch, the cameraman-director, could not film shots longer than one minute. In technical terms he, therefore, made a ‘montage film’ with a total length shorter than 30 minutes. Despite these unfavourable circumstances, the film has a remarkably conscious structure. Throughout the film, we can hear the tunes used to conjure up the spirits and for a moment an instrument with a single string is also visible in the hands of the musician. This moment calls into mind Rouch’s ciné-trans theory. While discussing his films depicting rituals of possession, he compares himself to the musician participating in the ritual arguing that his camera is like the “musical instrument” creating the performance (cited by Chanan 2007:93). While Rouch’s recordings might convince film scholars that they 10 With his ethnographic films depicting new social phenomena, Rouch actually revives or ‘salvages’ ethnological cinema for modern film culture.

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are presented with observational cinema, he does not simply observe but participates in the rituals with his camera. According to Rouch, the cameraman feels the trance to the same degree as the participants of the possession rituals, who are being possessed by spirits (Rouch 1978:7). In these films, Rouch uses long takes to capture the musical performances including the music of the single string instrument. However, this is not the case in The Mad Masters: there is no need for that because the director is consciously working with a different theme and a different film structure. The process of trance ‒ portrayed with great precision in all its stages (roundelay, twitching of limbs, stuck eyeballs, foaming of the mouth) in other films ‒ is not the focal point here. The portrayal of the ritual is connected to and derives from the specifics of the content. It is the conscious editing, the ‘high-end’ cutting that ensures the “ecstasy” of cultural encounters. This is also expressed in Rouch’s own narrative, more precisely in its vocal coding, expressing excitement and agitation at certain dramatic turning points of the plot. The dramatic arc and framed representation of the ritual are interrupted by an enigmatic parallel cut, which I will analyse to a greater extent because this interruption is especially significant in the context of the film’s reception. The director inserts a peculiar sequence into the presentation of the ritual which alters the interpretation. When the main conductor of the rituals breaks an egg on the head of the statue symbolising the governor, the narrator asks the following rhetorical question: why an egg? Rouch not only answers this question, while narrating the events but also shows it, with the help of footage showing the streets of Accra. After an abrupt cut, we see a military parade in the capital city as well as the governor himself wearing a plumed helmet. According to the narration, the use of an egg imitates the plume made from ostrich 37

feathers. This association conveys the humour of surreal aesthetics. Mimetic association is an integral part of the ceremony, appearing, for instance, in the plastic toy horse next to the statue, which also stands as the mimetic equivalent of the military kit. In the long footage of the march, the governor is framed from a high-angle shot and is thus ‘looked down’ on. Sarah Cooper in her analysis of the film, notes that this camera position reflects upon the director’s own position (Cooper 2006). He distances himself from his culture and approaches the other culture to take up a position at an “ideal proximity”: the close, almost “intimate” shots of the ritual express this proximity. According to Cathrine Russel, the parallels between the egg and the helmet are “wildly” surreal, as if Rouch offered this taint of surrealism to European viewers as a means to connect with the hauka ritual (cited in Cooper 2006). Since the main theme of the film is a ritual, the portrayed military march can also be seen as a kind of ritual. It is represented in the manner of a Dziga Vertovian serial montage. Besides the serialisation of rituals, the shots of law enforcement and the scenes of the ritual’s violent parts also enter into an associative relationship. It could be argued that ‘serialisations of rituals’ appear next to each other. The narration links the march sequence to the religious ritual with images of African bystanders enjoying the parade and Rouch’s voice-over narration talking about hauka dancers observing their models. Later we witness these models ‘coming to life’ during the ritual. In this way, the viewer accepts the proposed explanatory and causal logic of editing, even though the episode of the military parade violently interrupts the flow of the ritual. Initial feedback from the audience also influenced Rouch in shaping the final structure.

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The Reception of the Film The official colonial administration in 1955 banned the film, but after its Parisian premiere, it was also protested (although for different reasons) by African intellectuals, and French social scientists, including France’s leading anthropologist and Rouch’s former tutor Marcel Griaule (Henley 2006:733). Nevertheless, in the past fifty years, the critical establishment has restored its reputation, and as a consequence, the film has been reinterpreted. Thus, its ethnographic and film-historical significance has also been re-evaluated. It is also important to mention that it is being taught at African universities today as a powerful representation of colonial oppression (Henley 2006:734). Even outside academic circles, it has become a ‘cult film’ with a website dedicated to it (www.maitres-fous.net). Significant philosophers refer to the film. For instance, the poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze in his two-volume book on film philosophy or the postmodernist Jean Baudrillard in his The Transparency of Evil (Deleuze 1989; Baudrillard 1997). Deleuze takes The Mad Masters as an evident example of cinéma vérité, which “will have destroyed every model of the true to become creator and producer of truth: this will not be a cinema of truth but the truth of cinema” (Deleuze 1989:151). The first public screening in Paris sparked massive controversy. Rouch’s colleagues at the Musée de L’Homme demanded the raw material to be destroyed because they thought the film contributed to the racist image of Africans being dog-eating primitives (Henley 2006:733).11 The British colonial administration banned the film in 11 Henley describes how Rouch was labelled as racist (Henley 2006:733), although, as Gilles Deleuze has claimed later, “no one has done so much to put the West to flight, to free himself, to break with a cinema of ethnology and say Moi un Noir” (Deleuze 1989:223). In Deleuze’s definition ethnological cinema is a film form and situation characterised by non-involvement, the readiness to abuse its dominant position, and a ‘colonising’ camera.

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Gold Coast on charges that it symbolically humiliates the governor, the local representative of the British Crown, therefore it indirectly ridicules the Queen and the entire colonial system (Cowie 2007:210). Critics believed that the hauka ritual symbolically offends and humiliates the governor since an egg is broken on the head of the statue that represents him. Participants of the ritual denied the political or parodic intentions of hauka (Henley 2006:748). Nevertheless, several interest groups (such as African intellectuals, animal rights activists etc.) have boycotted the film. Interestingly, its early reception initiated the fiercest debates about what was seen on film while questions about filmic representation were ignored. By contrast, the film has gained considerable popularity and attention over time. It has been quoted in psychological, sociological and postcolonial studies, laying down the generally accepted interpretation, namely that the film is about cultural otherness, cultural conflicts and incommensurability. For example, Rouch’s film was referred to in Jean Baudrillard’s The Transparency of Evil as the representation of irreconcilable, radical otherness: All other cultures are extraordinarily hospitable (…) Whereas we waver between the other as prey and the other as shadow, between predation pure and simple and an idealising recognition, other cultures still retain the capacity to incorporate what comes to them from without, including what comes from our Western universe, into their own rules of the game. They may perform this recycling operation instantaneously or over the long term, but in no case are their code and basic arrangements threatened thereby. Precisely because they do not live by the illusion of a universal law, they 40

are not rendered oversensitive as are we, who are constantly being commanded to internalise the law and to make ourselves the origin of our own selves, acts, tastes and pleasures. (Baudrillard 1993:142) According to Baudrillard, primitive cultures do not bother to stay true to themselves, since “everything comes from the Other” (Baudrillard 1993:142). In his reading, the characters of Rouch are all Westernised primitives: “All are cannibals in the sense that they offer a lethal hospitality to values that are not and never will be theirs” (Baudrillard 1993:143). He adds that such hospitality does not appear in the form of a compromise, but a challenge, where the above-mentioned cannibalism is a practice of “assimilating, absorbing, aping, devouring” (Baudrillard 1993:144). Rouch himself has contributed significantly to the rehabilitation of his much-attacked film. This strategy is most evident in the film narration, which was added to the film after the scandalous Parisian screening. In his voice-over, Rouch makes it clear that the images that some may find shocking and astonishing have a compensatory function: they are reflections of the Songhai on our “mechanical civilisation” (Ungar 2007:113). In the closing scenes of the movie, Rouch concludes with the following: “these men of Africa have found a panacea for mental disorders [and] may have found a way to absolve our inimical society”. Though in the narration he primarily emphasises the contrast between the “mechanical”, technicised urban civilisation and the tribal society of the peaceful villages of the savannah, the hauka ritual is described as an escape from the city and a therapy to cure the damages caused by the mechanical world. It is important to recognise how Rouch, through the years, shifts the emphasis to the opposition between colonisers and the colonised people. If he previously regarded the 41

ritual as a treatment for personal mental problems caused by modern African metropolises, his later interpretations emphasise its potential to serve as group therapy with the potential to address problems precipitated by the colonial system. In his volume, Paul Henley (2006:737) includes Rouch’s commentaries made decades after the film’s initial screening, in which the hauka ritual is described as an implicit, revolutionary critique of the colonial system. Postcolonial studies discovered the film and adopted it into their agenda, emphasising the fundamental and remarkable anti-oppressionist gesture of making the anti-colonial critique of the Songhai rite visible. The Mad Masters became the classical prototype of anti-colonial parody and mimicry in postcolonial film history (see Cooper 2006), although studies on postcolonial mimicry highlight that mimicry might solidify power hegemonies. There are postcolonial readings, which do not accentuate the parodic dimension of the hauka ritual but regard the political opposition of coloniser and colonised as the manifestation of an internalised admiration for the hegemonic power of the white colonial power. This idea of internalised respect for hegemony is based on Fanon’s influential book Black Skin, White Masks, which focuses on “inner colonisation” and the psyche of the colonised. In the film, both meanings of mimicry transform into guilt for Western viewers. Considering Homi K. Bhabha’s theory of mimicry, the postcolonial readings of the film make the implicit revolutionary charge of the film ambiguous in that hauka, as mimicry is regarded as a strengthening of existing social hierarchies rather than a rejection of them. Bhabha believes that even parodic mimicry teaches norms, instead of questioning them (cited in Cooper 2006). At this point, the study of the hauka ritual can be analysed in the context of historical anthropology, especially through the phenomenon of the carnival, ‘a world turned upside down’. In this per42

spective, the film challenges the view that the carnival temporarily reverses the order of things and questions whether it really has a subversive potential (see Schindler 2000:183). To bring a more relevant example, Victor Turner (1977) carries out his research about rites of status reversal in Central Africa at the same time as Rouch shoots his film. In Turner’s analysis – which later became the most influential work in British symbolic and interpretive anthropology – temporary and ritual reversals of social statuses are followed by partial restoration and solidification of these statuses. Turner built his theories on Arnold van Gennep’s analytical description of rites of passage. Out of the three phases of the ritual process (see van Gennep’s concept of separation, transition and reintegration), the most important for Turner’s critical and descriptive purposes was the second element, which he called the „mimetic phase” implying a mimetic enactment of some dimension of the crisis that brought about the separation. Turner highlighted that during this phase the all-important confrontation of everyday norms took place through socially subversive ritual acts, the structures of everyday life being both challenged and elaborated, both questioned and refined in the course of this ritual process. He also called the co-occurrence of these two motives (challenge and elaboration) „anti-structure” and “structure” (Turner 1977). In Turner’s accounts, the Central African rites are dynamic “flow experiences” that bring “the opportunity of openness and change to the surface” (Abrahams 2002: 14), and they do not necessarily end in revolution, clash, power games or war between classes. “Religious beliefs and practices – he concludes – are something more than ‘grotesque’ reflections or expressions of economic, political, and social relationships” (Turner 1977:6).12 12 In the subchapter “The Powers of the Weak,” Turner refers to Henri Bergson. According to Turner, “marginal mythic types” represent what Bergson termed “open

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Sarah Cooper’s (2006) film analysis both supports and exceeds the postcolonial interpretational framework. According to Cooper, the director is aware of the situation of the colonised people, but he does not become one of them. Rouch does not become black (as the title I, a Negro would suggest) but finds the ideal proximity (to quote Levinasian terminology) between him and the Other. “Recorded through the camera lens of a western male, Rouch’s ethnography is [also] attentive to the positioning of the subject of vision when filming” (Cooper 2006). It seems that the filmmaker constructs a space, a site and a distance, as a way to signal what we cannot comprehend. As Rouch himself puts it: “It is a mistake to wish to say everything” (Rouch 2007:102). According to Cooper, Rouch does everything in his cinematic power to explore the other culture, but also questions the notion that this other culture can be understood exclusively through images, that the Other can be translated to one’s own culture, and that the filmed subject can be reduced to their images.13 The ritual of hauka dancers, according to Sarah Cooper, “attempts to move beyond the binary structure of colonialism and racial distinction altogether” (Cooper 2006): the ritual brings Africa and the West together, yet this results neither in their fusion nor in one nullifying or marginalising the other in the act of simple mimetic over-coding. In her attentive reading of the film, Cooper locates the ritual on the borders between mimesis and parody. She relies on Bhabha, according to whom the space between mimesis morality,” as opposed to closed morality in his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. (Turner 1977:110–111). 13 Sarah Cooper draws a parallel between this failure to “possess”, this sense of being subjected and the “ethnography of failure” or the “failure of ethnography” by pointing to the accounts of Sarah Ahmed on how the ethnographer learns that she cannot know everything, and also what it is that she cannot learn (Cooper 2006).

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and mimicry is the space of (creative) writing that marginalises history and creates a new reality, one – we might add – similar to the one cinéma verité creates. What Bhabha calls creative writing, in Cooper’s view, is explicitly manifested in the aesthetics of Rouch. For Cooper, Rouch’s ability to resist the traditional ethnographic position of the centre and establish the “ideal proximity” with the other culture is the ultimate guarantee to overcome dichotomous thinking (Cooper 2006). We need to emphasise that the ideal proximity is established through the shift away from his own, western culture. Rouch’s written ethnography Having overviewed postcolonial and mainstream film-philosophical readings, let me take a step back and examine what written ethnography has to say about hauka, taking into account the virtues, methods and findings of academic ethnography. The most important sources of reference in this regard are the ethnographic writings of Rouch himself, who not only documented the ritual on film but also researched it in depth and published his analyses in writing. In my attempt to outline how Rouch’s doctoral thesis presents Songhai religiosity, I shall rely on Henley’s work (Henley 2006). Henley differentiates between Rouch the ethnographer-author and Rouch the filmmaker-director (2006:737). Rouch the author points out that hauka is part of a broader group of spirit-possession cults, the so-called holey cults. Apart from hauka, five other possession cults belong here. The common feature of these is that the spirits in each are connected with some sort of “transposition” of ethnic otherness, that is, the spirit world is strongly associated with exotic alterity. These supernatural beings, therefore, possess attributes of alterity, which indirectly evoke ethnic groups 45

the Songhai have encountered in different chapters of their own history. Through these attributes the pantheon of holey spirits invokes the eastern and western black neighbours of the Songhai (the Hausa and Gourma peoples) as well as their northern non-black neighbours, the Tuareg and Fulbe peoples (Henley 2006:749–750). Furthermore, the elements of alterity combine with anthropomorphised forces of nature and, therefore, articulate the experience of radical, transcendental otherness. It should also be stressed that, although the exaggerated and often frightening attributes of these other ethnic groups are constructions of radical otherness, they do not correspond to the empirical experience of the Songhai. Unlike spirits associated with them, the Hausa people are not blood-sucking transvestites in the eyes of the Songhai, but peaceful partners in trade (Henley 2006:752). By the same token, the colonial figures of hauka are not absolute manifestations or photographic reflections of their models. This aspect is worth considering before interpreting the hauka as merely a mimesis of the participants of the colonial world. Another argument against the one-sided anti- and postcolonial readings of hauka is that the cult still exists, indeed, it flourishes in the postcolonial era, so much so that in the 1980s even one of the military dictators and governors of independent Niger became a hauka-initiate. In addition, the pantheon adopts newer and newer figures, which no longer manifest colonialism. For example, in the 1990s, due to the influence of popular kung-fu films the figure of the “Chinese” was included in the pantheon. These recent developments are later accounted for by Paul Stoller, not in Rouch’s writings (cited in Henley 2006:743). Each spirit “family” of the holey cult specialises in remedying certain issues, and in this sense, the hauka spirits can be especially useful when approached with requests of warding off witch46

craft, while they also prove quite effective in career counselling or in giving advice about how to avoid military service (Henley 2006:753). Hauka spirits also function effectively in the field of inducing fertility. The film makes seemingly unimportant but all the more relevant references to this: one of the penitents begging for healing and purification says that he has been impotent for two months after cheating on his wife with a married woman. It is worth noting that in the African context inducing impotence is connected to witchcraft. With a close-up showing the wife’s happy, smiling face, and with the voice-over narration justifying it, the end of the film suggests the success of the cure. Considering the interrelation between the hauka cult and fertility rites, the ritual offering of an egg as a classical symbol of fertility gains new light in the film, just as the role of the termite mound, which – according to ethnographic literature – is yet another symbol of fertility (Henley 2006:754). Impotence resulting from adultery, confessed by one of the penitents before the rite begins, is difficult to explain within the colonial framework. In this sense, the gesture of cracking the egg on the head of the Governor’s statue cannot be interpreted as parody but as a ritual offering presented to the summoned spirit of the Governor, bearing positive connotations.14 Another striking feature of hauka compared to other holey cults is the presence of the figures of the mechanical, technicised world: besides the ones mentioned in relation to the film, the hauka pantheon is expanded with, for example, the figure of the telephone repairman or that of the pilot. According to Henley, the Songhai’s relation to the power of technology is analogous to their relation to 14 The small model of a horse at the foot of the hauka Governor’s statue does not symbolise a soldier on horseback, but the “medium,” the possessed, who is said to be “mounted” by the spirits. This is what ethnographic literature suggests.

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the forces of nature. Negotiations and offerings during hauka follow the pattern with which Dongo, the storm god, asks for gifts in exchange for ending a drought: morality is offered in exchange for the power of European technology, and by summoning the forces of technology, participants hope to ward off witchcraft and infertility. Thus, rather than being a new form of religion generated by colonialism, hauka is an integral part of a wider group of cults. It belongs to a set of cults which incorporate the experience of alterity into their systems of belief. The joint analyses of hauka and holey exclude the interpretation of the former as parody. The parody of hauka’s colonial spirits is just as absurd as if one said that the Songhai were making fun of Dongo, the god of lightning and storm (Henley 2006:752).15 Hauka fits the broader category and historical context of holey, where Dongo is just as aggressive as the “colonising spirits” seen in hauka. This is authentically underpinned by Rouch’s possession films about Dongo. The term holey itself means mad people in the Songhai language, referring to the intrinsic link between madness and the spirit world. This relationship is also replicated in the film’s title, which itself raises the problem of the duplicity of interpretations. The ambiguity of the title’s Hungarian version also demonstrates this, since there are two translations of the original 15 Allow me to make two comments here, both of which oppose interpreting hauka as a direct parody of colonisers. On the one hand, the summoned spirit family includes not only the dignitaries of the colonial world, but it also enumerates characters of lower military and social status and lesser prestige. Furthermore, the pantheon reaches beyond evoking white Europeans, since a train or a car driver is probably not a white man in any African society. On the other hand, by acquiring the forces of technology, the spirit models also outgrow the human dimension. The fact that, apart from the director, no white man is present among the participants defies the idea of purposefully addressing the colonisers. The ceremony is conducted not for the sake of a ‘feature film’, but, conversely, the film is made for the ‘missionary’ purpose of the sect.

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Le maîtres fous: “the mad masters” and “the masters of madness”. The first version is a reference to the parodic perception of colonial masters whereas the second rather refers to the above-indicated authentic reciprocal relation between the spirit world and madness, using ethnographically sound terminology. Holey spirits are as cold as corpses, they eat excrement, wash themselves in mud, drink blood and are transvestites.16 Transgression, the crossing of social boundaries, and the violation of taboos are essential parts of their nature. It is exactly this violation of taboos which justifies their being transcendental insofar as they do not behave according to the norms of this world. The most significant violation of taboos in The Mad Masters appears in the scene in which a dog is eaten. According to the postcolonial reading, by showing the butchering of man’s best friend, this moment represents a gesture of resistance against European colonisers, and eating the dog is an act of counter-hegemonic performance (Cowie 2007:211). However, if we take into consideration the ethnographic literature Henley bases his analysis on, we will realise that the construction of otherness in Songhai imagination associates the taboo-breaking habit of dog eating with tribal people who live to the south (Henley 2006:755), and hence, this part of the rite is not explicitly targeted against colonial power. Rouch the filmmaker’s voice-over commentary at the ‘dramatic climax’ offers hardly any ethnographic clues regarding the interpretation of the dog-eating. The vocal coding of the narrative is elevated almost to the extent of being ecstatic. With a “dramat-

16 Each spirit is associated with melodies, scents, and costumes, furthermore, each has its own culture of movement. A lucid example of this is found in the ‘cinematic portrait’ of Dongo: the hauka dancer looks up to the sky and starts to growl since the arrival of the god of the tempest is accompanied by thunder.

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ically exaggerating” tone acceptable to the audience Rouch, the narrator, first claims that “in eating a dog, which is highly taboo, the hauka aimed to show that they are stronger than other men, ‘whether black or white’” (Henley 2006:755). Were we to take this seriously, the dominant interpretation which regards the film as a parody of European culture would be undermined since it challenges not only white people’s superiority but also that of other black neighbours. In an interview conducted years later, Rouch argues that the dog is the colonisers’ pet, thus butchering and eating it is analogous to the symbolic act of eating pigs as a way of protesting against Islamic influence. Rouch is fully aware that hauka is a “multicultural game,” but his subtle intentional inaccuracies in the film uphold and construct it as a power game. Rouch, the author, on the other hand, does not emphasise this aspect in his analysis. The seemingly improvisational narrative in the film is a conscious and precise construction. The act of dog-eating represents an exciting point in the course of understanding hauka. Indeed, the spirits represent not only the culture of white colonisers, since, as we have seen, they also reflect the image of otherness about the ethnic groups living to the south of the Songhai. At the same time, this hybrid quality does not come about accidentally but is an intrinsic feature of hauka spirits. As a result of the strong influence of Islam on the Songhai people, the hauka pantheon also incorporates characters of the Islamic world, that is, the colonizers’ direct political-technical impact becomes hybridised with Islamic authority, as Rouch himself observes (Rouch 2007:104). Hybridity increases to such an extent that the figures of colonialism also adopt attributes of Islam, which explains why the film makes an incomprehensible remark about the origins of the Governor’s spirit, according to which he comes from “the coast of the Red Sea,” in other words, from Mecca and 50

not London. The spirits reach beyond their original models, this varied model combines the powers of various alterities and by doing so it reveals to the cult members what the radical, strong Other may look like. The outlined ethnographic investigations show that hauka is primarily a religious event and not an anti-colonial political message. According to Henley, interpretations of the film stressing the latter confuse the purpose of the rite with its tools – participants of the hauka cult use the political phenomenon of colonialism only as instruments for religious purposes (2006:756). Conclusion Ethnographic details described by Rouch and other ethnographers elucidate the social meaning of the represented ritual more accurately. By considering the difference between the ‘two Rouchs’, the filmmaker and the ethnographer, I hope to have revealed the film’s intention and the nature of his poetics. Rouch’s film and his ethnographic texts present hauka somewhat differently. Rouch the director neither addresses the hybrid qualities of the hauka cult nor does he contextualise it in the broader, historical framework of the holey cults. Instead, he offers a lucid image of colonial rule and the mechanical world. This image is profound and shocking, it creates a new (representational) reality, and ‒ in line with the meaning-making processes of cinéma verité – it subverts the existing system of relations. Because the film as a medium is restricted by time and is defined by continuous screening, an ethnographic documentary cannot be expected to be as sophisticated, detailed, and informative as a written monograph. Yet the directorial concept limits the scope not only out of this formal necessity. Instead, it is worth taking into 51

consideration the specific directorial position occupied by Rouch, which stands on ethical grounds: the film holds a mirror to Western viewers, urging them to be self-critical and reflect on colonial reality. In the case of Rouch the director, it is easy to detect a creative authorial relationship with the represented topic. The principle of directing can be compared to the creativity of the hauka cult: much the same way as the hauka uses the colonial figures and other ethnic groups as means for religious purposes, Rouch uses ethnographic data as means for ethical purposes, namely to transmit the ethical demand of facing the negative aspects of the colonial system. The happy ending of the film’s narrative, which offers purification and healing through hauka to the disorders of the colonised Fanonesque psyche, can be considered such a creative motif. The building of the psychiatry clinic appears behind the healed characters, but our heroes do not need its services. Rouch, the filmmaker, deviates from the path of traditional documentaries to mimetically reproduce reality, and creates a distinct interpretation of hauka, deliberately selecting, or even camouflaging, mimicking the ethnographic data available in order to mediate his anti-colonial message. According to Bhabha (see Cooper 2006), between mimesis and mimicry lies the space of creative writing, which pushes history to the margins, creating – as so often is the case of cinema verité – a new social reality. In The Mad Masters, Rouch intentionally builds up a directorial narrative which foregrounds political rather than religious connotations. Some interpretations emphasised Rouch’s “atopical” directorial position as one that cannot be perceived as either the position of the coloniser or that of the colonised (Bensmaia 2007:81). Contrary to this, I believe that Rouch does occupy a definite position in space, meaning both ethical and geopolitical space. This fact delineates his position in film history and ethnography, 52

and should inspire further research to understand this in-between space. He occupies and constructs the ‘playing field’ between the Self and the Other, which Levinasian ethics describes with the concept of “ideal proximity” (see Cooper 2006). In Rouch’s film, everyone is drawn into this “ideal proximity” in the hope of narrowing distances and building bridges towards each other. REFERENCES Abrahams, Roger D. 2002 Előszó [Preface]. In A rituális folyamat [The Ritual Process]. Trans. István Orosz. Victor Turner, 9–16. Budapest: Osiris. Baudrillard, Jean 1993 The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. James Benedict. London – New York: Verso. Bensmaia, Reda 2007 A Cinema of Cruelty. In Building Bridges. The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Joram Ten Brink, ed. 73–85. London – New York: Wallflower Press. Chanan, Michael 2007 Rouch, Music, Trance. In Building Bridges. The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Joram Ten Brink, ed. 87–95. London – New York: Wallflower Press. Clifford, James 1988 The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvjf9x0h

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Cooper, Sarah 2006 Knowing Images: Jean Rouch’s Ethnography. In Selfless Cinema. Ethics and French Documentary. Sarah Cooper, 31–47. Oxford: Legenda. Cowie, Elisabeth 2007 Ways of Seeing: Documentary Film and the Surreal of Reality. In Building Bridges. The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Joram Ten Brink, ed. 201–218. London – New York: Wallflower Press. Deleuze, Gilles 1989 Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson – Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350251991 Heltai Gyöngyi 2002 Néhány jellemző tendencia a kortárs vizuális antropológiai gondolkodásban [Some Typical Tendencies in Contemporary Visual Antropological Thinking]. In Dialektus Fesztivál filmkatalógus és vizuális antropológiai írások [Dialektus Festival Film Catalogue and VisualAntropological Writings]. Zoltán Füredi – István Gergely – Orsolya Komlósi, eds. 89–112. Budapest: Palantír Film Vizuális Antropológiai Alapítvány. Kelecsényi László 2014 Vezetékneve: Godard [Last Name: Godard]. Filmvilág (57)12:38–43. Henley, Paul 2009 Shared Anthropology. In The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema. Paul Henley Paul, ed. 310–337. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

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Henley, Paul 2006 Spirit Possession, Power, and the Absent Presence of Islam: Re-viewing Les maitres fous. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (12)4:731–761. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2006.00361.x Kovács András Bálint 1985 Az etnográfus filmrendező [The Ethnographer Filmmaker]. Filmvilág (28)7:38–43. Rothman, William 2009 Introduction. In Three Documentary Filmmakers: Errol Morris, Ross McElwee, and Jean Rouch. William Rothman ed. 1–11. Albany: State University of New York. Rouch, Jean 2007 Ethnography and African Culture: Jean Rouch on La chasse au lion a l’arc and Les maitres fous (Hamid Naficy’s interview with Jean Rouch). In Building Bridges. The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Joram Ten Brink, ed. 97–107. London & New York: Wallflower Press. Rouch, Jean 1978 On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, the Sorcerer, the Filmmaker, and the Ethnographer. Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication (5)1:2–8. Schindler, Norbert 2000 Karnevál, egyház és fordított világ. A 16. századi nevetéskultúra funkciójáról [Carnival, Church and Reversed World. About the Function of the 16th century Culture of Laughter]. In Történeti antropológia [Historical Anthropology]. Marcell Sebők, ed. 183–215. Budapest: Replika.

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Turner, Victor 1977 The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Ithaca & New York: Cornell Paperbacks, Cornell University Press. Ungar, Steven 2007 Whose Voice, Whose Film? In Building Bridges. The Cinema of Jean Rouch. Joram Ten Brink, ed. 111–123. London – New York: Wallflower Press.

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3. BLOW UP “Anti-mimetic” framing methods in Attila Szűcs’s Lidice and other “traumatic” artworks Laura László […] one no longer finds photographs from nature in frames. The frame is suited only to structures with a closed unity, which a piece of nature never possesses. (Georg Simmel)1 We see the artwork, but we do not see the frame. (Paul Duro)2 The question of the frame is one of the most cardinal notions of art since ancient aesthetics.3 Its significance is not limited to the visual arts, but also to literature and music, which means that the frame is not only to be understood literally, in its physical sense, as an object which surrounds the painting but it is related to the artistic whole itself. What are the elements required to achieve an 1 Georg Simmel: “The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study”. Theory, Culture and Society, 1994/1, pp. 11–17. 2 Paul Duro (ed.): The Rhetoric of Frame. Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork. Cambridge University Press, 1996. 3 Research for this paper was partially funded through the ÚNKP-18-3 New National Excellence Program of the Ministry of Human Resources, Hungary.

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intelligible coherence, what are the necessary conditions for the definition of a work of art? The artistic and theoretical approaches to this “wholeness” change periodically. Contemporary aesthetics are fairly far from the Aristotelian thought of unity as a precondition to any artwork: “The component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them is transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated and destroyed. For if the presence or absence of a thing makes no visible difference, then it is not an integral part of the whole.” (Aristotle, 1997: 1451a). Needless to say, artistic expression has radically changed, especially after the historical tragedies of the 20th century, and this phenomenon raises some questions: does any positive artistic expression exist in working through the past? Can we speak in the language of absence? In this paper, I will focus on some “traumatic” visual artworks from after World War II and their special representational techniques. As we will see, representation itself is highly problematic in this case, because no one can show the formerly unimaginable and unspeakable horror of WWII.: the disappearance of beauty makes any harmonic composition and simple imitation impossible (or simply kitsch), and the notion of the whole and the notion of mimesis reaches crisis. Consequently, the frame itself also comes into crisis, but interestingly, it plays an important role in future artworks in an alternative way: its absence or the “anti-composition” becomes meaningful as well. According to my hypothesis, the special framing techniques and cutting methods themselves may have a deep dramatic effect and the potential to artistically “speak” of any tragedy, or they are, at least, a method through which the artwork avoids being profane. For the analysis, the Hungarian painter

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Attila Szűcs’s Postcard from Lidice (2003)4 will serve as a starting point. I will examine the zooming in and out phenomenon, by which a picture can “lose” the focus. After that, I will consider the “mythical” significance of the frame in showing an absence, an inexpressible entity, and I will analyse the possible artistic reasons for using this kind of method. The analysis is based on theoretical approaches to the concept of mimesis and the notion of the frame. *** First and foremost, we should look at the artwork itself, Postcard from Lidice by Attila Szűcs (figuresre no. 1). What we see is a mosaic or montage with eleven painted, blurred pieces based on a real postcard, which is also (re)presented on the right side of the picture in a rather small version. The original postcard (figuresre no. 2.) shows a common outdoor scene with some bushes, trees and paths on a field, on which people are walking – its other side also tells us the location: Lidice, the little Czech village. However, the work entitled Postcard from Lidice (hereafter referred to as Lidice) cuts this scene into small rectangular pieces, mixes their order, composes them in a (seemingly) random manner on a white background, and blurs the zoomed-in details. At first sight, there is nothing special or glaring on the landscape of the original postcard, which could clearly “explain” the strange montage technique of its artistic adaptation. Thus, the questions arise: what is happening in this cut and blurred scene? What can we see in this picture, or can we see anything at all? Why are the figures zoomed-in and separated? What is the role of the “inner” frames?

4 See https://szucsattila.hu/paintings/2003

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Here, before any deeper insights, it may already be clear that this fragmented and blurred painting has a different, unfamiliar, or unique relation toward ‘classic’ artistic representations and mimesis – insofar as we comprehend mimesis as a simple imitation, an image of reality. Etymologically, the word mimesis derives from the noun ‘mimos’, which refers to the person who imitates, and “a specific genre of performance based on the imitation of stereotypical character traits” (Potolski 2006:16). While mimesis has a long history in aesthetics, the mere, passive copying or imitation is not the only and the most proper way to approach the notion. This could also be instructive with regard to Lidice. We can follow the history of the concept of mimesis back to Plato, who discusses the term in his Republic with rather negative connotations. In his second book, he separates it from the essential, associates it with luxury and coins it as being a non-necessity in the life of the city (he names it in connection to some artistic activities, see Plato 1991:373c). As imitation, mimesis is also far from rationality and reality in his view, because it connects to emotions, pleasure and illusion, which can mislead the citizens. Consequently, as the third book concludes, poets should be excluded from the republic. In the tenth book, referring to the cave allegory, Plato considers artistic mimesis to be far from the world of ideas because of its illusoriness: it is only the shadow of reality on the walls, a mere image, which is falsely perceived as truth by the ‘inhabitants’ (prisoners) of the cave. Mimesis is compared to the mirror, which passively reflects real things (the craftsman creates “something that is like being but is not being”), thus, the product of mimetic action can only be mere appearance, – and artists (imitators) mirror the work of others, while lacking the professional knowledge of the original craftsmen.

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This approach to mimesis became more positive later with Aristotle, who “rehabilitated” the term in his Poetics. In contrast with Plato, he connects artistic mimesis to a universal reality through his famous lines: the historian “relates what has happened, the other [poet] what may happen”, and also emphasises that mimesis is rational rather than irrational. For Aristotle, mimesis has its own inherent rational, reasonable laws, and he regards art (poetry) as independent from anything (in itself), i.e. not as a mere mirror of the real or the truth, but as something entirely distinct from it. In this view, the artwork (tragedy) is structured much like an “organic” thing, it shows harmony among the parts, and it has a beginning, a middle and an end in their proper (necessary) positions. It is an intelligible unit, complete and whole. Aristotle emphasises that artistic mimesis is a creative process, not only a pure imitation, and the different kinds of artists (painters, sculptors, poets etc.) imitate in different ways, which may refer to the fact, that every genre has its own manner to imitate, and that each artwork is created by a special artistic choice. This Aristotelian theory has dominated the discourse on mimesis for a long time, but its meaning has changed, and it has become simpler, e. g. in the Renaissance: Lorenzo Ghiberti ([cca. 1447]1998) regarded it as the imitation of nature as far as possible; Leonardo da Vinci ([1651]1817) considers that the quality of a piece of art depends on the highest grade of representation of its subject; and according to Leon Battista Alberti ([1435]1997), imitation of nature is the most fitting way to achieve beauty, and the frame of the painting is like an open window. In this sense, mimesis loses some aspects of creativity, and the “mosaic” painting of Lidice is apparently not analysable in conformity with these conditions. The concept of mimesis as used in the 20th century, however, may bring us closer to analysing our subject. For instance, 61

Erich Auerbach in his Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Culture points out that instead of one “perfect” imitation of the “real” there are different artistic methods to achieve different aesthetic aims. In the well-known first chapter of his book, he introduces two elemental types of representation: the ancient Greek (Homerian) style without any background and tension in the expression, and the Judeo-Christian tradition (Auerbach mentions Abraham and the Sacrifice of Isaac) without “unnecessary” details but using an ellipse to create a mystic religious aura. This latter method points out that absence can be meaningful too. Another notable perspective on mimesis was elaborated by Paul Ricœur, who in Time and Narrative I., extends mimesis to the sphere of the interpreter by dividing it into three parts (“threefold mimesis”): mimesis I refers to the preconceptions of the recipient toward the work, mimesis II belongs to the artwork itself, and mimesis III refers to the mental representations of the recipient after reception. This approach tells us that artistic mimesis cannot be addressed without regard to the various aspects of the audience. This aspect may be important when considering Lidice as well, as it requires a rather active attitude from the interpreter, since the painting, one may argue, does not conventionally show anything. This aspect is not surprising if we consider the fact that the cultural climate dramatically changed in the 20th century, and as Theodor W. Adorno claims, in terms of the aesthetic effect, artistic expression became “the antithesis of »expressing something«.” He continues: “[m]imesis is the ideal of art, not some practical method or subjective attitude aimed at expressive values. What the artist contributes to expression is his ability to mimic, which sets free in him the expressed substance” (Adorno 1984:164). His famous lines on the impossibility of writing “poems” (creating art) after the Holocaust also reflect the view, that nobody can understand art 62

as an “open window”, through which the naïvely imitated beauty can be perceived. Beauty belongs to other epochs, representing harmony would be quasi-retrospective, nostalgic, and illusory. As Bertolt Brecht accurately underlines in his poem, To those born later: “Truly I live in dark times! / Frank speech is naïve […] What kind of times are these, when / To talk about trees is almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors” (Brecht 2018 [1939]). This changed attitude also deconstructs traditional notions of coherence and wholeness, which – as we usually imagine in paintings – are represented in a classical central perspective in regular, rectangular frames. Lidice, without a real centre or focus, and with its multiple frames, or frame-like and blurred offcuts can be considered as a challenge to this conventional expectation and provides another perspective for the Aristotelian understanding of wholeness and unity inherent in every intelligible artwork. For instance, in the German philosopher, Georg Simmel’s conservative view, the frame is a rigid notion, it highlights and separates the artwork from nature and common everyday life, implies and makes distance, from which the work of art can be perceived, and contributes to creating an integrated whole. He determines art as a closed unity, which a piece of nature “never possesses”, because nature is a heterogeneous, open, limitless outer world with no frames, while the work of art “closes itself off against everything external to itself as a world of its own” (Simmel 1994:11). As he states, frame “excludes all that surrounds it, from the work of art – including the viewer –, and thereby it helps in placing it at a distance from which it is solely aesthetically enjoyable. Psychologically, the distance of a being creates an undisputable unity to it. For only to the extent to which a being is self-enclosed does it possess that sphere into which no one can penetrate, that existence for itself with which it 63

can protect itself from every other sphere” (Simmel 1994:11–12). In other words, frame refers to a closed unity here, which can only represent a composition with a complete scene, a complete offcut (like an “open window”), whole figures, respecting the power of frame – this means that the represented scene cannot continue beyond the frames, the artwork can’t correspond to its background. Heinrich Wölfflin in his rudimental Principles of Art History (1915) shades the concept of frames when he makes comparisons between Renaissance and Baroque styles in visual arts. While the composition in the former case usually accommodates the frames with central perspectives (Wölfflin mentions The School of Athens by Raffaello), the latter usually shows disharmony with the boundaries, the figure wants to step out of the cabin (the author mentions Saint Sebastian by Pierre Puget). This observation underlines for the first time that the rebellion against the frame can also produce intended, aesthetically relevant results, a thought that has an unequivocal effect on our analysis of Lidice. From what we have seen so far, it seems clear, that the significance of frames is much more than that of simple, physical boundaries: the presence of the frame also means that intellectual surroundings remaining within the frame often refer to staying on the given topic without excursions, respecting the rules, assimilating into the given circumstances. This is obvious for the French art historian, Jean-Claude Lebensztejn as well, who points out that the frame enables everything with its normative, decisive function, it controls, compresses, cuts out, excludes and boxes in, provides the standards. However, several tricks on frames, e.g. Trompe-l’œil, blurring the limits between artwork and reality for different aesthetic reasons, obviously disarrays these rigid prescriptive features (Lebensztejn refers to Annunciation by Pontormo in Florence) and also questions the standards or status of art as an “open window” 64

(the author mentions here The Red Studio or The Dance in the Barnes Collection by Matisse, who supposedly refers to his latter painting as a rhythmic detail or fragment, whose one half is not on the picture). This avant-garde concept “opens” boundaries, it tries to change the excluding function of frames, which is a milestone in the history of thinking about frames and is especially important for our inquiry regarding Lidice. In this sense, as Louis Marin also states, the self-reflexive feature of frames begins to dominate instead of the representative (or transitive) character, which means that the picture does not represent anything except the picture itself (deixis). The frame then demonstrates nothing else but the fact that there is something (a work of art) which can attract the attention itself: it says “This is here”. In other words, the medium gets into the foreground, while the painted subject “remains” in the background of the aesthetic discourse. The fact that Lidice cannot be approached without its theoretical context and historical background, also means that it cannot be interpreted without its conceptual frames. It is no exaggeration to say that interpreting forms of “socially engaged art” – if we may call Attila Szűcs’s work thus – depends more notably on a “textual” background, and perhaps, refers more closely to a specific context than other types of art. We should observe the code through which the work ‘opens’ up and conveys a message to us. The wider comprehension of the frame as an outer context or possible room for interpretation derives from Erving Goffman’s influential analysis on cognitive frames (subtitled the “organisation of the human experience”, see Goffman 1986), a thought that has had a fruitful afterlife in social sciences but was successfully adapted in art theory as well. According to Goffman, we always give or discover interpretive frameworks for the most unusual things to make them meaningful. These backgrounds are called primary frameworks, 65

which “vary in degree of organisation. Some are neatly presentable as a system of entities, postulates, and rules; others – indeed, most others – appear to have no apparent articulated shape, providing only lore of understanding, an approach, a perspective” (Goffman 1986:21). Werner Wolf (2006) was also inspired by this usage of the frame, but he transferred it into the field of literature and other artistic media and called it contextual framing, which occurs in the given cultural background, ‘outside’ the work of art. However, this is one of the four basic frame categories that Wolf distinguishes, as in the case of any artwork, we always encounter a sender-based, a contextual, a textual and a recipient-based frame and their subtypes (Wolf 2006:25). These four are different perspectives, each providing a new lens for the analysis of artwork. Returning to the primary frames or the contextual “borders” of Lidice, we immediately arrive at a placename (Lidice), and the ‘genre’ of the postcard itself is based on a certain locality, in the way it refers to a concrete place. In this sense, we can easily consider Postcard from Lidice a ‘site-specific’ work. This placename has certain “compulsory” connotations, and therefore, a somewhat predetermined direction for the interpretation. The aesthetic quality, therefore, largely depends on the degree of this boundedness in this case, and the viewer is somewhat “framed” in the process of interpretation. As we may see then, the title, as an essential paratextual element, is tightly connected to the visual artwork in question: the name of Lidice evokes the history of an incident of genocide in 1942 when Hitler issued orders to “teach the Czechs a final lesson of subservience and humility”. 5This meant destroying Lidice and murdering its entire male population as revenge for Reinhard Hey5 See http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/world-war-two-and-eastern-europe/lidice-1942/

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drich, the second most important figure in the Nazi SS, who was assassinated in Prague. The 95 residences and farms of the village were burnt, 199 males were shot, 184 women and 90 children were transferred to concentration camps, and some children who were suitable for ‘Germanisation’ were separated from their mothers and given to SS families6. After the World War, Lidice was rebuilt, and today it is among the most tragic reminders of Nazi terror: (it has become a symbol and a dark touristic attraction, rather than a real residential village). Almost the whole township functions now as a living memorial,7 as a kind of exhibition, which likely also means a significant financial income for the leadership of Lidice. The village has a museum and a gallery and traces of the destroyed settlement lie everywhere, such as the foundations of the former school and the former church. In addition, we find a Gloriette, several memorials, long alleys and paths among the graves on the endless fields, and an impression of endless emptiness. Therefore, the interpreters of any Lidice-related artwork must keep the ‘virtuality’ of this town in mind, and many such artworks exist even in situ, beginning from 1945. Such artworks include a bronze statue Memorial to the Children Victims of the War dating from 1969 by an academic sculptor professor, Marie Uchytilová;8 a statue of a

6 See http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/world-war-two/world-war-two-andeastern-europe/lidice-1942/ and http://www.bibl.u-szeged.hu/bibl/mil/ww2/doksi/ k20609.html 7 See e.g. the orientation map of Lidice today: https://www.lidice-memorial.cz/en/ „In 2001, the Ministry of Culture established a benefit organisation Lidice Memorial. Its priority was to renew the care of the historical buildings and the whole area of the National Cultural Heritage site that was neglected in the post-communist era. […] The Lidice Memorial is an organisation of the Ministry of Culture of the Czech Republic, keeping lasting memory of the annihilation of Lidice.” For all artworks see the official website: http://www.lidice-memorial.cz/en/ 8 See http://www.lidice-memorial.cz/en/memorial/war-childrens-victims-monument/

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mother with her child in the former school by Bedřich Stefan; the sculpture of Peace with a girl and a boy figure, by Karel Hladík in the Rose Garden; but we can consider the Rose Garden itself as a sort of artistic, or at least symbolic performance as well because the English group “Lidice Shall Live” called it into existence as the Garden of Peace and Friendship by bringing 29 thousand rose plants from 32 countries. The amount of artwork on and around the site has also increased as a result of artists from every part of the world being invited to expand the Lidice art collection on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the massacre, as well as a tradition of an international children’s art competition and exhibition that exists to this day.9 These endeavours show the importance of aesthetic approaches to the village of Lidice. It seems that Lidice cannot exist without artistic activities. These activities function as a kind of therapy by having a role in working through past and present realities, i.e. the fact that this village, which was once completely wiped off the map and literally became nothing, finally became a “non-place” (Augé 1995), a ghost town, a completely artificial settlement in which it is really difficult to live surrounded by the ruins of death. Perhaps, the therapy can turn into art, if we understand it as a work that captures the strange experience of being nowhere in Lidice. We are then able to analyse Szűcs’s installation along with this insight. Attila Szűcs (born in 1967) is a well-known painter in the contemporary Hungarian and international art scene, whose works are successfully sold in auctions. Recently, for instance, one of his

9 “The International Children’s Exhibition of Fine Arts Lidice (ICEFA Lidice) was established in 1967 to commemorate the child victims from the Czech village of Lidice murdered by German Nazis, as well as all other children who have died in wars.” See http://www.mdvv-lidice.cz/en/

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paintings (Érintés / Touch) was purchased for a record price in Sotheby’s Contemporary East Auction in London, in 2016. According to his ars poetica, he has a special interest in space: I create empty spaces around the objects of thoughts and figures without defining them in a preconceived notion. It is the distance and the concentrated attention on absence that rules my relationship with painting. What I am most interested in is the search of interpretation of knowing and not-knowing, the way they are able to extinguish one another. I collect inspiration from the rubbish of collective memory, which I then re-interpret through the reality of painting.10 This is an outstanding feature in his works:11 the empty spaces which surround the painted figures are always abstract and blurred, full of tension and quasi-depressingly dominate the pictures almost all the time. Some of his works, which include this signature element are, Operating Room, Snowy Owl, Stars in a Moorland, Woman in Gold Evening Dress, Living Room in Kadar’s Villa, or The End of Gravity. Indeed, it seems that the space and the absence itself are the protagonists of his works. The different atmospheres and the different affections they determine play a cardinal role in these paintings: how can they change, how can they visually express the inner life of the figures, how subjective, how ‘misshapen’ can the frame be at times, and how distant is this ‘relative’ approach from the illusion of the ‘absolute space’. In his attempt 10 See https://szucsattila.hu/cv 11 For Attila Szűcs’s works, see his official website: https://szucsattila.hu/

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to break this illusion, the various framing techniques are a device in Attila Szűcs’s works, as the perspective he applies emphasises that the human perception is unable to comprehend any totality, therefore it is unnecessary to aspire to a proportional, harmonic representation that fits neatly into the given frame. This method is conspicuous in the image, entitled Girl Looking Down Her Hands for instance: in the centre, we only find the hands, and not the girl herself, whose head is ‘cut off’ from the picture, while the rest of the picture is ‘filled’ with ‘nothing’, we can only see a simple black background. One might say that there is “no reason” for this absence because there would be enough space on the right to show the whole figure. It is probably an obvious fact that the figure not fitting into the painting is not a compositional error. Instead, we suppose a special expressiveness behind this representation, and we have the impression that the emphasis was taken to the hands for some reason. We encounter a similar technique in the case of Hitler Without His Dog, where the title also provides absence as the convenient code for the work: it depicts an irrational and cold space, where Hitler is alone, but he lost his attribute and his human side, he would touch the dog, Blondi, but she is not present, much the same way Hitler as a human being cannot be present either. Szűcs’s other work, Investigating Figure, is also about the failure to find and express something: the clues are blurred and no one knows any answers. All in all, analysing these specific cases, the question arises: what is the artistic motivation to use this unusual lens and to stress absence? What is the effect and what are the consequences of the frame? These issues should be tackled with regard to Postcard from Lidice as well. As we have seen in the analysis of its contextual frame, the village it represents does in fact not exist, as despite 70

the reconstructions – the original place cannot be brought back. The new landscape is ‘frozen’, it is but a ‘spectacle’, a monument, a cemetery, and it turned from profane to sacred in a sense. This also means that entering the town is a kind of metamorphosis: it makes everyone a tourist, a visitor who only wants to see. On the other hand, it transforms the inhabitants too: they become hosts who show and help to see. They do not dwell, as others dwell in places; they do not exist without their visitors. So what are we able to see in the representation of this spectacle, what is observable from the perspective of a simple viewer? The postcard from which the artwork originates received its meaning from history, and through the minimum background knowledge outlined above. We may recognise the particular place and the scene: the group of people become pilgrims now, who are going to and coming from a cross on the curly path: from the mass grave of men. There is nobody on the grassy field: this ‘desert’ or nothingness, covers most of the picture. As we have already mentioned, the postcard itself can also be seen in Szűcs’s montage, but in a radically-smaller version in the bottom right-hand corner in an apparently unimportant part, on the periphery. This is the smallest element of the picture. On the one hand, one can immediately notice that the orientation is quite odd here due to the mosaic structure. On the other hand, the postcard no longer remains a postcard, not only because of the change of context, but also because of the change in its size: this genre also requires specific proportions (e.g. it fits into an envelope, just to mention one of the basic features), and it is no exaggeration to say that this play with the dimensions conveys meaning in this artwork. Consequently, the blurred mini-postcard in the bottom right corner cannot be seen clearly in this format, but this is probably the aim of the artist. It points to the fact that we should examine the picture 71

from the painter’s point of view. In addition, if we regard the small postcard as something original, we could call this constriction or compression an allegory of the whole tragedy of Lidice: the irreversible tragedy of the lost origin. Thus, the zooming-out technique itself has a narrative and dramatic effect in this way. In fact, the mini-postcard is not completely recognisable. To recognise it, we need the title (paratextuality) with the help of which we make sure to mark and notice the presence of that detail. However, can we consider it to be an acceptable mode of expression? The zooming-out technique absolutely blurs the lines and makes every figure, and every detail uncertain. We can only have some impressions and the belief that a postcard (or its painted version) can indeed be seen in the work. Despite our intentions, however, we do have serious problems with ‘seeing’ here, as we cannot be sure of what is in front of us. Is there anything to see? What should we see? With the help of background knowledge of this part of history, the latter question may be answered. The interpreter can probably explain what the picture displays, he can navigate us and show the ‘landmarks’ of the picture, much the same way a tourist guide would show us the village of Lidice. He can tell us what emotion is acceptable when interpreting the representation of the events in question. It is nevertheless hard to say anything about the seemingly irrelevant zoomed-in details, the empty parts of the field. Instead of being part of ‘real’ geography, these details perhaps belong to an inner or a mental landscape, a landscape of the traumatised memory, which is unable to recall reality in a photographic quality. As we have seen, Lidice is a special location, a “non-place”, using Marc Augé’s well-known phrase (Augé 1995). In this context, this means a place with no inhabitants, where nobody can be at home, a place of tragedy or transformation, or a place as an exhibition or 72

installation. If we consider Lidice as a location of an unimaginable or unspeakable horror, which oversteps ‘normality’, Attila Szűcs’s blurred mosaic seems an ideal artistic approach. On the one hand, his painting technique oversteps the normal, traditional way of painting with its multiple frames, strange zooming techniques, low exposure, and the absence of an exact focus. On the other hand, this blurry painting ‘clearly’ states that there is no chance for any innocent representation after these dark times. The painting signals the end of an era, in which a piece of art can be comprehended as an open window. The green, empty surfaces, the disorientated focus, and the zoomed-in and blurred shapes of the walking people show absence, the loss of something very human after the Nazi atrocities. Discovering the ‘personality’, ‘character’ or ‘human nature’ of the figures seems to be impossible in this picture, subjectivity disappears from this kind of representation. The details of the abandoned field and the white squares among the painted pieces can also mean absence and a place for contemplation. History stops here for a moment, the logical chain, which led to this moment breaks into simultaneous fragments. Mimesis in this context cannot mean harmony or a ‘complete’ composition anymore, the notion refers to a fragmented, absent, broken, unclear, and randomly detailed, zoomed-out original image (postcard) on canvas, which can become an anti-mimetic or silent monument of WWII. However, the painting is composed through another tricky framing technique: social framing or the social context. Since Lidice with its anti-mimetic feature cannot let the naive interpreter into its ‘core’, it can easily be meaningless to an outsider audience. In other words, the first step toward the artwork is to discover its social context as a primary frame, since there is no valid interpretation without it. Some questions may arise here: is the painting able to attract attention due to its form and technique alone? Does 73

it motivate the spectator to want to deepen their insights? Does the background story reveal all the potential meanings of the artwork? If the answer to the latter question is yes, the aesthetic value may disappear, the work may be exceedingly didactic and may become kitsch. This risk is assumed by many artworks, whose mission is working through the past, because the artwork, in this case, is merely a tool and not an autonomous product. These problems could be relevant in the case of other artistic projects as well. The Polish photographer Elżbieta Janicka (born in 1970) has been working on an artistic depiction of the Holocaust for many years. One of her astounding works is entitled Sobibor, which belongs to her photographic series The Odd Place (figuresre no. 3). Sobibor, as Attila Szűcs’s Lidice, also refers to a real location, where unimaginable war crimes and tragedies occurred: Sobibor was a Nazi German extermination camp in Poland under the inspection of the SS, next to a railway station and a forest. Janicka’s photograph of Sobibor seems to be an empty frame, a blank space. The quadrant surface ‘represents’ nothing, and only shows a monochrome white square surrounded by a black photographic frame. As in the case of Lidice, this background knowledge is rudimental to comprehend the aesthetic concept of Janicka’s artwork. In addition, it is also worth knowing the intention of the artist. According to her statement, she ‘captured’ the air in Sobibor. Janicka says: “The ashes flow in the air. We breathe this air […] The ashes are in the soil, in the rivers, on the meadows, and in the forests – subjected to constant recycling, in which we participate”.12 However, if we acquire the key to the meaning of the artwork through this external information, the photograph has only a didac-

12 K. Cichoń and E. Janicka, ‘Portrety powietrza’, Atlas Sztuki, 21 (2006).

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tic function, not a real, inherent artistic quality, because it drastically limits the horizon of understanding. In the case of Sobibor, in which nothing other than a photographic frame and a white absence inside is visible, it is difficult to reveal the aesthetic effect – although the black frame can function as a mourning edge if the recipient holds the relevant background information. When the work puts nothingness in the foreground and provides absolutely no clues of its real subject (in contrast to Lidice, on which several techniques and artistic solutions can also be discovered at first sight), the recipient, perhaps, begins to seek the paratextual (e. g. title) and the contextual elements connected to the artwork. In other words, the viewer tries to create meaningful conceptual frames for the interpretation, because there are no clues in the artwork. Consequently, the “reader” must make an effort to perceive the aesthetic of the artwork. A similar photo series by Janicka is called Herbarium (figuresre no. 4-5.), also related to the Holocaust. At first glance, we can see beautiful flowers and plants in the pictures, as if they were simple photographs of nature. However, this impression will be radically changed by additional information coming from outside of the world represented by the artwork: these plants are growing on the sites of several former concentration camps. Thus, the first assumptions may collapse: from this perspective, the onlooker perceives the artwork in a radically new light, and the photograph reveals its true meaning. This is the process through which contextual framing simplifies the subject and the concept of mimesis. The last example on this subject is another work from Janicka, in collaboration with Wojciech Wilczyk. The title of the project is Another City (figuresre no. 6.), which is regarded as one of the most important contemporary art projects in the history of Warsaw. The photographers represented the contemporary city of Warsaw with 75

different landmark buildings (e.g. Palace of Culture and Science or the Blue Skyscraper) captured only on the sites of the former ghetto of the city. The pictures were only taken on sunless days, and the artists used a large format (4x5 inch) film camera. Another City also works with absence and invisibility. The locations can work as a living memento for all the tragedy that occurred, and the background stories offer a code for understanding the art. In my view, if the contextual code reveals the obvious message behind the anti-mimetic technique, then this is not a real aesthetic legitimation. The “message” of this photo series is explained, there is space for other interpretations, even though prompting divergent interpretations may be considered the main purpose of any artwork. After analysing Attila Szűcs’s Postcard from Lidice, where the visual components can create a deep and a bit undetermined impression, aesthetic mimesis seems to work as a more unbound, constructive process, despite the difficulties in comprehending the blurred, mosaic-like pieces on the canvas. In other words, creativity and freedom, as the essence of the aesthetic product, cannot be absent from the concept of mimesis.

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Figures*

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* The reproduction of Attila Szűcs’s Postcard from Lidice is published with the permission of the artist. The works of Elżbieta Janicka are published with the permission of the artist.

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2.

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4. 79

5.

6.

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REFERENCES Adorno, Theodor W. 1984 Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Christian Lenhardt. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Alberti, Leon Battista 1997 A festészetről [Della pittura]. Trans. Hajnóczi Gábor. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó. Aristotle 1997 Poetics. London: Penguin Classics. Auerbach, Erich 2013 Mimesis. The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt3fgz26 Augé, Marc 1995 Non-places. An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London – New York: Verso. Benjamin, Andrew 1991 Art, Mimesis and the Avant-Garde. Aspects of a philosophy of difference. Sussex: Psychology Press. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203981450 Brecht, Bertolt 2018 The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht. Trans. David Constantine – Tom Kuhn. New York: Liveright Publishing. da Vinci, Leonardo 1817 Trattato della pittura. Roma: Nella Stamperia de Romanis.

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Duro, Paul ed. 1996 The Rhetoric of Frame. Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ghiberti, Lorenzo 1998 I commentarii. Firenze: Giunti. Goffman, Erving 1986 Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organisation of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press. Halliwell, Stephen 2002 The Aesthetics of Mimesis. Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400825301 Lebensztejn, Jean-Claude 1994 Starting out from the Frame (Vignettes). In Deconstruction and the Visual Arts. Peter Brunnette – David Wills, eds. 118–140. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marin, Louis 2001 On Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781503619401 Melberg, Arne 1995 Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597732 Plato 1991 The Republic. Trans. Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books.

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Potolski, Matthew 2006 Mimesis. New York – London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203401002 Ricœur, Paul 1990 Time and Narrative I. Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Simmel, Georg 1994 The Picture Frame: An Aesthetic Study. Theory, Culture and Society 11(1):11–17. Wolf, Werner – Bernhardt, Walter eds. 2006 Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Amsterdam: Rodopi. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401202022 Wölfflin, Heinrich 1929 Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style. In Later Art. Trans. M. D. Hottinger. New York: Dover.

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PART II IMITATION AND INNOVATION: FORM AND FUNCTION

4. Two theories of social imitation. Richard Dawkins and Gabriel Tarde on the meme Ádám Lovász Imitation plays a crucial role in a wide variety of social scientific discourses. In our cybernetic age, the phrase „meme” is now a commonplace term. The meme has had a wildly successful career, ironically itself having become an example of what it denotes. This notion has greatly simplified the investigation of communication. Metaphors suggestive of virality today compose a large part of social scientific discourses relating to communication as a social phenomenon. My question is the following: what is the meme, and what does this concept mean for social thought? What are the meme’s primary attributes? And how do memes transform social reality and social institutions? I am choosing two thinkers who have contributed immensely to the invention of this concept, namely the early twentieth-century French positivist sociologist, Gabriel Tarde, and the Neo-Darwinist biologist and philosopher, Richard Dawkins. Such a focus can be of help in conceptualising social imitation, as well as understanding exactly what such processes entail for social philosophy. According to Dawkins, the meme is explicitly analogous to genes, conceived of as a type of biological automata. While memes are cultural processes, they nonetheless share important characteristics with biological systems. As opposed to this reductionist viewpoint, I argue that Tarde’s position is more constructive because it allows us to conceive 87

of social evolution on its own terms. Society in Tarde’s system is composed of imitation and invention. New ideas and principles, in as much as they are adaptive, that is, suitably simple to be copied easily yet also intellectually compelling enough to be identified by agents as worthy of imitation, become popular over time. They act as if they were viruses, yet social evolution is radically distinct from biological evolution and cannot be reduced to any biological analogy. Through a process similar to Darwinian natural selection, ideas are differentiated, spreading from mind to mind. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that good or noble ideas will be those that prove viable in the long run. Richard Dawkins and the Selfish Meme It is no exaggeration to say that the word “meme” has proved to be one of the most successful scientific metaphors. This word, originally invented to denote viral tendencies in social life, has become a meme itself, a cultural formation prone to rapid transmission. We need to see that the sociological use of the concept preceded the biological one. The word may be traced back to Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (1976), but the underlying concept dates back to much earlier, the forgotten French sociologist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gabriel Tarde. The meme as a neologism is embedded within a broader conceptual environment relating to the ontological status of social and biological life. In Dawkins’ view, life may be considered as an aggregate of replicants. Living organisms are capable of selecting from their environments, and also reproduce themselves. In each case, replicators face a trade-off between “longevity” and “fecundity” (Dawkins 1976:17). These are the two vectors of all self-replicating units. Other things being equal, life may essentially be conceived of as a process of ac88

celerating self-replication. Each organism is nothing more than a “survival machine” in Dawkins’ reductionist framework. To take a few examples, “A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats.” (Dawkins 1976:21). Living bodies exist in order to both preserve and transmit the genes they happen to be endowed with. Hence, the body is merely a shell for genetic communication and reproduction. We find underneath the apparent variety of creatures a struggle for the means of replication that plays out between rival genes. Rich and suggestive metaphors are a necessary and unavoidable rhetorical device for scientific discourses. As Dawkins emphasises in the introduction to the first edition of The Selfish Gene, “this book should be read almost as though it were science fiction. It is designed to appeal to the imagination. But it is not science fiction: it is science. Cliche or not, ,stranger than fiction’ expresses exactly how I feel about the truth. We are survival machines ‒ robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” (Dawkins 1976:xxi). The story of both evolution and, indeed, the story of life, is the history of competition among genes. Bodies have an important role to play in all this: these structures are, in Dawkins’ view, transitory substrates designed to maximise the reproductive potential of the genes they carry. To put it another way, the body is an instrument for the transmission of genetic material. The clearly-observable variety of organisms stems from competition; evolutionary weapons races serve to accelerate the proliferation and adaptation of life forms, leading to the development of ever-newer bodily equipment by replicators. Such a view

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poses numerous questions when thinking about social life, as well as the political orientation of Dawkins’ broader project.1 But what about the meme as both concept and object? Concepts too are social objects, entities which are embedded within a certain social and historical ecology.2 My goal here is an investigation of what memes are in a social ontological sense. The phenomenon of life implies the presence of unintentional expediency in nature. Successful replicators “construct for themselves containers, vehicles for continued existence.” (Dawkins 1976:19). Words such as “construct” imply some kind of unconscious rationality or goal-orientedness on the part of genes. But in reality, there is nothing of the sort. Competition does not necessarily imply any planning or intentionality on the part of genes as units of selection. Similarly, the metaphor of “selfishness” also carries a great deal of subjectivist baggage, a point taken up by another of Dawkins’ critics, biologist Mary Midgley, who argued in a widely cited article published a couple of years after Dawkins’ book, that the phrase absurdly attributes egoism to the basic building blocks of life (Midgley 1979:447). According to Midgley’s train of thought, the metaphor of the selfish gene runs wild in Dawkins’ thinking, functioning infectiously, tainting the broader project of neo-Dar1 S. M. Amadae has traced a connection between Dawkins’ idea of the “selfish gene” and the broader framework of neoliberalism and suggests that the metaphor of life as a struggle for survival is deeply problematic when applied to social phenomena, which is precisely what Dawkins proceeds to do in The Selfish Gene through the semantic device of the “meme.” (Amadae 2016:252-269.) A similar connection between Dawkins and neoliberal ideology has been traced by Rob Nixon (Nixon 2012:593-599). 2 By “social objects”, one can mean refer to entities which involve intersubjective relationships. For this rather conservative definition see Quinton 1976:1-27. Or, more radically, one can view social objects as any object whatsoever that exerts agency in a social context. Bruno Latour’s concept of „actants” comes to mind. Latour, incidentally, proposed a return to Tarde’s sociology, precisely because of the latter’s greater sensitivity to the more-than-human nature of social objects (Latour 2002:117-132).

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winism with unwanted semantic content and problematic political implications. The whole project is irredeemably polluted by a metaphor that has escaped normal usage. While the misattribution of subjective concepts to unconscious objects can seem more of a subjective projection than a clear statement of the facts, Dawkins, to his credit, acknowledges that his book is, partly, a work of science fiction. Reality is stranger than fiction. We can give Midgley credit for pointing out the necessarily dangerous, unpredictable nature of metaphors. Because of their slipperiness, metaphors must be handled with great care. But it does not follow that complex phenomena such as the viral processes of memetic transmission cannot or should not be illustrated through the employment of metaphors. Of course, the abandonment of semantic purity in such cases is an unavoidable price. Replicators themselves, after all, create themselves through mistakes: innovation is the result of a mistake in the reproductive process. Life is a series of mistakes and mishaps. Errors inevitably tend to creep into any mechanism of self-transmission. We confront here a basic paradox of life, namely, that its perfection and development are unavoidably connected with the imperfection of replication. Perfect replicants would mean the end of evolution as we know it. The creation of new forms is a direct consequence of copying errors. If reproduction were perfect, terrestrial life would have remained stuck on the level of primitive single-cell organisms. Variety is born of aberration. Errors, if they are “to the advantage of the selfish mutator gene,” proceed to “spread through the gene pool” (Dawkins 1976:44). Because we are dealing with imperfect objects, our own discourse must necessarily be imperfect, full of analogies and metaphors that do not quite fit. The genius of Dawkins lies in the realisation that description cannot separate itself from the ambiguous nature of replicators themselves. Writing, if it is to correspond with the nature of rep91

licators, must acquaint itself with mistaken, mutated metaphors. This realisation is what motivates Dawkins to create a completely artificial, even anomalous neologism to specifically denote cultural replicators. Because the object of this study is the nature of the meme, it is worthwhile quoting Dawkins’ definition in its entirety: The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ’Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ’gene.’ I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ’memory,’ or to the French word meme. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ’cream.’ Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catchp-hrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. (Dawkins 1976:192) Underneath the apparently-carefree wording, we can observe a surprisingly coherent rhetorical strategy on Dawkins’ part. The meme is a primordially defective copy. Its very origin lies in a mistake, the erroneous adaptation of words that have shed their original meanings. Scientifically implausible, etymologically messy, grammatically scandalous: such is the meme. And yet, the “meme” has 92

proven a wildly successful meme in itself, a cultural object that has spread far and wide. Far beyond the scientific community, with the help of the Internet, the word “meme” has become commonplace. What happened? To what does the meme owe its remarkable fecundity? And what is a meme? A meme is a unit of cultural transmission, a self-replicating object that spreads through communication. Dawkins differentiates three characteristics of successful memes: longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity. (Dawkins 1976:194). All three of these components bear an importance of their own, while also unavoidably conflicting with each other. Theirs is a far from simple relationship. Reproductive success, for instance, seems to be more important than the durability of the survival-machines utilised by memes. When speaking about memes, it must be borne in mind that “longevity” applies to the meme itself, and not the individuals it happens to instrumentalise in order to spread as far and wide as possible. Reproductive success conflicts with the longevity of the individual (Dawkins 1976:234). Genes and memes do not care for the vital interests of the bodies they happen to use.3 But reality does not imply any “ought.” Copy-reliability occupies a middle ground between fecundity and longevity. Oddly enough, Dawkins does not explain whether replicators must be reliable in their self-copying. Too much repetition stifles innovation, whilst too little repetition can lead to a fatal destabilisation of the meme. In the life of every meme, we find both “continuous mutation” and “blending” (Dawkins 1976:195). The productivity of a cultural replicator, far from excluding distortion, actually encourages hybridity, but after a point, a split emerges within the original meme and new cultural feedback processes are unleashed. This 3 This latter point in particular can strike us as offensive, especially when compared with our all too human preoccupation with self-worth, value, and morality.

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can be observed in the conceptual history of the phrase “meme.” By the early years of the 21st century, it has become a synonym for easily communicable Internet multimedia content, a deviation from its original, broader usage.4 Any cultural phenomenon that shows a definite tendency to spread unintentionally can be considered a meme. Importantly, the meme is a product of cultural and not biological evolution. Cultural replicators do not necessarily connect to any single organic substrate, which means that they can spread at a far greater pace than biological replicators. Memes appear to be analogous to selfish genes, their evolution “looks like highly speeded up genetic evolution,” but Dawkins cautions his readers that this has nothing to do with genetic evolution (Dawkins 1976:190). Appearances are deceptive, as memes connect with their hosts differently to genes. Instead of bodies created through sexual reproduction, memes travel from mind to mind at a rapid pace. Successful ideas “propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation” (Dawkins 1976:192). Memetic transmission is inherently mimetic. Cultural replicators represent an unprecedented acceleration of evolution. The cultural level, as opposed to the organic, makes possible new and more flexible modes of adaptation, acting in a manner oriented toward the maxi4 The expression “Internet meme” was first coined by journalist Mike Godwin in a 1994 article (Godwin 1994). On his part, Dawkins has distanced himself from such usages of his neologism, a rather ironic fact considering the inherently promiscuous nature of cultural replicators. An important difference between the Dawkinsian meaning of “meme” and “meme” used as a phrase for cultural products is that memes in the first sense are usually unconscious products of cultural imitation, whereas Internet memes are deliberately produced for specific purposes, be they ludic or politic (Solon 2013). As we shall see later on, Dawkins’ distinction between “conscious” and “unconscious” cultural innovation is too rigid. Supposedly conscious decisions can indeed be traced back to impersonal collective social dimensions.

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mal acceleration of proliferation. Dawkins, by mapping the meme onto a biological metaphorology, is, despite his assertions to the contrary, engaging in biological reductionism. Saying the meme is “like” the organically transmitted gene is not specific enough and fails to consider the qualitative differences between social and natural phenomena. Because multiplication is its sole purpose, the meme only needs to transmit those elements which are vital to its more-or-less-smooth reproduction, as well as the maintenance of the communication epidemic. Because of the overarching value of ease-of-transmission, and the inevitable simplification this necessitates, mimetically transmitted content inevitably tends toward caricature, uniformity, and mutation (Dawkins 1976:195-196). Similarly to genes, memes too compete with one another within the “meme-pool.” There is a limited supply of minds amenable to mimetic infection. Intriguingly, Dawkins entertains the prospect of memes displaying a “quasi-ruthlessness,” a tendency to privilege their own transmission and oppose or even preclude that of other cultural objects (Dawkins 1976:198). A successful meme is a jealous meme. While we, living as we do for the most part in democracies, tend to think that several cultural phenomena can survive in a tolerant, mutually assured safe environment, yet large-scale mimetic phenomena are intolerant of differences and idiosyncrasies. While many small sub-genres of music may appear in a large metropolis, or even a glocal subcultural scene, almost certainly very few tunes can make the cut and become number-one hits in a global cultural environment. The range of hit songs is severely limited, for obvious reasons. How does one meme outdo its rivals? Why does one video achieve viewership running in the hundreds of millions, while others fail to achieve even a dozen views? In relation to infectiousness, Dawkins does not give an adequate explanation. Cultural 95

memes exploit the accentuated flexibility and plasticity of human consciousness, but also a suitable cultural environment is needed which is open to the spread of mimetic processes. Open societies are better ecologies for mimetic transmission than closed, tribal settings. An immense advantage of cultural memes as opposed to organic genes is that they are not intrinsically connected to any single substrate. True, individual genes or even sets of genes may be transplanted from one organism to another. But this process, in a natural environment, takes place over long periods. Cultural memes, on the other hand, spread like wildfire, often across very different and spatially remote populations, and can survive their hosts (Dawkins 1976:199).5 The imitative capability of the brain is all that is required for memes to spread, but memes are only advantageous to themselves. Nonetheless, Dawkins does not elaborate on precisely how the structure of mimetic transmission and genetic inheritance differ, because they relate to different levels of reality altogether. Beyond the explication of a loose analogy between genes and memes, we are left without a deeper understanding of what a meme is. Every cultural phenomenon may be reduced to the operations of replicators, yet it is far from evident that we must choose the gene as our point of reference. In the Dawkinsian framework, the selfish gene is the dominant metaphor. We are hence prevented from interpreting the meme on its own terms by this short-circuiting of the debate. Memes are cultural genes – such is the unsatisfying conclusion. Like genes and viruses, they are supposed to “spread,” but Dawkins tells us nothing about how or why. Alas, in The Selfish Gene, no real account is given about how 5 Dawkins has a tendency to conflate genes with viruses, and both with memes. Again, claiming that cultural memes are “like” viruses is not specific enough, and risks ending up saying nothing about the specifically social dynamics of memetic transmission.

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memes spread, and how the structure of this proliferation differs from that of genes apart from a couple of references to imitation. The meme remains a digression within a larger project whose primary purpose is the explanation of natural evolution, the evolution of selfish genes in particular. Following Christopher Evans, we may not entirely unfoundedly call the selfish gene a “horrendous concept.” Even bad ideas, as Evans explains, may nonetheless be powerful: “This horrendous concept ‒ the total prostitution of all animal life, including Man and all his airs and graces, to the blind purposiveness of these minute virus-like substances ‒ is so desperately at odds with almost every other view that Man has of himself, that Dawkins’ book has received a bleak reception in many quarters. Nevertheless, his argument is virtually irrefutable.” (Evans 1979:171). Here is not the place for deciding whether the selfish gene is an even remotely adequate concept for the explanation of evolution. Our philosophical position must remain that of agnosticism at this juncture. However, instead of accepting Dawkins at his word, we are compelled to dig deeper into the nature of the meme, analysing those mechanisms that remain latent in his explanation. Gabriel Tarde’s Idea of the Inorganic Society Thankfully, we have at our disposal an explanation of social imitation that avoids the pitfalls of biological reductionism. As a matter of fact, this model considers imitation as constituting the primary component of society. I believe that to understand what memes are, we are compelled to reach back to the groundbreaking work of positivist sociologist and criminologist Gabriel Tarde. In particular, Tarde’s monumental work, Les Lois de l’imitation (The Laws of Imitation), first published in 1890, will be crucial to explaining the ontology of the meme and understanding its functions. Distinct 97

from such representatives of the Positivist movement as Auguste Comte, Hippolyte Taine or, for that matter, Émile Durkheim, Tarde never gained a high level of popularity in the social scientific community. Rarely cited, his important insights were mostly forgotten until the late 20th century. For too long, Tarde was counted as one of many marginal representatives of French Positivist sociology, in spite of the fact that his work was already translated into English in 1903. The most important reason for the seachange in Tarde’s popularity has been the rapid success of Dawkins’ neologism, and the emerging scientific study of memes known as memetics. Another important contribution has been Maurizio Lazzarato’s 2002 study of Tarde, Puissance de l’invention, in which the Italian-French philosopher constructs an ambitious synthesis of Tarde with Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, which is of considerable interest in its own right. Instead of macro-level analyses, Lazzarato suggests that social philosophy must focus on “micro-political” processes, such as the imitation/innovation dyad which forms the core of Tarde’s social model. Alongside Lazzarato, we may also mention Everett Rogers’ at the time highly influential book, Diffusion of Innovations, published in 1962, which mentions Tarde as “one of the forefathers of sociology and social psychology”6 (Rogers 1962:40). While Tarde’s book does not contain the word “meme,” the object of Les Lois de l’imitation is cultural imitation. It may henceforth be considered one of the first, if not the first, systematic and social scientific treatments of memes. In terms of breadth and scope, it far surpasses Dawkins’ chapter on memes. From the perspective of so-

6 Tarde’s work also constitutes a key part of influential social philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato’s work. Apart from explaining innovation, Lazzarato also based his idea of “micro-politics” on Tardean sociology (Lazzarato 2002). (For further reading on micro-politics, cf. Muldoon 2014:57-76.)

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cial philosophy, the question of what memes are in an ontological sense is paramount. Before understanding how innovations are imitated, copied and proliferated, we must grasp what it is that is imitated, copied and proliferated, lest we lose ourselves amongst the many historical details, anecdotes and descriptions Tarde’s work contains. Despite – or perhaps because of – its status as a work of sociology, Les Lois de l’imitation is full of philosophical, political, legal, theoretical, methodological, economic and theological digressions. It is the polar opposite of Dawkins’ simplified, clearcut, apparently commonsense discourse. At times, we are treated to glimpses of a future that was, in Tarde’s time, far beyond the horizon but is now far more plausible in the age of social media and instant communication. Illustration, for Tarde, is inseparable from explanation. From the evolution of soldier’s uniforms to the “repugnant habit of tobacco-chewing” among North American women, we are confronted with several phenomena, all of which constitute an example of imitation (Tarde 1903:327). The level of aesthetic elaboration and colourfulness on Tarde’s part truly is remarkable, especially given the dry style of much of contemporary sociology. But here the structure of imitation is what we are after. Similarly to Comte, Tarde’s goal is to flesh out the contours of “pure sociology.” On this basis, while imitation does show similarities to natural phenomena, a purely sociologically oriented explanation is needed (Tarde 1903:ix). Laws are required which may illuminate the special characteristics of imitation as a social phenomenon, without having to rely upon concepts borrowed from other disciplines. In spite of this methodological purism, Tarde is under no illusions as to whether the laws unveiled by science can overcome the chaos of reality in itself. Laws are projections, rhetorical devices that help the sociologist interpret societies. According to Tarde, a “law” is a propaedeutic instrument, nothing more. 99

The laws developed by science do not have a basis in reality as it actually is. Such mental constructs cannot apply to existence as things stand, because “the actual can be explained only as a part of the vast contingent (...) In this it swims, like a star in infinite space. The very idea of law rests upon the conception of such a firmament of facts” (Tarde 1903:x). Underneath the appearance of necessity, we find the deep, fathomless irrationality of inexplicable existence, a vision that cannot be illuminated by even the strongest of iron laws. Rationality has but a marginal role to play in social life. In the foreword to the second edition, Tarde explains that contrary to appearances, there is no clear-cut difference between “the voluntary and the involuntary, between the conscious and the unconscious” (Tarde 1903:xiii). Furthermore, imitation is “the action at a distance of one mind upon another,” the imprinting of a “cerebral image” upon “another brain” (Tarde 1903: xiv). Tarde’s thesis here is simple: all that exists, does so in the form of repetitions. Three levels of being may be differentiated: these are the social, the vital and the physical. Each level has a dominant repetition that corresponds to it. In the social realm, we find imitative repetition. In the case of life, there is heredity. And in the physical world, “vibration” is the dominant repetition (Tarde 1903:7). Social phenomena show an analogy with infectiousness and contagion. The emphasis here on “analogy” must not be forgotten, however, for Tarde’s entire endeavour stands in opposition to sociobiological positions that reduce society to biological concepts. In particular, Tarde rejects the reductionism of such racial theorists as Arthur de Gobineau. Such racialism is, in Tarde’s view, fatally flawed from a methodological standpoint, because while the three levels of being and their corresponding repetitions can certainly influence one another, neither of these can be traced back to the other. Rather, each must be understood on its own terms. According to Tarde’s evolu100

tionist perspective, heredity, for instance, can certainly influence social outcomes, while the vibrations and oscillations of the physical world too are capable of causing socially important effects, but on the social plane, imitation must nonetheless be considered the primary, even dominant form of repetition.7 Gobineau and his followers are in error, because they mistakenly biologise society, repeating the all-too-common mistake of reductionists such as the 18th-century Physiocrats (Tarde 1903:xxii). According to Tarde, society is not a living organism, but rather, a lifeless, inorganic formation. Its connection with the organic realm is only incidental because society is built on communication.8 When examining the social dimension, we discover a structure characterised by the struggle between imitation and innovation. Anything which forms the object of imitation was formerly a type of innovation (Tarde 1903:2). Tarde recognises, not unlike Dawkins, that repetition is subservient to differentiation. Difference is a product of repetition as a universal synthesis. “Repetition,” writes Tarde, “exists for the sake of variation” (Tarde 1903:7). Tarde refuses to restrict society to humans. Animals are also capable of forming complex societies. What singularly differentiates human societies is the role imitation plays. We are social to the degree

7 What particularly comes to mind is the Social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer, which was far from unpopular in French left-wing progressive circles in Tarde’s time. The idea of progress was in large measure indebted to evolutionary thinking, and many progressives hoped to ground their ideals in the supposedly scientific discourse of evolutionism. We may even speak here of an “Evolutionary Left” that actively strived to reconcile Spencer’s (at the time) scientifically sound Social Darwinism with socialist politics (Beck 2014). This grouping was particularly active in France and Italy in the early 20th century but also had an influential Hungarian follower in the personage of the socialist agitator Oszkár Jászi. 8 This is a striking parallel with such sociologists of the late 20th century, as Jürgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann.

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that we imitate: “The social being, in the degree that he is social, is essentially imitative,” states Tarde, adding that “imitation plays a role in societies analogous to that of heredity in organic life or to that of vibration among inorganic bodies” (Tarde 1903:11). Imitation is the quintessential social synthesis. Tarde’s goal is to construct a sociological model capable of accounting for this phenomenon, while also accounting for its asymmetrically-opposing pole, namely, innovation. Even the most solid, most-conservative forms of civilisation are motivated by contagion. The basis of society is a variety of accelerating repetitions “or self-spreading contagions” (Tarde 1903:17). Modern societies in particular give greater scope for the acceleration of innovation and dissemination. This tendency tends toward the immediate commerce of ideas. Remarkably, Tarde forecasts an age of instantaneous imitation, made possible by advances in communications technology, while also adding that such a development will also greatly destabilise the future society. Instant imitation corresponds to “absolute irritability” (Tarde 1903:70). Against views that emphasise the importance of rational decisions, Tarde believes that society is governed by desire and belief; these are the two fundamental vectors that determine the broader socio-economic environment in which innovation occurs. Humans are first and foremost desiring creatures, and only rational in a derivative sense (Tarde 1903:32). Imitation is the medium that connects the members of society. Unlike Durkheim, who maintains that the division of labour and collective belief form the two most important integrating elements of social life, Tarde considers imitation to be the most essential synthesising force in society. The division of labour is merely a result of imitation: the latter is the true source of social integration. Dawkins expresses his hope at the end of his chapter on memes that humans may rid themselves of the influence of memes. Supposedly, “we, alone on earth, can rebel 102

against the tyranny of the selfish replicators” (Dawkins 1976:201). On the other hand, there is no such possibility within Tarde’s social model. Even the most self-reflexive of individuals will fall prey to some type of meme. An imitation can only be replaced by another. There is no way out of imitation. Tellingly, Tarde compares culture to hypnosis. Even those who believe – erroneously – that they are “external” observers of their own society, actually participate in the collective illusions of their epoch. Leaders are not exempt from this either: “The social, like the hypnotic state, is only a form of dream, a dream of command and a dream of action. Both the somnambulist and the social man are possessed by the illusion that their ideas, all of which have been suggested to them, are spontaneous” (Tarde 1903:77). Living in a society is akin to dreaming the same dream as many other people.9 Instead of being free and sovereign agents, we are manipulated and controlled, not by some grand conspiracy, but by those large-scale imitations which have succeeded in instituting themselves into dominant syntheses. Former innovations congeal into solidified, stabilised repetitions that rule despotically over even the most democratic social forms. Against many of his racially biased contemporaries, Tarde supposes that in open, free societies evolution has emancipated itself from the biological and anthropological substrate. Heredity certainly still exists, and the physical world has not evaporated into thin air. Rather, in society these repetitions are subsumed underneath imitation, the dominant repetition (Tarde 1903:36). Pure sociology 9 This position bears striking similarities with the social philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis, who also affirms that society can be conceived of in the form of a collective dream. Underneath the structure of reflection, society is a dream, an emotionally-charged plenitude. Without the ability to dream, we could not prepare ourselves for the unimaginable and the unforeseeable. Dreaming is a way for society to account for the unexpected (Kli 2018:125-146).

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must therefore understand imitation if it is to grasp anything important about society. This task is far from simple, as all three forms of repetition intersect with each other. In certain cases, some socially relevant phenomena or aesthetic practices can repeat themselves, without any empirical proof of contact or imitation between civilisations. Accidental “parallelisms” between remote cultures are possible, as is the case with pyramid-building (Tarde 1903:42). One type of repetition can, occasionally, cause changes on other levels. But Tarde nonetheless estimates such cases to be rare exceptions that do not disprove his fundamental thesis that imitation is the dominant synthesis of human society. Contagiously spreading innovations are not mutations, and must not be considered analogies of heredity. In this, Tarde seems much more flexible than Dawkins. In order to spread, an innovation must create an intersection between one “current of imitation” and another, or create an “intense perception of some objective fact which throws new light on some old idea” or, better yet, come up “with the lively experience of a need that finds unhoped-for resources in some familiar practice” (Tarde 1903:43). Any innovation may be judged successful if it connects at least two different desires. Every innovation is an answer to a problem. But answering, considered as action, is never an entirely-finished process that can be closed off to further enquiry: new answers lead to new desires, wishes, entreaties and needs. The universe is full of vibrating energy trying to expand itself. All that which exists, every single vibration, tends toward maximal expansion. Open societies pose few obstacles to expansion and dissemination apart from language, but even this limitation will soon be overcome according to Tarde, who imagines a single dominant civilisation that shall rule over the Earth. Imitation tends toward cultural uniformisation. A single global culture seems likely, although at the end of his work, Tarde qualifies his optimism, warning that “through the very effect 104

of its excessive development, the need for sociability may diminish or, rather, may become altered and transformed into a sort of general misanthropy” (Tarde 1903:392). Sociology can be nothing, if not ambiguous, when confronting the effects of imitation. It is also a product of imitation, after all. Just because a practice has spread far and wide, does not legitimise it in any manner. Dissemination only tells us information about the durability and speed of an invention, but this has nothing to do with its inherent ethical or aesthetic value. It matters not from the perspective of pure sociology whether we deal with moral beliefs or fashions: existence implies nothing about whether the phenomenon in question is correct or incorrect, “the thing which is propagated should not necessarily be beautiful or useful or rational” (Tarde 1903:49). The most grotesque and absurd customs, the most unrealistic beliefs can find adherents, since they connect with a suitable amount of desire in a reasonably open-minded population. Cultural patterns have no value in and of themselves. All social forms may be conceived of as the resonance between innovations on the one hand and desires on the other. A society is an aggregate of novelties which have congealed into repetitions, as well as novelties which still retain their freshness (Tarde 1903:68). This is the weak point of Tarde’s system, for it is very difficult indeed to identify where novelty ends and imitation begins. For the most part, this can only be identified a posteriori.10 This explicitly 10 A pertinent example is the case of a new religion or a radical, subversive political doctrine. At first, the new worldview is followed by a minority of mystics or political revolutionaries. Then, as it becomes more popular, it seizes power, becoming an official state religion or a one-party authoritarian state. Most probably the best a Tardean sociologist can do is identify key points of inflection in the history of the idea or group of ideas in question. In the example of religion, this may be the moment religion X becomes the official, government-backed religion of a certain territory.

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implies that society, according to Tarde’s usage of the term, is a far broader category than restricted terms such as “government,” “state,” or „nation.” When conceptualising imitation, there is not much point in speaking of “French” or “Hungarian” societies as such. Social organisation, at least in modernity, transcends national, state and even federal political structures. In Tarde’s view, the modern human type, exemplified by “the American of the future,” is more open to imitation than previous anthropological types (Tarde 1903:239). Tarde already conceives of society in global terms, for in the age of classical liberalism, new technologies, partly thanks to the colonial system, partly due to technological advances, already showed remarkable mobility which was not lost upon him. The period Tarde is writing in may be called the age of “triumphant liberalism” (Wallerstein 2011). Although religious belief and collective ritual have a role to play in society, it is not common belief as such, that integrates society. History does not show any clear progress beyond the dramatic expansion of the spatial reach of imitation. Beyond this, there is nothing else underlying society than “endless additions and subtractions of quantities of faith or desire which are brought forward by discoveries and which reinforce or neutralise one another, like intersecting vibrations” (Tarde 1903:69). Here one idea triumphs, there another opposing conception: everything depends on how each is capable of satisfying desires, emotional and material needs. Instead of unity, we find variation to be the most fundamental principle: “Heterogeneity, not homogeneity, is at the heart of things” (Tarde 1903:71). This is

An alternative course would be a content-based qualitative analysis of sacred texts, searching for spontaneity on the one hand and conventionality on the other. But this latter is a great deal more difficult and necessitates a background in the philosophy of religion or theology.

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the principle of difference, and it has important social ontological ramifications. Similarity, claims Tarde, is a task and never a given. Imitation is the primary force of social integration. First, we have differences, then the struggle of ideas and principles against one another, and from this struggle, unity and similarity are born. Yet no state of unity can remain intact for long. Impermanence haunts every repetition. Social institutions are merely congealed vibrations, but every vibration can be destabilised, even destroyed, by new tunes, refrains and beats. Sooner or later, new storms emerge and the idols of yesteryear are thrown down, only to be replaced by new, no less unreal divinities. Similarly to Dawkins, and once more unlike the Durkheimian School, Tarde does not believe that social organisation is the end goal or destination of social imitation. Rather, the social division of labour is also a mere instrument of imitation. “Organisation,” writes Tarde, “is but the means of which propagation, of which generative or imitative repetition, is the end” (Tarde 1903:74). Contagion cares naught for those structures it utilises for its own propagation: it is a blind, unconscious process whose only “goal” is maximum transmission. Actors and social institutions alike are merely instruments of infection. Anybody who lives in a society is a “somnambulist.” Modern humans in particular have become adapted to “obedience and imitation through fascination” (Tarde 1903:80). A society’s level of democratic openness does not depend first and foremost upon its political structures or electoral system. Rather, democracy for Tarde means above all else the reciprocity of imitation among its members. It is not only elites which function as the sources of imitation, for in an open society, the reverse can also occur. An important point of contention is what role reflexivity plays in imitation. In Tarde’s view, “as they become more civilised and, consequently, more and more imitative,” societies become “less and less aware that they 107

are imitating” (Tarde 1903:82). The modern, individualist subject would very much like to believe that it is acting rationally and also in a morally sound manner, but in a Tardeian framework, such reflexivity will always have a blindspot. We may want to consume in a nonconformist manner, but even this apparent nonconformism constitutes a type of conformism. When all is said and done, there is a trade-off between consuming ethically and consuming in a varied, refined manner. Which path we choose depends on which types of norms we follow.11 Every socially relevant object, humans included, is a carrier of repetitions. In an interesting section, Tarde compares sociology to archaeology. Archaeology as a metaphor has become widely popular due in no small measure to the later work of Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In Tarde’s case, “archaeology” refers to the sedimented nature of imitations. Just as the archaeologist reconstructs previous eras from abandoned objects, so too, on the most basic level, a society is composed of those inventions that form its infrastructure. In this sense, Tarde’s sociology is object-oriented: from individual objects, we can infer general laws pertaining to the mechanism of imitation. Innovations designate directions for desires, while archaeology shows us “the daily and indefinite drift and piling up of the sediments of true history, the stratifications of successive and contagion-spread discoveries” (Tarde 1903:91). In order to see what truly counts as social, we 11 It is a well-known fact that so-called “post-materialists” actually consume more products than supposedly materialist, that is to say, average, consumers. Being an ethical consumer by no means guarantees a recognition of the implicit elitism such a position implies. Neither does there seem to be any clear solution to the trade-off between ecologically sensitive consumption on the one hand and the desire for product variety on the other. Neither individualist consumer choice, nor normative principles seem to offer adequate guidance (Pellandini-Simányi 2014:166-178).

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must remove the various irrelevant sediments from society. Similar to the way in which Dawkins dissolves the various superficial aspects of bodies as survival machines, unveiling the struggle of selfish genes underlying them, so Tarde removes the physical and biological stratum from society, so as to reveal the elemental structure of repetition. The social is a different geological stratum than the others. Time is the most effective mechanism of selection, for it exposes society as the nonliving entity it really is: I know, this is a cruel deprivation; but time, in destroying the corpses and blotting out the memories of the painters and writers and modellers whose inscriptions and palimpsests they decipher and whose frescoes and torsos and potsherds they so laboriously interpret, has, nevertheless, rendered them the service of setting free everything that is properly social in human events by eliminating the carnal and fragile contents of the glorious form which is truly worthy of resurrection. (Tarde 1903:101). Society is made of communication in Tarde’s model, and not the organic humans who communicate. This is an important breakthrough in sociology, the momentous consequences of which were not recognised until much later developments in sociology and media theories. Similarly to the archaeologist, the sociologist too must penetrate down into the depths. Society must be purified of the various non-social or extra-social sediments that mask its true form. The idea of the world and the idea of life must be removed, so as to disclose the idea of society in itself. Society is the inorganic realm of communication. Instead of materialism, we have 109

here an object-oriented communicative theory. History is the unstable, uncertain flow of desire, perpetually giving birth to new inventions. Even the most stable of social structures is actually nothing more than an aggregate of impermanent, “unstable equilibria” (Tarde 1903:116). Inventions, that is, objects, are “the real agents” of history (Tarde 1903:102). If imitation is the connecting tissue of history, then innovations are the real actors on the stage of social evolution. Even the power of kinship is transcended by the universal energy of imitation. An important ramification of this is that, far from humans guiding innovation, humans are themselves constructed by their own inventions. The civilising process has important biological consequences. Tarde holds that modernity is characterised above all by heightened contagiousness and global society is tending towards the confection of a new type of human, “the American of the future,” an anthropological substrate which is more open to innovation than any previous human (Tarde 1903:239). Civilisation has had important biological effects, culture has proven capable of replacing the role of genetic heredity in favour of new, culturally-specific repetitions. The accelerated evolution of humans over the past ten thousand years, in particular, has resulted in the creation of socially-coded collective intelligence structures unparalleled among other complex organisms.12 Another important consequence of the determining role objects play in the life of civilisation is that we ourselves, cannot see our own society from an external viewpoint. Tarde advocates strongly for a type of epistemological modesty that would admit the inability of social 12 We may posit that the cultural level of repetition has profoundly altered and accelerated the evolution of humans. Peter Wolfendale has gone as far as to posit a „reformatting” of homo sapiens through the intelligence explosion made possible by forms of collective social intelligence such as language (Wolfendale 2019:55-66; see also Cochran and Harpending 2009).

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science to fully exhaust the complexity of any given social form. Naturally, this does not mean that useful typologies of innovations cannot be worked out. Imitation and innovation are the two building blocks of society. Only the former can be subordinated to laws: innovation would compose a dimension that entirely falls outside the remit of social research (Tarde 1903:142). No reason can be given for those sparks of intuition that result in groundbreaking inventions. The heart of society is progress. Although this does result in some positive changes – average humans today live far better on most counts than even the wealthiest elites of yesteryear – progress, in general, is only a synonym for the impermanence of every social form, the present one included. When we read of “progress” in Tarde or, for that matter, most late 19th-century and early 20th-century sociological texts, it lacks the type of normativity that has become attached to the word in later decades. Progress is just another word for “change.” Innovation and imitation struggle with each other, resulting in new bursts of progress: “Progress, then, is a kind of collective thinking, which lacks a brain of its own, but which is made possible, thanks to imitation, by the solidarity of the brains of numerous scholars and inventors who interchange their successive discoveries” (Tarde 1903:148-149). Society lacks a central nervous system, because it is nothing more than the ‒ in itself ‒ meaningless, unthinking repetition of change-making activities which nonetheless produce rapid mutations that spread throughout the sociocultural matrix. Society and its institutions, human brains included, are instruments of the true, authentic agents of history: objects. “There is no peaceful institution which has not been mothered by discord” (Tarde 1903:168). What of the logical laws of imitation? In Tarde’s view, it may be stated that the innovations most likely to spread as quickly as possible are those that satisfy the greatest number of psychological 111

desires. We must differentiate between conscious and unconscious processes of imitation. Innovations that transmit simple feelings have a competitive advantage. Sentiments are easier to remember than abstract thoughts or concepts (Tarde 1903:197). Again, not unlike Dawkins’ meme, Tarde believes that simpler innovations are far more likely to have intensive proliferative potential than complex objects or ideas. Provocatively, Tarde argues that imitation is fundamentally “extra-logical.” We cannot give adequate explanations as to why we replicate. Politics is composed of two poles, conservatives who affirm the repetitions of the past, and the progressives who position themselves as representatives of new repetitions. Needless to say, these two terms are interchangeable: today’s progressives can become tomorrow’s conservatives, and vice versa. “The innovating party,” states Tarde, “plays” merely a “transitory, although indispensable, part” in social evolution, serving as “a mediator between the spirit of comparatively narrow conservatism which precedes it and the spirit of comparatively liberal conservatism which follows it” (Tarde 1903:295). The most revolutionary and the most conservative of political movements are both beholden to deeper mimetic structures underlying society. In modern society, imitation has become both broader and more stable, although cultural “water towers” still play a role, especially in the highly strategic cultural sphere (Tarde 1903:221). Most cultural patterns still originate from culturally privileged elites. But even the most highly differentiated elite is nonetheless an instrument of imitation. Modes of production too are products of replication. Once the old structures prove inadequate, imitation finds new methods to propagate itself, resulting in a new “system of production” (Tarde 1903:333). It is inevitable in an age of unprecedented communication that desires will change and grow faster than the production of new products. Desire precedes production. 112

New modes of production generate more problems than they can solve: this is how novel ways of forming society are born. As soon as desires are freed, nothing can restrict them any longer. Infinite problematisation and discord – such is the result of desire fulfilled. Preferences will also tend to gravitate toward “the richest galaxy of inventions,” which usually, though by no means exclusively, entails a built-in preference for the future, at least in open societies (Tarde 1903:343). Social replication rarely knows regression. A rather optimistic view, in hindsight. Conclusion Successful innovations open up social evolution, allowing future perspectives and transforming unrealised potentials into current actualities. The most stable evolutionary strategies are those which, to quote Australian philosopher, John Leslie Mackie, “survive indefinitely in a group in competition with” rival “alternatives” (Mackie 1978:458). It is quite plausible that some replicators can survive unfortunate selections, even at the cost of sacrificing the interests of their own group. The meme is an example of such a selfish replicator. Nothing compels us to attribute any positive function to memes. In other words, there is no need to explain the success of a meme in terms of any benefit it confers on individuals or groups; it is a replicator in its own right. Contrary to the optimistic view often taken of cultural evolution, this analogy shows that a cultural trait can evolve, not because it is advantageous to society, but simply because it is advantageous to itself” (Mackie 1978:459-460). The law of the jungle does not imply the victory of righteous, moral or correct cultural patterns. This can be illustrated with an example. In 1986, McDonald’s introduced a new mascot to advertise its new, 24-hour opening hours, in the form of Moon Man. In the 113

early years of the 21st century, the mascot became an Internet sensation, only to be co-opted in 2007 by racists for anti-Black propaganda purposes. Upon closer examination, the original meme is far from unambiguous. The ad, “Mac Tonight,” is an adaptation of Bobby Darin’s 1959 hit song, “Mac the Knife,” the lyrics of which recount the career of a fictitious serial killer. The song, in turn, is an adaptation of a mörderlied, entitled “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” from Bertold Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, written by Kurt Weill. This bizarre and morbid example shows the essence of the meme: society is neither physical nor natural. Through this separation, society unveils itself as an inorganic system of imitation. The meme is a more-than-human formation. It does not obey any anthropomorphic moral, political or aesthetic imperative. Its arbitrariness prevents any prediction. You never know what to expect from a meme. Moon Man and Mac Tonight have survived every single usage they have been submitted to: while the original commercial has lost its actuality, the ad itself continues to be productive, in the form of a mutated, polymorphic pattern. It is almost certain that Mac Tonight will outlive the company that created it, while Moon Man shall transform into a myth, a spirit, or even the religious idol of a future age.

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REFERENCES Amadae, S.M. 2016 Prisoners of Reason. Game Theory and Neoliberal Political Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107565258 Beck, Naomi 2014 La gauche évolutionniste: Spencer et ses lecteurs en France et en Italie. Besançon: Presses universitaires de Franche-Comté. https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pufc.421 Cochran, Gregory – Harpending, Henry 2010  The 10,000-Year Explosion. How Civilisation Accelerated Human Evolution. New York – London: Basic Books. Dawkins, Richard 2006 [1976]. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Godwin, Mike 1994 Meme, Counter-Meme. [online] https://www.wired.com/1994/10/godwin-if-2 (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Kli, Maria 2018 Auto-Poiesis: The Self and the Principle of Creativity in the Philosophical Anthropology and Psychoanalysis of Cornelius Castoriadis. Cosmos and History 14(3):125–146. Latour, Bruno 2002 Gabriel Tarde and the End of the Social. In The Social in Question. New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences. Patrick Joyce, ed. 117–132. London – New York: Routledge.

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Lazzarato, Maurizio 2002 Puissances de l’invention. La psychologie économique de Gabriel Tarde contre l’économie politique. Paris: Les empêcheurs de penser en rond. Mackie, John Leslie 1978 The Law of the Jungle: Moral Alternatives and Principles of Evolution. Philosophy 53(206):455–464. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0031819100026322 Midgley, Mary 1979 Gene-juggling. Philosophy 54(210):439–458. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0031819100063488 Muldoon, James 2014 Lazzarato and the Micro-politics of Invention. Theory, Culture & Society, 31(6):57–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413514118 Nixon, Rob 2012 Neoliberalism, Genre, and “The Tragedy of the Commons”. PMLA, 127(3):593–599. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2012.127.3.593 Pellandini-Simányi, Léna 2014. Consumption Norms and Everyday Ethics. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. /Consumption and Public Life/ https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137022509 Quinton, Anthony 1976 I—The Presidential Address: Social Objects. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. 76:1–28. https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/76.1.1

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Rogers, Everett M. 1962 Diffusion of Innovations. New York: Free Press of Glencoe. Solon, Olivia 2013 Richard Dawkins on the Internet’s Hijacking of the Word ’Meme’. [online] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/richard-dawkins-memes (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Tarde, Gabriel 1903 [1890]. The Laws of Imitation. Trans. Elsie Clew Parsons. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Wallerstein, Immanuel 2011. The Modern World-System. Vol. IV. Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520948600 Wolfendale, Pete 2019 The Reformatting of Homo Sapiens. Angelaki 24(1):55–66. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2019.1568733

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5. Mimetic practices concerning the summer kitchen. Examples from thematic research Zsuzsanna Nagyné Batári Introduction: Framework for Research From 2016 to 2019, with the assistance of the Bolyai János Scholarship Programme, I researched the summer kitchen phenomenon in northern Hungary, as no monographic overview had yet been published on this type of building. Summer kitchens are secondary kitchens in the croft, usually independent buildings, mostly used for food preparation, to save the dwelling houses from dirt, noise, and smell. The research covered, among other aspects, an exploration of its historical roots, the documentation of changes, an analysis of their functions, the recording of contemporary versions and architectural features, an examination of the mentalities of use, and the collection of foreign parallels. I researched the appearance of the building, its structural versions (floor plans, building structures, and fireplaces), its position within the croft, its furnishings (set of objects, object migration within the household, objects and their placement), its patterns of use, and relevant information about the food culture (food preparation, storage, preservation, and processing), by applying traditional ethnographic methods. The inclusion of bakehouses and detached kitchens discovered in historical sources contributed to a better understanding of kitchen usage patterns and a larger-scale process of development. Research into 119

foreign examples provided exciting insights into the broader context of summer kitchens, as we can unequivocally state that summer kitchens are not exclusively a Hungarian phenomenon. However, ethnographic documentation has its limits, and to draw a complex picture, to explore different dimensions, it is also necessary to apply the data and methods of other disciplines. For instance, in thematic research of a building type, new aspects arise from the architectural study of the topic, extending the interpretation horizontally; and new data from historical research, with its diachronic approach, expands the analysis vertically by going beyond the current time horizons of documenting personal recollections. Further linguistic data refers to historical roots, functions, and the most important elements of usage, while the respective statements and interpretive models of psychology and sociology help to reveal the mindset behind the use. Research Methodology The backbone of research into summer kitchens was provided by the Upland market town and Northern Hungarian Village exhibition units1 at the Hungarian Open-Air Museum or Skansen. From the perspective of folk architecture, I studied the settlements where the exhibition buildings relocated by the Museum had originally stood. This system of architectural representation includes peasant 1 The exhibitions of the Hungarian Open Air Museum are organised geographically into ’regional units’. Each unit represents the folk architecture, interior furnishings, and way of life of a macro- or micro-region by means of buildings that have either been dismantled, relocated, and rebuilt, or created as copies or reconstructions. Furnished buildings make up smaller village parts, also representing characteristic settlement patterns. The buildings are selected on the basis of several criteria, including architecture, way of life, material culture, and social strata.

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communities living both in villages and in market towns that either developed into larger towns or dwindled into villages. However, due to the profile of the Hungarian Open-Air Museum, the museum’s representation of these territories lacks industrial cities. I, therefore, included Ózd, a town in northern Hungary with a history of heavy industry. I intended to examine the architecture, the material culture, and the respective lifestyle patterns of workers’ colonies to identify the differences and similarities between the economic activities, lifestyle, and mentality of workers as compared to peasants. I started the research into summer kitchens at the field sites using ethnographic methods, which consisted of structured and semi-structured interviews and documentation through photographs. The research also included the use of an online questionnaire, a review of bibliographical information, museum data archives, and archives providing the data that served as the basis for the analysis. The summer kitchen: definition of the concept The starting point of the analysis is to define the basic concept of the summer kitchen. For a better understanding of the history of the summer kitchen, I differentiate between the following types of kitchens: the ‘main’ kitchen, which can be found in the house, functioning as the central kitchen; the summer kitchen, discussed in detail later as a secondary kitchen; and as a functional variation, the so-called ‘dwelling kitchen’ (which can be either a main kitchen or a summer kitchen) which involves an added bedroom-function, with the owners using the same space for sleeping. The summer kitchen is a small building or room which seasonally takes over some of the functions of the kitchen in the main 121

building. Structurally it can be a separate building with varied floor plans, built together with several other rooms, or it can be part of the house. In the latter case the summer kitchen can be a new addition, the result of splitting a bigger room into smaller ones, or an old room with a new kitchen function. The objective is to save the living quarters from the odorous, dirty household chores, so the summer kitchen is closely related to representation, a ‘desire to display’.2 The summer kitchen is an everyday living space suitable for dining and relaxation, with direct garden access, making it easily accessible in the daytime and during work. In some cases, it was occupied by an older or younger couple, as their permanent residence, so it could provide a separate living area, thus enabling different generations to cohabit within one croft. However, its most important functions were baking, cooking, preserving (garden produce, fruits etc.), and processing (e.g. various types of meat). An essential component of its use is the hygiene aspect, as laundry, washing, and washing up are also linked to this place. It can also be used for naps and siestas, childcare, and other household chores. Its patterns of usage are varied, including documented summer-winter use (in which case there might be no kitchen in the dwelling house, therefore the actual summer-kitchen function is transformed), seasonal or whole-year use of the dwelling kitchen, and also multi-site cooking within a croft. Due to its flexibility, its main functions are outlined across different ages and socio-economic situations, adapted to the needs of the owners, creating a diverse pattern of use. Its first appearance in peasant culture is said to be in the late 19th and early 20th century (Filep 1981), but some

2 In the paper I use the terms representation or display as a reference for the desire to display identity, social status and/or wealth in the material surroundings of the interior.

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data (for example an 1828 advertisement) also reflect earlier use in more well-to-do urban environments.3 It is important to emphasise that there may be several structures and places at a peasant croft that serve as areas for baking, cooking, and food preservation: bakehouse, summer kitchen, smokehouse, drying oven, outdoor oven, shed, or different combinations of these edifices. This results in cooking becoming a multisite activity. According to research conducted so far, summer kitchens were typical in cities as well: our earliest written record is the above-mentioned advertisement in Kolozsvár (present-day Cluj Napoca, Romania) from 1828,4 but a classified advert of 1916 also refers to a summer kitchen in Eger (Heves County).5 In the towns of the Great Hungarian Plain, we can also find an additional building called the bakehouse next to the dwelling house used for baking and cooking.6 We even have written records of this from the 18th century, for example from Kiskunhalas (Bács-Kiskun County), (Kemény 2005:259, 270). Similarly, the use of summer kitchens has also been documented in the rural parts of market towns based on viticulture and winemaking, and we also have data that wine houses were turned into summer kitchens in the Tokaj-Hegyalja region.7 Summer kitchens are also found in the industrial city of Ózd (Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén County). Some were built by the factory called Rimamurány-Salgótarjáni Vasmű Rt. (Rimamurány-Salgótarján Iron Works Co.), and some were built

3 4 5 6 7

E.g. Erdélyi Híradó 1828. 2(12): 96. Erdélyi Híradó 1828. 2(12): 96. Egri Újság 1906. 23(327): 4. Own research in Karcag (Jász-Nagykun-Szolnok County), Hungary. Own research in Tokaj-Hegyalja, Hungary.

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privately (cf. Csontos–Vass 2001).8 Their prevalence is not as significant as the village examples, and differences can be discerned in usage. Thus, the summer kitchen appears relatively early, and its use is not restricted to villages. However, based on the results of the research, it can be asserted that the summer kitchen is more closely identified with the rural lifestyle. Summer kitchen research and mimesis: A framework for interpretation The study of mimesis/imitation in folk architecture and home culture leads to interesting conclusions. The architecture itself can be regarded as a kind of imitation (Nagy 2013:269–272), but the adoption of its forms in the rural architectural tradition represents the next step in the process. In my study, I examine two interlinked mimesis-related phenomena concerning the summer kitchen: the representative best room and the desire for display; and the prefiguration of the summer kitchen in the practice of the upper classes and its possible effect on rural practices. The first is the best room (known as the ‘clean room’ in Hungarian), a representative space of the house. The emergence of this best room, modelled after bourgeois salons, became possible when the development of the peasant house and lifestyle reached a stage where a room could be converted for this purpose by the owners. However, the best room was not properly integrated into everyday use, as it remained a space where display was the main function at the expense of the family living space, thus creating a way of

8 Own research in Ózd.

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life confined to a small space. Nevertheless, best rooms were an important part of the dwelling houses for a long time, and during the ‘cube house’9 construction period that began in the 1950s (Bali 2015:179), this tendency even intensified, with some buildings featuring more than one such room. The need for display in the best room later extended to the kitchen and sometimes to the entire house, creating spaces called clean, like a clean kitchen or a clean house.10 The summer kitchen complemented this way of life by providing a separate space for dirty, noisy, and odorous work. One question of my research is whether the summer kitchen itself is a product of mimesis since according to archival sources its antecedent (the secondary kitchen space and the separate kitchen building) can be found in castles and mansions. From this, it can be assumed that the second kitchen, indicating a larger household and often including staff accommodation, embodied a longed-for lifestyle which was then imitated by the peasantry. In both cases, it is possible that an inorganic takeover took place, which did not always result in a rational use of space or organisation of everyday activities. Despite their impractical character, it was still a goal to have one, as e. g. the best rooms had prestige value and became status symbols. Imitation thus provided the illusion of having achieved the desired social status, as the relation between imitator and imitated reflected this hierarchy. According to psychology, mimesis is a form of social learning (cf. Király– Szalay–Gergely 2003) a process in which the following of a model 9

Cube-shaped houses were built on the basis of type plans after the Second World War and on a greater scale from the 1960s onwards. They were almost identical in outward appearance, but had different layouts, totally disregarding former, traditional architectural features and stylistic elements (cf. Sári 2021:129–13). 10 Discussed in detail later.

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is an important factor. One of the motives for this is the acquisition of social power: as a result of imitation, identification with the role to be followed is realised.11 In this research, I hypothesise that the summer kitchen is partly the result of mimesis, because it had antecedents in the architecture of the upper classes. Historical antecedents The first form of imitation to be studied is the multiple uses of kitchens of the upper classes, which appears in various archival sources and bibliographic records dating back to the early-modern period. Interpreting this pattern of kitchen usage takes us closer to understanding and analysing other aspects of the summer kitchen and its role in the peasantry’s way of life. The study requires the exploration of different building types and their denotations, thus besides the kitchen, the bakehouse is also researched in the archival sources. The above-mentioned terms occurred in a variety of documents such as inventories, wills, documents of witch-hunts, minutes, testimonies (including testimonies of loss), affidavits, and diplomas. The archives show that the oldest relevant documents available are related to castles. These sources are mainly censuses which help to understand the nature of the rooms that served the inhabitants of the castle. It can be stated that in addition to a kitchen, a bakehouse is also listed in several surveys, and in some buildings, there can be more than one kitchen and bakehouse. Regarding mediaeval castles, it has been established that, due to fire hazard, the kitchens tended to be housed in a separate build11 http://www.jgypk.hu/mentorhalo/tananyag/Pedaggiai_pszicholgia_jegyzet_ vodapedaggusoknak/312_utnzs.html ( Last Accessed: 02. 28. 2023.)

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ing, away from the residential buildings. In larger castles, kitchens were housed in the outermost or lowest part of the castle near the outbuildings, while in dwelling towers they were located on the ground floor. Characteristically, in the Middle Ages, kitchens were built in castles that belonged to the baronial class. In the early modern age, there were two or more kitchens in the residences of aristocrats (castles, palaces, townhouses): an old (large) kitchen and a ‘small kitchen’ (not known by this name everywhere), where the lord’s kitchen was separate to that of the rest of the inhabitants of the castle (the latter belonging to the women or the children and their nurse). There were places in which the second kitchen was supposedly separated for the servants and other personnel, similar to the practice documented in Europe of second kitchen use by people of lower rank. In the early modern age, the kitchens were already in an upper (inner) castle, but examples of kitchens in the outermost and inner castles can also be observed. Although in the castles and fortresses rebuilt in the 16th and 17th centuries, the kitchen was relocated to the main building, it was still near the outbuildings, and the places for preparing food and for consuming it were far from each other. The large kitchens served the needs of the owners downstairs and the small kitchens fulfilled this role upstairs. In many cases, the kitchens had a porch, and their doors opened to the courtyard (Benda 2011 37–40). Besides the castles, it is also important to analyse the architectural traditions of the palaces, as their spatial and functional organisation is another example of how the architecture of the ruling classes may have influenced the practice of economically less well-endowed people. In his book Castles, Manors and Villas, György Kelényi writes that the golden age of castle architecture dates back to the 18th century. In the country liberated from Turkish rule, the castles of the aristocracy were transformed and became 127

ornate residences without fortification. The lifestyle of the nobility and the gentry evolved as a result of the new social system and changed economic conditions. Displaying wealth and social status became important for urban palaces and country castles. The workshops, granaries, sheds, chambers, bakehouses, staff quarters, conservatories, and orange houses belonged to the outbuilding complex. These one-story buildings were simple, with function-defined forms and architectural features (Kelényi 1974:6, 19). Architect Csaba J. Fekete also provides information on typical kitchen usage in castles in his PhD. thesis, according to which, 18–20th-century aristocratic dwellings were multi-kitchen households. In the 18th century, the use of multiple kitchens could be traced back to different reasons, such as the variety of foods and the different technological needs of their preparation. Thus there was a large kitchen called the Compl. Küche, bakehouse (Bäckerey Küche), frying kitchen (Bratküche), and confectionery (Zuckerbäckerey). In addition to the special kitchens, there was also a separate kitchen called Wäschkammer with an oven for hot-water laundry. In the following century, the combined cooking and baking range of the large kitchen in the yard was technologically sufficient, but one or more smaller ancillary kitchens, such as the Frühstücksküche, remained. These several smaller kitchens were located inside the building, mainly along the serving corridors. An important element of the technological development of the kitchens was geared towards de-smoking and healthy water intake, and functional separation also remained an important aspect (Fekete 2007:69). In 1836, architect Dániel Novák wrote: “The kitchens deserve special attention, and they should not be placed away from the ‘porch’ or the dining room, so as not to allow the dishes to cool down; on the other hand, they are not to be very close to the rooms, which would fill the rooms with ‘smells’ from the kitchen and thus 128

make them unsuitable. It is rather indecent to place a kitchen at the front of the building, where only the most ornate rooms and halls belong. If a building is designed for just one household or other reasons, the kitchen space can be underground, to banish impurity and moisture in an outbuilding”12 (Novák 1836:59–61 cited by Fekete 2007:70). From the 18th century, interior service rooms along with a community area with a dining room function formed a special technology group around the kitchens, complemented by the accommodation for the kitchen staff. Functional separation and efforts to render other rooms smoke-free also influenced the location of kitchens: in the 18th century, internal kitchens were installed on a separate floor or in a separate annexe, to isolate odour and noise. The result of the separation of service functions was the exclusion of the kitchen and pantries from the ground floor of the main building to a side or auxiliary wing that was accessed via an uncovered walkway. If there was a side carriageway, then the kitchen was either attached to it in the same wing or remained in the side wing or outbuilding that was closer to the main building. Occasionally, converting the cellar into a basement made it possible to separate the kitchen. An important consideration was that the service functions were placed in the basement or in a separate outbuilding although fumes had

12 „A’ konyhák különös figyelmet érdemelnek, ’s azok elrendeltetésükhöz képest, a’ tornácztól, ’s az ebédlő szobától távol helyezve ne legyenek, ne hogy ez által az étkek kihűljenek; ellenben igen közel se feküdjenek a’ szobákhoz, a’ mi által a’ konyhaszag csak megtelné a’ szobákat ’s termeket, ’s így az alkalmatlanságot szerezne. Felette illetlen, konyhát rendelni - el az épület homlokzatánál, hol csak a’ legdíszesebb szobáknak és termeknek van helyük. Ha valamelly épület csupán egy háznép számára készül - fel, föld alatt adhatni a’ konyhának helyet, vagy pedig más okoknál fogva, hogy t.i. elmellőztessék a’ tisztátalanság ’s nedvesség, a’ melléképületbe helyezhetni azt.”

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already been moved elsewhere and the tap-water supply had been addressed (Fekete 2007:69–72). In the programme of the great competition of the Hungarian Society of Engineers and Architects from 1907 to 1908, the following information on kitchens can be found: “In a separate wing, and linked to the dining room, there should be a spacious kitchen with an area of 50–60 m2, a 30–50 m2 small kitchen, a serving room, sink, pantries, laundry, ironing and mangling rooms, and a dining area for the maids and kitchen staff”13 (Sisa 2004:79–80). Besides castles, smaller noble dwelling houses, mansions, and manor houses also played an important role for the villagers, as these buildings significantly influenced the image of the villages (Kelényi 1974:31). Thus, it is an interesting fact (considering the history of summer kitchens) that some of the kitchens next to noble mansions appear as separate buildings in the archival sources. There was a summer house at the Roskovány mansion in Sáros County (Rožkovany, Slovakia), with a kitchen built beside it in 1738.14 In 1749 in Bresány in Kőrös County (possibly Brgežani, Croatia), the kitchen was part of a separate building, the cook’s living quarters.15 In 1761, in the case of the two-story noble manor house on Bosjakovina (Božjakovina, Croatia), it was noted that the landlord’s kitchen was not integrated within the dwelling, but in the separate servants’ house.16

13 „Külön épületszárnyban és kapcsolatban az ebédlővel legyen egy tágas konyha 50–60 m2 területtel, egy kis konyha 30–50 m2 területtel, tálaló, mosogató, éléskamrák, mosókonyha, vasaló- és mángorlószobák, cselédétkeztető és a konyhaszemélyzet lakószobái.” 14 Fiscal census, Hungarian National Archives. HU MNL OL E 156 - a. - Fasc. 068. No. 012. 15 Census, Hungarian National Archives. HU MNL OL E 156 - a. - Fasc. 151. - No. 029. 16 Fiscal census, Hungarian National Archives. HU MNL OL E 156 - a. - Fasc. 151. No. 043.

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In addition to several kitchens, a kitchen-bakehouse building division was also found, the latter being next to the kitchen, in some early modern aristocratic houses designed for economic purposes. According to archaeologists, bakehouses are secondary formations that developed later; initially a wall and a roof were built around open-air ovens or new ovens were built indoors. The oven in the bakehouse was also suitable for baking bread and other pastries, while the kitchens generally did not have an oven (Benda 2011:52–53). The reasons for using bakehouses are similar to those for using multiple kitchens. But it was not only the upper classes that divided kitchens. Regarding Hajdú-Bihar County, János Sőregi, introducing the 16th-century structure of the Debrecen civic houses, lists the bakehouse as well as the kitchen (cited by Zoltai 1938:145). Also, according to historical reviews, there were already bakehouses in Szabolcs and Szatmár Counties during the 1703–1711 Rákóczi War of Independence, as those fleeing from Transylvania were housed in the stables and bakehouses of the serfs’ lots (Balogh 1987:15). We know from the wills kept in different archives that in some towns there was a bakehouse as early as the 18th century (see Iványosi-Szabó 2002:252). It is clear from the above that the bakehouse appears in or next to castles, fortresses, palaces, and manor houses in the early modern period. As for the use of the kitchen, from the point of view of mimesis, it is also interesting to examine later examples, including uniform plans, for example, those constructed by MÁV (Hungarian State Railways). The buildings and the way of life of the middle-class residents conducted there could also be considered a model for the lower classes. In connection with these, it can be concluded that there is a general tendency in the plans of the officers’ apartments 131

to separate the service rooms and the living space. The elevation of the two-apartment adjutants’ house in the repository of plans for the year 1926 is a perfect example of this: in the cellar, in addition to the storage areas, there was a laundry and a bakehouse.17 Similarly to the two-apartment plan, the basement of the four-apartment building also had a bakehouse and a laundry.18 In the one-storey, one-apartment adjutant’s dwelling, the laundry-bakehouse is a single room in the basement.19 In the elevation of the four-apartment multi-level dwelling for junior officers, there is a separate room in the basement for the laundry and the bakehouse.20 Besides the examples mentioned above, the requests made to MÁV management for summer kitchens to be constructed provide further information in connection with overall summer-kitchen history; the documents

17 MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Kétlakásos, kétszobás segédtiszti lakóház terve. 1923. [MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188. Plan of two-room two-apartment adjutants’ house. 1923.] 18 MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Négylakásos, kétszobás segédtiszti lakóház terve, 1900-as tervszám. 1926. [MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188. Plan of two-room four-apartment adjutants’ house. No. of plan: 1900. 1926.] 19 MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Egylakásos, földszintes segédtiszti lakóház terve. Tervszám: 538. 1925. [MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188. Plan of one-storey, one-apartment adjutant’s dwelling. No. of plan: 538. 1925.] 20 MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Négylakásos, emeletes, egyszobás altiszti lakóház terve. Tervszám: 580. 1926. [MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188. One-room, four-apartment multi-level junior officers’ dwelling. No. of plan: 580. 1926.]

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date back to the 1910s, e.g. from Hosszúhetény in 191521 or from Ádánd in 1919.22 All of this outlines the fact that the varied use of kitchens and bakehouses in aristocratic and middle-class residences was due to differing needs and considerations. These included separate kitchen spaces for personnel, a high number of family members or residents (including guests), the diversity of food types, and a desire to keep odours and noise away from the living quarters and to minimise fire hazards. All these factors facilitated separate and multiple kitchen use. Thus, as for the architecture of the upper classes, it is proved that the kitchens were separated from the living space for the same reasons as in the case of summer kitchens belonging to peasants, i.e. to spare the building from noise and odours or fire hazards. The kitchen itself, besides functioning as a service room, was in many cases linked to a room used for accommodation. From the data, it can be concluded that these architectural solutions served as a powerful norm for the peasantry, for whom following the lifestyle and aspiring to certain elements of the material culture of the upper classes had always been important. Therefore, the above-mentioned examples could have served as models for the second kitchen, leading to the development of the peasantry’s summer kitchens; thus, the phenomenon could be interpreted as a form of mimesis. The summer kitchen becomes an organic part of the household: it performs a useful function by keeping odours, noise, and heat out of the main building. On the other hand, ad21 Pécs-bátaszéki osztálymérnökség. Nyárikonyha létesítése Hosszúhetény állomáson. 4071/1915 4. [Pécs-Bátaszék Engineering. Creating summer kitchen at Hosszúhetény railway station. 4071/1915 4.] 22 Állomás Elöljáróság, Ádánd 1919. Nyári konyha létesítése tárgyában. 2555/1919-es iktatószámú irat. 14. [Railway Station Office, Ádánd 1919. Creating summer kitchen.Reg.no 2555/1919, 14.]

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aptation also means that new features can appear, to address the different needs of different times. Best room, clean kitchen, clean house Other mimetic practices, such as the best room, could be associated with the summer-kitchen phenomenon. The best room is brought to life by the need to spare space, and by the intention of representation. However, this changes the use of space in the dwelling area and the function of the rooms. Different rules applied to the spaces that gained new functions: they could not be accessed at any time; they represented affluence, and this intention often assumed irrational dimensions. Sparing the best room may lead to the evolution of a ‘clean kitchen’, with the same function of display. The best room and the evolving clean kitchen have a clear connection with the summer kitchen, as the latter became the space where it was still possible to carry out those work processes that were forced out of the house. Moreover, the clean kitchen also has connections with the middle-class dining room. Another important developmental phase occurred with the emergence of the ‘clean house’ – the thoroughly spared dwelling. The best room The origin of the best room can be linked to the phenomenon of the bourgeois salon: they are the products of the same age, although the salon is the space of ‘living’ representation, while the clean room is that of the ‘dead’ (Juhász 2003:111). The need for representation was a powerful factor in peasant life, and throughout the 20th century, it determined the use of space, the material culture, and the way of life. “The salon or reception room, which was fur134

nished ‘according to a certain system’ […] was the highlight of the apartment. As a real scene of social life and public life inside the walls of the home, the salon is by definition the dead scene of the most expensive, most elegant furniture. It is dead because this room is only opened occasionally for large home gatherings and is not usually heated in the winter. There is no dispute: the salon is the purest one-function room in the civilian home. The salon has never been used for anything other than what it is meant to be by contemporary standards”. (Gyáni 1992:43).23 By the early 20th century, some household books demanded that this bourgeois space be reorganised and the usage changed: “First and foremost, a comfortable home should be arranged so that it is not so much welcoming for guests as for the family members. The driest and most spacious room should be the bedroom, the second one like this the living room, and only then comes the salon, which today should not be as cherished, closed, cleaned, heated and lit only for guests, as it once was. The living room should be the true nest of the family. The dining room furnishings can also be placed here. But there should be a good deck chair, a comfortable armchair, a woman’s work-basket, a husband’s newspaper rack so that they can feel comfortable after a meal [...] The salon should also be a habitable and enjoyable room, not a furniture-storage room or a mere showcase. It is not necessary to dedicate the most beautiful room to this purpose, but we cannot choose a dark, remote little corner either, 23 “A „bizonyos rendszer szerint” berendezett szalon vagy fogadószoba […] számított a lakás fénypontjának. A társas élet, az otthon falain belül zajló közélet voltaképpeni színtereként a szalon előírásszerűen a legdrágább, a legelegánsabb bútorok holt lerakata. Holt azért, mert ezt a helyiséget csak egyes alkalmakkor, népes házi összejövetelek céljaira nyitották meg, télen általában nem is fűtötték. Nem vitás: a szalon a polgári otthon legtisztábban egyfunkciós helyisége. A szalont soha nem vették igénybe másra, mint amire a korabeli normák értelmében szánva volt.”

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because this would offend our guests [...] Once and for all, it is necessary to put an end to the unreasonable but very common habit that at least the salon and the hall are not heated.” (Szabóné Nogáll 1903:43–44).24 Comparisons of salons and clean rooms can be traced in early ethnographic essays, such as the following: “The best room is on the left. It is equivalent to the salon of the modern man. We do not use it and they do not use it either. Its use begins when an appropriate guest arrives. Thus it is rather a store room, in our case for furniture, pictures, jewellery, and chandeliers, while in their case for women’s wear, starched festive skirts, festive men’s wear, or pillows.” (Tömörkény 1904:259).25 A top-down effect of transmission is possible, but it would have been impossible to realise this feature when the floor plan was two-celled. The opportunity to create best rooms came about when the development of the peasant dwelling reached a stage where such a function could be maintained in a separate room – that is, when, in the mid-19th

24 “A kellemes otthont mindenek előtt úgy kell berendezni, hogy abban ne annyira a vendégek, mint inkább a család tagjai érezzék jól magukat. A legszárazabb, legtágasabb szoba legyen a hálószoba, a második ehhez hasonló a nappali és csak ezek után következik a szalon, melynek mai nap már nem szabad olyan féltett, elzárt, csakis vendégségre kitakarított, fűtött és világított szobának lennie, mint régen. A nappali szoba legyen a család igazi fészke. Ide lehet tenni az ebédlőberendezést is. De legyen benne jó nyugágy, kényelmes karosszék is bőven, legyen ott az asszony munka-kosárkája, a férj ujságtartója, hogy étkezés után is kényelmesen érezhessék ott magukat… A szalon is legyen lakható, élvezhető szoba és ne bútor-raktár, csecsés kirakat. Nem szükséges éppen a legszebb szobát erre a czélra szentelni, de sötét, távol eső kis zugot sem választhatunk, mert ezzel mintegy megbántjuk a vendégeinket… Egyszersmindenkorra véget kell vetni annak az oktalan, de nagyon is általános szokásnak, hogy télen át legalább a szalont és az előszobát nem fűtjük.” 25 “Balfelől pedig a tisztaszoba. A modern ember szalonjával egyenértékű hely. Mi sem használjuk, ők sem használják. Használata csak akkor kezdődik, ha valamely alkalmas vendég jön. Ennélfogva inkább csak raktár az: Nálunk bútoroknak, képeknek, ékszereknek, csillároknak raktára, nála pedig asszonyruháknak, keményített ünneplő szoknyáknak, ünneplő férfigúnyáknak, tollas vánkosoknak eltartó helye.”

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century, the second room became increasingly common among the affluent peasant population (Zentai 1997:144). Although the best room sporadically emerged in the Hungarian peasantry earlier, at the end of the 18th century, among poorer peasant groups in certain parts of the country it was not even realised by the middle of the 20th century (K. Csilléry 1982). Examining descriptions and press articles of the age, it is possible to find very early descriptions of the best room, such as the 1877 report from Harta in Bács-Kiskun County (Galgóczy 1877:210) or the following passage describing best rooms from Szeged in 1874. “A hostess would consider herself a very earthbound creature, who would not introduce her guests to the ‘clean room’, this homely sanctuary, which contains the most precious possessions of the family from generation to generation: the ‘tulip chest’, where, in its most hidden nook, silver coins lie in a stocking; the bed, with its pillows and eiderdowns swelling up almost to the ceiling, and the large picture of the Virgin Mary, under which the glorious housewife sometimes lights a flickering candle of grace.” (Borostyáni 1874:313).26 Best rooms also existed in fragmented forms in households in which it was not possible to devote an entire room to prestige. For instance, in Novaj (Heves County), where the room-kitchen-pantry floor plan did not allow for a best room, an ornate, highly stacked bed was placed in the front right corner of the room (Nagyné Batári 2014:40–41). 26 “...ugy nagyon földhöz ragadt lénynek tartaná magát az a gazdaasszony, a ki nem vezethetné be ritka ünnepélyes alkalmakkor vendégeit a „tisztaszobába,” ebbe a házias szentélybe, mely magában foglalja a családnak ivadékról ivadékra szálló legbecsesebb ingóságait: a „tulipántos ládát”, a melynek legrejtettebb zugában harisnyába kötve pihen egy marok ezüst hatos; a vendégágyat, majdnem a padlatig duzzadó párnái és dunyháival, s a nagy Szűz-Mária képet, a mely alatt olykor a kegyelet pislogó mécsét gyújtja meg az ájtatos háziasszony.”

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Sociological research carried out by Katalin S. Nagy grouped best rooms by a synchronic and diachronic approach based on their differentiating interior types. According to Nagy’s research, the best room met a real need: it was created by the expansion of the holy corner (the corner of the diagonally furnished room, where festive occasions took place and the home shrine or sanctuary was placed) (cf. K. Csilléry 1981) when the financial situation of the family allowed it. While the feudal-peasant interior did not have a best room, it was popular in the homes of the bourgeois peasantry (S. Nagy 1987:129–130). The summer kitchen also appears in parallel with this. The dwelling house developed transversely or linearly with the addition of a pantry, stable, or porch. The summer kitchen also evolved in parallel: a pantry and other rooms were added, making it suitable for a family or part of a family to live in. This could transform the main building into a clean house. Another direction is the linear extension of the dwelling, the construction of a pantry or stable, converting the rooms previously used for this purpose into a room or kitchen. This brought about the same outcome: the main part of the building became a clean house, and the centre of gravity of the living and working space was shifted to the new rooms. Examining the functional connections of the best room, it can be said that the rooms were accessible via the porch or the stairs and that there was no direct connection to the locations separated for work. Best rooms do not reflect actual, real peasant use, but the desired purpose of everyday life and the former feudal-peasant, bourgeois-peasant norms (S. Nagy 1987:73–85). The construction of cube houses to mimic the urban lifestyle of the 1960s and 1970s spread rapidly, even if the traditional peasant, linear type of building would have served the lifestyle better. But some elements of the former farming order survived, so it was 138

necessary to construct some buildings/areas that could serve economic purposes, and which could only appear as extensions (as the house did not include outbuildings in its layout), such as the summer kitchens. This is how the so-called ‘centaur-houses’ (Kentaur-ház, a structure which is a cube-house from the front but is a peasant linear house from the back) emerged between the 1950s and the 1980s (a term coined by János Bali, cf. Bali 2015:192). In the case of the cube houses owned by workers whose workplace and dwelling were geographically separate, best rooms appeared with modern furnishings imitating the reception rooms of lower-middle-class homes. These best rooms turned into living rooms with the advent of television, but, even so, another best room in the house remained with a similar arrangement (S. Nagy 1987:131– 133). Parallel to this, after the Second World War, consumption increased, people bought durable goods, and factories produced more and more items that made life comfortable (Musil 1974:156). People needed space for those items that previously had not been used and that had no history of practical usage (e.g. armchairs). However, the kinds of furniture that appeared in the otherwise unused space prevented the owners from enjoying these features, thus shifting the focus back to summer kitchens. An interesting aspect of representative spaces is the duality captured by Gábor Gyáni: the need to separate private and public life. The public sphere was identified with work, the world of men, while the private sphere was the world of women, maids, and children, especially in the home. Men moved freely between the spheres, while most women remained within the confines of their homes. This phenomenon was based on industrialisation and modernisation in Western Europe and North America in the 19th century. The bourgeois lifestyle model later found its way to the lower social classes. A representative space, reserved for social interac139

tion, was part of bourgeois homes, as display of wealth and social status became increasingly important in the 19th century. This phenomenon was characterised in a brochure promoting small homes in the period between the two world wars, highlighting the facts that uncomfortable, outward-looking, representative spaces dominate, and the “rooms created for others in the apartments overshadow the rooms that make up the home” (Gyáni 1992:27–28). The ‘clean’ kitchen As the practice of sparing gradually extended to other rooms in the dwelling, clean kitchens appeared in different types of houses. The clean kitchen also became a place for display, sometimes used only for gestures of hospitality, for storing flowers during the winter, or seasonally, according to the ‘traditional’ summer-kitchen arrangement. In many cases, following seasonal use, winter cooking was also eliminated from the space. Occasionally, however, there were activities which remained in that space, for example, my research revealed ironing in a clean kitchen in Márianosztra (Pest County). In some cases, these rooms could also lose the kitchen function altogether. This phenomenon can be fitted into a longer developmental process. Based on his research in the micro-region of Hetés, János Bali described a three-part model of kitchen usage that can be applied to the present research. The first phase is feudal-peasant use, in which the kitchen has no representation/display function. In the second phase, the kitchens do have this function (approximately between 1960 and 1990); this is peasant-bourgeois use. The last stage is the modern one, which could be linked to the turn of the millennium in the region studied by Bali. This includes the clean kitchen, which can be found in a new or remodelled house, and is 140

not characterised by actual use. The owners would instead use the old kitchen, expecting the other kitchen to be of service when, for example, their children moved home. The clean kitchens formally follow the urban pattern, but in content, they are linked to the traditional peasant value system (Bali 2015:196–198). All this can be supplemented by a subsequent phase, in which the kitchen again becomes the central place for cooking, by giving up the use of the summer kitchen. Occasionally, these kitchens are open-plan kitchens, sharing an area with the living room. However, even if there is no summer kitchen, some activities may be temporarily moved from this space to the terrace, the garage, or other areas of the yard. With the emergence of summer kitchens, the in-house (main) kitchen sometimes became a dining room due to a multi-step process. The use of the dining room could also be structured, meaning that all meals still took place there, or perhaps only festive meals. The transition to dining room can be seen in converted peasant dwelling houses, but also later in cube houses. As in Cserépfalu (Báti 2009:143) and Göncruszka27 the transformation of the cube kitchen into a dining room was successfully documented with some kitchen functions retained. The dining-room design is also the result of following a bourgeois, urban pattern. The ‘clean’ house In the next stage of taking care of the dwelling, the whole house can be spared by the owners. According to Endre Füzes’s account, between 1958 and 1967, after the Second World War, the mentality did not follow the development in construction, and the new ex-

27 Own research.

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tension of the house was treated as a clean house and not used for living (Füzes 1987:141). According to sociological research, the skilled worker-agricultural working classes – whose workplace and dwelling were separate – were the first to build ‘clean houses’ as they no longer belonged to the village but nor did they belong to the city. They built two- and three-storey houses in villages, dwelling houses with different forms. These houses are also unusual in their appearance. “The owner does not want to live or work in this house, but to just represent, to emphasise his wealth, his standing as a civilian and not a peasant, and to prove his socio-cultural equality (with an imaginary benchmarking group)” (S. Nagy 1987: 109). In addition: “Modern best rooms outperform even the prestige-oriented spaces of civil homes. And where life is completely separate from the object built and takes place in a second-to-third-rate outbuilding, the exclusive purpose of the whole house is prestige and display. Instead of real social status resulting from the division of labour and cultural level, they want to create the appearance of the desired status. Exhibiting outwardly, in accordance with the disoriented people who are externally directed by having lost their cultural base and their traditions […] the city is the pattern to follow.” (S. Nagy 1987:108). According to Nagy’s research, in the 1970s the number of family members did not determine the use of the rooms; rather, families crowded into certain rooms, while the best rooms remained unused (S. Nagy 1987:48). The 1970s and 1980s were characterised by an unrealistic push for prestige, excess consumption, and displays of relative wealth (Bali 2015:181). Homeowners were proud to show off their best room, clean kitchen or clean house. With the transformation of the dwelling, the summer kitchen became the former undivided living and working space: the previous lifestyle was formed in a new 142

environment; and, in the design of its rooms and furnishings, the dwelling house made it possible to imitate the urban pattern, while the summer kitchen symbolised village life. Summary The private sphere, space requirements, display, function, self-expression (in the dwelling), identity, social status, cultural signals, life activities, interactions, and status symbol (S. Nagy 1987:11– 33): the combined examination of all the above factors will further enhance the research of summer kitchens. In the history of summer kitchens, mimesis takes place on several levels, which also counter-influence each other. The summer kitchen can be interpreted as imitating a pattern of kitchen use in the household organisation of the upper classes, in which food preparation, processing, and preservation took place in different locations. Another dimension is the imitation of the design of the salon, dining room, and hall, at the expense of not integrating them into a lifestyle, creating unused spaces and cramming the family into a single, small, undifferentiated living and working space. All in all, there are several variations in use, function, form, and structure, showing an abundance of possibilities in different periods and regions – however, the keywords for comprehending these multiple mimetic practices are ‘prestige’ and ‘status symbol’.

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Gyáni Gábor 1992 Polgári otthon és enteriőr Budapesten [Bourgeoisie Homes and Interiors in Budapest]. In Péter Hanák ed. 27–60. Polgári lakáskultúra a századfordulón [Bourgeoisie Housing Culture at the Turn of the Century]. Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézet. Iványosi-Szabó Tibor 2002 Kecskeméti testamentumok I. 1655–1767 [Source Documents. Testaments from Kecskemét I. 1655–1767]. Kecskemét: Bács-Kiskun Megyei Önkormányzat Levéltára /Forrásközlemények/ Juhász Katalin 2003 A famelencétől a fürdőszobáig. Adalékok a paraszti tisztálkodás eszközkészletének és helyének változásához a 20. század első felében [From the Dough Bowl to the Bathroom. Some Notes on the Changes in the Tools and Place of Hygiene of the Peasantry in the First Half of the 20th Century]. In Miklós Cseri – Endre Füzes, eds. 109–130. Ház és Ember 16. Szentendre: Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum. K. Csilléry Klára 1982 Szobaberendezés [Room Furnishings]. In Magyar Néprajzi Lexikon. Gyula Ortutay et al. eds. 63–68. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Kelényi György 1980 Kastélyok, kúriák, villák [Castles, Mansions, Villas]. Budapest: Corvina Kiadó. Kemény János 2005 Duna–Tisza közi mezővárosi végrendeletek 1738–1847 [The Last Wills of the Rural Towns Between the Danube and 146

the Tisza Rivers 1738–1847]. Kecskemét: Bács-Kiskun Megyei Önkormányzat Levéltára. /Forrásközlemények/ Koltói Lilla 2013 Pedagógiai pszichológiai jegyzet óvodapedagógusoknak. Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem.[online] http://www.jgypk.hu/mentorhalo/tananyag/Pedaggiai_pszicholgia_jegyzet_vodapedaggusoknak/312_utnzs.html (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Musil, Jiři 1974 [1971] Lakásszociológia [Sociology of Housing]. Trans Dániel Pfeifer. Budapest: Kossuth Kiadó. Nagy Marianna 2013 A mimézis szerepe az építészetben [The Role of Mimesis in Architecture]. Fiatal Műszakiak Tudományos Ülésszaka 18:269– 272. Nagyné Batári Zsuzsanna 2014 Az Észak-magyarországi falu [The North-Hungarian village]. Szentendre: Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum. S. Nagy Katalin 1987 Lakberendezési szokások [Styles of Interior Design]. Budapest: Magvető Kiadó. /Gyorsuló idő/ Sári Zsolt 2021 Kádár-kocka: presztízs és szimbólum [The Kádár cube: Prestige and Symbol]. In Kockaház. A 20. század vidéki háztípusa. [Cube house. A rural house type of the 20th century.] Máté Tamáska – József Szolnoki, eds. 129–149. Budapest: Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár – Martin Opitz Kiadó – Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum. 147

Sisa József 2004 Kastélyépítészet és kastélykultúra Magyarországon a historizmus korában. DSc Thesis. [online] http://real-d.mtak.hu/83/3/Sisa_kastélyépítészet_historzimus.pdf (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Szabóné Nogáll Janka 1903 Házi kincsek. Hasznos ismeretek tára a háztartás. az egészségés szépségápolás, valamint a társadalmi érintkezés köréből [The Treasures of the Household. Useful Tips on Household, Health, Beauty and Social Interaction]. Budapest: Hornyánszky. Tömörkény István 1904 A tanyai világból I [The World of Farms I]. Néprajzi Értesítő 5(8–9):253–265. Zentai Tünde 1997 A lakóház [The Dwelling House]. In Magyar Néprajz IV. Életmód [Hungarian Ethnography IV. Lifestyle]. Füzes Endre – Eszter Kisbán, eds. 139–155. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó. Zoltai Lajos 1938 Vázlatok a debreceni régi polgár házatájáról. [Some Notes on the Houses of the Old Citizens of Debrecen] In A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 37. Sőregi János, ed. 137–174. Debrecen: Déri Múzeum. /Debrecen Szabad Királyi Város Déri Múzeumának Kiadványai/ Documents Erdélyi Híradó 1828. 2(12): 96. Egri Újság 1906. 23(327): 4.

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Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár HU MNL OL E 156 - a. - Fasc. 151. No. 043. Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár HU MNL OL E 156 - a. - Fasc. 151. No. 029. Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár HU MNL OL E 156 - a. - Fasc. 068. No. 012. MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Kétlakásos, kétszobás segédtiszti lakóház terve. 1923. MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188 Plan of two-room two-apartment adjutants’ house. 1923. MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Négylakásos, kétszobás segédtiszti lakóház terve, 1900-as tervszám. 1926. MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188.Plan of two room four apartment adjutants’ house. No of plan: 1900. 1926. MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Egylakásos, földszintes segédtiszti lakóház terve. Tervszám: 538. 1925. MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial No 6188. MA 10188. Plan of one-storey, one-apartment adjutant’s dwelling. Plan number: 538. 1925. MÁV Tervtár, Központi Magasépítményi Tervtár. Karton sorszáma: 6188. MA 10188. Négylakásos, emeletes, egyszobás altiszti lakóház terve. Tervszám: 580. 1926. MÁV’s Repository of Plans, Repository of Plans for Central Architectural Engineering. Serial 149

No 6188. MA 10188. One-room, four-apartment multi-level junior officers’ dwelling. No of plan: 580. 1926. Állomás Elöljáróság, Ádánd 1919. Nyári konyha létesítése tárgyában. 2555/1919-es iktatószámú irat. 14. Railway Station Office, Ádánd 1919. Creating summer kitchen.Reg.no 2555/1919, 14. MÁV Tervtár Pécs-bátaszéki osztálymérnökség. Nyárikonyha létesítése Hosszúhetény állomáson. 4071/1915 4. Pécs-Bátaszék Engineering. Creating summer kitchen at Hosszúhetény railway station. 4071/1915 4. MÁV Tervtár

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6. Imitation-based innovations in the First World War Tamás Szegedy-Kloska The Hungarian Open-Air Museum and the Department of Ethnology of the University of Debrecen carried out versatile research between 2016 and 2020 that intended to unravel the impact and the memory of the First World War on rural society.1 One of the main undertakings of the project was an exhibition between 2020 and 2022, showing the changes that the war had brought on the home front of everyday life in rural Hungary.2 The war had also influenced material culture, therefore the exhibition paid special attention to this area. At first sight, it may not be obvious how many things can be traced back to the First World War. This cataclysm brought major changes that we still experience today as these affected not only the military but also the everyday.3 The innovations that were brought about by the Great War have been discussed in volumes of articles, academic papers, and books,

1 The research was enabled by the NKFI (OTKA) grant no. K115873A entitled ‘The Effect and Memory of the Great War on Rural Culture’. The project’s lead researcher was Miklós Cseri PhD, Director-General of the Hungarian Open-Air Museum, and Elek Bartha PhD, Vice-Rector for Education from the University of Debrecen. 2 ‘When everything has changed. Life during and after the Great War’. Temporary Exhibition in the Hungarian Open-Air Museum. 2020-2022. Curators: Szegedy-Kloska, Tamás – Tömöri, Szilvia – Sári, Zsolt. Virtual version of the exhibition: https:// amml.skanzen.hu/ (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) 3 Therefore, we can state that the First World War was a total war.

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both in Hungarian and English language literature.4 However, wartime innovations related to mimesis have eluded Hungarian literature. With this paper, I hope to fill this gap, summarise the results of both my own field of research and the closely-corresponding conclusions of the previously mentioned exhibition, and find connections between the Great War and mimesis, copying, faking, fashion, camouflage etc. The first question was whether there were any inventions during the Great War that are somehow related to mimesis. According to my hypothesis, some military innovations most likely match this description, since the First World War was the first mechanised mass war, and so created the basis for modern warfare. For example, camouflage, the mimicry of the landscape and its colours gained the utmost importance. It is also worth asking which military inventions ‘made it’ to the everyday lives of civilians. Among these procedures and objects are there any that exist 100 years on? It is important to note that the study does not aim to discuss every invention that could be linked to the war, as such a vast topic cannot be its goal. Since the supply of examples is abundant, only those few areas are relevant here (innovations in military technology, fashion, supplies and rationing, battlefield cuisine, substitute foodstuffs) where mimesis is related. Regarding strictly military inventions, the paper explores the appearance of uniforms providing real concealment, the importance of the usage of camouflage on battleships in the oceans, and the usage of decoy tanks after the introduction of armoured combat vehicles. The history of the trench coat, influential in both frontline and hinterland fashion un-

4 Including but not limited to: Stephan 2014; Taylor – Dutton 2014; Pollmann: 2015; Klein 2018; László 2018.

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til this very day, will also be explored, along with the changes in the supplies of the home front. Camouflage on Land The First World War facilitated several developments in military technology. The first armoured vehicles appeared, along with tracer ammunition, airborne combat, strategic bombing raids with Zeppelins, poisonous chemical warfare, flamethrowers, machine guns, long-range high-calibre artillery (e.g. the German 130km range, 210mm railroad-cannon, the Paris Gun) etc. (Németh–Sárhidai 2017:54). Therefore, the first point is to oversee the question of mimesis in military technology. The end of the 19th century still saw the infantry and cavalry regiments of armies in flamboyant uniforms, wielding shiny equipment whilst marching to battle. By the end of 1914 and early 1915, the conditions of trench warfare had come to mean that these flashy uniforms offered easy targets for the enemy, so the situation cried out for a quick solution. The answer was camouflage, mimicking the colours of the terrain, so by the second half of the war, some of the combatants had switched to darker-toned uniforms, which provided better concealment. However, there were countries that started the war with more modern uniforms providing better camouflage because they processed the experiences they had collected through the armed conflicts up until the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 had already produced images that were characteristic of the early Great War: the armies of closed infantry formations in flamboyant uniforms charging into battle were almost decimated by the enemy machine guns. This type of weapon was first applied to support the infantry charges, 153

but it was realised during the First World War that its firepower could be much better utilised defensively than supporting charging infantry (Wiest–Barbier 2003:19). Both the Russian and the Japanese military leadership drew their conclusions from the events, and furnished their armies with uniforms that better fitted the terrain (Bálint 2014:1). Great Britain also started the war with modern uniforms that provided good concealment. The red coat, something that had been a part of the uniform from the 17th century until the early 20th century (Barthorp 1982), was only considered for replacement after the terrible experience of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. There were occasions during the Rebellion when British units painted their uniforms khaki5. The Second Boer War between 1899 and 1902 saw the British troops making use of the benefits of camouflaged uniforms, thus the British military officially adopted the khaki uniform from 1902 (Macready 1925:258–259).6 A good counterexample is the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which decided to introduce a badly chosen colour, pike grey (Hechtgrau in German, csukaszürke in Hungarian). The frontline troops headed to the conflict during the 1914 mobilisation already wore pikegrey uniforms. “No chequered fashion-shirt, coloured necktie, white flannel-pants. The image of the streets turned into one colour: pike grey.” – this is what the Szabó Hírlap (a weekly newspaper) wrote in 1915 (cited by F. Dózsa 2012:162). Despite its name, this colour looked rather light-blue or pale-blue. This shade of grey did not fit into the environments on the fields of Galicia along the Rus5 Which, in Hindi, means dust (Armstrong 2014). 6 It is interesting to note that while they recognised the anachronistic nature of flamboyant uniforms, the British Army changed very slowly in other formalities. Between 1860 and 1916 British soldiers, regardless of rank, were obliged to wear a moustache (Macready 1925).

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sian front, in the forests of the Carpathian Mountains, along the shores of the Isonzo in the Italian theatre of war, or above the karst towns of Doberdó del Lago. The Austro-Hungarian troops, therefore, made easy targets. The time to switch to field grey (Feldgrau in German, tábori szürke in Hungarian) came in 1915, but the cavalry was not obliged to decommission its flamboyant clothing and traditional accessories. The losses among the Uhlans and the dragoons, due to their colourful patterns, and the hussars, because of their traditional red-blue clothing, were reaching catastrophic amounts, right at the beginning of the war. The Austro-Hungarian military leadership tried to solve this by commissioning pike grey fully or partially to the cavalry, but this didn’t turn out to be an adequate solution until they were supplied with field grey uniforms (Bálint 2015:9). When compared to the khaki Russians, or the greyish-green Serbian and Italian fighter troops, the failure of the Monarchy regarding the choice of colour was even more apparent. “One of the distinguished hussar-regiments was led to battle as if 19th-century war traditions still prevailed: in blue coats and red trousers, they charged into battle, their drawn-out swords shone from the sunlight – and the Russian machine guns mowed the entire regiment down like the harvesting peasants mow the ripe wheat.” – as Mrs. Mihály Károlyi (born Katinka Andrássy) wrote in her recollection (F. Dózsa 1989:23). Due to the losses, it became apparent that the clothing of the army was inadequate for the challenges of the modern battlefield. As there was no time for prolonged experimentation the well-tried field grey , used by the Germans since 1910 was commissioned in 1915. Its dim greyish tone provided much better concealment (Bálint 2015:9), and helped the camouflage problems of the army. By the end of 1916, the uniforms of each and every combat arm 155

were standardised, everyone was commissioned the field-grey coloured, downfold collared blouse and trousers. The lapels with the colours of the regiments were replaced by a baize strip sewn on the collar, and new unit identification measures were introduced in place of the lapel system. The crewmen wore these on the left side of the cap or on the epaulettes, while the officer only had them on their caps (Bálint 2015:10). In the name of the war thrift, the army also had to tighten its belts, quite literally, as the war-economy needed the copper for producing ammunition, so instead of gilded, copper buckled belts, the army commissioned belts with spiked iron buckles. The thrift mandates were not enough, though, so further measures were instigated. Leather belts were replaced by bands, and tin pouches and grubber pouches appeared (Bálint 2015:10–11). To make uniform baize, the wool was mixed with cotton. From 1917 the deceased could only be buried in underwear, as the sanitised uniforms were needed (Barczy–Somogyi 1990:220). The shortage occasionally forced the Austro-Hungarian soldiers to seize the uniforms of the enemy, especially the greenish-grey uniforms of the Italians that even resembled the field grey ones of the Dual Monarchy (Kemény 2012). Camouflage at Sea By mid-August 1914, Great Britain closed the La Manche and the Adriatic Sea, and with barrages and patrolling cruisers, maintained a blockade between the shores of Scotland and Norway. The aim was to nullify the overseas trading of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, and to seal off Berlin from its colonies. As an

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answer to that, Germany announced restricted submarine warfare on the 4th of February 1915 (Csonkaréti 2000:662).7 From this point on the importance of concealment became evident at sea as well, as the military and trade ships of the Entente had to find some protection against the German torpedoes. The British and the Americans initially experimented with somewhat strange methods: the ships were camouflaged as huge whales, clouds, or islands; or they were wrapped in mirrors - without achieving any result (Forbes 2009:94). The solution was found in the dazzle (zebraic) camouflage, invented by Norman Wilkinson, an English painter.8 There was no protection from the submarine torpedoes. The effective striking range of the German submarines of the time was around 1 900 metres, and the torpedo needed at least 300 meters to be primed, to be able to cause effective destruction (Waldemar 1919:17–19). The target of the submarines was usually moving, so to shoot accurately one had to know the target’s distance, direction and speed, and there was little time to make these calculations. The point of the dazzle camouflage was not direct concealment, but to make the calculations of distance, speed and direction difficult. Wilkinson’s idea was to paint the previously-grey ship hulls to vivid and contrasting colours, with sharp geometrical forms. The pattern greatly reduced the accuracy of measuring a ship’s exact speed and direction, and only a few degrees of difference were enough for the torpedoes to miss (Waldemar 1919:18). In October 1917, King George V of the United Kingdom examined the 7 It became unrestricted in January 1917. 8 Norman Wilkinson (1878–1971): British painter, artist, illustrator. Most usually he produced oil paintings and aquarelles, centred at the sea as their topic. During WW1 he was a voluntary reserve officer in the British Royal Navy, he saw Gallipoli, and started thinking about the solution to concealing Entente warships (Forbes 2009:90, 99)

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design (Forbes 2009:93), and with that began the repainting of the ships en masse. While the vivid colours were quickly eroded by the salty seawater, according to a September 1918 report 2 367 British ships received this zebraic paint up until that date. The Americans painted 1 256 ships between the 1st of March and the 11th of November of 1918. Out of all of these the Germans only managed to sink 18 commercial ships, and none from the military (Forbes 2009:96–98). With the advancement of technology (namely radar), the efficiency of the method decreased, and it was rarely applied in the Second World War. Decoy Tanks The trench-warfare of the first world war created a stalemate between the belligerents. By 1916, the Western Front saw the development of coherent defensive lines from the North of Belgium extending as far as the Swiss border. The Central Powers and the Entente had differing ideas on how to break through the line. The latter could concentrate on more grandiose developments due to its more powerful industrial capacity and better supply. Yet, it was a long road to the creation of tanks. The Landship Committee, created by Winston Churchill in 1915, contributed greatly to its invention. The first combat vehicles had their debut appearance on the 15th of September 1916, during one of the skirmishes of the Battle of Somme. In the times of a stationary war they could achieve somewhat significant breakthroughs with them (Kloska 2018:82–83). The British tried to name the new battle instrument as something that describes it well, but still does not give a hint about the real purpose of usage, so Water Carrier was chosen. This sounds logical in the case of a large, riveted steel structure, but Sir Albert Stern, secretary of the 158

Landships Committee had the uncomfortable thought that the military practice of abbreviation frequently uses the initial letters of an official designation, and was afraid of being called ‘the Secretary of the WC Committee’ in the future. So they decided on a shorter, but more misleading ‘tank’ designation (Fletcher 2001:45). After the armoured vehicles entered the scene the military leaderships of the Entente tried to avoid the risk of giving away information about the numbers of their tanks before launching the offensives. For the purpose of deception, they created armoured replicas, and put these decoy-tanks behind their lines. Before the attacks, this act created the illusion that they boasted far higher numbers of tanks than they actually had at their disposal. The structures of the decoys were made of wood and covered with camouflaged canvas. The crawler tracks were not functioning, in some cases, actual wheels were hidden under the replicas, and they pushed them into position or pulled them there with horses. Interestingly the Germans also created decoy tanks, copying the models of the Entente, but the duplicates were probably only used for training, and not for the purpose of deceiving the enemy (Hammerton 1918:34). Trench Coats To distance ourselves from military technology a little, but still stay on the battlefield, we must mention an iconic piece of clothing from the Great War, the trench coat. The trencskó (its name frequented by Hungarians of the time) became the symbol of the war in Great Britain (Tynan 2013:128). Its name in English really means what it is: a coat for the trenches. Still, despite its name, its origin is not from the world war, as waterproof fabrics had been invented and used earlier. Two companies claim its invention. One is the Aquascutum of John Emary, and the other is the Burberry, 159

created by Thomas Burberry. The former cloth factory master created and patented the new water-resistant wool material in 1853 and named his company Aquascutum.9 John Emary’s coats soon became quite popular among men who preferred a stylistic look even in bad weather. His great rival, Thomas Burberry created the so-called gabardine waterproof material in 1879, and patented it in 1888 (first made of combed wool, later of cotton). He was inspired to create the material by the English Hampshire County shepherds, who wore robes covered in lanolin (clean wool-oil). The new twill material was created by unique cotton strings, was lightweight, let air through sufficiently, but still stayed waterproof. Burberry’s coats also quickly became popular and several explorers wore them. Among others, the British Ernest Shackleton used gabardine-made coats and tents during his expedition to the Antarctic in 1907 (Kloska 2016). Burberry quickly became one of the leading British menswear, sportswear, and fashion designers. Between 1914 and 1918 the British Army ordered 500 000 trench coats (Garrulus 1930:40). Over the past hundred years Burberry coats barely changed, and are still handcrafted by their employees in Northern England, and, at least according to anecdotes, the young tailors need a full year of training to learn the exact techniques (Kloska 2016). The proliferation and popularity of the trench coat to this day, owes its success to the muddy, clay trenches of the First World War. Preceding the war, the British soldiers wore long coats, which proved to be heavy and rigid even in dry weather. These pieces of clothing absorbed muddy water in the trenches, and great-

9 Latin for watershield (Room 1982:30).

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ly hindered free movement in the narrow corridors. The soldiers needed something that was shorter, lighter, and more flexible, but kept them warm, was breathable, but stayed waterproof (Doyle 2014:26). This was the trench coat. We must state, though, that the members of the infantry units of the army did not wear trench coats, it only became popular among the officers. They had the opportunity to procure or sew their own garments, which is understandable considering the difference in their service pay (Doyle 2014:26). Thus, the trench coat had become an optional part of British officers’ equipment by 1916. It was not just soldiers who wore these during the time; the militarisation of the home front was manifested in the trench coat, as the inhabitants of the island wanted to wear (and started to buy) coats similar to those of the soldiers, as a patriotic gesture (Kloska 2016). After the armistice of the 11th of November 1918, the officers of the victorious army started to flow back home, and the trench coat gained even more popularity. It quickly became a part of everyday wear, and war veterans did not want to get rid of them, they wore their overused coats as they had in the trenches before. The trench coat signified military experience, which created prestige and became one of the symbols of British veterans of the First World War. The coat later gained popularity in Hungary as well, and some people started to mimic the garment in astonishing ways. A reporter for the periodical Est wrote the following about the coats in 1928: Trench coats… A few words about a fashion born in the trenches that has conquered the Paris of peace. Paris, February 14., from the delegate of the Est. During the World War the English, American, French and their connected armies were 161

furnished with a sort of rubber-robes […] Trench Coat, that’s what they called this innovation. Everyone knows that the World War has been over for a long time. No more trenches, no more gas attacks, no more blockades, parade-marches, or truces. […] So what doesn’t exist any more is war. Trench coats? Oh, they do! […] They have become fashionable […] Rugged, dirty, ironed – on a small guy or a big guy, on an old man or a young man – trench coat. […] But the trench coat always provides surprises. I saw a man. I had to laugh. This guy had taken the blanket from his bed at home. He’d used a pair of scissors to cut a strip from it for a belt, and two more pieces for the arms. He covered himself with what was left, attached the sleeves to his shoulders, put the belt around his waist, and suddenly – he’s elegant. (Nagy 1928:13).10 Rationing and Substitutes Let us move on from fashion to the home front and the ‘shortage economy’,11 the voluntary surrender of goods, requirements, queuing, stamp systems, black markets, substitute foods, famine meals. These terms are related to the everyday life on the home front, as they fundamentally replaced ordinary life. With the appearance

10 Translated by the author. 11 In this context shortage economy is not the same as János Kormai’s shortage economy term, who used this term to criticise the old centrally-planned economies of the communist states of the Eastern Bloc.

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of the ‘shortage economy’ the consumption of the inhabitants was strictly controlled; thus, the so-called coupon/rationing system12 was introduced in the Kingdom of Hungary in the second year of the war. The urban population found itself in an unusual situation as it could no longer rely on markets, bakeries, and grocers. The situation was different in the countryside, as the wealthier peasants could sustain pre-war levels of consumption for a while, thanks to their livestock and harvests. The villagers engaged in barter economy with those who travelled from the capital or the larger cities to the countryside for food. The wealthier peasants benefited from this, and during the war it was the first time one could find a piano, Persian carpets, or elegant metal cutlery in a peasant’s home (Romsics 2010:68). The countryside, therefore, became more important compared to towns and cities: before the war, the country folk visiting larger town markets, but by the end of the war “the townsfolk stood in front of village gates like dogs waiting for a piece of bacon. They were begging for bacon, eggs, or a small sack of flour, with the suit of the patriarch in their hands, with a Persian carpet, or a kitchen chair, anything that could be moved at home” (Illyés 1972:136),13 as it was observed by the novelist Gyula Illyés, a high-school student at the time . In Budapest, after the eruption of the war, for fifteen and a half months until mid-November, 1915, the prices of daily supply foodstuffs rose as follows: small white beans by 28%, sugar by 30%, brown bread by 35%, rose potatoes by 36%, milk by 47%,

12 A ration book contained coupons. Purchasers had to present ration books with them when shopping so that the coupon or coupons could be cancelled as these pertained to rationed items. 13 Translated by the author.

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sauerkraut by 76%, eggs by 159%, smoked sausages by 173%, pork meat by 186%, beef by 231%, bacon by 326% and pork fat by 419% (Botos 2015:87–88). After 1916 the prices of several setprice products went wild and lost control. One could only access beans or peas, tomatoes, and quite a few other foodstuffs on the black market at double or triple the price. In July 1915, a governmental decree designated Tuesdays and Fridays as meatless days.14 As an effect, the popularity of vegetables and the stews made of them started to rise, and unusual ingredients were used. The housewives of that era faced a new challenge: in the best case, they had to work with few ingredients, in the worst case, only with substitute foods, and make delicious and wholesome meals out of them. This was indicated by the keyword of the era: “delicious from nothing!” Several existing recipes were actualised to the needs of wartime, so already by 1914-1915 a military cooking literature had developed (See Bárczy–Sacher 1915; Fehér–Szécsi 2015:8). Examining this we see how the traditions of the poor peasantry were adopted by the upper classes. Ingredients appeared that were alien to the bourgeoisie, but widely used in the peasants’ cuisine, such as horse meat, blood, lungs, liver, tongue, udder, oxtail etc (Saly 2015:45). The main ingredients of the war cuisine were cereals, eggs, dairy products, potatoes, legumes, cabbages. The onion became a seasoning or a basis for goulash. In terms of seasoning, only salt, paprika and cumin were used generally. With the eruption of the war the beloved colonial goods15 gradually started to 14 2357/1915. M.E. Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára 1915. 1060. (The governmental decree of the meatless days was repealed on the 21th of November, 1918. 5575/1918. M.E. sz. rendelet, Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára 1918. 2268.) 15 Because of the naval blockade of the Entente, the main effort of which was to restrict the maritime supply of goods to the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire).

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disappear. It was hard to get coffee, cacao, tropical fruits, and species like black pepper and allspice. To replace them, new products or fake imitations appeared (S. Nagy–Spekál 2016:132–135). Through two examples I will try to illustrate very briefly meals during the shortage and substitutes that are so characteristic of the era. The governmental restrictions during the war mostly concerned the foodstuffs most important to the sustenance of the population, such as cereals and flour. It was so expensive to buy flour that wheat became the most sought-after product on the black market. To relieve the shortage of flour they tried to boost the wheat and rye flour supplies kept for public nutrition by mixing it with barley, corn, or potato flour in a 1/3 ratio. Obligatory baking was also controlled, the urban bakers could only bake bread from mixed flour from November 1915 thus the so-called ‘war-bread’ was born (N.N. 1915: 11). The bread made of corn flour left much to desire: it was flat, bad, dry, had a thick shell, no taste or a sour taste, and it did not bake well. The urban population had a hard time adapting to corn, barley, rice, or potato flour, as they lacked the skills to properly use the ingredients that were basic ingredients of the rural cuisine (S. Nagy–Spekál 2016:94). Coffee consumption started to proliferate among the poorer social strata around the turn of the century. During the war, it had been attempted to replace coffee with other supplementary products. The culture of coffee substitutes can be traced back to Franck Henrik and Sons Ltd., their advertisement signs reached thousands of grocery stores countrywide. We can list substitutes and supplements, with their terminologies controlled by decrees from the 1920s. The following substances counted as supplements: chicory roots, figs, malt, wheat, barley, corn, oak seeds, beech seeds, chestnuts, used to supplement coffee beans. Substitutes on the other hand were designated so because they resembled ground coffee 165

in their tastes and odours so well that they could fully substitute coffee, except that they do not contain caffeine (S. Nagy–Spekál 2016:189–190) Conclusion As a summary we can state that the subject of mimesis can be interpreted in several contexts during the topic of the First World War, a historical event that changed everything: morality, ethics, borders, material cultures. Because of the shortage economy, members of the social upper classes in the cities were forced to give up their living standards, and began to imitate the eating habits of workers and peasants. They tried to imitate original products and food with artificial or substitute ingredients. Especially in the countries that came out victorious after the war, civilians started to wear clothes associated with the army. The leaders of the opposing armies started to introduce uniforms that provided better camouflage, mainly imitating the colours of the environment of the battlefields. In this paper, I also tried to cover other areas of mimetic aspect that can be associated with the First World War. In warfare, mimetic relations became relevant mainly in the imitation of nature, and in the deception of the enemy. On the other hand, we pointed to the mimetic aspects of everyday life on different home fronts, such as the rich mimicking the eating habits of the poor or civilians imitating the victorious soldiers. While the examples presented in this paper are innovations that emerged with different goals, from different material circumstances, in different systems of relations, I would like to emphasise a common aspect: without exception they emerged out of necessity, and mimesis was a core principle in their development. These are highlights of complex societal changes that occurred after the 166

Great War, manifested in mimetic inventions that have permeated life since the post-war period.16 “Inventions” in clothing, food and military discussed here are still relevant to our everyday lives, hence, the mimetic decisions and actions during and following the World War17 to a certain extent, still create our reality more than a hundred years later.

REFERENCES Armstrong, Simon 2014 The trench coat’s forgotten WW1 roots [online] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-29033055 (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Barczy Zoltán – Somogyi Győző 1990 Királyért és hazáért: a m. kir. Honvédség szervezete, egyenruhái és fegyverzete 1868–1918 [For King and Country: The Organization, Uniforms and Weapons of the Royal Hungarian Army 1868–1918]. Budapest: Corvina. Barthorp, Michael

16 Some further examples: a new ideal is born in women’s fashion: the muscular, manly woman does not need to wear a corset anymore and prefers to have short hair over the towering installations of hairdressers. By 1918 the ‘pilotless air torpedoes’ appeared, which can be considered as a predecessor of drones. Tissue paper known today, the cheap alternative mimicking fabric tissues, also appeared during the Great War. Margarine replacing butter, and vegetarian (soy) sausage are also both the products of the war, invented by the later German chancellor Konrad Adenauer during his research into meat supplements. 17 According to American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan the First World War is the ‘Original Catastrophe’ of the 20th century (Kennan 1979:3).

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1982 British Infantry Uniforms Since 1660. New York: Blandford Press. Bálint, Ferenc 2014 Az Osztrák–Magyar Monarchia hadseregének egyenruhái 1914-be. [The Uniforms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1914] [online] https://m.blog.hu/na/nagyhaboru/image/workshop/ommuniform/ BalintFerenc-OMM_egyenruhai_1914.pdf (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) 2015 Az osztrák–magyar katonák felszerelése és az egyenruha változásai az I. világháborúban’. [The equipment of the Austro-Hungarian Soldiers and the Changes of the Uniforms during WW1] [online] https://docplayer.hu/1276089-Az-osztrak-magyar-katonakfelszerelese-es-az-egyenruha-valtozasai-az-i-vilaghaboruban.html (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Botos János 2015 A fizetőeszköz inflációja az első világháború alatt és után 1914–1924 [Currency inflation during and after the First World War 1914-1924]. Múltunk 60(3):70–138. Csonkaréti Károly 2000 Tengeralattjáró-háború (korlátlan). [Unrestricted Submarine Warfare] In Magyarország az első világháborúban [Hungary During the First World War]. Jolán Szijj, ed. 662. Budapest: Petit Real Doyle, Peter 2014 World War 1 in 100 Objects. New York: Plume

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F. Dózsa Katalin 1989 Letűnt idők, eltűnt divatok [Old Times, Old Fashions]. Budapest: Gondolat 2012 A Fényűzés Elleni Liga, avagy az I. világháborús és a divat [The Anti-Luxury League, or WW1 and Fashion]. A Hadtörténeti Múzeum Értesítője = Acta Musei Militaris in Hungaria. 12:159–166. Fehér Béla – Szécsi Noémi 2015 Hamisgulyás. Hadikonyha a 20. századi Magyarországon [Fake Goulash. Military Cuisine in 20th Century Hungary]. Budapest: Helikon Forbes, Peter 2009 Dazzled and Deceived. Mimicry and Camouflage. New Haven – London: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300181784 Fletcher, David 2001 British Tanks 1915–19. Ramsbury: Crowood Press Ltd. Garrulus, Coracius ed. 1930 Open Spaces. London: Burberrys Limited Hajdu Tibor – Pollmann Ferenc 2014 A régi Magyarország utolsó háborúja 1914–1918 [The Last War of Old Hungary 1914–1918]. Budapest: Osiris Hammerton, Sir John Aalexander, ed. 1918 Britannia: The Tank that Ruled the Trenches. The War Illustrated 8(185):34. Illyés Gyula 1972 Kora tavasz [Early Spring]. Budapest: Magvető

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Kennan, George F. 1979 The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco–Russian Relations 1875–1890. Princeton – New York: Princeton University Press Kemény Gyula 2012 Dr. Kemény Gyula ezredorvos naplója az orosz frontról 19. rész. [The Front Diary of the Military Doctor Gyula Kemény] [online] http://nagyhaboru.blog.hu/2012/05/28/dr_kemeny_gyula_naploja_12_resz (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Klein, Christopher 2018 WWI Inventions, From Pilates to Zippers, That We Still Use Today. [online] https://www.history.com/news/world-war-i-inventions-pilatesdrones-kleenex (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Kloska Tamás 2016 Divatcikk a lövészárokból – A trencskó története a búr háborúktól napjainkig [A Fashion Item from the Trenches – The history of Trenchcoats from the Boer War to the Present Day]. Napi Történelmi Forrás. [online] http://ntf.hu/index.php/2016/11/05/divatcikk-a-loveszarokbol-a-trencsko-a-bur-haboruktol-napjainkig/ (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) 2018 Gentleman acélszörnyeteggel – a brit válasz az állásháborúra [A Gentleman with a Steel Monster – The British Response to the Standstill War]. Hadtudományi Szemle 11(2):77–88. László Bernadett 2018 Tanktól a tisztasági betétig [From Tanks to Sanitary Napkins]. [online]

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http://www.elsovilaghaboru.com/tortenete/cikk/tanktol_a_tisztasagi_betetig (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Macready, Sir Nevil 1925 Annals of an Active Life. Vol I. New York: George H. Doran Company. Nagy, István 1928 Trencskót… [Trenchcoat] Az Est 19(40):13. Németh Ernő – Sárhidai Gyula 2017 A vasúti tüzérség általános jellemzői és típusai [General Characteristics and Types of Railway Artillery]. Haditechnika 11(1):54–58. N.N. 1915 Hogyan kell a hadikenyeret sütni? [How to Bake War Bread?] Pesti Napló 66(55):11. Pollmann Ferenc 2015 Haditechnika, stratégia, propaganda. A hadviselés átalakulása az első világháborúban. [Military Technology, Strategy, Propaganda. The Transformation of Warfare in the First World War]. In Az első világháború következményei Magyarországon [The Consequences of the First World War in Hungary]. Tomka Béla, ed. 45–54. Budapest: Országgyűlés Hivatala Romsics Ignác 2010 Magyarország története a XX. században [The History of Hungary in the 20th Century]. Budapest: Osiris Room, Adrian 1982 Dictionary of Trade Name Origins. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. 171

Saly Noémi 2015 Hadiháztartás, avagy hősnők a konyhában [Households in War, or the Heroines of the Kitchen]. A Hadtörténeti Múzeum Értesítője = Acta Musei Militaris in Hungaria. 12:41–48. S. Nagy Anikó – Spekál József eds. 2016 Gulyáságyú és rohamsisak: a nagy háború gyomornézetből [Field Kitchens and Assault Helmets: The Great War from a “Stomach View”]. Budapest: Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum Stephan, Evans 2014 10 Inventions that Owe their Success to World War One. [online] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26935867 (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.) Taylor, Peter – Dutton, Philip 2014 Weird War One: Intriguing Items and Fascinating Feats from the First World War. London: Imperial War Museums Tynan, Jane 2013 British Army Uniform and the First World War: Men in Khaki. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318312 Waldemar, Kampffert 1919 Fighting the U-Boat with Paint. Popular Science Monthly 94(4):17–19. Wiest, Andrew – Barbier, M. K. 2003 Gyalogos hadviselés [Infantry Warfare]. Debrecen: Hajja & Fiai Könyvkiadó 172

Documents 2357/1915. M.E. sz. rendelet 1915 Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára. Budapest: M. Kir. Belügyminisztérium. 1060. 5575/1918. M.E. sz. rendelet 1918 Magyarországi Rendeletek Tára. Budapest: M. Kir. Belügyminisztérium. 2268.

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PART III MIMETIC TEXT: COMPOSITION AND CONTEXT

7. Mimesis as a narrative mode in The Thousand and One Nights. Preliminary remarks on the study of narrative discourse in mediaeval Arabic prose literature Gyöngyi Oroszi The present study considers mimesis as a narrative mode. It discusses how mimesis is applied in narrative discourse and the role it plays in the interpretation of a text. The analysis focuses on mediaeval Arabic literature in an attempt to show how modern narrative theory may inform the study of Arabic literature. The present discussion focuses on The Thousand and One Nights, using the so-called Calcutta II edition (Alf layla 1839–1842). For general accessibility, I give the quoted passages in English, but the Arabic sources are also indicated. As for the Nights, I use Richard F. Burton’s translation (1885), while the quotations from the rest of the Arabic works are given in my translation. Using the English versions of the Arabic texts does not influence the outcome of the present discussion. This popular collection, which is primarily known to the modern reader for its rich material of wondrous tales, has also preserved a significant number of narratives that show close relation to indigenous Arab prose literature. As such, the examination of the Nights will discuss this material in comparison with that of the so-called learned literature of mediaeval Arabic culture to demon177

strate how narrative analysis and more precisely, the study of the narrative mode, helps to understand the differences which are present in the interpretation of learned literature and popular literature. When talking about mediaeval Arabic literature, the term khabar (pl. akhbār) inevitably comes up. It is even more so since the material discussed in this study belongs to what I refer to as the “khabar material” of the Nights. For this reason, it is pertinent for the following discussion to clarify the meaning of this Arabic term. It is the nature of pre-modern Arabic literature to collect existing material to spread knowledge among contemporaries and preserve that knowledge for future generations. This kind of accumulation of material is the focal point of mediaeval Arabic learned literature, and it is khabar through which this knowledge is recorded and preserved. In its most basic meaning, khabar can be defined as a piece of information. However, there is more to it than that. Keeping this in mind, we can determine the underlying function of these pieces of writing: to share information, edify, and do so in an entertaining fashion because, according to contemporary authors, that is the only way to keep the reader’s attention. Although function is not at the centre of the present discussion, some remarks must be made. The function of the khabar determines its relation to the world it describes. With its informing drive, khabar is – in theory at least – hard-pressed to adhere to reality. In other words, it depicts fact, not fiction. At present, however, we are not concerned with either the factual and ideological content of akhbār or how the recognition of these views influences our historical or ideological understanding of Arabic society at the time. What is of interest to us is how the text itself is manipulated for these purposes. According to Stefan Leder’s definition, khabar “constitutes a self-contained narrative unit which depicts an incident or a limited 178

sequence of occurrences or conveys sayings” (Leder 1999:279). They provide a piece of information in one short narrative unit. This is the form in which the acts of the Prophet Muḥammad had been handed down, and this is how the historical consciousness of Arabs was formed. Information is, then, irrevocably connected to this literary form of expression. And if form informs function, function informs form as well. The most apparent manifestation of this relationship between form and function is khabar’s structural composition and how it influences its relation to the world. Khabar consists of an isnād (chain of authorities) and a matn (text that contains the actual information). It is the presence of the isnād which determines the veracity of the information given in the matn. Later authors indeed tend to omit the whole chain of authorities, essentially making the presence of authority a simple reference (Fahndrich 1973:440). However, it does not change the fact that the reference stands as a testimony to factuality. It stands true for any khabar, no matter whether we are talking about a historical or anecdotal one, as Leder refers to them. In contrast to Fahndrich’s statements on the matter (Fahndrich 1973:442–445), I would argue that the shift of emphasis in meaning does not diminish the truth of these short pieces. What exactly does it mean when we analyse khabar as a literary form? Referring to Leder’s definition of khabar, again, it is a short text that includes reports of events and stories about events and personalities recounted in a single narrative unit (Leder 1999:278–279). This summary tells us much about the formal nature of khabar. For one, it is a narrative in the sense that it tells about an event. On the other hand, it is a narrative in the sense that it is the recounting of an event during an act of narrating. Thirdly, it is a narrative in the sense that it tells of an event in a narrative form. In the following, I employ Gérard Genette’s understanding 179

of the term narrative, which defines three distinct meanings that the term carries. Firstly, it denotes “the narrative statement, the oral or written discourse that undertakes to tell of an event or a series of events”. Secondly, it refers to “the succession of events, real or fictitious, that are the subjects of this discourse”. Thirdly, it means “the event that consists of someone recounting something: the act of narrating taken in itself” (Genette 1980:25–26). Accordingly, I will use the terms story, narrating, and narration, respectively, for these different notions of narrative in the khabar form. The khabar form is, then, determined by how these three notions of narrative interact. The result of this interaction will be referred to as khabar, which I understand as the physical embodiment of the khabar form without the further thematic or generic connotations the term usually carries. The short narratives of The Thousand and One Nights show some striking similarities with the khabar form while, at the same time, presenting such deviations from it, that it is difficult for the reader to recognise the form. Through the example of the handling of the narrative mood, I will argue that the khabar form, being such a fundamental form of Arabic literary expression, is still present in these popular narratives, though admittedly, in an altered fashion. Studying the way this form is transformed gives us the opportunity to gain more information on how short narratives are handled in mediaeval Arabic literature. The Mood of the Narrative in the Khabar Form In the context of narratology, mood consists of distance and perspective. Distance is concerned with the mode of narrative discourse: how the narrator shares narrative information. At the same time, perspective is more concerned with narrative information 180

shared through certain characters’ knowledge and points of view. Distance, then, regulates how the narrator and information relate to each other. In this respect, we are talking about a purely mimetic discourse when the presence of information is at its maximum while that of the informer is at its minimum. Conversely, we find diegetic discourse in those cases in which the presence of the narrator is predominant. Simply speaking, we have mimetic discourse when dialogues are given back word by word and diegetic discourse when events – among them dialogues – are summarised. However, even from this preliminary remark, it becomes clear that a strictly mimetic discourse is impossible. What do we call a strictly mimetic discourse? To answer this question, we have to refer back to Plato’s theory of mimesis, according to which mimesis is one of two narrative modes. It means that the narrator pretends to be someone else and speaks through that person. As opposed to this, there is the pure narrative in which the narrator himself is the speaker. Later, in Aristotle’s theory, these two modes (pure narrative and direct representation) are gathered under the concept of mimesis, essentially rendering the opposition between the two modes void. This – as Genette points out (Genette 1980:162–164) – also leads us to the idea that mimesis presupposes the imitation of speech. This problem, which was already present in Plato’s theory, became more prominent in Aristotelian thought, and much later, Anglo-American narrative theory picked up the idea. What happens, Genette poses the question, when one speaks not only of imitation of speech but also the imitation of events and actions? He concludes that one can only talk about mimesis in a literary work when it is the imitation of actually uttered words. In every other case, we can only talk about “degrees of diegesis” as there is a change in quality between what is imitated and how it is imitated. In other words, when actions and events are imitated, non-verbal 181

events must be transferred into verbal representation. This transfer is what Genette calls the “narrative of events”. Mimetic representation is, thus, only possible when speech is imitated, that is, repeated. Mimesis is “an ‘imitated’ discourse – that is, discourse fictively reported as it supposedly was uttered by the character” (Genette 1980:170). On the other hand, the diegetic mode contains “a ‘narrated’ discourse – that is, discourse treated like one event among others and taken on as such by the narrator himself” (Genette 1980:170). Genette distinguishes three kinds of character speech connected with narrative distance: narrated speech, transposed speech, and reported speech. In this schema, even in the most mimetic mode, the narrative is not considered entirely mimetic (Genette 1980:171–173). Khabar, however, is inherently mimetic: it is the word-by-word report of an eyewitness repeated by a person who heard it from that eyewitness. Let us consider the following example: Aḥmad b. Naṣr al-Nīsābūrī and others reported to us, saying: Abū Mushir reported to us on the authority of Ismāʽīl b. ʽAbd Allāh b. Samāʽa who knows it on the authority of al-Awzāʽī who heard it from Qurrah who knows it from al-Zuhrī who heard it from Abū Salama who knows it on the authority of Abū Hurayra who said: The Messenger of God said: “Among the excellence of one’s islām is that he leaves what does not concern him.” (al-Tirmidhī 2009, II:293 (2317), the English translation is my own.)

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It is a ḥadīth in which the khabar form appears in its most basic representation: the word-by-word quotation of the Prophet’s sayings by an earwitness. Al-Ḥasan b. ʽAlī was present when the Prophet said the very words recorded in the matn of the khabar. It is a mimetic discourse in its purest form as the matn does not consist of anything but a particular saying. However, this is not always the case, and there are more complex examples of narrative discourse even in the Prophetic tradition. Abū ʽUbayda b. Abī al-Safar related to us: Shihāb b. ʽAbbād related to us: Khālid b. ʽAmr al-Qurashī related to us on the authority of Abī Ḥāzim who knows it on the authority of Sahl b. Saʽd al-Sāʽidī who said: A man came to the Prophet and said: Oh, Messenger of Allah, tell me of a deed which if I do, will make Allah and the people love me. The Messenger of Allah said: “Renounce the world and Allah will love you. Renounce what people possess, and people will love you.” (Ibn Mājah 1998, III:228–229 (4102), the English translation is my own.) In accordance with Prophetic tradition, it is the saying of the Prophet, which is reported but, in this case, it is framed within a narrative of events: there is a man and the Prophet in dialogue with each other. Furthermore, this ḥadīth is not introduced with an isnād going back to the Prophet but the Prophet himself becomes a character in the narrative even though his words remain quoted word by word. This kind of narrative may be even more elaborate:

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It is also related on the authority of ʽUmar (may Allah be pleased with him), he said: One day, we were sitting in the company of the Messenger of Allah (may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) when a man, whose clothes were exceedingly white and whose hair was exceedingly black and on whom no signs of journeying were to be seen, and whom none of us knew, appeared in front of us. He sat down by the Prophet (may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him). Then he rested his knees against his and placed the palms of his hands on his thighs, then he said: Oh, Muḥammad, tell me about Islam. The Messenger of Allah (may the blessings and peace of Allah be upon him) said: Islam is to testify that there is no god but Allah and that Muḥammad is the Messenger of Allah, to perform the prayers, to pay the zakāt, to fast in Ramaḍān, and to make the pilgrimage to the House if you can do so. He said: You have spoken rightly. We were amazed at him asking him and saying that he had spoken rightly. He said: Then tell me about īmān. (al-Nawawī 1984:17–18, the English translation is my own.) The conversation goes on like this for some time. Just like in the first case, in these two examples, it is the Prophet’s words that are directly quoted. In these reports, however, this saying is included within a narrative of events: the Prophet is conversing with another man. This kind of elaboration will become typical of the khabar form in historical writing and learned literature in general. As Franz Rosenthal points out, among the three characteristics of 184

khabar, the “action is often presented in the form of a dialogue between the principal participants of an event” (Rosenthal 1968:67). In any case, what is of importance here is that it may seem that in the above examples, it is the diegetic mode that is predominant, with only the conversation being quoted word by word, which includes the saying of the Prophet as well. However, this is not the case. It is true that the ḥadīth’s primary purpose is to preserve the teachings of the Prophet through his acts and sayings but the report itself gains its authenticity through its chain of transmitters. In other words, the teachings of the Prophet are always reported through the direct quotation of an eyewitness (Makdisi 1993:375). In this case, ʽUmar b. al-Khattāb is quoted by the authority following him. This way, even a highly diegetic narrative becomes essentially mimetic. Through the example of ḥadīth literature, it can be stated that the khabar form displays a highly mimetic discourse. On the one hand, this is due to its structure, since the isnād requires an eyewitness at the end of the chain of authorities, making it possible to quote speech directly. The reason why the mimetic mode is necessary is to prove veracity. Through the mimetic mode, the information contained within the report becomes authoritative since the direct transmission – i.e., transmission from person to person – safeguards the veracity of the matn (Leder 1999:307–309). On the other hand, the presence of the chain of authorities provides for a more complex narrative of the eyewitness to be rendered mimetic through the process of quotation. As I see it, the eyewitness is also quoted, making his narrative of events entirely mimetic.

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Mimetic Mode and the Transformation of the Khabar Form Mimetic mode, then, is interconnected with the structure of khabar and its relationship with reality. The function of its relationship with reality, however, varies in the different kinds of literature of mediaeval Arabic culture. This variation means that while authenticity in ḥadīth literature has theological, juridical, and ideological consequences, elsewhere, this relationship shows more flexibility. Let us now discuss how this flexibility influences the mode of the narrative. We will proceed by discussing a group of stories that share the motif of the “slave-girl lost and regained”. Geert Jan van Gelder has already discussed this same theme (van Gelder 2004:201–217); however, I hope to provide another angle for discussing the matter. Three stories use the motif of the “slave-girl lost and regained” in the Calcutta II Edition of the Nights. For the time being, however, it is not the Nights that is at the centre of our discussion but examples are brought from the broader context of learned literature, especially from historiography and adab literature, the latter of which is most widely referred to as belles-lettres in modern research. The plot of these stories varies (versions are indicated by numbers in the table below) but this is of no main concern at the moment. It is their underlying similarity that serves to highlight other differences in the relationship between isnād and matn in these cases.

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historiography Abū Manṣūr ʽAbd alRaḥmān b. Muḥammad said: Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. ʽAlī related: ʽUbayd Allāh b. Abī al-Fatḥ told me: Abū al-Ḥasan st 1 story al-Dāraqṭanī said: Abū Ḥāmid al-Marwurūdhī used to be present in front of Ibn Abī Ḥāmid… (Ibn al-Jawzī: alMuntaẓam, XIII:319) adab literary work

2nd story

adab literary work Abū Manṣūr ʽAbd alRaḥmān b. Muḥammad said: Abū Bakr Aḥmad b. ʽAlī related: ʽUbayd Allāh b. Abī al-Fatḥ told me: Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāraqṭanī said: Abū Ḥāmid al-Marwurūdhī used to be present in front of Ibn Abī Ḥāmid… (al-Tanūkhī: Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, VII:270) adab literary work Abū Rawaq al-Harrānī said on the authority of alRayyāshī that there was a man of Basra…

ʽAlī b. Abī ʽAlī alMaʽdal said: My father related to me the following: Abū Rawaq al-Harrānī said on the authority of al-Rayyāshī that there was a man of Basra… (al-Sarrāj: Maṣāriʽ (al-Tanūkhī: Faraj al-ʽushshāq, II:184) baʽd al-shidda, IV:328)

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3rd story

adab literary work al-Qāḍī ʽAlī b. al-Muḥassin said: My father related: ʽUbayd Allāh b. Muḥammad alṢarawī said: My father related the following: A trusted friend of mine said: There lived a man in Baghdad… (al-Tanūkhī: Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, V:274)

adab literary work ʽUbayd Allāh b. Muḥammad b. alḤasan al-Ṣarawī said: My father related the following: There lived a man in Baghdad…

adab literary work It is related that there lived a man in Baghdad…

(al-Tanūkhī: Faraj (al-Ghuzūlī: Maṭāliʽ baʽd al-shidda, al-budūr, I:209) IV:316)

Through the example of the first variation of the story, we can observe that – as far as discourse is concerned – the characteristics of the khabar form are the same as in the case of ḥadīth literature, both in historical writing and adab literary works. The report goes back to a reliable source (Abū al-Ḥasan al-Dāraqṭanī), who is then quoted by the following person in the chain of authorities. The second example also attests to the fact that in adab literary works, there is a tendency for the khabar form to retain its original structural composition and, through that, its discursive characteristics. However, it cannot be denied that the isnād is employed more flexibly than in ḥadīth literature and even in historical writing. Despite al-Sarrāj and al-Tanūkhī’s being very similar, the difference between them is tangible. Al-Tanūkhī omits all of the isnād, only indicating the last person of the chain (al-Rayyāshī), who, however, should have been quoted in a normal case. It does not happen, though, and consequently, the matn becomes highly diegetic as opposed to that of al-Sarrāj, who retains other levels of the isnād. 188

The third example highlights a process that may occur in adab literary works: the isnād is transformed for one reason or another. In the present case, this transformation is due to the fact that the same report can be found in two different works of the same compiler. While in Nishwār al-muḥāḍara, al-Tanūkhī claims to collect such reports that had not been recorded so far (al-Tanūkhī 1995, I:1–14), in Faraj baʽad al-shidda he can use his previous works as a reference point and does not consider it necessary to give the full isnād. This does not influence the narrative mode in the report as the isnād is not missing, nor is it completely transformed – it is only abridged. This kind of abridgement is a common phenomenon that relies on the reader’s background knowledge to know the isnād and accept its implied presence in front of the matn. Even among ḥadīth scholars of later times, it is likely for the isnād to be only partially given since, due to the solidification of the Islamic schools of law, the association of one author or another with these schools of law provided authorisation enough for their person, rendering the listing of the chain of authorities redundant (Makdisi 1993:388). What remains in the cases of these reduced isnāds is the eyewitness and somebody to quote him, thus preserving the mimetic mode of the report. However, the isnād may at times be changed entirely. This is what happens in al-Ghuzūlī’s report, where the isnād is exchanged for the passive “ḥukiya” (it is related), which changes the mode completely, even though it retains the structural role of the isnād. Thus, the discourse becomes highly diegetic. We can conclude that the relationship between isnād and matn has a profound effect on the mood of the narrative, that is, it affects “the regulation of narrative information” (Genette 1980:162). It is the isnād that determines the mode of the narrative in khabar form. It might well be that the different kinds of literary works employ 189

the isnād in different ways but generally, it can be stated that the presence of the isnād supports the mimetic mode of the narrative in the matn, while its absence results in a highly diegetic mode of representation. Mimetic Mode vs. Diegetic Mode in the Nights We have to note that despite the mimetic mode being predominant in the khabar form, in one way or another, the diegetic discourse is also present, sometimes even more so in adab literature, where the handling of the isnād is freed from the strict rule of ḥadīth literature. This statement stands true for popular literature to an even higher degree since it represents a markedly different attitude to the material it shares with adab literature. In the following, I will show that this attitude allows for a different approach to these texts, which allows for another kind of reading as well. It is pertinent to continue discussing the relationship between isnād and matn since, by widening the scope of the source material under discussion, new observations can be made which may further specify the answers to the already raised questions. Some of these questions consider the isnād and how it appears in the stories of the Nights. Furthermore, we have to bring the ‘voice’ of the narrative into the discussion to understand more closely how this relationship influences the narrative mode of the matn. In Genette’s theory, voice describes the relationship between the narrator and the narration; more precisely, it covers questions concerning the stance the narrator takes on the narrated material, including “the temporal relations between story and narrating” and the “relationship of subordination” that exists between two narratives located at different narrative levels (Bal – Lewin 1983:236).

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In the following, we will concentrate on four short stories of the Nights. This group of stories and their specific narrative characteristics can aid us in describing the various ways in which the khabar form may appear in the collection. The stories are the following: 1. Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi and the Khorasan Man (Burton 1885, IV:285–288); in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:305–308. 2. The Three Unfortunate Lovers (Burton 1885, V:133–134); in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:439–440. 3. Abdallah bin Ma’amar with the Man of Bassorah and His Slave Girl (Burton 1885, V:69); in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:381–382. 4. Abu al-Aswad and His Slave-Girl (Burton 1885, V:80); in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:391. As far as the isnād is concerned, in the Nights, we cannot talk about a chain of authorities in the traditional sense. Except for a handful of cases, there are no sources indicated and even there, the list is cut short, with only one single name mentioned, as in the following passages: “Quoth Abú Hassán al-Ziyádi” (no. 1), or “Quoth Al-ʽUtbí” (no. 2). As far as I can tell, there is only one example in the Nights which closely resembles the example of the isnād of a ḥadīth if not in length but in the relationship between matn and isnād and between the person who is quoting and who is quoted. The Lovers of the Banu Tayy starts as follows: “Kásim, son of Adi, was wont to relate that a man of the Banú Tamím spake as follows. I went out one day…” (Burton 1885, V:137; in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:440–441). In this example, it is the unnamed man of the Banū Tamīm whose story is reported through a direct quotation by Qāsim. These cases are examples of mimetic discourse in the khabar form in the Nights as Shahrazād has the authority to quote. 191

What is more characteristic of the Nights, however, is that the structural role of the isnād is taken over by a general statement of the narrator, Shahrazād, like “I heard”, or “it is told”. The same transformation happens in the other two stories (nos. 3 and 4). This is the general tendency of the collection whether we examine the khabar form or other longer narratives. As mentioned above, although these general statements can assume the structural role of the isnād, they cannot exert the same influence on the narrative discourse as the chain of authorities does. Like earlier in al-Ghuzūlī’s case, these narratives are related in a highly diegetic mode told by Shahrazād, who is by no means connected to the events in the stories and does not rely on an authoritative figure as a source for these stories, either. Stories of the Nights are narrated by Shahrazād, a fact which would in itself lead to the conclusion that these stories are highly diegetic. To an extent, this is true. However, it has already been mentioned that mediaeval Arabic literature tends toward the mimetic, and this tendency can be observed in the Nights as well. Besides Shahrazād’s characters being likely to narrate their own stories in a highly diegetic mode, too, the message of the story is mostly expressed through a direct quotation. Despite becoming more diegetic than mimetic, popular literature recognises the importance of words as they are uttered. This recognition can be seen in the way texts from popular literature still employ direct quotations when the message of the story is concerned. Nevertheless, the matn part of the khabar form seems to lose its strong connection to the isnād, which results in the formerly predominant mimetic mode giving space to a diegetic form of expression. With isnād losing its significance, it also becomes more challenging to determine who the actual narrator of a given story is. This is the point where the voice of the narrative has to be 192

brought into the discussion. Only in relation to the person of the narrator and his stance on the narrated material can we fully understand how the narrative mode works in these stories. The Narrative Voice in The Thousand and One Nights Narrative voice refers to the person of the narrator, or more precisely, to the way the narrator chooses to narrate his story. It may be in the first-person or the third-person. The person of the narrator and the stance they adopt towards the narrative have a significant impact on the mood of the narrative as well. Genette generally refuses the notion of the third-person and first-person narrative on the grounds that first-person narration can refer to two very different things depending on whether the author is telling his own story or he has a character to tell a story in the first-person singular (Genette 1980:243–245). Nevertheless, I retain the usage of these two terms in describing the narrators as far as they describe their own presence in the narrating instance. Therefore, the examination that follows is dependent on the isnād and the person of the narrator, whose relation to the events related determines the mode of the narrative. In his discussion of scene and summary – in other words, the mimetic and diegetic representation – in the khabar, Daniel Beaumont provides three reports to show how the isnād influences the narrative mode (Beaumont 1996:9–13). Isnād is informative about the person of the narrator in that it indicates whether the person relating the narrative was an eyewitness of the events or not. As such, it has a great deal of influence on whether a story is narrated in the first-person singular or the third-person singular since it is only the eyewitness report that employs the first-person singular narrator, while all other cases are left with the third-person singular (Beaumont 1996:13). However, 193

the narrative structure of the Nights is extremely complex, with frame-stories containing multiple embedded ones. Story-telling, after all, is the central topic of the main frame. It means that every story is linked to an instance of narrating. How do we determine, then, who is narrating a story? For instance, in the aforementioned story of The Lovers of the Banu Tayy, it is Shahrazād who is recounting the story. However, it is not her words that are quoted: “Kásim, son of Adi, was wont to relate that a man of the Banú Tamím spake as follows. I went out one day […]” (Burton 1885, V:137; in Arabic, see: Alf Layla II:440). Shahrazād starts her report by providing an isnād, at the end of which there is an eyewitness whose words are repeated in the first person singular. Similarly, in the story of Ibrahim bin Al-Mahdi and the Merchant’s Sister, we read the following: “The Caliph Al-Maamún once said to his uncle Ibrahim bin Al-Mahdí, ‘Tell us the most remarkable thing that thou hast ever seen.’ Answered he: ‘I hear and obey, O Commander of the Faithful. Know that I rode out one day’ […]” (Burton 1885, IV:278; in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:298). From the structural analysis earlier, it is evident that the two stories are introduced by describing the instance of narrating. In both cases, Shahrazād is the narrator but the narrative itself is related in the words of one of the characters of Shahrazād’s story. There is no story related in the first-person singular by Shahrazād. There are, however, reports related in the first-person singular within Shahrazād’s stories. What differentiates them is the instance of narrating. The narrating instance of Shahrazād is outside of her story, while her character’s narrating instance is within. Effectively, her narrative performed in a specific instance of narration is narrating an instance of narrating. First-person singular narratives, thus, appear in the Nights in this context only.

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Shahrazād, then, only relates stories of which she has knowledge through unspecified channels. Accordingly, they are told in the third-person singular. Occasionally, however, she relates the story of somebody else who is reporting something that happened to them or to which they bore witness. These stories are narrated in the first-person singular. There is an interesting relation between the narrative of the story and whether it was heard or seen as a personal experience or only recalled from an undefined source. Let us consider two stories: al-Asmaʽi and the Three Girls of Bassorah and Tale of Maʽan the Son of Zaidah. We see here how the persons of the narrator change according to the instance of narrating. Al-Asmaʽī’s story is reported in the khabar form in which he himself narrates something he had witnessed. “I have heard a great store of women’s verses, but none pleased me save three sets of couplets I once heard from three girls” (Burton 1885, VII:110; in Arabic, see: Alf layla III:385); he starts the report in the first-person singular and proceeds to relate the event in that style as well. (Note that by “I have heard”, he refers here to the poems and not the event he himself experienced.) The second story starts with “It is told of Maʽan bin Záidah that, being out one day a-chasing and a-hunting […]” (Burton 1885, IV:96; in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:127). Through the passive “It is told”, it becomes possible for Shahrazād to narrate the events in her own words without quoting an eyewitness, and it is narrated in the third-person singular accordingly. There are also examples of confused narrating instances, as is the case in Muḥammad’s report about the six slave girls, narrated in the third-person singular in the story of The Man of al-Yaman and His Six Slave Girls. Although Muḥammad’s story is a report told at the request of the Caliph who wishes to hear something Muḥammad himself had heard, it is related in the third-person singular like 195

Shahrazād’s narratives in which she stays outside the events of her story. However, in the end, Muḥammad declares: “And never have I seen, O Commander of the Faithful, any time or any where, aught fairer than these six damsels fair” (Burton 1885, IV:259; in Arabic, see: Alf layla II:281), which implies his presence in the narrated events. There is some confusion in the story of The Ruined Man of Baghdad and His Slave-Girl (Burton 1885, IX:24–32; in Arabic, see: Alf layla IV:357–365), which is originally narrated by Shahrazād and, as such, starts with a third-person narrator. However, during the telling of the story and for no discernible reason, the narrative switches to the first-person singular perspective of the main character. From that point on, it is narrated as the personal report of the young man. There are further examples as well, which I have no space to elaborate on here. However, it is important to note that these shifts between points of view remain irregularities, most probably due to faulty transmission or mistakes during copying. The general characteristic of the khabar narrative pointed out by Beaumont is still a decisive feature of the akhbār material of the Nights: only eyewitness reports get to present their story in the first person singular. Determining Narrative Modes through the Narrative Levels: The Relationship between Mode and Voice As a result of the complex framing structure of the Nights, which relies on presenting embedded stories within the frame-stories, the narrator of the akhbār material is constantly changing: it is either Shahrazād herself or one of her characters, who, in turn, either relate a story as a narrator or may pass on the role to their characters who relate a story. This constant movement makes the narrative structure of the collection a multi-layered one, employing narrators 196

on at least three different levels. This observation has an essential role in discourse analysis since it is crucial to establish whom we consider the narrator of the story. In the case of a three-layered khabar like the story of the Three Unfortunate Lovers, this means that while the narrative of the old man is a highly diegetic one as it is an account of a curious event he had witnessed, observing that same narrative from the level of al-ʽUtbī or even that of Shahrazād, it becomes considerably more mimetic on account of it turning into a khabar par excellence, the report of an eyewitness account. This statement seemingly stands at odds with that of Beaumont, who, in his essay, has defined the close relationship between the isnād and how the narrative is presented, that is, whether it is mimetic or diegetic. According to his observation, the isnād requires an eyewitness at the end of the chain for the narrative to be mimetic (described in a scene through dialogue), or the narrator himself has to be placed at the end of it. Otherwise, the narrative description tends to be more diegetic, i.e., summarised by narrative (Beaumont 1996:7–13). Upon closer inspection, however, these two claims are not in opposition. The reason for the confusion is that Beaumont only considers one possibility: the narrator is the person who is relating an event of which he is not an active part; he is only an observer repeating the words of one of his characters, whether it is only a particular saying or a full-fledged narration. But what happens when more than one person can be recognised as the narrator in the same story? This often occurs as Shahrazād is all too ready to allow her characters to tell their own stories. This distribution of the role of the narrator requires us to regard the stories in the Nights not necessarily as single narratives but to examine the different levels of narrative within the khabar form. From the four stories discussed above, let us now concentrate on the ones where Shahrazād gives the role of the narrator to one of 197

her characters: the story of Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi and the Khorasan Man (No. 1) and the story of The Three Unfortunate Lovers (No. 2). As opposed to the other two stories in which Shahrazād is the narrator and, as such, makes the the diegetic mode predominant, in these cases, the relationship between the mode of the narrative and the person of the narrator is much more complex since the person of the narrator does not remain the same during the narration. We have to proceed with due consideration for the always-changing person of the narrator when we are to determine the mode of the narrative. The first story begins as follows: Quoth Abú Hassán al-Ziyádi:– I was once in straitened case and so needy that the grocer, the baker and other tradesmen dunned and importuned me; and my misery became extreme, for I knew of no resource nor what to do. Things being on this wise there came to me one day certain of my servants and said to me, “At the door is a pilgrim wight, who seeketh admission to thee.” Quoth I, “Admit him.” So he came in and behold, he was a Khorasání. We exchanged salutations and he said to me, “Tell me, art thou Abu Hassan al-Ziyadi?”; and I replied, “Yes, what is thy wish?” Quoth he, “I am a stranger and am minded to make the pilgrimage; but I have with me a great sum of money, which is burdensome to bear: so I wish to deposit these ten thousand dirhams with thee whilst I make my pilgrimage and return. If the caravan march back and thou see me not, then know that I am dead, in which case the money is a gift from me to thee; but if I come back, it shall be mine.” 198

I answered, “Be it as thou wilt, and thus please Allah Almighty.” So he brought out a leather bag and I said to the servant, “Fetch the scales;” and when he brought them the man weighed out the money and handed it to me, after which he went his way. Then I called the purveyors and paid them my liabilities– (Burton 1885, IV:285–288; in Arabic, see: Alf Layla II:305) The second one goes as follows: (Quoth Al-ʽUtbí,) I was sitting one day with a company of educated men, telling stories of the folk, when the talk turned upon legends of lovers and each of us said his say thereanent. Now there was in our company an old man, who remained silent, till all had spoken and had no more to say, when quoth he, “Shall I tell you a thing, the like of which you never heard; not ever?” “Yes,” quoth we; and he said, “Know, then, that I had a daughter, who loved a youth, but we knew it not; while the youth loved a singing girl, who in her turn loved my daughter. […] – One day, I was present at an assembly wherein were also the youth and the singing girl and she chanted to us these couplets:– ‘Prove how Love bringeth low * Lover those tears that run

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Lowering him still the more * When pity finds he none.’ Cried the youth, “By Allah, thou hast said well, O my mistress! Dost thou incite me to die?” Answered the girl from behind the curtain, “Yes, if thou be a true lover.” So he laid his head on a cushion and closed his eyes; and when the cup came round to him, we shook him and behold, he was dead. Therewith we all flocked to him, and our pleasure was troubled and we grieved and broke up at once. When I came home, my people took in bad part my returning before the appointed time, and I told them what had befallen the youth, thinking that thereby I should greatly surprise them. My daughter heard my words and rising, went from the sitting chamber into another, whither I followed her and found her lying with her head on a cushion, even as I had told of the young man. So I shook her and lo! she was dead. Then we laid her out and set forth next morning to bury her, whilst the friends of the young man set forth in like guise to bury him. As we were on the way to the burial place, we met a third funeral and asking whose it was, were told that it was that of the singing girl who, hearing of my daughter’s death, had done even as she did and was dead. So we buried them all three on one day, and this is the rarest tale that ever was heard of lovers. (Burton 1885, V:133– 134; in Arabic, see: Alf Layla II:439–440)

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In the first example, two narrative levels can be distinguished, while there are three such levels in the second one. The persons of the narrator can be established in the following way: on the first level, there is Shahrazād, who is, by default, the narrator of the whole collection; on the second, there are Abū Ḥasan and al-ʽUtbī, who are both relating a report of the events at which they were present and on the third level (in the second example), it is the old man who is doing the actual narrating. If we give it some more thought, it will become apparent that this is precisely how the simplest ḥadīth is structured: with a transmitter at the beginning of the isnād and an eyewitness at the end of it while there is a person in the matn whom the eyewitness directly quotes. In this respect, these two examples share more in common with the original form of the khabar and its narrative mode than the other two, where there is only Shahrazād’s narrative to speak of. The reason behind this is that purely third-person narration is non-existent in the original khabar form – or at least, it does not exist in itself. Where it does occur, it is within a first-person narration, signalling the diegetic mode of the first-person narrator, whose main message, nonetheless, is expressed in a mimetic fashion by directly quoting the person who is in the focus of his report. Even though the reporter of an event is never the main character of the story, he is always there as an ever-present “I”. In contrast, Shahrazād’s stories are not so directly linked to a figure of authority, which is also attested by the lack of isnāds. The lack of a figure of authority results in the weakening of the mimetic mode in the narrative as – instead of quotation – it is description that becomes predominant in the representation of words and events. Even though words are still directly quoted, the circumstances also gain significance since they still carry the main message.

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These last two examples attest to the fact that the khabar form possesses a rather complex narrative structure, especially in the case of the short reports in the Nights. In light of this observation, it becomes evident that determining the person of the narrator is a crucial factor for the narrative analysis. Keeping our focus on the story of The Three Unfortunate Lovers, recognising the three narrative levels allows for certain observations as far as the narrative mode is concerned. The story that the old man relates in his own words is predominantly diegetic, while the same story told by al-ʽUtbī with the old man indicated as the source is highly mimetic in that it is the old man who is quoted by al-ʽUtbī. At the same time, al-ʽUtbī’s story is also mimetic in the retelling of Shahrazād as she had indicated him as the source of the story and directly quotes his words. Thus, the story of the old man assumes the role of the matn of the khabar form as it is related as a “witness account” by al-ʽUtbī, who is, in turn, quoted by Shahrazād, who, in this case, can provide a kind of isnād for her story. This observation provides further significance to our claim, according to which it is the relationship between the isnād and the matn that is responsible for the narrative mode in the matn. The examples at the beginning of this study, taken from ḥadīth literature, served to showcase that in any report which is understood as an eyewitness account, this relationship has a profound influence on the narrative mode of the matn: it is highly mimetic since the eyewitness is quoted by the following authority in the isnād. Regarding the examples taken from the Nights, however, we pointed out that the matn itself may contain a narrative that exists in its own right, with a narrator of its own (the story of the old man). We also suggested that this narrative is highly diegetic. By recognising the eyewitness as the narrator of his own story, the highly mimetic narrative of the words of an authority becomes a highly diegetic nar202

rative of the events of the eyewitness. (In this regard, Beaumont’s observation regarding the relationship between the eyewitness and the mimetic discourse is not entirely correct; it needs adjusting according to the literary context of any given narrative.) This phenomenon exists in ḥadīth literature as well since the quoted narrative might stand independent of the whole of the isnād. However, this interpretation of the narrative independent of the isnād is hindered by generic reasons. Due to its role in theology, jurisprudence, and other auxiliary sciences, there is a sharp line between isnād and matn in ḥadīth literature: the matn is a report related by a reliable authority and is passed on by other reliable authorities in the same manner and form. Thus, it is a highly mimetic discourse. In this respect, it is only of secondary importance what the matn is about. If the chain of authority is respectable, it is worth preserving and teaching. As opposed to this, there is a definite shift toward the content of the matn in adab literature and even more so in popular literature. The strict divide between isnād and matn ceases to exist, and it becomes possible for the person in the matn to be regarded as the narrator of their own story. This is a significant change in the khabar form in popular literature. In conclusion, we can state that modern narrative theory may shed new light on the possibilities of interpreting pre-modern Arabic prose literature. With the help of narrative analysis, additional information may be gained for understanding khabar. As a result, the field of research widens considerably as new materials are brought into the discussion concerning the khabar form. As it turns out, the khabar form is not at all a unified concept, and as such, there can be no general statements made concerning its discursive characteristics. It has to be studied in all of its appearances, and if one aspires to a deeper understanding of this narrative form, one has to exam-

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ine the numerous appearances from a comparative perspective. The present study was the first attempt in this direction of analysis.

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al-Sarrāj, Abū Muḥammad Jaʽfar b. Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn 2007 Maṣāriʽ al-ʽushshāq, 2 vols. Bayrūt: Dār Ṣādir. al-Tanūkhī, Abū ʽAlī al-Muḥassin b. ʽAlī 1978 Kitāb al-faraj baʽda al-shidda, 5 vols. ʽAbbūd al-Thaljī, ed. Bayrūt: Dār Ṣādir. al-Tanūkhī, Abū ʽAlī al-Muḥassin b. ʽAlī 1995 Nishwār al-muḥāḍara wa-akhbār al-mudhākara, 8 vols. ʽAbbūd al-Thaljī, ed. Bayrūt: Dār Ṣādir. al-Tirmidhī, Muḥammad b. ʽĪsā 2009 Sunan al-Tirmidhī, 3 vols. al-Qāhira: Sharikat al-Quds.

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8. Mimesis and sin in László Németh’s novel Sin Enikő Polyák László Károly Németh (1901–1975) is considered a folk writer by literary historians, belonging to a “third trusteeship” in contrast to the left and right political and literary traditions of the 1930s and 40s Hungary. His repertoire consists of seven novels (Emberi színjáték, Gyász, Bűn, Iszony, Égető Eszter, Irgalom, Utolsó kísérlet), as well as several dramas, short stories, and essays. His psycho-realistic novels may be categorised as psychological novels. He is regarded as a decisive figure in modern 20th-century Hungarian literature and his novels are still a must-read in several school curricula. However, the scholarly analyses focusing on his work have become scarcer in recent years, and his work has been overlooked in a larger wave of literary reinterpretation, that many Hungarian writers have been recently subject to in the light of newer literary theories and interdisciplinary influences. In my PhD research, I am attempting to re-read and reinterpret László Németh’s novels using the findings and the theoretical frame of affect studies. Overview of the novel’s reception theory Sin is László Németh’s third novel, published one year after Grief, which was already a great success at the time of its publication. As a result, when it was published, Sin faced great criticism and according to contemporary reception, it failed to reach the standards set by Grief. Despite the short time between their publication, 207

however, there was no reason for the critics to compare the two novels. Rather, this was a result of the socio-historical and literary context of the time of publication. Analysing the writings from our temporal distance, we may be able to separate the two novels, and we might be able to interpret Sin as a work of its own. This is especially desirable because the topics of the two books do not justify a comparison: the two novels deal with different issues, the social milieus portrayed are distinct from each other, and it is also of analytical importance, that while Grief has a female protagonist (classifying the novel as a women’s novel), the protagonist in Sin is male, facts that allude to very different contexts, motivations, histories and emotions that need to be taken into account. In the words of Dezső Keresztury, “Sin is not less, nor more than Grief, but different from it” (Keresztury 1937). The aspect that has most decisively influenced early literary analysis of Sin is a biographical reading of the text. It was wellknown that Németh longed for the countryside, as opposed to his wife, who built a villa, which the writer did not want to move to. He even resented his wife for the unnecessary spending that the construction required. To reflect on these emotional hardships, the author first published a drama, The Lightning, which was – for a long time – interpreted as an ‘indictment’ against the house and his wife. However, this interpretation does not appear to be a successful one, because it does not add any layers to the understanding of the text. Although biographical reading used to be considered a fashionable analytical perspective, in light of literary theory today, basing our analysis on biographical realities fails to bring depth to the interpretation. Even though literary analysis has overcome the rigid paradigm of postmodern critique (“the author is dead”), I consider the reading of the novel outside of biographical constraints to be necessary (Márkus 2005). 208

According to Béla Márkus, Sin is considered one of the less-analysed writings of the oeuvre only by those only superficially familiar with the writer’s work. It is a very thoroughly-analysed novel. However, we cannot overlook the fact that many of these papers were written in the socialist period and are, thus, strongly Marxist in interpretation. Due to the negative assessment of Marxist theory produced under socialist rule, these analyses are not only disappointing in terms of literary interpretation in post-socialist countries but they also discourage the public from reading the novel (Monostori 2005). However, the novel’s theme is very complex, characterised through social sensitivity, realistic figures, detailed environments, lifelike visualisation, and psychological realism. “Sin is, among other things, perhaps, a novel of lost (very mundane) illusions” (Monostori 2005: 5). This suggests that researchers currently concerned with László Németh’s work are eager to incorporate Sin into the canon. In the following, I will first define the theoretical framework by discussing how the concept of mimesis and sin, and the theoretical framework of affect studies are useful to analyse this novel. Theoretical frameworks Mimesis The literature seems to agree that mimesis is a heterogeneous concept which is constantly shifting. It is already referred to as a concept in motion by Plato, recently called a “chameleon concept” by Lawtoon (2003), because it is difficult to grasp and define exactly. Defining the concept of mimesis depends on the disciplinary context. We can talk about mimesis as imitation in the field of social psychology, mimesis as identification in the field of psychoanaly209

sis, and hypnotic suggestion in pre-Freudian psychoanalysis. It can also be referred to as contagion in the field of crowd psychology and it is sometimes defined as trance in the field of religious anthropology (Lawtoo 2013). Furthermore, we can even talk about “good” and “bad” mimesis. Arne Melberg (1995) offers two alternative definitions of mimesis for scientists, in which one of them has a temporal dimension and the other one is almost always equivalent to repetition. Furthermore, in discussing the Aristotelian and Platonic understandings of mimesis in the arts. The two concepts are very different, since Aristotle’s mimesis is active and creative, while Plato’s mimesis is passive and imitative. Moreover, Plato is associated with the introduction of the concepts of mimetic and diegetic narration, which are still used today in the field of narratology. According to Aristotle, man is thoroughly mimetic. This thought was later elaborated by theorists who provided us with the perspective that mimesis – or in this sense imitation – is the means by which children learn to speak and behave. The ego is born through these mimetic and unconscious activities and also during the act of communication with others. To be more precise the ego and consciousness are born through the experience of mimesis. This process gives rise to anxiety, and with this procedure, we can arrive at what Kierkegaard calls the awakening of the Spirit. Before continuing with this idea, I will further clarify what aspects of mimesis I incorporate into my analysis. I use mimesis primarily as imitation in the Kierkegaardian sense, namely, in the sense that Lajos, the protagonist of the novel, imitates the behaviour of others to satisfy his need to fit into one of the groups he has come across along his journey. Thus, I examine whether mimicking others’ behaviour with the desire to integrate can be called imitation, and if so, the extent to which this informs our understanding of the sinfulness of the individual. I will discuss the concept of imitation 210

with reference to the relationships between characters in the novel. I will point out that this kind of integration is doomed to failure because of the strongly mimetic nature of performed behaviour. The protagonist cannot fit in because his actions are not sincere. Everyone around Lajos feels that he is neither authentic nor sincere, and thus, he cannot be accepted as a member of any of the groups, which in turn results in conflict. However, this is the point where the conflict comes to light. As previously mentioned, according to Aristotle, all human beings are thoroughly mimetic. However, if we affirm that every human being is the construction of a series of mimetic processes, then how can we suggest that Lajos is not authentic? Perhaps the root of resentment about Lajos’ imitation and mimesis is that, while the people around him are characterised by mimesis in its subconscious forms, he deliberately tries to imitate the behaviour of others. I will investigate whether the internal changes in the psyche which materialise in performance or speech could be understood as imitation. My other major analytical intersection focuses on examining whether mimicking other people’s behaviour with the desire to integrate can be called imitation, and to what extent this affects an individual’s sinfulness. In tackling this question, I will investigate how we can discuss imitation reflected in the relationships between the characters. According to my hypothesis, mimesis occurs between motivation and action, so if we look at the level of action every feeling can be equated with an act. Affect study In addition to studying mimesis as an important element for a reinterpretation of Sin, I will also analyse the novel through the analytical framework offered by affect studies. The recent “emo211

tional-turn” in the field of cultural sciences has put the research of emotions at the forefront of literary and social-scientific analysis. With the lens of affect studies, researchers are examining cultural forms and products through various aspects, forms and representations of affects. Affect studies, through the use of various theoretical backgrounds, have recently been influencing research in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and many other areas, including cultural sciences. In particular, psychology and neurology have been fields where the research in this framework is most notable (Leys 2011). In these studies, scientists are exploring how and when affects are created, as well as what the inputs and impacts are that define them. Here I must discuss what we call affect. Anglo-Saxon literature distinguishes three major concepts according to several studies, namely emotion, feeling and affect. Affect is deeply rooted in the mind and it occurs subconsciously and cannot be suppressed by the person. The markers or the expressions of that affect appear on the body immediately and they can be withdrawn or approved only afterwards by the person, which means they are immediate reactions (Leys 2011:460). In this paper I will use a typology by Ágnes Heller who distinguishes the following six aspects of the affects: drive feelings, affects, cognitive-situational feelings or proper emotions, emotional characters and personality, mood and caprice and lastly passion (Heller 1979:64–107). Affects are a remnant of instinctual acts which are the results of the demolitions of instinct reactions to outer stimuli. It is important to note that affects always have outer stimuli and are expressive. They are exposed at all times as facial expressions, gestures or even in voice modulation. Although these expressions can be modified, these modifications are consequences of cognitive emotions. Affects can also repress each other and they may be contagious (Heller 1979:70–74).

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In this paper, I will analyse how shame is represented in connection with Lajos, the main character. The concept of sin Before moving on to the textual analysis, we need to clarify our use of the concept of sin – the central problem of the novel, emphasised also in the title. The concept can be approached from many different angles, as there is a legal and moral definition of sin, but it can also be interpreted from a philosophical point of view, for which we will rely on some of Heidegger’s theories. In legal terms crime is a “deliberate or negligent offence” (Krémer 2004), a violation of rules by a community or an individual. Sin may be interpreted as a form of evil; however, the concept of evil is itself rather heterogeneous and difficult to define. From a different perspective, we can argue that sin can only be committed by a conscious being. From a moral point of view, sin is also a violation of community norms. “Sin is primarily interpreted as expressly turning against the moral law” (Krémer 2004), something that shame discourages us from doing (Fazakas 2018). Of course, we cannot discuss sin, without tackling the problem of the original sin, however, I will only address this with a few thoughts in connection to shame and anxiety, as relevant to our discussion. According to Kierkegaard, anxiety, sin and Spirit are inseparable concepts, and in fact, anxiety is a prerequisite for sin (Horváth–Balázs 2013). Not only is the concept of sin questionable because it means something different in legal, moral or religious terms, but also because it is often confused with evil (Paulson 2007). Sin – according to Paulson (2007) – is an inner conversation that occurs between ourselves and our conscience, or even the tension between the ego and the superego. Sin, therefore, 213

must not be confused with evil, bad, crime, or wrongdoing. In a religious sense, sin means an offence, and sin generally appears in the relationship between man and God, and is thus associated with concepts of obedience, worship, and offence (Paulson 2007). Analysis A special emphasis is placed on the thoughts and emotions of the protagonist in the novel and the way they are represented. As we discover the emotions and thoughts of the main character, Lajos Kovács, we can follow how these thoughts and emotions gradually manifest in the world, i.e. how they are transformed into action. Let’s take the example of the ‘stolen apricots’ episode, which can be interpreted as a mise en abyme, a constantly recurring motif. Since it is a mise en abyme it reappears in different variants throughout the text, the plot repeatedly mimics the same situation, and Lajos repeatedly makes the same mistakes and performs the same actions, i.e. he mimics himself over and over again. In this episode, Lajos, as a vagabond is trying to gain money by helping women and servants carry their shopping home (a moment that will become a leitmotif of the novel). Following the encouragement of one of his fellow vagabonds, Korányi, he steals a handbag by imitating what his friend does. Thus, while the woman who entrusted him with her bags is not paying attention, he steals the bag of apricots from the market and carries them to the cave he is hiding in. Because of his actions, he is constantly embarrassed and anxious – feelings that I will discuss in detail later. He hides the bag under a newspaper, which contains news of the robbery he himself committed: this episode is clearly a mise en abyme of Lajos’s sin. Because of his guilt, he does not even want to eat the apricots at first, but this doesn’t last and after a while, he eats too many of them and feels 214

sick. Finally, because he is suffering, he leaves the leftover apricots to rot, burns the bag and leaves his hiding place. The feelings of guilt, thus, produce physical symptoms, such as him having a stomach-ache and becoming weak. In the novel’s reality, we may perceive guilt and the resulting physical discomfort as punishment and letting the apricots rot, despite being on the brink of starvation, can be interpreted as a form of atonement. Lajos is haunted by what happened at the market throughout the novel, and by the thought that he could have established a prospering business by building a small hand cart, with which he could have transported products in larger batches – had he not wasted the opportunity. However, this dream remains unfulfilled due to the remorse he feels over the theft. According to Kierkegaardian theory, the guilt, which he feels over the wasted opportunity “and the phenomenon of death anxiety may have a transformative effect on the development of his personality” (Horváth–Balázs 2013), however, this personality development cannot be successfully completed, as the protagonist does not experience the “awakening of the spirit”. Guilt and anxiety are intertwined (Horváth–Balázs 2013), and thus, after committing sin Lajos feels not only ashamed but also guilty and anxious. These feelings, therefore, are difficult to separate from each other and appear to simultaneously influence Lajos’s character. They are definitive factors that may result in personality development in either positive or negative ways or might contribute towards a tragic end, although this tragic end is not the fate of the protagonist, but that of another character. When Horváth, the householder for whom Lajos is working tries to kill himself1, it is his first sin that manifests 1 Horváth planned to devote his wealth and knowledge for the benefit of the poor and the downtrodden by establishing a community in a near-natural place so to that it could work as a commune without the concept of money or property.

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in a Kierkegaardian sense, bringing about the “awakening of the spirit”. His first sin is that he does not help those who are in need as much as he wishes, and so he begins to comprehend that all his plans will eventually fail, and his quest to pursue the ideal society is completely futile. He is unable to endure this because on the one hand he constantly voices the view that money is unimportant, but on the other, his wife spends a fortune to construct a residence in Buda. Horváth’s principles and his physical life are, thus, incompatible, contradicting each other and he intends to resolve the resulting anxiety, dismay and shame by attempting suicide. However, he cannot commit himself entirely to suicide, but neither is he capable of pledging himself to his principles or a life with his family: ‘As Lajos was about to leave, the gentleman asked “So when do you go? Tomorrow morning?”, He grabbed his coat and felt the inner pocket, but it seemed that his wallet was not there. “Anyway, before you go, stop by my house. No matter how early it is, wake me...”, he hesitated, then smiled: slowly, but shrewdly. “I want to look up that Ady poem for you. There is some encouragement at the end, that’s why I have forgotten it” (Németh 1981). This way, Lajos discovers in time that Horváth was poisoned, and the householder survives. For Lajos the great question is why Horváth did what he did, and if he had decided to commit suicide why he did not remain firm with his decision until the end ‘Lajos remained on the kitchen chair; the package under the chair. “Poor bastard, why did he do it?”, he wondered. “Indeed, because the others were dancing, and he had to bear the sin.”’ (Németh 1981). The end of the novel suggests that the protagonist does not really understand what the sin of which the householder speaks is. He does not comprehend the meaning of sin in general, unless it is used in a legal sense, through which the court judges the criminal, or it is used in a religious sense, in which sin is a violation of divine 216

commandments. However, there appears to be some kind of sin outside of these two categories, which is incomprehensible, unintelligible for Lajos, and which triggers anxiety. We must remember that, according to Kierkegaard, anxiety is different from fear in that it has no object: it is fear from nothing, and therefore this is a sin that the man commits against himself. The tragedy of Lajos Kovács is deeply rooted in the fact that he is unable to fit into society in any manner, whatever he tries to do. This is a typical, recurring problem of the protagonists in László Németh’s other novels as well. An attempt to integrate and assimilate always fails. The main conflict of the novel, therefore, is that there is an incredibly strong desire for a stranger to assimilate, to fit into the community, and that is what determines the actions of and organises the life of, Lajos Kovács. As Gábor Biczó states: “Assimilation is always a ‘stranger’s’ assimilation, an attempt to respond to the abstract question of «What should be done with the stranger?»” (Biczó 2009) Lajos tries to be integrated by mimicking the behaviour of people he is familiar with. These imitated actions, and behavioural patterns, however, will eventually fail to be authentic and this is what his sin consists of. Everyone around him is aware that he is only imitating behavioural patterns he is familiar with, and that his motivation for this mimicry is that he wants to be accepted by the community, i.e. to become a valuable member of the society that despises his actions. This creates a vicious circle. What he perceives as sin, is also something he understands as being a reprehensible act by the general society and based on social patterns he observes. Sin – according to him – is something that others despise. Although he imitates Korányi and steals from the market, he considers this a sin. He feels guilt for this action throughout the novel and tries to atone for it. Because he had no real intentions or a motive for stealing, the sin itself becomes in217

comprehensible to Lajos, which leads to the realisation that he is not only guilty of the theft, but of Korányi’s sins as well. As a Jesus-like figure, he will thus try to atone for the sin of another person as well. However, as he never really understands his own sins, he cannot truly make amends for them and fails to achieve true redemption. Redemption is also unattainable for the people whose sins he has taken on his shoulders, failing, thus, as a saviour as well, because this too is only an imitated behavioural pattern that he tries to follow unsuccessfully. The ending of the novel reaffirms the parallel of Lajos as a failed saviour. “He joined his hands tucked in his coat pockets on his stomach and lowered his head. Well, the sin that the gentleman had been talking about, has driven them out at the same time. Him on foot, the gentleman in an ambulance. […] He stopped for a moment. With a tug, he adjusted the bag on his shoulder and licked the wet snowflakes sitting on the edge of his lips. The cross of Alpár Street was over his head. The dried-out bouquets left there by pious old ladies in the autumn had transformed into an unrecognisable bunch by winter. And under the eaves heavy with snow hung the naked, dingy tin Jesus. He had redeemed the world from sin. But that must have been a different kind of sin from the one the gentleman has spoken of, because Lajos had only adjusted his burden under it, and then went on” (Németh 1981). Lajos continues to carry his burdens as a sinner, but he no longer believes that it has any purpose or meaning. According to Katalin Szitár “sin is the ethical dimension of de-subjectivism” (Szitár 2010). Lajos and Korányi commit crimes or sins because they are on the periphery of society, which can only ignore them. They are avoided, and thus, they become outcasts. Committing sins is a tool to draw society’s attention to them, and a way to become integrated once again, even if that means being identified as guilty. 218

We can distinguish two types of crime: one is associated with a violation of the order of society and the other is a violation of the order of existence. In other words, because Lajos only imitates behavioural patterns, he counterfeits his existence in the world, and hence, he sins. According to Katalin Szitár, there are two kinds of actions related to sin in the novel: falling (esés) and failure (bukás). According to these types of actions, the characters in the novel can be divided into two groups. The sinners are those, whose sin is rooted in some form of deficiency, such as Korányi – Lajos’s handicapped former fellow construction worker – and Lajos himself. Mariska for example, belongs to the group of those who fall; she is punished and dies because of her sin of adultery and bringing an illegitimate child into the world (Szitár 2010). What these sinners share is that they are not punished. As I mentioned above, Lajos cannot redeem the sinners, and he himself cannot find redemption. This is in line with Katalin Szitár’s thoughts that the condition of being guilty is ineradicable from one’s existence. For instance, in the Biblical tradition, all people are considered sinners as a result of the original sin. The two sins of Lajos also carry biblical aspects: on one hand, he steals fruit, which he eats and then becomes sick, and on the other, he denies his own sister by condemning her of adultery. Shame is also a difficult concept to define because of its constantly changing nature: its understanding depends on culture and historical age. However, numerous researchers connect shame to the crossing of a line and the exposure to the Other’s gaze (Pabis, 2017). Shame is, of course, a concept that is closely related to sin, but whereas sin is bound to action, shame is an existence-related concept. Thus, sin is active, and shame is passive (Szitár 2010). Shame is often accompanied by speechlessness and the act of hiding. If we are ashamed before the other, we seek to mask our shameful deed 219

from their gaze (Pabis 2017). Shame is evoked by certain situations in which the individual’s basic needs or dignity are violated and this leads to the perception of a border (Fazakas 2018). Shame, however, also functions as a so-called “thing-before-morale” (Kiss 2017), as it discourages individuals from crossing boundaries established by society or other authorities. Examining the character of Lajos, we observe several aspects of shame, which define his actions and lead to the conclusion of the novel. He feels shame because of his interpersonal relations: his desire for recognition and appreciation is violated. He cannot fit into society, and his shame stems from the basic human need to belong to a group. On the other hand, all his attempts to integrate, to assimilate eventually fail, and he is ashamed of these attempts as well. The desire to belong somewhere is stronger, however, and this repeatedly tests his abilities, resulting in a growing number of unsuccessful trials. Lajos also feels a so-called, vicarious shame, being embarrassed by the sins of others. He is ashamed of the crimes committed by Korányi, and because his sister commits adultery. Some aspects of his experiences of shame emerge in connection to his sinful act of stealing the apricots as well. At one point he compares those to a murdered baby because the bag sits in his arms just as helplessly as a dead baby would. Linking such a petty theft with murder also demonstrates that Lajos considers his mistakes and sins much more drastic than they actually are. As he carries the bag of stolen apricots, he feels everyone’s gaze on his back, and these imagined gazes provoke a much stronger sense of shame than would be proportionate to the criminal act committed. “He felt that everyone nearby would realise the act of crime just by seeing the bag “ (Németh 1981). After this, he hides the bag of peaches with a newspaper, but he still feels the penetrating gazes and continues to feel ashamed as the theft cannot be concealed.

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Summary This essay aimed to show how focusing on affects can inform the analysis of a literary text, and how this new framework of interpretation can help re-read and reinterpret the literary works of László Németh. To illustrate this, I have attempted primarily to analyse the representation of shame and anxiety in László Németh’s Sin. I have examined how these affects are articulated in particular situations and how they prompt the development of the protagonist. Furthermore, I have focused on how these affects work and create lifelike situations. By examining affects, a new approach has emerged in the reading of Németh’s psycho-realistic psychological novels, and in addition to psychoanalytic analysis, it provides another method for examining the representation of affects along with the psychological contexts of the characters. In this view, I have analysed the relationship between mimesis and social inclusion, which indicated that Lajos could never fit into any social group, because his actions are always imitative and never sincere. At the same time, because he does not understand the reasons behind imitated actions, he does not understand other people, their reactions and motivations, and his mimesis can never become authentic.

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REFERENCES Balázs Katalin 2017 A bűn jelentése A szorongás fogalmában és A halálos betegségben [Sin in The Concept of Anxiety and in The Sickness unto Death]. Nagyerdei Almanach 1(14):41–58. Biczó Gábor 2009 Hasonló a hasonlónak… Filozófiai antropológiai vázlat az asszimilációról [Similis simili… Philosophical Anthropological Outline of Assimilation]. Pozsony: Kalligram. Fazakas Sándor 2017 New Moral Imperative: Do Not Be Ashamed... and Do Not Shame Anyone! The Social Relevance of the Theological Interpretation of Shame. Studia Theologia Reformata Transylvanica 63(1):19–37. Horváth Lajos – Balázs Katalin 2013 Szorongás és énhasadás [Anxiety and the Splitting of the Ego]. Magyar Filozófiai Szemle 57(3):106–126. Keresztury Dezső 1937 Németh László: Bűn [László Németh: Sin]. Válasz 4(2):117– 121. Kiss Lajos András 2017 Jean-Paul Sartre a szégyenérzetről [Jean-Paul Sartre on Shame]. In A szégyen reprezentációi [The Representations of Shame]. László Levente Balogh – Andrea Horváth – Eszter Pabis, eds. 63–72. Debrecen: Debrecen University Press. /Cultura Animi/

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Krémer Sándor 2004 Miért ,,bűn”, ami nem bűn? Richard Roarty a fiatal Heidegger koncepciójáról [Why is Something, that is not a Sin, a “Sin”? Richard Roarty on the Concept of the Young Heidegger]. In A bűn [The Sin]. András Dékány – Sándor Laczkó, eds. 380–387. Szeged – Kecskemét: Pro Philosophia Szegediensi Alapítvány – Librarius. /Lábjegyzetek Platónhoz/ Lawtoo, Nidesh 2013 The Phantom of the Ego. Modernism and the Mimetic Unconscious State. East Lansing: Michigan University Press. Márkus Béla 2005 Kovács Lajos (Németh László: Bűn). In A prózaíró Németh László [The Prose Writer László Németh]. András Görömbei, ed. 94–122. Debrecen: Kossuth Egyetemi Kiadó. /Bibliotheca Studiorum Litterarium/ Melberg Arne 1995 Theories of Mimesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511597732 Monostori Imre 2005 Kovács Lajos világa [The World of Lajos Kovács]. Kortárs 49(3):50–55. Németh László 1981[1936] Bűn [Sin]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó.

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Pabis Eszter 2017 A szégyen kulturális konstrukciójának történetéről és elméleti megközelíthetőségeiről [Preface]. In A szégyen reprezentációi [The Representations of Shame]. László Levente Balogh – Andrea Horváth – Eszter Pabis, eds. 7–22. Debrecen: Debrecen University Press. /Cultura Animi/ Paulson, Ronald 2007 Sin and Evil. Moral Values in Literature. New Haven – London: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.12987/9780300135206 Szitár Katalin 2010 A regény költészete [The Poetry of the Novel]. Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó.

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9. The ambivalence of mimesis in the worlds of video games Dániel László Pogány It is hard to find a more diverse topic than video games. It is enough to remind ourselves that over 100,000 of them have been created since the 1950s1 and they show remarkable diversity in their genre, the hardware required to run them and their visual style. In addition to monitor and television displays, nowadays VR headsets, smartphones and many other image-rendering devices can display video games, which can then be controlled by keyboards, mice and a host of controllers and other peripheries. For these reasons, it is all but impossible to make general statements about video games, so in this study, my primary goal will be to uncover some underlying trends in the world of AAA games2. Though whatever trend we follow, the changes in reality have a plethora of parallels with virtual worlds, which go through constant changes as time goes on. In the following, I will try to demonstrate how deeply the art form of video games is influenced by the reality it strives to imitate. Today it is taken for granted that games, just as stories, are an essential part of life. While playing we not only relax but learn as well. During childhood roleplaying, we have a chance to imagine ourselves in roles of our adult life, we can hone our skills and maybe even develop certain social skills. The discipline primarily 1 https://gamingshift.com/how-many-video-games-exist/ (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) 2 AAA or Triple-A games developed and distributed by major publishers, which have higher development and marketing budgets than indie developers.

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involved in the study of games, ludology, separates playing into two major categories: ludus and paidia (Frasca 2003). Ludus are the type of games where the rules are already in place and there are clear winners and losers, just as in games which we use to improve our reflexes and logical abilities. Paidia, on the other hand, is the kind of game more akin to the roleplaying of children: ad-hoc rules, with the main role played by fantasy, and the game is played for its own merit, not for some sort of prize or praise. In both cases, you can see the basics of the games relate to a sort of recreation of reality, and this logic can be extended to video games just as easily - just think about ‘RPG’-s (role-playing games) or rhythm games. From another perspective, in the words of Jesper Juul to be specific, video games are made of two main parts: firstly, the real rules, which the player can interact with, and based on which, can claim victory or be defeated. Secondly, the imaginary, fictional world, in which these rules effectively come to life (Juul 2010). Thus, when we are talking about video games we are dealing with a very special mix of reality and fiction. Even from just this description, it may be determined that mimesis has an incredibly important role in the video game industry, and in fact, we can even state, that it is the motive force of the industry, since video games are nothing more than a type of mimesis aimed solely to entertain. In spite of this, I do not mean to propose that a game can only be entertaining if it is trying to be realistic and attempting to recreate reality with the highest possible fidelity. Since if we only concentrate on graphics, besides games with representational graphics, you can find just as many with non-representational, heavily stylised graphics. These games often intentionally depart from reality just like Team Fortress 2 and Fortnite (Barišić 2016). It is exactly why in this study, mimesis cannot be constrained just to the level of realism in graphics. The emphasis is more on how the developers of a game 226

can make the system of rules more believable and immersive, thus we should study mimesis in the context of the story, the meta-rules and the gameplay. In fact, mimesis is not something that just happens randomly, it is part of video games, as it has been central to developers’ ideas since the birth of the technology, as games have always tried to copy some aspects of the material world in the most realistic manner. These efforts can be easily pointed out by taking a look at the evolution of graphics, but they are also significant in the shaping of rules, peripheries and controls of the games, and of the trailers used to advertise them. If we are looking only at the changes in gaming over the last 50 years, we could easily mistake the developmental process as being one dimensional. Like a process in which the newer, more modern games outperform the original, poorly developed works in all aspects, every part of them being closer to representing reality. The truth is, however, a lot more complex than that. In the following section, I will organise games into three eras according to a system in which the mimesis of reality is the main factor. This arrangement not only helps us to see the changes in the games themselves, but it gives us a view of those game properties the developers attempted to use to sell the games, meaning the ones that were most important to highlight in the trailers of these games (Kernan 2004). In fact, trailers play a central role regarding another interesting question. This question is none other than what happens, when the mimesis found inside the game is not based on the real world surrounding the player, but instead, as seen in many film adaptations of video games, are based on a fictional world out of a movie. In order to most easily represent the characteristics of the trailers of mainstream video games, I will be using the Resident Evil series as an example throughout the study.

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Resident Evil is not only one of the most well-known ‘horror games’, but in general it is one of the biggest best-selling franchises in the world, having sold over 90 million copies since the game came out in 1996 (Fischer, 2019). This franchise was the main reason behind the birth of the ‘survivor-horror’ genre. In this case, the term not only defines the genre of the story but also the overall structure of the game, much unlike the regular ‘horror games’, that do not actually define the gameplay elements. The story revolves around the spreading of a virus that has the effect of turning people into undead creatures. There is no single main character throughout the series, instead, each time we follow a member of the team sent into action. The game focuses on avoiding the zombies’ attacks, with survival being the ultimate goal. Resident Evil had a multitude of rivals over the years in the horror genre, - Silent Hill, for example - but only this series was able to satisfy the needs of customers again and again, as it was able to renew itself in line with the expectations of the times. The series had been side-tracked many times, and these attempts were always varied and interesting in terms of story and genre, as well as allowing room for a six-part movie series. For this reason, when separating the games into these three eras, I will also give an example from the movie trailers, which will be able to provide a reference point that helps to demonstrate the dynamics of changes. Gameplay-centric era Instead of specific dates and titles, we should only examine trends. The first era then stretches from the first video games all the way to the mid-2000s and is dubbed Gameplay centric. At this time, it was typical of the video game industry to think of graphics as the most important aspect of imitating reality, thus developers did 228

everything to bring the visuals as close to photorealistic as possible (Rothstein 2002). Understandably this did not work out at that time, as the technological limitations were too great, computers did not have the computing power required to provide the desired results and for decades, realistic 3D rendering was but a dream. However, there were games in this first era that had features that were closer to reality than those of their later counterparts, but since they did not reach the required breakthrough in their ability to render realistic visuals, the focus on imitating the physical world shifted from graphics to gameplay. As a characteristic of the era, we are usually met with an exact ruleset, mastery of which makes the game enjoyable. Because of this and the technological limitations of the period, developers experimented constantly with finding the perfect control scheme, but at that point, there were no overriding standard solutions in place. Thus, the controls were often awkward and overly complicated, sometimes making the control of the character on the screen a real challenge (Pot – Fitzpatrick 2018). Probably the best example of this phenomenon among the early 3D platformer games is Bubsy 3D (1996), where the perception of space was hampered by primitive 3D graphics. Thus, it was a steep challenge for the player, to estimate where the character would land while controlling Bubsy the bobcat across platforms. As another example, this time from the action genre, we should mention Superman 64 (1999), where flying, fighting and even just walking in a straight line was made difficult because of the then-experimental use of third-person camera controls. The learning curve of these games became rather steep, as it took a long time to master the programme controls. This statement can be easily demonstrated by the fact that the beat ‘em up’ genre was also born in this era, bringing along the term ‘combo’ with them. Combos are a series of actions, with the sequence and timing 229

strictly constrained. When executed properly, they grant the player extra advantages. In the context of beat ‘em ups, this means that executing attacks tied to predefined buttons in a specific order, then the attacks would combine into an even more powerful one. This clever innovation was first employed in the 1986 game Renegade, then in Double Dragon in 1987 and eventually appeared in later game series, such as the skateboard-based Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater games, in which with the pressing of the appropriate buttons at the appropriate times would make the player’s character perform tricks that were harder to execute and therefore worth more points than simpler ones. Combos essentially provided a solution for two separate problems, not only giving the player completely new challenges but also resolving a general issue stemming from the limitations of the peripherals used to control these games; using the popular controller layout of the time (a single joystick with four function buttons) a player could execute dozens of actions instead of the original four (Ragan 2006). In this era, the focus was rarely on narrative. In many cases it is fair to say that the story served to put the pixels on the screen into some sort of context, giving some sort of an explanation about what is being simulated onscreen. For instance, in the case of the oscilloscope display of Tennis for Two-s, simulation of a table tennis match. In certain cases the story was not even integrated into the game, only provided via separate booklets or live-action videos. Let’s remember the first ever home console, the Magnavox Odyssey, which was very limited in its functionality, only able to display a couple of moving dots across the TV screen. To create a game from this limited mechanic, you had to place an overlay onto your screen, which would create the visuals for a tennis court or a haunted mansion to name but a few examples. Though cer-

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tain genres centred around the story3, even in these cases the most important innovation was how developers were able to gamify a given story, as in turning a book or a story into the form of a video game. While text-based games also evolved, both increasing in complexity and perfecting their interactive structure, by the end of the 1990’s it became obvious that the pursuit of graphical realism was unstoppable and that it inherently permeated most genres (Hancock 2015). This era gives great opportunities to such genres as ‘RPG’s and ‘RTS’ (Real Time Strategy) games, where players can try their best at managing the problems of an imaginary context. In essence, the basic characteristics of the ‘Quests’ outlined by Jeff Howard had already been in use, while games also had expressive semantic and thematic meaning, a narrative backstory, and the fate of the simulated world depended on the performance of the player (Howard, 2008). As described above, the main motivation behind gaming of this era was also the solution of a problem by the player. However, instead of using graphics, these problems were made realistic at a more ‘theoretical level’, through the use of complex meta-rules governing the game. Thanks to this, the rules were complex, but they had clear, intuitive workings. Realistic peripheries were also a part of this striving for realism, be it a controller imitating a guitar, dance mat, gun or fishing rod.4

3 Namely ‘text-based adventure games’ like the Zork franchise, that were prevalent from the 1960’s to the 1990’s, where instead of giving visual feedback, the game gave a glimpse of the world in a written form. 4 See more: https://segaretro.org/Fishing_Controller (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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Resident Evil in the first era We can classify the first three games from the Resident Evil franchise into the first era. All three of these are very similar to each other, as there were no radical changes between the episodes. Gameplay mostly revolved around managing rare resources like ammunition and healing items, solving puzzles and the tactical avoidance of zombies, which was made even more difficult by the saving system. The player could decide how to handle a problem: for instance, they could just avoid their enemies, saving ammo but this way the zombies would remain a constant threat later. Another solution was to shoot them, which would cause them to come back in a stronger form later unless the player had the specific tools to dispose of them permanently. The graphics attempted to achieve a form of realism, the player character and enemies had 3D models that were becoming prevalent at the time, while the surroundings were pre-rendered scenes, allowing for a better look and using fewer resources. Still, the only realistic visuals were in the intros, which showed videos recorded with live actors. All in all, the graphics throughout these games have a rudimentary feel to them. The developers designed the games with complex, hard-tomaster controls that players referred to with the derogatory term ‘tank controls’ (White 2019). This means that by pressing the left or right movement keys, the player character does not move, instead it turns left or right, and when pointing in the right direction, players can make them move forward by pressing the forward key. These games also used a fixed camera, which, despite making gameplay more difficult, did a lot for the success of the series: since you could only see some enemies when the camera position shifted, thus adding a chance of unpleasant surprises hiding behind 232

any corner. The inventory could be reached from the menu screen, meaning that if the player wanted to heal or reload a gun, they had to pause the game. The stories of the games of the first era are relatively simple: locked inside a building, the player discovers a secret zombie experiment, and the climax of the game is to beat and destroy the monsters that are the experiments’ subjects. This story is mainly used as contextualisation for the game, the insignificance of which is further demonstrated by the legendarily bad English translation of the text and audio (translated from the original Japanese). All in all, it is clear that at that time, particular attention was not paid to the cinematic features that became dominant in the second era. The only things that added some complexity to the story were the multiple endings one could achieve by virtue of their in-game decisions. We might ask why these games became so popular back in this first era. Well, the player’s main motivation was solving puzzles and challenges, and these are their most compelling features. The logical puzzles and tactical gameplay of these first games saw a lot of people playing through them using walkthroughs and guides to complete harder parts. Also, the multiple endings and the special tools and difficulty levels unlocked, lend the games a high replayability factor. These features enabled players to create radical changes in gameplay in the second and third games.5

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For instance, an exceptionally strong, immortal monster, chasing the player throughout the game, forcing them to speed through the already complex puzzles and challenges.

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Resident Evil trailers from the first era The Resident Evil franchise began with the 1996 game titled Resident Evil, which then was followed by many spin-offs and sequels. For the purposes of my study, I will be looking only at the numbered and more important titles in the series, of which the first three can be classified into the first era, namely: Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998) and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis (1999). Of these three, the trailer that displays most of the peculiarities of the times is those of the first game, so we will take a closer look at that.6 The almost two-and-a-half-minute-long trailer first appeared on the 1996 demo disk from the PlayStation Magazine, so while even from the very beginning it was classified as a mainstream game, we started by seeing subcultural characteristics in the distribution of the trailer. At this point, it would be beneficial to take a short detour and look at the peculiar ways these trailers were distributed and the way these methods affected players, games, and the trailers themselves. Until the 1990s, it was rare to find video game trailers among analogue commercials. In the case of movies even the name ‘trailer’ refers to the way these were distributed, having the ads ‘trail’ the movies (it was only later that for economic purposes these were screened before the movies). However, one couldn’t see video game commercials in the theatres. While video games have been a popular pastime since the 1960s, they kept their subcultural roots up until the most recent console generations of the 2000s. Before the Phillips CD-i came out in 1991, the cartridge and tape-based consoles were incapable of storing and playing trailers due to their 6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MagnNzMwrM&feature=youtu.be (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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lack of storage capacity. There was a huge advancement in the 1990s in this regard as well. The first video game magazines, like the C&VG (Computer & Video Games), started appearing in the early 1980s and the following few decades brought their golden age. This of course was in line with the spreading of personal computers, and prompted by this, gaming magazines came out bundled with CDs. The shareware era flourished as these disks were mainly filled with the works of smaller game development studios and demos of mainstream games, and with time they often contained trailers as well. This was also the era of the VHS tapes, where distributors could place advertisements and trailers right before the movies. This practice was adopted by the video game industry, and you could often see the first recordings of the sequel of a game on the same CD as the original game itself. With the appearance of the PlayStation in 1994, the hardware came with a demo CD filled with trailers, as a means of demonstrating the abilities of the new console. Still, what I am trying to illuminate with this list, is that in this era it was far from easy to see these trailers, unlike today. If you were not that interested in gaming, did not watch movies that were somehow related to the games and did not buy magazines related to computers and IT, it was very unlikely that you would see any of these trailers. This gave a sort of closed-off, subcultural feel to video games, the origin of which, can mainly be found in the limitations of technology and distribution and not necessarily in the behaviour of the ever-growing group of gamers. The effects of this singular environment can be felt in the trailers as well. In the trailer of Resident Evil besides the live-action scenes, recorded with professional actors you could see in-game recordings as well. It is important to mention that the same videos could be viewed by the gamers themselves while playing the game as an intro and 235

outro. With the use of fast-paced music and spectacular scenes, a picture of a horror game is painted, in which the focus is on action instead of fear.7 The two trailers of Resident Evil (1996) continuously attempt to mix the live-action scenes and gameplay clips into coherent footage in a most realistic manner. For instance, one of the videos opens with live-action versions of the characters introducing themselves to the player. The scene here is enhanced with small details to resemble the in-game visuals. It is important to mention that action and realistic visuals are the focus of the video, while the most distinct characteristics of the game, the complex gameplay, the confusing inventory system or the challenging puzzles are never visualised. In the game, the horror element does not get much prevalence, mainly due to the fixed camera angles, it becomes mostly a part of the environment and spectacle, while the trailer promises us an experience akin to an action-packed horror movie. Due to the technological restrictions, however, the developers were unable to deliver on the promised effect, giving gamers a somewhat shallower experience (Švelch 2015). The game story tells us that there are strange murders in Raccoon City, the victims of which are found with marks of what looks like cannibalism all over them. The case is handed over to the agents of the S.T.A.R.S. (Special Tactics and Rescue Squad) team, however, all connection to the team is soon lost and HQ mounts a rescue expedition to get them out. Depending on the player’s choice, the player is part of this rescue team as either Chris Red-

7 Action is also the focus of the gameplay itself, as well as the aforementioned resource and tool management. With the latter, the game distances itself from a purely action-centred experience and can gamify the zombie-focused story in a new, unique way.

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field or Jill Valentine. This expedition also goes awry, as the team is chased into a castle by a bloodthirsty beast where the player is finally granted control over their character. The player’s mission is to explore the castle and rescue the surviving members of the other team. However, there is a secret laboratory under the castle, in which the Umbrella Corporation is working in secrecy on synthesising the dangerous T-virus, which can turn humans into zombies. By the end of the game, the castle and the whole game area have been destroyed, but Raccoon City and the characters introduced so far will continue to have a major role in the following games of the first era. Both Resident Evil 2 and 3 are set in Raccoon City, and the same goes for the first Resident Evil movie from 2002. The trailer for the movie8, which was mainly played in theatres, can be separated into two parts. The first part of the video introduces the main characters and the important points of the story, along with some narration, which is then followed in the second part by a barrage of action shots cut together over fast-paced action music. The movie was able to supply the viewers with the action and horror promised, the trailers for the first few games, however, were not able to fulfil this expectation. Experience-centric era The next era could be described as ‘Experience-centric’. In this period, spanning from the mid-2000s to the mid-2010s, the most distinctive feature of the game industry is the immense technological advancement, which interestingly enough, is not always used to mimic the analogue world. The complex nature of the game-

8 https://youtu.be/kEutwdia8n0 (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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play becomes less important as the logical puzzles and skill-based challenges are no longer at the forefront of the game experience. To be perfectly clear, the point of most of the games is to properly convey an experience to the player. To achieve this the developers often reach for the toolset of movies: control becomes easier and more schematic, so the player could comfortably focus on the story. The narrative plays a more important part in the game; gameplay starts and ends with the story itself. Compared to this, in the previous era arcade titles could be played endlessly for a higher score or a harder level. More movie-like genres, like horror and action, became increasingly popular. We see a peculiar ambivalence in the graphical improvements, as game visuals become dramatically better than they had been in the earlier era. Although they came ever closer to realism, they were also never able to reach that level, often falling into pits like the ‘uncanny valley’. The concept of the uncanny valley suggests humanoid objects which appear almost, but not exactly, like real human beings and they elicit uncanny, or strangely familiar, feelings of eeriness and revulsion in observers (Shin–Kim–Biocca 2019). The main motive shifted from solving challenges to experiencing realistic situations through mimesis. To make this experience as smooth as possible, the developers sacrificed many parts of the gameplay; rules became simpler and easier to understand and controls began to use universal schemes. These changes are also exemplified by the changes in the gaming peripheries of this period. The realistic and specialised accessories of the last era were replaced by over-generalised controls like the steering wheel from the Nintendo Wii console,9 which compared to the earlier era’s

9 https://nintendo.fandom.com/wiki/Wii_Wheel (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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standards is less precise and is a lot simpler both in its mechanics and its design. Resident Evil in the second era The second era contains Resident Evil 4 (2005), Resident Evil 5 (2009) and Resident Evil 6 (2012). The franchise took an immense turn at this point: the technological sophistication allowed the developers to change the viewpoint of the games to ‘TPS’ (Third Person Shooter) perspective, which caused some fundamental changes. ‘TPS’ view means that the camera is located slightly above and behind the shoulder of the player character, making our field of vision more like theirs. Graphics also greatly improved at this time, but the greatest change was the game becoming more action-oriented. While earlier episodes had been focused on survival and puzzles, this time the main role was given to spectacularly choreographed action and the player’s character was made part of the videos, so the trailers increasingly resembled movies. By the second era, developers were finally able to fulfil promises that they had not been able to deliver on before. The new ‘TPS’ viewpoint with the camera following the player constantly, not only changed gameplay, but also the style of the game. It is also important to note that while from a gameplay standpoint, precision aiming and quick reflexes had not been required, these now became a central focus of the franchise. Finally, the developers were able to produce a grandiose game in which we could experience scenes that we were only used to in movies. These games sped up and opened much more easily to the mainstream audience. The inventory management aspect from the earlier episodes partially lost its importance, though it was still the player’s task to arrange all the tools and items in their inventory in order to optimise the lim239

ited space given, but by the 6th title of the series this had become entirely void. Second-era games were still based on the story from the earlier episodes, though by this time they had expanded the play area beyond the destroyed ruins of Raccoon City. The T-virus became a global epidemic, and it was increasingly harder to find hiding places where one could be separated from the undead. In Resident Evil 4, the user mostly plays as Leon S. Kennedy, who was introduced in the second game. He had been promoted and became the most important agent in the service of the president, having the significant task of saving the president’s daughter. Of course, the way to her rescue led through more enemies as this time the player was tasked to clean out the zombies from a rural Spanish village and an underground tunnel system. The story became even more grandiose and global in the following episodes as in the 5th game the players found themselves fighting natives in Africa who have been turned into zombies by the same T-virus, while the 6th game lets the players travel to Eastern Europe, China and the USA as well. Resident Evil trailers from the second era In the reveal trailer of Resident Evil 6, the narration starts by explaining the current situation, letting the viewer know that 90% of the population of Tall Oaks has been infected, and thus people brave enough to venture there are greeted by 70,000 bloodthirsty zombies.10 One of the main characters even mentions that the situation is like being back in Raccoon City. This is important because this way the game can retain its feel and atmosphere from the ear-

10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sS_bGpe9qE8 (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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lier games while also being able to introduce new locations and scale up the story, making it more global and making gamers more involved in the action. The trailer is built up of easily separable parts. All three playable characters have a 30-second-long intro, in which they introduce themselves and ask relevant questions about these characters that are only going to be answered after the game is finished. Each of these introductory scenes is then followed by a movie trailer-like action montage, showing scripted scenes that also come up during gameplay. This demonstration of the new, updated movement animations showed that there had been a technological leap: this generation now allowed gameplay to be as action-oriented as action movies. While the first era had concentrated on survival, here the focus shifted to destroying enemies. The main goal of the three-and-ahalf-minute-long trailer was to reposition the game. The well-defined tight spaces that previously conveyed the terrifying atmosphere had been replaced by well-known real areas which could speak to the gamer base on a personal level. This line was reinforced by the viral marketing that was picked up months before the actual trailer came out. The ‘No Hope Left’ showed commercials starring live actors trying to reveal how hard it was to live as a civilian in a world infested by zombies.11 The trailer was first published on Capcom’s website, the company responsible for developing and distributing the game. Incidentally, with the spread of the internet, the distribution of trailers in the second era changed drastically. Now gamers could see these trailers without needing to get them on any physical medium. Two main factors determined online distribution at the beginning of the 11 See more: https://residentevil.fandom.com/wiki/No_Hope_Left (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.).

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second era. Distributors mainly ran their own websites, using these to handle the promotional aspects of these programs and they made the trailers available on the very same websites. Meanwhile, online video gaming websites also became more and more popular, where gaming news and reviews appeared side by side with these trailers. People even created websites that were dedicated to collecting video game trailers.12 By the end of the era, the most important platform was YouTube. With the help of the video-sharing website and its algorithm which features videos and ads, the trailers now might reach people who originally were not even interested in the games. For this reason, trailers started to take on a style which was appealing to more casual gamers as well. During the second era, three movies appeared from the franchise, Resident Evil Extinction (2007), Resident Evil Afterlife (2010) and Resident Evil Retribution (2012). The trailers for these movies first appeared on YouTube and it soon became apparent that they were eager to use the technological innovations available to grow the ranks of the franchise’s committed fans. Thus you can see that in the trailer for Resident Evil Afterlife13, the story plays a minor role, as from the very first seconds the viewer is bombarded with stunning action scenes and the animated subtitles between these. The latter reminds the viewer of the technological background of the new movie; the trailer tells us that it has used the world’s most advanced 3D camera: James Cameron and Vince Pace’s Fusion Camera System. The trailer was completely subordinated to this; all the scenes shown were carefully selected, each of 12 The most well-known of these, called GameTrailers, was started in 2005. The site gradually became insignificant in the vast ocean of social websites and video streaming services and by 2016 the website was closed and GameTrailers moved over to YouTube as a simple channel. 13 https://youtu.be/9dc5iiT0f1s (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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them making the viewer feel how much depth the movie is getting as the objects emerge from the flat plane of the silver screen. The whole trailer and the entire era can be summed up with the slogan of this trailer: ‘Experience a new dimension’. Immersion-centric era The third era trend which started in the mid-2010s, could be described as immersion-centric. The technology continued to improve, and as a result the previously-imagined goals – such as amazing physics, near-photorealistic graphics, or multiplayer games with an enormous player count – became achievable. Still, we need to be careful not to define trends from the perspective of the current world or our current position. While achieving realistic graphics like those in the AAA games became increasingly expensive, the minimum level acceptable to players became much easier to achieve due to the continuously-developing design programs and machine learning. A good example is the Style Transfer program developed by Google, which can turn a game from blank textures to a completely new look at the touch of a button (Schoon 2019). Of course, developers of the most successful mainstream games would not take this opportunity, but indie developers’ lives could be greatly improved by similar technologies. As it becomes increasingly difficult to show something new and prominent in the industry, gameplay has come to the forefront, reintroducing the complexity of the first era, while also preserving the schematic and simplified controls of the second era. The goal from the perspective of visuals is to replace the constructed world with virtual reality, so VR and AR technology gain prevalence. The specific trait era is that instead of moving virtual characters, we control our extended selves in games; the player and his or her character 243

effectively merge. For this reason, the narrative structure becomes secondary, because there is less need to precisely explain the context of the world surrounding the player. As the player becomes part of the game, there is more room left for interpretation. A good example would be the 2016 reboot of Doom,14 which wiped out narrative-centredness from its gameplay. In the first minutes of the game, the player is placed in front of a digital screen which starts to draw up the narrative for its audience, the motives of the enemies and the complexity of the world, right before the protagonist shatters the wall, only to begin some “mindless action” where rules do not matter. From that point, immersion becomes the most important motivating factor for the players. Most games try to affect our kinetic and tactile senses to offer the most realistic experience. Metarules and controls use methods based on reality, so players can figure out how to succeed in the game without explanation. In the case of peripherals, realistic displays are exchanged for realistic functions, so the player’s movement can be interpreted by the character controlled in the game. A process started in the second era, which reached its peak by the third era, controllers were assigned a brand-new role: they were not only the tool to control the game, but also got a greater role in feedback, mainly in the form of signals via haptic feedback and light technology. Today controllers are increasingly developed to create a flow of information from the game console to the player’s body. In line with this trend, the two biggest console creators, Microsoft and Sony have implemented features into their controllers

14 The Doom reboot is a first-person shooter game, where players take the role of a space marine, as he fights with demonic creatures from Hell. The first Doom game is one of the first FPS games, which introduced new features like 3D graphics and networked multiplayer gameplay.

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that have turned playing into a more immersive experience: such features are the ‘realistically’ vibrating ‘rumble triggers’ and the ‘adaptive triggers’ imitating the spring resistance of a gun trigger or the motion-sensitive technology of Kinect (Parisi 2016). When looking at controllers in the context of mimesis, we could talk about a two-way process. While fully imitating reality became less and less important and, in many cases, became part of a subcultural phenomenon (like controllers fully imitating the control board of an aeroplane), modelling the player’s gestures and motion and supplying game feedback became more complex and detailed, as it got closer to a realistic representation of reality. The focus of artistic representation moved from the design of the peripheries to recreating an authentic experience for the player. This is illustrated in the gaming industry, by the fact that both Microsoft and Sony tried to implement Nintendo’s ‘mimetic interfaces’ into their brands (Juul 2010). ‘Survivor horror’ became one of the most popular genres of the era. Some researchers, like Bernard Perron, even claimed that these games could outmatch Hollywood horror movies in every respect, and besides representation, simulation can allow the player to experience the situation of the protagonist in a very immersive manner. While in the case of a movie, the viewer is merely a disembodied spectator, in the case of a game, the body of the player also becomes part of the experience (Perron 2009). This not only points to the evolution of the specialised peripheries of the last decades, from vests that translate virtual injuries into electronic signals to modern VR goggles but also to the fact that in the third era, games have even more opportunities to create the spooky atmosphere of horrors.

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Resident Evil in the third era Variety was always important in the Resident Evil franchise as developers were able to base new entries of the series on completely new grounds. The most prominent installation in the third era was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard (2016), which in essence erased all previous traditions in the franchise. The ‘TPS’ view was replaced by ‘FPS’ (first-person view), in which the player can see his or her surroundings from the controlled character’s perspective. Furthermore, the action and diverse locations took a backseat and survival came into the spotlight once again. Yet, instead of puzzles, the game now tries to challenge our reflexes and skills, so we can escape from the gameplay area, which is limited to a single house. This time however it is not zombie hordes that make our job harder. The enemy are fewer in number and defeating them demands specific mechanics (most of them also have a name and a background story, they are not just nameless adversaries anymore). Compared to those of the previous episodes the story is much simpler. This time we gain control of a civilian, Ethan Winters, who is searching for his missing wife. The clues lead to the Baker family farm in Dulvey, Louisiana where the hero soon finds out that the farm’s residents are in fact cannibals, and they also possess superhuman abilities. As it turns out, again a virus is behind these strange phenomena, so the best bet is to escape the compound. The other example from the era is Resident Evil 2 Remake (2019), which is the upgraded version of the second game. We should note that as for gameplay rules the developers borrowed them from the first era, but the controls and the camera were in line with the second. Therefore, it is fair to say that the game is a synthesis of the first two eras and can also stay relevant to the players in the third era.

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Resident Evil trailers in the third era A peculiar thing about Resident Evil 7: Biohazard is that before the actual release, there were three special demos. Demos usually consist of a certain level or a shorter playable segment for free, which can help the player decide whether he or she wishes to purchase the game. The first demo immediately broke this tradition, as the segment entitled Kitchen consisted only of the utilisation of VR technology. The demo was presented during the 2015 E3 conference, as part of the world’s biggest video gaming event. For this reason and because of the high interest in VR technologies that were still in their infancy at the time, the game had no problem generating great interest in a short amount of time. The demo showcased on E3 2016, entitled Beginning Hour was based on the same phenomenon. Yet, as VR accessories were still not popular enough to make the next entry of the series exclusively available on VR, the reveal trailer of the game did not emphasise this aspect. Then again, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard did not exhaust its novelties in VR functionality. After years of hiatus, this was the return of single-location gameplay from the first era. The trailer was also shown at the 2015 E3, and unlike the previous ones, painted the picture of a scarier and more level-headed game.15 The three-minute video consisting of gameplay captures has slower cuts, cautious exploration instead of fast-paced action, and time-lapse videos that aim to showcase the game’s mood. This is the first trailer of the series that might stand on its own as a short movie or a music video as one does not need the games as a context for understanding. Thus we could talk about a new beginning for the game, which can reach everyone interested. This is also reinforced by the impor-

15 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1OUs3HwIuo (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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tance of the role attained by the increasingly-viewed and covered E3 conferences in this era, along with video-sharing websites. In the seventh episode, the connection to the movies was completely omitted, aside from a few smaller references. The movie released in the era, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016) all but ended the series. The movie trailer16 strongly builds on the previous episodes’ nostalgic references. The final trailer’s structure reflects this last goodbye, the end of an adventure, but in the case of the movies, the structure of the trailers was always consistent. Unlike the games, we cannot talk about a serious change of genre. For this reason, we have to look at the changes in expectations. There are basic differences between the structure of video games and movies: while in the case of games, the developers get a chance to make improvements with every episode, movies do not make these matters so simple. Games offer more opportunities to develop such alterations while also keeping the original atmosphere of the series. From the graphics to the gameplay rules, even the genre can be renewed without affecting the game’s reputation. Conclusions Summarising the previous statements, we can conclude that imitating the world that surrounds us plays an important role in the history of video games, and with a little exaggeration, we can also say that the entire history of the medium could be described with the term mimesis. Video games can work in a controversial way because they strive to be art forms and entertainment products at the same time. Games as an art form always wish to depict new things in unexpected ways, but as a form of entertainment, they build on mimicry 16 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Sd4GtOXuI&feature=youtu.be (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

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and simulation. It is important to note that in the case of games, imitation does not work as a first-degree function, where games get closer and closer to the one-hundred-per cent realistic imitation of reality. The subject of imitation changes from era to era, and this can explain why we can find greater realism in a new horror game than in a flight simulator from the first era. This constant change - which is mostly thanks to the simulation basis - makes it possible, that in addition to the mimesis of the real world, it is also able to copy other mediums, such as movies, or even drastically change the framework of the genre, as we see with video game trailers, this being a format that hovers on the line between simulation and representation. REFERENCES Barišić, Ilija 2016 Techniques and Styles of Animation in Videogame. Paper Presented at Animafest Scanner. Symposium for Contemporary Animation Studies III. Zagreb, Croatia. [online]. https://www.bib.irb.hr/873522 (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Fischer, Tyler 2019 ‘Resident Evil’ Series Passes 90 Million Units Sold. [online] https://comicbook.com/gaming/news/resident-evil-series-sales90-million/ (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Frasca, Gonzalo 2003 Simulation versus Narrative. Introduction to Ludology. London: Routledge. Hancock, Michael 2015 Games with Words: Textual Representation in the Wake of Graphical Realism in Videogames. PhD Thesis. [online] 249

https://uwspace.uwaterloo.ca/handle/10012/10189 cessed: 11. 13. 2022.)

(Last

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Howard, Jeff 2008 Quests. Design, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. New York: A. K. Peters – CRC Press. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/b10929/quests-jeff-howard Juul, Jesper 2010 A Casual Revolution: Reinventing Video Games and their Players. Cambridge: MIT Press. Kernan, Lisa 2004 Coming Attractions. Reading American Movie Trailers. Austin: University of Texas Press. https://gamescriticism. org/2023/07/24/a-counterrevolution-in-the-hands-the-console-controller-as-an-ergonomic-branding-mechanism/ Parisi, David 2015 A Counterrevolution in the Hands: The Console Controller as an Ergonomic Branding Mechanism. Journal of Game Criticism. 2(1) [online] http://gamescriticism.org/articles/parisi-2-1 (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Perron, Bernard 2009 The Survival Horror. The Extended Body Genre In Horror Video Games: Essays on the Fusion of Fear and Play. Bernard Perron, ed. 121–144. Jefferson: McFarland & Company. Pot, Justin – Fitzpatrick, Jason 2018 Why Old Video Games Were So Hard: The Unofficial History of Nintendo Hard. [online]. https://www.howtogeek.com/219142/

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why-old-video-games-were-so-hard-the-unofficial-history-of-nintendo-hard/ (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Ragan, John 2006 Playing With Power. 1UP.com. [online] https://archive.md/20120718091646/http://www.1up.com/do/feature?pager.offset=2&cId=3151392 (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Rothstein, Edward 2002 Realism May Be Taking The Fun Out of Games. The New York Times. [online] https://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/06/arts/ realism-may-be-taking-the-fun-out-of-games.html (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Schoon, Ben 2019 Google Stadia Can Create In-Game Art Styles in Real-Time Using ‘Style Transfer ML’. [online] https://9to5google.com/2019/03/19/google-stadia-style-transferml/ (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Shin, Mincheol – Kim, Se J. – Biocca, Frank 2019 The Uncanny Valley. No Need for Any Further Judgments When an Avatar Looks Eerie. Computers in Human Behaviour 94:100–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2019.01.016 Švelch, Jan 2015 Towards a typology of video game trailers: Between the ludic and the cinematic. [online] Game. The Italian Journal of Game Studies 4(2):17–21. White, Silas

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2019 Tank Controls In Horror Games Are Good, Actually, [online] https://www.thegamer.com/tank-controls-horror-games-good/ (Last Accessed: 11. 13. 2022.) Games Bubsy 3D. (1996). Accolade. Double Dragon. (1993). Technōs Japan. Fortnite. (2017). Epic Games Renegade. (1986). Technōs Japan. Resident Evil. (1996). Capcom. Resident Evil 2. (1998). Capcom. Resident Evil 3: Nemisis. (1999). Capcom. Resident Evil 4. (2005). Capcom. Resident Evil 5. (2009). Capcom. Resident Evil 6. (2012). Capcom. Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. (2017). Capcom. Resident Evil 2 Remake. (2019). Capcom. Silent Hill. (1999). Konami. Superman 64. (1999). Titus Interactive. Team Fortress 2. (2007). Valve Corporation. Tennis For Two. (1958). William Higinbotham. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (1999). Activision.

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PART IV MIMESIS AND RELIGION: ON BODY AND MIND

10. Votive offerings and early modern Marian pilgrimage in the Czech lands Tereza Kolmačková We can find votive offerings or ex-votos in many different cultures reaching from antiquity to modern times. These objects can vary in terms of their form, from everyday items to precious jewellery or objects made specifically to be offered as ex-votos. What makes all these very different objects fall within the category of votive offerings is the fact that they are given and sacrificed to a deity as a gift to give thanks for help received or to ask for protection and grace. The word votive or ex-voto comes from the Latin votum, meaning a promise to a deity or a vow. Ex-voto literally means from a promise, that is an object given to a deity based on a promise to offer it in return for divine help. As Ittai Weinryb puts it, anything, no matter its size, weight, form, or utilitarian function, can become an ex-voto. The category refers to a particular subset of the material world in which objects not necessarily made with the intention of being votives become charged with votive meaning once they have been consecrated to a deity or deities (Weinryb 2006:3). To narrow the topic down, I work only with votive offerings at Roman Catholic pilgrimage sites, particularly those consecrated to the Virgin Mary. These were offered mostly to give thanks for a miracle performed by her, her aid or simply well-being. I consider only movable objects that could be brought to a shrine and that are connected to the practice of pilgrimages. I exclude for example the founding of churches or chapels, building altars or erecting crosses

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along roads, acts performed as expression of gratitude for divine help that could thus be considered as votives. I am mainly interested in the Lands of the Crown of Bohemia during the post-Tridentine period and the time of the restoration of Catholicism, i.e., the 17th century. However, the evidence is lacking in many ways, particularly regarding extant offerings, which I will discuss below in more detail. Therefore, I base my research primarily on texts of Czech origin but in terms of material evidence, I rely mostly on comparative material from other areas, especially Bavaria where many votives from the early modern era have survived. I attempt to reconstruct what types of objects could have been offered based on Czech sources, to analyse the reasons for the offering of ex-votos and to show their relation to the votary and the deity. It has already been argued by scholars that this relation was a mimetic one as some of the offerings could be seen as a form of portrait of their respective givers. This mimetic nature of the votives helps to establish and maintain a relationship between the votary and the divine power. The mimetic relation is based on two principles – resemblance to the original, and physical contact, which establish a connection between persons or objects and enable the mimetic artefact to affect the original.1 These two principles are closely connected and often operate simultaneously, reinforcing each other so that in reality they cannot always be clearly distinguished, as Michael Taussig points out (Taussig 1993:54–57). Even though first described to explain magic and sorcery, the mimetic relation is much broader,

1 This notion of mimesis was first described by James George Frazer in his famous work The Golden Bough in a chapter on sympathetic magic (Frazer 1922:11–47).

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and can apply also in the context of worship and sacred images, as argued for example by Alfred Gell (Gell 1998:101–115). David Freedberg points out the importance of votives being life-like. He argues that votives, especially those in the form of body parts, were perceived to be efficient and powerful because they were made to resemble the original as closely as possible (Freedberg 1989:157–159). Votive body parts as images and simulacra of the bodies of the pilgrims are also mentioned by Megan Holmes (Holmes 2009) or Christopher Wood (Wood 2011). Robert Maniura gives a great analysis of the mimetic aspect of votive statues and figurines, using examples from 15th and early 16th-century Italy (Maniura 2009). I will discuss their research and outcomes later and try to show how, and to what extent they can also apply to early modern votives from the Czech lands. Sources I base my research on two types of primary sources – textual and material. Since the nature and preservation of these sources limit my study significantly, I will first describe them and point out their constraints. As for textual sources, I draw from two types of works – printed books about pilgrimage sites (also referred to as “books of miracles”), and Jesuit house chronicles litterae annuae. I use primarily texts dealing with the pilgrimage site Svatá Hora near Příbram in Central Bohemia (FIG. 1), and the Marian pilgrimage site in Stará Boleslav, both of which are among the most prominent and most frequented sites in the Czech lands. Regarding the printed pilgrimage books, my main sources are works by the Jesuit Bohuslav Balbín (1621–1688), one of the most important early modern Czech writers and historians, who among 257

many other works wrote about Czech Marian pilgrimage sites, namely Svatá Hora near Příbram (Diva Montis Sancti, 1665), Stará Boleslav (Epitome historica rerum Bohemicarum. Libri VI. et VII, 1677) and Tuřany near Brno (Diva Turzanensis, 1658). All of these works describe the origins of the pilgrimage site and various legends pertaining to it, then Balbín lists all important events of the site’s history and above all miracles ascribed to the Virgin Mary at that site. The most extensive of these is the work about Svatá Hora, covering the history of the site from its origin in 1632 up until Balbín’s visit there in 1661. The text about Stará Boleslav is shorter, describing events and miracles pertaining to the second half of the 16th century up to and including 1668. The history of this site had already been written before Balbín by Kašpar Arsenius z Radbuzy in a rather short Czech-language book Pobožná knížka o Blahoslavené Panně Mariji (A Pious Book about the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1629). Balbín uses this text as one of his main sources and cites Arsenius frequently. Diva Turzanensis is the least elaborate and contains much fewer miracle stories than the other two of Balbín’s works, but is still very useful for my research. In Diva Montis Sancti Balbín mentions around 130 votives, which, however, is only a small number compared to the number of miracles described in his book. This, nevertheless, does not mean that only a few people offered a gift to the Virgin Mary. Balbín paid a lot of attention to making sure his miracle stories had high credibility and thus he published only a curated selection of stories and purposely omitted a lot of them. The most prominent in his work are transcriptions and translations of written testimonies that the pilgrims themselves brought to the site after a miracle had happened. These first-person narrations with a signature and often also a seal contain only seldom any mention of a votive offering, unfortunately for my research. This could be because the written testimo258

ny was considered a kind of ex-voto in itself. This, however, does not exclude the possibility that other objects may have been offered together with it, but it might not have been appropriate or simply conventional to report them in this form of first-person narrative. When Balbín does mention ex-votos, he often chooses artefacts of high financial value such as jewellery and other objects made of precious metals, offerings given by important people (these two often coincide) or things that are valuable in some way. Above all, he writes about offerings that are signed and pertain to a particular miracle; after all, he is not interested in the votives but rather in the stories connected to them. In Diva Montis Sancti there are three chapters in the fifth book (cap. XX–XXII) devoted only to the votive offerings: the first describes eight votive pictures, and the other two mention all types of objects that can testify a miracle. As Balbín writes in the introduction to chapter XXI: There were times at Svatá Hora when they [i.e., the priests] did not ask for testimonies of miracles; either because of oblivion, or because the attention of our people turned elsewhere, or also because the pilgrims did not attest it trying to avoid any kind of vow out of fear (as is the ignorant nature of some people). Now we suffer by this omission and we strive to restore it. I have, however, found a way that could rectify the negligence and redress the loss. I have proof in my hands that when I gave life to this history, I myself composed from gifts and their inscriptions that contain reasons for offering, why this gold,

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this crown, ring, gemstone or other objects had been given (Balbín 1665:432)2. In his work about Tuřany, Balbín states very openly that he chooses only certain offerings while omitting a lot of others: There are golden necklaces, chains (one of them of forty golden coins), numerous rings, silver and gold offerings, embellishments embroidered in gold; I do not want to enumerate all of those in order not to tire the reader. And even if I wanted to, I could not because a lot of those offerings were secretly placed on the altar and we do not know what hand offered them. (Balbín 1658:145)3 My other source, the litterae annuae, are annual reports from Jesuit houses mentioning all important events, personal changes, educational and other activities (Valentová 2010:26–29). Reports

2 All of the Latin passages are translated by the author of this paper. Latin original: Fuerunt enim in Monte Sancto tempora, cum attestationes miraculorum non peterentur; aut oblivione, aut alio versis nostrorum hominum curis, aut etiam inutili peregrinorum timore omnem juramenti speciem (ut sunt quorundam hominum rudia ingenia) fugientium, non conficiebantur. Id jam dolemus omissum et retrahere post tempus cuperemus. Ego tamen inveni viam, qua negligentia prior reparari aliquantum et reconcinnari damnum possit. Est in manibus indiculus, quem ipse, cum historiae huic animum adjecissem, ex donariis eorumque inscriptionibus confeci, quibus additae caussae a donantibus leguntur, cur illud argentum, illud aurum, illa corona, anulus, gemma, aliaque donentur. 3 Latin original: Sunt aurei torques, cetenulae (quarum una quadraginta aureorum) sunt anuli plurimi, sunt argentea aureaque anathemata, sunt acu picta Phrygio opere ornamenta; sed haec minuta ob fastidium lectoris enumerare nolo, neque, si vellem, possum, cum pleraque occulte super altare jacta, a qua manu venerint nesciamus.

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from pilgrimage sites also contain information about miracles, pilgrims, feasts or processions and a few offerings. In my study, I work with reports from Svatá Hora from 1657 to 1661 (LA 1657, LA 1658, LA 1659, LA 1660, LA 1661), which corresponds to the period covered by Balbín in Diva Montis Sancti. Offerings mentioned there are a bit different from what we can find in Balbín’s work with even greater emphasis on valuable objects. The votives are often only listed without any additional information or stories and therefore it is sometimes hard to determine whether all of them can be considered as ex-votos. Regarding the material evidence, unfortunately for my research, there are hardly any extant examples in the Czech lands, probably due to the Josephine reforms4 but they might have been destroyed also during the interwar period or in the communist era. Some early modern votives survived in places that historically belonged to the Czech lands but later became part of another country, such as Wambierzyce in Kłódzko, today in Poland, where we can still see numerous votive pictures and other offerings, or Rosenthal in Upper Lusatia, today in Saxony, Germany. Due to this lack, I use evidence from other areas as a comparative material to the textual evidence from the Czech lands. Besides Wambierzyce, I also visited other Polish sites, namely Częstochowa and several churches in Kraków. Besides my visits to pilgrimage shrines, I rely also on publications dealing with votive offerings mainly from the German area, which is both geographically and culturally close to the Czech lands. To name the most 4 During the Josephine abolishment of the monastic orders, the buildings were used for other purposes and all of their other property was either sold or, if possible, used in parish churches (Bastl 1995:158). During this process, the votives at pilgrimage sites under monastery administration were probably either sold or destroyed in cases of no financial value.

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important of the scholars and monographs, Kriss-Rettenbeck published three books on votive offerings that contain numerous photographs of mostly early modern ex-votos from various pilgrimage sites; the majority of them consist of votive pictures (Kriss-Rettenbeck 1961, 1963 and 1972). A bit more varied, although not so numerous, votives are documented in Brauneck’s work on popular religious art (Brauneck 1978). A highly useful tool for research on votive pictures is an online database of pictures from Sammarei, a pilgrimage shrine near Passau (Votivtafeldatenbank). Over one thousand pictures ranging from the 16th to 20th century have survived there and are all accessible online with detailed descriptions. There are also publications dealing with other types of votives, such as objects from wax (Angeletti 1980) or specifically candles (Wünnenberg 1966), iron offerings (Kriss 1957), or votives depicting eyes (Jaeger 1979). Although I was able to see quite a large amount of objects, votives were so common in the early modern period that the many extant examples present only a small part of what had been given and on display at the pilgrimage sites. The objects had to go through many different selection processes to survive and to be documented. The amount of votive offerings especially in the 17th to 19th centuries was so high they could not all be on display in the church or even stored there. Therefore some of them were simply thrown away after some time, especially during the Age of Enlightenment (Brauneck 1978:88), or they were used as material for things needed in the church ‒ for example, waxen offerings were remelted into candles. As a result, not all types of objects have likely been preserved to the same extent and therefore the surviving examples probably are not quite representative, at least in terms of quantity. It is also quite difficult to date the offerings since their form remained unchanged over a long period. A lot of pictures and a few 262

other objects have a date written on them but otherwise, they usually remain undated even in academic publications. The by far most commonly documented objects in these publications are votive images, followed by statues, body parts and a few candles. This selection is affected both by the state of preservation and the interest of the scholars. They are usually primarily interested in early modern popular religion and therefore probably tend to choose objects that fall into the category of popular art. Jewellery, liturgical objects, garments, fabrics etc., artefacts well documented in textual sources, are omitted completely in these works, partly probably because they lie out of the interest of the authors. Another reason could be that these objects are currently placed in the treasuries and are not easily recognizable as ex-votos – parts of the treasuries at pilgrimage sites very probably consist of ex-votos and parts do not, but we cannot know for certain. Pilgrimage and the miraculous image To start with, votive offerings are closely connected to pilgrimages and miracles and have to be understood in their context. When talking about these topics I try to take into account the lived aspects and the popular practices over theological statements and the official doctrine. Even though the pilgrimage practice contradicted the Church teachings on this topic in many aspects, theologians do not seem to be particularly interested in it, at least after the iconoclasm had been condemned at the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 (Schatz 1997:88–94). The Tridentine Council published only one short decree on the invocation, veneration and relics of saints, and on sacred images during the last session in December

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15635 and there are a few works dealing with this issue6 but it did not stand in the spotlight of theology. Instead of pointing out the potentially unorthodox aspects of pilgrimage, church authorities engaged themselves in this practice and encouraged it. As Protestants opposed the veneration of saints and the Virgin Mary, this became an identification sign and served as a means to reaffirm the Catholic position among people.7 In the Czech lands, religious orders, especially the Jesuits, supported such practices as a way of recatholization. The Second Council of Nicaea approves the veneration of images because they encourage people to greater piety and move them to follow the example of the saints. The images themselves are not worthy of adoration, but we can see and venerate the saints in heaven through them. The decrees of the council also distinguish the degree or nature of worship that is acceptable for God (λατρεία ἀληθινή) and the veneration of saints (προσκύνησις τιμητική; Schatz 1997:88–94). The Council of Trent adopts this distinction, translating the terms into Latin as adoratio (adoration) for God, and veneratio (veneration) for saints (Council of Trent, 1545–1563, 1890:205–207). The saints could intercede for those praying to them but only God himself had the power to act and intervene in this world. Even though this view was referred to now and then, the church authorities were not concerned too much with enforcing it, and, as we shall see, people interacted with the saints 5 About the Council of Trent, see O’Malley 2013; for an English translation of the decrees, see The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, 1848. 6 For example, Carlo Borromeo’s work on building and furnishing of churches (Borromeo 1577). 7 About the role of images in post-tridentine Catholic Europe, see for example Baumgarten 2004.

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and the Virgin Mary differently. In the case of miracles connected to pilgrimages, it was the Virgin Mary who was perceived to perform them. People prayed directly to her and credited her alone with the help, as many of the stories in Balbín’s works imply. I would like to go one step further and argue that it was the particular material image of the Virgin Mary at the pilgrimage site that was endowed with miraculous power, as if divine power came into this world only through material objects. Not every depiction of the Virgin, however, could perform miracles; this ability had to be established in a certain way. Legends about pilgrimage sites often describe and reinforce the effectiveness of the image by showing its origin as divine or miraculous. A very common scenario shows the image as an active agent that reveals itself and its miraculous power. The relief of the Virgin from Stará Boleslav was found by a peasant who ploughed it out in a field. He brought the relief home but it returned to its original site several times until a church was built there (Arsenius 1629: unpaginated). Similarly, a peasant found the statue of Our Lady of Tuřany in a bush and it kept returning to that place, where a church was subsequently built (Balbín 1658:34–40). Very similar stories are connected also to the pilgrimage sites in Bohosudov (Hoffmann 2005:10–11) or Wambierzyce (Hačer after 1880:6–8) and we can find them also in other parts of the Catholic world, for example in Mexico in the legend about the Virgen de los Remedios (Turner and Turner 1978:68-69) or Our Lady of Octolan (Turner and Turner 1978:57–59). In these instances the miraculous power manifests itself on its own behalf through the particular image and people only react to its actions, thus the image reveals its ability to intervene in people’s lives. Other images derive their power from their resemblance to the living Virgin Mary. These are mostly images ascribed to St Luke 265

who saw Mary himself or whom she even sat as a model for (Belting 1996:57–58). In some cases, Luke could not finish the painting and thus Mary imprinted her face on the canvas; in other stories, the Holy Spirit finished the picture or at least led Luke’s hand (Štajnochr 2000:15). Thus the images depict the true appearance of the Virgin and this mimetic relation endows them with their power. St Luke is reportedly also the author of the image of Częstochowa, which is, moreover, painted on a board Mary used to sit on (Maniura 2004:49–50), so the image was physically in touch with her (FIG. 2). Resemblance and physical contact, the two aspects of mimetic relation as outlined in the introduction, play a crucial role in the affirmation of the miraculous power of sacred images. This would imply that an image is powerful when it is realistic. This is true in a way, but we have to rethink the meaning of realistic since a lot of the objects whose magical power is based on their similarity to the original do not look very similar to it, at least to our eyes. Taussig asks the question, “How much of a copy does the copy have to be to affect what it is a copy of? How ‘real’ does the copy have to be?” (Taussig 1993:51) And the answer seems to be “not very.” What matters is that the copy was made after the original to mimic it rather than that it should actually resemble its original. It is not the similarity itself that makes a true copy but also the physical touch with the original that ensures the connection between the two and makes the copy powerful (Taussig 1993:51–57). Moreover, we should be careful about what we call similar or realistic since this is based on our experience shaped by cultural standards and is by no means universal (Freedberg 1989:202–203). We consider images realistic when they convey the outer appearance of the depicted thing or person; and when judging the resemblance, we prioritise certain features, such as faces, over others. Different 266

cultures can, however, approach resemblance from different perspectives, accentuate other features and pay less attention to the outer appearance and rather focus on inner characteristics. Portraits of Christ, the apostles and the Virgin Mary from the apostolic times have always played an important role in the Catholic Church.8 They served as legitimization of religious images as such since they showed this practice as inherent to Christianity. They also provided testimonies of the true appearance of Christ, his mother and early saints so that other images could be painted after them (Freedberg 1989:205‒206). Their trustworthiness, however, was derived more from their origin than from the actual similarity to the depicted person. Thus the fact that Mary looked a bit different in every image even though all of them preserved her true appearance did not bother anybody. The Byzantine icons did not strive to capture the outer appearance but rather the inner character of the saint (Bartlová 2012:98-99). Physical touch also often reinforces the mimetic relation between the image and the person, for example in the case of the Lady of Częstochowa. A portrait can, in a way, become the Virgin Mary herself, as Belting writes: The difference between the image and what it represented seemed to be abolished in them [icons]; the image was the person represented, at least that person’s active, miracle-working presence, as the relics of saints had previously been. (Belting 1996:47)

8 About the early portraits of Christ, see, for example, Belting 2005.

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People of course distinguished between the Virgin Mary in heaven and her material representations but the image had the power to bring Mary’s presence to the Earth, to make her physical and approachable and thus easier to communicate with. She dwelt both spiritually in heaven and on Earth in a material form, which enabled her to interact with this world (Maniura 2004:114–115, 180). The miraculous power was not carried over only from saints to their portraits but also from those portraits to their copies, again based on the visual resemblance and physical contact. These newly produced images possessed no less power and authority than the original ones and once the miraculous power was carried over, the importance of the image was further derived from the number of pilgrims and miracles, not from the origin. On the one hand, the new image needed to resemble an already miraculous original, on the other hand, the resemblance was never perfect. It was sufficient to state a clear link to the original, but a lot of details could vary, even though those variations were rather subtle.9 This was not because of negligence but on purpose so that the new image could act as a distinctive and independent entity with its own cult (Freedberg 1989:113–115). Moreover, the ability to perform miracles could transition also to other objects that had touched the miraculous image, so basically, anything could work a miracle on behalf of the image of the Virgin Mary. The books of miracles talk about the personal belongings of the pilgrims such as clothes or devotional objects such as small printed pictures that worked as mediators in the healing process.

9 These slight variations can be observed for example in the first edition of Gumppenberg’s Atlas Marianus (1657–1659) with engravings of the Virgin from every included pilgrimage site.

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The explanation of miraculous power I present here clearly contradicts the official Catholic doctrine on this matter. However, this notion of the miracle-working power based on mimesis and the coming to this world through material images seems to be so strong that the official doctrine could not suppress it. I believe the theologians did not attempt to do so. For example, Balbín, a Jesuit priest and a highly educated man tells a miraculous story of healing his sore teeth. He prayed to the Virgin at Svatá Hora but the pain in his teeth did not cease until he touched the crown of the baby Jesus to his chin (Balbín 1665:367–368). Types of offerings Moving to votive offerings, I will first try to outline the types of objects that were offered as ex-votos in the Czech lands in the 17th century. As I have shown above, I do not have a very exhaustive or representative corpus of votives and thus this task takes a lot of conjecturing and interpretation. I can still present the most common types, as there are objects that are recurrent in my sources. However, I am well aware my presentation might not correspond to the frequency of what was offered, and I might miss some common artefacts. Votive picures (FIG. 3) are the most often mentioned by Balbín as the table below shows, and they are also relatively well preserved and documented in secondary literature. Even though Balbín does not give any description of the pictures, we can rely on a huge number of painted pictures preserved in neighbouring areas. These pictures are usually painted on wooden tablets by local anonymous painters and their artistic value is often not very high (Lepovitz 1990:760–761). Their general structure seems to stay very stable throughout both time and space in the whole Catholic 269

world only with slight alterations in formal style (Kriss-Rettenbect 1972:156, 164). The image of the Virgin Mary is usually depicted in the upper part of the picture, with the devotees in different situations captured below. Among the most common motives are the devotee or devotees kneeling with their hands clasped and raised towards the Virgin Mary, very often a whole family is painted. (FIG. 3) Another frequent motif is a depiction of a miraculous incident, i.e., an accident (FIG. 4 and 5); sometimes the devotee is portrayed ill and lying in his or her bed. We can also find images of domestic animals. Some pictures also contain written descriptions of the miracle or the reason for offering, the only thing that Balbín was interested in and that he reported. Based on his repeated complaints regarding pictures with insufficient descriptions,10 it seems that pictures without texts were very common in the Czech lands, which is in accord with the many extant examples from Bavaria, where long descriptions are relatively rare. More often, the texts are rather brief, in many cases they note only the name of the votary, the year or simply the phrase “ex-voto.” As David Freedberg says, “that inscription [i.e., the ex-voto] plays a significant role in ensuring that the picture or sculpture works as intended, but of course, it is the figuration itself that makes both content and context clear” (Freedberg 1989:156).

10 In Diva Montis Sanctis Balbín writes, “Then also some [votive pictures] are not worth mentioning because of insufficient inscriptions, others lack names, others years, other inscriptions are written on such unintelligible words that even the best educated scribes are not able to understand them. I omit these unclear and difficult [examples].” (Balbín 1665:428). Latin original: Deinde quaedam summa ignorantia scriptae non merentur adduci, aliae nominibus carent, quaedam annis, quaedam verbis tam obscuris conceptae, ut studiose scriptores earum, ne intelligerunt, cavisse videantur. Illas igitur obscuras et difficiles omittam. Similarly, he complains multiple times in the Epitomes (Balbín 1677:93, 103).

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Votive candles represent another very frequent type of offering (FIG. 10). Balbín mentions them several times but he does not give any description of their appearance or size with only one exception in Diva Montis Sancti: “Sir Adamus Italus […] offered wax candles on which he had painted his name and the reason [for offering]”11 (Balbín 1665:437). Even though modern scholars do not pay much attention to them, there are a few extant examples, as quite a large collection has survived at the pilgrimage site Andechs near Munich (Angeletti 1980). These candles are usually 150–180 cm tall with a wooden core and they are heavily decorated mostly with floral motives. Some candles also have metal sheets with pictures attached to them. These candles were not burned themselves but a smaller candle was placed on top of them as on a candlestick. Thus the candle could be lit without being damaged (Angeletti 1980:42). Pilgrims often also offered models of parts of the body made of various materials such as gold, silver or other metals, wax, and wood. Both Balbín and the litterae annuae mention offerings of this type made of silver and gold, sometimes life-sized,12 and a few wax body parts are mentioned there as well. The preserved and documented body parts (mainly from Germany) involve hands, legs, breasts, heads, eyes, ears and also the inner organs such as lungs. (FIG. 8 and 9) A lot of them were fabricated out of a mould

11 Latin original: Adamus Dominicus Italus […] candelas cereas obtulit, quibus nomen suum et caussam appingi curavit. 12 For example in Diva Montis Sancti: “In the same year 1659, Honourable Lord Servatius Engled, Lord in Mnissek, invoking the Holy Virgin, was healed from severe pain of head and breasts and he sent a silver head and breast in life size to Svatá Hora.” Latin original: Hoc ipso Anno 1659, Generosus D. Servatius Engel, Dominus in Mnissek, in atroci capitis et pectoris dolore Divam Virginem implorans curatur et justae magnitudinis caput et pectus ex argento ad S. Montem mittit. (Balbín 1665:441)

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and sold right at the pilgrimage site (Wood 2011:223),13 but they could be custom-made as well. We can still find a lot of these objects made of silver sheets in churches in Poland or Bavaria, a few wooden and waxen models have also survived.14 Besides parts of the body devotees also offered their crutches that they no longer needed after a miracle. Except for one mention in Arsenius’s work about Stará Boleslav (Arsenius 1629: unpaginated, quoted also by Balbín 1677:17), they are omitted both in primary and secondary sources. We can only guess that crutches were given relatively often based on a few altarpieces depicting them and some more recent examples, for instance in Lourdes or Częstochowa, but they were probably not worthy of mentioning. Another large group documented in the text of Czech origin, and supported also by preserved objects, consists of figures and figurines of all sizes and materials. We can find life-size figurines in wax, some of them even clothed, which make a very realistic impression (Angeletti 1980:46). Wax statues of nuns are also mentioned in Balbín’s Diva Turzanesis, but he does not give any information about their size (Balbín 1658:136). The Habsburg rulers, for instance, offered a statue in silver or gold of the weight of a newborn baby after its birth.15 A silver figure of a new-born baby is also mentioned by Balbín (Balbín 1665:443) and the litterae annuae (LA 1658:22; LA 1659:f. 265v.), but again without any further information on its size. Devotees typically offered much smaller

13 We still can see these today in the form of small metal votive hearts sold in a lot of pilgrimage churches. 14 Examples of eyes can be found in Jaeger 1979, waxen parts of the body, see Angeletti 1980. 15 For example, a golden statue of a baby was given to the Virgin Mary in Mariazell after the birth of Maria Theresa (Stollberg-Rilinger 2017:12).

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figurines of wax or metal, which sometimes only roughly resembled a human figure (FIG. 7). Jewellery, usually made of silver and gold with inserted gemstones, makes another very common group of ex-votos. This is the most common offering in the litterae annuae, and books of miracles also mention it very often. Both of these textual sources also bring records about precious fabrics and liturgical garments. They emphasise their value and beauty, as they were often heavily embroidered in gold and silver and embellished with gemstones. Other valuable artefacts mentioned both by Balbín and the litterae annuae include liturgical objects, lamps, decorations for shrines and clothes for the miraculous images. People also offered money or raw materials. We know about them from a few mentions in books of miracles16 and the litterae annuae, but these mentions are rather rare. Moreover, it is not always clear whether they are a votive offering or a donation for the site. On the other hand, the line between these two categories is just our analytical tool and early modern devotees did not necessarily need to distinguish between them. The list of offerings at Svatá Hora from 1657 in the litterae annuae is introduced in this way: I also add offerings from very pious people that were either offered to the Virgin at Svatá Hora by generous hands, or brought to the miraculous statue to show gratitude. (LA 1657:f. 173r.)17

16 Donation of money is mentioned in Balbín 1665:355, 389, 440; Balbín 1677: 26–27, 49–50 (both cases also in Arsenius 1729); Balbín 1658:105-106. There is also one record of offering raw wax in Balbín 1665:400. 17 Latin original: Addo quoque nonnulla piissimorum hominum anathemata, vel liberali manu B. Virginis S. Montis oblata, vel grati animi causa ad statuam Miraculosam appensa.

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There are also a lot of other things that were given as ex-votos that I encountered only in single occurrences and that remind us that nearly anything could have been and probably also was offered. Balbín in Diva Monstis Sancti, for example, mentions one donation of a monastic garment (Balbín 1665:441), a rosary (ibid.: 277),18 a floral wreath (ibid.: 264) or two examples of offering live sheep (ibid.: 257–258 310–312); in the Epitomes, he mentions cutoff hair (Balbín 1677:36)19 or a book (ibid.: 52). The following table shows the number of different types of offerings mentioned by Bohuslav Balbín in each of his three works about Czech Marian pilgrimage sites.20 I do not include ex-votos from the litterae annue, since the text often lists them without giving the number of the objects and therefore I cannot quantify them.21 Votive offering Pictures Candles Jewellery Body parts Silver objects Fabric Liturgical objects Chasuble

Svatá Hora 23 16 16 16 11 9 3 6

Stará Boleslav 30 7 5 4 2 1 5 1

Tuřany

Total

1 1 1 1 -

54 23 21 21 14 11 8 7

18 We can still find a lot of recent rosaries at modern pilgrimage sites, for example in Częstochowa. 19 Cut-off hair is also mentioned in Andree 1904:177–178. 20 I do not include Arsenius’ text since all the miracles and votives he mentions are included in Balbín’s work about Stará Boleslav. 21 For example: “Beside this also many gold rings, necklaces, a lot of silk and linen fabrics.“ Latin original: Praeterea annuli plurimi aurei, corallia, sericea lineaque supellex multa. LA 1657:f. 173v.

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Clothes for miraculous image Figures, statues, figurines Money Lamps Live sheep Candleholders Unspecified offerings Others TOTAL

6 5 3 1 2 1 7 6 131

1 2 2 1 2 4 67

1 1 1 7

7 6 6 4 2 2 9 10 205

The Miracle Ex-votos were presented as expressions of gratitude for a miracle or divine help, but critical reading of early modern sources implies that their relation to the miracle, the votary and the Virgin Mary is much more complicated and needs to be addressed in more detail. Miracle stories could serve as a means of promotion of a pilgrimage site and thus the clergy in charge of the sites ensured and encouraged their recording and archiving. They either wrote the stories down based on oral testimonies of the pilgrims or the pilgrims themselves brought hand-written testimonies as proof of the miracles. These stories were then collected and edited into printed books that could reach a larger audience and attract attention to the site (Holubová 2001:68–70). The far most common type of miracle stories in my sources are miracles that healed diseases or injuries. Significantly less frequent but still quite common are miracles dealing with natural disasters or military attacks; some stories include also the saving of livestock or property. Nearly every miracle story begins with some sort of human suffering or extreme danger that the people involved cannot solve or avert. The stories often talk about the helplessness of doctors or the certainty of impending death. In the moment of 275

despair, people turn to the divine power, in our case the Virgin Mary, for help with a prayer that is very often accompanied by a vow. People usually promised a pilgrimage to a particular shrine, pious deeds such as prayer or fasting, and votive offerings. Only after making the promise the Virgin Mary answers the prayer and helps the devotee. The story, however, does not end here. After receiving divine help, it was necessary to fulfil the vow ‒ in the case of recorded miracles, this usually involved a pilgrimage accompanied by bringing some type of testimony of the miracle and sometimes also a votive offering. If the person had not fulfilled what they had promised, the miracle could have been undone and the illness would have returned. Catholic theologians claim it is only God who has the power to perform miracles and whom people can ask for help whereas the Virgin Mary and all other saints can only intercede on behalf of the devotee. When we read the miracle stories, this, however, does not seem to be the case. The Virgin Mary always stands in the centre of the prayer, although the formulation of the invocation varies. Sometimes, in accordance with Church teachings, she is asked to pray for the person to God, but often the devotee calls her directly without any mention of God. In some instances, the devotee even specifies a particular manifestation of Mary at a specific pilgrimage site where they are asking for help. In these cases, the Virgin does not act as one being but each of her images is approached as a unique agent, as I have already argued. Our understanding of who was credited with the miracle is also limited by the fact that we cannot take the written evidence at face value because it might have been altered to better suit the Catholic doctrine. Even if not, we have access only to what the pilgrims remembered and wrote down after the events and not to what they experienced at the moment. They inevitably constructed the story in a particular way 276

and with particular intentions. These curated stories, however, also spread and could influence other people’s perceptions of miraculous events and their actions in similar situations. In all of the cases I am dealing with, a pilgrimage followed the miracle and there is no such thing as a pilgrimage to the one Virgin Mary ‒ it always leads to a particular image of her at a particular site. Regardless of the receiver of the initial prayer and the vow, the miracle was finally ascribed to a particular Marian manifestation by a pilgrimage and by writing the story down at a particular site. However, my scope of interest and sources might create a distorted view, as they by definition capture only the miracles pertaining to a specific pilgrimage site. Other types of divine power performing miracles might exist as well. People, for example, brought gifts to small Marian images attached to trees in the woods (Lepovitz 1990:762) but this practice is poorly documented. The promise plays a key role in miracle stories and it needs to be explored in more detail, even more so as I am dealing with ex-votos, which, as already mentioned, means promised or from a promise. The vow was usually made before the miracle and fulfilled afterwards but sometimes the order of events was reversed and the pilgrimage and offering of gifts preceded the miracle.22 The gifts offered before miracles in the hope to move the Virgin to help did not align with the official doctrine. From a theological point of view, votives served only to express gratitude and were not directly involved in the process of miraculous healing and thus church authorities tried to suppress this practice of offering in ad22 For example in this story: “He sent a silver heart to the Holy Virgin and his heart and spirit followed it. The Holy Virgin moved by this gift released his heart from pain.” Latin original: Divae Virgini cor argenteum misit et corde animoque secutus est. Diva velut jam pro preada sua solicita, cor a dolore vindicavit […]. (Balbín 1665:440).

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vance (Wood 2011:221). In reality, the offering of a promised gift was not a purely voluntary action but rather a necessity. The votives given before the miracle show more clearly that they should convince the Virgin Mary to act in favour of the votary. Their offering is ruled by the notion of reciprocity and the material object acts as a payment for divine help (Maniura 2009:421). The same notion hides also behind other vows and ex-votos. It seems the Virgin Mary came to help only after she had been promised a reward of some kind, as in this example: “The Holy Virgin, who always watches over us, came invoked by a promise and repelled pains”23 (Balbín 1665:439). The relation between the giving of votives and the miracles thus resembles an economic exchange and is based on cultural norms. It “imposes an obligation to offer a gift in return” (Maniura 2009:421). Although this reciprocity is not the same with regard to the divine being as among humans, it still seems to follow very similar rules. Every relationship requires both sides to actively maintain it ‒ the devotees fulfil it by promises and offerings, the Virgin Mary by answering their prayers. We perceive the votives primarily as material objects and indeed “[t]he material outcome of each vow was an artefact, but what was vowed in each case was an action: to make, to offer, to place” (Maniura 2009:421). These objects qualify as ex-votos only because they are part of the whole process of promising, giving and displaying at the pilgrimage site. All of these aspects are and have to be in effect together to constitute ex-votos.

23 Latin original: Beatissima Virgo, quae pro nobis semper vigilat, voto invoca venit, dolores depulit…

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The offering as a portrait This is not to diminish the importance of material votives, on the contrary, I am trying to emphasise the role of artefacts as such and show their potential compared to other non-material promised things. I would like to argue that the power of ex-votos lies in their performative character. Once placed and displayed at the pilgrimage site, they not only attest to the miracle but also actively constitute a relationship between the votary and the Virgin Mary. I follow J. L. Austin’s Speech Act Theory (Austin 1992), according to which speech and language do not simply describe the existing world but by the means of utterances or speech acts they constitute new reality and the world or our perception of the world. Austin’s theory can, however, apply also to other aspects of communication than just language and can be useful in the study of visual and material culture. To start with more straightforward examples, I would like to cite Maniura on a votive figurine from Italy from the second half of the 15th century (Maniura 2009:417–424). This life-size figurine was made as a portrait of its giver and manifested his presence in the shrine. It was most likely situated directly beneath a crucifix at the church wall and thus put in a position of continuous prayer to crucified Christ. It manifested and reminded the votary’s adoration of Christ but it did not only stand for this adoration and prayer. Regardless of the actions or attitude of the votary, his image was always present in front of Christ, always praying to him and thus it ensured and maintained the relationship with Christ on its own. This notion applies to all votive figures and figurines; they are brought to the presence of a miraculous image where they represent the votary and act on their behalf in relation to the Virgin Mary. Only some of the figurines, however, capture the appearance 279

of the giver and their specific features. Sometimes the figures were also signed or carried the donor’s coat of arms or were of the same weight or size as the votary (Holmes 2009:163–164). More often the figurines represent a general human figure, usually clearly male or female, but with no personal features whereby they could be a portrait of any person. The connection between the votary and the votive figurine lies only partly in the similarity; even though we cannot dismiss this possibility altogether as the figurines still bear the form of a human. Maniura claims they often tried to convey, rather, the votary’s humbleness and social status than their facial features (Maniura, 2009:420). The other aspect of mimesis, as indicated above, comes into play here as well; the objects become connected with the votary by physical contact, that is, the act of buying, bringing to the site and making the offering. In the theory of sympathetic magic, the mimetic object is usually used by a third party to bring harm to the represented person (Frazer 1922:11–47) but in the case of votives, the mimetic object is used directly by the represented person to act in their favour, very similarly to the power of miraculous images discussed earlier. Both Balbín and the litterae annuae report on offerings in the form of statues but, as I have already said, they hardly ever provide any information regarding the appearance or size. However, the relation to the giver is stated in some of the cases, as in this example: “[a prelate] placed a small silver statue (his own image) in front of the Virgin and added a silver gilded tooth” (Balbín 1665:366).24 This suggests the statue must have been signed in some way so that other pilgrims could distinguish it as a portrait of a particular per24 Latin original: [Praelatus] statuam parvam argenteam (suam scilicet effigiem) addit dente itidem argenteo inaurato, ante Divam deposuit. The same statue and tooth are also mentioned in LA 1657:f. 173v.: argenteam sui statuam cum inaurato dente.

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son. The fact that the similitude to the votary is mentioned implies that it was perceived as an important aspect of votive figures. Votive pictures also depict the votary and operate in the same way as figurines; their relation to the miraculous image, however, slightly differs. Whereas figurines represent only the votary and need to be placed in front of the sacred images to be effective, pictures depict both the devotee and the Virgin Mary who is helping or to whom the devotee is praying (Kriss-Rettenbeck 1972:156– 159), or at least this seems to be the most common form of votive pictures. Balbín does not take any interest in the visual part of the pictures but he does provide a description of the painted scene a few times, and in these cases, he mentions the votary being depicted ‒ once a man dragged by a horse (Balbín 1677:98) and once a mother with children praying to the Virgin (Balbín 1677:94). Similarly to figures, pictures do not need to capture an existing relationship and devotion outside the picture itself, but stand for them and pray for the votary through the depiction. Contrary to figurines, devotion is already part of the votive pictures regardless of their position. The pictures were still placed at the pilgrimage site which caused a multiplication of images of the Virgin Mary. Her miraculous image was situated at the altar but numerous replications could be found around in votive pictures. Through them, the power of the particular Marian manifestation was shown in different situations for all the other pilgrims to see. The votive pictures are the most narrative of all types of offerings and serve as testimonies of the miracles. Therefore they could be great means of promoting the power and prestige of each pilgrimage site. This, however, does not lessen their role in constituting and maintaining a relationship between the devotee and the divine power. The inscription ex-voto found in most pictures ensures this role is not forgotten or laid aside. 281

To move to other types of ex-votos, parts of the body can also be perceived as a kind of portrait of the giver. Body parts cannot represent a specific person, since all hands, legs and eyes look more or less the same, moreover, a lot of the extant examples were produced from moulds in large quantities and then sold at the pilgrimage sites (Wood 2011:223). Despite all this, Wood considers them portraits, because the context created them as portraits. The site and the display railing signify that this very object has made its way out of the artisan’s shop and into the hands of the votary. Simply by purchasing the object and transferring it from shop to shrine, the votary makes it his own. [...] To behold a display of wax hands and feet and organs is something like coming across a box of unlabelled nineteenth-century photographs. They are portraits even if we don’t know the names of the portrayed (Wood 2011:223). The resemblance is again accompanied by physical contact, the act of handling the object and offering it, which makes it connected to the giver. In the textual sources, these objects are associated with miraculous healings of a particular part of the body and thus the votives act as reminders of the disease or injury and the recovery. Homes argues that body parts were perceived both as sacred and powerful when in the form of relics of saints; and vulnerable and as symbols of suffering when in the form of cut-off heads of enemies (Holmes 2009:163). This double valence can be seen in votive body parts as these objects directly point to pain and suffering and show ways of overcoming it. They communicate this message both to the Virgin Mary in the hope of ensuring her grace and aid and to other pilgrims coming to the site, who are thus assured of the power of the Marian image. A lot of the votives mentioned both by Balbín and the litterae annuae, such as candles, jewellery, liturgical objects or fabrics do not bear any visual link to the votary and cannot be considered a 282

portrait of any type. Even when the similitude is missing, the link to the votary is maintained by the physical contact, the handling of the gift and offering it at the pilgrimage site. In our society nowadays, we often value objects given to us as gifts and create emotional bonds with them because they remind us of the person that gifted them to us, maybe also of the occasion and the act of giving. In the same way, any material offering that remained in front of the eyes of the Virgin Mary in her shrine could remind her of the votary and the miraculous event. As Maniura says, we are not dealing just with mimetic objects – pictures on walls and statues that in certain respects look like people – we are also dealing with mimetic rituals: rituals that mime social interaction and which actively constitute the relationship between devotees and saints (Maniura 2009:422). Two stories, one pertaining to Svatá Hora (Balbín 1665:434) and the other to Stará Boleslav (Arsenius 1629: unpaginated; mentioned also by Balbín 1677:30–31), show that the offering of jewellery did not have only high financial value but also emotional importance. In both of these stories, the Virgin Mary appeared in a dream to a woman and asked her to offer a piece of jewellery that was the most precious to her. The connection of the offered object to the votary is thus made very clear. Conclusion In my paper, I analysed 17th-century miracle books and chronicles from Czech Marian pilgrimage sites and tried to reconstruct what types of objects were offered as ex-votos. Based on these texts, I showed the importance of material artefacts in the pilgrimage practice and miracle stories. The destination of every Marian pilgrimage was a shrine with an image of the Virgin Mary, that is, 283

a material object. I argue these images do not only represent the Virgin but rather make her physically present in this world and are endowed with the power to perform miracles. This power is based on a mimetic relation, i.e., similarity and physical contact with Mary or her already miraculous images. The same mimetic principle can be observed in votives in the form of figurines, pictures and body parts. These objects become portraits of the votary through similarity and contact and are able to act on their behalf in front of the Marian image. Even though not all votives depict the votary or their body parts, they are still connected to the giver by the act of offering. Ex-votos engage in continuous communication with the Virgin Mary at the pilgrimage site and ensure the relationship between her, the votary and Mary’s divine help. However, the significance of ex-votos incorporated numerous different aspects and the mimetic relation to the votary is only one of them. Votives also played an important role in communication with other pilgrims. The artefacts served as a visual book of miracles and showed everyone the power and grace of the Virgin Mary. They did not convey the narrative but declared a miracle had happened. The great number of displayed offerings attested to the power of the Marian manifestation and encouraged people to pray to her in times of despair. They also promoted the pilgrimage site and helped to increase its authority and influence (Holubová 2006:110–111). We should not forget the more profane roles of votive offerings either. The highly valuable objects especially, communicated information about the wealth and social status of the votary. Gifts might have also helped to gain worldly influence and express one’s power. It is important to realise that the various motives for offering ex-votos are not mutually exclusive, they could all be present simultaneously and together created the effectiveness and importance of the offerings. Two main aspects of ex-votos arise from 284

my research. Firstly, they possess strong performative character and have the power to influence the course of events in favour of the votary. The promise of an offering made to the Virgin Mary also gives people the ability to affect situations that would be otherwise out of control. Secondly, votives ensured communication between the votary and the Virgin Mary and reinforced their relationship. They also conveyed information about the miracle, the power of the Marian image and the wealth and piety of the votary towards other pilgrims and thus served as a means of communication among people coming to the pilgrimage site.

List of figures: 1. The pilgrimage site Svatá Hora. Photograph by the author. 2. The Virgin Mary of Częstochowa. 3. Votive pictures in the cloister of the pilgrimage church in Wambierzyce. Photograph by the author. 4. Votive picture, pilgrimage site Maria Deutstetten in Veringenstadt, beginning of the 19th c. Photograph by Th. Fink Veringen, from https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Veringenstadt-Deutstetten_Votivtafeln_004.jpg [accessed 4.12. 2019]. 5. Votiv picture, pilgrimage site Maria Deutstetten in Veringenstadt, beginning of the 19th c.  Photograph by Th. Fink Veringen, from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Veringenstadt-Deutstetten_Votivtafeln_010.jpg [accessed 4.12. 2019]. 6. Votive picture, pilgrimage site Pilgramsberg bei Straubing, 1882. From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Votivtafel_aus_Pilgramsberg_bei_Straubing.jpg [accessed 4.12. 2019].

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7. Iron votive figure, Buttenweisen, undated. From Andree, R. (1904). Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volks in Süddeutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, fig. 39. 8. Wax votive offerings, pilgrimage site in Würzburg. Photograph by the author. 9. Silver votive body parts in the church in Wambierzyce.Photograph by the author. 10. Votive candles, the pilgrimage church in Wambierzyce.

Figures:

FIG 1. The pilgrimage site Svatá Hora. Photograph by the author.

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FIG 2. The Virgin Mary of Częstochowa.

FIG 3. Votive pictures in the cloister of the pilgrimage church in Wambierzyce. Photograph by the author. 287

FIG 4. Votive picture, pilgrimage site Maria Deutstetten in Veringenstadt, beginning of the 19th c. Photograph by Th. Fink Veringen, from https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:VeringenstadtDeutstetten_Votivtafeln_004.jpg [Last Accessed 14. 10. 2023].

FIG 5. otive picture, pilgrimage site Maria Deutstetten in Veringenstadt, beginning of the 19th c. Photograph by Th. Fink Veringen, from https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:VeringenstadtDeutstetten_Votivtafeln_010.jpg [Last Accessed 14. 10. 2023]. 288

FIG 6. Votive picture, pilgrimage site Pilgramsberg bei Straubing, 1882. From https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File: Votivtafel_aus_Pilgramsberg_bei_Straubing.jpg [Last Accessed 14. 10. 2023].

FIG 7. Iron votive figure, Buttenweisen, undated. From Andree, R. (1904). Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volks in Süddeutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, fig. 39. 289

FIG 8. Wax votive offerings, pilgrimage site in Würzburg. Photograph by the author.

FIG 9. Silver votive body parts in the church in Wambierzyce. Photograph by the author. 290

FIG 10. Votive candles, the pilgrimage church in Wambierzyce. Photograph by the author.

REFERENCES Andree, Richard 1904 Votive und Weihegaben des katholischen Volks in Süddeutschland: Ein Beitrag zur Volkskunde. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn. Angeletti, Charlotte 1980 Geformtes Wachs: Kerzen, Votive, Wachsfiguren. München: Callwey. Austin, John Langshaw 291

1992 [1962] How to do Things with Words. J. O. Urmson – Marina Sbisà, eds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bartlová, Milena 2012 Skutečná přítomnost: středověký obraz mezi ikonou a virtuální realitou [The Real Presence. Medieval Picture Between Icon and Virtual Reality]. Praha: Argo. Bastl, Ondřej 1995 Rušení klášterů v Čechách a na Moravě za Josefa II [Abolition of the Monasteries of Bohemia and Moravia, Under the Emperor Joseph II]. Historická geografie 28:155–182. Baumgarten, Jens 2004 Konfession, Bild und Macht: Visualisierung als katholisches Herrschafts- und Disziplinierungskonzept in Rom und im habsburgischen Schlesien (1560–1740). Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz. Belting, Hans 1996 Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2005 Das echte Bild: Bildfragen als Glaubensfragen. München: Beck. Brauneck, Manfred 1978 Religiöse Volkskunst: Votivgaben, Andachtsbilder, Hinterglas, Rosenkranz, Amulette. Köln: DuMont. Frazer, James George 1922 The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. New York: The Macmillan Company. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00400-3

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Freedberg, David 1989 The power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gell, Alfred 1998 Art and Agency: an Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hačer, Anselm ca. 1880 Vambeřice: popis počátku a události jejich. Praha: Jan Spurný. Hoffmann, Michael 2005 Mariaschein – Bohosudov: ein Wahllfahtsort im Dornröschenschlaf. Brno: L. Marek. Holmes, Megan 2009 Ex-votos. Materiality, Memory and Cult. In The Idol in the Age of Art. Objects, Devotions and the Early Modern World. Michael Cole – Rebecca Zorach, eds. 159–181. Burlington: Ashgate. /St Andrews Studies in Reformation History/ Holubová, Markéta 2001 Textové a obrazové zaznamenání svatohorských zázraků ve světle barokní doby. Podbrdsko 8:68–75. 2006 Panna Marie ve světle barokních knih zázraků [The Virgin Mary in the Light of Baroque Books of Miracles]. In Svätec a jeho funkcie v spoločnosti II. [The Saint and his Functions in Society]. Rastislav Kožiak – Jaroslav Nemeš, eds. 105–113. Bratislava: Chronos: Centrum pre štúdium kresťanstva. Jaeger, Wolfgang

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1979 Augenvotive. Votivgaben, Votivbilder, Amulette. Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke. Kriss-Rettenbeck, Lenz 1957 Eisenopfer. Das Eisenopfer in Brauchtum und Geschichte. München: Max Hueber Verlag. /Volksglaube Europas/ 1961 Das Votivbild. München: Georg D. W. Callwey. 1963 Bilder und Zeichen religiösen Volksglaubens: Rudolf Kriss zum 60. Geburtstag. München: Georg D.W. Callwey. 1972 Ex voto. Zeichen, Bild und Abbild im christlichen Votivbrauchtum. Zürich – Freiburg: Atlantis-Verlag. Lepovitz, Helena Waddy 1990 The Religious Context of Crisis Resolution in the votive paintings of Catholic Europe. Journal of Social History 23(4):755– 782. https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh/23.4.755 Maniura, Robert 2004 Pilgrimage to Images in the Fifteenth Century: the Origins of the Cult of Our Lady of Częstochowa. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2009 Ex Votos, Art and Pious Performace. Oxford Art Journal 32(3):409–425. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kcp034 O’Malley, John W. 2013 Trent. What Happened at the Council. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674067608 Schatz, Klaus

1997 Allgemeine Konzilien: Brennpunkte der Kirchengeschichte. Paderborn: Schöningh. https://doi.org/10.36198/9783838519760 Štajnochr, Vítězslav 2000 Panna Maria divotvůrkyně. Nauka o Panně Marii, mariánská ikonografie, mariánská poutní místa [The Blessed Virgin Mary: a Treatise on the Virgin Mary, Her Iconography, and Her Pilgrimage Places]. Uherské Hradiště: Slovácké muzeum. Stollberg-Rillinger, Barbara 2017 Maria Theresia: Die Kaiserin in ihrer Zeit. Eine Biographie. München: C. H. Beck. Taussig, Michael 1993 Mimesis and Alterity: a Particular History of the Senses. New York: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315021409 Turner, Victor – Turner, Edith 1978 Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Valentová, Kateřina 2010 Litterae annuae provinciae Bohemiae (1623–1755). Folia Historica Bohemica 25(1):23–49. Weinryb, Ittai 2016 Introduction. In Ex Voto. Votive Giving Across Cultures. Ittai Weinryb, ed. 1–22. New York: Bard Graduate Center. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12fw8bd.5 Wood, Christopher S. 2011 The Votive Scenario. Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 59– 60:206–227. https://doi.org/10.1086/resvn1ms23647791

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Wünnenberg, Rolf 1966 Andescher Votiv-Kerzen: die Kunst auf Wachs: ein alter religiöser Volksbrauch in Bayern. Augsburg: Multi-Druck Verlag. Early printed books Arsenius z Radbuzy, Kašpar 1629 Pobožná knížka o Blahoslavené Panně Mariji. Praha: Pavel Sessyus. Balbín, Bohuslav 1658 Diva Turzanensis: seu historia originis et miraculorum magnae dei hominumque matris Mariae. Olmutii: Ettel. 1665 Diva Montis Sancti. Pragae: Georgij Czernoch. 1677 Epitome historica rerum Bohemicarum. Libri VI. et VII. Pragae: typis Universitatis Carolo-Ferdinandeae. Borromeo, Carlo 1577 Instructiones Fabricae et Supellectilis Ecclesiasticae. Mediolani, apud Pacificum Pontium, Typographum Illustriss. Cardinalis S. Praxedis, Archiepiscopi. [online] https://www.memofonte.it (Last Accessed: 11. 17. 2022.) Gumppenberg, Wilhelm 1657–1659 Atlas Marianus Sive De Imaginibus Deiparae Per Orbem Christianum Miraculosis. Haenlin. Waterworth, James, ed. – trans. The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent. London: Burns and Oates – New York: Catholic Publication Society. 296

Published sources Council of Trent (1545–1563) 1890 Canones et decreta sacrosancti oecumenici Concilii Tridentini sub Paulo III, Julio III et Pio IV pontificibus maximis, cum appendice theologiae candidatis Perutili. Augustae Taurinorum: Petrus Marietti. Unpublished sources LA 1657 = Jesus Maria. Annuae literae provinciae Bohemiae [Societatis Jesu] 1654, 1655, 1657, 1659, XXIII.C.105/2, NK ČR, ff. 172r–173r. LA 1658 = [Annuae literae provinciae Boemiae Societatis Jesu 1658], XXIII.C.105/3, NK ČR, pp. 14–23. LA 1659 = Jesus Maria. Annuae literae provinciae Bohemiae [Societatis Jesu] 1654, 1655, 1657, 1659, XXIII.C.105/2, NK ČR, ff. 261r–265v. LA 1660 = [Annuae literae provinciae Boemiae Societatis Jesu 1660–1664], XXIII.C.105/6, NK ČR, ff. 24r–25r. LA 1661 = [Annuae literae provinciae Boemiae Societatis Jesu 1660–1664], XXIII.C.105/6, NK ČR, ff. 94r–97v. Databases Votivdatenbank. [online] http://www.philfak.uni-rostock.de/tthist/VOTIV/maske.htm Accessed: 11. 14. 2022.)

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11. Roman Catholic liturgy and mimesis. A dynamic paradox Benjámin Varga The following paper is a “side product” of my research1 on the phenomenology of liturgical rites in Western Europe. This topic is very diverse and quite complex, so I will try to provide only an essential summary here. Our basic question can be formulated as follows: What is the proper place of mimesis or mimetic action in the context of the Roman Catholic liturgy? As a point of departure, we have the cultic centre of Christian liturgy, the eucharistic rite whose mimetic character is so obvious, it does not need to be demonstrated.2 (From this point of view the differences in the theological and spiritual interpretations of the sacrificial rite of the Mass are irrelevant.) The Church is fortunate to have at its disposal the New Testament revelation of Christ’s words and deeds, including the words of t institution that instruct the disciples to repeat what he had done in concrete terms: “Do this in memory of me.” Here the word ‘memory’ is very emphatic, and the adverb of time “as often as” is used (1Cor

1 Our Research Group of Liturgical History is operating at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, currently under the aegis of the “Momentum” (Lendület) Programme of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 2 Naturally, it is quite impossible to provide even a rough review of the pertinent scholarly literature within the framework of the present work (for a list of the literature we used, see the bibliography at the end). We can only recommend here a few important scholarly works that will shed light on what we are proposing here: Essen 2007; Bradshaw–Johnson 2012.

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11,25-26). With this commandment, Christ instructs the disciples to perform a ritual mimesis, and not only a silent meditation on particular events of salvation history. He commands a series of acts for which he immediately provides an interpretative context by the words of institution: he radically identifies the bread and wine with his own body and blood physically present at the Supper (once again, the exact nature and consequent history of theologically interpreting this identification are irrelevant from our perspective). Moreover, according to ecclesiastical tradition, the words of the institution were originally performed within the context of another rite, itself strongly mimetic in character, namely, the Jewish Pasch. The ritually celebrated Passover Meal (Seder)3 annually commemorates the liberation of Israel from Egypt, both with verbal remembrance and symbolic re-enactment. It was within this ritual context that Christ decided to institute the Eucharist by reinterpreting the events of the Jewish Passover in light of his own Pasch. (The details of what can be known of the actual observances of the Seder in the 1st century BC are not important for us here). What is important is that based on the words and circumstances of the institution, and the ecclesiastical practice established to perpetuate it, the central element of Christian liturgy is evidently and closely connected with Jewish ritual observance, which the Church – following its Founder’s example – sees as a prefiguration of its own ritual; a new ritual that is both an explanation and a reinter3 From our point of view, it is almost immaterial whether the Last Supper was an actual paschal meal or just a very similar ritual meal on the evening before, with which Christ anticipated the official feast he would not be able to celebrate on account of his impending Passion. The debate on this question is still very active and it transcends denominations and scientific disciplines. For an up-to-date summary of arguments on both sides, see Jonathan Klawan’s blog: Klawan 2016, as well as Burrows 2007 and Pitre 2016.

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pretation of what came before. It seems evident then that the texts and gestures of the new Christian ritual must be seen in continuity with their liturgical antecedents, while it is also true that the liturgy of the new religious community was likewise in need of separating and differentiating itself from what preceded it. (We shall return to this ambivalent relationship later.) Many things were determined in the life of the Church by the fact that it had a liturgy before it systematically developed its theology. Summarising what we have said so far and reiterating our phenomenological perspective, based on the Eucharist we would normally expect that while the early Christian liturgy drew abundantly on Jewish ritual traditions and reinterpreted them, it also celebrated the “Christ event” (with all its substantial elements, including the birth, public life and sacrificial death of the Redeemer) dramatically and mimetically during its richly-articulated and multi-layered liturgical cycle (almost the same way as in its fully-developed, mature state many centuries later). Yet what we see is that the development of the annual cycle was the result of a long stretch of liturgical evolution. The first Christian calendar only knew one privileged day of the secular year: the Lord’s Day, that is Sunday, the day of Christ’s resurrection which was celebrated by a eucharistic ritual, only once a week. Weekdays were sanctified using another liturgical action, the recitation of the Psalmody, i.e., the Divine Office, which at first – especially in the earliest stages of its development – lacked any real dramatic element. It seems certain that already at a very early date, the Church commemorated Christ’s salvation in springtime, as well as the death of the martyrs on the day of their heavenly birth, but we see no evidence of anything more than the usual vigils and eucharistic celebrations – no proof of any “interesting” (popular, dramatic) rituals in specific connection with those days. 301

Let us see an example, that of the Mandatum, the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday.4 Just like the Eucharist, this very suggestive ritual, too, has its origin in the Gospels. It was “established” at the same time as the Eucharist, the disciples present at the Last Supper likewise received a commandment to imitate their Master’s example. Here, too, the Founder provided an interpretative context, introduced by the question: “Do you know what I have done to you?” (Jn 13,12). We know that as a result, the early Church was in the habit of ritually practising the same, but not in a liturgical framework, “only” as a sign of brotherly love. Sources from the 4th century testify that the Last Supper was commemorated by a eucharistic rite, but at first, it was not accompanied by the ritual washing of feet, at least not until the 6th century (although it seems natural to connect these two). Those who are intimately attached to dramatic elements of the Catholic liturgy such as the Palm Sunday liturgy’s reenactment of Christ’s entrance to Jerusalem may be surprised to learn that these elements are not authentic early Christian practices, and – insofar as it can now be ascertained scientifically – they were virtually unknown until the “dramatic revolution” of the Western liturgy in the 10th and 11th centuries.5 We know from the diary of Egeria, this famous pilgrim of the Holy Land, that in Jerusalem, at the end of the 4th century, children carried palm branches in the Palm Sunday procession, but this custom was not adopted by the West until much later. Even in the East, it was more likely a popular paraliturgical practice, tolerated rather than supported by the guardians of the official liturgical rites. It had 4 See https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/ (Last Accessed: 11. 07. 2022.). 5 For an historical perspective on the question, see Bedingfield 2002 and Swanson 1992. For an aesthetic and phenomenological perspective, see De Jong 2007.

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come into existence locally, because of its obvious connection to the holy sites in Jerusalem, while the official liturgy – its texts and rubrics, chants and gestures – failed to reflect on or legislate about this custom for a long time. The Western blessing of the branches is a 9th-century custom of Frankish origin. It was indeed a sign of the acknowledgement of this ritual’s liturgical character and legitimacy when a proper rite of blessing upon the branches was finally prescribed in the official liturgy. To keep the long story short: many questions arise in connection with what has been adumbrated above, two of which are deemed most important: (1) Why did the Western liturgy resist for a long time the official adoption of these dramatic and mimetic rites, and (2) why did this resistance eventually break down in the post-Carolingian age? Our attempts to come up with answers remain, of course, on the level of hypotheses. The first attempt seeks the answer in the Mass liturgy and its fundamental characteristics.6 We have said earlier that the eucharistic rite has a strong mimetic character, but it goes beyond mimesis. The liturgy contains, employs and mobilises profane gestures and elements, but at the same time, it also takes them out of their original secular context, and elevates them to a transcendent level; they are interpreted not from the temporal but from an eternal perspective. The first method of “elevation” is stylisation: the rite of Mass commemorates and re-represents the bloody sacrifice of the Redeemer, but strictly by employing unbloody means. “Although there is no bloodshed here, there is a divine blessing; redemption is abundantly poured upon us, the sacred dew-fall of his blood” – says the popular Hungarian folk 6 The theological literature is superabundant on this question. For the aspect that interest us here, see Bradshaw–Johnson 2012; Essen 2007.

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hymn about the Eucharist. While the eucharistic sacrifice does re-present the Lamb of God, it does not offer and share an actual lamb in the context of sacramental communion (even though the sacrificial lamb is an essential element of the rite of the Jewish Passover – Pasch, as well). Instead, it communicates the Lamb of God under the species of bread and wine, under the elements of our daily sustenance and joy. The redemptive sufferings of Christ are not re-enacted in their brutal and radical concreteness, as they are considered impossible to be repeated. Liturgical theology likes to discuss this ambivalence of concrete, realistic representation and abstract stylizing in terms of “anamnesis contra mimesis.”7 According to this narrative, the eucharistic rite and its strong mimetic character also possess an anamnestic character. The salvific acts of Christ are represented using a ritual commemoration without “replaying” the actual events. A complete “re-living” in the physical sense, a total performance (in addition to being impractical and unfeasible) would become an obstacle to spiritual involvement, taking into consideration especially the fact that the inherent logic of the original event also pointed beyond itself. Putting it more simply: even if “outwardly” we could re-enact the foundational event in its physical reality (which we can not, of course), its re-living and repetition “inwardly” (meaning its whole spiritual and mental reality) would still be impossible. Consequently, there is a fragile balance and a mutual correlation between these fundamental characteristics, that is, between anamnesis and mimesis. This ambivalence in and of itself sets certain limitations to liturgical mimesis: the dramatic-mimetic

7 This problem is treated by Gittoes (2016) and Houtman–Poorthuis–Schwartz–Turner (2015) extensively.

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elements cannot take the rite over completely, and anamnesis is never to be utterly overshadowed. The second possible attempt also seeks the answer within the intrinsic coherence of the liturgy. It may seem like a contradiction at first, but in a certain sense, it is precisely the mimetic characteristics of the Mass rite that creates an obstacle to the further expansion of liturgical mimesis. The absolute primacy and unquestionable dignity of the Mass rite are paired with a natural demand for exclusivity: it separates itself from, and towers above, the rest of the liturgical rites. It bears no “competition,” it does not easily integrate anything new.8 It is not accidental that beyond the Mass rite – although the yearly liturgical cycle would allow for ample dramatisation – the official liturgy (meaning: that which is contained in regulative ceremonial books) employs mimetic rites almost exclusively during Holy Week (from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday). The liturgy of this period is in many ways extraordinary; thus, it may be more prone to giving room to elements that are also out of the ordinary. But not even during Holy Week can we witness the interruption of the Mass by these irregular rituals, they can only take place before or after the Mass. Other than during Holy Week, we can barely find dramatising rituals that have been admitted to the official liturgy of the Church, like, for example, the “Star Play” during Epiphany (dramatising the adoration of the three magi before the Christ-Child). Even this was only admitted within the context of the Divine Office, right between the two canonical hours usually performed together (Matins and Lauds), at the “soft spot” of their 8 In seeming contrast, see the special and modern custom of Spanish Corpus Christi Plays of eucharistic inspiration (at times performed in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament!): Arias 1980.

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conjunction, when the former had already ended but the latter had not yet begun. It is the common feature of official mimetic rites outside of the Mass liturgy that the mimetic rite can be omitted if necessity warrants it, that is, Maundy Thursday is “valid” without the washing of feet, while it is certainly not “valid” liturgically without the evening Mass. (Some of these rites have even been dropped out of the church’s public liturgy, for instance, the washing of feet was rediscovered only in the 20th century.) Another possible answer (just a reminder, our question was: why is it not self-evident that the liturgy can freely adopt mimetic elements) is that liturgical tradition always wants to trace every rite (not only the Mass liturgy) back to the scriptural commandments of its divine institution. The Church only practises something regularly and out of obligation, if she believes that she is bound by a divine command. Such is the case with the words of eucharistic institution, with the biblical statements that exhort God’s people to constant prayer and the recitation of the psalmody, and such are the biblical foundations for administering the sacraments: Baptism, Penance, Anointing of the Sick, etc. Even in the case of smaller benedictions, the Church always uses as a point of reference those passages in the Bible where God’s people are exhorted to bless things or impart blessings on someone. This means that the Church feels entitled to anoint the sick, but not to wave palm branches around on Palm Sunday, to cast “roles” for the singing of the Passion, or to build a holy sepulchre guarded by “knights of Christ.” The importance of this element in the historical phenomenon at hand is underscored by the fact (as indirect proof) that the Western liturgy was always reluctant to employ non-scriptural texts (e.g., hymns, sequences), since they – notwithstanding their undeniable beauty – are not canonical, nor come from a secure and reliable source. Both of these genres, long after they gained wide 306

acceptance, remained somewhat alien within the liturgical corpus; sequences, for example, can be omitted anytime, which is unthinkable in the case of a real item of the Mass Ordinary or Proper. Last but not least, we must mention among the possible explanations the strong sacramental “interest” of the Roman rite, that is, the fact that it manifestly focuses, whilst performing its sacramental rites (e.g., blessings, exorcisms, impositions of hands, etc.), not so much on sightly dramatic gestures, as on the communication or application of supernatural energies and sacramental powers. This used to be considered a specifically Roman characteristic (a mark of Roman “simplicity” or purism), and it was customary to set it against the supposed characteristics of other, non-Roman Western ritual traditions (Gallican, Mozarabic). This romantic characterology, however, is not supported by the sources. It seems that in the West, even before the above-mentioned “dramatic revolution,” every ritual family was characterised by an emphatic sacramentality. Not to mention that if there is any Romanitas identifiable in the Roman rite, it is the linguistic character of its orations, which is of truly antique origin. With its intricate structures, elaborate metaphors, and pleasing rhythmic prose, it can hardly be called puritanical. If anything, it is proof that the religion of ancient Rome was no stranger to theatrics. Whenever the liturgy adopts anything from public human activity into its sacred sphere, its impact hugely increases, with it the risk of “theatrical catharsis.” Normally (and traditionally) the priest performs the sacred ceremonies with his face to the altar, but when he performs the events of Palm Sunday (taking the role of Christ and mounting a donkey), or when he takes the unveiled cross and shows it to the people during the adoration of the cross on Good Friday, he steps into a new and somewhat dangerous role; his personal qualities and characteristics come to the fore, while his 307

official, strictly regulated liturgical acts sink into the background. Let me quote a 16th-century parable here: One friar decides that he has the skill to make half of the congregation cry and the other half laugh. On Good Friday, therefore, when it is customary to take a large crucifix to the middle of the altar and unveil it before the congregation, the friar carried the crucifix to the sanctuary with his face all sad and his eyes tearful. On that account, all the women and silly pietists began to weep bitterly. In the back, however, he rolled up his garments so that his buttocks and appendages became visible, and whoever caught a glimpse of this, roared with laughter.9 This story is an extreme example, but the lesson for us is not in whether it actually happened, but in the implicit message, that is, that individual representation by role play is risky business – a mimetic-dramatic rite creates a kind of reality. If during the singing of the Passion I cry out with the “synagogue:” “Crucify him!” I may mentally place myself in the situation, and ask: where would I stand, what would I do at Christ’s trial? The liturgy provides us with great opportunities for deep spiritual reflection and the understanding of intricate historical events. It is also possible, however, that the sight of the innocent Lamb’s cruel slaughter may incite vengeful feelings in me toward a certain demographic. There is no 9 The anecdote is first related in Hungarian by Péter Bornemisza (Ördögi kísértetek, 1578); its original is the Italian Girolamo Morlini’s 44th short story, but it can also be found in the works of other 16th century authors.

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space here to develop this theme, I can only make a passing allusion to the correlation between certain pogroms and the celebration of Easter in mediaeval Europe.10 The liturgy carries certain dangers with it, and liturgical catharsis is not always an innocent affair. Strictly speaking, the liturgical cult itself does not need drama, the believers are the ones who need it. For the Christian faithful who constantly hear that their religion is based on someone who from the inscrutable shadows of eternity stepped into the limelight of human history to change its self-destructive course, it is a natural desire to participate – insofar as it is possible – in the salvific events of history. Since we were not “there and then” in Jerusalem when he entered the city on the back of a donkey, when he ate the Last Supper with his disciples or when he was crucified on Mount Calvary, the believers would like to experience these things in the “here and now” at least by way of mimetic rites or step into those saving realities in a sacramental manner. We may call this the constant desire of popular religion, to which the “hierarchical Church” reacts in its own fashion: limits are set, frames are established, certain elements are adopted into the official liturgy, and others are simply tolerated on the side (the so-called “paraliturgical” rites), yet others are forbidden. In the process of adoption, the Church resorts to stylization, signalling the distance between our rituals and the realities they are meant to represent and making sure we understand that total catharsis is both impossible and undesirable on this earth. The dynamic tension between our need for liturgical catharsis and the “official form” of religion is not a thing of the past, which is confirmed ‒ by way of example ‒ by a carefully worded 10 Newman 2012. For details about similar incidents in the context of Eastern Orthodoxy, see Judge 2011.

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paragraph in the Directory of 2002, issued by the Congregation of Divine Worship: In relation to sacred ‘representations’ it is important to instruct the faithful on the difference between a ‘representation’ which is mimesis (commemorative), and the ‘liturgical actions’ which are anamnesis, or mysterious presence of the redemptive event of the Passion. Penitential practices leading to self-crucifixion with nails are not to be encouraged.11 Not every inspired text became part of the canon, and not every edifying rite was adopted into the liturgy. The boundary between the sacred and the profane is not a thin line, but more like a “buffer zone” (para-liturgy) which allows for transit from both sides. The gates, however, cannot be open for both sides at the same time. In this sense, the history of the liturgy is the eventful history of a fertile relationship between liturgy and para-liturgy; the story, just like Sacred Scripture, is written by God and his people.

11 Vatican.va 2001:144.

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Figures

Figure 1. A mosaic of Christ washing the feet of his disciples (Venice, San Marco, beginning of the 13th century | © Wikimedia Commons)

Figure 2. The “Knights of Christ” keeping guard at Christ’s sepulchre (Hajdúdorog, Hungary, 2016 | © MTI, Zsolt Czeglédi)

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Figure 3. Palmesel (Palm donkey), a statue of Christ mounted on a donkey was used in Palm Sunday processions. The statue is from the 15th, and the carriage (wheeled platform) is from the 18th century (Zeppelin Museum, Friedrichshafen | © Wikimedia Commons).

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Figure 4. A contemporary Palmesel (© Ert/SMB)

REFERENCES Arias, Ricardo 1980 The Spanish Sacramental Plays. Boston: Twayne. Bedingfield, M. Bradford 2002 The Dramatic Liturgy of Anglo-Saxon England. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. /Anglo-Saxon Studies/ Bradshaw, Paul F. – Johnson, Maxwell E. eds. 2012 The Eucharistic Liturgies. London: Liturgical Press Burrows, D. Peter 2007 The Relationship between the Passover and the Mass: Catholic and Protestant Understandings. [online] 313

https://www.faith.org.uk/article/may-june-2007-the-relationship-between-the-passover-and-the-masscatholic-and-protestant-understandings (Last Accessed: 11. 17. 2022.) De Jong, Aad 2007 Liturgical Action From a Language Perspective About Performance and Performatives in Liturgy. In Discourse in Ritual Studies. Hans Schilderman, ed. 111–146. Leiden: Brill /Empirical Studies in Theology/ https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004158009.i-305.27 Essen, Georg 2007 “Can yesterday get better?” The Trouble with Memory and the Gift of the Eucharist. Systematic Theological Reflections on the Presence of the Past. In Discourse in Ritual Studies. Hans Schilderman, ed. 277–298. Leiden: Brill /Empirical Studies in Theology/ https://doi.org/10.1163/ej.9789004158009.i-305.76 Gittoes, Julie 2016 Anamnesis and the Eucharist. Contemporary Anglican Approaches. London: Taylor and Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315566931 Houtman, Alberdina – Poorthuis, Marcel – Schwartz, Joshua J. – Turner, Joseph, eds. 2015 The Actuality of Sacrifice, Past and Present. Boston: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004284234 Judge, Edward H. 2011 Easter in Kishinev. Anatomy of a Pogrom. New York: New York University Press.

Klawan, Jonathan 2016 Jesus’ Last Supper Still Wasn’t a Passover Seder Meal. [Blog] Bible History Daily. [online] https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/ daily/people-cultures-in-the-bible/jesus-historical-jesus/jesuslast-supper-passover-seder-meal (Last Accessed: 11. 17. 2022.) Newman, Barbara 2012 The Passion of the Jews of Prague. The Pogrom of 1389 and the Lessons of a Medieval Parody. Church History 81(1):1–26. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0009640711001752 Pitre, Brant 2016 Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist. Unlocking the Secrets of the Last Supper. New York: Image Books. Swanson, Robert Norman 1992 Medieval Liturgy as Theatre. The Props. Studies in Church History 28:239–253. https://doi.org/10.1017/s042420840001247x Further readings Alison, James – Palaver, Wolfgang eds. 2017 The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-53825-3 Chupungco, Anscar J. 1992 Liturgical Inculturation. Sacramentals, Religiosity, and Catechesis. Collegeville: Liturgical Press.

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Földváry Miklós István 2016 Survival vagy revival? Zsidó elemek a római liturgiában [Survival or Revival? Jewish Elements in the Roman Liturgy]. Magyar Egyházzene 23(3):269–274. Francis, Marj R. 2014 Local Worship, Global Church: Popular Religion and the Liturgy. Collegeville: Liturgical Press. Garrels, Scott R. 2011 Mimesis and Science: Empirical Research on Imitation and the Mimetic Theory of Culture and Religion. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press /Studies in Violence, Mimesis & Culture/ Grande, Per Bjørnar 2009 Mimesis and Desire: an Analysis of the Religious Nature of Mimesis and Desire in the Work of René Girard. Köln: LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Lukács, László 2007 Dogmatika IV. Szentségtan [Dogmatics IV. Sacramental Theology]. Budapest: Sapientia Szerzetesi Hittudományi Főiskola. McCall, Richard D. 2008 Do this: Liturgy as Performance. Notre Dame, Ind: University of Notre Dame Press. Reid, Alcuin ed. 2014 The Sacred Liturgy: Source and Summit of the Life and Mission of the Church. San Francisco: Ignatius Press

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Seligman, Adam B. – Robert P. Weller 2018 How Things Count as the Same. Memory, Mimesis, and Metaphor. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190888718.001.0001 Symes, Carol 2002 The Appearance of Early Vernacular Plays. Forms, Functions, and the Future of Medieval Theater. Speculum 77(3):778– 831. https://doi.org/10.2307/3301114 Other sources Unamsanctamcatholicam.com 2019 Mandatum. Liturgical history. Unam Sanctam Catholicam. [online] https://unamsanctamcatholicam.com/2023/04/06/liturgical-history-of-the-mandatum/ (Last Accessed: 08. 10. 2023.) Vatican.va 2001 Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy. Principles and Guidelines. [online] http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/ccdds/documents/rc_con_ccdds_doc_20020513_vers-direttorio_en.html (Last Accessed: 11. 17. 2022.)

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12. Mimesis in part VII of Denys the Areopagite’s On the Divine Names. God as archetypal wisdom, mind, intellect, “logos” and faith Miklós Vassányi Denys’ chef d’oeuvre On the Divine Names is an endeavour to capture finite traces of the infinite God who is represented, firstly, as an efficient cause of worldly excellencies and perfections. The first three parts of this larger-than-life composition are generally considered to be of an introductory or, rather a foundational character, in that particularly Part II frames the overarching theory that in God, an inwardly oriented infinite centre and an outwardly oriented periphery may be distinguished. Part IV, then, examines God as Good and the source of whatever is good, while Part V scrutinises God as Being and the source of being, and the brief Part VI presents God as Life and the principle of life. Part VII, the portion I would like to look into now, considers God as Wisdom and the source of wisdom (as well as unwisdom), with Part VIII following on with an investigation into God as Power (dynamis), justice and redemption. Which yields the following sequence of divine attributes, in this middle section of the treatise: Good ‒ Being ‒ Life – Wisdom – Power. In all likelihood, this is also a hierarchical as well as logical order for Denys, that is, an order based on the ontological importance of the particular divine aspects, and on their causality among them (Schäfer 2006). By and large, this order also displays a degree of resemblance to that of the henads in 319

Book III of Proclus’ Platonic Theology, where the order is the One (τὸ ἕν) ‒ Boundary (πέρας) ‒ Boundlessness (ἄπειρον) ‒ Being (τὸ πρώτως ὄν) ‒ Life (ζωή) ‒ Mind (νοῦς) ‒ Soul (ψυχή) etc.1 Denys’ logic of exposition might be explained in the following terms: The Good as an efficient cause is God’s creative aspect,2 which brings forward Being, whose final cause is, in turn, Life, as a superior form of Being (ζωὴ was identified as a divine attribute by Aristotle at the latest ‒ confer Chapter 7 of Book XII of the Metaphysics, 1072 B 26-30 ‒ though the cosmos as a quasi-divine being had received the attribute of life already in Plato’s Timaeus, 29 E 1‒31 A 1). Wisdom is, then, inserted by Denys as a link before Power probably because power and domination in general must be guided by wisdom. One of the implicit theses early on in Part VII is that God is “wisdom itself” (αὐτοσοφία)3 ‒ analogously to Part VI, which kicked off with the proposition that God is the source of “life itself” (αὐτοζωή).4 In the Proclean system, such compounds equipped with the prefix auto- played, the role of henads, that is, unitary realities possessing divine status but with Denys, they are consistently upgraded into divine aspects or attributes, as happens even here. Also, the opening proposition of Part VII immediately introduces the core query of this Part, which is the problem that God is wise and the efficient cause of wisdom at the same time, and hence, wise

1 See Proclus’ Platonic Theology, Book III, Chapters 6 and 10. 2 See ibid., Book II, Chapter 7. 3 Φέρε δέ, εἰ δοκεῖ, τὴν ἀγαθὴν καὶ αἰωνίαν ζωὴν καὶ ὡς σοφὴν καὶ ὡς αὐτοσοφίαν ὑμνῶμεν, μᾶλλον δὲ ὡς πάσης σοφίας ὑποστατικὴν καὶ ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν σοφίαν καὶ σύνεσιν ὑπεροῦσαν. (Suchla 1990:193) 4 Νῦν δὲ ὑμνητέον ἡμῖν τὴν «ζωὴν τὴν αἰώνιον», ἐξ ἧς ἡ αὐτοζωὴ καὶ πᾶσα ζωὴ καὶ ὑφ’ ἧς εἰς πάντα τὰ ὁπωσον ζωῆς μετέχοντα τὸ ζῆν οἰκείως ἑκάστῳ διασπείρεται. (Suchla 1990:190)

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and more than wise or, putting it more bluntly, wise and unwise in parallel. This point leads us to Denys’ argument that essentially, positive and negative theology are both true in their own manner ‒ which is to serve as a hermeneutical guideline here when interpreting Saint Paul’s noteworthy statement on the unwisdom of God in 1Cor 1,25. Along this interpretive principle, divine unwisdom or folly is viewed as superhuman wisdom and, paradoxically, the source that human wisdom imitates. Later on in the text, unwisdom will turn out to be a leitmotif of Part VII: The opposite of wisdom in semblance only, it is, in reality, the negative theological counterpart and the true completion of wisdom. Paragraph 3 of Chapter 1 duplicates this point as it identifies human unwisdom with the ecstatic loss or abandonment of the self, with a view to being unified with God. To gain insight into originary divine wisdom, and be able to imitate it, says the Areopagite, the believer must have risen above her or his general capacities of intuition and so reach a union with God beyond the mind’s capabilities: We have to be aware that, on the one hand, the human mind is possessed of a power of intuition, whereby it intuits the spiritual realities; and, on the other, of a union overtopping the nature of mind, whereby the mind comes in contact with things beyond it.5 Hence it is by way of the union that we ought to come to know the divine things, not according to the human way, but by putting 5 Sergius’ Syriac translation reinforces this somewhat strange structure and meaning (Fiori 2014a:74; Fiori 2014b:104).

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ourselves entirely out of ourselves and becoming entirely of God – because it is better to belong to God and not to ourselves.6 The notion of such an ecstasy will recur in Chapter 4 of this Part, where Denys will argue that the apparent folly of the believer is, in fact, the true mimesis of τὸ μωρὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ. But the main point Denys drives home in the above-cited paragraph is that discursive or intuitive thought are insufficient tools for knowing God while the paramount way is ecstatic union. What human thinking is capable of, at most, is the contemplation or intellectual vision of the spiritual realities, which implies distance and difference between the object of cognition and the cognizing subject and may result in no more than partial, aspectual knowledge, and imitation. Paradoxically, however, the mind is also able to reach out beyond itself and come into unmediated contact with transcendence. This model of cognition eliminates the interval and brings on an unqualified union – note that Denys does not bother here to distinguish contiguity (συνάπτεσθαι πρός τι) from utter unification (ἕνωσις). In this ‒ literally par excellence ‒ way of knowing God, we are supposed to ecstatically divest “our entire self of our entire self” to belong to God and not ourselves anymore. On this account, we may perhaps say that for Denys, a believer ‒ when they are ἐξεστηκώς ‒ has already lost themselves whilst a non-believer has not yet found themselves. Hence in the notion of mimetic wisdom, a complex

6 Δέον εἰδέναι τὸν καθ’ ἡμᾶς νοῦν τὴν μὲν ἔχειν δύναμιν εἰς τὸ νοεῖν, δι’ ἧς τὰ νοητὰ βλέπει, τὴν δὲ ἕνωσιν ὑπεραίρουσαν τὴν νοῦ φύσιν, δι’ ἧς συνάπτεται πρὸς τὰ ἐπέκεινα ἑαυτοῦ. Κατὰ ταυτὴν οὖν τὰ θεῖα νοητέον οὐ καθ’ ἡμᾶς, ἀλλ’ ὅλους ἑαυτοὺς ὅλων ἑαυτῶν ἐξισταμένους καὶ ὅλους θεοῦ γιγνομένους, κρεῖττον γὰρ εἶναι θεοῦ καὶ μὴ ἑαυτῶν. (Suchla 1990:194)

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interplay between semblance and reality unfolds: Apparent folly is true wisdom while apparent wisdom is true folly. Since Sergius’ Syriac translation reinforces the syntactic structure and hence also the meaning of this passage, we are compelled to believe that for Denys, the mind is somehow able to change shifts or, better, has two contradictory modes of operation, a “landing” and a “flying” gear. For a start, nous is a tool whereby the human being contemplates, and then imitates, the noēta (which may refer to the divine attributes in the present context) perhaps in the mode Plato conceived of this in the Phaedrus. But second, it can also completely give up or override itself, sich aufheben ‒ as it were, take off and operate in a self-eliminating manner, doing what it cannot do after all. Thus the mind is generally itself but sometimes, it is also its own annihilation, rising to a supra-human level. In epistemic terms, this mirrors a shift from positive to negative theology and gives us a preliminary notion of how angels come to know God according to Denys’ Celestial Hierarchy. For this participation in a higher mode of cognition, deriving from unmediated contiguity rather than distanced contemplation and imitation amounts to levelling up and being admitted to an angelic mode of operation. This corresponds to the concept of hierarchy developed in Part III, Chapter 1 of the Celestial Hierarchy, which implies a quasi-automatic but at the same time, controlled elevation of the lesser creatures from their original place in the seamless ontological series of beings to higher echelons of the same scale, in the élan of a universal mimesis.7 Hierarchy, for 7 Ἒστι μὲν ἱεραρχία κατ’ ἐμὲ τάξις ἱερὰ καὶ ἐπτιστήμη καὶ ἐνέργεια πρὸς τὸ θεοειδὲς ὡς ἐφικτὸν ἀφομοιουμένη καὶ πρὸς τὰς ἐνδιδομένας αὐτῇ θεόθεν ἐλλάμψεις ἀναλόγως ἐπὶ τὸ θεομίμητον ἀναγομένη, τὸ δὲ θεοπρεπὲς κάλλος ὡς ἁπλοῦν ὡς ἀγαθὸν ὡς τελεταρχικὸν ἀμιγὲς μὲν ἐστι καθόλου πάσης ἀνομοιότητος, μεταδοτικὸν δὲ κατ’ ἀξίαν ἑκάστῳ τοῦ οἰκείου φωτὸς καὶ τελειωτικὸν ἐν τελετῇ θειοτάτῃ κατὰ

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Denys, is a dynamic nonrigid structure, in a sense programmed to promote its own destruction, insofar as it has been designed, from the very beginning, to impart even the highest union to the meritorious believer.8 Continuing the same line of argument, Chapter 2 of Part VII identifies transcendent divine wisdom as the source and archetype of angelic intuitive cognition and human discursive reasoning alike. The specific difference of angelic intellectual operation is its markedly non-discursive, unitary, indivisible, and immaterial character. Among these markers, indivisibility and immateriality may be identified as divine attributes, at least in the Peripatetic tradition (confer Metaphysics XII/6‒7).9 Both indivisibility and immateriality, then, interdependent as they are, share the common feature of unity, which is the chief normative concept of this Chapter. Thus angels “intuit the spiritual things of the divine realities in a uniform fashion,” that is, their intuitions have the form of the One; and they are enabled to acquire divine insights by their “deiform unity.” The striking presence of unity or oneness as a normative concept in these formulations directs our attention to God understood as the One, which is the ultimate goal of the soul’s exaltation, the point τὴν πρὸς ἑαυτὸ τῶν τελουμένων ἐναρμονίως ἀπαράλλακτον μόρφωσιν. (Heil–Ritter 1991:17 – mark ἀναγομένη in line 2.) 8 Σκοπὸς οὖν ἱεραρχίας ἐστὶν ἡ πρὸς θεὸν ὡς ἐφικτὸν ἀφομοίωσίς τε καὶ ἕνωσις αὐτὸν ἔχουσα πάσης ἱερᾶς ἐπιστήμης τε καὶ ἐνεργείας καθηγεμόνα καὶ πρὸς τὴν αὐτοῦ θειοτάτην εὐπρέπειαν ἀκλινῶς μὲν ὁρῶν ὡς δυνατὸν δὲ ἀποτυπούμενος καὶ τοὺς ἑαυτοῦ θιασώτας ἀγάλματα θεῖα τελῶν ἔσοπτρα διειδέστατα καὶ ἀκηλίδωτα, δεκτικὰ τῆς ὰρχιφώτου καὶ θεαρχικῆς ἀκτῖνος καὶ τῆς μὲν ἐνδιδομένης αἴγλης ἱερῶς ἀποπληρούμενα, ταύτην δὲ αὖθις ἀφθόνως εἰς τὰ ἑξῆς ἀναλάμποντα κατὰ τοὺς θεαρχικοὺς θεσμούς. (Celestial Hierarchy, Part III, Chapter 2 = Heil–Ritter 1991:17‒18) 9 1071 B 20‒21: ἔτι τοίνυν ταύτας δεῖ τὰς οὐσίας εἶναι ἄνευ ὕλης. 1073 A 5‒7: δέδεικται δὲ καὶ ὅτι μέγεθος οὐθὲν ἔχειν ἐνδέχεται ταύτην τὴν οὐσίαν, ἀλλ’ ἀμερὴς καὶ ἀδιαίρετός ἐστιν.

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of culmination of the entire treatise, to be reached (and surpassed) later, in Part XIII: It is from her that the intelligible and intellectual powers of the angelic minds receive their simple and blessed intuitions. These intuitions collect the divine knowledge not in the form of, or departing from, partial sensations or discursive reasonings; nor are they embraced together by something common with a view to this;10 but since they are clean from all that is material, and multitude, they intuit the intelligible things of the divinity intellectually, immaterially, and uniformly. And their intellectual power and operation is glorified by the unmixed and undefiled purity; and it is enabled to instantly apprehend divine intuition by virtue of the indivisibility and immateriality and deiform unity, because it has been moulded according to the divine and more than wise mind and intellect, as far as this is feasible.11

10 Sergius gives the same meaning of this semantically not entirely clear clause; see Fiori’s interpretive translation (Fiori 2014a:75; Fiori 2014b:104). 11 Ἐξ αὐτῆς αἱ νοηταὶ καὶ νοεραὶ τῶν ἀγγελικῶν νοῶν δυνάμεις τὰς ἁπλᾶς καὶ μακαρίας ἔχουσι νοήσεις. Οὐκ ἐν μεριστοῖς ἢ ἀπὸ μεριστῶν ἢ αἰσθήσεων ἢ λόγων διεξοδικῶν συνάγουσαι τὴν θείαν γνῶσιν οὐδὲ ὑπό τινος κοινοῦ πρὸς ταῦτα συμπεριεχόμεναι, παντὸς δὲ ὑλικοῦ καὶ πλήθους καθαρεύουσαι νοερῶς, ἀΰλως, ἑνοειδῶς τὰ νοητὰ τῶν θείων νοοῦσιν. Καὶ ἔστιν αὐταῖς ἡ νοερὰ δύναμις καὶ ἐνέργεια τῷ ἀμιγεῖ καὶ ἀχράντῳ καθαρότητι κατηγλαϊσμένη καὶ συνοπτικὴ τῶν θείων νοήσεων ἀμερείᾳ καὶ ἀϋλίᾳ καὶ τῷ θεοειδῶς ἑνῖ πρὸς τὸν θεῖον καὶ ὑπέρσοφον καὶ νοῦν καὶ λόγον, ὡς ἐφικτόν, ἀποτυπουμένη. (On the Divine Names, Part VII, Chapter 2 = Suchla 1990:195)

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Just like Denys has said in the Celestial Hierarchy (I/2, VI/2, VII/4, VIII/1‒2, X/1, XIII/3) and suggested in the Ecclesiastic Hierarchy (I/2), the angels receive their power of intuiting God’s intelligible reality from God Himself as a matter of course. What the above paragraph adds to this is that that power is practically identical to the knowledge itself reaped by the same power. By virtue of their capacity of intuition donated by God, the angels intuit intuitions in God. While power and content thus coincide in angelic intuition, their common determinative feature is ‒ as we have seen above ‒ unity as an image or imitation of God. What angelic cognition strives to grasp in God is, for the Areopagite, the divine aspect of the One, and this striving for the One belongs to Denys’ Neoplatonic baggage. The second paragraph of Chapter 2 gets on to the subject of human cognitive powers. In contrast to the angelic mind, the human soul has an indirect, discursive way of apprehension, which circles around its object (a kind of motion Denys otherwise attributes to the first angelic order, the seraphim in the Celestial Hierarchy, VII/1 and 4). In the first approach, that object of cognition is “the truth concerning what there is,” ἡ τῶν ὄντων ἀλήθεια ‒ that is, not God who is more than being. Nonetheless, the form or method of human cognition is, again, synthesis, a gathering together of the manifold into one, which is a mimesis of divine unity. As by this time, Denys has surveyed the major effects of divine wisdom ‒ in something like a full induction from angelic through human to demonic spiritual powers ‒ in terms of positive theology, now he wants to cross over from the posterius to the prius, from the discussion of the effect to an analysis of the cause. Thus, in the third paragraph of Chapter 2, he advances the query of how God may be described as wisdom when He as a cause of wisdom transcends wisdom. For being a higher cause would entail a lack of the 326

lower powers characterising the effects ‒ just as we cannot say that God, literally, has sense perception. Denys offers a twofold answer: On the one hand, this is true – God does not have, for instance, sense perception etc. But on the other, God as an archetypal cause does have per eminentiam knowledge of everything precisely because He is the cause of everything ‒ to cite the Areopagite’s classic formula, saying that God lacks, for instance, mind is to be taken καθ’ ὑπεροχήν, οὐ κατ’ ἔλλειψιν, in an eminent and not in a privative sense. Being the Creator, God must have had a creative preconception and brought things forth as it were from their internal principles: Hence the divine mind holds everything together by virtue of Its knowledge which is removed from everything because in Its quality as the universal cause, It has preconceived in Itself the knowledge of everything; since It had known and created the angels before they came to be,12 and It had known and brought to being all the rest from inside and, so to say, from their very principle. […] Because the divine mind has known the existing things not by way of inquiring into them; but as a cause, It has antecedent knowledge and comprehension of everything and possesses the essence of everything in advance and has grasped together that knowledge and essence beforehand, from within Its own self and inside Its own self, not apprehending everything individu12 Sergius offers a better reading here: „…before the angels came to be, had known that It was going to create them…” (Fiori 2014a:76; Fiori 2014b:106).

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ally, one by one but knowing and holding them together by one single embrace in Its quality as a cause…13 This divine and eminent mode of cognition is thus secundum causam knowledge. In this, the order of existence and the order of cognition concur or, better, unite in God. It is, in the end, because of this that divine cognition can depart a priori, from the pre-existent essences of God; and that it is an inverse of the human mode of cognition. Again, it strikes the reader how Denys emphasises the unitary character of the divine knowledge: Once more, God appears as the One which generates the Many. As the closing paragraphs of Chapter 2 elaborate on the same unifying aspect of God (the positive theological banner of Part VII ‒ in fact, of the entire treatise) adding that consequently, God knows “the divisible things indivisibly and the multiple things uniformly,”14 a direct textual influence from Proclus’ Elements of Theology becomes visible. Denys borrows this expression literally from Proclus’ Thesis 12415 but as a characteristic turn, applies it to 13 Ὥστε ὁ θεῖος νοῦς πάντα συνέχει τῇ πάντων ἐξηρημένῃ γνώσει κατὰ τὴν πάντων αἰτίαν ἐν ἑαυτῷ τὴν πάντων εἴδησιν προειληφώς, πρὶν ἀγγέλους γενέσθαι εἰδὼς καὶ παράγων ἀγγέλους καὶ πάντα τὰ ἄλλα ἔνδοθεν καὶ ἀπ’ αὐτῆς, ἵν’ οὕτως εἴπω, τῆς ἀρχῆς εἰδὼς καὶ εἰς οὐσίαν ἄγων. […] Οὐ γὰρ ἐκ τῶν ὄντων τὰ ὄντα μανθάνων οἶδεν ὁ θεῖος νοῦς, ἀλλ’ ἐξ ἑαυτοῦ καὶ ἐν ἑαυτῷ κατ’ αἰτίαν τὴν πάντων εἴδησιν καὶ γνῶσιν καὶ οὐσίαν προέχει καὶ προσυνείληφεν οὐ κατ’ ἰδίαν ἑκάστοις ἐπιβάλλων, ἀλλὰ κατὰ μίαν τῆς αἰτίας περιοχὴν τὰ πάντα εἰδὼς καὶ συνέχων… (Suchla 1990:196) 14 Ἑαυτὴν οὖν ἡ θεία σοφία γινώσκουσα γνώσεται πάντα ἀΰλως τὰ ὑλικὰ καὶ ἀμερίστως τὰ μεριστὰ καὶ τὰ πολλὰ ἑνιαίως αὐτῷ τῷ ἑνὶ τὰ πάντα καὶ γινώσκουσα καὶ παράγουσα. (Suchla 1990:197) 15 Πᾶς θεὸς ἀμερίστως μὲν τὰ μεριστὰ γινώσκει, ἀχρόνως δὲ τὰ ἔγχρονα… […] Ἑνοειδὴς ἄρα καὶ ἀπαθὴς ἡ γνῶσις ἔσται τῶν πεπληθυσμένων καὶ παθητῶν. ‒ E. R. Dodds translates as follows: “Every god has an undivided knowledge of things divided and a timeless knowledge of things temporal… […] Accordingly their

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God instead of the Proclean henads. Claiming back this perfection for God, he hereby implicitly excludes any intermediary between God and creation. When we have examined how God knows creation, we must now consider how we creatures know Him, argues Denys, insofar as He is absolutely not one of the things that are in existence, οὔ τι καθόλου τῶν ὄντων but more than that. Chapter 3 offers a double response to this query (and this duplicity calls to mind Chapter 1 of Part III, where the Areopagite has voiced the opinion that uplifting prayer and ecstatic union are the par excellence way of knowing God). Firstly, there is the path of positive, causal theology ‒ an insightful perception of the cosmic order, which displays mimetic images and expressions of the divine παραδείγματα, creative ideas or even powers in God. This is a systematic elevation of human reason, which unfolds “by method and order” and whose cognitive principle is analogy (κατὰ τὴν πάντων ἀναλογίαν), leading ultimately to what is “beyond all” (ἐπέκεινα πάντων, a familiar Plotinian phrase from Treatise 10).16 On this path, intuition, understanding, knowledge, perception, imagination, and names are obtained. But the royal path runs an essentially different course and since it branches off from the ground up it does not nullify the validity of positive theology. It seems that the path of ecstatic prayer and union somehow overtops or crowns the culmination point calcu-

knowledge of things pluralised and passible will be unitary and impassible…” (Dodds 1992:110‒111; see also the Platonic Theology, IV/5.) 16 This passage ‒ which follows upon the lines where Plotinus characterises the internal prayer of the heart (see above, on account of Part III of On the Divine Names) ‒ develops the notable analogy of the sanctuary as the Alexandrian compares the One to Mind: Δεῖ τοίνυν θεατήν, ἐκείνου ἐν τῷ εἴσω οἷον νεῷ ἐφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ ὄντος, μένοντος ἡσύχου ἐπέκεινα ἁπάντων, τὰ οἷον πρὸς τὰ ἔξω ἤδη ἀγάλματα ἑστῶτα, μᾶλλον δὲ ἄγαλμα τὸ πρῶτον ἐκφανὲν θεᾶσθαι πεφηνὸς τοῦτον τὸν τρόπον… (Enneads 10 [V/1], 6).

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lative rationality may reach. The royal path surpasses both discursive and intuitive rationality; it is “most divine” because, on it, human intuition exceptionally achieves what naturally flows from the divine essence ‒ which stands aloof from whatever exists. In a second instance though, it abandons itself as “it is unified with the ultra-radiant beams gleaming from on high.” Once “there,” ἐκεῖ (and even this demonstrative has a Platonic and Plotinic ring to it), it will be illuminated by “the imperscrutable depths” of divine wisdom.17 And we do not know what happens next – there is no talk of a relapse of the nous into cosmic reality (like there is, for instance, with Augustine’s account of the ecstasy at Ostia, in Confessions IX/10). The story stops short at the point where the individual mind falls into the unfathomed abyss that is the infinity of God. While one cannot help finding this a fascinating journey, still one wonders what remains of the mind, the self, let alone the soul, at the end of it. Going down the royal path, can a measure of self-identity be preserved? Then again, what sense may illumination have when the nous has given up itself, including its intellectual capacities? These questions are left open because Denys’ theological query is open-ended itself: At the end of the road, it consists of opening up an infinite vista, rather than marking boundaries. Closing this Chapter, the Areopagite reiterates his claim that both kinds of theology: positive and negative ecstatic are viable in their own right. Speaking of which, he takes the opportunity to bring to the fore a so far less examined aspect of God, which is

17 Καὶ ἔστιν αὖθις ἡ θειοτάτη θεοῦ γνῶσις ἡ δι’ ἀγνωσίας γινωσκομένη κατὰ τὴν ὑπὲρ νοῦν ἕνωσιν, ὅταν ὁ νοῦς τῶν ὄντων πάντων ἀποστάς, ἔπειτα καὶ ἑαυτὸν ἀφεὶς ἑνωθῇ ταῖς ὑπερφαέσιν ἀκτῖσιν ἐκεῖθεν καὶ ἐκεῖ τῷ ἀνεξερευνήτω βάθει τῆς σοφίας καταλαμπόμενος. (Suchla 1990:198)

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His being the principle of connectivity, or concatenation, of the multiple substances constituting the universe, and the principle of transitivity of an effect from the cause. God is hence not only the universal efficient cause and prime mover but also the precondition of the operation of causality in all its ramifications throughout the world, and hereby, the agent maintaining the networking capacity of natural substances. Denys is going to elaborate more on this in Parts X‒XI. On a final note, let us add, concerning Chapter 3, that the existence of the two kinds of theology ‒ the more intellectual and the more event-like ‒ is reducible to the fact that God is by definition the noblest or most sublime being, which automatically invites two fundamental divine attributes: That He be the most disconnected (or, the most disengaged) as well as the most productive (or, the most engaged) being. In other words, being the highest ranking being requires God to be like the One of the First Hypothesis of the Parmenides as well as to be like the Good of Book VI of The Republic (which are the chief aspects under which Denys considers God). It seems justified to suggest that positive theology is constructed on the concept of God considered as the Good whilst ecstatic theology is on the concept of God considered as the One. In Book II, Chapter 6 of the Platonic Theology, Proclus also departs from the One and the Good as he sets out to discuss the two modes of speech about the most sublime being. In so doing, he anticipates much of the gnoseological material Denys handles in the Chapter under discussion, of On the Divine Names. In concord with what has been argued in the preceding paragraphs, Proclus says that the path of the Good relies on analogy while the path of the One on negative theology. Denys’ key thesis that God is the source of all knowledge although He is beyond all knowledge, is

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also found in Proclus concerning the One.18 All this reinforces the tendency of the middle chapters of On the Divine Names to proceed from God the Good towards God the One. Discussing God conceived as λόγος in the last Chapter of Part VII, Denys duplicates this tendency as he links up λόγος with unity (or simplicity) as well as transcendence (or disconnection).19 Here, our first interpretive question is what exactly we are to understand by λόγος. The inevitable anchor point is John 1,1, the Word of God ‒ and it is in this sense too that the early Syriac translation of On the Divine Names by Sergius renders λόγος with meltho’, word, also meaning the Word of God.20 At the same time, however, the context would allow for a translation with “reason” as well because λόγος is used evidently in this sense in the second line of the paragraph and also because so far, we have been treating mental habits or capacities (wisdom and mind). But these meanings may just coincide with “divine rationality conceived as the Word of God.” This is then coherently described by Denys as “uniformly preconceiving in itself the causes of all” and, at the same time, 18 “We endeavour therefore to know the unknown nature of the first principle, through the things which proceed from, and are converted to it; and we also attempt through the same things to give a name to that which is ineffable. This principle, however, is neither known by beings, nor is effable by any one of all things; but being exempt from all knowledge, and all language, and subsisting as incomprehensible, it produces from itself according to one cause all knowledge, every thing that is known, all words, and whatever can be comprehended by speech.” (Proclus: Platonic Theology II/6 = Taylor 1816:121) 19 «Λόγος» δὲ ὁ θεὸς ὑμνεῖται πρὸς τῶν ἱερῶν λογίων οὐ μόνον, ὅτι καὶ λόγου καὶ νοῦ καὶ σοφίας ἐστὶ χορηγός, ἀλλ’ ὅτι καὶ τὰς πάντων αἰτίας ἐν ἑαυτῷ μονοειδῶς προείληφε καὶ ὅτι «διὰ πάντων χωρεῖ» διικνούμενος, ὡς τὰ λόγιά φησιν, ἄχρι τοῦ πάντων τέλους, καὶ πρό γε τούτων, ὅτι πάσης ἁπλότητος ὁ θεῖος ὑπερήπλωται λόγος καὶ πάντων ἐστὶν ὑπὲρ πάντα κατὰ τὸ ὑπερούσιον ἀπολελυμένος. (Suchla 1990:198‒199) 20 Meltho’ deyn meshtabhaḥ ’Aloho’, bkhunoyoh men kthobhe’ qadhishe’. ‒ “But God is praised the Word, on His name from the sacred books.” (Manuscript Sinaiticus Syriacus 51, 35 verso B 24‒26 = Fiori 2014a:77; Fiori 2014b:108)

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“pervading all from beginning to end,” meaning it is hypercosmic and, in a way, encosmic in parallel, displaying characteristics of the One from the First and the Second Hypothesis of the Parmenides simultaneously. Predominating in this combination is the hyperbolically transcendent, supra-essential, absolute character of the Word of God ‒ which is also truth, the object of religious belief, and commandment to be executed. In his final touch on this complex picture, Denys returns to one of his initial themes, apparent folly as an ecstasy imitating τὸ μωρὸν τοῦ Θεοῦ, experienced by the believer who is saved from instability by divine truth. With this, he has closed the circle and imparted us insight into the paradoxical, double nature of God; and opened the infinite abyss that is the true divine essence, the object of never-ending human imitation. REFERENCES Dodds, E. R. 1992 Proclus: The Elements of Theology. A Revised Text with Translation, Introduction and Commentary by E. R. Dodds. Oxford: OUP. Fiori, Emiliano, ed. 2014a Dionigi Areopagita: Nomi divini, Teologia mistica, Epistole. La versione siriaca di Sergio di Rēsh‘aynā (VI secolo). Lovanii: in aedibus Peeters. /Corpus scriptorum Christianorum orientalium, Volumen 656, Scriptores Syri, Tomus 252/ Fiori, Emiliano, ed. 2014b Dionigi Areopagita: Nomi divini, Teologia mistica, Epistole. La versione siriaca di Sergio di Rēsh‘aynā (VI secolo) trad333

otta da Emiliano Fiori. Lovanii: in aedibus Peeters. /Corpus scriptorum Christianorum orientalium, Volumen 656, Scriptores Syri, Tomus 253/ Heil, G. – Ritter, A. M., eds. 1991 Corpus Dionysiacum II: Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagita: De coelesti hierarchia – De ecclesiastica hierarchia – De mystica theologia – Epistulae. Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter. /Patristische Texte und Studien, Bd. 36/ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110886320 Schäfer, Christian 2006 The Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite. An Introduction to the Structure and the Content of the Treatise. On the Divine Names. Leiden – Boston: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789047409441 Suchla, Beate Regina, ed. 1990 Corpus Dionysiacum I: Pseudo-Dionysios Areopagita: De divinis nominibus. Berlin–New York: Walter de Gruyter. /Patristische Texte und Studien, Bd. 33/ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110886337 Taylor, Thomas 1816 The Six Books of Proclus, the Platonic Successor, on the Theology of Plato… Translated from the Greek…, Vols. I‒II. London: A. J. Valpy.

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