On Belonging and Not Belonging: Translation, Migration, Displacement 9780691231662, 9780691212388

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on be l ongi ng a n d no t be l ongi ng

On Belonging and Not Belonging t r a nsl at ion, m igr at ion, displ ace m e n t

M a ry Jacobus

pr i nce­t on u n i v e r sit y pr e ss pr i nce­t on & ox for d

Copyright © 2022 by Prince­ton University Press Prince­ton University Press is committed to the protection of copyright and the intellectual property our authors entrust to us. Copyright promotes the pro­gress and integrity of knowledge. Thank you for supporting ­free speech and the global exchange of ideas by purchasing an authorized edition of this book. If you wish to reproduce or distribute any part of it in any form, please obtain permission. Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to permissions@press​.­princeton​.­edu Published by Prince­ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince­ton, New Jersey 08540 99 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6JX press​.­princeton​.­edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jacobus, Mary, author. Title: On belonging and not belonging : translation, migration, displacement /    Mary Jacobus. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2022] | Includes bibliographical   references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021050073 (print) | LCCN 2021050074 (ebook) |   ISBN 9780691212388 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780691231662 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting. | Emigration and immigration   in literature. | Identity (Psychology) in literature. | Assimilation (Sociology)   in literature. | Other (Philosophy) in literature. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM /    Comparative Literature | LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES /    Translating & Interpreting Classification: LCC PN241 .J33 2022 (print) | LCC PN241 (ebook) |   DDC 809/.93355—dc23/eng/20211221 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050073 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021050074 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available Editorial: Anne Savarese, James Collier Production Editorial: Terri O’Prey Jacket/Cover Design: Layla Mac Rory Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Jodi Price, Carmen Jimenez Copyeditor: Jennifer Harris Jacket image: Mudassir Ali / Pexels This book has been composed in Arno Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca 10 ​9 ​8 ​7 ​6 ​5 ​4 ​3 ​2 ​1

In memory of my unknown aunt, Nina, and all the ­others.

c on t e n t s

List of Illustrations  ix Acknowl­edgments  xi Introduction: Unbelonging

1

1 Identity Poetics

11

2 Of  Birds and Men

36

3 The Coastal Paradox

64

4 Displaced Persons

93

5 Border Crossing

119

6 Rewilding Antigone 154 Notes  185 Index  213

vii

i l lu s t r at ions

1.1. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne (1622), Galleria Borghese, Rome

19

1.2. Inge Morath, Romania, Sulina, Where the Danube Meets the Black Sea (1994)

24

1.3. Inge Morath, Romania, On the St. George Canal in the Danube Delta (1958)

33

1.4. Inge Morath, Germany, Near Sigmaringen, The Young Danube (1959)

34



2.1 to 2.12.  Film stills from Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016) 51–62

3.1. Eugenio Montale, Cinque Terre (Manarola) (1966)

68



3.2. Elizabeth Bishop, Brazilian Landscape (undated)

77



3.3. Elizabeth Bishop, Nova Scotia Landscape (undated)

86

3.4. Tony O’Malley, Ballycunnigar (1952)

91

4.1. Robert Walser, “Jaunts elegant in nature” (Microscript)

96

4.2. Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Shoe (2007)

105

4.3. Walter Benjamin, “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism” (ca. 1925)

107

4.4. Walter Benjamin, “Rus­sian Toys” (1930)

110



5.1. Josef Koudelka, Vinodol, 1968 126



5.2. Josef Koudelka, Zehra, 1967 128



5.3. Josef Koudelka, Jarabina, 1963 129

5.4. Josef Koudelka, Zehra, 1967 130

5.5. Josef Koudelka, Rakusy, 1964 131

5.6. Josef Koudelka, Velka Lomnika, 1963 133 ix

x  L i s t o f I l l u s t r a t ion s



5.7. Josef Koudelka, Jarabina, 1963 133



5.8. Josef Koudelka, Spain, 1976 136

5.9. Josef Koudelka, Wales, 1977 137 5.10. Josef Koudelka, Spain, 1975 138 5.11. Josef Koudelka, France, 1976 138 5.12. Josef Koudelka, ­England, 1978 139 5.13. Josef Koudelka, Italy, 1981 140 5.14. Josef Koudelka, Switzerland, 1980 141 5.15. Josef Koudelka, Ireland, 1978 142 5.16. Josef Koudelka, Baqa ash Sharqiya Access Gate, 2009 146 5.17. Josef Koudelka, Bethlehem Checkpoint, 2009 148 5.18. Josef Koudelka, A-­Ram, East Jerusalem, 2010 148 5.19. Josef Koudelka, Qalandiya Checkpoint, Ramallah Area, 2010 150 5.20. Josef Koudelka, Rachel’s Tomb, 2010 150 5.21. Josef Koudelka, Al ‘Eizarya (Bethany), East Jerusalem, 2010 152 6.1 to 6.8.  Film stills from Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018) Plates for figures 2.2, 2.6, 2.11, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 5.7, 5.15, and 6.1 through 6.8 follow page 82

169–183

ac k now l­e d g m e n t s

i am grateful to the Bogliasco Foundation for a residency in Liguria, Italy, in fall 2017 that allowed me to finish drafting chapter 2 and to complete a draft of chapter 3; my time ­there was especially valuable for giving shape to some of the ideas in this book. I would like to rec­ord my par­tic­u­lar thanks to Laura Harrison, Ivana Folle, and the staff of the Bogliasco Foundation for their hospitality. I owe my start in Italian language study to the encouragement and enthusiasm of Valeria Dani, now launched on her own academic ­career, and to the generosity of the faculty and language teaching staff of Cornell University’s Italian Department; I thank them for their in-­class hospitality and support, including during the past year of the Covid-19 pandemic when remote classes provided welcome contact with ­others. A number of friends and colleagues have provided encouragement, advice, information, and insights drawn from their own work; among ­others, I thank Kevin Attell, Brett de Barry, Susan Buck-­Morss, Frances Jacobus-­Parker, John Kerrigan, Catherine Porter, Haun Saussy, Avery Slater, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Marina Warner, and Andrew Webber. The Australian poet Andrew Taylor kindly allowed me to read some of his verse translations of Eugenio Montale, and John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson, co-­residents at the Bogliasco Foundation, shared their insights into documentary filmmaking. Tacita Dean generously shared online access to her film, Antigone (2018). Anne Savarese fortuitously drew my attention to Colm Tóibín’s book on Elizabeth Bishop, and Colm Tóíbín kindly provided an image of a painting by Tony O’Malley. Thanks to them all. I am grateful to Kelly Hoffer for her work checking and revising the manuscript; her astute comments saved me from many a solecism. Three attentive and constructive anonymous readers gave me invaluable suggestions for revision; their comments, criticisms, and signposting of gaps and connections helped to make this a better book. I am especially grateful to my editor, Anne xi

xii  A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

Savarese, for moving the book forward, and to the staff of Prince­ton University Press for their dedication and expertise. I owe a practical debt to ­Will Sheavely for making it pos­si­ble for me to spend time in the library by providing pre-­Covid in-­home care for Reeve Parker, who patiently endured my absences and my preoccupation with my laptop; thanks also to Josiah Jacobus-­Parker for his willingness to deputize for me for time away that made all the difference. I am grateful to the following for permission to reproduce images in the text: Magnum Photos, for photo­graphs by Inge Morath and Josef Koudelka; Kino Lorber, Inc., for stills from Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea, 2016); Tacita Dean for film stills from Antigone (2018), courtesy of the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris; and Matthew Marks Gallery for permission to reproduce Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Shoe (2007). The following publishers have also given permission for image reproduction: Libri Scheiwiller, Milano, for an e­ tching by Eugenio Montale; Macmillan Publishers, for images of works by Elizabeth Bishop included in Changing Hats: Paintings (2011); Suhrkamp Verlag Zu­rich and Frankfurt am Main, New Directions Publishing Corp., and Christine Burgin, for an image from Robert Walser’s microscripts; Suhrcamp Verlag Zu­rich and Frankfurt am Main, for images of “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism” and “Rus­sian Toys” (1930) from the Walter Benjamin Archive. Detailed credits are provided in the captions.

on be l ongi ng a n d no t be l ongi ng

Introduction: Unbelonging

the title of this book has run like a man­tra in my head during the past several years. It echoes D. W. Winnicott’s famously perplexing formulation in his 1963 essay “Communicating and Not Communicating.” Winnicott explains the second part of his title (“Not Communicating”) by contrasting s­ imple not-­communicating with an active or reactive not-­communicating, like a child’s game of hide-­and-­seek: “the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found.”1 He reframes this need, in paradoxical terms, as the child’s need to establish a private self: “It is a sophisticated game of hide and seek in which it is joy to be hidden but disaster not to be found.” Winnicott’s essay designates the individual’s hidden core as an unfound “isolate” that must be protected at all costs from traumatic intrusion: “each individual is an isolate, permanently non-­communicating, permanently unknown, in fact, unfound.”2 My title uses “belonging” and “not belonging” in much the same double-­ edged way. I want to acknowledge, on one hand, the power­ful h­ uman need to “belong” or assimilate, to identify with a group or find common ground, to recover or establish a home. On the other hand, I want to explore a more complicated relation to not belonging: the painful experience of outsider or exile status, with its lifelong uncompensated losses; but also, coexisting with it, a deep-­seated re­sis­tance to belonging at all—­a conscious or unconscious choice, ­whether self-­protective, contestatory, or recognizing that some part of the self remains fundamentally unassimilable. For the individual (translator, poet, memoirist, photographer, filmmaker), not belonging may be as impor­ tant as Winnicott’s not communicating. For the critic, identification necessarily coexists with distance—­overdetermining the choice of texts and subjects, while speaking to the same contradictory impulse: si­mul­ta­neously wanting and not wanting to belong; in Winnicott’s terms, wanting and not wanting to be found. Or perhaps we find ourselves in what we choose to write about. 1

2  I n t r o du c t i on

This is far from being a collection of autobiographical essays. My approach is mainly literary, with excursions into photography, documentary, and film. But it inevitably draws on my own experiences and preferences—­both lasting fascinations and more recent interests that respond to personal circumstances or global concerns. No choice is innocent or unmotivated by the past or the pre­sent, especially when it comes to what one chooses to write about. A recent trip to Poland—­now emptied of all but the most attenuated traces of a thousand years of Jewish culture—­brought home to me the extent to which, like many ­children born at the end of World War II, I grew up ­under the shadow of something incomprehensible, yet powerfully transmitted: a parent’s prewar emigration from a country and a society whose subsequent destruction in the war erased entire families, and along with them, their memories and the rec­ords of their lives. The blank in my memory occupies a space that coincides with places and memories that w ­ ere literally unrecoverable for my ­father, and ­until recently, for me too. The postwar “Iron Curtain” (how dated that phrase now sounds) cut off what I somehow ­imagined, as a child, to be a land of darkness and danger that could neither be revisited nor communicated with. Doubtless, the s­ ilent trauma of immigrant or refugee experience fuels the second generation’s conscious or unconscious need to assimilate and succeed. The wish to recover and remember what had been lost by a previous generation may arrive l­ater in life. And so it was for me. A digitized copy of a f­ amily photo­graph a­ lbum dating from the late 1920s and early 1930s recently came into my possession. The original had accompanied my grand­mother, aunt, uncle-­in-­law, and cousin from Poland via Bucharest to Tel Aviv, and ­later to São Paulo in Brazil, in 1940. The a­ lbum contained a time capsule of pre-­World War II bourgeois life: f­ amily holidays at spas or by the sea; cele­brations in restaurants and open-­air picnics; trips to Italy and factory openings; precious babies and valued friends. In the midst of t­ hese scenes, with a shock of recognition, I came upon a photo­graph of my f­ ather: a serious young man in his late twenties, maybe ten years before I was born, seeming already to be eyeing his uncertain f­ uture in the Poland of the early 1930s. In other photo­graphs from this period, his lively and glamorous older s­ ister occupies center stage, sometimes affectionately intertwined with my ­father’s quieter, patriotic, younger half-­sister Nina (her photo­graphs never previously seen by me), who perished in unknown circumstances during the Holocaust, having chosen to remain ­behind with her fiancé rather than exiting for Tel Aviv when ­there was still time, along with her ­mother, ­sister, and brothers-­in-­law.

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My truly “impossible” foreign ­father, with his excellent written En­glish, heavi­ly accented spoken En­glish, interrupted c­ areer, and restless intellectual ambitions, was in some unstated way unassimilable by my En­glish ­mother’s large anglophone ­family, with its unbroken history and sense of entitled belonging. For me, he inevitably became a psychic placeholder for the past that shadowed his (mostly unsuccessful) attempts to reestablish himself in Oxford when he arrived t­ here with his young f­ amily a­ fter the end of the war, along with many ­others seeking to rebuild their interrupted lives, studies, and c­ areers ­after military ser­v ice or war-­work. When I moved to Amer­i­ca in my mid-­ thirties—as I often reflected, at much the same age that my f­ ather had left Poland—­I recognized ­others who had internalized similar ­family experiences: immigration and lost relatives in the previous generation, or two; the sense of a cut-­off past and incomplete belonging; and the subtle or not-­so-­subtle forms of intellectual dissent and internal division that surprisingly often coexist with academic life, finding an outlet in the ­limited forms of academic activism that universities provide. ­After my ­father’s death, I was astonished to find on his shelves—­representing his postwar psychoanalytic ambitions—­books by Melanie Klein that I thought I had discovered for myself. Writing a book on psychoanalysis, I found in London’s psychoanalytic community a comparable community of “unbelongers,” some of them affiliated with the diasporic origins of psychoanalysis itself in the prewar period. So it can be no accident that many of the poets, translators, writers, photog­ raphers, and filmmakers whose work appears in t­ hese essays are mi­grants or emigrants—­w hether second-­generation, like the novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, whose 2015 In altre parole (In Other Words) triangulates Amer­i­ca, Italy, and the India of her parents’ generation; or emigrants by choice or necessity like W. G. Sebald, who opted to live and teach in E ­ ngland while continuing to write in German; or the internally displaced Swiss-­German “isolate” Robert Walser, who left Berlin to live out his life as an inmate in a Swiss asylum; or Walter Benjamin, self-­exiled from Nazi Berlin when he could no longer make a living ­there, taking with him his books and the memories of his Berlin childhood; or the Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, who left Czecho­slo­va­kia a­ fter the Soviet invasion of 1968, and—­having previously documented the lives of East Slovakian Roma communities—­continued to focus on the marginalized ­people and landscapes of “­free” Eu­rope. My final chapter, on versions of Antigone, finds in her both a figure of freedom, ejection from the polis, and the ambiguous pull of familial memory; but also the tensions that Edward Said evokes apropos of timeliness and lateness—­“intransigence, difficulty, and

4  I n t r o du c t i on

unresolved contradiction”—­“a sort of deliberately unproductive productiveness ­going against. . . .”3 “Rewilding Antigone” tries to recover this stubborn, unresolved oppositionality, along with the irrational ties of familial or erotic love that bind Antigone to the past. Sebald, Benjamin, and Koudelka each quitted their country of origin, motivated by their need for personal or po­liti­cal survival; yet each retained an oblique relation to it—­neither entirely leaving, nor entirely returning even when they could, finding in displacement itself an enduring motive for their work. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale and the American poet Elizabeth Bishop can both be read as exilic poets—by temperament if not by circumstances—­w ho returned obsessively in memory to their respective childhood coasts, remaining anchored to the past yet viewing it from a distance. Colm Tóibín, writing about Bishop, acknowledges the imaginative hold of a coastal landscape transformed by time into a landscape of memory, eventually becoming a landscape of mourning. Distance and travel together unsettle the idea of home: “Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be?” (Bishop, “Questions of Travel”).4 Is “home” the place to which we once belonged, but to which we can never go back? Is the elusive sense of belonging always located in the past? Was leaving home not so much a ­matter of choice or necessity as an opportunity—in other words, not only a question of leaving somewhere, but also of what might be found elsewhere? A ­ fter all, every­one at some level wants to escape their home, even if they dream of ­going back. Ideas about home and linguistic identity are necessarily ambivalent and divided. In its inscription of foreignness, translation can appear as an almost existential dilemma. To live and speak in a second language, however fluently, is always to be at a slight but significant remove from expressing oneself in one’s native language. In Hannah Arendt’s words, “I write in En­glish, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it.”5 For Lahiri, by contrast, writing in Italian expressed her contradictory need for an imperfect relation to language, finding new immediacy in imperfection itself. Then again, the dictionary definition of “translation” includes not just linguistic translation from one language to another, but also translation from one place to another—­translocation. The concept of translation embraces notions of metamorphosis and change, along with transformation, and even (for Walter Benjamin) the idea that a literary work only truly finds itself in translation. Crucially, it may also include transmission across time. Seamus Heaney, exploring the death of his f­ ather in his posthumously published 2016 translation Aeneid Book VI, or Tacita Dean, in her 2018 film Antigone—in some sense a father-­daughter inquiry—­were each

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inspired respectively by Virgil and by Sophocles; in 2004, Heaney too became a translator of Antigone, exploring the shadowy embrace of the past, of ­family, and of paternity. With hindsight, the Aeneid, one of the key texts of Western culture, can also be read as a migration narrative founded on an original trauma and on the dangers of the Mediterranean crossing that are definitive of t­ oday’s Mediterranean mi­grant crisis, the subject of Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 documentary about the island of Lampedusa, Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea). Rosi’s traumatized survivors, coming ashore like ghosts of their former selves, arrive on an island whose subsistence economy had caused generations of previous emigrants to seek their fortunes elsewhere. ­Today, contact between islanders and mi­grants remains minimal, if not potentially conflictual, as the sheer number of incoming mi­grants overwhelms traditional island hospitality. Lahiri’s 2018 novel Dove mi trovo, a story of solitude and disconnection with journeying as its telos, initiated a new fiction-­writing ­career in Italian focused on a pervasive sense of not fully belonging—in language as well as place.6 With altogether humbler aims and a less life-­changing literary outcome, I strug­gled with the challenge of learning to speak and write Italian in l­ater life, initially motivated by writing in situ about Cy Twombly, the artist whose move to Rome in the 1960s defined his relation to the art of both pre­sent and past—­ making him in his own way a temporal mi­grant (he firmly rejected the term expatriate). Although endlessly frustrated by my own lack of oral proficiency, I became intrigued by the unexpected recovery of childhood’s vivid absorption in writing, even at an elementary level; ­later, attempting to write literary criticism in another language, I found myself forced to hone my thoughts to the limits of my ability to express them. Unexpected spin-­offs from my attempt to learn Italian included greater access to Italian poetry as well as prose. Having previously read Montale in translation, I was just about able to read his poetry in Italian, experiencing with greater immediacy the changeable weather and rocky terrain of the Ligurian coast—­another form of borderline, like Bishop’s edgy walking-­the-­shoreline poetry. A fortuitous month-­long residence on the Ligurian coast fired my imagination in almost physical ways. The sound of the waves pounding the cliffs beneath my study win­dow became a distant refrain to thinking about both Montale and the ­hazards of Mediterranean migration. Long before, studying Greek at school, my first exposure to Greek tragedy was to Sophocles’s Antigone—­overdetermined terrain for a f­ uture feminist. Antigone is revisited ­here in Heaney’s 2004 translation, The Burial at Thebes, as well as in Kamila Shamsie’s 2017 novel Home Fire (set in con­temporary diasporic London), and in Dean’s analogue film Antigone, whose dialogue with

6  I n t r o du c t i on

Anne Carson’s pared down “antick” version, Antigonick, enters the film in the form of its ongoing argument. Sophocles’s Antigone, often read as a paradigmatic text about w ­ omen’s oppression by the laws of kinship, reemerges in Judith Butler’s Antigone’s Claim as “the occasion for a new field of the ­human . . . ​ when the less than ­human speaks as ­human.”7 Language itself becomes a symbolic snare for Carson’s Antigone; and—as Heaney’s translation makes clear—­ language is also a power­ful po­liti­cal tool. A play about exclusion from the civic order holds warnings for the precarity of rights and belonging in the post-9/11 era, a danger Arendt had understood in the wake of the emergence of statelessness ­after World War II.8 Arendt’s pessimism about ­human rights based on humanist or theological concepts of both the “­human” and of “rights” implies a dif­fer­ent understanding of belonging. As a po­liti­cal category, the right to have rights is predicated on a form of community that can never be fully addressed even by recognition of the nation-­state—­desirable as it may be—­but only by a polity whose voluntarism can appear utopian or simply wishful (as it certainly risks d­ oing in Arendt’s writing). Belonging (or not) is never simply a ­matter of choice or sociality, but rather exists at the unstable intersection of the ­legal and the bio-­political, the area that Giorgio Agamben refers to as the “no-­man’s land between public law and po­liti­cal fact, and between the juridical order and life.”9 Agamben’s no-­man’s land corresponds to the wilderness occupied by Sophocles’s Antigone. One way to understand both cultural and psychic identity as aspects of belonging is to see them as paradoxically rooted in foreignness; as inexpressible, or as only partly accessible to consciousness. An identity founded or refound in language is potentially capable of translation, and hence of change. Lahiri complicates identity politics by substituting for it a “poetics” of identity predicated on writing in another language. In one of Lahiri’s touchstones, Daphne’s tree-­form transformation in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, constriction and escape are entwined with each other. David Malouf ’s 1996 novel, An Imaginary Life, reimagines the metropolitan Ovid leaving language b­ ehind altogether, as he crosses into the dream-­time of the natu­ral world. In the judicial realm, ­today’s border-­crossers are more likely to experience the vio­lence of compulsory translation. In order to claim asylum, mi­grants must construct a coherent account of themselves in the language of the host country, often denying cultural differences and papering over the contradictions in their stories. By way of contrast, Sebald’s affiliation with internal emigrants and exiles such as Walser and Benjamin allowed him to hold tenaciously onto Germany’s literary past, or e­ lse swerve t­ oward Swiss-­German writers, while disowning the

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conscious amnesia of postwar Germany—as if endorsing Arendt’s “What Remains? The Language Remains.”10 His side-­long allusions to other writers not only revive the marginalized literary culture of the past but also create a displaced form of life-­writing, like Benjamin’s or Proust’s, that is entwined with lost t­ hings. Benjamin’s cultural criticism resurrects some of the same overlooked and marginal writers who ­were beloved by Sebald. He too chose to displace remembrance of t­ hings past, not only onto writers but onto found objects—­quarrying urban culture for its second-­hand detritus and mapping autobiography onto the urban geography of Berlin, the city of his childhood: a city of memory and ghosts. Dean comments on her personal predilection for obsolescence (her privileging of analogue over digital media) in ways that echo Benjamin’s fascination with superannuated technologies and with the “aura” of distance that surrounds them. Her salvaging of analogue film in Antigone suggests the potential for rethinking translation in terms of “analogue”—as Dean defines it, a repre­ sen­ta­tion of the original in another media. Benjamin argues in “The Task of the Translator” that a work’s “translatability” lies in its potential to engender new meanings in other linguistic and cultural contexts. This constitutes both its afterlife and its belatedness: “to some degree, all g­ reat texts contain their potential translation between the lines.”11 If translation is a form, its content is its relation to other languages and even other media; and ultimately, for Benjamin at least, its relation to what cannot be communicated at all—­its untranslatability and re­sis­tance to literal translation (rather than “poetic” or meta­phorical translation). All that the translator can do, writes Benjamin, is “lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s way of meaning . . . ​liberat[ing] the language imprisoned in a work in his re-­creation of that work.”12 Re-­ creation (including re-­mediation) ­frees up an imprisoned original, allowing its untranslatability to survive in another form. Carson’s 2012 Antigonick achieves this heady freedom via the afterwardness of her version of Sophocles’s Antigone—­not only politicizing Antigone’s exclusion from the law in terms of Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception,” but also incorporating some of the unstated questions raised by the original and by its successive interpretations. Carson’s version is a “wild” reading—­not in the amateur sense signified by Freud’s “wild psychoanalysis,” but in its passionate relation to Antigone’s “­going against” (Said’s telling phrase), that is, her oppositionality and unbelonging. Translation can be regarded as a form of linguistic migration and rediscovery, or as a conditional recharging of the original via the politics of marginalization itself.13 On the move in all ­these essays is the figure of the mi­grant or

8  I n t r o du c t i on

border-­crosser, at once traveler, nomad, exile, vagabond, and barbarian (in its original sense of linguistic other).14 Migration raises questions about hospitality to strangers and outcasts, including the tensions explored by Derrida between Kant’s Law of Hospitality and the judicial right to asylum. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein, the homeless Being is an absolute Other, an outcast who indirectly acquires language and education from his unknowing host-­ family. The destructiveness aroused by his rejection makes him a limit case for unconditional hospitality, enacting fears surrounding the mi­grant who rages at the unjust state of unbelonging and its dehumanizing deprivations. Rosi’s Fuocoammare brings together a local boy who ranges about the island, shooting birds with his slingshot, and the island’s troubled humanitarian doctor. Its inspired pairing reveals the collision between settled island life and the uncontainable mi­grant crisis washing up on its shores. The images and soundtrack of Fuocoammare ask us to see and hear the disjunction, as if hearing a distress call at sea. The h­ uman voice—­call and response—­captures the vulnerable relationships drowned out by the omnipresent technologies of communication on which both islanders and mi­grants depend for their survival. Can hospitality ever be sufficiently elastic? Koudelka’s 1977 Gypsies brought its viewers face to face with the forced immobilization of a formerly nomadic community. His l­ater 1988 book of photo­graphs, Exiles, documents his own adoption of an itinerant lifestyle; his camera exposes the poverty and anomie he found at the margins of a supposedly prosperous West. Koudelka’s crisscrossing Eu­ro­pean travels link his photographic proj­ect to Sebald’s discursive walkabouts, with their deliberate reminiscences of Walser’s and Rousseau’s Swiss wanderings, and to the subversive urban strolls of Benjamin’s 1923–26 One-­Way Street—­inspired by his love both for outmoded ­things and for a Bolshevik ­woman artist of revolutionary change, but also by his awareness that the price paid for modernity is its destruction of the past. In Koudelka’s ­later panoramic photography, borders and checkpoints—at once limiting ­human movement and dividing ­people from one another—­become the focus of emptied-­out, dehumanized landscapes, along with Eu­rope’s fortified borders and its industrial-­scale destruction of the environment. Making borders vis­i­ble as a site of aesthetic and po­liti­cal inquiry, Koudelka exposes what he calls “the princi­ple of the wall,” a princi­ple transferable to other walls and other places, including the notorious wall intended to deter mi­grants from crossing the US-­Mexican border. Militarized border-­ crossings criminalize not only migration and mi­grants, but also h­ uman movement. They function to “dis­appear” entire populations (refugees, families, ­children) as well as admitting, apprehending, or excluding them.

U n be l ongi ng 

9

Translation moves between the pages of this book much like ideas about migration and memory: now vis­i­ble, now invisible, yet always pre­sent in some shape or form. Outstanding translations exist of writers ranging from Montale and Sebald to Benjamin and Sophocles, and I have used them. Philosophic texts in the con­temporary canon have themselves become internationalized, even naturalized, drawing attention to the role of translation in the formation of philosophy. Indeed, theories of translation have themselves achieved the status of philosophy, given philosophy’s ancient origins and the migration of philosophical texts across languages that characterizes t­ oday’s theoretical and critical repertoires.15 Although I have necessarily been informed by it, I have touched only lightly on the im­mense volume of con­temporary writing on the theory and practice of translation. This is not the place to tackle the issue of untranslatability, or the fact that translation itself can be refigured as a citational patchwork of the foreign—as non-­translation, or language turned inside out, engaged in constant exchange with other systems.16 The compendious Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (itself a work of translation) concludes its introductory entry on the verb “to translate” with a telling allusion to displacement: the reader may be left in peace by “the exchange of supposedly equivalent linguistic values in the passage from one language to another”; or, alternatively, “the displacement of the reader in relation to his [sic] native language by virtue of the translation (übersetzen) [is] such that they become foreign to each another, which is perhaps the best method for presenting it.”17 The translated reader ­here becomes a figure (a repre­sen­ta­tion) for the most disturbing effect of the foreign: becoming foreign to oneself, both in and out of language. It would be difficult adequately to acknowledge the formidable expertise, scope, and urgency of con­temporary migration and citizenship studies. Although I have tried to do so, if only glancingly and in passing, my approach is primarily literary-­critical—­not only selective, but predominantly Eurocentric in focus, and often having more to do with the respective subjectivity and aesthetics of the prac­ti­tion­ers I have singled out than with the traumas of mi­ grant experience or negotiating a­ ctual frontiers t­ oday.18 I have benefited and borrowed from redefinitions and debates in cultural fields where the terms “migration” and “borders” have themselves become key terms urgently in need of updating, along with salutary critique of migration studies’ Euro-­Atlantic focus. This book is not intended as a polemic, nor does it attempt to engage with the intractable issues surrounding modern migration and displacement.19 But my hope is that t­ hese essays—­like translation—­will not so much leave their readers in place as displace them, if not from one language to another, or

10  I n t r o du c t i on

from continent to continent, at least to a position from which they glimpse the alternative to economic globalization that Viet Thanh Nguyen, in his 2018 collection The Displaced, refers to as the utopian vision of cosmopolitanism—­ namely, the dissolution of borders altogether: “Making borders permeable we bring ourselves closer to ­others, and ­others closer to us”—at once an exhilarating and a frightening prospect, and arguably beyond reach of the current world of finite resources, regressive ethno-­nationalisms, and unresolved military and economic conflicts.20 Nguyen freely admits that many writers, and not only refugee writers, are used to feeling displaced, and (as I have suggested) their work may even depend on displacement of dif­fer­ent kinds. But I have also tried to avoid the consoling fiction that we are all refugees now. We are not. Most of t­ hose reading the following pages w ­ ill never have experienced the incalculable dangers, dislocation, and losses involved in refugee status; or participated in the attempt to breach barriers erected against mi­grants; or experienced the daily strug­gle to survive in the often inhuman conditions of temporary detention, on islands, in camps, or in prison-­like centers as they await pro­cessing, asylum-­hearings, or deportation to countries where their lives are at risk or have long been deprived of meaning, and where they may not even speak the language. It is one t­ hing to choose a life lived in translation or voluntary migration—­ which may amount to the same ­thing—­but quite another to be a forced mi­grant. The most that one can do (quoting Nguyen again) is make vis­i­ble the plight of refugees who are “ignored and forgotten by t­ hose who are not refugees u­ ntil they turn into a menace.”21 ­Today’s tired walkers with their backpacks, bundles, and ­children, trudging across Eu­ro­pean or Latin American borders in their quest for asylum, are not vagabonds by choice, any more than mi­grants crossing the Mediterranean or the En­glish Channel in their unseaworthy craft aspire to found a new empire on the shores of Italy, like Virgil’s Aeneas, or to become parasitic on Western welfare systems. Rather, they are simply trying to survive—­let alone thrive—­along with their ­children. However defined, mi­ grants are the product of economic, po­liti­cal, military, and (sure to become exponentially worse in the f­ uture) climatic crises that combine to undermine utopian visions of a borderless global community, at peace with itself and richly renewed by intercultural and linguistic difference. The long-­term devastation inflicted by a global pandemic on mi­grant populations without adequate (or any) healthcare, accompanied by restrictions on movement, the hardening of national borders, and the weaponization of migrants themselves, has hardly begun to be assessed. But that is a subject for another book and another, postpandemic time.

1 Identity Poetics

identity politics, with its implied essentialism, has long been a suspect category, if also at times strategically necessary. Substituting “identity poetics” offers an alternative that emphasizes the literary and linguistic construction of identity. Translation is one of the many ways in which belonging (or not-­ belonging) can play out. In each of the texts considered in this chapter, translation unsettles the linguistic foundation of identity, ­whether conceived as divided and conflicted or as rooted in native soil. The Indian American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole (In Other Words, 2016) and the Australian nov­ elist David Malouf ’s novel An Imaginary Life (1978) intersect with Ovid’s late poem of exile, the Tristia, in the problematic area of language. In each case, the subject’s tenacious hold on identity gives way in translation to something that may be unfamiliar, frustrating, or even freeing. ­These three texts belong to a long history of transformation and translocation that spans empire and exile, stretching from metropole to margin and back again. Such histories in any case disturb fixed ideas about cultural and national bound­aries. On one hand, they can be understood as inalienable forms of belonging, and their attenuation as something to be resisted. On the other hand, an identity rooted in language is capable of transformation. Alongside their explorations of identity, each of ­these writers inscribes a theory of making (poesis) as well as a theory of translation. Hence, “the poetics” of identity—­identity constructed and discovered in another language, rather than inherited or given. Lahiri’s In altre parole strug­gles to disentangle the losses and gains of learning another language. However imperfect, Lahiri suggests, her reading and writing acquire new strength through an act of translation that she compares to Daphne’s flight in Ovid’s Metamorphosis, in a reading that sidesteps both pathos and artifice. Ovid’s first-­century Tristia, written during his banishment 11

12  C h a p t e r 1

to the farthest edge of the Roman Empire, resonates with the pains of literary and linguistic as well as geo­graph­i­cal banishment. His unreconstructed imperial subjectivity emphasizes the loss of community, sociality—­and Latin, his native and literary language. David Malouf ’s An Imaginary Life reimagines Ovid’s exile as the poet’s gradual crossing into the nonhuman world that lies beyond the borders of sociality and language, on the other side of the river Ister (the modern Danube)—­the symbolic boundary that marks the farthest reach of the Roman Empire. For Malouf ’s Ovid, death is a gradual pro­cess of becoming. As an Australian postcolonial and immigrant subject, Malouf is sensitive to the tension between appropriation and interchange, both with the natu­ral world and with unknown forms of otherness. Ahistorical dream-­time pushes the envelope of language and consciousness ­toward the ­silent poetry of metamorphosis glimpsed at the end of Malouf ’s novel. Exchange, metamorphosis, interchange; translation, transformation, pro­ cess: ­these terms emerge indirectly from authorial journeys that span India, Amer­ic­ a, and modern Rome; Ancient Rome, its Black Sea outpost, and the barbarian lands beyond the Ister. Journeying, as Heidegger argues in his war-­ strained reading of Hölderlin’s river poem, “Der Ister,” is also location, and location implies journeying, just as the familiar includes foreignness. Translation occupies a central place in what Heidegger calls “poeticizing,” the philosophic work of poetry that tries to think beyond the constraints of abstract concepts and symbolic equivalences. In its encounter with the foreign, language has the potential to question bound­aries and undo national and imperial versions of belonging—­including Heidegger’s own wishful nativizing of Hellenic culture and his questionable appropriation of Hellenism for Germanic culture. It goes without saying that the crossing over from one language to another is constitutive of both identity and translation. In exposing the nonequivalence of words, translation (along with untranslatability) inevitably puts “identity politics” in question. Reading across ­these three fictions of individual, collective, or national identity shows how writerly subjectivity is constantly being undone by the vicissitudes of language. In place of identity politics, “identity poetics” is ­here conceived as piecemeal, malleable, mobile, and potentially transformative—in other words, as a theory of translation, or rather, untranslatability. Translation’s departure from an “original” offers a way to discover alternative linguistic (even nonlinguistic) versions of a necessarily fictive self, at once disorienting and freeing.

I de n t i t y P o e t i c s  13

i. Writing on the Margins Scrivo ai margini, così come vivo da sempre ai margini dei Paesi, delle culture. . . . ​ L’unica zona a cui credo, in qualche modo, di appartenere. (I write on the margins, just as I’ve always lived on the margins of countries, of cultures. . . . ​The only zone where I think that, in some way, I belong.) —­j h u m pa l a h i r i1

What Lahiri calls the writer’s “zone” of belonging—­writing on the margins— is also the place of non-­belonging. At the core of Jhumpa Lahiri’s account of her twenty-­year strug­gle to learn, speak, and write the Italian language are questions that complicate the relation between translation and identity. Is language merely the dress of meaning that overlays cultural identity, or is language itself a tenacious b­ earer of cultural identity?2 Is translation only skin-­ deep? Or do profound and disconcerting changes underlie the shift into another language? Lahiri’s previous novels and short stories have explored the experience of first-­and second-­generation South Asian immigrants into Amer­ i­ca; but she has chosen to write her most recent novel, Dove mi trovo (2018), in Italian, extending her exploration of linguistic and geo­graph­i­cal disorientation.3 Lahiri’s first published venture into Italian, In altre parole, includes a short story that she says came to her suddenly as she worked in a library in Rome; ­later, she confesses that it is autobiographical: “la protagonista, appena modificata, sono io. . . . ​Ho visto e osservato tutto quello che descrivo” (“the protagonist, slightly changed, is me. . . . ​I saw and observed every­thing that I describe”) (IAP, 218–19). In Lahiri’s story, the protagonist becomes a stranger about whom we know l­ittle. The story is called “Lo Scambio” (“The Exchange”)—­a title that spans the colloquialism of “swap” or “mix-up” along with “trade” or “confusion” (as opposed to il cambio, substitution). The “s” in the Italian title has the negative force of “un-” in En­glish, as if signaling a latent differential; the tension between “exchange” and “change” is more than the shift from first-­person protagonist to third-­person narrative. The story’s exchange becomes fantastical and dream-­like, as if its unmoored central character—­a translator by profession—­has stumbled into another world. For reasons mysterious to the translator herself, she has de­cided to quit her former comfortable life: “C’era una donna, una traduttrice, che voleva essere un’altra persona. Non c’era un motivo chiaro. Era sempre stato così.” (“­There was a ­woman, a translator, who wanted to be another person. Th ­ ere was no precise reason. It had always been that way.”) (IAP, 66–67). Wanting to be

14  C h a p t e r 1

another person provides the enigmatic rationale for the story. Perhaps the translator of texts is trying to produce a better draft of herself: “Si considerava imperfetta, come la prima stesura di un libro.” (“She considered herself imperfect, like the first draft of a book.”) (IAP, 66–67). Taking with her only the barest essentials—­a black dress, shoes, and a black sweater—­she moves to an unfamiliar city, seemingly without friends or occupation. One rainy day she follows a group of ­women entering a private apartment where elegant garments are discreetly for sale; their designer too is indefinably foreign. H ­ ere the protagonist tries on black clothes that are modern, versatile, and ideal for travel (so their designer tells her). Yet she finds she has no wish to buy anything. When the time comes to leave, she is unable to find her own sweater. ­After a while, a sweater that resembles hers is found, but she does not recognize it: “Era un altro, sconosciuto. La lana era più ruvida, il nero meno intenso, ed era di una misura diversa.” (“It was another one, unfamiliar. The wool was coarser, the black less intense, and it was a dif­fer­ent size.”) (IAP, 76–77). The translator feels only revulsion for this unfamiliar sweater. Perhaps someone has taken hers by ­mistake. Her hostess obligingly telephones the departed guests, but with no result. The translator leaves with the sweater, feeling emptied and defeated. The next day, her sweater is once more familiar, and she puts it on. Lahiri’s story suggests that the proj­ect of exchanging oneself for another may stall as the familiar becomes uncomfortably strange, even off-­putting. The translator understands that she had come to this unknown city in search of freedom from her previous identity, only to find its hold unexpectedly tenacious: “Era venuta in questa città cercando un’altra versione di sé, una trasfigurazione. Ma aveva capito che la sua identità era insidiosa, una radice che lei non sarebbe mai riuscita a estirpare, un carcere in cui si sarebbe incastrata.” (“She had come to that city looking for another version of herself, a transfiguration. But she understood that her identity was insidious, a root that she would never be able to pull up, a prison in which she would be trapped.”) (IAP, 78–79). Yet, when she puts on her sweater again, both it and she seem changed: “Quando lo vide, non provava più nessun ribrezzo. Anzi, quando lo indossò, lo preferì. Non voleva ritrovare quello perso, non le mancava. Ora, quando lo indossava, era un’altra anche lei.” (“When she saw it, she no longer felt revulsion. In fact, when she put it on, she preferred it. She ­didn’t want to find the one she had lost, she d­ idn’t miss it. Now, when she put it on, she, too, was another.”) (IAP, 80–81). What is the nature of this fantastic metamorphosis?—­this exchange that is no-­change; not another version of the translator, but the emergence of a previously undiscovered preference for—­what?

I de n t i t y P o e t i c s   15

The riddle posed by Lahiri’s story concerns the relation of identity not only to language but also to imperfection. In a ­later chapter of In altre parole titled “L’Imperfetto” (“The Imperfect”), Lahiri describes her lifelong quest for perfection and her shame at her imperfectly spoken and written Italian. She singles out her strug­gle to master the distinctive Italian usage of the imperfect tense (a continuous or unchanged state of affairs in the past). Yet her story implies something e­ lse. Although her recovered sweater appears rough, ill fitting, its color lacking intensity, it has become dif­fer­ent, as if seen through new eyes—­and she with it. Just as she declines the elegant clothing she has tried on in the apartment, she realizes that the imperfection of her sweater is ineradicable and habitual, almost a habitus. When she reassumes her familiar identity, the translator d­ oesn’t miss what she had thought lost: “Non voleva ritrovare quello perso, non le mancava.” (“She d­ idn’t want to find the one she had lost, she d­ idn’t miss it.”) (IAP, 80–81). A sense of imperfection becomes the previously unacknowledged, lifelong root of her identity: “Mi identifico con l’imperfetto, perché un senso d’imperfezione ha segnato la mia vita.” (“I identify with the imperfect b­ ecause a sense of imperfection has marked my life.”) (IAP, 110–11). The imperfect tense is her. She inhabits (or is inhabited by) a continuous past tense, a state of being that is both intensely familiar and disturbingly strange. Lahiri’s is the classic immigrant’s dilemma: w ­ hether to assimilate, or to resist change; w ­ hether to write from the margins, or to assume a new identity, however conflicted and divided. Although In altre parole ostensibly concerns the difficulty of learning to read and write in another language, it is also a writer’s odyssey that emphasizes Lahiri’s discovery of a more robust authorial voice for her writing: “Una nuova voce, grezza ma viva, da migliorare, da approfondire” (“A new voice, crude but alive, to improve, to elaborate”) (IAP, 62–63). The author feels as if she has gone back to childhood, discarding the language of choice and distinction that shapes her anglophone writing for a more direct and immediate voice—­rough, like the sweater (“grezza”), lacking in depth or color, yet living (viva); a voice with unknown depths to plumb (“approfondire”): “Il verbo sondare vuol dire esplorare, esaminare. Vuol dire, letteralmente, misurare la profondità di qualcosa.” (“The verb sondare means ‘to explore, to examine.’ It means, literally, to mea­sure the depths of something.”) (IAP, 182–83). The author tells us that she d­ oesn’t know how to think about this short story that seemed to come unbidden and from an unknown source: “Benché sia venuto da me, non sembra completamente mio.” (“Although it came from me, it ­doesn’t seem completely mine.”) (IAP, 64–65). In this, it

16  C h a p t e r 1

resembles her refound sweater. L ­ ater, the meaning of the story reveals itself to her: “il golfino è la lingua” (“the sweater is language”) (IAP, 64–65). Not any language, but the language in which she recovers an imperfect self. Confronted by her missing sweater, she initially feels “ribrezzo” (revulsion). But by the end of the story, “non provava più nessun ribrezzo” (“she no longer felt revulsion”). She has become used to it. It fits. The term ribrezzo carries visceral implications, an ele­ment of physical repugnance that rhymes with grezza, the coarse texture of the recovered sweater—­the double “z” catching like rough wool on dry skin. The pared-­ down language of Lahiri’s story lacks the ease and transparency of the fash­ion­ able, diaphanous garments tried on by the translator. A text is also a texture. Writing in an unfamiliar language puts the translated self in contact with the materiality that underlies even the use of one’s so-­called native language. The challenge confronting the writer is not simply to express herself in ways that feel more immediate and au­then­tic; it is also to find another and freer—­stranger and stronger—­way to be a writer. When she writes in Italian she feels like an intruder or a complete stranger, a foreigner (“un’intrusa,” “completamente straniera”) (IAP, 82), as if she has crossed a border. Contradictorily, she experiences the loss or recovery of her old identity as si­mul­ta­neously confining and liberating: “Com’è possibile, quando scrivo in italiano, che mi senta sia più libera sia inchiodata, costretta?” (“How is it pos­si­ble that when I write in Italian I feel both freer and confined, constricted?”) (IAP, 82–83). Inchiodata means something close to “nailed down” or “pulled up short”; costretta means “forced” or “constrained.” Why pursue freedom—­a freedom that also involves confinement—at such risk? In a ­later chapter (“La Metamorfosi”), Lahiri alludes to another, mythic story in order to explore the perplexing link between liberty and constraint: the myth of Daphne’s flight from Apollo and her gradual transformation into a laurel tree, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Lahiri’s reading of the episode is itself unsettling. It speaks to her sense of the rigor that stubbornly attends translation-­as-­writing yet takes a new (and potentially feminist) direction that both is and is not Ovid’s. The adjective inchiodato/a recurs, the first time translated as “fixed,” the second time as “confined” (IAP, 162–63, 164–65). Perhaps Lahiri turns to the myth b­ ecause it foregrounds organic growth—­not clothes, this time, but bark—in the form of a tough skin-­covering that confines and protects, offering safety in both rootedness and constriction. In Lahiri’s own retelling, the myth of Daphne doubles the act of translation. She had first read Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a student, in the original Latin—an experience she describes as one of enchantment and intimacy. The myth of Daphne’s flight

I de n t i t y P o e t i c s  17

from Apollo becomes an allegory of Lahiri’s flight into Italian: “un pesante torpore le pervade le membra, il tenero petto si fascia di una fibra sottile, i capelli si allungano in fronde, le braccia in rami; il piede, poco prima così veloce, resta inchiodato da pigre radici, il volto svanisce in una cima” (“a heaviness pervades her limbs, her tender breast is bound in a thin bark, her hair grows into leaves, her arms into branches, her foot, a moment before so swift, remains fixed by sluggish roots, her face vanishes into a treetop”) (IAP, 162–63). Lahiri observes how Ovid’s language juxtaposes two ele­ments that are fused or grafted together—­a pro­cess si­mul­ta­neously violent and regenerative. Contiguous and doubled in Ovid’s telling, linguistic transformation creates a new and unknown mode of being that seems both troublingly, even sluggishly, physical and yet all too fragile and evanescent. Daphne’s face vanishes into a treetop. Ovid’s own narrative devotes more time to Apollo’s insistent wooing and cruel pursuit (snapping at Daphne’s heels like a hound chasing a hare) than it does to Daphne’s transformation into a laurel. The nymph’s headlong flight—­ with sweetly disarrayed clothes and hair—­makes her all the more desirable to her pursuer and would-be rapist. As she tires, she begs her river-­god ­father to transform her too-­great beauty and save her from rape—­“change and destroy this beauty” (“mutando perde figuram”) (Met. I. 547).4 In Ovid’s telling, the chase is a scene of frustrated desire; but instead of sexual consummation, we find aesthetic appropriation by the poet himself. The natu­ral beauty to which Apollo lays claim is also the art that accrues to Ovid’s supremely cultured text. Daphne’s leaves become Apollo’s laurel crown: the myth of Daphne becomes a triumph of Ovidian artifice. Ovid tells his tale from Apollo’s perspective, as he lays his desirous hand on the still-­palpitating heart beneath the bark: “placing his hand upon the trunk, he felt the heart still fluttering beneath the bark” (“sentit adhuc trepidare novo sub cortice pectus / conplexusque suis ramos ut membra lacertis / oscula dat ligno”) (Met. I. 554–56). By contrast, Lahiri’s reading downplays Apollo’s rapacious desire. Instead, she underlines Daphne’s wish to remain alone in the woods, drawing attention to Ovid’s linguistic grafting, as her hair sprouts into leaves, her arms stretch into branches, and her breast roughens into bark: “Si vedono, una accanto all’altra, le parole che descrivono sia Dafne che l’albero (nel testo latino frondem/crines, ramos/bracchia, cortice/ pectus).” (“The words that describe both Daphne and the tree are right next to each other [in the Latin text, frondem/crines, ramos/bracchia, cortice/pectus].”) (IAP, 162–63). Ovid’s transformation creates a rhetorical chiasmus that underlines its own linguistic status: neither tree nor ­woman, but something e­ lse.5

18  C h a p t e r 1

Daphne’s swift foot remains “inchiodato da pigre radici” (“fixed by sluggish roots”) (IAP, 162–63). She is held fast, unable to move: “Adesso sta ferma, non riesce più a muoversi.” (“Now she is ­stopped; she can no longer move.”) (IAP, 164–65). Immobilized, she loses her in-­flight life, yet retains her freedom. Adapting the allegory to her own situation, Lahiri sees her decision to write in Italian as a similar flight, at once confining and self-­protective, like the rough bark that covers Daphne’s body: “come Dafne, anch’io mi trovo inchiodata. . . . ​ Ora una nuova lingua, l’italiano, mi copre come una specie di corteccia. Resto dentro: rinnovata, incastrata, sollevata, scomoda.” (“like Daphne, I, too, find myself confined. . . . ​Now a new language, Italian, covers me like a kind of bark. I remain inside: renewed, trapped, relieved, uncomfortable.”) (IAP, 164–65). Even as she is renewed and relieved, her new language traps and discomfits her. The bark-­like covering makes her more vulnerable as a writer, yet paradoxically tougher, freer, fostering new growth: “mi trovo quasi senza pelle. Sebbene mi manchi una corteccia spessa, sono, in italiano, una scrittrice indurita, che cresce diversamente, radicata di nuovo.” (“I’m almost without a skin. And although I d­ on’t have a thick bark, I am, in Italian, a tougher, freer writer, who, taking root again, grows in a dif­fer­ent way.”) (IAP, 172–73). The transplanted nymph—­rerooted rather than uprooted—­f lourishes in her woody incarceration. Although well-­versed in Ovid’s poetry, Lahiri says comparatively ­little about Rome’s cultural and aesthetic ambiance—­its omnipresent classical remains and re­nais­sance buildings; its teeming street-­markets and tourists; its palazzi and museums. She (or her persona) lives in Rome, seemingly almost alone despite her ­family, as if inhabiting the uncannily emptied-­out city of “Lo Scambio,” in a world that seems to consist of dictionaries and notebooks, books and libraries—­the solitary life of the writer. Her immersion-­method at times seems more like a defensive carapace than a second skin. Sociality largely takes the form of literary encounters at conferences, readings, and festivals. Yet it is in Rome’s Galleria Borghese that one finds the most arresting intermedial realization of Ovid’s myth, Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (1622–25) (figure 1.1). Bernini’s sculpture seems to fuse motion and fixity, flesh and stone, as Apollo lays his hand on the fleeing nymph at the very moment of her metamorphosis from nymph into tree. The statue embodies a double miracle of transmediation—­from Ovid’s poetry to marble, and from Bernini’s marble to the appearance of palpitating organic life. The leaves springing from Daphne’s upraised hands and floating hair seem airborne, as if lifted by the updraft of her flight; a cleft tree grows up, seeming to cover the nudity of gleaming marble

I de n t i t y P o e t i c s  19

figure 1.1. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne (1622), Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photo © Andrea Jemolo/Bridgeman Images.

flesh. Daphne is arrested as a petrified body, her semi-­naked flight a triumph of artistic illusion. The aesthetics of transformation is the enigma teased out by Lahiri’s story. Is language skin-­deep, or does it reach down to the tenacious root of hybrid cultural identity? What price must be paid for linguistic translation? We learn that both linguistic and cultural identity have been triangulated from the

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outset by Lahiri’s own Bengali origins. At home, her immigrant parents spoke a language that she herself spoke only imperfectly. Linguistically and culturally, she is a child of the late 1960s, ­after a wave of professional middle-­class immigrants had moved from India to Amer­i­ca. A similar disjunction f­ aces the second-­generation immigrant characters in Lahiri’s stories and novels: the parents returning to Calcutta, the one place where they still feel they truly belong; their ­children no longer at home with Bengali ­family life, customs, or arranged marriages—­high-­flyers ­shaped by their education in American high schools, ivy-­league colleges, and gradu­ate research programs. Lahiri writes: “La mia lingua madre, il bengalese, in Amer­i­ca è straniera. Quando si vive in un Paese in cui la propria lingua è considerata straniera, si può provare un senso di straniamento continuo. . . . ​Una mancanza che crea una distanza dentro di sé.” (“My m ­ other tongue, Bengali, is foreign in Amer­i­ca. When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. . . . ​An absence that creates a distance within you.”) (IAP, 18–19). This originating estrangement or internal lack, allegorized in the story of the translator’s missing sweater, implies that the flight into another language is also a return to a continuous-­past state of affairs associated with the emigrant’s linguistic estrangement and internal distance. Unlike Ovid’s, Lahiri’s writerly flight is deliberate and self-­chosen: “Penso a Ovidio, bandito da Roma in un luogo remoto. In un avamposto linguistico, circondato da suoni alieni.” (“I think of Ovid, exiled from Rome to a remote place. To a linguistic outpost, surrounded by alien sounds.”) (IAP, 18–19). Linguistic exile becomes her chosen condition, a return in its own way to the language of a marginalized and emigrant postcolonial identity. The yearning for Italian, like the long-­distance love of Dante for Beatrice, is both an idealization and an escape. The teachers who become friends and mother-­substitutes nourish a longing for what Italian comes to mean: distance and desire, silence and longing, combined with an unexpected sense of homecoming. Both longing and non-­belonging are connected with homesickness for a place and for a language that had never felt like home in the first place. She belongs to the country of words, a deeply rooted yet cleft identity, at odds with the cultures and languages to which she supposedly belongs by descent, education, or assimilation. Early on, Lahiri tells us, she had written in her pocket dictionary the following equation: “provare a = cercare di” (“try to = to seek to”). Trial or quest? She comments: “Questo frammento casuale, questa equazione lessicale, può essere una metafora dell’amore che provo per l’italiano.” (“That random fragment,

I de n t i t y P o e t i c s  21

that lexical equation, might be a meta­phor for the love I feel for Italian.”) (IAP, 8–9). She terms her devotion “un ostinato tentativo, una prova continua” (“a stubborn attempt, a continuous trial”) (IAP, 8–9). The ­little pocket dictionary still finds a place alongside the large monolingual dictionaries on her desk. Learning Italian represents a perpetual trial or proof to which she can never be equal. Equals: the mathematical sign (=) suggests the prob­lem of translation; no word or phrase is ever quite equivalent to another, no substitution perfectly aligned to the sense (let alone sound) of the original language. Identity is at once rooted and estranged, just as the text remains obstinately other to itself and to its translator. Trying to do something, seeking to do something (provare a = cercare di) generates the unsettling trial-­quest for language acquisition that Lahiri compares to a chance encounter with an intimate stranger or potential lover: “Sembra una persona che incontro un giorno per caso, con cui sento subito un legame, un affetto. Come se la conoscessi da anni, anche se c’è ancora tutto da scoprire.” (“It’s like a person met one day by chance, with whom I immediately feel a connection, of whom I feel fond. As if I had known it for years, even though ­there is still every­thing to discover.”) (IAP, 14–15). Like falling in love—­“[u]n colpo di fulmine” (“love at first sight”) (IAP, 14–15)—­learning a new language involves both closeness and distance, foreknowledge and Dante-­like hesitation, doubt and humility. This is perhaps no more than to say, in more secular terms, that language is always both inside and outside, at once part of identity and radically other, always waiting to be found or refound. The language learner has an unassuaged longing, “un bisogno folle” (“a crazy need”) (IAP, 16–17), that defines her exilic longing: “La mia relazione con l’italiano si svolge in esilio, in uno stato di separazione.” (“My relationship with Italian takes place in exile, in a state of separation.”) (IAP, 18–19). This painful split (scismo) is played out as if it ­were a love affair defined from the outset by the tension between known and unknown: “Com’è possibile, sentirmi esiliata da una lingua che non è la mia? Che non conosco?” (“How is it pos­si­ble to feel exiled from a language that i­ sn’t mine? That I d­ on’t know?”) (IAP, 20–21). The writer answers: “Forse perché io sono una scrittrice che non appartiene del tutto a nessuna lingua.” (“Maybe b­ ecause I’m a writer who ­doesn’t belong completely to any language.”) (IAP, 20–21). Yet, at the same time, change—­like belonging—­takes place ­under duress, as if from without: “Credo che ciò che può cambiare la vita esista sempre al di fuori di noi.” (“I believe that what can change our life is always outside of us.”) (IAP, 42–43). Like location and culture, language and identity emerge from this collision with the foreign, with what is outside or alien to the self, penetrating its

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bark-­bound borders. Lahiri’s In altre parole implies that translation involves both non-­belonging and the painful pro­cess of internalizing difference, ­whether comforting or discomfiting. The mi­grant learns to cherish her scratchy sweater (her second skin), the sweater that is both hers and not hers, recognizing that all writing and all translation fall short of a perfect fit: “In un certo senso la scrittura è un omaggio prolungato all’imperfezione.” (“In a certain sense writing is an extended homage to imperfection.”) (IAP, 112–13). Like the artifice of Ovidian poetry or the consummate skill of Bernini’s sculpture, writing pays its own homage to loss: nothing comes naturally, not even language. A materialized imagination can never become the living tree.

ii. Exile Exile is . . . ​the unhealable rift forced between a ­human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. — ­e dwa r d sa i d6

Defining the exile’s insurmountable sadness, Edward Said calls the twentieth ­century “the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration” (RE, 174)—­a collective plight beyond the scale of aesthetic and humanistic comprehension. Geopo­liti­cally and historically, exile lies “just beyond the frontier between ‘us’ and the ‘outsiders’ . . . ​to where in a primitive time p­ eoples ­were banished” (RE, 177). Said is most engaged with the plight of poets, for whom poetry is the only available form of homecoming: “exile is a solitude experienced outside the group: the deprivations felt at not being with ­others in the communal habitation” (RE, 177). Exilic poets like Mahmoud Darwish testify to the overwhelmingly physical experience of uprooting. By definition, writes Said, “an exile is always out of place” (RE, 180). Elsewhere, in “Between Worlds,” Said quotes Adorno’s formulation—­“For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live”—­along with his pessimistic conclusion: “In the end the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing” (RE, 568).7 Exile, as Said points out, originated in the age-­old practice of banishment: “Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider” (RE, 181). Although incommensurate with the plight of twentieth-­century refugees, Ovid’s five-­book Tristia constitutes one of the ­great laments about po­liti­cal punishment meted out to the writer for offenses against power. Ovid’s exile entailed the loss of the implied community of poets to which he laid claim—­urban Latin poets identified with the imperial

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metropole, Rome.8 Banished for an unspecified po­liti­cal offense that may have included poetic levity or indecency, Ovid attempts to curry ­favor with the Emperor Augustus (hoping to commute his sentence) by means of a verse apology that combines flattery with complaint. Ostensibly wooing the emperor, Ovid’s Tristia skillfully impugns Augustus’s judgment and undermines his claims to omnipotence, while appealing indirectly to a more sympathetic Roman audience. Argument and extenuation are mingled with piercing elegy. The urban poet experiences his displacement in the most literal sense, from metropole to a margin where no one speaks his language. His homesickness is both ­mental and bodily: lassitude and loss of appetite, as well as depression. A dangerous sea voyage delivers him to a climate of harsh winters, burning summers, and the incomprehension of strangers in a Black Sea outpost constantly threatened by marauding tribes from across the Ister (Danube). Ovid describes his book as unkempt and disordered, as if in mourning like himself. Storm-­tossed, travel-­stained, and choked with fear, he dispatches his poetry during the arduous journey to plead on his behalf: “my habitation / remains the world’s end, a land from my land remote” (“nobis habitabitur orbis / ultimus, a terra terra remota mea”) (T I. i. 127–28).9 A narrative of displacement, the Tristia is also a literary apologia focused on the loss of all that Rome symbolizes; the imperial and divine city retains its tenacious grip on the exile: “Rome, centre of empire, seat of the gods” (“imperii Roma deumque locus”) (T I. v. 70). Blaming his exile on his previous work, Ars Amatoria, Ovid undertakes a reputational accounting of himself and his poetry. The author’s envoi (his book) is destined for a library, his only assured form of an afterlife.10 Writing is both the cause of Ovid’s banishment and a fragile guarantee of survival. Book I, scribbled during his perilous voyage, ends with Ovid’s long-­deferred arrival at the Roman Empire’s bridgehead, Hellenized Tomis, on the Pontic Sea (modern-­day Constanta, a Black Sea port and resort), where the Danube winds through marshes to meet the Black Sea (figure 1.2). For Ovid, Tomis is the last bastion of imperial law and order, “only / marginally adhesive to the empire’s rim” (“vixque / haeret in imperii margine terra tui”) (T II. 199–200). Poetry, Ovid’s most compelling advocate, anticipates his fate—an obscure death in a desolate foreign land: unknown, unheard, and unread. Ovid vividly conveys the visceral experience of the frontier (Said’s marginal zone, “just beyond the frontier between ‘us’ and the ‘outsiders’ ”). As he shivers at the edge of civilization, the river forms the only barrier between him and the barbarian hordes: “beyond h­ ere lies nothing but chillness, hostility,

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figure 1.2. Inge Morath, Romania, Sulina, Where the Danube Meets the Black Sea (1994). Photo © Magnum Photos.

frozen / waves of an ice-­hard sea” (“longius hac nihil est, nisi tantum frigus et hostes, / et maris adstricto quae coit unda gelu”) (T II. 195–96). Ovid’s “beyond” is a construction—­a Roman Empire ringed with frozen wastes and threatened by hostile tribes. Commentators have pointed out that both extreme climate and untamed Scythians ­were literary ste­reo­types.11 Exiled from the urban center, the imperial subject proj­ects his own cultural alienation onto the barbarous beyond (the other) of empire. The trope of distance and periphery structures the entire poem as both an end-­of-­world and an end-­of-­life scenario: “beyond that, nothing but frozen, uninhabitable tundra—­/ alas, how close I stand to the world’s end!” (“ulterius nihil est nisi non habitabile frigus. / heu quam vicina est ultima terra mihi!”) (T III. iv. 51–52). The imperial subject’s nostalgia for familiar ­faces and places reinforces his dependence on an identity still defined by imperial fiat and imperial culture. Ovid knows that his error is to have offended the power that constitutes him as a poet. His only remedy is yet more poetry; it alone offers any assurance that he ­will be read ­after his death. Ovid dreams of being summoned home, or at least to somewhere that is warmer and closer to civilization. But his confinement to Tomis (whose name

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commemorates a ­brother’s killing) implies that his own final fate is to be scattered and dismembered, consigned to an unknown burial place in an alien land. In a strange and compelling image, he imagines hanging before his eyes, like a double or premonition of death, “a vis­i­ble entity, the shape, the presence, / of [his] ill fate” (“veluti spectabile corpus / astat fortunae forma legenda meae”) (T III. viii. 35–36). This is the face of his own death-­wish (amor necis), “when I survey this place, its ways, speech, lifestyle, / remembering who I am, and what I was” (“cumque locum moresque hominum cultusque sonumque / cernimus, et, qui sim qui fuerimque . . .”) (T III. viii. 37–38). An existential crisis, his exile becomes literally life-­threatening when the seasons change with winter. The Danube defends the city during warm temperatures, but once it freezes over, raiders can cross the river, laying waste to local farms, pillaging, burning, and carry­ing off prisoners. Ovid’s description of frozen waves, chilling gales, bare plains, and hostile periphery occupies an entire section of the Tristia. The motif recurs at intervals throughout the poem to emphasize the terrors that lie beyond the edge of empire to which he clings: “Just as a stag, run down by ravenous / bears, or a lamb ringed round with mountain wolves, / ­will quake in fright, so I, hedged in by belligerent tribesmen, / feel terror: the e­ nemy’s all but touching me” (“utque fugax avidis cervus deprensus ab ursis, / cinctave montanis ut pavet agna lupis, / sic ego belligeris a gentibus undique saeptus / terreor, hoste meum paene premente latus”) (T III. xi. 11–14). The harsh and unforgiving climate of Tomis coincides with the perils of the unknown across the river. Written “in time of exile, in a barbarian world” (“exilium tempus barbariamque locum”) (T III. xiv. 30), the Tristia echoes, not to the books and poetry that form Ovid’s previous habitat, but to “the twang of bowstrings, the rattle of arms” (“pro libris arcus et arma sonant”) (T III. xiv. 38). Worse even than the lack of books and the ever-­present danger of armed marauders is the literary prospect that ­faces Ovid: his near-­death as a writer. The poet of sociality and artifice, Ovid now lacks an audience as well as a library—­“No person in this place, should I recite my poems, / on whom I could count for a comprehending ear” (“nullus in hac terra, recitem si carmina, cuius / intellecturis auribus utar, adest”) (T III. xiv. 39–40). The loss of literary and linguistic community is equated with the failure of speech itself: “when I try to express myself, often—­shameful confession!—­/ words fail me, I’ve unlearnt the art of speech” (“dicere saepe aliquid conanti—­turpe fateri!—­/ verba mihi desunt dedidicique loqui”) (T III. xiv. 45–46). Beyond even his fear of being buried far from home, the poet fears the loss of his native

26  C h a p t e r 1

language, Latin, on which his identity as a writer is predicated. He apologizes for his infection by Pontic Greek (the local lingua franca) or Getic dialect: “I fear you may find my Latin / diluted with Black Sea usage, local terms / inflecting my work.” (“timeo ne sint inmixta Latinis / inque meis scriptis Pontica verba legas”) (T III. xiv. 49–50). He writes to be in the imaginary com­pany of his Roman friends and the loyal wife he left ­behind, and also (it goes without saying) to sway persons of influence who might advocate for him and persuade Augustus to commute his sentence. He writes b­ ecause writing is a form of solace. But he also writes to overcome his linguistic isolation: “­there’s not a single person in the population / who speaks Latin, even one or two common words” (“unus in hoc nemo est populo, qui forte Latine / quaelibet e medio reddere verbe queat”) (T V. vii. 53–54). Barely able to recall his own Latin, he risks falling into barbarous solecisms; but “for that you must blame / the place, not the author” (“non hominis culpa, sed ista loci”) (T V. vii. 60). The ­tables are turned: “­Here I’m the barbarian, understood by no one, / and t­ hese stupid peasants mock my Latin speech” (“barbarus hic ego sum, qui non intellegor ulli, / et rident stolidi verba Latina Getae”) (T V. X. 37–38). Challenging Ovid’s metropolitan status, the reversal from civilized subject to barbarian outsider upends the status quo, and with it his assumption that he is the last ­bearer of civilization on the rim of empire. The Tristia not only rec­ords Ovid’s drawn-­out effort to get his sentence commuted, by sheer persuasiveness, but also an internal dialogue—­a form of memory-­work, performed alone: “I converse with myself, I practice / terms long abandoned, retrace my sullen art’s / ill-­fated signs” (“ipse loquor mecum desuetaque verba retracto, / et studii repeto signa sinistra mei’) (T V. vii. 63–64). The poem anticipates the death of Ovid’s identity as a celebrated, urbane, and artful Latin writer, forcing him to turn elsewhere: “Already, I feel, I’ve forgotten how to speak my own language / through learning the local lingo instead” (“ipse mihi videor iam dedidicisse Latine: / nam didici Getice Sarmaticeque loqui”) (T V. xii. 57–58). Critics point out that that Ovidian elegy enacts the division inherent in an epistolary form that inscribes absence and division within writing itself. If the poet is his own elegist—­singing, swan-­like, as he dies—­his poem is also an elegy for a lost imperial identity based on the ability to speak and write in Latin. Bodily discomfort, extreme weather, and the clash of marauding tribes become tropes for linguistic discomfort. Not only is Ovid’s literary identity imperiled, but his core identity also risks being overtaken by a barbarous dialect as hostile as the brutal weather. Ovid sees adaptation to

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his situation as the ultimate defeat. Muteness and death are the only alternatives to the imperial culture that defines him. Ovid’s Tristia paradoxically affirms the triumph of the literacy whose loss it laments. Holding fast to a literary identity predicated on Roman sociality, Ovid turns the transformations explored in his own poetry against himself. Metamorphosis is inconceivable; every­thing depends on his longed-­for recall to Rome and his recovery of the civilization within which he can function effectively as a poet. In this, he resembles not so much Said’s sad exilic poet, lacking a place to call home, or the tension between rootedness and transformation explored by Lahiri, as the colonial who stubbornly holds onto the fantasy of a distant “home” with its familiar language and customs, long past any real possibility of return. This is not to dismiss the homesickness of the postimperial subject as negligible, but rather to set limits to the idea that Ovid’s Tristia might also speak to the suffering of the twentieth-­century refugees whose uprooting Said articulates. Ovid’s exilic identity crisis is the tax extorted by empire from grateful and rebellious subject alike, as distinct from the forced refugee’s experience of powerlessness, displacement, and precarious survival in the “host” country. In the face of Ovid’s own intransigent elegy for a lost empire, David Malouf ’s novel, An Imaginary Life (1978), reimagines Ovid’s exile as a dif­fer­ent fable—­a fable of literary identity and artifice shed like a confining carapace. Malouf aims “to make this glib fabulist of ‘the changes’ live out in real­ity what had been, in his previous existence, merely the occasion for dazzling literary display.”12 Stranded in a garrison town where no one speaks his language, Malouf ’s Ovid inhabits an unreadable landscape, “a vast page whose tongue I am unable to decipher, whose message to me I am unable to interpret” (IL, 17). He dreams of digging with the wolves to find the grave of his previous Roman identity, “the grave of the poet Ovid—­Publius Ovidius Naso, Roman of the Equestrian order, poet” (IL, 18). Malouf ’s Ovid speaks across the centuries, to a time when Latin may no longer be the lingua franca of the Roman Empire; he imagines his reader “in a lighted room whose furnishings I do not recognize . . . ​translating this—­with what difficulty?—­into your own tongue” (IL, 19). Literary survival means translation, a fate unforeseen by the Ovid of the Tristia: “Have you heard my name? Ovid? Am I still known? Has some line of my writing escaped the banning of my books from all the libraries and their public burning, my expulsion from the Latin tongue?” (IL ,19). Malouf ’s Ovid stands for all the poets whose lines have been passed on secretly, by word of mouth or in the form of fragments, in sayings, poems, letters—­their banning,

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burning, and expulsion, but also their salvaging in the forms of quotations and reconstructions. An Imaginary Life transforms the Tristia’s ice and cold into something at once more intimate and more exotic, a boundary zone between the h­ uman and the natu­ral, where ethnography and myth jostle for space in dreams as well as in everyday life. Tormented by the guttural language that surrounds him, Malouf ’s Ovid painfully starts to listen to its intonations, imagining himself as a spider reweaving his poetry in an arachnoid tongue (“The New Metamorphoses of the poet Ovid in his Exile in the spiders’ tongue”) (IL, 21). The weave of creatures at the humblest margin of ­human existence offers a new form of textuality—­and a new immediacy. Learning the local language returns Malouf ’s Ovid to the vivid tastes and sights of his childhood home, his f­ ather’s farm at Sulmo in the Abruzzo countryside: “Poppy, scarlet poppy, flower of my far-­off childhood. . . . ​Scarlet. Magic word on the tongue to flash again on the eye. Scarlet.” (IL, 31). Primal experience pierces the skin of urban artifice. In his dreams, Malouf ’s Ovid encounters ghostly mounted warriors who entreat him to let them into his life, uttering strange syllables: “I woke, cried out. And the word I uttered was not in my own tongue.” (IL, 25). Becoming foreign to himself, the poet meets an unconscious world endowed with its own language and untamed energies. His expulsion from the Latin tongue opens him to a linguistic other that is already within, as well as to what lies beyond the known world: “It is as if each creature had the power to dream itself out of one existence into a new one.” (IL, 28–29). The inanimate becomes animate, returning to nature via an unending series of changes. In the words of Ovid’s own Metamorphoses: “What changes they [­things] undergo, listen and I w ­ ill tell you. . . . ​Nothing retains its own form . . . ​ what we call birth is but a beginning . . . ​death is but cessation of a former state.” (Met. XV. 237–38, 252–57).13 Language, naming flowers and gods, is the start of creation. Malouf ’s Ovid repudiates his Roman past. In d­ oing so, he embarks on a new life: “ ‘ You w ­ ill be separated from yourself and yet be alive.’ Now I too must be transformed.” (IL, 33). This is the mythic prophecy once made to Atalanta, in Ovid’s own words.14 His Metamorphoses had dealt with transformations that traverse the boundary between ­human and natu­ral worlds. For Malouf, language itself initiates t­ hese metamorphoses. At the center of the novel is Ovid’s encounter with the Child. Like an Enlightenment Jean Itard, Malouf ’s Ovid strug­gles to humanize this wild child, teaching him language, affection, and play.15 But the chiastic structure of the novel works in unanticipated ways.

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The wild child puts Ovid in touch with his lost childhood other, the imaginary familiar who had once haunted the bound­aries of his f­ ather’s farm at Sulmo: “He is the wild boy of my childhood. I know it now. Who has come back to me. He is The Child.” (IL, 54). Led by the wild boy, Ovid crosses into the endless steppes beyond the river, his death more like “cessation of a former state” than that of a famous Roman poet. Malouf makes his Ovid confront “something that is not myself or of my own imagining” (IL, 52)—­natu­ral pro­ cess, a “beyond” of language, previously unlived. Malouf’s Ovid first encounters the boy in his dreams, communicating “[i]n a language beyond tongues” (IL, 63). This is the language of becoming, or metamorphosis redefined: “We have only to conceive of the possibility and somehow the spirit works in us to make it ­actual. This is the true meaning of transformation.” (IL, 64). His poetry changes as he begins to understand Getish: “I believe I could make poems in it. Seeing the world through this other tongue I see it differently. It is a dif­fer­ent world. Somehow it seems closer to the first princi­ple of creation, closer to what­ever force it is that makes ­things what they are and changes them into what they would be.” (IL, 65). His new language is the language of change. It opens a dialogue with otherness. When Malouf ’s Ovid tries to teach the captive wild child to speak, he discovers that ­there is another way of communicating—­identification. As the Child speaks the language of birdcalls, he himself becomes a bird, “miraculously transformed” (IL, 90): “He is being the bird. He is allowing it to speak out of him. So that in learning the sounds made by men he is making himself a man” (IL, 92). The Child learns to speak painstakingly, by bodily touch: throat, nose, lips, tongue, teeth. Malouf ’s Ovid teaches the Child to identify with the ­human by feeling in his own body what it means to speak. But in the pro­cess, he himself learns to identify with (to learn and learn from) the Child’s language. As Malouf ’s Ovid seeks to lead the Child into his humanity, the Child in turn leads him into awareness of another way of learning language and relating to the world—­“a kind of library of forms that [the Child] has observed and committed to memory, another language whose hieroglyphs he can interpret and read” (IL, 93). When Malouf ’s Ovid decides to teach the Child, not Latin, but Getish, he finds he has already made another decision: “I s­ hall never go back to Rome” (IL, 94). Instead, he enters the Child’s world: “a ­whole hidden life comes flooding back to consciousness” (IL, 95). This hidden life foretells the final change at the end of the novel, when the spirit of inanimate t­ hings migrates into him (“The spirit of ­things ­will migrate back into us. We ­shall be ­whole.”) (IL, 96). He learns that the truest language of communication is “that

30  C h a p t e r 1

speech in silence” (IL, 97). This is the language by which he had first communicated with the Child in his dreams, and the language by which he had once communicated with his childhood familiar. Its rediscovery involves reconciliation rather than division: When I think of the language that has been taken away from me, it is some ­earlier and more universal language than our Latin, subtle as it undoubtedly is. Latin is a language for distinctions, e­ very ending defines and divides. The language I am speaking of now, that I am almost speaking, is a language whose ­every syllable is a language of reconciliation. We knew that language once. I spoke it in my childhood. We must discover it again. (IL, 98) The language of undivided identity (can t­ here be such a t­ hing?) posits the reconciliation of all t­ hings; but at the price of self-­loss. An Imaginary Life reconciles nature and culture, but only within the pages of a book. Crossing over involves both a flight into fantasy and the ultimate silencing of the writer. Fleeing the claustrophobia of the Tomic community, Malouf ’s Ovid and the Child escape across the soon-­to-­thaw frozen river. Their flight takes up the Ovidian motif of change, at once a new birth and the end of life as previously known: “What e­ lse should our lives be but a continual series of beginnings, of painful settings out into the unknown, pushing off from the edges of consciousness into the mystery of what we have not yet become” (IL, 135). The movement beyond consciousness announces a new kind of poetry, “beyond the limits of our speech” (IL, 136). As he crosses the Ister, Malouf ’s Ovid enters another world that he calls “the last real­ity” (IL, 141). Now it is the Child’s turn to care for his teacher, finding him morsels of food in the limitless steppes whose emptiness “feeds the spirit” as “[i]t expands to become the ­whole landscape, as if space itself w ­ ere its dimensions” (IL, 141, 142). In this world of birds’ eggs, grass-­stalks, seeds, roots, and tubers, with the empty plain stretching away into infinity, bound­aries are replaced by a new kind of exchange: “Wandering along together, wading through the high grasses side by side, is a kind of conversation that needs no tongue, a perfect interchange of perceptions, moods, questions, answers, that is as s­ imple as the weather” (IL, 145). Lacking “the structures of formal speech,” poet and Child commune wordlessly: “It is like talking to oneself. Like one side of the head passing thoughts across to the other.” (IL, 145). Malouf ’s own language speaks eloquently of an interchange that has no need of language, reminding the reader that poetry can evoke what it c­ an’t itself perform. Journeying across the steppes, Malouf ’s Ovid becomes aware of a landscape in which the Child has always been at home. As energy streams up

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through the grass stems, he grasps the pro­cess of “the Changes”—­“columns of light, upright channels by which the earth feeds itself to the sky” (IL, 146), as insect life swarms below. The pro­cess of energy-­exchange becomes the universal energy linking the soil to the ­human body as it begins the gradual pro­cess of returning to its original state. The dreaming poet “almost feel[s] it begin to happen . . . ​as the interchange begins. . . . ​Between our bodies and the world ­there is unity and commerce” (IL, 147). The “interchange” resembles a membrane that grows transparent and tears, ­until the small creature flies ­free, just as the body pushes “the thin, transparent envelope that still contains it, that keeps it from bursting forth into what­ever new form it has already conceived itself as being” (IL, 148). The Child’s migration across the endless plain mirrors the poet’s apprehension of a world beyond ­human articulation or imagining. Is the Child becoming a god as he leads the poet ­toward the place he recognizes as his destination, the place of his own death?—­a place he has dreamed of, where “I ascend, or lower myself, grain by grain, into the hands of the gods” (IL, 150). At this end to which his life’s journey has led, the poet regains his childhood self, while the Child, his guide, steps away from him, transfigured by light: “He is walking on the ­water’s light. And as I watch, he takes the first step off it, moving slowly away now into the deepest distance, above the earth, above the ­water, on air.” (IL, 152). The novel’s last, poetic words bring poet and Child together, bridging pre­sent and past in a single, dazzlingly rooted realization: “I am ­there” (IL, 152).16 ­There, at the same time nowhere, his final destination. The beyond of language becomes the writer’s prelinguistic other, his imaginary rerooted life.

Coda: Ister Man nennet aber diesen den Ister. Schön wohnt er. Es brennet der Säulen Laub, Und reget sich. (And they call this the Ister. Beautiful his dwelling. Leaves on columns Burn and quiver.)17 —­h öl de r l i n, “de r ist e r”

For Malouf ’s Ovid, the name “Ister” (Greek Istros) “mark[s] the bound­aries of our Roman world” (IL, 136). The syllables Is-­ter, he says, “have always given me . . . ​some thrill in my innermost being” (IL, 136). Is-­ter is the final boundary

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waiting to be crossed, as its syllables whisper: “I am the border beyond which you must go if you are to find your true life, your true death at last” (IL, 136). At the farthest reaches of empire, “this last river at the end of the known world” (IL, 137) shifts and freezes, cracks and flows. In a movement at once centrifugal (away from Rome) and internal (­toward some as yet unknown mode of being), this frontier crossing undoes the poetics of imperial identity. Magic syllables, “Is-­ter”—­“ born of my own breath frozen solid, and waiting” (IL, 137)—­resemble the intake and outlet of breath. Breathing is the most minimal boundary between life and death, between animate and inanimate worlds; breath is also the precursor of orality and speech. An im­mense river flowing into the Black Sea, its markers calculated in distance from sea rather than source, the Danube inscribes a border that belongs to both cultural and geo­graph­i­cal imaginaries (like Ovid’s), in recent times consolidated as a po­liti­cal boundary—­not just the beginning or end of a journey, but the bound­aries between East and West mapped onto post–­World War II Eu­rope. In Grenz. Räume / Last Journey (2003), the photographer Inge Morath, herself displaced by the events of World War II, comments on a 1958 Danube River trip commissioned by Magnum as an exploration of what had become the East/West Eu­ro­pean border: “I always particularly loved Hölderlin’s idea of viewing rivers in reverse flow—­from estuary to source. . . . ​One feels as if one ­were crossing over to other shores.” (see figure 1.3).18 Morath’s birthplace, Graz (the frontier city between Austria and what is now Slovenia) gave her a lifelong fascination with the idea of the border that Arthur Miller describes as “the end of something and also the beginning, the escape and the entry, the desire to forget and the need to remember.”19 In Hölderlin’s hymn, “Der Ister,” the river is identified with the origins of poetry—­origins located in both West and East, Germany and Greece, as the river flows back on itself recursively. The poem’s opening invocation of divine fire (“Jetzt komme, Feuer!”) (HF, 110), its seemingly recursive pro­gress from Black Sea to source, and its riddling close, made it a magnet for Heidegger in his 1942 war­time Hölderlin lectures: “But what he does, the river, / Nobody knows” (“Was aber jener tuet, der Strom, / Weiss niemand”) (HF, 114–15). Heidegger’s reading—­a knife-­edged dialogue between antiquity and modernity, the native and the foreign—­builds on Hölderlin’s translational dialogue with the Greeks.20 “The Ister” provides an occasion for Heidegger’s definition of the poet’s calling. The river belongs to language, like the poet; it is the sign both of the poet and of his poeticizing, his form of knowledge. Yet, as Heidegger points out, the river’s essence remains an enigma for the poet himself (“But what he does, the river, / nobody knows”)

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figure 1.3. Inge Morath, Romania, On the St. George Canal in the Danube Delta (1958). Photo © Magnum Photos.

(HH, 19–20; HF, 114–15). Heidegger notes that the root of the word “enigma” (Rätsel) spans both “counsel” and “care” (HH, 34). The poem’s “poetizing” offers its own kind of knowing, its own mysterious wisdom, as it winds from its end back to its pastoral source (figure 1.4). Heidegger’s Ister is at once journey and home, mirroring the backward eddy of the river: “The river is the locality of journeying. The river is the journeying of locality.” (HH, 43). His Hölderlin lectures provide the occasion for staging an encounter with the paradoxical (dis-)unity of home and homelessness (Heim and unheimlich): The river is the journeying of that journey in which the becoming of being at home has its essence. The river is not simply one of ­these (locality) and then the other (journeying) in addition. The river is both, and is so in an originary unity. ­Human beings, as historical, are grounded in relation to this essence of the river. (HH, 42–43) The poem poetizes “the back-­and forth between the foreign and the homely” (HH, 43). For Heidegger, “[c]oming to be at home is thus a passage through

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figure 1.4. Inge Morath, Germany, Near Sigmaringen, The Young Danube (1959). Photo © Magnum Photos.

the foreign” (HH, 49)—­a passage that flows back on itself, while engaging in a historical dialogue with the foreign: “the poetic mediation on becoming homely must also for its part be of a historical nature and, as poetic, demand a historical dialogue [Zwiesprache] with foreign poets” (HH, 49). By definition, “What is one’s own, which the poetic meditation and telling is concerned with finding and appropriating, itself contains the relations to that foreign through which coming to be at home takes its path” (HH, 49). ­There can be no definition of home without journeying, no journeying that does not involve the foreign; the alien is at once an aspect of the historicity and singularity—­the identity— of (Hölderlin’s) poetry, and a sign of the essential uncanniness of the h­ uman.21 It helps to remember that Heidegger’s reflections on home and belonging, and on the place of the unhomely within Hölderlin’s poetry (the place of Hellenic culture within Germanic culture), have as their context the contingencies of war­time Nazi Germany. The previous year, 1941, Germany had invaded and occupied Greece.22 To whom does Greece—­properly or improperly—­belong?

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Heidegger’s attempt to hold the balance between homeland and foreignness, Hesperian and Hellenic—­like his emphasis on the co-­existence of native and alien within Hölderlin’s hymn, and within poetic language more generally—is an act of dissimulation as well as appropriation. Hölderlin’s hymn had named India as both telos and origin in the East, beyond even Greece. Heidegger’s embrace of Greece as an attribute (not just a tributary) of German culture erases the tertiary structure of Hölderlin’s hymn. For Hölderlin himself, t­ here ­were not two but three distinct rivers: the Indus, the Alpheus, and the Ister. Heidegger’s reading represses the alterity of an East that is farther east than Greece, while seamlessly appropriating Greece to Germany and especially to German lit­er­a­ture, via the per­sis­tence of German Romantic classicism within the Germanic literary tradition. The river has fulfilled its destiny by having gone East and returned to its true homeland in the West. Rather than being exiled from Greece, or by Greece, “we” are “exiled from exile,” an exile from which t­ here is no return.23 A deconstructive reading might c­ ounter that t­ here can be no belonging, since home is always lined (and aligned) with the unhomely that bounds it. Neither identity nor language can ever be proper, any more than poetry can have purely nativist origins, or possess unique knowledge proper to itself.24 Hölderlin’s river hymn exposes the tensions within Heidegger’s nationalist ideology. We are led past the physical and historical barrier provided by the Danube to consider how both home and myths of national origin—­native language and cultural identity—­can never be fully owned, but only appropriated by an intellectual sleight of hand. In his insistence on a national provenance that is historical yet noncontingent, Heidegger naturalizes and delimits the foreign, domesticating it as native-­born. Lahiri, Ovid, and Malouf offer differing versions of the ways in which the poetics of identity are intertwined with language, translation, and exile—as schism, graft, and impediment, but also with a potential for change and exchange that exceeds the reach of both Heideggerian philosophy and national or imperial bound­aries. Each writer explores the unstable forms of identity available to a necessarily divided and heterogeneous subject. Translation provides a meta­phor for the forging of literary identity both in and beyond language. It points to the way in which linguistic identity, even as it asserts itself, works to bring about its own undoing and to unsettle latently nationalist appropriations such as Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin’s “Der Ister.” The poetics of identity are continually being made and unmade, moving away from their origins and back again like the recursive windings of the Ister.25

2 Of  Birds and Men

what has the current Mediterranean mi­grant crisis to do with birds, and what has translation to do with migration? Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid—­ Aeneas’s visit to the underworld in quest of his dead f­ ather—­provides a precursor text for a crossing as ancient as the movement of birds across the Mediterranean from Africa to Italy. Avian migration is still used to reference the plight of modern mi­grants attempting to cross the Mediterranean, risking death by hypothermia, dehydration, or drowning. T ­ oday’s Mediterranean mi­grants are as likely to encounter hostility as humanitarian assistance. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers and the rise of anti-­migrant politics, once hospitable Mediterranean islands have become sites of detention centers and friction between locals and mi­grants. Probing the tensions within Kant’s Enlightenment concept of hospitality and the rights of the stranger, Derrida points out that nameless mi­grants are required to give an account of their origins in the language of the country where they have applied for asylum. The intertwining of law and language puts translation at the heart of the mi­grant’s quest for ­legal identity and asylum. In Mary Shelley’s Enlightenment Frankenstein (1818)—at once an origin story and a failed Bildungsroman—­the Being’s absolute demand for hospitality tests the limits of sociality to breaking point. Interwoven with the Being’s story, and often seen as a mystifying crux in Shelley’s novel, Justine Moritz’s confession and sentencing by the law has an unexpected parallel in modern Italy, where trafficked ­women mi­grants are required to undergo a l­ egal pro­cess akin to confession and to provide a coherent story in the language of their host country in order to obtain l­egal residence. Taking a dif­fer­ent perspective on the mi­grant crisis, Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 documentary, Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), focuses on the island of Lampedusa—­the closest Italian arrival point for incoming mi­grants crossing by boat from Libya. Taking its title from a local 36

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song, Rosi’s documentary pairs a twelve-­year-­old island boy, Samuele, with the island’s humanitarian doctor in order to create a bifocal vision of an island community and the mi­grant tragedy taking place at sea. Samuele aims his slingshot at incoming birds, unaware of the stunned survivors coming ashore ­after their coast guard rescue. Immersing the viewer in the Lampedusa community, with its subsistence economy, coast guards, and local radio station, Rosi dives beneath the surface—­beyond images, and beyond the hymn-­like theme song—in order to forge connections that exceed the limits of translation and even language. A boy chirping to a bird elicits a sense of tenuous connection (if only via song) reminiscent of the mi­grant’s hymn of safe arrival as seen and heard elsewhere in the film. The trajectory traced in this chapter, from Heaney’s Aeneid Book VI to Rosi’s Fuocoammare, admits the poetry of transhistorical time into the urgency of con­temporary migration studies, along with a power­ful trope of mourning for ­those drowned at sea.1 How best to memorialize the uncounted and anonymous mi­grants who perish during the Mediterranean crossing remains unresolved, sidelined by the strug­gle between humanitarian assistance and anti-­immigration policy.

i. Translation Anxiety . . . ​all the fleeting, fitful anx­i­eties that afflict the literary translator. — ­s e a m us h e a n e y, “t r a nsl ator’s not e ,” a e n e i d book v i 2

So ends the “Translator’s Note” to Seamus Heaney’s posthumously published, end-­of-­life translation Aeneid Book VI (2016). The verse-­writer’s anxiety gives rise to a flutter of alliteration and assonance: fleeting, fitful, afflict. Literary translation brings along with it specific anx­i­eties about rhythm and lineation, voice and pacing. But t­ here is more to be heard in t­ hese fitful fluttering f ’s. Heaney confronts not only the shade of Virgil but also—­like Aeneas confronting the shade of Anchises—­his own dead f­ ather. Heaney tells us that he gravitated ­toward Book VI “­after [his] f­ ather died, since the story it tells is that of Aeneas’ journey to meet the shade of his f­ ather Anchises in the land of the dead” (Aeneid Book VI, vii). Translators and exiles are haunted equally by the loss of their dead and by the language of the past. For Derrida, too, “The question of the foreigner concerns what happens at death and when the traveler is laid to rest in a foreign land.”3 Like Aeneas’s descent to the underworld, Heaney’s late-­life path to translating Aeneid Book VI involved a detour—­the memory of his Latin teacher,

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Michael McGlinchey, sighing regretfully, “Och, boys, I wish it ­were Book VI,” as he prepares his class for their Latin exam (Aeneid Book VI, vii). Another detour included the twelve ­earlier poems that make up Heaney’s “Route 110,” the autobiographical sequence included in ­Human Chain (2010).4 A loose versioning of episodes from Book VI of the Aeneid, “Route 110” compares urban crowds boarding their buses to Virgil’s restless shades gathering to cross the Styx. A three-­day wake for a drowned neighbor references the drowning of Aeneas’s helmsman, Palinurus, washed ashore ­after three days, lamenting his own lack of burial. An avian flutter accompanies ­these tropes of crossing and drowning: the passengers flock to their buses “like agitated rooks,” while a wedding suit is “grey // As Venus’ doves” or “McNicholls’ pigeons” (HC, 50, 51, 52). In the penultimate section of “Route 110,” eve­ning on a riverbank, “a-­hover / With midge-­drifts,” morphs into an uneasy commingling with “shades and shadows stirring on the brink” as the living “stood ­there waiting, watching, / Needy and ever needier for translation” (HC, 56, 57). The midge-­drifts recall the spirits swarming like bees in Book VI of the Aeneid as they wait to cross the Styx. Virgil’s shades and the shadows of eve­ning (“Needy and ever needier for translation”) are a reminder that literary translation also necessitates a meta­phorical crossing-­over. The language of translation and death commingle disquietingly on an Irish riverbank. Heaney’s imagination tugs him ­toward the underworld where Aeneas searches for his ­father, a Trojan refugee who perishes on the island of Sicily before he can reach the shores of Italy. With hindsight, Aeneid Book VI resonates both with Heaney’s own unexpected death before the publication of his translation, and with ­today’s Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy, a voyage under­gone by hundreds of thousands of mi­grants and refugees in unseaworthy fishing boats and dinghies.5 Virgil’s Cumaean Sibyl seems already to be addressing ­these modern mi­grants when she warns parenthetically of dangers yet to come for the new arrivals in Italy, even ­after having survived their crossing: “you who survived, / In the end, the sea’s dangers (though worse still await / On the land)” (Aeneid Book VI, 121–23). Invoking ­future wars and disasters, the Sibyl’s “menacing riddles” (Aeneid Book VI, 141) provide a preview of Rome’s troubled f­ uture as well as its triumphant foundation—­a history that includes the back-­story of Aeneas’s flight from a fallen city (Troy) and lives lost at sea, as well as tragic events even a­ fter the voyagers come safely to shore. Aeneas descends into the underworld to meet his ­father’s shade, bearing a golden bough for safe passage. But before he can leave for the Styx, he has to bury a drowned man, his trumpeter Misenus, washed up and

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awaiting cremation. The ceremony both precedes and enables Aeneas’s journey in search of his f­ ather, as if the apotropaic burning of a single body might lay to rest the unquiet shades of all ­those drowned at sea without funeral or memorial. Aeneas enters the underworld via the volcanic lake Avernus, with its noxious sulfuric fumes: “No creature of air / Could wing its way safely over that ­water” (Aeneid Book VI, 316–17). The name “Avernus,” w ­ e’re told, means “place / Without birds” (Aeneid Book VI, 320–21)—­one of a number of references to birds in Book VI of the Aeneid, recalled by Heaney’s avian allusions in “Route 110” (including “birdless Lake Avernus”; HC, 50). The dead souls ferried by Charon in his rusty craft come pouring to the banks of the Styx like mi­grants embarking on the decrepit boats of Libyan people-­smugglers. In a famous simile, they resemble autumn leaves, “or flocks of birds / Blown inland from the stormy ocean, when the year / Turns cold and drives them to migrate / To countries in the sun” (Aeneid Book VI, 410–13). The passage of birds to and from Africa punctuates the seasons, as the mi­grant flocks, headed for their breeding-­grounds, make their first exhausted landfall on the Italian islands of Lampedusa, Linosa, and Sicily—­the offshore islands where t­ oday’s h­ uman mi­grants arrive, alive or drowned, clothed or half-­naked, or sometimes already zipped into anonymous body-­bags. Bird migration provides Virgil’s simile for the numberless souls of the dead flocking to the brink of the Styx, begging to be allowed to board, stretching their arms longingly t­ oward the farther shore. In a proleptic moment, Aeneas asks the Sibyl the meaning of Charon’s decision as he allows one group to board but peremptorily denies passage to another: “What decides that one group is held back, another / Rowed across the muddy ­waters?” (Aeneid Book VI, 422–23). Only the properly buried are allowed to cross, the Sibyl replies; the rest must wait a hundred years u­ ntil they are allowed to approach the w ­ aters of forgetfulness and join the happy spirits on the far side. The unburied are driven back like mi­grants without papers, caught between the people-­ smugglers on one shore and bureaucratic pro­cessing on the other; or e­ lse they are lost to sight, literally numberless, their lives captured only in official estimates of t­ hose drowned at sea, month by month and year by year. Before Aeneas can travel to the underworld, he encounters yet another drowned man: “his helmsman, Palinurus, / Who not long since had pitched and tumbled off / The stern into open sea” (Aeneid Book VI, 446–48). Apollo had prophesied that Palinurus would arrive safely on the shores of Italy—­and so he does, a­ fter three nights clinging to his steering oar. The fourth day brings

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him ashore, where he is murdered by hostile native inhabitants. In a roiling passage of alliteration, Heaney has him complain: “Now surf keeps me dandled, / The shore winds loll me and roll me” (Aeneid Book VI, 479–80).6 Not unlike the bodies of mi­grants washed up on ­today’s Mediterranean beaches, the body of Palinurus is dandled and rolled in the surf with an almost maternal fondness.7 His ghost begs for a handful of earth by way of burial, or e­ lse a lift from Aeneas across the Stygian marsh: “take me with you / Over the waves, so that in death at the least / I ­shall find a calm haven” (Aeneid Book VI, 494–96). The Sibyl gives him a dusty answer: “You who a­ ren’t even buried, what makes you think / You can look on the ­waters of Styx or the Furies’ / Grim river?” (Aeneid Book VI, 500–502). By way of compensation, he receives reverence for his bones, a tomb, and a place named a­ fter him. It is tempting to see in Palinurus’s restless shade a trope for the fate of subsequent Mediterranean mi­ grants—­those who fall off their crowded boats or are failed by cheap lifejackets when the people-­smugglers’ boats capsize, their bodies found floating and disfigured, granted only the dubious rites of DNA identification. Aeneas reproaches Palinurus, an experienced helmsman, for falling asleep as he steers. But unknown to Aeneas, the death of Palinurus is the price exacted so that other Trojans can come safely ashore. His unquiet end anticipates the fate of all ­those undocumented, uncounted, and unburied who risk their lives to make the Mediterranean crossing without any guarantee of safe passage. Arriving in the underworld, Aeneas is surrounded by the wailing of dead infants and by ­those unjustly condemned to die, by suicides, and by the unrequited lovers who inhabit the Fields of Mourning (including his own abandoned lover, Dido). Aeneas weeps too, but he pushes on to the fields of dead and mutilated heroes from the Trojan wars, following the forked path that leads, one way, to hideous scenes of eternal punishment, and the other, to the Groves of the Fortunate where Orpheus plays for the entertainment of patriots, poets, and scientists. Beyond lies the valley where ­father and son are re­ united. Their meeting is tearful, joyful, and fraught with longing. Although Anchises is relieved to see his son—­“I was afraid that Africa / Might be your undoing” (Aeneid Book VI, 935–36)—he eludes Aeneas’s filial embrace: “Three times he tried to reach arms around that neck. / Three times the form, reached for in vain, escaped / Like a breeze . . .” (Aeneid Book VI, 942–44). From a distance, Anchises provides information about the spirits hovering “like bees in meadows / On a clear summer day” (Aeneid Book VI, 951–52; the bees become Heaney’s swarms of gnats in “Route 110”). ­These are the fortunate “spirits destined to lead a second life / in the body” (Aeneid Book VI, 960–61),

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assembled to drink the w ­ aters of Lethe that “[h]eals their anx­i­eties and obliterates / All trace of memory” (Aeneid Book VI, 963–64) before their rebirth or “translation”—­Heaney’s word (HC, 57). Anchises tells how all life is renewed as the dead take on fresh flesh-­and-­blood forms, then reveals the long vista of Roman imperial genealogy initiated by Aeneas’s f­ uture landing on the Italian shore. In the closing line, “Anchors are cast from the prow; sterns cushion on sand” (Aeneid Book VI, 1222). Migration offers a powerfully reflexive trope for the concept of translation, with its implications of diaspora and the dispersal of identities and lives on hostile foreign shores (leaving aside the cultural encounters created by modern globalization).8 Translation condemns texts to nomadic existence, with no place to call home, like Said’s so-­called translated men, compelled to negate their own history in order to fit into their a­ dopted society. Paradoxically, the Trojan Aeneas—­himself a mi­grant—is already more Roman than the Roman Empire he founds.9 His back-­story of flight and exile, dispossession and war, informs an epic that sets out to create a retrospective genealogy of the imperial regime triumphantly foretold by Anchises. In other words, Virgil predicates his vision of imperial culture on an originary disaster. The destruction of Trojan civilization and the risk of death by drowning make Aeneas’s coming to shore a thoroughly ambiguous survival. Palinurus’s drowned body—­dandled by the surf, laid to rest on foreign soil—­disturbs both imperial and linguistic identity. An immigrant’s landing-­story with epic dimensions, Aeneas’s descent into the world of death does more than fuel the unmoored translation-­anxiety that Heaney acutely identifies in his “Translator’s Note.” It also memorializes the untold cost of t­ oday’s Mediterranean mi­grant passage, providing a vista of the imperial past—­its founding myth—­that spills over into the disconsolate pre­sent, where no such triumphal fate awaits the incoming mi­grant, who instead must undergo a series of l­ egal rites de passage designed to award or refuse asylum in the country of his or her arrival.10

ii. Inhospitable Language “Displaced persons,” exiles, ­those who are deported, expelled, rootless, nomads, all share two sources of sighs, two nostalgias: their dead ones and their language. —­j acqu e s de r r i da , of hospi ta l i t y (oh, 87)11

Derrida is by no means the first to point out that the etymology of hospitality and hostility, host and stranger, are intimately intertwined in the Latin word

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hostis (­enemy, adversary, stranger)—or that exiles are haunted equally by their dead and by their language. Immanuel Kant’s concept of hospitality (Wirtbarkeit) in Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) includes a claim for world citizenship and Universal Hospitality. Kant extends the stranger’s rights beyond mere philanthropy at the bound­aries of communities where strangers meet.12 According to Kant, “hospitality means the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone ­else’s territory.” Kant continues: “The stranger cannot claim the right of a guest to be entertained” but only a “right of resort” by virtue of the need to tolerate ­others in a world where infinite dispersal is no longer pos­si­ble.13 The juridical rights of the outsider might be thought to include ac­cep­tance or recognition of the stranger as a universal right. The same conceptual oscillation trou­bles the discourse of migration. Is the extension of the “right” to asylum predicated on an overarching global humanity? Or are such rights based on laws s­ haped by a world of finite resources, hence necessarily subject to juridical restriction? Are ­these rights universal or merely contingent? The 1951 Geneva Convention on refugees obliges signatories to accept refugees whose return to their own country puts them in danger of death or exposes them to persecution based on race, creed, sexual orientation, or politics. The ­legal pro­cess of claiming asylum, rather than primarily humanitarian considerations, defines this restricted route to the right to live and work in a host state. The opposition between an ethical imperative to grant hospitality to all strangers versus a conditional right to asylum based on specific criteria emerges at the point of the mi­grants’ arrival, as they undergo bureaucratic pro­cessing in reception centers, detention, and (sometimes) the granting of temporary identity papers for onward movement. In Eu­ro­pean Union (EU) countries, application for asylum and permanent residence comes ­later. The humanitarian support of nongovernmental organ­izations (NGOs) and religious charities—­doctors with or without borders—­gives way to the arduous pro­cess of acquiring identity papers and resident status, negotiated from a position of social and l­egal limbo. Strictly speaking, the mi­grant is no one before overcoming this most formidable of l­egal obstacles, a pro­cess most often conducted in a foreign language or with the help of interpreters and cultural mediators. Jacques Derrida’s “On Cosmopolitanism” (1997) tackles head on the contradictions inherent in this double and conflicted imperative: the absolute duty (devoir) of hospitality versus the ­limited right (droit) inherited from Kant’s Enlightenment concept.14 As Derrida observes, the category of the

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economic mi­grant, seeking work or a better life, tends to be sharply distinguished from the plight of refugees and asylum-­seekers fleeing war or persecution. Not that seeking asylum on any grounds is easy. Already in 1997, Derrida could observe presciently: “Asylum-­seekers knock successively on each of the doors of the Eu­ro­pean Union states and end up being repelled at each one of them” (OC, 13). This is still more the case over twenty years ­later, as Eu­ro­pean countries strug­gle to absorb the influx of mi­grants and refugees from war-­torn Syria, Af­ghan­i­stan, and African countries that include, among o­ thers, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria. Anx­i­eties about the po­liti­cal and economic effects of migration along with the specter of home-­grown terrorism drive increasingly stringent ­legal requirements for residence. In the United States—­a nation of immigrants—­restrictions on immigration and asylum coupled with draconian policies of deportation have led to the criminalization of undocumented mi­ grants, irrespective of their circumstances or their potential economic and social contribution, as well as to the erosion of the ­legal concept of asylum established in the wake of the genocides of World War II. In a sweeping identification of ethos with ethics, Derrida writes: “Hospitality is culture itself, not simply one ethic amongst ­others” (OC, 16). Ethos, literally one’s home or dwelling place, becomes coextensive with the ethics of hospitality in relation both to ourselves and to ­others: Insofar as it has to do with the ethos, that is, the residence, one’s home, the familiar place of dwelling, inasmuch as it is a manner of being ­there, the manner in which we relate to ourselves and to o­ thers, to o­ thers as our own or as foreigners, ethics is hospitality; ethics is so thoroughly coextensive with the experience of hospitality. (OC, 16–17) Yet, as Derrida observes, alongside an ethos predicated on residence, home, and dwelling-­place, ­there exists a contrary impulse: to appropriate, master, and expel. Derrida reminds his readers that Kant’s formulation of the law of hospitality contains within it a fundamental antimony. Kant asserts two limits: the right to reside (restricted to visitation), and the sovereignty of the state. An a priori unconditional law of hospitality coexists with conditional laws governing the l­egal right to reside. The space for negotiation between t­ hese two provides a testing-­ground where ideas about asylum and hospitality confront law and democracy. Invoking hospitality without limits, while allowing for the necessity of borders and sovereignty, Kant pits an unlimited right of visitation against legally prescribed residence. The law of unconditional hospitality and the conditional laws of hospitality have been painfully tested in

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modern times by changing po­liti­cal attitudes to migration and by successive waves of mi­grants fleeing vio­lence or in search of better lives. Derrida’s Of Hospitality (1997) crucially extends the debate about the “Foreigner Question” to language: “the foreigner, . . . ​inept at speaking the language, always risks being without defense before the law of the country that welcomes or expels him” (OH, 15). As he points out, “the foreigner is first of all foreign to the ­legal language in which the duty of hospitality is formulated, the right to asylum, its limits, norms, policing, ­etc.” (OH, 15). Translation becomes an obligatory rite de passage accompanying the request for asylum. Derrida takes as his example Socrates’s plea for his life before the Athenian judges whose language he is forced to speak. Asylum-­seekers too have to plead for a life that is imperiled in their country of origin, while using the language of the host state. Without language—­w ithout name, f­amily, or social status—­ anonymous asylum-­seekers can only be radical outsiders to the juridical system from which they seek recognition and protection. Yet, Derrida points out, absolute or unconditional hospitality imposes an equally impossible and one-­sided obligation on the host: To put it in dif­fer­ent terms, absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a f­ amily name, with the social status of being a foreigner, ­etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them e­ ither reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. (OH, 25) This obligation to open one’s home to an anonymous, extra-­linguistic other is in stark contradiction to the juridical pro­cess of acquiring the ­legal right to reside and work. As part of this juridical pro­cess, the nameless other must submit to routine questioning: “what is your name?”; “who are you? where do you come from? what do you want?” (OH, 27, 131). The l­ egal pro­cess requires a coherent narrative of origins—­a travel-­narrative with dates and places, evidence of po­liti­cal or religious persecution and endangered life, and (in the case of the trafficked mi­grant) an official denunciation of the trafficker. The narrative resembles that of an embryonic Bildungsroman, a partly fictive construction required to demonstrate a required telos of growth, uprooting, and potential belonging.15 Derrida defines the prejuridical other as an “absolute” outsider to ­family, community, city, and nation-­state—­“the completely other who is relegated to

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an absolute outside, savage, barbaric, precultural, and prejuridical, outside and prior to the ­family, the community, the city, the nation, or the State” (OH, 73). The “foreigner” comes into being as an essentially l­ egal entity. Previously, this “barbaric, precultural” being is not only nameless and unassimilable, but monstrous, in the sense of being at once monitory and disturbing. To obtain l­ egal rights, the mi­grant must acquire a name and a story that are legible within the linguistic order of the host country. Translation becomes the paradoxical means to mediate and subjugate otherness. At the same time, the mi­grant has to abjure agency (even the desire for economic betterment and an improved life) and establish victim-­status. Supposedly erasing hostility, hospitality in the form of “leave to remain” is designed to produce a grateful and integrated mi­grant. But the pro­cess is always incomplete. The Other as stranger-­enemy morphs (if only in collective fantasy) into a threatening figure haunting the periphery of the privileged State of Belonging. Relegated to the economic margins of society and the lowest rungs of the workforce, or banished to the city’s outskirts (periferia, banlieue, or tent-­city), this incompletely assimilated Other marks the limits of hospitality. Barbaric, untranslatable, and menacing, Derrida’s absolute outsider disturbs philanthropic and judicial ideals of hospitality with an unconditional demand for recognition. Enter Mary Shelley’s construction of the quin­tes­sen­tial abandoned and rejected Other, Frankenstein’s monstrous Being. Frankenstein has provided the basis for a variety of Enlightenment and post-­ Enlightenment fables. Shelley’s Being had already posed the question of the absolute Other in terms of an Enlightenment critique of justice based on William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Po­liti­cal Justice (1793). Fabricated from disparate ­human body-­parts, the Being resembles no single h­ uman being; he has no paternity, no ­family, no name, and no language. His origins are obscure and his attempts at social assimilation fraught with clumsy m ­ istakes and painful rejections. Abandoned by his maker, Shelley’s inhuman or post-­human creature pleads for social identity, attempting to join or found a f­ amily on the basis of the innate capacity for love and benevolence with which Shelley uncompromisingly endows him. The Being is doomed to rejection not only ­because he has no look-­alike, but ­because he is perceived as the b­ earer of the most repugnant aspects of humanity—­physically abject, morally degenerate, hatefully wretched, and (­after repeated rejections) possessed by superhuman malice and rage. As we learn when the Being is allowed to tell his own origin-­story, he requires for his transformation only the satisfaction of recognition by a fellow Being. His bottom-­line demand is for a mate like himself: “what I ask

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of you is reasonable and moderate.”16 (F, 98). This “moderate” demand provokes in his creator a thoroughly immoderate and proto-­racist fear: that the Being and his mate might engender a new and monstrous race and eventually overrun the ­human race. Rejected by Frankenstein, his half-­finished mate destroyed, the Being turns to murder and revenge. By the end of Shelley’s novel, monster and maker are both doomed outcasts, haunting the polar wastes. In place of hospitality, mutually assured destruction. The explorer Robert Walton first encounters Frankenstein in pursuit of his monstrous alter ego. In the fleeing figure of the Being on his ice-­sledge, the ethnocentric Walton at first sees only “a savage inhabitant of some undiscovered island” (F, 13). By contrast, he at once recognizes in Frankenstein a “Eu­ro­pean” and gives his story a sympathetic hearing. ­Earlier in the novel, the Being experiences one of many rejections when he throws himself on the mercy of the De Lacey ­house­hold. He asks rhetorically: “Could they turn from their door one, however monstrous, who solicited their compassion and friendship?” (F, 88). Yes, they could. The Being’s rejection stems from the viewer’s horror at his misshapen appearance. But, as he tells Frankenstein, another unconscious motive underlies the emotions he provokes: “All men hate the wretched”; he continues: “how then must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living t­ hings!” (F, 65). The Being’s hyperbolic wretchedness exceeds the bounds of even the most capacious Enlightenment sympathy, although he pleads his wretchedness with all the eloquence of the Enlightenment education that he has acquired as the unacknowledged (and previously well-­behaved) guest of the De Lacey ­house­hold. Shelley’s Godwin-­derived theory of criminality attributes the Being’s demonic deeds to his exclusion from the bonds of sympathy: “[M]isery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I s­ hall again be virtuous.” (F, 66). The Being’s exorbitant demand is no less than the giving of universal hospitality to an absolute, anonymous Other, in Derrida’s words, “that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them ­either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names” (OH, 25). In the face of Frankenstein’s uncompromising refusal of this demand—­“­There can be no community between you and me: we are enemies” (F, 66)—­the Being insists on the mutual bond of hatred that links them to each other: “­Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? . . . ​I am miserable, and they ­shall share my wretchedness.” (F, 66). Wretchedness means, literally, the state of exile or banishment—­etymologically, from the Proto-­Germanic wrakjon, pursuer; one pursued. Pleading his case, the Being invokes l­ egal pro­cesses, demanding

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his day in court in the form of the accused’s right to self-­defense: “The guilty are allowed, by ­human laws, bloody as they may be, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned” (F, 67). All he claims is a hearing, as if rehearsing his story might lead to ac­cep­tance by his maker: “Hear my tale; it is long and strange” (F, 67). The Being’s back-­story resembles the abortive Bildungsroman of an Enlightenment enfant sauvage endowed with the power of speech—­his coming to consciousness and bodily sensation; hearing the sounds and flight of birds; experiencing heat, cold, fire, hunger; and fi­nally, spurred by hunger, “emigration” (F, 70). He too is a would-be mi­grant in search of a better life. Observing the daily lives of the De Lacey ­family from his hiding place, the Being learns reading, writing—­and (importantly) translation, as he overhears the lovely Arabian, Safie, learning the language of her Eu­ro­pean hosts. Along with Volney’s critique of civilization and empire in Ruins of Empire (1791), the Being is exposed to Shelley’s radical Godwinian critique of “the strange system of ­human society.”17 He learns that he lacks the privileges—­social status, patronage, property, wealth—­needed to succeed in an unequal society. Without birth or history, he is “a blot,” literally, unreadable, as well as abhorrent: “Was I then a monster, a blot upon the earth, from which all men fled, and whom all men disowned?” (F, 81). The “blot”—­a blank or an illegible m ­ istake—­extends to his unknown origins: “all my past life was but a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. . . . ​I had never yet seen a being resembling me, or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I?” (F, 81). Filled with rage and despair ­after his rejection by the terrified De Lacey ­family, he sets fire to their cottage and embarks on an existential c­ areer of revenge and murder. Shelley imagines the growth of a benevolent Being’s mind tested, literally, to destruction—­a Godwinian thought-­experiment, gone fatally awry. Shelley interweaves other strands of Enlightenment social criticism to reinforce her account of the Being’s unjust exclusion from sociality. The Being’s first victim—­Frankenstein’s ­little ­brother William—­produces a seemingly perplexing turn in Shelley’s narrative: the interpellated story of Justine Moritz. Like the Being, Justine is a casualty of maternal deprivation (a haunting condition for the motherless Mary Shelley). Her encounter with the law involves a miscarriage of justice in which she herself becomes complicit through her false confession of guilt. This blatant miscarriage of justice provides the opportunity for a scathing exposé of interwoven ­legal and religious systems. As we learn from the Being himself, he has incriminated Justine by slipping into her pocket the miniature portrait of William’s (and Frankenstein’s) ­mother that

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William wears around his neck. We might infer that the miniature infuriates the Being not only (as he claims) ­because he has been deprived of female companionship, but ­because he too has lacked a ­mother’s love. Duly discovered in Justine’s pocket, the miniature provides the circumstantial evidence that seals her other­wise unmotivated guilt. Her alibi for the night of William’s murder is already shaky and her be­hav­ior “confused”—­a word that recurs in connection with her testimony. Asked what she was d­ oing near the spot where William’s body is l­ ater found, she “only returned a confused and unintelligible answer” (F, 52). The incoherence and gaps in her story, combined with the discovery of the miniature, make her the chief suspect in William’s murder. Despite her irreproachable life and character, Justine is found guilty. Sentenced to death, she herself confesses to the murder. Why? Justine’s confession (it transpires) has been coerced by a zealous priest who threatens her with excommunication. His threats identify her explic­itly with the Being himself as a kind of alter ego: “he threatened and menaced, ­until I almost began to think that I was the monster that he said I was” (F, 56). And so “I did confess, but I confessed a lie. I confessed that I might obtain absolution.” (F, 56).18 Identified with a monster (“the monster that he said I was”), Justine resembles the Being in her own unhappy back-­story. Rejected by her ­mother, she had been a­ dopted by the Frankenstein f­ amily as a servant, finding a substitute ­mother in Frankenstein’s own ­mother, to whom she was tenderly attached. When Justine’s siblings die, her own ­mother recalls her—­believing that she is being punished for maternal neglect, yet also that Justine is somehow to blame. Having dutifully nursed her m ­ other on her deathbed, Justine returns to the Frankenstein ­family, where she in turn becomes a tender substitute ­mother to ­little William. Maternal death and maternal neglect are intertwined. Like her Sadeian namesake, Justine proves to be a magnet for punishment. Only her false confession makes her recuperation pos­si­ble in the eyes of the community. It is as if she tells a lie in order to acquire a recognizable identity (that of a sinner) within an authorized discourse of sin and absolution. Now she is guilty indeed, but of telling a lie—­“that falsehood lies heavier at my heart than all my other sins” (F, 56). An analy­sis of Justine’s fate at the hands of the law suggests a modern parallel in the confessional pro­cess under­gone by ­women mi­grants trafficked as sex-­workers. Cristiana Giordano’s study of Italian trafficked ­women, Mi­grants in Translation (2014), shows how, in order to acquire ­legal residence and work papers in the Italian l­egal system, the trafficked w ­ oman must “repent” of her employment as a prostitute and officially denounce her trafficker. A period of

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residence in a Catholic hostel run by socially committed nuns forms a stage in rehabilitation along the way to a work permit that w ­ ill allow her to find alternative ways of surviving. In the pro­cess of attaining subject-­hood, the trafficked ­woman undergoes a form of effacement through translation—­sometimes literally, as when a fragmented story is converted to the coherent narrative needed to bring about the passage from illegal immigrant to ­legal resident equipped with work papers.19 With the help of cultural mediations, the trafficked ­women’s stories are “translated” into judicial language, using protocols that Giordano identifies as covertly derived from ­those of Catholic confession. Only by becoming subject to (subjects in) translation can they attain official recognition and the right to work accorded by state-­sponsored forms of rehabilitation. Like Justine’s confused and fragmented alibi, the edited narratives of trafficked ­women—­dates, places, persons—­shape the encounter between the bureaucratic demand for a watertight story and the illegibility of individual histories. Gaps and incoherencies in a life-­narrative become holes (“blots”) in the official document, the verbale or denuncia, that provides the basis for the ­women’s required criminal charges against their traffickers. Rather than being understood as forms of truth or meaning, the contradictions and ambiguities of the mi­grant’s story are edited out of her official narrative. The police officer explains to the trafficked ­woman that she is ­there “to tell her true story of how she was brought to Italy”—­“she had to tell him her real name, the date and place of her birth, and all the exact events . . . ​concerning her travel to Italy and her involvement in prostitution” (MiT, 140). He typically warns her that “[p]roviding false information would be punishable as a crime . . . ​she had to tell him nothing but the truth” (MiT, 140). As Giordano observes, “the story produced in filing criminal charges uncannily resembled the pro­cess of religious confession, where sins are formally, but privately, admitted to the priest in order for the sinner to be redeemed” (MiT, 160–61). The trafficked ­woman’s denuncia serves to absolve her: “[she] tells her story in order to be admitted into the ­legal domain of society.” Giordano concludes: “Redemption and expiation, therefore, are central issues . . . ​for the integration policies promoted by the state” (MiT, 161). In order to overcome her other­wise untranslatable difference, the ­woman mi­grant must not only confess but also acquire victim-­status. In contrast to the judicial pro­cess, the ethno-­psychiatric care given to trafficked ­women at the radical Clinic Fanon in Turin (the site of Giordano’s anthropological fieldwork) allows the ­women’s truth or life-­world—­including beliefs that they w ­ ill be subject to voodoo if they denounce their traffickers—to

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coexist alongside medical or psychiatric diagnoses such as depression or psychosis. Whereas the state requires a seamless narrative regulated by rigid police protocols, the Fanonian clinic acknowledges the untranslatability of cultural categories. In one especially poignant case history, Giordano pieces together the story of a trafficked w ­ oman from Albania whom she calls Afërdita (Aphrodite, or Dawn). Afërdita’s childhood experience of maternal deprivation resembles that of Shelley’s Justine; she too has been left with uncompleted maternal mourning. She weeps incessantly, not only at the clinic but also in court, and eventually loses her own c­ hildren to adoption—­a state-­ sanctioned travesty of justice that her psychiatrist describes as “a case of epistemic vio­lence that screams for justice ­because it was never heard” (MiT, 236). Translated into the language of confession, her story interpolates her as a subject—­but only at the price of submitting to legally prescribed vio­lence that results in the removal of her c­ hildren. Shelley’s Being complains that he resembles no one. But in his wretchedness, he resembles anyone who has ever been deprived of a ­family, ­whether through state intervention, deportation, or by other means.20 At the end of Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein—­the Being’s progenitor—­has also become a solitary exile, dreaming of the dead ­family who “haunted even [his] waking hours” (F, 142). The remorseful Being is left with his own unanswerable question as he hangs over Frankenstein’s corpse: “Was ­there no injustice in this? Am I to be thought the only criminal, when all ­human kind has sinned against me?” (F, 154–55).

iii. Your Po-­si-­tion I would regularly go out and target migrating birds as they ­stopped to rest from their long flight across the sky. . . . ​As I took aim and looked at the multitude fluttering in a wave-­shaped formation overhead, I thought about the long way ­these birds had come, and the long way they had ahead of them. In that moment, it was as if I could see in the flock the ­faces of the other mi­grants: ­people who are willing to brave all kinds of dangers . . . ​for the sake of their homing flight. —­p i et ro ba rtol o, t e a r s of s a lt 21

Fuocoammare, Gianfranco Rosi’s 2016 documentary about the Mediterranean mi­grant crisis, focuses on everyday life on Lampedusa, a barren island off the coast of Sicily—­one of the first landing points for incoming Mediterranean mi­grants: “I wanted to switch the point of view and tell the story of the mi­ grants through the eyes of the ­people of Lampedusa, and especially the eyes

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figure 2.1. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

of Samuele.”22 In the first scene, we see the twelve-­year-­old Samuele hoisting himself into a tree in order to saw off a forked pine-­branch with his knife; l­ ater he teaches his friend how to make a home-­made slingshot (figure 2.1). Rosi cuts to the radio exchanges between the Italian coast guard station and desperate mi­ grants: “Your po-­si-­tion” (in En­glish): “Your po-­si-­tion”; “Your po-­si-­tion.” We hear numbers, frantic entreaties for help: “ ’Ow many p­ eople?”—­“Please, I beg you!”—­“Madam, calm down.” Position (both location and point of view) is crucial to Rosi’s bifocal vision in the film; Lampedusan life goes on while the offshore mi­grant tragedy plays out not many miles away. How should we position ourselves, between the continuities of island life and lives risked or lost at sea? We hear the local radio newscast in a tranquil kitchen announcing the numbers of bodies (men, w ­ omen, c­ hildren) recovered from a recent disaster—­ perhaps the aftermath of previously heard exchanges between the coast guard station and mi­grants calling for help. Radio si­mul­ta­neously links and divides the two communities: the coast guard’s matter-­of-­fact response to an emergency call, the local disk jockey in his broadcasting studio singing along as he plays the title song, “Fuocoammare,” that Rosi calls “almost like a hymn in the island.”23 Wrapped in their glittering foil survival-­blankets, newly arrived mi­grants queue up to undergo routine medical screening, police pat-­down, photographing, and numbering. On the dock, they queue, cough, and climb numbly onto

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figure 2.2. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

buses labeled “Misericordie” (emergency services), bound for a temporary reception camp, with its portable phone booths, communal prayers, and improvised football teams. Clambering aboard, slumped exhausted in the bus, and disembarking at a temporary detention center, they resemble Virgil’s flocking shades in the underworld, or Heaney’s agitated crowds in “Route 110” (figure 2.2). Only the name of the humanitarian organ­ization on the front of the bus (mercy: Italian misericordia) posts a subliminal message. Rosi comments: “I d­ on’t like to make films with a message. I like to leave t­ hings open.”24 Meanwhile, the islanders have to make a living somehow. For Samuele’s f­ ather, life at sea has been hard (“It w ­ asn’t a nice life”); ­today, he earns his living as a local fisherman—­the ­future that lies ahead for young Samuele. For now, we see his aimless, time-­killing activities: alone or with friends, exploring the cliffs, in class at school, or indoors during a storm, with his nonna, flipping through his En­glish homework (in the film, En­glish also provides the lingua franca of cultural encounter between African mi­grants and Italians). His ­father urges him to spend less time practicing with his slingshot and instead to try getting over his seasickness on the rocking pontoon, with its tied-up fishing boats and coast guard dinghies. Samuele, a clumsy kid in a bulky anorak, provides the main focus for the film’s predominantly land-­based vision. The gap between subsistence on Lampedusa and the up-­ended lives of

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figure 2.3. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

African mi­grants emerges from the alternation of land and sea, day and night. The camera illuminates two dif­fer­ent kinds of darkness: one lit up by Samuele’s flashlight during his nocturnal birding expeditions, the other by the Navy ship’s power­ful searchlight at sea. L ­ ater, camera and lights go underwater into the strange sea-­world that surrounds Lampedusa, seeming almost to undergird the island, as if it too is floating in the ocean. In a scene with the local doctor, Dr. Bartolo, the pivotal figure who bridges island and immigrant communities, we see nascent life: a pregnant mi­grant ­woman, with insufficient amniotic fluid, her entwined twins vis­i­ble on the sonogram screen (figure 2.3). Communication between doctor and patient is impeded by the language gap—­“ The cultural mediator is on his way so that we can communicate better.” A ­later shot recalls the entwined limbs on the sonogram—­a brief, horrific glimpse of the tangled bodies of mi­grants overcome by heat and fumes below decks on their unseaworthy boat: bodies unborn or half-­naked corpses; precarious life in the womb or lives lost to dehydration and toxic chemical burns. The film offers multiple screens and ways of seeing, from the doctor’s sonogram to illuminated screens on the bridge of the Navy ship or in the cockpit of a rescue he­li­cop­ter; computer screens surround the cheerful disk jockey at the local radio station. Technologies of sight, oversight, and insight do more than reference the camera’s eye. As we discover, seeing

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figure 2.4. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

and not-­seeing are also impor­tant for Samuele—­armed with his slingshot (emulating traditional island bird-­hunters), but afflicted with an eye prob­lem. In one scene, he and his friend set up an elaborate war-­game (“Poum!”), carving the island’s ­giant cacti into crude anthropomorphic ­faces, and bombarding them with their slingshots, using stones and “fizzers” (crackers) as ammunition (figure 2.4). Together they take time out to repair the damaged cacti with duct tape (“It’s all broken”). Their game—­a distant echo of Mediterranean war zones, past and pre­sent—­links vio­lence and care, destruction and cure; play is both reenactment and reparation.25 Samuele, it turns out, has a “lazy eye.” Flipping lenses as he tests Samuele’s eyes, the oculist asks him: “When you hunt with your slingshot, do you close one eye?” (figure 2.5). He explains that Samuele’s brain ­doesn’t receive images from his lazy eye; he uses his good eye instead. Equipped with new glasses and an eye-­patch, Samuele retreats to a secluded spot u­ nder a tree for target practice, first without his glasses (hit) and then wearing his new eye-­patch (miss). We see him and his friend shooting out to sea, wielding imaginary machine guns: “Enough. You killed ’em all”—­“I got him stone-­dead.” The film takes its name from the so-­called lost pearl, the song that alludes to the war­time bombardment of Lampedusa in 1943 as the Allied forces approached Sicily; in the words of the island dialect, “Chi focu a mmari ca c’è stasira. Che fuoco a mare

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figure 2.5. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

che c’è stasera!”26 Sewing tranquilly as Samuele does his homework while thunder and lightning rage outside, his grand­mother reminisces: “[T]he ships fired rockets. It was fire at sea.” War has touched Lampedusa just within living memory. More recently, “fire at sea” also references the on-­board conflagration that engulfed an overloaded boat carry­ing mi­grants bound for Lampedusa on 3 October 2013, within a mile from shore. Of the more than 500 passengers, mostly from Eritrea and Somalia, only 155 survived.27 With his glasses and eye-­patch, Samuele is a diminutive Cyclops—­a ­little monster. Throwing up dreamily on his f­ ather’s fishing boat or slurping spaghetti at home, he resembles any preteen boy. But not quite. His cyclopean vision points to the disjunction between the two worlds of the island. An unconscious ­bearer of the disquiet produced by the militarization of the Mediterranean (including the sea’s function as a deadly border through combined surveillance and abandonment), Samuele becomes the island’s unlikely avatar.28 The film asks: how do we see, or rather fail to see, the exhausted army of survivors who come ashore in their incongruous tee-­shirts, hoodies, and athletic shorts? Do we even see them as ­people, in the way we see Samuele ranging about the island in his anorak? Police portraits of each mi­grant become anti-­portraits, ­faces with numbers held up beside them, briefly humanized by moments of eye contact—­a look, a gesture, a smile as a w ­ oman allows a

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glimpse of the hair ­under her hijab. Addressing the painful images of burned and drowned mi­grants on his screen, Dr. Bartolo complains that the pro­cess of dehumanization continues ­after death, when he has to amputate fin­gers and ears from dead bodies, even c­ hildren’s bodies, in order to collect DNA samples for identification. Instead of preserving life, he is forced to dissect it. In one long sequence, a Nigerian mi­grant chants his oral testimony in English—­departure from Nigeria, crossing the Sahara, flight to Libya and its prisons (“A place not to stay”); a story of despair and survival: “we cried on our knees what ­shall we do?”—­“The sea is not a place to pass by,” “The sea is not a road.” But: “we went to sea and we did not die,” and “­Today we are alive.” Half prayer, half hymn of thanksgiving for delivery from danger, the mi­grant’s song is a collective salvation narrative (figure 2.6). In the penultimate scene of Fuocoammare, the soundtrack pointedly links the plight of modern African mi­grants to the enslaved Israelites fleeing Egypt. As Zia (Aunt) Maria, whom we have previously seen in her island kitchen, meticulously smooths and straightens the matrimonial bed, she kisses a bedside icon and prays: “Let me have a nice day and give me a ­little health” (figure 2.7). In the background, the local radio station plays the Israelite’s solemn prayer from Rossini’s popu­lar operatic oratorio, Moses in Egypt (Mosè in Egitto, 1818—­the same year that saw the publication of Frankenstein), as the Israelites wait anxiously on the shores of the Red Sea for the waves to part and save them from their Egyptian pursuers: “Dal tuo stellato soglio” (“From your starry throne”).29 Tamping down operatic pathos, Fuocoammare focuses on the mundane domestic rituals of home-­making—­cooking, sewing, bed-­making. We see the collective memory of a community whose own ­future is uncertain, on an island where fishing and tourism provide the only income, and from which ­earlier generations have themselves migrated in search of a better life. A classroom scene in which Samuele strug­gles with his En­glish translation gestures ­toward this wider world, while hinting at the inner awakening made pos­si­ble by the naming of unnameable affects. Samuele searches his vocabulary for synonyms: “D” for delighted, or—­improvising—­“D” for depressed. Th ­ ese are the words in which Samuel must learn to express himself, like any mi­grant learning a new language. Rosi’s previously shore-­based camera withholds u­ ntil late in the film a harrowing sequence that follows the rescue of a shipload of exhausted mi­grants (figure 2.8). A he­li­cop­ter takes off to reconnoiter, a dinghy distributes life jackets to the surviving passengers on their overcrowded boat, navy coast guards disembark semiconscious bodies and bring them on board

figure 2.6. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

figure 2.7. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

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figure 2.8. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

for medical treatment. The patients lie inert on the metal deck, overwhelmed or unconscious, half-­naked in their wet clothes, while medical workers in white hazmat suits and masks attempt to revive them; corpses in body-­bags come aboard like awkward parcels. The surviving mi­grants collapse into stunned silence. A man weeps tears of blood, a ­woman sobs, another pours a ­bottle of w ­ ater over her head, a third falls dead asleep. Only at the end of the sequence do we witness, briefly, a terrible thirty-­second shot of the tangle of half-­naked bodies below decks in the mi­grant boat—­footage that Rosi was determined to include in the film somehow.30 The camera pulls back from the now-­empty boat to the impassive vista of sea-­swell, the moon far overhead in a clouded night sky. ­There are no words (figure 2.9). As Rosi observes, the prob­lem presented by documenting ­human disaster is that images lose their power to shock, or e­ lse risk the voyeurism of disaster-­ pornography. “Shock” is one of the En­glish words Samuele learns at school (“we are shocked by the class’s preparation,” his teacher observes with good-­ natured sarcasm). How does Rosi’s film convey the under­lying shock of Mediterranean migration with its multiple, anonymous deaths?—­a s­ ilent trauma only indirectly witnessed by the islanders. In another extended sequence, confronted by a haunting computer-­image of a chemically burned mi­grant,

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figure 2.9. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

Dr. Bartolo itemizes the cost of a passage on the people-­smugglers’ boats: $1,500 for a first-­class space above decks; $1,000 for a less-­desirable second-­ class space; $800 for the third-­class space where passengers crowded below decks risk death from dehydration, asphyxiation, or chemical burns from the caustic mix of diesel fuel and seawater washing around in the bilges. At the end of his monologue, the doctor gives voice to Rosi’s own unstated ethical imperative: “It is the duty of e­ very ­human being to help t­ hose ­people.” The part of his work that he most hates, he says, is taking the DNA samples: “It leaves you with an emptiness in your gut, a hole.” In the scene (contrived by Rosi) that brings doctor and Samuele face to face, we learn that Samuele suffers not just from his lazy eye but from a psychosomatic prob­lem: a difficulty in breathing. “Is it anxiety?” Samuele asks. The doctor replies reassuringly, “­you’re a ­little anxious.” Samuele undergoes another examination, this time a chest exam (figure 2.10). The encounter brings to light what had previously been left unsaid. Doctor and patient are linked by their malaise. Samuele responds to the mi­grant crisis with an asthma attack—­a somatic version of the complaint voiced by Dr. Bartolo: “an emptiness in your gut, a hole.” Armed with his own home-­made slingshot, Samuele imitates the now-­ outlawed island sport, hunting migrating Mediterranean songbirds with guns

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figure 2.10. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

or traditional catapult. His incoming targets ­were once the quarry of hunters like Dr. Bartolo himself, who used to pick off the exhausted flocks making first landfall on the Italian coast during their annual migration (“I would regularly go out and target migrating birds as they s­ topped to rest from their long flight across the sky”).31 Migrating songbirds are still covertly consumed as delicious mouthfuls, at home or in Italian gourmet restaurants, even though the sport has been made illegal.32 Virgil’s “flocks of birds / Blown inland from the stormy ocean” (Aeneid Book VI, 410–13) alludes to a seasonal rhythm, thousands of years old. The image of migrating birds—­half ­human, half avian—­recognized by Dr. Bartolo has become synonymous with con­temporary humanitarian repre­sen­ta­tions of the Mediterranean mi­grant crisis: “it was as if I could see in the flock the f­ aces of the other mi­grants: p­ eople who are willing to brave all kinds of dangers . . . ​for the sake of their homing flight.”33 At the end of Fuocoammare, a last sequence shows Samuele firing out to sea, his imaginary gun aimed at incoming birds. But, bird-­catcher that he is, Samuele—­a young Papageno as well as a ­little Cyclops—­knows the mi­grant songbirds’ calls. In an extraordinary scene near the end of the film, Rosi’s camera captures Samuele ­going out at night with his flashlight (still wearing his eye-­patch) to locate a chirping bird, perched in the branches of a low-­growing pine (figure 2.11). Tiptoeing and chirruping, Samuele whistles a duet with a songbird that lets him

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figure 2.11. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

approach within arms’ length. Instead of shooting it with his slingshot, he reaches out to stroke its head with a twig, taking part in an avian conversation: call and response. No longer a ­little monster, Samuele partners with a bird in a tender prelinguistic dialogue. The sequence provides a fitting envoi, followed as it is by Moses’s prayer for the deliverance of the Israelites on the brink of their escape from captivity: “Dal tuo stellate soglio.”

Coda The strangest figure of all in Rosi’s film is the underwater fisherman who goes out stealthily in the eve­ning, encumbered by his diving gear and the second skin of his wetsuit. Rosi calls him “L’uomo-­pesce,” the fish-­man, an amphibian who seems most comfortable underwater.34 First seen in a wide-­angled shot as he steps clumsily across the cliff landscape in his flippers, he flops from the rocks into a mysterious sea-­world where he is instantly transformed—­ translated, one might almost say—­into a graceful underwater fisherman g­ oing about his forbidden business of harvesting sea urchins (figure 2.12). The underwater footage provides a glimpse of the ambient sea in all its strangeness and beauty. The amphibious fish-­man allows Rosi’s camera to engage with the timeless ele­ment that defines life on the island of Lampedusa, where the sea

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figure 2.12. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

has yielded up its harvest of fish and bodies since time immemorial. The island’s hostile landscape is replaced by an aquatic environment where both fish-­man and underwater camera appear effortlessly at home, uniting the two worlds of the island. In the same way, Samuele, tweeting like a bird, seems fi­ nally in tune with his island world, transformed from a one-­eyed Caliban with a slingshot into an image of connection and belonging. The omnipresent technologies of sight and sound in Fuocoammare (screen, radar, radio, telephone) bring death directly into the islanders’ kitchens and bedrooms, along with the theme song that gives the film its title and serves as a repository for island memory. We see and hear how visual and aural technologies connect disparate worlds and lives, sonogram even penetrating the interior of a pregnant ­woman’s body. The coast guard answering a mi­grant ship’s SOS, the disk jockey singing along, mi­grants queuing up to use the telephone, a survivor chanting his litany of salvation, Rossini’s operatic chorus, even Samuele’s avian duet—­all use the h­ uman voice as a means of communicating with, and connecting to, the other. The musicality of song extends beyond images, even beyond words. Fuocoammare responds to the first question put to the mi­grant, “Where do you come from?” with a question addressed to its viewers: how should we respond to the other’s call? Rosi recalls of the popu­lar song that he took as the film’s title, “This song was always very pre­sent.

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It’s almost like a hymn in the island. It was pre­sent since the first time I arrived, ­there was always this song everywhere. . . . ​This song is so light, but it’s somehow connected to a big tragedy, to death.”35 His documentary suggests that the mechanisms of humanitarian intervention on their own may not be enough to sustain h­ uman (let alone interspecies) connection. He leaves us with the hymn-­like song that preserves the memory of Lampedusa’s war­time past, now overlaid by the conflagration of an unseaworthy, overloaded boat off the coast of Lampedusa that has become a symbol of the cumulative disaster of modern migration: “somehow connected to a big tragedy, to death.”

3 The Coastal Paradox

a coastline is created by many small events at the meeting point of land and sea—­inlets and bays, promontories and headlands, slow erosion and sudden cliff-­falls. Irregular and constantly subject to the effects of time, w ­ ater, and weather, a coastline is an edge or a zone, not necessarily a territorial border. The “coastal paradox” (a prob­lem in fractal math) refers to the difficulty of mea­sure­ment: how long is a coastline? Accuracy involves breaking it down into ever smaller units ­until they can get no smaller, like the action of waves on rocks as they sediment into pebbles and eventually into fine particles of sand. Coastline fractals are jagged and irregular, not smooth and predictable. Change may be both abrupt and imperceptible, an avalanche of rocks or marl ­gently crumbling into the sea. The coastal paradox offers a meta­phor for forms of memory that are both unpredictable and subject to gradual erosion, sometimes disappearing altogether. In much the same way, parataxis—­a list of particularized descriptive observations (“and,” “and”)—­replaces the unspooling thread of narrative with detail, “drift[ing] along with the flow of time,” as Theodor Adorno puts it apropos of Hölderlin.1 Memory returns, but the landscape is never quite the same. It functions not as a point of origin, but a locus of temporal instability. Viewing a coastline as home means perpetually living on the cusp of change. Replacing Freud’s archeological depth-­analogy for the surfacing of repressed memory, coastal phenomena provide a meta­phor for the slow pro­cess of dissolution. In the words of the Italian lyric poet Eugenio Montale, “We should think instead of . . . ​rapid immersions in a dif­fer­ent ele­ment, unfamiliar to the poet himself.”2 Apropos of another writer, Italo Svevo, Montale comments: “He who looks backward cannot make time reversible: he can only reoccupy it partially, extracting it from the deposits of memory . . . ​recovered 64

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time does not unwind its thread, but rather stagnates” (SLA, 108–9). Partial reoccupation, extraction, stagnation—­Montale’s terminology invokes the ubiquitous phenomena of his lyric poetry, with its figures of dehiscence and decay. The cuttlefish bones that provide the title for his first and best-­known volume of poems, Ossi di seppia (Cuttlefish Bones, 1925), are brittle structures cleansed of organic life—­scoured marine detritus that Montale’s translator, Jonathan Galassi, refers to felicitously as “the sea’s rubble prey to elemental forces.”3 Elsewhere in Montale’s poetry, landscape and emotion evaporate ­until “tutto divaga / dal suo solco, dirupa, spare in bruma” (“each ­thing strays / from its furrow, topples, vanishes in haze”) (CP, 54–55). Haze, entropy, and evanescence dissolve the rocky outlines of Montale’s Ligurian shore; t­ hings vanish into thick air. This evanescent thickening—­like the marine heat-­haze—­provides the medium (at once text and texture) of Montalean memory. In his 1960 “Dialogue” on Poetry,” Montale wrote: “pure poetry . . . ​tends ­toward a kind of knowing. My ‘specific’ way of knowing can be reconciled with Lukács’ ‘par­tic­u­lar.’ Man himself is a universal made par­tic­u­lar” (SLA, 325).4 Montalian specificity involves a synecdochic way of knowing (part for ­whole) that depends on “particularity.” Hidden in the word “par­tic­u­lar” is the word “part”—­both the fragment of a w ­ hole and a constituent ele­ment. The term includes other meanings, such as division, separation, or parting, as if particularity is cognate with departure and leave-­taking. Departure abuts on the familiar themes of journeying, including escape and loss, exile and nostalgia. ­These, I propose, are themes that link the lyric poetry of Eugenio Montale and the American poet Elizabeth Bishop, and, more recently, the novels of Colm Tóibín (a sometime lyric poet writing in prose)—­three minutely descriptive and particularizing writers, each of whom returns obsessively to the coastline of their respective childhoods: Liguria, Nova Scotia, and the County Wexford shores of Southeast Ireland. Each writer defines the past in relation to a remembered coastline that serves as geo­graph­i­cal and imaginative anchor, never fully let slip, however far away they travel. All three writers, as it happens, also respond vividly to painting, ­w hether as paint­ers or as collectors, seeing their childhood landscapes pictorially, as if from a distance, through the accumulated details imprinted on memory. The alternating movement—­going away and coming back, flight and return—­renders their native coasts si­mul­ta­neously clear-­cut and distant, as if subject both to time’s action and to gradual forgetting.

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“Particulation”—­lyric (p)articulation in its most geo-­specific form—­ conveys the par­tic­u­lar knowledge that constitutes each writer’s way of knowing, including their sober knowledge of what has been lost and gained by travel. Detailed observation on an ever-­diminishing scale functions si­mul­ta­ neously as mnemonic and erasure, yet also as a characteristic mode of seeing and recording change—­and distance. Farther is closer, closer is more intensely seen, the lowest common denominator of paratactic description. For Tóibín, a familiar stretch of coast is subject to constant gnawing by the sea, an erosion that threatens to erase memory itself (“so that soon it ­will be remembered by no one”).5 Recognizing the coastline of his childhood in a landscape by the Irish painter Tony O’Malley, Tóibín reflects: “I never looked at it like that. It was part of what was normal, what was t­ here. But I remember it.” The childhood seascape that Tóibín took for granted introduces another thought—­the slipping away of memory itself. Once he himself is gone, he writes, “no one ­will recognize the scene in this painting” (OEB, 198). Remembering is tied to the thought of the observer’s own death. The slow erasure of time leaves only the residue of the marks made by writer or painter, stripped of their organic life, like Montale’s cuttlefish bones tossed on a rocky shore. The aesthetics of particularity are yoked to pastness. None of ­these three writers are forced mi­grants, but rather mi­grants by choice who ­were impelled to seek other shores, for what­ever reasons. Travelers in quest of landscapes and freedoms not available to them at home, they join the marginal yet capacious category of ­those whose internal migration endlessly recurs—­homesick even as they strain to be away and untethered. For Montale, Bishop, and Tóibín, the question of place looms large. Why go back? The tension in their work underlies a specific form of exilic melancholy that might be termed landscape-­loss. In the work of t­ hese three writers, each remembering their very dif­fer­ent coastlines, describing landscape becomes a mode of memory: hence “particulation,” the late-­returning phenomenon at the core of their lyric writing. One could say that they are not so much exiles as chronic departers, honing their descriptions of a seashore that is ever more finely e­ tched even as it decays. This is the coastal paradox: the finer the observation, the more the coastline becomes a border to which one can never return.

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i. The Journey Ends ­Here Il viaggio finisce a questa spiaggia che tentano gli assidui e lenti flussi. (The journey ends ­here, on this beach worked by ­these assiduous, slow waves.) —­e uge n io mon ta l e , “c a sa su l m a r e” ( “house by t h e se a”; cp, 1 2 6 –27)

In “Intentions (Imaginary Interview)” (1946), Montale makes his imaginary interviewer—Montale himself—ask: “at what moment, and due to what accidental cause, in front of what picture, I was able to declare prophetically, ‘I too am a painter.’ How I became committed to and recognized in my own art, which has not been painting” (SLA, 295).6 The apparent non sequitur underlines the ways in which Montale’s poetry returns continually to a unique landscape, one that seemed to belong to him alone and came to define the specificity of his own rootedness in a vivid yet now-­abandoned place. Apropos of an early poem in Ossi di seppia, he asserts: “The prey was, it’s understood, my landscape” (SLA, 298). The ele­ments of his internal landscape are already pre­ sent: blazing garden wall, thorns and brambles, rustling snakes and calling blackbirds, cracked earth and files of ants, a throbbing sea seen between pine-­ branches, the sound of cicadas, and (a Montalean specialty) “triste meraviglia” (“sad amazement”)—­a mood prompted by the discovery that all life consists in following “una muraglia / che ha in cima cocci aguzzi di bottiglia” (“a wall / with broken ­bottle shards imbedded in the top”) (CP, 40–41).7 Walls topped with jagged shards of glass line the steep paths and irregular flights of steps climbing the Ligurian hillside between ­houses and villas, crisscrossing the slopes above the sea, keeping strangers out and defending hidden gardens against intruders. ­These high walls form a barrier, shutting out the view of the sea and imprisoning the walker in a narrow defile. The Ligurian landscape is one of blockage and confinement, perched on “a barren and solemn shelf,” its cliffs prone to sudden storms and thundering rockfalls (figure 3.1).8 Montale describes the best exercises for a poet as internal “acts of meditation or reading,” aimed not at “a philosophical poetry” or the diffusion of ideas, but at “a specific, not a general truth”—­“A truth of the poet-­subject which . . . ​ ­doesn’t deny what separates him and makes him unique and unrepeatable” (SLA, 298–99). The poet’s uniqueness lies both in his self-­enclosure and in the

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figure 3.1. Eugenio Montale, Cinque Terre (Manarola) (1966). Etching. 11.9 × 8.6 cm. Reprinted, with permission, from Vanni Scheiwiller, Eugenio Montale, immagini e documenti (Libri Scheiwiller, Milano, 1985).

existential tensions that define his life.9 Instead of committing himself to a philosophic program, Montale wanted his words “to come closer” to something than the words of other poets—­“Closer to what? I seemed to be living ­under a bell jar, and yet I felt I was close to something essential. A subtle veil, a thread, barely separated me from the definitive quid.” Struggling to break through the constraints of words in order to reach the essence of ­things, Montale sensed that the tearing of veil or thread would have meant “an explosion, the end of the illusion of the world as repre­sen­ta­tion. But this remained an unreachable goal.” Initially, his strug­gle took the form of “counter-­eloquence,” a literary revolt against “our old aulic language” in an attempt “to attack that

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barrier between external and internal” (SLA, 300, 302).10 Walled in by outmoded literary language, as if by the steep hillside footpaths and enfilades of the Ligurian coast, Montale creates a poetry of contingency, in which sudden summer storms shake the barrier between external and inner real­ity. His lyr­ics redefine philosophical poetry as poetry that thinks about its materials—­the images and language of real t­ hings that also signify internal moods and abstract trains of thought. “In Ossi di seppia every­thing was attracted and absorbed by the fermenting sea . . . ​the sea was everywhere, for me” (SLA, 302). But, Montale writes, “I knew even then how to distinguish between description and poetry.” He recognized “that poetry c­ an’t grind on nothing, and that t­ here c­ an’t be concentration ­until ­there has been diffusion. I ­didn’t say waste” (SLA, 298). Montale’s phrase “poetry ­can’t grind on nothing” (no concentration without diffusion) echoes the action of the fermenting sea, where once-­living detritus is ground down and transformed into inorganic m ­ atter. In this opaque object world, with its sullen and changeable weather-­scape, moments of miraculous revelation pierce like lightning or descend like bolts from the blue. In the language of the prototypical poem from Montale’s poetic sequence, Mediterraneo (Mediterranean, 1924), pine-­trees shadow the burning earth, haze veils the sea, distance muffles the thunderous w ­ aters boiling on the shoals below, when suddenly, “Come rialzo il viso, ecco cessare / i ragli sul mio capo; e via scoccare / verso le strepeanti acque, / frecciate biancazzurre, due ghiandaie” (“As I raise my eyes, the braying overhead / ceases: and bluewhite arrows, / two jays, / shoot by ­toward the roaring ­waters”) (CP, 66–67). The bluewhite jays shoot out of the sky like flashes of revelation—­literal and meta­phorical bolts from the blue.11 Mediterraneo meditates on the entanglement of landscape and subjectivity. “Avrei volute sentirmi scabro ed essenziale / siccome i ciottoli che tu volvi, / mangiati dalla salsedine; / scheggia fuori del tempo” (“I would have liked to feel harsh and essential / like the pebbles you tumble, / gnawed by sea brine; / a splinter out of time”) (CP, 74–75). Scheggia are both splinters and lightning. But: “Altro fui: uomo intento che riguarda / in sé, in altrui, il bollore / della vita fugace” (“I was dif­fer­ent: a brooding man / who sees the turbulence of fleeting life / in himself, in ­others”) (CP, 74–75). Turned in on himself, slow to act, fixated on the passing moment, he requires (he confesses) other books than the sea in order to achieve a cold and constant ­will: “Altri libri occorrevano / a me, non la tua pagina rombante” (“I needed other books, / not your roaring page”) (CP, 76–77). Yet, he concludes, he has no regrets: “Ma nulla so rimpiangere: tu sciogli / ancora i groppi interni col tuo canto. / Il tuo delirio sale agli astri ormai.” (“Yet I c­ an’t regret a ­thing: you still / dissolve internal tangles with your song. / Now your frenzy rises to the stars.”) (CP, 76–77).

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The stellar frenzy is both an expression and a release of the poet’s brooding inwardness. Drowned out by the roaring sea, the internal tangles of thought (i groppi interni) dissolve, and with it the contradictions of Montale’s poetic thought. His language—­highly specific, intensely subjective, intellectually complex—­paradoxically aspires to the wordlessness of the sea’s delirium. Montale addresses the conceit of lyric harmony head-on in the next poem in Mediterraneo: “Potessi almeno costringere / in questo mio ritmo stento / qualche poco del tuo vaneggiamento; / dato mi fosse accordare / alle tua voci il mio balbo parlare” (“If at least I could force / some small part of your raving / into this halting rhythm; / if I could harmonize / my stammer with your voices”) (CP, 76–77). The sea is the unruly ele­ment in which nature and art fuse, “per gridar meglio la mia malinconia” (“the better to shout out my sadness”) (CP, 76–77). All the poet has at his disposal is the legacy of threadbare words, whining laments, tired phrases associated with the traditions of Italian lyric poetry. Haltering, stammering, restricted by his second-­hand language, the poet is emptied of thought by an inrush of images that exceeds both limit and sense: “Ed il tuo rombo cresce, e si dilata / azzurra l’ombra nuova. / M’abbandonano a prova i miei pensieri. / Sensi non ho; né senso. Non ho limite.” (“And your roaring rises, / and the new shadow waxes blue. / My ideas desert me at the test. / I have no senses, and no sense. No limit.”) (CP, 76–77). Borne up by the shadow of sublime tumult, Montale’s lyric poetry strains beyond words and thought. It is not that the poet becomes one with the roaring sea. The sea makes him mindless, leaves him dazed and stunned: “Non ho limite.” The final section of Mediterraneo ends by associating the return of memory with the confusion of self-­loss: Ma sempre che traudii la tua dolce risacca su le prode sbigottimento mi prese quale d’uno scemato di memoria quando si risovviene del suo paese. (But always when I overheard your sweet backwash along the shore I was dumbfounded like a man without his memory whose country comes back to him.) (CP, 78–79) The sound of the sea’s backwash produces consternation (sbigottimento), as if a returned traveler who had lost his memory w ­ ere somehow to recover it. The

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childhood landscape of Montale’s eclogues belongs to the realm of diminishment. Meriggi e ombre (Noons and Shadows, 1922–24) includes poems explic­ itly concerned with his loss of childhood’s sensual immersion and the emergence of a new disquiet associated with adulthood. Montale wrote apropos of the lead poem, “Fine dell’infanzia” (“End of Childhood”): “I have glimpsed—­ with the help of memory—­the first arising of doubt in ­children’s souls. I ­don’t know with what results” (CP, 457). Doubt infiltrates the child’s hectic world, as the adult looks back at the once-­familiar country that contains “an image of me”—an image recovered, like lost memory, at its place of origin, but now an image of uncertainty. “Fine dell’infanzia” opens with the sweep of the thundering foam-­flecked sea, as the debris of a flooded stream meets the roiling tide in a stanza of pulsating observation: Rombando s’ingolfava dentro l’arcuata ripa un mare pulsante, sbarrato da solchi, cresputo e fioccoso di spume. Di contro alla foce d’un torrente che straboccava il flutto ingialliva. Giravano al largo i grovigli dell’alighe e tronchi d’alberi alla deriva. (Thundering, a throbbing sea hatched by furrows wrinkled and flocked with foam was engulfed in the curved shore. The tide turned yellow where it met the mouth of a flooding stream. Offshore, tangled seaweed and drifting tree trunks rolled.) (CP, 82–83) A new m ­ usic—­“ la musica dell’anima inquieta / che non si decide” (“the m ­ usic of a restless, / undecided soul”) (CP, 82–83)—­signals a change of perspective: the arc of a beach, with its joyless vista of old brick h­ ouses and thin tamarisks, surrounded by unexplored hills of olive groves, vines, pine groves, and rocks. A man passing by on a mule provides the prosaic authenticating detail—­almost a spot of time—­that stamps itself permanently on memory: “un uomo / che là

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passasse ritto s’un muletto / nell’azzurro lavato era stampato / per sempre—­e nel ricordo” (“a man who passed ­there / sitting on a mule / was stamped on the washed blue /—­and in the mind—­forever”) (CP, 84–85). The anonymous passing figure, seen at a distance, sets in motion the poem’s implied narrative: the growth of the poet’s unquiet mind, its amazed recollection of tangled trails ­running along embankments, clearings, ravines, and dank recesses, and its precarious fixation on a par­tic­ul­ ar place: “quell’orlo di mondo” (“that ledge of world”) (CP, 84–85). For the racing c­ hildren, all paths turn back to the h­ ouse by the sea, “alla casa sul mare, al chiuso asilo / della nostra stupita fanciullezza” (“to the ­house by the sea, / the safe harbor of our astounded childhood”) (CP, 84–85). The word “astounded” or “amazed” (stupita) evokes Montale’s stunned landscape of memory. Inner and outer coalesce as the child’s world centers on a beloved safe­house. The vividly remembered landscape shifts ­toward apprehension, like uncertain weather: “sommerse ogni certezza un mare florido / e vorace che dava ormai l’aspetto / dubbioso dei tremanti tamarischi” (“an exuberant, voracious sea / that drowned all certainty took on / the dubious look of the shivering tamarisks”) (CP, 86–87). The stormy weather-­scape eclipses past time with its hungry sea and dubious tamarisks; an open door grumbles on the garden gravel as the storm approaches: “Era in aria l’attesa / di un procelloso evento” (“The air was full of waiting / for a stormy occurrence”) (CP, 86–87). Interrupting the endless games of childhood—­“L’inganno ci fu palese” (“The game was up”)—­vio­lence erupts in the false calm: Certo guardammo muti nell’attesa del minuto violento; poi nella finta calma sopra l’acque scavate dové mettersi un vento. (Yes, we watched and waited silently for the violent moment; fi­nally, in the false calm over carved ­waters a wind had to come.) (CP, 88–89) In Montale’s greatest lyr­ics, the pay-­off arrives, not in the form of a ­grand claim, but in the moment of electric calm that precedes a storm. Entropy shapes the geological drama of Montale’s shoreline. In “Clivo” (“Slope”), a cliff collapses to the sound of trumpets: “Viene un suono di buccine /

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dal greppo che scoscende, / discende verso il mare . . .” (“A sound of trumpets comes / from the cliff as it sheers away, / sinks to the sea . . .”) (CP, 106–7). The shuddering of the sheered-­away cliff as it dissolves into the breakers announces a kind of shrugging-­off and rebirth of memory: “si dismemora il mondo e può rinascere” (“the world shrugs memory off, to live again”) (CP, 106–7). As if seen through a needle’s eye—­“come visto a traverso di una cruna”—­the world becomes smaller. The paths among the olive groves dis­appear, rocks hurtle into the sea, drawn by its irresistible downward pull: “un crollo di pietrame che dal cielo / s’inabissa alle prode . . .” (“a crumbling of rock that hurtles / out of the sky to the shore . . .”) (CP, 108–9). In the poem’s final lines, the horns break out again: “Nella sera distesa appena, s’ode / un ululo di corni, uno sfacelo” (“One hears, in the eve­ning unfolding / a wailing of horns, a fading”) (CP, 108–9). A  dying fall—­the sound of disintegration and dissolution—­makes its own melancholy ululation. In “Egloga” (“Eclogue”), the sound of the coastal train swells as it comes out of a cliff-­side tunnel, and a pelting flight of birds takes off: “Strepita un volo come un acquazzone” (“A flight / pelts like a downpour”) (CP, 98–99). Unease surfaces with the rising of a crescent moon: “Nei miei paesi a quell’ora / cominciano a fischiare le lepri” (“In my country this is when / the hares begin to hiss”) (CP, 100–101). Th ­ ese startling last lines—­not dehiscence, but hissing—­ summon a previously unheard sound, audible only when the daytime rumble of the train falls s­ ilent. Montale thought of the companion poem, “Flussi” (“Flux”) as a second “eclogue.” In this anti-­pastoral world, even the vine-­ covered statue of Summer has lost her nose: “Ma la dea mutilata non s’affaccia” (“But the faceless goddess ­won’t appear”) (CP, 102–3). Life has become banal, prosaic—­“La vita è questo scialo / di triti fatti” (“Life is this wearing-­down / of threadbare facts”) (CP, 102–3). Divinity has deserted the summer landscape; every­thing seems run-­down; even the runnels of w ­ ater are sluggish, and no fruit hangs on the boughs. When the ­children return ­later, the revolving wheel of time only gives back a hurtling image of lost knowledge: “soltanto la statua / sa che il tempo precipita. . . . ​/ E tutto scorre nella gran discesa” (“only the statue knows / time rushes. . . . ​/ Every­thing hurtles in the ­great descent”) (CP, 104–5). Slingshot pebbles announce the end of childhood: “Addio!—­ fischiano pietre tra le fronde” (“Farewell!—­pebbles whistle in the leaves”) (CP, 104–5). The silence that falls in this country of declivity hisses like a hare or whistles like stones shot through the leaves. Nothing is untouched by the sound of falling. Montale’s “Casa sul mare” (“House by the Sea”) and “La casa dei doganieri” (“The House of the Customs Men”) from Le occasioni (The Occasions, 1939)

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respond to each other across time.12 Written five years apart (in 1925 and 1930, respectively), each marks the end of a journey. “Casa sul mare” localizes the turn and return that in Montale’s poetry often takes the form of a revolving wheel; ­here, time moves with the creaking regularity of a pump bringing w ­ ater to the surface: Ora i minuti sono eguali e fissi come i giri di ruota della pompa. Un giro: un salir d’acqua che rimbomba. Un altro, altr’acqua, a tratti un cigolio. (The minutes now are regular and fixed like the revolutions of the pump. One turn: w ­ ater surfaces, resounds. Another turn: more ­water, and some creaking.) (CP, 126–27) What goes around, comes around: “Il viaggio finisce a questa spiaggia / che tentano gli assidui e lenti flussi” (“The journey ends ­here, on this beach / worked by t­ hese assiduous, slow waves”) (CP, 126–27). The slow-­working waves, like the mechanical turn of the waterwheel, ask a half-­answered question. Does every­thing dissolve (vanisce) in the haze of memories (poca nebbia di memorie)? Is ­every destiny fulfilled in the sighing of the breakers? Or is ­there, instead, a hurtle of time ­toward infinitude—if only for the absent “you” addressed by the poem? For the poet, the sole means of flight appears “labile come nei sommossi campi / del mare spuma o ruga” (“unstable as foam or a trough / in the troubled fields of the sea”) (CP, 126–27). In Montale’s labile poetic world, the road ends in the instability of the wave-­lapped shore: “Il cammino finisce a queste prode / che rode la marea col moto alterno” (“The road ends on this shore / that the tide gnaws with its come-­and-go”) (CP, 128–29). The tide’s gnawing alternation suggests insatiable flux, not the unchanging eternity (l’eterno, rhyming with alterno) that is the poem’s last word, in lines addressed to someone who may already have set sail for eternity, unlike the poet lingering unheard on the shore: “Il tuo cuore vicino che non m’ode / salpa già forse per l’eterno” (“Maybe your nearby heart that ­doesn’t hear me / already has set sail for the eternal”) (CP, 128–29). ­Imagined posthumousness also frames Montale’s l­ater poem, “La casa dei doganieri.” Montale himself recalls: “I wrote it for a young vacationer who died very young. In the short time she lived, it may be she was never even aware I existed” (CP, 511).13 The self-­abdicating subjectivity of “Casa sul mare” turns

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to the life of someone who never saw the ­house of the customs men, destroyed when Montale himself was a small child: “The girl in question never could have seen it; she went on . . . ​to die, but I only learned this many years l­ ater. I stayed and still remain. It’s unclear who made a better choice. But in all likelihood ­there was no choice.” (CP, 511). The poem’s strained vantage point—­that of the aging “remainer,” rather than the girl who died young—­produces a vertiginous effect, as if childhood memory ­were already a tenuous afterthought on this shore of loss: “Tu non ricordi la casa dei doganieri / sul rialzo a strapiombo sulla scogliera” (“You ­don’t recall the ­house of the customs men / on the sheer bluff that overhangs the reef ”) (CP, 222–23). Like the gales that lash the walls of the deserted ­house, unquiet thoughts once swarmed around it. But whose? “Tu non ricordi” (“You d­ on’t remember”). Unowned memory unsettles the wavering compass needle: “la bussola va impazzita all’avventura” (“the compass needle staggers crazily”) (CP, 222–23). A slender thread links past and pre­sent. The series of random images—­images of randomness—­ culminate in the spinning weathervane on the roof. Holding Ariadne’s thread (the thread of writing and memory), the poet is left to trace his fragile connection with a dead girl, or perhaps an absent lover: “Ne tengo un capo; ma tu resti sola / né qui respiri nell’oscurità” (“I hold one end; but y­ ou’re alone, / not h­ ere, not breathing in the dark”) (CP, 222–23). The poem ends with a confused cry, invoking the indistinct horizon line and its far-­off tankers passing in the night: Oh l’orizzonte in fuga, dove s’accende rara la luce della petroliera! Il varco è qui? (Ripullula il frangente ancora sulla balza che scoscende . . .). Tu non ricordi la casa di questa mia sera. Ed io non so chi va e chi resta. (Oh the vanis­hing horizon line, where the tanker’s light shines now and then! The channel’s ­here? (The breakers still seethe against the cliff that drops away . . .) You d­ on’t recall the ­house of this, my eve­ning. And I d­ on’t know who’s ­going or who’ll stay. (CP, 222–23) The unspooling thread that links memory, pre­sent and past—­memory before its time, and afterward—­recedes like the vanis­hing horizon line and the

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elusive boat channel. What links now and then, the living and the dead, ­those who stay and t­ hose who go? Occupying both positions at once, Montale holds not just one, but two ends of the thread of recollection attached to the empty shell of an abandoned shed: a dead girl, an absent lover, an unlived life that may or may not be his own. Montale’s lyric seascapes are sad clarion-­call memorials to the disembodied life of poetry. The cliff-­edge drops away, leaving him in the uncertain realm corresponding to Montalean memory, where the shoreline meets the gnawing tide that erodes the f­ uture as well as the past: “Ed io non so chi va e chi resta” (And I ­don’t know who’s ­going or who’ll stay”) (CP, 222–23).

ii. The Long Trip Home I move with ­great precision. . . . ​I believe in the oblique, the indirect approach, and I keep my feelings to myself. . . . ​I admire compression, lightness, and agility, all rare in this loose world. —­e l i z a bet h bishop, “st r ay e d cr a b”14

Elizabeth Bishop’s strayed crab is a self-­portrait of the crustacean poet. Holding t­ hings together in a loose world, enclosing feelings within a carapace of descriptive detail, crab-­wise obliquity lightens and tightens Bishop’s poems. Their agile humor skims a frozen past. In the title poem of Questions of Travel (1965), the too-­many waterfalls, hurrying streams and rain-­spilling clouds of the Brazilian landscape (to which Bishop had moved in mid-­life) “keep travelling, travelling” backward in time. Even the mountains look like capsized ships, “slime-­ hung and barnacled.” (figure 3.2). The Brazilian highlands morph into the upturned boats of Bishop’s Nova Scotia childhood. Caught in the oscillation between “­here” and “­there,” question follows question: “Think of the long trip home. / Should we have stayed at home and thought of ­here? / Where should we be t­ oday?” And again, still undecided, “must we dream our dreams / and have them, too?” (Poems, 91). Life u­ nder a southern sun, only partly shuttered against the past, alternates with an ­imagined return that Bishop calls “the long trip home.” “Questions of Travel” conducts an internal argument with itself: unacted dreams of travel, or the crowding-in of impressions experienced by traveler or tourist? The shifting perspective, as southern mountains merge into the rocky Nova Scotia coast, implicates a shadowy childhood landmass that persists in memory. The effect is inverted, like seeing “the sun the other way around” (Poems, 91). The exotic landscape recorded by appreciative eyes (the view “instantly seen and always, always delightful”) is at once beguiling and

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figure 3.2. Elizabeth Bishop, Brazilian Landscape (undated). Watercolor and gouache. From Exchanging Hats: Paintings, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1996, 1997, 2011 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Carcanet Press. All rights reserved.

precarious. David Kalstone remarks that Bishop’s world is constantly being reconstituted “as if it ­were in danger of being continually lost.”15 The poem asks why travel melds nostalgia for a place called home with regrets for what might other­wise never have been seen at all, without having left home: “But surely it would have been a pity / not to have seen the trees along this road. . . .” (Poems, 91). The theatrical trees, with their exaggerated beauty and pink-­robed gestures, or “the sad, two-­noted, wooden tune / of disparate wooden clogs” clacking over a greasy filling-­station floor, offer postcard-­size vignettes and parenthetical asides: “(In another country, the clogs would all be tested. / Each pair t­ here would have identical pitch)” (Poems, 92).16 The poem’s serial observations—­the sound of mismatched clogs, a fat brown bird singing in its baroque cage above the broken gas pump—­resemble journal entries or holiday snapshots, except for their doubtful conditional tense: “it would have been a pity / not to have seen. . . .” (Poems, 91). The too-­vivid particularity is just slightly off, like the tune of the two-­noted clogs. Mountainous Brazilian hills and Nova Scotia coastline are a mismatched pair. What is the connection, the poet asks, between “the crudest wooden

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footwear” and “the whittled fantasies of wooden cages”? The traveler’s notebook seems never far away. Writing, even “the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages,” ponders a past of never having read, studied, or listened to the Brazilian rain (“so much like politicians’ speeches”), with its alternations of oratory and “sudden golden silence / in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes. . . .” (Poems, 92). The ostensible point is less the poet’s imagining and comparing than her scrupulous note-­taking—­the missed inflections of Brazilian history, po­liti­cal speeches, the impact of Jesuit architecture on the intricate baroque design of birdcages (“careful and finicky”). Is it, asks the poet, suddenly urgent, “Is it lack of imagination that makes us come / to ­imagined places, not just stay at home?”—­“Or could Pascal have been not entirely right / about just sitting quietly in one’s room?” (Poems, 92)—­recalling Pascal’s “all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber.”17 Like the songbird, the poet is forever caged in the fantastical and finicky space of her writing-­room. ­These, then, are Bishop’s own Pascalian pensées. Her private questions of travel culminate in the unanswered question that concludes the poem, making its penultimate pronouncement at once regretful and open-­ended: “Continent, city, country, society: the choice is never wide and never ­free. And ­here, or ­there. . . . ​No. Should we have stayed at home, wherever that may be?” (Poems, 92) If the choice is never wide, and never ­free, neither ­here nor ­there—­undecidable, and ultimately irrelevant—­what does Bishop’s apparently definitive “No” actually mean? Does it mean that Pascal was wrong about just sitting quietly in one’s room? Or does it mean that one arrives at the same place, e­ ither way? (“never wide and never fr ­ ee”). Aloneness surfaces unbidden from the allusion to Pascal, as if to imply that the traveler never r­ eally succeeds in transporting her self-­confined mind to an elusive elsewhere. The poem ends with a dif­fer­ent question: not so much “Should we have stayed at home . . .” but rather “wherever that may be?” The unattainability of home turns out to be the poem’s real question. Home is ever-­present in the mind’s eye, like the shadowy Brazilian mountains inverted as barnacle-­covered ships. The word “should” at the end of the poem inserts a sliver of obligation into what­ever teasing difference it makes to be “­here” as opposed to “­there” (“wherever that may be?”). Yet questions of travel remain unanswerable. Home is not wide, not ­free, and never a m ­ atter of indifference; but it does not come down simply to one place rather than

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another—­like the poem itself, where the foreign merges seamlessly with the childhood landscape enfolded within it, vision remains bifocal. Bishop’s guarded vignettes give ­little away, but they let slip volumes from beneath their self-­protective detail. Her poems are all eyes. ­Later, Bishop wrote apropos of “Sandpiper” (included in Questions of Travel) that “all my life I have lived and behaved very much like that sandpiper—­just ­r unning along the edges of dif­fer­ent countries ‘looking for something.’ ”18 The panicky sandpiper runs obsessively (“He runs, he runs to the south, finical, awkward, / in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake”), looking for something (what?) in a grain of sand on the hissing beach, beside the roaring ocean, as the “interrupting w ­ ater comes and goes”—­“He runs, he runs straight through it, watching his toes” (Poems, 129). The five stanzas, their witty rhymes clinched by the second and last line, dart with the same inconsequential rapidity as the sandpiper through whose myopic eyes we see the draining Atlantic waves and the “dragging grains” of sand.19 The poet too is “looking for something, something, something,” with the bird’s obsessive focus: “Poor bird, he is obsessed!” The bird’s myopic, parenthetical seeing—­“(no detail too small)”—­delivers minute paratactic revelations: “The millions of grains are black, white, tan, and gray, / mixed with quartz grains, ­rose and amethyst.” (Poems, 129). This is not exactly Blake’s visionary world contained in a grain of sand. Rather, the lines have the granularity of a microscope’s close-­up—­a form of visionary short-­ sightedness.20 “Sandpiper” momentarily glimpses the minute vastness and clarity of a bird’s myopia as Bishop’s own linguistic precision subjects the shoreline to an avian close-­reading. For the poet and her avatar, close-­looking transforms the phenomenal world: “The world is a mist. And then the world is / minute and vast and clear.” (Poems, 129). Obsessed, amethyst, mist: the verbal sibilance of Bishop’s seashore (“The beach hisses like fat”) recalls the strange whistling of Montale’s Ligurian landscape—­a sound heard in the interstices of silence. “I have always felt I ­couldn’t possibly live very far inland, away from the ocean.”21 The meeting point of land and sea is an edge—­etymologically, a sharp corner, like the zigzag of a fractal coastline. Bishop’s “The Map” (the first poem in North & South, 1946) rhymes “edges” with “ledges” as if examining a real map on the wall (and perhaps she was, since she owned one)—­the closest Bishop might ever come to home: Land lies in ­water; it is shadowed green. Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges showing the line of long sea-­weeded ledges

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where weeds hang to the ­simple blue from green. Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from ­under, drawing it un­perturbed around itself? Along the fine tan sandy shelf is the land tugging at the sea from ­under? (Poems, 5) Green, green; edges, ledges; ­under, u­ nder; itself, shelf. The softly self-­rhyming, merged and submerged relation of sea and land, poses a puzzle. How to tell one from the other, over from u­ nder? Does land lie in w ­ ater, or does it “lean down to lift the sea from ­under”? Where does land end and ­water begin in this infinitely variable meeting? Shadowy Newfoundland is flat and still, yellow Labrador as if oiled by Eskimos, while “The names of seashore towns run out to sea, / the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains” (Poems, 5). This is the map-­maker’s work, or e­ lse the poet’s over-­spilling emotion: “—­the printer ­here experiencing the same excitement / as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.” Emotion exceeding its cause aptly describes both questions of geography—­questions of north and south and home—­and the hidden emotions in Bishop’s poetry that constantly threaten to destabilize its witty, amusing, yet precarious poise, for all the delicacy with which she colors in the map’s outlines. The map’s superimposition of bound­aries, names, and printed letters on an unstable coastline implies a modernist cultural narrative (“a description of a description”), a repre­sen­ta­tion capable of arousing emotion in its own right.22 Fingered possessively, yet with a sense of unrest, “­These peninsulas take the ­water between thumb and fin­ger / . . . ​and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation” (Poems, 5). The Norwegian hare names a poetic figure, like printed names ­running out to sea or across mountains. For the map-­loving poet, “Mapped ­waters are more quiet than the land is, / lending the land their waves’ own conformation . . . ​/ profiles investigate the sea, where land is.” (Poems, 5). The outlines of sea and land oscillate on the map’s surface as if with the slight repetition-­w ith-­difference of self-­rhyming line-­ends and lapping waves (“where the land is” and “where land is”). Curiosity animates the map like a child’s question (“can the countries pick their colors?”). And what about seas?—­“ What suits the character or the native ­waters best. / Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.” The poem leaves dangling the question of the poet’s own preference: land or sea; or is it rather their unfixed relation that so intrigues her? The mapmaker’s and the poet’s colors, their shadowed green, are “[m]ore delicate than the historians.’ ” Their geography

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lesson intuits, not just the problematic nature of edges and borderlines, but also the poem’s par­tic­u­lar challenge: superimposing description on a northern coastline, like the outlines of a map, or the names of cities overprinted on mountains–­-­the verbal equivalent of a visual repre­sen­ta­tion, impossibly flattened and hung on a wall. Bishop’s shore-­poems comprise a distinct category within her work. Like Montale’s, her “eclogues” sustain a dialogue with loss. In “The End of March” (from Geography III, 1976), a cold walk along a Mas­sa­chu­setts beach—­“the tide far out, the ocean shrunken, / seabirds in ones or twos”—­has as its destination a boarded-up h­ ouse, palisaded against high tides: “my proto-­dream-­ house, / my crypto-­dream-­house, that crooked box / set up on pilings” (Poems, 199).23 The crypto-­dream is to retire inside the ­house and do nothing, “or nothing much”—­looking through binoculars, reading boring books, writing down useless notes, talking to oneself, with a glass of grog by a hot stove. “But—­impossible. / . . . ​and of course the ­house was boarded up” (Poems, 200). On the return walk, as if to compensate for this unfulfilled fantasy, the after­noon sun turns the stones multicolored, “set in their bezels of sand.” The bezel—an edge, sharp or diagonal—is the setting for a jewel. The walk on the freezing shoreline, with its leonine paw-­prints and oversized tangles of white string—­a huge kite batted out of the sky?—­lofts an improbably high-­ flying conceit: a lion sun (March ­going out like a lion), “who’d walked the beach the last low tide” (Poems, 200).24 The lion sun lofting and batting his kite serves as a figure for the overreaching poet, seeking compensation in a larger-­ than-­life meta­phor. Th ­ ere is nothing for pedestrian consciousness to do but seek out a quaint culinary refuge, “a sort of artichoke of a ­house, but greener / (boiled with bicarbonate of soda?).” Compared to the soda-­bright artichoke ­house, the sky is hard-­edged, resistant as yellow jade: “The sky was darker than the w ­ ater /—­it was the color of mutton-­fat jade” (Poems, 199). The end-­of-­ March sun turns “the drab, damp, scattered stones” into multicolored jewels, as if the entire poem formed the “bezel” (setting) for Bishop’s foray into extravagant observation, letting go the line and pulling it in again like the lion, or ­else enacting her own shadow-­play, like the stones at her feet: “all ­those high enough threw out long shadows, / individual shadows, then pulled them in again” (Poems, 200). The come-­and-go is the movement of Bishop’s own verbal imagination, a line played out and withdrawn, fantastically released and then pulled in. Bishop’s e­ arlier shore-­poem, “Cape Breton” (from A Cold Spring, 1955), uses the coastline as a geography for an unrecorded past, starting with the razorbill auks and silly-­looking puffins stationed “in solemn, uneven lines along the

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cliff ’s brown grass-­frayed edge” (Poems, 65). Faintly comical, like the sheep that go “Baaa, baaa” (sometimes stampeding onto the rocky shore), the birds occupy the hinterland between weaving w ­ ater, observation (that grass-­frayed edge), and sheer inconsequentiality: The silken ­water is weaving and weaving, disappearing ­under the mist equally in all directions, lifted and penetrated now and then by one shag’s dripping serpent-­neck, and somewhere the mist incorporates the pulse, rapid but unurgent, of a motorboat. (Poems, 65) As David Kalstone put it appositely, writing about Bishop’s poetry of acutely focused observation: “Landscapes meant to sound detached are ­really inner landscapes.”25 The poem’s own pulse (“rapid but unurgent” like the motorboat’s) is muffled as its travels across this inner landscape, moving inland from the shore to where the mist hangs “like rotting snow-­ice sucked away / almost to spirit” and where “the ghosts of glaciers drift / among t­ hose folds and folds of fir.” (Poems, 65). Ghostly yet iridescent, each riser of spruce and hackmatack (“dull, dead, deep peacock-­colors”) is “distinguished from the next / by an irregular ner­vous saw-­tooth edge, / alike, but certain as a stereoscopic view” (Poems, 65). The trope of stereoscopic vision—­two images of the same trees seen from dif­fer­ent a­ ngles—­reproduces the edgy, over-­defined vision of Bishop’s own observing eye.Like seabirds lined up on the grass-­frayed cliff-­edge, or saw-­tooth firs, the road that “clambers along the brink of the coast” seems at once sharply incised and infinitely small, as if seen through a reversed telescope—­little white churches “dropped into the matted hills / like lost quartz arrowheads,” their original meaning lost: “What­ever the landscape had of meaning appears to have been abandoned” (Poems, 65). Lost or buried meaning, like geo-­history, is sequestered “in the interior, / where we cannot see, / where deep lakes are reputed to be” (Poems, 65). Veiled by mist like the weaving w ­ ater and vanished glaciers, both interior and interiority seem on the cusp of disappearing “where we cannot see.” Miles of burnt forests stand “in gray scratches / like the admirable scriptures made on stones by stones” (Poems, 66). The stony landscape writes its own illegible script. But “­these regions now have ­little to say for themselves,” except in sparrow songs rising up through the mist. Bishop’s depressed, departed m ­ other once taught school on this Nova Scotia island, before her marriage and Bishop’s own birth.

Figure 2.2. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

Figure 2.6. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

Figure 2.11. Gianfranco Rosi, Fuocoammare (2016). Film still courtesy of Kino Lorber, Inc.

Figure 3.2. Elizabeth Bishop, Brazilian Landscape (undated). Watercolor and gouache. From Exchanging Hats: Paintings, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1996, 1997, 2011 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Carcanet Press. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.3. Elizabeth Bishop, Nova Scotia Landscape (undated). Watercolor and gouache. 5 1/4 × 8 inches. Collection Frani Blough Muser. From Exchanging Hats: Paintings, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1996, 1997, 2011 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Carcanet Press. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.4. Tony O’Malley, Ballycunnigar (1952). 8 × 10 inches. Oil on canvas. Photo Aidan Dunne. Courtesy of Colm Tóibín and reproduction granted permission by Jane O’Malley.

Figure 5.7. Josef Koudelka, Jarabina, 1963. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

Figure 5.15. Josef Koudelka, Ireland, 1978. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

figure 6.1. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.2. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.3. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.4. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.5. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.6. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.7. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

figure 6.8. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

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Can this ghostly m ­ other ever be recovered from the glacial interior? Perhaps not. Through the present-­day landscape comes a packed bus, with its weekday freight of groceries, spare car and pump parts, and its two frock-­coated preachers. Passing roadside stands and closed school­houses, the bus lets off the occasional passenger. As it pulls away, the landscape ­settles back into its ghostly re­sis­tance: The birds keep on singing, a calf bawls, the bus starts. The thin mist follows the white mutations of its dream; an ancient chill is rippling the dark brooks. (Poems, 66) This is the muted landscape of a dream, seen as if through a long-­dead m ­ other’s eyes—­the ancient chill like the touch of a ghostly maternal revenant. Mist and cold, the true o­ wners of Cape Breton, prompt thoughts of a dead, depressive ­mother, frozen and withdrawn, mingling with the unrecoverable ghosts of melted glaciers.26 Colm Tóibín describes such poems as si­mul­ta­neously remembering and seeing: “It was essential for them that the remembering be exact and precise, enough for it to draw in and hold all the emotions surrounding belonging, or dreams of belonging, or loss, or dreams of loss, or indeed knowledge of loss” (OEB, 59). What do the acts of memory and seeing in Bishop’s poetry “know” about dreams of ­either belonging or loss? Bishop’s “At the Fish­houses” (included in A Cold Spring) posits knowledge as sea-­cold, salt, and b­ itter—­Tóibín’s “knowledge of loss.”27 The poem opens with characteristically understated observation. On the shore “an old man sits netting, / his net, in the gloaming almost invisible / a dark purple-­brown, / and his shut­tle worn and polished” (Poems, 62). Fisherman and poet converse, the poet’s nose ­running and eyes watering, against the outlines of the fish-­houses with their peaked roofs and cleated gangplanks. Even the opaque surface of the sea is touched by time: “All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea, / swelling slowly as if considering spilling over. . . .” (Poems, 62). Familiar objects in this fish-­world (benches, lobster pots, masts) are silvered (“of an apparent translucence”) by fish scales and the lens of Bishop’s own watering eyes. Herring scales line the fish-­tubs and wheelbarrows “with creamy iridescent coats of mail, / with small iridescent flies crawling on them.” Every­thing gleams as if underwater, even the tiny flies. Fish-­scale “sequins” adhere to the old man’s vest and thumb, as he wields his worn knife: “He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty, / from

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unnumbered fish with that black old knife” (Poems, 63). Like the net-­maker’s shut­tle (“worn and polished”), the knife’s old blade signals the everyday decline of the local fish-­economy: “The old man accepts a Lucky Strike. / . . . ​We talk of the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring” (Poems, 62). The path of reminiscence and decline leads down into the silvery sea, like the boat ramp “descending into the ­water, thin silver / tree trunks” ­going “down and down / at intervals of four or five feet” (Poems, 63). The recurrent movement of Bishop’s poetry—­from surface to depth and (sometimes) back again to a footing on dry land—­leads by way of description to knowledge that is unbearably cold, beautiful, and profoundly inhuman: “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear, / ele­ment bearable to no mortal, / to fish and to seals. . . .” (Poems, p. 63). One comically curious seal—­like the poet, “a believer in total immersion”—­used to stand up in the ­water listening to Baptist hymns: (“I also sang ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ ”). The past imperfect tense frames the poem’s habitual retrospect (“I have seen it over and over”) with the movement of the indifferent icy w ­ aters of the sea above the stones, like the internal repetitions of the lines themselves (over and over, above and above): I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same, slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones, icily ­free above the stones, above the stones and then the world. (Poems, 63) Swinging sea and bone-­chilling ­water—­burning “as if the ­water ­were a transmutation of fire / that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame”—­offer a scalding draft of knowledge, entirely devoid of comfort: It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly ­free, drawn from the cold hard mouth of the world, derived from the rocky breasts forever, flowing and drawn, and since our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown. (Poems, 64) The poem’s own knowledge is as impersonal as the movement of verse.28 It seems to flow directly from the stony mouth and rocky breasts of loss. Internal half-­rhymes (“drawn . . . ​flowing and drawn . . . ​flowing, and flown”) define such knowledge as f­ ree only b­ ecause it cares nothing for the individual: it is “drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world.” Knowledge like this is

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uncompromisingly dark, “historical” in the sense of transcending persons, and—­like the past—­“flown.” Only language as icy cold and burning could articulate the salty meaning of loss. Bishop’s “Poem” (from Geography III) concentrates its gaze on an imaginary small painting of a Nova Scotia landscape, “About the size of an old-­ style dollar bill” (Poems, 196).29 The tiny, toy-­town scene with its wooden ­houses, low hills, and church steeples, miniscule cows, geese, and wild irises, includes “a half inch of blue sky / below the steel-­gray storm clouds” and a “specklike” bird (“Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?”—­another unsettling either/or) (figure 3.3). The minute brushstrokes with their traces of brush-­ hairs compose an instantly recognizable scene, yet posthumous and “before my time”—­“ We both knew this place, / apparently, this literal small backwater, / looked at it long enough to memorize it” (Poems, 197). The pictorial detail rec­ords two coinciding acts of looking, the poet’s—­Bishop painted the scene in her inimitable, primitivist style—­and that of the painter, her U ­ ncle George, RA. (His painting does not survive, hers does.). How tell life and memory apart? Whose seeing came first? Or, in Bishop’s closing question, “Which is which?”: Our visions coincided—­“visions” is too serious a word—­our looks, two looks: art “copying from life” and life itself, life and the memory of it so compressed ­they’ve turned into each other. Which is which? (Poems, 197) “Poem” looks into the art of “copying from life,” or representation—­art and life, life and memory, in all their affecting, overflowing detail: “how live, how touching in detail”—­“the munching cows, / the iris, crisp and shivering . . . ​the yet-­to-­be-­dismantled elms, the geese.” (Poems, 197). The art of description (­here, the paratactical art of listing) is preemptively charged with the double vision of past and pre­sent, like “the yet-­to-­be-­dismantled elms.” The l­ittle painting (the poem—­ut picture poesis?) is already a memento, its miniaturized landscape translated into the past tense as something twice seen. Bishop’s look (her “vision”) is a vehicle, not for picture-­making, but for childhood seeing as a kind of second sight. What has never been seen appears as if lodged in memory. “Poem” asks where art ends and memorial begins—­where particularity and parting coincide in the minutiae of Bishop’s bifocal optics and her repeated attempts to imagine or dream irrecoverable loss.

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figure 3.3. Elizabeth Bishop, Nova Scotia Landscape (undated). Watercolor and gouache. 5 1/4 × 8 inches. Collection Frani Blough Muser. From Exchanging Hats: Paintings, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1996, 1997, 2011 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Carcanet Press. All rights reserved.

iii. A Grey Shine on the Sea In the 2012 afterword to his novel The South (1990), Colm Tóibín tells of arriving at an impasse in his writing: “when no new images came, when I felt I was blocked with the book, I remembered what [the painter] Barrie Cooke had said. I made a mark. I de­cided I would write the first t­ hing that came into my head and then make it stick. What came was: ‘The sea. A grey shine on the sea.’ ”30 In their ­earlier conversation, Tóibín had asked Cooke how he began a painting: “ ‘ You make a mark,’ he said, as he gestured the making of an almost random mark with an imaginary paintbrush” (South, 225). The moment surfaces again in Tóibín’s own meditation on Bishop’s poetry, On Elizabeth Bishop. Writing about the unsettling Catalonian background to The South, he realized that his novel needed something ­else to anchor it: “I thought I would close my eyes for a while, think of nothing, open them and type a word, any word, and then see where that word led. I wrote: ‘The sea.’ And then I wrote: ‘A grey shine on the sea’ ” (OEB, 37). With t­ hese words, the landscape of his own childhood returned in his mind’s eye.

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Unlocking Tóibín’s visual memory, the word “sea” and the phrase associated with it si­mul­ta­neously unlocked the elegiac cadences of memory: Suddenly, I was back in an Irish landscape, with Irish weather, and not only that, but in a very precise place—­the strand at Ballyconnigar on the Wexford coast. I moved my characters t­ here, and I found a calm, stable, melancholy tone to work with. I could see the shore stretching south to Curracloe in many types of Irish summer weather, including days when the haze so easily becomes mist and when soft clouds so easily darken and become rain. . . . I was surprised. . . . ​I had not thought that this world was something I could write about. It belonged to me so fundamentally that I saw no drama in it; also, it was a place of loss, and I was, although I did not put a name on it then, in flight from loss. (OEB, 37–38) As well as the taken-­for-­granted summer landscape of his Irish childhood, with its ever-­changing, moisture-­infused weather-­effects, Tóibín discovered the recurring subject of the novels that he went on to write—­loss, and the unacknowledged flight from loss. His next novel, The Heather Blazing (1992), “became a story about inner exile and grief, set firmly on that stretch of Irish coast.” It established the almost obsessive pattern of Tóibín’s novels: “escape, return, escape, return” (OEB, 38–39). In South, Tóibín describes, as if through an artist’s eyes, “[t]he dull grey light on the gun-­metal sea at Ballyconnigar. Each colour a subtle variation of another: cream, silver, light blue, light green, dark grey” (South, 191).31 For his central character, Katherine—an Irish painter-­in-­exile—­returning to the Irish seascape defines a new aesthetic: “She would make every­thing fade into itself, build the colours up carefully so ­there was a texture: the sea a vague shimmer of grey light” (South, 192). Katherine is stretching a canvas, but the word “texture” suggests the textual detail of Toíbín’s prose. His Ballyconnigar sea shimmers with the changeful gray light of memory and mourning. On this familiar shore, Tóibín’s characters lose and find themselves, families fall apart and come together, and the bereaved fi­nally let go of the past. In The Heather Blazing (1992), the marly cliff mea­sures the passing of time as the land gradually succumbs to the waves, and h­ ouses that had once been set back start to topple over the edge: It had been so gradual, this erosion, a m ­ atter of time, lumps of clay, small boulders studded with stones becoming loose and falling away, the sea

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gnawing at the land. It was all so strange, year ­after year, the slow disappearance of the one contour to be replaced by another, it was hard to notice that anything had happened.32 Tóibín’s mea­sured description notices the slow pace of erosion, the imperceptibly altered contours, the ­house missing a front wall, ­until what was once someone’s home suddenly collapses onto the strand below, and the strand itself becomes a scene of mourning. In this passage, the protagonist, Eamon Redmond, hears the hollow yet strangely comforting sound (“modest, intimate”) of small stones rattling against each other in the waves: “They made a clattering, gurgling sound as each wave hit them and then retreated” (HB, 33).33 ­Later, a­ fter his wife’s death, he mechanically walks the strand, noticing the same sea as Katherine in The South, “washed of all colour now, just vague hints of blue and green against white and grey” (HB, 203). Tóibín’s “Afterword” to The Heather Blazing returns to his discovery that the stretch of coastal landscape where he had spent his childhood summers could become a source of vivid and dramatic images: “It was clear that I could return ­there—to that eroding coastline with its washed grey light, to the subtle drama in the contours of the landscape . . . ​the images emerged as haunting aspects of memory and loss” (HB, 246). Something ­else is involved, too: the blurring of identities, along with the fading into one another of memory and imagination. The County Wexford coastline becomes an image not only of time passing, but also of something still more impersonal—­the per­sis­tence of language beyond the writer; specifically, the language and words of lost t­ hing: “I used the eroding cliffs at Cush not as meta­phor, but as themselves, exactly as they ­were when we went ­there each summer, but with all the resonance which lost t­ hings can have, t­ hings which cannot be recovered except in words” (HB, 247). The clatter of stone on stone on the seashore is the ­music of “­things which cannot be recovered except in words,” a ­music that haunt Tóibín’s novels like Montale’s wailing trumpets as a cliff shears off into the sea, or like the whistling hiss of hares at eve­ning. Tóibín notices how the rhythms of his own writing nudged him compulsively “back home to the damp air and the dulled light of the southeast of Ireland, closer and closer to ­things that happened ­there, to the place of loss, to the loss itself, to minute details, to the very spaces.” This is the rhythm of “care and precision” that he recognizes in poems by Bishop “that dealt with the pull ­toward a place despite the lure of elsewhere. I saw something that I knew and

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felt” (OEB, 40). It should be no surprise to discover that Tóibín tried his hand at lyric poetry before becoming a novelist. Observing that Bishop never returned to live her life in Nova Scotia, he suggests that language of her poetry enacts a “sort of home-­coming” (OEB, 61), as the closing lines of Bishop’s “At the Fish­houses” arrive “like a boat sent to rescue someone, into an ambiguous space . . . ​beyond the personal . . . ​creating a ­music filled with risk and repetition”—or like (so Tóibín suggests) the language of secular prayer without faith (OEB, 59). Freed from “the world of ­things,” a transformed and transforming image “suggest[s] something that has not been formulated or ­imagined by anyone before” (OEB, 61). The same sense of something never previously ­imagined or put into words takes the ubiquitous mourners of Tóibín’s novels beyond their individual feelings and memories, t­ oward the consoling, aria-­like, impersonality of a glistening and unpeopled sea.34 At the close of On Elizabeth Bishop, ­under the heading of “North Atlantic Light,” Tóibín returns to this scene of memory and mourning that is also a scene of familiarity and repetition (“see again,” “write about again”): “this small stretch of coast, this literal small backwater, where I feel closest to something I know, or remember, or wish to see again, write about again” (OEB, 193). Tóibín rehearses his infinitely repeatable yet subtly varied description of the changeable Ballyconnigar seascape, using the pre­sent tense of habitual observation: the light over the sea in the morning, and the way a rainy day can clear up in the eve­ning, and the marly sand of the cliffs, and the strand itself, and the hesitant, insistent low waves and the small stones of dif­fer­ent shapes and colors (no detail too small) at the edge of the shoreline that make a hollow rattling sound as they hit against one another when a wave comes in or e­ lse they are pushed ­toward the back of the strand by the tide and left ­there when the tide goes out. (OEB, 193–94) Like Bishop’s sandpiper-­seeing (“no detail too small”), the changing light and sandy cliff, the stones with their rattling refrain on the shoreline, achieve a kind of visionary horizon. Writing moves beyond description or memory and ­toward memorialization, with its implication of pastness and death. Tóibín concludes by invoking a landscape painting of the same stretch of shore by the Irish artist Tony O’Malley, who had drawn and painted the Ballyconnigar coastline during the 1940s and early 1950s—­“As far as I know, he was the only painter who thought this mild landscape worthy of attention” (OEB, 195)

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(figure 3.4). As if in response to O’Malley’s painting, Tóibín returns to the sea’s perennial, subtle, infinitely varied appearance: In the mornings in Ballyconnigar, the sea is always dif­fer­ent. It can seem closer sometimes, ready to spill over, when the light is clear, and then distant and forbidding, alien, almost steely sharp, stately, withdrawn, when ­there are clouds and no wind. In the mornings when t­ here is sun, the light on the sea can be all glare, or buttery on softer days, or austere when ­there are clouds in the western sky. (OEB, 196) Tóibín’s prose conveys a quiet passion, an almost obsessive search for the right words for weather that is always changing and a seascape that is always the same. The sea—­close or withdrawn, buttery or austere—­transcends this par­ tic­u­lar viewer; yet it amounts to nothing without the brimming-­over of Tóibín’s feeling for this par­tic­ul­ ar, charged landscape. Like Bishop describing ­Uncle George’s tiny painting (his or hers?) in “Poem,” O’Malley’s small landscape painting (inscribed “1952 Ballycunnigar”) becomes a talisman for loss—­“a scene that is not ­there anymore.” Tóibín’s ekphrastic description repeats all the ele­ments of light, clouds, sea, along with the crucial absence of ­people: The painting is small, eight inches by ten. It is of a cliff, a strand, the sea, the sky. It is a scene that is not ­there anymore. It is the soft marl of the cliff . . . ​gradually g­ oing down to be eaten away, washed away, to become nothing. . . . ​W hat is strange is that it could be nowhere ­else in the world ­because of the incline of the cliff, the softness of the sand and the sea, and the precise and peculiar curve of the land ­going north. It is Ballyconnigar. . . . (OEB, 197–98) What emerges from this scene of recognition is not so much Tóibín’s identification of a familiar stretch of coast, with its marly cliff and changeable weather, and the “precise and peculiar curve” of the strand that makes the painting’s location instantly recognizable to him. Instead, we are led to reflect on the coincidence of looks that Bishop had emphasized in “Poem”—­“our visions coincided” (Poems, 197; OEB, 198). It is not just that O’Malley and Tóibín each studied the same seascape closely, or that they saw it at much the same time. What ­matters to Tóibín is that the rec­ord of O’Malley’s past seeing in his small painting recollects and re-­creates what he has tried to describe again and again in his own writing: “It must have mattered to him to make a painting from precise looking and rendering, or finding shapes and colors that would

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figure 3.4. Tony O’Malley, Ballycunnigar (1952). 8 × 10 inches. Oil on canvas. Photo Aidan Dunne. Courtesy of Colm Tóibín and reproduction granted permission by Jane O’Malley.

approximate what he saw, but capture it, envision it, re-­create it” (OEB, 198). Precise looking and rendering—­description transformed into a mode of both memory-­making and parting—­defines an art of seeing that extends beyond the life of the individual seer. In its very there-­ness (“part of what was normal, what was t­ here”), Tóibín’s taken-­for-­granted seascape comes to signify the erosion of memory itself, and ultimately the absence of the viewer: “erosion itself changed this landscape, lowered the cliff and altered the incline, so that soon it w ­ ill be remembered by no one and no one w ­ ill recognize the scene in this painting” (OEB, 198). All that is left in the face of this slow wearing-­away of memory and subjectivity are the marks made by the writer on the page: “Language is all ­there is now” (OEB, 60). Language is there-­ness, or rather, language is absence. Tóibín’s plangent statement offers another version of the coastal paradox: not just that farther is closer, or that closer is more intensely and deeply seen; not just that language can in itself provide a form of stability within the tidal come-­and-go of both poetry and forgetting. Rather, what I have called “particulation”—­the detailed verbal articulation of precise looking, with its undertow of parting and

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loss—­implies the most final parting of all: the severing of the mark from the mark-­maker, and the absence of poet or painter from the scene described. ——— For Tóibín, the sense of belonging in Bishop’s poems is communicated by the exactness and precision of memory: “It was essential for [Bishop’s poems] that the remembering be exact and precise, enough for it to draw in and hold all the emotions surrounding belonging” (OEB, 59). Remembering, like poetry or a map-­maker’s printing, is a kind of container or place-­holder for brimming emotion. The sense of belonging derives from a reconstituted past that also serves as a mnemonic for loss. The descriptive particularity of Montale’s, Bishop’s, and Tóibín’s memory writing has parallels in other writers’ returns to the taken-­for-­granted landscapes of their childhood. Remembrance of t­ hings past has every­thing to do with place. But why coastlines, with their distinctive weather-­effects, their sea-­wrack and clattering stones, their cliff-­falls and neglected huts? For Montale, Bishop, and Tóibín, the coastal border of childhood is suffused, not only with loss, but with the negation of their own subjectivity as writers. Personhood drops away, to leave Bishop’s tentative, half-­rhyming formulation: “It is like what we imagine knowledge to be . . . ​flowing and drawn, and since / our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown” (“At the Fish­ houses”).  Another name for this historical knowledge might be “unbelonging”— a negative mode of knowing: knowledge without a knower, sight or hindsight without a seer, tenuously located on an ever-­shifting shoreline.

4 Displaced Persons

“art,” wrote W. G. Sebald, “is nothing without patient handi­work . . . ​­there are many difficulties to be reckoned with in the recollection of ­things.”1 In 1966, W. G. Sebald traveled from Switzerland to Manchester to take up a university post as German Lector, leaving his homeland for good. Among the books in his suitcase, he took with him a novel by Robert Walser, the early twentieth-­century Swiss-­German writer who (according to Sebald) could “only ­free himself from the obsessive compulsion to write by . . . ​withdrawing from society altogether” (PC, 4). Just before the outbreak of World War I, Walser left Berlin, where he had made a slender living from his newspaper feuilletons and whimsical novels, returning to his native city in Switzerland. ­After the war, following a breakdown, he entered a local asylum, where he lived out the remainder of his life u­ ntil his death in the 1950s as a privileged inmate, making day-­trips into the mountains with his guardian (the Swiss-­German writer, editor, and publisher Carl Seelig).2 A witness to Walser’s l­ater years described how Walser “would always carry with him in his waistcoat pocket a pencil stub and a few scraps of paper, carefully cut to size, on which he would often jot down one t­ hing or another,” quickly concealing them from view and using his own form of microscript. Sebald: “Evidently the business of writing is one from whose clutches it is by no means easy to extricate oneself ” (PC, 5) (figure 4.1). Like Walser, Walter Benjamin left Berlin, his childhood home, returning periodically to Germany before g­ oing into exile for good in 1933 when the rise of Hitler and Nazi persecution of Jewish intellectuals made it impossible for him to earn a living from his writing.3 In “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Collecting” (1931), Benjamin describes how unpacking his books from their crates unleashed a “spring tide of memories”—­“­Every passion borders on the 93

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chaotic, but the collector’s passion borders on the chaos of memories.”4 ­After the long day’s unpacking, he was filled with memories, “not thoughts but images, memories. Memories of the cities in which I found so many ­things: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris” (SW, 2: 492); memories that brought back the book-­filled rooms in which he had lived during his Berlin boyhood, his student days, and his ­later travels. Books become portable place-­holders—­suitcases full of memory. Sebald’s intellectual and literary formation by the Frankfurt School helped shape his dissenting relation to postwar German culture.5 The books in Sebald’s suitcase signaled his alternative literary affiliation, in this case with German-­speaking Switzerland. Walser’s pocket-­writing and microscripts gave him a secret refuge. Benjamin’s portable library anchored his nomadic existence. All three ­were compulsive walkers as well as collectors of forgotten writers, recondite information, and overlooked or outdated ­t hings. Their wanderings—­Sebald’s pilgrim-­route through East Anglia in The Rings of Saturn (1995), Walser’s Alpine hikes, Benjamin’s city strolls—­provided essential copy. Taking a melancholy tour through time, Sebald uses his wanderings as an intricate form of life-­writing. Walser’s accounts of his rambles rec­ord light-­ hearted encounters with a world of hyper-­charged ordinariness: “We ­don’t need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much.”6 So much is already too much for Walser. Benjamin’s One-­Way Street (1928) excavates the fossils of a forgotten past that anticipate the destruction to come. Apropos of his writing, Adorno observes: “The eye, mourning the losses it is about to incur, rests patiently and intensively on t­ hings,” reporting Benjamin’s private remark: “I am not interested in p­ eople, he said; I am interested only in t­ hings.”7 Not any old ­things, but lost ­things—­the debris of the past that underlies modernity. Commenting on “the awful tenacity of ­those who devote their lives to writing” (PC, 4), Sebald identifies the dual afflictions of writing and thought, before adding a third: exile. His essay on the Swiss-­German writer Gottfried Keller describes exile as “a form of purgatory located just outside this world. Anyone who has visited it w ­ ill forever a­ fter be a stranger in his own country.” For Keller, “the return from exile, like exile itself, amounts to a premature encounter with death” (PC, 108). Exile is a near-­death experience, one from which the writer never fully recovers, even if he survives to tell the tale. World War II gave the official name “Displaced Person” (DP) to t­ hose forced to leave their countries by war and expulsion; in German, Vertriebene, or (for the internally displaced) Heimatvertriebene. Postwar Eu­rope became the land of the

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homeless and stateless. ­These are the figures and tropes to which Sebald’s writing returns, in its melancholy search for lost time and lost ­things. Walser belongs to the category of forgotten writer beloved by both Benjamin and Sebald. Sebald’s “Le Promeneur Solitaire: A Remembrance of Robert Walser” (1998) traces a ghostly path “so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (PC, 127). Sebald echoes the 1929 essay in which Benjamin notes “a very Swiss feature of Walser’s writing: his reticence [Scham]” (SW, 2: 258).8 Or rather, his loquacity: “a torrent of words pours from him in which the only point of e­ very sentence is to make the reader forget the previous one” (SW, 2: 258). Benjamin hears the distress masked by this torrent of words: “sobbing is the melody of Walser’s loquaciousness. It reveals to us where his favorite characters come from—­namely, from insanity and nowhere ­else.” Walser’s characters “have left madness ­behind them. . . . ​If we w ­ ere to attempt to sum up in a single phrase the delightful yet also uncanny ele­ment in them, we would have to say: they have all been healed.” (SW, 2: 259). They live “where the fairy tales stop. ‘And if they have not died, they live t­ here still.’ ” (SW, 2: 260); they exist in a state of suspended animation, untouched by time, living on beyond the end. Introducing Benjamin’s Schriften, Adorno invokes Benjamin’s “micrological method”—­“the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in an image. One understands Benjamin correctly only if one senses b­ ehind each of his sentences the conversion of extreme animation into something static, in fact the static conception of movement itself. . . .” (NL, 2: 228). Under­lying this sedimentation of image and arrested movement, Adorno detects the melancholy that “endowed every­thing he took up with a deathly shimmer”—an awareness of imminent catastrophe that “cast a spell even on the con­temporary and turned it into something long past” (NL, 2: 228, 231). The freeze-­frame image defines the method pioneered by Benjamin’s One-­Way Street—­namely, the Denkbild, or “Thought Figure.”9 In Freud’s dreamwork, desire drives displacement: the Denkbild displaces cultural analy­sis onto arrested images and superannuated ­things. In the creaturely realm, displacement can also retain its more pedestrian meaning. Both Sebald and Benjamin connect their life-­ writing (memory-­writing) with the habit of pedestrianism, while Walser’s best-­known pedestrian fantasy is called “The Walk” (1917).10 Walking and remembering go together. The patient recollection of small ­things provides a displaced narrative of psychic and social catastrophe: homeless and stateless ­people on the move—­literally, displaced persons.

figure 4.1. Robert Walser, “Jaunts elegant in nature” (Microscript 9). By Robert Walser, translated by Susan Bernofsky, from The Microscripts, copyright © Suhrkamp Verlag Zu­rich and Frankfurt am Main 1985. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Christine Burgin.

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i. Of No State Was He a Citizen He was at home everywhere and nowhere. He had no home country, and of no state was he a citizen. Without motherland and without happiness he was; he had to live completely without love and without ­human joy. —­r obe rt wa l se r , “t h e wa l k” (1917)11

W. G. Sebald’s “Remembrance” of Walser belongs with the four fictionalized narratives that make up The Emigrants (Die Ausgewanderten, 1993), each of which centers on a melancholy figure who has outlived his time and place. Walser too was an internal emigrant, a writer sidelined by the Nazi preference for a nationalistic Heimat style celebrating the Homeland. Sebald places him in the same ambiguous space of memory that surrounds his other survivors of the mid-­twentieth-­century Eu­ro­pean catastrophe. Ele­ments in his story parallel that of Sebald’s Great-­Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, whose life ends in an Ithacan asylum in upstate New York—­a city identified with another writer-­in-­ exile, Vladimir Nabokov, whose ghostly figure flits in and out of The Emigrants with his butterfly net.12 Sebald pursues Walser as if he too is a spectral apparition who might vanish at any moment: “The precariousness of Walser’s existence—­ persisting even ­after his death—­the emptiness blowing through ­every part of it, lends it an air of spectral insubstantiality” (PC,130). An elusive and enigmatic figure, Walser inhabits a hinterland of hearsay, coincidence, and conjecture, leaving ­behind only his ephemeral and (­until recently) indecipherable writings. Walser’s journey into silence follows the same path as that of the reclusive survivors in Sebald’s The Emigrants: Dr. Henry Selwyn, who shoots himself with an antiquated hunting ­rifle; Paul Bereyter, who lies down on the railway-­ track in front of an oncoming train; Ambros Adelwarth, who consigns himself to an asylum “longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as pos­si­ble of his capacity to think and remember.”13 Walser’s own solitary death during an alpine walk in the snow, on Christmas Day, 1956, makes him a similar casualty of self-­extinction. Sebald’s essay conflates Walser with another figure from his own past—­his beloved grand­father, Josef Egelhofer, with whom he used to go walking as a child, at much the same period and in a similar Alpine landscape. Photo­graphs of Josef, hat on head and stick or umbrella in hand, interrupt Sebald’s sequence of photo­graphs of Walser, similarly equipped.14 By coincidence (as so often in Sebald’s writing), both died in the same year, 1956. Sebald imagines his dead grand­father’s body taking the place of Walser’s: “in my mind’s eye I always see [my grand­father] lying on the horn sledge on which

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Walser’s body, ­after he had been found in the snow and photographed, was taken back to the asylum” (PC, 135). In Sebald’s life-­writing, one person is always displacing another, even in the time and manner of their death. “What,” Sebald asks rhetorically, “is the significance of t­ hese similarities, overlaps, and coincidences? Are they rebuses of memory, delusions of the self and of the senses, or rather the schemes and symptoms of an order under­lying the chaos of ­human relationships, and applying equally to the living and the dead . . . ?” (PC, 135). Are t­ hese memory puzzles a form of subjective delusion, or are they symptoms of the uncanny link between fact and fiction? Sebald’s trope of similarity allows his narrative to capture any overlap, however fleeting, as one life touches on another, ­whether by happenstance or by the sheer elasticity of his imagination. Rather than unveiling his characters, Sebald envelops them in an intertextual spider-­web. Fragile threads link his digressive life-­ writing, even when its details are as elusive as Walser’s—­“Every­thing written in ­these incomparable books has . . . ​a tendency to vanish into thin air” (PC, 130–31). Walser’s writing dissolves into Sebald’s when he draws on Walser’s novel The Robber (Der Räuber, 1925) in The Emigrants in order to reference Ambros’s crossing of Lake Constance: “the Robber crossed Lake Constance by moonlight. Exactly thus—by moonlight—is how, in one of my own stories, Aunt Fini imagines the young Ambros crossing the selfsame lake, although, as she makes a point of saying, this can scarcely have been the case in real­ity” (PC, 135–36). Writerly acknowledgement, or mischievous obfuscation? Si­mul­ta­neously signaling and disclaiming his debts to other writers (and even to himself ), Sebald knits them seamlessly into his narrative. Cross-­ references to Great-­Uncle Ambros’s story pile up—­a mysterious lady from Shanghai dressed all in brown, along with an unusual compound noun, “Trauerlaufbahn [­career in mourning]”—­a coinage that Sebald says he thought he had in­ven­ted himself. Except that in this instance, as in o­ thers, he confesses that his borrowings are a way of tipping his hat to writers with whom he felt a literary affinity. But he adds disconcertingly, “it is one ­thing to set a marker in memory of a departed colleague, and quite another when one has the per­sis­ tent feeling of being beckoned to from the other side” (PC, 136). Who is beckoning to whom in this verbal haunting by “a departed colleague”? In the spectral life of writing, recollection is always “false,” at once rebus and hauntology—­ constructed on the basis of literary coincidence and cross-­reference, secret acknowledgement and deft quotation. Commenting on the peculiar effect of levity in Walser’s style, Sebald speculates that Walser hoped “through writing, to be able to escape the shadows

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which lay over his life from the beginning . . . ​transforming them on the page from something very dense to something almost weightless. His ideal was to overcome the force of gravity” (PC, 138). Floating on a manic high, Walser deliberately untethers his writing from real­ity. Sebald ends by invoking Walser’s own feuilleton on ballooning (1913) as an emblem of the way his prose “always seeks to rise above the heaviness of earthly existence, wanting to float away softly and silently into a higher, freer realm” (PC, 162).15 The closing lines of Sebald’s “Remembrance” of Walser invoke a childhood memory from Nabokov’s memoir, Speak, Memory (1951): a picture-­book adventure in a hot-­ air balloon. Like Nabokov’s favorite hero, the miniscule “Midget,” Walser “drifted into an abyss of frost and stars—­alone” (PC, 164).16 Wafted aloft on the buoyant words of another memoirist, Walser floats into the ether in the com­pany of Nabokov’s Lilliputian aeronaut. Noticing the inclination of Walser’s feuilletons ­toward minimalism, and the tiny coded writing of his microscripts, Sebald calls Walser “a clairvoyant of the small” (PC, 139). No stranger to prolonged sentences and piled-up detail in his own writing, Sebald observes in Walser’s prose “[t]he playful—­and sometimes obsessive—­working in with a fine brush of the most abstruse details” (PC, 139). He lists Walser’s stylistic mannerisms as exaggerated participial constructions, conglomerations of verbs, neologisms “which scuttle away ­under our gaze like millipedes,” flights of meta­phor, curiosities, regionalisms, and “the almost manic loquaciousness” characteristic of Walser’s style (the sobbing loquacity noted by Benjamin), as if “out of a fear of reaching the end too quickly. . . . ​Indeed, the detour is, for Walser, a m ­ atter of survival” (PC, 139–40). Without its detours—­w ithout its flights of fancy—­Walser’s life-­in-­writing would come down to earth. The same could be said of Sebald’s own life-­writing, born aloft on an updraft borrowed from Nabokov, as if taking his distance from Walser via a private literary detour of his own. Sebald observes that the demands of high culture marginalized Walser’s “linguistic montages,” along with his jaunts and detours. In its “utter subjection of the writer to the language,” Walser’s overwrought manner achieved “the perfect realization of that irony only ever hinted at by the German Romantics” (PC, 140)—­that is, the dissolution of the writer into his writing. A Romantic ironist born out of his time, Sebald’s ironic Walser lays claim to the detached self-­consciousness of a literary tradition stretching back to Schlegel and forward to include Sebald, himself a modern master of the “phantastical” sentence beloved by Walser: “­Little sentence, ­little sentence . . . ​you seem to me phantastical as well, you do!” (PC, 141).17 Sebald’s Walser is a composite

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persona, constructed out of both his own and Sebald’s fantastical style, his world populated by ghostly walk-on parts “like actors in the earliest films . . . ​ surrounded by a trembling, shimmering aura which makes their contours unrecognizable” (PC, 142). Invoking Nabokov on the “tribe of harmless madmen” that ­people Gogol’s works, Sebald compares them to “the almost compulsive contemplation of strangely unreal creations appearing on the periphery of [Walser’s] vision” (PC, 143). Citing Benjamin, Sebald pays tribute to “the anonymous, evanescent quality of Walser’s characters. They come, [Benjamin] says ‘from insanity and nowhere ­else’ ” (PC, 142). Walser is quoted by Sebald as saying that one could describe all his novels as “a much-­chopped-up or dismembered Book of Myself.” The main character (“the Ich or ‘I’ ”), “almost never makes an appearance in this Ich-­Buch but is left blank, or rather remains out of sight among the throng of other passing characters” (PC, 144). Sebald might be commenting h­ ere on his own cast of shadowy figures and marginalized speakers—an ensemble designed to create a dismembered “Ich-­ Buch” in which fiction, autobiography, and memoir are woven together via his “periscopic” narrative, reinventing the memoir as a composite form through quotation, citation, and indirect speech.18 Sebald compares Walser’s life to “the awful provisionality” of Gogol’s existence, with its mood swings, panic, and capricious humor, along with his “invention of a ­whole populace of lost souls” (PC, 144). Like U ­ ncle Ambros, “Their ideal state is that of pure amnesia” (PC, 145). Clues to Walser’s “inner emigration”—­the indecipherable late writings that illustrate Sebald’s essay—­evince his attempt “to duck down below the level of language and to obliterate himself” (PC, 151). His micro-­writing is a disappearing act. A long quotation about ash drawn from Walser provides an image for what Sebald calls the “personal auto-­da-­fé” of Walser’s writerly life: “. . . ​if, for example, one blows on ash it displays not the least reluctance to fly off instantly in all directions. Ash is submissiveness, worthlessness, irrelevance itself, and best of all, it is itself pervaded by the belief that it is fit for nothing. Is it pos­si­ble to be more helpless, more impotent, and more wretched than ash? Not very easily. . . . ​W here t­ here is ash t­ here is actually nothing at all. Tread on ash and you w ­ ill barely notice that you have stepped on anything.” (PC, 146) Sebald could hardly have cited Walser’s disquisition on ash without bringing to mind the Holocaust’s destruction of memory, along with the burning of books and the reduction of bodies to wretched ash. In The Emigrants, Max Ferber’s continual erasure of his work coats his studio with undisturbed layers

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of paint and charcoal dust, “the debris generated by painting and the dust that continually fell and which, as he was coming to realize, he loved more than anything ­else in the world. . . . ​[H]e never felt more at home than in places where ­things remained undisturbed, muted u­ nder the grey, velvety sinter left when ­matter dissolved, ­little by ­little, into nothingness.” (E, 161).19 Like his unsatisfactory attempt to complete “the faceless portrait, ‘Man with a Butterfly Net’ ”—­“in his view it conveyed not even the remotest impression of the strangeness of the apparition” (E, 174)—­Ferber turns his subjects into apparitions (­here, the ghost of Nabokov wielding his butterfly net). In his uncompleted portraits, the onlooker might glimpse “a long lineage of grey, ancestral ­faces, rendered unto ash, but still ­there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper” (E, 162). Gogol’s “tribe of harmless madmen” are all portraits of the same person, their ancestral ­faces obliterated by Ferber’s painstaking work of erasure. Ashes to ashes. Self-­incarcerated in his Swiss asylum, Walser doubles for the disappearing writer whom Sebald imagines as Heimatvertriebene, both an internal exile and a perpetual wanderer.20 Like an imaginary twin, Walser seems to accompany Sebald on his Alpine rambles as a ghostly reminder of the connection between Heimat and exile: Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natu­ral history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile. On all t­ hese paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a ­little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings. (PC, 159) Following in Walser’s footsteps, Sebald immerses himself in Walser’s essay, “Kleist in Thun,” much as Walser had previously immersed himself in Kleist’s lake-­world. Walser sees the landscape through Kleist’s eyes: Sebald imagines seeing “with [Walser’s] eyes the bright Seeland and within this land of lakes the lake like a shimmering island, and in this lake-­island another island, the Île Saint-­Pierre, ‘shining in the bright morning haze, floating in a sea of pale trembling light’ ” (PC, 159). The succession of shimmering island images—­a mise en abyme of nested island and lakes, doubled associations and retraced wanderings—­immerses the reader in the infinite regress of Sebald and Walser’s combined seeing. What does it mean to imagine seeing—or walking—­ with someone ­else’s eyes in one’s head? Anticipating Sebald’s fascination with the act of looking, Walser wrote of Kleist: “He wants to perish into the image. He wants eyes alone, only to be one

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single eye.”21 In “J’aurais voulu que ce lac eût été l’Océan,” Sebald ventriloquizes the proj­ect of another solitary wanderer, Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, who undertook to compose a detailed botanical description of ­every single plant on the Île Saint-­Pierre: “In accordance with this noble plan, ­every morning ­after breakfast I would set out with a magnifying glass in my hand and my Systemae Naturae ­under my arm . . .” (PC, 59–60). Like writing, or like his copying out of ­music, Rousseau’s self-­imposed occupation is a defense against thought. Sebald calls it “one of the few means of keeping at bay the thoughts continually brewing in his head like storm clouds” (PC, 59). Rousseau’s meticulous botanizing “becomes, for the writer plagued by the chronic need to think and work, a demanding rationalistic proj­ect”—as Sebald comments soberly, “an innocent bricolage in comparison with the self-­destructive business of writing” (PC, 60, 61). Rousseau’s pressed-­flower collections survive in Paris museums. But, as Sebald does not fail to remind his reader, the eleven quarto volumes of Rousseau’s herbarium, preserved in Berlin’s Botanical Museum, met a far dif­fer­ent fate: “like so much and so many in that city, it went up in flames one night during one of the nocturnal bombing raids” (PC, 61). The telos of both collecting and books is ashes. In The Emigrants, Rousseau reappears in the figure of Dr. Henry Selwyn, whom we first see in his garden as “a motionless figure lying in the shade cast on the lawn by a lofty cedar” (E, 5). Stretched on the grass, he peruses it with the fixed gaze associated with the botanizing Rousseau: “I was counting the blades of glass, he said, by way of apology for his absentmindedness. It’s a sort of pastime of mine.” (E, 5). Perhaps Dr. Selwyn is counting the blades of grass to fend off the thought of his f­ amily’s long-­ago flight from Riga. Rousseau’s magnifying glass reappears on the wall of Ferber’s studio in “a copy of Rembrandt’s portrait of a man with a magnifying glass” (E, 180). Magnifying glass in his lap, Rembrandt’s melancholy, mustachioed sitter, painted in the 1660s (as it happens, a good likeness of Sebald himself, minus his eyeglasses) doubles for Ferber, in an infinite regress of close-­looking. Ferber’s minute, multilayered account of a faked photo­graph of the Nazi burning of books in Würzburg (the book-­burning actually took place at night) gives way to his close contemplation, magnifying glass in hand, of a book of reproductions of the Tiepolo ceiling fresco in Würzburg, “trying to see further and further into them” (E, 185), as if he might find himself back ­there again, viewing the fresco in the com­pany of his ­Uncle Leo.22 Held up to history, the magnifying glass of memory reveals the limits of the photographic image. When it comes to establishing the facticity of the past, fiction does a better job.

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Ferber—­his skin darkened from a lifetime of ingesting charcoal dust—­ recounts having stumbled on a newspaper article about silver poisoning: According to the article, the British Medical Association’s archives contained the description of an extreme case of silver poisoning: in the 1930s, ­there was a photographic lab assistant in Manchester whose body had absorbed so much silver in the course of a lengthy professional life that he had become a kind of photographic plate, which was apparent in the fact (as Ferber solemnly informed me) that the man’s face and hands turned blue in strong light, or, as one might say, developed. (E, 164–65) By analogy with a photographic plate exposed to light, memory retrospectively “develops” the images of the past. Ferber’s anecdote provides a meta-­ commentary on Sebald’s own method—­not just his use of found postcards and a­ lbum photo­graphs (ambiguously functioning to authenticate, to mislead, or simply to slow down the narrative), but also his interweaving of intertexts and anecdotes whose historical significance only “develops” in retrospect.23 Sebald’s imagination becomes a kind of photographic plate. In The Arcades Proj­ect, Benjamin quotes a passage on the photographic meta­phor as a figure for the way in which the past only becomes vis­i­ble in the f­ uture: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to ­those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate.” The quotation continues: “The ­future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly.”24 Benjamin’s historical method is retrospective—­a form of visionary hindsight, appropriated by Sebald for his own writing. Walser’s writing, by contrast, lives entirely in the pre­sent, heedlessly and fecklessly, seemingly without a past at all. In his long prose excursion, “The Walk” (1917), Walser’s fictional “Ich” takes to the road in the guise of an aristocratic flâneur, like “a marquis strolling up and down his park, though it was only a semi-­rural, semi-­suburban, neat, modest, nice ­little poor-­quarter and country road.”25 At once ingenuous and mischievous, Walser stages a series of picaresque adventures in suburban banality. Pausing for sarcastic exchanges at bookshop and bank, tax-­office and bakery, his walker passes factories and farms, orchards and nut groves, bicyclists, dogs, playing ­children, milliners, and butchers: “ ‘All this,’ so I proposed to myself as I stood t­ here, ‘I s­ hall certainly soon write down in a piece or sort of fantasy, which I ­shall entitle ‘The Walk’ ” (W, 67). But ­there is an interruption. Into this innocuous suburban scene, while the walker is preoccupied by “all sorts of more or less beautiful and pleasant thoughts,” suddenly stalks a strange and terrifying sight, “namely, the ­giant TOMZACK.” This “fellow . . . ​whom I knew alas only too well”

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erupts into the suburban idyll as Walser’s melancholic other, a personification of the undying wanderer that is Walser’s persecutory alter ego: Oh, I knew who he was. For him ­there was no rest. Restlessly he went up and down in the world. He slept in no soft bed and could live in no comfortable homely ­house. He was at home everywhere and nowhere. He had no home country, and of no state was he a citizen. Without motherland and without happiness he was; he had to live completely without love and without ­human joy. He had sympathy with no man, and with him and his mopping and mowing no man had sympathy. Past, pre­sent, and ­future w ­ ere to him an insubstantial desert, and life was too small, too tiny, too narrow for him. For him ­there was nothing which had meaning, and he himself in turn meant something to nobody. Out of his g­ reat eyes t­ here broke a glare of grief in overworlds and underworlds. Infinite pain spoke from his slack and weary moments. A hundred thousand years old he seemed to me, and it seemed to me that he must live for eternity, only to be for eternity no living being. He died ­every instant and yet he could not die. (W, 69, 70) Tragic and stateless, Tomzack inhabits the dark underside (“overworlds and underworlds”) concealed by Walser’s airy nothings. Condemned to a life without meaning or h­ uman connection, Tomzack—­Walser’s pedestrian familiar, as Walser was to be Sebald’s shadowy walking companion—­becomes a phantasmagoric embodiment of the twentieth-­century Heimatvertriebene. Defending his seemingly inconsequential walk, Walser insists: “Without walking, I would be dead, and my profession, which I love passionately, would be destroyed. . . . ​Without walking, I would not be able to make any observations or studies at all. . . . ​Without walking and the contemplation of nature which is connected with it . . . ​I deem myself lost, and I am lost” (W, 85–86). Echoing the rhythms of Walser’s description of Tomzack, Sebald makes Walser himself stand in for the writer’s restless internal exile: “Nowhere was he able to s­ ettle, never did he acquire the least t­ hing by way of possessions. He had neither a ­house, nor any fixed abode, nor a single piece of furniture, and as far as clothes are concerned, at most one good suit and one less so” (PC, 127). The solitary walker writ large, Tomzack personifies the despair that underlies Walser’s flippant persona and innocuous jaunts. Benjamin’s “­Little History of Photography” (1931) uses the act of walking to acknowledge how ­little we ­really know about it: Whereas it is a commonplace that, for example, we have some idea about what is involved in the act of walking (if only in general terms), we have no

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figure 4.2. Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Shoe (2007). Unfired clay. 12 × 19 × 7 inches (31 × 48 × 18 cm). © Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery.

idea at all what happens during the fraction of a second when a person actually takes a step. Photography, with its devices of slow motion and enlargement, reveals the secret. It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis. (SW, 2: 510–12). Like photography, writing is a technology of slow motion and enlargement, a form of textual unconscious from which emerge “image worlds, which dwell in the smallest ­things—­meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams” (SW, 2: 512). In “The Walk,” Walser exposes to view what is hidden in his own waking dream: “I had become an inward being and I walked as in an inward world; every­thing outside me became a dream. . . . ​I was no longer myself, was another, and yet it was on this account that I became properly myself. . . . ​I realized, or believed I realized, that perhaps the inward self is the only self that r­ eally exists.” (W, 90). Walser’s “The Walk” recovers the dismembered “I” of the Ich-­Buch in the form of a dream-­self: Sebald’s “Remembrance” of Walser discovers in his own composite writing “the only self that ­really exists,” as if stepping into Walser’s invisible boots (figure 4.2).

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ii. The Dream Has Grown Gray The dream has grown gray. The gray coating of dust on ­things is its best part. Dreams are now a shortcut to banality. Technology consigns the outer image of ­things to a long farewell, like banknotes that are bound to lose their value. —­w a lt e r be n ja m i n, “dr e a m k itsch” (1925) (s w, 2: 3)

The superannuated object-­world that defines Benjamin’s view of modern culture is summed up by his short essay, “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism” (1925). Benjamin defines kitsch as “the last mask of the banal, the one with which we adorn ourselves, in dream and conversation, so as to take in the energies of an outlived world of t­ hings” (SW, 2: 4). Like technology, dreams capture the images of t­ hings as they slip away: “the hand retrieves this outer cast in dreams and, even as they are slipping away, makes contact with familiar contours. It catches hold of objects at their most threadbare and timeworn point” (SW, 2: 3). Objects that are doomed to lose their value, like the ornate banknotes of the inflationary post-­World War I period, constitute the debased currency of a sentimental economy: “The side which ­things turn ­towards the dream is kitsch” (SW, 2: 3). The accumulated objects of consumer capitalism—­ second-­hand, discarded, or concealed just beneath the urban surface—­ provide the dreamer with an overlooked trea­sure trove. Adorno wrote of Benjamin’s One-­Way Street: “The dream becomes a medium of unregimented experience as a source of knowledge, in contrast to the encrusted surface of thought” (NL, 2: 323). Adorno—­still the most perceptive interpreter of Benjamin’s writing—­identifies the unfiltered and chaotic object-­world found in dreams as the essential medium for Benjamin’s form of cultural analy­sis (figure 4.3). “Dream Kitsch” can also be read as a gloss on One-­Way Street. Benjamin’s imaginary stroll down an urban street extends his liking for ephemeral genres—­short stories and prose pieces, oblique observations and thought-­ provoking aphorisms—to include the ubiquitous signage of the modern Eu­ro­pean city: shop-­signs, notices, and advertisements, painted and printed words culled from storefronts, hoardings, and newspapers.26 Spanning the worlds of consumerism and surrealism, street-­signs and “found” objects allow Benjamin to analyze Weimar society on the cusp of collapse, along with its inflationary economy. Benjamin saw this historical pro­cess as irreversible, as he announced with his uni-­directional title, One-­Way Street.27 Like Louis Aragon in prewar Paris, or Adorno in postwar Los Angeles, he sets out to capture

figure 4.3. “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism” (ca. 1925; Benjamin-­Archiv ms. 187). Walter Benjamins Archive. Bilder, Texte und Zeichen, herausgegeben vom Walter Benjamin Archiv, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006. © Suhrkamp Verlag Zu­rich and Frankfurt am Main 2006.

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the essentials of twentieth-­century modernity at a critical moment in time, adopting the methods of avant-­garde montage.28 He gave the name Denkbilder—­ thought-­images, or “Thought-­figures”—to his composite genre of discontinuous cultural analy­sis. History may be end-­stopped, but not thought. Adorno again: “They [Denkbilder] do not want to stop conceptual thought so much as to shock through their enigmatic form and thereby get thought moving, ­because thought in its traditional conceptual form seems rigid, conventional, and outmoded” (NL, 2: 323).29 Thinking through thought-­images, as if in a moving cinema, with its cuts, close-­ups, freeze-­frames, and juxtapositions, shocks traditional analytic concepts into heterodoxy. Benjamin visited Naples, Capri, Rome, Paris, Marseilles, Riga, and Moscow during the period that led up to the publication of One-­Way Street in 1928. He adopts the stance of a viewer uniquely able to uncover the shattered remnants of nineteenth-­century bourgeois life obscured by the overlay of modernity. Inflected by his collaboration with the Bolshevik artist Asja Lacis, the places he visited are rendered porous, like Naples, where the indoors takes to the street and the street migrates indoors.30 Writing itself leaves the shelter of the book and goes outside, “pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos.”31 The urban stroll of One-­Way Street features advertisements for furnished apartments, lost-­and-­found, antique shops, stamp shops, tax advice, office equipment, street amusements, and fortune telling. Examining the period between a faltering post-­World War I recovery and the looming financial crisis of the 1930s, Benjamin uncovers the wreckage of the past in city streets—­superfluous, second-­hand, or unexpectedly exotic. His subject is the detritus that surfaces amidst the chaotic construction-­site of modernity. Benjamin’s mode of cultural analy­sis in One-­Way Street resembles a flipbook, a rebus, or a dream-­book; Adorno compared the Denkbilder to “scribbled picture-­puzzles, parabolic evocations of something that cannot be said in words” (NL, 2: 323). Benjamin’s straw man in One-­Way Street is the “new man” or “furnished man,” with his brand-­new trademarked possessions, inhabiting the claustrophobically cluttered nineteenth-­century interior that provides the dramatic, proto-­typically “noir” mise-­en-­scène for the murder of a cap­i­tal­ist in his Kilim-­hung lair.32 Conspiratorial and confessional, Benjamin makes copy not only from his detective work, but also from his private passions: book collecting, stamp collecting, c­ hildren’s games—­a displaced portrait of the author-­as-­collector. In his unpublished fragment, “Excavation and Memory” (1932), he writes that “memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but

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rather a medium,” one that includes both the pre­sent and the intervening layers: “genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through” (SW, 2: 576). What the medium of memory uncovers, therefore, is “an image of the person who remembers.” One-­Way Street is a displaced form of memory-­writing, masquerading as an investigation of the spaces of urban consumer capitalism. Benjamin defines the activity of the imagination as unfolding, inventing, and interpolating images compressed into the smallest ­things—­“receiving each image as if it w ­ ere that of [a] folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes, in its new expanse, the beloved features within it” (SW, 1: 466). Everyday objects contain miniature versions of the world. The ­children in “Construction Site” are small collectors, “irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, ­house­work, tailoring, or carpentry. In waste products they recognize the face that the world of ­things turns directly and solely to them” (SW, 1: 449). Intuitively combining discarded materials into magical playthings, “[c]hildren thus produce their own small world of ­things within the greater one” (SW, 1: 450). The adult’s accumulation of street signs, curiosity shops, and urban amusements resembles the trea­sured collection of the “untidy” child: “Each stone he finds, each flower he picks, and each butterfly he catches is already the start of a collection, and ­every single ­thing he owns makes up one g­ reat collection” (SW, 1: 465). The child’s passionate accumulation lingers on in antiquarians, bibliomaniacs, and researchers’ card catalogues—­and in Benjamin’s own toy collection, evidence of the “micrological method” described by Adorno: “his concentration on the very smallest, in which the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in an image” (NL, 2: 228).33 (figure 4.4). Benjamin’s untidy child is the original surrealist, his life a dream-­world controlled by chance and contiguity; his dresser drawers “arsenal and zoo, crime museum and crypt.” As if to possess its magic for himself, he secures his exotic booty in secret: “prickly chestnuts that are spiky clubs, tinfoil that is hoarded silver, bricks that are coffins, cacti that are totem poles, and copper pennies that are shields” (SW, 1: 465). The child’s miniature kingdom is the blueprint for scientific method: “Magical experience becomes science. As its engineer, the child disenchants the gloomy parental apartment and looks for Easter eggs” (SW, 1: 466). The child inhabits a world of magic filled with ritual, idols, and accumulated loot. Like the sailor whose chest contains the souvenirs of

figure 4.4. Walter Benjamin, “Rus­sian Toys” (1930). Walter Benjamins Archive. Bilder, Texte und Zeichen, herausgegeben vom Walter Benjamin Archiv, Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2006. © Suhrkamp Verlag Zu­rich and Frankfurt am Main 2006.

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his travels—­“the leather b­ elt from Hong Kong is juxtaposed with a pa­norama of Palermo and a girl’s photo from Stettin” (SW, 1: 485)—­the child compresses the world between the pages of his stamp collection. The stamps of “Stamp Shop” contain an enchanted archive: the lost stories of undelivered postcards, dead letters, postmarks, dismembered placenames, deceased empires—an archeology that bristles with numbers and letters, swarming like mutilated life-­forms. The stamp a­ lbum opens to reveal the modern magic of postal traffic that circulates the globe with the regularity of celestial bodies in an astrological system: “Stamp ­albums are magical reference books; the numbers of monarchs and palaces, of animals and allegories and states, are recorded in them. Postal traffic depends on their harmony as the motions of the planet depend on the harmony of the celestial numbers” (SW, 1: 479). Stamps encapsulate small histories and tiny portraits, like ancestral photo­graphs; they bear mysterious scripts and open onto exotic landscapes: “The child looks ­toward far-­off Liberia through an inverted opera-­glass: ­there it lies ­behind its ­little strip of sea with its palms, just as the stamp shows it.” Australia’s black swan “glides on the ­waters of a pool as on the most pacific ocean” (SW, 1: 479). Benjamin sums up the child’s miniaturized relation to the wider world in an aphorism: “Stamps are the visiting cards that the g­ reat states leave in a child’s room.” In this fantastic world-­order, the child undertakes his own dream-­voyage: “Like Gulliver, the child travels among the lands and ­peoples and states of his tiny postage stamps. The geography and history of the Lilliputians, the w ­ hole science of the ­little nation with all its figures and names, is instilled in him in sleep” (SW, 1: 480). The child is a time-­traveler who dreams of a rapidly receding miniaturized past.34 Benjamin’s “Surrealism” essay of 1929, subtitled “The Last Snapshot of the Eu­ro­pean Intelligent­sia,” criticizes “the well-­meaning left-­w ing bourgeois intelligent­sia” for failing to address Surrealism’s revolutionary potential—­its capacity to harness the mysteries in everyday t­ hings: “we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize in it the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday” (SW, 2: 213, 216). The “dialectical optic” finds its motive for po­liti­cal action in an “image space” where “po­liti­cal materialism and physical creatureliness share the inner man . . . ​w ith dialectical justice” (SW, 2: 217). Inspired by Bolshevism, Benjamin’s “Surrealism” ends by proclaiming technology as the route to social transformation, collective embodiment, and revolutionary transcendence.35 “Surrealism” echoes the paroxysm of revolutionary

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procreation heralded as a new po­liti­cal order at the end of One-­Way Street: “Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation” (SW, 1: 487)—­a pronouncement that may reveal something of Benjamin’s state of mind at the time, given his hapless pursuit of Asja Lacis to Riga and afterward to Moscow.36 Benjamin envisages his Denkbilder (thought-­images, or images to think with) as unlocking the potential for revolutionary social transformation. Like an emblem, with its inscriptio and subscriptio, the Denkbild represents a modernist form of materialist analy­sis, shuttling between emblem and textual explanation. The gigantic hoarding or neon sign is an emblem both of itself and of the nonequivalence of image and text that turns a consumer society into the society of spectacle: “­Today the most real, mercantile gaze into the heart of ­things is the advertisement. It tears down the stage upon which contemplation moved, and all but hits us between the eyes with ­things as a car, growing to gigantic proportions, careens at us out of a film screen” (SW, 1: 476). Benjamin’s gaze into the heart of t­ hings shifts from the careening car and the gigantism of cinematic motion on the big screen to its reflection in the urban environment, where untoward collisions happen: “What, in the end, makes advertisements so superior to criticism? Not what the moving red neon sign says—­but the fiery pool reflecting it in the asphalt” (SW, 1: 476). The advertisement’s phantasmagoric projection onto the urban environment is an instance of revolutionary shock—­not what the sign says, but its fiery reflection on the asphalt.37 Although One-­Way Street includes careening car, moving cinema, and even the newly ubiquitous gas station, Benjamin’s pace and a­ ngle are most often ­those of a foot-­passenger—­arrested by discreet notices and seduced by esoteric shop win­dows, pausing for private assignations in curio shop, betting office, or beer hall. In a telling textual analogy, Benjamin contrasts the view from an airplane (a figure for modernity) with walking down a country road: “The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands.” Benjamin’s walker follows the text’s “command”—­that is, to retrace its steps, rather than reading it as if it ­were a daydream: Only the copied text thus commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by the text, that road cut through the interior jungle forever

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closing ­behind it: b­ ecause the reader follows the movement of his mind in the ­free flight of daydreaming, whereas the copier submits it to command. (SW, 1: 448) Hence, according to Benjamin, the guarantee of cultural transmission produced by the Chinese practice of copying books. The road commands the faithful copyist. The opposition between the free-­flight of daydreaming (one might call it the “writerly” or Sebaldian method) versus apparent submission to following the road (the Benjaminian method) produces the head-­spinning moment of blockage identified with Benjamin’s dialectical image. Cutting through “the interior jungle” as the engineer Asja Lacis cuts through the urban streets of Berlin, Benjamin replaces free-­associative reading with the arrested moment that he calls “the caesura in the movement of thought.”38 The juxtaposition of modern airplane passenger and foot-­passenger makes the open road the site of a collision between Denkbild and dialectical image: “Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—­there the dialectical image appears.”39 Quoting Benjamin, Adorno formulates the Denkbild as “a dialectic of images rather than a dialectic of pro­gress and continuity, a ‘dialectics at a standstill’ ” (NL, 2: 228).40 Benjamin comes down on the side of copying rather than reading or dreaming, ­because, like the Chinese transcript—­“a key to China’s enigmas” (SW, 1: 448)—­only fidelity to the cultural text accurately “glosses” the enigmas of One-­Way Street. Apropos of fortune telling (“Madame Ariane: Second Courtyard on the Left”), Benjamin writes: “Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man in the book of life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text” (SW, 1: 483). Benjamin’s focus is not on the ­future foretold by the fortune-­teller, but on the revelation—­the presentiment of loss—­revealed by memory’s ultraviolet rays: “if an object dear to you has been lost, ­wasn’t ­there—­hours, days before—an aura of mockery or mourning about it that gave the secret away?” (SW, 1: 483). In light of this question, the title of Benjamin’s essay on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—­“On the Image of Proust” (1929)—­becomes teasingly ambiguous: the image of Proust in his writing, or the image in Proust’s writing, with its aura of mockery and mourning? Benjamin describes Proust’s “lifework” as a supremely apropos repre­sen­ta­tion of “the irresistibly growing discrepancy between lit­er­a­ture and life”—­not “a life as it actually was [wie es gewesen ist] but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it” (SW, 2: 237–38). What m ­ atters for Benjamin is “the weaving of [Proust’s] memory, the Penelope work of recollection

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[Eingedenken]”—or rather (in a sudden reversal), “a Penelope work of forgetting” (SW, 2: 238). The image in (of) Proust is the image of the dear lost object. Upending his Penelopean meta­phor, Benjamin identifies Proust’s mémoire involontaire with amnesia rather than preservation (“remembrance is the woof and forgetting the warp”). The “purposive remembering” of the day unweaves the “fringes of the carpet of lived existence” woven by the night’s forgotten dream-­work. Benjamin’s Proust sought “the undisturbed unfolding of the most banal, most fleeting, most sentimental, weakest hour in the life of the one to whom they pertain” in “the hour that was most his own . . . ​an everyday hour; it comes with the night, a lost twittering of birds, or a breath drawn at the sill of an open win­dow” (SW, 2: 238). The bridge to the dream lies in this insomniac hour—in boredom, melancholy, or banality; in waking or falling asleep. Proust’s elegiac (un)happiness “transforms existence into a preserve of memory” (SW, 2: 239). Proust’s special realm—­“the universe of intertwining”—is the universe of Baudelairian correspondances that bridges dream and the everyday (SW, 2: 244), corresponding to the entwined universe in (and between) the writing of Sebald and Benjamin. For Benjamin, the essence of the Proustian image is something that ­children grasp in their access to the dream world, just as a stocking unfolds its potentialities in the laundry basket. Benjamin draws his image of image-­making both from the world of everyday t­ hings and from the opacity of the homesick writer’s dream-­world: ­ hildren know a symbol of this world: the stocking which has the structure C of this dream world when, rolled up in the laundry hamper, it is a “bag” and a “pre­sent” at the same time. And just as c­ hildren do not tire of quickly changing the bag and its contents into a third t­ hing—­namely, a stocking—­ Proust could not get his fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke in order to keep garnering that third ­thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity—­indeed, assuaged his homesickness. He lay on his bed racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of similarity, a world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through. (SW, 2: 239–40)41 “The image of Proust” is the image of displacement itself, the metonymic movement whereby the rolled-up stocking is at once bag, gift, and a “third ­thing”—­just a prosaic stocking in the laundry hamper. For Benjamin, this is “a world in which the true surrealist face of existence breaks through.” Proust’s homesickness for “the world distorted in the state of similarity”

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(SW, 2: 240) allows him to keep emptying and refilling the imaginary stocking (“the dummy, his self ”) with images from childhood that assuage his perennial homesickness.42 Knitting together the fleeting, most sentimental, most banal aspects of ­things, the image of the emptied-­out stocking unknits the image of Proust. Like the stocking, the self is a container that lacks content u­ ntil it is filled up with “that third ­thing, the image” (SW, 2: 240). Inevitably, Benjamin reminds the reader that “The Latin word textum means ‘web’ ” (SW, 2: 238). Once unpacked of its infinite promise, the knitted stocking or textual web is empty. “What happens in Proust” (Benjamin’s phrase) resembles the activity of the lace-­maker from whose hands emerge “a fragile precious real­ity: the image. It detaches itself from the structure of Proust’s sentences just as that summer day at Balbec—­old, immemorial, mummified—­emerged from the lace curtains ­under Françoise’s hands” (SW, 2: 240).43 Benjamin unpacks the rule of similarities—­actualization, the physiology of style, everyday banality—to reveal Proust’s “involuntary remembrance” as a stratum in which the materials of memory no longer appear singly, as images, but tell us about a ­whole, amorphously and formlessly, in­def­initely and weightily, in the same way the weight of the fishing net tells a fisherman about his catch. Smell—­this is the sense of weight experienced by someone who casts his nets into the sea of the temps perdu. And his sentences are the entire muscular activity of the intelligible body; they contain the ­whole enormous effort to raise this catch. (SW, 2: 247) In this moment, Benjamin lands his own textual catch. Proust’s strenuous sentences become the physical embodiment of his efforts to capture the materiality of memory in image-­form as it is conveyed by Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Benjamin’s autobiographical “A Berlin Chronicle” (1932)—­later developed as Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1938)—­rediscovers the scene of memory in the topography of his own native city.44 Benjamin explains: “I have long, indeed for years, played with the idea of setting out the sphere of life—­bios—­ graphically on a map” (SW, 2: 596). Reviving the fin de siècle image of an unfolding fan, he describes his own unstoppable memory-­writing, with its interconnected images and sensuous experiences: What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serious. He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its

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segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside—­that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected. . . . ​Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilettantishly, in which he ­will hardly find more successors than he needed companions. (SW, 2: 597) Invited to write a series of subjective “glosses” for a Berlin newspaper, Benjamin a­ dopted a ruse that allowed him to short-­circuit the continuous flow of autobiographical narrative and substitute his own preferred form: “­Here, I am talking of a space, of moments and discontinuities. . . . ​even if months and years appear ­here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration” (SW, 2: 612). Th ­ ese “moments and discontinuities” function as placeholders for memory, unfolding like the segments of a fan: the districts, habitats, schools, apartment ­houses, cafés, zoos, parks, and meeting rooms of Benjamin’s Berlin childhood, and even his childhood bedroom—­a labyrinth of interconnected life-­paths and passageways, encounters and friendships, emotions and imprinted memories.45 Benjamin’s Berlin is less a map than a dreamscape that resembles the Surrealist’s Paris, where insights “came in a flash, with the force of an illumination,” revealing his relationships “in their most vivid and hidden intertwinings.” In the Pa­ri­sian world of intertwined t­ hings, “the dream image waits to show the ­people their true ­faces.” ­These f­ aces, “the sites of encounters with ­others or ourselves”—or with ­others as ourselves—­provided Benjamin’s model for making the city’s labyrinthine topography the vehicle for his own displaced autobiography (SW, 2: 614). Whereas “On the Image of Proust” had invoked the lace-­making of the past, “A Berlin Chronicle” invokes a specifically modern technology: photography, the undeveloped photographic plate or “plate of remembrance” (SW, 2: 632). Paris had revealed his sketch of his life as a composite “figure” in which “the ­people who had surrounded [him] drew close together to form a figure.” ­Later, in Berlin, at the beginning of the war, “the world of ­things contracted to a symbol similarly profound” (SW, 2: 615). This “figure” or “symbol”—­four elaborately described rings, given by four friends to their beloveds—­contains a central absence: Benjamin himself. The pro­cess of recovery resembles a photographic plate that contains the invisible image of a forgotten room, “­until one day from an alien source it flashes as if from burning magnesium powder, and now a snapshot transfixes the room’s image on the plate. It is we ourselves, however, who are always standing at the

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center of t­ hese rare images” (SW, 2: 632–33). At the center but invisible, like the person holding the camera. Benjamin’s memory-­writing recovers the displaced and invisible self in such “moments of sudden illumination,” when “we separated from ourselves”; when “our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the l­ittle heap of magnesium powder by the flame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images” (SW, 2: 633). The startling magnesium flash reveals the self as a type of the dialectical image, illuminated, halted, and shockingly transfixed by the snapshot of memory. In the famous words of The Arcades Proj­ect, “image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill.”46 Like the dialectical image, the self at a standstill is formed out of the constellation of past and pre­sent, that is, from images indelibly imprinted by the after-­effects of shock—or, as we would now say, by trauma: “So the room in which I slept at the age of six would have been forgotten, had not my f­ ather come in one night—­I was already in bed—­with the news of a death.” (SW, 2: 633).47 The prematurity of the child’s encounter with death and with the emotions surrounding it together mark the emergence of traumatic memory, unpacking the indelible images of the rooms that furnish a self, much as Benjamin’s library recalled the rooms and places in which he had lived his nomadic life, immersed in the inner world of books that accompanied him on his travels.

Coda: The Last Walk In his proximity one was like the child at the moment when the door to the room where the Christmas pre­sents lie waiting opens a crack and the abundance of light overwhelms the eyes to the point of tears. . . . ​All the power of thought gathered in Benjamin to create such moments, and into them alone has passed what the doctrines of theology once promised. — ­t h eodor a dor no (n l , 2: 232)48

The closing words of Adorno’s introduction to Benjamin’s 1955 Schriften provide a magical epitaph for a writer who never lost his sense of enchantment, even during the precarious final de­cade of his life, when he had become one of many displaced German Jews forced into exile in France: literally, Vertriebene. Benjamin considered suicide ­after leaving Berlin in 1933 as a result of

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the worsening po­liti­cal situation.49 In 1936, his German citizenship revoked, he became officially stateless. In June 1940, fleeing the German occupation and expecting to be interned at any time, he left Paris on one of the last trains g­ oing south. The same month, France had signed a cease-­fire agreement with Germany that did away with the right of asylum for foreigners. Two months l­ ater, in Marseilles, Benjamin was issued an American visa and a transit visa for Spain—­but not an exit visa from France. Despite his heart condition, he managed to make his way on foot across the mountainous Pyrenean border with other refugees, guided by a hand-­written map, only to find the Spanish border closed.50 Exhausted and depressed ­after the news that he would be returned back across the border the next day, Benjamin self-­administered the supply of morphine that he had brought with him “in reserve for the utmost emergency” (NL, 2: 232). Carl Seelig, Walser’s ­legal guardian, describing his many hikes with Walser during the previous two de­cades, rec­ords their animated discussions and convivial alcohol-­fueled meals. In his imagination, he reconstructed Walser’s last walk in the snows of Christmas Day, 1956. ­After an early Christmas lunch at the Herisau asylum, Walser took a train to the start of a familiar climb, aiming for a mountain crest with a spectacular view: “The noon hour is so calming: snow, pure snow, as far as the eye can see. . . . ​The lonely walker sucks in deep breaths of the clear winter air. One could almost eat it, it’s so solid.”51 The town with its landmarks lies b­ ehind him: “He climbs the Schochenberg between beeches and firs, perhaps a bit too fast for his age. But he is drawn farther and higher, his heart beating curiously.” Walser, like Benjamin, had a bad heart. Seelig imagines him resisting the desire to pause for a cigarette, pushing on to a hollow where he can rest: “It must be about half past one now. The sun shines wanly, like a rather anemic young girl. Not victoriously bright, but tenderly melancholic and hesitant, as if t­ oday it would like to give the lovely landscape over to night sooner than usual.”52 Like Adorno remembering the enchantment of Benjamin’s com­pany, or Sebald imagining Walser as his ghostly hiking companion, Seelig’s epitaph accompanies Walser on his way, saluting his snowy death by hailing him as “a true poet” of the ephemeral—­“a writer, who delighted in winter, with its light, merry dance of snowflakes.”53 Seelig’s tender memorial belies the melancholy of a life lived in the shadow of the catastrophe that Sebald sets out to remember, retracing the footsteps of Benjamin and Walser: displaced persons, rendered spectral by time, by their writing, and by the inexorable vanis­hing of t­ hings.

5 Border Crossing (1) Every­one has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State. (2) Every­one has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country. —­a rt icl e 13, u n i v e r s a l dec l a r at ion of h ­ u m a n r igh ts, 194 8

I was brought up ­behind the wall and all my life I wanted to get out, and this is the princi­ple of the wall—­you know you ­can’t get out. —­j ose f kou de l k a1

the figur e of the border-­crosser has been called both a border-­walker (Grenzgängerin) and a border-­wounder (Grenzverletzerin)—­not only someone who negotiates borders, but also a transgressor of what borders represent.2 Border-­crossing carries complex overlapping meanings, including the “wound” or trauma involved in the act of crossing itself. He or she may be an exile or a refugee, defined by voluntary or involuntary mobility; or someone who deliberately sets out to question what Josef Koudelka calls the “princi­ple of the wall—­you know you ­can’t get out.”3 The border-­crosser is engaged in a quest for freedom, not just from danger or repression, or for the basic right to live or earn a living, but for freedom of movement—­the princi­ple declared by the 1948 Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights. In ­today’s Eu­ro­pean Union, nation-­states regulate freedom of movement from outside its bound­aries, while militarized fences and checkpoints proliferate even on its internal borders. Soviet-­era walls built to keep p­ eople in have returned in the guise of barriers designed to keep p­ eople out (mi­grants and asylum-­seekers at 119

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Eu­ro­pean and US-­Mexican borders), or as internal security fences like the Israeli Wall dividing Israel from the occupied West Bank. The Wall becomes an endless construction proj­ect designed to prevent h­ uman movement. It provides both a militarized and a symbolic spectacle of sovereignty for the state it is supposed to secure against both unauthorized entry and exit.4 The border-­crosser is also an artist or interpreter whose work makes borders vis­i­ble as a site of aesthetic inquiry and po­liti­cal protest.5 The Czech photographer Josef Koudelka (b. 1938), documents his own visual inquiry into marginality, borderscapes, and border aesthetics.6 Growing up in the wake of World War II, Koudelka was first known in the West for his iconic photo­graphs of Czech citizens protesting the arrival of Rus­sian tanks on the streets of Prague in 1968. Signed only “P.P.” (Prague Photographer), their publication abroad made him an obvious target for repression in the aftermath of the Rus­ sian invasion.7 Previously, during the 1960s, Koudelka had immersed himself in a proj­ect to photo­graph East Slovakian Roma—­one of Eastern Eu­rope’s most marginalized p­ eoples.8 In 1970, Koudelka left Czecho­slo­va­kia on a three-­ month exit visa, ostensibly to continue with his proj­ect of photographing the Roma ­people of Eu­rope. Granted asylum in the UK, he became part of the Magnum photography collective based in London, Paris, and New York, eventually acquiring French citizenship. ­Until then, his papers had been stamped with the letters “N.D.,” standing for “Nationality Doubtful.”9 He remained in exile for two de­cades, only returning to Czecho­slo­va­kia in 1990 ­after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Koudelka’s first book, Gypsies (Gitans, 1975), based on the photo­graphs he had taken in the Roma settlements of East Slovakia, w ­ ere eventually published, a­ fter painstaking winnowing and rearrangement, with the ironic subtitle La fin du Voyage.10 A de­cade l­ ater, Koudelka published a second book of photo­graphs, Exiles (1988), based on the years he spent crisscrossing Eu­rope, ­Great Britain, and Ireland to attend Roma and Traveller gatherings, fairs, and religious festivals.11 In both books, his images deliberately eschew commentary or captions; all we know is their date and location. He rejects explanatory text (“I ­don’t need text”), trusting his photo­graphs to speak for (and among) themselves.12 Koudelka used a hand-­held camera for his immersive portrayal of Roma communities, ­later shifting to a pair of Leicas.13 In Exiles, he turned the camera on himself, and on marginal individuals and groups, and on scenes that are glimpsed sidelong, as if by a casual passer-by. For his l­ater books, Koudelka used a panoramic camera to rec­ord the industrial-­scale destruction

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of the Eu­ro­pean landscape. Black Triangle: The Foothills of the Ore Mountains (1994), Chaos (1999), and Lime Stone (2001) all focus on Eu­rope’s industrial mining areas and derelict borderlands.14 His most recent book, Wall: Israeli & Palestinian Landscape 2008–2012 (2013), rec­ords the disfiguration of landscape by massive engineering constructions designed to control Palestinian access from the occupied West Bank into Israel: “As t­ here exists crimes against humanity, ­there should exist the crime against the landscape.”15 From the intimacy of his photo­graphs of Slovakian Roma communities to his depiction of Eu­ro­pean poverty and anomie at the margins, the trajectory of Koudelka’s l­ater work shifts t­ oward unpeopled borderscapes and security barriers: “An Israeli poet said to me, ‘You did something impor­tant—­you made the invisible vis­i­ble.’ He meant that Israelis ­don’t want to see the wall and they d­ on’t even want to speak about it.”16 Koudelka’s life-­work as a photographer could be described as making “the invisible vis­i­ble.” His approach is to “scale” the wall—­not by breaching it, but by scaling it up visually in order to show the magnitude of the devastation wrought on the physical and ­human environment, separating p­ eople from each other, from their land, and from their homes. When Koudelka first shifted to the panoramic photo­graphs that define his ­later ­career, Henri Cartier-­Bresson remarked that the h­ uman figure was almost entirely absent: “But where are the p­ eople?”17 The absence of ­people is the most telling aspect of Koudelka’s panoramic photo­graphs. An emphasis on the experience of marginality forms the connecting thread between Gypsies, the Eu­ro­pean non-­lieu of Exiles, and the devasted landscapes of Koudelka’s ­later photography. Koudelka himself said: “I go around the world and try to discover what interests me and what has something to do with me”—­“whatever I do, essentially, I do for myself.” His commitment to discovering a relationship between himself and his subjects allows his work to be seen within a larger philosophical framework: that of the ethics and bio-­ politics of relation explored by two notable postwar phi­los­o­phers, Emmanuel Levinas and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben. The mediated vision of Koudelka’s Gypsies qualifies Levinas’s ethical mistrust of the image and of figuration, while Koudelka’s focus on the intersection of ­human and animal life in Exiles overlaps with Agamben’s bio-­political concept of the “inoperative” as both undoing and potentiality; last, the disappearance of the ­human figure in Wall underlines Koudelka’s commitment not only to an environmental politics of landscape, but to the unstated politics of relation that underlies all his photographic work.

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i. Face to Face A face is a trace of itself, given over to my responsibility, but to which I am wanting and faulty. It is as though I ­were responsible for his [sic] mortality, and guilty for surviving. A face is an anachronous immediacy more tense than that of an image offered in the straightforwardness of an intuitive intention. —­e m m a n u e l l e v i na s18

Commentators have strug­gled with Levinas’s negativity t­ oward the image, along with his apparent short-­circuiting of all forms of aesthetic or epistemological mediation for the sake of what amounts to an epiphanic relation to the other.19 His perplexing pronouncements about “the face” are a case in point. Levinas’s readers are often warned that they should be read neither in terms of immediate response to seeing (“an image offered in the straightforwardness of an intuitive intention”), nor as a mere meta­phor for responsibility to the other, but as a more complex form of immanence.20 In Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961), the face of the other comprises a seemingly unmediated summons to a relation that exceeds sociality and ultimately resists the mind’s grasp: “The face resists possession, resists my powers. In its epiphany, in expression, the sensible, still graspable, turns into total re­sis­tance to the grasp. . . . ​ [T]he face speaks to me and thereby invites me to a relation incommensurate with a power exercised, be it enjoyment or knowledge.”21 The peculiar vulnerability of the face—­defined as the signifier of what escapes power—­ si­mul­ta­neously provokes murderousness and (through its very vulnerability) enjoins the universal prohibition against killing. “To kill is not to dominate but rather to annihilate. . . . ​Murder exercises a power over what escapes power” (T&I, 198). The nudity and destitution of the other’s face gives rise to contradictory impulses: on one hand, the impulse to kill (or not), and on the other, the compensatory demand for justice. Levinas, a Jew, spent most of World War II in a French officers’ POW camp, thereby escaping death in the Holocaust. His postwar writings wrestle with the burden of his own survival: “It is as though I w ­ ere responsible for [the other’s] mortality, and guilty for surviving” (OB, 91).22 Koudelka’s photo­graphs of East Slovakian Roma communities and settlements coincide with Levinas’s insistence on an overarching ethical relation to the other. At the same time, his Roma photo­graphs point to the unresolved tension in Levinas’s thought between epiphany and mediation, face and figuration. During the 1960s, Koudelka’s immersive relation to the East Slovakian

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Roma of Soviet-­era Czecho­slo­va­kia had led him to question his own stance as a photographer. Originally trained as an aeronautical engineer, he first encountered Roma communities during working trips to the countryside to repair crop-­dusters. He made some of his early trips in the com­pany of a sociologist, but his ­later man­tras—­“I am filtering real­ity through me” and “Do what you have a relationship with”—­underscore his rejection of both so­cio­log­i­cal analy­ sis and documentary objectivity.23 Instead, his images pose an implicit question: what is the photographer’s relation to ­those he portrays? Can he create a photographic portrait of Roma communities without ­doing vio­lence to their vulnerability or effacing their difference? One answer lies in the way his photo­ graphs often focus directly on Roma f­ aces—­one might call them “speaking” ­faces—­that look back eloquently, challengingly, and sometimes with amusement, at the photographer. As it does for Levinas, the face becomes a form of unspoken address. The 1975 publication of Koudelka’s Gypsies included a short historical afterword by Willy Guy, detailing the past and pre­sent social and economic conditions of Czech Roma u­ nder successive regimes, first Nazi and then Communist. Like Eastern Eu­ro­pean Jews, Eastern Eu­ro­pean Roma had been subjected during World War II to race-­based persecution, deportation, and extermination. Czech Roma ­were incarcerated in concentration camps, sent to Polish extermination camps (including the notorious “Gypsy ­Family Camp” in Auschwitz-­Birkenau), and murdered in the gas-­chambers. At least 250,000 East Eu­ro­pean Roma perished ­under the Nazis.24 More Roma survived in Slovakia, where forced ­labor and isolated settlements legislated long-­standing discrimination both before and a­ fter World War II. During the postwar Communist era, Czech Roma w ­ ere subjected to compulsory assimilation and resettlement. Laws passed in 1958 halted their migratory way of life; their h­ orses ­were confiscated, and the wheels w ­ ere removed from their caravans, turning them into immobilized shacks.25 Rehoused on the edges of villages and towns, Roma communities w ­ ere rendered doubly marginal—­the men e­ ither unemployed or employed as migratory workers, while the ­women stayed at home with their ­children. Roma poverty, poor living conditions, and large families attracted de­cades of Soviet-­era State intervention including relocation and the compulsory sterilization of Roma ­women.26 Koudelka’s Roma photo­graphs communicate his physical and emotional proximity to ­those he portrays, as if he was living among them (as he did for periods of time). Rather than capturing his subjects g­ oing about their lives unawares, documentary-­fashion, he often photo­graphs them portrait-­style—as

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individuals, accompanied by the objects of special significance from their former lives (a horse-­driver’s whip, a ­family photo­graph, the commemorative medal of a by-­gone Communist leader). Sometimes ­couples or entire families sit for him, with or without their ­children (Koudelka remained especially interested in ­couples); at times he photo­graphs extended families gathered to celebrate weddings or mourn the death of a f­ amily member. Individually or in groups, his subjects are posed against a background of derelict interiors and desolate countryside. But their lives are not defined by their vis­i­ble poverty, their stripped-­down homes, or the hardships of sickness and old age. The f­ aces of men, w ­ omen, and c­ hildren are also animated by joy, laughter, lively intelligence, and sometimes by a direct appeal to the photographer. Koudelka conveys their intimate connection with each other and with himself, si­mul­ta­ neously bearing witness to their resilience and to the passing of the Roma way of life. Against cracked plaster walls or featureless landscapes, Koudelka’s Roma occupy spaces, indoors and out, that signify State-­sponsored programs of uprooting, immobilization, and attempted assimilation. We are never allowed to forget that Roma have been deprived of their traditional nomadic way of life. We see the derelict cottages and shacks at the edges of villages, the wheel-­less caravans, the over-­crowded rooms with their broken-­down furniture. Yet Koudelka’s photo­graphs also rec­ord closeness, gaiety, and warmth. His images of arresting dark-­eyed ­faces—­young, old, beautiful, wrinkled, laughing, grief-­ stricken—­are always, literally, eye-­catching. The photographer has caught their eye and they have caught his. This reciprocal look, returned from subject to photographer, derives partly from Koudelka’s use of a small hand-­held camera at eye-­level that created his immersive viewpoint; the subsequent use of a wide-­angle lens enabled him to get close without sacrificing background detail, as if viewers of his photo­graphs ­were seeing the scene in person, or as if Koudelka’s own seeing had itself become in some way “wide ­angle”—as he says of himself, “My eyes, my vision became wide a­ ngle.”27 The background to his figures forms part of the overall effect of their portraits. Embedded in the Roma community, Koudelka became (as he put it in an interview) “part of every­thing that is around [him].”28 Roma interlocutors jokingly called him a “romantico clandestino,” an undercover Roma (or maybe a hidden romantic). The f­ amily—­the most impor­tant unit of Roma social organ­ization—­becomes a kind of theater in which the photographer mingles freely with the protagonists, as he did when photographing avant-­garde theatrical per­for­mances in Prague.29 A violinist and accordion player who also

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took up the Czech bagpipes, Koudelka initially got to know Roma musicians whom he heard playing at folk festivals.30 His interest in their m ­ usic gave him a point of entry into closed Roma communities—­“Taking photo­graphs in gypsy settlements ­wasn’t always easy”—­and Roma musicians appear in a number of his photo­graphs.31 Spanning dif­fer­ent life-­stages, from childhood to weddings, old age and death, his photo­graphs communicate a sense of robust life—­especially evident in the lives of ­children: boys grinning as they show off their biceps; c­ hildren r­ unning and playing outdoors, posing with their parents, or sound asleep on the floor. In the background, we often see references to religion in framed pictures of the Madonna and Child, along with Jesus and Roma saints.32 Koudelka’s pictures convey the vibrancy and per­sis­tence of customs sustaining a community that is more usually defined by its marginality but could also be defined in terms of its focus on f­ amily life, and particularly on ­children. The ethical engagement of Koudelka’s approach remains implicit. Writing on the responsibility imposed by the other’s mortality, Levinas proffers (without seeming to realize it) a strikingly figural and biblical allusion, one that obliquely illuminates Koudelka’s own unstated relation to his subjects: In proximity to the absolutely other, the stranger whom I have “neither conceived nor given birth to,” I already have on my arms, already bear, according to the Biblical formula, “in my breast as the nurse bears the nursling.” [Numbers XI.12] He has no other place, is not autochthonous, is uprooted, without a country, not an inhabitant, exposed to the cold and the heat of the seasons. To be reduced to having recourse to me is the homelessness or strangeness of the neighbor. It is incumbent on me. (OB, 91) For Levinas, obligation—­“It is incumbent on me”—­weighs on the witness to the stranger’s uprooting as an almost physical burden, along with the nursling’s helplessness and exposure to the ele­ments. Levinas continues: “It presses the neighbor up against me. Immediacy is the collapse of the repre­sen­ta­tion into a face, into a ‘concrete abstraction’ torn up from the world, from horizons and conditions . . . ​coming from the emptiness of space, from space signifying emptiness, from the desert and desolate space” (OB, 91). The absolute exposure to, and of, the “neighbor” is where responsibility to the other begins. It is not so much that repre­sen­ta­tion collapses into the immediacy of a “concrete abstraction.” Rather, the face itself becomes the signifier for an abandonment to which Koudelka’s photography responds as if with a Levinasian ethical imperative.

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figure 5.1. Josef Koudelka, Vinodol, 1968. © Josef Koudelka / Magnum Photos.

An example: at the start of Gypsies, we see a m ­ other carry­ing a small child, naked except for a trailing shawl (figure 5.1). An older barefoot child runs at his ­mother’s side, wearing an outsize shirt, while another ­woman follows in her heavy patterned skirts. The season is wintry, in spite of the scantily clad ­children—­the ground poached and crusted, bare stalks silhouetted against the sky. In this emptied-­out landscape with its bleak horizon-­line, the ­mother holding her naked child forms the central focus. Her face, still young, is caught in an ambiguous expression—­greeting, solicitation, or appeal? Both she and her child have made eye-­contact with the photographer. It is as if she accosts him with the unspoken words, “Behold the child”—­the iconic gesture of the so-­called Pre­sen­ta­tion of Jesus when the Christ-­child is brought by his m ­ other to be blessed in the ­Temple. For all the abject poverty and discomfort communicated by this mobile group of w ­ omen and c­ hildren traversing a wasteland, ­there is something strangely trusting in the face of the ­woman carry­ing her naked child, encumbered by her muddied skirts and trailing shawl. We sense the literalness of child-­bearing that is this ­woman’s destiny, and we infer that the small pro­cession has as its destination a shelter not much better than

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the unforgiving outdoors. We ­don’t know their destination. All we know is that the photographer has met them where they are, in transit. Koudelka’s photo­graphs often include tender cele­brations of parenthood. In one striking photo­graph, a handsome c­ ouple squat against a wall, their toddlers on the f­ ather’s knees, while he holds them and their m ­ other close with evident pride and happiness (figure 5.2). The bare boards and flaking plaster testify to poverty, but the f­ amily seems richly and affectionately connected, linked by their entwined arms and outlined sharply against the light background. The man looks up and out, the ­woman looks down with an expression combining strength and plea­sure. We see that this is a ­family, their ­faces side-­ lit, displaying both their c­ hildren and their intimate bond. Elsewhere, a smiling ­family lined up on a bed tries to coax their dog into being part of the group, or several generations pose happily together, seen through a doorway, proudly overseen from the next room by their aging grand­father. A ­mother watches over her sleeping ­children, another rocks a baby in an improvised hammock as her toddlers look on; lively communal scenes include nursing babies, while a young w ­ oman with tousled hair stands in front of the marital bed, beneath a picture of the Madonna and child that seems to gesture ­toward her wished-­ for destiny, maternity. By contrast, the men photographed on their own, hanging around on street corners, often seem isolated and unoccupied, and on occasion even swept up in criminal scenes. One especially troubling photo­graph seems to witness a young man’s arrest (figure 5.3).33 Against a deeply rutted, unpaved road on the outskirts of a village stands the figure of a young man wearing a striped woolen jacket and open-­necked white shirt. On second glance, we see his handcuffs. His pose is strangely a-­kilter, as if caught off-­balance. B ­ ehind him, in the background, a straggling line of villa­gers watches his departure as he is consigned to a judicial pro­cess that singles him out for—­what? To the left we see policemen, an Alsatian police dog, and (uncropped on the lower left corner) the uniformed leg of another policeman, level with the invisible photographer. A Barthesian reading might focus on the young man’s handcuffs as the punctum, the traumatic wound that skewers the viewer’s identificatory pro­cess. But ­there is something altogether more poignant in the young man’s facial expression. ­W hether he is guilty of a crime, we ­don’t know—­nor, it seems, does he. He confronts what awaits him almost shyly, with an expression of bewildered fatalism, as if the guilty verdict is already as good as given. His collision with the law, a State institution external to Roma judicial procedures, reads as vio­ lence done both to him and to his community.34 Koudelka seems to ask, with

figure 5.2. Josef Koudelka, Zehra, 1967. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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figure 5.3. Josef Koudelka, Jarabina, 1963. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

Levinas, what it means “to be like a stranger, hunted down even in one’s home, contested in one’s own identity and one’s very poverty” (OB, 92). In one of many posed and seemingly memorial portrait-­photographs—as if the photographer has put himself at the ser­vice of his subjects—­a ­mother and ­daughter sit side by side. The w ­ omen’s distinctive patterned clothes, sprigged and polka-­dotted (blouses, skirts, stockings), stand out from the shadows surrounding them. The face of the older ­woman, marked by time, contrasts with the open face of her d­ aughter, who holds a funeral photo­graph, perhaps the image of a dead ­father or ­brother. The double portrait of ­mother and d­ aughter is clearly a commemorative trio; t­ hese w ­ omen are remembering an absent third who composes their ­family. The girl’s bare feet and the uncovered floorboards, along with the roughly plastered wall ­behind her, suggest a home devoid of comfort. Yet the deep chiaroscuro with its sidelong light and pooling shadows creates an interior space. In this stripped-­down interior, the two sitters attain their own interiority from the aura of darkness that surrounds them (figure 5.4). Another portrait photo­graph defines the frail subject by his past. A middle-­ aged man with disheveled hair lies among his rumpled bedclothes, displaying

figure 5.4. Josef Koudelka, Zehra, 1967. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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figure 5.5. Josef Koudelka, Rakusy, 1964. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

two images: a framed photo­graph of himself as a younger man—­white collar, hair slicked back—­alongside a commemorative plaque of the Czech politician, Klement Gottwald, the founding f­ ather of Czech Communism, General Secretary of the Czech communist party from 1929 to 1945, prime minister and president ­after the 1948 Soviet-­backed coup ­until his death from a chill caught at Stalin’s funeral (figure 5.5). Fifteen years ago, both Gottwald and the bedridden sitter ­were at the height of their powers. The man’s watch hangs above his head on a nail in the wall­paper. Time has passed him by, along with the end of Gottwald’s regime. Koudelka has taken on board the sitter’s sense of himself, the prized objects from the past with which he identifies, and the world in which he had been a younger man and in good health. The obsessive patterning of the expanse of wall­paper ­behind him writes a history that remains untold. We know nothing apart from the two icons he holds prominently in front of himself, as if they could explain his anonymous life-­story. Koudelka’s portrait photo­graphs, we infer, might themselves hang on the walls of his subjects as commemorative images—­among the ways in which a community preserves its sense of identity and its customs. In one photo­graph of a Roma wedding cele­bration, the musicians are seen from below, playing in

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front of a mirror that reflects the c­ ouples dancing together, alongside the paired religious pictures on the low-­ceilinged cottage wall (figure 5.6). Elsewhere, as in the final photo­graph included in Gypsies, an extended f­ amily lines up on e­ ither side of a coffin, the corpse seen from the feet, the adults with their heads bent, the c­ hildren looking back t­ oward the photographer, their f­ aces illuminated by light streaming from the win­dow on e­ ither side of the laid-­out corpse—­a ­woman in formal graveclothes and unworn boots (figure 5.7). Koudelka’s chiaroscuro creates an effect as reverential and visually traditional as the pose of the extended ­family gathered around the coffin. From his position at the foot of the coffin, the photographer conveys the profound emotions involved in paying final re­spects to the dead. The luminous penumbra of the win­dow, side-­lighting the ­faces of the mourners, makes this more than a commemorative photo­graph. It conveys the solemnity of the occasion through something like the intensity and stillness of painting—­ painting with light and dark. Repre­sen­ta­tion and figuration coincide, just slightly aslant, like the ceiling’s beams and the photographic a­ ngle, as if to unsettle our own perspective on death. Here Koudelka’s wide a­ ngle seeing seems especially pronounced. Levinas notoriously tries (and fails) to cast out the figurativeness of his own philosophical language.35 The face returns in his writing as a figure for figuration itself, at once visage and figure: “The face of a neighbor signifies for me an unexceptionable responsibility. . . . ​It escapes repre­sen­ta­tion, it is the very collapse of phenomenality.” Even as its skin signals physical vulnerability or destitution, the face is a trace of the elusive past (“a pre­sent which is already the past of itself ”): “The disclosing of a face is nudity, non-­form, abandon of self, ageing, d­ ying, more naked than nudity. It is poverty, skin with wrinkles, which are a trace of itself. My reaction misses a pre­sent which is already the past of itself ” (OB, 88). Not Koudelka glossing the tender and expressive photo­ graphs in Gypsies—as it well could be—­but Levinas, for whom the face exists in in a transcendent and religious space, prior to repre­sen­ta­tion, prior even to social justice, yet already coterminous with ethics and the imperative of an ethical relation to the other. Koudelka transforms the vulnerable f­ aces of his sitters into a figure for relation to the individuals and community addressing us with such immediacy in a pre­sent that is “already the past of itself ”—­like the medium of photography.36 His Roma photo­graphs document what was fast becoming history, while commemorating Roma lives that remained tenaciously rooted in the pre­sent.

figure 5.6. Josef Koudelka, Velka Lomnika, 1963. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

figure 5.7. Josef Koudelka, Jarabina, 1963. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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ii. Someone ­Going Away Who has twisted us around like this, so that no ­matter what we do, we are in the posture of someone ­going away? (Wer hat uns also umgedreht, daß wir, was wir auch tun, in jener Haltung sind von einem, welcher fortgeht?) —­r a i n e r m a r i a r i l k e , t h e e igh t h du i no e l eg y 37

As Jean-­Pierre Liégeois observes in his study of Eu­ro­pean Roma, “Travellers are still Travellers even when they stop travelling. . . . ​Nomadism is more a state of mind than a state of fact.”38 Koudelka found common ground for his own nomadism in Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (1987), where survival in the outback depends on mobility, and being at home means being able to leave: “To move in such a landscape was survival: to stay in the same place suicide. The definition of a man’s ‘own country’ was ‘the place in which I do not have to ask.’ Yet to feel ‘at home’ in that country depended on being able to leave it.”39 Koudelka recalls with amusement Roma ­children, when they saw him sleeping outdoors, inquiring: “Where is your house?”—­“Do you sleep with your clothes on?”—­“ When did you last see your p­ eople?”40 A passage by Marguerite Yourcenar pasted into one of Koudelka’s meticulously kept notebooks reinforces this paradoxical state of belonging and not-­belonging: “I have never had a feeling of belonging wholly to any one place. . . . ​Though a foreigner in ­every land, in no place did I feel myself a stranger.”41 Discovering through his self-­chosen exile what it meant to be an outsider (“You are on the outside of territories, countries, languages”), Koudelka responded by turning the camera on himself and on the disquieting images that he captured obliquely, as if in transit.42 “The real gypsy is you. You travel, you ­don’t have anything, and you sleep anywhere.”43 Although he planned his seasonal itinerary around Roma and Traveller gatherings, the photo­graphs spanned by the period of Exiles rarely depict communal life, let alone ­family life in the manner of Gypsies. Koudelka catches ­people from ­behind, in silhouette, in pieces or in passing: the backs of old Irishmen pissing in a blind alley, its walls topped with barbed wire; a man asleep on a concrete bench, only his head vis­i­ble; the legs and lower bodies of passers-by casting their shadows on

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a cobbled road; the back of a one-­legged man making his way down a cobbled alley; a ­woman with a forbidding profile and a hideous hat, silhouetted against austere buildings; a drunk man sprawled at the foot of a flight of stairs.44 ­These accidents of seeing—­images caught without the subject’s knowledge—­ contrast with the open and generous vision (face to face) that Koudelka had previously brought to bear on the communal lives of Roma ­people. Koudelka not only chose exile for himself; he also chose to depict life on the margins of western Eu­ro­pean prosperity: the poor, the destitute, the disabled, the el­der­ly; ­those who wait or pass by, or pass out on benches. When he photo­graphs festivals, the moments he registers are eccentric: a boy climbing up to embrace a life-­size statue of the Madonna; a choirboy on a bicycle with angel-­wings attached to his surplice, a c­ ouple waking amid the collapsed tents of the previous night’s festival. ­Children’s play becomes especially disquieting. One photo­graph shows a small child in the street wrapped entirely in rolls of toilet paper, like an enigmatic ­mummy; another shows a child lying on the ground, its body hidden in leaves, only the face vis­i­ble, as if a changeling or a partly disinterred corpse. This is a Eu­rope of isolation and detritus, where a French prostitute sits yawning in a litter-­strewn layby, waiting for customers. The prevailing moods are anxiety and boredom, accentuated by glimpses of feral dogs and dead animals. H ­ umans and animals often appear as silhouettes, isolated in desolate urban or rural settings, without any perceivable relation to ­others. Even in exile, Koudelka’s stance remained that of a nonconformist: “I de­cided to try not to conform. I wanted to stay dif­fer­ent and keep my healthy anger as long as pos­si­ble.”45 He took numerous photo­graphs of himself as an itinerant crisscrossing Eu­rope with only his rucksack and sleeping bag, spare clothes, camera, rolls of film, notebooks, and map.46 As he noted in a 2016 interview, he knew only that this proj­ect involved his own subjectivity—­“I am filtering real­ ity through me.”47 In a 1976 photo­graph, his close-up wrist and wrist-­watch in the foreground dwarf an olive-­grove landscape (figure 5.8). ­Here Koudelka is quoting his own e­ arlier photo­graph, taken in Prague in August 1968, using a friend’s arm and wristwatch to rec­ord the exact time and place of the Rus­sian invasion, against the background of Prague’s Wenceslas Square—­emptied of its forewarned demonstrators, with the Soviet tanks lying in wait beneath the trees.48 What holds together the habitus of someone whose sense of being at home depends on being able to leave? What becomes of his own past as it too slips away, leaving him face to face with new landscapes and new po­liti­cal realities? As if in answer to this question, Koudelka’s photographic scrapbooks cata­ logue his temporary sleeping spots: a rug on a bare wooden floor, a piece of

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figure 5.8. Josef Koudelka, Spain, 1976. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

cardboard laid on concrete, a sheet of creased foam-­rubber on a bed of straw, a sleeping bag encircled by stones on a beach, like the markings of an ancient gravesite.49 Another unpublished series shows Koudelka stretched out on the ground, his eyes closed, u­ nder the stars or dossing down on a friend’s floor. ­These delayed-­time portraits convey his experience of freedom in homelessness.50 He was always confident of sleeping somewhere, always ready to move on once he felt he had photographed what­ever he found. His photographic assemblages are the visual counterpart to his annotated notebooks. They rec­ ord a mobile but far from unfocused existence: “What I needed most was to travel so that I could take photo­graphs. . . . ​I d­ idn’t want to have what p­ eople call a ‘home.’ I ­didn’t want to have the desire to return somewhere.”51 He needed to know that he could leave. Exiles transforms an itinerant lifestyle into an art-­form, experimenting with a kind of formal abstraction. In one photo­graph, a cruciform arrangement of carpet laid on crushed swirls and tangles of coarse grass creates a design of textures and patterns—­a temporary bed-­site, lacking its anonymous sleeper, transformed into an artwork by its crisp definition (figure 5.9). In a related

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figure 5.9. Josef Koudelka, Wales, 1977. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

image, the photographer’s well-­worn shoes rest on a tree-­trunk, the visual field tilted at an a­ ngle, with the sky occupying one corner and a worm’s eye-­view of plants the other, while the folds of his own jeans-­clad legs occupy the foreground. Taken from a reclining position, the photo­graph suggests a private pastoral of sky, tree, vegetation—­and well-­worn walking shoes (figure 5.10). The ­angle of vision defamiliarizes pastoral by skewing it ­toward the photographer’s own perspective. Another image, a still-­life with an open copy of the International Herald Tribune, carefully composes an outdoor picnic—­knife, apple, cheese-­wedges, milk, bread, scraps of butter-­paper—­against a background of crumpled newsprint and international headlines: “In Britain, Some Ideas to Combat the Drought,” “10 Said Slain in Soweto,” “Middle-­Class Youths Swell Ranks of Argentine Terrorists” (figure 5.11). Is the itinerant photographer connected to the world of international news, or is he completely out of it? What does it mean to travel freely, unencumbered, and alone? Apart from the implied presence of the photographer himself, the photo­ graphs in Exiles are often emptied of h­ uman life altogether. Against a curving road with its unkept grass verges and looming hedge, we see the dotted lines

figure 5.10. Josef Koudelka, Spain, 1975. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

figure 5.11. Josef Koudelka, France, 1976. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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figure 5.12. Josef Koudelka, ­England, 1978. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

of a T junction beneath a windswept tree (figure 5.12). The twisted branches silhouetted against the sky indicate the prevailing coastal wind, forming a directional marker for a road that leads nowhere. The photo­graph rec­ords the textures of asphalt and road-­markings, the curve of field and road converging with the horizon line. And that’s all. The image is resolutely minimal, void of affect. It suggests a road traveled without expectation: “I needed to know that nothing was waiting for me anywhere, that the place I was supposed to be was where I was at that moment, and that when ­there was nothing more to photo­ graph ­there, then it was time to leave for another place.”52 The final image of Exiles is one of departure: the wake of an Arran Island ferry leaving graceful patterns in the w ­ ater as low hills recede into the mist. Exiles has its share of images of amputation and disfigurement: a vast marble arm (relic of an ­earlier Soviet era) hangs over a dockside railway-­line, above tiny ant-­like dockers; the ripped and bullet-­scarred poster of a Serbian politician denotes past conflict; a huge boulder ensnared by wire against distant mountains seems to mark a hostile border-­crossing. Relics of road-­work scar urban tarmac in an aimless puzzle. A wooden fence blocks the sea, a man watches a departing cross-­Channel hovercraft from the beach. Along with

figure 5.13. Josef Koudelka, Italy, 1981. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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figure 5.14. Josef Koudelka, Switzerland, 1980. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

t­ hese scenes of blockage and departure, Koudelka brings his camera to bear on images that suggest improvised shelters: a tarp cascading through a hole in a canvas; or, in the penultimate image of Exiles, metal rods suspending a makeshift construction of sacking in an abstract design of drape and fold, at once graceful and temporary (figure 5.13). In another bleak image, cobblestones and splintered wooden lathes (like a residual unlit fire) hint at the detritus of the Western postwar construction boom. The price of redevelopment may be destitution, with its dereliction and loss of h­ uman shelter and connection (figure 5.14). The phi­los­o­pher Agamben—­using a term derived from Bataille—­calls the impoverishment of both human-­and object-­worlds “inoperativeness” (inoperosità), or, in French, désoeuvrement, implying undoing and inactivity.53 Koudelka’s images of animals increasingly signify the dehiscence of ­human communities: a cat and its shadow ­running vertically down a brick wall; a chained monkey; a ferocious-­looking dog outlined against snow; a turtle stranded on its back near a beach; a lone goat making its way along a deserted street; a pigeon on the road pecking at litter. Most disquieting of all, a dead crow hangs on a wire, wings spread, its claws outlined the sky, in front of a wind-­tossed field of barley.

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figure 5.15. Josef Koudelka, Ireland, 1978. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

Lowering clouds come a third of the way down the image, while the unharvested field climbs up ­toward the bleak skyline (figure 5.15). The wheat bends and ­ripples in the breeze, but the crow’s flight is suspended in order to make it a literal scarecrow—­a warning sign to other birds, and even to ­humans. A desolate image of division and hostility, the bird is put to monitory use. The photo­ graph insists on the cruelty of the dividing line between ­human and animal. The opening lines of Rilke’s eighth Duino Elegy give their name to the meditation in Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal (2002) on Rilke’s famous distinction between ­human and animal: With all its eyes the natu­ral world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. (Mit allen Augen sieht die Kreatur das Offene. Nur unsre Augen sind wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang)54

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Rilke’s natu­ral world looks freely out into the open, unlike the backward-­ turned, entrapping ­human eye. Heidegger, notoriously, read Rilke’s poem against the grain, in support of his “thesis on poverty in world as the essential characteristic of the animal.”55 Dismissing Rilke’s ­earlier reversal of the hierarchy between man and nature, Heidegger denounces it as anthropomorphism of the animal and animalization of the h­ uman. For him, the animal world is the one that is captive and impoverished. Agamben turns the ­tables back on Heidegger, in order to expose the poverty and emptiness of Heidegger’s own vision of the h­ uman world, singling out “profound boredom” (tiefe Langewiele) as the pervasive affect of Heideggerian Dasein (Open, 63–64). For Agamben, contrary to Heidegger, boredom defines the moment when the h­ uman comes closest to the animal—­the boundary where Heidegger’s reimposed hierarchy collapses.56 Arguing against Heidegger’s insistence on the poverty of the natu­ral world and the animal’s captive suspension in its environment, Agamben resists Heidegger’s troubling claim that the passage from poverty-­of-­world to “world” is constitutive of the h­ uman. As summarized by Agamben, Heideggerian Dasein is “simply an animal that has learned to become bored; it has awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation. This awakening of the living being to its own being-­captivated . . . ​is the [Heideggerian] h­ uman” (Open, 70). Opposed to what he sees as the radical impoverishment of both ­human and animal worlds in Heideggerian thought, Agamben reclaims the original “open” of Rilke’s poem—­“the central emptiness” between man and animal—as an opening for his own bio-­politics, proposing instead that we should “risk ourselves in this emptiness,” this “suspension of the suspension” (Open, 92). Agamben’s term, “inoperativeness” (inoperosità) offers a way to understand Koudelka’s disquieting images of h­ umans and animals at the margins, as if his photo­graphs deliberately reveal the potentiality that emerges when the barrier between man and animal breaks down. In Rilke’s words, “We arrange it. It breaks down.” (Wir ordnens. Es zerfällt.).57 The break-­down is Koudelka’s subject. Agamben’s essay “The Face” (1990) indirectly addresses Levinas. “All living beings are in the open. . . . ​But only h­ uman beings want to take possession of this opening, to seize hold of their own appearance and their being manifest.”58 Rather than linking the face to Levinasian transcendence, or to Levinas’s mistrust of the mediated image, Agamben links it to community—­“The face is the only location of community”—­and especially to the ­human capacity for language: “The face’s revelation is revelation of language itself ” (“Face,” 91, 92). The face speaks, and in speaking, both addresses and engages with the world of appearances. While animals care nothing for images, “­Human

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beings, on the other hand, separate images from t­ hings and give them a name precisely b­ ecause they want to . . . ​take possession of their own very appearance” (“Face,” 93).59 In Agamben’s words, “the task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear” (“Face,” 95). Taking possession of the appearance of dispossession, Koudelka’s Exiles—as if in proleptic dialogue with Agamben—­causes bio-­politics to appear in Eu­rope’s empty landscapes and its population by marginalized ­human and nonhuman figures.

Coda: The Princi­ple of the Wall And it may be that nowadays the entire Earth, which has been transformed into a desert by humankind’s blind ­will, might become one single face. — ­g iorgio ag a m be n ( “face ,” 92)

Wall: Israeli & Palestinian Landscape 2008–2012 extends Koudelka’s existing commitment to photographing the industrial destruction of landscape and with it, the erasure of the h­ uman figure.60 Black Triangle—­The Foothills of the Ore Mountains explores the devastation caused by open-­cast coal-­mining: “I ­don’t think that Black Triangle is only about environmental issues. I am not an environmentalist. . . . ​Most p­ eople consider this devastated landscape dreadful. But for me, it is not the landscape that’s dreadful. What is dreadful is the destruction.”61 In Chaos (1999), Koudelka depicts a depopulated and defaced landscape, crisscrossed by borders and marked by former conflicts—­ the fallen Berlin wall, a graveyard of decommissioned Czech STOP signs, a perimeter fence at Auschwitz, battle-­scarred walls in Beirut, a pock-­marked traffic-­sign in Bosnia. In Limestone (2002), huge stone quarries leave the formerly pristine limestone landscape carved up by mechanized methods of extraction—­a lunar landscape of strange cuts, desolate beauty, and abandoned machinery. Koudelka was initially wary of being coopted for po­liti­cal ends when he was invited to take part in a proj­ect to photo­graph the Israeli and Palestinian landscape. He agreed “to photo­graph the wall not as a po­liti­cal prob­lem but ­because of its devastation of the landscape. And this is monumental. I see this wall as a failure of civilization.”62 The destruction of landscape drew him into the proj­ect in a profoundly personal way: “This is the landscape that had something to do with me”—­“essentially the wall is about not being able to go to the other side.”63 Slicing through the uneven terrain of the occupied West Bank, the Wall imposes a visual barrier with all the characteristics of a de facto

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defended po­liti­cal border. Among the highly charged h­ uman meanings that it imposes on the landscape—­protection, aggression, physical displacement—­ Koudelka focused on the confinement of one ­people by another. Sometimes innocuously called a “security” barrier or a “separation” barrier, the Wall is ostensibly designed to protect the State of Israel and its West Bank settlements. But as Koudelka realized, its main effect is to impede movement, including movement between and among Palestinian villages, often preventing Palestinians from getting to work, schools, or hospitals, or farmers from reaching their own fields and olive groves. By design, the Wall is less vis­i­ble from the Israeli side than from the Palestinian side. Paradoxically, t­ hose outside the Wall are its prisoners, only allowed to cross at official border-­crossings. Clamorous, patient, or intimidated, they wait in line at the checkpoints that separate them from their lives, their homes, their villages—­indeed, from their entire history.64 Instead of following the 1949 Armistice Line, or “Green Line,” the Wall encroaches onto the West Bank, encircling both Israeli settlements and Palestinian agricultural land.65 In 2004, the International Court of Justice declared the Wall’s intrusive route illegal and the UN General Assembly approved a resolution reaffirming its judgment. Successive l­ egal challenges and modifications have failed to check the creep ­toward legitimizing a border that has now grown to more than twice the length of the original Green Line. Closed military areas (the “Seam Zone”) between the route of the Wall and the original Green Line have created yet another area of restricted access for West Bank farmers. By 2013, over half the wall had been constructed, much of it inside West Bank territory, effectively annexing Palestinian land from its original ­owners.66 The narrative of unilateral border creation frames Koudelka’s Wall, his photo­graphs this time captioned with commentary by Ray Dolphin.67 Koudelka’s panoramic photo­graphs reveal the sheer scale of the militarized barrier as it winds through bare hills and rocky valleys, encircling a settlement ­here, a village t­ here, slanting across a slope to protect a hilltop development, slaloming down its contours to reveal the full paraphernalia of electronic surveillance systems, groomed “anti-­intrusion” sand-­paths, observation posts, and military patrol roads. We register the nine-­meter-­high concrete panels and ubiquitous razor-­wire coils, the protected overpasses and underpasses on the Israeli side (where the Wall may be partially disguised by landscaping). On the Palestinian side, we see the ancient, uprooted olive trees and shuttered village businesses, the concrete roadblocks and the rusty wire strung across

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figure 5.16. Josef Koudelka, Baqa ash Sharqiya Access Gate, 2009. © Josef Koudelka/ Magnum Photos.

backroads. In a rare glimpse of the Palestinian inhabitants, we see ­children in Hebron in front of an improvised street barrier made from concrete-­filled oil barrels, or a man mourning the ruins of his demolished h­ ouse. Other­w ise, Koudelka’s barricaded landscape appears to be virtually uninhabited. Checkpoints represent the main point of contact between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian civilians.68 The crossing, with its lengthy waits and humiliating searches, becomes a pro­cess of subjugation in itself. The crossing-­points resemble prison-­like barriers, with one-­way arrows leading to enclosed spaces.69 Koudelka’s photo­graphs emphasize this intimidating architecture of transit. An access point to the Seam Zone pre­sents an array of electric, mechanized, wire-­link gates and halt signs, through which its 7,500 inhabitants must reach their homes and villages (figure 5.16). The Bethlehem checkpoint—­the main crossing point between East Jerusalem and the southern West Bank—­consists of a roofed and barred entry­way where p­ eople move passively from one side of the checkpoint to the other, corralled between bars like ­c attle in a

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slaughter­house and dwarfed by the Wall’s graffiti-­covered concrete slabs (figure 5.17). In urban East Jerusalem, the Wall cuts through residential areas with a tangle of upright concrete sections, wire netting, cables, power-­boxes, and observation towers (figure 5.18). In the countryside, farmers tending their fields (armed with “visitor” permits) negotiate electrified metal gates and tall chain-­link fences topped with coils of barbed wire. Regulated by Israeli-­issued permits, heavy traffic enters Jerusalem through one of only four highly fortified checkpoints from the West Bank (figure 5.19).70 Rachel’s Tomb, imprisoned like a traffic island within towering modern walls, provides the last photo­graph in the series, making the prison analogy vis­i­ble, as if seen from a temporarily halted vehicle. One way leads to an isolated sacred monument, the other, in the direction of Jerusalem, leads to a forbidding canyon between tall concrete sections, ending at a gate and yet another surveillance tower (figure 5.20). “But where are the ­people?”—­Cartier-­Bresson’s prescient question when Koudelka began to experiment with panoramic photography—­underlines the politics of Wall.71 In place of ­people, Koudelka’s panoramic border-­scapes

figure 5.17. Josef Koudelka, Bethlehem Checkpoint, 2009. © Josef Koudelka/ Magnum Photos.

figure 5.18. Josef Koudelka, A-­Ram, East Jerusalem, 2010. © Josef Koudelka/ Magnum Photos.

figure 5.19. Josef Koudelka, Qalandiya Checkpoint, Ramallah Area, 2010. © Josef Koudelka/ Magnum Photos.

figure 5.20. Josef Koudelka, Rachel’s Tomb, 2010. © Josef Koudelka/Magnum Photos.

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figure 5.21. Josef Koudelka, Al ‘Eizarya (Bethany), East Jerusalem, 2010. © Josef Koudelka/ Magnum Photos.

depict anonymous forms of control designed to exert maximum symbolic and psychic pressure at crossing-­points. The ­people who queue to cross are designated as potential invaders and criminal hordes, much like mi­grants attempting to cross the US-­Mexican border or make their way into the EU by sea or on land.72 The ­w ill to power suggested by ­these vast yet claustrophobic images—­massive obstacles, towering prefabricated concrete panels, ubiquitous razor-­wire—­does more than normalize separation; it turns occupation into a form of erasure, making Palestinians invisible.73 Border-­crossings become an impediment to sight as well as movement, paradoxically exposing to view the myth of an aboriginally uninhabited landscape on which the founding of the State of Israel had depended.74 Koudelka’s ethics of relation includes the making vis­i­ble of the other’s erasure; in Agamben’s words, “The task of politics is . . . ​to cause appearance itself to appear” (Agamben, “Face,” 95). Agamben’s “homo sacer”—­the banned person subject to the law, yet outside its protection—­can be consigned with

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impunity to this negative form of relation, where the law posits nonrelation as “the limit form of relation.”75 Just so, legalized occupation disputes the rights of the occupied to own their own homes and access their land. In the fortified border-­scapes of Koudelka’s Wall, ­there can be no relation, no link other than a chain-­link fence, no distant prospect that is not obstructed by coils of barbed wire (figure 5.21). Despite—or ­because of—­Koudelka’s reluctance to compromise his in­de­pen­dence, his panoramic landscapes undertake the indispensable po­liti­cal task of photography: to cause appearances to appear, including the disappearance of t­ hose whose lives and histories have been made invisible by the Wall.

6 Rewilding Antigone

“one person who had not done a version was W. B. Yeats,” noted Seamus Heaney, listing the many Irish adaptations of Sophocles’s Antigone that preceded his own version, written for the centenary of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre.1 Yeats’s successful prose adaptations of Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus (1926 and 1927) had been performed at the Abbey Theatre, but he never completed the Oedipus trio with Antigone. He did, however, compose an overwrought version of its “Eros” Chorus: “Overcome—­O ­bitter sweetness, / Inhabitant of the soft cheek of a girl . . . ​Overcome the Empyrean”— That in the same calamity ­Brother and ­brother, friend and friend, ­Family and ­family, City and city may contend, By that ­great glory driven wild.2 To be driven “wild” (Irish: fiáin) has a par­tic­u­lar Irish inflection. Yeats invokes the power of love (“that g­ reat glory”) to unleash chaos and anarchy, overcoming even the gods. His lines bear the imprint of civil war and divided communities, as well as the cause of Irish nationalism; elsewhere in his poetry, love looses revolutionary fervor on the world: “And what if excess of love / Bewildered them till they died?” (“Easter 1916”).3 Yeats’s ambiguous verb, “bewilder,” implies having been led into wildness—an uncharted wilderness?—by love’s excess. In The Burial at Thebes (2004), Heaney translates Yeats’s “By that g­ reat glory driven wild” as “letting madness loose”—­“Love that c­ an’t be withstood. . . . ​ Love . . . ​you put them mad.” (BT, 49). His version of the “Eros” Chorus eschews Yeats’s high romantic rhe­toric for domestic havoc “in heart and home” (BT, 49). Con­temporary versions of Antigone tend not to inquire about the relation 154

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between love’s wildness and revolutionary uprising. Rather, they ask the leading question: what justifies Antigone’s revolt against the extra-­juridical “state of exception” associated with tyrants, dictators, and colonial powers?—­ unsettling what might be called (­after Carl Schmitt) the “po­liti­cal theology” of Sophocles’s tragedy, transformed by Hegel into a clash between the mutually exclusive claims of kinship and state, with Antigone demarcating the threshold between.4 The immediate prompt for Heaney’s version brought the timeless into relation with con­temporary events. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the “war on terror,” and the 2002 establishment of Guantánamo Bay detention camp had looked to Heaney like a modern version of the situation in Sophocles’s play. The same events also prompted Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception (Stato di eccezione, 2003), where Agamben’s critical reading of Schmittian ­legal theory traces the “state of exception” from the theorists of the Third Reich to its normalization within modern techniques of government.5 Heaney’s The Burial of Thebes is shadowed by the history of Ireland’s strug­ gles against British rule, as well as by the more recent Northern Irish Trou­bles. Neil Corcoran’s 2004 review of Heaney’s version locates Antigone in this bitterly contested national space: on one hand, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s notorious appropriation of the play to warn Belfast students that the Northern Irish civil disobedience campaigns of the 1960s risked unleashing sectarian vio­lence (with O’Brien playing the moderating part of Antigone’s ­sister, Ismene); and on the other, Tom Paulin’s savage reply to O’Brien in The Riot Act: A Version of Antigone (originally performed in 1984), where Antigone’s nonviolent protest is explic­itly directed at the entrenched prejudices and injustices of Unionist Northern Ireland.6 Rather than dramatizing the Hegelian conflict between competing moralities—­two clashing rights that produce a wrong—­Paulin’s version denounces British rule for legitimizing factionalism and creating a nation of informers. The Westminster-­ese of Paulin’s Creon combines the unctuousness of an (En­glish) Irish Secretary of State with the bullying tones of the Ulster Unionist Ian Paisley: “if ever any man ­here should find himself faced with a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend, then he must swiftly place that friend in the hands of the authorities.” At the end of The Riot Act, Paulin’s Creon delivers his own verdict in the third-­person demotic of a broken man: “Made a right blood-­mess, / did Creon.”7 Twenty years l­ ater, a­ fter the Northern Ireland Peace pro­cess and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Heaney’s ear was attuned less to the politics of Westminster and Ulster than to the either/or logic of securitization mobilized by the Bush Administration to rally international support for the invasion of

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Iraq. When Heaney’s Creon demands “­Either you are a patriot, a loyal citizen . . . ​or e­ lse you yourselves are traitorous, . . .” he uses the terms ventriloquized by Heaney’s explanatory note to The Burial at Thebes: “Are you in favour of state security or are you not? If you d­ on’t support the eradication of this tyrant in Iraq and the threat he poses to the ­free world, you are on the wrong side in ‘the war on terror.’ ” (BT, 76). Post 9/11, the emotively named USA PATRIOT Act of 2001—­transforming po­liti­cal dissent into anti-­patriotic sedition—­allowed any noncitizen to be arrested who appeared to endanger national security. In the name of securitization, the PATRIOT Act had the effect of creating Agamben’s “legally unnamable and unclassifiable being”—­a suspect deprived of l­egal protection, and even in some cases of the rights of citizenship.8 But Heaney’s inner ear was also attuned, in a more literary way, to the history of Irish verse. Antigone’s outraged grief during her exchanges with Ismene in the fast-­paced opening scene echo the keening rhythms of one of the most famous laments in Irish vernacular poetry, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill’s eighteenth-­century Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. Heaney describes it as “an outburst of grief and anger from a ­woman whose husband had been cut down and left bleeding on the roadside in County Cork, in much the same way as Polyneices was left outside the walls of Thebes, unburied, desecrated, picked at by the crows” (BT, 77). Heaney chose the authoritative meter of iambic pentameter for Creon’s speeches, but he uses the three-­beat “drive and pitch of the Irish verse” of Eibhlín Dhubh Ní Chonaill’s Irish lament to express Antigone’s outraged grief: “the voice of a ­woman outraged, as she finds the body of her beloved lying beside a ­little furze bush, dead, without the last rites, without anyone close except ‘an old, old ­woman / and her cloak about you’ ” (BT, 77, 78). Heaney is alert to the impact of sectarian vio­lence on w ­ omen, as w ­ idows, wives, lovers, ­mothers, ­sisters, and ­daughters: “why are we always the ones? . . . ​ again it hits us hardest” (BT, 5)—­this is Heaney’s Antigone, in her opening speech to Ismene (BT, 5). In Sophocles’s Antigone, when Antigone and Ismene are left to mourn the loss of their ­brothers, one buried with honor while the other is cast out as a traitor, each chooses to confront Creon’s edict in her own way, ­either with defiance or e­ lse submission. The play’s unresolved dilemma, loyalty to ­family versus obedience to the state, is played out in the confrontation between the binary logic of Creon’s edict—as expressed by Heaney, “whoever i­ sn’t for us / Is against us” (BT, 7)—­and Antigone’s assertion of her own rights, which include rights pertaining to f­ amily (“me and mine”): “what are Creon’s rights / When it comes to me and mine?” (BT, 9). Given their

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context, Irish versions of Antigone have tended to emphasize the erosion of ­human rights, criticizing Creon’s law-­and-­order agenda and legitimizing Antigone’s passionate re­sis­tance in the face of oppression.9 Heaney’s note refers to Antigone’s “instinctive affirmation of what we might now call a ­human right against the law-­and-­order requirements of the state” (BT, 76). Agamben’s State of Exception cites “the right of re­sis­tance,” invoking language originally proposed for a draft of the Italian constitution: “When the public powers violate the rights and fundamental liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, re­sis­ tance to oppression is a right and a duty of the citizen.”10 Antigone comes laden with baggage from previous versions performed in times of re­sis­tance to oppression—­notably, versions by Jean Anouilh, Bertolt Brecht, and Athol Fugard—­performances that in some cases endangered the performers themselves.11 Previous playwrights had used Antigone to indict totalitarian regimes, mourn the h­ uman cost of resisting them, and redefine the contest between law and ethics for their own po­liti­cal times. Walter Benjamin argues that all texts contain within themselves an internal self-­difference that may only be fully realized in a ­f uture not yet available to the author. Re­ orienting Sophocles’s play t­ oward East-­West conflict (the Iraqi invasion of 2003 and “the war on terror”), Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes pits the demands of modern securitization against ­family loyalty. Kamila Shamsie’s prize-­ winning novel Home Fire (2017) brings Antigone home to the British Muslim community, broaching fierce con­temporary debates about f­ amily, community, and the right to citizenship. Anne Carson’s Antigonick (2012)—­part critique, part commentary—­redefines Antigone’s exclusion from the protection of the law in terms of Agamben’s “state of exception.” Tacita Dean’s film version Antigone (2018) reimagines the missing play between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus in order to explore the intertwining of ­family and politics during Antigone’s wanderings in the wilderness with Oedipus; the film arrives at its own judicial reckoning and ultimate telos in a courtroom scene in Thebes, Illinois. Each of t­ hese versions—­translation, adaptation, critique, or “analogue” (Dean’s media-­derived term)—­“rewilds” Antigone, not for uncharted strug­gles, but for a version of rights that complicates modern conceptions of ­human rights, themselves now subject to debate and controversy by l­ egal and po­liti­cal theorists. Recent versions of Antigone not only champion the demo­cratic right of re­sis­tance; they also ask what it means for citizens to have rights at all—­ where re­sis­tance ends, where anarchy begins, and what the tyrant himself has to lose. Each version of Antigone exists in the specificity of its time and place. But in another sense, not being in time—­belatedness, refusal to change,

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ambiguous ties to the past or to ­family, even the deliberate obsolescence of analogue technology in Dean’s work—­underpins modern versions of the Sophoclean tragedy. Antigone asks: What does it mean to belong? Does “belonging,” by definition, mean adhering to old or even outworn loyalties? Are unresolved contradictions (as Said has argued) equally inseparable from lateness and from the idea of belonging itself?12

i. Enemies of the State “The ones we love . . . ​are enemies of the state.” —­s e a m us h e a n e y, t h e bu r i a l at t h e b e s (bt, 5)

The phrase “­enemy of the state” (along with its variant, “­enemy of the p­ eople”) is regularly applied by authoritarian regimes and demagogues to criminalize po­liti­cal dissidents or to attack t­ hose who speak truth to power (especially journalists)—­sometimes as a justification for silencing or even murdering them. The phrase has also been used to discriminate against, imprison, exile, or eliminate t­ hose belonging to proscribed ethnicities, religions, or groups perceived as transgressive or threatening to the State ( Jews, Roma, homosexuals in Nazi Germany, to name only a few); to close down opposition movements (­today’s Rus­sia or Nicaragua); or to confine or eject marginalized ­peoples (Uyghurs in China, the Rohingya p­ eople of Myanmar, Afghan’s Hazara minority). Writing in an ostensibly postfascist era, Heaney has Antigone indignantly repeat the language of autocracy in her opening scene with Ismene: “The ones we love . . . ​/ Are enemies of the state. / To be considered traitors—” (BT, 5). Quoted ­here, in Antigone’s scathing denunciation, Creon recycles the terminology of law-­and-­order to outlaw the per­for­mance of Polyneices’s burial rites, making it a test-­case for his regime and its clamp-­down on citizens’ re­sis­ tance: “This is law and order / In the land of good King Creon . . . ​‘I’ll flush ’em out,’ he says. / ‘Whoever ­isn’t for us / Is against us in this case’ ” (BT, 7). Heaney allows Creon’s own uses of the language of power greater nuance, in its appeal to the seeming disinterestedness of the true patriot: “For the patriot, / Personal loyalty always must give way / To patriotic duty” (BT, 16)—­a sanitized version of Creon’s informer’s mandate in Paulin’s The Riot Act (“a choice between betraying his country and betraying his friend”).13 “In this case” (Antigone’s phrase), Creon has made a po­liti­cal example of his dead nephew by criminalizing Polyneices as both exile and traitor, issuing an edict that casts him out as an “obscenity” (literally, an unburied corpse). Eteocles, meanwhile,

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is buried with due funeral rites. Language, we see, has material effects on the body. Heaney’s Antigone denounces Creon’s law in the name of a definition of justice rooted in an elsewhere that she defines as the world of the dead: “the law was not / The law of Zeus nor the law ordained / By Justice, Justice dwelling deep / Among the gods of the dead” (BT, 29). The Chorus associate Antigone’s commitment to a form of justice beyond Creon’s jurisdiction with the “wildness” that she has inherited from Oedipus (“she got it from her ­father,” they say). Creon, meanwhile, demeans Antigone’s wildness as a specifically female disobedience to be mastered and tamed: “Wild she may well be / But even the wildest h­ orses come to heel” (BT, 30). She too is cast out from the polity—­not only as a w ­ oman (“­Women w ­ ere never meant for this assembly. / From now on ­they’ll be kept in place again”) (BT, 38), but also ­because, in Antigone’s own words to Ismene, she has “long gone over to the dead” (BT, 36). In Creon’s view, too, she has crossed over to the other side, thereby subverting his law-­and-­order regime, already condemned to the past tense of the officially dis­appeared: “­There’s no ‘is’ anymore” (BT, 37).14 Explaining his decision to Haemon, who loves Antigone (“­you’re wild for her,” according to his ­father), Creon uses the contrasting language of self-­ discipline: “The city has to see / The standards of a public man reflected / In his private conduct. . . . ​W hen discipline goes self-­discipline goes as well” (BT, 41, 42). ­Women c­ an’t “be allowed / To walk all over us. Other­wise, as men / ­We’ll be disgraced” (BT, 42). We begin to see how the language of personal disinterestedness masks both a fear of ­women and the fear of losing control. Being wild for a w ­ oman (or being like a w ­ oman) becomes a synonym for weakness. By contrast, Haemon urges his f­ ather to “[s]wallow pride and anger. Allow yourself / To change” (BT, 44). What would it take for Creon to change, or at least change his mind? This, as much as Antigone’s “wildness”—­her rebellion in the name of duty to her f­ amily—­becomes the play’s tragic question. Heaney’s Creon starts to sound like an angry man who c­ an’t find a way to climb down, testily reasserting the mandate literally inscribed in his name (Creon): “Rulers, I thought, ­were meant to be in charge” (BT, 45). In his argument with Haemon, it is he who sounds “deranged” (Haemon’s word)—in other words, mad, in his anger at being challenged by a ­woman and in his refusal to hear his son Haemon’s pleading, or heed his advice about the Theban citizenry’s sympathy for Antigone. The strong man’s strength becomes his po­ liti­cal and personal undoing. Heaney allows The Burial at Thebes to be as much Creon’s tragedy as Antigone’s; he notes that “Creon’s sufferings weigh heavi­ly and evenly in the scales”

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(BT, 76). The man who puts his patriotism before ­family loses every­one that he loves to a decision made in anger. Instead of emphasizing Antigone’s “wildness,” Heaney foregrounds Creon’s “overbearing” (BT, 76). It takes Tiresias to speak truth to power; or rather, in Creon’s scornful anticipation of Trump’s denunciation of journalists, “start delivering fake truths on demand” (BT, 59). Tiresias tells him that “­mistakes ­don’t have to be forever, / They can be admitted and atoned for” (BT, 59)—­putting the blame for the impasse on Creon himself (“the overbearing man”), rather than on Antigone’s headstrongness. Heaney’s Creon refuses to believe that Tiresias (or the guards) c­ an’t be bought. Tiresias responds: “Honest advice is not a t­ hing you buy.” Remarking that rulers, not seers, “have a name for being corrupt” (BT, 60), he graphically forecasts the consequences of Creon’s rigid enactment of the law—­his prohibition against burying Polyneices, his death sentence on Antigone, and his violation of the prerogatives of the underworld: “­there lie in wait for you / The inexorable ones, the furies who destroy” (BT, 61–62). Tiresias’s prophecy leaves Creon unnerved: “I hate a climb-­down, but something’s gathering head” (BT, 62). The Chorus step in, calling on Creon to forestall the tragic outcome foreseen by Tiresias. “Right,” says Creon: “All hands get a move on. ­Here and now / The judgement is reversed. . . . ​In my heart of hearts I know what must be done” (BT, 63). But “­Here and now” is already too late. Entering with his terrible news—­“Dead. They are dead. And the living bear the guilt” (BT, 66)—­the Messenger offers his own reflections on the heart of a strong ruler (“­there he was. Strong king, / Strong head of ­family, the man in charge”): You can dwell in state, Have all the trappings of success and style, But if you c­ an’t enjoy them in your heart What does it mean? If your joy in life’s destroyed ­You’re left with a mirage. Shadows and ash. (BT, 65) The Messenger’s heart-­breaking narrative—­the hasty burial of Polyneices’s remains, the opening of the cave, the discovery of Antigone’s suicide, the death of Haemon when he turns his sword on himself—­teaches “us living witnesses / The mortal cost of ill-­judged words and deeds” (BT, 69). When Creon returns, it is as “king of wrong,” in his own words: “wrong-­headed on the throne, / Wrong-­headed in the home, / Wrong-­footed by the heavens,” and crushed by “the hammer-­blow of justice” (BT, 70). His self-­recrimination knows no bounds ­after his wife Euridice dies by her own hand, killing herself with

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Creon’s sword. Creon cancels his very existence, calling himself “nothing now. Forget me. Treat me as nothing” (BT, 73), and fi­nally: “Every­thing I’ve touched / I have destroyed. . . . ​My recklessness and pride / I paid for in the end” (BT, 74). The Chorus adds its own moral: “Wise conduct is the key to happiness. . . . ​/ ­Those who overbear ­will be brought to grief ” (BT, 74)—as if recommending “wise conduct” could ever restrain an autocrat bent on imposing his own ­will. Creon’s decree had deprived Polyneices’s body of the customary purification rites (washing and burial) that would allow him to enter the society of the dead: “Hereby he is adjudged / A carcass for the dogs and birds to feed on.” Patriots are to be honored, but “traitors and subversives” are to be denied “[e]qual footing with loyal citizens” (BT, 17). When Polyneices’s body is found to have been partially interred, Creon blames the work of “[a] certain poisonous minority / Unready to admit the rule of law” (BT, 22). Evidently the poison is already within the city gates, never mind Polyneices’s treachery. Creon’s cynical equation of disloyalty with bribery—­his bluster that the ­people, and even leaders, can always be bought—­hints at the potential treachery of all citizens. His anti-­corruption stance proj­ects financial motives even onto Tiresias, whose graphic description of his failed divination sacrifice accentuates the language of pollution: “Slime, / Slime was what I got instead of flame. / ­Matter oozing out from near the bone” (BT, 58). He might be describing the decay of Polyneices’s body in the heat of the midday sun. Tiresias locates the decomposing body as the origin of the contagion spreading far and wide beyond the city: “That’s why we have this plague, / This vile pollution” (BT, 58). Creon responds defiantly, “None of your pollution talk scares me” (BT, 59), but Tiresias has the last word: flesh ­w ill answer for flesh and corpse for corpse; the unburied corpses left on the battlefield ­will turn to filth, carried back by crows and dropped on their own cities, spreading plague and making “­enemy cities rise to avenge each corpse” (BT, 62)—­a vision of warring city-­states. Heaney gives Creon the language of vested interest and Tiresias the language of pollution. He reserves for Antigone the voice of mourning that he heard in that long-­ago Irish lament for a murdered lover. Grieving not only for her unburied ­brother—­“crying her eyes out. . . . ​She was like a wild bird round an empty nest” (BT, 28)—­she grieves for herself, for every­thing she ­will miss in life and love, and ultimately for the doomed f­ amily to which she is joined in death: “Given away to death! / Remember this, citizens. / I am linked on Hades’ arm. . . . ​He ­will give me to Acheron, / Lord of the pitch-­black lake . . .” (BT, 50). Comparing herself to “Niobe turned to stone / In the thawing snow

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and rain” (BT, 51), perpetually weeping for her dead ­children, Antigone is aligned both with maternal grief—­despite her childless state—­and with the natu­ral ele­ments, not just stone, but snow and rain, or “ivy in a shower / Sluicing down the ridge / Of high Mount Sipylus” (BT, 51). She is already beyond the city and the binary logic of inside/outside, patriot/traitor that defines the politics of the city-­state as Creon understands it. Countering the language of loyalty and disloyalty, Antigone had asked: “Who knows what loyalty is in the underworld?” (BT, 33). Her affinity with elemental nature transforms her stony prison—­“Stone of my wedding chamber, stone of my tomb, / Stone of my prison roof and prison floor” (BT, 53)—­into a passage to her long-­wished-­ for homecoming in the underworld where her f­ amily awaits her: “They are my ­people and t­ hey’re waiting for me” (BT, 53). Antigone imagines herself as ­going to meet the doomed, multigenerational Oedipal f­ amily associated in an ­earlier Chorus with the underwater heave of an ocean wave surging up onto the shingle: “It starts like an undulation underwater, / A surge that hauls black sand up off the bottom, / Then turns itself into a tidal current . . .” (BT, 39). Death, like an unstoppable tide, propels a glad ­family reunion: “when they see me coming down the road / ­They’ll hurry out to meet me, all of them” (BT, 54)—­father, m ­ other, b­ rothers, all “[a]s dear to me as when I washed and dressed / And laid them out” (BT, 54). Washing, dressing, laying out has been her ­woman’s work. The underworld of the dead to which Antigone ultimately belongs is allied to memory. For Antigone, the space of the inner world, where internal objects are preserved, mourned, and never fully given up, is inseparable from her definition of justice, “Justice dwelling deep / Among the gods of the dead” (BT, 29). A reading inspired by Freud’s view of the Death Drive (fundamentally conservative, destructive, and repetitive) might put a darker spin on Antigone’s commitment to her care-­giving role and her imaginary journey to rejoin her dead ­family—­not so much upholding Justice, as wedded to death rather than life, a legacy of the “wildness” associated with Oedipus’s passionate self-­ blinding. She herself acknowledges the incestuous tie that binds her to the past as “that fatal line / And the ghastly love I sprang from” (BT, 52). How might this predetermined and repetitive attachment—­“Over and over again / ­Because I am who I am / I retrace that fatal line” (BT, 52)—­qualify readings framed by a modern understanding of h­ uman rights?15 What place is occupied by love’s “wildness,” its sheer irrationality and capacity to unleash anarchy? What does it mean to belong to a ­family linked to death?—or for that ­matter, to a community whose fragile access to po­liti­cal rights is constantly at risk of

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being withdrawn, creating a climate of fear and insecurity that can tip into suicidal vio­lence. Shamsie’s novel Home Fire takes its epigraph from Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes (“The ones we love . . . ​are enemies of the state”). It sets out to answer ­these questions, putting equal pressure on the potential for excess of love—­its wildness—to overturn po­liti­cal order, and on the issue of ­human rights, ­here unsecured even by the rights of citizenship. Shamsie relocates Antigone to London’s British Muslim community and middle-­class neighborhoods. Set in the aftermath of the “war on terror” with its hideous revelations about torture at Bagram Air Base and the conditions of arbitrary detention at Guantánamo Bay, Home Fire shows how grief, shame, and disempowerment can lead both to alienation from one’s community of origin and to home-­grown terrorism inspired by the rise of Islamic State (the life of this par­tic­u­lar ­family has been shadowed by the death of an absentee Jihadi ­father). Shamsie’s novel exposes the scar-­tissue of assimilation along with the unhealed wounds of dispossession that coexist within even established and well-­knit immigrant communities. ­These can be partly understood as f­ amily ­matters, exacerbated by the chronic insecurity that is a by-­product of twenty-­first-­century “securitization.” Shamsie’s compromised, superficially sympathetic Creon is a British politician of Pakistani descent whose rise to the position of Home Secretary has meant distancing himself from his Muslim background and Pakistani origins. The novel’s law-­student Antigone, Aneeka, embarks on a passionate affair with the Home Secretary’s privileged son, Eamonn, initially as a last-­ditch attempt to bring home her twin b­ rother, who has been successfully groomed in London as a recruit to a Syrian Islamic State media unit, but then the love affair becomes for real. Now recoiling in horror at the Islamic State’s brutal regime in Raqqa, her ­brother wants nothing so much as to come home.16 When he is killed near the British Consulate in Istanbul while trying to escape from his Islamic State minder, Aneeka engages in a fiery and ultimately suicidal campaign to repatriate his body—­now decaying in the Karachi heat—­after it has been summarily offloaded to Pakistan and his British citizenship revoked by the unyielding Home Secretary. Home Fire revisits the situation created by Theresa May when, as Home Secretary between 2010 and 2016, she stripped Islamic State terrorists and terror-­ suspects of the protection of British citizenship. May had also introduced a controversial amendment to the 2014 Immigration Act that would have allowed the government to strip British nationals suspected of terrorism of their citizenship even if they ­were thereby rendered stateless, in defiance of

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international law. Shamsie’s novel incorporates verbatim Shami Chakrabarti’s scathing 2014 indictment, speaking as president of the UK h­ uman rights organ­ization, Liberty: “Removing the right to have rights is a new low. . . . ​ Statelessness is a tool of despots not demo­crats.” (HF 206, 276).17 The action of the novel takes place in the age of instant information (cellphones, Skype, wall-­to-­wall TV coverage, tabloid journalism—­every­thing but Twitter) that has become synonymous with the surveillance state, whose dangers include, for the internet-­savvy Aneeka, “googling while Muslim.” Complicating the equivalence of Creon and Antigone as equally unyielding and hot-­headed, Shamsie links questions of identity, ­family, and community to the precariousness of national citizenship—­defined as a legally protected right, rather than a privilege to be withdrawn at w ­ ill by the Home Secretary, as h­ uman rights ­lawyers have not failed to point out.18 Chakrabarti’s phrase, “the right to have rights” echoes Hannah Arendt in a skeptical essay originally published in 1949, “ ‘The Rights of Man’: What Are They?” l­ater absorbed into The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).19 Arendt observes that the “right to have rights” first became vis­i­ble along with widespread statelessness in the wake of World War II, when t­ hose rights had already been lost: “We became aware of the existence of a right to have rights (and that means to live in a framework where one is judged by one’s actions and opinions) and a right to belong to some kind of or­ga­nized community, only when millions of ­people emerged who had lost and could not regain ­these rights ­because of the new global po­liti­cal situation.”20 ­Human rights, she saw, remain fundamentally unprotected—­a t­ hing of the past—­without the guarantee of national citizenship, thereby creating stateless persons who belong nowhere, or ­else (as Shamsie’s account of border-­control interrogation by a British security official vividly conveys) rendering their citizenship insecure, since they become suspect even when their documents are in order. For Arendt (a stateless person herself for almost twenty years), the “right to have rights” is inseparable from belonging to a community within which one can function effectively as a thinking and acting agent, or, in other words, as a full po­liti­cal participant. In Arendt’s carefully calibrated language, deprivation of the “right to belong to some kind of or­ga­nized community”—an all-­too-­precarious form of po­liti­ cal belonging—­incurs extreme penalties that exceed the deprivation of ­human rights as legally or even theologically defined. In a passage that has been seized on by critics of ­human rights grounded on historic Declarations, Conventions, or an ultimately theologically derived “humanity,” Arendt frames her argument in terms of the deprivation of belonging

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to a community as a m ­ atter of course (or not belonging as a m ­ atter of choice), and where being treated like a criminal depends on having committed a crime: The fundamental deprivation of h­ uman rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. Something much more fundamental than freedom and rights, which are rights of citizens, is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a ­matter of course and not belonging no longer a ­matter of choice, or when one is placed in a situation where u­ nless he commits a crime, his treatment by o­ thers does not depend on what he does or does not do. This extremity, and nothing ­else, is the situation of ­people deprived of ­human rights.21 Without the guarantee of participation in a functioning polity and its l­egal system—­w ithout freedoms and rights secured by citizenship—­“ ­human rights” remain fragile at best, and illusory at worst.22 The implications of Arendt’s long-­overlooked but now critical contention (that rights can only be fully secured by national citizenship) do more than upend issues that have become increasingly debated by con­temporary scholars of l­egal identity and citizenship.23 The right to belong, redefined as the right to national citizenship (notwithstanding issues of nationalism and the vexed status of ethnic and minority groups) is seen by some ­human rights ­lawyers as the only secure foundation for claiming more abstractly conceived h­ uman rights, w ­ hether natu­ral, ­legal, or God-­given. The explosive conclusion to Home Fire allows love in all its madness to appear in a new guise, allied both to destruction and to a momentary, perhaps wishful glimpse of “peace” (the novel’s last word) as the two doomed lovers cling to each other in the Karachi park where Aneeka, joined by Eamonn, is keeping a televised protest vigil over her dead ­brother’s body—­w itnessed from afar by a Home Secretary doomed to lose the son he loves as the price of his unbending po­liti­cal stance. Shamsie frames the tragedy with the comforting, tenacious, painful, and sometimes tyrannous (even duplicitous) ties that bind lover to lover, ­sister to ­sister, ­sister to ­brother, parent to child, and ­family members to each other. The novel’s focal consciousness and its balancing-­ point are articulated by Aneeka’s older s­ ister, Isma (the more reflective and responsible of the two ­sisters—an alternative take on Ismene’s caution).24 It is Isma who voices the novel’s implicit position, close to the end, in a late-­night kitchen-­confrontation with the Home Secretary, who recognizes in her an authority derived from the shared community of origin from which he has

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distanced himself in the interests of his po­liti­cal ­career. ­After rearing her much younger twin siblings, Isma has left them to pursue her own path as a gradu­ate student in sociology at an American university, where she turns her encounter with UK border-­control into fieldwork for a collaborative paper titled “The Insecurity State: Britain and the Instrumentalization of Fear” (HF, 40). Instrumentalizing affect, securitization relocates the threat within an already marginalized subject identified as a security risk, rendering her doubly insecure—an inhabitant of the State of non-­belonging. As Judith Butler puts it, “the state . . . ​can signify the source of non-­belonging, even produce that non-­ belonging as a quasi-­permanent state.”25

ii. Antigone’s Time “Where I lack light, I am ­silent.” — ­s ophocl e s, oe di pus r e x 26

Meditating on her own practice, the artist and filmmaker Tacita Dean defines “analogue” not as a transcription or a translation but as “an equivalent in a parallel form: continuously variable, mea­sur­able and material.”27 Dean’s definition allows for works that are more than “versions,” yet still recognizably related to the original. Analogue film includes variation, measurability, and materiality (indexicality as opposed to digitality), and—­for Dean—­a commitment to recording (in) real time. Her almost-­hour-­long film Antigone uses the 56 minutes of the ­Great American Eclipse of 2017 as its timekeeper, while saluting the photochemical medium of a vanis­hing cinematic era, 35-­millimeter analogue film. In the space of ­those 56 minutes, Dean tracks Antigone’s and Oedipus’s wanderings in the wilderness, occupying the unwritten Sophoclean play between Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus.28 Dean’s film also takes place in a personal time-­lapse—­its making included a twenty-­year delay—­while si­mul­ta­neously conducting a rear-­guard defense of what had already become an outmoded film technology. For her, Dean writes, digital technology “just does not have the means to create poetry” (“Kodak,” TDSW, 68).29 Using a poetics inseparable from obsolescence, Dean transforms Antigone into her own “take” on the missing Sophoclean play, juxtaposing a succession of desolate or chthonic landscapes—­unpopulated wildernesses—­w ith the time-­scape of a solar eclipse, while addressing an unresolved intrafamilial riddle. Dean found the script for her long-­unmade film in a poem by the translator, poet, and classicist Anne Carson: “TV Men: Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2).”30

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When Oedipus at Colonus opens, Oedipus and Antigone are resting on a rock near a grove outside Athens. Carson’s two “scripts” use this ­imagined resting-­ point to ironize the limitations of TV as a visual and conceptual medium. Antigonick, Carson’s 2012 version of Sophocles’s tragedy—as much commentary (allusive, elliptic, and “antic”) as translation—­frames Antigone’s prob­lem with previous layers of interpretation, including Butler’s post-­Hegelian reading in Antigone’s Claim.31 Antigonick follows both Butler and Agamben in viewing Antigone’s defiance of Creon as a rebellion against the “state of exception [that] marks the limits of the law.”32 Neither inside nor outside, Carson’s Antigone bears the full weight of her exclusion as a nonperson. The title of Carson’s Antigonick also alludes punningly to the “nick” of time—­the formal reversal that speeds ­toward irreversible catastrophe in the accelerated time frame of Sophoclean tragedy. Both Dean’s Antigone and Carson’s Antigonick constitute what Richard Grusin calls radical remediation, or “remediation all the way down,” in the sense that they put in question how we understand or mea­sure anything, including their Sophoclean original.33 Commenting on her film, Dean emphasizes the indirection or unknowing from which meaning emerged only as the film took shape in the cutting-­room. Not knowing where it would end up—­wandering in the wilderness, like blind Oedipus with Antigone as his guide—­allowed contingency to shape the work. Dean’s Antigone imagines a guiding and informing role for the d­ aughter who leads Oedipus t­ oward his own reckoning with the gods. Carson’s Antigonick confronts the retrospective meanings that have accrued to Sophocles’s tragedy, making her tersely abbreviated translation in its own fashion a “wild” (unorthodox) reading of both Antigone and the play’s subsequent interpretations. Carson’s radical Antigonick brings to light what lies between the lines of Sophocles’s dialogue: Dean’s Antigone is committed to blindness—to what eludes both the camera’s eye and her own. Not-­seeing and not-­knowing define her patient practice, in contrast to the critical and scholarly omniscience of Carson’s Antigonick. In the end, they ­don’t so much read each other from divergent perspectives, as fold into each other. Dean’s film ends by incorporating Carson’s role as poet and interpreter, making her an actor within the film, playing the part of herself as instructor, oracle, and voice-­over as she reads from her own verse “script.” Dean described the projected film as “this moment between the two Sophocles plays that I would transcribe in a con­temporary way. It was a dialogue between the ­father and d­ aughter in some sort of desert situation, but in a con­temporary setting.”34 What did she mean? Making no secret of her long

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inability to complete the proj­ect, she returned to her original 1997 proposal for a Sundance residency. Occupying the interstice between Oedipus’s discovery of his own guilt and self-­blinding, and his arrival at the sacred grove where he is eventually received by the gods, Dean’s film also follows the real-­time trajectory of a solar eclipse. We never actually see Antigone guiding her blinded and self-­exiled father/brother through a series of “desert” scenes. Instead, the actor playing Oedipus, Stephen Dillane, laboriously tap-­taps across the deserted landscape of Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor, stumbling realistically and forced to feel his way forward, temporarily “blinded by his eclipse glasses,” arriving somehow on the banks of the Mississippi. Walking and wandering, darkness and light, and above all the slow passage of time, structure a film that touches on Dean’s long-­standing preoccupation with blinding and maiming, as well as her interest in strange landscapes (Bodmin Moor’s bleakness, Delphi’s vapors, Yellowstone National Park’s thermal springs), along with hard-­ to-­catch solar effects that test the limits of her medium and of vision itself.35 Dean surrenders herself to the camera’s blind seeing, identifying with the position of blind Oedipus as he traverses the unmea­sured, immea­sur­able distance between Thebes and Colonus. In the essay that accompanied her film, Dean writes: “I maimed and blinded the camera to make Antigone. Heavy with studio lenses and with its vision impaired by masks, I surrendered agility and spontaneity and instead let the camera see with its inner eye” (“Antigone,” TDSW, 110). Her Antigone testifies to a blind pro­cess that allows for chance effects of light and the contingencies of sight. Dean’s willingness to wait it out defines her patient relation to film-­ making, including the painful gap between the disappearance and reappearance of the sun: “waiting for the eclipse and then waiting for the return of the normal sun, which was actually more painful” (Obrist, 39) (figure 6.1). The two long minutes of darkness during the sun’s total eclipse come exactly half-­ way through the film’s 56 minutes. Losing and refinding the sun’s light provides its formal and cosmic structure, linking a solar vicissitude to the historical accidents of film technology.36 Heavy with equipment, impeded by her half-­blinded camera, Dean grafts the ancient past onto a juxtaposed series of mysterious landscapes. Delphi’s vapors and Yellowstone’s volcanic steam combine the mythic past with the unknown workings of the earth. On a split screen, the film tracks the slow-­ moving figure of blind Oedipus from the archaic remoteness of Cornwall’s Bodmin Moor (not far from Dean’s first art school) to the industrial banks of the Mississippi, where the hundred-­year-­old Union Pacific railway-­bridge

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figure 6.1. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

crosses the broad expanse of the river. In Thebes, Illinois, a disused courtroom converted to a library provides the scene for the culminating discussion of Sophocles’s Antigone between Carson as herself and Dillane (in and out of his role) as Oedipus, with Dean pre­sent in the background.37 Like the sun’s 56-­minute-­long eclipse, a train’s crossing of the Mississippi against the sunset sky occupies a single take, forming part of the film’s bridging-­act as it travels in time and space (figure 6.2). “Why did it take so long? To get from t­ here to ­here?” asks Oedipus, crouched over an open-­air fire in the darkness, as Dean voices an unseen Antigone off to one side.38 ­Because, she might have replied, that’s just the time it takes. Dean’s film draws heavi­ly on aspects of her own f­ amily romance, addressing unsolved riddles that include her fascination with her older ­sister’s name, Antigone, and with the entwined relationship of Antigone and Oedipus, for which the gap between the two Sophoclean plays provides a meta­phor: “My interest lay in the gap between the plays . . . ​as if scripting that fictional time might be the means to give voice to the complexities of that very par­tic­u­lar relationship” (TDSW, 107).39 Fictional and ­actual time-­gap open a space in which to explore the ambiguity of given names and the tangled threads of ­family relationships. In an extract from a 1997 conversation with the filmmaker Stewart Stern (read by the publisher Peter Mayer in the film), Stern comments that the story shows the entanglement of Antigone and Oedipus, providing

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figure 6.2. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Antigone with the opportunity to “tell him what­ever she has to say and get out of ­there without him. To be able to say you go your way and I’ll go mine.”40 Stern’s comment suggests Dean’s unspoken need to ­free herself from her Oedipal ­family of origin, in a manner and at a time of her own choosing. She arrives at her reckoning with the past (and her f­ ather) only by submitting herself to the camera’s blindness and delay. Dean acknowledges that she used the name Antigone as “the prism through which to work . . . ​a space where I could blindly wander and forget enough to find my destination” (TDSW, 111). By forgetting enough, she arrives at her destination: Thebes, Illinois. Why would a modern f­ ather call his d­ aughter Antigone? Dean’s f­ ather, a judge, called Antigone “the first feminist,” seemingly oblivious to the weight placed on his older ­daughter by giving her such a tragically freighted name.41 Oedipus at Colonus powerfully articulates Oedipus’s love for both his d­ aughters (Ismene as well as Antigone), as he moves t­ oward the as-­yet unknown moment of his death. His name (swell-­foot) is linked to Dean’s long obsession with feet, overdetermined by her own increasing arthritic lameness—­glimpsed in the film—as well as an old ­family friend nick-­named “Bootsy” on account of his orthopedic shoe.42 “I did all this ‘swollen foot’ stuff when I was a student, even about Oedipus” (Obrist, 13). Are names destiny (destination), or a retrospective back-­formation that shapes the meaning of the story only in hindsight, and even shapes an identity? Does the meaning of a name only ­later

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figure 6.3. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

become clear, like the mystery surrounding Oedipus’s birth, or the events leading up to his death? Or, for that ­matter, does a long-­unmade film only find its meaning in the cutting-­room? Dean superimposes her stylized, enigmatic drawings of feet on the image of the sun, like a partial eclipse or the shadowy foot of Skiapod (“Skipiod,” as Dean miscalls him) (figure 6.3). The sun (cosmic organ of sight) and its eclipse (sign of cosmic blindness) illuminate the now-­ you-­see-it, now-­you-­don’t meanings of sibling naming: Tiggy (short for Antigone), and Tacita, or “­silent one.” The older s­ ister—­her rebellion tragically silenced in Sophocles’s Antigone—­gives voice to the ­silent younger ­sister, Tacita, who has choosen to identify herself with images rather than words. Dean describes how, in making her film, she took on the pressures of dysfunction: “I felt as blind as Oedipus, and as reliant as he on Antigone, although my Antigone was buried deep within my unconscious pro­cess” (TDSW, 109). Oedipus’s self-­blinding is repeated in Dean’s deliberate disabling of the camera, her partial masking of the aperture gate before shooting one section of her film, afterward rewinding the camera to film another section: “This meant that the film was composed without the possibility of seeing what was already exposed in the frame.” The random juxtapositions ­were like the throw of a dice, a ­gamble that prioritized the medium over the artist: “Making images like a gambler in light . . . ​my preference for using film is bound up in the blindness it necessitates in order for me to see. A medium guides an artist. . . . ​I maimed

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and blinded the camera to make Antigone.” The language of blindness and maiming identifies Dean with Antigone’s father/brother Oedipus. Surrendering to her self-­imposed technical constraints, Dean “let the camera see with its inner eye” (TDSW, 110), the medium of the “optical unconscious” identified by Walter Benjamin.43 The medium guides the partially self-­blinded artist, just as Antigone guides Oedipus. Dean describes her practice of indirection as a way of remaining true to the work. Not knowing where she was g­ oing becomes a validation of her filmmaking: “somehow I am only able to keep faith in the work I make if I am blind to its final manifestation” (TDSW, 109). Dean’s film, she writes, is paradoxically “instructed by blindness”—­“[her] own creative blindness, the blindness of Oedipus and the cosmic blindness found in nature in the form of the total eclipse of the sun” (TDSW, 109–10). The image is tied not only to the (Oedipal) blindness of the filmmaker, but to impersonal cosmic forces that further disable the camera’s seeing, freeing the optical unconscious to do its work. Structured by the power­f ul binaries of its medium (darkness and light, blindness and sight), Antigone tracks an overarching cosmic narrative: “balance and proportion in the universe and sublime blindness in nature” (TDSW, 110). Its locations juxtapose familial, chthonic, and sublime ele­ments—­ Bodmin Moor’s windswept landscape and Yellowstone’s geothermal springs (figure 6.4).44 The film took on the formal structure of a diptych in response to Dean’s ambivalence about film’s monocular form: “I found synthesis with the eclipse’s perfect cosmic binary and turned Antigone into a diptych: sun and moon, dark and light, Antigone and Oedipus, father/daughter, brother/sister and two blind eyes” (TDSW, 110). Meanwhile the vis­i­ble sprocket-­holes in 35-­millimeter film remind the viewer of the materiality of film—­yet another way to mea­sure time.45 No fast-­forwarding interrupts the film’s slow-­moving passage from one scene or continent to another, or from f­ amily of origin to Sophoclean myth. The two self-­blinded eyes of the camera provide both its structuring device and its interpretive apparatus, a mechanism that combines passive recording with a dynamic synthesis of ele­ments, as in the pro­cesses of photochemical film—­receptive not only to the alternation of light and dark, but also to the subtle poetry of color and light-­effects that obscure or transform a landscape, making it both hauntingly beautiful and unrecognizably strange. Dean’s Antigone is a landscape film that uses the moving image as its medium—­a medium already associated with the past: “For me, making a film is connected to the idea of loss and disappearance.”46 The wanderings of Oedipus and Antigone become a meta­phor for the disappearance of analogue film.

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figure 6.4. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

iii. The Nick of Time “­We’re standing in / the nick of time.” —­a n n e c a r son, a n t igon ick

Lacking a film script of her own, Dean found one in the intimate gesture and fierce irony of Carson’s “Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2).” Carson features in the film in her own energized persona—­discussing, interrogating, oracular; pacing while pounding a baseball mitt with a judicial hammer in the former Thebes, Illinois, courtroom; reading her poem aloud, sometimes in doubled, unsynchronized voice-­over. Why did the journey take so long? Carson answers with a pointed non sequitur: ­because Antigone and Oedipus ­were in-­between ­people, dirty, polluting and polluted, like ­matter in the wrong place. Carson’s “TV Men” had already responded ironically to the limits and exigencies of tele­vi­sion, based on her experience of the 30-­second soundbites imposed on her when she was drafted in as the token humanist on a TV program.47 The epigraph to “TV Men” alludes to Longinus’s On Sublimity: “TV makes ­things dis­appear. Oddly the word comes from Latin videre, ‘to see’ ” (MOH, 61).48 Tele­vi­sion, we infer, is a visual medium that paradoxically dis­appears t­ hings. Like Dean, Carson is interested in disappearance. “Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2)” includes both longer and shorter versions of Antigone’s wanderings as she

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walks ­behind Oedipus “to brake the wind” u­ nder a “March sky cold as a hare’s paw” (MOH, 100). The longer version is atmospheric and poetic—­Carson’s rendering of the scene that opens Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus. The abridged version is scripted and drastically cut, resonating with the compressed irony characteristic of Carson’s Antigonick. Eating lunch on the edge of a crater, surrounded by ancient trees forced to the ground by the wind, Antigone tenderly guides Oedipus’s hand to “One green centimeter of twig / still vertical,” and “Lightly left it t­ here” (MOH, 100). The light-­touch evocation dis­appears on TV. On-­air, Antigone takes the mike to offer a brief, exasperated commentary on their wandering life-­style (“­There is nowhere to keep anything the way we live. / This I find hard”). She responds irreverently to a request to describe her ­future proj­ects (“I want to make a lot of money”) and evades the interviewer’s next question, “No I do not lament. / . . . ​ ­Today we are light, tomorrow shadow, says the song.” Her interlocutor gets short shrift: “Ironic? Not ­really. My ­father is the ironic one. / I have my own ideas about it. / At our backs is a big anarchy” (MOH, 101). Unlike Oedipus, “the ironic one”—­ironized by his meta­phorical and self-­inflicted blindness—­Antigone has “[her] own ideas.” The language of “anarchy” and “freedom,” along with elliptical phrases such as “Too much memory,” gesture ­toward Antigone’s as-­ yet-­undefined role in Sophocles’s ­future play. She promises: “if you are strong you can twist a bit off [anarchy] / and pound on it—­your freedom!” (MOH, 101). Carson’s Antigone is both anarchist and freedom-­fighter. Pared down to five concentrated lines, Script 2 offers its own directorial commentary: “[For sound-­bite purposes we had to cut Antigone’s script from 42 seconds to 7: substantial changes of wording ­were involved but we felt we got her ‘take’ right.]” The cut version represents this stringent editing, along with Carson’s own flippant “take”: Other ­things I like: a lot of money! The way we live, light and shadow are ironic. Proj­ects? yes: physics. Anarchy. My ­father. ­Here, twist a bit off. Freedom is next. (MOH, 101)49 This unspoken verdict on TV as a medium captures irony’s b­ itter twist. Antigone’s “own” ideas (about authority and law, freedom and anarchy) frame Carson’s l­ater, fiercer Antigonick. In a short verse epistle on “the task of the translator of Antigone,” Carson chooses to engage with Antigone in person, addressing her as “dear Antigone” and announcing: “it’s not that we want to

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understand every­thing / or even to understand anything / we want to understand something ­else” (Antigonick, 3). What is that something ­else? In line with Butler’s reflections on speech acts, kinship, and power in Antigone’s Claim, Carson’s “something ­else” may be that Antigone not only defies Creon’s edict against burying her ­brother but also openly admits to her defiance by putting it into words: “She not only did it, but she had the nerve to say she did it.”50 Antigonick is heavi­ly burdened by the interpretative history to which Carson’s prefatory epistle alludes: Hegel’s “eternal irony of the community”; George Eliot’s characterization of Antigone as an example of “masculine intellect and moral sense”; Slavoj Zizek’s Tito, standing up to Stalin in 1942; the leaders of the French Re­sis­tance in the first-­night audience of Jean Anouilh’s Antigone in 1944 during the Nazi occupation of Paris. Carson also alludes to Bertolt Brecht’s postwar Antigone (1948), in which Antigone carries a door on her back as the sign of her burdened outsider-­status—­a reference invoked in the text of Antigonick, when Kreon’s wife Eurydike calls Antigone “that girl with the undead / strapped to her back” (Antigonick, 39). When it comes to Antigone, ­there is never a blank slate: “who can be innocent in dealing with you / t­ here was never a blank slate” (Antigonick, 6). But the translator’s task remains, “to get you and your prob­lem / across into En­glish from ancient Greek” (Antigonick, 4). Like Samuel Beckett’s attempt “to bore hole a­ fter hole in [language] ­until what cowers ­behind it seeps through,” or John Cage’s method of building up the silence of 4′33″  “out of many small pieces of silence,” Carson asks us to listen to a drastic linguistic cut: “the sound of what happens / when every­thing normal/musical/careful/conventional or pious is taken away” (Antigonick, 5, 6). Antigonick is as much about the challenge of using pared-­down language as Dean’s film is about making analogue film during an eclipse of the sun, using a half-­blinded camera lens. Carson’s bare-­bones version offers its own commentary on the densely knit text of Sophocles’s Antigone.51 As if to affirm the value of the translator’s cut, an abbreviated Antigonick speeds to its foreseen catastrophe: Chorus: “quick quick quick” (Antigonick, 36). Carson’s “Note from the Translator” prefacing her 2015 translation of Antigone emphasizes the riddling untranslatability of Sophocles’s language. Carson’s first example, Antigone’s “I was caught / in an act of perfect piety” underlines “the precariousness of the moment: it is top-­ heavy with meaning” (Sophokles Antigone, 5). Like the encumbrance of a door strapped to Antigone’s back, it lugs too much meaning derived from the past. Carson defines this linguistic weight by referencing Aristotle’s knock-­out observation: “a tragic plot is most effective when the recognition and the reversal

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happen at one blow” (Sophokles Antigone, 7)—­the moment emphasized by Antigonick. Carson’s second note also focuses on the prob­lem of untranslatability, alluding to the “withness” or in-­betweenness (the improper mix that belongs nowhere) that defines an Antigone who is both d­ aughter and s­ ister, destined for a living death: “I’m a strange new kindofinbetween ­thing ­aren’t I / not at home with the dead nor with the living” (Sophokles Antigone, 8). In Carson’s rendering, the negativity of her living death informs Antigone’s final words: “unwept / unwed / unloved / I go” (Antigonick, 30). The Antigone of Carson’s Antigonick occupies an unlivable space, at once within and outside a system of symbolic terms (kinship, law, piety, and language) that leads to her silencing by Kreon’s rule of law. Antigonick references Giorgio Agamben’s po­liti­cal realm of the concentration camp and refugee camp—­a realm to which Carson (playing herself ) also alludes pointedly during her courtroom discussion with Dillane as Oedipus in Dean’s film.52 Carson’s Kreon upbraids Antigone’s spectacular autonomy, “autonomous / autarchic / autodidactic . . . ​and autobeguiled” (Antigonick, 19–20), raising some of the unanswered questions about her actions and motivations only to beg them—­questions not only about Antigone’s autonomy, but about her death-­wish and her fatal identification with her Oedipal ­family, along with her refusal to find an exit or to allow anyone e­ lse to find one for her. But not even Antigone’s self-­questioning can diminish the force of her closing lament in Carson’s stripped-­down version: “O tomb / O bridal chamber / O ­house in the ground forever” (Antigonick, 31). Language is ­there for Carson’s Antigone when she needs it; when it’s already too late. The extra character in Antigonick—­“Nick a mute part [always on stage, he mea­sures ­things]” (Antigonick, 7)—­picks up the phrase “the nick of time” uttered by Carson’s Kreon (Antigonick, 17). The phrase returns in Eurydike’s speech a­ fter she hears of her son Haimon’s suicide, and before she kills herself: “Have you heard this expression / the nick of time / what is a nick, / I asked my son” (Antigonick, 40). The word “nick” receives its fullest treatment in the penultimate Chorus that precedes the news of Antigone’s and Haemon’s suicides. Instead of praying to the gods at this juncture, like the Chorus in Sophocles’s play, the Chorus in Carson’s Antigonick meditates on time, the tick-­tock beat of its time-­keeping lines commenting on the brinkmanship of Kreon’s change of mind—­too late to avert Antigone’s suicide, or that of his son: “another / an hour / an hour and a half / a year / a split second / a de­cade / this instant / a second / a split second / a now / a nick / a neck. . . .” Carson’s Chorus ends: “­We’re standing in / the nick of time” (Antigonick, 37), echoing Tiresias’s warning to

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Kreon (“­you’re standing on a razor”; Antigonick, 35). The Chorus occupies the precise critical moment in time, the razor’s-­edge, when Kreon’s change of mind and Antigone’s life hang in the balance. The role of the Chorus is to underline “the precariousness of the moment,” the instant between Kreon’s reversal of his judgment and the catastrophe that undoes him and every­one he loves, making him a creature “perfectly blended with pain” (Antigonick, 43)—­mixed-up with death, an in-­between ­thing like Antigone. In its own way, the well-­worn phrase “the nick of time” parallels the untranslatable phrase to which Carson’s “Note from the Translator” draws attention, glossing Antigone’s “caught in an act of perfect piety” as the reduplicative “I have been completely pious in committing an act of complete piety” (Sophokles Antigone, 5). This is Antigone’s linguistic double-­bind—­caught red-­ handed by her own words as she breaches Kreon’s edict: “I ­don’t know the words go wrong they call my piety impiety / . . . ​I was caught / in an act of perfect piety” (Antigonick, 31, 32). Antigone is entangled by language, as if language itself constitutes a form of double jeopardy that catches her out and puts her in the wrong, not simply catching her in the wrong place at the wrong time. In Shakespearean usage, the reduplicative phrase, “the nick of time” refers, to the contrary, to being in the right place at the right time. During the Re­nais­ sance, timepieces and the necks of musical instruments ­were both adjusted to “nicks” or notches that kept them precisely on time and in tune. This is the function of Time itself, the grave clock-­keeper (in Ben Jonson’s words) “who is to see that they all keep time to a nick.”53 Carson’s Antigone is wrong-­footed by language and by the irreversibility of time; the clock c­ an’t be turned back any more than Kreon’s edict can be undone. The superfluous mute character introduced into Antigonick is the inexorable timekeeper who marks the hinge between reversible and irreversible catastrophe—­before a neck is broken or a sword plunged—by reflecting (like the Chorus) on the difference made by an hour, a year, a second, a de­cade or a split second. This is the precarious moment weighed at each turn and counterturn by the end-­stopped form of Sophoclean tragedy, and accentuated in the quick, insistent beat of Carson’s colloquially abbreviated lines. The tick-­ tock of Antigonick’s verse is the timekeeper of the tragic impetus that drives the play to its end, and beyond: “[exeunt omnes except Nick who continues mea­ sur­ing]” (Antigonick, 44). In Carson’s Antigonick, Nick is the only character who never runs out of time, moving inexorably on t­ oward the unknown f­ uture. Dean’s film includes extended footage of Carson pacing the floor in a restless choreography of her own, as she reflects on the meaning of Sophocles’s

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figure 6.5. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Antigone during her discussion with Dillane (both himself and Oedipus), and with Dean in her own persona (briefly glimpsed in the courtroom). The courtroom-­cum-­library, with its wooden chairs, books, and bookshelves, and the distant view of the Thebes railway bridge over the Mississippi (echoed in a framed print on the wall) provide the setting for a closing po­liti­cal debate (figure 6.5). Carson’s reference to Agamben’s “state of exception / [that] marks the limit of the law” (Antigonick, 39) frames the discussion. In Antigone’s Claim, Butler cites Agamben’s Homo Sacer: “we live increasingly in a time in which populations without full citizenship exist within states; their ontological status as ­legal subjects is suspended.”54 Butler continues: “How are we to understand this realm . . . ​which haunts the public sphere, which is precluded from the public constitution of the ­human, but which is ­human in an apparently catachrestic sense of that term?”55 Like piety, like kinship, “­human” has become an impossible term, no longer the ground for establishing h­ uman rights, as Arendt had pessimistically argued. Antigone occupies the ontological place from which speaking truth to power is always, already, an offense against the state. Butler explores the way in which Antigone’s positioning both within and outside the law si­mul­ta­ neously silences her and prohibits her from taking effective action: “in acting, as one who has no right to act, she upsets the vocabulary of kinship that is a

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precondition of the h­ uman.” Or, in Arendt’s terms, she has no community other than the one she finds in the realm of the dead to which she ultimately chooses to belong. Her very speech-­acts contest the terms inside/outside, the in-­betweenness that consigns her to a living death: “She is not of the ­human but speaks in its language.”56 Carson ends Antigonick on a sharply unphilosophical note, with the Chorus’s terse injunction: “last word / wisdom: better get some / even too late” (Antigonick, 44). Meanwhile, the s­ ilent figure of Nick continues to measure—­a figure for the poet/translator, who seals the play with her own verdict: better too late than never. But too late all the same. Successive iterations of Antigone allow it to be understood in ways that retrospectively unfold the Sophoclean original, opening new (post-­Hegelian) potentialities for Antigone’s scream of protest. Carson had written: “I take as the task of the translator / to forbid that you should ever lose your screams” (Antigonick, 6). By choosing to set her film in the gap between two plays, chronologically prior to Sophocles’s Antigone, Dean clarifies her own riddling familial questions with the help of an obsolescent medium. The presence of Antigone—­only voiced in the film—is implied throughout in the pro­cesses of Dean’s own filmmaking, along with the soundtrack that comes now from one side, now from the other. Dillane, giving voice to Robert Fagles’s translation of Oedipus at Colonus, laments Antigone as a beloved guide when Creon tries to rip her away from him at the end of the play: “the helpless darling of my eyes, my light in darkness!”57 In the specially written dialogue between Dean and Dillane, with Dillane crouching in the dark over a blazing cauldron fire, Dean’s soundtrack quietly interpolates an invisible Antigone. Oedipus calls for the sun and for Antigone in the same breath, as if both could comfort him. Off-­screen, Dean’s Antigone utters the line that became the epigraph to her essay about the film—­a line spoken, as it happens, not by the omniscient Tiresias (to whom Dean attributes it), but by Creon in W. B. Yeats’s original draft for his 1928 version of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, when Creon cross-­ examines Oedipus about the mysterious circumstances of his ­father’s murder: “Where I lack light I am ­silent.”58 Dean’s deliberate aporia keeps her film open-­ ended. The film-­maker’s cut resembles Carson’s scissored poem. Less is more. Tacita Dean, ­daughter of a judge, whose given name means “­silent,” transfers the words uttered by the accusing and suspicious Creon to the blind seer of Sophoclean tragedy—­a strangely “Oedipal” displacement, so to say. As Oedipus’s companion and guide, Antigone (the s­ ilent daughter/sister) speaks for a blind seeing that also acknowledges the threads binding ­family members to

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multiple roles in the familial drama. “Antigone” thus seems to name (speak on behalf of) a wandering position that migrates across dif­fer­ent eras, continents, time-­zones, and subjectivities. Its internal pro­cesses may be as unavailable to the filmmaker herself as the inside of a camera; or perhaps, like Carson’s Antigone, for what­ever reasons, she too is “guilty of her own repression” (Antigonick, 21). Be that as it may, Carson asserts—­coaching Dillane in his role as Oedipus—­that Sophocles ­wasn’t interested in internal states; rather, he was interested in change. Creon’s ambiguously unknowing position in Yeats’s Oedipus the King is taken over by Dean’s deliberate masking of the camera; it gives us sight rather than insight, movement rather than motive. Unlike Carson’s Antigonick, which knows both destination and mea­sure, Dean seems to accept the vicissitudes of her own pro­cess, rather than ironizing them, hobbled as she is by her cinematic apparatus and blinded by a cosmic eclipse. The viewer might ask what it is that the poetry of the moving image “knows” that language alone ­can’t broach. The camera’s lens provides an analogue for the sun’s impartial eye as the shadow of the ­Great American Eclipse moves across the continent on its predetermined path (figure 6.6). What the moving image knows is the passage of time. The camera at the mercy of time becomes a figure for Dean’s purposive indirection, her openness to what time brings—­ including forgetting. In a recorded talk, she alludes (perhaps pursuing a dif­ fer­ent thread) to the generational forgetting needed to become a successful immigrant.59 As her work often does, her film rec­ords generational memory—­ uncles, grand­fathers, ­family friends. Elsewhere, she alludes to the fact that her great-­great u­ ncle was the presiding judge who pronounced the death-­sentence at Roger Casement’s 1916 treason trial.60 One might add to this overdetermined ­family history the historic judgment that resonated all the way from Thebes, Illinois, to the Civil Rights Movement. The formerly enslaved Dred Scott may have been imprisoned in the Thebes court­house jail while his claim for freedom from slavery was being heard. In 1857, the US Supreme Court passed judgment on Scott’s case, asserting that African Americans had no rights u­ nder the constitution, thereby depriving enslaved ­people of ­legal standing—­a verdict that helped to precipitate the American Civil War with all its unfinished business, including the Civil Rights Movement and t­ oday’s Black Lives ­Matter protests. The longue durée of history is muted within Dean’s film in ­favor of cosmic time; but she allows the disused courtroom-­cum-­ library of Thebes, Illinois, to show more than it knows, registering time-­ present as well as time-­past.

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figure 6.6. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Dean’s Antigone ends by giving its viewer the unrivaled splendor of the sun, the real sun for which Oedipus impotently calls, in the form of a spectacular sunset viewed from the open courtroom win­dows overlooking the Mississippi River. The actor Dillane, speaking in his own person, says: “We missed the sunset.” Then he adds: “it’s a quote from something. ‘We missed the sunset.’ It’s somebody talking and talking and talking about politics.” Dean responds: “Actually quite magnificent: the sun has taken its form.”61 Her camera ­doesn’t miss the sunset, as she rec­ords the magnificence of a real-­life, one-­time-­only sunset sky above the Mississippi vista, with its long rail-­bridge and distant landscape. Carson’s role in the film is to acknowledge both the burden of history and the way history keeps on repeating itself (“talking and talking and talking about politics”). When Stewart Stern commented, back at the time of Dean’s original idea for Antigone, that it was “a wonderful dark hole to fill,” he gave Dean permission to fill that unknown space with her own creative pro­ cess: “I think that the pro­cess of reaching down without knowing much more than you know, without planning much more than you plan. . . . ​I think ­those are the kind of areas . . . ​to find an image or what­ever it is that is along this journey and gives them a start line.”62 Reaching down along her journey, Dean found her starting image in the wildness of Bodmin Moor, and her resting point in the spectacular sunset that marks the end of her film (figure 6.7).

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figure 6.7. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

Afterimage By definition, analogue is a repre­sen­ta­tion that comes afterward, like finding one’s way to a closing image. Translators, poets, and filmmakers—­equally, phi­ los­o­phers and literary critics—­“twist a bit off ” to find their own freedom, ­whether through reimagining a tragedy that continues to resonate in t­ oday’s po­liti­cal landscape, or by exploring time and memory through an obsolescent film technology. Dean is above all a technologist of memory—­equally open about her attraction to the past and her strug­gle to maintain the integrity of film, a medium whose re­sis­tance she experiences as a stimulus for her own work: “every­thing that excites me no longer functions in its own time.” Obsolescence, Dean observes, is like film in being about the passage of time, “the time you can hear passing: the prickled silence of mute magnetic tape or the static of a rec­ord. So obsolescence has an aura: the aura of redundancy and failure; the aura of what has been improved upon” (“Obsolescence,” TDSW, 167). The “aura” of Dean’s image-­making—­its plaintive poetry, its unresolved afterwardness—­preserves the quality that Benjamin calls “[a] strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near it may be.”63 Dean’s mute and prickled silence is the sound of time receding into the past, imaged as a distant landscape u­ nder the fading light of the eve­ning sky (figure 6.8). Not a reconciliation or a ­dying fall, but rather an acknowl­edgment

R e w i l di n g A n t i g o n e   183

figure 6.8. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018). Two synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, with a ­running time of exactly 1 hour, continuous loop synced to start on the hour. Film stills: Courtesy of the artist; Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris.

that the idea of belonging remains at once elusive and auratic, and (at least in Dean’s film) mediated by the very pastness of the medium used to explore the passage of time. Dean’s binocular Antigone provides an afterimage for histories that include the vio­lence of con­temporary displacement, statelessness, and migration along with the subtler forms of unbelonging that are mediated not only by lit­er­a­ture, art, photography, and film, but by the interstices and connections between them.

no t e s

Introduction: Unbelonging 1. D. W. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites” (1963), in The Maturational Pro­cesses and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International Universities Press, 1965), 185. 2. Ibid., 186, 187. 3. Edward Said, On Late Style (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 7. Apropos of Adorno on Beethoven’s late style, Said sees Adorno himself as a paradigmatic figure of lateness: “Lateness . . . ​is a kind of self-­imposed exile from what is generally acceptable, coming a­ fter it, and surviving beyond it” (ibid., 16). 4. Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 92. 5. Hannah Arendt, “ ‘ What Remains? The Language Remains’: A Conversation with Günter Gaus” (1964), in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Com­pany, 1994), 13: “­There is a tremendous difference between your ­mother tongue and another language. . . . ​The German language is the essential t­ hing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved.” 6. Jhumpa Lahiri, Dove mi trovo. Romanzo (Milan: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2018); Whereabouts: A Novel, trans. Jhumpa Lahiri (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2021). 7. Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life & Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 82. 8. See Lyndsey Stonebridge, Placeless ­People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), for Arendt’s understanding of postwar statelessness as both po­liti­cal and existential; for Arendt and h­ uman rights, see ibid., 57–64, and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 293–94. 9. Giorgio Agambem, State of Exception (2003), trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 1. 10. Arendt, “What Remains? The Language Remains,” 12. 11. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923), in Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin, Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 263. For translation’s belatedness, see Antoine Berman, The Age of Translation: A Commentary on Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” trans. Chantal Wright (London: Routledge, 2018), 88–89: “Benjamin is not simply saying that translation comes ­after the original text, . . . ​but that this ­after falls into the late (in the sense of tardif) category” (ibid., 89). 185

186  N o t e s t o I n t r o du c t ion 12. Berman, “The Task of the Translator,” 260, 261. 13. See Paul F. Bandia, “Translocation: Translation, Migration, and the Relocation of Cultures,” in A Companion to Translation Studies, ed. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (Chichester, UK: Wiley/Blackwell, 2014), 275: “immigrants always remain mi­grants or ‘(double-) exiles’ at some level. . . . ​The specific rapport between translation and migration has to do with the politics of this hyphenated mi­grant space, which involve issues of marginalization, difference, and otherness that the mi­grant condition brings to the forefront.” 14. I take t­ hese tropologies from Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Mi­grant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015). Nail adds “Proletariat” to this list of mi­grant figures in his po­ liti­cal theory of mi­grants on the move; what all mi­grants share, he writes, “is the experience that their movement results in a certain degree of expulsion from their territorial, po­liti­cal, juridical, or economic status” (ibid., 2). 15. See Robert J. Young, “Philosophy in Translation,” in A Companion to Translation Studies, 41–53. 16. As argued by Haun Saussy, Translation as Citation: Zhuangzi Inside Out (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 20: “languages are not bounded systems but communicative ones, thriving in contact and exchange with other systems.” Saussy aptly considers “translations that do not so much make an expression in the target language as find it” (ibid., 2). 17. Barbara Cassin, ed., Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, trans. ed. Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2014), 1139; the distinction is attributed to Schleiermacher. Emily Apter, Against World Lit­er­a­ture: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London and New York: Verso, 2013), provocatively reclaims untranslatability in order to disrupt both translation studies and the seamless concept of “world lit­er­a­ture.” Compare also Emily Apter, The Translation Zone (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), for translation and untranslatability as warring tensions within comparative lit­er­a­ture. 18. Current work on refugee, migration, and citizenship studies is comprehensively surveyed in collections such as The Oxford Book of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, ed. Elena Fiddian-­ Quasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); James C. Hathaway and Michelle Foster, The Law of Refugee Status, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For an alternative inquiry into Eu­ro­pean borders and the migration “crisis,” see Nicholas de Genova, ed., The Borders of “Eu­rope”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), where “bordering” involves complex negotiations and give-­and-­ take on both sides (“tactics”). 19. See Nicholas de Genova, Sandro Mezzadra, and John Pickles, eds., “New Keywords: Migration and Borders,” Cultural Studies, 29, no. 1 (2015), 55–87, for an updating and critique of terms focused on “migration” and “borders,” including knowledge, regimes, countermapping, spectacle, spaces, bordering, management, surveillance, strug­gles, ­labor, and subjectivity: “we want to begin from the assumption that mi­grants’ practices, experiences and strug­gles cannot be considered in isolation from the discourses, practices, devices, laws and institutions that constitute par­tic­u­lar forms of h­ uman mobility as ‘migration,’ and thereby make ‘mi­grants’ out of some ­people who move but not ­others” (ibid., 83–84).

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1   187 20. Viet Thanh Nguyen, ed., The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives (New York: Abrams Press, 2018), 19. See also the four-­volume collection by writers based on their accounts of refugee stories: Refugee Tales: Vol. 1 (2016), Vol. II (2017), Vol. III (2019), Vol. IV (2021) ed. David Herd and Anna Pinckus (Manchester, UK: Comma Press, 2016–19), as well as the telling categories used to or­ga­nize Dohra Ahmad, ed., The Penguin Book of Migration Lit­er­a­ture: Departures, Arrivals, Generations, Returns (New York: Penguin Books, 2019). 21. Nguyen, The Displaced, 15.

Chapter 1: Identity Poetics 1. Jhumpa Lahiri, In altre parole / In Other Words, trans. Ann Goldstein (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 92–93. Subsequent parenthetical page references refer to Lahiri’s Italian text and Goldstein’s facing translation. [Hereafter IAP.] Compare Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Lit­er­a­ture (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2006), 5–6, for the contestatory term “zone,” used to designate “sites that are ‘in-­translation,’ that is to say belonging to no single, discrete language or single medium of communication”—­hence “[t]ranslation is a significant medium of subject-­re-­formation and po­liti­cal change” (ibid., 6). Taking 9/11 as its point of departure, Apter’s “Translation Zone” is also a war zone. 2. Compare Lahiri’s meditation on the book jacket, The Clothing of Books, trans. Alberto Vourvoulias-­Bush (New York: Vintage Books, 2016), originally written and published in Italian: “On the one hand, I want desperately to belong, to have a clear identity. On the other, I refuse to belong, and I believe that my hybrid identity enriches me. I ­will prob­ably always remain torn between ­these two roads, ­these two impulses” (ibid., 64). 3. See Jhumpa Lahiri, Dove mi trovo. Romanzo (Milan: Ugo Guanda Editore, 2018); translated by the author as Whereabouts: A Novel (New York: Knopf, 2021). Each chapter is located prepositionally in place or time, recording the transient consciousness of the central narrative voice: “Esiste un posto dove non siamo di passaggio? Disorientata, persa, sbalestrata, sballata, sbandata, scombussolata, smarrita, spaesata, spiantata, stranita: in questa parentela de termini mi ritrovo” (Dove me trovo, p. 159); “Is t­ here any place w ­ e’re not moving through? Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around. I’m related to t­ hese related terms” (Whereabouts, 153). 4. Latin quotations and their En­glish translations are taken from Ovid, Metamorphoses: Books I–­VIII, trans. Frank Justus Miller, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). [Hereafter Met.] 5. The translator’s doubling of the Latin words with their En­glish equivalents accentuates the effect (“leaves/hair, branches/arms, bark/breast”) (163–65). 6. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 173. [Hereafter RE.] 7. See Theodor Adorno, “Memento,” in Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: New Left Books, 1974), 87. 8. For the poet’s “sacred bonds” (communia sacra), see Philip Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 305–6. 9. Quotations in En­glish are taken from the verse translation, Ovid: The Poems of Exile, trans. Peter Green (London: Penguin, 1994), cited with Tristia book, section, and line numbers in the

188  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 1 Latin edition. The Latin quotations are taken from the Loeb edition: Ovid with an En­glish Translation: Tristia. Ex Ponto, ed. A. L. Wheeler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924). [Hereafter T.] 10. For the poet personified as his book, see Hardie, Ovid’s Poetics of Illusion, 298–300. 11. Ovid’s construction of imperial margins is explored by Gareth D. Williams, Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), esp. 3–25. 12. David Malouf, “Afterword,” An Imaginary Life (New York: Vintage International, 1996 [1978]), 154. [Hereafter IL.] See also Hardie’s discussion (Ovid’s Poetry of Illusion, 326–31), as an exploration of the relation between fantasy, real­ity, and magical language. 13. “Haec quoque non perstant, quae nos elementa vocamus, / quasque vices peragant, animos adhibete: docebo” (Met. XV. 237–38); “Nec species sua cuique manet, rerumque novatrix / ex aliis alias reparat natura figuras: / nec perit in toto quicquam, mihi credite, mundo, / sed variat faciemque novat, nascique vocatur / incipere esse aliud, quam quod fuit ante morique / desinere illud idem (Met. XV. 252–57). 14. See Met. X. 566. 15. Malouf ’s “Afterword” acknowledges Itard’s Enlightenment account of Victor, the wild boy of Aveyron, referencing his own preference for setting the story in a time and place “in which mysterious forces ­were felt to be at work and thinking had not yet settled into a rational mode” (IL, 154). 16. See Natalie Seger, “Imagining Transcendence: The Poetry of David Malouf,” Australian Literary Studies 22, no. 2 (1 October 2005), 146–59. Seger argues that Malouf ’s concept of transcendence is grounded in the body, as well as “an ethics in which the self and the other are variously and inextricably bound” (ibid., 158). 17. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments, trans. Richard Sieburth (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1984), 110–11. [Hereafter HF.] 18. Inge Morath, Grenz. Räume / Last Journey (Munich: Prestel, 2003), 147. Morath continues: “The war over and the old world gone forever, I made a significant discovery: regardless of where I was working, I found that my language was the language of the ­enemy. That was tough and instructive. So I tried to learn as many languages as was humanly pos­si­ble. I also did a lot of translating work.” (ibid., 147). 19. Arthur Miller, “Inge Morath and Borders,” in Grenz. Räume / Last Journey, 15. 20. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Davis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). [Hereafter HH.] For the controversies surrounding Hölderlin’s “disjunctive” translational practice, see Aris Fioretos, “Color Read: Hölderlin and Translation,” in The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin, ed. Aris Fioretos (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 268–87. 21. Andrzej Warminski in “Monstrous History: Heidegger Reading Hölderlin,” ibid., 201–14, notes that Heidegger turns Hölderlin’s word “monstrous” (ungeheur) into “uncanny” (unheimlich), thereby taking translation in the direction of interpretation. 22. For the politics of Heidegger’s position on translation in the 1942 “Ister” lectures and the combined threat of “Americanization” to the German language and Anglo-­Saxon Amer­i­ca’s threat to the Homeland (Heimat), see Pol Vandevelde, Heidegger and the Romantics: The Literary Invention of Meaning (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 165–68. 23. Warminksi, “Monstrous History,” 212.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2   189 24. In an out-­take from David Barison’s and Daniel Ross’s philosophic film The Ister (2004, Icarus Films), Werner Hamacher argues that poetry has to admit something foreign to itself that cannot be owned by the poem and that the search for this knowledge is constitutive of poetry’s recursive movement. 25. See the relevant discussion of origins by Samuel Weber, “Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s ‘Task of the Translator,’ ” in Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2005), 65–78. Noting Benjamin’s echo of Hölderlin’s description of the Rhine in “Der Rhein” (ibid., 78 n. 8), Weber writes: “Translatability is the never realizable potential of a meaning and as such constitutes a way—­way of signifying—­rather than a what. But if it is a way, if it makes its way, where is it headed? Not simply back to the original or to the origin, but rather away from it” (ibid., 75).

Chapter 2: Of Birds and Men 1. For Lampedusa’s relation to the “mi­grant tragedy” (past and pre­sent) and the resonance of the term “tragedy” in modern literary repre­sen­ta­tions of mi­grant experience, see John Kerrigan, “Lampedusa: Mi­grant Tragedy,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 8, no. 2 (2021), 138–57. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to read this illuminating essay in proof. 2. Seamus Heaney, Aeneid Book VI: A New Verse Translation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), xi. References in the text (Aeneid Book VI) using roman numerals are to page numbers of Heaney’s “Translator’s Note”; references using Arabic numerals are to the Latin or En­glish lines of Heaney’s bilingual edition. 3. Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 87. [Hereafter OH.] 4. Seamus Heaney, ­Human Chain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). [Hereafter HC.] 5. Estimates by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) indicated close to 100,000 arrivals by sea in 2018; sea arrivals peaked in 2015 at over a million. Dead and missing peaked at over 5,000 in 2016, with more than 2,000 deaths in 2018. See https://­data2​.­unhcr​.­org​/­en​/­situations ​/​mediterranean. 6. “nunc me fluctus habet versantque in litore venti” (Aeneid Book VI, 362); “Now the wave holds me, and the winds toss me on the beach” (Loeb ed., Aeneid Book VI, 557); compare “Now I belong to the waves; winds roll me about on the seashore”; Aeneid, trans. Frederick Ahl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), Book Six, line 362. 7. Among other arresting scenes, Emanuele Crialese’s feature film Terraferma (2011) shows the bodies of drowned or half-­drowned mi­grants being washed ashore on the beaches of Linosa (Lampedusa’s neighbor) ­under the horrified gaze of sunbathing tourists. 8. See Paul F. Bandia, writing on migration as a meta­phor for translation: “Translation and the postcolonial mi­grant condition frequently share displacement or relocation as a defining attribute”; “Translocation: Translation, Migration, and the Relocation of Cultures,” in A Companion to Translation Studies, ed. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (London: Wiley/Blackwell, 2014), 274. 9. Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 173.

190  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2 10. Colum McCann, in Apeirogon: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2020), uses the phenomenon and meta­phor of avian migration to comment on the difficulty of h­ uman movement across the borders of Israeli Occupied and Palestinian territories. I am grateful to the anonymous reader who drew my attention to this Eastern Mediterranean parallel. 11. Compare Anne Dufourantelle, responding to Derrida on Oedipus at Colonus (OH, 100–102). See also Jacques Derrida, “The Princi­ple of Hospitality,” Parallax, 11, no. 1 (2005), 6–9. 12. Compare the definition by Seyla Benhabib, in The Rights of ­Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 26–27. “The right of hospitality is situated at the bound­aries of the polity; it delimits civic space by regulating relations among members and strangers. Hence the right of hospitality occupies that space between h­ uman rights and civil rights, between the right of humanity in our person and the rights that accrue to us insofar as we are members of specific republics” (ibid., 27). 13. Emmanuel Kant, “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Po­liti­cal Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 105–6. Kant comments on the potential injustice displayed by imperial “visitors” (conquerors) on terrain such as East India (where “the native inhabitants w ­ ere counted as nothing”), leading to “oppression of the natives, incitement of the vari­ous Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the ­whole litany of evils which can afflict the ­human race” (ibid., 106)—­prescient words in light of recent imperialist ventures in Af­ghan­i­stan. 14. See Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 5. [Hereafter OC.] 15. For the Bildungsroman as a genre articulating a model of social relations that engages both law and lit­er­a­ture, see Joseph Slaughter, ­Human Rights, Inc. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), esp. 39–44. 16. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818), ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996), 154–55. [Hereafter F.] 17. See F, 79–80. Constantin-­François Volney’s 1791 critique of reigning ideologies and religions in Ruins of Empire was first translated by William Godwin in 1792. 18. A ­ fter the Being’s murder of Frankenstein’s friend Clerval, Frankenstein himself undergoes ­legal interrogation; accused and imprisoned, he is l­ater acquitted, but condemns himself the true murderer: “A bad conscience! Yes, surely I had one. William, Justine, and Clerval, had died though my infernal machinations . . .” (F, 127). 19. Cristiana Giordano, Mi­grants in Translation: Caring and the Logics of Difference in Con­ temporary Italy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014). [Hereafter MiT.] For another account of the situation of detained ospite (including trafficked ­women), see Stephanie Malia Hom, “Becoming Ospite: Hospitality and Mobility at the Centre of Temporary Permanence,” in Italian Mobilities, ed. Ruth Ben-­Ghiat and Stephanie Malia Hom (London: Routledge, 2016), 88–110. Hom points to the prevalence of the language of hospitality (including the term ospite) in the official language of Italian immigrant pro­cessing. 20. For a glimpse of the ­legal precariousness of the families and ­children of undocumented mi­grants, see Jacqueline Bhabha, “The ‘Mere Fortuity of Birth’? ­Children, ­Mothers, Borders, and the Meaning of Citizenship,” in Migrations and Mobilities: Citizenship, Borders, and Gender, ed. Seyla Benhabib and Judith Resnik (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 187–227.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 2   191 21. Pietro Bartolo and Lidia Tilotta, Tears of Salt: A Doctor’s Story, trans. Chenxin Jiang (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), 46–47; first published in Italian as Lacrime di sale: La mia storia quotidiana di medico di Lampedusa fra dolere e speranza (Milan: Mondadori, 2016). 22. Gianfranco Rosi, interview by Alessandra Potenza, in “How Italy’s Gianfranco Rosi Made the Stunning Oscar-­Nominated Mi­grant Doc Fire at Sea,” The Verge, 24 January 2017: www​.­Theverge​.­com​/­2017​/­1​/­24​/­14371650​/­fire​-­at​-­sea​-­gianfranco​-­rosi​-­interview​-­academy​ -­awards​-­documentary​.­For Lampedusan films that preceded Rosi’s documentary, see Áine O’Healy, “Imagining Lampedusa,” in Ben-­Ghiat and Hom, Italian Mobilities, 152–74. As well as Crialese’s Terraferma, previous documentaries include Antonio Tibaldi’s [S]comparse (2011) and Soltanto il mare (2011) by Dagmawi Yimer, Fabrizio Barraco, and Giulio Cederna (2011)—­all preceding the shipwreck of 3 October 2013 that brought the Mediterranean mi­grant situation to widespread public attention. 23. “How Italy’s Gianfranco Rosi Made . . . ​Fire at Sea,” 7. For a historian’s first-­hand account of Lampedusa and efforts to memorialize the mi­grants who arrive ­there, alive or dead, see Tony Kushner, “Lampedusa and the Mi­grant Crisis: Ethics, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and History,” Mobile Culture Studies: The Journal, 2 (2016), 59–92. Kushner draws attention to Lampedusa as an invisible border to Eu­rope as well as to the cultural repre­sen­ta­tion of “bordering” in theater, film, and documentary (including Rosi’s); Kushner’s photo­graphs document Lampedusa’s cultural and memorial sites. 24. “How Italy’s Gianfranco Rosi Made . . . ​Fire at Sea,” 11. “I like to have more questions than answers in my films.” 25. See “Island,” in Stephanie Malia Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip: Historical Echoes in Italy’s Crisis of Migration and Detention (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 19–62, for Lampedusa’s links to Libya and the history of Italian imperialism; Hom shows that the mi­grant detention regime is continuous with Italy’s history of penal colonies and island incarceration ­under Fascism. Like Kushner in “Lampedusa and the Mi­grant Crisis,” Hom describes attempts to memorialize ­those lost at sea (Hom, Empire’s Mobius Strip, 60–62). 26. “What a fire at sea ­there is to­night.” For words and song (“la perla nascosta che Rosi ha il merito di aver riportato alla luce”—­the lost pearl that Rosi deserves credit for having brought back to light), see Valeria Brigita, “ ‘Fuocoammare’, anche la canzone è un gioiello prezioso”: http://­www​.­ilfattoquotidiano​.­it​/­2016​/­02​/­28​/­fuocoammare​-­anche​-­la​-­canzone​-­e​-­un​-­gioiello​ -­prezioso​/­2502484​/­. 27. Kerrigan quotes from “At Lampedusa,” by the Eritrean poet Ribka Sibhatu, memorializing the fatal 3 October 2013 shipwreck. Written in her acquired Italian but incorporating lines and script from her native Tigrinya, Sibhatu’s poem combines issues of translation and communication; see Kerrigan, “Lampedusa: Mi­grant Tragedy,” 5–7. For the full text of Sibhatu’s poem translated from the original Italian, see https://­www​.­eurolitnetwork​.­com​/­at​-­lampedusa​ -­by​-­ribka​-­sibhatu​-­translated​-­by​-­cristina​-­viti​/­. 28. For the Mediterranean as a deadly “liquid frontier,” see Charles Heller and Lorenzo Pezzani, “Liquid Traces: Investigating the Deaths of Mi­grants at the EU’s Maritime Frontier,” in The Borders of “Eu­rope”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, ed. Nicholas de Genova (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 95–119. 29. Often overperformed in choral adaptations, Rossini’s three-­act opera used an Italian libretto by Andrea Leone Tottola based on Francesco Ringhieri’s L’Osiride (1760); ­later revised by Rossini as Moïse et Pharaon, ou Le passage de la Mer Rouge (1827).

192  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 30. Potenza, “How Italy’s Gianfranco Rosi Made . . . ​Fire at Sea,” 5: “When we started editing, I said, ‘­These 30 seconds [showing dead mi­grants in the hold of a boat] have to be in the film.’ . . . ​So the ­whole structure of the film was basically to arrive to that. This is how the ­whole film was structured, to have ­these 30 seconds belonging to the film without becoming voy­eur­ is­tic or pornographic. You know, when you film death, it’s always something extremely violent, so it was a challenge.” 31. Bartolo and Tilotta, Tears of Salt, 46. See also Jonathan Franzen, “Emptying the Skies,” New Yorker, 26 July 2010. Franzen’s passionate investigation includes Cypriot ambelopoulia (lime-­stick trapping) on an industrial scale involving high-­volume playing of birdsong as a lure, in contravention of the EU’s 1979 Bird Directive; Maltese-­style shooting around airports, from urban rooftops, and from the bunkers of recreational hunters (also fiercely resistant to EU regulations); and Italian poaching from Brescia in the north, to Sardinia, the Venetian wetlands, Umbria, Tuscany, Campania’s Camorra-­controlled hunting and bird-­harvesting in the south; and intense lobbying by hunting associations and gun and munitions industries directed against government restrictions. See www.​ ­newyorker.​ ­com/​ ­magazine​.­2010​/­07​/­26​/­emptying​-­the​-­skies. 32. See Clare Mahon, “Eating Songbirds,” New Yorker, 4 April 2012: “My husband always tells the story about the time he’d gone fishing in Lampedusa and, since the fish ­weren’t biting, he’d bagged the poor birds that alighted on the boat to rest on their migration to Africa.” www​ .­newyorker​.­com​/­culture​/­culture​-­desk​/­eating​-­songbirds. 33. Bartolo and Tilotta, Tears of Salt, 47. 34. “He [the fish-­man] was very shy. He was very, very uncomfortable with the camera, but he was very comfortable underwater. He’s almost like a person who lives underwater. . . . ​He ­can’t fish the sea urchins, ­because it’s forbidden, so he has all this method of hiding” (Potenza, “How Italy’s Gianfranco Rosi Made . . . ​Fire at Sea,” 9). 35. Ibid., 7.

Chapter 3: The Coastal Paradox 1. See Theodor Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, Vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 134. “The narrative tendency in the poem strives downward into the prelogical medium and wants to drift along with the flow of time.” For Adorno, Pindar’s “formation of a flowing continuum of images” works against narrative as such. 2. Eugenio Montale, “On the Poetry of Campana” (1942), in The Second Life of Art: Selected Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Galassi (New York: Ecco Press, 1982), 71: “it is not the notion of an excavation that best describes Campana.” [Hereafter SLA.] 3. Eugenio Montale, Collected Poems 1920–1954, trans. Jonathan Galassi, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 452; Galassi’s note alludes to “le inutili macerie del tuo abisso” (“the useless rubble of [the sea’s] abyss”; ibid., 68–69). [Hereafter CP.] 4. Compare Janet Wolff, The Aesthetics of Uncertainty (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 129–31, discussing Lukács apropos of “imagistic sociology” in the context of “micrological method.” See also the discussion of this passage from Montale’s “Dialogue” in Clodagh J. Brook, The Expression of the Inexpressible in Eugenio Montale’s Poetry: Meta­phor, Negation, and Silence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 83–84; for “the par­tic­u­lar” in Lukács’s

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3   193 aesthetics, see Agnes Heller, “Lukács’ L ­ ater Philosophy,” in Lukács Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 187–88. 5. Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2015), 198. [Hereafter OEB.] 6. For Montale’s sketches—­drawings, prints, and pastels, including coastal scenes—­see Vanni Scheiwiller, Eugenio Montale: Immagini e documenti (Milan: Libri Scheiwiller, 1985). Montale knew and admired the poet and fauvist painter Filippo De Pisis (a De Chirico disciple), one of whose paintings (Il Beccaccino) he owned; De Pisis’s quasi-­surrealist landscapes and still lifes influenced Montale’s postwar paintings and drawings; see Gallassi’s note (CP, 494). 7. Listing the crucial ingredients of Montale’s poetry, Galassi writes: “­these ­things . . . ​are constantly returned to, as if they had not yet ‘betray[ed] their final secret,’ as the poet attempts again and again to restate the fundamental prob­lem of his work” (CP, 421). 8. In “The Cinque Terre” (1946), Montale writes: “the miserly landscape is unwalkable except by ­those who are willing to clamber like goats across the terraces of vineyards that step down to the sea. . . . ​A rocky and austere landscape . . . ​refuge for fishermen and farmers living hand to mouth on a strip of shore that is given, in places, to constant erosion; a barren and solemn shelf, among the most primitive in Italy” (SLA, 226). For the motif of margins and edges in Ossi di seppia, including orto (garden), bound­aries, and limen, see Rebecca J. West, Eugenio Montale: Poet on the Edge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), esp. 11–38. 9. Montale’s “Intentions (Imaginary Interview)” outlines the philosophical influences on Ossi di seppia, including “the French phi­los­op­ hers of contingency” (Émile Boutroux): “For me . . . ​[i]mmanence and transcendence ­aren’t separable. . . . ​One needs to live his own contradictions without loopholes” (SLA, 299–300). Montale wrote that he owed to his childhood and youth at Monterosso “the habit of introspection, which amounted to a feeling of imprisonment within the cosmos”; see G. Singh, Eugenio Montale: A Critical Study of His Poetry, Prose, and Criticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973), 6. 10. Discussing this passage, West (Eugenio Montale, 23) links the filo (thread) both ­here and in Ossi di seppia to an elusive linguistic and literary event identified with Montale’s creative “edge space”—­“a real or meta­phoric area of delineation that serves to define the limits or bound­aries of an entity or concept” (ibid., 9), positing that “language itself is at the center of Montale’s uncertainty” (ibid., 74). 11. Montale wrote that Croce “does not think poetic activity is a bolt from the blue” (SLA, 125). L ­ ater, the “flashes” of “Flashes” e Dediche (“Flashes” and Inscriptions, 1948–52) evoke the camera’s magnesium flash, or snapshots of memory (see CP, 561). 12. Montale regretted having included “Riviere” (“Seacoasts,” 1922), at the end of Ossi di seppia, in an attempt to heal the division between past and pre­sent: “too premature a synthesis and cure . . . ​followed by successive relapse and disintegration” (CP, 482). Le Ocassioni traces this failed synthesis. 13. “La casa dei doganieri” was one of the poems translated by Robert Lowell; see Imitations (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1961), 115–16; Lowell’s opening phrase, “A death-­cell?” captures the disquiet of the derelict “shack” (casa). In a letter of 1 March 1961, Elizabeth Bishop wrote that she read Imitations “very rapidly and concentrated mostly on the Montale” (“Montale sounds very beautiful”); see Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 354, 355.

194  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3 14. Elizabeth Bishop, Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 164. [Hereafter Poems.] 15. See David Kalstone, “Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel” (1977) in Elizabeth Bishop: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), 59. For Bishop and “the foreign,” see Mariana Machova, Elizabeth Bishop and Translation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 89–113, and for the Brazilian poems, see Barbara Page, “Home, Wherever That May Be: Poems and Prose of Brazil,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 124–40. 16. The word “pitch” also occurs in Bishop’s e­ arlier essay, “In the Village” (1953), describing a sound like that of a flicked lightning rod whose “pitch would be the pitch of my village”; see Elizabeth Bishop, The Collected Prose, ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 251. 17. See Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. H. Trotter, 2nd ed. (New York: Dutton, 1958), 39, #139. 18. Bishop, “Laureate’s Words of Ac­cep­tance,” in World Lit­er­a­ture ­Today, 51, no. 1 (Winter 1977), 12. She continues: “Naturally I know, and it has been pointed out to me, that most of my poems are geo­graph­ic­ al, or about coasts, beaches and rivers ­r unning to the sea” (ibid., 12). Bishop first focused on the sandpiper in an early prose piece, “The Sandpiper’s Revenge”; see Brett C. Miller, Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 116–17. 19. In “Writing Poetry Is an Unnatural Act . . . ,” Bishop mentions a poem called “Grand­ mother’s Glass Eye,” describing it as “about the prob­lem of writing poetry. The situation of my grand­mother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-­real; the natu­ral with the unnatural: the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.” See Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allen Poe & The Juke-­Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments, ed. Alice Quinn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 212. For Bishop’s interest in optics, see also Susan Rosenbaum, “Bishop and the Natu­ral World,” in The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Cleghorn and Ellis, 62–78. 20. Compare Bishop’s letter to Anny Baumann, quoted in Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, 335: “The world has wonderful details if you can get it just a ­little closer than usual.” 21. Bishop, “Laureate’s Words of Ac­cep­tance,” 12. 22. See Jon Hegglund, World Views: Metageographies of Modernist Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15, for modernist narrative, spatial self-­consciousness, and repre­sen­ta­ tions of place (“a description of a description”), including “the narrative incorporation and description of maps.” Hegglund traces the ubiquity of geo­graph­ic­ al repre­sen­ta­tions in modernism to the late nineteenth-­century work of Halford Mackinder in promoting a new geography emphasizing cultural and geopo­liti­cal perspectives on coastal realms, including the maintenance of imperial bound­aries (ibid., 12–19). 23. Compare Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, 491: “The impossible ‘proto . . . ​crypto’ dream ­house brings to a close the poet’s lifelong preoccupation with places of refuge, shelters, and solitary retreats.” Soon ­after, the beach-­shack was demolished (ibid., 495). See also David Bromwich, “Elizabeth Bishop’s Dream-­Houses,” in Elizabeth Bishop, ed. Bloom, 172: “Any place we live in, savage or homely, dream-­house or rough shelter, we ourselves have been the making of.”

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 3   195 Bishop’s “The Sea & Its Shore” (1937), offers another fantasy of the beachcomber as reader, with a h­ ouse “more like an idea of a h­ ouse than a real one . . . ​a shelter, but not for living in, for thinking in” (Bishop, Prose, 171–72). Bishop had read Lowell’s translation of “La casa dei doganieri” (see note13, ­earlier), with its derelict shack and “sea-­green weathercock.” 24. Perhaps a sly domestication of Wallace Stevens’s destructive “lion of the spirit” or poetic force (“calling him to account for his overfondness for imaginary abstractions”); see Anne Stevenson, Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop (London: Bellew, 1998), 122–23. Compare Bonnie Costello, Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 168–73, locating a dif­fer­ent affirmation of imaginative power in “The End of March.” 25. Kalstone, “Questions of Memory, Questions of Travel,” 59. 26. For the freezing effects of the “dead ­mother” (withdrawn into depression and mourning), see André Green, “The Dead M ­ other,” in On Private Madness (Madison, WI: International Universities Press, 1986), 142–73. 27. Bishop’s first visit to Nova Scotia since her own childhood and her ­mother’s death produced notes that s­ haped the end of “At the Fish­houses”; her note reads: “Description of the dark, icy, clear ­water—­clear dark glass—­slightly ­bitter (hard to define). My idea of knowledge. this [sic] cold stream, half drawn, half flowing from a-­great-­rocky-­breast.” (Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, 181). 28. For Bishop’s interest in “a meta­phorical resemblance between the dynamics of w ­ ater and ­those of the verse line,” see Peggy Samuels, Deep Skin: Elizabeth Bishop and Visual Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 37–43. 29. See Miller, Elizabeth Bishop, 474–75, for Bishop’s revisiting in “Poem” of “Large Bad Picture” (1946), based on a painting by her great-­uncle; she has in mind “a tiny ­little painting” given her by one of her aunts, embellished with “a l­ ittle ‘poetic license.’ ” Bishop’s own painting is reproduced in William Benton, ed., Exchanging Hats: Paintings (Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 2011), 17 (see figure 3.3). See also Linda Anderson, “The Story of the Eye: Elizabeth Bishop and the Limits of the Visual,” in Elizabeth Bishop: Poet of the Periphery, ed. Linda Anderson and Jo Shapcott (Newcastle, UK: Bloodaxe Books, 2002), 159–74, esp. 170–71. 30. Colm Tóibín, The South: A Novel (New York: Scribner, 2012), 226. [Hereafter South.] 31. Written in Portugal in 1984, “The Sea” was separately published as a short story in the Irish Times before publication in Tóibín’s much-­revised South (see “Afterword,” South, 227). 32. Colm Tóibín, The Heather Blazing (New York: Scribner, 2012), 32. [Hereafter HB.] 33. Nora Webster hears the same sound of pebbles on the strand, the leitmotif of mourning in Tóibín’s novels: “­There was hardly any colour. The world in front of her had been washed down. If she moved nearer to the shore, she could look at the small stones that made a rattling sound when the waves broke over them. She saw how exact the colour of each stone was . . .”; Colm Tóibín, Nora Webster (New York: Scribner, 2014), 150. 34. In The Blackwater Lightship (1999), as her ­brother lies ­dying of AIDS, Helen reflects on the sea’s “resolute hardness” and imperviousness to h­ uman imaginings, longings, pain, and prejudice: “It was not just that they would fade: they hardly existed, they did not ­matter, they would have no impact on this cold dawn, this deserted remote seascape where the w ­ ater shone in the early light and shocked her with its sullen beauty. It would have been better, she felt, if ­there never had been ­people. . . .”; Colm Tóibín, The Blackwater Lightship (New York: Scribner, 1999), 260.

196  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4

Chapter 4: Displaced Persons 1. W. G. Sebald, “Forward,” in A Place in the Country: On Gottfried Keller, Johann Peter Hebel, Robert Walser, and O ­ thers (Logis in einem Landhaus, 1998), trans. Jo Catling (New York: Random House, 2013), 6. [Hereafter PC.] Sebald is commenting on the work of the painter Jan Peter Tripp. For a slightly dif­fer­ent translation, see Carol Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 148–49: “I learned from his pictures that one has to look into the depths, that art does not get on without handwork and that one has to take many difficulties into account in enumerating ­things.” 2. For Carl Seelig’s engaging rec­ord of their walks and talks, see Walks with Walser, trans. Anne Posten (New York: New Directions, 2017). 3. I have relied on Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); see also the detailed chronologies in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996–2003). 4. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, eds., Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 486. [Hereafter SW, 2.] 5. See Ben Hutchinson, “The Shadow of Re­sis­tance: W. G. Sebald and the Frankfurt School,” Journal of Eu­ro­pean Studies 41, nos. 3–4 (2011), 267–84. Hutchinson points to the re­sis­tance on the part of German university students of the early 1960s to what they saw as the compromised moral authority of their teachers, and the role of the Frankfurt School in countering it: “Sebald’s discovery of the Frankfurt School when he was at university in Freiburg . . . ​was an aspect of his growing sense of already being an exile” (ibid., 268). 6. Robert Walser, “A L ­ ittle Ramble” (1914), in Selected Stories, trans. Christopher Middleton (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 1982), 31. 7. Theodor W. Adorno, “Benjamin the Letter Writer,” in Notes to Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2: 236. [Hereafter NL.] 8. Sebald cites Elias Canetti: “what set Walser apart from other writers was the way in which, in his writing, he always denied his innermost anx­i­eties, constantly omitting a part of himself ” (PC, 129). 9. See Adorno, “Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse,” in NL, 2: 322–23, for the evolving meaning of the Denkbild in Benjamin’s short aphoristic writings. 10. Walser, “The Walk” (1917), in Selected Stories, 54–108. For Sebald and the tradition of the walker/writer, see Lynne Sharon Schwartz, ed., The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007), 81, and, for the link between Sebald’s peripatetic writing and the recovery of repressed and marginalized histories, see Christian Moser, “Peripatetic Liminality: Sebald and the Tradition of the Literary Walk,” in The Undiscovered Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, ed. Markus Zisselsberger (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 37–62. I am indebted also to Eric L. Santner’s illuminating discussion of Sebald and Benjamin in On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 11. Walser, Selected Stories, 70.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4   197 12. See Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 52: “I also knew . . . ​that my great-­uncle Ambros Adelwarth had interned himself in an asylum in Ithaca, which is where Nabokov taught for many years. And where . . . ​he was always in his spare time ­going out with his butterfly net.” For Nabokov’s apparitional figure in the Emigrants, see Jacobs, Sebald’s Vision, 25–26. 13. W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Vintage Books, 2002), 114. [Hereafter E.] Sebald compares Gogol and Walser: “It is through writing . . . ​that they cut themselves off from the past. Their ideal state is that of pure amnesia” (PC, 145). 14. See Seelig, Walks with Walser, 57: “­Today . . . ​despite the cold, he has brought neither overcoat nor umbrella. He looks rather raffish in his worn-­out yellow-­checked suit, gentian blue shirt, red-­striped tie, and rolled-up trousers.” 15. Compare Walser, “Balloon Journey” (1913), in Selected Stories, 14–16: “The loneliness of remote regions has a special tone, such that one believes one o­ ught to understand and even see this special t­ hing that slips away from thought” (ibid., 15); Walser l­ater vividly described his “romantic ­ride” in a hot-­air balloon to Seelig (see Seelig, Walks with Walser, 48). 16. Sebald is echoing Nabokov, whose hero Midget “drifted into an abyss of frost and stars—­ alone.” See Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory: A Memoir (London: Victor Gollancz, 1951), 54. 17. For the mix of High German and Swiss German in Walser’s writing, see J. M. Coetzee, “Robert Walser” (2000), in Inner Workings: Literary Essays 2000–2005 (New York: Viking/ Penguin, 2007), 15–29. 18. Sebald applies the term “periscopic” from the work of Thomas Bernhard: “He only tells you in his books what he heard from o­ thers. So he in­ven­ted, as it w ­ ere, a kind of periscopic form of narrative. Y ­ ou’re always sure that what he tells you is related at one remove, at two removes, at two or three. . . . ​Bernhard, single-­handedly, I think, in­ven­ted a new form of narrating” (Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 83). 19. In the original German text, Ferber is called Aurach, a name uncomfortably close to that of Frank Auerbach, whose artistic practice and ­family history Sebald appropriates for his character; see Lise Patt and Christel Dillbohner, eds., Searching for Sebald: Photography ­after W. G. Sebald (Los Angeles: Institute of Cultural Inquiry and ICI Press, 2007), 310 and 18 n. 3. For Benjamin’s allusions to dust, see also Susan Buck-­Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Proj­ect (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 95–96: “history stands so still, it gathers dust” (ibid., 95). 20. Walser told Seelig: “I had the disposition to become a kind of tramp, and I hardly resisted it. . . . ​It suits me now to dis­appear, as inconspicuously as pos­si­ble” (Seelig, Walks with Walser, 36–37). 21. Walser, “Kleist in Thun” (1913), in Selected Stories, 22. 22. For the Würzburg photo­graph, see Florence Feiereisen and Daniel Pope, “True Fictions and Fictional Truths: The Enigmatic in Sebald’s Use of Images in The Emigrants,” in Patt and Dillbohner, Searching for Sebald, 162–87, esp. 176. 23. See Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 41–42, for Sebald’s comment on the photo­ graph’s dual function of verification and “arresting time”—­“they act like barriers or weirs which stem the flow.” Compare Clive Scott, “W. G. Sebald: Enumeration, Photography and the Hermeneutics of History,” in ­After Sebald: Essays and Illuminations, ed. Jon Cook (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Full Circle Editions, 2014), 125–40: “It is only in the displacements of Historical authenticity that au­then­tic experience becomes available” (ibid., 138).

198  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4 24. See Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 482 [N15a,1]; the quotation is from André Monglond, Le Préromantisme français (1930). Monglond references the texts of Marivaux and Rousseau for “a mysterious meaning which the first readers of ­these texts could not fully have deciphered.” 25. Walser, “The Walk” (1917), in Selected Stories, 62. [Hereafter W.] “The Walk” conforms to the con­temporary definition of the kleine Form (“­little form”) or newspaper feuilleton radicalized by Benjamin’s One-­Way Street: “poetic observations of the small and big world, daily experience in all its charm, fond strolls, curious encounters, moods, sentimental chatter, glosses and ­things of that sort” (Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 258). 26. Many of the pieces included in One-­Way Street (written between 1923 and 1926) first appeared in newspaper as feuilletons, or “below the line” (unter dem Strich); for the kleine Form as a “primary mode of cultural commentary and criticism in the Weimar republic,” see Jennings and Eiland, Walter Benjamin, 258. 27. See Adorno’s “Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften: “His philosophical interest is not directed to the ahistorical at all, but rather to what is temporally determined and irreversible. Hence the title One Way Street” (NL, 2: 226). 28. For Benjamin’s avant-­garde practice in One-­Way Street, see Michael Jennings, “Walter Benjamin and the Eu­ro­pean Avant-­Garde,” in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18–34. 29. For Benjamin’s “Thought Figures” (1933), see SW, 2: 723–27. 30. See “Naples, written with Asja Lacis” (1925), in SW, 1: 420: “Just as the living room reappears on the street . . . ​the street migrates into the living room.” The epigraph to One-­Way Street—­“This street is named / Asja Lacis Street / ­after her who / as an engineer / cut it through the author” (SW, 1: 444)—­equates the engineer and the Bolshevik artist; both “cut through” external appearances: “who besides the engineer and the proletarian had climbed the steps that alone made it pos­si­ble to recognize what was new and decisive about ­these structures: the feeling of space?” (Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, 156, [F3,5]); see also Buck-­Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, 126–27. 31. “One-­Way Street” (1928), in Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 456. [Hereafter SW, 1.] 32. In “­Little History of Photography,” Benjamin observes: “It is no accident that Atget’s photo­graphs have been likened to t­ hose of a crime scene. But i­ sn’t e­ very square inch of our cities a crime scene? E ­ very passer-by a culprit? I­ sn’t it the task of the photographer . . . ​to reveal guilt and to point out the guilty in his pictures?” (SW, 2: 527). 33. “He escaped the antithesis of the eternal and the historical through his micrological method, through his concentration on the very smallest, in which the historical movement halts and becomes sedimented in an image.” (NL, 2: 228). For Benjamin, collecting, and toys, see Annie Pfeifer, “A Collector in a Collectivist State: Walter Benjamin’s Rus­sian Toy Collection,” New German Critique 45, no. 1 (133) (2018): 49–78; see also “Physiognomy of the Thingworld,” in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz, and Erdmut Wizisla, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2015). 34. For Benjamin’s fascination with the Lilliputian ele­ment of the world of ­children’s toys and the meaning of their play, see his series of essays on ­children’s toys, “Old Toys” (1928), “The Cultural History of Toys” (1928), and “Toys and Play” (1928) (SW, 2: 98–102, 112–16, 117–21).

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 4   199 For his essay, “Rus­sian Toys,” see also Gary Smith, ed., Walter Benjamin: Moscow Diary, trans. Richard Sieburth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 122–24. 35. “Only when in technology body and image space so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has real­ity transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto” (SW, 2: 217–18). 36. One-­Way Street includes a glimpse of Benjamin combusting with passion for Asja Lacis on the streets of Riga: “had she touched me with the match of her eyes, I would have gone up like a powder keg” (SW, 1: 461); for Benjamin’s visit to Moscow when Asja Lacis fell ill and entered a sanatorium, see Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 267–77. 37. In “Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse,” Adorno describes Benjamin’s style as a kind of “intellectual short-­circuiting” that “casts a sudden light on the familiar and perhaps sets it on fire” (NL, 2: 323). 38. “To thinking belongs the movement as well as the arrest of thoughts. Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with tensions—­there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the movement of thought” (The Arcades Proj­ect, 475, [N10a,3]). 39. Ibid., 475. 40. Adorno is quoting Benjamin’s Arcades Proj­ect, 462 [N2a,3] and 463 [N,1]. 41. Compare Benjamin’s “Doctrine of the Similar” (1933) on ­children’s mimetic play and the “natu­ral” and “magical correspondences” that awaken the mimetic faculty: “The perception of similarity is in ­every case bound to a flashing up. It flits past, can possibly be won again, but cannot r­ eally be held fast as can other perceptions. It offers itself to the eye as fleetingly and transitorily as a constellation of stars. The perception of similarities thus seems to be bound to a moment in time” (SW, 2: 695–96). Mimetic pro­cesses also express themselves in the act of writing: “Script has thus become, like language, an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences” (SW, 2: 697). See Beatrice Hanssen, “Language and Mimesis in Walter Benjamin’s Work,” in Ferris, The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, 54–72. 42. For a subtle and comprehensive reading of the “stocking” meta­phor in relation to the autobiographical work of filling and emptying “the dummy, his self,” see Carol Jacobs, “Walter Benjamin: Image of Proust,” in In the Language of Walter Benjamin (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 39–58. 43. Compare Adorno, “Introduction to Benjamin’s Schriften,” NL, 2: 224: “he always chose as his object the nodal points of the concrete, the points where it has coalesced to become genuinely indissoluble.” 44. Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1938) evolved from 1934 ­until 1938; see Jennings and Eiland, Walter Benjamin, 380–85. For Benjamin’s mapping of Paris onto Berlin as both memory-­space and dream-­space, and for urban mapping as a form of allegory in “Berlin Chronicle” and Berlin Childhood, see Andrew Weber, Berlin in the Twentieth C ­ entury: A Cultural Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 61–103. 45. For an illuminating reading of the relation between topography and life-­writing in “A Berlin Chronicle” see Jacobs, “Berlin Chronicle: Topographically Speaking,” in In the Language of Benjamin, 16–38. 46. “It is not that what is past casts its light on what is pre­sent, or what is pre­sent its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation”; Benjamin, The Arcades Proj­ect, 463 [N3,1].

200  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 47. “It was not r­ eally the news itself that so affected me. . . . ​But in the way in which my f­ ather told me, ­there lay [text breaks off]” (SW, 2: 633). 48. The Arcades Proj­ect was originally titled “A Dialectical Fairy Scene”; see Buck-­Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 33–34. 49. See Eiland and Jennings, Benjamin, 377–79. 50. See ibid., 668–76. For a con­temporary reenactment of Benjamin’s strenuous last walk across the Pyrenees, see Gwen Strauss, “Walter Benjamin’s Last Hike.” Catapult, 10 August 2017. https://­catapult​.­co​/­stories​/­walter​-­benjamins​-­last​-­hike. 51. Seelig, Walks with Walser, 137. 52. Ibid., 137. 53. Ibid., 138.

Chapter 5: Border Crossing 1. James Estrin, “Josef Koudelka: Formed by the World,” Lens Blog, New York Times, 19 November 2013. https://­lens​.­blogs​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2013​/­11​/­19​/­josef​-­koudelka​-­formed​-­by​-­the​ -­world​/­​.­See also the second part, James Estrin, “Josef Koudelka: A Restless Eye,” Lens Blog, New York Times, 20 November 2013. https://­lens​.­blogs​.­nytimes​.­com​/­2 013​/­11​/­2 0​/­josef​ -­koudelka​-­a​-r­ estless​-­eye​/­. 2. See the “border subject” entry from the “key terms” developed by the online proj­ect Border Poetics (https://­borderpoetics​.­wikidot​.­com): “The border subject inhabits the borderland or comes into being while crossing the border. Th ­ ere are many names and categories by which the border subject may be referred to: the hybrid, the creolized, the Grenzgängerin (‘border walker’ i.e. someone who purposefully lives on the edge), the Grenzverletzerin (‘border wounder’ i.e. somebody who transgresses the border), the interpreter, the go-­between.” The borderer is “both subject to trauma and in a position to attain insight and cultural capital by living on the border” (https://­borderpoetics​.­wikidot​.­com​/­border​-­subject). See also Nicholas de Genova, Sandro Mezzadra, and John Pickles, eds., “New Keywords: Migration and Borders,” Cultural Studies, 29, no. 1 (2015), 55–87, for a nuanced account of border studies and “bordering,” including the spectacles and regimes of bordering (ibid., 66–70). 3. Estrin, “Formed by the World.” 4. For a definitive account of the relation between walls, states, and theories of sovereignty, including both the Israeli “Security Fence” and the US-­Mexico Border Barrier, see Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), esp. 28–42. For another discussion of the history and theory of borders in relation to ­human movement (kinetics and “kinopower”), see also Thomas Nail, Theory of the Border (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Neil’s empirical example is the US-­Mexico border fence. 5. See the collection of essays, Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe, eds., Border Aesthetics: Concepts and Intersections (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2017), for a searching exploration of “how art represents, explores and negotiates border experience” (ibid., 7); for literary and aesthetic border-­work at Israeli-­Palestinian checkpoints, including checkpoints as sites of pushback, see also Emily Apter, “Checkpoints and Sovereign Borders,” in Against World Lit­er­a­ture; On the Politics of Untranslatability (London and New York: Verso, 2013), 99–114.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5   201 6. See the complete Koudelka chronology, exhibition list, and bibliography by Stuart Alexander, in Koudelka: Returning, ed. Josef Koudelka and Irena Šorfová (Prague: Kant, 2018), 298–305. 7. For the international publication and recognition of Koudelka’s photo­graphs of the Soviet invasion of Czecho­slo­va­kia, see Josef Koudelka, “The Maximum, That’s What’s Always Interested Me,” in Josef Koudelka (Prague: Torst, 2002), 129–31: “What happened in Prague in August 1968 happened only once in my life. . . . ​I felt that every­thing that could happen in my life was happening during ­those seven days” (ibid., 130). 8. EU nomenclature, post-1980s, f­ avors “Roma”; previously “Gitani” (“Gypsies”), the term used for Koudelka’s first book of photo­graphs. On the alternative designations of Roma, Gypsies, and Travellers, see Jean-­Pierre Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope (Strasbourg: Council of Eu­rope Publishing, 2007), 11–12. 9. For Koudelka’s nomadic way of life during the period of his exile, see Amanda Maddox, “A Stranger in No Place: Josef Koudelka in ­Great Britain, 1969–1984,” in Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, ed. Matthew S. Witkovsky, The Art Institute of Chicago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 138–47. Koudelka’s work was funded by grants from the Arts Council of ­Great Britain, Magnum royalties, and by colleagues and friends who provided a roof over his head between his travels when he sorted and cata­logued his photo­graphs. 10. See Witkovsky, “Gypsies,” Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, 104–12, for the long pro­ cess of se­lection in collaboration with Koudelka’s French editor and curator, Robert Delpire, and for successive editions of Gypsies. 11. See Stuart Alexander, “­Under the Stars, 1970–1990,” Josef Koudelka: Nationality Doubtful, 170–77. 12. Estrin, “Formed by the World.” Koudelka says, “I d­ on’t like picture stories. In fact I think picture stories destroyed all photography. . . . ​I am interested in one picture that tells many dif­ fer­ent stories to dif­fer­ent p­ eople” (ibid.). Introducing Exiles, the Polish poet and translator Czesław Miłosz—­another exile—­calls Koudelka’s technique the “art of telling stories without words.” See Czesław Miłosz, “On Exile,” in Josef Koudelka, Exiles (New York: Aperture, 1988); Miłosz’s text replaced the three-­way conversation that appeared as the introductory text in the original French edition (Exils, 1988). 13. “I photographed the Gypsies with an Exacta camera and a 25-­millimeter Flektogon f4 lens. I shot inside mostly at a 30th of a second or less. I bulk-­loaded this East German 400 ASA movie film—­and pushed it as far as it could go in a hot developer. . . . ​W hen I understood that I d­ on’t need any more wide-­angle lens photos . . . ​I bought two Leicas and started to use a 35-­millimeter lens and a 50-­millimeter lens. I knew that the techniques w ­ ill change the vision—if you change the technique.” See Estrin, “A Restless Eye.” Subsequently, Koudelka switched to a Fuji panoramic and eventually to a digital panoramic S2 Leica: “The digital is much more precise and I have more control of the focus, the depth of the focus, and I can photo­graph much closer” (ibid.). 14. In addition, Teatro del Tempo (2003) focused on the vast archeological ruins of classical civilization (“nothing is permanent”): “Q. What did you learn from visiting all t­ hese places and spending all this time thinking about the archaeology sites and the history of man? A. That nothing is permanent.” See Estrin, “A Restless Eye.” 15. Estrin, “Formed by the World.” For other aesthetic protests focused on the Wall, see William Parry, Against the Wall: The Art of Re­sis­tance in Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2010).

202  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 16. Estrin, “Formed by the World.” 17. See Giles A. Tiberghien, “ ‘ Where Are the P ­ eople?’: Landscape in the Photography of Josef Koudelka,” in Witkovsky, Josef Koudelka, 218–21. 18. Emmanuel Levinas, Other­wise Than Being, or Beyond Essence (1974), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1998), 91. [Hereafter OB.] 19. “Levinas’s central ideas combat the reductive character of what is perhaps the central category of Western philosophy: the key role played by the concept of mediation”; see Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 372–73. 20. For an extended account of the tensions involved in Levinas’s “unrepresentable face,” see Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 50–77: “the face is exposed as a figure of unreconstructed paradox: it represents that which it claims is unrepresentable; it pre­sents immediacy through the mediation of an image; it makes an ethical claim that compels the hearer without ever becoming audible or legible” (ibid., 54). See also Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1996), 46, 132–35, on the nonvisibility of the face (le visage) and its “epiphany” in language (“the epiphany of the face is entirely language”): “we are constantly warned not to confuse the Levinasian face with anything we might see, thematize and appropriate”—­“Both the real­ity of the encounter and the elusiveness of the face are crucial to Levinas’s argument” (ibid., 132, 133, 135). 21. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Totalité et Infini, 1961), trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 197–98. [Hereafter T&I.] See also Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-­Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) for the continuing resonance of Levinas’s response to modern “crimes against hospitality” (ibid., 70–71). 22. See Howard Caygill, Levinas and the Po­liti­cal (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 49–93, for the impact on Levinas of prewar National Socialism, war, and the horror of the Holocaust. 23. Josef Koudelka, 1977 Notebook; see Michel Frizot, “Wanderer in Non-­Places,” in Josef Koudelka: The Making of Exiles, ed. Josef Koudelka and Clément Chéroux (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou / Éditions Xavier Barral, 2017), 133. 24. For Nazi policy t­ oward Eastern Eu­ro­pean Roma during in World War II, see Jean Pierre Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope, 114–17, and Michael Stewart, “The Other Genocide,” in Multi-­ Disciplinary Approaches to Romany Studies, ed. Michael Stewart and Márton Rövid (Budapest: Central Eu­ro­pean University, 2011), 172–95. For contradictory policies that both included and exempted Roma from Nazi racist ideology and murder, see Yaron Matras, The Romani Gypsies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 205–24. 25. See Jean-­Pierre Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope, 35–38, on the variety of compromises with mobility for “settled” Roma p­ eople and their uneasy relation to relocation; for the Czech Communist period, see ibid., 127–28. Some of Koudelka’s photo­graphs show wheel-­less caravans turned into stationary dwellings. 26. For a detailed account of Roma ­under State socialism, see Zoltan Brabany, The East Eu­ ro­pean Gypsies: Regime Change, Marginality, and Ethnopolitics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 112–56; Roma w ­ ere dispersed from Slovakia to the emptier Czech regions (10 ­percent remained in Slovakia). For the overlapping histories of Czech and Slovenian Roma,

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5   203 see also Donald Kenrick, Historical Dictionary of the Gypsies (Romanies), 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 60–62, 247–53; for an informative account of Eu­ro­pean Roma more generally, see also Becky Taylor, Another Darkness, Another Dawn: A History of Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers (London: Reaktion Books, 2014). Large Roma families w ­ ere regarded as particularly problematic, with w ­ omen subjected to compulsory sterilization as recently as the early twenty-­first ­century. 27. Koudelka, “The Maximum, That’s What’s Always Interested Me,” 126. For the “look” of Koudelka’s Roma photo­graphs, see Witkovsky, “Schooled in the Sixties,” in Witkovsky, Josef Koudelka, 50: “In 1961 Koudelka set aside his Rolleiflex and began working with a 35 mm single-­ lens reflex held at eye level—­the classic equipment for photojournalists. Two years l­ater he obtained a 25 mm wide-­angle lens, which, as he has often commented, determined to a ­great extent the look of his Gypsies photo­graphs.” 28. See Sean O’Hagan, “40 Years On: The Exile Comes Home to Prague,” Observer, 23 August 2008. “You know, ­people say, ‘Oh, Josef, he is the eternal outsider,’ but on the contrary I try always to be an insider, both as a photographer and as a man. I am part of every­thing that is around me” [Hereafter Koudelka.] https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­artanddesign​/­2008​/­aug​/­24​ /­photography. 29. See Witkovsky, “Schooled in the Sixties,” 51–52, for Koudelka’s participatory approach to photographing avant garde theater during the 1960s. For the importance of the ­family in Roma society, see Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope, 71–75. 30. See Koudelka, “The Maximum, That’s What’s Always Interested Me,” 122–23: “it was the ­music that got me started again and again. . . . ​W hile visiting their settlements I often made recordings of gypsy songs” (ibid., 123). 31. See Gypsies, Velka Lomnika, 1963; Straznice, 1965; and compare Witkovsky, “Gypsies,” Josef Koudelka, 104. As part of the assimilationist policies ­under Communism, Bulgaria tried to outlaw Romani musicians and bands; see Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope, 129. 32. For the importance of Catholicism in Slovakian Roma life, see ibid., 77–79. 33. See O’Hagan, “40 Years On: The Exile Comes Home to Prague”: “In one startling image that has haunted me since I first saw it, a bewildered young Gypsy in handcuffs stands alone on a hill while in the ­middle distance a line of ­people, and a few uncertain-­looking policemen, stand watching like onlookers in an absurdist drama. The man, it turns out, had just been arrested and charged with murdering his wife.” 34. See Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope, 61–63, for the kris or Roma communal court of justice. 35. Diane Perpich, “Figurative Language and the ‘Face’ in Levinas’s Philosophy,” Philosophy and Rhe­toric, 38, no. 2 (2005), 103–21, provides an illuminating philosophical discussion of the tension in Levinas’s thought between ethics and rhe­toric: “Levinas’s thought relies on a figure or image—­a rhetorical trope—to convey its main philosophical (and supposedly non-­figural) point. . . . ​The absolute alterity of the other is approachable, according to Levinas, only in nonfigurative or nonrhetorical language, but the notion of such alterity can be expressed only figuratively with the aid of an image that the phi­los­o­pher claims represents the inadequacy of images” (ibid., 117). For the Levinasian face as both figure and image, see also Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, esp. 68–74. 36. For Levinas’s problematic relation to the image and aesthetics in general as well as the mutual exclusiveness of art and ethics in his writings on aesthetics, see de Vries, Minimal

204  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 Philosophies, 409–42; nevertheless, de Vries concludes: “Art is . . . ​the negative foil against which philosophical inquiry and, hence, truth receive their distinctive profile, but art . . . ​also forms a positive modality—­and thus an intrinsic possibility—of both” (ibid., 442). For an extensive consideration of Levinas’s hostility to the image and to art, see also Jill Robbins, Altered Reading: Levinas and Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 39–72; as Robbins points out, the giving of face is also the giving of voice, or the figure of prosopopoeia (ibid., 57). For a brief discussion of the status of art in Levinas’s philosophy and “the poetics of proximity,” see Gerald L. Bruns, “The Concepts of Art and Poetry in Emmanuel Levinas’s writings,” in Simon Critchley and Robert Bernasconi, The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 206–33. 37. Rainer Maria Rilke, Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Random House, 1995), 380–81. 38. Liégeois, Roma in Eu­rope, 67. 39. Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (New York: Viking, 1987), 56; quoted by Maddox, “A Stranger in No Place,” 147 n. 49. For links between Chatwin and another per­sis­tent traveler, W. G. Sebald, see Brad Prager, “Convergence Insufficiency: On Seeing Passages between W. G. Sebald and the ‘Travel Writer’ Bruce Chatwin,” in The Undiscover’d Country: W. G. Sebald and the Poetics of Travel, ed. Markus Zisselsberger (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2010), 189–212. 40. See Frizot, “Wanderer in Non-­Places,” in The Making of Exiles, 125 (1973 Notebook). 41. Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian, trans. Grace Frick (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005), 123; quoted by Maddox, “A Stranger in No Place,” 147 n. 5. Koudelka liked to quote this passage in interviews; see Clément Chéroux, “The Open Sky,” in The Making of Exiles, 29 and n. 11. 42. Quoted by Frizot, “Wanderer in Non-­Places,” 127 (1976 Notebook). 43. Chéroux, “The Open Sky,” 29. In 1972, Koudelka referred to himself as a “vagabond who roams the world;” see Frizot, “Wanderer in Non-­Places,” 127 (1972 Notebook). 44. For Koudelka’s disorientation, see Frizot, “Wanderer in Non-­Places,” 112: “Plunged into a state of restlessness that did not suit him as he scanned the photographic horizon . . . ​he began to see signs and figures—­images whose existence he had never suspected before and that he had never ­imagined seeing—­like visions induced by his rootlessness.” 45. Koudelka, “The Maximum, That’s What’s Always Interested Me,” 132. 46. For the contents of Koudelka’s backpack, see Frizot, “Wanderer in Non-­Places,” 122; some of Koudelka’s open notebooks, outlining his timetable and travels for each year, are reproduced by Frizot, ibid., 120–21. 47. See ibid., 117 and n. 25 (2016 interview), and ibid., 133 (1977 Notebook). 48. “The hands of the watch do not pinpoint a historical moment, they indicate a personal temporality. Koudelka understood that a photo­graph was not a transparent instrument for representing the world. . . . ​He was keen that ­people looking at his photo should understand that it was . . . ​the expression of somebody’s subjective view” (Chéroux, “The Open Sky,” 29). 49. The series is reproduced in Koudelka and Chéroux, The Making of Exiles, 104–5. 50. Chéroux argues that Koudelka’s photo­graphs of himself, morning or eve­ning, along with the inclusion of his own hand, feet, or shadow, are not so much self-­portraits as a photographic

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5   205 means of embedding his own experience (see “The Open Sky,” 29). For Koudelka’s sense of the freedom he gained by refusal to conform to Western photographic norms, see Koudelka, “The Maximum, That’s What’s Always Interested Me,” 132–33. 51. Ibid., 135. 52. Ibid., 135. 53. For the genealogy of Agamben’s term, including Maurice Blanchot’s désouvrement and Jean-­Luc Nancy’s writing, see Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 18–20 and 330–32. 54. Rilke, Ahead of All Parting, 376–77. 55. Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 54. [Hereafter Open.] See Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 328–34, for Agamben’s intervention into Heidegger’s reading of Rilke: “Inoperativeness is not laziness or inactivity; it is the open space where formless life and lifeless form meet in a distinct life-­form and form of living that are rich with their own singular potentiality. This is the ‘open’ that Agamben’s title strives to name” (ibid., 331). I am indebted to Durantaye’s careful reading of Agamben’s take on Heidegger in The Open. 56. Agamben quotes an extended passage from Heidegger: “We are sitting, for example, at the tasteless station of some lonely minor railway. It is four hours u­ ntil the next train arrives. The district is unattractive. We do have a book in our rucksack, though—­shall we read? No. Or think through a prob­lem, some question? We are unable to. We read the timetables. . . . ​We look at the clock. . . . ​We walk up and down, just to have something to do. But it is no use . . . ​—­and so on” (Open, 63–64). See Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solidtude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93. 57. Rilke, Eighth Duino Elegy (Ahead of All Parting, 380–81). 58. Giorgio Agamben, “Face” (1995), in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 91. [Hereafter “Face”.] See also Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben, 330. For Levinas’s problematic relation to “animal ­others” (with or without a recognizable face), see the discussion of animals and the environment in Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, 150–76, and Peter Atterton, “Facing Animals,” in Facing Nature: Levinas and Environmental Thought, ed. William Edelglass, James Hatley, and Christian Diehm (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2012), 25–39. 59. For the divergence between Agamben and Levinas over ­human rights predicated on their differing understanding of extra-­political subjectivity, see Nick Mansfield, “­Human Rights as Vio­lence and Enigma: Can Lit­er­a­ture ­R eally Be of Any Help with the Politics of ­Human Rights?” in Theoretical Perspectives on ­Human Rights and Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg and Alexandra Schultheis Moore (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 208–10, 213. 60. Koudelka was one of twelve photog­raphers commissioned to take part in a proj­ect titled This Place: Making Images, Breaking Images—­Israel and the West Bank, conceived by the photographer Frédéric Brenner: “a portrait of the place as a living organism, with all its rifts and paradoxes”; see endnote, Josef Koudelka, Wall (New York: Aperture, 2013). 61. Koudelka, “The Maximum, That’s What’s Always Interested Me,” 139: “I d­ on’t find it horrible. I find it tragic, but beautiful. Horribly beautiful.”

206  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 5 62. O’Hagan, “40 Years On: The Exile Comes Home to Prague.” 63. Estrin, “Formed by the World.” 64. For the constant and time-­consuming harassment of Palestinians negotiating checkpoints, see Colum McCann, Apeirogon: A Novel (New York: Random House, 2020); McGann juxtaposes two f­ athers (one Palestinian, one Israeli) who have each lost a d­ aughter, respectively, to Israeli army or to terrorist vio­lence, coming together in their work for peace. 65. See Ray Dolphin, The West Bank Wall: Unmaking Palestine (London: Pluto Press, 2006), 35–69. 66. See ibid., 71–108, and compare René Backmann, A Wall in Palestine, trans. A. Kaiser (New York: Picador, 2010 [2006]), for the impact of the Wall on the economic and daily lives of Palestinians on the West Bank. 67. Each photo­graph carries Dolphin’s one-­sentence caption indicating the function and effects of the Wall; as well as a “Lexicon,” Dolphin contributed an initial chronology of the origins, inception, and development of the Wall from 2000 to 2013, making Wall a more explicit po­liti­cal intervention than any of Koudelka’s previous books. 68. For the function and characteristics of the security checkpoint in border regimes, see Nail, Theory of the Border, 138–61. 69. See Rula Halawani’s series of photo­graphs, “Gates to Heaven,” in Keep Your Eye on the Wall: Palestinian Landscapes, ed. Mitchell Albert and Olivia Snaije (London: Saqi Books, 2013). Raja Shehadeh’s foreword comments on the “closed spaces” of Halawani’s photo­graphs: “The texture of the gates set within the concrete is harsh, opaque. . . . ​[T]he white arrow painted in the asphalt lead[s] the eye forward only to meet the shut gate.” 70. The writer Gillian Slovo, “Qalandia,” in This Is Not a Border: Reportage & Reflections from the Palestine Festival of Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Ahdaf Souief and Omar Robert Hamilton (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), 77–80, provides a personal account of her humiliating passage through the Qalandia checkpoint from Ramallah to Jerusalem. 71. See Tiberghien, “Where Are the ­People?” 218. 72. See Ruchama Marton and Dalit Baum, “Transparent Wall, Opaque Gates,” in Against the Wall: Israel’s Barrier to Peace, ed. Michael Sorkin (New York and London: New Press, 2005), 212–23. Viewed as a primitive form of splitting and control, the Wall’s crossing points “become clear foci of pressure—­the conflict points where the power­ful occupier exercises power over the weak occupied” (ibid., 220). See also Brown’s account of the psychoanalytic function of walls in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 107–33: “Mobilizing the defenses that Anna Freud names ‘reversal’ and ‘displacement,’ walls against immigration construe it as an invasion” (ibid., 129). 73. For the normalization of the Wall as an absolute border involving checkpoints, observation towers, and mandatory documents, see Eyal Weizman, “Hollow Land: The Barrier Archipelago and the Impossible Politics of Separation,” in Against the Wall, ed. Sorkin, 224–53. 74. See Sari Hanafi, “Spacio-­cide and Bio-­Politics: The Israeli Colonial Conflict from 1947 to the Wall,” in Against the Wall, ed. Sorkin, 158–73. For the inaccessibility of the divided Palestinian landscape to the would-be hiker, see also Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanis­hing Landscape (London: Profile Books, 2007). 75. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­ Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 29.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6   207

Chapter 6: Rewilding Antigone 1. Seamus Heaney, “A Note on The Burial at Thebes,” in The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 75. [Hereafter BT.] 2. “From the ‘Antigone,’ ” The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1953), 272. Based on the Richard Jebb translation. See Yasuko Suzuki, “Yeats’s ‘From the “Antigone” ’: Desire and Loss,” The Harp: Journal of Irish Studies, 15 (2000), 47–58, for the association of erotic frenzy and revolutionary fervor in Yeats’s poetry. 3. Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, 179. 4. See Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 4–5, and compare Carl Schmitt, Po­liti­cal Theology (Politiche Theologie, 1922), trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 5. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), for an extended discussion of Carl Schmitt’s Po­liti­cal Theology. Prompted by the invasion of Iraq and its po­liti­cal aftermath, State of Exception continues the e­ arlier discussion of Schmitt in Agamben’s Homer Sacer (1995); see Leland de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 335–59. 6. Tom Paulin, The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles’ Antigone (London: Faber and Faber, 1985) was performed in 1984; see also Tom Paulin, “The Making of a Loyalist” (1980), in Writing to the Moment: Selected Critical Essays 1980–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 1–17. O’Brien had called the tragic deaths in Antigone “[a] stiff price for that handful of dust on Polyneices,” blaming Antigone and identifying her with Bernadette Devlin and the Civil Rights movement (ibid., 4–6). For Neil Corcoran’s Guardian review of Heaney’s The Burial at Thebes, “The State ­We’re In,” see https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­books​/­2004​/­may​/­01​/­poetry​.­seamusheaney. 7. Paulin, The Riot Act, 16, 62. See also Tom Paulin, “Antigone,” in Amid Our Trou­bles: Irish Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (London: Methuen, 2002), 165–70: “I set out to try and prove [O’Brien] wrong again”; Paulin notes that Douglas Hurd duly trotted out “the usual cliché about d­ oing a ­great deal of listening” when he took over as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (ibid., 167). For the three versions of Antigone belonging to 1984 (by Tom Paulin, Brendan Kennelly, and Aidan Mathews) to which Heaney’s “Note” refers, see also Hugh Harkin, “Irish Antigones: T ­ owards Tragedies Without Borders?” Irish University Review, 38, no. 2 (2008), 292–309. 8. Agamben, State of Exception, 3–4. 9. See Marianne McDonald, “The Irish and Greek Tragedy,” in McDonald and Walton, Amid Our Trou­bles, 37–86, esp. 51–60. McDonald points out that the play’s h­ uman rights issues (notably ­women’s issues) came into focus in 1984 with the rejection of the divorce referendum and abortion rights, as well as the increased powers given to the police by the Criminal Justice Bill (ibid., 52–53). 10. Agamben, State of Exception, 10–11. The German Federal Republic (Article 20) legalized the right of re­sis­tance in defense of the demo­cratic constitution (“all Germans have a right of Re­sis­tance, if no other remedies are pos­si­ble”). See also Costas Douzinas, “Philosophy and the Right to Re­sis­tance,” in The Meanings of Rights: The Philosophy and Social Theory of ­Human Rights, ed. Costas Douzinas and Conor Gearty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 85–105.

208  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 11. For a comprehensive account of the imagining and reimagining of Antigone from Aristotle to Lacan, see George Steiner, Antigones: How the Antigone Legend Has Endured in Western Lit­er­ a­ture, Art, and Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1984). See also Athol Fugard, “Antigone in Africa,” in McDonald and Walton, Amid Our Trou­bles, 128–47. Fugard’s version of Antigone, The Island (1973), is set on Robben Island in the form of a play-­within-­a-­play; when the Black South African actor playing Haemon in Fugard’s production of Antigone was sentenced to twenty years on Robben Island, he managed to reconstruct the final confrontation between Creon and Antigone for a prison per­for­mance, the genesis of Fugard’s The Island. 12. See Edward Said, On Late Style (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 7. 13. Paulin, The Riot Act, 16. 14. An echo of the first grammatical rule of the concentration camp: “ ‘Hier ist kein warum’ (­there is no why ­here)” (“qui non c’è perché)”; see Primo Levi, If This Is a Man (1947), in The Complete Works of Primo Levi, ed. Ann Goldstein, 3 vols. (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation [W. W. Norton and Com­pany], 2015), 1: 25, and Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 2014), 21. 15. Heaney’s note (BT, 75) refers to Marianne McDonald’s translation, Sophocles Antigone (London: Nick Hern Books, 2000); McDonald’s introduction calls Antigone the first and greatest play in Western lit­er­a­ture “about the consequences of individual conscience defying civil authority” (ibid., ix). Elsewhere, McDonald writes “the issues about h­ uman rights have everlasting relevance. This play . . . ​shows the price of supporting ­these rights” (McDonald, “The Irish and Greek Tragedy,” 52). 16. Shamsie acknowledges Gillian Slovo’s National Theatre play, Another World: Losing Our ­Children to Islamic State (London: Oberon Books, 2016). Using interviews with participants and parents, Slovo mixes the language of ISIS spokespeople with testimony by former terrorist suspects, social workers, and young ­people, and—­especially moving—­the ­mothers of ISIS recruits (see especially the concluding dialogue, ibid., 50–55). Shamsie’s novel has its real-­life parallel in the three fifteen-­year-­old east London schoolgirls who went to Syria to join ISIS, of whom Shamima Begum (a British-­born citizen of Bangladeshi descent) is the sole presumed survivor—­stranded in a Syrian refugee camp, the ­mother of three dead ­children, refused by Bangladesh and unable to return to the UK. By an irony of history, she was stripped of her UK citizenship in 2019 by the then Conservative Home Secretary, Sajid Javid (like the characters in Shamsie’s book, also a British citizen of Pakistani origins). This topical footnote to Shamsie’s novel suggests a darker side to the need to belong that includes loyalty to a khalifate noted for its oppression of ­women. See also the recent discussion of Begum’s de-­citizenship in Lyndsey Stonebridge, Writing and Righting: Lit­er­a­ture in the Age of ­Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 85–86, 89–91, and Ankhi Mukherjee’s searching analysis of Shamsie’s Home Fire and “the tangled vocabularies of love” in “On Antigone’s Suffering,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 8, no. 2 (2021), 214–31. 17. See https://­www​.­theguardian​.­com​/­politics​/­2014​/­may​/­0 6​/­theresa​-­may​-­support​-­plan​ -­deprive​-­terror​-­suspects​-­british​-­citizenship. 18. See Helena Kennedy, QC, commenting on May’s attempt to change immigration law to deprive ­people of UK citizenship: https://­www​.­thebureauinvestigates​.­com​/­opinion​/­2014​-­03​ -­20​/­helena​-­kennedy​-­qc​-­citizenship​-­is​-­not​-­a​-­privilege​-­it​-­is​-­a​-­protected​-­legal​-­status. Kennedy argues persuasively that unilateral deprivation of citizenship without due l­ egal pro­cess is equivalent to a penal sanction imposed without criminal trial or conviction.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6   209 19. Arendt’s position has been extensively discussed; see for instance, Seyla Benhabib, “The Right to Have Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contradictions of the Nation-­State,” in The Rights of O ­ thers: Aliens, Residents, Citizens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 49–69; compare also Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), esp. 79–82. Dif­fer­ent aspects of Arendt’s phrase are analyzed in detail by Stephanie DeGooyer, Alastair Hunt, Lida Maxwell, and Samuel Moyn in The Right to Have Rights (London: Verso, 2019). 20. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951), 294. 21. Ibid., 293–94. 22. For Butler’s questioning of Arendt on statelessness, rights, and “belonging,” see Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-­State? (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), esp. 11–43; I regret not having read Butler’s and Spivak’s highly relevant dialogue prior to drafting this chapter. 23. For the dubious legality and problematic ethics of denationalization, see Matthew J. Gibney, “Denationalization,” in The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship, ed. Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauböck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 358–82. 24. Colm Tóibín’s single-­actor drama, Pale ­Sister (Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland: Gallery Press, 2019)—­performed at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, in 2019 with Lisa Dwan in the title role—­refocuses attention on Ismene, who becomes the voice of the narrator-­survivor (“I alone can speak, I alone, the pale s­ ister. The witness”). She fi­nally takes her stand at the end of the play as Antigone’s avatar, confronting Creon’s addictive vio­lence: “I am not afraid of you . . . ​I am not afraid” (ibid., 12, 38, 40). 25. “We might expect that the state presupposes modes of juridical belonging . . . ​but since the state can be precisely what expels and suspects modes of ­legal protection and obligation, the state . . . ​can signify the course of non-­belonging, even produce that non-­belonging as a quasi-­permanent state” (Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-­State?, 3–4). 26. Epigraph, Tacita Dean, “Antigone” in Tacita Dean: Selected Writings 1992–2018 (London: Royal Acad­emy of Arts, 2018), 106. [Hereafter TDSW.] The words are spoken by Antigone (played by Dean) in the film itself. Dean attributes the quotation to the Caedmon recording of the Stratford, Ontario, Shakespearean Festival Players, directed by Tyrone Guthrie but the exact wording of Dean’s epigraph comes from Yeats’s draft typescript, where it is attributed to Creon; see W. B. Yeats, Sophocles’ King Oedipus: A Version for the Modern Stage (1928), in The Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, ed. Russell K. Alspach (London: Macmillan, 1966), 824, ll. 419–20 and app. crit. 27. Tacita Dean, “Kodak: Analogue” (2006) (TDSW, 68). “Thinking too becomes analogue when it is materialized into a concrete form . . . ​my unconscious reverie [is] made manifest as an impression on a surface” (“Kodak,” TDSW, 68). 28. Tacita Dean, Antigone (2018): 2 synchronized 35 mm color anamorphic films, optical sound, 60 minutes. 29. Compare Dean in “Save Celluloid for Art’s Sake” (2011): “the film image is dif­fer­ent from the digital image; it is not only emulsion versus pixels, or light versus electronics but something deeper—­something to do with poetry” (TDSW, 254). Dean’s commitment to photochemical film led her to document the partially dismantled Kodak film-­processing factory in her film Kodak (2006), attempting to capture the technology of film-­processing before it was forgotten. A Kodak employee laments that “the generation who are of an age with digital w ­ ill soon never

210  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 have seen celluloid film or known the photographic negative” (TDSW, 69). See also Dean’s manifesto for preserving obsolete film technology, “Film Preservation” (2015), in TDSW, 276–82. 30. Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 100–101. [Hereafter MOH.] 31. See Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 31–39, for Hegel and the law. 32. Antigonick (Sophokles), trans. Anne Carson (New York: New Directions, 2012), 39; spoken by Creon’s wife, Eurydike. Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1995)—­like his ­later State of Exception—­ shows how the suspension of law in a time of crisis allows government to abolish the ­legal rights of certain categories of persons; the paradigmatic instance is the concentration camp: “The original po­liti­cal relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion)”; see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-­Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 181; and compare Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 81. 33. See Richard Grusin, “Radical Mediation,” Critical Inquiry 42 (Autumn 2015), 124–48: “In radical mediation, all connections involve modulation, translation, or transformation, not just linking. . . . ​R adical mediation insists that it is remediation all the way down” (ibid., 138, 146); “mediations are always remediations, which change or translate experiences as well as relating or connecting them” (ibid., 128). For a more ­limited account of “new” media (including film, digital media, and TV), see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 34. “Hope” (2003 interview), in Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tacita Dean: The Conversation Series 28 (Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2012), 14. [Hereafter Obrist.] 35. Compare Dean’s account of the making of The Green Ray (2003): “looking for the green ray became about the act of looking itself, about faith and belief in what you see. This film is a document; it has become about the very fabric, material and manufacture of film itself” (TDSW, 43). For landscape as medium in its own right in Dean’s work, see Sarah Lea, “Tacita Dean: Mediums,” in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life (London: Royal Acad­emy of Arts, 2018), 30–47. 36. “It was in part my fight to save photochemical film that brought me . . . ​back into connection with the idea of cinema. Using film, and so sharing the industry’s historic medium, inevitably tied me to its vicissitudes” (TDSW, 109). 37. For the synchronized courtroom scene script, transcribed in parallel (Left Eye and Right Eye), see the exhibition cata­logue, Tacita Dean (Bregenz: Kuntshaus Bregenz, 2019), 38–45. 38. Ibid., 44. 39. In “The Book That Changed Me: ‘Fires’ by Marguerite Yourcenar” (2016), Dean quotes a passage from Yourcenar in connection with Antigone (her “­great, unmade proj­ect”): “She leads along the roads of exile this f­ather who is at the same time her tragic older b­ rother. . . . ​She ­will have no peace ­until she sees him rest in a night more absolute than blindness” (TDSW, 185). 40. Conversation with Stewart Stern,” in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, 111. 41. Dean in conversation with Marina Warner: “The name Antigone has been a huge ­thing for me b­ ecause of finding out who the original Antigone was and being viscerally shocked that my ­father could do that to my s­ ister—it is a heavy burden to hear;” see Jean-­Christophe Royoux, Marina Warner, Germaine Greer, Tacita Dean (London: Phaidon, 2006), 13.

N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6   211 42. Boots or Bootsy (Robert Steane) appears in Dean’s film, Boots (2003), where his slow walk through an empty villa in Porto provides the film’s narrative thread; see Obrist, 12–13, and Tacita Dean, “Boots,” TDSW, 49–50. 43. See Benjamin’s “­Little History of Photography” (1931): “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of this optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis”; Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 2, 1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 510–12. 44. See Lea, “Tacita Dean: Mediums,” 46: “Dean collects and combines ­these places inside her camera to form a Pangaeaic wilderness.” 45. Compare “Film has time as its internal discipline” (“Shoot Film D ­ on’t Kill It,” TDSW, 273). 46. Dean in conversation with Warner, Tacita Dean, 17. 47. See Melanie Rehak, “­Things Fall Together,” New York Times Magazine, 26 March 2000, sec. 6. 48. See Longinus, De Sublimitate, 5.5. Bolter and Grusin identify tele­vi­sion’s claim to “liveness” or present-­ness as its superiority over film: “Even when tele­vi­sion acknowledges itself as a medium, it is committed to the pursuit of the immediate to a degree that film and ­earlier technologies are not” (Remediation, 187); tele­vi­sion, they conclude, “remediates the real” (ibid., 194). Dean mentions her own attraction to “distant seeing” apropos of her East German TV tower film, Fernsehturm (2001); see Dean in conversation with Warner, Tacita Dean, 33. 49. Carson uses the term “physics”—­“God’s ­will is not some sort of physics, is it” (MOH, 100)—in the sense of “natu­ral science” or “knowledge that comes from nature [phusis].” 50. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 34. Compare the “permanent elsewhere located ‘in’ ­human being” to which Carson’s “Note from the Translator” alludes in her full translation of the play, citing Butler’s discussion of Hegel and Lacan (Antigone’s Claim, 43); see Sophokles Antigone, trans. Anne Carson (London: Oberon Books, 2015), 8. 51. “Translation cannot convey the complex interaction of this meta­phorical system or the inevitability of the catastrophe to which it leads” (Carson, Sophokles Antigone, 8). 52. The courtroom dialogue between Carson, Spillane, and Dean (courtroom transcript, Tacita Dean, 38–45) includes Carson’s ironic comment: “just put them somewhere where they ­won’t pollute ­others. Some space, like some refugee camp” (ibid., 45). 53. See Ben Jonson’s masque, Pan’s Anniversary (1621): “For to t­ hese t­ here is annexed a clock-­ keeper, a grave person as Time himself, who is to see that they all keep time to a nick . . .”; see The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson, ed. David Bevington, Martin Butler, and Ian Donaldson, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 5: 455, ll. 92–94. 54. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 81. 55. Ibid., 81. 56. Ibid., 82. 57. Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), 338, l. 990. 58. Alspach, Variorum Edition of the Plays of W. B. Yeats, 824, ll. 419–20 and app. crit. (see note 26, ­earlier); Tiresias is not notably ­silent or unknowing in his acrimonious exchanges with Oedipus.

212  N o t e s t o c h a p t e r 6 59. See Dean’s comments in a video accompanying the Royal Acad­emy showing of Antigone: https://­www​.­facebook ​.­com​/­royalacademy​/­v ideos​/­tacita​-­dean​-­on​-­antigone​/­1015602859 2202415​/­. 60. See Tacita Dean, “W. G. Sebald,” in TDSW, 53–60; Dean is commenting on her own reading of a passage from Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (1995) which released a stream of f­ amily reminiscence and genealogy. 61. Courtroom transcript, Tacita Dean, 45. I am grateful to Tacita Dean and Stephen Dillane for identifying the source of this quotation as Tom Stoppard’s Rus­sian trilogy, The Coast of Utopia (2002); Stephen Dillane had played the central part of Alexander Herzen. The quotation is approximate, but the context relates to the end of the first play, Voyage, when the el­derly (significantly) blind ­father of Bakunin is brought out to see an invisible sunset; see The Coast of Utopia (London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 115–17. 62. “Conversation with Stewart Stern,” in Tacita Dean: Landscape, Portrait, Still Life, 110–11. 63. See “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936; second version), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 104–5.

I n de x

Arcades Proj­ect, 103, 117, 198nn24, 30, 199n46, 200n48; and “aura,” 7, 182, 212n63; and Berlin, 3, 7, 93, 94, 113, 115–16, 117, 199n44; Berlin Childhood around 1900, 115, 199n44, 200n47; “Berlin Chronicle,” 115–17, 199nn44, 45; and books, 3, 93–94, 117; and ­children, 109–11, 114–15, 198n34, 199n41; and collecting, 93–94, 108–9, 198n33; and cultural analy­sis, 7, 106, 108, 198n26; and dialectical image, 113, 117, 199nn28, 46; and dialectical optic, 111; and Denkbilder, 95, 108, 112, 113, 196n9; “Doctrine of the Similar,” 199n41; “Dream Kitsch,” 106, 107 (fig. 4.3); and dust, 197n19; and enchantment, 117, 118; “Excavation and Memory,” 109–10; and exile, 3, 4, 6, 93, 117; and forgetting, 114–15; and kleine Form, 198nn25, 26; and Asja Lacis, 8, 108, 112, 113, 198n30, 199n36; and last walk, 117–18, 200n50; and life­writing, 7, 95, 115–16; “­Little History of Photography,” 104–5, 172, 198n32, 211n43; and lost t­ hings, 7, 94, 114, 118, 185n11, 189n25; and memory-­writing, 94, 108–9; and micrological method,198n33; One­Way Street, 8, 94, 95, 106, 108–13, 198nn5, 26, 27, and 28, 199nn35, 36; “On the Image of Proust,” 113–15, 199n42; and “optical unconscious,” 104–5, 172, 211n43; and Paris, 116, 118, 199n44; and photography, 103, 104–5, 116–17, 211n43; and Marcel Proust, 7, 115–16; and Proust’s stocking, 114–15, 199n42; “Rus­sian Toys,” 110 (fig. 4.4), 198–99n34; and stamps, 112; and W. G.

Adorno, Theodor: and Walter Benjamin, 117, 118; and Denkbilder, 108, 113; and exile, 22; and Friedrich Hölderlin, 64; and lateness, 185n3; and Los Angeles, 106; and “micrological method,” 95, 109; and One-­Way Street, 94, 106, 198n27, 199n37; and parataxis, 64, 192n1; and Edward Said, 22, 185n3 Agamben, Giorgio: and bio-­politics, 6, 121, 143, 144; “The Face,” 143–44, 152; and Martin Heidegger, 143, 205nn55, 56; Homo Sacer, 152–53, 178, 207n5, 210n32; and “inoperativeness,” 121, 141, 205nn53, 55; and Emmanuel Levinas, 205nn58, 59; The Open, 142–43; and Rainer Maria Rilke, 142–43, 205n55; State of Exception, 6, 7, 152, 155, 156, 157, 167, 176, 207n5, 210n32 Anouilh, Jean, 157, 175 Apter, Emily, 186n17, 187n1, 200n5 Arendt, Hannah: and German language, 4, 7, 185nn5, 8; and ­human rights, 6, 178; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 164, 185n8; “The Rights of Man,” 164–65, 178, 179, 185n8, 209nn19, 22; “What Remains?” 4, 7, 185n5 Aragon, Louis, 106 Auerbach, Frank, 197n19 Barthes, Roland, 127 Bataille, Georges, 141 Baudelaire, Charles, Correspondances, 114 Beckett, Samuel, 175 Benjamin, Walter: and Adorno, 94, 95, 106, 108, 109, 113, 117, 118, 198nn27, 33, 199nn37, 43; and advertisements, 106, 108, 112; The 213

214 i n de x Benjamin, Walter (continued) Sebald, 4, 6, 7, 93, 94, 95, 100, 103, 114, 118; and suicide, 117–18; and surrealism, 106, 109, 114–15; “Surrealism,” 111–12; and revolution, 199n35; “The Task of the Translator,” 7, 157, 185n11, 189n25; “Thought Figures,” 198n29; and toys, 109, 110 (fig. 4.4), 111, 198n33, 198–99n34; and trauma, 117; and Robert Walser, 93, 95, 99, 100, 118; “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 212n63; “Unpacking My Library,” 93–94 Bernhard, Thomas, 196n18 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, Apollo and Daphne 18–19 (and fig. 1.1), 22 Bishop, Elizabeth: and William Blake, 79; and Brazil, 76–78, 77 (fig. 3.2), 78, 194n15; “Cape Breton,” 81–83; A Cold Spring, 81, 83; “End of March,” 81, 194–95n23, 195n24; “The Fish­houses,” 83–85, 89, 195nn27, 28; Geography III, 85; “In the Village,” 194n16; and David Kalstone, 77, 82; and Robert Lowell, 193n13, 194–95n23; “The Map,” 79–81, 93, 194n22; and maternal loss, 82–83, 84–85, 195nn26, 27; and Nova Scotia, 65, 76, 77, 81–82, 85, 86 (fig. 3.3), 89, 195n27; and Blaise Pascal, 78; and painting, 65, 77 (fig. 3.2), 85, 86 (fig. 3.3), 195n29; “Poem” 85, 90, 195n29; “Questions of Travel,” 4, 76–79; Questions of Travel, 76, 79; “The Sandpiper,” 79, 89, 194n18; and seeing, 79, 89, 194nn19, 20, 195n29; and shore-­poems, 5, 79–81, 194n18; “Strayed Crab,” 76; and Colm Tóibín, 4, 65, 83, 86–87, 88–89, 92; and travel, 4, 65, 66, 76–79 borders: and Walter Benjamin, 118, 200n50; and border-­aesthetics, 120, 200n5, 206n69; and border-­crossers, 6, 7–8; and border­scapes, 147–53 (figs. 5.16–5.21); and bordering, 186nn18,19, 191nn23, 28, 200n2; and checkpoints, 8,119, 145, 146–47 and 146–51 (figs. 5.16–5.20), 200nn4, 5, 206nn68, 70; and coastal borders, 5, 64–92; and dissolution, 10; and empire, 12, 24, 25, 26,

32; and Eu­ro­pean, 10, 32, 119–20, 139, 144, 186n18, 192n23; and Israeli/Palestinian Wall, 120, 121, 144–53 (and figs.5.16–5.21), 190n10, 200nn4, 5, 206nn64, 67, 69, 70, and 72–74; and Josef Koudelka, 119–53; and Mediterranean as, 55, 191nn23, 28; as modern keyword, 9, 186n19, 200n2; and “princi­ple of the wall,” 8, 119; and securitization, 120, 164, 166, 200n4, 206n68; and sovereignty, 43, 200n4, 5; and US–­Mexico Border Barrier, 8, 10, 120, 152, 200n4 Boutroux, Émile, 193n9 Brecht, Bertolt, 157, 175 Brown, Wendy, 200n4, 206n72 Butler, Judith: Antigone’s Claim, 6, 166, 167, 175, 178–79, 210n32, 211n50; and Gayatri Spivak, 209n22 Cage, John, 175 Campana, Dino, 192n2 Canetti, Elias, 196n8 Carson, Anne: and Giorgio Agamben, 167, 176, 178, 210n32; “Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2),” 166–67, 173–74; Antigonick, 5–6, 7, 157, 167, 173–79, 180, 210n32; and Judith Butler, 6, 167, 175, 178–79, 210n32, 211n50; and Tacita Dean’s Antigone, 166–67, 169, 173–75, 180, 181, 211n52; and Stephen Dillane, 169, 176, 177–78, 180, 211n52; and language, 175, 176, 177; and “Nick,” 167, 173, 176–77, 179, 211n52; Sophokles Antigone, 175–76, 177, 211nn50, 51; “TV Men,” 167, 173–74, 211n48; and untranslatability, 176 Cartier-­Bresson, Henri, 121, 147 Casement, Roger, 180 Chatwin, Bruce, 134, 204n39 Chakrabarti, Shami, 164 Chonaill, Eibhlín Dhubh Ní (Eileen O’Connell), 156, 161 Dante Aligheri, 20, 21 Darwish, Mahmoud, 22 Dean, Tacita: and analogue film, 5, 7, 157, 158, 166, 172, 175, 180, 182, 209n27, 209–10n29;

i n de x   Antigone (film), 4, 5–6, 157–58, 166–73 (and figs. 6.1–4), 175, 176, 177–83 (and figs. 6.5–6.8), 209n26, 211nn48, 52; and blindness, 164, 167, 170, 171–72, 175, 179, 180, 210n39, 212n61; and Bodmin Moor, 168, 172, 181, 182 (fig. 6.7); “Boots,” 170, 211n42; and Anne Carson’s “Antigone (Scripts 1 and 2),” 166, 167, 173–74; and chthonic landscapes, 166, 168, 172, 173 (fig. 6.4), 210n35; and courtroom scene, 157, 169, 173, 176, 177–78 (and fig. 6.5), 180, 181, 210n37, 211n52, 212n61; and Stephen Dillane, 168, 169, 176, 178–181 passim, 211n52, 212n61; and feet, 170, 171 (and fig. 6.3), 211n42; Fernsehturm, 211n48; and ­Great American Eclipse, 166, 168, 169 (and fig. 6.1), 171, 172, 175, 180; “The Green Ray,” 210n35; “Hope,” 210n34; and immigration, 180, 211n59; “Kodak: Analogue,” 209n27; and names, 169, 170–71, 179–80, 210n41, 211n42; and obsolescence, 7, 158, 166, 179 182–83, 209–10n29, 210n36; and Oedipus at Colonus, 157, 166, 167, 169, 170, 179; and Oedipus Rex, 157, 166, 180; “Save Celluloid for Arts’ Sake,” 209–10n29; and W. G. Sebald, 212n60; “Shoot Film, ­Don’t Kill It,” 211n45; and Sophocles’s Antigone, 169, 171, 173, 179; and Stewart Stern, 169–70, 181; and Thebes, IL, 157, 168–69, 170, 173, 178, 180; and W. B. Yeats’s Oedipus the King, 179, 180, 209n26, 211n58; and Marguerite Yourcenar, 210n39 Derrida, Jacques, and hospitality, 6, 36, 37, 41–45, 46, 190n12, 202n21 Dillane, Stephen: in Tacita Dean’s Antigone, 168, 179, 181; discussion with Anne Carson, 169, 176, 177–78, 180, 211n52; and Tom Stoppard, 212n61 Dolphin, Ray, 145, 206nn65, 67 Eliot, George, 175 exile: and Adorno, 185n3; and Aeneas, 41; and banishment, 11–12, 22, 23, 46, 158; and Walter Benjamin, 3, 93, 117; and

215 border-­crosser, 6, 8, 119; and departure, 65, 66; and experience of, 1, 22, 23, 24, 25, 50; and Frankenstein, 46, 50; and Heimatvertriebene, 94, 101, 104; and internal, 6, 101; and Josef Koudelka, 120, 121, 143–44, 201n9, 203n28; and Martin Heidegger’s “Ister,” 32–35; and David Malouf, 12, 27–31; and Vladimir Nabokov, 97; and Oedipus, 168, 210n39; and Ovid, 8, 11, 12, 20, 23–28; and Edward Said, 22, 185n3; and W. G. Sebald, 3, 4, 6, 93, 94, 99–105, 196n5; and Colm Tóibín, 87; and translation, 21, 37, 41–42; and Vertriebene, 94, 117; and Robert Walser, 3, 8, 93, 94, 95, 97–105. See also migration Fagles, Robert, 179 Frankfurt School, 94, 196n5 Freud, Anna, 206n72 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 64, 95, 162 Fugard, Athol, 157, 208n11 Galassi, Jonathan, 65, 192n3, 193n7 Giordano, Cristiana, and mi­grant ­women, 48–50, 190n19 Godwin, William, 45, 46, 47, 190n17 Gogol, Nikolai, 100, 101, 197n13 Gottwald, Klement, 131 Grusin, Richard, 167, 210n33, 211n48 Guy, Willy, 123 Halawani, Rula, 206n69 Heaney, Seamus: Aeneid Book VI, 4, 37–41, 60; The Burial at Thebes, 5, 6, 154–57, 158–63, 163, 207nn6, 7, 208n15; and Irish Antigones, 207nn6, 7, and 9; “Route 110,” 37–38, 39, 40, 52 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, and Antigone, 155, 167, 175, 179, 210n31, 211n50 Heidegger, Martin: and Giorgio Agamben, 143, 205nn55, 56; and boredom, 143, 205n56; and “Der Ister,” 12, 32–35,188nn20, 21, and 22; and Rainer Maria Rilke, 143–44, 205n55, and translation, 188nn21, 22

216 i n de x Hölderlin, Friedrich: and Adorno, 64: and Martin Heidegger, 12, 32–35, 188nn20, 21, and 22; “Der Ister,” 32–35; Der Ister (film), 189n24l; “Der Rein,” 189n25; and translation, 188nn20, 21 hospitality: and Jacques Derrida, 8, 36, 41–44; and hostility, 36, 41–42, 45, 46; and Immanuel Kant, 8, 36, 42, 43, 190n13; and Emmanuel Levinas, 202n21; and ospiti, 48–50, 190n19. See also migration ­human rights. See rights Ister (Danube): as East/West boundary, 12, 23, 25, 30, 31–32, 35; and Martin Heidegger, 32–35, 189n24; and Friedrich Hölderlin’s “Der Ister,” 32–35; Der Ister (film), 189n24; and Inge Morath, 24 (fig. 1.2), 32, 33 (fig. 1.3), 34 (fig. 1.4), 188n18 Itard, Jean, 28, 188n15 Jacobs, Carol, 196n1, 197n12, 199n42 Jonson, Ben, 177, 211n53 Kalstone, David, 77, 82 Kant, Immanuel: and Jacques Derrida, 8, 36, 37, 41–45, 46; and empire, 190n13; and hospitality 8, 36, 42, 43–44 Keller, Gottfried, 94 Kennedy, Helena, 208n18 Kerrigan, John, 189n1, 191n27 Klein, Melanie, 3 Kleist, Heinrich von, 101–2 Koudelka, Josef: and Giorgio Agamben, 121, 141–44, 152–53, 205nn53, 55, 56, 58, and 59; and animals, 135, 141–42, 142 (fig. 5.15), 142–44, 205n58; and bio-­politics, 6, 121, 143, 144; Black Triangle, 121, 144; and border­aesthetics, 119–20, 121, 152, 200nn2, 5, 206nn 69, 72, and 74; and camera, 120–21, 124, 132, 134, 141, 201n13, 203n27; and Henri Cartier-­Bresson, 121, 147; Chaos, 121, 144; and checkpoints, 146–51 (and figs. 5.16–5.20); and Ray Dolphin, 145, 206n67; and Eastern Eu­ro­pean Roma, 3, 120, 121,

122–33 (and figs. 5.1–5.7), 201n8, 202n24, 202–3n26, 203n31; Exiles, 8, 120, 121, 134–44, 136–42 (and figs. 5.8–5.15), 201n12, 204n41, 204–5n50; and the face, 122–23, 124–27, 129, 132, 135, 143–44, 202n20, 203n35, 203–4n36, 205n58; Gypsies, 8, 120, 121, 123, 126–33, 126–33 (figs. 5.1–5.7), 134, 201nn8, 10, and13, 203nn27, 33; and Martin Heidegger, 143–44, 205nn55, 56; and “inoperativeness,” 121, 140–43 (and figs. 5.13, 5.14), 205nn53, 55; and Israeli/ Palestinian Wall, 144–46, 147, 148–52 (and figs. 5.16–5.21),152–53, 200n4, 201nn1, 5, 206nn69, 72, 73, and 74; and landscape, destruction of, 8, 120–21, 144–46, 205n61; and Emmanuel Levinas, 121, 122–23, 125, 127–29, 132, 143, 202nn19, 20, 203n35, 203–4n36, 205n58; Limestone,144; and nomadism, 4, 124, 134, 135–38 (and figs. 5.9–5.11), 139, 201n9, 204nn43, 44 and 46; and panoramic photography, 8, 120–21, 145, 153, 147–53 (figs. 5.16–5.21), 201n13; and politics of relation, 121, 122–23, 125, 132, 135, 152–53, 200n4, 203n28, 204n48, 204–5n50; and “princi­ple of the wall,” 8, 119,144; and Roma musicians, 125, 131–32, 133 (fig. 5.6), 203nn30, 31; and Roma portraits, 123, 124, 127, 128–31(and figs. 5.2, 5.4, 5.5); and Rus­sian invasion of Prague, 3, 120, 135, 136 (fig. 5.8), 201n7, 204n48; and stories, 201n12; and theater, 124, 203n29; Teatro del Tempo, 201n14; Wall: Israeli & Palestinian Landscape, 121, 144–153, 146–153 (figs. 5.16–5.21), 201n15, 205n60, 206n67; and wide-­angle lens, 124, 201n13, 203n27; and Marguerite Yourcenar, 134, 204n41 Kushner, Tony, 191nn23, 25 Lacis, Asja, 108, 112, 113, 198n30, 199n36 Lahiri, Jhumpa: and Bengali, 19–20; and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, 18–19 (and fig. 1.1), 22 ; The Clothing of Books, 187n2; and Dante Alighieri, 20, 21; and dictionaries, 20–21; Dove mi trovo (Whereabouts), 5, 13, 187n3; and identity

i n de x   poetics, 6, 11, 12, 35; and imperfection, 15–16, 22; In altre parole, 3, 4, 6, 11, 13–22; and learning Italian, 13, 15–16, 20–21; and linguistic exile, 20–21; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 6, 16–18, 22; and Rome, 12, 13, 18, 20; “Lo Scambio,” 13–16, 18, 20, 22; and translation as flight, 17–18; and writing on the margins, 13, 15 Lampadusa: and avian migration, 36, 37, 39, 50, 69–60, 192nn31, 32; as Eu­ro­pean border, 55, 191nn23, 28; and film documentaries, 189n7, 191n22; and fishing, 52, 55, 56, 61–62 (and fig. 2.12), 192nn32, 34; and imperialism, 191n25; and Mediterranean crossing, 5, 10, 36, 37, 38, 40, 60, 191n2; and mi­grant memorials, 191nn23, 25; and Gianfranco Rosi’s Fuocoammare, 5, 36–37, 50–63, 189n1, 191nn22, 23, 25, and 27, 192n32; and 2013 shipwreck, 191n27 Levi, Primo, 208n14 Levinas, Emmanuel: and animals, 205n58; and ethics, 121, 125, 129, 132, 203n35, 205nn58, 59; and the face, 125, 132, 143, 202n20, 203n35, 203–4n36; and the Holocaust, 122, 202n22; and hospitality, 202n21; and mediation, 122–23, 125, 202nn19, 20, 203–4n36 Liégeois, Jean-­Pierre, 134, 201n8, 202n24, 203n29 Longinus, 173, 211n48 Lowell, Robert, 193n12, 194–95n23 Lukács, György, 65, 192–93n4 Malouf, David: and arachnoid New Metamorphoses, 28; and the Changes, 27, 28, 31; and the Child, 28–31; and dreaming, 28–30, 31; An Imaginary Life, 6, 11, 12, 27–32; and interchange, 30–33; and the Ister, 30, 31–32; and Jean Itard, 28, 118n15; and language learning, 28–30, 35; and literary survival, 27–28; and Ovid’s Abruzzo childhood, 28, 29, 30; and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, 27, 28; and poetry, 30, 31, 188n16 McCann, Colum, Apeirogon, 190n10, 206n64

217 migration: and asylum, 6, 8, 10, 36, 41–44, 119–20; and avian migration, 36, 37, 39, 50, 59–60, 190n10, 192nn31, 32; and ­children, 190n20; and criminalization, 8, 43, 46–47, 152, 165; and detention, 191n25; and figure of the mi­grant, 7, 45, 97, 119, 186n14; and hospitality, 8, 42–45; and Immigration Act (2014), 163, 208n18; and internal, 66, 100; and Mediterranean, 5, 10, 36–37, 38, 40, 41, 50–61, 189n5, 191nn22, 28; and memorialization, 37, 41, 191nn23, 27;and migration studies, 9, 37, 186n18; as modern keyword, 186n19, 200n2; and ospiti, 48–50, 190n19; and politics of, 4, 6, 7–8, 10, 36, 43–44, 145, 186n13, 200n4, 206n72; and statelessness, 183; and tragedy, 37, 51, 63, 189n1, 191n27; and translation, 7, 9, 10, 41, 186n13, 189n8; and Virgil’s Aeneid, 5, 36, 37–41; and weaponization of, 10 Miłosz, Csesław, 201n12 Montale, Eugenio: and Elizabeth Bishop, 4, 65, 79, 193n13, 194–95n23; and Émile Boutroux, 193n9; “La casa dei doganieri” (“The House of the Customs Men”), 73, 74–75, 193n13, 194–95n23; “Casa sul mare” (“House by the Sea”), 67, 73–74; and childhood, 71–73, 193n9; and “The Cinque Terre,” 193n8; “Egloga” (“Eclogue”), 73; and entropy, 72–73; “Fine del infanzia” (“End of Childhood”), 71–72; Flashes e Dediche (Flashes and Inscriptions), 193n11; “Flussi” (“Flux”), 73; and Jonathan Galassi, 65, 192n3, 193n7; and language, 68–69, 193n10; and Liguria, 5, 65, 67, 68 (fig. 3.1), 69, 79, 193nn8, 9; and Robert Lowell, 193n13, 194–95n23; and György Lukács, 65, 192–93n4; Mediterraneo (Mediterranean), 69–70; and memory, 64–65, 70–71, 73, 75–76, 92; Meriggi e ombre (Noons and Shadows), 71; Le occasioni (The Occasions), 73–76, 193n12; Ossi di sepia (Cuttlefish Bones), 65, 67, 69, 193nn8, 9, 10, and 12; and painting, 67, 193n6; and the par­tic­u­lar, 65, 72, 192–93n4; and posthumousness, 74–76; “Riviere” (“Seacoasts”), 193n12; and Italo Svevo, 64–65

218 i n de x Morath, Inge, 24 (fig. 1.2), 32–33 (and figs. 1.3, 1.4), 188n18 Mukherjee, Ankhi, 208n16 Nabokov, Vladimir, 97, 100, 101, 197nn12, 16; Speak Memory, 99 Nail, Thomas, 186n14, 200n4, 206n68 Nguyen, Viet Thanh, The Displaced, 10, 187n20 O’Brien, Connor Cruise, 155, 207nn6, 7 O’Malley, Tony, Ballicunnigar, 66, 89–91 (and fig. 3.4) Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso): and Abruzzo childhood, 28–29; and Black Sea, 12, 23, 24 (fig. 1.2), 26, 32; and Emperor Augustus, 23, 26; and exile, 11–12, 20, 22–28 passim; and Getish, 26, 29; and imperial identity, 22–23, 24, 26–27; and Latin, 12, 22–23, 25–30 passim; and literary survival, 27–28; and David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, 12, 27–32, 188n12; Metamorphoses, 6, 16–18, 22, 27, 28, 31; and near-­death as writer, 25, 26, 27; and Rome, 12, 22–23, 27, 29, 32; and Tomis, 23, 24–25, 30, 188n11; Tristia, 11–12, 22–27 Pascal, Blaise, 78 Paulin, Tom: The Riot Act, 155, 156, 158, 207nn6, 7 pandemic, global, 10 Proust, Marcel, 7; À la Recherche du temps perdu, 113–15, 116; mémoire involuntaire, 114, 115 refugees: and asylum seekers, 43; and Hannah Arendt, 185n8; and Walter Benjamin 118; and border-­crossing, 119; and climate change, 10; disappearance of, 8, 10, 121, 153; and Displaced Persons, 94, 101; experience of, 2, 6, 10, 27, 50; and 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees, 42; and refugee camps, 176, 208n16; and refugee stories, 10, 187n20; and refugee studies, 186n18; and Edward Said, 22, 27; and state of exception, 176; and statelessness, 164–65, 183, 185n8, 209n22; Trojans as, 38; and UN Refugee

Agency (UNHCR), 189n5; and writers, 10, 187n20. See also exile; migration; rights Rembrandt, van Rijn,102 rights: and Arendt, 6, 164–65, 178, 185n8, 209nn19, 22; and asylum, 6, 8, 10, 36, 41–45 passim, 118; and citizenship, 42, 156, 157, 163–65, 178, 190n20, 208n16, 209n23; Civil Rights Movement, 180; and freedom of movement, 119, 120, 186n19, 190n10, 200n4; and hospitality, 36, 42, 45, 190n12; and ­human, 162, 163, 164–65, 178, 205n59; Irish Civil Rights movement, 155, 207nn6, 9, 208n15; right of re­sis­tance, 157, 207n10; and Sophocles’s Antigone, 6, 157, 162, 208n15; and Universal Declaration of ­Human Rights, 119 Rilke, Rainer Maria, Duino Elegies, 134, 142–43 Roma: and ­children, 123–27, 132, 134; and communities, 3, 121–25 passim, 135; and discrimination, 123, 158; East Slovakian, 3, 120, 121, 122–23; and ethnopolitics, 202n26; and families, 124, 126 (and fig. 5.1), 128 (fig. 5.2), 202n25, 202–3n26, 203n29; and funeral, 132, 133 (fig. 5.7); and gatherings, 135; and judicial procedures, 127, 129 (fig. 5.3); and Josef Koudelka’s Gypsies, 126–33 (and figs. 5.1–5.7); and musicians, 124–25, 133 (fig. 5.6), 203n3; and Nazi genocide, 123, 202n24; and nomadism, 124, 134, 202n25; and nomenclature, 201n8; and portraiture, 120, 129, 130–31 (and figs. 5.4, 5.5); and religion, 25, 203n32; and state settlement, 202; and wedding, 131–32, 133 (fig. 5.6). See also Josef Koudelka Rosi, Gianfranco: and Pietro Bartolo, 50, 53 (and fig. 2.3), 56, 59, 60 (and fig. 2.10), 192n31; and bird-­hunting, 50, 54, 59–60, 192nn31, 32; and communication, 8, 53, 60–61, 62–63; and “Fire at Sea” (song), 51, 54–55, 63, 191n26; and fish-­man, 61–62 (and fig. 2.12), 192n34; Fuocoammare (Fire at Sea), 5, 8, 36–37, 50–63, 191nn22, 23, and 26, 192n30; and Lampedusa, 5, 36–37, 39, 50–55, 61–62, 63; and Mediterranean migration, 5, 36–37, 50–63; and Gioachino

i n de x   Rossini’s Moses in Egypt, 56, 61, 62, 191n29; and Samuele, 50–55 (and figs. 2.2, 2.5), 56, 58–61 (and figs. 2.10, 2.11), 62; and Zia Maria, 56, 57 (fig. 2.7) Rossini, Gioachino, Moses in Egypt, 56, 61, 62, 191n29 Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques, 8, 102, 198n24 Said, Edward: and exile, 22, 23, 27, 41; and lateness, 3–4, 7, 158, 183n3 Saussy, Haun, 186n16 Schlegel, Friedrich, 99 Schmitt, Carl, 155, 207nn4, 5 Scott, Clive, 197n23 Scott, Dred, 180 Sebald, W. G.: and ash, 100–101, 102; and Benjamin, 3, 4, 6, 95, 100, 103–4, 114, 118; and displaced persons, 95, 101, 104; The Emigrants, 97, 98, 100–103 passim, 197nn12, 19; and exile, 6, 94, 95, 104; and facticity, 102, 197nn22, 23; and Frankfurt School, 94, 196n5; and Nikolai Gogol, 100, 101; and hauntology, 97–98, 101, 104, 118; “J’aurais voulu que ce lac eût été l’Océan,” 102; and Gottfried Keller, 94; and Heinrich von Kleist, 101–2; and Vladimir Nabokov, 99, 100, 101, 197nn12, 16; and “periscopic” narrative, 100, 197n18; “Le Promeneur Solitaire,” 95, 97–101, 105; and photography, 103–4, 197n23; The Rings of Saturn, 94, 212n60; and Romantic irony 99–100; and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, 8, 102; and Jan Peter Tripp, 196n1; and walking, 8, 94, 196n10, 204n39; and Walser, 3, 6, 8, 93, 94–95, 97–103, 105, 196nn8, 10; and writing, 93, 95, 98–99, 102, 113, 197nn13, 18 Seelig, Carl, 93, 118, 196n2, 197nn14, 15 Shamsie, Kamila: and Shamima Begum, 208n16; and Shami Chakrabarti, 164; and citizenship, 157, 163–65, 208nn16, 17, and 18; Home Fire, 5, 157, 163–66; and Theresa May, 164–65, 208n18; and Gillian Slovo, 208n16 Shelley, Mary: and Bildungsroman, 36, 44, 47; Frankenstein, 8, 36, 45–47, 50, 56, 190n15;

219 and justice, 45, 47, 50, 190n18; and Justine Moritz, 36, 47–48, 49, 50 Slovo, Gillian, 206n70, 208n16 Sophocles, Antigone: and Judith Butler, 6, 166, 167, 175, 178, 207n4, 210n32, 211n50; and Anne Carson, 6, 7, 166–67, 169, 171, 173–79, 180, 181, 210n32, 211nn50, 51, and 52; and Tacita Dean, 7, 166–72, 179–81, 183, 212n59; and Athol Fugard, 157, 208n11; and Seamus Heaney, 5, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158–62, 208n15; and Georg Wilhelm Hegel, 155, 167, 175, 179, 210n31, 211n50; and Irish Antigones, 154, 155, 208n15; and Tom Paulin, 155, 156, 158, 207nn6, 7; and re­sis­tance, 157, 175; and rights, 164–66, 207nn7, 9; and George Steiner, 208n11; and Colm Tóibín, 209n24; and W. B. Yeats, 154, 207n2 —­Oedipus at Colonus: and Anne Carson, 167, 174; and Tacita Dean, 157, 168, 170, 179; and W. B. Yeats, 154 —­Oedipus Rex: and Anne Carson, 169, 173, 180, 181, 211n52; and Tacita Dean, 157, 166, 168, 170, 171, 172, 180, 209n26, 211n58; and W. B. Yeats, 154, 166, 179, 180, 209n26, 211n58 Spivak, Gayatri, 209n22 Steiner, George, 208n11 Stern, Stewart, 169–70, 181 Stevens, Wallace, 195n24 Stonebridge, Lyndey, 185n8, 208n16 Stoppard, Tom, 212n61 surrealism, 106, 107 (fig. 4.3), 109, 111–12, 114–15, 193n6 Svevo, Italo, 64–65 Tóibín, Colm: and Ballyconnigar, 87–91; and Elizabeth Bishop, 4, 65, 83, 86–89 passim, 92; On Elizabeth Bishop, 86, 88–89; The Blackwater Lightship, 195n34; and erosion, 66, 87–88, 91; The Heather Blazing, 87–88; and mourning, 87–89, 195nn33, 34; Nora Webster, 195n13; and Tony O’Malley, 66, 89–91 (and fig. 3.4); Pale ­Sister, 209n24; “The Sea,” 195n31; The South, 86–87, 88, 196n31

220 i n de x translation: and adaptation, 157; as analogue, 7, 157, 166; and anxiety, 37, 41; and asylum. 44, 45, 190n19; belatedness, 185n11; and Walter Benjamin, 7, 157, 185n11, 189n25; and citation, 9, 186n16; and commentary, 167; and critique, 147;and crossing over, 38, 41; and exchange, 13–15; and Frankenstein, 47; and Martin Heidegger, 188n21; and Friedrich Hölderlin, 32, 188n20; and identity 4, 12, 13, 19–20, 35; and imperfection, 15, 22; and language-­learning, 4, 13, 15–16, 20–21, 56; and metamorphosis, 4, 12, 16–17; and meta­phor, 7, 21, 35, 38, 189, 211n51; and migration, 9, 36, 41, 186n13, 189n8; and nomadism, 41; and (non) belonging, 11, 22; and non-­equivalence, 21, 22; and ospiti, 190n19; and otherness, 45, 186n13; and survival, 27; theory of, 9, 11, 12, 185n11, 186nn13, 16 and 17; and trafficked ­women, 48–49; and transformation, 4, 6, 11, 12, 16–17; and translocation, 4, 189n8; and remediation, 210n33; and trans­mediation, 18–19; and untranslatability, 7, 9, 12, 45, 49, 50, 175, 176, 186n17, 200n5; and zone, 187n1 Tripp, Jan Peter, 196n1 Twombly, Cy, 5 Virgil: Aeneid Book VI, 5, 10, 37–41; and Anchises, 36, 37, 40–41; and bird migration, 39, 60; and Cumaean Sibyl, 38; and empire, 10, 41; and Seamus Heaney’s Aeneid Book VI, 4, 37, 38–41; and Seamus Heaney’s “Route 110,” 37–38, 39, 40, 52; and Lake Avernus, 39; and Mediterranean crossing,

36; and Palinurus, 38, 39–40, 41; and the Styx, 38, 39, 52; and the underworld, 36, 37, 38–40, 52 Volney, Constantin-­François, 47, 190n17 Walser, Robert: and ash, 100–101; and ballooning, 99, 197nn15, 16; and Walter Benjamin, 95, 100; death of, 97–98, 118; and Nikolai Gogol, 100; as Heimatvertriebene, 3, 93, 95, 97, 100, 101, 104; and Ich-­Buch, 94, 100, 105; “Jaunts elegant in nature,” 96 (fig. 4.1), 104; “Kleist in Thun,” 101–2; and melancholic other, 103–4; and microscripts, 93, 94, 96 (fig. 4.1), 99, 100; and Vladimir Nabokov, 99, 197n16; The Robber, 98; and Romantic irony, 99; and W. G. Sebald, 6, 8, 93–95, 97–103, 105; and Carl Seelig, 93, 118, 197nn14, 15; and spectrality, 97, 98, 100, 104; and Swiss asylum, 3, 93, 97–98, 101; and Swiss German, 197n17; “The Walk,” 95, 97, 103–5, 198n25; and walking, 94, 95, 97, 101, 103–5, 196n10, 197n20; and weightlessness, 98–99, 104 war on terror, 155, 156, 157, 163; and securitization, 166 Weber, Samuel, 189n25 Winnicott, D. W., 1 Yeats, W. B.: “Easter 1916,” 154; “Eros” Chorus (“From the Antigone”), 154, 207n2; Oedipus the King, 154, 179, 180, 209n26, 211n58 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 134, 204n41, 210n39 Zizek, Slavoj, 175

a no t e on t h e t y pe

This book has been composed in Arno, an Old-style serif typeface in the classic Venetian tradition, designed by Robert Slimbach at Adobe.