Symbolism 2018: Special Focus: "Cranes on the Rise" - Functions of Metaphor in Autobiographical Writing 9783110580822, 9783110579581

Citation preview

Symbolism An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics

Symbolism

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

Symbolism

An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics Volume 18 Edited by Rüdiger Ahrens, Florian Klaeger and Klaus Stierstorfer Assistant Editor Marlena Tronicke

ISBN 978-3-11-057958-1 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058082-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-057979-6 ISSN 1528-3623 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Foreword from the Editors Metaphors are doubtless among the most important and most frequent symbolic practices. They constitute a major tool of making sense of the world and help to shape and represent it to our minds. They therefore constitute an apt subject for this annual. While such general statements about the significance of metaphor in literature and culture and its omnipresence are widely consensual, the matter becomes complicated when the concepts of metaphor as they are used by individuals and in everyday speech, by scholars in various disciplines and by theorists of metaphor are compared: they unfailingly turn out to be diverse, if not incompatible, and people may be talking at cross-purposes while using the same word. The attempt to bring order and clear definitions in this chaos is nothing less than Sisyphean. It has, for instance, been undertaken by Eckard Rolf in Metaphertheorien: Typologie, Darstellung, Bibliographie (Berlin: de Gruyter 2005) who identifies no less than 25 distinct theories of metaphor and then tries to bring them into systematic order. For all of Rolf’s heroics, his material still remains overwhelming, bursting his systems at the seams. How then to deal with metaphor in a responsible and scholarly manner? One approach informs the Special Focus of this volume 18 of Symbolism, which links this prominence of metaphor to life writing. The texts of this category could almost be seen as extended metaphors for the lives they narrate, and metaphors certainly have a central place in the genre. Although the focus does not solve the riddle of a general theory of metaphor, it successfully employs one such theory to examine metaphor and its various functions in life writing, thus disciplining the exuberance of the concept towards a very specific purpose and context. The focus is complemented by Jack Stewart’s and Franziska Quabeck’s contributions in the general section and the book review forum. The editors wish to express their gratitude to Katja Sarkowsky as guest editor of this volume’s special focus as well as to all contributors; to Marlena Tronicke for her expert coordination as assistant editor and for the always reliable collaboration of Chris Wahlig, supported by Svea Türlings; and to the editorial team at De Gruyter, above all to Stella Diedrich and Angelika Hermann. Rüdiger Ahrens University of Würzburg

Florian Klaeger University of Bayreuth

Klaus Stierstorfer University of Münster

Table of Contents Foreword from the Editors

V

Special Focus: “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing Corresponding editor: Katja Sarkowsky Katja Sarkowsky “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction

3

Christine Marks Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the 13 World Anna Thiemann Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor in Kenny Fries’s The History of My Shoes 29 and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory Simon Dickel Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

43

Lut Missinne About Vegetables and Depths in Life: Metaphors in the Autobiographical Work of Atte Jongstra 63 Agnieszka Rzepa Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A 81 Prairie Memoir Gabriele Linke Language as Metaphor: Functions of Metalinguistic Reflection in European Migrants’ Life Writing 97

VIII

Table of Contents

Dagmara Drewniak ‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity – Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups and Laura Elise Taylor’s A Taste for Paprika 117 Katja Sarkowsky “Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays 137

General Section Jack Stewart Fairytale Elements in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The 155 Man Who Loved Islands” Franziska Quabeck Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

181

Book Reviews Evelyn Koch Adam Scovell. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Anna Hegland Rhodri Lewis. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness.

204

Marlena Tronicke Antonija Primorac. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminism and 208 Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women. List of Contributors Index

219

215

199

Special Focus: “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing Corresponding editor: Katja Sarkowsky

Katja Sarkowsky

“Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction In his memoir Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (1990), Anishinaabe (Chippewa) author Gerald Vizenor begins his autobiographical narrative with stories of tribal emergence, the establishment of the original five totems of the Anishinaabe, and with his paternal ancestors’ crane totem heritage. My tribal grandmother and my father were related to the leaders of the crane; that succession, over a wild background of cedar and concrete, shamans and colonial assassins, is celebrated here in the autobiographical myths and metaphors of my imagination, my crossblood remembrance. We are cranes on the rise in a new tribal narrative.¹

While the recourse to family history is not unusual in a memoir, Vizenor uses it to explicitly introduce his autobiographical agenda: he places his own story in a larger context of Anishinaabe storytelling; these stories are not only grounded in what became the White Earth reservation in 1867 (“cedar”), but also in the urban sprawl of Minneapolis (“concrete”), in Anishinaabe culture as well as in the experience of colonial conquest. The image of the crane connects the individual, the familial, and the collective; at the same time, it signals a phoenix-like rebirth out of an experience of death and destruction: “My father died in a place no crane would choose to dance, at a time no tribal totem would endure. One generation later the soul of the crane recurs in imagination; our reversion, our interior landscapes.”² Remembrance, but also imagination, provides the basis for this autobiographical narration; the crane functions as a metaphor that links tribal and family heritage to individual subjectivity and to the act of Vizenor’s own autobiographical storytelling. The autobiography itself is not just a revision but also a form of actual return – a return not to an ‘undiluted tradition,’ but to narrative possibilities. Myths and metaphors, as the memoir’s title already announces, are central to this text’s claim to and enactment of narrative agency.

 Gerald Vizenor, Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 1990): 3.  Vizenor, Interior Landscapes, 3. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-001

4

Katja Sarkowsky

Whether the crane – as a totem – is a metaphor, a metonymy, a myth, or something else altogether is an important question in the discussion of Native American autobiography, but not one I want to further pursue in this introduction. In the context under discussion here, Vizenor’s memoir is a good example for the ways in which writers – in recourse to a variety of cultural conventions of storytelling and autobiographical narration – use stories, myths, metaphors, and symbols to construct and investigate their life stories and subjectivity. As Paul John Eakin has remarked, “the stories we tell about the past are in fact extended metaphors for stories we are living out in the present,”³ and he has gone so far as to argue that “autobiography not only delivers metaphors of self, it is a metaphor of the self.”⁴ The “crane on the rise” can be seen as such a metaphor that not only effectively links the autobiographer to a communal and family background, but also suggests a new beginning for both the individual and “new tribal narratives” as manifest in the autobiography. The metaphor of the crane is a powerful vehicle of individual and communal meaning-making. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have reminded us in Metaphors We Live By (originally published in 1980) that humans are symbolic creatures; metaphor, they argued, is not only poetic and linguistic – rather, “our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”⁵ Classic theories of metaphor understand it in the Aristotelian tradition as a special rhetorical device. In Book XXI of his Poetics, Aristotle defines metaphor as “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy, that is, proportion.”⁶ As Paul Ricoeur points out, the metaphor as a transposition of an “alien name” implies deviation,⁷ with the effect of metaphor hinging on the contrast between regular speech and the strategic use of words out of their usual meaning or context. In his 1936 The Philosophy of Rhetoric, I. A. Richards defines as metaphorical “those processes in which we perceive or think

 Paul John Eakin, “Autobiography as Cosmogram,” Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies 6.1 (2014): 21– 43, 26.  Paul John Eakin, “What Are We Reading When We Read Autobiography?” Narrative 12.2 (2004): 121– 132, 130.  George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003): 4.  Aristotle, Poetics, transl. S. H. Butcher, The Internet Classics Archive (acc. 10 March 2018). For a critique of the contemporary reception of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphor, particularly in Conceptual Metaphor Theory, see Matthew S. Wood, “Aristotle’s Theory of Metaphor Revisited,” Museion: Journal of the Classical Association of Canada 14.1 (2017): 63 – 90.  Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979): 18.

“Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction

5

of or feel about one thing in terms of another.”⁸ While following Aristotle in the understanding of metaphor as a transposition of meaning from one field to another, drawing on Shelley’s “Defense of Poetry,” Richards’ understanding also diverts from Aristotle’s in its insistence that metaphor is not ‘special’ language but an “omnipresent principle of language,”⁹ even “language’s formal manifestation of the mind’s connecting activity.”¹⁰ Richards’ conception – focused on the questions of metaphor’s role in and for rhetoric – thus anticipates what Lakoff and Johnson developed as Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), namely the premise that metaphor is not only a form of language but of thinking, and that it exceeds the individual metaphor to encompass entire semantic fields. Zoltán Kövecses relates metaphors to what he calls “the metaphorical linguistic expression” as follows: “the linguistic expressions (i. e., ways of talking) make explicit, or are manifestations of, the conceptual metaphors (i. e., ways of thinking).”¹¹ If classic metaphor means expressing one kind of thing in terms of another, using words and expressions in new, rare, other otherwise unusual contexts, the proposition in CMT is that metaphor means “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another”¹²; ‘argument is war’ and ‘time is money,’¹³ or ‘love is a journey,’ ‘theories are buildings,’ and ‘ideas are food’¹⁴ are central conceptual metaphors that, in the eyes of their proponents, do not merely give expression to experience but present manifestations of both mental and bodily experience. What do both classic theories of metaphor as rhetorical device and models such as CMT imply, when it comes to the analysis of how human beings speak about themselves and their own lives, both in everyday utterances and in structured, e. g. published life narratives? As Richards has put it, the “metaphors we are avoiding steer our thought as much as those we accept,”¹⁵ thus impacting the ways we both think and speak about our lives. If metaphor as such, as Denis Donoghue writes with reference to I. A. Richards’ discussion, “has the ambition to change life by telling a different story about it,”¹⁶ if it is indeed “an irruption of

 I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York and London: Oxford UP, 1936): 116.  Richards, Philosophy, 92.  Rosalind J. Gabin, “The Most Significant Passage for Rhetoric in the Work of I. A. Richards,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 18.2 (1988): 167– 171, 169.  Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010): 7.  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 5.  Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 4; 7.  Kövecses, Metaphor, 5 – 6.  Richards, Philosophy, 92.  Denis Donoghue, Metaphor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2014): 95.

6

Katja Sarkowsky

desire, specifically the desire to transform life by reinterpreting it, giving it a different story,”¹⁷ then this power to mold life stories must be particularly pertinent in life narratives. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, in their discussion of terminology, “employ the term life writing for written forms of the autobiographical, and life narrative to refer to autobiographical acts of any sort,”¹⁸ that is, including performative or visual forms. The contributions in this volume all focus on life writing, and most fall into the category of autobiography or memoir. While life writing – and the examples covered here attest to this – is a highly heterogeneous genre, it nevertheless tends to follow particular conventions of how to tell a life story; how to tell one’s life as a recognizable life narrative is very much dependent on cultural context.¹⁹ Life writing, in its unique conceptual negotiation of ‘fact’ and ‘fiction,’ thus draws on both conventions of (culturally embedded) everyday speech and of literary genres as they have developed in specific contexts. Conventions entail the use of specific metaphors, and some of the metaphors central to autobiographical narration in European and European American traditions are so prevalent that they have indeed become commonplace: the initially mentioned idea of one’s life as a ‘journey’ is an obvious example, discussed at length by Lakoff and Johnson. A conceptual understanding of such a metaphor allows us to analyze “how we can conceive of and express one kind of experience in terms of another,” as Madalina Akli has put it in Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography. ²⁰ Yet, literary memoirs in particular also show that consciously constructed life narratives – while they of course tend to build on “metaphors we live by” – nevertheless use a range of explicit and often unusual (‘original’) metaphors to narratively frame or reframe the respective life story. Most of the narratives under discussion in this volume were written by writers of fiction and/or scholars, that is, by autobiographers who consciously work with language and thus can be credited with a heightened awareness concerning the use of metaphor. Nevertheless, even those texts that were written by less experienced writers sometimes display a deliberate use of metaphor that exceeds conceptual metaphor as manifest in everyday life and speech. “Original, creative literary metaphors […] are typically less clear but richer in meaning than either

 Donoghue, Metaphor, 134.  Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010): 4.  Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999): 74.  Madalina Akli, Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography (New York: Peter Lang, 2009): 25.

“Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction

7

everyday metaphors or metaphors in science,” argues Kövecses. However, as he continues, “original, creative literary metaphors of the structural kind seem to be less frequent in literature than those metaphors that are based on our everyday, ordinary conceptual system.”²¹ Thus, literature employs both original and everyday metaphors. Kövecses’s example for an original metaphor is a striking one; he cites the following passage from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera: “Once he tasted some chamomile tea and sent it back, saying only, ‘This stuff tastes of window.’”²² Kövecses’s following juxtaposition of ‘original’ and ‘ordinary’ metaphors builds on the metaphor of ‘tea tasting of window,’ as setting the standard for originality, and hence allows for little in between Márquez’s indeed startling metaphor and other maybe less original metaphors that are not necessarily used in everyday speech. With regard to the specific genre under discussion here – a genre often positioned between the literary and the non-literary – I suggest that metaphors, like narrative tropes and emplotments, provide the autobiographer with a potential, recognizable form for his/her experiences, remembrances, and evaluation of life. Moreover, depending on the autobiographer and his/her other ‘work with words,’ such metaphors can be anything from the conventional to the highly original, but even conventional metaphors may change their established functions in the context of the genre of life writing. The contributors to this volume discuss the various kinds of metaphors autobiographers use in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and to what effect they do so. While not every contributor follows the understanding of metaphor as proposed by CMT closely, they all understand metaphor as more than a rhetorical and stylistic device; as previously stated, particularly in the genre of life writing, the use of metaphor calls upon a culturally shared conceptualization of how life can be told and how narrative identity can be constructed. Thus, the use of metaphor has to be understood in the specificity of the context of its use.²³ The importance of metaphors in and for life writing is indisputable; equally indisputable is the vastness of potential research foci when studying metaphor and its function in life writing, and this may be the primary reason why there appears to be relatively little systematic attention to metaphor in life writing. As a collection of essays, this volume cannot fill this lacuna; nevertheless, the individual contributions draw attention to the range and kinds of metaphors

 Kövecses, Metaphor, 49.  Quoted in Kövecses, Metaphor, 49.  See also Zoltán Kövecses, Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015): chapter 10.

8

Katja Sarkowsky

and the ways in which they provide the autobiographer (or life writer) with possibilities of framing and interpreting life. Susan Sontag has famously argued that “illness is not a metaphor, and […] the most truthful way of regarding illness – and the healthiest way of being ill – is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphorical thinking.”²⁴ However, as illness narratives illustrate, and as Christine Marks shows in her contribution “Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World,” metaphor cannot only serve to blame those afflicted by illness and disease but also to find ways of narratively dealing with the experience.²⁵ Marks provides a critical reading of Ensler’s 2013 memoir in which the playwright and activist not only presents her experience with cancer as an exploration of her body as a medium of agency, but in which, as Marks argues, she also uses metaphors as “agents of connection” that problematically project a notion of a transhistorical and transcultural female body. While highlighting the need for global solidarity, particularly among women, Ensler therefore also tends to erase cultural differences and situatedness. Although with their emergence they were closely connected to illness narratives, disability narratives have by now been established as a genre in its own right. The following two contributions fall into this category. Anna Thiemann’s “Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor in Kenny Fries’s The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (2007)” reads Fries’s second memoir as a creative reconceptualization of the relation between homology, analogy, and metaphor in evolutionary theory. As such, History not only deals with Fries’s experiences as a gay Jewish man who was born missing several bones in his legs, but it also critically engages with Darwin’s notion of the ‘survival of the fittest.’ The memoir, argues Thiemann, not so much dismisses this principle. Instead, it redefines it to stress cooperation rather than competition, thus reconciling it with the objectives of disability activism. In “Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto,” Simon Dickel discusses two texts that Thomas Couser has tentatively identified as belonging to a category of “new disability memoirs” that focus on the “formation of a disabled identity” rather than on the actual impairment.²⁶ Dickel reads Kuusisto’s use of metaphor for sensual experiences, particularly in relation to his guide dog Corky, in Planet of the Blind (1998) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (2006) as critically engaging with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomen Susan Sontag, Illness and Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978): 3.  Sontag, Illness, 47.  G. Thomas Couser, “Introduction: Disability and Life Writing,” Journal of Cultural & Literary Disability Studies 5.3 (2011): 229 – 241, 232– 233.

“Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction

9

ology of Perception (1945) and as resonating with Don Ihde’s Phenomenologies of Sound (1976). The relation between the autobiographical narrator and Corky, argues Dickel, can be understood in terms of Donna Haraway’s concept of “significant otherness,” fundamentally transforming his lived experience. All three previously discussed memoirists are writers and poets who use metaphors in their autobiographical narrations to reframe bodily experiences of illness or disability. The two following contributions also look at writers/artists’ memoirs, but they focus more broadly on the kinds of metaphors these writers use to capture and explore their emergence and lives as artists. Lut Missinne’s contribution “About Vegetables and Depths in Life: Metaphors in the Autobiographical Work of Atte Jongstra” looks at the Dutch author’s autobiography Klinkende ikken. Bekentenissen van een zelfontwijker [Resounding Selves. Confessions of a Selfavoider], published in 2008. Jongstra’s work, as Missinne shows, tends to intertwine the autobiographical with the fictional, and literary and individual identities also permeate one another in this explicitly autobiographical text. Exploring a number of recurring metaphors (such as ‘war’ pertaining to personal relationships), Missinne thus also shows how Klinkende ikken uses metaphors, particularly that of the detour, as a structuring device for the text itself. If the ‘self-avoider’ is a paradoxical image for an autobiographer, it clearly illustrates the complexities of self-narration in this text. Canadian poet Lorna Crozier’s memoir Small Beneath the Sky engages with metaphors of spatial embeddedness in order to negotiate the self in terms of interrelatedness and belonging. In her contribution “Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir,” Agniesza Rzepa reads Crozier’s 2009 memoir through what the autobiographer calls ‘first causes,’ images referring to the land/scape, to family, or to story and language, images that metaphorically capture the intricate interrelatedness of the world constructed in the memoir. At the same time, as Rzepa argues, and in light of the prominence of patriarchal spatial metaphors in the Canadian imagination, these metaphors contribute to a critical revision of such established images from a feminist perspective. Language and its connection to place and identity play a central role in Rzepa’s discussion of Crozier’s memoir. The link between language and belonging tends to be emphasized by those autobiographers who, for a variety of reasons, need to or feel they need to claim it. Gabriele Linke, in her contribution “Language as Metaphor: Functions of Metalinguistic Reflection in European Migrants’ Life Writing,” takes her cue from CMT, Kövecses in particular, to look at language as a conceptual metaphor in autobiographical writings by Eastern Europeans who migrated to Western Europe and to Canada. The acquisition of a new language in the context of migration, so her argument, tends to make ‘language’

10

Katja Sarkowsky

not only a topic, but also a metaphor of identity. Thus, language is imbued with conceptual meaning, such as language as food or language as object, and language acquisition as road, with all of these conceptual metaphors potentially exploring the complexities of migrant identities. The struggle to find an appropriate language for experiences of diaspora and displacement is also at the center of the last two contributions to this volume. Building on Rosalía Baena’s concept of “gastro-graphy” and the importance of food metaphors for the negotiation of ethnic identity Baena identifies,²⁷ Dagmara Drewniak’s contribution “ ‘ Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity – Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups and Laura Elise Taylor’s A Taste for Paprika” looks at how these two writers use food metaphors to negotiate their diasporic identities, with their families rooted in Ukrainian and Austro-Hungarian backgrounds respectively. Drewniak analyzes how food metaphors are employed to negotiate both ethnic heritage and interpersonal relations, and she convincingly shows how these negotiations intertwine with the exploration and affirmation of gender and sexual identities. Katja Sarkowsky’s contribution “ ‘ Writing is not Homecoming’: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays” focuses on yet another context of migration, more specifically, of exile. Looking at Sephardic American writer André Aciman’s autobiographical writings, his essays in particular, she argues that his city of birth, Alexandria, functions as a metaphor of self and belonging. Belonging, however, is not a state of being that can be inhabited; rather, in Aciman’s autobiographical work, it is necessarily and constantly deferred, ‘being longing’ rather than ‘belonging.’ As a consequence, the experience of displacement functions metonymically for a life/story lived between places, a continuous ‘elsewhere’ remembered and imagined but never owned, and a process that is not only expressed in narrative but that impacts how autobiographical remembrance and narration can work – or fail to work. The essays in this volume document the potential functions of metaphor in and for life writing across a range of geographical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. While each of the discussions paves the way for further inquiry of their specific materials, read together, they also pose fundamental questions regarding the functions of metaphor in self-narratives. How context-specific are such metaphors, to what extent can and do they cross cultural and linguistic boundaries?

 Rosalía Baena, “Gastro-graphy: Food as Metaphor in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails’n Breadfruit,” Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études ethniques au Canada XXXVIII.1 (2006): 106 – 116.

“Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing. An Introduction

11

Zoltán Kövecses addresses the question of universality in Metaphor in Culture,²⁸ but examples such as the initial passages from Gerald Vizenor’s autobiography or the use of ‘first causes’ in Crozier’s memoir, not only of specific metaphorical expressions but also of conceptual metaphors. As Eakin has observed, “[a]rmed with our own notions of what ‘a life per se’ is, what a ‘story of individuation is,’ we may not necessarily recognize another culture’s practice of identity narrative as such when we encounter it.”²⁹ This may also apply to the use or even the understanding of metaphor and to the related question of how autobiographical metaphors are connected to particular conventions of life writing. Also, given that almost all of the texts discussed in this volume were produced by writers and/or scholars who consciously work with language, one may ask what role autobiographical metaphors play in non-literary texts or in oral utterances, including everyday speech. As critics remind us, there is a thin line between literary and everyday narratives of self; Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson have defined an “autobiographical act” as “occasions when people are coaxed or coerced into ‘getting a life’.”³⁰ “Living autobiographically,” as Eakin’s calls it,³¹ entails the use of metaphor, and we might ask how the metaphors we use everyday to speak (about) ourselves relate to the kinds of literary metaphors that tend to shape the kinds of autobiographical narrations discussed here. While a collection of essays – all of them from literary and cultural studies – cannot claim to pursue these questions systematically, this volume hopefully contributes to the further discussion of these and other inherently interdisciplinary questions.

 Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2012).  Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories, 74.  Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 64.  Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008).

Christine Marks

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World In her memoir In the Body of the World (2013), the American playwright and activist Eve Ensler presents her experience with uterine cancer as an exploration of the broken and abject body, a body that through its vulnerability becomes a medium of self-discovery, connection, and self-actualization. Throughout her narrative, Ensler employs metaphors as centralizing forces placing her at the center of a global system of care and solidarity. Through a critical reading of Ensler’s memoir, this article advocates for developing more complex approaches to embodied experience in metaphor studies, to avoid reductive conceptions of a universal and therefore transcultural and transhistorical body. While Ensler’s poetic use of metaphors as agents of connection highlights the demand for global solidarity, her push toward this global awareness posits a universality of suffering and pain that erases considerations of positionality and cultural difference.

By definition, metaphors connect, bridging gaps between distinct subject matters by establishing likeness and relation. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have shown in Metaphors We Live By (1980) and Philosophy in the Flesh (1999),¹ metaphors are grounded in social and embodied experiences and pervade everyday lives. Life writing, in general, and illness narratives in particular, rely on metaphor to communicate the story of the self, to convey personal experience through shareable imagery and creative analogy. Like any medium of linguistic expression, metaphors “offer inspiring possibilities of agency or resistance,”² yet they may also be subject to hegemonic restraint if their complexity and “semantic incompleteness” are disregarded in favor of one-dimensional meaning making.³ In this article, I read the American playwright and activist Eve Ensler’s

 George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980); Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic, 1999).  Anita Wohlmann, “Of Termites and Ovaries on Strike: Rethinking Medical Metaphors of the Female Body,” Signs: Journal of Women and Society 43.1 (2017): 127– 150, 129.  Wohlmann, “Of Termites and Ovaries on Strike: Rethinking Medical Metaphors of the Female Body,” 129. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-002

14

Christine Marks

memoir In the Body of the World (2013) as a text that employs metaphors both as sites of feminist agency and as centralizing forces that contract semantic possibilities, to the point of reducing complex and often contradictory dimensions of the text in favor of identification and sameness. Throughout her autobiographical account, Ensler relies on metaphor as a medium of connection and agency, a counter agent to the fragmenting forces of illness, trauma, and violence. She devises her experience with uterine cancer as a product of the many traumatizing moments of violence she has encountered in her personal and activist life, including being sexually abused by her father as a child and listening to hundreds of women’s stories of rape and abuse.⁴ A step towards overcoming the personal trauma of abuse and illness, In the Body of the World celebrates connection and fusion, quickly moving from the concrete and intimate to global events and metaphorical relations between people. From the start, Ensler frames her narrative as one embedded in global relationships, listing the many places she visited to hear other women’s stories: “Jalalabad, Sarajevo, Alabama, Port-au-Prince, Peshawar, Pristina,”⁵ and most prominently, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where she claims to have found “the end of the world” in women’s stories of systematic rape and mutilation. Through telling their stories, Ensler seeks to eliminate the distance between the reader and these women’s horrific experiences of violence, to create a shared sense of pain and vulnerability. Indeed, Ensler conceives her own cancer as a “flesh monument,” A taut ball of cellular yarn spun out of the stories of women, made of tears, silent screams, rocking torsos, and the particular loneliness of violence. A flesh creature birthed out of the secrets of brutality, each blood vessel a ribbon of a story. My body has been sculpting this tumor for years, molding the pieces of pain, the clay residue of memories. (IBW, 27)

This passage exemplifies the deep embeddedness of embodied experience in metaphorical thinking that lies at the heart of Ensler’s memoir. Shifting between literal and metaphorical as well as personal and global registers, Ensler reads her cancer as an expression of a suffering greater than the self, placing herself  For The Vagina Monologues (1996), Ensler interviewed 200 women about their vaginas, including experiences with genital mutilation and sexual assault. Ensler’s global activism to fight violence against women has especially targeted the atrocities committed against women in the Congo. To support survivors of sex and gender violence in the Congo, Ensler co-founded the City of Joy, a “transformational leadership community,” in Bukavu in 2007. “About City of Joy” (2018), Drc.vday.org (acc. 10 July 2018).  Eve Ensler, In the Body of the World: A Memoir of Cancer and Connection (New York: Picador, 2013): 4; further references in the text abbreviated as “IBW.”

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

15

at the center of a global system of care beyond the individual sphere. She develops a grand vision of the connectedness of all things and people through the horrendous synchronicity of cancer in all its metaphorical manifestations: Suddenly the cancer in me was the cancer that is everywhere. The cancer of cruelty, the cancer of greed, the cancer that gets inside people who live downstream from chemical plants, the cancer inside the lungs of coalminers. The cancer from the stress of not achieving enough, the cancer of buried trauma. The cancer that lives in caged chickens and oildrenched fish. The cancer of carelessness. The cancer in fast-paced must-make-it-have-itsmoke-it-own-it-formaldehydeasbestospesticideshairdyecigarettescellphonesnow. (IBW, 7)

While Ensler’s metaphorical poetry of connection demands that readers become aware of being agents in interlocking global systems, her push toward this global awareness, as I seek to illustrate in this essay, posits a universality of suffering and pain that erases considerations of positionality and cultural difference. I investigate this tension between universality and particularity in the use of metaphor to rethink questions of metaphorical representations of illness and the body. The essay thus examines the construction of oneness and collectivity through metaphor – a move that, while instrumental to an activist agenda seeking to affect social change, can silence minority voices and gloss over cultural, geopolitical, and economic differences and diversities. While the first part of my analysis focuses exclusively on Ensler’s memoir, I read her account as exemplary for larger issues in both feminist life writing and metaphor studies. In the second part of this essay, I situate my reading of In the Body of the World at the intersection of those two fields and advocate developing more complex views of embodied experience in metaphor studies, which frequently puts forth reductive notions of a universal and therefore transcultural and transhistorical body.

Envisioning connection: metaphor and myth-making Ensler’s desire to overcome the isolation that pain and suffering bring through envisioning a shared corporeal experience connects her with a tradition of women’s pathography that has emphasized the need for connection and solidarity. Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) is likely the most prominent example of an illness narrative transforming the cancer experience into an occasion for claiming one’s identity in solidarity with other women. Voicing one’s pain, making it visible for others, is a necessary step towards healing. In Cancer Journals, Lorde presents herself as a warrior – not against her own body, but against social

16

Christine Marks

injustice and the medical establishment.⁶ Ensler shares with Lorde an emphasis on female solidarity and the need to fight for a greater cause. She courageously embraces pain, weakness, vulnerability, and the abject, and she rages against apathy and indifference, against capitalist exploitation on disastrous global scales. Like Lorde, Ensler celebrates a female community of care, expressing her deep appreciation of the many women who spend their lives caring for others, especially nurses weaving “an invisible web of care” across the world, connecting Panzi Hospital in Bukavu with the Mayo Clinic, where Ensler is treated. “When the world is right,” she proclaims, “it will be the unpaid and unsung people like Cindy [a nurse] who will be the honored ones […] When the world is right, it will be these invisible people who we see and cherish” (IBW, 189). Both women draw on metaphorical language to create a deepened sense of interconnection, presenting themselves not as lone warriors fighting in isolation, but warriors linked with other fighters in a common quest: in Lorde’s case, she taps into the myth of the Amazon warriors,⁷ while Ensler sees herself as “an awakened warrior” after her first chemo, describing the diverse group of women surrounding her at the infusion suite as her “tribe” (IBW, 122). Frequently, the warrior motif is applied to the body itself, turning it into a battleground between opposing forces of health and illness. Anne Hunsaker Hawkins highlights that many cancer patients envision their fight against cancer in terms of a knight’s quest. The body’s internal processes are turned into an epic battle between “good” white blood cells or chemical agents defeating “evil” cancer cells.⁸ Ensler follows a similar pattern, describing the tumor as “an irrepressible army” (IBW, 20). Her former therapist Sue asks her to imagine the chemo as a way of vanquishing evil spectres from her past, imprints left by the perpetrators who abused and hurt her. The chemo itself becomes an “empathetic warrior” fighting to restore “wholeness, innocence, peace” (IBW, 113). Enlisting the aggressive treatment in the spiritual crusade against evil allows Ensler to become a warrior, fighting not just for her own but “all women’s bodies” (IBW, 113). Yet, while Ensler yearns to create a sense of joined vulnerability between herself and all women who suffered physical and psychological violence, she does not acknowledge the multiplicities that shape embodied experience in different and often incommensurable ways.

 For a detailed reading of the use of the warrior metaphor in Lorde’s Cancer Journals, see Tanja Reiffenrath, Memoirs of Well-Being: Rewriting Discourses of Illness and Disability (Bielefeld, Germany: Transcript, 2016): 97– 103.  Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980): 28; 25; 45.  Anne Hunsaker Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 1999): 63.

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

17

Drawing on the metaphorical dimensions of cancer and the holes and tumors to which it subjects the body, Ensler stylizes her narrative within the conventions of the quest and triumph narrative common among American pathographies. In order to build a narrative of triumph, Ensler resorts to mythic thinking, a strategy that Anne Hunsaker Hawkins has found in the majority of the illness narratives she studied in Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1999). Generally, Hawkins conceptualizes the “pathographical act” as “construct[ing] meaning by subjecting raw experience to the powerful impulse to make sense of it all, to bind together the events, feelings, thoughts, and sensations that occur during an illness into an integrated whole.”⁹ This, in fact, is Eve Ensler’s obsession in In the Body of the World. Through the use of metaphor, she superimposes a mythic scheme on encounters and forces that shape her life, “construct[ing] necessary fictions out of the building blocks of metaphor, image, archetype, and myth.”¹⁰ Ensler begins her story as a tale of absence, exile, and alienation. Having grown up with a distant mother and an abusive father, she is a stranger to her own body and the environment, thinking of the former as a burden and the latter as an enemy. As she writes, “For years I have been trying to find my way back to my body, and to the Earth” (IBW, 2). Ensler frames her life story as a quest of repossessing herself and reestablishing a healthy relationship with her body and her natural environment, a quest which she may never have fulfilled had her free fall not been disrupted by the shock of being diagnosed with cancer. Indeed, she reimagines her cancer experience – with all its physical and mental terrors – as a means towards connecting with her own body and the Earth, turning her from a mere visitor into an inhabitant with a sense of belonging. Throughout her memoir, Ensler resorts to metaphorical myth-making to counteract the bewildering and terrifying mutilation of a body turned into a “flesh monument.” As Laurence Kirmayer has pointed out, “the turn toward the body represents a longing for community, for bodily connection and participation in a habitable world of substance and feeling.”¹¹ Yet, often language and pain seem irreconcilable, as bodily pain propels “us to the most desperate gestures of faith.”¹² Ensler’s memoir is torn between the chaos and incomprehensibility that cancer brings to her body and the pull of the quest narrative arranging all fragments into a poetic whole. The form of the memoir echoes the fragmented  Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness, 18.  Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness, 18.  Laurence J. Kirmayer, “The Body’s Insistence on Meaning: Metaphor as Presentation and Representation in Illness Narratives,” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6.4 (1992): 323 – 346, 324.  Kirmayer, “The Body’s Insistence on Meaning,” 324.

18

Christine Marks

representation of the body in medical imaging, a collection of “Impressions. Scenes. Light beams. Scans” (IBW, 9) in a necessary abandonment of linear narrative in favor of fragments. Instead of forcing coherence onto the text, Ensler allows for a free association of thoughts that has a liberating quality, yet she uses metaphor to draw together seemingly disconnected events. While she is unsparing in her account of her illness, describing the abject body without omissions, it is precisely the broken, leaky, suffering body that ultimately becomes the medium of self-discovery, metaphorical connection, and self-actualization. An agent of transformation, metaphor acts as a centripetal force organizing the events of the world into a unified whole centered on Ensler’s embodied self. M. M. Bakhtin has argued in The Dialogic Imagination that every utterance constitutes an intersection between centralizing – centripetal – and decentralizing – centrifugal – forces.¹³ Often, centripetal forces favoring a “unitary language” suppress the “realities of heteroglossia.”¹⁴ Bakhtin observed that poetic language tends to be marked by centripetal forces, while the novel is more centrifugal and dialogic.¹⁵ With its initial emphasis on fragmentation and association, Ensler’s prose may at first sight be more closely affiliated with the genre of the novel, yet she essentially strives towards a unitary poetic model of linguistic expression. Her use of metaphor foregrounds a monological model of the world that forecloses moments of heteroglossia and dialogical encounter with the other that Bakhtin has observed in the novel. As Ensler herself proclaims, her job “was to survive and find a way of imagining all this so that I could transform and tolerate it. My job was to find the poetry” (IBW, 178 – 179). The mythic quality of Ensler’s experience is reinforced by testimonies from friends and health care practitioners: For example, her friend Paul describes her physical wounds as “Congo Stigmata” – traces of the stories of rape that have entered her body (IBW, 41). Ensler comes to view her own body as ultimate expression of empathy: she so internalized the stories of others that her body becomes a vehicle of expressing their pain: “Essentially, the cancer had done exactly what rape had done to so many thousands of women in the Congo” (IBW, 41). Ensler bears the pain of the women of the Congo as Jesus Christ bore the pain of humanity during his Crucifixion – the symbolism of martyrdom transforms cancer into a holy wound, personal suffering into spiritual sacrifice. Through her reference to these “Congo Stigmata,” Ensler inserts herself into a long and troubled history of “white savior” ideology, integrating the suffering of others to endow  M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981): 272.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 270.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 272– 273.

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

19

her own quest with spiritual meaning and purpose. This spiritual, mythic register of her experience is further confirmed through the testimony of “Dr. Handsome,” one of her doctors, who claims that the findings related to her cancer “‘are not medical, they are not science. They are spiritual” (IBW, 42). Such symbolic idealizations turn Ensler’s own body into a centripetal force drawing together the multiplicities of “thousands of women in the Congo” into a single triumph narrative. Kathlyn Conway assesses the model of the triumph narrative critically in her Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression, warning that for many people suffering from serious illness the triumph narrative is “at best a silly romance and at worst a cruel denial of their situation.”¹⁶ The triumph narrative is infused with American ideology and promoted constantly through American media, and it tends to hide the uncomfortable truths of the failing or decaying body. While Ensler is not interested in glossing over any physical aspects of her illness, she does adhere to the desire for telling a story of victory over the vicious cancer that attacks her. She is certainly frank about her own initial uncertainty and despair and her ongoing struggles with her failing body, but she makes sure to leave the reader with an uplifting incantation of a collective rising above all challenges. In her study, Hawkins observes the “mythogenic habit”¹⁷ of creating dichotomies of good vs. evil, or health vs. illness, which she sees rooted in the Western Christian tradition. Ensler, in contrast, is often drawn towards monistic Eastern spiritual models, aiming for oneness rather than binary opposition. However, she still maintains certain dichotomies. For example, she juxtaposes living as a machine with the desirable state of living in harmony with nature; following a traditional association of the female with nature, the Earth becomes equated with the female body: “The raping of the Earth. The pillaging of minerals. The destruction of vaginas. They were not separate from each other or from me” (IBW, 5). Again, Ensler relies on metaphor in order to establish the mythic connection between herself, other women, and the Earth at large, in this case conceiving of the exploitation of resources like copper and coltain in the Congo as rape. Both Earth and women are victimized by violent men, and Ensler sees her quest against violence and cancer embedded in a quest against capitalist greed, pollution, and destruction (IBW, 5). In the Congo, this becomes particularly acute, as Ensler finds that women there are systematically raped and killed as a “military/corporate tactic to secure minerals” (IBW, 5). In a further example,

 Kathlyn Conway, Beyond Words: Illness and the Limits of Expression (Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 2007): 17.  Hawkins, Reconstructing Illness, 62.

20

Christine Marks

Ensler plays with the multiple meanings of holes in juxtaposition to wholeness, linking the holes in the body (fistulas) to traumatic gaps in memory and holes in the earth’s surface and the ozone layer, “Holes that destroy the integrity, the possibility of wholeness, of fullness” (IBW, 43). Similarly, she overlaps her body’s infection in the aftermath of surgery with the BP oil spill happening simultaneously. She intersperses her own symptoms with the effects of the spill: “abdominal pain, chills, diarrhea, oil penetration destroying the plumage of birds, […] lack of appetite, nausea, dolphins spurting oil through their blow holes” (IBW, 69). Throughout the memoir, metaphor is an expression of commonality between distinct phenomena, bridging the gap between the individual and the collective, the human and the non-human. Ensler’s fluid transitions from the human to the non-human actually work against dichotomies of civilization vs. nature, in line with monist epistemic practices promoted by material ecocriticism. In Vibrant Matter, for example, Jane Bennett affirms that “human culture is inextricably enmeshed with vibrant, non-human agencies”¹⁸ and deconstructs human/nonhuman boundaries. Intermixing human suffering with the suffering of the Earth, Ensler also pushes her readers toward a non-dualist ethical relationship with the world. At a later point in the memoir, she moves from the simple act of her hair being washed by a friend to a reflection on the value of water, on the pollution of water by human greed, on the gulf she used to swim in and the gulf both her parents watched as they died, on the gulf between herself and her mother, and “the gulf dividing tribes, families, continents, and colors” (IBW, 177). While Ensler builds her narrative around holes, spills, gulfs, and other interferences with an intact view of the world, she seeks to mend those gaps through the connective tissue of an all-encompassing story. This is reconfirmed in the memoir’s final incantation, conjuring up “the second wind,” an invisible force transcending both difference and indifference, a wind that lifts the reader into a realm beyond the self, to become “part of this collection of molecules that begins somewhere unknown and can’t help but keep rising. Rising. Rising. Rising” (IBW, 217).

 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010): 108.

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

21

Metaphor, feminism, and the question of universal embodiment As shown above, much of Ensler’s claim to connection is founded on the erasure of difference and the assumption that female experiences of suffering are always shareable, regardless of cultural context. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson have established a foundational belief in shared bodily experience in metaphor studies that has not been sufficiently questioned in the field up until today. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), a classic text in metaphor studies, they observed that metaphors govern everyday lived experience, and in Philosophy of the Flesh (1999), they proposed that the majority of the metaphors we use emerge from common embodied experience. Ultimately, they suggest, “our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths.”¹⁹ Metaphor theory, as Laurence Kirmayer has suggested, “subsist[s] in bodily experiences that are themselves unconflicted. The bodily grounding of metaphor provides modes of thinking that yield rich, yet often hidden, meanings.”²⁰ The assumption of unconflicted bodily experiences offering stable corporeal truths seems highly questionable, if one acknowledges the many moments of resistance against the possibility of such “stable truths” that have emerged through various academic fields. If, for example, one takes into consideration Michel Foucault’s and Judith Butler’s reflections on body, power, and discourse, there can be little doubt that the body is not simply a biological entity, but a site of ideological struggle embedded in grids of interpretations and interventions, discursive practices that shape bodily experience. If women across cultures do not necessarily have a common understanding of the body and its functions, how can the body serve as an uncontested medium of connection and oneness? Embodied experience always depends on context, and this has significant implications for a feminist project that neglects to acknowledge the differentiated individual experiences of the women it claims to represent. Judith Butler, indeed, warned against the “totalizing gestures of feminism” in Gender Trouble: The effort to include ‘Other’ cultures as variegated amplifications of a global phallogocentrism constitutes an appropriative act that risks a repetition of the self-aggrandizing gesture

 Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 6.  Kirmayer, “The Body’s Insistence on Meaning,” 335.

22

Christine Marks

of phallogocentrism, colonizing under the sign of the same those differences that might otherwise call that totalizing concept into question.²¹

She alerts her readers that the emphasis on “the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social, and political intersections in which the concrete array of ‘women’ are constructed.”²² Similarly, Smith and Watson note that “it is a central instance of the universalizing agenda of Western theorizing that erases the subject’s heterogeneity as well as its agency” and that “privileging the oppression of gender over and above other oppressions effectively erases the complex and often contradictory positionings of the subject.”²³ Ensler promotes this problematic ideology of a universal and undifferentiated sisterhood through her insistence on the connectedness of all female experience – a connectedness which she achieves through a use of metaphor that neglects cultural contexts. Unsurprisingly, not all women in the Congo share Ensler’s vision of a universal sisterhood and global revolution to end violence against women. As Jessie Daniels observes, in a meeting of radical feminist Congolese women, many expressed anger towards One Billion Rising, a movement emerging from Ensler’s V-Day, using words like ‘insulting’ and ‘neo-colonial’ to describe the campaign.²⁴

Similar complaints have been made against Ensler’s famous episodic play The Vagina Monologues (1996), which, unlike the memoir, makes an attempt at including a multitude of voices. Wairimũ Ngarũiya Njambi deplores Ensler’s appropriation of non-Western women on the basis of an allegedly universal model of female sexuality in “ ‘ One Vagina to Go’: Eve Ensler’s Universal Vagina and Its Implications for African Women.”²⁵ She also rejects Ensler’s focus on the mutilated body of African women – the same complaint can be made of In the Body of the World, as Ensler uses the women of the Congo as a collective of bro-

 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990): 18.  Butler, Gender Trouble, 19.  Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, ed., De/colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992): xiv.  Jessie Daniels, “The Trouble with White Feminism: Whiteness, Digital Feminism and the Intersectional Internet,” in Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex and Culture Online, ed. Safiya Umoja Noble and Brendesha M. Tynes (New York: Peter Lang Digital Edition series, 2016): 41– 60, 17.  Wairimũ Ngarũiya Njambi, “‘One Vagina to Go’: Eve Ensler’s Universal Vagina and Its Implications for African Women,” Australian Feminist Studies 24.60 (2009): 167– 180.

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

23

ken bodies for her to identify with. Srimati Basu, as the title of her essay “V Is for Veil, V Is for Ventriloquism” proclaims, turns a critical gaze to the problematic approach of “speak[ing] ‘for’ women assumed to be invisible and silent.”²⁶ Kim Hall, in “Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues,” suggests that the play both “challenges and reinscribes (albeit unintentionally) systems of patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, and ableism.”²⁷ Hall also convincingly deconstructs notions of a universal human body and highlights how the female body continues to be reconceptualized.²⁸ Christine Cooper notes that difference fails to emerge as a meaningful site of critique in the play. Instead, it serves a missionary feminism, where the (white, affluent, Western) feminist is positioned to aid, if not save, her others by witnessing their pain.²⁹

As in In the Body of the World, the women whom Ensler takes it upon herself to represent are at times shown as a collective entity rather than individual voices. Cooper criticizes that especially in the case of Ensler’s treatment of Bosnian women, which, while it powerfully communicates the experience of violence, denies her subjects the privatized individuality of an autobiographical subject. Ensler’s move typifies a colonizing Western perspective; the Bosnian woman disappears under the sign of the anonymous, opaque village, while unique selfhood is left to the West alone.³⁰

Cooper’s complaint can be transferred to In the Body of the World. For example, the final acknowledgments/dedications of the book are emblematic for some of the overall deficiencies of Ensler’s ideological project: While practically all other people are addressed by name – the nurses, the doctors, the friends, the family – the women of the Congo are addressed as just that: a collective and nameless entity of suffering. The creation of an ideological unit of powerful women may make sense within Ensler’s gender activist frame, yet it remains highly problematic as it disregards the fact that there are many “women of the Congo” living

 Srimati Basu, “V Is for Veil, V Is for Ventriloquism,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 31.1 (2010): 31– 62, 32.  Kim Q. Hall, “Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues,” Hypatia 20.1 (2005): 99 – 119, 100.  See Hall, “Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues,” especially 112– 113.  Christine M. Cooper, “Worrying about Vaginas: Feminism and Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues,” Signs 32.3 (2007): 727– 758, 745.  Cooper, “Worrying about Vaginas,” 745.

24

Christine Marks

their lives beyond and removed – both physically and ideologically – from Ensler’s world. Ensler’s comparison of her own suffering with that of women across the globe, from Pakistan to the Congo, disregards the social embeddedness of the illness experience. As Julie Livingston’s book on a Botswana cancer ward, Improvising Medicine, illustrates, bodily suffering is not a universal phenomenon. She highlights the situatedness of cancer, the discrepancies between cancer experiences in different sociocultural environments: Cancer in Botswana and cancer in New York City have come into existence, are experienced, and are defined through particular technological fields. They are created or made sense of through particular social, cultural, and historical categories of meaning.³¹

Experiences of illness and pain are deeply intertwined with the individual’s social environment. “This total situatedness of pain,” as Livingston writes in opposition to Elaine Scarry’s notion of pain as “an object located in an individually bounded body,”³² “its refusal to be separated from the flow of pathological social experience is meaningful.”³³ Suffering does not come in a single, universal shape. While Ensler stresses the importance of social support systems in dealing with her cancer throughout her memoir, she ignores that this social positioning of illness counters any kind of universal claims regarding the nature of pain. Pain is a dialogically produced, ever shifting phenomenon, happening in specific contexts and environments, and Ensler’s American cancer experience may differ drastically from the trauma and pain experienced by a woman who has been raped brutally in the Congo. The particularity of the pain experience is grounded in the different linguistic and metaphorical representations of the body. Livingston describes how she and other doctors and nurses struggled to translate cancer “into Setswana language and regimes of embodiment.”³⁴ She writes, we tried to seal off patients in their own envelope of skin (so their relatives wouldn’t think them somehow toxic and segregate them), and to rhetorically create and inject cells, tumors, and metastases into the individuate bodies of the patients, often using agricultural metaphors (seeds, roots, weeds) or biological analogies (sores and meat).³⁵

 Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (Durham; NC: Duke UP, 2012): 52.  Livingston, Improvising Medicine, 120.  Livingston, Improvising Medicine, 120.  Livingston, Improvising Medicine, 76.  Livingston, Improvising Medicine, 76.

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

25

Livingston acknowledges the problem of translation, a problem that Ensler simply erases in her insistence on female unity.³⁶ Recounting her participation in a demonstration in the Congo, Ensler remembers giving a speech to the crowd, which is initially translated by her friend Christine. But then Ensler’s magic sets in again, and all questions of miscommunication or mistranslation are resolved: I must have begun the speech, but honestly I don’t know which one of us gave it. She finished my English sentences in French. Our bodies were no longer separate. We were one unit of female resistance exploding on a box in a field in the Congo. (IBW, 77)

Significantly, her fiction of an undifferentiated coalescence is made up of the languages of two colonial powers, failing to consider the over 200 other languages spoken in the Congo. While Livingston struggles with adjusting to foreign metaphorical systems in an attempt at creating sites of dialogical exchange, Ensler is not concerned with opening up her narrative to such complications. In the field of metaphor studies, some attempts have been made to raise awareness of the cultural contexts shaping embodied experience and its linguistic representations. The cognitive linguist Zoltan Kövecses, for instance, examines the interrelations between metaphorical expression, embodiment, and cultural context and explores the limits of universal metaphorical meaning. Investigating Lakoff and Johnson’s model of conceptual metaphors, Kövecses generally agrees that much of embodiment is universal,³⁷ but he also concedes that conceptual metaphorical systems vary considerably in different cultural environments, and he acknowledges that contextual factors have been neglected in metaphor studies. Kövecses provides a wealth of examples in support of the universality of certain metaphors such as conceptualizations of emotions and time.³⁸ Yet, he also complicates the idea of the universality of metaphors through counterexamples. In works such as Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (2000), Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (2005) and Where Metaphors Come from: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor (2015), he sets out to examine the impact of contextual factors on the production and reception of metaphors. Zövecses emphasizes that specific socio-cultural

 Ensler does admit that cancer has little meaning in the Congo as it “is rarely talked about” and “The word is hardly used” (75). It is telling that even the central metaphor employed in the memoir – cancer – is one that is practically untranslatable.  Even though interpretations of the body and its activities are not; see Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2005): 285.  Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture, 36 – 53.

26

Christine Marks

and historical contexts as well as individual experiences shape the production of metaphors. For example, he shows in Metaphor and Emotion that conceptualizations of emotions are in fact often shaped by their cultural environments. Metaphorical expressions for anger, for example, arise from the classical medieval model of the “four humors” in the Euro-American tradition, while Chinese expressions of anger emerge from understandings of energy flow and homeostasis.³⁹ Like Zövecses, the linguist Ning Yu draws attention to the interrelation between metaphor, embodiment, and cultural context. In his article “The Relationship between Metaphor, Body and Culture,” he develops the model of a “circular triangle” to visualize this relationship. As Yu explains, culture, by interpreting bodily experience, affects the formation of conceptual metaphors; body, by grounding metaphorical mappings, affects cultural understanding; and metaphor, by structuring cultural models, affects the understanding of bodily experience.⁴⁰

Comparing Chinese and English, Yu notes considerable variations in the use of metaphor. For example, he points to the culture-specific metaphorical conceptualization of the gall bladder as an organ of justice, emerging from traditional Chinese medicine and ancient Chinese philosophy. This example highlights that our understanding of the body and its metaphorical meanings are indeed not always shared among different cultures⁴¹ – an aspect of metaphor studies that requires a lot more scholarly attention in the future. The work of these linguists exemplifies the limitations of Ensler’s conceit of universal connection. At times, Ensler’s claims to universality and its conflation of other women’s suffering with her own are deeply troubling. Frustrated with a doctor’s disinterest in her subjective experience of suffering, of his utter disregard of her own voice, she exclaims: And I suddenly know what the bride in Pakistan felt when the drones bombed her wedding and her fiancé splintered into pieces and her mother was only fragments of dress. They were throwing everything at al-Qaeda [just like her doctors are throwing everything at her cancer]. (IBW, 72)

 Zoltán Zövecses, Metaphor and Emotion: Language, Culture, and Body in Human Feeling (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2000): 167– 168.  Ning Yu, “The Relationship between Metaphor, Body and Culture,” in Body, Language, and Mind Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness, ed. Roslyn M. Frank, René Dirven, Tom Ziemke, and Enrique Bernárdez (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2008): 387– 408, 389.  Yu, “The Relationship between Metaphor, Body and Culture,” 402.

Metaphor, Myth, and Universality in Eve Ensler’s In the Body of the World

27

This rather outrageous equation of herself as a victim of an admittedly cruel and uncaring health care practitioner in one of the best clinics in the United States with the Pakistani woman who loses her family in a U.S. drone attack on the day of her wedding is maybe the most striking example of the author’s instrumentalization of others’ suffering to portray her own helplessness and fear. The privileged white activist, who is treated in institutions that the majority of Americans, let alone “the rest of the world,” has no access to, has little in common with the woman whose life is destroyed by a force as uncontrollable, destructive, and ruthless as the American military’s drone attacks. Ensler is not entirely blind to her privilege, yet rather than pointing to some of the disparities pervading the American health care system, she chooses to point to the lack of medical care for women in the Congo. When visiting the Congo for the first time after receiving chemotherapy, Ensler feels acutely aware of the health care privileges she received, in contrast to the perceived lack thereof in the Congo. Yet, ultimately she wants to tell a story of oneness and connection, and so she presents her own body’s brokenness as deepening the bond between herself and the women she encountered in the Congo. Ensler rejoices in her cancer as a physical expression of the empathy she feels. Now, Ensler fully participates in the shared brokenness of the female body: “Before [cancer] when I was with the women and they were leaking from their fistulas, I could only imagine what it felt like. Now we are one wild mass of drumming, kicking, raging, leaking women” (IBW, 198). Margaret Shildrick and others have proposed that leakiness is at the very center of the postmodern feminist ethic, suggesting that the biomedical body has always been a construction of material fixity, an artifact that has little to do with actual female bodies. Ensler’s embrace of her own and other women’s unruly bodies, as instruments of resistance to male violence, celebrates the revolutionary potential of the precarious body. However, it completely disregards the situatedness of bodily materiality – one that is determined by the individual’s linguistic, cultural, and economic context.

Conclusion Especially because of Ensler’s deep engagement for women’s rights across the globe, her literary project might profit from a more developed sensibility toward the dangers of subsuming diverse material identities into an ideology of global sameness. One might suggest the same for the theorization of metaphor: a shift away from assumptions of universal bodily expression toward an approach that focuses on sociocultural positionality and difference may lead to new and exciting understandings of the interrelatedness of embodied identity and linguis-

28

Christine Marks

tic expression. After all, as Kim Hall proposes, the strategy of “grounding identity in anatomy” is ultimately “self-defeating.”⁴² Both Ensler and scholars of metaphor have been following this approach for decades in rather undifferentiated and uncritical terms. It is true that embodied experience allows individuals to participate in what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called an “interworld,” a shared and intersubjective space determining phenomenological perception. Yet, it is at the same time crucial to acknowledge the limits of shareability, to preserve the other’s radical alterity (Levinas) and incommensurability (Bakhtin), to maintain an ethical relationship that accepts and in fact prioritizes difference over sameness. Empathy, in its ideal form, does not aim towards incorporating the other and does not assimilate difference.⁴³ As tempting as it may be to turn to “the only constant in a rapidly changing world” and therefore to “the source of fundamental truths about who we are and how society is organized,”⁴⁴ universalizing claims about corporeal experience almost inevitably silence voices expressing difference. “All the stories began to bleed together” (IBW, 4), Ensler writes about the many narratives of violence and pain she encounters, and while they may have bled into her personal account of suffering, it is impossible for the reader to distinguish the very different shades of blood and pain merging in the poetic flow of this illness memoir. Finally, one may ask if the genre of the illness narrative itself, with its focus on individual inner states, may profit from more experimentation with such difference, including multiple voices instead of instrumentalizing others’ suffering to promote a story of the self.

 Hall, “Queerness, Disability, and The Vagina Monologues,” 114.  Dominick LaCapra, History In Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004): 66 – 67.  Arthur W. Frank, “Bringing Bodies Back In: A Decade Review,” Theory, Culture and Society 7 (1990): 131– 162, 133.

Anna Thiemann

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor in Kenny Fries’s The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory This contribution discusses the relationship between homology, analogy, and metaphor in evolutionary theory and their appropriation in Kenny Fries’s memoir The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (2007). The memoirist’s unorthodox comparison of species, bodies, and personal histories – most notably his experience as a traveler and the adventures of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace – sheds new light on Fries’s disability and the evolutionary doctrine of “the survival of the fittest.” By shifting his focus from homology, or structural similarities, to analogy, or functional similarities, and metaphor, Fries reveals an unpopular(ized) side of Darwin and his theory, which stresses reciprocity, sympathy, and cooperation rather than autonomy, hostility, and competition. Consequentially, the principle of “the survival of the fittest” is not dismissed but reinterpreted and reconciled with the aims of disability rights activism. The Darwinian world is always capable of further description, and such description generates fresh narratives and fresh metaphors which may supplant the initiating account. – Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots (1983)

Looking back on his career as a poet and memoirist, the US-American writer Kenny Fries states that “[m]uch of [his] work the past twenty years has been concerned, in one way or another, with the body, as both subject and metaphor; as the place where the personal becomes the universal.”¹ To readers unfamiliar with the author and his work, this poetic mission might seem rather banal. To conceive the body as a metaphor for the universal, or universally shared experience, requires little imaginative effort for most people. After all, “[t]he human body, including its physiological, structural, motor, perceptual, and so on, makeup, is essentially universal,”² as Zoltán Kövecses reminds us in Metaphor in Culture (2005). For Fries, however, who was born with a congenital disability, the

 Kenny Fries, “Personal Statement” (n.d.), Goddard College (acc. 5 November 2017).  Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2005): 285. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-003

30

Anna Thiemann

universality of the human body and experience is far from self-evident. Missing several bones in both of his legs and unable to walk without orthopedic shoes, the author is seen by many as a deviation from the ‘norm.’ Doctors who treated him as a child, teenager, and adult even considered him ‘unfit’ to survive proposing ‘corrective’ surgery or even assisted suicide.³ Under the medical gaze, Fries’s disability becomes a Darwinian “monstrosity,” a “considerable deviation of structure, generally injurious, or not useful to the species.”⁴ In strictly evolutionary terms, the bone structure in Fries’s legs is not “homologous” and thus seems to lack “real affinities”⁵ with the anatomy of other human beings or closely related animal species. Haunted by the doctrine of the “survival of the fittest”⁶ since he was a child, Fries dedicated his second memoir, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (2007), to evolutionary theory and its impact on his life. As the title indicates, the book consists of two parts or narratives: one that focuses on Fries’s personal experience and one that deals with Darwin’s scientific ideas. At first glance, it is tempting to read Fries’s History as an “autobiology,” a text that focuses on “mapping out the self against […] the meta-narrative of evolutionary theory.”⁷ According to Alexis Harley, who coined the term, this genre was initiated by nineteenth-century writers such as Darwin himself, who used their autobiographies as sites for testing how the human subject, the self, the author’s own self, fares under evolutionary principles – […] under the principles of inheritance, variation, the struggle for survival, intra- and inter-species continuity.⁸

It becomes evident that Fries draws on this tradition when he reflects on the “evolution” of his pain-stricken body, asking if it “had reached the apex of what it could do, of where it could take [him]” (HE, 180, 5). On closer inspection, however, his autobiographical self-construction is more complex. The History is in fact a double (or triple) life narrative focusing not only on Fries’s experience in

 Kenny Fries, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007): 4– 6; further references in the text abbreviated as “HE.”  Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008): 37.  Darwin, Origin, 319, 314.  The phrase “survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer in 1864, and Darwin decided to use the term instead of “natural selection” in subsequent editions of The Origin of Species. Lance Workman and Will Reader, Evolutionary Psychology: An Introduction [2004], third ed. (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 2014): 38.  Alexis Harley, Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2015): 6.  Harley, Autobiologies, 17.

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor

31

the United States and remote places such as Bali and Thailand but also on Darwin’s research trips and the life of the lesser known adventurer and champion of evolutionary theory Alfred Russel Wallace. The title of Fries’s memoir hints at its parallel and comparative structure, in which the two main narratives, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, are set side by side, with each chapter focusing either on the narrator’s life or its nineteenth-century counterpart, thereby inviting the reader to correlate these episodes or “exhibits,” as they are called in the table of contents. In addition to this ‘intra-species’ comparison, Fries highlights commonalities between humans and animal species, which allows him to reinterpret not only his own life but also Darwin’s theory. In this article, I will argue that the key principle underlying Fries’s self-representation is not homology but analogy, which evolves into metaphor. This representational strategy reveals and corresponds to an unpopular(ized) side of Darwin and his theory, stressing reciprocity, sympathy, and cooperation rather than autonomy, hostility, and competition. As a result, the principle of “the survival of the fittest” is not dismissed in Fries’s memoir, but it acquires new meaning and becomes compatible with the aims of disability rights activism. The structural peculiarities of The History were first noted in a review by Laurie Clements Lambeth, who observes that Fries opens his text “to the suggestive possibility of associational links […] simply through images and proximity.”⁹ Tanja Reiffenrath’s more recent study Memoirs of Well-Being (2016), which includes an entire chapter on Fries’s memoir, presents the text as “a creative reappropriation of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution,”¹⁰ allowing the narrator to recast his disability and his shoes in terms of variation and adaptation. Similar to Lambeth, however, Reiffenrath does not give much weight to “the positive ideas […] inherent in Darwin’s work,” such as “interdependence” and “morality,” which are ostensibly “glosse[d] over”¹¹ in Fries’s memoir; and neither of them examines the relationship between the structure of The History and Darwin’s theory. What is also lacking in both scholarly texts is an in-depth analysis of Darwin’s and Wallace’s life narratives and their relationship to Fries’s autobiology. Lambeth and Reiffenrath mainly focus on Darwin’s scientific ideas, even though Fries is equally concerned with Darwin and Wallace’s relationship and their respective family life, which draws the reader’s attention to the role of sympathy,

 Laurie Clements Lambeth, “Review of The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory, by Kenny Fries,” Disability Studies Quarterly 28.1 (2008): (acc. 5 November 2017).  Tanja Reiffenrath, Memoirs of Well-Being: Rewriting Discourses of Illness and Disability (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2016): 201.  Reiffenrath, Memoirs, 202.

32

Anna Thiemann

altruism, and cooperation in the development of evolutionary theory and human life in general. Before analyzing the above-mentioned aspects of Fries’s memoir in more detail, it is necessary to sketch the conceptual links between homology, analogy, and metaphor in evolutionary theory and their relationship to “the positive ideas” in Darwin’s work. It makes sense to begin with a discussion of analogy due to its close connection to the other two terms: Since Aristotle, literary critics have regarded metaphor as “a specific form[] of analogy,”¹² whereas homology is traditionally defined in contradistinction to analogy (and, by extension, metaphor). My conceptual framework mainly draws on Devin Griffiths’s The Age of Analogy (2016) and Gillian Beer’s classic, but still highly relevant, study Darwin’s Plots (1983), which provide valuable insights into the epistemological and ethical implications of homology, analogy, and metaphor in Darwin’s work. As a rhetorical device and a mode of understanding and argument, analogy is widely used in a variety of discourses and disciplines, such as literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences.¹³ Deriving from the Greek analogia, meaning proportion, analogy is generally defined as “the process of reasoning from parallel cases,” involving “the description of something known in order to suggest in certain respects something unknown.”¹⁴ Like metaphor, analogy is “usually understood […] as a relation between vehicle and tenor – as the ‘mapping’ of relationships from ‘source’ to ‘target.’”¹⁵ The common distinction between “source” and “target,” or “analogue,” suggests that one side of the analogy takes priority over the other because the former is “more familiar” than the latter, which is a new but presumably “similar or parallel” case or phenomenon.¹⁶ The epistemological implications of these conceptualizations are carved out in Devin Griffiths’s study on the role of analogy in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and science. In The Age of Analogy, he distinguishes between “formal analogy,” which corresponds to the widely accepted definition

 “Analogy,” in The Broadway Pocket Glossary of Literary Terms, comp. Laura Buzzard and Don LePan (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview P, 2014): 12.  Nilli Diengott, “Analogy as a Critical Term: A Survey and Some Comments,” Style 19.2 (1985): 227– 228.  “Analogy,” in Current Literary Terms: A Concise Dictionary of their Origin and Use, by A. F. Scott (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1985): 12.  Devin Griffiths, The Age of Analogy: Science and Literature between the Darwins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2016): 33.  “Analogy,” in The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, by Chris Baldick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015): 14.

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor

33

mentioned above, and “harmonic analogy,” which is actually more relevant to his study: Whereas analogy is generally understood as a top-down, formal operation, an understanding I ascribe to formal analogies (which apply a previously understood pattern of relationships to a new context), I have found that many of the analogies most important to this study operate differently. In particular, the following chapters explore the importance of what I term harmonic analogies, analogies that work from the bottom up, exploring a pattern between two different sets of relationships, to see what common features the pattern picks out. These harmonic analogies allow significant shared features to emerge through contact between two different domains placed in serial relation – juxtaposed across time or space, in the world or in the imagination – rather than asserting the prearticulated features of what is already understood.¹⁷

In contrast to formal analogy, its harmonic counterpart is “reciprocal,” “dynamic,” and “uncertain”;¹⁸ it reveals “patterns between discrete categories that are otherwise invisible.”¹⁹ In doing so, harmonic analogy “challenge[s] the […] principle of discrete membership” and provides “a model for sympathetic understanding.”²⁰ According to Griffiths, Darwin’s evolutionary theory is fundamentally based on the principle of harmonic analogy. Along similar lines, Beer observes that Darwin uses analogy (and metaphor) “to disturb demarcations” and to develop a “universalist world view[] in which all phenomena are and can be shown to be interrelated.”²¹ In Darwin’s Plots, Beer argues that these rhetorical devices “allow[] him to express, without insisting on, kinship” and thus to turn “[t]he whole of animate nature [into] one moving and proliferating family.”²² Yet, as Beer also reminds us, Darwin’s insistence on seeing “the natural world in terms of an ‘inextricable web of affinities’” is curiously at odds with his interest in classification, which requires attention to “real affinities” or homology rather than ‘mere’ analogy.²³ The biologist Richard Owen first used the term homology in 1843 while studying and comparing the anatomy of various species. According to Owen’s pre-evolutionary definition, analogous organs are structurally dissimilar but serve the same function, whereas homologous organs

 Griffiths, Age of Analogy, 18; original emphasis.  Griffiths, Age of Analogy, 36.  Griffiths, Age of Analogy, 38.  Griffiths, Age of Analogy, 149, 36.  Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Elliot and NineteenthCentury Fiction [1983], third ed. (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009): 79.  Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 83.  Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 18.

34

Anna Thiemann

share the same structure “under every variety of form and function.”²⁴ A few years later, evolutionary theorists elaborated that while analogy results from convergent evolution or adaptation to the same environment, homology indicates common descent or ancestry and thus “real affinities.” In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin exemplifies this concept of analogy with reference to the wings of birds and insects, which are structurally dissimilar but characterized by “similarity of function,”²⁵ enabling both species to fly. To illustrate the concept of homology, he compares “the arm of man” to “the wing of a bird,”²⁶ which are used for entirely different purposes even though they have the same bone structure. This example has been a classic in comparative anatomy ever since 1555, when Pierre Belon produced his “famous comparative diagrams of the skeleton of a bird and that of a human, with most of the individual bones correctly homologized.”²⁷ By the first half of the nineteenth-century, homology was closely connected to the centuries-old idea that there is “a natural order of organisms” or scala naturae, which developed into a “tree-like divergent hierarchy emphasized by both Wallace (1855) and Darwin.”²⁸ Griffiths, the abovementioned author of The Age of Analogy, regards homology as “a kind of formal analogy” because it presumes a “higher model”²⁹ or ideal against which other species or specimen are measured and compared. Fries’s History provides a critical analysis of formal analogy, or what could be termed traditional homology, and encourages the reader to adopt the principle of harmonic analogy by revealing unforeseen similarities between people, species, and their physique. Adopting Wallace’s belief that “knowledge founded on long-continued observation […] must modify [his] views as to the origin and nature of human faculty,”³⁰ the narrator discovers new homologies, and more importantly, a host of analogies, or functional similarities, which deconstruct “the principle of discrete membership,” especially the established demarcation between ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ bodies. The shift from formal to harmonic analogy, or from biased to unbiased observation, is particularly evident in the first chapter, or “exhibit,” following the prologue. In “Still Disabled,” the narrator recounts his involuntary and humiliating visit to a doctor, who is supposed to de-

 Alec L. Panchen, “Homology: History of a Concept,” in Homology, ed. Novartis Foundation (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1999): 14.  Darwin, Origin, 371.  Darwin, Origin, 376.  Panchen, “Homology,” 6.  Panchen, “Homology,” 6, 8.  Griffiths, Age of Analogy, 161.  Qtd. in Fries, History, 135.

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor

35

termine if Fries is still entitled to medical benefits. While the narrator is waiting in Dr. Mendotti’s office, his gaze wanders to a shelf across the room, which displays “five models – two white, three beige – of legs, the kind that show not only the bones but also the ligaments and tendons as well” (HE, 3). In contrast to medical specialists, Fries looks at the “models” with fresh eyes and compares them to his own body without relying on preexisting frameworks that would limit his perception: I have always been fascinated by these models because, although I know which bones I am missing, neither my doctors nor numerous physical therapists have ever been able to tell me which ligaments and tendons my legs do contain. When I have fallen and torn something in my right knee, my doctor and I have never been sure whether it is the meniscus or the anterior cruciate ligament that I have torn, or whether it was some soft tissue adapted solely for the odd orthopedic configurations of my legs. (HE, 3)

The passage clearly challenges biomedical discourse with its exclusive focus on deficits, which results in the devaluation of ‘deviant’ bodies. What is interesting, however, is that the narrator does not condemn the scientific process of observation and comparison per se, but only science’s obsession with difference, which coincides with a blatant ignorance of obvious similarities. This problem is amply illustrated by Dr. Mendotti’s response to Fries’s “congenital deformities” (HE, 4). When the narrator takes off his shoes and socks, the doctor only sees his ‘unspeakable difference.’ Unable to provide a “believ[able]” description of what he has in front of him, the doctor is reluctant to even use the term “feet” and questions the narrator’s ability to “walk on those” (HE, 3). During the examination, Fries feels the urge to recoil his legs and to tell the doctor that he “walk[s] just fine” with his shoes, that he is okay as he is. But, in this particular situation, where he depends on Dr. Mendotti’s judgment, he has no choice but to silently endure the humiliating procedure. Fries’s response to the “models” in Dr. Mendotti’s office shifts the focus from bones to ligaments, tendons, and tissue adaptation, thus revealing structural and functional similarities that are usually ignored. In a later chapter, the narrator mentions further homologies between ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ bodies, pointing out that “[a]bove the hips [his] body could be described just like everybody else’s” (HE, 22). Yet, his main interest lies with functional rather than structural similarities, and thus analogies, which undermine the clinical obsession with normative homology. This shift from structure to function is closely connected to the narrator’s realization that his shoes are not a stigma but an adaptive device. This significant reinterpretation of Fries’s physical ‘deviance’ is addressed early on, in the prologue of his memoir:

36

Anna Thiemann

In 1960, I was born a month premature with bones missing in both of my legs. For most of my life, when I looked at my shoes, I saw only the different way I walk. / But now, when I look at my shoes I see much more than my own particular difference. I see the places they have allowed me to explore. (HE, xv–xvi)

Most importantly, the shoes have enabled Fries to retrace Darwin’s route to the Galápagos Islands and to “climb the steep trail” to Darwin Lake on top of a volcano, “the place where once young Darwin stood.”³¹ The fact that Fries follows in Darwin’s footsteps underlines his ‘fitness,’ while also hinting at his adoption and adaptation of Darwinian modes of observation and writing. The prologue and the rest of Fries’s memoir suggest that mobility and survival do not depend on normative structural characteristics but on the ability to adapt to constantly changing and mostly unpredictable situations and environments. The most powerful and poetic evocation of functional similarity occurs in the final paragraph of The History, which describes the narrator’s feelings as he is using a hand cycle called the Easy Flyer for the first time. In order to fully understand this episode and Fries’s perspective on homology, analogy, and metaphor, it is necessary to go back two chapters. The “exhibit” “Transformations to Flight” deals with the narrator’s visit to the Galápagos Islands, during which he and his partner, Ian, have the opportunity to observe a young waved albatross “waddling awkwardly” through the deserted nesting grounds. They arrive just in time to witness the lone bird reaching “its take-off point near the edge of the cliff where, in an instant, it throws itself off, transforming from a gangly land dweller into an expert flyer” (HE, 198). A similar transformation takes place when Fries gets on the Easy Flyer. Picking up speed as he is crossing a bridge, he takes his hands off the pedals and leans back to look at the sky: “I am sky-pointing, I think, and, keeping both feet off the ground, I am the waved albatross, the last remaining bird of its kind, now ready to take flight” (HE, 203). It is tempting to read Fries’s comparison between himself and a bird here, and elsewhere in the narrative, as a direct reference to the concept of homology, which, as mentioned above, is traditionally exemplified by reference to “the arm of man” and “the wing of a bird.” In Fries’s case, however, the comparison is used in a different way. According to Darwin, human arms and the wings of a bird are homologous, but not analogous because they serve different functions. By turning ‘flying’ into a metaphor, the impossible becomes possible and the demarcation between ho-

 The memoir can be regarded as an example of “footsteps travel writing.” Christopher M. Keirstead, “Convoluted Paths: Mapping Genre in Contemporary Footsteps Travel Writing,” Genre 46.3 (2013): 285 – 315.

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor

37

mology and analogy and, thus, between the narrator and the waved albatross is effectively disturbed. Fries’s closing metaphor clearly stands out in a text that is otherwise rife with analogies broadly defined – not only between humans and animal species but also between Fries and the evolutionary theorists Wallace and Darwin. In contrast to the metaphor mentioned above, most of these analogies are implicit, meaning that they are not directly stated by the narrator but “constructs made by the reader, who discovers similarities between two or more elements in the text and uses them to construct analogical patterns.”³² One of the first obvious examples, which is also discussed by Lambeth, is the analogy between the Galápagos marine iguana and the narrator in chapters four and five. In “A Little World Within Itself,” the animal is said to “move[] stupidly and sluggishly” on land while moving “with perfect ease and quickness” in the water (HE, 19). The following chapter, titled “Bodies of Water,” deals with the narrator’s regular visits to a local pool. Fries explains that he enjoys swimming because it “is easier for [him] than walking” (HE, 21) even though the pool is also the place where his ‘deviant’ body and swimming technique are in plain view. Yet, rather than heightening his sense of being ‘different,’ Fries’s close observation of other “Bodies of Water” make him realize that “the norm” is nothing but an “unreachable” “fantasy,” an “abstract, ultimately fictitious notion of what we should be.” Using the first-person plural in this context, Fries suggests that “our bodies” and insecurities are not so different after all (HE, 23).³³ According to Griffiths, “harmonic analogies allow significant shared features to emerge through the contact between two different domains placed in serial relation – juxtaposed across time or space, in the world or in the imagination.” The above-mentioned passage from Fries’s memoir focuses on spatially demarcated bodies, but the narrator is equally interested in a historical comparison between himself and his nineteenth-century predecessors Darwin and Wallace. As indicated above, the implicit analogy between Fries’s experience and Darwin’s and Wallace’s life narratives is pointed out in the very title of the memoir. Its syndetic coordination of the quasi-synonyms “history” and “evolution” encourages the reader to look for similarities between the contemporary and nineteenth-century episodes of the memoir. One obvious parallel or analogy results from Fries’s description of Darwin’s and Wallace’s ‘maladaptation’ and ‘unfitness’ during their research trips and at home, which are reminiscent of Fries’s recurring doubts about his ability to survive in familiar and unfamiliar environments.

 Diengott, “Analogy as a Critical Term,” 230.  Original emphasis.

38

Anna Thiemann

Right before introducing the marine iguana and his own fondness of swimming, the narrator mentions Darwin’s “severe seasickness” (HE, 19), which afflicted him during his voyages. As the memoir eventually reveals, Darwin’s “stomach problems” occurred not only at sea but also when he was in London, desperately working on what would become The Origin of Species. Like Fries, Darwin is “ruled by his body” (HE, 28), unable to accomplish the task he set for himself. Meanwhile, Wallace’s fieldwork in the Amazon and the Malay Archipelago is repeatedly hampered by malaria, making it impossible for him to continue his research for weeks at a time. After several years in the tropics, the self-taught naturalist finds himself “exhausted and no longer able to withstand the privations of island jungle life” (HE, 90) and accordingly decides to return home. However, things do not seem to change for the better when Wallace is back in England, where he has “a difficult time adjusting to the fast pace, noise, and grit of Victorian London” and comes down with “a bad case of boils” (HE, 95, 94). The distinction between the supposedly ‘able-bodied’ Darwin and Wallace and the ‘disabled’ narrator is thus effectively challenged and further undermined by the latter’s ability to literally follow in the former’s footsteps and to travel to the Galápagos Islands and other remote and inaccessible places like the jungles of Bali. Another parallel between Fries’s two main narratives is their focus on two pairs of men, Darwin and Wallace, on the one hand, and Fries and his partner, Ian, on the other. Admittedly, their relationships seem to be quite different at first sight. After all, Darwin and Wallace are competitors in the newly emerging field of evolutionary theory, while Fries and Ian are lovers who support each other unconditionally. On closer inspection, however, Darwin and Wallace’s relationship is not so different after all. The stories and original letters in Fries’s memoir present two men who treat each other with sincere respect and generosity. In doing so, they ironically falsify the popular evolutionary idea of ruthless competition, which is closely connected to the principle of the survival of the fittest. The best illustration of their supportive and cooperative behavior is Wallace’s humble and admiring response to Darwin’s success and Darwin’s insistence on using his influence in London “to get a government pension” (HE, 108) for the socially and economically disadvantaged Wallace. Fries concludes that “Darwin’s journey toward the theory of evolution was an act of reciprocity” since he depended on the support of his family and neighbors and “on the theories of others, such as Malthus, Lyell, and Wallace” (HE, 163). Rather than letting these insights into Darwin’s and Wallace’s life stand as an insoluble contradiction between the content and ‘evolution’ of Darwin’s theory, Fries reveals that his nineteenth-century predecessors actually had certain doubts about the applicability of their scientific ideas on the human species. Wallace, in particular, believed in “the moral and higher intellectual nature of

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor

39

man” and “the infinite advancement of our mental and moral nature.”³⁴ Darwin was more conflicted about the matter and insisted on describing human behavior in terms of instincts. But he nonetheless found a place for morality and sympathy in his theory, a way to explain and justify the protection and preservation of sickly, feeble, or otherwise ‘endangered’ individuals who cannot survive on their own. As Fries points out with reference to The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin did say that “the weak members of civilized societies” propagate and “this must be highly injurious to the race of men.” However, he quickly qualified his statement by also saying that “the aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered … more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason.” He concluded, “If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it would only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil. We must therefore bear the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.” (HE, 143 – 144)

In The History, Darwin’s mixed feelings about human sympathy gain a significant personal dimension, not only because of the scientist’s altruistic support of Wallace but also because of Darwin’s own ‘unfitness.’ In addition to paying close attention to the latter’s failing health, Fries mentions his marriage, or ‘interbreeding,’ with his first cousin Emma Wedgwood and the illnesses and deaths of his children, thereby placing him and his family among “the weak members” of society. For Fries, Darwin’s thoughts on human sympathy are highly significant because it is hard for him to accept help from others and because he keeps wondering “what people with disability offer to society” (HE, 164). It is thus hardly surprising that he returns to Darwin’s ideas on this matter, referring to a passage in The Descent of Man that “talks about how, as man’s reasoning powers improved, each individual would soon learn that if he aided others he would receive aid in return.” According to Darwin, this learning process and the “habit of performing benevolent actions” gave rise to the feeling of sympathy which, in turn, became “the initial impulse for benevolent actions” (HE, 162). In contrast to the previously mentioned passage from The Descent of Man, this argument presents sympathy not as harmful, but as beneficial and necessary for the survival of the human race. It prompts Fries to ask if people with disabilities “help the human species survive” by revealing “the importance of interdependence, of community” (HE, 164). This reinterpretation of the Darwinian struggle for survival stresses the need for sympathy and cooperation, while also casting the disabled in the role  Qtd. in Fries, History, 101– 102.

40

Anna Thiemann

of the needy and dependent. Yet, the latter point is significantly challenged, not only by a question mark but also by Fries’s depiction of his relationship with Ian, which is characterized by interdependence and mutual support. Like the Darwin-Wallace connection, the relationship between Fries and Ian reveals more than is apparent at first sight. In this case, however, the most surprising discovery is not primarily due to unexpected details, but it results from the narrator’s use of analogy and metaphor, which casts new light on Darwin’s theory. During their travels in Bali, Fries and his partner visit the Bali Starling Reintroduction Center in Barat National Park, which “is now the only place to see the endangered bird in its natural habitat” (HE, 37). The narrator is fascinated by the small birds and can barely imagine how they manage to survive in the jungle. At the center, a guide encourages Fries to look into a box containing “the tiniest bird” he has ever seen. The narrator observes that it “looks more like an embryo than a bird, its beak seemingly larger than the rest of its colorless body. Thinking we are here to feed it, the embryo-like creature opens its beak, pleading” (HE, 50). Fries is overwhelmed with emotions since the bird reminds him of himself. He was born a month premature and was thus required to spend “the first four weeks of his life in an incubator.” At that time, “[t]he doctors were not sure whether [he] would survive” (HE, 50). The clinicians’ uncertainty draws the reader’s attention to Fries’s vulnerability, while his survival and perseverance underline his strength or ‘fitness.’ The analogy between the starling and the narrator is picked up again in a later passage about Fries and Ian’s attempt to see the black monkey in the Balinese jungle. Significantly, it is not the experienced guide but Ian who spots the rare and endangered species with surprising ease. At this point in the narrative, the reader knows that Ian was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder (ADD) and therefore often depends on Fries to keep his hyperactivity and distractibility in check. According to one explanation of the syndrome, “[p]eople with ADD are leftover hunters” from past societies where “traits such as constantly monitoring the environment, the ability to change strategy at a moment’s notice [and] visual thinking” were highly advantageous (HE, 131– 132). ADD causes many problems in Ian’s professional and private life, but in the Balinese jungle, his mental ‘otherness’ proves to be highly useful. After all, it is only with Ian’s help and “through his eyes” that the narrator is able to observe the black monkey in its natural habitat, for which they “have come halfway across the world to see.” Accordingly, this episode closes with the seemingly odd but fitting observation that “the hunter helps the starling” (HE, 139). In the context of Fries’s memoir, it is clear that this is first and foremost a metaphor which develops out of previous comparisons and analogies, but its literal meaning is equally significant. The unlikely alliance and mutual support between a hunter and an endangered species

Homology, Analogy, and Metaphor

41

underlines the human ability to sympathize and cooperate not only with other people but also with other species. Like Darwin’s “metaphoric language,”³⁵ Fries’s imagery turns “[t]he whole of animate nature [into] one moving and proliferating family.” The idea(l) of inter- and intra-species sympathy and “extended family” relations (HE, 155) is taken up time and again in The History. When taking a trip down the Colorado River with a group of ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ people, Fries “adapt[s] [quickly] to life on the river,” not only because of his new gear, a wetsuit and aqua booties, but also because the group manages to “liv[e] as a family.” Fittingly, this chapter is titled “Reciprocal Altruism” (HE, 153). Fries makes similar experiences in Thailand, where communities seem to care for the old and disabled out of respect and sympathy. Finally, it is important to mention that the narrator himself extends his sympathy to others, which is underlined by his fascination with endangered species. In one episode, Fries helps a Galápagos land iguana survive by making a rare cactus flower, the creature’s preferred food, fall to the ground. Since his arm is not long enough, the narrator is only able to reach the flower with his walking cane, which is thus shown to be a versatile and powerful device rather than a sign of its owner’s impairment. “Without your cane,” Ian points out, “that iguana might have starved” (HE, 189). The chapter “A Cane with No Story” is clearly different from the episode at the Bali Starling Reintroduction Center, where the roles are reversed and Fries identifies with a starving bird. The contrast between both situations suggests that weakness and strength, or ‘fitness,’ are not inherent but relative qualities that may change over time and in different contexts. What is unchanging, however, is the universal need for sympathy and support. Almost halfway through The History, the reader learns that the phrase “survival of the fittest” was originally “coined by philosopher Herbert Spencer,” and that Wallace urged Darwin to use the term instead of the seemingly misleading “metaphor natural selection” (HE, 82, 95). In Wallace’s view, it was wrong to personify nature in this way because “she does not so much as select special various species as exterminate the most unfavorable ones” (HE, 96). The author of The History clearly thinks that Darwin’s original metaphor, which can be regarded as a quasi-religious celebration of every living creature on earth, is far more acceptable and instructive than a seemingly straightforward phrase like “the survival of the fittest.” But, rather than dismissing the Spencerian doctrine for its harmful implications, Fries’s memoir takes a fresh approach to ‘fitness’ and reinterprets it in a way that makes it compatible with disability rights activism.

 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 70.

42

Anna Thiemann

Like the evolution of Darwin’s theory, this reassessment turns out to be “an act of reciprocity” since the author draws on Wallace’s and Darwin’s work. Following in the latter’s footsteps both literally and metaphorically, as a traveler and as a writer, Fries makes new observations and creates his own formal analogies and images to elucidate both parts of his narrative. As a consequence, The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory offers a reevaluation of the narrator’s disability and of Darwin’s most popular(ized) ideas, including his adopted and extremely influential phrase “the survival of the fittest.” Drawing on his own experiences and Darwin’s and Wallace’s lesser known beliefs, Fries suggests that survival does not depend on physical strength, but on the ability to adapt to changing environments and the willingness to cooperate with others. In doing so, he makes a strong case against traditional hierarchies and the conventional categories of ‘able’ and ‘disabled’ bodies.

Simon Dickel

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto Throughout his two memoirs Planet of the Blind (1998) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (2006) the legally blind writer Stephen Kuusisto uses metaphors to depict the sensual experiences of the narrator Stephen. The memoirs can be read as contributions to the field of philosophical phenomenology. Kuusisto’s memoirs do not support Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s example in Phenomenology of Perception (1945) of a blind person who learns to use a walking cane and incorporates it into his body schema. Instead, Kuusisto emphasizes the transformative effects of a guide dog and depicts the relationship between Stephen and his guide dog Corky in terms of love, romance, and symbiosis. The relationship between Stephen and Corky can be taken as an example of Donna Haraway’s concept of significant otherness. Eavesdropping focuses on the experience of listening. Stephen’s descriptions of the sounds of objects, nature, animals, and human beings resonate with Don Ihde’s typology of different voices, which he develops in Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (1976). Kuusisto and Ihde explicitly refer to the composer John Cage when they describe everyday objects as musical instruments and everyday sounds as musical compositions.

In his two memoirs, Planet of the Blind (1998) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (2006), the legally blind writer Stephen Kuusisto builds on his experiences of passing as sighted for the first 39 years of his life and has the narrator Stephen explain how his life changes,¹ after deciding to first use a walking cane and then getting acquainted to his guide dog Corky a little later.² As both cane and dog are visible markers of blindness, his disability becomes a marked category, which is then visible for others. Both memoirs contain long passages in which Stephen describes his sensual experiences. For this reason, I read them as phenomenological accounts of how Stephen is oriented in the world through his body and his senses. Building on the phenomenology of Maur-

 Throughout this essay, I use the name Kuusisto when I refer to the author of the memoirs and the name Stephen when I refer to their narrator.  On passing and disability see chapter five “Disability Masquerade” in Disability Theory, ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008): 96 – 119. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-004

44

Simon Dickel

ice Merleau-Ponty, especially the example of blindness in Phenomenology of Perception (1945, first English translation 1962), which is a critique of the Cartesian split between mind and body, and on Don Ihde’s Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound (1976), I demonstrate how Kuusisto’s memoirs resonate with, support, and sometimes contradict these phenomenological texts. Kuusisto describes the majority of Stephen’s sensual experiences by making extensive use of metaphors. He translates the lived experience of blindness into images that can be understood by sighted readers. In this essay, I will particularly focus on his use of metaphor with regard to the depiction of his relationship with his guide dog Corky on the one hand, and the descriptions of the experience of listening, on the other. Depicting the guide dog team Stephen-Corky, Kuusisto uses metaphors of love, romance, and symbiosis. When he addresses the experience of listening, he does so in terms of music and composition. In the first part of my essay, I will critically discuss Merleau-Ponty’s example of a blind person who uses a walking cane. I will argue that Kuusisto’s and other blind writers’ memoirs can be read as critical interventions into Merleau-Ponty’s example of a blind person whose cane becomes incorporated into their body schema. I will then build on Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto (2000) and her idea of significant otherness to argue that Stephen’s account of meeting his guide dog suggests a fundamental change in his lived experience. This becomes most obvious in the metaphorical language he uses to describe the manifold new sensations he experiences through the pairing with his dog. In the essay’s second part I will focus on descriptions of sound and listening and argue that Eavesdropping supports Ihde’s claim that everything in the world has a voice and can be read as an example of John Cage’s view of everyday sounds as musical compositions. I take both aspects, the depiction of the guide dog team and the passages about sound and listening, as negotiations of phenomenological ideas. Whereas the first questions the validity of Merleau-Ponty’s use of the example of blindness by offering an alternative phenomenology of blindness, the second resonates with and extends Ihde’s phenomenology of sound. Even if Kuusisto’s memoirs do not take the form of philosophical arguments, their uses of metaphorical language have the potential of adding an additional dimension to the phenomenological debate.

Walking cane and guide dog Eavesdropping was published eight years after Planet of the Blind. Even if the two texts sometimes overlap in narrating similar time periods, for example the narrator’s childhood, they do so with different foci. Planet of the Blind follows the

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

45

conventions of a coming-of-age narrative; it entails a political critique of the material and psychological effects of “compulsory able-bodiedness,”³ and it culminates in the liberating decision not to pass as sighted any longer. Eavesdropping shifts the focus from the society to the individual. It is more concerned with detailed depictions of the blind narrator’s access to the world, in order to offer an additional way of perceiving and to intervene into stereotypical ableist assumptions. Whereas the positive effects of guide dog teams are addressed in both texts, the topic of listening and sound is much more elaborated in Eavesdropping. Each memoir completes the narrative of the other, but both of them can also be read as standalone texts. In Planet of the Blind, Stephen starts to use a walking cane when he is 39 years old. For most of his life, he has passed as sighted, and the decision to use a cane is a decision to become visibly blind. His mobility trainer Mike Dillon refers to one direct positive effect of this visibility and states that “when you use this cane, people get out of your way. […] Cars slow down.”⁴ In his account of first using the cane himself, Stephen emphasizes the significance of being perceived as blind: [Mike Dillon] hands it to me, and I take it. Finally. Nothing terrible happens. He shows me how to use it, sweeping from side to side like an electronic metal detector. The paradox is that my cane produces only casual regard. Cars slow for me. An old man on a porch calls out cheerfully. I’m wrapped in the silence of discovery. I’m an acrobat walking on the wings of a biplane. I’m both light-headed and somber, bending to a delicate task. Nothing terrible happens. I can be disabled. On this ordinary street. I need to touch my hair. I want to feel my own face. Nothing is ever going to be precisely the same. My cane is a divining rod. (PB, 145)

The next day he voices his blindness by confirming the truth of a boy’s observation that he must be blind. This instance and the quotation reveal that for Stephen using the cane is strongly connected to the effects of being perceived as blind, which are described in a positive way, “nothing terrible happens. I can be disabled.” This dimension of actively embracing the stigmatized identity categories disabled and blind is inextricably linked to the use of the cane and has direct consequences for his lived experience and being-in-the-world. The use of the cane is first expressed in a simile, Stephen sweeps it “like an electronic metal detector,” which implies that he is about to detect something precious, namely

 Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York UP, 2006): 2.  Stephen Kuusisto, Planet of the Blind (New York: Dial, 1998): 145; further references in the text abbreviated as “PB.”

46

Simon Dickel

the positive effects of a visible disabled identity. However, for Stephen the use of the cane is “a delicate task” that requires concentration. The metaphor “I’m an acrobat walking the wings of a biplane” indicates that he has to concentrate every time he is performing; it entails that the ability does not come naturally. The benefits of using the cane have limits, which Stephen points out: The cane feels good in my hand. My adjustment to it has been grudging but altogether necessary. I recognize this. With Mike Dillon’s encouragement I do not cheat and take the cane with me every time I leave the house. I’ve been doing this for about a month. But I have to convince myself that the morning air is innocent, that fear is less florid than reality, that the world’s red insects will not come flying at my face. (PB, 149)

In his memoir The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, the legally blind writer Rod Michalko gives his own account of using a white cane and points out similar benefits and limitations. Michalko uses the term “pathos” and relates it to the white cane as a marker of blindness: Considering the cane as a guide to mobility made me aware of the pathos of blindness. The cane was an unmistakable sign of labored and graceless movement. Its whiteness suggested naïve vulnerability. The white cane represented sheer necessity without choice.⁵

Pointing out the limitations of the cane, he then makes a direct reference to an idea Merleau-Ponty introduces in Phenomenology of Perception, namely that the white cane is incorporated into the body schema of blind persons and that it extends the boundaries of the body: I found that my speed and confidence did not increase significantly, and the ever-present pathos filled me with an unease that I could not readily identify. Becoming a skilled user of the white cane was not particularly challenging, and I felt no sense of mastery. I did not experience the cane as an extension of my body or as a part of myself. I soon discarded it and reverted to my original mode of travel, which was not as safe but was at least free of pathos. ⁶

 Rod Michalko, The Two in One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1999): 23. A third example is the memoir My Eyes Have a Cold Nose (1947) by the blind writer Hector Chevigny. Hector mentions the cane only once and rejects it as “customary identification of the blind.” Hector Chevigny, My Eyes Have a Cold Nose (London: Michael Joseph, 1947): 248.  Michalko, The Two in One, 23.

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

47

In the preface to Eavesdropping, Kuusisto asks whether it is “possible to write a memoir about what my ears know.”⁷ The idea that knowledge is located in parts of the body rather than in the mind is also expressed in Phenomenology of Perception, for example in Merleau-Ponty’s expression “knowledge in our hands” when he refers to a typist’s habitual use of the typewriter.⁸ Merleau-Ponty explains bodily knowledge with the term “habit” and refers to a blind person who learns to use a walking cane. Perceiving the world through the cane becomes a habit by which this person unconsciously navigates the world. Merleau-Ponty refers to the blind person using a cane as an example of two different but related types of habit, motor habit and perceptual habit. The term “motor habit” refers to the way we make use of new objects or instruments and incorporate them into our body schema. Merleau-Ponty gives three examples of extensions of bodies through objects. In addition to two examples taken from everyday experiences of able-bodied readers, in his third example, he refers to the blind person who uses a cane and explains how the cane is incorporated into their body schema.⁹ Habitual use of the cane, he argues, turns it from being an object to becoming “an extension of the bodily synthesis.”¹⁰ Explaining the term “perceptual habit,” Merleau-Ponty makes an analogy between the gaze of sighted persons and the cane of blind persons: With the gaze we have available a natural instrument comparable to the blind man’s cane. The gaze obtains more or less from things according to the manner in which it interrogates them, in which it glances over them or rests upon them. Learning to see colors is the acquisition of a certain style of vision, a new use of one’s own body; it is to enrich and to reorganize the body schema.¹¹

Merleau-Ponty uses the analogy of blindness in order to explain habitual ways of seeing which would otherwise remain unnoticed because they are naturalized. Gail Weiss emphasizes that in contrast to other philosophers, Merleau-Ponty provides

 Stephen Kuusisto, Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening (New York and London: Norton 2006): xi; further references in the text abbreviated as “ED.”  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 145.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 144– 145.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 154.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 154– 155.

48

Simon Dickel

many examples of experiences that are normally regarded as disabling, such as the phantom limb, aphasia, or the case of Schneider, a WWI combat veteran with a serious brain injury, even if these latter (…) always seem to end up on an enabling note.¹²

Merleau-Ponty’s example of blindness might also be regarded as a positive account of what others would regard as a disabling experience. However, one should take Georgina Kleege’s critique of the uses of blindness as an example in the ocularcentric Western philosophical tradition into account. The reference to the example of blind persons has a long and, as Kleege argues, negative tradition. In her 2005 essay “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account” she refers to philosophical references to blindness as “the hypothetical blind man” and calls this figure “one of the stock characters of the western philosophical tradition.”¹³ She states that the primary function of the hypothetical blind is “to highlight the importance of sight and to elicit a frisson of awe and pity which promotes gratitude among the sighted theorists for the vision that they possess.”¹⁴ In Phenomenology of Perception, too, Merleau-Ponty speculates about a hypothetical blind person’s experience of getting used to a cane in order to draw an analogy to sight. But, rather than rejecting Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on motor habit and the body schema on the grounds of Kleege’s critique, I take Kuusisto’s and Michalko’s memoirs as critical interventions into and extensions of the phenomenological debate. In his memoirs Kuusisto formulates a critical counterpoint to Merleau-Ponty’s use of blindness, and Rod Michalko, a professor of sociology with an expertise in phenomenology, explicitly rejects it by stating that the cane is not incorporated into his body schema.¹⁵ In Kuusisto’s memoirs, the accounts of using the cane differ from the descriptions of how Stephen’s guide dog changes his bodily orientation in the  Gail Weiss, “The Normal, the Natural, and the Normative: Implications of Merleau-Ponty’s Work for Feminist Theory, Critical Race Theory, and Disability Studies,” Continental Philosophy Review 48.1 (2015): 77– 93, 89.  Georgina Kleege, “Blindness and Visual Culture: An Eyewitness Account,” Journal of Visual Culture 4.2 (2005): 179 – 190, 180.  Kleege, “Blindness and Visual Culture,” 180.  Kuusisto’s implicit and Michalko’s explicit rejections of Merleau-Ponty’s example of the blind person who uses a cane and incorporates it into their body schema question philosophical debates that build on Merleau-Ponty’s example. For example, in a recent essay, philosopher Margrit Shildrick refers to Merleau-Ponty’s example of blindness in a positive way and argues that he “does demonstrate the transformational nature of prostheses – famously in the example of the blind man’s cane becoming an extension of his self-embodiment […] – and shows that the lived body is not identical with the material entity bounded by the skin.” Margrit Shildirck, “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’: Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics,” Hypatia 30.1 (2015): 13 – 29, 15.

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

49

world. After the threat of a traffic accident Stephen directly names the cane’s limitations, “I need something more powerful than the cane. I need eyes. Now that I’m out of the closet and blind for everyone to see, the cane has done all that it can do” (150). Stephen explicitly limits the benefits of the cane to its function as a marker of his blindness for his surroundings. The metonymic use of the word “eyes” refers to his decision to get a guide dog. In the passage quoted above Stephen explains that despite of the changes the cane brought to him, he still has to convince himself that the morning air is innocent. This earlier reference to the morning air is explicitly taken up again when he remembers how his life has changed after getting acquainted to his guide dog Corky: When one has been returned to life, everything is compelling, but for me the mornings are the best thing of all. At dawn, Corky gets me up out of my disheveled bed by tugging the blanket. While I’m getting to my feet, she returns with one of my running shoes. (…) On Fifth Avenue the world tickles us. What a thrill to hear a horse’s hoove at sunrise! Here comes a mounted policeman! Corky stands stock still, erect, making sure I don’t step into the street. The freshness of the hour circles and sways around me. I didn’t know the dog would bring me the morning. I smell bread from a French bakery, chestnuts roasting, the wet skins of oranges. At the center of this sensorium is the soft jangle of Corky’s harness, a striving music like a tiny breeze along a mast. Now on Fifth Avenue with aching, foggy eyes, I can walk without trying to see. I close my eyelids and move smoothly as a dragon in a child’s story. (PB, 176)

Stephen describes the experience of having a guide dog as a returned life, not unlike a patient who is cured from depression. Stephen explains his new mode of being in the world by telling this morning experience, the time of the beginning of a new day. It is noteworthy that Stephen highlights senses other than vision in this passage: 1) touch: “the world tickles us […] the freshness of the hour circles and sways around me;” 2) smell: “I smell bread from a French bakery, chestnuts roasting, the wet skins of oranges;” and 3) sound: “what a thrill to hear a horse’s hoove at sunrise.” After explicitly placing Corky “at the center of this sensorium,” he points out that his harness is “a striving music like a tiny breeze along a mast.” Here, the idea is already introduced that everyday sounds, such as “a tiny breeze along a mast,” can be perceived as musical compositions, which Kuusisto turns into an extended metaphor in the later memoir Eavesdropping. This newly found access to the world – his joy to be alive – is made clear in this celebration of the interplay of different formerly undervalued senses. Stephen simply enjoys smelling the wetness of oranges. The difference to the bleak and hostile description of the morning when Stephen was still using the cane couldn’t be more explicit. At the end of this quotation, Stephen states that he can finally let go of the visual sense, moving “as smoothly as a dragon in a child’s story.” This simile not only comments on the fairy tale ending of the

50

Simon Dickel

process of coming to terms with his blindness, but it also reveals that Corky changes Stephen’s being in the world to a much larger degree than the mobility training with his walking cane. This fundamental difference is emphasized with the use of metaphor: although he was still afraid of “the world’s red insects” while using the cane, a metaphor which evokes a sense of constant danger, annoyance, and alertness, Stephen is now calm and relaxed; he enjoys the “striving music” of Corky’s harness and feels safe to let go of the visual sense. The contrast of these metaphors refers to the difference between tension and relaxation and makes clear that, for Stephen, using a cane and getting acquainted with a guide dog are fundamentally different experiences. In Signifying Bodies: Disability and Contemporary Life Writing G. Thomas Couser likens the narrative structure of Planet of the Blind to the conventions of a gay coming out narrative. He analyzes Stephen’s coming out as a blind man as a process in three steps: using the cane, getting acquainted with Corky, and willfully accepting assistance. Disagreeing with this idea, I argue that getting to know Corky is not a further step in his coming out process but his first step towards inventing a new way of life as a self-proclaimed blind man. I think it noteworthy that his account of a fundamental change of the ways he inhabits his body and the world is narrated through his increasing relationality with another living being. Likening the guide dog to the cane, Couser refers to Corky as a “canine prosthesis,” an expression that suggests a purely instrumental relation.¹⁶ My reading of the memoirs of Kuusisto, Michalko, and Chevigny strongly contradicts such a view of guide dogs as “canine prostheses.” In all three texts, the parts that narrate the experience of walking the streets with their guide dogs are in opposition to those that focus on the use of the cane because the dogs are depicted as fundamentally changing the lived experience of the blind narrators, a change that affects both their perception and their comportment. In Planet of the Blind, Stephen comments on the changed perception while walking and on the decrease of fear of other sensations: For the first time I feel the sunken lanes under my feet. The street is more my own. I belong here. I’m walking without the fight-or-flee gunslinger crouch that has been the lifelong measure of blindness. I am not frightened by the general onslaught of sensation. The harness is a transmitter, the dog is confident. At every curb we come to a reliable firm stop. I cannot fall. (PB, 170)

 G. Thomas Couser, Signifying Bodies: Disability in Contemporary Life Writing (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2009): 166 – 167.

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

51

Navigating the world together with Corky has direct effects on Stephen’s posture, “at age thirty-nine I learn to walk upright” (PB, 171), and he becomes relaxed because of Corky: “We belong in this territory, she seems to say, and my own joints loosen. We slip through the unfamiliar with balance. Entanglements of harsh light do not slow us” (PB, 172). Whereas I suggested above that Stephen’s account of using the cane can be read as a critical intervention into Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the cane being incorporated into the body schema, in order to change Stephen’s posture and movements, the passages quoted above convey the idea that, due to his constant contact with Corky through the harness, he can navigate the world differently, thereby resulting in a unique and fundamental change in his bodily situation in the world. In Planet of the Blind he speaks of the harness as a transmitter and in Eavesdropping he states: “I felt her caution, her body’s whole intelligence signaling through the handle of her harness” (ED, 66). Stephen narrates his relationship to Corky not as instrumental but as a love relationship. Reciprocal love between two living beings is on a different level than the one-directional use of a prosthesis, which is on the level of material objects even if qualified by the adjective “canine.” By narrating his fundamental change as reciprocal love, Stephen enables sighted readers who lack the same experience to envision its transformative dimensions for body and mind. In The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003), Donna Haraway addresses relations between dogs and humans. The manifesto belongs to the larger discourse on posthumanism and – in Haraway’s words – is about “the implosion of nature and culture in the relentlessly historically specific, joint lives of dogs and people, who are bonded in significant otherness,”¹⁷ a notion that is also drawn upon by Couser when he speaks of a “transhuman symbiosis” between Stephen and Corky. Haraway states that there must be two or more species that are constitutive of the idea of what she terms a companion species: There cannot be just one companion species; there have to be at least two to make one. It is in the syntax; it is in the flesh. Dogs are about the inescapable, contradictory story of relationships in which none of the partners pre-exist the relating, and the relating is never done once and for all.¹⁸

 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2000): 16.  Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 12.

52

Simon Dickel

Building on this idea, one can describe the relation of Stephen and Corky as a companion species, which is supported by Kuusisto’s extensive use of metaphors of love, romance and symbiosis.

Love and significant otherness The chapter “Love Stories” of Haraway’s manifesto is particularly interesting if read in conversation with Kuusisto’s depiction of the relationship between Stephen and Corky. Here, she refutes the cultural narrative of the unconditional love of dogs towards humans; instead, she supports the idea that the term “love” should be used when describing such relationships and states that “love between historically situated dogs and humans [is] precious.”¹⁹ Haraway argues that some relationships between dogs and humans can and should be considered as actual love relationships, and Kuusisto draws on metaphors of love to underline the unique status and exceptionality of the relationship between Stephen and Corky.²⁰ From the beginning, the relationship between Stephen and Corky is depicted as a romance. On observing Stephen and Corky’s first encounter, one trainer aptly comments, “Corky’s in love” (PB, 168). The text directly underlines the reciprocity of the relationship and contradicts a common view that sees the guide dog solely as an instrument for the blind person. Alluding to both the figurative and literal meaning of the word “blind,” Stephen humorously refers to this meeting as “the definitive blind date” (PB, 169). Their first meeting is described as both dialogical and symbiotic. Stephen balances the difference in height and lies with Corky on the floor. He says, “I tell you what, Cork: Let’s you and me take care of each other. Let’s go places. How do you like that idea?” He speaks of their “common head” and compliments Corky on her outward appearance: “Your ears are so soft, they have no analogy” (PB, 169) and later compares her to Marlene Dietrich (PB, 172). This comparison implies that Stephen’s heterosexual desire is shifted to Corky, who combines attributes commonly ascribed to the diva Marlene Dietrich, such as intelligence, beauty, and determination. Corky reacts approvingly with a tail wag each time Stephen says something. Stephen comments, “this really is a date. We learn about each other,” and he concludes this passage by stating, “on our first night together […] Corky tries repeatedly to  Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 33.  In a few passages of Chevigny’s My Eyes Have a Cold Nose, the language used to describe Hector’s relationship with his guide dog Wizard, “tragic hurt,” “adored instructor,” “beloved,” position Chevigny’s text close to those of Kuusisto. Chevigny, My Eyes, 218 – 219.

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

53

climb in bed with me” (PB, 170), suggesting a sexual desire. This allusion is all but the only reference to sexuality in the memoirs of the three blind writers. It is decidedly different from a text Haraway refers to when addressing the love between humans and dogs, namely J. R. Ackerly’s My Dog Tulip (1956), which she calls “a great love story” (34) and points out how clearly the narrator addresses sexual desire and defecation. One reason for the different strategies when it comes to addressing “all the fleshly detail of a mortal relationship” (34) might lie in the subtext of Ackerly’s memoir. On the surface, it narrates the life of a human and a dog, but implicitly, it addresses gay sexuality in 1950s Britain. At the time, the terms homosexuality and sodomy were used synonymously, and there are several topics in Ackerley’s text that refer to gay culture. For example, the cruising for a sexual partner for the dog Tulip in a public park, the extensive passages about and implicit sexualization of the anus, or the passages about the use of Vaseline for stimulation and easier penetration. Surprisingly, Haraway reads Ackerley’s memoir matter-of-factly without acknowledging this strategy of implicitly addressing sexual customs and practices among gay men by explicitly talking about a dog. In contrast to My Dog Tulip, the memoirs of the blind writers, whose narrators live in heterosexual marriages, do not aim at negotiating sexuality. The one sexual allusion in Kuusisto’s text solely functions as a humorous conclusion to the pun “blind date,” whereas all other references to interspecies love refer to a non-sexual symbiosis. One could object that guide dog teams are professional relationships and should be approached differently than that of a human and a pet-dog. Haraway takes this into account and, with reference to the writings of Donald McCaig about humans and working sheepdogs, states that even though respect and trust, not love, are the critical demands of a good working relationship between dogs and humans, [McCaig’s] dealings with his dogs might properly be called love if that word were not so corrupted by our culture’s infantilization of dogs and the refusal to honor difference.²¹

Stephen and Corky’s relationship is a professional one, which Stephen describes in similar terms to Haraway’s “respect” and “trust” when he states, “this partnership requires discipline and precision. The payoff is self-reliance and faith” (PB, 173). Moreover, as demonstrated above, it is very much depicted, according to Haraway’s definition of love, as a relational condition that transforms all partners rather than to the narrative of the one-sided unconditional love of dogs. It is made clear that it is not only Corky who adjusts to Stephen’s human  Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 39.

54

Simon Dickel

needs but that both of them transcend the species boundaries of human and animal respectively when Stephen writes “Corky lies next to me […] and soon we’re making noises together, visceral tunes, bone music, rubbing our backs, each of us growling” (PB, 174). Whereas in these examples of Planet of the Blind, Stephen is lying down to be at the same height-level with Corky, in Eavesdropping this equality is once achieved by Corky standing up: “My Labrador, my big yellow soul mate, was standing on her hind legs, her forepaws on my shoulders” (ED, 64). These passages evoke the impression of a relationship of equal partners based on reciprocity. This depiction of the guide dog team stands in clear contradiction to a view that regards guide dogs as prostheses. In both memoirs, metaphors of symbiosis of man and dog are put forward. The boundaries of both human being and animal become blurred not only for onlookers who don’t understand whether Stephen or Corky is in charge when crossing the street, but also in the way Stephen describes it. For example, he states that Corky is “absorbing” him with her gaze (PB, 168) and refers to him and Corky as “a self-conferred powerhouse” (PB, 171). The idea of blurred species-boundaries is made more explicit in Eavesdropping when a symbiosis between human and animal is suggested by referencing Greek mythology when Stephen evokes the figure of the centaur: “I should tell you up front that I am not a man – not specifically. One ought to think of me as a six-legged being for I am both a man and a dog” (ED, 63), and later repeats, “again, I had this sense for just a moment […] that we were a centaur. She was the feet. Then she was the head and I was the feet. We were Dog-Man” (ED, 68).²²

Different voices Eavesdropping extends Stephen’s account of the experience of blindness. This second memoir is focused on sounds and listening. Stephen narrates periods of his life already known to readers of the first memoir. However, compared to Planet of the Blind, in Eavesdropping, the memories of growing up and passing as sighted have a lighter note because of the addition of the new dimension of the listening experience. Eavesdropping resonates with Don Ihde’s Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, which provides the analytical categories  More matter-of-factly, Rod Michalko describes the relationship with his guide dog Smokie as the process “home-making.” In contrast to Kuusisto, Michalko upholds the differentiation between human and animal, society and nature. But he underlines the peculiarities of his relationship to Smokie and argues that these two sides are merged in their social identity and become inseparable. Michalko, The Two in One, 91.

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

55

needed to understand how Kuusisto elaborates on the idea that everything, including material things and animals, has a voice. In Eavesdropping Kuusisto explicitly addresses how Stephen’s listening experience as a blind person relates to the use of metaphor: I related to David my newfound practice. ‘I am trying,’ I said, ‘to hear little compositional moments – recitatives – in the ordinary seconds when I am not thinking at all about music. I want to wake up all day long.’ I admitted to him how silly this is. ‘But if you’re blind,’ I said, ‘you need to make hearing as pleasurable as sight-seeing.’ ‘I suppose,’ I went on, ‘that one needs to be open all the time to lucky possibilities in the soundscape. These things might be a personal ‘found music’ – an approximation of the visual world.’ David pointed out that visual sight-seeing is just an unending series of triggers. Object hits retina. The object is translated instantly into analogy or metaphor. This is the core of visual pleasure. It is the thing we think we see that thrills us. The imagination is always trying to make sense of surprise. (ED, 76)

Stephen draws an analogy between audio and visual pleasure. In this remembered conversation with his friend David, they compare Stephen’s idea of sight-seeing by ear to the more common practice of sight-seeing by eye. The use of the term “sight-seeing by ear” suggests that – similar to sighted persons who translate what they see into analogy or metaphor – blind persons do the same with what they hear. The reader can deduce that it is the thing that Stephen thinks he hears that thrills him. As is the case with sighted persons, his imagination is also always trying to make sense of surprise. The extended metaphor Stephen uses to address his experience of listening to everyday sounds is that of music. It runs through the two parts of the memoir “Sweet Longings,” in which Stephen narrates his experiences as a child and young adult, and “Walking by Ear,” in which he addresses his adult travels with his guide dog Corky. In both parts, Stephen dwells on the idea that the chance sounds of his surroundings can be taken as musical compositions. Stephen goes beyond a mere functional approach to sound as sense-data that help him orient himself in the world and experiences beauty in everyday-sounds instead. Already in the very beginning, he tells the reader that it was his father who introduced him to “the chance music of the city” (ED, 5). Stephen’s idea that chance sounds can be regarded as musical compositions evokes the artistic practice of the composer John Cage, who is explicitly referenced later in the memoir when Stephen remembers hearing fragments from an interview, in which “Cage said something about every sound being part of a composition” (ED, 75). This idea becomes one of the foundations of Stephen’s practice of sightseeing-by-ear. Likening the practice of phenomenologists to that of artists, stating that both engage in “the practice of exploring the possible and

56

Simon Dickel

of doing it in variant ways,” Ihde values Cage’s practice as a composer: “By performing silence, he inverts the usual, the expected, and the multistability which occurs may be focused either on the silence itself, or on the incidental sounds which occur and now become the ‘music.’”²³ Building his chapter “A Phenomenology of Voice” on Merleau-Ponty’s metaphorical usage of the word “voice,” Ihde elaborates on the idea that “there is a deep sense in which all things, the things of the world, have voices.”²⁴ Ihde distinguishes four sets of voices: voices of material things, voices of nature, animal voices, and dramaturgical voice. In Eavesdropping, Stephen extensively refers to each set of voices. As his use of lyrical language is decidedly different from Ihde’s theoretical approach, large parts of Eavesdropping might be regarded as translations of Ihde’s phenomenology of sound for readers who do not read philosophical texts. Even if Kuusisto does not directly name Listening and Voice as an influence, it clearly resonates with Kussisto’s memoir. In the beginning of Eavesdropping, Stephen gives examples of the first three sets of voices. When he moves through an icy garden, he states: “I was thrilled to discover I could influence the percussive speech of the frozen world” and later describes this as “good music” (ED, 13). He describes everyday objects in the world as musical instruments: There was a wire fence in the woods and I found that I could play it like a harp. The fence was rusted and frozen and it sagged among rocks. If you plucked it with a finger it sounded like a dark piano string. And birch trees swayed, their skins of ice making a bright, sympathetic sunlit music. (ED, 14)

Directly referencing the imaginary boy in the beginning of Robert Frost’s “Birches” he tells how he “shook the birches one by one and was rewarded with the sound of ice skittering down from the high branches” (ED, 14). This lyrical passage with its similes is a fitting example of Ihde’s idea that “the voices of things that are often silent are made to sound only in duets or more complex polyphonies” (LV, 190), namely Stephen’s finger plucking the wire fence and him shaking the birch trees. The polyphony does not have to involve human beings, and the “multiplicity of voices in the natural world” is what Ihde calls “the voices of nature” (LV, 191). Stephen remembers how rain can be one part of the duet, for example, when “rain struck at the tall windows until they sounded like snare

 Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, second ed. (Albany: State U of New York P, 2007 [1976]): 189; further references in the text abbreviated as “LV.”  Ihde quotes Merleau-Ponty’s metaphorical expressions “voices of silence” and “singing the world” (LV, 190).

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

57

drums” and “rain pounded on abandoned steel drums in the uncut grass” (ED, 15). When Stephen speaks of the wire fence as a harp and the windows as drums, throughout the memoir, he describes the sounds he perceives in musical terms. Ihde, too, takes the voices as music and states: Taken in this way, we invert the usual relation of music to the field of sound, for there is a fundamental sense in which the sounds of the world are the first music, with what we call music in a narrower sense as a kind of abstracting from this auditory realm, perhaps setting it in an auditory frame, perhaps enhancing and embroidering upon it. So, in a kind of ironic turn, by taking the world as voice and music, we come to see what we ordinarily take as voice and music is a particular configuration within the world of sound. (LV, 191)

Ihde claims that every object in the world can become a musical instrument when treated the way Stephen approaches his surroundings as a young boy. He argues that different aspects are revealed through the voices of things, namely something of its nature, shape, and dimension, stating that what the voices of things bespeak is a kind of direct sound of their natures: materiality, density, interiority, relations within experienced space, outward hollows and shapes, complex, multi-dimensioned, often unheard in potential richness, but spoken in the voices of things. (LV, 192)

Following Stephen’s sonic explorations of his surroundings, we as readers shift our attention away from the use-value of material things towards the qualities that are revealed through their voices. Ihde’s third set of voices are animal voices. In this context, the term “voice” is used in a less metaphorical way, compared to material objects, because animals, as well as humans, use voice to express how they relate to others and the environment (LV, 193). In contrast to the human voice, or in Ihde’s terminology “dramaturgical voice,” animal voices are still close to the voices of material things. One quality Ihde points out is the musicality of animal voices, expressed for instance in the idea of birdsong. Stephen makes extensive use of musicological terms when describing the sounds of animals, for example when he refers to “the polyphony of hungry birds” (ED, 4). He describes his solitary encounter with a horse in musical terms: “Strophe and antistrophe. Step. Rhythm. Pulse beat. I’d crossed a threshold, hearing and walking the uncertain space that opened before me […]” (ED, 9), and he calls the singing of a bird a concert (ED, 11). Ihde refers to human speech as dramaturgical voice because, in spoken language, the speakers add an auditory atmosphere and an auditory aura to the things they say:

58

Simon Dickel

What dramaturgical voice presents is the multidimensional and multipossibilitied phenomenon of voice. The voices of language, display for us a range of possible worlds, themselves multidimensional. And the voices of the speakers also double and redouble throughout the range of possibilities. (LV, 197)

Ihde presents a multilayered discussion of the differences between spoken and written language, and he sees advantages in both. Writing, “a visual embodiment of language,” he argues, “can preserve and enrich the sense of what is not here” (LV, 197), and he sees the advantage of capturing what is past also in auditory recordings, because they preserve “the individual and dramaturgical sound of a voice” (LV, 200). Stephen elaborates on this phenomenon, the individual and dramaturgical sound of a recorded voice, in much detail when he gives an account of encountering a Victrola in the attic of his grandmother’s house. Stephen has never encountered a Victrola before, and his limited sight makes it even more obscure. When he finally touches the machine, “the platter turned and there was a groan!” (ED, 16). Stephen refers to the medium’s capability of capturing the past and the unknown: “When I turned the record again I heard the raging wind from some unidentifiable continent” (ED, 16). At this stage, the voice he produces is still that of a material object, because he has not yet understood that the disc is a recording of Caruso’s “Vesti la guibba.” Stephen remembers that he learned how to operate the Victrola the next day and gives an account of dramaturgical voice interspersed with the sounds of analog technology: I listened to Canio, the clown and murderer…the hollow needle…a noise of pitching metal and wax…It sounded as if a vital man was singing through a steam pipe from a room in cellar. Then the frightful laughter…I ran each time I heard it…the cachinnation of a madman suddenly rose from the enormous bell of a trumpet. (ED, 17)

This account of first encountering the Victrola is Stephen’s first acquaintance with a medium that transmits sounds. He marks this as a stage of transition from his early childhood, which “occurred in the last moments of unmediated listening” (ED, 11). After the Victrola, also in 1962, he encounters a radio, and later that same year he owns a transistor radio. It is noteworthy that both the Victrola as well as the radio are depicted as uncanny entities that seem to be alive and dangerous. He ascribes a “great, crackling heart” (ED, 17) to the Victrola and likens it to his own racing heart. The radio, too, is characterized by features of a living entity with its

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

59

green glass eye that glowed when the machine was turned on. With my nose directly on the glass eye I could feel the electricity humming through the huge box. A burst of static suddenly popped from the speaker and I jumped. (ED, 20)

He ascribes the sounds coming out of the radio to the machine itself and remembers how he pressed his “nose against the radio’s cloth-draped speaker and felt the vibrating laughter” (ED, 20). Remembering being terrified of jazz music from the old radio, he once again describes the radio as a living being, this time a monster, “I thought of the radio playing back in my grandmother’s parlor and imagined that it was still shaking and pouring out its hideous music. I remembered the radio’s dreadful green eye” (ED, 23). The radio is not the only inanimate object described as a living entity. Stephen refers to the voice of the grandfather clock in his grandmother’s house as if it were forming words, “I heard chains raise and lower the iron weights. They had a vocabulary. The rising chain said watch, watch, watch, watch. The lowered chain said lucky, lucky, lucky” (ED, 23). He remembers the clock coming alive: There was a click from the center of the gearbox. It was like the tip of needle tapping a dish. Then came the sound of wings, a stirring of parts, hidden life rose into the air. A complaint of thin metal…old gears shuddered…dark fingers grabbed and clutched…the mahogany shivered…spoons clattered…All the clock’s parts were arguing at once…the chimes stirred with a sound of bedsprings…the hammers reared back…The chimes were violent, rising, shaking. Both the glass and wood of the clock’s casement and the bones of my ears were stunned. (ED, 24)

The clock is depicted as an organism coming to life. For example, it consists of human body parts (fingers), has human bodily reactions, such as shivering, and performs human activities, such as arguing. Finally, Stephen and the clock become one when the skeleton of the clock, represented by glass and wood, and a part of Stephen’s skeleton, namely the bones of his ears, are equally affected by the sound of the chimes. The account of the transistor radio is different from the Victrola and the old radio with the green eye. It is small and portable and not terrifying. It is noteworthy that Stephen uses it not only passively as a medium to play music, but he uses it actively as a musical instrument. In the chapter “Transistor Radio 1962,” he narrates how he turns the radio on and off. He refers to the songs played on the radio and then describes the sounds he hears when the radio is turned off. Through this repeated juxtaposition of song and surrounding sound, a relation between the two is established that sometimes appears to be causal and intentional. For example, a long passage in which he turns the radio on and off eight times starts like this:

60

Simon Dickel

I turned off the radio and held my breath and listened to crickets singing from all directions. I turned on the radio and heard Dee Clark’s ‘Raindrops.’ It was the voice of a man standing on tiptoe and reaching for something sweet. I turned off the radio and heard this tree and that grass and this soft ticking of tangled branches far above. (ED, 32– 33)

Similar to a composition, the natural sounds of the singing crickets are connected to the singer of “Raindrops,” a song that is then related to the sounds of a tree and grass. Stephen’s usage of the transistor radio as a musical instrument, in connection with his attention to the natural sounds, or, in Ihde’s terminology, the voices of nature foreshadow the practice of approaching everyday sounds as a composition, which mirrors Ihde’s conclusion of the chapter “A Phenomenology of Voice”: “All the sound, we noted, is the field which might be called the field of possibilities of music, even as anything might be an instrument, and all voices primordial musical statements” (LV, 202). Whereas the examples of listening, voice, and composition in the first part of Eavesdropping appear to be unsystematic memories, in the second part, as well as in the foreword, they are presented as programmatic ideas that explicitly build on two artists, Walt Whitman and John Cage. In the first part Stephen already formulates the idea that one “can think of a whole day as a kind of musical pattern” (ED, 48) and that he can “find patterns in the street noises” (ED, 56), an idea that is lyrically elaborated on in the ninth chapter “Telescopes.” In the chapter “The Invention of the Cell Phone” Stephen refers to both Whitman and Cage. He formulates the “daylong Whitman method” (ED, 72) as follows: Whitman liked walking in harbors to hear the wind knock against the tackle of sailing boats. He liked the music of boats going nowhere…the clatter of a thousand masts like dropped spoons…Whitman could deconstruct a whole day remembered in sequence. This was my ambition, at least for the moment. (ED, 71)

When trying to live up to Whitman’s practice and being attentive to sounds allday long, Stephen encounters what he calls “ugly” sounds, such as televisions in public spaces or cell phone conversations. He decides to incorporate such sounds into his method and refers to John Cage to legitimize this decision. Stephen gives an account of a remembered statement Cage made in a TV-documentary on modern dance and states: [Cage] was talking about the music one hears in bus stations and airports. The music of machines and happenstance, the neural, icy soundscapes of a large city…John Cage: the maestro of spoiled environments. He said something about every sound being part of a composition. If you really want to hear with penetration and find its associated pleasures, you must imagine you are waking up over and over again – waking on your feet, becoming

Phenomenology and the Memoirs of Stephen Kuusisto

61

aware ‘in medias res.’ The John Cage method is the Whitman method. The modernist composer wants the ugliness of both the notes and the intervals to have meaning. (ED, 75)

Before calling his practice the Whitman-method and the Cage-method, Stephen gives an account of enjoying the sounds of an ordinary street as an eight-year old in 1963. The description of parts of conversations overheard and connected by Stephen becomes more and more surreal until he concludes, “the ordinary street was weird and lovely as the mind itself. All one had to do was stop” (ED, 38). The blind narrator, this passage seems to imply, had lived according to Whitman’s and Cage’s methods before he even knew who they were. It further suggests a likeness between the being-in-the-world of blind persons and that of sighted artists. At the end of the chapter, Stephen gives an example of the Cage-method. He reminisces a Tchaikovsky violin concert of Pekka Kuusisto. Rather than limiting his account to the recited music, he describes the interplay of the pianist, the presence of a housefly in the auditorium, and the reactions to this fly by his guide dog Vidal and the noises of the metal dog tags against the legs of the chair as a composition in which three equal parts come together (ED, 77). Kuusisto and Ihde both appreciate modernist artistic practices, especially in the context of music and composition. Both refer to Cage, and Ihde explicitly values Cage’s artistic approach as a phenomenological one: Similarly in music, the contemporary introduction of noise to be taken as music, of random sounds, of monotonous sounds, all strain at making a new gestalt for listening. This is artistic playfulness that the phenomenologist can also appreciate. (LV, 189)

Through his detailed reports on the sounds he is listening to, Kuusisto translates Ihde’s analysis of the artistic playfulness known from Cage into the realm of literature to the effect that his memoir can be read as a lyrical phenomenology of listening and voice. Kuusisto’s memoirs can be read as contributions to the phenomenology of blind embodiment. Planet of the Blind adds two dimensions to Merleau-Ponty’s example of the (hypothetical) blind person who gets accustomed to a cane; first, its focus on the effects of marking blindness as a stigmatized subject position, and second, the value of inhabiting the world in close relation to a dog. Kuusisto demonstrates this value by using metaphors of love, romance, and symbiosis when addressing the guide dog team Stephen and Corky. Opposing a functional view of the dog as a prosthesis, he emphasizes the mutuality of their relationship, which provides the grounds for a new way of being-in-the-world. Moreover, Eavesdropping contributes to phenomenology because it supports Don Ihde’s

62

Simon Dickel

claim that everything in the world has a voice. Kuusisto uses the extended metaphor of music to describe how Stephen experiences the voices of objects, nature, animals, and fellow human beings. The use of these stylistic devices translates the experience of blindness into the realms of experience of sighted readers. After reading the memoirs, sighted readers might view guide dog teams differently and pay attention to sounds and other sensual experiences in new ways.

Lut Missinne

About Vegetables and Depths in Life: Metaphors in the Autobiographical Work of Atte Jongstra Metaphors in autobiographical texts can have various functions: they can be used either as tropes for a personal life story or for the description of the birth and life as a literary author. Thus, they can represent a cognitive process of increasing self-insight and function as a more stylistic strategy, aiming at aesthetic self-presentation. In this article, I focus on the autobiography Klinkende ikken. Bekentenissen van een zelfontwijker [Resounding Selves. Confessions of a selfavoider] (2008) by the Dutch author Atte Jongstra and concentrate on the nature and functioning of metaphors in this work from an epistemological, aesthetic and discursive perspective. Thereby, I pay attention to the way in which Jongstra on the one hand creatively manipulates conventional tropes, and on the other hand uses innovative metaphors for the representation of his life and life experiences.

Not only in literature but also in daily life, we encounter many different images that represent the course of a lifetime: “life is a pilgrimage,” “life is a wheel,” “life is a river,” “life is a labyrinth,” “life is a theatre play,” or “life is a journey,” etc.¹ Numerous variations can be built on the foundation of such commonly used tropes: life cannot only be called a theatre play, but it can be compared to a comedy or a tragedy, or even to a piece written by a specific playwright, as in “life is a play by Ionesco.” The Dutch author Cees Nooteboom did not simply write that life is a journey, but that we should be able to remember life like a trip abroad.² Guided by different contexts and personal experiences, people assemble and use images to describe the course of life, in order to “make sense of their lives and experiences through time,” and “they often refer to ‘life courses,’ ‘cycles,’ ‘developmental sequences,’ ‘stages of growth,’ and other recursive patterns.”³

 For a sociological view on life metaphors see James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium, Constructing the Life Course (New York: General Hall Inc., 2000).  “Het leven / je zou het / je moeten kunnen herinneren / als een buitenlandse reis” is the first stanza of the poem “Niets” [Nothing] in: Cees Nooteboom, Gemaakte gedichten (Amsterdam: Bezige Bij, 1970): 35.  Holstein and Gubrium, Life Course, X. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-005

64

Lut Missinne

Before looking at specific metaphors and the way they function in autobiographical texts, one could ask why, of all tropes, the metaphor in particular should be at the center of attention, more than any other trope, such as metonymy, analogy, or allegory. The reason Jonathan Culler gave in his still quite instructive book, The Pursuit of Signs (1981), as to why literary studies have considered the metaphor to be “the figure of figures,” still seems valid to me, and it fits well the theme of metaphorical language in literary autobiographies. Until the late seventies metaphor theory was mainly a concern of linguistics and rhetoric. With the cognitive turn at the beginning of the eighties, metaphor got its chance to become the first-rate trope, because “[o]f all the figures metaphor is the one that can most easily be defended or justified on cognitive grounds.”⁴ Metaphors, as Culler states, generally make claims that could, in principle, be restated as propositions, which is undoubtedly why “metaphor has long been thought of as the figure par excellence through which the writer can display creativity and authenticity: his metaphors are read as artistic inventions grounded in perceptions of relations in the world.”⁵ In other words, metaphor in general is considered as “a figure whose referentiality can be defended,”⁶ and – so I would like to add – simultaneously enables the writer to exploit his creative talent, a combination that well matches the genre of the literary autobiography. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s famous book Metaphors We Live By (1980) has played a seminal role in the study of metaphor and metaphorical language. The authors consider metaphor to be a cognitive process, in which one conceptual domain is understood in terms of another (the “source” and the “target” domain). Each metaphor relies on mapping, or a set of systematic (but non-exhaustive) correspondences between the two domains. This mapping makes the transfer of knowledge between the two domains possible.⁷ Especially the idea of the ubiquity of metaphorical language – metaphors as conceptual structures, steering and organizing our understanding, are supposed to be subconsciously present everywhere, also in daily life and in everyday language – has given rise to discussions and to the question as to what the particular nature of “literary metaphor” could be then.⁸

 Jonathon Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1981): 191.  Culler, Pursuit Signs, 191.  Culler, Pursuit Signs, 191.  Madalina Akli, Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography (New York: Lang, 2009): 25 – 26.  Dennis Tay, “Lakoff and the Theory of Conceptual Metaphor,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics, ed. J. Littlemore and J. R. Taylor (London: Bloomsbury, 2014): 49 – 59; Ray

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

65

In More Than Cool Reason (1989), Lakoff and Turner demonstrated that metaphors used to conceptualize notions such as life, death, and the great chain of being in the Western literary tradition might appear extraordinarily complex, but are in fact traceable to the same underlying mappings which structure everyday language and thought.⁹

The same point of criticism, as on their thesis of the ubiquity of metaphor, was heard again: handling a large cognitive definition of metaphor, as Lakoff and Turner do, obstructs an explanation for specific types of metaphor, namely those that manifest themselves in a text “by some overt incongruity,” which literary texts are.¹⁰ Although the perspective on metaphor as a cognitive instrument can make it difficult to render an account of poetic metaphors, the CMT (conceptual metaphor theory) offers some arguments that seem interesting and relevant for the study of metaphors that conceptualize a life course in literature. Dennis Tay summarizes the main premises on metaphor in CMT as three foundational arguments: (1) the conventionality argument, (2) the conceptual structure argument, and (3) the embodiment argument. These are exemplified by means of the metaphor “life is a journey,” a widespread image that can turn up in variations, such as “we are fellow travellers in the journey of life.”¹¹ “The conventionality argument is made on the basis that such expressions, although metaphoric, are routinely used and understood, and seem to have roughly equivalent counterparts in many languages.”¹² Languages and cultures show a tendency to speak about life in terms of travel and journeys. In addition, it not only “appears to be very difficult to understand and convey these points about ‘life’ without using metaphor […],” but it also “lends support to the conceptual structure argument.”¹³ Here, Tay follows Lakoff’s suggestion that our conception of the world is structured by numerous such metaphoric associations and that these associations are expressed in language. The third argument, the embodiment argument, states that we use “source concepts [that] are often experientially concrete and possess some kind of ‘bodily basis’ (Johnson, 1987), while target concepts are often abstract and cannot be Jackendoff and David Aaron, “Review on More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor by George Lakoff and Mark Turner,” Language 67.2 (1991): 320 – 338.  Tay, “Lakoff’s Theory,” 54.  Jackendoff and Aaron, “Review,” 325.  Tay, “Lakoff’s Theory,” 52– 53.  Tay, “Lakoff’s Theory,” 53.  Tay, “Lakoff’s Theory,” 53.

66

Lut Missinne

directly experienced or perceived.”¹⁴ Since important notions like “life,” “time,” or “emotions” are abstract, we need other concepts that are grounded in our experience or that emerge directly from our physical interaction with the environment, in order to grasp them.¹⁵ Thus, we speak about “decisive steps” and “sidepaths” in our lives, elaborating on the image of “life as a journey.” An important and, for literary metaphor study, vital perspective has been brought in by Gerard Steen. While previous metaphor theories mostly focused either on the production of metaphors, or on the reception, and “on the interpretative operations performed by readers when confronted by a textual incongruity,”¹⁶ Steen points out the importance of the communicative context in metaphor use. He looks at the function of metaphors in a communication process between two sides, which implies that they can be used intentionally and that questions of the relation between intention and uptake have to be considered.¹⁷ In his model for discerning various properties of metaphor, Steen introduces three dimensions: a linguistic one (are we dealing with a metaphor or a simile?), a conceptual one (is it a “novel” or a “conventional” metaphor?) and a communicative dimension (are we speaking about a “deliberate” or a “non-deliberate” metaphor?).¹⁸ The last two dimensions seem to be crucial for literary metaphors, as Madalina Akli has demonstrated in her study on Conventional and Original Metaphors in French Autobiography (2009). Literary metaphors are not to be considered (only) as subconscious conceptual patterns in a Lakoffian sense, but should be seen as deliberate linguistic constructs. Akli, like Steen, underlines the communicative dimension of metaphorical language use and points out how important it is for an author to strive for a balance between the recognizable and the innovative. This is why autobiographers use “conceptual devices that are familiar to the reader,” they resort to patterns of thought and cognitive models they all share.¹⁹ However, they go one step further and manipulate “a specific conceptual template of conventional metaphors” into new and innovative forms.²⁰ On the one hand, the use of a readily available pattern guarantees the writer that the reader will be able to connect to the new/original/innovative meaning of his ar-

 Tay, “Lakoff’s Theory,” 53.  Akli, Conventional Metaphors, 25.  Culler, Pursuit Signs, 208 – 209.  Gerard J. Steen, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor – Now New and Improved!”, Review of Cognitive Linguistics 9.1 (2011): 26 – 64, 42.  Steen, “Contemporary Theory,” 45 – 46.  Akli, Conventional Metaphors, 19.  Akli, Conventional Metaphors, 21.

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

67

tefact. On the other hand, the creative way in which he uses this modified image in his literary work provides the reader with new insights and with aesthetic pleasure. The literary effect of metaphors is an interplay between tradition and innovation. A similar statement was formulated by Lakoff and Turner: “[p]oetic thought uses the mechanisms of every-day thought, but it extends them, elaborates them, and combines them in ways that go beyond the ordinary.”²¹ They exemplify different mechanisms for manipulating daily metaphors by means of the image “death is sleep.” In the Shakespearean line, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,” the common metaphor underwent an extension, since “dreaming is not an intrinsic part of the metaphorical mapping from sleep to death”; an elaboration of a metaphor is a similar procedure, in that one fills in slots in unusual ways, for instance conceiving of death as departure in a particular sort of vehicle, say a raft. Questioning of a metaphor occurs when the poet presupposes a conventional metaphor and then casts doubt on it. Poetic metaphor also undergoes compression, being used more densely, pervasively, and allusively than in ordinary language.²²

Maybe the richest and most significant difference, according to Jackendoff, “lies in the poetic composition of metaphors, when multiple metaphors are used side by side, acting on each other and reinforcing each other.”²³ The reasons why autobiographers use metaphors in their writings are multiple. Firstly, they help to structure the literary creation. Structuring patterns in autobiographies can be considered as metaphors per se, as they translate a life into a life story. Especially life stories that have no “calendar-based” order need another conceptual structure that can be recognized by the reader, as Akli has demonstrated. She analyzed three examples of French autobiographies that lacked a chronological concept and found out that the authors resorted to metaphorical constructs to frame their story of life. Jean-Paul Sartre in Les Mots (1964) [The Words] used the folklore figure of the obedient Griselda as a model for the (re)construction of his life. George Perec structured his life story in W ou le souvenir d’enfance (1975) [W or The Memory of Childhood] as a void that had to be filled in, and Nathalie Sarraute organized her Enfance (1983) [Childhood] around the opposition between center and periphery. A second reason why metaphorical frames are helpful in structuring a personal life course, in

 Cited in Jackendoff, “Review,” 333.  Jackendoff, “Review,” 333.  Jackendoff, “Review,” 333.

68

Lut Missinne

the view of Akli, is that they help to represent this as a collective life course, a concern of many literary autobiographers that should not be underestimated because “each life is a unique response to a human condition which is nevertheless allegedly universal.”²⁴ Thirdly, not only do metaphors serve as structuring tropes for an individual life story and for the construction of a personal identity, but in the case of authors writing an autobiography, they are also used to conceptualize their birth and life as a literary author. In the debut novel by the Dutch author Atte Jongstra, the I-protagonist, an alter ego, calls his first style exercises “‘the asphalting of the runway.” Jongstra made his debut in 1989 with a collection of stories about a writer making his debut. Thereby, he compared his first literary tryouts to the preparations made by a pilot apprentice before he could free himself from his literary historical background.

Atte Jongstra It is not without reason that only a small number of the works by Atte Jongstra (*1956) have been translated into other languages. The play on words, the witty phrasing, the hidden allusions and humor, the ambiguities and paradoxes make transferring this writer’s pleasure into a foreign language a difficult job. Merely one collection of his stories has been published in Danish and Spanish, and only his Lexicon voor feestgangers (1993) exists in a German translation (Festliches Lexikon, 1994). His debut, De psychologie van de zwavel (1989),²⁵ [The Psychology of the Sulphur], a collection of mimicry texts, parodies, and pastiches on admired Dutch authors can itself be read as a pastiche on a nineteenth-century Bildungsroman, since it is about a debutant writer searching for his individual style. “I put myself in their shoes, imitated their style, their way of thinking, and learned a lot from that,”²⁶ Jongstra wrote about his debut in Klinkende ikken (2008) [Resounding I’s], an autobiographical collection of essays and stories he published about twenty years later. All of his books plunge the reader into a chaos of fact and fiction, which he composes with one of his favorite devices – footnotes – that identify quotations of real and invented authors, or that provide the reader with a wealth of absurd, curious, or serious but useless information. Jongstra has

 Akli referring to Sartre, 65.  Atte Jongstra, De psychologie van de zwavel (Amsterdam: Contact, 1989).  “Ik kroop in hun huid, imiteerde hun stijl, hun manier van denken, en leerde daar veel van,” in Atte Jongstra, Klinkende ikken (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2008): 81. Further references in the text abbreviated as “KI.” Please note: all further translations from Dutch are mine; original quotes are found in the corresponding footnotes.

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

69

been characterized as “one of those writers who believe they have to irritate the readers, to goad them into questioning what they are reading and to let them pleasantly lose their way in the text.”²⁷ Nevertheless, his books, which are difficult to be classified in genres, are to a high degree autobiographical, although they are no autobiographies in the strict sense of the word, since they do not follow the track of his curriculum vitae. Some of his books are introduced to the reader as autobiographical texts, like Klinkende ikken, which was published in ‘Privé-domein’ [Private Domain], a well-known series of ego-documents by the Amsterdam publishing house Arbeiderspers, or Diepte! (2015) [Depth] and Worst (2016) [Sausage], both displaying the genre “novel” on the front cover, but announced on the back flap as “maybe his most autobiographical novel” and as a “highly autobiographical, illustrated novel.”²⁸ While the novel Groente (1991)²⁹ [Vegetables] is not presented as an autobiographical text – the main character is an old man who has shut himself up in his vegetable garden and tries to recall his memories – the book is interesting with regard to its context to metaphors and life writing since it is about memory and the attempt to get a grip on the course of life.³⁰ As is always the case with Jongstra, the author playfully introduces many autobiographical allusions: The danger is that you shut yourself up. This is what happens to the main character. Calling up memories is all about telling stories. But these tend to lead a life of their own and what really happened is hard to tell. In the end this lonely vegetable freak is left defeated in his library.³¹

In this article, I will focus on Klinkende ikken and the way in which Jongstra, on the one hand, creatively manipulates conventional tropes and, on the other hand, uses innovative metaphors for life and life experiences that surprise and amuse the reader.

 “Atte Jongstra: Vegetables,” Nederlands letterenfonds (acc. 10 October 2017).  Atte Jongstra, Diepte! (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2013). Further references in the text abbreviated as “D!”; Atte Jongstra, Worst (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 2015).  Atte Jongstra, Groente (Amsterdam: Contact, 1991).  “Atte Jongstra: Vegetables,” Nederlands letterenfonds (acc. 6 January 2018).  “Atte Jongstra: Vegetables,” Nederlands letterenfonds (acc. 6 January 2018).

70

Lut Missinne

A self-avoider Klinkende ikken already reveals something about the nature of this autobiographer in its subtitle “Confessions of a self-avoider.”³² The reader doesn’t encounter a straightforward account of a life course, but is carried along a most diverse collection of anecdotes consisting of 49 chapters, among which we find travel accounts, dreams, reading experiences, vicious comments on colleague writers and critics, childhood memories, discussions with his wife, comments on the pin-up girl Betty Page and on ageing women, as well as previous publications by the author himself, reflections on character traits, family stories, jokes, and ironic comments on obscure associations or people. In addition, the portfolio does not give a traditional survey from baby Atte, up to the author in his fifties. Rather, it starts with a picture of his parents and sister, and although the first chapter is titled “character images,” it also contains mystified portraits and bizarre drawings and photographs (KI, 175). Jongstra’s ultimate aim of his book is to attain self-insight. He feels challenged not only by the Delphic maxim gnothi seauton and by Marcus Aurelius’ exhortation “find your inner compass and follow it,” but most of all by someone (his wife?) who has told him that he should think more about himself (KI, 12). Thus, he decides: “So I am going to think deeply about myself, a whole book long. Analyze my feelings profoundly, reconstruct my acts, turn the whole thing inside out […].”³³ He doesn’t do this wholeheartedly, as the idea of digging deep in himself makes him nervous and anxious, and so he is glad to find an article by the American psychologist Tim Wilson, which discusses the paradox that deeply thinking about oneself makes one temporarily know even less about oneself (KI, 15). The concept of the “detour,” of taking the roundabout way to the goal, is a first recurrent image in Jongstra’s narrative about his own life. Despite all these avoiding maneuvers, Klinkende ikken still displays a discernible autobiographical pattern because it starts with a chapter on the author’s name, his date and place of birth, ‘Wispolia’ (Latin for his native village in Friesland) and ends with two chapters that can be more or less called autobiographical: one on his portrait made for the Literary Museum of The Hague and the other as a reflection on the entire project, entitled “Travelling to I-kaigne.”³⁴ In addition to these, one could say that other traditional autobiographical

 “Bekentenissen van een zelfontwijker.”  “Ik ga dus een heel boek lang eens diep over mezelf nadenken. Grondig mijn gevoel analyseren, mijn handelingen reconstrueren, de hele boel binnenstebuiten keren […]” (KI, 17).  “Op reis naar Ikkanië” (KI, 395 – 397).

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

71

topoi are also present in Klinkende ikken: from an early ‘shocking’ memory, to a visit with his father, to a story about a school teacher, and to a problem family living in a tiny, dirty house (KI, 20). Further elements include the dramatic family story about the near death of his grandfather, which explains why his mother is so anxious and overprotective of her son; his first love, who abandoned him after two dates, and his first marriage and divorce. The separation from his first wife and their two children is repeatedly referred to as a “war,” a widespread conventional metaphor for a certain type of messy divorces. But, this metaphorical concept is elaborated on and developed into a complete chapter with the title “Treason in times of war.”³⁵ My divorce had become a disaster. My personal 1672. Simply say it: there was a war on. […] Anyway, after a full divorcement year it went off so nastily from her side that I saw myself forced into all maneuvers one can execute on the battlefield and surroundings. All in accordance with the Conventions of Geneva – there were children involved – but truly a war.³⁶

The reference to the year 1672, known as the “disaster year” in Dutch history, and to the Geneva Conventions (because of the children) is an unexpected and, despite the context, humorous filling-in of the traditional image “divorce is a war.” Yet, the messy divorce goes one step further; the author also involves the position taking of his friends in the separation and makes the starting point of this chapter the question of with whom he would enter the resistance and with whom he would not. The war isotopy, serving as the source domain for this metaphorical transfer, is extensively developed in an anecdote on one particular friend, Herman, who from the beginning seems to take the side of his ex-wife. Reacting to what he perceives as partisanship, the I-narrator/author begins to behave increasingly like a real “resistance fighter,” and when he notices that his friend starts plugging his ears against his stories about the “turmoil of war,” he decides to go “underground.” Meanwhile, it comes to an “armistice” with his ex-wife. “Sometimes the fights flared up, but it clearly went on to peace…”³⁷ He remains silent towards his friend, until years later Herman writes him a letter, in which he admits that the accusation of his being “unsuitable for resistance” was an offense that he never managed to forget. Continuing with the resistance metaphor,

 “Verraad in oorlogstijd” (KI, 299).  “Mijn scheiding was een ramp geworden. Mijn persoonlijke 1672. Zeg maar rustig: het was oorlog. […] Het werd hoe dan ook na een vol scheidingsjaar zo bitter van haar kant dat ik me gedwongen zag tot alle manoeuvres die je op slagveld en omgeving uitvoert. Alles binnen de Conventies van Genève – er waren kinderen bij betrokken – maar toch echt oorlog” (KI, 300).  “Soms laaiden de gevechten op, maar het ging duidelijk op vrede toe […]” (KI, 301).

72

Lut Missinne

Herman in turn blames his old friend that his silence over the years has turned him “into a traitor.” The war/resistance metaphor thus spans and intertwines an offense in a friendship and a broken marriage. Interestingly, the footnotes in this chapter do not give information on the narrated life facts, but are situated on the “source domain” of the metaphor: they are citations from newspapers published during the Second World War. Thus, one sentence from the last letter to Herman, “my war is over now,” is commented on with the footnote: “The war is over. The battle for peace can commence. Did we prepare ourselves for this battle in the last war years?’ – De strijder, September 15, 1945.”³⁸ Like in all of Jongstra’s work, the footnotes – although they seem to be and often are authentic quotes – usually undermine or question the referentiality of the text more than they support it. The reader is left in doubt, questioning the authenticity of what he has read. Not many chapters in Klinkende ikken have a direct or even metaphorically phrased autobiographic title, as with the above-mentioned example on his divorce, or as with the title “Trauma conversations with my dentist” (KI, 152). The construction of the book, with its mixture of serious and ironical pieces, brought together in a loose, jumpy and associative narrative is to a certain extent an expression of the method the author applies to undertake the investigation into himself – never straight ahead, only walking sideways, or often not moving at all. Confronted with the self-assigned task to make a “rush ahead” in introspection (KI, 9), he reacts with complete immobility, being stuck behind his computer at home and merely sending his language into the world: “The words have to do it.”³⁹ He has the feeling that someone does not let him enter into himself, a feeling he describes with a Munchhausenian phrase: “I’m being pulled on my own hair if I want to move in my direction.”⁴⁰ (KI, 13) Anxiety, shame, and a paradoxical aversion to self-exploration make this “self-avoider” look for round-about routes and an “adjacent view” (KI, 396) to reach his goal. Another image, besides the “detour,” present throughout Jongstra’s work, even in the title of a recent autobiographical novel, is the “void” or the “hole,” as in Diepte! [Depth]. The isotopy of digging and delving into one’s memory, or into the past, is a common and widespread metaphor in autobiographical discourse. We speak about “youth as a goldmine” and about “descending into the past.” Jongstra also uses this image but distorts it in the sense that what he finds by digging in his own life is paradoxically only a hole. The novel Diepte!  “De oorlog is ten einde. De slag om de vrede kan een aanvang nemen. Hebben we ons in de afgelopen oorlogsjaren op deze slag voorbereid?” (KI, 302).  “De woorden moeten het doen” (KI, 9 – 10).  “Ik word aan mijn haren teruggetrokken als ik in mijn richting wil bewegen” (KI, 13).

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

73

starts with a child memory of the autobiographical narrator, who sees his father digging in the garden in his war against moles. A reflection on the blanks or holes in our memory follows, about which the author decides to write his book as “the history of a hole.” From that moment on, the hole becomes the theme of the novel and functions in both a metaphorical and a literal sense. In the next chapter, the occupation of his forefathers comes up: mud shovelers. He juxtaposes their work with the poor result of his own delving: “My digging into my inner self turned out to be a fruitless digging. I didn’t find anything, despite my reading a bookcase full of psychological standard works. An empty hole.”⁴¹

Collections and citations While Diepte! is mostly about Jongstra’s childhood and the history of his small native village, Klinkende ikken also focusses on his life as a literary author, a genesis that likewise has taken place by detouring movements. Jongstra’s debut as an imitator of admired literary forefathers has already been mentioned. His abundant use of literary quotations is another illustration of his circumscribing mode of operation. It is easy, so he admits, to refer to citations as arguments in a discussion or to conceal one’s own void by quoting others (KI, 56). Ironically, this statement is supported by a footnote giving two quotations on quotations, one by Rudyard Kipling: “He wrapped himself in quotations – as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors;” and one by Montaigne: “Je ne cite les autres que pour mieux exprimer ma pensée” [I quote others only in order to better express myself].⁴² In his novel Groente (1991), we also find a compilation of quotations provided with a self-ironic comment on this typical postmodern procedure: “Of all writer types I do not despise one so much as the compiler, who in every nook and cranny of the library searches for snatches from the work of others and lays these as sods (of grass) in the middle of his own work.”⁴³ The compiler in this book is both the writer and the gardener, and the garden is both a

 “Mijn in het eigen innerlijk graven bleek echter delven zonder vrucht. Ik vond er niets, lezing van een kast vol zielkundige standaardwerken ten spijt. Een leeg gat” (D!, 17).  “’Hij omwikkelde zichzelf met citaten – zoals een bedelaar zichzelf het paars der Keizers zou aanmeten.’ – Kipling. ‘Ik citeer anderen alleen maar om mezelf beter uit te drukken.’ – Montaigne” (KI, 56).  “Van alle schrijverstypen veracht ik er geen zo als de compilator, die in alle hoeken en gaten van de bibliotheek naar brokstukken uit de werken van anderen zoekt en deze als graszoden in een perk, midden in zijn eigen werk plakt” (Groente, 116).

74

Lut Missinne

“real” vegetable garden and a metaphor for life and for the writing about this life: “Can you still follow me? Because I speak, when I talk about my vegetable garden, exclusively about myself. A matter of reflection.”⁴⁴ “I’m working on my vegetable garden writings. An autobiography. Memories of fulfilled and unfulfilled possibilities.”⁴⁵ It is but a small step now to combine the garden metaphor with the one of ‘digging in the past’: “I was going to dig in my memory. To bring as much of the harvest of the years to the surface.”⁴⁶ Both his personal and his literary identity seem to depend on activities of collecting and compiling. He asks himself if the lists and collections that he so adores do not first and foremost serve to avoid himself. However, at the same time his peculiar collection shapes an image of his identity: My collection. I have the idea/impression that all those paintings, lithos, lino-cuts, pictures and engravings and all of these statues, plates, pipkins and caskets, including the photograph of an unknown woman with two dental bridges, that figure on chimney-piece and window-sill in one way or another give an image of who I am.⁴⁷

Thereupon, he promptly resolves to reconstruct all the collections he has ever had and to present them to the reader, “so that he can tell me who I am” (KI, 16). It is therefore no wonder that he looks upon himself as somebody “meandering like a river.” “Not completely the driftwood of Montaigne,” he says; he still has “an own driving force, and yet [is] inclined to a deviation when stones or other indomitabilities occur on the way.”⁴⁸ The French renaissance philosopher Montaigne holds an important position in Jongstra’s oeuvre. With Laurence Sterne and Multatuli, he belongs to the group of literary ancestors presented by the author in his essay collection Familieportret (1996) [Family Portrait] as his literary family. The words of Montaigne – “More I’s than one, two souls” –

 “Volgt u mij nog ? Want ik spreek, als ik over mijn moestuin vertel, uitsluitend over mijzelf. Een kwestie van spiegeling” (Groente, 14).  “Ik werk aan mijn moestuingeschriften. Een autobiografie. Herinneringen aan vervulde en onvervulde mogelijkheden” (Groente, 29).  “Ik ging graven in mijn geheugen. Om zoveel mogelijk van de oogst der jaren boven te brengen” (Groente, 11).  “Mijn verzameling. Ik heb het idee dat al die schilderijen, litho’s, lino’s, foto’s en gravures en wat er allemaal prijkt op schoorsteenmantel en vensterbank aan beeldjes, bordjes, potjes en doosjes, met inbegrip van een onbekende vrouw met twee tandartsbruggen op een foto, op een of andere manier een beeld vormen van wie ik ben” (KI, 13).  “Niet helemaal het drijfhout van Montaigne, wel degelijk met een eigen stuwende kracht, maar toch geneigd tot een omweg als zich stenen of andere onverzettelijkheden op de route voordoen” (KI, 150 – 151).

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

75

perfectly fit the fragmentary and unfixed identity presented here, which is also expressed in the title of the book, Klinkende ikken, and in expressions like “the whole I’s-club”: “It has given me a good feeling to belong to something, whereas I prefer to be no member of anything.”⁴⁹ An individual and a literary identity are thus constantly intermingled and permeate each other. Another nice example of this can be found in the chapter on “The force of habit” (KI, 66 – 69). It starts with a direct personal statement: If I want to understand something, I need books. If it concerns wisdom about myself, I even seem to persistently overlook the essence even in the best books. I generally do see connections, emotional connections, my whole work is based on associations. But I badly associate with myself.⁵⁰

When somebody makes a remark on one of his character traits, this incites him to go and search for information in his library or, preferably, on the internet. In this chapter, someone mentions the fact that the force of habit seems to have great impact on his doings, and, as a reaction to this, he huddles in his books for an explanation. Suddenly, however, he remembers that every Sunday his father drove the whole family by the same route through an allotment area, and, to reassure his mother, every new road was immediately incorporated by repeated trips into the restricted amount of variations in the fixed family route pattern. This recollection then leads him back to literature, to Erasmus, whom he quotes: “A nail should be driven out by another nail, a custom can only be overcome by a new one.”⁵¹ Finally, the chapter ends with what could be called a flash of selfinsight: “Anyway I also originate from such a habitusnest, and maybe I should stop resisting to the indisputable delight that keeping to the well-trodden paths yields.”⁵² To use another metaphor, the metaphors in the work of Jongstra can be seen as a hyphal network. Not only does he invert, expand, or vary on images that are

 “Meer ikken dan één, twee zielen. […] Het heeft me een goed gevoel gegeven ergens bij te horen, terwijl ik toch liefst nergens lid van ben” (KI, 53).  “Als ik iets wil begrijpen heb ik boeken nodig. Als het wijsheid over mezelf betreft, blijk ik zelfs in de beste boeken helaas hardnekkig over de essentie heen te lezen. Ik zie in het algemeen best verbanden, gevoelsverbanden, mijn hele werk is op associaties gebaseerd. Maar met mezelf associeer ik slecht” (KI, 66).  “ ‘ Een spijker drijf je met een andere spijker uit,’ zegt Erasmus. ‘Over een gewoonte kom je heen door een andere gewoonte aan te nemen’ ” (KI, 68).  “Ik ben hoe dan ook uit zo’n habitusnest afkomstig, en misschien moet ik maar eens ophouden me te verzetten tegen het onmiskenbare genot dat het steeds maar opnieuw begaan der gebaande paden oplevert” (KI, 69).

76

Lut Missinne

commonly used for conceptionalizing the process of remembering or of increasing self-knowledge, he also constructs his own pattern within his complete oeuvre. The familiar image of a life course as progressive and purposeful is countered by a concept of verticality, which is not only found in the images of motionlessness, depth, and digging, but also in the metaphor of the tower. An ambitious but never realized dream occurs in several books, to build and live in a tower, far above the drag of daily life, as an image for his “ideale Ich?” (KI, 64). This may be an extreme example of the experiential concreteness that characterizes the metaphor for abstract concepts like “identity.” Yet, the tower would, of course, also be a symbol for his literary production, that which remains of an author after death. That is why he dreams of a tower on a not so obvious spot, so that people say, “it remains nonsense, that building, no sense, no use, but how beautiful, or funny or crazy it is to look at.”⁵³ Let’s finally take a look at the concluding chapters of Klinkende ikken and Diepte!. Strikingly, they both take up the most familiar metaphor in life writing discourse: “life is a journey.” In Diepte! the author looks back on his life, and in the narrative he has come to write about it, doing so as if he were a sea voyager: I left my native village in 1968, traveled over what one loves to call ‘the wild billows of life,’ and sailed over an ocean of books. Forty-four years after my departure I very carefully set course for 53 degrees, 1 minute and 3 seconds north latitude/6 degrees, 2 minutes and 33 seconds eastern longitude. I knew where I would arrive. Wispolia, my native village. Of course I realize that with my three-master I navigated the Lethe, the waters of memory. However, I had filled the hold of my vessel to the brim with wispoliana: cuttings from journals, archives and memories of my former fellow-villagers; in particular my dear parents; before you realize, you start telling fairy tales. Looking back on these pages, it is as if with my return to Wispolia I discovered an exotic island. I described what I saw, in admiration […]. As a child I had never seen my village like this.⁵⁴

 “Het blijft onzin, dat bouwwerk, zonder zin, zonder nut, maar wat is het mooi, of leuk, of gek om naar te kijken” (KI, 63).  “Ik verliet mijn geboortedorp in 1968, reisde over wat men zo graag ‘de woelige baren van het leven’ noem, en bezeilde een oceaan van boeken. Vierenveertig jaar na mijn vertrek koerste ik heel nauwkeurig naar 53 graden, 1 minuut en 3 seconden noorderbreedte/6 graden, 2 minuten en 33 seconden oosterlengte. Ik wist waar ik aan zou komen. Wispolia, mijn geboortedorp. Natuurlijk realiseerde ik me met mijn driemaster Lethe de geheugenwateren te bevaren. Ik had het ruim van mijn vaartuig echter volgestouwd met wispoliana: materiaal uit kranten, archieven en herinneringen van mijn voormalige dorpsgenoten, mijn beminde ouders in het bijzonder: voor je het weet ga je fabeltjes vertellen. Terugkijkend op voorliggende bladzijden is het alsof ik met mijn terugkeer in Wispolia een uitheems eiland heb ontdekt. Ik beschreef wat ik zag, vol verwondering. […] Zo heb ik als kind mijn dorp nooit gezien” (D!, 90 – 91).

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

77

In the context of Jongstra’s work, this passage is a remarkably serious observation and reflection of the constructive character of his autobiographical writing. Klinkende ikken also ends with a chapter that contains a “journey”-metaphor, although here the image of life traveling is immediately undermined by the ironic title: “Op reis naar Ikkanië” (KI, 396), alluding to “‘The Land of Cockayne,” the fantastic land of plenty. It is as if the author recoils from the consequences of his search for self-insight and warns the reader not to take it all too seriously, since this book has “no middle nor an end. Sometimes we visit Iceland, sometimes Marrakech or Istanbul. Take it easy. Don’t go too fast. Dwelling and circling around must be done slowly, or you won’t see yourself. If you want that at all.”⁵⁵

Conclusion Despite all deviation maneuvers, irony, pastiches, self-relativism, and literary tropes, the autobiographical books by Jongstra show the reader a fairly good self-portrait of the author. Despite his use of accumulated quotations as a deviation, he does expose his literary identity in his literary preferences. Copyists always find something of themselves in all their books, and their libraries contain traces of their self-portraits.⁵⁶ In his comment on the status and function of metaphor (versus metonymy), Jonathan Culler concluded that this topic “involves the question of the relation between thought and language” and of the distinction between “the literal” and “the metaphorical.”⁵⁷ He introduced a distinction between the via philosophia and the via retorica. “The first locates metaphor in the gap between sense and reference, in the process of thinking of an object, event or whatever as something.” In this view, “the cognitive respectability of metaphor” is emphasized: “Metaphor thus becomes an instance of general cognitive processes at their most creative or speculative.”⁵⁸ This strand concurs with the position of Lakoff and Turner that all our conceptualizing of experience takes place through metaphorization processes, leading to the conclusion that language itself is metaphorical. The second position, which Culler calls the via retorica, focusses

 “[…] middelpunt noch einde. We bezoeken soms IJsland, soms Marrakech of Istanbul. Kalm aan. Vooral niet te snel willen gaan. Dwalen en rondcirkelen doe je langzaam, anders zie je jezelf niet. Als je dat al wilt” (KI, 397).  Anthony Mertens, “Daadkracht als tegenhanger van verlammende paniek,” Bzzlletin 32.290 (2004): 69 – 82, 75.  Culler, Pursuit Signs, 202.  Culler, Pursuit Signs, 202.

78

Lut Missinne

more on the functioning of metaphor on the level of language itself. Here, the gap is located “in the space between what is meant and what is said,” making metaphor more a stylistic rather than a cognitive device.⁵⁹ One could ask, which seems the more appropriate categorization of the metaphors analyzed above? It is difficult to determine whether the metaphorical language of Jongstra is based on a cognitive process (an increasing self-insight), or if his metaphorical writing is primarily a stylistic device, and if so, we could ask why someone chooses this “complex” way, which requires a “supplemental conceptual effort” from the reader?⁶⁰ Apparently, this is an issue that the author himself muses upon. If one accidently discovers a phenomenon, like a hole in the lawn, and one doesn’t mention it, then there is nothing wrong. But, if one talks about it, it gets loaded with meaning. “Suppose we give coherence to our world by connecting arbitrary events with something else, maybe with a hole. Then I wouldn’t be surprised when by the end of times such a hole gives the chaos a direction, an order.”⁶¹ Jongstra describes here how the concept of the “hole,” which has a common meaning in autobiographical recollection narratives (the “holes” in our memory), becomes a perceptive guideline to him. He discovers stories about real “holes” everywhere in his personal life and in the history of Wispolia – he even develops a real hole-mania.⁶² His autonomous cognitive capacities do not lead him to self-knowledge, and from there to his autobiographical writing, but his linguistic associative capacity playfully leads him to new insights. Undoubtedly, the literary metaphors in Klinkende ikken are what Steen calls deliberate metaphors. “Deliberate metaphor is an overt invitation on the part of the sender for the addressee to step outside the dominant target domain of the discourse and look at it from an alien source domain.”⁶³ The reader is invited to walk into the narrative by a familiar entry, but is then pushed into a new perspective that functions as “a device for the defamiliarization of cognition.”⁶⁴ We could still subsume this process under the cognitive dimension of metaphor. Jackendoff specifies this cognitive effect into a particular characteristic when it comes to poetic or literary metaphor. Then, the effect “is not unlike that in

 Culler, Pursuit Signs, 204.  Akli, Conventional Metaphors, 21.  “Stel dat wij onze wereld samenhang geven door willekeurige gebeurtenissen met iets anders te verbinden, misschien wel met een gat. Dan zou ik niet verrast zijn als bij het einde der tijden zo’n gat richting aan de chaos schenkt, en orde” (D!, 130 – 131).  “gatmanie” (D!, 62).  Steen, “Contemporary Theory,” 38.  Steen, “Contemporary Theory,” 38.

About Vegetables and Depths in Life

79

dreams, where we can experience a person who carries one individual’s appearance but at the same time is ‘known’ to be someone else.”⁶⁵ Thus, a metaphor involves a “split reference” (Ricoeur). Fine details of the source image do not find precise correlates in the target domain, but they are quite valuable because they still contribute to the meaning and effect of the composite. Or, as Fauconnier has formulated: there remains a contrast “between the extreme brevity of the linguistic form and the spectacular wealth of the corresponding meaning construction.”⁶⁶ The untransferable “rest” generates a rich complex of conceptual and affective components. This might well be what Jongstra tries to communicate to the reader in his chapter “Knowledge without poetry.”⁶⁷ His publisher once asked him to quickly translate a small encyclopedia-like English book, full of useless, funny petty facts. Jongstra did his utmost best to find creative Dutch equivalents for the English-related anecdotes and curiosities, which in translation would have be incomprehensible for a Dutch reader. However, the translation was rejected by the English author. Don’t mind him, Jongstra comforted his publisher, “[this man] is just blind to poetry.”⁶⁸ Real poetry requires the space to wake up the imagination.

   

Jackendoff, “Review,” 334. Quoted in Akli, Conventional Metaphors, 32. “Kennis zonder poëzie” (KI, 86 – 90). “[…] hij heeft geen oog voor poëzie” (KI, 89).

Agnieszka Rzepa

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir This article focuses on metaphoric structures in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir (2009). Crozier’s straightforward narrative of incidents from her past is structured around a series of poetic vignettes describing originary phenomena that have shaped her. The “first causes,” as she calls them metaphorically, add up to the familiar mix of parameters of origin and belonging: the intimate place/landscape, family, and discourse. My aim is to demonstrate how Crozier’s metaphors contribute to the world of interrelatedness she constructs in the memoir. In the process, Crozier continues to develop a broader project of the revisioning of patriarchal mythologies (e. g., the Canadian myth of the prairie West) from a female/feminist point of view. ¹

In an interview, Lorna Crozier – a recognized Canadian poet – states that the 2009 “prairie memoir” of her Saskatchewan childhood and much more selectively treated adulthood titled Small Beneath the Sky is “a life work for me. […] it’s about questions and concerns I’ve been living with since I became conscious of my thoughts.”² Indeed, the themes, motives, and tropes she develops in the memoir are well known to the readers of her poetry, which often either tends towards the autobiographical or is openly so. The memoir itself, Crozier’s first attempt at prose writing, in fact hovers between poetry and prose both in terms of style and form. The mosaic-like sequence consists of the straightforward narrative of incidents from Crozier’s past – some of which include moments of epiphany – described in brief prose chapters punctuated by vignettes in poetic prose, which can also be read as prose poems. The vignettes constitute attempts at capturing the originary phenomena that have shaped the autobiographical narrator, and which she metaphorically calls “first causes.” The “first causes,” which Crozier, inspired by Aristotle, describes as “something beyond the chain of

 Research for this article was supported by the National Science Centre Poland under grant PRO-2012/05/B/HS2/04004.  Susan Olding, “An Interview with Lorna Crozier – Featuring New Work!” (acc. 10 June 2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-006

82

Agnieszka Rzepa

cause and effect, something that started it all,”³ are light, dust, wind; mom and dad; rain, snow, sky; insects; grass, gravel, horizon; story. They add up to the familiar mix of parameters of origin and belonging to which they are synecdochically related: place, family, and discourse. Juxtaposing prose sketches of fleeting snatches of the past and poetic vignettes of what might seem transient or incidental, but nevertheless endures, produces a sense of a deep and intimate connection between the two “orders.” The end result, as was Crozier’s intention,⁴ is a verbal moving picture of herself and her other human subjects engaged in the hustle and bustle of life set against a timeless, almost mythical, though hardly stationary or inanimate background, with which they are intimately connected. In this respect, the memoir is continuous with Crozier’s poetic project: the contention she develops in her poems – that sentience is not just a quality of people, but rather of everything that surrounds us, animals, the natural world, the inanimate world, the universe itself,⁵ and her delight in the ordinary and mundane, in what we overlook in everyday life.⁶ My aim is to demonstrate how Crozier’s specific rendition of her conceptual metaphors – “place/family/discourse is a beginning/the point of origin,” i. e. the textual rendition of the entities metaphorized as her “first cause” – contributes to the world of interrelatedness she unobtrusively constructs in the memoir. The “self” that the text describes is deeply relational⁷ and formed by interactions with others and the stories they tell, but – even more crucially – this self is given rise to, is shaped and sustained by the natural phenomena of the prairies, which become “the pared-down language of your blood and bones” (SBS, 194) and are actualized through “story.” The sense of relationality and of the inextricable interrelatedness of discourse, material/natural world and the self that the text gives rise to is constructed and supported primarily by means of an intricate web of intersecting metaphors. In the process, the memoir becomes yet another contribution to a broader project of Crozier’s writing often remarked

 Lorna Crozier, Small Beneath the Sky: A Prairie Memoir (Vancouver et al.: Greystone Books, 2009): n. pag.; further references in the text abbreviated as “SBS”.  Olding, “An Interview.”  Marilyn Rose, “ ‘ Bones Made of Light’: Nature in the Poetry of Lorna Crozier,” Canadian Poetry 55 (2004): 56 – 58. (acc. 10 December 2016).  Shelley Boyd, Garden Plots: Canadian Women Writers and Their Literary Gardens (Montreal: MQUP, 2013): eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).  Cf. Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1999).

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

83

upon by critics: a revalidation of the feminine and a re-visioning of patriarchal mythologies,⁸ in particular the Canadian myth of the prairie West, from a female/feminist point of view. These aims are partly achieved through a redefinition of the relationship between human beings and nature.⁹ In the memoir, however, they are accomplished, to a large extent, through subtle foregrounding and the universalizing of the figure of Crozier’s mother, written into the landscape of the prairies, but also through the way in which Crozier conceptualizes her own self. The way Crozier describes the first causes makes it clear that she does not really differentiate between animate and inanimate, tangible and intangible; a phenomenon, a place, a plant, an insect, a person, a story. All are primary and crucial; all are both “hers” and “everybody’s.” While the poetic vignettes, in contrast to the prose pieces, use the second and not the first person perspective, as well as present tense, rather than past, in order to achieve a sense of distance and of permanence of the “first causes,” they nevertheless rely on descriptions that foreground lived, sensual, specific bodily experiences. This, again, is particularly important in the case of those “causes” that are features of place, and which collectively build the image not of the town of Swift Current in Saskatchewan – Crozier’s home town, which is described in the prose fragments – and the farms close to it, but of the prairie environment (Saskatchewan and Canadian prairies) in general. In fact, place is the “first cause” par excellence to which all of the pluralized “first causes” of Crozier’s memoir are related in one way or another. Even “mom and dad” and “story” are part of place: the former belong in it, the latter originates from it and makes it, by providing the autobiographical self access to place not only in the present, but also in its past incarnations remembered not through her own stories, but through stories of others. Crozier’s foregrounding of place is not surprising, given her grounding in Canadian literary tradition (which will be addressed later in this text) and given the importance of place in the process of remembering, and its presence in the common everyday metaphors. The metaphors – often utilized in self-texts – transform the temporal into spatial and conceptualize our lives in terms of space or movement in space (suggesting, for example, that life is a journey, that it can be mapped, that the past is back or behind you and the future ahead of you, etc.). The past is always placed “in actual experiences of remembering, the spatiality and temporality of the mnemonic presentation are often correlated to the

 Boyd, Garden Plots, eBook Collection (EBSCOhost).  Cf., for example, Rose, “ ‘ Bones Made of Light.’ ”

84

Agnieszka Rzepa

point of becoming indissociable.”¹⁰ The key to the past, if we follow Edward S. Casey’s argument, is “place” in the sense of space as experienced, lived, endowed with emotion; place “which cannot be reduced to site (the just where) […] Having been places is […] a natural resource for remembering our own being in the world.”¹¹ In her transformation of “actual experiences of remembering” into a well-crafted memoir, Crozier transforms the temporal into spatial experienced and re-experienced, so that her text seems to metaphorically invoke space, not simply and not only as a container of both the body itself and lived experience, but as place so strongly linked to the autobiographical subject that it not only defines it, but makes it. Similarly, place depends on the subject for its existence. As Deirdre Heddon notes, analyzing various approaches to the concept, place has no objective existence beyond the human subject; rather, it is “something we bring into existence thorough our relationships with it and our relationships with others in, on or around it.”¹² Remembered places depend for their existence on our experience of place. The way Crozier presents remembered place as experienced through the senses and the body seems to confirm Casey’s contention that “an intimate relationship between memory and place is realized […] through the lived body […] the lived body puts us in touch with the psychical aspects of remembering and the physical features of place.”¹³ Even though in her descriptions of the “first causes” Crozier strives for the sense of the mythical and unchanging, they are rooted in intimate, sensory, bodily experience, which she universalizes and makes atemporal through the use of the second person as her primary narrative perspective in the vignettes. The pronoun “you” is, on the one hand, often used in very specific contexts, so that it is clear that it refers to the lived experience or facts from the life of the autobiographical narrator – strengthening, however, the sense of both temporal and, we might assume, spatial distance of the narrator from phenomena or events described. On the other hand, the “you” promises to include readers, regardless of their individual backgrounds or experiences, paradoxically reducing the distance between them and the phenomena or events, suggesting a universal, even mythical, nature of what is described, inviting readers to look both into and beyond the incidence of individual life. This is well demonstrated in the three opening vignettes of the memoir. In the first one – “first cause: light” –

 Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP): 71.  Casey, Remembering, 215 (emphasis in the original).  Deirdre Heddon, Autobiography and Performance: Performing Selves (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 93.  Casey, Remembering, 190 (emphasis in the original).

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

85

Crozier metaphorically describes “light” as experienced in “the plains where you were born,” as “another form of water.” She develops the metaphor to transform the visual into tactile experience: the light is palpable, can be touched leaving the skin damp, “after an hour or two of walking, you are soaked in brightness,” its currents can drown you. At the same time, it feels animate, its dampness reminding “you” of a dog licking your cheek, its quality – of a bird: “All day long it touches you with the smallest of its million watery wings” (SBS, 1). Light in the plains is in this section a full-body experience, and a quality of place is described primarily through the effect it has on the person “emplaced.” Like the majority of other renditions of “first causes,” the metaphoric description contributes simultaneously to building the readers’ sense of the Canadian prairies as an atemporal “first cause,” a sense of how the autobiographical subject experienced the place and the life in the prairies in general. Yet, it also invites the readers to “feel with” the narrator: to make a connection between specific descriptions and aspects of their own lived experience. “Dust,” as defined in the vignette that follows, is the opposite of light and opaque where the light is “clear.” It is shown as part of everyday mundane experience of the prairie life and as a grand metaphor for the mysteries of death and life: It thickens your spit, it tucks between your fingers and toes, it sifts through the shell of an egg. Here’s dust in your eye and ashes to ashes. It is the bride’s veil and the widow’s, the skin between this world and the next.

At the end, there is a return to how dust is experienced through the body, as the image becomes olfactory: “It is the smell you love most, the one that means home to you, dust on the grass as it meets the first drops of summer rain” (SBS, 2). “First cause: wind,” the third of the opening vignettes, completes – but does not exhaust – the description of the broad environment of the prairies by introducing plant, animal and human life into the picture. Wind, metaphorized as “an exhalation” of huge lungs, is described through its tangible effect on and interaction with “what loves [it] in this spare land”: the aspens, the tumbleweeds, the wheat, the badger, the wolverine, and finally, a woman. Though loved, it is a force to reckon and contend with. The vignette concludes with the figure of the woman walking against the wind, “bent into it, a flat country’s Sisyphus, the wind rising.” Though unnamed, which gives her a universal aura, the woman is clearly special – loving the wind which “most of her kind hate” (SBS, 4) – again both a generalized everywoman and one special woman,

86

Agnieszka Rzepa

who – as the memoir develops – is strongly associated with the figure of Crozier’s autobiographical narrator’s mother. The first three vignettes describe the prairie phenomena that seem intangible yet enduring, permeating the place, making the environment through which “you” move. Their impact is ambivalent; they are all both enchanting and dangerous, originary and final at the same time. Descriptions of the place-related “first causes” that follow – rain, snow, sky, insects, grass, gravel, horizon – only develop and deepen the cords struck in the first three. The fact that the vignette on “light” opens the memoir is not coincidental. Light, through its metaphoric rendition as water, is presented as the source and sustainer of life, but also its figurative end: “If you stay too long in the open, you could drown, its currents carrying you to its source, your body bobbing, then going under, your lungs full of lustre” (SBS, 1). In her poems, in particular in the volumes Everything Arrives at the Light (1995) and (though differently) in Apocrypha of Light (2002), which contains her rewritings of biblical stories, Crozier has already established light as the presence that begins it all. Light precedes and makes God, who is but the shape the light needs to “move inside” in order to confront darkness/absence and make the world glow/be.¹⁴ It makes its appearance in many of her poems at liminal moments of birth and death, the two often invoked at the same time, as in: “I remember my own birth, / tumbling forward / toward the light the dying speak of.”¹⁵ Light, as Rose concludes, functions in Crozier’s texts as “a principle that informs the world and all that is in it, thereby offering us a mechanism by which we can read, write and sing the sentient universe.”¹⁶ The universal sentience, discussed by Rose in relation to Crozier’s poetry, is evoked in the memoir mostly in and through the poetic vignettes. While the sense of “the sentient universe” emerges from the combination of prose and poetic pieces, in the vignettes themselves it is clearer in the descriptions of inanimate phenomena or plants (“first cause: grass”) than, for example, of insects, though those are also treated as one of the “first causes.” The vignette on insects (flies, grasshoppers, dragonflies, miller moths, mosquitoes, ants) foregrounds their omnipresence and seemingly timeless existence – in this respect they are like light, dust, and wind. The fragments tend toward simple description, stressing the effect the presence of insects has on both farm life and individual life. Again, however, insects are presented as intimately connected with the circle  Lorna Crozier, “Apocrypha of Light,” in Apocrypha of Light (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002): 3  Lorna Crozier, “Who has seen neither birth nor death,” in Everything Arrives at the Light (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995): 13.  Rose, “ ‘ Bones Made of Light,’ ” 57.

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

87

of life, but also eternal: flies are “the ones who started it all” (SBS, 104), miller moths leave “across the wall and counterpane […] a grimy smudge, dust with some oil in it, close to what we must become” (SBS, 106), ants incessantly “recreate the earth” (SBS, 107). In “first cause: gravel” sentience seems to be out of question: “there’s no un-man-made, earthly thing more lifeless,” “nothing so resists pathetic fallacies” as gravel, the narrator notes. And yet, she also notes its resistance, “its need-to-go” (SBS, 135), recognizing finally the ultimate unknowability of gravel arising from its absolute difference from the human subject. It is accorded the status of a first cause, because “it is commonplace, and everywhere a prairie road can go” (SBS, 135), omnipresent and timeless. The descriptions of landscape- and weather-related first causes also demonstrate human life as affected by place – a universalized picture that is particularized in prose recollections. The vignettes show not only the mutual relationship between place and individual subject, but cumulatively also give the reader a broader sense of the experience of life in the prairies, including the prairie farm, which features only tangentially in the autobiographical prose chapters. Crozier’s life as a child and teenager is lived primarily in the town of Swift Current. Her parents, both born on farms, are relatively poor working-class town people. She knows farm life from the recollections of her parents and from regular visits to her maternal grandparents’ farm. It is, therefore, to a large extent thanks to the “first cause” fragments that the reader receives a broad picture of the prairie and a sense of the area as primarily agricultural. “First cause: rain,” for example, is presented not only as the receiver of the autobiographical subjects moods, “a mynah bird calling its notes” (SBS, 57), but – because of its alternating scarcity and overabundance, as well as its life-giving and life- and crop-destroying force – also as “a malevolent mercy, keeping a farmer off the field for half a season; a hard baptism, dropping crystal pebbles on your skin, flattening the ripened crops, the most bountiful in twenty years,” and a force that has the power to make “the people dance” (SBS, 57). Setting her individual experience against the broader natural and cultural landscape of the prairies and a prairie town, Crozier enters a territory densely written over by Canadian historical, cultural and literary discourse. For a reader of Canadian literature, the dominant position she accords to light, dust, wind, rain, snow, sky; insects, grass, gravel, horizon, family and story are overly familiar. The harsh experience of prairie settlement, the stifling atmosphere of a small prairie town, the image of a prairie family, and finally, stories of the prairies and prairie homesteading in general have constituted an important part of Canadian national mythology. Canadian prairie literature – first through its romanticized renditions of the Canadian West as a paradise in the making and a laboratory of a new society, later in realistic revisions of this mythology in novels by Fred-

88

Agnieszka Rzepa

erick Philip Grove, Robert Stead, Martha Ostenso, W. O. Mitchell and Sinclair Ross, and more recently through rewritings of the earlier paradigms by writers such as Aritha Van Herk or Margaret Sweatman – has not only contributed to the creation of this mythology, but also reflected and challenged it. In the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century, when Canada sought to draw immigrants to the prairies, the prairie settlement was conceptualized as a way of changing barren wasteland into a bountiful Eden, thereby constructing a new society guided by the values of the reinvigorated British Empire. S. Leigh Matthews comments: That the Canadian West was intended to inspire a rebirth of the British Empire, together with all its perceived superior and ‘civilized’ values, inevitably meant that cultural narratives of western expansion and settlement became inscribed by a spatial politics of gender.¹⁷

Culturally, and through the medium of literature as well as political propaganda, the process was presented as a primarily masculine heroic endeavor. The prairies themselves, the land conceptualized as clear of any prior history or signification, were presented as fertile and feminine, open to penetration, exploration, possession and cultivation by the male settler. The figure of the prairie woman was constructed in this discourse analogically as that of a sturdy, fertile helpmate of the settler. Additionally, she was to function as the civilizing force and guardian of moral values: “in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the image of the white prairie woman was represented as the central vessel through which the Anglo ideology of ‘civilization’ would be replicated in the west.”¹⁸ Canadian literature responded with images that variously supported or challenged the ideology. While even early prairie novels demonstrate a variety of approaches, allowing for interpretations foregrounding a number of different motives and tropes, Canadian literary critics from the 1940s through the 1970s – Edward McCourt, Henry Kreisel, Eli Mandel, Laurie Ricou, Dick Harrison – chose to focus on what they perceived as a deterministic (though to different degrees) and rather dark relationship between landscape and character, and the alien and alienating

 S. Leigh Matthews, Looking Back: Canadian Women’s Prairie Memoirs and Intersections of Culture, History and Identity (Calgary: U of Calgary P, 2010): 210.  Matthews, Looking Back, 217.

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

89

character of the prairie that resists articulation.¹⁹ The negative images of the hostile, but also flat and uninteresting natural environment of the prairies, the single-minded almost inarticulate male farmer and his hard-working, badly treated family, and of a parochial prairie town have dominated the cultural imagination in Canada. The images still persist in spite of the “rewriting” and critical re-reading of the prairie West in fiction and non-fiction as well as in works of literary criticism, history and culture from the beginning of the 1980s on. Perhaps the most important element of the more recent renditions of the prairie is the reassertion of the Native and female presence, and a changed presentation of prairie nature as neither the Eden nor the wilderness wasteland, but as a complex ecosystem that people are merely a part of. While life writing texts, especially memoirs by prairie women, have apparently always presented a less unequivocal image of the settlement and life on the prairies and the land itself ²⁰ than the one at least some of prairie fiction has, Crozier’s reworking of the stereotypical images, especially the gender paradigm, is still unique. Nevertheless, the prairies she remembers and recollects remain staunchly Anglo-Saxon and devoid of Native presence. She only notes with regret that her grandfather had no stories about the first people; and that by her own times they were nowhere to be seen, ousted out of their ancestral grounds, their presence visible only through occasional artifacts found on the prairie. Similarly, her hometown, as she describes it, is a familiar, but stagnant little place, very much class- and genderconscious and prudish. Crozier’s memoir interestingly uses, confirms, and subverts some of the other established images and tropes. Apart from her nuanced presentation of the “first causes” that constitute familiar ingredients of the prairie environment, as discussed above, she manages to address also the gendered paradigms through which the prairies have been defined. Some of the recollections featured in the memoir seem to confirm at least part of the stereotypical image of prairie life and prairie family. Her maternal grandfather, for example, is a Welsh immigrant, who arrived in Canada with his family drawn by the false promises of free land, “healthful” climate, and agricultural plenty, only to discover after arrival that there was no more “free land left to homestead” (SBS, 25), and the land itself was bare and unwilling to yield harvest. In her rendition of the story, Crozier uses and subverts stereotypical images of the Canadian West exemplified by images shown by Canadian recruiters to the prospective immigrants, in which fertile  Cf. Alison Claire Calder, “The Lie of the Land: Regionalism, Environmental Determinism, and the Criticism of Canadian Prairie Writing,” 1996. Digitized Theses. Paper 2670. (acc. 12 Nov. 2016).  Cf. Matthews, Looking Back.

90

Agnieszka Rzepa

land willingly yielding its plenty to the farmer was feminized and personified as “blonde, Nordic-looking women bearing apples, grapes and huge vegetables” (SBS, 26). Crozier offers a different personification and, alluding to the “Nordic-looking women,” shows the story of her grandfather’s life as played out under the “unrelenting” blue of the eye of the prairie sky: “a hard, no-nonsense colour impossible to romanticize. There was no way to match its gaze or change its mind” (SBS, 26). After many years as a hired laborer, Grandpa Ford manages to get a farm, but years of hard work make him a dour, unsmiling and cruel man, a tyrant to his wife and children, cruel to animals, hostile to formal education. The imagery Crozier uses to describe relations between her grandparents is the one famously summed up by Robert Kroetsch in his 1978 essay “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction” as the “horse : house” dichotomy, which he perceived as a baseline for gender relations in prairie fiction.²¹ Having associated man with open exterior spaces (and therefore with “horse”) and woman with closed interior spaces (“house”), Kroetsch proceeds to build analogous pairs of opposites: “movement : stasis” and “pleasure : duty.” In Crozier’s memoir horses are definitely an attribute of the prairie man, used not only for work, but also for show during town parades, when pride of place is accorded to local big shots on horseback and a “life-sized black-and-white pinto made of steel” (SBS, 5). Gender relations on the prairie farm are definitely described as those defined by the “horse : house” dichotomy. The chapter titled “the drunken horse” starts with the description of her stern and sour Grandpa Ford’s favorite story focusing on his loving relationship with his horse Billy, whose qualities – “endurance and willingness to work” – he shares (SBS, 28) and with whom he visits local pubs. Billy is the only animal treated by the grandfather with affection. When they get to the pub, Billy sticks his head through a window to drink the first pint of beer bought by the grandfather, and the delighted patrons keep buying drinks to the pair late into the night. The story brings together masculinity/horse/movement/ pleasure, a depiction which stands in stark opposition to the image of the maternal grandmother, always in the house, always busy, and alert not to be late to open the gate when her husband arrives “with his team of horses” (SBS, 27). Similarly, Crozier’s paternal grandmother is associated with house/stasis/duty. After leaving the farm to her younger son, disinheriting Crozier’s father in the process, she resides “in the smallest house [her granddaughter has] ever seen,” incapacitated by her “milk leg,” almost completely stationary. Both the grandfather and the

 Robert Kroetsch, “The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space,” in Sinclair Ross’s As for Me and My House: Five Decades of Criticism, ed. David Stouck (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1991): 114.

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

91

grandmothers are presented as essentially unloving and cold, and unjust in the treatment of at least some of their children. Their relation to the land is based on hard relentless work and that to animals and family members on functionality bordering on cold pragmatism. The stereotyped image of gender relations and prairie people is evoked in the memoir mostly in reference to the older generation of Crozier’s family, the farm people, but also through images of big family celebrations, like Thanksgiving dinners on the farm, during which male and female duties were strictly defined and separate. However, descriptions of her parents, especially her mother, build a different image of prairie (town) people and their relation to their surroundings, though prairie town is not idealized, and remains a stifling, constricting environment. Nevertheless, Crozier’s mother – though still focusing on household duties and child rearing – enjoys much more freedom than her mother did. While she works hard in the house and cultivating her garden, she – like her husband – takes up different jobs outside the house, enjoys curling matches and meetings with friends. Her daughter’s duty is to be happy; there is no backbreaking work for the child, though helping around the house and in the garden is required. Crozier’s father is an important, sometimes flamboyant, though murky presence in the text. His alcoholism, which the mother attempts to hide from the community, and his emotional detachment from the kids cast a shadow over the narrator’s childhood and teenage years, thereby becoming a constriction and a lens through which young Crozier is perceived by others: “I was Emerson Crozier’s daughter. That was the circle of light I stood inside no matter what I did or who I tried to be” (SBS, 97). This bitter but at the same time strangely warm image returns later in the memoir when, during dancing lessons with her father, she finds, to her surprise, a pleasure “in being inside the circle of his arms” (SBS, 123). It is the mother, however, who dominates every aspect of the memoir. In spite of poverty and her husband’s alcoholism, she remains a sustaining presence, a nurturer devoted to her family, but also a provider and her own person, fully in control of her life, definitely not a victim trapped by economy and an unhappy marriage. Crozier’s autobiographical narrator discovers the latter, to her shock, through the final words her mother directs to her husband, after scattering his ashes: “There you go, Emerson […] You made my life better” (SBS, 150). It is also through those words that the narrator gets to recognize the mystery and the power of intimate long-term relationships; and it is through the figure of the mother that the reader gets a sense of a different, deeper nature of the relationship between people and the land, one not based on domination, exploitation and economic gain, but on love, or at least a sense of affinity. When, in “first causes: mom and dad,” Crozier announces that “[her mother’s] favorite place is Saskatchewan: she can’t understand why anyone would

92

Agnieszka Rzepa

want to go anywhere else, even for a holiday, even in winter” (SBS, 34), the announcement simply concretizes the image the reader is already familiar with because, early in the text, in “first cause: wind,” Crozier introduces the figure of the woman who loves the wind. She shows her out in the open (exterior) space, which is culturally coded as “male,” enjoying her encounter with the wind. The description foregrounds the fact that “love,” in this case, does not involve submitting to the force of the wind or enjoying its delicate caress. Rather – much like Peggy Crozier’s love for her husband Emerson and her family – it involves an unending, perhaps futile struggle (SBS, 4). The description foregrounds the determination and physical strength of the woman “pushing the boulder of the wind with her shoulders and chest,” but also her affinity with the wind, whose energy is her own: “There’s an energy that gusts inside her; wind steals her soul, adds distance and desire, then gives it back” (SBS, 4). Instead of a towering presence of the “vertical” man against the background of the “horizontal world,” whose challenge he has to meet – as popularized by prairie realism in fiction and foregrounded by critics, notably Laurie Ricou – and instead of Kroetsch’s man/horse/movement/pleasure – the first image of a human being Crozier’s reader encounters is that of a woman leaning lovingly and forcefully into the wind: woman/movement/pleasure. When an upright human figure in the flat landscape appears in the memoir, it is that of Crozier’s autobiographical narrator – another female figure – next to a solitary tree (SBS, 103). No struggle or attempt at dominating the landscape ensues. The tree, like some other natural phenomena and creatures appearing in the memoir – the stars, the snake – is transformed into a symbol of bitter knowledge and existential fear that comes with growing up. The cottonwood, the only tree in the vicinity of the town of Swift Current, Saskatchewan that was not planted by people, first appears in the text as a local landmark, not just a good place for picnics, but also a symbol of placedness and a safe haven. Recalling the time she spent under the tree with her friend Linda, sheltered by the leaves and branches from the outside world, Crozier’s narrator says: “beneath the golden branches, we knew exactly where we were. Then, we didn’t know how rare that was or what it meant. We didn’t know how easily you can get lost once you move away from childhood” (SBS, 102). The realization comes later, when she drives to see the tree in winter, against the darkening sky. “Ordinary yet remarkable, the two of us were the only upright things for miles” (SBS, 103), she comments. The leafless tree no longer “talks”; rather, Crozier writes, “its branches bore the blue star-silence of the snow” (SBS, 103). The image, foregrounding the loneliness, the impending darkness, silence, coldness, alludes to two earlier moments of epiphany: one, when young Crozier, forced to watch boys nail a snake to a telephone pole, loses her fear of snakes and sees them instead

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

93

as creatures gesturing at, able to taste with their tongues, “the darkness at the heart of things” (SBS, 73); and another one, when she “really” sees the stars for the first time – their cold, remote stare – and starts fearing the dark, feeling eternal loneliness. She writes: That night, I knew there was no comfort in the world. Something pitiless among the stars had shown itself and seemed to know me. Among a thousand earthly things, it had picked me out for loneliness […]. I knew then that was what waited in the dark […]. (SBS, 81)

The transformation of the metaphoric meaning of the tree, from safe “home place” to a marker of cosmic loneliness, indicates the general trajectory of the memoir, which culminates with the long description of Crozier’s mother’s last days and the magic realist sequence of their two meetings and conversations when she is already dead. The impending death of the mother makes the autobiographical narrator articulate her hope for the possibility that death means the energy of the body is returning to energy that makes the world. Even though she finds this vision heartening, she desperately yearns for her mother to remain “intact” after death, to watch over her, to remain a presence in her life. Her vision of immortality, however, adds a new dimension to the meaning of the first causes as participants “of the great mass of energy that makes up the world, its spirit and its matter” (SBS, 175 – 176). They are sustained by the same energy that sustains every individual human being. In a sense, then, they are us, we are them. Crozier reflects that her parents, who wanted their ashes to be scattered near the neighboring farms where they grew up, close to a stream emptying into an alkaline lake, will return to the element from which they were made and were a part of, the prairie: “the minerals leaching into the food and water that nourished them came from the same dry wheatland soil. […] Their eyes filled with the unblinking prairie light that candled the stubble at dawn” (SBS, 149 – 150). The two appearances of the mother during her writer’s retreat in a monastery not far from Saskatoon – first on the bleachers, then in a wheat field – might be read as an imaginative response to the desire to keep the mother as she was in life: in her bodily form, separate from the prairie. However, it might also be read as an expression of the hope that the dead somehow endure and can be recaptured through the world that surrounds us – an interpretation supported by the fact that while the memoir describes the months of the mother’s final decline and her approaching death, the author does not give the description of the mother actually dying. Mom, one of the first causes, remains – like them – eternal. The strange transformation, or even destruction, of time that eternity implies is already hinted at as the family sit vigil at the house of the dying mother.

94

Agnieszka Rzepa

The house becomes open to the elements, discrete units of time disappear, and time itself is revealed to be a curtain or a shroud: “wind blows through the hours and shreds them into ragged strips. There’s no definite beginning or end to one hour, two, three” (SBS, 167). The shredded curtain of time refuses, however, to offer any glimpses into the “great beyond.” The conversations Crozier has with her mother, as she makes her unexpected appearances, reveal no mysteries of existence, although, since they take place before Crozier is diagnosed with melanoma, the mother seems to be obliquely communicating a health warning. In general, however, the conversations are whimsical and focus on trivial matters. At the end, the mother disappears, leaving Crozier alone in a field of wheat – one of the stereotypical symbols of the prairie, the all-important place. The endurance, the omnipresence of the intertwining first causes is then perhaps the only “mystery” that the memoir posits. The memoir finishes with the vignette titled “first cause: story,” which brings together all the first causes, foregrounding the capacity of discourse to breach the bounds of time and space. Story and imagination give the autobiographical author access to times and events, and the family past she cannot possibly remember. Story is really the first cause and the last stand, it enlivens memory, which is not just individual but communal, “inherited.” Story inheres in place, which is presented metaphorically as language: This ache, this country of wind and dust and sky, is your starting point, the way you understand yourself, the place you return to when there’s nowhere else to go. It is the pareddown language of your blood and bones. […] Wherever you go, you speak with the earth on your tongue, in the accent passed down for generations. (SBS, 194)

The description denies the link Kroetsch makes in his essay between gender and discourse, his clean-cut division between male and female and his association of maleness with external space, which is “the silence that needs to speak or that needs to be spoken” and femaleness with the closed, interior space, “the having spoken,” the book.²² For Crozier, the closed space of the house and the “having spoken” of the book are not identitarian points of reference; rather, she associates herself with the eternal language of the open prairie, a book without an ending. Even though she talks about the language as being handed down through generations, it seems that it is handed down most significantly in the female line – in the vignette her immediate ancestry is defined through her mother, which clearly associates the land and the language with femininity.

 Kroetsch, “Fear of Women,” 112.

Metaphors of Interrelatedness in Lorna Crozier’s Small Beneath the Sky

95

The device Crozier uses in Small Beneath the Sky of interspersing prose fragments with poetic vignettes of metaphorically rendered first causes allows her to construct a self and a world shaped by a dense network of interconnected forces and influences, those eternal and those incidental, among which discourse, story, is most basic and essential. The vision of old books with missing pages, which the narrator fills in with her own localized and individualized story (SBS, 194), demonstrates metaphorically the process of asserting the importance and uniqueness of one’s own life among many others by articulating it.

Gabriele Linke

Language as Metaphor: Functions of Metalinguistic Reflection in European Migrants’ Life Writing

Throughout its history, Europe has witnessed the movement of people across political, cultural, and linguistic borders. Even during the Cold War, some individuals crossed the borders between the Eastern and Western bloc to live in the West. Especially since the 1980s, several Eastern Europeans who crossed the borders to Western Europe, and to Britain in particular, have written about their lives in two or more different countries and languages and have published their narratives in English. For many of them, the acquisition of English as a second language and the maintenance of their native tongue assume meanings that go far beyond their obvious necessity and usefulness for living in another culture. Rather, the authors employ reflections on their struggles with language to negotiate and describe changing and conflicting identifications, assigning language metaphorical meanings. In its analysis of some examples for such autobiographical texts, this contribution builds on Zoltán Kövecses’ appropriation and further development of conceptual and complex metaphors based on Lakoff/Johnson’s fundamental insights. It argues that – as metaphors can express abstract qualities, emotions etc. – identity and social belonging may be concepts that are often understood through (complex) metaphors and that talking about the acquisition of a language may metaphorically deal with identity. “I believe the true home is the language. If you leave the language, you leave home.”¹ – Oskar Maria Graf, cited in “Lederhose in New York”

Introduction When Oskar Maria Graf, a popular Bavarian author since the 1920s, emigrated to New York in 1938, he fell in love with and remained in the cosmopolitan city, but

 “Ich glaube, die wahre Heimat ist die Sprache. Wenn man die Sprache verlässt, verlässt man die Heimat.” Oskar Maria Graf, cited in Rudolf Neumaier, “Lederhose in New York” (München), Süddeutsche Zeitung (June 3/4/5, 2017): 18. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-007

98

Gabriele Linke

he continued to write and publish in German, speaking very little English even after twenty years in the United States. As a true cosmopolitan, he appreciated multicultural Manhattan, but his true home, he once said, was – the German – language.² For Graf, language stands for home, but home as a cultural and spiritual rootedness that does not concur with the author’s actual place of living. Graf’s statement, the statement of an emigrant from Nazi Germany, may serve as a first indication that in situations of migration, of physical movement to other countries or cultural environments, language can assume specific metaphorical meanings, as for example in this context, in which language is a place. This study, however, will explore more recent narratives of migration. Especially since the 1980s, numerous persons from the former Eastern bloc crossed the borders to Western Europe and Britain in particular, or to North America, out of which a number of writers have emerged and whose memoirs about their lives in two or more different countries and languages have been published in English. For many of them, the acquisition of English as a second language has assumed meanings that go far beyond its obvious necessity and usefulness for living in another culture, while the maintenance of their native language becomes a need that is hard to describe. Thus, the authors employ reflections on their struggles with language to negotiate and describe their changing and conflicting identifications, assigning both language in general and their different languages – native and foreign³ – metaphorical meanings. One of the metaphors studied extensively in cognitive linguistics, “Life is a journey,”⁴ is also one that is most suitable for autobiographical writings on both conceptual and textual levels. It offers itself to support constructions of migrants’ lives, which involve, for example, places of departure, obstacles, and destinations. As Graf’s statement shows, language can function as a metaphor expressing the discrepancies between physical and cultural-emotional place at the end of a journey, his emigration to New York. Before addressing the questions of how language functions as a metaphor and how reflections about language often carry metaphorical meanings in Euro-

 Neumaier, “Lederhose in New York,” 18.  Although linguists distinguish between foreign and second language acquisition, and in the case of migration, the foreign would become the second language, the term ‘foreign language’ is preferred here to emphasize its cultural difference from the native language.  Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005): 123, and George Lakoff, “The Contemporary Theory of Metaphor,” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1993): 202– 251, 223 – 224. George Lakoff, Zoltán Kövecses, and others use capital letters to indicate that an item is a concept rather than a word.

Language as Metaphor

99

pean migrants’ life writing, the concept of metaphor, as used in this study, needs to be clarified further. This brief and, admittedly, reductive introduction to conceptions of metaphor will be followed by an outlook on the texts analyzed and a discussion of examples of the metaphorical meanings language can take on in migrants’ life narratives. As the acquisition of a new language is a process paralleling a shift of identity, the foreign language may function as an object to be appropriated while the native language is being lost, or food/liquid that is devoured or rejected, nourishing, or indigestible. The learning process can be seen as a road to a new belonging, and language, a carrier of cultural and emotional connotations, is apt to represent life, the vanishing life of the native and blossoming life of the new identity.

Metaphor, and

LANGUAGE

as metaphor

Although there are numerous theories of metaphor, this paper employs the concept of metaphor as “based on embodied human experiences” and as a means of thinking and understanding the world, which was developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson and other cognitive linguists,⁵ including Zoltán Kövecses. Kövecses attempts to make one version of the cognitive linguistic theory of metaphor accessible for the study of social-cultural phenomena, for instance emotions, politics, and thought, as well as “highly abstract processes and entities such as time, life, and personhood.”⁶ For this purpose, he has elaborated the concept of metaphor in cognitive linguistics with regard to the universality and variation of metaphors and focused on culture-specific conceptualizations of “intangibles” such as love. He suggests a distinction between primary metaphors like affection is warmth, which are used across different cultures, and complex metaphors, which are not necessarily based on bodily experience but rather “on cultural considerations and cognitive processes of various kinds,”⁷ of which life is a journey is an example. Furthermore, he argues that metaphors are “just as much cultural as they are cognitive entities and processes” and that both primary and complex metaphors have “meaning foci” or major themes that are culture-specific associations with the source domain of the metaphor.⁸ These considerations should prove meaningful in a discussion of language as metaphor in European migrants’ life narratives.    

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live by (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1980). Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture, xiii. Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture, 3 – 4. Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture, 11– 12.

100

Gabriele Linke

Although coming from a similar background in cognitive linguistics as Kövecses, Andrew Goatly employs a different terminology (Root Analogy for conceptual metaphor), but what is of interest here are his sets of Root Analogies regarding language,⁹ among which are the following: idea/words = substance/object (LM, 65), idea/information/words = food/drink (LM, 70), = liquid (LM, 72) words/language = human (LM, 77).

Goatly points out that these Root Analogies for language emphasize either the discursive process or the static product (LM, 66). His list provides inspiration for a discussion of language as a complex conceptual metaphor, but he approaches the matter as a linguist so that the details of his descriptive study are not applicable for the cultural-textual approach pursued here. Moreover, in the context of migration and the resulting acquisition and uses of a second language, rather specific mappings of metaphors may be encountered. For migrants who have arrived in another country, metaphors not only conceptualize language use in general, but, because of the complicated decisions and emotions regarding the uses of their native (first) and the foreign (second) language, different and more diverse meanings may also surface. Their understanding of language will be complicated by the diverse functions, feelings, and values attached to the (at least) two different languages migrants have at their disposal. Since metaphors can also express abstract processes and entities such as life and personhood, and identity and social belonging are concepts that may often be understood through the use of (complex) metaphors, this study will explore how migrants’ narratives involve statements about language that deal metaphorically with identity and belonging. This is based on the assumption that language, although an abstract and complex concept in itself, can provide the (more physical and concrete) source domain through which a different, more abstract domain of experience, belonging/identity, may be understood.¹⁰ In addition, Goatly, for example, suggests that metaphors can be reversed and the target domain can be turned into the source domain (LM, 66), which may happen when both concepts are rather abstract. In this study of memoirs, it is therefore necessary to consider some textual constructions regarding language that go beyond the lexical level.

 Andrew Goatly, The Language of Metaphors (London: Routledge, 1997); further references in the text abbreviated as “LM.”  Kövecses, Metaphor in Culture, 5.

Language as Metaphor

101

This study is only a first exploration of a field that spreads slightly uneasily between linguistics, textual, and cultural studies. It can neither offer an elaborate application and adaptation of the metaphor theory of cognitive linguistics to migrants’ life narratives nor provide a comprehensive description of metaphors involving language in autobiographical writing. Rather, with the help of examples from migrants’ life narratives, the limits of linguistic description will be transgressed and the contribution of various conceptual language metaphors to a deeper understanding of the complex and diverse social and emotional processes migrants go through will be explored. The textual analysis is organized through some main groups of metaphors that were found in the five autobiographical texts. For the discussion of the meanings and representations of language, however, it will be unavoidable to take into regard each author’s and text’s specificity because the repertoire of language metaphors is flexible and employed by each author to express his/ her individual situation, experience, and narrative strategies.

Autobiographical texts by migrants from the former ‘Eastern bloc’ The five memoirs by migrants from the former Eastern bloc were selected for this study because they, on the one hand, share some of the same features, such as their authors’ Europeanness, experience of life in the Eastern bloc, migration to an English-speaking country, and acquisition of English as their second language, so they are in this respect comparable. On the other hand, they were written by authors of different generations, coming from different countries, and migrating at different times in their lives and in European history, which needs to be considered for the interpretation of language metaphors. To be able to discuss language in metaphorical expressions and to find out what these metaphors say about the author’s specific conceptualization of the experience of migration, the five texts will be introduced briefly in order to establish each autobiographer’s background of migration and language situation. The order will be roughly chronological, starting with the earliest text. Eva Hoffman was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1945. Due to growing anti-semitism, the family left Poland when she was thirteen to settle in Montreal; Hoffman moved to the United States to study and, from the 1970s on, to work as a professor of literature and creative writing at various universities. Her autobiography Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, published in

102

Gabriele Linke

1989,¹¹ recounts her childhood “Paradise” in Cracow, her “Exile” in Canada, and her settling in “The New World” in the USA.¹² Her autobiography was one of the first by an emigrant from the Eastern bloc to be written in English, and it won critical acclaim for its take on the experience of exile and language. As a literary scholar writing in the 1980s, her thinking and writing appears to be influenced by deconstruction, resulting in an abundance of reflections on the workings of language, out of which only a few examples can be discussed here. Vesna Goldsworthy, born in 1961 in Belgrade, enjoyed a middle-class childhood and youth in Yugoslavia. She then married an Englishman and moved to the UK in 1986, where she later entered a career as a literary scholar and writer. Like Hoffman, she is an academic autobiographer who is highly aware of the academic discourses as well as the identity politics of her time and writes a highly intellectual prose. With regard to her 2005 memoir Chernobyl Strawberries, she claims that she wrote it after she had been diagnosed with cancer so she could capture her voice and Serbian heritage for her son Alexander.¹³ It covers her life from her early years in Belgrade to the time of writing. As a BBC radio broadcaster and journalist during the war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, she was directly confronted with her native language and culture. A second memoir by an ex-Yugoslav who moved to the UK is Vesna Maric’s Bluebird. ¹⁴ In 1992, when Maric was 16, she was taken from Bosnia to England by a volunteer organization to protect her and other women from the beginning war in Yugoslavia. Maric opens her memoir by describing the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina at the outbreak of the war and then focuses on her journey to England and the slow and difficult process of settling in and finding her place in the UK, which coincides with her coming of age. The story ends in 1996 with her first trip back home after having been granted refugee status. She also became a journalist and writer. Gazmend Kapllani’s A Short Border Handbook,¹⁵ which portrays his Albanian life, his illegal border-crossing, and his arrival and first weeks in Greece in 1991, stands out in several ways. While the majority of migrants’ memoirs has been written by women, Kapllani’s book provides a male perspective and includes the experience of a refugee camp for men. The author uses the peculiar form

 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language (London: Vintage, 1998 [1989]); further references in the text abbreviated as “LT.”  These are the headings of the three parts of Hoffman’s Lost in Translation.  Vesna Goldsworthy, Chernobyl Strawberries: A Memoir (London: Atlantic Books, 2006): 281.  Vesna Maric, Bluebird: A Memoir (London: Granta, 2009).  Gazmend Kapllani, A Short Border Handbook, trans. Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife (London: Portobello, 2009).

Language as Metaphor

103

of a Handbook to systematize his experiences and directly address and educate his readership about migrants in general; and the edition used here is a translation from Greek, which raises the question of whether the metaphors featured in the Handbook are all Kapllani’s, or if they have been brought in by the translator. With regard to this question, I would argue that most metaphors in the text are not English idioms but were generated grammatically, and since Kapllani speaks English, he will have authorized the translation; therefore, it seems sufficient to keep in mind that the original was written in a different language – albeit in yet another foreign language for the author. Kapka Kassabova’s Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria ¹⁶ is a mixture of childhood memoir and travel writing. Born in 1973 in Sofia and growing up there until her family moved to Colchester in 1990 and then later to New Zealand, she became a journalist, poet, and novelist and settled in Scotland. In Street without a Name, she records the stops and stations of her extensive trip throughout Bulgaria in the early 2000s, in the course of which she re-visited places, re-united with friends of her childhood and youth, and encountered a changed Bulgaria. Because her text does not primarily deal with the time of her integration into Britain, language does not play as prominent a role as in Hoffman’s and Goldsworthy’s texts, but in some instances, she does reflect on the role of French in Bulgaria and on her early experiences with English. All five texts, published between 1989 and 2009, were produced by authors who were born and raised in a country of the Eastern bloc but who went west when they were young – to the UK, USA, Canada, or Greece – and who later had their memoirs published in English. They will be referred to as migrants because they share the common experience of migration, that is, of crossing national borders to live permanently in another country. Nevertheless, it needs to be acknowledged that this is a mere simplification because their situations, motives, and experiences vary greatly, and they themselves also use other terms such as expat, exile, refugee, or cosmopolitan. They recount the circumstances of their leaving, the routes they took, the welcome or rejection they received upon their arrival, and the process of their accommodation in their host culture. Yet, since each experience as well as each style of writing is different,¹⁷ they em-

 Kapka Kassabova, Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (London: Portobello, 2008).  It must be emphasized that the Eastern bloc was never culturally and socially homogenous but rather marked by great diversity. The specificity of each country in the Eastern bloc regarding history, culture, languages, and its peculiar ‘brand’ of socialism cannot be considered here. Some publications have already started addressing recent autobiographical writing by authors

104

Gabriele Linke

ploy both similar and very different metaphors of language, that is, their native as well as the foreign language(s), to re-construct and make comprehensible their unique, complex, and contradictory experiences.

LANGUAGE as a metaphor in migrants’ memoirs The following section is structured by groups of conceptual metaphors of language, whose meanings are mapped with the help of examples from the texts introduced above. As all texts deal with migration, the meanings of both native and foreign language will play a central role, be it regarding language as a static product or language as a discursive process. The groups result from a systematization of the language metaphors found in the five texts and reflect the most frequently used conceptual metaphors and, in particular, those that represent aspects of identity and belonging in the situation of migration. This study does not claim to be exhaustive, neither with regard to the types of language metaphors nor with regard to their concretizations in the five texts.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

=

OBJECT/SUBSTANCE

Describing the migrant’s beginning engagement with his¹⁸ host country’s language, Kapllani addresses his feelings of both success, as “[the foreign language] starts to grow on him,” and failure, when “[i]n his hands, the language isn’t spoken but broken. He doesn’t just break it, he butchers it.”¹⁹ The metaphor occurs in one of the passages in which Kapllani teaches his readers about the generic

from the former Eastern bloc, as for example, Ioana Luca, “Post-Communist life writing and the discourses of history: Vesna Goldsworthy’s Chernobyl Strawberries,” Rethinking history: A journal of theory and practice 13:1 (2009): 79 – 93; Konstantina Georganta, “The unbearable similarity of the other: The multiple identities of Gazmend Kapllani’s migrant narratives,” Interactions: Studies in Communication and Culture 3:2 (2012): 187– 197; Maria Oikonomou, “Learning New Languages. Literature of Migration in Greece,” in Emergence and Recognition of Immigrant and Ethnic Minority Writers since 1945: Fourteen National Contexts in Europe and Beyond, ed. Sandra Vlasta and Wiebke Sievers (Leiden: Rodopi-Brill, in print), and some contributions in Barbara Korte et al. (ed.), Facing the East in the West: Images of Eastern Europe in British Literature, Film and Culture (Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2010).  Kapllani always uses the masculine form when writing about the generic migrant although the female experience enters his text in a special chapter, including a moving narrative (“The gender of borders” in Border Handbook, 46 – 53).  Kapllani, Border Handbook, 19.

Language as Metaphor

105

migrant’s experiences, and the metaphor could be described as foreign language = object/organism. While the object must be hard, even brittle to be broken, it also has qualities of a living being, an organism that can be butchered. The metaphor captures the perceptions of both the hardness and the organic character of the foreign language system and the culture it represents. As the migrant uses “his hands” to break and butcher the language, he is ascribed a manual laborer’s roughness and crudeness in the treatment of the new language. The metaphor of the organism, however, also implies the possibility of growth, and the growth of the language on the migrant that is mentioned in the first part of the quotation could be understood as learning foreign language = growing, which is a metaphor of the process of the re-formation of the migrant’s identity and a shift towards identification with the host culture. However, since Kapllani concludes the paragraph with “Better mute than annoying,” the migrant’s anxiety and inhibition prevail, metaphorically caused by his destructive clumsiness with language. Hoffman’s language metaphors change in the course of her life narrative. In the section entitled “Exile” (LT, 99 – 164), which is devoted to her school years in Canada, she reflects on the initial obstacles and difficulties of living in English, while in her later years in the United States, “The New World” (LT, 167– 280), she celebrates her full command of English. While in school in Montreal, she “pick[s] [new words] up from school exercises, from conversations” but finds that there are “some turns of phrase to which I develop strange allergies” (LT, 106). The metaphor at work here can be expressed as foreign language/words = object/substance. At this early stage, she gathers new words; nevertheless, some of them do not agree with her, evoking rejection. Foreign words = substance entails a metaphorical mapping that, like a substance triggering negative bodily responses, some words can provoke mental or emotional rejection. The “strange allergies” to some English phrases are an expression of the emotional barriers at work in the acquisition of a foreign language and new identity. As Hoffman explains further, the allergenic objects are mainly conventional phrases of politeness such as “[y]ou’re welcome,” which she can hardly make herself say because “it implies that there’s something to be thanked for, which in Polish would be impolite” (LT, 106). She muses that the most conventional phrases in the foreign language feel most artificial, which may have its causes in the values implicit in such phrases, which she has not yet accommodated in her value system. This friction with conventional phrases may signify that she has not yet mastered the emotional deep structure of values underlying both language and identity. At the textual level, Hoffman’s various uses of the metaphor foreign language = liquid indicate the process of learning to live in a new language.

106

Gabriele Linke

While still new in Canada, she waits for “that spontaneous flow of inner language” that used to come at night, but “[n]othing comes” (LT, 107) because Polish does not apply to her new experiences, and English has not yet been internalized enough. Neither her native nor her foreign language comes to her mind as effortlessly, smoothly, and quickly as a flowing liquid. Again, the subconscious mental barriers at work in the acquisition of a foreign language are given a material form in this metaphor. The in-between status of mind and language capacity is also described through words = substance when Hoffman encounters a people who are “a different species” from anyone she had known in Poland but is not able to characterize them because she lacks the words, again, in both languages: “Polish words slip off them without sticking. English words don’t hook onto anything” (LT, 108). Neither Polish nor English words are capable of connecting with – stick, or hook onto – the new experience, as Polish words do not match the new reality, but her mind has not yet a full command of English. The whole language situation, I suggest, can be read as a metaphor for her awareness of un-belonging, the increasing inappropriateness of her Polish identity and the incomplete character of her Canadian one. This changes, though, with time, and after her musical studies in Texas and at the Yale Music School, Hoffman is admitted to Harvard and switches her major to English literature. There, finally, she claims that she starts walking around as if she were “tentatively trying on a new home” (LT, 202), employing home = clothes to indicate that she is testing the fit of a new identity and the possibility of a new belonging. However, she returns to language metaphors since, for her, the full command of the foreign language is a precondition of full belonging: The thought that there are parts of the language I’m missing can induce a small panic in me, as if such words were missing parts of the world or my mind – as if the totality of the world and mind were coeval with the totality of language. (LT, 217)

If missing words, here, are missing objects, then her full command of the entire foreign language stands for her complete mental appropriation of, and settlement into, the new world and thus her fully formed new identity as a Polish American: (foreign) language = (new) world, and (foreign) language = human/mind. At this point, however, Hoffman still expresses her fear that she may not achieve the state of – linguistic, mental and social – wholeness for her new identity. Gradually, reflections on the difficulties of moving from one language to another vanish, and, instead, she celebrates her newly acquired ease with English: “We speak, my lover and I, until words tumble out without obstacle, until they deliquesce into pure flow, until they become the air that we breathe, until they

Language as Metaphor

107

merge with our flesh” (LT, 246). In this one sentence, various metaphors are combined to represent her new naturalness with English, the once foreign language. Again, words = objects/liquid/air, but here words as objects are produced with ease, meeting no emotional obstacles, and those objects are so smooth and flexible that first they liquefy so that their tumbling becomes a flow, then they even turn into air to be breathed in and be absorbed by the body, augmenting her new identity. The “we” emphasizes the shared character of this human experience. Words, through being objects and substance/air, become food/ organic matter/human. It is relevant here that the words belong to the foreign language, so this sequence of metaphors can be seen as representing the assimilation of the foreign language, English, to the Polish expatriate’s life, transforming her into a new American to whom English comes naturally and of whose identity it has become part, with “flesh” being a mere pars pro toto for the human being. The powerful metaphor of language/words = liquid is also used by other life writers, as Maric remembers that she “soaked up the English language ceaselessly.”²⁰ Kassabova, though, when she starts school in England, observes that even “in fluent English, some things about our lives were inexplicable.”²¹ She, like Hoffman, constructs the process of acquiring a new language, life, and identity as marred by obstacles, but in Kassabova’s case, despite fluency, the foreign language is not sufficient to express the reality of “our life” with its Bulgarian aspects. The foreign language flowing like a liquid does not yet grant a full representation of her Bulgarianness and its integration into a new Bulgarian British identity. It also marks the inaccessibility of the Bulgarian experience for the (native speakers of) English. By assigning the foreign language a fluid quality, the authors stress that it can be eaten, drunk, or breathed, and thus integrated into their body, which means it can be learned and integrated into their identity, although the body rejects what it cannot (yet) absorb, and fluency does not necessarily grant the full expression of meaning. While the language metaphors previously discussed all refer to the migrant’s situation in a new cultural environment, Kassabova first uses words = objects in the context of her youth in Bulgaria, when French was the most popular foreign language and students dreamed of France. She offers a new mapping when she writes, “I clutched my French vocabulary like a money-belt, hoping that one day I might be able to afford the crossing.”²² From the perspective of

 Maric, Bluebird, 72.  Kassabova, Street without a Name, 124.  Kassabova, Street without a Name, 106.

108

Gabriele Linke

the young person in Bulgaria longing to emigrate, the forceful grip on the foreign language represents the need for a good command of it because, as the simile “like a money-belt” suggests, it is valuable as a possibility to “afford the crossing,” that is, enable her to start a new life in another country, France. If foreign language = object, then the object is a currency to buy, metaphorically, into another culture or pay for a crossing, which will be further discussed below. The desperate clinging to foreign words, possible because foreign words = objects, reappears in Kassabova’s statement about her early days in Britain where she “desperately clutched at words” to make sense when her British friend Helen talked too quickly.²³ Here, words, lexical items, are the solid parts of the foreign language, the elements to rely on for understanding, and Kassabova’s use of “clutch” stands for the despair of the language learners who want to hold on to the foreign language, keep it, make it their own, and through it, tap into new possibilities of identity.

FOREIGN LANGUAGE

=

FOOD

Food metaphors are bound to occur in migrants’ life narratives because, at all stages of the spatial and mental journey of migration, a person needs to be sustained and may experience hunger as well as satiation. In her youth in socialist Bulgaria, Kassabova perceives foreign language, and in this case, French, a western European language, as Food, as she writes about hearing Michel Sardou’s chansons: Every song with a political message resonated with us. It didn’t matter what the original meaning of the message was. We were so hungry, so alive, and so isolated that the mere bones of a human voice thrown from the outside fed us.²⁴

In this metaphor, the voice, or French song (language/text), comes from the western world to Bulgarians who, due to the confinement of their society and borders, thrive intellectually already on the smallest items such as songs (food/bones) coming in from the outside world. The metaphors here have several layers as, for example, voice/song = bones points to the relatively meagre input of French language and culture that one singer’s songs can offer and which characterizes the situation in Bulgaria. The complex metaphors emphasize the intellectual starvation in Bulgaria, which makes young Bulgarians eagerly ab Kassabova, Street without a Name, 124.  Kassabova, Street without a Name, 107.

Language as Metaphor

109

sorb any fragment of the foreign language and culture. However, the high value placed on foreign language also arises from the young Kassabova’s cosmopolitan leanings that unfold further in her adult life and travels. The hunger for words is also described by Hoffman as follows: I gather [words], put them away like a squirrel saving nuts for winter, swallow them and hunger for more. If I take in enough, then maybe I can incorporate the language, make it part of my psyche and my body. (LT, 216)

As Hoffman settles into the new (American) world, she sees the process of language learning as gathering, swallowing, and hungering for (more) words, and this process is presented as indispensable for survival – survival being indicated through the comparison with the squirrel preparing for winter. She herself explicates the meaning of the food metaphor, calling eating the “incorporat[ion]” of language, and this possibility to incorporate English into her body and mind then warrants her survival in American culture. Maric also draws on food metaphors, but in different contexts. She combines, for example, words = substance with words = food to express a Bosnian immigrant’s ability to mix substances by anglicizing her Bosnian language, but only by adding an English intonation. She wonders what her friend Bakira’s English husband “thought his new wife was saying when she uttered her Bosnian words dipped in Anglophonic sauce.”²⁵ Maric’s food metaphor, like her memoir, is more humorous than, for example, Hoffman’s, but she still captures the felt necessity of assimilating in the Bosnian wife’s inadequate attempts to anglicize her language and herself for the sake of her husband and married life in England. The sauce metaphor, however, also points to the superficial character of the Bosnian woman’s attempts to assume some features of the foreign language and Englishness.

LANGUAGE LEARNING

=

MOVEMENT/PASSING INTO FOREIGN CULTURE

This metaphor involves agents as well as places; thus, the language learner, acquiring a new language, may encounter the foreign language as both a border that may or may not be crossed through language and a route to a new culture, identity, and belonging. The metaphor is based on the conceptual mapping that, for the language learner, there is a within and a without of the new culture, a

 Maric, Bluebird, 142.

110

Gabriele Linke

here and a there divided by borders but connected by bridges, as in language = road/bridge/border. Kapllani, whose “border handbook” has the crossing of borders as its central theme, uses such metaphors in various places, including the spatial metaphor of passing from one culture and identity to another: “All of this you try to say in as convincing an accent as you can, hoping to pass for a native and convince them you can become one of them.”²⁶ The author, who often generalizes about the migrant experience and seeks to educate his readers, emphasizes the importance of speaking the foreign language well for passing, moving into his host society and a new belonging. The acquisition of the foreign language is equated with the acquisition of a new identity. Furthermore, the mapping of this passing suggests that it depends on the willingness of the receiving culture just as much as it does on the migrant’s convincing performance of the language (“accent”) and his/her acceptance of the culture. Although Kapllani often talks about the generic (first generation) migrant, he observes a difference between the migrant from a prosperous Western and an impoverished Southeast European country – and speaking the foreign language takes on a different meaning: When it comes down to it, there is a real difficulty about difference: when an American speaks broken Greek, he is classified as a ‘nice American,’ but when an Albanian speaks broken Greek, he is classified as nothing more than a ‘bloody Albanian.’ When an American speaks perfect Greek, he is an ‘exceptional American,’ but when an Albanian speaks perfect Greek, all he hears is, “You’ll never be Greek!”²⁷

The metaphorical use of language in this instance suggests that learning language = passing is not universally valid. The migrant’s national or ethnic identity may or may not override the perfect language command as a metaphor of belonging. Coming from Albania renders the perfect speaking of Greek useless as a means of passing and being accepted into Greek society. Again, the receiving society plays a crucial role for the success of passing, and the conclusiveness of language (learning) as a metaphor for assuming a new identity is questioned, exposing the fragility of the process and the power of the host society.

 Kapllani, Border Handbook, 79.  Kapllani, Border Handbook, 21.

Language as Metaphor

LANGUAGE

=

111

LIFE/HUMAN

While the metaphors previously discussed dealt with the perceived qualities of language as an animate (organism) or inanimate object and with language learning as a movement or process, a new metaphorical domain will now be entered, where language is assigned features of organic life and humanity. Again, it will be interesting to determine which meanings their native and the foreign languages have for migrants. Hoffman, whose text is particularly rich in such metaphors, describes that, at the stage of exile, she finds, on the one hand the English word ‘river’ “cold, without an aura,” while on the other hand, “Polish, in a short time, has atrophied, shriveled from sheer uselessness” (LT, 106; 107). The first quotation could be expressed as foreign language = lifeless. Being “cold,” English has not (yet) taken on the quality of warm, which stands for affectionate (LM, 48), meaning that the foreign language has no emotional connotations, and the absence of an “aura” marks a lack of energy of life. Her native language, Polish, however, has started losing life/strength because it has gone out of use. Both languages have qualities of life, but the native language is losing them while the foreign language has not fully acquired them. Very clearly, the state of the two languages also stands for the in-between state of identity. While Hoffman’s Canadian identity has not developed its full human dimensions, lacking emotional ties in particular, her Polishness has rapidly lost its relevance for her identity. Hoffman elaborates further on the lifelessness of English at that point in her life, comparing how, in Polish, the mobility of her face used to emanate “from the mobility of the words coming to the surface and the feelings that drive them” with the current situation, in which, she writes, “I can’t feel how my face lights up from inside; I don’t receive from others the reflected movement of its expressions, its living speech. People look past me as we speak” (LT, 147). In her native language, words are embodied in herself, enriched and propelled by feelings and expressed physically in her face. But, when speaking English her face does not show “its living speech,” since the foreign language, English, has not yet become embodied; it does not come “from inside” and thus cannot speak through her body, and her face in particular, the way her native language used to do. Foreign language is not yet life, not yet human. As with the food metaphor, Hoffman clearly distinguishes between different stages of her life, “Exile” and “The New World,” so that finally, when she writes about her settling into her new (US-American) world, the embodiment of the foreign language does happen, and English does become one with her body and identity. English words = chromosomal substance is a metaphor she employs to explain that English finally comes to life as “now [English words]

112

Gabriele Linke

break up, de-form, and re-form as if they were bits of chromosomal substance trying to rearrange itself” (LT, 243). Not only is English, the foreign language, now granted the quality language = life, with the creativity and malleability this entails; it is also placed in her body and life, which becomes clearer in another statement: Perhaps I’ve read, written, eaten enough words so that English now flows in my bloodstream. But once this mutation takes place, once the language starts speaking itself to me from my cells, I stop being stuck on it. Words are no longer spiky bits of hard matter, which only refer to themselves. They become, more and more, a transparent medium in which I live and which lives in me – a medium through which I can once again get to myself and to the world. (LT, 243)

Here, several metaphors are brought together to describe metaphorically the process of becoming one with the foreign language and thus being able to live a new identity. At first, English words are called “spiky bits of hard matter” (words = objects) and indigestible. Over the course of time, however, so many words are “eaten” (words = food) that they “flow” in her bloodstream, or mind (language = liquid), becoming one with her, and finally the – once foreign – language starts its own productive life inside her (language = life), which renders her productive in her relationship with the new world. The completion of the process that results in (foreign) language = life is celebrated and explicated further in statements, such as “the language has entered my body, has incorporated itself in the softest tissue of my being” and “the words are filled and brimming with the motions of my desire; they curve themselves within my mouth to the complex music of tenderness” (LT, 245). As the (foreign) language/words have evolved into living organisms and merged with her body, they now carry the emotional connotations they lacked at the beginning when they were cold and lifeless. With this language metaphor, Hoffman manages to capture various levels of a migrant’s identity formation, emphasizing not only the relevance of emotion, affection, and love in the process of integration but also the creative energy that can be released when the foreign words come to life and thrive in her own life and social relations, thereby engendering emotional ties as the ultimate link to the “new world.” As an eminent novelist and literary scholar, Hoffman invests much poetic energy in metaphors representing the deep entanglement between her language(s) and evolving identity. Goldsworthy, however, also a literary scholar and writer, presents her negotiations between her native language and English in different terms. When she mentions that she has “fewer inhibitions in English” because for her, “it doesn’t

Language as Metaphor

113

yet carry the subcutaneous layers of pain,”²⁸ she acknowledges that native language = human because Serbian is her language of feelings of loss (“pain”) – of her childhood and youth left behind and of the country destroyed by war. These feelings are embodied in the language invisibly, under its skin. Yet, English, the foreign language, does not carry the emotional load and is thus less restricting, but this does not necessarily mean foreign language = not human; rather, it seems to be less intensely human and therefore more freely usable in some contexts, and in emotional ones in particular. What Goldsworthy’s metaphor shares with Hoffman’s is that the foreign language – and the new identity – acquires its emotional value reluctantly, but only Goldsworthy presents the lack of emotional weight in English as an occasional advantage, making her “more blunt” and “direct” than her Serbian persona.²⁹ Goldsworthy elaborates on the specific quality of native language = human when she suggests: The shards of memory, of everything that there was before I came to London, were embedded so firmly into Serbian that they wouldn’t translate without pain. The illness and fear made the memories erupt. For better or worse, English had to do. Where I was once happy in not belonging, I now wanted to be all in one place just as much as I needed to be all in one piece.³⁰

Here, Goldsworthy’s past life is expressed as memories = objects and, as such, fractured and fragmented “shards.” These memories are only embedded in her native language, from which they erupt and have to be extracted painfully to be preserved in the foreign language. The act of re-storing her memories in the foreign language, English, is then concluded with foreign language = identity because with this transfer and translation of her memories, she strives for fully belonging to her host culture, which can only be completed when foreign language becomes the new depository of emotional memories once only kept in the native language. The transfer of the shards of memory from one body of language to another stands as another metaphor for the process of the shifting of identity in Goldsworthy’s (a migrant’s) life. Her native language, she observes, “remained firmly locked in its mid-eighties Serbo-Croat time capsule,” an object/body that, severed from its natural environment, is losing life/strength and “officially does not even exist anymore.”³¹ Here, as in Hoffman’s “atrophied”

   

Goldsworthy, Goldsworthy, Goldsworthy, Goldsworthy,

Chernobyl Chernobyl Chernobyl Chernobyl

Strawberries, 150. Strawberries, 150. Strawberries, 261. Strawberries, 198.

114

Gabriele Linke

Polish, the ossification and decline of their native language = identity becomes obvious.

TRANSLATION

=

IDENTIFICATION

The last example in this discussion of language metaphors is translation = identification, which is a highly complex metaphor implemented at the textual level. Maric employs it in her narrative as such: Our interpreter and fellow refugee Esma became less and less inclined to translate things from one language to the other. […] she slowly turned from our eloquent translator at the front of the bus […] to a woman falling apart.³²

Worrying about her husband in Bosnia, Esma is not able to loosen the ties to her native Bosnia and slowly loses her mind. She ends up returning to Bosnia and falling into depression. Maric uses the story of Esma’s withdrawal from translation and the foreign language as a metaphor of a failed shift of identity and of the possibility that some migrants’ strong emotional ties to their homelands (native language) prevent them from increasing their involvement and identification with the host culture (foreign language). Regarding herself, though, Maric states, “[a]s my English gradually improved, I started translating for ex-Yugoslavs,”³³ which marks her active involvement in the mediation of the different sides of her identity (languages) and growing engagement in her host culture (foreign language). In both cases, the act of translating between native and foreign language expresses an in-between state of identity. However, while Esma retreats from the foreign language and returns to Bosnia and her Bosnian language and identity, Maric herself begins translating in addition to learning English, clearly signaling, through her eagerness to engage with the foreign language, her changing identification. Hoffman also reflects on translation, but from her characteristic analytical perspective. She writes about her reaction when her Canadian friend talks about her feelings: “I try laboriously to translate not from English to Polish but from the word back to its source, to the feeling from which it springs.” However, she realizes that this translation does not work, which makes her aware that she does not fully understand expressions of emotions in English (LT, 107). For her, the word in the foreign language is not yet connected with emotion Maric, Bluebird, 49 – 50.  Maric, Bluebird, 112.

Language as Metaphor

115

al connotations, making it un-translatable at this early stage in her “life in a new language.” The impossibility to translate English words for emotions, that is, to recover their emotional roots, stands for her incomplete identification with the new culture. The complex metaphorical statement entails words = organism/ life/feelings as well as no translation = no identification/belonging. This concern with translation is already evident in the title of Hoffman’s book, Lost in Translation, which clearly indicates the difficulty of finding a new identity when living between two languages.

Conclusion Language in general, and native and foreign language in particular, turned out to be a productive means of the representation of the migrant experience. Although my corpus consists of autobiographies by expatriates from countries of the former Eastern bloc, most of the metaphors appear to express the difficulties and obstacles migrants generally encounter when they attempt to adapt their language and identity to the situation in the host country. These difficulties may reside within themselves or in their host society, and they may be overcome gradually or result in exclusion or withdrawal, as in the case of the translator in Maric’s memoir – language metaphors are employed creatively to express such experiences. Furthermore, the process of identity formation and possible stages and results are described through metaphorical uses of native and foreign language, representing the culture the migrant was socialized in and the culture to which he/she tries to adapt. The various aspects of language and its elements, such as words and conventional phrases, its different layers of meaning, from denotative to connotative, and the stages of language learning make it an ideal domain for a representation of the mental and emotional losses and gains that accompany the process of acculturation. However, one must keep in mind that different autobiographers use different mappings of language metaphors. Various factors appear to influence the rather diverse mappings of metaphors. Albania is one of the most marginalized and disregarded countries of the former Eastern bloc, and Kapllani, entering Greece as an illegal immigrant, is the only one of the five writers to experience internment. Therefore, it is not surprising that both the longing to belong and the denied belonging play a role in his writing, as does the host society’s attitude towards him. In contrast, the four female writers enter western countries legally, and they do not only earn university degrees, like Kapllani, but they also enter careers in journalism, literary studies, or creative writing, which may to some extent account for the attention they pay to language. Coming from Poland, Yugoslavia,

116

Gabriele Linke

and Bulgaria, they encounter less fundamental hostility than the Albanian Kapllani and use language metaphors more intensely to reflect on the subtleties of the process of identity formation, the role of emotions, and the meaning of a new identity and belonging. They favor food metaphors that can express need, hunger, and the incorporation of foreign language and use human/life metaphors for the role of feelings, creativity, and development. Hoffman, writing her Life in a New Language as an academic in her mid-forties, calls herself “a living avatar of structuralist wisdom” to characterize her highly analytical approach to herself and the world, but at the same time she rejects the “radical disjoining between word and thing,” defending a “living connection” between the two (LT, 107). Building on this awareness of the connectedness between language and life, she reaches the highest level of reflection on and metaphorical use of language. Goldsworthy’s position is similar in many ways and with regard to the level of reflection in particular. It is not surprising that Maric, in contrast, delivers a more traditional narrative rich in anecdotes and observations because she wrote her memoir in her early thirties with less historical and reflective distance, while Kassabova, with her record of writing across genres and of travel writing in particular, reflects on language but theorizes less. Because of the focus on inner processes of identification, some of the language metaphors from Goatly’s list do not play a role in the texts discussed here, for example, writing/speaking = walking/running and speaking/arguing = war/fighting (LM, 73, 75). This appears to be connected to the genre of migrants’ life writing because in the process of identity re-formation, the changing meanings of native and foreign language offer themselves as metaphors of shifting identities while other, general metaphorical uses of language are not as prominent. However, since migrants’ life narratives are highly subjective creative reconstructions of experience, there is no fixed set of genre-specific metaphors. For example, Oskar Maria Graf’s metaphor of native language = home/ place, marking his resistance to Americanization, does not appear in the texts under discussion, while Hoffman emphasizes the transformation of her identity through the metaphor foreign language = place/home in the subtitle of her book, A Life in a New Language. Generally, spatial meanings of language do not feature strongly in the texts considered (except for road/bridge), as all authors engage in their host culture and its language. Nevertheless, where they are used, language metaphors are able to contribute substantially to our understanding of the experience of migration.

Dagmara Drewniak

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity – Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups and Laura Elise Taylor’s A Taste for Paprika Food is an increasingly popular metaphor in autobiographical texts, and recent memoirs in the Anglophone world use it for powerful investigations of ethnic identity. This contribution concentrates on two Canadian “gastrographies,” to use Rosalía Baena’s term, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007) by Marusya Bociurkiw, in which food becomes a focal metaphor for her Ukrainian-Canadian identity, and Laura Elise Taylor’s A Taste of Paprika: A Memoir (2004). Both memoirs, to a different extent, utilize the theme of food as a vehicle, moving the autobiographical narrators back in time and space to explore their ancestors’ past and refer to food as a means of either gaining self-awareness and identity or purpose in life. They also purport to negotiate the ethnic self of the narrators of the memoirs and, as a result, successfully contribute to the boom of diasporic life-writing in which food and cooking can also be seen as ways of revisiting one’s traditions and excavating the long forgotten or suppressed aspects of family identity. ¹

According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, [t]he concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get round the world, and how we relate to other people.²

The examination of metaphors, as proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, remains a seminal text in the study of the concept. The conviction that metaphors reach into the down-to-earth and mundane life supports the thesis proposed in this contribution, which states that food can serve as a metaphor for identity, partic-

 This work was supported by the Polish National Science Centre (Narodowe Centrum Nauki) under Grant UMO–2012/05/B/HS2/04004.  George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago and London: Chicago UP, 1981): 3. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-008

118

Dagmara Drewniak

ularly in autobiographical narratives. In the further sections of their book, the two scholars draw upon the metaphors of food, linking them with more intellectual and sophisticated, yet intangible concepts.³ In the opening sections of both memoirs discussed in this contribution – Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007) by Marusya Bociurkiw and Laura Elise Taylor’s A Taste of Paprika: A Memoir (2004) – the authors refer to food as metaphors of ethnic identities, which are recalled many years after emigration to the New World in the diasporic environments the next generations live in. When Bociurkiw depicts her father’s almost religious pilgrimages to a Jewish bakery, “a hybrid location” (CF, 26),⁴ she simultaneously mentions that food, its tastes and smells in the form of “the sharp pungency of rye and caraway, the gentle forgiving aroma of egg bread, the honey cake’s complex perfume” (CF, 26) have always stood in the family for the complex history from which the family members have emerged, such as pogroms, wars, colonization of Ukraine, as well as the safety of a home in which one always has a place for the hungry and the poor. Marked by terror and banishment, as Taylor’s grandmother’s life was, she also carried across borders and continents “the recipe for Zwetschgenknödel – plum dumplings […] in her memory from da Hoam when she emigrated to Canada” (TP, 3 [italics in the original]). Consequently, it is worth exploring how food can become a metaphor of one’s diasporic identity as it is frequently the legacy of the previous generations that has been identified as crucial in the context of identity construction processes. Julie Rak’s recent publication entitled Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market (2013) pointed to the growing sales of memoirs written by ‘ordinary’ people referring to the everyday life aspects of human existence. Within this group of memoirs, one may notice an interesting trend visible in bookstores, film industry, on reality TV channels or even radio programs: namely that of including culinary stories and recipes as bases for scripts, scenarios, plots and memories. Among these are such intriguing publications as Julie Powell’s Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen (2005), Eat, Pray, Love: One’s Woman Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert, Dream Homes by Joyce Zonana (2008), or Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations… One School at a Time (2007) by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.⁵ Both Powell’s and  See Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors, 109 – 153.  Marusya Bociurkiw, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp P, 2007); further references in the text abbreviated as “CF.”  For other examples, see Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2010): 148 ff.

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

119

Gilbert’s books have been adapted into feature films. There are also productions such as, among others, Under the Tuscan Sun (a Frances Mayes’s memoir published in 1996 and filmed in 2003) or Eleanor Coppola’s Paris Can Wait from 2016, which make the discussions on local food a substantial part of the narrative process. Nonetheless, there is also a high demand for cookbooks, cooking blogs, TV and radio programs devoted to cooking written and hosted by ordinary people as well as by celebrities. They have attested to the popularity of reality programs and the boom in the memoir market as well as provided testimony to a successful fusion of food as a metaphor for search for one’s identity and meaning in life.⁶ As a result, food and cooking have become increasingly important vehicles of self-identity (also connected to the fashioning of what is considered healthy food). Their significance in the process of re/creating or re/gaining one’s identity is essential as according to Sandra Vlasta: “Eating is vital and at the same time very strongly linked to culture and identity […] [i]t is also often used to construct or de-construct identity […]. Food and eating can build a bridge to the lost homeland.”⁷ Therefore, ethnic literature in general, and especially ethnic memoir is the genre that allows its authors to address and deal with their diasporic identities and establish links to the country of their and their ancestors’ origins. Since the two memoirs studied below were written by women, and the recipes and stories were extracted from other women (mothers and grandmothers), these texts become more symbolic than just physiological studies of the meaning of the local food. Rather, the memoirs in question prove to be the inquiries into the family stories, self-positioning as a woman and bearer of recipes and traditions. In Marusya Bociurkiw’s Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl (2007), food becomes a focal metaphor for her Ukrainian-Canadian identity, and Laura Elise Taylor’s A Taste of Paprika: A Memoir (2004) utilizes the theme of food as a vehicle moving the author back in time and space to explore her ancestors’ Austro-Hungarian roots. There are obvious differences between the texts with regard to form (Bociurkiw’s memoir is a bit more experimental as it includes the genuine recipes and is organized similarly to a cookbook) and the ethnic background they refer to (the former concerns the Ukrainian heritage and the latter draws upon the community of Jewish inhabitants of the AustroHungarian empire). Despite these differences, however, these two texts also

 Cf. Rak, Boom!, 52 ff.  Sandra Vlasta, Contemporary Migration Literature in German and English: A Comparative Study (Leiden and Boston: Brill-Rodopi, 2016): 52.

120

Dagmara Drewniak

share certain similarities that demonstrate how powerfully autobiographical texts make use of food to address questions of ethnic identity. They were published within three years of one another and they both refer to food as a means of either gaining self-awareness and identity or purpose in life. Moreover, in both texts the representatives of the younger generations living in Canada feel compelled to revisit and describe the old traditions and cooking customs that may disappear with the impending death of the ancestors. In both texts, there is an analogized, dual journey back to the family’s place of origin, which fits with a diasporic theme. Furthermore, both memoirs also purport to negotiate the ethnic self of the autobiographical authors of the memoirs and, as a result, they successfully contribute to the boom of diasporic life-writing in which food and cooking can also be seen as representative of the ways of revisiting one’s traditions and excavating the long forgotten or suppressed aspects of family identity. In a study on the meaning of food in literature, Rosalía Baena coins the term “gastro-graphy” that perfectly illustrates this interplay of the epistemological quandary of a diasporic self, intertwined with the discussion of self-representation in a memoir, which is by definition an autobiographical genre.⁸ Among various metaphors of identity, such as language and music, Baena sees food and eating as one of the most important “ethnic signs that symbolize the processes of transition that characterize transcultural selves.”⁹ Smith and Watson add that “[l]ife writing invoking food as both memory and metaphor may index a shift in subjectivity”¹⁰ and “the rise of gastrography may announce a radically personal form of a memoir, in which ‘you are what you eat.’ ” ¹¹ With this in mind, in the two diasporic memoirs Comfort Food for Breakups and A Taste for Paprika I focus on metaphors of ethnic and female identities. I argue that it is not only food, per se, that stands for the de-constructing of one’s identity and the self-positioning against and along the ethnic heritage, but also its preparation, recipe collection (and reproduction) and food-based stories that underlie the projection and representation of a diasporic, transcultural, female self. In both texts, the autobiographical narrators are no longer just the heirs of their ancestor’s legacy, but they become, through their active participation in eliciting stories and recipes,

 Rosalía Baena, “Gastro-Graphy: Food as Metaphor in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails’n Breadfruit,” Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études ethniques au Canada XXXVIII.1 (2006): 106 – 116.  Baena, “Gastro-Graphy,” 106.  Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 149.  Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 150.

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

121

the transcultural bearers and re-creators of Ukrainian-Canadian and Jewish-Austrian legacies respectively.

‘A hungry girl’ – Marusya Bociurkiw Marusya Bociurkiw is a Ukrainian-Canadian film-maker and media activist, as well as a scholar and writer. She was born in Edmonton to Ukrainian-Canadian parents. Discussion of their ethnicity was a common theme in their home as Bociurkiw’s father – Bohdan Rostyslav Bociurkiw – was one of the founders of the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies. Currently, she is an associate professor of media theory and co-director of The Studio for Media Activism and Critical Thought. She is a published author of fiction, poetry, and memoir, a successful food blogger, and a number of her short stories have been anthologized. Both in her writing and filmmaking, Bociurkiw is devoted to the themes of ethnicity, patriarchy, feminism, race and gender. Bociurkiw’s memoir, Comfort Food for Breakups: The Memoir of a Hungry Girl, received a selection of literary awards and nominations.¹² Lisa Grekul aptly summarizes the problems current Ukrainian Canadian writers, including Bociurkiw, tackle in their works. She views them as artists who “critically examine the political allegiances, patriarchal social structures, and heterosexism of their Ukrainian Canadian communities.”¹³ Moreover, Bociurkiw does not only look into her ethnic roots but also “question[s] [her] sense of belonging” in Canada.¹⁴ In this context, it is interesting to see Comfort Food for Breakups as a memoir in which food serves as a metaphor for an intersectional gender, sexual, and ethnic identity. Recalling the tastes of food served at Ukrainian summer camps for girls in Alberta, throughout her narrative Bociurkiw is aware of the fact that, despite her early years spent in the ethnic diaspora among the children of other immigrants and refugees, she now has to create a space for her own Ukrainianness within the mainstream Canadian culture in which she participates. Food, its preparation, eating, studying recipes, become a link that Bociurkiw associates with her past, her family, her mother, and that finally reconnects her with her own Ukrainian and lesbian self. These

 The biographical information comes from the following sources: Wikipedia (acc. 02 August 2017); bio note from RTA School of Media, (acc. 02 August 2017), bio note from Comfort Food for Breakups.  Lisa Grekul, “Re-Placing Ethnicity: New Approaches to Ukrainian Canadian Literature,” in Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy and Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa: Ottawa UP, 2004): 369 – 383, 372.  Grekul, “Re-Placing Ethnicity,” 373.

122

Dagmara Drewniak

facets constantly overlap and intertwine with Bociurkiw’s position of a family storyteller. In the Preface to her memoir, which introduces the readers to the concepts of the memoir as a palimpsest of memories and stories, Bociurkiw remembers her grandmother, who in her Edmonton house was always ready to serve food to her tired or sad granddaughter no matter what the time of day or night she came to visit. The ritual, as Bociurkiw recalls, was always the same: Marusya was obliged to sit, watch and listen to stories that ensued while cooking, and ‘Baba’ was preparing delicious perogies or cakes. The storytelling that accompanies cooking and eating is frequently comprised of the same anecdotes, repeatedly brought up to fill the autobiographical narrator not only with food, but also with the feeling of familiarity and safety. The whole procedure is well established between the two, and, as a result, creates the space of comfort and, even if unwanted at times, family memories. The family memories are the stories from the old country as well as accounts of how her father’s social and professional activism contributed to the status of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada. These two notions are, therefore, interconnected for Bociurkiw and form a continuum of “[f]ood and stories, stories and food: it’s a marathon, and you have to be prepared. It is painful, and deeply satisfying” (CF, 14). Hence, as Baena argues, “food is a multi-layered trope that functions to both read and record the world and to situate [one]self.”¹⁵ It may be a simple nutrient, a way of living and earning money, but it may also be a “conduit of memory.”¹⁶ Bociurkiw’s memoir is exactly this kind of multi-layered text invoking memories of the past smells and tastes of Ukraine – the homeland that is no longer hers (and formally never was) but constitutes her identity by the way of family memories and the way in which they structure everyday interaction. Moreover, it is not only food per se that evokes such memories, but “it’s the smell that shows up […] an idea, or a recipe, or a gesture towards it […] [or] just ingredients” (CF, 14– 15). This exploration of the metaphorical idea of food as bearer of memory and a vehicle towards identity in the preface frames the whole text.

 Rosalía Baena, “Gastro-Graphy: Food as Metaphor in Fred Wah’s Diamond Grill and Austin Clarke’s Pig Tails’n Breadfruit,” Canadian Ethnic Studies/Études ethniques au Canada XXXVIII.1 (2006): 106 – 116, 108.  Baena, “Gastro-Graphy,” 108.

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

123

Gendered identity In her memoir, Bociurkiw examines her identity as a woman, a scholar, a daughter, and a lesbian. These four aspects of her identity are intertwined and developed over the years into a mutually dependable knot that is both painful and satisfying to her. Food is always a part of this process of constructing identity, and the “hungry girl” of the memoir’s subtitle must be constantly fed. Obviously, food is always present at any gathering and suppresses the physical hunger after traveling long hours, for instance. But what is probably more important is the way in which the autobiographical narrator tries to figuratively appease herself. She is hungry for emotions, relationships, and stories. In one of the episodic vignettes, she mentions a dish, kasha, which, though prepared slightly differently than at home, and served for dinner rather than breakfast, invokes the feeling of sharing this moment with her father, reclaiming memory and gesturing towards mutual understanding (not frequent when they lived together) through repetition of a recipe handed down. Food, therefore, becomes a carrier of storytelling and food preparation or even a gesture towards making food, sates the hunger for love. By creating an analogy between satisfying a physical and psychological hunger, Bociurkiw discusses the connection of food to the body. Eating is, by definition, a sensory process, but for the memoirist it is also a therapy that satisfies other needs and desires. Food thus becomes a metaphor for safety and quenching, or at least trying to quench, various desires, as Bociurkiw reflects: “My own needs and desires always felt like a burden, like a second body I carried on my back, a child who could never be fully satisfied. Food forms a bridge between the world and those desires. Flesh of my rewritten flesh: bodies whose queer desires for food, for love, for sex, rend the world apart, and create it anew” (CF, 118). She frequently alludes to her hunger for acceptance and love in her narrative. Significantly, it is a craving for the acceptance of her lesbian identity by her quite conservative parents as well as her simultaneous choices in the academic world and in society. One of Bociurkiw’s earliest memories relate to the 1960s cocktail parties organized by her parents who invited many scholars, activists and established people. Early on in the memoir she recalls realizing that among “the legions of professors and their wives” there were almost no women (CF, 21). This story is juxtaposed with the recognition that when she was defending her PhD, she was still childless and independent whereas her father at the same age already had children and a stabilized position as a proud Ukrainian-Canadian, an activist, and a scholar. In this context, she puts herself in a position of competition

124

Dagmara Drewniak

with her father, not with her mother. Nevertheless, despite her mother’s thinly veiled resentment concerning the lack of grandchildren, it is her who takes over the kitchen, and feeds Bociurkiw’s friends when they come to congratulate her after the PhD defense. By cooking for them, Bociurkiw’s mother tries to accept her daughter’s lifestyle and celebrate her scholarly success. Even though the autobiographical narrator presents herself in competition with her father, the mother-daughter relationship is nevertheless a significant element of Bociurkiw’s inquiry. She admits that the relationship has always been troubled. They never spent much time together, and her mother complained that the longest visits only lasted 48 hours. Their views differed greatly and this discrepancy may be attributed to the generation gap and lack of acceptance. Only a tragic event does eventually allow them to spend a longer period of time in each other’s company. After the family learns that Bociurkiw’s brother Roman died suddenly of a heart attack in a hotel room after an exhausting hiking trip, she spends a week of mourning with her mother, interrupted by visits from her other siblings and friends. At that moment, food becomes a factor that unites their family at one table. Bociurkiw’s narrativization of this painful moment by way of the depiction of food, its preparation and consumption makes it a metaphor for their previous loss of family unity. At that point in time, the family had not met for many years, and, hence, did not have a chance to retrace their identity as a family of Ukrainian-Canadians. Despite the dramatic circumstances, they were able to spend some time together, and, repeatedly, “[f]ood punctuated those moments, gave structure to chaos, something to hold onto for the length of a meal” (CF, 72). Bociurkiw realizes that discussions about such unimportant matters as food preparation, ingredients and recipes, in the light of the preceding traumatic event paradoxically improved the mother–daughter relationship, and, as they start conversing honestly, she realizes that “[f]ood creates a kind of dialogue between us, an implicit assent missing in other aspects of each other’s lives” (CF, 77). In addition to her troubled mother-daughter relationship, Bociurkiw also needs to come to terms with her lesbian self, a process in the context of which she meets many people – outside her family – who support her. Simultaneously, the process is also a source of pain resulting from falling in love, being abandoned, starving for love, as well as for having her queer identity accepted. As in the emotional economy of the family, painful moments (including the eponymous breakups), in addition to joyful ones, require special recipes. Falling for someone or being left are always life situations connected to food. In the memoir, one can find a selection of recipes for the comfort food Bociurkiw prepares when in need. They precede every larger section in the text and serve not only as testimony to the moments in which such food is needed, but provide sto-

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

125

ries from the past, triggered by the memory of cooking the particular dish. Describing such a “recipe for trouble” (CF, 145) at a point in her life when she is already a successful scholar living a fulfilled life, she speaks of her girlfriend who “could see inside of [her]” (CF, 145) while she cooks for her. From this impression of transparency, Bociurkiw concludes that she herself almost involuntarily copies her female ancestors’ behaviors by repeating her Baba and Mama’s habits, refilling her lover’s plate when she is not looking. At this precise moment, Lila, her girlfriend, pays her a compliment: “You’re so feminine” (CF, 145), and although Bociurkiw responds quite ambivalently to this statement, she then ponders it, comparing it to “[f]emme [which is] related to feminine, but it’s not the same thing. It’s a distillation, like a pan of balsamic vinegar that’s been reduced to sweet, elegant sauce” (CF, 146). Bociurkiw realizes that cooking for the beloved is not so much a disliked female chore, but a profound communion of bodies that are fed as a result of mutual involvement in food preparation. Hence, feeding the people closest to oneself is both taking care of their bodies as well as of their souls, satisfying physical and psychological desires. It is a communal act, strongly felt in the context of this lesbian relationship. For Bociurkiw, cooking constitutes the legacy of the whole generation of women in the family who have been feeding both the literal and figurative “hunger inside” (CF, 147). Gender identity has always been strongly linked to the social position of women, an aspect that Bociurkiw also confronts in her text. Her queer identity is a vehicle leading her to the rediscovery of her position within the circle of other strong women in the family. This identity is formed alongside the rebellion against the older generation’s choices and their worldviews. It is formed almost imperceptibly among the quarrels, meals, exchange of recipes and cooking according to and against them. Changing a recipe is not only seen as an act of rebellion but also as a sign of the cook’s mature identity. Thus, Bociukiw asks a rather rhetoric question: “How does an identity so deeply felt get formed? Did I learn it in my Baba and Mama’s kitchen, along with the best way to make strudel and the quickest way to preserve pickles?” (CF, 145).

Finding a Ukrainian In her discussion of gastrography in the texts by Fred Wah and Austin Clarke, Baena points to the innovative forms of these memoirs as well as “culinary language [which] makes the notion of food a metonym of the elaboration of culture

126

Dagmara Drewniak

and identity.”¹⁷ Bociurkiw’s memoir undoubtedly falls into the same category of a gastrographic narrative, in which discourse evolving around food becomes an innovative expression of selfhood, understood not only as the aforementioned study of femininity but also as a metaphor of “ethnic heritage, and diasporan mixing.”¹⁸ Yet, Bociurkiw’s ethnic identity is more than just an obvious element of family tradition. Being a Ukrainian-Canadian, and the rediscovery of this identification through food, constitutes an extremely important element of the memoir. Bociurkiw, through her identification with Ukrainianness, comes to terms with her own self by combining all significant parts of the jigsaw puzzle called identity: her ethnicity, her sexuality, her femininity, her being a daughter and a sister, and finally her being an artist. It is the generation of Bociurkiw’s parents, who immigrated to Canada a few decades before, that saw food as one of the factors sustaining their cultural identity and traditions. Krishnendu Ray describes this as “a myth of stability in a world that is perpetually changing”¹⁹ because “food […] plays a crucial role in anchoring [migrants] in a world that refuses to stay still.”²⁰ Marusya Bociurkiw, daughter of a historian and scholar passionate about Ukrainian history, did not need an introduction to a long forgotten ethnic family heritage, as it was an issue discussed at home on a daily basis. After she left home for the university, she admitted that she rarely returned home and avoided spending time with her traditional, conservative family who had not fully accepted her lesbian identity. Furthermore, she traveled frequently and learned a lot about French and Italian cuisines. Rather than relinquishing this identity, however, she needed a personal, almost intimate revision of her roots in order to establish her Ukrainian-Canadian identity by herself. The memories stretch from her grandmother’s legacy, “Baba died a few years ago at age ninety-two, but the aroma of her kitchen – cabbage, garlic, onions frying in butter – is still in my nostrils” (CF, 14), through a range of culinary memories connected to her mother who never visited a bakery with her children but who, “would decry the excess of rum babas, and why in the name of Jesus and Mary, did we need three loaves of pumpernickel bread?” (CF, 27 [italics in the original]), to her father, who “always […] made us breakfast” (CF, 16). These memories mostly recall Ukrainian traditions like the ones depicted in the chapter, “Food for the Soul,” where Bociurkiw refers to Ukrainian Christmas Eve tradi Baena, “Gastro-Graphy,” 105.  Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 148.  Krishnedu Ray, The Migrant’s Table: Meals and Memories in Bengali-American Households (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2004): 12.  Ray, The Migrant’s Table, 12.

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

127

tions, during which “rituals of cooking and eating are a kind of memory machine, unleashing smells and tastes that evoke spectral presences,” (CF, 59) and through which she is able to satisfy the hunger for food as well as for “family and lover, kin and skin” (CF, 14). However, the group of younger family members and friends would also introduce more North American traditions such as Thanksgiving (CF, 61– 65), thus establishing decidedly Canadian Ukrainian hybrid cultural practices. Additionally, her father, who spent a year in a concentration camp,²¹ also made his children aware of the Jewish culinary traditions. Hence, in the book one can find a recipe for Tsimmes (CF, 65), as well as a recipe for life: “When someone comes to your door hungry, you take them in, and you give them a meal. That is what you do” (CF, 27 [italics in the original]). Therefore, the recipe itself acquires a metaphorical meaning. This piece of advice comes from Bociurkiw’s great aunt, Olena, who hid Jews during World War II. The inherited memories, experiences and legacies are juxtaposed with Bociurkiw’s North American, cosmopolitan lifestyle of an emancipated artist. Despite childhood traumas, culinary habits like “fish on Fridays” (CF, 109 – 114), Bociurkiw’s cooking “palimpsest” (CF, 17) is enhanced by numerous journeys. In particular, two travels recounted by Bociurkiw influenced her perception of food and identity. Not surprising, there were trips to France and Italy, two countries with genuine and rich cooking and eating traditions, which she passionately explored. Bociurkiw admits that alongside touristic and relationship revelations, these voyages changed her attitude towards cooking. As she says, “travelling, I learned how to improvise, like a singer who left her score at home: to deepen the notes of a tomato sauce with a whisper of anchovy […]” (CF, 94). Yet, the depiction of her voyages to France and the Swiss Alps leaves the readers with some questions: whether journeys abroad make us learn new cuisines, or if they perhaps bring us back to home tastes instead. The answer to such questions is rendered when Bociurkiw remembers her travel to Italy, which “seductive and exotic as it was, had only worked to strengthen the flavours of home […] All of it [Italy] is home, but the road there appears and disappears – so that it’s only the smell of cooking food that points you in the direction of where you came from, and who you need to be” (CF, 101). Consequently, Ukrainian food cooked by first generation of migrants, as well as both faithfully and freely recreated by the second generation undoubtedly provided an anchor for the autobiographical narrator’s self-identity. It also guar Bociurkiw explains that her father spent a year in a concentration camp “for resisting the German army as they encroached upon Ukraine” (CF, 27). He was not transported to Auschwitz and was called a political prisoner. Bociurkiw does not elaborate on this part of her father’s biography.

128

Dagmara Drewniak

anteed the necessary safety zone to which she turned when in trouble, grief, pain, love or happiness. The tradition of Ukrainian cuisine is present in Bociurkiw’s family and her own kitchen and stems from the background of their ethnicity, becoming a metaphor for home. However, she also adds with firm certainty that home is also in relation to what is not home; we define ourselves by what we aren’t, identity forming itself along that slippery, uncomfortable edge […] And home is also this: the thin, barely visible underpainting of grief and loss. Bleached-out flashes of film frames. The exact timbre of my brother Roman’s voice, heard as though via a film’s scratchy old soundtrack. The smell of kasha on a winter morning, and my father’s joyful, achingly dependable, wake-up call. (CF, 167– 168 [italics in the original])

This fragment clearly shows how Bociurkiw understands her own identity. She is definitely not only a Ukrainian, though as a cosmopolitan Canadian she rediscovers her Ukrainianness in her own creative way. Moreover, as a contemporary writer and artist, traveling the world, she defines herself through the palimpsest of her culinary traditions and food metaphors. Using Eva Hoffman’s words, Bociurkiw’s text proves that she “is made, like a mosaic, of fragments—and [her] consciousness of them.”²² Being a writer, documenting the family’s story is also a responsible task. On the one hand, Bociurkiw wants to give testimony to her relatives and their diasporic identity, and, on the other hand, she is deeply aware of the nature of a memoirist relying on fallible memory. She states: I am my family’s self-appointed bearer of memory, recalling the absent spaces, recording the recipes, searching for the glimmer of devotion, the aroma of happiness, the back beat of bitterness. Between recipes and stories, I will ask myself a thousand times: who owns these memories? How is it that each of us remembers in a different way? (CF, 16)

That is why, in her memoir, she not only reproduces the original recipes from the past, as well as contemporary ones showing her culinary discoveries, but she also leaves space for the unremembered, mistaken, forgotten, and differently remembered memories and stories. Her task as an ethnic writer is to offer a memoir of the self, filtered through others’ perspectives, fleeting smells and involuntary recollections.

 Eva Hoffman, Lost in Translation (London: Vintage, 1998): 164.

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

129

In search for Burgenländer – Laura Elise Taylor Laura Elise Taylor, who holds an M.A. from the University of Alberta, works as a freelance writer and photographer in Ontario. She has written one memoir, A Taste for Paprika (first edition 2004), and has contributed her photography to the Cottage Bible (second edition 2016). Her narrative is not as hybrid in form as Bociurkiw’s memoir: she does not include recipes on separate pages with a layout that reminds the readers of a cookbook, as in Bociurkiw’s case. Taylor, however, uses a metaphor of food and cooking for her discussion and de/re/construction of her Austrian, Hungarian, and predominantly Burgenländer roots. Born in 1975 in Canada, Taylor comes from an immigrant family whose origins go back to Central Europe. Her grandmother – Laura Binder, called Oma in her native German language – was born in 1912 in a small German-speaking village, Jakobshof, situated on the border between Hungary and Austria. After World War II and the Potsdam Conference directives, the German-speaking Binder family had to relocate to Germany, along with thousands of others, since the Hungarian government insisted on the ‘purification’ of its territories of all Germans, despite the fact that people like the Binders had Austrian passports (issued in 1920). The family stayed in Germany for eleven years, feeling awkward and uprooted, and finally decided to leave Europe. Oma, together with almost all the family members who survived the war, migrated to Canada. Taylor’s mother, who was thirteen at the time of emigration and who did not know any English, not only had to cope with a new language, but also new friends, a new school and a new situation, all at once. While Taylor’s mother refused to talk about her experiences, Oma was willing to share hers. Writing the memoir provided Taylor with a means to excavate and save these stories from oblivion. Hence, the memoir is actually a combination of three narratives: the ‘regular’ memoir narrative by the autobiographical narrator, which includes Taylor’s rendition of her family’s story; Oma’s story, or rather fragmented pieces of it, both in English and in German; and, finally, Taylor’s journal, in italics, written to her mother, visualizing her mother’s childhood, youth and adulthood. Since Taylor frequently complains about her mother’s unwillingness to talk about the past, she declares: “Mom, if you won’t tell me these stories any more, I’m going to tell them for you. For us.”²³ Like in Comfort Food, both food and cooking play a central metaphorical role in A Taste for Paprika. Taste is also a story of family relations, of different per Laura Elise Taylor, A Taste for Paprika: A Memoir (Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2005): 16 [italics in the original]; further references in the text abbreviated as “TP.”

130

Dagmara Drewniak

spectives, of storytelling and of silencing – all of them triggered by cooking and eating. Taylor’s family is definitely one with dominating women. In Canada, the grandmother lived with Laura’s family for a long time, and her strong individuality definitely set a mark on her granddaughter whose father died the very year she was born. Moreover, it was Oma who could cook, and for Laura she quickly became the bearer not only of recipes but also of memories. Her own mother was not born to cook, nonetheless she led a satisfactory life (married again and became a flight attendant). Yet, it was Oma who disclosed her stories to Laura.

Cooking as story The memoir is divided into four parts – Ingredients, Home, Parting, Return – and is preceded by a genealogical tree of the family, dating back to the 1850s. In a simple way, it records the memories Taylor gathered during numerous conversations, usually while cooking and eating, with her grandmother. These reminiscences go back in the past, from the early childhood memories of the 1910s in Jakobshof, through the family’s deportation to Germany and their further migration to Canada, and to the three women’s voyage to visit Oma and mother’s place of birth (today’s Jakabháza in Hungary) and to see relatives in Budapest. Despite this seemingly plain outline of the narrative, two significant factors influence the reader’s perception of this autobiographical discourse. Firstly, it is the mother who stays out of cooking and storytelling. Although she loves eating, “she is not a natural cook […] [and] when Oma and I join forces in the kitchen, my mother steers clear of us” (TP, 5 – 6). Since Taylor’s mother does not care to cook, she is apparently the odd one out in such a family of food lovers. Moreover, her status is also a result of her lack of disposition towards stories about the past. Whether with recipes or stories, “Oma works from memory. This is something my mother avoids whenever she can” (TP, 6). The first section “Ingredients” fulfills a similar paratextual function as Bociurkiw’s Preface: Hungry Girl; here, Taylor suggests her perspective by saying: This is not the whole story. Ask my mother her opinion of what follows and she will tell you, ‘Well, that’s one perspective. I see things differently.’ Ask her to elaborate, and she will shake her lovely, youthful head, saying, ‘Don’t ask.’ (TP, 6)

Since her mother is unwilling to tell stories, the memoirist includes quasi letters to her mom and, by so doing, gives voice to this other perspective. Intertwined with the narrative, she talks to her in the second person singular narration, ask-

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

131

ing her direct questions, pondering the plausible answers, retelling stories, making up for the unsaid words, and filling in the gaps of unheard stories. Secondly, while Taylor may not be a very experienced writer, she finds a perfect way through which she offers her own imprint to the text. Although a lot of space is devoted to the grandmother and she is a central figure in the narrative, this is not a biography of her grandmother. Rather, it is Taylor’s personal memoir, an autobiographical inquiry into the search for her own ethnic identity. Using the metaphor of food preparation and the notion of a recipe, she concludes her introduction with the following words: We each have our own recipes for history, our own ways of blending the ingredients of memory into a palatable tale. What follows are my Oma’s stories, as I have heard them since before I could talk. And my mother’s story, as best I can guess it. Ultimately, though, this recipe is mine. (TP, 6)

In her preface to Tricks with a Glass: Writing Ethnicity in Canada, Rocío Davis points to the seminal interests of writers who take their ethnic identity up in their texts. She claims that [t]he situation of the ethnic writer, conscious of a between-worlds position, involves an intense re-working of issues such as oppositionality, marginality, boundaries, displacement, alienation and authenticity: a process rather than a structure, requiring constant variation and review.²⁴

Bociurkiw and Taylor have to, therefore, place themselves at the center of this process, in order to find both the “stability and instability”²⁵ of their identities. They both affirm their identities through food serving as a metaphor of this very process. Throughout the entire memoir, Taylor acknowledges the need to balance this unique position in the light of tangled stories and varied dishes her Oma offers. As a result, Laura Taylor becomes aware of the kaleidoscope of ethnic identities she is exposed to through stories and food. One of the first recipes Taylor learns is for Zwetschgenknödel, plum dumplings, carried in memory across borders and continents by her Oma. This one, together with recipes such as the one for Mohnstrudel, smells of “da Hoam” (TP, 9). The smells and tastes of home are felt even before the dish is prepared; the ingredients themselves carry the aro Rocío G. Davis, “Introduction: On Writing Ethnicity in Canada,” in Tricks with a Glass: Writing Ethnicity in Canada, ed. Rocío G. Davis and Rosalía Baena (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000): xiii–xxiv, xvi.  Davis, “Introduction,” xvi.

132

Dagmara Drewniak

mas, which, for the granny, are always associated with the village and region she left behind over forty years ago. They also conjure up memories of the Judenmarkt in St. Gotthard, whose counterpart Oma found in Toronto’s Kensington market, where she used to buy food and spices years ago upon her arrival in Canada. Among memories of recipes, smells, and old tastes, Taylor’s grandmother told stories of the multiethnic region she grew up in, the place where “the border swished back and forth like a horse’s tail […] [and] the people who called this piece of land home danced and worked and died without taking much interest in the machinations of empires or nation-states.” (TP, 3 – 4). Taylor’s narration is certainly selective, but she relays both her grandmother’s painful and happy moments. At one of the family gatherings, Oma mentions the situation of German speaking civilians during World War II, who were not identifying themselves as Germans. Throughout the memoir, she repeatedly comes back to this dilemma, relating how lots of Germans ended up there [in Siberia], from Poland, from Czechoslovakia. […] When Hitler lost the war, the winner said all the Germans must be deported back to Germany. From everywhere. From Yugoslavia, from Hungary, from everywhere. But we weren’t German, and Germans didn’t want us. (TP, 131– 132)

She talks of British bombs and bullets that killed thousands of Hungarian soldiers. There is a story of Opa, the grandfather, who was enlisted by force to the German army. Reminiscing on these dark moments in the world’s history, Oma complains that it is the other side of the story that is known; theirs were always silenced and not worthy of remembering and retelling. Feeling responsible for this part of the family story, Taylor recounts it with detailed descriptions of the dead and wounded bodies Oma took care of as well as their traumatic memories of deportation. The autobiographical narrator herself, however, also acknowledges the cosmopolitan, Canadian part of her identity by admitting that her two favorite dishes are prepared by her mother, who is otherwise so devoid of any culinary passions. The two only dishes she could make, stroganoff and lasagna, and their preparation, “call for ingredients not found in Oma’s kitchen” (TP, 104 [italics in the original]). By favoring these international meals, despite Taylor’s troubled relationship with her mother and her frequent disappearance from the pages of the book, and despite the fact that she rarely spoke of the past, Taylor honors her mother in this way. Again, this is done through food. Metaphorically, it is the food prepared by her unskilled hands, which makes such an impact on her daughter. Food seems to be a vital source of knowledge about the family’s past for Taylor. She cannot fully accept the fact that her mother’s inability to prepare food coincides with her being silent about her own past. The fact

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

133

that her mother prepares these international dishes at some point is a suggestion that she would offer only a story about her life in Canada, a hybrid mosaic of international influences. In this way, she tries to understand her mother and asks whether it was “then that she [i. e., Oma] taught you the silence? Or is it something you inherited?” (TP, 117) As a result, Taylor’s relationship with her mother is not an easy one. The troubled mother-daughter love does not make it easy for the author to extract any information about the past, and especially about the earliest childhood memories her mother may remember. Thus, she turns to her Oma, who teaches her about the past through food, and connects food to the act of storytelling. The shards of stories that Taylor excavates are painful and silenced in the family. They are lost, just as some recipes from the past. Through her relationship with Oma, the memoirist tries to voice them. She realizes, however, that some of them can no longer be reached, just as she does not remember the way to the small cemetery she used to visit with Oma, where her little brother is buried. She also knows that stories are remembered and (un)told differently, which is why Taylor rhetorically wonders: “Why would I want to interrogate your best memories?” (TP, 8) and “You don’t want to unearth memories, I know. But will you take me there?’ (TP, 118). Upon her retirement, Taylor’s mother, together with her daughter, revisits Austria and Hungary once again. The previous journey together with Oma focused on visiting the Budapest relatives, only passing through Jakobshof in heavy rain. During the second visit, it is the mother who is excited about the whole trip. She reads books about the history of the region exclaiming: “I’m Austrian! […] all these years I thought we were Donau Schwaben […] but I’m a Burgenländerin from Austria” (TP, 156). These rare moments of visiting the places where they come from trigger instances of conversation. Again, Taylor is very cautious regarding the intensity of these discussions as well as their full honesty. Nevertheless, one of the most important dialogs circles around recipes. This is how Taylor recounts it: I have found a book on Hungarian cuisine. As we flip through the colourful pages of recipes and photos – five whole pages on paprika – I feel my mother grow tense. ‘Will you look at this – a recipe for Zwetschgenknödel!’ she breathes. ‘And Kropfen and Gulasch and Kumpenkauch. I don’t believe it. Everything is in here. This is just what I’ve always looked for!’ ‘So now you’re going to cook?’ I ask. ‘Sure, why not? The recipes are all here.’ My mother rushes into the store to pay for the book. I can’t decide whether to be pleased or frustrated.

134

Dagmara Drewniak

‘Oma can teach you all of it,’ I say when she returns. ‘Yes,’ she replies, ‘but here everything is written down for me. That’s how I work.’” (TP, 158 [italics in the original])

Taylor’s mother once again emphasizes the fact that she does not want to recollect memories, her revision of her roots can only go according to a neatly prepared recipe, as if leaving space for improvisations might lead to evoking traumatic memories. She juxtaposes cooking according to the cookbook with cooking with her own mother, and favors the former, in order to avoid listening to stories. It is her way of keeping the past at bay, yet she desires the rediscovery of her roots as dearly as her own daughter does. The wordless reconciliation of mother and daughter takes place on Oma’s borderlands after visiting the entire region, the small villages and cemeteries where their ancestors are buried. Obviously, Oma is not with them at the time because of her age, but when “from a nearby house comes the unmistakable small of bread baking in a Holzofen” (TP, 177), Taylor knows the journey to the past is completed and stories are not necessary to prove this rare moment of unity with history, with her mother, her Oma, and her roots. According to Gullestad, [a]utobiographical writing can be analyzed as a metaphor of the self, and as a mediation between private and public realms. [He] define[s] the modern self as a continuous and processual effort of a person – with no definite end product – to bring together her various roles, identities, and experiences.²⁶

Both memoirs analyzed here are testimonies to such processes of finding one’s identity. Comfort Food for Breakups and A Taste of Paprika offer such a mediation between the personal and intimate revision of one’s identity, juxtaposed with the search for Ukrainian-Canadian and Austro-Hungarian-Canadian ethnic identities, which have always been informed by public realms. Both Bociurkiw and Taylor, through their gastrographic narratives, try to identify their roles as daughters, granddaughters, partners, and collectors of recipes and stories. Never is the process complete, as their memoirs tell only fragments of their lives. Utilizing the metaphor of food, its preparation and eating brings the reader closer to the intimacy of kitchen stories, centered around women as bearers of recipes and memories. Through their undertaking and participation in these practices they

 Marianne Gullestad, “Tales of Consent and Descent: Life Writing as a Fight against an Imposed Self-Image,” in The Ethics of Life Writing ed. John Paul Eakin (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2004): 216 – 243, 218 [italics in the original].

‘Between Recipes and Stories’: Food as Metaphor for Identity

135

not only refer to the communal act of eating together, i. e., creating a familial and familiar community, but also to the rediscovery, reconstruction and deconstruction of their multiethnic, diasporic origins.

Katja Sarkowsky

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays André Aciman has frequently quoted Lawrence Durrell’s dictum of Alexandria as the “capital of memory,” and his memoir Out of Egypt (1994) clearly explores Alexandria as a place of autobiographical grounding and projection. But the role of Alexandria is more complex and has expanded in the decades since the memoir’s publication. This contribution looks at how Aciman’s autobiographical essays argue that ‘place,’ the city of Alexandria in particular, functions as a central metaphor of self, suggesting that the metaphorization of Alexandria intertwines with a metonymization of displacement, which, in Aciman’s more recent essays, increasingly turns into a metaphorization of autobiographical narration as such. While Aciman’s essays seem to propose at times that ‘writing’ has taken the place of a home in exile, I argue that Aciman’s writing about autobiographical memory and his essays about writing autobiographically explore the potential of autobiographical imagination as a homecoming constantly deferred.

“I am elsewhere”: metaphors of self Towards the end of his memoir Out of Egypt (1994), André Aciman recalls the night before he and his family had to leave Alexandria in 1965: And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession. I wanted to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the night after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cakes along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of that moment when, if only for an instant, I caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved.¹

 André Aciman, Out of Egypt: A Memoir (New York: Picador, 1999 [1994]): 339. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-009

138

Katja Sarkowsky

The quote conveys not only a sense of intense longing but also of its complex relation to both place and the experience of displacement. I will come back to this passage later; for now, it suffices to point to the specificity of place and time described at the end of Aciman’s memoir – Alexandria’s seafront on the evening before leaving Egypt – and to the role that Alexandria, or more precisely its recollection, is to play in Aciman’s autobiographical writing. In his essay “Arbitrage,” Aciman writes that “Egypt itself had become a metaphor,”² a metaphor of a search, not so much for a place as for a sense of self. Veronica Della Dora is, I think, more precise when she sees Alexandria, not Egypt, serving as Aciman’s central metaphor of self,³ and it plays, I argue in this contribution, a crucial role in Aciman’s continuous exploration of how to adequately capture displacement – and the displaced, exiled self – in and through metaphor. André Aciman’s recollections of his youth in Alexandria, the stories of multiple dislocations he tells of his Sephardic family, and the eventual expulsion of his and other Jewish families from Egypt in 1965 by the Nasser regime in Out of Egypt won him instant acclaim. Already a respected Proust scholar, Aciman’s literary career began with a memoir at the age of 43. In the years since, he has become a renowned novelist, with Call Me By Your Name (2007; most recently turned into a movie) probably being his best-known work. Called a “poet of the city” and of “disappointed love” by one reviewer,⁴ Aciman nevertheless continued to mainly write about the experiences of dislocation and exile, about memory and place in his autobiographical essays; the titles of the two collections published to date, False Papers. Essays on Exile and Memory (2000) and Alibis. Essays on Elsewhere (2011), are indicative for his central concerns. In his afterword to Alibis, Aciman writes about the German author W. G. Sebald a sentence that easily could apply to him, too: “Sebald himself cannot think, cannot see, cannot remember, and, I wager, cannot write without positing displacement as a foundational metaphor.”⁵ ‘Displacement’ may indeed be seen Aciman’s own foundational autobiographical metaphor. In Metaphors of Self, James Olney regards the act of autobiographical narration as a form of metaphorization; a changing self demands and finds expression

 André Aciman, “Arbitrage,” in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York: Picador, 2000): 147– 164, 159.  Veronica Della Dora, “The Rhetoric of Nostalgia: Postcolonial Alexandria between Uncanny Memories and Global Geographies,” Cultural Geographies 13 (2006): 207– 238, 218.  Wendy Lesser, dust jacket of André Aciman, False Papers (New York: Picador, 2000).  André Aciman, “Afterword: Parallax,” in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011): 185 – 200, 189.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

139

in changing metaphors of self.⁶ While Olney’s concept effectively proposes “a oneness of the self, an integrity or internal harmony that holds together the multiplicity and continual transformations of being,”⁷ he concedes a crucial point about the effect of memory on the self: The very fact of memory and its peculiar operation, bringing back some things, neglecting other things and other times entirely, seems to argue that selfhood is not continuous; for it brings up one self here and another self there, and they are not the same as one another, nor do they even seem to the same degree selves.⁸

In more recent autobiographical research, this is a notion that has indeed replaced conceptions of the self as coherent and stable.⁹ The reason why I quote Olney at length is the aptness of his word choice with regard to Aciman’s complex explorations of place and memory, in which places come to function as metaphors of a complexly layered “imaginary self.”¹⁰ Memories of places are not about sequence and chronology; rather, the layers crisscross autobiographical chronology in favor of a nostalgic simultaneity in which not only the remembered but, more importantly, also the remembering self is always elsewhere. While both the remembrance and the imagination of place and self are certainly not unusual in autobiographical writing, Aciman’s essays clearly stand out through their continuous explication of these processes of imagination and remembrance, reflecting upon the kind of self that they present. He does not just write about his autobiographical memories but he at the same time reflects about the process of remembering and the narrativization of memories, a permanent reinterpretation of his narrative of selfhood, which at times effectually removes the autobiographical subject from critical sight. His metaphor of the ‘alibi’ applies as much to narrated as to the narrating I; “I am elsewhere,” writes Aciman, “[t]his is what we mean by the word alibi. It means elsewhere. Some people have an identity. I have an alibi, a shadow self.”¹¹ In this contribution, I propose that Aciman’s work is characterized by an ongoing interplay between metaphorization and metonymy, with place, specifically

 James Olney, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1972): 331.  Olney, Metaphors of Self, 6.  Olney, Metaphors of Self, 24.  Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010): 201.  André Aciman, “Alexandria: Capital of Memory,” in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York: Picador, 2000): 3 – 21, 20.  Aciman, “Afterword: Parallax,” 192.

140

Katja Sarkowsky

Alexandria, as a central metaphor of self and displacement as central metonymy of the life story. Alexandria is not the place longed for, nor is it the site of nostalgia: Alexandria is a metaphor of the imaginary self in the past that could easily have been another. Hence, it projects a sense of futurity that the autobiographical narrator can only conjure up by remembering the future as it was imagined in the past. Nostalgia, as Aciman writes, lies in the process of recalling, reconstructing, or of actively imagining this past ‘I.’¹² This process of recollection or reinvention is itself a constant theme in Aciman’s autobiographical work. In fact, it is most likely the central theme, particularly in his more recent essays, in which he frequently turns to metaphorizations and metonymies of autobiographical narration itself and to the notion of writing as an exploration of constantly deferred homecoming.

“A city I never knew I loved”: place, nostalgia, and the imaginary self Metaphors and metonyms abound in Aciman’s autobiographical writing. Alexandria, as briefly discussed above, is a frequent, but by no means coherent and stable spatial metaphor; rather, Aciman’s essays, as will be illustrated, present evernew explorations of the possibilities of metaphor to capture the displaced self. Yet, despite Aciman’s ongoing revisions and reinterpretation of both his life and the telling of his life, his projection of constant fluidity, instability, and mirage-like images of the past, I suggest that there is a stable narrative trope that frames these explorations: life as displacement, life as a state of being out-ofplace.¹³ This may sound self-evident; after all, Aciman says as much when he writes: I’ll write about diaspora and dispossession, but these big words hold my inner tale together, the way lies help keep the truth afloat. I use the word exile, not because I think it is the right term, but because it approximates something far more intimate, far more painful, more

 André Aciman, “Pensione Eolo,” in False Papers: Essays on Exile and Memory (New York: Picador, 2000): 133 – 146, 139.  For this argument, see also Katja Sarkowsky, “Out of Egypt, Out of Place: Memory, Exile, and Diaspora in André Aciman’s and Edward Said’s Memoirs,” in Censorship and Exile, ed. Johanna Hartmann, Hubert Zapf (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2015): 49 – 64.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

141

awkward: exile from myself, in the sense that I could so easily have had another life, lived elsewhere, loved others, been someone else.¹⁴

However, this obviousness conceals a fundamental interplay between metaphor and metonym at the heart of Aciman’s autobiographical project in which ‘displacement’ functions metonymically for the life story, while specific places – Paris, Rome, New York, and time and again Alexandria – or words suggesting doubling, absence, or projection (such as alibi, mirror, or shadow) serve as metaphors of self. They do so by way of complex acts of remembrance in which the act of remembering is reflected upon as a constant deferral of belonging.¹⁵ Aciman, I suggest, turns the actual, physical displacement he and his family have suffered into an interpretative matrix of his individual life between and across different places. Thus, he metonymically shifts the meaning from the concrete experience to an abstract conception of a life story that nevertheless remains inextricably connected to the spatiality of expatriation and of a Sephardic diaspora that precedes the family’s expulsion from Egypt in 1965. While the metonym of displacement remains largely in place throughout Aciman’s autobiographical writings, the use of his metaphors shifts. ‘Place’ is clearly a crucial and recurrent metaphor in Aciman’s autobiographical work; yet, it is not a stable referent, and the way Alexandria, in particular, functions metaphorically shifts significantly over time as a result of Aciman’s autobiographical revisions. The essays, written over a period of almost two decades, present not only complex and highly self-referential explorations of autobiographical metaphors of self, loss, longing, and displacement but also project what Frédéric Regard has called “topologies of the self”: [a]utobiography is the production, even perhaps the invention of a language, whose tropes provide us with topological models and hypotheses. […] Tropes spatialize the inscription of one’s presence in the world; topologies of the self rest on tropologies.¹⁶

 André Aciman, “A Literary Pilgrim Progresses to the Past,” in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011): 87– 91, 89.  While I understand ‘metaphor’ broadly as “conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another,” that is, with the two domains being distinct from one another (the city and the self), I regard the ‘metonym’ as a shift from a term’s ‘normal’ use to its ‘new’ use, while remaining within one domain. The quotes are taken from Zoltán Kövecses, Where Metaphors Come From: Reconsidering Context in Metaphor (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015): 2, 19.  Frédéric Regard, “Topologies of the Self: Space and Life-Writing, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 1.1 (2003): 89 – 102, 98; 99.

142

Katja Sarkowsky

The references to and the use of ‘Alexandria’ in Aciman’s essays mark a transformation in these “topologies of self,” from Alexandria as a metaphor of an irretrievable past to Alexandria as a metaphor of an imaginary self. In “Alexandria: Capital of Memory,” Alexandria “exists in memory alone, the way Carthage and Rome and Constantinople exist as vanished cities only.”¹⁷ The Alexandria of his memory is colonial Alexandria, with English and French as dominant languages and with a multilingual mix of Greek, Italian, Ladino, and Arabic spoken by its inhabitants: This is the Alexandria I live with every day, the one I’ve taken with me, written about, and ultimately superimposed on other cities, the way other cities were originally sketched over the Alexandrian landscape when European builders came.¹⁸

Alexandria’s palimpsestic structure is inverted in its autobiographical function: it now literally overwrites other cities, just as it had been the result of earlier overwriting. The autobiographical narrator does not put it this way, but the Alexandria of the present, the Alexandria he visits to retrieve the Alexandria of his youth (knowing that he can never find it), had in turn overwritten the remembered pre-1965 Alexandria in the process of expulsing the European and Levantine Jewish inhabitants from the city in the 1950s and 1960s. The town that the autobiographical narrator remembers as a multilingual and multiethnic place, where he imagined a future in Europe, he now encounters as an exclusively Arabic urban space. The autobiographer’s journey is thus narrated as one of a return that can never be one, but he also turns it into a journey that places him in a larger familial and cultural context. Not only does he search for (and find) his grandfather’s grave, thereby emphasizing genealogy and emplacement, but he also contextualizes his visit in the larger framework of the Jewish diaspora. “I’ve come back to Egypt the way only Jews yearn to go back to places they couldn’t wait to flee. The Jewish rite of passage, as Passover never tells us, is also the passage back to Egypt, not just away from it.”¹⁹ The last evening in Egypt before his family had to leave – as he tells it in Out of Egypt – was the evening of the Passover Seder. By pointing to the familial and community remembrance of the Jewish exodus from Egypt, this reference thereby presents a form of autobiographical closure as well as an ascription of meaning beyond the individual exile that is usually at the center of Aciman’s essays.

 Aciman, “Alexandria,” 4.  Aciman, “Alexandria,” 5.  Aciman, “Alexandria,” 5.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

143

Overall, however, the ‘return’ to Alexandria, as Aciman narrates it, is marked by disillusionment, disappointment, and a sense of failure; too little is forgotten, too little is unfamiliar for a superimposition of memories on the present to be possible.²⁰ In a word, this is a nostalgic journey in which ‘nostalgia’ falls flat once the autobiographical narrator arrives in Alexandria. ‘Nostalgia’ is etymologically a combination of two words, νόστος (nostos = return home or homecoming) and ἄλγος (algos = pain, grief, distress, but also that which causes pain).²¹ In “Alexandria,” Aciman expands on the possibilities of the term when he writes: “Nostalgia is the ache to return, to come home; nostophobia, the fear of returning; nostomania, the obsession with going back; nostography, writing about return.”²² All of these facets apply to Aciman’s own writing, his obsessive engagement with the remembering, imagining return, attempting to return; as Brigitte Scheer-Schaetzler has astutely observed, he has “turned himself into a nostographer par excellence,”²³ and Homer’s Ulysses is not accidently one of the literary references in Aciman’s work. Alexandria, in this essay, appears at first as a place of the past to be revisited, but ultimately lost in the present, with “the enthusiastic lover of Proust […] constantly engag[ing] in a recherche de la place perdue.”²⁴ However, Alexandria is not just the irrevocably changed place, and the nostalgia the narrator mulls over is not necessarily for that place; the place functions as a metaphorical stand-in, indeed as close to a “recherche du temps perdu” as to the search for a lost place. Robert Porter has suggested that Aciman is nostalgic about nostalgia itself, not about the places to which he attaches it.²⁵ While Porter makes an important point, frequently confirmed by Aciman’s own meta-autobiographical reflections, I suggest reading nostalgia not just as a feeling but, in light of Aciman’s declensions of ‘nostos,’ as yet another metaphor of displacement. In Aciman’s writing, autobiographically invested place is increasingly either ‘elsewhere’ or in the complex intertwinement of future and past, never really a ‘here’ and never really in the present; it is remembered and imagined, and it brings forth and provides a place for an equally imaginary self that is never

 Aciman, “Alexandria,” 7.  Dora, “Rhetoric,” 209.  Aciman, “Alexandria,” 7.  Brigitte Scheer-Schaetzler, “In the Museum of Loss: Reflections of André Aciman’s Essays,” in A Sea for Encounters: Essays Towards a Postcolonial Commonwealth, ed. Stelle Borg Barthet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009): 165 – 174, 167.  Scheer-Schaetzler, “In the Museum of Loss,” 166.  Roger Porter, “Autobiography, Exile, Home: The Egyptian Memoirs of Gini Alhadeff, André Aciman, and Edward Said,” Biography 24.1 (2001): 302– 313, 308.

144

Katja Sarkowsky

‘here’ but always elsewhere. “When I remember Alexandria,” Aciman writes in the afterword to his 2011 collection Alibis, it’s not only Alexandria I remember. When I remember Alexandria, I remember a place from which I liked to imagine being already elsewhere. To remember Alexandria without remembering myself in Alexandria longing for Paris is to remember wrongly.²⁶

This sense of a constant elsewhere dominates the essays in this volume. In this context, then, Alexandria shifts from a metaphor of the past to a metaphor of self. This self, of course, it not retrievable either, and every memory of that younger self is a form of retrospective invention; it is, as Aciman puts it already in “Alexandria,” an imagined, even an ‘imaginary self.’ “It is not cities that beckon us, nor is it even the time spent in those cities that we long for; rather, it is the imagined, unlived life we’ve projected onto these cities that summons us and exerts its strong pull.”²⁷ This affects how Alexandria can function as a metaphor of that self. In 1990, Aciman published an essay in Commentary entitled “Out of Egypt: A Memoir,” the same title he would later choose for his book.²⁸ The essay ends at the same point the memoir does: the narrator’s last night in Egypt, before the forced departure. However, the earlier text differs in some significant details from what became the memoir. Most notably, in the essay the narrator is not alone; his brother is with him, and it is his brother who, literally, has the last word. While the essay closes with the brothers making their way to the cinema to see a movie they had already seen, the book ends with the narrator remembering imagining that he’d come home from the seafront to join his family at the cinema. Although a detailed analysis of these and other differences would be interesting with regard to autobiographical rewriting strategies, I would like to focus not so much on the differences, per se, as on Aciman’s own discussion of them in “Rue Delta,” one of the essays published in Alibis. Here, he elaborates on one change that a direct comparison between the texts will not yield, one that does not come as a real surprise to a reader of Aciman’s later essays but that further complicates the metaphorical function of Alexandria in Aciman’s work. The passage cited at the beginning of this contribution – a passage that so much seems to capture a nostalgia already setting in, while still in the very place the narrator imagines missing in the future – was, writes Aciman, “in fact, written with one purpose only: to smooth out the ridges left by my brother’s disap-

 Aciman, “Afterword,” 186.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 194.  André Aciman, “Out of Egypt: A Memoir,” Commentary 89.5 (1990): 43 – 51.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

145

pearance, to elegize him away.”²⁹ The final sentence of the passage, “I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved,” turns out to be his textually erased brother’s sentiment: “My brother loved Alexandria; I hated it,” and the change from the original wording – “I suddenly caught myself longing for a city I never knew I hated” – became an appropriation of his brother’s voice for textual coherence.³⁰ The revised version indeed better captures the sense the reader gets of the autobiographical narrator’s feeling towards Alexandria throughout the memoir. Yet, if we take this confession seriously, it clearly complicates the metaphorical function Alexandria has in Aciman’s essays, too. “I had never loved Egypt. Nor had I loved Alexandria, not its odors, not its beaches or its people,”³¹ Aciman continues, thus fundamentally calling into question the portrayal of his relationship to Alexandria as depicted in the memoir; “I had no love for Egypt,” he writes elsewhere, “and couldn’t wait to leave; it had no love for me and did, in the end, ask me to leave.”³² The portrayal of Egypt, as Aciman writes again and again, is not a place longed for, but a self longed for that fantasized about living elsewhere. But, there is yet something else, “another confession in store. The night walk on rue Delta on our last night in Egypt, with or without my brother, never did occur. […] My last walk with my brother in Egypt was simply a fiction.”³³ ‘Confession,’ the classical autobiographical mode, is the keyword here. It would be easy to call this simply a breach of the ‘autobiographical pact,’ of course; the flexibility of that pact, the boundary between selectivity and subjective truthfulness on the one hand, and lying on the other, has long been an issue in both autobiographical scholarship and public discussion of obvious hoaxes. However, the interesting aspect of this revelation – Aciman’s elaborations on the changes in the memoir rather than the changes themselves – are the avenues they open for an understanding of the autobiographical metaphors Aciman uses in his essays. As Smith and Watson have put it in another context, if we approach such self-referential writing as an intersubjective process that occurs in a dialogic exchange between writer and reader/viewer rather than as a story to be proved or falsified, the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding.³⁴

 André Aciman, “Rue Delta,” in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011): 173 – 183, 180.  Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 181.  Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 181.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 185.  Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 181.  Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, 16 – 17.

146

Katja Sarkowsky

Indeed, Aciman himself justifies his ‘breach of trust’ by appealing to a notion of truthfulness rather than factual truth when he writes, “this fiction grounded me in a way the truth could never have done. This, to use Aristotle’s word, is how I should have felt had I taken a last, momentous walk that night.”³⁵ The “grounding” is, in effect, the narrative closure provided by the fictional episode in contrast to the actual events. As Aciman relates the events in his confession, “[e]veryone stayed home that night, morose and worried as ever, saying farewell to the occasional guests who came by and who, despite our repeated pleas, showed up again on the following morning.”³⁶ The ‘truth’ has nothing of the fiction’s futuredirectedness, and it lacks the farewell to a meaningful place that makes the ending of the memoir so powerful. It is understandable why Aciman invented this ending, further refining it as he went through the rewritings from essay to memoir. It is a novelistic ending; “novels, with their conventionalized plot-lines and highly suggestive myths, provide powerful, often normative models for our own self-narration and interpretation of the past.”³⁷ While the fictional ending provides an effective narrative closure, it also imbues Alexandria with the metaphorical significance it otherwise would not have: not just as a metaphor of the past but also as a metaphor of self. The autobiographical narrator does not ‘remember remembering,’ as Paul John Eakin has put it so aptly in his reading of Aciman’s essay “Arbitrage.”³⁸ Yet, he does something complementary and to the same effect: he remembers anticipating remembering and hereby “invest[s] place with self so that self can be extracted from place later on.”³⁹ Alexandria – in the fictional ending of the memoir – is a place of emergence for a self that constantly imagines itself elsewhere in the future, thereby allowing the autobiographical self to emerge, which will come to dominate the autobiographical essays: an exilic instead of a diasporic self.⁴⁰ Seen as an inscription of place for autobiographical extraction, it is therefore paradoxically secondary that the ending is fictional. When visiting Alexandria years later, after the completion of the memoir, the autobiographical narrator

 Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 181.  Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 181.  Birgit Neumann, “The Literary Representation of Memory,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010): 333 – 343, 341.  Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008): 165.  Eakin, Living Autobiographically, 165.  For this reason, it is also important that in the final book version the autobiographical narrator is by himself and not in the company of his brother.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

147

of “Rue Delta” does not remember the last night in Alexandria; he merely remembers writing about it: “All I remembered was not what had happened there decades ago, but simply the fiction I’d written. I remembered something I knew was a lie.”⁴¹ Writing an autobiographical fiction becomes an autobiographical memory that eventually overwrites the place of remembrance. “What I certainly can’t remember is the real rue Delta, the rue Delta as I envisioned it before writing Out of Egypt. That rue Delta is forever lost.”⁴² I have suggested that Alexandria serves as a metaphor of a self that is always elsewhere, while ‘displacement’ functions metonymically as a structure for autobiographical narration. As an autobiographer and a Proust scholar, Aciman frequently reflects on the process of autobiographical memory and narration, dissecting – as he does in “Rue Delta” – his own remembrance as well as his autobiographical writing. The true site of nostalgia is, writes Aciman, not the place that was lost or the place that was never quite had in the first place; it is the text that must record that loss. In fact, the act of recording the loss is the ultimate homecoming, inasmuch as the act of recording one’s inability to find one’s home on going back to it becomes a homecoming as well.⁴³

Aciman thus understands memory as always already narrativized; as Max Saunders has put it, “we may think of memory as somehow prior to auto/biography, or literature, or any form of textuality, our memories are always already textualized.”⁴⁴ And just as he obsessively explores the metaphorization of the self, he also sets out to find new metaphors for the process of autobiographical narration. What is remembered is closely intertwined with how it is remembered, with narrativization being not so much the documentation of memory as it is its very process.

 Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 182– 183. For Aciman as an exilic self, see also Sarkowsky, “Out of Egypt,” 54.  Aciman, “Rue Delta,” 183.  Aciman, “Pensione Eolo,” 144– 145.  Max Saunders, “Life-Writing, Cultural memory, and Literary Studies,” in A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010): 321– 331, 323.

148

Katja Sarkowsky

The paradoxes of homecoming At the core of Aciman’s self-narration is the family’s expulsion from Egypt and the self as figuratively and metaphorically exiled. If Aciman’s memoir ends on the eve of leave-taking, the imminent departure and the nostalgic anticipation of remembering this evening only close the memoir’s autobiographical plot. There are two crucial additional elements to this plot and its narration: the family’s history of displacement, which, as previously argued, makes this memoir less the story of exile that his later essays present than a story of diaspora; and the frequent insertions of the narrating ‘I’ to reflect on the process of autobiographical remembrance and storytelling, a process that would become the center of his later essays. As Aciman stresses in a discussion on the question of how true to life biography is, “the parts of Out of Egypt that matter to me the most are not those set in Egypt, but those where the solitary, awkward, inadequate narrator goes looking for Egypt in Europe and America for the remains of Egypt.”⁴⁵ ‘Alexandria’ exemplifies the importance of spatial metaphors in Aciman’s autobiographical essays as the setting for a remembered imagining of the future, but while this is the most frequent metaphor of self – the self that ‘imagines becoming’ rather than the self that ‘was’, a self that longs for belonging but never belongs – he also explores a number of others that are directly connected to reflections on the process of autobiographical remembrance and narration. The ‘alibi’ is such a metaphor that stresses the elusiveness of presence and thus captures a sense of self, which Aciman describes as a “shadow self,” a sense of being there and not there at the same time; reading an episode from Out of Egypt (in which the young protagonist seeks to appease both of his grandmothers by giving each of them the impression of avoiding the other and hence of privileging her) through the metaphor of the alibi he then continues to ask “what about the writer who pretends to remember this episode but in reality is making it up, and, by admitting that he’s invented it, hopes to come clean with this clever loop an access a third-degree alibi?”⁴⁶ This time, that is to say, the ‘alibi’ does not concern the young boy’s attempt to outwit both of his grandmothers – the core of the discussed episode – but the writer’s alibi to the reader.

 André Aciman in Jeffrey Meyers, “How True to Life Is Biography?” Partisan Review 68.1 (2001): 11– 56, 41.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 196.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

149

If it goes well from the start, if I am in the groove, if I come home to writing, it’s not the writing for me. I need to have lost the key and to find no replacement. Writing is not a homecoming. Writing is an alibi. Writing is a perpetual stammer of alibis.⁴⁷

If the fictionalization of the last night in Alexandria provided Aciman with a kind of grounding that factual accuracy could never have accomplished, ‘writing’ appears as a figurative ‘homecoming’ where literal return is impossible; here, however, any such notion is clearly dismissed. It is the search for home and belonging, and not the arrival, that is at the center of the processes of remembering and writing the past. They constitute acts of deferral, not of accomplishment of belonging. ‘Ulysses’ serves as one of the literary ‘shadow selves’ in Aciman’s work. In “Reflections of an Uncertain Jew,” Aciman writes about paradoxes as a way of life that eventually “alienate one, […] make one a stranger from one’s people, one’s homeland, one’s second and third homeland, and ultimately from who one is. You become nothing, nobody, like Ulysses.”⁴⁸ Aciman refers to Homer’s Ulysses and his encounter with the Cyclops Polyphemus, but the actual importance of this figure, I suggest, lies in the different versions of Ulysses’ story referenced throughout Aciman’s work. Homer’s is indeed a story of Ulysses’ eventual return to Ithaca, but the variations Aciman alludes to have Ulysses continue his wanderings. In Out of Egypt, the autobiographical narrator is introduced to Ulysses and the different literary manifestations by his Italian tutor, Signor Dall’Abaco: there is Dante’s version, whose Ulysses in Canto XXVI of the Inferno leaves Ithaca again after his victory, in order to explore new lands and to pass the strait of Gibraltar into the Atlantic, and to ultimately die away from home; and there is the Ulysses of Constantine Cavafy, the Greek Alexandrian poet, whom Dell’Abaco credits – falsely, as it turns out, but this is besides the point here – with yet another version of Ulysses: I think it is Cavafy, the Alexandrian, who is right. He says that Ulysses wavered, unable to decide between going back to his wife or living as an immortal with the goddess Calypso on her island. In the end, he opted for immortality and he never went back.⁴⁹

So, while it seems, at first, that ‘Ulysses’ serves yet as another embodiment of what Aciman presents as a subject that, as Joanne Saul has phrased it in a differ-

 Aciman, “Afterword,” 198.  André Aciman, “Reflections of an Uncertain Jew,” in Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011): 75 – 86, 83.  Aciman, Out of Egypt, 290.

150

Katja Sarkowsky

ent autobiographical context, “will not stay still,”⁵⁰ it is rather the versions, the act of narrating but never pinning down ‘the’ version of a (life) story that Ulysses represents. ‘Ulysses’ in Aciman’s work is not a character, not even a literary figure, but a constantly rewritten story of deferred homecoming. Eakin speaks of ‘storied selves’ when reflecting on the narrative construction of identity in and through autobiographical narration. Narrative, he argues, is not merely a literary form but a mode of phenomenological and cognitive self-experience, while self – the self of autobiographical discourse – does not necessarily precede its constitution in narrative.⁵¹

Aciman’s continuous rewriting (and, as we have seen, revising of) his own past thus presents not only the revision of a story, but also an exploration of how the process of narrating remembrance can – and often fails to – work, and how it impacts the constitution of self. If earlier theories of autobiographical remembrance have seen the fallibility of human memory as a deficit, more recent conceptualizations see remembrance and imagination closely linked,⁵² an insight Aciman clearly incorporates into his reflections on memory. In the afterword to Alibis, he comes up with yet another metaphor, but not for the self, rather for the actual process of looking back and for the way in which the individual past is then ‘seen’: parallax, a term borrowed from photography. It implies, Aciman writes, that “not only are the things before us unstable, but our point of observation is no less unstable.”⁵³ This at first seems to suggest the quotidian insight that the object we look at appears different, depending on the position from where we perceive it. Thus, it points to the impact of the narrative present on the processes of autobiographical selection, omission, and interpretation of memory; the past is a result of the present rather than the present a result of the past. But, as Slavoj Žižek has stressed, the observed object is not simply ‘out there’ to be observed from different standpoints; rather, “subject and object are inherently ‘mediated,’ so that an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.”⁵⁴ Reading Aciman’s autobiographical essays through such an expanded understanding of

 Joanne Saul, Writing the Roaming Subject: The Biotext in Canadian Literature (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006): 103.  Paul John Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999): 99.  Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005): 47.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 187.  Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2006): 17.

“Writing is Not Homecoming”: André Aciman’s Autobiographical Essays

151

the parallax, the metaphor captures, on the one hand, the futile attempt of “snap[ping] a picture, hoping to gather one picture, when in fact the real picture is an infitie imbrication of unstable images.”⁵⁵ On the other hand, and maybe primarily so, it serves to describe a process of detour in which “through the conduit of this imaginary elsewhere […] you begin to see what’s right before you,”⁵⁶ the present comes into focus. But then, just as the past is not accessible through memory, the present is not accessible through unmediated experience but only through reflections of the past. Looking at Aciman’s more recent essays, ‘displacement’ noticibly shifts from a strongly spatial connotation of a literally ‘displaced life’ and its metonymic function to a metaphor of the self as fundamentally displaced; the parallactic look at past and present is “not just a disturbance in vision. It’s a derealizing and paralyzing disturbance in the soul,”⁵⁷ not just about displacement, or feeling adrift both in time and space, it is a fundamental misalignment between who we are, might have been, could still be, can’t accept we’ve become, or may never be.⁵⁸

Displacement – identified by Aciman as the central metaphor in Sebald’s writing, as noted earlier – has indeed become the fundamental metaphor of Aciman’s own writing, a metaphor to cover both the self and the process of self-narration. For Aciman, exile, displacement, and dislocation translate into corresponding intellectual and pyschological states,⁵⁹ a position that echoes Edward Said’s understanding of exile as a physical and a psychological condition. For Said, exile is a painful but also productive state of being that both connects to and extends the status of a displaced person, allowing for “a sharpened vision.”⁶⁰ However, relating the position of the intellectual to that of the exile, he also observes that

 Aciman, “Afterword,” 187.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 187.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 187.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 189.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 196.  Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2001): xxxv.

152

Katja Sarkowsky

the intellectual as exile tends to be happy with the idea of unhappiness, so that dissatisfaction bordering on dyspepsia, a kind of curmudgeonly disagreeableness, can become not only a style of thought, but also a new, if temporary habitation.⁶¹

Sharing in this fundamental sense of perpetual “disagreeableness” in his own understanding of exile, Aciman pushes this notion even further when he sees ‘exile’ as disappearing “the very notion of a home, of a name, of a tongue. The exile no longer knows what he’s exiled from.”⁶² There is not only no home to return to, but there is also no idea of home left; displacement, as in Said, is a driving force,⁶³ yet it is not even a metaphorical location anymore. Aciman’s autobiographical and meta-autobiographical essays, I suggest, have increasingly moved from explorations of spatial metaphors of self to metaphors that stress processes of seeing and remembering. Both types of metaphor, however, in effect seek to capture an experience of a displacement that does not imply the productivity of a “sharpened vision” highlighted by Said. By calling into question the very idea of a sharpened vision, replacing it with an idea of vision that is constantly out of focus, Aciman somewhat paradoxically strenghtens the importance of imaginative remembering, storytelling, and writing. “You write not after you’ve thought things through; you write to think things through. You chisel in order to imagine what you might have chiseled with better eyes in a better world.”⁶⁴ Writing is emphatically not home and neither is it a way of imagining home; rather, it is a way of exploring a homecoming constantly deferred.

 Edward Said qtd. in Alon Confin, “Intellectuals and the Lure of Exile: Home and Exile in the Autobiographies of Edward Said and George Steiner,” The Hedgehog Review (2005): 20 – 28, 22.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 189 – 190. Emphasis mine.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 189.  Aciman, “Afterword,” 198.

General Section

Jack Stewart

Fairytale Elements in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Man Who Loved Islands” In this study of fairytale form in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Man Who Loved Islands,” I draw on insights of Vladimir Propp, Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Bruno Bettelheim, Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Max Lüthi, Jack Zipes, and other critics of the genre. These short stories share a series of fairytale elements that give Lawrence’s themes a clarity of outline and symbolic focus. My purpose is to examine how fairytale elements such as formulaic openings, challenges or trials, treble sequencing, magic animism, isolation, spells and hallucinations, the uncanny, repetition and incantation, subversion, psychological dynamism, and economy of form and action lend force and lucidity to the expression of Lawrence’s themes. Psychologically, fairytale form gave him a symbolic means of exploring potentially traumatic issues; formally, it gave him a clear-cut framework to illuminate his creative, yet critical, vision.

Many critics have alluded to fairytale or fable form in “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and “The Man Who Loved Islands,” but there have been no in-depth studies of the subject. For an understanding of fairytale form, I draw on Vladimir Propp, Carl Jung, Marie-Louise von Franz, Bruno Bettelheim, Ruth Bottigheimer, Max Lüthi, Jack Zipes, and others who offer valuable insights on the genre. Keith Cushman, tracing Lawrence’s ability “to imagine his fictions more freely,” notes that “[u]ltimately [he] would create his own original fairy tales in such stories as ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner’ and ‘The Man Who Loved Islands.’”¹ My purpose in this essay is to examine how Lawrence adapts fairytale form and structure to original expression of his themes in these two fictions of the self. “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is a satiric exposure of a money-mad society that destroys love and life; “The Man Who Loved Islands” exposes an eccentric egotist’s quest for mastery of self and environment. I will examine the intersection of nar-

 Keith Cushman, “The Achievement of England, My England and Other Stories,” in D. H. Lawrence: The Man Who Lived, ed. Robert B. Partlow and Harry T. Moore (Carbdondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1980): 27– 38, 33. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-010

156

Jack Stewart

rative structure, style, and protagonist’s role in these two stories with fairytale elements and paradigms. Vladimir Propp points out that “fairy tales possess a quite particular structure which is immediately felt and which determines their category.”² Readers of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” become aware of fairytale structure from the start: There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.³

This omniscient statement establishes the fairytale tale paradigm and presents the problem that sets the narrative moving. The timeless, placeless, nameless setting and character point beyond contingent reality to an archetypal situation, in which the boy desperately attempts to compensate his mother for her lack of love. Psychologically, Paul is an ironic counterpart of Lawrence, whose wish to compensate his mother for her loveless marriage might have led to personal disaster, but ultimately stimulated his creative drive.⁴ Fairy tale’s formal concentration makes it a “mirror[] of inner experience,” to cite Bruno Bettelheim and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” is an outstanding example.⁵ It is an ironic “rags to riches” tale that displays “the hallmarks of fairy tales – magic objects and sudden acquisitions of wealth.”⁶ Among the elements of this “sardonic fairy-tale,” as Kingsley Widmer calls it, are [t]he mockingly simple exposition, with its devices from the children’s story of the beautiful lady with the hard heart […] [t]he shrewd dialogue, the economical delineation of figures in a set milieu, the allegorical neatness of the whispering house and magical rocking horse … and the precise irony of the luck not worth having.⁷

 Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed., rev. Louis A. Wagner (Austin: U of Texas P, 1970): 6.  D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995): 230 – 243. Further references in the text abbreviated as “R-HW.”  At the climax of Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers [1913], ed. Helen Baron and Carl Baron (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), the autobiographical hero, also named Paul, shuns the deathward drag of his departed mother and heads “towards the city’s gold phosphorescence” (464).  Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales [1976] (New York: Vintage-Random, 2010): 64.  Ruth B. Bottigheimer, Fairy Tales: A New History (Albany: State U of New York P, 2009): 20.  Kingsley Widmer, The Art of Perversity: D. H. Lawrence’s Shorter Fictions (Seattle: U of Washington P, 1962): 92; 93; 95.

Fairytale Elements

157

Lawrence wrote the story for Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Ghost Book (1926), to replace “Glad Ghosts,” which contained a portrait of Lady Cynthia she did not like. The outlines of the woman in the story may have been based on Lady Cynthia, but the character is abstracted to a functional role as in fairy tale, where plot dynamics surpass psychological realism and mysterious forces drive characters towards denouements that underline moral principles. In fairy tale, Bettelheim notes that “good and evil are given body in the form of some figures and their actions.”⁸ Art and psychological understanding go hand in hand. But Bettelheim emphasizes that “the enchantment [in fairy tales] […] comes not from the psychological meaning of a tale […] but from its literary qualities – the tale itself as a work of art.”⁹ So it is in “The RockingHorse Winner,” which eclectically welds together traditional elements of fairy tale with related genres. In John F. Turner’s view, [the story] is like a fairy tale […] [in] that it relates the magically assisted journey of a young child through the trials and tribulations of his life. A supernatural gift, brought through the agency of a friendly […] animal, offers hope of salvation from the persecuting figure of heartless authority.¹⁰

But this is to subsume the originality of Lawrence’s plot under a fairytale model, whereas Lawrence subverts traditional fairytale outcomes, as the hero fails in his quest to save his mother and becomes a scapegoat of the money mania that infects society. One of Lawrence’s motives for employing fairytale form was to radically objectify tendencies he had experienced and rejected.¹¹ Marie-Louise von Franz observes that “[t]he [fairy] story begins always with a state of imbalance, and balance has to be restored through a compensatory process.”¹² In “The RockingHorse Winner,” the lack of balance between love and lucre, mother and son leads to the boy’s frantic efforts to restore it. The mother’s lack of love for her children seems to have been inflicted on her like a curse or spell. “[W]hen her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard. […] Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place

 Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 8 – 9.  Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 12.  John F. Turner, “The Perversion of Play in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner,’ ” D. H. Lawrence Review 15.3 (1982): 249 – 270, 268.  For Widmer, “it appears that Lawrence […] played agonized variations on one of his nuclear personal experiences” (Art of Perversity, 95), his relation to a devouring mother.  Marie-Louise von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales (Toronto: Inner City, 1997): 23.

158

Jack Stewart

that could not feel love, no, not for anybody” (“R-HW,” 230). This mysterious lack of love poses the problem that drives the plot, as Paul strives to break the spell with a desperate drive for luck and lucre. In line with fairytale abstraction, the emotional situation of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” seems more destined than motivated. The characters embody archetypes that reveal “the comparative anatomy of the collective unconscious, the deeper layers of the human psyche,”¹³ whose contents can only be made manifest by a magical shift of focus. Fairy tale has much in common with dream, but Bettelheim makes a crucial distinction: “While a fairy tale may contain many dreamlike features, its great advantage over a dream is that the fairy tale has a consistent structure with a definite beginning and a plot that moves toward a satisfying solution.”¹⁴ There is nothing fluid or amorphous about fairytale form. Lawrence’s fairytale structure is punctuated by refrain-like repetitions – “There must be more money, there must be more money” (“R-HW,”230) – refrains being an integral feature of fairy tale. Rhythm takes a compulsive form in Paul’s mad rocking, and this obsessive movement is reinforced by incremental repetition. Maurice Merleau-Ponty observes that “[in] every successful work, the significance carried into the reader’s mind exceeds language and thought as already constituted and is magically thrown into relief during the linguistic incantation”.¹⁵ This applies especially to fairy tale, where stylized narrative and incantatory language weave spells. Hypertrophied patterns and rhythms give Lawrence’s fairytale narrative a supernatural aura and a cutting edge that psycho-social realism cannot match. The whisper that haunts the house emanates from the collective unconscious of a whole society, with its mad drive for “success” and perverted love of money. This obsession accounts for the mother’s frozen heart and ultimately kills her son. The compulsive refrain, “There must be more money! There must be more money!” (“R-HW,” 230), underlines the mother’s failure to experience love or the father’s to make money. An uncanny autonomy is at work, as in a ghost story: “And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase” (“R-HW,” 230). Repression only makes matters worse and the whisper more strident. A craving for “luck” and “lucre” pervades the atmosphere, leading to aural hallucinations that reverberate through the house casting a malign spell. As in tales of the uncanny, such as Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” the whisper can be read magically and at the same time psychologically.

 Von Franz, Archetypal Patterns in Fairy Tales, 21.  Bettelheim, Uses of Enchantment, 57.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962): 401.

Fairytale Elements

159

Animism, by which objects come to life or take on magical properties, is a prominent feature of folktale and fairy tale. Lawrence entered into the spirit of primitive animism in New Mexico, where he wrote of a pine tree on the Kiowa Ranch: “The tree has its own aura of life. […] [Its] life penetrates my life and my life the tree’s. […] It vibrates its presence into my soul, and I am with Pan.”¹⁶ Coming from a totally different context, this animistic belief nevertheless matches the convention of animal or object helpers that assist heroes in folktales or fairy tales. In “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” the spellbinding refrain seems to be cathected onto objects, so that the “splendid toys” in the nursery that reflect an insatiable desire for luxury seem to hear it (“R-HW,” 230 – 231). Propp observes that “objects [in fairy tale] act in the same way as do living things,”¹⁷ and Widmer notes that “Lawrence dramatizes the inner consciousness of his characters by projecting their feelings into inanimate objects.”¹⁸ “The whisper [that] was everywhere” (“R-HW,” 231) takes on a weird life of its own, standing for the obsession that grips family, house, and society. A psychic spell penetrates the gendered objects – rocking-horse, pink doll, and “foolish puppy” – in the nursery. As in magical animism, “[it] came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse” (“R-HW,” 231). After being rocked into action, “[i]ts red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy-bright” (“R-HW,” 232), as if it were breathing heavily and looking its rider in the eye. Mechanical sound and motion give rhythmic emphasis to the uncannily voiced lust for money, so that “even the horse, bending his wooden champing head, heard it” (231). Animism is at work, but psychologically it is Paul’s repressed drives that animate his mechanical toy. A fairytale catechism in clipped dialogue clarifies hidden forces that propel the narrative towards a fateful conclusion: “Is luck money, Mother?” [the boy] asked, rather timidly. “No, Paul! Not quite. It’s what causes you to have money.” “Oh!” said Paul vaguely. “I thought when Uncle Oscar said filthy lucker it meant money.” “ ‘ Filthy lucre’ does mean money,” said the mother. “But it’s lucre, not luck.” (“R-HW,” 231)

This catachresis or verbal slip, by which “lucre” replaces – and negates – “luck,” resembles the coded language of fairy tale and contains an ominous warning.

 Lawrence, “Pan in America,” in Mornings in Mexico and Other Essays, ed. Virginia Crosswhite Hyde (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009): 153 – 164, 158.  Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 82.  Widmer, Art of Perversity, 93.

160

Jack Stewart

Love, luck, and lucre are incantatory terms of a riddle the boy must figure out, or pay the price. Solving riddles, often with the help of a supernatural agent, is salvational in fairy tale; failure to do so often fatal. Intelligence and inspiration are vindicated, rashness and over-confidence punished. Paul’s obsessive drive for success is underlined by the incantatory rhythm: “[He] wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. […] He would sit on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily” (“R-HW,” 232). He is desperate to prove himself “lucky,” so as to compensate for his mother’s lack of luck. The gambling drive that has replaced love in the collective unconscious infects the boy’s mind and being. He acts as if possessed by his mechanical steed. “When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey, he climbed down and stood in front of his rocking-horse, staring fixedly into its lowered face. Its red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy bright” (“R-HW,” 232). He is, as it were, consulting a demonic oracle onto which he projects his urgent desire to “know,” or make love to, success. The rocking-horse becomes a fetish embodying psychic or demonic powers. W. D. Snodgrass notes that “many witches supposedly rode hobby-horses of one sort or another (e. g., the witch’s broom) to rock themselves into a magical and prophetic trance”;¹⁹ Von Franz that “[w]itches very often have a phallic attribute: they ride on a broom” (AP, 128). Paul, as if in “some self-induced prophetic frenzy”, drives his mechanical creature on: “And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip … He knew the horse would take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it” (“R-HW,” 233). Fixing his mind on luck, he rocks furiously. His mother urges him to stop, [b]ut Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. […] At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop, and slid down. ‘Well, I got there!’ he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy legs straddling apart. (“R-HW,” 233)

Paul’s flaring, glaring eyes match the “glassy-bright” eye of the horse that is an extension of his obsessive will – and forcing the will is a violation of one’s being, for Lawrence. His Uncle Oscar takes Paul to the Lincoln, where he puts five pounds on a rank outsider, Daffodil, who comes in first at 4– 1: “The child, flushed and with eyes blazing, was curiously serene” (“R-HW,” 235). He is “sure” and has

 W. D. Snodgrass, “A Rocking-Horse: The Symbol, the Pattern, the Way to Live,” in D. H. Lawrence: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mark Spilka (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1963): 117– 126, 119.

Fairytale Elements

161

the look of a seer. “ ‘ It’s Master Paul, Sir!’ said Bassett [Uncle Oscar’s batman], in a secret, religious voice. ‘It’s as if he had it from heaven’” (“R-HW,” 236) – although the mysterious source is more likely the opposite. After Paul wins 10,000 pounds on Lively Spark at the Leger, Uncle Oscar interrogates him, but “the boy watched him with big blue eyes, that had an uncanny cold fire in them, and he said never a word” (“R-HW,” 238). When his uncle asks him why he does not want his mother to know of his winnings, “the boy writhe[s] in an odd way” and simply replies: “ ‘ I don’t want her to know, Uncle’ ” (“RHW,” 238). The uneasy gesture and reticence hint at a masturbatory element in his compulsive rocking – an element that Snodgrass was the first to recognize.²⁰ Arrangements are made for a thousand pounds to be paid out of Paul’s winnings to his mother on her birthdays for the next five years, but when she receives the envelope she conceals her feelings and goes to the lawyer, demanding the whole amount cash down. “[T]he flow of libido in the unconscious” that energizes the fairytale hero has become locked in a sterile drive that cannot create the desired change of heart in Paul’s mother.²¹ As in the Grimms’ fairy tale, “The Fisherman and His Wife,”²² the more she gets the more she wants, until her demands become self-defeating. The boy consequently needs to win on the Grand National, Lincoln, or Derby. The desire for material success to compensate for personal failure that lies at the back of the money craving can never be satiated, but increases exponentially. This self-destructive pattern points to the moral element in the story that has been likened to that of fable or parable. Paul’s striving for luck and lucre only exacerbates “[t]he voices in the house [that] suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening” (“R-HW,” 239). While the house sees “a blossoming of the luxury Paul’s mother had been used to,” “the voices in the house … simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: ‘There must be more money! Oh-h-h! There must be more money!’” (“RHW,” 239). The compulsion to win at any price (even the price of one’s soul), which is the curse of a money-mad society, claims Paul as sacrificial victim. Having lost in the Grand National and Lincoln, he feels huge pressure to succeed in the Derby. The uncanny,²³ a prominent feature of fairy tale, depends on a strange

 Snodgrass, “A Rocking-Horse,” 122 – 125.  Marie-Louise von Franz, Individuation in Fairy Tales, rev. ed. (Boston: Shambhala, 1990): 41.  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, trans. and introd. Jack Zipes (New York: Bantam, 1992): 65 – 73.  W. S. Marks III, “The Psychology of the Uncanny in Lawrence’s ‘The Rocking-Horse Winner,’ ” Modern Fiction Studies 11.4 (1965): 381– 392, rpt. ProQuest-Johns Hopkins UP, 2003, relates “Paul’s ability to make lucky predictions by riding himself into a trance on his totemic hobby-

162

Jack Stewart

merger of reality and the marvelous: embedded in reality, it yet seems to depart from it. So “[Paul’s] big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness” (“R-HW,” 238) appear “uncanny,” as if in touch with supernatural powers. He does not want to be sent away to the seaside before the Derby, because the house that is the source of the ghostly whisper is also the source of his “secret of secrets,” namely “his wooden horse, that which had no name” (“R-HW,” 241). His secrecy reinforces the subliminal sexual suggestion:²⁴ “Since he was emancipated from a nurse and a nursery-governess, he had had his rocking-horse removed to his own bedroom at the top of the house” (“R-HW,” 241), a site that Widmer associates with “the fairy-tale magic tower” (93). It is a place beyond surveillance to which he can retreat to survey the surrounding world. When his mother complains that he is “too big for a rocking horse,” he replies: “ ‘ Well, you see, Mother, till I can have a real horse, I like to have some sort of animal about’ ” (“R-HW,” 241). The rocking-horse appears to be a sexual totem for the pre-pubertal boy as well as a means to activate psychic powers. Paul’s mother “[is] at a big party in town, when one of her rushes of anxiety about her boy, her first-born, gripped her heart” (“R-HW,” 241). She phones to see if he is all right and her concern is undercut by a sense of complicity: “She did not want her son’s privacy intruded upon” (241). She seems to intuit that he has a guilty secret. The scene where the mother goes to the boy’s bedroom and waits outside the door is intensely dramatic, like the climactic disclosure of a fairy tale that unmasks secrets or reveals the unconscious: There was a strange, heavy and yet not loud noise. Her heart stood still. It was a soundless noise, yet rushing and powerful. Something huge, in violent, hushed motion. […]. She felt that she knew the noise. […] Yet she could not place it. […]. And on and on it went, like a madness. (“R-HW,” 242)

Softly she opens the door. “Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on the rocking-horse” (“R-HW,” 242). This iconic scene sheds a shocking light on the dark secret of the boy’s rocking: his “green pyjamas” and his mother’s “green and crystal” dress (“R-HW,” 242) frame the two in the same magic circle. The boy screams out the name of the Derby winner, Malabar, and “[h]is eyes blazed at her for one strange and

horse […] [to] Freud’s paper ‘The Uncanny,’ where this phenomenon is defined as a product of narcissistic regression to a primitive belief in animism” (384).  Snodgrass maintains that “[e]ven a brief reading of [Lawrence’s “Pornography and Obscenity”] should convince one that Paul’s mysterious ecstasy is not only religious, but sexual and onanistic. That is Paul’s ‘secret of secrets’ “ (“A Rocking-Horse,” 122).

Fairytale Elements

163

senseless second, as he ceased urging his wooden horse. Then he fell with a crash to the ground” (“R-HW,” 242). As he tosses about in a fever, “[Paul’s] eyes were like blue stones. His mother sat, feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into a stone” (“R-HW,” 243). Intense compression of motifs into a single formula or magic object is characteristic of fairytale narrative. So the symbolic cluster of eyes, heart, and stone signifies a fused passion for money, luxury, and success that calcifies love or feeling. The mad pursuit of “filthy lucre” has atrophied all feeling, turning the mother’s heart to stone and bringing a curse upon the house. It has instilled a desperate desire in Paul to give his mother what she lacks – a desire that leads to his hypertrophied sexual development and premature death. Ironically, Malabar’s victory earns Paul “over seventy thousand pounds,” so he can assure his mother: “I am lucky” (“R-HW,” 243). He has achieved his aim, but in concentrating all his instincts on winning, he has destroyed all chance of sane and healthy development: after raving about his “luck,” he “die[s] in the night” (“R-HW,” 243), Uncle Oscar, who is largely responsible for the boy’s fate, offers a cynical summing-up: “ ‘ My God, Hester, you’re eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But poor devil, poor devil, he’s best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner” (“RHW,” 243). Trebling of the phrase “poor devil,” as in a fairytale chant, suggests that the boy has symbolically made a contract with the devil. Snodgrass observes that “the story resembles many well-known fairy tales or magical stories in which the hero bargains with evil powers for personal advantages or forbidden knowledge” (“A Rocking-Horse,” 119). The boy is inveigled into his devilish contract by his mother’s need and his uncle’s greed, both being enrolled in the worship of Mammon. The “sin against the Holy Ghost,” for Lawrence, is mechanization of the life instinct by committing it to material ends and Uncle Oscar, who values “filthy lucre” more than love or life, unconsciously acts as the devil’s agent. Critics have variously related “The Rocking-Horse Winner” to fairy tale, fable, parable, allegory, folklore, ritual, and myth, illustrating the stylistic diversity of the story. But there is little agreement as to how these formal and generic elements cohere in Lawrence’s tightly organized style. While the omniscient opening and keynote refrain mark the story’s primary affinity with fairy tale, its satiric, ironic, and moral elements suggest parable. Turner connects it with parable “[in] that it has the air of a dark saying, inviting exegesis […] and yet remaining elusive in its dark suggestiveness.”²⁵ He notes that

 Turner, “The Perversion of Play,” 268.

164

Jack Stewart

the [traditional] fairy tale […] is a myth of psychological integration […]. Yet Lawrence […] offers no such consolation in the macabre ending of his tale. It is a fairy tale of experience, not of innocence, and it has the dangerous openness of parable in its appeal to the listener.²⁶

In this sense, “The Rocking-Horse Winner” cuts a broader existential swath than the classic fairy tale or Märchen. It combines the uncanny and perverse elements of a sinister fairy tale with the satiric and moral focus of fable. Lawrence sharpens its impact by employing the crisply economic style and supernatural elements of fairy tale, but ironically subverts fairy tale’s normally optimistic outcome.²⁷ “The Man Who Loved Islands” (1928) had its genesis in Lawrence’s disillusionment with Compton Mackenzie, whom he had met on the Isle of Capri in December 1919, and their utopian scheme to buy a yacht and explore the South Seas.²⁸ But his personal motive in writing the story seems to have been to deal cathartically with negative tendencies he had experienced in himself, by driving them to fictional extremes. On June 14, 1926, about the time he began the story, he wrote to his sister Emily: “Compton Mackenzie wants me to go to an island off Lewis, in the Outer Hebrides.”²⁹ Instead, he fashioned an “ectoplasm” or outward shell of Mackenzie – his propensity for buying islands where he could lord it over a circle of admirers – and injected into that shell elements of his own psyche.³⁰ The outer cellular plasm of Cathcart/Mackenzie includes the man in the white suit, who bought a succession of increasingly remote islands, while the inner plasm is drawn from Lawrence’s own psychic experience.³¹ Like

 Turner, “The Perversion of Play,” 268 – 269.  Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1991), notes that “[t]he fairy tale and the mirror [of bourgeois idealism] cracked into sharp-edged, radical parts by the end of the nineteenth century” (105).  D. H. Lawrence, “The Man Who Loved Islands,” in The Woman Who Rode Away and Other Stories, ed. Mehl and Jansohn, 151– 173. Further references in the text abbreviated as “MWLI.”  D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: vol. 5: 1924 – 27, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989): 367.  Ectoplasm in biology is “the outer portion of the cytoplasm of a cell”; in spiritualism, it is “the supposed emanation from the body of a medium” (Random House Dictionary, 1966). Compton Mackenzie probably intended the spiritualist sense when he “explain[ed] to Harry T. Moore [in 1950] that Lawrence “had a trick of describing a person’s setting or background vividly and then putting into [it] an ectoplasm entirely of his own creation” (qtd. George H. Ford, Double Measure: A Study of the Novels and Stories of D. H. Lawrence [New York: Norton, 1965]: 84).  Jill Franks, Islands and the Modernists: The Allure of Isolation in Art, Literature and Science (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), observes that Lawrence, “[s]howing the down side of his ideals […] is engaged in self-analysis and self-parody” (129).

Fairytale Elements

165

Paul in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” his protagonist represents tendencies he had known from the inside, intensely re-imagined, but distanced and heightened in fairytale form. The hybrid character that results is a recognizable figure with alien psychic contents.³² Lawrence defended himself against Mackenzie’s protests by insisting that “though the circumstances are some of them his, the man is no more he than I am.”³³ As he confessed elsewhere, “one sheds ones sicknesses in books – repeats and presents again ones emotions, to be master of them” – and in this case he sheds them onto Mackenzie.³⁴

Fairytale form, displacement, and narrative structure Northrop Frye’s theory of the “displacement” of myth provides a clue to Lawrence’s adaptation of fairytale form.³⁵ Frye observes that mythic displacement “tends toward abstraction in character-drawing” (138) – an element that Max Lüthi, in The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man,³⁶ stresses as vital to fairy tale. In “The Man Who Loved Islands,” it is not so much a matter of abstraction, however, as of deepening and disguising the personal, so that it coincides with the mythic and universal. The opening statement, “There was a man who loved islands” (“MWLI,” 151), alerts the reader to the timeless, omniscient tone of fairy tale. Such formulaic openings (cf. “RH-W”) are conspicuous markers of fairytale form. Lüthi explains that “[t]he teller of fairytales narrates primarily incrementally rather than by using subordination, which results in a linear […]

 L. D. Clark, The Minoan Distance: The Symbolism of Travel in D. H. Lawrence (Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1980), sees “[t]he protagonist […] [as] one of Lawrence’s most curious and subtle combinations of himself and another man – though Compton Mackenzie […] saw no Lawrence in Cathcart, only an ectoplasm presented under the facts of his life” (356).  D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: vol. 6: 1927 – 28, ed. James T. Boulton and Margaret H. Boulton with Gerald M. Lacy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991): 205.  D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence: vol. 2: 1913 – 1916, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1981): 90. Further references in the text abbreviated as Letters 2.  For Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York: Atheneum, 1966), “[t]he presence of a mythical structure in realistic fiction [. . .] poses certain technical problems for making it plausible, and the devices used in solving these problems may be given the general name of displacement” (136).  Max Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form and Portrait of Man, trans. Jon Erickson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984): 24– 36.

166

Jack Stewart

narrative structure.”³⁷ He emphasizes that fairy tale has “a crystal-clear narrative technique” and “[a] structure […] characterized by clarity, compactness, and exactitude,” in which “linearity, isolation, juxtaposition and sequencing […] [contribute to] optical clarity.”³⁸ Thanks to Lawrence’s use of fairytale form, a whole pattern of existence is laid out before the reader in parallel but contrasting stages. He adopts a fairytale narrative structure that binds separate stages together in a single line of development. Each section is clearly marked with a sub-heading (“First Island,” “Second Island,” “The Third Island”) and occupies its own narrative space, yet parallels and contrasts with the other episodes. Lawrence’s tendency to expressionism heightens contrasts, matching what Lüthi calls “[t]he tendency to the extreme, which is at work in every nook and cranny of the fairytale […] contribut[ing] to [its] clarity and sharpness.”³⁹ Fairytale extremes are formally a way of structuring reality and psychologically of mastering the shadow self, which C. G. Jung defines as “the dark half of the personality.”⁴⁰ Cathcart’s “shadow self” emerges in those nighttime scenes in which he enters the archetypal unconscious and imagines primitive sacrifice. The stark power of Lawrence’s narrative to grip the reader’s imagination depends largely on triadic structure or “trebling,”⁴¹ a device integral to fairy tale that highlights progression through a series of encounters. Lüthi notes that the number three, ritually featured in fairy tales, has a “mythic” and “magical” force; he also emphasizes the structural significance of tripled sequences, especially “in conjunction with differentiation, intensification, and contrast.”⁴² In “The Man Who Loved Islands,” the threefold structure of diminishing returns and increasing isolation is dramatically expressive of self-caused fate. The narrative conforms to the fairytale pattern of a series of trials of increasing intensity, facing which the hero triumphs or succumbs. But in contrast with “the depthless, sublimating style of the fairytale,”⁴³ Lawrence fleshes out natural settings

 Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 41.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 53; 54; 44.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 43.  C. G. Jung, “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales,” in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 2nd ed., trans R. F. C. Hull, Bollingen Series 20 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1968): 207– 254, 246.  Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, 74.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 44– 45.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 16.

Fairytale Elements

167

in sensuous depth and detail,⁴⁴ framing the protagonist’s existence against a detailed backdrop of place, space, and time.

Isolation and the isolated protagonist According to Lüthi, “isolation is one of the governing principles in the fairy tale,” which “portrays its hero as isolated.”⁴⁵ As he puts it, “missing elements, and the corresponding need and striving for remedy dominate […] the fairytale narrative.”⁴⁶ The elements that Lawrence’s protagonist misses are a sense of splendid isolation and command of the environment. In fairy tale, the hero follows a lonely path to encounters that reveal his essential self and deliver rewards or punishments. The motif of isolation is central to Lawrence’s tale, in which the protagonist’s actions reveal not only his will-to-isolation, but his identity and fate. Cathcart drops out of the human community, sundering himself from those “dependents” on whom he had (ironically) depended, and sequesters himself on a barren island in the Atlantic. There he faces the elements alone, ultimately finding himself beyond the pale of civilization or of existence itself. He follows a lonely path to more and more extreme encounters with the void and breaks the saving link between “[i]solation and universal connection” that Lüthi sees as integral to folktale or fairytale form.⁴⁷ In Lawrence’s anti-fairy tale, the anti-hero suppresses or denies his relations with others and becomes increasingly isolated. Lüthi contrasts “the frame with which the folktale circumscribes events […] with the expansive plot, which leads to the farthest distances.”⁴⁸ So Cathcart’s diminishing domains are polarized with an increasing expanse of ocean, and the shrinking microcosm of self with a looming background of time and space. He takes on a series of tests or challenges, as in fairy tale, but his isolation increases exponentially. He is the consummate anti-hero in an anti-fairy tale, a sub-genre that reverses the normative pattern by starting positively and ending negatively. His island utopia turns into dystopia and his quest for life on his own terms into annihilation by seem-

 Elizabeth Cook, The Ordinary and the Fabulous: An Introduction to Myths Legends and Fairy Tales, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1976), notes that the contemporary fairy tale boasts “a style of language and structure that is [. . .] sensuous and packed with tactile imagery” (xv).  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 42; 135.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 55.  Max Lüthi, The European Folktale: Form and Nature, trans. John D. Niles (Philadelphia: ISHI, 1982): 90.  Lüthi, The European Folktale, 78.

168

Jack Stewart

ingly hostile elements. Reflecting on folktale or fairytale form, Lüthi observes: “Every living thing grows in accord with immanent laws and yet […] must adapt to its surroundings.”⁴⁹ The immanent law of Lawrence’s protagonist is to re-create and control his environment, rather than adapt to it, and his conscious urge toward isolation is driven by an unconscious will to self-immolation. In the classic fairy tale, the hero’s isolation leads to contacts with magical helpers or acquisition of magical objects; but in “The Man Who Loved Islands,” the anti-hero’s social and spatial isolation becomes starker the further he pursues his dream. His hubris in rejecting the social laws of man and ecological laws of nature leads him, by inevitable stages, to alienation and extinction. The first island evokes some of Lawrence’s most lyrical description: “In early spring, the little ways and glades were a snow of blackthorn, a vivid white among the celtic stillness of close green and grey rock […]” (“MWLI,” 152). There is enchantment in the natural, unspoiled world, as in the pristine freshness of fairy tale. In autumn, “[with] the oat-sheaves lying prone, the great moon, another island, rose golden out of the sea, and, rising higher, the world of the sea was white” (“MWLI,” 152). The first island has many aspects, some benign and some malign. At night, darkness and isolation transform the islander’s consciousness, so that “the blackthorn grove […] was crying with old men of an invisible race, around the altar stone” (“MWLI,” 153). In reaction to this haunted realm, “our islander daily concentrated upon his material island. Why should it not be the Happy Isle at last? Why not the last small isle of the Hesperides … all filled with his own gracious, blossom-like spirit? A minute world of pure perfection, made by man, himself” (“MWLI,” 153).⁵⁰ Ego-consciousness is at the root of the Master’s “islomania:”⁵¹ his fairytale dream is to create an island domain, “[h]imself, of course, to be the fount of this happiness and perfection” (“MWLI,” 155). His desire for a “perfect place” mirrors his desire for order and control, but it is a fantasy or hubristic illusion, for man is only part of the natural order. Yet the dream reflects Lawrence’s quest for Rananim, an island community of kindred souls.⁵²

 Lüthi, The European Folktale, 100.  Lawrence satirizes romantic optimism, as in the hero’s quest for “the Happy Isles” in Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (See Alfred Tennyson, Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. [New York: Norton, 1971]: 54, line 63).  Lawrence Durrell calls his Reflections on a Marine Venus (London: Faber, 1960) an “anatomy of islomania” (16).  Lawrence wrote from Cornwall in January 1915: “I want to gather together about twenty souls and sail away from this world of war and found a little colony” (Letters 2: 259); and from Spo-

Fairytale Elements

169

Contrasts and negative shading Negative shading of darkness against brightness, obscurity against clarity, and evil against good is a prominent feature of fairy tale,⁵³ reflected in the symbolic contrasts of “The Man Who Loved Islands.” Cathcart’s troubles put him in the shade amid the floral abundance of the first island. All his expensive improvements ironically ruin the environment as well as his bank balance: “The marsh-marigolds were blazing in the little swamp where the ditches were being dug for drainage” and the Master realizes that “[t]he yellow beauties would not blaze again” (“MWLI,” 158). After a celebratory feast for harvesthome, a valuable cow is found lying dead at the foot of a cliff. The Happy Isle is built on illusion and things continually go wrong. The negative aspects of island living take on sinister Gothic and supernatural dimensions: “As sure as the spirits rose in the human breast, with a movement of joy, an invisible hand struck malevolently out of the silence” (“MWLI,” 158). The metaphor suggests a supernatural force akin to witchcraft: “The island itself seemed malicious. […] Then suddenly again one morning it would be fair, lovely as a morning in Paradise […]. Then as soon as the Master was opened out in spirit like an open flower, some ugly blow would fall” (“MWLI,” 159). This mysterious malevolence recalls the evil spirit that challenges the hero in fairy tale and, in Lawrence’s story, there are hints of evil spells and dark forces: “Out of the very air came a stony, heavy malevolence. The island itself seemed malicious” (“MWLI,” 159). Much labor, capital, and organization are expended, yet Paradise (not being a material entity) fails to materialize. The islander seems to be the victim of malign enchantment: the island’s seductive appeal – “When there was a scent of honeysuckle, and the moon brightly flickering down on the sea, then even the grumblers felt a strange nostalgia for it” (“MWLI,” 159) – simply lands him in more trouble. The Master becomes alienated from his retainers and socially isolated: “He knew that their spirits were secretly against him, malicious, jeering, envious, and lurking to down him” (“MWLI,” 159). At every turn, he seems bewitched by a lurking malevolence. Night introduces another realm of space and time, in which he loses control of his imagination: “[He] began to be a little afraid of his island. He felt here

torno, Italy, eleven years later: “I still wish my old wish, that I had a little ship to sail this sea, and visit the Isles of Greece […]. That Rananim of ours, it has sunk out of sight” (Letters 5: 367).  Lüthi observes that, “when one looks at the fairytale world as a whole, it is the negative amid the positive that stands out, the dark color amid all the magnificence and sparkle” (The European Folktale, 105).

170

Jack Stewart

strange, violent feelings he had never felt before, and lustful desires that he had been quite free from” (“MWLI,” 159). Lawrence draws on his sense of the Druidic past on the Cornish coast or the pagan aura of Sardinia,⁵⁴ and the magic and mystery associated with primitive sacrifice evoke the mythic side of fairy tale. The island generates a malevolent animism: “[It] was still mysterious and fascinating. But it was also treacherous and cruel, secretly, fathomlessly malevolent. In spite of all its fair show of white blossom and bluebells […] it was your implacable enemy” (160). The Master’s reflections betray a growing paranoia: “The island was mysterious […] it seemed to pick the very money out of your pocket, as if it were an octopus with invisible arms stealing from you in every direction” (“MWLI,” 160) – a hint of the monstrous as in Märchen. The dream of paradisal isolation is undermined by animistic forces that recall the supernatural in fairy tale.

Space, time, and narrative Lawrence’s islander becomes obsessed with space and time. He experiences the island landscape – bushes, flowers, hills, rocks, cliffs, sea – in daytime and a series of seasons. But at nighttime, “[t]he little earthy island has dwindled […] into nothingness, for you have jumped off […] into the dark wide mystery of time, where the past is vastly alive, and the future is not separated off” (“MWLI,” 152). From this expanded perspective, local and actual translate into universal and archetypal: “Strangely, from your little island in space, you were gone forth into the dark, great realms of time […]” (“MWLI,” 152). Living on a small island exposes one to the magnitude of time and space, and the consequent sense of isolation relates to the timeless extremes and universals of fairy tale. Gerald Doherty sees “the displacement of time by space as the ordering principle,”⁵⁵ but time also displaces space in a dialectical interaction, voiding spatial reality and plunging “our islander” into the archetypal unconscious. On winter nights, “when the wind left off blowing in great gusts and volleys […] you felt that your island was a universe […] not an island at all, but an infinite dark world” (“MWLI,” 152). But the expansion of limits is illusory, like Hamlet’s claim that he could be “bound in a nutshell” and yet be “king of infinite

 See Letters 2: 519 – 520 and D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia (1921), ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997): 81.  Gerald Doherty, “The Art of Survival: Narrating the Nonnarratable in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘The Man Who Loved Islands,’ ” D. H. Lawrence Review 24.2 (1992): 117– 126, 119.

Fairytale Elements

171

space”⁵⁶ – for “once isolate yourself on a little island in the sea of space, and the moment begins to heave and expand in great circles, the solid earth is gone, and your slippery, naked dark soul finds herself out in the timeless world” (“MWLI,” 153). Lawrence’s incremental repetition, with its overlapping, merging images, dramatically captures the islander’s loss of contact with reality and lapsing into the void. Lüthi comments on the listener’s or reader’s identification with the hero in fairy tale,⁵⁷ and, in Lawrence’s story, the narrator includes the reader’s point-ofview in the protagonist’s by using first- and second-person as well as third – “Our islander loved his island,” “The island, your island” (“MWLI,” 152) – reminding one that the narrative is exemplary, as in fable, folk, or fairy tale. Lawrence’s pronominal grammar and expressionist style generalize an existential, transpersonal condition. The atmosphere is that of a ghost story with metaphysical dimensions: “The souls of all the dead are alive again, and pulsating actively around you” (“MWLI,” 153). The islander’s metaphysical condition foreshadows his ultimate fate: “He had reduced himself to a single point in space, and a point being that which has neither length nor breadth, he had to step off it into somewhere else. Just as you must step into the sea, if the waters wash your foothold away, so he had, at night, to step off into the otherworld of undying time” (“MWLI,” 153). He is stepping from the limited world of daylight consciousness into the bottomless abyss of the archetypal unconscious, realm of ghosts and suprapersonal forces. On his first island, Cathcart is initiated into the Celtic twilight with the uneasy sense of simultaneously inhabiting two worlds, present and past, civilized and primitive, that marks the uncanny:⁵⁸ “He was uncannily aware, as he lay in the dark, that the blackthorn grove that seemed a bit uncanny even in the realm of space and day, at night was crying with old men of an invisible race, around the altar stone” (“MWLI,” 153). He feels “a wild yearning […] to be far back in the mysterious past of the island, when the blood had a different throb. Strange floods of passion came over you, strange violent lusts and imaginations of cruelty” (“MWLI,” 159). The Master’s “[u]ncanny dreams, half-dreams, half-evocated yearnings” (“MWLI,” 159) signify an atavistic return to a realm of blood-con-

 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Edward Hubler, Signet Classic (New York: New American Library, 1963): 2.2.258 – 259.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 134.  According to Zipes, Fairy Tales, “Freud argues that the uncanny or unfamiliar (unheimlich) brings us in closer touch with the familiar (heimlich), because it touches on emotional disturbances and returns us to repressed phases in our evolution”; Zipes also notes that “the uncanny plays a significant role in the act of reading or listening to a fairy tale” (171).

172

Jack Stewart

sciousness and sacrifice that predates civilization – a world Lawrence explored in The Plumed Serpent (1926) and “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1928). The uncanny irruption of myth and ritual into everyday experience is consistent with folktale or fairy tale, where “[s]ide by side with the ordinary world exists the otherworld.”⁵⁹ This odd conjunction of opposites is a feature of fairytale form. Lüthi sees “the conflict between appearance and reality” in fairy tale as “reflected in the change of situations […] presented in the form of sudden transformations, enchantments and disenchantments.”⁶⁰ The enchantments of summer and spring on the first two islands are followed by the desolate disenchantment of winter on the third. Three years pass on the first island before “the Master,” disillusioned with employees and burdened with debt, sells out and moves to a second – a transitional site in a narrative line that represents dissolution of bonds with others: “It was already autumn, Orion lifting out of the sea” (“MWLI,” 161) – a symbol of pursuing fate, as Orion is the hunter. The decreased size of the new island along with increased isolation strike the islander as an improvement, but are really a measure of regression. Hypnotized by sounds and swells of the sea, he relapses into a trancelike state that he calls “peace,” but which has the sinister tone of a latent death-wish: “The strange stillness from all desire was a kind of wonder […]. He didn’t want anything. His soul at last was still in him, his spirit was like a dim-lit cave under water, where strange sea-foliage expands upon the watery atmosphere, and scarcely sways, and a mute fish shadowily slips in and slips away again” (“MWLI,” 162– 163). This sensuous reverie, reminiscent of Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters,” reflects a worldweary retreat from action, antithetical to Lawrence’s isolationist, but activist, slogan: “Retreat to the desert, and fight.”⁶¹ A sinister animism comes to dominate the islander’s experience: “On this island there were no human ghosts, no ghosts of any ancient race. The sea, and the spume and the wind and the weather, had washed them all out … so there was only the sound of the sea itself, its own ghost, myriad-voiced, communing and plotting and shouting all winter long” (“MWLI,” 161– 162). A vast ocean surrounds the islander’s foothold in the void and ominous imagery foreshadows his ultimate annihilation by the elements. The utopian ideal of island cultivation has become a flight from humanity and a fantasy of returning to nature: “It was as if [the islander] and his few dependents were a small flock of seabirds alighted on this rock, as they travelled through space […]. The silent mys Lüthi, The European Folktale, 77.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 133.  D. H. Lawrence, “St. Mawr,” in St. Mawr and Other Stories, ed. Brian Finney (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983): 19 – 156, 80.

Fairytale Elements

173

tery of travelling birds” (“MWLI,” 162). But while instinctual adaptation enables sea-birds to survive storms at sea, the islander is an outcast in an alien environment and his connection with humanity is steadily dissolving.

Man’s relation with nature and cosmos The islander’s pursuit of his chimerical dream is measured on a scale of diminishing returns. His second island is much smaller than his first and so is his staff, reduced from fourteen to five. But “[on] his hump of rock” (“MWLI,” 161) he still asserts his mastery, his will to be monarch of all he surveys. The satiric irony aimed at egotism and idealism is unmistakable, as isolation and entropy take their toll of the island dream: “The island was no longer a ‘world.’ It was a sort of refuge” (“MWLI,” 162). “The Master” may be lulled into thinking that he is at one with nature and in control of his own destiny, but he is increasingly cut off from human reality. On the second island, the old Druidic, blood-sacrificing ghosts of the first are gone. Loneliness affects the mind, so that the natural elements themselves seem haunted and malevolent. “[T]he celtic sea sucked and washed and smote [the island’s] leathery greyness. […] [D]eep explosions, rumblings, strange long sighs and whistling noises: then voices, real voices of people clamouring […] under the waters […]. [T]hen a tremulous trilling noise, very long and alarming, and an undertone of hoarse gasping” (“MWLI,” 161). Lawrence’s sound imagery is eerily sensuous and menacing. The islander’s failure to distinguish between natural sounds and aural hallucinations, marked by anthropomorphic metaphors, is a projection of his tense psyche. Desiring complete isolation after the failure of his perfunctory marriage with the servant-maid Flora – whose mythic name symbolizes the floral realm he has abandoned – Cathcart buys a third island far out in the Atlantic. “It was just a few acres of rock away in the north, on the outer fringe of the isles” (“MWLI,” 165). As he heads north to this island, he has learnt nothing about the ultimate direction of his quest. His new domain is almost inaccessible: “For several days, owing to the seas, he could not approach it. Then, in a light sea-mist, he landed, and saw it hazy, low, stretching apparently a long way. But it was an illusion” (“MWLI,” 165) – as is his whole project of self-fulfillment in isolation. A tin shack is built for him with a few necessities; there are no trees on the island and his walks always bring him back to “the ceaseless, restless sea” (“MWLI,” 167). Yet he is glad of his narrow domain: “His bare, low-pitched island in the pale blue sea was all he wanted” (“MWLI,” 167). As with the plants on the previous island, he experiences “a flicker of the old passion, to know the name of everything he saw” (“MWLI,” 168) – to possess the floral realm by knowledge,

174

Jack Stewart

rather than interact with it. Cutting down desires and activities and becoming a hermit is not, however, the way for the islander to find fulfillment.⁶² There is nothing but emptiness on his horizon: “Sometimes, like a mirage, he would see the shadow of land rise hovering to northwards. It was a big island beyond. But quite without substance” (“MWLI,” 167). Appearance displaces reality; silence and isolation are all he wants, “the whispering sound of the sea, and the sharp cries of the gulls, cries that came out of another world to him” (“MWLI,” 168). Living at the edge of existence, he becomes alienated from the human life-world. The physical extent of the third island is as illusory as the ontological innerspace the islander seeks to master. His alienated stance leads to a more-thanSwiftian misanthropy: “[he] loathe[s] with profound repulsion the whole of the animal creation. What repulsive god [he wonders] invented animals, and evilsmelling men?” (“MWLI,” 169).⁶³ He mistakes the black heads of seals swimming in the bay for men and is overcome with shock and repulsion. The Ancient Mariner was released from his curse by a momentary empathy with the sea-snakes, but the islander has no such salvational empathy for other creatures – or for his own species. Isolation leads to disorientation, if not demonic possession. It is a world that hovers beyond the mainstays of language or reason. Steven Swann Jones notes that “[t]he fairytale, both traditional and literary, is … inherently preoccupied with the mental landscape of the protagonist” and Cathcart’s mental landscape is mirrored (often ironically) in the islandscapes he encounters.⁶⁴ Microcosm matches macrocosm, as the waste of the protagonist’s life matches “the waste of the lifeless sea” (“MWLI,” 173). Inner and outer merge in a trancelike state and “[he] felt […] as if dissolution had already set in inside him. Everything was twilight, outside, and in his mind and soul” (“MWLI,” 169).⁶⁵ On this final island, the protagonist is fully exposed to the timeless world of space: “Only

 Lawrence wrote (September 1, 1916) from Higher Tregerthen, Zennor, in Cornwall: “Like the monks of Nitria, I […] sit amidst silence […]. [T]here is […] great hollow reverberating space, the beauty of all the universe – nothing more” (Letters 2: 648 – 649).  Lawrence himself experienced bouts of intense “androphobia” during the First World War: “I must say I hate mankind […]. When I see people in the distance, walking along the path through the fields to Zennor, I want to crouch in the bushes and shoot them silently”; like the protagonist of “The Man Who Loved Islands,” he laments: “If only one had the world to oneself” (Letters 2: 650).  Steven Swann Jones, The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of Imagination (New York: Twayne, 1995): 104.  David Willbern, “Malice in Paradise: Isolation and Projection in ‘The Man Who Loved Islands,’ ” in D. H. Lawrence Review 10.3 (1977): 223 – 239, points to “the spectral and surreal landscape of the third and final [island]” (225).

Fairytale Elements

175

he still derived his single satisfaction from being alone, absolutely alone, with the space soaking into him. […]. Nothing human […] Only space, damp, twilit, sea-washed space! This was the bread of his soul” (“MWLI,” 170).⁶⁶ It is a communion with the void, such as Eastern mystics might have experienced but, in the context of Lawrence’s story, it is an escape from human reality. Lüthi highlights “the principle of repetition” as “[o]ne of the most notable characteristics of style and composition in the fairytale,”⁶⁷ and verbal repetition strikes sinister chords in “The Man Who Loved Islands.” The “stony, heavy malevolence” that seemed to come “[o]ut of the very air” (“MWLI,” 159) on the first island possesses the islander again on the third, “[a]nd if he saw the labouring sail of a fishing boat away on the cold waters, a strange malevolent anger passed over his features” (“MWLI,” 170). He has internalized and redirected the malevolence he felt was directed against him on the first island. Lawrence’s incremental repetition of keywords such as “malevolent” recreates the ominous spell that grips the islander. The source of his altered consciousness is disillusionment combined with a horror vacui – a negative shading “magically thrown into relief” by Lawrence’s expressive style that reveals conflict and ambivalence.⁶⁸ Such “linguistic incantation” is related to spells in fairy tale and Lawrence’s imagery is designed to cast a spell over the reader – a spell from which its author has awakened.

Space, time, language, and identity David Ellis has called “The Man Who Loved Islands” “probably the most philosophical fiction [Lawrence] ever wrote.”⁶⁹ Using fairytale form to clarify his theme, Lawrence traces deep connections between space and time, language and identity. Significantly, the islander “[keeps] no track of time” and “obliterate[s] any bit of lettering [or print] in his cabin” (“MWLI,” 170), so as to elude the grasp of language. Deprived of words or even animal contact (his cat has disappeared), “[he] prowled around his island in the rain,” himself a lonely animal. “Time had ceased to pass” (“MWLI,” 170) and with it his sense of identity has gone. What finally overcomes him is his island’s loss of outlines, its blurred

 Lawrence’s imagery seems drawn from his appreciation of the Isle of Skye, which he visited in August 1926 and likened to “the twilight morning of the world […] the sea running far in, for miles, between the wet, trickling hills” (Letters 5: 512).  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 76.  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 401.  Davis Ellis, D. H. Lawrence: Dying Game 1922 – 1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998): 310.

176

Jack Stewart

amorphousness under the snow that matches his own loss of identity. He struggles to dig himself out of his walled-up cabin. “But his island was gone. Its shape was all changed, great heaping white hills rose where no hills had been, inaccessible, and they fumed like volcanoes, but with snow powder” (“MWLI,” 172). This apocalyptic landscape raises the action to mythic dimensions. “In the silence it seemed he could hear the panther-like dropping of infinite snow. Thunder rumbled nearer, crackled quick after the bleared reddened lightning. […]. The elements! The elements!” (“MWLI,” 173). More than any Götterdämmerung, this invocation of the inhuman signifies that the limits of human existence have been reached.⁷⁰

Symbolic portents: myth, ritual, and primitive culture The protagonist’s psychic state on his third island leads to a series of portents akin to magic signals in fairy tale. Living alone, he becomes obsessed with a large gull, reminiscent of the albatross in Coleridge’s “The Ancient Mariner,” that “[walked] back and forth in front of the open door of the cabin, as if he had some mission there” (“MWLI,” 168). The gull is at once an actual bird and a symbolic portent, as the text specifically spells out: “the folded wings had shut black pinions, and on the closed black feathers were three very distinct white dots making a pattern. […]. He was portentous, he had a meaning” (“MWLI,” 168 [emphasis mine]). The gull is a bird of ill omen, antithetical to the animal and bird helpers of fairy tale, and his “mission” is to awaken, in the islander, some sense of the pattern of his own existence. The “three very distinct white dots” form an abstract hieroglyph of the three islands, marking three stages of devolution. As sea birds instinctually respond to weather signals and desert the island, portents of doom increase: “There was a strange rumbling of far-off thunder in the frozen air, and through the newly-falling snow, a dim flash of lightning” (“MWLI,” 171). The snow that walls in the islander’s cabin is the symbolic equivalent of the element that overcomes Gerald in the “Snowed Up” chapter of Women in Love. ⁷¹ The world seems to contract around the protag-

 Cf. Joyce Carol Oates, “Lawrence’s Götterdämmerung: The Apocalyptic Vision of Women in Love,” in Critical Essays on D. H. Lawrence, ed. Dennis Jackson and Fleda Brown Jackson (Boston: Hall, 1988): 92– 110.  D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (1921), ed. David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987): 441– 474. Cf. Loerke’s apocalyptic “dream of fear […] [in

Fairytale Elements

177

onist, with “flashes of lightning blinking reddish through the falling snow” (“MWLI,” 171) – an otherworldly portent of imminent fate. There is an air of fateful mystery about the islander’s final moments: “As he looked, the sky mysteriously darkened and chilled. From far off came the mutter of the unsatisfied thunder, and he knew it was the signal of the snow rolling over the sea” (“MWLI,” 173). The “unsatisfied” thunder is the relentless voice of the elements, portentous as the voice of some dark god announcing doom. The fairytale narrative or philosophical fable of the anti-hero’s isolation ends on the existentially bleak note of man’s isolation in the universe. There is increasing exposure to meteorological and cosmic forces: “The birds passed away … Some he saw lying frozen. It was as if all life were drawing away, contracting away from the north, contracting southwards” (“MWLI,” 171). The fourfold repetition of “away” lends a note of incantation to departure, as if with the soul’s departure from the body. In Lawrence’s symbolic geography, north and east are deathly directions, south and west vital. The scale has switched from local to global, as in “the world-incorporating character, the universalism, of the fairytale.”⁷² “The Man Who Loved Islands” concludes without the moral summation of fairy tale or fable, in sheer exhaustion of life and meaning, as entropy overtakes the islander. The anthropologist Francisco Vaz da Silva links fairy tales with myth, ritual, and primitive culture. “[F]airy tales,” he writes, “deal with the sort of images anthropologists call ‘mythical’ […]. [There is] a lunar realm of initiation and metamorphosis right at the core of fairy tales, which is reminiscent of ‘ritual’ imagery.”⁷³ Da Silva observes that “the symbolic language of fairy tales is comparable to that of a faraway ‘primitive’ culture. … [F]airy tales rely on widely perceived metaphors concerning basic physiological and cosmic processes. If so, the symbolic survey of fairy tales belongs with that of myths and rituals […] in the study of human symbolic imagination.”⁷⁴ Lüthi cites Mircea Eliade’s view that “[the fairy tale] possesses an unmistakable initiatory structure […] [and] that it transposes the experiences of initiation onto the level of imagination.”⁷⁵ The fairytale aura of Lawrence’s story links the islander’s imagination, intensified by nighttime and space, with mythic and ritual dimensions of experience including the archetypal.

which] only white creatures […] and men like awful white snow-birds, persisted in ice-cruelty” (453).  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 149.  Francisco Vaz da Silva, “Fairy-Tale Symbolism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Fairy Tales, ed. Maria Tatar (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015): 97– 116, 113.  Vaz da Silva, “Fairy-Tale Symbolism,” 113.  Lüthi, The Fairytale as Art Form, 160.

178

Jack Stewart

Genre Much critical discussion of “The Man Who Loved Islands” focuses on genre. Elements of fairy tale, folktale, fable, parable, and myth, overlap and are incorporated into Lawrence’s visually expressive style. The structuralist Propp and formalist Lüthi treat “fairy tale” and “folktale” as virtually synonymous. Fairy tales are populated by princes, princesses, giants, witches, and ordinary people like younger brothers, kitchen maids, tailors, and soldiers; folktales are “stor[ies] passed on by word of mouth rather than by writing, and thus partly modified by successive retellings before being written down.”⁷⁶ Fables often involve animal characters that exemplify human qualities; parables are brief tales that illustrate moral truths without magical objects or animals. These genres are closely related: according to Baldick, “[folktale] includes legends, fables, jokes, tall stories, and fairy tales or Märchen.”⁷⁷ F. R. Leavis regards “The Man Who Loved Islands” as “notable for its success in a mode suggestive of the märchen,” the classic fairy tale that involves magic gifts and acts – but later refers to it as a “fable.”⁷⁸ Julian Moynahan maintains that “ ‘ The Man Who Loved Islands’ […] is perhaps Lawrence’s greatest story in what may be called the fable or parable form” and includes “The Rocking-Horse Winner” as “[an]other notable example[].”⁷⁹ Moynahan observes that these stories “never emerge as flat allegories, and their characters manage to remain fully expressive and alive”⁸⁰ – signifying Lawrence’s absorption of inter-generic elements into his own prophetic and symbolic style. Jill Franks, like Moynahan, conflates “fairy tale” with “parable” but notes that “[u]nlike in a parable […] this story’s hero never learns. The story’s ending resembles the most fatalistic ones of Grimms’ Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables.”⁸¹ Widmer observes that the story “opens with the detached tone of the fable” and links it with “fables of hard romanticism” featuring “the sacrificial antihero”, but primarily sees it as a “parable of annihilation.”⁸² Turner notes that “[the] story has commonly been considered a fable which, by satirizing sickness, points the reader in the direction of health,” but also considers it “an open tale

 Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (New York: Oxford UP, 1991): 85.  Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, 85.  F. R. Leavis, D. H. Lawrence: Novelist (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964): 324; 325.  Julian Moynahan, The Deed of Life: The Novels and Tales of D. H. Lawrence (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1963): 185.  Moynahan, The Deed of Life, 185.  Franks, Islands and the Modernists, 129.  Widmer, Art of Perversity, 11-17.

Fairytale Elements

179

with the dark multiple significances […] of parable.”⁸³ The convergence in the story of all these generic elements testifies to Lawrence’s adaptation of traditional narrative forms, such as folktale and fairy tale, to his own symbolic and realistic modes of expression.

Conclusion A series of fairytale elements links the two stories. (1) Formulaic openings that announce the genre. (2) A narrative sequence of challenges or trials: in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a series of races and winners leads to a climactic win that ironically spells defeat; in “The Man Who Loved Islands,” a series of three islands and three degrees of isolation leads to the anti-hero’s annihilation. (3) Trebling, as in the “love – lucre – luck” riddle of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” and the three-island sequence of “The Man Who Loved Islands.” (4) Animism: in “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” a totemic object comes to life with demonic power; in “The Man Who Loved Islands,” the ominous voice of the sea is rendered in a range of anthropomorphic images. (5) Isolation: the boy alone at the top of the house with his rocking-horse, the islander alone on a barren island in the Atlantic. (6) Reader identification with hero: the protagonist of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” provides a brightly lit dramatic focus, while the reader of “The Man Who Loved Islands” is invited, through focalization, to empathize with the protagonist. (7) Spells and hallucinations, repetition and incantation, as in the magical effects of fairy tale. (8) Enchantment and disenchantment, utopia and dystopia, as in the sudden transformations of fairy tale. (9) The uncanny: the sense of living in two worlds at the same time, at the interface of material and marvelous. (10) Subversion: both stories are anti-fairy tales that subvert traditional patterns of love, luck, and success. (11) The magical dynamism of both stories owes much to Lawrence’s probing of his own past conflicts and ambivalences. But there are differences. The compressed plot, abstraction, and symbolism of “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” with its touches of supernatural and surreal, has the aesthetic objectivity of the classic fairy tale or Märchen. The plot of “The Man Who Loved Islands” is more broadly eclectic, with the anti-hero working out his destiny through a prolonged narrative sequence that dramatizes subjectivity. Psychologically, fairytale form gave Lawrence a symbolic means of exploring potentially traumatic issues; formally, it gave him a clear-cut, narrative framework that intensified his creative vision and expression.

 Turner, The Perversion of Play, 262; 283.

Franziska Quabeck

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House The article looks at the significance of dirt in Bleak House. The novel’s world is covered in mud, fog and general dirt and so are its characters. It is a generally accepted thesis that the fog in Bleak House stands for Chancery, but critics still disagree how much symbolism Dickens’s realism allows. The article will therefore look at dirt as both literal soil and symbolic cover. The characters in Bleak House are either covered in dirt or obsessed with becoming clean. While Jo finds his tragic end amidst the dirt, Esther Summerson does her utmost to keep her world clean and in order. I will argue that her focus on dirt and order is a mechanism of repression that reveals her true concern, which is her identity and her position in society. While the literal dirt in Bleak House presents a real danger to society, its symbolic meaning relates to questions of identity.

Dickens’s fictional world is famous for its dirt. His spaces and places, as well as his people are dirty, and the significance of this dirt is the subject of this article. Dirt in Dickens raises two central questions: first, what is dirt and how can we theorize it? Second, is its significance in Dickens a symbolic or a literal one? In this paper, I will therefore discuss theories of dirt and filth and their common denominators, consider the historical and cultural significance of dirt in nineteenth-century England, and I will look at dirty matter from both a symbolic and a literal point of view. I would like to argue that dirt in Dickens signifies not only matter out of place, but also people out of place. Dirt in Dickens is a question of identity, and in order to point that out he uses dirt in both a literal and a symbolic sense. Theories of dirt struggle first and foremost with terminology: dirt, filth, grime, grunge, soil, crap, shit and many more terms may refer to dirty matter, but they all evoke subtly distinct associations. While dirt seems more literal, filth suggests a moral dimension, and it is possibly for this reason that academic discourse makes much more use of the term ‘filth’ than of the term ‘dirt,’ as the most influential theorists such as Richard A. Barney, William Cohen and Ryan Johnson argue. In many ways, discussions of the topic tend to imply a moral dimension, but as this paper draws a distinct line between literal and symbolic matter, I will refer to this matter as ‘dirt.’ However, as many theorists use filth as an umbrella term, the following discussion has to use both terms interchangehttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-011

182

Franziska Quabeck

ably. So, in what ways might dirt be significant at all, beyond its embellishing inclusion in realist narratives? Dirt signifies power dimensions of the cultural order to an extent that is vital and yet easily overlooked. This argument was first brought forth by Mary Douglas, who emphasized dirt’s revolutionary potential: “As we know it, dirt is essentially disorder. […] Dirt offends against order.”¹ Dirt has the potential to disturb the system in place, which means reciprocally that “[w]here there is dirt, there is system.”² This means, of course, that the system also prescribes what one ought to consider dirt: “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.”³ Thus, dirt is no a priori category. It is relational to the very system it offends and relative in nature. In other words, if dirt is “matter out of place,”⁴ it is a culturally defined category that can vary greatly in substance, depending on the culture that frames it. We have no means of defining dirt per se, we can only define it in relation to that order it seems to offend. Hence, it is the very lack of its definition that renders dirt a fruitful subject of analysis. Dirt means very different things, depending on the cultural and historical framework we regard it in, but it nevertheless bears one characteristic that applies beyond time and space: dirt plays “a signal role in disturbing cultural boundaries.”⁵ While the definition of dirt is relative, whatever is regarded as dirt within a certain cultural framework will always be considered as a disturbance, as a counter-reaction to the established order. This necessarily evokes existing power structures and a hegemonic view of what disturbs the established order. William Cohen has defined this dynamic in terms of abjection: In a general sense, filth is a term of condemnation, which instantly repudiates a threatening thing, person, or idea by ascribing alterity to it. Ordinarily, that which is filthy is so fundamentally alien that it must be rejected; labeling something is a viscerally powerful means of excluding it.⁶

In that sense, dirt is a dangerous category, for it does not only pertain to things or objects but, more importantly, to people and subjects. The very lack of definition and the dependence on a hegemonic cultural framework give it symbolic  Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (London and New York: Routledge, 2002): 2.  Douglas, Purity and Danger, 44.  Douglas, Purity and Danger, 44.  Douglas, Purity and Danger, 50.  Richard A. Barney, “Filthy Thoughts, or, Cultural Criticism and the Ordure of Things,” Genre 27.4 (1992): 275 – 293, 286.  William A. Cohen, “Introduction: Locating Filth,” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen, and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005): vii–xxxviii, ix.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

183

meaning that can far exceed the presence of actual substance and therefore be attributed to objects and persons as a degradation. As Cohen argues, commonly “[p]eople are denounced as filthy when they are unassimilably other.”⁷ Their exclusion is therefore subjective and arbitrary, prescribed by the system that is already in place and resists being overturned. Dirt therefore functions as a means of othering and as a heuristic means of establishing seemingly organic distinctions. The dirty subject or object is excluded as decidedly other and not the same, as belonging to a different category that must be segregated safely and completely. In that sense, Cohen argues, “filth is frequently so disturbing that it endangers the subjective integrity of the one who confronts it.”⁸ Since dirt is no stable category, it also threatens to contaminate. The dirty subject is not inherently dirty but described as dirty; it has become dirty. Presumably, dirt can affect hitherto ‘clean’ subjects and objects and therefore poses the danger of contamination. A central human mechanism that keeps dirt in its place is disgust. As William Miller has shown, “[d]isgust evaluates (negatively) what it touches, proclaims the meanness and inferiority of its object.”⁹ However, disgust is no ‘natural’ sentiment either: “It is culture, not nature, that draws the lines between defilement and purity, clean and filthy, those crucial boundaries disgust is called on to police.”¹⁰ Disgust therefore establishes the systematic cultural hierarchy that subordinates the dirty subject into its distinct category as other and at the same time, “it presents a nervous claim of right to be free of the dangers imposed by the proximity of the inferior.”¹¹ When Lady Dedlock recoils in disgust from Jo’s state, she does so with the unshakeable conviction that it is her God-given right to live in a world that is clean of such creatures. Disgust therefore implies a moral norm to be safe from that which offends, putting it in its place outside the social community. In that sense, dirt is first and foremost a marker of distinction and, as the example shows, more often than not a marker of social class. Several studies have emphasized this meaning of dirt in Victorian culture and so do Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in their influential study on the poetics of transgression. They emphasize that the rigid class-structure of Victorian England gives dirt a vital significance, as it excludes whole groups from the social order. The Victorian cleanliness campaigns are an obvious example of a socially established and politically encouraged act against the lowest order of society that only thinly veils the disgust of the he Cohen, “Locating Filth,” ix.  Cohen, “Locating Filth,” x.  William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997): 9.  Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 15.  Miller, Anatomy of Disgust, 9.

184

Franziska Quabeck

gemony for those at the bottom of the social ladder.¹² It is not surprising, therefore, that typical Victorian discussions of dirt evoke the simultaneity of cleanliness and morality, equating the clean body with the clean mind. As Stallybrass and White argue, although health reformer Henry Mayhew attempted to discuss moral depravity and physical contamination separately, “the very categories of his work […] foreground the connection between topography, physical appearance and morality.”¹³ Dirt functions as the watershed that classifies people into different social groups and ascribes not only a lack of hygiene, but also a lack of morality to the dirty ones. This is why dirt is a central symbolic marker in nineteenth-century literature, but it is important to note in what follows that being dirty is not a static or irrevocable condition. Instead, it is fluid and variously attributable. In other words, dirt does not cling to predestined members of society irrevocably. Rather, their very ability to shed dirt and rise from the ashes is a central theme, as well as the danger of contamination of those who have a desire to be perceived as ‘clean.’ This is why fears of contagion and contamination haunt Bleak House both literally and symbolically, for the capability to stay clean shows the character’s moral and social integrity. The novel therefore serves as a perfect example to show how Dickens uses dirt both literally and symbolically in his works. Stallybrass and White have famously argued that these dynamics are particularly palpable in the nineteenth century as Victorian society tries to dissect itself into distinct and separable groups and spaces. Class distinctions are visible in the geography of the city and the more segregation works as a dividing force, the more anxious the hegemony to keep it that way: The result is a mobile, conflictual fusion of power, fear and desire in the construction of subjectivity: a psychological dependence upon precisely those Others which are being rigorously opposed and excluded at the social level.¹⁴

This dependence is mirrored in the demographic of a city that has institutionalized the slum as the physical containment of the poor and dirty. The middle and upper classes desire to separate themselves from those in physical, moral, and institutional terms, pushing the embodied dirt to the periphery. However, the fact that the dirt cannot be safely contained is visible in its recurrence from repression: like Freud’s uncanny, dirt returns from society’s unconscious and enters the cultural production of the age and dominates the work of such

 See Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986): 125 ff.  Stallybrass and White, Poetics of Transgression, 129.  Stallybrass and White, Poetics of Transgression, 5.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

185

influential authors as Charles Dickens. The ‘other’ comes back to haunt those who desire to segregate it and this is why, as Stallybrass and White have claimed, “what is socially peripheral is so frequently symbolically central.”¹⁵ In the case of dirt, however, this creates a conundrum: when do we foreground dirt’s literal, when its symbolic meaning? Is it even possible to distinguish between the two? In the most recent study on dirt in Victorian literature and culture, Sabine Schülting has argued that dirt necessarily comes with “an incessant shift of meaning” and continuously “slides” between “matter and metaphor.”¹⁶ Schülting emphasizes with Mary Douglas that dirt is not “an ontological but a relational and spatial category”¹⁷ and can therefore mean very different things on both a literal and a symbolic level. Accordingly, it can be difficult to distinguish whether nineteenth-century realist narratives refer to dirt as a literal presence or a symbolic image. Schülting claims that in nineteenth-century texts, dirt “constantly slides between references to its materiality on the one hand and its metaphorical implications on the other, between a gesture to the world of pure matter and the rhetorical use of the term as a means of social rejection.”¹⁸ There is no doubt, for instance, that the Jellyby residence is literally dirty and the children it houses accordingly also, but Dickens also indicates that Peepy’s dirty face has symbolic meaning, as it so obviously stands for his parents’ neglect. Moreover, dirt also has a more general symbolical meaning. As Schülting has shown, it is “almost always a marker of class, and frequently also of race, suggesting not only physical labour but also dark skin colour, uncivilized habits, immorality, and the neglect of homes and personal belongings.”¹⁹ In the Jellyby house, neglect is of course the most important of those, but Dickens takes this particular point further and accuses neglect on the national scale. Some critics have insisted that when it comes to the subject of dirt in nineteenth-century England, there is great need to understand it as literally as possible. The very real “pollution anxiety” that arises out of the growth of the modern city becomes a central theme of the novel and, according to Eileen Cleere, “a driving mechanism of the plot.”²⁰ In view of Dickens’s social activism and con-

 Stallybrass and White, Poetics of Transgression, 5.  Sabine Schülting, Dirt in Victorian Literature and Culture: Writing Materiality (New York: Routledge, 2016): 5.  Schülting, Dirt in Victorian Literature, 6.  Schülting, Dirt in Victorian Literature, 7.  Schülting, Dirt in Victorian Literature, 6.  Eileen Cleere, The Sanitary Arts: Aesthetic Culture and the Victorian Cleanliness Campaigns (Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2014): 13.

186

Franziska Quabeck

cern with sanitation and poverty in particular, it can certainly make sense to read Dickens’s dirt as literally as possible, and certain scholars have emphasized this concern with hygiene. Thus, Murray Baumgarten describes Dickens as “the modern artist of London whose vision includes the realism of the photographers of urban grime and misery.”²¹ Dickens’s realism leaves no doubt that he has a political motive that lets him address the subject of dirt that threatens to smother the London poor. Moreover, in the less than sanitary conditions of the modern city, dirt must be seen as an “actual danger” that “connoted a composite of feces, refuse and offal,” as Nasser Mufti has insisted.²² F. S. Schwarzbach has frequently argued this point with even more emphasis: To say, then, as often has been said, that the mud and fog are symbols of social malaise is to miss the point entirely: Dickens is pointing to a literary economy of filth and disease that functions not as symbol but as fact to poison the very air his readers breathe, according to scientific laws as inexorable as those of gravity.²³

Schwarzbach makes an important point, of course, and it is vital that one not overlook that Dickens addresses very real living conditions, so that one might conclude that a retreat to the symbolic meaning of dirt is quite unnecessary. Its literal meaning is important, dangerous, and critical enough. I would like to argue, however, that we must not ignore either meaning of dirt. In the case of Dickens’s Bleak House especially, the meaning of dirt is twofold for it tells us something about the material as well as the symbolic world of the novel. This paper therefore reads dirt as both material dirty matter and as a symbolic marker of social identity. In one of the first essays that would change Dickens’s standing in literary scholarship in the twentieth century, Edmund Wilson claimed with great certainty that in Bleak House, “the fog stands for Chancery, and Chancery stands for the whole web of clotted antiquated institutions in which England stifles and decays.”²⁴ Today, most scholars define Wilson’s “The Two Scrooges” as the definitive turning point in Dickens criticism in the twentieth century. Wilson argues especially that Dickens’s symbolism is much more intricate than has hitherto been seen:  Murray Baumgarten, “Fictions of the City,” in The Cambridge Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. John O. Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001): 106 – 119, 110.  Nasser Mufti, “Walking in Bleak House,” Novel 49.1 (2016): 65 – 81, 75, 72.  F. S. Schwarzbach, “Bleak House: The Social Pathology of Urban Life,” Literature and Medicine 9 (1990): 93 – 104, 95. See also his Dickens and the City (University of London: The Athlone P, 1979).  Edmund Wilson, “The Two Scrooges,” in The Wound and the Bow: Seven Studies in Literature (London: Methuen, 1961): 33.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

187

[E]ven when we think we do know Dickens, we may be surprised to return to him and find in him a symbolism of a more complicated reference and a deeper implication than […] metaphors that hang as emblems over the door.²⁵

For many years, other critics followed suit and few have contested the thesis of the fog’s symbolic meaning in Bleak House since. The fog that clouds Chancery and stands for Chancery at the same time is “the central symbol” of the novel,²⁶ but Dickens is famous for his realism and realism and symbolism might seem to sit oddly with one another. Thus, John Carey devoted his The Violent Effigy to the demonstration that in Dickens, objects are “intensely themselves, not signs for something else”: [T]he sort of symbolism that issues in protracted allegories has no place in Dickens – or not when he’s writing well. Critics devoted to extracting these from the novels seldom conclude with anything but catchwords and platitudes.²⁷

Carey understandably had trouble to ascribe the famous realist writer a profound use of symbolism, but the fact that Dickens nevertheless makes frequent and quite consistent use of symbols remains. Chris Brooks therefore tried to find a solution through his thesis of “Dickens’s own form of symbolic realism.”²⁸ He argued, “Dickensian symbolic realism is semantically self-sufficient”: Within the terms of the fiction, conceptual elements and realist elements cease to be distinct: the external world, in all its detailed succession of empirically recognisable entities – houses, shops, people, dogs in the street – has come to mean rather than simply to be. In Dickens’s conception of reality, the symbolic and the actual are co-extensive.²⁹

In this sense, the fog of Bleak House is both “a physical presence in the world the novel depicts and a symbol of spiritual blindness and of the suffocation of cre-

 Wilson, “The Two Scrooges,” 34.  Bruce Robbins, “Telescopic Philanthropy: Professionalism and Responsibility in Bleak House,” in Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling. New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan P, 1998): 139 – 162, 143. See also Robert Newsom, who has argued that “the fog and mud ‘stand for’ the central evil and confusion, ‘most pestilent of hoary sinners,’ the High Court of Chancery.” Dickens on the Romantic Side of Familiar Things: Bleak House and the Novel Tradition (New York: Columbia UP, 1977): 16.  John Carey, The Violent Effigy: A Study of Dickens’s Imagination (London: Faber and Faber, 1973): 129, 130.  Chris Brooks, Signs for the Times: Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984): 34.  Brooks, Signs for the Times, 35.

188

Franziska Quabeck

ative power.”³⁰ Brooks thus attests a “synthesis of symbolic and realist values,”³¹ which has led to a widespread scholarly agreement that it might be impossible to separate the symbolic from the literal in Dickens. In this sense, the dirt that covers London and its inhabitants has come to mean several things, ranging from the medical understanding of its inherent dangers to its symbolic manifestation as a marker of class. Finally, as I would like to argue, dirt also serves as a symbol for the novel’s oppressed characters’ search for identity. Efraim Sicher has claimed that our attempts to “divorce the figurative and the literal” in Dickens will necessarily be thwarted.³² This is especially true for Bleak House. As David Paroissien has shown, we are confronted with its “overriding symbols of fog, rain, and decay” as well as the grim reality of “the way things are in the urban world” and both at the same time.³³ David Lodge also showed in his famous analysis of the opening passage that Dickens ‘pushes’ his prose “towards the metaphoric pole.”³⁴ So on the one hand “the fog and mud ‘stand for’ the central evil and confusion, ‘most pestilent of hoary sinners,’ the High Court of Chancery,” as Robert Newsom claimed. Other critics, however, have argued that it is more important to read Dickens’s dirt as a realistic representation of the dangers of insufficient sanitation: Bleak House is a medical map, doing exactly as other medical maps and sanitary narratives did to show how disease spreads from poor to wealthy neighbourhoods […]. [T]he contaminated wetness of London miasmatically breeds disease and confusion, but we need not look to metaphor to understand that this moisture is filthy.³⁵

The fog of Bleak House, therefore, is both a symbol and a danger. The same is true for the novel’s dirt. Coming back to Schülting’s argument that in nineteenth-century literature dirt “constantly slides between references to its materiality on the one hand and its metaphorical implications on the other,”³⁶ her ar-

 Brooks, Signs for the Times, 53.  Brooks, Signs for the Times, 35.  Efraim Sicher, Rereading the City – Rereading Dickens: Representation, the Novel, and Urban Realism. New Revised Edition (New York: AMS Press, 2015): 2.  David Paroissien, “Subdued by the Dyer’s Hand: Dickens at Work in Bleak House,” Partial Answers 9.2 (2011): 285 – 295, 294, 289.  David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977): 99.  Pamela K. Gilbert, “Medical Mapping: The Thames, the Body, and Our Mutual Friend” in Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, ed. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005): 78 – 102, 80.  Schülting, Dirt in Victorian Literature, 7.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

189

gument can also be applied to Bleak House very convincingly, although her focus lies on Our Mutual Friend. As Karl Ashley Smith has claimed, dirt is here not “used simply as an illustration, but as a fully realized part of the novel’s ethos and theme.”³⁷ The world of Bleak House is an exceptionally dirty world, as its frequently quoted opening passage makes clear immediately. Moreover, Dickens emphasizes from the very beginning that this dirt is offensive, for it threatens to disturb the established order or, rather, it makes it all too obvious that such order is an illusion. Many critics have noted that the people of Bleak House desperately cling to a system in the attempt to create hard facts and stable categories, while underneath it all, it is clear that this world is already on the verge of complete ruin: Bleak House is a novel obsessed with the possible failure or collapse of barricades or gates, haunted by the fear that what does not belong might somehow find a way in, that the unnamed, the non-thing, might find its way into the realm of the named and acknowledged […].³⁸

It becomes gradually clearer throughout the novel that all gates and barricades have long been porous, and the social system is rotting from within. Strategically placed deaths that occur across all the existing social classes attest to the holistic decay of the novel’s universe and reveal that the idea of an ordered world that the characters try to cling to is nothing but an illusion. As J. Hillis Miller put it: Dickens wants to define England exactly and to identify exactly the causes of its present state. As everyone knows, he finds England in a bad way. It is in a state dangerously close to ultimate disorder or decay. The energy which gave the social system its initial impetus seems about to run down. Entropy approaches a maximum. Emblems of this perilous condition abound in Bleak House – the fog and mud of its admirable opening, the constant rain at Chesney Wold, the spontaneous combustion of Krook, the ultimate consumption in costs of the Jarndyce estate, the deaths of so many characters in the course of the novel (I count nine).³⁹

In the same vein, D. A. Miller has shown that furthermore all attempts to separate the personal from the public in the novel are in vain:

 Karl Ashley Smith, Dickens and the Unreal City: Searching for Spiritual Significance in Nineteenth-Century London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008): 75.  Robert E. Lougy, “Filth, Liminality, and Abjection in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House,” ELH 69.2 (2002): 473 – 500, 480.  J. Hillis Miller, “Interpretation in Bleak House” in Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling. New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan P, 1998): 29 – 53, 31.

190

Franziska Quabeck

If […] we need to say that, in its representation of bureaucracy and the police, Bleak House regularly produces a difference between these institutions and the domestic space outside them, we must also recognize that it no less regularly produces this difference as a question, in the mode of the ‘problematic. The bar of separation and even opposition that it draws between the public and private spheres is now buttressed, now breached, firm and fragile by turns.⁴⁰

Privacy and personhood are strategically undermined, and, in analogy, characters’ identities are also both firm and fragile, as the ‘unnamed’ seek their way into the acknowledged. Esther is the ‘unnamed’ (quite literally, considering the many pet names she receives and her conflicting surnames Hawdon and Summerson), whose identity is fragile and who seeks acknowledgement by the established order. At the same time, she seems firm in her identity as narrator and part of the hegemony in her attempt to clean up the world she has entered. Esther is the novel’s central character, not least due to her exposed position as its part-time narrator, but before I turn to her obsession with dirt as a symbol for her perceived lack of identity, I would like to draw a parallel to the character who mirrors her predicament exactly. Jo is Esther’s nemesis and double as he moves flexibly through the various social groups of the novel, never accepted or acknowledged until his death, and the literal and figural embodiment of dirt. As Robert Lougy has argued, “whatever else Jo might be, he is matter perpetually out of place, told throughout the novel to move on, to keep moving on.”⁴¹ Jo is stuck in dirt and he knows better than anyone how impossible it is to contain it: “He knows that it’s hard to keep the mud off the crossing in dirty weather, and harder still to live by doing it” (BH, 256).⁴² Jo comes from dirt, Tom-all-Alone’s, whose stench even Mr. Snagsby can hardly bear; Jo feeds on dirt, munching “his dirty bit of bread” (BH, 258); and Jo returns to dirt, when he asks specifically to be buried in the pauper’s burial ground, the source of his illness. Ironically, Jo’s miserable ‘occupation’ as a sweeping boy consists of an endless struggle with dirt, for he finds like Sisyphus that all the dirt he sweeps away returns immediately. Thus, Jo appears as the lowest of the low, the very bottom of the social hierarchy, and yet he permeates all other social levels and unconsciously weaves a web from Tom-all-Alone’s to Lady Dedlock. The novel questions the likelihood of his wide-reaching influence (“What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury  D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988): 80.  Lougy, “Filth, Liminality and Abjection,” 482.  Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. Nicola Bradbury. Penguin Classics (London: Penguin Books, 1996). All references to Bleak House are to this edition and will be given parenthetically, abbreviated as BH.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

191

in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom […]?” BH, 256), yet makes a point of Jo’s significance by using him to cause the most central effects of the plot. He is Lady Dedlock’s confidant, Inspector Bucket’s instrument, Mr. Tulkinghorn’s victim and Esther Summerson’s nemesis. The fact that he infects Esther with smallpox causes her to recover her real identity and leads to the only honest encounter with her mother, while his death reunites her with Mr. Woodcourt. Jo is the most central axis of the plot. Thus, the novel uses him just like the reckless characters who tell him to ‘move on,’ but at the same time the reproach to society for Jo’s wretched state is clearly audible. As Robert Donovan argues, “Jo’s function as an instrument of Dickens’s social protest is clear”: In his life and in his death he is a shattering rebuke to all those agencies of church and state which are charged with the care of the weak and the helpless and the poor, from the Lord Chancellor’s court down to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. And Jo’s experience throws a strong glare on the causes of their inadequacy […].⁴³

Jo is not dirty from natural causes; his dirt does not cling to him because he is destined to be at the bottom of the social order. His dirt, just like Peepy’s, is a sign of neglect, only that it is not his parents who neglect him but his country. Thus, while Peepy can be saved, temporarily through Esther and lastingly through Caddy, Jo falls victim to the neglect that has made him what he is. When he returns after he has given Esther his serious disease, obviously innocently, of course, Woodcourt sees that Jo and dirt have become one homogenous entity: … [H]is grimy tears appear so real, and he lies in the corner up against the hoarding so like a growth of fungus or any unwholesome excrescence produced there in neglect and impurity, that Allan Woodcourt is softened towards him. (BH, 714/715)

While Jo seems almost like natural ‘dirt’, fungus, which spreads uncontainably and dangerously, Woodcourt’s perspective foregrounds the neglect, the social and not natural cause of Jo’s wretched state. In pitting Peepy against Jo as “one of the dirtiest little unfortunates” (BH, 51) Esther ever saw (until she meets Jo, that is), Dickens makes clear that dirt does not cling to these children irrecoverably. Their dirty cover is both a literal and symbolic marker of their social class, but this dirt is not a stable category. It is relative to the social care these children receive, and, as Peepy finds stability, he rises from the ashes,

 Robert A. Donovan, “Structure and Idea in Bleak House,” ELH 29.2 (1962): 175 – 201.

192

Franziska Quabeck

whereas Jo returns to dust. The only redemption is the cleansing bath he receives before his death, which functions as both baptism and last rite. Jo’s dirt is both literally and symbolically dangerous in the world of Bleak House. On the one hand, he is the very real carrier of an infectious disease that spreads regardless of social class, and on the other hand, Jo’s contagion shows the permeability of a seemingly intact social order. The narrator’s emphasis on the (un)likelihood of Jo’s connection to Lady Dedlock is of course more than metafictional self-criticism: the passage gives voice to the anxiety of blurred distinctions that characterizes the whole novel. Jo is the “unnamed, the nonthing” that “might find its way into the realm of the named and acknowledged.”⁴⁴ Jo is bereft of an identity beyond that of the “very muddy, very hoarse, very ragged” (BH, 176) sweeping boy. He literally does not know who he is: Name, Jo. Nothing else that he knows on. Don’t know that everybody has two names. Never heerd of sich a think. Don’t know that Jo is short for a longer name. Thinks it long enough for him. – He don’t find no fault with it. Spell it? No. He can’t spell it. No father, no mother, no friends. Never been to school. What’s home? (BH, 177)

His lack of identity and his rootlessness directly contribute to his death as it enables those who oppress him to continue to tell him to ‘move on.’ His premature and tragic death is a moment of great pathos and empathy in the novel, and Dickens leaves no doubt that society has to take the blame for this tragedy: Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order. Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around us, every day. (BH, 734)

Jo’s lack of identity and his rootlessness, however, also create an unmistakable parallel to Esther, who also asks herself “what’s home?” from the beginning of her story. These two nameless characters without identities are put on a par, albeit on two opposite ends of the social scale. They are linked through the disease they both fall victim to, but their connection is even more important as it draws attention to Esther’s continuous battle against disorder, which is her attempt to recover and stabilize her own identity. The fog that is the central symbol of the novel does not only stand for Chancery, it also stands for the utter confusion and blindness of the novel’s central characters. They all seem to ask themselves who they are, perceiving themselves in conflict with the categories offered by society, but no one does so more than Esther. The secret of her illegitimacy and its rev-

 Lougy, “Filth, Liminality and Abjection,” 480.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

193

elation are equal in suspense to the whodunit motif, especially because Esther herself constantly tries to hide her anxiety from us. On the surface, Esther’s obsession with cleanliness and order mirrors the Victorian anxieties about dirt and infection, the very real dangers of pollution the city struggled with. The Victorian cleanliness campaigns fell on particularly fruitful ground with England’s middle class, who embraced the idea of the spotless home as a possibility to confirm their social status. Thus, Mrs Bagnet keeps the perfect home of the whitewashed room, which has a sanded floor, and a barrack smell, and contains nothing superfluous, and has not a visible speck of dirt or dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin pots and pannikins upon the dresser shelves. (BH, 441)

Esther seems equally bent on establishing such a spotless home in both her actual home and wherever else she goes, so that Karen Chase and Michael Levenson have felt inclined to compare her to the figure of an Inspector of Nuisances, appointed by the Public Health Act of 1848: Within Bleak House, Esther surely qualifies as Inspector of Nuisances, the one (and only one) who descries the full reach of dirt, decay, and disease. She finds herself in, and gives her shoulder to, the realm of filth. Her relentless housekeeping can be seen as a figure, even a hopeless figure, for tenacious acts of recovery in the face of debilitating neglect.⁴⁵

Thus, Esther seems to be battling with the neglect that causes Jo’s tragic death and she manages to save Peepy, Caddy, and Charley and her siblings by giving them the necessary attention and, more importantly, taking them out of the dirt and giving them a good scrub – both literally and figuratively. However, her housekeeping has even more levels of meaning to it than the direct reference to Victorian cleanliness. Kay Hetherly Wright has emphasized that one of the most important motifs of the novel is “uncertainty about origins”: “[J]ust as Chancery and its fog envelop practically the entire world of the novel, questions of legitimacy, bastardy, and confused origins are everywhere.”⁴⁶ Esther addresses her search for identity freely by telling us of the crucial conversations with her aunt and Jarndyce, but

 Karen Chase and Michael Levenson, “Bleak House, Liquid City: Climate to Climax in Dickens” in A Global History of Literature and Its Environments, ed. John Parham and Louise Westling (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017): 201– 217, 215.  Kay Hetherly Wright, “The Grotesque and Urban Chaos in Bleak House,” in Dickens and the City, ed. Jeremy Tambling (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012): 265 – 280, 271, 272.

194

Franziska Quabeck

the anxiety she feels about who she really is and where the revelation might place her on the social ladder is repressed by her. Instead, she goes about trying to bring order to every place she goes to, as if she could thereby secure herself a place in the social order. On the one hand, her ‘housekeeping’ that extends far beyond her actual duties at Bleak House is significant for Dickens’s commentary of the country, as Robert Tracy has argued: Her role as housekeeper is a metaphor both for the part she plays in narrating the novel and for the need for a responsible national housekeeper to clear away the literal and figurative dirt and cobwebs that Dickens finds everywhere in the neglected household of England.⁴⁷

On the other hand, however, Esther’s housekeeping also constitutes the attempt to find her way into a society that she fears might reject her if her true identity will ever be known. Thus, housekeeping for Esther is an act of repression whenever she is confronted with troubling feelings about her past or her present: It was not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit and a grateful heart. So I said to myself, ‘Esther, Esther, Esther! Duty, my dear!’ and gave my little basket of housekeeping keys such a shake, that they sounded like little bells, and rang me hopefully to bed. (BH, 103)

Her attempt to establish cleanliness and order about her is therefore only the attempt to establish cleanliness and order within her, in the assumption that if she keeps herself ‘clean,’ she will be rewarded her place in the social hierarchy. She feels like matter out of place, as Jo is matter out of place, and seems to calculate that she might find her place, if she keeps the dirt away. As Christine van Boheemen-Saaf has pointed out, Esther is obsessively creating order out of disorder and stalling this disintegration of society at large (domestically reflected in the state of Mrs Jellyby’s closets) by her unrelenting diligence and the protection of her household keys, which she jingles to the refrain of ‘Esther, duty, my dear.’⁴⁸

 Robert Tracy, “Bleak House” in A Companion to Charles Dickens, ed. David Paroissien (London: Blackwell, 2008): 380 – 389, 383.  Christine van Boheemen-Saaf, “ ‘ The Universe Makes an Indifferent Parent’: Bleak House and the Victorian Family Romance” in Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling. New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan P, 1998): 54– 64, 55.

Dirt and Dickens’s Symbolic Realism in Bleak House

195

Significantly, Esther is an odd narrator. Robert Newsom has stated, “[t]here is nothing in Esther’s narrative to suggest that she is not telling the truth,”⁴⁹ but there is plenty in Esther’s narrative to suggest that she is deliberately omitting things from that truth. Her refusal to tell us about Allan Woodcourt is the obvious case in point, but she also refrains from presenting a definitive picture of her own person. The most obvious contradiction that characterizes her narrative is her incessant insistence on her self-proclaimed lack of intelligence, while she indirectly makes a point through her entire story of how other people appreciate her for her wisdom. Her self-deprecating modesty that she often expresses in interjections such as “O my goodness, the idea of asking my advice on such a point!” (BH, 121) is an act that she uses in order to subordinate herself. She is so anxious to belong despite her dubious origins that she falsifies her own narrative. This passivity and subordination that changes the form of her narrative is of course mirrored in her actual passivity within the storyworld. She subordinates herself to Jarndyce to the extent that she gives up her name, agrees to marry him, although she is in love with someone else, and finally lets him hand her to Woodcourt, as if she were her ‘Guardian’s’ actual possession. As Chris Vanden Bossche points out, [b]y addressing her as the spinster Dame Durden, Jarndyce defines her, like others without property, as devoid of agency; having done so, he proceeds to meddle on her behalf with both of her suitors, Woodcourt and Guppy, and even to make his own ill-advised marriage proposal.⁵⁰

Thus, Esther appears as both firm and fragile: firm as the narrator of her story who brings order to those around her – fragile as a narrator who does not dare come out as her real self and subordinates herself to others throughout her entire story. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that it is she, who catches Jo’s disease, which likens these two literally self-less characters. Significantly, Dickens lets her physical recovery and the recovery of her true identity coincide in the plot. When Esther recovers, she recovers who she really is, which allows her no firmer place in society, but a more stable sense of self. It must be an equally enjoyable moment for Dickens to give her a doctor as husband, in order to secure her final position in society and the identity she comes to terms with in the end. As Boheemen-Saaf emphasizes, Esther’s “awareness is structured by the tension between her true but unmentionable natural identity and the necessity to ensure a place and role in the patri-

 Newsom, Romantic Side of Familiar Things, 13.  Chris R. Vanden Bossche, “Class Discourse and Popular Agency in Bleak House,” Victorian Studies 47.1 (2004): 7– 31, 16.

196

Franziska Quabeck

archal social system to which she is an outsider.”⁵¹ By marrying Woodcourt, she can finally place herself securely within this patriarchal system and has relinquished the parallel to the equally self-less, dirty Jo. Dickens uses Jo’s death for a heartfelt appeal to responsibility, but Jo’s death is equally constitutive for Esther’s identity, when he as her double disappears back to the dirt he came from and leaves her in a clean, middle-class house, finally safe from the threat of social degradation as the illegitimate predecessor of a fallen woman. Jo’s death saves Esther from further contamination for good, as he takes his literal and his symbolic dirt with him to the burial ground. Esther’s mother’s death has the same effect, of course. From the beginning, Esther is told that her mother is her “disgrace” (BH, 30), and while that mother still lives, she is an equally dangerous source of contamination for Esther as Jo. Although the recovery of her true identity serves as a cathartic moment in her story, her mother’s death must inevitably follow for her to come to a happy ending. Esther’s own cleanliness campaign is subconsciously motivated by her attempt to clean herself of the stain her mother has left on her being. As Audrey Jaffe puts it, her “goal is the separation of herself from the bad object”: “[T]hroughout her narrative, Esther replaces the object labelled ‘disgrace’ with good objects, shaping her rhetoric and her narrative so that she will be reflected by good objects rather than bad.”⁵² Dirt offends order and Esther’s perceives the order she is placed in as so fragile that she is even more concerned with securing it. Matter out of place must not exist in a universe in which she feels out of place herself. As mentioned above, the novel is steeped in a general anxiety about the fragility of its order and the permeability of boundaries and distinctions. How close this society is to actual eruption is visible in the unhindered spreading of Jo’s disease that renders social boundaries void in the face of death. Thus, both his disease and the dirt it stems from have symbolic and literal meaning in equal measure. The world of Bleak House is literally dirty, but dirt is also used as a symbol for the blurred distinctions that prevent clearcut identities. Jo’s dirt prevents him from coming into being and leaves him one of many nameless dead, but Esther manages to create an order for herself that leaves no space for matter out of place. The question of dirt in Dickens is therefore symbolically charged with a question of identity. Dirt contaminates and soils identities both literally and symbolically. The real task for the characters in Bleak House therefore is either to rise from the ashes or return to dust.

 Boheemen-Saaf, “The Universe Makes an Indifferent Parent,” 54.  Audrey Jaffe, “David Copperfield and Bleak House: On Dividing the Responsibility of Knowing” in Bleak House: Contemporary Critical Essays, ed. Jeremy Tambling. New Casebooks (Basingstoke: Macmillan P, 1998): 163 – 182, 169.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

199

Adam Scovell. Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange. Leighton Buzzard: Auteur Publishing, 2017. 215 pp. ISBN 9781911325222, EUR 22.49. Folk Horror has experienced a revival in recent years, but since this sub-genre thrives and prospers at the margins of popular culture,¹ academia has not taken an extended interest in it so far.² The “proper” beginnings of Folk Horror were established retrospectively with regard to the release of three unusual horror films at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s – Witchfinder General (1968), The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1972) – which effectively eschewed some established horror tropes derived from the Gothic. These films share a setting in the beautiful British landscape and mainly take place in broad, sunny daylight; yet at the same time, the evil either lurks beneath the soil or in the landscape itself – a landscape which can have an agency of its own – or it is inherent in rural British communities themselves waiting to be unleashed. Thus, Folk Horror “is the evil under the soil, the terror in the backwoods of a forgotten lane, the loneliness in a brutalist tower block, and the ghosts that haunt stones and patches of dark, lonely water” (183). In Folk Horror narratives, we meet isolated communities struggling with the threats and insecurities of modern society and instead turning to desperate means, often in the form of performing costly rituals or clinging to traditional beliefs, which are supposed to save them from becoming entrapped in the machinery of modern ways of living and the demands connected with it. But instead of finding any relief in the green and pleasant land they are set in, this land itself frequently turns out to be nasty. This idea is not a new one and had already been explored since the end of the nineteenth century by writers such as Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, M.R. James or Robert Aickman. With these influences in mind, it becomes clear that Folk Horror narratives share an affiliation with weird fiction rather than with the traditional Gothic. It is no surprise then that 1960s and 1970s TV adaptations of M.R. James’ ghost stories neatly fit into the canon of Folk Horror. This period saw in general an upsurge in Folk Horror films and TV series in Britain such as Robin Redbreast (1970), Children of the Stones (1977), Penda’s Fen (1974) or even various episodes of Doctor Who. After slowly petering out in the 1980s, Folk Horror experienced a revival from the

 However, with the release of some more recent TV productions Folk Horror appears to move slowly into the mainstream.  The first conference on the topic, “A Fiend in the Furrrows: Perspectives on Folk Horror in Literature, Film and Music,” was held in Belfast in 2013. A few selected papers can be found in various collections concerned with horror or landscape in general. There is also a forthcoming special issue of the online journal Revenant on Folk Horror.

200

Book Reviews

2000s onwards, creating a thriving online community,³ curating older and more recent works as well as organising various events in Britain.⁴ The post-millennial period saw films like Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) and A Field in England (2013), David Egger’s The VVitch (2015), David Keating’s Wake Wood (2009) and David Bruckner’s The Ritual (2017). In British television, Folk Horror has re-emerged for example in the form of Ashley Pharoah’s The Living and the Dead (BBC, 2016) and Rona Munro’s episode “The Eaters of Light” (BBC, 2017) for Doctor Who, and most recently in Jez Butterworth’s Britannia (Sky Atlantic, 2017) and Kris Mrksa’s Requiem (BBC, 2018). Even TV programmes such as The League of Gentlemen (BBC, 1999 – 2002, 2017) feature the notion of Folk Horror, albeit in comedic treatment. In literature, we find Folk Horror in many works of Alan Garner and Susan Cooper as well as more recently in Andrew Michael Hurley’s The Loney (2015) and Devil’s Day (2017), Beth Underdown’s The Witchfinder’s Sister (2017) and the forthcoming The Old Religion (2018) by Martyn Waites, to name but a few examples. Folk Horror has also transferred to other media apart from film and literature as various music videos,⁵ or the recent remake of The Blood on Satan’s Claw (2018) in form of an audio play shows. There is even a Folk Horror-themed role-playing game called The Shivering Circle (2018) by Howard David Ingham. The writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell has written about the phenomenon of Folk Horror in various print and online publications as well as in his own blog Celluloid Wicker Man for some years now and with Folk Horror. Hours Dreadful and Things Strange (2017) he published the first monograph to pursue the question what Folk Horror actually is.⁶ The book starts and ends with the question “What is Folk Horror?” The term itself had been coined by director Piers Haggard referring to his own film The Blood on Satan’s Claw, and gained wider attention due to Mark Gatiss’ BBC documentary A History of Horror (2010). Gatiss effectively canonised the three films Witchfinder General, The Blood on Satan’s Claw and The Wicker Man as Folk Horror since they “shared a common obsession with the

 See and its various social media outposts; the Facebook group of “Folk Horror Revival” currently has more than 21 800 members (March 2018). By now, various forms of merchandise featuring the aesthetics of Folk Horror is available too.  For a list of events, see . One event at the British museum has been published in book form: Andy Paciorek (ed.), Otherwordly. Folk Horror Revival at the British Museum (Durham: Wyrd Harvest P, 2017).  See e. g. “Ogre” by Richard Dawson or “Burn the Witch” by Radiohead.  The first publication entirely devoted to the subject in print was Andy Paciorek (ed.), Folk Horror Revival: Field Studies (n.p.: Wyrd Harvest P, 2015), a collection of essays and interviews on the subject, of which a second edition has just been published.

Book Reviews

201

British landscape, its folklore and superstitions” (7). This “unholy trinity,” as these films are often referred to, is also the starting point of Scovell’s analysis of what typically constitutes Folk Horror. The aesthetics and themes of these highly unusual horror films, compared with the, for example, more dominating contemporary Hammer horror films, were born out of the British counter-culture movement of the 1960s and 1970s which featured an increased interest in things like “Folk Music and Folklore, Astrology, nineteenth-century Transcendentalist ideals and Wicca Magic” (13). However, Folk Horror mirrors rather the dark side of this movement when peace and love had gone sour and early Folk Horror is frequently “drenched with the dying embers of the British counter-culture itself” (3). This is an important point; even Folk Horror period pieces are rarely purely historical representations but the past depicted in these works always reflects heavily on the present, something to which I will come back later. To answer the question of what Folk Horror is, Scovell has proposed “the Folk Horror Chain: a linking set of narrative traits that have causational and interlinking consequences” (14). The first link in this chain is landscape, the aesthetics and agency of which decidedly sets Folk Horror apart from other sub-genres of horror. As a result, “elements within its topography have adverse effects on the social and moral identity of its inhabitants” (17) and, what is more, the landscape has the function of isolating its inhabitants which leads to the next link in the chain, that of isolation. This seclusion from the rest of society often produces skewed belief systems and morality; this, in turn, culminates in some form of happening/summoning which may feature supernatural elements, but not necessarily. Scovell admits later that this theory may not encompass all works of Folk Horror since we are dealing with a highly disparate body of work in this area. Thus, other traits have to be established during the following analysis. The author continues in chapter three with looking at the topographical notion behind the concept of landscape in Folk Horror, i. e. “[t]he core theme of a place retaining a trace of historical and cultural happening” (56), by mainly dealing with examples of British television from the 1960s and 1970s in which Folk Horror particularly thrived. Chapter four focuses on the concept of rurality, i. e. the “twin effect of bringing in historical and cultural memorabilia from British ruralism” (81), which acknowledges the fact that many films certainly share the visual aesthetics of Folk Horror but completely lack the element of horror. Rather than exclude these works from the genre, Scovell points out the relevance of these films sitting on the very edge of the genre by arguing that “[t]he horror in this sense is not a feeling of terror but more of a pressurised frustration at the old

202

Book Reviews

ways being bulldozed and tarmacked into the byways” (83).⁷ Furthermore, ruralism frequently conveys a sense of eerieness, a trait it shares with Folk Horror. Chapter five deals with “Occultism, Hauntology and the Urban ‘Wyrd’” in which the author analyzes Folk Horror through the prism of hauntology, “now commonly used to account for our own cultural, and sometimes moral, relationships with British artefacts from the 1970s as well as artwork that deals with the concept of lost futures” (122). By means of hauntology, Scovell tackles the presence of the occult in 1970s Britain and further argues that Folk Horror can be found in urban spaces too, as for instance demonstrated in Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He concludes that Hauntology presents Britain in the 1970s as a place of skewed morality, of isolated Brutalist zones, of the ‘Urban Wyrd’ and of paranoid, dystopian delusions surrounding the treatment of women and children. In other words, Hauntology shows the decade in its true guise; not just the place where Folk Horror was produced most abundantly but itself the most terrifying form of Folk Horror conceivable (162).

The last chapter puts emphasis on the recent post-millennial re-emergence of Folk Horror which is constituted in several ways. On the one hand, older works are rediscovered or remade,⁸ and thus to some degree canonised. On the other, new works are created in the spirit of Folk Horror, often subtly addressing political and social issues of the present regardless whether these narratives are set in our time or in the past. To give an example, the ongoing digitisation “means that a fear of being isolated and removed from such technology is itself actually a far more unnerving prospect than it probably was forty years ago” (167– 168). A film such as Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011) certainly transports the weirdness and uncomfortableness that equally affects us when thinking of how literal the skewing of morality is in 2010s Britain; a rerun of class riots, massive transfers of wealth, recessions, open normalisation of all sorts of xenophobia, public sector cuts, post-factual political debates and revelations about the historical abuse committed by people in positions of power” (178).

Although the chapters are divided thematically, the author admirably manages to combine this approach with a chronological treatment of Folk Horror from its earliest examples up to the present, thus giving a succinct introduction

 This notion is prevalent too in Hope Dickson Leach’s brilliant debut film The Levelling (2016) as well as in Clio Barnard’s Dark River (2017), both of which were theatrically released after the publication of Scovell’s book.  See e. g. the remake of The Blood on Satan’s Claw as an audio play, as mentioned before.

Book Reviews

203

into many films and TV productions with which many readers might not have been familiar with before. In general, Scovell “does not argue for a rigid Folk Horror canon” (81), but, of course, by applying his Folk Horror Chain to various works and by fathoming the relationship of works to the genre which are situated slightly outside the core understanding of it, he effectively does canonize Folk Horror. Although the book has its main focus on British Folk Horror, Scovell briefly introduces other treatments of Folk Horror from various countries such as Kaneto Shindo’s Onibaba (1964) from Japan or Daniel Myrick’s and Eduardo Sánchez’ The Blair Witch Project (1999) from the US. He thereby indicates that the concept of folklore as well as the traits of a landscape differ from country to country, thus rendering the appearance of Folk Horror differently. Scovell also looks at the “folk” in Folk Horror and concludes that this genre “is never all that fussed with a genuine, accurate recreation of folklore” (28) but rather presents a picture of folklore as mediated through works such as Sir James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). The author does not draw extensively on this issue and dismisses criticism of this representation of folklore as irrelevant to its effect in Folk Horror.⁹ Yet, he overlooks the fact that Frazer’s work also served political ends, particularly with regard to British identity construction, something which is still transmitted in many works of Folk Horror: the creation of an unbroken chain of transmission of folk-lore and traditions from a vaguely pre-Christian past up to the present. He thereby ignores the long history of immigration, conquest, and cultural exchange within the British Isles in the context of which such a continuous transmission is not possible. This treatment of folklore and “[t]he longing for an apparently simpler, more communal period often envisioned in Folk Horror narratives” (169) has consequences for the selfimage of British identity and its resulting politics of power, which should not be ignored. Overall, Adam Scovell finds a good balance in eruditely writing both for an academic as well as a cinephile audience. On the one hand, the scope of exclusively exploring films and TV series opens the opportunity for detailed analyses of a wealth of examples. After all, the aesthetics of Folk Horror were first firmly established in the medium of film; this is naturally a good starting point of introducing the topic, a task which Scovell fulfills brilliantly. On the other hand, however, this approach offers only a glimpse of the broad range of media in

 Mikel J. Koven, “The Folklore Fallacy,” Fabula 48.3/4 (2007): 270 – 280; Richard Sermon, “The Wicker Man, May Day and the Reinvention of Beltane,” in The Quest for the Wicker Man, ed. B. Franks, S. Harper, J. Murray & L. Stevenson (Edinburgh: Luath, 2006): 26 – 43.

204

Book Reviews

which Folk Horror is by now present. Other publications looking into Folk Horror as represented in literature are certainly desirable since “the evil under the soil” (183) has only just awakened. Evelyn Koch

University of Bayreuth

Rhodri Lewis. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2017. 392 pp. ISBN 9780691166841, USD 39.95. Since the eighteenth century, Hamlet has been a role that most actors aspire to play. The character has eclipsed the play itself, as we, led for better or for worse by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others of the Romantic period, have come to see ourselves reflected in the character of Hamlet. As our cultural needs change generation to generation, so does our reading of the Danish Prince, and Hamlet has been made and remade over the years to suit our needs as well as the desires, anxieties, and values of our time. So what more can be said about Hamlet or indeed about Hamlet? Rhodri Lewis’s Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness comprises an impressive reinterpretation which envisions the play as a model for engagement with a moral order and the character of Hamlet as a representative embodiment of the breakdown of that order. Lewis builds upon Margreta de Grazia’s 2007 reading of Hamlet and the critical field surrounding it, but rather than separating the play and character he takes a more holistic approach, examining Hamlet and Hamlet in the context of humanist philosophy. This is Hamlet within Hamlet, rather than Hamlet without. The humanistic context extends beyond simply the dramatic and theatrical, including the “psychological, rhetorical, and moral-political theorizing that lay at the heart of sixteenth-century humanism” (6). Lewis contends that “Hamlet can be read as a profound meditation on the nature of human individuality without relying on conceptual frameworks drawn from the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries” (5 – 6), and his analysis is therefore carefully grounded in “texts and artefacts that were available before the end of the sixteenth century, and that may therefore have had some direct or reflected impact on Shakespeare’s writing” (45). Throughout, Lewis demonstrates that the humanist philosophies to which Hamlet subscribes are intrinsically flawed, “concerned with [their] own propagation rather than with the pursuit or preservation of truth” (303). Hamlet as a play delivers a piercing critique of Hamlet as a character, a university-educated young man who adopts the language of early modern philosophy to suit his needs and

Book Reviews

205

craft his various social personas, who casts himself as an “embodiment of philosophical transcendence” (306) but fails to meet the mark. Lewis puts forward a version of the Danish Prince who is at once more antagonistic and more impotent than I have ever seen on stage. This Hamlet trades in “laboured but superficial humanism” (214), as the play itself “explores with unflinching sensitivity the ways in which an individual’s chosen mode of behaviour works to affect, and to deface, the quality of his or her being” (30). Hamlet as Lewis portrays it, with a nod to Lorna Hutson, is inferential rather than referential (8). In this reading, Shakespeare actively engages with and subverts medieval mystery plays, early revenge dramas, and the core humanist texts which formed the basis of English grammar school education. By grappling with and rejecting the humanist model as put forward by Cicero, whose writings helped shape humanism in the medieval and early modern periods, and others, Shakespeare writes a post-humanist tragedy that moves its audience beyond itself, so that we might better see and understand the world around us. The book includes five chapters, which approach Hamlet and Hamlet from five distinct but interconnected directions. Chapter one places Hamlet in conversation with the traditions of sixteenth- and seventeenth- century humanist moral philosophy, as a work which both interacts with and reacts to contemporary humanist doctrine. Lewis argues that not only was Shakespeare familiar with humanist moral philosophy, but that he used Hamlet as a means of pushing back against and grappling with these doctrines, while addressing what was perhaps his dissatisfaction at their failings. Lewis notes the “astonishing precision” (17) with which Shakespeare works to place Hamlet within the theatrical revenge tradition while at the same time consistently decreasing the likelihood that any action towards revenge takes place. This is the first of many examples of Hamlet’s attempts to try on different, inherently performative personas, which are then studied in greater detail in the second half of the book. Chapter two continues by arguing that Hamlet acts as a firm rejection of humanism, highlighting a “refractory moral dislocation that, as it was intended to, leaves these doctrines in ruins” (18). Lewis focuses on the wealth of hunting language found in Hamlet, which he presents as an extension of scholarly work done by Edward Berry in Shakespeare and the Hunt (2001) and Catherine Bates in Masculinity and the Hunt (2013). Drawing on “the vocabulary and assumptions of hunting, fowling, falconry, and fishing” (43), Lewis offers his readers a version of both Shakespeare and drama more generally which are unafraid to tackle uncomfortable ideas as they seek to understand humanity. If this is a world where, as Lewis suggests, “appetite, expediency, and opportunism are all” (45), then human behavior itself is the best, most compelling argument

206

Book Reviews

against a humanist worldview. Cicero’s concepts of honestas and decorum become meaningless in a world governed by animalistic passions and instincts. Chapters three, four, and five work to find a humanist middle ground between “a heuristic and a structural principle” (10) through the use of Francis Bacon’s three categories of human understanding: memory, imagination, and reason (10 – 11). Memory, as discussed in chapter three, concerns Hamlet’s function as a would-be historian and the play’s continuous “attempt[s] to make sense of the past” (112). This chapter is especially concerned with the image of fathers as remembered by their children, as Lewis concentrates on Fortinbras, Laertes, Ophelia, and Hamlet in turn. Memory is a subjective and vulnerable thing, and Hamlet’s anxiety over forgetting, or even not remembering well enough, plays a major role. Here Lewis considers not only Hamlet’s second soliloquy, and the ghost’s instruction to “remember me” (1.5.91), but Fortinbras’s use of memory as a means of establishing and justifying his claim to the Danish throne, as well as Polonius’s insistence that Laertes recount “these few precepts in thy memory” (1.3.58). But Lewis points out that, in a world that ascribes to the Ciceronian ideals of honestas and decorum, “[p]roper remembrance is not so much neglected as irrelevant” (127). Laertes hardly listens to Polonius’s commonplaces; Fortinbras largely ignores the fact that his father was killed in battle and their lands forfeit; Hamlet chooses to obsess over his mother’s hasty remarriage instead of his father’s death – in fact, “Shakespeare never shows him mourning his father other than in the most stagily public fashion” (143), though Lewis agrees with Stephen Greenblatt that it is difficult to believe any actual forgetting has occurred. Ghosts are not easily put aside. Instead, Hamlet is torn between expectation and reality; “he does not, and perhaps cannot, remember his father as he and the Ghost think he should” (153) and therefore cannot take revenge. Hamlet fares no better in his attempt to become a poet and actor, as examined in chapter four. Following George Puttenham and Philip Sidney’s concept of poetry (meaning the “imaginative arts,” which include drama, verse, and narrative prose [174]), Lewis demonstrates Hamlet’s poetic abilities – or lack thereof – through close readings of his love letters to Ophelia, speech to the Players, and reception of The Murder of Gonzago. Lewis determines that Hamlet’s university education works against him, as he enthusiastically “champions humanist poetics without the ability to apply them critically” (195). Some of Lewis’s best work comes when he discusses Polonius and Hamlet in front of the Players, devoting clear and insightful analysis to the two characters’ rhetorical parallelism. The idea that Hamlet is somehow linguistically related to Polonius, and that the older man may actually hold a better, though still flawed, philosophical understanding of the dramatic arts, was strikingly unfamiliar and intriguing. Notably, Lewis also stresses the role of the audience in this chapter, as we are “allowed to

Book Reviews

207

judge the ways in which Hamlet applies these beliefs in practice” (175), giving us an active, participatory role in not only the drama itself but humanist theory and its application. And yet, Lewis writes, Hamlet “is himself the only audience that matters” (231). While Shakespeare may intend for us to view his protagonist’s humanist practice critically, Hamlet “has no interest in how others might perceive events” (231), and this cleverly executed trick proves the self-serving emptiness of the humanist worldview. Chapter five, devoted to reason and Hamlet’s function as a philosopher, continues to push the audience to recognize and consider the limitations of early modern humanism. This final chapter works to place Hamlet in conversation with models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophy. Shakespeare, Lewis argues, invites us to “reflect on the nature of rhetorical, dialectical, and poetic invention” (269), in order that we may come to the understanding that this is not the way the world actually works and that the humanist methods cannot capture the essence of the human condition. We should instead turn to dramatic poetry – stage drama – and its ability to ask difficult questions and seek out inconvenient truths; it is drama, not humanist philosophy, that comes closest to “represent[ing] something of the human condition as it really is, replete with its illusions, delusions, and frustrated desire to understand” (238). The central thesis is firmly based on primary source material, relying on readings of Pierre de La Primaudauye’s The French Academie, William Cornwallis’s Essayes, and English translations of Boethius. The Boethian reading is significant: as Lewis points out, there is no evidence that Shakespeare directly engages with Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, but similar themes (the wheel of fortune is the first cited) are invoked within the text of Hamlet. Ultimately, Hamlet fails in his Boethian practice as well; Lewis quotes Boethius’s Lady Philosophy to great effect, as she scorns the “man who falsely assumed the title of philosopher not on account of a commitment to true virtue, but from vanity and to burnish his own reputation” (249). Hamlet may view himself as some kind of sage, but his own words betray the fact that he is decidedly not. Despite the clarity with which Lewis writes, the philosophical texts on which he bases his argument are quite dense and sometimes difficult to follow. That being said, this is an engaging book, which challenges established readings of Hamlet and sheds new light on some very well known soliloquies. Amid this fresh interpretation, there are some delightfully funny moments – at one point Lewis conflates Hamlet and Martin Luther to drily comic effect. However the book’s weakness is that clarity and humor occasionally border on overly-conversational. When outlining Hamlet’s love letter to Ophelia, for instance, the text momentarily breaks its rhythm by attempting a modernized excuse by “Hamlet” for his bad verses. The text also contradicts itself at times; after making it clear

208

Book Reviews

that we have no way of knowing whether or not Shakespeare directly engaged with certain humanist texts, Lewis concludes his final chapter by saying that Shakespeare rather firmly “sets himself against Boethius, against Cicero, against the conventions of humanism in the philosophical and religious round” (302– 303). The key question which guides the text is this: how are we, as readers, viewers, or scholars, to interpret the quality of Hamlet’s adopted personae? That Hamlet does not play the roles of friend, enemy, moralist, philosopher, poet, or historian well (or even coherently) is convincing. But to what purpose? This is, according to Lewis, deliberate incoherence on Shakespeare’s part, which takes the form of a “boldly contrarian affirmation of dramatic poetry” (303). In each persona, Hamlet looks to find some fixed meaning, but “in each case, [he] discovers nothing of significance there” (39). Moral philosophy has little to offer, it rests on pretense and the truths of humanity must be sought elsewhere. Shakespeare uses Hamlet and Hamlet to illustrate by practice, rather than theory, that drama is the best means by which we can hope to find truth. Hamlet and the Vision of Darkness is an original and valuable addition to the critical field, and compelling reading for those interested in expanding their understanding of the intersection between early modern drama and contemporary moral philosophy. Anna Hegland

University of Kent

Antonija Primorac. Neo-Victorianism on Screen: Postfeminism and Contemporary Adaptations of Victorian Women. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 201 pp. ISBN 3319645587, GBP 85.71. Primorac’s monograph is a timely and thought-provoking study in so far as it not only discloses the major role TV and film adaptations have played in defining twenty-first-century conceptualizations of Victorian femininity but also, and perhaps even more importantly, addresses a striking imbalance in the field of neo-Victorian studies at large. Although many formats that have contributed to the ever-growing popularity of the neo-Victorian genre are TV and film adaptations, substantial studies, let alone monographs, on this topic are rare. The relative critical neglect of audiovisual adaptations may have to do with both a generally presumed superiority of the written word – Robert Stam speaks of “iconophobia” as well as simultaneous “logophilia” – and the assumption that adaptations necessarily ‘debase’

Book Reviews

209

their adapted texts in the adaptive process;¹⁰ the latter is especially unhelpful since, as Primorac reminds us, all neo-Victorian texts are by definition adaptations of some sort. Her definition of the subject matter is rather wide, subsuming under ‘neo-Victorianism’ all “adaptations of Victorian texts that offer a critical re-visioning of Victorian narratives; screen adaptations of neo-Victorian texts; contemporary biopics of Victorians; and meta-adaptations” (4). This conceptual broadness is also reflected in the selection of the corpus: whereas Primorac does provide in-depth analyses of a number of texts, others are merely touched on in passing. Even though, in effect, some discussions remain somewhat tentative, such a kaleidoscopic approach seems well suited to such a varied and vibrant field. Furthermore, it fits the study’s overall aim of providing a wide-ranging look at an area of cultural production that, so far, has been understudied. Several of the individual chapters are revised and updated versions of articles that have been previously published elsewhere, which is why they appear self-contained. What binds them together, though, is the overall framework of postfeminism Primorac uses to explain the ways in which many of the adaptations discussed here have produced distinctly conservative portrayals with regard to gender, sexuality, race, and class; in other words, portrayals which counteract the neo-Victorian’s critically-subversive potential. In her nuanced dissections of the individual primary texts, the author’s critical stance towards the concept of postfeminism becomes clear, and chapter two even opens with a discussion of the term as situated within the context of Anglophone media. Here, Primorac declares that – in line with critics such as Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, Diane Negra, and Yvonne Tasker – she understands the term as “a form of anti-feminism that has appropriated aspects of feminism” and resulted in a “retro-sexist discourse that shuts down even the possibility of critique” (31– 32). However, with a concept as contested and hotly debated as postfeminism, it might have been better to locate such a vital debate in the introduction, thus providing a more coherent frame narrative and firmly identifying the study’s theoretical angle. This second chapter, “Postfeminism and Screen Adaptations of Sherlock Holmes Stories,” takes a closer look at on-screen incarnations of the character named ‘the woman’ by Sherlock Holmes. Addressing the Irene Adlers in the BBC’s Sherlock, CBS’s Elementary, and Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes as well as Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Primorac powerfully delineates the “prominent reduction in Adler’s agency that is hidden behind the spectacle of

 Robert Stam, “The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in Film Adaptation, ed. James Naremore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP): 54– 76, 58.

210

Book Reviews

her overt sexualisation in her screen afterlives” (29). Conan Doyle’s original story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” she indicates, shows a strikingly modern female character that is emphatically portrayed as Holmes’s equal and thus endowed with a lot of agency – agency that the screen adaptations discussed here silence again, albeit to different degrees. This chapter is most compelling whenever Primorac refers to the Sherlock episode “A Scandal in Belgravia,” which in its reluctance to portray female agency reduces Adler to what Primorac calls “the worst of the late Victorian and turn-of-the-century stereotypes” (43): a highly sexualized femme fatale who, as a professional dominatrix, uses her body as a means to control Holmes. Additionally, the author rightly points out, Sherlock employs another problematic image: by letting Adler end the episode as an abducted woman in a hijab, kneeling in the desert and imploring Sherlock to rescue her, the writers Steven Moffatt and Mark Gatiss not only support the narrative of the fallen woman who has to be punished for her sexual transgression, but also, and equally dubiously, reinforce both Victorian and present-day Orientalist notions about colonial space. The author extends her discussion of the nexus between representations of gender and colonial space in chapter three, “Re-Presenting the Past,” exploring to what extent neo-Victorian costume drama is still largely defined by nostalgia rather than a critique of colonial policies or challenging of gender roles. This is not, however, limited to an uncritical adoption of Orientalist notions in the adapted Victorian texts. Rather, Primorac observes, successors of the 1980s ‘heritage cinema’ even introduce forms of Orientalism where the adapted text contains none. That way, not only the colonial space but also the Victorian past as such appears as an exotic Other. It would be an exaggeration to say that neo-Victorian representations of race and empire have so far been a blind spot (in both criticism and cultural production), but in comparison to the abundance of work on questions of gender and sexuality these concerns remain understudied. That Primorac addresses this lacuna lends a lot of critical edge to the overall study and makes this particular chapter the most topical one. She first addresses two film adaptations of Victorian classics, Jane Campion’s Portrait of a Lady and Mira Nair’s Vanity Fair, both of which imagine an exoticized colonial space in the attempt to ‘update’ the Victorian text and create a backdrop for their respective heroine’s (sexual) liberation. Screen adaptations of neo-Victorian novels, the author suggests, seem to proceed conversely. As she argues with reference to Gillian Armstrong’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s novel Oscar and Lucinda – this time via an illuminating reading of the language of clothes – such adaptations seem preoccupied with “their quest for genre identity” (76) and thus prioritize historical ‘authenticity’ over critical engagement with the past. The chapter closes with a focus on Ripper Street, which Primorac situates in the tradition of works such

Book Reviews

211

as Andrea Arnold’s critically acclaimed Wuthering Heights and labels, with reference to Phil Powrie, ‘alternative heritage’ for its focus on the life and social conditions of the lower middle and working classes. This show repeatedly engages with the aftereffects of Britain’s imperial actions, most overtly so in the opening episode of season two. While directly holding the British involvement in the Opium Wars responsible for the deplorable living conditions of Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century East End, in Blush Pang the episode simultaneously features a stereotypical example of the exotic, colorful and mysterious woman who looks utterly foreign in her East End surroundings. In combining these two elements, Primorac concludes, Ripper Street, too, implies that “neoVictorian costume drama as a genre […] cannot sustain more than one critical take on the past at the same time for fear of risking a breach with the perceived generic framework of ‘authenticity’” (85). A properly neo-Victorian take on gender issues that interrogates traditional norms and gives voice to marginalized identities, the author’s close reasoning suggests, always seems to come at the expense of a postcolonial critique, and vice versa. In chapter four, “In the Grip of the Corset,” Primorac traces the trope of the caged bird through its filmic translation into a tightly-laced corset. By looking at Campion’s Portrait of a Lady and The Piano, Marc Munden’s TV adaptation of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge!, as well as Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and The Corpse Bride, she demonstrates that this image is not so much an ‘authentic’ Victorian trope as it is a twenty-first century cliché which has developed into “an accepted visual shorthand for the notion of the literally and metaphorically repressed Victorian woman” (98) through its constant re-iteration on screen. As Primorac indicates, the caged bird’s flight from its cage often finds a parallel in the rejection of a mother figure. Flora’s renunciation of her mother in The Piano, for instance, she reads as a postfeminist rejection of second-wave-feminism, although the film’s ending emphasizes the “necessity to resolve what appears to be a generational conflict about the meaning and purpose of feminism” (122). Sugar’s breaking out of the cage and rejection of her biological mother in The Crimson Petal and the White, on the other hand, for Primorac suggests “that only a clean break with the practices of the previous generation could promise a new start for the coming generation” (124). This chapter is the most varied and crowded one in terms of the material that is discussed and consequently prioritizes variety over argumentative depth at times. By examining such a wide range of material, however, Primorac manages to establish the preeminence of the trope in question. Also, her close readings of the films’ visual language are greatly supported by a number of screenshots, the majority of which can be found in this chapter and which are distributed across the volume slightly unevenly.

212

Book Reviews

The previous chapter’s coda segues into chapter five, “Re-fashioning Victorian Heroines and Family Relations.” Taking into account Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, James Bobin’s Alice Through the Looking Glass, John Logan’s Penny Dreadful, and Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Affinity, Primorac explores films and TV series that share a rejection of conventional, heteronormative family structures with clearly-assigned gender roles and instead opt for “queer ‘families of choice’” (134). The longest part of this chapter is dedicated to the complex constructions of mother- and fatherhood in Penny Dreadful, which consistently portrays the failure of biological, heterosexual families. Primorac’s lucid analysis of female sexuality, same-sex desire, and the show’s ultimate inability or refusal to “stage a queer neo-Victorian ending on queer terms” (157) is one of the strongest passages in the entire book. The chapter concludes with an equally sharp take on the ending of Affinity. Whereas Waters’s surprise twist provides a happy ending for the two lesbian characters who are from the working class, Andrew Davies’s interpolation of an alternative happy ending for Selina and the upper-class Margaret overwrites the novel’s subversive potential, since it “cancels out the possibility that the ‘non-reproductive’ families of choice even attempt a political disturbance to the contemporary affective economy organised as it is” (166). The result, Primorac argues quite rightly, is an adaptation that falls back into the plot structure of traditional romance, thus ultimately catering towards the largely heterosexual audience of costume drama. Similarly to Penny Dreadful, it thereby forfeits its queer revisionist potential. Chapter six, “No Country for Old Women,” which simultaneously forms the conclusion, considers Queen Victoria as the quintessentially Victorian figure in whom all the different foci addressed in this study come together. Contrary to the image of Queen Victorian that is firmly engrained into cultural memory, on-screen representations of her – with the exception of John Madden’s Mrs Brown – have tended to focus on her early years on the throne, depicting her as a youthful romantic heroine who falls in love with her fairy-tale prince. In this context, Primorac addresses the BBC miniseries Victoria & Albert, JeanMarc Vallée’s The Young Victoria as well as ITV’s Victoria, the latter of which is the most recent text discussed in this monograph. For Primorac, Victoria is the “ideal postfeminist subject” (182) in that it portrays its title character as a young, attractive, and feisty woman who actively chooses to give up her freedom in order to become a married woman and mother instead. The past envisioned in this manner, she concludes with reference to W. B. Yeats, “will decidedly remain no countries for old (or non-white, un-maternal, non-heterosexual or lowerclass) women until there is a break with the stultifying doublespeak of postfeminism in the media” (187). This final sentence of the book perfectly captures its relevance: a very readable and entertaining foray into the filmic representa-

Book Reviews

213

tions of Victorian femininity, Neo-Victorianism on Screen offers a valuable contribution to debates on intersectionality within both postfeminism and neo-Victorian/adaptation studies. The fact that, in all likelihood, neo-Victorian films and TV series will continue to attract audiences and to diversify – there certainly is a lot of untapped potential in terms of a critical engagement with the colonial past – adds to its topicality even more. Marlena Tronicke

Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster

List of Contributors Simon Dickel is Professor for Gender and Diversity Studies at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen/Germany. From 2009 to 2016, he was junior professor for Ethnic and Postcolonial Studies at the English Department at Ruhr-University Bochum. He is the author of Black/Gay: The Harlem Renaissance, the Protest Era, and Constructions of Black Gay Identity in the 1980s and 90s (2011), co-editor of After the Storm: The Cultural Politics of Hurricane Katrina (2015), and co-editor of Queer Cinema (2018). His fields of research include queer theory, critical race theory, and disability studies. In his current research project, he addresses phenomenology and social difference. Dagmara Drewniak, Ph.D., D. Litt., teaches American and Canadian literature at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań. Her research interests include multiculturalism in English Canadian literature, images of Central and Eastern Europe in Canada and Canadian literature (Polish-Canadian, Lithuanian-Canadian, Jewish-Canadian), literature by immigrants from Poland and Eastern Europe, Jewishness in Canadian literature, life-writing, and postcolonial literature in English. She has published essays on Kulyk Keefer, Stachniak, Hoffman, Rushdie, Ondaatje, Appignanesi, Kojder, Eisenstein and other contemporary writers. She coedited (with Anna Branach-Kallas, Piotr Sadkowski and Renata Jarzębowska-Sadkowska) a second number of TransCanadiana Canada and Its Utopia/Canada et ses utopies (2009). In 2014 she published a book entitled Forgetful Recollections: Images of Central and Eastern Europe in Canadian Literature. She has a forthcoming book: The self and the world. Aspects of the aesthetics and politics of contemporary North American literary memoir by women (written with Agnieszka Rzepa and Katarzyna Macedulska). She is currently Vice-President of the Polish Association for Canadian Studies. Gabriele Linke is professor of British and American Cultural Studies at the University of Rostock, Germany. In the 1990s, after obtaining her PhD in Applied Linguistics at the University of Jena, she shifted her focus in research and teaching to British and American Cultural Studies. She is author of Populärliteratur und kulturelles Gedächtnis (2003), in which she rereads American and British popular romances as cultural memory. In her recent research she has focused on the teaching of culture, for example as editor of the collection Teaching Cultural Studies (2011), and on film. She has also written about gender issues and co-edited five collections of interdisciplinary gender studies, one of them entitled Migration – Geschlecht – Lebenswege (2016). In the field of autobiography studies, she has published various articles investigating class, gender, place, intimacy, memory, diasporic identities, and other aspects of contemporary autobiographical writing in English. The volume British Autobiography in the 20th and 21st Centuries, co-edited with Sarah Herbe, came out in 2017. Christine Marks is Associate Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. She received her PhD from the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. Her academic interests include contemporary American literature, relationality, literature and medicine, and food studies. Her monograph “I am because you are”: Relationality in the Works of Siri Hustvedt was published by Winter (Heidelberg University Press) in March 2014. She co-edited the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-013

216

List of Contributors

volume Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Essays (De Gruyter 2016). Lut Missinne is Professor of Modern Dutch Literature at the University of Münster. She studied at the universities of Leuven and Utrecht and completed her PhD on Flemish interwar periodicals. Her current research focuses on interwar literature, translation studies, travel literature and autobiographical writing. Oprecht gelogen (2013) focuses on autobiographical novels and autofiction in recent Dutch-speaking literature. She co-edited Albert Vigoleis Thelen: Mittler zwischen Sprachen und Kulturen (2005, with H. Eickmans), Gerard Walschap: Regionalist of Europeeër? (1922 – 1940) (2007, with H. Vandevoorde), and Travel Writing in Dutch and German, 1790 – 1930. Modernity, Regionality, Mobility (2017, with A. E. Martin and B. van Dam). She is currently co-editing a handbook on fictionality with R. Schneider and B. van Dam. Franziska Quabeck is assistant professor for British Studies at the University of Münster. She holds a PhD in English Literature and her dissertation was published as Just and Unjust Wars in Shakespeare (de Gruyter, 2013). She is also the author of “Just War Theory in Shakespeare” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and War, eds. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (CUP, 2019) and of “Shakespeare’s Unjust Wars,” Critical Survey 30.1 (2018). She has written a second book on Kazuo Ishiguro’s novels, which is currently in the process of publication. She has also written articles on Irvine Welsh, Gregory Burke, and Zadie Smith. Her current research project focuses on the symbolic value of dirt in nineteenth-century literature, with a specific emphasis on the works of Charles Dickens. Agnieszka Rzepa is head of the Centre for Canadian Literature at the Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. She has taught and conducted research on Canadian literature since the early 1990s, focusing on contemporary Canadian novel and short story, Canadian postcolonial studies, as well as Native Canadian literatures and Canadian life writing. She has published numerous articles in these areas as well as the books Feats and Defeats of Memory: Exploring Spaces of Canadian Magic Realism (2009), Eyes Deep with Unfathomable Histories: The Poetics and Politics of Magic Realism Today and in the Past (2012; editor with Liliana Sikorska), The Self and the World. Aspects of the Aesthetics and Politics of Contemporary North American Literary Memoir by Women (in press; with Dagmara Drewniak and Katarzyna Macedulska), and others. She is editor-in-chief of TransCanadiana: Polish Journal of Canadian Studies. Katja Sarkowsky is professor of American Studies at the University of Muenster, Germany. Her research currently focuses on the study of life writing, law and literature with a focus on cultural concepts of ‘citizenship,’ and indigenous literatures in the United States and Canada. Publications include the monographs AlterNative Spaces: Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations Literatures (2007) and the forthcoming Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature (2018). She is the co-editor of Violence and Open Spaces. The Subversion of Boundaries and the Transformation of the Western Genre (2017, with Stefanie Müller and Christa Buschendorf), Migration, Citizenship, Regionalization. Comparing Canada and Europe (2015, with Sabine Schwarze and Rainer-Olaf Schultze), and Travelling Concepts: Negotiating Diversity in Canada and Europe (2010, with Christian Lam-

List of Contributors

217

mert) and currently serves as editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien. Jack Stewart, professor emeritus, University of British Columbia, is the author of Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers (2008; illustrated in color), The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (1999; with 23 black-and-white illustrations); and The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock (1990). His research focuses on interrelations of literature and painting, landscape and travel writing, ecology, art and ontology, and his essays have appeared in D. H. Lawrence Review, Deus Loci: The Lawrence Durrell Journal, Journal of Modern Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, Style, Mosaic, Canadian Literature, Canadian Poetry, Canadian Fiction Magazine, Modern Fiction Studies, Studies in Short Fiction, Studies in the Novel, Studies in the Humanities, Critique: Studies in Short Fiction, Journal of Narrative Theory, Philological Quarterly, Anglistik, and Symbolism. Anna Thiemann is assistant professor of English and the coordinator of the Graduate School Practices of Literature at the University of Münster, Germany. Her research interests include American Studies, transatlantic studies, early modern drama, Black studies, gender studies, trauma studies, and disability studies. She is the author of Rewriting the American Soul: Trauma, Neuroscience and the Contemporary Literary Imagination (New York: Routledge, 2017), which focuses on the political implications of trauma theory, its impact on cultural representations of collective trauma, and its subversive appropriation in pre- and post-9/11 fiction. Her current book project, provisionally entitled “Transatlantic Scenes of Subjection: Staging Early Modern Slavery,” scrutinizes the discursive entanglement of figurative political slavery and colonial chattel slavery in dramatic texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Index abstraction 158, 165, 179 Aciman, André 10, 137–152 – Alibis. Essays on Elsewhere 138, 140– 141, 144–145, 149–150 – False Papers, Essays on Exile and Memory 138–140 – Out of Egypt 137–138, 140, 142, 144, 147–149 Ackerly, J. R. 53 – My Dog Tulip 53 Aesop’s Fables 178 aesthetic objectivity 179 allergies 105 analogue/analogy 4, 8, 13, 29, 31–37, 40, 42, 47–48, 52, 55, 64, 100, 123, 190 animal 30–31, 37, 43, 54–57, 62, 85, 90– 91, 159, 174–176, 178 animism 159, 162, 170, 172, 179 anti-fairy tale 167, 179 anti-hero 167–168, 177, 179 Aristotle 4–5, 32, 81, 146 Asquith, Lady Cynthia 157 – Ghost Book 157 Austria 129, 133 Austro-Hungarian 10, 117–134 autobiographical pact 145 autobiographical topoi 70–71 autobiography 3–4, 6, 9, 11, 63–64, 68, 74, 101–102 – literary autobiography 64 autobiology 30–31 Baena, Rosalía 10, 117, 120, 122, 125–126 Bakhtin, M. M. 18, 28 belonging 8–10, 17, 81–82, 97, 99–100, 104, 106, 109–110, 113, 115–116, 121, 141, 148–149 Bennett, Jane 20 blindness 43–62, 187, 192 Bociurkiw, Marusya 10, 117–134 – Comfort Food for Breakups 10, 117–121, 129, 134

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110580822-014

body 8, 13–27, 29–30, 35, 37–38, 40, 43– 44, 46–48, 50–51, 59, 84–86, 93, 107, 109, 111–113, 123, 177, 184, 210 Butler, Judith 21–22 – Gender Trouble 21–22 Cage, John 43–44, 55–56, 60–61 Casey, Edward S. 84 Celtic twilight 171 centrifugalism 18 centripetalism 18–19 Chevigny, Hector 46, 50, 52 citation 72–73 Clarke, Austin 120, 122, 125 cognitive process 63–64, 77–78, 99 cognitive turn 64 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 176, 204 – “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” 176 Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) 4–5, 7, 9, 65 consciousness 159, 168, 171, 175 Coppola, Eleanor 119 cosmic forces 177 Couser, G. Thomas 8, 50–51 Crozier, Lorna 9, 11, 81–95 – Small Beneath the Sky 9, 81–95 cultural context 6, 21–22, 25–26, 142 Darwin, Charles 8, 29–34, 36–42 Davis, Rocío 131 demon/demonic 160, 174, 179 devil 163 diaspora/diasporic 10, 117–122, 126, 128, 135, 140–142, 146, 148 Dickens, Charles 181–196 – Bleak House 181–196 – Our Mutual Friend 188–189 disability 8, 29–31, 39, 41–43 – disability narratives 8–9 discourse 21, 32, 35, 51, 72, 76, 78, 81– 82, 87–88, 94–95, 126, 130, 150 disenchantment 172, 179 disorientation 174

220

Index

displacement 10, 131, 137–138, 140–141, 143, 147–148, 151–152, 165, 170 Douglas, Mary 182, 185 dreams 67, 70, 76, 79, 158, 168, 170–171, 173, 176 dust 82, 85–87, 94, 192–193, 196 dystopia 167, 179

5, 10, 93, 99–100, 107–109, 111–112, 116–135 Freud, Sigmund 162, 171, 184 Fries, Kenny 8, 29–42 – The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory 8, 29–42 Frye, Northrop 165

Eakin, Paul John 4, 6, 11, 134, 146, 150 ectoplasm 164–165 embodied experiences 13–28 empathy 18, 27–28, 174, 192 emplotment 7 enchantment 157, 168–169, 172, 179 Ensler, Eve 8, 13–28 – In the Body of the World 8, 13–28 – The Vagina Monologues 14, 22–23, 28 entropy 173, 177, 189 environment 17, 24, 34, 36–37, 40, 42, 57, 60, 66, 85–86, 89, 91, 113, 155, 167– 169, 173 – (socio)cultural environment 24–26, 98, 107 epiphany 81, 92 ethnic/ethnicity 10, 110, 117–121, 126, 128, 131–132, 134–135, 142 evil 16, 19, 39, 157, 163, 169, 187–188, 199, 204 exile 10, 17, 102–103, 105, 111, 137–138, 140–142, 148, 151–152

gastrography/gastro-graphy 10, 117, 120, 125–126, 134 gender/gender relations 10, 14, 21–23, 88–91, 94, 121, 123, 125, 209–212 gendered paradigm 89 genre V, 6–8, 18, 28, 30, 64, 69, 116, 119– 120, 155, 157, 167, 178–179, 199, 201, 203, 208, 210–211 Germany 98, 127, 129–130, 132 ghosts 157, 171–173, 199, 206 – ghost story 158, 171, 199 Gilbert, Elizabeth 118–119 Goatly, Andrew 100, 116 Goldsworthy, Vesna 102–104, 112–113, 116 Gothic 169, 199 Graf, Oskar Maria 97–98 gravel 82, 86–87 Grekul, Lisa 121 Grimm Brothers 161, 178 – Complete Fairy Tales 161 – The Fisherman and His Wife 161 guide dog 8, 43–45, 48–50, 52–55, 61–62 Gullestad, Marianne 134

fable 155, 161, 163–164, 171, 177–178 fairy tale 155–179 family 3–4, 9, 23, 27, 31, 33, 38–39, 41, 70–71, 74–75, 81–82, 87, 89, 91–94, 101, 103, 117–133, 137–138, 141–142, 144, 148, 159 femininity 83, 88, 125 feminism/feminist 9, 14–15, 21–23, 27, 81, 83, 121, 207, 209, 211–212 fetish 160 figural embodiment 190 first cause(s) 9, 11, 81–87, 89, 91–95 floral realm 173 folklore 67, 163, 201, 203 folktale 159, 167–168, 172, 178–179

food

hallucination 155, 158, 173, 179 Hamlet 170, 204–208 Haraway, Donna 9, 43–44, 51–53 Hawkins, Anne Hunsaker 16–17, 19 Heddon, Deirdre 84 Hesperides 168 hieroglyph 176 hobby-horse 160 Hoffman, Eva 101–107, 109, 111–116, 128 homecoming 10, 137, 140, 143, 147–150, 152 homology 8, 29, 31–37 horror vacui 175 hubris 168 Hungary 129–130, 132–133

Index

idealism 164, 173 identity 7–11, 15, 27–28, 45–46, 54, 68, 74–77, 97, 99–100, 104–135, 139, 150, 167, 175, 181, 186, 188, 190–196, 201, 203, 210 Ihde, John 9, 43–44, 54–62 – Listening and Voice 43–44, 54, 56 illness narratives 8, 13, 15, 17, 28 imaginary self 139–140, 142–144 incantation 19–20, 155, 158, 175, 177, 179 initiation 177 insect 82–83, 86–87 instinct 39, 163 – life-instinct 163 interrelatedness 9, 27, 81–82 interspecies companionship 51–54 islandscapes 174 islomania 168 isolation 15–16, 155, 166–168, 170, 172– 174, 177, 179, 201 James, Henry 158 – “The Turn of the Screw” 158 Jewish (Sephardic) 8, 10, 101, 118–119, 121, 127, 138, 141– 142 Johnson, Mark 4–6, 13, 21, 25, 64–65, 97– 99, 117–118 – Metaphors We Live By 4, 13, 21, 64, 99, 117 – Philosphy in the Flesh 13, 21 Jones, Stephen Swann 174 Jongstra, Atta 9, 63–79 – Klinkende ikken. Bekentnissen van een zelfeontwijker 9, 63, 68–73, 75–78 Jung, Carl G. 155, 166 Kapllani, Gazmend 102–105, 110, 115–116 Kassabova, Kapka 103, 107–109, 116 Kleege, Georgina 48 Kövecses, Zoltan 5–7, 9, 11, 25, 29, 97– 100, 141 Kroetsch, Robert 90, 92, 94 Kuusisto, Stephen 8, 43–62 – Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening 8, 43–45, 47, 49, 51, 54–56, 60–61

– Planet of the Blind 61

221

8, 43–45, 50–51, 54,

Lakoff, George 4–6, 13, 21, 25, 64–67, 77, 97, 99, 117–118 – Metaphors We Live By 4, 13, 21, 64, 99, 117 – Philosphy in the Flesh 13, 21 land 9, 36–37, 77, 85, 88–91, 94, 132, 149, 199 – homeland 114, 119, 122, 149 landscape 3, 81, 83, 87 – 88, 92, 170, 197, 199, 201 – apocalyptic landscape 176 – mental landscape 174 language 5–6, 9–11, 17–18, 25, 52, 56–58, 64–65, 68, 72, 77–78, 94, 97–116, 120, 125, 129, 158–159, 174–175, 177, 204– 205, 210–211 – metaphoric(al) language 16, 41, 44, 64, 66, 77, 94, 97, 99, 101, 104, 107, 110, 112, 114–115 Lawrence, D. H. 155–179 – “Glad Ghosts” 157 – “The Man Who Loved Islands” 155, 164– 169, 174–175, 177–179 – The Plumed Serpent 172 – “The Rocking-Horse Winner” 155–159, 163–165, 178–179 – “The Woman Who Rode Away” 156, 164, 172 Leavis, F. R. 178 lesbianism 121, 123–126, 212 libido 161 light 82, 84–87, 91, 93 liquid 99, 100, 105–107, 112 Livingston, Julie 24–25 – Improvising Medicine 24 Lodge, David 188 London 38, 186, 188 Lorde, Audre 15–16 – The Cancer Journals 15–16 Mackenzie, Compton 164–165 magic 155–156, 158–160, 162–163, 166, 168, 170, 176, 178–179 – magic realism 93

222

Index

Märchen 164, 170, 178–179 Maric, Vesna 102, 107, 109, 114–116 marvelous, the 162, 179 material ecocriticism 20 Mayes, Frances 119 Mayhew, Henry 184 memoir 3–4, 6, 8–9, 11, 13–17, 20, 22, 24–25, 28, 29–32, 35–38, 40–41, 43– 50, 53–57, 61– 62, 81–84, 86, 89–94, 98, 100–104, 109, 115–126, 128–134, 137–138, 144–146, 148 – prairie memoir 9, 81, 89 memory 20, 69, 71–74, 78, 84, 94, 113, 120, 122–123, 125, 127–128, 130–131, 137–139, 142, 144, 147, 150–151, 206, 212 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 8, 28, 43–44, 46– 48, 51, 56, 61, 158 – Phenomenology of Perception 8, 46–48, 158, 175 metamorphosis 177 metaphor 3–154 – complex metaphor 97, 99–100, 108, 114–115 – conceptual metaphor 5–6, 9–11, 25–26, 82, 100, 104 – conventional metaphor 7, 66–67, 71 – deliberate metaphor 66, 78 – innovative metaphor 63, 69 – original metaphor 7, 41 – primary metaphor 99 metonymy 4, 64, 77, 139–140 Michalko, Rod 46, 48, 50, 54 – The Two in One 46, 54 misanthropy 174 monstrous, the 170 Montaigne, Michel de 73–74 Mortenson, Greg 118 mystery 91, 94, 170, 177 myth/mythic(al) 3–4, 15–19, 81–84, 126, 146, 163–166, 170 172–173, 176–178 mythogenic habit 19 mythology 54, 87–88 narrative 3–11, 13–15, 17–20, 25, 28, 30– 31, 36, 38, 40 ,42, 45, 50, 52–53, 70, 72, 76, 78, 81, 84, 97–98, 100–101,

104, 108, 114, 116, 118–119, 121, 123, 126, 129–131, 134, 139–140, 146, 150, 156, 158–159, 163, 165–167, 170–172, 177, 179, 182, 185, 195–196, 199, 201– 203, 206, 209–210 – life narratives 5–6, 30–31, 37, 99, 101, 105, 108, 116 – narrative trope 7, 140 – triumph narrative 17, 19 narrator 31, 34–38, 40–42, 43–45, 50, 53, 61, 71, 84–85, 87, 91–92, 95, 117, 143– 144, 148, 171, 190, 192, 195 – autobiographical narrator 9, 73, 81, 84, 86, 91–93, 117, 120, 122–124, 127, 129, 132, 140, 142–143, 145–146, 149 nostalgia 140, 143–144, 147, 210 object 10, 43, 47, 51, 55, 57–59, 62, 77, 99–100, 104–108, 111–113, 150, 159, 163, 168, 178–179, 182–183, 187, 196 olfactory 85 Olney, James 138–139 oracle 160 organism 105, 111–112, 115 origin 34, 81–82, 120 Orion 172 parable 161, 163–164, 178–179 paradise 87, 102, 169 parallax 150–151 paranoia 170 pattern 16, 33, 60, 66, 70, 75–76, 161, 166–167, 176 philosophical 43–44, 48, 56, 205–208 – philosophical fable 177 – philosophical fiction 175 place V, 9, 29, 36–37, 39–40, 81–87, 89–94, 98, 102, 116, 118, 132, 137–147, 162, 166, 168, 181–183, 187, 190, 194–196, 199–200 Powell, Julie 118 prairie 81–83, 85–94 – Canadian prairies/Canadian prairie literature 83, 85, 87 – prairie fiction 89–90 – prairie novel 88 – prairie realism 92

Index

– prairie West 81, 83, 89 – prairie woman 88 primitive 159, 162, 166, 170–171, 176–177 prophetic 160, 178 Propp, Vladimir 155–156, 159, 178 psyche/psychic 158–160, 162, 164–165, 173, 176 Public Health Act (of 1848) 193 quest 16–17, 19, 155, 157, 167–168, 173 quotation 105, 111 race 121, 168, 171–172, 185, 209–210 rain 82, 85–87, 188 Rak, Julie 118–119 Rananim 168–169 Ray, Krishnendu 126 refrain 158–159, 163 relational self 82 relationality 50, 82 Relin, David Oliver 118 remembering 59, 76, 83–84, 132, 139–141, 143–144, 146, 148–149, 152, 206 return 3, 38, 85, 93–94, 130, 142–143, 149, 152 reverie 172 rewriting 86, 88 – 89, 144, 146, 150 rhythm 57, 158, 160, 207 Richards, I. A. 4–5 Ricoeur, Paul 4, 79 riddle V, 160, 179 ritual 122, 163, 172, 176–177 Root Analogy (Goatly) 100 sacrifice 18, 166, 170–172 Said, Edward 140, 151–152 Saskatchewan 81, 83, 91–92 satiric/satirize 155, 163–164, 168, 173, 178 Saul, Joanne 149–150 Schülting, Sabine 185, 188–189 self 4, 9–11, 13–14, 18, 20, 28, 30, 73, 82–83, 95, 117, 120–122, 124, 126, 128, 134, 137–152, 155, 167, 195 – shadow self 139, 148, 166 self-insight 63, 70, 77–78 sentience 82, 86–87 sexuality 22–23, 53, 126, 209–210, 212

223

Shildrick, Margaret 27, 48 site 21, 84, 140, 147, 162, 172 situatedness (of pain) 8, 24, 27 Smith, Sidonie 6, 11, 22, 118, 120, 126, 139, 145 social degradation 196 social hierarchy 190, 194 social ladder 184, 194 social order 183, 191–192, 194 social system 189, 196 Sontag, Susan 8 sound 43–45, 49, 54–62, 159, 172–174 space 28, 37, 57, 78–79, 83–84, 90, 92, 94, 119, 121–122, 128, 131, 134, 142, 160, 166–167, 169–172, 174–175, 177, 181– 184, 190, 196, 202, 210 spells 155, 157–158, 169, 175, 179 Stallybrass, Peter 183–185 Steen, Gerard 66, 78 story 3, 5–6, 9–11, 13–14, 17, 19–20, 27– 28, 49, 51, 53, 67, 71, 82–83, 87, 89– 90, 94–95, 114, 123, 128–133, 148–150, 157, 163–164, 171, 175, 177–179, 195– 196 – life story 6, 10, 17, 63, 67–68, 140–141, 150 substance 17, 100, 104–107, 109, 111–112, 174, 182–183 subversion 155, 179 Sugars, Cynthia 121 supernatural 157–158, 160, 162, 164, 169– 170, 179, 201 surreal 61, 174, 179 Swiftian [re Swift, Jonathan] 174 symbolic V, 4, 19, 119, 155, 163, 169, 176– 179, 181–188, 191, 196 – symbolic manifestation 188 – symbolic meaning/means 155, 179, 181, 185–187 Taylor, Laura Elise 10, 117–119, 129–134 – A Taste for Paprika 10, 117–119, 129–134 Tennyson, Alfred 168, 172 – “The Lotos-Eaters” 172 – “Ulysses” 168 time 25, 33, 37, 63, 66, 93–94, 99, 119, 167, 169–171, 175, 182

224

Index

totem 3–4 – sexual totem 162 – totemic object 179 trance 160–161, 172, 174 transformation 18, 36, 84, 93, 116, 139, 142, 172, 179 transgression 183, 210 trebling 163, 166, 179 Turner, Mark (and George Lakoff) 65, 67, 77 – More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor 65 Ukraine 118, 122, 127 Ukrainian-Canadian 117–134 Ulysses 143, 149–150 uncanny, the 155, 158, 161–162, 164, 171, 179 unconscious 158, 160–162, 166, 170–171, 184 universality 11, 13, 15, 25–26, 30, 99 utopia(n) 164, 167, 172, 179

via philosophia 77 via retorica 77 Victorian 183, 185, 193, 208–213 – Victorian society 184 Vizenor, Gerald 3–4, 11 – Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors 3 Vlasta, Sandra 104, 119 Wah, Fred 10, 120, 122, 125 Wallace, Alfred Russel 29, 31, 34, 37–42 water 20, 37, 85–86, 93 Watson, Julia 6, 11, 22, 118, 120, 126, 139, 145 Weiss, Gail 47–48 White, Allon 183–185 Whitman, Walt 60–61 wind 20, 82, 85–87, 92, 94 witch/witchcraft 160, 169, 178 woman/everywoman 27, 85, 88, 90, 92, 109, 119, 123 Zonana, Joyce

118